VFP members peacefully gathered before the White House to perform democracy’s most sacred and patriotic duty –- holding the government accountable for its own conscious and integrity.
In my view, Christian Amanpour is an agent of a foreign power and should be fired by CNN, while also investigated by the FBI. She is actively putting forward the agenda and views of foreign powers, calling the US President a liar, and stating as fact what most of us with integrity know to be false: that the only way to defeat ISIS is to invade with US troops.
A Muslim exile from Iran, Amanpour is in my view totally suspect. I consider her compromised across multiple fronts, and believe she is like an agent I had once, who was taking money from everyone. She should be actively investigated by the FBI.
The BBC reports this week that a secession movement in Hawaii continues to simmer under the surface:
An upcoming election has highlighted the deep disagreement between native Hawaiians over what the future should look like. For some, it's formal recognition of their community and a changed relationship within the US. Others want to leave the US entirely – or more accurately, want the US to leave Hawai'i.
Point: After the announcement of the attacks of November 13, you wrote on twitter: “It was the [Western] Right and Left who sowed the war against political Islam and we are now reaping blowback from that war against political Islam. “Do not you feel like you are trying the victim rather than the culprit?
This summer, Jean-Jacques Nantel and I worked on a project of Research Institute on Quebec independence that we presented to Mr. Pierre Duchesne, Chief of the Leader of the Official Opposition, Mr. Pierre Karl Péladeau, at a meeting held on 9 October. You will find this project attached to this text.
The paradox of the current global crisis is that for the last five years, all relatively responsible and independent nations have made tremendous efforts to save the United States from the financial, economic, military, and political disaster that looms ahead. And this is all despite Washington’s equally systematic moves to destabilize the world order, rightly known as the Pax Americana. The contradiction between the concept of escaping the crisis, which has been adopted the US elite, and the alternative concept – proposed by Russia and backed by China, then by the BRICS nations and now a large part of the world – lay in the fact that the politicians in Washington were working from the premise that they are able to fully control the globalized world and guide its development in the direction they wish.
After Paris: An American Grand Strategy – Evidence-Based, Affordable, Balanced, Flexible — No Longer Ignoring Gladio, Wahhabism, or Traitors in Our Own Ranks
Robert David Steele
UPDATED 22 November 2015
The Paris attacks bring home far better than any words of mine just how desperately lacking we are in both intelligence and integrity. None of the government leaders – and none of the media personalities – dare utter the obvious: these attacks are either state-sponsored attacks, or a neo-Nazi false flag operation organized by the still-strong remnants of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Gladio program,[1] perhaps drawing on volunteers offered up by Turkey[2] or Saudi Arabia. [3] Although these attacks are also consistent with Israel's long-standing “Oded Yinon” Plan for fomenting a clash of civilization between Muslims and Christians[4] — it is never out of the question for any alleged ISIS attack to actually be an Israeli false-flag attack, especially if it furthers the Balkanization of the Middle East and forces France to join the war against Syria – on balance I favor the Gladio narrative – what was done to Italy is now being done to France. The role of the US in creating the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) cannot be ignored,[5] nor can Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public report identifying 40 states allowing individual to provide financial support to ISIS.[6]
The recent Democratic presidential “debate” was sophomoric. No one was willing to discuss a prior history of Western deceit and war crimes,[7] a recent history of political betrayal of the public trust and gross mis-judgment,[8] and our long tolerance of Saudi Arabian export of Wahhabist terrorism and Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and plain ignorance. The Republican presidential candidates are no better – they will hold the Middle Eastern powers blameless and call for more spending on a military that is already too hollow and too expensive. We will never hear the truth from either wing of the two-party tyranny.[9] We are our own worst enemy.
President Barack Obama is absolutely correct in refusing to put boots on the ground in Syria — it was boots on the ground in Iraq, and the dismantling of the Iraqi army, that enabled Saudi Arabia to create ISIS on top of our own creation of the precursor to ISIS in Libya.[10] Absent a strategic decision to confront and contain Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel, no amount of violence against ISIS within Syria will neutralize this asymmetric challenge.
As Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Representative Max Thornberry (R-TX) focus their respective Armed Services Committees on defense reform, I propose that we embrace the Paris attacks as our wake-up call – as a sign that we need a total make-over. We need a grand strategy rooted in intelligence with integrity, one that allows us to totally reinvent defense, diplomacy and development (D3). The Secretary of Defense is doing what he can with the D3 Innovation Summit, but without a grand strategy led by the White House and acceptable to all Congressional jurisdictions, we should expect no constructive changes before 2018.
I believe that the Vice President’s decision not to run for President opens the possibility for his rendering a historic service on behalf of the President and in the public interest: he should oversee a Grand Strategy review such as has not been done since President Dwight Eisenhower commissioned Project Solarium in the summer of 1953. Such a review could be hosted by the U.S. Army War College and The Eisenhower Institute. Such a review could include a balanced mix of Members of Congress, staff from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), Cabinet professionals, and a range of representatives from across the eight “tribes” of information in America: academia, civil society including labor and religion, commerce, government at all levels, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit.
The review should be conducted at four levels – strategic, operational, tactical, and technical, across four domestic domains and four national security domains as listed below and subject to modification by the Vice President:
The review should have a mandate to examine the entire budget (i.e. a zero-based bottom-up review) but also a mandate to emerge with recommendations that are job and revenue neutral across the political landscape. This is not as impossible as it may seem if we are allowed to trade off-off domestic-oriented jobs and domestically-based soft-power jobs (e.g. a new Inter-Agency Development Corps) against heavy-metal military jobs.
In 1989 I ghost-wrote an article for the Commandant of the Marine Corps calling for a greater focus on emerging non-state actors and followed that up with my own published work in 1990, finally presenting four threat classes and four needed forces after next at the Marine Corps University in 1992.[11] We were ignored. In 1998 the Army War College addressed the asymmetric threat and the need to restructure ourselves.[12] In 2008 the Army War College addressed the need to rebalance the instruments of national power.[13] For a quarter-century the loyal dissidents striving to serve the Republic have been ignored. We have wasted trillions of dollars and millions of lives and we are on the verge of becoming a Third World nation, broken at home and impotent abroad, because our political process is in grid-lock.
A grand strategy review led by the Vice President and committed to a balanced program of reform that is job and revenue neutral across the political landscape is our only hope for restoring our homeland prosperity and our foreign punch.
I have developed my own answers, limiting myself to the national security domain, in a published white paper, An American Grand Strategy: Evidence-Based, Affordable, Balanced, Flexible.[14] Below is the executive chart. I have no doubt a broader group will achieve better results, but I am quite certain that if we do not attempt this process, with buy-in from the White House and Congress, the current Administration will end with a whimper, and the military will be incapacitated for the next two to ten years.
Central to this grand redesign is an Open Source (Technologies) Agency such as I have proposed to the Vice President, copied to the Secretaries of State and Defense.[15] That agency would be an open source innovation engine for development, while also making possible necessary multinational “eight tribe” information sharing and sense-making on climate change, poverty, and other non-military threats that now require military-level attention and spending. I have proposed that the Vice President be the Chairman of the Board of Visitors for this new agency, and stay on in that position beyond his political term of office.
The above – and my longer white paper – are nothing more than a starting point for a broader discussion. The time/distance challenge must be joined by the weight/energy challenge, with the lethality challenge and the fiscal challenge always present. We can no longer afford to pretend to be strong. We can no longer afford to accept Congressional largesse that detracts from our ability to create real capabilities needed in the real world. We can no longer accept “budget share” as the foundation for defense allocations. We can no longer afford to short-change diplomacy and development. We can no longer afford to make decisions lacking in intelligence and integrity.
What we can do is get a grip on reality, have a conversation, and put our house in order. My commitment to job and revenue neutrality across the political landscape is a serious one. I seek one person in the White House and one person in Congress with whom to have this conversation.
Robert David Steele is CEO of Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 educating leaders in holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. A former spy, he has been co-creator of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and CEO of Open Source Solutions, Inc. He has personally trained over 7,500 mid-career officers from across 66+ countries. His personal website is http://robertdavidsteele.com.