by Bruno Adrie
October-November 2015

from BrunoAdrie Website


 

Part I

October 31, 2015

Excerpts from the translation of the French article

made by William Blum and David N. Gibbs

Original french version

Doctor Brzezinski waging war against the Russians,

Kyber Pass, Pakistan, a few kilometers from the Afghan border on February 3^rd,1980.

What happened there was reported

by The Washington Post, February 4^th 1980.

In August 25^th 2007, the candidate Obama received the support of Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, against the candidacy of Hillary Clinton on the (official) pretext that "being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president".

After two Republican mandates that he had strongly criticized, this close friend of David Rockefeller's had asserted that America needed,

"a new face" and "a new definition of its role in the world".

 

• Would the new America he vowed for reject the absurd choices made by the big-headed and unqualified Donald Rumsfeld, considered as an American disaster by his biographer Andrew Cockburn?

   

• Would this new America pull out its troops from Afghanistan and Irak and replace its strong tendency to invade by a desire to dialogue with the rogue states, those countries who obstinately refuse to open their borders to the benevolent NATO forces and their wallets to the enriching whirlwinds of the Wall Street banks and hedge funds?

 

"Something like that", seemed to promise this apostle of the Manifest Destiny, while asserting that he was "willing to meet with the leaders of U.S. antagonists such as Iran and Venezuela".

In front of such a position, the former first lady who had probably taken offense of the harsh treatment of being publicly reduced to what she was in fact, a former first lady, then told that he was "naive".

You may believe, incidentally, that there had been serious debates about American foreign policy inside the Democratic Party.

But the sure thing was that there was no such thing as a good relationship between the hawkish democrat woman and the old veteran of tours and detours of modern diplomacy.

But how could she say he was naive? How could she consider a man like that as naive?

The fact is that Zbigniew Brzezinski had a good intuition regarding the results of the elections. Or was he told by his friends from the Center for a New American Security that the young Senator from Illinois would probably become president?

We'll never answer this question but, the sure thing is that even before he was elected Obama thanked Brzezinski.

During the Iraq Speech on September 9^th 2007, he told that he couldn't say enough about his contribution to the United States but gave the audience a few elements of an exemplary career and an exemplary profile:

the doctor "helped to shape Camp David, and bring about a lasting peace between Israel and some of its neighbors, he's somebody who has over decades framed some of the most prominent foreign policy specialists" in both parties, "he is one of our most outstanding scholars, one of our most outstanding thinkers" and "has proven to be an outstanding friend and somebody who I have learned an immense amount from".

But the candidate Obama forgot to mention before the audience a key element of his idiosyncrasy: his frankness y his taste for truth.

Because we really can say that doctor Brzezinski is a very frank man and his frankness is a direct consequence of the strength of the belief that keeps him going, a belief formerly expressed with these words by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century:

American leadership is good for the world and good for America...

The best evidence - but not the only one - of Dr. Brzezinski's frankness can be found in an interview published in the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur (15/01/1998) and entitled "Yes, the CIA went to Afghanistan before the Russians" (Oui, la CIA est entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes) in which the doctor confirms what the ex CIA director Robert Gates revealed in his Memoirs - the same Robert Gates who was nominated as Secretary of Defense in 2006 and remained in his seat until 2011, let's just say that almost until the end of the first Obama mandate - the fact that the American secret service went into Afghanistan long before the date exposed by the "official version of history" which pretends that the US "aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980".

According to Brzezinski, who knows what he's talking about:

"Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention".

Now the Russians arrived on December 24^th.

After confessing this maneuver, Obama's favorite doctor in geopolitics soothes his remarks by saying:

"We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."

It's not a conspiracy then, just the arrangement of an action with the aim of increasing the probability of a particular response. Then the journalist asks him, maybe half-jokingly, if he "regrets any of this today".

The pleasant professor answers :

"Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?

 

The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially:

'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war'."

And he concludes, in an offhand manner, like a cowboy full of common sense and inaccessible to doubt:

"What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

According to the doctor, those who claim that,

"Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today" are only talking "nonsense".

And he adds:

"There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.

 

But what is there in common among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia , moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries…"

Then, there's no doubt about the fact that Dr. Brzezinski is a frank man.

There's also no doubt about the fact that in his opinion, the biggest enemy of America, the dead weight, the rock against which the marvellous wave of military and economic globalization is breaking, is Russia.

As far as Islamic fundamentalism is concerned, you'll judge by yourself, since everyone has the right for a personal point of view given the fact that we live in the age of opinion : most people will believe what our politicians and journalists don't stop repeating, those people we hear and see everywhere. 

They serve wheeler-dealer lobbies and their main function is to confiscate our freedom of speech and make us believe fairy tales about, for example, Islamic fundamentalists.

As far as I am concerned, I've made my mind:

between doctor Brzezinski and all those people who are used to telling lies and belong to the same Nomenklatura covered with hubris and stuffed with contempt, I've chosen the doctor.

Because he did something and tells us what he did, because he sincerely believes in what he says, and because,

"he is somebody who I have learned an immense amount from".

Needless to say that I don't share his belief about the role of America and I believe, contrary to him, that the American leadership is not good for the world and neither good for America.

But I tend to believe him when he's talking about facts...

Part II

November 04, 2015

Original french version

"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island",

that is to say Eurasia.

The geographer Halford Mackinder became famous because of this shock-phrase taken from his book Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).

But the idea had already been expressed in his article "The Geographical Pivot of History" published in 1904 in the Geographical Journal (No.4, April 1904, Vol.XXIII).

In fact, if we look at the map published in this article the Heartland (Pivot Area) matches with today's Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Iran.
 

Eurasia map divided by Zbigniew Brzezinski

in his article "A Geostrategy for Eurasia"

Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997.

In the September/October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an article entitled "A Geostrategy for Eurasia" in which he wanted to implement the hegemonic thinking of his predecessor.

According to him, Russia is now living shut off in the nostalgia of its imperial past, a nostalgia that prevents it from contemplating the future with pragmatism. Instead of being realistic, Russia is regularly tempted by engaging "in a futile effort to regain its status as a global power".

But Russia must stop living in the contemplation of its golden age.

The Russian bureaucracy has had a negative effect on the development of,

"the world's largest piece of estate spanning ten time zones and dwarfing the United States, China, or an enlarged Europe" and, in a near future, it won't be able to resist the pressure of its neighbors.

Brzezinski's conclusion is final:

Russia has to modernize and decentralize or die.

And then, putting his money where his mouth is, he takes the map of Russia and divides it into three equal parts, creating what he calls,

"a loosely confederated Russia, composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic".

This solution, if applied one day, would allow the newly created states to engage in,

"closer economic relations with [their] neighbors", disconnected from "Moscow's heavy bureaucracy".

And seven years later, in a book entitled The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (2004), he goes further pretending that a transnational effort to develop and colonize Siberia could stimulate genuine European-Russian bonding".

In his opinion, Siberia is a new "Alaska", a new "California", "an El Dorado for [Europe's] more adventurous settlers", a source of "immeasurable natural wealth", "an occasion for profitable investments".

Caught in the rapture of geopolitics, he contemplates the transformation of Siberia into,

"a common Eurasian asset exploited on a multilateral basis".

For him, this change would have the advantage of,

"challenging the satiated European society with an exciting new frontier".

You thought the good old times of colonization were gone? Then you're wrong, because they aren't.

Thanks to Dr. B., a "Drang Nach Osten for development" is on its way. Nevertheless, he points out that things won't be easy since the Russians won't accept this "geopolitical pluralism" right away.

Opposing,

"the residual imperial ambitions of much of its political elite" that could turn the regime to dictatorship will be "the major task of the Euroatlantic policy".

How will this be done?

Simply by,

"creating enduring obstacles to any attempt of imperial restoration".

An idea that is deeply rooted in the doctor's mind since he wrote, seven years before, that,

"a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization".

(Foreign Affairs)

But let's summarize the Doctor's central belief:

• First, Russia must stop being a challenger to the US and let itself get absorbed by NATO and the European Union. By doing so, it will stop being a threat to the US and the US will have ample opportunity to apply a military pressure for example on… China.

  
   

• Second, Russia must become a democracy, but only according to the definition that reduces Democracy to the western system of universal suffrage.

   

  We European and American citizens know what this kind of democratization is leading to. It will bring to power a bunch of opportunistic and understanding technocrats who will launch a Barbarossa operation on the citizen's freedom and completely ignore the most urgent environmental issues.

   

  Those agents will act in accordance with the local and western oligarchs' diktats and will be compensated by political lobbies or end up being members of some corporation's board of directors.

   

  Of course, they will turn a blind eye to the deregulation of the financial market, welcome the outsourcing of western factories and apply a permissive labor code that will authorize the exploitation of workers all over the country.

   

  They will also make it easier for those who don't want rigorous fiscal policies to keep their immense profits. In short, those politicians will spread corruption in order to increase the profits of those who have always benefited from the neoliberal and capitalist economic system.

  
   

• Third, Russia must agree to be dismantled and become the promised land of a new generation of pioneers who will be able to run the subsoil of these regions that will soon become, given that men are brothers in oil and gas extraction, a middle ground, an area of collective and shared economy, some kind of international kolkhoz maybe.

   

  And, what a coincidence, the Siberian Republic, the central part of the new division of Russia, perfectly matches with the Western Siberian Basin which is, according to a 2003 USGS report (Petroleum, Geology and Resources of the West Siberian Basin, Russia, by Gregory F. Ulmishek),

"the largest petroleum basin in the world covering an area of about 2.2 million km²" between the Ural Mountains and the Yenisey River, and the Kara Sea.

 

"The basin contains several tens of giant and supergiant oil and gas fields", "produces over the three-quarters of both oil and gas in Russia" and "remains moderately explored (…) in spite of large volumes of drilling".

If we take a look at the BP Statistical Review of World Energy of the year 2015, we realize that today, Russia holds 6.1% of total proven reserves of world oil (2.9% only for the US) and 17.4% of proven reserves of world gas (only 5.2% for the US).

 

Let's say by the way that Iran holds 18.2% of proven reserves of world gas, 9.3% for Turkmenistan. Needless to say that those two countries are unfortunately located in Mackinder's Heartland.

One can smile at the list of renunciations demanded of Russia by the optimistic Dr. Brzezinski:

• at a political level (renunciation of the regime that allows the country to remain independent to replace it by a so-called democratic regime in fact only based on elections and therefore easily influenced by corporate lobbying and corruption)

• at an economic level (renunciation of its sovereignty over hydrocarbons-rich territories)

• at a strategic level (loss of military bases, of nuclear missiles bases, of the biggest part of its coastline)

That's why it's really too difficult to remain serious before a joke so seriously expressed and directed at readers who worry only about getting richer and more powerful, pioneering-minded readers who view Siberia as a new Alaska, as a new California, as the opportunity of a new gold rush, of a new Drang nach Osten that will not be peaceful at all but will be, on the contrary, one more plundering, a bigger one, the Technicolor plundering of a Heartland once and for all submitted to the big money and whose submission will mean, for those who still believe in it, the end of History.

Let's remember what president Obama said about the Doctor:

• that he "has, over decades framed some of the most prominent foreign policy specialists" in both parties

• that as an outstanding scholar, an outstanding thinker, and an outstanding friend, he himself has learnt "an immense amount from"

It seems consistent that this particular Obama - not the one who made promises on two electoral occasions, but the real one - shaped and brought to presidency by the powerful group of people of whom Dr. B. is the representative, has decided to wage a war against Russia, a war that began with a fascist coup in Ukraine, followed with a series of sanctions against Russia and an attempt to destabilize the Syrian ally, using the pretext of a terrorist organization called ISIL whose actions justified - what a divine surprise - the American interventionism in a sovereign state, through a series of inefficient bombings and the financial and military support given to a liberation army of "moderate Islamic fundamentalists", maybe not as moderate as they say but very useful, as the ones the Doctor provided with weapons back in 1979 in Afghanistan to give the Russians their own "Vietnam War".

The goal of Obama's America, which is Brzezinski's America and the one of the elite who controls the foreign policy from the Council on Foreign Relations, is to make Russia move backwards, to lock it up in its own borders, to besiege it, to defeat it and to smash it into three blocks easier to crush under the legs of the dinosaurs of globalization.

I just hope these remarks will enable the hesitant reader to better understand Mr. Putin, his protection of Assad's Syria, his resistance in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his political moves against the "Islamic" fundamentalist movements whose funding source should be investigated before drawing definitive conclusions.