IRAQ AND PALESTINE: THE FUTILITY OF IMPERIALISM
Soon after Bush's vote fraud operation, the US moved with sickening predictability to crush the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah. After an immense slaughter of civilians, the US command announced that it had "broken the back" of the Iraqi resistance. The US propaganda machine had been at great pains to build up a certain Zarkawi as the leader of the Iraqi resistance, and there was every reason to believe that Zarkawi, to the extent that he exists at all, was run by the US as a countergang to the coalition forces. Notably, during the same week in October when BBC 2 was broadcasting its documentary entitled "The Power of Nightmares," which advanced philosophical doubts about the existence of bin Laden and his band in the real world, Zarkawi felt moved to rush to the defense of bin Laden's credibility by proclaiming his own eternal loyalty to the erratic Saudi sheikh -- which only confirmed that both bin Laden and the phantomatic Zarkawi, around whom the strangest rumors swirl, are CIA/MI-6 projects from beginning to end.
In reality, the US forces had only succeeded in shifting the main theater of resistance combat northward to Mosul. The death of Arafat during the same period underlined that the US occupation of Iraq was now just as bankrupt as the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. In both cases, the foreign occupation of sovereign Arab territory is the cause of the resistance; the only way to end hostilities is to end the foreign occupation, which becomes more odious to the victim population with each successive month.
In the case of the Palestinian territories, the general outlines for peace are doubtless those of the Yasser Abed Rabbo Yossi Beilin Geneva accord of November 2003: all Israeli settlements must be removed from the occupied territories, and a Palestinian state must be erected in the West Bank and Gaza as a sovereign state, not a glorified Bantustan. The Israeli wall might be legitimate, but only on Israeli land, if it follows the internationally recognized line of demarcation. The Palestinian right of return must apply only to the new Palestinian state, and not to Israel. Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees ought of course to be indemnified, and here is one area where the United States and the European Union could contribute. The Palestinian state must extend security guarantees to Israel, and to be effective, these must not be undermined by false-flag synthetic terror. One Italian philosopher, Enrico Nuzzo of Salerno, has suggested that both Israel and Palestine could become members of the European Union, a proposal which would facilitate economic reconstruction and development. In one way or another, a comprehensive Marshall Plan for the underdeveloped and war-torn states of the entire Middle East should be provided, under non-monetarist auspices.
The mindless Bush regime never tires of repeating the mantra of "finish the job" and "a democratic Iraq." Here again, it is the US occupation which is radicalizing the situation by eliciting a national resistance. Peace can come only after the occupation is ended. The situation of the hapless US forces in the country could soon become extraordinarily critical, leading to their concentration in a few enclaves in the desert supplied from the air. Iraq would appear to be converging on something like the famous Sicilian vespers of 1282, when a spontaneous general mass uprising, triggered by an insult to a Sicilian lady leaving a church service, suddenly drove the French occupying forces of Charles of Anjou out of that Mediterranean island.
THE DEATH AGONY OF THE DOLLAR SYSTEM
In November 2004, the US dollar collapsed to a level of $1.35 to the euro. Exchange bureaus in Europe were selling euros for $1.45, as American tourists howled. It looked like the beginning of a new world monetary crisis, for the first time since 1973. The immediate trigger was a comment from Greenspan, attending a finance conference, to the effect that the US current account deficit was unsustainable because foreigners could not be counted on to keep buying dollar-denominated assets. Soon the Russian and Indonesian central banks signaled that they were continuing to diversify out of the dollar, and it became clear that the Chinese central bank was doing the same thing.
Although the euro had been gaining ground fast of late, two thirds of world central bank reserves were still kept in dollars, for a value of $2.3 trillion. At stake was the absurd and obsolete role of the dollar as the sole reserve currency of the world, a role which has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of a solvent rival currency in the form of the euro. The US was by far the world's largest debtor nation, with almost $3.3 trillion in net foreign liabilities.
The inherent instability in the dollar system was that the dollar was the reserve currency while the US was also the biggest debtor on the planet, and things were getting worse fast. According to the OECD Economic Outlook, the US current account deficit was on track to rise to $825 billion per year (or 6.4% of GD P) by 2006, approximately the mid-point in Bush's second term.
By 2008, when Bush is getting ready to head for the last roundup, the US current account deficit would likely rise to 8% of GDP per year. But, as the gnomes of the City of London pointed out, the breaking point will be reached well before that. The dollar, in their view, was headed for a $1.80 to the euro exchange rate in the near future. That would then pose a problem for the holders of some $11 trillion in dollar-denominated assets, the largest single category of the world's "wealth." If the dollar were to begin an even more dramatic slide, they would be motivated to run for the exits, dumping their dollar assets and sinking the greenback. That would blowout the US housing bubble causing a "deep recession," the polite term for a world economic breakdown crisis. Fear of this is mainly what is keeping many central bankers from selling off their dollars right now; this is what Larry Summers, Clinton's Treasury Secretary (now president of Harvard) has called "the balance of financial terror." (London Economist, December 4, 2004) In other words, a dollar devaluation of the most serious type is now inevitable, and may bring down what passes for a world monetary system. How much of that $11 trillion in dollar-denominated paper will survive? Will it be 40%? Or 25%? Or less? In any case, the amount of wealth in the world is going to turn out to be much less than is currently thought, because so much of that $11 trillion will shortly be exposed as purely fictitious capital.
The dollar's reserve currency status is the true heart of US international arrogance. As Simon Nixon commented, the privileged status of the dollar gives the US "the freedom to keep printing dollars without sparking inflation, enabling it to fund wars, giant trade deficits, government spending programs and tax cuts." The US is thus bereft of an economic reality principle. The really decisive issue is when a major oil producer will stop accepting dollars. Nixon notes that the British pound's half-life as a reserve currency after World War II ended when Saudi Arabia stopped taking pounds. Today, when it comes to the dollar, "even the Saudis are wavering ... If the oil producers turn their back on the dollar, the ramifications for the global economy will be immense. ...[b ]oth oil exporters and importers would switch a significant proportion of their reserves into euros, thus triggering a stampede out of the dollar into euros." Another "danger is that if Asian central banks do stop buying dollars, the result will be a devastating collapse of the US currency." The US therefore faces "a challenge to their economic hegemony." (London Spectator, October 18, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) During 2004, there has already been a net outflow from the US of long-term foreign investment.
Perhaps the neocons will goad Saudi Arabia or Russia into taking the plunge. Putin and Schroder discussed how the EU could buy oil from Russia with euros in early October, 2003. That news "set off a chain reaction in the private sector, leading to a fourfold increase in euro deposits in Russian banks this year and sending Russian citizens scrambling to change their stashes of greenbacks into euro notes." (Daily Telegraph, October 10, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) The solution to the world monetary crisis was a new Bretton Woods system among euro, yen, and dollar, with fixed parities set by participating governments, the comprehensive re-regulation of financial markets, and a mechanism for international clearing and gold settlement to prevent any participant from running chronic deficits in the way the Anglo-Americans customarily had. Most important, the new Bretton Woods had to be a monetary system explicitly geared to the fullest scientific, technological, and economic development of the third world, with rising living standards, longevity, and energy throughput for humanity as a whole.
THE NEW COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA
This book differs from all studies of 9/11 which have been examined so far in the importance it gives to the US-Russian nuclear forces relation as the framework in which the 9/11 criminal attacks must be understood. This book proceeds from an intelligence and counterintelligence picture of explosive US-Russian military, political, and terrorist tensions which have been masked to some extent by the charade of friendship which Bush and Putin have practiced in public. The view here is that on 9/11 Putin, seeing the hegemony of the invisible government lunatics in Washington and London, decided to adopt a policy of war avoidance through broad concessions to the US at many levels, including central Asia.
Putin could see that the neocon war plans for the Middle East would exhaust, weaken, and disperse US forces, while Russia might become stronger over the same months and years. In the service of this policy, Putin was prepared silently to swallow many a bitter affront and injury. To this extent, the relation between Bush and Putin may be seen in the light of the Hitler-Stalin relationship of September 1939-June 1941. This analogy is suggestive, but we should not follow it into every detail. We must also remember, as General Suvorov's "icebreaker" thesis specifies, that Stalin was preparing his own attack on Hitler, Operation Thunder, for early July 1941. Hitler, with his smaller forces, was able to strike first, in effect beating Stalin to the draw. This is the kind of unstable relation that now obtains between the world's two great nuclear powers. And there should be no doubt that, if Russia can destroy the US superpower, as it most assuredly can, then it is a sophistry to deny that Russia emphatically qualifies as a superpower too. Scenarios have suddenly become plausible which lead to general thermonuclear war.
The future being prepared for Russia by the neocons became clear shortly after Putin assumed power. Shortly before 9/11 Jeffrey Tayler wrote a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly ("Russia is Finished") in which he developed an apocalyptic perspective for the Eurasian giant:
Internal contradictions in Russia's thousand-year history have destined it to shrink demographically, weaken economically, and possibly disintegrate territorially. The drama is coming to a close, and within a few decades Russia will concern the rest of the world no more than any Third World country with abundant resources, an impoverished people, and a corrupt government. In short, as a Great Power, Russia is finished. (Atlantic, May 2001)
Note well: "internal contradictions." Cultural determinism, and not the IMF, not the great criminal revolution of shock therapy, not Jeffrey Sachs, not Anders Aslund, not the US-UK oil cartel's campaign to loot the oil of Siberia, not US UK support for Chechen and other terrorists.
In this contest, Putin has the decisive merit of simply wanting to defend his country from the Anglo-Americans. As the Beslan school massacre showed, Putin was also the victim of Anglo-American terrorism. Putin has shown great restraint in not reacting to US-UK provocations, like the Kursk incident and others. Putin has also been right: the neocons have substantially weakened the US military position in the world. Putin has also been correct in thinking that a few years might give Russia some important strategic trump cards useful for facing down the self-styled Anglo-American neocon supermen. This was illustrated on November 18, 2004, when Putin announced that Russia possessed a new and advanced strategic nuclear missile unlike any held by any other country.
Some speculated that this was a mobile third generation version of the Topol M missile, known to NATO as the SS-27. Others thought Putin was referring to the Bulava submarine launched long-range ballistic missile. Whichever it was, it appeared that this new Russian missile had capabilities which would allow it to defeat any US strategic anti-missile defense over the relevant historical future. Putin stressed that foreign countries would not be able to match his new missile for a very long time. Russia appeared to be ahead of the US in a number of key strategic departments; it appeared that Putin had chosen to generously support certain key areas of weapons development which might give him a critical advantage over the Anglo-Saxons if confrontation were to loom.
Another example of this was the SS-N-22 Sunburn, called Moskit in Russian, a supersonic cruise missile which could fly as fast as Mach 3 and as low as nine feet above the surface of the water. This formidable weapon had clearly been conceived for the purpose of destroying US aircraft carriers, and it was said to have been sold to China (and to Iran, according to some unconfirmed reports). Russia's nuclear deterrent was not just alive and well, it was extremely robust.
Why Putin had chosen November 18 to make this momentous announcement became clearer on Sunday, November 21, when the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) attempted a "people power" coup in Ukraine. The cynical propaganda technicians of Connecticut Avenue had orchestrated a mass movement of street mobs around the presidential candidacy of former prime minister Yushchenko, whose main attraction for them was his pledge to lead Ukraine into full membership in NATO. The candidacy of current Prime Minister Yanukovych had received explicit support from Putin.
The Yushchenko supporters were using the playbook developed by the NED in toppling Milosevic in Serbia in 2000; the same methods had also been successful in ousting the pro-Moscow Eduard Shevardnadze in the "revolution of roses" in Georgia in the first days of 2004. (In Belarus, a similar attempt had been beaten back.) The Yushchenko forces styled themselves as the orange revolution, and blocked the streets of Kiev, claiming that the apparent election victory by Yanukovych represented vote fraud. Many were sincerely interested in democratic reform, but this did not make them any less dupes of the perception-mongers from Washington. The street mobs were able to secure the rejection of the election results by the supreme court, and the calling of a new election for several weeks later.
Much of the operation had been conduited through Poland by the Brzezinski family clique; in addition to Zbigniew, the prophet of 9/11 and the man responsible for the 1979-1988 Afghan War and thus for the emergence of bin Laden & Co., there was now also his nepotistic son Mark, a veteran of the Clinton NSC. Zbigniew was notorious as a hysterical Russophobe and nostalgic of the petty Polish nobility, or szlachta. Both Brzezinskis were giving media interviews around the clock during the first days of the Ukraine crisis, and it may have been in their service that Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, made bold to offer his services in Ukraine as a mediator.
Support for Yanukovych was strong in the industrialized cities in the eastern Ukraine, where much of the population were ethnic Russians. Yushchenko's own political fiefdom was an economic wasteland. Fascist skinheads could be seen among Yushchenko's orange legions, but western commentators were willing to count them as democratic because they were anti-Russian. When Yanukovych's victory was abrogated in the courts, officials in the eastern Ukraine began to talk about home rule, and then about secession. If secession were tried, would anyone try to prevent it by force? Would Russia intervene on the side of the secessionists? Would Poland, now a NATO power, intervene against Russia? Would the US and the rest of NATO then be drawn into the worst of all insane adventures? Putin had some sharp exchanges with EU foreign affairs spokesmen, since many Europeans had foolishly allowed themselves to be taken in by the orange carnival. However, German Chancellor Schroder seemed to have some understanding of the farce in Kiev, and his planned summit with Putin was successfully held in Schleswigjust before Christmas, although the crucial step of adopting the euro for paying the EU's oil bills was apparently not taken.
Needless to say, Ukraine is the royal road taken by every invader of Russia, from Napoleon to Hitler. Tampering with Ukraine is a recipe for triggering the instinctive defense of Russia, which is still a powerful instinct in most Russians. What possible American interest could be served by extending NATO all the way to the Crimea? In the meantime, this book's view of the world strategic context had been decisively validated. Putin underlined this with his wry Christmas present to the Anglo-Americans, which was the nationalization of the huge Yukos oil company, whose former boss, the oligarch Khodorkovsky, remained in jail. Putin's move was seen as a prelude to the large-scale roll-back of the widespread illegal nomenklatura privatizations of Soviet state property under Yeltsin's pro-IMF regime in the early 1990s.
The Bush regime won yet another Oscar for international hypocrisy in regard to the Ukrainian situation. Bush had just stolen another term in office thanks to a vote fraud of pharaonic proportions. But while he savored vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, he claimed to find it intolerable in Kiev. The same was true of the farcical European Union election observers, who had been invited in by the US State Department under the auspice of the Helsinki accords and the OSCE. They were blind to vote fraud in Columbus, but eagle-eyed in Kiev. (The same crew proposed to validate the bloody grand guignol of US-backed elections in Iraq -- but only from the safety of Jordan!)
US strategy had been concerned with isolating, impoverishing, and destabilizing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its successor states, and its alliances for a long time. In 1989-90, the NATO coalition had succeeded in dismantling its long-time adversary, the Warsaw Pact. With the fall of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Soviet-led economic bloc, the Comecon or CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), also fell apart. The Soviet Union itself had needlessly been driven into extinction in December 1991. In 2004, it became increasingly evident that Anglo-American policy aimed at breaking up the Russian Federation, the old RSFSR, itself. The overarching goal here was absolute and uncontested Anglo-American world domination, to be obtained by completing the Balkanization of Russia as a great power. The Russian strategic arsenal would be removed or at least divided somewhere along the way. An included feature of this geopolitical quest was of course Russia's status as the world's second largest oil exporter.
The great development of 2003 was the re-emergence, after a century of futile and fratricidal conflict, of the continental bloc of France, Germany, and Russia, the main alternative to bankrupt Anglo-American world domination. In 2002 Germany had provided leadership for this bloc with Schroder's steadfast rejection of the neocon Iraq aggression. In 2003 Chirac and Villepin had taken over the lead, also with regard to Iraq. In 2004, Putin had challenged the Anglo-Americans over their sponsorship of terrorism and hostile intent.
The last days of 2004 were a somber time. There was much consternation across the world because of the prospect of four more years of Bush. There is a considerable body of evidence that the modern territorial national state is becoming obsolete and may need to be replaced. But it may not yet be conclusive.
If we recall Machiavelli's three moments of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy ( corresponding to the ontological categories of the one, the few, and the many, which will always be with us), then we must note that all attempts to go beyond the national state (the United Nations, the European Union) have been conducted on an oligarchical basis, and thus contain strong tendencies which are antithetical to human progress and to the overcoming of the current world crisis. The main problem of oligarchy is its mediocrity and inertia, the latter being especially stubborn because change requires convincing so many different oligarchs to cooperate. The prevalent oligarchy needs to be balanced by a strong executive, in effect a world president. This was the genius of the new monarchy of early modern Europe, in which kings like Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England allied with their respective bourgeoisies to terminate the abuses of the feudal aristocracy.
Given the profoundly oligarchical nature of the current world, it is much to be feared that any world government institutions which might be created in the foreseeable future would be even more vitiated by oligarchy than the existing ones. The problem facing advocates of world government is to chart a course for arriving at a unified world executive, an extremely touchy matter for many obvious reasons. If it could be done peacefully, a future world federal state might supercede the current United Nations in the same way the US federal Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, which had an oligarchical congress but no executive to check them. But, given the power of the neocon warmonger clique in today's world, it appears dilatory and utopian to even speculate on such possibilities. It is unfortunately more likely that world government will be attained, if it ever is, as a result of a new and cataclysmic world war in which entire national states, weakened by the globalization depression, will disappear as readily as royal dynasties did at the end of World War I.
We are living in the twilight of the Anglo-American world order, a system of planetary domination by the Whig financier faction since just after 1700. This system had certain positive features, but it has now become a barrier to human progress, and it is past time for it to exit the world scene:
The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
-- Tennyson
By some reckonings, we now stand at the beginning of a new fascist era. If that night must come, let it at least have the vivid clarity and sharpness of a polar night, not clouded by the fog of myth and lies.
W.G.T.
December 23, 2004