Andreas von Bülow: “Our priority should be the fight against manipulation”

What kind of balance of forces in the world could bring back equilibrium and guarantee the enforcement of international law?

Frankly speaking, I have no answer at all to the question posed for this panel to deal with. We had, over the past half a century, a military confrontation not only in Europe but around the globe between two blocs, which expressively swore to one another not to be willing to attack the other side, but non of them believed in that. So both sides put millions of soldiers who waited t for an alarm signal within minutes, thousands of aircraft on alert, tank divisions, nuclear warheads in artillery units, fighter aircrafts, short-range, medium-range, long-range missiles, submarines with missiles, aircraft carriers, battleships with cruise missiles cruising undetectable deep into the landmasses of the opponent. The secret services had the task to inflate the threat perception and the military industrial complex with its professors and journalists trailing behind the defence money was happy. To talk to the other side reasonably with the will to change the tension was stereotypically denounced as softness on communism. The official talks and treaties about force reductions were all things considered more or less a farce. They usually covered only the outdated material. But given the situation, that both sides were anxious not to be engaged into war, there was room for talks about force structures. So at the end of the east-west confrontation we had a situation, where the Soviets were willing to access the idea of defensive structures. If both sides are not willing to aggress each other You can ask the question: Why are you relying on masses of tanks ready to roll into your potential enemy within hours of alert time. So let’s reduce the capability to intervene, to transgress into the other guys territory. Instead both sides should restructure more to barrier instead of aggressive defence structures. If you are nervous about your defence, you may be allowed to spend more on barrier forces, antitank, antiaircraft, antimissile, but not in systems for deep penetration.

On the western side we could have enforced our barrier type conventional forces, reduce the tank force and by this restructuring on both sides dispose of the doctrine of nuclear first strike out of conventional weakness. That our allies were not always unhappy with NATO-reliance on nuclear weapons as a means of last resort again was understandable, because it has always been the double job of NATO to «keep the Russians out and the Germans under control».

The situation has fortunately changed. The East-West or West-East confrontation is gone. The US as well as NATO are now chasing Muslim terrorists. It was within minutes after 9/11 that the new enemy was spotted: Osama with his 19 followers.

We still wait for reliable and verifiable documentation of what really happened on that date. But within a few hours after 9/11 Afghanistan was defined as the home country of our old CIA asset Osama and his Al Quaida, the CIA Veterans fighting Soviets in Afghanistan. Then Iraq was suggested to be the country supporting Al Quaida terrorists, which was a lie, supported by fabricated intelligence information. Then the administration felt threatened by the weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, perhaps even nuclear in the hands of Sadam Hussein. Or the program to secure the material to build weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration used the so stupidly forged Niger documents, that one wonders, who did the forgery and why as bad and to what aim?

And then within two days the Bush administration escalated, calling for a Holy War against all states which were supporting international terrorism. The Mars-warshiper Rumsfeld as well as Vice-president Cheney told us, that now the US are at war with up to 60 states. Even the President is talking about a Fourth World War, which will last longer than a generation. In this new world, the United States alone decides who will the enemy be, no questions asked, no court to decide. Who is not with us, is against us, is our enemy. It reminds me of Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser hundred years ago. No United Nations are accepted to intervene. UN officials doing their duty impartially— for example— the Brazilian inspectors of chemical weapons who were denied a second term in the hope to replace him with a more treatable personality.
And now we all are flabbergasted how Muslim fundamentalist terrorism out of the wholes in Afghanistan to construct within a few years a threat which forces the United States to spend much more money on defence than they did to contain the Soviet Union and other communist states. They now outspend all other nations’ combined with an outlay of 430 billion dollars instead of 300 billion before. The military industrial media complex must be happy. And as with the threat of the Soviet Union, the so called independent media are trailing behind like the masses of defence professors and experts.

The Bush-Administration has an unilaterally defined agenda, counting on allies without any willingness to consult and find compromises at multilateral level.
_We find a heavy armed high-tech Hegemon without no military counterweight to balance. At least not against the continuous indiscriminate bombing of whole populations.

The agenda follows the line laid out in the Project New American Century formula for aggressive American policy. It aims at securing the military, financial, economic, cultural, cyberspace superiority in and above all continents. It calls for not for less but for more troops to unleash pre-emptive wars where threats might be found behind horizons. We have the anathema for any thinking of a balance of forces.

When President Eisenhower denounced the military industrial complex as the destroyer of democracy in the United States he argued about the beginning of a dangerous process. It has never been stopped and it is probably entering its final stage. The Romans couldn’t sustain the burden. How long will it take for the US?
_Without any rebellion from within the American political system there seems no fast track to change the course of the Hegemon.

There seems to be no doubt: US foreign, military, and covert action policy is bipartisan. And there is no chance of breaking it up via the democratic process.
_Look at the gurus of the American imperial process like Henry Kissinger, having the ears of Republicans, praises in his 1000-page book «On Diplomacy» each statesmen in history either French, British, Spanish, or American who committed crimes against national or international law to further successfully expand national power. And we all know his record.

Zbig Brzinsky, influencing more the democratic part of the political spectrum follows the same line. How to keep US as the only superpower? Fight by pre-emptive war anybody daring to question the hegemonic role. Superiority on all continents, right to tab and rule over the raw materials around the planet. The main danger to American superiority, says Brzezinski, might come from Eurasia. So keep Europe, China, India under control. etc.; give Russia no chance to recover as a world power alone or in combination with others.

The Hegemon has a huge arsenal at hand to make unwilling, neutral, not friendly or even allied states follow his policy. In the first row one should not always look for the military, because war is not popular, especially not in democracies. First tool today is media manipulation. The Pentagon alone has a budget as high as 655 Million Dollars for disinformation and influencing public opinion especially in allied countries unwilling to follow the American preventive war policy. Not only the CIA but now also the Pentagon is authorized by Congress to use false flag operations including acts of terror to manipulate the worldwide media and the democratic public. So anybody will finally be agree, that it is important, to help the States in its world war against terror. And there is money around to bribe publishing houses, embedded professors and journalists.

We all have to face an environment, where not only truth is the first victim of war. Governments are confronting their public, the media, the UN general assembly with outright lies, falsified documents, even against the protest of the CIA experts, knowing, that they are fake. Confronted with the daily propaganda and in order to balance the news we have to realize, that photos, videos, e-mails, voice recordings, phone-tapes, translations might be falsified to drive people behind the agenda of the Hegemon.

One of the thousand-year-old instruments used to destabilize the political system of countries or societies to make them follow or even break them up along the wishes of the Hegemon are ethnic minorities. What you have to do is: destroy the leaders of ethnic groups who keep the peace between minority and majority by daily compromising along the lines of common sense. Have them killed by members of organized crime or make them look silly or naïve or both. Support the craziest fundamentalist of both sides, not willing to compromise. And let terror kill the willingness of the majority and the minority to live in peace side by side. Then the radicals may divide the territory. Also in Iraq, I suspect the divide and rule slogan is at work at work. Terror in Iraq might lead to the division into three units. Project New American Century is arguing in this direction.

Or you throw money and support into a kind of «orange revolution». I think in Iran we might observe a development, similar to what we have seen in Ukraine.
Global Drug economy provides the money for regime changes as well as destabilizing processes. Cocaine from Colombia or Heroine from Afghanistan are smuggled around the globe into the highly industrialized countries. The warlords in Afghanistan are warlords because they get their power as drug-lords. And these drug-lords are the allies of covert American policy. Flow of drugs may raise hell wherever necessary. The whole drug smuggling by organized crime is protected by deals between the CIA and national secret services and the drug-law enforcement agencies. The CIA is more or less an accomplice of organized crime and vice versa. And the crime rate in our cities has up to 80% its cause in this hidden process.

In order to steer the cash flow to the spots where covert operations have to be financed, the laundering process must be protected as well by the intervention of intelligence agencies. Privileged banks are part of the playing field. So everybody along the drug line is happy for excessive earning of money without running any risk.
On the spot you’ll never know, whether you are confronted with original organized criminality, real Muslim fundamentalists as terrorists or whether there is a CIA or Pentagon background. And you’ll never know whether the CIA drug-dollar or the pentagon tax-dollar are working for further hegemonic interests.

Now would some people suggest, that it is necessary and even wise to have only one global policeman with a bigger stick than all other policemen? And this should be the respective administration in Washington?. Perhaps it might be wise to think about it. But after 9/11 we have a policeman, who is not restrained any longer by law, national or international, who is allowed to torture, torture witnesses to get largely false confessions. We observe a policeman acting on the basis of biased, interested if not corrupted information. And not willing to consult with other nations. So the answer must be: No to a monopolized policeman. A policeman being the biggest military, financial and economic power on Earth with overwhelming interests to use its law enforcement as cover for enforcing new military bases on all continents and the aim to secure for its industrial and financial conglomerates the resources wherever they are found is not what we all are aiming at.

Most of our industrialized nations rely on the free market forces to gain access to energy and other resources. There is no need to occupy these resources and watch the access by a military apparatus with a price tag of 430 billion dollars a year. This is the dream of the military industrial complex and the Bush-Administration as they brush aside the most stringent emergencies of the poorest quarter of the American people.

To organize peace we have to peacefully engineer a new global balance mostly on other fields than military. To challenge the Hegemon by initiating new arms races will lead nowhere. China and perhaps Russia may go this way up to the limits of their economic strength and realizing that the extension of territory as well as huge populations are a force per se.

But in the field of information, finances, trade, technology, culture and law the offending unilateralism will lead to more and more isolation. The change of the public attitude against the Bush administration is running deep in Europe, notwithstanding a normally very sympathetic feeling to the American people in general.

Brzezinski is right in observing the unsurpassed influence of the United States in economics, finances, military, culture etc.. It would be so easy to use this influence together with allies around the globe in a wise and outbalanced way. The Bush-Cheney crew has decided otherwise. So by not being anti-American at all I hope that we will be able to finally convince the American people against their mainstream media that they are manipulated in a way nobody might have considered a few years ago. And that they have to change the dangerous way the administration is following. Internet opens access to alternative news, which the global community is becoming aware of. So we have to feed the Internet and other media with what there is need to know.

To blow up the Psy-ops of the Pentagon, the CIA and those of the Mossad and their satellites in our media, is the most important task before us. It seems strange, but to ask stubbornly the «Cui Bono» question against the daily al Quaida, Osama bin Laden or Zarquawi insinuations in the media will lead to see things the other way, opposite to the official disinformation. And we have to insist on the delivery of hard evidence in order to discover false flag operations using patsies. Confessions via Internet, video clips, phone tapes, evidence gained by torture are, if not corroborated by hard evidence is not reliable.

Since most terrorists are patsies, found within the cohort of youngsters dealing with drugs, they will easily be branded as drug criminals. So they can be forced to make deals with the criminal prosecution. For leniency they are willing to give false testimony, used in criminal courts, misused to confirm the propaganda.

To uncover destabilizing operations and in order to derail them, follow the steering process of drug traffic and the money laundering process to finance covert operations. In all high income countries we find arrangements between drug as well as law enforcement agencies and Secret Services like the CIA to find out the ways of drug smuggling by just watching the ways, means and persons of global drug smuggling. Hidden behind this process is the covert financing process of organized crime and its influence down to the last street operations of the drug addicted population. So the drug addicted are paying the bill not only for organized crime and the drug lords in Colombia or Afghanistan but also the manipulations of the CIA and others. 80% of drug addicts pay with money out of small criminality.

For the time being the Hegemon can not be influenced with proposals for balancing forces. The biased, one-sided and very often corrupt way of handling world affairs by the Bush Administration produces an extreme negative image for the USA. This must hurt American business outside the military industrial complex. That might bring balancing pressure upon the American political elite. But we should not nourish any illusion about the overwhelming power, the imperial, neo-colonial complex has on politics. It’s a very long way to go.