“For more on the rockets now used by Hamas and Hezbollah, Robert Siegel speaks with Ted Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Postol also comments on Israel's pursuit of an upgraded defense system.
Break Them Up to Make Them Powerless and Thus Much Easier to Control: Mike Whitney
Here's the key take away from this excellent analysis well worth reading entirely:
“What is happening in Iraq today was anticipated in a 2007 Seymour Hersh article titled “The Redirection.” Author Tony Cartalucci gives a great summary of the piece in his own article. He says:
Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 10, 2014 – 10:03am
PBI Executive Summary: Significant fraud in first round (at least one seventh of the total votes); 3,000 election staff fired, Afghan government indicted for forbidding polls (the major fraud detection measure) and allowing repeat of massive fraud. New polls indicate Ghani wins easily on demographics alone. If normally standard measures do not counter fraud, election will be polarizing, civil war the outcome, and all investment to date made moot.
The Russians are actually making a move against the petrodollar. It appears that they are quite serious about their de-dollarization strategy. The largest natural gas producer on the planet, Gazprom, has signed agreements with some of their biggest customers to switch payments for natural gas from U.S. dollars to euros. And Gazprom would have never done this without the full approval of the Russian government, because the Russian government holds a majority stake in Gazprom. There hasn't been a word about this from the big mainstream news networks in the United States, but this is huge. When you are talking about Gazprom, you are talking about a company that is absolutely massive. It is one of the largest companies in the entire world and it makes up 8 percent of Russian GDP all by itself. It holds 18 percent of the natural gas reserves of the entire planet, and it is also a very large oil producer. So for Gazprom to make a move like this is extremely significant.
The self-referencing chattering class is up in arms about the $400 billion Russia-China gas deal, seeing it and the associated Russia-China alliance as a threat to the grand strategic ambitions of the United States to remain, in the words of President Obama at West Point, the world’s “indispensable”* power. Taking place against the immediate backdrop of the prevailing US narrative** describing the Ukraine Crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the gas deal is manna from heaven for the unreconstructed cold warriors and neocons in the press, the Pentagon, the defense industry, and the State Department who are fanning anti-Russian/anti-Putin hysteria with prognostications that the US, being on the cusp of a new Cold War, should not cut back its defense spending or its propensity to meddle in the affairs of others.
Viewed thru Russian and Chinese eyes, however, the gas deal may be part of a defensive grand strategy aimed at evolving pathways around Russia’s “NATO expansion problem” and China’s “pivot east” problem. The attached essay by Immanuel Wallerstein, a traditional ‘balance of power' scholar (in the best sense of the phrase), presents a fascinating speculation in this regard. Only time will tell if he is on to something, but his hypothesis is well worth thinking about.
I have reformatted Wallerstein’s essay to highlight his main points … if you find this distracting, the original is at this link.
Editor's Note: Well, it looks like Obama the Peacemaker image took another hit today. China, which has no overseas military bases and no carrier battle groups sailing the seas to defend its customers, considers itself a target and not a threat. Imagine that!
The US “divide and conquer” ploy with the Asia Pivot is turning into Obama's Asia Boomerang. The land of freedom and democracy has turned into the major stimulus on the planet for forming defensive military alliances.
It seems they don't want to buy one of our “Sanctions-R-US” franchises. The Founding Fathers are turning over in their graves.
Maybe it's all a trick. Maybe “they” want to divert China and Russia's capital investment away from peaceful business endeavors and whiz it out the window, following the example of the $2 trillion we blew on the military industrial complex over the last decade with no credible threats on the planet.
Good gosh, what group in America would want to do that when our bridges are falling down and the highway trust fund is almost empty… the list goes on and on. Take a look at the companies that the Bush (43) thugs are all involved with, before and after. They seem to have done well.
Don't be surprised to hear brain dead Congressional candidates screaming about how we must rearm American to protect ourselves from the yellow horde building unsinkable inner tubes to float millions of Chinese secret DNA commandos across the Pacific to invade America.
The think tanks are sharpening their pens and swords to scare Americans into putting what money they have left into their various coffers by going on their Asian Jihad. Americans need to form a security alliance of their own here at home to defend ourselves against “you know who”… Jim W. Dean ]
