I lifted five short paragraphs from today’s ‘Defense One’ newsletter and will propose a question; where is the rest of the story in this narrative that should be about the immense profits and skyrocketing stock values of the arms suppliers, as much as it is about the sales.
The U.S. Air Force is burning through its Hellfires, “depleting its stocks of munitions and prompting the service to scour depots around the world for more weapons and to find money to buy them,” USA Today reports.
“We’re in the business of killing terrorists and business is good,” U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said channeling a memorable movie line from the descendant of mountain man Jim Bridger. “We need to replenish our munitions stock,” she said. “Weapons take years to produce from the day the contract is assigned until they roll off the production line.”
More broadly, the U.S.-led effort to defeat ISIS is re-shaping American arms exports to its allies, Defense One Global Business Reporter Marcus Weisgerber writes. And the kinds of weapons going to those countries — Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others — have shifted dramatically.
“Earlier deals focused largely on longer-term investments, maintaining existing equipment, and building up weapons stocks,” he writes. “The more recent ones have been largely for tactical equipment: bombs, missiles, tanks, armored trucks and antitank weapons needed on the battlefield today, according to documents and U.S. government officials.”
Beyond arms sales, the State Department is looking more broadly at how it aligns assistance funding for foreign militaries through regional funding as opposed to a specific country.
Now, this last [immediate, preceding] line is most interesting. Restated, it could read: ‘How does the Department of State become more creative in assisting sales out of the pocket of American taxpayers?
The report found that 76 out of 108 top generals took such jobs from 2009 to 2011, and a few continued to advise the Department of Defense while on the payroll of contractors. The report cited Gen. James Cartwright, who was elected to a paid position on Raytheon’s board of directors while serving on the Defense Policy Board. Adm. Gary Roughead also served on the board while joining the board of Northrop Grumman, earning $115,000 per year.
The report didn’t find a causal link between the revolving door and specific contracts. However, the report cites statistics showing 2011 spending at the five largest defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman — at $100 billion, with at least nine retiring top generals and admirals taking positions at the firms
Now, this graphic is certainly underestimated as it only relates to ‘domestic consumption’ (expenditures on American military.)
Can’t have layoffs at Boeing, Ratheon, Lockheed-Marten, General Dynamics, DuPont, Northrop-Grumman and ‘friends’, now, can we? Meanwhile, terror has never been so good for business:
As things stand, this won’t stop until something breaks and breaks in a big way, because:
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” -Albert Einstein
And that is what we have; the mentality which began our problems with geopolitical engineering (‘Saddam must go’ regime change), giving us more of the same (‘Assad must go’ regime change.) If you’d not read it before, perhaps now’s a good time to have a look at the dynamic behind a circumstance where if the weapons sales associated with regime change or other destabilizing activities were stopped, the western democracies economic engines would collapse:
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” -Albert Einstein
In case you missed that one certain, salient fact about the current iteration of ‘regime change’ to remove the ‘murderous Assad’, definitive proof is emerging it was actually Turkey’s intelligence service (NATO’s Erdogan) gassed the more than 1,300 Syrians who died of Sarin poisoning outside of Damascus that Obama blamed on ‘Assad’s regime’ (a false flag attack previously attested to by Seymour Hersh.) It really seems like anything goes to make money, you think?
In this 1st segment of a two part, 1995 interview with former CIA officer Phillip Agee, if you begin about minute 46, he’ll state in no uncertain terms how it is radical Islam had spread; with the CIA intervention in 1980s Afghanistan. The CIA had provided training, weapons and supplies to ‘volunteer’ Muslim radicals from across North Africa and the larger Arab world. The ‘Afghanis’ (as they are known in their home countries as citizens who’d fought in Afghanistan) then returned home and began applying their considerable (CIA provided) expertise to organizing what became Al Qaida and other Islamic fundamentalist ‘terror’ groups.
Denial is when those responsible for creating a problem which has spun out of control, convince themselves they are the people necessary to solve the problem, resulting in a simple process of aggravation of the very problem they’d created. Here is a flashback in history pointing squarely to the CIA and a USA in denial as we plunge into aggravating, or perhaps better said, irrigating the weeds we’d planted, now taking over the garden our planet used to be:
We all should know the rest of the story; the Taliban won Afghanistan on account of the CIA anti-Soviet efforts, ‘Black Hawk Down’ was a result as the Islamists began to get on their feet in Somalia, and it just continued to grow and spread across the globe, as far as Indonesia in the east to the North African states in the west. Not only that, the USA & ‘friends’ opened the door wide for these groups in Iraq and Libya, has empowered them immensely with the efforts to overthrow Syria’s Assad, finally culminating in the Islamic State and American efforts to suppress what the had created only seeing events spin out of control. Behind all of this, Agee very properly points his finger at a very few powerful interests (multinationals) profiting from CIA activities directly involved with the spread of terror.
For those with time and inclination, the preceding video in its entirety is a quite informative background to today’s events and the second part (conclusion) is quite interesting as well:
Every now and again, one gets away from the CIA’s hit squads, Agee was one of those and he wasn’t the last one ..
Former FBI Coleen Rowley on Counterfeit Coin: “Wow, very well put and comprehensive. I tend to agree with your assessments“
Deep State series, part five of eight
COUNTERFEIT COIN
(The alliance of economics & counter-insurgency)
“If the Soviet Union were to disappear off the face of the map, the United States would quickly seek out new enemies to justify its own military-industrial complex” -CIA officer John Stockwell, 1980
What I had learned based on studying my special forces operations assignment is, counter-insurgency does not work. Insurgency is largely sustained by social inequities, and counter-insurgency, more often than not, props up the status quo. The result? Prolonged civil war with attending process of radicalization in the populace. So it should come as no surprise the U.S. military’s counter-insurgency [COIN] manual’s ‘don’t create more enemies than you eliminate’ is factually unobtainable. Consequently, when the manual states…
“The conclusion of any counterinsurgency effort is primarily dependent on the host nation and the people who reside in that nation. Ultimately, every society has to provide solutions to its own problems. As such, one of the Army and Marine Corps’ primary roles in counterinsurgency is to enable the host nation.”
…is a classic case of what George Orwell aptly called ‘doublethink.’ USA supported counter-insurgency is the farthest possible thing from allowing societies solve its own problems, particularly when a society’s grassroots insurgency has determined the incumbent powers cannot be otherwise influenced to social equity. The resultant counter-insurgency effect of radicalizing of social elements with the propping up of corrupt regimes, metastasizes and leads to events such as ‘global jihad’, example given.
In my day, our Special Operations Forces had not yet become pervasively criminalized but we did see the beginning of this process when Special Forces elements coordinated with the CIA and PHOENIX. Apart from this initial perversion, we saw ourselves more along the lines of an elite Peace Corps working the most hazardous territories of a Cold War world. Critical to our mission was pacification of populace in the areas we worked, and pacification is and was a straightforward word. We worked to bring peace to neighborhoods in conflicts. John Wayne stereotype aside, the military aspects were honest endeavor to provide self-defense training to remote villages with an objective the populace could not be easily exploited by irregular militia, but that was never going to be accomplished in any case, except that we understood and respected and even integrated to the local customs and culture. Our primary work was focused on action anthropology, providing health care and education in an indigenous social context.
That we had elite, lethal training, was primarily survival oriented, yes, there were the occasional ‘special operation’ to perhaps decapitate the leadership of a particular guerrilla group or undertake sabotage behind enemy lines in the course of our work, examples given, but this was the exception, not the rule.
Primarily our superior skills were required to operate small teams in areas where we might meet with considerably stronger numerical force. The highly honed and elite skills of the 1960s and 1970s Green Berets teams were more often than not, more than equal to a larger irregular force. If vastly out numbered, we knew how to inflict savage and costly casualties on our pursuers in the course of evasion. In our pacification work, Action Anthropology …
“committed to collaborative work, social justice, and a pragmatic view of social scientific knowledge … envisioned the possibility of simultaneously advancing such knowledge and helping the subjects of ethnographic fieldwork articulate and accomplish their own goals”
… was the norm of the day. We integrated to our human and social environment. We were armed educators, medical providers and social workers. We were not primarily meant to be offensive, to the contrary, restraint was a big piece of our discipline and training. Cowboy mentalities were not tolerated.
It is quite clear things have changed away from this ideal (and somewhat self-propagandized) focus, dramatically, for the military applications of special operations forces, in the approximately four decades since Vietnam. Firstly, one must consider a flipped circumstance; the Cold War world, or one might say the previous ‘bi-polar’ world, was a world where the rug had since been pulled out from numerous societies stability. Into the vacuum created by the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its many aligned satellite states political structures around the world, greed is stepping in as the western democracies ‘capitalize’ on this circumstance. Consequently, as opposed to a primary focus on the ‘liberation’ of oppressed peoples (recalling the Special Forces motto ‘De Opresso Liber’ or ‘liberate the oppressed’) from totalitarian rule, the actuality has become the reverse- openly propping up corrupt regimes whose relationship to us is one of inter-exploitation. Example would be mining Corporations and the Toronto Stock Exchange:
The corrupt regimes handing us (in the western democracies) raw resources on the cheap are no less dependent on us than we are dependent on corrupt regimes to keep the value of our stocks competitive. It is a trap, where if the western democracies allow for social equity to be realized, and must pay a fair market value for resources consequently, the value of stocks will drop in the market ‘adjustment’ to the new circumstance. In a situation of many cases of exploitation, concerning many nations and hundreds of stocks at the exchanges in Frankfurt, London, Toronto and Wall Street (among other exchanges), a drop in these values reflecting a fair market value wealth redistribution necessary to achieve social stability in the developing nations, would also see a dramatic drop in the stocks of the military-industrial sector which is inter-dependent with the corruption and associated expenditures on counter-insurgency necessary to prop up the corrupt regimes providing resources on the cheap.
As this process accelerates and widens, recently the example is Ukraine with Western democracies intelligence agencies laundering operations with professional mercenaries assisting the new regime in Kiev with COIN tactics employed in the ethnic Russian areas of the south and east, this raises a question; at what point has the corruption become so endemic to the cycle, that to break the cycle of corruption would collapse the economic engines of the western democracies, which have become dependent on arms sales feeding associated aggression required to prop up the (profitable to us) necessarily unstable, corrupt regimes?
Another critical consideration is, now that ‘liberty’ is become an increasingly obvious, patent lie (no longer a ‘half truth’ of previous era), what will be the end result of a power grab by corporate elites dedicated to maintaining the status quo?
“Mr. Snowden has brought home to us that, while we Americans do not yet live in a police state or tyranny, we are well along in building the infrastructure on which either could be instantly erected if our leaders decided to do so. No longer protected by the law, our freedoms now depend on the self-restraint of men and women in authority, many of them in uniform. History protests that if one builds a turnkey totalitarian state, those who hold the keys will eventually turn them” -former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman
With the Soviet Union no longer a justifiable geopolitical boogeyman to frighten us into vast arms and ‘security’ expenditures, ‘terror’ has replaced our past Cold War world’s enemies. But nearly everywhere you see a relationship to terror, you will also find a history of corrupt, authoritarian regimes propped up by the western democracies.
1) Authoritarian regime x resultant civil unrest x resultant hyper regime repression = insurgency
2) Insurgency x counter-insurgency = long term civil war
3) Long term civil war x resultant radicalized population metastasizes into terror and spreads
4) Western societies, bled by taxes and political lies propping up the status quo for what amounts to the sole benefit of western corporate oligarchs, become destabilized.
This returns us to the lie of COIN. The factual deceit in counter insurgency is, it must propagate, or be part and parcel of a larger web of lies (or self-deceits) in any case. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it cannot be admitted the wealth of the western democracies depends on exploitations, effective enslavement of entire societies, to prop up our so-called ‘liberties’ and associated economic freedoms which must be severely curtailed in the event of the actual fair, equitable and lawful redistribution of wealth required to cease the oppression of peoples around the world. People with eyes open call our system ’empire.’ People who live in illusion call our system ‘democracy’, however it is necessary to build a police state to maintain our so-called ‘democracy’ because of the raw hatred or ‘terror’ the system generates. And at the end of the day, the only meaningful vote is in the corporate boardroom and that does not bode well for our future because:
“In any democracy, ethics, self restraint, tolerance and honesty will always take a second seat to narcissism, avarice, bigotry & persecution, if only because people who play by the rules in any democracy are at a disadvantage to those who easily subvert the rules to their own advantage” –Ronald’s Maxim
Our poster child for this militarized society is General Petraeus. It is common political knowledge in Washington DC, that President Obama had appointed General Petraeus to head the CIA as a means of sidelining the General’s political ambitions over serious concerns Petraeus would hook up with the likes of Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman in a run against Obama for the presidency in 2012. Either way you have it, a commander-in-chief, whether a military veteran or not, is a sword that can cut two ways. Obama’s naiveté in military affairs, having never served, is the 2nd worst possible circumstance in an America where naked fundamentalist ambition has overtaken the leadership of American military command structures, outside an out and out fundamentalist president. That Obama would, as a matter of political expediency, appoint Petraeus to head up the CIA with its historically out of control Operational Division working in close concert with the radicalized and criminalized Christian extremist special operations forces of today’s American military…
…was simply asking for disaster. General Petraeus was key [together with Robert Gates] in convincing Obama to radically beef up the USA’s special operations forces, at a time it was already decided the overall troop numbers would have to be reduced.
General Petraeus has had a close association with special operations forces throughout his career. When Petraeus had been appointed to DCI [Director of Central Intelligence or CIA] Admiral William H McRaven, overall boss of the special operations forces which these days are routinely assigned to CIA operational missions, had requested his forces be allowed to operate outside the traditional Department of Defense channels. This was, no doubt, a sleight-of-hand grab for these elite forces away from normal supervision via established Department of Defense structures, and away from any significant oversight by Congress, by Admiral McRaven and his close professional associate, then CIA Director Petraeus.
The myth of General Petraeus in the public purview is a demonstrable tactical lie. In fact the ‘surge that turned around the war in Iraq’ for which he became famous, was at best a deceit along the lines of a shell game or bait and switch. General Petraeus beefed up the American force, momentarily disrupted the insurgency with an all out push that could not be sustained in any case, and then pulled the bulk of the American forces back to their bases and took the Americans, for the first time, largely out of public circulation before the insurgents in Iraq could regroup. It is this removing the American soldiers from the everyday Iraqi life which had dramatically dropped the violence in Iraq, nothing more. The same could have been accomplished in 2004, and honestly at that, were it not for literally crusading extremist neo-con commanders and secular officers afraid to speak out and challenge the status quo at the CIA and Pentagon, to call a spade a spade, a career ending move. It is truly Faustian, if you speak out your career is over and you have been weeded from the ranks which only become more Christian extremist with the favored or ‘blessed’ replacements, if you keep your mouth shut, it all evolves towards fascism regardless.
Moving over to Afghanistan, notoriously there have been many special operations forces crimes, inclusive of attacking weddings and other incidents where fleeing women and kids had been shot in their backs, cold blooded murders. We pay the Afghans compensation but the root problem of anti-Islam fundamentalism in the American military is never effectively addressed and the hate for the Americans only spreads. General Petraeus had a large hand in keeping these American special operations independent of NATO, effectively exercising impunity and generating a strengthened Taliban when the Americans are seen as a worse curse. This is today’s COIN in action.
General Petraeus had been the hand that guided today’s COIN manual creation, one of the most, perhaps THE most influential military publication in modern American military strategy. When testifying to Congress, where it is essential the success of a counter-insurgency strategy lie be maintained, the COIN manual stating…
“The general rule for the use of force for the counterinsurgents is ‘do not create more enemies than you eliminate with your action’”
…cannot be squared with General Petraeus ties to CIA dirty wars…
…and bringing in veteran professional killers to oversee secret torture centers and and running death squads in Iraq as established by the (above linked) Guardian/BBC Arabic exposé. But that is the real nature of the militarized beast that would rule our society.
“perhaps the severest criticism of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine derives from actual record of counterinsurgency programs. The continuing violence and instability in Iraq and Afghanistan would seem to indicate that existing counterinsurgency doctrine is either misconceived or that, for whatever reason, it cannot be effectively implemented”
Aftergood sets out two premise in his conclusion, ‘misconceived’ and ‘cannot be effectively implemented.’ Based on my own Special Forces operations assignment, and related studies in social psychology, I can make the case it is not one or the other, but is both. Counter-insurgency in any case, creates more enemies than it eliminates for the very fact of its inter-dependence with propping up western corporate capitalism’s profit line with necessary support for corrupt and authoritarian regimes. The idea of countering ‘terror’ with COIN is a lie.
Similar to Gladio, the American COIN doctrine is a virus that has escaped the lab. Essentially, COIN generates the terror it self-justifies for its existence, practically speaking, a military-industrial employment insurance package that means you will never be out of a job. A practical application of this is, COIN provides the very skills used to fight insurgency, to the insurgents themselves.
Shia death squads set up under Petreaus command in Iraq, followed on with General Petraeus responsible for training and arming the so-called Sunni ‘awakening councils‘, strengthened al-Qaida in Iraq & Levant (now operating in Syria and Iraq under the banner of ISIS since breaking with al-Qaida) empowering both parties to the civil war that followed the USA’s exit from Iraq:
“Crazy as it may seem, to an [American military trained but now unemployed] Iraqi who’s been left high and dry to fend for himself by his “liberators,” killing his fellow citizens to feed his family is a viable option. Al Qaeda knows this, and is taking full advantage of the situation”
Reiterating the fact General Petraeus ‘surge’ in Iraq appeared to work on paper for the reason the U.S withdrew to its bases after, and violence dropped because the Americans were out of public exposure for the first time since invasion (and why the Iranian aligned Iraqi Shia cleric al-Sadr declared his ceasefire, relating to the Americans) points to the insurgency having had national roots in a society where all sides wanted the Americans out, first and primarily. In the mix of this, the so-called ‘awakening councils’ put into practice by the Petraeus written COIN doctrine (no matter if it were initiated by subordinate generals on location in Iraq during Petraeus interim assignment at the Pentagon) is what eventually empowered today’s ISIS at the apex of Iraq’s widening civil war, a civil war initiated by Petraeus earlier (1st Iraq tour), when setting up the Shia death squads, he had trained al-Sadr’s militia (as documented in the the above linked Guardian/BBC Arabic exposé “Searching for Steele”.) COIN training, consequently, had been responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq from both Shia and Sunni elements. Both had sent numerous members to be trained in the two programs. The same COIN model has been taken advantage of by radicalized insurgents in Syria, where special operations training has been offered to the ‘opposition’ and now you see the fruits of this spilled back into Iraq (again.)
The Petraeus COIN doctrine presently, enthusiastically, embraced by Obama (not only by Bush and too many other neo-conservatives and neo-liberals to count) is the tool of choice with side effect responsible for what you see coming apart at the seams (blow-back) from Ukraine to Iraq to Africa, and ultimately is policy of military-industrial corporate boards and used for propping up stock values from Frankfurt to London to Toronto to Wall Street. Also, it would appear the several western democracies military and intelligence agencies have elements answering to corporate boards as opposed to executive or legislative oversight with strong evidence this has gone on for a very long time.
Destabilized nations are ripe for rip-off, and the recipe is, desperate for cash related to ‘security’, corrupt regimes propped up by the western democracies are inclined to sell their resources on the cheap and use the proceeds to buy military equipment necessary to beat back insurgency and stay in power, so the money they received from selling their resources to the western democracies are returned to the western democracies military-industrial coffers (noting it is not only the USA in this game.) This model has been initiated in Ukraine and if there were successful regime change accomplished in Syria, you would see it happen there, all a criminal enterprise heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer (not to mention soldiers deaths in the thousands) to the benefit of the stockholder bottom line (profit.)
If you wonder whether the western democracies corporate body might learn its lesson from having trained al-Qaida and other Salafist militia (preceding notes on the ‘awakening councils’), the answer is obviously NO. Previous to this, the CIA had employed American special operations forces for provision of advanced training to Mexican military officers who’d ultimately defected to the drug cartels and it was not long before they’d formed a cartel of their own, Los Zetas:
“Los Zetas’ training as a local version of the Green Berets constitutes their foremost asset. In cooperation with their U.S. counterparts, the Mexican military created the Gafes in mid-1990s. Foreign specialists, including Americans, French, and Israelis, instructed members of this elite unit in rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, intelligence collection, counter-surveillance techniques, prisoner rescues, sophisticated communications, and the art of intimidation”
And now, following on having trained al-Qaida in Iraq & Los Zetas in Mexico as special operations commandos who in turn can train their own future generations of recruits, the USA is repeating the same behavior in Africa:
“The secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali”
Epilogue
Restated in the simplest possible terms, the USA’s ‘vital national interests’ (and western democracies generally) is euphemism for corporate welfare, corporate welfare is all about the bottom line (profit) and profit historically has happened when we take raw material at gunpoint from disadvantaged nations. Modern corporate neo-colonialism creates social unrest and consequent fighting back which has evolved to ‘terror’, which in turn strengthens the market place in the ‘security’ or arms industry. The overthrow of Gaddafi (for reasons including he wasn’t buying high end weapons from France, following his ‘rehabilitation’) started brush fires (e.g. Mali) with his now unemployed mercenaries, ‘lost’ weapons flow and western trained guerrillas/insurgents moved on to instances of ‘jihad’ the western powers feel must be in turn stamped out. This strengthens the cycle of spreading ‘terror’ which again strengthens the outlay for security, propping up western economies in what has become a war of civilizations.
In the case of Djibouti and a one billion dollar USA drones base built there, there is yet a French Foreign Legion presence hanging on from colonial era with the region surrounding nearby Somalia in process of destabilizing since Charles Grassley’s efforts provided a vast arsenal of American weapons to the regime of Mohammed Said Barre nearly 30 years ago. Barre in turn employed those weapons to wreak a biblical terror on his own nation. This has impacted from Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond.
The result at home? ‘Terror’ propaganda leading to the loss of civil liberties and increasing consolidation of the corporate-power corrupt over the vast and spreading malignancy of the entire cycle. This fact can only lead to our national demise when you factor in the western democracies own ‘jihadis’, i.e. extreme ‘Christian Taliban’ personalities attracted to the ‘security’ business. Now days the Pentagon is fundamentalist Christian crusader central and has moved from ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ to ‘the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim’ as a matter of policy in a pursuit of world-wide “manifest destiny.” And so reality is created for us and reality is pointed to literal Armageddon, the consequence of living beyond our means.
The other side of this coin is, if the arms and related ‘security’ expenditures were halted, the resulting jobs loss would finish collapsing the western democracies economic engines, where the armaments industries are a critical component of the dynamic propping up our infrastructure.
What are the chances the western democratic leaders will surrender ego to reality and begin dismantling this hydra? Not good when reality is we should be moving towards construction of changed climate Hobbit burrows to survive.
What’s happening isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap
If you want stronger evidence for the criminal insanity of the western democracies counter-insurgency policies (a core component of what’s known as ‘humanitarian violence‘) you likely need psychiatric help-
*
The USA’s criminal military-industrial complex policies are certainly consistent; judging by the 1935 speech of General Smedley Butler (‘war is a racket’ that has gone on for a very long time.)
A former Special Forces Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence, Ronald Thomas West is a retired paralegal/investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption and human rights. Ronald is published in International Law as a layman (The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole) and has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background is primarily social psychology.
It’s pretty simple actually. The USA’s ‘vital national interests’ (and western democracies generally) is euphemism for corporate welfare, corporate welfare is all about the bottom line (profit) and profit historically has happened when we take raw material at gunpoint from disadvantaged nations. Modern corporate neo-colonialism creates social unrest and consequent fighting back which has evolved to ‘terror’, which in turn strengthens the market place in the ‘security’ or arms industry. The overthrow of Gaddafi (for reasons including he wasn’t buying high end weapons from France, following his ‘rehabilitation’) started brush fires (e.g. Mali) with his now unemployed mercenaries, ‘lost’ weapons flow and western trained guerillas/insurgents moved on to instances of ‘jihad’ the western powers feel must be in turn stamped out. This strengthens the cycle of spreading ‘terror’ which again strengthens the outlay for security, propping up western economies in what has become a war of civilizations.
In the case of Djibouti and a new one billion dollar drones base being built there, there is yet a French Foreign Legion presence hanging on from colonial era with the region surrounding nearby Somalia in process of destabilizing since Charles Grassley’s efforts provided a vast arsenal of American weapons to the regime of Mohammed Said Barre nearly 30 years ago. Barre in turn employed those weapons to wreak a biblical terror on his own nation. This has impacted from Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond.
When nations are in cycles of violence, their raw materials can be had on the cheap by corporations because of instability and attending corruption, increasing stock values from Frankfurt to London to Toronto to Wall Street.
The result at home? ‘Terror’ propaganda leading to the loss of civil liberties and increasing consolidation of the corporate-power corrupt over the vast and spreading malignancy of the entire cycle. This fact can only lead to our national demise when you factor in the western democracies own ‘jihadis’, i.e. extreme ‘Christian Taliban’ personalities attracted to the ‘security’ business. Now days the Pentagon is fundamentalist Christian crusader central and has moved from ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ to ‘the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim’ as a matter of policy in a pursuit of world-wide “manifest destiny.” And so reality is created for us and reality is pointed to literal Armageddon, the consequence of living beyond our means.
The other side of this coin is, if the arms and related ‘security’ expenditures were halted, the resulting jobs loss would finish collapsing the western democracies economic engines, where the armaments industries are a critical component of the dynamic propping up our infrastructure.
What are the chances the western democratic leaders will surrender ego to reality and begin dismantling this hydra? Not good when reality is we should be moving towards construction of changed climate Hobbit burrows to survive.
What’s happening isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap-
New Sibel Edmonds interview on Boston bombing, CIA, media manipulation and ongoing Operation Gladio (II) .. a USA continuation of a centuries old aggression of the British empire historically known as ‘The Great Game.’ In this interview Sibel Edmonds demonstrates a mastery of the subject and lays out the facts behind the political lies
Ronald Thomas West 