Pakistan's Incredible Duplicity-Chapter Two

After the allegations that top-level Pakistani officials have secretly aided Al Qaeda and the Taliban, sheltering Osama Bin Laden himself, now comes a startling new charge: “Pakistan’s Military Plotted to Tilt U.S. Policy, FBI says.”

Now we wait for the predictable stream of American outrage. Pure hypocrisy: the Pakistanis have done nothing more than take a page from the CIA playbook.

According to the New York Times, the FBI investigation, involved at least (count them) eight FBI field offices, They conclude that Pakistan’s military and the ISI, its powerful spy agency, have used front groups to funnel campaign donations over the past two decades to members of the U.S. Congress and presidential candidates. This in blatant disregard of the law prohibiting foreign governments from making donations to American political candidates.

The dastardly aim of that operation? To counter the Indian lobby in Washington and persuade the United States government to push India to allow a vote in Kashmir that would let Kashmiris decide on their own future. I mean—can you imagine!!

The total amount involved: $4 million over two decades—which works out to $200,000 per year. That included $250.00 donations to the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of al Gore and Barack Obama. The congressmen involved claimed they had no knowledge that the money actually originated with the Pakistani government.  

Of course, the Pakistani effort is pocket money compared to what the United States has been up to clandestinely for more than half a century, spending billions not just to “tilt” policy of other countries, but to literally buy elections, legislators, intelligence chiefs, generals, cabinet ministers, and entire governments around the globe—starting with Italy and Greece and Iran post World War II and continuing across every continent since.

Take for instance, last year’s revelations that several of Afghan President Karzai’s top officials—including some of the most corrupt---are on the U.S. intelligence payroll. 

As for Pakistan itself, its military have been on the receiving end of billions of dollars in “military aid” , both parties realizing that horde is little more than a bribe to keep the military at least officially on side.    

Such pay-offs are just for starters. Why bother “tilting” a government—when you can work to overthrow it or knock off its leader?  i.e. Mossadegh in Iran, (1953) Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960, Iraq (1963), Cuba (1959 to this day) Chile (1964-73), Brazil (1962-64), Indonesia 1965, Angola (1975), Nicaragua (1981 to 90) Grenada (1983), Saddam Hussein 2003. And so on—more than fifty instances over the past fifty years.

Who are the headline writers kidding? You don’t need to be an investigative reporter or a congressman privy to secret intelligence briefings. It’s all out there on Google.  

The Pakistanis have been tightly linked to (if not allied with) the CIA for decades. It would have been amazing if they had not been up to such games.

God help us if they, the Russians, Chinese or anyone else ever decide to really follow the American lead—like liquidating anyone they consider a mortal enemy with their own global-roaming Predators.

What Obama Should have told AIPAC

The Presidents Speech-Or What Obama Should have said to AIPAC

My fellow Americans, I could say it is an honor to speak again before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. I could also dish out the usual rhetoric you expect from American political leaders of both parties,-—an emotional, iron-clad guarantee to maintain America’s undying support for Israel, the embattled outpost of democracy, and so on and on and on, to great applause..  

But —as befits a conversation among long time friends - I’d rather be frank.  

As we all know, the reason I’m here is because you are the most powerful lobby in Washington—the mightiest senators and congressmen live in terror of your disapproval. Your decision on who to support will be a key factor in the coming Presidential elections.

That power has brought you innumerable victories.  Though Israel is one of the smallest nations, altogether since World War II it has received more foreign aid from the U.S. than any other country. Though we condemn Iran’s nuclear program, we still officially ignore the fact that Israel has had the bomb for more than 40 years.

Our leaders have gone along with the fiction that Israel is somehow a key strategic asset for the U.S. in the Middle East, when, in fact, the opposite is true. Our unwavering support of Israel has won us the hostility of the entire Arab and much of the Moslem world.

O.K. But that’s the past. Today the U.S. and Israel face huge new challenges in the Middle East.  And I have decided that provoking your disapproval is a risk I must take…for the sake of America—as well as Israel..

We can no longer afford to confuse supporting the State of Israel, with supporting the policies of the leaders who control the Israeli government at a particular time. The interests of the two are not necessarily the same. Particularly when, in my view—and the view of many Israelis as well—those policies undermine the long-term security of the Israel.

As President of the United States, I was elected to serve the interests of all 300 million Americans——not a tiny minority, numbering just 2.2% of our population.  Of course, we value your great contributions to all facets of our society and our culture, but that does translate into continuing to give AIPAC the right to call the shots on a key element of our Middle Eastern Policy.

Indeed, within the American Jewish community itself, there are new lobbying groups, such as JPAC, who are highly critical of Israel’s current leaders, and make it clear that AIPAC may not represent the consensus of American Jews.

As I have said, the government of Israel can no longer put off serious negotiations  with the Palestinians.  Population growth and the current uprisings sweeping the region are certain to work against Israel’s long-run security.

Unfortunately, Prime Minister Netanyahu, has made it more than clear that his government has no real interest in taking the steps needed to convince the Palestinians that negotiations would be worth their while. This is not just me saying this. The Prime Minister’s political opponents and important Israeli commentators are saying it as well.

Therefore, as President of the United States—of all Americans —I am today announcing a change in policy towards the Middle East. I have decided that we will no longer stand in the way of the Palestinian drive for a United Nations resolution next September to recognize the existence of a Palestinian State. I realize that resolution will not actually create a state —but it may be the best way to start the process going.

I am also calling once again on the government of Israel to cease the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. I made that same request a few years ago, but backed down when Prime Minister Netanyahu refused.  I was wrong to back down. It will not happen again.  

The Israeli government charges that Hamas is a terrorist organization. It is, and we have labeled it as such. I call upon Hamas to reconsider its aims if it truly wants to achieve a settlement with Israel.

On the other hand, many violent groups once labeled terrorist organizations—such as the IRA --changed their tactics with the lure of peace negotiations.  Indeed, at one time in their careers two of Israel’s most renowned leaders—Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir-- were condemned as terrorists themselves.

I realize this new policy may well subject me to a barrage of the most virulent political attacks--from right wing TV talk shows to lurid ads filling our media, to congressional resolutions. It will be charged that all along I—Barrack Hussein Obama-- have been secretly plotting with radical Islam to destroy Israel. And after Israel, the United States.  

They will say of course, that I am anti-Semitic—a charge that is leveled these days against any prominent individual who criticizes the current government of Israel. An irony, since—as I’ve said--some of the strongest attacks on Israeli’s current policies come from Israeli Jewish commentators and politicians themselves.

I understand the emotional storm that is roiling this audience right now—I can hear the boos and catcalls. I can feel your enormous upset. But I ask you members of AIPAC --before you and your allies unleash an attack against me in the media and in the Congress and local communities across the country--I ask you, by unleashing such a massive campaign—if in the end, isn’t there a danger that such a massive campaign may demonstrate to the American people –to all the American people—exactly the point I have been making in this speech? That is-- the extent to which your lobby has distorted the workings of our democratic system.

In short, in the end, your attempt to defeat my desire to pursue a policy that is in the interests of all Americans—as well as the State of Israel-- could lead to your own downfall.

Think about it. And thanks for letting me talk.

Follow me on Twitter @barrylando

Whose War on Terror?

At a time when the White House is spending hundreds of billions and has dispatched killer teams to liquidate Osama Bin Laden and lesser targets, imagine what the leaders of other countries might do if they were to declare their own War on Terror. Cuba, for instance. That question is provoked by a disturbing new documentary chronicling the past half century of Cuban-American relations and titled, “Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand up.”

Written and Directed by radical, Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Saul Landau, the report shies away from revolutionary cant and vague rhetoric. Instead, Landau backs up his case with research and interviews that, taken together, represent a damning indictment of U.S. policy. Most of the facts he cites are not news to those who have closely followed relations between Cuba and the U.S. since February, 1959 when Castro came to power. But the great majority of Americans have not paid attention. And most of what they have been told has been filtered through a Cold War prism that continues to warp U.S. -Cuban relations to this day.  

Washington’s war against Castro began long before May 1961 when he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist. Indeed, almost from the time that Castro marched into Havana and made it clear his revolution was the real thing, American Presidents—Republican and Democrat--have attempted to combat and then overthrow his regime by every possible means, from an embargo that strangled the country’s economy, to allowing Cuban exiles operating from Florida to attack Cuba’s refineries, infrastructure, sugar cane fields, and assassinate government officials.  Of course, there were also notorious attempts by the CIA to kill Fidel himself. And then came the disastrous Bay of Pig’s Invasion in 1961.   

Incredibly, after Cuba charged—accurately—that the U.S. was behind the invasion, U.N. Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, had the gall to “categorically” deny the allegation:  “The United States has committed no offense against Cuba and no offensive action has been launched from Florida or any part of the United States”

As part of the agreement ending the Missile Crisis in the Fall of 1962, President Kennedy pledged that the U.S. would not invade Cuba, but the White House and the CIA continued to support the radical exile groups based in the U.S. intent on using terror and violence to topple Fidel.

According to Landau’s report, for instance, in October 1976, the CIA had information that one of the Cuban exiles linked to them was planning to plant a bomb on a Cuban airliner—but the U.S. never informed the Cuban government. All seventy-three passengers were killed. Altogether, the Cubans estimate that more than three thousand of their people have been died in such terrorist acts.

All this, of course, would have been immediately denounced and  massively  countered by the United States --if such a campaign had been waged against the U.S. or its allies by the likes of Iran, North Korea, Hamas--or Cuba.

On several occasions, Castro attempted to negotiate with the U.S. government. And there were Americans who argued for a change in policy. As John Burton, the former President of the California Senate put it,  “We do business with all sorts of bad quote undemocratic countries without free elections, but we pick on Cuba because we can, because they're small because they're political benefit to doing it in Florida.”

Even after the end of the Cold War, millions of voters in Florida still view the struggle to bring down Castro as a holy crusade, which is the reason no American President—including Obama--has had the guts to change course. In effect, Florida is the only state with its own foreign policy. One of the best comparisons is the lock that the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. has had on  America’s Mideast policy.

In the face of unrelenting attacks from U.S. territory, Castro’s government did what any government would have done: it dispatched intelligence agents to the U.S. to infiltrate radical exile Cuban groups and thwart their plans.

One of the groups they targeted was “Brothers to the Rescue”, flying small planes out of Florida to buzz Cuban cities, dropping anti-Castro leaflets and propaganda.  According to Landau’s report, the group was also experimenting with weapons that could be fired from the air.

In 1996, Fidel Castro told visiting Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico:  “You’ve got to tell your government to get control of these people.” As Fidel declared, “What would the U.S. do to if the Cubans flew over Washington?  How long would that plane last?” Richardson relayed the message to Morton Halperin point man for Cuba on Clinton’s National Security Council staff. Halperin said he would raise the issue with the FAA. The flights continued.   

Again, a top Cuban official asked Saul Landau to alert Halperin that there would be drastic consequences if the U.S. didn’t stop the flights. According to Landau, Halperin indicated he would have the FAA cancel the licenses of the exile Cuban pilots. But the FAA didn’t. And on February 24,1996 Cuban Migs shot down two of three small Cessnas over international waters, killing their passengers. Clinton, who reportedly had been hoping to loosen American policy towards Cuba, instead was forced by political pressure to further tighten the embargo.

Radical Cuban exile groups also targeted Cuba’s vital tourist industry, warning potential visitors they would turn the island into a free-fire zone. They bombed several Havana hotels, injuring and killing the innocent.

According to Landau, in 1998 Fidel Castro gave a letter to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez to transmit to President Clinton: to stop the violent exile groups, Cuba would be willing to cooperate with the FBI. An FBI team was dispatched to Havana and the Cubans supplied them with substantial information about exile terrorist activities.

Instead of dismantling those exile groups, the FBI used the information to discover the identities of the undercover agents in Florida working for the Cuban government. On September 12, 1998, five Cuban intelligence officers were arrested in Miami and charged with, among other things, conspiracy to commit espionage and murder. Among the allegations--they had giving the Cuban government the information needed to shoot down the “Brothers” illegal flights.

The Cubans denied that charge, but spent more than a year in solitary confinement and—most important—were denied a motion to move the trial from Dade County, an area seething with anti-Castro sentiment. They were found guilty and received maximum sentences; in the case of one of them, two life sentences without possibility of parole. Last October, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down their appeal to have the trial remanded for change of venue.

A couple of months later, on the other side of the world, a CIA contract operative, Raymond Davis, was arrested by Pakistani authorities after killing two men in Lahore, presumably part of America’s War on Terror. After a barrage of calls to Pakistani officials from the highest levels in the U.S. government and the payment of “blood money” to the murdered men’s relatives, Davis was quietly released to American authorities and spirited out of Pakistan.

 Meanwhile, in Florida the most prominent of the radical Cuban exiles—those proudly linked to the campaign of terrorism against Castro’s Cuba--remain free and the toast of many inside and outside the exile community. 

Osama Bin Laden-Everyone's Missing the Point

A tale of two Arabs: Osama Bin Laden and Mohamed Bouaziziz

The jubilation of Americans and Western leaders at the death of Osama Bin Laden, though understandable, misses the point. In many ways, the figure gunned down in Pakistan was already irrelevant—more a symbol of past dangers than a real threat for the future.

Indeed, from the point of view of America and many of its allies, the most menacing symbol in the Arab World today is not Osama Bin Laden but another Arab who recently met a violent death--Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor who chose to set himself on fire after being harassed by corrupt local police.

His act, of course, ignited the storm that has spread across the Arab World and proven a much more serious threat to America’s allies in the region than Al Qaeda ever was. Ironically, his sacrifice probably also dealt a far more devastating blow to Al Qaeda’s fortunes than the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.  

The Arab world today bears no relationship to the situation a decade ago after 9/11. Obsessed by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the U.S. has been sucked into a vast quagmire--a disaster for the Americans, their economy, and their standing in the Arab World.  

What particularly provoked Osama Bin Laden—a Saudi--was the decision of Saudi rulers to accept the presence of more than a hundred thousand “infidel” U.S. troops and their allies in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In general, |he and his followers were outraged by U.S. support for corrupt, repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia, to Egypt to Yemen, as well, of course, for America’s backing of Israel.

As Osama himself  told CNN in 1997, “the U.S. wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this, If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists…Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”

Bin Laden’s message reverberated throughout the Muslim world. But U.S. officials remained deaf to its meaning, and continued obsessed by Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. The upshot--U.S. policy was the best recruiter Osama could have asked for. Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, CIA killer teams, mercenaries, predators and, and “diplomats” swarmed across the region from Iraq, to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia, supported by sprawling new bases and pharaonic embassies. 

The bill for all this—for an America crippling cutbacks in health, infra-structure. and education-- will be in the trillions of dollars. But despite this massive effort, none of those targeted Arab countries could by any stretch of the imagination be considered a success story. Hostility to the U.S. is high throughout the region. In polls, the majority of those Arabs queried consider the United States a greater threat than Al Qaeda.

In Pakistan, despite the U.S. lavishing tens of billions of dollars on that country’s  military, it turns out that, Osama Bin Laden, rather than groveling as an outlaw in the isolated tribal regions, has been living in a fortified villa near the country’s major military academy and a large army base, just a few miles away from the capital city.

America had also launched an ambitious civilian aid program: 7.5 billion dollar over five years, designed to win Pakistani hearts and minds and bolster the civilian government.  But, corruption is so rife throughout the Pakistani government, and its officials so incompetent, that the U.S. has been unable to disburse most of the aid. As the New York Times reports,

Instead of polishing the tarnished image of America with a suspicious, even hostile, Pakistani public and government, the plan has resulted in bitterness and a sense of broken promises…

The economy is failing. Education, health care and other services are almost nonexistent, while civilian leaders from the landed and industrialist classes pay hardly any taxes.

Pakistanis see the aid as a crude attempt to buy friendship and an effort to alleviate antipathy toward United States drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas.

The same reports come from Afghanistan. A decade after the U.S. invaded, tens of thousands of American troops are still fighting what seems to be, at best, a see–saw battle against the Taliban. There also, according to another report in the New York Times,  the U.S. is backing incompetent, corrupt, unpopular leaders. Millions of dollars of U.S. funds actually get diverted as payoffs to the Taliban and their allies—bribing them not to attack U.S. projects, such as $65 million highway that may never be completed in Eastern Afghanistan.

The vast expenses and unsavory alliances surrounding the highway have become a parable of the corruption and mismanagement that turns so many well-intended development efforts in Afghanistan into sinkholes for the money of American taxpayers, even nine years into the war.

Now back to Mohamed Bouazizi the Tunisian fruit vendor, whose death unleashed the Arab Spring that is still roiling the region,

Though Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have yet to be credited with overthrowing an Arab regime, the spark provided by Bouazizi has already led to the downfall of  American-backed tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, and continues to threaten other despots in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Ironically, most of the leaders overthrown or desperately trying to hang on to power, had declared themselves implacable enemies of Al Qaeda. Yet, again, it was not Bin Laden but Bouazizi that turned out to be a far greater menace.

Precisely for that reason, it is Mohamed Bouazizi’s Arab Spring, not sophisticated U.S. killer teams, that most threaten Al Qaeda and its allies. By demonstrating that secular uprisings can succeed in toppling the aged, crusty tyrannies, young Arabs across the region have—so far--undercut the appeal of the Islamic radicals.

So far, because despite the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt, the future of the Arab Spring is far from clear. The current process will take decades to play out. The political and economic establishments have been decapitated in Egypt and Tunisia, but not decimated. In the rest of the region, though seriously shaken, the old order still reign supreme. 

The same corrupt Saudi regime that fueled Bin Laden’s outrage is still in power, still backed by the United States. Indeed, they have been doing their utmost to tamp the spreading revolt, spending millions to bribe Yemen’s tribal leaders, dispatching their troops to Bahrain to help crush the uprising of the Shiite majority in that country.

Indeed, that brutal repression may radicalize thousands of young Shiites, generating hosts of new recruits for Al Qaeda or other extremists Islamic groups—even as the corpse of Osama Bin Laden lies somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

  

A Tale of Two Hospitals: Kuwait 1991, Bahrain 2011

Scene: The Human Rights caucus of the U.S. Congress hears the testimony of a fifteen-year old girl, introduced by only her first name Nayira, in order, the audience is told, to protect the safety of her family. The young girl recounts how invading soldiers had stormed into the hospital where she says she had been working as a volunteer. Tearfully, she describes how rampaging soldiers had trashed the hospital, brutalized patients, gone “into rooms where fifteen babies were in incubators. They tore the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the floor to die.”

That story is flashed around the world by a horrified media. “I don’t believe that Adolph Hitler ever participated in anything of that nature,” declares the outraged American President.

If anything justified the U.S. going to war against Saddam in 1991 to a wavering Congress and American public, that performance was it.

The problem was that the story was not true. Kuwaiti medical authorities denied that the incubator incident had ever occurred. It was only after the end of the Gulf War, however, that the deception was finally revealed. It was a total fabrication, right out of the fertile, high-priced imagination of Hill and Nolton, the Kuwaiti ruling family’s Washington P.R. firm. Nayira, the tearful fifteen-year-old girl who had so convincingly recounted the atrocity, turned out to the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States; she had never been in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. By the time that was discovered, however, the U.S.-led coalition had charged in and the Kuwaiti royal family was securely back on its throne, and the folks at Hill and Knolton had earned their pay.

Scene two: Police swarm through the wards of another major Arab hospital. At least 32 doctors, including surgeons, physicians, pediatricians and obstetricians, are arrested and detained. Their apparent crimes, guaranteeing medical care to people wounded in a popular uprising against an aged, corrupt dictator.

According to emails received from a surgeon at the hospital and published by The Independent, “One doctor, an intensive care specialist, was held after she was photographed weeping over a dead protester. Another was arrested in the theatre room while operating on a patient...many of the doctors, aged from 33 to 65, have been ‘disappeared’ – held incommunicado or at undisclosed locations. Their families do not know where they are. Nurses, paramedics, and ambulance staff have also been detained. The emails provide a glimpse of the terror and exhaustion suffered by the doctors and medical staff.

‘The author of the emails, a senior surgeon, was taken in for questioning at the headquarters of the interior ministry. He never re-emerged. No reason has been given for his arrest, nor has there been any news of his condition.”

A hospital in Libya? In battered Misurata, perhaps? Where President Obama has  ordered a couple of Predator drones to join in the flailing struggle against the barbarous  Muammar Gadhafi, where Senator John McCain jetted in himself for a quick look-see and instantly declared the rebels—my heroes.  Libya, where France and England have dispatched an unknown number of military trainers to see if they can whip the hapless, squabbling rebels into shape?

No,that hospital is not in Libya but in Bahrain: the Salmaniya Medical Complex, the tiny state’s main civil hospital.  And, of course, the more than one thousand heavily armed invading troops who are backing the local police terrorizing the hospital, “disappearing” doctors, and brutally crushing the local uprising are Saudis.

The same Saudis who gave the U.S. and Nato the green light to intervene to save the largely Sunni rebels in Libya. In exchange for which America discretely turned its back as the Saudis invaded Bahrain to prevent a Shiite majority there from toppling  a repressive Sunni monarch. God only knows what the experience will do to radicalize tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of Shiites.

But true to its promise, America’s back remains turned.

A  footnote:  Such smarmy diplomatic trade-offs are not at all unique. In 1991, for instance, the U.S. and its coalition allies were also looking for Arab “cover” for their move into Kuwait. In exchange for agreeing to back the invasion, Syria was given—among other things--a free hand to take control of most of Lebanon. The European Community also lifted economic sanctions it had imposed against Syria, while Britain restored diplomatic relations. In the end it was all symbolic: none of the 18,000 Syrian troops who joined the coalition forces in Saudi Arabia ever fought. [See Barry Lando Web of Deceit, (Other Press, New York.2006) pp. 140-141]

Secret History of the "Arab Spring" Chapter 7

Recruits for Al Qaeda

Since 9/11 the overriding concern of U.S. policy across the Middle East and Central Asia has been to defeat Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on that obsession. Yet when the secret history of the current “Arab Spring” is written, we may learn that one of the many unintended consequences of U.S. attempts to keep up with—and influence--the historic events, was to provide a flood of new recruits to radical Islam.

 The immediate cause: Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

While America and its allies have launched a military effort to protect the rebels in Libya, America has voiced only muted protests as its major Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, crushes the rebels in Bahrain—with what could be ruinous reverberations for all concerned. 

The rebels in Bahrain are predominately Shiites—who have long chafed under minority Sunnite rule. Riding a mounting wave of popular protests, the Shiites seemed to be on the road to forcing the government in Manama to accept at least some of their demands.

With the Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain, U.S. officials have also been concerned about the unrest. But their attempts to encourage the government to meet some basic demands for change failed. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Manama on 12 March, criticized the regime for its “baby steps” toward reform.

Meanwhile King Abdullah in neighboring Saudi Arabia looked on with horror as the Arab Spring came sweeping towards him. The Saudis (Sunnis) have their own restive Shiite minority. The King was also concerned that a Shiite breakthrough in Bahrain would strengthen Iran’s sway in the region.

Even more alarming for Abdullah--the alacrity with which Obama turned his back on one-time dictator allies. America’s unceremonious dumping of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was a shocking harbinger. Could Washington’s remaining key Arab ally be next?

Thus, on March 14^th the Saudis (along with their Gulf allies ) finally acted--dispatching a thousand troops along with tanks and armored vehicles across the causeway that separates them from Bahrain-to help brutally stifle the revolt.

In the process, the Saudi king reportedly ignored a specific request from Obama to stay out. The Hell with the duplicitous Americans! He’d had enough of following Washington’s lead. The Americans were shocked and humiliated. Relations between the two governments are supposedly at a nadir. 

That’s the official version. But when the history of these events is written, I imagine the real facts will tell a more Machiavellian tale: that the U.S. in fact gave a tacit go ahead to the Saudis to act—with disastrous results.

There have been some unconfirmed reports to that effect, and they make sense. There was a trade off: Libya for Bahrain. Without the Saudis, the U.S. could never have convinced the Arab League to ask for the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya. And without that Arab League resolution, the intervention in Libya would never have occurred.  The Saudis and their Gulf partners are also taking part to some extent in that intervention, to provide at least a façade of Arab participation.

In return, U.S. officials have been very muted in any criticism of the brutal crack-down in Bahrain—a country much more vital to Saudi interests, than is Libya.

And brutal it has been:  Backed up by the Saudis, Bahraini security forces and pro-regime thugs armed with swords and clubs attacked demonstrators throughout the kingdom. Human rights activists have reported that a total of 26 people have been killed, 300 have been imprisoned, and at least 35 people are missing in the three weeks since the crackdown began in earnest.

Yet scarcely a peep out of Washington.

O.K. you say, what’s wrong with the U.S. trading Bahrain for Libya. It’s realpolitik, right out of the Henry Kissinger playbook.

Except that the consequences of that Saudi intervention may prove much more disastrous to Western (and Saudi) interests than any possible positive fall-out from the adventure in Libya. 

That according to a study just issued by the International Crisis Group. What has happened, says the report, is that that from those hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful Shiite protestors in Bahrain, who had thought they could achieve change through peaceful protests--as the Americans have been advocating--that many of those thwarted, bloodied protestors may now turn to violence—exactly as Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups have been preaching.

 As the report puts it, “Manama’s crackdown and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention are dangerous moves that could stamp out hopes for peaceful transition in Bahrain and turn a mass movement for democratic reform into an armed conflict, while regionalizing an internal political struggle. They could also exacerbate sectarian tensions not only in Bahrain or the Gulf but across the region.

“Along with other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia purportedly is responding to dual fears: that the takeover would be tantamount to an Iranian one. Both are largely unfounded. It also is concerned protests might inspire similar movements among its own Eastern Province Shiites, oblivious that its involvement is likelier to provoke than deter them.

“Bahrain’s brutal crackdown and Saudi interference fan flames both want to extinguish. The most effective response to the radical regime change threat or greater Iranian influence is not violent suppression of peaceful protests but political reform. Time is running short and trends are in the wrong direction.”

 “In short, the intervention likely achieved precisely the opposite of what it intended.”

Over the years, throughout the region, from Egypt to Yemen to Saudi Arabia, such repression and subsequent radicalization has been a vital source of recruits for Al Qaeda.  

Yet, on his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense of what is still billed as the most powerful nation on the planet, Robert Gates reportedly didn’t even dare raise the issue of Bahrain issue King Abdullah.

Just imagine having to face the monarch’s wrath!

Secret History of the Libyan Uprising

The secret history of the Libyan Uprising (what you’re probably going to read some day)

U.N. resolution 1973 authorizes action to create a no-fly zone in Libya. It does not authorize the use of foreign troops on the ground.

President Obama seemed to accept that limitation when he made his famous “no U.S. boots on the ground” declaration--a statement that has been repeated by every U.S. spokesman since.

Since Obama’s declaration however, we have learned that, in fact, for several weeks CIA operatives have been active in Libya, supposedly to find targets for the missile and rocket attacks of the U.S. and its allies, as well as to get some idea of who the opposition is that Obama and Sarkozy et al have chosen to support. 

The joke was those CIA types are not wearing boots, but sneakers.

O.K. but now we learn, via Al Jazeera English, that there is a secret training site in Eastern Libya where U.S. and Egyptian Special Forces are giving basic weapons training to selected rebels. Those rebels are also now receiving more sophisticated weapons.

You can be sure those U.S. advisers are wearing boots. 0

That report was long expected. For when the secret history of this current struggle is written (there are already several books in the works), we will almost certainly learn that, despite Obama’s public protestations, he was advised prior to launching his Libyan adventure that U.S. “advisors” would more than likely also be needed.

Revelations will probably also make it clear that President Obama was also advised that those U.S. advisors could not just be limited to instructing the rebels how to fire their weapons, but would also have to train them, give them basic military skills. And it probably wouldn’t stop there.

Those advisors are likely also—behind the scenes—already filling key command roles: advising the rebels when and how to advance—either directly or in liaison with special forces from other countries with boots on the ground in Libya--everyone doing their best to maintain the fiction that those “advisors” aren’t there.  And that the rebels are calling their own shots.

For those American spooks and troops are not alone

According to other reports, special “Smash Squads” from Britain’s famed SAS have also been on the ground in Libya for several weeks now pursuing similar missions.

Perhaps they’re the same SAS teams who Britain supposedly dispatched to train Khadaffi’s  Special Forces a year or so back —part of the warming of relations between the two countries. 

And considering the determination of France’s President Sarkozy to push for the original attacks, reports that elite French troops are also on the ground in Libya are almost certainly true as well.

The above would mesh with an unconfirmed report from a Pakistani newspaper claiming that:

“According to an exclusive report confirmed by a Libyan diplomat in the region “the three Western states have landed their “special forces troops in Cyrinacia and are now setting up their bases and training centres” to reinforce the rebel forces who are resisting pro-Qaddafi forces in several adjoining areas.

A Libyan official who requested not to be identified said that the U.S. and British military gurus were sent on February 23 and 24 night through American and French warships and small naval boats off Libyan ports of Benghazi and Tobruk.”

Which brings us to the declaration of an American military official briefing the press.   When he was asked, whether the coalition forces communicate with the rebels in Libya, he said, no. “Regarding coordination with rebel forces, nothing. Our mission is to protect civilians,” said the official. “It’s not about the rebels, this is about protection of civilians,” he added.