Just this week, my news filters started picking up what increasingly appears to be a disinformation campaign aimed at "poisoning the well" in Latin America:

* "DEA Reports Show That Mexican Cartel 'Thugs' Are Receiving Training From Iranian Revolutionary Guard"

* "Mexican Drug Cartels and Islamic Radicals Working Together"

* "The Caracas-Tehran Axes"

Something is up.
They are cranking up the propaganda machine perhaps in preparation for
a future deployment of U.S. forces in Mexico, Colombia and/or Paraguay.
For now, their intention seems to be to threaten and to terrorize.
Imagine that.

Mexico,
in stoking up the heat on the drug cartels, has fallen into anarchy
within its northern states along the U.S. border. Although the Bush
Administration recently announced funding support for the Mexican
military in their violent struggle against the Sinaloa
Federation and Gulf Cartels, it is possible that more direct support
may have been “placed on the table,” even though the cartels have
devolved into interior power struggles and internecine wars for
territorial control.

Bolivia and Ecuador
are lining up with our OPEC "enemy," Venezuela, who currently supplies
25% of our imported oil. Both are currently experiencing diplomatic
conflagrations with the right-wing government of Colombia, which the
Bush Administration supports. Issues involve Colombia's alleged
cross-border incursions into Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in pursuit
of left-wing guerrillas whom Colombia claims have been given sanctuary
by them. Venezuela has vehemently denied any support.

All the while, the Bush Administration has recommissioned the 4th
Fleet and sent it to the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. The Navy
has already launched acts of provocation, in the form of "accidental"
flyovers of Venezuelan island territories in the Caribbean, drawing
protests from Chavez. At the same time, Ecuador demanded that the
United States close its airbase in that country, which we did, moving
it to Colombia.

Last week, it was revealed that George W. Bush's man in Bogota, President Álvaro Uribe [right], just happens to be one of the former captains of Colombia's infamous Madeline cocaine cartel, led by Pablo Escobar [left],
who was "reportedly" killed in a joint operation of DEA and Colombian
government forces in the 90s. What appears to have occurred is that CIA
and Mossad handlers lost control over both Escobar
and Daniel Noriega of Panama after Vice President George H. W. Bush,
Oliver North and John P. Walters, who is not surprisingly the current
"Drug Czar" under George W. Bush-43, spent so much "persuasive" effort
in bringing them into the CIA Colombian "plaza" in order to benefit the
Contra counter-revolution against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

It has been a general rule in Latin America that if the government was a first generation democracy emerging from the neo-liberal
thumb of American corporatism, then the drug "plaza" was run by the CIA
against them in order to raise illegal covert funding for groups like
the Contras in Nicaragua, mentioned above; ergo, the infamous
Iran-Contra Affair. But now, competition has arisen even in the
underworld as resurgent left-wing movements, such as Colombia's FARC, have moved into "the plaza" to take their "cut" of the profits in order to buy arms; although, the Bush and Uribe governments have announced that FARC is all but defeated.

Much of the time, it is the U.S. arms industry providing the arms for the left and the right and now, evidence has begun to emerge that Mossad has always been active in the region as a silent partner to the CIA. Some have even accused Mossad of covertly "outing" the CIA by deferring all of the blame for Iran-Contra onto President George H. W. Bush, who outrightly
favored the oil rich Arab nations over the national interests of Israel
in the immediate years of the Soviet's demise in the Cold War. Now they
feel much more comfortable with his -- let's face it -- idiot son, who
has allowed an obviously compromised and corrupted Richard Cheney,
stumbling along in the secure hands of a cabal of sayanim neocons with their promise to create wealth for the American oligarchy, take over the American government from the shadows. So go the recent accusations from the underground press.

We all should be keeping our eyes on Latin America as our politicians, both conservative (McCain) and "progressive" (Obama)
refine their respective "opposing" positions on a possible withdrawal
from Iraq, only to redeploy them to Afghanistan while looking askance
at Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. The controlled press has been
cooperative in covering stories of strengthening Taliban forces in
South Asia but such a redeployment would only represent a shell game.

Indeed, the press is jabbering
on behalf of the Pentagon, calling for more troops in Afghanistan and
publishing stories of U.S. troops on the verge of being overwhelmed at
the same time the Latin American press is being planted with stories
regarding an eminent DEA paramilitary operation in South America [see stories cited above]. Afghanistan happens to be conveniently located on the Northeastern border of Iran.

Personally, what this writer perceives is the opportunity to set up and execute a classic pincer movement [cf. article below]
against Iran from Iraq's southeastern or northeastern border and from
Afghanistan's southwestern border. At the same time, the Pentagon may
set aside a regiment or two for redeployment against OPEC's Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has formed an alliance with Iran's Ahmadinejad,
even moving to the Euro currency for Venezuelan oil/gas transactions
just as Saddam Hussein did and Iran has now done, except in the case of
the latter, Iran has opened its bourse to a number of currencies other than the dollar.

In fact, this amounts to the same formula by which Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, at first drew Russian
military forces into Afghanistan by attacking their puppet regime in
Kabul with U.S. surrogate Mujaheddin forces; and then by covertly
supporting the Mujaheddin against them in an extended, Vietnam-like
debacle in order to get them to dump their GNP into a costly war with
no return, one that would devalue the ruble and then break them. Yet
this is exactly the trap the Bush/Cheney Administration has fallen into
in Iraq. It would not surprise anyone to discover that -- out of
retaliation -- Russian economic advisers inspired first Saddam Hussein
and then Iran and Venezuela to reject the dollar for oil transactions,
thus bringing the full force of the U.S. foreign debt onto our own
heads as the dollar is replaced as the coin of the realm by the Euro.
The U.S. is betting that the dollar will survive all challenges,
including this speculative one.

The Afghanistan redeployment will proceed, despite the State Department's
initiation of talks with Iran, a diplomatic strategy forsworn by Bush
until now. Israel is said to be on the verge of issuing a scathing
denouncement of a negotiated settlement, even though they have begun
negotiating with Syria. Their fear is that the U.S. will withdraw
leaving them vulnerable to future aggression by Iran, who maintains the
strongest military presence in the Middle East, opposite Israel's. Both
Israel and the United States want assurances that Iran will not enrich
uranium that could be used to develop nuclear weapons, but this
artificially precludes the possibility of Iran procuring enriched
uranium from Russia or China, their allies in trade.

Therefor, a dual diplomatic and a military strategy
appear to be in the offing, but many cautious pundits have opined that
Bush is only going through diplomatic paces so that he can later claim
he tried everything possible to avoid war, a tactic he used against
Saddam Hussein that was later documented to have been disingenuous and
perfunctory from the beginning. Bush is known to have an unrealistic
need for certainty; negotiated settlements could never assuage his
anxiety. Besides, one of the primary Straussian (neoconservative) goals set out by PNAC
beyond securing Israel is to insure that the Soviet Union is never
again resurrected to threaten another expansion of her empire into the
oil rich Caspian and Middle East regions or into Afghanistan to secure
southeastern pipeline routes to the coastline of Pakistan. The best way
to prevent a resurgence of the Soviet empire, neocons aggressively assert, is to replace it in the region with our own.

Given Obama's initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq, for Barack Obama to call for (now a staged) withdrawal, one supported by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki of Iraq,
at the same time he promotes sending troops to Afghanistan, is
disingenuous at worse and inadequately informed at best. Since he is
now being handled by some of the top insider foreign
policy experts in the country, my estimation is that he and his
campaign staff are being duplicitous. Notwithstanding the secret
mission established by Cheney to secure for ourselves the
trans-Afghanistan pipelines from the Caspian and the gas rich region of
South Asia west of there, the stated reason for going into Afghanistan
originally was to eliminate al-Qaida
in the wake of 9/11. The Taliban became a secondary issue once we
invaded despite their current resurgence. Nevertheless, I'm sure Obama thinks his position is now more "nuanced."