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In the summertime, people flock to Montreux, Switzerland, to follow the jazz festival. This week, though, the 'performance' is by a positively un-swinging lot, part of the (in theory) very serious Geneva 2 conference on Syria. What is Geneva 2 for? It has nothing to do with 'peace' . It won't yield an international deal to end the Syrian tragedy. The horrible war facts on the ground will remain facts, and horrible; many perpetrators won't be gathering in Montreux. Syrian civil society has not even been invited. And then the whole charade degenerated into pitiful parody even before it started.

Meet 'good' and 'bad' Al-Qaeda Time to break it down. Washington ruled that Iran cannot be in Montreux because it supports Assad. It's as simple as that. Washington dictating to the UN is the norm. Washington dictating to the Exiled Syrian 'Opposition' is Also the norm. Everyone is a puppet in this lethal comedy. As for Western spin doctors, they are dizzier than flies over corpses. As Part of the New Western Myth That the Saudi Arabia-Sponsored Islamic Front - Last September Formed Against the US-backed Supreme Military Council - are nothing but 'Al-Qaeda good' , now we have TOP 'Rebels' routinely acknowledging to Western corporate media they are, well, Al-Qaeda. Tens of thousands of foreign jihadis using Al-Qaeda's network of safe houses in Turkey - well, that's not such a big deal. As the Narrative Goes, 'our New friends' in the Islamic Front are just 'conservative Salafi Muslims' . What if they are fond of the odd torture binge and will think nothing of slaying the odd Shiite or Christian? Not such a big deal. As for the 'bad' Al-Qaeda gang - from Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - They are on A roll. After all, they are the ones with fighting experience / leverage on the ground. And when push comes to shove, they just run yet another ring around clueless Western necks. Take Ahrar al-Sham. They now lead the Islamic Front - and talk to the Americans. And guess what; they're going to Montreux! The icing on this cake is Takfiri That, Ultimately, Their "interests" are Being Defended by no less than US Secretary of State John Kerry. Washington promoting al-Qaeda? Well, we've seen that movie before.

Washington is the Selling Fiction it is 'leading' Geneva 2 to 'reconstruct' Syria. This is utter nonsense. Theoretically - and even that is still extremely debatable - the Obama administration's core interest in Southwest Asia is to negotiate a very complex deal with Iran, which will take most of 2014. Ultimately, this whole charade is between Washington and Tehran. The US Navy will not make Assad 'go' Anytime soon - or Ever; everything so, in Theory, Remains on the table.

Following a 13 year rampage that has reduced large swathes of Central Asia and the Middle East to anarchy and ruin, the US military juggernaut has finally met its match on a small peninsula in southeastern Ukraine that serves as the primary operating base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is the door through which Washington must pass if it intends to extend its forward-operating bases throughout Eurasia, seize control of vital pipeline corridors and resources, and establish itself as the dominant military/economic power-player in the new century. Unfortunately, for Washington, Moscow has no intention of withdrawing from the Crimea or relinquishing control of its critical military outpost in Sevastopol. That means that the Crimea–which has been invaded by the Cimmerians, Bulgars, Greeks, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, and Germans–could see another conflagration in the months ahead, perhaps, triggering a Third World War, the collapse of the existing global security structure, and a new world order, albeit quite different from the one imagined by the fantasists at the Council on Foreign Relations and the other far-right think tanks that guide US foreign policy and who are responsible for the present crisis.

How Washington conducts itself in this new conflict will tell us whether the authors of the War on Terror–that public relations hoax that concealed the goals of eviscerated civil liberties and one world government–were really serious about actualizing their NWO vision or if it was merely the collective pipedream of corporate CEOs and bored bankers with too much time on their hands. In the Crimea, the empire faces a real adversary, not a disparate group of Kalashinov-waving jihadis in flip-flops. This is the Russian Army; they know how to defend themselves and they are prepared to do so. That puts the ball in Obama’s court. It’s up to him and his crackpot “Grand Chessboard” advisors to decide how far they want to push this. Do they want to intensify the rhetoric and ratchet up the sanctions until blows are exchanged, or pick up their chips and walk away before things get out of hand? Do they want to risk it all on one daredevil roll of the dice or move on to Plan B? That’s the question. Whatever US policymakers decide, one thing is certain, Moscow is not going to budge. Their back is already against the wall. Besides, they know that a lunatic with a knife is on the loose, and they’re ready to do whatever is required to protect their people. If Washington decides to cross that line and provoke a fight, then there’s going to trouble. It’s as simple as that. Perma-hawk, John McCain thinks that Obama should take off the gloves and show Putin who’s boss. In an interview with TIME magazine McCain said “This is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly…We need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now.” “High cost” says McCain, but high cost for who?

What McCain fails to realize is that this is not Afghanistan and Obama is not in a spitting match with puppet Karzai. Leveling sanctions against Moscow will have significant consequences, the likes of which could cause real harm to US interests. Did we mention that “ExxonMobil’s biggest non-US oil project is a collaboration with Russia’s Rosneft in the Arctic, where it has billions of dollars of investments at stake.” What if Putin decides that it’s no longer in Moscow’s interest to honor contracts that were made with US corporations? What do you think the reaction of shareholders will be to that news? And that’s just one example. There are many more. Any confrontation with Russia will result in asymmetrical attacks on the dollar, the bond market, and oil supplies. Maybe the US could defeat Russian forces in the Crimea. Maybe they could sink the fleet and rout the troops, but there’ll be a heavy price to pay and no one will be happy with the outcome.

As jihadists everywhere celebrate their stunning victories in Mosul and Tikrit, as well as the abject retreat of the United States from Afghanistan, we can only hope that they accord due credit to a man who was indispensable to their success. Now an obscure businessman seeking crumbs from the table as an “international consultant,” Zalmay Khalilzad was in his day an imperial envoy sent by the United States to decree the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. His decisions, most especially his selection of puppet overseers to administer the conquered lands, were uniformly disastrous, contributing in large degree to the catastrophes of today. To be sure, many others among the neocon clique and their liberal-democrat interventionist allies deserve a place on the jihadist honor roll of useful idiots, but few contributed as much as Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former academic who selected Hamid Karzai and Nuri al-Maliki as suitable leaders for their respective countries. Initially promoted up the ranks of the national-security clerisy by Albert Wohlstetter, the dark eminence of neoconservative theology who also mentored neocon godfather Richard Perle, Khalilzad found a useful niche in such company as the only Muslim any of them knew, ready to spout their militarist nostrums at the flutter of a grant check. I myself got an early intimation of Khalilzad’s tenuous grasp on military reality in 1981, when he assured me in all seriousness that the Afghan mujahideen were enjoying great success in disabling Soviet tanks by thrusting thick carpets into their treads. During the administration of the elder Bush, he worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. In 1992 he wrote the initial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which became an iconic neoconservative text.

Khalilzad’s leap out of relative obscurity came with the post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, an Afghan Loya Jirga assembly indicated by a clear majority that they wanted their aged king, Zahir Shah, to return from his long exile in Rome to preside over the government. This was not to the taste of presidential special envoy, and later ambassador, Khalilzad, who importuned Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to prevent the Shah from leaving Rome as he meanwhile brusquely informed the Loya Jirga that their leader was to be Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of modest reputation. Afghan politicians of all stripes concluded that Khalilzad had purposefully picked someone with little internal support in order to ensure that his own authority remained unchallenged. This authority he exercised by operating as supreme warlord, rewarding or threatening the lesser strongmen who had emerged in various provincial power bases with grants of aid or threats of airstrikes from the bombers and Predator drones at his command. Afghans who could foresee the inevitable consequence of this laissez-faire policy toward the universally hated warlords did their best to persuade Khalilzad to change course. One of them later related to me that he suggested that Khalilzad put “ten of them in handcuffs and ship them off to the International Court at The Hague for crimes against humanity.”

“I’m going to bring them in and demobilize them,” countered Khalilzad confidently. “No, Zal,” replied the Afghan sadly, “you’re going to legitimize them.” So it transpired. While Karzai presided, in his self-designed costume of furry hat and cape, over a regime of staggering corruption, large swaths of Afghanistan fell under the control of characters like Hazrat Ali, a ruffian of pliable loyalties who used American support to gain control of the eastern city of Jalalabad and installed himself, with Khalilzad’s approval, as security chief of Nangahar Province. He then began vying with fellow warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzada for the title of world’s leading heroin trafficker (a practice both men denied engaging in) while delivering hapless victims labeled “high value targets” to the torture cells of Bagram or the oubliette of Guantánamo. In inevitable consequence, disgusted Afghans rallied to a resurgent Taliban. The rest is history.

Now, in the latest example of just how tenuous Washington’s grip on the region has become, the Iraqi parliament's Security and Defense Committee is calling for the review and cancellation of Baghdad’s security agreement with the US.  “The government and parliament need to review the agreement signed with the United States on security because the United States does not seriously care about its fulfillment,” committee member Hamid al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni lawmaker told Sputnik on Wednesday. “We demand that it be annulled,” he added. 

and in the fight against terrorism in Iraq," another committee member said earlier this week.  Recall that this is precisely what we said would happen once we learned in September that Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria had set up a joint intelligence sharing cell in Baghdad. It was clear from the beginning that Tehran saw an opportunity to consolidate its power in Iraq and preserve its influence in Syria by convincing Vladimir Putin that Russia could replace the US as Mid-East superpower puppet master by helping Tehran to defeat the insurgency in Syria and boot the US from Iraq once and for all. Moscow will of course get a warm reception from Iraqi lawmakers thanks to the fact that many MPs are loyal to Iran.  This makes sense logistically as well. Once the Russians and Iranians have retaken Aleppo (which admittedly is taking a while), they can push east towards Raqqa and from there, move straight across the border, effectively pinching ISIS between an advance from the west and Iran’s Shiite militias already operating in Iraq. Of course that will entail some measure of cooperation with the US, France, Britain, and, once in Iraq, the Peshmerga. It is at that point that Washington’s resolve when it comes to preserving whatever charade is being perpetrated in Raqqa will be put to the ultimate test.  In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the US responds to a move by Baghdad to nullify the security agreement.

It now appears that the stage is set for Baghdad to claim that the US, like Turkey, is illegitimately occupying the country (again). If Iraq nullifies the security agreement and moves to invite the Russians into the country, the US will be forced to either pack up and leave, cooperate with Moscow, or fight for the right to preserve American influence. 

Every political junkie on the planet has to be glued to the ongoing Brazilian House of Cards, consistently offering an unparalleled feast of cheap thrills.The latest cliffhanger was the leak of a conversation between one of the key operators involved in the oil giant Petrobras corruption scandal and a senator and short-lived Minister of Planning in the usurper interim government currently replacing President Dilma Rousseff while she is undergoing an impeachment trial by the Senate.  Call the leak a short autopsy of what from the beginning should have been defined as golpeachment; a mix of coup (“golpe”, in Portuguese) and impeachment, which took place in a one/two sequential vote in the Brazilian Congress and Senate, as a notorious congregation of crooks investigated for myriad offenses and crimes seized power in Brasilia in a full-fledged Buffon’s Opera. I call their scam Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic (PBSR).  

The leak/autopsy duly unveiled how the PBSR cancer progressed.  One of the key plotters outlines the coup; stresses how it should protect Brazilian plutocracy/kleptocracy from unintended consequences of the ongoing, two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation; and how the Left – from President Rousseff to Lula and the Workers’ Party – should be criminalized for good. 

The rest would be history, including the demolition of recently acquired social and workers’ rights via the imposition of a neoliberal restoration; total reversion in foreign policy, with geopolitical and geoeconomic relations back to a colonized mindset; and the reestablishment of a conservative, neoliberal, rentier hegemonic class lording over a socially-oriented, democratic society. That fits in with the current Brazilian Congress and Senate dominated by “BBB” interests. “BBB” stands for Beef (the powerful agribusiness lobby); Bullet (the weapons and private security complex); and Bible (evangelical fanatics), all supported by corporate media. Many of these unsavory characters are connected and/or represent the toxic Brazilian rural aristocracy – which are in fact heirs to nobility titles handed over to slave owners. It was going all so swell after only a few days – even with the former head of the lower house, notorious crook Eduardo Cunha, temporarily sidelined; Cunha – the ringleader of a campaign financing scam inside Congress – de facto had become the Prime Minister of the puppet former Vice-President and current, interim President Michel Temer. 

On June 28th 2009, Honduran soldiers marched into the bedroom of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya while he was in his pajamas and forced him at gunpoint to walk into a waiting jet and exiled him to Costa Rica. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the ouster of the Honduran President as a coup as she called for “the full restoration of democratic order in Honduras.” The “democratic order” Clinton was suggesting was not to restore Zelaya as the legitimate president but a president (or more like a U.S. Puppet) that Washington finds suitable for its interests. Roberto Micheletti replaced Zelaya as an interim president. Micheletti lived in the U.S. (Florida) early in his life. Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras Manual Zelaya is clear while most of the main-stream media ignores Clinton’s involvement in destroying yet another democracy in Central America by the U.S. government. Central America has experienced U.S. orchestrated coups and civil wars in the past including Guatemala (1954), Costa Rica (mid 1950’’s and 1970-71) and civil wars in Nicaragua (1981-90) and El Salvador (1981-92).

House Speaker John Boehner and his cronies removed North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones from the House Financial Services Committee in late 2012, as part of a purge that removed Republicans who were not all in for Wall Street -- and for Boehner's brand of "service" to the industries that are supposed to be regulated by Congress -- from the one panel with the power to hold bankers and brokers to account. But Jones, who had opposed bank bailouts and favored Wall Street regulation, did not go quietly. He spoke up about the purge and made little secret of his sense that -- though he had split with Boehner on a number of issues -- his biggest "sin" in the eyes of the party leadership was his refusal to bow to the demands of big campaign donors. “This whole place is all about money. Money is more important than policy,” complained Jones, who has in recent years co-sponsored most major pieces of campaign-finance reform legislation in the House -- including a call for a constitutional amendment designed to restore the ability of federal, state and local officials to regulate campaign spending.

The congressman's bluntness did not go over well with the masters of the universe on Wall Street. So, this spring, they set out to purge Walter Jones from Congress altogether. They found a consummate DC insider with close ties to the financial-services industry, Taylor Griffin, and filled the challenger's campaign treasury with PAC checks from J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, as well as political powerbrokers like former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour and Wayne Berman of the Blackstone Group. It did not stop there. Jones' independence extended far beyond debates over Wall Street bailouts and regulation. The Republican is a social and economic conservative -- make that a social and economic very conservative -- but he has repeatedly broken with the party establishment on issues of war and peace, privacy rights, trade policy and budgets. He even voted against proposals by the darling of Wall Street and the party establishment, Congressman Paul Ryan

Bush administration aides and apologists rushed in with public statements and "independent" expenditures to attack Jones for his opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for his refusal to go along with moves that might lead to wars with Iran and other countries. Former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer gave his enthusiastic backing to Griffin, as did former national security adviser Juan Zarate. Sarah Palin, one of the party's most consistent militarists, came in big for Griffin, who hailed her as an "old friend." A neo-conservative group, the Emergency Committee For Israel, spent at least $250,000 on ads that claimed Jones "preaches American decline." What Jones actually said was that, “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.” At the same time, the wealthy champions of Ryan's crony-capitalist approach to budgeting were in with big money for TV ads and direct mail from the "Ending Spending Action Fund" -- a super PAC backed by billionaire businessman Joe Ricketts. By a lot of DC measures, Jones should have been doomed.

What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election? I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA a while back whether arming rebel forces – pretty much the agency’s signature strategy — had ever worked in the past. He was told that it almost never has. But then in June, once the political pressure for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that — sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military. Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway.

Obama’s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan. During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama’s vow to re-engage in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain. What’s not clear to this day is precisely when Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless. By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?

But one month into his presidency, Obama announced he was sending more troops there – 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must — an exit strategy – he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls shot up. Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans. There were public signs in November 2009 that Obama was “rethinking” his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal, wrote that Obama actually began a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed” even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the “main point” his guests tried to make was “that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,” Garry Wills wrote  later.)

UPDATES: Well known writers Thierry Meyssan and Kevin Barrett see the “terrorist” attach on Charlie Hebdo as a false flag attack. See http://www.voltairenet.org/article186441.html [1] and http://presstv.com/Detail/2015/01/10/392426/Planted-ID-card-exposes-Paris-false-flag [2] Update: According to news reports, one of the accused in the attack on Charlie Hebdo when hearing that he was being sought for the crime turned himself in to police with an ironclad alibi. https://www.intellihub.com/18-year-old-charlie-hebdo-suspect-surrenders-police-claims-alibi/[3] According to news reports, police found the ID of Said Kouachi at the scene of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Does this sound familiar? Remember, authorities claimed to have found the undamaged passport of one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers among the massive pulverized ruins of the twin towers. Once the authorities discover that the stupid Western peoples will believe any transparent lie, the authorities use the lie again and again. The police claim to have discovered a dropped ID is a sure indication that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an inside job and that people identified by NSA as hostile to the Western wars against Muslims are going to be framed for an inside job designed to pull France firmly back under Washington’s thumb. http://www.wfmz.com/shooting-at-french-satirical-magazine-office/30571524 There are two ways to look at the alleged terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

One is that in the English speaking world, or much of it, the satire would have been regarded as “hate speech,” and the satirists arrested. But in France Muslims are excluded from the privileged category, took offense at the satire, and retaliated. Why would Muslims bother? By now Muslims must be accustomed to Western hypocrisy and double standards. Little doubt that Muslims are angry that they do not enjoy the protections other minorities receive, but why retaliate for satire but not for France’s participation in Washington’s wars against Muslims in which hundreds of thousands have died? Isn’t being killed more serious than being satirized? Another way of seeing the attack is as an attack designed to shore up France’s vassal status to Washington. The suspects can be both guilty and patsies. Just remember all the terrorist plots created by the FBI that served to make the terrorism threat real to Americans. http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/22/human-rights-watch-all-of-the-high-profi [4] France is suffering from the Washington-imposed sanctions against Russia. Shipyards are impacted from being unable to deliver Russian orders due to France’s vassalage status to Washington, and other aspects of the French economy are being adversely impacted by sanctions that Washington forced its NATO puppet states to apply to Russia.

This week the French president said that the sanctions against Russia should end (so did the German vice-chancellor). This is too much foreign policy independence on France’s part for Washington. Has Washington resurrected “Operation Gladio,” which consisted of CIA bombing attacks against Europeans during the post-WW II era that Washington blamed on communists and used to destroy communist influence in European elections? Just as the world was led to believe that communists were behind Operation Gladio’s terrorist attacks, Muslims are blamed for the attacks on the French satirical magazine. The Roman question is always: Who benefits? The answer is: Not France, not Muslims, but US world hegemony. US hegemony over the world is what the CIA supports. US world hegemony is the neoconservative-imposed foreign policy of the US.

Donald Trump has doubled down on his statement at a town hall last week that he aims to be neutral in his comments on the Israel/Palestine conflict so as not to injure his ability as president to negotiate a deal between the parties. On Meet the Press yesterday he pointedly did not buy into the Republican “orthodoxy” on Israel, saying he’s very pro-Israel but peace there is the “ultimate deal” and he wasn’t going to prejudice matters.

Trump surely senses that he can gain by exhibiting independence of the Israel lobby. Here are some other straws in the wind: –A new poll shows that the number of Americans holding a favorable view of Israel has declined 16 percent in the last year, to 59 percent. And in the same interval those holding a favorable view of the Palestinians has surged 42 percent, to 25 percent, and even Iran has had an image-makeover, with 16 percent of Americans regarding the country favorably, up considerably. Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy says the data reveal “a stunning turn in U.S. public opinion.” –The MSM are reflecting the thaw. Last week Newsweek ran a defiant piece by Hanin Zoabi, the Palestinian Israeli legislator who has been suspended from the Knesset as a troublemaker, explaining Palestinian violence as a response to occupation and discrimination. Boldly titled, “Why Israel Is Fighting the Indigenous Palestinians,” it included these lines: “The occupier does not have the right to self-defense. We, the occupied, have the full and only right to fight it, by all means recognized within the framework of international law.”

I throw in these stray facts to say that American public opinion is changing (as is Jewish opinion) and there is political hay to be made of the changes. Donald Trump surely senses this, in his populist campaign. And so he is preparing to run against Marco Rubio by saying that Rubio is Sheldon Adelson’s “perfect little puppet”, and preparing to set up a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton in which he can call out her beholdenness to the billionaire Haim Saban. In his reissued autobiography of last fall, Bernie Sanders refers with disdain to Sheldon Adelson and the “Adelson primary” on the very first page. But that’s the last we hear of it: Adelson, who is in bed with Hillary Clinton’s good friend Haim Saban. Sanders is ignoring a populist political opportunity that Donald Trump has seized upon. Go figure