Rex Tillerson Is The Most Irrelevant Secretary of State Since William Rogers

 Rogers was Nixon's Secretary of State. Kept out of the loop, Nixon ran foreign policy himself with his henchman Henry Kissinger, a sycophantic brownnoser to power. Kissinger was Nixon's National Security Adviser until Rogers was tossed overboard and Kissinger became Sec. of State.

Nixon was a pathological creep who held his cabinet members in contempt.

I don't know if Trump holds Tillerson in contempt. He probably thinks he's better than Rex because he's richer (presumably). Tillerson has been nearly invisible. The top staff positions at State other than Tillerson are vacant. Trump is proposing to slash the State Department's budget by 28%- a huge downgrade.

Tillerson makes pronouncements that disappear almost immediately, like pebbles tossed into a pond.

For some reason, Tillerson refuses to allow the media to accompany him. Either he doesn't want to be observed, or Trump decreed this. On his current trip to Asia, he brought along on his plane just one pseudo-journalist, a propagandist who is designated to function as a shill. Two GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) operatives formed a fake "news" outfit a few weeks ago, and hired this young women with zero journalistic background or experience to pretend to be a reporter. She is the sum total of the "press pool" accompanying Tillerson in Asia.

Tillerson just made an empty threat to go to war with North Korea, employing the usual U.S. gangster lingo, the euphemism "all options are on the table." Except that war with the deranged, nuclear-armed North Korean regime would be an act of insanity. Aside from its nuclear weapons, the North Korean totalitarian cult has 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, South Korea, the capital and commercial center of that nation. I don't think the South Koreans would appreciate having it obliterated.

But Tillerson has wasted no time in prnetsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt      oving himself truly loathsome. Since the bloodthirsty Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines last June on a platform of murdering "drug dealers an users," over 6,000 mostly poor Filipinos have been murdered in their homes and on the streets by Duterte's hit squads and independent "vigilantes." When pressed on this in Congress, Tillerson refused to condemn or criticize it.

See "Rex Tillerson Sets Off Alarm Bells in the Human-Rights Community," The Nation, January 12, 2017.

"I am NOT irrelevant, DAMN it!"

 

China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S. claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea, which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)

The U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.

The Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle was gathering "military oceanographic data...." [My emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.  [1]
 
China will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act, which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)

This incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S. wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."

The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.

Duterte brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.

A bit of background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II, when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S. pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S. military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine work in suppressing Filipino resistance.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this, they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.

Two giant U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever since.

For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.

 

                       EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!


Instead of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S. gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms (witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.

The U.S. is so powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the question, as obviously a land invasion is!

China is ruled by a patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected (every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something off-putting.

But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes. [2]

1]  Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement, from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub warfare, especially "sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on salinity and temperature, for example. So this drone is not so innocent, to quote a song.

"Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.

Using appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV -- an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship (ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/

2] See "Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.

China Joins U.S. As Outlaw Nation

China’s claims over huge swaths of the South China Sea are illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

So ruled the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands. [1]

China is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and thus is legally obligated under that treaty to abide by decisions of the Court. [Fat chance.]

In reaction to the Court's ruling, China's government and media (which is part of the government) have gone into paroxysms of denunciation and hysterical vows to ignore the ruling. Even before the official ruling, Chinese propagandists were issuing crazed rants, for example a front-page editorial spewed out the day before the Court issued its decision, by the so-called People’s Daily, blaring a conspiracy theory line that the case was a US and Philippine plot against China, a sneaky trap set by the US and the Philippines with the Court acting as an accomplice.

[I might interject here that, contrary to my somewhat misleading title, China isn't just now becoming an outlaw nation. Its invasion and absorption of Tibet was a criminal act also. And it has long been guilty of numerous, severe abuses of human rights. Oh, and it invaded Vietnam in 1979, an act of unprovoked aggression. (Actually the "provocation" was that Vietnam had the temerity to overthrow the mass murdering Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The U.S. was also mad at Vietnam for doing that.)]

China did not defend itself in the Court, obviously because it knew it didn't have a leg to stand on legally or factually, and it had already determined in advance that it would ignore the Court's decision. China claims, absurdly, that most nations support its illegal position on the series of disputes in the South China Sea.

The other nations whose feet China has been stomping on regarding their territorial claims and rights of free navigation and fishing, are Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Taiwan (which China insists is a mere "province" of China), and Vietnam, that last one a country China has repeatedly invaded over the centuries, including in 1979 with the connivance of the Carter regime of the U.S.  [2]

China is a lovely neighbor, eh?

Only the Philippines had the guts to bring suit (so far) against China. It filed the case last year.
China is trying to grab undersea oil and gas, as well as hog the fish in the area. It has been caught illegally fishing in the territorial waters of other nations in the region. In return, its navy chases the fishing boats of other countries out of international waters, which it illegally claims as Chinese territorial waters.

Part of China's scheme has been creating artificial islands, reinforced with military runways and bases, around which it then claims territorial waters. The Court rejected this tawdry scam in its ruling.  [3]

But the Court, lacking a navy, has no enforcement powers over China, It can't even freeze Chinese assets or bar China from the international financial system -only the U.S. has those powers.

There is a superceding law over all the formal laws and treaties in "international relations." It's an unwritten law; The Law of the Jungle. The principle of that "law" is, Might Makes Right.

In other words, as long as you can get away with it, it's "legal." Because you just declare it so.
Put another way, the powerful decide what the rules are, regardless of what's written down on some piece of paper they solemnly signed and ratified (aka a "treaty").

Such as when the regime of Bush the Younger declared U.S. torture wasn't torture, merely "enhanced interrogation techniques," a smarmy, slimy euphemism persisted in to this day by the U.S. corporate propaganda system, known by the opaque and evasive term, "the media."

And invading Iraq on a trump-up, transparently fraudulent pretext wasn't criminal aggression. (But the U.S. has been invading places since 1812. It's a tradition, you see.)

Speaking of the U.S, so far the U.S. response to China's contemptuous spitting on its international obligations under the treaty it signed, has been quite muted. Nothing from Obama, or even John "Skull and Bones" Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State. Just an anodyne, milquetoast burp from State Department chief mouthpiece John Kirby, saying, while not being able to comment yet on the merits of the case, the U.S. supports the rule of law and peaceful efforts to resolve maritime disputes. (The merits were already decided, Kirby, by the body empowered to decide them! And the Court vote was 5-0. Sounds pretty definitive to me.)

Highlights of the absurd, evasive, head-ducking press release from State Department Chief Flack Kirby:

"The United States strongly supports the rule of law. " [Actually it only supports it when it's in the U.S. "interest." Otherwise fuck the law. See for example invasion of Iraq, torture, subversion and overthrow of "hostile" government, assassinations, gross human rights violations domestically and abroad, etc. In fact, the U.S. doesn't even respect its own domestic laws or Constitution. Its police are virtually above the law, for example. Its police and secret police routinely violate the "guaranteed" rights of the Constitution, and always have. Officials break numerous laws all the time with impunity. If a big enough scandal erupts from lawbreaking, such as Reagan's criminal Iran-contragate conspiracy, a price is paid- namely "embarrassment." Man, if "embarrassment" were the only penalty for crimes, I'd be a bank robber! (Not really. Unlike the people in power here, some of us have a moral compass.)]

More from Kirby:

“In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions,” he said, splitting the non-existent difference. Now you all behave yourselves.

"We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case... As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations." [My emphases. So even-handed! The ruling went almost totally against China. And why does the U.S. "have no comment on the merits of the case"? The merits have been decided, you just effectively admitted, Kirby.]

In fact, much of the statement is written as if the Court decided nothing. It urges the parties to "clarify" their claims and "work together to manage and resolve their disputes." Well they tried that already, that's why the Philippines went to Court! China is openly defying the ruling of the Court, despite the fact that they signed a treaty agreeing to accept dispute resolution through the Court. Now what's the U.S. gonna do about it?  [4]

It has alliances, official and unofficial, with most of the countries on that list that China is pushing around. China has declared, quite furiously, that it intends to push ahead with its absorption of the various islands, reefs, rocks, and vast ocean area it claims as its property. The other nations cannot successfully confront China's military unless the U.S. military backs them up.

Best case scenario is that Obama steps up to the plate, and China backs down in a confrontation. But what happens in a decade or two, when China's military is stronger, maybe much stronger?

But there's no reason to assume Obama will even risk a confrontation at present. His punking out when Assad, the Butcher of Syria, crossed Obama's "red line" over using chemical weapons, does not inspired confidence. Obama is good at attacking the weak. Confronting even the somewhat strong is too risky for his taste. Backing down from China will be a green light for increasing Chinese aggressiveness.

THEY'VE THROWN DOWN THE GAUNTLET TO THE U.S. SO FAR THE U.S. IS PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE.



1]  The Court issued a press release and the judgment, which they call an "Award," as English .pdfs, July 12. Click on the indicated links for those. The judgment is 501 pages, by the way.

2]  I remember well how the Chinese dictator at the time in 1979, Deng Xiaoping, came to the U.S. to be officially feted by president "Jimmy" Carter, and immediately after Deng left, China invaded Vietnam. Being a "cynic," that is, someone who isn't brainwashed by the crap in this country, I thought at the time that there was probably some connivance between the U.S. and China, given the timing, and the grudge the U.S. held against Vietnam for not surrendering after the U.S. killed at least 3 million Vietnamese, dropped 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam (three times the tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II), permanently poisoned the land with defoliants contaminated with carcincogenic, neurotoxic, and DNA-damaging dioxins, and the commisions of numerous war crimes and atrocities. Carter said the U.S. didn't owe Vietnam any apology (much less reparations) because "the destruction was mutual." (Yeah, the U.S. bombed Vietnam, and Vietnam shot down some of the bombers. So it's even.)

The Carter regime of course lied through their teeth and denied they'd had the slightest inkling of the impending invasion. (And this with the massive U.S. global surveillance system. Even if the Chinese couldn't resist sharing their plan with the U.S. so they could mutually gloat in advance, U.S. communications intercepts and satellite and airplane surveillance couldn't possibly have missed the military build-up on Vietnam's borders and the preparations for invading.) As it turned out, the Vietnamese beat back the Chinese invaders.

Some years later, the sinister Count Dracula lookalike, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Russian-hating Pole who was Carter's eminence grise as head of the "National Security Council," couldn't resist boasting about how Deng had told the American rulers of the impending invasion. The Carter regime imperialists couldn't have been happier.

Brzezinski, by the way, successfully plotted to lure the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, another crime he unwisely boasted about. [See Brzezinski in his own words, from Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, although I can't vouch for the English translation. Also "THE STRATEGIC MIND OF ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: HOW A NATIVE POLE USED AFGHANISTAN TO PROTECT HIS HOMELAND," whose author interviewed Brzezinski, former CIA Director Robert Gates, who oversaw an operation to arm violent Afghan religious fanatics, the so-called Muhajideen, "Holy Warriors," starting six months before the Soviet invasion,  high government apparatchiks Walter Slocombe, David Aaron, Dennis Ross, Leslie Gelb, leading Democratic Party operative Bob Shrum,  Jim Mowrer, and journalist Hedrick Smith.

There are brief summaries of Brzezinski's anti-Soviet plot, which eventually culminated in the Afghanistan we have today, at "Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Now Orlando’s Nightmare," Huffington Post, June 10, 2016.

Here's Brzezinski's flippant dismissal of the immense "blowback" the U.S. and much of the rest of the world has suffered from the policy he sold to his stupid boss, president Carter:

“What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold war?”
("Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Vietnam," Aljazeera, April 23, 2003.)

Carter was and has often been sold to the U.S. public as a "peanut farmer," but more pertinently he was a career naval officer who served on atomic missile submarines. He was steeped and marinated in the culture of U.S. imperialism and anti-Soviet ideology. He increased the military budget by 50% during his single four-year term in office, a fact that is never mentioned in the U.S.

Carter also initiated the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua. And before that, to get around Congress, he secretly had Israel supply arms to the dying regime of the evil dictator Somoza. On top of  that, Carter declared that the Shah of Iran, rated as the worst dictator in the world by Amnesty International when he was in power, as a "good friend." As with Somoza, he tried to save him (and was considered a weakling by U.S. fascists when that proved impossible).

Jimmy Carter, getting to live to a ripe old age in his 90s, unlike so many of his victims, has reinvented himself (with U.S. media help) as some kind of Great Humanitarian. Yeah, right.
By the way, Deng Xiaoping ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few thousand eggs! (The "omelet" being the continual rule of bastards in power.)

3]  See for example, "China has reclaimed 3,200 acres in South China Sea, Pentagon says," PBS NewsHour, May 13, 2016. PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service, set up by the U.S. government and funded in part by large corporations and a slew of major haute bourgeois foundations, plus U.S. government money and viewer donations.

4]  I've reprinted the entire State Department press release here, so you don't have to have your ip address snatched up by the U.S. government and spyware planted on your computer.  But if you insist on verifying the accuracy of it, click on the title below:

Decision in the Philippines-China Arbitration
Press Statement
John Kirby
Assistant Secretary and Department Spokesperson, Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, DC
July 12, 2016

The decision today by the Tribunal in the Philippines-China arbitration is an important contribution to the shared goal of a peaceful resolution to disputes in the South China Sea. We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case, but some important principles have been clear from the beginning of this case and are worth restating.

The United States strongly supports the rule of law. We support efforts to resolve territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea peacefully, including through arbitration.

When joining the Law of the Sea Convention, parties agree to the Convention’s compulsory dispute settlement process to resolve disputes. In today’s decision and in its decision from October of last year, the Tribunal unanimously found that the Philippines was acting within its rights under the Convention in initiating this arbitration.

As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations.

In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions. This decision can and should serve as a new opportunity to renew efforts to address maritime disputes peacefully.

We encourage claimants to clarify their maritime claims in accordance with international law -- as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention -- and to work together to manage and resolve their disputes. Such steps could provide the basis for further discussions aimed at narrowing the geographic scope of their maritime disputes, setting standards for behavior in disputed areas, and ultimately resolving their underlying disputes free from coercion or the use or threat of force.

Hooboy! This China thing is gonna be tricky! State Department Flack-in-Chief John Kirby. Maybe he should have taken the day off.

Self-fancied Master of International Intrigue Zbigniew Brzezinski.

"Peace and Love, Everybody!" James Earl "Jimmy" Carter.

Deng Xiaoping, erstwhile paramount ruler of China, finally deceased after a long, destructive life

Chickens Come Home To Roost In Saudi Arabia With 3 Suicide Bombings

The feudalistic regime of the House of Saud, which arrogated to itself the right to claim ownership of an entire country constituting most of the land area of the Arabian peninsula, just experienced some blowback for its spreading globally of a noxious, intolerant, extremist religious ideology, Wahhabism. The blowback came in the form of three suicide bombers, who struck in three separate Saudi cities near the end of the "holy" month of Ramadan.

One bomber took out four Saudi security guards with him, and wounded five more, outside "the prophet's mosque" in Medina, "the second holiest city in Islam," as the catechism goes. Another bomber, a Pakistani man who came to Saudi Arabia 12 years ago to work as a driver, according to the Saudi regime, blew himself up outside the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, wounding two guards. The third bomber targeted a mosque in the predominantly Shiite city of Qatif. (Wahhabism and its terrorist spawn are Sunni. Both the Saudi regime and ISIS persecute Shias. The regime executed a leading Shiite cleric in January for leading protests for more rights and democracy, and ISIS considers Shiites "apostates," abandoners of Islam, and worthy of death.)

This is far from the first time people even more extreme than the Saudis have violently attacked the regime. There have been other attacks on religious sites, shootouts with state security, and assassinations.

So repression, even the extreme repression of a Saudi Arabia, cannot totally suppress attacks by determined zealots willing to sacrifice themselves or take great risks. This is one reason the eventual overthrow of vicious regimes does not result in humane new orders. It is the fanatics who have the gumption, will, and commitment to fight repressive regimes. The decent, moral people are cowed, imprisoned, driven into exile, or killed.

All across the world, cancerous offspring of Wahhabism have sprouted. First came Al-Qaeda, then various Taliban organizations and movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose military aided and abetted the creation of terrorist organizations to use against India, and provides a haven for the Taliban, policies that in recent years have come back to bite them. (Frankenstein's monster slipping out of the control of the creator.)

In the Philippines there is Abu Sayyef, founded by a veteran of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistai anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan instigated by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and vigorously pursued by the Reagan regime in the 1980s.

Another of the numerous Sunni jihadist organizations is Jemaah Islamiyah, which also operates in the Philippines, and in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Indonesia, the major country in that region, is also the site of Islamist terrorist activities, such as the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 that targeted Australian and other tourists and killed 202 people. (A lot fewer than the approximately one million Indonesians murdered in the CIA-inspired anti-communist military pogrom of 1965.) Members of Jemaah Islamiyah were convicted in the bombings.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has wreaked havoc. (The brutality of the various Nigerian military regimes led directly to radicalizing Boko Haram.)

In Libya there is a war on against ISIS by Libyans fighting back.

In Bangladesh, the regime's tolerance of Islamofascists murdering bloggers, writers, and secularists by hacking them to death with machetes has suddenly come with a price tag, as Islamofascists just attacked foreigners in a restaurant. This is not only scaring off tourists, but is causing foreign clothing companies to consider taking their production business out of the country to saver slave-wage states.

Other attacks in just the last few days include a truck bombing in Baghdad that slaughtered over 200 people so far, and the first attack in Malaysia credited to ISIS, a grenade lobbed at a club that wounded 8 people. [1]

Egypt's tourism industry has been devastated by Islamofascist attacks there, including the destruction of two airliners in flight so far, first a Russian one, then an Egyptian.

In Turkey, the most recent bombing there, in the Istanbul airport by armed suicide bombers, is being blamed on ISIS, even though ISIS hasn't boasted its responsibility, which they usually do. (NPR and other media have been claiming the attack "has the hallmarks of ISIS" or even "all the hallmarks of ISIS." No it doesn't. Which doesn't mean ISIS didn't do it, of course.)

So while ISIS is being systematically squeezed geographically in Iraq, where it declared its "caliphate," and is being fought by the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, fanatics inspired by it have been undertaking attacks on civilians around the world.

We can expect this situation to last for years. Which is great news for the U.S. political elites of both parties, and the secret police/military combine. That combine sought and deliberately created a never-ending "war on terrorism" in order to gain huge increases in both funds and powers. They initiated this operation, with malice aforethought, by arranging to allow al-Qaeda operatives to hijack planes on September 11, 2001. In order to create "another Pearl Harbor," in the words of one of the seminal planning documents for this criminal enterprise, agents of the U.S. deep state planted demolition charges in three steel structures at the World Trade Center and detonated them on that day, as has been proven beyond doubt by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, an organization of 2,000 experts.

Thus the program to Create a More Perfect Police State continues, under both Democratic and Republican regimes.

1]  "Toll climbs to more than 200 in Islamic State’s worst-ever bomb attack on civilians," Washington Post, July 4, 2016.  "Islamic State launches first successful attack in Malaysia," CNN, July 4, 2016.

Suicide bomber goes up in cloud of smoke in Medina, presumably ascending to paradise and his reward of an orgy with waiting virgins.