US Government Behind Campaign Violating North Korean Airspace

October 23, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - North Korea has recently warned against the use of drones over its sovereign airspace to spread subversive propaganda.

CNN in its October 11, 2024 article, “North Korea accuses South of flying drones over Pyongyang,” reported, “North Korea accused South Korea of flying propaganda-filled drones over Pyongyang and threatened “retaliation,” state media reported.”

The same article admits that “South Korean activists and North Korean defectors have sent balloons to the North, loaded with propaganda material criticizing leader Kim Jong Un, along with USB sticks filled with K-pop songs and South Korean television shows.”

What the article omitted is that this campaign is not an organic activity carried out by independent activists, but a campaign of subversion organized and funded by the US government.

A US State Department Provocation…

As early as 2014, the Western media promoted what was called, “Thumb Drives for Democracy,” a campaign organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF).

The Atlantic published an article in early 2014 titled, “We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives,” by HRF founder Thor Halvorssen, which admits its balloons carry “subversive information” meant to undermine the North Korean government. It also admits that before HRF began its campaign, “the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy* and the State Department’s DRL [The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs] programs.”

The balloons were just one part of a much wider campaign of subversion and ultimately regime change.

HRF also organizes the annual “Oslo Freedom Forum” (OFF) funded in part by the Freedom Fund, which includes the US State Department as a “key investor.” The OFF is a continuation of US State Department-funded training programs gathering agitators from around the globe, training, funding, and equipping them to then return to their respective nations and attempt to overthrow them.

The New York Times in its 2011 article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” admits the US government prepared years ahead of the so-called “Arab Spring,” backing the core organizations that ultimately carried it out across the Middle East and North Africa. The article explicitly states:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

Clearly, HRF serves as an intermediary continuing US government-funded sedition around the globe in a way more difficult to trace directly back to the US government itself. Its objectives nonetheless remain to undermine, divide, destabilize, and overthrow nations targeted by the US State Department for regime change, including North Korea.

More Than Just Balloons…

Considering the aftermath of the admittedly US-engineered “Arab Spring” which included the full-scale destruction of Libya, a deeply divided Egypt, and a nearly destroyed Syria, North Korea’s concerns regarding similar US government-sponsored activities being aimed at it falls far short of an overreaction.

US-Israel Inch Toward Wider, More Dangerous War

October 14, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Beginning in October 2023 a renewed cycle of violence began destabilizing the Middle East. Hamas’ October 7, 2023 military operation into Israeli-held territory served as a pretext for Israel, not to dismantle Hamas itself, but to conduct an indiscriminate punitive military operation against all of Gaza.

 
Israel all but admitted as much, with Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari admitting “thousands of tonnes of munitions had already been dropped on the tiny strip” by October 10, 2023 and that, “right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.”

While the Western media repeatedly refers to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack as “Iranian-backed,” the West itself has admitted that Iran had no knowledge of the impending operation, let alone any role in it. This resembles deliberate attempts by the US to infer Iraqi culpability regarding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, despite officially admitting Iraq played no role, all to serve as a partial pretext for the eventual US invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 onward.

Omitted from deliberately deceptive narratives trying to link Iran to Hamas is the fact that Hamas has a long-standing history of serving as an extension of US aggression in the region, rather than serving as a bulwark against it. In 2012, Hamas publicly announced it would mobilize against the Syrian government on the side of US-backed and armed militants. For years, Hamas fighters would play a role in fighting the Syrian government and its Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah allies.

For years, Hamas has worked in tandem with Israel itself to frustrate efforts to establish a two-state solution, perpetuating hostilities, and serving as a continuous pretext for continued Israeli aggression.

Creating an Impossible Dilemma for Iran

The ultimate goal of Israel’s punitive operation against Gaza is to create an impossible dilemma for Iran and its allies and, eventually, a permissive environment for wider conflict across the region.

While Iran does not support Hamas, it supports the Palestinian people and their right to resist what the UN recognizes under international law as illegal Israeli occupation. Iran and its allies, including Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Yemen-based Ansar Allah (referred to across the Western media as “Houthis”) were compelled to assist the Palestinians.

Hezbollah has since exchanged fire with Israeli military targets along the Israeli-Lebanese border, while Ansar Allah has conducted interdiction operations against Israeli-bound shipping through the Red Sea.

Israel has used this as a pretext to escalate further, striking Iran’s consulate in Syria on April 1, 2024, and a series of terrorist attacks and targeted assassinations against Hezbollah culminating in the death of Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

Both escalations were met by Iranian retaliation. Iran conducted a large-scale attack on Israel using stand-off weapons including drones, cruise missiles, and long-range ballistic missiles in mid-April and a larger ballistic missile strike in early October.

Both strikes were conducted with considerable restraint.

The mid-April strike was preceded by Iranian warnings, providing the US and Israel days to prepare. The second strike, although conducted on short notice and involving a larger number of ballistic missiles, was designed to demonstrate Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses rather than to maximize damage.

Western Media Urges Public: Believe Our Lies, Not Your Own Eyes

October 2, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In a recent London Telegraph article titled, “The British travel bloggers ‘sugarcoating’ China’s Uyghur problem to the delight of Beijing,” readers are told that “more than one million Uyghurs are believed to be detained in re-education camps,” in Xinjiang and that Western tourists traveling to the region and seeing no evidence at all of this or other claims made by the Western media for years, are simply toeing the line of the Chinese government for clicks and cash.

The article claims that the Chinese government has “given them a helping hand” by providing visas enabling easier access to China, including the western region of Xinjiang, trying to make efforts by Beijing to counter baseless Western propaganda with transparency appear sinister.

To refute what tourists have seen with their own eyes and relayed through their travel vlogs, the Telegraph quotes Daria Impiombato, “a cyber analyst” at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) who claimed, “vloggers with large platforms had a responsibility to inform themselves and to be sceptical.”

By “inform themselves,” the ASPI analyst almost certainly means toeing the line of the US government ASPI itself helps define because unlike the tourists the Telegraph obliquely smears throughout its article but ultimately admits, “there is no suggestion any of the vloggers are acting at the behest of the Chinese government or receiving its money,” ASPI receives the bulk of its funds (PDF) from the US government, other Western governments, and Western arms manufacturers (PDF) like Lockheed Martin, Thales, Saab, and Boeing.

China Responded to Very Real, Very Extensive Terrorism…

For years, the US government, mainstream Western media outlets, and a large network of US government-funded organizations – including ASPI – have attempted to perpetuate the myth of a “Uyghur genocide” taking place in China’s western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This followed years of US government-sponsored separatism and terrorism that shook the region, spread across both China and the rest of Asia, before spanning half the globe and reaching battlefields in Syria.

In 2014, the BBC would report on the vicious terrorism plaguing China:

In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew.

There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year, 27 people died in Shanshan county after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings.

At least 31 people were killed and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a “violent terrorist incident”.

It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi’s south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others.

In July, authorities reported an attack on government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China’s largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later.

In September, about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear, and activists have contested some accounts of incidents in state media.

Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The BBC also noted:

China has often blamed ETIM – the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – or people inspired by ETIM for violent incidents both in Xinjiang and beyond the region’s borders.

ETIM is said to want to establish an independent East Turkestan in China. The US State Department in 2006 said ETIM is “the most militant of the ethnic Uighur separatist groups”.

“East Turkestan” (sometimes spelled East Turkistan) refers to a proposed independent region separatists seek to carve Xinjiang off from China to create.

The US government, through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds a multitude of organizations who officially pursue independence, referring to Xinjiang as “East Turkistan” and as being “occupied” by the Chinese government. This includes the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Campaign for Uyghurs, and the Uyghur Transitional Justice Database Project.

The World Uyghur Congress on its website, for example, claims it declares an “opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkistan.” Despite openly pursuing separatism in China, it is listed as a grantee of US NED money.

In response to US-sponsored separatism and the brutal terrorism used to achieve it, China initiated sweeping security measures, infrastructure projects, education and training initiatives, and job placement programs to root out extremism and the poverty in the remote region that made many among the population susceptible to extremism to begin with.

In turn, the US government has used claims of “genocide” and “forced labor” as a pretext to level sanctions against China and in particular businesses across China hiring Uyghurs from Xinjiang. In addition to hurting China’s economy overall, the objective is to reintroduce the socio-economic conditions across Xinjiang amid which extremism, terrorism, and instability can once again flourish.

Two Different Approaches to Terrorism

Despite the Western media having openly and eagerly reported on rampant violence consuming Xinjiang a decade ago, it now attempts to depict any mention of terrorism and the need to address it as Chinese propaganda. The Telegraph article at one point questions claims by British tourists traveling in Xinjiang who concluded security measures were for everyone’s safety by claiming it, “rams home the government line that enhanced security in Xinjiang “is not an overreaction” due to the threat of terrorism from religious extremists and ethnic separatists.”

What’s Wrong with Boris Johnson’s Plan to “Save” Ukraine?

September 29, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A September 21, 2024 article published in The Spectator written by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson titled, “It’s time to let Ukraine join NATO,” attempts to formulate a theory of victory for Ukraine as war with Russia continues to grind on.

Johnson provides a “three-fold plan for Ukrainian victory.”

Johnson demands that the collective West “end the delays” and that the West “get it done and get it won.” By this, he means lifting all restrictions on the use of Western long-range weapons on pre-2014 Russian territory.

Next, he demands the US and Europe provide a “package of loans on the scale of Lend-Lease: half a trillion dollars,” or “even a trillion.” Johnson claims such support will send a message to the Kremlin that, “we are going to out-gun you financially and back Ukraine on a scale you cannot hope to match.”

Finally, he demands Ukraine be allowed membership into NATO immediately, even as the conflict rages on. In respect to NATO’s Article 5 regarding “collective defense,” Johnson proposes that:

…we could extend the Article 5 security guarantee to all the Ukrainian territory currently controlled by Ukraine (or at the end of this fighting season), while reaffirming the absolute right of the Ukrainians to the whole of their 1991 nation. We could protect most of Ukraine, while simultaneously supporting the Ukrainian right to recapture the rest.

While Johnson points out the political implications of this policy, meaning all of NATO would, “have to commit to the defence of that Ukrainian territory,” he falls far short of considering the practical implications.

NATO Intervention in Ukraine: Political vs. Practical Considerations

Far from a lack of political will or financial resources, the collective West has fallen short supplying Ukraine with the military equipment, vehicles, weapons, and ammunition required to match or exceed Russian military capabilities because its collective military industrial base itself is incapable of physically producing the quantities required, regardless of the money allotted to do so.

Military industrial production requires several fundamental factors in order to be expanded – financial resources being only one of many. Expanding production also requires the physical enlargement of existing facilities, the building of new facilities, the expansion of trained workforces which includes reforming and expanding primary, secondary, and specialized education, as well as the expansion of downstream suppliers and the acquisition of additional raw materials required for production across the entire industrial base.

Any one of these measures could take years to implement. Implementing them all would take longer still.

Then there is the very structure of the collective West’s military industrial base. Consisting of corporations prioritizing the maximization of profits, not performance, the collective West’s military industrial base has for years focused on low quantities of highly-sophisticated (and very expensive) weapons systems and munitions.

For the duration of the so-called “Global War on Terror” these weapon systems were adequate, if inefficient. They enabled US-led forces to roll over the antiquated, poorly-trained, poorly-equipped Iraqi army in 1991 and again in 2003, as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Such weapon systems also proved effective in the destruction of Libya in 2011.

But as the global balance of military and economic power has shifted throughout the 21st century, limits to this military industrial approach became apparent. In 2006, Israel’s vast Western-backed military machine categorically failed in its invasion of southern Lebanon, confounded by Hezbollah leveraging modern anti-tank weapons.

Washington Sets Trap for Iran, Will Iran Take the Bait?

September 24, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific, Washington is moving toward an equally dangerous, regional war in the Middle East between its Israeli proxies and a growing list of neighboring states and organizations.
This includes Lebanon and the Lebanese-based military and political organization Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Republic, Iran, as well as Shi’a militias across Iraq and Yemeni-based Ansar Allah referred to across the Western media as the “Houthis.”

This large group of nations and organizations stretching across the region share a common denominator – they all serve as obstacles to US primacy over the region, with the US itself having waged war directly and/or indirectly against each since the end of World War2.

Just as the US has recruited Ukraine to wage war on Russia by proxy in Eastern Europe and has politically captured and used the island province of Taiwan against the rest of China in the Asia-Pacific region, the US has carefully cultivated Israel politically and militarily for decades to serve as a proxy used to carry out assassinations, terrorist attacks, military strikes, and even provoke wars the US itself seeks plausible deniability in regard to.

Toward this end, the US provides Israel with billions in aid annually, including a steady flow of arms and ammunition Israel’s various wars of aggression would be impossible to conduct without. While Washington publicly poses as seeking peace and stability in the Middle East, its continuous support for Israel enables the perpetual conflict and instability undermining the region.

Most recently, the US has repeatedly claimed to have urged Israeli restraint regarding its military operations against Gaza. In practice, however, the US has enabled the large-scale destruction of Gaza through the continual shipment of munitions including thousands of bombs used in Israeli airstrikes, Reuters reported in June of this year.

Despite both the US and its Israeli proxies claiming Israeli actions are done in self-defense, the level of violence has been one-sided, with Gaza all but flattened and tens of thousands left dead, injured, or displaced. In parallel with its operations in Gaza, Israel has carried out strikes against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran – none of whom were involved in Hamas attacks in October last year, according to the Israeli military itself.

All three nations have repeatedly resisted retaliating to these Israeli provocations.

Israel: The Original Ukraine-Style Battering Ram

The nature of Israeli belligerence is transparent, part of a well-documented US policy to provoke wider war across the Middle East the US can then justify intervening in – and war both the US and its Israeli proxies can cite when using weapons and tactics otherwise difficult or impossible to justify – up to and including nuclear weapons.

In 2009, the Brookings Institution in its 170-page paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran,” would detail various means to coerce, contain, and ultimately overthrow the government of Iran, including waging war against Iran.

The paper admits how difficult it would be for the United States itself to launch military strikes against Iran, stating:

…any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it.

It also says:

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it.

An entire chapter was dedicated to the use of Israel to carry out an initial strike on Iran, allowing the US to distance itself from culpability. Titled, “Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” it explicitly states:

…the goal of this policy option would be to destroy key Iranian nuclear facilities in the hope that doing so would significantly delay Iran’s acquisition of an indigenous nuclear weapons capability. However, in this case, an added element could be that the United States would encourage—and perhaps even assist—the Israelis in conducting the strikes themselves, in the expectation that both international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel.

The paper notes that an Israeli strike could, “trigger a wider conflict between Israel and Iran that could draw in the United States and other countries,” giving Washington the pretext it seeks ahead of any war of aggression it itself wages against Iran.

With this policy in mind, Israel’s steady cadence of increasingly provocative attacks against Iran and its allies is easier to understand. The US, through Israeli provocations, seeks to provoke a wider war the US itself can wade into, appearing to be aiding an ally rather than initiating yet another war of aggression in the Middle East.

Ultimately, for this trap to work successfully, Iran must retaliate to one of these many provocations, and do so in a way the US and its allies can portray as disproportionate or even “unprovoked.”

So far, Iran’s responses have been exceedingly measured.