Gulf Monarchies In the News + Ferguson Outrage Ongoing

I like to catch up on my reading while watching the Sunday NFL games. What I do is print out stories from Counterpunch, Robert Parry's Consortium News, select articles from the Sunday Gray Lady, etc. -- the type is big, 12-14 pts., with lots of leading -- which I read during the innumerable commercials and penalty delays.

There were two particularly good offerings on the Counterpunch web site over the weekend: Rannie Amiri's "Attack of the Five Monarchies: An Alliance of Dictators and Despots" and Ben Reynolds' "There are No Moderate Syrian Rebels: We've Seen This Play Before." The Reynolds piece is refreshing because he reminds us of something we don't hear very often: U.S. deep state intelligence agencies are actually quite good at what they do:

The Obama administration’s new plan hinges on Saudi Arabia’s support for the training effort, including an offer to host training camps on Saudi soil. The Saudis are in no way a reliable partner for the U.S. in the Syrian conflict. Even discounting the fact that Saudi-purchased anti-tank rockets somehow found their way into ISIS’s hands, the Saudis have a notorious history of supporting unsavory groups in the Syrian conflict, including Salafists in the Islamic Front. The greater Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the training program is, the greater pressure there will be for Islamic Front fighters to receive U.S. arms and training. After Congress balked at the Obama Administration’s request for $500 million, the Saudis offered to fund the training and arming of the Syrian rebels. This means that there is a large chance the U.S. will directly support groups who work closely with Jabhat al-Nusra. 

There is no doubt that the Obama administration knows this. Classified U.S. intelligence is simply better than publicly available sources, particularly in the case of an important conflict like Syria. It defies common sense that the administration would somehow be unaware that the “moderate opposition” exists in name only. Contrary to popular belief, the United States does not stumble blindly and hopelessly through the Middle East. It stands to reason that there is an important motive behind choosing to back the non-ISIS Syrian opposition, rather than tacitly supporting the Assad regime, to counter ISIS.

The United States wants the Assad regime to fall because it is the lynchpin of the regional alliance between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar overwhelmingly desire Assad’s overthrow because they feel significantly more threatened by Iran than they do by any Islamist militant group, even ISIS. Even though the U.S. wants to destroy ISIS, it faces significant pressures to avoid aiding Assad’s regime, and Iran by proxy. While hardline Islamists stand less of a chance of eliminating ISIS than the Syrian Army, they will still certainly weaken Assad and require both Hezbollah and Iran to continue pouring resources into Syria. If this is correct, the United States may rather support al-Qaeda aligned forces than give the Iranian axis a victory in Syria. 

We’ve seen this play before. The U.S. often turns a blind eye to the activities of local “allies” if they seem to provide a means of countering regional adversaries. In the 1980s, the U.S. supported the mujaheddin fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, only to ultimately see the Taliban win the resulting civil war and provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda. During the Libyan civil war, the U.S. and its allies bombed Qaddafi’s forces while providing arms to the opposition. Libya has now descended into a bloody civil war, and arms from Libya have flooded the Syrian conflict for years, oftentimes with the aid of the U.S. and its allies. Once they are dispersed, the use and transfer of arms cannot be controlled. Like those in Libya, arms sent to Syria will ultimately find their way to future conflicts throughout the region. 

American policymakers have been protected from the consequences of these decisions by virtue of the U.S.’s geographic position, but the Middle East has not. Libya is in tatters. Afghanistan is awash in violence and the Taliban will probably make significant gains there when U.S. forces ultimately depart. There is no end in sight for the Syrian civil war, and there is little confidence even in Washington that the administration’s new strategy will bring an end to the conflict. Expanding the arming and training of the Syrian opposition would be a disastrous mistake. Unfortunately, the administration’s plan passed Congress. If the U.S. program goes forward, the blood from a renewed wave of violence in the Middle East will be on America’s hands.

Rannie Amiri highlights the absurdity of the conservative, anti-democratic Arab sheikhdoms bombing their Islamic State offspring:

It is the irony of ironies. A cadre of repressive monarchies is chosen to liberate the captive peoples of Iraq and Syria from the tyranny of ISIS. 

Combating a group known for its violent sectarianism, the five Arab allies ordered by the United States to participate in the bombing campaign against ISIS are themselves the region’s worst sectarian agitators. Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are now at the vanguard of efforts to dismantle an organization that is essentially of their own creation. 

After the downfall of Saddam Hussein, it was King Abdullah II of Jordan who raised the sectarian specter, warning of the emergence of a “Shiite crescent” in the Middle East, sending panic throughout the monarchies of the Gulf and beyond. It was a rallying cry; a call to arms which heralded operations to destabilize Iraq, and in less than ten years time, Syria. 

Bahrain has been a true standout in its brutal crackdown against pro-democracy activists and reformers who hope to see the unchecked powers of the al-Khalifa royal family restrained. For its part, the regime has hidden nothing. Their brazen oppression is very much out in the open for its Western allies to witness: torture, show trials, arbitrary detentions, revocation of citizenship, deportations and media blackouts. All are daily occurrences and come in the backdrop of longstanding socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement. 

Mark Landler reports today that vice president Joe Biden has embarked on an "apology tour" of the Middle East because of remarks made last week in a talk he gave at Harvard. Apparently Biden had the temerity to repeat information that appears in newspapers throughout the world, that Turkey has had an open borders policy for jihadis wanting to enter Syria to battle the Assad government and that jihadi organizations receive funding from the Gulf Arab emirates. This is all basic stuff, common knowledge to anyone who has paid the tiniest bit of attention to what has been going on in the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. But as Landler makes clear in "Saudis Are Next on Biden’s Mideast Apology List After Harvard Remarks," a vice president is not allowed to speak publicly about what is on the front page of the newspaper:

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has one more stop on what has become a Middle East apology tour in the wake of his impolitic answer to a Harvard student’s question: Saudi Arabia. 

After apologizing to officials from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates over the weekend, Mr. Biden is trying to connect with Saudi leaders, a senior official said, to clarify that he did not mean to suggest that Saudi Arabia backed Al Qaeda or other extremist groups in Syria. 

The vice president’s troubles began Thursday when he declared, in a question-and-answer session at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, that the biggest problem the United States faced in dealing with Syria and the rise of the Islamic State was America’s allies in the region. 

Turkey, Mr. Biden said, has admitted allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria, while Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia funneled weapons and other aid to Syrian rebels that ended up in the hands of Al Nusra, Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. 

The White House expressed relief on Monday over Mr. Biden’s apologies, with the press secretary, Josh Earnest, noting that “the vice president is somebody who has enough character to admit when he’s made a mistake.” But asked repeatedly about the substance of his remarks, Mr. Earnest did not say the vice president was wrong. 

In fact, neither of Mr. Biden’s claims is inaccurate. The United States has been pressing the Turkish government for months to seal off its border to prevent would-be jihadists from using Turkey as a transit route to join the ranks of the Islamic State. And experts say aid from the Persian Gulf monarchies has wound up with extremist groups in Syria.
President Obama made a similar point in August about Syria’s Arab neighbors fueling extremist organizations in their zeal to oust President Bashar al-Assad, though he did not name the culprits.

“There are factual mistakes, and then there are political mistakes,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is a political mistake.”

If it is a political mistake to repeat what is on the front page of the newspaper, and what has been front-page news for years, then I say we've crossed over into unstable, bizarre territory, the territory where U.S. leadership can't even voice basic truth.

The fact that such absurdity is accepted as rational behavior is proof that there is no decency or accountability left in USG. It is free floating. It goes to war without the consent of the governed. Its public elections are post-modern plutocratic charades.

Now that the Umbrella Revolution has sputtered to a close (zero Honk Kong stories in the Gray Lady this morning). it is worthwhile to remember that the Michael Brown, Ferguson-based revolt is ongoing. The Gray Lady publishes a tepid story today by Julie Bosman, "Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal." Composed of man-on-the-street interviews, Bosman doesn't provide any context in her piece. I would think the main point is that protests have never ended since the August murder of an unarmed teenager. Reporters have moved on but the demand remains to bring to justice the police officer who gunned down Mike Brown. Bosman obliquely inserts this idea that the protests never ended by repeating that Ferguson residents are tired of the unrest and agitation in their city. And to her credit, there are several revealing quotes, including this one:

Some Ferguson residents — most of them white, but not all — insisted that Mr. Brown’s death had revealed racial tensions that they had not realized were there. Last week, Doug Hindle, who is white, paused from mowing his front lawn on a side street in Ferguson, where he has lived for 30 years. Mr. Hindle said that before Mr. Brown was killed, he thought that whites and African-Americans in Ferguson got along just fine. Both of his next-door neighbors are black, he said, and while they all don’t socialize, they always wave and say hello. For years, Mr. Hindle said, he has driven the older woman across the street, who is African-American, to church, the grocery store or wherever she needs to go. 

“Everything was fine before,” Mr. Hindle said. “People are making this look like a bad place to live. We can hear them chanting at night. You can’t leave, you can’t open your windows at night. People are shooting their guns off. It’s never been like that. If they let Wilson go, all hell’s going to break loose. I really hope he goes to jail, just so people can get their justice. This has got to stop.”

Robert Parry's Bombshell: CIA Has Proof Junta Brought Down MH17

The place to begin this morning, if you missed it yesterday as did I, is Robert Parry's "What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?" The story contains the following bombshell:

What I’ve been told by one source, who has provided accurate information on similar matters in the past, is that U.S. intelligence agencies do have detailed satellite images of the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile, but the battery appears to have been under the control of Ukrainian government troops dressed in what look like Ukrainian uniforms. 

The source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. 

Instead of pressing for these kinds of details, the U.S. mainstream press has simply passed on the propaganda coming from the Ukrainian government and the U.S. State Department, including hyping the fact that the Buk system is “Russian-made,” a rather meaningless fact that gets endlessly repeated. 

However, to use the “Russian-made” point to suggest that the Russians must have been involved in the shoot-down is misleading at best and clearly designed to influence ill-informed Americans. As the Post and other news outlets surely know, the Ukrainian military also operates Russian-made military systems, including Buk anti-aircraft batteries, so the manufacturing origin has no probative value here.

What we know is that as soon as the Malaysia Airlines Boeing went down last Thursday the junta began shrieking that it was the "terrorists" who did it. These assertions were backed up by unnamed USG officials. Since then we have been treated to a steady stream of junta supplied telephone intercepts of gloating militiamen and photographs of missile batteries purportedly being moved across the border into Russia. All this material is passed through to the front pages of the U.S. prestige press without any caveats.

So what we have here is full-blown propaganda campaign, the kind of which we are by now very familiar with. The Ghouta sarin attack of last August comes to mind.

Novorossiyan militia control of the crash site has been one of the main pillars of the Kiev/U.S. propaganda onslaught. From Friday onward the refrain has been that the militia is destroying evidence, desecrating the bodies of passengers, refusing access to OSCE monitors, refusing to release the bodies, etc. Basically, a word picture has been painted depicting the Novorossiyan militia as pirates.

But when you actually move beyond the scare headlines and read these stories in their entirety -- say, for instance, the one by Sabrine Tavernise and Noah Sneider filed yesterday -- a different image emerges. The crash site is in the middle of territory where a war is going on. The Novorossiyans are not refusing to release the bodies; they are waiting for the Dutch to arrive to claim them (which apparently they have just done). There is not a professional crime scene investigation complete with yellow caution tape because there are no police. There is civil war. Instead, you have volunteers doing the work. Where is the evidence, besides the shrill allegations of the junta, that something malign is happening at the crash site? Poroshenko even went as far to blame the Novorossiyans for looting. According to Tavernise and Sneider:

President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine has claimed that rebels stole credit cards from the wreckage. One villager, Elena, who declined to give her last name, strongly disputed that. 

“That is a sin, a big sin in our faith,” she said. “This is a cemetery. Who would take from it?”

So be wary of the headlines, like the latest about Putin being forced under pressure of new sanctions to allow for an international investigation. Putin has never been opposed to an international investigation. He has been the one saying let's not rush to judgment as the U.S. and Kiev are doing; let's wait to see what a proper investigation reveals.

And the whole time Kiev's assault on Donetsk and Luhanks continues.

In Donetsk, a thick plume of dark smoke could be seen rising into the bright blue afternoon sky. One man, a passenger in a blue car that was stopped at a red light, said two people in his building were killed in the fighting. He said he ran out of his house in nothing but his slippers. 

The fighting in Donetsk killed a woman in the Kuibysheva neighborhood, which was hit in the morning, as she walked through a wooded courtyard near a small child’s playground, and two men were found dead nearby. A piece of clothing had been placed over her body, and pools of blood were drying in the sun. A grocery discount card was on the ground near the bloody outline where her body had been.

“They are trying to push the D.N.R. back but they end up hitting us,” said Yevgeny Zhitnikov, a 17-year old resident of the city. “Victory is more important to them than than human life.” 

Said his father, who was arranging bags on the ground for the family to leave to a nearby bomb shelter: “Animals.” 

A series of booms thumped through the courtyard consistent with the sound of a grad rocket. The rockets hit near dentist office complex and a library. 

“Why are people suffering, for what?” said Galina Afrina, a 60-year old retired financial worker who was holding some compote she had made. “We are being told to evacuate.” 

By 2:30 p.m., residents were leaving the nighborood. A woman carrying a large gray cat rushed by. A man carrying a kitten walked a bicycle. 

The rocket that killed the woman had punched a deep hole into the courtyard. Its shape indicated it had been come from the northwest, the area that the Ukrainian government controls. 

There will be a price for the U.S. backing this murderous campaign. Putin's relative silence is not a sign of guilt but of strength. Like Parry's bombshell, the truth is starting to emerge about MH17. And when it does, the fallout will be immense, hopefully great enough to topple Kiev and hopefully to permanently tarnish a warmongering Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS.

The Coming Collapse of U.S. Hegemony

Events seem to be moving in the direction of a big battle for control of Slovyansk city center. The junta military has established checkpoints surrounding the city, according to putschist interior minister Arsen Avakov. Since Avakov does a great job impersonating Joseph Goebbels, it is difficult to assess how strong these roadblocks are and how likely it is that junta troops will storm Slovyansk. But if they do, there is no doubt that the conflict in Ukraine will graduate to another level of violence.

Based on a reading of the blogs -- Moon of Alabama, The Vineyard of the Saker -- over the weekend, the sense out there is that Russia is being provoked by the United States to intervene militarily in Ukraine in order to block European integration east with the Russia and China. A Russian invasion would force Europe to side with its North Atlantic partner in building up NATO military forces on Russia's border as well as severing trade ties with the Russian Federation. At this point, barring mass slaughter of civilians by the putsch government, it doesn't look like Russia is going to take the bait.

Energy supply is the obvious vulnerability in any plan to sever Europe from Russia. Andrew Higgins explores the current U.S.-generated fantasy of how Ukraine can achieve independence from Gazprom in "Kiev Struggles to Break Russia’s Grip on Gas Flow." The idea is that Slovakia has the pipeline capacity to reverse flow natural gas to Ukraine. But for some reason -- Higgins sees the baleful, corrupting influence of Vlad Putin at work -- the Slovak government has been slow to embrace the scheme. It is a long story. One has to read to the end to get to the obvious. Reverse flows depend on the agreement of all parties, meaning that Gazprom would have to sign off in it. Why would they do that?

Alexander Medvedev, the head of Gazprom’s export arm, said he had no problem in principle with reverse-flow supplies to Ukraine but said such arrangements “require the agreement of all parties involved,” including Gazprom. 

“Normally, you can’t arrange a physical reverse flow without a new pipeline,” he added, indicating Gazprom’s opposition to the use of existing Slovak pipelines.

The main event over the weekend was the Friday massacre in Odessa. Federalist, pro-Russian protesters were attacked by Ukrainian nationalist soccer hooligans, chased into a building and the building was set on fire. Forty people died. Putsch prime minister Yatsenyuk in a gross perversion of common decency immediately blamed Russian provocation and police ineptitude. The Gray Lady dutifully echoed his words, even though video evidence and crime-scene reporting established that the slaughter was caused by Ukrainian nationalist mobs. Robert Parry, whose Consortium News web site does an excellent job keeping the February Ukrainian coup in proper perspective, asks, "Will Ukraine Be NYT's Waterloo?"

Andrew Kramer brings the Gray Lady back closer to what really happened in Odessa over the weekend with his "Ukraine’s Reins Weaken as Chaos Spreads":

Yanus Milteynus, a 42-year-old construction worker and pro-Russian activist, said he watched from the roof as the pro-Ukrainian crowd threw firebombs into the building’s lower windows, while those inside feared being beaten to death by the crowd if they tried to flee. 

“Some people jumped or tried to run away, but they chased them and beat them,” he said. Videos of the inferno, however, also show pro-Ukrainian activists trying to move scaffolding from a stage to the building, to rescue those inside. 

Only when the police managed to form a cordon to escort out those rescued by firefighters was he able to leave. If the roof caught fire before then, he said, “I would have stayed and sizzled like a sausage in a frying pan.” 

The conflict is hardening hearts on both sides. As the building burned, Ukrainian activists sang the Ukrainian national anthem, witnesses on both sides said. They also hurled a new taunt: “Colorado” for the Colorado potato beetle, striped red and black like the pro-Russian ribbons. Those outside chanted “burn Colorado, burn,” witnesses said. Swastikalike symbols were spray painted on the building, along with graffiti reading “Galician SS,” though it was unclear when it had appeared, or who had painted it. 

“The biggest thing they ever did to make me hate this country was sing the anthem,” Mr. Milteynus said. “I was going to die, and they sang the anthem. I hate them deeply.”

The United States will pay a large price for fomenting this coup in Ukraine. This is no Kosovo. In what increasingly looks like a desperate, reckless attempt to maintain its global hegemony, the USG is paving the way for its collapse. Democrats cannot win as a pro-war party. This means that Republicans will reap the reward. GOP national leadership will further fracture and discredit the country. Get ready. This is what is in store.

Putschists Announce Another Military Campaign To Retake Eastern Ukraine

Moon of Alabama has a timely, on-the-mark post this morning, "Ukraine: 'Anti-Terrorism' Campaigns Follow Visits From U.S.," where it is noted that, first, following a weekend visit by CIA Director John Brennan and, then, yesterday's cheerleading bagman appearance in Kiev by vice president Joe Biden, the putsch government has launched military assaults against pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine. The first one fell apart last week spectacularly due to a combination of peaceful protest, lack of motivation among the putschist armed forces and a sprinkling of Russian special forces, a.k.a., "green men." What has a changed in a week to make the putschists think that the outcome will be any different is hard to divine. It could be that as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the USG the gang in Kiev is just robotically following orders heedless of the disaster which awaits their completion.

The danger here is that with each military debacle the coherence of the Ukrainian state and the viability of its putschists erode to the point of no return. Then the May 25 presidential elections -- even with U.S. financing and management -- become pointless. This is an outcome the Obama White House wants to avoid at all costs. So it is likely that there will be a new wrinkle in the current putschist "anti-terrorism" campaign. Could it be that a CIA-managed mercenary army of ex-Navy SEALS and ex-Army Rangers will lead the attack? Who knows. Robert Parry over at Consortium News thinks a massacre of eastern Ukrainians is coming. I don't think Russia allows this to happen. I do think there are Russian special forces on the ground in the ten eastern cities under the control of protesters. The question then becomes, How does conflict between special forces, West vs. East, play out? Does it mushroom into a trade war that engulfs Europe?