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Official Washington is awash with tough talk about Russia and the need to punish President Putin for his role in Ukraine and Syria. But this bravado ignores Russia’s genuine national interests, its “red lines,” and the risk that “tough-guy-ism” can lead to nuclear war, as Alastair Crooke explains.

We all know the narrative in which we (the West) are seized. It is the narrative of the Cold War: America versus the “Evil Empire.” And, as Professor Ira Chernus has written, since we are “human” and somehow they (the USSR or, now, ISIS) plainly are not, we must be their polar opposite in every way.

“If they are absolute evil, we must be the absolute opposite. It’s the old apocalyptic tale: God’s people versus Satan’s. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection with the enemy.” It is the basis to America’s and Europe’s claim to exceptionalism and leadership.

Russian President Vladimir Putin laying a wreath at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on May 8, 2014, as part of the observance of the World War II Victory over Germany.

And “buried in the assumption that the enemy is not in any sense human like us, is [an] absolution for whatever hand we may have had in sparking or contributing to evil’s rise and spread. How could we have fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its successes? It’s a basic postulate of wars against evil: God’s people must be innocent,” (and that the evil cannot be mediated, for how can one mediate with evil).

Westerners may generally think ourselves to be rationalist and (mostly) secular, but Christian modes of conceptualizing the world still permeate contemporary foreign policy.

It is this Cold War narrative of the Reagan era, with its correlates that America simply stared down the Soviet Empire through military and – as importantly – financial “pressures,” whilst making no concessions to the enemy.

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The IMF Joins the New Cold War

December 9, 2015

The IMF Joins the New Cold War

On December 8, the IMF’s Chief Spokesman Gerry Rice sent a note saying:

“The IMF’s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors. We will provide details on the scope and rationale for this policy change in the next day or so.”

Since 1947 when it really started operations, the World Bank has acted as a branch of the U.S. Defense Department, from its first major chairman John J. McCloy through Robert McNamara to Robert Zoellick and neocon Paul Wolfowitz. From the outset, it has promoted U.S. exports – especially farm exports – by steering Third World countries to produce plantation crops rather than feeding their own populations. (They are to import U.S. grain.) But it has felt obliged to wrap its U.S. export promotion and support for the dollar area in an ostensibly internationalist rhetoric, as if what’s good for the United States is good for the world.

The IMF has now been drawn into the U.S. Cold War orbit. On Tuesday it made a radical decision to dismantle the condition that had integrated the global financial system for the past half century. In the past, it has been able to take thelead in organizing bailout packages for governments by getting other creditor nations – headed by the United States, Germany and Japan – to participate. The creditor leverage that the IMF has used is that if a nation is in financialarrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan – and hence, for packages involving other governments.

This has been the system by which the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. The beneficiaries have been creditors in US dollars.

But on Tuesday, the IMF joined the New Cold War. It has been lending money to Ukraine despite the Fund’s rules blocking it from lending to countries with no visible chance of paying (the “No More Argentinas” rule from 2001).

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Former Defense Secretary Warns US is Pushing Towards Nuclear Apocalypse

December 7, 2015

Former Defense Secretary Warns US is Pushing Towards Nuclear Apocalypse

The United States is on the brink of a new nuclear arms race that will elevate the risk of nuclear apocalypse to Cold War levels, former Secretary of Defense William Perry warned on Thursday.

Perry, who from 1994 to 1997 served as Pentagon chief under President Bill Clinton, delivered his remarks at an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group

“We’re now at the precipice, maybe I should say the brink, of a new nuclear arms race,” he said. “This arms race will be at least as expensive as the arms race we had during the Cold War, which is a lot of money.”

The Pentagon is starting a major overhaul of its nuclear triad, made up of bomber, submarine and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) nuclear options. Perry called for the breaking of the triad by dismantling the ICBM stockpile.

ICBMs, he said, “aren’t necessary … they’re not needed. Any reasonable definition of deterrence will not require that third leg.”

The guided missile destroyer USS Barry (DDG 52) launches a Tomahawk cruise missile

US’ New Nuke-Armed Missiles ‘Inherently Destabilizing’

In an August assessment, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments projects that it will cost more than $700 billion over the next 25 years to recapitalize the nuclear triad.

Perry said spending that money is foolish considering the United States is both short of cash for other programs and capable of a robust nuclear deterrence already, Defense News reported.

The risk of nuclear war is exacerbated by the deterioration of the relationship between Moscow and Washington that had been formed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Without clear military-to-military communication between those two nations, the risk of an accidental conflict increases, Perry said.

“Today – probably I would not have said this 10 years ago – but today we now face the kind of dangers of a nuclear event like we had during the Cold War, an accidental war,” he said.

“I see an imperative: to stop this damn nuclear arms race from accelerating again.”

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s

November 20, 2015

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s

Jingoists conveniently forget the West’s Cold War strategy was to arm the Islamic extremists that became al-Qaida

(Credit: AP/Dennis Cook)

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.

Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13, this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.

Where did militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida come from? The answer is not as complicated as many make it out to be — but, to understand, we must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other.

How the West cultivated Osama bin Laden

We needn’t reach back far into history, just a few decades.

A much-circulated photo of an article published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West’s twisted hypocrisy. Titled “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,” it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a Western ally.

Osama bin Laden, reported on favorably in the U.K.'s The Independent in 1993 (Credit: Imgur)

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ISIS Is Being Aimed At The West By Globalists – Here’s What We Can Do About It

November 18, 2015

ISIS Is Being Aimed At The West By Globalists – Here’s What We Can Do About It

Over the past year and a half, I have been writing on the engineered nature of ISIS, delving deeply into its history and its backing by Western intelligence agencies in articles such as “Is Martial Law Justified If ISIS Attacks?” as well as “What Will You Do When Tyranny And Terrorism Work Hand In Hand?” and “The Time Is Ripe For A False Flag Attack On American Soil.”

Specifically, I compared the ISIS phenomenon to another establishment-backed terrorist program that began at the onset of the Cold War in Europe and was publicly exposed in the 1990s. That program was called Operation Gladio.

Gladio involved the manipulation of existing extremist groups as well as the complete fabrication of terrorist cells within Europe claiming to be “left-wing.” The reality was that these terrorist cells were made up of intelligence agency operatives (including CIA operatives) acting as handlers often for duped scapegoats and patsies. These proxy terrorists initiated decades of attacks in Europe, which focused on shootings and bombings in public areas with full media saturation. Gladio-influenced cells, such as Action Directe, carried out at least 50 different violent attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, along with groups like Red Army Faction, Black September and the PLFP.

Governments across Europe began using the attacks as a rallying cry for a centralized one-European nation; that cry culminated in the formation of the EU.

Operation Gladio began in France in 1947, when French Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army codenamed “Plan Bleu.”

In France in 1948, the Western Union Clandestine Committee (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. After the creation of NATO a year later, the WUCC was integrated into the military alliance under the name Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC).

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Blowback—–The Washington War Party’s Folly Comes Home To Roost

November 17, 2015

Blowback—–The Washington War Party’s Folly Comes Home To Roost

Exactly 26 years ago last week, peace was breaking out in a manner that the world had not experienced since June 1914. The Berlin Wall—-the symbol of a century of state tyranny, grotesque mass warfare and the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over the planet—-had come tumbling down on November 9, 1989.

It was only a matter of time before the economically decrepit Soviet regime would be no more, and that the world’s vast arsenal of weapons and nuclear bombs could be dismantled.

Indeed, shortly thereafter according to Gorbachev, President George H.W. Bush and Secretary Baker promised that NATO would not be expanded by “as much as a thumb’s width further to the East” in return for acquiescing to the reunification of Germany.

So with its “mission accomplished” there was no logical reason why NATO should not have been disbanded in parallel with the Warsaw Pact’s demise, and for an obvious and overpowering reason: On November 9, 1989 there were no material military threats to US security anywhere on the planet outside of the suddenly vanishing front line of the Cold War.

As it turned out, however, there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.

So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1990 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night.

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Putin & Military Establishment

November 11, 2015

Putin & Military Establishment

The strategy of the Obama Administration regarding Russia and foreign affairs has been a total disaster. They have achieved quite remarkably in bringing back the Cold War and placing the world at risk all for their power-plays that American citizens are ignorant about. This issue in Syria illustrates how once politicians make a mistake, they will never admit it nor will they reverse their policy. The entire Syria strategy was to overthrow the government their to get a pipeline through to Europe to compete with Russia and reduce its economy with regard to natural gas it sells to Europe. This policy has led to ISIS, the refugee invasion of Europe, and a continual support with now troops advising on the ground how to overthrow the Syrian government.. This will lead to war because this is now totally insane and Saudi Arabia is beginning to issue bonds for the government’s budget counted on higher oil prices.

Putin has now announced that he will counter the US-NATO’s missile shield defense program by deploying new strike weapons which are capable of piercing the shield that the Democrats objected to initiated by Ronald Reagan, Putin stated publicly that that he was now developing defenses against ballistic missiles to prevent Obama from attempting to “neutralize” Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Unfortunately, Obama has one year left and that is too much time to screw the world up even more.

What we need is a non-politician with brains and guts. Someone who will stop the bureaucrats in the military establishment from creating World War III. Project Northwoods reveals how these people would even kill American citizens and blame it on someone else just to get their military goals.

The revelation of Northwoods after the Oliver Stone Movie has shed some light on the entire assassination of JFK.

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Checkmate on ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’

October 28, 2015

Checkmate on ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’

Exclusive: Since the end of World War II, what some call the “deep state” has taken hold of the American Republic, stripping the citizens of meaningful control over national security issues, with CIA Director Allen Dulles playing a key early role, according to David Talbot’s new biography reviewed by Lisa Pease.

David Talbot’s new book The Devil’s Chessboard is an anecdotal biography of not just Allen Dulles but of the national security establishment that he helped create. Talbot gave himself the monumental task of summing up a 25-year slice of important history.

Because Talbot has a keen eye for both the absurd and the darkly humorous, he managed to make the disturbing history of that period not only eminently readable but engaging and at times downright entertaining.

I have consumed dozens of books on Allen Dulles, the CIA and Cold War history, yet I was still surprised by numerous revelations in Talbot’s book. He often covers well-known episodes through a less well-known set of incidents and characters.

Talbot writes about the ratlines (escape routes from Europe to Latin America for Nazis), but in the context of one particularly Machiavellian character. He writes about Lee Harvey Oswald from the point of view of one of his friends who sold him down the river to the Warren Commission, likely at the behest of the CIA, a friend who later ostensibly committed suicide just as a member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations was about to interview him. Talbot talks about the CIA’s mind-control programs in the context of Allen Dulles submitting his own son to those horrors.

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War on Islamic State: A New Cold War fiction

October 10, 2015

War on Islamic State: A New Cold War fiction

The Islamic State group is little more than the proxy bastard child of a New Cold War that looks set to escalate

Russia is bombing “terrorists” in Syria, and the US is understandably peeved.

A day after the bombing began, Obama’s Defence Secretary Ashton Carter complained that most Russian strikes “were in areas where there were probably not ISIL (IS) forces”.

Anonymously, US officials accused Russia of deliberately targeting CIA-sponsored “moderate” rebels to shore-up the regime of Bashir al-Assad.

Only two of Russia’s 57 airstrikes have hit ISIS, opined Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in similar fashion. The rest have hit “the moderate opposition, the only forces fighting ISIS in Syria,” he said.

Such claims have been dutifully parroted across the Western press with little scrutiny, bar the odd US media watchdog.

But who are these moderate rebels, really?

Moderate al-Qaeda

The first Russian airstrikes hit the rebel-held town of Talbisah north of Homs City, home to al-Qaeda’s official Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the pro-al-Qaeda Ahrar al-Sham, among other local rebel groups. Both al-Nusra and the Islamic State have claimed responsibility for vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs) in Homs City, which is 12 kilometers south of Talbisah.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that as part of “US and Turkish efforts to establish an ISIS ‘free zone’ in the northern Aleppo countryside,” al-Nusra “withdrew from the border and reportedly reinforced positions in this rebel-held pocket north of Homs city”.

In other words, the US and Turkey are actively sponsoring “moderate” Syrian rebels in the form of al-Qaeda, which Washington DC-based risk analysis firm Valen Globals forecasts will be “a bigger threat to global security” than IS in coming years.

– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/war-islamic-state-new-cold-war-fiction-1608242142#sthash.mAgLlnu2.dpuf

How The War Party Betrayed America’s Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Tradition

October 3, 2015

How The War Party Betrayed America’s Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Tradition

So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.

Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.

A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us — to Tehran.

The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.

How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.

Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.

Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.

On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?

What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?

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Obama Deifies American Hegemony

September 29, 2015

Obama Deifies American Hegemony

Today is the 70th anniversary of the UN. It is not clear how much good the UN has done. Some UN Blue Hemet peacekeeping operations had limited success. But mainly Washington has used the UN for war, such as the Korean War and Washington’s Cold War against the Soviet Union. In our time Washington had UN tanks sent in against Bosnian Serbs during the period that Washington was dismantling Yugoslavia and Serbia and accusing Serbian leaders, who tried to defend the integrity of their country against Washington’s aggression, of “war crimes.”

The UN supported Washington’s sanctions against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. When asked about it, Clinton’s Secretary of State said, with typical American heartlessness, that the deaths of the children were worth it. In 2006 the UN voted sanctions against Iran for exercising its right as a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty to develop atomic energy. Washington claimed without any evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon in violation of the non-proliferation treaty, and this lie was accepted by the UN. Washington’s false claim was repudiated by all 16 US intelligence agencies and by the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground in Iran, but in the face of the factual evidence the US government and its presstitute media pressed the claim to the point that Russia had to intervene and take the matter out of Washington’s warmonger hands. Russia’s intervention to prevent US military attacks on Iran and Syria resulted in the demonization of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. “Facts?!, Washington don’t need no stinkin’ facts! We got power!” Today at the UN Obama asserted America’s over-riding power many times: the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world.

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US Readies Battle Plans For Baltic War With Russia: Report

September 19, 2015

US Readies Battle Plans For Baltic War With Russia: Report

One of the most interesting – or perhaps “worrisome” is the better word – things about Moscow’s move to increase its support for the Bashar al-Assad regime as it battles to wrest control of large swaths of territory in Syria from Islamic State and other anti-government forces, is that it comes as the conflict in Ukraine still simmers.

Even if, as Bloomberg suggested on Friday, The Kremlin is “leaning on the separatists to limit cease-fire violations and focus on turning their makeshift administration into a functioning government with the help of Moscow-trained bureaucrats,” the issue is far from resolved and if Transnistria is any guide, it may never be.

That of course means the tension between Russia and Europe isn’t likely to dissipate any time in the foreseeable future, a fact that makes Moscow’s overt military support of Assad in Syria seem like a rather risky maneuver. In short, it appears that no matter how one wishes to characterize Moscow’s actions (i.e. irrespective of who the “aggressor” is), the West’s Russophobia as it relates to Putin’s willingness to chance a direct military confrontation with NATO isn’t entirely unfounded and as we’ve been keen to point out over the last several days, what the Russians have done by reinforcing Assad at Latakia is effectively call America’s bluff.

Needless to say, NATO’s actions over the last six or so months have done nothing to de-escalate what amounts to the most intense staring contest between Russia and the West since the Cold War. War games and snap drills conducted along Russia’s border combined with the stationing of heavy weapons in Poland lend credence to the idea that at best, the US isn’t nearly as anxious to re-establish a constructive dialogue with Moscow as Washington would like the public to believe.

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Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

September 16, 2015

Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

Exclusive: Despite a record of unprecedented error, American neocons remain the dominant foreign policy force in Official Washington, demanding more “regime change” in the Middle East and a new Cold War that could heat up and end all life on the planet, writes Robert Parry.

The neoconservatives arguably have damaged American national interests more than any group in modern history. They have done more harm than the marginal Communists pursued by Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, more than the Yippies of the 1960s, more than Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in the 1970s or the Iran-Contra conspirators in the 1980s.

The neocons have plunged the U.S. government into extraordinarily ill-considered wars wasting trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and destabilizing large swaths of the planet including the Middle East, much of Africa and now Europe. Those costs include a swelling hatred against America and a deformed U.S. foreign policy elite that isno longer capable of formulating coherent strategies.

Yet, the neocons have remained immune from the consequences of their catastrophes. They still dominate Washington’s major think tanks as well as the op-ed pages of virtually all the leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They hold down key positions in the State Department, and their “liberal interventionist” pals have the ear of President Barack Obama.

Clearly, the neocons are skilled operatives, knowing how to arrange a steady stream of funding for themselves, from military contractors donating to think tanks, from U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, and from ideological billionaires set on aligning U.S. foreign policy with hard-line Israeli desires.

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How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed West

September 10, 2015

How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed West

The conditionality of the Soviet Union’s agreement to allow East Germany to be taken by West Germany and for the Cold War to end, was that NATO would not expand «one inch to the east». This was the agreement that was approved by the Russian President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, a great man and a subsequent hero to democrats around the world.

He agreed then to end the Soviet Union and abandon communism and thus to end the entire Cold War; he agreed to this because he had been promised that NATO would expand not «one inch to the east,» or «one inch eastward,» depending upon how the promise was translated and understood — but it has the same meaning, no matter how it was translated. He trusted American President George Herbert Walker Bush, whose friend and Secretary of State James Baker made this promise to Gorbachev. With this promise, Gorbachev agreed to end the Soviet Union; end the communist mutual-defense pact which was their own equivalent of NATO, the Warsaw Pact; and he believed that the remaining nation that he would then be leading, which was Russia, would be accepted as a Western democracy.

He was even promised by the United States that «we were going to make them a member [of NATO], we were –observer first and then a member». In other words: the U.S. promised that NATO would not extend up to the borders of Russia and so become a mortal threat to the national security of the Russian people – now isolated and separated from its former military allies. Instead, Gorbachev was told, Russia would itself become welcomed into the Western Alliance, and ultimately become a NATO member. That was the deal, ending the 46-year Cold War.

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War Drums Beating: Bulgaria Blocks Russian Access To Its Airspace For Syria Flights

September 8, 2015

War Drums Beating: Bulgaria Blocks Russian Access To Its Airspace For Syria Flights

On Monday we flagged a notable escalation in the build up to the geopolitical “main event” in Syria where, thanks largely to the West’s ambition to break Gazprom’s leverage over Europe, the US and Russia are one “accidental” run-in away from taking the “proxy” out of the term “proxy war.”

With the Kremlin now ramping up its military presence around the Assad stronghold of Latakia, the US is scrambling to do anything and everything in its power to slow the Russian build up – including putting pressure on Greece to deny Russia the use of its airspace for supply flights to Syria.

This isn’t the first time Greece has found itself in the middle of Cold War 2.0, as Athens (and notably Panagiotis Lafazanis) used Greece’s geographical position to field competing gas pipeline bids from Washington and Moscow during the height of the country’s fraught bailout negotiations.

So while we wait for Greece to pick a side between the US and Russia by either allowing Moscow to use its airspace on the way to supplying Assad or else snubbing the Kremlin and jeopardizing a potentially lucrative gas deal, at least one country has been quick to make a decision: Bulgaria…

Al Arabiya English

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#BreakingNews Bulgaria has denied Russia use of its airspace for supply flights to Syria http://ara.tv/9p2sy