by Wayne Madsen
From the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) to the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Washington has been playing a dangerous game of intrigue and deception with regard to steering these organizations in a pro-American direction. The Obama administration has decided that the halls, offices, and conference rooms of international organizations are acceptable battlefields to wage propaganda and sanctions wars.
The first American target of note was the international football association, FIFA. Not content with trying to sully the reputation of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics with issues of gay rights and doping of athletes, the US disinformation boiler rooms began a full-scale attack on FIFA. The major reason is Russia’s hosting of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The US Justice Department, in a major move toward the internationalization of domestic US law, began unsealing indictment after indictment of FIFA officials for financial crimes. The actual target of these indictments was Russia.
The United States, continuing its economic and political pressure on Venezuela, decided to pressure its three right-wing allies in Latin America – Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay – to deny the chair of the Mercosur customs union to Venezuela. After Uruguay, whose term was expiring, the next country in alphabetical order to assume the chair of the Latin American customs union was to be Venezuela. However, two countries where the Central Intelligence Agency arranged for constitutional coups to oust progressive presidents – Brazil and Paraguay – joined Argentina, ruled by a right-wing president narrowly elected in a dubious electoral process, in denying the chair to Venezuela.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez said that what Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay were doing to Venezuela was the restoration of the CIA’s Operation Condor against Venezuela. Condor was a 1970s operation concocted by Henry Kissinger, the CIA, and fascist governments in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay to target leftists throughout the Condor participants with assassination and torture. In a display of ultimate hubris, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay refused to recognize Venezuela as the chair of Mercosur, citing Venezuela’s economic, political and social crises, all of which were hatched by the CIA and its surrogates inside Venezuela.
If Washington wanted to split Mercosur, it got its wish. Uruguay responded to the actions of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay by stating, “there are no legal grounds to prevent the handover of the pro tempore presidency to Venezuela”. Bolivian president Evo Morales tweeted that the Washington-inspired diplomatic assault on Venezuela was “Another attack on the economic integration by instruments of the capitalist system. We salute the Venezuelan pro tempore presidency of Mercosur.”
The operation to oust progressive president Dilma Rousseff as president of Brazil and replace her with the proto-fascist Michel Temer was designed to prevent Rousseff from opening the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Neither the Obama administration nor the CIA wanted to see South America’s first Olympics opened by a progressive leftist who had once been tortured by CIA-trained interrogators.
The CIA’s nightmare scenario was a 2016 Olympics where Rousseff would have been joined in the VIP section of the Olympics stadium in Rio by Latin America’s other progressive leaders: Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Morales, Uruguay’s Tabare Vazquez, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet. With Temer opening the Olympics, Rousseff and many of her political allies in Latin America will not be present in Rio. The United States had no problem ensuring the Rio Olympics became a total disaster just to guarantee that progressive Latin American leaders were denied a platform to show the world that Latin America was no longer under the colonialist boot heel of Washington. It was the same mindset that Washington had in mind for Sochi. The United States was more than willing to ensure disruption at the 2014 Winter Olympics through quiet support, much of it through George Soros-financed organizations, for gay rights and other pressure groups to damage the reputation of the Sochi games.
Not content with disrupting the Rio Olympics by ousting Rousseff as president of Brazil, Washington doubled down by using its agents of influence to resurrect doping accusations against the Russian Summer Olympics team. Washington’s goal was to see Russia suspended from the Rio games.
Resisting pressure from Washington, IOC president Thomas Bach wisely decided to avoid a blanket ban of Russian athletes. Bach called such a unilateral ban on Russia participating in the Rio games as a “nuclear option”. He also said that such a “nuclear option” would have resulted in “collateral damage” among innocent athletes. Bach’s use of two geopolitical military terms was no mistake and it bore the mark of someone responding to familiar American “shock and awe” pressure. The United States used its compliant stooges, Germany and Canada, as well as the dubious World Anti-Doping Agency, run by a Scottish lawyer, to call for a total ban on Russian athletes in Rio.
Washington has also used its influence in ASEAN to ensure the organization became part of the US alliance against China in East Asia. Working behind the scenes within ASEAN, Washington attempted to get the organization, which does not include the United States among its members, to issue a statement backing the decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejecting China’s maritime claims to waters and islands in the South China Sea claimed by the Philippines. Cambodia blocked Washington’s maneuver and prevented an ASEAN statement in support of the Philippines against China.
In 2012 and 2016, ASEAN failed to issue a joint statement following a foreign ministers’ summit. This has happened only twice in the 49-year history of the organization. In both cases, it was Cambodia that stood in the way of an ASEAN statement, initiated by American agents within the ASEAN Secretariat in Indonesia, in opposition to China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Across the globe, the United States has sought to expand its influence in international organizations. The United States, using Germany and a few right-wing countries in Eastern Europe as surrogates, has ensured the European Union does not weaken economic sanctions against Russia. The Arab League has become a tool of the United States in applying pressure on Syria, thanks mostly to jihadist-supporting regimes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. The African Union has become nothing more than a pathetic cheerleader for the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), which only seeks to undermine the sovereignty of African nations and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities.
Through its neo-colonialist local partners, Australia and New Zealand, Washington ensures the Pacific Islands Forum remains nothing more than a powerless talking shop. To ensure that the forum never touches the issue of the colonial status of American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Marianas Islands, Washington has permitted all three colonial territories to join the Pacific Islands Forum as observer states to advance America’s agenda. American nuclear weapons in the Pacific Ocean region are never discussed by the forum nor is the semi-colonial status of three full members of the forum that remain beholden to the dictates of Washington: Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau.
There is a bull in the china shop of international diplomacy and its wears the ugly and discredited attire of Uncle Sam.