Month: February 2015

AZERBAIJANI FOREIGN MINISTRY SAYS ELECTIONS IN OCCUPIED KARABAKH ARE ILLEGAL

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Feb 28 2015

27 February 2015 – 2:10pm

The so-called parliamentary elections, planned to be held in the
Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Republic of Azerbaijan on May 3, 2015,
are illegal, spokesman for the Azerbaijani foreign ministry Hikmet
Hajiyev said today.

“The holding of the elections is a clear violation of the Constitution
of the Republic of Azerbaijan. These elections are aimed at undermining
the negotiating process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement,”
Trend cited Hajiyev.

RUSSIAN SOLDIER GOES MISSING IN ARMENIA

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Feb 28 2015

27 February 2015 – 7:46pm

Russian soldier Artur Afyan of the FSB Border Directorate in Armenia
has gone missing. He is a citizen of Armenia. His disappearance was
reported on February 23. Before disappearing, the soldier told his
wife that he had big debts. She was the one to inform the police about
the missing man. The Armenian Investigative Committee has initiated
a criminal case on murder, Interfax reports.

From: A. Papazian

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE THREAT TO INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Foreign Policy Journal
Feb 27 2015

by Paul Craig Roberts
February 27, 2015

Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the trust
achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility of
nuclear war.

This week I was invited to address an important conference of the
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Scholars from Russia and from
around the world, Russian government officials, and the Russian people
seek an answer as to why Washington destroyed during the past year
the friendly relations between America and Russia that President
Reagan and President Gorbachev succeeded in establishing. All of
Russia is distressed that Washington alone has destroyed the trust
between the two major nuclear powers that had been created during the
Reagan-Gorbachev era, trust that had removed the threat of nuclear
armageddon. Russians at every level are astonished at the virulent
propaganda and lies constantly issuing from Washington and the Western
media. Washington’s gratuitous demonization of the Russian president,
Vladimir Putin, has rallied the Russian people behind him. Putin has
the highest approval rating ever achieved by any leader in my lifetime.

<img class=”alignleft size-medium wp-image-24491″
src=””
alt=”Paul Craig Roberts in front of a portrait of Alexander Hamilton,
the first Secretary of the Treasury.” width=”300″ height=”210″
/>Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the
trust achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility
of nuclear war from the grave in which Reagan and Gorbachev buried it.

Again, as during the Cold War, the specter of nuclear armageddon
stalks the earth.

Why did Washington revive the threat of world annihilation? Why is
this threat to all of humanity supported by the majority of the US
Congress, by the entirety of the presstitute media, and by academics
and think-tank inhabitants in the US, such as Motyl and Weiss, about
whom I wrote recently?

It was my task to answer this question for the conference. You can
read my February 25 and February 26 addresses below. But first
you should understand what nuclear war means. You can gain that
understanding here.

The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative
Ideology of American Hegemony

Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference, Hosted
by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State
Institute of International Relations, Moscow, February 25, 2015, Hon.

Paul Craig Roberts

Colleagues,

What I propose to you is that the current difficulties in the
international order are unrelated to Yalta and its consequences,
but have their origin in the rise of the neoconservative ideology in
the post-Soviet era and its influence on Washington’s foreign policy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only constraint
on Washington’s power to act unilaterally abroad. At that time
China’s rise was estimated to require a half century. Suddenly the
United States found itself to be the Uni-power, the “world’s only
superpower.” Neoconservatives proclaimed “the end of history.”

By the “end of history” neoconservatives mean that the competition
between socio-economic-political systems is at an end. History
has chosen “American Democratic-Capitalism.” It is Washington’s
responsibility to exercise the hegemony over the world given to
Washington by History and to bring the world in line with History’s
choice of American democratic-capitalism.

In other words, Marx has been proven wrong. The future does not belong
to the proletariat but to Washington.

The neoconservative ideology raises the United States to the unique
status of being “the exceptional country,” and the American people
acquire exalted status as “the indispensable people.”

If a country is “the exceptional country,” it means that all other
countries are unexceptional. If a people are “indispensable,” it means
other peoples are dispensable. We have seen this attitude at work in
Washington’s 14 years of wars of aggression in the Middle East. These
wars have left countries destroyed and millions of people dead, maimed,
and displaced. Yet Washington continues to speak of its commitment to
protect smaller countries from the aggression of larger countries. The
explanation for this hypocrisy is that Washington does not regard
Washington’s aggression as aggression, but as History’s purpose.

We have also seen this attitude at work in Washington’s disdain
for Russia’s national interests and in Washington’s propagandistic
response to Russian diplomacy.

The neoconservative ideology requires that Washington maintain its
Uni-power status, because this status is necessary for Washington’s
hegemony and History’s purpose.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world supremacy is most clearly
and concisely stated by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative who
has held many high positions: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense,
Director of Policy Planning US Department of State, Assistant Secretary
of State, Ambassador to Indonesia, Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank.

In 1992 Paul Wolfowitz stated the neoconservative doctrine of American
world supremacy:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,
either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere,
that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the
Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new
regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent
any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would,
under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

For clarification, a “hostile power” is a country with an independent
policy (Russia, China, Iran, and formerly Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi,
Assad).

This bold statement struck the traditional American foreign policy
establishment as a declaration of American Imperialism. The document
was rewritten in order to soften and disguise the blatant assertion of
supremacy without changing the intent. These documents are available
online, and you can examine them at your convenience.

Softening the language allowed the neoconservatives to rise to
foreign policy dominance. The neoconservatives are responsible for the
Clinton regime’s attacks on Yugoslavia and Serbia. Neoconservatives,
especially Paul Wolfowitz, are responsible for the George W. Bush
regime’s invasion of Iraq. The neoconservatives are responsible for
the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi in Libya, the assault on Syria,
the propaganda against Iran, the drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen,
the color revolutions in former Soviet Republics, the attempted
“Green Revolution” in Iran, the coup in Ukraine, and the demonization
of Vladimir Putin.

A number of thoughtful Americans suspect that the neoconservatives
are responsible for 9/11, as that event gave the neoconservatives the
“New Pearl Harbor” that their position papers said was necessary in
order to launch their wars for hegemony in the Middle East. 9/11 led
directly and instantly to the invasion of Afghanistan, where Washington
has been fighting since 2001. Neoconservatives controlled all the
important government positions necessary for a “false flag” attack.

Neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who
is married to another neoconservative, Robert Kagan, implemented and
oversaw Washington’s coup in Ukraine and chose the new government.

The neoconservatives are highly organized and networked,
well-financed, supported by the print and TV media, and backed by
the US military/security complex and the Israel Lobby. There is no
countervailing power to their influence on US foreign power.

The neoconservative doctrine goes beyond the Brzezinski doctrine,
which dissented from Detente and provocatively supported dissidents
inside the Soviet empire. Despite its provocative character, the
Brzezinski doctrine remained a doctrine of Great Power politics and
containment. It is not a doctrine of US world hegemony.

While the neoconservatives were preoccupied for a decade with their
wars in the Middle East, creating a US Africa Command, organizing
color revolutions, exiting disarmament treaties, surrounding Russia
with military bases, and “pivoting to Asia” to surround China with
new air and naval bases, Vladimir Putin led Russia back to economic
and military competence and successfully asserted an independent
Russian foreign policy.

When Russian diplomacy blocked Washington’s planned invasion of
Syria and Washington’s planned bombing of Iran, the neoconservatives
realized that they had failed the “first objective” of the Wolfowitz
Doctrine and had allowed “the re-emergence of a new rival . . . on
the territory of the former Soviet Union” with the power to block
unilateral action by Washington.

The attack on Russia began. Washington had spent $5 billion over a
decade creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine
and cultivating Ukrainian politicians. The NGOs were called into
the streets. The extreme nationalists or nazi elements were used
to introduce violence, and the elected democratic government was
overthrown. The intercepted conversation between Victoria Nuland and
the US ambassador in Kiev, in which the two Washington operatives
choose the members of the new Ukrainian government, is well known.

If the information that has recently come to me from Armenia and
Kyrgyzstan is correct, Washington has financed NGOs and is cultivating
politicians in Armenia and the former Soviet Central Asian Republics.

If the information is correct, Russia can expect more “color
revolutions” or coups in other former territories of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps China faces a similar threat in Uyghurstan.

The conflict in Ukraine is often called a “civil war.” This is
incorrect. A civil war is when two sides fight for the control of the
government. The break-away republics in eastern and southern Ukraine
are fighting a war of secession.

Washington would have been happy to use its coup in Ukraine to
evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base as this would have been a
strategic military achievement. However, Washington is pleased that
the “Ukraine crisis” that Washington orchestrated has resulted in the
demonization of Vladimir Putin, thus permitting economic sanctions
that have disrupted Russia’s economic and political relations with
Europe. The sanctions have kept Europe in Washington’s orbit.

Washington has no interest in resolving the Ukrainian situation. The
situation can be resolved diplomatically only if Europe can achieve
sufficient sovereignty over its foreign policy to act in Europe’s
interest instead of Washington’s interest.

The neoconservative doctrine of US world hegemony is a threat to the
sovereignty of every country. The doctrine requires subservience to
Washington’s leadership and to Washington’s purposes. Independent
governments are targeted for destabilization. The Obama regime
overthrew the reformist government in Honduras and currently is at
work destabilizing Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and
most likely also Armenia and the former Central Asian Soviet Republics.

Yalta and its consequences have to do with Great Power rivalries. But
in the neoconservative doctrine, there is only one Great Power–the
Uni-power. There are no others, and no others are to be permitted.

Therefore, unless a moderate foreign policy arises in Washington and
displaces the neoconservatives, the future is one of conflict.

It would be a strategic error to dismiss the neoconservative ideology
as unrealistic. The doctrine is unrealistic, but it is also the guiding
force of US foreign policy and is capable of producing a world war.

In their conflict with Washington’s hegemony, Russia and China are
disadvantaged. The success of American propaganda during the Cold
War, the large differences between living standards in the US and
those in communist lands, overt communist political oppression, at
times brutal, and the Soviet collapse created in the minds of many
people nonexistent virtues for the United States. As English is the
world language and the Western media is cooperative, Washington is
able to control explanations regardless of the facts. The ability
of Washington to be the aggressor and to blame the victim encourages
Washington’s march to more aggression.

This concludes my remarks. Tomorrow I will address whether there
are domestic political restraints or economic restraints on the
neoconservative ideology.

Paul Craig Roberts, Address to the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta
Conference, Moscow, February 26, 2015

Colleagues,

At the plenary session yesterday I addressed the threat that the
neoconservative ideology poses to international relations. In this
closing session I address whether there are any internal restraints
on this policy from the US population and whether there are economic
restraints.

Just as 9/11 served to launch Washington’s wars for hegemony in the
Middle East, 9/11 served to create the American police state. The
Constitution and the civil liberties it protects quickly fell to
the accumulation of power in the executive branch that a state of
war permitted.

New laws, some clearly pre-prepared such as the PATRIOT Act, executive
orders, presidential directives, and Department of Justice memos
created an executive authority unaccountable to the US Constitution
and to domestic and international law.

Suddenly Americans could be detained indefinitely without cause
presented to a court. Habeas corpus, a constitutional protection
which prohibits any such detention, has been set aside.

Suddenly people could be tortured into confessions in violation of
the right against self-incrimination and in violation of domestic
and international laws against torture.

Suddenly Americans and Washington’s closest allies could be spied on
indiscriminately without the need of warrants demonstrating cause.

The Obama regime added to the Bush regime’s transgressions the
assertion of the right of the executive branch to assassinate US
citizens without due process of law.

The police state was organized under a massive new Department of
Homeland Security. Almost immediately whistleblower protections,
freedom of the press and speech, and protest rights were attacked
and reduced.

It was not long before the director of Homeland Security declared
that the department’s focus has shifted from Muslim terrorists to
“domestic extremists,” an undefined category. Anyone can be swept into
this category. Homes of war protesters were raided and grand juries
were convened to investigate the protesters. Americans of Arab descent
who donated to charities–even charities on the State Department’s
approved list–that aided Palestinian children were arrested and
sentenced to prison for “providing material support to terrorism.”

All of this and more, including police brutality, has had a chilling
effect on protests against the wars and the loss of civil liberty.

The rising protests from the American population and from soldiers
themselves that eventually forced Washington to end the Vietnam War
have been prevented in the 21st century by the erosion of rights,
intimidation, loss of mobility (no-fly list), job dismissal, and other
heavy-handed actions inconsistent with a government accountable to
law and the people.

In an important sense, the US has emerged from the “war on terror”
as an executive branch dictatorship unconstrained by the media and
barely, if at all, constrained by Congress and the federal courts. The
lawlessness of the executive branch has spread into governments
of Washington’s vassal states and into the Federal Reserve, the
International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, all of
which violate their charters and operate outside their legal powers.

Jobs offshoring destroyed the American industrial and manufacturing
unions. Their demise and the current attack on the public employee
unions has left the Democratic Party financially dependent on the same
organized private interest groups as the Republicans. Both parties now
report to the same interest groups. Wall Street, the military/security
complex, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and the extractive industries
(oil, mining, timber) control the government regardless of the party in
power. These powerful interests all have a stake in American hegemony.

The message is that the constellation of forces preclude internal
political change.

Hegemony’s Archilles heel is the US economy. The fairy tale of American
economic recovery supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image
that keeps the dollar’s value up, the stock market up, and interest
rates down. However, there is no economic information that supports
this fairy tale.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below
the levels of the early 1970s. There has been no growth in real
retail sales for six years. The labor force is shrinking. The labor
force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian
employment to population ratio. The 5.7 percent reported unemployment
rate is achieved by not counting discouraged workers as part of the
work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find
a job and has given up looking.)

A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term
(less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported,
stands at 11.2 percent. The US government stopped including long-term
discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994. If
the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate
in the US stands at 23.2 percent.

The offshoring of American manufacturing and professional service
jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology has
decimated the middle class. The middle class has not found jobs with
incomes comparable to those moved abroad. The labor cost savings
from offshoring the jobs to Asia has boosted corporate profits, the
performance bonuses of executives and capital gains of shareholders.

Thus all income and wealth gains are concentrated in a few hands at
the top of the income distribution. The number of billionaires grows
as destitution reaches from the lower economic class into the middle
class. American university graduates unable to find jobs return to
their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes and work as waitresses
and bartenders in part-time jobs that will not support an independent
existence.

With a large percentage of the young economically unable to form
households, residential construction, home furnishings, and home
appliances suffer economic weakness. Cars can still be sold only
because the purchaser can obtain 100 percent financing in a six-year
loan. The lenders sell the loans, which are securitized and sold
to gullible investors, just as were the mortgage-backed financial
instruments that precipitated the 2007 US financial crash.

None of the problems that created the 2008 recession, and that
were created by the 2008 recession, have been addressed. Instead,
policymakers have used an expansion of debt and money to paper over
the problems. Money and debt have grown much more than US GDP, which
raises questions about the value of the US dollar and the credit
worthiness of the US government. On July 8, 2014, my colleagues and
I pointed out that when correctly measured, US national debt stands
at 185 percent of GDP.

This raises the question: Why was the credit rating of Russia, a
country with an extremely low ratio of debt to GDP, downgraded and not
that of the US? The answer is that the downgrading of Russian credit
worthiness was a political act directed against Russia in behalf of
US hegemony.

How long can fairy tales and political acts keep the US house of
cards standing? A rigged stock market. A rigged interest rate. A
rigged dollar exchange value, a rigged and suppressed gold price. The
current Western financial system rests on world support for the US
dollar and on nothing more.

The problem with neoliberal economics, which pervades all countries,
even Russia and China, is that neoliberal economics is a tool of
American economic imperialism, as is Globalism. As long as countries
targeted by Washington for destabilization support and cling to
the American doctrines that enable the destabilization, the targets
are defenseless.

If Russia, China, and the BRICS Bank were willing to finance Greece,
Italy, and Spain, perhaps those countries could be separated from
the EU and NATO. The unraveling of Washington’s empire would begin.

THE LONG READ: FORGET LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, HERE’S THE REAL HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND WORLD WAR 1

The National, UAE
Feb 26 2015

Justin Marozzi
February 26, 2015

On November 11, 1914, Sheikh Al ­Islam Urguplu Hayri Bey, the supreme
religious authority in the Ottoman Empire, posed a dramatic question in
the Fatih Sultan Mehmed Mosque, one of the most venerable monuments on
the Istanbul skyline. The question, and the emphatic one-word answer
it generated, would affect the lives of millions of Muslims, as well
as their adversaries, across the Middle East over the next four years.

“Question: When it occurs that ­enemies attack the Islamic world, when
it has been established that they seize and pillage Islamic countries
and capture Muslim persons and when his Majesty the Padishah of Islam
[the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V] thereupon orders the jihad in the form
of a general mobilisation, has jihad then … become incumbent on
all Muslims and has it become an individual duty for all Muslims in
all parts of the world, be they young or old, on foot or mounted,
to hasten to partake in the jihad with their goods and money?

“Answer: Yes.”

Traditionally, historians have downplayed the significance of the
ensuing German-orchestrated jihad against the Allies, to the extent
that it has been branded irrelevant to the wider war effort.

­Certainly it did not have the devastating effect wished for by its
architects and, on this purely military level, it can be contrasted
with the more immediately effective British-sponsored uprising of the
Arabs against the Ottomans, their co-religionists and long-standing
colonial overlords.

Yet this explanation, says Professor Eugene Rogan, the author of a
new landmark study – The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
Middle East, 1914-1920 – fails to take into account the effect the
jihad had on the Entente Powers or Allies.

“I think it failed to provoke a global Islamic uprising, but the way
it played on British and French war planners was very significant,
right through to the fall of Jerusalem in November 1917. The British
were preoccupied that defeats at the hands of the Ottomans might
­provoke uprisings by colonial Muslims in India and Egypt – and it
really shaped a lot of their wartime planning. So to say the jihad
was irrelevant needs revising.”

The uniquely western perspective of fighting on the Ottoman Front,
long a neglected and underrated theatre of the First World War with the
exception of the numerous works about Lawrence and the Arab Revolt,
has been equally in need of revision. Just as for many Europeans,
particularly the British and French, the Great War is popularly known
almost exclusively as a Western Front affair, so with the war in the
Middle East, European and especially British historians have tended
to see the conflict through a British lens. Thus we have those hoary
staples of “Churchill’s debacle” at Gallipoli; “Townshend’s surrender”
at Al Kut, the most ignominious in British military history; “Maude’s
entry” into Baghdad in March 1917, ending 383 years of Ottoman rule;
“Allenby’s conquest” of Jerusalem in November that year. And, of
course, that most enigmatic and quintessentially British figure, with
a liberal sprinkling of Hollywood stardust, “Lawrence of Arabia”,
long lionised by Brits as the leader of the Arab Revolt. Arabs, it
hardly needs explaining, have consistently and vigorously contested
this view, including most recently the distinguished Iraqi historian
Ali Allawi in his 2014 biography Faisal I of Iraq.

This Eurocentric approach to the war in the Middle East tends to be
parochial to the point of one-sided, a narrow perspective which Rogan
is keen to widen. While David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace
(1989) reflected the classic view from British archives, Kristian
Coates Ulrichsen’s The First World War in the Middle East (2014)
offered a broader canvas. With Rogan, Gallipoli, Kut and Gaza now
rightly become hard-won, resounding Ottoman victories rather than
heroic British defeats. Far from proving the key to a swift end to war
through a lightning defeat of the “Weak Man of Europe”, as the Allies
had anticipated, the Ottoman Front only succeeded in lengthening –
and vastly broadening – the greater conflict, claiming millions of
soldiers from the Entente and Central Alliances.

What is especially welcome in this study is the long overdue focus on
the experiences of Turkish and Arab soldiers and civilians during the
war, culled from a series of recently published diaries and memoirs.

During the past 10 years, perhaps 30 Ottoman soldiers’ diaries have
been published in Turkey, counterparts to visceral British works such
as Pâ~@~IW Long’s Other Ranks of Kut (1938). These are alternately
harrowing, heart-rending, sometimes amusing, but always intensely
human documents. Rogan says they were “the most exciting part of
writing the book. They allow us for the first time to approach the
common soldier’s experience of fighting, and what’s so exciting are
the parallels between what they write and what western soldiers write –
we’ve never had it from both sides of the trenches before.”

Thus we hear the voices of ordinary men such as Corporal Ali Riza Eti,
a Turkish medic called up for military service to fight the Russians
at Köpruköy, the first Ottoman battle of the First World War in
November 1914. Eti transcribed the terrifying symphony of bullets
as civ civ civ. “As it was my first day [of fighting], I was very
afraid of dying,” he noted in his diary. “With each civ I broke out
in a sweat from my teeth to my toenails.”

French and Ottoman soldiers’ diaries bear common witness to the terror
of hearing the enemy digging under their lines. “The Turks wrote a lot
of poetry too, much of it very bad, like that of the soldiers they
were fighting,” says Rogan. “The experience was so big it seemed to
defy prose so they resorted to poetry to do justice to it.”

Rogan charts how the emerging Arab movement pressing for rights
for Arab subjects within the Ottoman Empire came under ever more
severe Young Turk repression in the lead-up to the Great War. Tens
of thousands were exiled for their political views and dozens were
hanged in Beirut and Damascus in 1916. Increased Ottoman suppression,
combined with the hardship of the war years, fuelled increasingly
separatist views among the Arabs.

Though sensitive to the general sophistication of Ottoman rule,
Rogan does not pull his punches on the Armenian genocide of 1915. The
chapter detailing “the annihilation of the Armenians”, with systematic
massacres of males who were 12 years and over, often within sight or
hearing of their womenfolk, sounds an eloquent riposte to long-standing
Turkish denial of these “crimes against humanity”.

Tâ~@~IE Lawrence famously considered the Arab Revolt “a sideshow of
a sideshow”. By contrast, Rogan demonstrates that the Ottoman Front
writ large was unquestionably an international affair that transformed
Europe’s Great War into the First World War.

Here the British made common cause with South Asians, North Africans
and New Zealanders, Australians, Senegalese, Sudanese and the French
to fight a polyglot Ottoman army containing Turks, Arabs, Kurds,
Armenians and Circassians. The Ottoman Front was “a veritable tower
of Babel, an unprecedented conflict between international armies”.

Much of the turmoil currently convulsing the Middle East can find its
echoes on the region’s battlefields a century ago. “What we forget was
that the war was fought in many areas of the Middle East,” Rogan says.

“There was fighting that affected people’s daily lives in Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Yemen, across the Hijaz, in Iran
and in Turkey. The number of people touched by the war counted in
the millions.”

Death came through disease, spread by the movement of huge armies,
through famine and through direct conflict.

Another argument that comes in for intense re-examination concerns
British wartime partition plans, which are typically considered
“deeply duplicitous” in promising the same land to multiple parties.

It is only by studying the series of different diplomatic agreements
within their immediate military context, Rogan convincingly argues,
that it becomes clear that diplomacy consistently was playing
second fiddle to the overriding objective of winning an increasingly
murderous war.

Thus the Constantinople Agreement of 1915, in which France and
Britain promised Russia the prizes of Istanbul and the Dardanelles,
reflected Allied confidence in a swift capture of the Ottoman
capital. The protracted Hussein-McMahon Correspondence with the
Hashemites in 1915-16 was engendered by Britain’s need for an Arab
ally to counter the rabble-raising Ottoman jihad. Then came the
Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 to carve up the Ottoman
Middle East, struck in anticipation of an imminent Ottoman collapse
that then proved stubbornly elusive. The ominous and conflicting
Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a belated effort to recalibrate
Sykes-Picot and secure British rule for Palestine. In Rogan’s words:
“Britain was not thinking about drawing up borders in the Middle East
so much as defeating the ­Germans.”

With the war won, and the ailing Ottoman Empire on its deathbed,
the Great Powers turned avaricious eyes on the post-war prize of the
Middle East. To the victors the spoils. In the last years of Sunni
Muslim Ottoman rule, from the Young Turks revolution of 1908, the
mixed populations of the Middle East had been represented in Istanbul
on equal terms. The traditional dhimmi status for Jews and Christians
had been abolished. Now Muslim rule gave way to European imperialism.

The new masters were determined to snuff out the aspirations for Arab
independence they had ignited only a couple of years earlier.

For Rogan, the conflict has left a distinctly baleful legacy in the
region. “I think the Middle East has suffered more from the enduring
consequences of World War I than practically any other part of the
world,” he says.

Although the British and French successfully created what proved
to be a remarkably resilient state system in which borders survived
virtually intact for a century, they also left a legacy of unresolved
national issues, which have continued to destabilise the region.

Stable on one level, the long-lasting borders have engendered multiple
conflicts on the other, notably with Palestine and the Kurds.

In fact, the legacy of the Great War in the Middle East extends far
beyond Israel, the Palestinians and the Kurds. Lebanon emerged with the
seeds of sectarian conflict planted within its own borders, vulnerable
to ambitions from a Syria that was never reconciled to its loss.

Perhaps nowhere, though, has been as bloodied and scarred by its
modern history as Iraq, conceived by the British as a union between
the three related but separate Ottoman vilayets or provinces of
Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. After a brief period of hope under a
fledgling monarchy that lasted from 1921 to 1958, Iraqis have not
been able to break the ensuing vicious cycle of revolutions, coups,
wars and dictatorship. They are now engulfed by a sectarian conflict
that traces its origins back more than 1,200 years before the Great
War, to the Battle of Karbala in AD680, the crystallisation of the
Sunni-Shia division.

Last year, Europe embarked on a four-year commemoration of the First
World War. In the Middle East the centenary has been met largely
with silence rather than celebrations of victories or commemoration
of losses. There are other, more immediate conflicts to concentrate on.

“It’s the forgotten war because it’s seen as someone else’s war even
though it was fought on their soil and it was their men fighting and
dying,” says Rogan. The people of the region had not chosen to get
involved in this war. “World War One was the misfortune that led to
the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of European imperialism
and it’s remembered as a period of tremendous suffering.”

This is a formidable narrative history, written with great verve
and empathy. Through its meticulous scholarship and its deft weaving
together of the social, economic, diplomatic and ­military history of
this neglected front, The Fall of the Ottomans provides an engrossing
picture of a deadly conflict that proved catastrophic for the peoples
of the region.

Surveying the state of the Middle East a century after the conflict,
Rogan argues the basic peacetime challenge of generating jobs and
economic growth for a young and rapidly expanding population has been
frustrated by numerous, currently overwhelming setbacks.

“What prevents the region from addressing those legitimate challenges
are layers and layers of political problems and regional conflicts
that seem to drive the prospects of a free and prosperous region
deeper and deeper into the future,” he says. “With the conflicts in
Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya – and with political volatility in Egypt,
Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan and Algeria – I think everyone is rational
to be pessimistic about the prospects for the region. None of these
problems have a short-term solution.”

â~@¢ Eugene Rogan will attend the Emirates Literature Festival in
­Dubai on March 4. He will take part in a panel discussion ‘100 Years
On: Continuing Reverberations in the Arab World’ as well as speak about
his own work. For more information, visit

Justin Marozzi is the author of Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood.

EX-TURKISH POLICE CHIEF DETAINED OVER ALLEGED NEGLIGENCE IN ARMENIAN JOURNALIST’S KILLING

Daily Journal
Feb 26 2015

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s state-run news agency says a former police
intelligence chief has been detained as part of an investigation
into negligence by officials in the 2007 murder of an ethnic Armenian
journalist.

Anadolu Agency says Ramazan Akyurek was detained Thursday in Ankara
for the death of Hrant Dink.

Dink was gunned down outside his Agos newspaper by a nationalist
teenage gunman who was convicted in 2011. The trial, however, failed
to shed light on alleged official negligence or even collusion.

Akyurek’s detention follows a court ruling in June that reopened a
negligence probe.

Akyurek was among hundreds of police removed from their posts amid
a purge of officers believed to be linked to a movement led by a
U.S.-based Islamic cleric, which is accused of orchestrating corruption
allegations targeting officials.

FOR MODERN-DAY ASSYRIANS THEIR PRESENT IS UNDER ATTACK FROM ISIS, AS IS THEIR PAST

Spectator, UK
Feb 27 2015

by Ed West

The historian Tom Holland tweeted this morning: ‘What #ISIS are doing
to the people & culture of #Assyria is worthy of the Nazis. None of
us can say we didn’t know.’

He linked to a Washington Post article about how the Islamist group
had kidnapped at least 200 Assyrian Christians from their homes in
north-east Syria, and may well be preparing to murder them. In another
tweet he showed a video by Assyriology professor Simo Parpola on the
history of the ancient Assyrians, from whom today’s Assyrians claim
descent, the Finnish academic warning that their history and culture
is being deliberately destroyed.

On top of the kidnappings, yesterday footage emerged of Isis men
smashing up Assyrian artefacts in Mosul, northern Iraq, the biblical
Nineveh. Some of these items date back as far as the 8th century BC,
before archaic Greece had entered its classical glory (although at
least some are thought to be replicas, the Winged Bull is thought to be
the original). Three thousand years they have stood – then destroyed
in an instant. (Ironically, according to Paul Kriwaczek’s Babylon,
the Assyrians invented the veil for women, and the Muslim Arabs only
picked up the idea later.)

There are a few thousand Assyrians in Britain, many of whom were given
right of entry because their grandfathers fought alongside the British
in two world wars. They are immensely proud of their heritage, and fond
of the British Museum where so much of it remains safe; can one imagine
how they feel watching footage of these savages destroying what their
ancestors built and which they hoped to pass on to their descendants?

There are currently Assyrian troops fighting alongside the Kurds on
the front line with Isis, but they are short of weapons. They say
they have got little military support from the West, just as they
have received little political support in the past; before the latest
crisis broke out Assyrians in Iraq campaigned for a safe haven in the
Nineveh Plains where they and other minorities, namely the Yazidi,
could protect themselves inside the country. Without support from
the Americans, the Baghdad government would not agree, and in light
of recent events it seems like a reasonable request now.

The Syrian front line is not far from Edessa in modern-day Turkey,
which was in the second century capital of the small Aramaic-speaking
kingdom of Osrhoene. Legend has it that its incurably ill King Abgar
V heard of Jesus of Nazareth and wrote a letter offering to let him
stay in the country, as he was being persecuted at home. Jesus replied
that he couldn’t go but he would send over his apostle Thaddeus, who
arrived after the crucifixion and cured the king of his disease. The
historical reality is that Christianity had reached Edessa very early,
most likely in the first century, and in the second century its King
Abgar VIII converted.

For the modern-day Assyrians, Christianity therefore plays a central
role in their cultural identity, but so too does the heritage of the
ancients; and just as their present is under attack, so is their past.

But what about their future? A century ago Edessa still had a thriving
Christian population, but then came the 1915 genocide in which large
numbers of Assyrians were wiped out alongside Armenians and Greeks. A
century later history appears to be repeating itself.

For Tweets and videos go to

From: Baghdasarian

ASSYRIAN CHRISTIANS UNDER ATTACK: WHO ARE THEY?

Acton Institute
Feb 27 2015

Friday, February 27, 2015
By Elise Hilton

In both Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is literally hunting
and killing Assyrian Christians. Just this week, dozens of these
Christians in Syria were captured by the Islamic State; their fate
remains unknown. Who are these people facing persecution?

Michael Holtz, at1 The Christian Science Monitor, examines the long
history of these Christians.

Alternatively known as Syriac, Nestorian, or Chaldean Christians, they
trace their roots back more than 6,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia,
predating the Abrahamic religions. For 1,800 years the Assyrian empire
dominated the region, establishing one of most advanced civilizations
in the ancient world.

The Assyrian empire collapsed in 612 B.C. during the rise of the
Persians. Then, 600 years later, they became among the earliest
converts to Christianity. They still speak an endangered form of
Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, and consider themselves the
last indigenous people of Syria and Iraq.

Following the birth of Christianity, Assyrian missionaries spread
across Asia, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and built a new
empire that lasted until Arab Muslims swept through the Middle East
in 630.

Modern Assyrian Christians are all too familiar with religious
persecution. One hundred years ago, the Assyrians were the victims
of genocide at the hands of Armenians in modern-day Turkey. About
40,000 Assyrian Christians remain in Syria today; many have fled the
country because of extremist groups like the Islamic State.

The Islamic State has imposed a “religious tax” on any groups that
are not Muslim in Syria and other regions, and there are reports
that the group has ordered the removal of crosses from churches. Of
course, these are small concerns compared to the mass kidnappings
and executions the Islamic State is known for.

Read “Who are the Assyrian Christians under attack from Islamic
State?” at The Christian Science Monitor.1

2

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Own all 107 of the lectures from Acton University 2014 on a USB flash
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Includes plenary lectures from:

Rev. Robert Sirico, co-founder of the Acton Institute and author
of Defending the Free Market3 Makoto Fujimura, Artist and Public
Intellectual Andy Crouch, Executive Editor, Christianity Today Ross
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Includes lectures from the following popular speakers:

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initiative9 Kishore Jayabalan, director of Istituto Acton10
Charlie Self, author of Flourishing Churches and Communities: A
Pentecostal Primer on Faith, Work, and Economics for Spirit-Empowered
Discipleship11 Michael Butler, author of Creation and the Heart of
Man: An Orthodox Perspective on Environmentalism12 Vincent Bacote,
Director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College
John Armstrong, author of The Unity Factor: One Lord, One Church,
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Visit the official Acton University website14 for information on
attending in person!

ASSYRIANS IN CALIFORNIA TO PRAY FOR THOSE KIDNAPPED, THREATENED BY ISIS

The Pasadena Star-News, CA
Feb 27 2015

By Susan Abram, Los Angeles Daily News

The woman who entered St. Mary’s Assyrian Church of the East on
Thursday morning kissed the foot of a cross, then cried out a
tearful plea.

“Please, God, please help the innocent,” she said in an ancient
language inside the San Fernando Valley church. “Please save them.”

Her prayers reflect an ache that has settled into the hearts and minds
of Assyrians far and wide since Monday, when the Islamic State, also
known as ISIS, pillaged three dozen Assyrian Christian villages along
the Khabur River in northeastern Syria. They burned down homes and
churches, kidnapped more than 200 people, mostly women and children,
and threatened to execute them if the Kurdish militias in the region
do not release several ISIS militant prisoners.

It’s the latest Middle East crisis for Assyrians, who were among the
first Christians in the world, said Cor-Bishop Father George Bet Rasho,
who heads St. Mary’s Parish in Tarzana.

Bet Rasho said the kidnappings and the displacement of 3,000 people
have prompted a worldwide call for Assyrian churches in California
and across the nation to hold a special prayer vigil Friday night. His
hope is that people of all faiths in the community will join them at
7:30 p.m. at St. Mary’s at 5955 Lindley Ave. in Tarzana to pray for
the helpless.

“We’re praying that ISIS will not parade these women and children in
cages and burn them,” he said, referring to the Jordanian pilot who was
burned alive by ISIS earlier this month. “We’re hoping for a miracle.”

To say the Assyrians’ plight is dire is an understatement, Bet Rasho
and others said. Assyrians are the indigenous people of Mesopotamia,
presently Iraq, where the last and largest concentration of
Aramaic-speaking people in the world have lived for thousands of years.

But after the start of the second Gulf War in 2003, an estimated
half-million Assyrians fled to Syria because of a surge of Islamic
extremist attacks against them and other Christian minorities. Then
the Syrian civil war began, and the ranks of ISIS swelled.

Since the takeover in June of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city,
ISIS has targeted the Christian population, whose faith has been
present for almost 2,000 years. Assyrians were forced to flee again.

The U.S. State Department this week released a statement condemning
the militants’ actions “in the strongest possible terms.”

U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, of Burbank, is the top Democrat of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He introduced a bill
recently for use of military force against ISIS that would prohibit
the use of American ground forces in a combat mission. Schiff said the
White House is trying to determine how many people have been kidnapped,
where they have been taken and ways to liberate them. There also are
ongoing efforts to support the Christian and non-Christian groups
fighting to protect the villages, Schiff said.

“People are not only being kidnapped, but women are being forced
into slavery, men are murdered and churches are burned in an effort
to eradicate their history,” he said Thursday.

“Every effort has to be made to protect these communities, to seek
the safe return of those kidnapped, and to stop this evil that goes
by the name of Islamic State,” Schiff said.

Schiff, who has sought U.S. recognition for the Armenian Genocide,
said he can understand why Christians in the Middle East have drawn
parallels to that event that began exactly a century ago this year. An
estimated 1.5 million Armenians from the Ottoman Empire died from
1915-23 in what was called the first genocide of the 20th century.

Though the Turkish government still denies it, Armenians say the
killings involved the systematic cleansing of Christians, which
included Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.

“It does harken back for both Armenians and Assyrians to terrible
chapters in the past in efforts to exterminate them,” Schiff said.

“I’ve been concerned about these communities ever since civil war
began in Syria. We’re only seeing that trend continue and accelerate
with the execution of the Coptic Christians, with the kidnapping of
Assyrians, and the displacement of Armenians in Kessab.”

Members of A Demand for Action, a group founded last year to raise
awareness and create a safe haven in Iraq for indigenous people and
minorities, said they will continue to press legislators to make sure
some action is taken to avoid the deaths of those kidnapped.

“We are devastated, frightened and horrified,” said Nuri Kino, founder
of the group. Kino said families of the abducted who call relatives’
cellphones in Syria hear the phrase “Allahu akbar,” or “God is Great.

This is the Islamic State.”

“We will not rest before we have the help of the world leaders,” Kino
said. “If ISIS increases its power it, will be the worst threat to
the world since the Nazis. The president of the United States needs
to speak out and save our victims. Our militias need more support. We
and the Kurds together are the only ones who can save those areas. U.S.

has to send airstrikes to give us assistance and boots on the ground.”

Meanwhile religious leaders such as Bet Rasho say they are often
confronted by questions of faith, and by those who express anger and
frustration in a world that seems to have forgotten them.

“Sometimes we don’t know the reasons for things,” Bet Rasho said. “But
we do know there is a God who provides us with the air we breathe,
that there is more good in the world than evil and that we can’t give
up. When we give up hope, that is when we lose.”

THE GENOCIDE OF ASSYRIANS THAT STARTED IN IRAQ CONTINUES IN SYRIA

Assyrian International News Agency AINA
Feb 27 2015

By Peter BetBasoo
Posted 2015-02-27 09:19 GMT

(AINA) — On Tuesday, February 23 ISIS attacked 35 Assyrian villages
on the Khabur river in the Hassaka province in northeast Syria (AINA
2015-02-23). At least 9 Assyrians fighters were killed defending their
villages. Up to 373 Assyrians were captured. 3000 Assyrians fled from
their villages and are now in shelters in Hasaka and Qamishli.

None of the Assyrians want to return. This is what they have told
their bishops.

Three weeks earlier, ISIS ordered Assyrians in the region of Hasaka
to remove the crosses from their churches and to pay jizya (Christian
poll tax), warning residents that if they failed to pay they would
have to leave or else be killed (AINA 2015-02-03).

The list of atrocities against Assyrians in Syria is very long;
it includes murders, kidnappings and the destruction of cultural
resources, including churches and ancient Assyrian historical
artifacts.

In Iraq it has been the same. With the first church bombing on June
24, 2004 there began a relentless, low grade genocide (report) which
culminated in the displacement of 200,000 Assyrians from the Nineveh
Plain by ISIS (report). Where the population of Assyrians in Iraq was
at 1.4 million in 2004, it has dwindled to 300,000 in 2015. Most fled
to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey –and now these same refugees
will be forced to flee from Syria, along with the Assyrians of Syria.

ISIS has not only killed and displaced Assyrians in Syria and Iraq,
it has destroyed the Assyrian cultural heritage. It has destroyed 118
churches in Iraq (report) and 6 in Syria. It has destroyed Assyrian
archaeological sites and historical artifacts in Iraq and Syria
(see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

This is genocide — there is no other word for it. This is the erasure
of a nation from the land which it has inhabited for 6764 years.

Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide lays down the meaning of genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

To this we can add the destruction of the cultural heritage of a
nation, including the destruction of secular and religious institutions
and historical and archaeological artifacts.

All of these acts have been committed against Assyrians in Syria and
Iraq in the last ten years.

It is ironic that the ISIS attacks on Assyrians in Syria is occurring
in 2015, the centennial anniversary of the 1915 Turkish genocide of
Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians, in which 750,000 Assyrians were killed
(75%), 500,000 Pontic Greeks and 1.5 million Armenians.

This is not a coincidence. ISIS is pretty savvy and is historically
informed. When ISIS pushed into the Nineveh Plain in Iraq last year,
forcing 200,000 Assyrians to flee their homes, they began their
invasion on August 7, which is the official Assyrian Martyrs Day,
a day on which each year Assyrians remember their fallen.

How should the civilized world react to this? When a group destroys a
nation it destroys the cultural heritage of the civilized world. When
the Taliban destroyed the 2,500 year-old Buddhist statues in
Afghanistan, the civilized world lost. When ISIS destroyed the walls
of Nineveh, the civilized world lost. When ISIS killed Yazidis, the
civilized world lost. When ISIS killed Shiites the civilized world
lost. When ISIS killed Assyrians the civilized world lost.

And now ISIS is destroying the very foundations of world civilization.

It is in Mesopotamia where civilization as we know it began.

Destroying Assyrian artifacts is ISIS’s message to the world, that
it aims to eradicate the very basis of its civilization because it
is not Islamic.

There is no moral ambiguity in what is occurring — ISIS is evil and
the source of this evil is Islam.

The civilized world must find the courage to accept the force of its
moral superiority and act on it. If it does not, the world will fall
into shadow.

There is a dark veil falling on the world and it is Islam as embodied
by ISIS. Who has the courage to lift this veil?

From: Baghdasarian

FRENCH THEOLOGIAN: ‘MASSACRES’ OF NEAR EAST CHRISTIANS ARE ‘STAIN ON CIVILIZATION’

Daily Caller
Feb 27 2015

An Orthodox theologian from France claims that Christians in the Near
East are being massacred because of their religion, 20 Minutes reports.

Jean-Francois Colosimo, author of the book “Unwanted Men: The
Curse on Eastern Christians,” says that ISIS uses Christians of all
denominations — Coptic, Armenian, Orthodox, etc. — as scapegoats.

“They want to increase ethnic tensions in the region,” he told 20
Minutes. “They say Christians are agents of Europe — even though they
have lived in the region long before Islam came — and use them in
order to provoke Western powers and therefore fuel their own animosity
towards Christians.”

“Islamists want religious uniformity in the region,” he continued.

“Today’s Eastern Christians are like 19th-century Jews in Europe: in
minority, stigmatized, without international protection or national
territory.”

However, unlike his fellow country man and member of the French Academy
Jean d’Ormenson, Colosimo does not want to use “genocide” to describe
the dire situation. “A genocide is mass killings that require a plan,
like the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Such is not the case right now.”

From: Baghdasarian