Il Manifesto (Italy)

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Pirates of the Indian Ocean

Rome (Italy) | 20 June 2012
Officially present in order to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean, NATO forces are themselves behaving like pirates with military blunders that cost the lives of innocent fishermen, protection of industrial fishing fleets which deprive local fishermen of their stocks and protection of those dumping waste that destroys the environment. The fight against piracy is clearly more complicated than meets the eye…

The EU’s possessive partner

Rome (Italy) | 5 June 2012
"Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down" was the role of NATO in Europe in the words of its first Secretary General, Lord Hastings Ismay. Manlio Dinucci explores the prospects of Atlanticist vassalage that lie ahead following the Chicago summit in May 2012.

Whose atrocities?

Rome (Italy) | 16 May 2012
Since The end of WWII and the Nuremburg Trials, international justice and the denunciation of crimes against humanity have operated according to a double standard. The right of the strongest has functioned best for the U.S. and its allies which have accumulated crimes with complete impunity, all the while presenting themselves as the guarantors of human rights. International courts, organizations and the media, far from denouncing this state of affairs, support this “humanitarian” farce. Hence, for Manlio Dinucci, Obama’s newly-created Atrocities Prevention Board is just another tool for placing the humanitarian rubric at the service of warfare.

Market massacres

13 May 2012
The sociobiologist and philosopher Henri Laborit once enunciated the hypothesis that human beings confronting oppression had only three choices: submission, struggle or flight. Within the frame of his sociobiological analysis, suicide constituted the most extreme form of flight. In the face of the programmed crisis being unleashed across Europe, may the victims of injustice never forget that the best antidote for the suffering engendered by any system is to combat it.

NATO’s school of death

Rome (Italy) | 22 April 2012
At Monsanto, Portugal, NATO has established a study center for self-evaluation and formulation of proposals to improve military effectiveness. Under the authority of the Allied Command Transformation established in 2003, its role is to ensure that the Organization, previously responsible for warding off a "Soviet threat," is now properly geared for its new task of supporting the neo-colonial conquests of the "war on terror" era.

South Sudan: Realities and Fictions

Rome (Italy) | 10 April 2012
The case of South Sudan is an exemplary illustration of the success of Israeli strategy in Africa. Relying on the armed forces of the United States, as in Iraq and Libya, the Hebrew state and its ally have been able to divide the country and thereby eject their most important commercial rival, China, from the part of Sudan richest in resources. Symbolically, the media promotion of this operation fell to the Hollywood actor, George Clooney, prodigal son and spokesperson for the marriage of convenience linking Israeli and American colonial interests.

Libya one year later: a forgotten memory

Rome (Italy) | 30 March 2012
It’s one year after the war in Libya and no one dares to make an assessment of its aftermath. The colonial powers declared they were supporting a democratic revolution against a tyrant. In fact, they have once more divided the country and restored the Senussi Dynasty to power in the eastern region of Cyrenaica. The Jamahiriya of Gadhafi’s time, a strange hybrid of Proudhonian anarchy and autocracy, has given way to a liberal chaos where torture and murder have become the norm while the multinationals are on a permanent binge.

The Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa

Rome (Italy) | 26 March 2012
The Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa is one of two “commands” of AFRICOM, the new Unified Combatant Command of U.S. forces in Africa. Originally conceived by the Israeli-American Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, AFRICOM is the central command for the new ambitions of empire in Africa. The most recent illustration of this is the creation of the no-fly zone used in the conquest of Libya, allowing the United States to seize the oil resources of that country and the state of Israel to rid itself of its most serious rival on the African continent.

US turns the page towards new wars

Rome (Italy) | 23 January 2012
The recent announcement that US military spending is set to grow at a slower pace and that ground troops will not fight in more than one major war at once was welcomed by many. However, according to Manlio Dinucci, it is all smoke and mirrors: the incremental outsourcing of conflicts to vassal states, the black budgets for intelligence agencies and the expanded use of technological warfare hardly foreshadow a scaling down in the number of Pentagon-run theaters of wars.

Behind the attack on Libya are strategies of economic warfare

Rome (Italy) | 4 May 2011
The West’s aggression against Libya was not motivated by its greed for oil, which foreign companies had already been exploiting since the thawing of diplomatic relations. What is playing out is therefore not a resource war. However - as expounded by Manlio Dinucci - the war situation, plus France’s hasty endorsement of the National Transitional Council (10 March) and the London Conference (30 March) are all factors that have enabled multinational enterprises to modify their contract terms, now paying only a token fee on their exploitation rights. Under this angle, it has indeed all the trappings of a classic colonial war.

The heist of the century: the assault of the ‘willing’ on Libyan SWFs

Rome (Italy) | 28 April 2011
Manlio Dinucci elaborates on an aspect already highlighted in our columns since the outset of the war: the appropriation by the "willing" colonial powers of Libya’s colossal investments abroad. The frozen assets in Western banks were a threat to the monopoly of the World Bank and the IMF over development projects in the Third World. The funds continue to "yield" (no longer as investments but as bank guarantees), but for the benefit of Western interests.

New U.S. nuclear strategy: a warmed-over "novelty"

Rome (Italy) | 9 April 2010
Washington has just published its new nuclear doctrine as well as signed the new treaty on arms control with Russia in the midst of a big media fanfare. And yet, upon closer scrutiny, the position of the Obama administration does not mark any real shift from that of its predecessors. It simply attunes the policy of the Bush administration to today’s reality. Even worse, it dodges the two main questions: Will the anti-missile shield reactivate the arms race? Will nuclear weapons be replaced by strategic arms which will prove even more destabilizing?

Afghanistan: The Secret War

Rome (Italy) | 31 March 2010
General McChrystal, who organized death squads to eliminate targets designated by Vice-President Cheney, can no longer bear the system he set up. Now, as Commander in Chief in Afghanistan, he sees his own strategy disrupted by the secret interventions of Special Operations Forces that escape his control. He is appealing for a reorganization of the system. Not due to ethics, but as a way of reasserting his authority.

“The Balkans, a gap to be filled”

2 December 2005
While the historians’ answer is still awaited as to whether Yugoslavia died of natural causes, whether it was killed, whether it committed suicide or whether others made it “commit suicide”, the anniversary of its long disintegration and agony will be celebrated in 2005.
In the geopolitics of anniversaries, we commemorate this year the beginning of two “protectorates”: Bosnia-Herzegovina, which dates back 10 years ago and the 6 years of the protectorate of Kosovo. The Dayton Agreements put (...)