CSIS – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 Media Concern Trolling About Afghanistan Withdrawal Again https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/13/media-concern-trolling-about-afghanistan-withdrawal-again/ Tue, 13 Apr 2021 16:00:57 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=736835 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

“Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women’s rights,” blares a new headline from CNN.

“Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women’s rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country,” CNN tells us.

What follows is yet another concern-trolling empire blog about why US troops need to stay in Afghanistan, joining recent others geared toward the same end like this CNN report about how the US military will open itself up to “costly litigation” if it withdraws now because it signed defense industry contracts into 2023, and this one by The New York Times about a US intelligence report urgently warning that a withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to the nation being controlled by the people who live there.

This latest article by CNN features an extensive series of quotes by Annie Pforzheimer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank regurgitating the tired old mantra that a withdrawal from Afghanistan needs to be “conditions-based”, to ensure that no women will be mistreated if the US ends its twenty-year military occupation of the country.

CSIS, for the record, is funded by war profiteering corporations like Northrop Grumman and Boeing, as well as fossil fuel companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco. It is also funded by plutocrats. It is also funded directly by the United States government and its allies. This article is precisely the sort of narrative management initiative that such think tanks exist for, and the fact that it’s considered normal journalistic practice to quote sources with such blatant ulterior motives as objective experts shows that western news media is propaganda.

When think tankers like Pforzheimer babble about a “conditions-based withdrawal” from Afghanistan, they are lying about what the requisite “conditions” would actually be. A complete and total withdrawal will have nothing to do with whether women are guaranteed to be treated nicely. It will have nothing to do with whether defense contractors will sue the US government or whether the Taliban will be able to retake control of the nation. A complete and total withdrawal from Afghanistan will happen when Afghanistan ceases to be a vital geostrategic point of control, which effectively means the US will maintain some sort of foothold in Afghanistan for as long as China, Russia and Iran remain sovereign nations.

A US puppet regime in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. If that somehow happens one day, the empire will have no further use for Afghanistan. Those are the real “conditions”.

The US empire does not care about women. The US empire routinely kills women and creates lawless environments where rape and sexual slavery are commonplace with its military interventionism. What this hand-wringing about women’s rights in Afghanistan has actually accomplished is a convenient justification for further military occupation, a destructive industry of shady NGOs, and functionally not much else.

But this argument wouldn’t even make sense if it was sincere. The only way to argue with logical coherence that the US should militarily occupy a nation to uphold liberal values is to also argue that the US should invade and occupy all other nations in the world with illiberal cultural values and force them all to change at gunpoint. Unless you uphold this argument with logical consistency in this way (and almost nobody does this because that would be insane), it looks like you’re simply making up arguments to justify invading and occupying geostrategically crucial regions with great military and resource value. And, of course, this is exactly what you are doing.

So much empire propaganda is just concern trolling at mass scale. Oh my it sure is concerning how they’re abusing that poor oppressed population in that nation whose government we just so happen to want to topple. Sure we’d have to butcher mountains of human beings and destabilize entire vast regions in order to rescue them, but that’s a sacrifice we’d be willing to make. We are humanitarians, after all.

“Concern” is the propaganda carrier for the most violent of interventions. If imperialism was a virus, “concern” would be the benign-looking shape it took so the body didn’t set off an immune response. “Concern” is the most Karen of manipulations.

Still it says a lot that they need to tug at our humanitarian heart strings like that in order to advance their empire-building agendas these days. It used to be stuff like “They’re savages and they need to learn about Jesus,” or even just “Your King has decreed that those people shouldn’t get to control the land they live on anymore.”

We’ve evolved as a society to the point where at least now they need to appeal to our better demons. Where they need to hide their disgusting agendas behind noble-looking ones.

Let’s keep evolving, please. Maybe our collective consciousness can expand so far that they won’t be able to get away with any of their psychopathic murderousness at all.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> Govt-Linked CSIS Urges DC to Partner With Social Media Firms to ‘Promote Protests Movements’ https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/10/govt-linked-csis-urges-dc-partner-with-social-media-firms-promote-protests-movements/ Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:00:39 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=719648 Widespread protests were a feature of 2020, engulfing 68 nations. However, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a pro-regime-change think tank based in DC, is most preoccupied with those in China and Russia.

Alan MACLEOD

A new report from Washington D.C.-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) concludes that the U.S. government should work closely with social media companies to ensure that protest movements around the world result in an outcome more conducive to American interests. Along with intern Riley McCabe, the organization’s senior fellow, Samuel Brannen, argued that the White House, State Department, and intelligence community must explore deeper coordination with major tech companies that provide global media platforms:

The U.S. government should think creatively about public-private partnerships that can expand its toolkit to defend the legitimate rights of political protestors globally, including preserving the digital rights of peaceful democratic activists while muting harmful mis- and disinformation from violent state and nonstate actors seeking to tip the balance in various countries.”

While the language used couches the potential move as defending democracy, the rest of the article makes clear that the fight of the future lies between the democratic U.S. and other “like-minded governments” versus “authoritarian states — especially China and Russia.”

Widespread protests were a feature of 2020, engulfing 68 nations, according to the CSIS. However, they appear to be most preoccupied with those in China and Russia. The CSIS applauded American sanctions on Russia that followed the imprisonment of anti-Putin politician Alexei Navalny, calling them “a step in the right direction” — phrasing which suggests they want to see far more aggressive action taken against Moscow. Beijing’s moves against the Hong Kong protests, meanwhile, amounted to the “totalitarian conclusion” and the destruction of democracy in the city-state.

The U.S. has been intimately involved in protest movements against its enemies. In 2014, then-vice-president Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine to gin up the protagonists of the anti-Moscow Maidan Revolution, with senior U.S. official Victoria Nuland even photographed handing out cookies to protestors. Washington was also a major actor in the Hong Kong protests, funding and training many of its leaders, and spending at least $29 million on “pro-democracy” projects in the region.

More Americans were arrested after barely a week of protests following the killing of George Floyd than in over one year of demonstrations in Hong Kong, and protest organizers and journalists alike are still facing lengthy sentences for their roles in them. Yet, the CSIS presents the U.S. response to internal strife as exemplary, stating that “the United States is uniquely positioned to make its own handling of political dissent and protest a centerpiece of U.S. outreach to the world,” claiming that it can “lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

A bastion of neocon thought

The CSIS is one of the most influential and well-connected think tanks in Washington. War planners like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, military commanders like Brent Scowcroft and James L. Jones, and former Secretaries of Defense such as William S. Cohen and Harold Brown occupy key positions on its advisory board.

The organization is also funded by virtually every Western government, major weapons contractors including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, as well as the foundations of notable billionaires like Pierre Omidyar, Bill Gates, and Charles Koch. It can also boast current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken as a former senior fellow at the think tank. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that its output represents a dominant strain of thinking within the foreign policy establishment.

“The CSIS masquerades as an independent, objective think tank, but has historically close ties to U.S. intelligence and the military industrial complex,” Tim Shorrock of The Nation told MintPress News in 2019, “it’s abundantly clear that everything it does reflects the interests of its government and corporate donors, which include every major U.S. defense contractor.”

The think tank has also supported regime change through protest movements before. In Bolivia, for example, it applauded the far-right takeover of the country in November 2019, falsely suggesting that the previous month’s elections were fraudulent while presenting the military handpicking obscure senator Jeanine Añez to be president as “according to the Bolivian constitution,” which it certainly was not.

A few months earlier, it went past just promoting protest movements in Venezuela to hosting a secret conference exploring the feasibility of a U.S. invasion of the country in order to finally overthrow the ruling United Socialist Party.

Cyber wars

The United States is already engaged in online warfare against its enemies and long ago enlisted the support of Silicon Valley corporations. On the advice of similarly hawkish think tanks, Twitter and other social media platforms have taken action against what they claim were foreign government attempts to game their services, deleting hundreds of thousands of accounts supposedly linked to enemy regimes, be they Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Cuban or Venezuelan. Yet they appear to never be able to find the American government or its allies doing the same thing, despite the fact that it was revealed 10 years ago that the U.S. has similar influence projects.

In their book titled, “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen wrote, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” suggesting that the new battleground is virtual, and that big tech companies are willing to be the U.S.’ top weapon in maintaining global supremacy.

While that prediction might have seemed surprising eight years ago when the book was first published, a number of moves in recent years suggest that Schmidt and Cohen will be proven correct. In 2018, Facebook announced it was partnering with a NATO cutout organization, the Atlantic Council, to root out disinformation and promote accurate data. Last month, it went further, hiring a former NATO press officer as its new intelligence chief. Meanwhile, Jessica Ashooh left her job as a Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy for the Atlantic Council to join Reddit as its Director of Policy.

One notable case of the U.S. government directly working with social media to inflame protests was in Iran, where the Obama administration convinced Twitter to delay a temporary maintenance shutdown of its operations in order to aid the coordination efforts of anti-government demonstrations. Last year, the Trump administration ordered Facebook to suppress any positive mention of Qassem Soleimani on its platforms. Trump had recently given the order to assassinate the statesman, sparking global indignation. Facebook complied with the request, stating that, “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership.” Soleimani was widely beloved in the country (a U.S. poll found over 80% of the public held a positive opinion of him). This meant that Facebook was suppressing the speech of Iranians talking to other Iranians in Farsi, sharing a majority opinion, all at the behest of the American president.

It is a standard response of authoritarian governments the world over to claim that protests against them are illegitimate, and spurred on by outside enemies intent on seeing them destroyed. This even happens in the U.S., where senior politicians have suggested that political strife of all sorts, from Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling to the George Floyd protests, to the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, had been amplified by Russia. This latest CSIS offering will only add weight to those governments who see an American hand behind domestic dissent.

mintpressnews.com

]]> US Military Attack on Venezuela Mulled by Top Trump Advisors and Latin American Officials at Private DC Meeting https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/15/us-military-attack-on-venezuela-mulled-by-top-trump-advisors-and-latin-american-officials-at-private-dc-meeting/ Mon, 15 Apr 2019 13:41:44 +0000 https://new.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=85173 Away from the public eye, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank hosted a top-level, off-the-record meeting to explore US military options against Venezuela.

Max BLUMENTHAL

(The complete list of attendees for the private CSIS event on US military options against Venezuela appears at the bottom of this article.)

The Washington, DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a private roundtable on April 10 called “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” A list of attendees was provided to The Grayzone and two participants confirmed the meeting took place. They refused to offer any further detail, however.

Among the roughly 40 figures invited to the off-the-record event to discuss potential US military action against Caracas were some of the most influential advisors on President Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy. They included current and former State Department, National Intelligence Council, and National Security Council officials, along with Admiral Kurt Tidd, who was until recently the commander of US SOUTHCOM.

Senior officials from the Colombian and Brazilian embassies like Colombian General Juan Pablo Amaya, as well as top DC representatives from Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido’s shadow government, also participated in the meeting.

On January 23, following backroom maneuvers, the United States openly initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected government by recognizing National Assembly president Juan Guaido as the country’s “interim president.”

Since then, Venezuela has endured a series of provocations and the steady escalation of punishing economic sanctions. President Nicolas Maduro has accused the US of attacks on the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant at the Guri dam, which have led to country-wide blackouts openly celebrated by top Trump officials.

In a March 5 call with Russian pranksters posing as the president of the Swiss Federation, US special envoy for Venezuela Elliot Abrams ruled out military action against Venezuela, revealing that he had only held out the threat to “make the Venezuelan military nervous.”

Since then, however, Guaido has failed to mobilize the national protest wave the Trump administration had anticipated, and the Venezuelan military has demonstrated unwavering loyalty to Maduro. In Washington, the sense of urgency has risen with each passing day.

‘We Talked About Military Options in Venezuela’

The CSIS meeting on “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela” suggests that the Trump administration is exploring military options more seriously than before, possibly out of frustration with the fact that every other weapon in its arsenal has failed to bring down Maduro.

On April 10, I obtained a check-in list containing the names of those invited to the meeting. It was apparently incorrectly dated as April 20, but had taken place earlier that day, at 3 PM.

I confirmed that the meeting had taken place with Sarah Baumunk, a research associate at CSIS’s Americas Program who was listed as a participant.

“We talked about military… uh… military options in Venezuela. That was earlier this week though,” Baumunk told me, when The Grayzone asked her about the meeting that was wrongly listed for April 20.

When The Grayzone asked if the event took place on April 10, Baumunk appeared to grow nervous. “I’m sorry, why are you asking these questions? Can I help you?” she replied.

After I asked again about the meeting, Baumunk cut off the conversation. “I’m sorry I don’t feel comfortable answering these questions,” she stated before hanging up.

The Grayzone received additional confirmation of the meeting from Santiago Herdoiza, a research associate at Hills & Company, who was also listed as an attendee. “I’m sorry, that was a closed meeting. Good evening,” Herdoiza commented when asked for details on the event.

A Who’s Who of Trump Administration Coup Advisors

The CSIS check-in list not only confirms that the Trump administration and its outside advisors are mulling options for a military assault on Venezuela; it also outlines the cast of characters involved in crafting the regime change operation against the country.

Few of these figures are well known by the public, yet many have played an influential role in US plans to destabilize Venezuela.

The complete check-in list can be viewed at the end of this article. Below are profiles of some of the more notable figures and organizations involved in the private meeting. (Names of attendees are in bold).

Admiral Kurt Tidd, Former Commander of US SOUTHCOM: From 2015-18, Tidd was the commander of the US Naval Forces Southern Command, overseeing operations in Central and South America. Last October, Tidd complained, “My Twitter feed is made up of about 50 percent of people accusing me of planning and plotting the invasion of Venezuela, and the other 50 percent imploring me to plan and plot the invasion of Venezuela.” Given his participation in the CSIS meeting on attacking Venezuela, his accusers might have had a point.

On February 20, Tidd’s successor, Admiral Craig Faller, threatened Venezuela’s military and urged it to turn on Maduro in support of the US-backed coup attempt.

Brownfield advised Trump’s National Security Council, “Don’t just hit everyone because you can. Hit the right people and then maybe get others to just be scared and wonder when they’ll get hit.” Mark Feierstein, a NSC official at the time who now works as a senior associate at CSIS and attended its April 10 meeting, was reportedly involved in the plot. However, the plan fell apart as soon as the US sanctioned Cabello under pressure from Sen. Marco Rubio.

Fernando Cutz and Juan Cruz, former National Security Council officials at the Cohen Group: Cutz collaborated closely with Brownfield on the plan to generate rifts in Maduro’s inner circle. Born in Brazil, Cutz is a career USAID foreign service officer who worked on Cuban policy under Obama and entered the Trump NSC under its former director, Gen. H.R. McMaster. Cutz is credited by the Wall Street Journal with presenting Trump with his initial platter of options for destabilizing Venezuela, starting with “a financial strike at Venezuela’s oil exports.” Cutz’s colleague at the Cohen Group, Juan Cruz, was Trump’s former Latin America director. In March 2018, Cruz became the first US official to openly call for the Venezuelan military to disobey Maduro and implement a coup.

Pedro Burelli, BV Advisors: A former JP Morgan executive and ex-director of Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA, Burelli allegedly helped foot the $52,000 bill for a series of meetings in Mexico in 2010 where Guaido and his associates plotted to bring down then-President Hugo Chavez through street chaos. In an interview with The Grayzone, Burelli called the Mexico meetings “a legitimate activity,” though he refused to confirm his participation. Today, he makes no secret of his desire for Maduro’s removal by force, tweeting images of jailed Panamanian President Manuel Noriega and the murdered Libyan leader Muammar Ghadafi to suggest preferred outcomes for Venezuela’s president.

Roger Noriega, American Enterprise Institute: A veteran of the Iran-Contra scandals and regime change operations from Haiti to Cuba, where he plotted to sabotage US efforts at rapproachment – “stability is the enemy and chaos is the friend,” he said – Noriega has been at the center of Washington’s efforts to impose its will on Venezuela. Last November, Noriega recommended that Trump appoint Ambassador Brownfield to lead contingency plans for a military invasion of the country.

Carlos Vecchio and Francisco Marquez, Guaido’s shadow embassy in Washington: Installed as the symbolic ambassador of the Guaido coup regime in Washington DC, Vecchio currently oversees no consular facilities and has no diplomatic authority. He is wanted in Venezuela on arson charges and was photographed posing with a young man who brutally beheaded a woman named Liliana Hergueta. Marquez is associated with Vision Democratica, a DC-based lobbying outfit which employs another Venezuelan opposition member who attended the CSIS meeting on military force, Carlos Figueroa.

Sergio Guzman, Bernardo Rico, and Karin McFarland, USAID: The US Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) has been the leading edge of the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine Venezuela’s government. After ramping up its activities in Venezuela in 2007, USAID began contributing between $45-50 million per year to Venezuelan opposition political, media, and civil society groups. On February 23, USAID director Mark Green presided over a deliberately provocative attempt to ram aid shipments by truck across the Colombian border and into Venezuela. The humanitarian interventionist spectacle backfired badly, resulting in opposition hooligans setting fire to the aid shipments with molotov cocktails. (Green falsely accused Maduro’s forces of burning the aid.) This February, USAID rolled out plans for a “Red Team…to train aid workers as special forces” capable of “executing a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations in extremis conditions.”

Emiliana Duarte, Caracas Chronicles and advisor to Maria Corina Machado: Duarte’s name was crossed off the CSIS check-in list, indicating that she was invited to the private meeting on military options but did not attend. She is a staff writer for Caracas Chronicles, a leading English language publication echoing the political line of Venezuela’s opposition. Duarte has also contributed to the New York Times, most recently in February, when she argued that the US-backed coup attempt was, in fact, “Venezuela’s very normal revolution.” Nowhere in Duarte’s writing has she acknowledged that she is serving as an advisor to Maria Corina Machado, a close ally of Sen. Marco Rubio and one of the most extreme figures among Venezuela’s opposition. In 2014, a series of emails were leaked allegedly revealing Machado’s role in an alleged assassination plot. “I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart,” Machado wrote in one email.

Santiago Herdoiza, Hills & Company: While Herdoiza appears to occupy a low level position, he works at a high powered international strategy firm founded by former George W. Bush administration officials. The firm works on behalf of clients like Chevron, Boeing, and Bechtel to “eliminate barriers to market access and profitability.” In some cases, the firm says it has been able to persuade governments to lower tariffs and drop opposition to free trade deals. Through its participation in the private CSIS meeting, Hills & Company seems to have signaled that it is willing to also entertain the use of military force to open up markets for its clients.

David Smolansky, OAS coordinator for Venezuelan migrants: Once a leader of Guaido’s US-backed Popular Will party, Smolansky took sanctuary in Washington and began working for regime change in 2017. Following the US recognition of Guaido as “interim president,” Smolansky was appointed by OAS President Luis Almagro as coordinator for Venezuelan migrants. While it is unknown what advice Smolansky offered at CSIS regarding a military assault on his country, there is a near-consensus in Washington that an attack would massively exacerbate the migration crisis. A war on Venezuela “would be prolonged, it would be ugly, there would be massive casualties,” Rebecca Chavez, a fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, declared in testimonybefore the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March. (Chavez’s boss, Michael Shifter, was a participant in the CSIS meeting on use of force).

thegrayzone.com
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