Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Washington Hits Back at Putin’s Humiliation FINIAN CUNNINGHAM

 
| 11.10.2016 | OPINION
Washington Hits Back at Putin’s Humiliation
The Obama administration is now accusing Russia of cyber-crime and trying to disrupt the US presidential election. The claim is so far-fetched, it is hardly credible. More credible is that the US is reeling from Putin’s stunning humiliation earlier this week.
Since June, US media and supporters of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton have been blaming Russian state-sponsored hackers for breaking into the Democratic party’s database.
It is further alleged that Moscow is stealthily trying to influence the outcome of the election, by releasing damaging information on Clinton, which might favor Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Russia has vehemently denied any connection to the cyber-crime charges, or trying to disrupt the November poll.
Now the Obama administration has stepped into the fray by openly accusing Russia. «US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections», reported the Washington Post.
This takes the row to a whole new level. No longer are the insinuations a matter of private, partisan opinion. The US government is officially labelling the Russian state for cyber-crime and political subversion.
Predictably, following the latest allegations, there are calls among American lawmakers for ramping up more economic sanctions against Russia. While US intelligence figures are urging for retaliatory cyber-attacks on Russian government facilities.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov derided the US claims as «rubbish». He noted that the Kremlin’s computer system incurs hundreds of hacking attempts every day, many of which can be traced to American origin, but Moscow doesn’t turn around and blame the US government for such cyber-attacks.
There are several signs that the latest brouhaha out of Washington is a bogus diversion.
As with previous Russian-hacker claims by the Democrats and US media, there is no evidence presented by the Obama administration to support its grave allegations against the Russian government. Assertion without facts does not meet a minimal standard of proof.
When reports emerged in June – again through the Washington Post – that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian agents, the allegation relied on investigations by a private cyber security firm by the name of CrowdStrike. The firm is linked by personnel to the NATO-affiliated, anti-Russian think tank Atlantic Council. Again no verifiable evidence was presented then, just the word of a dubious partisan source.
Back then the Russian scare story, for that’s what it was, served as a useful diversion from far more important issues. Such as the 19,000 emails released from the DNC database showing that the party chiefs had preordained Clinton’s presidential nomination over her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders. Much-vaunted «US democracy» was exposed as a fraud, and so the Washington establishment quickly went into damage-limitation mode by smearing Russia.
It was the whistleblower site Wikileaks, run by Australian journalist Julian Assange, that released the embarrassing emails. It had nothing to do with Russia. Assange has since hinted that his source was within the Democrat party itself.
This is where it gets really explosive. Assange has vowed to release more emails that will prove that Clinton as Secretary of State back in 2011-2012 masterminded the supply of weapons and money to Islamist terror networks in Libya and Syria for the objective of regime change. Furthermore, Assange says that the emails prove that Clinton lied under oath to Congress when she denied in 2013 that she was had any involvement in facilitating arms to the jihadists.
Assange has said that Wikileaks is going to publish the incriminating emails on Clinton’s alleged gun-running to terrorists this month. If the evidence stands up, Clinton could be prosecuted for perjury as well as treason in aiding and abetting official terrorist enemies of the US.
The exposure of an American presidential candidate as being involved in state sponsorship of terrorism while serving as a top government official is a powerful incentive for the Obama administration to find a lurid diversion.
Hence, the latest charges by the US government against Russia as perpetrating cyber-crime and of trying to subvert American democracy.
This is just one more illustration of how irrational and unhinged the US government has become.
Day by day, it seems, leads to more damning revelations of Washington’s complicity in illegal wars, covert subversion of foreign states, and systematic collusion with terrorist networks which have inflicted thousands of deaths on American citizens, among many more thousands of other innocent civilians around the world.
In addition to exposure by sources like Wikileaks, much of revelation about US criminality and state-sponsored banditry has emerged from Russia’s principled military intervention in Syria. Russia’s intervention has not only helped salvage the Syrian nation from a foreign conspiracy of covert war for regime change. Russia’s intervention has also brought into clear focus the systematic links between Washington and its terrorist proxy army working on its behalf in Syria.
Washington’s mask of moral and legal superiority has been ripped from its face. And what the world is seeing is the vile ugliness beneath.
Such is Washington’s ignominious fall from pretend-grace to its grim, odious reality that Vladimir Putin this week was empowered to speak from the moral high ground.
In announcing Russia’s unilateral suspension of a 2002 accord with the US for the disposal of nuclear-weapon-grade plutonium, Putin went much, much further. He gave Washington a list of ultimatums that included the US ending its trumped-up sanctions against Russia, with financial compensation, as well as the scaling back of NATO forces from Russia’s border.
In other words, the Russian leader was talking truth to American power in a way that megalomaniac Washington, with all its ridiculous delusions of «exceptionalism», has never ever heard before.
American pretensions of greatness are eroding like a castle built on sand. Washington’s criminal enterprises and specifically the complicity in terrorism for the supreme crime of foreign aggression are being glaringly exposed.
And now with due contempt, Russia is putting manners on Washington. It must be excruciating the humiliation for the narcissistic American tyrant to be treated with the disrespect that it deserves and which is long overdue.
Moreover, the humiliation is not just in the eyes of the world. The American people can see the true ugly nature of their rulers too. When a giant banner declaring «Putin a peacemaker» was unfurled off Manhattan bridge in New York City this weekend, the popular enthusiasm went viral.
Washington is reeling from Putin’s righteous courage to call it out for what it is. The truth-telling is hard to take for this unipolar unicorn. Its deluded myth-making about its own virtues are being stripped bare.
What’s going on here is a world-class, historic exposure of American power as a nefarious excrescence on humanity.
The reaction is understandable: foaming-at-the-mouth, desperate, hysterical and panicked. Accusing Russia of hacking into the American «democratic process» is a wild attempt to divert from the paramount issues: Washington’s exposed descent into a vile morass of its own making; the emperor is a criminal; the people know it; and a genuine world leader like Vladimir Putin has the temerity to lay it on the line to this has-been.

The Eurasian Century Is NOW Unstoppable by William Engdahl


 
11.10.2016
The transfer of the geopolitical center of gravity to Eurasia is something the West will have to get used to
William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, “New Eastern Outlook”
I recently returned from a fascinating two week speaking tour in China. The occasion was the international premier of my newest book, One Belt, One Road–China and the New Eurasian Century.
In the course of my visit I was invited by China’s Northwest University in Xi’an to give a lecture and seminar on the present global political and economic situation in the context of China’s New Economic Silk Road as the One Belt, One Road project is often called.
What I’ve seen in my many visits to China, and have studied about the entirety of this enormously impressive international infrastructure project convinces me that a Eurasian Century at this point is unstoppable.
The idiotic wars of the Washington war-hawks and their military industry–in Syria, in Ukraine, Libya, Iraq and now the South China Sea provocations against China–are not going to stop what is now clearly the most impressive and economically altering project in more than a century.
The term “American Century” was triumphantly proclaimed in a famous editorial in Life magazine in 1941 in the early phase of World War II, before the United States had even entered the war, to describe the system publisher Henry Luce saw dominating the postwar world after the fall of the rival British Empire.
The American Century has lasted a mere seven decades if we date from the end of the war. Its record has been one of dismal failure on balance. The industrial base of the United States, the predominant leading industrial nation and leading scientific innovator, today is a hollowed, rotted shell with once-booming cities like Detroit or Philadelphia or Los Angeles now burned-out ghettos of unemployed and homeless.
The Federal Debt of the United States, owing to the endless wars its Presidents engage in, as well as the fruitless bailouts of Wall Street banks and Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie Mae, is well over 103% of GDP at an astonishing $19.5 trillion, or more than $163,000 per taxpaying American and Washington is adding to the debt this year at near $600 billion. Countries like China and Russia are moving away from subsidizing that debt at a record pace.
America’s economic basic infrastructure–bridges, sewer and water treatment plants, electric grid, railways, highways–have been neglected for more than four decades for a variety of reasons.
The American Society of Civil Engineers recently estimated that gross domestic product will be reduced by $4 trillion between 2016 and 2025 because of lost business sales, rising costs and reduced incomes if the country continues to underinvest in its infrastructure. That is on top of the fact that they estimate the country at present urgently requires new infrastructure investment of $3.3 trillion by the coming decade just to renew.
Yet US states and cities are not able to finance such an investment in the future in the present debt situation, nor is the debt-choked Federal Government, so long as a cartel of corrupt brain-dead Wall Street banks and financial funds hold America to ransom.
This is the sunset for the American Century, a poorly disguised imperial experiment in hubris and arrogance by a gaggle of boring old patriarchs like David Rockefeller and his friends on Wall Street and in the military industry. It is the starkest contrast to what is going on to the east, across all Eurasia today.
Flowing the Thought to Transform
The Eurasian Century is the name I give to the economic emergence of the countries contiguous from China across Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, Iran and potentially Turkey. They are being integrally linked through the largest public infrastructure projects in modern history, in fact the most ambitious ever, largely concentrated on the 2013 initiative by Chinese President Xi Jinping called the One Belt, One Road initiative or OBOR.
The project and its implications for Europe and the rest of the world economy have been so far greeted in the west with a stone silence that defies explanation.
It’s been now three years that have transpired since then-new Chinese President Xi Jinping made one of his first foreign visits to Kazakhstan where he discussed the idea of building a vast, modern network of high-speed train lines crossing the vast Eurasian land space from the Pacific coast of China and Russia through Central Asia into Iran, into the states of the Eurasian Economic Union, principally Russia and potentially on to the select states of the European Union.
That initial proposal was unveiled in detail last year by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s economic planning organization, and the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Commerce.
It’s a useful point to look now more closely at what has transpired to date. It reveals most impressive developments, more because the development process is creative and organic. The great project is no simple blueprint made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and then simply imposed, top down, across the so-far 60 countries of Eurasia and South East Asia.
An international conference was recently held in Xi’an, origin of the ancient version of One Belt, One Road, namely the Silk Road. The purpose of the international gathering was to review what has so far taken place.
It’s fascinating, notably, in the care that’s being taken by China to do it in a different way, as indications so far are, different from the way American Robber Barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, E.H. Harriman, Jay Gould or Russell Sage built rail monopolies and deluded and defrauded investors with railroad monopolies more than a century ago.
The seminar, titled the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Shared Memory and Common Development, on September 26th, brought together over 400 participants from more than 30 countries including government officials, universities, corporations, think tanks and media.
A key role is being played by Renmin University of China’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies to identify progress and problems of the OBOR project. Their report in Xi’an presented principles underlying the OBOR international project: It adheres to the principles of the UN Charter; it is completely open for new participant nations to cooperate; it will follow market rules and seek mutual benefit of participating countries.
Those are noble words. What’s more interesting is the flow process underway to realize such words and to build the mammoth game-changing infrastructure.
Notably, China’s Xi Jinping decided to encourage input from sources other than the state central planning agency or the Communist Party for the complex OBOR. He encouraged creation of private and independent think-tanks to become a source of new creative ideas and approaches.
Today there is a Chinese Think Tank Cooperation Alliance group coordinating efforts around OBOR headed by the dean of the Renmin University. In turn they partner with think tanks along the OBOR route including think tanks in Iran, Turkey, India, Nepal, Kazakhstan and other countries.
There will be two main routes of the OBOR. On land there are several routes or corridors in work. The Initiative will focus on jointly building what is being called a new Eurasian Land Bridge from China via Kazakhstan on to Rotterdam. Other OBOR land rail corridors include developing China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central Asia-West Asia, China-Pakistan, Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar, and China-Indochina Peninsula economic corridors.vThis is huge.
It will build on international transport routes, relying on core cities along the OBOR route and using key economic industrial parks as “cooperation platforms.”
At sea, the Initiative will focus on jointly building smooth, secure and efficient transport routes connecting major sea ports along the “Belt and Road” including modern upgraded super port construction that will link present China ports at Haikou and Fujian with Kuala Lumpur’s port in Malaysia at the Malacca Strait passage, Calcutta in India, Nairobi in Kenya and via the Suez Canal to Athens and beyond. Crucial is that land and sea parts of OBOR are seen as one whole circulatory system or flow of trade.
The OBOR Initiative will link key Eurasian ports with interior rail and pipeline infrastructure in a way not before seen
To date China has signed memoranda of understanding with 56 countries and regional organizations regarding OBOR. Since his initial proposal in 2013, President Xi Jinping has personally visited 37 countries to discuss implementation of OBOR. China Railway Group and China Communications Construction Company have signed contracts for key routes and ports in 26 countries.
Power plants, electricity transmission facilities and oil and gas pipelines, covering 19 countries along the “Belt and Road” in some 40 energy projects have begun. China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile are speeding up cross-border transmission projects in countries along the “Belt and Road” to expand international telecommunication infrastructure.
Already, taking the full sea and land routes of OBOR, some $3 trillion of China trade since June 2013 has flowed over the route, more than a quarter of China’s total trade volume.
To date China has also invested more than $51 billion in the countries along the present OBOR route. The new land rail routes will greatly reduce transportation costs across Eurasia, enable formerly isolated regions to connect efficiently to sea and land markets and ignite tremendous new economic growth across Eurasia.
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The effects of the OBOR are already beginning to appear. Earlier this year an Iranian container ship arrived at Qinzhou Port in China with 978 containers from several countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road opening the first shipping route linking the Middle East and the Beibu Gulf or Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnamese.
In February 2016 a container train with Chinese goods took only 14 days to complete the 5,900 mile (9,500km) journey from China’s eastern Zhejiang province through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
That was 30 days shorter than the sea voyage from Shanghai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, according to the head of the Iranian railway company. China and Iran, now formally part of the OBOR, have targeted bilateral trade, none in US dollars by the way, to exceed $600 billion in the coming decade.
China is presently in negotiations with 28 countries China is in talks with 28 countries including Russia, on high-speed rail projects, China’s train maker, China CNR reports.
It includes a major joint China-Russia $15 billion high-speed Kazan to Moscow line. The 770 kilometers of track between Moscow and Russia’s Tatarstan capital, Kazan, will cut time for the journey from 12 hours now to just 3.5 hours. China has agreed to invest $6 billion in the project which would become a part of a $100 billion high-speed railway between Moscow and Beijing.
Notably, for the new high-speed track being laid, China is developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching speeds of 400 kilometers per hour. And the new trains will solve the costly rail gauge switching problem between China rails and Russian.
Trains in Russia run on a 1520mm track, compared to the narrower 1435mm track used in Europe and China. Jia Limin, the head of China’s high-speed rail innovation program told China Daily that, “The train… will have wheels that can be adjusted to fit various gauges on other countries’ tracks, compared with trains now that need to have their wheels changed before entering foreign systems.”
Given its strategy of building thousands of kilometers of high-speed railways and developing its domestic Chinese rail sock manufacture as well as other rail technology, China today is the world’s leading producer of rail technology.
Financing the moving
Impressive is that China has secured capital commitment for the OBOR from various sources including the China Development Bank, Export-Import Bank of China, the China-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS New Development Bank and other sources including its Silk Road Fund to finance the huge undertaking.
The Silk Road Fund has posted $40 billion to fund the OBOR projects. So far close to a quarter trillion US dollars of ready money and another half trillion in supranational institutional working capital is reasonably within reach.
The Western doomsday reports of China’s economy going down the tubes are simply either self-serving propaganda of hedge funds or speculators or fed by lack of understanding of the profound transformation in the entire structure of not only China’s but all Eurasia’s economy through the One Belt One Road initiative. China is undergoing a major transformation from a cheap-labor screwdriver assembly nation to a high-value-added high-tech manufacturer.
Geopolitical transformation
The One Belt, One Road initiative of Xi Jinping and the Eurasian partners, especially Russia, also has strategic dimensions of major import. The construction of new infrastructure corridors spanning across the Eurasian landmass in the form of highways, railways, industrial parks, and oil and gas pipelines, OBOR is connecting for the first time in the modern era landlocked regions of hinterland China and Russia and Central Asia republics with the sea ports.
Linking key Eurasian industrial hubs to ports with efficient transportation will revolutionize connectivity of hinterland industrial products and raw materials of every kind. The Russian and Eurasian lands, including China, contain perhaps the richest untapped concentration of every raw material known.
The One Belt, One Road also includes oil and gas pipeline transportation corridors. In January 2015 the Myanmar-China Pipeline project, 2400 km long, was completed, linking Myanmar’s deep-water port of Kyaukphyu on Maday Island in the Bay of Bengal with Kunming in Yunnan province in southeast China near Myanmar’s border.
It’s a joint project of the China Development Bank and Myanmar Foreign Investment Bank. The new pipeline allows China to import up to 400,000 barrels a day of Middle East oil over a route 1100 km shorter than the previous Malacca Strait sea route, reducing time to reach the large industrial hub city of Kunming by 30%, major economic gains, and avoiding the strategic chokepoint of the Malacca Strait where the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet dominates.
Previously, 80% of Chinese oil and gas imports crossed the Malacca straits and were subject to US controls. Were the present escalating tensions between Washington and China over the South China Sea or other issues to escalate, China would be brought to her knees much like Japan prior to declaring war in 1941, when the USA embargoed her oil. A second pipeline brings natural gas from Qatar and Myanmar gas fields to China.
The OBOR includes oil and gas pipelines that reduce time and distance to imports of Middle East oil and gas
China will pay $53 billion to Myanmar in pipeline royalties over 30 years. They will also invest $25 million in schooling and other social development projects along the pipeline and 10% of the gas will stay in Burma.
Mackinder Outflanked?
The totality of the strategy behind Xi Jinping’s Eurasian One belt, One Road rail, sea and pipeline initiative, which is moving quietly and impressively forward, is transforming the world geopolitical map. In 1904 a British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, a fervid champion of the British Empire, unveiled a brilliant concept in a speech to the London Royal Geographical Society titled the Geographical Pivot of History.
That essay has shaped both British and American global strategy of hegemony and domination to the present. It was complemented by US Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, which advocated “sea power,” stating that nations with domination of the seas, as the British Empire or later the USA, would dominate the world.
The One Belt, One Road, by linking all the contiguous land areas of Eurasia to the related network of strategic new or enlarged deep-water ports of OBOR’s Maritime Silk Road, has rendered US geopolitical strategy a devastating blow at a time the hegemony of America is failing as never in its short history.
The Eurasian Century today is inevitable and unstoppable. Built on different principles of cooperation rather than domination, it just might offer a model for the bankrupt United States and the soon-bankrupt European Union, to build up true prosperity not based on looting and debt slavery Source:.http://www.4thmedia.org/2016/10/the-eurasian-century-is-now-unstoppable/

Offener Brief An den ARD Programmdirektor von Prof. Dr. Mohssen Massarrat

Herrn Reinold Becker und 
ZDF Programmdirektor, Herrn Dr. Norbert Himmler
Sehr geehrte Herren,

Am Sonntag, dem 9. Oktober 2016, berichtete der Fernsehsender Euronews von der Bombardierung einer Trauerfeier in Jemen am Tage zuvor, bei der mindestens 140 Menschen  ihr Leben vorloren haben. Mit Empörung musste ich feststellen, dass Ihre Sender, also ARD und ZDF, bei keiner der Nachrichtensendungen am gestrigen Sonntag und soweit ich verfolgen konnte, auch bis heute nicht von diesem Ereignis, das zweifelsohne einem schlimmen Kriegsverbrechen gleichkommt, berichtet haben.

Als Bürger dieses Landes bin ich maßlos darüber empört, dass die 140 Opfer der jemenistischen Zivilbevölkerung  der ARD und dem ZDF nicht einmal eine Nachricht Wert waren, geschweige denn ausführlicher Berichte über den Hergang des Bombardements und über mögliche Verantwortliche für dieses Verbrechen, die dem Haager Gerichtshof zu überantworten wären. Ich bin der Meinung, dass beide Einrichtungen ihren Auftrag als öffentlich rechtliche Sender bei der Unterlassung dieser für die deutsche Öffentlichkeit so wichtigen Nachricht ihre Informationspflicht massiv verletzt haben. Ich bin mir völlig im Klaren, dass dabei Ihre Sender auch gegen ihre Neutralitätspflicht verstoßen haben, da der Verdacht naheliegt,  dadurch  Geschäftsbeziehungen mit Saudi  Arabien, dem Land, das aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach  für das Verbrechen verantwortlich ist, nicht schädigen zu wollen. Dabei gilt auch zu berücksichtigen, dass über das Kriegsverbrechen gegen die UN-Hilfskovois, das der syrisch-russischen Allianz zugeschrieben wurde, Ihre Sender  tagelang ausführlichst berichtet haben.

Ihre systematische Unterschlagung der Tötung Unschuldiger im Jemen bereitet mir, und ich bin sicher auch Millionen anderen  Menschen, sehr geehrte Herren  Programmdirektoren von ARD und ZDF, auch große Sorgen um die Pressefreiheit in unserem Land, da in dieser Sache zwischen beiden Sendern ein einheitliches Verhalten an den Tag gelegt worden ist. Es stellen sich in diesem Zusammenhang wichtige Fragen: Wie konnte es überhaupt zu diesem einheitlichen Verhalten kommen? Ein Zufall muss jedenfalls angesichts des gleichartigen Vorgehens über beinhe zwei Tage ausgeschlossen werden. Gab es, so muss des weiteren gefragt werden, Absprachen zwischen beiden Sendern,  Meldungen über Kriegsverbrechen im Jemen zu zensieren? Es stellt sich ferner auch die Frage, ob  womöglich bereits eine Art Clearingstelle oberhalb beider Sender für die Zensur missliebiger Nachrichten existiert. Eine solche Institution würde jedoch  die Verfassung verletzen und die Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit massiv beeinträchtigen. Die Schaffung von zwei  öffenlich rechtlichen Sendern sollte ausdrücklich für Meinungs- und Informationsvielfalt sorgen und nicht dafür, dass sich beide Anstalten untereinander absprechen oder durch eine übergeordnete Stelle zur Verbreitung genehmer und Unterschlagung missliebiger Informationen genötigt sehen.

Sie sind, sehr geehrte Herren Programmdirektoren, auf jeden Fall verpflichtet, der Öffentlichkeit zu erklären, wie es zu der Zensur der Katastrophennachricht aus dem Jemen am 09.10.2016 gekommen ist und welche Stelle bzw. Personen dafür die Verantwortung tragen.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen

Prof. Dr. Mohssen Massarrat

Präsident Obama, zügeln Sie das Pentagon und geben Sie dem Frieden eine Chance!

Ehemalige US-Geheimdienstmitarbeiter appellieren an den US-Präsidenten, die wegen Syrien weiter steigenden Spannungen mit Russland zu entschärfen.
Obama soll die Spannungen mit Russland entschärfen
Von Ray McGovern
War is A Crime, 02.10.16
(
http://warisacrime.org/content/need-rein-pentagon-give-peace-chance )
Eine Gruppe ehemaliger US-Geheimdienstmitarbeiter ermahnt den Präsidenten Obama, die wegen Syrien entstandenen und ständig wachsenden Spannungen mit Russland zu entschärfen, die Dämonisierung des russischen Präsidenten Putin einzustellen und die zi- vile Kontrolle des Weißen Hauses über das Pentagon durchzusetzen.
Dringender Appell an den Präsidenten
von
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity / VIPS (von ehemaligen Geheimdienstmitarbeitern für Vernunft), in Syrien noch Schlimmeres zu verhindern
Wie den Präsidenten George W. Bush sechs Wochen vor dem Angriff auf den Irak [s. htt- ps://consortiumnews.com/2003/02/05/powells-un-speech-and-the-case-for-war/ ]* möchten wir auch Sie davor warnen, sich nur von einer kleinen, relativ unerfahrenen, nicht beson- ders klugen Clique beraten zu lassen, weil das schreckliche Folgen haben könnte. Dieses Mal geht es um Syrien.
Wir hoffen, dass Sie bei der Lagebesprechung morgen früh der am Samstag von Maria Sacharowa (s. http://theduran.com/russian-fm-spokeswoman-maria-zakharova-makes-a- fool-of-boris-johnson-after-he-accused-russia-of-war-crimes-in-syria/ ), der Sprecherin des russischen Außenministeriums, ausgesprochenen Warnung die nötige Aufmerksamkeit widmen werden. Sie hat gesagt: "Wenn die USA einen direkten Angriff auf Damaskus und die syrische Armee starten, hätte das eine schreckliche, tektonische Verwerfung nicht nur in Syrien, sondern in der gesamten Region zur Folge." (Weitere Infos dazu s. unter https://www.rt.com/news/361294-us-aggression-damascus-tectonic-shift/ .)
In einem Statement im russischen Fernsehen warnte sie vor denjenigen, die sagen: "Warum sollten wir auf Diplomatie setzen..., wenn wir die Macht dazu haben, Probleme auch mit Gewalt zu lösen. Wir kennen diese Logik bereits, sie ist nicht neu für uns. Sie führt nur in eine Richtung – in einen groß angelegten Krieg."
Wir hoffen auch, dass Sie nicht erst jetzt von dieser zweifellos offiziell gebilligten Erklärung hören. Wenn Sie sich am Sonntag nur in den Mainstream-Blättern informiert haben, könn- te sie Ihnen entgangen sein. In der Washington Post erschien nur eine kurze Zusammen- fassung der Zacharowa-Erklärung im letzten Abschnitt eines elfspaltigen Artikels mit der Ãœberschrift "Krankenhaus in Aleppo erneut von Bomben getroffen" – ohne ein Wort zum "groß angelegten Krieg". Die New York Times hat die Erklärung der Sprecherin des russi- schen Außenministeriums völlig ignoriert.
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Friedenspolitische Mitteilungen aus der US-Militärregion Kaiserslautern/Ramstein LP 136/16 – 10.10.16
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Unserer Ansicht nach wäre es ein riesengroßer Fehler, wenn Ihre Sicherheitsberater dem Beispiel der beiden führenden US-Zeitungen folgen und die Bedeutung der Zacharowa-Er- klärung ebenfalls herunterspielen würden.
Mehrere Ereignisse in den letzten Wochen haben dazu geführt, dass Vertreter Russlands US-Außenminister John Kerry nicht mehr vertrauen. Der russische Außenminister Sergei Lawrow hat dieses Misstrauen mit sorgfältig gewählten Worten auch öffentlich ausge- drückt. Einige russische Offizielle vermuten, dass Kerry ein doppeltes Spiel getrieben hat; andere glauben, dass seine diplomatischen Bemühungen immer wieder vom Pentagon hintertrieben werden. Wir glauben, dass dieser Mangel an Vertrauen überwunden werden muss und nur Sie das schaffen können.
Es kann nicht als Paranoia der Russen abgetan werden, wenn sie die am 17. September von US-amerikanischen und australischen Kampfjets geflogenen Luftangriffe auf Truppen der regulären syrischen Armee, durch die 62 syrische Soldaten getötet und 100 verwundet wurden, nicht als "Versehen" durchgehen lassen, sondern als vorsätzlichen Versuch anse- hen, die von Kerry und Lawrow ausgehandelte teilweise Waffenruhe zu verhindern, auf die Sie sich mit dem russischen Präsidenten Putin fünf Tage vorher verständigt hatten. [Weite- re Infos dazu s. unter http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/world/middleeast/us-airstrike-sy- rian-troops-isis-russia.html?_r=0 .]
In öffentlichen Äußerungen, die an Befehlsverweigerung grenzen, haben führende Penta- gon-Offizielle offene Kritik an wichtigen Aspekten der Kerry-Lawrow-Vereinbarung geübt. Wir können davon ausgehen, dass sich Lawrow im Privatgespräch mit Putin genau so of- fen und untypisch drastisch geäußert hat, wie er das am 26. September beim russischen Fernsehsender NTV tat.
"Mein guter Freund John Kerry ... ist unter heftige Kritik der US-Militärmaschinerie gera- ten. Präsident Barack Obama versichert Kerry zwar immer wieder, dass er dessen Kontakte zu Russland auch als Oberbefehlshaber der US-Streitkräfte unterstütze, was Obama bei seinem Treffen mit dem russischen Präsidenten Wladimir Putin auch bestätigt hat. Das US-Militär scheint seinem Oberbefehlshaber aber nicht mehr zu gehorchen."
Lawrows Worte sind nicht nur Rhetorik Er kritisierte auch Joseph Dunford, den Chef des US-Generalstabes, weil der vor dem US-Kongress erklärt hat, er sei dagegen, Erkenntnis- se der US-Geheimdienste mit Russland zu teilen, obwohl Obama und Putin das vereinbart hatten; er halte es für "schwierig, mit solchen Partnern zusammenzuarbeiten".
Die politischen Differenzen zwischen dem Weißen Haus und dem Pentagon waren noch nie so offensichtlich, wie sie das jetzt bei der Syrien-Politik sind. Wir schlagen Ihnen vor, sich Rat in einem neuen Buch zu holen, das in dieser Woche erscheinen wird. Es hat den Titel "The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War" (Der General gegen den Präsidenten: MacArthur und Truman am Rand eines Atomkrie- ges, weitere Infos dazu unter https://www.amazon.com/General-vs-President-MacArthur- Nuclear/dp/0385540574 ) und sein Autor ist der bekannte Historiker H. W. Brands (s. htt- ps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._W._Brands ). Brands erklärt an Hand bisher unterdrückter Fakten, warum Präsident Truman General Douglas MacArthur (s. dazu auch https://de.wi- kipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur ), einen Helden des Zweiten Weltkriegs, im April 1951 vom Oberbefehl über die im Auftrag der Vereinten Nationen in Korea operierenden Streit- kräfte entbunden hat. Ein früher Rezensent stellt zu dem Buch fest: "Brands Buch wirft die Frage auf, ob es auch heute wieder zu einem so gravierenden Konflikt zwischen der zivi- len und der militärischen Führung kommen könnte?" Dieses neue Buch könnte für Sie nützlicher sein als das von Ihnen so geschätzte Werk "Team of Rivals" (s. https://en.wiki- pedia.org/wiki/Team_of_Rivals ).
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Die Tür zu weiteren Verhandlungen ist noch einen Spalt offen. In den letzten Tagen haben russische Offizielle aus dem Außen- und Verteidigungsministerium und der Sprecher des Präsidenten Putin sorgfältig vermieden, diese Tür ganz zu schließen, und wir halten es für ein gutes Zeichen, dass US-Außenminister Kerry wieder mit dem russischen Außen- minister Lawrow telefoniert hat. Und die Russen haben die Bereitschaft Moskaus betont, in Bezug auf Syrien getroffene Vereinbarungen doch noch umzusetzen.
Nach Ansicht des Kreml steht für Russland viel mehr auf dem Spiel als für die USA. Tau- sende russischer Dissidenten und Terroristen haben sich auf den Weg nach Syrien gemacht und sammeln dort Erfahrungen im Umgang mit Waffen sowie über die Beschaf- fung von Geld und die Anzettelung gewaltsamer Aufstände. Moskau ist natürlich sehr be- sorgt wegen der Bedrohung, die nach ihrer Rückkehr von ihnen ausgehen wird. Außerdem wird vermutlich auch Präsident Putin von seinen Militärs gedrängt, "das Problem Syrien ein für allemal aus der Welt zu schaffen", unabhängig davon, wie schwierig eine rein mili- tärische Lösung für beide Seiten sein wird.
Wir wissen, was viele Leute im Kongress und in den Mainstream-Medien jetzt von Ihnen erwarten; Sie sollen in Syrien höher pokern und – offen und/oder verdeckt – mehr US-Mili- tär einsetzen. Wir möchten Sie an Ihre spöttischen Bemerkungen über das "Drehbuch Wa- shingtons" erinnern, die Sie Anfang dieses Jahres in einem Interview mit Jeffrey Goldberg vom Magazin The Atlantic gemacht haben [s. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archi- ve/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/ ]. Wir setzen einige Hoffnung in Ihre Antworten die Sie Goldberg auf Fragen nach diesem "Drehbuch gegeben haben; damals haben Sie gesagt, ein Drehbuch könne "zur Falle werden, zu falschen Entscheidungen verleiten und zu Dummheiten verführen".
Zu Goldberg haben Sie gesagt, vor sieben Jahren hätten Sie sich vom Pentagon zu den Truppenverstärkungen in Afghanistan drängen lassen, und vor drei Jahren sei Ihnen fast das Gleiche in Syrien passiert, wenn Sie der russische Präsident nicht dadurch davor be- wahrt hätte, dass er Assad zur freiwilligen Herausgabe seiner Chemiewaffen überredete. Wenn das damals funktioniert hat, können Sie sich doch heute wieder von Putin aus der Klemme helfen lassen.
Außerdem wäre es nützlich, wenn Sie einen Ihrer Berater damit beauftragen würden, die Mainstream-Medien wissen zu lassen, dass ihre kindischen und bösartigen Verunglimp- fungen des russischen Präsidenten Putin größtenteils ungerechtfertigt und ganz bestimmt nicht hilfreich sind.
Ein neuerlicher direkter Dialog mit Präsident Putin bietet Ihnen wohl die beste Chance, sich unerwünschtem Druck zu entziehen. Wir glauben, dass John Kerry recht damit hat, dass die Lage in Syrien wegen der gegensätzlichen Interessen und der sehr unterschiedli- chen Splittergruppen äußerst kompliziert ist. Trotzdem hat er im Zusammenwirken mit dem meistens sehr entgegenkommenden russischen Außenminister Lawrow schon viel nützliche Vorarbeit geleistet.
Wegen der nicht nur bei den Russen herrschenden Skepsis bezüglich Ihrer Unterstützung für Ihren Außenminister glauben wir, dass Gespräche auf höchster Ebene am besten ge- eignet wären, Hitzköpfe auf beiden Seiten daran zu hindern, eine bewaffnete Konfrontation zu riskieren, die niemand wollen sollte.
Deshalb empfehlen wir Ihnen dringend, Präsident Putin zu einem Treffen an einem beiden genehmen Ort einzuladen, um zu einer Verständigung zu kommen, die den Menschen in Syrien noch Schlimmeres erspart.
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Nach dem Gemetzel im Zweiten Weltkriegs kam Winston Churchill zu einer Einsicht, die auch im 21. Jahrhundert noch gültig ist: "Reden, reden, reden ist viel besser als Krieg, Krieg, Krieg."
* Das Memorandum an den Präsidenten George W. Bush, in dem wir VIPS die Rede kriti- siert haben, die Colin Powell am 5. Februar 2003 vor den Vereinten Nationen gehalten hat, endete mit den Worten: "Nachdem wir die Rede gehört haben, die US-Außenminister Powell heute gehalten hat, meinen wir, Sie sollten nicht auf Berater hören, die unbedingt in einen Krieg ziehen wollen, für den wir keinen zwingenden Grund sehen und von dem wir glauben, dass seine unbeabsichtigten Folgen höchst wahrscheinlich katastrophal sein werden."
Für den Lenkungsausschuss der Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co- founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Fred Costello, Former Russian Linguist, USAF
Mike Gravel, former Adjutant, top secret control officer, Communications Intelligence Ser- vice; special agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps and former United States Senator
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson, CIA and State Department officer
John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS) Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.) Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.) Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)

Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA, (ret.) Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat

(Wir haben den Appell, der zeigt wie nahe wir schon einem Dritten und letzten Welt- krieg gekommen sind, komplett übersetzt und mit Ergänzungen in Links in runden Klammern versehen. Die Links in eckigen Klammern waren bereits im Originaltext enthalten, den wir nachfolgen abdrucken.) 

Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington by Pepe Escobar


 
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos   11.10.2016
Almost six years ago, President Putin proposed to Germany ‘the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’
This idea represented an immense trade empirium uniting Russia and the EU, or, in Putin’s words, “a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of dollars.”
In a nutshell: Eurasia integration.
Washington panicked. The record shows how Putin’s vision – although extremely seductive to German industrialists – was eventually derailed by Washington’s controlled demolition of Ukraine.
Three years ago, in Kazakhstan and then Indonesia, President Xi Jinping expanded on Putin’s vision, proposing One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a.k.a. the New Silk Roads, enhancing the geoeconomic integration of Asia-Pacific via a vast network of highways, high-speed rail, pipelines, ports and fiber-optic cables.
In a nutshell: an even more ambitious version of Eurasia integration, benefiting two-thirds of the world population, economy and trade. The difference is that it now comes with immense financial muscle backing it up, via a Silk Road Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB), and an all-out commercial offensive all across Eurasia, and the official entry of the yuan in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights; that is, the christening of the yuan as a key currency worth holding by every single emerging market central bank.
At the recent G20 in Huangzhou, President Xi clearly demonstrated how OBOR is absolutely central to the Chinese vision of how globalization should proceed. Beijing is betting that the overwhelming majority of nations across Eurasia would rather invest in, and profit from, a “win-win” economic development project than be bogged down in a lose-lose strategic game between the US and China.
And that, for the Empire of Chaos, is absolute anathema. How to possibly accept that China is winning the 21st century / New Great Game in Eurasia by building the New Silk Roads?
And don’t forget the Silk Road in Syria
Few in the West have noticed, as reported by RT, that the G20 was preceded by an Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Essentially, that was yet another de facto celebration of Eurasia integration, featuring Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.
And that integration plank will soon merge with the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union – which in itself is a sort of Russian New Silk Road.
All these roads lead to total connectivity. Take for instance cargo trains that are now regularly linking Guangzhou, the key hub in southeast China, to the logistics center in Vorsino industrial park near Kaluga. The trip now takes just two weeks – saving no less than a full month if compared with shipping, and around 80 percent of the cost if compared with air cargo.
That’s yet another New Silk Road-style connection between China and Europe via Russia. Still another, vastly more ambitious, will be the high-speed rail expansion of the Transiberian; the Siberian Silk Road.
Then take the closer integration of China and Kazakhstan – which is also a member of the EEU. The duty-free Trans-Eurasia railway is already in effect, from Chongqing in Sichuan across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland all the way to Duisburg in Germany. Beijing and Astana are developing a joint free trade zone at Horgos. And in parallel, a $135 million China-Mongolia Cross-Border Economic Cooperation Zone started to be built last month.
Kazakhstan is even flirting with the ambitious idea of a Eurasian Canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea and then further on to the Mediterranean. Sooner or later Chinese construction companies will come up with a feasibility study.
A virtually invisible Washington agenda in Syria – inbuilt in the Pentagon obsession to not allow any ceasefire to work, or to prevent the fall of its “moderate rebels” in Aleppo – is to break up yet another New Silk Road hub. China has been commercially connected to Syria since the original Silk Road, which snaked through Palmyra and Damascus. Before the Syrian “Arab Spring”, Syrian businessmen were a vital presence in Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the largest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goods in the world, where they would go to buy all sorts of products in bulk to resell in the Levant.
The “American lake”
Neocon/neoliberalcon Washington is totally paralyzed in terms of formulating a response – or at least a counter-proposal – to Eurasia integration. A few solid IQs at least may understand that China’s“threat” to the US is all about economic might. Take Washington’s deep hostility towards the China-driven AIIB (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Yet no amount of hardcore US lobbying prevented allies such as Germany, Britain, Australia and South Korea from joining in.
Then we had the mad dash to approve TPP – the China-excluding, NATO-on-trade arm of the pivot to Asia that was meant to be the cherry of the mostly flat Obama global economic policy cake. Yet the TPP as it stands is practically dead.
What the current geopolitical juncture spells out is the US Navy willing to go no holds barred to stop China from strategically dominating the Pacific, while TPP is deployed as a weapon to stop China dominating Asia-Pacific economically.
With the pivot to Asia configured as a tool to “deter Chinese aggression”, exceptionalists have graphically demonstrated how they are incapable of admitting the whole game is about post-ideological supply chain geopolitics. The US does not need to contain China; what it needs, badly, is key industrial, financial, commercial connection to crucial nodes across Asia to (re)build its economy.
Those were the days, in March 1949, when MacArthur could gloat,“the Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake”. Even after the end of the Cold War the Pacific was a de facto American lake; the US violated Chinese naval and aerial space at will.
Now instead we have the US Army War College and the whole Think Tankland losing sleep over sophisticated Chinese missiles capable of denying US Navy access to the South China Sea. An American lake? No more.
The heart of the matter is that China has made an outstanding bet on infrastructure building – which translates into first-class connectivity to everyone – as the real global 21st century commons, way more important than “security”. After all a large part of global infrastructure still needs to be built. While China turbo-charges its role as the top global infrastructure exporter – from high-speed rail to low-cost telecom – the “indispensable” nation is stuck with a“pivoting”, perplexed, bloated military obsessed with containment.
Divide and rule those “hostile” rivals
Well, things haven’t changed much since Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski dreaming in the late 1990s of a Chinese fragmentation from within, all the way to Obama’s 2015 National Security Strategy, which is no more than futile rhetorical nostalgia about containing Russia, China and Iran.
Thus the basket of attached myths such as “freedom of navigation” – Washington’s euphemism for perennially controlling the sea lanes that constitute China’s supply chain – as well as an apotheosis of“China aggression” incessantly merging with “Russia aggression”;after all, the Eurasia integration-driven Beijing-Moscow strategic partnership must be severed at all costs.
Why? Because US global hegemony must always be perceived as an irremovable force of nature, like death and taxes (Apple in Ireland excluded).
Twenty-four years after the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide, the same mindset prevails; “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and southwest Asia”.
Oops. Now even Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski is terrified. How to contain these bloody silky roads with Pentagon “existential threats” China and Russia right at the heart of the action? Divide and Rule – what else?
For a confused Brzezinski, the US should “fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.”
Have a pleasant nightmare.
This piece first appeared on RT.