Friday 29th of March 2024

the guns of the imperium...

imperium

One of the unstated goals of imperial warfare is to make hapless civilians pay a price for having the temerity to be born in a targeted nation.

Prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq, for example, the Western oligarchies imposed sanctions which destroyed water treatment infrastructures and killed about 700,000 children, and about 1 million other innocent Iraqis. These consequences were all planned and projected.  There was nothing accidental about the mass killings. It was simply imperial punishment for living in Iraq. Part of the calculus for such barbarity is that Imperialists hope that such punishments will demoralize local populations, and possibly make them reject their leaders.  It falls under the euphemistic categories of “destabilization” and “collateral damage”.  More accurately, it is targeted mass murder.

Why did the Western oligarchies choose to destroy Iraq and its people?  It had nothing to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction, or terrorism, or any other of the creative lies perpetrated by cooked intelligence reports and public relations agencies.  More accurately, CIA asset Saddam Hussein had decided to stop using the US dollar for foreign trade.  Once Iraqi oil fields were under U.S control, oil sales were switched back to the dollar. Multitudes of innocent people were slaughtered – and continue to be slaughtered– for the US dollar, oil, and oligarch profits.  Whereas Iraq under Hussein was free of Wahhabism, and other assorted Western-supported terrorists, now it is a hotbed for terrorism, and innocent Iraqis are still paying for their temerity.

Libya, like Iraq, was also a well-developed nation.  Under Gaddafi, it had become the most prosperous nation in Africa, but innocent Libyans are still paying the price for having been born there. Hillary Clinton’s recently-disclosed e-mail records  demonstrate that Libya had decided to create an international reserve currency based on Libya’s gold dinar. Consequently, NATO planes provided air-cover for its al Qaeda proxies, Muammar Gaddafi was murdered, and now Libya too is a hotbed for terrorists, including the liver-eating ISIS variety.  The country has been successfully “destabilized”.

These are common imperial tactics, all masked by the duplicitous oligarchies. Ukraine is being destroyed and destabilized in a similar fashion, and to serve hidden imperial agendas, as is Syria.

Syrians are lucky though.  The Syrian army, Russia, Iran, and affiliated forces such as Hezbollah are successfully defeating the Western terrorist proxies, including al-Nusra Front and ISIS.

All of this mass death and destruction points to huge geo-political shifts, as it shines a light on the forces of justice and freedom and opposing forces of death and destruction...

read more: http://off-guardian.org/2016/01/09/western-hegemony-versus-russian-sanity/

 

we don’t treat our chickens with chlorine...

Russia has presented a surprising proposal for overcoming tensions with the EU, namely that the EU should renounce the TTIP free trade agreement with the United States and instead enter into a partnership with the newly created Eurasian Economic Union. A free trade zone with your neighbors would make more sense than a deal with the U.S.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russian Ambassador to the EU, surprised with a new proposal: renewal of the partnership between the EU and Russia. Chizhov suggests that the EU stop negotiating with the U.S. on the controversial TTIP free trade agreement, and opt instead to begin negotiations toward entering the Eurasian Economic Union, which came into force January 1.

Chizhov said to the EU Observer: “You really think it is wise to put so much political energy into a free trade agreement with the United States when one has a much more natural trade partner next door right in the neighborhood? At least we don’t treat our chickens with chlorine.”

Chizhov: “Our idea is to take up official contacts between the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union as quickly as possible. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of this not too long ago. The EU sanctions against Russia are no hindrance.” The ambassador expressed that it would be reasonable to establish an ensemble economic space in the Eurasian region, in which prospective member states Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and the Ukraine could play a role.

Chizhov said that neither the sanctions, nor the low oil prices, nor the depressed condition of the rouble would jeopardize the Eurasian project. “Russia was wise enough to build up a huge reserve, which which we can resist external pressures.” In the view of the ambassador, a long-term partnership between the Eurasian Union would make sense, particularly in the energy sector.

read more: http://off-guardian.org/2016/01/09/russia-to-eu-dump-the-ttip-and-embrace-the-eurasian-union/

the lost guns of the imperium...

 

For more than a decade, the United States has supplied huge quantities of weapons and military hardware to the Iraqi government—and a large chunk of that equipment has disappeared and landed in the hands of ISIS fighters and members of Iranian-backed Shiite militias responsible for massacring civilians. Everything from M-16s and bullets to Humvees and tanks have been lost. But neither the US nor Iraqi governments can say how much US-supplied materiel has been diverted to militant groups or how it's ending up there.


Losing weapons to extremists and insurgents has long been a problem for the US military and the Iraqi army, but it became more urgent after ISIS seized chunks of Iraq in 2014, overrunning Iraqi troops and sweeping up their weapons. With that equipment, ISIS solidified its hold on its captured territory and drew the United States back into Iraq. Still, the Pentagon has not been able to monitor the loss of its weapons and other supplies to ISIS. "The bottom line is that the US military does not have a means to track equipment that has been taken from the Government of Iraq by ISIL," Commander Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, wrote in an email to Mother Jones, using the government's preferred acronym for ISIS.


It's not supposed to work this way. "The US does place a lot of restrictions—in theory—on [arms] transfers," says Patrick Wilcken of Amnesty International, who worked on a recent report on ISIS's weaponry. If the United States wants to provide arms to another country, the Department of Defense is required by law to obtain assurances that the weapons will be secured. There's a Pentagon organization called the Defense Security Cooperation Agency that carries out and monitors these arms shipments and makes sure the weapons are being used for their intended purposes. And a 2013 UN treaty bars the United States from providing arms to countries where weapons could end up with armed groups committing human rights violations. But despite these mechanisms, significant amounts of US-supplied arms—including rifles, pistols, and ammunition—are still going missing, largely thanks to the Iraqi military's patchwork supply system.


The source of the problem is no mystery: the Iraqi military. It keeps tabs on its weapons only through what Wilcken describes as "scraps of paper." In September, the Pentagon's inspector general issued a report noting that the Iraqi army lacked any sort of supply database and instead relied on "a manual, paper-based system for tracking supplies and equipment." That report came eight years after the Government Accountability Office found in 2007 that nearly 200,000 US-supplied weapons went unaccounted for in Iraq, due to shoddy recordkeeping by the Iraqi army and the US-led coalition. The GAO couldn't tell where those weapons went, but many probably landed in the hands of jihadists. Wilcken's report found that a "substantial portion" of ISIS's weapons come from Iraqi army stocks.


"Many developing states have no post-delivery controls [for weapons] in place, or have poor mechanisms for applying the controls which exist," says N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a consultancy that tracks global arms trade. "Weapons delivered to such countries can be subject to limited oversight at best, often quickly slipping 'outside the system' in a conflict situation."


This issue of the Iraqi military losing control of US-supplied weapons has not attracted much congressional attention, at least not publicly. The House and Senate foreign relations committees have jurisdiction over arms sales, but neither has held a hearing on the topic in the past two years. A Republican aide on the Senate committee says staff members have received briefings on Iraq's arms storage problems, but he would not discuss the details of these briefings or say when they had occurred.


By shipping arms to Iraq despite these problem, the US government risks violating both domestic and international law. The Arms Export Control Act of 1976 says the United States can only provide weapons to partners who "will provide substantially the same degree of security protection afforded to such article or service by the United States Government." For example, the US military keeps its M-16 rifles locked in an armory, and it tracks each gun by the serial number. If an M-16 is supplied to Iraq, both the Iraqi army and the Pentagon are responsible for monitoring it. And as part of the US monitoring process, American inspectors are supposed to visit Iraqi supply depots to make sure the Iraqi army is securing its weapons and ensuring the arms are only used by its own soldiers.


Yet the Pentagon inspector general's report says that's not happening. US personnel "at the Taji National Depot did not have accurate knowledge of the contents of individual supply warehouses under Iraqi control at that location or at other supply locations throughout Iraq," the report states. The IG investigation also found that Iraqi officers refused to grant American advisers access to most weapons storage facilities. So in addition to the US military not being able to tell how many of its weapons have been obtained by ISIS or other jihadi groups, no one in the Iraqi or American governments can keep accurate track of what the Iraqi army has in its possession in the first place.

 

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/why-iraq-black-hole-american-arms