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America's jihadist friends from the 80-ies and 90-ies are welcomed backReader comment on item: Libyan Blues Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Aug 25, 2011 at 08:45 Dr. Pipes wrote : " The NATO intervention in March 2011 was done without due diligence as to who it is in Benghazi that it was helping. To this day, their identity is a mystery. Chances are good that Islamist forces are hiding behind more benign elements, waiting for the right moment to pounce... I fear that a dead-end despotism will be replaced by the agents of a worldwide ideological movement. I fear that Western forces will have brought civilization's worst enemies to power." I can't agree with the tacit presumption of Dr. Pipes' analysis, namely that the rebels' identity was unknown. That it wasn't revealed to the public doesn't mean at all that those who decided to help them didn't know who was going to use their weapons and money. If anything, it rather means that they someone didn't want us to know too much which begs for the obvious question "Why ?". To my mind the CIA and all other western secret services cooperating with the CIA are competent enough and well informed about who has rebelled in Eastern Libya, what their plans and ideas are.What is more , I think it is exactly because of this that they are being assisted. How could one explain otherwise the fact that e.g. the 'rebels' in Bahrain were abandoned to the hangmen of the local tyrant and his Pakistani mercenaries while in Libya the "rebels" were given protection from the air and the whole Western apparatus of propaganda is working for them? So again it is more than natural to suggest that only after learning who they are the decision to help them militarily and financially was made in Washington. With two unfinished wars on hand one doesn't rush to get engaged in a third war without compelling reasons. So contrary to Dr. Pipes I think that those in the inner circle of power in the West know perfectly well the identities of the so called 'rebels' as they did know the identities of the members of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt whom they supported. I wouldn't even be surprised if I learned one day that many names of the Libyan "rebels" had been on the Western record and payroll since the time of the jihadist wars in the Balkans, Chechnya and Afghanistan. But to understand why America supports them one has to bear in mind a number of unpleasant circumstances. Some time ago the International Monetary Fund issued a report which predicts that in just 5 years , i.e. in 2016 China's economy will surpass US economy which has huge budget and trade deficits. So what we are witnessing is an unprecedented revolution in the world power structure comparable only to that of c. 1890 when the US had overtaken the UK's economy thus ushering in the age of America's world mastery. Now China with its incredible economic growth rates has one very weak spot. It's a giant that stands and falls with oil imports. It is in search for oil in Africa and elsewhere. It had major oil investments in Eastern Libya , i.e. exactly where the rebellion started and where the Chinese investments are now ruined. E.g. "the termination of the six projects run by Great Wall Drilling Co., is estimated to cause 1.2 billion yuan (US$187.51 million) in losses for the company, higher than losses incurred during the 2009 financial crisis" True, the Western investments were damaged too , but as one "rebel" spokesman said : "We don't have a problem with Western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies. But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil". But damaging the Chinese in Libya by fomenting a rebellion there is just one aspect of a bigger global game the US is playing.The game has one strategic objective – to secure US hegemony in the world at any cost. And as the US can't do it with its own limited forces and weakening economy burdened with $ 14 trillion foreign debt , of which $ 1 trillion alone belongs to the Chinese government, it has willingly concluded a strategic alliance with regressive jihadist forces to achieve that goal with their help. We are dealing here with the same major strategy of having an alliance with jihadism as in the 1980-ies which secured the victory over the USSR in Afghanistan and afterwards disrupted and paralyzed the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The father of the then US-jihadist axis was Zbigniev Brzezinski who is so proud of his past actions which has made jihad such a formidable force in today's world. Brzezinski himself of course can't see any connection between his activities and the rise of global jihad. Why should he denounce his tool after achieving his goal with it ? Now this man has been appointed a top foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration. The demand for his ideas remains apparently tremendous and his ideas are clear, unsentimental and brutally simple. In his memorable interview to "Le Nouvel Observateur" he declared : "What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" If we replace "the Soviet empire" with "Communist China" , "the Taliban" with, say, "the Libyan or Uyghur Taliban" or "the Moslem Brotherhood" , "the liberation of Central Europe" with "partition of China and Russia" , "the end of the cold war" with "the end of China's challenge to world hegemony", then I guess we will have a fairly valid model to explain what is going on behind the scenes. Destabilizing China and partitioning Russia through global US-backed jihadism has two extra negative aspects worth noting. Wherever what Dr. Pipes calls 'civilization's worst enemies" prevail, there is regress, primitivism, decline in life expectancy, rise in poverty, massacres, the new Middle Ages. And this side effect of empowering jihadism to promote regress seems to be quite intended, given the global scarcity of resources. The earth can't support the extraordinarily high living standards of all mankind, so one can use "civilization's worst enemies" to reduce them wherever possible preventing in the process a billion Chinese or a hundred million Russians to consume the scarce resources which are needed elsewhere. Regress can be a potent tool of policy-making and control in world affairs. Second, the new global game has disastrous consequences for Israel which becomes a liability and a hindrance for the US's new policy. Israel can't be used to partition Russia, to undermine China, to foment Uyghur uprisings in Sing Kiang, to make the Libyan jihadists enthusiastic.It is a thorn in the flesh of the dar al-Islam. It must fall victim to the policy which sets in motion regressive Moslem forces on a global scale. In short, in this new political situation Israel has all to lose and nothing to gain while America by pursuing its egoistic global goals can achieve its main goal by sacrificing Israel. There are signs galore that America is slowly changing its previous policy towards Israel, more or less openly siding with its enemies. In many of his articles Dr. Pipes has enumerated the instances of this shifting attitude of the US official elite towards Israel. If the above is true, then these are no casual disconnected accidents but symptoms of a larger and very dangerous systematic change. Now the above is not only my invention. There is a very interesting book by Russian political scientist S. E. Kurginyan ("The Political Tsunami. The analysis of the events in North Africa and the Near East" Moscow 2011 ) who after detailed analyses comes to very sad conclusions. He writes on p.91 : "Disparity of economic growth and power is fraught with conflicts between the US and China after the example provided by the conflict between Germany and Great Britain which escalated in 1914. But a conflict between the two nuclear powers is too expensive. And although the possibility of such a conflict has been extensively debated (…) , its alternatives can't but be as extensively debated. For example, the strategy of controllable chaos. The Greater South is being heated up and set in motion. An alliance with this Greater South is concluded exactly as it was the case in Afghanistan against the USSR. The aggressive energy of the Greater South is directed against the Greater Far East - first of all, but not exclusively, against China. The danger lurking in the disparties of growth and power is thus diminished and the hegemon gets a respite. We do know that such plans have been discussed by many, including Brzezinski himself. We do know that such plans were implemented on many an occasion in the past. Why not make a conjecture (…) to the effect that all the strange facts that stand in such a glaring contrast to the previous US policy somehow are correlated ( although admitedly not in absolute terms) to the schemes which have already been experimented with in the past and not without success ?" Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". << Previous Comment Next Comment >> Reader comments (51) on this item
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