Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Onward to Iran!

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, Military, War, WMD

The following is from this week’s column, “Onward to Iran!”:

That acts of war and elections often coincide should come as no surprise. It’s unfortunate, but electability in fin de siècle America still hinges on projecting bully power around the world—an American leader has to aspire to “protect” borders and people not his own, and if they refuse his advances, he should be prepared to bomb them to kingdom come.

Having used the American military to particularly great political effect—the barefaced Barack Obama may be preparing to blast Iranians with something even “better” than the BLU-82, Bush’s weapon of choice.

Elections are not the only cause for war.

Perverse as this may seem, in its ongoing, reflexive efforts to maintain power and metastasize, the media-military-industrial-congressional complex can’t help but motivate for war.

Thus, out of the blue, in January of 2012, before things had heated up with Teheran, the Anglo-American press reported a military milepost. The Pentagon was working on a “13.6 ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).” It “is the deepest penetrating ‘bunker buster’ currently in the U.S. arsenal,” swanked the DailyMail Online, “designed to take out fortifications built by Iran to hide their alleged nuclear weapons.”

Correlation is not causation, but the case for hitting Iranian installations has since hardened into dogma.

According to the MailOnline, the work on this big boy began because the Pentagon had “identified” a deficit in the US’s military capabilities: “officials believe [the current arsenal] is not capable of destroying Iran’s fortified underground facilities.”

Essentially, the premise for the MOP project was that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching all corners of the world.

Since the president’s reign of terror abroad began, the Iranian currency had lost 65 percent of its value. Or so boasted Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s inane, wishy-washy correspondent, who represents the media’s voice of moderation in the ramp-up to war with Iran.

Like all fixtures of mainstream media, the Zombie Zakaria has an appetite for destruction. …”

The complete column is “Onward to Iran!”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

Meanwhile, In ‘Liberated’ Libya

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, War

Meanwhile, in “Liberated” Libya
Nebojsa Malic

As part of its great white-knighting enterprise to charm the jihadists of every color an hue, the Empire launched a “kinetic military action” last spring to “liberate” Libya from its own government. That evil little war is now being invoked to justify a similar endeavor in Syria.

But was Libya really liberated? Depends on your definition of liberty. If it involves keeping dark-skinned folk in cages and torturing them, then yes. Establishing Sharia law? Check. Desecrating Christian cemeteries, a la Kosovo (another one of Empire’s “liberation” projects)? Ditto.

Last week, the “free and democratic” Libyans vandalized a number of gravestones of both Allied and Axis troops who died during the North African campaign of WW2. The campaign, pitting Italian and German (Afrika Korps) troops against the British and Commonwealth forces, had swept back and forth across today’s Libya between 1940 and 1942, with some of the fiercest fighting around Tobruk and Benghazi. The cemeteries survived Libyan independence and Col. Gadhafi’s reign, but not the NATO-installed “transitional” government.

Now, it is entirely possible that the “government” in Tripoli has nothing to do with this, and that it was the handiwork of local, Benghazi jihadists, noted veterans of the Iraqi insurgency. But that is precisely the constituency – for lack of a better word – which the Empire sought to “protect” by intervening. And now there is word that Cyrenaica (the area in question) is seeking “autonomy” from Tripoli.

Back in March 2011, as the “kinetic military action” became imminent, Justin Raimondo noted that Libya was a construct – three disparate provinces with different tribal composition. First under Ottoman rule (1551-1911), then under Italy (1911-1941), the regions were put together into the independent Kingdom of Libya (1951-1969) by the British. Colonel Gadhafi overthrew the monarchy in 1969, and ruled Libya until last year. And now the country is – predictably – coming apart.

Kosovo offers some clues about what might happen next. It, too, was a “humanitarian” intervention on behalf of a terrorist “liberation army,” with the goal of “regime change” (replacing Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic with someone more to Empire’s taste – i.e. the October 5 crowd and their current incarnation). The deliberate and systematic destruction of Serbian Orthodox churches and cemeteries began almost immediately, along with the murder and expulsion of ethnic Serbs, Roma, Turks and other “unwanted” communities. The UN and NATO occupation authorities did nothing to stop this persecution, which peaked in March 2004 with a 3-day pogrom. Not only was no one involved punished, the Albanians were rewarded in 2008 with US and EU recognition of their illegal declaration of independence (sure, the ICJ said it wasn’t illegal, but only after torturing the facts).

The Empire now insists on inviolability of “Kosovo” borders, seeking to suppress the remaining Serbs who refuse to accept “independence”. Yet carving out Kosovo clearly violated Serbia’s borders, which the Empire had no trouble with. Chances are it will seek to suppress the “autonomy” in Cyrenaica, then – unless the separatists there are the actual clients of Empire, in which case the “transitional council” might be thrown under the bus.

In other words, there really are no principles involved; just power. For all the media prattle about saving innocent civilians and helping democracy and freedom, “humanitarian” interventions – be they “kinetic military actions” involving bombers or ground troops or “regime change” operations involving astroturf revolutionaries – are never actually humanitarian. They do, however, involve murder, destruction, terrorism, organized crime, butchery, and plenty of lies. Such are the fruits by which we ought to know them.

My good friend Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. We are always thrilled when Nebojsa finds the time to pen an exclusive editorial for Barely A Blog. (Click on “BAB’s A List” for Nebojsa’s articles archive.)

UPDATED: Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim (Annals of Pillage In Afghanistan)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, Military, Multiculturalism

The following is an excerpt from my new column, “Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim,” in which I “hit both sides of aisle for reactions to Quran-burning incident”:

“Just the other day, America was debating whether it was OK for our soldiers to pee on people they had killed in Afghanistan. There was no quarrel over whether it was OK to kill the peed-upon, in the first place.

Building on the skewed, To-Pee-Or-Not-To-Pee diversion, the question du jour is whether the same soldiers should say sorry for incinerating Qurans on a bonfire in the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.

Built by Kellogg Brown & Root, which was ‘until recently a subsidiary of Halliburton,’ the Bagram Base ‘is located on a sere plain beneath snowcapped spurs of the Hindu Kush,’ writes author Cullen Murphy in ‘Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Rome.’

‘In the Past, Bagram has yielded glassware and bronzes from as far away as imperial Rome.’ But,

Bagram today is an outpost of American, not Hellenic, civilization. … Bagram Air Base supports a population of more than 5000. The base perimeter, nine miles around, is ringed not with walls of stone or mud but with chain-link fencing and concertina wire and arrays of bright lights and electronic sensors.

With its rows of ‘prefabricated dwellings,’ stacked ‘shipping containers’ (‘giant bladders of water and fuel’), ‘American-style stores’ and hospitals; with, precincts packed with hundreds of contractors who cater to the troops, with checkpoints, multi-denominational chapels, which double-up as Vegas-style, quickie naturalization centers for Afghan recruits—Bagram embodies ‘imperial overstretch’: “The idea that one’s security needs, military obligations, and globalist desires increasingly outstrip resources available to satisfy them.’ (‘Are We Rome,’ p. 71.)

The dilemma over an apology is only the froth on the top. It is the elephantine character of the American entanglement in Afghanistan that underpins the fury. …”

The complete column is“Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim.”

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

UPDATED (March 5): Annals of pillage in Afghanistan, via RT, which is honest about Russia’s role in the destruction.

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?

BAB's A List, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Islam, Jihad, The West

My good friend Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. I am always thrilled when Nebojsa finds the time to pen an exclusive editorial for Barely A Blog. (Click on “BAB’s A List” for Nebojsa’s articles archive.)

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?
BY NEBOJSA MALIC

In my Antiwar.com article last week, I mentioned the call to war in Syria sounded by WSJ contributor  Fouad Ajami in early February. According to Ajami, B. Hussein Obama should follow the example of his Democratic predecessor, who launched proxy and air wars to “save” the “Bosnians” and “Kosovars.”

The quotation marks are absolutely necessary here. Because all three factions that fought in Bosnia were actually native Bosnians, the Western media applied the name solely to the Bosnian Muslims, who in 1993 deliberately adopted the name “Bosniak” to stake a claim on the country. At least they use that name for themselves; denizens of the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo don’t even bother with “Kosovar” – a nice, sanitized name bestowed upon them by sympathetic NATO propaganda – and identify themselves simply as Albanian.

Last, but not least, neither were actually “saved” by Clinton. The Bosnian Muslims started a civil war after being given assurances of U.S. support, but in the end settled for an arrangement worse than the one they rejected at Washington’s urging. In Kosovo, Washington embraced a terrorist, drug-running, organ-harvesting cabal of Nazi sympathizers, responsible for killing many more fellow Albanians than the Serb “oppressors,” who used the NATO air war to purge all rivals and set up a mafia “state” thereafter. Both the Bosnian Muslim leadership and the “Kosovo Liberation Army” have shown the most callous disregard for the lives of their kin, so long as their deaths furthered the cause. Whatever was required to mobilize the world opinion, it was provided: fake death camps, fabricated stories of mass rapes, marketplace massacres or “genocides”.

Horrific as it was, such behavior at least had some degree of logic behind it. If you are a weak local actor, the best way to reach power is to get a strong outside power to fight and win your wars; fourth-generation warfare at its most effective. But what had possessed the American Empire to go along? Brendan O’Neill explained it as a quest for meaning following the Cold War: by “saving” the fictitious damsels in distress in Bosnia and Kosovo, the U.S. could present itself as the White Knight, thus earning the everlasting gratitude of Muslims worldwide.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-KLA), a noted interventionist, validated this analysis in 2007, when he called on “jihadists of all color and hue” to take note of the U.S. creating another Islamic state in Europe. By that he meant Kosovo, Bosnia presumably being the first (though over half of its population is Christian). 

Trouble is, the expected gratitude of worldwide jihadists manifestly failed to materialize. Washington’s white-knighting in the Balkans was followed by 9/11. “Bosnians” mocked international humanitarian aid efforts with a kitschy monument to canned beef. Albanians may have erected a gilded statue of Bill Clinton, but what is one to make of a stream of Albanian jihadists since the “liberation”? Meanwhile, the “nation-building” programs in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a complete fiasco. U.S. activists may have helped steer the Egyptian “revolution” but now find themselves on trial.

None of this is going to make the slightest dent in Washington’s reality-distortion field, unfortunately. Odds are there will be an intervention of some kind in Syria, on the pretext of “saving lives”, but definitely with the expectation of Muslim gratitude.

Ajami and his fellow interventionists are missing a key difference between Clinton and Obama. While Clinton embarked on white-knighting wars to cover up scandals at home and would do anything to be loved, Obama is a paragon of virtue in comparison, and treats adulation as his due. Remember, he got a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up, and a statue in Indonesia just for being a schoolboy there once. In other words, he has no need to prove himself now – not with the Republican establishment candidates being so absolutely inept, that Obama’s second Imperial mandate is all but guaranteed.

Then again, Obama didn’t really care about Libya, either. The three Valkyries ran that operation. They may yet do the same in Syria, hoping perhaps for statues of their own – and gratitude that will never come.