Philip Giraldi

RE Map: Why does Israel continue to build settlements on the west bank and continue its expansionist policies? The ultimate goal is to capture all of ‘Eretz Israel’. The ‘Promised Land’ extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, a bit of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Yasser Arafat always used to keep an Israeli coin in his pocket showing Israel with the ‘Eretz Israel’ borders, to remind people that they shouldn’t be fooled by the Zionists, as they have no defined borders and continue to expand their land.

Most observers have become wearied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s frequently voiced demands that Iran must be attacked because it is a threat to the entire world. The reality is otherwise, that Iran’s theocratic government’s security apparatus oppresses mostly its own people and its military lacks the capabilities that would enable it to threaten either Israel or the United States. Israel’s government knows that perfectly well and has even conceded that Iran currently has no nuclear weapons program, a viewpoint shared by America’s CIA. It also knows that any attempt by its air force and navy to attack Iran would be fraught with peril, quite likely leading to a regional war in which Israel would sustain considerable damage even if it would ultimately prevail due to its superior armaments provided by the United States.

So if Iran is no threat and Israel is incapable of staging a successful attack using its own resources, why is there a constant drumbeat from Netanyahu? One might suggest that Israel has been all along intending to let Washington do the fighting and dying for it by creating a sense of urgency over what Iran’s intentions and capabilities might actually be. Useful idiots in Congress, most recently Senators Kirk and Menendez, continue to push through resolutions demanding more and harsher sanctions against Iran. This demonization effort has been successful in that it has placed the US Congress firmly on the side of wrecking the Iranian economy as a means to eliminate Tehran’s nuclear program while prominent media spokesmen have been voicing much the same sentiment. Mitt Romney also drank the Kool aid, pledging to stop Iranian “capability” to create a nuclear weapon, something that it already has, before demonstrating that he did not even know where Iran was located. Because of the misinformation that circulates freely, opinion polls suggest that most Americans believe that Iran already has a nuclear weapon and constitutes a threat, though few would want a new war in the Middle East to deal with it.

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Philip Giraldi

The silhouette of U.S. President Barack Obama is seen as he
sits in the back of the Marine One helicopter, landing on the
South Lawn of the White House in Washington.

Outside of websites such as Antiwar.com, there has been remarkably little commentary over the issue of the White House–managed kill lists, which played no part in the election but will nevertheless continue to be a keystone of security policy in the new administration in Washington. Details on how the lists were developed and maintained surfaced in the media on Oct. 23 in an article in the Washington Post which described how the White House has decided that targeted assassinations will continue to be necessary for the next decade. The article provoked some negative commentary in the usual places, but little in the way of genuine outrage. In a saner world, one might even have expected that extralegal targeted killing could have been used in a partisan fashion by the Republicans to highlight Obama’s dismantling of constitutional and legal protections, but Mitt Romney voiced nary a word of criticism, suggesting that he too sees death by government fiat as an essential tool against terrorism and approves of what the president is doing.

The assassination by drone and special ops teams was a program initiated by President George W. Bush but it appears that it was not actually made operational until a former community organizer who promised change named Barack Obama entered the White House. Citing the difficulty of dealing with the Guantanamo prisoners, Obama apparently determined that it would be better to kill possible terrorists than to go through the tactical complications and extra expense entailed in trying to detain them and risk a trial in a court of law.

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Philip Giraldi

Re-elected President Barack Obama’s first foreign policy challenge is likely to be Syria and one has to hope that he will have the wisdom to avoid grasping the nettle. After watching last week’s video of rebels lining up twenty-eight captured soldiers and executing them at close range with machine guns, one might well ask what has been going on in that country. It is the repetition of a familiar pattern for the US, beginning with fundamental failures on the part of Washington and its surrogates to understand the internal dynamics of a foreign land, resulting in bad decisions that have produced even worse results. Since 9/11 the United States has invaded two countries and interfered with a heavy hand in a handful more, with nary a good outcome to be seen. If Washington has a genuine national interest that is at stake in Syria, it would be that the country stay united and stable to keep it from becoming the latest playground for Jihadi warriors. Inevitably perhaps, it appears to be dissolving in chaos and that is precisely what it has become.

The Syrian debacle began as part of the Arab Spring in March 2011 as demonstrations swept the country demanding the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad and a new constitution that would remove the Ba’ath Party from power. The Ba’ath Party was then and is now dominated by Alawites, a sect of Shi’ite Islam. Al-Assad is himself an Alawite but has a British-born wife and is regarded as non-religious. Sunnis, the majority religious group in the country long resentful of Ba’athist Alawite rule, joined minority Kurds in the initial demonstrations, which were violently suppressed by the government.

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Stephen Lendman

An honest election is impossible in a one-party state.

Stephen Lendman: Obama's Legacy of Shame
Stephen Lendman: Obama's Failed State of the Union
Stephen Lendman: Murder, Inc: Official Obama Policy
Glen Ford: Why Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil
Yves Smith: Barack Obama, the Great Deceiver
Philip Giraldi: Obama’s Report Card

The same party wins every time. Duopoly power rules. America is a one party state with two wings. Each replicates the other. On major issues mattering most, not a dime's worth of difference separates them.

The late Gore Vidal explained it as well as anyone. Some of his best comments included:

■ "Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."
■ "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."
■ "By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."
■ "Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."
■ "The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."
■ "We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth."

He also said America is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together." He thought of himself as a modern-day Voltaire. We need a legion of them at perhaps the most perilous time in world history.

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Philip Giraldi

The choice for the voter comes down to how one prefers to see worldwide chaos and the death of the Constitution develop. It would be in heavy doses wrapped in the flag with Romney, while Obama would take pains to hide what he is doing as he marches down what is pretty much the same road.

Many Americans are rightly disgusted by the non-choice they are offered in the presidential race every four years. This year is no different despite the serious problems that the United States faces at home and abroad. Mitt Romney has no actual plan to fix the economy, and the record of President Barack Obama over the past four years speaks for itself. Romney is a big-government Republican, while Obama is an even-bigger-government Democrat. Either will increase the deficit to the bankruptcy point; Romney through more spending on arms, soldiers, and wars, Obama with a sorely needed health-care program that will break the bank because it was created in collusion with the health-care and insurance industries and makes no effort to limit costs.

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Philip Giraldi

The frequently repeated threat by the Israeli leadership to attack Iran is not a serious plan to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. It is more likely a long running disinformation operation to somehow convince the United States to do the job or a deliberate conditioning of the Israeli and US publics to be supportive if some incident can be arranged to trigger an armed conflict. If one believes the two presidential candidates based on what they said in Monday’s debate, both have more-or-less conceded the point, agreeing that they would support militarily any Israeli attack on Iran. Whether Romney or Obama is actually willing to start a major new war in the Middle East is, of course, impossible to discern.

During the Napoleonic Wars, when it was reported that the French were preparing to invade England, Admiral John Jervis said “I do not say they the French cannot come–I only say they cannot come by sea.” Barring the movement of a regiment of sans culottes across the English Channel by a fleet of Montgolfier balloons, the Jervis comment pretty much summed up the limits to French ambitions as long as Britannia ruled the waves.

A similar bit of military overreach appears to be surrounding the alleged planning by the Israelis to stage an air assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US media and even some Pentagon spokesmen have suggested that Israel cannot do the job alone, but the problem is much larger than that, leading to the question whether Israel can do it at all. Israel has over 400 fighters, but many of them are configured to establish air superiority over an opponent by shooting down opposing aircraft and disabling air defense facilities on the ground. They are fighters supporting ground operations first with a limited secondary capability as bombers.

Israel has no dedicated bomber force but it does have an estimated 125 advanced F-15I and F-16I’s, which have been further enhanced through special avionics installed by the Israel Aircraft Industry to improve performance over the types of terrain and weather conditions prevailing in the Middle East. The planes are able to fly long range missions and very capable in a bombing role but they do have their limitations.

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Philip Giraldi

Spencer Tracy by the tracks in the John Sturges thriller
from 1955, Bad Day at Black Rock. It tells the story of a
mysterious stranger who arrives at a tiny isolated town in
a desert of the southwest United States in search of a man.

I am still trying to recover from the Republican Party’s overwhelming failure to understand that only Ron Paul was speaking good sense about the dismal state of U.S. foreign policy. Depending on whom you listen to, however, one might almost think in spite of all evidence to the contrary that the revolution is still going on and just one more tweak will deliver a Brave New World. That is because hardly a day passes without yet another email from the various organizations that are seeking to cash in on the Ron Paul legacy, demonstrating that they have the moxie to continue the fight. The most recent email from John Tate and Campaign for Liberty pledged to do something about drones, the latest empty promise that comes on top of not-quite-achieved victories in auditing the Fed and Pentagon and defending the Internet. Just send $50 or whatever one can spare. We’ll spend it wisely. Really.

In spite of it all, I strongly believe that Dr. Paul’s immense contribution to the political debate forced something of a rethinking of the unfortunate direction that our nation has taken in the past 10 years. His message continues to resonate, if muted, and is worth more than an eventual footnote in a history book. In the area of foreign policy, he alone had the courage to speak out on issues that the other candidates chose to ignore while puffing out their chests, wrapping themselves in the flag, and boasting of “American Exceptionalism.”

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Philip Giraldi

Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv’s demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.

Well, I don’t feel that way. I don’t like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn’t alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.

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Philip Giraldi

The view into Syria from Turkey's Ulu mosque

Regional powers aren't immune to blowback and other consequences of intervention either.

Over the past eleven years we have become so accustomed to the United States intervening in the affairs of other countries, to include regime change and military invasion, it is sometimes possible to forget that some other nations have also found themselves mired in situations that they cannot extricate themselves from when they pursued similar policies. America’s closest and most important ally in the Middle East Turkey now finds itself in a largely lose-lose situation in its dealings with its neighbor Syria.

Turkey certainly has many detractors who point to the increasing authoritarianism of the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government, its increasing drift from secularism to a mild Islamism, and the de facto limits on civil liberties and rule of law demonstrated in its arrests and prosecutions of journalists and political opponents. But both visitors and longtime foreign residents would also note the country’s dynamic society and vibrant economy at a time when much of the Western world appears to be mired in self-doubt and historical revisionism. Turkey’s economy has been growing, currently at an 8% annual rate, and its centrality as a militarily powerful moderate Muslim regime has led to speculation that they are a possible role model for other developing Islamic states in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, was a passionate secularist, believing as he did that it was the Medievalism of Islam that retarded the nation’s development. He was also a nationalist. During and immediately after the First World War Turkey was a polyglot nation with large Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Jewish, and Arab minorities. Turkish ethnics were a majority, but nearly half of the nation was non-Turkish. Pogroms against the Armenians and the war of liberation against an invasion by Greece produced major population shifts, sharply reducing the numbers of Christians in the country. But the other major ethnic groups remained. Ataturk’s solution to the country’s ethnic diversity consisted of declaring that henceforth all citizens of the Republic of Turkey would be Turks, whether they liked it or not and without regard to what language they spoke at home and how they chose to worship. This was referred to as “Turkification” and some languages, including Kurdish, were actually made illegal. Ethnic riots in the 1950s further reduced the number of Greeks, primarily in Istanbul, but the fundamental instability of the Turkish state based on its large, predominantly Kurdish minority remained.

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Philip Giraldi

The next New York Police Department coming to a place near you!

Remember the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel who made his mark saving aristos from the guillotine? “They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel.” Fortunately Baroness Orczy’s creation lived and worked in the eighteenth century. It’s not so difficult to find people these days given the capabilities afforded by high tech methods of intruding into people’s lives and monitoring their activities. Nowadays the Pimpernel would no doubt be detected and detained when using his cell phone or swiping his credit card at a 7-11.

For New Yorkers nostalgic for a reminder of life in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s city, experiencing something from home is not now nearly so elusive. In fact, New York is pretty much anywhere you turn. A little bit of New York has turned up in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and even Williamsburg, Va. It’s in Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Spain, India, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, and Israel. No, it’s not in the form of a Broadway deli or a Famous Original Ray’s pizza. It’s the New York City Police Department, which proudly displays the motto “Fidelis ad Mortem,” faithful unto death. The NYPD is everywhere.

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