End of deception as basis of int’l relations
Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe
The underlying dishonesty of the US pursuing Sri Lanka at the UNHRC
on war crimes becomes easier to comprehend when considered in the
context of the neocon foreign policy principle laid down by the
godfather of the movement, Henry Kissinger - he spelt out that “moral
perfection” is not a US foreign policy imperative.
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One of the
UNHRC sittings |
Such disregard for morals should surprise no one, coming from, as the
late Christopher Hitchens charged, a war criminal directly responsible
for over a million civilian deaths in Vietnam and Cambodia alone, and
many more in Latin America.
On the bright side, it is the execution of such an immoral,
deceptive, and often criminal, foreign policy by the US that is causing
the fast crumbling of the empire, some might say, not before time.
There is sweet irony in the US attempts to act as the global
‘enforcer’ of human rights too. Their preoccupation with the charade
seems to make them totally oblivious to the crumbling of the empire
around them. Alternatively, they are in denial about the emergence of a
new international order led by China and Russia, sounding the death
knell for neocolonilaism.
The issuing of further instructions to Sri Lanka by a whole list of
apparatchiks of the US ruling cabal, on how we could comply with the
orders delivered through the good offices of Navanethem Pillay, embodied
the arrogance and stupidity of the crumbling empire; Secretary of State
John Kerry, and noisy state department operatives like Eileen Donohue
and Victoria Nuland, and the ambassador in Colombo all offered further
advice and instructions to Sri Lanka - It did not look like the thought
‘no one may be listening’ had crossed their minds!
A cursory look at the division at the UNHRC on the vote on Sri Lanka,
as has been done by many commentators, shows that the battle lines are
drawn between the former European colonisers and the neocoloniser
America, tagging along the eastern Europeans yearning to join the
‘white’ European Union club on one side, and the progressive developing
nations led by Russia and China on the other.
This neat division of forces is only excepted by special cases like
India, where domestic politics is fast becoming a neocon plaything, made
so through the infiltration of the higher echelons of the administrative
services, the ministry of external affairs in particular, periodic
staging of ‘terror’ attacks, and subtle propaganda campaigns designed to
arouse raw public emotions. There is also the ‘special’ relationship the
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha forged, amongst collecting
chins, with the neocon Hillary Clinton.
South Korea is another exception where the fraudulent creation of
tension in the Korean peninsula by the neocons, by harping on the threat
of an imminent North Korean missile attack, leaves them in an untenable
position. Few corrupt African and Latin American puppet governments also
fall in to this mix.
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| Vladimir
Putin |
Xi Jinping |
Barack
Obama |
Despite such aberrations, pleasingly, there are signs that the days
of manipulation of international affairs by the intellectually and
financially corrupt neocon cabal are numbered.
Countries that matter mind their own business
A number of momentous international events that signalled the
emergence of a new international order based on mutual respect and
interest, and non-interference were taking place right at the time of
the US orchestration of the anti-Sri Lankan resolution at the UNHRC in
Geneva.
The most significant of these was the arrival of the new Chinese
President Xi Jinping in Moscow.
Mr Xi’s choice of Russia as his first overseas destination since
assuming office in November 2012 was clearly designed to send a strong
message to the world, to America in particular.
During the meeting the Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the
warmth of the strong economic and strategic relationship between Russia
and China that is set to grow stronger - Bilateral trade between the two
countries has been steadily growing, reaching $88.1 billion in 2012.
During the March visit, Mr Xi and Mr Putin signed 30 more trade
agreements on Russian natural gas, oil, arms, and engineering goods in
exchange for Chinese consumer products. Bilateral trade between the two
countries is forecast to reach $200 billion by 2020.
The strategic relationship is intensifying on the back of increasing
trade.
While such historic developments were taking place in Moscow, in
stark contrast, President Obama was visiting Israel, the albatross
around America’s neck, as if to apologise to the world about the
international relations quagmire they are in.
Obama would have found that the Middle East has changed
unrecognisably from what he saw in his 2009 visit to Cairo where he
announced a “new beginning” with the Muslim world, based on “mutual
interest and mutual respect.” The rhetoric was not backed by any
meaningful action.
The broadly-based Muslim anger against the US is reflected in the
latest survey by the Pew Research Centre’s Global Attitudes Project -
support for the US in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Pakistan is lower today
than it was during the closing years of George W. Bush’s administration.
The Arab Spring, which Obama would have thought was going to usher in
a new era for exploitation of the Middle East for the US, has diverged
onto the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nor did Obama have anything to
offer the Middle East in terms of ‘road maps’, for peace, any other
grand designs or major foreign policy initiatives. Young Palestinians
showed their frustration by defacing billboards with Obama’s image and
burnt pictures of him in the streets. Obama just had a gala dinner with
the armed and the powerful, toured the Holocaust memorials, and of
course, the Wall and flew back home.
The international community is turning away from the US and the West
There are increasing signs that the world is simply waking up to the
‘sick’ neocon world of deceptive talk and militarism, and are beginning
to protest against their destruction of the global value system based on
the cultural heritage of, definitely the Asian countries, and Russia,
founded on mutual respect and non-interference in the affairs of others.
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J.
Jayalalitha |
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Hillary
Clinton |
This view is reinforced by Mr Putin’s announcement with the Chinese
President that - “Our relations are characterised by a high degree of
mutual trust, respect for each other’s interests, and support in vital
issues”.
The values of the global relations regime instituted by the “special
relationship” between the old colonial master Britain and the new
neocoloniser US, founded on deception and interference is fundamentally
different to these ideals and the world is finding it repulsive.
British writer Mark Curtis who has written a number of books exposing
the human rights violations and other British crimes around the world,
writes in his 2003 book Web of Deceit - Britain’s Real Role in the
World, that Britain’s foreign policy that is purported to promote
democracy, peace and human rights globally, in reality supports
terrorism. Indeed, “violating international law has become as British as
afternoon tea” Curtis writes.
By exposing the formerly secret planning record, Curtis sheds new
light on the human rights abuses the British-US ‘special relationship’
has committed in the developing world, often in collaboration with the
corporate media and academia through their support of foreign policy
decisions. Curtis estimates that approximately ten million deaths have
been caused since 1945 as a result of the UK’s foreign policy.
As recently as the 1950s, the British colonial police murdered around
10,000 Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule and
used torture techniques such as slicing off ears, flogging until death
and pouring paraffin over suspects and setting them alight. “Free fire
zones” were set up, where any African could be shot on sight, with hands
often chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. At the same time the
British media was expressing horror at the Mau Mau tactics.
As to the more recent atrocities, the human cost of the Iraq invasion
amounts to more than a million civilian deaths due to “shock and awe’
bombing, and millions were made refugees in their own country or around
the world. Bloodshed continues.
Aiding and abetting of secessionists the primary tool
The US-British led on-going attempts to establish a global value
system based on a deceitful commitment to human rights protection and
the promotion of so-called ‘civic society’ activism is in fact the
corollary to their grand plan of divide-and-rule by aiding and abetting
of secessionist movements in the developing world.
Actions aimed at diverting national attention from economic
development, to perpetuate poverty that serves as the foundation for
rebellion, and financing the conversion of various disaffected groups in
to bellicose NGOs are the other components of this elaborate scheme of
sabotage of the developing world. Most such activities are carried out
under diplomatic cover, fully exploiting the provisions of the Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961.
The obnoxious disparity between their own record of human rights
violations and the pursuit of human rights protection ideal through UN
and other multilateral fora is explained by their primeval desire to
‘protect’ secessionists by curbing the efforts of national governments
to counteract by tying their hands behind their backs.
In addition to inciting domestic rebellion, the use of the UN system
in the past, through the cynical exploitation of the good will of Russia
and China at the Security Council, has been the other primary tool of
achieving global control through regime change.
This particular fraud worked in the cases of lies about Iraqi
“weapons of mass destruction” and the Libyan “war crimes” canard - In
both cases, the fraudulently obtained Security Council resolutions were
misinterpreted to initiate military invasions.
Syria proved the straw that broke the camel’s back
The neocons orchestrated the Iraqi and Libyan invasions a decade
apart, in 2002 and 2011 respectively, in order to conceal the similarity
of their methodology and to exploit the generational change of UN
representations of member countries.
It took a while, but slowly and surely, Russsia and China woke up to
the fraud and repelled the neocon attempts to use the same methodology
to carry out a “humanitarian invasion” of Syria. More importantly, the
repeated attempts to deceive them at the UNSC turned Russia’s ‘dislike’
of the neocon methods into deep ‘disgust’, leading President Putin and
his principled Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to stop communicating with
Hillary Clinton towards the end of her stint. It has been well known in
foreign policy circles that the US started arming the Syrian opposition
in 2006. Following their ‘success’ in Libya, they intensified support
through the post-Gaddafi Libyan junta, itself a funder and arms supplier
of the Syrian insurgents.
The neocon conspiracy for a Syrian regime change imploded on
September 11, 2012, ten years to the day of the World Trade Centre
events, when an armed group of Jihadists staged a nighttime attack on
the US consulate and a neighbouring CIA “safe house” in Benghazi, Libya.
Mystery surrounded the circumstances of the attack and there were
clear signs that the US was hiding something - White House was creating
the false narrative that a protest over an anti-Muslim video was behind
the attack, but there was no record of protests in Benghazi over the
video.
The State Department declined to reveal the number of casualties. It
later emerged that four Americans including US Ambassador to Libya,
Christopher Stevens and had been killed and some State Department and
CIA employees, and security contractors were among the casualties. The
injured had their names changed on hospital records so as not to be
identified since they work in clandestine services.
In November 2012 however, Clare Lopez, a former operations officer
with the CIA, now an intelligence expert on the Middle East, broke the
news of the CIA’s presence and their activities in Benghazi, Libya, also
identifying two former Navy SEALs killed as being employed by the CIA.
Investigative journalist Aaron Klein reported that the “consulate” in
Benghazi was in fact a CIA “safe house” used by Stevens and others to
coordinate with the Libyan Al-qaeda groups and the Turkish, Saudi and
Qatari governments on supporting the “Arab Spring” insurgencies in Iran
and Syria. Normal security measures weren’t provided at the building in
order to protect its cover as a State Department operation.
It emerged that Stevens was managing a CIA operation, together with
the CIA Director David Petraeus, to ship Al-qaeda fighters and heavy
weaponry from Muammar Gaddafi’s stock to Syrian rebels through Turkey,
through his ‘friend’ Abdelhakim Belhadj, leader of the Al-qaeda
franchise in Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that led the
“opposition” in Libya. The State Department provided “diplomatic cover”
to the operation by placing seven of its employees.
Pieces began to fall in to place in the light of a UN Security
Council resolution the US obtained to “help secure the loose weapons” in
Libya and Hillary Clinton’s announcement a month after the October 2011
murder of Gaddafi to commit $40 million to help Libya “secure and
recover its weapons stockpiles.” Shortly before the Benghazi US embassy
attack, on September 6, a Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of SA-7s
surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades docked
in southern Turkey. The ship was captained by a Libyan from Benghazi,
the head of an organisation called the Libyan National Council for
Relief and Support,” established by the new government. Ambassador
Stevens’ last meeting on September 11, before he was killed in the
attack, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, “to negotiate a
further weapons transfer.” That never happened, hopefully.
Sidelines to the Syrian weapons transfer conspiracy
There are other interesting sidelines to the Syrian weapons transfer
story that expose other aspects of deception the neocon establishment
subject, not only the wider world, but US citizens too.
The announcement of a scandal of an extramarital affair of the CIA
Chief David Petraeus with his biographer was timed so that Petraeus
could avoid testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about
the CIA’s role in the illegal weapons transfer.
The second was the hospitalisation of Hillary Clinton on account of
‘concussion’ she suffered during a fall; the informed opinion is that
Clinton found the revelation of the Benghazi clandestine operation too
much and suffered a nervous breakdown - an occupational hazard
associated with deceptive activities that tantamount to mass murder.
The other more significant aspect of the story is that the neocon
owned wire services and other corporate media, including the Associated
Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post, the guardians of
freedom of expression revered by the NGOs, had agreed not to publish the
information on the CIA operation at the request of the US government.
Other agencies, like the ABC News, provided disinformation that the aims
of the operation was to “round up dangerous weapons” in Libya.
The US corporate media only reported that in Syria, good people are
trying to overthrow a tyrant who uses the military against the good
people of Syria!
America breaks international law with impunity
The worst outcome of the Benghazi attack to the neocons was that it
validated Russia’s long-held position that the US of providing support
to Syrian terrorists to topple the Assad government, in breach of
international law.
This is nothing new - for decades, the US has backed terrorists the
world over as tools to achieve its geopolitical objectives. The US
supported opposition which overthrew Libya’s Gaddafi was largely
comprised of Al-qaeda terrorists headquartered in Benghazi. The neocons
have been planning regime change in Syria using false flag terror since
the end of the 1967 war.
They have been active elsewhere too - in 1986, the International
Court of Justice, presided by Justice Nagendra Singh of India decided by
twelve votes to three,(in Nicaragua Vs United States of America - Case
Concerning The Military And Paramilitary Activities In And Against
Nicaragua), that the US, by training, arming, equipping, financing and
supplying the ‘contra’ forces in Nicaragua, acted in breach of its
obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the
affairs of another State. The present weapons supply to Al-qaeda
however, breaks an international law they themselves imposed on the
world - a binding arms embargo on UN member states that prohibits
weapons transfer to countries or groups involved in terrorism including
Al-qaeda.
But they do not seem to consider the so-called ‘international law’
applies to them. David Cameron indicated in early March that the UK
might be prepared to bypass an EU arms embargo to Syrian rebels. His
Foreign Minister William Hague announced soon after that Britain would
be providing “non-lethal equipment” to Syrian insurgents.
It took the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to remind Haig
that any move by the British government to give the rebels military
equipment would breach international law, adding - “International law
doesn’t allow, doesn’t permit, the supplies of arms to non-governmental
actors.”
Lessons for Sri Lanka
The unethical, and often criminal, behaviour of the neocon controlled
US administrations in the international arena has cost them respect of
the international community. The US attempts to disguise the decidedly
‘unfriendly’ actions as the introduction of resolutions on unfounded
charges of war crimes as helpful ‘advice’ of a friend must be discarded
out of hand.
The adoption of the anti-Sri Lankan resolution at the UNHRC did not
indicate the acceptance by the international community of the necessity
of Sri Lanka’s commitments in implementing the proposals for
reconciliation and accountability, as suggested by Victoria Nuland. The
government must resolutely adhere to its own programme of addressing
poverty and economic deprivation of all communities.
The government needs to pay special attention to the announcement by
the US ambassador that “America has already initiated several programmes
in organising civil society groups and empowering the youth with a view
to support the reconciliation process.”
It sounds suspiciously like a programme of funding and training for
internal subversive groups, true to form.
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