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July 16, 2010 - No. 134 All Out for the July 17 Day of Action
Against
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According to the official, the concrete date
of the
first exercises will be decided July 21 when south Korean Foreign
Minister Yu Myung Hwan, Defense Minister Kim Tae Young, U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will meet
in Seoul. South Korea and the U.S.
will issue a joint statement after the meeting, news agencies report.
The planned statement would likely mention the future of the alliance
between the two countries, joint naval
drills and other means to "strengthen deterrence" against the DPRK,
according to Yonhap News Agency.
NATO Sea Breeze military
exercises began in
Ukraine's Black Sea region on July 12.  Comrade Fidel Castro participates in the Cuban television show "The Roundtable" on July 12, 2010. (Cuba Debate) |
Information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), said Fidel, left no doubt whatsoever as to the danger facing humanity. The total military spending of the United States in 2009 was $1.531 trillion, representing a 49% increase in relation to 2000.
It is not difficult to imagine what would happen if even just a small part of this arsenal were to be used and "in [the U.S.] Congress, some members' positions are even more aggressive than that of the president," added the leader of the Revolution.
Military spending in the United States has continued to grow. Fidel noted that the budget of its Defense Department was in excess of $316 billion in 2001 and $565 billion in 2010, a 2.16-fold increase.
"The United States alone spends more than all the other countries put together," he said. "It has 2,002 strategic and 500 non-strategic warheads. It has deployed 2,702, while Russia has 2,787 strategic and 2,047 non-strategic warheads. Between the two, that is almost 7,000 strategic warheads. It is a ludicrous figure."
Agreed on the Risk of War
Responding to a comment from Randy about the danger that a war in the Middle East could produce, Fidel confirmed, "I fully agree about the imminent risk of war," adding, "I started writing about this subject after the accusation was made against North Korea, which was accused of sinking the very sophisticated South Korean ship, one of the U.S. industry's most modern models, which uses special metals, items that they do not sell to North Korea."
He scorned the accusation made against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which, they claim, used an old torpedo manufactured in the 1950s for the attack. "Imagine that! An old torpedo against that sophisticated boat!" he commented.
He confirmed that a U.S. analyst had provided a logical explanation: "South Korea was engaged in maneuvers with its ally, the United States. The worst thing about this event -- one which is very difficult for the United States to admit -- is that it was them who sunk the sophisticated South Korean vessel. Forty-six men died....A boat like that could only have been blown up with a mine. And they did it."
Fidel said that he was convinced that if this situation with Korea had gotten out of hand then, it would have been a very dramatic situation, and he recalled what the Koreans had said: "There will be a sea of fire, of flames." He acknowledged that "this was what I had thought initially, that the problem was going to break out there, because the [Security Council] resolution on Iran had not yet been passed."
When it was passed, "It became evident that conflict would first be unleashed against Iran, and then in Korea. The people who should pay most attention to what happens in Iran are those in North Korea."
Obama's Most Serious Crisis
Fidel commented on recent statements by U.S. political scientist Noam Chomsky, who confirmed that the U.S. position on Iran "is the most serious foreign policy crisis that the Obama administration is facing."
"Iran is the big apple of discord," stated Fidel, "because it is a certain fact that they will not be able to carry out their inspections. Thirty-one years ago, when they launched their chemical war against Ayatollah Khomeini who managed to overthrow the Shah of Iran without the use of weapons, there was no army, they just had the Revolutionary Guards."
Fidel added, "Ahmadinejad is not an improviser -- you may or may not be in agreement with him -- but he is not an improviser. To make a calculation on the basis that the Iranians are going to come running out to ask the yankees for forgiveness is absurd."
He argued that the Iranians "have spent 30 years preparing themselves, with industrial development, acquiring planes, radars, anti-aircraft weapons... The Russians committed themselves to providing them with S-300 missiles, but they are taking their time and have not handed them over. All the planes that they have been able to buy, they have bought. They have Russian weapons. They have hundreds of rocket launchers alone. The Army also has its forces, in the air, on land and sea. The Navy also has air, land and sea capability. Soldiers -- just the Revolutionary Guards alone -- there are more than one million of them. They are training everyone above 12 years of age and younger than 60. And there are 20 million Shiite Muslims. Who is going to sympathize with an enemy who wants to destroy everything and announce it as well?"
Fidel stated that the nuclear powers jointly possess some 20,000 nuclear weapons and that the pretext used against Iran is risible: "This problem that has been created is risible, as are all the resolutions [of the UN Security Council]. The risk is that Iran could develop or manufacture two nuclear weapons within the next two or three years. Where is the logic? This whole problem is because of this."
In the opinion of the Commander in Chief, the real cause is "the control and the influence that the state of Israel has over the United States. A country that has become a nuclear power in the space of a few years."
He affirmed that Cuba understands the nuclear experience very well: "We have lived under the threat of being attacked. During the Reagan government, they carried out a nuclear test in the ocean. In a boat. We guessed that because we had troops on their way to Namibia."
Via Israel, "they provided the South Africans with 14 nuclear weapons, more powerful than those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This situation is nothing new. We were there [in Angola] with 60,000 men advancing. And we had already felt the threat of a nuclear experience."
He recalled the moment when the Soviets installed their nuclear rockets in Cuba; "From then on they didn't like us, because when we made this Revolution, we didn't have any alliance with the USSR." That alliance "came to us at a very opportune moment, because when [the U.S.] took away our oil, [the USSR] gave it to us. We are not talking without having lived through that experience: we went through it in '62 and in '70 and a bit, on an internationalist mission. And we adopted all the measures; advancing and going underground. We couldn't take any chance. Everything had been confirmed. Not even Mandela knew what they did with those weapons. I asked him: 'I don't know,' he said. They took them away. They have never acted cleanly."
"Could they be playing around with this?" he added. "If you're talking about a hypothesis, you're not going to convince anybody. There is no need to dramatize, because the events are dramatic enough in themselves."
The leader of the Revolution provided a new analysis on these dangerous events for humanity in his Reflection published on the CubaDebate website on Sunday, July 11.
The Origin of Wars
I affirmed on July 4 that neither the United States nor Iran would give in; "one, due to the pride of the powerful, and the other, out of resistance to the yoke and the capacity to fight, as has occurred so many times in the history of humanity..."
In almost all wars, one of the parties wishes to avoid them, and sometimes, both. On this occasion, it would come about even though one of the parties does not wish it, as happened in the two World Wars in 1914 and 1939, with only 25 years of distance before the first outbreak and the second.
The slaughters were horrific, they would not have been unleashed without prior errors of calculation. The two parties were defending imperialist interests and they believed that they would obtain their objectives without the terrible cost that that implied.
In the case that concerns us: one of them is defending national, absolutely just interests. The other is pursuing illegitimate intentions and crude material interests.
If we analyze all the wars that have taken place, starting from the known history of our species, one of the parties has sought those objectives.
Any illusion that, on this occasion, such objectives will be reached without the most terrible of all wars is absolutely vain.
In one of the best articles published by the Global Research website on [April 11], signed by Rick Rozoff, he provides abundant indisputable arguments on the United States' intentions, of which any well-informed person must be aware.
"...Victory can be attained when an adversary knows it is vulnerable to an instantaneous and undetectable, overwhelming and devastating attack without the ability to defend itself or retaliate," is what the United States thinks, according to the author.
"...A country which aspires to remain the only state in history to wield full spectrum military dominance on land, in the air, on the seas and in space."
"...To maintain and extend military bases and troops, aircraft carrier battle groups and strategic bombers on and to most every latitude and longitude. To do so with a post-World War II record war budget of $708 billion for next year."
It was "...the first country to develop and use nuclear weapons..."
"... the U.S. retains 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 2,200 (by some counts 3,500) more in storage and a triad of land, air and submarine delivery vehicles."
"The non-nuclear arsenal used for disabling and destroying the air defenses and strategic, potentially all major, military forces of other nations will consist of intercontinental ballistic missiles, adapted submarine-launched ballistic missiles, hypersonic cruise missiles and bombers, and super stealthy strategic bombers able to avoid detection by radar and thus evade ground- and air-based defenses."
Rozoff lists the many press conferences, meetings and statements of Joint Chiefs of Staff and high-ranking members of the government of the United States in the last few months.
He explains the commitments to NATO and the reinforced cooperation with Near East allies, primarily, read Israel. He says, "The U.S. is also intensifying space and cyber warfare programs with the potential to completely shut down other nations' military surveillance and command, control, communications, computer and intelligence systems, rendering them defenseless on any but the most basic tactical level."
He speaks of the signing in Prague, on April 8 of this year, of the new START Treaty between Russia and the United States, which "does not contain any constraints on current or planned U.S. conventional prompt global strike capability."
He refers to countless news items on the subject and illustrates the intentions of the United States with one overwhelming example.
He notes that "...'The Department of Defense is currently exploring the full range of technologies and systems for a Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) capability that could provide the President more credible and technically suitable options for dealing with new and evolving threats.'"
I maintain the opinion that any president whosoever, not even the most expert military chief, would not have one minute to know what should be done if it was not already programmed on computers.
Imperturbably, Rozoff relates what the Global Security Network affirms in an analysis titled: "'Cost to test U.S. global-strike missile could reach $500 million,'" by Elaine Grossman.
"'The Obama administration has requested $239.9 million for prompt global strike research and development across the military services in fiscal 2011... If funding levels remain as anticipated into the coming years, the Pentagon will have spent some $2 billion on prompt global strike by the end of fiscal 2015, according to budget documents submitted last month to Capitol Hill.'"
"A terrifying scenario comparable to the effects of a PGS attack, in this case the sea-based version, appeared three years ago in Popular Mechanics:
"'In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president's command to launch. When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles.
"'At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident's four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet.
"'Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel.
"'Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods -- each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.'"
Rozoff immediately explains the April 7 statement of General Leonid Ivashov, joint chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, made in a column entitled "Obama's nuclear surprise."
In that same column Ivashov, refers to the speech by the U.S. president in Prague last year: "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War" -- and his signing of the START II agreement in that same city on April 8, Rozoff quotes the author, who stated:
"'No examples of sacrificial service of the U.S. elites to mankind or peoples of other countries can be discovered in the U.S. history over the past century. Would it be realistic to expect the advent of an African-American president to the White House to change the country's political philosophy traditionally aimed at achieving global dominance? Those believing that something like that is possible should try to realize why the U.S. -- the country with a military budget already greater than those of all other countries of the world combined -- continues spending enormous sums of money on preparations for war.'"
"... 'The Prompt Global Strike concept envisages a concentrated strike
using several thousand precision conventional weapons in 2-4 hours that
would completely destroy the critical infrastructures of the target
country and thus force it to capitulate.'"
"'The Prompt Global Strike concept is meant to sustain the U.S. monopoly in the military sphere and to widen the gap between it and the rest of the world. Combined with the deployment of the missile defense supposed to keep the U.S. immune to retaliatory strikes from Russia and China, the Prompt Global Strike initiative is going to turn Washington into a modern era global dictator.'"
"'In essence, the new U.S. nuclear doctrine is an element of the novel U.S. security strategy that would be more adequately described as the strategy of total impunity. The U.S. is boosting its military budget, unleashing NATO as the global gendarme, and planning real-life exercise in Iran to test the efficiency of the Prompt Global Strike initiative in practice. At the same time, Washington is talking about the completely nuclear-free world.'"
In essence, Obama is trying to deceive the world by talking of a humanity free of nuclear weapons, which would be replaced by other extremely destructive ones, ideal for terrorizing state leaders and achieving the new strategy of total impunity.
The yankees believe that Iran's rendition is already close. The European Union is expected to announce a sanctions package of its own to be signed on July 26.
The last meeting of the 5+1 took place on July 2, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad affirmed that "his country would return to talks at the end of August with the participation of Brazil and Turkey."
A high-ranking EU official "stated that neither Brazil nor Turkey will be invited to take part in talks, at least not at this level."
"Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki stated that he was in favor of defying international sanctions and continuing with the enriched uranium program."
From Tuesday, July 5, in the face of the European reiteration that they are to promote additional measures against Iran, this country has responded that it will not negotiate until September.
Every day the possibilities of overcoming the insurmountable obstacle are reducing further.
What is going to happen is so evident that it can be foreseen in an almost exact form.
For my part, I must make a self-criticism; I committed an error in affirming in the June 27 Reflection that the conflict would break out on the Thursday, Friday or at the latest Saturday. It was already known that Israeli warships were navigating toward that objective together with the yankee naval forces. The order to search Iranian merchant ships was already given.
However, I did not realize that there was a prior step: confirmation of the negation of permission for the inspection of its mercantile fleet on the part of Iran. In analyzing the torturous language of the Security Council imposing sanctions on that country, I did not notice that detail to give the inspection order full effect. It was the only thing missing.
The 60-day period given by the Security Council on June 9 to receive information on compliance with the Resolution expires on August 8.
But something really most lamentable happened. I was working on the latest material on the delicate issue drafted by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the said document did not contain two key paragraphs -- the last two of the abovementioned resolution -- which textually state:
"Requests within 90 days a report from the Director General of the IAEA on whether Iran has established full and sustained suspension of all activities mentioned in resolution 1737 (2006), as well as on the process of Iranian compliance with all the steps required by the IAEA Board of Governors and with other provisions of resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008) and of this resolution, to the IAEA Board of Governors and in parallel to the Security Council for its consideration;
"Affirms that it shall review Iran's actions in light of the report referred to in paragraph 36 above, to be submitted within 90 days, and: (a) that it shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, as verified by the IAEA, to allow for negotiations in good faith in order to reach an early and mutually acceptable outcome; (b) that it shall terminate the measures specified in paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 12 of resolution 1737 (2006), as well as in paragraphs 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of resolution 1747 (2007), paragraphs 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of resolution 1803 (2008), and in paragraphs 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 and 24 above, as soon as it determines, following receipt of the report referred to in the paragraph above, that Iran has fully complied with its obligations under the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and met the requirements of the IAEA Board of Governors, as confirmed by the IAEA Board of Governors; (c) that it shall, in the event that the report shows that Iran has not complied with resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008) and this resolution, adopt further appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to persuade Iran to comply with these resolutions and the requirements of the IAEA, and underlines that further decisions will be required should such additional measures be necessary..."
A compañero from the Ministry, after the exhausting work of many hours at the machine making photocopies of all the documents, fell asleep. My eagerness in seeking out information and exchanging points of view on these delicate issues, made it possible for me to discover this omission.
From my point of view, the United States and its NATO allies have said their last word. Two powerful states with authority and prestige did not exercise their right to veto the perfidious UN resolution.
It was the only possibility of gaining time to seek some formula for saving the peace, an objective that would have afforded them greater authority to continue fighting for it.
Today, everything is hanging from a tenuous thread.
My principal intention was to advise international public opinion of what was occurring.
I have in part achieved that by observing what was taking place, as a political leader who, for many years, has been confronting the empire, its blockades and its indescribable crimes. But I am not doing it out of revenge.
I am not hesitating to run the risks of compromising my modest moral authority.
I shall continue writing Reflections on the subject. There will be a number more after this one in order to continue going more profoundly into it in July and August, unless some incident occurs to trigger the deadly weapons currently pointed at each other.
I have very much enjoyed the final games of the World Cup and the volleyball games, in which our valiant team is marching at the head of its group in the World League of that sport.
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 11, 2010
8:14 p.m.
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