New world order

 

The Project for a New American Century didn't get off the ground, and its spawn - Projecte 2025 - is practically a 180 turn.

A PNAC accolite is happy with the assassination

The original PNAC (Project for the new American century) plan was to take out (regime change) Syria (after Iraq), but that seems to have proven more difficult than the brilliant planners expected.  So, we'll go with Iran.  What a swell idea.

[December 14, 2017]   Years ago there was a plan, A Clean Break: Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to wreck the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and to re-mold the Middle East. It first involved destroying Iraq or in the discredited words of Paul Wolfowitz, “The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.”

Destroying Syria was to be next. And then Iran. In 2006, columnist Taki Theodoracopulos warned in TheAmerican Conservative of the “Clean Break” plan “to aggressively remake the strategic environments of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

[...]

Core promoters of the PNAC plan signed an open letter to then President Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. They were Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick and John Bolton, all solid members of the Neoconservative project.

[...]

I reported in TAC in 2010 of neoconservative David Wurmser (subsequently Vice President Cheney’s principal advisor) forecasting “if Saddam Hussein were driven from power, Iraq would be ‘ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,’ and out of the ‘coming chaos in Iraq and most probably in Syria,’ the United States and her principal allies, namely Israel and Jordan, could redraw the region’s map.”

Of course, all this was years ago, but the plan remains, supported by many powerful American war interests.

  The American Conservative

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is it time to be reminded of PNAC?

December 15, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Years ago there was a plan, A Clean Break: Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to wreck the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and to re-mold the Middle East. It first involved destroying Iraq or in the discredited words of Paul Wolfowitz, “The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.”

Destroying Syria was to be next. And then Iran.

[...]

Core promoters of the PNAC plan signed an open letter to then President Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. They were Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick and John Bolton, all solid members of the Neoconservative project.

  Information Clearinghouse

"And John Bolton."

Of course, all this was years ago, but the plan remains, supported by many powerful American war interests.

Also...something from September 2014: A History of Turkish False Flag Attacks on Syria

An article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh in April of this year  [2014] titled: ‘The Rat Line and the Red Line’, argues that the gas attack last year in Ghouta was an attack carried out by the Syrian rebels with the planning of Turkish authorities as opposed to the Syrian government. In the article Hersh quotes a former intelligence official as stating: ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line’. As soon as the gas attack hit the mainstream press in the West, the calls for war went into overdrive. War was only averted due to massive public opposition to the move which forced the British parliament to vote against intervention in Syria, as well as the Russian government brokering a deal to place the Syrian government’s chemical weapons supplies under international control.

The notion that Turkey is capable of planning such a malevolent attack was strengthened when officials from the top echelons of the Turkish government were caught red handed discussing a false flag attack on their own territory, in order to justify a war with Syria earlier this year. The officials are heard discussing the possibility that they could arrange an attack on the tomb of the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman Shah, which is situated in a Turkish enclave in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkish intelligence is heard saying in the leaked audio tape: “We can also prepare an attack on Suleiman Shah’s tomb if necessary”, Fidan continues, “Listen, listen commander if it’s a pretext we’ll give you one. I’ll send over four men and have them fire right rockets on an empty lot. That’s not the problem, pretexts can be arranged.”

  New Eastern Outlook

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let's not split hairs, John Bolton IS a neocon

Will Bolton be in his job long enough to bring fellow neocons salivating in the wings back into the White House?  How about Wolfowitz?  What's he doing these days?  Bill Kristol, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century?  We know where he is, suddenly transformed into an anti-Trump talking head, but will Bolton in the White House change his mind?  Is Dick Cheney going to come out of the shadows?  Rumsfeld?  Where's Robert Kagan these days?  Is Richard Perle still alive?  Newt Gingrich is already around and visible, although I've been trying to ignore the fact.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile, the PNAC project is coming along

Surely Syria is about to be "softened up" enough.

And It Will Ever Be Thus

After using Goldman Sachs as a punching bag for his campaign, sharply criticizing his political opponents for ties to the investment bank, Donald Trump has taken unprecedented steps to appoint former Goldman Sachs attorneys and executives to the upper echelons of government.

It goes far beyond what’s been reported. Not only is Jay Clayton Trump’s chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, after serving as the attorney who advised the bank during the bailouts of 2008, but new disclosures show that the team Clayton brought with him to oversee the financial market regulator are also former Goldman Sachs attorneys.

[...]

Trump’s inner circle consists almost entirely of former Goldman Sachs executives, including his chief political adviser Steve Bannon, his national security adviser Dina Powell, and his top economic advisor Gary Cohn. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years. Last month, Trump nominated Eric Ueland, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, to serve as as the Under Secretary of State, one of the most senior posts in the State Department.

The appointments coincide with Trump advancing a regulatory and tax agenda that is largely identical to the policy demands of the financial services industry.

  The Intercept

Which is really just a continuation of government at least since George W Bush.

One of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country’s most extreme and discredited neocons. While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current President.

  Glenn Geenwald

This has been going on at least since I've been paying attention. The ruling class comprises both parties.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

PNAC on Track

In 2013, when the United States first considered intervening in the Syria war, teams of U.S. Air Force commandos scouted out, across the Middle East, no fewer than 300 potential sites for new bases to support a possible intervention force.

Since then, the Pentagon has established or expanded scores of bases in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, among many other countries. Now we’ve located what appear to be another two new bases—one in Jordan near the border with Syria, and another a short distance across the same border in southern Syria. The two airstrips could support drones, helicopters, and special operations airplanes.

  The Daily Beast

Read it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Obama's Serious Syria Errors

President Barack Obama has long been under fire from the US national security elite and the media for failing to intervene aggressively against the Assad regime.

  Middle East Eye

And lambasted constantly in media and political circles for "inaction" in Syria, which would be laughable if it weren't pathetic. Action, I suppose, doesn't include funding, arming and advising. (And, in September, running an air strike on the Syrian army.)

But the real strategic blunder was not that Barack Obama didn’t launch yet another war in Syria, but that he decided to go along with the ambitions of America's Sunni allies to create and arm a Syrian opposition army to overthrow the regime in the first place.

[...]

[A] former [anonymous] official revealed that when Obama made the first move toward supporting the arming of Syrian opposition forces, the president failed to foresee the risk of a direct Iranian or Russian intervention on behalf of the Syrian regime in response to an externally armed opposition – because his advisors had failed to take this likelihood into account themselves.

[...]

Obama’s advisers assumed instead that neither Iran nor Russia would do more than offer token assistance to keep Assad in power, so there was no risk of an endless, bloody sectarian war.

I find this almost impossible to believe. How could they not foresee such an event? The entire world has known about the American Project for a New American Century  (PNAC) created in the run-up to the GW Bush administration with one of its stated goals being to take control over Syria. Syria has been seen for decades in the Middle East as a deterrent to attacks from Israel. Did they think Russia and Iran would just stand back and watch? And, if they did realize it would draw them into the conflict, it suggests that they intended it.

The former administration official confirmed the recollections of both former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Pentagon official Derek Chollet that Obama’s advisers believed Assad’s fall was inevitable.

Some of those advisers believed Assad lacked the “cunning and fortitude” to remain in power, as Chollet put it.

Just as they believed Hillary's coronation was inevitable. Bubbles are bad places from which to govern.

Obama did make a statement [in the summer of 2011] suggesting that Assad should step aside, but he made it clear privately that he had no intention of doing anything about it. “He viewed it as simply a suggestion, not a hard policy,” the ex-official said.

But soon after that, a bigger issue arose for the administration’s policy: how to respond to pressure from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for a US commitment to help overthrow Assad.

Countries who were counting heavily on a Hillary Clinton presidency which would announce a no-fly zone in Syria, further increasing the chance of a direct confrontation between Russia and the US.

Apparently to assuage the dissatisfaction of the Sunni allies, then-director of the CIA David Petraeus devised a plan, which Obama approved, to help move the small arms from Libyan government stocks in Benghazi to Turkey.

Confirming the 2014 story by Seymour Hersh, the ex-official recalled: “It was highly secret but officials involved in the Middle East learned of the programme by word of mouth.”

The combination of those two policy decisions committed Obama – albeit half-heartedly - to the armed overthrow of the Assad regime.

[...]

Obama and his advisers blundered on Syria in thinking that they were not getting into a high-risk war situation.

I would say that's an extremely large blunder, to the point of almost being unbelievable.

But there is a deeper level of explanation for the willingness of Obama and his advisers to go along with the inherent risk of another regime change policy – even if Obama was half-hearted about it at best and limited direct US involvement in it.

The administration was unwilling to be at cross-purposes with its Sunni allies, the former official recalled, because of the direct US military interests at stake in its alliances with those three states: the Saudis effectively controlled US access to the naval base in Bahrain, Turkey controlled the airbase at Incirlik, and Qatar controlled land and air bases that had become central to US military operations in the region.

Now that sounds more like it. They knew, but they decided the risk was worth it. Besides, if we don't stay involved in war, our economy will sink like a stone. It's barely hanging on as it is, and the next financial crash will need a big cushion.

This Gareth Porter article outlines the entire Syria debacle, including how the US once again became a partner with a terrorist organization in the Middle East, and is definitely worth the read if you're fuzzy on the details.

By the way, Donald Trump said America will no longer be in the regime change business when he's in the White House.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that was just another lie to get elected. It might not happen in the beginning, but it will happen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

HyperNormalisation Convo

This @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE discussion with Adam Curtis is outstanding. Again: watch HyperNormalisation on YouTube. https://t.co/z9TwEdrHPz

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 27, 2016

Yes, this is good.

Here's the documentary:



UPDATE:
And here's a negative review of the film: Another Manager of Perceptions

I think Glenn Greenwald will have some comment on that review, so if you're curious, come back tomorrow and see if I've added anything from him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Hillary Is Running the NeoCon Plan to Own the World

Formerly known as Project for the New American Century.

October 2015:

In an apparent break with the Obama White House, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the creation of a no-fly zone inside Syria Thursday, the day after Russian warplanes started bombing rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC affiliate WHDH in Boston after a campaign event nearby.

  MSNBC

At a CNN/NY1 Democratic debate [...] with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton reiterated her support for such a move.

"I do still support a no-fly zone because I think we need to put in safe havens for those poor Syrians who are fleeing both Assad and ISIS and so they have some place they can be safe," she said.

  CNN

So far, the Obama administration has resisted. But I expect President Hillary will go for it. Let's look at that No-fly Zone approach as implemented in Libya.

In this fifth anniversary week of the U.S.-led Libya intervention, it’s instructive to revisit Hillary Clinton’s curiously abridged description of that war in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices. [...] In late March 2011, Clinton quotes herself telling NATO members, “It’s crucial we’re all on the same page on NATO’s responsibility to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians in Libya.”

Just two paragraphs later [...] [t]here is an abrupt and unexplained seven-month gap, during which the military mission has inexplicably, and massively, expanded beyond protecting civilians to regime change — seemingly by happenstance. The only opposition combatants even referred to are simply labeled “the rebels,” and the entire role of the NATO coalition and its attendant responsibility in assisting their advance has been completely scrubbed from the narrative.

[...]

[It is pertinent] to treat Libya as a case study for the ways that supposedly limited interventions tend to mushroom into campaigns for regime change. Five years on, it’s still not a matter of public record when exactly Western powers decided to topple Qaddafi.

  Foreign Policy

But I believe it would be safe to say it was when the Project for a New American Century was rolled out in 1997.

[PNAC] was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."

Of the twenty-five people who signed the PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

  Wikipedia

(For a better reading of PNAC, click on those two links at the beginning of this post.)

To more fully comprehend what actually happened in Libya five years ago, let’s briefly review what the Obama administration proclaimed and compare that with what actually happened.

[...]

Two days [after President Obama announced a no-fly zone in Libya], Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon declared, “The military mission of the United States is designed to implement the Security Council resolution, no more and no less.… I mean protecting civilians against attacks from Qaddafi’s forces and delivering humanitarian aid.” The following day, Clinton’s deputy, James Steinberg, said during a Senate hearing, “President Obama has been equally firm that our military operation has a narrowly defined mission that does not include regime change.” [ed: emphasis mine]

[...]

Given that decapitation strikes against Qaddafi were employed early and often, there almost certainly was a decision by the civilian heads of government of the NATO coalition to “take him out” from the very beginning of the intervention.

[...]

On March 20, 2011, just hours into the intervention, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a British submarine stationed in the Mediterranean Sea struck an administrative building in Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound, less than 50 yards away from the dictator’s residence.

[...]

Later that day, Vice Adm. William Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, was asked by the press, “Can you guarantee that coalition forces are not going to target Qaddafi?” Gortney replied, “At this particular point, I can guarantee that he’s not on a targeting list.” When it was then pointed out that it was Qaddafi’s personal residence that had been attacked, Gortney added, “Yeah. But, no, we’re not targeting his residence. We’re there to set the conditions and enforce the United Nations Security Council resolution. That’s what we’re doing right now and limiting it to that.”

[...]

During the theatrical and exhaustive Benghazi hearing in October 2015, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Clinton about a video clip that read, “‘We came, we saw, he died [meaning Qaddafi].’ Is that the Clinton doctrine?” Clinton replied, “No, that was an expression of relief that the military mission undertaken by NATO and our other partners had achieved its end.” Yet, this was never the military mission that the Obama administration repeatedly told the world it had set out to achieve.

[...]

In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat and had abandoned their vehicles. Fittingly, on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that attacked a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially murdered by rebel forces.

[...]

Meanwhile, the public learned just this week — only because Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed on Saturday — that there is a previously unannounced detachment of Marines in northern Iraq providing “force protection” for the Iraqi military and U.S. advisors. The gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention.

  Foreign Policy

How many of the NeoCons who created PNAC are now backing Hillary? How many will she employ in her administration?

We know Robert Kagan has endorsed her campaign, and Paul Wolfowitz recently said he'd probably vote for her. He will - not "probably". "The co-founder of the DLC is a member of PNAC: Will Marshall." [source]

Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.

They shouldn’t have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead.

The paper, titled “Expanding American Power,” was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president.

[...]

Former Secretary Clinton already affirmed her belief in regime change during the campaign, but now it looks like those waiting in the wings to staff her government are anxious to wet their bayonets.

  Off-Guardian

“I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” leading neoconservative Robert Kagan told a group gathered around him, groupie-style, at a “foreign policy professionals for Hillary” fundraiser I attended last week. “I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.”

[...]

Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s hardline assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland, who would likely serve in a senior position in a Clinton administration, supports shipping weapons to Ukraine despite major opposition from European countries and concerns about the neo-Nazi elements those weapons would empower.

Another thing neoconservatives and liberal hawks have in common is confidence that the foreign policy establishment is right, and the growing populist hostility to military intervention is naïve and uninformed.

Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.

[...]

The neoconservative Weekly Standard celebrated Clinton’s 2008 appointment as secretary of state as a victory for the right, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem.”

[...]

“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” [Kagan] said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”

  The Intercept

Get ready to be persuaded and educated.

Hillary Clinton: where neo-liberalism meets neo-conservatism. "Intersectionality."

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Everything You Need to Know About Hillary Clinton

A prominent neoconservative intellectual and early promoter of the Iraq War is headlining an official campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton next month, Foreign Policy has learned. The move signals a shift in the Clinton campaign’s willingness to associate with prominent Republicans and is the latest sign of how far some GOP defectors are willing to go to block a Donald Trump presidency.

  Foreign Policy

Or maybe just a sign of how right wing Hillary Clinton is.

On Wednesday, Clinton picked up the endorsement of Republican Brent Scowcroft, who served as a national security adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and held formal or advisory positions in the administrations of former Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

And who is this neocon?

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century...

Emphasis mine. Look it up.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In Case You've Only Been Watching Television

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/wikileaks-cables-shed-light-on-us-foreign-policy-failures.html

I often forget that PNAC isn't old news to many (if not most) US citizens.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Take Your Sandals, Boys

1,600 US ground troops are already in Iraq, despite the Obama Administration’s claims that there won’t be any ground war in the nation. More or coming to the region very soon.

The Marine Corps has announced a plan to send 2,100 troops to Kuwait as part of the “Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force” for Central Command, to perform assorted “theater sustainment missions.” The exact timing of the deployment is unclear, but will come at some point in FY2015, according to officials.

[...]

Marine officials insisted that the planned deployment actually predates the new US air war in Iraq and Syria.

  Antiwar

Perhaps it was. It might well have been part of the Grand Plan, which has always included Syria.

Less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks General Wesley Clark was called into the office of a high-level official on duty at the Pentagon. There he was given the agenda spelled out in the reports PNAC, many members of which were now also members of the Bush cabinet (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.), had been asking of the US government and the military industrial complex.

“The general,” Clark stated during a 2007 book tour, while in the meeting “told me we’ve already made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” A couple months later while meeting with the same general, Clark said he was told the situation was even worse than originally thought and the plan was to actually take down the governments of at least “seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”

  Examiner.com

Five years.  We're a little behind schedule.

So, since we aren’t putting any “boots on the ground” in Iraq, are they staying in Kuwait, where they are being sent, or when they cross the border into Iraq, will they change into sandals?

Creation of the Monster: It's STILL About the Oil

According to a little-known November report for the US Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and Strategic Studies Department, Dividing Our Enemies, post-invasion Iraq was “an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ [enemy-against-enemy] firefights.”

The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi’s militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah’s 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.

[...]

”[T]his underside of the counterinsurgency coin is calculated to exploit or create divisions among adversaries for the purpose of fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters.”

The JSOU report referred to events in late 2004 in Fallujah where “US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists” undertook to “set insurgents battling insurgents.” This involved actually promoting Zarqawi’s ideology, ironically, to defeat it: “The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities – and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters – thereby diminishing his folk-hero image,” and encouraging the different factions to pick each other off. “By tapping into the Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis the Joint PSYOP Task Force did its ‘best to foster a rift between Sunni groups.’”

[...]

To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut-off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi’a militia and police. “Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies,” observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi’s legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself “the Islamic State.”

[...]

Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

[...]

The empowerment of the Islamist factions within the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) was a foregone conclusion of the strategy.

  MintPress News

Beyond the chaos that could have been (and no doubt was) foreseen in this strategy, according to this article…

The State Department even hired an al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan militia group to provide security for the US embassy in Benghazi – although they had links with the very people that attacked the embassy.

Last year, CNN confirmed that CIA officials operating secretly out of the Benghazi embassy were being forced to take extra polygraph tests to keep under wraps what US Congressman suspect was a covert operation “to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.”

[...]

CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training went straight into ISIS.

[...]

Classified assessments of the military assistance supplied by US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar obtained by the New York Times showed that “most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups… are going to hardline Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”

[...]

In August, Debkafile [an Israeli military intelligence website] reported that “The US, Jordan and Israel are quietly backing the mixed bag of some 30 Syrian rebel factions”, some of which had just “seized control of the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing, the only transit point between Israeli and Syrian Golan.” However, Debkafile noted, “al-Qaeda elements have permeated all those factions.” Israel has provided limited support to these rebels in the form of “medical care,” as well as “arms, intelligence and food.

[...]

This support also went to ISIS.

[...]

In mid-2013, the Obama administration intensified its support to the rebels with a new classified executive order reversing its previous policy limiting US direct support to only nonlethal equipment. As before, the order would aim to supply weapons strictly to “moderate” forces in the FSA [Free Syrian Army].

As if anyone actually believes that to be possible.

The US government keeps track of rebels receiving assistance purely through “handwritten receipts provided by rebel commanders in the field,” and the judgement of its allies.

[...]

[P]rivately, Pentagon officials estimate that “more than 50%” of the FSA is comprised of Islamist extremists, and according to rebel sources neither FSA chief Gen Salim Idris nor his senior aides engage in much vetting, decisions about which are made typically by local commanders.

And, IS now has control over some oil fields in Iraq and is selling it through Turkey, and reportedly, Kurdistan. And, before you make a joke about how we will soon be buying oil from IS, it’s no joke.

Early last month, a tanker carrying over a million barrels in crude oil from northern Iraq’s Kurdish region arrived at the Texas Gulf of Mexico. The oil had been refined in the Iraqi Kurdish region before being pumped through a new pipeline from the KRG area ending up at Ceyhan, Turkey, where it was then loaded onto the tanker for shipping to the US. Baghdad’s efforts to stop the oil sale on the basis of its having national jurisdiction were rebuffed by American courts.

In early September, the European Union’s ambassador to Iraq, Jana Hybášková, told the EU Foreign Affairs Committee that “several EU member states have bought oil from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist organisation that has been brutally conquering large portions of Iraq and Syria,” according to Israel National News. She however “refused to divulge the names of the countries despite being asked numerous times.”

[...]

In May, Reuters revealed that Israeli and US oil refineries had been regularly purchasing and importing KRG’s disputed oil.

Yes, ExxonMobil and Chevron have been drilling under KRG contracts.

No wonder Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s air strikes and arms supplies to the Kurds – notably not to Baghdad – effectively amount to “the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal – as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example – are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company.”

[...]

White House officials now estimate that the fight against the region’s ‘Islamic State’ will last years, and may outlive the Obama administration.

How very lucky for the US “defense” industry.

Of course, that assumes no nuclear holocaust, which may not be a well-founded assumption.

But this ‘long war’ vision goes back to nebulous ideas formally presented [in 1996] by late RAND Corp analyst Laurent Muraweic before the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board at the invitation of then chairman Richard Perle. That presentation described Iraq as a “tactical pivot” by which to transform the wider Middle East.

[...]

The 2002 Perle-RAND plan was active in the Bush administration’s strategic thinking on Iraq shortly before the 2003 war.

Yes, the Project for a New American Century. We haven’t forgotten.

The policy paper advocated a strategy that bears startling resemblance to the chaos unfolding in the wake of the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ – Israel would “shape its strategic environment” by first securing the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and ‘roll back’ Syria.” This axis would attempt to weaken the influence of Lebanon, Syria and Iran by “weaning” off their Shi’ite populations.

[...]

In 2008, the strategy re-surfaced – once again via RAND Corp – through a report funded by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command on how to prosecute the ‘long war.’

[...]

One way or another, some semblance of this plan is in motion.

Right on target.

More and more it looks like the "election" of Barack Obama was just part of the plan...who could they put in place to pacify the growing liberal resistance to Bush but who would in actuality speed the Project on its way?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.