Grant Of Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Asylum For Chechen Terror
Envoy Gave Obama Foreign Policy Guru Zbigniew Brzezinski
'One Of The Happiest Days Of My Life'

By Webster G. Tarpley

2-3-8

If the American public were generally aware that the "foreign minister" of one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in the world, a man whose extradition on terrorism charges is sought by at least one UN Security Council permanent member, is living openly in Washington DC, they might be indignant. If Americans knew that this is the "foreign minister" of a terrorist group specializing in killing women and children first in a hospital, then in a school, and later defenseless civilians in a theater, their indignation might grow into rage. If they knew that this envoy for terrorists is living in the comfortable Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington DC with a lifestyle most Americans could not afford, with an office, a secretary, a travel budget, and a public relations budget all paid for at the expense of the US taxpayers, with State Department checks signed by Condoleeza Rice, they might be furious. If they knew that this ambassador for terrorists had been set up in his current all expenses paid, taxpayer-funded lifestyle by a man who is the main image adviser and the main foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, their view of the Illinois senator and his qualifications for the presidency might well undergo a radical change.

And yet, all this is reality. The terrorist organization in question is the Chechen rebel group associated with the names of two of the greatest butchers of our time, Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev, both deceased even though the organization they built fights on. The foreign minister and ambassador for this terrorist group is Ilyas Khamzatovich Akhmadov (born December 19, 1960, who was granted political asylum in the United States in 2003. Akhmadov's patron is none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former head of the National Security Council during the Jimmy Carter administration and, before that the co-founder with David Rockefeller of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. Zbigniew Brezezinski in turn is not only the main foreign policy adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign; Zbigniew is in many ways the creator of the public relations image profile now being used by Obama in his quest for the White House, an image that is developed in Zbig's latest book, Second Chance. Zbigniew's son Mark Brzezinski, a veteran of the NSC under Clinton, is another key foreign policy adviser for Obama. Mika Brzezinski, daughter to Zbigniew and sister to Mark, churns out a propaganda line slanted in favor of Obama every morning on the MSNBC Morning Joe program. Ian Brzezinski, another son of Zbigniew, is busy poisoning US relations with Russia from his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and Russia in the Bush Pentagon. Yet another member of the clan, Zbigniew's nephew Matthew Brzezinski serves as a de facto public relations representative for Akhmadov, whitewashing this envoy for Chechen terrorists in the pages of the Washington Post. The entire crew is made of of petty Polish aristocrats notable mainly for their fanatical, consuming hatred of Russia and Russians. The family project is to hitch the remaining military power of the United States to their monomania of hatred. If they are allowed to succeed, the bloody excesses of the neocons in the Middle East will seem like schoolyard games by comparison, since the Brzezinski gang wants to court all-out confrontation with a first-class thermonuclear power that is moving well ahead of the US in certain crucial types of strategic weaponry. The now-infamous neocons have been careful to pick on powers with little or no strategic retaliatory potential. Brzezinski lacks this faculty of discrimination. This is the reality behind the messianic edification and utopian platitudes dished up by Obama. Under an Obama administration, Americans will risk getting a reminder of what real war looks like, and they may discover that it is a two-way street.

Voters who may be wondering what the foreign policy of a future Obama administration might look like need to learn from recent painful experience with George W. Bush and look closely at the foreign policy advisers around the candidate, since it is these figures who will prepare the policy options and, by so doing, will determine the course of a new administration. For Bush, these advisers were the self-styled "Vulcans," figures like Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Cheney, most of them neocons and most of them chosen by George Shultz, who created the disaster of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Even though Bush might have been a blank slate in foreign policy, it was evident from the presence of these neocon warmongers which direction the new regime would choose. Who then are the corresponding figures around Obama? A cursory look reveals that in foreign affairs and not just foreign affairs, Obama is the creature of the Brzezinski machine.

"HE'S A TERRORIST, THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT."

The country that wants Akhmadov extradited into their custody to stand trial for multiple murder charges is the Russian Federation, which has repeatedly requested that Akhmadov not be allowed to stay in Washington. Russia has been demanding Akhmadov's extradition since 2003. "He's a terrorist, there is no doubt about it," commented Aleksander Lukashevich, senior political counselor at the Russian Embassy in Washington. "We have proof . . . Our foreign minister has made Russia's position on extradition quite clear." "Harboring terrorists, their henchmen and sponsors undermines the unity and mutual trust of parties to the antiterrorist front," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in an address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2004. Russian President Vladimir Putin commented during a visit to India in December 2004: "We cannot have double standards while fighting terrorism, and it cannot be used as a geopolitical game." Akhmadov's presence in Washington is thus already a major irritant in US-Russia relations. Seen in this context, Akhmadov emerges as pawn in the Brzezinski clan strategy to set the United States and Russia on a confrontation course, a strategy they plan to impose on Obama, who is their clueless puppet in international affairs.

Voters may remember the Chechen terrorists for their greatest atrocity, the September 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, located in the ethnically diverse trans-Caucasus region of southern Russia. At that time, Chechen terrorists took hundreds of hostages in an elementary school. Before the terror attack was finished, more than 300 persons, mainly school children and women, had been massacred. The responsibility for this atrocity was claimed in a formal statement by the terrorist leader Shamil Basayev, a reputed CIA agent later killed by Russian troops. This infamous Basayev, one of the fiercest terrorists of our own or any other time, is generally acknowledged to have been the direct superior officer, mentor, and friend of Ilyas Akhmadov, the prot©g© of Zbigniew Brzezinski now living at US taxpayer expense. Akhmadov himself admits his close relationship to Basayev, whom he first met in 1992. In 1994, when the Chechen secessionist rebellion began, Akhmadov was quick to join an infantry unit commanded by Basayev operating near the Chechen capital of Grozny. Akhmadov's other great terrorist sponsor was the Chechen rebel "president" Maskhadov, who named Akhmadov to the job of foreign minister which he still claims to hold, despite his claims to disagree with the terrorist policies of the government he continues to represent. Maskhadov was killed by Russian forces. Akhmadov, who demands Sam Adams on draft, not in bottles when he is thirsty, told Zbigniew's nephew Matthew that he no longer approves of what Basayev and Maskhadov did, but his complicity is beyond doubt. (See Matthew Brzezinski, "How a Chechen terror suspect wound up living on taxpayers' dollars near the National Zoo," Washington Post, March 20, 2005.)

1995 BUDYONNOVSK HOSPITAL MASSACRE BY AKHMADOV'S FRIENDS

In 1995, a group of 150 Chechen terrorist fighters commanded by Basayev attacked a Russian hospital in Budyonnovsk, about 100 miles north of the Chechen border. Basayev and his terrorist commandos took more than 1,000 hostages at the hospital, leading to a siege by Russian forces which lasted a week. Basayev's Chechen terrorist fighters used the defenseless Russian patients and staff as human shields. In the ensuing fighting, more than 100 Russian hostages, including many women and children, perished. These are the forces which Akhmadov has represented and continues to represent, with the American taxpayer footing the bill.

Akhmadov's track record is so horrendous that even some important Republican Congressmen resisted granted him asylum in the US. The 2003 House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), and the chairman of the Immigration and Border Security subcommittee, John Hostettler (R-Indiana) jointly demanded that the then Attorney General John Ashcroft review the ruling that granted Akhmadov political asylum. "If the United States had evidence that Mr. Akhmadov was involved in terrorist activities, it is unclear why he was not barred from asylum as a terrorist and as a danger to the security of our nation," they told Ashcroft in September 2004.

ZBIGNIEW: "ONE OF THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF MY LIFE"

"In July 2004...after running up legal fees that (if he had had to pay them) would have set him back $250,000, Akhmadov received the final decision. He could stay in America," writes Matthew Brzezinski. He does not make clear who footed the bill for Akhmadov's quarter million dollars of lawyers' expenses. Was it the American taxpayer? In any case, there is no doubt that the pro-Akhmadov lobbying was spearheaded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his faction of Russia haters. When Akhmadov was granted permanent asylum, it was apparently Zbigniew Brzezinski who called to give him the news: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that one of the happiest days of my life was when I called Ilyas to tell him that he would be able to stay in America," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, as quoted by his own nephew, Matthew. (Washington Post, March 20, 2005)

Akhmadov was later given a Reagan-Fascell grant by the State Department. This provides him with a generous stipend for living expenses, an office at the National Endowment for Democracy complete with private secretary, plus extra money for travel and public relations purposes ,Äì all courtesy of the American taxpayer. Would an Obama administration, with an anti-Russian foreign policy dictated by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his clan, bring Chechen and terrorists in large numbers to this country, provided that they were anti-Moscow? Would these terrorists get Reagan-Fascell grants from the State Department, so that they could live and operate at US taxpayer expense? What impact might that have on US-Russian relations? If these terrorists were to orchestrate a huge atrocity in Russia that had their fingerprints all over it, what might the Russian response be? Do we really want to go down this road in deference to the psychotic obsessions of an aging revanchist and Russophobe like Zbigniew Brzezinski?

Especially after the publication of Matthew Brzezinski's whitewash of Akhmadov, the presence of an ambassador for such a terror organization being maintained by the US taxpayers in Washington DC became a public scandal. The scandal came out in the pages of Johnson's Russia List, the scholarly clearing house for information about Russia. Professor Robert Bruce Ware of Southern Illinois University offered the following facts to challenge the Matthew Brzezinski article, which had claimed that Akhmadov was now a penitent for the actions of the Chechen terrorist regime: "On August 2 and September 5, 1999, the Russian Republic of Dagestan was invaded by about 2,000 terrorists from al-Qaeda-connected bases in Chechnya. Dozens of innocent Dagestani men, women, and children were murdered. According to figures furnished by the UNHCR, 32,000 people were driven from their homes. The invasions were potentially genocidal in that they exposed to direct attack the entire ethnic territories, and all villages, inhabited by some of Dagestan's smaller ethno-linguistic groups, such as the Andis. During these months Illyas Akhmadov was serving as Chechnya's foreign minister. He did not resign from that position. I have been able to find no evidence that Akhmadov issued any public statement repudiating the invasions of Dagestan during the six weeks that they were in progress. During interviews with Dagestanis since that time, I have been able to find no one in Dagestan who is aware of any public statement issued either by Illyas Akhmadov or Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov repudiating the invasions while they were in progress, let alone offering to assist the people of Dagestan in resisting them." (Robert Bruce Ware, "Response to Brzezinski," Johnson's Russia List, March 20, 2005)

Professor Ware challenged the Brzezinski cabal to justify their support for Akhmadov and the Chechen terrorists, especially in the light of Bush's posturing that those who harbor terrorists are themselves to be classified as terrorists: "We Americans can easily imagine how we would feel if we were to discover that Mullah Omar, or any other important Taliban official, had been granted political asylum in Russia. ...Now here are my first questions for Illyas Akhmadov, the Brzezinski clan, ... and everyone else cited in the Brzezinski article: If the United States was correct to declare the entire Taliban government a terrorist organization, then why isn't the Russian government correct to declare Chechen government, including Aslan Maskhadov and Illyas Akhmadov, to be a terrorist organization? If we would think it wrong of Russia to grant political asylum to Mullah Omar, then why do we not think that it is wrong for the United States to grant political asylum to Illyas Akhmadov? Why didn't Illyas Akhmadov resign from the Chechen government when Dagestan was invaded? Why didn't Illyas Akhmadov resign from the Chechen government when Aslan Maskhadov refused to extradite the leaders of the invasion of Dagestan? During the months of August and September 1999, Illyas Akhmadov was shuttling between Moscow and Grozny in order to negotiate these points with Russian officials. During those months did Illyas Akhmadov personally refuse, or convey refusals, of requests such as these? Exactly what record is there that Illyas Akhmadov ever issued a public statement repudiating the invasions of Dagestan while those invasions were in progress, or supporting the extradition of the invasions' leaders? (Robert Bruce Ware, "Response to Brzezinski," Johnson's Russia List, March 20, 2005)

"ACHMADOV SHOULD BE ASKED TO LEAVE THE UNITED STATES"

Professor Ware's conclusion was that Akhmadov needed to be deprived of his State Department funding and kicked out of the United States: "If the 9/11 made Bin Laden a terrorist, and if the Oklahoma City blast made McVeigh a terrorist, then why didn't his public acceptance of responsibility for the Ingushetia raids make Aslan Maskhadov a terrorist? And if his public acceptance of responsibility for those raids made Maskhadov a terrorist, then why doesn't it implicate those who represented him, such as Illyas Akhmadov, in charges of terrorism? And if it does make Illyas Akhmadov a terrorist then why is he enjoying political asylum and a prestigious professional position at the expense of the American taxpayer?... Akhmadov should be asked to leave the United States as soon as possible." (Robert Bruce Ware, "Response to Brzezinski," Johnson's Russia List, March 20, 2005) Better yet, Akhmadov should be handed over to Russia, which would get him off the back of the US taxpayer. At the very least, Akhmadov should be indicted for terrorism and put on trial in Washington.

BRZEZINSKI SUPPORTED POL POT

Zbigniew Brzezinski's support for Chechen terrorism, no matter how dangerous this policy may be for the United States, is exemplary for his entire approach to world affairs, which he calls "geostrategy." In practice, this means Russophobia, the hatred of Russia. So fanatical is Zbigniew's hatred for Russia that he is willing to embrace any lunatic adventure, no matter what the potential for blowback and damage to the United States, as long as he thinks that Moscow may be harmed in the process. A good example is his support of the genocidal Pol Pot regime in Cambodia during the time he ran foreign policy during the Carter Administration. Pol Pot was supported by the Chinese, and the Chinese at that time were the key to Brzezinski's version of the China card policy, which was to play Beijing against Moscow in the hopes of weakening both. This is another very dangerous idea that he hopes to duplicate under a future Obama regime. Here is Brzezinski's confession that he backed Pol Pot, which makes him an accessory to one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the twentieth century. The Pol Pot regime slaughtered between two and three million of its own people, a greater proportion of the target population than that attained by any other genocide in our time. But this was no impediment to Zbigniew: "In 1981, President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, 'I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.' The US, he added, 'winked publicly' as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand." Even after the Pol Pot regime had been defeated on the battlefield by the forces of Hanoi, it continued to occupy the Cambodian seat at the United Nations, thanks largely to the support of the Carter administration which was ordered by Zbigniew Brzezinski as a Cold War measure and as a part of his China Card anti-Russian rapprochement with Beijing. By this time, it was clear that the Pol Pot regime had indeed committed genocide. (John Pilger, "The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot," Fall 1997, online at: http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf, citing Elizabeth Becker, When the War was Over, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986, p. 440.)

Brzezinski also set the United States on the course that has led to the First Gulf War and the current Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. In 1980, Brzezinski was the author of the Carter Doctrine, which stated that the United States was determined to dominate the Persian Gulf against all comers. Two subsequent wars have done nothing more than play out the logic of that committment, which Zbigniew intended to favor a collision between Washington and Moscow.

BRZEZINSKI BOASTS OF STARTING THE AFGHAN WAR

Brzezinski was also the great promoter of Islamic fundamentalism, which he celebrated as the greatest bulwark against Soviet Russian communism. Using the Islamic faundamentalists, Brzezinski hoped to make the entire region between the southern border of the USSR and the Indian Ocean into an "arc of crisis," from which fundamentalist subversion would radiate into Soviet territory, first and foremost into the five Soviet republics of central Asia, Azerbaijan, etc. It was in the service of this Islamic fundamentalist card that Brzezinski first helped overthrow the Shah of Iran, and then insisted that the replacement could be no one else than Ayatollah Khomeini. To magnify the impact of Khomeini, Brzezinski sent subversion teams into Afghanistan during the summer of 1979 to undermine the pro-Soviet forces there and induce Moscow to intervene. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan at Christmas 1979, Moscow claimed that they were responding to earlier aggressive moves into that country by the US. In an interview about ten years ago, Brzezinski conceded that this had been true: Zbig had indeed sent subversion and terror teams into Aghanistan at least six months before the Soviet invasion., as is clear from this excerpt from that interview:

Brzezinski: ... According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: 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? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: 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?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense!

(Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998)

From today's perspective, a greater irresonsibility and adventurism could hardly be imagined. The First Gulf War, the disastrous Iraq War, and the looming Iran War are the direct fruits of Zbigniew's adventurous precedents. If Zbig now argues that he did not mean to go so far in this theater, that changes nothing in this picture.

THE BRZEZINSKI PLAN FOR RUSSIA

The leaders in Moscow have Zbigniew's number ,Äì he has been ranting against them for fifty years and more. They are well aware of the existence of a Brzezinski Plan, a confidential design to break up the Russian Federation and partition European Russia along the lines of what occurred during the Russian Civil War in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. In those days the White Armies were led by figures like Wrangel, Deinkin, Kolchak and the rest, with US forces landing at Murmansk. Today, the reactionary armies are led by the megalomaniac Zbigniew, who deludes himself that he can go as a victor to Moscow, where Napoleon and Hitler failed.

Brzezinski's aggressive plans are notorious among Russian leaders. As the Russian government minister Ivanov remarked: "Russia has to remain strong culturally, economically and politically," he was quoted as saying by ITAR-Tass. "Otherwise, the 'Brzezinski plan' may prove a reality." The wire explained that the "'Brzezinski plan' is a term used by Russian political figures since at least the mid-1980s to describe alleged Western plots to destabilize the Soviet Union and later Russia." (Douglas Birch, "Kremlin Powers May Be Split After Putin," AP, June 26, 2007)

Another news article related that by 2002 pro-Russian forces in Ukraine "have increasingly given credence to a 'Brzezinski plan' conspiracy that was first aired by Russian sources close to President Vladimir Putin. The 'Brzezinski plan' is supposedly an elaborate plan concocted by a group of U.S. policymakers to overthrow President Kuchma [then the president of Ukraine] and replace him with [NATO puppet] Yushchenko in a 'bloodless revolution.' An analogy is drawn with the overthrow of Slobodan Milosovic in Serbia in October 2000. Yushchenko's alleged allies in this plot are the two wings of the radical anti-Kuchma opposition, [kleptocrat] Yuliya Tymoshenko, his former deputy prime minister, and Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz. (Taras Kuzio, "Russia Gives Ukraine a Helping Hand in Its Elections," RFE/RL, January 22, 2002) This is of course the scenario that played out under Brzezinski's command, with great and continuing danger to the peace of Europe and the world, at the end of 2004. The Yushchenko pro-NATO regime in Kiev was installed by the November-December 2004 CIA people power coup or color revolution cynically orchestrated by Zbigniew and Mark Brzezinski, with the help of Mark Penn.

OBAMA: A FACE LIFT FOR IMPERIALISM

The terms of Zbig's endorsement of his own prot©g© are very revealing. Obama "recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America's role in the world," Brzezinski remarked during an interview on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt." "Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand," Brzezinski said. "He has a sense of what is historically relevant, and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world." Brzezinski dismissed Hillary Clinton as totally inadequate: "Being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president. President Truman didn't have much experience before he came to office. Neither did John Kennedy," Brzezinski said. Clinton's foreign-policy approach is "very conventional," Brzezinski added "I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago." "There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs," he continued. "And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world." (Bloomberg, "Zbigniew Brzezinski Endorses Barack Obama," Friday, August 24, 2007)

In other words, US imperialism needs a face lift and a dose of steroids to be able to address the question of finally eliminating any challenger powers and attaining a permanent US-UK Universal Monarchy, the real content of the shopworn phrase, "New World Order." Brzezinski's latest book, Second Chance, is widely viewed as the user manual for an Obama puppet regime. Here Zbig argues that there is a worldwide political awakening going on. This is true, and in the real world the content of this awakening is the demand for national independence, no more IMF conditionalities, economic progress, modern science, modern industry, modern technology, and rising standards of living. This awakening is clearly expressed in the world-wide demand for peaceful nuclear power reactors which is currently sweeping the planet, and which the Bush administration has been powerless to block, despite their efforts at confrontation with Iran over precisely this issue.

Here is Zbigniew's preion in a nutshell: "The price of failing to implement ... [my] strategy is twofold. First, the US will spur Russia and China among others to form a rival axis of power that could tip the world toward larger imperial wars. Second, it will antagonize the emerging populist rebellion against global inequality. This widening inequality is producing "revolutionaries-in-waiting ... the equivalent of the militant proletariat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.... [The] political awakening is now global in geographic scope, comprehensive in social scale..., strikingly youthful in demographic profile and thus receptive to rapid political mobilization, and transnational in sources of inspiration because of the cumulative impact of literacy and mass communications. As a result, modern populist passions can be aroused even against a distant target, despite the absence of a unifying doctrine such as Marxism.... Only by identifying itself with the idea of universal human dignity'with its basic requirement of respect for culturally diverse political, social, and religious emanations'can America overcome the risk that the global political awakening will turn against it."

As a perceptive reviewer summed it up, "Brzezinski's book is a liberal manifesto for rehabilitating imperialism. But it relies on a fundamental, faulty assumption that the world's nations, both great powers and war torn nations, can be led by the US as a global commonweal." Ashley Smith, "Rehabilitating US Imperialism: Review of Zbigniew Brzezinski's Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower," www. Dissident voice.org . Zbig's book is thus a thinly veiled call for more and better color revolutions and CIA people power coups on the model of those of Belgrade, Kiev, and Tiflis, all stressing the rights of subject nationalities to secede from larger entities ,Äì a perfect recipe for chaos and war in the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus, which the madman Brzezinski regards as one of the keys to world domination because of the potential he sees there to destabilize and dismember the Russian Federation. Brzezinski's ancestors worked with the British to incite the subject nationalities of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires to rebel against St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin, not in their own interests, but rather for the greater glory of London. Now Zbigniew wants to pose as the modern Mazzini, who wanted to make Italy turbulent ,Äì which was bad for Vienna ,Äì without making her united and strong, which would have posed problems for the imperial lifeline to India through the central Mediterranean. Brzezinski's method would lead quickly to an economically depressed, impoverished and desolate world of squabbling, impotent petty states, presided over by Anglo-American finance oligarchs and their all-mportant eastern European emigre advisers.

Naturally, Zbigniew is a fanatical opponent of third world economic development; he once said that the US would never tolerate any more Japans in Asia ,Äì in other words, no more successful transitions from backwardness to a modern full-set economy. A basic tenet of counter-insurgency is that when you are confronted with broadly supported economic and political demands, play the card of divide and conquer in the form of local control, tribal, racial, ethnic, and religious divisions, etc. Zbig claims that the real goal of the world-wide awakening is "dignity." By dignity he means respect for every minute parochial or particularist trait of every real or imagined ethnic group and sub-group. It is the kind of dignity that reduces those who enjoy it from the status of independent nations to mere ethnographic material. Such dignity as Zbig imagines it can only be attained by the smallest possible political units ,Äì by the thorough balkanization, partition, and subdivision of the existing national states. It is the kind of dignity the British Empire had in mind when it played the Mazzini card of national self-determination against the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires. Woodrow Wilson played the same card at Versailles. This kind of dignity is congenial and compatible with the Bernard Lewis Plan for carving and balkanizing every nation in the Middle East ,Äì three Iraqs, six or seven Irans, four or five Pakistans, two Sudans, multiple Lebanons, with Turkey, Syria, and other mutilated and chopped up as well. Think of the current tragic status of Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, and you will see the kind of dignity that Zbig is selling. Zbig obviously intends to apply this recipe in the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus with a view to starting the ethnic disintegration of all of Russia ,Äì a lunatic ploy if there ever was one. Another obvious flashpoint is Kosovo, where attempts to declare unilateral independence by the terrorist gun-runner and narcotics dealers of the KLA could come as soon as February 2008 ,Äì this month. Russia has already announced unspecified countermeasures to deal with such a unilateral declaration of independence, which is illegal under international law because of the Helsinki CSCE treaty of 1975 which finally put an end to World War II by fixing all European borders as of that date as permanent, except for changes mutually agreed to by the concerned parties. Zbig, one of the cheerleaders for the bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1975, cares as little about international law as any neocon.

OBAMA WANTS TO ATTACK PAKISTAN

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, pro-Obama swooner Andrew Sullivan pointed to the massive soft power ,Äì understood as the ability to dupe and deceive the masses of the developing sector ,Äì that would accrue to the United States by making the Illinois senator with his lofty utopian and messianic platitudes the new face of US imperialism. He illustrates this by imagining a young Pakistani Moslem who sees Obama's inauguration on his television screen, and presumably rushes off to join in the pro-Obama swoon of the corrupt and decadent US media whores. This is an ironical choice, since Pakistan is the one country that Obama has talked of attacking and bombing. Will Obama's magical charisma still be able to dupe the Pakistanis when the bombs begin to fall?

Another issue that worries the imperial apologist Sullivan is the deep partisan divide in US public life which is the heritage of Bush and his gaggle of neocon fascist madmen. Sullivan is concerned that the raging resentment against Bush & Co. may undermine the ability of the US ruling elite to manipulate and control public opinion by means of false flag terror operations. Here Sullivan sees the potential for a Spanish-style anti-terrorism backlash, on the model of Madrid in March of 2004, which punished and ousted the neofascist prime minister Aznar, who had tried to ride the terror attacks into a permanent personal dictatorship by suspending the national elections. Obama is seen by Sullivan as the key to restoring the unity of a nation of sheep and dupes that will have a uniform Pavlovian reaction to the next false flag terror provocation:

"Perhaps the underlying risk is best illustrated by our asking what the popular response would be to another 9/11-style attack. It is hard to imagine a reprise of the sudden unity and solidarity in the days after 9/11, or an outpouring of support from allies and neighbors. It is far easier to imagine an even more bitter fight over who was responsible (apart from the perpetrators) and a profound suspicion of a government forced to impose more restrictions on travel, communications, and civil liberties. The current president would be unable to command the trust, let alone the support, of half the country in such a time. He could even be blamed for provoking any attack that came." Andrew Sullivan, "Good-Bye to All That," Atlantic Monthly, December 2007, p. 46)

With Obama in the White House and the partisan divide papered over, the way would be clear to unleash new false flag provocations as needed, and the entire Anglo-American oligarchy could breathe easier.

In addition to his call for an attack on Pakistan, Obama has also demanded the addition of 93,000 more combat troops to the permanent US regular army. This demand puts him in the company of the some of the most extreme hawks. Obama stated: "To defeat al Qaeda, I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnership as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar." Barack Obama (Fred Hiatt "Stay-the-Course Plus: Obama, Romney and Foreign Engagement on Steroids," Washington Post, June 4, 2007.

MAX HASTINGS: "WILL WE HAVE TO FIGHT RUSSIA IN THIS CENTURY?"

The idea of inevitable war with Russia is now looming large in the pathological imagination of the corrupt and incompetent Anglo-American ruling elite; it has assumed the proportions of a new twilight of the gods. The British ruling class has been leading the charge, with their absurd charges about the Politkovskaya and Litvinenko assassinations, and their ham-handed provocations during the dispute about the status of the subversive British Council in Russia. The influential British oligarchical spokesman Max Hastings summed up this mood in the London Guardian last summer in an article entitled "Will we have to fight Russia in this century?"

"We should hope that George Bush's successor as U.S. President is less appallingly clumsy, in provoking Moscow with promised missile deployments a few miles from her border. But the notion of Western friendship with Russia is a dead letter. The best we can look for is grudging accommodation. The bear has shown its claws once more, as so often in its bloody history, and its people enjoy the sensation. We may hope that in the 21st century we shall not be obliged to fight Russia. But it would be foolish to suppose that we shall be able to lie beside this dangerous, emotional beast in safety or tranquility. (Max Hastings, ("Will we have to fight Russia in this century," Guardian, June 5, 2007)

ZBIG'S GRAND STRATEGY FOR 2009-2013: PLAY CHINA AGAINST RUSSIA

Given the ongoing breakdown crisis and disintegration of the US-UK currency and banking systems, these powers are impelled to try to consolidate their world domination while there is still a chance of doing so. Single superpowers do not last very long, as history shows. The Spanish Empire of Phillip II seemed close to universal monarchy after the Turkish naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571 and the outbreak of the religious civil wars in France, but by the treaty of Vervins in 1598, it was clear that the resurgent France of Henry IV was once again capable of checkmating and balancing the Spanish. The France of Louis XIV appeared close to universal domination at the time of the Peace of the Pyrenees with Spain in 1659, at the end of the Thirty Years War. But by 1689 William of Orange had assembled his grand alliance against the French Sun King, and by Rijswijk in 1697 it was clear that the French domination was weakening. Today's grand alliance against US-UK pretensions to universal empire is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), composed of China, Russia, and most of the central Asian republics, with new members knocking at the door. It is this SCO which Brzezinski is determined to smash, with Obama as his chief operative.

In June, 2007 Bush the elder and Bush the younger co-hosted Vladimir Putin at their compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, in the so-called lobster summit. The goal here was to detach Russia from the SCO and play it against China as an Anglo-American kamikaze. This was of course wrapped up in platitudes about preserving US-Russian friendship, but the reality was the attempt to use Russia as a dagger against Beijing. Putin was of course far too intelligent to accept such a degrading and suicidal role, despite the many false friends who were urging him to accept. In reality, the Russian nyet had already been delivered six months earlier by Foreign Minister Lavrov in his essay on the catastrophic Russian experience as a member of the British-dominated triple entente during World War I. Lavrov's retrospective led to the conclusion that Russia would never again be duped into the role of pawn for anybody's imperialism. Since Putin declined to go to work for the US-UK against China, Washington-Moscow relations have steadily deteriorated, with Bush threatening world war three in both October and November 2007.

Since the Bushies had failed to play Russia against China, Zbig now proposes to play China against Russia. In a recent op-ed, he argued in veiled language that China's energy needs could be manipulated in such a way as to direct Chinese expansionism and dynamism on eastern Siberia, thereby setting up China for a direct military conflict with Russia ,Äì an old cold war dream that has circulated in Zbig's revanchist circles since the 1950s. Zbig delicately summed up China's energy vulnerability as follows in a late November 2007 Washington Post op-ed: "I recently visited China, where I had the opportunity to engage Chinese leaders in wide-ranging private conversations. I returned with two strong impressions regarding China's attitude toward the Iranian problem. The first is that the magnitude of China's internal transformation makes it vulnerable to global political and economic instability." The second is that China does not want the US to attack Iran, which is a major oil supplier.

In Samuel Huntington's work on the clash of civilizations in the mid-1990s, the assumption was that China and the Arab/Islamic world were the main challengers to the US-UK world system. Now Zbig wants to revise that, putting China among the supporters of the status quo and Russia at the top of the list of the rebels against the Anglo-American yoke: "Thus China, despite its meteoric rise toward global preeminence, currently is geopolitically a status quo power." By contrast, "...Russia is an increasingly revisionist state, more and more openly positioning itself to attempt at least a partial reversal of the geopolitical losses it suffered in the early 1990s. Cutting off direct U.S. access to Caspian and Central Asian oil is high on the Kremlin's list." A US attack on Iran is to be rejected, because it would alienate China while making Moscow stronger, Zbig argues: "Moreover, longer-term geopolitical threats are seen by Moscow's elite as involving potential Chinese encroachments on Russia's empty but mineral-rich eastern areas and American political encroachments on the populated western areas of Russia's recently lost imperial domain. In that context, the outbreak of a political conflict in the Persian Gulf may not be viewed by all Moscow strategists as a one-sided evil. The dramatic spike in oil prices would harm China and America while unleashing a further wave of anti-American hostility. In that context, Europe might distance itself from America while both Europe and China would become more dependent on Russia's energy supplies. Russia would clearly be the financial and geopolitical beneficiary." (Washington Post, November 30, 2007) In other words, an attack on Iran is useless and self-destructive, since it would help Russia and open the eyes of the slumbering Europeans. Better to address the Russian challenge directly, Zbig hints.

What this doubletalk points to in the real world is the need to turn away from confrontation with Iran in the short run, allowing the Chinese to increase their dependence on Middle East oil that must come across waters controlled by the US-UK fleets. An unspoken but obvious corollary is that the US must do everything possible to prevent the Chinese from developing access to oil sources in Africa or in central Asia. The African side of this effort is easily visible in the US-UK agitation around Darfur: the attempt to orchestrate an attack on Sudan has nothing to do with humanitarianism (by the butchers of Baghdad!), and everything to do with the fact that Sudan is one of the key oil suppliers to China, and will become an even bigger supplier as time goes on. The new US-AFRICOM, now in Stuttgart but soon to move to Ethiopia, is a key aspect of the US mobilization in many African countries to deprive China of future oil sources in that continent. About a year ago, the US-UK successfully played off Ethiopia against Somalia, severely weakening both. The new US deal with Libya is another aspect of the same effort. In recent months, terrorist actions by al Qaeda in Algeria and the other countries of the north African Maghreb have indicated that Algeria, a large oil producer, will be subject to US-UK destabilization as part of the same anti-Chinese campaign. The destabilization of Kenya has everything to do with this same thrust. If the Chinese can be kept out of Africa, their dependence on the Middle East will increase. As this is written, there is word of large-scale destabilization in Chad. At some future time, London and Washington could close the Middle East oil spigot, and China might conclude that the only alternative would be to seize the oil wells of sparsely populated eastern Siberia, as Brzezinski's article suggests. That way one could get rid of both China and Russia, Zbig suggests. Hare-brained "geostrategic" scheming of this sort was an important cause of World War II. The advantages offered by Obama for a campaign of large-scale subversion in Africa are obvious. The detailed work would be done by Susan Rice, Clinton's assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, and manifestly a proponent of an early US attack on Sudan, among other targets.

The mere thought that Trilateral Commission founder Brzezinski clan may be getting close to the nuclear button thanks to an Obama puppet presidency has already elicited rumblings from Moscow. General Yuri Baluyevsky, the Russian chief of staff, announced in January 2008 that Russia was now shifting its nuclear doctrine to include first use of nuclear weapons in certain situations. An AP report quoted Baluyevsky as stating: "We have no plans to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to clearly understand ... that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons,' Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky said.... Baluyevsky identified no specific nations or forces that threaten Russia. According to the ITAR-Tass news agency, however, he said threats to global security include 'the striving by a number of countries for hegemony on a regional and global level' ' a clear reference to the United States ' and terrorism." (AP, January 19, 2008)

Around the same time, a group of retired NATO generals led by John Shalikashvili of the United States and Klaus Naumann of Germany proposed that NATO also shift its doctrine to frank reliance on the first use of nuclear weapons, a shift that the United States has already made for its own forces. General Ivashov, the former chief of staff of the Russian forces, replied from Moscow that the collapse of the US dollar was spurring the US and NATO to court "nuclear Armageddon." Every vote for Obama is a vote to make these matters worse by bringing Zbigniew Brzezinski's fingers closer to the nuclear button.