US/NATO War on Russia

[Peter Presland]

Ah that old Rigby-Guyatt counterpoint is back - tonic for jaded old souls in an insane world.

Official translation of the entire Putin speech here. I've added headings to aid readability and citation; otherwise its verbatim from the Kremlin.

And anyone doubting Putins genuine popularity should watch the two included videos. I sense that the Ukraine / Crimea events and Putin's reactions to them are game-changers. Russia is clearly totally pissed off with US-NATO arrogance and deceit and has acted accordingly

My big worry is that all this was VERY thoroughly gamed by the CIA-DOD before it appeared on anyone's radar and that they will now push Russia even harder to secure a cassus belli that looks just a might more credible - developments in Syria are ominous for example.

[David Guyatt]

As a convinced cynic, I most respectfully refer all to my post No. 6 in this thread and also another post I made HERE.

Add the latter to the former and I think the answer is crystal clear.

I could easily be wrong, of course...::untank::

[Albert Doyle]

US has no business in Ukraine.

[Lauren Johnson]

[URL="http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/today-every-free-person-in-world-has-won.html"]must read
[/URL]

Today every free person in the world has won!

Following the past few, truly incredible, days which saw momentous developments taking place at an amazingly rapid pace, I think that it is time to take a moment to calmly and carefully reflect about what I consider to be a historical event of an immense magnitude. Formally, this event will be recorded as the "The address of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the State Duma deputies, Federation Council members, heads of Russian regions and civil society representatives in the Kremlin". In reality, of course, this was much more. This was the address of the New Russia to the entire world and, especially, to the many people worldwide who reject the social, economic and political model embodied in the current AngloZionist Empire otherwise known as "The West", including those inside the so-called "West".

The great disconnect between the 1% and 99%

In the hours following Putin's speech I was amazed to see the total disconnect between what I just had heard, the reaction of the people in Russia, and the way the official corporate media covered the event. In Russia senior political figures compared what had just taken place with the victory against Nazi Germany in 1945, they repeated over and over again that what had just taken place would create a new world order and that the nature of the system of international relations had been changed forever. And yet, the western corporate media spoke about the pomp of the ceremony and how Putin had justified the Russian annexation of Crimea. Had they listened to a different speech?!

But then came the reactions of the readers of my blog who in increasing numbers were reporting that they had listening to Putin's speech with tears in their eyes. Many even praised Putin in terms that would make even a Kremlin PR officer blush with embarrassment. What was going on here? Clearly my readers were not only apprising the contents of Putin's speech and expressing their overall agreement with his views, no, they were having a deeply emotional reaction to something which they had felt deep inside their gut and in their souls, something which powerfully resonated deeply inside them. Why? Very few of these readers had any connections to Russia, even less had any Russian roots. Some had even served in the US military against the Soviet-backed Vietnamese. The vast majority were old enough to vividly remember the Cold War and how it felt to live under the bulleye of the Soviet nuclear forces. And yet these people clearly totally rejected the official view of the corporate media and adopted a radically different view. Why?

I have to mention here that every since my blog acquired a better visibility (roughly over the past 6 months) I have been getting a lot of emails from literally all over the world and that many of these emails were extremely emotional, clearly written "with gut and soul" and they often gave me the feeling that my correspondent was baring his/her soul showing an immense amount of pain, frustration and even rage, and an even bigger gratitude and appreciation for what I was trying to achieve with this blog. And, again, this made me wonder what was it that I was doing that was eliciting such an outpouring of gratitude and emotions?! After all, I had never intended my blog as a crowd-pleaser, but only as the "thinly anonymous" blog of just one guy speaking his mind and trying to foster a free exchange of views. And yet, some readers have even claimed that reading this blog had "changed their lives". Why?! How?! I was honestly baffled by such reactions.

And then I understood

People were hungry, they were literally starved for truth, and even when they did not agree with what I wrote, which happened quite often, they were grateful for the fact that I clearly had no agenda and that I simply spoke the truth as I saw it. It became clear to me that a lot of people fully understood that they were lied to, they just did not always have the means to get to the real story or just enough facts to connect the dots for themselves. In the case of my blog, the fact that I was fluent in five languages meant that I could help them cross the language barrier and my past as a military analyst who had seen the "behind the scenes" true face of the AngloZionist empire made it rather easy for me to debunk many, even if not all, of the lies of the corporate media. Finally, the fact that I had no political agenda or affiliation of any kind, even if I held strong and often goofy views about many subjects, meant that I was not trying to "sell my stuff" - it was here to take it or leave it and that it made no difference to me what people thought of my views. One of the many positive side-effects of "thin anonymity" (which I define as anonymous enough to have readers focus on ideas and not personalities, anonymous enough not to be bothered by idiots, but clearly not anonymous enough to hide from any person making even a very modest effort to try to identify me) is that I am clearly not even trying to sell myself. No, what was going on here is something far more basic and I will use an image to make my point: it's not that the food I was cooking was so amazingly tasty, it's that my guests were truly starved and, as the Irish say, "hunger is the best sauce".

I very much believe that this "hunger" is also what explains the very strong and emotional reaction that so many people have had after listening to Putin. Clearly, this was much bigger than Crimea, the Ukraine or even Russia. These were just triggers which ended up eliciting a Russian reaction which nobody had seriously believed possible. But many felt that something much more important had just happened.

What am I referring to here? Let's turn to Putin's speech and parse some of its most important segments (the full speech is available here and here and I urge everybody who has not done so yet to read it in its entirety or, better, watch the video here).

Putin's message to the world

Predictably, Putin's speech began by discussing the recent events in Crimea including the results of the referendum. He spoke about what Crimea and Sevastopol meant for the Russian history, culture and nation, and he recalled the horrors suffered by the Tatar people during the Soviet era. He then outlined the circumstances in which Nikita Khrushchev single-handedly (and illegally) transferred Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukraine and how, after the fall of the Soviet Union the Ukraine suffered under the rule of corrupt leaders. And then he explained how the legitimate protests of the Ukrainian people were literally hijacked by very different and violent people:

I understand those who came out on Maidan with peaceful slogans against corruption, inefficient state management and poverty. The right to peaceful protest, democratic procedures and elections exist for the sole purpose of replacing the authorities that do not satisfy the people. However, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day (...) we can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler's accomplice during World War II.

This reference to WWII is not just a politician's rhetorical exaggeration aimed at eliciting a knee-jerk reaction from the audience, it is something much more important an unambiguous statement that today, just as during WWII, the very existence of Russia as a country, a culture and a nation was at stake. Of course, the threat to Russia does not come from a few baseball bat wielding nationalist thugs in Kiev or from the new regime in power, if only because this new regime is a complete fiction anyway:

It is also obvious that there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now, nobody to talk to. Many government agencies have been taken over by the impostors, but they do not have any control in the country, while they themselves and I would like to stress this are often controlled by radicals. In some cases, you need a special permit from the militants on Maidan to meet with certain ministers of the current government. This is not a joke this is reality. Those who opposed the coup were immediately threatened with repression

So where does the real danger come from and who is the real aggressor threatening Russia at least as much has Hitler did in WWII? Before answering that question, I would like to note that Putin made a rather candid admission about the so-called "polite armed men in green". He saidemphasis added)

The President of the Russian Federation received permission from the Upper House of Parliament to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine. However, strictly speaking, nobody has acted on this permission yet. Russia's Armed Forces never entered Crimea; they were there already in line with an international agreement. True, we did enhance our forces there; however this is something I would like everyone to hear and know we did not exceed the personnel limit of our Armed Forces in Crimea, which is set at 25,000, because there was no need to do so.

So the mystery of the "polite armed men in green" is now solved: "strictly speaking" they were an "enhancement" to the Russian forces in Crimea which did not exceed the maximal total number of troops allowed by the treaty with the Ukraine. In other words, the number of Spetsnaz GRU troops sent to Crimea was within the terms of the treaty and the other forces seen were, indeed, local self-defense units and not part of the Russian military. Elegant formulation, for sure.

Putin then quoted the position of the UN International Court and the United States on the issue of the secession of Kosovo: "General international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence" (UNIC) and " Declarations of independence may, and often do, violate domestic legislation. However, this does not make them violations of international law" (USA) and added:

For some reason, things that Kosovo Albanians (and we have full respect for them) were permitted to do, Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars in Crimea are not allowed. Again, one wonders why.

Here we are getting at the core of his argument: the Empire has no other use for International Law then to use it as a fig leaf for its project of world hegemony and when that is not possible, then the Empire simply ignores it and uses brute force:

This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow (…) After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle "If you are not with us, you are against us." To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organisations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall. (…) We understand what is happening; we understand that these actions were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration (…) we have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position, because we maintain it and because we call things like they are and do not engage in hypocrisy. But there is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line, playing the bear and acting irresponsibly and unprofessionally.

Amazing words coming from the President of a nuclear-armed superpower: not only does he denounce the complete and total hypocrisy of the AngloZionist Empire, he even places it in the direct continuation of three centuries of anti-Russian policies by Western European powers! Not only does he denounce the Empire's double-standards, he even openly ridicules the incompetence of its leaders:

After all, they were fully aware that there are millions of Russians living in Ukraine and in Crimea. They must have really lacked political instinct and common sense not to foresee all the consequences of their actions. Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.

Indeed, one can only wonder what in the world they were thinking in the "imperial high command" when they decided to use Nazis in the Ukraine just like they used al-Qaeda in Afghanistan: did they really think that Russia would yield yet again? Did it even have such an option? Not according to Putin:

It is at historic turning points such as these that a nation demonstrates its maturity and strength of spirit. The Russian people showed this maturity and strength through their united support for their compatriots. Russia's foreign policy position on this matter drew its firmness from the will of millions of our people, our national unity and the support of our country's main political and public forces. (…) Obviously, we will encounter external opposition, but this is a decision that we need to make for ourselves. Are we ready to consistently defend our national interests, or will we forever give in, retreat to who knows where? (…) Russia will also have to make a difficult decision now, taking into account the various domestic and external considerations. What do people here in Russia think? Here, like in any democratic country, people have different points of view, but I want to make the point that the absolute majority of our people clearly do support what is happening.

Let's sum up. Putin has now openly stated that:

1) There is no limit to the hypocrisy, lies, evil, stupidity and aggressive nature of the AngloZionist Empire.
2) That this Empire represents by its very nature an existential threat to Russia.
3) That the Russian people are united in their determination to resist this Empire.

Frankly, to me this sounds very much like a declaration of war. Not necessarily a hot war with military forces fighting each other, but something more than a Cold War in which the status quo is an acceptable option. Putin is suggesting that the next war will be a civilizational one, a cultural one and even a moral one, a war in which one side will stand for absolute rule of a cynical world hegemon and the other side for a multi-polar world in which all countries are to be subjected to the same set of rules and principles. But even more importantly than a single set of rules, the kind of international system Russia is seeking to establish is one in which each nation, culture and religion would have the actual, not just theoretical, freedom to live as it want. He clearly said so in his 2013 annual Presidential address to the Federal Assembly when he said:

Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone's right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values. We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life, not just material existence but also spirituality, the values of humanism and global diversity. Of course, this is a conservative position. But speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.

It is pretty clear that this last sentence expresses Russia's view on the level of civilizational and cultural degradation the AngloZionist Empire has imposed upon the people of Europe and the USA. Furthermore, when Putin says that "destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority" he is clearly stating that the AngoZionist Empire is not ruled by the people which live in it, but by minorities, special interest groups, behind the scenes lobbies and cabals who impose their warped agenda upon the rest of the people.

Again, the bottom line is this: the President of Russia has made an open declaration of war against the 1% elite which currently is in control the AngloZionist Empire. This war will be a multi-level one combining "soft power" (cultural resistance, religious resistance, informational resistance, financial and economic warfare) with "hard power" (a military ready fight the US/NATO if needed, the use of the "energy weapon" to retaliate against economic warfare). In an ironical twist of history, especially for a capitalist society which has ridiculed Marx and repudiated the concept of class warfare, this war will also profoundly be a class war in which oligarchs from different countries will support each other and in which the regular, 99%, people will work together on, for example, the "virtual battlefields" of the Internet.

The crucial battlefield: "global information operations"

"Information operations" is the term used by the US military to refer to "direct and indirect support operations for the United States Military". Psychological operations, or PSYOPs, are seen as a subset of IO. For our purposes, however, is to extend this concept to not only military operations, but to the full spectrum of national security policies of a country and, in our case, for the "deep state" which holds the reins of power in the AngloZionist Empire. I will thus speak of Global Information Operations or GIOs the core component of which is represented the western corporate media.

For a while in my life I, like many other military analysts, made my living by, among other things, reading the Soviet press every day. Not just the Pravda or Izvestia, but also even more boring or specialized newspapers, magazines and reviews. I listen to the Soviet radio as often as I could, and I never missed a chance to watch the Soviet TV, especially the news shows. At the time I was young, very naïve and very dumb, and I sincerely believed that the Soviet Union was a mortal threat to western Europe and that the only thing which stood between them, the evil commies, and us, the free world, was the military power of the NATO alliance. Looking back at myself and the utter garbage I had in my brain then, I feel embarrassed and, frankly, ashamed of my total credulity. But at the time I was a dedicated soldier of the Cold War whose motto was "know thy enemy". And I knew my "enemy" really, really, well. I want to explain all of the above before stating the following:

In all honesty and sincerity, I have to say here that in comparison to the modern western corporate media the Soviet press was far more pluralistic, more diverse and more trustworthy. True, the Soviet press simply did not mention certain topics, but that goes to show that, unlike the western corporate media, it did not feel that it could brazenly lie to the point where even what is obvious is categorically and totally denied. For one thing, the Soviet public was far better educated. We all, including myself, used to poke fun at the obligatory lessons in Marxism-Leninism in Soviet schools, but we overlooked that any halfway decent course in Marxism-Leninism will include topics like dialectics, historical materialism and economics: stuff that makes you think. This is not to say that the Soviet people could not be lied to they could and they have been but only that the lies had to be at least halfway credible and present a plausible scenario. In contrast, for a public raised on CNN, BBC or MTV the lies need not be even capable of passing a basic common sense test (as is so vividly illustrated by the western corporate media's coverage of the 08.08.08 war or the events in the Ukraine): the Doublethink predicted by Orwell in his book 1984 is now fully upon us and black can be called white and vice-versa with no problems at all. I would even argue that, in comparison, even the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter contained more information than, say, the NYT, WSJ or the BBC whose level of brazen lying I could only compare to, maybe, the Der Stürmer.

I first noticed this absolutely unprecedented level of outright lying by the western corporate media during the US/NATO war on Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo), but I think that it has only gotten worse since. In contrast, the modern Russian press is extremely diverse and the people in Russia are regularly shown the type of coverage the current events in the Ukraine get in the western press and it leave them baffled. They simply cannot understand how this is possible in a society which externally seems to have all the characteristics of a free and pluralistic society. In the bad old days of the USSR, it was all simple: there was state censorship. But there is no state censorship in the West, no Glavlit and no Goskomizdat, and yet the western press is far more monolithic and dishonest then even the official party press in the USSR. But there is one crucial difference between the USSR and today's AngloZionist Empire: the Internet.

Simply put, the Internet is the only global media not controlled by either governments or corporations (which is really the same thing). Yes, there are numerous attempts by both governments and corporations to change this, but at least for the time being, information is circulating freely throughout the Internet. This introduced amazing changes:

1) a single citizen with a minimal income now had the means to meaningfully oppose the lies of even major corporations or governments: the case of Alain Soral in France is typical of this amazing trend.
2) the resistance to the Empire is now geographically decentralized: as this blog illustrates so well with the amazing diversity of its readers.
3) information simply cannot be suppressed: the world learned of the massacres and atrocities of the Wahabi insurgents in Syria even though the corporate media tried hard to ignore them.
4) low-level classified government documents do regularly get compromised by various individuals who can then leak it without anybody being able to stop it (Assange, Snowden, Manning).
5) an increasing number of people sever their exposure to the corporate media which now mostly subsists on government grants.
6) even those who still watch TV or read the press are aware that they are being lied to.

All this means that we live in a new reality in which the global AngloZionist Empire is now actively opposed by a global resistance which knows no borders, no nationalities and no religions: people from different countries, nations and religions stand together against a common hegemon not just in theory like in "Proletarians of all countries unite!" slogan, but in actuality and they actively collaborate with each other.

It is to this global resistance to the Empire and its GIOs that Putin addressed his words yesterday. Sure, of course, he was primarily speaking to the people of Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine, but he was also reaching beyond, to all those, probably many millions, who would make the effort to listen to him on YouTube or read a transcript of his speech. Because, of course, all this is much bigger than just a power struggle over a relatively small peninsula in the Black Sea: yesterday, for the first time, a powerful and determined leader openly told the Empire: we know you, we understand what you are trying to do, and we are not going to let you do it. In fact, we reject everything you stand for and we will never let you rule the planet. And today, we have the means to stop you!

Dust storms reported world wide

I think that we are entering a new era which many of us had been hoping for for a very long time. An era when a resistance which used to be only local has finally found a leader capable not of commanding it, no, but capable of representing and inspiring it. I honestly don't think that Putin wanted that. He would have much preferred to be in the shoes of Chinese President Xi Jinping who fully supports Putin, but who prefers to avoid an open confrontation with the Empire, at least until such time when China becomes truly powerful. Iran and Hezbollah have been openly resisting for many years, but they simply did not have the means to reach much further beyond the Middle-East. As for the resistance in Latin America (Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia) it has not been able to effectively deal with more lukewarm or hesitating leaders (Brazil, Chile, Argentina) or with outright US puppet states (Colombia). If anything, the recent vote at the UNSC in which only China abstained and every other member voted against Russia goes to show that on the global scale Russia is alone and that no world leader has the courage to openly stand next to Putin.

Even though I had been following Putin's career very carefully since 1999, it took me until 2008 to fully get a sense of what this man was all about. Still, I know that a lot of people remained skeptical: was he really what he appeared to be or was he simply playing a sophisticated game of "good cop bad cop" with Medvedev, with each of them catering to their own audience? When Russia was invited to the G8 and when it acceded to the WTO a lot of careful observers wondered whether Putin was really as "anti-Empire" as he claimed to be, or whether he was just conducting a hard bargain for better conditions inside the Empire's international system. I hope that they today these skeptics see that Putin is "for real" and that he is now the de-facto leader of the global resistance against the AngoZionist Empire.

As I have mentioned above, a lot of readers of this blog, with no personal connections to Russia at all, reported yesterday that they had listened to Putin's address with tears in their eyes. This resulted in a rather moving discussion of red-eye triggering "dust storms" reported from various parts of the world (Germany, USA, Uruguay, Austria, Canada and, of course, Russia). One anonymous poster though did not want to use a cute euphemism and simply wrote : "Here it wasn't a dust, it was just a sincere pure cry for the hope of the all humanity around the world, that we can live in peace, mutual respect , abundance and prosperity for everyone around this beautiful earth. I do believe that this is the start of the new era." In other words: Putin we heard you!

Conclusion a victory which belongs to every free person

First, let me be clear about this: what happened in Crimea is definitely a victory, but only one in a much wider war which is far from over. The first rule of warfare is to never underestimate your enemy and to never do what the French call "sell the bear's skin before having killed it". This is far from over and if this is indeed the "beginning of the end" for the Empire, this is still only the very beginning of a long and most dangerous process. Some Empires die more or less peacefully, destroyed by economic ruin and over-reach, but others need to be defeated in an orgy of violence. Though on my bad days I sometimes daydream about seeing a private of the Russian army plant a Russian flag on the Capitol as Meliton Kantaria did over the Reichstag, I don't think that this would be much of a cause for joy in the midst of a nuclear winter. So the task is to bring down the Empire without bringing down the rest of the planet with it.

Those parts of the planet which have been "liberated" (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, Iran, etc.) need to resist, if needed by force, and remain free. Those parts which are still fought over (Syria, Lebanon, Venezuela, etc.) need to continue their struggle, as for the rest of the world it needs to continue its non-violent, ideological and informational resistance against the Empire and it's lies. We can use the well-known image of a swarm of bees attacking a large animal individually the bees can do little, but in a coordinated attack they can defeat and even kill the much larger animal.

In the meantime, yes, we can rejoice over our common victory this week and paraphrase the words of Hassan Nasrallah in his absolutely beautiful "Divine Victory" speech and say: "We feel that we won; Russia won; Crimea won; the Slavic nations won, and every oppressed, aggrieved person in this world also won. It is not the victory of a party or a community; rather it is a victory for true Russia, the true European people, and every free person in the world. Don't distort this big historic victory. Do not contain it in party, sectarian, communal, or regional clans. This victory is too big to be comprehended by us".

There is a song about war as a metaphor for any resistance to evil and brutality which is very popular in Russia called "A toast to" which has the following words: (see home-made music video here)

Let's toast to life, come on brother, until the end
Let's toast to those who were with us then
Let's toast to life, and may all wars be accursed!
We'll remember those
Who were with us then.
A toast to them, a toast to us
And to Siberia and the Caucasus
To light of distant cities
And to friendship and to love
A toast to you, a toast for us,
To the Airborne Troops and the Spetsnaz
To combat decorations
Let's lift a toast, my old friend!

In the same spirit, I toast to you, all my readers and friends in the resistance, and I wish you courage and steadfastness in the long struggle ahead. But today, let us celebrate indeed!

[Kenneth Kapel]

The Current Huffington Posr headline:"Nato fear Russia won't stop", wheras IMO the headline should read:"Russia fears NATO won't stop", OMG I forget that the US press, even the so called" liberal media" is just an arm of the U.S. National Security State.

[David Guyatt]

The Current Huffington Posr headline:"Nato fear Russia won't stop", wheras IMO the headline should read:"Russia fears NATO won't stop", OMG I forget that the US press, even the so called" liberal media" is just an arm of the U.S. National Security State.

The west has always projected their own values and motives on others. This is not the first time Russia has been tagged with the mad dog label, the cold war was all about defeating communism by creating the picture that the evil Russians were about to attack western Europe - when in fact it was the US wanting to attack Russia.

If you want war you need to create an enemy. For my money, the Muslim/Al-Qaida option is all but played out.

[Albert Doyle]

Revenge for Cuba I guess.

[Lauren Johnson]

Pepe Escobar addresses the public China's neutrality

"We are paying very close attention to the situation in Ukraine. We hope all parties can calmly maintain restraint to prevent the situation from further escalating and worsening. Political resolution and dialogue is the only way out."

This, via Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong, is Beijing's quite measured, official interpretation of what's happening in Ukraine, tailored for global consumption.

But here, in a People's Daily editorial, is what the leadership is really thinking. And the focus is clearly on the dangers of regime change, the "West's inability to understand the lessons of history", and "the final battlefield of the Cold War."

Yet again the West misinterpreted China's abstention from the UN Security Council vote on a US-backed resolution condemning the Crimea referendum. The spin was that Russia - which vetoed the resolution - was "isolated". It's not. And the way Beijing plays geopolitics shows it's not.

Oh, Samantha …
The herd of elephants in the (Ukraine) room, in terms of global opinion, is how the authentic "international community" - from the G-20 to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) - who has had enough of the Exceptionalist Hypocrisy Show, has fully understood, and even applauded, that at least one country on the planet has the balls to clearly say "F**k the US". Russia under President Vladimir Putin may harbor quite a few distortions, just like any other nation. But this is not a dinner party; this is realpolitik. To face down the US Leviathan, nothing short of a bad ass such as Putin will suffice.

NATO - or shorthand for the Pentagon dominating European wimps - keeps issuing threats and spewing out "consequences". What are they going to do - launch a barrage of ICBMs equipped with nuclear warheads against Moscow?

Furthermore, the UN Security Council itself is a joke, with US ambassador Samantha "Nothing Compares to You" Power - one of the mothers of R2P ("responsibility to protect") - carping on "Russian aggression", "Russian provocations" and comparing the Crimean referendum to a theft. Oh yes; bombing Iraq, bombing Libya and getting to the brink of bombing Syria were just innocent humanitarian gestures. Samantha The Humanitarian arguably gives a better performance invoking Sinead O'Connor in her shower.

Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin was polite enough to say, "these insults addressed to our country" are "unacceptable". It's what he added that carried the real juice; "If the delegation of the United States of America expects our cooperation in the Security Council on other issues, then Power must understand this quite clearly."

Samantha The Humanitarian, as well as the whole bunch of juvenile bystanders in the Obama administration, won't understand it. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov gave them a little help; Russia didn't want to use the Iranian nuclear talks to "raise the stakes", but if the US and the EU continue with their sanctions and threats, that's what's going to happen.

So the plot thickens - as in a closer and closer strategic partnership between Tehran and Moscow.

Secessionists of the world, unite?
Now imagine all this as seen from Beijing. No one knows what exactly goes on in the corridors of the Zhongnanhai, but it's fair to argue there's only an apparent contradiction between China's key principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and Russia's intervention in Crimea.

Beijing has identified very clearly the sequence of affairs; long-running Western interference in Ukraine via NGOs and the State Department; regime change perpetrated with the help of fascists and neo-nazis; a pre-emptive Russian counterattack which can be read as a by-the-book Samantha The Humanitarian R2P operation (protecting Russians and Russian speakers from a second coup planned in Crimea, and thwarted by Russian intelligence.)

On top of it Beijing well knows how Crimea has been essentially Russian since 1783; how Crimea - as well as a great deal of Ukraine - fall smack into Russian civilization's sphere of influence; and how Western interference directly threatened Russia's national security interests (as Putin made it clear.) Now imagine a similar scenario in Tibet or Xinjiang. Long-running Western interference via NGOs and the CIA; a take over by Tibetans in Lhasa or Uighurs in Kashgar of the local administration. Beijing could easily use Samantha's R2P in the name of protecting Han Chinese.

Yet Beijing (silently) agreeing to the Russian response to the coup in Kiev by getting Crimea back via a referendum and without a shot fired does not mean that "splittists" Tibet or Taiwan would be allowed to engage in the same route. Even as Tibet, more than Taiwan, would be able to build a strong historical case for seceding. Each case bears its own myriad complexities.

The Obama administration - like a blind Minotaur - is now lost in a labyrinth of pivots of its own making. A new Borges - that Buddha in a gray suit - is needed to tell the tale. First there was the pivoting to Asia-Pac - which is encircling of China under another name - as it's well understood in Beijing.

Then came the pivoting to Persia - "if we are not going to war", as that Cypher in Search of an Idea, John Kerry, put it. There was, of course, the martial pivoting to Syria, aborted at the last minute thanks to the good offices of Moscow diplomacy. And back to the pivoting to Russia, trampling the much-lauded "reset" and conceived as a payback for Syria.

Those who believe Beijing strategists have not carefully analyzed - and calculated a response - to all the implications of these overlapping pivots do deserve to join Samantha in the shower. Additionally, it's easy to picture Chinese Think Tankland hardly repressing its glee in analyzing a hyperpower endlessly, helplessly pivoting over itself.

While the Western dogs bark …
Russia and China are strategic partners - at the G-20, at the BRICS club of emerging powers and at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Their number one objective, in these and other forums, is the emergence of a multipolar world; no bullying by the American Empire of Bases, a more balanced international financial system, no more petrodollar eminence, a basket of currencies, essentially a "win-win" approach to global economic development.

A multipolar world also implies, by definition, NATO out of Eurasia - which is from Washington's point of view the number one reason to interfere in Ukraine. In Eurasian terms, it's as if - being booted out of Afghanistan by a bunch of peasants with Kalashnikovs - NATO was pivoting back via Ukraine.

While Russia and China are key strategic partners in the energy sphere - Pipelineistan and beyond - they do overlap in their race to do deals across Central Asia. Beijing is building not only one but two New Silk Roads - across Southeast Asia and across Central Asia, involving pipelines, railways and fiber optic networks, and reaching as far as Istanbul, the getaway to Europe. Yet as far as Russia-China competition for markets go, all across Eurasia, it's more under a "win-win" umbrella than a zero-sum game.

On Ukraine ("the last battlefield in the Cold War") and specifically Crimea, the (unspoken) official position by Beijing is absolute neutrality (re: the UN vote). Yet the real deal is support to Moscow. But this could never be out in the open, because Beijing is not interested in antagonizing the West, unless heavily provoked (the pivoting becoming hardcore encirclement, for instance). Never forget; since Deng Xiaoping ("keep a low profile") this is, and will continue to be, about China's "peaceful rise". Meanwhile, the Western dogs bark, and the Sino-Russian caravan passes.

Also a long analysis on China's geo-political strategy: [URL="http://rt.com/op-edge/china-construction-economic-projects-342/"]Westward march of the Chinese Dragon in Eurasia
[/URL]

As the US militarily pivots into the Asia-Pacific, the Chinese steadily march westward simply through trade-oriented construction and economic projects.

The Chinese have finished the construction of a major tunnel that is part of a mountain transport corridor from Turpan to Kurla that is linked to Pakistan. The corridor is part of the extension of the Karakoram Highway that is part of a project to re-integrate the westernmost portion of the People's Republic of China with the areas of Eurasia to its west.

Beijing has been setting up its own transportation infrastructure and energy pipelines in Eurasia, and the infrastructure being built will be the engine of an economic renaissance that is unfolding. The Chinese now have a presence all around the old Silk Road and the ancient maritime trade routes in the Indian Ocean that sold spices and precious metals.

China has been busy building deep-sea ports, holding bays, railroads, highways, tunnels, and transportation hubs throughout these regions.
Despite US pressure and attempts to militarize and control the Indian Ocean's shipping lanes, the Chinese have been busy setting up an infrastructure network stretching all the way to Gwadar, close to the Persian Gulf, in Pakistan and Hambantota in Sri Lanka from Chittagong in Bangladesh and Kyaukphyu in Myanmar.

While the US watches with displeasure from the sidelines, these Chinese projects are weaving the fabrics of Eurasian integration.

Washington's secret wars against China in Xinjiang and Tibet

The US has tried and is continuing to try to weaken China. Washington's attempts at weakening China have included exploiting the ethnic tensions and cleavages between the Han Chinese, which compose the majority of the Chinese population, and China's non-Han citizens. This includes stoking tensions in East Turkestan between the Han and the predominantly-Muslim Turkic-speaking Uyghur indigenous population in the autonomous region of Xinjiang.

The US has also continuously pushed for protests and secession in Tibet. Although the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile claim that the unrest was the result of discontent with Beijing, US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) teams, US planning and CIA training were all involved in sparking and manipulating the Tibetan unrest that erupted in Lhasa on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Han and predominately-Muslim Hui, an ethnic group comprised essentially of Hans that have mixed with Silk Road travelers and traders over the millennia, were targeted and killed during this wave of anti-Beijing unrest.

During the American Anthropological Association's 110th Annual Meeting in 2011 (running from November 16 to November 20 in Montréal), one anthropologist even admitted that for research purposes that they were given privileged access to the CIA's training program that ignited the 2008 unrest in Tibet.

The CIA even has training camps for Tibetan guerillas on American soil, away from public eyes in the Rocky Mountains.

Despite Washington's rejections, there is also a body of literature that candidly discusses Washington's covert Tibet operations. The Tibetan activist Jamyang Norbu wrote a chapter in a book published in 1994 and edited by Columbia University professor and Tibet specialist Robert Barnett, Resistance and Reform in Tibet, openly detailing the CIA's role in Tibet against the Chinese government. The Tibetan Resistance Movement and the Role of the CIA' is the title of Norbu's particular chapter. More recent literature includes the University Press of Kansas book by Kenneth Conboy and former CIA agent James Morrison that was published in 2002, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet'. These authors all openly reveal how the US has waged a covert war against China by encouraging Tibetan secession and controlling the heart of the Tibetan guerilla movement fighting against Beijing.

Westward march

Washington has been pushing for trouble between China and the countries bordering China in the South China and East China Seas.
US officials dream of rebooting the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) too.

SEATO is the defunct NATO of East Asia that was supposed to expand in parallel with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), just as NATO and the European Union have expanded hand-in-glove over in Europe on the western portion of Eurasia.

There is also the Asiatic segment of the global missile shield project that the Pentagon is building next to China's heavily populated eastern borders. This is part of a Eurasian strategy of encirclement that targets both China and Russia alike.

This brings us to the so-called Asian Pivot' that Hillary Clinton announced in 2011 when she claimed that the US was pivoting towards the Asia-Pacific region and away from the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.

Beijing did not buy any of it. China knows better. The US has no intentions of leaving the Middle East or the Pentagon's military playland in Afghanistan.

Instead the Chinese are continuing with their project of slowly developing a trade-based infrastructure network that moves westward towards the Caspian and Mediterranean shores of the Middle East.

Foreign Policy, the magazine founded by Samuel Clash of Civilizations Huntington, was even given a taste of what is the obvious in China by the Stimson Center's East Asia fellow Yun Sun in 2013: "As America pivots east, China marches in the other direction," she explained to readers.
Eagle's Empire of Blood v Chinese Empire of Trade

The US has not stopped skimming to halt the Chinese in their tracks. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is yet another US scheme to do this. The aim of the TPP is to isolate the Chinese by imposing trade restrictions between Beijing and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.
Beijing, however, has other plans.

China is going ahead with its projects, because it is not susceptible to Washington's ongoing pressure and destabilization operations.
The shadow that the American Eagle has been casting from the sky over Eurasia is waning and shrinking as it steadily declines.
The Silk Road is being rebuilt in Eurasia by the Chinese Dragon and its friends. It is Marco Polo in reverse.

The Dragon and its friends, including the Russian Bear and the Iranian Lion, have different ideas about the management of their part of the world. Management in Eurasia they have declared will be local and not American. This is the basis for the blooming of an alphabetical hodgepodge of different regional organizations ranging from the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and the Eurasian Union to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).


This is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which cut Iran off from the international banking system in 2012 under Uncle Sam's orders, reported at the end of 2013 that China's national currency supplanted the European Union's euro as the second most-widely used global currency after the US dollar. 8.66 percent of global trade was taking place in the Chinese yuan.
This is just the beginning. The use of the yuan will increase in international transactions.

Despite US attempts to curb Beijing globally, Chinese influence in Africa and Latin America is increasing too.

The US divided Sudan, attacked the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and created US Africa Command (AFRICOM), while their French poodles begun to re-impose themselves militarily across Africa under Nicolas Sarkozy, as part of the attempt to drive the Chinese out of Africa. The results, however, have done little and Chinese influence has continued to grow in Africa.

Across Latin America there is talk about increasing trade with China. The Chinese are preparing to start building a mega canal in Nicaragua to meet the increased demands for trade from Latin America too. At the same time, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) are also reorienting Latin America away from the US towards China and its Eurasian partners.

The Chinese presence is additionally felt in both the North Pole and South Pole. Beijing is eagerly waiting for the opening of an Arctic Silk Road or sorts and for exploration projects in Antarctica.

Beijing, in addition, a permanent observer at the Arctic Council and China has invested heavily in the research, Arctic development projects, and exploration of the countries bordering the North Pole. Beijing's ultimate aim is to develop an Arctic transport network and access Arctic energy reserves.

The Pentagon sees China as the biggest threat to the United States. The threat, however, is not one of a military nature; it is economic.
Chinese soft power is outflanking US hard power. Unlike Washington and its Western European friends, Chinese capitalism is not sustained by military force. While Washington continues to wage war and siphon the wealth of vanquished nations, the Chinese just continue to do business across the world as they steadily continue their westward march in Eurasia towards the banks of the Caspian and Mediterranean. In other words, China works while America boxes.

[Peter Lemkin]

Neocons' Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit

March 19, 2014

Exclusive: The Ukraine crisis in part stirred up by U.S. neocons has damaged prospects for peace not only on Russia's borders but in two Middle East hotspots, Syria and Iran, which may have been exactly the point, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
You might think that policymakers with so many bloody fiascos on their résumés as the U.S. neocons, including the catastrophic Iraq War, would admit their incompetence and return home to sell insurance or maybe work in a fast-food restaurant. Anything but directing the geopolitical decisions of the world's leading superpower.
But Official Washington's neocons are nothing if not relentless and resilient. They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they won't do the honorable thing and disappear. They keep hatching new schemes and strategies to keep the world stirred up and to keep their vision of world domination and particularly "regime change" in the Middle East alive.
Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists at a rally in Kiev.

Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving two nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But even if nuclear weapons don't come into play the neocons have succeeded in estranging U.S. President Barack Obama from Russian President Vladimir Putin and sabotaging the pair's crucial cooperation on Iran and Syria, which may have been the point all along.
Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the chronology of the recent uprising and the neocon interest in it meshes neatly with neocon fury over Obama and Putin working together to avert a U.S. military strike against Syria last summer and then brokering an interim nuclear agreement with Iran last fall that effectively took a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the table.
With those two top Israeli priorities U.S. military attacks on Syria and Iran sidetracked, the American neocons began activating their influential media and political networks to counteract the Obama-Putin teamwork. The neocon wedge to splinter Obama away from Putin was driven into Ukraine.
Operating out of neocon enclaves in the U.S. State Department and at U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, led by the National Endowment for Democracy, neocon operatives targeted Ukraine even before the recent political unrest began shaking apart the country's fragile ethnic and ideological cohesion.
Last September, as the prospects for a U.S. military strike against Syria were fading thanks to Putin, NED president Carl Gershman, who is something of a neocon paymaster controlling more than $100 million in congressionally approved funding each year, took to the pages of the neocon-flagship Washington Post and wrote that Ukraine was now "the biggest prize."
But Gershman added that Ukraine was really only an interim step to an even bigger prize, the removal of the strong-willed and independent-minded Putin, who, Gershman added, "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad [i.e. Ukraine] but within Russia itself." In other words, the new hope was for "regime change" in Kiev and Moscow.
Putin had made himself a major annoyance in Neocon World, particularly with his diplomacy on Syria that defused a crisis over a Sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Despite the attack's mysterious origins and the absence of any clear evidence proving the Syrian government's guilt the U.S. State Department and the U.S. news media rushed to the judgment that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did it.
Politicians and pundits baited Obama with claims that Assad had brazenly crossed Obama's "red line" by using chemical weapons and that U.S. "credibility" now demanded military retaliation. A longtime Israeli/neocon goal, "regime change" in Syria, seemed within reach.
But Putin brokered a deal in which Assad agreed to surrender Syria's chemical weapons arsenal (even as he continued to deny any role in the Sarin attack). The arrangement was a huge letdown for the neocons and Israeli officials who had been drooling over the prospect that a U.S. bombing campaign would bring Assad to his knees and deliver a strategic blow against Iran, Israel's current chief enemy.
Putin then further offended the neocons and the Israeli government by helping to facilitate an interim nuclear deal with Iran, making another neocon/Israeli priority, a U.S. war against Iran, less likely.
Putting Putin in Play
So, the troublesome Putin had to be put in play. And, NED's Gershman was quick to note a key Russian vulnerability, neighboring Ukraine, where a democratically elected but corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was struggling with a terrible economy and weighing whether to accept a European aid offer, which came with many austerity strings attached, or work out a more generous deal with Russia.
There was already a strong U.S.-organized political/media apparatus in place for destabilizing Ukraine's government. Gershman's NED had 65 projects operating in the country training "activists," supporting "journalists" and organizing business groups, according to its latest report. (NED was created in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, nurture pro-U.S. operatives under the umbrella of "promoting democracy.")
So, when Yanukovych opted for Russia's more generous $15 billion aid package, the roof fell in on him. In a speech to Ukrainian business leaders last December, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover and the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, reminded the group that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in Ukraine's "European aspirations."
Then, urged on by Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, protests in the capital of Kiev turned increasingly violent with neo-Nazi militias moving to the fore. Unidentified snipers opened fire on protesters and police, touching off fiery clashes that killed some 80 people (including about a dozen police officers).
On Feb. 21, in a desperate attempt to tamp down the violence, Yanukovych signed an agreement brokered by European countries. He agreed to surrender many of his powers, to hold early elections (so he could be voted out of office), and pull back the police. That last step, however, opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias to overrun government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for his life.
With these modern-day storm troopers controlling key buildings and brutalizing Yanukovych supporters a rump Ukrainian parliament voted, in an extra-constitutional fashion, to remove Yanukovych from office. This coup-installed regime, with far-right parties controlling four ministries including defense, received immediate U.S. and European Union recognition as Ukraine's "legitimate" government.
As remarkable and newsworthy as it was that a government on the European continent included Nazis in the executive branch for the first time since World War II, the U.S. news media performed as it did before the Iraq War and during various other international crises. It essentially presented the neocon-preferred narrative and treated the presence of the neo-Nazis as some kind of urban legend.
Virtually across the board, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, the U.S. press corps fell in line, painting Yanukovych and Putin as the "black-hat" villains and the coup regime as the "white-hat" good guys, which required, of course, whiting out the neo-Nazi "brown shirts."
Neocon Expediency
Some neocon defenders have challenged my reporting that U.S. neocons played a significant role in the Ukrainian putsch. One argument is that the neocons, who regard the U.S.-Israeli bond as inviolable, would not knowingly collaborate with neo-Nazis given the history of the Holocaust (and indeed the role of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in extermination campaigns against Poles and Jews).
But the neocons have frequently struck alliances of convenience with some of the most unsavory and indeed anti-Semitic forces on earth, dating back to the Reagan administration and its collaboration with Latin American "death squad" regimes, including work with the World Anti-Communist League that included not only neo-Nazis but aging real Nazis.
More recently in Syria, U.S. neocons (and Israeli leaders) are so focused on ousting Assad, an ally of hated Iran, that they have cooperated with Saudi Arabia's Sunni monarchy (known for its gross anti-Semitism). Israeli officials have even expressed a preference for Saudi-backed Sunni extremists winning in Syria if that is the only way to get rid of Assad and hurt his allies in Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Last September, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his Iranian backers weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives taking power in Syria.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc," Oren said in the interview. "We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran."
Oren said that was Israel's view even if the other "bad guys" were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Oren, who was Israel's point man in dealing with Official Washington's neocons, is considered very close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reflects his views. For decades, U.S. neocons have supported Netanyahu and his hardline Likud Party, including as strategists on his 1996 campaign for prime minister when neocons such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith developed the original "regime change" strategy. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."]
In other words, Israel and its U.S. neocon supporters have been willing to collaborate with extreme right-wing and even anti-Semitic forces if that advances their key geopolitical goals, such as maneuvering the U.S. government into military confrontations with Syria and Iran.
So, while it may be fair to assume that neocons like Nuland and McCain would have preferred that the Ukraine coup had been spearheaded by militants who weren't neo-Nazis or, for that matter, that the Syrian rebels were not so dominated by al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists the neocons (and their Israeli allies) see these tactical collaborations as sometimes necessary to achieve overarching strategic priorities.
And, since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go.
By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine's elected president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events now including Crimea's secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Like other neocon-engineered schemes, there will surely be much collateral damage in this latest one. For instance, if the tit-for-tat economic retaliations escalate and Russian gas supplies are disrupted Europe's fragile recovery could be tipped back into recession, with harmful consequences for the U.S. economy, too.
There's also the certainty that congressional war hawks and neocon pundits will press for increased U.S. military spending and aggressive tactics elsewhere in the world to punish Putin, meaning even less money and attention for domestic programs or deficit reduction. Obama's "nation-building at home" will be forgotten.
But the neocons have long made it clear that their vision for the world one of America's "full-spectrum dominance" and "regime change" in Middle Eastern countries opposed to Israel overrides all other national priorities. And as long as the neocons face no accountability for the havoc that they wreak, they will continue working Washington's corridors of power, not selling insurance or flipping hamburgers.

[Peter Lemkin]

Snowden might reveal US war plans to China, Russia: Intelligence experts

Former intelligence officials say most of Snowden's documents are related to US military capabilities.

Wed Mar 19, 2014 6:24PM GMT

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Former US intelligence officials have warned that American whistleblower Edward Snowden might disclose US war plans to China and Russia, according to a report.

The Hill reported in an article on Wednesday that "US officials might not know for years whether former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden divulged war plans to China and Russia."
Although Snowden has denied leaking US secrets, former intelligence officials believe that some tactical shifts might be apparent right away.
"We may see some things immediately that might indicate that they have things, but it will create a great deal of uncertainty for years," former CIA assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production Mark Lowenthal told The Hill.
Most of Snowden's documents are related to US military capabilities and plans documents of particular interest to Russia and China, according to former intelligence officials.

The documents could include everything from defense budget data to information about weapons capabilities to documents about covert actions.
"This includes anything that was being moved out over their communications systems, not just about the collection of intelligence," former CIA official Gary Berntsen said.
"We have military forces positioned around the world, they push plans back and forth, assessments, deployment information the whole thing," he said.
Lowenthal said one clue that Russia or China is privy to the war plans could be adjustments to the way they exercise and train.
"If you notice changes in someone's exercises, dramatic changes that seem different to you that's not evolutionary, you would have to think, Why are they doing this? Do they have their hands on war plans; have they read the plans?' "
Although Washington closely tracks how other nations exercise, it would take time for other countries to change their methods.
"It depends on how fast they can get their act together. Militaries don't exactly turn on a dime," Lowenthal said. "It's not proof positive, but it would be a good indicator."
According to Lowenthal, another clue would be changes in military purchases clearly aimed at thwarting US defenses and weapons.
That could take "years and years" to notice since militaries have to buy the equipment, build it, and test it, Lowenthal said.
Last month, member of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Pete King accused Snowden of revealing his documents to Russia and China.
"We have to assume… all of data he had is available to the Russians. I mean, they can break any type of code," King said. "I think we have to assume the Chinese have it all, too."