US Policy Shift On Iran-Iraq Again Shows Brzezinski Rules In Washington.

Looming Attack On Pakistan Spells Nuclear Confrontations With China, Russia & Their Allies. Webster Tarpley's take on the Grand Chessboard:

With the Bush regime sending a top State Department diplomat to sit down with Iranian officials, with signs that the US departure from Iraq may now be accelerated, and with Israel beginning to make deals with Hezbollah, some observers in this capital are beginning to celebrate Peace in Our Time in an outburst of midsummer euphoria.

But this perspective is an illusion: the United States and NATO now escalating the hopeless and unwinnable Afghan war, and is preparing to send US and NATO forces on the ground to seize parts of Pakistan, a country which is almost 3 times more populous than Iran, and possesses a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it.

The Bush-Cheney-neocon era in foreign policy is over, and the Brzezinski-Trilateral-Rockefeller-Soros phase of aggression has begun; the US hit list now features Chinese allies like Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan.

Brzezinski is striving to put together some huge provocation for the Beijing Olympics, to make the Chinese government lose face and begin disintegrating. The ultimate targets of the new Obama-Brzezinski foreign policy are Russia, China, and the other members and friends of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main pole of resistance in the world to the designs of Washington and London.

The stakes are now much higher than a mere conventional clash in the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski's adventurism goes far beyond that of the neocons, and objectively places the danger of a thermonuclear exchange on the world agenda. Watch for the Polish-Czech-Lithuanian missile crisis, a Balkan crisis, and a crisis between Georgia and Russia to point the world in this ominous new direction.

The US government is now being run by the Principals' Committee, an interagency cabal that includes Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary Of State Rice, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, and other operatives of the Trilateral Wall Street financier faction.

It is clear that under the new policy, Iran will be able to continue to process uranium: 'The Bush administration's decision to send a senior American official to participate in international talks with "More news and information about Iran." Iran this weekend reflects a double policy shift in the struggle to resolve the impasse over the country's nuclear program.

First, the Bush administration has decided to abandon its longstanding position that it would meet face to face with Iran only after that country suspended its uranium enrichment, as demanded by the "More articles about Security Council, U.N." United Nations Security Council.

Second, an American partner at the table injects new importance to the negotiating track of the six global powers confronting Iran - France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States - even though their official stance is that no substantive talks can begin until uranium enrichment stops.

The increased engagement raised questions of whether the Bush administration would alter its stance toward Iran as radically as it did with North Korea, risking a fresh schism with conservatives who have accused the White House of granting concessions to so-called rogue states without extracting enough in return.' (New York Times, July 17, 2008)

This gambit of appeasing Iran is being done in the hopes of turning Iran against Russia and China ­ a project of incalculable folly. Brzezinski is glad to see the Iranians have nukes, because he thinks he can keep them, pointed at Moscow.

At the same time, US and NATO forces are getting ready for a large-scale invasion of Pakistan, with the excuse of catching the phantomatic Bin Laden. The real goal is to so humiliate and discredit the current US puppet regime in Pakistan that the country will descend into civil war and split apart, destroying a key Chinese ally in the process.

The timetable is short: 'ISLAMABAD, July 13 (Reuters) - The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, visited Pakistan on the weekend, fueling speculation that the United States was about to take action against militants in northwest Pakistan.'

Even troops of other NATO states are getting ready to attack Pakistan: 'KABUL, July 16 (Reuters) - NATO forces in Afghanistan hit targets inside Pakistan with artillery and attack helicopters after coming under rocket fire from across the border, the alliance said on Wednesday.

Tension is high along the border with a sharp rise in attacks in eastern Afghanistan coming from inside Pakistan that Afghan and NATO officials blame on de-facto ceasefires between the Pakistani military and militants in its lawless tribal belt. (Reuters North American News Service, July 16, 2008) All of which goes to show that Brzezinski is mad as a hatter.

THE BRZEZINSKI-OBAMA PLAN FOR RUSSIA

Groaning under the weight of two lost wars, the terminal crisis of the US dollar, banking panic, and hyperinflation, the US ruling elite is attempting to unify itself around Obama for a breathtaking reversal of their entire strategic and ideological field. The intent is to largely jettison the post-9/11 enemy image of Islamic terrorism and the focus on the Middle East, and to shift target to Russia, China, and their allies in a vast global showdown or planetary end game for which Trilateral asset Obama is supposed to be the figurehead.

As outlined by the cold warrior and Russia-hater Brzezinski, the first phase is to eject the Chinese from Africa, cutting off their access to oil and raw materials, and thus sabotaging their current rapid industrial development.

All of Africa is rapidly becoming a battlefield of the US against the Chinese, and Obama is the ideal front man for this.

Chinese allies like Sudan and Zimbabwe, and also Pakistan and Burma, are all being targeted as part of this plan. With Iran and Syria, the effort will not to attack them, but to turn them against Russia and China.

This Brzezinski design is why Obama says he wants to negotiate with Iran, but bomb Pakistan.

China is being weakened and destabilized by the Tibetan insurrection and other operations, and Zbig would like to stage a large-scale incident under the cover of the summer Olympics.

In the final stage, Zbig thinks he can drive the oil-starved Chinese in on Russia's provinces of eastern Siberia, where there is much oil and few Russians.

Obama is thus the bearer of a plan for Sino-Russian World War III that far surpasses the insanity of the neocons. Since Russia and China are both well aware of the Brzezinski plan, this entire lunatic project is sure to blow up in our faces, with cataclysmic results.

The Iraq war will seem a tea party by comparison. The main grounds for aggression in the new phase will be humanitarian and human rights claims, not terrorism, so as to maximize left cover. The Bin Laden pretext is now mainly for Afghanistan-Pakistan, where the existing war is being expanded and re-directed to fit the new policy.

OBAMA ESCALATES AFGHANISTAN, ATTACKS PAKISTAN

An example of the heightened aggressiveness that could be expected under the Brzezinski plan was the question of unilateral US bombing of Pakistan. Not a few observers spent the first half of 2008 worrying about an imminent attack on Iran.

The reality was that the growing power of the Brzezinski faction in Washington made such an attack less and less likely, at least as far as the United States and the United Kingdom were concerned. But these same observers were largely blind to a program of systematic aggression being carried out by the United States and the British against Pakistan, a country that was almost 3 times larger than Iran, and became equipped with nuclear weapons and medium-range ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Every gust of wind in the Persian Gulf was considered a harbinger of Armageddon, but the constant bombing raids in the northwest regions of Pakistan were considered a matter of scant importance.

The irony was that the bombing attacks on Pakistan had been demanded by none other than Obama. Speaking indeed the July 2008 Democratic candidates' debate held in Chicago, Obama had stated:

' what I said was that we have to refocus, get out of Iraq, make certain that we are helping Pakistan deal with the problem of al Qaeda in the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, if we have actionable intelligence on al Qaeda operatives, including bin Laden, and President Musharraf cannot act, then we should. Now, I think that's just common sense. I don't know about you, but for us to authorize -- (cheers, applause) -- (inaudible) --.'

Senator Clinton had disagreed with this reckless and unilateral approach. Senator Dodd had joined Clinton in criticizing Obama. Senator McCain had scored Obama for making such a reckless and incendiary proposal. Even Bush himself stated that he intended to work closely with President Musharraf in regard to all operations conducted by the United States on Pakistani territory.

Since the tenant of the White House had ruled out the unilateral bombing of Pakistan which Obama had demanded, the matter appeared to be closed. Jake Tapper of ABC News found it striking that Obama, who was posing as the peace candidate for Iraq, should be so aggressive in regard to Pakistan.

Tapper showed that Obama was raising the issue on the campaign trail, quoting him. '"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges," Obama said, "but let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

There it was again: unilateral US bombing of a sovereign state that had nuclear weapons. Tapper commented: 'In many ways, the speech is counterintuitive; Obama, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush.' (Jake Tapper, 'Presidential Candidate Pushes Aggressive Stance Toward Pakistan,' ABC News, August 1, 2007)

In other words, when it came to Pakistan, Obama was a bigger warmonger and any Republican or Democrat in sight, including Bush and McCain, to say nothing of Clinton.

Astoundingly, the power of Brzezinski in Washington grew so rapidly that Obama was destined to prevail over Bush, the alleged president, imposing his policy instead of the announced intentions of the man who kept calling himself the president of the United States.

Late in March 2008, a press account revealed that the US had indeed gone over to unilaterally bombing northwest Pakistan: 'The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in "Pakistan's tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan's new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials. "We have always said that as for strikes, that is for Pakistani forces to do and for the Pakistani government to decide. . . . We do not envision a situation in which foreigners will enter Pakistan and chase targets," said Farhatullah Babar, a top spokesman for the "Pakistan People's Party, whose leader, Yousaf Raza Gillani, is the new prime minister. "This war on terror is our war."

But Kamran Bokhari, a Pakistani who directs Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group in Washington, said the new government will almost certainly take a harder line against such strikes. "These . . . are very unpopular, not because people support al-Qaeda, but because they feel Pakistan has no sovereignty," he said.

The latest Predator strike, on March 16, killed about 20 in Shahnawaz Kot; a Feb. 28 strike killed 12 foreign militants in the village of Kaloosha; and a Jan. 29 strike killed 13 people, including senior al-Qaeda commander Abu Laith al-Libi, in North Waziristan. (Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, :US Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan," Washington Post, March 27, 2008)

Soon it became clear that this was a systematic US bombing campaign and represented a scandal as big in its own way as the Nixon-Kissinger secret bombing of Cambodia back in the early 1970s. This is no hyperbole; we must simply remember that a nuclear power, and not some banana republic, is being attacked!

The US bombing campaign was being conducted with wild and reckless abandon, and members of Pakistani paramilitary formations were getting killed: 'Pakistan is condemning a "Pakistan: US airstrikes kill 11 border troops" U.S. air strike which allegedly killed 11 Pakistani paramilitaries as a "completely unprovoked and cowardly act."

U.S.-led forces killed Pakistani troops in an air strike along the volatile Afghan border that Pakistan's army condemned on Wednesday as "completely unprovoked and cowardly." U.S. officials confirmed that three aircraft launched about a dozen bombs following a clash between Taliban militants and Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces late Tuesday. Pakistan says the strikes killed 11 of its paramilitary troops.

The Pakistani army said the air strike hit a post of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in the Mohmand tribal region and was a "completely unprovoked and cowardly act." It launched a strong protest and reserved "the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression," the military said in a statement. The statement said the clash "had hit at the very basis of cooperation" between the allies in the war on terror.'

The Pakistani government was now the one elected in the elections conducted after the death of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. This was supposedly the regime the US had wanted to install, but Brzezinski was doing everything possible to humiliate, mortified, and thoroughly antagonize the new government in Islamabad. 'The Frontier Post of Pakistan reported: 'On June 10, 2008 US - led coalition forces along the Afghan border launched an air strike on a Frontier Corps Sheikh Baba border post in the mountainous Gora Prai region in Mohmand Agency. 11 Pakistani paramilitary troops including one major, 10 civilian killed and several injured. The incident took place inside Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.

Pentagon confirmed that coordinated artillery and air strikes was carried out. On Jun 11 2008, Prime Minister Gilani condemned the deaths, telling parliament: "We will take a stand for the sake of this country's sovereignty, for the sake of its dignity and self-respect". He further revealed that "We do not allow our territory to be used. We completely condemn this, and will take it up through the foreign office."("NATO's Senseless Aggressiveness in FATA," Frontier Post)

By early July 2008, the US was making preparations to escalate: 'US commandos are reportedly poised to launch raids against al-Qa'ida and Taliban targets in Pakistan as Washington moves an aircraft carrier into the Arabian Sea. The redeployment of the Abraham Lincoln and its escort vessels from the Gulf yesterday came after US military intelligence officials recorded an increase in the number of foreign fighters travelling to Pakistan's tribal areas to join with militants.'

What is Brzezinski doing? He is obviously using the absurd pretext of bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban in order to destroy the central government of Pakistan, and promote civil war, Balkanization, partitioning, and subdivision in that country.

The goal is evidently the division of Pakistan into three or four or five petty states, including such areas as Sind, Pushtunistan, Baluchistan, Waziristan, and so forth. This operation has nothing whatsoever to do with bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the "global war on terror," but had everything to do with the fact that Pakistan was a traditional Chinese ally and economic and trading partner.

Pakistan had to be destroyed as part of the Brzezinski strategy to strip China of all of allies, and promote the isolation and encirclement of the Middle Kingdom. Northwest Pakistan is one of the very few parts of the world where the US continued to rely on the bin Laden-Al Qaeda myth to justify its policy. Elsewhere, pretexts and cover stories about humanitarian intervention and human rights, and nuclear non-proliferation, are on the front burner.

GOP LAMENTS: LAME DUCK BUSH REDUCED TO CHILD'S PLAY

In the late spring and early summer of 2008, it is clear that Bush, Cheney, and the neocons had indeed lost power to Brzezinski and company. Bush and Cheney appear to have about as much power as the White House janitor or the groundskeeper at the Naval Observatory.

Bush and Cheney are variously described as finished, washed up, lame ducks, figureheads, and kaput. Some Republicans were becoming concerned that Bush had lapsed into a figurehead-lame-duck status, and impotence and passivity so extreme that they might become a negative factor for McCain in the upcoming election.

One columnist noted: 'Some of President Bush's allies tell the Political Bulletin they are embarrassed and angry that the White House seems to be wasting Bush's time on frivolous events when much of the country is suffering through economic hard times. "Look at the schedule for Monday," says an outside Bush adviser. "A highlight of his day was witnessing a tee ball game. ... He is being reduced to child's play."

The adviser says Bush also signed a supplemental appropriations bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on Monday, but he adds that it didn't get much coverage and that the tee ball game set the wrong tone. There is growing concern among Bush allies that the Democrats will effectively portray the President and GOP candidate John McCain as out of touch. Some GOP insiders now predict that the Republicans will lose at least five seats in the Senate and 15 to 20 in the House, and it could get worse if gasoline prices continue to soar and the public remains in a disgruntled mood.'

RICE HUMILIATES CHENEY WITH NORTH KOREA DEAL

Another leading symptom of this loss of power by Bush and Cheney is the announcement by Secretary of State Rice, another member of the Principals' Committee, that a deal has been reached with North Korea concerning the termination of the North Korean nuclear weapons program, in exchange for which the United States had pledged to remove North Korea from the State Department list of terrorist states.

The remaining neocons were apoplectic to the point of foaming at the mouth. The British press revealed that the diehard Cheney had fought tooth and nail to block this deal, but had been vanquished by Rice -- and thus by the superior power of the Principals' Committee, in our view: 'Vice President Dick Cheney fought furiously to block efforts by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to strike a controversial US compromise deal with North Korea over the communist state's nuclear program Mr Cheney was so angry about the decision to remove North Korea from the terrorism blacklist and lift some sanctions that he abruptly curtailed a meeting with visiting US foreign experts when asked about it in the White House last week, according to the New York Times "I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department," he reportedly said before leaving the room.

"The exchanges between Cheney's office and Rice's people at State got very testy. But ultimately Condi had the President's ear and persuaded him that his legacy would be stronger if they reached a deal with Pyongyang," said a Pentagon adviser who was briefed on the battle.

Top neocon John Bolton was beside himself with rage, and saw this deal with the DPRK as a harbinger of the final neocon Götterdämmerung: '"It's shameful," said John Bolton, Bush's former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "This represents the final collapse of Bush's foreign policy." (CBS-AP, June 26, 2008)

The mood of his fellow neocon Richard Perle was equally apocalyptic: '"Usually the word 'meltdown' applies to a nuclear reactor. In this case it applies to Bush administration diplomacy which once aimed to halt the North Korean program and has now become an abject failure," Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon defense policy board in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, told the Telegraph.' (Daily Telegraph, June 28, 2008) Both Bolton and Perel, for once, have it right. Brzezinski and his tool Rice are running the show.

MULLEN WARNS ISRAELIS: DON'T ATTACK IRAN

At the same time, a pattern of intense diplomatic activity has emerged across the Middle East, even as the Israeli politician Shaul Mofaz was threatening Iran with an inevitable nuclear attack if it were to persevere in its alleged attempts to procure nuclear bombs.

The Israelis are known to be negotiating with Syria in a series of talks mediated by the Turkish government. The Israelis were also making deals with Hamas and Hezbollah, something that was formally speaking a violation of the strict Bush doctrine in this regard.

Remarkably, the top levels of the US government have issued some unusual warnings to the Israelis, telling them to back off from any plan to strike at Iran: President Bush and the top "U.S. Armed Forces" U.S. military commander warned "Israel" Israel... against bombing Iran, suggesting the " U.S. doesn't want to get involved in a third war.

"This is a very unstable part of the world and I don't need it to be more unstable," "Michael G. Mullen" Adm. Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman [and leading member of the ruling Principals' Committee], said at a briefing. Bush said, "I have made it clear to all parties [including Israel] that the first option is diplomacy," in getting Iran to stop enriching uranium that could be used for a nuclear weapon. The warnings came after the disclosure that Israel had conducted air operations over the Mediterranean that could simulate a strike on Iran.'

In addition to these public warnings, there are also reports of private messages telling the Israelis to back off. One was personally delivered by Admiral Mullen of the Principals' Committee, according to the Israeli press: 'The US did not give the green light for an Israeli attack on Iran, Prof. Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and currently the top defense analyst at the ABC TV network, said Monday.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen. Cordesman was speaking during a meeting with Israeli defense analysts held by the Institute of National Security Studies. He said IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi was notified of the United States' stance regarding Iran by Admiral Michael Mullen, the top uniformed US military officer, during Mullen's visit here at the end of June. The US has opted at this point to stick to the diplomatic track in its efforts to keep Iran from going nuclear, and has made clear to Israel that it shouldn't attack Iran without White House approval, Cordesman said. He added that the current US policy is likely to remain unchanged at least until the next US president is sworn in. Israeli officials confirmed that Cordesman's statements indeed reflected the current tone of US policy.'

There are solid indications that Iran is being offered the possibility of continuing to enrich uranium at the level of its present capacity to do so, while opening a negotiation with Javier Solana of the European Union. This was welcomed by the Iran Foreign Minister Mottaki, and was widely regarded as the prelude to a deal or modus vivendi between the US under Brzezinski and the Iranians: ''Iran agreed to enter into talks with the European Union about its nuclear program before the end of the month, Iranian state-run media said. The EU, which recently placed sanctions on Iran, has offered a package of political, economic and security incentives to Iran if it halts uranium enrichment. Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, called EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to tell him the response to that offer was coming, according to Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency, and Solana's office characterized Jalili's tone as friendly and positive.

The EU has proposed suspending further sanctions if http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Iran" Iran takes a six-week break from installing or manufacturing any more centrifuges that enrich uranium. Iran would be allowed to continue to run the more than 3,000 centrifuges it already has but could not manufacture more ("Iran ready to discuss EU's nuclear offer," CNN, July 4, 2008)

In the midst of these negotiations, Iran launched a number of medium and short range ballistic missiles. The neocons tried to beat the drum, but the response of Secretary Gates of the Principals' Committee was as low-key and placid as could be imagined: 'The United States is no closer to confrontation with Iran after Tehran test-fired missiles it says could reach Israel and U.S. assets in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.

Asked if the United States was any closer to confrontation, Gates told reporters: "No, I don't think so." Gates also said it was "highly unlikely" that Russian air defense missiles would be in Iranian hands soon. An improved air defense system would make a strike on Iran more difficult.' (Reuters: "Pentagon chief: US no closer to Iran confrontation," July 9, 2008) Gates also mentioned the terrible consequences which any hostilities with Iran would have.

The following day, there were press reports that the US was allowing the Israelis to use Iraqi airspace to ready an attack on Iran. These reports were quickly denied by the Pentagon. An Israeli attack could not be ruled out, but there was no doubt that the US and the British were strongly opposed to the idea, which would undercut Brzezinski's entire plan to turning Iran against the Russians.

There was yet another example of a Principals' Committee member overriding Bush and making policy.

On July 11, 2008, it was reported that Treasury Secretary Paulson had convinced Bush that the administration policy of hostility (based on Bush's hatred of FDR and the New Deal in any form) to Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, the twin giant mortgage guarantors and lenders whose debts amounted to some $5.3 trillion, was risking a systemic crisis of the US banking system ­ a financial Armageddon.

Paulson reportedly told Bush that if he insisted on driving Freddie and Fannie into bankruptcy liquidation, systemic crisis would quickly follow and Bush would be Hooverized in very short order, long before he left office.

At this point, wheels were set into motion and the Federal Reserve signaled that Freddie and Fannie would get access to the discount window of the US central bank. This story is highly relevant here because it shows the degree to which the members of the Principals Committee are now running the government and telling Bush what to do on most the major issues.

It is clear that Brzezinski and his fellow Trilateral oligarchs intend to maintain and consolidate the current preeminence of the Principals' Committee under a possible future Obama administration, and also if McCain becomes president, although that variant is much less promising for their hopes of giving US imperialism a hyper-demagogic facelift. In the case of McCain, the Trilateral inside operative would be Ian Brzezinski, the neocon son of the clan patriarch, who tells McCain what to say about world affairs.

NEOCONS DISPLACED BY TRILATERALS, 2006-2008

The erosion of neocon power had proceeded apace, starting around the time of the 2006 US congressional elections. Around that time, British intelligence began signaling the urgent necessity of shifting target towards Russia by staging to bombastic intelligence circuses in the form of the Politkovskaya murder and the Litvinenko radiation bomb affair, both of which were immediately blamed on Russian President Putin.

The British also stepped up their subversion efforts inside the Russian Federation under the cover of cultural exchanges conduit through the Foreign Office front organization, the British Council.

As a result of the new Democratic majority in the Congress, the discredited neocon factional leader Rumsfeld was forced out and replaced by Robert Gates, a Sovietologist who had served as the Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski's office boy at the National Security Council during 1977, 1978, and 1979.

Gates had also been active in Brzezinski's mujaheddin operations against the Soviets, operations which had been given birth to the CIA Arab Legion, Al Qaeda. At the end of 2006, the report of the Iraq study group, also known as the Baker-Hamilton commission, signaled a change in oligarchical policy and with it the beginning of the end of the neocon dominance in Washington.

The Iraq study group recommended that there be no US attack on Iran, and that negotiations with Syria and Iran be begun immediately. James Baker, a former secretary of state under Bush the Elder, stated explicitly that he had procured Syria as an ally for the United States during the first Gulf War, and that he could do so again.

Neocon press organs screamed that Baker and Hamilton were "surrender monkeys," but the handwriting was now on the wall. The middle of the year saw the fall of the crypto-neocon Tony Blair, a creature of Rupert Murdoch and the last of the major European leaders who had cooperated with Bush and the neocons to unleash the Iraq war in the first place.

The last serious attempt of the neocon faction to launch war with Iran probably occurred at the end of August and the beginning of September 2007, when rogue forces allied with Cheney in effect hijacked a B-52 intercontinental strategic bomber carrying six nuclear armed cruise missiles, and flew it from North Dakota to Louisiana. One of more of these missiles was probably destined to join in the Israeli attack on Syria which occurred on September 6.

The fact that this B-52 was not allowed to proceed, and that a consensus against letting it leaves the United States rapidly emerged in the higher levels of the oligarchy, probably represented the last gasp of the US - UK neocons as far as starting a wider war was concerned. Bush's outbursts in October and November about World War III were partly directed against Putin, and partly expressed his frustration that no strategic attacks on Iran were likely.

This overall impression was solidified in December 2007 with the issuance of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that there was no longer any active Iranian program to build nuclear bombs. In 2008, attention was already shifting to such classic Brzezinski gambits as Kosovo independence and the emerging Polish missile crisis, along with the Tibet insurrection, threats to attack Sudan, and a clear desire to use a humanitarian emergency in Burma as a pretext for a humanitarian invasion and regime change because the Burmese junta was not an efficient distributor of relief supplies.

In these same months, the US Supreme Court was handing down majority opinions striking down the Bush-Cheney military commissions plan for alleged terrorist captives, and then asserting the right of habeas corpus for the prisoners being held in the US enclave of Guantánamo Bay Cuba. Once again, the neocons howled in their impotence. Then came the deal to de-list North Korea as a terrorist state, followed by increasing indications of an imminent deal with Iran, even as the attacks on Pakistan escalated and that country teetered on the brink of civil war and partition.

The years had not been kind to the neocons: Scooter Libby had been convicted, and only escaped prison through Bushes highly controversial pardon. Lord Conrad Black, arguably an even bigger neocon then Libby, was now actually serving a multi-year prison sentence in a US federal penitentiary for embezzling money from his companies. Lord Black had been one of the major funders of the American Enterprise Institute, where no less a personage than Lynn Cheney, as well as Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen had been employed.

As for neocon Michael Ledeen, his problems might only be beginning: a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee alleged that Ledeen and his old Iran-Contra friend Ghorbanifar had conspired to manipulate US intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war.

This report had no doubt received much personal attention from the Committee Chairman, who was none other than Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, of the Trilateral-Rockefeller faction which also included Brzezinski. Other neocons like torture advocates and Geneva Convention deniers Addington (Cheney's Cheney) Yoo were hauled in front of the Nadler committee of the House to be grilled and lambasted. These were some of the steps by which the Trilaterals had ousted the neocons from their previous positions of power, had neutralized Bush and Cheney, and had generally introduced a demagogic left turn in the entire posture of Anglo American foreign policy, propaganda, and intelligence operations.

Now, all they needed was a figurehead to become the spokesman for this deceptive and cynical left turn -- and this was obviously the role assigned to Obama.

If the American people could imagine no conflict worse than the Iraq war, or even the now-unlikely Iran war, they were obviously suffering from a severe poverty of imagination.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's imagination was richer than that. He could and did imagine a drive to break up both Russia and China, reducing both to a congeries of warlords and petty states, all absolutely impotent to resist the Anglo-Americans.

That would give London and Washington another century of world domination.

Brzezinski would always claim that his intention was to accomplish all this using proxies, surrogates, and pawns, and without embroiling the US in direct war with Russia and China.

His approach had all the defects of the old Astor family-Cliveden set of the 1930s, who were convinced that they could build up Hitler, turn him east, play him against Stalin, and then destroy both Germany and the USSR in the process, letting the British Empire survive for another hundred years.

Unfortunately, they had been too clever by half, and their plan had blown up in their faces when Hitler turned west before going east. That had caused World War II.

Now, it was clear that Brzezinski's fantastic strategy was also destined to blow up in his face, and in all our faces, except now there are ICBMs and H-bombs.

The Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his faction clearly had read Brzezinski's intentions accurately:

"Where did you get a public opinion that we should fully disarm and then, according to some theoreticians, such as Brzezinski, divide our territory into three or four states? If there is such a public opinion, I would disagree with it,"

Putin had stated on June 4, 2007.

OBAMA A ONE-WAY TICKET TO THERMONUCLEAR WAR

An Obama regime was therefore a probable one-way ticket to thermonuclear war, an outcome several orders of magnitude worse than anything the neocons had ever plotted.

Brzezinski and his friends were more aggressive, more adventurous, more intelligent, and more insane than the neocons. The American people, if they succumbed to Obama, were about to leap out of the frying pan and into the fire.

By Webster G. Tarpley

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