Monthly Archives: November 2007

The Re-Gathering Storm

The Re-Gathering Storm

Zahir Ebrahim

November 24 2007

Document ID: PHBFZE20071124 URL: http://humanbeingsfirst.org. | Print | Wblog | PDF | Comment.

[ An abbreviated version of this essay also appeared as Letter to Editor (cached) Dawn, Dec 3, 2007. ]

In reference to the incredibly courageous reporting of Dr. Mubashir Hasan’s views in the Dawn newspaper article ‘US preparing to invade Pakistan’ http://archives.dawn.com/2007/11/22/nat38.htm (cached), I have to sadly say, PRECISELY!

This seems to be the first time that someone from within Pakistan has seen glimpses of the ominous neo-con plan on the ‘Grand Chessboard’ for Pakistan – at least publicly – one that was already made known in 1996 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the principal architect of ‘CIA Intervention in Afghanistan’ in 1979 and the subsequent predictable Soviet invasion. Both deliberately and causally crafted to “knowingly increase[d] the probability that they would [intervene]” – as per Brzezinski’s own admission two decades later in 1998* – by the Jimmy Carter Administration of which Brzezinski was the erstwhile National Security Advisor. Mr. Carter of course received the Nobel Peace prize as the seeds of total decimation of one of the oldest civilizations were deftly laid on his watch, to which Brzezinski could only remorselessly express the following ‘regret’ some two decades later after the destruction was complete:

“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? … What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

For the repeat performance in Iraq, the only thing that comes to mind is a variation of the age old cliché, ‘destroy me once, shame on you, destroy me twice, shame on me’. And what about a third time? And a fourth? As of late, I have seen at least 6 redrawn maps of Pakistan. And we already know of the repeated threats of nuclear first strikes against Iran!

So Mubashir Hasan’s dire warnings of the regathering storm shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone following the ‘great game’ on the ‘Grand Chessboard’ – for one can easily imagine a Brzezinski progeny, or the grandmaster himself, bragging in another two decades:

Regret What? The 911 covert-ops was an excellent idea. It had the effect of enabling the massive “imperial mobilization” disguised as ‘war on terror’. What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Moslems or the “full spectrum dominance” and conquest of the entire world to finally create the much longed for “one world government” led by the ruling elite of the world united in a common bond of wealth and power?**

Those who don’t learn from history, those who don’t read their “Mein Kampfs” du jour, are condemned to suffer the same fate. Those who don’t remove their own dictators at considerable cost to themselves are willingly brought to suffer the “shock and awe” of ‘democracy’ rained onto them at monumental cost to their entire society and civilization; almost to the point of annihilation through Depleted Uranium poisoning of their entire racial DNA makeup. The story of Iraq and Afghanistan – a monumental shame for the world’s peoples who call ourselves civilized human beings; all too busy pursuing the diktats of our stomach until the barbarians come knocking on our doors too! Well they are here!

The ‘arc of crises’, defined since the Berlin Wall fell – to redraw these borders in precisely the same interests as Mubashir Hasan notes (as reported in the Dawn article): “… It wanted an elected government of millionaires under civil and military establishment to serve its interests and those of millionaires in Pakistan…”, except it is not only true for Pakistan but in the entire ‘arc of crisis’.

All of it is together serving the ruling interests of a handful of very elite multi-billionaire ruling class worldwide in the natural culmination of this pyramid path into a “one world government” by the world’s ruling elite on the top. We already see the world’s financial control exclusively in their grubby hands – and these already transcend national boundaries – money can already come and go across geographies in the bare fleeting of a butterfly’s wings, and most of the developmental economics and national policies of nations in the entire Global South are already entirely beholden to Western arm-twisting institutions like the WB and IMF and their sister organizations that are entirely dominated by the same ruling elite. Their multi-millionaire henchman in the developing nations methodically implementing the deftly crafted neoliberal policies and trade and commerce laws favoring the global corporate interests of their multi-billionaire masters – the new rulers of the world that transcend national boundaries.

It matters little what is used in local geographic governance – full freedom there to have any local administrative domain with its own local ‘police force’ which is where the once wondrous creation of the twentieth century, the nation-states, are headed in the ‘one world government’ of the twenty-first century that will command one set of global laws that matter and one global armed to the teeth military to enforce those laws and to keep the “American peace” – so long as the ‘independent’ local governance is contained in the macro box that sits on the same neoliberal train that is headed to only one destination. The destination in which the rich and affluent Global North-West will harvest the poverty stricken but resource rich Global South-East with the help of the local indigenous ruling elite. This isn’t a speculation at all but entirely rooted in empiricism as can be gleaned by the systematic privatization impetus and theft of the public commons of almost every developing nation under the arm twisting agendas of various instruments of hegemony! And this is all ‘legal’ – just as our PCO and our illustrious leadership is now ‘legal’.

This emphasis on ‘legal sanction’ is least understood by the vast polity in the developing nations, including our own, for it is indeed the graft of the West! ‘The rule of Law’ – yes the laws made by the ’emperor’ and duly approved by the ‘parliament’, the ‘judiciary’, and all systems of ‘democracy’ – must be followed!

The legal rape of nations and the people!

Thomas Friedman, though clearly not one of my favorite imperial columnist, let the truth explode candidly through his pen in his 1999 New York Times column “Manifesto for a Fast World”:

‘ The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. “Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,” says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. “If a lesser power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.” ‘

We are merely seeing the imperial baby-steps of the manufacture and global deployment of the new imperial coin of modernity being played out today. The philosophy isn’t new at all; indeed it’s the same old wine in a new bottle, as “Hegemony is as old as mankind”. Only its fantastic enablement in the post colonial period since the end of World War II has been dramatically facilitated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and drastically accelerated by the “New Pearl Harbor” of 911. This imperial quest is the only true bipartisan policy of the sole superpower state with its own helpless peoples being unwillingly dragged into this “imperial mobilization”.

Just as it needed a Churchill to defeat Hitler, a Nelson to defeat Napoleon, and a Nazi Germany to take down the power of the British Empire – all global conflagrations that saw alliances emerge even among unlikely protagonists – the path to freedom from predators is an entirely obvious lesson of history. Provided one is rationally able to tell the predator from the victims. In these ‘Orwellian’ times with the “technique of infamy” and deception being the first weapon of “hectoring hegemons”, obfuscation through mass media and deflection through re-semanticizing words requires much rationalism and resort to ab initio analysis to uncover the reality when ‘Alice’ is awake. Rather than be caught in the internal branches of the dense tree of deception with assumptions and pre-suppositions that remain unvoiced, one must resort back to the fundamentals (‘the fundamentalists’) and the roots-DNA of the tree itself in order to dismantle the matrix. Otherwise, “off with the head” appears to be the only all encompassing reality, like the ‘war on terror’, one so real, and so visible, that even the remarkable and observant ‘Alice’ remained convinced that it was real!

And St. Augustine from the 4th Century AD provides an excellent vehicle to unravel this word game – the collateral damage to language itself, the first and only vehicle in which we humans can possibly think and reflect, and hence always the first victim of all predators – that indeed seeds all imperial mobilizations:

“When the King asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: ‘the same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.’ ”

Thus those who do not recognize the ‘War on Terror’ as the imperial fiction created to mobilize America as its “democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”, and instead of dismantling this fiction to safeguard the peoples’ interests worldwide are themselves using this age old well worn mantra for their own indigenous agendas in the pyramid structure that supports the global domination of the world’s ruling elite at the apex, are just as monumentally criminal as those who directly ordered the ‘shock and awe’ upon defenseless civilian populations and decimated their entire civilizations.

And Pakistan is indeed the heart of the matter in all these imperial baby-steps – the only nuclear armed state that can change the tables overnight on ‘The Grand Chessboard’ were it to acquire a truly independent government working in the interests of its own peoples. This will never be allowed to happen willingly in any nation, least of all in Pakistan, as should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.

If there was a statesman like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto alive today and in any position of national leadership – we may have seen interesting alliances and mutual defense pact treaties with our neighbors coming into existence. ZAB was, after all, whatever one might think of him – as a tyrant or savior – the first person since the invention of modern nation-states to bring together all the Islamic countries in Lahore in an amazing summit in 1974 which is what actually sealed his fate. The ultimate penalty for the pursuit of the ‘Islamic bomb’ was merely the icing on the cake as promised by Henry Kissinger – ZAB would have been eliminated regardless, as all globally nationalist leaders who have sought ‘independence from hegemony’ have always been removed, lest the trend become contagious and a global example for emulation by the have-nots!

So kudos to the lonely Dr. Mubashir Hasan on his courage to speak up and warn the nation of what should be entirely obvious to all un co-opted peoples on this planet. The fact that he is the first one to so bluntly and forthrightly raise the spectre haunting us as the barbarians await at the gates of hell, says a great deal about our intelligentsia, our politicians, our defense analysts, and our ubiquitous talking heads on the now defunct news media – not such a great loss after all to have them zipped – the ‘reality television show’ with little substance.

The real issue is – and we already know the malady whether or not some have the courage to express it – what is a wise remedy for self-defense and who will beard the ‘hungry lions’, the self described ‘hectoring hegemons’ on the ‘Grand Chessboard’? The following short youtube video of the ‘Battle at Kruger’ can perhaps teach us a remedy if we are wise enough to learn it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

*Brzezinski’s interview in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76. English translation at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

**Predictive words of this author.

Source URL: http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/11/re-gathering-storm.html

Print URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/12/re-gathering-storm.html

Mirror URL: https://bloghumanbeingsfirst.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/the-re-gathering-storm/

PDF URL: http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-re-gathering-storm-nov242007.pdf

Original PDF: http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/the-re-gathering-storm-updated.pdf

The author, an ordinary researcher and writer on contemporary geopolitics, a minor justice activist, grew up in Pakistan, studied EECS at MIT, engineered for a while in high-tech Silicon Valley (patents here), and retired early to pursue other responsible interests. His maiden 2003 book was rejected by six publishers and can be read on the web at http://PrisonersoftheCave.org. He may be reached at http://Humanbeingsfirst.org.

Copyright Notice:

All material copyright (c) Project Humanbeingsfirst^TM, with full permission to copy, repost, and reprint, in its entirety, unmodified and unedited, for any purpose, granted, provided the URL sentence and this copyright notice are also reproduced verbatim as part of this license, and not doing so may be subject to copyright license violation infringement claims pursuant to remedies noted at http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html. All quotations and excerpts are based on non-profit “fair use” in the greater public interest consistent with the understanding of laws noted at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html. Full copyright notice and Exclusions at http://www.humanbeingsfirst.org.