Eric Margolis

BEWARE GROWLING BEARS

When the Russian bears growls, it’s best to pay attention. Vladimir Putin’s harsh criticism of US military and foreign policy on 10 February should have set off alarm bells in the west.

But senior US officials are so obsessed with Iraq, and so used by now to having Moscow agree to whatever Washington wanted to do around the globe, even in Russia’s backyard, they mostly shrugged off Putin’s warnings. The US and British media self-righteously blasted the Russian leader for daring question the Pax Americana.

In his startlingly blunt speech at a security conference in Munich, Russia’s president accused Washington of seeking world domination, undermining the UN and other international institutions, trying to monopolize world energy sources, destabilizing the Mideast by its bungled occupation of Iraq, and unleashing a new nuclear arms race by planning to deploy anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe.

Russia has long fumed over NATO’s advance to its western borders, and Washington’s attempts to replace Moscow’s influence in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. This writer has long maintained that while one deeply sympathizes with the desire of East European states to take shelter from old foe Russia by joining NATO, pushing the alliance to Russia’s doorstep was dangerously provocative and militarily ill-advised.

`He who defends everything,’ said Frederick the Great, `defends nothing.’ The Baltic states are indefensible; Bulgaria and Romania military liabilities, as Germany found in World War II. Bulgaria and Romania were inducted into NATO because the US Air Force wanted use of their Black Sea air bases as part of its air bridge to the Mideast and Central Asia.

President Putin certainly merits strong criticism for his fabricated war against independent Chechnya and massive human rights violations there, and for his increasingly authoritarian rule – ironically, the same charges many also level at President George W. Bush over Iraq.

But Putin is right when he warns the Bush Administration has undermined the UN, made a dangerous mess in the Mideast, and threatens to ignite a strategic arms race by modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and planning to deploy ballistic missile defense systems(BMD) in Poland and the Czech Republic.

In response, Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, warned US BMD plans may compel Russia to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a cornerstone of US-Russian détente, and deploy a new generation of intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe.

However, it remains unclear amidst all the ruckus how a US BMD system in Poland and the Czech Republic would threaten Russia’s long-range missiles, which are mostly based in silos or on rail cars in central and eastern Russia, whose normal trajectory would be over the Arctic regions, not Eastern Europe.

The Russians scoff at US claims its new BMD systems in Poland and the Czech Republic are designed to stop missiles from Iran and other unspecified `rogue’ states. They certainly have a point. Why on earth would Iran fire missiles at Warsaw or Prague if it had them? A propos, Iran’s longest-range missile, Shehab-3,which carries a conventional warhead, is about 800 miles. The expected range of the Shehab-4 under development is 1,200-1,300 miles, not enough to even reach Eastern Europe.

The new US BMD strategic systems, says Moscow and some western defense analysts, are part of the Bush/Cheney Administration’s profoundly destabilizing efforts to erect anti-missile defenses in Alaska, Europe, and elsewhere around the globe that are intended to nullify the nuclear arsenals of Russia and China.

The White House appears to be heading away from the traditional balance of mutually assured destruction and toward absolute nuclear supremacy. Given the faked war against Iraq, and Bush and Cheney’s strident talk about `pre-emptive strikes against threatening nations,’ the Russians are understandably uneasy. Their nuclear arsenal remains the leading strategic threat to the United States.

Putin’s angry speech is a warning that a reviving Russia will not allow the US to attain unchallenged world nuclear, political, or energy domination. China echoes this warning. Ironically, high world oil prices caused in good part by Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq have boosted Russia’s oil-based economy, allowing Moscow to modernize its run-down armed forces.

Putin’s speech also suggest Russia will take a more active role in the Mideast. This could be a positive development given the striking inability of the Bush/Cheney Administration to separate itself from the policies of Israel’s right wing parties and return to its traditional somewhat more balanced Mideast role.

Some Europeans also quietly welcomed Putin’s speech. There is growing irritation in the EU and NATO – what former US National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski cruelly terms `America’s vassal states’ – at being brusquely ordered about by Washington and told send troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.

History repeatedly shows that when one nation becomes too dominant, others will join forces to oppose it. Russia and China are drawing closer together to challenge American power. President Putin has said `enough.’ A new Cold War? Not quite yet, but there are plenty of alarming portents.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

THE BELOVED LEADER PLAYS PYONGYANG BLUFF POKER

North Korea’s `Dear Leader,’ Kim Jong-il has long supported the desperately poor nation he inherited from his father by playing a game in which he truly excels, Pyongyang Bluff Poker.

Kim long ago learned that frightening his neighbors and the United States with nuclear weapons and truculent behavior was the best way to get food and cash aid from the rich nations. Though North Korea’s nuclear program was clearly designed for self-defense and thwarting an American attack, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations rose to bait and treated with the isolated Marxist state as if it was an existential threat to the United States.

As his economic woes mounted, Kim figured that staging a nuclear test would shake even more money out of the imperialist devils.

However, Kim’s tiny nuclear explosion four months ago backfired badly. Japan, the leading potential target for North Korea’s potentially nuclear-armed medium range missiles, went absolutely ballistic. PM Shinzo Abe’s new conservative government began openly talking about dropping Japan’s traditional military and strategic timidity adopting a far more muscular stance. This would include the ability to strike at North Korea with missiles and strike aircraft, beefing up military forces, and erecting a multi-layer anti-missile shield.

China, which lost 10 million people fighting Japan’s invasion of the 1930’s and 40’s, and never tires of beating the war drums over alleged `reborn Japanese militarism,’ also got seriously angry at the `Dear Leader’ for provoking the Japanese.

Beijing fears Japan will one day use its huge economic strength to restore itself to a major military power that would challenge China’s growing might. China is concerned North Korea’s saber rattling might induce Japan to produce its own nuclear weapons – which it could do within three months. Some years ago, this writer obtained a copy of a diagram for a Japanese-nuclear device.

Beijing reacted with unprecedented anger and criticism to North Korea’s nuclear test, openly calling it reckless and dangerous. China is North Korea’s only ally, sole source of oil, and supplies much of its food. Soon after Kim’s nuclear test, Beijing started squeezing North Korea by cutting back deliveries of oil and foodstuffs.

The inevitable ensued. North Korea was forced back to the negotiating table. Secret direct North Korean-US talks in Germany in January reached a tentative deal. Last week, the US, South Korea, Russia and Japan initialed a nuclear deal with North Korea in Beijing that is a significant diplomatic accomplishment, but one that must also be taken with an excess of caution.

North Korea is notorious for backing away from deals, and, claims the US, has violated numerous previous ones. The latest agreement, trumpeted by the Bush Administration as a great diplomatic victory, was really due to China’s intervention. Whether it holds up and advances, or Kim is just buying more time, remains to be seen.

This column has long predicted that North Korea would eventually be bribed to junk its nuclear program. The US was not prepared to go to war against North Korea which, unlike Iraq, could fight back. Bombing North Korea was not an option since South Korea’s capitol, Seoul, is within range of North Korean artillery and missile batteries dug in to the DMZ. So payoffs were the only logical recourse.

The latest deal mostly mirrors the one offered North Korea by the Clinton Administration in 1994 and denounced by Republican as a `sell-out.’ The Clinton deal was scuppered by neocons in the Bush Administration who accused North Korea of secretly developing a Pakistani-supplied uranium enrichment program. The neocon’s primary concern was not US national security but the fear that North Korea might sell nuclear warheads and delivery systems to Israel’s Arab foes.

This time, however, North Korea will not get a light water power reactor promised under the Carter deal, but $400 million worth of oil. In return, North Korea agrees to seal its Yongbyon reactor.

But under the Beijing Accord, North Korea will still retain its nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The secret uranium enrichment operation the US claims North Korea has hidden away remains unresolved. This and many other contentious issues were left open for future discussions. They promise to be extremely difficult. At least the Bush Administration wisely opted to deal with North Korea in a step by step process of rewarding Pyongyang in well-defined stages for each concession it makes.

American neoconservatives are furious at President George Bush for what they claim is pandering to `axis of evil’ North Korea in order to achieve a desperately needed foreign policy success after so many gross failures.

What really worries them, of course, is that direct talks with North Korea raise the obvious question: why not direct talks with Iran over its so far peaceful nuclear program? The neocons want war with Iran, not talks, so the example of North Korea is undermining their carefully developed strategy.

Meanwhile, back in North Korea, `Dear Leader’ Kim must be figuring out his next poker hand. He could always play his favorite hand. Which is to make a deal after torturous negotiations, agree to terms, then break the deal. Then later resume talks, using the final terms agreed to in the first negotiations as the starting point for achieving even better terms in the new talks.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

NOTICE RE COMMENTS SECTION

I much appreciate and value the thoughtful comments being posted by many readers. They are, for the most part, very helpful and enlarge the general discussion and exchange of views. However, a small number of readers continue to employ abusive language or are using the `Comment' section as a chat room. I do not have the time to edit comments. So I again ask readers like `Hagadem' and `Bino' to be restrained, mature and polite in their commentary or I may have to shut down the section. Thank you for your cooperation.
Eric Margolis

THE SECOND MOST EXPENSIVE WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY

`A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,’ famously quipped US Senator Everett Dirksen back in the 1960’s.

The US government has just estimated that President George Bush’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and his so-called `war on terror,’ will cost at least $690 billion by the end of next year. That’s more than the total cost to America of World War I, the Korean War, or Vietnam, and second only to the $2 trillion cost of World War II(in current dollars).

This means that by 2008, Bush’s wars in the Muslim World will have cost each American man, woman and child $2,300.

The $690 billion poured into the bottomless hole of the faux war on terrorism does not include the estimated $100 billion direct cost of the 9/11 attacks, the urgent need to replace $66 billion of US military equipment worn out or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan, billions in lifetime care for seriously injured soldiers, $125 billion in backlogged veteran’s claims, and untold billions spent in secret CIA programs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ironically, half of the money spent on these wars is being borrowed from former American enemies, Communist China and Japan. Half the current American deficit is being tied directly to the war on terrorism. After six years, the Bush/Cheney Administration cannot even define what it means by victory in its wars in the Muslim World.

Defeat looms large in Iraq; Afghanistan is headed that way; and the US National intelligence Estimate just reported that al-Qaida is actually stronger than ever. The still elusive Osama bin Laden, who said the only way to expel US influence from the Muslim World was to bleed the US financially, must be beaming over the success of his grand strategy.

As all kings have found since the dawn of time, in war, money is as important as armies. Wars always cost far more than originally projected. A primary architect of the 2003 Iraq War, former US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, assured Americans the Iraq war would only cost $40 billion. The cost of occupying Iraq would be fully covered, he claimed, by plundering its oil. Wolfowitz now heads the World Bank.

Speaking of epic idiocy, enter the man selected by Wolfowitz to become proconsul of US-occupied Iraq, a bumbling conservative Republican hack named Paul Bremer.

During the 14 months he ran Iraq, Bremer committed two enormous follies. He dissolved Iraq’s army and police, then fired all government employees who were members of Saddam’s Ba’athist Party. Iraq was left without security forces or functioning government.

The first lesson in Imperialism 101 is that when you invade a country, the first thing to do is buy the loyalty of its army, police and bureaucracy.

Chaos ensued in Iraq. Banks and museums were looted. Banditry was endemic. For a few hundred million dollars, the US could have hired much of Saddam’s army, security forces and bureaucrats. Instead, the Bush/Cheney Administration declared them outlaws and began using Shia militias and death squads – called the `Iraqi Army’ by the US media - to fight the Sunni resistance, so helping to trigger today’s ghastly Sunni-Shia civil war.

Anarchy in US-occupied Iraq, and the collapse of its banking system and Ba’ath Party-run social programs, forced Washington to rush 363 tons of US $100 dollar bills to Baghdad. This money, which belonged to Iraq, came from the UN-run `Oil for Food’ program. Bremer’s people dished out $12 billion by the truckloads and bagfuls. Another $800 million was stolen by US-appointed officials of Iraq’s Defense Ministry.

But Bremer’s missing $12.8billion was just the tip of the corruption iceberg. US corporations in bed with the Republican Party’s rightwing, like Halliburton, and mercenary-supplier, Blackwater, made billions out of Iraq. Halliburton, whose former CEO was VP Cheney, was awarded $16 billion in questionable Iraq contracts.

Last week, House Democrats opened hearings that finally began to expose the tsunami of corruption that accompanied the occupation and plundering of Iraq. Billions more of fraud and thievery concealed by the Administration will likely be uncovered.

The whole sordid story of the 100,000 `private contractors’ employed by the US in Iraq has only begun to emerge. According to the US Government Accountability Office, at least 48,000 of these – let’s use the correct term, mercenaries - are private gunmen working for hundreds of shadowy US military corporations like Blackwater and Vinnell. These heavily-armed desperados are a law unto themselves and under no supervision.

Some of these mercenaries make US $1,000 daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the US locks up Muslims it brands `illegal combatants’ in Guantanamo, it has deployed an army of armed thugs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even interrogation and torture of Iraqis and Afghans has been farmed out to US private enterprise.

Blackwater reputedly has the world’s biggest private military base and a fleet of aircraft. Such huge numbers of uncontrolled mercenaries are a menace. They could also pose a serious internal danger to America. Under the Bush/Cheney Administration, we saw the neoconservatives create their own private intelligence organizations within the Pentagon and a top secret military outfit to spy on Americans. It is hardly a great leap of imagination to picture the same neocons creating their own corporate-run army in the heart of the United States.

The White House wants to help pay for its foreign wars by slashing spending on health and seniors. While the Washington DC police no longer dare patrol crime-infested southern parts of America’s capitol, President Bush and VP Cheney are sending the 82nd Airborne Division to try to pacify Baghdad. If this isn’t the extreme theater of the absurd, I don’t know what is.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

COUNT-DOWN TO WAR WITH IRAN?

In spite of being hopelessly bogged down in $700 billion wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush/Cheney administration appears set on a collision course with Tehran. In recent weeks, the White House’s war of words against Iran has sharply intensified, and grown increasingly bellicose.

What is the White House up to? Either trying to bluff Tehran into abandoning its entirely legal but worrisome civilian nuclear power program, which would allow the administration to claim a major victory after so many reverses.

Or, the lame duck Bush/Cheney Administration is attempting to divert attention from the worsening debacle in Iraq and intends to provoke an air and naval war against Iran as a last desperate, ideologically-driven assault against its foes in the Muslim World. One is reminded of the suicidal banzai charges of cornered Japanese troops during World War II.

Time is running out for the pro-war neocons: Bush has less than two years left in office and is facing a revolt in Congress. Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to leave office by the end of April – or earlier if he is engulfed by a raging scandal over selling titles. The arrest of Lord Levy, Blair’s principal fund raiser and pro-war mentor on the Mideast, has seriously undermined the faltering Blair government.

Evidence continues to accumulate that the Bush/Cheney Administration is planning an air and naval war against Iran in spite of a rising chorus of protests by serving and retired senior US military officers and diplomats.

The heaviest concentration of US naval strike forces since the 2003 war against Iraq is concentrating off Iran. In a disturbing replay of that conflict, CIA drones and US Air Force recon aircraft, along with US and British Special Forces are overflying Iran and probing its nuclear and military installations.

CIA and Britain’s MI6 are stirring unrest among Iran’s Kurds and Azerbaijanis, and arming Iranian Marxist and royalist exiles.

In a clear provocation, President George Bush ordered US forces in Iraq to `kill’ Iranians officials or diplomats who appear `threatening.’ US troops in northern Iraq broke into an Iranian liaison office and arrested its military staff. Bush warned Iran not to `meddle’ in neighboring Iraq.

Pentagon sources accused Iran of smuggling weapons and explosive to `Iraqi insurgents’ – though the `insurgents’ are in fact Shia militiamen allied to the US-installed Baghdad regime. Accusations that Iran is behind attacks on US forces are clearly designed to lay the groundwork for a `causus belli’ - justifying war.

Half the 21,000 additional US troops headed to Iraq may be positioned to block an Iranian threat to the vulnerable main US Kuwait-Baghdad supply line in the event of war with Iran. US anti-aircraft and anti-missile batteries are being airlifted to Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman.

New contingents of US Air Force personnel and warplanes are arriving at key forward air bases in Bulgaria and Romania that link the US to the Mideast and Central Asia. US bases in Britain, Germany, Diego Garcia, the Gulf, Central Asia, and Pakistan are reported on heightened alert. Turkey is being pressed to allow US and Israeli strike aircraft to use its air space to attack northern Iran.

The Pentagon’s latest strike plan against Iran includes over 2,300 `high value’ targets such as its dispersed nuclear infrastructure and, worryingly, operating reactors, air and naval bases, ports, telecommunications, air defenses, military factories, energy networks, and government buildings. Iran’s water and sewage systems, bridges, food storage, and bomb shelters could also be targeted, as were Iraq’s in 2001.

A swift `surgical strike’ is not likely. Given the large number of potential targets in Iran, and its efforts to defend and disperse some of the high value ones; it is very probable the US would have to launch multiple air and missile strikes against many of them to assure destruction. Iranian ground forces moving toward Iraq and Kuwait would also come under repeated attack, along with their long-ranged artillery and mobile tactical missiles.

The US Treasury has mounted a highly effective campaign to strangle Iran financially, seriously hurting its foreign banking connections, retarding industrial growth and energy production, and scaring off foreign investment.

The Bush Administration and close ally Israel have sharply intensified their war of words against Iran, claiming, implausibly, it poses a nuclear threat to the entire world, though Tehran has no nuclear weapons or long-range delivery systems. Nor do Washington’s fear-mongering neoconservatives explain why on earth Iran would want to threaten the rest of the world – even if it could.

The real neocon objective, of course, is not to rid the world of a potential threat, but to get America into attacking and seriously damaging the nation now regarded as Israel’s primary foe, Iran. With Egypt sidelined and under tight US control, Iraq demolished and occupied, Syria isolated and petrified, only Iran remains a threat to Israel and seriously challenges its continued occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Politicians in Israel are in dangerous emotional overdrive and make open threats to attack Iran – even with nuclear weapons. Israeli rightists and their American supporters absurdly claim Iran is a new Nazi Germany and Israel faces a second Holocaust.

The fact that Israel possesses a powerful triad of air, land and sea-based nuclear forces that can survive any surprise attack is never mentioned. At any given time, Israel has at least one Dolphin-class submarine on station in the northern Arabian Sea that can hit Iran with nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

Though UN inspectors find no evidence Iran is producing nuclear weapons, Tehran, like Saddam’s Iraq, is being told to prove an impossible negative -that it has no nuclear weapons or secret programs hidden away. Ironically, there are persistent reports that Iran’s nuclear program is moving at a snail’s pace and has encountered serious technical problems.

With disturbing déjà vu, the US Congress and American media are swallowing the administration’s torrent of unproven accusations against Iran precisely the way they lapped up grotesque White House lies about Iraq.

Amid growing war fever in North America, last week France’s President Jacques Chirac sensibly observed, in an off the record interview, that even if Iran had a few nuclear weapons, they would be only for self-defense, and `not very dangerous.’

Iran would be obliterated by US and Israeli nuclear counter-strikes if it ever used its nukes against Israel, noted Chirac with Cartesian logic, and are unlikely to commit national suicide.

After his candid comments became public, Chirac retracted them after a storm of protests from Washington, Israel and even members of his own government who toe the US party line that Iran is a grave threat to world security. Chirac, who is a lame duck, was simply telling a truth that few cared to hear.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007