Carol- Admin
- Posts : 31729
Join date : 2010-04-07
Location : Hawaii
Carol Fri Nov 27, 2015 5:25 pm
RUSSIA’S RT NOTICES THE “FACTIONAL ...
Posted on November 24, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell
Mr. S.U. shared this article with me, and I regard it as so important that I have to pass it along, together with my usual "high octane speculations." First, the article itself, from Russia's RT:
Who’s in Control? Obama or the generals?
Now, let us remind ourselves of a little context form recent history here, regarding both Iran and Syria. It was not very many years ago, you'll recall, that the war drums were being beaten - quite loudly in fact - regarding Iran's nuclear program, and there were loud voices, both in Israel and the USA, pressing for some sort of American "intervention" in Iran to prevent that country from acquiring yet another Islamic bomb. Similarly, there were loud voices cheeering on the then-"freedom fighers" in Syria, also pressing, again, for a "more active American role." In both instances, the Obama administration was loudly denounced and pilloried by a certain segment of the American and "international community" for having avoiding war in both instances.
At the risk of citing most of the article, I want to draw the readers' attention to these statements:
US President Barack Obama’s business-like meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit at the weekend belies a spate of bellicose comments made by the Pentagon towards Moscow. So, who is in control: Obama or the generals?
The two leaders held an earnest 35-minute face-to-face discussion on the opening day of the G20 conference in Antalya, Turkey. The gathering of the world’s top 20 economic nations was dominated by the massive terror attack in Paris two days earlier, which claimed at least 129 lives and hundreds more wounded.
Obama’s meeting with Putin – their first since Russia launched its military intervention in Syria nearly seven weeks ago – was described by the White House as “constructive”.
The American president even appeared to welcome Russian airstrikes against terror groups fighting the Syrian government, most prominently Islamic State (IS) jihadists, also known as ISIL.
“As the diplomacy continues, President Obama welcomed efforts by all nations to confront the terrorist group ISIL and noted the importance of Russia’s military efforts in Syria focusing on the group,”said a White House spokesman.
That’s quite a contrast in substance and tone from a speech made by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter only a week before.
In a blustering tirade, Carter labeled Russia a “global threat” in a speech at the Reagan Library in California. He denounced Russia for “nuclear saber-rattling” and “aggression” in Europe and he slammed Putin’s military operation in Syria as “throwing gasoline” on a fire, which, he said, would lead to more terrorism across the Middle East.
And these:
This is by no means the first time that a schism has become apparent in Washington with regard to Russia.
Back in July, Obama and Kerry both issued embarrassing repudiations of the Pentagon’s hawkish line on Russia. That was after General Joseph F Dunford in his nomination to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress that Russia posed “an existential threat to the United States.”
“If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” Dunford said. “And if you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.”
Kerry’s spokesman at the State Department, Mark Toner, immediately scotched that belligerent view, saying: “The secretary [Kerry] doesn’t agree with the assessment that Russia is an existential threat to the United States, quite frankly.”
That repudiation was also echoed by the White House whose spokesman Josh Earnest said that General Dunford’s comments reflected “his own view and doesn’t necessarily reflect the consensus analysis of the president’s national security team.”
And now consider RT's conclusions as to what this might mean:
One way of better understanding the apparent contradictions and zigzags is that the Pentagon and CIA are running policies separately and covertly from the official stance of the White House and State Department.
John Kerry vows that he is trying to end the carnage in Syria through political talks in Vienna. But the signs are that the covert warmongers in the CIA are intent on fuelling more conflict in Syria, even if that means triggering an all-out confrontation with Russia.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the CIA, along with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, is preparing to supply surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to militants in Syria “even though Obama has long rebuffed that idea.”
What we may be seeing in US policy is competing agendas. The diplomatic track appears to be favored by the White House and State Department as a more efficacious way of achieving regime change against the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. But the Pentagon, and specifically the CIA, has its own militarist schemes, even if that means providing weapons to terror groups with much greater fire power and risking a proxy war with Russia.
The upshot is that US foreign policy is dangerously all over the place because of competing power players within Washington. The disturbing conclusion is that the American president and his State Department are simply not in control. It’s like watching a driver of an articulated truck whose grip on the wheel has no steering.
A deep, darker state within the official state is by no means a new concept to describe American government and its foreign policy. More than 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy was so perplexed by CIA covert operations undermining him on Cuba and Vietnam that he declared he would “smash it into a thousand pieces.” That intention probably caused Kennedy his life at the hands of the deep state and its military-industrial complex. (Emphases added)
Now, those who know me well, or even regular readers here, are aware of the fact that I have no love lost for Mr. Obama, his administration, or most of his policies. But the real question is to what extent Mr. Obama really is the author or advocate of the policies attributed to him. His "centerpiece" legislation - Obamacare - is a rehash of proposals actually drafted by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known Republican and ostensibly "conservative" think tank. More importantly, I have pointed out time again again that Mr. Obama has been the target of "security stripping" that were possibly designed to "send messages," from the state dinner he threw during his first administration for visiting Prime Minister Modi of Indiam when two individuals were able to gain access to the dinner who were not on the guest list, to the more recent incident when an individual not on the invitation list was able to come within close physical proximity to Mr. and Mrs. Obama, all in eerie resemblance to the security stripping that occurred around President Kennedy on his ill-fated trip to Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963, alluded to in the RT article. More recently, during an interview, Mr. Richard Hoagland suggested that the two people who crashed that state dinner for Mr. Modi were, in fact, people known to Mr. Obama, and that what might have occurred on that occasion was a test of the reliability of his personal security on his part. Either way one parses that event, however, what one ends with is a presidency under seige, much like the Kennedy administration, a point also alluded to by the RT article.
So let's indulge, once again, in our trademark high octane speculation, for some sort of internal power struggle - "factional infighting" as I've been calling it - does appear to be taking place in the American deep state, between the military-industrial-intelligence complex on the one hand, with friendly elements in the Department of State, and the White House. Projected into a much larger geopolitical context, one has the Bush-Saudi connections, with all the attendant ties between the Clintons and the Bushes, on the one hand, and the Russian-Iranian ties, and determination to end Sunni jihadism, on the other. And thrown into this mix, for good measure, are the erstwhile US "allies," Turkey and Saudi Arabia, willing to sell the weapons they buy to the west (they don't make them themselves), to such radical groups. Also to be thrown into this mix are those pictures of Putin and Obama at the last G20 meeting, meeting privately and huddled over a table with their interpreters, in a kind of de facto "summit". I suspect, that one subject of discussion during this apparently impromptu meeting, was precisely the question of just who is really running America. And never, ever, to be forgotten, are all those historical ties between Nazism and radical Muslim groups, a point which puts Russian statements that their real problem isn't the Nazis in Kiev, it's the Nazis in Washington, into a very sobering contextual light.
So what RT is really doing is corroborating something that I personally have advanced over the past few years and in numerous blogs, namely, that the Western House is not in order, and that there are serious cracks and fissures beginning to appear in its foundations, cracks and fissures that make the task of international diplomacy even more dangerous, and that make the European response toward, and awareness of, this possibility even more crucial. Those cracks and fissures suggest that, once again, there is serious factional infighting occuring within the American "deep state,"(to employ Peter Dale Scott's terminoogy) which to ignore, imperils any effort to assess the situation soundly.
http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/11/russias-rt-notices-the-factional-infighting/
_________________
What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
