Print this post.Eric Zuesse
Ukrainian POWs being paraded through Donetsk’s main thoroughfares, bowed heads in humiliation. The US-supported and created Kiev regime has been trying to wage an ethnic-cleansing war against Eastern Ukrainians that reject its neofascist rule, but the campaigns have not fared too well due to lack of morale and superior fighting ability of the newly independent republics. (RIA/Novosti)
U.S. President Barack Obama apparently is going ahead with his plan for NATO missiles to be placed in Ukraine aimed against Moscow, but found a way to do it that won’t violate the warnings by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin against Washington’s directly supplying those arms to Ukraine (such as is demanded of Obama by congressional Republicans, and even by a few hawkish Democrats — all passionate supporters of Hillary Clinton). Obama’s subordinate (or dependent local leader), the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, is now arranging to receive those weapons via a less direct channel; and this arrangement couldn’t happen if the U.S. White House were opposed to it. The idea might even have originated inside the White House.
On Tuesday, 24 February 2015, in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, Poroshenko placed the finishing touches on the purchase of Western, mainly U.S., weapons, via the UAE, from Western firms such as, perhaps, Lockheed, GE, Krupp, Euromissile, etc., which will be paid for by Western taxpayers, via IMF ‘loans’ to Ukraine, which money comes from taxpayer contributions to the IMF, but which ‘loans’ can never be paid back to the IMF — they’ll inevitably default, because these ‘loans’ are at the very end of the long line of creditors of Ukraine, which is a bankrupt country, having been looted for decades (and especially during the past year) by its aristocrats (called “oligarchs”), who have already spirited tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars off to Western tax-haven countries, so that only Ukraine’s public (who received little if any benefit from those debts of the Ukrainian Government) will pay even the pennies-on-the-dollars that Ukraine’s bondholders will be receiving (and the recipients will be only the holders of the oldest of Ukraine’s bonds, which won’t be the IMF, EU, or U.S., Ukraine’s post-coup ‘lenders’).
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This is called the IMF’s “austerity” program, for looted nations such as Greece and Ukraine, and it holds sacred the thefts by aristocrats, while it transfers all of aristocrats’ losses off onto their respective publics, who (as Ukrainians now will) pay it via their stripped governmental services and hiked taxes; and these poor people then serve aristocrats as virtual slaves (low-wage labor), many of whom thus migrate to wealthier countries, which, in turn, reject the burden of caring for them, thus producing yet more resentments and hatreds against these poor people, regardless of how they behave.
Here is the way this Ukrainian arms deal works:
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The deal itself was publicly, but only vaguely, announced on Tuesday, the 24th, along with “what Poroshenko described as a ‘very important negotiation about the facilitation of the United Arab Emirates investment in the Ukraine.’ He declined to provide specifics of the deal.” The reason why Arabic royals (in this case the Al Nahyan family that controls Abu Dhabi) are naturals for this — the logical persons to serve as the middle-men to sell Western-made weapons to Russia’s new (since the time of Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup) enemy, Ukraine — is that the U.S. plutocracy has, for at least 70 years, been allied with Sunni aristocracies, against, originally, the Soviet Union, and then Russia. Russia had been the chief supplier of oil and gas to the other Soviet republics; it was and is the local oil-and-gas giant. Whereas Russia’s aristocrats bonded instead with Shia Iran (which alliance was interrupted during 1953-79 by the CIA’s coup there and then the Shah’s ultimate overthrow and then the restoration of Iran’s alliance with Russia), the American aristocrats had bonded with Sunni Saudi Arabia, and with other Arab royals, in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc. So, with the exception of Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petreoleum, which bonded with Libya’s pro-Soviet Sunni anti-imperialist and anti-Western Muammar Gaddafi, Western oil companies generally allied with the Saud family, who had allied with the most intensely Sunni clergy of all, who were the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had personally agreed in 1744, with Muhammad bin Saud, that the Sauds and Wahhabs would jointly control the Kingdom and ultimately the world — Wahhabs controlling the laws, and Sauds controlling the military.
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In short: America’s plutocracy bonded with Sunni aristocrats, and Russia’s plutocracy bonded with Shia ones. Ukraine has now joined the Sunni alliance, and this is done with Obama’s blessing.
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America’s progressives might find it hard to understand, but America’s far-right plutocratic Koch brothers, who are allied with Big Oil on almost everything else, have no part in Big Oil’s alliance with the Sauds, and consequently the Kochs’ Cato Institute actually did an honest analysis of U.S.-Saudi relations, concluding, “The United States should reassess the current Washington-Riyadh axis. The American commitment to the Saudi royal family is a moral blemish and a practical danger. It has already drawn the United States into one conventional war and has helped to make Americans targets for terrorism, which generated far more casualties in one day than did the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, and the Afghanistan campaign (so far) combined.”
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Instead, most of America’s aristocrats who are heavily invested in crushing Russia are Democrats, such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. These are the CIA Democrats. Another example of that is (the DailyKos) Markos Moulitsas. Of course, CIA Republicans dominate the anti-Russian campaign, but virtually the entire U.S. plutocracy is either funding it or else doesn’t much care either way about it. None cares about the extermination of the residents in Ukraine’s former Donbass region. This is why the U.S. media are now pouring forth with virtual unanimity against Russia — as if it were Russia that were surrounding NATO, instead of NATO that’s surrounding Russia. Even though Obama’s Ukrainian Government is carrying out an ethnic-cleansing campaign, its victims are being portrayed as if they were ‘terrorists’ and even ‘Russians.’ The victims are just former Ukrainians.
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On 11 February 2015, I headlined “Al Qaeda’s Bookkeeper Spills the Beans” and reported that the person who had kept the financial books for Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda during the period leading up to 9/11, and who entered each and every donation into their financial books, including each one of the many multi-million-dollar donations, which poured in from Saudi and other Arab royals, provided sworn testimony recently, in a U.S. prison where he has been held incommunicado for more than a decade in order to protect Saudi and other Sunni royals — testimony that he swore upon the Quran, which he holds dearer than anything else — and, in this sworn testimony he explained in detail the profound interdependency between the Wahhab clergy and the Saud family, and the resulting dependency that Al Qaeda had upon both that clergy and that royal family, so that even the other Sunni royal families (such as in Qatar, Bahrain, and UAE) are beholden to the Saudi royal family and its Wahhabist clerics.
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In other words: the U.S. plutocracy’s allliance with the Sauds explains an important part of the reason why the U.S. Government’s explanation of 9/11 is based upon lies.
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King Saud, the founder of the Saudi royal mafia. Why American leaders kiss the ass of these medieval brutes is anyone’s guess. They could be easily overthrown just like any other nation.
A little-noticed news story in Al-Monitor, on 27 January 2015, from Bruce Reidel, reported that, “Feb. 14 marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the US alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 14, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with King Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud in Egypt and the two forged a partnership that has endured despite occasional severe strains for the last 70 years.” Reidel went on:
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“The meeting was a closely held secret for security reasons. Only a handful on each side knew it was coming. FDR and Ibn Saud met on the USS Quincy, a cruiser, in the Great Bitter Lake along the Suez Canal, as World War II was coming to an end. FDR arrived from the Yalta summit with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt’s health was very poor; he had only weeks to live. Ibn Saud had come from Jeddah on an American destroyer, the USS Murphy, with an entourage of bodyguards, cooks, slaves, an astrologer, a fortune-teller and other retainers and some sheep. The king only reluctantly agreed to leave his wives behind in Jeddah. It was his first trip outside the Arabian Peninsula aside from a brief visit to Basra in Iraq. The two agreed to work together to ensure stability in the post-war Middle East. The United States would ensure security for the kingdom, and the Saudis would ensure access to their oil fields. The United States acquired use of Dhahran air base for operations in the Middle East. US oil companies were already operating in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia declared war on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan two weeks later, securing a seat in the United Nations.”
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Barack Obama wants to continue the program that George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and G.W. Bush, worked on before him, to surround Russia with NATO missiles. The takeover of Ukraine, and the enlistment of the Arabic oil sheikhs in assisting further to turn the screws against Russia, are key components in doing that: crushing Russia’s resistance to American domination.
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Whereas, for FDR, the alliance with Sunni Islam was purely anti-communist, against the Soviet Union, the U.S. Presidents after 1980 were and are anti-Russian, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. The U.S. plutocracy intend to dominate the plutocracy in every other nation, and Russia is the only militarily powerful nation that is opposed to being controlled by this global Empire. Consequently, President Obama, who is an agent for America’s plutocracy, wants to cripple if not destroy Russia. And this is why, in his National Security Strategy 2015, 17 of the 18 times he uses the term ‘aggression’ are applying it against Russia. Russia’s President Putin would have to be an idiot not to recognize that today’s United States (its plutocracy, not the American public, who are quite different) is extremely hostile.
Obama asking Congress for more powers to strike ISIL, the US government’s own Frankenstein creation. Taxpayers dollars at work. Enjoy. (RT.com)
Russia could be the bulwark that, along with the rest of Europe and America, could restrain Islamic extremism; but, since America’s plutocracy is primarily concerned with crushing Russia, Islamic terrorism will probably only continue to grow.
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Furthermore, events such as 9/11 are necessary for the Arabic aristocrats in order for them to keep their clerics with them and thereby control their own nation’s public.
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So: the U.S. ends up being allied with Islamic terrorists, while accusing Russia of backing ‘terrorists’ in the former Ukraine, whose only crime is that they don’t want to be slaughtered.
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On 12 February 2015, was issued a “Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Ukraine,” which opened: “Ms. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), statement today in Brussels, Belgium: ‘I am pleased to announce that the IMF team working in Kiev has reached a staff-level agreement with the Ukrainian government on a new economic reform program that would be supported by an Extended Fund Facility of SDR 12.35 billion (about $17.5 billion, €15.5 billion) from the IMF, as well as by additional resources from the international community.” Violating even the IMF’s own prohibitions against pouring loans into a nation that’s at war, the IMF was here making clear that they were 100% behind Obama’s Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. This is where the money will come from to finance Ukraine’s acquisition of more weapons to exterminate or else drive out the residents in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President that Obama overthrew.
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It’s ongoing mass-murder on the installment plan, with the IMF providing most of the funds.
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Because the loaned money is going to pay the ethnic-cleansing campaign, it’s not going toward the needs of the Ukrainian people. This is extreme austerity, and it started immediately, a day after the day, 26 February 2014, when Arseniy Yatsenyuk became appointed to run the country, as he had been selected to do by Victoria Nuland of Obama’s State Department 22 days prior. As Kommersant reported, on 6 March 2014: “the strategy of the government was approved in Parliament on 27 February and on 3 March the Ministry of Finance sent an action plan for approval to the Ministry of Economic Development. The document is striking in its scale. … ‘Under the Knife’ go social costs. Already in March, the payment of pensions will be reduced to only 50% of the designated pension amounts.” But an uproar held that up. However, now it’s being done.
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On December 11th: “Cabinet wants to reduce schooling to 9 years [from 12 years], to reduce the cost of the budget Finance Ministry proposes to amend the legislation governing the humanitarian sphere, the sphere of public administration, pensions, social security, the work of the prosecution and the army.”
On December 19th: “Education Minister Sergey Kvit noted that the department, which he heads, will never agree to such a proposal.”
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On December 24th: “Education Minister Sergei quits.”
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Pensions are now set to be halved, even in the greatly depreciated Ukrainian currency; and public schooling is to be reduced to only 9 years. All of that IMF (and U.S., and EU) money goes instead to pay to mass-murder the residents in Ukraine’s former Donbass region, the area shown on this map in which the residents voted 90% for Viktor Yanukovych, whom Obama overthrew, and where all of the residents are officially ’terrorists.’ The phrase for that used to be: “free-fire zone.” Obama wants the residents exterminated, and the IMF and EU are going along with that.
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The circuitous way in which Ukraine will be buying its weapons is designed to avoid triggering a declaration of war by Vladimir Putin, or else to make non-obvious to the public why he would be justified in doing so.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box] Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. [/box]