Category: Iraq

  • 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

  • Curveball’s confession: another dent in the Iraq conspiracy theory

    Curveball’s confession: another dent in the Iraq conspiracy theory

    Another liar surfaces in the Iraqi tragedy and, yet again, doesn’t turn out to be Tony Blair

    Rafid Ahmed Alwan

    Oh dear – another liar surfaces in the Iraq tragedy and, yet again, doesn’t turn out to be Tony Blair.

    If you haven’t yet read the Guardian’s sensational disclosure that the Iraqi intelligence source known as Curveball deliberately lied, you should read it right away.

    Who says he lied? He does. His name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, and he’s a chemical engineer now living with his family in the German industrial town of Karlsruhe with German citizenship but no work, and no €3,000 a month stipend from German intelligence any more either.

    What did Janabi lie about? Saddam Hussein’s secret biological weapons programme. Why did he do it? “I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy,” he explains.

    That’s quite a bold claim after what Martin Chulov – the Guardian’s Baghdad correspondent – and Helen Pidd’s background reportdescribed as “more than 100,000 civilian deaths and a savage sectarian war.” It’s not a description I’d dispute, but others will.

    The details are fascinating. Read them as they go round the world – via US and Australian radio among others. The BBC has made little mention of the story, displaying a welcome degree of caution before following a Fleet Street story which it does not always show, alas.

    By all means check it out, lads, but it reads pretty persuasively to me.

    Assuming Janabi – a self-confessed liar, after all – is telling the truth this time, what conclusions might we safely draw? He has talked to the Guardian after not talking to others as frankly since being outed by US network TV in 2007.

    Janabi says his claims were not motivated by his need for asylum status for himself and (later) his wife. He also says that, when parts of his story didn’t check out, he admitted making it up. He was amazed when he watched Colin Powell relying heavily on his claims when addressing the UN security council just before the US-led invasion began in March 2003.

    US intelligence officials seem to be relieved to be seen to have a source to justify their conclusion that Saddam had WMD – a verdict shared by major intelligence agencies around the world at the time, even those who opposed the war.

    The Iraqi dictator himself lied about it, if you remember. Yet German intelligence (BND) knew it was flakey. So must the Brits and Americans have done, Janabi now suggests.

    But it doesn’t end the buck-passing that has marked the entire policy since the lightning military victory descended into a bloody occupation and brutal sectarian terror.

    In today’s paper, the US neocon and armchair Pentagon warrior Richard Perle is still saying Janabi wrote to him just before the invasion and bemoaned the fact that US intelligence wasn’t taking him seriously enough.

    He blames the CIA – neocons like him and Dick Cheney usually do – for failing to do its job properly and sort the wheat from the chaff. Others say it eases the burden of blame on George Bush and, by implication, Blair.

    As ever, intelligence involves a lot of smoke and mirrors. In his UN speech, Powell also rested his case in part on Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium – “yellowcake” from Niger – which the US has also since disowned as forged, but M16 still insists was correct.

    “Niger exports chickens and yellowcake (to France mostly) and the Iraqis didn’t go there to buy chickens,” I once heard a top spook avow.

    It’s still clear that politicians keen to bring down the restlessly ambitious and ruthless Saddam, by war if all other means failed, and were happy to accept intelligence data that was already ringing bells – and that Janabi’s later uncertainties were deemed unhelpful.

    Evidence to the Chilcot inquiry also underlines (we knew most of it anyway) that there were unrealistic expectations about the occupation and woefully poor planning for it. The vacuum thus created allowed sectarian violence – triggered by resentful, usurped and unemployed Sunnis, Saddam’s own people – to flare up.

    Among our own sectarians, there’s an eagerness to see Sir John Chilcot dump the whole can of worms for failure at Blair’s front door – at one or other of them – though the sound of officials and soldiers passing their own bit of buck at Chilcot’s tribunal has been unedifying.

    By coincidence, last weekend the Times (paywall) carried a welcome attempt at balance. Written by Brigadier Paul Gibson, a former director of counter-terrorism and UK operations who also commanded the 4th Armoured Brigade in Basra during part of the war – one of many in a (too) fast-changing command structure, he notes.

    Gibson’s article does not exempt the politicians from mistakes, from being too keen to get into Iraq, with Janabi’s assistance, and then too keen to proclaim assorted successes for “Iraqi-isation” and get out again.

    But he usefully says the military made a lot of mistakes too, discredited themselves with the Americans (who learned faster from their mistakes) and were often both insular and complacent.

    Too many of our 46,000 troops (2003) left too soon (UK troop levels were down to 8,600 within a year), writes Gibson – an error that matched the Pentagon’s own. It allowed the bad guys free rein.

    I suppose I could interpolate the thought, too, that the anti-war movement’s pressure for withdrawal and for delegitimising the invasion also contributed to the desire to scuttle and emboldened the suicide bombers and sectarians.

    But when the Brits finally left Basra with their tails between their legs – “ignominious” is Gibson’s description – the Iraqis and the Americans had to sort out the local militias we had “allowed to flourish”, he says.

    As with Janabi’s testimony, Gibson provides a useful correction to the dominant narrative: Bush and Blair went to war eagerly and on a lie. The decision to bring home Britain’s fallen soldiers (it didn’t ever happen as recently as the Falklands war of 1982) and thereby trigger coroners’ inquests has accentuated that tendency.

    It has allowed inexperienced coroners to blame politicians for battlefield deployments, decisions and kit, blame which really belong in the military witnesses’ knapsacks.

    I note in passing, and without complaint, that the current defence secretary, Liam Fox, had no compunction in blaming MoD officials for sacking long-serving soldiers via email.

    Beware the dominant narrative – it skews clear judgment and affects future decisions: Iraq will be inhibiting any urge to intervene in rogue states for decades. Perhaps that is a good thing, though innocents will die as a result, and do die daily, for instance in the Congo.

    Which leads me to a relevant footnote about the Nato war in Kosovo – not sanctioned by the UN, incidentally – in 1999. Do you remember how the US “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and caused a huge stink for which Washington apologised?

    Tucked away in this week’s Sunday Times (paywall), Michael Sheridan reported from Hong Kong that ex-President Jiang Zemin had admitted in an unpublished memoir that the US had very good grounds for the bombing.

    Why? The Chinese president says he acceded to a plea from Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to shelter key military personnel in the embassy during US raids on strategic targets.

    He hoped to get leverage in ex-Yugoslavia after Russia had refused to back the Serb president as well as, Sheridan speculates, to get whatever bits of high-tech US military kit the Serbs shot down. China was secretly sending Milosevic surface-to-air missiles.

    It was all a mistake, Jiang’s memoir concedes, and destroyed his relationship with President Bill Clinton. Why? Because the Serbian officials used the Chinese embassy to carry out their military business, and Washington privately provided Beijing with evidence of electronic transmissions.

    The US apologised for its “mistake” and China called off its domestic rioters, but it was a face-saving exercise for Chinese benefit. Interesting, huh? And I’d have expected wider media interest.

    Perhaps we haven’t had that because too many of us are still hooked on the “Americans as global imperialists” narrative, while China enjoys a free pass as an emerging east Asian economy.

    Tell that to the Japanese. This week, China’s economy overtook them.

    The Guardian

  • Popular anger boils over in Iraq

    Popular anger boils over in Iraq

    Further protests in Algeria, Tunisia and Yemen

    iraq map

    The eruption of the Egyptian revolution, in the wake of the Tunisian events, is inspiring populations across the Middle East and North Africa.

    Protest over social conditions spread to Iraq this week, as demonstrations broke out in numerous cities. Meanwhile, a mass rally has been scheduled in Algiers for Saturday. In Tunisia itself, the population continues to simmer, with the same autocratic power structures still in place despite the flight of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Jordan, Yemen and Morocco are also witnessing protests.

    The Iraqi population is beginning to openly register its opposition to the wretched conditions that have been created by eight years of US and allied occupation, as well as bitter sectarian conflict.

    Last weekend, protesters stormed government buildings and a police station in Hamza, an impoverished and heavily Shiite community in southern Iraq, to protest shortages of power, food and jobs, as well as political corruption. Security officials allegedly opened fire on the demonstrators, killing one and wounding four others.

    The National, from the United Arab Emirates, cited the comment of Abu Ali, who reportedly helped organize the protest: “There will be a revolution of the hungry and the jobless in Iraq, just as there was in Egypt,” he said. “It was a march by the unemployed, by those who have lost hope and who see [Prime Minister] Nouri al Maliki and the new government becoming another dictatorship.”

    On February 10, protests of varying sizes took place in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Karbala, Diwaniyah, Kut, Ramadi, Samawah and Amara. In Baghdad’s Sadr City, demonstrators took to the streets to protest the lack of public services, unemployment and government corruption. Public sector employees joined residents in the protest. A group of employees from the Ministry of Industry denounced the decision to cut their pay by 20 percent.

    In Karbala, residents also demanded an improvement in municipal services and an investigation into the local government. One protest sign read, “We have nothing. We need everything. Solution: Set ourselves on fire”—a reference to the suicide of a young man that ignited the Tunisian upheaval. In Najaf, farmers demanded greater assistance from the government and the resignation of the head of the local government. Demonstrators in Basra explained that changes in food ration policy had left families unable to buy enough food as prices for basics have nearly doubled in recent months.

    One of the largest protests Thursday brought some 3,000 lawyers onto the streets of a Sunni Muslim neighborhood in western Baghdad. They called for an end to judicial corruption and prisoner abuse in Iraq’s prisons. The Canadian Press cited the comment of Kadhim al-Zubaidi, spokesman for Iraq’s lawyers’ union in Baghdad: “This is in solidarity with the Iraqi people.… We want the government to sack the corrupt judges.” He added, “We also demand that the interior and defence ministries allow us to enter the [recently exposed] secret prisons…. We want to get information about these prisons.”

    In Karbala, the head of the local lawyers’ guild mocked the pittance the government was giving out monthly in place of rations that included cooking oil, rice, flour and sugar. “We reject this amount of money,” said Rabia al-Masaudi, adding, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), “that MPs were getting paid $11,000 per month, while many of the six million families nationwide who depend on government rations were receiving $12 a month in place of their full supplies.”

    On Friday, further protests were held across Iraq. One of the Baghdad protests marched to the Green Zone, where government buildings and embassies are located, calling for an improvement in basic services. According to Reuters, placards carried various messages, including “Where are your electoral promises, food rations and basic services?” and “Tahrir Square Two,” a reference to the events in Cairo.

    In Baghdad’s impoverished Bab-al-Sham district last Sunday, one protester, an engineer, told the media, “It is a tragedy. Even during the Middle Ages, people were not living in this situation.” Reuters notes, “Almost eight years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq’s infrastructure remains severely damaged. The country suffers a chronic water shortage, electricity supply is intermittent and sewage collects in the streets.”

    In Algeria, the security apparatus is preparing for a large demonstration, perhaps in the tens of thousands, planned for February 12 by the National Coordination for Change and Democracy (CNCD)—a grouping of human-rights, unions, and official “opposition” parties tolerated by the regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

    The government has officially banned the march and will reportedly deploy some 30,000 police to block the protest. An opposition spokesman, Said Sadi, told the media that the regime had ringed the capital in an effort to prevent people from participating. “Trains have been stopped and other public transport will be as well,” he said.

    The AFP reported: “Large quantities of teargas grenades had been imported, he [Sadi] added. Anti-riot vehicles were seen parked not far from the square where the rally is scheduled to begin on Saturday, and police in uniform patrolled surrounding streets.”

    Protests took place in a number of Algerian towns on February 8. In the city of Annaba, 600 kilometers east of Algiers, a hundred unemployed young men protested outside the city’s prefecture and in the streets. In an especially desperate act, in the nearby town of Sidi Ammar, seven jobless men inflicted knife wounds on themselves and threatened a mass suicide outside the town hall.

    An Algerian newspaper reports that in the same area, the residents of the village of Raffour also took to the streets. In the last few weeks, around 20 people have attempted to set themselves on fire. Three have died from their injuries.

    In Tunisia, where the self-immolation of 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi in mid-December helped set off mass protests, a woman set herself on fire Thursday in front of government offices in Monastir, the birthplace of longtime Tunisian dictator Habib Bourguiba. The woman, from Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, took the action because of difficulties in obtaining medicine for her husband, afflicted with cancer. She remains in “serious condition” with third-degree burns.

    Demonstrations were held in numerous Tunisian cities this week demanding the resignation of officials associated with the Ben Ali regime. In Kasserine, 250 kilometers southwest of Tunis, hundreds of people blocked a main road to call attention to their social problems. In Gafsa also, protesters Tuesday demanded that the new governor step down.

    In Yemen, two marches were held Friday in the capital of San’a and in the port city of Aden in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution. Hundreds of young protesters assembled in the afternoon in Aden. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Eyewitnesses said police and protesters scuffled, and about a dozen protesters were arrested. A security official in Aden said the police took action to ensure safety in the city.”

    University students in San’a also staged a protest, closing down main roads for about three hours on Friday. They ended their demonstration near the Egyptian embassy. The protest expressed support for the Egyptian people, but also called on US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign. Protesters denounced the ill treatment and torture of detainees in the secret police headquarters.

    In southern Yemen, several thousand people demonstrated Friday in support of secession, and demanded Saleh’s ouster as well. Army tanks, reports Reuters, “rolled into Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan, where suspected Al Qaeda militants have been active and over a thousand protesters gathered on Friday. Hundreds of men sat outside a former South Yemen leader’s home, wearing white shrouds to symbolise their readiness to fight to the death.

    “ ’Ali, Ali, catch up with Ben Ali,’ they shouted, implying that Saleh should follow former Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to exile in Saudi Arabia.”

    In Amman, Jordan, two protests took place, one—organized by left organizations—demanding the resignation of the new prime minister, Marouf al-Bakhit, and the second in support of the struggle to topple Mubarak. At the latter, organized by Islamists, Hamzeh Mansour, secretary general of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, told the crowd, “Arab rulers should listen to the voice of their peoples and stop betting on the United States.”

    The Jordanian Farmers Union organized a protest Friday, tossing crates of tomatoes onto the Karak-Aqaba highway to protest dropping prices.

    In the Moroccan capital of Rabat on Friday, more than 1,000 protesters rallied to demand public sector jobs. An organizer of the protest told the media that at a meeting January 24, the government had asked for a truce because of the unrest in the region. The truce ended February 10, the government’s deadline for recruiting 4,500 highly qualified graduates. The unemployment rate for university graduates stands at around 18 percent.

    According to the communication minister, Khalid Naciri, at least 21 protests daily are being held in Morocco, a nation beset by social inequality and government corruption.

    WSWS

  • Through the desert to a country with no name

    Through the desert to a country with no name

    By Wayne Madsen
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    (WMR) — WMR’s Middle East sources are pointing to a looming battle that will be waged for control of the life-sustaining waters of the Nile River when southern Sudan, or whatever it’s name will be, achieves independence from Sudan following the ongoing independence referendum.

    Independence for southern Sudan has long been a goal of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her god-daughter, current U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. The splitting of Sudan has long been in the interests of Israel, which has yearned for a client state in southern Sudan that could put the squeeze on the supply of the Nile’s headwaters to Egypt and northern Sudan. For Rice, a vitriolic hatred for Khartoum and its majority Arab population, has helped the cause of the southern Sudanese. Rice’s views on southern Sudan and Khartoum were partly influenced by two members of the Israeli Lobby who had direct control over U.S. policy toward Sudan as counter-terrorism officials in the Bill Clinton National Security Council: Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin.

    The late southern Sudanese leader, John Garang, was one of Albright’s celebrated ex-Marxist “beacons of hope” for Africa, along with other U.S. client dictators in the region as Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. Congo’s Laurent-Desire Kabila and Garang were among Washington’s “red princes” until they got cross-wise with the CIA and U.S. corporate plans for their respective nations and were removed in assassinations plotted by Langley.

    Southern Sudan has not even settled on a name for the new nation. However, any of the proposed names raises the specter of ambitions by the Israelis and other external actors vying for influence in central Africa. One name proposed is the Nile Republic but that would immediately send an alarm to Cairo and Khartoum concerning the long-term control of the Nile’s waters by the new pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli government with its capital in Juba in southern Sudan. Another proposal would call the country “Nilotia,” again, problematic, because of the reference to the Nile River.

    Another proposed name, Cush, is taken from the Jewish Bible and refers to an ancient kingdom extending from the Horn of Africa to southern Egypt. There is some informed speculation in the region that the Mossad was behind the recent Christmas car bombing outside an Egyptian Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt in order to stir up tensions between Egypt’s ten percent Coptic minority and its majority Muslim population. Some Middle East commentators pointed out that remotely-controlled car bombs are virtually unknown in Egypt but have been carried out by Mossad in Lebanon, where they are then blamed on Hezbollah.

    Mossad is reportedly recruiting agents from the hundreds of southern Sudanese in Israel who have migrated to Israel for employment opportunities. Many of these southern Sudanese refugees, mostly found in Tel Aviv, are expected to return to their new nation.

    Southern Egypt, the land that supposedly once included Cush [Cush was the mythical grandson of Noah], is a center for Egypt’s Copts and wider irredentist claims in the region by an independent Cush [or “Kush”] in southern Sudan could further inflame tensions along the entire stretch of the Nile River.

    Another proposed names for the new nation in southern Sudan, New Sudan, may stir up tensions on the disputed oil-rich territory on the border of old Sudan and “New Sudan,” the Abyei region. Continued use of “South Sudan” or “Southern Sudan” would give the impression of a divided country like South and North Korea or South and North Yemen. Continued use of Sudan in the name may also create friction as seen in the Balkans between Greece and Macedonia. Greece has insisted that Macedonia be referred to by the United Nations as “FYROM: former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” because of what it believes are irredentist claims by Macedonia on northern Greece.

    The Jews of KurdistanHowever, it is the ambitions of Israel that may pose the greater problem for the land of the Nile headwaters. Israel’ expansionist government is fond of using the collection of ancient folk lore and myths known as the “Old Testament” to drive claims to land in the West Bank [which are referred to by the arcane biblical names of Judea and Samaria] but also, increasingly to lands in northern Iraq. On January 28, 2008, WMR reported: “Israeli expansionists, their intentions to take full control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and permanently keep the Golan Heights of Syria and expand into southern Lebanon already well known, also have their eyes on parts of Iraq considered part of a biblical ‘Greater Israel.’ Israel reportedly has plans to re-locate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel, including expatriates from Kurdish Iran, to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimages to ancient Jewish religious shrines. According to Kurdish sources, the Israelis are secretly working with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to carry out the integration of Kurdish and other Jews into areas of Iraq under control of the KRG. Kurdish, Iraqi Sunni Muslim, and Turkmen have noted that Kurdish Israelis began to buy land in Iraqi Kurdistan after the U.S. invasion in 2003 that is considered historical Jewish ‘property.’ The Israelis are particularly interested in the shrine of the Jewish prophet Nahum in al Qush, the prophet Jonah in Mosul, and the tomb of the prophet Daniel in Kirkuk. Israelis are also trying to claim Jewish ‘properties’ outside of the Kurdish region, including the shrine of Ezekiel in the village of al-Kifl in Babel Province near Najaf and the tomb of Ezra in al-Uzayr in Misan Province, near Basra, both in southern Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated territory. Israeli expansionists consider these shrines and tombs as much a part of “Greater Israel” as Jerusalem and the West Bank, which they call ‘Judea and Samaria.’”

    Oil is also a major factor in the independence of southern Sudan. The new country is rich in oil and with Africa’s oil and other resources now highly sought after by competing nations like the United States, China, and Japan, the traditional strictures issued by the Organization of African Unity upon its founding in 1963 against changing Africa’s colonial borders through secession have been overtaken by new realities and a new organization, the African Union, which has now permitted two nations to secede from established nations: Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993 and now southern Sudan or whatever it will call itself, from Sudan in 2011.

    Several nations point to Somaliland, the former British Somaliland that declared itself independent from Somalia in 1991, as the next state in line to achieve recognition. Israeli diplomats have reportedly been in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, to talk about Israeli recognition of the state. However, it will be the United States and Britain, both of which favor recognition, that will spur Somaliland’s quest for international recognition and UN membership. After Somaliland, two other parts of Somalia, Puntland and Jubaland, will likely follow suit.

    Some Africa policy habitués of the Council on Foreign Relations and other fronts for the global banking elites are already floating the idea that the Sudan solution may be applied to Africa’s other north-south and Islamic-Christian flash points like Nigeria and Ivory Coast. They reason that if majority Christian south Sudan can separate from largely Muslim north Sudan, why not majority Muslim north Ivory Coast from largely Christian south Ivory Coast and Muslim north Nigeria from Christian south Nigeria? And the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been seen as a prime candidate for “Balkanization” by the Corporate Council on Africa and its affiliates at the Kissingerian Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    As for southern Sudan or whatever it will be, after the likes of John Kerry and George Clooney depart from the photo ops in Juba, they will be replaced by non-governmental organization and international aid agency faceless international bureaucrats, the foot soldiers of the global “misery industry” who migrate from killing fields to war zones in search of new tax-free income, walled compounds with servants and Land Rovers, and duty free shopping gigs. Southern Sudan’s “independence” will be in name only, with the aid agencies and NGOs calling the shots as they do in Haiti today.

    Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

    Copyright © 2011 WayneMadenReport.com

    Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report

    , Jan 18, 2011

  • Turkey Resolved To Take Any Measures To Protect Rights Of Its Citizens

    Turkey Resolved To Take Any Measures To Protect Rights Of Its Citizens

    Turkey’s foreign minister said on Tuesday that Turkish Republic was resolved to protect rights of its citizens.

    281210 ta karar12

    “We are still waiting for apology and indemnity from Israel,” Foreign Minister Davutoglu said while commenting on Turkey’s expectations from Israel because of attack of Mavi Marmara ship.

    Speaking to reporters at a news conference with Abdurrahman Hamad Al-Attiyah, Secretary-General of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Davutoglu said Turkey’s stance on the matter was clear.

    “Turkey expressed its views on the Israeli attack on Mavi Marmara ship and the aid convoy in many platforms. There is no need to reiterate them. Our stance is explicit. Turkish Republic is capable of protecting the rights of its citizens and resolved to take every kind of measures to protect those rights. No change is in question in our stance.Turkey’s views, expectations and demands have been expressed. We will continue to exert every kind of diplomatic efforts for our demands to be met. There are different statements coming from the Israeli party,” Davutoglu said.

    On May 31, Israeli soldiers attacked the “Palestine Our Route Humanitarian Aid Our Load” flotilla in international waters. Nine activists were killed and 54 others were injured by Israeli attacks.

    -DAVUTOGLU TO TRAVEL TO IRAQ-

    Asked to comment on his planned visit to Iraq, Davutoglu said he was planning a visit to Iraq on January 10-11. “We had a telephone conversation with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki after he established the government. We decided to have second meeting of High Level Strategic Cooperation Council soon.”

    Davutoglu said works regarding the details of the meeting continued and necessary statements would be made soon, adding Turkey’s support to Iraq would always continue.

    Iraq’s parliament approved last week Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his government, nine months after the general elections.

    AA

  • Çubukçu: Turkish schools important bridge between Turkey and N. Iraq

    Çubukçu: Turkish schools important bridge between Turkey and N. Iraq

    Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu said on Wednesday that Turkish schools operating in northern Iraq play an important role in fostering friendly relations between Turkey and the autonomous region.

    Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu
    Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu

    During a visit to a kindergarten and the Işık (Light) University opened by Turkish volunteers in the northern Iraqi province of Arbil yesterday, Çubukçu made a speech lauding the services that Turkish education institutions provide to Iraqis and their contribution to the relations between the two nations. “The works done and the schools built by a group of self-sacrificing education volunteers under difficult circumstances here have established a bridge of feelings between Iraq and Turkey in the name of humanity. We know friendships initiated under difficulties are always firmly established and more enduring. In addition to being world citizens, students of these schools also speak Turkish very fluently, growing up to know all about our language. These students will be architects of the bridges of love that are necessary for humankind’s peace and prosperity,” said Çubukçu, also noting that the graduates of Turkish schools are playing significant roles in the development of Turkey’s southeastern neighbor.

    Pointing out that one of northern Iraq’s most pressing needs is education, Çubukçu stressed that important responsibilities lie with Turkey, given its historical relations with the region. “We consider advancing our cooperation in education in line with our increasingly growing economic, social and cultural relations a responsibility. In the era ahead of us, the investments in education by Turkish entrepreneurs here will further expand and Turkey’s hand of brotherhood and friendship will always be extended to our brothers in northern Iraq,” she said.

    Education institutions opened in northern Iraq are being operated under Fezalar Education Institution Inc. After Çubukçu delivered her speech, the company’s general director, Talip Büyük, presented her with a plaque of appreciation. Additionally, a student from the Turkish high school in Kirkuk gave the minister a charcoal portrait of her as a present.

    Çubukçu and the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) delegation accompanying her left the university after having a photo taken with the students. Among the AK Party deputies who visited the kindergarten and university with Çubukçu were Mesude Nursuna Memecan from İstanbul, Fatma Şahin from Gaziantep and Gülşen Orhan from Van. Turkey’s consul general to Arbil, Aydın Selcen, was also present during the deputies’ visit to the two education institutions yesterday. The members of the Turkish delegation also attended a concert held for them by the students. Çubukçu and Gülşen joined the students in some of the songs they performed.

    via Çubukçu: Turkish schools important bridge between Turkey and N. Iraq.