June 18, 2010
The Cardboard Lotharios
ANALYZING STAGED WORLD CONFLICT
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/06/17/gordon-duff-the-cardboard-lotharios/
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor, Veterens Today
In 2006, North Korea exploded a plutonium based nuclear weapon, an unsuccessul test of either a “found” nuke in poor repair, or something poorly designed. America had predicted that they were at least five years from this capability, we always hear the same story, everyone is five years from having nuclear weapons. On May 25th, 2009, North Korea exploded its second bomb, its first clearly identifiable nuclear weapon, a “Hiroshima sized” bomb, tiny by US standards. What we didn’t say is that the signature of this bomb had been seen before.
An identical nuclear weapon, manufactured at the same facility, same design, same impurities, had been exploded in September 22, 1979, in a test in the Indian Ocean conducted jointly by Israel and South Africa. When UN inspectors were asked to come to South Africa in 1990 to arrange to dismantle their nuclear weapons, ten bombs were admitted to having been built with one tested. Today we claim six existed, none were tested and three never existed. One of those three exploded in North Korea. The mystery is, how did it get there? Are American “broken arrow” nukes, recovered, sold and traded? What “special country” might do this?
The cover story was that Pakistan through nuclear scientist, Dr. A. Q. Khan, had supplied Korea with the required highly specialized centrifuges along with nuclear triggers and advanced missile technology. Investigations have shown, however, that the US had asked, or rather demanded, President Musharraf “convince” Khan to confess to this and a seemingly endless series of nuclear proliferation violations from South Africa to Libya to Germany. The deal was that Khan had to confess but would be immediately pardoned. We have another mystery, who was the US covering for and why? Who wanted it to seem like North Korea had a real nuclear program, who would profit by this? What could be more comical than “Cardboard Lothario” Kim Jung-il, war mongering mastermind terrorizing the world from one of the most isolated and poverty stricken nations on earth. I could carve a better “axis of evil” dictator out of a banana.
Who are the Cardboard Lotharios? They are world leaders and conflict driven icons who simply don’t seem to fit. We knew where Hitler came from, we understood Napoleon, Mussolini, even George W. Bush. With a world bereft of “prime movers,” no major ideological struggles, no national races for dwindling resources, only multi-national corporations carving away the world, today’s chaos is purely manufactured and the cardboard cutout bad-boys aren’t even good actors. Who invented Osama bin Laden, Bibi Netanyahu, Mullah Omar, Kim Jung-il, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Do we add Hameed Karzai to the list? How to people like Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi simply quit, get taken off the list and retire as though they had been to some sort of “terrorist mastermind rehab?” Remember Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric whose Mahdi army was the caused mayhem in Iraq? How can Gulbuddin Hekmatyar be number one on the world terror list and be asked by Americans to open negotiations with the Taliban at the same time? Anyone smelling a rat?
A hypothesis, several forces, conspiratorial in nature, hiding in plain sight are “out there.” The players, oil, arms, banking, are the real powers in the world, easily “super-governments,” well beyond any Illuminati-Freemason or Bilderberg conspiracy. Their game, ”they” meaning the real powers that control the governments, is managing continual regional conflicts where none, according to respected studies of the dynamics of global conflict and the real clash of “civilizations,” should exist. We live in a world where our wars, our news, the stories and myths we accept as gospel are little more than part of a play. Shakespeare had said, “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players” (William Shakespeare, As You Like it, Act II, Scene VII) How can we get to this point? Lets take a look at today’s hotspot, Iran.
Iran and Iraq fought a war from 1980 to 1988, exhausting both countries, a war neither recovered from. What is Iran today? We are told they are a radical Islamic country run by the Hitleresque maniac, Ahmadinejad, who plans to “wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” It isn’t important that he didn’t really say that. He says enough things like that. In fact, Ahmadinejad says anything that comes into his mind. Why? He is a stooge, put into office in a rigged election, someone with long financial and ethnic ties to banksters, Israel and the thieves that he complains about. In fact, his life is a balancing act, working with his friends in Russia, China and, oh yes, Israel, to keep his few supporters in Iran believing he is looking after them in a hostile world.
Iran has no enemies, certainly not the United States, Russia, Israel or anyone else. This is an advanced country with a totally inept government run by a petty thief backed by a pack of illiterate religious numb-skulls. Sometimes I think Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu must have been twins, separated at birth. The concept of Iran as a strategic threat to the region is totalbunk. Their relations with all their neighbors run from largely benign to cordial. They have little ability to project a military presence more than a few miles. What they are is an idiot talking on TV when he gets a call from Tel Aviv. The people who want you to believe different are, well, Bibi Netanyahu and his partner in crime, “Bubbles” Ahmadinejad.
Two issues have sparked curiosity about Iran recently. Why would Russia and China vote for sanctions for Iran when both countries are, not only strong supporters of Iran, both with records of debunking ideas of Iranian nukes, knowing quite well that the centrifuges Iran has could never, in a million years, produce weapons grade fuel. China does billions in trade with Iran, a nation that is China’s largest oil supplier. The second issue is Russia withholding the sale of a purely defensive S300 air defense system. Iran may not have the newest “old technology” S300 system (Iran is using a Tor M1 system with all upgrades) but whatevere they do have, Russians are in Iran running it for them. Everyone but Iran has one, they are all the rage. Turkey is starting to manufacture them, Greece has had one for years, even Peru is getting one, concerned about a resurgence of Inca incursions into their airspace. Air defense systems, something we need to get into more later.
All that Russia and China have accomplished, aided by phony news stories of Saudi Arabia facilitating an Israeli attack on Iran, is to keep “cardboard cutout” Ahmadinejad in power longer, despite demands by his own people for his ouster. What is his value? Who else will stand on their hind legs, braying like an ass, whenever a phony crisis is needed to hide something real, something threatening and something not as irrelevant as toothless Iran.
Running with our hypothesis, we could look at two tiers of conflict, geopolitical and “irregular warfare” or “globalterrorism.” Depending on your local school system, you might call terrorism and insurgency “asymetrical warfare.” Were neither to exist, either or both can be created and stimulated easily and inexpensively yet both are major sources of significant economic gain for those pulling the strings. Conflict propagation is far more valuable than conflict resolution. Quoting Robert Duval in Apocalypse Now, “Someday, this war could end….”
For the decades of the Cold War, east and west played a game of cat and mouse, each working to install puppet governments throughout the third world, particularly adjacent to the borders of the other whenever feasible. Thus, Russia had Turkey, Iran and Pakistan on its border and Russia had Cuba and, for awhile, Nicaragua threatening the United States. However, most of the world’sgovernments with the exception of a very few “non-aligned states” operated under the virtual control of American corporations, backed the the CIA and US military. A call to Langley from the Whitehouse, if the fruit or sugar company ordering the “hit” sought to include them in the loop, could have a revolution going in a matter of days, car bombs in the capital, suicides, assassinations, newspaper publishers jailed and a new “savior of democracy” in place. Vice President Dick Cheney’s self annoited role as defacto “controller-grande” of the Joint SpecialOperations Command was a manifestation of the privatization of war, bereft of oversight and command structure, accountability, treaties or international law.
With the advent of a corporate multinational”one world government,” though the goals may have changed, the same capabilities have been used often, with the end result, as always, economic gain at the cost of social cohesion. For years securing oilwasthe overwhelming need and driving force until it was found other industries could pay better. With peace accords ending strife between Egypt and Israel, the two “high threat” players in the Middle East, a rationale was needed for chaos and destabilization, but not just for oil. The realmoney was in guns and drugs, “South Central-style” but on a massive international scale. Instead of “Crips” and “Bloods” we created a new form of street theatre, the “global war on terror.”
You can’t turn on a TV without seeing something about the CIA and drugs. Colonel Eugene Khrushchev (ret), former First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Kabul calls US Special Envoy to Afghanistan a “drug kingpin” working with the “Karzaibrothers incorporated” drug network, selling $65 billion dollars a year in heroin. US drug interdiction policy in Afghanistan can’t be characterized in any terms other than one of the most successful agricultural enterprises in world history. Never has crop production and marketing know how been so succesfullyimplemented as under US drug control policy in Afghanistan. Not only can the US and its Central Intelligence Agency be thanked but key groups from Israel, India, Pakistan and western Europe who handle transporation, distribution and splitting the profits. A particular thanks comes from the government of Russia whose millions of heroin addicts require their daily fix from poppy fields protected by United States Marines. Russia’s gratitude is increasing to the point where getting the thanks they are planning may be quite an awakening for some, ask our friends in Krygystan. If they held an Academy Awards for crime, every acceptance speech would end with, “None of this would be possible without the support of the mainstream media and a special thanks to my friends at Fox News, we love you!”
To play the game, civilian rule in the United States had to be eliminated. To do that, control of the media was a must, that and an iconic disaster, a “New Pearl Harbor” as author David Ray Griffin called it, had to push America into blind obedience. Doubters became “soft on terror” and faced public scorn or worse. The icon, of course, was 9/11, nearly a decade later barely surviving under the weak cover story of a dozen or so angry Arabs performing endless acts that violate, not only all probabilities but several physical laws as well. Even the whitewash of the 9/11 Commission blew up in their faces with demands for criminal investigations being refused and all real findings classified. All that has been needed is for the media to push the myth, hide the real findings and ignore the controversy. Thus, the most massive fraud in world history was created, a three trillion dollar looting of America, two nations invaded, over a million killed and a decade of war.
To keep it going, all that has been needed is a few perfectly timed terrorist acts, London, Madrid, Detroit, Times Square, Mumbai, dozens in Pakistan, all, like 9/11, showing “Oswald ” dupes traveling around the world with the ease of diplomats in private jets.
All that was required to provide cover for an imagined worldwide terrorist conspiracy, banding together groups that hate each other more than us is the same branding process we follow when buying soap and toothpaste. “Can you give me a pack of bin Ladens, a bottle of the Mullah Omar and a bag of those Hezbollah’s please? Oh, and a lottery ticket.” You could spend a lifetime talking about terrorist leaders but one thing is true of all of them. They all worked for intelligence agencies, either the CIA, ISI, RAW, MI-6, Mossad, the Saudis or someone. For those who don’t know, an ISI officer in Pakistan is more comfortable with a Mossad agent than, let’s say, a political opponent in his own country. Anyone who works for or with one intelligence agency is likely to be handed around like a drunken sorority girl in a football locker room.
What does our hypothesis say? No terrorists were in Iraq, we attacked and suddenly, we were up to our necks in terrorists for years. When Osama bin Laden died in Afghanistan in 2001, the same bin Laden reputed to be in exile at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach, he may have been the only person in the world America knew for certain had nothing to do with 9/11. If you don’t think the FBI confirms this, go to www.fbi.gov.
Bin Laden is a funny fellow. His family has been tied to the Bush family for decades, still are. They are respected and decent people who helped a young George W. Bush financially when he failed in the oil business. Osama bin Laden, working closely with the CIA, was a very minor player in the war to expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan. As a wealthy Saudi Arab, he was welcomed in Afghanistan out of Islamic hospitality but in a part of the world, the center of the ethnic Pashtun universe, being a Saudi is the last thing you want. Pashtunshave their own tribal military leaders, the best trained in the world, as we learn more of every day and deeply resent the idea that we would think that Osama bin Laden would be anything in Afghanistan but an irritating house guest. This is the truth, everything else is simply storytelling, part of the myth used in branding the “war on terror” so endless billions could be pumped into the coffers of the “merchants of death.”
Seemingly, managing to keep people fearful of world terrorism to the point of running, not only the United States into hopeless debt but Europe as well, while tying much of the rest of the world into a series of low intensity regional conflicts, continual terror alerts with the concurrent destabilizing arms, security technolgy competitions has required little expenditure or even cleverness. With management of most of the world’s news media in the hands of Israeli interests, the tiny country that is now the third largest exporter of arms in the world, almost no effort was needed at all. The gang, the US, Russia, Israel, France, Britain and China appear to operate much as the Mafia familiesof Godfather era New York, with Israel sitting at the head of the table, something quite astounding taking into consideration to what degree their control and influence belies their insatiable desire for “keeping Israel secure” even if the whole world dies in the process.
Without the subtext of global terrorism, piracy and a series of religious and ethnic conflicts in Africa likely to continue for the next century, maintaining world chaos and instability through the “cardboard cutout” evildoers, nations the United States could militarily overwhelm with extreme ease, generalized peace would break out in most of the world. Minor acts like Russian ships visiting badboy Hugo Chavez, push the nations in the region into a flurry of arms purchases.
As mentioned earlier, one of the ways of managing conflict, regional destabilization and economic and social entropy is through arms races. India and Pakistan are classic examples. Both are nuclear powers, claiming, in the most nationalistic terms to have risen to status as world class danger to themselves and others because of a since of nationalistic superiority. Of course, other nations simply gave India and Pakistan their nuclear capabilities. India was given “the bomb” by the United States. They were supposed to represent a hedge against possible Chinese expansion. In return, China gave Pakistan “the bomb.” Questions?
Then Russia gave India stealth aircraft, actually American stealth technology stolen by Israel, sold to Russia and passed on to India. Then China entered a joint venture with Pakistan to build the J-10 advanced strike fighter, largely American technology “borrowed” by Israel who sold it to the Chinese who gave it to India. It doesn’t stop here, we have a dozen other weapons systems that are moving around the world the same way. Americans should consider this an amusing way of seeing their trillion dollars a year in military expenditures at work.
Lets take a minute to talk about air defense systems. Many of us remember the US setting up Patriot missile batteries in Israel to ward off, quite unsuccessfully actually, Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missile attacks during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Since that time, technology has improved dramatically. Missiles have longer range, go faster, higher and radar systems are more advanced. The newer versions of the Russian S300 air defense system, a quite affordable gift for any small nation, are reliably effective against pretty much everything. They shoot down medium range missiles, short range missiles, cruise missiles, stealth aircraft and even the specialized jamming aircraft meant to destroy air defense systems. Flying little loops, dropping flares and chaff or typical television maneuvers are a waster of time. These babies will follow you home and turn out your lights, end of story. The aging Tor system Iran is using now has the following lethality index:
0.92-0.95 against aircraft
0.80-0.96 against helicopters
0.60-0.90 against cruise missiles (with an effective range of around 5 km/3 miles)
0.70-0.90 against precision munitions (LGBs, glide bombs, etc.)
0.90 against UAVs
The S300 system is being withheld from Iran is considerably better than this as is the system Israel has now and wishes supplemented.
The Russians have had the more advanced S400 system out for years and are deploying even more advanced systems. Typically, this type of approach can track up to 100 targets at a time with interception at ranges of around 100 miles at altitudes up to 150,000 feet. America has similar systems, equal to Russia in radar but well behind in quality of rocket boosters. Both the US and Russia are in the process, a seemingly endless process, of deploying “air defense umbrellas” over pretty much everything but with one problem, it never seems to happen. India doesn’t have one but could easily afford it as can Pakistan. Iran isn’t being allowed to have one and they can afford anything. Air defense systems are marketed like appliances. If you sell something “too good,” you lose a customer.
If Israel had such as system, and they do, paid for by the US and being updated with something even more advanced, they could repel any air attack including ballistic missiles with absolute certainty. Problem for Israel, like admitting they are the only nuclear power in the Middle East, its hard to go whining to the world about how scared you are when you were never in any danger in the first place. So, if either Israel or America admit to the fact that Israel is a nuclear power with long range ballistic missiles and a total missile and air defense shield in place, then the billions we give them, the bunker buster bombs, the cluster bombs, the endless “defense funding” wouldn’t make any sense. All the racket Israel makes, especially to the Christian Zionist community in America through their Fox News outlet about being surrounded by enemies is a joke. Israel’s air force, supplied by the United States, is two generations ahead of any of their neighbors and Israel itself is impenetrable to air attack, planes, missiles, anything. In fact, we have overarmed Israel to such an extent they have become bullies.
These systems aren’t really so much destabilizing as they are dangerous to the localarms market. Why buy a cluster bomb when you get shot down before dropping it on a playground or hospital? What good is an AWAC if it can be shot down from over a hundred miles away despite its countermeasures. Without our airplanes, our tanks and those millions of assault rifles we make are worthless. We might as well be fight 17thcentury style. So, the dealis, to keep weapons systems out of each conflict, or as our local MBA would call it, “market,” that would eliminate the sales of high priced, high maintenanceplatforms like Apache helicopters and F-35 fighter aircraft. The Russians have their versions, Israel has theirs, marketed, sometimes with China, sometimes with India and even, on occasion, with Russia but always good old American technology taken from the good old USA by one of those spies we hear so much about.
What then does our hypothesis demand? Do we accept that the trillions spent, not billions mind you, trillions of dollars spent to defend America against nations that barely know who we are, nations we could erase without effort and the thousands of lives lost in conflicts we no longer remember why we are involved in seem ill advised? I remember being asked in a press interview how Israel, such a small country, could have so much influence in the United States. I tried not to let my eyes roll back into my head thinking of the 444 members of congress considered “Israel Firsters” and thought of an answer suitable for television.
He could, just as easily asked, why does the United States and its puppets, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey along with their co-conspirators, Russia and China along with whatever Israel is, something none of us will understand, simply seek some other path for the world other than building debt, causing endless entropy, creating oligarchies, exploiting ethnic rivalries, destroying the world’s ecosystem, flooding our society with narcotics and pornography?
Then, is the basis of our hypothesis that some invisible criminal conspiracy, a genuine axis of evil, guides the world, a power above any nation, seemingly above the g-d’s themselves? A hundred years ago, when a nation misbehaved, they had a reason, right or wrong, it was a reason. If they won the war, their reason was right. Today, we no longer ask for reasons. Why do we fight? We fight to be safe. Safe from whom? Safe from the people we fight. Any question beyond this limited scope is considered philosophical and elitist, even “liberal” or “peace-mongering.”
The alternative is admitting that we are living in an Orwellian nightmare, one worse than any Orwell would have imagined. As Orwell himself would point out, only a rare individual would recognize the senselessness and absurdity. When we began believing, when we began to forget how to ask, “Why,” we created world whose moral soil was fertile for the depredations of the myth makers, the storytellers, those who exist off chaos, fear, starvation and in conditioning people who consider themselves righteous to accept the suffering and death of children without a thought, much less a tear.
We have arrived.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
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