As Buddhists are fond of remarking, everything is connected.
I think one or two Sloggers had doubts /couldn’t follow/detected hype in relation to this site’s earlier post today about what Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Syria and Iran all have in common for the United States.
So let’s start with Greece. Athens media assert that the Troika is suddenly far more reasonable about Greek debt: it is now discreetly pushing for easier terms for the Hellenic Republic. The Slog thinks this is not unrelated to American and Israeli schmoozing of Athens in recent days: Brussels senses that one of its easily-bullied satellites might be defecting. For example, while insisting that it is ‘speeding up’ Greek asset sales,
the Samaras Government continues to cite its two recent elections as contributory factors in the delays to something – indeed anything – happening.
Lest we forget, Athens initially targeted privatisation proceeds of €50 billion by 2015, but cut the target to €19 billion after ‘making a slow start’ to the programme.
A short distance across the sea lies Syria, a country The Slog has insisted will be given to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood by the US, because that’s what Clinton’s State Dept is backing: Sunni Muslims…they being the right sort of Saudi Arabian Muslims. Well, today Syria’s Prime Minister Riad Hijab fled the country, denouncing the “terrorist regime” of Bashar al-Assad. Hijab is a Sunni Muslim, and the United States was quick off the mark in hailing “the highest level government defection yet” as a sign the Syrian president is losing his grip.
But surely, this same United States that condemns Iranian terrorism cannot be siding with a Sunni brotherhood consistently targeting non-zealot anti Bassad rebels for assassination? Well, Zero Hedge today reminds us that the Director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom – made a point of testifying that “Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world…by any measure the US has long used terrorism. In the period 1978-79, the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation….”
Everything is connected. Greece is connected to Cyprus, which is connected to Turkey – and massively connected to EU debt and the Aegean, which is connected to energy and rare earths, which is connected to Israel, which is unpleasantly connected to Syria and Iran, which are connected to the American desire for Sunnis to triumph, which is connected to the fact that Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly Sunni.
If people think this is conspiracy theory, then the human being is not a synapse-connected skeltal structure, but a delusional conspiracy theory concocted by blogosphere nutters. Surely, people of reasonable intelligence can agree that a major power in decline will try to secure the supply of industrial materials and economic energy vital to its survival. And surely those same people can accept that it will interfere in the affairs of everyone and anything involved in order to achieve that end…..especially if the overwhelming ethic of its commerce is one of ‘do what it takes but don’t get caught’.
For some months now, The Slog has argued – using both testimony and behavioural evidence – that the US is engaged in a process of triumphing over the EU, avoiding any contagion therefrom, and remaining the dominant influence in oil-rich Arab Africa. It remains a mystery to me that many people still refuse to see the connection. But as I have said ad nauseam previously, Homo sapiens’ ability to deny is unequalled by any other species.
The Slog 