Sunday, September 11, 2011
Bloomberg
It was an extraordinary scene: President Barack Obama, sitting impassively in the Oval Office in May as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured him, at considerable length and at times condescendingly, on Jewish history, Arab perfidy and the existential challenges facing his country.
What was extraordinary wasn’t the message -- it was not an untypical Netanyahu sermon. What was notable was that Netanyahu was lecturing the president live on television, during a photo opportunity staged so that the two leaders could issue platitudes about the enduring bonds between their nations.
That display of impudence left the president and his team feeling unusually angry. Shortly afterward, Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, called the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, to communicate the displeasure of the White House in a reportedly heated way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who watched her husband battle Netanyahu in the late 1990s, also expressed anger and frustration about the prime minister within the administration.
Nothing in ReturnBut it was Robert M. Gates, the now-retired secretary of defense, who seemed most upset with Netanyahu. In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security -- access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing -- and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.
Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee...[Full Article]
Labels: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Robert Gates
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Deadline after deadline after meaningless withdrawal deadline passes
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
April 8, 2011
The world’s media reacted with a collective shrug of the shoulders today as Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted that US troops are likely to stay in Iraq beyond 2011, making another scheduled withdrawal date nothing more than an empty meaningless promise.
There will be no withdrawal, because a permanent military occupation was agreed long ago.
The date for the final pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq keeps being pushed back further and further. Obama campaigned in 2008 on the promise that he would “immediately” withdraw troops from Iraq, then that was put back to June 2009, then it became August 2010, and now the date has been pushed back to the end of 2011. Every time a deadline gets close, the Obama administration simply insists that the situation is too unstable for withdrawal and the date is pushed back again.
Nevertheless, last August, with much sickening fanfare, the corporate media announced the “official” end to the occupation of Iraq.
“The last American combat troops left Iraq today, seven-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion, and two weeks ahead of President Barack Obama’s 31 August deadline for withdrawal from the country,” the London Guardian reported on August 19.
Buried in the recesses of such coverage was the fact that over 50,000 troops would remain behind to make up a “transition force”.
Even that number was misleading, however, given that the US still has over 100,00 contractors in Iraq.
In reality there is no plan to withdraw the military from Iraq, far from it, the plan is to stay there… forever.
In 2008 details of that agenda leaked to the media. It was revealed that the globalist neocon cabal in control of the government was actively seeking permanent occupation of the country, along with the construction of over 50 permanent bases and the right to launch pre-emptive military strikes on any country from inside Iraq.
The London Independent reported:
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country. [...]
Under the terms of the new treaty, the Americans would retain the long-term use of more than 50 bases in Iraq. American negotiators are also demanding immunity from Iraqi law for US troops and contractors, and a free hand to carry out arrests and conduct military activities in Iraq without consulting the Baghdad government.
Further details of the plot then emerged from senior Iraqi military sources who detailed the wish on behalf of the White House to control Iraqi airspace below 29,000ft and secure the right to launch military campaigns against other countries from inside Iraq:
The military source added, “According to this agreement, the American forces will keep permanent military bases on Iraqi territory, and these will include Al Asad Military base in the Baghdadi area close to the Syrian border, Balad military base in northern Baghdad close to Iran, Habbaniyah base close to the town of Fallujah and the Ali Bin Abi Talib military base in the southern province of Nasiriyah close to the Iranian border.”
The military and both the Bush and Obama administrations have consistently denied any plans for permanent bases in Iraq, yet the Pentagon continues to spend billions on the construction of permanent bases. Of course, they are not referred to as “permanent”, rather they are “enduring” bases.
The push to permanently occupy Iraq did not subside with the election of Obama, who sent a special envoy last September to meet with senior Iraqi military and civilian officials to carve out a secret deal to keep troops in Iraq beyond 2011.
The U.S. has around 1,000 bases and military installations in 156 countries scattered around the world. The Pentagon does not plan to “drawdown” its presence in these countries anytime soon. In fact, it is continually looking for excuses to expand its presence, as we have seen with the recent incursion into Libya.
Obama’s two-faced con in announcing that there will be a full withdrawal from Iraq while in reality tens of thousands of troops and contractors will remain as an occupying force for years if not decades strikes at the root of Obama’s hypocrisy and the fact that, while posturing as a peace advocate, he is firmly in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.Labels: Iraq, Robert Gates, Steve Watson
Friday, April 8, 2011
Stars and Stripes
MOSUL, Iraq — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said U.S. troops could remain in Iraq for years to come.
It would depend, he said, on what the Iraqis want and what Washington is willing to give.
Gates met soldiers of the 4th Advise and Assist Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, in Mosul, where — like the troops Gates met one day earlier in Baghdad — they asked if they would actually be staying beyond 2011, and if so, for how long.
“Well, I think that would be part of any negotiation,” Gates answered, “... whether it would be for a finite period of time, whether it would be negotiated that there be a further ramp down over a period of two or three years, or whether we would have a continuing advise-and-assist role that we have in a number of countries that just becomes part of a regular military-to-military relationship.”...[Full Article]
Labels: Iraq, Robert Gates
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 25, 2011
As we have documented, the so-called popular revolutions spreading across the Middle East are orchestrated affairs unleashed by the globalists, their NGOs, and agencies of the U.S. government.
“What happened in Georgia with the Rose Revolution and Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2003-2004 was part of a long-term strategy orchestrated by the Pentagon, the State Department and various US-financed NGOs like Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy to create pro-NATO regime change in those former Soviet Union areas and to literally encircle Russia,” author and researcher William Engdahl told RT in January.
”What is going on in the Middle East with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that we saw a few days ago, and now in Egypt with Mubarak in his 80s, and obviously a regime that is not exactly the most stable one, we have a food crisis taking place as a backdrop and the IMF coming and telling these countries to eliminate their state food subsidies so you have, of course, the explosive background for popular unrest. Within that you have these NGOs, like Freedom House, training activists and trade unions and various other organizations to demand democracy, demand human rights and so forth,” he added.
Even members of the United Nations have accused Freedom House of being a CIA front that supports terrorists.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Gates instructed the Syrian military to depose leader Bashar al-Assad and “empower a revolution.”
“I’ve just come from Egypt, where the Egyptian army stood on the sidelines and allowed people to demonstrate and in fact empowered a revolution. The Syrians might take a lesson from that,” Gates added.
While Assad is certainly a hereditary dictator, he is also one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world, according to a CNN Arabic poll conducted in 2009. If you follow the corporate media in the United States, however, you would think Assad is as reviled as Mubarak was in Egypt.
Internet activists and organizers in academia have been financed with over half a billion dollars through the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative program to overthrow outdated dictatorships in the Middle East. Gates’ comments reveal Syria will be the next domino to topple over. The globalists are exploiting Syria’s difficult economic and social conditions, including high unemployment, rising food prices, constraints on personal freedom, and endemic corruption.
Gates did not bother to mention that Egyptians will not be allowed to protest their new government. On Wednesday, the Egyptian cabinet approved a decree that criminalizes strikes, protests, demonstrations and sit-ins that interrupt private or state owned businesses or affect the economy in any way.
The new Egyptian government is a creature of the Supreme Armed Forces Council headed by Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who served as Mubarak’s defense minister for two decades. The military is controlled by Egypt’s elite and thus the globalists now engineering color revolutions throughout the neighborhood.
In order to head off the demands of Gates and the globalists, on Thursday Assad agreed to unprecedented reforms to his one-party Baathist state. Piecemeal reforms, however, will not be acceptable to the global elite and the political establishment in the United States.
Labels: Robert Gates, Syria
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
RAMADI, Iraq -- Marking the formal end of the United States' combat mission in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested Wednesday that even if the war-torn country emerges from the chaos and upheavals of recent years in a way that favors U.S. interests, the venture will always be "clouded" by the faulty intelligence the Bush administration cited to make the initial case for war.
"The problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid -- that is, Saddam (Hussein) having weapons of mass destruction," Gates told reporters after meeting with troops at Camp Ramadi in al-Anbar province. "Even if the outcome (of the war) is a good one from the standpoint of the United States, it will always be clouded by how it began." ...
[Full Article]
Labels: Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
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