I am not a paranoid conspiracy theorist and pay no attention to people who believe that they were abducted by aliens from outer space or those who claim that the US government or Israel carried out the WTC attacks on 9-11. On the other hand, it is naive to gullibly accept as the word of God, what one gets from newspapers or TV. My education began when I read Chomsky and Herman's book 'Manufactured Consent', which is available even in India.

Most of us are too involved in making two ends meet, spending time with our families and worrying about our children, to spare the time delving deep in learning the truth. Our remaining spare time is spent in passive entertainment by watching soap operas, cricket and Bollywood or Hollywood on TV. We forget that the main objective of all media is to make money. They do not get any substantial monetary benefit from readers or viewers but need the large audience to charge higher fees to advertisers which are generally corporations and government. Thus they are rarely hypercritical of the government which can withdraw their ads or licenses and in India deny them newsprint paper. They are even more reluctant to do investigative journalism that may reveal the bribery and corruption nexus between regulators, elected leaders and corporate bigwigs regarding favorable laws, tariff policies and licenses. 

The motivation of elected leaders is to ensure their perpetuity in power. They need money, which they garner from the wealthy by promising favorable future legislation. They also need the votes of the masses and for that they use bribery, cheating and inciting emotions to fool the populace to vote against their own economic interests. In America, they wave the red flag of abortion, gay rights, welfare cheats and racism towards African-Americans to make the average and poor white vote for the Republican agenda of cutting taxes of the rich, increasing corporate profits by moving jobs to cheaper nations or reducing local wages by threats. The Democrats talk of the common man but their policies are equally bought and paid for by the rich. The charade of democracy is maintained while the choices of the electorate are restricted by limiting the choice of candidates and parties to perpetuate a false sense of choice between two parties with not an iota of difference, integrity or honesty.

In India, slogans like Garibi Hatao, the fear of Muslims, the oppression of Dalits, linguistic loyalty appeals, pandering to minorities or the xenophobia of non-Maharashtrians or non-Assamese are used by the Congress, BSP, BJD, BJP, TDP, DMK, Shiv Sena and ULFA. The rampant corruption and self-enrichment of leaders is ignored or swept under the rug. The re-election of criminals or those with unresolved pending corruption enquiries in UP, Bihar and Punjab shows how the electorate is fooled about democracy by limiting the choices to the same manipulating candidates, often proven crooks.

Political parties are shrewd and calculating. In the US, the Monica Lewinsky affair and renting out the Lincoln bedroom in the White House for political contributions, had raised a strong aversion to Clinton and the Democrats. The Republican party rallied behind their anointed candidate George W. Bush not for any intellectual, political or any other savvy, but because he was the son of President Bush who was defeated by Clinton and he was dumb enough to be a puppet and his reformed born again Christianity to overcome his 'Bottled Imp', would appeal to the Christian Right voters. Even then they insisted on a handler in Cheney, as vice president. His agenda was to enact huge tax cuts for the rich just like a former predecessor Reagan, while talking big about balancing the budget without any cuts in spending. He thus practiced Keynesianism of huge government deficit spending to stimulate the economy and pump up the markets . His accomplice Greenspan, the chief of the Federal reserve cheered him on and opened up the money spigots. The result is that the foolish electorate felt good, went on a debt laden spending binge and in the meantime the rich got richer by rising markets and tax cuts and the nation slipped further down the slope of increased debt and bankruptcy. Now again, Bill Clinton's wife Hillary will probably be the next president. It is similar to the dynastic musical chairs of Indian elections.

The second agenda was to further strengthen military force projection abilities and use them to gain control over Middle Eastern oil. This control would ensure cheap, reliable energy and keep Europe, Japan, China and India at the mercy of the US. The Islamic insurgency in Iraq threw a spanner into his plans, but he has no choice but to carry on if the US is not to become irrelevant in world affairs due to its falling economic and industrial status. Saddam had attacked Iran and Kuwait with US encouragement or indifference and had used chemical weapons obtained with US connivance, against Iran and the Kurds. He was a tyrant and a criminal sitting on huge oil reserves and could be justifiably toppled under the pretext of humanitarian reasons and for his financial support of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers plaguing Israel's oppression. The pretext changed from WMDs to democracy for Iraqis. The US imposed an appointed government of collaborators on Iraq and resisted elections till Ayatollah Sistani forced them. Now they have a bunch of Shiites, incapable of governing and dependent on US troops for their safety, who have finally assented to the sellout of Iraqi oil to the western multinationals without control by the Iraqi judiciary, legislature or executive branches. The new oil law is on the verge of passage. The US has the support of the Kurds and will retreat to its billion dollar mega-bases in the Kurdish area and elsewhere and militarily supervise the rape of Iraqi oil resources. This is exactly what was done to Iran in the earlier part of the twentieth century by the British with Indian troops based in Southern Iran.

The intrigue is even more intricate in the trifurcation of Iraq. The neighboring Sunni states have been worried about the Shia resurgence and a Shia crescent stretching from Lebanon to eastern Saudi Arabia. They had been turning a blind eye to Sunni insurgents and their funding by rich Saudis to teach the US a lesson and to garner support from their citizens for their illegitimate rule. Now to prevent Iranian regional hegemony, they are insisting that the US stay on and are buying newer arms to enrich the ruling families by bribes like the BEA investigation in UK showed. The US would really like to push the Shia Sunni wedge till it leads to the fragmentation of Iran by supporting the Kurds in the northwest and the Azerbaijanis in Iran's north. More important would be to split the oil rich Arab Shia south of Iran and merge it with the oil rich Shia south of Iraq under the US military and oil company control and essentially liquidate Iran as a power and a nation, once it is depleted of its oil wealth. The US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan either and wants to use it as a military base to control the oil rich trans-Caspian region. It has a military base in Kyrghyzstan to monitor China.

The installation of ABMs in Poland and the Czech republic are meant to encircle Russia and have nothing to do with Iranian missiles. A ring of missile shields around Russia from Alaska to Eastern Europe is to achieve what Mearsheimer calls total nuclear superiority and combined with space satellites capable of raining nuclear and non-nuclear weapons (rods from god) on any country at 30 minutes notice without fear of retaliation. It would make the US the master of the world, capable of demanding obedience and tribute to prop up the sagging status of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, due to its burgeoning debtor status. This is why Putin aggressively condemned the US in Munich. India is of marginal importance and only to counter the manpower military might of China. It cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power of China's level, as the US can counter China's nukes on its own, but needs a conventional military power to stand up against China. Russia is thus trying to cement a Russia-China-India axis to contain a unipolar US world hegemony. It is able to stand up against the US nukes but it also needs India's conventional military, its rising economic power and even more importantly it does not want India in the US camp.

Pakistan is unsure how long the US will support it or stay in Afghanistan, so it is co-operating with the US to gain aid, but supporting the Taliban to gain strategic depth and get rid of a neutral to slightly pro-India Karzai government in Kabul. It is further solidifying its economic and military ties with China and fomenting terrorism in Kashmir, Assam and the northeast of India. In India, we have the communists with blind loyalty to China and animosity to America wagging the dog of a corrupt Congress government whose puppet leaders have no understanding of what is happening in the world, dance to Sonia's string pulling, and are only focused on the equally ignorant and corrupt BJP trying to oust them. The US is fueling a Shia Sunni war which will destabilize the Middle East and Pakistan. India is surrounded by insurgencies in Nepal, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Maldives and Sri Lanka and mired in its own internal unrest by separatist groups like ULFA, Nagas and Maoists, while its leaders fiddle and quarrel.

The only redeeming factor is our military leaders, who are achieving a strong force with new planes, ships, submarines and other weapons. The large expenditure is worthwhile because just like nuclear weapons, it acts as a deterrent against military adventurism like Kargil by insane fanatics like Musharraf, who can never be trusted. Fighting a war when not financed by Germany or Japan like the first Iraq war, costs 100 billion dollars a year which is unaffordable even to the US. While a war with Pakistan would cost less for India, it would still be around 25 billion dollars or more a year. Furthermore India lacks the capability to promptly replace destroyed aircraft, ships, submarines and even howitzers and ammunition, as our rates of production of these prove. This needs to be remedied promptly. It is another blind spot of the elected fools at the helm.