One of the most significant developments of the post-Cold War era, and certainly the most ominous, is the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military bloc created by the United States during the genesis of the Cold War in 1949, into one that has grown to encompass the entirety of Europe, has expanded military partnerships throughout the world and has waged war on three continents.
As the baton travels around that notional ‘family’ of two billion people, starting in Delhi, it would be great to have a country-by-country account of Britain’s conquests, wars and plundering, past and present.
We could even have the historian Mark Curtis, author of Unpeople and Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, on-hand to help chart the ten million deaths that Britain is complicit in since 1945 alone.
The invasion of Iraq was undertaken with warnings from the intelligence services in the United States and Britain, both the attacking countries, intelligence services warned that this was going to increase terrorism. It did by a huge factor. According to government statistics by about a factor of seven in the first year. Does that help security? Well they had other reasons to invade Iraq, not security and this goes way back.
Michael Parenti is an internationally known, award winning scholar, with a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a columnist and television commentator
The US-created puppet government of Libya can not control the production of oil independently. This, in fact, is what the Americans wanted. If the U.S. takes oil production under control of its military, oil will be supplied at lower prices – approximately $25 per barrel.
The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.
While the General Assembly was discussing the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is another matter altogether that concerned the diplomats: are the United States still the superpower they have claimed to be since the demise of the Soviet Union or has the time come to break free of their tutelage?
The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war.
More than most armed struggles, the conflicts have been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television and radio journalists played a central role. In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
It is not supposed to be awarded to good humanitarians whose work has little or nothing to do with peace, such as most other recent recipients. As with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace which works for almost anything but, in violation of its creator’s will, and as with many a “peace and justice” group focused on all sorts of good causes that aren’t the elimination of militarism, the Nobel has become a “peace” prize, rather than a peace prize.
A documentary, directed by Chis Smith, on Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned independent reporter who predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness.
Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who describes himself as an investigative reporter and radical thinker, has authored books on the events of the September 11 attacks and of energy issues. Critics call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist but he’s been proved to be truly prophetic.
Michael Ruppert is an investigative journalist and author of two books, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World. In the 1970s, Ruppert was a narcotics officer for the LAPD. While there, he discovered evidence that the CIA was complicit in the illegal drug trade. He alerted his superiors with this information and soon found himself dismissed even though he had an honorable record. These events spurred Ruppert to begin a new career for himself as an investigative journalist. He was the publisher/editor of the From The Wilderness newsletter which, until its closure in 2006, examined government corruption and complicity in such areas as the CIA’s involvement in the war on drugs, the Pat Tillman scandal, the 2008 economic collapse and issues surrounding Peak Oil.
If they had any sense of shame, the people who have destroyed Iraq would at least have had the grace to retire from public life. But neo-cons and liberal imperialists don’t do shame or remorse. The same bunch of ’humanitarian’ interventionists and hawks who urged the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have spent the last two years propagandizing for an attack on Syria. These manic warmongers would rather we ‘move on’ from Iraq to focus on the next Middle Eastern country on their hit list.
