Obama Personally Tells the Egyptian Dictator That U.S. Will Again Send Weapons (and Cash) to His Regime

Here is another sad story. The US government news agency the BBG “Broadcasting Board of Governors” with its annual budget of 720 million dollars, is having difficulty countering RT “Russia Today” with its budget of 241 million US dollars.

The Americans are thinking of increasing the BBG’s “truth” budget to counter the “propaganda” coming from Russia’s RT. Things have gotten so bad, says John Kerry, that “Many think we’re the problem”.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-02/sanctions-strapped-russia-outguns-the-u-s-in-information-war

The silence from the many purporting to care about democracy and American values is just sad.

The last few real Democrats and real Republicans can’t even be heard above the roar of the neolibcons.
And there’s nobody to penalize them for piping in fake applause.

I worry about the events that will be created to justify maintaining this crap.
Nothings Shocking by Jane’s Addiction comes to mind.
The PR machine is going to go big, and we are all fair game.

So…short term stability…ignoring, even encouraging massive human rights violations is one way to look at current US policy on Egypt.

Another motivating factor for Obama, is the neocon’s common enemy with general Sissi, lslamic popular mobilization. Described by General Sissi as “terrorism”. The fighter planes and tanks America is sending, are going to help the dictatorship fight poets who witness police brutality, journalists who interview elected politicians and other “terrorists” because a credible election was already tried, and the military didn’t win.

Rather than being on the side of the majority, It seems Obama’s neocons, and Sissi’s generals both find themselves sharing the goal of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, namely the destruction of Islam.

Reason Magazine:

“Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.”

I don’t think Obama’s neocons, and Sissi’s generals are going to win. I prefer to think of it this way:

“I argue that the only viable strategy to containing the threat posed by all forms of extremism is to maintain international justice, universal freedom of conscience, secular governance, and a return to our Creator in personal worship. And I hold this position because this is the example set forth by Prophet Muhammad himself.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/an-open-letter-to-ayaan-h_b_6952412.html

Looking for trouble that will come to haunt in future. Always supporting autocratic and brutal regimes in the name of strategic interests that will bring deaths; suffering and then jihadist that will look for revenge. These are the America countless signatures in the Middle East; endless cycle of deaths and violence. Always supplying weapons when not killing with drones.

America’s aggressive foreign policy, leads to a preference for dictators, which has a bearing on this:

“It is, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an occupational hazard in negotiating with a country that has such divided power centers.
“A perennial challenge in dealing with Iran is that Iran’s most powerful officials are inaccessible, while Iran’s most accessible officials aren’t powerful,” “

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/world/middleeast/as-nuclear-talks-drag-on-us-and-iran-find-it-harder-to-hear-each-other.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

First of all, It is kind of funny, that Americans in the land where congress is trying to subvert the president on everything from medical care to nuclear negotiations, need help explaining how other countries have “divided power centers”.

But it is true that when your stated goal is world wide “full spectrum dominance”, fragile puppet regimes are simpler to deal with than nations with local legitimacy and popular support.

This article helps the terrorists win™

Flash: US foreign policy not motivated by humanitarian ideals, but by national security. The horror, the horror! Next up: Americans place own lives above lives of people outside the US.

The geopolitical agenda in Egypt goes back to the end of World War II – Britain and France wanted to re-establish their colonial empires in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, but regional independence movements and the new Soviet-American Cold War put an end to that agenda c.1954. The central point there was the Suez Canal, which Nasser, Egypt’s independent leader, nationalized. As Nasser made deals with the Soviets, the CIA responded c.1963 by providing weapons and training to the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps the first example of U.S. support for radical Islamic terror groups as a bulwark against the Godless Communists, a theme that continued throughout the Cold War – indeed, it this continued even after 9/11 (U.S. backing for Islamic terrorist groups targeting Iran c.2003, etc.).

As ever, the agenda in Egypt is military and involves access to and control of the Suez Canal. U.S. Naval warships are continually patrolling from the Red Sea to the Somali coast to fight piracy; so they want Egypt as a cooperative military ally to protect oil shipping in the region. This is similar to the reason that we backed the Saudis when they sent tanks into Bahrain in March 2011 to crush the pro-democracy protests and keep the dictators in charge there – the U.S. has a 5th Fleet base in Bahrain, and the dictatorships are cooperative – who knows what democracy would bring? They’re afraid of something like the mayor of Okinawa, Japan leading protests against the presence of military bases on their soil.

The establishment in Washington still views the Middle East as America’s oil tanker; they’ve been reaping the proceeds from this deal for decades: oil flows out of the Middle East to world markets, the money flows into Wall Street and London banking centers under deals with the dictators in the region, and a good chunk of that money finances arms purchases by the dictatorships (the almost unmentioned $50 billion arms deal to the Saudis overseen by Obama, who also wants to sell them nuclear reactors on behalf of GE and Westinghouse – the Salesman in Chief, acting Willy Loman). This arrangement was set up in the 1970s and continues to this day; similar shady deals (like U.S. support for Israeli nuclear weapons production) date back to that same period, when the U.S. was in bed with the savage Shah of Iran and his torturers, and feeding him nuclear weapons technology (which is how Iran got a nuclear program in the first place, actually). A continuation of this policy, but with more aggressive military action, was the heart of the neocon agenda that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, Woolsey etc. represented, it is why they cooked up the lies about Iraqi WMDs and 9/11-Saddam connections to support their aggressive militaristic agenda. They should all have been tried and imprisoned as war criminals under Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg legal precedents.

But that’s just background – but today, it all still revolves around ‘military-economic imperatives’ as the neocons would put it; the PR veneer of human rights, democracy, free press – nonsense, Obama worked overtime hand-in-hand with Middle East dictators to crush the Arab spring and keep the dictatorships intact. Why do they like dictators? They’re easy to bribe and they follow orders, unlike some uppity independent democracy.

So, does anything happening today change any of that? Speigel has a a very good article out on the current geopolitics of the Saudi-Yemen conflict, U.S. cooperation with the Saudis on the bombing, U.S. cooperation with Iraq’s Al Quds Brigade to fight the Saudi-sponsored Daesh groups in Iraq – and the summation is that perhaps the the old U.S.-Saudi-Israeli alliance (the Axis of Sleaziness) is on its way out; the Middle East is of less and less importance as fossil fuels lose their economic importance to widespread renewables (note that fossil fuel use is in decline, demand is dropping, but the economy is not in collapse) – hence the whole ‘shift to the Pacific’ concept in U.S. geopolitical strategic thinking.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nuclear-talks-with-iran-show-new-us-approach-to-middle-east-a-1026489.html

If this means we can get out of our sleazy relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, so much the better. It’s like having a burning tire around your neck, to have those two anti-democratic countries as close friends and allies. Yes, anti-democratic – both need major democratic reforms; the Israelis can have a one-state solution only if everyone in the West Bank and Gaza is allowed to vote in elections; otherwise it’s just South African apartheid complete with ‘Arab homelands’, and Saudi Arabia needs to eliminate rule by Royal Decree in favor of a parliamentary democracy along British lines. That’s what we should be pushing for in the region, it would finally put our actions in line with our words, which would be a nice change.

I feel Mr. Greenwald is being somewhat judgmental in this article. He uses labels such as ‘vicious tyrant’ which aren’t really conducive to promoting dialogue. The President on the other hand, as indicated in a 2009 interview, avoids such pitfalls.

BBC: Do you regard President Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, I tend not to use labels for folks.

He went on to say that Mubarak was a force for stability and good.

So I would encourage Mr. Greenwald to reflect, practice tolerance and in future avoid using labels for folks such as Mr. Al-Sisi. He is not a ‘tyrant’ or a ‘despot’, but rather a leader who is committed to the process of working towards democracy. A wise leader understands that you should not thrust democracy on the people before they have been trained to be properly obedient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law

“The Leahy Law or Leahy amendment is a U.S. human rights law that prohibits the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity.”

Does our support of Egypt have anything to do with our special relationship with Israel? I only ask because I saw nothing regarding an explanation of it in the article above.

“So the U.S. is, as usual, standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the region’s most oppressive regimes, whose survival at least partially depends on the abundant U.S. largesse they receive, once again provoking that age-old mystery: Why do they hate us?” Glenn Greenwald

Who are “they”? The Afghan Taliban? The Pakistani Taliban? Al Qaeda? AQAP? Boko Haram? Those groups primary targets ARE NOT the United States. They carefully attack and kill primarily Muslim civilians. So, who are “they”? There are no indications that most Muslims in Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Europe… while they strongly disagree with the West foreign policy, hate the West to a point that they want to kill Western civilians.

We got into bed with Stalin to defeat Hitler. How is it different if we get into bed with Egypt to defeat ISIS?

Maybe the move by the US government was based on wanting to insure that Russia does not gain too much influence in Egypt given that Putin recently visited the country.

It’s too bad that the Salon website doesn’t have indexed and archived Greenwald’s many excellent pieces on the hypocrisy of US officials, and his documentation and exposure of Washington’s terrorism in the Greater Middle East. As Frank Furedi noted in his must-read book “New Ideology of Imperialism” (1994), the aggressors (the US and UK) effectively portray themselves as the victims, and portray the victims of imperialist terrorism as the perpetrators.

Below is an incomplete list (suggestions and additions welcome). It should all be included among The People’s evidence against the imperialist war criminals and warmongers. (Dammit, when’s the Greenwald Reader coming out?)

Dec 11 2014
EXCLUSIVE: “Corrupt, toxic and sociopathic”: Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul
Glenn Greenwald tells Salon how the torture report exposes true evil — and a nation drowning in hypocrisy
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/11/exclusive_corrupt_toxic_and_sociopathic_glenn_greenwald_unloads_on_torture_cia_and_washingtons_rotten_soul/

August 7 2012
Unrestrained savagery | In Yemen, Al Qaeda bombs a funeral of someone it killed days earlier. How can Terrorist monsters do this?
salon.com/2012/08/07/unrestrained_savagery/

June 25 2012
Collapsing U.S. credibility | Condemning foreign governments for abusive acts while ignoring one’s own is easy. But the U.S. leads the way
salon.com/2012/06/25/collapsing_u_s_credibility/

May 29 2012
Obama the Warrior | A new NYT article sheds considerable light on the character of the Democratic Commander-in-Chief
salon.com/2012/05/29/obama_the_warrior/

April 19 2012
America’s drone sickness | The U.S. slaughters at will, then shields its actions from all forms of judicial and democratic accountability
salon.com/2012/04/19/americas_drone_sickness/

March 14 2012
Obama’s personal role in a journalist’s imprisonment | Abdulelah Haider Shaye helped expose deadly US misbehavior in Yemen — and now the president won’t let him go free
salon.com/2012/03/14/obamas_personal_role_in_a_journalists_imprisonment/

Dec 8 2011
U.S. arming Egyptian military crackdown | Amnesty International documents the vast difference between the administration’s words and actions on democracy
salon.com/2011/12/08/u_s_arming_egyptian_military_crackdown/

November 23 2011
What Endless War looks like | U.S. officials simultaneously announce that we’re defeating Al Qaeda and they’ll be a major threat “for years”
salon.com/2011/11/23/what_endless_war_looks_like/

November 13 2011
GOP and TP on Obama’s foreign policy “successes” | To wild GOP crowd cheers, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachman vehemently defend Obama’s assassination policy
salon.com/2011/11/13/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes/

November 12 2011
U.S. takes the lead on behalf of cluster bombs | After long refusing to join the convention banning these weapons, Obama now works to overturn it
salon.com/2011/11/12/u_s_takes_the_lead_on_behalf_of_cluster_bombs/

August 21 2011
U.S. Mideast policy in a single phrase | While publicly praising the Arab Spring, the U.S. and Israel mourn the loss of “dependably loyal” despots
salon.com/2011/08/21/mideast_7/

July 18 2011
The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia | The U.S. continues to spawn the very Terrorism problem it claims to combat, with the media helpfully in tow
salon.com/2011/07/18/terrorism_37/

July 13 2011
US more unpopular in the Arab world than under Bush | A new poll confirms prior ones: anti-American sentiment is now at dangerously – even unprecedentedly – high levels
salon.com/2011/07/13/arabs/

June 14 2011
Yet another illegal war — now in Yemen | A newly announced CIA bombing campaign is without a whiff of legal authority
salon.com/2011/06/14/yemen_illegal_war/

Apr 26 2011
Strong anti-American sentiment in Egypt | A new poll reveals the dangers of U.S. policy in that region, and the lack of change in perception
salon.com/2011/04/26/egypt_12/

February 21 2011
This week in winning hearts and minds | Four incidents from the last week alone highlight why there is intense anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world
salon.com/2011/02/21/heartsandminds/

February 8 2011
Obama’s man in Cairo | No discussion of Omar Suleiman is complete without examining his brutal and repressive history
salon.com/2011/02/08/suleiman/

October 12 2010
They hate us for our occupations | A new study by a University of Chicago professor reveals the obvious about what actually causes terrorism
salon.com/2010/10/12/terrorism_28/

August 25 2010
An exciting new Muslim country to drone attack | Administration officials anonymously boast of preparations to escalate a bombing campaign in Yemen
salon.com/2010/08/25/yemen_4/

February 17 2010
Hillary Clinton gets tough with “military dictatorships” | Who is the target audience for the pretense that the U.S. will not tolerate dictatorships?
salon.com/2010/02/17/clinton_83/

December 21 2009
Cruise missile attacks in Yemen | The widely recognized causes of the 9/11 attacks seem stronger and more alive than ever
salon.com/2009/12/21/terrorism_12/

Mr. Greenwald, I am a great admirer of your work, and I generally agree with you at least 100%, but I am somewhat puzzled by your antipathy toward al-Sisi. Al-Sisi has adopted an orientation similar to that of the BRICS nations, in that he is insisting on developing his nation’s infrastructure and spurning the demands of the imperial IMF/World Bank system. Obama until recently had been encouraging the so-called Islamicist opposition to al-Sisi, as he has also done in Libya, Syria and other countries which had secular, nationalist leaders. Apparently he has concluded that this is a losing strategy. But I hope that you can see that the Islamicists have historically been a tool of the British in particular, who have used them to destabilize any Middle Eastern nation that was charting an independent course and attempting to become economically self-sufficient.

The establishment continues its kabuki theater, always pushing the idea to both Democrats and Republicans that their own leaders are at least a tolerable lesser evil. The Republicans in the populace are kept believing their representatives are hampered by the Dems from reducing the size of government, and the Democrats in the populace are kept believing that their representatives are hampered by the GOP from using the State’s power for uncorrupted good. But neither side in the establishment actually wants to diminish the corporatism and militarism of the State at all! They just want the public to be so sentimental and aroused in left/right loyalties that they (the public) can not resist identifying with the CARICATURES of these ideologies offered by the State theater, and thus protract the charade indefinitely – a charade which facilitates corruption and waste while claiming to be a debate on how best to avoid them.

And the establishment sells this by appealing to gut-level, base notions, like Republicans are more ‘macho’ war-enforcers and Democrats are ‘nanny-state’ lovers, for these are foundational caricatures which both sides (interestingly) want to believe, and which do contain a small kernel of truth – even though a less gracious perspective shows that many Fox News viewers are obviously dependent on the nanny-state and many MSNBC viewers are obviously neoliberal militarists. But the apparent ferocity of the theater leads the propagandized straight into dishonesty with themselves and lame excuses for their party, subdued in the single desire to humiliate the opponent at all costs.

And so we find the kabuki saying to the public “Obama is anti-war,” which is laughable on its face, YET BOTH DEMOCRATS *AND* REPUBLICANS WANT TO BELIEVE IT. But it is absurd. As Trevor Timm said yesterday:

“If Obama is an anti-war president, he’s the worst anti-war president in history. In the last six years, the Obama administration has bombed seven countries in the Middle East alone and armed countless more with tens of billions in dollars in weapons… Those clamoring for more war are detached from reality: the US is already escalating – not pulling back – its involvement across the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the president has quietly delayed pulling US troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year so they can continue special forces raids and drone strikes, despite loudly celebrating the supposed “end” of combat operations during the State of the Union in January. In Iraq, US forces escalated its airstrikes in the so-called battle to re-take Tikrit, which the New York Times editorial board decried as a folly, but received scant scrutiny elsewhere. The Pentagon also confirmed last week that they expect the Isis war to last ‘3+ years.'” (Trevor Timm)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/obama-anti-war-presidency-detached-from-reality

It’s nice to let the penny drop:
To see that we’ve been had.
The Democrat’s the play’s Good Cop,
The G.O.P., the Bad.
Trust them as you would a snake,
Be quite on guard, in fact.
Both the Cops are ‘on the take.’
The fight is just an act.

Right, because the regime that al-Sisi replaced was so friendly to gays.