With RSA, a big and respected name (actually initials) in cryptography, currently getting flayed in the public press for taking $10 million from the NSA and, in return, embedding a dodgy, NSA-compromised random number generator a.k.a. DUAL EC EBRG in its products (RNGs help generate encryption keys; a compromised RNG yields a limited, more crackable set of keys), a few observations:

First, as is probably recalled, the compromised character of the NSA RNG was revealed in a previous tranche of the Snowden documents in September, and an embarrassed RSA quickly issued a recommendation that users cease using that particular RNG.

Second, even back in October, there were rumblings about possible financial considerations playing a part in RSA’s willingness to include the RNG in its products.  Here’s a snip from a piece I wrote at the time:

[On a recent episode of Science Friday] Ira Flatow asked Philip Zimmerman [creator of the PGP open-key e-mail encryption system] why RSA would have done such a thing. There was a long, awkward silence and some awkward laughter before Zimmerman slid into the passive voice/third person zone:

ZIMMERMAN: And yet RSA did a security – did use it as their default random number generator. And they do have competent cryptographers working there. So.

FLATOW: How do you explain that?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, I’m not going to – I think I’d rather not be the one to say.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: But if someone else were to say it, what would they say?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, someone else might say that maybe they were incentivized. 

Maybe Mr. Zimmerman had an advance peek at the relevant Snowden documents.  I think it more likely that he had already heard some tittle-tattle in his high tech circles but was not interested in calling down a corporate and legal sh*train upon himself by openly accusing the RSA of taking government money (interesting legal question: is it slanderous to allege that a US corporation engaged in a legal transaction with the US government?).

Third, Blame the Suits!  Per the Reuters expose:

No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.

“The labs group had played a very intricate role at BSafe [the product line that was compromised by the RNG], and they were basically gone,” said labs veteran Michael Wenocur, who left in 1999.

Actually, outside security analyst Bruce Schneier and others had raised serious concerns about DUAL EC EBRG in 2007 in a public forum and, as Zimmerman pointed out, RSA had competent cryptographers in the building.  DUAL EC EBRG was provided as only one option, albeit the default, and security-savvy users would be able to select another, better RNG.  And RSA cryptographers could further console themselves with the awareness that, even if Clueless Enduser kept DUAL EC EBRG as a default, probably the only entity with the message collection and analysis capability to exploit it effectively was America’s own NSA.

In other words, it wasn’t just RSA Chief Executive and Designated Villain Art Coviello sneaking down into the lab and inserting the lethal code while the techies obliviously shipped the compromised product.

Fourth, I think there is a growing awareness that a significant element of the Snowden story is the collusion between Big Tech and the NSA, fueled by the awareness that both sides want the same thing: a thoroughly backdoored Internet open to individual data profiling and surveillance penetration (and tolerate the resultant security breaches as cost of doing business/collateral damage).

I wonder if the story will get any more traction, since there are sizable vested economic, political, and ideological interests extending all the way to the Oval Office that are engaged in perpetuating the image of a benign, democratic/populist information order dedicated to information security.  The constituency interested in seeing Google and the other tech giants share the blame for ruining the Internet–and in the process evaporating a few hundred billion dollars of personal wealth, market cap, and stock options–is, on the other hand, powerless and vanishingly small.

Inside the tech industry, the attitude seems to be one of damage control i.e. media initiatives to convince the public that the Internet companies care about YOU and hate helping out that nasty old government.   As to the question of whether a corporate Snowden will emerge, the attitude seems to be, as Phil Zimmerman–a genuine and battered hero of the encryption wars in the 1990s–put it: “I think I’d rather not be the one to say.”  Maybe the code of omerta lives on in the tech industry.

Fifth, I find it amusing and somewhat irritating that, ever since I wrote about RSA in October, I am bombarded with RSA pop-up ads on my own blog and across the web.  It’s the Internet equivalent of a golden retriever that pursues me down the street driven by the irresistible urge to sniff the seat of my trousers.  Make it stop!

I have theorized that the reflective nature of the tropical clouds, in particular those of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) just above the equator, functions as the “throttle” on the global climate engine. We’re all familiar with what a throttle does, because the gas pedal on your car controls the throttle. The throttle on any heat engine controls the running conditions by limiting (throttling) the amount of incoming energy.

Similarly, in the climate heat engine, the throttle is the tropical albedo (reflectivity). The tropical albedo controls how much incoming solar energy is rejected back to space at the hot end of the heat engine. In other words, the albedo throttles the incoming energy to control the entire system.

I have further said that the tropical albedo is a threshold-based and extremely non-linear function of the temperature. So I thought I’d use the CERES satellite data to take a look at how strong this climate throttle is in watts per square metre (W/m2), and exactly where the throttle is located. If such a throttle exists, one of its characteristic features would be that the amount of solar energy reflected must increase with increasing temperature. Figure 1 shows the results of that analysis.

Figure 1. Average change in reflected solar from a 1° increase in surface temperature. Red areas show greater reflection with increasing temperature. The change in reflected energy is calculated on a per-gridcell basis as the change in albedo per 1° temperature increase for that gridcell, times the average solar radiation for that gridcell. Gray line shows zero change in albedo with temperature. Dotted lines show the tropics (23.45°N/S) and the Arctic/Antarctic circles (66.55°N/S).

Clearly, then, such a throttle mechanism exists. It is also where we would expect to find it, located near the Equator where the maximum energy is entering the system. On average, the throttle operates in the areas enclosed by the gray line. I was surprised by the strength of the mechanism, however. There are large areas (red) where a one degree C warming in temperature increases the solar reflection by 10 W/m2 or more. Obviously, this thermostatically controlled throttle would be a factor in explaining the observations of a hard upper open ocean temperature of about 30°C.

The throttle mechanism is operating over much of the tropical oceans and even some parts of the tropical land. It is strongest in the ITCZ, which runs below the Equator in the Indian Ocean and over Africa, and above the Equator in the Pacific and Atlantic.

Next, it is worth noting that overall the effect of temperature on solar reflections is about zero (global area-weighted average is -1.5 W/m2 per degree, which is smaller than the uncertainty in the data). In addition, large areas of both the land and the ocean in the extra-tropics are quite similar, in that they are all just slightly negative (light orange). This is another indication that we have a thermoregulatory system at work. Since over much of the planetary surface the albedo is relatively insensitive to changes in temperature, small changes in temperature in the tropics can have a large effect on the amount of energy that is entering the system. Figure 2 shows the relationship (land only) between absolute temperature in °C, and the change in reflected energy per degree of warming.

Figure 2. Change in reflected solar (W/m2 per °C) versus absolute surface temperature (°C) over the land. Note that where the annual temperature averages below freezing (0°C), there is little variation in surface reflection with temperature. From freezing to about 20°C, the amount reflected is generally dropping as temperatures increase. Above about 20°C, there are two kinds of responses—sizeable increases or sizeable decreases in reflected solar with temperature.

Next, over the oceans the areas near the poles show the reverse of the behavior in the tropics. While the tropical albedo changes cool the tropics, near the poles as the surface warms, the albedo and the reflected sunshine decreases with increasing temperatures.

Figure 3. Change in reflected solar (W/m2 per °C) versus absolute surface temperature (°C) over the ocean, annual averages. Where the annual temperature averages near freezing, there is strong negative variation in surface reflection with temperature. From freezing to about 20°C, the variation is stable and slightly negative. Above about 20°C, there are two kinds of responses—sizeable increases or sizeable decreases in reflected solar with temperature, up to the hard limit at 30°C

What this means is that in addition to limiting overall energy input to the entire system, the temperature-related albedo-mediated changes in reflected sunlight tend to make the tropics cooler, and the poles warmer, than they would be otherwise. Clearly this would tend to limit the overall temperature swings of the planet.

Finally, the use of monthly averages obscures an important point, which is that the changes in tropical albedo occur on the time scale of minutes, not months. And on a daily scale, there is no overall 10 W/m2 per degree of temperature change. Instead, up to a certain time of day there are no clouds, and the full energy of the sun is entering the system. During that time, there is basically no change in tropical albedo with increasing temperature.

Then, on average around 11 am, within a half hour or so the albedo takes a huge jump as the cumulus clouds emerge and form a fully-developed cumulus regime. This makes a step change in the albedo, and can even drive the temperature down despite increasing solar forcing, as I showed here, here,  here, here, and here

From this we see that the thermal regulation of tropical albedo is occurring via changes in the time of the daily onset and the strength of the cumulus/cumulonimbus regime. The hotter the surface on that day, the earlier the cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds will form, and the more of them there will be. This reduces the amount of energy entering the system by hundreds of watts per square metre. And on the other hand, during cooler days, cumulus form later in the day, cumulonimbus may not form at all, and there are fewer clouds. This increases the energy entering the system by hundreds of W/m2.

I bring this up to emphasize that the system is not applying an average throttle of e.g. 10 W/m2 over the average area where the throttle operates.

Instead, it is applying a much larger throttle, of a couple hundred watts/square metre, but it is only applying the throttle as and where it is needed in order to cool down local hot-spots, or to warm up local cold spots. As a result, the averages are misleading.

The final reason that it is important to understand that the albedo changes are HOURLY changes, not monthly average changes, is that what rules the system are instantaneous conditions controlling cloud emergence, not average conditions. Clouds do not form based on how much forcing there is, whether the forcing is from solar or CO2 or volcanoes. They form only when the temperatures are high enough.

And this means that things won’t change much if the forcing changes … because the cloud emergence thresholds are temperature-based, and not forcing-based.

I hold that this immediate response is the main reason that it is so hard to find e.g. a solar signal in the temperature record—because the thermoregulation is temperature based, not forcing based, and thus operates regardless of changes in forcing.

This is also the reason that volcanoes make so little difference in the global temperature—because the system responds immediately to cooling temperatures by reducing albedo, opening the thermostatically controlled-throttle to allow the entry of hundreds of extra W/m2 to counteract the drop in temperature.

There is plenty more to mine from the CERES dataset, and although I’ve mined some of it, I still haven’t done lots of things with it—an analysis of the efficiency of the climate heat engine, for example. However, I think this clear demonstration of the existence of a temperature-regulated throttle controlling the amount of energy entering the climate system is important enough to merit a post on its own.

Introduction

In ancient Rome, especially during the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob violence to block, intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant faction in the Senate. While neither the ruling or opposing factions represented the interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or slaves, the use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of representative government and the republican form of government laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers) and the transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.

Demagogues, in the pay of aspiring emperors, aroused the passions of a motley array of disaffected slum dwellers, loafers and petty thieves (ladrones) with promises, pay-offs and positions in a New Order. Professional mob organizers cultivated their ties with the oligarchs ‘above’ and with professional demonstrators ‘below’. They voiced ‘popular grievances’ and articulated demands questioning the legitimacy of the incumbent rulers, while laying the groundwork for the rule by the few. Usually, when the pay-master oligarchs came to power on a wave of demagogue-led mob violence, they quickly suppressed the demonstrations, paid off the demagogues with patronage jobs in the new regime or resorted to a discrete assassination for ‘street leaders’ unwilling to recognize the new order’. The new rulers purged the old Senators into exile, expulsion and dispossession, rigged new elections and proclaimed themselves ‘saviors of the republic’. They proceeded to drive peasants from their land, renounce social obligations and stop food subsidies for poor urban families and funds for public works.

The use of mob violence and “mass revolts” to serve the interests of oligarchical and imperial powers against democratically-elected governments has been a common strategy in recent times.

Throughout the ages, the choreographed “mass revolt” played many roles: (1) It served to destabilize an electoral regime; (2) it provided a platform for its oligarch funders to depose an incumbent regime; (3) it disguised the fact that the oligarchic opposition had lost democratic elections; (4) it provided a political minority with a ‘fig-leaf of legitimacy’ when it was otherwise incapable of acting within a constitutional framework and (5) it allowed for the illegitimate seizure of power in the name of a pseudo ‘majority’, namely the “crowds in the central plaza”.

Some leftist commentators have argued two contradictory positions: One the one hand, some simply reduce the oligarchy’s power grab to an ‘inter-elite struggle’ which has nothing to do with the ‘interests of the working class’, while others maintain the ‘masses’ in the street are protesting against an “elitist regime”. A few even argue that with popular, democratic demands, these revolts are progressive, should be supported as “terrain for class struggle”. In other words, the ‘left’ should join the uprising and contest the oligarchs for leadership within the stage-managed revolts!

What progressives are unwilling to recognize is that the oligarchs orchestrating the mass revolt are authoritarians who completely reject democratic procedures and electoral processes. Their aim is to establish a ‘junta’, which will eliminate all democratic political and social institutions and freedoms and impose harsher, more repressive and regressive policies and institutions than those they replace. Some leftists support the ‘masses in revolt’ simply because of their ‘militancy’, their numbers and street courage, without examining the underlying leaders, their interests and links to the elite beneficiaries of a ‘regime change’.

All the color-coded “mass revolts” in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR featured popular leaders who exhorted the masses in the name of ‘independence and democracy’ but were pro-NATO, pro-(Western) imperialists and linked to neo-liberal elites. Upon the fall of communism, the new oligarchs privatized and sold off the most lucrative sectors of the economy throwing millions out of work, dismantled the welfare state and handed over their military bases to NATO for the stationing of foreign troops and the placement of missiles aimed at Russia.

The entire ‘anti-Stalinist’ left in the US and Western Europe, with a few notable exceptions, celebrated these oligarch-controlled revolts in Eastern Europe and some even participated as minor accomplices in the post-revolt neo-liberal regimes. One clear reason for the demise of “Western Marxism” arose from its inability to distinguish a genuine popular democratic revolt from a mass uprising funded and stage-managed by rival oligarchs!

One of the clearest recent example of a manipulated ‘people’s power’ revolution in the streets to replace an elected representative of one sector of the elite with an even more brutal, authoritarian ‘president’ occurred in early 2001 in the Philippines. The more popular and independent (but notoriously corrupt) President Joseph Estrada, who had challenged sectors of the Philippine elite and current US foreign policy (infuriating Washington by embracing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez), was replaced through street demonstrations of middle-class matrons with soldiers in civvies by Gloria Makapagal-Arroyo. Mrs. Makapagal-Arroyo, who had close links to the US and the Philippine military, unleashed a horrific wave of brutality dubbed the ‘death-squad democracy’. The overthrow of Estrada was actively supported by the left, including sectors of the revolutionary left, who quickly found themselves the target of an unprecedented campaign of assassinations, disappearances, torture and imprisonment by their newly empowered ‘Madame President’. Read more…..

 

 

“Bride and Boom!”
We’re Number One… In Obliterating Wedding Parties

The headline — “Bride and Boom!” — was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.  Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post.  The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud.  As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners — “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” — in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them.  Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers.  Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege.  The media would descend.  The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House.  You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones?  No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed.  As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original.  It turns out to be a stock Post headline.  Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.”  Ba-boom!

As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately.  “A U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday — a wedding party heading to the festivities.”

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance.  In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power.  If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the first party of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A U.S. drone… took out a likely target.”

After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country — six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen.  And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously.  Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom’s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis.  And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit.  U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony.

The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the drone.  The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft.

Non-tabloid papers were far more polite in their headlines and accounts, though they did reflect utter confusion about what had happened in a distant part of distant Yemen.  The wedding caravan of vehicles was going to a wedding — or coming back.  Fifteen were definitively dead.  Or 11.  Or 13.  Or 14.  Or 17.  The attacking plane had aimed for al-Qaeda targets and hit the wedding party “by mistake.”  Or al-Qaeda “suspects” had been among the wedding party, though all reports agree that innocent wedding goers died.  Accounts of what happened from Yemeni officials differed, even as that country’s parliamentarians demanded an end to the U.S. drone campaign in their country.  The Obama administration refused to comment.  It was generally reported that this strike, like others before it, had — strangely enough — upset Yemenis and made them more amenable to the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

In the end, reports on a wedding slaughter in a distant land are generally relegated to the inside pages of the paper and passing notice on the TV news, an event instantly trumped by almost anything whatsoever — a shooting in a school anywhere in the U.S., snow storms across the Northeast, you name it — and promptly buried and forgotten.

And yet, in a country that tends to value records, this represents record-making material.  After all, what are the odds of knocking off all or parts of eight wedding parties in the space of a little more than a decade (assuming, of course, that the destruction of other wedding parties or the killing of other wedding goers in America’s distant war zones hasn’t gone unreported).  If the Taliban or the Iranians or the North Koreans had piled up such figures — and indeed the Taliban has done wedding damage via roadside bombs and suicide bombers — we would know just what to think of them.  We would classify them as barbarians, savages, evildoers.

You might imagine that such a traffic jam of death and destruction would at least merit some longer-term attention, thought, analysis, or discussion here.  But with the rarest of exceptions, it’s nowhere to be found, right, left, or center, in Washington or Topeka, in everyday conversation or think-tank speak.  And keep in mind that we’re talking about a country where the slaughter of innocents — in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, workplaces and movie theaters, parking lots and naval shipyards — is given endless attention, carefully toted up, discussed and debated until “closure” is reached.

And yet no one here even thinks to ask how so many wedding parties in foreign lands could be so repeatedly taken out.  Is the U.S. simply targeting weddings purposely?  Not likely.  Could it reflect the fact that, despite all the discussion of the “surgical precision” of American air power, pilots have remarkably little idea what’s really going on below them or who exactly, in lands where American intelligence must be half-blind, they are aiming at?  That, at least, seems likely.

Or if “they” gather in certain regions, does American intelligence just assume that the crowd must be “enemy” in nature?  (As an American general said about a wedding party attacked in Western Iraq, “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) Or is it possible that, in our global war zones, a hint that enemy “suspects” might be among a party of celebrants means that the party itself is fair game, that it’s open season no matter who might be in the crowd?

In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called “signature strikes” — that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against “a pre-identified ‘signature’ of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity.”  In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are).  In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.

Consider it a record.  For the period since September 11, 2001, we’re number one… in obliterating wedding parties!  In those years, whether we care to know it or not, “till death do us part” has gained a far grimmer meaning.

[Note on American air power and wedding parties: TomDispatch has attempted over the years to record and point out the cumulative nature of these “incidents.” Check out, for instance, “The Wedding Crashers,” or a 2012 piece, “It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There.” What follows, gathered by TomDispatch’s Erika Eichelberger, are links to the other seven wedding massacres with brief descriptions of what is known: December 29, 2001, Paktia Province, Afghanistan (more than 100 revelers die in a village in Eastern Afghanistan after an attack by B-52 and B-1B bombers); May 17, 2002, Khost Province, Afghanistan (at least 10 Afghans in a wedding celebration die when U.S. helicopters and planes attack a village); July 1, 2002, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan (at least 30, and possibly 40, celebrants die when attacked by a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 gunship); May 20, 2004, Mukaradeeb, Iraq (at least 42 dead, including “27 members of the [family hosting the wedding ceremony], their wedding guests, and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony” in an attack by American jets); July 6, 2008, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (at least 47 dead, 39 of them women and children, including the bride, among a party escorting that bride to the groom’s house — from a missile attack by jet aircraft); August 2008, Laghman Province, Afghanistan (16 killed, including 12 members of the family hosting the wedding, in an attack by “American bombers”); June 8, 2012, Logar Province, Afghanistan (18 killed, half of them children, when Taliban fighters take shelter amid a wedding party. This was perhaps the only case among the eight wedding incidents in which the U.S. offered an apology).]

It is freezing cold in Kiev, legendary city of golden domes on the banks of Dnieper River – cradle of ancient Russian civilisation and the most charming of East European capitals. It is a comfortable and rather prosperous place, with hundreds of small and cosy restaurants, neat streets, sundry parks and that magnificent river. The girls are pretty and the men are sturdy. Kiev is more relaxed than Moscow, and easier on the wallet. Though statistics say the Ukraine is broke and its people should be as poor as Africans, in reality they aren’t doing too badly, thanks to their fiscal imprudence. The government borrowed and spent freely, heavily subsidised housing and heating, and they brazenly avoided devaluation of the national currency and the austerity program prescribed by the IMF. This living on credit can go only so far: the Ukraine was doomed to default on its debts next month or sooner, and this is one of the reasons for the present commotion.

A tug-of-war between the East and the West for the future of Ukraine lasted over a month, and has ended for all practical purposes in a resounding victory for Vladimir Putin, adding to his previous successes in Syria and Iran. The trouble began when the administration of President Yanukovich went looking for credits to reschedule its loans and avoid default. There were no offers. They turned to the EC for help; the EC, chiefly Poland and Germany, seeing that the Ukrainian administration was desperate, prepared an association agreement of unusual severity.

The EC is quite hard on its new East European members, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria et al.: these countries had their industry and agriculture decimated, their young people working menial jobs in Western Europe, their population drop exceeded that of the WWII.

But the association agreement offered to the Ukraine was even worse. It would turn the Ukraine into an impoverished colony of the EC without giving it even the dubious advantages of membership (such as freedom of work and travel in the EC). In desperation, Yanukovich agreed to sign on the dotted line, in vain hopes of getting a large enough loan to avoid collapse. But the EC has no money to spare – it has to provide for Greece, Italy, Spain. Now Russia entered the picture. At the time, relations of the Ukraine and Russia were far from good. Russians had become snotty with their oil money, the Ukrainians blamed their troubles on Russians, but Russia was still the biggest market for Ukrainian products.

For Russia, the EC agreement meant trouble: currently the Ukraine sells its output in Russia with very little customs protection; the borders are porous; people move freely across the border, without even a passport. If the EC association agreement were signed, the EC products would flood Russia through the Ukrainian window of opportunity. So Putin spelled out the rules to Yanukovich: if you sign with the EC, Russian tariffs will rise. This would put some 400,000 Ukrainians out of work right away. Yanukovich balked and refused to sign the EC agreement at the last minute. (I predicted this in my report from Kiev full three weeks before it happened, when nobody believed it – a source of pride).

The EC, and the US standing behind it, were quite upset. Besides the loss of potential economic profit, they had another important reason: they wanted to keep Russia farther away from Europe, and they wanted to keep Russia weak. Russia is not the Soviet Union, but some of the Soviet disobedience to Western imperial designs still lingers in Moscow: be it in Syria, Egypt, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Venezuela or Zimbabwe, the Empire can’t have its way while the Russian bear is relatively strong. Russia without the Ukraine can’t be really powerful: it would be like the US with its Mid-western and Pacific states chopped away. The West does not want the Ukraine to prosper, or to become a stable and strong state either, so it cannot join Russia and make it stronger. A weak, poor and destabilised Ukraine in semi-colonial dependence to the West with some NATO bases is the best future for the country, as perceived by Washington or Brussels.

Angered by this last-moment-escape of Yanukovich, the West activated its supporters. For over a month, Kiev has been besieged by huge crowds bussed from all over the Ukraine, bearing a local strain of the Arab Spring in the far north. Less violent than Tahrir, their Maidan Square became a symbol of struggle for the European strategic future of the country. The Ukraine was turned into the latest battle ground between the US-led alliance and a rising Russia. Would it be a revanche for Obama’s Syria debacle, or another heavy strike at fading American hegemony?

The simple division into “pro-East” and “pro-West” has been complicated by the heterogeneity of the Ukraine. The loosely knit country of differing regions is quite similar in its makeup to the Yugoslavia of old. It is another post-Versailles hotchpotch of a country made up after the First World War of bits and pieces, and made independent after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Some parts of this “Ukraine” were incorporated by Russia 500 years ago, the Ukraine proper (a much smaller parcel of land, bearing this name) joined Russia 350 years ago, whilst the Western Ukraine (called the “Eastern Regions”) was acquired by Stalin in 1939, and the Crimea was incorporated in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Khrushchev in 1954.

The Ukraine is as Russian as the South-of-France is French and as Texas and California are American. Yes, some hundreds years ago, Provence was independent from Paris, – it had its own language and art; while Nice and Savoy became French rather recently. Yes, California and Texas joined the Union rather late too. Still, we understand that they are – by now – parts of those larger countries, ifs and buts notwithstanding. But if they were forced to secede, they would probably evolve a new historic narrative stressing the French ill treatment of the South in the Cathar Crusade, or dispossession of Spanish and Russian residents of California.

Accordingly, since the Ukraine’s independence, the authorities have been busy nation-building, enforcing a single official language and creating a new national myth for its 45 million inhabitants. The crowds milling about the Maidan were predominantly (though not exclusively) arrivals from Galicia, a mountainous county bordering with Poland and Hungary, 500 km (300 miles) away from Kiev, and natives of the capital refer to the Maidan gathering as a “Galician occupation”.

Like the fiery Bretons, the Galicians are fierce nationalists, bearers of a true Ukrainian spirit (whatever that means). Under Polish and Austrian rule for centuries, whilst the Jews were economically powerful, they are a strongly anti-Jewish and anti-Polish lot, and their modern identity centred around their support for Hitler during the WWII, accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of their Polish and Jewish neighbours. After the WWII, the remainder of pro-Hitler Galician SS fighters were adopted by US Intelligence, re-armed and turned into a guerrilla force against the Soviets. They added an anti-Russian line to their two ancient hatreds and kept fighting the “forest war” until 1956, and these ties between the Cold Warriors have survived the thaw.

After 1991, when the independent Ukraine was created, in the void of state-building traditions, the Galicians were lauded as ‘true Ukrainians’, as they were the only Ukrainians who ever wanted independence. Their language was used as the basis of a new national state language, their traditions became enshrined on the state level. Memorials of Galician Nazi collaborators and mass murderers Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych peppered the land, often provoking the indignation of other Ukrainians. The Galicians played an important part in the 2004 Orange Revolution as well, when the results of presidential elections were declared void and the pro-Western candidate Mr Yuschenko got the upper hand in the re-run.

However, in 2004, many Kievans also supported Yuschenko, hoping for the Western alliance and a bright new future. Now, in 2013, the city’s support for the Maidan was quite low, and the people of Kiev complained loudly about the mess created by the invading throngs: felled trees, burned benches, despoiled buildings and a lot of biological waste. Still, Kiev is home to many NGOs; city intellectuals receive generous help from the US and EC. The old comprador spirit is always strongest in the capitals.

For the East and Southeast of the Ukraine, the populous and heavily industrialised regions, the proposal of association with the EC is a no-go, with no ifs, ands or buts. They produce coal, steel, machinery, cars, missiles, tanks and aircraft. Western imports would erase Ukrainian industry right off the map, as the EC officials freely admit. Even the Poles, hardly a paragon of industrial development, had the audacity to say to the Ukraine: we’ll do the technical stuff, you’d better invest in agriculture. This is easier to say than to do: the EC has a lot of regulations that make Ukrainian products unfit for sale and consumption in Europe. Ukrainian experts estimated their expected losses for entering into association with the EC at anything from 20 to 150 billion euros.

For Galicians, the association would work fine. Their speaker at the Maidan called on the youth to ‘go where you can get money’ and do not give a damn for industry. They make their income in two ways: providing bed-and breakfast rooms for Western tourists and working in Poland and Germany as maids and menials. They hoped they would get visa-free access to Europe and make a decent income for themselves. Meanwhile, nobody offered them a visa-waiver arrangement. The Brits mull over leaving the EC, because of the Poles who flooded their country; the Ukrainians would be too much for London. Only the Americans, always generous at somebody’s else expense, demanded the EC drop its visa requirement for them.

While the Maidan was boiling, the West sent its emissaries, ministers and members of parliament to cheer the Maidan crowd, to call for President Yanukovich to resign and for a revolution to install pro-Western rule. Senator McCain went there and made a few firebrand speeches. The EC declared Yanukovich “illegitimate” because so many of his citizens demonstrated against him. But when millions of French citizens demonstrated against their president, when Occupy Wall Street was violently dispersed, nobody thought the government of France or the US president had lost legitimacy…

Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State, shared her biscuits with the demonstrators, and demanded from the oligarchs support for the “European cause” or their businesses would suffer. The Ukrainian oligarchs are very wealthy, and they prefer the Ukraine as it is, sitting on the fence between the East and the West. They are afraid that the Russian companies will strip their assets should the Ukraine join the Customs Union, and they know that they are not competitive enough to compete with the EC. Pushed now by Nuland, they were close to falling on the EC side.

Yanukovich was in big trouble. The default was rapidly approaching. He annoyed the pro-Western populace, and he irritated his own supporters, the people of the East and Southeast. The Ukraine had a real chance of collapsing into anarchy. A far-right nationalist party, Svoboda (Liberty), probably the nearest thing to the Nazi party to arise in Europe since 1945, made a bid for power. The EC politicians accused Russia of pressurising the Ukraine; Russian missiles suddenly emerged in the western-most tip of Russia, a few minutes flight from Berlin. The Russian armed forces discussed the US strategy of a “disarming first strike”. The tension was very high.

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s international editor and author of The New Cold War, is a hawk of the Churchill and Reagan variety. For him, Russia is an enemy, whether ruled by Tsar, by Stalin or by Putin. He wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say that the [Ukraine] determines the long-term future of the entire former Soviet Union. If Ukraine adopts a Euro-Atlantic orientation, then the Putin regime and its satrapies are finished… But if Ukraine falls into Russia’s grip, then the outlook is bleak and dangerous… Europe’s own security will also be endangered. NATO is already struggling to protect the Baltic states and Poland from the integrated and increasingly impressive military forces of Russia and Belarus. Add Ukraine to that alliance, and a headache turns into a nightmare.”

In this cliff-hanging situation, Putin made his pre-emptive strike. At a meeting in the Kremlin, he agreed to buy fifteen billion euros worth of Ukrainian Eurobonds and cut the natural gas price by a third. This meant there would be no default; no massive unemployment; no happy hunting ground for the neo-Nazi thugs of Svoboda; no cheap and plentiful Ukrainian prostitutes and menials for the Germans and Poles; and Ukrainian homes will be warm this Christmas. Better yet, the presidents agreed to reforge their industrial cooperation. When Russia and Ukraine formed a single country, they built spaceships; apart, they can hardly launch a naval ship. Though unification isn’t on the map yet, it would make sense for both partners. This artificially divided country can be united, and it would do a lot of good for both of their populaces, and for all people seeking freedom from US hegemony.

There are a lot of difficulties ahead: Putin and Yanukovich are not friends, Ukrainian leaders are prone to renege, the US and the EC have a lot of resources. But meanwhile, it is a victory to celebrate this Christmastide. Such victories keep Iran safe from US bombardment, inspire the Japanese to demand removal of Okinawa base, encourage those seeking closure of Guantanamo jail, cheer up Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, frighten the NSA and CIA and allow French Catholics to march against Hollande’s child-trade laws.

What is the secret of Putin’s success? Edward Lucas said, in an interview to the pro-Western Ekho Moskvy radio: “Putin had a great year – Snowden, Syria, Ukraine. He checkmated Europe. He is a great player: he notices our weaknesses and turns them into his victories. He is good in diplomatic bluff, and in the game of Divide and Rule. He makes the Europeans think that the US is weak, and he convinced the US that Europeans are useless”.

I would offer an alternative explanation. The winds and hidden currents of history respond to those who feel their way. Putin is no less likely a roguish leader of global resistance than Princess Leia or Captain Solo were in Star Wars. Just the time for such a man is ripe.

Unlike Solo, he is not an adventurer. He is a prudent man. He does not try his luck, he waits, even procrastinates. He did not try to change regime in Tbilisi in 2008, when his troops were already on the outskirts of the city. He did not try his luck in Kiev, either. He has spent many hours in many meetings with Yanukovich whom he supposedly personally dislikes.

Like Captain Solo, Putin is a man who is ready to pay his way, full price, and such politicians are rare. “Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?”, asked a James Joyce character, and answered: “His proudest boast is I paid my way.” Those were Englishmen of another era, long before the likes of Blair, et al.

While McCain and Nuland, Merkel and Bildt speak of the European choice for the Ukraine, none of them is ready to pay for it. Only Russia is ready to pay her way, in the Joycean sense, whether in cash, as now, or in blood, as in WWII.

Putin is also a magnanimous man. He celebrated his Ukrainian victory and forthcoming Christmas by forgiving his personal and political enemies and setting them free: the Pussy Riot punks, Khodorkovsky the murderous oligarch, rioters… And his last press conference he carried out in Captain Solo self-deprecating mode, and this, for a man in his position, is a very good sign.

 

Mediastan will have a limited viewing schedule in Australia. Find details here…..

(A review of Mediastan, A Wikileaks Road Movie. The film was screened for the first time in London Raindance Film Festival October 1, 2013, and in a Moscow Festival a week later.)

A diverse gang of five journalists in their early thirties ride a car through deserts and high mountains of Central Asia.  Amidst breathtaking scenery, they cross impassable tunnels, negotiate steep curves and flocks of sheep on country roads, visit the capitals of new republics that came into being since the fall of the USSR, meet interesting people and discuss freedom of speech and its limits. A road movie par excellence, it’s Easy Rider by Wim Wenders, but in a better setting.

Soon we learn that theirs is not a joyride. These young people had been sent on a quest to far-away lands by the maverick genius of Julian Assange, captive of Ellingham Hall in East Anglia. (The events unfold two years ago, before Julian’s escape to the Ecuador Embassy) He has his adventure by proxy, unable to leave the walls of the manor. Assange makes a few appearances in the film, and one of the scenes, a fast night walk in the woods, is an artistic gem, as the director Johannes Wahlstrom (the Swede in the gang) conveys dramatic urgency and Julian’s acute personal involvement by cinematic means. Assange speaks to editors via Skype, and argues with his co-workers about the purpose of the whole exercise. Thus we learn that the young party’s goal is to deliver the State Department  cables deftly lifted by Sergeant Manning to remote lands, so the peoples of these countries will know the truth, namely how they are perceived by the imperial power. This truth is to liberate them, but they need a mediator: the media.

Somebody has to select, translate, explain and publish the cables so they will reach the target audience. Assange’s missionaries meet with editors of newspapers, news agencies and radio stations, and offer them their tempting and dangerous load, for free. The majority refuse the offer. They are too tightly connected with the American power structure, with the all-embracing tentacles of the Empire. Some take it, but we do not learn whether they actually use it. (I personally had better luck disseminating these cables in Russia, with its vibrant media and anti=American sentiment). Our travellers easily accept that Central Asian media is far from free, but in a subtly presented turn of events they will later discover that the mighty Western mainstream media is equally suborned.

The area they travel  is comprised of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and they deal with local media as they go: hence the title, Mediastan. Our travellers learn that the US habitually pays these local media to publish articles favourable to the US; some of those articles are published first in Russia, and afterwards reprinted in local publications, so that they appear to carry more authority. Some chief editors actually reside in the US and control their publications remotely. In timid Turkmenistan they visit a central newspaper office; every issue of the newspaper carries a photo of their president in full colour on the front page, and the editor tells his visitors that he is not looking for trouble. Leaving his office, they drive through a rebuilt-from-scratch Ashgabat, an architectural wonder of marble houses and clean broad avenues. Apparently not all the natural gas revenue has been siphoned abroad, and this seems a positive development. However, our visitors end up being expelled from the republic, just in case.

In Kazakhstan, they encounter the oil workers of Zhanaozen, who have carried a long hunger strike: no media reported on this development, until a month later, after they had been dispersed by bullets.  A dozen strikers were killed, many wounded and even more imprisoned. This film footage is remarkable for preserving the sorrows and complaints of the oil workers before the violent repression.   Even afterwards, the drama of the oil workers received very little exposure, for they were working for Western oil companies, and the President, Mr Nazarbayev, is considered West-friendly. For the mainstream media, gay pride parades have greater news value than a workers’ hunger strike.

The travellers also meet up with a character from another Wikileaks exploit, a released Guantanamo prisoner. Wikileaks had published his secret CIA file (among others). This big, grim, handsome and bearded man spent five years in that hellish camp; he tells our gang of his life in limbo, and they reveal to him why he was imprisoned – like Edmond Dantes of The Count of Monte Cristo, Gitmo prisoners are never told of the accusations against them.  When he learns that he had been locked up for so long simply because American interrogators  wanted to learn from him the mood among Tajik refugees in Afghanistan, he became furious: “Couldn’t they just ask me, and let me go?” he exclaims.

The Afghan episode stands apart from the rest, but that is the attraction of a road movie: it allows the film-maker to piece together quite disparate items. In semi-occupied Northern Afghanistan our gang visits a Swedish camp, where the Swedish press officer admits that they have no clue why they are there in the first place. The Afghans want them to leave, because the Swedes do not give bribes. We learn that under American pressure, the Swedes do something similar to bribing, in order to stay. Why are they there at all? The US wants to impress the natives with Swedish good will, at no expense for itself.

In a somewhat comic episode, Johannes tries to push his leaked cables to the head of local Radio Liberty, the US-owned and financed propaganda network. He is solemnly informed that Radio Liberty enjoys full freedom of expression, can discuss any subject, and knows no censorship. Johannes might as well have offered the cables to the US embassy!

2

The realm of Mediastan is not enclosed by the high mountains; it stretches all the way to Hudson River and the Thames, for there Wahlstrom meets two people thriving at the top of the media food chain: in London, chief editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger and in New York,  the then executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller. The two are smooth, glib and polished, suave and botoxed, they have their answers at the ready, but they are as subservient to power as a lowly editor of Stan-News.

The Guardian played a tricky part in the Wikileaks story, a part they are likely to repeat now with Snowden. In the case of Snowden, they published his materials, previously vetting them with the NBA, induced him to reveal his identity, beefed up their ‘’progressive’’ reputation, and at the end, commissioned their own hatchet-man, Luke Harding, to write a book, presumably trashing him. They gained a feather in their cap with the intelligence services, with the trusting readers, and are likely to end up destroying the man.

They did the same with Julian: they used his stuff, vetted it, censored it to fit their masters’ agenda, and afterwards published all the dirt on him they could find, bringing him as much disrepute as they could. The NY Times was even worse, as they collaborated with the CIA and Pentagon all the way, and fully supported the Assange witch-hunt.

The CP readers were able to follow this unique saga in real time, from its very inception, probably better than anybody in mainstream or blogs. They could learn how cables were published, and how the Guardian maligned Assange (they received confidential Swedish police records and distorted its contents). When, some months later, the records were made public, a Swedish site wrote: “The sleaze printed …above all [by] the toxic Nick Davies of The Guardian, can stand no more… Nick Davies’ account of the protocols was maliciously skewed”. The Guardian tendentiously headlined the cables obtained by Manning and delivered by Assange. Ordinary people rarely read beyond headlines. So the Guardian habitually ascribed to Wikileaks certain remarks of the US officials, as you can see here, most often in order to undermine Russia and delegitimise its president. Only now can we understand the reason for these relentless attacks on Putin – only he was strong-willed enough to bridle the impending US attack on Syria, and thus signal the end of American hegemony.

The Central Asian cables were more interesting, than somewhat,  for the US ambassadors in the region were incautious, even brutally frank, in their communications with the State Department. “The Guardian has deliberately excised portions of published cables to hide evidence of corruption [by Western companies in Central Asia]”, as CP readers were told in this piece, which is difficult to locate via Google (surprise, surprise!). Wahlstrom asks Alan Rusbridger why he excised the names of the grafters and receives a true-to-(Mediastan)form response: these are very rich people and they could take us to court.

3

The film appears just in time to coincide with first screening of The Fifth Estate, the Hollywood film on the same subject. It’s not a coincidence: Assange was very unhappy with the Hollywood project and he said so openly to its producer, its director and to the actor who played his part. He wisely decided to keep his hands off Mediastan: he refused to get involved so the film maker would be independent. This is definitely not a groupie movie about their guru: the central figure is not Julian, but media.

The films are vastly different. The Fifth Estate is based on a story by Assange’s co-worker turned enemy and wannabe rival, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and was produced on an above-the-average budget of $40 million, while Mediastan was done by the young director Johannes Wahlstrom, a friend of Assange, on a shoestring budget out of his own slim pocket; the DP (Director of Photography) and other dedicated, but lacking in resources, crew members worked for free. Despite all odds, they succeeded in producing a powerful and haunting thriller for the thinking man – an epic quest to deliver vital truth to the unwilling.

The film occupies a very special niche of a documentary that uses all the tools of a feature film: it’s dynamic, tightly wound, rich with nuances,a pleasure for the eyes and food for thought, beautifully photographed by Russian virtuoso of the camera, Feodor (Theo to his friends) Lyass, the DP for the recent top success of Russian cinema, Dukhless.  Director Johannes Wahlstrom – (I do not dare to say how wonderful he is, because, after all, he is my son) – was  brought up in Israel, and moved to Sweden with his Swedish mother when he was 12. This is his first full feature film;  he previously worked in Swedish TV and edited a magazine. He is one of these brave young men who want to fix the world instead of giving it a fix.

I suggest you see this film, for the sheer pleasure of watching these keen young faces, wild landscapes and far-away lands, if not also to learn more about how Wikileaks has changed the world.

[Language editing by Ken Freeland]

Israel Shamir lives in Moscow.

 

By: Sami Kleib

It only took two suicide bombers to destroy the oldest public hospital in Syria. Aleppo’s Kindi Hospital is now reduced to rubble as militants took control of it December 20.

Aleppo – Since the start of the Syrian crisis, battles between the Syrian army and the opposition fighters around Kindi Hospital in Aleppo’s northern countryside have not subsided. The Syrian army thwarted several of the opposition’s attempts to take over the hospital, but on December 20, the army’s defense collapsed when two trucks exploded inside the hospital. Rebels seized the hospital, killing dozens of army personnel and capturing 16 individuals.

Over the course of many months, at least 400 opposition fighters died in various attempts to control the hospital, according to military sources. The opposition formed a joint operations center at the beginning of December, dubbed “One Heart” and consisting of the Islamic Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa al-Tawhid, al-Nusra Front, and al-Fajr Islamic Movement.

Dozens of Syrian army soldiers fought for 16 days to protect the hospital, which sits on a hill overlooked by the armed groups’ Handarat Camp. Then, suicide bombers detonated two trucks loaded with 40 tons of explosive materials, according to opposition websites. The trucks targeted the hospital’s two main buildings where soldiers were gathered, and the militants stormed the hospital after putting out a massive fire. Syrian army soldiers withdrew to the Nakarin groves and the Aleppo Central Prison.

Armed groups announced the killing of Reuters photographer Molhem Barakat and his brother Mustafa during the attack. Insurgents killed included fighters of different nationalities such as Abu Omran al-Maghribi and suicide bomber Abu Marwan al-Halabi. But the militant groups did not disclose the identity of the bombers.

A military source told Al-Akhbar, “The total death toll at the walls of the hospital and in the storming operations exceeded 400 fighters, including a large number of non-Syrians.”

A Historic Hospital From Nasser’s Era

Before the University of Aleppo-affiliated hospital was first captured by the militants in 2012, it included 250 physicians and over 650 nurses and administrators. Kindi Hospital was built to treat tuberculosis patients in Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s era, during the union between Syria and Egypt.

Generations of specialized doctors graduated from the hospital over the decades, including surgeon Tarek al-Mualem. He was shocked by the destruction of the hospital, where he first started working in 1997. He said, “Those who attacked, destroyed, and looted the hospital were once patients who came into Kindi scarred and broken, and came out physically healed but with ailing minds.”

One opposition doctor who declined to give his name said, “The regime is responsible for the destruction of the hospital because it turned it into a military base – a human slaughterhouse for extracting confessions from injured patients in operating rooms with the help of informant doctors and Iranian, Russian, and Korean physicians.”

The doctor, who was among the first to participate in the protests, left Syria for Turkey to work in field hospitals. He criticized what he called “the lamentation session over the hospital that Syrian security forces ordered among their followers.”

“The revolution will rebuild the hospital with devout medical cadres under the supervision of the Union of Free Syrian Doctors and equipment from genuinely friendly countries that continue to support the revolution,” he said.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/suicide-bombing-leaves-historic-aleppo-hospital-ruins

History is just one of those hard things to ignore, especially in South Sudan.

In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the U.S. The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and U.S. money poured in to pay for the new government. Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the U.S. was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”

In 2012 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the nation as part of an extended effort at creating B-roll footage for her 2016 campaign, and Obama publicly applauded a deal brokered between Sudan and South Sudan on oil pipeline fees that the White House claimed would “help stem the ongoing violence in the region.”

However, like in Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other places that fell apart while being democratized and stabilized by the U.S. (one also thinks of Libya, itself part of the African continent), the rush to mediagenic proclamations without addressing the underlying fundamentals led only to catastrophe. A scant few years later, South Sudan is at the brink of civil war and societal collapse, the U.S. is evacuating another embassy and indeed one variety or another of “rebels” are shooting at U.S. military aircraft arriving in their country in violation of their national sovereignty. Those who believe that the U.S. efforts in South Sudan do not involve special forces on the ground and drones overhead no doubt will have a nice Christmas waiting up to catch a glimpse of Santa.

Obama, apparently unwilling to remember how he stood aside while an elected government recently fell apart in Egypt, went on to double-down on hypocrisy by stating in regards to South Sudan, “Any effort to seize power through the use of military force will result in the end of long-standing support from the United States and the international community.”

The Militarization of Africa

If the U.S. efforts in South Sudan were isolated, that would be tragedy enough. However, the U.S. militarization of Africa paints such a sad, similar picture that it bears a recapping here. The always on-track Nick Turse reported:

– In recent years, the US has trained and outfitted soldiers from Uganda, Burundi and Kenya, among other nations. They have also served as a proxy force for the US in Somalia, part of the African Union Mission (Amisom) protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu.

– Since 2007, the State Department has given about $650-million in logistics support, equipment and training for Amisom troops. The Pentagon has given an extra $100 million since 2011.

– The U.S. also continues to fund African armies through the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership and its Pentagon analogue, now known as Operation Juniper Shield, with increased support flowing to Mauritania and Niger in the wake of Mali’s collapse. In 2012, the State Department and the US Agency for International Development poured approximately $52 million into the programs and the Pentagon chipped in another $46 million.

– In the Obama years, U.S. Africa Command has also built a sophisticated logistics system, officially known as the Africom Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as “the new spice route”. Its central nodes are in Manda Bay, Garissa and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier.

– In addition, the Pentagon has run a regional air campaign using drones and manned aircraft out of airports and bases around the continent including Camp Lemonnier, Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia, Niamey in Niger and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while private contractor-operated surveillance aircraft have flown missions out of Entebbe. Recently, Foreign Policy reported on the existence of a possible drone base in Lamu, Kenya.

– Another critical location is Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, home to a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment and the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support Initiative that, according to military documents, supports “high-risk activities” carried out by elite forces from Joint Special Operations Task Force — Trans-Sahara.

The Failure of the Militarization of Africa

Libya is in flames, Benghazi the only point of attention for Americans while chaos consumes a once-stable country. Egypt, again on the continent though perhaps not of it, saw its brief bit of democracy stamped out by a military coup. The governments of Mauritania and Niger fell to their militaries. Chad experienced a coup, albeit unsuccessful. Fighting continues in Mali and the Central African Republic. In October 2011 the U.S. invaded, albeit in a small way, the Central African Republic In December 2012, the U.S. evacuated its diplomats and civilians. 2011 also saw a U.S.-backed Kenyan invasion of Somalia. U.S. troops are hunting humans in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like ghosts from the 18th century, pirates haunt the waters off East Africa. The U.S. admits to having 5,000 troops in ten African countries when once there were none.

And So, Why?

The basic rule for any investment is what do you gain in return for risk? It applies to buying stocks as well as investing a nation’s blood, resources and prestige.

In the case of Africa, the U.S. investment has been a disaster. Chaos has replaced stability in many places, and terrorists have found homes in countries they may have once never imagined. The U.S., in sad echo of 19th century colonialism, has militarized another region of the world.

Every rebel and terrorist the U.S. kills creates more, radicalizes more, gives the bad guys another propaganda lede. The more we kill, the more there seem to be to kill. America needs fewer people saying they are victims of America. The Chinese are building cultural ties and signing deals all over Africa, and we’re just throwing up barbed wire. Why?

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/12/23/any-more-u-s-stabilization-and-africa-will-collapse/