Terrorism Raids in Belgium Yield 16 Arrests

Andrew Higgins and Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura
NY Times: November 22, 2015

After a dramatic security sweep late Sunday marked by the deployment of soldiers in the historic center of the Belgian capital, the authorities here announced early Monday that 16 people had been arrested in a joint police and military operation to try to head off what the prime minister earlier described as a “serious and imminent” threat of a Paris-style terrorist assault.

Belgian security forces conducted 19 raids in the Brussels region on Sunday and three in the southern town of Charleroi, Eric Van der Sijpt, a magistrate and spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office, said at a late-night news conference. Backed by heavily armed soldiers, the police also sealed off at least two areas of central Brussels, including streets around the city’s medieval central square, the Grand Place, a major tourist attraction.

But the main target of the clampdown, Salah Abdeslam, suspected to be one of the gunmen in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, was not among those arrested, Mr. Van der Sijpt said. The raids also uncovered no weapons or explosives, he added.

(read the full article at NY Times)

Zero Hedge: November 21, 2015

Last month, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard went on CNN and laid bare Washington’s Syria strategy. 

In a remarkably candid interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gabbard calls Washington’s effort to oust Assad “counterproductive” and “illegal” before taking it a step further and accusing the CIA of arming the very same terrorists who The White House insists are “sworn enemies.” 

In short, Gabbard all but tells the American public that the government is lying to them and may end up inadvertently starting “World War III.”

For those who missed it, here’s the clip:

That was before Paris. 

Well, in the wake of the attacks, Gabbard has apparently had just about enough of Washington vacillating in the fight against terror just so the US can ensure that ISIS continues to destabilize Assad and now, with bi-partisan support, the brazen Hawaii Democrat has introduced legislation to end the “illegal war” to overthrow Assad. 

Gabbard, who fought in Iraq – twice – has partnered with Republican Adam Scott on the bill. Here’s AP: 

In an unusual alliance, a House Democrat and Republican have teamed up to urge the Obama administration to stop trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad and focus all its efforts on destroying Islamic State militants.

 

Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Austin Scott, a Republican, introduced legislation on Friday to end what they called an “illegal war” to overthrow Assad, the leader of Syria accused of killing tens of thousands of Syrian citizens in a more than four-year-old civil war entangled in a battle against IS extremists, also known as ISIS.

 

“The U.S. is waging two wars in Syria,” Gabbard said. “The first is the war against ISIS and other Islamic extremists, which Congress authorized after the terrorist attack on 9/11. The second war is the illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad.”

 

Scott said, “Working to remove Assad at this stage is counter-productive to what I believe our primary mission should be.”

 

Since 2013, the CIA has trained an estimated 10,000 fighters, although the number still fighting with so-called moderate forces is unclear. CIA-backed rebels in Syria, who had begun to put serious pressure on Assad’s forces, are now under Russian bombardment with little prospect of rescue by their American patrons, U.S. officials say.

 

For years, the CIA effort had foundered — so much so that over the summer, some in Congress proposed cutting its budget. Some CIA-supported rebels had been captured; others had defected to extremist groups.

 

Gabbard complained that Congress has never authorized the CIA effort, though covert programs do not require congressional approval, and the program has been briefed to the intelligence committees as required by law, according to congressional aides who are not authorized to be quoted discussing the matter.

 

Gabbard contends the effort to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it is helping IS topple the Syrian leader and take control of all of Syria. If IS were able to seize the Syrian military’s weaponry, infrastructure and hardware, the group would become even more dangerous than it is now and exacerbate the refugee crisis.

And make no mistake, Tulsi’s understanding of Washington’s absurd Mid-East policy goes far beyond Syria. That is, Gabbard fully grasps the big picture as well. Here’s what she has to say about the idea that the US should everywhere and always attempt to overthrow regimes when human rights groups claim there’s evidence of oppression:

“People said the very same thing about Saddam (Hussein), the very same thing about (Moammar) Gadhafi, the results of those two failed efforts of regime change and the following nation-building have been absolute, not only have they been failures, but they’ve actually worked to strengthen our enemy.”

(read the full article at Zero Hedge)

RELATED: Paris and What Should Be Done

Ron Paul : November 15, 2015

The horrific attacks in Paris on Friday have, predictably, led to much over-reaction and demands that we do more of the exact things that radicalize people and make them want to attack us. The French military wasted no time bombing Syria in retaliation for the attacks, though it is not known where exactly the attackers were from. Thousands of ISIS fighters in Syria are not Syrian, but came to Syria to overthrow the Assad government from a number of foreign countries — including from France and the US.

Ironically, the overthrow of Assad has also been the goal of both the US and France since at least 2011.

Because the US and its allies are essentially on the same side as ISIS and other groups – seeking the overthrow of Assad – many of the weapons they have sent to the more “moderate” factions also seeking Assad’s ouster have ended up in the hands of radicals. Moderate groups have joined more radical factions over and over, taking their US-provided training and weapons with them. Other moderate groups have been captured or killed, their US-provided weapons also going to the radicals. Thus the more radical factions have become better equipped and better trained, while occasionally being attacked by US or allied planes.

Does anyone not believe this is a recipe for the kind of disaster we have now seen in Paris? The French in particular have been very active in arming even the more radical groups in Syria, as they push for more political influence in the region. Why do they still refuse to believe in the concept of blowback? Is it because the explanation that, “they hate us because we are free,” makes it easier to escalate abroad and crack down at home?

It may not be popular to say this as emotions run high and calls ring out for more bombing in the Middle East, but there is another way to address the problem. There is an alternative to using more military intervention to address a problem that was caused by military intervention in the first place.

That solution is to reject the militarists and isolationists. It is to finally reject the policy of using “regime change” to further perceived US and western foreign policy goals, whether in Iraq, Libya, Syria, or elsewhere. It is to reject the foolish idea that we can ship hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to “moderates” in the Middle East and expect none of them to fall into the hands of radicals.

More bombs will not solve the problems in the Middle East. But a more promising approach to the Middle East is currently under fire from the isolationists in Washington. The nuclear deal with Iran ends UN sanctions and opens that country to international trade. Just last week the presidents of France and Iran met to discuss a number of trade deals. Other countries have followed. Trade and respect for national sovereignty trumps violence, but Washington still doesn’t seem to get it. Most presidential candidates compete to thump the table loudest against any deal with Iran. They will use this attack to propagandize against approving trade with Iran even though Iran has condemned the attack and is also in the crosshairs of ISIS.

Here is the alternative: Focus on trade and friendly relations, stop shipping weapons, abandon “regime change” and other manipulations, respect national sovereignty, and maintain a strong defense at home including protecting the borders from those who may seek to do us harm.

We should abandon the failed policies of the past, before it’s too late.

Ron Paul Institute

AlternativeFreePress.com

With ISIS claiming responsibility for the November 13th attacks in Paris, it’s important to reflect on where ISIS came from. Here is a recap of ISIS related articles from over the past couple years:

Secret Pentagon Report says US created ISIS by deliberately supporting Islamist extremist groups:

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”

According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of this strategy, and warned that it could destabilize Iraq. Despite anticipating that Western, Gulf state and Turkish support for the “Syrian opposition” — which included al-Qaeda in Iraq — could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the document provides no indication of any decision to reverse the policy of support to the Syrian rebels. On the contrary, the emergence of an al-Qaeda affiliated “Salafist Principality” as a result is described as a strategic opportunity to isolate Assad.

Ben Swann explores the origin of ISIS that has already been long forgotten by American media. Swann takes on the central issue of whether or not ISIS was created by “inaction” by the United States government or by “direct” action.

Not only has the U.S. created an unholy alliance with states who sponsor terrorism, it has strengthened ISIS by training and arming radical Sunni insurgents who join ISIS, that share similar goals of creating an Islamic caliphate.Blowback in Iraq: How U.S. Proxy Wars Led to the Rise of ISIS

Noam Chomsky: Defeating ISIS Starts with the US Admitting Its Role in Creating This Fundamentalist Monster:

These things have terrible consequences. Actually, there’s an interesting interview with Graham Fuller. He’s one of the leading Middle East analysts, long background in CIA, U.S. intelligence. In the interview, he says something like, “The U.S. created ISIS.” He hastens to add that he’s not joining with the conspiracy theories that are floating around the Middle East about how the U.S. is supporting ISIS. Of course, it’s not. But what he says is, the U.S. created ISIS in the sense that we established the background from which ISIS developed as a terrible offshoot. And we can’t overlook that.

Bush/Cheney Created Conditions That Led Directly to ISIL

It was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL). […]

But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.

Bush’s “de-Baathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.[…]

The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.

Terrorists are seemingly growing in numbers because western forces are invading countries and killing civilians including children

During a previous attack in Paris, slain gunman Amedy Coulibaly and hostages at the Paris kosher store was unwittingly recorded by French radio station RTL. The media released what it says was Coulibaly speaking on the West’s “attack on Muslims.”

“Leave the Muslims alone, we will leave you alone,” the man believed to be the 32-year-old gunman can be heard as saying in fluent French on an audio clip released by RTL.“Each time, they try to make you believe that the Muslims are terrorists. But I was born in France. If they hadn’t attacked elsewhere, I would not be here,”
Terrorists Don’t Hate Our Freedom; Attacks Are Response To Western Intervention

There is no one in the Middle East who looks to the Iraqi state and sees a better life for them and their children.

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

Nabil Na’eem, the founder of the Islamic Democratic Jihad Party and former top al-Qaeda commander, told the Beirut-based pan-Arab TV station al-Maydeen all current al-Qaeda affiliates, including ISIS, work for the CIA.Former al-Qaeda Commander: ISIS Works for the CIA

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror. Iraq: ISIS “Made in USA”; “Geopolitical Arsonists” Seek to Burn Region

Patrick Buchanan
LewRockwell.com : October 2, 2015

So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East (that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us).

Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.

A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us — to Tehran.

The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.

How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.

Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.

Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.

On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?

What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?

“After the end of the Cold War, a single center of domination emerged in the world, and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think they were strong and exceptional, they knew better.”

Then, adopting policies “based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity,” this “single center of domination,” the United States, began to export “so-called democratic” revolutions.

How did it all turn out? Says Putin:

“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. … Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.

 

Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.”

Is Putin wrong in his depiction of what happened to the Middle East after we plunged in? Or does his summary of what American interventions have wrought echo the warnings made against them for years by American dissenters?

Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.”

The Soviet Union tried that way, said Putin, and failed. Now the Americans are trying the same thing, and they will reach the same end.

Unlike most U.N. speeches, Putin’s merits study. For he not only identifies the U.S. mindset that helped to produce the new world disorder, he identifies a primary cause of the emerging second Cold War.

To Putin, the West’s exploitation of its Cold War victory to move NATO onto Russia’s doorstep caused the visceral Russian recoil. The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine that overthrew the elected pro-Russian government led straight to the violent reaction in the pro-Russian Donbas.

What Putin seems to be saying to us is this:

If America’s elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict. And, one day, this will inevitably result in war, as more and more nations resist America’s moral imperialism.

Nations have a right to be themselves, Putin is saying.

They have the right to reflect in their institutions their own histories, beliefs, values and traditions, even if that results in what Americans regard as illiberal democracies or authoritarian capitalism or even Muslim theocracies.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans had no problem with this, when Americans accepted a diversity of regimes abroad. Indeed, a belief in nonintervention abroad was once the very cornerstone of American foreign policy.

(read full article at Lew Rockwell)

Mark Jeftovic

Thomas Pynchon once wrote: ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.’ Words to live by for the the major political parties in Canadian Federal politics.

The refugee crisis in Syria, Iraq and spilling into Europe has become an election issue, with each of the major parties pulling magic numbers out of their ears around “how many” is the “right number” of refugees to admit to Canada, which once again underscores the Libertarian criticism that the both major political parties espouse largely uniform campaign platforms in which the issues are for the most part homogenous while the really important questions are rendered conveniently out-of-scope (and even the NDP’s, sniffing a faint shot at power, are pivoting off their principles in order to get it)

If we peer behind the veil of mainstream media oversimplification we find that the humanitarian crisis we are faced with today are the straight line consequences of a decades-old policy on the part of the West (defined as the US, the UK, Israel and including complicit Canada) to subvert and destabilize the very nations that are submerged in civil war and strife.

A String of Coup D’Etats

Syria and Iran were both once full-on democracies who’s duly elected governments committed the literal, mortal sins of offending Western corporate powers. Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh wanted to audit the books of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was instead overthrown and replaced with the Shah. We’re all aware how that turned out why Iran is so fond of the West to this day.

Syria’s plight is not as well known, our (meaning the West’s) first political coup d’etat against their elected government was in 1949, when the CIA over throws Shure al-Quwatly and replaces him with the first of many military strongmen in Syria, Colonel Husni al-Zaim. “America’s Boy” as he was dubbed, wasn’t so strong after all and was deposed and executed after 2 months in power. No fewer than 5 more military coup’s were sponsored over the years in Syria, so many that there is even a Wikipedia page “List of Military Coups in Syria” (1954, 1961, 1963, 1966 and 1970).

When not actively overthrowing the elected governments of Syria and Iran, the west has been for decades, offering up policies designed to justify them and other initiatives that will destabilize and subvert the autonomy of “the target nations”.

A Multi-Decades Policy of Destabilization and Subversion

Via various think tanks and policy institutes, white papers are authored by the same recurring personages to shape the direction of mid-east policy. They have names which overlap heavily with the US Neo-conservative movement which ended up having a much stronger effect on the direction of Canadian politics than many would care to admit.

The rationales for these behaviours is usually the same: “when the citizens of these countries see where their improperly aligned leaders have gotten them, they will embrace democracy” (considering at least two of the targets in question started out as democracies in the first place, it brings to mind the parable of the Harvard MBA and the fisherman).

As far back as 1982, Oded Yinon publishes “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” in Hebrew in the journal Kivunium.

“The paper, published in Hebrew, rejects the idea that Israel should carry through with the Camp David accords and seek peace. Instead, Yinon suggests that the Arab States should be destroyed from within by exploiting their internal religious and ethnic tensions: “Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon.”

A decade later, Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis describes the process of “Lebanonization” in his Foreign Affairs article “Rethinking the Middle East” when “[the] state then disintegrates into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.”

The thrust of the article argues that “the West and Islam have been engaged in a titanic ‘clash of civilizations’ and that the US should take a hard line against all Arab countries.”

Then in 1996 Lewis’ protege, Richard Perle, is lead author on a position paper for Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” that advocates abandoning the previous peace process in favour of destabilizing Syria and Iraq and exploiting mid-east tensions.

After 9/11 Richard Perle becomes a chief architect of “The global war on terror” and with it came things like “slam dunk” WMDs in Iraq (which were never found) and the Saddam Hussein / bin Laden axis (which did not exist). Today, Iraq is in shambles and not a single WMD was ever found there. Anybody who read former UN weapon’s inspector Scott Ritter’s “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know“, published more than a year ahead of the Iraq invasion, already knew that there were no WMD there. Everybody now has the hindsight to see that the entire Iraq war was premised on lies but few talk about it in polite company.

Canada Gets With the Program…

One could argue that “peace keeping”, in the context we are all supposed to understand it (creating a multi-national coalition in a hot spot to prevent a global thermonculear war from erupting) was a Canadian invention with Lester Pearson’s solution to the Suez Crisis which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

In those days, both major parties would be headed by leaders with strong convictions about what was “the right thing to do” for the world at large and for Canada as a nation. Whether it was Pearson’s aforementioned statesmanship during the Suez Crisis or Deifenbaker’s stance, very much ahead of its time, on the issue of South African Apartheid. As a nation we seemed to have some kind of functional moral compass which had important divergences from both our UK and US “allies”.

Today, not so much.

While Chretien did manage to keep Canada out of the disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq, he did join in the occupation of Afghanistan, which seemed a turnkey, off-the-shelf intervention just waiting for an excuse to happen. Ostensible reasons for the invasion aside (i.e. like that it was actually legal), the one big outcome of the invasion (and our participation in it) has been the steady increase in heroin output of that country ever since.

On a parallel track to neo-Con flavoured designs on a “new American Century” south of the border, the co-opting of Canadian diplomacy began in earnest during the 90’s with the country’s largest corporate interests positioning for a “Grand Bargain” with the US, it was once again 9/11 that provided the catalyst for putting these policy tracks into overdrive.

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) sent a delegation to Washington in April 2003 where they received their marching orders from US overseers, namely DHS Secretary Spencer Abraham and (once again) Richard Perle (congenially known within the beltway by now as “The Prince of Darkness”). The latter delivered a particularly moving lecture* to the corporate elite in attendance that Canada had to unambiguously “get with the program” and step up as an unwavering ally of US foreign policy. This included dramatically increasing military and security commitments. This was framed as the “ante” for having the next round of Free Trade talks with the USA. (*detailed in Ricardo Grinspun and Shamsin Yamsie’s “Who’s Canada? Continental Integration, Fortress North America, and the Corporate Agenda“)

The meeting is considered a defining moment in Canada/US relations. The Paul Martin Liberals quietly adopted the CCCE agenda and which was then embraced more aggressively by Team Harper.

Again we have the incumbent parties following the same path, largely dictated by an external power along which we find ourselves today: party to the latest military engagement in Syria, actively complicit in ubiquitous surveillance both at home and abroad and none of it open to discussion, debate or alternatives among the citizens of Canada.

ISIS did not arrive on a comet from deep space

To borrow a phrase coined by David Stockman in his book about the (mal)response to the 2008 Gobal Financial Crisis, “ISIS did not arrive on a comet from deep space”.

Rather, they are the consequences of deliberately executed campaigns of intervention and subversion designed to produce exactly the kind of humanitarian crisis occurring now. Granted, it gets messy when the fallout from grand stratagems fail to confine themselves to the target countries of Syria, Iraq and Iran, but these “deep-policy” ideologues have a track record for underestimating “blowback”.

The rise of ISIS then, is hardly surprising. Nor is their meteoric ascent within their sphere of operations. For decades, we’ve been usurping any democratically elected governments in the target countries, instead propping up strongmen and authoritarian regimes, inducing various factions into war with each other (supplying both sides), dropping and droning bombs from the sky and occasionally stepping in with boots-on-the-ground military invasions.

Now we’re shocked when another reactionary, fundamentalist, West-hating movement steps into the vacuum?

Former NATO Secretary Generals Javier Solana and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer lamented that any further intervention and escalation in Syria would have precisely the opposite effects of their ostensible intentions:

“Rather than secure humanitarian space and empower a political transition,Western military engagement in Syria is likely to provoke further escalation on all sides, deepening the civil war and strengthening the forces of extremism, sectarianism and criminality gaining strength across the country. The idea that the West can empower and remotely control moderate forces is optimistic at best. Escalation begets escalation and mission creep is a predictable outcome if the West sets out on a military path [emphasis added].”

Today in Syria, the situation tragically comic as the West supplies it’s “anti-Assad rebels” with weapons, who often end up switching allegiances to ISIS.

The truth is that what Solana & Scheffer were cautioning against has been going on since at least 1949 (the date of the first of six Western engineered military coup d’etats in Syria) and what we have today is the result of it.

Conclusion: Sooner or later….

“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences…” – Robert Louis Stephenson

So if you really want to make “refugees” the election issue “du jour”, one can waste a lot of time watching the mainstream incumbent parties bicker over the “right” number of refugees to allow into Canada or how much taxpayer money to throw at aid, or even whether more Canadian “boots on the ground” should be headed over there on various “peace keeping” escapades.

OR,

You could ask the really hard hitting questions like
•Why is there a refugee crisis in the first place?
•Would there be one if Western foreign policy wasn’t one of destabilization and subversion going back for decades?
•Could what we call “terrorism” possibly be an asymmetric response to our pre-emptive (and often brutal, often bloody, often murderous) subversion of foreign governments whom we deem unfavourable to our interests?

And, given the newer data points such as 1) the arrival of Russia’s military in Syria and 2) Canada’s deployment of military trainers to the Ukraine, another good question could be
•Would you mind very much if we got into a shooting war with Russia?

Finally:
•Given Canada’s complicity in this mess, both under Conservatives and Liberal regimes, should either of those parties be taken seriously in their earnest looking hand wringing?

The major parties are happy to serve up easily digestible over-simplified “solutions” to these election issues.

It takes a Libertarian to ask the truly relevant, albeit uncomfortable questions like “what was our part in it?” and to face the unpleasant facts that our society, our country isn’t an ubermoral saviour to these “Arab savages” rending their own societies apart, but that we are were actually complicit in implementing and profiting from policies and actions that helped cause it and we are collectively happier to be ignorant of that.

Now you can wonder how many of these refugees we should take in.

* * *

Mark Jeftovic is the Libertarian Party candidate for Parkdale / High-Park in the upcoming federal election.

markjeftovic.ca

Dan Sanchez
AntiMedia : September 8, 2015

A baby boy turned to flotsam. Washed up on the shore, face down in the mud. His family, refugees from Syria’s civil war, had tried to reach Greece, but their over-crowded raft overturned in the Mediterranean Sea and he drowned along with his brother and mother. The viral image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless little body on a Turkish beach has shaken the conscience of the West and wrenched America’s attention to the refugee crisis now rocking Europe.

Newsflash to the oblivious citizenry of the power-projecting “free world”: this is what war looks like. This times ten million. That which is mere “foreign policy” to you and your government is desperation and death to those on the receiving end of it.

Children just as innocent and precious as Aylan are being driven into the sea in Libya, incinerated by drone in Pakistan, or starved to death in Yemen all the time, and it is all on your dime. And every single instance creates a sight just as achingly forlorn and horrifically tragic as the one above, even if it isn’t photographed and seen by millions.

Aylan drowned in the arms of his father, who had been desperately trying to keep his head above water. The prelude to the disaster probably looked something like this photo of another Syrian refugee family.

It actually shows an arrival and not a departure. Still, especially for anyone with young children, the picture is a punch in the gut. It only takes a shred of empathy to instantly imagine how the father must feel. Overwhelmed and near the end of his rope. His daughter’s arms wrapped around his neck. His son’s face buried in his chest. Both looking to him for protection and provision he ultimately might not be able to give. It is no wonder this visceral photograph has also gone viral.

Another newsflash: this is what war displacement looks like, both in the sea and on dry land. What you see in his face is the anguish felt right this very moment by the many millions of mothers and fathers driven from their homes and sources of livelihood throughout the countries shattered by weapons from the West: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Ukraine, and more.

It is a shame that the curiosity, empathy, and imagination of most are so stunted that they require such vivid imagery as this showing up in their news feeds to feel concern for the havoc wreaked by their governments’ policies.

And then they are stirred, not enough to actually learn a damn thing about it, but only enough to be manipulated into demanding— or at least countenancing — more of the very same kind of intervention that caused the tragedies in the first place.

Warmongers in government and the media are perversely but predictably trying to conscript Aylan’s corpse into their march to escalation. They are contending that Aylan died because the West has not intervened against Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, and that it must do so now to spare other children the same fate.

Um, no, Aylan’s family were Kurdish refugees from Kobani who had to flee that city when it was besieged, not by Assad, but by Assad’s enemy: ISIS.

And ISIS is running rampant in that part of Syria only because the US-led West and its regional allies have given them cover by supporting and arming the jihadist-dominated uprising against Assad.

The West has been intervening in Syria heavily since at least 2012. Indeed, it is Western intervention that has exacerbated and prolonged the conflict, which has now claimed a quarter of a million lives.

But because much of the intervention has been covert and by proxy, it has received little media coverage and public attention. So the “blowback” that results from it, including Aylan’s death, can be conveniently blamed on alleged “non-intervention” and used to justify more overt and direct intervention.

In this way, governments have long exploited public obliviousness and gullibility to get their wars.

Moreover, if the hawks were to get their wish of seeing Assad finally overthrown and his forces dismantled, there would then be zero local resistance to ISIS, Syrian Al Qaeda, and the other jihadist groups completely overrunning Syria.

As bad as the refugee crisis is now, just imagine what it will be like as all of Syria’s many religious minorities desperately flee from these hyper-violent and hyper-sectarian Sunnis, armed to the teeth with Western weapons.

Far from preventing such tragedies as Aylan’s drowning, intervening further would only produce many more

(read the full article at The Anti-Media)

Justin Raimondo
AntiWar.com : July 31, 2015

We’re in the summer doldrums of the news cycle, a perfect time for our government and the media – or do I repeat myself? – to drop certain inconvenient stories down the Memory Hole. My job, of course, is to retrieve them….

Remember Ukraine? I seem to recall blaring headlines about a supposedly “imminent” and “massive” Russian invasion of that country: the Anglo-Saxon media was ablaze with a veritable countdown to D-Day and we were treated to ominous sightings of Russian troops and tanks gathering at the border, allegedly just awaiting the order from Putin to take Kiev. And it turns out there has been an invasion, of sorts – although it isn’t a Russian one. It’s the Kiev regime’s own foot-soldiers returning from the front and turning on their masters.

The war is going badly for the government of oligarch Petro Poroshenko. The east Ukrainians, who rose in revolt after the US-sponsored coup threw out democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, show no signs of giving up: they’ve repulsed the “anti-terrorist” campaign launched by Kiev, withstanding relentless bombardment of their cities and enduring many thousands of casualties, not to mention widespread destruction. Indeed, the brutal protracted war waged by Kiev against its own “citizens” has arguably steeled the rebels’ resolve and made any thought of reconciliation unthinkable.

As is usual with violent fanatics, the war aims of the Kiev coup leaders – to bring the eastern provinces back into the fold – have been rendered impossible by their methods and conduct. The de facto blockade imposed on the east has bound the separatists all the more tightly to Russia, and so economics as well as searing hatred of a government the easterners regard as “fascist” has sealed the country’s fate.

Unable to crack the rebels’ resolve, the “revolutionaries” who once gathered in the Maidan have begun to turn on each other. Poroshenko, fearful of the rising power of the far-right militias who make up the backbone of his makeshift army, has ordered their dissolution – and the rightists are resisting.

A standoff between the Right Sector militia and Ukrainian police the other day culminated in a pitched battle as the rightists attacked police positions in Mukachevo, in western Ukraine, and took a six-year-old boy hostage. A dispute over control of the local cigarette smuggling operation had ended with two Right Sector thugs killed and seven others – it’s not clear which side they belonged to – injured. The rightists used grenade launchers to pulverize two police cars. Oh well, no worries, Washington will send replacements…. for both the cars and the launchers.

The big problem for the Kiev regime is that Right Sector and allied far-rightist militias are the core of their military operation against the east. Right Sector provided the muscle of the Maiden revolution, standing in the front lines against the widely feared Berkut special forces loyal to Yanukovych. If these thugs must be reined in, then the success of the “anti-terrorist” campaign is doubtful: yet Kiev is increasingly unwilling to pay the high price of appeasing their increasingly troublesome Praetorians.

The aftermath of the Mukachevo stand off was a clear victory for the rightists, who saw their leader, Dmytro Yarosh, a member of parliament, negotiating with the Interior Ministry – and Right Sector militia blocking the road from Kiev to the scene of the fighting. The result was an announcement from the Interior Ministry that the police chief of Mukachevo has been suspended, pending an “investigation” of the charges of aiding and abetting smuggling.

In short, Right Sector emerged victorious. Following up their victory, the group declared that a national referendum will be held – without gathering the required signatures, and under their sponsorship – on multiple questions, essentially demanding that their entire program for the nation be adopted. They call for a formal declaration of war against Russia, a complete blockade of the eastern provinces, martial law, and the legalization of their militias. Oh yes, and they also want the present government, up to and including Poroshenko, to be impeached.

Mired in debt, and rapidly sinking into an economic abyss, Ukraine is literally coming apart at the seams – and the ugly underside of the Maiden “revolution” is being exposed to the light of day. The most recent atrocity is the uncovering of a torture chamber used by members of the “Tornado” Battalion, another far-right grouping, in which militia members kidnapped, tortured, raped, and robbed citizens in the eastern Luhansk region, where the government is fighting to retain some modicum of control. Eight members of the Tornado militia were recently arrested and are being held by military prosecutors in Kiev: the Tornado “volunteers,” who mostly consist of ex-convicts, defend their actions by claiming that this is just retaliation because they uncovered a smuggling operation run by local officials – who, they say, are collaborating with the rebels. They initially refused to lay down their arms and barricaded themselves into their camp.

The Aidar Battalion, also operating in eastern Ukraine, has been accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes: that was in 2014, but the charges were largely ignored until the local governor began to complain. Aidar’s leader, member of parliament Serhiy Melnychuk, of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party, has been stripped of immunity from prosecution and charged with kidnapping, issuing threats, and operating a criminal gang.  Melnychuk, while admitting there was “some looting,” attributed the dissolution of the Aidar Battalion by authorities to “Russian propaganda” and revealed that some members are still operating independently in Luhansk.

Then there’s the openly neo-Nazi Azov Brigade, whose members sport fascist symbols from the World War II era, and whose leader, Andriy Biletsky, declares that the goal of his group is to “lead the White Races of the world in a struggle for their survival.” There was so much bad publicity surrounding the Azov Battalion that the US Congress unanimously passed legislation forbidding any aid to the group – a provision, as this piece by Joseph Epstein in the Daily Beast points out, that is essentially unenforceable:

“In an interview with The Daily Beast, Sgt. Ivan Kharkiv of the Azov battalion talks about his battalion’s experience with U.S. trainers and US volunteers quite fondly, even mentioning US volunteers engineers and medics that are still currently assisting them. He also talks about the significant and active support from the Ukrainian diaspora in the US As for the training they have and continue to receive from numerous foreign armed forces. Kharkiv says ‘We must take knowledge from all armies… We pay for our mistakes with our lives.’

 

“Those US officials involved in the vetting process obviously have instructions to say that US forces are not training the Azov Battalion as such. They also say that Azov members are screened out, yet no one seems to know precisely how that’s done. In fact, given the way the Ukrainian government operates, it’s almost impossible.”

Yes, your tax dollars are going to arm, train, and feed neo-Nazis in Ukraine. That’s what we bought into when Washington decided to launch a regime change operation in that bedraggled corner of southeastern Europe. Your money is also going to prop up the country’s war-stricken economy – albeit not before corrupt government officials rake their cut off the top.

(read the full article at antiwar.com)