De Amerikaanse politicus Zbigniew Brzezinski is op 89-jarige leeftijd overleden. Hij was de nationaal veiligheidsadviseur onder president Carter (1977-1981) en bleef ook na zijn aftreden van invloed op de Amerikaanse buitenlandpolitiek.
http://nos.nl/artikel/2175173-oud-veiligheidsadviseur-brzezinski-de-havik-van-carter-overleden.html
Wat de NOS verzwijgt is het volgende:
In 1998 verklaarde Brzezinski tegenover het Franse kwaliteitsweekblad Le Nouvel Observateurdat de Verenigde Staten vóór 1980 de voormalige Sovjet Unie bewust had geprovoceerd om Afghanistan binnen te vallen door in het geheim islamitische extremisten in dat land financieel en militair te steunen, waardoor ze een gewapende strijd tegen de pro-Sovjet regering konden beginnen. Op de vraag of hij daar geen spijt van had, antwoordde Brzezinski:
Spijt waarover? Die geheime operatie was een uitstekend idee. Het had als resultaat dat de Russen in de Afghaanse val trapten en wil je dat ik dat betreur? De dag dat de Sovjets officieel de grens waren over gestoken, schreef ik aan president Carter, in essentie: ‘We hebben nu de gelegenheid om de USSR zijn eigen Vietnam Oorlog te geven.’
Deze geopolitieke strategie kostte een miljoen Afghanen het leven, maakte drieënhalf miljoen Afghanen tot vluchteling en verwoeste de infrastructuur van het toch al zo arme land. Brzezinski merkte tevens op:
Indeed for ten years Moscow had to conduct a war that was intolerable for the regime, a conflict which involved the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet Empire.
Le Nouvel Observateur: And also, don't you regret having helped future terrorists, having given them weapons and advice?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: What is most important for world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? Some Islamic hotheads or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Le Nouvel Observateur: ‘Some hotheads?’ But it has been said time and time again: today Islamic fundamentalism represents a world-wide threat.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Rubbish! It's said that the West has a global policy regarding Islam. That's hogwash: there is no global Islam.
Nog geen twee decennia nadat de alom in het Westen gerespecteerde adviseur van de ’s werelds machtigste politici had beweert dat ‘enkele islamitische heethoofden’ een te verwaarlozen element waren in het geopolitieke machtspel, bekende dezelfde Brzezinski dat mede als gevolg van het geweld van ‘enkele islamitische heethoofden’de Amerikaanse elite in Washington en op Wall Street nu genoodzaakt is de werkelijkheid onder ogen te zien, namelijk dat
the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment,
waarbij de VS ‘no longer the globally imperial power’ is. Was deze constatering volgens hem eerst nog ‘hogwash,’ vandaag de dag vertelt Brzezinski de westerse beleidsbepalers dat dit alles geenszins ‘onzin’ is. Dit is een verstrekkende constatering gezien het feit dat ‘There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat,’ zoals de beroemde Amerikaanse auteur Gore Vidal ooit krachtig samenvatte. Men moet niet vergeten dat
toen de Republikeinse senator John McCain in 2000 in de race was om de conservatieve presidentskandidaat te worden, Brzezinski zijn buitenlandse adviseur was,’ terwijl hij ‘Acht jaar later, in 2008,’ als ‘buitenlandse adviseur van de nieuwe Amerikaanse president’ optrad, ‘de Democraat Barack Obama, die het in de verkiezingen opnam tegen dezelfde John McCain.’ https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzeziński
Dit alles kan omdat de VS, in de woorden van oud-president Carter, een ‘oligarchy with unlimited political bribary,’ is, een feit dat in mindere of meerdere mate altijd al het geval is geweest, en in de nabije toekomst zo zal blijven. Daarom zijn de huidige machtsverschuiving zo bedreigend voor de status-quo, de hegemonie van Washington en Wall Street, dat een neoliberaal systeem met propaganda en geweld verdedigt, waarbij 62 individuen even rijk zijn als de helft van de hele mensheid tezamen.
Nu de VS ‘no longer the globally imperial power,’ spreekt het voor zich dat de vraag urgent is geworden wat de westerse elite gaat doen om haar slinkende macht op zijn minst af te remmen. In het gezaghebbende tijdschrift Foreign Affairs, gepubliceerd door de invloedrijke Council of Foreign Affairs, waarvan David Rockefeller de ‘Honorary Chairman’ is, en als spreekbuis functioneert van
the world’s foremost policymakers, business leaders and public intellectuals to discuss the most important global, regional and industry developments of our day. Each event and conference draws on our unique network of experts who shape opinion, influence policy and move markets,
betoogde Brzezinski nog in 1996 onder de kop 'A Geostrategy for Eurasia’ het volgende:
America's emergence as the sole global superpower now makes an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative.
Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America’s.
Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy.
Vanuit dit geopolitiek feit blijft ook vandaag de dag nog voor Brzezinski gelden dat
Europe is not now and is not likely to become a global power. But it can play a constructive role in taking the lead in regard to transnational threats to global wellbeing and even human survival. Additionally, Europe is politically and culturally aligned with and supportive of core U.S. interests in the Middle East, and European steadfastness within NATO is essential to an eventually constructive resolution of the Russia-Ukraine crisis…
the currently violent political awakening among post-colonial Muslims is, in part, a belated reaction to their occasionally brutal suppression mostly by European powers. It fuses a delayed but deeply felt sense of injustice with a religious motivation that is unifying large numbers of Muslims against the outside world; but at the same time, because of historic sectarian schisms within Islam that have nothing to do with the West, the recent welling up of historical grievances is also divisive within Islam.
Juist omdat de VS ‘no longer the globally imperial power’ is, benadrukt Brzezinski dat
the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence erupting within and occasionally projected beyond the Muslim world — and in the future possibly from other parts of what used to be called the Third World — can be contained without destroying the global order.
Die ‘orde’ is nogmaals — het kan niet vaak genoeg herhaald worden — de neoliberale ‘orde’ die de huidige chaos heeft veroorzaakt, waarbij het westen in een permanente staat van oorlog verkeert met mens en natuur, de kloof tussen arm en rijk almaar toeneemt, het Amerikaanse militair-industrieel complex het meeste belastinggeld als subsidies ontvangt, en 62 individuen nu even rijk zijn als de helft van de mensheid tezamen. Hoewel Brzezinski zich inmiddels realiseert dat de VS niet meer de ‘only superpower,’ is -- die volgens de Amerikaanse neoconservatieven in de regering Reagan, pa en zoon Bush en Obama,‘the end of history’ had veroorzaakt -- kan ook hij geen afstand nemen van de gedachte dat Washington en Wall Street de toekomst van de hele mensheid dienen te bepalen. Naar aanleiding van het feit dat ‘Zbigniew Brzezinsky Forced to Downsize US Imperial Ambitions’ nam de goed geïnformeerde website Russia Insider een artikel over dat eerder was gepubliceerd door de website van de ‘thinktank’ Katehon:
an independent organization consisting of an international network of people - from a wide variety of fields and disciplines - who specialize in the geopolitical, geostrategic and political analysis of world events. The group consists of political thinkers, international relations (IR) researchers, experts in security and counter-terrorism, and journalists concerned with international affairs, geopolitics, ethno-politics and inter-religious dialogue.
De schrijvers van het artikel stellen:
Famous American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski once again frightened mankind by saying that ‘the end of America's global role ... would most probably be global chaos.’ To avoid this, the supporter of the American hegemony of the United States suggested Global Realignment. That's the name of his article in the JournalThe American Interest. So, what is the American Interest according to Brzezinski?
To briefly summarize the content of Brzezinski’s article it boils down to two theses:
1) The United States is no longer a global imperial power.
2) As was already mentioned above - the probable chaos as a result of the collapse of the US imperial hegemony. In order for the United States to maintain its power, Brzezinski offers several recipes:
a) Make the main geopolitical rivals of America - Russia and China - work towards US interests. This is supposed to use the crisis in the Middle East as a source of supposed common threats to all three powers.
‘America can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China.’
‘The political prospect for China in the near future is to become America's principal partner in containing global chaos, of the sort that is spreading outward (including to the northeast) from the Middle East. If it is not contained, it will contaminate Russia's southern and eastern territories as well as the western portions of China.’
b) Making the Islamic world work towards US interests. To do this, Brzezinski once again recalls his doctrine of ‘global democratic awakening,’ which justifies US involvement in Arab Springs. The gist of it is simple: use the anti-American forces to strengthen US domination through the various mechanisms of influence and direct infiltration.
Brzezinski states that special attention should be focused on the non-Western world's newly politically aroused masses, and this can be understood only in the context of his theory of global democratic awakening. The emergence of ISIS, and before that the color revolutions of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Islamic world can be regarded as the practical application of this particular strategy. These forces ‘surprisingly’ create problems for anyone except the United States.
c) To maintain the US military presence in the Middle East by any means. The text states that this is crucial for the United States, as withdrawal will immediately trigger the collapse of American hegemony:
‘A comprehensive US pullout from the Muslim world favored by domestic isolationists, could give rise to new wars (for example, Israel vs. Iran, Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, a major Egyptian intervention in Libya) and would generate an even deeper crisis of confidence in America's globally stabilizing role. In different but dramatically unpredictable ways, Russia and China could be the geopolitical beneficiaries of such a development even as global order itself becomes the more immediate geopolitical casualty. Last but not least, in such circumstances a divided and fearful Europe would see its current member states searching for patrons and competing with one another in alternative but separate arrangements among the more powerful trio.’
In other words, Brzezinski offers the following strategy, where the Middle East is playing a key role:
1. To foment chaos and war in the region, relying on the strength of ‘global democratic awakening.’
2. Declare war on terrorism and to shift the burden onto Russia and China, drawing them into a hopeless conflict in the region.
3. Maintain or even increase its military presence under the pretext of preserving stability in the Middle East.
Of course, all of this is masked by the theses of the struggle against terrorism and paying attention to the suffering of Muslims and the inhabitants of the Third World in general, and because the main actors in the crisis in the Middle East chessboard of Eurasia — Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Europe, and Saudi Arabia — are invited to participate in it. The pretext is that they are all interested in resolving the conflict, but in fact it will only lead to a conflict of interest and increase the chaos.
‘The overall threat of Islamic terrorism’ is not a ‘threat’ per se. The US were seriously hit by Islamism only once in its history, on September 11th, 2001. In the US, Muslims consist of around 1% of all citizens, as opposed to the multi-million Muslim populations of Russia and China. And unlike these two countries, there is no region in the US where the threat of Islamist separatism may emerge.
The US is separated from the conflict region by the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, the US can afford to play at two tables at once - to covertly support extremists and combat terrorism, drawing Russia and China into the conflict and subsequently weakening the Islamic world as well.
America hopes to use the US-grown Islamic extremists to re-engage Russia into their orbit, as has been noted - probably post-Putin. It will be the threat of Islamism that will be used in order to engage Russia in an America-centric system. Brzezinski openly declared that this pro-Western strategy relies on Russian nationalism, or on Russia’s transition from the Byzantine imperial expansionist ideology to the concept of Russian national bourgeois European states as part of the Western world:
‘Russia's own future depends on its ability to become a major and influential nation-state that is part of a unifying Europe.’
It is significant that Brzezinski, in accordance with the classical geopolitical tradition, considers the main US enemy to be Russia, not China:
‘And that is why it behooves the United States to fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.’
Brzezinski’s analysis is based on a manipulation of facts and outright lies, designed to hide the rough edges of his vision.
Firstly, he is absolutely wrong when he assesses Russia's position. From the point of view of Brzezinski, this country is in the latest convulsive phase of its imperial devolution. Meanwhile, Russia reunified with Crimea in 2014, and before that in 2008, conducted a successful military campaign in Georgia. In 2015-2016, for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, Russia launched a military campaign overseas - in Syria. Russia demonstrates not imperial devolution, but imperial renaissance. Even if Russia tries to become a nation-state, is will only push it to expand, as millions of Russians live in the territories of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries, and Kazakhstan. Both imperial and truly national versions of Russia do not fit into the Brzezinski’s vision of Russia - as one of the states of the European Union.
Secondly, Brzezinski did not take into account the new rising superpowers: India, Brazil, and South Africa. Indirectly, this may mean that the United States dropped them off, hoping to overthrow their independent elite by color revolutions and coups, like what is currently happening in Brazil. However, their demographic, economic, and, as in the case of India, ideologically anti-Western potential is extremely high.
Thirdly, he overlooks the potential for disintegration within the ‘European Union.’ The migration crisis, the collapse of the Schengen, diametrically opposite positions between leaders of states on key issues, and the growth of Euroscepticism, are all problems in the euro zone. This is not a Union that Russia would like to enter. This is not a Union where Brzezinski's ideas may promote the globalist agenda: ‘play a constructive role in taking the lead in regard to transnational threats to global wellbeing and even human survival.’
Fourthly, Brzezinski demonstrates thinking within the neorealist paradigm of ‘hegemonic stability.’ The collapse of US hegemony in his opinion would mean the collapse of the world order as such. But, first of all, the US does in no way contribute to the preservation of world order, turning the whole world into a zone of controlled chaos using the theory by another American analyst — Steven Mann. Why would it be a factor of stability in the future? Secondly, a number of neo-realists believe that the bipolar world will have a greater equilibrium than a unipolar one. Thirdly, there is a model of a multipolar world as a world divided by the imperial ‘big spaces,’ which takes into account the diversity of the world’s civilizations. It is also not chaos, but the most adequate alternative to American unilateralism.
It may be concluded that Brzezinski’s article demonstrates the desperate attempts of the American elite to maintain its hegemony in the world. At the same time it is full of propaganda clichés, and in many cases its assessment of the situation does not correspond to reality.
http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=brzezinski+afghanistan
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