F. William Engdahl Newsletter -- 18:06:2019

F. William Engdahl Newsletter -- 18:06:2019

Dear Reader,

In this selection for my complimentary newsletter I offer a section from my recent bestselling book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy…. It deals with the actual background actors who instigated the so-called Arab Spring and the little-known reason for the urgency by the Obama Administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to destroy Libya and Mohammar Qaddafi in particular and bring a CIA-steered Muslim Brotherhood into power across the Middle East. We are very much paying the costs of this criminal episode today in the form of millions of war refugees and terrorism. I hope you find it interesting and if you have not, please consider buying the book as well.

Until now despite the growing censorship of critical texts such as this in the internet and social media, I am able to offer my content without charge. If you are able please consider making a support contribution to keep this possible, via my PayPal here.

I thank you for your interest and support,

William Engdahl

www.williamengdahl.com

Chapter Fourteen:

NATO’s Arab Spring and Unintended Deadly Consequences

“Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances…Averting this contingency…will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.”

--Zbigniew Brzezinski, former foreign policy adviser to Presidential candidate Barack Obama

Drastic measures… 

The Bush-Cheney wars against Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 were a failure in every dimension. The staggering costs of the wars were dumped onto American taxpayers and indirectly to those trade surplus countries like China and Russia who bought hundreds of billions of dollars of US Government debt as the only “secure” haven for their massive trade dollar surpluses. In March 2007 the American “Sole Superpower” faced a profound, terrifying new challenge, this time from within.

The US financial system began a domino-style collapse as the market for fraudulent real estate loans, especially so-called “sub-prime” home loans, failed. It had been a speculation bubble like every bubble in US history, including the 1920’s Wall Street stock market bubble. Unlimited military spending for the expansion of the global domination of the USA was threatened.

By September 2008 it was clear to powerful circles in Washington and Wall Street that if drastic measures were not undertaken, the role of the USA as sole superpower would soon end in collapse.

To shift the global power calculus again to their favor, they needed drastic and bold measures. The response was a policy that was meant primarily to block an emerging Eurasian economic challenge from Russia and China.

The strategy involved inciting revolutions, later called Arab Spring, across the Islamic world to directly challenge the oil and energy flows of China and of Russia, each in different ways. It was also intended finally to open the staggering sovereign wealth of absolutist Arab oil monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and beyond, to Western financial domination, using the IMF as they had done so successfully in Latin America and Yugoslavia in the 1980’s.

Using their “free market” mantra that had seemed to work so well, they believed they could force open the vast wealth of Arab oil monarchies to looting by Wall Street and the City of London financial institutions. The people who dreamed it up clearly thought they were very intelligent. They weren’t.

New thirty years’ war

In 2008 the Pentagon released a document titled, 2008: Army Modernization Strategy. That document stated that the objective of US Army strategy was to span and dominate the entire universe, not just the planet. It called for “an expeditionary, campaign-quality Army capable of dominating across the full spectrum of conflict, at any time, in any environment and against any adversary—for extended periods of time... achieving Full Spectrum Dominance.” [i]

No other army in world history had had such ambitious goals, not even of Alexander of Macedonia. They aimed at control essentially of everything and everyone everywhere.

Most relevant, the policy paper stated that Army Modernization envisioned that the United States, for at least the next “thirty to forty years,” would be engaged in continuous wars to control raw materials. [ii] To control in order that potential challengers such as China and Russia would be kept in their place.

In a clear reference to China and Russia, the Pentagon’s strategic plan declared:  “We face a potential return to traditional security threats posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for depleting natural resources and overseas markets.” In terms of economic growth, the only “emerging near peer” on the planet in 2008 was China, which was looking everywhere for secure sources of oil, metals, and other raw materials to sustain its dramatic growth projections.

In terms of military power, the only potential “emerging near peer” would be Russia. Russia was the only power with a nuclear strike force capable of challenging NATO. US military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq following the onset of the 2001 War on Terror posed a certain conventional military challenge to China and Russia.

But short of a highly risky all-out nuclear war, something more diabolical was deemed necessary by the Pentagon planners. It was to be called the Arab Spring.

Consequences of stupidity

What unfolded after the launching of the Arab Spring revolutions in 2010 were the unintended consequences of policies not thought through in their complexity by who were essentially stupid people in Washington and NATO.

Real intelligence in politics as in science is the ability to recognize connections that are not necessarily obvious, relationships, seeing the inter-connectedness of all life, of peoples, of all wars. Real intelligence is the ability to understand how when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects all mankind destructively.

The strategists at the CIA, the State Department, at the Pentagon and White House were only capable of thinking in a one-dimensional way, like animals. They simply blacked out anything that showed how their actions and strategies were interconnected, viewing the complexity instead with narrow blinders, reduced to isolated atoms or singularities. That inability to appreciate the connectedness of all would ultimately “blowback” on the perpetrators themselves and on their succeeding generations. The consequence of their stupidity led the world to animal results, to bestiality, and on a scale that would resonate for decades if not centuries. They called that stupidity Arab Spring.

There was no intelligence behind the CIA’s strategy to use the Muslim Brotherhood, to pit Islamic warriors against Christians, fanatical Jihadists against other Islamic forces—Sunni against Shi’ite, Alawite or Sufi, Sunni Turks against Alawite Syrians, Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis against Wahhabite Sunnis or other ‘infidels.’ It was a stupidity that led to disaster on a scale unimaginable.

Instead, the policy of the United States might have encouraged real, peaceful development of nations in a climate of peace and cooperation, creating the conditions of economic growth that could serve as the natural cauldron to create a democratic process in nations with no exposure to such. That cooperation could have included with China and Russia, instead of encirclement, confrontation, chaos, and war.

That would be something different for a change. That could even lessen the hatred for America in the world. Tragically, Washington was deaf and blind to such ideas.

The CIA and other Western intelligence services believed that they could simply use the same template of Jihad they used in the 1980’s against the Soviets in Afghanistan with the Saudi-financed Osama bin Laden, scale it up, and detonate the entire Middle East in “democratic revolutions” that would merely replace one group of old tyrants with Washington’s newly favored choice, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Obama White House and Hillary Clinton’s State Department engaged members or backers of the Muslim Brotherhood at the highest levels, including key Brotherhood members in top policy posts at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and White House. Leading Muslim Brotherhood members were granted a VIP treatment by Homeland Security at US airports reserved for diplomats.[iii]

Israel and Saudi Arabia were deeply alarmed by that US shift to back the political Islam of the Muslim Brothers, to put it mildly. The self-confident Israelis of the 1990’s seemed now confused, lacking a clear strategy, fearful and aggressive in an increasingly futile manner. The peace faction of Israel’s old Labor Party had been decimated after September 11, 2001 with the onset of Washington’s War on Terror. Peace was replaced by a permanent state of war, war against Palestinians, against Libya, against Syria, and increasingly covert war against Washington. It was run by a militant Likud in their domination of internal Israeli politics from Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu.

The toll internally of thirteen years of constant war, fear of war, threats of war, by the Netanyahu government, had been severe as countless mass protests demonstrated. The result was an internal rotting of the Israeli economy, an exodus of its brightest youth, a polarization of her society.

For their part, the US military industry and their neo-conservative agents in government, and in Washington Think Tanks like RAND Corporation or Georgetown CSIS, thought they could again weaponize political Islam, this time to gain control of the entire world by encircling and with active Islamist revolts, by weakening China and Russia, the only potential contenders for global hegemony.

The Saudi Royal House and their Wahhabite allies in the monarchies of Kuwait and the Emirates such as Dubai, alarmed at the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood could be turned against their own rule, thought they could use their vast oil billions to dominate. Their strategy seemed to be to build new “Las Vegas” skyscrapers and glittering extravagant mosques around the world whether in Erdogan’s Turkey or in Syria or Central Asia, thereby “buy” control of the world and claw back gains made by Shi’ite Iran in Iraq and Syria since the disastrous unintended consequences of the earlier US military occupation after 2003. It was a silly strategy.

The secretive Muslim Brotherhood, with operations across the entire Islamic world, in Western Europe and even the United States, Central Asia, Russia and China, saw the chance finally to realize their Global Jihad. They began in Tunisia, then Egypt and on across the entire Arab Middle East, all with the full backing of the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The report of one Egyptian citizen on the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood rule there was emblematic:

They burn churches-80 to date. They kill Christians and steal their businesses. They kill policemen and army officers and mutilate the officers and soldiers and then cut their bodies and drag them in the streets. They lynch cadets on vacation. They lie them on the ground, tie their hands behind their backs and then shoot them in the back of their heads at 20 centimeters distance. They throw children from the top of buildings. They use orphan children, five and six year old, as human shields. They rob banks and commercial centers, killing the employees. They bomb government buildings all over Egypt. They stop fire trucks from reaching fires that are started by them. They invade universities trying to disrupt studies and exams. They beat up professors and teachers…[iv]

As the violence, done in the name of Allah, spread like a brushfire, children of the “wrong faith,” deemed infidels, were decapitated. Women were brutally gang-raped then murdered, all in the name of Jihad. The Jihadists were serious believers, at least in killing other humans.

There were combined but, at the same time, conflicting goals of a universal Sharia, of the attempt at geopolitical containment of Russia and China, of Washington’s Full-Spectrum Dominance.

All the major players in the great game of religious wars were soon to realize that their dreams of empire and power were turning into catastrophic nightmares as the deadly unintended consequences of the “Arab Spring” began to become manifest.

The brilliant CIA strategists, in truth, were not so brilliant; they were shallow and arrogant and, ultimately, blind to the complex consequences of igniting the fires of religious hatred.

Unleashing Global Jihad

The Western intelligence services that had used political Islam as a weapon since the Afghanistan war in the 1980’s, decided during the earliest days of the Obama Presidency, from Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the CIA, that they were ready to massively scale up their use of Islamic terrorism or Jihad (depending on one’s perspective), and set the entire Islamic world afire in an Arc of Crisis, from Afghanistan to Egypt to Libya to Morocco.

The aim would be to create chaos and ungovernability across the entirety of Eurasia, from the Caucasus to Syria to Xinjiang in China, thereby to destabilize the emerging economic and political bonds between Russia, China, Iran and the countries of Central Asia—Brzezinski’s much-feared “anti-hegemon” coalition that was becoming all too real.

The Pentagon plan was first set off in the North African land of Tunisia. The CIA and State Department spent millions of dollars before training Tunisian student activists in protest techniques using the Belgrade Otpor  CANVAS organization. [v] On December 17, 2010 mass protests across Tunisia against the government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali exploded. In the western media it was called the Jasmine Revolution after  the country’s national flower.

In a January 13, 2011 speech in Doha Qatar, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that Washington was on the side of the growing anti-regime protestors. Referring to the Arab Middle East she said, “…people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order. They are demanding reform…the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand.” [vi]

Secretary Clinton made another revealing reference in her speech. She stated, “People are… profoundly concerned about the trends in many parts of the broader Middle East, and what the future holds.” [vii]

The expression “broader Middle East” was a reformulation of a project proposed under the Bush-Cheney administration called the Greater Middle East Project. It was the Washington neo-conservative blueprint for transformation of the political and religious balance of power of the entire Islamic world from Afghanistan and Pakistan on to Morocco on Africa’s west coast.[viii] The Greater Middle East Project was being implemented under the guise of the Arab Spring by the Obama Administration.