When Giants Fall

Talk Might Not Be So Cheap

2009-11-08T22:03:43-05:00

"Hostile rhetoric and facile assertions that armed conflict may be the best way to resolve differences have become increasingly commonplace."
--Chapter 3, "A Future of Violence," When Giants Fall

There is undoubtedly a big difference between threatening war and following through on such threats. In fact, as with the story of Chicken Little, who claimed that the sky was falling so often that people no longer cared, those who repeatedly say things that aren't true tend to be ignored or treated with disdain. The problem with making certain kinds of hostile challenges, however, is that they can induce a level of apprehension, fear, hostility, or paranoia on one side or the other that transforms the threats into self-fulfilling prophecies. So while some people might be getting bored or fed up with the rants of America's long-time nemesis to the south, it's also possible that, at some point, a report like the following from Bloomberg, "Chavez Says Venezuela to Prepare for War as Deterrent," ends up being the precursor to the real thing.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told the military and civil militias today to prepare for war as a deterrent to a U.S.-led attack after American troops gained access to military bases in neighboring Colombia.

Chavez said a recently signed agreement that gives American troops access to seven Colombian bases is a direct threat to his oil-exporting country. Colombia has handed over its sovereignty to the U.S. with the deal, he said.

“Generals of the armed forces, the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one,” Chavez said in comments on state television during his weekly “Alo Presidente” program. “Colombia handed over their country and is now another state of the union. Don’t make the mistake of attacking: Venezuela is willing to do anything.”

The U.S. agreement with Colombia is part of an effort to “strengthen and increase ties with countries in the region,” Robin Holzhauer, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, said by telephone. “We’ve done that with governments who want to have partnerships with us.” Colombia has said the agreement would help combat drug trafficking.

Ties between Venezuela and Colombia have deteriorated this year after Colombian President Alvaro Uribe accused Chavez of financing leftist Colombian rebels. Chavez, a self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary, said he would stop importing goods from Colombia due to the U.S. military pact. The two countries are each other’s second-largest trading partners after the U.S.

Colombian Exports

Colombian exports to Venezuela plunged 45.7 percent in August from a year earlier, according to data from the Colombian statistics institute.

Chavez ordered an increase of troops along the more than 2,000-kilometer border between Venezuela and Colombia last week and said he may declare a state of emergency after two officials from the National Guard were shot and killed by supposed Colombian rebels.

In March 2008, Chavez sent 10 tank battalions to the border with Colombia after the Colombian military attacked leftist rebels in Ecuadorian territory, killing Raul Reyes, a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Chavez later called the tanks back from the border and helped dissipate tensions between Uribe and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.

Weapons Purchases

Venezuela has purchased billions of dollars of weapons, tanks, fighter jets and helicopters from Russia since 2003. Chavez says the purchases are necessary to modernize the Armed Forces and to protect the country’s natural resources from a possible invasion from the U.S.

Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Tarek El-Aissami said last month officers from Colombia’s domestic intelligence agency are operating clandestinely in his country to destabilize the government.

Venezuela is also holding three Colombian citizens accused of spying as agents of the Colombian intelligence agency, known as DAS. Colombia says two of the individuals don’t belong to the agency, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, and that the other was on vacation in Venezuela when arrested.

Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez said that the military deal with the U.S. will help “end drug-trafficking and terrorism in Colombia” during the signing ceremony in Bogota on Oct. 30.

Colombia is the source of 80 percent of the cocaine sold in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

‘Foreign Intervention’

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro expressed concern similar to Chavez’s on Nov. 6, saying the U.S. might send Colombian troops to crush Venezuela’s government.

“The empire hopes to send them to fight against their Venezuelan and Ecuadorean brothers and other Bolivarian and Alba peoples to crush the Venezuelan revolution, just as they tried to do with the Cuban revolution in April 1961,” Castro wrote in a “reflection” published on the Cubadebate.cu Web site. The Alba bloc is a nine-member group of Latin American countries led by Chavez.

The presence of U.S. troops in Colombia is a “shameless foreign intervention in their internal affairs,” Castro said. The agreement amounts to the U.S.’s “annexation” of the South American country, he said.

A military attack on Venezuela would spread to other countries in the region because Venezuela has “friends” from Mexico to Argentina, Chavez said during the program.

“If the Yankee empire tries to use Colombia to attack Venezuela, the war of 100 years would begin,” he said. “The war would extend to other countries in the continent, from Mexico to Argentina. No one believes that a war against Venezuela would only be in Venezuela.”

The U.S. may try to help Colombia invade Venezuela, as the U.S supported Iraq’s invasion of Iran in the 1980s, Chavez said.

(Hat tip War New Updates.)

Scramble for Africa, 2.0

2009-11-07T21:43:31-05:00

(Source: European claims in Africa, 1914)

According to Wikipedia, The Scramble for Africa, also known as the Race for Africa,

was the result of conflicting European claims to African territory during the New Imperialism period, between the 1880s and the First World War in 1914.

As a result of the heightened tension between European states in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning of Africa may be seen as a way for the Europeans to eliminate the threat of a European-wide war over Africa.

Although the names are more varied -- the list of interlopers is now global, and includes the Chinese, the Indians, the Americans, and many others -- the game hasn't changed all that much for a continent that seems to be in a permanently state of instability and upheaval. While efforts like those described in the following Independent report, "UN Attempts to Slow the New Scramble for Africa," may be well intentioned, the broader issue of global resource constraints suggests they will likely be successful.

Alarm over scale of foreign holdings and secretive land deals by wealthy nations

More than 50 heads of state will gather for a summit later this month to look at ways of policing the extraordinary "land grab" that has seen richer countries buy up at least 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa in the last 18 months. The United Nations is drawing up a "code of conduct" in an effort to slow what's been described as a new scramble for Africa, while agriculture experts are calling for a new global watchdog and aid agencies are appealing for a moratorium on new deals.

Countries including the Gulf States, China, South Korea and a host of private investors and sovereign wealth funds have provoked serious concerns internationally with a string of aggressive and often secretive deals for large tracts of arable land on the world's hungriest continent.

David Hallam, the deputy director of the trade and markets division at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and one of the experts drafting the code, said yesterday that the "principles are agreed" and he expected leaders to make a joint statement at a summit in Rome in a fortnight's time. "It's going to bring these deals into focus and make people think about what's going on," he told The Independent.

According to FAO figures the recent wave of land acquisitions is equivalent to one-tenth of the entire area already farmed in Africa, or twice the arable land in Germany.

The code is expected to try and break the secrecy surrounding these deals and ensure locals' rights are not being trampled by big corporations or governments and that Africans' food security is not further threatened. "In the worst cases it's fair to say we are looking at neo-colonialism," said Dr Hallam.

In the last year Saudi Arabia has added to huge holdings in Sudan with a $100 million deal for land in famine stricken Ethiopia; Qatar has begun acquiring 40,000 hectares in Kenya's Tana River Delta to grow fruit and vegetables despite a drought that sees the UN feeding four million Kenyans; China has added to its huge holdings in Zimbabwe and Algeria; and Egypt has leased 2 million acres of land from Uganda to grow corn and wheat.

The deal that really brought the phenomenon to the surface was the Madagascar government's decision to lease 1.3 million hectares, or half the island's arable land, to the South Korean giants Daewoo for 99 years for biofuel plantations. When it was revealed that Daewoo would pay nothing for the land and would instead barter it for infrastructure projects, president Marc Ravalomanana's administration became the first to be toppled over "land grabbing". The deal has been scrapped.

The scramble has its roots in last year's food crisis, which saw a huge spike in the price of staples and food protectionism, where countries slapped export bans on rice and other foodstuffs. Food was not only more expensive, it was unavailable. Then came the oil price rises. "Oil-rich and water-poor countries suddenly became interested in securing their long-term food supplies," said Ruth Meinzen-Dick, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington.

"Many of these deals were quite secretive and there was no clear benefit for the people living in these areas."

Added to these factors was the historic switch from food to fuel, driven by US subsidies for corn-based ethanol and hasty moves by the EU to set targets to switch from fossil fuels to bio-fuels which have since been reversed.

The IFPRI is calling for a watchdog "with teeth" to ensure that there is "informed consent" in poorer countries where land is being leased, as well as respect for African customary law, which is supposed to protect the traditional rights of smallholders.

Meinzen-Dick advocates a system that would ensure that in times of shortage there would be restrictions on the amount of food exported from foreign-owned land.

The irony is that the current trend could be a win-win situation as everyone is agreed that Africa is in dire need of investment: foreign aid and domestic spending on agriculture has dipped alarmingly in the last two decades.

The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development rejects the "land grab" analysis as too "simplistic". In a recent report the think-tank argued that there can be an upside if the investments are structured to create "new opportunities".

The report does warn that too much of the land being signed away is "high value" and that African governments are pushing through deals under the pretence that common land is "unused".

Speaking at an FAO event in Washington earlier this year Chido Makunike, a Zimbabwean agricultural consultant, explained: "In Africa, far from being perceived as a mere economic resource land has cultural, sentimental, and political meanings, and represents one of the strongest symbols of dispossession during the colonial era."

Getting Nasty

2009-11-06T22:10:40-05:00

In a post I wrote three days ago, "No Turning Back," I noted an increasingly aggressive tone among prospective U.S. rivals:

Slowly but surely, the rhetoric is changing. The words are are increasingly blunt and assertive. It was only a short while ago, for instance, that geopolitical up-and-comers like China and Russia were griping, almost like children, about the unfairness of a system dominated by one nation -- the United States. Then they began to speak a bit more forcefully about rejigging the existing framework to meet the needs of new, more multipolar world. And now...they are openly warning of confrontations and conflicts in an area that was once viewed as out of bounds.

Based on the following Financial Times report, "China Brands US 'Protectionist,'" it appears that blunt-edged assertiveness is also coloring emerging powers' dealings with the U.S. in the economic realm:

China on Friday accused the US of protectionist and biased trade policies less than a week before president Barack Obama’s first visit to Beijing.

In a stinging rebuke to Washington, China’s commerce ministry promised to take measures to protect its domestic industry after the US slapped anti-dumping duties on $2.6bn of Chinese steel pipe imports. The duties are part of a growing roster of trade conflicts between the two countries, despite a high-level meeting last week in China aimed at reducing tensions.

“China resolutely opposes such protectionist practices and will take steps to protect the interests of our domestic industries,” Yao Jian, ministry spokesman, said on its website.

“The US should give objective consideration to the fact that the fundamental problem of the US industries in question is the fall of demand brought about by the financial crisis.”

The decision by the US Commerce Department, which imposed tariffs of up to 99 per cent on some Chinese steel pipes, follows a move earlier in the week by the US, European Union and Mexico to file a formal complaint at the World Trade Organisation against Beijing’s restrictions on exports of specialised raw materials. Last month the Obama administration levied 35 per cent tariffs on tyres made in China.

In response, the Chinese have opened probes into US exports of poultry on grounds of safety and into cars and car parts because of the state aid those industries have received.

Lawyers in Beijing say that the government has raised the issue of state aid to push its case for China to be awarded market economy status, which would make it harder for the US to bring anti-dumping cases against Chinese products and has long been a sore issue in Beijing. “They are trying to show that every country’s markets have imperfections,” said a US trade lawyer in Beijing.

In its statement on Friday, the Chinese commerce ministry said: “We hope that the US will set aside its biases and act as quickly as possible to recognize China as a market economy.” At the US-China meeting in Hangzhou last week, Gary Locke, the US Commerce secretary, promised to set up a panel to consider the issue.

“We should be aware of this kind of trend of western countries using the WTO and free trade as an excuse to challenge us,” said Mei Xinyu, a researcher at a think tank connected to China’s commerce ministry. “Western countries adjust their own trade policies depending on the market needs of their own interest group.”

Expanding Down South

2009-11-05T22:29:01-05:00

The U.S.-inspired financial crisis and the accelerating run of "drunken uncle" spending and borrowing being orchestrated by Washington indicate (to me, at least) that it won't be long before America is forced to abandon many, and eventually most, of its imperial ambitions. But that doesn't mean it will all end at once.

In fact, in some parts of the world, the U.S. is likely to carry on trying to spread its wings militarily (and otherwise) even when it becomes clear that it is a lost cause. Because of its proximity to the U.S., one region where we will likely see such trends continue beyond their sell-by date is South America.

In an Intelligence Daily commentary, "Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War: Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin America," Rick Rozoff provides an overview of America's more recent adventures in the region.

This year began with Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, visiting Colombia in mid-January and meeting with that nation’s defense minister and top military commander. While in Bogota Mullen railed against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas and accused the government of Venezuela of conniving with them.

Less than two months and the inauguration of a new president later, America’s top military commander returned to Colombia, the third largest recipient of U.S. military assistance in the world, as part of a Latin American tour that also took him to Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico. Upon returning to Washington Mullen said that “The U.S. military is ready to help Mexico in its deadly war against drug cartels with some of the same counter-insurgency tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan” [1] and “the Plan Colombia aid package could be an ‘overarching’ model for Pakistan and Afghanistan….” [2]

He was then speaking for the Barack Obama and no longer the George W. Bush administration but Mullen, like his superior Defense Secretary Robert Gates who nominated him for his current post in 2007, was advocating a military and geostrategic polity that is pursued regardless of who occupies the Oval Office in the White House and whose photograph adorns the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

Military commanders and former CIA directors like Mullen and Gates have seen a succession of presidents and secretaries of state pass by during their professional careers and the latter, like shadows on a wall, have not affected in any substantive manner plans for international military and intelligence expansion. Elected officials and their civilian appointees are to be humored, cajoled or ignored as the situation requires but have never stood in the way of the creation and maintenance of a 65-year-old military-security-intelligence state with its tentacles extended into every latitude and longitude of the planet.

The role of American elected officials on the federal level and what the nation and the world politely pretend to consider its diplomatic corps is to issue a steady stream of imprecations against “rogue regimes” and frighten the domestic populace with inflated if not entirely concocted claims of other, non-Western, nations’ military threats, the better to give the Pentagon (which may play the part of a coy and hesitant ingenue for public consumption) what it wants.

Witness the false alarm sounded by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on May 1st of this year when she, striking the pose of a modern Paul Revere, warned that Washington’s backyard was besieged by specters of the Cold War once thought long laid to rest and spoke of the need to “counter growing Iranian, Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere,” lamenting that “Republican President George W. Bush’s policy had been counterproductive, allowing leftist leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega to promote anti-U.S. sentiment and rely on aid from China, Iran and Russia.” [3]

The fact that the three heads of state identified by Clinton as a New World Axis of Evil irrationally bent on contaminating their neighbors with an “anti-U.S. sentiment” were popularly elected is of no concern to Washington. Central and South American electorates have voted before in ways displeasing to the U.S. – Guatemala in 1951, Guyana in 1953 and 1961, Chile in 1970 – and Washington successfully reversed the outcomes through subversion and coups d’etat.

The month after Clinton’s statement U.S.-trained commanders in Honduras ordered troops to storm the residence of President Manuel Zelaya, abduct him and fly him to exile in Costa Rica. The leader of the coup, School of the Americas-trained General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, also dispatched troops to assault the ambassadors of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, as though he had studied Hillary Clinton’s comments and taken them to heart.

Following the armed overthrow of the Honduran government on June 28, a state of affairs still not reversed over four months afterward notwithstanding the U.S.’s decisive leverage over the ringleaders in Tegucigalpa, media coverage was rife with allusions to a return to the era of Latin American coups staged and backed by Washington during the Cold War.

This November 9th will mark the twentieth anniversary of the event that more than any other is acknowledged as having signalled the end of the Cold War: The opening of the gates along the wall dividing East and West Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the time much of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief and in some quarters emitted a whoop of triumph, expecting that the end of the decades-long U.S.-Soviet conflict would issue in a golden age of global harmony, disarmament, the elimination of nuclear weapons and a massive peace dividend to fund civilian needs long given short shrift during the preceding forty three years.

Those hopes turned out to be so many vain opium reveries.

Warning signs were evident even at the time.

The former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was abruptly and without a referendum absorbed into the Federal Republic (West Germany) – and into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a U.S.-dominated military bloc – and the 1990 Western armed buildup in the Persian Gulf and the next year’s war with Iraq followed almost immediately.

One didn’t have to wait that long, however, to discover that the fruits of a Western victory in the Cold War were sour. Were poison.

Less than a month following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, on December 2, 1989 U.S. president George H.W. Bush and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev led respective national delegations to the Mediterranean island nation of Malta for a summit described fairly typically since as “the most important since 1945, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed on a post-war plan for Europe at Yalta.” [4]

The American delegation, incidentally, included two officials who weren’t familiar to many observers at the time but would become so over a decade later: Then Director for Soviet and East European Affairs at the National Security Council Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz.

Within days of the summit’s completion and as though to suggest that the two leaders agreed to address respective Cold War era thorns in their sides, ten days of violence erupted in Romania on December 16, culminating in the nation’s aged leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife Elena dragged before a firing squad on Christmas Day.

In the middle of that ten-day uprising Washington launched an armed invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, with over 27,000 troops and 300 aircraft, deposing President Manuel Noriega, who continues to languish in an American prison cell almost twenty years later.

The post-Cold War world order was baptized in blood.

Following the Panama attack and the next two years’ preparation for and activation of war plans against Iraq, the U.S. and its allies observed an almost decent interval – aside from wreaking carnage in Somalia, conducting ongoing bombing runs in Iraq, bombing Bosnian Serb targets with depleted uranium-tipped shells and firing cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan – until 1999, when the U.S. and NATO launched a 78-day air war against Yugoslavia and right afterward Washington inaugurated Plan Colombia. The latter has resulted in Washington providing almost $5 billion in military assistance to Colombia since 2000. Current American vice president Joseph Biden pushed the hard-line – counterinsurgency – version of the initiative in the U.S. Senate in 1999.

Since then there has been a reactivation of the worst aspects of the Cold War period. Just as then, political change in any country is viewed through the prism of what it means in terms of alignment with or apart from the United States. And neutrality is not an option. The top official in charge of American foreign policy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has indicated her view of Latin American nations attempting an independent regional and global orientation. They are enemies. And are the proxies of larger adversaries: Russia, China and Iran.

On October 30 the U.S. and the Alvaro Uribe regime in Colombia signed an agreement during a closed-door ceremony in Bogota for the Pentagon to acquire seven new military bases in the South American country. [5]

“One of the bases involved, at Palanquero, 180 kilometers (110 miles) west of Bogota, boasts a 3.5-km (two-mile) runway adapted for large cargo planes, which critics say would allow the US to project itself far beyond Colombia’s borders.” [6]

“The United States maintains similar ‘forward operating locations’ in El Salvador and Aruba-Curacao [Netherlands Antilles].” [7]

Colombian troops illegally entered neighboring Venezuela last August and Caracas claims to have apprehended Colombian paramilitaries on its soil at the time of the signing of the U.S.-Colombia bases deal on October 30.

In late September, less than two months after elections brought pro-Washington President Ricardo Martinelli to power, Panama’s La Prensa newspaper announced that the new government will “sign a treaty with the United States on the opening of two U.S. naval bases on its territory….”

Minister of Government and Justice Jose Raul Mulino was quoted confirming that “The U.S. and Panama will sign before October 30 an agreement on the deployment of two naval bases on the Pacific coast of our country….One of the bases will be located in Bahia Pina…450 kilometers [280 miles] east of the capital, Panama City, and another one – in Punta Coca about 350 km [217 miles] west of the capital.” [8]

American bases had been closed and troops brought home in 1999 in accordance with the 1977 treaty signed by the two nations. However, Washington led the 11-day PANAMAX 2009 military exercise in September with forces from Argentina, Brazil, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and NATO allies Canada, France and the Netherlands. The formal purpose of the maneuvers was to “simulate a terrorist threat in the Panama Canal,” Gerald W. Ketchum, U.S. Operation, Preparation and Mobilization sub-director from the Southern Command, claimed. [9]

A comparable multinational exercise, Honduras-Commando Force 2007, was held in the nearby Central American nation two years earlier which included “marine, air and shelling operations” and the participation of troops from the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. The drills were also described as “anti-terrorist exercises…under the aegis of the United States under the pretext of an alleged attack by the Al Qaeda network.” [10]

What purpose U.S. training of the Honduran armed forces in fact has been put to was demonstrated last June 28. The Pentagon maintains its Joint Task Force-Bravo at the Soto Cano Air Base in the nation.

Further south, in 2007 two retired Peruvian military intelligence officers, Jesus Suasnabar and Juan Castro, exposed American plans to construct a base in their country to replace the military base in Manta, Ecuador from which the U.S. has now been evicted.

“The two ex-military officers pointed out that the US base would be the center of domination of Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonia, where multinational rapid-action forces would be deployed….[T]he military base would also prevent the consolidation of an energy bloc made up of Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela….Peru might get involved in the Colombian conflict, as the military facility would be used to intervene in that country.” [11]

Washington has now compensated, and far more than compensated, for the loss of the air base at Manta with the acquisition of seven new bases in Colombia, positioning its military closer to that country’s eastern border with Venezuela. (And perhaps its southwestern border with Ecuador.)

As with all other parts of the world, where the Pentagon goes so do its NATO allies. Until earlier this year Great Britain was reported to be the second largest provider of military aid to Colombia.

In Venezuela’s eastern neighbor, Guyana, the Pentagon deployed 650 troops (infantry, naval and air force) this July for New Horizons Guyana, “a U.S. Southern Command-sponsored annual exercise starting July 1 designed to strengthen ties with partner nations in Central and South America….” [12]

In recent days a controversy has arisen in Guyana after Britain withdrew assistance for a security project following the Guyanese government’s “refusal to allow training by UK Special Forces on a western border location with live firing….” [13] Guyana’s western border is with Venezuela. A letter to a local newspaper denounced the “U.K.’s demands for the training of British Special Forces officers on Guyana’s territory, and worse yet, in close proximity to Guyana’s South American neighbours, namely, Brazil and Venezuela.

“Such a request from the British must be seen as unreasonable, an affront to Guyana’s territorial sovereignty and could even undermine Guyana’s relationship with her neighbours whom we know from previous experiences could interpret the presence of Western military personnel in close proximity to their borders as an act of hostility or concern and may even spark an arms race in South America.” [14]

In Guyana’s eastern neighbor, Suriname, the Pentagon has also been busy. Two years ago U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited and secured “military premises on its territory.

“Suriname President Ronald Venetiaan said the United States wants to build military premises in Surinamese soil to test the capabilities of military vehicles in the forest,” Associated Press reported on October of 2007. [15]

Anticipating American military chief Mullen’s tour this March, “Before his…visit to Suriname, Gates met leaders in El Salvador, Colombia, Chile and Peru.” [16]

The eastern-most of the three Guianas, the French, is still an overseas department and used for various military purposes.

French military instructors at a camp on the premises of the Guiana Space Center in Kourou “operate one of the most grueling courses in jungle warfare and survival, opening it to Special Forces from around the world….

The base’s “main purpose is preparing legionnaires for hardships in places where France still uses them for military intervention, like Chad, Djibouti or Ivory Coast.” [17]

Three years ago Paris used the space center, “which each year launches into orbit about half of the world’s commercial satellite payloads,” [18] for another objective. It launched “the military satellite Syracuse 3B from Kourou in French Guiana thereby creating the conditions for faster and more efficient military exercises abroad.

“The satellite is to be made available to Germany’s military and to the NATO alliance.”

The Syracuse satellites “cover an area extending from the eastern United States to eastern China and would multiply the existing transfer capacity by ten…of France and the European Union to act.” [19]

No part of the world is now isolated from and left unmolested by the West’s worldwide military network.

This past September the new president of Paraguay Fernando Lugo (elected last year) cancelled the U.S. Southern Command’s scheduled New Horizons military maneuvers after the announcement that Washington was going to sign the agreement with Colombia for seven new bases. Lugo said of his government’s decision “There would be about 500 US military and other personnel in the country and that wouldn’t go unnoticed.” [20]

Elections in Central and South America over the past eleven years – Venezuela in 1998 and since, Argentina in 2003, Uruguay in 2004, Bolivia in 2005, Ecuador and Nicaragua in 2006, Paraguay in 2008, El Salvador in 2009 and for while in Panama after 2004 and Honduras after 2006 – have severely limited the scope of the Pentagon’s plans to renew and expand its presence in Latin America. To compensate for these unprecedented losses, long-time military clients in Colombia and Peru are being tapped for greater commitments and concentrated efforts are being exerted to recruit Brazil and Chile into the fold. [21]

Three years ago retired Brazilian scholar Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira provided an outline of American armed forces plans for South America:

“They occupy an area extending from Guiana into Colombia….Most of them are not uniformed soldiers, but employees of what are known as private sector military companies. The Pentagon has been outsourcing war operations since the 1990s. These private military contractors have been playing an important role in military operations exactly because they are outside restrictions imposed by the US Congress.” [22]

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War and ten after NATO declared itself a global organization rivaling and ultimately supplanting the United Nations, the Western Hemisphere south of the United States is not being spared in plans for a Western-dominated international military bloc. In August the Colombian regime announced that it would “send 84 soldiers to join NATO forces in Afghanistan in yet another nod to US wishes,” [23] joining troops from four other continents.

In 1989 no one could have foreseen that a decade later Western military expansion would begin a process that led to American bases in parts of the world where their presence was hitherto unimaginable: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Australia, Bulgaria and Romania. And the first permanent U.S. base in Africa, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, with a new regional military command, AFRICOM, covering the entire continent. [24]

That Washington would gain strategic air bases on the Black Sea and in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Would conduct military exercises in Cambodia, East Timor, Gabon, Georgia, India, Mali, Mongolia, Senegal, Uganda and Ukraine. Would redeploy its military to the Philippines and permanently assign troops to Israel and Poland to staff missile radar and interceptor missile bases. Would stake out the Arctic Circle for military and missile shield deployments.

The Cold War ended a generation ago. Wars did not. Neither did the militarization of the world, which has instead intensified, reaching even into space.

Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/

1) Reuters, March 6, 2009
2) Reuters, March 5, 2009
3) Associated Press, May 1, 2009
4) Wikipedia
5) Colombia: U.S. Escalates War Plans In Latin America
Stop NATO, July 22, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/colombia-u-s-escalates-war-plans-in-latin-america
6) Agence France-Presse, October 30, 2009
7) CNN, October 30, 2009
8) Russian Information Agency Novosti, September 27, 2009
9) Xinhua News Agency, September 12, 2009
10) Prensa Latina, June 23, 2007
11) Prensa Latina, December 27, 2007
12) Air Forces Southern Command, May 29, 2009
13) Stabroek News, October 29, 2009
14) Stabroek News, October 29, 2009
15) El Universal, October 8, 2007
16) Canadian Press, October 7, 2007
17) New York Times, December 1, 2008
18) Ibid
19) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 12, 2006
20) Press TV, September 18, 2009
21) NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica
Stop NATO, May 30, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/nato-of-the-south-chile-south-africa-australia-antarctica
22) Agencia Brasil, January 19, 2006
23) Press TV, August 8, 2009
24) AFRICOM: Pentagon Prepares Direct Military Intervention In Africa
Stop NATO, August 24, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/africom-pentagons-prepares-direct-military-intervention-in-africa/

Rivals Ally

2009-11-04T22:17:24-05:00

In many industries, most notably technology, partnering up with rivals is often viewed as a necessary evil to achieve broader strategic goals. It is a means to an end, in spite of the threat that vulnerabilities will be exposed and key secrets revealed.

Such pairings don't necessarily last forever, of course. More often than not, the relationship either becomes strained by organizational or philosophical differences or the two sides learn just enough about each other that they think about encroaching on their partner's turf.

While things don't quite work the same way when it comes to geopolitics, I wonder if the burgeoning partnership described in the following Rossiyskaya Gazeta commentary, "Russia Continues to Tilt Towards China," by Andrei P. Tsygankov, a professor of international relations at San Francisco University, will eventually track a vaguely similar course.

China’s ways of influencing the north continue to expand. Even routine domestic economic decisions in Russia are increasingly made with a consideration for China. For instance, Beijing sent a delegation to Moscow in July to negotiate conditions of a large group of ethnic Chinese affected by the Moscow government’s decision to close the large Cherkizovsky Market following multiple violations of labour and immigration law.

Headed by Beijing’s deputy trade minister, the delegation negotiated restoration of the trading area on condition of a Chinese $1bn investment. But in recognition of the growing need for China’s investments and export markets, Russia was unwilling to press environmental claims against its neighbour when it polluted the Amur river.

China’s rising importance has translated into the growing prominence of the Sinophiles in Russia’s national discussions. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the China discourse has evolved from one dominated by the Westernisers to one largely controlled by Sinophiles, who have supporters in the government, energy firms with ties to Asia and the military-industrial complex.

The general public has also grown more pro-China over time. For example, a June poll by VTsIOM revealed that the share of Russians viewing China as a strategic and economic partner had grown from 34pc to 41pc over the past several years. In addition, 47pc of the respondents voiced optimism regarding the future of relations with China.

Sinophiles push strengthening relations with China based on Russia’s economic and security priorities. Although they want to defend Russia’s sovereignty, they insist it would be better protected by closer economic and political ties with China rather than the West. This is driven by influential leaders in the defence ministry, foreign ministry and military-industrial complex who want to prevent the US dominating global affairs.

Creating a multipolar world is needed to revive Russia’s superpower status. Pushing for a US retreat from Eurasia in the next five years, advocates of multipolarity call for political, economic and military union along the lines of a Warsaw Pact with China, India, Iran and other non-Western nations.

In the area of economic relations, the pro-China position is often favoured by energy producers and military enterprises seeking high-ticket defence contracts in Asia. Kremlin strategists believe the country would be better off redirecting its oil and gas supplies toward Eurasian countries such as China and India because such a measure would assist the country in developing energy-intensive goods and transforming its current status as a raw materials appendage of Europe.

As of now, Russia’s most commonly exported products to China are energy and weapons, whereas the most commonly imported products include everything from electronics to clothes. In addition, some state corporations have benefited from Chinese loans. For example, China’s $6bn loan helped Rosneft purchase Yuganskneftegaz in a December 2004 auction.

Notably, the chairman of Rosneft is Igor Sechin, who is a deputy prime minister and member of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. As the key negotiator, Sechin is now applying the model of a recently signed oil deal with China to other energy areas including electricity, natural gas and atomic energy.

The prospect of a growing pro-China tilt in Russia’s foreign policy may force the West to alter its foreign policy course. Rather than trying to secure the 21st century as another American or Western century, Washington and Brussels will do well to prepare for the emergence of a post-Western world and reassess the role that Russia will play in this new structure.

Preventing a potentially anti-Western Moscow-Beijing axis means that the West has to strengthen its ties with Russia, while preserving strong relations with China. The objective should be not to marginalise or isolate China, but rather to strengthen Russia’s ability to choose its future partners in the post-Western world.

No Turning Back

2009-11-03T22:25:52-05:00

Slowly but surely, the rhetoric is changing. The words are are increasingly blunt and assertive. It was only a short while ago, for instance, that geopolitical up-and-comers like China and Russia were griping, almost like children, about the unfairness of a system dominated by one nation -- the United States. Then they began to speak a bit more forcefully about rejigging the existing framework to meet the needs of new, more multipolar world. And now, as The Telegraph notes in "Space Arms Race Inevitable, Says Chinese Commander," they are openly warning of confrontations and conflicts in an area that was once viewed as out of bounds.

An arms race in space is an "historical inevitability", a senior Chinese air force commander has warned, marking an apparent shift in Beijing's opposition to weaponising outer space.

China, which hopes to put a man on the moon by 2020, has long stated that it supported the peaceful uses of outer space and opposed the introduction of weapons there.

However Xu Qiliang, a senior Chinese air force commander, said it was imperative for the PLA air force to develop offensive and defensive operations in outer space.

"As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space," he told the People's Liberation Army Daily in an interview to mark last month's 60th Anniversary of Communist China, "this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back."

Although Beijing has also sought to establish an international treaty to control the deployment of weapons in space, China surprised the world in 2007 when it shot down one of its own weather satellites in a test seen by many, including the United States, as a possible trigger of an arms race in space.

"The PLA air force must establish in a timely manner the concepts of space security, space interests and space development," Mr Xu added, "We must build an outer space force that conforms with the needs of our nation's development (and) the demands of the development of the space age."

Superiority in outer space can give a nation control over war zones both on land and at sea, while also offering a strategic advantage, Xu said, noting that such dominance was necessary to safeguard the nation.

"Only power can protect peace," the 59-year-old commander added.

China is currently in the process of rapidly modernising its armed forces, investigating the construction hardware such as aircraft carriers as well as cyber warfare techniques that could paralyse enemy's command and control systems.

Last year's annual Pentagon report to the US Congress warned that Chinese militarisation was changing the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.

China, however, dismisses such talk as alarmist and says that its rise will be peaceful. China currently spends 1.4 per cent of GDP on its armed forces, compared with two per cent in Britain and France and four per cent in the United States.

Walking the Talk?

2009-11-02T09:52:00-05:00

Each year since 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English hands out "The Doublespeak Award," which is an "ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered."

For this year's award, I nominate the Russian and Belarusian spokesman cited in the following Telegraph report, "Russia 'Simulates' Nuclear Attack on Poland," who claim that a simulated attack on Poland -- including the launch of nuclear missiles -- on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that country was designed to help "ensure the strategic stability in the East European region."

Russia has provoked outrage in Poland by simulating an air and sea attack on the country during military exercises.

The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential aggressor".

The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations appeared to have an offensive nature.

The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline.

The operation also involved the simulated suppression of an uprising by a national minority in Belarus – the country has a significant Polish population which has a strained relationship with authoritarian government of Belarus.

Karol Karski, an MP from Poland's Law and Justice, is to table parliamentary questions on Russia's war games and has protested to the European Commission.

His colleague, Marek Opiola MP, said: "It's an attempt to put us in our place. Don't forget all this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland."

Ordinary Poles were outraged by news of the exercise and demanded a firm response fro the government.

One man, identified only as Ted, told Polskie Radio: "Russia has laid bare its real intentions with respect to Poland. Every Pole most now get of the off the fence and be counted as a patriot or a traitor."

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, has tried to build a pragmatic relationship with the Kremlin despite widespread and vocal calls in Poland for him to cool ties with Moscow.

After spending 40 years under Soviet domination few in Poland trust Russia, and many Poles have become increasingly wary of a country they consider as possessing a neo-imperialistic agenda.

Bogdan Klich, Poland’s defence minister, said: “It is a demonstration of strength. We are monitoring the exercises to see what has been planned.

Wladyslaw Stasiak, chief of President Lech Kaczynski’s office, and a former head of Poland’s National Security Council, added: “We didn’t like the appearance of the exercises and the name harked back to the days of the Warsaw Pact.”

The Russian troop exercises will come as an unwelcome sight to the states nestling on Russia’s western border who have deep-rooted anxieties over any Russian show of strength.

With a resurgent Moscow now more willing to flex its muscles, Central and Eastern Europeans have warned of Russia adopting a neo-imperialistic attitude to an area of the world it still regards as its sphere of influence.

In July, the region’s most famed and influential political figures, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, wrote an open letter Barack Obama warning him that Russia “is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.”

Moscow and Minsk have insisted that Operation West was to help "ensure the strategic stability in the East European region".

A Persistent Theme

2009-11-01T21:38:58-05:00

Efforts to tap into and exert control over oil and other resources in the Arctic region have been a recurring theme during the past several years. In a report last January, CNN explained why:

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are recoverable in the frozen region north of the Arctic Circle.

And the fight over who owns those resources may turn out to be the most important territorial dispute of this century. Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland all have a stake in the Arctic's icy real estate.

In fact, I've highlighted the issue in a number of posts here at When Giants Fall, including "Polar Clashes Around the Corner?" "Gearing Up for Something Big," "Canada Is Not Standing Idly By," "Energy Battle Lines Being Drawn," and "A Vision of the Future."

Unlike other topics that seem to garner a burst of media attention and then fade from view, interest in this story remains relatively active, in part because the various countries with designs on the region and what it has to offer keep upping the ante. In "Russia Plans Research to Support Arctic Claim," the Associated Press details the latest development.

Russia is planning extensive research to support its claim to a broad swath of energy-rich territory beneath the Arctic Sea, a top official of the nation's icebreaker fleet said Friday.

Icebreakers will lead research vessels into the Arctic in a series of missions over the next three years to conduct a detailed geological analysis of the seabed, said Andrei Smirnov, deputy director for operations at state-run Atomflot.

Moscow claims a large part of the Arctic seabed as its own, arguing that it is an extension of Russia's continental shelf. In 2007, scientists staked a symbolic claim by dropped a canister containing the Russian flag onto the seabed from a small submarine.

The United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway have also been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic, which is believed to contain as much as a quarter of the Earth's undiscovered oil and gas.

The dispute has intensified amid growing evidence that global warming is shrinking polar ice, opening up new shipping lanes and new resource development opportunities.

Smirnov said Russian researchers are currently planning an Arctic mission set to depart next June. It will include a powerful atomic icebreaker and a research ship.

He said similar missions will also take place over 2011-2012.

The researchers will use sophisticated sonic equipment and other gear to study the seabed, Smirnov said.

Moscow first submitted the claim to the Arctic seabed to the United Nations in 2001, but it was rejected for lack of evidence.

Artur Chilingarov, a polar scientist who was recently appointed the Kremlin's point man for Arctic issues and led the flag-planting expedition, said in June that Russia might resubmit the claim in 2013 after collecting more data.

At the time, Chilingarov said Russia's fleet of six nuclear-powered icebreakers gives it an edge in polar exploration. Russia is the only nation that now has an atomic icebreaker fleet, he said.

He said that two giant Soviet-built atomic icebreakers that have been decommissioned are currently undergoing tests for possible extension of their use.

Design work is under way on a new class of atomic icebreakers, and four of them will likely be built, Smirnov said.

'Growing at an "Unprecedented Rate"'

2009-10-31T20:36:09-04:00

Back in March, Stratfor published the second of a three-part series on China’s development of a "blue-water navy" -- that is, a maritime force capable of operating across the deep waters of open oceans. In "Part 2: China’s Plan for a Blue-Water Fleet," the global intelligence firm detailed some of the background behind those efforts:

In 1999, as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) marked its 50th anniversary, Chinese naval officials already were planning to expand the range and role of the navy, with a clear eye toward moving beyond a traditional coastal defense capability (the so-called "green-water" navy) to a true "blue-water," or oceangoing, navy. But they knew the change would be neither quick nor easy. It would require not only new ships, but also new logistics systems, new training and new communications protocol -- in essence, an entirely new navy.

Beyond the obvious budget constraints, other hurdles loomed, including debate over the pros and cons of a carrier fleet, domestic security concerns that would shift budgets and attention back to dry land and the age-old Chinese concern over the strategic logic of an expeditionary navy.

Clearly, developing an entirely new navy would not happen overnight. Moving from a coastal fleet to an expeditionary fleet would take at least a generation, and the PLAN needed a way to maintain its coastal mission while expanding its operational reach long before such a transition could be completed. (Chinese analysts have begun looking into building a coast guard, patterned after that of the United States, that would take on the coastal role while the navy focused on blue-water force projection.) To accomplish this transition, the PLAN embarked upon four steps that are not necessarily sequential; action on one does not depend on the completion of another, nor do all the steps need to be accomplished in full. Taken together, however, these overlapping steps create a path for China to protect its interests while moving toward its objective of deploying a robust blue-water navy:

Secure China's claimed exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which includes most of the South China Sea, in order to create a maritime buffer similar to the terrestrial buffers of Xinjiang and Tibet.
"Extend" the Chinese shoreline via port agreements and island development to create a string of logistical hubs that would enable coastal vessels to operate farther from the mainland.
Develop and deploy asymmetrical countermeasures to deal with the technological gap between China and the world's dominant naval power, the United States.
Begin building the ships, logistics train and doctrine for a truly expeditionary navy.

Ten years after making its naval ambitions known, it appears that China has made the sort of progress that can make even a global superpower feel nervous, if the following Associated Press report, "US Admiral Concerned about China Military Buildup," is anything to go by.

A U.S. Navy admiral expressed new concern Friday over China's military buildup and urged Beijing to be clearer about its intentions.

With China's military growing at an "unprecedented rate," the U.S. wants to ensure that expansion doesn't destabilize the region, Rear Adm. Kevin Donegan told reporters on a visit to the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

Donegan referred to China's expanded weaponry. His remarks echoed the concerns of other U.S. military leaders who have said the growth in China's military spending — up almost 15 percent in the 2009 budget — raises questions about how Beijing plans on deploying its new power.

"When we see a military growing at that rate, we're interested in transparency and the understanding of the uses of that military," said Donegan, commander of the USS George Washington aircraft carrier strike group, a key part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Donegan's comments come as a top Chinese general visits the United States on a mission to strengthen trust between the two militaries and dispel U.S. concerns about the growth of the People's Liberation Army.

Xu Caihou, the PLA's second-highest ranking officer, told President Barack Obama on Wednesday that ties between the two countries' militaries play "an important role in enhancing strategic mutual trust and deepening their pragmatic cooperation," according to Chinese media reports.

China has boosted military spending by more than 10 percent annually for almost two decades, and the official figure of $71 billion this year is thought by many analysts to represent only a portion of total defense spending. It still amounts to only a fraction of U.S. defense spending.

China says much of the increase is used to improve salaries and living conditions for soldiers, but it has also been adding sophisticated new warships, submarines, fighter jets and other weapons systems to its arsenal. PLA leaders have also said they are considering building an aircraft carrier, but such a development is thought to be years, if not decades, away.

Donegan acknowledged the possibility of a Chinese aircraft carrier, but also said he was concerned with anti-access weapons. This class of weapons includes missiles and submarines that can threaten U.S. forces in the region and prevent them responding in the event of a crisis.

"I am absolutely concerned," Donegan said.

He went on to say, "When a navy is doing that, we just want to make sure it's transparent enough so those in the region understand what they're doing."including a special forces unit and two ship-borne helicopters.

The Challengers Also Have Challenges

2009-10-30T20:39:47-04:00

Although the emergence of economically powerful challengers like China, India, Russia, and Brazil is one reason why America's dominant role in the world is under siege, things are not that simple. Many up-and-comers face challenges of their own, including inadequate infrastructure, underdeveloped financial systems, and destabilizing demographic imbalances. They are also exposed to sociopolitical threats, including those stemming from long-simmering separatist, independence, and decentralization movements. In "In Russia, an Intensifying Insurgency," the Washington Post updates us on a festering sore in the southern part of our former Cold War rival.

Under crackdown, Chechen separatism turns into a regional Islamist revolt

SUNZHENSKY, RUSSIA -- Her face wet with tears and framed by a black shawl, Madina Albakova sat in her ransacked living room and described how she had become another teenage widow here in Ingushetia, the most volatile of Russia's Muslim republics.

The details emerged between sobs: the arrival of the security forces earlier in the day, her husband's panicked attempt to flee, the gunfire that erupted without warning. He was a law student, barely 20 and "so beautiful," she said, but the soldiers planted a rifle next to his body and called him an Islamist rebel. Then they took everything of value -- the family's savings, a set of dishes, even baby clothes, she said.

Such heavy-handed tactics by the Russian security forces have helped transform the long-running separatist rebellion in Chechnya, east of Ingushetia, into something potentially worse: a radical Muslim insurgency that has spread across the region, draws support from various ethnic groups and appears to be gaining strength.

Moscow declared an end to military operations in Chechnya in April, a decade after then-President Vladimir Putin sent troops into the breakaway republic. But violence has surged in the mountains of Russia's southwest frontier since then, with the assassination of several officials, explosions and shootouts occurring almost daily, and suicide bombings making a comeback after a long lull. On Sunday, a popular Ingush opposition leader was fatally shot, months after the slaying of Chechnya's most prominent human rights activist.

The insurgency is a key reason Russia has been reluctant to support sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program; diplomats say the Kremlin is worried Tehran might retaliate by setting aside sectarian differences and backing the rebels in Muslim solidarity. Washington, meanwhile, is concerned that the area is becoming a recruiting ground for militias in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At least 519 people were killed in rebel attacks and clashes with government forces from May to September, up from 299 during the same period last year, according to a study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. The fighting is concentrated in the largely Muslim eastern part of the North Caucasus, an area the size of Oregon with 14 million people from as many as 50 ethnic groups.

After a brief calm following two wars, militant attacks have spiked in Chechnya, as well as in nearby Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria. But the violence has been worst in Ingushetia, the smallest and poorest of Russia's provinces, where rebels and security forces compete in brutality and even rights activists carry guns.

A few hours after the soldiers killed Albakova's husband, Movsar Merzhoyev, in this rural district on Oct. 9, a car bomb exploded several miles away in what appeared to be a failed suicide attack. Over the next week, gun battles here left 11 suspected militants and three police officers dead.

Ingushetia has been on edge since June, when a suicide bomber hit the convoy of the republic's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, putting him in a coma and killing three bodyguards. Two months later, as Yevkurov was returning to work, another suicide attack leveled the police department of Ingushetia's largest city, Nazran, killing at least 24 people and injuring 200 others.

Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs' brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

A major figure in the recent violence is Alexander Tikhomirov, a young preacher known here as Sayid Buryatsky who joined the rebels last year after converting to Islam in his native Siberia and studying in Egypt.

Tikhomirov, thought to be in his late 20s, has become the new face of the insurgency and appeared in videos claiming a role in the Yevkurov assassination attempt and the police station bombing. The latter showed him sitting with a barrel of explosives in the truck purportedly used in the attack.

Tikhomirov's fluent Russian and religious training set him apart from other rebel leaders, and he appears to be playing a key role in uniting loosely linked ethnic and local factions under the banner of the Caucasus Emirate, said Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Caucasian Knot, a Web site that reports on the region.

"He's exactly what they needed," Shvedov said, arguing that Tikhomirov's status as an outsider and his unusual heritage -- half-Russian and half-Buryat, a Buddhist minority -- have made him a powerful symbol for the movement.

In a sign of Tikhomirov's rising profile, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin's strongman in Chechnya and the most powerful politician in the region, has disparaged his Muslim credentials and accused him of using drugs to brainwash recruits. Kadyrov's forces appear to be gunning for him, too. In August, soldiers at a checkpoint shot and killed a Russian police officer they mistook for him.

Tikhomirov's sermons on the Internet have resonated in Ingushetia, where unemployment is as high as 75 percent, corruption is rampant and the young see few chances to improve their lives. He has also tapped into anger against the security forces, who are widely thought to engage in abductions, torture and killings.

Even leaders of the moderate opposition have expressed admiration for Tikhomirov, who mixes passages of the Koran with jabs at Putin and Kadyrov.

"He has charmed so many young hearts. The youths of Ingushetia just love him. . . . At least somebody is pushing back against Kadyrov and his men," said Maksharip Aushev, a prominent Ingush businessman and opposition figure, who argued this month that Tikhomirov was no worse than security officers engaged in "state terrorism."

Though he opposed the Caucasus Emirate, Aushev said that most Ingush believe they would be better off living under Islamic law than with the government's excesses, and that many of the rebels had been "forced into terrorism" by the abuses of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB.

Such criticism of the authorities, he added, made him a target. On Sunday, two weeks after welcoming journalists to a son's wedding and foiling an attempt to abduct some of them from a local hotel, Aushev was gunned down in his car on a major highway.

When Ingush join the rebels, locals say they have "gone to live in the woods." Timur Akiyev of the human rights group Memorial said the recruits are often young men seeking revenge for relatives who have been killed by the authorities. Police make matters worse, he added, by targeting Muslims who reject local traditions in favor of what they consider purer forms of Islam.

Akiyev cited the case of two brothers, Khusein and Khasan Mutaliyev. Because Khusein had studied in Egypt, police detained him for questioning and beat him. After he filed a complaint with Memorial's help, they returned and fatally shot him when he tried to flee.

His brother filed a complaint, but it was ignored. When Memorial next heard from him, Khasan had joined the insurgents. He died in February with rebels who detonated a bomb during a police raid, killing four officers.

Magomed Khazbiev, an opposition leader who was blocked from running in local elections this month, said the rebels promise something that the government has been unwilling or unable to deliver: justice.

Several months ago, a few rebels showed up at his home wearing long beards and carrying assault rifles, he said. They urged him to stop organizing protests for democratic reform, saying his efforts were futile and drawing recruits away from them. "They said, 'We don't want a constitution written by people who refuse to follow it,' " he recalled.

In two years at most, the rebels vowed, "we would be living under the law of Allah," he said. "They really believed it."