In spite of scores of warnings, Israel was taken by surprise.  Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan sneered at the Arabs as incompetent bunglers and could not imagine that the Syrians and Egyptians who had been quickly routed in the 1967 war could have the audacity to attack Israel.

Israeli armored units counterattacked with their usual panache. Israel’s air force, among the world’s best, pounced on the advancing Egyptians and Syrians.   To their dismay, new, Soviet-supplied Sagger AT-3 anti-tank missiles and Egyptian infantry with shoulder-fired RPG missiles shattered Israel’s armored thrusts that rashly lacked infantry support.

New Soviet SA-6 and older SA-2 and SA-3 anti-aircraft missiles, and hundreds of AA guns, shot down almost 20% of Israel’s air force.  On Golan, close to 1,000  Syrian tanks advanced.

As a veteran war correspondent,  I had been able to inspect Egypt’s Suez Canal deployments, and both Syrian and Israeli positions on Golan.   Both sides fought like lions.   But Israel enjoyed major advantages: its superb  air force, its highly-trained tank crews, and British and American tanks that were much superior to the Soviet T-54/55 or T-62’s of the Egyptians and Syrians.

On Golan, 100 Israeli Centurions held up close to 800 Syrians tanks.  Using their deadly 105mm cannon, Israel’s tankers picked off advancing Syrian armor at ranges of over 3 kms.

Small Israeli forts on Golan played a key defensive role.

Israel’s defense of Golan was a second Thermopylae.

Eventually, overwhelming Syrian forces pushed almost to the edge of the Golan Heights above the strategic B’not Ya’acov Bridge.   Northern Israel lay exposed.

Then, mysteriously,  Syria’s armored juggernaut halted.  To this day the reason is uncertain. The Syrian high command may have been frightened of advancing into Israel, fearing its exposed flanks would be attacked (this was the French theory of allowing gaps in their defensive line to encourage the enemy to cross them and then be attacked on three sides).

I was told by Soviet military intelligence that the Syrian halt was caused by Moscow’s warning to Damascus that Israel was deploying its nuclear armed missiles to strike the advancing Syrians.

By contrast, Prof. Alon ben-Meir, a highly respected Israeli intelligence and military analyst who was there tells me that Israel would never use nukes so close to its populated areas.  By why then does Israel reportedly still have nuclear land mines?   Is this what Pulitzer-prize winner  Seymour Hersh calls Israel’s “Sampson Option” ?

Or, it may be that Syria’s strongman, Hafez al-Assad, was confused, and fearful of losing his army.   Syria’s plan was to retake Golan, not advance into Israel proper.  Meanwhile, Israel was rapidly mobilizing its reserved armored units and rushing them up to Golan.

At the same time,  a massive US military airlift was under way to resupply the Israelis who were critically low on missiles, bombs, spare parts and other war gear.   President Richard Nixon authorized the air bridge that saved Israel on the 11^th hour.  Ironic since he was reputed to be an anti-Semite.  Nixon and his foreign policy chief Henry Kissinger worried that failure to resupply Israel could cause the Republican Party to lose votes and funding.

The US aided Israel in another critically important way. A US SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 recon aircraft and satellites spotted a yawning gap in Egypt’s lines that separated its two armies on the east side of the Canal. Israel’s brilliant Gen. Ariel Sharon exploited this gap, rushing his armor across the Suez Canal and destroying much of Egypt’s anti-aircraft guns and missiles on its west side that had been fending off the Israeli Air Force. Israel’s crossing the canal cut off Egypt’s two armies on the other side of the Canal.

Egypt and Syria fought ponderously as they were trained by Soviet advisors. Israel’s tank forced fought in the German style of lightening movement.   In the end, both sides won victories: Egypt at least restored its pride by the daring  Suez Canal crossing; Israel proved it could smash its Arab foes.

Israel went on to prosper and grow stronger.  Egypt slide deeper into dictatorship and near total US influence.

Either way, Reid’s nasty remark captured the bitter animosity surging through the US Congress as the mighty United States faces running out of money on 18 October.

Legislators in the House and Senate are at one another’s throats.  President Barack Obama blames conservative “tea party” Republicans for trying to defund his signature health care legislation, and for opposing a raising of the US national debt ceiling – meaning Washington’s ability to borrow more money.

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, warns of a possible US default in which it fails to make good on its outstanding bonds.  This would be financial nuclear war: world markets would go into panic and banks would face runs or collapse.  The 2008 crash would look puny by comparison.

If Congress does not approve raising the debt ceiling, now at  $16,699 trillion,  the government will supposedly grind to a halt.  Over 100,000 non-essential workers have already been temporarily laid off.  We are told the US faces financial Armageddon.

Wait just a minute.  I’m no fan of America’s Tea Party Republicans. But this time,  they are speaking sense.  Someone has to put a foot on the nation’s financial brakes.  At least they have the guts to do what mainstream politicians do not:  oppose the financial, military-industrial complexes and say no to ever bigger government.

America has got to clean up its dire financial mess.  The 2008 crash was a warning.  The United States has become deeply addicted to debt at all levels.  The nation’s leading industry is now  finance which keeps further addicting the country to the opiate of borrowed money.

The latest example of this fatal addiction was the failed attempt by the Federal Reserve to slow and then end what is euphemistically called “quantitative easing(QE)” – printing more and more money, then injecting it into the economy as a form of financial amphetamine.

This sleazy financial ploy, a usual recourse of bankrupt Third World countries,  gives stock markets a phony boost.  But the effort last month by the Fed to slow down QE caused a near panic on markets and was quickly abandoned.   The temporary cure has become addictive.

The Tea Party rebels are telling the country that its bloated, corrupted finances have to be reined in.   The deficit is caused by Washington spending far more than it collects in taxes. So spending must be slashed to bring it into line with revenue, and maybe taxes raised as well.

Military spending is the obvious target.  The US accounts for almost half of the world’s total military expenditure.  America’s close allies in Europe and Asia make up another 25%.  The United States has no serious strategic enemies that can be identified.

The Pentagon’s annual budget, close to $1 trillion with foreign wars and black programs included, is not for defense of North America but designed to impose US military domination over large parts of the globe.  But the US tax base cannot support such global ambitions – even when the cost is obscured by borrowed money.   The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both waged on borrowed money.

Just as Europe has been undergoing the agonies of cutting spending, so must the US take bitter medicine.  Its absurd tax code must be rationalized and made fair by cutting all loopholes.  Farm subsidies and special benefits for ethnic minorities dropped.  Wall Street, which has virtually taken over the government, must be curbed.

In 2007, the national debt stood at 36% of gross domestic product.  Six years later, it’s now 75%.  The US is fast bankrupting itself.  Only the money-lenders and their corrupt politicians they own will benefit.

Break our addiction to debt demand the tea party stalwarts.  Break our addiction to war add libertarians.   Between unstoppable debt and endless wars we are being driven to ruin.

Will this happen? Not likely.  Some fancy way will be found around the debt ceiling issue and the chariot of the borrowed money juggernaut will keep rolling on.

That was a time when the 30 ft pikes and deadly halbards (pole axes) of Switzerland’s fierce mercenary armies were the terror of Europe.   The “furia Helvetica” ruled the battlefields until 1515 at Marignano when French guns, firing at point-blank range, tore apart the massed Swiss pike phalanxes.

Today, the memory of Swiss military glory is preserved at the Vatican by its colorful Swiss Guard.

Switzerland has long stayed behind its borders and observed armed neutrality, avoiding both world wars.   But on voting days in the Alps, burly farmers come down from the mountains carrying their rifles, axes,  and swords – reminders that Swiss independence was won and remains thanks to her people’s force of arms.

Switzerland is the world’s oldest democracy, dating from 1291. As a former resident, I believe this beautiful nation is the world’s most perfect and sensible democracy.  Citizens vote directly in all major questions. The 26 Swiss cantons manage their own financial, judicial, and administrative affairs, leaving only defense, railroads, post and foreign affairs to a tiny government in Bern.

Last week, Swiss were asked to vote on a key question that keeps recurring every decade: pacifist and leftists put to referendum the proposal of eliminating national military service and disarming the Swiss Confederation.

Most Swiss are keenly aware that as one of the world’s richest nations they are always surrounded by hungry neighbors.   They just watched the US hold up their banks.  They voted no to the foolish referendum.

Switzerland’s independence and horde of gold have been protected by their soldiers,  not by treaties or the Alps.  When I was a student in Switzerland in 1960, the Swiss could mobilize 700,000 soldiers in 48 hours. Each was trained to hit targets with his rifle 300 meters away (the US Army trains at 100 meters).

Every Swiss soldier keeps his semi-automatic rifle and uniform at home in a secure compartment.  Gun violence in law-abiding Switzerland is extremely rare.

All Swiss male citizen soldiers train annually and serve from the age of 19-34 years. The Swiss Army is a vital part of the national character, integrating Switzerland’s three major languages and religions.

Switzerland and France were the world’s most fortified nations.  I have had the privilege of being the first non-citizen to be shown many of Switzerland’s top secret fortifications that honeycomb the Alps, blocking the gateways of St Maurice, Sargans and Gothard.

These forts, and 700,000 tough Swiss soldiers, deterred Nazi Germany and Italy from invading in 1940.  The Swiss commander, Gen. Henri Guisan, sent a chilling order to his men: if the enemy attacked, they were to abandon their families and retreat to the Alpine Redoubt.  “Fight to your last bullet; when your bullets are exhausted, fight with your bayonet.   Die where you stand.”  I keep a Swiss Army bayonet on my desk.

Germany and France wisely decided to leave the Swiss porcupine alone.  Some leftist historians claim it was because the Axis needed the Swiss banks. Nonsense.  Berlin and Rome had access to banks in neutral Portugal, Sweden and Turkey.   The real reason was all those angry Swiss mountaineers, with their rifles zeroed in at 300 meters.

As the cold war ebbed, Switzerland slowly reduced its potent military down to today’s 155,000 – men which is not so bad for a small nation of only 8 million.   Another 33% reduction will occur in 2016.   The Swiss no longer fear invasion by the Soviet Red Army – a very real danger during the 1960’s.

Having been in the field with the Swiss Army, I regret seeing this once mighty force so reduced.  But the same is happening everywhere else.   Still, the Swiss are very right to keep compulsory military service.  Young men, still immature and besotted by hormones, need military discipline and structure.   I look back on my own army days as some of the best of my life.

In this cruel world,  self-defense is essential.  Look what happened to rich Kuwait and Libya – both pounced on and looted.   Hitler thundered “I will teach these insolent Swiss cheese-makers a lesson.”  Until his generals told him how much invading the high Alps would cost.

So wise old Machiavelli was right about the Swiss.

President Barack Obama, having just been wrong-footed over Syria, now faces a surprise Iranian diplomatic and public relations offensive that will be hard to resist.   America’s war party is furious: its dreams of seeing US power crush Syria, then Iran are in jeopardy.

Ever since a popular revolution ousted the US-installed regime of Shah Pahlavi in 1979,   Washington has sought to overthrow Iran’s Islamic republic.

Iran has been isolated, put under intense economic and diplomatic siege, become the target of subversion and the US-backed invasion by Iraq in 1980 that killed up to 500,000 Iranians.

The US challenge to Iran is always depicted for public consumption as an effort to stop Tehran getting nuclear weapons.  Iran is routinely accused of supporting “terrorism” and subversion.

In reality, US hostility towards Iran is mostly about  old-fashioned power politics.    In 2003, US  Secretary of State Colin Powell let the cat out of the bag by admitting that Iran’s acquisition of a few nuclear weapons would “limit” US ability to use force in the region.

Control of the Mideast is one of the pillars of US world power.  The US has dominated the Mideast since 1945, as I detail in my book “American Raj – How America Rules the Mideast.”  Islamic Iran emerged after 1979 as the most potent challenge to US regional domination and control of its energy.

Iran and US ally Saudi Arabia have waged a bitter proxy war in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and East Africa by arming and funding extremist groups.  Syria is the latest example.

Washington and Israel have used the nuclear arms issue to isolate Iran and make it an outcast state, much as was done with Cuba in the 20^th Century.

It’s easy to forget that nearly all of Iran’s nuclear energy industry is under very tight UN supervision, not to mention incessant monitoring by western intelligence agencies and Israel.   By contrast, Israel refuses UN inspection and maintains a sizeable nuclear and chemical arsenal.

It’s also easy to forget that the original signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – the US, Russia, Britain, France (and later China) – have all violated the pact’s pledge to swiftly reduce, then eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Iran is now making a major push to convince the world it has no nuclear weapons ambitions, starting with its spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomenei who has issued a fatwa condemning all nuclear weapons.  So far, the US, strongly pressed by Israel, is responding cautiously but positively.

Israel has made it clear it wants the US to attack Iran and crush its nuclear and non-nuclear military capabilities.  Equally important, says Israel, is the need to liquidate Iran’s scientific nuclear cadre of scientists.

My sources in Iraq report that since the US invasion in 2003, over 200 Iraqi nuclear scientists and technicians have been mysteriously assassinated.  A number of Iranian nuclear personnel have also been assassinated by bombs, widely believed to be the work of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

The logical course for the United States to follow is to welcome Iran’s overtures and restore normal relations between the two powers.   An Iran aligned to the outside world is less likely to be troublesome than the angry, frightened, besieged Iran of today.

Furthermore, Washington has at some point got to accept that Iran is an  influential regional power with  its own legitimate interests.  If Iran truly has no nuclear weapons ambitions, then the only reason for Tehran to suffer punishing sanctions is national pride.  Iran needs economic growth, not pride.

If Washington really wants stability rather than just obedience, then it should welcome Iran’s overtures.

As for the near-war state between Iran and Israel, the crux of this confrontation is the lack of a Palestinian state.  If Israel ever agrees to such a viable state, hostility with Tehran will sharply lessen.  Recall that amidst mutual threats in the 1980’s, Israel quietly sold Iran $5 billion of US arms.

Israel has been using the alleged nuclear threat from Iran to derail progress towards a Palestinian state.  PM Rouhani has a golden opportunity to pry open the doors of Mideast peace.

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize should be rescinded and given, instead, to Vladimir Putin.

Add a warning to Obama’s amateur foreign policy advisors:  “don’t play chess with the KGB!”

In fact, Obama, who rudely snubbed former KGB agent Putin recently, owes Russia’s leader a “Bolshi Spaseba”(big thanks) for pulling his bacon out of the fire in Syria.  Putin brilliantly  demonstrated to the world the difference between diplomacy and  force, the rapier versus the cudgel.

The American cynic Ambrose Bierce aptly defined a diplomat as “a patriot ready to lie for his country.” 

True enough, but diplomacy is the essential lubricant of international relations.  Ever since the Bush administration, America’s foreign relations have become  militarized and run by the Pentagon while the State Department has been eclipsed.  America has become addicted to small wars and debt.

The frequent threats and bombast by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – ie to “vaporizing Iran” if it dared attack Israel – have been seamlessly continued by John Kerry’s fulminations against Syria.  Clinton and Kerry both have 2016 presidential ambitions and are playing to key potential donors.

It is also painful and disturbing watching Obama and Kerry deliver impassioned orations  about poor little Syrian babies gassed by the wicked Bashar Assad, a former eye specialist who would probably prefer to be living in London.

What about all those babies killed in Afghanistan and Iraq? What about those killer drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?

Vietnam anyone?  Nagasaki?

Enough, please, with the synthetic moral outrage over Syrian babies or ludicrous claims Syria was threatening the US.  Remember the phony Kuwaiti babies dreamed up by a Washington PR agency?  Egypt’s US-armed and financed Army just shot down over 1,500 civilian protesters.

Americans are rightly fed up with past crusades and increasingly disillusioned by President Obama and the tame US media.   His indecisiveness and lack of a clear strategy have made him singularly unpopular.  Nor is there any clamor for war against Syria in Britain and France, whose governments are trying to divert attention from economic woes by bashing the Syrians.

As the crisis mounted, we heard increased patriotic guff about “American exceptionalism,”  a code phrase for American proto-fascism,  for “Amerika Uber Alles.”  Scary stuff.  President Putin warned about this in an incisive  analysis of the Syrian crisis in the New York Times.

The US Congress also owes big thanks to President Putin.  Had he not short circuited Obama’s foolish war plans for Syria,  Congress would have been caught between anti-war Americans and major cash donors from special interests who are lusting for war.

The sensible resolution of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis – a manufactured crisis if I ever saw one -  raises new  questions.    What happened to the planned Syria peace conference in Geneva?  The real question is ending this awful war, not chemical weapons.

Next questions:  why did Syria (and Egypt)  acquire chemical weapons?  The answer is as a poor man’s counter to Israel’s large nuclear and chemical arsenal. If Iran ever decided to make nuclear weapons, it will be for the same reason.   So why not revive talks proposed by the Arabs and Iran for a nuclear-free Mideast that were repeatedly brushed aside by the US and Israel?

Finally, what about a Palestinian state?  Much of the uproar over Iran and Syria was designed to divert attention away from this essential subject, the essential element of Mideast peace.

Meanwhile, Vlad Putin and his very able foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov,  deserve kudos for their patient diplomacy and acute timing.  By the way, the idea of removing Syria’s chemical weapons did not come from an off-hand remark by John Kerry.  It originated in Moscow.

So in what could have been a second Cuban missile crisis, Putin and Lavrov get A+.   Obama and his angry advisors get an F- and orders to get intense tutoring in diplomacy.

President Putin has just forced the US to begin treating Russia with the dignity and importance that it deserves as a nuclear great power instead of dismissing it as a third-rate blini-republic.

Today, the nations in ruins and mourning are Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser degree,  Libya, all dismembered or broken up by the power of the mighty American Raj.

Syria is clearly the next target of the American imperial bulldozer.   After two years of brutal rebellion armed and financed by the US and its regional allies, Syria now faces devastation.

A campaign of air-strikes and missiles will crush Syria’s air force, tanks, artillery and communications.  Israel stands ready to sweep up the ruins of Syria.

Pure black comed. Shamelessly stealing Bush administration propaganda,  the Obama White House has been actually warning that Syria’s chemical weapons (most of their raw materials came from Europe) pose a dire threat to the United States.  Syria acquired chemical weapons to counter Israel’s large arsenal of nuclear weapons, originally supplied by France.

Failure to act will be another Munich appeasement, warns Obama.   But the US Congress could not take action because it was still on summer vacation.

President Obama even allowed there was no urgency for action.  The important thing he declared was that America’s “credibility” was at stake.   Politicians invoke credibility as a excuse after they have made a huge blunder –notably Obama’s foolish “red lines” in Syria that boxed the president into a corner of his own making.

What we are seeing is the latest, 21^st century version of the new era of colonialism and imperialism, with a touch of Crusader zeal thrown in.

Today, the favored euphemism is humanitarian intervention, but the song remains the same.   Syria is not about poison gas or human rights: it’s about a proxy war against Iran, the only nation now challenging total US and Israel military domination of the Mideast.

For France, it’s about reasserting its former colonial rule in Syria and Lebanon

In 1857, a Chinese baker in Hong Kong tried to poison the British trade superintendent.  Britain’s parliament was summoned to vote on retaliation against China. The vote did not pass.  But soon after a new parliament with more conservatives voted for war.

France rushed to join Britain, citing the killing of a French missionary. Russia and the US joined.  The Second Opium War had begun.  China was quickly defeated by the western powers and forced to open it ports to their commerce and begin consuming highly addictive opium grown in the British Indian Raj.

Look at current events in Syria in this historical light rather than all the indignation over chemical weapons in Syria.  Besides, given that the weird Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo,  managed to produce home-made Sarin  ( I just barely missed its attack on Tokyo’s subway), how do we know who really made Syria’s gas?

Far more important, the US Congress has become seriously corrupted by special interest money – and that’s putting it gently.  How else did all the Wall Street bankers escape punishment for their egregious financial frauds and theft?

Now, other wealthy special interest in America are beating the war drums and pulling the strings of their legislators.  Israel is pushing the US hard to destroy its old foe Syria – which would remove the last Arab state capable of offering even  modest military resistance to Israel.

So it seems likely the upcoming Congressional vote may approve a “limited” war.   But remember “mission creep” from Vietnam days?  Previous estimates of a so-called limited air campaign against Iran called for over 3,200 targets to be hit repeatedly.

And who will rule Syria after President Bashar Assad is deposed or killed?   Today’s Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan hardly offer a promising example of Washington-guided democracy.

Washington is still trying to figure out what happened to Herzegovina – it’s not ready for Syria’s maddening complexity. In fact, I’d wager that most members of the US Congress could not find Syria on a map.  Ordinary taxpaying Americans, polls show, are totally against yet another jolly little war that has no sense to it, no exit strategy, and that offers only mayhem and confusion.

But the US chariot of the Juffernaut just keeps rolling along.

If the US directly attacks Syria,  the real cause will not be the recent chemical attacks.  What are 300 or so dead in a 2-year old war fuelled by the western powers that has so far killed over 100,000?

Chemical weapons are horrible. So are bullets, shells, bombs, cluster bombs, fuel-air explosive, white phosphorus, and napalm.  All wars are crime writ large.

We don’t yet know if the recent chemical massacre in Damascus was a real chemical attack using Sarin nerve gas,  a rebel provocation, an industrial accident, or an attack by rogue Syrian army units?  After Iraq, we can’t trust western intelligence and so-called evidence.

This is not even the main issue at hand though it makes an excellent pretext for outside powers to intervene.

The Syrian conflict is a proxy war being waged against Iran by the United States, conservative Arab oil producers, and three former Mideast colonial powers, Britain, France and Turkey who are seeking to restore their domination in the region.  Israel, hoping to isolate Hezbollah and cement its annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, cheers from the sidelines.  Syria and Hezbollah are  Iran’s only Arab friends.

The US and allies ignited the anti-Assad uprising two years ago, using the underground Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and imported jihadis.   But Assad’s forces, with some limited help from Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah,  held on and are now beating the US-backed rebels.

As a result, the Obama administration is now leaning towards direct US military intervention to stave off defeat of its proxies by neutralizing Assad’s air force, armor and artillery.  As for Syria’s chemical weapons, they were developed as a counter to Israel large nuclear and chemical arsenal.

Back in 1990, I was in Baghdad covering the lead-up to the first US war against Iraq. I found four British scientific technicians who told me – and showed documents – that they had been sent by Her Majesty’s government to help Iraq’s biowarfare programs.

The four scientists were stationed at Salman Pak laboratories to manufacture four types of germ weapons for Iraq for use  against Iran, including anthrax and q-fever.  The feeder stocks for the germ weapons came from a US lab in Maryland; their export was ok’d by Washington.  I repeatedly reported on this grim discovery.

During the long, bloody Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988),  the US, Britain, Italy and Germany exported chemical weapons plants and raw material to Iraq that produced Sarin nerve gas and burning mustard gas.    Many thousands of Iranian soldiers were killed, horribly burned or blinded by these western-supplied weapons.

So a little less western moral outrage, please, particularly from the Brits whose own sainted Winston Churchill authorized the use of poison gas against rebellious Iraqi and Afghan tribesmen.

Let’s also recall how North Vietnam was drenched with the toxic Agent Orange, how the resisting Iraq city of Falluja was showered by white phosphorous, how Iraq was permanently contaminated by radioactive depleted uranium.   These foul weapons also kill babies.

At least many Americans seem to have learned caution from the campaign of neocon lies that led them into the 2003 Iraq invasion, one of the biggest disasters and shames in US history.   Even some usually bellicose Republicans are urging the Nobel Peace prize winner in the White House and his entourage of bloodthirsty liberals to slow his rush to war and consult Congress.

More tellingly, Gen. Colin Powell, who disgraced himself before the world by parroting the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq now also urges caution over Syria.

Powell is right.  The US has lost its last two “crusades” in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The US  has no strategic interests in Syria beyond an obsession to overthrow Iran’s disobedient government.

Washington’s Syrian misadventure threatens to put the US on a very perilous collision course with Russia,  Syria’s close ally.  So far, Russia has sought a diplomatic solution, but it’s most unwise to push tough Vladimir Putin too hard.  Syria is as close to Russia as northern  Mexico is to the United States.

Courting even the remote threat of a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia just to overthrow President Assad, a former US ally,  is the height of irresponsibility.

Benazir Bhutto was killed during a bomb attack on her convoy in Rawalpindi during an election rally in December, 2007. She had just returned from exile in Britain and Dubai and was campaigning to regain power as prime minister at the head of her powerful People’s Party.

I had known Benazir for many years and was horrified and shaken by her death. I also knew her accused killer, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, making this a very personal case for me.

Though I’d been a frequent critic in the past of Benazir and her corruption-embroiled relatives, in recent years I’d drawn close to the embattled leader at a time when she was down and out in exile. Some of my readers in Pakistan accused me of being “bewitched” by Benazir. Not bewitched, just deeply impressed by this brilliant, intense, regal woman.

I’d just finished drawing up a proposed new political platform for the People’s Party that emphasized independent policy, an end to feudalism, and reconciliation with tribal and Islamic militants on the Northwest Frontier (today Khyber Pakhtunkwa).

Two days before her killing, we had been exchanging emails in which I warned her not to appear in public except behind bullet-proof plexiglass, as do India’s leaders. We discussed various types of body armor.

“Eric, I’ve got to appear before my supporters. That’s the way we do it in Pakistan,” she replied, brushing off my warnings.

Over the phone, she told me, “if I am killed, the murderers will be the Chaudry brothers from Punjab.” Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi were two of Musharraf’s most important backers and wealthy political barons.

Since Benazir’s murder, no evidence linking the Chaudhrys to her murder has emerged. But she was emphatic in naming them to me.

Interestingly, Benazir and I were in London with her son Bilawal shortly before her ill-fated return to Pakistan. I asked her about the assassination of another Pakistani leader I’d known well and admired, President Zia ul-Haq. She dismissed my question with scorn (Zia had hanged her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto), and said “we’ll never know who killed him – but who cares? He’s dead and gone.”

Ironically, her murder may also remain a permanent mystery.I find it hard to believe that Musharraf orchestrated Bhutto’s death. True, she had outfoxed this not very bright general (she had contempt for all Pakistani generals, and they for her, calling Bhutto, “that girl.”) The discredited Musharraf seemed destined to be a powerless figurehead while the US-backed Benazir resumed leading Pakistan.

At the behest of Washington, Musharraf had ordered the deaths of many tribal and religious militants. He had too eagerly allowed the US military to occupy parts of his country and involve it in the Afghan conflict. But it’s difficult to imagine that Mush ordered the killing of the wildly popular Bhutto when an assassination could easily have failed and backfired. Such a plot would have exposed him to the anger of his patron, the United States, which had been promoting a Bhutto-Musharraf diumverate.

Though I don’t see Musharraf guilty of murder, he seems open to charges of treason for overthrowing the government of Nawaz Sharif and opening Pakistan to foreign domination. However, Musharraf’s cronies and supporters in Punjab should fall under suspicion, as Benazir asserted. The idea that she was killed by tribal militants from Waziristan lacks credibility.

A UN investigation found Benazir’s murder could have been prevented had the government (ie Musharraf) provided proper security.

Musharraf had ordered the arrest and beating of senior judges who are now influencing his case. So Pakistan’s judiciary, never renowned for jurisprudence, can rightly be accused of bias.

Even so, Musharraf has a lot to pay for, including the killing of the most prominent Baluchi tribal chief. The US drone campaign that now ravages Pakistan was approved by him. Pakistan’s fierce generals are outraged by the trial of one of their own, but this time they should allow what passes for justice in Pakistan to take its course. That would be a final gift from Benazir.

So far, army and security police have scored brilliant battlefield victories against unarmed men, women and children, killing and wounding thousands who were demanding a return to democratic government.

The latest Cairo protests by supporters of the elected Morsi government have been scattered by gunfire and huge armored bulldozers resembling the giant vehicles used by Israel to smash Palestinian barricades and protesters. All Egyptians opposing the Sisi dictatorship are now officially, “terrorists.”

Egypt’s generals and hard right Mubarakist supporters have ditched any pretense of civilian government and now rely on the bayonet and tank. The men with the guns make the rules.

This is the third fairly elected Arab government to be overthrown or besieged, like Gaza, by Western-backed military regimes. Unlike Algeria, where the first elected government was crushed, Egypt’s Islamists have no arms and are unlikely to be able to mount serious domestic resistance aside from some pinprick attacks in Upper Egypt and Sinai.

The bloody Mubarakist counter-revolution, financed by Saudi Arabia and some Gulf monarchies, has put the United States, Egypt’s patron, into a serious jam. Washington was forced to denounce the coup and ongoing state repression as “deplorable,” in the words of US State Secretary John Kerry.

However, weeks earlier the clearly confused Kerry had praised the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected government as “restoring democracy.” He refused to brand the military putsch a coup, for that would have meant cutting off annual $1.3 billion in US payments to Egypt’s armed forces, a key US ally. President Obama has simply ducked the whole issue.

Since Washington preaches democracy, civilian rule, and human rights, it can’t be seen to be openly backing Egypt’s brutal military and security forces. So the Obama administration has been pussyfooting around events in Egypt, pleased to see Egypt’s generals in charge and the Islamists out of power, but unwilling to say so.

US Mideast policy is run from five different power centers: the White House, State Department, Pentagon, CIA and Congress. America’s powerful pro-Israel lobby gives Congress its marching orders over Egypt, controlling financial aid, food supplies and weapons deliveries. In effect, Israel is a sixth player in this game.

Now, the White House has made a significant demarche: after delaying delivery of a few F-16 fighters, it just cancelled the annual US-Egyptian Brightstar military exercise, an affirmation of the Pentagon’s domination of Egypt’s military. This is a blow to the Pentagon and a boost for Kerry’s State Dept.

Egypt’s 440,000-man armed forces is joined at the hip with the Pentagon which controls its arms, funding, training, high tech equipment, promotion lists, spare parts and munitions supply, the latter two always kept in short supply.

So Egypt’s generals will soon have to sheathe their swords, withdraw tanks, and fabricate a figurehead civilian government that at least looks somewhat real, instead of the army-installed cigar-store Indians now supposedly running the government.

This will mollify Washington. After all, the US happily backed and financed the brutal Mubarak military regimes for three decades, turning a blind eye to its torture, executions and massive human rights violations. Western media obediently lauded the Mubarak dictatorship as a pillar of Mideast stability (US code talk for status quo).

Expect a rapid return to Mubarakism once the bloodshed dies down, and likely his release from jail. The prisons will fill again, the torturers will work overtime and Egypt will return to full-blown military-police state led, most likely, by General al-Sisi, who looks every inch a modern dictator in his dark sunglasses and medals.

For once, leading Republican senator John McCain got it right: Washington should cut off all military aid to Egypt he urged, as US law mandates. America’s image in the entire Muslim world is at risk. Remember when President Obama called for full democracy across the Mideast?

But Obama is reluctant to move because Israel, its friends in Congress, and the Pentagon brass are squarely behind Egypt’s military regime, as they were behind Mubarak. Egypt, and its US guided armed force, are a pillar of the American Mideast Raj.

That’s why President Barack Obama’s insulting cancellation of his planned meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, during the 5-6 September Group of 20 meeting in St. Petersburg is so dismaying.

Russia has over 3,000 active nuclear warheads, the majority aimed  at North America.  The US has a similarly powerful nuclear arsenal,   primarily targeted on Russia, or in reserve for a second strike in the event of all-out war.

When two men are holding loaded pistols to each other’s heads, keeping cool, calm and polite is imperative.  But that’s just what Washington has not been doing, exposing Americans to an unnecessary national security risk for no apparent gain.

Informal meetings between heads of state on the sidelines of major international meetings are common and useful.  Such sit-downs serve to smooth over ongoing disputes and send a message of orderly, civilized relations.   The tone is often more important than the content.

Relations between Washington and Moscow have been growing steadily chillier over recent years.  Gone are the days when the credulous George Bush could say he looked into Vlad Putin’s eyes and trusted him.  A series of disputes – Syria, Palestine, arms control, missile defense – bedevil US-Russian relations.  Washington has been blasting Moscow over human rights, which is pretty rich coming after Guantanamo, waterboarding,  and massive US spying on the whole world, including Americans.

Behind this Big Chill is Washington’s ongoing treatment of Russia as a second or third-rate power.  The US lectures and hectors Russia and affords scant concern of Moscow’s strategic interests or spheres of interest.  Europe gets much the same treatment.  Whenever Russia refuses to go along with US policy – Syria being a good example – it comes in for barrages of criticism over human and political rights in America’s state-influenced media and Congress.

President Putin is no angel:  he’s tough as nails and brooks no opposition.  But that’s what Russians want.  Putin has raised Russia off its knees.

In 1989, I was the first western journalist admitted into KGB’s Moscow  headquarters, the Lubyanka.  I was told by senior KGB generals that they were ditching the rotten, corrupt Communist Party. What Russia needed, they said,  was a tough, iron-fisted leader like the strongmen then running Chile and South Korea.  Shortly after, KGB mounted a palace coup in the Kremlin and installed one of its star officers, Vladimir Putin, as prime minister, then president.

Now, President Obama has made clear he is boycotting his planned meeting with Putin because of human rights issues and Syria.  The 800-lb gorilla he did not mention is Edward Snowden, now in temporary Russian exile.   Given that Washington is in bed with numerous rights violators – think of Uzbekistan, Mubarak’s Egypt, Azerbaijan – its squeamishness over Russia rings hollow.

As for Syria, it’s Washington that is violating international law by fomenting the uprising against the Assad regime in Damascus; Russia is well within its legal rights to support Assad and arm him.   More important, Syria is close to southern Russia and a long-time Soviet/Russian ally.  Imagine the US response if Russia sought to overthrow Mexico’s government using Cuban advisors and local insurgents.

Imagine if the US increased its arms supplies to Syria’s rebels and imposed a no-fly zone, as Sen. John McCain urges.  Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles down US warplanes.  The US launches attacks on Russian AA units, then on Russian ships delivering arms to the Assad government.   It’s not hard to see how a direct clash over Syria could put Russia and the US on their most perilous collision course since the Cuban missile crisis.

Instead of dealing with this major threat, Obama, under blistering attack from Republicans over the deaths of three Americans in Benghazi, Libya, is offending Putin and indeed all Russians.  This is foolish, short-sighted and sure to worsen US-Russian relations as well as scuttling chances of an arms control pact in the next few years.

Or, in simple English:  President Obama, don’t kick sand in the face of a man holding a gun to your head.  How about some presidential behavior re Russia?

Around midnight, a gruff voice broke into the call. “This is your KGB listener. This is the most boring, stupid call I’ve ever listened to.  Shut up and go to bed!”

Ah, those innocent Cold War days.  Today, Big Brother listens to your calls, reads your email, and follows your internet searches on silent cat’s feet.

China’s Taoists warned, “you become what you hate.”  They are right: the September 2001 attacks on the US, as John Le Carré wrote, producing a period of temporary psychosis.  America was knocked back to the ugly days of Sen. McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950’s.  The big difference was that today the bogeymen of “terrorists” have replaced menacing Marxists.  And today, terrorists were everywhere.

When I enlisted in the US Army during the Vietnam War, we were taught that it was our duty as American soldiers to report all war crimes and violations of the Geneva Convention, and to refuse to obey unlawful orders from superiors as established at post WWII  Nuremburg trials  At the time, I was proud to serve in America’s armed forces.

Today, the military trial of document leaker PFC Bradley Manning has echoes of the Soviet era: a show trial in which a lonely individual is slowly crushed by the wheels of so-called military justice, an oxymoron.

The dramatic revelations of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden brings back sharp memories of Soviet-era dissidents, jailed, banished, locked in foul psychiatric hospitals for daring to speak the truth.

In my day, those seeking justice and freedom used to defect from the East Bloc to the United States and Britain.  Now, ironically, we see a major defector, Ed Snowden, fleeing to Russia.

While the corporate-owned US news networks sugarcoat or obscure the NSA and Afghanistan War scandals, it’s left to Russian TV (RT) to tell Americans the facts.  Who would have thought?

We journalists used to mock Pravda and Trud as party mouthpieces.  Today, it’s the party line all the time from the big US networks, online news, and newspapers.

The Republican far right calls Snowden and Manning traitors; some demand the death penalty. Snowden’s lawyers warn he faces torture and possibly execution if he returns home; Manning has already had a long term in solitary confinement, which is itself a form of psychological torture.

We recall the horrific case of a Chicago gang member Jose Padillo during 9/11 hysteria. In an order signed by President George W. Bush, Padillo was accused on the flimsiest grounds of being an enemy combatant and stripped of all legal rights. He was held for over three years in solitary, tortured, sleep and sensory deprived, and injected with psychotropic drugs.   Padillo was broken physically and mentally, then sent to prison for 17 years.

Such a gruesome fate could await Manning and Snowden.

I don’t know if PFC Manning took his charges of war crimes and other illegalities up the chain of command, the proper course for soldiers.  He would, of course, have gotten nowhere – just look at the crimes committed at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.  Going out of the command structure insured that Manning would have faced serious charges. Releasing a sea of details about US foreign policy inevitably courted severe punishment.

But as far as we know,  Manning’s revelations didn’t harm America, it only embarrassed Washington by making it look bullying, two-faced and utterly cynical.  Bureaucrats hate embarrassment much more than spying.

Snowden followed candidate Barack Obama’s pre-election call on whistleblowers to reveal waste and wrongdoing.   America’s intelligence agencies have clearly overstepped their bounds and likely violated the law.  A majority of Americans don’t buy the claim they were spied on to protect the nation from vague terrorist threats.

Snowdon and Manning were, in my view, patriotic Americans warning their nation that its ruling elite, obsessed with power and global hegemony, had veered way off course and were violating the US Constitution.  However foolhardy, they acted with courage and honor.

Economically, Japan is a giant, albeit a staggering one. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party just secured full control of both houses of Japan’s  parliament. Abe’s “three-arrow”  reform program has injected new life in Japan’s formerly stagnant $5 trillion economy industry and driven down the over-valued yen.

But militarily, Japan remains a midget.   Its so-called Self-Defense Forces were designed to stop a Soviet amphibious invasion of the northern islands.  Japan’s US-written pacifist constitution prohibits all offensive military operations or exports of arms and military equipment.  

The 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty laid the foundation of relations between Washington and Tokyo.  The US in effect pledged to defend Japan against all comers; amusingly, Japan pledged to help defend the US – but banned from sending military forces abroad.   The key to the treaty was the establishment of permanent US air, land, and sea bases in Japan.   They remain, half a century later.

Japan thus became a giant US aircraft carrier from which it dominates highly strategic North Asia.  In exchange, Japanese industry was given open access to the US market, thus laying the base of Japan’s economic upsurge of the 1960’s.  South Korea enjoyed a similar deal.

This cozy arrangement is now being challenged by the rapid rise of China’s military and economic power. Just this week, a Chinese military aircraft that overflew waters near Japan’s Okinawa, provoked an uproar in Japan.

Over the past year, Chinese aircraft, warships and submarines have challenged Japanese territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands, ruled by Japan since the late 19^th century, but now claimed by China.  Even more worrying, China has begun asserting claims to Okinawa on the basis that its independent rulers paid tribute to Imperial China in the past.

These claims, and China’s rapid development of a true blue water navy and long-ranged aircraft that can project power into the Pacific, and Beijing’s increasingly assertive claims to all the East China Sea, are deeply alarming Japan.

As the nationalist drums beat ever louder in China, Japanese increasingly feel vulnerable.  Japanese are asking whether the US would really risk nuclear war with China to defend Japan’s  Senkaku or Ryukyu Islands.

China, for its part,  sees its rising naval and maritime power constricted, even threatened, by the Japanese archipelago that acts as a giant barrier, blocking China from the open Pacific. 

The Soviet Union faced a similar problem accessing the North Pacific.

For China’s fleets and oil tankers, getting to the Pacific means running the barrier of Japan’s home islands, the Senkaku and Ryukyus (Okinawa), or going through the Philippine’s narrow Luzon Strait.  To no surprise, the US is negotiating with Manila to reopen the Subic Bay naval and air base that the US vacated in 1992.

China is clearly trying to muscle its way out of the East China Sea and into the Pacific.  But, on a grander strategic scale, China is trying to demean and punish Japan for World War II by making it lose face over the naval and air challenges, and showing Asia who is now the big dog on the block.

Japan is perfectly aware of this grave challenge but undecided on how to respond to the biggest threat it has faced since World War II.   The choices seem to be: hope the US will block China’s expansion; or abandon the US-imposed strictures from the post-war period, develop a real foreign policy, and create credible military forces – including nuclear arms.

Doing so means casting off Japan’s eternal bowed head, apologetic attitudes and obedience to its former WWII enemies.   That would be a vast sea change in Japan, where most people appear happy to accept the status quo – or at least until another big military scare from China.

The naming of Caroline Kennedy, a major Obama supporter and donor, as ambassador to Japan is hardly the right person in these troubled times.

Japan has to cast off  its cross of shame over having been defeated in the 1940’s and renew its national spirit.

A process in which Washington, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization hold intense talks over holding talks, a ritual as stylized as the traditional Japanese dance. In the end, it’s the same empty, cynical ritual, year after year.

This past week, US Secretary of State John Kerry has been leading the dance in the latest attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO. As of this writing, the talks appear off. But they may be on again just as quickly. It depends on how much Washington offers its feuding clients, Israel and the PLO.

Watching this annual charade is both painful and exhausting. It makes cynics of the most idealistic hopers for Mideast peace.

Israel holds all the cards, and knows it. Jewish settlements, roads, and security walls are roaring ahead, relentlessly gobbling up the occupied West Bank, Golan and their water resources. West Bank Palestinians are being crammed into future native Bantustans patterned after South Africa’s apartheid-era reservations for blacks.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vows there will be no Palestinian state, appears to have an impregnable hold on power. Israel’s economy is doing very well, thanks in part to billions in US economic and military aid, privileged access to the US market, and exports of arms and electronics. Israel’s high tech and medical industries are among the world’s leaders. New gas and oil finds between Israel and Cyprus may make Israel an energy exporter within a decade.

The United States has eliminated any possible Arab military challenge to Israel’s absolute military domination of the Mideast by destroying Iraq as a functioning state and then fueling Syria’s civil war. Egypt, once Israel’s leading foe, has been bought off by American money.

Israel has finished deploying an indestructible triad of nuclear forces based on missiles, aircraft and, most lately, submarines that can fire cruise or, possibly, ballistic missiles, all targeted by Israeli and US satellite networks. This means that Israel can survive any nuclear attack and retaliate in kind against attackers. Israel’s Mideast nuclear monopoly remains secure.

Equally important, Israel, through its American supporters, effectively guides much of America’s Mideast policy. Almost 50% of Republican voters are now rural born-again Christian Zionists for whom Israel is an essential part of their Biblical prophecy of the return of the Messiah.

President Barack Obama’s feeble efforts to press Israel into real peace negotiations with the Palestinians were quickly squashed by the pro-Israel lobby and its partisans in Congress. Netanyahu probably exerts more influence over the US Congress than President Obama.

Moreover, Israel is “negotiating” with a PLO that has become a sock puppet for the US and Israel after its former leader, Yasser Arafat, was very likely assassinated to make way for the compliant Mahmoud Abbas. The PLO is run and financed by the US and Israel, its security forces trained and directed by CIA, its intelligence agency an arm of Israel’s Mossad. Its elected rival, Hamas, remains jailed in Gaza.

Yet even this is not enough. Netanyahu now demands the Arabs recognized Israel as a “Jewish state,” knowing this is unacceptable. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Christian and Muslim.

Tragically, Israel right wing parties have spurned the sensible 2002 peace offer led by Saudi Arabia. The plan calls for a withdrawal to 1967 borders, with some minor rectifications for large Jewish settlement blocs, full peace and recognition between Israel and 57 Muslim nations, and a “just” solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis – meaning some token repatriation of refugees and compensation for Jews who fled the Arab world.

This is clearly the best solution. But it is rejected by Israel’s Likud Party and other rightists because they refuse to define Israel’s borders. As the late Israeli Moishe Dayan stated, it is up to god, not man, to determine Israel’s future growth. Israel’s right wingers have long looked with desire upon Lebanon and parts of Syria. Baghdad once had a large Jewish population.

Why sacrifice all this for the sake of little Palestinian rump state that will anyway become an Israeli protectorate? Just keep talking about talks while the bulldozers roar ahead.

According to some reports,  Luxembourg’s ruler, Grand Duke Henri, was bugged by means of a Dick Tracy-style watch.   All this recalls the late comic Peter Sellers’s delightfully silly film, “The Mouse that Roared.”

Europe, however, is not laughing. Recent revelations of massive, ultra-intrusive US electronic spying in Europe by fugitive National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden have ignited a firestorm of outrage – and hypocrisy – across the European Union.

Germany, with sinister memories of the Gestapo and East German Stasi, is particularly incensed.  The magazine “Der Spiegel” says documents shown it by Snowden show that NSA read half a billion phone calls, emails, faxes and bank communications in Germany alone – in a month.  German officials called this spying “disgusting” and “intolerable.”

France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé, denounced the US for spying on a close ally.   Russia and China rubbed their hands in glee over Washington’s acute embarrassment.

Two points to keep in mind.  First, dear old Uncle Sam indeed spies on everybody and everyone. His big electronic ears, and those of his very close allies, hoover up all electronic communications – and have done so for decades.   Every foreign embassy in Washington is bugged;  most secret codes are broken by NSA’s giant computers and math wizards.

Now we learn that even our personal computers, cell phones and keyboards are bugged.  It’s clear that surveillance technology has far outdistanced the restraints of law or  good government.   The giant security bureaucracy is out of control.

One wonders just how much useful information Big Brother can distill from the sea of data he acquires?  In East Germany and the Soviet Union, a “listener” was always eves dropping and taking notes.

But that was so Cold War.  Today, computers filter and parse every word, looking for key phrases, red-flagged words, or patterns.

Second, Europe’s politicians are loudly denouncing the US for spying on their people.  But Britain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain and Belgium signed secret pacts with the US decades ago allowing NSA and CIA to spy on their citizens, and to share intelligence with Washington.   The largest NSA listening post in Europe is inside NATO HQ at Brussels.

France’s intelligence agencies, notably, DGSE and predecessor SDECE, were notorious for bugging their citizens, politicians and foreign targets.  Most French assumed everything said on the phone was recorded.   Even pillow talk with one’s mistress was risky.   DGSE even went so far as the bug the First Class seats on Air France’s flights.

Britain’s hush-hush GCHQ listening agency was almost a  subsidiary of NSA and CIA.  Ditto for electronic listening  agencies in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and Canada. The Soviet-run Warsaw Pact had a similar structure: the East bloc’s security agencies became “little brothers” of KGB.   Bulgaria’s spy agency was used for “wet affairs:”  the Czechs for sophisticated operations;  the East Germans for infiltrating West Germany.   US intelligence uses the same subsidiary structure in Europe and parts of Asia.

The recent refusal by France, Spain, Italy and Portugal to allow the president of Bolivia’s aircraft to transit their air space because of an erroneous CIA report Ed Snowden was aboard shocked most Europeans and made them wonder just how strong American influence really is over their governments.

France, the self-proclaimed champion of human rights and asylum for political refugees covered itself with shame and dishonor in “la affaire Snowden.”

Even so, Washington’s lame excuse “everyone does it” or blaming “terrorism” is clearly bogus.  No other nation mounts such an intensive worldwide electronic spying operation.  Spying on EU trade negotiators discussing banana quotas has nothing to do with so-called terrorism.

Bureaucrats and politicians hate whistleblowers. Not so much because these brave, public-spirited people reveal deep dark secrets of state, but because they cause sharp political embarrassment and identify all sorts of dirty business concealed from voters.   That’s why lynchings are planned for both US Army whistleblower Bradley Manning and Ed Snowdon.

The real “national security” issue involved here is the security of  hypocritical politicians and career bureaucrats.

A year ago, Egyptians elected Mohammed Morsi president in their first fair democratic election. Morsi came from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, an eight-decade old conservative movement of professionals dedicated to bringing Islamic principals of public welfare, politics, education, justice, piety and fighting corruption.

But the deck was stacked against Morsi and the Brotherhood from day one. The brutal US-backed Mubarak had fallen, but the organs of his 30-year dictatorship, Egypt’s pampered 440,000-man military, judiciary, academia, media, police, intelligence services and bureaucrats, remained in place. Even Morsi’s presidential guard remained under control of the Mubarak forces.

The dictatorship’s old guard – better known as the “deep government” – sought to thwart every move of the Brotherhood. In fact, the stolid, plodding Morsi only became president after more capable colleagues were vetoed by the hard-line Mubarakist courts.

Morsi should have purged the “deep government,” notably the police, secret police, judges, and media who were sabotaging the democratic government. But Morsi was too soft, and the entrenched powers arrayed against him too strong. He never managed to grasp the levers of state. Ironically, after all the media hysteria in North America over the alleged dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood, it turned out to be a dud.

The Brotherhood stumbled from one crisis to the next asEgypt’s economy, already in terrible shape before the 2011 revolution, sank like a rock. Tourism, that provided 17% of national income, evaporated. Unemployment soared over 13%, and over 50% among angry urban young. We have recently seen this same phenomena in Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Pakistan, and Western Europe. Severe shortages of fuel and electricity sparked outrage.

Egypt’s curse is that it cannot feed its surging population of over 90 million. So Cairo imports huge quantities of wheat and subsidizes retail prices for bread. The US sustained the Sadat and Mubarak regimes with boatloads of wheat discounted 50%. This vital aid tapered off when Morsi took power. Food prices in Egypt rose 10%.

Equally important, ever since Anwar Sadat invited in the US to rearm his outdated military, Egypt’s armed forces have become joined at the hip with the Pentagon. Just as Turkey’s 500,000-man armed forces were, until eleven years ago, and Pakistan’s so remain today.

Armies of many Muslim states are designed to control their populations, not defeat foreign enemies. The only Arab military force in recent memory to beat an invader has been the guerilla forces of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

The US provides Egypt’s military $1.5 billion annually, not counting tens of millions of “black” payments from CIA to leading generals, police chiefs, commentators and bureaucrats.Egypt’s military has been totally re-equipped with US F-16 fighter-bombers, M-1 heavy tanks, armored vehicles, radars, electronic systems, and artillery.

Washington has supplied Egypt with just enough arms to control its population and intimidate small neighbors, but not enough to wage war against Israel. Further, the Pentagon sharply limits Egypt supplies of munitions, missiles and vital spare parts. Many of Egypt’s generals have been trained in US military colleges, where they formed close links with US intelligence and the Pentagon. CIA, DIA, and NSA have large stations in Egypt that watch its military and population.

Under Mubarak, the US controlled Egypt’s military and key parts of its economy. When Morsi and the Brotherhood came to power, Washington backed off for a while but in recent months apparently decided to back the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratic government.

This fact became perfectly clear when the White House refused to call the military coup in Cairo a coup. Had it done so, US law would have mandated the cutoff of US aid to Egypt.US politicians and media, with shameless hypocrisy, are hailing the overthrow of Morsi as a democratic achievement. In North America, anything labeled “Muslim” has become ipso facto menacing.

The counter-revolution of Egypt’s “deep government” was financed and aided by the US and Saudi Arabia, cheered on by Israel, the UAE, Britain and France. Tiny Qatar, that backed Morsi with $8 billion, lost its influence in Cairo. The Saudis will now call many shots in Egypt.

In recent weeks, mass street demonstrations in major Egyptian cities against Morsi were organized by the police, secret police and the Mubarakist structure. Fears of the Brotherhood were whipped up among Egypt’s nervous Coptic Christians, 10% of the population, who form much of the urban elite.

Then there were tens of thousands of unemployed, highly volatile young street people, as we recently saw in Istanbul, ready to explode at any excuse. Large numbers of Egyptians were fed up with stumbles of Morsi’s government – even some of his former Salafist allies. – and the threat of economic collapse. Liberals, Nasserites, Marxists joined them.

There may be some armed resistance against the coup, but it will likely be crushed by Egypt’s military and attack-dog security forces. Senior Brotherhood officials are already being arrested, and pro-Brotherhood media gagged, while Washington turns a blind eye.

As of now, the threat of a real civil war such as Algeria suffered in the 1990’s after a US and French-backed military coup seems unlikely, but not impossible. Meanwhile, the military has installed a puppet president for the time being. The old US “asset” Mohammed el-Baradei may take over as civilian frontman for the generals, who prefer civilian sock puppets get blamed for Egypt’s economic and social crises.

So much for democracy in the Mideast. The overthrow of a moderate Islamist government will send a message to the Muslim world that compromise with the Western powers is impossible and only violent resistance can shake the status quo.

Nice, France – I’m just down to sea level from the 2,600 meter high mountain forts on France’s wild, vertiginous Alpine border with Italy.

The Cote d’Azur, or Riviera, is buzzing with summer activity: packed beaches, traffic jams, crowded restaurants, outrageously priced hotels and an armada of yachts jostling for scarce marina space.

Looking at all this opulence and conspicuous consumption one would not know that France is plunged these days into economic and mental depression. French call it “morosité.”

French are an excitable people. They often strike me as an unstable mix of Germans and Italians. When French spirits are high, they are unstoppable. Just think of Napoleon’s armies and the “furia francese.” But French morale can sink just as fast. Today, France’s spirits are down in the dumps.

Other nations would be lucky to have such problems. In spite of uncontrollable debt, high unemployment, strikes, and declining industry, bountiful France is still one of the world’s most beautiful nations and best places to live.

French have one of the world’s best, most responsive health care services. Its food, wine and culture astound and delight. TGV high-speed trains zip through the beautiful countryside. Unlike much of western Europe, France is a large nation with varied topography, and distinctive regions. Some 75% of French spend their lavish, six-week vacations in their own country.

French still read books, study history, and, for the most part, eat real food. Never mind all those silly academic studies that tell you Auckland, New Zealand is the best place to live, France is the world’s premier destination and place to live.

Now, the bad news. Glorious, beautiful, well-run France may be facing the end of its “bel époque.” French industry has been ruined by overly powerful unions and their political allies in the Socialist Party.

One would be crazy these days to open a factory in France with its absurd 35-hour work week, endless vacations, surly unions, strikes, and social costs that add 50% to worker’s salaries. Laying off workers during downturns or closing plants involves siege warfare, with posturing socialist politicians fighting employers at every turn.

In an ominous new development, French have taken to comparing their economic malaise to Germany’s vibrant economy where past tough structural reforms in the labor market modernized and made its industry competitive.

Thanks to German’s intelligent system of vocational training for youth, its youngsters are at work while 45% of young French are unemployed. No wonder. French universities keep churning out unemployable graduates in social anthropology, sociology, and film-making.

Government in France employs 56% of all workers, an unsustainable cost that, with retirement at 60 and unemployment benefits – now 32% of GDP – is bleeding the economy to death. Even President Francois Holland’s recent tax increases will not save the economy from ruin – and France from a possible euro crisis.

The problem is that many French know their gravy train must slow down but they can’t bear to change. “La vie en rose” is just too seductive. Special interests – farmers, teachers, truckers, transport unions – demand the “rich” pay the bill. They can shut down France.

But there are not enough “rich” to foot France’s big bills – or America’s, for that matter. Many wealthy French are moving out of the country, like Gerard Depardieu, or quietly moving assets to more friendly locales. French fear that the desperate socialists will slap more and higher taxes on citizens and even on foreign residents. Louis XVI had similar cash problems.

France’s media is full of alarms all about how the industrious Germans are pulling way ahead, as if Germans were somehow a threat to France. This is potentially a very dangerous notion. The Franco-German entente is the rock upon which united Europe is built. Nothing must be allowed to endanger this architecture – particularly not envy, nationalism, and blaming the Teutons for France’s self-inflicted wounds.

What France urgently needs is another Charles De Gaulle who had the courage and strength to end the bitter war in Algeria in 1962 and bring stable government. A new De Gaulle must force drastic cuts in social welfare and spending, and force French to learn a new work ethic.

The Best of Eric Margolis

SOSPEL, FRANCE – The wild Maritime Alps are the most remote and least known part of this country, a chain of vertiginous, snow-capped peaks and narrow defiles running due south along the Franco-Italian border from Switzerland down to the Mediterranean on the Riviera.

As a military historian, I’ve come here to remember the heroic stand against overwhelming odds in June, 1940 of Gen. René Olry’s Army of the Alps: a little French Thermopylae.

The German offensive in the West that erupted on 10 May, 1940 was a revolutionary kind of fluid warfare based on fast-moving armor and mechanized units, close air support, and advanced communications.

In only six weeks – by 20 June 1940 – France’s proud army, considered the finest in the world, was shattered; 240,000 French soldiers were killed or seriously wounded; 2,000 French tanks were destroyed by the German “blitzkrieg.”

Germany’s generals had learned much from the slaughter of World War I, vowing to make their troops mobile to avoid static warfare. France’s hidebound generals, by contrast, planned to refight World War I in a defensive campaign based on fortified regions and massed artillery.

The German armored attack cut through the dense Ardennes Forest, crossed the moat of the Meuse River, and broke into the open plains of Picardy before the slow-moving French forces could effectively respond. The German 1940 offensive, planned by Gen. Erich von Manstein and Adolf Hitler, and executed by the dashing Generals Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian, was one of history’s greatest military triumphs.

France’s powerful Maginot Line forts, backed by 400,000 interval troops, was not outflanked, as is wrongly believed. The Line achieved its twin goals of defending Lorraine’s iron and steel industry from a surprise German attack and forcing the Germans to attack through Belgium or Switzerland’s fortress chains.

The Maginot Line was never designed to defend the entire Franco-German frontier. Not one of its major forts was taken by German assault.

France’s unwieldy field army was scattered by flank and rear attacks by German armor. France’s air force proved ineffective. Britain’s army abandoned its French ally and ran for the coast.

As France lay dying, Italy’s swaggering dictator, Benito Mussolini, frantic he might miss out on the spoils of war, declared war on 10 June on France and Britain. Italy demanded France return former Italian possessions of Nice, Cannes, Marseilles, and Menton.

France’s first Maginot fort, Rimplas, was begun in 1928 after “Il Duce” intensified his irredentist demands. A score of major forts and smaller works were built to guard the river valleys and passes leading into Italy. Sospel, the back door into Nice, received particular attention.

Mussolini launched two armies, some 340,000 men, along three axis against France’s Maritime Alps, Savoy and the Dauphiné. Some of the units, like the elite “Alpini,” were crack troops; others were mediocre.

France’s Army of the Alps has been denuded of men and material to oppose the relentless German advance on its rear down the Rhone Valley. General René Olry, had only 35,000 men. Among them were light ski units and elite Alpine infantry in their trademark big berets known as “tartes.”

Italian troops swarmed over the high mountain passes and ridges running at high as 2900 meters. But their main attacks concentrated on the Col de Larche with the road leading from Turin to Grenoble, Sospel, and Menton.

The southern Maginot forts performed perfectly. They spotted the advancing Italians and brought down a devastating crossfire of 75mm shells on them. Other French 155mm heavy artillery units blasted the Italian columns, guns and armored trains, forcing the Italians to retreat in disarray. The famed French 75mm field and fortress gun was light but it could fire up to 18 shrapnel shells a minute, producing a lethal a blizzard of steel.

Overlooking the French border fortress city of Briancon was the menacing 3,130 meter Mt Chaberton, on which Italy had emplaced eight 149mm guns in turrets. On 24 June, French 280mm mortars, firing with amazing accuracy, blew away all eight turrets, ending the threat to Briancon.

The biggest Italian offensives broke against Sospel, the backdoor into the Riviera, and Menton. The ten Maginot forts between Mt Gros north of Sospel to Cap Martin next to Menton on the Mediterranean, crossed their flanking fire and shattered the advancing Italian infantry columns.

Italy’s deepest penetration was 1.5 km in Menton/Cap Martin. Before Menton, eight French soldiers at the border post of Pont St Louis stopped an entire Italian division for a day.

The southern arm of the Maginot Line worked brilliantly, resisting all Italian attacks and shelling. The Line was designed for a repeat of WWI; the Italians waged a 1914-style battle. The Germans did not.

But France’s little Army of the Alps, all but abandoned and forgotten in the debacle of 1940, stood firm and fought with skill and panache against odds of ten to one, aided by the Maginot Line and the difficult terrain.

Olry and his men fulfilled the motto of the Maginot Line: “on ne passé pas.” They shall not pass.

The Best of Eric Margolis

In June, 1942, the United States Navy achieved one of history’s greatest naval triumphs over the Imperial Japanese Navy, thanks to a combination of brilliant leadership, plain good luck, and code-breaking.

US carrier-based dive bombers led by the intrepid Commander Wade McClusky Jr. swiftly sank three Japanese carriers. A fourth Japanese carrier was sunk soon after.

Midway turned the course of the Pacific naval war and spelled inevitable defeat for Japan in World War II.

US Navy code breakers had secretly deciphered Japan’s naval codes, so US Admiral Nimitz knew the Japanese fleet’s movements and timing. Nimitz positioned three US carriers northwest of Hawaii and ambushed the oncoming Japanese fleet heading for Hawaii.

Code breaking played a key role in the Allied WWII victory. The British and Soviets also broke many German military codes. The decisive battle of Kursk and the U-boat war were primarily won thanks to code breaking. Ever since, the US has made signals intelligence (SIGINT) a key part of military operations.

Fast forward to last week’s furor over electronic snooping under the PRISM program by the US National Security Agency (NSA) into America’s nine big internet providers. We should not have been surprised. Surveillance and spying cannot be stopped unless forcefully constrained. Intelligence, like fire, to quote Ben Franklin, is “a useful servant; but a terrible master.”

The National Security Agency is America’s largest but least known spy agency. In the military, we used to jokingly call NSA, “No Such Agency.” I was invited to join NSA at the end of my US Army days, but declined.

Investigative author James Bamford has written fine books and articles about the top secret workings of NSA. Way back in the 1960’s, we knew that NSA could listen in to almost every foreign embassy in Washington and many military transmissions around the globe.

When I was covering Moscow, NSA managed to eves drop on the private phone of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. We also know that NSA’s secret “ECHELON” system was hovering up phone and fax messages around the globe.

That was fine – overseas. At home, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot listen to the private communications of Americans.

But 9/11 conveniently changed all that. President George Bush and his neoconservative advisors got a cowardly US Congress to enact the pernicious Patriot Act that tore down America’s constitutional safeguards and allowed the intelligence agencies to run amok under the guise of national security. Warrantless wiretaps became common. Unlimited electronic snooping spread like wildfire to Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Most communications by phone, email, fax, Skype, Tweets are sucked up by NSA’s big ears and run through the world’s most powerful computers at NSA HQ at Fort Meade Maryland and its many branch locations.

President Obama asserted this week that the PRISM program only collected metadata – that is, patterns rather than reading mail. NSA’s chief claimed snooping in the US thwarted numerous terrorist attacks.

Both claims are hard to believe.

The US security state keeps growing. Any communications of possible interest are read under the impossibly vague anti-terrorism laws. If I am a subject of interest because I read Muslim religious sites on the internet, then anyone who emails me also becomes a suspect, and anyone who contacts them, and so ad infinitum.

The endless faux “war on terror” sanctions all violations of personal rights. Its is the magic lantern of the far right, a carte blanche pushing the US and its allies ever further to the right. Once bad laws like the Patriot Act are established, they rarely go away.

Americans will just have to get used to acting as if they live in old Communist East Germany or the Soviet Union. Anything sent electronically becomes government property. Privacy has been repealed by the 342-page Patriot Act. The big internet providers are becoming government accomplices.

Amazingly, polls show a third of Americans think all government surveillance is good if it protects them from “terrorism,” whatever that is. Many Germans thought similarly in the 1930’s.

As an American, I am hugely proud of our code breaker’s triumph at Midway. But dismayed and angry that today our SIGINT efforts are aimed at our citizens.

The Best of Eric Margolis

Western politicians and media have been scolding Turkey’s prime minister Recep Erdogan over this past week’s anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara.

What began as a local protest over the foolish plan to raze trees in Gezi Park near Istanbul’s bustling Taksim Square quickly exploded into major protests thanks to the ham-handed response of Istanbul police, who tear-gassed and beat demonstrators. Turkish police have never been famed for gentleness.

PM Erdogan’s curt dismissal of the crowd as “looters” further inflamed the situation. In the West, Erdogan was accused of growing authoritarianism and trying to remake Turkey into an Islamic state. Even the normally sensible “Economist” magazine accused Turkey’s leader of trying to become a new Ottoman sultan.

What hypocrisy. These were the same Western newspapers and politicians who ardently backed Turkey’s former governments that were little more than sock puppets for the military. The very same opinion-makers lauded Egypt’s brutal dictator, Husni Mubarak, as a “statesman.” So-called NGO’s like Freedom House and Amnesty International, cat’s paws for western governments, attacked Erdogan.

The demonstrators in Turkey’s cities were mostly young, secular and indulging in a springtime flash riot, facilitated by new social media and support from abroad. Many were rightly angered by Erdogan’s wrong-headed decision to take a lead role in trying to overthrow Syria’s government, a key trading partner for Turkey. Others, by his plans to limit public drinking and the eternal dispute over women’s head scarves.

What we have been witnessing is an attempt by anti-Erdogan secularists and far rightists, joined by members of Turkey’s long quiescent far left, to achieve what they could not do at the ballot box: ousting Erdogan’s moderate Islamic AK party from power.

These are the same forces who made a terrible mess of Turkey when they were in power from the 1940’s until the 1990’s: coups, riots, murders, regular financial crisis, and brutal human rights violations.

The United States and its media have turned against Erdogan primarily because of his clashes with Israel. Pro-Israel groups in the US are now taking the lead in calling for Erdogan’s ouster. Washington’s conservatives see him as too independent and unreliable.

Over the last decade, Erdogan transformed battered, bankrupt Turkey into an economic powerhouse by imposing sound finances and releasing the pent up power of the commercial class that had long been stifled by the cartels and monopolies of the secular leadership for whom the 1930’s anti-Islamic dictator, Kemal Ataturk, remains a state deity.

Ataturk was a great national hero who saved Turkey from being carved up by the Western powers, Greece, and the Soviet Union. But he proved a destructive political leader, tearing up Turkey’s historical roots and religion and replacing them with a vague form of 1930’s state fascism.

Erdogan has indeed grown mildly imperious; success and the lack of any real political opposition has gone to his head. But he is not yet a new sultan and shows few signs of trying to become one. He has brought real democracy to Turkey, financial stability, and brought it close to European social and legal standards.

Syria aside, Erdogan has made great strides in restoring Turkey’s regional leadership and power. As Turks used to say, “Turkey is the center of everything.” Erdogan remains the Mideast’s most popular leader.

Turkey’s able president, Abdullah Gul, who may become a rival of Erdogan in upcoming elections, has helped calm the waters. Gul remains the good cop while Erdogan the bad.

Remember, in the last election, Erdogan won a landslide in Turkey’s fractured political system, taking almost 50% of the vote in a poll with an over 80% turnout.

Recent demonstrations have sent Turkey’s stock and bond markets into a tailspin, threatening a financial crisis after a decade of calm and steady growth.

Erdogan is on the edge of achieving a real peace with Turkey’s rebellious Kurds – the most important advance in modern Turkish history. One suspects Turkey’s generals, some of them itching to stage a coup, and their foreign allies, are trying to derail Kurdish peace talks by encouraging the current violence.

It took the AK Party a decade to defang the generals and push them out of politics. Are Turkey’s pashas trying to stage a comeback?

The Best of Eric Margolis

That old colonial impulse keeps coming back. This past week, Britain and France pushed the rest of the European Union to lift the arms embargo in Syria – which in plain English means outright military intervention in that nation’s civil war.

Let’s recall that Britain once ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface and most of its oceans. France ruled much of West Africa, the Sahara and, after Word War I, what are today Syria and Lebanon. Britain ruled much of the rest of the Mideast.

Well, they’re back! France and Britain took the lead in attacking Libya and overthrowing its long-time leader and former ally, Muammar Ghadaffi. They now dominate Libya’s oil – a major source of energy for Europe. France just sent troops to protect its mining interests in former colonies, Mali and Niger.

Britain, which has invaded Afghanistan four times, is maintaining its troops there even though the war to dominate Afghanistan looks lost. Now, Britain has its sights set on reasserting its influence in Mesopotamia. France, Syria’s former colonial ruler, is championing plans to overthrow Syria’s government and reassert its domination of Lebanon, which it created during the colonial era.

Adding spice to this dangerous stew, Israel threatened this week to attack Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles if delivered to Syria. It remains unclear if these very effective missiles have yet arrived in Syria. Moscow promised S-300’s years ago to both Damascus and Tehran, but delayed deliveries under US pressure. Last week, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad apparently said that the first deliveries of the potent defensive weapons had arrived.

Israel’s three previous air attacks on Syria and threats to destroy S-300 missiles if emplaced there have sharply raised tensions with Moscow. The Russians, whose influence in Syria is being sharply challenged by the West, are low on patience at a time when even Israel is challenging Moscow.

Moscow’s efforts to organize a peace conference over Syria are being thwarted by the EU’s call to lift the so-called Syrian arms embargo and provide more military aid to anti-regime rebels. The entry of some Hezbollah fighters into battles along the Syrian-Lebanese border, and Shia-Sunni fighting inside Lebanon, underline the threat of the civil war becoming regionalized.

Will Russia sit back with its arms folded and watch rebels backed by the Western powers and conservative Arab states overthrow the Assad government? Russia has a small naval depot at Tartus, Syria, but it is hardly of major strategic importance. Of more concern to Moscow is that its influence in the Levant and Caucasus, which is being relentlessly chipped away by the US and its allies.

If Israel continues and intensifies its air strikes and goes after the S-300’s when they are operational (which could take up to one year), Russia may be forced to intervene militarily just as it did in Egypt in 1970 during the “War of Attrition” on the Suez Canal. Russian anti-aircraft missile batteries and fighter squadrons battled Israel air power to a stalemate over the Canal and western Sinai.

Syria’s civil war is clearly threatening to turn into a regional conflagration that involves both the subplot a Sunni-Shia conflict and blatant outside military intervention reminiscent of the 1930’s Spanish civil war. There is also a deeper theme: a major effort to crush Syria, Iran’s sole Arab ally. Right after US forces entered Baghdad in 2003, Israel’s then prime minister Ariel Sharon urged Washington, “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” This time around, the route to Tehran runs via Damascus.

The western powers were lulled into over-confidence by their easy victory against feeble Libya. An armed rabble from Benghazi, NATO air power and special forces made quick work of Ghadaffi’s toy army. But Syria, as we see, will not be push-over and may result in a ghastly Lebanese-style civil war that could last for a decade.

Worse, it could draw Russia, which has been quietly fuming over US-led efforts to push NATO right up to its borders in the Baltic, Eastern Europe and Caucasus, to send its military forces into action. The one thing the nuclear-armed United States and Russia must avoid at all costs is a head-on confrontation over Syria.

A political settlement remains the way out of this mess.

The Best of Eric Margolis

In the later 1990’s, I was invited to a small dinner in New York given for the Dalai Lama. All of the guests came expecting to hear His Holiness explain the meaning of life.

To their bewilderment, the Dalai Lama gave a rather long, detailed talk about the history of Himalayan border problems between India, China and his own Chinese-occupied Tibet. This subject had always fascinated me – and I was the only person who knew anything about this remote region.

That dinner with the Dalai Lama inspired me to write my first book, War at the Top of the World, a geopolitical overview of the conflicts in the high Himalayas and Karakoram mountains and in Afghanistan.

I predicted that in coming years, China and India would fight a major war over their poorly demarcated, 4,000 km Himalayan border and vie to dominate strategic Burma, China’s route to the Indian Ocean.

Thank the British for this historic Himalayan mess. The British created MacMahon Line, poorly drew the wild, little-known border of the British Indian Raj and Tibet. Legend has it that the British used a thick tipped pen to draw the line on a map, leaving a wide area undefined. China refuses to recognize this British Imperial creation – today, India’s Arunachal Pradesh.

In 1962, India and China fought a brief but bloody border along India’s eastern mountain border in what was then called Northeast Frontier Agency, and in the western region of Ladakh, often called “Little Tibet,” the westernmost extension of the Tibetan Plateau.

The Indian Army was badly defeated by the Chinese, who could have pushed on to take Calcutta. But Chairman Mao called off the war, claiming India had been taught a “lesson.” India indeed learned a lesson: it began arming and preparing for future mountain wars with China. Since then, tensions have periodically flared on and off along the Indo-Tibetan border.

Near Ladakh lies Aksai Chin, a vast wilderness of frozen peaks and lakes at an average altitude of 4,600 meters that China seized from India in the 1950’s in order to build a military road linking its western-most province of Xinjiang to Tibet.

Smack in the middle of the towering mountains is the vast, poorly demarcated Siachen Glacier at an average 6,000 meters altitude. Starting in the mid-1980’s, India and China have fought over this almost airless white hell in the highest war in history. I observed combat between Pakistani commandos and Indian mountain troups there in the late 1980’s.

In mid-April of this year, Chinese troops set up a series of small encampments in Indian Ladakh. India moved troops nearby.

India, which believes it is being surrounded by China and Chinese allies, reacted with great alarm to the small incursions. For a time, there was talk in India’s media of a new war with China. But after three weeks of nationalist uproar by India’s militant Hind parties, both sides calmed down and agreed to withdraw their troops.

But, according to many Indian analysts, China had scored a big point by getting parts of India’s border to be called “disputed territory,” a time-honored ploy so often used by Israel in claiming Arab lands.

India remains deeply worried by the relentless Chinese strategic buildup on the Tibetan plateau: new air and missile bases; military roads, depots and barracks; radars and other electronic intelligence systems. Chinese forces in Tibet literally look down on India’s plains.

Equally worrisome for India, many of its major rivers that provide hundreds of millions of its people with water and nourish crops originate in or near Chinese-ruled Tibet.

Indian and Chinese officials have conducted polite but unproductive border talks for years. More are set to be held.

But neither side appears ready to make serious concessions.

Meanwhile, Indian-Chinese trade is growing and has reached $10 billion per annum, but the strategic confrontation continues, with growing Indian alarms over China’s push into the Indian Ocean, which Delhi considers its “mare nostrum.”

Add to Himalayan tensions India’s mounting concerns over China’s involvement in new port-building in Pakistan’s Baluchistan, Burma and Sri Lanka. One never knows, my prediction of a clash between the two Asian giants may yet come to pass.

The Best of Eric Margolis

America owes Russia a big apology for the embarrassing case of bumbling CIA spy Ryan Fogel caught red-handed in Moscow trying to recruit a Russian agent.

Shame on the US. What ever happened to professional respect? Russia has always been the grand master of espionage. In Russia, spying is a high art form, like ballet.

Having been given an exclusive visit to the KGB’s museum of espionage, I can heartily attest to Russia’s mastery of spying. Too bad most people don’t known how masterful and patient the Russian were – and continue to be.

Sending an amateur American spy on a ham-handed attempt to recruit a Russian agent was an insult to the profession. Russia deserves the top US agents, not bumblers from the backwoods.

Agent Fogel, under thin diplomatic cover as third secretary at the US Moscow Embassy, was certainly no James Bond. More like agent 000. According to the Ruskis, he even had a nifty little spy kit with a Swiss Army knife, map of Moscow, two wigs, and compass. And a letter offering a bribe of “up to” $1 million to work for CIA.

Why didn’t CIA just run a spy-wanted ad in Moscow’s Pravda newspaper?

A counter-story was immediately spread that the bumbling Fogel was somehow trying to glean information related to the recent Boston bombing.

Coming just before crucially important US-Soviet talks over Syria, the Fogel affair was either incredibly inept or a crude attempt to sabotage the peace talks.

Agent 000’s case underlines concerns of veteran US intelligence professionals that CIA has become too absorbed running its own paramilitary operations around the globe and hunting so-called terrorists to pay proper attention to its basic business of gathering information.

The Cold War is long over, but intelligence operations continue at a higher intensity than during the long US-Soviet confrontation. China’s spies are increasingly active across the globe, particularly so in the US and Canada, but also in Russia.

Even allies spy on one another, most often to acquire advanced technology. The venerable “honey trap” where an attractive female agent seduces a target remains a favorite of the Russians, French, Israel’s Mossad, and, yes, the prudish CIA.

I recall nights in my awful Moscow hotel waiting for lovely Soviet female agents called “swallows” to tempt my devotion to the Free World. Alas, none ever came.

This writer has closely followed Soviet, then Russian intelligence operations . In 1989, I was the first journalist ever allowed into KGB headquarters at Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison. I interviewed two senior KGB generals who told me the Soviet Union was about to collapse due to the ineptitude of the Communist Party.

“What we need,” said one, “is a leader who will make Russians work at bayonet point, like Chile’s Pinochet or South Korea’s Park Chung-hee.” A decade later, they got their wish in the form of a former tough KGB/FSB agent, Vladimir Putin.

In spite of America’s self-congratulation over its victory in the Cold War, there is little doubt in my mind that though Moscow’s empire collapse into ruins, the Soviet KGB bested America’s CIA and other western spy agencies.

KGB and GRU(military intelligence) put agents into President Roosevelt’s White House. At the infamous Yalta Conference that divided up Europe, I saw the palace where Roosevelt and the US delegation stayed that was bugged from basement to roof by the KGB. The naïve Americans didn’t even think to look for bugs. In the early 1990’s, I saw the new US Embassy in Moscow that was so filled with bugs it was a giant microphone. The US had given the construction contract to a Russian company!

Soviet moles Aldrich Ames and John Walker handed America’s most precious secrets to Moscow. KGB spies like Philby, Burgess, Lonsdale and Blake came very close to destroying Britain’s intelligence agency MI6, and wrecking France’s spy outfit, SDECE.

In the end, the Soviet KGB managed to survive the Soviet collapse, re-emerging as FSB and SVR foreign intelligence from the KGB’s elite First Directorate. While CIA and the 15 other US intelligence agencies enjoy leadership in electronic, air and space-based intelligence(ELINT), their human intelligence (HUMINT) has lagged way behind the Soviets/Russians. US HUMINT about the Mideast, Iran and especially North Korea is poor.

Two years ago this week, US special forces shot and killed Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man.

American TV is filled with chest-thumping and flag-waving about how bin Laden was hunted down and executed. For most Americans, bin Laden was the acme of evil and author of the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people. Good riddance.

Hunting “bad guys” is a venerable American tradition from the days of the Wild West and the Roaring 20’s: Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger. The TV program “America’s Most Wanted” remains one of the nation’s most popular programs. Osama bin Laden was the ultimate most wanted.

However, this simplistic “good guys v. bad guys” tale remains troubled by the facts. Why, for example, was a clearly retired bin Laden living without bodyguards in a villa in Abbottabad, Pakistan? Was he really found by the CIA’s patient detective work, or betrayed for the $25 million put on his head by Washington? Did Pakistan really not know Osama was in Abbotabad, and hour’s drive from its capital, Islamabad?

Why was bin Laden executed gangland style and not brought to stand proper trial in New York City? A trial could have finally determined if he was in truth the author of 9/11, as alleged by the US government and media. If not, who was?

Circumstantial evidence regarding 9/11 points to bin Laden. But he always denied responsibility for the attacks, though he applauded them after the fact. The Afghan Communists produced fakes tapes supposedly showing bin Laden demonstrating how the attacks were made. These fakes tapes ran widely on US TV.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Hamburg, Germany and, apparently, Madrid, Spain, not by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, as the US claimed. The planners and executors of the attacks were mostly Saudis, not Afghans.

After the attack, US Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded Afghanistan’s Taliban government hand over bin Laden. Taliban refused to do so without a proper extradition request detailing bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11. Powell promised to issue a White Paper about bin Laden’s guilt, but never did so. Why? Probably because the US could not assemble a convincing case. US forces invaded Afghanistan and began their hunt for the elusive bin Laden.

The Bush administration, caught sleeping on guard duty, needed a target for America’s fury over 9/11: Afghanistan, Taliban (which had nothing to do with 9/11), bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization were blamed. Al-Qaida was wildly exaggerated by western governments and media into a nefarious worldwide network of fanatical Islamic conspirators worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu.

I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the birth of al-Qaida and spent many hours with its founder, Sheik Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor. Al-Qaida was a rest house for jihadists going to fight in Afghanistan; it never had more than a few hundred members. Al-Qaida was not run by CIA, but the US planned to use bin Laden’s men against Muslim regions of western China in the event of a US-China war.

Al-Qaida’s so-called “terrorist training camps” in Afghanistan were in fact mostly run by Pakistani intelligence to train guerillas for use in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Al-Qaida was dedicated to battling Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Afghan Communists, and KGB agents of influence, warlords Ahmad Massoud and Rashid Dostam.

In 2010, then CIA chief Leon Panetta admitted there may only be 25-50 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan. But the convenient myth of al-Qaida continues. While America glories in killing bin Laden, many in the Muslim world still see him as an Arab Che Guevara, one man against the mighty US imperial order. Most Muslims disapproved of the 9/11 attacks, yet many felt a sneaking admiration for the Saudi firebrand whose goal was to drive western influence from the Muslim world.

Osama bin Laden is dead, and discarded at sea in true pirate “dead men tell no tales” tradition. But the anti-western movement he began is alive and growing: al-Qaida was not an organic organization but a trans-national movement.

Anti-western groups have sprung about across the Mideast, Africa, Central and South Asia. Many have adopted the al-Qaida brand name. That was bin Laden’s plan.

While the United States beats the war drums over North Korea and Iran’s long-ranged nuclear armed missiles –which they don’t even possess – Washington remains curiously silent about the arrival of the world’s newest member of the big nuke club – India.

In January, Delhi revealed a new, 800km-ranged submarine launched missile (SLBM) designated K-15. Twelve of these strategic, nuclear-armed missiles will be carried by India’s first of a class of domestically built nuclear-powered submarine, “Arihant.” India is also working on another SLBM, K-5, with a range of some 2,800km.

These new nuclear subs and their SLBM’s will give India the capability to strike many high-value targets around the globe. Equally important, they complete India’s nuclear triad of nuclear weapons delivered by aircraft, missiles, and now sea that will be invulnerable to a decapitating first strike from either Pakistan or China.

Last February, it was revealed that India is fast developing a new, long-ranged, three-stage ballistic missile, Agni-VI. This powerful missile is said to be able to carry up to ten independently targetable nuclear warheads, known as MIRV’s.

Agni-VI’s range is believed to be at least 10,000km, putting all of China, Japan, Australia, and Russia in its range. A new 15,000km missile capable of hitting North America is also in the works under cover of India’s civilian space program. India is also developing accurate cruise missiles and miniaturized nuclear warheads to fit into their small diameter.

These important strategic developments will put India ahead of other nuclear powers France, Britain, North Korea, and Pakistan, about equal in striking power to Israel and China, and not too far behind the United States and Russia.

Delhi says it needs a nuclear triad because of the growing threat of China, whose conventional and nuclear forces are being rapidly modernized.

This writer has been reporting on the nuclear arms race between India and China since the late 1990’s. China has replaced Pakistan as India’s primary nuclear threat. Even so, Indian and Pakistani nuclear forces remain on a frightening hair-trigger alert within only a 3-5 minute warning time of enemy attack, making the Kashmir cease-fire line (or Line of Control) the world’s most dangerous border.

The Bush administration began quietly aiding India’s nuclear program with nuclear fuel when India had a shortage of fissile material. Some advanced technology from the US and India’s second largest arms supplier, Israel, has also aided Delhi’s nuclear and missile delivery programs.

India, as I wrote years ago after one of its big nuclear tests, is feeling its “nuclear Viagra.” Most Indians take great pride in their strategic nuclear programs as their way into the great power’s exclusive nuclear club.

But not all Indians are so delighted, particularly those on the left who ask how their nation, with one third of all the world’s poorest people, can afford to spend tens of billions on advanced weapons, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and ICBM’s.

According to the World Bank, 32.7% of Indians subsist below the international poverty level of $1.25 daily, and 68.7% on less than $2 daily. Aid agencies say 33% of Indian children are malnourished.

Delhi is making steady progress in reducing poverty and disease, and in trying to break down the pernicious caste system that dooms a quarter of Indians to lives of misery.

This, critics claim, is no time to be posturing as a world power when Mother India still has feet of clay.

The Bush administration was totally unaware that India’s advent as a major nuclear power whose weapons might one day challenge the United States. Bush & Co. wanted India to bulk up as a competitor to China, a permanent enemy of the Republican hard right. Today’s Republicans think similarly.

India is a great democracy where politicians, not generals, make policy. She is a staunch friend of the United States, where over one million Indians now live. True enough, but we have seen there are no permanent friends in world politics, only permanent interests.

One day mighty India may vie for influence with the US for Mideast and Central Asian oil, and control of the Indian Ocean’s vital sea lanes. But not today, as all eyes are on pipsqueak North Korea and dilapidated Iran.

This column was first published in 2010.

There is an old saying about the fierce Chechen tribes who inhabit southern Russia’s Caucasus mountains: “Chechen cannot ever be defeated. They can only be killed.”

Chechen are Russia’s nemesis. Even the notoriously brutal Russian mafia fears the ferocious Chechen, and for good reason.

Last year, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proudly proclaimed that resistance to Russian rule in the North Caucasus had been eliminated. The region was pacified.

Confounding Putin’s claim, Chechen suicide bombers hit Moscow’s subway last week, killing 39 and injuring over 70. Chechen suicide bombers in Dagestan killed twelve, mostly policemen. There were further attacks in neighboring Dagestan. The North Caucasus was again at a boil.

The attacks seriously rattled Russians and left the Kremlin deeply embarrassed and enraged.

Two “black widows” – wives or daughters of Chechen independence fighters killed or raped by the Russians (Russians call them “Islamic terrorists” and “bandits”) – took their revenge last week, as so often in recent years.

The latest Chechen leader, Doku Umarov – all his predecessors were liquidated by Russia – claimed from his hideout in the Caucasus mountains that the subway attacks were reprisal for the recent killing of Chechen civilians by Russian security forces.

He warned Moscow, “we will make you feel what we feel.”

In recent years, Chechen “black widows” have brought down two civilian airliners. Other Chechen hijacked an entire Moscow theater, and derailed the “Alexander Nevsky” Express that runs from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Chechen are a tiny but fierce North Caucasian mountain people of Indo-European origin. They, and other Muslim Caucasian tribes, such as Dagestanis and Cherkass (Circasians), have battled Russian imperial rule for the past 300 years.

In 1877, Imperial Russia killed 40% of the Chechen population of about 220,000. Four hundred thousand Cherkass were expelled.

Stalin, from neighboring Georgia, hated Chechen. He divided Chechnya, creating the republic of Ingushetia. Then, in July 1937, his secret police, NKVD, shot 14,000 Chechen.

In 1944, Stalin ordered the entire Chechen people rounded up and shipped in cattle cars to his Siberian concentration camps or dumped to perish into icy fields. Other Muslims followed: Ingush, Tatars, Karachai, Balkars.

Neither bullets nor gas chambers were needed in Stalin’s death camps. A third of the prisoners died each year from cold, starvation or disease in the concentration camps. In all, some 2.5 million Soviet Muslims were murdered by Stalin, “the Breaker of Nations,” among them half of the Chechen people.

In my new book, American Raj, I entitle the section on the Chechen, “Genocide in the Caucasus.”

Gulag survivors filtered back to Chechnya. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechen demanded independence like the Soviet republics.

Instead, Boris Yeltsin’s government invaded Chechnya, killing some 100,000 Chechen civilians through massive carpet bombing and shelling. Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev was assassinated, reportedly thanks to telephone homing equipment supplied to Moscow by the US National Security Agency. President Bill Clinton actually lauded Boris Yeltsin as “Russia’s Abraham Lincoln.”

Incredibly, Chechen fighters managed to defeat Russia’s army and won de facto independence.

But in 1999, apartment buildings in Russia were bombed, killing some 200 people, and creating a national panic.

Chechen “terrorists” were immediately blamed. But there was disturbing evidence that government agents staged the bombing to justify invading Chechnya.

Moscow media reported that a group of Federal Security Service (FSB – the successor to the KGB’s internal security service) agents were caught red-handed planting explosives in an apartment building. They claimed the explosives were merely bags of “sugar,” part of a “test.”

An ex-FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, joined other critics in accusing the government of a false flag operation in staging the attacks to justify a new war against the Chechen. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London.

Litvinenko also accused the Kremlin of being behind the murder of the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She told me before her death that she was marked for assassination by the government because of her stinging exposés of Russia’s human rights violations in Chechnya.

FSB chief Vladimir Putin was catapulted into power by the anti-Chechen hysteria caused by the mysterious bombings. Two years later, the eerily similar 9/11 attacks would similarly turn George Bush from a non-entity into a hero, and provide a pretext for the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

Powerful Russian forces invaded and crushed the life out of Chechen resistance. All moderate Chechen leaders were assassinated, the last in Qatar in 2004, leaving mostly militant Islamists. A Moscow-installed Chechen puppet regime imposed a rein of terror upon the population, using torture, murder, mass reprisals, hostages and rape.

The world ignored these violations but paid rapt attention to another crime, the death of over 300 Russian child hostages in the still murky school massacre at Beslan.

The outside world totally ignored the death of another 100,000 Chechen after Moscow successfully branded them, “Islamic terrorists.” A quarter of the Chechen people, Muslims and Russians, died from 1991 until 2010, not counting Stalin’s mass murder. But Chechen keep fighting on.

Moscow worries insurrection is spreading across its soft Caucasus underbelly. President Dimitri Medvedev made laudable efforts to humanize Russia’s rule there. But after the subway atrocity, Putin and Medvedev vow to “destroy” remaining resistance in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Moscow should end this historical tragedy by granting Chechnya independence. Doing so is of course risky: it could spark demands by other Caucasian Muslims for independence, and enflame some of Russia’s 20 million-strong Muslim minority – though most still appear content to live in the Russian Federation.

An independent Chechnya could also open another door to growing US penetration of the Caucasus and campaign to encircle Russia. The US and Russia came frighteningly close to a head-on clash over Georgia. The Cold War has not ended.

An independent Chechnya would be unstable and violent. But that is better than the savagery and atrocities that this terrible conflict continues to generate.

Modern Russia needs to set the Chechen free.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” wrote Karl Marx.

Exhibit A: look at Pakistan this week where former dictator Pervez Musharraf’s monkeyshines made a laughing-stock of the nation created in 1947 to be a model of good government for the world’s Muslims.

The former self-styled “president-general returned from exile last month to run in Pakistan’s May elections for reasons no one understands. My best guess is egomania.

Musharraf, who faces a wide variety of legal charges ranging from corruption to murder and treason, was allowed back under a pre-arranged bail. But on Thursday, as Musharraf was in court for a hearing, bail was revoked. The former president-general and his bodyguards bolted from the courthouse and fled to his farm compound outside Islamabad where he remains as of this writing. Farce indeed.

Gen. Musharraf overthrew the elected government of Nawaz Sharif in 1999, after Nawaz tried to dismiss him. What began as a personal feud soon drew in the United States after 9/11.

According to Musharraf, the “US put a gun to my head” and demanded Pakistan allow itself to be semi-occupied and join the war against Taliban – or be bombed back to the Stone Age.

Washington much liked Gen. Musharraf’s military dictatorship. Without its full support, the US could not have waged war in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s ports, air bases, supply routes and military were essential to the US war effort. In return, Pakistan received at least $1.5 billion annually and untold “black” payments to high-ranking officials. “Mush,” as he was known in Washington was hailed as the latest in a long line of “our SOB’s.” Part of Pakistan’s army was rented out to support the US-led war in Afghanistan – a move that inflamed the autonomous Northwest Frontier, leading to tribal uprisings against Islamabad.

Under Musharraf, large numbers of opponents and Taliban supporters disappeared at US behest. Prisoners were tortured and abused. But overall, Mush was not as brutal a dictator as his Central Asian or Mideastern counterparts. Yet his arrest of senior members of Pakistan’s high courts who were investigating his crimes eventually led to his downfall.

There was something strange about the little general. He was certainly not up to Pakistan’s take-no-prisoners politics, and gave in to Washington far too readily. He seemed a bit dazed and uncertain if he really wanted to lead Pakistan. He showed the same signs when he arrived in Islamabad last month.

I interviewed him soon after he seized power and I found him weak and totally without charisma. Having met most of Pakistan’s leaders and top fire-breathing generals, and much admiring the tough Zia ul-Haq, I was deeply disappointed by Musharraf. “You’re no Zia,” I recall saying to myself as we were talking.

Pakistani, by and large also rejected Musharraf; many accused him of being a stooge of Washington. Seeing his support slipping away, Washington sought to kick him aside and install its favorite, Benazir Bhutto, as president. I was with Benazir in Washington as she was trying to line up US support for her return.

Soon after Benazir returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile to campaign for office, I warned her about her security and urged her to stay behind bullet-proof plexiglass, as India’s leaders do. She told me she had to mix with the public: “it is our way in Pakistan.”

On 27 Dec. 2007 she was murdered in Rawalpindi by a bombing and shooting attack on her convoy. Her supporters claimed that either Musharraf or Pakistani Taliban were behind the attack. But shortly before she was killed, Benazir told me in a phone call that if she were assassinated, the culprits would be powerful Punjabi supporters of Gen. Musharraf.

No proof has yet emerged that Musharraf was linked to Bhutto’s murder. But he should clear his name at minimum as a service to the nation lest Pakistan be sneered at as being run by murderous cutthroats.

Mush has much to answer for. Most of all, high treason. I think he was crazy to return to Pakistan where fair trials are even rarer than honest politicians. Recklessly brave, out of touch with reality, or hoping Washington will return him to power? Hard to say.

Korea, wrote the famed German expert on geopolitics Baron Haushofer a century ago, was one of the world’s five most strategic areas. So it remains today, as China, Russia, Japan and the United States vie for influence on the peninsula and the waters around it.

The latest crisis over Korea began in March with an annual major military exercise by the US and South Korea designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea. The flight of US B-52 and B-2 heavy bombers 30 km from North Korea’s border was a clear warning to North Korea to cease its nuclear program.

Instead of the usual fulminations against the US and South Korea, the new North Korean dynastic regime of Kim Jung-un issue a blizzard of war threats that included nuclear strikes against the US – something that Pyongyang is quite unable to do. But the storm of hot air raised the danger of an accidental military clash that could quickly escalate to all-out war in which tactical nuclear weapons might well be used.

Until this past week, the Korea crisis has been more or less run by the US Pentagon. Amazingly, South Korea’s tough 600,000-man armed forces are under the command of a US four-star general 60 years after the end of the Korean War, backed up by 28,500 US troops that include a full heavy infantry division,

North Korea calls itself the “true Korea,” denouncing the South as “puppets of the US imperialists.” Interestingly, some studies show that many South Koreans share this view and are proud of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program though they want no part of its socialism and self-reliant policy know as “juche.”

Now, the US has finally deployed its diplomatic muscle by sending the new Secretary of State John Kerry to Beijing to try to arm-twist China into clamping down on its errant bad boy, North Korea. The result was a joint communiqué calling on the US and China to jointly pursue the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

China has long advocated this policy, so nothing new here. But the North American media hailed it as a breakthrough in the crisis. In fact, China is not happy with North Korea’s nuclear program, but Beijing considers an independent, stable North Korea essential for the security of its highly sensitive northeast region of Machuria.

Chinese strategists fear the collapse of the Kim dynasty in North Korea would lead to the US-dominated South Korea absorbing the north and even implanting US bases within range of Manchuria and the maritime approaches to Beijing. In 1950, China responded to the advance of US forces onto its Manchurian border, the Yalu River, by intervening in the Korean War with over 1.5 million soldiers.

The collapse of North Korea would also move South Korean and US military power 200 km closer to Russia’s key Far Eastern population and military complex at Vladivostok.

Accordingly, China’s strategy to date has been to talk moderation and issue occasional blasts at North Korea to appease the outside world and its major American trading partner while quietly ensuring that North Korea remains viable. China supplies all of North Korea’s oil, part of its food, and large amounts of industrial and military spare parts.

North Korea’s Kim Jung-un appears to have climbed too far out on a limb by issuing dire threats that include nuclear war. His problem is to climb back without losing too much face or appearing to be forced by the United States.

Prestige is a key factor in dictatorship. An obvious defeat can lead to the dictator’s fall. That’s why Hitler refused to retreat from the deathtrap at Stalingrad, rightly fearing such a loss of prestige and his mystique of military genius would encourage his domestic foes to move against him.

So Kim will likely need Beijing’s help in ending the crisis, and Beijing will be both happy to do so and end up in a position to demand useful concessions from Washington.

Beijing has been claiming that the US whipped up the current Korea crisis to justify deploying new military forces to Asia and emplacing more anti-missile systems in Alaska and a new one in Guam – all part of President Barack Obama’s much heralded “pivot to Asia.”

Recently by Eric Margolis: War in Korea

Korea, wrote the famed German expert on geopolitics Baron Haushofer a century ago, was one of the world's five most strategic areas. So it remains today, as China, Russia, Japan and the United States vie for influence on the peninsula and the waters around it.

The latest crisis over Korea began in March with an annual major military exercise by the US and South Korea designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea. The flight of US B-52 and B-2 heavy bombers 30 km from North Korea's border was a clear warning to North Korea to cease its nuclear program.

Instead of the usual fulminations against the US and South Korea, the new North Korean dynastic regime of Kim Jung-un issue a blizzard of war threats that included nuclear strikes against the US — something that Pyongyang is quite unable to do. But the storm of hot air raised the danger of an accidental military clash that could quickly escalate to all-out war in which tactical nuclear weapons might well be used.

Until this past week, the Korea crisis has been more or less run by the US Pentagon. Amazingly, South Korea's tough 600,000-man armed forces are under the command of a US four-star general 60 years after the end of the Korean War, backed up by 28,500 US troops that include a full heavy infantry division,

North Korea calls itself the "true Korea," denouncing the South as "puppets of the US imperialists." Interestingly, some studies show that many South Koreans share this view and are proud of North Korea's nuclear weapons program though they want no part of its socialism and self-reliant policy know as "juche."

Now, the US has finally deployed its diplomatic muscle by sending the new Secretary of State John Kerry to Beijing to try to arm-twist China into clamping down on its errant bad boy, North Korea. The result was a joint communiqué calling on the US and China to jointly pursue the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

China has long advocated this policy, so nothing new here. But the North American media hailed it as a breakthrough in the crisis. In fact, China is not happy with North Korea's nuclear program, but Beijing considers an independent, stable North Korea essential for the security of its highly sensitive northeast region of Machuria.

Chinese strategists fear the collapse of the Kim dynasty in North Korea would lead to the US-dominated South Korea absorbing the north and even implanting US bases within range of Manchuria and the maritime approaches to Beijing. In 1950, China responded to the advance of US forces onto its Manchurian border, the Yalu River, by intervening in the Korean War with over 1.5 million soldiers.

The collapse of North Korea would also move South Korean and US military power 200 km closer to Russia's key Far Eastern population and military complex at Vladivostok.

Accordingly, China's strategy to date has been to talk moderation and issue occasional blasts at North Korea to appease the outside world and its major American trading partner while quietly ensuring that North Korea remains viable. China supplies all of North Korea's oil, part of its food, and large amounts of industrial and military spare parts.

North Korea's Kim Jung-un appears to have climbed too far out on a limb by issuing dire threats that include nuclear war. His problem is to climb back without losing too much face or appearing to be forced by the United States.

Prestige is a key factor in dictatorship. An obvious defeat can lead to the dictator's fall. That's why Hitler refused to retreat from the deathtrap at Stalingrad, rightly fearing such a loss of prestige and his mystique of military genius would encourage his domestic foes to move against him.

So Kim will likely need Beijing's help in ending the crisis, and Beijing will be both happy to do so and end up in a position to demand useful concessions from Washington.

Beijing has been claiming that the US whipped up the current Korea crisis to justify deploying new military forces to Asia and emplacing more anti-missile systems in Alaska and a new one in Guam — all part of President Barack Obama's much heralded "pivot to Asia."

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

The Best of Eric Margolis

The intensifying war of words between North Korea on one hand and the United States and ally South Korea on the other risks igniting a major conflict.

North Korea’s young new leader Kim Jong-un appears to be trying to use this crisis to force Washington into recognizing his nation, normalizing relations, and ending 60 years of US-led economic warfare against the North.

But it’s a very dangerous gamble. An accidental clash at sea, in the air, or along the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas could quickly escalate to war.

What would such a war in Korea look like?

First, nuclear conflict is unlikely. North Korea is not believed to have any long-ranged nuclear weapons, certainly none that could hit North America. North Korea might be able to strike South Korea or even Japan with a nuclear device. But then US nuclear weapons would wipe North Korea off the map.

The Pyongyang government of Kim Jong-un is not suicidal.

For a nation of under 25 million, North Korea has a potent sting: its tough army has 1.1 million active troops and 6 million reserves. North Korea’s military strategy would be to launch a surprise attack on the south to occupy Seoul and Inchon.

The vital US Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, and eight South Korean air bases, would be primary targets along with the major port installations at Inchon and Busan (formerly Pusan).

North Korea’s elite 88,000 special forces units are tasked to attack and neutralize these air bases and ports as well as headquarters, communication nodes, and munitions depots of the US and Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. What the Pentagon calls “leadership targets” would also be high on Pyongyang’s hit list.

Barrages of North Korean conventional missiles would hit these bases and command hubs, some possibly with chemical warheads.

Special North Korean amphibious units would land and strike these targets from the sea. North Korea has 300 old Soviet-era AN-2 biplanes that carry ten commandos each. Invisible to radar because they are made of fabric and hug the earth, the AN-2’s would air assault suicide squads into US and ROK airbases and command headquarters.

Other North Korean special forces are tasked with attacking US bases in Okinawa, Japan and as far off as Guam, where the US is installing its new THAAD anti-missile system.

North Korea has developed potent electronic warfare capability that would degrade US/South Korean communications and online targets as well as attacking America’s internet.

Meanwhile, 14,000 North Korean heavy guns and rocket batteries dug into caves behind the DMZ could pour storms of shells or rockets onto US/ROK positions south of the DMZ. North Korea’s powerful 170mm guns and 240mm rockets have a range of 50 and 45 km respectively. Large parts of Seoul would be heavily damaged.

North Korea has about 700,000 soldiers within 150km of the DMZ, with another 400,000 in backup echelons further north. These divisions would fight their way south through South Korea’s “Maginot Line,” seven parallel lines of anti-tank ditches, minefields, and high earth walls surmounted by tanks. South Korea denies this defense line exists, but I have seen it.

In spite of intense air attacks by the US and ROK, the North Korean offensive would cross the wide Han River and could likely reach at least as far south as Seoul, only 90 minutes drive from the DMZ. That is, provided that North Korea’s special forces have seriously degraded US airpower and communications in South Korea.

US retaliation would be ferocious. US and ROK warplanes would quickly attain air superiority over the entire peninsula. North Korea’s 70 airbases would be obliterated and its obsolescent 1970’s vintage air force quickly neutralized.

North Korea’s navy, composed of light craft and small submarines would share a similar fate. US warplanes would pound North Korea’s command and control, communications, rail lines, bridges and all factories not buried underground.

During the 1950-53 Korean War, US B-29 heavy bombers literally flattened North Korea. That’s why North Korea reacted so furiously when US B-52 heavy bombers and B-2 Stealth bombers skirted its borders late last month, triggering off this latest crisis. The B-2 can deliver the fearsome ‘MOAB’ 30,000 lb bomb called “the Mother of All Bombs” designed to destroy deep underground command HQ’s (read Kim Jong-un’s bunker) and underground nuclear facilities.

Since the 1950’s, the North Koreans have buried much of their military-industrial complex and continue to train their ground forces in small unit, off-the-road tactics. The North also has a militia of 1.6 million to defend key targets and factories.

Unless the US uses tactical nuclear weapons, it will be difficult to defeat North Korea unless its army turns on the Kim dynasty. An invasion of North Korea would prove a risky operation that might invite Chinese intervention, as it did in 1950. However, the US has hinted over the years that it may use tactical nuclear weapons to halt another North Korean invasion of South Korea.

Moreover, US ground and air forces are bogged down in Afghanistan and the Mideast, their equipment is run down, and the US Treasury seriously out of money. A real war in Korea might plunge the US into a depression. One must wonder if Kim Jong-un and his advisors have chosen this moment when Washington is over-stretched abroad to challenge the US.

The Pentagon estimated a full-scale invasion of North Korea could cost 250,000 American casualties. In short, a real war, not the police actions launched by the US in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recently by Eric Margolis: War Scare in Korea — AManufacturedCrisis

The intensifying war of words between North Korea on one hand and the United States and ally South Korea on the other risks igniting a major conflict.

North Korea's young new leader Kim Jong-un appears to be trying to use this crisis to force Washington into recognizing his nation, normalizing relations, and ending 60 years of US-led economic warfare against the North.

But it's a very dangerous gamble. An accidental clash at sea, in the air, or along the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas could quickly escalate to war.

What would such a war in Korea look like?

First, nuclear conflict is unlikely. North Korea is not believed to have any long-ranged nuclear weapons, certainly none that could hit North America. North Korea might be able to strike South Korea or even Japan with a nuclear device. But then US nuclear weapons would wipe North Korea off the map.

The Pyongyang government of Kim Jong-un is not suicidal.

For a nation of under 25 million, North Korea has a potent sting: its tough army has 1.1 million active troops and 6 million reserves. North Korea's military strategy would be to launch a surprise attack on the south to occupy Seoul and Inchon.

The vital US Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, and eight South Korean air bases, would be primary targets along with the major port installations at Inchon and Busan (formerly Pusan).

North Korea's elite 88,000 special forces units are tasked to attack and neutralize these air bases and ports as well as headquarters, communication nodes, and munitions depots of the US and Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. What the Pentagon calls "leadership targets" would also be high on Pyongyang's hit list.

Barrages of North Korean conventional missiles would hit these bases and command hubs, some possibly with chemical warheads.

Special North Korean amphibious units would land and strike these targets from the sea. North Korea has 300 old Soviet-era AN-2 biplanes that carry ten commandos each. Invisible to radar because they are made of fabric and hug the earth, the AN-2's would air assault suicide squads into US and ROK airbases and command headquarters.

Other North Korean special forces are tasked with attacking US bases in Okinawa, Japan and as far off as Guam, where the US is installing its new THAAD anti-missile system.

North Korea has developed potent electronic warfare capability that would degrade US/South Korean communications and online targets as well as attacking America's internet.

Meanwhile, 14,000 North Korean heavy guns and rocket batteries dug into caves behind the DMZ could pour storms of shells or rockets onto US/ROK positions south of the DMZ. North Korea's powerful 170mm guns and 240mm rockets have a range of 50 and 45 km respectively. Large parts of Seoul would be heavily damaged.

North Korea has about 700,000 soldiers within 150km of the DMZ, with another 400,000 in backup echelons further north. These divisions would fight their way south through South Korea's "Maginot Line," seven parallel lines of anti-tank ditches, minefields, and high earth walls surmounted by tanks. South Korea denies this defense line exists, but I have seen it.

In spite of intense air attacks by the US and ROK, the North Korean offensive would cross the wide Han Tan River and could and could perhaps reach 30-50km south of Seoul, only 90 minutes drive from the DMZ. That is, provided that North Korea's special forces have seriously degraded US airpower and communications in South Korea.

US retaliation would be ferocious. US and ROK warplanes would quickly attain air superiority over the entire peninsula. North Korea's 70 airbases would be obliterated and its obsolescent 1970's vintage air force quickly neutralized.

North Korea's navy, composed of light craft and small submarines would share a similar fate. US warplanes would pound North Korea's command and control, communications, rail lines, bridges and all factories not buried underground.

During the 1950-53 Korean War, US B-29 heavy bombers literally flattened North Korea. That's why North Korea reacted so furiously when US B-52 heavy bombers and B-2 Stealth bombers skirted its borders late last month, triggering off this latest crisis. The B-2 can deliver the fearsome u2018MOAB' 30,000 lb bomb called "the Mother of All Bombs" designed to destroy deep underground command HQ's (read Kim Jong-un's bunker) and underground nuclear facilities.

Since the 1950's, the North Koreans have buried much of their military-industrial complex and continue to train their ground forces in small unit, off-the-road tactics. The North also has a militia of 1.6 million to defend key targets and factories.

Unless the US uses tactical nuclear weapons, it will be difficult to defeat North Korea unless its army turns on the Kim dynasty. An invasion of North Korea would prove a risky operation that might invite Chinese intervention, as it did in 1950. However, the US has hinted over the years that it may use tactical nuclear weapons to halt another North Korean invasion of South Korea.

Moreover, US ground and air forces are bogged down in Afghanistan and the Mideast, their equipment is run down, and the US Treasury seriously out of money. A real war in Korea might plunge the US into a depression. One must wonder if Kim Jong-un and his advisors have chosen this moment when Washington is over-stretched abroad to challenge the US.

The Pentagon estimated a full-scale invasion of North Korea could cost 250,000 American casualties. In short, a real war, not the police actions launched by the US in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

The Best of Eric Margolis