Iran Versus Israel: Who’s Threatening to Nuke Whom?

Iran has never, ever, ever threatened to nuke Israel, nor have they ever, ever threatened to wipe Israel off the map. These are just the fevered dreams, delusions and hallucinations of the Jews and their Islamophobic and Zionist Gentile supporters. It’s all nonsense.

Iran isn’t suicidal. Even if they got a bomb, and of course I support Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon 100%, they would never use it in a first strike against Israel. The notions about a “suicidal Shia regime” are from the panting breaths of super-Jews like Bernard Lewis.

No Arab nation has ever threatened to nuke Israel, nor have they ever threatened to kill all the Israelis. The worst they have advocated is an invasion and conquest of Israel, followed by making the Jews leave. That was Saddam’s position and that is the position of some hardline Palestinians. It’s not even the position of Iran! Even Ahmadinejad says he wants to get rid of the Zionist regime in Israel followed by a single state for everyone in Israel/Palestine. Not one Jew has to leave.

Even Al Qaeda doesn’t advocate killing all the Jews in Israel. Sure, they want to conquer the place, and after that, they say that all the Jews have to take off. But that’s not the same as extermination. This “they are going to do a Holocaust 2 on us” is all coming from the paranoia of the Jews and their Gentile Zionist supporters. There’s no basis for it in reality.

But as we can see in this video, there is one party that is threatening to nuke another party. Israel is threatening to nuke Iran! Sure, they say they will use “tactical nukes,” but they are threatening to use nukes nonetheless. The only nation in the region threatening to nuke another country is Israel.

“We Are All Jews Now,” or the Reasons for the Iraq War

Gay State Girl wrote:

I don’t know why they identify the Iraq war as an exclusively Jewish war. There certainly were Jewish policy makers pulling the strings behind the war, but Jewish politicians, reporters, and entertainers were also among the first outspoken critics of the Iraq war.

Less than 1/4 of American Jews believed it was a good idea. It has effectively been tarred as a Jewish war, and those who believe that are not open to debate. In a way, white gentiles are lucky that Jews dominated the West in its last hour: The blame will ultimately go to those in power.

Neoliberalism, Globalization, secularization, neocolonialism, Radicalism and perversion of traditional values could have all been achieved with white gentiles in power and many rich white gentiles seem eager to jump on the bandwagon or at least cash in on it.

Jewish support for the war on the day of the war was around 58%, but it dropped below 50% shortly after. Nevertheless, the powerful Jews in the US, the money Jews and hardline US Zionism was in back of the war 100%+. For instance the major US Jewish organizations supported the war at the time and probably do to this day.

I read Israeli and Jewish papers in the run-up to the war, and 100% of them supported the war. A good source for hardline Zionism is Debka.com. It’s more or less run by the Mossad or former Mossad agents. I can’t even put into words the intensity with which Debka was pushing for that war. Debka is pretty much the voice of hardline national security Zionism in Israel.

I was on Usenet in Jewish and Israeli Usenet groups, and there was not a single Jewish person who was not pushing the war. And at the time, I was trying to sell a book written by a top official in Saddam’s regime that said there were no weapons of mass destruction. A lot of people were interested in the book. Two of the agents I talked to were violently, I mean violently opposed to the book. Both were Jewish.

Radical Zionists in both the US and Israel were some of the major people pushing the war. The sausage factory cooking up fake evidence was run out of Ariel Sharon’s office. After the US invaded Iraq, Sharon said, “Good, now invade Syria, Libya, Iran and a few other countries.” Israeli military officers and intelligence officers were deeply involved with the neocon group in the Executive Branch that was cooking up the war. All of the major US Jewish organizations were behind the war. The big money Jews were all behind the war.

Jews were some of the loudest and most belligerent voices promoting the war. Thomas Friedman wrote that the war was cooked up in Washington and Tel Aviv by 25 people, most of them Jewish.

That said, the US Right was totally behind the war for a very long time, since the last war really (and this was the principal reason for the war). That radical Zionism was also for the war was more a marriage of convenience than anything else. The US Right has now been taken over by neocons, and most of the US Right are White Gentiles. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, etc. were all pushing this war for a very long time, and Bush did not attack Iraq for Israel! He ain’t that stupid. He did it for his own reasons.

Bush and the leaders of the US Republican Party and rightwing were discussing plans to attack Iraq before Bush even took office. As soon as Bush took office, many people in his administration argued for attacking Iraq. It was something Bush always wanted to do anyway. Saying that the dirty Jews talked the dumb goy Bush into attacking Iraq for the Jews is stupid. These guys are not that dumb. He was going to do it anyway.

Sure, helping Israel was part of the prize, but it wasn’t the main reason. The US does not march off into major wars in the Middle East solely to benefit Israel. I am not sure if we have ever done so. However, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are all deeply tied in with far rightwing Zionism, such as JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It’s full of retired and sitting US military. It has been a longstanding policy of Zionism to tie the US and Israeli militaries together at the hip like Siamese twins, and that is what has been done.

A former Marine officer told me about the Israelis, “We (US national security) got totally infiltrated by (the Israelis) back in the early 1980′s, and they’ve been there ever since. By now, it’s impossible to get rid of them.” Many US national security concerns have been signed over to the Israelis, and Israeli spies, double agents and dual citizens are running amok all over our national security complex.

Support for radical Zionism is now an essential part of US military doctrine, and overwhelmingly, US Gentiles in the security state, the legislative branch and the Executive Branch are now on board with it. So it’s not a bunch of Jews pulling the strings.

It’s more, “We are all Jews now,” Jewmerica, Judeomerica, the Jewnited States of America, USreal, Israel as the 51st state, etc.

This is why I used “USreal” and “Jewmerica” to describe the two countries which are essentially tied together as a single nation at the moment. Jews are only 2% of the US population. They couldn’t have tied the two countries together without a Hell of a lot of Gentile help.

The oil people were initially against the war, but Cheney et al convinced the oil people that the war was a done deal and told them to get on board. They laid out maps of Iraqi oil fields before the war and divided them up. Nevertheless, oil was not the major reason for the war.

The major reason for the war was US politics. It wasn’t a war for Israel or a war for the Jews or any of that crap. Those were decorations on the cake, not part of the main ingredients.

“Obama’s Anti-China Stratagems – Drumbeats Of War,” by Peter Tobin

An excellent piece by Peter Tobin, who is a Marxist, on how US imperialism appears to be threatening China and trying to encircle that country. Indeed, US imperialists are very afraid of China. The motto of the ultra-impieralist neoconservative crowd around George Bush seemed to be “Get China!” Richard Perle, Super-Jew, Cold Warrior and one of the most vicious US imperialists of all, was quoted as saying that if China continued on its present trends of economic and military development, war with the Chinese was probably inevitable within 20 years.

This same crowd, which included Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other punks, also listed Western Europe as a “US enemy” and suggested various projects to screw the Europeans, who were economic competitors.

I have always said that capitalist nations, by their very nature, have no allies, none. They can’t have any, as they out to screw over every other country on Earth. I don’t want to screw over all the other countries. I want to grow together with them. Solidarity over imperialism and realpolitik and Great Games. That’s one reason I’m a socialist.

Lenin was correct. Capitalism leads to imperialism and imperialism leads directly to war. Around World War 1, only the socialists were sounding the alarm, saying that the war was really just a mad capitalist grab for land and resources. They were right; that’s exactly what WW1 was.

Similarly, WW2 was another mad rush for land and resources on the part of the Axis Powers, who were eating sour grapes because they felt they had been locked out of the colonialism game, which the West had fenced off by colonizing most of the world. The Axis said, reasonably enough, “We want colonies too!”

Of course colonialism was always a capitalist and imperialist project. For all the blather about “White man’s burden,” ultimately colonialism was and still is (in its modern form of neocolonialism) all about the loot.

In the conflict below of the US Empire versus China, my heart lies with the Chinese people.

Obama’s Anti-China Stratagems – Drumbeats Of War

US economic and military muscle-flexing in the Pacific and specifically its unilateral intervention into the complex maritime issues among the countries contiguous to the South China seas has led the Chinese to warn about ‘outside forces’ getting involved in disputes that it argues should be settled bilaterally.

What is at stake is a region that carries one-third of the world’s seaborne trade and over half of its oil and gas transport and where there are known to be massive petroleum resources waiting to be exploited.

America is also attempting to tie China to increased free trade arrangements through the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). It has signed bilateral free trade deals with eight Pacific Rim countries to the exclusion of the ‘economically unreformed’ China. There has also been increased pressure in the long-running dispute regarding an undervalued Chinese Yuan which the US alleges costs American jobs by using ‘unfair currency practices’ to undervalue and effectively dump Chinese goods on western markets.

But the most ominous development has been the increased focus on military presence to counter China’s growing naval power. E.g. the Chinese Navy has recently commissioned its first aircraft carrier, the Varyag, a clear challenge to the hitherto US domination of the Pacific. Hu Jintao has further announced a increase in naval strike capacity as a ‘preparation for war.’

In this regard, an important first for the Pentagon war-planners was the agreement to deploy 2,500 Marines plus naval ships and aircraft to a base in Darwin, Australia commencing next year.

America, before it dominated the world by ‘land, sea and air’ was a maritime empire in the Pacific, emerging in the last decades of the 19th Century. The blue-water strategy was driven to a great extent by the perceived need to penetrate the untapped Chinese market, known as the ‘Open Door’ policy. The phrase that encapsulated America’s global ambition was ‘Manifest Destiny’, i.e. the belief that Americans were God’s people whom he had chosen to shape the world. Starting with Asia, the precept was: “Westward the course of Empire takes its sway.”*

Significantly this continued expansion across the Pacific was underpinned and legitimized by the new theory of geopolitics which asserted that national powers do not act for moral reasons, although they may claim to, but for strategic ones. Securing unfettered access to resources, controlling markets and military domination are what drive empires and any stratagem that secures long-term hegemony in these areas is justified. It furthermore theorized that future empires would be resource-driven and therefore would have to be continental powers before all else.

The American empire for all its attitudinizing about ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ has in fact followed the logic of the theory’s principal advocates, Admirals Mahan and Mackinder, with regard to ‘realpolitik’ – the realization that securing national advantage required the ruthless application of power necessary to build and sustain an empire.

All of these elements can be traced in recent US activity in the region and this activity is meant to remind any potential usurpers that, whatever the rate of relative economic and political decline, the US is still the number one world power and retains overwhelming military superiority over all others. Note that the USA constitutes only 3% of the world’s population but is responsible for over half of its military expenditure.

“Violence Is As American As Cherry Pie.” (H. Rap Brown)

That fact that the US empire is able to refocus, diplomatically, economically and military, on the rising threat of China while, among other things, fighting a major war in Afghanistan, threatening war against Iran, fomenting civil war in Syria, bankrolling the military machine of the Israeli settler state and initiating this year by Presidential decree a military presence in sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrates the flexibility and strength of the Empire and its continuing global military dominance.

The Empire has also intensified is its warmongering ethos. America is a society saturated in cultural, personal and institutional violence, racism, anti-communism and militarism. As its economic power declines, it is therefore conditioned to resort to even use of force to maintain domination. As the Black Panther leader, H. Rap Brown, (above) pointed out: violence and its glorification are in America’s historical DNA.

Its latest interventions in the Pacific and South China Seas therefore have all the classic ingredients for later imperial war by provocatively laying yet more bricks in the wall around China. They also march in step with the present diplomatic initiative made by US Secretary of State Clinton who made a recent visit to Myanmar to try to woo that nation from its long-standing Chinese alliance.

In their turn these projects march in step with the rest of the joined-up strategy in SE Asia which, while having other economic and political objectives, has the geopolitical strategy of encircling and hobbling China.

Thus its involvement in Afghanistan is as much about extirpating a Islamist threat as part of its ongoing ‘War On Terror’ as it is to securing access to the petroleum resources of the many ‘Stans’ in Central Asia and to having a standing army or militarized client state in the region as a counterweight to the now well-established continental power across the border.

Similarly, its post 9/11 embrace of Gyenandra and subsequent funding of the expansion of the King’s army by over 20,000 personnel and provisioning of huge amounts of arms and military equipment to that army was as much about defeating the communist revolution in Nepal as it was about getting another footing on the same border.

The relationship between US and Nepalese militaries continues to  strengthen to this day as joint strategy meetings at command level take place in the US embassy and joint visits are common. In fact the NA High Command in August attended a US Navy-convened maritime conflict scenario conference in sunny California! What is a land-locked country doing being represented there?

The Nepalese Maoists tried, after Powell’s visit in 2002, to point this out to the Chinese in an attempt to forge common cause, at least among equally threatened parties, if not actual comrades. The Chinese noted their points.

The new strategic alliance with India show the multifaceted interests of US imperialism in action.

Among these are 1) the increasing penetration of neoliberal global capitalism into the Indian market and society beginning with the Memos of Understanding (MOUs) initiated by Bush in 2006, 2) granting India a pass card in relation to its nuclear power obligations, 3) the insertion of American and Israeli military advisers into counterinsurgency where they assisted with the planning and execution of the genocidal Operation Green Hunt which has claimed the lives of many Adivasis and communists (the most recent being Comrade Kishenji), and 4) being granted a potential anti-China launching platform.

The establishment of this new alliance was facilitated by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) American oligarchs sharing a strong class bond with the Hindutva Brahminical Indian oligarchs.

Anti-China from Communism to Capitalism

The hostility to People’s Republic dates to its communist origins in 1949. American reactionaries had armed and supported the Chaing Kai-shek-led Bonapartist, feudal, comprador Koumintang (KMT) against the communists, and their overwhelming defeat by the PLA was seen as a ‘betrayal’ by ruling circles in America. It directly contributed to the anti-communist hysteria and show trials of the McCarthy period.

It also led to America fighting a proxy war against China when the CIA funded and armed Tibetan Yellow-Hat Gelugpa separatists in their 1959 uprising, a failed attempt to restore their pre-1950 medieval theocratic slave society. India had facilitated this by allowing the Lamists, under CIA guidance, to establish a base in Khalimpong which even Nehru referred to as “a nest of spies.”

It further saw the attempt by the CIA to establish a Khampa base in Nepal’s Mustang region for the purposes of cross-border raids. This was destroyed by the RNA in 1974.

The ripples of this policy are still clearly evident in the financial, diplomatic and political support given to the Gyatso clique in the figurehead of the Dalai Lama. The same network also funds their monasteries in Nepal and the network’s presence is evident in the number of monks you see loafing around in Kathmandu talking on expensive cell-phones.

America still uses Tibetan ‘Human Rights’ as a club to beat Nepal with as evident from the threat last week to withdraw specific funding if the Nepalese government would not guarantee safe passage for renegade Tibetan/Chinese using Nepal as a transit station and for agitprop activities.

Aside from these specific policies during the 1950s, there was also a massive propaganda campaign in the West to paint Chinese communism as the ultimate ‘totalitarian’, ‘ant-hill’ society and threat to human ‘freedom’. This went hand-in-hand with the cosying up to the more ‘moderate’ communism of the USSR in the era of ‘Détente’.

This sustained vitriolic brainwashing provided the ideology that the American ruling class utilized in the wars it launched against Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos beginning in the early fifties. Its earlier drive to empire saw it slowly choke, provoke and finally sweep aside the indigenous westernizing Japanese empire, but post-1945 it was beaten decisively in three and stalemated in one of these later unprovoked aggressions.

All these protean efforts were galvanized by the aim of establishing itself as the major continental power in SE Asia, following Mahan and Mackinder’s advice.

The emergence of China as a state-capitalist concern, following the termination in the mid 1970s of the period of communist construction, was wholeheartedly embraced by the US dominated west, as it provided cheap goods to sate its obsessive consumerist society. Later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was yet another proof that capitalism was triumphant everywhere and that history was effectively at an end.

The hostility has resurfaced as established Western capitalism has become mired in a decade-long financial crisis, caused essentially by substituting metaphysics for materialist criteria in the law of value, in short: speculation instead of production.

China’s new type of state-planned capitalism, where land and the finance sector are state-controlled and where the state-directed economy is production oriented has proved more resilient. It is an historical irony that erstwhile communists have proved to be the more efficient capitalists.

What is happening is that within the era of the capitalist mode of production, the torch is being taken from a declining power and passed on to a rising power. Thus it has reawakened American hostility to China. Hence we have Emperor Obama, lecturing the Chinese prior to the recent East Asia Summit about its need to be a ‘grown up’ economy and for it to stop ‘gaming the system’ (i.e. getting the better of the Americans).

America has had designs on China for well over a century; during that period it has variously tried to contain, defeat, subvert, and control China, all of which have come to total failure. China is getting stronger in every sphere despite America’s efforts, and that is what makes war more likely at some point in the coming decades.

Encircle America

The US state is presently the most dangerous threat to world peace and progress. It is a state built on genocide and slavery and which through creating a post-1945 military/industrial economy has become increasingly dependent on war economically, technologically and strategically as a solution to all problems. Consider that while it is engaged in massive reductions in state expenditure along with all the other developed capitalist nations in crisis, it is increasing military expenditure.

This is a sure sign that it foresees an increasing need for force to maintain its hegemony. So America’s very conditions of existence make it gung-ho, trigger-happy and create a culture of impunity. The absence of a socialist bloc further encourages the tendency to act unilaterally and murderously.

It shows that contradictions within differing types of expanding capitalist societies are becoming increasingly antagonistic in the global jostle for power and resources.

It is why Lenin stressed that great power rivalry under imperialist capitalism inevitably leads to hostilities and that therefore imperialism is war – continual war – and why Mao added:

In order to end (imperialist) war we must make (People’s) war.

American imperialism remains, even intensifies, as the principal contradiction facing the world proletariat. The US is the heart and head of international reaction. Domestically its progressive and proletarian forces are outnumbered and beleaguered, but as the recent upsurge in class struggle around the Wall Street occupations has shown, they are not negligible or without fighting spirit.

The further these domestic contradictions intensify, the weaker will become the cohesion required to withstand the external revolutionary threat. That is why struggles everywhere are symbiotically fused and why this century will be the battleground where reaction and revolution will contend.

At the moment, the fact remains that the US with its vast and expanding military-industrial complex remains the arsenal of fascism and as such is a threat both to human progress and survival. It is this ‘Evil Empire’ that must itself be encircled and smashed by world revolution. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote the choice for humanity is stark:

Socialism or barbarism.

*The obverse of the ideology of American ‘exceptionalism’ in this instance led to the specific racist view of Chinese as the “Yellow Peril’, a paranoia created by the influx of cheap ‘coolie’ labour brought in from the mid-19th century to work the goldfields and build the railways, particularly the transcontinental track.

They died in their thousands, unmourned and despised by the nation they were serving. As soon as they were no longer useful, the US government adopted a series of controls over further Chinese immigration beginning with the 1875 Page Act, moving on to the 1885 Chinese Exclusion Act, etc. and culminating in the 1922 Cable Act, which declared that Chinese were not racially acceptable as American citizens. The term ‘Yellow Peril’ was a precursor to the later ‘Red Menace,’ which similarly saw ‘Asian hordes’ swarming the barricades of western ‘civilization’.

“Balance of Military Forces in Nepal – in Relation to PLA Integration into the NA,” by Peter Tobin

Here is another article from Peter Tobin, this time on the situation in Nepal. As of now, the PLA has been integrated into the Nepalese Army, so the article is moot, as it was written over the summer before this happened. Nevertheless, it gives you a good view of what is happening on the ground in Nepal. As I mentioned before, Peter is real Communist, and his articles at the least give you a chance to see things from a Communist point of view.

The groups that I read on the Net are all screaming that the integration of the PLA into the Nepalese Army was a “betrayal.” I am not sure it was, and I generally support integration of rebel armies into the main national army as part of a peace agreement.

Balance of Military Forces in Nepal – in Relation to PLA Integration into the NA
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Before reporting on arguments around the integration into NA, (as per terms of 2005 CPA) of approximately 20,000 PLA cadre, it is necessary to understand the overwhelming logistical and numerical apparent superiority of the military available to the reactionary parties through the state apparatus.

The Nepalese Army has 95,000 active personal. It has been well-armed by India, US, UK, Russia and Israel. Its officer caste is trained in India, the US and the UK, and its high command is profoundly anti-Maobaadi (viz the 2008 coup against the Prachanda-led coalition).

Last year the PM of Nepal – the unelected UML, GS, and Delhi’s placeman after Prachanda - threatened to unleash the forces at his disposal against any “Maoist attempt to seize state power” during the May manifestations. There is no doubt that the NA general staff would have complied.

It receives $1.7 billion from US though the EMET program which is jointly funded by Defense/State Departments, and funneled through the euphemistically titled: EIPC (Enhanced International Peacekeeping Capabilities).

Further military networking and synching occurs through OCD (Office for Defense Co-operation) convened under CINCPAC (US Commander-in Chief – Pacific).

The OCD office is in the American Embassy - I have tried to take a picture of this Reich Protector’s bunker – it is architecturally the projection of ugly American power, and I wanted to attach it to my comments, but was taken in by Nepalese embassy police – jointly controlled by the Americans, and questioned for an hour, photos copied and then deleted, mobile phone numbers taken and personal details and photo taken.

I was told it was against the law, but was shown no proof, was read no rights, and was not offered legal representation. (I tried to tell them of my construction background, and how, aesthetically, I was interested in grotesque, fascist-brutalist architecture, but to little effect).

Initially, this growing post 9/11 relationship with the US compromised Nepal’s ‘traditional’ neo-colonial subservience to India, but as each share an equal detestation and fear of Maoism, and so, along with the Nepalese quislings form a unholy triumvirate, in opposition, by fair means or foul, to Maoist advance.

Add to the NA figures another 40,000 heavily armed paramilitaries - ’Armed Police Force’ and potentially, the reactionary static classes have access to approximately 150,000 active military/para-military personal – equipped with new and well-tried weaponry – a huge superiority of man-, and fire-power, over about 20,000 PLA fighters.

It is almost certain that there is a contingency plan in Washington and Delhi, should all means and stratagems fail, of imposing a Chilean-style solution in the event of Maoists taking state power through a People’s revolt.

Right now Kathmandu has the formal appearance of a city under a military dictatorship; it is an armed camp, soldiers or paras, bristling with guns, are either on every street corner, patrolling, or charging about in personnel carriers. Every government, or significant, building is guarded and fortified.

There are dozens of military barracks – large and small – scattered throughout Kathmandu – like chocolate chips in a cookie, and holding thousands of soldiers and police.

After obviously noting the traditional Lee Enfield, Sterling, and AK 47s, I can now spot Heckler-Kochs, Galils, and Insas; Katmandu must be one of the most heavily military infested cities in the world, with troops, paras, primed, preened, and ubiquitous.

Many among NA ranks have combat experience, not just against the PLA from 1996 to 2005, but as UN ‘peacekeepers’ and US mercenaries in Iraq and Somalia. Sending a further contingent to NATO-occupied Afghanistan is now being given strong government consideration. The High Command is in favor, as it develops their policy of building a flat up Washington’s ass.

All these forces fall under the remit of the NDC (National Defense Counsel), which the principal members are the PM, the Home Minister and the CoS. Its recommendations go to the President – who has replaced the King – since 2008 as the ultimate Commander.

(That’s ‘democracy’ folks – replacing the rule of one man and his advisers by another man and his. It was, in fact, a functional and symbolic a change of class power, the feudal succumbing to the Bhradralok dressed up in the forms of democracy, and the latter, for the second time since 1990, both riding on, and betraying, the Peoples’ revolutions of 1990 and 2006).

All this looks bleak  on paper - so needs to be heavily qualified: The NA is not completely homogenous, demographically Nepal is a young country, youth unemployment is high, in the cities and countryside; the army is therefore an attractive magnet.

They held a recruitment rally in one of gardens in Tudikhel Park near city-center, and thousands turned up last Friday.

Many of recruits are, like their peer group, naive, friendly, and curious. (I get asked the same question by bored sentries, as I do everywhere: ‘kun desh aaunuhuncha? kina Nepalma basnuhuncha? – “Where from? Why Nepal?” etc. Always in the polite form.)

It reflects the diversity of communities and ethnic groups in Nepal, and the question of whether it would follow a bloodthirsty, anti-Maoist, officer caste through whatever gates of hell they might choose to open up, is moot; tragically, dozens were shot by the RNA and AP, during both Andolans, but it could have been much higher.

One of the reasons CoS, Thapa, ran to the King after 19 days of popular, determined agitation to tell him the war was lost, was said to be significant rank-and-file revulsion at what killings had occurred and definite reluctance to be active butchers in further killings of their own people.

In the short-term they might well participate in a ‘crackdown’ or, indeed, a coup. But whether they are capable of the sustained murderous sadism that all ranks showed following Kissinger’s 1972 coup in the CIA trained Chilean army is doubtful.

Uncertainty regarding the unswerving loyalty of the NA’s lower ranks is one reason its officer caste, through the high command, have prevaricated over integrating committed PLA cadre into its ranks. The fear of ‘Bolshevik’ contagion spreading among the NA rank-and-file is great.

It is worth noting that UPCN(M) Politburo member CP Gajurel was quoted as saying to the effect that the paramilitary Armed Police Force was a greater threat than the NA.

But the biggest reason not to over-awed by the raw statistics is this was the same military machine that, despite complying with the axiom of warfare that requires those attacking a fortified, or entrenched position to possess, no less than a 3 to 1 majority over a defender, could not defeat, or even out-maneuver, the PLA, for the best of a decade. Despite $20 billion US aid, swelling its ranks from 50,000 to 70,000, in the few years following 2002, it signally failed to defeat or roll-back the Mobaadi.

To the contrary, it was pushed out of more and more of the countryside and into its city strongholds, where the Maoists now faced the attacker’s dilemma. A few attempts, around 2002, to break into Katmandu had been costly and easily repulsed – to send the PLA in frontally, or even to try insert them into urban areas, would have been military suicide.

This stalemate led the Maoists to adapt the PPW and move from an armed phase to a political one, by making a tactical alliance with reactionary parties against the, by now, common monarchical enemy, in order first to overthrow feudalism, and second, equally important, to gain access to the urban masses and bring them into the revolution.

The balance of forces is exactly the same today as it was in 2006, except that the PLA – still in brigade structure and still with access to weapons – is relocated in cantonments as per the CPA, and it underlines the importance of the PLA to the Party and the People.It is
why the UCPN(M) has consistently refused the demands of the political/military reactionaries; to dilute, dismantle or disarm this crucial armed section of the proletariat.

It should also be noted that the bare figures of declared PLA combatants are far less than the numbers of committed, experienced warriors. The PLA is the beating heart of a strong cardiovascular system. The people were, and remain, the blood that flows through its ventricles.

PLA/NA Integration – No Middle Way
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The apparent decision by the Dahal/Bhatterai axis to change party policy on integration and a new constitution by going in step and agreeing in ‘modalities’ to integration first, has further alarmed the axis around Baidya/Gajurel.

The ‘Dual Step’ policy has always been a practical proposition, that, as in the last analysis - political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and that if the PLA disarmed before a new constitution was agreed to, the Bhadralok/quislings classes, then with absolute monopoly of violence through the state’s repressive apparatus, would force through governmental arrangements to continue the Katmandu centralized ancien regime, with superficial concessions to ‘democratic’ forms and furbelows.

There was also concern that decisions were being made by party leaders contrary to party policy and outside party structures. This was apparent over ending the ‘dual security’ arrangements for the UCPN(M) leadership, where 200 PLA cadre gave them round-the-clock protection. The security personnel guarding the Baidya group are still refusing to hand over their weapons.

It was reported that this was part of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ – a 5 point plan, to extend the CA for 3 months and conclude the peace process simultaneously with a new statute, was reached party leaders of CPN-UML, NC and UCPN(M) on May 28th.

The Baidya group claimed this was a further violation of party norms and should have been put before the Central Committee, and many of PLA combatants were reported to have been shocked by the precipitate nature of the decision and rued the “humiliation” of being dispatched, with their weapons, back to their cantonments.

The press photo of the first batch to go on May 6 (Katmandu Post) taken at Dahal’s residence, shows a solemn farewell, with Dahal looking impassive in the centre of what best can be described as a stone-faced group.

The five-point deal has widened the fissure within the Party, the standing-down of the security unit is its latest crack. The Baidya/Gajurel have specifically rejected the DDR proposals, cited above, and fear that the Dahal/Bhatterai leadership are making too many compromises, that amount to a ‘surrender’ of the PLA’s moral and military integrity, to be sacrificed on the altar of ‘reformism’ and ‘parliamentary cretinism.’

Therefore, the NA suggestion that 10,000, approximately, PLA combatants be subsumed in a new unit, which they would form 50%, the other shared between NA, APC and Nepal Police. This would be under NA officer command. There are further suggestions that it could be unarmed, either as a forest guard, or assigned to the currently fashionable, and expanding, area of ‘disaster management.’

Regarding the latter; there was huge meeting of top military and civil officers of the “Nepal-US Military Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Table Top Exercise” (Phew!), where top brass from the NA and US Marines plus some politicos and the usual NGO stooges, were present. But, ‘Marines’ – ‘humanitarian’ – even Pentagon PR (oxy)morons can’t get traction from such an unlikely combination.)

The 5 PP rejectionists have argued for maintaining the PLA as a single cohesive armed force, suggesting they be assigned as border security, as there is none at present, while Indian maintains an active border force that encroaches into Nepal when it chooses, with impunity and without challenge.

National self-respect and territorial integrity demand no less, and with the PLA: ‘cometh the hour – cometh the man’.

However, the press-labeled soi dissant ‘hardliners’ have said, following the rejection of the above Maoist proposal, that they might consider the NA one, if, and only if, it is under PLA command, Otherwise, the PLA’s identity would be compromised, as this was their sole presence in the armed forces, whereas the others would retain theirs, due to their presence throughout the security apparatus.

Another reason for seeing positive aspects to the NA proposal is that the NA have abandoned the completely unacceptable proposal for individual integration under NA aegis and now recognize the PLA is a force and can be integrated as such (albeit they might have just moved from dissolving it completely and will try to disarm it completely.)

As Party secretary Gajurel has acknowledged, it is a “positive development,” especially set against the UML quisling hoodlum faction around Oli and the Nepal NC and NA officer caste, who have always claimed it was a private army, therefore, could not be integrated.

But there is a strong feeling that if Dahal agrees to NA command of an integrated PLA force, whatever its shape, it will not ensure a stable peace.

PLA Position
*********

This concern is shared in PLA ranks. At a meeting between the commanders and Party leaders, they stated their united opposition to surrendering their weaponry, presently in containers located in the seven cantonments, and demanded the weapons be put back in the ‘process of integration.’ They further insisted on adhering to Party policy on unit/brigade integration and not on individual selection. They also raised the question of a ceiling on PLA cadre promotion and the related command structure of the proposed unit.

On the numbers of 10,000 PLA combatants, there is broad consensus – the exception being the opportunist Madhesi MJF-L, which calls for only 6,000 to be in the process - with the remaining 9,600 getting rehabilitation packages, funded by the peace-loving, conflict-resolving USA and the EU.

Political points were made to the effect that, as the active division commander of 5th Rolpa said, “They fought for the revolution, not for the sake of the leaders.”

They further expressed concern at vacillations in the party line, and wanted to know if they were for peace and constitution or for people’s revolt, which had been put on hold.

But in fact there is a division in the ranks, with most of the commanders close to the Dahal camp, while the majority of lower rung commanders and rank and file are close to the Baidya faction.

So when the latter said that Dahal was preparing to sacrifice the PLA to continue the ‘march through the corridors’; there was a strong rebuttal from the PLA’s deputy commander Sharma, who stressed that the Dahal/Bhatterai faction was equally worried about the PLA’s combatants future. He was reported as saying, “We formed the PLA. I am one of its deputy commanders. So, we love our party’s army more than Kiranji (Baidya)”.

Yet there is still general concern, across the PLA that the leadership have not given convincing counter-arguments against the allegations of the Baidya group. This is focused on the central role played by its charismatic, pressured Chairman.

Dahal’s Position
************

Up to the Palungtar plenum late last year, the Party had sanctioned a ‘two-line struggle’ between what first appeared to be a tactical difference regarding whether to seize state power through a third Andolan sooner or later. This hardened into a more fundamental division between continuing the revolution or consolidating its gains, hitherto, through an ‘historic compromise.’ A third position emerged around Dahal which appeared to be a perfectly laudable attempt to finesse a compromise position between the two factions.

It did not prove possible, so when Dahal sided with the Baidya camp at the plenum, calling for preparation for an uprising, Bhatterai put in a dissenting note. Since then the Dahal leadership did little practical preparation to enforce this decision, and has in fact now formally declared it to be ‘impractical, in the present circumstances.’ In the last month it has been buried with Dahal’s decisive move towards the Bhatterai position for peace and as new constitution.

Arriving at a consensus has always been a difficult, but it is an essential feature of the Maoists’ political endeavors in Nepal.

While the bourgeois press and the hireling petit bourgeois ‘commentariat’ for obvious reasons are always screaming about ‘splits’, the Party has never conferred that much importance on them.

Internal arguments, struggles, divisions are intrinsic, and distinctive, among adherents of Mao’s political philosophy; thus the conflict between the Bhatterai-Baidya factions is seen a ’unity of opposites,’ where each position encapsulates a different visionary approach, and that far from being a potential party-breaker, these are just different routes to a remaining common goal.

The weakness in this argument could be said to Dahal’s position, which is more of being a political fixer than ‘visionary,’ and where he is forced to be ‘all things to all men.’ Facing threatening, unbending, incorrigible static forces, principally embodied by NC and UML (that’s Unified Marxist-Leninists – you have to pinch yourself sometimes, when confronting such blatantly contradictory nomenclature), backed and paid by India and US, he has reacted by palming them off, buying time, and trying to hold an increasingly factious party together.

This had led to charges of ‘opportunism,’ ’revisionism’ and ‘reformism’ from the so-called ‘hardliners’, there is also suspicion that Dahal is being groomed as a ‘Statesmen’, with reactionaries describing him as an architect of the peace process, along with the late, unlamented, GP Koirala!

It should be noted that the ‘march through the corridors’ has not been completely unproductive, as Maoists have recently ensured that their nominee, Mahara, got the crucial post of Home Secretary, and the cops, reactionary parties, and the lackey media are still screaming about it.

Conclusion (For Now)
***************

The present aim is to conclude the outstanding differences between the parties in the CA within the 3 month extension, not just in terms of PLA/NA integration, but the constitution – will it be a People’s Federal Democracy, as the UCPN(M) want, or just another western-style parliamentary charade?

These, the positions of the 300,000 strong formidable YCL, the return of property expropriated during the armed phase of PPW, the termination of the process of Maoist combatants being hounded for alleged ‘Human Rights’ violations, are all among 70 or so issues to be resolved.

The Party factions have further agreed to work together to prevent a split, by allowing open discussion and dissent with their ranks and agreeing to convene a party congress – the first for eighteen years - later this year, to hammer out a unified position.

On the bright side, the party, in both the country, the CA and the government, has declared its total unity against allowing an Indian multinational, GMR, to run the Upper Karnali Hydropower Project, declaring it an ‘anti-national move’ and saying the party is ‘prepared to shed blood’ in resisting it if the government sends in the NA to guard the site. It is seen as a continuation of India stealing Nepal’s vital water resources through unequal treaties and economic domination.

The government, for its part, is determined to see GMR run the project and have stated they will put in the NA to protect the site.

Thus there is the possibility of a flashpoint, as the Maoists, and indeed many non-communist patriotic Nepalese, are not prepared to see another repeat of the 1996 scandal of the Mahakali Project (brilliantly documented and exposed by Dr. Bhatterai), where the UML-led government gave way completely to Indian interests, with the hoodlum faction around Oli lining its pockets.

Regarding the present outstanding differences, the position is that Chairman Dahal is preparing a ‘bottom line’ on NA/PLA integration and an acceptable constitution.

Whatever consensual talks UCPN(M) leaders enter into with the reactionary parties; UML, NC etc., these parties are unlikely to change their stance on these issues.

The Baidya group want Dahal to ‘correct’ his mistake of accepting the NA’s proposal of setting up a separate force of the PLA, whereas he counters that he only agreed to the ‘spirit of the suggestion’ and not to the modalities. He has therefore said that should be bulk integration and that Maoists should command its directorate.

The Baidya and Bhatterai factions, indeed the whole Party and PLA, want to maintain this position.

The NC, predictably, has rejected both bulk integration and Maoist command, and has also refused, along with Oli the UML hoodlum dadagiri (boss), to give it a military mandate, as required by the Maoists.

The UCPN(M) is also proposing that the new constitution should be “anti-expansionist and anti-imperialist” and should guarantee the rights of the marginalized, the Dalits and the oppressed Janjatis, and should be a Federal People’s Democracy.

PS. I would like to thank Comrades Guarev and Kanchan, and latterly some of the Lazimpath (Katmandu suburb where I live) comrades for their information and opinions in compiling the above. I have also extracted information from the bourgeois English language press.

The Survival of North Korea

Here.

Nice and actually sane review of a book called The Survival of North Korea in Foreign Policy in Focus. They are one of the few sane American groups writing about foreign policy. As the review points out, legions of idiots have been predicting the oncoming doom of the North Korean regime for the past 20 years. They’ve all been wrong, over and over. Various US Administrations have also been predicting the looming demise of North Korea. The Bush Administration actually had a policy designed to make the regime collapse.

There is one thing I would like to say.

Yes, there is malnutrition in North Korea. At its worst, it was at the exact same level as India’s malnutrition and starvation is year in and year out. You never heard that in the capitalist press, now did you?

If North Korea’s food problems are evidence of the failure of Communism (despite the fact the Communist nations generally did an excellent job of providing basic caloric intake for their citizens), then why is the capitalist world’s chronic malnutrition and starvation crisis (capitalism starves 14 million humans to death every year, mostly in South Asia) not evidence of the failure of capitalism?

But one thing makes me absolutely sick. And that is that the US, the West and South Korea have been playing politics with food aid to North Korea. At the same time that the West is screaming that North Korea is starving its people (A lie – the regime is not deliberately starving its people – there is just not enough to go around), the West is cruelly withholding food aid to the nation, frankly killing and sickening North Koreans. What bullshit is that?

I would also like to take this opportunity to come out in strong support of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. They should absolutely not dismantle this program, and they need to expand it greatly. They also need to come up with some missiles that have a long enough range to actually hit the mainland US. The problem is that this is the only thing that US imperialist dogs will listen to.

Western imperialists are intent on regime change. In general, regimes have a right to national sovereignty and certainly have a right to resist regime change by Western imperialism. North Korea watched with dismay as one regime after another – Serbia, then even worse Iraq, and most recently Libya, fell to imperialist regime change for the simple reason that they did not have nuclear weapons. The only way to head off Western regime change imperialists is to get yourself some nuclear weapons.

So this is what North Korea has done. That decision was correct, proper and above all moral. A nation has a moral duty to preserve its state from enemy invaders, which is what regime changers are.

Continued cooperation with South Korea will result in many benefits for both nations.

US Imperialism in Latin America: The Example of Haiti

Tulio is a US Black on the site who has consistently defended US imperialism, particularly in Latin America. Here, he uses they “they do it too” argument to support US imperial meddling in its neo-colonies in the Western Hemisphere.

Latin Americans do plenty of that to each other. They are their own worst enemy. Hell, in 1969, Honduras and El Salvador went to war over a fucking soccer match. Thousands of civilians ended up dying. Here is your homework assignment: Find out why Bolivia is a land-locked country. They weren’t always one.

So, because Latin Americans fight each other from time to time, US imperialism should intervene constantly in Latin America to create a continent of impoverished neo-colonies dependent on their US imperial master? And if you disobey your Yankee patron, we will slaughter you by the thousands.

The US overthrew Aristide under George Bush, put in a Duvalierist regime, which then murdered 3,000 Haitians. US Marines showed up at his door and ordered him to leave the country or they would murder him and his family. The coup regime was then kept in power by a UN army that massacred poor Haitians and helped the Duvalierists slaughter the poor. Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have stated explicitly that Aristide is not coming back.

Aristide incurred the wrath of World Imperialism by daring the raise the minimum wage. In addition, he built more schools in 4 years than had been built in 200 years since 1804. He offered every poor Haitian child a free lunch once a day, but he could not afford to feed everyone. And he rejected the World Bank and IMF terms for Haiti.

For these crimes (probably mostly for raising the minimum wage), the US, Canada and France overthrew Aristide, slaughtering many Haitians in the process. Afterwards, 3,000 poor Haitians were brutally murdered by the Duvalierists while the US, Canada and France looked on and cheered.

It is curious why a supposedly non-imperialist country like Canada got involved, but they have a lot of factories in Haiti.

The US also has many factories in Haiti. Aristide was overthrown by the US at the behest of US corporations who owned factories there.

The role of France is complicated. Let us say that France has hated Haiti ever since they threw out the French colonialists in 1804 and slaughtered some 25,000 Frenchmen in the process. France has never forgiven them and has demanded that Haiti pay back France for the loss of its stolen colonial property. Why France overthrew Aristide is not known, but I believe he said he was not going to make payments to France anymore.

I am very curious to see how Tulio feels about US imperial meddling in Haiti, which resulted in the US colonization of Haiti for decades followed by decades of US support for the Duvalierists who destroyed the country, stole all the money for themselves and their elite pals, and murdered 150,000+ Haitians with their Tonton Macoute militias, not to mention the overthrow of a proud nationalistic Black man by three rich White Western countries, which resulted in the mass murder of 3,000 Haitians.

Jean Bertrande Aristide was the first pro-people President in the history of Haiti. For the crime of helping his people, Western imperialism overthrew him at gunpoint and then oversaw the mass murder of 3,000 Aristide supporters.

This Haiti vignette is US policy in Latin America in a nutshell. This is what it is, everywhere on the continent. This is how it’s been off and on since 1850, with a brief respite with the Good Neighbor Policy under Roosevelt.

The US imperialist war on the Haitian people has continued under Barack Obama, a Black President.

US Foreign Policy in a Nutshell

Smedly Butler, US general, War Is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Everything Butler wrote is correct. Not only that, but the US is still doing this. The Cold War is over, and we haven’t changed 1%. That’s because the Cold War was never really about fighting the USSR. It was about the interests of the US corporations.

Butler sums up US imperialism (US foreign policy is simply US imperialism and vice versa) in a nutshell. And that’s US foreign policy as it was, as it is, and as it will be into the forseeable future. US foreign policy has the support of the entire US political class, both parties, every US administration, the entire US media and most crucially the US rich and US big business, who frankly run this country as a sort of a dictatorship.

It’s a dictatorship because there is no opposition. There’s no opposition press. There’s no opposition party. There are never any US administrations that oppose the essentials of US corporate capitalism and its corollary, US imperialism.*

US imperialism simply means that the US is constantly intervening all over the globe in the interests of the US rich and US corporations. As the middle classes, working classes and poor are attacked by the moneyed classes who control the US, so the US military is used by the US moneyed class as their private army. When you join the US military, you are joining the rich man’s army.

The US military is the army of the rich and the army of the corporations. The purpose of the US military is to go around the world attacking the middle and working classes and poor who are going up against the US rich and businesses their elite allies. That’s what those ~170 or so bases are there for.

If you’re not from the moneyed classes, why in God’s name have you joined the Army of the Rich, the army of your class enemies? Why are willing to go off and fight, get hurt and die for your rich enemies? What’s wrong with you?

*FDR was probably the most progressive President that the US has ever had. The Good Neighbor Policy, initiated in 1934, was the only time in US history that the US has had an anti-imperialist attitude towards Latin America. In addition to the Great Anti-Fascist War (WW2) that he waged and his progressive policies at home, FDR goes down in history as the greatest progressive US President of the 20th Century.

Bill Clinton did a few anti-imperialist things here and there. He restored Leftist Aristide to power in Haiti via US Marines. He proposed several frank humanitarian interventions in which US imperialism had no interests whatsoever (whenever anyone says “US interests” they mean the interests of US imperialism).

He apologized to Guatemalans for overthrowing the pro-people government in 1954, which led to 35 years of rightwing governments that slaughtered 200,000 Guatemalans in cold blood, with the total support of both US political parties and administrations of both parties.

By contrast to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is simply a US imperialist dog of the worst order. And Hilary Clinton, once in office as Secretary of State, has turned into a nasty, monstrous rightwing witch, a murderous agent of imperialism. Hilary Clinton was much better as Bill’s wife when he was in office. Since 2008, she’s turned into a reactionary monstrosity.

North Korea Downs US Spy Plance With Electronic Warfare

Good.

Serves em right.

“Was the Atomic Bombing of Japan Necessary?” by Robert Freeman

Was the Atomic Bombing of Japan Necessary?

by Robert Freeman

Few issues in American history – perhaps only slavery itself – are as charged as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Was it necessary? Merely posing the question provokes indignation, even rage. Witness the hysterical shouting down of the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit that simply dared discuss the question fifty years after the act. Today, another eleven years on, Americans still have trouble coming to terms with the truth about the bombs.

But anger is not argument. Hysteria is not history. The decision to drop the bomb has been laundered through the American myth-making machine into everything from self-preservation by the Americans to concern for the Japanese themselves-as if incinerating two hundred thousand human beings in a second was somehow an act of moral largesse.

Yet the question will not die, nor should it: was dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a military necessity? Was the decision justified by the imperative of saving lives or were there other motives involved?

The question of military necessity can be quickly put to rest. “Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” Those are not the words of a latter-day revisionist historian or a leftist writer. They are certainly not the words of an America-hater. They are the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future president of the United States. Eisenhower knew, as did the entire senior U.S. officer corps, that by mid 1945 Japan was defenseless.

After the Japanese fleet was destroyed at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the U.S. was able to carry out uncontested bombing of Japan’s cities, including the hellish firebombings of Tokyo and Osaka.

This is what Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, meant when he observed, “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” Also, without a navy, the resource-poor Japanese had lost the ability to import the food, oil, and industrial supplies needed to carry on a World War.

As a result of the naked futility of their position, the Japanese had approached the Russians, seeking their help in brokering a peace to end the War. The U.S. had long before broken the Japanese codes and knew that these negotiations were under way, knew that the Japanese had for months been trying to find a way to surrender.

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, reflected this reality when he wrote, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, said the same thing: “The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Civilian authorities, especially Truman himself, would later try to revise history by claiming that the bombs were dropped to save the lives of one million American soldiers.

But there is simply no factual basis for this in any record of the time. On the contrary, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported, “Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.” The November 1 date is important because that was the date of the earliest possible planned U.S. invasion of the Japanese main islands.

In other words, the virtually unanimous and combined judgment of the most informed, senior, officers of the U.S. military is unequivocal: there was no pressing military necessity for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan.

But if dropping the bombs was not driven by military needs, why, then, were they used? The answer can be discerned in the U.S. attitude toward the Russians, the way the War ended in Europe, and the situation in Asia.

U.S. leaders had long hated the communist Russian government. In 1919, the U.S. had led an invasion of Russia – the infamous “White Counter Revolution” – to try to reverse the red Bolshevik Revolution that had put the communists into power in 1917. The invasion failed, and the U.S. did not extend diplomatic recognition to Russia until 1932.

Then, during the Great Depression, when the U.S. economy collapsed, the Russian economy boomed, growing almost 500%. U.S. leaders worried that with the War’s end, the country might fall back into another Depression. And World War II was won not by the American laissez faire system, but by the top-down, command and control over the economy that the Russian system epitomized. In other words, the Russian system seemed to be working while the American system was plagued with recent collapse and a questionable self-confidence.

In addition, to defeat Germany, the Russian army had marched to Berlin through eastern Europe. It occupied and controlled 150,000 square miles of territory in what is today Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. At Yalta, in February 1945, Stalin demanded to keep this newly occupied territory. Russia, Stalin rightly claimed, had been repeatedly invaded by western Europeans, from Napoleon to the Germans in World War I and now by Hitler. Russia lost more than 20,000,000 lives in World War II, and Stalin wanted a buffer against future invasions.

At this point, in February 1945, the U.S. did not know whether the bomb would work or not. But it unquestionably needed Russia’s help to end both the War in Europe and the War in the Pacific. These military realities were not lost on Roosevelt: with no army to displace Stalin’s in Europe and needing Stalin’s support, Roosevelt conceded eastern Europe, handing the Russians the greatest territorial gain of the War.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, Stalin agreed at Yalta that once the War in Europe was over, he would transfer his forces from Europe to Asia and within 90 days would enter the War in the Pacific against Japan. This is where timing becomes critically important. The War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. May 8 plus 90 days is August 8. If the U.S. wanted to prevent Russia from occupying territory in east Asia the way it had occupied territory in eastern Europe, it needed to end the war as quickly as possible.

This issue of territory in east Asia was especially important because before the war against Japan, China had been embroiled in a civil war of its own. It was the U.S.-favored nationalists under General Chiang Kai Shek against the communists under Mao Ze Dong. If communist Russia were allowed to gain territory in east Asia, it would throw its considerable military might behind Mao, almost certainly handing the communists a victory once the World War was ended and the civil war was resumed.

Once the bomb was proven to work on July 15, 1945, events took on a furious urgency. There was simply no time to work through negotiations with the Japanese. Every day of delay meant more land given up to Russia and, therefore, a greater likelihood of communist victory in the Chinese civil war. All of Asia might go communist. It would be a strategic catastrophe for the U.S. to have won the War against the fascists only to hand it to its other arch enemy, the communists. The U.S. needed to end the War not in months, or even weeks, but in days.

So, on August 6, 1945, two days before the Russians were to declare war against Japan, the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. There was no risk to U.S. forces then waiting for a Japanese response to the demand for surrender. The earliest planned invasion of the island was still three months away, and the U.S. controlled the timing of all military engagements in the Pacific.

But the Russian matter loomed and drove the decision on timing. So, only three days later, the U.S. dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, eight days after the first bomb was dropped.

Major General Curtis LeMay commented on the bomb’s use: “The War would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the War at all.” Except that it drastically speeded the War’s end to deprive the Russians of territory in east Asia.

The story of military necessity, quickly and clumsily pasted together after the War’s end, simply does not hold up against the overwhelming military realities of the time. On the other hand, the use of the bomb to contain Russian expansion and to make the Russians, in Truman’s revealing phrase, “more manageable,” comports completely with all known facts and especially with U.S. motivations and interests.

Which story should we accept, the one that doesn’t hold together but that has been sanctified as national dogma? Or the one that does hold together but offends our self concept? How we answer says everything about our maturity and our capacity for intellectual honesty.

It is sometimes hard for a people to reconcile its history with its own national mythologies – the mythologies of eternal innocence and Providentially anointed righteousness. It is all the more difficult when a country is embroiled in yet another war, and the power of such myths are needed again to gird the people’s commitment against the more sobering force of facts.

But the purpose of history is not to sustain myths. It is, rather, to debunk them so that future generations may act with greater awareness to avoid the tragedies of the past. It may take another six or even sixty decades, but eventually the truth of the bomb’s use will be written not in mythology but in history. Hopefully, as a result, the world will be a safer place.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history, and education. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Repost from the old site.

One wonders where to begin with a post like this. Rafik Hariri, of course, was the Prime Minister and self-made billionaire who ruled Lebanon for a time recently. He was assassinated in an expertly planned car bomb attack, but no one really knows who did it. All suspicion fell on Syria, and Syria did have good reason to kill Hariri.

You really need a lot of background in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics to even begin to understand the twists and turns of this sinuous murder mystery.

Hariri was elected head of Lebanon and proceeded to go on a borrowing spree, mostly with Saudi money, and rebuilt Lebanon after the Civil War destroyed it. He did this by playing all factions off each other. He also instituted a Lebanese version of free market economics, an economic system that, thank God, is largely absent from the Middle East because it contradicts Arab and especially Islamic values.

Hariri is a Sunni, but a fairly secular one. The Sunnis make up maybe 17% of Lebanon. The Shia, represented by Hezbollah, make up about 40%. The Maronites make up about 30%. The Druze and Orthodox Christians make up about 10%. There has been no census taken in about 50 years, because everyone is afraid of how things are going to turn out.

The Christians used to be the majority – in fact, Lebanon was originally split off from Syria by the French to give the Christians their own country. Partly for this reason, it’s very existence is resented by a number of Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, who figure that Syria and Lebanon are all one country.

Syria itself has long regarded the severance of Lebanon from Mother Syria as illegitimate, and her behavior in recent years has been motivated in part by these feelings. The Shia were long-downtrodden, especially by the Sunnis. The Sunnis were the Muslims who were pretty much in charge of the place in terms of who was in charge of the Muslims in the country. The Sunni held the reigns, and discrimination against the Shia was rife.

Shia were regularly attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut up into the 1970′s. The Shia complain that the Sunnis would only allow them to be garbagemen – that was the best job they could get. After the late 1950′s, when a Christian lost the election and Lebanese Christians feared that their power would be constricted, there has been a power-sharing agreement in place.

The Prime Minister must be a Sunni, another high post must be a Christian, etc, etc. As the Christians have gone from majority to minority, this system has become less and less fair. In particular, Muslims, especially the Shia, are dramatically underrepresented. The Christians did not want to give up their power in the late 1950′s, so the US Marines landed to enforce illegitimate Christian rule over Lebanon.

The Civil War began in part once again over demands that Lebanese democracy be derived more on one man one vote and that the excessive power of the Christians be curtailed. Further, the Christians have always run the Lebanese economy, at least in recent years.

I say all of this because in the US there is a strong tendency to side with the Lebanese Christians against the evil Muslims. Further, the Lebanese Maronite Christians (the largest sect) have made an important alliance with the Zionist Jews in Israel, an alliance that helped to drive the Civil War.

So US Zionist propaganda, which floods our media night and day, strongly favors the Maronites once again. As an example of this alliance, one of the highest ranking neoconservatives of all is a Maronite Lebanese lawyer named F. Michael Maloof who is very close to uber-neocons Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. He is up to his eyeballs in the planning of the war on Iraq.

With the Lebanese Civil War and the rise of Hezbollah, the Shia have finally been given a place at the table of Lebanese politics. The Druze are a real wild card. They shift all over the place on the whim of their erratic leader, Walid Jumblatt, from anti-Israel and anti-US to anti-Syrian and pro-US.

The Shia, and Hezbollah along with the more secular Amal Party, are allied with Syria and Iran. Syria keeps Hezbollah armed in Southern Lebanon as a tool to threaten Israel with in order to try to get the Golan Heights back. That’s all Syria gets out of the game. If Hezbollah is disarmed in Lebanon, Syria loses it’s most powerful weapon and may never get its land back.

Hezbollah has since taken up the cause of Lebanese nationalism, agitating for the return of the Shebaa Farms and some nearby hills that they say Israel is occupying. It is probably Lebanese land, but Israel seems to have captured that land from Syria when it grabbed the Golan.

For its purposes, Syria wants to say that the Shebaa is Lebanese for purposes of keeping Hezbollah armed, and to say it’s Syrian as soon as Hezbollah tries to make peace with Israel or vice versa. So Syria must play a double game here, but everyone is in this crazy part of the world.

As a condition of ending the Civil War, Syria was tasked with ruling the place. Syria had actually entered the war to save the Maronite Christians from defeat, but the Christians soon forgot about this and turned on the Syrians. The Taba Agreement, constructed with the help of the US and other powers, put Syria in charge until the Lebanese could figure out how to stop killing each other.

Syria quickly started meddling in Lebanese politics bigtime, and an independence movement arose to get Syria out of Lebanon. This was ignored by the US until George Bush came to office. Now the same US that put Syria in power started demanding that Syria leave. Not only that, but there were increasing demands on Lebanon to “disarm all militias”, code words for disarm Hezbollah.

Now, Syria needs Hezb in Lebanon until it gets the Golan back, so them’s fighting words to the Syrians. At the same time, the US invaded Iraq and threatened Iran, Libya, and Syria, while Israel killed Arafat by poisoning him.

This whole process was set into motion by the neocons who were operating in the interests of the Israeli government. It was an Israeli plan to deal a powerful blow to some of their worst enemies in order to secure the realm, as Xymphora lays out brilliantly here.

Part of this Zionist plot was to knock out Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of a triple blow against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. Hezbollah kept getting more powerful on Israel’s northern border, and the Israelis were getting more upset.

So the US and France pushed through a UN resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon and for the disarming of Hezbollah. Note that France is still an imperialist power in the region, defending the interests of the Christians who they put in charge of their former colony.

Also, the US Congress pushed a bill called the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, a bill that may as well have been written by the Israeli Knesset. It’s so pro-Israeli, it’s almost impossible to comprehend that the US Congress wrote it. Apparently, it imposes sanctions on Syria for a variety of mostly-bullshit reasons.

The US is in Iraq, apparently forever, threatening Syria and Iran, for the most part in order to benefit the Israelis, since Syria and Iran have no particular beefs with the US. Iran and Syria clearly want the US out of Iraq and US guns away from their doorstep. They have no interest in keeping the US in Iraq at all.

Anyway, the US status of forces agreement that they are trying to negotiate with the Iraqis is explicitly meant to use Iraq as a base for attacking neighboring countries, mostly Iran but possibly Syria too. So rage at Syria and Iran for not being overjoyed about the US military in Iraq is misplaced. No sane Syrian or Iranian leader would want us there.

Amidst this backdrop, Hariri supported UN Resolution 1559, probably because finally even the Lebanese Sunnis were getting fed up with Syria’s high-handedness. They had supported Syria for a long time, but Syria kept trying to push people to their limits.

It was the Maronite Christians who really hated the Syrians being there. Why is uncertain. The Maronites despise the Shia and Hezbollah and want the Palestinian refugees gone too.

By the way, the reason that the Palestinians have never been allowed to work or become citizens in Lebanon is because of the Maronites. The Maronites fear that allowing the Pallies to become citizens will increase the Muslim population at the expense of the Christians.

So the Hariri crowd was riding the wave of anti-Syrianism. At the same time, he was closely allied with the Saudis. The Saudis’ whole role in the region is to support the Sunnis and screw the Shia, in a word. So the Saudis were backing Hariri solely because he is Sunni, and also to stop Iran and Hezbollah and increasingly Syria, who is allied with Iran and Hezbollah and hence in the enemy camp as far as the Saudis see it.

There really is not much sane reason for the Saudis to fear Iran. All the hate in the region goes from Sunni to Shia, pretty much. Perhaps the Iranians could energize the long-downtrodden Saudi Shia to rebel against the Saudis, but the Saudis ought to give them more rights anyway. Sunni fears of Iran attacking the region are simply insane, kind of like Nazi fears of the USSR overrunning Europe, so the Nazis had to attack first.

Iran has never attacked another state in at least 100 years and possibly longer. The Shia are on the outs in the Arab World, and the Sunnis have all the power. There are no nefarious Shia plots to evangelize Shia Islam and convert all the Sunnis – this is just mad Sunni paranoia. But the Saudis do work hard in Iran to convert the Shia Ahwaz Arabs to Wahhabi Sunnism, and they have had some success at this.

The Shia have been killing a lot of Sunnis in Iraq, but the Sunnis started it. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, started the war against Iran for no good reason, and received volunteers and money from most of the Sunni states in the region.

Against this backdrop, as Syria was leaving Lebanon (though a spy network remains behind) Hariri was killed in the very professional car bomb attack. An Al Qaeda type radical Salafist Islamist associated with Jund al-Sham (Army of the Levant) was promptly fingered in the attack, though there were a lot of questions about whether or not Syria was actually involved.

The US and France got a UN commission to actually send a law enforcement team to investigate the killing. A couple of teams were sent out there and a couple of reports came back. One team was headed by Detlev Mehlis, a German.

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a journalist in Germany, is an acquaintance. He’s a former member of the STASI and is associated with the former East German government and the political party that came afterwards. Külbel is a Leftist, and for a long time he was pushing theories saying that US imperialism was in back of a lot of the shenanigans in the ME, including I guess the invasion of Iraq.

He showed a profound disinterest in investigating any Israeli or Jewish Lobby involvement in many of the conflicts over there. This is standard Leftist line that absolves Israel of everything and pushes it all off on imperialism.

So it is interesting that Külbel has now come around to the notion that Israel killed Hariri and then tried to pawn it off on Syria. He has also shown links that Mehlis had with the US AIPAC. Mehlis, as it turns out, used to work for WINEP, which is nothing AIPAC as a research arm. So his finding that Syria was involved has been attacked by Külbel.

Külbel was subsequently imprisoned for ten days for violating a court order by printing some East German STASI papers on his website. I’m not sure of their contents, but it may have shown how Mehlis was associated with WINEP. So the Voltaire Network has taken up the cause of Külbel, about which I feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Of interest to our Maronite discussion above, a group called UNIFL, which has interests that are almost precisely in line with the Israeli government, figures in all of this. These are the most hardcore radical rightwing Maronites, who are for all intents and purposes a quasi-fascist movement.

They were deeply involved in the War Against Iraq and other great big messes. They’ve been selling this BS story about how the Christians are so persecuted in Lebanon, and the persecution is being done by evil fundamentalist Islamic Syria (run by ultra-secular Alawis).

It’s mostly just a pack of lies, but there were arrests, tortures and killings under Syrian rule, it is true. That’s all over now, and the Maronites did tons of killing in their own day.

After all, they committed the most and worst massacres of all during the Civil War.

Maloof is in with these guys, so is a guy named David Wurmser (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) and his evil witch of the West wife Meyrav (read Hebrew for “Mary”, no? Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship).

So is Richard Pele (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?), and worst of all, Daniel Pipes (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) of Middle East Watch and Campus Watch and all of that Zionist fascist censorship, harassment and firing crap leaping up all over our land). Nice long sentence.

Pipes, whose father was an evil Cold War maniac and professional liar about the Soviet Union, inherited the evil maniac part, but all he cares about is Israel. Paul Wolfowitz (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) is also in deep with these guys.

Harold Rhode (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is another one, but no one has ever heard of him, so I will make him famous today for all time. Rhode is a Jewish guy who is religious and was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He was in on the plot to attack Iraq with all the rest of them from the very start.

Afterward, he became obsessed with the Jewish religious relics that the evil anti-Semitic Arab-Nazi government had somehow, through a sudden stroke of anti-Semitism, managed to preserve, despite their genocidal intentions towards all the world’s Jews.

Saddam wanted to kill every Jew on Earth, of course, but damn right he was going to save those Jewish holy books. That proves Saddam was a madman all right, just like the yahoos screamed before the invasion.

Rhode ran over to Iraq as soon as the war was done and got himself a big team put together right away while the museums and archaeological relics of the nation were being devastated. After all, the history of Jews receives precedence of the history of those lowly, dirty Arabs and over the very history of mankind itself, right? Jews take precedence over Arabs. Jews take precedence over humanity. You get the picture.

Well, anyway, a lot of money was spent grabbing every single Jewish relic in Iraq and “storing” it away in the US (in Jewish hands, I guess). Well, that’s sort of illegal. Now that Iraq is more stable, the Iraqi government wants their Jewish stuff back. It belongs to Iraq, not to the world’s Jews. Whoops, I forgot. No nation is allowed to own Jewish relics. Jews take precedence over all real nations on Earth.

Also, it’s funny that the US (Are we the second Jewish state?) bent all over backwards to grab all that old Jewish stuff, while we sat back and watched, first, while the whole non-Jewish history of Iraq was looted and destroyed to Hell, in particular the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Well, screw the Ottomans, they were just evil Muslims who ruled the Arab World and treated the Jews like crap, right? Or they were just scummy Muslims, screw em. Anyway, obviously the Jewish history of Iraq got nabbed by the nimble hands of the Jewish “Americans”, but the non-Jewish history of Iraq was scatted to the Seven Winds and the Seventy Thousand Thieves.

After all, in any country with lots of Jews, only the Jewish history matters ,and the non-Jewish history is just, pshaw! Right? Trash the museums and the libraries and re-burn the Library of Alexandria if the US and Israel are in the book-burning and library-sacking business, which apparently they are.

Funny how the US can’t spare a soldier to save the history of Muslim Ottoman Iraq from being ruined. Those records have been flooded and subjected to all sorts of abuse, and the US can’t spare one sentry to guard that stuff. Wow, gee, why do they hate us anyway?

They must be jealous of all of our stuff, and our freedoms, and you know, our stuff.

Ever notice that the far-Right jingoist dickheads who scream the loudest about “our freedoms” and “they hate us for our freedom” are the first ones to start shutting freedoms down? Scooter Libby (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is in with UNIFL too. So are Steven Hadley and Donald Rumsfeld. Hadley’s some weird poli-sci ultra-rightwing Vulcan dude.

Külbel also accuses UNIFL along with Israel of killing Hariri.

And it’s surely possible that a Maronite or UNIFL-type spy was used by the Mossad in Syria to kill Iranian super-agent Imad Mughniyeh. My theory, yes, I read up on that one too.

Why can’t Syria uncover the Mossad network deep in its very bowels?

Why can’t Iran either? Iran did catch one Mossad agent, and they just sentenced him to death after one of the shortest trials in recent history. If he’s really Mossad, hang him high, go ahead.

And I know that Iran is full of US spies and even US undercover troops (500 total? How many?). Same with British spies. Iran can’t catch these guys? The US guys are running around blowing up stuff up, and the British are giving bombs to Iranian rebels, including Al Qaeda types called Jundallah in Balochistan.

I guess Mossad, the US and probably the UK too, are all trying to get at Iran’s nuclear sites, and yes, I am certain the Iranians are making a nuclear bomb right now. I think they already have one, but it’s just a uranium bomb, and that isn’t good for anything but making one square mile of Earth uninhabitable for 70 years.

Actually, just to be a completely evil and horrible scumbag and make people hate me even more than they already do, I will right now officially support Iran’s efforts to get a nuclear bomb.

Is that an evil position or what?! Not to shoot one, just to get one.

Also to make a whole bunch of evil biological and chemical weapons and WMD-this and WMD-that. Also, just to be even more of an ass and arouse more hatred, I will say that I was deeply sad when North Korea blew up their reactor, because I wanted them to make more nukes to threaten people, namely the US, my country with. Not to shoot at us. Just to even it up.

Why be an ass? Long argument, but it has to do with imperialism’s gross abuse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.

I’m not saying this is what happened or anything, Maronites and Mossad killing Hariri. No one on Earth will ever know what happened. Figure it out yourself, I give, and I spent many long hours reading and poring over this mystery until I finally just gave up and don’t want to read about it anymore.

Such are the homicidal intrigues of the Middle East, like vines in a jungle, no beginning, no end, no middle, nothing much to grab, and every new lead carries you off on more red herrings and impossibilities and possibilities, and everything seems possible, but still nothing ever totally adds up. God I love a mystery. To a point.

Sorry this went on, but I never wrote a Hariri post. Now it’s done, and hopefully I won’t need to write any more. Believe it or not, I could have written way more, but I’m not into putting readers to sleep. I’m long-winded enough, as it is.

Try the Angry Arab blog (I’ve talked to this guy; As’ad, a Leftist Arab nationalist professor at a university very close by) if you can’t get enough of this maddening Lebanon stuff.

Or Joshua Landis’ (an acquaintance) great Syria Comment if you want to dip into the Syrian mystery casserole, where nothing makes sense either, and you think you can see the fish in the bowl, but the more you look, the more you can hardly make them out, and plus they always change.