U.S. Involvement in Yeltsin’s Russia: From "America’s Colony" to "Number One Threat"

Veteran Moscow reporter Mark Ames discusses American encouragement and complicity in what I call the oligarch's "rape of Russia" under Boris Yeltzin, and how that led to the rise of Putin

by Gaius Publius

I'm going to keep the reading part of this piece short and encourage you to listen to the above interview, with veteran reporter Mark Ames. His main point and mine — the U.S. is responsible for what I call "the rape of Russia" (or "extreme privatization," a classic Bill Clinton goal) by Boris Yeltzin and the newly created oligarchs because it suited U.S. policy and ideology.

Needless to say, like much of American foreign interference, it worked until it didn't, and everyone in Russia remembers. The history, well detailed in the video above, is fascinating and eye-opening.

Ames provides excellent detail on how that went down, who benefited and why. About Ames:

Mark Ames (born October 3, 1965) is a writer known for his work as a Moscow-based expatriate American journalist and editor. He is the founding editor of the biweekly the eXile in Moscow, to which he regularly contributed before he returned to the U.S. Ames has also written for the New York Press, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, GQ (Russian edition), and is the author of three books.

At the eXile, Ames and Matt Taibbi were co-editors until Taibbi left Russia to return to the U.S. (When you read Taibbi's comments below, keep in mind his deep familiarity with Russia and its political system.)

The description of the video reads (my emphasis):

The increased aggression towards Russia from US politicians and media is made more clear when taking into account the real history of the post-Soviet period. The hidden story of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency explains how deeply the US government, along with Western capitalist institutions, cheered, shaped and exploited the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, paving the way for the political system they all condemn today.

To uncover just how much the US Empire has interfered in Russia’s political evolution, Abby Martin interviews Mark Ames, an American journalist who spent a decade reporting from Yeltsin’ and Putin’s Russia and witnessed the country’s transformation from an American “colony” to it’s “number one threat.”

Again, please do give it your attention. You will get this information in few other places. Ames is an easy person to listen to, and the interview goes by quickly. It's also good through to the end.

As always with post-WWII U.S. foreign relations, it's impossible to understand an event without understanding how we were involved in what lead up to it. Case in point (one of a great many): It's impossible to understand the Iranian Revolution of 1979 without understanding the role of the U.S., the Dulles brothers, Winston Churchill, and British Petroleum in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

If you want to stop here and just listen, please do. My main point is in the interview. Everything below is gloss.

Ray McGovern and Matt Taibbi on the "Russian Hacking" Case

Regarding the "Russian Hacking" case, I've written about that somewhat extensively — see "Who’s Blackmailing the President & Why Aren’t Democrats Upset About It?" — but I want to add a few comments by former U.S. intelligence officer Ray McGovern and veteran reporter Matt Taibbi. Just a short quote from each, which hopefully will lead you to the source articles for more (h/t the excellent link aggregation site Avedon's Sideshow for both).

First, Ray McGovern writing recently at Consortium News, "Obama Admits Gap in Russian 'Hack' Case:

Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very big hole in it, i.e., that the U.S. intelligence community has no idea how the Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation - expressed with 'high confidence' - has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions now are dispelling some of the clouds."

Does the Russian government hack, as many other governments do? Of course. Did it hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee? Almost certainly, though it was likely not alone in doing so. In the Internet age, hacking is the bread and butter of intelligence agencies. ...

What remains to be demonstrated is that it was “the Russians” who gave those emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t know.

At President Obama’s Jan. 18 press conference, he admitted as much: “the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.” [Emphasis added by author]

Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, "The Russia Story Reaches a Crisis Point:

Have we ever been less sure about the truth of an urgent news story?

Three days into the 'Russian dossier' scandal, which history will remember by a far more colorful name, we still have no clue what we're dealing with. We're either learning the outlines of the most extraordinary compromise to date of an incoming American president by a foreign power, or we're watching an unparalleled libel and media overreach." [emphasis mine]

Taibbi expands on this "either-or" statement with his usual clarity and prose.

Again, though, the meat of this piece is in the video, the history of  U.S. involvement in what I call "the rape of Russia" by Yeltsin and the oligarchs — how we encouraged it, enabled it, and benefited enormously from it — until we didn't.

I guarantee that few in this country do know this story. I guarantee that few in Russia don't know it.

GP
 

Robert Kennedy Jr.: Syria Is Another Pipeline War

Proposed pipeline routes through the Middle East to gas markets in Europe. The purple line is the Western-supported Qatar-Turkey pipeline. All of the nations it passes through — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey (all highlighted in red) — have agreed to it ... except Syria. The red line is the "Islamic Pipeline" from Iran through Iraq into Syria. See text below for further explanation. (Source: MintPress News; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

Summary first: We have been at war in Syria over pipelines since 1949. This is just the next mad phase.

I'm not sure most Americans have figured out what's happening in Syria, because so much of what we hear is confusing to us, and really, we know so little of the context for it. Is it an insurgency against a brutal ruler? Is it a group of insurgencies struggling for power in a nearly failed state? Is it a proxy war expressing the territorial and ideological interests of the U.S., Russia, Turkey and Iran?

Or something else?

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. it is something else — a war between competing national interests to build, or not build, a pipeline to the Mediterranean so natural gas can be exported to Europe. Inconveniently for Syria, that nation lies along an obvious pipeline route.

Which makes it another war between interests for money — something not very hard to understand at all.

Here's Kennedy's argument via EcoWatch. This is a long piece, well worth a full read, but I'll try to present just the relevant sections here.

The Historical Context: Decades of CIA-Sponsored Coups and Counter-Coups in Syria

Kennedy's introductory section contains an excellent examination of the history of U.S. involvement in Syria starting in the 1950s with the Cold War machinations of the Eisenhower-appointed Dulles brothers, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Together, they effectively ruled U.S. foreign policy.

Kennedy writes (my emphasis):

Syria: Another Pipeline War

... America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

... [W]e need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan [sic] Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency's creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria's democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA's handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za'im. Al-Za'im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.

Kennedy then details the history of coups and counter-coups in and against Syria, and concludes this section with this:

Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.

The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today." ... A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA's bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.

While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.

So much for our supposed interest in "humanitarian" intervention in Syria. From a Syrian point of view, it has never been thus. It has been about pipelines since 1949, and they understand that, even if we don't.

The Current Conflagration

Kennedy then turns to the present, or the near-present. Refer to the map above as you read:

A Pipeline War

In [the Syrians'] view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world's richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar's gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.

The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin's stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia's second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia's conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.

The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.

Which puts the Qatari pipeline squarely opposite to Russia's national interest — natural gas (methane) sales to Europe.

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."

That was likely the last straw vis-à-vis the U.S. Which brings us to another pipeline, the so-called "Islamic Pipeline" (see map above):

"Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline" running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Another, competing pipeline which would run through Syrian territory, but this time carrying Iranian gas instead of Qatari gas. Thus the demonizing of Assad as evil in the mold of Saddam Hussein, instead of just a run-of-the-mill Middle East autocrat, as bad as some but better than others. Kennedy includes a good section on the history of the al-Assad family's rule of Syria, including this information from top reporters Sy Hersh and Robert Parry:

According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn't beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca." Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis."

In September 2013, the Sunni states involved in the Qatar-Turkey pipeline were so determined to remove Syrian opposition to the pipeline that they offered, via John Kerry, to carry the whole cost of an U.S. invasion to topple al-Assad.

Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."

Obama's response:

Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents." But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.

The rest is a history of provocation and over-reaction — a great deal of both — and chaos and death in Syria. Kennedy provides much detail here, at one point adding:

[Syria's] moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad's Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can't blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.

I'll leave it there, but again, do read the entire piece if you want to truly understand what's going on in Syria, and what is about to go on.

Bottom Line

Bottom line, it's as Kennedy said: "No one wants to die for a pipeline" ... but many do and will.

I'll offer three thoughts. One, if we weren't so determined to be deeply dependent on fossil fuels, this would be their war, not ours. Two, we are deeply dependent on fossil fuels because of the political machinations of the oil companies, their CEOs, and the banks and hedge funds who fund them, all of whom pay our government officials — via campaign contributions and the revolving door — to prolong that dependence. We're here because the holders of big oil money want us here.

And three, keep all this in mind during the term of the next president. It will help you make sense of the phony warrior-cum-humanitarian arguments we're almost certain to be subjected to.

We have been at war in Syria over pipelines since 1949. This is just the next mad phase.

GP
  

File Under: What If...

If you're following the narrative on the blog with any regularity over the week, you probably noticed we've been taking a close look at Stephen Kinzer's brilliant new book, The Brothers, an intense look at the two worst and most destructive arch-villains in 20th Century American history. Having a major international airport named after John Foster Dulles is a slap in the face to all Americans who revere democracy and detest the aggressive fascism he espoused his entire miserable life.

The Dulles brothers had just finished deposing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosadegh, and we getting ready to do the same to the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, when the 13th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Fred Vinson had a heart attack and died. Eisenhower immediately offered his Secretary of State, former sleazy Wall Street lawyer, Foster Dulles, the position. Dulles immediately turned him down. He had monsters to slay all over the world and had no time for Justice, not even a chance to pervert it. Kinzer speculates that "Foster's decision to remain as secretary of state opened the way for the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. If he had decided otherwise and left the State Department, Allen would undoubtably have continued to press the anti-Arbenz project. Whether another secretary of state would have shared his passion for it is an intriguing question for which there can be no answer." And that's true. But, had he been interested in domestic matters rather than international affairs, Kinzer could have taken the other fork for speculation, one for which there are plenty of answers: what if John Foster Dulles, a dull-minded bigot and fascist operative, had become the Chief Justice instead of Earl Warren? America would be a very different place today, a far worse one.

Warren, who had served 3 terms as the Republican governor of California (although he was also nominated by the Democrats for reelection), served as Chief Justice from 1953 until 1969. He was one of the three or four most impactful Chief Justices in American History and there isn't a single decision he is best known for-- from Brown v Board of Education in 1954 to Miranda v Arizona in 1966-- that Foster Dulles would have agreed with. Both men were Republicans and elitists but Dulles was the preeminent American reactionary of his time and Warren was a lifelong idealist and progressive.

In fact, Warren turned out to be so unabashedly progressive on the Court-- and so persuasive in terms of forging a liberal activist majority on the Court-- that Eisenhower came to rue the day he ever appointed him. Eisenhower is said to have remarked that appointing him was "the biggest fool mistake I ever made," although this may be a right-wing myth.

Dulles would have never voted to desegregate American schools, the decision Warren is probably most well-known for. And Dulles, a dedicated anti-democracy fanatic certainly would never have championed the two big "one man, one vote" cases by which Warren ended the dominance of rural areas in state legislatures. Although conservatives in Congress frantically tried to pass a Constitutional Amendment to overrule Warren, they failed. "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen," explained Warren defiantly. "The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause." Had he been in a position to, John Foster Dulles would have ended universal suffrage entirely and gone back to a system in which only wealthy, white, male, property owners could vote.

In 1963, Warren's progressivism helped shaped the Gideon v Wainwright decision that requires that indigent defendants are entitled to legal counsel paid for by the government. Other Warren Court decisions that Dulles would have never allowed to slip through outlawed mandatory school prayer and enshrined a doctrine of privacy that led to abortion rights (Griswold v Connecticut).

Will Obama's Covert Actions In Egypt Haunt America In Future Decades The Way Eisenhower's Covert Actions In Iran Haunt Us Today?

Everyone blames Nazi-sympathizer John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, and his bumbling and incompetent brother, Allen, head of the CIA, for the unintended consequences brought on by the violent CIA overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. History blames them-- and history was meant to blame them. Eisenhower's fingers are nowhere near any of that stuff-- only on his revered speech warning Americans about the Military-Industrial Complex. Eisenhower, who desperately wanted a cheap "victory" against communism, is more to blame than the venal Dulles brothers. He bought in to the fabrication-- a direct precursor of the Big Lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction-- that the anti-Communist Mosaddegh was a Soviet puppet or, when that became too implausible even for the most simpleminded of foreign policy observers, that he was so weak that the Soviets could and soon would overthrow him... and the next step would be landings in Omaha and Salt Lake City.

Eisenhower cut taxes on the rich and paid for that, in part, with slashing the Pentagon budget, primarily shrinking the size of the military. But he decided it would be cheaper and more effective to use covert wars against fifth-rate powers to project a sense of supposed American omnipotence around the world. The effects of the policy were an unmitigated disaster that is still playing out in Iran, the Congo, Cuba and several other countries. It was such an unmitigated disaster that Obama seems to have embraced an updated version of the dreadful strategy in, among other places, Egypt. We'll get back to Egypt in a moment. This is from Stephen Kinzer's fantastic new book about the Dulles brothers, The Brothers.

"Moscow's involvement with Iran was negligible," the historian Richard Immerman later concluded, but [Foster] Dulles could not distinguish between indigenous nationalism and imported communism."

..."Eisenhower participated in none of the meetings that set up Ajax [the overthrow of Mosaddegh's popular government and the installation of a repressive fascist dictatorship]; he received only oral reports on the plan; and he did not discuss it with his cabinet or the NSA," Stephen Ambrose wrote in his biography of Eisenhower. "Establishing a pattern he would hold to throughout his presidency, he kept his distance and left no documents behind that could implicate the President in any proposed coup. But in the privacy of the Oval Office, over cocktails, he was kept informed by Foster Dulles, and he maintained a tight control over the activities of the CIA."

Wednesday, the NY Times reported that the Obama-backed repressive military junta that overthrew Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has now outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a very big deal and it is bound to play out over decades.

Egypt’s military-backed leaders on Wednesday designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, outlawing the country’s most successful political movement and vowing to treat anyone who belongs to it, or even takes part in its activities, as a terrorist.

Egypt’s leaders have been in conflict with the movement since July, when the military deposed Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a former Brotherhood leader. State forces have killed hundreds of the group’s supporters during protests against Mr. Morsi’s removal. Most of its leaders and thousands of its members have been imprisoned.

Now, with Wednesday’s decision, the government signaled its determination to cut off any air to the more than 80-year-old Islamist organization.

Analysts said the designation opened the door to the most severe crackdown on the movement in decades, requiring hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood members to abandon the group or face prison, and granting the military and the police new authority to suppress protests. The decision makes it a crime to promote the Brotherhood and could also outlaw hundreds of welfare and charitable organizations affiliated with the movement that help Egyptians with little access to government services.

The move came a day after officials blamed the Brotherhood for a suicide bombing at a police headquarters north of Cairo that killed 16 people, though on Wednesday a separate group-- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has derided the Brotherhood for its lack of militancy-- claimed responsibility for that bombing.

The government was not swayed. In announcing the designation, it again blamed the Brotherhood for bombing the police headquarters, without supplying evidence that the Brotherhood was responsible.

Officials framed their decision as part of a long struggle between the state and a militant movement, making no mention of the Brotherhood’s more recent emergence as the most successful force in democratic elections after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. “The Muslim Brotherhood remains as it has been,” the cabinet said in a statement. “It only knows violence as a tool.”

The designation represented a victory for government hard-liners who have sought to eradicate the Brotherhood since the military’s ouster of Mr. Morsi in July and who cast doubt on the repeated promises by officials of an inclusive, democratic transition. It appeared to set Egypt, which has been in crisis since the military takeover, on an even more precarious course.

Khalil al-Anani, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington who studies the Brotherhood, called the designation “a turning point” and said it could lead Egypt to a civil conflict like the one in Algeria in the 1990s.

“This is a big miscalculation from the government,” he said. “It is a massive social movement, whose supporters might retaliate or fight back.”

With most of the Brotherhood’s senior leaders already imprisoned, he said, “there is a lack of communication between the leadership and young Brotherhood members. And these people can be dragged to the violent path.”

With the decision on Wednesday, the current government moved against the group even more aggressively than had been the case under Mr. Mubarak, who ruled for three decades before being deposed by the uprising in 2011. In the Mubarak era, the Brotherhood was banned and its leaders were imprisoned, but some members could participate in politics, and the group’s social organizations and charities were permitted to operate.

Mr. Anani said that the cabinet decision would not have been announced without the blessing of the military and the powerful defense chief, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. The military was giving the police “carte blanche,” he said. “They don’t have a political solution,” he said.

In a statement, the cabinet said that the authorities would punish anyone who joined the Brotherhood or remained a member, as well as “those who take part in the activity” of the group or “promotes it by speech, writing or any other means and all those who fund its activities.” The law mandates a maximum five-year sentence for joining a banned group, but allows judges to impose lengthier sentences if terrorism is involved.

The Times dug deeper Thursday as the junta went on the offensive against Brotherhood members, announcing "dozens of arrests across the country, and the seizure of land, stocks and vehicles belonging to the Islamist movement’s members."

Social and charitable groups even loosely associated with the group struggled after their funds were frozen by the state. It was a new level of disruption to a society already riven by violence and suspicion in the months since the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a Brotherhood leader.

Egypt’s new leaders clearly signaled that they had opened a wide-ranging and possibly protracted war on every facet of the Brotherhood’s activities, with the terrorism designation giving the security forces greater latitude to stamp out a group deeply rooted in Egyptian social and civic life. The government had also sought to deny the group foreign help or shelter, urging other Arab governments to honor an antiterrorism agreement and shun the organization.

...The defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, set the official tone, vowing to eradicate those who try to harm Egypt from “the face of the Earth,” according to a statement released by the military.

“Don’t let these treacherous terrorist incidents affect you or your spirits,” he said, speaking of recent bombings by militants for which the government has blamed the Brotherhood. “We’re on the side of pronounced righteousness.”

The police announced the first arrests under the terror designation, charging 16 Brotherhood supporters in Sharqiya Province with belonging to a terrorist group. That charge carries a five-year prison sentence, the Interior Ministry said, but leaders of the Brotherhood potentially face execution.

Now let's skip back to an interview Terry Gross of NPR did with Kinzer in October. "The way you describe it, John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state, plotted a new kind of war; and then Allen Dulles, as head of the CIA, waged those wars covertly. So describe what their working relationship was when plotting to overthrow leaders they thought opposed what was in America's best interest," asked Gross.

KINZER: We have very little written record of the relationship between the two of them. And the reason is, they would speak on the phone several times a day; they would meet after work sometimes or on weekends; and it just took a wink or a nod, sometimes literally, for these huge operations to be carried out. They had the full blessing of President Eisenhower, and they didn't do anything behind his back. But he gave them, more or less, free rein, and they functioned as kind of two jaws of a serpent that are kind of not connected but working towards the same goal. Foster Dulles would provide the diplomatic backdrop and the political motivation that American citizens would hear, and then Allen would carry out the operation secretly.

GROSS: What were the major coups or overthrows they engineered?

KINZER: I think the main theme of this book that is new is that during the 1950s - which according to most histories, was a period of peace in the world - actually, we were involved in a continual secret war. Nobody noticed it because it was covert. I use this phrase monsters to describe the enemies that the Dulles brothers struck out against. That's a word that John Quincy Adams used in a famous speech, when he said America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But the Dulles brothers did.

They saw enemies everywhere, and they waged one war after another, in a sense merging these into one single conflict. The first two monsters they struck out against were people against whom they had grudges from their days as corporate lawyers. Their job was to protect the interests of big American corporations in foreign countries, and in 1951they failed twice.

Two of their major clients were attacked by foreign leaders, and they couldn't do anything to protect their clients. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, which was a longtime client of the Dulles brothers, was affected by a land reform law. And around the same time, the government of Iran nationalized its oil industry, and the oil company that they nationalized had used as its financial agent a bank that the Dulles brothers represented and on whose board Allen Dulles sat.

So this represented an unaccustomed failure for the Dulles brothers. They developed deep grudges against President Arbenz of Guatemala and Prime Minister Mosaddegh of Iran. They carried those grudges into office, and within the first 18 months of their terms in office, they had disposed of both of those leaders. So those were the first two.

Then they began developing new ideas of who the real monsters in the world were. In my book I talk about their efforts to foment civil war in Indonesia; their terribly tragic decision to get involved in Vietnam, which led to the entire American war there; and their actions against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in The Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

There were some others that they were interested in trying to topple, like Nassir in Egypt and Nehru in India, all of them believers in neutralism, which was a horrible concept to the Dulles brothers, but those operations didn't succeed, and we are now living with the legacies of both their failed operations and their successful ones.

GROSS: Yeah, we'll get to some of the legacies a little bit later. When you say neutralism, they saw the world as divided between communism and the free world, and if a country was neutral, why was that a bad thing?

KINZER: Actually, President Sukarno asked that question to Foster Dulles, and Dulles told him our policy is global. He even used the word immoral to describe the concept of neutralism. He believed that everything that happened in the world during the 1950s was part of the Cold War.

For example, it wasn't conceivable to him that land reform in Guatemala could be a project that Guatemalans had designed to deal with a Guatemalan situation. He just assumed that it had been ordered by the Kremlin. They had this view of the world, which I think was implanted in them from a very young age, that there's good and evil, and it's the obligation of the good people to go out into the world and destroy the evil ones.

...They had no concept of what we now call blowback. They had no idea that operations that seemed successful at first might have terrible long-term effects that wouldn't even be visible for decades, or even generations.

...The prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and the parliament of Iran decided in the early 1950s to nationalize their oil industry. That was a challenge not only to the oil industry worldwide but to the entire economic system by which the world was ruled. That system was based on the idea that corporations in rich countries had the right to extract resources from poor countries and find markets in poor countries.

And it also assumed that those companies should have the right to operate in those countries under rules that they themselves set. So Mosaddegh's nationalization of the oil industry was profound. In addition, it directly affected a key Dulles brothers client, that was the Schroder Bank, which was a bank on which Allen Dulles served as a board member, and both of the brothers represented it.

So that bank lost a huge client in Iran when Mosaddegh nationalized his oil industry. As a result, they saw Mosaddegh as a challenge to the stability of the world. Why? Because he didn't allow large international companies, in this case Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, to operate freely in Iran. The Dulles brothers were terribly afraid of the precedent this might set.

They could not let anyone get away with tinkering with the system that allowed large corporations to operate freely in weak countries. They saw Mosaddegh as a challenge, and they felt that if they let him get away with it, the entire edifice of the way the world economy was run might crumble.

...What would happen, and this happened in Iran and almost simultaneously in Guatemala, Is that John Foster Dulles would make speeches to the American people explaining that dangerous forces were at work in Country X. He wouldn't say what we were going to do about it. In fact he always denied that we had done anything about it.

But while he was creating the public climate in which Americans would come to sense Country X as an enemy, his brother would be actively working to bring down that government. Foster Dulles' role was to tell Americans that huge numbers of people in Iran opposed Mosaddegh, or huge numbers of people in Guatemala opposed Arbenz. That wasn't true in either case.

However, when Allen Dulles and the CIA brought those governments down, Foster Dulles was then able to complete the circle by going on television and saying the people of Country X have done just what we thought they might do. They've risen up to overthrow their tyrant. So he was certainly not above distorting what had really happened, and in fact he specifically said in his television address after the overthrow of the Guatemalan government the problem was solved by the people of Guatemala themselves.

This was completely untrue; he knew that. The problem had been solved by Allen Dulles. But Americans didn't know that and didn't realize it for decades.

Ironic that Obama is working to clean up the mess Eisenhower (and the Dulles brothers) left us in Iran 60 years ago, even while he is making a mess in Egypt for a future president to clean up.

Painted in 1954 by Diego Rivera, Glorious Victory has as its subject the infamous CIA coup in Guatemala of the same year. At the center of the mural, CIA Director John Foster Dulles is shaking hands with the newly installed U.S. puppet, Colonel Castillo Armas. Resting at their feet is an anthropomorphized bomb bearing the smile of President Eisenhower. Allen Dulles and the U.S. Ambassador are handing out money to members of the fascist junta as Mayan workers salve away loading bananas onto a United Fruit Company ship.

Republican War On Christmas Might Be Over For The Year, But Their War Against Women Never Ends

Sometimes we cover the Republican War on Women, and invariably some pompous Republican asshat denies that there's any such thing. But it's very real and very serious and profoundly undemocratic. And it's got to stop. I've been reading The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer's much-acclaimed book about the two most venal Republicans who lived in any of our lifetimes, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, two deeply corrupt men-- in terms of using government office for self-enrichment-- the former the most destructive Secretary of State in American history and the latter, the bumbling head of the CIA. They founded the Council on Foreign Relations and refused to admit any women. In fact, no woman was ever admitted until a year after both were in their graves (1970).

It wasn't a whim; it's how they were raised and it's part of what made them Republicans-- and two of the most influential Republicans of the Twentieth Century. Even before Foster became the prototype for the modern-day lobbyist, the young men were completely disdainful of women. Using family connections, both weaseled their way into the Peace Conference in Paris that ended World War I. Their uncle, Robert Lansing, was Wilson's mediocre Secretary of State. That turned out to be fortuitous for them-- though not for their sister Eleanor. She was eager to get in on the action in Paris as well.

She had asked "Uncle Bert" to find her a useful position in the post-war relief effort, but he dismissed her, saying that the only way a woman could contribute would be by knitting socks. Infuriated, she paid her own way to Europe and went to work for a Quaker reilef group that was building homes for refugees along the Marne River.

Lansing was a conservative, but a conservative Democrat. It was his two nephews who joined the GOP and who brought their inbred misogyny to its upper reaches. Neither Dulles brother had close relationships with any of their children, but a story Kinzer relates early in the book will give you more of an idea about the formative state of the Republican war on women.

Foster's middle child, Lillias, offended her father's sense of order by announcing that she wished to attend college and, like her aunt Eleanor, make a career for herself. Foster believed education spoiled women and disapproved. "He didn't want her to learn anything, except maybe the feminine charms, which he thought she lacked," Eleanor later wrote. Finally Lillias persuaded her father to allow her to attend Bennington College, which he mistakenly believed to be a finishing school... "His work [overthrowing governments around the world and making millions along the way] was very important to him, and he felt a real sense of obligation toward colleagues and subordinates," Eleanor wrote of her elder brother. "He couldn't neglect them for his children."

His attitude of disdain for women and his embrace of a narrow, air-less and tightly ordered world, ultimately lend him to embrace fascism. His firm did more business with Nazi Germany than any other firm in America. He was a staunch admirer, like so many from his class and upbringing, of Hitler. Starting in 1933, all letters from the German offices of Cromwell & Sullivan the biggest law firm in America, over which he presided, were signed with the salutation "Heil Hitler."

The firm brokered a trillion dollars (in 2013 dollars) in loans to the Hitler regime-- most of which had to be written off by his clients. Kinzer called him "the preeminent salesman of German bonds in the United States, probably the world. He sharply rejected critics who argued that American banks should invest more inside the United States, and protested when the State Department sought to restrict loans to Germany... 'Without Dulles,' according to a study of Sullivan & Cromwell, 'Germany would have lacked any negotiating strength with [the International Nickel cartel], which controlled the world's supply of nickel, a crucial ingredient in stainless steel and armor plate.' [He and the Nazi Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, were extremely close.] Like Dulles, he projected an air of brisk authority. He was tall, gaunt, and always erect, with close-cropped hair and high, tight collars. Both men had considered entering the clergy before turning their powerful minds toward more remunerative pursuits. [Foster] fought successfully to block Canada's effort to restrict the eexport of steel to German arms makers."

Foster had clear financial reasons to collaborate with the Nazi regime, and his ideological reason-- Hitler was fiercely anti-Bolshevik-- was equally compelling. In later years scholars would ask about his actions in the world. Did he do it out of a desire to protect economic privilege, or out of an anti-Communist fervor? The best answer might be that to him there was no difference. In his mind defending multinational business and fighting Bolshevism were the same thing.

...This put Foster at odds not only with Allen but also with their sister Eleanor, who had traveled to Nazi Germany and was horrified by what she saw. She appealed to Foster to change his mind, but he never took her seriously and told her she was "working herself up" over nothing.

She was right, of course, and he was tragically, horrifyingly wrong. But the Republican Party missed that lesson and that message and they just stuck with the age-old conservative values that demean and denigrate women as little more than property for the pleasure and convenience of men. And like most misogynists, Foster Dulles was also homophobic. He helped establish the Republican Party as a bastion of hatred and bigotry against gay people. Partially the placate a deranged and alcoholic Senator McCarthy-- his day's Ted Cruz-- Dulles moved against gay people working in the State Department.

During his first weeks in office, Foster dismissed twenty-three diplomats as security risks, apparently after being told that they might be homosexual.

John Foster Dulles vs William O. Douglas-- The Conservative Mind vs The Progressive Mind

Lately, I've been writing a bit about a book I'm reading, Prediposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford. As I mentioned the other day, one of the themes is that "liberals and conservatives report distinct personality and psychological tendencies and have different tastes in all sorts of things from art and sports to personality traits and vocational preferences… Conservatives' cognitive patterns reveal a comfort level with clarity and hard categorization while liberals are more likely to value complexity and multiple categories."

Another book I'm reading-- and loving the hell out of-- is The Brothers by Stepgen Kinzer, about two of the twentieth centuries most despicable American villains, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, two ruthless and venal imperialists who viewed the apparatus of power-- one ran the State Department and the other ran the CIA-- as vehicles for enriching themselves, their families and the circles. Early in Kinzer's brilliant narrative Foster had become the managing partner of the country's most powerful law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell and America's best paid lawyer. When he recruited his brother into the firm, Allen worried about "venturing into a moral and ethical twilight" and wrote "I want to keep as good a reputation as I can, notwithstanding the taint of my environment." Foster has chosen his brother when things went badly with one of his first prospective hires, William O. Douglas, one of the most brilliant legal minds of the century, a future chairman of the SEC and celebrated Supreme Court Justice. Foster told his friends that he had turned Douglas down because Douglas "didn't seem sharp enough." Douglas told the story a bit differently, and Kinzer's reflections on that illustrate the point in the work we're studying in Predisposed.

"I saw John Foster Dulles and decided against him because he was so pontifical," he wrote in a memoir. "He seemed to me like a high churchman out to exploit someone. In fact, I was so struck with Dulles' pomposity that when he helped me on with my coat as I was leaving the office, I turned and gave him a quarter tip."

Foster and Douglas were profoundly different kinds of Americans. Beneath their encounter lay opposing beliefs about how law should be practiced, how the United States should act in the world, and, in the end, how life should be lived. Foster was a tightlipped patrician who had become rich by serving America's powerful corporations and banking houses. Douglas was a passionate iconoclast who sympathized with underdogs and admired foreign cultures. One embraced religious and political certitudes, abhorred upheaval, and viewed the world from paneled suites in New York, Washington and European capitals. The other rejected dogma, learned about the world by taking rugged trips through remote lands, and believed the United States should approach other countries "with humility" and let them solve their problems "in their own way."

"I'm not sure I want to go to heaven," Douglas mused later in life. "I'm afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there."

Even if he has a rather important airport named after himself-- something JFK tried to prevent but was unable to achieve-- I tend to doubt that whichever saint is guarding the pearly gates, there would be any way for Foster to slip through. Dante's 8th Circle, in fact, seems to have been custom-designed for John Foster Dulles.

Douglas served longer on the Supreme Court, 36 years, from 1939, when FDR appointed him to replace another giant, Louis Brandeis, until 1975, longer than any other Justice in history. Upon his retirement, Time heralded him as "the Court's uncompromising Libertarian" though not a Ron or Rand Paul perversion of that word.

William O. Douglas was the court's most undeviating liberal voice right up to his sudden retirement last week. In his later years, some critics came to view Douglas as a dangerous radical. Yet Douglas did not see the court as a tool for radical social change, "but rather as a mechanism to keep open the democratic process," says Yale Law Professor Thomas I. Emerson. To this end his decisions supported free speech, the broadest possible interpretation of individual constitutional rights and, less often noted, far-reaching Government power to regulate the economy… He was "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court."

Right-wingers from the Dulles mold tried several times to impeach Douglas, and failed. He died in 1980 at the age of 81, outlasting the horrid and destructive Dulles, who died at age 71 in 1959.

The Brothers

When we think about contemporary brothers wreaking damage on America it's natural to immediately focus on the John Bircher extremists, David and Charles Koch, the billionaires financing a relentless campaign against American democracy itself. If they're successful, history will remember them as two of the most vile and destructive characters in American history. But this post is about two different brothers from David and Charles and set in a time many DWT readers may not have been following politics or even born yet.

Right now I'm reading two books about characters in American history who, though celebrated by the Establishment, the media and, to a great extent, the public, embody pure, unadulterated evil. One, Angler came out some time ago and recounts how Dick Cheney usurped the presidency for his own sick and twisted vision of America. The other, The Brothers, just came out and it is the story of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA chief Allen Dulles. We've been looking at what Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman says about Cheney already. Today I'd like to get into a little background on the Dulles brothers based on some of the fascinating information Stephen Kinzer sets the stage with.

Many people who keep track of 20th century history are aware of the murderous roles the Dulles brothers played in shaping post World War II American foreign policy. Our country is still reeling from the results of their horrifying activities in places from Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo and Cuba. Both men define what it means to be a war criminal. Neither was ever punished and when President Kennedy tried changing the name of Washington's big new international airport to anything other than Dulles, he was so violently assailed by the far right, that he backed down entirely. What most Americans who are even aware of the Dulles brothers' nefarious behavior around the world don't know is why. I certainly never di and I've long ranked them as among the most evil players in U.S. history, right up there with the Confederate traitors who dragged the country into a Civil War and as rotten to the core as Kissinger and, speaking of the devil, Cheney. OK, time for some excerpts from Kinzer. As way of introduction, he states right off the bat that "This story is rich with lessons for the modern era. It is about exceptionalism, the view that the United States is inherently more moral and farther-seeing than other countries and therefor may behave in ways that others should not. It also addresses the belief that because of its immense power, the United States can not only topple governments but guide the course of history. To these widely held convictions, the Dulles brothers added two others, both bred into them over the years. One was missionary Christianity, which tells believers that they understand eternal truths and have an obligation to convert the unenlightened. Alongside it was the presumption that protecting the right of large American corporations to operate freely in the world is good for everyone."

Aside from a very strict Christian missionary-oriented father, the brothers' two biggest influences were an uncle and a grandfather who were both secretaries of state, both of whom helped drive home a belief that "America's destiny was to go forth and raise up the world's benighted massed" by activities, it turns out, such as toppling Iranian and Guatemalen democracies and replacing them with brutal military dictatorships, as well as assassinating the Congo's first prime minister and sending that country spiraling into a half a century of instability, turmoil, human and ecological degradation and genocide.

Grandfather Foster was a typical self-righteous, conservative Republican asshole who served, briefly as Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State in 1892-3. He inculcated his two grandsons with the idea that America was "a nation blessed by Providence, powerful to the point of invincibility, whose people were destined to spread, civilize and command. From him they also learned how profitable it can be to ingratiate oneself with men of wealth and influence." Gramps may well have been the nation's first corporate and international lobbyist. But he's better known for his singular accomplishment as Secretary of State. In 1893 he helped direct the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and that country's annexation by the United States with the help of the U.S. military. He was the first American secretary of state to participate in the overthrown of a foreign government. His grandson, John Foster, put him to shame with his string of "accomplishments."