Why is the U.S. targeting Russia and Iran?
Part of this is copied from the 1.8mg .pdf file linked below. The actual web page has some excellent maps that bolster the writer's arguements that say that Iran is the scapegoat and Russia is the actual target.
WHY THE US IS TARGETTING RUSSIA AND IRAN ?
Iran is the scapegoat. Russia is the real target.
Russia is fast emerging as the world’s new energy giant. In July 2007 it overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer of oil. But the real measure of its geo-strategic significance is its huge reserves of natural gas, by far the biggest in the world. And what worries the West is that President Putin, from a low point where Yeltsin had sold off its oil and gas assets to the oligarchs, has steadily and single mindedly reasserted state control and ownership of Russia’s oil and gas reserves and pipelines, not only from those who stole them in the 90s, but from the unequal Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) with the US and UK oil companies who followed in their wake.
Today Russia’s oil pipelines and exports are firmly in the hands of Sibneft and its gas sales and pipelines exclusively handled by Gazprom, both nationally owned. Russia now supplies 30% of the natural gas to Western Europe and through a new network of gas and oil pipelines from Siberia and Sakhalin Island on Russia’s far eastern seaboard is set to supply an increasing amount of energy to China (and per-haps also Japan and South Korea).
If you add to that the new oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan through Kazakhstan to China, the gas pipeline from the offshore Myanmar fields in the Bay of Bengal to Kunming in Yunnan province and the proposed Iran- Pakistan-India gas pipeline, you can see the pattern of a new Asian Energy Security Grid taking shape.
These are not just energy deals. They bind the oil and gas producing nations of Iran, Russia and the eastern Caspian into a new relationship of mutual dependancy with the huge and growing economies of China and India, giving them a stake in the political and economic stability of one another and increasing regional cooperation and
integration. Clearly the growing economic, energy and
military relationship between Russia and China stands at its core.
Its political dimension has been formalised in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation(SCO) comprising Russia, China and the states of central asia. Iran, along with India, Pakistan and Mongolia, is now an observer to the SCO, and has openly declared its wish to become a fully fledged member.
This is America’s biggest nightmare. It has the makings of a rival economic, political and military bloc comprising almost half the world’s population and cornering up to half the world’s oil and gas. It threatens US control over the arterial network of oil. . It simply bypasses US naval supremacy by the increasing use of land-based pipelines across ‘Eurasia’ - the world’s biggest and most populous continent . And it will rapidly accelerate the growing trend to denominate oil sales in currencies other than the dollar, threatening the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And this, in turn, will threaten the entire American way of life, predicated on a huge credit bubble
and a mountain of petrodollars held by the world’s central banks. Above all it will threaten the huge US arms budget, sustained by deficit budgetting, which defends America’s global empire.
Nuclear Primacy
How will corporate America respond to this challenge? It will use the one area of superiority it still possesses over all its rivals - its huge war machine and its virtual monopoly over advanced military technology. The neo-conservatives around Dick Cheney have always been
aware of the dangers of an economically resurgent Russia with its huge land mass straddling Europe, the Middle East and Asia and its rich energy reserves. Their strategy has been to encircle, isolate and deconstruct Russia with the main prize its huge oil and gas assets.
The influential former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (certainly not a neo-con) in an article entitled ‘A Geostrategy for Eurasia’ called for a post-soviet Russia to be decentralised, based on free-market economics and loosely confederated into a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic. Thus the US ‘Committee to expand NATO’ (a committee
packed with prominent neo-cons) from the earliest days of the Bush administration set about recruiting new NATO members from eastern and southern Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War. By 2004 Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slokavia and Slovenia had all been admitted to NATO with Georgia and the Ukraine being considered for the future.
In 2003 many of the same individuals opened a new powerful lobbying organisation called the ‘Project on Transitional Democracies’designed to encourage and help fund regime change in the former Soviet republics along the southern flank of Russia - the so-called ‘colour’ revolutions of Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
And that strategy of encirclement has now taken a new more ominous twist.
The intention to deploy missile defence interceptors in Poland and associated radar in the Czech Republic along with the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons can only be interpreted as part of an aggressive first strike strategy and a move to establish Nuclear Primacy.
A first strike strategy is, of course, not new. What is new is that Missile Defence plus an accurate new warhead could give the United States the ability to strike first without fear of effective retaliation.
Gone are the days of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) or joint vulnerability. In its place one side has established such overwhelming dominance that it could launch a nuclear attack and survive unscathed. And this nuclear primacy is unmistakably directed against Russia, the only country with the military technology and infrastructure to be any kind of potential military rival in the foreseeable fu-
ture.
Of course the Bush administration will not say so openly. Iran, they claim, is the main aim of the missile defence posture, but nobody, certainly not Vladimir Putin, believes that and a cursory examination of the facts reveals this to be less than credible. Iran, according to IAEA chief Mohammed El Baredei, has no nuclear weapons pro-
gramme. And even if it did, according to most nuclear experts it would still be 5-10 years from acquiring a single atom bomb.
It simply does not make economic or strategic sense that the United States, with its overwhelming military dominance would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in missile defence and the weaponisation of space to counter the remote threat of a relative minnow like Iran.
Iran is the scapegoat. Russia is the real target.
Iran - the weak link
But Iran is not just a scapegoat for an ultimate move on Russia. It is a US target in its own right. It stands at the centre of US ambitions in the Middle East. With its growing influence to the west and the east, Iran is the crucial link in the formation of a new Asian energy security grid. It is also, as the Americans see it, the weakest link in this network. The coming war with Iran could be, in effect, the first resource war against Eurasia.
Firstly let us be clear what this is not about. It is not about the risks of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against America or any other country. Nuclear weapons are specifically outlawed in Iran by a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Komeini in the 1980s that the production, possession and use of nuclear weapons
was against Islam.
Iran has co-operated with the IAEA inspections programme, and initially agreed to the Additional Protocol insisted on by the United States and the EU-3 (Britain, Germany and France) which involved snap inspections and broader searching powers. Since October 2005, however, it has suspended its co-operation with the Additional Protocol until the IAEA recognises its rights to ‘complete the nuclear fuel cycle’. With the prospect of future US
miltary action, Iran is understandingly reluctant to part with all its secrets.
All of this and more, available at: Campaign Iran
Nice find, man. But how did you copy this text from a .pdf? Is that possible, or did you copy it from the HTML version?
The reason I ask is because I've spent about 3 hours so far typing out an excerpt from Walt and Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S Foreign Policy for publication here at WUFYS, but I've been told by a mate that I could probably obtain the whole book in .pdf format via p2p file-sharing. If I can do that, and copy the chapter I want to share, fuck wasting all that typing it out. I'm a one-finger typist.
wasting all that time* typing it out.
i just copied and pasted it from the original .pdf file.
However, when i pasted it to WUFYS, it needed cleaning up, since the sentences tended to break wherever they wanted to and each chapter broke up the narrative.
But that cleaning up didn't take long.
Sorry to hassle you, but my question was how. When I'm on a .pdf page, my cursor turns into a little white hand that 'grabs' the page when I left-click to attempt to copy the text. I have no idea how you'd go about copying text from a .pdf file.
In the toolbar above the PDF document, there should be a button with a vertical line with two tiny horizontal lines top and bottom. This is the text selection tool. Drag it over the text you require, and choose copy from the Edit menu.
Note that not all PDF files allow copying of text. The security settings on the PDF may prevent you from doing anything with the text you select, including copying it.
Hey, no hassle, but not sure i can answer your question of how to copy the .pdf file.
i'm aware of the problem you stated about the cursor acting funny and not copying the page, but i didn't have that problem.
Maybe it's my Safari browser that allows that to happen, but i really don't know.
Thanks. Maybe I don't have a good enough version of Adobe Acrobat. This is what my toolbar looks like.
There's nothing there that looks like the icon you described. If I hover over the third icon from the top left, the one that looks like two sheets of paper, it says 'copy', but that option is disabled. It's not in bold like the other buttons. In any case, Greg seems to have been able to copy the text without using his toolbar.
I'll get someone to physically show me. Thanks for the help, both of you.
If you look below the copy icon you will see a letter T icon. That is the button. Try clicking twice on it. The little hand you usually see when you are clicking all over the pdf text will turn into an
" I " ...after you click on that T icon.
Like Sullivan said, that's what it looks like.
This " I " will allow you to copy text from pdf. Just drag it over the text, like you tried with the hand.
Usually it works. Sullivan is right, not all pdf text can be copied, but most of it can.
Oh Rhiannon, you legend. Yep, I've got it. But it doesn't turn into an 'I' after I click on it.
When I read that, I visualised something like a capital 'I' with the horizontal lines at the top and bottom detached from the vertical, so I missed it.
Beautiful, thanks. That'll be handy.
Oh, you meant the cursor turns into an 'I', I thought you meant the icon. Yeah, that happens. Finally I know how to get rid of that little grabby hand.
Cheers.
It was the T (Text) icon. Thats what I get for writing something from memory when not fully awake!