Richard Holbrooke: A contrary opinion from India

 Richard Holbrooke: A contrary opinion from India

While the Western leaders and media is piling up glowing obituaries on US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, a contrary opinion hit the Page:19 Times of India story by its Washington correspondent Chitanand Rajghatta.

All things said, it is surprising that if Indian circles hold that the overarching motivation for US diplomat is/was to make it to Nobel Peace Prize list, why should Indian authorities succumb to arm-twisting by the West to vote for Chinese dissident Linbao, when it was clear the West's nomination was political and meant to humiliate China.

And to think that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to visit India on a goodwill/business visit within days. Can there be more belligerent in your face reception to a neighbor than India's attending Nobel Peace Awards ceremony, just to get India's good mention in Nobel award's presentation speech. India should not get so cheaply managed by western

India should have taken this singular opportunity to send out a signal to the West that it has its own opinion as to the Western herd mentality to view all the world in its own strategic colored glass and ready to raise world media campaigns like Nobel prizes, to push its agenda on world's silent majority.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>

------------------------------

-----
http://lite.epaper.timesofindia.com/getpage.aspx?pageid=19&pagesize=&edid=&edlabel=TOIM&mydateHid=15-12-2010&pubname=&edname=&publabel=TOI

When the Raging Bull met the Indian wall

Delhi Nixed Holbrooke Plan To Link Kashmir,Af-Pak
Chidanand Rajghatta TNN


The man who died of a ruptured aorta was famously credited with bursting blood vessels of many a player in the world diplomatic community.Richard Holbrooke,who passed away on Monday in Washington DC at the age of 69 from complications following a heart surgery,was variously described as feisty, abrasive,and high-octane by admirers and critics alike. His in-your-face style earned him the nickname Raging Bull. Henry Kissinger,his forbear in the world of aggressive diplomacy,once advised someone, "If Richard calls you and asks you for something,just say yes.If you say no,you'll eventually get to yes,but the journey will be very painful."

But in the stolid Indian government, Holbrooke, the irresistible force, met the immovable object. New Delhi must have caused the ruptured aorta, was the feeble joke in the Indian analysts community, as news of the death of this much admired man trickled.Some mandarins compared him to J N Dixit, India's former foreign secretary,who died less than a year into his role as the National Security Advisor,before he could leave his imprint on Indias foreign policy,born from a capacious intellect and ceaseless learning.

Like Mani Dixit in South Block,Holbrooke too fell just short of the policy making pinnacle in Foggy Bottom.A lifelong Democrat,friend and acolyte of the Clintons, he was tipped to be Secretary of State if Hillary reached the White House in 2008.In a sparkling career that lasted nearly half century,Holbrooke held almost every important job in Washington's diplomatic world, from serving as the US permanent representative to UN to ambassador to Germany to two stints as assistant secretary. His expansive interests covered the globe,except for a small patch of geography that involved the sub-continent,although Indian mandarins had a few run-ins with him in Turtle Bay.

President Obama plugged that gap when he appointed Holbrooke a special envoy to the Af-Pak region.The scuttlebutt in Washington was that Holbrooke wanted India,including the vexing Kashmir issue,in his brief.

The Raging Bull aka Bulldozer was famously credited with hammering together the Dayton peace accord (which his admirers felt should have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize).He believed resolving the Afghan situation was linked to ending the tensions Pakistan had with India,and at the end of that rainbow (according to his fan club),lay a Nobel Prize.

But New Delhi,questioning the linking Af-Pak to Kashmir,balked.The Obama administration was persuaded to keep Holbrooke's mandate restricted to Af-Pak.For months thereafter,Holbrooke tried to visit New Delhi,but there was always scheduling problems and the two sides struggled to find mutually acceptable dates diplospeak for you are not welcome just now.

When Delhi finally consented to receive him in January this year,it was not the lion it expected,but a lamb.

As ambassador Timothy Roemer reported in his cable to Washington DC (disclosed by Wikileaks), Holbrooke, in his meeting with foreign secretary Nirupama Rao,noted that he comes with a clear vision of the centrality of India to the strategic landscape in the region. He reiterated that his portfolio explicitly excludes India.

Holbrooke assured Rao that he is not influenced by what he hears in Islamabad.

German Schools Embrace Islam By Herbert L. London

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1725/german-schools-embrace-islam

German Schools Embrace Islam

by Herbert I. London
December 13, 2010 at 4:00 am

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1725/german-schools-embrace-islam

Print

Send

Comment

RSS

Share

In an odd form of social suicide, rather than increasing efforts to integrate Muslims into German society, German students will be taught about Islam. In a sense, German educators will be engaged in proselytizing for Islam.

The German state of Lower Saxony will start including Islam in its schools' core curriculum as part of an initiative to counter growing anti-Islam sentiment in Europe. Dr. Bernad Althusmann, Minister of Education in Lower Saxony announced that schools there will start including Islamic education in their main curriculum, saying, during a visit to an elementary school in the city of Hanover which offers an Islamic education class, "I think we will be able to start implementation by the academic year after the next," said Justifying this approach, Juergen Zoeliner, Berlin Minister for Education, Science and Research, notes, "For years, society and schools have been faced with a variety of new duties and challenges. One of these big challenges is to have people from different traditions, cultural and religion affiliations living together peacefully and respectfully." .

One might assume that Muslims in the West should come to know and appreciate Western Civilization. Students who are not versed in the history and customs of the polity they find themselves in will be handicapped. Yet integration -- once the overarching strategy for dealing with immigrants -- has been replaced in Germany, and throughout Western Europe, by efforts to bend over backwards to accommodate the Islamic population. In the process, this effort produces results that counter good intentions. First, the Islamic population believes, with considerable confirmation, that Europeans do not possess the will to assert the importance of their own culture and traditions. Second, the insertion of Islam into German schools suggests tacitly that Islam is on the rise and cannot be denied even in non-Islamic nations

"Diversity education" is predicated on the belief that we in the West have on obligation to understand Islam -- however, the converse does not follow.

Of course, whether the program ultimately leads to a peaceful result is questionable. Why did the armies of Europe turn back the Turks at the gates of Vienna 500 years ago when programs, like these instituted in Germany, are handing Islam the keys to the future?

Although German shame over Nazi atrocities has made Hitler's heritage the end of German history and identity, should this shame be replaced by preemptive capitulation to a religion with a relentless imperial impulse?

To be sure, the Salafists, with Saudi funding, will follow up on their efforts in the schools. But will the full story of Islam be told including the stoning of adulterers, the execution of homosexuals, polygamy, apostasy as a capital offense and the belief that Jews are the offspring of apes and pigs?
Preemptive capitulation is nothing more than a form of defeat, and Islamic leaders recognize it in this way. The aggressive stance taken by Islamic leaders in Europe is based to an extraordinary degree on the flexibility and weakness of those who could defend the West.

G.K. Chesterton once noted that "an open mind, like an open mouth, should close on something." 

As I see it, that something should be the traditions of the West, the Judeo-Christian principles that gave birth to our civilization. If people want to live in this civilization, that is what they should be obliged to learn.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - By Alfred W. McCoy - THE NATION

http://www.thenation.com/article/156851/decline-and-fall-american-empire

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Alfred W. McCoy

December 6, 2010  

This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch.

A soft landing for America 40 years from now?  Don’t bet on it.  The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.  If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Related Content

America and the World: The End of Easy Dominance

Muscling Latin America

The New Geopolitics of Energy

Taiwangate?--Bush Appointees Linked to Secret Slush Funds UPDATE

The End of Free-Trade Globalization

About the Author

Alfred W. McCoy

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A...

Also by The Author

Welcome Home, War! (Covert Ops, US Intelligence, US Wars and Military Action, Society)

Will the Afghan and Iraq wars lead to a surveillance state here in the US?

Alfred W. McCoy

Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze (Executive Branch, Law, Politics, Society)

With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy.

Alfred W. McCoy

Related Topics

America Disaster Entertainment Technology United States War Washington

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck.  Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire.  It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.”  Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional US military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline  summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today).  The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III.  While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union.  There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000.  A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.  Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010.  The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened.  By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”
Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency.  Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget.  Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter.  By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US  dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.  Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. 

Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US had held for over a century.  Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that.  Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources.  

The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports.  Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66%.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock.  By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill.  Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros.  That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further.  At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan.  Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman.  Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements,  the “Carter Doctrine,” by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025.  All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures.  This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse.  Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf.  This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.”  Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.  Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history.  It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet.  The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan.  It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike.  Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits.  The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic.  They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order.  At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all.  While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up.  He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high.  Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going.  It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

Alfred W. McCoy

December 6, 2010  

# Word Count : 4816

Germany Will Become Islamic State - German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Germany Will Become Islamic State

Chancellor Merkel

      

Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans have failed to grasp how Muslim immigration has transformed their country and will have to come to terms with more mosques than churches throughout the countryside, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily.

 
"Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the task of dealing with immigrants,” Ms. Merkel told the daily newspaper. “For years we've been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before.”
 
Germany, with a population of 4-5 million Muslims, has been divided in recent weeks by a debate over remarks by the Bundesbank's Thilo Sarrazin, who argued Turkish and Arab immigrants were failing to integrate and were swamping Germany with a higher birth rate.

 

The Chancellor’s remarks represent the first official acknowledgement that Germany , like other European countries, is destined to become a stronghold of Islam. She has admitted that the country will soon become a stronghold.

 

In France , 30% of children age 20 years and below are Muslims. The ratio in Paris and Marseille has soared to 45%. In southern France , there are more mosques than churches.

 

The situation within the United Kingdom is not much different. In the last 30 years, the Muslim population there has climbed from 82,000 to 2.5 million. Presently, there are over 1000 mosques throughout Great Britain - - many of which were converted from churches.

 

In Belgium , 50% of the newborns are Muslims and reportedly its Islamic population hovers around 25%. A similar statistic holds true for The Netherlands.

It’s the same story in Russia where one in five inhabitants is a Muslim.

 

Muammar Gaddafi recently stated that “There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without sword, without gun, without conquest. We don’t need terrorists; we don’t need homicide bombers. The 50 plus million Muslims (in Europe ) will turn it into the Muslim Continent within a few decades.”

 

The numbers support him. 

RSS deadlier then Al-Qaeda : Abu Asim Azmi - Siasat Daily

http://www.siasat.com/english/news/rss-deadlier-then-al-qaeda

RSS deadlier then Al-Qaeda | Siasat
Nagpur, December 12: The Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Asim Azmi created a furor in a session of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly when he alleged that ...
www.siasat.com/english/news/rss-deadlier-then-al-qaeda

RSS deadlier then Al-Qaeda

Sunday, 12 December 2010

Nagpur, December 12: The Samajwadi Party legislator Abu Asim Azmi created a furor in a session of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly when he alleged that according to the WikiLeaks disclosure the Hindu militant organization Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS) was a thousand times more dangerous than the Al-Qaeda.

This remark by Azmi drew strong protests from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena (SS) and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) legislators. An agitated Azmi had to leave the house in huff stating he was being interrupted and not being allowed to put forth his point of views on the issue in the Assembly.

“It has been exposed in the WikiLeaks as to how a thousand times more dangerous is the RSS than the Al Qaeda. Therefore I demand that strong and stern action must be taken against the RSS,” Azmi told the Assembly.

Responding to Azmi, NJP firebrand legislator Devendra Phadnavis said: “Azmi by tabling an irrelevant issue was misguiding the Assembly.”


Other BJP legislators supported Phadnavis allegation against Azmi.

Azmi, frustrated by the continued interruption of his speech by the opposition, complained to the Assembly deputy speaker Vasant Purke who told Azmi that though the issue raised by him was irrelevant, but still he was accepting the issue raised by Azmi as part of general interest. But the Sena and BJP legislators continued raising slogans against Azmi, forcing him to walk out of the Assembly in protest against the saffron alliance legislators.

Congress legislator from Mumbai Baba Siddiqui also created a stir in the house when he alleged that Shiv Sena working President Uddhav Thackeray was receiving money from two Mumbai-based industrial houses, based on the intercepted phone recordings between Tata Group spokeswoman Shalani and Public Relations Corporate chief Nira Radia.

Siddiqui made the allegations against Uddhav of accepting money from the two industrial houses – Reliance and Tata Group of Companies. Since Siddiqui made this allegation in English, the Sena legislators failed to grasp the allegations as there was no protest from them. However, BJP legislator Phadnavis responded to Siddiqui and stated that there was no connection of Uddhav with the tapes.

“It is not proper to connect the discussions on the power problems with the tapes. Therefore Siddiqui should not make false and fabricated allegations against Uddhav,” Phadnavis stated.


The Sena legislator woke up only after Phadnavis responded and protested against the allegations leveled by Siddiqui against their leader. Later Siddiqui handed over the tapes to the Assembly speaker.

US professor behind EVM [Electronic Voting Machine] study deported on arrival

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/us-prof-behind-evm-study-deported-on-arrival/723897/

Sun, 12 Dec 2010

US prof behind EVM [Electronic Voting Machine] study deported on arrival

Geeta Gupta

Tags : American computer scientist not allowed to enter India, J Alex Halderman, India EVMs vulnerable to fraud

Posted: Mon Dec 13 2010, 03:46 hrs

New Delhi:
An American computer scientist, J Alex Halderman, who had co-authored a study titled “India’s EVMs are vulnerable to fraud”, was not allowed to enter the country after landing at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport here on Sunday evening. Airport sources said he would be deported, but offered no reason for the action.


Speaking to The Indian Express from the airport, Halderman said: “I am about to be thrown out of this country and there is no reason anyone is giving me. There is just no explanation, they are not letting me enter.”


Halderman, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of Michigan, was here to attend a technical conference in Gujarat.


In February this year, top researchers from India, US and Netherlands, had come up with a study which said that EVMs are prone to tampering. Halderman and his Indian co-author, Hari K Prasad, were part of the group.

Earlier, the Election Commission had challenged Prasad to demonstrate how EVMs could be tampered with. The EC, however, withheld access to the EVMs.


In his blog about the study, Halderman wrote: “Despite widespread reports of election irregularities and suspicions of electronic fraud, the Election Commission has never permitted security researchers to complete an independent evaluation. Hari and others in India repeatedly offered to collaborate with the Election Commission to better understand the security of the machines, but they were not permitted to complete a serious review.”


He added: “Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are ‘tamperproof,’ but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source. The story took a disturbing turn when my co-author, Hari Prasad, was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.”

Readers' Comments:

Anti-politician By: D'mans | 13-Dec-2010 Reply | Forward anything against the politicians is banned, not to be discussed and considered antinational, be it equipment,news, film, graft, bribe etc

EVMs van be tampered with By: Gopu T R | 13-Dec-2010 Reply | Forward How election commission can take an ADAMANT stand that it would not allow experts to examine its vulnarability. In todays world all electronic mechines can be tampered, communications can be intercepted, Internet hacking possible. So EVMs should be allowed to be checked by experts. There were doubt about the UPA victory after 2009 elections. EVMs are not fool proof.

Observation By: Concerned Citizen | 13-Dec-2010 Reply | Forward If there is a concern regarding the EVMs, it should be cleared either by providing proof about how it was handled then or by performing a test now. Arresting or withholding information or keeping quiet does not remove the concern at all but only increases our own doubt as to the rightful function of the EVMs in our democracy. Our country is already ripe with lots of scams and problems, even to the highest level. Simply by dismissing these concerns as baseless does not do any good to solving these problems. Rather, it undermines our confidence in our governance. It is the duty of the government and the officials responsible to handle the matter in an open manner. If these concerns were to have any truth and the government acted in a dismissive manner, it would be a grave situation to handle then.

Deportation By: Indian | 13-Dec-2010 Reply | Forward It is bad on part of Indian democracy. Deporting US professor with out giving reason is unpardonable. It proves that Election Commission is corrupt and cooking up with POwerful Politicians.

dal me kala.. By: bodhlal | 13-Dec-2010 Reply | Forward something is fishy after this knee jerk reaction of the govt. let the election commission clear the suspicion once and for all by inviting the deported gentleman and co. to prove the claim about EVM.



 

 

Zionists bring mysticism as a vehicle of entry into Indian Muslim ethos - Ghulam Muhammed

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Zionists bring mysticism as a vehicle of entry into Indian Muslim ethos

Israelis have cottoned up to Indian people's deep commitment to all mystical, Para-supernatural, pseudo-religious phenomena and had been opportunistically trying to win the hearts and minds of especially Muslims, by visits to Dargahs, burial sites of revered Muslim saints. The Israeli Ambassador's visit to Ajmer Dargah should be an affront to Indian Muslims, while Israelis are so deeply involved in war crimes, ethnic cleansing and usurpation of Palestinian lands.

The visit of Jewish French President and his wife Carla Bruni, to the Dargah of Sufi Saint Saleem Chisti, at Fatehpur Sikri, too should be viewed in a holistic Jewish/Zionist attempt to creep into India, through working among the illiterate and ill-informed Muslim milieu.

In Fatehpur Sikri Mazar of Saleem Chisti, the Jewish Sarkozy, put out a ruse as to be following the foot-steps of India’s most popular Mughal Emperor, Akbar, who got his son, Jahangir, widely believed to be through the blessings of the Saint. Sarkozy is endorsing the legend to cozy up to the sentiments of all those who are so steeply convinced of the miracles of getting children through the intervening blessings of the Saints.

Sarkozy’s reputation vis a vis Muslims can be judged by his vigorous campaign and banning of Burqa as Symbol of Islamic presence in a Catholic/Pseudo secular France and Sarkozy's earlier forays into French Muslim quarters, when he was the interior minister and had come down very heavily on Muslims, sending them to prison, in a wholesale drive.

It is for the Indian Muslims to keep their Indian compatriots informed of the deep animosity between Zionists, Israel and Islam and the conspiracies that the Zionist can plant in their land which has escaped the evil designs till Hindutva leaders went out and got Israel to come to India with their notorious skill at fighting Muslims and Islam, not only in Palestine, but all over the world. The teaming up of Hindutva forces and Zionists will never bring peace to India, unless both the violent ideologies are openly and boldly confronted by the secular forces in India.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

http://ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com  

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article947721.ece

Today's Paper » NATIONAL

JAIPUR, December 12, 2010

Muslims upset over Israeli Ambassador's remarks

Special Correspondent

“Arab-Israeli dispute should not be seen as involving religions”

Muslim groups in Rajasthan have expressed surprise over the remarks of Israeli Ambassador to India Mark Sofer during his weekend visit to the State that Israel was “not in any type of conflict” with Islam. They said the remarks should be judged in the light of eviction of thousands of Palestinian Muslims, illegal construction of Jewish settlements and threats to the historic Al-Aqsa Mosque.


Mr. Sofer, who visited the Ajmer dargah in September this year, went to Bassi town near Jaipur this past Thursday to launch a new Indo-Israeli centre of agricultural excellence.

He said on the occasion that the Arab-Israeli dispute should not be seen as involving religions and the three great Abrahamic religions were the offshoots of the same faith.

The Rajasthan Muslim Forum – an apex body of Muslim groups in the State – said here on Saturday that while the Israeli envoy's visit to the dargah was merely a “diplomatic gesture” addressed to the Indian Muslim community before the start of peace process in West Asia, his latest observations were “insincere” as they were not backed by the ground realities in his country.

“The very establishment of Israel on the Palestinian land in 1948 was the outcome of an alliance forged between Zionism and European colonialism based on a weird mixture of religious myths and colonial interests leading to the Balfour Declaration,” pointed out Muslim Forum convenor Qari Moinuddin, adding that the Jewish State continues to suppress Muslims in the occupied territories.

Ancestral right

There are “credible reports” that Israel, which claims an ancestral right of Jews to the Palestinian land, is planning to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – the third holiest site of Islam – through an excavation plan, according to the Muslim Forum.

“Extremist elements among Jews supported by Christian evangelists have announced that the mosque would be demolished and a Jewish temple built in its place.”

Mr. Moinuddin said the Israeli authorities were digging underneath the mosque and had constructed tunnels weakening its foundations. As part of its declared policies, Israel had closed Jerusalem to Palestinians with a wall, destroyed Muslim neighbourhoods and was penetrating the Muslim quarter of the Old City to build synagogues and put Jewish settlers there, he added.

“In spite of all this, Mr. Sofer observing that Israel is not in conflict with Islam is outrageous. Israel's official policies involve religious discrimination in its dispute with Palestinians who have been [rendered] homeless in their own land,” said Muslim Forum member and Jamat-e-Islami Hind State president Mohammed Salim.

Mr. Salim pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's refusal this week to freeze construction of Jewish settlements had led to international concerns. Besides, there is a proposal to shift Israeli Muslims compulsorily to any future Palestinian State and the rabbis have ruled that Jews must not rent or sell property to Arabs.

‘Annul agreement'

Referring to Mr. Sofer's remarks that disputes “between nations” should not be ascribed to religions, the Muslim Forum asked in its statement: “Where is the Palestinian nation to form an equal footing? It is Israel which is opposing the legitimate Palestinian claims to statehood.”

The Muslim Forum demanded that the Rajasthan Government annul the agreement signed with Israel for establishing the agricultural centre, which “in fact, is an Israeli subterfuge to get legitimacy for its policies through interventions in the development sector”.

The Muslim Forum regretted that Indo-Israeli defence ties were constantly expanding without any regard to Israel's track record and delegations from India were routinely visiting the Jewish State to study its “development projects”.

The latest instance is that of a BJP delegation led by party president Nitin Gadkari which would be leaving for Israel on a “goodwill visit” this Monday.

---

“Observations insincere as they are not backed by the ground realities”

“Jewish State continues to suppress Muslims in the occupied territories”