Australian Productivity Commission launches wage-cutting review

Mike Head

With Australia’s economic position deteriorating rapidly, the Australian Productivity Commission last week spelled out a central thrust of the program being demanded by the financial elite: systemic wage-cutting to match the levels already imposed on the working class in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
Outlining a Liberal-National government-convened review of the country’s workplace relations system, the commission openly canvasses abolishing penalty wage rates for after-hours work and scrapping the minimum wage. These proposals would impoverish wide layers of workers, who depend on penalty rates to survive, and undercut the wages of all workers, far beyond those on the minimum wage.
This signals an historic assault. Together with the minimum wage, higher rates of pay for working shifts on weekends, public holidays, at night or outside regular hours have existed in Australia for more than a century, as a result of hard-fought battles by the working class.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose government is under intense pressure from big business to slash labour costs, as well as impose outstanding budget cuts to social spending, immediately declared his support for the abolition of penalty rates.
Echoing statements by the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry welcoming the review, Abbott said: “If you don’t want to work on a weekend, fair enough, don’t work on a weekend, but if you do want to work on a weekend and lots of people, particularly young people, particularly students would love to work on the weekend, you want to see the employers open to provide jobs.”
This turns reality on its head, of course. Scrapping penalty rates would force millions of workers, particularly the young, to work at any hour of the day or week on low rates of pay, and this would be compounded by the abolition of the minimum wage. A survey last September found that a growing proportion of young workers were already being compelled to work under such conditions. One in four people aged between 18 and 30 had recently worked “cash-in-hand”—that is, illegally, without penalty rates, holidays or other entitlements. Among all workers, the proportion was 13 percent.
While such conditions have been imposed ad hoc until now, what is now being demanded is the wholesale lowering of wages, including the removal of all legal restrictions, via industrial awards and agreements, on minimal pay rates. Real wages officially fell in Australia last year for the first time in 17 years, as the mining boom began to unravel, but they remain significantly above those in rival countries.
One of the designated benchmarks is the United States, where the Obama administration enforced the halving of wages for new hires in the auto industry. The Productivity Commission contrasted Australia’s poverty-line federal minimum wage of $16.87 an hour for adults with the rate in the US, which stands at roughly half that level. Last year, the Abbott government’s Commission of Audit made exactly the same comparison.
Junior minimum rates are already much lower—down to $6.20 an hour for workers aged below 16 years—but even these levels are now too high as far as the corporate and media establishment is concerned.
One of the Productivity Commission’s suggestions is to ditch the minimum wage in favour of income tax credits. In effect, the government would partly subsidise low wages through the tax system. That would be combined with “targeted” welfare payments, supposedly to prevent lower wages from encouraging jobless workers to try to “stay on welfare.”
In other words, a simultaneous dismantling of welfare entitlements is also being prepared in order to ensure that employers have access to a large pool of desperate unemployed. This is under conditions where more than 777,000 workers are now officially unemployed and the jobless rate is rising.
On penalty rates, the review will “investigate” various policy approaches, including whether the setting of rates should be a “choice for individual enterprises and their employees with less or no role by the regulator.” In plain language, that means scrapping penalty payments and giving employers the ability to dictate low flat-rate wages.
To strengthen the capacity of employers to drive down wages and conditions, the Productivity Commission’s five “discussion papers” also target unfair dismissal laws, which set limited constraints on victimising workers, along with the limited right of workers to take industrial action during brief enterprise bargaining periods. Strikes have already dropped to historical lows, because of the ruthless manner in which the trade unions have enforced the Fair Work industrial laws imposed by the previous Labor government, but an even greater suppression of workers’ resistance is now required by business.
The deepening economic crisis driving this offensive was underscored by last weekend’s Australian Financial Review editorial, which began by declaring that 2015 would be “more difficult than anything we could have imagined … one year ago.” Seven years after the global financial breakdown of 2008, its “shadow” loomed around the world. In Australia, “the prices we earn on huge volumes of mineral exports fell around half last year.” The editorial insisted that “hard economic choices” had to be made, including to eliminate “outdated penalty rates.”
The Australian likewise insisted that the Productivity Commission inquiry “raises the curtain on the next great economic reform debate.” Significantly, it declared that Abbott’s government had “proven timid on workplace reform” compared to the “big changes” made by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 via their Accords with the trade unions and the introduction of “enterprise-level bargaining.”
Labor Party leader Bill Shorten, a former union leader, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) feigned opposition to the commission’s wage-cutting agenda and accused the Abbott government of preparing “WorkChoices 2.0.” This is a reference to the Howard government’s deeply unpopular WorkChoices individual contract legislation, which became a major factor in the Coalition government’s defeat in the 2007 election.
Labor and the ACTU are seeking to channel the mass discontent to the Liberal-National government behind the return of a Labor government, as they did in 2007. That campaign paved the way for the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, which only stepped up the assault on jobs and working conditions via the Fair Work laws, with the unions functioning as their industrial police forces.
By 2013, Labor and the unions were already imposing outright wage cuts on workers, including in the auto industry, and that role has since intensified. The Productivity Commission itself drew attention to last April’s stated willingness of a key mining sector union, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), to accept a new enterprise agreement in Western Australia that reduced its members’ wages by up to 20 percent.
This explicit reference to the CFMEU is a warning that the union leadership will step up its efforts to impose the wage-cutting requirements of the corporate elite, and that this offensive would be once again conducted in the closest partnership with any Labor government that replaced Abbott’s increasingly crisis-ridden Liberal-National government.

Berlin mayor resigns: The end of the era

Emma Bode & Serena Nees

On December 11, 2014, Klaus Wowereit, the Social Democratic (SPD) mayor of Berlin, resigned after 13 years in office. The Wowereit era was marked by sharp social divisions, growing poverty and the further enrichment of the city’s already wealthy upper class. Announcing his resignation, Wowereit declared: “I was mayor at the right time.”
In fact, Wowereit proved invaluable to the German ruling class during a period of worsening international economic and political crisis. He was the architect of a state government that for the first time incorporated the post-Stalinist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which later became the Left Party. From 2001 to 2011 Berlin was ruled by a so called “red-red” (SPD-Left Party) Senate, which enforced tough austerity measures in the face of broad popular resistance. The Senate’s services were openly recognized by the media. One day after the Berlin election in 2011 Zeit online described the red-red coalition just voted out of office as “most likely the only conceivable one that could follow through and sustain such austerity measures.” Any other constellation would have been confronted with “persistent protests by those affected...”
In the middle of 2001 Berlin’s governing grand coalition led by Mayor Eberhard Diepgen (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) broke up following a banking scandal, which had triggered huge popular outrage. The state’s majority-owned Bankgesellschaft Berlin (BBS) group was on the brink of bankruptcy due to speculative financial transactions and dividend guarantees for privileged fund holders. One of the main people behind the scandal was former CDU chairman and CEO of the Berlin Mortgage and Bond Certificate Bank, Klaus-Rüdiger Landowski, a close confidant of Diepgen.
The election of Klaus Wowereit as mayor, after a no-confidence vote against Diepgen and the formation of the red-red state government from October 2001 onwards, coincided with the SPD-Green party government at a federal level under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party). The government’s move from Bonn to Berlin had already been in progress for some time following German reunification, and was accompanied by a more assertive German foreign and domestic policy.
For the first time since the end of World War II the German army actively participated in war, first in Yugoslavia and later in Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks were followed by anti-terror campaigns and the buildup of police and intelligence agencies, while at the same time the anti-welfare Hartz laws led to a drastic intensification of social inequality, with severe consequences for the recently reunified city of Berlin, with already high levels of unemployment, especially in the eastern districts of the city.
The red-red Berlin government supported the policies of the federal SPD-Green Party government and its successor in all respects, proving to be a reliable partner and guaranteeing law and order in the capital.
Although the self-enrichment of the wealthy in Berlin had caused great outrage and contributed to the victory of the SPD and the PDS, the new Senate immediately guaranteed the repayment of the bankrupt BBS group’s debt, allocating large sums from the state budget. Wowereit and his finance minister, Thilo Sarrazin, and Left Party economics minister Harald Wolf recouped the missing public funds from the population, by cutting billions in education, along with job and pay cuts and privatizations.
One of the first measures of the red-red administration was quitting the federal state’s tariff community, which led in turn to massive pay cuts for public service employees. Furthermore, the Senate privatized water companies and sold off state-owned housing concerns to speculators, ended the funding of social housing, and closed numerous libraries, public swimming pools and cultural facilities.
The Hartz laws were implemented promptly and vigorously by the senator for social affairs, Heidi Knaake-Werner (PDS-Left Party). In 2006, Wowereit was appointed chair of the supervisory board of the Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH Airport. After many years of delay, as the budget for the project has multiplied many times over, the airport has still not been completed.
During this time the Left Party, in alliance with the local trade unions, played a special role in gridlocking any resistance. The public service union Verdi and its small army of officials, who are members of either the Left Party or SPD, made sure that strikes by teachers, transport and health employees were regularly sold out. They in turn received political cover from a variety of pseudo-left groups, which promoted the red-red Senate as a left alternative to the grand coalition under Diepgen.
At the same time the red-red Senate increased funding for the police and security services, promoted the construction of a new enormous BND headquarters, and limited the right to demonstrate. By the time of the elections for the House of Representatives in 2011, illusions that the PDS had sought to arouse in 2001, that its coalition government with the SPD represented a “left turn,” were gone. The 22.6 percent of the votes that the PDS won in 2001 decreased to 11.7 percent in 2011. The red-red senate was voted out of office, and the discredited CDU returned to government.
Wowereit’s party and political career was bound up with the decline of the SPD. Since its return to government in 1998 under Gerhard Schröder, the SPD has been at the forefront of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy and brutal attacks on social rights, such as the German army operations in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, its support for the right-wing coup in the Ukraine, and the Hartz laws and the related Agenda 2010.
In order to distance Wowereit from these right-wing policies the media portrayed him as a charismatic politician from humble beginnings who was popular due to his folksy and often flippant remarks. Wowereit was proud of the description of the capital city which emerged under his regency—“poor but sexy”. His homosexuality was used to provide a certain liberal façade behind which brutal attacks on the social and political rights of the working class were carried out.
Better-off cultural layers, academics, media personalities, start-ups in the creative scene and the alternative economy, and the self-employed formed an important part of Wowereit’s social base. These groups hailed him as he implemented repressive measures against workers, Hartz IV recipients, refugees and minorities.
At the end of the Wowereit era, the number of millionaires is increasing, although many long-established West Berlin companies have withdrawn their headquarters. According to the media the new layer of millionaires are mainly real estate speculators and the wealthy from other states, who have moved their retirement homes to the city of glamor and cultural events.
This is also Wowereit’s heritage, a man who continually sought to promote big spectacles and exhibitions, as well as the restoration of the iconic city palace of the German emperor at the site of the former East German Palace of the Republic.
On the other hand, more and more working families are facing a life in poverty. The unemployment rate remains high at 11 percent, and 17 percent of the population are dependent on miserly Hartz IV welfare benefits. In Berlin almost one in three children is considered poor and every seventh person is at risk of poverty.
According to the figures of the last poverty report, the poverty rate of 21.2 percent is well above the national average of 15.2 percent. The real estate boom is increasing rents dramatically and displacing people from their long time lodgings. Poverty among the elderly and the number of one-euro jobbers and low wage earners is increasing rapidly.
Before Wowereit left office he initiated the next tranche of even more ruthless budget cuts. On December 12, 2014, the day after his resignation, the SPD and CDU adopted a two-year budget for 2014-15, which for the first time makes it illegal for Berlin to take out new loans, thus enforcing the nationally agreed debt ceiling before its constitutional deadline. In recent discussions Wowereit proudly called it a “black zero” budget. The interests Wowereit represents and has always represented were exposed by the report that he is due to become a board member of Berlin’s Association of Berlin Merchants and Industrialists (VBKI). The press release claimed he is due to act “as an ambassador of Berlin’s economy.”
Workers and young people must draw the lessons of the Wowereit era. A red-red coalition is now being discussed as a model on a federal level, and on December 5 Bodo Ramelow became the first elected state premier of the Left Party in Thuringia. Workers can only expect an intensification of attacks on their social and democratic rights from such governments.

Sri Lankan government promises “devolution pact” to woo Tamil elite

Pani Wijesiriwardena

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe declared last week that his government would implement the 13th amendment to the country’s constitution. After nearly three decades, the amendment, which provided for the limited devolution of powers to the Tamil elite on a provincial level in the island’s north and east, has never been carried out fully.
Wickremesinghe made the statement on January 19 while explaining the government’s agenda to the first parliamentary sitting following Maithripala Sirisena’s election as president on January 8. Sirisena appointed Wickremesinghe, leader of pro-US United National Party (UNP), as prime minister based on a new ruling coalition, the National Democratic Front, which includes a number of right-wing parties.
Wickremesinghe’s promise to implement the 13th amendment is in the first instance a pitch for the support of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main Tamil bourgeois party. More fundamentally, however, it underscores the shift in foreign policy toward the US and India that was ushered in by Sirisena’s election. India, supported by the US, has repeatedly demanded the amendment’s implementation as part of a “political solution” to the protracted Sri Lankan civil war that ended with the defeat of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.
The presidential election had the character of a regime-change operation backed by both the US and India against former President Mahinda Rajapakse. Sirisena, a key cabinet minister and general secretary of Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), defected to the opposition as soon as the election was announced in a move orchestrated by Wickremesinghe and ex-President Chandrika Kumaratunga. Washington was hostile to Rajapakse’s ties with Beijing in conditions where it is seeking to strategically encircle China as part of the US “pivot to Asia.”
The 13th amendment was introduced in November 1987 under the Indo-Lanka Accord, which provided for Indian “peacekeeping” troops to occupy the island’s north and disarm the LTTE. The amendment, which provided for the devolution of powers to a combined north-eastern provincial council, was aimed at securing the backing of the Tamil elites for the Accord. Eight provincial councils were established across Sri Lanka in 1988 but the north-eastern council was dissolved in 1990 when a UNP government plunged the island back to war.
Sinhala chauvinist parties and organisations have always bitterly opposed the 13th amendment. The Supreme Court ordered the de-merger of the northern and eastern provinces in 2006 on the application of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Under pressure from the US and India, the first election for the northern province was held last year, and was won by the TNA. However, Rajapakse’s government continued to effectively rule the province through a military governor, marginalising the TNA-dominated council.
While Wickremesinghe’s promise to implement the amendment will be welcomed by the TNA, as well as India and the US, it will generate sharp tensions within the ruling coalition, which includes the Sinhala supremacist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) and General Sarath Fonseka’s Democratic Party. Fonseka was army chief during the final brutal offensive against the LTTE. The JVP is not part of the ruling coalition but is also supporting the government.
In an effort to placate his Sinhala chauvinist allies, Wickremesinghe declared that the “reform will be introduced preserving the unitary character of the country.” He also indicated that one of the more controversial powers—control of the police—would not be granted to the provinces. He told India’s NDTV television channel there was a “big fear in the country” that provincial “chief ministers may turn the police into their own private army.”
Wickremesinghe’s statement came as his external affairs minister, Mangala Samaraweera, was making his first overseas trip—to India, which welcomed Sirisena’s election. New Delhi is hoping that the new government will enable India to strengthen its position in Colombo at the expense of Beijing, which India has long regarded as a regional rival.
The Modi government is also hoping that the implementation of the amendment will deflect opposition among working people in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to the treatment of Sri Lankan Tamils. The protracted civil war in Sri Lanka and continuing repression and discrimination against Tamils has generated political instability in India.
Wickremesinghe and Samaraweera have both painted devolution as enabling “reconciliation” and democratic rights for Tamils. In fact, the 13th amendment is the means for establishing a power-sharing arrangement with the Tamil elites to facilitate the joint exploitation of the working class. Speaking to a group of journalists in New Delhi, Samaraweera called on the TNA to join the government.
The TNA, along with the JVP, is already part of the National Executive Council established by the government to oversee the implementation of its 100-day program in preparation for parliamentary elections at the end of April.
In his statement to parliament, Wickremesinghe announced that the government will introduce a 19th constitutional amendment to replace the 18th amendment, which gave wide powers to the president to appoint top judges, the election commissioner and other senior officials. The government also plans the “transfer of executive powers to the legislature and the cabinet” currently held by the president.
The government is preparing to release an “interim financial statement” on January 29 to deliver a limited salary increase for public sector employees and tax reductions on some essential items. All this, along with a propaganda blitz over the previous Rajapakse administration’s corruption, is part of the government’s efforts to conceal its real agenda as it prepares for parliamentary elections.
Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake has already started discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and promised to meet the IMF’s fiscal targets. The previous government agreed to reduce the budget deficit to 3.8 percent of the gross domestic product in 2016, down from 5.8 percent in 2013.
The new government is seeking to establish the widest possible coalition in anticipation of popular opposition to its agenda of austerity at home and the integration of Sri Lanka into US war plans. While Wickremesinghe is promising to implement the 13th amendment to secure the TNA’s support, his UNP is just as mired in Sinhala chauvinism as Rajapakse’s coalition. As social tensions sharpen, it will inevitably turn to the whipping up of communal tensions as the means to divide the working class.
During the presidential election, the Socialist Equality Party was the only party to fight for the unity of workers—Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim—in a common struggle to oppose the US war drive and secure basic democratic and social rights by abolishing capitalism. The SEP fights for a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam as an integral part of the struggle for a Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia and internationally.

State of emergency declared in eastern Ukraine, as US vows more sanctions against Russia

Niles Williamson

Presaging a further escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, Prime Minster Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Monday declared an official state of emergency in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. He also announced that the rest of the country would be placed on high alert. The eastern Donbass strongholds of separatists opposed to the regime in Kiev that came to power last year after a US- and EU-supported coup have seen renewed hostilities in recent weeks.
Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, India on Sunday, US President Barack Obama blamed Russia for the renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine and vowed to use all options short of war to escalate political and economic pressure on Moscow.
Obama glibly told reporters that the United States has no interest in weakening Russia or devastating its economy. “We have a profound interest, as I believe every country does, in promoting a core principle, which is, large countries don’t bully smaller countries. They don’t encroach on their territorial integrity. They don’t encroach on their sovereignty. And that’s what’s at stake in Ukraine,” he said.
Obama expressed concern over the collapse of a ceasefire agreement signed in Minsk in September, accusing the pro-Russia separatists of fighting “with Russian backing, Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops.” To date neither the US government nor the regime in Kiev has provided any solid evidence backing up their repeated claims of direct Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine.
President Obama vowed to “ratchet up” the pressure on Russia and ominously promised that the US government would consider all options “available to us short of a military confrontation” to resolve the ongoing conflict.
At the same time that Obama denounced supposed Russian interference in Ukraine, he reiterated that Washington would continue to give economic support to the Kiev regime, as well as provide equipment and training for its armed forces.
It was announced last week that the United States Army would be sending a contingent of advisers to western Ukraine in the spring to train four companies of the National Guard of Ukraine. At the end of last year, Obama signed the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, which authorizes the president to deliver a large cache of lethal military equipment to the Ukrainian government and implement a new raft of sanctions against Russia at his discretion. (See: US announces plans to deploy military advisers to Ukraine).
Obama’s remarks were part of a coordinated response to a deadly artillery attack in the city of Mariupol on Saturday that struck a residential area, killing 30 civilians and injuring approximately 100 others. An investigation by members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) concluded that Grad and Uragan rockets were fired into the city from rebel-held territory.
After an emergency meeting of NATO and Ukrainian ambassadors on Monday, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg blamed Russia for the escalating violence in eastern Ukraine. “We condemn the sharp escalation of violence along the cease-fire line in eastern Ukraine by Russia-backed separatists. This comes at great human cost to civilians,” he told reporters.
After the shelling in Mariupol, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, called for new sanctions against Russia after an “urgent” phone call with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The former Polish prime minister bellicosely tweeted, “Once again, appeasement encourages the aggressor to greater acts of violence. Time to step up our policy based on cold facts, not illusions.”
Responding to the new allegations of support for the anti-Kiev forces in eastern Ukraine and threats of escalating sanctions by European and American leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the Ukrainian army of operating as a foreign legion for NATO. Speaking to students in Moscow on Monday, he stated that the operations of the Ukrainian army were tied to the “geopolitical containment of Russia” rather than the “national interests of the Ukrainian people.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the EU and US of using the attack on Mariupol to “whip up anti-Russian hysteria.” He defended the actions of the separatists, saying they were fighting to defend themselves from the Kiev regime’s new offensive. “They started to act...with the goal of destroying Ukrainian army positions being used to shell populated areas,” he told reporters in Moscow.
Alexander Zakharchenko, prime minster of the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic, denied that the separatists were responsible for the attack on Mariupol. “Kiev decided to shift the blame on us for its erroneous fire from Grad multiple rocket launchers at residential areas,” he told reporters.
The effort by the US and EU to maintain economic sanctions against Russia has been showing signs of strain in recent weeks, with some countries, such as France and Italy, pressing for the improvement of diplomatic and economic relations with Russia. Last week, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini published a paper that outlined possible ways to begin improving diplomatic relations with Moscow.
In the wake of the Mariupol attack, Mogherini has called for an extraordinary session of the EU Foreign Affairs Council. The foreign ministers of the 28 EU member countries will convene in Brussels on Thursday to discuss possible new sanctions against Russia.
Fighting has flared up in the east in the last two weeks in the wake of an assault launched by the Kiev regime on separatist-held areas. The pretext for the new attack was the shelling of a commuter bus that killed 13 people in Volnovakha, a small town on the main highway between Donetsk and Mariupol.
Speaking at a rally in Kiev on January 19, President Petro Poroshenko denounced the attack, which he blamed on the separatists, and vowed that his government would “not give away one scrap of Ukrainian land.” That same day the Ukrainian military was authorized by Poroshenko to launch a “massive assault” on separatist-held positions in the east.
The Kiev regime launched an offensive in an attempt to solidify its control over the Donetsk International Airport. In an embarrassing turn of events, pro-Russian separatists succeeded at the end of last week in repelling the attack and dislodging Ukrainian troops and right-wing militia fighters from the airport’s main terminal. The symbolically and strategically important airport, the site of intense fighting between both sides for the last several months, has been nearly completely destroyed by relentless artillery bombardment.
Shelling in Donetsk on Monday damaged a power station at the Zasyadko mine, temporarily trapping 496 miners underground. Temporary power generators were used to bring the mine’s elevators back online and the miners were gradually evacuated.
Pro-Russian separatists have moved to surround the government-controlled town of Debaltseve, where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers taking part in the renewed offensive have encamped. The town is located on the main highway and rail line connecting the separatist strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk. At least seven Ukrainian soldiers have been reported killed and 24 wounded in the last day of fighting in the Luhansk region.

US resumes drone strikes in Yemen

Thomas Gaist

Just days after Houthi rebels in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa toppled the US-backed government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, Washington has resumed its drone war against the impoverished country, killing a 12-year-old boy and two alleged Al Qaeda militants in a missile strike against a car traveling in the eastern Marib province.
The strike was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, US officials told the Wall Street Journal. The CIA administers one of two US targeted killing programs directed against Yemen, with the other managed by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
New waves of drone strikes against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are currently in preparation, President Barack Obama and US military officials said Sunday. The US has launched hundreds of drone strikes against alleged terrorist targets in Yemen in recent years.
Monday’s strike comes amid indications of preparations for expanded US and NATO military action in Yemen and a growing list of other countries. US Secretary of State John Kerry pointed to Nigeria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and the Central African Republic as candidates for new US military operations in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.
President Obama announced Monday that he would cut short his visit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to travel to Riyadh for discussions with Saudi leaders focused on the situation in Yemen and the US-led war in Iraq and Syria.
Obama administration national security official Ben Rhodes told Reuters that the meetings would focus on “the leading issues where we cooperate very closely with Saudi Arabia,” so as to insure “good alignment” with regard to US-Saudi “overlapping interests.”
US efforts to train Syrian opposition fighters are being closely coordinated with the Saudi monarchy, Rhodes said.
In statements on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” program last Sunday, Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, highlighted the bipartisan support enjoyed by the Obama administration as it plans to unleash yet another surge of military violence across broad areas of the Middle East and Africa.
Warning that Iran is “on the move in Bahrain” and is “winning,” McCain called for new training missions, Special Forces deployments, and air and drone campaigns against Iran’s regional allies, including the Syrian government and Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He also urged an escalation of the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“Iran is on the march throughout the region,” McCain said, adding, “The Iranians are now either dominant or extremely influential in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. AQAP and the ISIS in both Iraq and Syria are doing quite well. There is no strategy to defeat them.”
“We need more boots on the ground,” McCain said. “Thousands of young people all over the world” are flocking to the banners of ISIS and similar groups, he warned.
Acknowledging that this was “a tough thing for Americans to swallow,” McCain called for deployment of “Special Forces” and “air controllers,” as well as “intelligence” and “other capabilities” to Yemen and areas along the Syrian and Iraqi borders.
“We can’t train young people in Syria and send them back into Syria to be barrel-bombed by Bashar Assad,” McCain said, making the case for a campaign to “neutralize” Assad’s air forces with the imposition of a “no-fly zone.”
Feinstein repeatedly noted her agreement with McCain during the talk show, warning of the threat posed by growing Iranian power and saying it was necessary to take “a good look at our policy with respect to Yemen.”
She said, “My concern is, where is Iran going? Is Iran trying to begin the development of an Iranian crescent?”
Feinstein claimed Monday that AQAP had already attempted to smuggle four bombs—specially designed to evade metal detectors—into the US mainland. She called for new deployments of Special Forces units to “take out” the group’s leadership and demanded further military aid to US-allied governments in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Asked whether she favored new ground troop deployments, Feinstein avoided a direct answer while clearly implying her support. The US must “relook” at its policy in relation to Syria, she said, expressing agreement with McCain that the US must not “tolerate Assad.”
Speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told “Face the Nation” that the Obama administration is preparing to expand military operations aimed at “destroying… manifestations of Al Qaeda” in South Asia, East Africa and North Africa.
McDonough said that the White House has sought to negotiate a “political agreement” with the Houthi militants who have taken control of the Yemeni capital that would allow the US military and CIA to “keep on the offensive against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
The US embassy in Yemen is being closed to the public and is suspending all consular services for an indefinite period of time, US officials announced Monday. The US embassy is closing because it is now surrounded by “chaos,” an anonymous State Department official told Reuters. The US already carried out a partial evacuation of embassy staff last week.

Syriza forms coalition government with right-wing Independent Greeks

Robert Stevens

It took just hours for the leftist pretensions of Syriza, (the Coalition of the Radical Left) to be exposed following its victory in Sunday’s Greek general election.
Syriza won 36.3 percent of the vote, obtaining 2,246,064 votes, but its final tally of 149 seats fell just short of the 151 needed for an absolute majority in the 300-strong parliament.
On Monday morning, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras held talks lasting barely an hour with Panos Kammenos, leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Independent Greeks (ANEL). Following the talks, Kammenos announced that the Greek government would be a Syriza-Independent Greeks coalition.
Tsipras, seeking to widen support for the coalition, held talks with To Potami leader Stavros Theodorakis on Monday evening. While Theodorakis previously ruled out sitting in a Syriza-led cabinet, he stressed Monday the need for a “patriotic action plan.”
The alliance with ANEL underscores Syriza’s character as a bourgeois party, based on privileged layers of the petty bourgeoisie, which articulates the interests of sections of the Greek capitalist class and international capital.
The Syriza-ANEL government is the fulfilment of the “new patriotic alliance” that Tsipras pledged at his final election rally last week. It is just as committed to the defence of capitalism and its international institutions, including the European Union and NATO, as the discredited conservative New Democracy-led government it has replaced. ANEL arose from a right-wing split-off from New Democracy (ND) in February 2012. It polled just 4.68 percent (13 seats) in the election.
Commenting on Syriza’s programme just days before the election, the Financial Times said the party in government would initially carry out “cost-free, or relatively inexpensive, gesture politics” such as reinstating 595 cleaners fired by the last government. Behind such token gestures, however, the real task of the Syriza government will be to prepare the political and social basis for an even greater onslaught against the working class.
Syriza’s coalition with ANEL was prepared well in advance. In March 2013, Syriza entered into a “front” with ANEL based on efforts to save the Cypriot banks with aid from the European Union (EU).
Following Monday’s talks, the Protothema newspaper reported that “Syriza and ANEL have already reached an agreement on the issue of the Greek president and ANEL’s red lines on national issues will be respected by its leftist coalition partner.”
ANEL’s “red lines” are of a thoroughly reactionary character. Like the National Front in France and similar ultra-right formations, its complaint over EU-dictated austerity is that it has undermined Greek capitalism. Its nationalist and racist policies include demands for the persecution and deportation of undocumented immigrants, under the guise of “national security.”
Syriza’s victory is by no means the popular endorsement claimed by the media and its various pseudo-left apologists. Nearly 40 percent of the electorate did not vote, with turnout at just 63 percent (6.3 million out of an electorate of 9.9 million).
This is extraordinarily low, given the blanket media coverage of the election and its presentation as the most important in Greece’s modern history. The turnout was lower than in the May 2012 election (65.1 percent), when Syriza made its first electoral breakthrough.
Tspiras’s party is the undeserving beneficiary of widespread hostility to New Democracy and especially the social democratic PASOK, which have ruled Greece since the fall of the 1967-1974 military junta.
PASOK was virtually wiped out, managing to win just 13 seats, with 4.7 percent of the vote, only just passing the 3 percent needed for parliamentary representation. Most of Syriza’s support came from layers previously supporting PASOK.
ND finished second with 76 seats, having obtained 27.8 percent of the vote. It will form the parliamentary opposition. The fascist Golden Dawn won 6.3 percent of the vote, securing 17 seats and finishing third. The newly formed populist To Potami (The River) come in fourth, with 6.1 percent of the vote and 17 seats. The Stalinist Communist Party of Greece gained 15 seats, winning 5.5 percent of the vote.
Syriza’s programme has been developed in close collaboration with sections of the ruling elite who disagree with economic policies based solely on austerity, as advocated by Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel. In the Thessaloniki Programme that Syriza put forward for the election, the party stressed that, as opposed to the ND government’s perspective of building an alliance only “with the German government,” Syriza was “ready to negotiate, and we are working towards building the broadest possible alliances in Europe.”
German government officials have ruled out any easing of the terms of the debt repayment program imposed on Greece by the so-called “troika” (the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank). Following the announcement of the election result, Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said, “We believe Greece has accepted terms that are not off the table after the election day.” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said, “There are rules, there are agreements. Whoever understands these things knows the numbers, knows the situation.”
A European Central Bank (ECB) official cited in the Wall Street Journal said, “Mr. Tsipras must pay. Those are the rules of the game. There is no room for unilateral behavior in Europe. That doesn’t rule out a rescheduling of the debt.”
Those comments were backed up by ECB executive board member Benoît Coeuré, who told a French radio station, “If he [Tsipras] doesn’t pay, it’s a default and it’s a violation of the European rules.”
But Syriza’s support for the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing policy and its demands for selective debt restructuring have been endorsed by the Financial Times and other representatives of capital.
The White House issued a press release stating that “we look forward to working closely” with the new government. After first dropping on news of the Greek election result, the euro climbed for the first time in three days against the dollar following the announcement of the Syriza-ANEL government. The FTSE 100 stock index finished up 19.57 points, or 0.29 percent.

Russia and US end collaboration on nuclear disarmament

Clara Weiss

Russia and the United States ended their collaboration in the disposal of nuclear waste in mid-December, according to a report in the Boston Globe on Monday. After the US, Russia is the second largest nuclear power in the world. Together Washington and Moscow own 90 percent of global nuclear weapons.
Within the framework of nuclear disarmament treaties, which came into force in the early 1990s, the US and Russia had agreed that American specialists would assist with the securing and destruction of nuclear weapons and materials so that they were not sold or passed on to terrorists.
According to the Globe report, the US has spent $2 billion to date on the so-called cooperative threat reduction programme, and had planned a further $100 million for this year. “Since the cooperative agreement began, US experts have helped destroy hundreds of weapons and nuclear-powered submarines, pay workers’ salaries, install security measures at myriad facilities containing weapons material across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and conduct training programmes for their personnel,” the newspaper wrote.
At a three-day meeting in Moscow in mid-December, the Russians declared that they rejected all further cooperation with the US in the securing and destruction of nuclear weapons. Prior to the Globe report, there had been no official statement about this ending of cooperation.
The newspaper reported that several dozen leading figures had participated on both sides, including officials from the US Energy Department, the Pentagon and the State Department, as well as several Russian military experts and government representatives.
From 1 January, the expansion of security equipment was halted at some of Russia’s seven closed nuclear sites, where large quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium are located. The joint securing of 18 civilian nuclear depots, as well as two sites that transform highly enriched uranium into a harmless substance, has been stopped. The construction of hi-tech surveillance systems at 13 nuclear depots and the installation of radiation detectors at Russian ports, airports and border crossings are also at risk.
The ending of cooperation did not come as a surprise. In November, the chairman of the Russian federal agency for nuclear energy, Sergei Kiriyenko, told US government representatives that Russia was not planning any new joint contracts in 2015 for nuclear disarmament.
US government officials expressed their disappointment to the Boston Globe about the ending of cooperation. In reality, the Russian move was predictable and effectively provoked by last year’s aggressive policies on the part of the US and European Union (EU).
The ending of cooperation is above all the result of the provocative actions of US and German imperialism in Ukraine. Washington and Berlin supported a putsch last February that brought a regime to power that not only intends to join NATO, but also has raised the prospect of Ukraine’s nuclear rearmament.
Until the Budapest Agreement of 1994, the world’s third largest nuclear stockpile was in Ukraine. In the Budapest memorandum, the Ukraine government promised to relinquish all nuclear weapons. In exchange, the US, Russia, Britain, France, China and Germany guaranteed the borders of Ukraine at the time.
The announcement of the ending of cooperation in nuclear disarmament reflects extreme military tensions. In the face of a civil war in Ukraine and NATO’s rearming against Russia, the Kremlin is signalling that it no longer trusts American specialists with the checking and destruction of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear disarmament New START treaty, which came into force at the beginning of 2011, will still apply. According to the Stockholm-based peace research institute SIPRI, however, the US and Russia disarmed much more slowly between 2013 and 2014 than they had done between 2012 and 2013.
According to the report, the US had reduced its total number of warheads by 400 to 7,300. Of these, 1,900 are ready to be deployed. In Russia, the total fell by 500 to 8,000, of which 1,600 are ready for deployment. According to New START, each country is expected to reduce its strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550. SIPRI expert Phillip Schell told German news channel NTV, “It is relatively clear that this has nothing to do with a genuine process of disarmament.”
Shortly before the final ratification of the treaty in 2011, cables released by WikiLeaks exposed plans for war by NATO against Russia.
Both Russia and the US are once again rearming their nuclear arsenals, although the US invests by far the largest sums of money in its nuclear weapons programme. As the New York Times reported in November 2014, the Obama administration plans to begin the investment of what will eventually amount to $1.1 trillion in nuclear weapons over the coming three decades. $350 billion is to be used up in the coming 10 years alone.
In addition, the US published a military blueprint at the end of 2014, outlining US preparations for military interventions around the globe, as well as for a third world war.
In contrast to the United States, Russia is not an imperialist country. It functions chiefly as a supplier of energy to the world market and as a sales market for global concerns. The total value of all Russian shares was put at $531 billion in November, above all due to western sanctions. This is less than one US company alone, Apple, with a share value of $620 billion.
But precisely because of Russia’s economic and political weakness, the Kremlin sees nuclear weapons as the only possibility of strengthening its position in negotiations with the imperialist powers and preparing for a potential war with NATO member states.
In this context, the cancelling of the agreement on disarming Russian nuclear weapons is a further sign of the growing danger of a war between the two nuclear powers, the US and Russia.

US announces plans to deploy military advisers to Ukraine

Niles Williamson

The head of the United States Army Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, announced on Wednesday that a contingent of US soldiers will be dispatched to Ukraine in the spring to undertake the training of four companies of the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU). The exact number of American soldiers who will be stationed at the Yavoriv Training Area outside the western city of Lvov has yet to be determined.
The highly provocative move, which follows the positioning of US and NATO forces in Poland and the Baltic states and escalating threats of a military confrontation with Russia, came as the Kiev government steps up its war against pro-Russian separatists in the Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region.
Lt. Gen. Hodges made his announcement on his first visit to Kiev where he met with the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Lt. Gen. Anatoliy Pushnyakov and the acting commander of the NGU Lt. Gen. Oleksandr Kryvyenko. Hodges told reporters after the meeting he was “impressed by the readiness of both military and civil leadership to change and reform.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Vanessa Hillman told Defense News the training mission was part of a State Department effort “to assist Ukraine in strengthening its law enforcement capabilities, conduct internal defense, and maintain rule of law.” The Obama administration has so far committed $19 million from the Global Security Contingency Fund to help build up and train the NGU.
Disbanded in 2000, the National Guard was reestablished in March of last year in the aftermath of the US and EU-supported and fascist-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President Victor Yanukovych. The new National Guard is being developed as a light infantry, rapid response force aimed at assisting the suppression of the anti-Kiev, Pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
In addition to the deployment of advisers, the US has also been supplying Ukraine with heavy military equipment necessary to fight the separatists. On Monday, the US Embassy in Kiev announced the delivery of an armored Kozak mine-resistant personnel carrier to the State Border Guard Service (SBGS).
The US also recently delivered 35 smaller armored trucks as well as personal protective gear for use by the SBGS along the eastern border with Russia and against separatist held areas. SBGS spokesman Andriy Demchenko told the Southeast European Times the armored vehicles will "depart to the eastern border area for patrolling between checkpoints. Armored vehicles are not required for peaceful areas, we need it [in the east] to increase the efficiency of border monitoring and to protect the State Border Guard Service staff."
In a confrontational move at the end of last year, US President Barack Obama signed into law the Ukraine Freedom Support Act. The bill, which passed unanimously in both houses of Congress, authorizes the president to deliver a cache of over $350 million in military equipment to the Kiev regime over the next three years. This potential aid includes anti-tank and anti-armor weaponry, grenade launchers, mortars, machine guns and surveillance drones.
The intensification of US support for the Kiev regime and its operation against pro-Russia separatists comes as intense fighting and shelling has erupted in the east, particularly in and around the city of Donetsk.
While fighting continued over the strategically and symbolically important Donetsk International Airport, Ukrainian officials acknowledged control over the main terminal had been ceded to the separatists. Despite admitting this loss Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council spokesman Col. Andriy Lysenko insisted that Ukrainian armed forces remained in control of the airport runway and control tower.
At least nine civilians were reported killed and another 20 injured Thursday morning when mortar shells struck a public transit stop, destroying a trolley bus and a nearby car. Both sides blamed the other for the deadly attack. Representative of the Donetsk People’s Republic accused a covert unit backed by the regime in Kiev, which, they said, had set up inside the city and fired the mortar from the back of a pickup truck.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov released a statement denouncing the attack as a “crime against humanity… aimed at disruption of efforts to regulate the Ukrainian crisis peacefully.”
Meanwhile at Unity Day Rally in Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk blamed Russia for the bus attack, stating, “Today Russian terrorists again committed a terrible act against humanity. Russia bears responsibility for this.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday Ukrainian military spokesman Vladyslav Seleznyov stated that six soldiers had been killed and another 16 taken captive before they decided to pull back. Other social media reports indicate that at least 37 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the fighting.
Social media posts by George Tuka, head of the nationalist volunteer aid group People’s Home Front, stated that a number of soldiers were killed when a portion of the terminal’s second floor ceiling collapsed in on them. After months of fighting, the main airport terminal has been laid waste by bombardment from mortar shells and Grad rockets.
On Wednesday, Dymtro Yarosh, head of the fascist Right Sector organization and a member of the Ukrainian parliament, was wounded by shrapnel from a grad rocket in the course of fighting near the airport. Yarosh was leading a volunteer battalion formed by Right Sector, which has been at the forefront of military operations against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region.
Fighting also flared up this week near the eastern city of Luhansk. The Ukrainian military claimed that Check Point 31 on the border with Russia came under attack on Wednesday by highly trained Russian soldiers who routed the troops and subsequently took over the post.
In a speech given Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko made the unsubstantiated claim that 9,000 Russian soldiers were currently fighting with the separatists in the east and appealed for more military aid from Europe and the United States. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, refused to confirm the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine insisting instead that there had been “an increase in Russian equipment inside eastern Ukraine.” As it has in the past, Russia denied the accusations that its soldiers are fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Crisis talks in London over Islamic State

Paul Mitchell

US Secretary of State John Kerry joined 20 of the 60 or so “coalition” states in London on Thursday in crisis talks over the offensive by the Sunni militants of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
ISIS controls most of eastern Syria and western Iraq.
It was the first time the US-led coalition had met since the Paris attacks by gunmen affiliated with al Qaeda on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.
Participating in the UK/US-hosted talks were Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Norway, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Press releases said they were there to discuss how to support Iraqi and Kurdish armed forces, cut ISIS financing, counter its propaganda and provide humanitarian assistance.
Kerry said, “The purpose of coming here is to bring everybody’s best advice, everybody’s thoughts about where there may be weaknesses, everybody’s thoughts about things we can do better, put that together, improve our own performance and operations, and lay down the strategy for the days ahead.”
He made clear what he meant when boasting that some 2,000 coalition air strikes had halted or reversed the momentum of the jihadist group, reclaimed some 700 square kilometres and killed half its leadership since August, adding that Iraqi forces would be getting lots of M16 rifles “very, very shortly.”
“We need to move ahead on every single front, militarily, but also through law enforcement, through intelligence sharing, by attacking the root causes so that terrorist appeals fall flat and foreign recruits are no longer enticed to go to a place and wreak havoc on it,” Kerry added.
Kerry’s remarks followed the State of the Union address January 20 by President Barack Obama, who insisted air strikes were effective. “In Iraq and Syria, American leadership—including our military power—is stopping ISIL’s (IS) advance,” Obama said. “Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group.”
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said progress against ISIS was slow, but the coalition was determined to defeat it. “This isn’t going to be done in three months or six months. It’s going to take a year, two years to push ISIL back out of Iraq but we are doing the things that need to be done in order to turn the tide,” Hammond asserted.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi warned that his country’s military capability was suffering from low oil prices and pleaded with the conference to provide more weapons and training. Baghdad has criticised Washington for not doing “enough” to destroy ISIS.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron told Abadi that he was ready to help rebuild the Iraqi military so they could carry out a sustained ground offensive against ISIS, but stopped short of making any new commitments.
“The threat from extremist terror you face in Iraq is also a threat we face here in the United Kingdom,” he said. “We will do everything we can to help stop foreign fighters coming to your country and creating the mayhem we see today.”
European police agency Europol estimates up to 5,000 European Union citizens have joined ISIS.
On January 16, Cameron met with Obama to discuss the escalation of military operations by the two countries in the Middle East, further NATO provocations against Russia and, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack in France, greater domestic repression in the name of the “war on terror.” Cameron wanted Obama’s cooperation in putting “pressure” on US Internet companies such as Facebook and Twitter to work more closely with UK intelligence agencies. He has pledged to implement a “snoopers’ charter” Communications Bill, giving the British intelligence agencies greater powers to access encrypted communications.
The London meeting took place a day after Kurdish forces in northern Iraq said they had cleared ISIS from nearly 500 square kilometres of territory and broken a key supply line to Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul, which ISIS seized in June 2104. Reports earlier this month in the American press suggested that the US troops sent to Iraq by Obama are on the verge of entering direct combat with ISIS.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that an Iraqi counteroffensive to retake Mosul “will be the centrepiece” of the US-led military efforts for early 2015. WSJ also revealed that the total of US and allied “trainers and advisers” deployed in Iraq has reached 5,000, considerably higher than the figures usually cited for this effort.
Over the last period, ISIS has scored a number of propaganda successes, which many analysts see as a big factor in its recruitment of thousands of international volunteers. One shows captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh—ISIS claimed it had downed his plane using a heat-seeking missile—describing the way the US lays down operations against ISIS. “There are American bases in Qatar where the missions are planned, targets are decided, and assignments are distributed,” Kasaesbeh tells the interviewer, adding, “They draw out the missions for every participating country a day before. The participating parties are informed of their assignments by 4 o’clock the next day. The Americans use aerial snipers, satellites, spies, and drones taking off from Gulf countries to determine and study targets. We are given aerial maps and pictures of the targets.”
Captured British journalist John Cantlie has appeared in several IS propaganda videos apparently railing against the growth of “dollar-linked fiat currencies” and promoting ISIS plans to bring in a new currency based on a return to some sort of gold standard.
German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, the first western journalist granted access to ISIS after spending time in Mosul, declared, “ISIS is much stronger than we think here.”
He described how it is supported by “an almost ecstatic enthusiasm that I have never encountered in any war zone” and is implementing “social welfare” and a “school system.” Todenhofer concludes that ISIS cannot be overcome by Western intervention or air strikes.
On January 19, the US Central Command was forced to take down its Twitter feed after a group declaring its sympathy with ISIS hacked the Command’s social media accounts, just as Obama was delivering a speech on cyber security, and replaced its logos with an image of a hooded fighter and the words “CyberCaliphate” and “I love you ISIS”.
ISIS’s growth is the responsibility of the US, which has consciously promoted fratricidal sectarian warfare in order to overthrow the Baathist party of former president Saddam Hussein and prepare new efforts to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. These conditions enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS—neither of which existed in Iraq before the US-led invasion—to gain a foothold in the country.
Like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the latest war in Iraq and Syria is a predatory intervention aimed at securing imperialist domination over the resource-rich and geo-strategic Middle East. Its purpose is to stabilise the deeply unpopular US-backed regime in Iraq and effect regime change in Syria. That is the real agenda behind the London talks.

Financial markets celebrate European Central Bank launch of €1 trillion quantitative easing program

Nick Beams

The European Central Bank (ECB) committed itself to a quantitative easing (QE) program of at least €1.1 trillion after announcing Thursday that it would buy sovereign debt and other financial assets to the tune of €60 billion a month to September 2016, and possibly beyond.
The decision was announced by ECB President Mario Draghi after a series of negotiations and manoeuvres in recent months aimed at circumventing German opposition to the plan. Bowing to that opposition, Draghi announced that the region’s 19 central banks would make 80 percent of the purchases and be responsible for any risks.
The official rationale for the decision is that the QE program is needed to combat deflationary pressures in the euro zone—inflation turned negative last month—and boost the region’s economy, which has still not reached the levels of output attained in 2007.
But the measures will have little or no impact on the real economy. Rather, they are aimed at making available further supplies of ultra-cheap cash for financial speculation, while governments across the region press ahead with so-called “structural reforms” to worsen the social position of the working class.
Draghi said the decision had been taken with the aim of lifting inflation rates close to but below 2 percent. But with no evidence QE will have any such impact, the statement amounted to a commitment to open-ended monetary expansion.
The markets celebrated because both the extended time frame and the monthly volume of bond purchases exceeded expectations. Economists had predicted the monthly injection would be €50 billion.
European stocks continued their rise of the last few days, reaching new seven-year highs. In the US, all three major stock indexes rose substantially, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shooting up 259 points.
The value of the euro fell further, fueling hopes on the continent that the plunging European currency will boost exports.
The mood of the financial speculators, who will benefit to the tune of tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars as a result of the decision, was summed up by Laurence Fink, the chief executive officer of the massive hedge fund BlackRock. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s billionaires in Davos, Switzerland, where this year’s theme is inequality, he said: “We’ve seen over the last few years you have to trust in Mario. The market should never, as we have seen now, the market should not doubt Mario.”
The decision to begin the QE program was not unanimous. German Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann and Germany’s representative on the ECB’s executive board, Sabine Lautenschläger, voiced their opposition to the move, with Austrian, Dutch and Estonian central bank governors also reportedly expressing reservations.
Weidmann has called QE “sweet poison,” as it lets European governments off the hook when it comes to carrying out debt-reduction programs.
Draghi said the bank’s governing council had taken these issues “into account, and that’s why this decision will mitigate those concerns.” The chief concession to Germany and other critics is that 80 percent of purchases will be carried out by national central banks, which will bear the risks.
The depth of opposition was indicated in a Financial Times report which said that, while paying lip service to ECB independence, “German officials were privately seething… that the bank had decided to embark on QE.”
The effect of ECB’s concession is to increase national divisions over policy and undermine the principle that the ECB acts in the interests of the euro zone as a whole. In the longer term, it adds to concerns that the entire project of monetary union is inherently unviable and the euro currency itself may collapse.
The Financial Times cited one unnamed euro zone finance minister who said “the problem with purchases by national banks is that it sends a signal that the euro zone is not moving in the direction of greater mutualisation of debt, something that will be necessary in the longer term for a successful single currency.”
Earlier this month, as it was becoming apparent that concessions would be made to the German position, the governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, opposed the abandonment of risk-sharing. “We would be well advised to maintain the procedures that [are used] in all our monetary policy interventions: risk should be shared across the euro system as a whole,” he said.
While making concessions to Germany, Draghi also attempted to assuage concerns that national divisions were being introduced. He said the governing council would retain control “over all the design features of the program and the ECB will coordinate the purchase, thereby safeguarding the singleness of the Eurosystem’s monetary policy.” However, his remarks could not cover over the divisions that exist and are becoming more open.
Speaking at the Davos meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel avoided any direct criticism of Draghi and the ECB, claiming Germany had a tradition of supporting independent central bank decisions. But she made clear that the austerity drive, which her government has promoted across the euro zone, should be deepened. Responding to critics that Germany was promoting austerity for its own sake, rather than growth, Merkel said healthy finances were necessary and debt had to be kept down.
According to a Financial Times report, Merkel’s message, conveyed both in her speech and in her responses to questions that followed, was that with additional monetary loosening, governments might be tempted to “buy time and avoid doing structural reforms.” Merkel said she was not surprised that the ECB decision was regarded as controversial because it allowed uncompetitive companies to survive, at least in the short term.
The national divisions and conflicts reflected in the structure of the European QE program are not confined to that region, but are expressed more broadly. One of the consequences of the decision will be to further depress the value of the euro, already at an 11-year low, sending it closer to parity with the US dollar and consequently worsening the American trade position.
In the past week, central banks in Denmark, Turkey, India, Peru and Canada have announced cuts in interest rates, which will lower the value of their currencies.
The Canadian central bank, which made a surprise decision to cut its rate on overnight loans by 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday—the first such reduction in almost five years—said the sharp fall in oil prices had increased downside risks on inflation and financial stability. An interest rate cut was needed to return the economy to full output, it said.
Since Australia, like Canada, is a commodity-exporting country, the Canadian decision has increased pressure on the Australian central bank to reduce rates.
Together with the QE programs in Europe and Japan, the effect of these measures is to lower the value of the various currencies and apply upward pressure on the US dollar. In effect, this week’s decision represents an escalating currency war in which each of the participants tries to offload the effects of deflation onto its rivals.
Yesterday’s European QE decision will not bring economic recovery. Instead, it will intensify the deepening global conflict between rival economies.

Measles outbreak in California spreads to six other states

Kelvin Martinez

A measles outbreak in California has now spread to six other states and Mexico, infecting at least 70 people, according to public health officials.
Measles is an extremely contagious respiratory disease and can be easily transmitted through public spaces like hospitals and schools. Measles can be dangerous especially to the elderly and small children, and can lead to blindness. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), for every 1,000 cases of measles, one or two children die.
The most recent outbreak in California has been linked to tourists visiting the Disneyland theme parks in Southern California last December, who most likely brought the disease from abroad. The majority of infections are in California, while Colorado, Utah, Washington and Oregon have also reported cases. Most patients reported feeling ill after visiting the park in December, while some people were exposed to others who traveled to the parks.
The incubation period (the time in which the measles is most transmittable) for people exposed at the Disney parks has ended, but many secondary infections can still occur, especially for people who have not been vaccinated. The symptoms include fever, runny nose, cough, and a rash all over the body. It is recommended that those who are contagious avoid public spaces and that unvaccinated people in contact with an infected patient be quarantined for 21 days.
The CDC recommends that children receive two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. The disease, declared to be eliminated in 2000, has made a comeback in the US, which saw 644 measles infections in 27 states last year. Most of the infections were brought from the Philippines, which experienced a measles epidemic. The disease can quickly spread among those who have not been vaccinated due to personal beliefs or those too young to be vaccinated.
In California, two patients at the Oakland Medical Center’s outpatient clinic exposed “less than 100 patients” to infection said Stephen Parodi, director of hospital operations for Kaiser Permanente, Northern California. To avoid spreading the virus, hospital staff had to close the rooms where the infected patients had been treated, and contact any patients who might have been exposed.
School officials in several California school districts told unvaccinated students to stay home after infected students showed up at school, including 24 students at Hunting Beach High School. Some parents have opted out of vaccinations because of a discredited study linking the vaccine to autism.
According to William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, one dose of the MMR vaccine is about 92 percent effective, while a second dose is 98 percent effective. The measles vaccine’s effectiveness can fade over several decades, however, and and even countries in Western Europe have had large outbreaks of the disease, largely because of low vaccination rates.
This week, Disneyland and the California Department of Public Health told reporters that it was safe for tourists to visit the park unless they are unvaccinated. Officials also warned parents not to bring babies under 1 year old to Disneyland and other crowded venues that attract international travelers, such as airports. Disneyland has said that five employees have been infected and everyone who has been in contact with them have been put on paid leave.
Some parents have opted out of the mandatory vaccine shot for young children, citing personal beliefs. According to the LA Times, 9.5 percent of kindergartners at Capistrano Unified in south Orange County (south of Los Angeles) in 2013 were exempted from measles shots citing personal beliefs, while the rate was 14.8 percent in Santa-Monica-Malibu Unified. The statewide rate for that year was 3.1 percent. Public health officials are worried that low vaccination rates can spread an already highly contagious disease.
Orange County Public Health Officer Dr. Eric Handler told the L.A. Times, “There's the tug here between a very effective vaccine and a very infectious virus. And so when you have a scenario where hundreds of people get exposed, then even if the vaccine is 99% good after two doses, you're going to have a handful of people who are going to get sick.”
The last major outbreak of measles in California occurred in 1989 which caused 75 deaths in the state, out of 120 deaths nationwide. Since then, federal guidelines have recommended two doses of the vaccine. Prior to widespread use of the vaccine, the United States saw 4 million cases of measles every year, with 400 to 500 deaths. The vaccination of children entering public school, especially in making vaccines more available, led to the elimination of endemic measles infection in the US by 2000.
Despite this, measles, along with a host of other preventable diseases such as whooping cough, has returned to the United States. The reemergence of these preventable diseases has corresponded with intensification of the social crisis in the US, particularly since the onset of the 2008 economic downturn.

New Senate Intelligence Committee chair moves to suppress CIA torture report

Patrick Martin

The new Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, sent a letter last week to the White House demanding the Obama administration return all copies of the full report on CIA torture whose executive summary was made public last month.
The letter to Obama asked that “all copies of the full and final report in the possession of the executive branch be returned immediately,” according to several press reports. The request is unprecedented in relations between the legislative and executive branch, where historically it is usually the legislature seeking more information and the executive branch declining to provide it.
In this case, the legislative branch is seeking to recall (and likely suppress) copies of a report which the new majority in the Senate regards as too critical of the CIA and too revealing of the methods employed by the intelligence agency in its brutal interrogations of prisoners at secret “black site” facilities in Europe and Asia, as well as at Guantanamo Bay.
The Senate Intelligence Committee produced a 6,900-page report on the CIA torture program, which still remains completely secret. The 512-page executive summary was released last month, albeit with extensive redactions, along with dissenting opinions by the Republican minority on the panel and by the CIA itself.
While official Washington and the corporate-controlled media have largely shelved the report, after an initial flurry of publicity, the executive summary has become a best seller with the American public. When a small publisher brought out the executive summary as a paperback book December 31, the entire 50,000-copy press run was sold out the first day, making a second press run necessary to meet the demand.
Senator Burr did not give any public explanation for seeking the return of copies of the full report, but press accounts suggested that he was seeking to put the document out of reach of requests under the Freedom of Information Act, which applies to the executive branch but not to Congress.
The White House, the CIA, the FBI and other executive branch agencies have occasionally been forced to divulge documents under court order following FOIA lawsuits filed by news organizations or civil liberties groups.
Restricting the number of copies circulating in Washington would also make it less likely that the document would be leaked to the press.
Burr has defended the brutal practices employed by CIA interrogators, including waterboarding, sadistic beatings, sodomizing prisoners through “rectal rehydration”, and lengthy sleep deprivation. He has also denounced the Intelligence Committee report’s conclusion that CIA officials lied to both Congress and the White House about the torture program and its results.
The Republican senator has adamantly opposed any investigation into CIA crimes since he joined the Intelligence Committee. He was once quoted saying that he opposed any public hearings of any kind on the activities of the US intelligence apparatus, on grounds of “national security.”
In his letter to Obama, Burr said that he considered the report “to be highly classified and a committee sensitive document,” and insisted that it “should not be entered into any executive branch system of records.”
Burr also indicated he would return to the CIA an internal CIA document, dubbed the “Panetta review.” This document was a 1,000-page internal review of the torture program prepared for Leon Panetta, then the director of the CIA, in 2010. According to those who have read it, the Panetta review contradicts the public posture of the CIA that the torture program was consistent with international law and effective in gaining intelligence on future terrorist attacks.
Senate committee staff came across the Panetta review in the course of the examination of more than 6 million pages of CIA material on the torture program. The agency had intended to withhold this document from the committee, even though the panel is supposed to exercise legislative oversight over the operations of the intelligence agencies, and the Panetta review was clearly relevant to the committee investigation.
The Panetta review became the occasion for further CIA crimes, as the agency assigned a group of five agents to find out how the Senate committee staff had gained access to the document. These agents conducted surveillance of the Senate panel’s computer system, including email exchanges. Senator Dianne Feinstein, then the committee’s chairman, denounced this surveillance as illegal and unconstitutional in a speech last March on the floor of the Senate.
CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the spying on the Senate committee had taken place but was later forced to admit it and issue an apology to the committee. The whole matter was then swept under the rug, with a CIA review panel deciding earlier this month that no charges would be brought against any of the five agents.
Now the new Republican chairman of the committee plans to return the Panetta review to the CIA, burying the issue for good.
Several Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee publicly opposed Burr’s actions. Feinstein issued a statement January 20 saying, “I strongly disagree that the administration should relinquish copies of the full committee study, which contains far more detailed records than the public executive summary.”
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said returning the document would “aid defenders of torture who are seeking to cover up the facts and rewrite the historical record.”
However, these Democrats all accepted the countless redactions demanded by the CIA in the executive summary, with the support of the White House, and have rubber-stamped Obama’s decision that neither the CIA torturers nor the White House and Justice Department officials who approved the torture program would be prosecuted.
Feinstein, Wyden & Co. agreed from the very beginning to focus the investigation solely on the CIA itself, and leave out President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other top officials who ordered and sanctioned torture and created the spurious legal rationales for it.

Saudi king’s death threatens to deepen US crisis in Middle East

Bill Auken

The death of Saudi Arabia’s 90-year-old King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, the head of one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies, has been met with profuse tributes and open mourning by Washington and its allies, along with the Western media.
Abdullah, who has effectively ruled Saudi Arabia since his predecessor and half-brother, Fahd, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995—becoming king upon his death in 2005—has maintained the country’s theocratic dictatorship as a lynchpin of regional counterrevolution and US oil interests for the past two decades.
His death introduces another layer of uncertainty and potential crisis into a Middle East already reeling from political eruptions that are directly tied to the role of the US-Saudi axis in the region, from the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to the collapse of the regime that they both backed in Yemen.
World leaders have rushed to the Saudi capital of Riyadh to participate in the three days of official mourning proclaimed by the monarchical regime, among them US Vice President Joe Biden, French President François Hollande, Britain’s Prince Charles, Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and many others. All of them are anxious to see their interests in the kingdom—which sits atop the second largest proven petroleum reserves in the world and is the number one producer of crude oil—preserved.
The tributes paid by Western government officials and the corporate media were nothing short of obscene.
Barack Obama praised Abdullah as a leader who “had the courage of his convictions.” The US president added, “One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the US-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.”
The courage of Abdullah’s convictions—always essential for an absolute monarch—found its expression in his regime’s beheadings last year of at least 87 people, in some cases with their headless corpses publicly crucified after death. Among the crimes punished by beheading were “sorcery,” adultery, drug possession and political opposition to the ruling monarchy.
The Washington Post described Abdullah as “a master politician” who “gained a reputation as a reformer without changing his country’s power structure,” adding, with no substantiation, that he was “popular with his subjects.” The New York Times described him as a ruler who had “earned a reputation as a cautious reformer” and was, “in some ways, a force of moderation.”
It was this “moderation” that was on display, no doubt, in the postponing last week—for medical reasons—of the second round of 50 of the 1,000 lashes to which the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced. He also received a 10-year jail term for the crimes of “adopting liberal thought” and “insulting Islam.”
The intimate US-Saudi relationship, which Obama praised Thursday as “a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond,” stands as an unanswerable indictment of the hypocrisy of US imperialism’s attempt to justify its predatory policies in the Middle East and internationally in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”
The heart of this relationship has been US military protection of Saudi Arabia in return for tying its domination of the world oil markets to American interests. This was solidified in 1973 in a deal brokered by then US President Richard Nixon in which he pledged to ensure US defense of and arms sales to the Saudi monarchy in return for all of the kingdom’s oil sales being denominated in US dollars, giving rise to the recirculation of “petrodollars” into US financial markets and arms purchases.
With a population of 28 million—fully one third of it made up of migrant workers who do virtually all of the labor—Saudi Arabia has the fourth largest arms budget in the world.
US imperialism has likewise long relied on Saudi Arabia’s propagation of Wahhabi Islamic religious ideology as a counter to secular nationalist and socialist movements in the region. King Abdullah provided unstinting support to Hosni Mubarak against the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and then to the coup of Egyptian General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2013. He sent troops and tanks across the causeway into Bahrain to crush mass protests in that Gulf kingdom in 2011.
Significantly, among those praising Abdullah Thursday was Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who said he had “contributed greatly to Middle East stability.”
The Saudi succession has only underscored the sclerotic character of the ruling monarchy. The new king, Salman bin Abdulaziz, is 79 and reportedly in ill health, suggesting that real power will be wielded by others. His successor, the new crown prince Mugrin bin Abdul Aziz, at 69 is described as “relatively young” for a Saudi ruler.
The successor king and those behind him confront a series of deepening crises for the regime. Next door in Yemen, the unpopular regime that both Riyadh and Washington backed has collapsed in the face of a revolt by the Houthis, a population that Saudi Arabia had repeatedly attacked and which it sees as an ally of its regional rival, Iran.
In Syria, the monarchy’s bankrolling and arming of Islamist “rebels,” again in alliance with the US, has produced ISIS, which has overrun much of that country and Iraq, bringing its forces to Saudi Arabia’s own borders. The implications of this were driven home earlier this month in an ISIS suicide attack that claimed the lives of General Oudah al-Belawi, the commander of all Saudi forces in the northern part of the country, along with two border guards. Nurtured on Saudi money and Wahhabi ideology, ISIS is now turning its sights on its former patrons.
Meanwhile, there is the fall of oil prices, which, by refusing to cut production, the Saudis have promoted in a deal worked out with Washington with the aim of weakening both Russia and Iran. The halving of oil revenues as a result, however, has ominous implications for Saudi Arabia itself, which has used its petroleum export surpluses to pacify the population with public spending on housing, education, salary hikes and other forms of public welfare. Next year, it is projected to run a deficit of $39 billion, amounting to 5.2 percent of GDP—the largest in the kingdom’s history. Resulting cuts in salaries, benefits and public spending in a country where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line can spell social unrest.
There are also indications of strains in the relations with Washington, which have increased since Obama backed off his threat to bomb Syria in 2013 and moved instead toward a halting rapprochement with Iran. Abdullah, who was eulogized repeatedly Thursday as, in the words of US Secretary of State John Kerry, “a proponent of peace,” had called upon the US administration to “cut the head off the snake” by launching a military intervention against Iran.
Finally, the Saudi regime will undoubtedly face internal tensions as the struggle over succession and division of the spoils develops among the thousands of princes and princesses and their entourage. While Abdullah had based his rise to power on his role as commander of the National Guard, a post inherited by his son, the rival Sudairi faction of the ruling family, to which the new king belongs, will undoubtedly attempt to fill positions with their own supporters. How this faction fight works out will affect not only internal politics, but potentially the disposition of major contracts with the oil conglomerates, arms dealers and other transnational corporations.
The fact that US imperialism counts the Saudi regime as a key pillar of its interests in the Middle East only underscores the reactionary role that it plays throughout the region as well as the fundamental instability of the system of hegemony that it is attempting to impose there.

After Yemeni regime’s collapse, calls mount for US military escalation across Middle East and Africa

Thomas Gaist

One day after Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi announced his resignation amidst the occupation of his government’s central facilities and his private residence by Houthi militants, a chorus of voices from the US political establishment and punditry are calling for expanded US and NATO military operations across the Middle East and Africa.
The collapse of the Yemeni regime, which was previously sustained by hundreds of millions in military aid flowing from Washington, represents another major debacle for US imperialism in the Middle East. In the face of popular hatred, the US relied on Hadi and his predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to rubber-stamp authorization for drone missile strikes and cover up the civilian death toll.
Yemen was previously upheld as a successful model of the Obama administration’s “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting,” strategy, in which a relatively "lite" US military presence collaborates with local forces to coordinate air strikes and special forces raids.
Now these methods have succeeded only in completing the implosion of Yemeni society and the creation of a political situation in which the major contending forces consist of a Shia militia aligned with Iran and the local affiliate of Al Qaeda, with the country’s partition a real possibility.
Remarks late this week from Obama administration officials, legislators, and a small army of former military officials and security experts made clear that together with the Charlie Hebdo attacks - now commonly attributed to the Yemen based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - the Houthi takeover is to serve as the pretext for new wars and interventions directed against Iran and its regional allies and proxies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, as well as against extremist groups including Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Yemen's Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Nigeria's Boko Haram.
The Houthis, a movement based in Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority, seized power in part by successfully exploited hostility to the US drone war and military presence in the country.
In the wake of Hadi’s ouster, the US military ordered emergency deployments near Yemen in preparation for a range of contingencies. “We are continuing to closely monitor the situation in Yemen,” a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.
“The unrest in Yemen is a concern overall. The [USS] Iwo Jima and [USS] Fort McHenry are on station, and between those two warships, there’s enough combat power to respond to whatever contingency may come up,” the US military spokesman said.
During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry and French President Francois Hollande issued similar calls for a comprehensive expansion of NATO military and intelligence operations throughout the Middle East and Africa.
Kerry cited numerous countries as prime targets for new Western military incursions. “We must eliminate Daesh [ISIS], strengthen Somalia, intensify our efforts in Nigeria, and strike at the tentacles of al-Qaeda in Yemen, the Maghreb, and wherever else they appear,” Kerry said.
Kerry also pointed to Central African Republic, Libya, and Afghanistan as countries where new “long term” military interventions had become necessary. The NATO powers must focus their operations on “zones of greatest vulnerability,” including “the Horn of Africa, segments of the Swahili coast, the area around Lake Chad, and certain parts of the greater and south central Asian region,” Kerry said.
In high-flown rhetoric evoking an epochal struggle, Kerry compared the fight against Islamic extremist groups to the US military campaign against Nazi Germany, saying that Islamic State, Boko Haram, and similar groups pose an existential threat to the US-dominated political order established after World War II.
“This is a threat to the entire structure that we have worked so hard to put in place since the end of World War II. It’s a threat to nation-states. It is a threat to rule of law,” Kerry said.
The representative of US imperialism attributes to a handful of Islamist militants the crisis of the capitalist nation-state system that has arisen out of the contradictions of the capitalist system itself, giving rise to a new era of militarist aggression and drive toward world war.
Kerry also announced Friday that he will travel to Nigeria to confer with officials there about further US involvement in the Nigerian government’s war with the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
Also speaking in Davos, French President Hollande vowed that France will steadily escalate its already substantial military presence in Africa. “In Africa, France is on the ground and it will continue to be so more than ever before. It will be present to bring help to those countries who are having to deal with the scourge of terrorism,” Hollande said.
"I’m thinking of the Sahel, in particular, but also the situation in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad, who are under attack from Boko Haram,” he said.
Kerry’s and Hollande’s remarks were accompanied by an appearance by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who demanded that the Western military alliance supply more aid to his government’s fight against ISIS.
Numerous other voices from the US political and military elite argued that the collapse of Yemen’s officially recognized government posed the necessity for aggressive new US military action.
“AQAP is fresh off its attack on Paris and has grown since 2009 into the most dangerous al-Qaeda affiliate in the world. It has attacked Detroit and Chicago. It is dedicated to overthrowing the House of Saud,” former CIA and Pentagon official Bruce Riedel wrote in Al Monitor.
US Representative Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the Houthi coup in Yemen represents “a big step forward for Al Qaeda” and a “win for Iran.” He repeated the mantra that AQAP constitutes the “most toxic, most lethal Al Qaeda affiliate.”
Royce praised the deposed Yemeni president for his collaboration in the US drone war. “Hadi was particularly helpful to the US in assisting us in targeting drone strikes against Al Qaeda” and was a “very close ally and partner,” Royce said.
The “global jihadist threat” is “greater than at any time in our history,” senior Defense Department official Michael Vickers said Wednesday in remarks to the Atlantic Council.
“Attacks on the West in particular are very high on their list and increasing in priority,” said Vickers, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence.
“Few on the ground see anything but an Islamic State on the move,” the Wall Street Journal warned.
US counterterrorism policy in Yemen is “in tatters,” the Washington Post reported. “If order and a friendly regime are not restored soon in Yemen, the White House may be confronted with a difficult choice: keep flying the drones even if they violate Yemeni sovereignty, or halt the operations and ease up on al-Qaeda,” the Post argued.
Former US Ambassador to Yemen Stephen Seche told the Post that the Houthi coup marked a turning point in US policy.
“I don’t think we’ll just want to continue running operations like we have done the last several years,” Seche said, suggesting that a considerably more aggressive intervention is on the agenda.
Meanwhile, an OxFam report published Friday found that Yemen faces a “humanitarian disaster” that places “millions of lives at risk.” Some 50 percent of Yemenis require some form of humanitarian assistance, with nearly a million children in the country subsisting on the verge of starvation, OxFam found. Saudi Arabia, which provided much of the funding for Yemen’s government, cut off most of its aid after the Houthis seized control of the capital in September.