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#Harper’s War(s): The Next Generation(s) of Serfs #cdnpoli #elxn42

October 15, 2015 @opHarper Leave a comment

For this (hopefully last) installment of the “#Harper’s War(a) series we thought it might be a good idea to consider the actual costs vs benefit of the Harper’s ongoing far-right Economic Extraction Action Plan with regards to the current hybrid “Millennial” generation and next generation(s). At this stage in this game as the election draws near we must also ponder the mysteries within the “text” of the highly secret TPP that was “promised” to be released prior to election day but for rather lame “Go along, to get along” reasons, it will not be available.

The Harper Regime’s non-stop divisive Babylonian shell-game economics, fear-mongering, war profiteering, script regurgitation, hyperbolic rhetoric and it’s pandering for strategic voters to the extreme far-right minority segments for support is a very real and significant problem. They have purposely timed this coordinated operation to coincide with a very small Parliamentary calendar and will complete the far-right takeover with 3 successive blows. While all persist in the war-drumming and Bill C-51 distractions the delayed omnibus budget will go unchallenged, un-scrutinized and unnoticed. Since we know that there is no Parliament sitting until after the election, serious questions have and will continue to simply go unanswered and unaddressed. Win or lose, the Harper Regime wins in the end since if they lose, they won’t have to answer for a lot of issues that are bubbling over, the next group will yet if they do win, it’s full steam ahead until they ultimately lose control of the narrative, message and messengers. Unfortunately if they manage to steal a majority, it will propel us past the point of no return.

Before proceeding further down this rabbit hole, we should contemplate the shorter term consequences with regards to the safety and security of the younger generations, domestically. One thing that we are certain of is that each and every Government policing and security agency across the board are undergoing sweeping downsizing and compounding budget reductions. In other words, more budget cuts and downsizing measures are being implemented before any review of the cost/benefit analysis of past cuts to see where shortfalls have been discovered and persist to be problematic. With the massive and solitary refocus upon the minimalistic lone-wolf “terrorist” attack scenario, the already stressed system will deteriorate and downgrade the Police State’s collective ability to provide adequate resources for investigations into crimes that affect almost everyone, everyday. The trade off, we as a society are being forced to accept in the form of Bill C-51, is that all resources, real and imaginary, must be allocated to waging a war against an invisible needle-in-a-haystack boogeyman and not against those countless, easy to find, individuals engaging in organized crime, money laundering, Ponzie scheming, fraud, corruption, drug smuggling, gun running, child exploitation, human trafficking, gang warfare, armed robbery and the like. Since we must be made less-safe at all costs to be more-safe with future costs, all that will be needed in the future will be the stoke of a pen and an ever expanding list of “terrorists” can be determined and declared as necessary.

Even putting aside that all of the opaque enemies, boogieman and murky allies in these officially declared and unofficially undeclared ideological wars by the Harper Regime and their globalist comrades, aka: Bolsheviks, are between ultra-right entities fighting for dominance in their sphere of influence and then compound that with the way Bill C-51 is worded to declare the “official” far-right and ultra-right “enemies” and pay attention to the lack of certain “useful” far-right entities. Fast forward a bit and one may notice that in any foreign intervention scheme the Harper Regime’s choice is always in support of the furthest to the right of the embattled parties in the region with the most advantageous economic trade-route territories and better financed private mercenary armies. If we disregard any “left” opposition exists in any region, we can only presume that this Government sanctioned strategy in-itself creates an immediate far-right adversary within itself and is designed for almost immediate failure.

We also know that once any Party is beholden to an assortment of competing unholy fringe alliances for electoral convenience, ultra-far-right (or left) extremist segments can and will, easily coalesce, conspire and ultimately seize complete power and control over the government, economy and the military in one sweep. Isn’t this how the previously far-right Reform/Alliance coup transpired? First they acquired the party apparatus then they seized total control of the PMO and consolidated the powers within itself and the Treasury Ministry and Justice Ministry. Now we will bear witness to the evolution of extreme politics as the Liberal Party will transition further to the right to appeal to the former conservative base that oppose Harper and to piggyback on the politics of fear-mongering and war profiteering that made the “West” great. If recent history is to be proven correct, the best way to form a Party quickly is to coordinate, co-op and/or outright hijack one. In the above scenario, either way the vote goes, the “right” retains control of the Government apparatus with a solid plan b that on the surface seems palatable with the added bonus of redrawing the boundaries and redefining the “left” side of the spectrum.

Considering the generations that will pay for these wars, with their lives and limbs and odious unpayable debts by insulated older generations have zero voice, we must explore and understand the costs, ramifications and implications of an unfettered march to war policy for both the short term and long term. Having driven their carefully “controlled messages” this far into the collective psyche, the Harper Loyalists, propagandists and apologists can now begin probing even further towards the far-right extremes based upon zero facts, tin-foil hats and illogical fears by way of deception and subversive intimidation.

The oddly concealed and/or conveniently overlooked fact remains that these younger generations, with absolutely no voice, will be the bearers of the debts and actions of today’s political establishment. The veil is finally lifting and exposing the “invisible hand” of the economy and how many, if not most, of the publicly elected officials are beholden to the interests of the top 15% of the population. This may well be the ideal scenario, who knows, but even if it is there should be a system of checks and balances so that they do not go off the rail off into some ideological fantasy land. Contrary to the constant “…net new jobs…” mantra we hear repeated, consider real math and compare that to the actual number of newly work-aged employes into the workforce since the Harper Regime first came to power, their employment opportunities and their debt servitude.

The Harper Regime’s job creation results are truly pathetic and serve only the wants of a coddled 15% that will never serve in a war, nor suffer on any battlefield at the expense of the 85% majority. Compound that even further by looking at the age demographics of the actual hiring and associated pay scales, one will see that skewed in favour of the expanding 55+ segment as opposed to the expanding 25 and under segment. Once again, the beneficiaries will never have to serve in military services, but will be free to profit off such endeavours.

This seems to be the beginnings of the perfect generational storm as one generation seeks to reap the rewards of their labours, irregardless to their losses while the generations that will be necessary to fund these rewards remain jobless. This poses a problem since this age segment lost a significant portion of their savings, investments and pensions, aka: “wealth”, in the aftermath of the economic crisis and may never recover. This presumes that one will only have the freedom of choice to choose to be sent off to slaughter as cannon fodder abroad or exist within a rationed impoverishment at home. This also begs the question, how are such a select few able to initiate and instigate problems seeking solutions that they themselves never end up paying for, or adequately funding and/or administering, the long term solutions.

Pay close attention to the shell gaming by way of omnibus budgeteering only short gains profits and all real costs of their selectively interventionist backstopping practices are allowed to download the costs of their imposed austerity measures and military backed foreign financial adventurism, the lower 85% will continue to spiral downward and rapidly converge into a broader society with an overall lesser quality of life. Oddly enough, the data shows that within a zero-sum economic model, the top 15% are pretty much immune to the effects of deteriorating economy and due to the constraints and trade offs that accompany globalization schemes and economic integration agendas, the younger generations are constrained by the vary same global investors that discourage “public” investment necessary to properly educate our children and instead favour various privatization schemes. This financial downloading can be witnessed in real time with regards to health care, infrastructure, First Nations, Veterans and other public service cuts such as police, fire and other emergency first responder services.

We really can’t proceed without pondering the relativity of the abrupt resignation of John Baird, the shady foreign endeavours file, think Myanmar/Burma and Hillary Clinton’s email (treason) scandal, the pending Iraq/Syria and Beyond War Act, Bill C-51 and the delayed budget fit into this toxic mix. The combination of these three topics uncovers an entirely new perspective into how pervasive and powerful the anti-diplomatic, antagonistic, pro-war lobby has become and how any anti-war dissent will be stifled and suppressed with extreme prejudice and impunity.

Now, one must consider and compare how vigorously the Harper Regime fully endorsed, sanctioned and supported the Maidan, and set the stage for this tragically epic battle of the oligarchs civil war, in Ukraine with how vigorously, through legislation such as the Fair Elections Act and Bill C-51 or violence as in the case of the Toronto G8/G20 kettle filled crackdown, they are assuring that any popular demonstrations and/or uprising against their ideological rule, are fearfully discouraged and cannot happen in Ottawa or elsewhere. In this new norm, only Harper Loyalist’s and apologists will be afforded to any rights and/or freedoms such as speech, thought, association and/or assembly. The inconvenient truth is that all of these bits and chunks of power consolidation to the PMO and Treasury will be afforded to any/all future Governments.

It seems plausible that the fear-mongering, war drum beating and shell-game economics propaganda can easily neuter any opposition. It’s a major trump card and it is being played in much the same way as it was in the lead up to WW1. The pre-war propaganda that sets the stage campaign is in full gear as we speak.

First of all we should remember the timing of the “Arab Spring” and how the Libyan intervention, sprinkled with the “Assad Must Go” sideshow narrative, contaminated the 2011 election campaign that was fraught with several seedy and shady election shenanigans by outside market players beyond the legal jurisdiction of Canadian law enforcement agencies and the reach of Elections Canada. This deviously cleaver tactic conveniently led to major distractions with regards to the fundamental issues that lead up to the Election of 2011 and the ongoing epic failures of the Harper Regime at the time.

Remember, while some have slithered their way into the courts, the major issues with their governance and opacity were never resolved while their dirty deeds remain hidden and concealed from the public by the politicos and media alike for the most part. With cunningly shrewd manipulation of legislation and the subsequent consolidation of powers into the PMO and Treasury Ministry, their collective “documented” shenanigans will be sealed as classified far beyond the reach of the youth of today and tomorrow.

In other words, it is in their collective (15%) opinion, most of which invest and shelter their ill gotten “wealth” abroad, that after they themselves so greatly benefited from, and fully reaped the fruitful rewards of a rigged system, that very same system must be destroyed from the inside and out. This “controlled demolition” will hypothetically assure by way of distraction and diversion that their collective (15%) future prosperity, safety and security is assured at the expense of the remaining 85%, aka: serfs…

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#Harper’s War(s): Ten + Reasons to Vote Against the Use of Military Force #cdnpoli #GPC #NDP #LPC #CPC

March 13, 2015 @opHarper Leave a comment

With the hyper-accelerations and unprecedented fear-mongering campaign being waged upon “We the People” of Canada and our “Allies” with regards to the “terrorist” threat posed by IS/ISIL/ISIS. With the recent tragic friendly-fire death of a Canadian soldier, the reports that an Agent employed by a Canadian intelligence organization was involved in the delivery of the 3 U.K. schoolgirls into Syria and the media blackout by the Canadian media conglomerates regarding the very important Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing titled “The President’s Request for Authorization to Use Force Against ISIS: Military and Diplomatic Efforts” (AUMF), we feel it is necessary to republish an open letter by former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich Members of Congress detailing 10 reasons to vote against the use of military force.

The reason this is of utmost importance is that the Harper Regime is hell-bent on furthering our military intervention and has thus far been less than transparent, actually rather deceptive and opaque, regarding our role in Iraq/Syria and beyond while the U.S. is proposing an initial 3 year open ended commitment. According to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, President Barack Obama’s proposed resolution authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State contains no geographic limitations. The proposal allows attacks on “associated persons or forces” or any “closely related successor entity” to IS/ISIL/ISIS that is at war with the United States or its partners.

Yes, this is the very same Dennis Kucinich that announced the raising of the Al Qaeda flag over the courthouse in Benghazi in Libya back in November 2011 after the “successful liberation” of Libya by NATO air power. Oddly enough, the Canadian military predicted Libya would descend into civil war and Top Pentagon officials distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya as well.

We may also presume why John Baird has decided to “quit” the game of geo-poltics, maybe there was too much blood on his hands and realized that the fix is in within the Harper Regime. Now this is extremely problematic considering the rush by the war-mongering Harper Regime to ram Bill C-51 through and the implications of these combined issues. Within a few days we have several “Allies” that are publicly stating views that counter the narrative of not only the Harper Regime, but our so called “free and independent” media conglomerates. Unlike the coordinated one-sided Ukraine/Russia propaganda campaign, this poses such an interesting and convoluted conundrum that even the AP and Reuters can’t seem to deliver a straight storyline. This is presumably, much like the dueling Israel/Iran narrative, due to the fact that their dueling narratives reach a much broader audience on both sides of the false left/right paradigm with the single solid connection that there are a small group of fear-mongering war-profiteering NeoCons within both “official” political Parties, whether they may be Liberal/Democrats or Conservative/Republicans. Below this open letter, we will embed the above mentioned video uploaded by former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich along with another article titled “How Governments Twist Terrorism” since there seems to be no clear “definition” being presented by the Harper Regime with regards to Bill C-51 and the Harper Regime members of the Committee seem to have a serious problem asking questions of the witnesses and instead are presenting monologs to the witnesses.

Ten Reasons to Vote Against the Use of Military Force

Dear Colleague,

I was honored to serve in Congress for 16 years. During that time I provided information and helped to create debates over U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other nations, defending the Article I, Section 8 responsibilities of Congress on matters of war and peace. Those of you who know me are aware that I avoid partisanship. I have challenged Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Congress rightfully lacks confidence in this administration, given its bungling of a war against Libya and its general mishandling of international policy.

Why would Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, be so ready to give up its constitutional power to this president with an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which represents a wholesale appropriation of war power?

This could be one of the most important votes you will ever cast, so I want to share with you, collegially, information that I hope will be of use in your deliberations.

I present some thoughts for your consideration as you enter into a momentous, new debate over the authorization of military force, this time against the Islamic State.

This could be one of the most important votes you will ever cast, so I want to share with you, collegially, information that I hope will be of use in your deliberations.

Here are 10 reasons why Congress should not grant the president authority to use military force against the Islamic State, based on fact, consequences and the U.S. Constitution:

ISIS is not a threat to the U.S. homeland.

Writing in The American Conservative, Senior Editor Daniel Larison points out that the U.S. is taking on an unnecessary risk:

“… the U.S. mistakenly volunteers to address a regional security problem that poses no real threat to America, [while] its regional partners do as little as they can get away with, and in some cases stop doing even that in order to get the U.S. to take additional risks on their behalf.”

If the U.S. enters the fray, of course, regional partners will let us do the fighting.

There is no credible information available that indicates ISIS is a direct threat to the U.S. According to a Wall Street Journal article, “Lawmakers Told Islamic State Isn’t Terror Threat on U.S. Soil,” Congress has already been advised by U.S. counterterrorism officials that ISIS is not a threat to the U.S. homeland. Additionally, no new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced alleging ISIS is a direct threat to America. However, an all-out U.S. war against ISIS could expose America to unnecessary threats, without any national security benefits.

The AUMF disingenuously calls for a “limited” war, while it is written to guarantee a permanent war, thus nullifying the power of the people’s representatives in Congress.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were vitally concerned with the separation of powers, especially when it came to war. The power to declare war is vested in the Congress, in Article I, Section 8. The AUMF is written to enable the administration to conduct war, unilaterally, against any group, anywhere, at any time, over a period of three years, which opposing combatants will ignore.

If the administration succeeds in gaining approval for this particular AUMF, it will not have to return to Congress for approval as it takes its war from nation to nation. This is clearly contrary to the intent of the founders. It weakens Congress’ constitutional power (checks and balances) and undermines the Constitution.

The AUMF is a blank check and a fiscal black hole.

Since the AUMF sets the stage for a worldwide conflict, the cost of action will run into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars, particularly if ground troops are involved in a war with religious overtones that go back 14 centuries. This war will inevitably require an emergency wartime supplemental appropriation and massive borrowing, adding to the $16 trillion U.S. deficit and weakening the U.S. economy internally while providing great wealth to war profiteers who are already draining America’s wealth.

Regional armies appear to be rising to their own defense; U.S. presence will escalate war.

At this very moment ISIS is finally under pressure from Iraqi forces and pro-government militias, without U.S. boots on the ground. Additionally, ISIS is said to be experiencing internal pressures and conflicts. The Washington Post points out: “The Islamic State is battling major offensives waged on at least three fronts — by Kurds in northern Syria, Kurds in northern Iraq and the combined force of Iraqi army and Shiite militia fighters advancing on the central Iraqi city of Tikrit.”

“…the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An [U.S.] invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide … they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims.” — Graeme Wood in the Atlantic Magazine, March 2015.

ISIS desperately needs to draw the U.S. in, to provide a rallying cry “against the foreign invader.” Why should America put our troops in harm’s way to provide this terrorist organization with new life, especially since armies in the region are stepping up to take the fight to ISIS?

In the AUMF, the president wants language that provides for U.S. ground forces to have “flexibility.” Read: “Boots on the ground!” If Congress passes the AUMF, it will have no say in the conduct of this war, except for appropriations.

The U.S. could get drawn into a worldwide religious war.

President Obama says, “We are not at war against Islam.” Congressional approval of the president’s request for the AUMF against the Islamic State will change that quickly. The AUMF will become a powerful recruiting tool for ISIS. How else will it be interpreted abroad, other than America at war with Islam? The U.S. could blunder into a complex, multidimensional conflict with explicit religious overtones, no matter what the president says.

ISIS wants to draw the U.S. into a religious war, to secure its role as the self-proclaimed defender of Islam against crusading foreign invaders.

Jihadis, anticipating a great war for Islam, have streamed into the region from all over the world to join ISIS ranks. An estimated 20,000 fighters from 90 nations have converged to fight alongside ISIS.

“This is a fight the Islamic State should be denied. And yet we should have learned that it is a bad idea to get into a ground war with people whose idea of victory is martyrdom.” — Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2015.

ISIS and Al Qaeda are divided. US re-entry into war could unite them.

ISIS and Al Qaeda are in a deep rift. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri differ on strategy, tactics, methods, religious interpretations and on Baghdadi’s establishment of a caliphate.

An all-out U.S. military attack against ISIS will force Al Qaeda into an alliance it does not want, to join ISIS in a “fight against Western invaders,” creating a united front much stronger and more deadly to America and her allies.

A Solution: Follow ISIS’ money, and shut it down.

Where is ISIS getting its money? Up to 100,000 ISIS fighters are funded by Gulf State donors, identified in the past as being from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. Fully equipping and providing for one modern combat-ready soldier can cost $850,000 to $1,000,000 a year. ISIS’ army could be gaining $85 billion to $100 billion a year from various sources. We can either commit the U.S. military to another war, and the U.S. to further risk of impending attacks through the genesis of a new crusade, or we can fight this threat with intelligent power and high technology.

The administration must identify the specific sources of ISIS’ money, the individuals, the nations and the means of transfer, and shut them all down. It must sanction countries and individuals, tie up their bank accounts and commercial activities, freeze their assets and cancel their credit cards. Send platoons of accountants from the Treasury Department and the IRS into the fray, not platoons of U.S. soldiers. The U.S. must track oil sales, sales of antiquities and other valuables. Anyone involved in any transactions of any kind with ISIS must be identified and sanctioned.

Solution: Cyber response.

The U.S. has the ability to identify and disrupt terror networks using digital technology. The CIA, in a major reorganization, has just created a fifth directorate, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, in recognition that intelligent power means using the most technologically advanced tools available. For its part, the NSA, which has admitted gaps, is also strengthening its information collecting. If, as Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” in the 21st century we have other means to avoid a “boots on the ground” shooting war.

Endless wars enable Washington to ignore a domestic agenda.

It has been said that others attack us in order to destroy the way we live. Since 9/11, our own government has been responsible for shredding the Constitution through wars of choice and the imposition of a national security state with a permanent state of emergency.

The U.S. now spends about $1 trillion a year to “defend” America using lethal means. Yet the more money we spend, the greater the peril. Why? Meanwhile, at home, America’s middle class is falling apart, wages and benefits have dropped, retirement savings have vanished and Wall Street and war profiteers clean up. Americans, punished through unwarranted, massive surveillance, have forfeited constitutional rights and civil liberties. The right to privacy, which is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, has been destroyed in the name of security.

The time has come for the U.S. to review the effects of interventionism.

ISIS grew out of U.S. interventions. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have disintegrated into chaos and violence. The price tag has been extraordinary in loss of human life and the cost of trillions of dollars. Bad judgments, misinformation and even lies have caused our nation to intervene, inspiring radical elements, stoking the fires of nationalism and engendering religious conflict. A great price has been paid and continues to be paid by our troops and their families.

This is the time for Congress and the administration to rethink the failed national security strategy, the failed doctrine of intervention, the failed “right to protect” doctrine and the abominable intrusion into the private lives of Americans.

Congress must refuse to give up its constitutional power under Article I, Section 8 and hold the executive branch in check on matters of war. It should defeat the AUMF and stop the administration from spreading war around the world.

Congress has a new opportunity to get control of runaway spending and keep America strong without wasting resources. In my early years in Congress, I was shocked to learn, from the inspector general to the Department of Defense, that DOD had over $1 trillion in accounts that could not be reconciled. According to the GAO, the Army “lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch units.” The Constitution, Article I, Section 9, requires an accounting. With the national security budget at $1 trillion annually, and trillions spent for wars of choice, and a trillion unaccounted for, and countless billions in cost overruns, the question is who is defending the taxpayers?

The Authorization for the Use of Military Force provides a new opportunity for a much-needed debate over the direction of America, our priorities and the best way to protect our nation from harm. Thank you for considering my views.

Respectfully,

Dennis Kucinich
Member of Congress 1997 – 2013

source: http://www.kucinich.com/?_escaped_fragment_=10-Reasons-to-Vote-Against-the-Use-of-Military-Force/c1z12/5500a8330cf27b8ab26b528e
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/03/11/open-letter-to-members-congress-about-authorization-to-use-military-force/

Uploaded on Nov 2, 2011

Hi, Congressman Dennis Kucinich here. I just got off the phone with a very well-known talk show host from Cleveland, Mike Trivisonno, who told me about calls that he is getting from people who are concerned that there is an Al Qaeda flag flying over the courthouse in Benghazi in Libya. It was put there by the same group that we helped to oust the Gaddafi regime.

What is going on in America? On the one hand, we have soldiers dying in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda. On the other hand, we just helped a group of people take over Libya and the Al Qaeda flag is flying over their capital city headquarters.

What are we doing? It is time for America to get its story and its priorities straight about what we stand for as a nation. Its time to get out of all these wars and all of these conflicts where we think we can play both sides against the middle and it usually ends up with U.S. soldiers getting killed.

Its time to bring our troops home and take care of things here at home. As we approach Veteran’s Day 2011, we should really honor those who serve by having a foreign policy that is straight. That speaks directly to the concerns of the American people. That is mindful of the fact that we can’t tell the whole world what to do and we have an obligation to get our own house in order here at home and put people back to work.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0FQzhWy0VI

How Governments Twist Terrorism
By Philip Giraldi | March 12, 2015

States craft terror definitions and designations to absolve themselves and satisfy their constituencies.

The Washington Post reports that “terrorism trend lines are ‘worse than at any other point in history.’” But what is terrorism? It has frequently been pointed out that “terrorism” is a tactic, not an actual physical adversary, but it is less often noted that a simple definition of what constitutes terrorism is hardly universally accepted, while the designation itself is essentially political. The glib assertion that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter fails to capture the distinction’s consequences as the terror label itself increasingly comes with a number of legal and practical liabilities attached. Describing an organization as terroristic in order to discredit it has itself become a tactic, and one that sometimes has only limited connections to what the group in question actually believes or does.

The bone of contention in defining terrorism is where to draw the line in terms of the use of violence in furtherance of a political objective. In practice, it is generally accepted that state players who employ violence do so within a social framework that confers legitimacy, while nonstate players who use political violence are ipso facto terrorists, or at least susceptible to being tagged with that label, which confers upon them both illegitimacy and a particularly abhorrent criminality. But some on the receiving end of such a Manichean distinction object, noting that the laws defining terror are themselves drawn up by the governments and international organizations, which inevitably give themselves a pass in terms of their own potential liability. They would argue that established regimes will inevitably conspire to label their enemies terrorists to marginalize both resistance movements and internal dissent in such a way as to diminish the credibility of the groups that are so targeted. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recently been doing precisely that, and one might reasonably argue that government use of violence is often in practice indistinguishable from the actions of nonstate players.

Some common dictionary definitions of terrorism include engaging in “the systematic use of terror,” surely an indication of the inscrutability of an issue when the word must be used to define itself. The United Nations has been unsuccessfully negotiating a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism since 2002 that would define terror as causing death or serious injury or destroying or damaging public or private property “to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.” The United States Federal criminal code uses similar language, as does the Patriot Act, with the key elements being the use of violence or physical destruction to “intimidate or coerce” a civilian population or an existing government.

Governments are aware of what can be accomplished by invoking the word “terrorism.” The diplomacy-averse United States frequently hides behind the label, as it is prohibited by law from negotiating with groups so-labeled, and thereby avoids having to confront the possible legitimacy of what they represent. And it also justifies a uniformly violent response, which is invariably described as self-defense.

Fourteen years ago the “global war on terror” was used to justify wholesale American intervention in predominantly Muslim countries. A number of European countries, including France and Britain, have followed the example of the two Patriot Acts by introducing antiterrorism legislation that provides special police and intelligence service authorities that limit normal legal protections in terrorism cases. The broadly written laws have largely rendered the authorities immune from either regulation or prosecution, and governments in the West have generally been reluctant to allow any third-party inquiries into the related behavior of military and police forces. In the United States the state secret privilege, originally intended to prohibit the exposure of classified information in court, has been used to completely derail judicial proceedings relating to offenses allegedly committed by the government in terrorism cases.

And critics of the essentially hypocritical double standard used in defining terrorism certainly have a point. One might reasonably argue that the use of drones, in which “signature” targets are killed because they match a profile, fits comfortably within the definition of terrorism. During 2003-4, American Army and Marine forces in Fallujah sometimes shelled and bombed targets in the city indiscriminately and were certainly responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. The Israeli Defense Forces killed thousands of civilians in two incursions into Gaza as well as several attacks on Lebanon. There was no declaration of war to justify the use of armed force in either case, and independent observers noted that many of the civilian casualties could have been avoided, normally a defining factor that makes an incident terror. Both Israel and the United States turned the tables on the situation by referring to their opponents and victims as “terrorists.” There has been no accountability for the deaths because it was two governments that carried out the killing.

In a world seemingly obsessed with terrorism it was inevitable that something like an anti-terrorism industry would grow dramatically. Every television and radio network has its own stable of pundits who pontificate on every violent incident, and there also are well-compensated freelancers, who describe themselves as experts, such as Evan Kohlmann and Steve Emerson. Emerson recently had to apologize after claiming that Birmingham, England had a number of no-go areas controlled by local Muslim extremists.

It should be no surprise that lawyers have now also gotten into the game. In 1996 Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which allows victims of terrorism to file civil suits in federal and state courts against sponsors or supporters of terrorism. Once you have a group or individual labeled as terrorist, or providing assistance to terrorists, there are a number of options you can pursue. The burgeoning antiterrorism industry appears to be in some ways linked to the increasing employment of Lawfare, which uses the legal system to wage war by alternative means, making it possible to obtain a favorable judgment and damages from the assets of a recognized terrorist organization. Such litigation benefits from favorable legislation in the United States that makes terrorism a worldwide crime subject to U.S. judicial review.

Recent court cases have involved both states that allegedly sponsor terrorism or actual organizations that are now parts of governments that either currently or at one time were perceived to be terrorists. Many of the groups targeted are enemies of Israel, and the Israeli Lawfare center Shurat HaDin is most active in pursuing such litigation. In a recent case in New York City, the Palestinian Authority was successfully sued by a group of Israelis and Americans over terrorist attacks that took place in Israel in 2002-4. If the appeal fails, the Palestinian Authority will be required to pay $1 billion in damages and will be bankrupted, with negative consequences for the United States, which has been seeking to create a viable government on the West Bank.

The U.S. Department of State identifies four countries as state sponsors of terrorism, making them prime targets for sanctions and other legal action. They are Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran. Cuba is an anomaly as it has not threatened anyone in decades but remains on the list due to the deep passions within America’s politically powerful Cuban Lobby. Sudan likewise should not be so designated, as even the U.S. government admits that it is cooperative on terrorism issues.

This leaves Syria and Iran, both of which are regarded as state sponsors of terrorism even though both are themselves victims of terrorist attacks carried out by groups supported by the United States. They are on the list because they harbor or cooperate with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. All three groups consider themselves to be resistance movements against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, but Israel regards all three as terrorists, a view shared by the United States on the state department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list. That viewpoint is not necessarily shared by many European governments, which regard the organizations as having evolved into legitimate political parties. There are also thousands of individuals and groups considered to be terroristic or criminal, collected by the U.S. Department of Justice on its Special Designated Nationals List. Individuals and organizations on the list have their assets blocked and are subject to other punitive action by the United States government.

Being designated by the Department of the Treasury or state does not necessarily mean that someone or some organization was actually involved in terrorism. The Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity, was declared a terrorist organization in 2001. Its officers were convicted and imprisoned in a 2008 trial because the Treasury Department determined ex post facto that it had given money to Hamas before that group was itself named as a terrorist organization.

Inclusion on the State or Treasury lists can mean that there is solid evidence of wrongdoing, but it can also represent mere insinuations or a strong desire to see a group singled out for punishment. In any event, once a group or person is designated for a list, it is difficult to get off. Organizations that have not engaged in terrorist activity for many years remain on the list while other groups that are active escape censure. Recently, the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist group that killed six Americans in the 1970s, was removed from the list under political pressure from Congress and the media. Again, Israel was involved. MEK is an enemy of the current government in Tehran and is itself an important component of the Israeli intelligence effort against Iran, having been involved in the fabrication of information suggesting that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program as well as participating in the assassinations of Tehran’s scientists.

So what terrorism actually consists of very much depends on one’s perspective, rendering the word itself largely meaningless. But those who are listed as terrorists experience real consequences even accepting that the designation is both selectively applied and politicized. The United States and Israel in particular use the terrorism label to demonize opponents, drum up fear, and generate popular support for security policies that might otherwise be unpalatable. They also justify their own behavior by asserting that they occupy the moral high ground in the defense of the world against terror, a claim that certainly should be regarded with considerable skepticism.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-governments-twist-terrorism/

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#Harper’s War(s): #Canada vs #C51 vs #CSIS vs #RCMP – #cdnpoli #pnpcbc

March 12, 2015 @opHarper Leave a comment

In our previous brief summary, The Rise of the #NeoBolsheviks aka #NeoCons, we touched upon the various similarities between the Harper Regime and the Bolsheviks counter-revolution that violently seized power in Russia in 1917. For this brief summary we will pose a few questions and issues that seem to be missing from the current discourse, dissemination, conversation, reporting and debate about Bill C-51.

When will the Opposition and those opposed to the Orwellian and dystopian Bill C-51 mobilize in mass protests and how long will they remain committed?

Before we delve into the content, or lack thereof, we feel it is necessary to question the “Bread and Circuses” methods that are being utilized to “frame and mandate” the debate via the MSM and social media. The easiest way to present this is by utilizing our own CBC News coverage. At a later date we hop to present a summary that compiles the result of our in-depth analysis into how the CBC News and especially CBC’s Power and Politics, and to a lesser degree the Exchange, are nothing more than well organized and scripted “Limited Hangouts” that are engaging in a full spectrum “Gaslighting” operation against the citizenry that is being guided directly via the PMO. Not only are the hosts actively engaged but the supporting staff and reporters, guests, panelists, lobbyists and free-lance journalists are as well. This does nothing but cast a broad cloud of suspicion and call into question their own ethics and legitimacy. This harms our economy, society, peace, safety and security more than anything and everything else combined.

The short and simple overview is that the primary mandate is one that completely reinforces the PMO scripts and message about the geo-political and economic environment with a shrewd blend of “Yellow Journalism” and a tightly “Controlled Opposition” counter narrative when necessary, if at all. To observe this one only needs to inspect the language that is crafted within their coverage and articles and how “Sockpuppets” and carefully placed commentary divert the comments sections and social media discussions.

For the above to be addressed, we propose a few remedies that may open the debate and conversion. In our opinion, the collective Opposition and concerned backbenchers must, on behalf of all Canadians, demand a formal, immediate, open and transparent inquiry into how the PMO is utilizing tax-payer resources to contaminate and gaslight discussion and comment threads.

Who are those being employed and who is actually accountable for the scripts and narrative?
What are the costs vs benefits and implications vs opposition associated with these activities and what amount of resources are being utilized?
When will there be an initial investigation and/or formal inquiry.
Where are the message control operatives operating from, where are they being deployed?
Why is there no public and/or Parliamentary scrutiny and/or oversight and why has this issue been allowed to fly under the radar for so long?
How much is this actually costing, how can these practices be acceptable to anyone that is not in power and how will the results of any investigation be presented?

Moving forward to the Bill C-51 “Bread and Circuses” debate, keeping in mind that this is directly related and overlaps several narratives that converge the economy and security amongst others. These narratives are in full view and converging rather rapidly. We need to point out that this is by design and being controlled by a relatively small few that have the controlling stake within the Harper Regime itself, the segment that is completely protected from the implications and/or ramifications of Bill C-51 for various reasons.

Bill C-51, like all of the previous Omnibus Bills, many of which we have still not felt the ramifications of, is an extremely opaque, ill-conceived, bloated and convoluted piece of oppression. Just observe the smugness, arrogance, and self-absurdness of the Harper Regime and their Loyalists.

Who ultimately controls the fear-mongering narrative surrounding Bill C-51 and who ultimately benefits other than the Harper Regime, their special interest lobbies and their Loyalists?
What measures are in place to assure the legality the fear-mongering scripts, talking points, narrative and spin surrounding Bill C-51 by the Harper Regime, their special interest lobbies and their Loyalists?
When will the illegal terror propaganda being disseminated and propagated, fear-mongering scripts, talking points, narrative and spin surrounding Bill C-51 by the Harper Regime, their special interest lobbies and their Loyalists be investigated and prosecuted?
Where are the fear-mongering scripts, talking points, narrative and spin surrounding Bill C-51 by the Harper Regime, their special interest lobbies and their Loyalists being organized and are they legal?
Why are the scripts, talking points, narrative and spin by the Harper Regime, their special interest lobbies and their Loyalists surrounding Bill C-51 being endlessly regurgitated and why have the Opposition not formed, fostered, nutured and/or encouraged protests?
How are the the fear-mongering scripts, talking points, narrative and spin surrounding Bill C-51 being addressed and countered?

To move forward a bit, we also need to open the debate about expanding the powers of CSIS, especially intervention strategies, when they conflict with the RCMP and/or contaminate and/or corrupt active investigations by other law enforcement agencies. We know there are serious flaws with the U.S. with regards to the conflicting agendas of the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. When one or more agencies are directing resources in what amounts to turf wars, which take precedence and who reimburses the resources that were wasted.

We already have serious backlogs and deficiencies within our own systems and entities. The most troubling stem from the lack of adequate funding, manpower and resources across the board. These deficiencies have bogged down investigation, burdened the courts and crated an extremely insecure environment. Considering the lack of security within the various Government controlled Ministerial databases and web portals, one must ponder how these can be adequately addressed without proper funding and oversight. In short, the entire “system” is insecure and that places all Canadians at risk.

Who will assure that the activities and expanded powers being proposed do not encourage a “spy vs spy” scenario playing out and who will assure the integrity of the investigations?
What provision will be utilized to assure that there are absolutely no conflicts of interest between CSIS interventions and RCMP investigations along with covert foreign intelligence operatives/agencies operations and what steps are being taken to assure that the expansive inter-Ministerial data sharing system is secured and invulnerable to exploits and back door attacks?
When will the public be allowed to address their concerns about the ramifications of entrapment and dragnet surveillance?
Where are the provisions that address the activities of foreign intelligence operatives and agencies that are actively conducting their own independent operations in Canada?
Why is the Harper Regime entitled to be given a blank check free pass to directly and indirectly seize complete control of Canada and the lives of Canadians at home and abroad?
How can CSIS and the RCMP assure Canadians that rogue agents within their own ranks or the ranks of Government are identified and eliminated as potential threats to our collective safety and security?

In addition to the above questions and concerns we need to be very mindful of the potential long term effects regarding Bill C-51 especially the budgetary implications. We presume that, based upon the previous failed budgets, that none of the programs and/or operations will be allocated adequately. This presumption is based upon several key components and the inadequate funding that are associated with the unbroken string of failed budgets by the Harper Regime and taking into consideration that the across the board austerity cuts have yet to actually fully be realized nor have they borne any positive results.

We realize that Bill C-51 is the most opaque, broad sweeping, dangerous and un-democratic Trojan Horse legislation ever proposed by the Harper Regime. We also realize that the language about “economic” security is even more opaque. What we take great issue with is the way in which the likes of the oppressive Regimes of Egypt, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are glorified as proponents of liberty, freedom, democracy, peace, safety, security and prosperity with regards to the funding of ongoing terrorist activities in Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, while other less oppressive regimes are demonized, targeted and sanctioned.

Contrary to the published punditry, we realize that while the Harper Regime insists that the provisions contained within Bill C-51 is not a treat to legitimate forms of dissent and/or protests, past experiences and practices employing agent provocateurs by policing agents at the Montebello SPP Summit in 2007, the kettling, arrests and mass detention of “legal” protesters at the Toronto G8/G20 while suspected agent provocateurs went unattained, the various attacks and anti-protest legislation passed nationwide, but specifically against Quebec students and the storm trooping of the Occupy protests.

In other words, since the foreign funded bloodless coup d’état by Stephen Harper and his Reform/Alliance cabal over the past decade that brought them to power, virtually all forms of opposition, legitimate dissent and legal protests have either been co-opted, infiltrated by agent provocateurs, faced threats and intimidation, been financially sanctioned, silenced, censored, slandered and discredited.

Most of all and probably of utmost importance, protests to the actions and inactions of the Harper Regime have been either declared illegal, disallowed and/or severely limited by way of legislation and/or by-laws.

If we were to foresee “who” Bill C-51 is targeting. Based upon the militarism and foreign adventurism trend by the Harper Regime and their failed attempts to become actively involved and deploy forces into the 2003 GW Bush fraudulent WMD War upon Iraq that was blocked by “We the People”, anti-war advocates, activists and protesters are the intended targets. All of the others that are already on Harper’s Hit List are just gravy on the potatoes and frosting on the cake.

Now, keeping in mind that the Harper Regime actually sent officials to stand by those protesters at the Ukrainian Maidan and supported, advocated and encouraged the overthrow of an corrupt albeit elected Regime, not to mention their active involvement into the affairs of Libya and Syria, both of which are mired in foreign funded civil wars, that directly fostered the foreign funded “barbaric terrorists” of today, the only real questions that remain are really simple:

Who benefits from the Harper Regime’s opaque agenda and mandate?
What is the true agenda the Harper Regime’s Loyalist and supporters?
Where is this mass suppression and surveillance data accumulation by the the Harper Regime ultimately headed?
When will the will of “We the People” be heard and acknowledged by the Harper Regime?
Why does the Harper Regime fear and refuse to address questions and concerns?
How far will the Harper Regime go in their quest of full spectrum domination of Canada and Canadians?

Wake up, smell the coffee and face the cold hard facts, this may well be the last time Canadians will ever be able to protest anything that is not sanctioned by the Regime that controls the Parliament and Government of the day.

Remember, politics is a contact sport, like hockey, so please feel free to add quick contributions, observations and relevant information as a comment below!

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#Harper’s War(s): The Rise of the #NeoBolsheviks aka #NeoCons #cdnpoli #pnpcbc

March 10, 2015 @opHarper 2 Comments

At certain points in time one must reflect upon the past in order to sort out the present as it trends into the future. In many ways this seems like an impossible task for even the most prolific academics and historians considering history is often typically distorted and “created” based upon past propaganda that contradicts current propaganda efforts. This is why we must go back a bit further in time for comparison to decipher and decode the facts and realities from the fictions and propaganda in order to reconstruct the actual facts and realities. Keep in mind that the shylocks, charlatans and snake-oil salesmen that control the past easily control and rewrite “history” on demand and ultimately control the present and intend to do so well into the future.

We assUme that our “free” and “independent” media plays an unbiased and transparent role in investigating, researching, presenting and publishing evidence based facts. The only constant fact about this assumption is that it is fundamentally flawed. The one simple and glaringly obvious fact is that our “free” and “independent” media presents information in a very hyper sensationalized, biased and opaque manner to gain and retain viewers, followers and subscribers. These distorted facts and opinions are then presented to the general public by our “free” and “independent” media conglomerates to serve the needs and requirements of their own investors, stake-holders and advertisers. In other words, they are “free” and “independent” to publish whatever provides the best return on investment, period. At the present time, as has occurred in the past, if it bleeds, it leads, because fears and wars sell “papers” and allows the ruling Party to fraudulently sell the “justification” loss of freedoms and liberties to an ill-informed populous.

We also, sometimes foolishly, assUme that our “elected” officials play an unbiased and transparent role when in fact they only present the information in an opaque manner that serve the needs of its own investors and ideological supporters in order to get “elected” by the less informed citizenry. In reality our “free” and “independent” media are simply the sell-side tools of the Harper Regime Loyalists that promote globalist intervention schemes. Instead of well researched facts to formulate and base our own opinions, “We the People” are simply given “Bread and Circuses” to distract from reality in order to further an opaque and hidden agenda that is based upon their fabricated realities. Simply put, the “free” and “independent” media are nothing more than the ultimate tools of war, at home and abroad and they are indeed controlled by munitions makers, armaments dealers, war profiteers and financial terrorists along with countless mercenaries, private militias and armies that engage in both quasi-legal, semi-legal and illegal terrorist activities.

The parallels between the past and present are astounding considering the fact that if either of these collective entities fails to remain transparent with the facts, they utterly fail the populous, not only today but well into the future. In other words, just as the victors of the past wrote their own version of history, todays political victors misguided, falsified talking points and regurgitated published propaganda become the historical fact well into the future as they are the only source of information. This may be refereed to as the “Big Lie” theory and is developed and nurtured via “sockpuppets”, “Limited Hangouts” and the “Gaslighting” effect.

While this is noticeable to a great degree across the MSM, to see this in action one only needs to parse the “articles” and comments on our own tax-payer funded CBC News website. Pay close attention to how the timing of the “UPDATES” coordinate with the arrival of sockpuppets and trolls and how the message is massaged on both ends by way of subversive propaganda techniques. On the one hand, there are several half truths presented with subtle innuendos, based upon hearsay, within the “articles” themselves at various points to appear well researched, honest, truthful and factual. On the other hand, important and relevant factual articles that have been investigated and researched, worthy of broad discussion and sharing, typically have the comments feature disabled. Most of the sensationalized and misrepresented articles are from outside sources, primarily Reuters and AP. These articles work two-fold, first and formost to drive a message that follows the Harper Regimes talking points and spin as close as possible and second as a click-bait distraction that keeps and/or pushes these well spun “articles” into the “Most Viewed” sections in order to drive out the more important topics.

For many the “title” of this entry and the reference to Bolshevism seems comparatively disjointed in the least or sensational at best. It poses a sort of conundrum and prompts further explanation, if at all possible. One may inquire as to how Stephen Harper and the Harper Regime Loyalists could be compared to the Bolsheviks circa 1917? Some might opine, isn’t that a stretch of the imagination? Others may ponder and obsess that Stephen Harper and the Harper Regime Loyalists are more akin to NeoNazis and fascists.

In order to delve a bit further we need to understand the difference between the Russian Revolution in the spring of 1917 that lead to the downfall of the Czar, coincidentally a cousin of the reigning Crown, and the violent Bolshevik Revolution that hijacked it within a few months time as summer transcended into autumn of 1917. One must keep in mind that the initial revolutionaries sough to create an elected Constitutional Republic much like that of France and the United States, not a theocratic oligarchy based upon subjects and/or serfdom led by empty promises and catchy sloganeering.

While the comparison to fascists seems more appropriate and fairly well traveled within the interwebz to many they really are two sides of the same coin that enable technically what amounts to total government control and oppression of all dissenting opinions total government control and oppression of all dissenting opinions. In broad terms, fascists typically aim to protect the interests and well being of the citizenry of the Sovereign State they represent, its own productivity, industries, public services, etc. to support a strong national economy founded upon a high quality education that leads to full employment. On the other side of the coin, bolsheviks prefer global domination and the concept of globalization where the interests of the Sovereign State become secondary to the global investor class of Carpetbaggers and Robber Barons hell bent on global domination at all costs. Sadly, as opposed to a multi-polar “win-win” economy, the uni-polar “zero-sum” economy transfers those costs to the citizenry while the profits are quickly offshored.

This seems like it is impossible since over the past century we have all been indoctrinated into believing a false left/right paradigm exists based upon the battle of the “…ists & …ism’s” factored within. This simple word play allows global investors to play the tried and true leftists vs rightists meme along with the persistent communists vs fascists theme. This easily allows the ultra small minority investor class, aka: regional/global oligarchs, complete control over the establishment main-stream media and anti-media conglomerates, dis-information aggregators, politicians, economists and politicos in order to “trickle down” and share in the spoils of excess, while the majority of the populous are burdened with the costs under the collective banner of “capitalists/capitalism” that serve no public or national interests anywhere.

This was fairly evident during the First Cold War propaganda campaign that cemented the sides by way of half truths, misrepresentation and factual manipulation that ultimately relied upon morphing German and Soviet propaganda intermixed with the Allies propaganda to confuse and indoctrinate the masses. The problem and stark reality is that none of the propaganda that was published and propagated in the various regional/global media outlets to “sell” these wars before and during the First and Second World Wars have ever been properly scrutinized and disseminated before it was shrewdly entrenched into the educational system as history class nor corrected before it took root into the collective psyche.

This conundrum has become even more evident now that we have hyper accelerated into the Second Cold War via the external geo-political/military meddling in the EU, the Ukraine, North Africa and the Middle East, not to mention the rest of Africa, Asia and South America. This begs the question of who benefits when the Regime in power actively seeks out, creates and encourages enemies at home and abroad? At what point does one acknowledge that the Regime in power may in fact, be the actual enemy of the State?

If one analyzes and digests the implications of the above, one can easily draw parallels to how the Harper Regime and it’s die hard Loyalists, aka: Reform Party, effectively hijacked a major political party in what amounts to a bloodless coup d’état. These Loyalists have formed under the collective banner of what amounts to fear-mongering, war-mongering NeoConservatives within the U.S. and Canada and draw upon a fraudulent form of flag waving nationalism that encourages misguided ultra-nationalists to, in many cases violently, force their agenda, lest one be labeled as “unpatriotic”, towards furthering extreme economic NeoLiberalism that ignites the flames for extremists and terrorists to thrive at home and abroad.

The inconvenient truth is that no matter how often the Harper Regime Loyalists proclaim and repeat their pre-scripted talking points, nothing is ever either just black or just white, there are an infinite number of shades of gray in-between. The Harper Regime and their Loyalists, under the guise of providing safety and security with their endless “Tough on Crime” rhetoric, undermines the safety and security of now only Canadians, at home and abroad, but the entire global community.

This should sound multiple alarm bells that something is rotten in Ottawa. The only question that really remains is will the collective Opposition, non-Reformers and Conservative backbenchers actually take the hard steps necessary to remove the stench and rot before more damage is done, or will they simply choose to await another fraudulent election shrouded within the fog of war and rhetoric as they did in 2011 when the Harper Regime, its Loyalists and apologists declared that Libya must be bombed back into the stone age and Syria’s Assad Must Go? The reality is that the previous NeoCon led schemes in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to the destabilization of the region and the more recent NeoCon instigated schemes in Libya, Syria and Ukraine have literally flooded 3 Continents with an endless supply of modern weaponry and uncontrollable chaos.

Do Canadians really “need” the Harper Regime to “protect” Canada from the various “terrorists” they themselves fostered and nurtured into existence? Keep in mind that the Harper Regime’s aggressive interventions in Libya and Syria alone have accounted for millions upon millions of displaced and impoverished families, hundreds of thousands of dead men, women and children of all ages and hundreds of billions of dollars in destroyed infrastructure, not to mention the countless lost historical sites and artifacts.

As a final point to ponder, has anyone really considered that Bill C51 is really designed to silence the anti-war, anti-foreign intervention advocates? Let’s face it, the genie is outta the bottle, Pandora’s box has been ripped wide open as the Harper Regime and their collective war-profiteering “Allies” at home and abroad have seemingly crossed the rubicon, passed the point of no return, and leading “We the People” into yet another multi-continental World War.

Cui bono?

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The end of the New World Order

October 19, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

By Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Friday 19 October 2012 18.00 BST

Culture shock … the collapse of Lehman Brothers ushered in the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

In the late summer of 2008, two events in quick succession signalled the end of the New World Order. In August, the US client state of Georgia was crushed in a brief but bloody war after it attacked Russian troops in the contested territory of South Ossetia.

The former Soviet republic was a favourite of Washington’s neoconservatives. Its authoritarian president had been lobbying hard for Georgia to join Nato’s eastward expansion. In an unblinking inversion of reality, US vice-president Dick Cheney denounced Russia‘s response as an act of “aggression” that “must not go unanswered”. Fresh from unleashing a catastrophic war on Iraq, George Bush declared Russia’s “invasion of a sovereign state” to be “unacceptable in the 21st century”.

As the fighting ended, Bush warned Russia not to recognise South Ossetia’s independence. Russia did exactly that, while US warships were reduced to sailing around the Black Sea. The conflict marked an international turning point. The US’s bluff had been called, its military sway undermined by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades during which it bestrode the world like a colossus, the years of uncontested US power were over.

Three weeks later, a second, still more far-reaching event threatened the heart of the US-dominated global financial system. On 15 September, the credit crisis finally erupted in the collapse of America’s fourth-largest investment bank. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers engulfed the western world in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.

The first decade of the 21st century shook the international order, turning the received wisdom of the global elites on its head – and 2008 was its watershed. With the end of the cold war, the great political and economic questions had all been settled, we were told. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had triumphed. Socialism had been consigned to history. Political controversy would now be confined to culture wars and tax-and-spend trade-offs.

In 1990, George Bush Senior had inaugurated a New World Order, based on uncontested US military supremacy and western economic dominance. This was to be a unipolar world without rivals. Regional powers would bend the knee to the new worldwide imperium. History itself, it was said, had come to an end.

But between the attack on the Twin Towers and the fall of Lehman Brothers, that global order had crumbled. Two factors were crucial. By the end of a decade of continuous warfare, the US had succeeded in exposing the limits, rather than the extent, of its military power. And the neoliberal capitalist model that had reigned supreme for a generation had crashed.

It was the reaction of the US to 9/11 that broke the sense of invincibility of the world’s first truly global empire. The Bush administration’s wildly miscalculated response turned the atrocities in New York and Washington into the most successful terror attack in history.

Not only did Bush’s war fail on its own terms, spawning terrorists across the world, while its campaign of killings, torture and kidnapping discredited Western claims to be guardians of human rights. But the US-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq revealed the inability of the global behemoth to impose its will on subject peoples prepared to fight back. That became a strategic defeat for the US and its closest allies.

This passing of the unipolar moment was the first of four decisive changes that transformed the world – in some crucial ways for the better. The second was the fallout from the crash of 2008 and the crisis of the western-dominated capitalist order it unleashed, speeding up relative US decline.

This was a crisis made in America and deepened by the vast cost of its multiple wars. And its most devastating impact was on those economies whose elites had bought most enthusiastically into the neoliberal orthodoxy of deregulated financial markets and unfettered corporate power.

A voracious model of capitalism forced down the throats of the world as the only way to run a modern economy, at a cost of ballooning inequality and environmental degradation, had been discredited – and only rescued from collapse by the greatest state intervention in history. The baleful twins of neoconservatism and neoliberalism had been tried and tested to destruction.

The failure of both accelerated the rise of China, the third epoch-making change of the early 21st century. Not only did the country’s dramatic growth take hundreds of millions out of poverty, but its state-driven investment model rode out the west’s slump, making a mockery of market orthodoxy and creating a new centre of global power. That increased the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states.

China’s rise widened the space for the tide of progressive change that swept Latin America – the fourth global advance. Across the continent, socialist and social-democratic governments were propelled to power, attacking economic and racial injustice, building regional independence and taking back resources from corporate control. Two decades after we had been assured there could be no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, Latin Americans were creating them.

These momentous changes came, of course, with huge costs and qualifications. The US will remain the overwhelmingly dominant military power for the foreseeable future; its partial defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for in death and destruction on a colossal scale; and multipolarity brings its own risks of conflict. The neoliberal model was discredited, but governments tried to refloat it through savage austerity programmes. China’s success was bought at a high price in inequality, civil rights and environmental destruction. And Latin America’s US-backed elites remained determined to reverse the social gains, as they succeeded in doing by violent coup in Honduras in 2009. Such contradictions also beset the revolutionary upheaval that engulfed the Arab world in 2010-11, sparking another shift of global proportions.

By then, Bush’s war on terror had become such an embarrassment that the US government had to change its name to “overseas contingency operations”. Iraq was almost universally acknowledged to have been a disaster, Afghanistan a doomed undertaking. But such chastened realism couldn’t be further from how these campaigns were regarded in the western mainstream when they were first unleashed.

To return to what was routinely said by British and US politicians and their tame pundits in the aftermath of 9/11 is to be transported into a parallel universe of toxic fantasy. Every effort was made to discredit those who rejected the case for invasion and occupation – and would before long be comprehensively vindicated.

Michael Gove, now a Tory cabinet minister, poured vitriol on the Guardian for publishing a full debate on the attacks, denouncing it as a “Prada-Meinhof gang” of “fifth columnists”. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun damned those warning against war as “anti-American propagandists of the fascist left”. When the Taliban regime was overthrown, Blair issued a triumphant condemnation of those (myself included) who had opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and war on terror. We had, he declared, “proved to be wrong”.

A decade later, few could still doubt that it was Blair’s government that had “proved to be wrong”, with catastrophic consequences. The US and its allies would fail to subdue Afghanistan, critics predicted. The war on terror would itself spread terrorism. Ripping up civil rights would have dire consequences – and an occupation of Iraq would be a blood-drenched disaster.

The war party’s “experts”, such as the former “viceroy of Bosnia” Paddy Ashdown, derided warnings that invading Afghanistan would lead to a “long-drawn-out guerrilla campaign” as “fanciful”. More than 10 years on, armed resistance was stronger than ever and the war had become the longest in American history.

It was a similar story in Iraq – though opposition had by then been given voice by millions on the streets. Those who stood against the invasion were still accused of being “appeasers”. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted the war would last six days. Most of the Anglo-American media expected resistance to collapse in short order. They were entirely wrong.

A new colonial-style occupation of Iraq would, I wrote in the first week of invasion, “face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone” and the occupiers “be driven out”. British troops did indeed face unrelenting attacks until they were forced out in 2009, as did US regular troops until they were withdrawn in 2011.

But it wasn’t just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense. For 30 years, the west’s elites insisted that only deregulated markets, privatisation and low taxes on the wealthy could deliver growth and prosperity.

Long before 2008, the “free market” model had been under fierce attack: neoliberalism was handing power to unaccountable banks and corporations, anti-corporate globalisation campaigners argued, fuelling poverty and social injustice and eviscerating democracy – and was both economically and ecologically unsustainable.

In contrast to New Labour politicians who claimed “boom and bust” to be a thing of the past, critics dismissed the idea that the capitalist trade cycle could be abolished as absurd. Deregulation, financialisation and the reckless promotion of debt-fuelled speculation would, in fact, lead to crisis.

The large majority of economists who predicted that the neoliberal model was heading for breakdown were, of course, on the left. So while in Britain the main political parties all backed “light-touch regulation” of finance, its opponents had long argued that City liberalisation threatened the wider economy.

Critics warned that privatising public services would cost more, drive down pay and conditions and fuel corruption. Which is exactly what happened. And in the European Union, where corporate privilege and market orthodoxy were embedded into treaty, the result was ruinous. The combination of liberalised banking with an undemocratic, lopsided and deflationary currency union that critics (on both left and right in this case) had always argued risked breaking apart was a disaster waiting to happen. The crash then provided the trigger.

The case against neoliberal capitalism had been overwhelmingly made on the left, as had opposition to the US-led wars of invasion and occupation. But it was strikingly slow to capitalise on its vindication over the central controversies of the era. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given the loss of confidence that flowed from the left’s 20th-century defeats – including in its own social alternatives.

But driving home the lessons of these disasters was essential if they were not to be repeated. Even after Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror was pursued in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks from Pakistan to Somalia. The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.

And while neoliberalism had been discredited, western governments used the crisis to try to entrench it. Not only were jobs, pay and benefits cut as never before, but privatisation was extended still further. Being right was, of course, never going to be enough. What was needed was political and social pressure strong enough to turn the tables of power.

Revulsion against a discredited elite and its failed social and economic project steadily deepened after 2008. As the burden of the crisis was loaded on to the majority, the spread of protests, strikes and electoral upheavals demonstrated that pressure for real change had only just begun. Rejection of corporate power and greed had become the common sense of the age.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm described the crash of 2008 as a “sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin wall”. It was commonly objected that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.

The same would be true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions.

The upheavals of the first years of the 21st century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order, and of genuine social and economic change. As communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered 20 years later, nothing is ever settled.

This is an edited extract from The Revenge of History: the Battle for the 21st Century by Seumas Milne, published by Verso. Buy it for £16 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

continue reading source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/19/new-world-order

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Afghanistan, Canada, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Military, Misc, Palestine, Syria, Uncategorized

Salafism and Arab Democratization

October 2, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

Salafism and Arab Democratization

By Kamran Bokhari
Vice President of Middle Eastern & South Asian Affairs
October 2, 2012 | 0900 GMT

The outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 brought significant attention to groups — known as Islamists — seeking to establish Islamic states in countries once ruled by secular autocrats. The bulk of this attention went to already established political groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which caused consternation in the West when its Freedom and Justice Party won control of both Egypt’s parliament and its presidency.

Much less attention was paid to the Brotherhood’s principal Islamist competitors, members of the ultraconservative Salafist movement, despite their second-place finish in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. This changed in late September when certain Salafists played a key role in the unrest in reaction to an anti-Islamic video posted on the Internet.

Since then, Salafism has become the subject of much public discourse — though as is often the case with unfamiliar subjects, questions are vastly more numerous than answers. This is compounded by the rapidity of its rise from a relatively minor, apolitical movement to an influential Islamist phenomenon.

Origins and Goals of Salafism

Modern Salafism is based on an austere reinterpretation of Islam, calling for Muslims to return to the original teachings outlined in the Koran and the practices of the Prophet Mohammed as understood by the earliest generation, i.e., the Companions of the Prophet. From the Salafist perspective, non-Islamic thought has contaminated the message of “true” Islam for centuries, and this excess must be jettisoned from the Islamic way of life.

Salafists are a minority among the global Muslim population and even among Islamists. Unlike members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists do not belong to a singular organization. Instead, the movement comprises a diffuse agglomeration of neighborhood preachers, societal groups and — only very recently — political parties, none of which are necessarily united in ideology.

In many ways, Salafism can be seen as a rejection of the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. For most of the movement’s existence, it shunned politics — and thus Islamism — in favor of a focus on personal morality and individual piety, arguing that an Islamic state could not exist without Muslims first returning to the tenets of “true” Islam. This means Salafism also was at odds with the concept of jihadism — itself a violent offshoot of Salafism — as practiced by groups such as al Qaeda that sought to use force to manifest their Islamist ideology.

The Salafist movement could also afford to stay away from political activism in large part because it had a political backer in the government of Saudi Arabia. While many Salafists didn’t agree with some of Riyadh’s policies, its historical role as the birthplace of Salafism and role as the patron underwriting the global spread of Salafist thought kept the movement within the Saudi orbit.

This remained the case until the 1991 Gulf War, in which Saudi Arabia was forced to allow some 500,000 U.S. troops into the kingdom to protect itself from Baathist Iraq, after the latter’s brief occupation of Kuwait. The move caused an uproar over the religious legitimacy of allowing non-Muslim soldiers on what many consider to be holy grounds, and it also gave way to a wider debate about the political state of affairs of the Saudi kingdom. Prominent scholars began publicly calling for reform, which led to Salafists in general engaging in political discourse and, eventually, to the concept of Salafism as an Islamist philosophy.

Nevertheless, Salafists would not become a political force for another two decades, simply because it takes time for an apolitical religious movement to develop a political philosophy. At the same time, the Saudi leadership was rallying the country’s religious establishment to contain these newly politicized Salafists. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. actions against jihadism further advanced Salafist thought as the sect tried to hold on to its core values amid U.S.-led international pressure for reform, distinguish itself from jihadists and come up with a viable political alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Arab Spring

By the end of the 2000s, Salafism had spread across the Arab world, most notably to Egypt and Tunisia, expanding both the number of its adherents and its institutional scope, which now included social organizations engaged in charity, relief and community work. They stopped short of formal political groups, largely because of the autocratic regimes under which they lived, but they quietly developed the infrastructure for such groups. It was under these circumstances that the Salafists found themselves at the beginning of the Arab Spring.

The case of Egypt’s Salafists is the most telling. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, they were caught unprepared when the popular agitation largely led by liberal youth groups broke out and began to consume decades-old secular autocratic regimes. While they eventually were able to overshadow the largely non-Islamist forces that played a key role in forcing the ouster of then-President Hosni Mubarak, they lacked the political machine that the Brotherhood had developed over the course of some 80 years. The result was the rise of various Salafist forces haphazardly trying to assert themselves in a post-authoritarian Egypt.

Several Egyptian Salafist groups applied for licenses to form political parties. Two prominent parties — al-Nour and al-Asala — emerged along with a host of individuals, such as Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, who ran as an independent candidate for president. The two Salafist parties banded together with the newly formed political wing of the former jihadist group Gamaa al-Islamiya — the Building and Development Party — to form the Islamist Bloc. The alliance was able to garner more than a quarter of ballots cast in the parliamentary polls late last year, coming in second place behind the Brotherhood.

What was most important about these Salafists participating in mainstream politics is that they embraced the electoral process after decades of having denounced democracy as un-Islamic. In other words, they ultimately adopted the approach of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they had hitherto vehemently rejected. This transformation has been more a rushed affair stemming from expediency rather than a natural ideological evolution.

There is an expectation that radical forces joining the political mainstream could, over time, lead to their de-radicalization. That may be true in the case of states with strong democratic systems, but in most Arab countries — which are just now beginning their journey away from authoritarianism — the Salafist embrace of electoral politics is likely to delay and perhaps even disrupt the democratization process and destabilize Egypt and by extension the region.

Much of this chaos will stem from the fact that the move to accept democratic politics has led to further fragmentation of the Salafist landscape. Many Salafists still are not comfortable with democracy, and those who have cautiously adopted it are divided into many factions. The result is that no one Salafist entity can speak for the bulk of the sect.

What Lies Ahead

Clearly, the Salafists are bereft of any tradition of civil dissent. That said, they have exhibited a strong sense of urgency to exercise their nascent freedom and engage in political activism. The outcome of this was the rioting that took place in reaction to the anti-Islamic film.

The Salafists are not just suffering from arrested political development; they face an intellectual discrepancy. On one hand, they wish to be part of the new democratic order and a mainstream player. On the other, they subscribe to a radical agenda that dictates the imposition of their stern interpretation of Islamic law across the Arab and Muslim world.

Their envisioned order is not just a problem for secularists, Christians, Jews and other minorities but also for more moderate Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood lost its monopoly on Islamism close to four decades ago but back then it didn’t matter because the Brotherhood was an opposition movement. Now that the group has won political power in Egypt, the Salafists represent a threat to its political interests.

Some of the more politically savvy Salafists, especially the political parties, are willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood toward the common goals of furthering the democratic transition and containing radical and militant tendencies. Ultimately, however, they seek to exploit the Brotherhood’s pragmatism in order to undermine the mainstream Islamist movement’s support among religious voters. Additionally, the Salafists are also trying to make use of their role as mediators between the Brotherhood-led government and the jihadists active in the Sinai region to enhance their bargaining power and lessen the Brotherhood’s.

Salafists — whether they operate through legal means or through raw street power — can be expected to create problems for Egypt’s new government led by President Mohammed Morsi, especially when it comes to foreign policy matters. A prime example is the recent case of the film-related violence, during which Morsi had a difficult time balancing the need to placate the masses at home and maintain a working relationship with the United States, upon which Egypt relies for its economic well-being. While the anger over the film is a passing phenomenon, the underlying dynamic persists.

There is also no shortage of issues for right-wing Islamists to exploit. U.S. imperatives in the region will continue to place the Morsi government in a tight spot and provide reasons for the Salafists to oppose Cairo’s policies. Even more volatile than the dealings between the Morsi administration and Washington will be Israeli-Egyptian relations.

So far, Morsi has managed to avoid dealing too directly with Israel. But the Egyptian president and the Brotherhood cannot avoid this for too long. They know that they will face situations where they could be caught between the need to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and deal with Salafists taking advantage of the widespread anti-Israeli sentiment among Egyptians. This is one of the reasons Morsi and his associates have been speaking of revising the peace treaty with Israel, which is an attempt to manage the inevitable backlash on the home front.

Egypt’s difficulties are particularly pronounced given the country’s status as the leader of the Arab world, but Salafists of various stripes are slowly emerging as political stakeholders across the region, especially in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Democratization by its very nature is a messy affair in any context, but in the case of the Arab spring, Salafist entities can be expected to complicate political transitions and undermine stability and security in the Middle East.

The major challenge to stability in the Arab world thus lies only partially in the transition to democracy from autocracy. Greater than that is the challenge mainstream Islamists face from a complex and divided Salafist movement.

“Salafism and Arab Democratization is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

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Canada, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Israel, Syria, Uncategorized

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s Annual Awards Dinner

September 28, 2012 @opHarper 1 Comment

28 September 2012
New York City, New York

Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered the following remarks at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s Annual Awards Dinner:

“Thank you very much Rabbi Schneier, Chairman Chenevert, Louis; my colleagues Ministers Baird, Kent, Fantino,Ablonczy; Parliamentary Secretary Obhrai; Senator Wallin; Ambassadors Doer and Rishchynski; High Commissioner Campbell; Consul General Prado; my fellow award winners Vikram Pandit and Virginia Rometty; all the honoured guests of our head table and distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen.

“First, I want to begin by thanking Henry Kissinger for that generous introduction.

“I have to say Dr. Kissinger, I am of course aware not only of your immense contributions to your country and international relations, but I have long been an admirer.

“I have to tell you, I have been an admirer indeed since before I was old enough to vote.

“So being able to share the stage with you and to be introduced really does mean a great deal to me.

“I’m also, of course, honoured and want to thank Rabbi Schneier for the fact that we are all here tonight.

“I don’t just refer to this large and impressive gathering, but more particularly to the cause for which you have brought it together and have brought it together for so many years.

“In a globe of conflicting and complex and competing interests, it is far too easy to set aside the silent and subtle appeals of the conscience.

“But, if we do, the world is lost.

“You have made it your life work to take the horrors of your own experience and to use them to remind us of something truly hopeful: the freedom and human dignity of every person.

“And so you have our admiration and our appreciation!

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it is upon this foundation – of freedom and human dignity – that Canada seeks, in an uncertain world to articulate a foreign policy built on certain principles.

“These principles are rooted in our own country’s ancient heritage and long practice of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

“But it is more than that.

“On foreign affairs, there is a widely shared consensus among Canadians, a generosity of spirit that one might describe as a simple desire for fair play.

“We Canadians, for example, are very conscious of our own sovereignty and we expect our governments to make pragmatic decisions in Canada’s national interest.

“But we also want those governments to be good world citizens, to try to understand other points of view and to act in concert with our partners, for the wider interests of humanity.

“That is, of course, not the same thing, friends, as trying to court every dictator with a vote at the United Nations or just going along with every emerging international consensus, no matter how self-evidently wrong-headed.

“When confronted with evil in the world, we do take a stand, we take strong, principled positions in our dealings, whether popular or not.

“And that is what the world has counted on from Canada – and received – in two world wars, in Korea, in a generation of peacekeeping operations, Gulf War One, and of course, most recently in Afghanistan and also in Libya.

“Finally, I came to tell you that Canadians are proud, fiercely proud, of the reputation we have established for both a competitive economy and a compassionate society, and for the unparalleled combination of cultural diversity and harmony which draws to us people of all nations.

“In short, ladies and gentlemen, I come here tonight to accept your award, not for any qualities of my own, but on behalf of the unique and magnificent country that I have the privilege of leading.

“Among the many assets of Canada is its neighbourhood.

“That is to say that Canada has only one real neighbour, and it is the best neighbour any nation could possibly have.

“Now Rabbi, we do remember that 200 years ago this year began the last war between our two countries, the war that effectively established our independence.

“That our comparatively small country has since lived in secure peace and growing prosperity for almost two centuries is a testament to the enduring strength and the essential benevolence of the United States of America.

“So thank you for our great partnership and for your unwavering friendship.

“And, friends, allow me in this vein to offer you, let me offer you our unequivocal condemnation and outrage over the recent anti-American riots around your embassies and the deadly attack upon your consulate in Libya, and the deep sympathies of the Canadian people for all who lost friends and loved ones in that violent event.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to want I want to do tonight which is a brief reflection on the state of the world in which we live and the state of our values in the world in which we live.

“I referred a few moments ago to our uncertain world.

“What are the uncertainties and what are their consequences?

“The years through which we are now passing seem to be times of extraordinary change, as if some great hand is spinning the wheel of history.

“Nations with a history of shared values, like many of our friends in Europe, are weighed down by debts they cannot seem to control, by entitlements they can no longer afford, and by sluggish economies that show few signs of growth.

“Meanwhile, new powers are rising, whose commitments to our ideals are often neither firm nor clear.

“What appears to some a hopeful spring for democracy quickly becomes an angry summer of populism.

“Old resentments seem to come back to life, energizing groups who advocate terror and dangerous, rogue states seek nuclear weapons.

“Of course, these great global changes often present us global opportunities.

“The world is probably a freer and more democratic place today when I look at it than at any point in my lifetime.

“Yet, paradoxically, rarely has the future of the free and democratic world been less secure.

“As I said, some new powers are neither sure friends nor implacable foes.

“Because these are perhaps the most difficult, the hardest to evaluate, I will not elaborate on them here other than to say, it is ever important in interacting with them that we clearly understand and always remember what we are dealing with.

“Other countries, however, constitute unambiguously a clear and present danger and thus demand a very sober assessment.

“First among these is the Government of Iran.

“I speak not merely, friends, of its appalling record of human rights abuse or its active assistance to the brutal regime in Syria, or its undeniable support for terrorist entities, or its continued denial of diplomatic rights, or its pursuit of nuclear weapons, rather it is the combination of all these things with a truly malevolent ideology that should concern us.

“I believe that the appeal of our conscience requires us to speak out against what the Iranian regime stands for.

“Likewise, it requires us to speak in support of the country that its hatred most immediately threatens, the State of Israel.

“Now friends, in supporting Israel, we don’t sanction every policy its government pursues.

“When, however, it is the one country of the global community whose very existence is threatened, our Government does refuse to use international fora to single out Israel for criticism.

“And it is important to state, that whatever Israel’s shortcomings, neither its existence nor its policies are responsible for the pathologies present in that part of the world.

“And we are also mindful of an lesson of history, that those who single out the Jewish people as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us.

“Indeed, those who so target Israel today are, by their own words and deeds, also a threat to all free and democratic societies.

“Now friends, I say these things not to counsel any particular action, not to wish any additional hardship on the long-suffering Iranian people and certainly not to advocate war, but rather so that we not shrink from recognizing evil in the world for what it is.

“Our Government simply contends that the international community must do more, must do all it can, to further pressure and isolate this regime.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let me just conclude with this.

“We should never consider others evil merely because they disagree with us or because they compete with us.

“But where evil dominates, you will invariably find irreconcilable disagreement with the ideals that animate Canada, America and like-minded nations, the ideals which assert that all people possess human dignity and should be accorded equal rights.

“It is not for Canada to lecture others, but it is the responsibility of our Government to make the choices that circumstances force upon us, and these are the choices we shall make.

“First, we shall choose our friends well.

“And our true friends are those who to their core both respect the will of their majority and the rights of their minorities.

“Second, we shall deal openly and fairly with those who may not be our friends, but we will not deceive ourselves about those relationships.

“And we shall not sacrifice our guiding principles in the interests of some transient advantage.

“Third, we shall endeavour to recognize clear and unequivocal threats and we shall speak out against them when they stand before us.

“And finally this, for ourselves, we shall strive to manage our own house, our economy and our finances, in such a way that our own freedom of action is not compromised.

”Because we must remember that the ideals for which we stand may be invaluable, but they are not invincible.

“They require our countries to be vigilant and well governed.

“And they require us to forever impress their privileged nature upon our successive generations.

“We therefore must hold on to them ourselves and teach them to our children.

“We must speak of democracy in our schools.

“We must praise freedom as we go out and justice as we come in.

“We must value our institutions and their endurance.

“And we must cherish the individual rights for which our ancestors bled and inscribe upon our hearts, the vision of citizens who know what it is to live without fear.

“For in the end, that is the mark of liberty.

“My friends, if we do these things, our nations shall endure and shall continue to inspire others.

“And those of us to whom leadership has been entrusted will have done all that can be expected of them.

“Thank you very much for having me, for the honour you’ve extended, for your invitation this evening.”

source: http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=3&featureId=6&pageId=49&id=5052

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Canada, Uncategorized, Women

When was Rona Ambrose last asked about her status of women file?

September 28, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

When was Rona Ambrose last asked about her status of women file?

by Laura Payton Posted: September 28, 2012 5:06 PM Last Updated: September 28, 2012 5:39 PM

On Wednesday, Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose voted in favour of a motion that would have created a parliamentary committee to study the Criminal Code definition of when life begins. Motion 312, presented by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth, was defeated 203 to 91.In the House of Commons Thursday, Ambrose was questioned about her vote and said this:

This is the first question I’ve received on the status of women file this year. In fact, I think this is the first question I’ve received since last year as well. And you know why that is? Because this government has an incredible track record for standing up for Canadian women. We have increased funding for Status of Women to its highest point in Canadian history and so far in just a couple of years, we’ve funded over 550 projects from coast to coast to coast to tackle violence against women and empower women and girls and we’ll continue to do just that.

Asked to clarify what Ambrose meant by “this year” — in the two weeks since MPs returned from the summer break? Since Jan. 1, 2012? Since Sept. 27, 2011? — a spokeswoman for her office explained that she had couched it in “I think” and wouldn’t answer specific questions about when the last question had been posed.

The spokeswoman said she would have to spend a day going through Hansard to figure it out.

continue reading source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-politics-blog/2012/09/when-was-rona-ambrose-last-asked-about-her-status-of-women-file.html

Laura Payton Laura has been covering politics since 2007, working in a number of newsrooms around Parliament Hill. Originally from Saskatchewan, she studied journalism at Carleton University and then briefly covered crime and animal stories in Vancouver before missing politics and returning to the capital. When not chasing politicians down hallways, she’s trying out new recipes or watching bad reality TV.

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Canada, Foreign Policy, Iran, Uncategorized

Foreign Affairs paid $2M for study on threats to embassies

September 15, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

The Canadian Press
Posted: Sep 15, 2012

The Foreign Affairs Department paid almost $2 million to an international security firm for a sweeping intelligence study of potential threats to Canada’s foreign embassies.

The assessment would have undoubtedly informed the Harper government’s decision to close its embassy in Tehran last week.

The contract was awarded earlier this year to Control Risks Group, a company that boasts 34 offices across the world, and a network of government, police, aid groups and media.

Neither the company nor Foreign Affairs would comment specifically on the nature of the work done.

The government has said repeatedly that the safety of its diplomats was the primary reason for pulling out of the Iranian capital.

Canada shut its Cairo embassy for a day on Thursday after anti-U.S. riots broke out in Egypt, Libya and Yemen over an American film that denigrates the prophet Muhammad. An attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, claimed the life of its ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three American embassy co-workers.

$2M for work done in under 10 weeks

According to the government’s procurement notice, Foreign Affairs was looking for an intelligence firm to describe possible threats to its diplomatic corps from terrorism, instability and natural disasters in 174 countries, including 46 major cities.

The government paid $1,997,903 for work done between Jan. 25 and March 31. The government was willing to spend up to $5 million for the Baseline Threat Assessment, or BTA, comprised of 15- to 30-page documents for each country.

The government put out the call for tenders in December, one month after the British embassy in Tehran was stormed by an angry mob. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has cited the attack on the British mission as one of the reasons for the Tehran pullout.

Baird said Friday that planning on the Iranian embassy withdrawal had been underway for several months.

The BTAs were to give a ranking in seven categories: political instability; criminality; terrorism/insurgency; conflict zones; natural disasters; the health environment; and the general environment — “e.g. fatalities, cultural constraints.”

The government called for the study to assign labels of “low, medium, high and critical” to each of those seven categories.

The government wanted the BTAs to be “living documents, which will allow the department to assess the vulnerability of government of Canada assets abroad (people, programs, infrastructure) and determine appropriate security safeguards.”

Angry anti-U.S. protests have spread to 20 more countries, including Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I’m obviously very concerned with what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa. As I’ve said before, our diplomatic personnel are not military, they are not paid to put their lives on the line,” Harper said Friday.

“It’s my responsibility to ensure that our people are protected. Obviously we’ve closed one mission that’s in Iran where we thought the risks are particularly high.”

On its website, Control Risks says it provides strategic security advice to companies, governments and non-profit organizations.

“Our services range from providing strategic consultancy, through to expert analysis and in-depth investigations, to handling sensitive political issues, to practical on the ground protection and support,” the company says.

“Whatever the nature of the political, security or integrity risk facing our clients, Control Risks can tailor an effective solution that will meet their exact requirements.”

The 2010 federal budget set aside $450 million over seven years for the Security Abroad Strategy to bolster security at Canada’s foreign embassies.

source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/09/15/pol-canadian-embassies-security-study.html

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Canada, Ideology, Immigration, Media, Military, Police State, Sovereignty, Uncategorized

Under this PM, the state is everywhere

September 10, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Lawrence Martin
Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Monday, Sep. 10 2012, 10:46 AM EDT

What does the Grey Cup football game have to do with the Canadian military? Not much, you say. True enough. But chalk up another public-relations triumph for the governing Conservatives. They turned the opening ceremonies of our annual sports classic into a military glorification exercise.

For our part in the NATO Libya campaign, the Defence Minister took bows on the field. A Canadian flag was spread over 40 yards. Cannons boomed.

The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instill. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper’s governance, is becoming all-intrusive.

Conservatism, as defined by Ronald Reagan, was about getting government off the backs of the people. Conservatism, as practised by team Harper, is more akin to an Orwellian opposite. State controls are now at a highpoint in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.

The propaganda machine has become mammoth and unrelenting. The parliamentary newspaper The Hill Times recently found there are now no fewer than 1,500 communications staffers on the governing payroll. In the days of the King and St. Laurent governments, there were hardly any. In recent decades, the numbers shot up, but Mr. Harper is outdoing all others, a primary example being his institution and maintenance of a master control system wherein virtually every government communication is filtered through central command.

In his minority governments, the rationale was that tight controls were necessary for survival. With a majority, it was thought that the controls that brought on parliamentary shutdowns and contempt of Parliament rulings would ease up. Those who thought that way didn’t know Stephen Harper.

continue reading source: http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/under-this-pm-the-state-is-everywhere/article4179640/?service=mobile

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APEC, Canada, Economic, Iran, Russia, Sovereignty, Syria, Trade, Uncategorized

Harper and Putin talk tough on trade, Mideast, but warm up over hockey

September 8, 2012 @opHarper 39 Comments

Mark MacKinnon
Vladivostok, Russia — The Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Sep. 08 2012, 7:49 AM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Sep. 08 2012, 4:08 PM EDT

‘There’s lots of things that Mr. Putin and our government do not necessarily agree on, but our conversations are extremely frank on these issues,’ Canadian Prime Minister says.

At least there was hockey to talk about.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Russian President Vladimir Putin reminisced briefly but warmly about the epochal hockey series 40 years ago between Canada and the Soviet Union during a bilateral meeting Saturday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.

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It was the only time the two leaders found common ground during a meeting marked by disagreements about policy toward Iran and Syria, as well as the unimpressive Canada-Russia trade relationship.

The meeting – the first tête-à-tête between Mr. Putin and Mr. Harper since 2007 – began awkwardly with Mr. Putin running more than an hour late because of a packed schedule of other bilateral meetings. Mr. Harper then made Mr. Putin wait several minutes before finally entering the meeting room to stiff smiles and handshakes.

“I’ll just say the tone with Mr. Putin, you know, there’s a lot of things, it’s not a secret, there’s lots of things that Mr. Putin and our government do not necessarily agree on,” Mr. Harper told reporters afterward, “but I’ll always say that our conversations are extremely frank on these issues.”

Mr. Harper said he spent part of the 50-minute meeting trying to encourage Mr. Putin to end its support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin has provided diplomatic cover for Mr. al-Assad as he has used his army to try to crush the 18-month rebellion, using its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block resolutions designed to pressure the regime.

“I did bring up Syria of course. Obviously, the government of Russia and ourselves have very different perspectives on this. Our view is pretty clear that as long as Assad remains in power, practising brutality against his citizens, the situation is going to become more and more desperate and more chaotic for everybody. And that’s why he needs to go and, obviously, Mr. Putin has a different perspective. But I urged Mr. Putin to play a more positive role.”

Mr. Harper said he also encouraged Mr. Putin to continue to pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

Disputes over issues in the Middle East have started to affect the broader ties between Ottawa and Moscow. In a letter to Canadian delegates attending the APEC conference, Canadian ambassador to Russia John Sloan wrote that “because of the disagreements on Syria and other issues, our political relationship is in something of a holding pattern.”

It’s unlikely Mr. Harper managed to change the Russian President’s mind on Saturday. In an interview broadcast on Russian television this week ahead of the opening of the APEC summit, Mr. Putin gave a combative defence of his country’s policies in the Middle East.

“How come Russia is the only one who’s expected to revise its stand? Don’t you think our counterparts in negotiations ought to revise theirs as well? Because if we look back at the events in the past few years, we’ll see that quite a few of our counterparts’ initiatives have not played out the way they were intended to,” he told RT television. “Look at what’s going on in Arab countries. There have been notable developments in Egypt. Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, etc. Would you say that order and prosperity have been totally ensured for these nations? And what’s going on in Iraq?”

Mr. Putin seemed more interested in discussing the anemic trade between Canada and Russia than Mr. Harper’s thoughts about the Middle East. Hosting the APEC summit in Vladivostok – a port city of 600,000 that was a closed military base during the Soviet era – is part of a Kremlin push to deepen its engagement with the Asia-Pacific region, a task made urgent by the economic crisis in Europe.

In brief remarks before reporters were ushered out of the room, Mr. Putin lamented the fact that while the potential for Canada-Russia trade was “huge,” the two countries had not yet been able to elevate their economic relationship to the level Russia would like. “Unfortunately, in absolute figures, the value remains limited,” he said.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail ahead of the APEC summit, Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast – who led a trade mission to Moscow in June – said Canada wanted to expand trade with Russia, but “Canadian businesses are still concerned about the investment climate. When Canadian businesses invest abroad, they look for certainty, they look for predictability and they look for the security of their investment.”

In his remarks about the Canada-USSR hockey series, Mr. Putin particularly praised the Canadian players as “true goodwill ambassadors” for travelling to Russia this week to mark the anniversary. In particular, he asked Mr. Harper to pass on his thanks to them for playing a memorial game in the city of Yaroslavl, whose hockey team, Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, was wiped out in a plane crash a year ago.

Mr. Harper called the 1972 series “the beginning of our modern cultural relations.”

continue reading: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/harper-and-putin-talk-tough-on-trade-mideast-but-warm-up-over-hockey/article4529251/

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Doug Saunders By cutting ties with Iran, we just shot ourself in the foot

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Afghanistan, Canada, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Israel, Libya, Syria, Uncategorized

By cutting ties with Iran, we just shot ourself in the foot

September 8, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Doug Saunders
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, September 08 2012

The boxy red-brick building on Metcalfe Street looks more like a medium-security prison than an embassy, and its air of menace extends beyond its architectural design and impenetrable gates.

Iranian Canadians have long believed that Tehran’s outpost in Ottawa is used to spy on their activities, in less than subtle ways, and occasionally to send intimidating messages to expats.

That sort of subterfuge, if it got out of hand, might have been a good reason to expel Iran’s ambassador to Canada. Likewise, the torture killing of Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi in 2003 and its subsequent cover-up were good reasons to withdraw Canada’s ambassador from Tehran.

But those were not the sorts of reasons given by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird on Friday when he tried to explain the extraordinary step he had just taken of cutting diplomatic relations with Iran, closing Canada’s embassy in Tehran and expelling Iran’s diplomatic staff from Ottawa.

Instead, Mr. Baird said, at some length, that Canada simply does not like Iran. The Islamic Republic supports Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in his brutal crackdown against rebels. It continues to be dishonest with the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear programs. It backs dangerous organizations, including terrorist groups, in Lebanon and Afghanistan. Its loudmouth president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, often rails against Israel and Jews and doesn’t treat leaders and diplomats with respect.

Mr. Baird even went so far as to claim that the current government of Iran is “the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.” Even if that were true, it would not be a reason to sever diplomatic ties – in fact, it would be a very good reason to maintain them.

Closing an embassy is rarely done even in moments of hostility. By its very nature, it prevents the possibility of further relations with the country in question, good or bad, influential or ineffective. Messages of protest, off-record moves to quell an eruption, clandestine efforts to build relations with reformists within the regime – all of these options are no longer possible. Once you’ve pulled the plug, you’re out of the game.

Libya’s embassy in Ottawa was more menacing than Iran’s has ever been – it employed goons in Moammar Gadhafi’s intelligence agency to infiltrate visiting students, follow them daily, and sometimes threaten to kill their families.

Even after Libyan embassies in other countries had fallen to anti-Gadhafi rebels last year, the Ottawa mission remained firmly loyal to the dictator. Yet, Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t order it closed until August of 2011, after Canada and its NATO partners had been at war with Libya for months. Up to that point, it made sense to maintain the embassy: It was a vital channel to the regime.

Iran is a deeply troubled country controlled by a religious dictatorship and an elected president who have little respect for international agreements. Yet, these are matters of diplomacy, negotiation and sanctions – and Iran’s leadership is factional and fragmented and very likely rejected by a majority of the public, so has genuine potential for movement.

There’s no imminent risk. U.S. intelligence agencies and Israel’s military chief, Benny Gantz, have said recently they believe Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. There’s no suggestion of any Iranian military attack against any other country at the moment. The Iranian menace is all politics and potential.

The crucial milestone in Iran is not the acquisition of nuclear weapons – which, even if they began pursuing them, would be years away. It’s the June 14, 2013, presidential election – which could repeat the crackdowns, reprisals and fraud of the 2009 vote, but also have real potential for leadership change. (Mr. Ahmadinejad, facing a term limit, will not be running.)

Sanctions have the power to sway that vote. So do diplomatic acts. Canada has now abandoned such possibilities.

“This is the first time in decades that a Canadian prime minister, Liberal or Conservative, appears to be advocating approaches that reduce diplomatic opportunities for peace during an international crisis,” Canada’s last full ambassador to Tehran, John Mundy, wrote on this page this year when Stephen Harper began talking about abandoning negotiations. We now have another unfortunate first. The Prime Minister ought to listen to his diplomats.

source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/by-cutting-ties-with-iran-we-just-shot-ourself-in-the-foot/article4527936/

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Economic, Energy, Libya, Sovereignty, Trade, Uncategorized

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

January 6, 2012 @opHarper Leave a comment

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

by Nile Bowie

January 6, 2012

Lagos Dissents Under IMF Hegemony

Nigeria: The Next Front for AFRICOM

On a recent trip to West Africa, the newly appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde ordered the governments of Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad to relinquish vital fuel subsidies. Much to the dismay of the population of these nations, the prices of fuel and transport have near tripled over night without notice, causing widespread violence on the streets of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and its economic center, Lagos. Much like the IMF induced riots in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, public discontent in Nigeria is channelled towards an incompetent and self-serving domestic elite, compliant to the interests of fraudulent foreign institutions.

Although Nigeria holds the most proven oil reserves in Africa behind Libya, it’s people are now expected to pay a fee closer to what the average American pays for the cost of fuel, an exorbitant sum in contrast to its regional neighbours. Alternatively, other oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offer their populations fuel for as little as $0.12 USD per gallon. While Lagos has one of Africa’s highest concentration of billionaires, the vast majority of the population struggle daily on less than $2.00 USD. Amid a staggering 47% youth unemployment rate and thousands of annual deaths related to preventable diseases, the IMF has pulled the rug out from under a nation where safe drinking water is a luxury to around 80% of it’s populace.

Although Nigeria produces 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day intended for export use, the country struggles with generating sufficient electrical power and maintaining its infrastructure. Ironically enough, less than 6% of bank depositors own 88% of all bank deposits in Nigeria. Goldman Sachs employees line its domestic government, in addition to the former Vice President of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is widely considered by many to be the de facto Prime Minister. Even after decades of producing lucrative oil exports, Nigeria has failed to maintain it’s own refineries, forcing it to illogically purchase oil imports from other nations. Society at large has not benefited from Nigeria’s natural riches, so it comes as no surprise that a severe level of distrust is held towards the government, who claims the fuel subsidy needs to be lifted in order to divert funds towards improving the quality of life within the country.

Like so many other nations, Nigerian people have suffered from a systematically reduced living standard after being subjected to the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP). Before a loan can be taken from the World Bank or IMF, a country must first follow strict economic policies, which include currency devaluation, lifting of trade tariffs, the removal of subsidies and detrimental budget cuts to critical public sector health and education services.

SAPs encourage borrower countries to focus on the production and export of domestic commodities and resources to increase foreign exchange, which can often be subject to dramatic fluctuations in value. Without the protection of price controls and an authentic currency rate, extreme inflation and poverty subsist to the point of civil unrest, as seen in a wide array of countries around the world (usually in former colonial protectorates). The people of Nigeria have been one of the world’s most vocal against IMF-induced austerity measures, student protests have been met with heavy handed repression since 1986 and several times since then, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. As a testament to the success of the loan, the average laborer in Nigeria earned 35% more in the 1970’s than he would of in 2012.

Working through the direct representation of Western Financial Institutions and the IMF in Nigeria’s Government, a new IMF conditionality calls for the creation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian Minister of Finance commented on how the SWF was hastily pushed through and enacted prior to the countries national elections. If huge savings are amassed from oil exports and austerity measures, one cannot realistically expect that these funds will be invested towards infrastructure development based on the current track record of the Nigerian Government. Further more, it is increasingly more likely that any proceeds from a SWF would be beneficial to Western institutions and markets, which initially demanded its creation. Nigerian philanthropist Bukar Usman prophetically writes “I have genuine fears that the SWF would serve us no better than other foreign-recommended “remedies” which we had implemented to our own detriment in the past or are being pushed to implement today.”

The abrupt simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies in several West African nations is a clear indication of who is really in charge of things in post-colonial Africa. The timing of its cushion-less implementation could not be any worse, Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency after forty people were killed in a church bombing on Christmas day, an act allegedly committed by the Islamist separatist group, Boko Haram. The group advocates dividing the predominately Muslim northern states from the Christian southern states, a similar predicament to the recent division of Sudan.

As the United States African Command (AFRICOM) begins to gain a foothold into the continent with its troops officially present in Eritrea and Uganda in an effort to maintain security and remove other theocratic religious groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, the sectarian violence in Nigeria provides a convenient pretext for military intervention in the continuing resource war. For further insight into this theory, it is interesting to note that United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania conducted a series of African war game scenarios in preparation for the Pentagon’s expansion of AFRICOM under the Obama Administration.

In the presence of US State Department Officials, employees from The Rand Corporation and Israeli military personnel, a military exercise was undertaken which tested how AFRICOM would respond to a disintegrating Nigeria on the verge of collapse amidst civil war. The scenario envisioned rebel factions vying for control of the Niger Delta oil fields (the source of one of America’s top oil imports), which would potentially be secured by some 20,000 U.S. troops if a US-friendly coup failed to take place At a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward then went on to brazenly state the priority issue of America’s growing dependence on African oil would be furthered by AFRICOM operating under the principle theatre-goal of “combating terrorism“.

At an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM was to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market“, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. After the unwarranted snatch-and-grab regime change conducted in Libya, nurturing economic destabilization, civil unrest and sectarian conflict in Nigeria is an ultimately tangible effort to secure Africa’s second largest oil reserves. During the pillage of Libya, its SFW accounts worth over 1.2 billion USD were frozen and essentially absorbed by Franco-Anglo-American powers; it would realistic to assume that much the same would occur if Nigeria failed to comply with Western interests. While agents of foreign capital have already infiltrated its government, there is little doubt that Nigeria will become a new front in the War on Terror.

:: Article nr. 84585 sent on 07-jan-2012 05:57 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=84585

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Afghanistan, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Israel, Libya, Military, NAU, SPP, Uncategorized, US

Tougher foreign policy vital to Canada: Baird

December 28, 2011 @opHarper Leave a comment

By Lee Berthiaume, Postmedia News
December 28, 2011

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird knows some of his government’s positions on the world stage are unpopular. Supporting Israel and walking away from the Kyoto accord earlier this month are two examples.

Baird won’t apologize for either.

“We don’t develop foreign policy to be popular around the world,” he says in a recent interview with Postmedia News. “Sometimes you’re alone saying something, and then a number of years later, it’s conventional wisdom.”

The refusal to concede on issues of importance to the government is one of the clearest marks that Canada’s approach to world affairs has undergone a dramatic change since the Conservatives first came to power nearly six years ago,

Gone is the so-called “soft power” and “human security agenda” of the previous Liberal government, symbolized by consensus building at the United Nations and diplomatic initiatives like peacekeeping.

In its place is a clear pursuit of interests linked to an uncompromising projection of values backed up by a strong military.

The government’s top concern, says Baird, is Canadian economic prosperity.

“It is a lens through which we view almost anything,” he says. “Foreign policy has become even more important to the economy. It’s really essential.”

The Foreign Affairs Department budget has increased by about $700 million since 2006 to $2.8 billion. Where it has resulted in more feet on the ground, those have largely been trade commissioners in trade offices opened in China, India, Brazil and other economic hotspots.

At the same time, Baird is quick to list the number of free trade and foreign investment agreements being pursued by the government. Perhaps not by coincidence, when Canada’s embassy in Tripoli, Libya reopened in September, the first officials deployed were trade officers, not political and human rights experts.

But nothing is bigger than the United States, and Baird identifies the recent Canada-U.S. border security agreement as the best example of “traditional diplomacy” from the last year.

“It took a solid, personal relationship at the top between the prime minister and the president in order to initiate something, successfully see its conclusion and announce it,” Baird says.

The same is true with the mission in Libya, he adds.

“I think Libya’s a big success because of strong leadership on behalf of the prime minister,” Baird says, though he also praises Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander who oversaw the NATO operation.

In fact, the foreign affairs minister describes Libya as Canada’s biggest diplomatic accomplishment in the past year.

“No doubt the diplomatic work, the coalition-building and the military success in Libya was a big one for Canada,” he says. “How many thousands, tens of thousands, of civilian lives were saved? It’s just a remarkable accomplishment. (Moammar) Gadhafi was just the worst of the worst.”

The Canadian military has emerged as a major player in Canadian foreign policy in recent years, bolstered by the fact the Defence Department budget has increased nearly $5.6 billion to $20.3 billion since the Conservative government came into power. This has included the purchase of new aircraft, ships and armoured vehicles, as well as heavy combat roles in Afghanistan and Libya.

Critics have lamented what they say is the Conservative government’s prioritizing of military power over Canada’s traditional strength, diplomacy.

Sitting in his 10th-floor office at Foreign Affairs headquarters, known in Ottawa circles as Fort Pearson, Baird says the government is simply undoing years of damage wreaked by Liberal governments in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“The military was gutted for 13 years,” he says. “Hollowed out. Even the man the Liberals appointed to be chief of defence staff (Rick Hillier) called it a ‘decade of darkness.’ That didn’t happen here at DFAIT.”

But while the government is preparing to spend billions on new F-35 fighter jets, Baird refuses to rule out the closure of Canadian embassies abroad through budget cuts next year.

“I’m confident within the department we can achieve our mandate,” he says. “If spending is unsustainable, that’s the biggest threat to the public service, that’s the biggest threat to the department.”

Baird’s appointment to the Foreign Affairs portfolio in May came as a surprise to many. Known for his bombastic style in the House of Commons, many wondered whether he would be able to make the transition to becoming Canada’s top diplomat.

Baird says the biggest lesson he’s learned is that nothing matters more in Foreign Affairs than personal relationships.

“When we have an issue, whether it’s in the United States, whether it’s in Turkey, being able to pick up the phone and talk to my counterpart directly about it,” he says.

The country’s failure to land a UN Security Council seat in October 2010, ultimately losing to Portugal, has called into question whether the Conservative government has squandered the goodwill built up over the decades by previous Canadian governments.

Baird initially tries to blame North Korea and Iran, but eventually acknowledges some of the unpopular positions taken by Canada in recent years were a factor in turning away countries in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world.

When asked how he reconciles the importance of strong relationships with the fact a number of positions adopted by the government are unpopular with the international community, Baird indicates those who are most critical of Canada’s stances aren’t likely to be friends anyway.

“We’ve taken a tough stand on human rights in some parts of the world, and that makes some people feel very uncomfortable,” he says. “If you’re a government which doesn’t respect human rights, you’re probably not keen on Canada talking about the rights of women, the rights of religious minorities, the rights of gays and lesbians.”

In recent weeks, Canada has been called out by many nations, including European allies, for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol.

Baird says only a few countries have brought the issue up with him personally, adding that the government is simply leading where other nations will eventually follow.

He says this is exactly what happened with Canadian calls several years ago for all major emitters to be included in whatever climate change agreement is negotiated after Kyoto.

“People may not have liked our position on climate change in 2007, but they’ve adopted it almost wholly across much of the world today,” he said

original source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Tougher+foreign+policy+vital+Canada+Baird/5916863/story.html

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The end of the New World Order

The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

Salafism and Arab Democratization

Salafism and Arab Democratization

Origins and Goals of Salafism

The Arab Spring

What Lies Ahead

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s Annual Awards Dinner

When was Rona Ambrose last asked about her status of women file?

When was Rona Ambrose last asked about her status of women file?

Foreign Affairs paid $2M for study on threats to embassies

$2M for work done in under 10 weeks

Under this PM, the state is everywhere

Harper and Putin talk tough on trade, Mideast, but warm up over hockey

More Related to this Story

More Related to this Story

By cutting ties with Iran, we just shot ourself in the foot

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

by Nile Bowie

Tougher foreign policy vital to Canada: Baird

Canadians Against the Harper Regime [CAHR] Collective Research Collaboration

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The upheavals of the early 21st century have changed our world. Now, in the aftermath of failed wars and economic disasters, pressure for a social alternative can only grow

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Salafism and Arab Democratization

Origins and Goals of Salafism

The Arab Spring

What Lies Ahead

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When was Rona Ambrose last asked about her status of women file?

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$2M for work done in under 10 weeks

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The IMF and US African Command (AFRICOM) Join Hands in the Plunder of the African Continent

by Nile Bowie

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Canadians Against the Harper Regime [CAHR] Collective Research Collaboration