Category: Russian Federation

  • Arab League condemns broad bombing campaign in Libya

    Arab League condemns broad bombing campaign in Libya

    ALBy Edward Cody,

    CAIRO—The Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa, deplored the broad scope of the U.S.-European bombing campaign in Libya on Sunday and said he would call a new league meeting to reconsider Arab approval of the Western military intervention.

    Moussa said the Arab League’s approval of a no-fly zone on March 12 was based on a desire to prevent Moammar Gaddafi’s air force from attacking civilians and was not designed to embrace the intense bombing and missile attacks—including on Tripoli, the capital, and on Libyan ground forces—that have filled Arab television screens for the last two days.

    “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone,” he said in a statement on the official Middle East News Agency. “And what we want is the protection of civilians and not the shelling of more civilians.”

    Moussa’s declaration suggested some of the 22 Arab League members were taken aback by what they have seen and wanted to modify their approval lest they be perceived as accepting outright Western military intervention in Libya. Although the eccentric Gaddafi is widely looked down on in the Arab world, Middle Eastern leaders and their peoples traditionally have risen up in emotional protest at the first sign of Western intervention.

    A shift away from the Arab League endorsement, even partial, would constitute an important setback to theU.S.-European campaign. Western leaders brandished the Arab League decision as a justification for their decision to move militarily and as a weapon in the debate to obtain a U.N. Security Council resolution two days before the bombing began.

    As U.S. and European military operations entered their second day, however, most Arab governments maintained public silence and the strongest expressions of opposition came from the greatest distance. Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Fidel Castro of Cuba condemned the intervention and suggested Western powers were seeking to get their hands on Libya’s oil reserves rather than limit the bloodshed in the country.

    Russia and China, which abstained on the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing military intervention, also expressed regret that Western powers had chosen to get involved despite their advice.

    In the Middle East, the abiding power of popular distrust against Western intervention was evident despite the March 12 Arab League decision. It was not clear how many Arab governments shared the hesitations voiced by Moussa. But so far only the Western-oriented Gulf emirate of Qatar has announced it would participate despite Western efforts to enlist Arab military forces into the campaign.

    The Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassem Al-Thani, told reporters Qatar made its decision in order to “stop the bloodbath” that he said Gaddafi was inflicting on rebel forces and civilians in rebel-controlled cities. He did not describe the extent of Qatar’s military involvement or what the mission of Qatari aircraft or personnel would be alongside U.S., French and British planes and ships that have carried out the initial strikes.

    Islam Lutfy, a lawyer and Muslim Brotherhood leader in Egypt, said he opposed the military intervention because the real intention of the United States and its European allies was to get into position to benefit from Libya’s oil supplies. “The countries aligned against Libya are there not for humanitarian reasons but to further their own interests,” he added.

    But the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in the Youth Coalition that spearheaded Egypt’s recent upheavals took no official position, busy instead with Saturday’s referendum on constitutional amendments designed to open the country’s democracy. Similarly, the provisional military-run government took no stand and most Cairo newspapers gave only secondary space to the Libya conflict.

    When the Arab League approved imposition of a no-fly zone, only Syria and Algeria opposed the league’s decision, according to Egyptian officials. The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Thursday reiterated Syria’s opposition, as diplomatic momentum gathered for the U.S.-European operation.

    “Syria rejects all forms of foreign interference in Libyan affairs, since that would be a violation of Libya’s sovereignty, independence and the unity of its land,” it said in a statement.

    Al Qaeda, which could be expected to oppose foreign intervention in an Arab country and embrace Gaddafi’s qualification of the campaign as a new crusade, made no immediate comment. This likely was due in part to the Qaeda leadership’s difficulty in communicating without revealing its position. But it also was a reminder of Gaddafi’s frequent assertions that Al Qaeda was behind the Libyan revolt and that he and the West should work hand-in-hand to defeat the rebels.

    Iran and its Shiite Muslim allies in Lebanon’s Hezbollah, reflexively opposed to Western influence in the Middle East, also were forced into a somewhat equivocal position, condemning Gaddafi for his bloody tactics but opposing the Western military intervention.

    “The fact that most Arab and Muslim leaders did not take responsibility opened the way for Western intervention in Libya,” declared Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, in video speech Sunday to his followers. “This opens the way for foreign interventions in every Arab country. It brings us back to the days of occupation, colonization and partition.”

    At the same time, Nasrallah accused Gaddafi of using the same brutality against his opponents as Israel has used against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

    The Iranian Foreign Ministry, which previously criticized Gaddafi’s crackdown, on Sunday expressed “doubts” about U.S. and European intentions. Like the Latin American critics, it suggested the claims of wanting to protect civilians were just a cover for a desire to install a more malleable leadership in Tripoli and make it easier to exploit Libya’s oil.

    Gaddafi has been on the enemies’ list of Shiite activists in the Middle East since 1978, when Lebanon’s paramount Shiite leader, Imam Musa Sudr, disappeared during a fund-raising visit to Tripoli. His fate has never been officially cleared up but Palestine Liberation Organization investigators determined that he was probably killed by Gaddafi’s security agents after they misunderstood an order from Gaddafi to “get rid of” Sudr and his pestering for money.

    codyej@washpost.com

    www.washingtonpost.com, 20 March 2011

  • Erdogan’s Moscow Visit Produces Mixed Results

    Erdogan’s Moscow Visit Produces Mixed Results

    Erdogan’s Moscow Visit Produces Mixed Results

    Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 8 Issue: 54

    March 18, 2011

    By: Saban Kardas

    On March 15, Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accompanied by a large delegation of businessmen and cabinet members, travelled to Moscow. Though on balance it produced mixed results, the visit constitutes yet another major step in the flourishing Turkish-Russian ties, characterized as a multi-dimensional strategic partnership. Both during his meetings with the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other bilateral gatherings he attended, Erdogan underscored the multi-dimensional character of the relationship and the determination to further deepen it (Anadolu Ajansi, March 15).

    On March 15, Erdogan attended the Turkish-Russian Business Forum in Moscow, organized jointly by leading Turkish business associations. Addressing around one thousand businessmen from both nations, Erdogan reiterated earlier objectives set by his government to boost the bilateral trade volume, in order that it reaches $100 billion in the coming years (EDM, January 25).

    Despite the announcement of such ambitious objectives, however, Turkish-Russian trade volume stood at around $27 billion last year, down from $38 billion in 2008, reflecting the impact of the global financial crisis. Most of this trade is accounted for by Turkey’s energy imports from Russia, creating a trade deficit in Russia’s advantage. To address this deficit, Turkey has requested that Russia implement some measures to bolster the import of Turkish goods. Thus far, there has been no major progress in this area.

    Traditionally, the construction projects Turkish contractors undertook in Russia have partly compensated for the trade deficit. Through such investments, Turkish businesses have recorded valuable profits, and many Turkish engineers and workers have found employment opportunities in the Russian construction market. However, in recent years Turkish developers have faced difficulties in securing new projects in Russia. This was due partly to the contraction of the construction industry as a result of the global financial crisis and to the growing competition from other countries. As Russia launches new highway projects and prepares for a fresh round of infrastructure investments in preparation for the 2013 Summer Universiade Games in Kazan and 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Turkish contractors hope to benefit. Erdogan raised this issue with his Russian counterparts, and reportedly the Russian authorities also expressed their desire to see greater Turkish participation in the upcoming construction boom. It remains to be seen if the Russians will really offer privileged treatment to Turkish constructors in the months to come, or if such words are only sweeteners to please the Turkish side.

    However, both parties agreed to finalize the ongoing preparations for visa free travel. Starting from mid-April 2011, citizens from the two countries will be able to visit the other country visa free for 30 days. This development is expected to accelerate not only mutual visits but also the bilateral trade volume. Turkey has been placing great value on this agreement, as the government uses many of the recently initiated visa liberalization deals as an indicator of success for its new foreign policy doctrine of integration with its neighbors.

    Another area where the parties demonstrated commitment to further the bilateral relationship was cooperation in nuclear energy. Turkey had awarded the contract for the construction and operation of its first nuclear power plant to Russia. Joining the worldwide wave of going nuclear, Turkey has been planning to build up to three nuclear plants in the coming decades. In the wake of the recent catastrophes in Japan which resulted in damage to its nuclear reactors, however, nuclear safety issues appeared on the agenda, forcing many countries to reconsider their plans for opening new nuclear power plants. In Turkey, the groups that had objected to nuclear power plants reignited this debate, calling for the suspension of the projected plants, especially given the fact that Turkey is situated on geological fault-lines. Before his departure for Russia, Erdogan ruled out any cancellation of the nuclear contract, adding that no project was risk-free (Anadolu Ajansi, March 15). During his meetings in Moscow, Erdogan reassured his Russian counterparts about his commitment to see this project through and announced that construction would start as early as May. Yet, it seems Turkey asked Russia to improve the safety precautions for the project. While currently the plant was expected to withstand magnitude 8 earthquakes, it might have raise it to an even higher magnitude.

    However, limited progress was made on other energy projects. Turkey has been asking for price reductions for the natural gas it imports from Russia and the easing of “take-or-pay” clauses, especially in view of its declining energy consumption due to the financial crisis. Despite Ankara’s insistence and ongoing negotiations for some time, the Russian side has not accommodated Turkish concerns on this issue and in the planned Samsun-Ceyhan bypass oil pipeline. Reports indicate that there was no concrete progress on the remaining disagreements in energy projects, and Moscow deferred the issue for further discussion of the technical details. Responding to a question on this topic during the joint press briefing with Erdogan, President Medvedev said they would evaluate Turkey’s demands within the framework of existing agreements. Turkish media even speculated that when he failed to receive any concessions from Medvedev, Erdogan’s delegation raised this issue again during the meeting with Putin (www.turkrus.com, March 16). In contrast, the Russian side complained about Ankara’s delays in authorizing the construction of part of South Stream in Turkey’s exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, which in their view obstructs the further progress of the project (Cihan, March 16).

    On March 16, in a ministerial meeting attended by both sides the two countries held their High Level Strategic Cooperation Council (HLSCC) meeting. This is a new framework for bilateral cooperation, which Turkey established with various neighboring states in recent years. Following the initiation of a HLSCC with Syria and Iraq, Turkey moved on to sign similar agreements with Jordan, Greece and Russia and has recently taken a step towards forming one with Azerbaijan. Under this framework, both sides form committees to discuss ways to improve cooperation in various areas, and the leaders hold biannual summits to set the broader direction of bilateral partnership. Although Turkey publicizes such summits as indicators of strategic cooperation with its neighbors, the failure to bridge the remaining differences with Russia show that there are significant diverging interests which might set serious barriers to further cooperation.

     

    https://jamestown.org/program/erdogans-moscow-visit-produces-mixed-results/

     

  • Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011
    Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction.”

    The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.
    Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.
    No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. Noone can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.
    What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

    To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder sounding “New Middle East.”

    As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

    The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.
    Egypt rising?

    The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

    Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.
    Washington ‘soft’ revolutions

    The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

    They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

    At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

    The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.
    April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.
    According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process.”4

    Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

    Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

    ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6 Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

    Kefaya—Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’

    Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”
    Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED)7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

    Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare.”8

    The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.
    The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood.9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

    Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

    RAND and Kefaya

    No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”11

    A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.
    In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:
    “The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.
    However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country.”12

    RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13

    Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:
    “The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions.14

    The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:
    “The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

    “Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. “15

    As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.
    The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements.16

    In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

    Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.
    Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

    If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.
    Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.
    The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.
    The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order.18

    As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA19

    The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.20

    The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.
    NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.
    The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,
    “NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.”21

    Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.22

    In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,
    “The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end… We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow…”23

    The US Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’

    The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.
    The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
    That policy recommendation was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon.24

    Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky. By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch war hawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.
    Greater Middle East orthographic projection

    Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

    In May 2005, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a USMiddle East free trade area within a decade.” 25

    Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership.” Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

    The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each.” 26

    The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

    Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife.27 It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

    Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

    Will it work?

    At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a USdominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

    It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ‘Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ‘If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region.28

    The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

    1 DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, accessed in www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often contain interesting leads for further investigation.

    2 Ibid.

    3 The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to Nasser’s secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic ideology.

    4 Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm

    5 Ibid.

    6 Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31, 2011, accessed in .

    7 National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africahighlights.

    8 Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.

    9 Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9

    10 Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya

    11 Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

    12 Ibid.

    13 For a more detailed discussion of the RAND “swarming” techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

    14 Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

    15 Ibid., p. 50.

    16 Ibid., p. iii.

    17 Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, January 29, 2011, accessed in https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-protest-movement-in-egypt-dictators-do-not-dictate-they-obey-orders/22993

    18 George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order…”

    19 Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.

    20 National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in

    21 Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in .

    22 National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.

    23 George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005,accessed in http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.

    24 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

    25 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.

    26 Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in https://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

    27 Ibid.

    28 William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

    http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Creative%20Destruction%20Washington%20Style.pdf

  • Was Turkey preparing to occupy Adjara?

    Was Turkey preparing to occupy Adjara?

    by georgiatoday.ge

    Armenian and Russian sources have seized on American embassy cables published by WikiLeaks which claim that Turkish armed forces were ready to occupy Adjara during the war of August 2008 in the event of Russian troops coming 100 km from the Georgian-Turkish border.

    The leaked information suggests that Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan and members of the Turkish parliament flew to Moscow to inform Russia’s President Dimitri Medvedev that Turkey, as a NATO member country would have the right to bring military units to the conflict zone in order to protect the territory of the neighboring country.

    In such a scenario, the cables claim, Turkey would have sent its ground units into Adjara supported by air power. There is in fact a precedent for the scenario, as in 1921 when the Red Army conquered Georgia, Turkey’s military units moved in to occupy Adjara.

    Is this all true?

    The cables claim that on March 3, 2009 the Georgian Interior Minister, Vano Merabishvili told Georgian journalists that if during the Russian-Georgian war, the government had not been able to ensure the country’s security, Turkey was ready to bring its armed forces in through Adjara to protect Georgia.

    According to the Kars agreement, signed by Russia after the occupation of Georgia in 1921, Turkey has the right under international law to bring troops into the Autonomous Republic of Adjara, but it is hard to believe that an armed conflict could take place between NATO-member Turkey and Russia over the territory.

    There are several reasons for doubting that the sides would ever have

    come to blows: First – the Turkey would not have been able to act in

    the name of NATO without the consent of every NATO member state.

    Second – Turkey could bring troops to Adjara but not as a NATO-member state, it would only have been possible to use the Kars agreement to justify a military presence in the territory, not actual conflict.

    Third – Ankara would have done its best not to allow military confrontation between the Turkish and Russian military units to occur as such an event would cause a serious international incident.

    On the morning of August 11, 2008, Russian jets bombed a Georgian military base in Khelvachauri, Adjara as well as Sharabidzes, Kapandichi and Makho, villages 10 km from the Georgian-Turkish border.

    Russian planes flew well within the exclusion zone near the Georgian-Turkish border but no response was seen from Ankara.

    During the August war, a Russian commando unit entered Poti and bombed several sites in the port town. One month later, a Russian control-checkpoint was still located at the entrance to Poti. Even though these actions took place less than 100 km from the Georgian-Turkish border (70 km), there was no serious military reaction from the side of the Turkish government.

    These factors certainly shed doubt on the truth of the reports being circulated in the Russian and Armenian media.

    It cannot be ruled out that agencies of certain countries may be trying to use the WikiLeaks data to spread misinformation as it is quite difficult to check the validity of the information in the vast hoard of data that can be found on the website.

    /Times.am/

  • High-Speed Trains in Russia and Turkey

    High-Speed Trains in Russia and Turkey

    Turkey got its first high-speed trains back in November 2007. It’s state railway company (TCDD) was the 8th in the world to operate high-speed trains (and the 6th in Europe). News now is that the country has just started testing out some bullet trains. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended an inaugural run on December 17th. Testing of these bullet trains is expected to finish in the summer of 2011 and then they will be officially launched for use on Turkish high-speed rail lines.

    vladimir putin

    Meanwhile, over in Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just announced that Russia, which was recently selected to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup (beating out England, Spain/Portugal, and Holland/Belgium for this great opportunity), will have high-speed rail connecting all of its host cities by 2018.

    “It will be a powerful incentive for the development of high speed rail services in the European part of Russia,” Putin said.

    The host cities that high-speed trains will be running back and forth between are Moscow, Kazan, Samara, and Ulyanovsk.

    Putin made this announcement after trying out a new high-speed train from Finland to Russia. He and Finnish President Tarja Halonen got to go on “an inaugural journey on the French-made high speed Allegro train linking Helsinki to St. Petersburg” last week.

    It is great to see the world moving forward on this clean, fun transportation technology. High-speed rail uses uses 1/3 the energy of airplanes (per passenger) and 1/5 the energy of automobiles (per passenger).

    via High-Speed Trains in Russia and Turkey – EcoLocalizer.

  • Turkey’s first nuclear power plant to cost about $20 bln

    Turkey’s first nuclear power plant to cost about $20 bln

    On a question about nuclear waste disposal, Lokshin said that nuclear waste would be returned to Russia to be buried.

    Wednesday, 15 December 2010 16:42

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    Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, planned to be built by Russian state nuclear company on the southern coast of the country, would cost around $20 billion, a Russian official said on Wednesday.

    In May, Turkey and Russia signed a deal for construction of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant in Akkuyu, a small town on the Mediterranean coast.

    Alexander Lokshin from ROSATOM, Russia’s state-owned atomic power corporation, appeared at a press conference in Istanbul to give information about Akkuyu nuclear power plant process.

    Lokshin said that Akkuyu site would be licensed by the end of 2011.

    “We have one year ahead for applications,” Lokshin said, however, he added that it could take a little bit more than a year to complete legal procedures for licensing.

    Earlier this week, Russian Ambassador to Turkey Vladimir Ivanovsky said that Russian company was likely to start building the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in 2013 and the

    first reactor was planned to generate electricty in 2018.

    Turkish state-owned electricity corporation has guaranteed to buy a fixed amount of the plant’s output over the first 15 years starting from initial commercial operation at a reported price of 12.35 US cents per kWh, with the rest of the electricity to be sold on the open market by the project company.

    Lokshin said it was not an expensive price considering a fixed period of nearly 23 years from now.

    In the meantime, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has arrived in Turkey earlier in the day to meet Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz. Sechin and Yildiz are expected to discuss details of works aimed at setting up a project company, a move to push the button for actual launch of the nuclear power plant project.

    Turkey is also in talks with Japan for construction of another nuclear plant on the north coast of the country. Turkey started talks with Japan last month after a failure of negotiations with South Korea.

    Russia will build four 1,200 megawatt units on Akkuyu site. Lokshin said Russia’s nuclear technology was one of the best in tho world. He said technology transfer could be negotiated with Turkey in case of a Turkish request.

    Lokshin ruled out any concerns about Russian technology when asked about a public apprehension in Turkey after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, saying that reactors to be used at Akkuyu were “totally different” from Chernobyl reactors.

    He said Russian company understands “prejudices” and public concerns and that such doubts were caused by public unawareness which could be eliminated by the help of awaraness-raising campaigns.

    On a question about nuclear waste disposal, Lokshin said that nuclear waste would be returned to Russia to be buried.

    AA