U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter Implies Russia and China Are “Enemies” of America. What Next?
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research
November 11, 2015
On Saturday November 7th, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who had started his career at the Defense Department during the Reagan Administration as an aide to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Cold-Warring against the communist nations U.S.S.R. and China, delivered a speech saying, “We are in the middle of a strategic transition to respond to the security challenges that will define our future. … We’re responding to Russia, one source of today’s turbulence, and China’s rise, which is driving a transition in the Asia-Pacific.”
So: what has changed for him in all of that time? The weapons are more advanced; he expressed pride in that. And the former Warsaw Pact nations that were allied with the U.S.S.R. surrounding Russia, have increasingly joined NATO and become Russia’s enemies. (The U.S.S.R. terminated the Warsaw Pact, but the U.S. didn’t terminate NATO; instead, NATO with its former Warsaw Pact members increased from the 16 nations it had when the Soviet Union broke up, to the 28 nations today. And U.S. President Barack Obama and SecDef Carter want to increase that number to 29 by including Ukraine, which is on Russia’s border.)
Carter’s speech presented Russia repeatedly as constituting the “aggressor.” He actually used this term three times, two of which concerned Russia explicitly:
“We’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russia’s aggression.”
“We are adapting our operational posture and contingency plans as we – on our own and with allies – work to deter Russia’s aggression.”
“We are also changing fundamentally our operational plans and approaches to deter aggression.”
None of his usages of “aggression” referred to jihadists, nor to the top funders of jihadists, the Saudi and Qatari royal families, respectively the Sauds and the Thanis. Instead, we arm those people, and they then send some of those arms to jihadists in Syria so as to remove from power Syria’s secular pro-Russian President, Bashar al-Assad.
Secretary Carter, like his boss President Obama, want Assad to be replaced by the fighters that the Sauds and Qataris are arming. Carter and Obama call these fighters “moderate Syrians,” though the secular Shiite Assad runs a non-religious government, and all of the fighters against him want a Sunni Islamic state, no secular state at all.
The Rest…HERE
