Israel Turns to Greece, Deal Cut to Bring Putin Back, Gut US Prestige and Power
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
When fears of losing the Jewish vote pushed Obama and Secretary Clinton into promising Netanyahu an American veto of Palestine’s bid for UN membership, as is the norm, the real issues weren’t seen. The big loser, at first anyway, will be America. Payoffs, being cut in on the oil and gas deals between Cyprus, Israel and Greece will make key Democrats “well.” We call that bribery.
Israel has played the GOP into total self destruction. Now a party totally under Israeli control, the GOP is fielding a hopeless gang of losers for the presidency but can expect gains in both the house and senate. The reasons? Israel wants America weak and indecisive, seeing opportunities for its friends to do well while crashing the dollar and splitting the European Union.
Israel also believes it is building a new alliance, Russia and India, betting that America will disappear into the “sands of time.” Pushing them is the aggressive stand Turkey has taken, its navy off Cypriot shores today, in a bid to counter Israeli claims to vast gas reserves under the Mediterranean, some potentially Turkish but many clearly owned by the new Palestinian state that Israel is working to block.
To secure control of Cyprus, Israel turned to Greece, blocking a gas pipeline that would have gone there, leaving Israel as the only potential market for gas and oil the projected multi-trillion dollar finds in the Mediterranean.
Israel sold out Cyprus too.
In the process, Israel turned to Greece, asking them to intercede with Russia, promising them America’s now empty place at the table as arbiter of Middle East affairs. Turkey’s major strategic asset, control of the Bosporus, threatens Russia’s plans to replace America as the major naval power in the Mediterranean.
Thus, the chess pieces move and the pawns, some thinking of themselves as kings, prepare to fall.
Terrorism as Policy
Have things gone this far? Standing by Israel, America will lose Turkey as an ally. With that, the conflict in Iraq is likely to escalate, helped by a strong Israeli presence with the PKK in Kurdistan and an extensive terrorist presence around Mosul, one responsible for hundreds of bombings used to keep US forces in place as an offset to Iranian influence in the area. Israel has been, for years, the prime mover in the attacks in Iraq blamed on Sunni and Shiite groups.
Similarly, Israel has used the PKK, the communist Kurdish rebels, to stage terror attacks inside Turkey and recently threatened to begin another terror campaign. Israel openly admitted its role in PKK terror, part of its odd history of “friendship” with Turkey, befriending the army and intelligence services while helping the military in Turkey destabilize the civilian government.
Erdogan just finished pushing the US into giving Turkey Predator drones to use against Israeli backed rebels. This is America’s attempt at maintaining some influence and playing the “brinksmanship” game. As reported in the Jerusalem Post:
Jerusalem Post
The US military flies unarmed surveillance Predators based in Iraq and shares images and vital intelligence with Turkey to aid Ankara as it battles Kurdish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) rebels who have camps in northern Iraq.
Erdogan, speaking to reporters in New York on Friday where he attended a UN General Assembly, said Turkey has offered to buy or lease the drones and that details are being worked out.
US troops are due to leave Iraq at the end of 2011. Turkish officials have expressed concern the PKK, which has bases in northern Iraq, might exploit any security vacuum left by the departure of the US military from Iraq.
Security experts say Turkey is very dependent on the Predators and other spy aircraft in its fight against the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
Turkey, a NATO ally for the United States, agreed earlier this month to host a NATO early-warning radar system as part of the defenses of the Western military alliance.
The Turkish military has launched air strikes and artillery raids against suspected PKK hideouts in northern Iraq in retaliation for a spate of militant attacks inside Turkey, despite opposition from Iraq’s regional Kurdish government.
Erdogan said such operations will continue until the PKK lays down its weapons. Iraqi Kurdish government officials have called for the issue to be resolved through diplomatic means.
“Our decision is clear. We can not back off, we can not think about ending the cross-border operations,” Erdogan said.
“If the terrorist organization can manage to lay down weapons, naturally the operations will also stop.”
There has been an increase in rhetoric by Turkey of a potential cross-border land operation into northern Iraq, possibly in cooperation with Iran, which is locked in its own conflict with an offshoot of the PKK.
The PKK has fought for Kurdish self-rule for more than 27 years in a conflict that has killed 40,000 people.
What is not said in the Jerusalem Post is that the PKK has been controlled by Israel since its origins much as Israel controls similar groups in Bahrain and Yemen along with the Boko Harum in Nigeria. All are said to be “Al Qaeda” franchises, a claim made often of the new Libyan government. A long time joke in the region is that the organization known as Al Qaeda, which is attractive to so many younger Islamic extremists angry at the west, has never existed.
When examined carefully, all “Al Qaeda” attacks have served the foreign policy needs of Israel, from 9/11 to 7/7 to Mumbai, always timed to support western intervention, strain relations between Pakistan and India or to, more often than not, enhance the marketability of Israeli defense technology firms who invariably show up the day after any attack, marketing their wares.
Nigeria just had one of those experiences, no, actually two. More are coming.
When the trail of the Detroit “crotch bomber” led to Israeli based security companies, first in helping the “bomber” reach Detroit and then in marketing $2 billion dollars of defective scanners that leaked dangerous ionizing radiation in America airports, supplying both “the disease” and “the cure,” this time the trail went directly to Michael Chertoff, former Bush Homeland Security chief and his friends.
From Mother Jones
Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the “big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer” was “Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?”
Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, “You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out.”…
As I documented in my book The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11, airport security has always been compromised by corporate interests.When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
… Yesterday, the London Independent reported on “authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation.” A British defense-research firm reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting “low-density” materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids—precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt “a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery”—all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan. According to the Washington Post:
Chertoff’s advocacy for the technology dates back to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government’s first batch of the scanners—five from California-based Rapiscan Systems.
Today, 40 body scanners are in use at 19 U.S. airports. The number is expected to skyrocket at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration this week said it will order 300 more machines.
In the summer, TSA purchased 150 machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds.
The Washington Examiner last week ran down an entire list of all the former Washington politicians and staff members who are now part of what it calls the “full-body scanner lobby”:
One manufacturer, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is American Science & Engineering, Inc. AS&E has retained the K Street firm Wexler & Walker to lobby for “federal deployment of security technology by DHS and DOD.” Individual lobbyists on this account include former TSA deputy administration Tom Blank, who also worked under House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Chad Wolf—former assistant administrator for policy at TSA, and a former aide to Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., a top Senate appropriator and the ranking Republican on the transportation committee—is also lobbying on AS&E’s behalf.
Smiths Detection, another screening manufacturer, employs top transportation lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates, including Kevin Patrick Kelly, a former top staffer to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who sits on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee. Smiths also retains former congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md.
Former Sen. Al D’Amato, R-N.Y., represents L3 Systems, about which Bloomberg wrote today: “L-3 has ‘developed a more sophisticated system that could prevent smuggling of almost anything on the body,’ said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., who has a ‘hold’ rating on the stock.”
Now the role Israel has taken on has gone much further, no longer satisfied with “disease related marketing,” Israel has been able to orchestrate itself into a virtual stranglehold on American politics, total control of the GOP, the creation of an extremist branch, the “Tea Party” by its Koch Brothers organization and now the ability to blackmail the president into what can be described as nothing short of “historical suicide.”
In the midst of an “Arab Spring,” which now includes massive demonstrations across Israel itself, its Jewish population raised to political awareness of decades of phony manipulation, staged “threats” and imaginary enemies. What happens when the people of Israel learn the truth, that their own government is responsible for many of the rocket attacks and suicide bombings over the years?
Israeli’s are already more than aware that their financial future, the huge wealth of Israel has left the majority of even Jews in substandard housing and employment. All they have to do is look at America’s bleak outlook to see what is in store for them.
Israeli Bungling
Israeli bungling in Egypt, their operation of Mubarak as a “hand puppet” has brought a real security threat to their door. Mubarak’s unwillingness to respond to human rights abuses in Gaza by the Israeli military cost him his rule and probably his life. The Egyptian people, now impatiently waiting for the military to step aside, stand ready to abrogate their peace treaty with Israel.
Turkey’s Erdogan, enraged at Israel over last summers murder of 9 Turkish nationals during the Mavi Marmara affair, just days ago gutted Turkey’s military of its long time Israeli influence. Dozens of top officers, long benefiting from Israeli “largess,” kickbacks on military contracts and “secular pleasures” that Israel doles out to their friends, “pleasures” long enjoyed by many in the Pentagon and Congress, those officers are gone.
What was Israel’s bungling? It is one thing executing peace activists on the open sea. Israel was able to quash a UN investigation. However, in doing so, they insulted Turkish national pride.
Further, when Israel was caught attempting to cover their tracks, phony radio traffic, films of their victims peppered with faulty CGI (computer generated images), third rate video alteration not dissimilar to the bin Laden messages generated “on demand” in much the say manner as the now “highly suspect” terror attacks such as the London 7/7 bombings.
John Anthony Hill’s film, “Ripple Effect,” that led to his extradition, trial and exoneration in Britain, a film that categorically proves the 7/7 attacks in London to have been politically theatrical “false flag terror” can be seen here on VT. Israel had already discredited itself with areas of the world that have wider access to press with its release of poorly produced bin Laden videos. Here from Gordon Duff at VT and Arnaud de Borchgrave at UPI, a timely piece on the death of Osama bin Laden, not the more recent “re-death” but one a bit more credible.
[youtube YToIN12NOsI]
Israel’s interference on behalf of both Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt has proven fatal. Though suppressed in the western press, these acts and other “bungling” has left Israel more isolated than ever in its history.
Thus, Israel Turns To the Soviet Union, Sorry, “Russia”
With a powerful US fleet in the Mediterranean, US influence in Egypt, backed by Israel’s secret control of Mubarak and key Egyptian military and intelligence leaders, the military partnership between Israel and Turkey and weak and corrupt governments across the region, only Iraq and Iran remained as global influences, not real threats to Israel, long under American protection, but threats to Israel’s covert policy of global manipulation.
Israel had little power over President Carter, in fact he is now considered an enemy of the Jewish people by many Zionist groups. Reagan was capable of dictating to Israel though his vice president, George H. W. Bush had a long history of personal financial intrigues involving Israel and had allowed the Mossad to penetrate the highest levels of the CIA under his tenure as director.
Israel tried to remove President Clinton, using Monica Lewinsky and their control of the GOP, with the Newt Gingrich/Rupert Murdoch partnership gutting America’s independence with their quasi-theatrical “neocon” movement. The issues were never religious or ethnic but rather meant to set the stage for a global currency destabilization that would undermine democratic movements around the world. “Iran-Contra” was part of it for sure, removing the Soviet Union was another.
A more predictable enemy was needed and the Soviets had proven far too democratic and flexible under Gorbachev.
The rest was easy. With the mechanisms in place, the drug dealing and arms trading of Iran Contra, the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan as “fall guys” and CIA asset Osama bin Laden as the “cardboard Lothario” evil doer, only a “Pearl Harbour” type event as outlined by the neocon group, PNAC (Project for a New American Century) was needed.
The rigged election of 2000, putting a weakling president in office, totally surrounded by Zionist operatives, allowed “the plan” to move forward, one meant to bankrupt America while destroying Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, leaving a power vacuum for a globalist agenda easily controlled through timed assassinations, a car bombing here and there and the looting of the world’s financial institutions.
Israel Flunks
Though the billions in drug money is still flowing from Iraq and America is still seemingly military strong though politically and economically castrated, Israel is worse off than ever. Iran is still there, overtly “non-nuclear” but, according to some insiders, holding dozens of advanced nuclear weapons bought from “the Stans” and more than capable of delivering them. Israel is stuck trying to sell the idea of an Iranian nuclear program based on medical isotope enrichment, a story nobody is buying, while Iran may well have long had a nuclear arsenal they would never be able to use.
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Israel’s nuclear arsenal, used to threaten Western Europe, is even more worthless, a waste of resources that has made Mordechai Vanunu a world hero. Back in 2002, Foreign Correspondent (ABC, Australia) interviewed Israeli historian Martin Van Cleveld on his idea of two states based on the 1967 borders:
Interview with Martin van Creveld
Broadcast: 20/03/2002
Reporter: Jennifer Byrne
Professor Martin van Creveld, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel’s most prominent military historian. In this interview with Jennifer Byrne he claims that despite the recent increase in Israel’s military operations, the huge Israeli defence forces will inevitably lose to the Palestinians.
Transcript
Byrne: Thanks for joining us tonight on Foreign Correspondent. How has it come to this, Martin… how is it that the mighty Israeli army – one of the world’s most powerful – with its helicopter gunships, with its tanks, with it’s missiles, can be losing to this relatively small, relatively under-armed if fanatical group of Palestinians?
Van Creveld: The same thing has happened to the Israeli army as happened to all the rest that have tried over the last sixty years. Basically it’s always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself. If you behave like a coward then you are going to become cowardly – it’s only a question of time. The same happened to the British when they were here… the same happened to the French in Algeria… the same happened to the Americans in Vietnam… the same happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan… the same happened to so many people that I can’t even count them.
Byrne: : Martin you used the word ‘cowardly’ yet what we’ve seen tonight – these commando units, the anti-terrorist squads – these aren’t cowardly people.
Van Creveld: I agree with you. They are very brave people… they are idealists… they want to serve their country and they want to prove themselves. The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel… if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape. Now the Israeli army has not by any means been the worst of the lot. It has not done what for instance the Americans did in Vietnam… it did not use napalm, it did not kill millions of people. So everything is relative, but by definition, to return to what I said earlier, if you are strong and you are fighting the weak, then anything you do is criminal.
Byrne: : You are a military historian, but let’s face it the Prime Minister was a general… how could General Sharon – Prime Minister Sharon – be getting it so wrong, by your analysis?
Van Creveld: It’s not a question of personalities, it’s a question of the balance of forces. I’ll use a metaphor that I’ll take from Lao-tzu – the Chinese sage who lived about 2,400 years ago – ‘a sword put into salt water will rust’ – it is only a question of time. And this is happening to the Israeli army and to the Israeli society, almost regardless of who is leading it.
Byrne: : Are they losing, or have they lost, in your opinion?
Van Creveld: No they have not yet lost, but they are as far as I can see, well on the way to losing, which is why Israel over the last few weeks has been positively begging the Palestinians for a ceasefire. We have arrived at the point where, if you will, like Johnson in Vietnam, we are constantly asking the other side for a ceasefire, and the other side either will or will not respond as it pleases him – the reason being of course that they have so much less to lose.
Byrne: : The reason being also, in a sense, that it’s what isn’t about, isn’t it? A ceasefire would provide security for the Israelis, which is what they want, but it would not provide statehood for the Palestinians, which is what they want.
Van Creveld: Exactly. The other side will definitely not have a ceasefire without some considerable political achievement. If I were Arafat and the Palestinians, I would not put an end to this intafada, because the way I see it, from the first day of the first intafada they have been winning.
Byrne: : What options does the Israeli army have, do you think?
Van Creveld: Nothing will work.
Byrne: : Nothing at all? Do you think there’s no change of strategy?
Van Creveld: No. There is one thing that can be done – and that is to put and end to the situation whereby we are the strong fighting the weak, because that is the most stupid situation in which anybody can be.
Byrne: : And how do you do that?
Van Creveld: Exactly. How do you do that. You do that by A, waiting for a suitable opportunity… B, doing whatever it takes to restore the balance of power between us and the Palestinians… C, removing 90% of the causes of the conflict, by pulling out… and D, building a wall between us and the other side, so tall that even the birds cannot fly over it…. so as to avoid any kind of friction for a long long time in the future.
Byrne: : Well, that’s a tall list. Let’s start with the last one – the wall… I mean, when I was there last month people were talking about a wall but you’re seriously saying this is an option, to build a gigantic wall…. what…. on the old green line, basically – there’s Gaza – there’s the West Bank – and there’s Israel proper, and they shall never be combined?
Van Creveld: “Never” is too much of a word. Nothing lasts forever. But history proves that walls work. The Roman wall – the Limus(?) – worked for hundreds of years… the Great Chinese Wall worked, not forever, but for hundreds of years… the wall in Korea has been working for fity years… the wall between Turks and Greeks in Cyprus is working…. the Berlin Wall worked beautifully…. Unfortunately, the Israeli army insists against all military logic on being present on both sides of the wall. We could formally finish the problem at least in Gaza, in 48 hours, by getting out and building a proper wall. And then of course, if anybody tries to climb over the wall we kill him.
Byrne: : What about the many thousands of extremely belligerent Israeli settlers that would be on the wrong side of the wall?
Van Creveld: If it were up to me, I would tell those people – and you’re quite right, many of them are quite belligerent – look, ladies and gentlemen, you have been magnificent, you have served us well, you have protected us all those years, but this is coming to an end. If you choose to stay, it’s your problem – you are on your own. My guess is that 95% of them will come home.
Byrne: J: What about another scenario, which has been much discussed in recent months – which is one of full military solution? Basically, the Israeli army just goes in… it doesn’t build a wall – it basically blows up the Palestinian home… razes the camps… stops, as it might say, pussyfooting around, and it’s “curtains”?
Van Creveld: Look… a home that has been demolished offers even better shelter than a home that stands intact. The Americans in Vietnam tried it. They killed between two-and-a-half and three million Vietnamese. I don’t see that it helped them much.
Byrne: : Martin, just personally… can you bear the thought of living in Jerusalem behind a wall – as the only way to be safe?
Van Creveld: Quite to the contrary – I came to live in Jerusalem in 1964… three years before the 1967 war. There actually was a wall, and life was wonderful. Nothing ever happened. Jerusalem was the quietest, safest place on earth. More than that, between 1957 and 1967 the number of Israelis who lost their lives as a result of enemy action was just thirty-five. Now we pray for a week in which we shall not lose thirty-five people.
Byrne: : Martin van Creveld, thank you very much for joining us tonight. Thank you.
Van Creveld: Thank you. Bye.
This is the policy Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders are overtly offering while their private mechanizations are entirely global. Were one to take a look at cover policy, removing the US from the Middle East and replacing them with Russia, returning Putin to day to day control and assuming pro-Zionist oligarchs around Putin are the real power of Russia.
Of course, the long term victim here is Putin himself. Russia’s humiliation in Afghanistan is “alive and well” as is the influx of Afghan heroin that the CIA sees is convoyed in by the ton.
America’s virtual stranglehold over the Black Sea, if Turkey and America come to an impasse, will end, another potential prize to dangle before Putin. Israel figures that Putin will see the power vacuum in the Middle East as a chance to restore Russian prestige and place Russian influence over European gas supplies, Russia’s traditional political “trump card” on much solider ground.
If history proves to be a credible methodology of prediction, Putin will die mysteriously, Russia will suffer a mysterious economic collapse, maybe not today but inexorably, and the world will finally have to admit that a cabal of financial criminals long in the shadows are the only surviving super power.
Is it, perhaps, time we admitted that the “global chessboard” is, in itself, a grand conspiracy, hardly a “theory,” once capable of engineering, not only terrorism, but nuclear war as well, the “unthinkable” now little more than an “afterthought.”
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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