The Obama Administration’s sudden announcement last night that it has discovered the Syrian government used chemical weapons and thus crossed the “red line” is pretty unconvincing.

The Administration provided no evidence, no new information, and no explanation of why the intelligence community’s assessment of just three months ago that chemical weapons had not been used by the Syrian government has changed so dramatically.

What changed? They won’t tell us. The Administration spokesman who made the announcement would only say that they have a “high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information.” What are those streams of information? They won’t tell us.

It reminds me of a decade ago, when another presidential spokesman came forward to tell us:
 
“But make no mistake — as I said earlier — we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.”
 
That was President Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer speaking about Iraq in early 2003.
 
Those who have been shown this evidence are not too impressed. An aide to Russian President Putin said today that the US side “tried to present us with information on the use of chemical weapons by the regime, but frankly we thought that it was not convincing.”
 
The Administration has announced that based on this new information, it would begin providing weapons to the Syrian opposition. This is of course another stretch of the truth, as it is well known that the Administration has been facilitating the transfer of weapons to the Syrian rebels for quite some time. The CIA is training the rebels in Jordan. The New York Times and other major media have reported on this numerous times.

But it is true that President Obama is taking us further toward war in Syria. And it is true that again Congress is taking no role in the matter, beyond the usual cheerleading by warhawks like McCain and Lindsey Graham.
 
Perhaps the Obama administration, seeing the multitude of scandals that have broken over the past several weeks, has decided to take a page from Bill Clinton, who famously bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan on August 20, 1998, just three days after he was forced to appear at a grand jury hearing investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
 
I will have more on this developing news on Sunday in my weekly column. You can subscribe to my column here .

This year’s Iranian presidential election is likely to produce a strong political figure who will have a significant impact on the Islamic Republic’s foreign and domestic policies, helping to ensure Iran’s continued internal development and bolstering its regional importance. Yet every four years, a combustible mix of pro-Israel advocates, Iranian expatriates, Western Iran “experts,” and their fellow travelers in the media try to use Iranian presidential elections as a frame for persuading Westerners that the Islamic Republic is an illegitimate system so despised by its people as to be at imminent risk of overthrow.

Iran’s election processes, pundits tell us, will be manipulated to produce a winner chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei — a “selection rather than an election” — consolidating Khamenei’s dictatorial hold over Iranian politics. Either Iranians will be sufficiently outraged to rise up against the system, commentators intone, or the world will have to deal with increasingly authoritarian — and dangerous — clerical-military rule in Tehran.

But this year’s presidential campaign, like its predecessors, challenges Westerners’ deep attachment to myths of the Islamic Republic’s illegitimacy and fragility. The eight candidates initially approved by the Guardian Council represented a broad spectrum of conservative and reformist views. While one conservative and the most clear-cut reformist — neither of whom attracted much support — have withdrawn, they did so not from intimidation but to prevent conservative and reformist votes from being dissipated across too many candidates from each camp.

Contrary to an engineered selection, Iran is in the final days of a real contest. Candidates have had broad and regular access to national media, (including the broadcasting of extended videos about each candidate prepared by their campaigns), have advertised and held campaign events, and have participated in three nationally televised (and widely watched) debates.

High-quality surveys by both Western and Iranian pollsters show that the campaign is having a powerful effect on the eventual outcome. Western pundits and journalists have regularly identified nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Khamenei’s “anointed” candidate and the clear “front-runner.” But high-quality polls have never identified Jalili as the clear front-runner. As election day looms, moreover, polls conducted after the final debate show Jalili losing ground to three rivals: Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezae, and former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani (the only cleric on the ballot).

Read the rest of the article.

Foreign Policy magazine’s website featured an interesting article yesterday on the ongoing protests in Turkey. The protests have been covered quite a bit in the media over the past couple of weeks, as they spread throughout the country, were met with violence by the authorities, and threatened the ten years of relative stability and economic progress under the government of Prime Minister Erdogan.

Though most press reports tie the beginning of the protests to a dispute over the Turkish government’s decision to turn an Istanbul city park into a shopping mall, Sophia Jones reports in the above Foreign Policy article that widespread protests actually began weeks earlier in Turkey and had nothing to do with the shopping mall.

Instead, mass protests first began after a bombing in the town of Reyhanli killed more than 50 Turks. The bombing was widely suspected in Turkey to have been the work of a faction of the Syrian rebels that Erdogan has strongly supported, in a ploy to get Turkey even more embroiled in the conflict next door.

According to a recent opinion poll conducted by a research firm in Ankara, more than 72 percent of Turks oppose Erdogan’s policy of intervening in the Syrian unrest. Like most Americans, Turkish citizens want no part of the war next door and they are furious at their prime minister for his support for the Syrian rebels.

It appears that Erdogan’s interventionist foreign policy even more than his decision to clear out a city park is what enraged the population and turned a good part of it against him. Perhaps both the Turkish government and the US government would be smart to listen to their citizens when they demand an end to intervention and meddling in the affairs of other countries.

The Turkish uprising is rooted in the inconsistencies of the Erdogan government. The latter—after having billed itself as “Muslim Democrat” (based on the “Christian Democratic” model)— suddenly revealed its true nature with the advent of the Arab Spring “color revolutions.”

In terms of domestic and foreign policy, there is a before and after a volte-face. The previous stage involved the infiltration of institutions. The aftermath has been characterized by sectarianism. Before, Ahmed Davutoğlu’s theory of “zero problems” with Turkey’s neighbors took center stage. The former Ottoman Empire seemed to be coming out of its slumber and returning to reality. After that, the opposite happened: Turkey fell out with each of her neighbors and went to war against Syria.

The Muslim Brotherhood

Piloting this shift is the Muslim Brotherhood, a secret organization that Erdogan and his team have always been affiliated with, despite their denials. Even if this shift is subsequent to the one involving Qatar—the financier of the Muslim Brotherhood—it bears the same implication: authoritarian regimes that claimed to be foes of Israel suddenly act like close allies.

It is important to remember that the label “Arab Spring” given by the West is a deception to make people believe that the Tunisian and Egyptian governments were overthrown by a mass movement. While there was a popular revolution in Tunisia, its goal was not to change the regime, but to achieve economic and social changes. It was the United States, not the street, that ordered Zinedine el Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak to step down. Then it was NATO that toppled and lynched Muammar al-Gaddafi. And it is again NATO and the GCC that have fueled the attack against Syria.

Across North Africa—with the exception of Algeria—the Muslim Brotherhood has been placed in power by Hillary Clinton. Everywhere, Turkish communications advisors are on board, courtesy of the Erdogan government. Everywhere, “democracy” was a facade which allowed the Brothers to Islamize firms in exchange for embracing the pseudo-liberal capitalism of the United States.

The term “Islamize” reflects the rhetoric employed by the Brothers, not reality. The Brotherhood intends to control the privacy of individuals based on principles which are outside the scope of the Quran. It calls into question the role of women in society and imposes an austere lifestyle without alcohol or cigarettes, and without sex…at least for others.

Over the past ten years, the Brotherhood has stayed under the radar, leaving the transformation of public education in the hands of the sect run by Fethullah Gülen, of which President Abdullah Gül is a member.

Although the Brotherhood flaunts its hatred for the American way of life, it thrives under the protective wing of the Anglo-Americans (UK, USA, Israel) who have always been able to use its violence against those who resisted them. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had appointed to her cabinet her former “body woman,” Huma Abedin (wife of former Zionist Congressman Anthony Weiner), whose mother Saleha Abedin presides the women’s division of the Brotherhood. It was through this channel that Clinton stirred up the Brotherhood.

The Brothers purveyed the ideology of Al-Qaeda, through one of their members: Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organizer President Sadat’s assassination and currently the leader of the terrorist organization. Al-Zawahiri, like Bin Laden, has always been an agent of U.S. services. Although officially listed as a public enemy, from 1997 to 2001 he met regularly with the CIA at the U.S. Embassy in Baku in the context “Operation Gladio B,” as testified by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds [1].

A progressive dictatorship

During his imprisonment, Erdogan claimed to have broken with the Brothers and to have quit the party. Then, he got himself elected and gradually imposed a dictatorship. He ordered the arrest and incarceration of two thirds of the generals accused of involvement in Gladio, the secret network under U.S. influence. In addition, he put behind bars the highest number of journalists for an individual country. This fact has been obscured by the Western media, unwilling to criticize a NATO member.

The army is the traditional custodian of Kemalist secularism. However, after the September 11 attacks, senior officers were concerned about the totalitarian drift of the United States, and made contact with their counterparts in Russia and China. To nip these unwelcome initiatives in the bud, certain judges pointedly reminded them about their historical ties with the U.S.

If, like in any other profession, journalists can be rascals, the world’s highest incarceration rate is indicative of a policy: intimidation and repression. With the exception of Ululsal, television turned into an official eulogy, while the press followed the same path.

“Zero problems” with its neighbors

The foreign policy of Ahmed Davutoğlu was equally laughable. After seeking to tackle the unresolved problems left over from the Ottoman Empire one century earlier, he tried to play Obama against Netanyahu by organizing the Freedom Flotilla to Palestine [2]. However, less than two months after Israel’s act of piracy, he accepted the international commission of inquiry created to cover it up and resumed in secret his collaboration with Tel Aviv.

As a token of the cooperation between the Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda, the Brotherhood had placed on the Marvi Marmara al-Mahdi Hatari, the second in command of Al Qaeda in Libya and a likely British agent [3].

Economic disaster

How did Turkey squander not only a decade of diplomatic efforts to restore its international relations, but also its economic growth? In March 2011, she participated in the NATO operation against Libya, one of its major economic partners. With Libya devastated by the war, Turkey lost its market. At the same time, Ankara embarked on a war against neighboring Syria, with whom a year earlier she had signed a trade liberalization agreement. The impact was swift: the growth in 2010 was 9.2%, in 2012 it fell to 2.2% and continues to fall [4].

Public Relations

The rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in North Africa went to the Erdogan government’s head. By brandishing his Ottoman imperial ambition, he disconcerted the Arab public to begin with, and then turned the majority of his people against him.

On one hand, the government is funding Fetih 1453—a film that gobbled up an astronomic budget for the country—which is supposed to celebrate the conquest of Constantinople, albeit historically flawed. On the other hand, it attempts to ban the most popular television series in the Middle East, The Sultan’s Harem, because the truth does not project a peaceful image of the Ottomans.

The real reason for the uprising

In the present context, the Western press has focused on specific details: a housing project in Istanbul, ban on late-night sales of alcholol, or statements encouraging population growth. All this is true, but it doesn’t add up to a revolution.

By showing its true nature, the Erdogan government has cut itself off from the population. Only a minority of Sunnis can identify with the backward and hypocritical programme of the Brothers. As it happens, about 50% of Turks are Sunni, 20% Alevi (that is to say Alawites), 20% are Kurds (mostly Sunni), and 10% belong to other minorities. It is statistically clear that the Erdogan government can not hold out against the uprising that its own policies helped to ignite.

By overthrowing him, the Turks would be solving not only their own problems, but would also be putting an end to the war against Syria. I have often pointed out that the war would stop the day one of its foreign sponsors exits the scene. This will soon be the case. Thus, the Turkish people will also halt the Brotherhood’s expansion. Erdogan’s fall foreshadows that of his friends; Ghannouchi in Tunisia and Morsi in Egypt. It is in fact most unlikely that these artificial governments, imposed via rigged elections, can survive their powerful sponsor.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 
Gaia Edwards

[1] “Al Qaeda Chief was US Asset,” by Nafeez Ahmed, 21 May 2013.

[2] “Why did Israel attack civilians in the Mediterranean?” and “Freedom Flotilla: The detail that escaped Netanyahu,” by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 1 and 8 June 2010.

[3] “Free Syrian Army commanded by Military Governor of Tripoli,” by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 19 December 2011.

[4] “Turkey’s Economic Growth Slows Sharply,” by Emre Perer and Yeliz Candemir, The Wall Sreeet Journal, 1 April 2013.

Voltaire Network, Reprinted with permission.

On many occasions the “Turkish-style” political system has been viewed as an example for Egypt to follow after the “Jasmine Revolution”. Visiting Cairo in 2011, Prime Minister Recap Tayyip Erdoğan, who is also the chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), tried to appear as someone who has won victories without actually going to war and a leader who has succeeded in getting back the lands lost by the Ottoman empire, the process revived under the new historic conditions. He strongly praised the performance of his country, which has really reached telling economic and foreign policy achievements in the 2000s.

But things do change and the Middle East is a volatile region. Now the events in Turkey are acquiring increased similarity with what took place in Egypt, where peaceful protestors filled the Tahrir square in Cairo. The Prime Minister appears to have somewhat overestimated the country’s resources and capabilities.

The local protest spurred by ambitious construction plans in the area of Taksim square has grown into a nation-wide mass unrest with dozens, or even hundreds, of protestors hitting the streets. The calls for ecology protection have turned into political slogans. The key demand is the resignation of Erdogan and his government. The protest keeps on spreading to encompass new areas and walks of life. Fierce clashes between protesters and police (it’s not without reason some units are viewed as Erdogan’s “private guards”) take place in Istanbul, Ankara and other large provincial centers (like Izmir and Konya), the offices of ruling party being smashed up.

Even soccer fans of rival teams have gotten together against police violence. The Turkey’s Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions (KESK) has joined the protests. Some say in case strikes expand across the country, the Padishah’s position will become really shaky. Of course, Turkey has not been immune from crises before, but the armed forces intervened any time it happened. Today they are destitute of such functions; the ruling party has effectively crashed on the military to eradicate any attempts of conspiracy adding to confusion and uncertainty in its ranks. (2)

As previously in Egypt, the unrest movement has thrown up no leader (or a group of leaders) and social networks have an important role to play uniting over 8 million people. More than two million messages highlighting the Turkey events were sent by Twitter users in just 24 hours. Around 90% of posts came from inside the country, half of them from Istanbul. Approximately 88% of massages were in Turkish language leading to the conclusion that it was the internal audience the messages were addressed to.

The are other signs telling the activists of unexpected unrest are perfectly prepared for information warfare, while the powers that be appear to be on the defensive and at a loss in mass media and Internet (unlike the police facing the protesters on streets and squares). According to the Guardian, Mr. Erdogan blamed foreigners and attacked Twitter saying, “Now we have a menace that is called Twitter. The best example of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society”.

The role of media in the modern world is well known, so making similar statements is the shortest way to acquire the image of “oppressor of freedom” and a “dictator”. No wonder, there is no de-facto support for the Prime Minister from the West: the media and politicians lash out against the Turkish police being too tough quelling the unrest. For instance, US Secretary of States John Kerry expressed concern over the anti-government demonstrations in Turkey calling for restraint. This statement is in line with the one made by Brussels on the same occasion. 

Obviously not each and every political group or informal organization, whose activists hit the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and other cities, is liberal and West-oriented. The radical participants of Occupy Taksim movement include Erdogan’s opponents from all political specters, including ultra-nationalists, who despise him for starting a dialogue with Kurds, and left-wing groups opposing his excessively “pro-capitalist” social and economic policies, as well as the support of Syrian anti-government militants. (3) In case the unrest goes on, the most steadfast forces, which follow coherent plans of action and are ready to go to any length to achieve strictly defined goals, will be the ones to gain. 

Evidently, the insight into the events of such gravity and scope requires having a look at the whole range of internal and external causes. The situation could be caused by surfaced tensions between “soft” (gradually becoming hard) Islamism of Erdogan and the sentiments spread in the ranks of secular oriented part of society. These are the very same tensions that one way or another have been a specific feature of the Ottoman caliphate and the Cembalist Republic after 1923. No matter the Justice and Development Party has won a string of elections; the Westernization has gone too deeply into the fabric of Turkish society.

Even in such traditionally conservative cities as Konya, the Western influence has taken deep enough roots. Erdogan would hardly be able to substitute secular legal system with Islamic laws, but he insists on the priority of religion-oriented values and symbols. For instance, the recently adopted law restricting alcohol consumption. Defending the expediency of the measure, Erdogan said he liked his people and wanted to protect them from bad habits. But many people don’t want to live under the watchful sight of caring father. (4) 

Thus, there is a civil division, or even, a cultural and civilization split reflecting the vibrant and contradictory social, economic and political processes going on in the country. Turkey’s NATO membership and it’s standing in the Middle and Near East is no less important bringing the country into focus of the recent West-led geopolitical experiments. The country’s destructive role in the Syrian crisis is evident. Those who follow the events closely have paid attention on unprecedented pressure the United States has exerted on Turkey. Let me recall that Hosni Mubarak, the former leader of Egypt, was also seen as a reliable US partner. Not long before the overthrow he had started to display some certain degree of independence…

Talking about the near future forecasts, it is quite possible Abdullah Gül, the President of Turkey, will take conciliatory steps. Formally an Erdogan’s political fellow traveler, he keeps some distance away from Prime Minister’s unwavering course and has a reputation of a moderate politician. One of possible outcomes could be gaining strength by some political elite groups.

The glaring example is Fethullah Gülen, who went into self-imposed exile in 1998 and resides in Pennsylvania. He enjoys strong support back home. A spiritual leader of the Hizmet global movement, which comprises media outlets, schools and charitable organizations (to large extent it is funded by entrepreneurs based in Anatolia), the Muslim scholar has significant political clout in Turkey, as the Economist reports. (5) Many (if not the majority) of those, who vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party, are the supporters of Fethullah Gülen and his Hizmet network, no wonder his opinion on a wide range of issues (the emerging dialogue with Kurds, for instance) has fundamental importance. (6) 

On May 31 he met Ahmet Turk, the leader of pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), who was visiting the United States. (7). Before that a meeting between him and Erdogan’s Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc had taken place. (8) Perhaps it’s all not about the Kurdish issue only. Reading a sermon in the middle of May, Gülen came out with veiled criticism of Erdogan’s vanity (9). No doubt, it reflects the Erdogan’s style. Some reporters of Zaman, the newspaper closely linked to his movement, have also made critical remarks about the Prime Minister’s arrogant attitude. (10) The Gülen’s followers, who have acted as the ruling party’s allies recently (but more friendly to the West), may take a more definite stance if the unrest continues. On the other hand, other parties and groups, including those who are rather on the radical side, may intensify their activities too. 

All of it is hardly surprising. Let’s recall the “hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy”, a shift from long time support for dictatorships to bolstering democracies as a fundamental principle of foreign policy outlined just a few years ago by President Bush Jr., when his tenure was nearing the end. (11) Other actors, who maintain a kind of “competition/cooperation” relation with Washington, may pursue their own interests. The voices have already been raised calling the situation in Turkey a “milestone turn of events” to promote more mature “Turkish democracy”. It’s quite evident. The matter is that in concrete terms the emergence of this type of democracy will entail further fragmentation of Turkish society (taking into consideration its historically complex ethnic composition and rather complicated character of relationship with the neighbors) influencing the ties with all adjacent states in the future. 

Endnotes: 

(1) Main trade union backs Turkey’s anti-govt protests // http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=59209

(2) Moreover, the rumors are going around in Istanbul that the secular oriented military have refused to meet the police requests to lend a helping hand in quelling the unrest, the protesters have even been reported to be given gas protection masks in military hospitals – Dorsey J. Tahrir’s Lesson For Taksim: Police Brutality Unites Battle-Hardened Fans‏ – Analysis // http://www.eurasiareview.com/04062013-tahrirs-lesson-for-taksim-police-brutality-unites-battle-hardened-fans%E2%80%8F-analysis/

(3) After the May 11 blasts a few thousand protesters hit the streets of Reyhanli discontent with the government policies, not Syria, which the Erdogan’s cabinet tried hard to lay the blame on. Earlier in 2012, Faruk Logoglu, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People’s Party, said the events were a direct result of the government’s policy on Syria. One can hardly put into question the competence of former deputy Foreign Minister, an experienced diplomat, involved in preparation of many important events (including those related to Syria and the Middle East in general). 

(4) Mustafa Akyol. How Not to Win Friends and Influence the Turkish People.

(5) The Gulenists fight back. A Muslim cleric in America wields surprising political power in Turkey // http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21578113-muslim-cleric-america-wields-surprising-political-power-turkey-gulenists-fight-back

(6) Is Gulen Movement Against Peace With PKK? // http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/gulen-movement-peace-process-pkk.html

(7) Ahmet Türk Fethullah Gülen’le görüştü iddiası // http://www.timeturk.com/tr/2013/05/31/ahmet-turk-fethullah-gulen-le-gorustu-iddiasi.html

(8) Bülent Arınç: Fethullah Gülen’le 3 saat görüştük // http://www.sabah.com.tr/Gundem/2013/05/23/bulent-arinc-fethullah-gulenle-3-saat-gorustuk

(9) Tahrir’s lesson for Taksim: Police brutality unites battle-hardened fans // Tahrir’s lesson for Taksim: Police brutality unites battle-hardened fans

(10) As Turks Challenge Their Leader’s Power, He Tries to Expand It // http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/europe/turkish-protests-raise-questions-on-leaders-rule.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(11) Vladimir Avtakov, expert on Turkey, offers a glance at the history of Arab states setting the instances of the waves of unrest bringing to surface the people with the images of “popular” or “Islamists” leaders, while in reality they were lock, stock and barrel dependent on the United States of America. Turkey: Managed Chaos and Police Instead of Military. http://www.iarex.ru/articles/37353.html

 Reprinted by permission from the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Last week we saw dramatic new evidence of illegal government surveillance of our telephone calls, and of the National Security Agency’s deep penetration into American companies such as Facebook and Microsoft to spy on us. The media seemed shocked.

Many of us are not so surprised.

Some of us were arguing back in 2001 with the introduction of the so-called PATRIOT Act that it would pave the way for massive US government surveillance—not targeting terrorists but rather aimed against American citizens. We were told we must accept this temporary measure to provide government the tools to catch those responsible for 9/11. That was nearly twelve years and at least four wars ago.

We should know by now that when it comes to government power-grabs, we never go back to the status quo even when the “crisis” has passed. That part of our freedom and civil liberties once lost is never regained. How many times did the PATRIOT Act need renewed? How many times did FISA authority need expanded? Why did we have to pass a law to grant immunity to companies who hand over our personal information to the government?

It was all a build-up of the government’s capacity to monitor us.

The reaction of some in Congress and the Administration to last week’s leak was predictable. Knee-jerk defenders of the police state such as Senator Lindsey Graham declared that he was “glad” the government was collecting Verizon phone records—including his own—because the government needs to know what the enemy is up to. Those who take an oath to defend the Constitution from its enemies both foreign and domestic should worry about such statements.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers tells us of the tremendous benefits of this Big Brother-like program. He promises us that domestic terrorism plots were thwarted, but he cannot tell us about them because they are classified. I am a bit skeptical, however. In April, the New York Times reported that most of these domestic plots were actually elaborate sting operations developed and pushed by the FBI. According to the Times report, “of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.”

Even if Chairman Rogers is right, though, and the program caught someone up to no good, we have to ask ourselves whether even such a result justifies trashing the Constitution. Here is what I said on the floor of the House when the PATRIOT Act was up for renewal back in 2011:

“If you want to be perfectly safe from child abuse and wife beating, the government could put a camera in every one of our houses and our bedrooms, and maybe there would be somebody made safer this way, but what would you be giving up? Perfect safety is not the purpose of government. What we want from government is to enforce the law to protect our liberties.”

What most undermines the claims of the Administration and its defenders about this surveillance program is the process itself. First the government listens in on all of our telephone calls without a warrant and then if it finds something it goes to a FISA court and get an illegal approval for what it has already done! This turns the rule of law and due process on its head.

The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We need to turn the cameras on the police and on the government, not the other way around. We should be thankful for writers like Glenn Greenwald, who broke last week’s story, for taking risks to let us know what the government is doing. There are calls for the persecution of Greenwald and the other whistle-blowers and reporters. They should be defended, as their work defends our freedom.

May was Iraq’s deadliest month in nearly five years, with more than 1,000 dead – both civilians and security personnel — in a rash of bombings, shootings and other violence. As we read each day of new horrors in Iraq, it becomes more obvious that the US invasion delivered none of the promised peace or stability that proponents of the attack promised.

Millions live in constant fear, refugees do not return home, and the economy is destroyed. The Christian community, some 1.2 million persons before 2003, has been nearly wiped off the Iraqi map. Other minorities have likewise disappeared. Making matters worse, US support for the Syrian rebels next door has drawn the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government into the spreading regional unrest and breathed new life into extremist elements.

The invasion of Iraq opened the door to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which did not exist beforehand, while simultaneously strengthening the hand of Iran in the region. Were the “experts” who planned for and advocated the US attack really this incompetent?

Ryan Crocker, who was US Ambassador to Iraq from 2007-2009, still speaks of the Iraqi “surge” as a great reconciliation between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq. He wrote recently that “[t]hough the United States has withdrawn its troops from Iraq, it retains significant leverage there. Iraqi forces were equipped and trained by Americans, and the country’s leaders need and expect our help.” He seems alarmingly out of touch with reality.

It is clear now that the “surge” and the “Iraqi Awakening” were just myths promoted by those desperate to put a positive spin on the US invasion, which the late General William Odom once called, “the greatest strategic disaster in American history.” Aircraft were loaded with $100 dollar bills to pay each side to temporarily stop killing US troops and each other, but the payoff provided a mere temporary break. Shouldn’t the measure of success of a particular policy be whether it actually produces sustained positive results?

Now we see radical fighters who once shot at US troops in Iraq have spilled into Syria, where they ironically find their cause supported by the US government! Some of these fighters are even greeted by visiting US senators.

The US intervention in Iraq has created ever more problems. That is clear. The foreign policy “experts” who urged the US attack on Iraq now claim that the disaster they created can only be solved with more interventionism! Imagine a medical doctor noting that a particular medication is killing his patient, but to combat the side effect he orders an increase in dosage of the same medicine. Like this doctor, the US foreign policy establishment is guilty of malpractice. And, I might add, this is just what the Fed does with monetary policy.

From Iraq to Libya to Mali to Syria to Afghanistan, US interventions have an unbroken record of making matters far worse. Yet regardless of the disasters produced, for the interventionists a more aggressive US foreign policy is the only policy they offer.

We must learn the appropriate lessons from the disaster of Iraq. We cannot continue to invade countries, install puppet governments, build new nations, create centrally-planned economies, engage in social engineering, and force democracy at the barrel of a gun. The rest of the world is tired of US interventionism and the US taxpayer is tired of footing the bill for US interventionism. It is up to all of us to make it very clear to the foreign policy establishment and the powers that be that we have had enough and will no longer tolerate empire-building. We should be more confident in ourselves and stop acting like an insecure bully.

After nearly a week of increasing public protests in Turkey, ostensibly over government plans to turn a last bit of green space in Istanbul into another shopping mall, matters became far more serious on Friday. Riot police descended on the protestors with various forms of tear gas (and possibly worse chemical and biological agents — raw sewage?) and water cannon, blasting everyone and everything in sight including non-participants. When they caught protestors, they beat them violently and brutally, as can be seen in this video. Photographs show that police fired tear gas into crowded underground metro stations, leading to panic and worse. Istanbul looks like a war zone.

Today indications are that protests have only increased in number and fury in response to the violence with which they were met yesterday.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under increased criticism at home over his enthusiastic support for those fighting to overthrow the government in neighboring Syria. Turkish government support for the rebels came early and has included providing safe havens for the Islamist insurgents and safe passage into Syria from Libya, Yemen, and other countries of the insurgents’ origin.

Erdogan’s stated policy of “zero problems with neighbors” has been turned on its head by his support for the rebels fighting next door. Public dissatisfaction with the Turkish government’s policy of encouraging an Islamist insurgency next door has steadily increased.

The insurgents fighting the Syrian government were still unsatisfied by the level of support they received from their Turkish hosts and they took to false flag attacks in places like Reyhanli and a planned false-flag sarin gas attack on southern Turkey in Adana in attempt to provoke a Turkish (and NATO) military response against Syria.

Suddenly the tables are turned at home.

Faced with a nascent but growing protest movement of his own, Erdogan expresses a very different view toward the people in the street. The Prime Minister strongly supported the “Arab Spring” overthrow in Egypt and supports the overthrow of Assad next door because he said the leaders of these countries did not listen to their people. Just last week he met with President Obama and agreed that “Assad must go.” Now with protesters in Turkey chanting “Erdogan must go” he is singing a different tune. Now “the people” he claimed to speak for — on the streets in Egypt and Syria, at least — were, in Turkey, “with terror, have dark ties,” in his words.

Suddenly “the people” are not so noble when they are calling for his ouster. With the tables turned on Erdogan, he can only demand order! “I call on the protesters to stop their demonstrations immediately,” he thundered yesterday.

Erdogan caught the tiger by the tail and thought he would become a new Ottoman Sultan. Reality bites back hard on the streets of Istanbul and elsewhere. This is far from over.

What could be less controversial than a US public high school social studies teacher informing his students that they have the right to refuse to answer whether they have done something illegal? In fact, this concept—the right against self-incrimination—is part of the typical high school curriculum. Nonetheless, in Illinois this week the Batavia Public School District 101 school board reprimanded and disciplined Mr. John Dryden, a public high school social studies teacher, for informing some of his students of just this concept.

Dryden, who received a student survey just before his first class of the day, realized his students’ names were on their respective survey forms, meaning the survey was not anonymous. He also noticed the survey asked about matters including the students’ drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, as well as their emotions. Dryden then informed some of his students they could apply to this survey the right against self-incrimination. The school district found this otherwise routine lesson unacceptable when the lesson stood in the way of school officials reviewing completed surveys.

While the school district argues, as have other school districts, that such surveys will aid the school district in helping students at risk for suicide, students who admit to drug or alcohol use in such surveys have a legitimate concern that this information could be used against them. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most recent Crime in the United States report, there were over 155,000 arrests of people under 18 years old for alleged legal violations in the categories “Drug Abuse Violations” and “Liquor Laws” in 2011. Further, students have reason for concern when they consider that some schools invite drug-sniffing dogs to campuses for locker-to-locker and car-to-car drug searches and participate in programs awarding cash for tips leading to school administrative action, arrest, or charging of students for drug or alcohol legal violations.

Many parents and students are also concerned about the widespread use of mental health screening surveys of students that include detailed questions about drug use, sexual activity, and other personal matters and are administered without parents’ knowledge and consent. Concerns about mental health screening include the risk of misdiagnosis and the pressure to use pharmaceuticals that may cause worse problems than any mental issues the drugs are supposed to address.

Parents and students also may be concerned that records of drug use or emotional issues could be used against a student who may later desire to own a gun or work in certain kinds of employment

There are many reasons parents and students would refuse to participate in surveys such as the one administered by the Batavia school district. But one reason should be more than sufficient: The information sought in these surveys is private and none of the school districts’ business.

Our experience in the U.S. government — running from roughly the period of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s until March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, when we left our positions at the White House on the National Security Council staff — effectively spanned the high-water mark of American primacy in the Middle East. In an interview for the University of California’s Conversations with History series, see here, we discuss how our government service gave us “ringside seats” to watch as “the United States really misused that primacy, misused its supremacy in ways that were grossly counterproductive for its own interests, and for America’s standing in international affairs.” We also reflect on how our experience in government has both prompted and helped us to explore the ways in which succumbing to an “imperial temptation” in the Middle East distorts American perceptions of the region and warps U.S. policy outcomes.

Turning to Iran, we argue that “structure” alone can’t explain modern Iranian foreign policy; one must also pay attention to culture and agency (in non-social science-speak, “choice”). In particular, one must appreciate the enormous differences between Iranian strategic culture under the Shah and Iranian strategic culture under the Islamic Republic. These differences explain why the Shah’s foreign policy was hegemonic, while, as Hillary puts it, “The Islamic Republic looks at regional and international relations, at regional politics in terms of balance.” It seeks to replace U.S. and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East not with Iranian hegemony, but with balance.

In the interview, we describe how encouraging the spread of more popular and representative governments in the Middle East is a central element in the Islamic Republic’s balancing strategy. This leads into a discussion of the extremely polarized reaction to Going to Tehran — including, on the negative side, highly personal attacks against us.  On this point, Flynt says:

“The problem that people have with us — they’ll say it’s a question of ‘tone,’ or this or that — the real problem is that what we’re saying is that, particularly in a Middle East in which public opinion is mattering more than ever before, the United States does not have a narrative with which to compete for influence. We’ve got carrier battle groups coming out our ears, but we do not have a narrative…The Islamic Republic has one, and it knows how to use it to its strategic advantage…[For Americans with a hegemonic perspective on the Middle East,] we’re creating cognitive dissonance.”

Of course, we take up the place of Israel in both American and Iranian grand strategies. We have enormous respect for John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt; Flynt was one of the few former U.S. officials to speak to them on the record for their essential book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. But we differ somewhat from John and Steve in our argument that “blind” American support for Israel is not primarily a function of the Israel lobby. Rather, the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship” is driven by American elite perceptions, since the 1967 war, that a military dominant Israel helps America’s own hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East; in this context, the Israel lobby is “pushing on an open door.”

We discuss other topics during what turned out to be a substantively very rich conversation with Harry Kreisler: the Iranian case for the integration of participatory politics with Islamic governance as the only way for Muslims to reassert their independence and embrace true self-determination; the Islamic Republic’s 2009 presidential election; the Iranian nuclear program; and the imperatives for U.S. rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. We end on the “Nixon-to-China” model, the real requirements for a U.S. diplomatic breakthrough with Tehran, and the future of America’s role in the Middle East.

Hosted by Harry Kreisler, Conversations with History has for 31 years recorded interviews with some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of international affairs, journalists, writers, and other public intellectuals (e.g., Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, the late Chalmers Johnson, Kishore Mahbubani, John Mearsheimer, Kenzabuo Oe, and Stephen Walt). We are humbled and gratified to be included in the series, and grateful to Harry Kreisler for inviting us. We encourage everyone to watch the video — and urge all who do to leave comments where the video is posted on You Tube as well as here.

From Going to Tehran website, printed with permission.

In Mafia terms, it’s called “making an offer that can’t be refused”. The “offer” is not one of free choice between options that may benefit the object party. In reality, it is about setting up a scenario of duress, under which the object party is coerced to capitulate to detrimental terms of extreme prejudice determined cynically by the other party.

This is the scenario that Washington and its NATO allies are contriving for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad…

The so-called international peace conference that may take place in the coming weeks, at the behest of Washington and Moscow, is ostensibly aimed at finding a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria that is now in its third year and which has resulted in up to 80,000 deaths. At least half of these deaths are believed to be civilian.

Russian officials have confirmed that the Syrian government is willing to participate, in principle, in the conference with factions of the Syrian “opposition” – provided, says Damascus, that the latter participants do not have “blood on their hands”.

That criterion may yet turn out to make the forthcoming conference a non-runner since the main opposition group – the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) – is entwined with a host of mercenary forces on the ground that are drenched in blood from a relentless campaign of terrorism and sabotage. 

However, it is not even clear if the fractious and mainly exile-based SNC has any authority over the motley crew of militant groups – more than 75 per cent of whom are foreign self-styled jihadi extremists that emanate from 30 or more Arab and other countries, according to United Nations reports. 

Chief among these groups that comprise the so-called Free Syrian Army is the Al Nusra Front, the main fighting force, which is aligned with the Al Qaeda-affiliated network that stretches from Russia’s Caucus region, through Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Mali and Niger. 

It has to be said that Russia’s intentions for a negotiated peace settlement seem to be honourable – and based on the principle of arriving at some kind of internal Syrian consensus. To that end, Russia maintains the position of not setting preconditions about the political fate of the incumbent President Assad. Russia is supported in this view by Iran and China. It is not, they say, for foreign governments or their regional allies and proxies to determine the outcome of the conference and in particular the political future of Assad.

Contrast that with the position of the other broker – Washington. At a preliminary meeting in Jordan this past week, the US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted, along with NATO allies, Britain, France, Italy and Germany, as well as the Persian Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, that Assad “must go”.

Kerry told the assembled “Friends of Syria” that the US was not dictating the outcome of the planned peace conference, but then contradicted himself flatly by repeating the assertion that President Assad would not be part of any Syrian political transition. 

“Can a person who has used artillery shells and missiles and Scuds and tanks against women and children and university students – can that person possibly be judged by any reasonable person to have the credibility and legitimacy to lead that country in the future?” asked Kerry.

The veracity of these allegations against the Assad regime is more than a moot point. There is substantial evidence that the violations Kerry was attributing to Syrian government forces, such as the rocket attack on Aleppo University in January that resulted in more than 80 deaths, were in fact committed by Western-backed militants. The use of chemical weapons near Aleppo in March has also been shown recently by Russian RTR journalists to be the work of Western-backed militants, not the regime, as Western governments have been insinuating. 

But that aside, the immediate point here is that Kerry and his “Enemies of Syria” coalition are very much trying to dictate terms on the anticipated political process. That same Western intransigence was largely why the Geneva accord reached last June by the UN Security Council came unstuck – and tens of thousands more Syrian deaths followed. 

Adding to the warped framework of negotiations, the US, Britain and France are also insisting – in contrast to Russia and China – that Iran should not be permitted to take part in the process. Of course, the NATO powers can rely on their Sunni allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to endorse that stipulation. Why the Western powers and their Arab dictator friends have any more right than Iran – an ally of Syria with vital interests at stake in the conflict – is beyond their permitted rationale or discussion. 

So, the upshot is that Assad is being offered a poisoned political chalice. On one hand, he is being told to forfeit the sovereign rights of his people to have him as their leader, and by all accounts a leader with a popular mandate, to give way to a negotiation with “opposition” parties who are solely designated, funded and patronised by foreign powers. 

The SNC’s Ghassan Hitto, a Texas-based Syrian businessman, is designated by Washington, London and the former colonial power Paris as Syria’s premier-in-waiting. It is fair to say that Hitto, as with many other American-accented members of the SNC, has negligible popular support within Syria. That is, without any mandate from the Syrian population, these exiles are being foisted to negotiate the political future of Syria – a future that is extremely prejudicial in favour of Western geopolitical interests. 

On the other hand – and this is where the Mafia analogy takes hold – the Western powers are making thinly veiled threats that if Assad does not conform to the warped political framework, that is, drink from the poisoned chalice, then all hell will break lose on this country with an even greater escalation of Western-backed violence. 

“The United States is lobbying European governments to back a British-led call to amend [lift] the EU arms embargo on Syria,” reported the British Guardian this week, as Washington and its friend were gathering in Jordan. 

Up to now, Washington has at least been maintaining the fiction that it is not arming the anti-Assad militants. It has, of course, been plying the mercenaries covertly with weaponry and logistics, along with its NATO allies and the Gulf Arab dictatorships. 

Militant commander Brigadier General Salim Idriss has been pleading for Washington to begin openly supplying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles – not just the assault rifles and explosives that have come so far through the clandestine CIA/MI6 conduits of Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. 

Since last month, Washington officials have begun briefing media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, that the Obama administration is moving towards more direct military intervention in aid of the militants in Syria. “We’re clearly on an upward trajectory,” a senior US official said somewhat cryptically on 30 April. “We’ve moved over to assistance that has a direct military purpose.”

Days later, in the first week of May, US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosted a press conference at the Pentagon with his British counterpart, Philip Hammond. “Arming the rebels, that’s an option,” said Hagel, indicating an apparent reversal of White House policy of ostensibly only sending “non-lethal aid”.

And this week a US Senate committee voted in favour of Washington arming the “rebels” in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry is adding to this increasingly articulated threat. Voice of America reported from the Jordanian meeting last week: “Kerry says the Obama administration hopes President Assad ‘will understand the meaning of that’ [shift in US military policy towards Syria].”

This latent threat of greater aggression against Syria by the US, if it does not toe the political line as ordained by Washington, is not a new tactic in America’s underlying objective of regime change. 

Last month, the Iranian FARS news agency reported that Syrian envoy to Iran, Adnan Mahmoud, disclosed that as far back as March 2011 – when the conflict was kicking off in Syria – that the then US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, had starkly told the Damascus government that it faced “a choice”.  

The Syrian envoy to Iran was quoted by FARS as saying: “Of course, in the very first weeks of the conflict in Syria, the US Secretary of Defence [Robert Gates] sent a message to the Syrian government, and said we should have cut our ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran if we wanted to stop the war, and stressed that if we did so, they [the US] would provide us with whatever we want”. In other words, Washington was making Syria back then “an offer it couldn’t refuse”. Well, Syria did refuse back in early 2011 to comply with US demands to cut its strategic ties with Iran, and as time has shown Damascus has since paid a heavy price in terms of human lives and the destruction of the country.

Now again, as the American-backed “peace conference” is being dangled in front of Damascus, Washington is replaying that same cynical offer. Either, drink from this poisoned political chalice – or “we’ll send the boys around to do their worst”. 

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

This past Thursday and Friday, President Obama delivered two speeches designed to outline his new thinking on national security and counter-terrorism. While much was made in the media of the president’s statements at the National Defense University and the US Naval Academy suggesting that the most active phase of US military action overseas was coming to an end, this “new” approach is but the same old policy wrapped in new packaging. In these addresses, the president panders to the progressives, while continually expanding and solidifying the “enabling act” principle.

The president will continue and even expand drone attacks overseas because they are “less deadly” than ground invasions. He promises to be more careful in the future.

He is entertaining the introduction of “kill courts” which will meet in secret to decide who is to be executed without trial or charge. He promises these will have sufficient oversight.

He will seek a new and updated Authorization for the Use of Military Force to expand his legal authority to wage war wherever and whenever he wants. He promises it will one day be repealed.

He will continue to indefinitely detain at Guantanamo individuals who have been neither charged nor convicted of any crime, and who cannot even be tried because they were tortured and thus the evidence is tainted. He promises to “commit to a process of closing GTMO.”

The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.

The president warns of the threats of the new al-Qaeda affiliates that have sprung up in places like Iraq without explaining that it was the US invasion of Iraq that opened the door to their entry in the first place. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, just as there was little extremism in Libya before the US attack on that country in 2011.

The president claims that “unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.” However, it was the US-led attack on Libya that resulted in extremists gaining power there, with many fighters afterward spreading unrest and destruction by joining the wars against the Syrian and Malian regimes. The extremists brought to de facto power in places like Benghazi were responsible for the murder of the US ambassador, yet the president says nothing about that unintended consequence of his interventionist policies.

He calls for even more interventionism in the future, but he promises that it will be a different kind of interventionism. He wants the US to shape democratic transitions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya while actively supporting those seeking to overthrow the government in Syria.

He wants to take nation-building to a whole new level, urging that the US “help countries modernize economies, upgrade education, and encourage entrepreneurship.” He promises to battle extremism overseas by “training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists.”

What the president does not seem to understand is that we do not have the money to build schools, upgrade education, modernize economies, and encourage entrepreneurship overseas at a time when our national debt is $16 trillion. And besides, isn’t it a deeply flawed idea that the US government can achieve all of these remarkable results overseas when we know what a disaster these big government undertakings have produced at home? What we reject at home as Soviet-style central planning is fully embraced as effective foreign policy overseas. Should it really be the US government’s role to “modernize economies” or “encourage entrepreneurs” anywhere? Those are activities best left to the private sector, whether here at home or in far off lands.

President Obama’s speech is not at all what it seems. It is a call for more empire and more power to the executive branch. The president promises that “this war, like all wars, must end.” Unfortunately the war on the American taxpayer never seems to end. But end it will, as we are running out of money.