Flight MH 17; Lying West Brings the World to Boil ;Remember 2013 False Charge of Syria Chemical Gas Attacks
If there was a Nobel Prize for falsehoods, United States and poodle British leaders will win them year after year. It makes little difference whether the US leader is white or otherwise and the British in the history have been lying since colonial days with Clive, Hastings, Curzon and Churchill, the recent contenders, hands down, would be Tony Blair, apart from George Bush Jr, Dick Cheney et al
It is understandable that the US and poodle British and even European media fall in line straightaway, but whatever goes by the name of the media in India has a deplorable record of repeating the lies of former and current overlords in the West.
President Barack Obama described the shooting down as "an outrage of unspeakable proportions" adding that there was increasing evidence that MH17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile launched from the area controlled by Russian-backed separatists inside Ukraine. While it was too early to go into detail about Russia's involvement, however he said the rebels would not be in the position they are in without the support of Russia.
"This will be a wake-up call to the world that there are consequences of an escalating conflict in east Ukraine," he threatened.
By now it is quite clear that Moscow had nothing to do and sooner or later, US led Western charge that anti-Ukraine, NTT Ukrainians fired at the aircraft are also not supportable. Reports are suggesting that a Ukrainian jet or two followed and MH17 till it was almost shot down .An unconfirmed report even suggests that an unmarked Israel owned aircraft from Azerbaijan could be responsible for the catastrophe .
Europe: ECM Battle Over Poland Saved Putin's Life and ...
europebusines.blogspot.com/.../ecm-battle-over-poland-saved-putins.htm...
Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) Saved Putin's Life but Downed MH17
(As the first ever Indian Ambassador to Baku in Azerbaijan, when I visited the unusually big Israeli embassy being further enlarged and renovated, I remarked jokingly to the Israeli ambassador if they will house agents to infiltrate Iran from the North. (US) &Tel Aviv and Baku have very close relations. At that time, 1993, the Russian embassy was confined to a couple of rooms in a grade C in tourist Hotel.)
I had written in depth pieces on US organised franchised regime changes in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine etc failing In Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. I will request readers to read though and separate grains from western chaff being spread day in and day out.
I am reproducing at the end the following to articles;
Ambassador (Rtd) K Gajendra Singh. 23 July 2014.Mayur Vihar, Delhi
http://tarafits.blogspot.com/2011/08/amb-rtd-k-gajendra-singh-cv-post.html
1. THE ROVING EYE
A chessboard drenched in blood
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-230714.htm
"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Everyone remembers the Downing Street Memo, which unveiled the Bush/Blair "policy" in the run-up to the 2003 bombing/invasion/ occupation of Iraq. The "policy" was to get rid of Saddam Hussein via a lightning war. The justification was "terrorism" and (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which had "disappeared", mounted in trucks, deep into Syria. Forget about intelligence and facts. (Full article below)
2. Economic meltdown scenario piles pressure on Russia and the West –the Guardian.London
Policymakers dread slump in Russia – from further sanctions by the west – would trigger another global economic meltdown
Larry Elliott economics editor
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jul/22/economic-meltdown-scenario-piles-pressure-on-russia
European politicians are under pressure to be wary of provoking Vladimir Putin into retaliation that rebounds on the west.
The Guardian , Tuesday 22 July 2014
Oil prices above $200 a barrel. Energy shortages in western Europe. The return of recession to the still-fragile global economy. A slump in Russia. That's the fear haunting policymakers as they contemplate how to respond to the shooting down of MH17 over eastern Ukraine last week.
The meltdown scenario can be easily sketched out. Every global downturn since 1973 has been associated with a sharp rise in the price of energy. Russia is one of the world's biggest energy suppliers and is responsible for about one-third of Europe's gas. America's economic recovery from the deep recession of 2008-09 has been weak by historic standards, while the European Union's has barely got going. From the car plants of Germany to the finance houses of the City of London and French defence firms, there has been pressure on politicians to be wary of provoking Vladimir Putin into retaliation that might rebound on the west.
US and CIA's wet dream
However, before that, let me quote extracts from an article by George Friedman from CIA's website Stratfor and by Lee from Asia Times, which bring up the fact that US led West unhappy at the staying power of Vladimir Putin and Russia's rising influence on its own and along with other Brics powers are worried and want to take out Putin.
George Friedman let the cat out in CIA's website Stratfor
Can Putin Survive?
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article46552.html
--Meanwhile, Putin must consider the fate of his predecessors. Nikita Khrushchev returned from vacation in October 1964 to find himself replaced by his protégé, Leonid Brezhnev, and facing charges of, among other things, "harebrained scheming." Khrushchev had recently been humiliated in the Cuban missile crisis. This plus his failure to move the economy forward after about a decade in power saw his closest colleagues "retire" him. A massive setback in foreign affairs and economic failures had resulted in an apparently unassailable figure being deposed.
Russia's economic situation is nowhere near as catastrophic as it was under Khrushchev or Yeltsin, but it has deteriorated substantially recently, and perhaps more important, has failed to meet expectations. After recovering from the 2008 crisis, Russia has seen several years of declining gross domestic product growth rates, and its central bank is forecasting zero growth this year. Given current pressures, we would guess the Russian economy will slide into recession sometime in 2014. The debt levels of regional governments have doubled in the past four years, and several regions are close to bankruptcy. Moreover, some metals and mining firms are facing bankruptcy. The Ukrainian crisis has made things worse. Capital flight from Russia in the first six months stood at $76 billion, compared to $63 billion for all of 2013. Foreign direct investment fell 50 percent in the first half of 2014 compared to the same period in 2013. And all this happened in spite of oil prices remaining higher than $100 per barrel.
Putin's popularity at home soared after the successful Sochi Winter Olympics and after the Western media made him look like the aggressor in Crimea. He has, after all, built his reputation on being tough and aggressive. But as the reality of the situation in Ukraine becomes more obvious, the great victory will be seen as covering a retreat coming at a time of serious economic problems. For many leaders, the events in Ukraine would not represent such an immense challenge. But Putin has built his image on a tough foreign policy, and the economy meant his ratings were not very high before Ukraine.
Imagining Russia after Putin
In the sort of regime that Putin has helped craft, the democratic process may not be the key to understanding what will happen next. Putin has restored Soviet elements to the structure of the government, even using the term "Politburo" for his inner Cabinets. These are all men of his choosing, of course, and so one might assume they would be loyal to him. But in the Soviet-style Politburo, close colleagues were frequently the most feared.
The Politburo model is designed for a leader to build coalitions among factions. Putin has been very good at doing that, but then he has been very successful at all the things he has done until now. His ability to hold things together declines as trust in his abilities declines and various factions concerned about the consequences of remaining closely tied to a failing leader start to maneuver. Like Khrushchev, who was failing in economic and foreign policy, Putin could have his colleagues remove him.
It is difficult to know how a succession crisis would play out, given that the constitutional process of succession exists alongside the informal government Putin has created. From a democratic standpoint, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin are as popular as Putin is, and I suspect they both will become more popular in time. In a Soviet-style struggle, Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov and Security Council Chief Nicolai Patryushev would be possible contenders. But there are others. Who, after all, expected the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev?
The charge of the Atlanticist Brigade Peter Lee (Jul 22, '14 Atimes)
No credible version of events points to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine as intentional mass murder or terrorism, and with international experts now getting access to the black box, there seems to be little the Atlanticist Brigade can use to point the finger at Moscow. Still, expect sanctions on Russia to follow, and for the reverberations to reach east all the way to China.
--The key evidence for the overall investigation will be the surveillance records of US and Russian satellites and radars, which should be able to identify where the missiles came from, as well as addressing accusations that Kiev fighters were shadowing the jet, etc.
---outsider's impression is that the US foreign policy for Russia has been pretty much captured by doctrinaire anti-Russians in a diplomatic and military deep state that pretty much permeates and survives every incoming administration. The Russia desk has had a reasonably good run since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I think today the prevailing idea is that oligarch anxieties about the sanctioning of their overseas assets will soon reach a tipping point (see this article about "horror of the oligarchs"), and the "Atlanticists", perhaps led by that nice Mr Medvedev, will club together against Putin's "Eurasianists" and pull the plug on his dreams of confronting the West as an equal and opposite force.
Maybe Putin will need more of a shove - he's an ex-KGB guy with multiple assets in the Russian elite and his current approvals are running over 80% - but there's an app for that: intensified sanctions===.
So sanctions, and more sanctions. Sanctions for Crimea, sanctions for succoring the separatist uprising, now sanctions related to the plane crash. Sanctions that will never go away, no matter what Putin does, as long as he stays in power.
Best case, some combination of popular and elite revulsion pushes Putin from power and a new regime approaches the West as supplicant. Worst case, Russia = Venezuela, neutered by perpetual sanctions, vitriol, economic and political warfare, and subversion.
The key point, at this stage, is for the US to get European buy-in - especially from Angela Merkel, who is demonstrably less than enthusiastic about having a constitutionally dysfunctional relationship with Russia (and not enamored of the continual political heat brought by revelations of US spying) - so that the US is isolating Russia, and not the other way around.
My sense of the situation, especially from the Asian perspective, is that the US is in danger of overplaying its hand, indeed that it has a bad case of tunnel vision in which it is fixated on the goal of sticking it to Putin at the expense of US global interests.
With its almost comical insistence that "the world" is uniting against Russia (which only counts if "the world" is defined as the Atlantic democracies and their close allies ;and China, India, et al are excluded) and, even more damagingly, the US insistence on peddling the Russia = the world's greatest monster story even as the United States condones the catastrophic and much more bloody Israel incursion into Gaza, the US is accelerating the natural trend toward disintermediation of America
THE ROVING EYE
A chessboard drenched in blood
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-230714.htm
"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Everyone remembers the Downing Street Memo, which unveiled the Bush/Blair "policy" in the run-up to the 2003 bombing/invasion/occupation of Iraq. The "policy" was to get rid of Saddam Hussein via a lightning war. The justification was "terrorism" and (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which had "disappeared", mounted in trucks, deep into Syria. Forget about intelligence and facts.
The tragedy of MH17 - turned, incidentally, into a WMD - might be seen as a warped rerun of imperial policy in Iraq. No need for a memo this time. The "policy" of the Empire of Chaos is clear, andmulti-pronged; diversify the "pivot to Asia" by establishing a beachhead in Ukraine to sabotage trade between Europe and Russia; expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Ukraine; break the Russia-China strategic partnership; prevent by all means the trade/economic integration of Eurasia, from the Russia-Germany partnership to the New Silk Roads converging from China to the Ruhr; keep Europe under US hegemony.
The key reason why Russian President Vladimir Putin did not "invade" Eastern Ukraine - as much as he's been enticed to by Washington/NATO - to stop a US military adviser-facilitated running slaughter of civilians is that he does not want to antagonize the European Union, Russia's top trading partner.
Crucially, Washington's intervention in Kosovo invoking R2P - Responsibility to Protect - was justified at the time for exactly the same reasons a Russian intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk could be totally justified now. Except that Moscow won't do it - because the Kremlin is playing a very long game.
The MH17 tragedy may have been a horrendous mistake. But it may also have been a desperate gambit by the Kiev minions of the Empire of Chaos. By now, Russian intel may have already mastered the key facts. Washington's predictable modus operandi was to shoot from the hip, igniting and in theory winning the spin war, and doubling down by releasing the proverbial army of "top officials" brimming with social media evidence. Moscow will take time to build a meticulous case, and only then lay it out in detail.
Hegemony lost
The Big Picture spells out the Empire of Chaos elites as extremely uneasy. Take Dr Zbigniew "The Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, who as a former foreign policy mentor has the ears of the increasingly dejected White House paperboy. Dr Zbig was on CNN this Sunday challenging Europe's leaders to "stand up to Putin". He wonders if "Europe wants to become a satellite" and worries about "a moment of decisive significance for the future of the system - of the world system".
And it's all Putin's fault, of course: "We're not starting the Cold War. He [Putin] has started it. But he has gotten himself into a horrendous jam. I strongly suspect that a lot of people in Russia, even not far away from him who are worried that Russia's status in the world is dramatically being undermined, that Russia's economically beginning to fail, that Russia's threatened by the prospect of becoming a satellite to China, that Russia's becoming self-isolated and discredited."
Obviously Dr Zbig is blissfully unaware of the finer points of the Russia-China strategic partnership, as well as their concerted voice inside the BRICS, the G-20 and myriad other mechanisms. His trademark Russophobia in the end always gets the better of him. And to think that in his latest book, Strategic Vision (2012), Dr Zbig was in favor of an enlarged "West" annexing Turkey and Russia, with the Empire of Chaos posing as "promoter" and "guarantor" of broader unity in the West, and a "balancer" and "conciliator" between the major powers in the East. A quick look at the record since 2012 - Libya, Syria, Ukraine, encirclement of China - reveals the Empire of Chaos only as fomenter of, what else, chaos.
Now compare a fearful Dr Zbig with Immanuel Wallerstein - who was a huge influence in my 2007 warped geopolitical travel bookGlobalistan. In this piece (in Spanish) Wallerstein argues that the Empire of Chaos simply can't accept its geopolitical decadence - and that's why it has become so dangerous. Restoring its hegemony in the world-system has become the supreme obsession; and that's where the whole "policy" that is an essential background to the MH17 tragedy reveals Ukraine as the definitive do or die battleground.
In Europe, everything hinges on Germany. Especially after the National Security Agency scandal and its ramifications, the key debate raging in Berlin is how to position itself geopolitically bypassing the US. And the answer, as pressed by large swathes of German big business, lies in a strategic partnership with Russia.
Show me the missile
slowly; with no hype and no spin, the Russian military are starting to deliver the goods. Here, courtesy of the Vineyard of The Saker blog is their key presentation so far. As The Saker put it, Russia had - and has - a "20/20 radar vision", or full spectrum surveillance, on everything going on in Ukraine. And so, arguably, does NATO. What the Russian Ministry of Defense is saying is as important as the clues it is laying out for experts to follow.
The damaged MH17 starboard jet engine suggests a shape charge from an air-to-air missile - and not a Buk; that's consistent with the Russian Ministry of Defense presentation graphically highlighting an Ukrainian SU-25 shadowing MH17. Increasingly, the Buk scenario - hysterically peddled by the Empire of Chaos - is being discarded. Not to mention, again, that not a single eyewitness saw the very graphic, thick missile trace that would have been clearly visible had a Buk been used.
Way beyond the established fact of a Ukrainian SU-25 trailing MH17, plenty of unanswered questions remain, some involving a murky security procedure at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport - where security is operated by ICTS, an Israeli company based in The Netherlands and founded by former officers from the Israeli Shin Bet intel agency. And then there is the unexplained presence of "foreign" advisors in Kiev's control tower.
As much as Bashar al-Assad in Syria had absolutely no motive to "gas his own people" - as the hysterical narrative went at the time - the Eastern Ukraine federalists have no motive to down a civilian airliner. And as much as Washington doesn't give a damn about the current civilian slaughter in Gaza, it doesn't give a damn about the MH17 civilian deaths; the one and only obsession is to force Europeans to sanction Russia to death. Translation: break up Europe-Russia commercial and geopolitical integration.
One week before the MH17 tragedy, the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies was already sounding the alarm concerning the Empire of Chaos's "policy" and its refusal to "adhere to the principles and norms of international law and the rules and spirit of the existing system of international relations".
Moscow, in building its case on the MH17 tragedy, will bide its time to debunk Kiev's claims and maximize its own credibility. The game now moves to the black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder. Still Ukraine will remain the do or die battlefield - a chessboard drenched in blood.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2014 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Economic meltdown scenario piles pressure on Russia and the West
Policymakers dread slump in Russia – from further sanctions by the west – would trigger another global economic meltdown
Larry Elliott Economics editor the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jul/22/economic-meltdown-scenario-piles-pressure-on-russia
European politicians are under pressure to be wary of provoking Vladimir Putin into retaliation that rebounds on the west.
The Guardian , Tuesday 22 July 2014
Oil prices above $200 a barrel. Energy shortages in western Europe. The return of recession to the still-fragile global economy. A slump in Russia. That's the fear haunting policymakers as they contemplate how to respond to the shooting down of MH17 over eastern Ukraine last week.
The meltdown scenario can be easily sketched out. Every global downturn since 1973 has been associated with a sharp rise in the price of energy. Russia is one of the world's biggest energy suppliers and is responsible for about one-third of Europe's gas. America's economic recovery from the deep recession of 2008-09 has been weak by historic standards, while the European Union's has barely got going. From the car plants of Germany to the finance houses of the City of London and French defence firms, there has been pressure on politicians to be wary of provoking Vladimir Putin into retaliation that might rebound on the west.
"The possible involvement of Russian-backed separatists in the airliner's destruction has raised the risk of further sanctions against Russia by the international community," says Adam Slater, senior economist at Oxford Economics. "These would further damage Russia's economy. Russia's next moves remain uncertain but an escalation of the conflict is still a significant risk which would have potentially negative global spillovers in particular via the impact on global energy markets."
The extent of that economic damage depends on two factors: how tough the west gets and how Russia responds.
Given the public outrage at the loss of life on MH17 some increase in the severity of the sanctions looks inevitable. In Brussels on Tuesday, there was talk of imposing restrictions on capital movements from Russia and of curbs on exports of defence and energy technology. These measures would certainly increase the pain for Russia, and would run the risk that Putin would retaliate by choking off oil and gas exports to the west, looking instead to energy-hungry China as an alternative market. Slater estimates that UK growth next year would be 1% lower than expected were Russia to halt gas supplies through Ukraine, with the impact felt through higher energy prices, higher inflation, falling share prices and weaker consumer confidence. Closing the gas taps could then trigger the "phase three sanctions" being resisted by many EU countries, including Germany, France and Italy. These would target entire sectors of the Russian economy, blocking their exports to the west and preventing them doing business with companies in the European Union and North America.
It is this prospect that has prompted fears of rapidly rising oil prices. Slater calculates that Russian energy exports to the rest of the world could be cut by as much as 80%, with less than half the shortfall made up by the OPEC oil cartel. "In such a scenario, world oil prices could soar above $200 per barrel and gas prices would also rise steeply."
Julian Jessop at Capital Economics notes that the biggest losers from this would be Russia, already in recession. Other suppliers would have an incentive to keep prices low in order to grab Russia's energy customers. The west could draw down on strategic oil supplies to limit the impact of the loss of Russian supply.
It is the potential for Russia to damage the west and for the west to cause even more damage to Russia that explains the belief that the crisis will not escalate into a full-scale economic war. The European Union will talk tough but fall shy of imposing wide-ranging financial and trade sanctions as punishment for the Kremlin's alleged role in the attack on the Malaysia Airlines jet. Meanwhile, hopes that Putin is putting pressure on the separatists in Ukraine boosted share prices.
But events of a century ago show that the optimism of markets is not always to be trusted. It was only in the last week of July 1914 – once Austria-Hungary had delivered its ultimatum to Serbia – that bourses woke up to the fact that the assassination in Sarajevo had the potential to lead to a war involving all the great European powers. Up until then, the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was seen as merely a local affair and nothing to worry about. Similarly, the expectation now is that Europe will huff and puff but be wary of provoking Putin. For his part, the Russian president will be aware of the economic damage that even limited sanctions are doing and so be inclined to put quiet pressure on the rebels in the Ukraine to co-operate with the international investigation at the crash site. Russia's economy was already contracting before the west imposed its most recent set of sanctions in the spring. The fear now is that things could unravel quickly – just as they did in 1914.
Germany
Imports from Russia €38bn (£30bn) Exports to Russia €36bn Germany is by far Russia's largest trading partner in Europe, while 6,000 German firms have set up shop in the country. Business lobby groups anxious to protect the country's lucrative exports of machine tools, cars and chemicals have claimed Germany would suffer "irreparable damage", losing its dominant economic position to China if sanctions escalate. The Committee on Eastern European Relations estimates that German exports to Russia and Ukraine are on course to shrink by €6bn in 2014 and claims 25,000 people will lose their jobs if these companies do not find alternative export markets.
France
Imports €10.3bn Exports € 7.7bn
In 2008 the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, thrust himself into the centre of attempts to broker a peace between Russia and Georgia after a short war that saw Georgia crushed. Less than three years later, Sarkozy signed a contract to sell Russia two Mistral warships, below, that could have been used to defeat Georgia "in 40 minutes", according to a Russian naval commander. The €1.2bn deal – the Russian military's first major foreign arms purchase in modern history – supports 1,000 jobs in the French shipbuilding and defence industries, but France is now under heavy pressure not to deliver the second ship. French banks are also heavily exposed to Russia and could be vulnerable if Russian companies are unable to repay debts in the wake of tighter financial sanctions.
UK
Imports €8bn Exports €4.6bn
Russian billionaires' love of London houses and English football clubs is well known, but the UK may be less affected by a freeze in economic relations with Russia than generally thought. Just 1% of the UK's £118bn exports in financial services – lawyers' and bankers' bills – go to Russia, although this figure understates the money cycled back through UK offshore centres, such as the British Virgin Islands. UK banks have also lent generously to Russian companies, with $19bn flowing to Russia in 2013. More than 50 Russian companies are listed the main London stock exchange, but the number of companies seeking a listing has dropped sharply since the 2008 financial crisis.
Netherlands
Imports €29bn Exports €8bn
The economically liberal Dutch are one of Russia's most important trading partners. Out of all the EU countries, the Netherlands has the largest trade deficit with Russia, although the effect may be overstated by goods arriving at Dutch ports. The Dutch conglomerates Unilever, Heineken and Shell are heavily involved in Russia. After a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in May, just weeks after the annexation of Crimea, Shell's chief executive, Ben van Beurden, declared that he was keen to expand oil and gas projects in Russia's far eastern territory.
Central Europe and the Baltics
Poland: Imports €18.6bn Exports €8.1bn
Energy dependency is the Achilles heel of countries in central and Eastern Europe, which are among the Kremlin's most vocal critics. Poland gets more than 80% of its gas from Russia, while the Baltic States and Finland are 100% dependent. These countries are most vulnerable if Russia retaliates against tougher sanctions by turning off its gas supplies. Hungary, which is 80% dependent on Russian gas, could find a controversial deal it signed with Russia in February to build two nuclear reactors coming under the spotlight.
Southern Europe
Italy: Imports €20bn Exports €10.8bn
Italy's economy minister, Pier Carlo Padoan, said on Tuesday that Europe's economy was weaker than expected and sanctions could be a problem for all sides. Italy's energy giant Eni is building the €17bn South Stream pipeline with Gazprom, a controversial project to send gas from the Black Sea to Austria and Italy. In May Italian company Pirelli sold a 13% stake to Gazprom, underscoring the economic ties between the two countries. Italy's luxury handbag makers are also expected to be hit, as Russia's super-rich close their wallets in response to a weaker Russian economy: luxury good sales to Russia are forecast to fall by up to 6% this year.
