- It is hard to sort through the hype and heat of Obamania,
but one thing is clear: who's pulling the strings, argues Eric Walberg
-
- As the United States election race enters the final stretch,
Barack Obama as the candidate promising change is revealing his true
colours, much to the despair of anyone actually expecting any change.
His recent call to declare Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel,
his denial of Palestinians' right of return, and his support for
a Bantustan Palestinian "state" which poses no threat to
Israel show how completely he has caved in to the Zionist establishment
on that issue.
-
- As President George W Bush calls for early reductions
in combat troops in Iraq, Obama's position on Iraq - a vow to bring
troops home within 16 months, excepting a "residual force"
- looks less and less of a defining moment in his foreign policy.
Whatever happens to troop levels, there is no explicit talk of overriding
the plans for 14 permanent bases.
-
- Obama is toeing the line in Afghanistan, too. As NATO
casualties continue to mount, surpassing monthly Iraqi causalities
as of June this year, he is proposing - now seconded by McCain -
that the United States shift up to 15,000 more troops there from
Iraq. Just prior to his trip to Afghanistan, he wrote in a New York
Times Op Ed, "We need more troops, more helicopters, better
intelligence- gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the
mission there." Please, will someone show me the silver lining
in an Obama victory in November?
-
- But then none of the above should come as any surprise
to those familiar with his chief promoter and foreign policy adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, along with current (and likely future)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has already entered history as
helping "suck the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire". These
are the words of President Jimmy Carter's Under-Secretary of Defense
Walter Slocumbe in March 1979, eight months before the Soviets were
successfully "sucked in", when Gates was CIA chief. The changing
of the guard, come November, will change nothing. US foreign policy
has a logic which transcends who sleeps in the White House.
-
- What's especially ghoulish about all this is that there
are five Brzezinski offspring who are all onboard the Obama wagon:
Mark (director of Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security
Council under President Bill Clinton, and one of the prime movers of
the 2004 color revolution in Ukraine), Ian (currently the US Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State for European and NATO affairs and a
backer of Kosovan independence, NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia
and US ABM missiles in Poland), Mika (political commentator on MSNBC
whose interview with Michele Obama contributed to the general media
Obamania) and finally, Matthew (a friend of Ilyas Akhmadov, "foreign
minister" and US envoy of the Chechen opposition).
-
- Brzezinski's brand of anti-Russian, anti-Muslim geopolitics
will dominate a future Obama administration. In Second Chance: Three
Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, published last
year, he lays out his New World Order agenda without so much as a
blush. Apparently, there is a global political awakening going on,
the goal of which is "dignity". Not economic development, not
the alleviation of poverty, not national sovereignty against the
IMF and World Bank. Just plain old dignity, though Zbig's brand of
dignity is the kind attained through secession, balkanisation, and
the creation of weak statelets for each ethnic minority subservient
to the US. Think: Kosovo and - if he has his way - Chechenia. Neo-
Wilsonian demagogy in the service not of peace but of US world domination,
encirclement of Russia and control of the Arab world.
-
- Zbig said in endorsing Obama: "What makes Obama
attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different
world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples."
Obama's alleged global approach and trans-ethnic, trans-racial allure
are right out of Zbig's university textbook, or rather Second Chance,
which will be the manual for the Obama campaign and presidency.
-
- Obama is literally a second chance for Brzezinski: having
destroyed the Soviet Union and shattered the Warsaw Pact, he now
wants to dismember the Russian Federation itself and put the finishing
touches on Afghanistan as an impregnable US military base against
China, Russia... the list is endless. Perhaps Zbig is dreaming of
restoring Greater Poland circa 1600 - from the Black Sea to the Baltic,
all controlled by petty szlachta aristocrats like... the Brzezinskis?
-
- The Economist blog put it best: "A new brain for
Barack Obama! It's 78 years old and it still works perfectly. It
belongs to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the peppery ex-national security
adviser to Jimmy Carter."
-
- The messianic idealism of the Obama campaign has not
been seen since the days of another Brzezinski creation - Jimmy Carter,
who made him national security adviser with disastrous results. Brzezinski's
anti- Russian obsession back in 1976 prompted him to foment the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism, which he touted as the greatest single bulwark
against Soviet communism. Tarpley argues that Brzezinski was even
a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the overthrow of the Shah of Iran
and installing Ayatollah Khomeini in power in Tehran. Brzezinski
cared less about the Middle East and its oil than he did about the
need for a centre from which Islamic fundamentalism of the most retrograde
type could penetrate the soft southern underbelly of the USSR. For
Brzezinski, the space between the southern frontier of the Soviet
and the Indian Ocean littoral became an "arc of crisis",
and we have his handiwork to thank for the horrors taking place there
to this day.
-
- The 1980 Carter Doctrine - that the US was determined
to dominate the Persian Gulf - is at the root of the first Gulf War,
of the present Iraq war, and of the possible war on Iran. Brzezinski's
grandiose schemes of world transformation caused a renewal of the
Cold War and gave birth to Al-Qaeda, and without Soviet restraint
the results could easily have been far more tragic than they turned
out to be. By 1980, disillusionment with Carter led to the nightmare
of the Reagan regime. But this was of little concern to Brzezinski -
a mere blip on his radar screen.
-
- In 2008, we have an obscure Illinois senator, a neophyte
with no legislative achievements to speak of, but with a raft of
utopian promises, including solving the race problem once and for
all. Recession, unemployment and an alarming rise in poverty are
of no consequence; a golden age is at hand thanks to his magnetic
personality. Since he knows nothing of foreign policy, these matters
will be competently managed by the Brzezinski cabal.
-
- But there seems to be one slight hitch. Despite Obama's
slavish pro- Israeli genuflections of late, he is still not trusted by
the Jewish lobby. Quite possibly because they know who the power
behind the throne-to-be is, and they can't stomach him, nor he them.
Addressing the AIPAC crew in an interview with The Daily Telegraph,
he said, "They operate not by arguing but by slandering, vilifying,
demonising. They very promptly wheel out anti-Semitism. There is an
element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt
at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel."
-
- But then Brzezinski was a key player in Carter's 1978
Camp David Accords, much loathed by the Zionists as giving up Sinai
in exchange for a cold peace with Egypt. Brzezinski is definitely
not a hardcore Zionist, though he's happy to allow the destruction
of Palestine. Perhaps he is, under his suave exterior, still the
quintessential Polish anti-Semite, with a vision of the New World
Order without Israel at the centre.
-
- If he can keep up the momentum, however, he may be able
to outflank the Zionists in Washington and bringing his horse first
past the finish line. They are on the defensive these days, what
with spy trials, even J Street Project, a Jewish lobby group that
- gasp - dares to criticise Israel. Is this, then, the silver lining
in an Obama victory?
-
- ***
-
- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach
him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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