Liz Warren’s Chronicle of Self-Awareness
By Steve Sailer • Unz Review • January 30, 2020
From CNBC:
Elizabeth Warren proposes criminal penalties for spreading voting disinformation online
PUBLISHED WED, JAN 29 2020
Sunny KimDemocratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday released a plan to fight disinformation and to hold tech companies accountable for their actions in light of the 2016 election.
“Disinformation and online foreign interference erode our democracy, and Donald Trump has invited both,” Warren said in a Tweet Wednesday. …
Warren proposed to combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google responsible for spreading misinformation designed to suppress voters from turning out.
She added she will also open up data for research so that academics and organizations can provide the public with knowledge on disinformation.
With her superb grasp of symbolism and self-awareness, Warren chose to announce her plan to fight online disinformation on the one-year anniversary of her helping spread Jussie Smollett’s hate hoax disinformation online.
Also this week, Liz endorsed Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx, who let Jussie walk last year.
France sends warships to Mediterranean to deter Turkey
MEMO | January 30, 2020
French President Emmanuel Macron has sent warships to the Eastern Mediterranean to give support to Greece against Turkey’s quest for energy reserves in the region.
Together with Macron was Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was on a visit to the French capital Paris to gather support against Turkey. Mitsotakis welcomed the decision and described the warships as “guarantors of peace.”
“The only way to end differences in the eastern Mediterranean is through international justice,” he told reporters after holding talks with Macron. “Greece and France are pursuing a new framework of strategic defence.”
Tensions have increased significantly over the past year in the Eastern Mediterranean due to Turkey’s dispute with Southern Cyprus over the distribution of energy resources in the waters off the island of Cyprus.
In June last year, Turkey deployed drilling vessels to search for natural gas in retaliation to a deal struck by Greece, Southern Cyprus and Israel earlier that month, in which the three states agreed to build a pipeline harnessing the reserves of natural gas off the southern shores of the island. This pipeline – named EastMed – which is estimated to produce a profit of $9 billion over 18 years of the reserve’s exploitation, would be supplying gas from the Eastern Mediterranean region all the way to countries in Europe.
Turkey has called on those countries to participate in a fair and equal distribution of the energy resources discovered off Cyprus, insisting that they are attempting to exclude and alienate Turkey by striking their own deal without the consideration of both the major regional player and the people of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Therefore, it stresses that the drilling activities that Turkey is carrying out is legal and within territorial waters.
The EU, however, has repeatedly called on Turkey to give up its claim on having a share in the energy resources, claiming that its activities are “illegal”, leading to the Union to impose sanctions on the Republic in July last year over the issue, as well as due to Turkey’s military incursion – Operation Peace Spring – into northern Syria in October.
As France is one of the most prominent supporters of Greece in the dispute, Macron accused Turkey of being the one responsible for raising tensions as well as causing trouble in war torn Libya. “I want to express my concerns with regard to the behaviour of Turkey at the moment,” said Macron. “We have seen during these last days Turkish warships accompanied by Syrian mercenaries arrive on Libyan soil. This is an explicit and serious infringement of what was agreed in Berlin [conference]. It’s a broken promise.”
Greece itself has reportedly long been prepared for a military confrontation, with Defence Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos recently warning that the country was “examining all scenarios, even that of military engagement.” This was shown with Greece’s arming of 16 Aegean islands last week, in violation of international law which stipulates that they remain demilitarised. When Turkey called on Greece to disarmed them and uphold international law, Greece refused.
Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ won’t bring peace – that was the plan
The proposal deliberately includes a host of unrealisable preconditions before what remains of Palestine can be recognised
By Jonathon Cook | The National | January 2, 2020
Much of Donald Trump’s long-trailed “deal of the century” came as no surprise. Over the past 18 months, Israeli officials had leaked many of its details.
The so-called “Vision for Peace” unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.
The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony, and would not have come had they been. This was a deal designed in Tel Aviv more than in Washington – and its point was to ensure there would be no Palestinian partner.
Importantly for Israel, it will get Washington’s permission to annex all of its illegal settlements, now littered across the West Bank, as well as the vast agricultural basin of the Jordan Valley. Israel will continue to have military control over the entire West Bank.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to bring just such an annexation plan before his cabinet as soon as possible. It will doubtless provide the central plank in his efforts to win a hotly contested general election due on March 2.
The Trump deal also approves Israel’s existing annexation of East Jerusalem. The Palestinians will be expected to pretend that a West Bank village outside the city is their capital of “Al Quds”. There are incendiary indications that Israel will be allowed to forcibly divide the Al Aqsa mosque compound to create a prayer space for extremist Jews, as has occurred in Hebron.
Further, the Trump administration appears to be considering giving a green light to the Israeli right’s long-held hopes of redrawing the current borders in such a way as to transfer potentially hundreds of thousands of Palestinians currently living in Israel as citizens into the West Bank. That would almost certainly amount to a war crime.
The plan envisages no right of return, and it seems the Arab world will be expected to foot the bill for compensating millions of Palestinian refugees.
A US map handed out on Tuesday showed Palestinian enclaves connected by a warren of bridges and tunnels, including one between the West Bank and Gaza. The only leavening accorded to the Palestinians are US pledges to strengthen their economy. Given the Palestinians’ parlous finances after decades of resource theft by Israel, that is not much of a promise.
All of this has been dressed up as a “realistic two-state solution”, offering the Palestinians nearly 70 per cent of the occupied territories – which in turn comprise 22 per cent of their original homeland. Put another way, the Palestinians are being required to accept a state on 15 per cent of historic Palestine after Israel has seized all the best agricultural land and the water sources.
Like all one-time deals, this patchwork “state” – lacking an army, and where Israel controls its security, borders, coastal waters and airspace – has an expiry date. It needs to be accepted within four years. Otherwise, Israel will have a free hand to start plundering yet more Palestinian territory. But the truth is that neither Israel nor the US expects or wants the Palestinians to play ball.
That is why the plan includes – as well as annexation of the settlements – a host of unrealisable preconditions before what remains of Palestine can be recognised: the Palestinian factions must disarm, with Hamas dismantled; the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas must strip the families of political prisoners of their stipends; and the Palestinian territories must be reinvented as the Middle East’s Switzerland, a flourishing democracy and open society, all while under Israel’s boot.
Instead, the Trump plan kills the charade that the 26-year-old Oslo process aimed for anything other than Palestinian capitulation. It fully aligns the US with Israeli efforts – pursued by all its main political parties over many decades – to lay the groundwork for permanent apartheid in the occupied territories.
Trump invited both Netanyahu, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, and his chief political rival, former general Benny Gantz, for the launch. Both were keen to express their unbridled support.
Between them, they represent four-fifths of Israel’s parliament. The chief battleground in the March election will be which one can claim to be better placed to implement the plan and thereby deal a death blow to Palestinian dreams of statehood.
On the Israeli right, there were voices of dissent. Settler groups described the plan as “far from perfect” – a view almost certainly shared privately by Netanyahu. Israel’s extreme right objects to any talk of Palestinian statehood, however illusory.
Nonetheless, Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition will happily seize the goodies offered by the Trump administration. Meanwhile the plan’s inevitable rejection by the Palestinian leadership will serve down the road as justification for Israel to grab yet more land.
There are other, more immediate bonuses from the “deal of the century”.
By allowing Israel to keep its ill-gotten gains from its 1967 conquest of Palestinian territories, Washington has officially endorsed one of the modern era’s great colonial aggressions. The US administration has thereby declared open war on the already feeble constraints imposed by international law.
Trump benefits personally, too. This will provide a distraction from his impeachment hearings as well as offering a potent bribe to his Israel-obsessed evangelical base and major funders such as US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson in the run-up to a presidential election.
And the US president is coming to the aid of a useful political ally. Netanyahu hopes this boost from the White House will propel his ultra-nationalist coalition into power in March, and cow the Israeli courts as they weigh criminal charges against him.
How he plans to extract personal gains from the Trump plan were evident on Tuesday. He scolded Israel’s attorney-general over the filing of the corruption indictments, claiming a “historic moment” for the state of Israel was being endangered.
Meanwhile, Abbas greeted the plan with “a thousand nos”. Trump has left him completely exposed. Either the PA abandons its security contractor role on behalf of Israel and dissolves itself, or it carries on as before but now explicitly deprived of the illusion that statehood is being pursued.
Abbas will try to cling on, hoping that Trump is ousted in this year’s election and a new US administration reverts to the pretence of advancing the long-expired Oslo peace process. But if Trump wins, the PA’s difficulties will rapidly mount.
No one, least of all the Trump administration, believes that this plan will lead to peace. A more realistic concern is how quickly it will pave the way to greater bloodshed.
Americans Keep Putting Up Roadblocks Against Russian Troops on Key Syrian Highway
By Marko Marjanović | Anti-Empire | January 29, 2020
This is now the fourth time this has happened that we know of. US troops in northeastern Syria keep blockading the M4 highway to prevent Russian troops from moving on it.
In fall of 2019, to prevent a Turkish invasion of the Kurdish-held northeastern Syria, the Pentagon hammered out a deal with the Turks for joint US-Turkish patrols on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border.
As soon as that happened however Trump, after a talk with Erdogan, declared and ordered a US military withdrawal from Syria. At this moment Russia jumped in and took over the US role in the formerly US-Turkish agreement. To minimally appease Erdogan and limit his invasion it would now be Russians who patrolled together with the Turks, which was welcomed by the Kurdish leadership.
In separate negotiations with the Kurds the Russians also gained a number of bases in the northeast to make the patrols possible, and thousands of Syrian army troops also poured in to reinforce the Kurds against the Turkish invasion in the limited sector it was taking place in.
At this point Trump reversed himself, saying US forces would stay in Syria, but only in the oil-rich parts. But the withdrawal from the Syrian-Turkish border, where US presence had hampered US-Turkish relations, would be permanent.
Blue is the obvious path, but the Americans insist the Russians must hug the border along the red path
What is happening now is that when the Russians coming from the west want to take the direct and obvious route to their facilities in the city of Qamishli they periodically encounter US troops near the town of Tell Tamr standing in their way.
The Americans block the road with their vehicles and demand the Russians take the longer, indirect way to Qamishli along inferior roads hugging the Syrian-Turkish border.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen registers as lobbyist for Emirates in Washington
Press TV – January 30, 2020
A former US congresswoman has been registered as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to lobby US officials regarding “export controls and sanctions, and foreign and defense policies.”
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s registration comes as the United Arab Emirates has managed so far to stave off US congressional restrictions on arms sales over its controversial role in the deadly Saudi war on Yemen.
The former chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee was registered as lobbyist to represent Abu Dhabi earlier this month.
She will “provide outreach to US government officials and counsel on policy issues,” according to a Justice Department filing.
According to the document, she will also be counseling officials on “human rights, trade policies, foreign media registration, and strengthening trilateral relations and regional security.”
Ros-Lehtinen, who is known as a pro-Israel hawk on Iran and Latin America, has passed her one-year cooling-off period for retired lawmakers and became eligible to lobby her former colleagues.
She was registered on Jan. 21 by US lobby firm — Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — which is one of over a dozen lobbying firms the UAE has under contract, according to al-Monitor.
Akin Gump, which has been lobbying for Abu Dhabi since 2007, campaigned last year for more US sanctions against Iran, the UAE’s role in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen and arms sale.
The United Arab Emirates has been among the major buyers of US weapons, clinching a $1.8-billion arms deal with Washington last year.
Many countries, including Denmark, Finland, Germany and Belgium, have suspended arms exports to UAE either upon court orders or receiving evidence that the weapons were indeed used against civilians in Yemen.
According to a December 2018 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, the Saudi war has claimed the lives of more than 60,000 Yemenis since March 2015.
The war has also taken a heavy toll on the Arab country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The UN says more than 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger.
Russia’s UN Envoy Blasts ‘Deal of the Century’ Map Which Shows Golan Heights as Part of Israel
Sputnik – 30.01.2020
Israel took over part of Syria’s Golan Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War, annexing the area in 1981. The UN denounced Tel Aviv’s decision as “null and void and without international legal effect.” Last March, Washington formally recognised the occupied area as Israeli territory. Damascus blasted the move and vowed to regain its lands someday.
The Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vaily Nebenzya has called on the architects of the so-called ‘deal of the century’ Israeli-Palestinian peace plan to remember that the Golan Heights belong to Syria.
“Yesterday, Washington published its vision for a settlement in the Middle East. We could not help but notice that the maps included in the plan defined the Golan Heights as Israeli territory,” Nebenzya said, referring to a pair of maps tweeted out by President Trump showing the proposed Israeli and Palestinian states which clearly show the Golan Heights northeast of the Sea of Galilee as part of Israel.
“In this connection, we would like to remind the ‘geographer’ who created this map that we and Security Council Resolution 497 do not recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan,” Nebenzya added.
“The Golan Heights are illegally occupied Syrian territory,” the ambassador stressed.
In 1981, after Tel Aviv moved to annex the occupied areas of the Golan Heights, the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution saying that Israeli claims to the Golan Heights were “null and void and without international legal effect.” In 1982, 86 other countries in the General Assembly adopted a second resolution calling for a general boycott of Israel over its occupation of Syrian territory, but the US and its European allies rejected the initiative. Israel gained control of the Golan Heights in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, a brief conflict which took place in June 1967 which began when Israel launched preemptive airstrikes against an Arab coalition led by Egypt.
US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights in March 2019 after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Dozens of countries including the US’s European allies rejected Washington’s change in position, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov characterised the decision as a “conscious, deliberate demonstration of lawlessness.”
Syria warned that it would never give up its claims to the Golan Heights territories, and indicated that it has the legal right to regain the Golan Heights by any means possible, alleging that force was “the only language which Israel understands.” Skirmishes have been reported in the area in the months since, with Israel occasionally reporting the destruction of projectiles launched from the Syrian side of the border, while Syrian air defences have reported the shootdown of Israeli missiles.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited ‘Deal of the Century’ Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. The proposal envisions a two-state solution, recognises Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and grants the Palestinian Authority several neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. It also offers the Palestinian side $50 billion in investments. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the proposal outright, telling Trump Jerusalem was “not for sale,” and vowing that the deal would “not go through” under his watch.
U.S. in the Middle-East: Preparing for Disaster
By The Saker • Unz Review • January 30, 2020
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Turns out that Trump and the Pentagon were lying. Again. This time about the true impact of the Iranian counter-strike on US forces in Syria. First they claimed that there were no injured U.S. personnel, only to eventually have to fess up that 34 soldiers had suffered traumatic brain injury (which Trump “re-classified” as a “headache”). Then they had to admit that it was not really 34, but actually 50!
According to some sources, not all U.S. personnel were hiding in bunkers and some were deployed to defend the base perimeter. Whatever may be the case, this adds yet another indication that the Iranian counter-strike was much more robust than originally reported by the Empire. In fact, Iranian sources indicate that following the strike, a number of wounded casualties were flown to Israel, Kuwait and Germany. Again, we will probably never find out the full truth about what happened that night, but two things are now certain:
- The Iranian attack was extremely effective and it is undeniable that all the US/NATO/Israeli forces in the region are now exposed like sitting ducks waiting for the next Iranian strike.
- Uncle Shmuel has had to dramatically under-report the real extent and nature of the Iranian counter-strike.
Now, let’s be clear about the quality of the warning the U.S. personnel had. We now know at the very least the following warnings were received:
- Warning through the Iraqi government (whom the Iranians did brief about their intentions).
- Warning through the Swiss authorities (who represent U.S. interests in Iran and whom the Iranian did brief about their intentions).
- Warning through the US reconnaissance/intelligence capabilities on the ground, air and space.
And yet, in spite of these almost ideal conditions (from the point of view of defense), we now see that not a single Iranian missile was intercepted, that the missiles all landed with very high accuracy, that the U.S. base itself suffered extensive damage (including destroyed helicopters and drones) and that there were scores of injured personnel (see this article for a detailed discussion of the post-attack imagery).
If we look at this strike as primarily a “proof of concept” operation, then it becomes pretty clear that on the Iranian side what was proven was a superb degree of accuracy and robust ballistic missile capability, whereas on the U.S. side the only thing this strike did was to prove that the U.S. forces in the region are all extremely vulnerable to Iranian missile attack. Just imagine if the Iranians had wanted to maximize U.S. casualties and if they had given no warning of any kind – what would the tally be then?! What if the Iranians had targeted, say, fuel and ammo dumps, buildings where U.S. personnel lived, industrial facilities (including CENTCOM’s key logistic nodes), ports or even airfields? Can you imagine the kind of hell the Iranians would have unleashed against basically unprotected facilities?!
Still dubious?
Then ask yourself why Trump & Co. had to lie and minimize the real scope of the Iranian attack. It is pretty obvious that the White House decided to lie and to present the strike as almost without impact because if it had admitted the magnitude of the strike, then it would also have had to admit to the total powerlessness to stop or even to meaningfully degrade it. Not only that, but an outraged U.S. public (most Americans still believe the traditional propaganda line about “The Greatest Military Force in the History of the Galaxy”!) would have demanded a retaliatory counter-counter-strike against Iran, which would have triggered an immediate Iranian attack on Israel which, in turn, would have plunged the entire region into a massive war which the U.S. had no stomach for.
Contrast that with the Iranian claims which, if anything, possibly exaggerated the impact of the strike and claimed that 80 servicemen were injured (I would add here that, at least so far, the Iranian government has been far more candid and less inclined to resort to crude lies than the U.S. has). Clearly the Iranians were ready for exactly the kind of further escalation that the U.S. wanted to avoid at almost any cost.
So what really took place?
There are two basic ways to defend against an attack: denial and punishment. Denial is what the Syrians have been doing against the U.S. and Israel every time they shoot down incoming missiles. Denial is ideal because it minimizes your own casualties while not necessarily going up the “escalation scale”. In contrast, punishment is when you don’t prevent an attack, but when you inflict retaliatory counter-strike on the attacking side, but only after being attacked yourself. That is what the US could do against Iran, at pretty much any time (yes, contrary to some wholly unrealistic claims, Iranian air defenses cannot prevent the US armed forces from inflicting immense damage upon Iran, its population and infrastructure).
The problem with punishing Iran is you are dealing with an enemy who is actually willing to absorb immense losses as long as these losses eventually lead to victory. How do you deter somebody who is willing to die for his country, people or faith?
There is no doubt in my mind that the Iranians, who are superb analysts, are fully aware of the damage that the U.S. can inflict. The key factor here is that they also realize that once the U.S. unleashes its missiles and bombers and once they destroy many (if not all) of their targets, they will have nothing else left to try to contain Iran with.
Here is how you can think of the Iranian strategy:
- If the U.S. does nothing or only engages in symbolic strikes (say, like Israel’s strikes in Syria), the Iranians can simply ignore these attacks because while they are very effective in giving the Americans (or the Israelis) an illusion of power, they really fail to achieve anything militarily significant.
- If the U.S. finally decides to strike Iran hard, it will exhaust its “punishment card” in that counter-attack, and will have no further options to deter Iran.
- If the U.S. (or Israel) decides to use nuclear weapons, then such an attack will simply give a “political joker card” to Iran saying in essence “now you are justified in whatever retaliation you can think of.” And you can be darn sure that the Iranian will come up with all sorts of most painful forms of retaliation!
You can think of the current US posture as “binary”: it is either “all off” or “all on.” Not by choice, of course, but these conditions are the result of the geostrategic realities of the Middle-East and from the many asymmetries between the two sides:
Country | US | Iran |
---|---|---|
Air superiority | yes | no |
Combat capable ground forces | no | yes |
Willingness to incur major losses | no | yes |
Short and secure supply lines | no | yes |
Prepared for major defensive operations | no | yes |
The above is, of course, a simplification, yet it is also fundamentally true. And the reason for these asymmetries lies in a very simple yet crucial difference: Americans have been brainwashed into believing that major wars can be won on the cheap. Iranians have no such illusions (most certainly not after Iraq, backed by the US, the USSR and Europe, attacked Iran and inflicted immense destruction on the Iranian society). But the era of “wars on the cheap” is now long over.
Furthermore, Iranians also know that U.S. air superiority alone will not magically result in a U.S. victory. Finally, the Iranians have had 40 years to prepare for a U.S. attack. The U.S. has only really been put on notice since January 8th of this year.
Again, for the US, it is “all in” or “all out”. We saw the “all out” in the days following the Iranian counter-strike and we can get an idea of what the “all in” would look like by recalling the Israeli operations against Hezbollah in 2006.
The Iranians, however, have a much more gradual escalatory capability, which they just demonstrated with their attack on the U.S. forces in Iraq: they can launch only a few missiles, or they can launch hundreds of them. They can try to maximize U.S. casualties, or they can decide to go after CENTCOM’s infrastructure. They can chose to strike Uncle Shmuel directly, or they can decide to strike his allies (KSA) and bosses (Israel). They can chose to take credit for any action, or they can hide behind what the CIA calls plausible deniability.
So while the U.S. and the AngloZionist Empire as a whole are much more powerful than Iran, Iran has skillfully developed methods and means which allow it to be in control of what military analysts call the “escalation dominance”.
Has Iran just “Ledeened” the almighty US?
Remember Michael Ledeen? He is the Neocon who came up with this historical aphorism: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business“.
Is it not ironic that Iran did exactly that, they took the US and “threw it against a wall, just to show that they meant business”, did they not?
And what does this all tell us?
For one thing, the U.S. military is in real trouble. It is pretty obvious that U.S. air defenses are hopelessly ineffective: we saw their “performance” in Saudi Arabia against the Houthi strikes. The truth is that the Patriot missiles never performed adequately, not in the first Gulf War, nor today. The big difference is that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not have any high-precision missiles and that its attempts to strike at the U.S. (or Israel, for that matter) where not very effective. Thus, it was easy for the Pentagon to fudge the real performance (or lack thereof!) of its weapon systems. Now that Iran has been able to pinpoint some buildings while carefully ignoring others shows that the entire Middle-East has entered a radically new era.
Second, it is equally obvious that U.S. bases in the Middle-East are very vulnerable to ballistic and cruise missile attacks. Air defenses are a very complicated and high-tech branch of the military and it often takes years, if not decades, to develop a truly effective air defense system. Due in part to its tendency to only attack weak and lightly-defended countries, and also due to the very real deterrent might the U.S. armed forces used to deliver in the past, the U.S. never had to really worry much about air defenses. The “little guys” had no missiles, while the “big guys” would never dare to openly strike at Uncle Shmuel’s forces.
Until recently.
Now, it is the previously almighty World Hegemon which has been tossed against a wall by a much weaker Iran and thus found itself being treated like a “small crappy little country”.
Sweet irony!
But there is much more to this story.
The real Iranian goal: to get the U.S. out of the Middle-East
The Iranians (and many Iranian allies in the region) have made it clear that the real retaliation for the murder of General Soleimani would be to bring about a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Syria primarily, followed by a complete withdrawal from the entire Middle-East.
How likely is such an outcome?
Right now, I would say that the chances of that truly happening are microscopically small. After all, who could seriously imagine the U.S. leaving either Saudi Arabia or Israel? Ain’t gonna happen short of a true cataclysm.
What about countries like Turkey or Pakistan which are formally allies of the US but which are also showing clear signs of being mighty fed-up with the kind of “patronage” the US likes to mete out to its “allies”? Do we have any reason to believe that these countries will ever officially demand that Uncle Shmuel’s mercenaries (because that is what U.S. forces are, paid invaders) get the hell out?
And then there are countries like Iraq or Afghanistan which have hosted a very successful and active anti-U.S. insurgency which has kept U.S. forces hunkered down in heavily fortified bases. I don’t think there is anybody mentally sane out there who could offer a even semi-credible scenario of what a U.S. “victory” would look like in these countries. The fact that the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan even longer than the Soviets did shows not only that the Soviet forces were far more effective (and popular) than their U.S. counterparts, but also that Gorbachev’s Politburo was more in touch with reality than Trump’s NSC.
Whatever may be the case, I believe it is undeniable that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are lost and than no amount of grandstanding will change this outcome. The same goes for Syria where the U.S. is basically holding on out of sheer stubbornness and a total inability to admit defeat.
Uncle Shmuel’s “vision of peace” for the Middle-East
I just listened to the Idiot-in-Chief proudly present “his” Middle-East “peace” plan to Bibi Netanyahu and the world. This latest stunt shows two crucial things about the mind-set in Washington, D.C.:
- There is nothing which the U.S. ruling classes will not do to try to get the favor and support of the Israel Lobby.
- The US does not care, not even marginally, what the people of the Middle-East think.
This dynamic, which is not anything new, but which received a qualitative “shot of steroids” under Trump, will only further contribute to the inevitable collapse of Empire in the Middle-East. For one thing, all the so-called “U.S. allies” in the region understand that the only country which matters to the US is Israel, and that all the others count for almost nothing. Furthermore, all the rulers of the Middle-East now also know that being allied to the US also means being a cheap prostitute for Israel which, in turn, is guaranteed political suicide for any politician not wise enough to smell the trap. Finally, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria have shown that the “Axis of Kindness” is long on hyperbole and hubris, but very short in terms of actual combat capability.
The simple truth is that the abject brown-nosing of the Israel Lobby that Trump has been engaged in from Day 1 of his term only serves to further isolate and weaken the U.S. in the Middle-East (and beyond, really!).
In this context, how realistic is the Iranian goal of kicking Uncle Shmuel out of the region?
As I said, not realistic at all, if seen solely in the short term. But I hasten to add that it is very realistic in the mid-term if we look at some, but not all, the countries of the region. Finally, in the long term, it is not only realistic, it is inevitable, even if the Iranians themselves don’t do much, or anything at all, to make that happen.
These grinning ignoramuses are doing more than anyone else to bring down the Empire, even if they don’t understand this!
Conclusion: “Israel’s” days are numbered
The Israelis have been feeding us all a steady diet about this or that country or politician being a “new Hitler’ who will either gas 6M Jews “again”, or wants to wipe Israel “off the map” or even engage in a new Holocaust. Gilad Atzmon brilliantly calls this mental disorder “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” and he is spot on. The Israelis mostly used this “preemptive geschrei*” as a way to squeeze out as many concessions (and money) from the western goyim as possible. But in a deep sense, it is possibly that the Israelis are at least dimly aware that their entire project is simply not viable, that you cannot ensure the survival of any state by terrorizing all of your neighbors. Violence, especially vicious, rabid, violence can, indeed, terrorize people, but only for so long. Sooner or later, the human soul will outgrow any fear, no matter how visceral, and will replace that fear by a new and immensely powerful sense of determination.
Here is what Robert Fisk said in distant 2006, 14 years ago:
You heard Sharon, before he suffered his massive stroke, he used this phrase in the Knesset, you know, “The Palestinians must feel pain.” This was during one of the intifadas. The idea that if you continue to beat and beat and beat the Arabs, they will submit, that eventually they’ll go on their knees and give you what you want. And this is totally, utterly self-delusional, because it doesn’t apply anymore. It used to apply 30 years ago, when I first arrived in the Middle East. If the Israelis crossed the Lebanese border, the Palestinians jumped in their cars and drove to Beirut and went to the cinema. Now when the Israelis cross the Lebanese border, the Hezbollah jump in their cars in Beirut and race to the south to join battle with them. But the key thing now is that Arabs are not afraid any more. Their leaders are afraid, the Mubaraks of this world, the president of Egypt, King Abdullah II of Jordan. They’re afraid. They shake and tremble in their golden mosques, because they were supported by us. But the people are no longer afraid.
What was true only for some Arabs in 2006, has now become true for most (maybe even all?) Arabs in 2020. As for the Iranians, they have never had any fear of Uncle Shmuel, they are the ones who “injected” the newly created Hezbollah with this qualitatively new kind of “special courage” (which is the Shia ethos, really!) when this movement was founded.
Empires can survive many things, but once they are not feared anymore, then their end is near. The Iranian strike proved a fundamental new reality to the rest of the world: the US is much more afraid of Iran than Iran is afraid of the US. U.S. rulers and politicians will, of course, claim otherwise. But that futile effort to re-shape reality is now doomed to failure, if only because even the Houthis can now openly and successfully defy the combined might of the “Axis of Kindness”.
You can think of U.S. and Israeli leaders as the orchestra on the Titanic: they play well, but they will still get wet and then die.
(*geschrei: the Yiddish word for yelling, crying out, to shriek)
The Sham Palestine Plan Is the Kind of One-Sided Peace the Empire Would Impose on Rebel Donbass…If It Could
By Paul Robinson | Anti-Empire | January 30, 2020
War, said Clausewitz, is an ‘interaction’, ‘not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass but always the collision of two living forces.’ This is one of the things which makes it so difficult to manage. You can’t just do x, and expect y to happen, even if y happened last time you did x, because there are always others involved, with wills of their own.
If war is an interaction, so too is peace. Short of one party’s total destruction, war ends because both sides choose for it to end, either because they’re both exhausted and choose to negotiate, or because one side realizes that it’s defeated and gives up. In the latter case, it’s not the winner who decides exactly when the war ends, it’s the loser. Or, as Fred Ikle put it in his book ‘Every War Must End’, ‘peace is made by the loser’.
In short, even when you’re on top, you don’t get to unilaterally decide when and how to stop a conflict. The key is getting your opponents to agree to stop. This can be done through a combination of negative and positive inducements, or by negotiation. But at the end of the day, the other side always has to agree (even if reluctantly).
Unilaterally-imposed take it or leave it solutions which involve the humiliation or total submission of one party are a bad way of getting this agreement. Given the loss of honour (at best), or of independence or even life (at worst), which such solutions involve, people won’t agree to them unless the negative inducements are extremely powerful (think Germany in 1945, for instance). Consequently, if you’re not prepared to put such extreme negative inducements into effect, you don’t really have any choice, if you truly want peace, but to talk with the other side. You have to get them to agree.
Somewhere along the line, sadly, we seem to have forgotten this (if we ever actually understood it). There’s this sense that great powers can draw up a peace plan for somebody else’s conflict and then force it down their throats without even bothering to consult them. It’s odd, for the most part decidedly unrealistic, and more than a little arrogant.
And so it is that Donald Trump rolled out his ‘deal of the century’ to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Notionally, this is an American plan, but it seems clear that the Israelis were consulted about it before it was unveiled, and they obviously don’t have any objections to it. The problem is that neither the Israelis nor the Americans bothered consulting the other party to the conflict – the Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, the latter have wasted no time in rejecting the plan, as well they might given that the map released by the White House shows that the planned Palestinian state would look like this:
The Palestinian response is hardly surprising. Short of extreme negative inducements, it’s hard to see why anybody would accept a state divided up into lots of little pieces which doesn’t even have access to water. The whole thing seems to have been designed entirely to keep one side happy, while not bothering at all about what the other side wants (the hope apparently being that they can be bought off with a lot of money). One shouldn’t be too shocked if it all turns out to be dead at birth.
Sadly, though, this isn’t a unique case. The American approach to the war in Ukraine has been rather similar. The official line has been to put pressure on the Russian Federation so that it will abandon Donbass, which will then be forced to accept whatever terms Ukraine chooses to give it.
More moderate analysts instead propose cutting some sort of deal with Russia (e.g. recognition of the annexation of Crimea in return for the abandonment of Donbass). But either way, talking to the people of Donbass, let alone their notional leaders, is out of the question. However peace comes, it isn’t to be by means of agreement with the people doing the fighting. Peace must be unilateral, or there won’t be peace at all.
Which, of course, is nuts. As I said, it takes two make war. It takes two to make peace as well.