A cursory look at the geo-political developments taking place in the Middle East would draw our attention to one very critical aspect of Middle Eastern politics: Israel's transforming strategic environment and its geo-political posture therein. It would not be wrong to say that one of the greatest beneficiaries of the US' geo-political maneuverings in the Middle East during last two decades or so has been the state of Israel. In fact, Israel's strategic position vis-à-vis other regional powers has fundamentally changed over the last two decades or so, making it one of the most 'formidable forces' in the region. However, the credit for this "change" does not merely go to Israel's own defence related preparations, but also to the declining power of its strategic competitors, thanks to the recurrent US direct and indirect interventions!

For instance, the conventional military threats to Israel has been significantly reduced. The phased destruction of the Iraqi army, first in the 1991 Gulf War and then during the 2003 Iraq War, has eliminated Iraq as a significant conventional threat. It is easy to forget that until this process began, Iraq possessed a very large conventional order of battle and contributed expeditionary forces to the Arab war coalitions attacking Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Until 1991 Israeli defense planners needed to constantly update their estimates of the size of the potential Iraqi expeditionary force could be sent to join an "Eastern Front" attack on Israel and of the speed with which these forces might traverse Syrian territory and the Jordanian desert to reach the front lines. In June 2014, by contrast, the ease and speed with which a few thousand-strong insurgents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) caused the newly reconstructed units of the Iraqi military to melt in the face of an attack illustrates how difficult it would be for Iraq to once again constitute a threat to Israel's security.

Similarly, for the past two years, a very different development in Syria has seriously diminished if not eliminated that country's capacity to pose a significant conventional military threat. The ongoing civil war has weakened Syria's armed forces and has rendered many of its fighting units inoperable. Indeed, among Israel's close neighbors, only Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan still possess significant conventional military forces. But Egypt has adhered to its peace treaty with Israel for the past 35 years, and Jordan has shown similar commitment for the past two decades.

NATO plans to deploy military forces in Romania are inadequate and confrontational, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Lukashevich said Wednesday.

"In fact, it is a sequential transformation of the country into another supportive foothold for the United States and NATO close to the Russian border. We have repeatedly commented on such steps by NATO member states, noting their confrontational manner and stressing their inadequacy and redundancy, both militarily and financially," Lukashevich said.

According to Lukashevich, the Romanian government is sacrificing the safety of the region by agreeing to deploy the bloc's military forces.

"One is tempted to conclude that the current Romanian authorities, in order to raise their 'profile' in the eyes of the overseas strategists... are willing to sacrifice maintenance of stability in the Black Sea region for tactical reasons," Lukashevich said.

Almost 10 years before the September 11 attacks, the US government had been tracking nearly every call made from America to a number of foreign countries - an effort that eventually laid the groundwork for the National Security Agency's own surveillance.

According to a report by USA Today, which cited multiple unnamed officials, the program gathered information on billions of international phone calls made by Americans. It was jumpstarted in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush and carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in order to monitor drug trafficking rings and uncover new ones.


The program - known as USTO because it monitored calls from the US to foreign nations - first began targeting Colombian drug cartels and, thus, only set its sights on a few countries. It eventually expanded to up to 116 countries, however, and took aim at international phone calls made to Canada, Mexico, Italy, Afghanistan, Iran and others, as well as "most of Central and South America."

Huge story: The DEA harvested billions of US phone records for nearly a decade before 9/11, becoming NSA's blueprint. http://t.co/XhlqT5gzq8

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) April 7, 2015

Notably, the DEA program was described as a "blueprint" for the surveillance programs launched by the NSA during the presidency of George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. It was approved by four presidential administrations before Attorney General Eric Holder put an end to the program in 2013 - more than 20 years after it first began - after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's own domestic spying efforts.

In December 2011, the United States sold $30 billion worth of weapons to the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Included in the sale were 84 F-15 fighter jets, which are now "at the core" of the Saudi war in Yemen.

This fact, and numerous others about the Kingdom have received scant attention from proponents of the Saudi attack on Yemen.

Here's a look at five things about Saudi Arabia that US officials and the establishment media are neglecting to talk about as Saudi bombs continue to drop on the people of Yemen with the support of the United States:

1. Sharia Law runs the country.
2. Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian dictatorship: There are no national elections, no parties, and no rights.
3. People are publicly beheaded in the Kingdom.
4. Human rights for Saudi women are among the worst in the world.
5. The monarchy is a cash machine for terrorists.

"Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. (...) This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today."
Oded Yinon, "A strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties", Kivunum, translated by Israel Shahak, February 1982.

During the five-day trip he made to the United States, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon told Steve Inskeep, one of the hosts of Morning Edition on National Public Radio that "MidEast borders 'absolutely' will change" [1].

Ya'alon follows to the letter the balkanization process of the "Yinon Plan", named after a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official [2]: "the borders have already changed" since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is no longer in a position to unify his country and that he "only controls 25% of Syria", which creates a problem that Israel "will have to pay." How sad!

Once in a while a book appears that forces us to rethink the previous cognitive patterns. To use the celebrated phrase from Thomas S. Kuhn's influential, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it introduces the paradigm shift. Kuhn's explored scientific revolutions and the shifts produced by, say, Newtonian or quantum physics. The realm of social ideas is not immune to similar breakthroughs. In the twentieth century, Orwell's analysis of a doublespeak and the mutual corruption of politics and language has clearly changed the way we look at modern politics.

Recently, Harry C. Frankfurt's little pamphlet, with its beguilingly simple title, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) has pushed Orwell's insights into a higher degree of conceptualization. While written in Orwellian vein and addressing the abuse and manipulation of language, Frankfurt's analysis offers a new way of looking at the old problem. The book open with the following, by now well-known observation: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows it. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves."

Without proper understanding of its functions and purposes, we are left, frankly, unarmed to confront and understand bullshit, despite our confidence to recognize it. For Frankfurt, BS is a greater enemy of truth then a lie because a liar does care about truth and thus tries to pass falsehood for truth, while BS artists do not really care about the truthfulness of their statements - they just make assertions to impress, while disguising their real agenda. There are obvious mechanisms to challenge lies: just produce facts. But how does one challenges bullshit and understands its secret agenda? There is no cognitive frame, no intellectual traps into which the bullshitter can be caught.

Every now and then, it's worth taking a stroll down memory lane. In 2008, TomDispatch regular Karen J. Greenberg, now the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, took just such a stroll -- and found herself in a torture museum in Prague. The piece she wrote on "torture lite" in medieval Europe and medieval twenty-first century America is, in my opinion, a little TD classic. It's also a grim reminder that Americans didn't need a Senate torture report (along with the CIA's efforts to make sure it would never appear) to grasp just what a nightmarish path this country's leaders took us down in the wake of 9/11. In the same way, we don't need to wait for the Senate drone report of 2019 to know that those high-tech weapons systems Washington has deployed across the backlands of the planet are law-breakers, sovereignty-destroyers, terror-makers, and chaos creators. Nor should we need future Senate investigations to grasp that the U.S. military has, over these last 13 years, made a dreadful hash of significant parts of the planet.

And in a sense, it all began with the urge of top officials of the Bush administration to turn torture into an essential go-to option in the war on terror -- that is, not just to cross but obliterate a moral line so old and obvious that no "enhanced interrogation techniques" should have obscured the crimes being committed from American consciousness. In these years, as I've written, our government became a crime-free zone (except for those who wanted to release information to the American people about what's actually going on in their name behind the closed doors of the national security state). Increasingly, it's gained something of the look of a criminal enterprise. Imagine, as Greenberg does at the end of her piece, what a future museum in Washington dedicated to the post-9/11 era might feature -- and then take that little stroll down TomDispatch's version of memory lane with my introduction and Greenberg's piece from seven years ago. Tom]

According to the New Yorker's Paul Kramer, here's what A.F. Miller of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment wrote in a letter to the Omaha World-Herald in May 1900 from the Philippines about the treatment of a prisoner taken by his unit: "Now, this is the way we give them the water cure. Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don't give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I'll tell you it is a terrible torture."

Two weeks ago, Ukraine said it would suspend importing Russian gas when the countries' contract expired on March 31, primarily because of the high price, especially when it can get the fuel at lower cost from Europe.

Apparently that pressure worked. The two countries' state-owned gas companies, Ukraine's Naftogaz and Russia's Gazprom, signed a three-month contract on April 2 that would supply Ukraine with less costly gas from Russia through June.

And the gas will flow regardless of the $5 billion debt, disputed by Kiev, that Naftogaz owes to Gazprom, according to Alexander Novak, Russia's energy minister. He said the debt, subject to an eventual ruling by an arbitration court in Stockholm, would not interfere with the April-June deliveries of gas to Ukraine.

"We currently have a prepayment system," Novak said April 4. "As far as I am aware, they have paid $30 million, which means that there will be supplied gas for this amount."

One of the elements of cultural ideology in the USA is that the United States is somehow exceptional compared to other countries; that is, it is different in a number of positive ways that distinguish it from all other countries.

Exceptional in Health, Education & Retirement?

In a perverted way, there is some truth to this. The United States is exceptional in that it is the only advanced economy in the world that has failed to provide universal health care for its citizens. It has a large, parasitical for-profit health care system, dominated by multi-billion dollar profit making private health insurance companies that suck $1 trillion a year from the wallets of US consumers for pushing paper around, a vast network of 'for profit' hospital chains that suck another $900 billion a year, pharmaceutical drug companies that charge $94,000 for drugs to treat someone with hepatitis C (that's $1,125 per pill) and charge patients $14,000 to $64,000 a month for cancer drugs, and it has the highest paid professional medical personnel in the world.

The US spends more than $3 trillion a year, and rising, on health care. That's about 18% of its $17.4 trillion annual GDP, or almost one dollar out of every five spent on everything is for healthcare. That's the highest spending on healthcare in the industrial world. In return for that massive spending, it ranks 39th in infant mortality rates, 42nd in adult mortality, and 36th in life expectancy. Yes, the US is exceptional in health care.

It is also exceptional in education. Its college students have become, in effect, indentured servants to the education establishment of overpaid administrators and bankers, owing more than $1.1 trillion in debt just to get a college education—more per capita higher education debt than any other country in the world. The cost of attending a four year college today is, on average, $30,000 to $60,000 a year for a four year undergraduate education. For those who can't afford college there's no meaningful job training programs available any longer. Meanwhile, 70% of college professors and instructors in the US are part time/temp workers, many of whom earn poverty wages and have no benefits. That too is 'exceptional', I suppose.

For all its rhetoric about "liberal democracy" and "freedom," Europe has quietly become a hotbed of political repression. While some groups are allowed to express themselves openly - from fascists that praise Nazi collaborators of the World War II period, to feminist and gay rights groups - there is one particular brand of free speech that is simply not allowed: anti-war protest.

Masking the repression of anti-war, anti-NATO, and anti-imperialist groups behind defamatory rhetoric and demonization, the mass media in Europe attempts to portray such activists as little more than "pro-Kremlin" puppets whose strings are secretly being pulled by the wicked villains of Moscow. Rather than engaging with the critical issues raised by such groups, the political and media establishment instead targets them for repression.

Police and state repression, often of a violent nature, has been carried out under the auspices of "fighting terrorists" in Ukraine all throughout the conflict that erupted in early 2014. So too has such repression reared its ugly head in Lithuania in recent months, as anti-imperialist leftist organizers have been singled out for political persecution by the vehemently Russophobic, Euro-sycophant government. Additionally, Estonia has continued its systematic oppression of its Russian-speaking population which has been forced to exist as second class citizens, with dubious legal protections to say the least.