vrijdag 30 mei 2014

NATO Watch

US lawmakers urge NATO to buy French warships

By Ian Davis, NATO Watch

On Thursday a group of US lawmakers urged France to withdraw the sale of two sophisticated helicopter carrier ships to Russia and suggested instead that NATO buy or lease them, according to a report by Reuters.

"The purchase would send a strong signal to President Putin that the NATO allies will not tolerate or in any way enable his reckless moves," they said in a letter to NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen obtained by Reuters. Washington and some European partners have been advising Paris to review its high-tech arms supplies to Moscow following Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March and ongoing involvement in the Ukrainian crisis.

Acquiring the French Mistral-class ships, which can carry 16 helicopters, four landing craft, 60 armoured vehicles, 13 tanks and up to 700 soldiers, would also boost NATO's capabilities at a time when many European members have been cutting defence expenditures, and reassure NATO allies in Central and Eastern Europe, the US lawmakers said. It seems very unlikely however, that NATO would buy the ships, since military procurement within the Alliance (with a few exceptions) is a national prerogative. Similarly, finding an alternative national buyer among NATO allies also seems unlikely given that it would be a substantial and unplanned addition to any nation's military budget in a time of austerity.

Signatories to the letter included US Representative Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee; Representative Michael Turner of Ohio, chairman of the US delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly; and Massachusetts Representative William Keating, the top Democrats on the House Europe subcommittee. Four other US lawmakers wrote to Obama earlier in May urging him to oppose the sale.

France is reluctant to jeopardise the 2011 deal that is worth $1.66 billion, has created about 1,000 jobs and includes the option for two more vessels. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had cited the contract as evidence that the Cold War was over, while his successor President François Hollande has never questioned the deal because of the perceived benefits to the French defence industry.

US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks indicate that US concerns go back as far as 2009 when French officials first informed their Western counterparts of the possibility of cutting a deal with Moscow. In a closed-door meeting in February 2010, then US Defence Secretary Robert Gates urged his French counterpart not to proceed with the sale because it “would send the wrong message to Russia and to our allies in Central and East Europe”, according to the New York Times. In 2011, Washington made its disapproval known through the chairman of the Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warned that France "had ignored the evident dangers of selling sophisticated warships to Russia when Moscow adopts an increasingly hostile attitude toward the United States, its neighbours and Europe itself”.

The warships are expected to strengthen Russia's naval presence either in the Black Sea region (where they could pose a threat to Ukraine and Georgia) or the Baltic Sea. A Russian naval commander was quoted as saying Russia’s Black Sea Fleet could have carried out its mission during the conflict with Georgia in 2008 “in 40 minutes” if it had possessed a ship like the Mistral. In a November 2009 cable, John Bass, the American ambassador to Georgia, described the deal as “the wrong ship from the wrong country at the wrong time".

“The technology and capability represented by the Mistral should not be passed to a Russian Federation that continues to threaten its neighbours,” said James Stavridis, the retired admiral who served as NATO’s top commander from 2009 to 2013. Serving NATO officials have been more reluctant to publicly condemn the deal, however, regarding the defence contract as a “sovereign matter between France and Russia".

During his visit to France in April, for example, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen praised France's leading security role at meeting with President Hollande. At a subsequent press conference the Secretary General applauded France’s contribution to the Alliance’s collective security. “France has kept defence spending close to our agreed target of 2% of economic output. France has also shown a great commitment to invest in the capabilities we need, both in NATO and the European Union. This is a valuable example of European Allies choosing to invest the right resources in the right capabilities", he said.

Earlier in his statement, the Secretary General had described "Russia's illegal aggression against Ukraine" as the "greatest challenge to Europe's security in a generation". But when asked about the Mistral contract, Rasmussen clearly sounded ill at ease, saying: "At the end of the day it is a national decision. I am not going to interfere as such in a national decision. And I am confident that France will take the necessary decision taking into account all the concerns that have been expressed". When pressed further on the question of arms transfers to Russia, the Secretary General said:

Let me stress that such regulation or possible regulation are not NATO business. They are dealt with in the EU and other for a. These are national decisions and as I stated I am confident that the French Government as well as governments in other NATO allied nations will take their decisions taking into account the overall security situation and taking into account the solidarity principles within our Alliance.

While European arms exports are indeed governed by the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports, NATO has also previouslyattached great importance to conventional arms control issues and has in the past provided an essential consultative and decision-making forum on such issues. Indeed, the Alliance's 2010 Strategic Concept reiterates the major role of arms control in achieving security objectives, as well as the continued importance of harmonizing defence and arms control policies and objectives and NATO’s commitment to the development of future arms control agreements. None of this appears to be a priority for the current Secretary General, however, whom appears more at home lecturing member states about the need to increase their defence budgets.

The first of the French carriers, the Vladivostok, is due to be delivered by the last quarter of 2014. Some 400 Russian sailors were scheduled to arrive in June in Saint Nazaire to prepare for the handover of the warship. It is not clear whether this will still happen. The second warship, to be delivered by 2016, is rather mockingly named Sebastopol, after the Crimean seaport.

During a visit to Washington at the beginning of May, the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said his government would decide in October whether to proceed with the delivery of two of the ships, and asserted that France had struck the right balance between “dialogue and firmness” in its dealings with Moscow. It seems unlikely that the deal will be cancelled. As Sophie Quintin Adali concluded in an article in March:

Frustrating as it may be for the Americans, the Gaullist tradition of political independence on defence issues and the quest for a special relationship “between eternal France and Russia” is here to stay. As a new Cold War era seemingly grips East-West relations, France continues to deal with Russia according to its national interests, including those of its defence industry.

General W. Clark

http://quietube6.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKrkokQIx9g

donderdag 29 mei 2014

Zionism

MAY 29, 2014

The Israel that could have been in Argentina

EDITOR

By Uri Avnery

During his short visit to Israel, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl.

That was not a usual gesture. Foreign heads of state are obliged to visit Yad Vashem, as did the Pope, but not the grave of Herzl. It is not like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.

So why Herzl’s grave? Obviously, this gesture was intended to emphasize the Zionist character of the state.

Herzl was the founder of modern political Zionism. He is officially called “the Visionary of the State”. His is the only picture decorating the Knesset plenum hall. If we had saints, he would be St Theodor.

… if Herzl had had his way, Francis would have been greeted by President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Spanish. He would have honoured Herzl’s grave in the Jewish state somewhere south of Buenos Aires.

Probably Francis did not give another thought to this gesture. If so, it’s a pity. The Argentine Pope could have found a lot of interest in this colourful Viennese journalist and playwright.

Because if Herzl had had his way, Francis would have been greeted by President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Spanish. He would have honoured Herzl’s grave in the Jewish state somewhere south of Buenos Aires.

If Francis had never heard of this episode, he is not the only one. The vast mass of Israelis has not either. It is not taught in Israeli schools. It is hidden, rather shamefully.

Uganda as Israel

Israelis know about “Uganda”. Shortly before his early death, Herzl was invited by the British government to implement his ideas in part of British East Africa (actually, it was the Kenyan highlands, a plateau with a mild climate, which later became a part of Kenya).

By that time, Herzl had despaired of getting Palestine from the Turkish sultan. The Kenyan project, which could be implemented at once, attracted him and his main supporter, Max Nordau, who advised him to take it at least temporarily, as a “night asylum”.

But the Russian Zionists, the bulwark of the movement, rebelled. Palestine or nothing. Herzl was overruled by his admirers and died soon after of a broken heart, it was said.

This episode is well known. Much has been written about it. Some would say that if during the 1930s a Jewish Commonwealth had existed in Africa, many European Jews could have been saved from the Nazis.

But the Argentine chapter has been erased. It did not fit the image of “the Visionary of the State” on the walls.

Herzl’s long trek to Zionism started when, as a Hungarian-born Jewish student in Vienna, he encountered anti-Semitism. His logical mind found the answer. Being a playwright, he described the scene: all Austrian Jews, except himself, would march in an orderly fashion to the Cathedral and convert en masse to Catholicism. The Pope would have been enthusiastic.

However, Herzl soon learned that neither would the Jews accept baptism (“the Jews are afraid of water,” Heinrich Heine once joked), but the nationalist goyim [gentiles] did not dream of accepting them into their ranks. How could they? Jews were everywhere, in many different countries, so how could they sincerely join any national movement?

That’s when Herzl had his historic insight: if the Jews could not join any of the national movements that were mushrooming in Europe, why shouldn’t they constitute themselves as a separate, new-old nation?

For Herzl, that was a sober, rational idea. No God involved, no holy scriptures, no romantic nonsense. Palestine did not enter his mind. Nor had he any interest in the religious fantasies of Christian Zionists in Britain and the US, like Alfred Balfour.

“I can tell you everything about the ‘promised Land’ except its location”

Herzl’s project was fully completed, up to the smallest detail, and written down in the brochure that became the Zionist Bible “Der Judenstaat”, before he even started to think seriously about the place where it should be realized.

The pamphlet started as a speech he made to the “family council” of the Rothschilds, the richest Jews on earth. He expected them to finance the project.

The text is immortalized in his Diaries, a very well-written document covering several books. On page 149 of the first book of the original German print, after explaining his plans, he remarks that “I can tell you everything about the ‘promised Land’ except its location.” This will be left to a conference of outstanding Jewish geographers, who will decide where to set up the Jewish state, after examining all the geological, climatic, “in short, the natural circumstances, taking into account the most modern investigations”. It is a “purely scientific” decision to make.

In the end, when the pamphlet came out under the title “Der Judenstaat”, the location was almost ignored. Less than a page was devoted to it, under the expressive title: “Palestine or Argentina?”

Argentina as Israel

Herzl clearly preferred Argentina. The reason for this has also been forgotten.

A generation before Herzl, Argentina consisted mainly of the north of the country, around Buenos Aires. The vast south, called Patagonia, was almost empty.

What Herzl saw with his mind’s eye was a huge new country more or less empty, just waiting to be turned into a Jewish state. He thought that the Argentine government would give it up for money. The remaining local population could be pushed out…

At the time, Argentina started a campaign of conquest, that many today consider genocidal. The indigenous pre-Columbian population, including a tribe of “giants” (two meters tall) was annihilated or pushed out. That was called, almost in Zionist fashion, “the desert campaign”.

Such genocidal campaigns were at the time quite usual. The US ran one against the “red Indians”. The Germans committed genocide in today’s Namibia, and the mass-murderer was feted in the Kaiser’s Germany as a national hero. The King of the Belgians did something similar in the Congo.

“Herzl detested Palestine. Most of all he detested Jerusalem”

The rational approach of Herzl was soon swamped by the irrational character of his movement – a mixture of religious fantasies and East European romanticism. The plan to resettle the Jews in a safe environment turned into a Messianic movement. This has happened to the Jews before, and always ended in disaster.

Herzl detested Palestine. Most of all he detested Jerusalem.

Curiously enough for the prophet of Zionism, he long refused to visit Palestine. He crisscrossed Europe from London to St Petersburg, from Istanbul to Rome, in order to meet the great of the world, but did not set foot in Jaffa until he was practically compelled by the German Kaiser…

Wilhelm II, a romantic and rather unstable type, insisted on meeting the leader of the Jews in a tent near the gates of Jerusalem…

Herzl fled the town and the country as quickly as he could. The Holy City, for which his successors are today ready to shed much blood, looked to him ugly and dirty. He escaped to Jaffa, and there climbed in the middle of the night onto the first available ship going to Alexandria. He claimed to have heard rumors about a plot to kill him.

All this could have been food for the Pope’s reflections, if he had been focused on the past. But Francis lives in the present and held out his arms to the living, especially the Palestinians.

Instead of entering the land through Israel, like everybody else, he borrowed a helicopter from King Abdallah II of Jordan and flew directly from Amman to Bethlehem. This was a kind of recognition of Palestinian statehood. On his way back from Bethlehem to the helicopter, he suddenly asked to stop, went up to the occupation Wall and laid his hands on its ugly concrete, as his predecessors had done at the Western Wall. His prayer there could only be heard by God.

From there the Pope flew to Ben-Gurion airport, as if he had just arrived from Rome. He marched on the red carpet between Peres and Netanyahu (since neither of the two would cede the honour to the other).

I don’t know what the Pope found to talk about with this shallow duo, but I would surely have enjoyed listening in to a conversation between the two intelligent Argentinians, Francis and Herzl.

http://www.redressonline.com/2014/05/the-israel-that-could-have-been-in-argentina/

The Sixth Great Extinction

World On Brink Of Sixth Great Extinction, Species Disappearing Faster Than Ever Before

| By SETH BORENSTEIN

Posted: 05/29/2014 2:47 pm EDT Updated: 10 minutes ago

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at least 1,000 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene, and the world is on the brink of a sixth great extinction, a new study says.

The study looks at past and present rates of extinction and finds a lower rate in the past than scientists had thought. Species are now disappearing from Earth about 10 times faster than biologists had believed, said study lead author noted biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University.

"We are on the verge of the sixth extinction," Pimm said from research at the Dry Tortugas. "Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions."

The work, published Thursday by the journal Science, was hailed as a landmark study by outside experts.

Pimm's study focused on the rate, not the number, of species disappearing from Earth. It calculated a "death rate" of how many species become extinct each year out of 1 million species.

In 1995, Pimm found that the pre-human rate of extinctions on Earth was about 1. But taking into account new research, Pimm and his colleagues refined that background rate to about 0.1.

Now, that death rate is about 100 to 1,000, Pimm said.

Numerous factors are combining to make species disappear much faster than before, said Pimm and co-author Clinton Jenkins of the Institute of Ecological Research in Brazil. But the No. 1 issue is habitat loss. Species are finding no place to live as more places are built up and altered by humans.

Add to that invasive species crowding out native species, climate change affecting where species can survive, and overfishing, Pimm said.

The buffy-tufted-ear marmoset is a good example, Jenkins said. Its habitat has shrunk because of development in Brazil, and a competing marmoset has taken over where it lives. Now ,it's on the international vulnerable list.

The oceanic white-tip shark used to be one of the most abundant predators on Earth and they have been hunted so much they are now rarely seen, said Dalhousie University marine biologist Boris Worm, who wasn't part of the study but praised it. "If we don't do anything, this will go the way of the dinosaurs."

Five times, a vast majority of the world's life has been snuffed out in what have been called mass extinctions, often associated with giant meteor strikes. About 66 million years ago, one such extinction killed off the dinosaurs and three out of four species on Earth. Around 252 million years ago, the Great Dying snuffed out about 90 percent of the world's species.

Pimm and Jenkins said there is hope. Both said the use of smartphones and applications such as iNaturalist will help ordinary people and biologists find species in trouble, they said. Once biologists know where endangered species are they can try to save habitats and use captive breeding and other techniques to save the species, they said.

One success story is the golden lion tamarin. Decades ago the tiny primates were thought to be extinct because of habitat loss, but they were then found in remote parts of Brazil, bred in captivity and biologists helped set aside new forests for them to live in, Jenkins said.

"Now there are more tamarins than there are places to put them," he said.

___

Online:

Journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

The American Fools

Uit het imperium dat de hegemonie in de wereld met geweld afdwingt:

John Boehner: 'I'm Not Qualified To Debate The Science Over Climate Change'

Posted: 05/29/2014 11:45 am EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

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WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is preparing to roll out new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants on Monday, and the rules are already drawing criticism from congressional Republicans.

Of course, many of the rules' opponents are not even convinced that the issue the rules seek to address -- namely, climate change -- is even a problem at all. The Republican-led House Science Committee is holding a hearing on Thursday morningquestioning the most recent scientific reports on climate change.

A reporter asked House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) at Thursday morning's Republican leadership press conference if, given his stated concerns about EPA regulations, "Are there steps you would support to take action against climate change, and do you think that's a problem?"

Boehner's response didn't exactly answer the question.

"Well, listen. I'm not qualified to debate the science over climate change. But I am astute enough to understand that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs," said Boehner. "That can't be the prescription for dealing with changes in our climate."

The speaker's low estimation of his grasp of the science has not prevented him in the past from casting doubt on the idea that climate change is a problem that can be attributed to human activity, and particularly the burning of fossil fuels.

In 2009, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Boehner what the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions would be, and Boehner dismissed the concern. "George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical," said Boehner. "Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide." He went on to suggest, though, that Republicans would come up with a plan.

In 2012, without then having offered any such plan, he told USA Today, "I don't think there's any doubt that we've had climate change over the last 100 years. What has initiated it, though, has sparked a debate that's gone on now for the last 10 years ... I don't think we're any closer to the answer than we were 10 years ago."

Obama's Afghanistan War

Congress Could Slow Obama’s Push for a Longer Afghan War

George Zornick on May 28, 2014 - 1:13 PM ET

US Marines in Afghanistan. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

President Obama announced Tuesday afternoon that 9,800 American troops will remain in Afghanistan after 2014, a number that he said could be cut in half by the start of 2015. By the end of 2016, the last year of his presidency, Obama envisions a final end to America’s longest war.

The decision to drag out the war for two and half more years is an almost total surrender to many Pentagon officials who were pushing the president for around 10,000 troops to remain in the country; NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski reported it was “exactly” what General Joseph Dunford, the top American commander in Afghanistan, had requested.

For months, reports had been leaking out of the White House about serious internal divisionsabout the war. Some senior advisors were pushing for no troops after 2014, and Vice President Joe Biden was reportedly pushing for a much smaller force of 2,000 to 3,000 troops. Biden and his allies apparently lost the debate.

But Obama still faces resistance to his desire for more war in Afghanistan—now, from Congress. The Nation has learned that there will be a push in the Senate to request a congressional vote on any troop presence in Afghanistan past 2014. It will come in the form of a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which just cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Last year, twelve senators from both parties sponsored a similar amendment, but Senate majority leader Harry Reid didn’t allow a vote during the defense authorization process. Senators Jeff Merkley, Joe Manchin, Rand Paul and Mike Lee reintroduced a similar measure in February as a stand-alone bill, but it never received a hearing.

At least some members of the group are ready to give it one more run. A Senate aide close to the process told The Nation there would be a “strong push for an amendment vote” during the defense spending bill debate, which should begin before the end of the year. The February bill gained eight co-sponsors from both parties, including two senators in tough re-election battles: Merkley and Senator Mark Begich.

That effort is just one part of broadening congressional disapproval. “President Obama promised he would end the war in Afghanistan,” Representatives Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva said Tuesday in a statement on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made up of sixty House members. “We are glad the original combat mission in Afghanistan is coming to a close, but keeping a residual force of 9,800 in the country after 2014 is not ending the war.”

US troops will still be effectively engaging in war, by any definition, past 2014—which is no doubt undergirding the congressional concerns. Obama affirmed Tuesday that remaining troops would still be “supporting counterterrorism operations against the remnants of Al Qaeda,” which is broad enough to theoretically include just about any operation inside Afghanistan. Details of a draft Status of Forces Agreement with Afghanistan that were leaked last year showed the United States fought for, and apparently won, the right to continue entering the homes of Afghan citizens.

During the House debate on the NDAA, a measure to sunset the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force at the end of 2014 failed, but got more votes than it did in previous years. The finally tally was 233-191.

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Representative John Garamendi, a co-sponsor of that effort, also voiced concern Tuesday about Obama’s new strategy. “While I always welcome news of service members returning home from Afghanistan, I remain deeply concerned about the scope and length of our continued military involvement in Afghanistan beyond 2014,” he said in a statement.

Senator Merkley, who helped spearhead the earlier Senate efforts, expressed similar skepticism. “After more than a dozen years in Afghanistan, I believe it is time to end the longest war in American history and bring our sons and daughters home,” he said. “If the administration wants to keep troops in Afghanistan beyond this year, Congress should vote. The American people deserve a voice in issues of war and peace. Automatic renewal is fine for Netflix and gym memberships, but it is not the right approach when it comes to war.”

Read Next: Why the left should worry about Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/180038/congress-could-slow-obamas-push-fora-longer-afghan-war

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