Tunisian Wikileaks Putsch: CIA Touts Mediterranean Tsunami of Coups; Libya, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Jordan, Italy All Targeted; US-UK Want New Puppets
to Play Against Iran, China, Russia; Obama Retainers Cass Sunstein, Samantha Power, Robert Malley, International Crisis Group Implicated in
Destabilizations
[Translate]
Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
January 16, 2011
Washington DC, January 16, 2011 – The US intelligence community is now in a manic fit of gloating over this weekend’s successful overthrow of the
Tunisian government of President Ben Ali. The State Department and the CIA, through media organs loyal to them, are mercilessly hyping the Tunisian
putsch of the last few days as the prototype of a new second generation of color revolutions, postmodern coups, and US-inspired people power
destabilizations. At Foggy Bottom and Langley, feverish plans are being made for a veritable Mediterranean tsunami designed to topple most existing
governments in the Arab world, and well beyond. The imperialist planners now imagine that they can expect to overthrow or weaken the governments of
Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and perhaps others, while the CIA’s ongoing efforts to remove Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi
(because of his friendship with Putin and support for the Southstream pipeline) make this not just an Arab, but rather a pan-Mediterranean, orgy of
destabilization.
Hunger revolution, not Jasmine revolution
Washington’s imperialist planners now believe that they have successfully refurbished their existing model of CIA color revolution or postmodern
coup. This method of liquidating governments had been losing some of its prestige after the failure of the attempted plutocratic Cedars revolution in
Lebanon, the rollback of the hated IMF-NATO Orange revolution in Ukraine, the ignominious collapse of June 2009 Twitter revolution in Iran, and the
widespread discrediting of the US-backed Roses revolution in Georgia because of the warmongering and oppressive activities of fascist madman
Saakashvili. The imperialist consensus is now that the Tunisian events prefigure a new version of people power coup specifically adapted to today’s
reality, specifically that of a world economic depression, breakdown crisis, and disintegration of the globalized casino economy.
The Tunisian tumults are being described in the US press as the “Jasmine revolution,” but it is far more accurate to regard them as a variation on
the classic hunger revolution. The Tunisian ferment was not primarily a matter of the middle class desire to speak out, vote, and blog. It started
from the Wall Street depredations which are ravaging the entire planet: outrageously high prices for food and fuel caused by derivatives speculation,
high levels of unemployment and underemployment, and general economic despair. The detonator was the tragic suicide of a vegetable vendor in Sidi
Bouzid who was being harassed by the police. As Ben Ali fought to stay in power, he recognized what was causing the unrest by his gesture of lowering
food prices. The Jordanian government for its part has lowered food prices there by about 5%.
Assange and Wikileaks, Key CIA Tools to Dupe Youth Bulge
The economic nature of the current unrest poses a real problem for the Washington imperialists, since the State Department line tends to define human
rights exclusively in political and religious terms, and never as a matter of economic or social rights. Price controls, wages, jobless benefits,
welfare payments, health care, housing, trade union rights, banking regulation, protective tariffs, and other tools of national economic self-defense
have no place whatsoever in the Washington consensus mantra. Under these circumstances, what can be done to dupe the youth bulge of people under 30
who now represents the central demographic reality of most of the Arab world?
In this predicament, the CIA’s cyberspace predator drone Julian Assange and Wikileaks are providing an indispensable service to the imperialist
cause. In Iceland in the autumn of 2009, Assange was deployed by his financier backers to hijack and disrupt a movement for national economic survival
through debt moratorium, the rejection of interference by the International Monetary Fund, and re-launching the productive economy through an
ambitious program of national infrastructure and the export of high technology capital goods, in particular in the field of geothermal energy. Assange
was able to convince many in Iceland that these causes were not nearly radical enough, and that they needed to devote their energies instead to
publishing a series of carefully pre-selected US government and other documents, all of which somehow targeted governments and political figures which
London and Washington had some interest in embarrassing and weakening. In other words, Assange was able to dupe honest activists into going to work
for the imperialist financiers. Assange has no program except “transparency,” which is a constant refrain of the US UK human rights mafia as it
attempts to topple targeted governments across the developing sector in particular.
“Yes we can” or “Food prices are too damn high!”
Tunisia is perhaps the first case in which Assange and Wikileaks can make a credible claim to have detonated the coup. Most press accounts agree that
certain State Department cables which were part of the recent Wikileaks document dumps and which focused on the sybaritic excess and lavish lifestyle
of the Ben Ali clan played a key role in getting the Tunisian petit bourgeoisie into the streets. Thanks in part to Assange, Western television
networks were thus able to show pictures of the Tunisian crowds holding up signs saying “Yes we can” rather than a more realistic and populist
“Food prices are too damn high!”
Ben Ali had been in power for 23 years. In Egypt, President Mubarak has been in power for almost 30 years. The Assad clan in Syria have also been
around for about three decades. In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi has been in power for almost 40 years. Hafez Assad was able to engineer a monarchical
succession to his son when he died 10 years ago, and Mubarak and Gaddafi are trying to do the same thing today. Since the US does not want these
dynasties, The obvious CIA tactic is to deploy assets like Twitter, Google, Facebook, Wikileaks, etc., to turn key members of the youth bulge into
swarming mobs to bring down the gerontocratic regimes.
tarpley.net