Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, obliges states to impose certain restrictions on freedom of speech. The article was the product of a long debate among UN members. Countries from the Soviet bloc and many non-aligned nations, notably Brazil, were keen to include a prohibition on propaganda for war, and also to make it as broadly defined as possible – that is to say to ban not just incitement of war, but propaganda on behalf of war more generally. Western states, by contrast, were rather more reluctant to include the provision, and in so far as they were willing to accept it, wanted to limit it just to incitement. In the end, the West lost the debate. The final wording of Article 20 states clearly: “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.”
In the aftermath of the Covenant, communist countries in many cases enacted suitable provisions in their domestic law. For instance, a Soviet law entitled ‘The Defence of Peace’ stated that ‘war propaganda’ of any sort was a criminal offence. East Germany similarly made propaganda for a war an offence punishable by up to eight years in prison. To this day, many post-communist states retain similar provisions in their law. Moldova’s constitutions, for instance, prohibits incitement to war; Armenia’s constitution bans speech ‘for the purposes of … propaganda for violence and war’; and the criminal codes in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzia, and Latvia similarly ban any ‘advocacy for war’. Some other countries, such as Morocco and Kenya have also enacted legislation to this end. Apart from Germany, however, states in the Western world have not met their obligation under the Covenant.
In the English speaking world, meanwhile, propaganda for war is not only not prohibited, but actually quite respectable, and scarily common. Take, for instance, an article published this week by Foreign Policy magazine, and entitled ‘It’s time to bomb North Korea.’ I wish that I could say that this is an isolated case, but it isn’t. Over the past two decades, the American and British press has published no shortage of articles calling for a military attack on this country or that. To use just the example of the New York Times, in March 2015 it published a piece by John Bolton entitled ‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran’; in 2012, it printed an article by Michael Doran and Max Boot entitled ‘5 Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now’; in 2011, it ran several op-eds urging Western powers to intervene in Libya (such as this and this); and of course in 2003, it famously supported the invasion of Iraq. And that’s just one newspaper. It’s a story repeated across the Western media. There must have been hundreds of articles in different outlets urging the bombing or invasion of countries such as Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
It has been argued that enacting a prohibition on war propaganda as required by the International Covenant is impossible as the term ‘war propaganda’ cannot be properly defined. But this is a poor argument. In the past 15 years, numerous Western states have enacted laws prohibiting incitement to terrorism and in some cases, such as the British 2006 Terrorism Act, even the ‘glorification of terrorism’. Just suggesting that terrorism might on occasion be justified is sufficient to get you locked up in some countries. In Canada, for example, it is a crime to ‘advocate’ terrorism. Yet, you can advocate for war as much as you like.
This is despite the obvious fact that war is far more damaging than terrorism. The number of people killed by terrorists in the past 20 years pales into insignificance when compared to number killed in the wars which states, including those in the Western world, have started. It is a serious crime to advocate for the killing of a few. But advocating for the killing of human beings en masse is quite all right.
Sadly, in the English-speaking world, war propaganda isn’t just respectable; it’s mainstream. It shouldn’t be.
Award winning journalist James Risen has recently described in some detail his sometimes painful relationship with The New York Times. His lengthy account is well worth reading as it demonstrates how successive editors of the paper frequently cooperated with the government to suppress stories on torture and illegal activity while also self-censoring to make sure that nothing outside the framework provided by the “war on terror” should be seriously discussed. It became a faithful lap dog for an American role as global hegemon, promoting government half-truths and suppressing information that it knew to be true but which would embarrass the administration in power, be they Democrats or Republicans.
If one were to obtain a similar insider account of goings-on at the other national “newspaper of record”, The Washington Post, it is quite likely that comparable trimming of the narrative also took place. To be sure, the Post is worse than the Times, characterized by heavily editorializing in its news coverage without necessarily tipping off the reader when “facts” end and speculation begins. In both publications, stories about Iran or Russia routinely begin with an assertion that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and that Iran is the aggressor in the Middle East, contentions that have not been demonstrated and can easily be challenged. Both publications also have endorsed every American war since 2001, including Iraq, Libya and the current mess in Syria, one indication of the quality of their reporting and analysis.
A recent op-ed in the Times by Bret Stephens is a perfect example of warmongering mischief wrapped in faux expert testimony to make it palatable. Stephens is the resident neocon at the Times. He was brought over from the Wall Street Journal when it was determined that his neocon colleague David Brooks had become overly squishy, while the resident “conservative” Russ Douthat had proven to be a bit too cautious and even rational to please the increasingly hawkish senior editors.
Stephens’ article, entitled Finding the Way Forward on Iran sparkles with throwaway gems like “Tehran’s hyperaggressive foreign policy in the wake of the 2015 nuclear deal” and “Real democracies don’t live in fear of their own people” and even “it’s not too soon to start rethinking the way we think about Iran.” Or try “A better way of describing Iran’s dictatorship is as a kleptotheocracy, driven by impulses that are by turns doctrinal and venal.”
Bret has been a hardliner on Iran for years. Early on in this op-ed he makes very clear that he wants it to be dealt with forcibly because it has “centrifuges, ballistic missiles, enriched uranium [and] fund[s] Hezbollah, assist Bashar al-Assad, arm[s] the Houthis, [and] imprison[s] the occasional British or American citizen.” He describes how Iran is a very corrupt place run by religious leaders and Revolutionary Guards and proposes that their corruption be exposed so that the Iranian people can take note and rise up in anger. And if exposure doesn’t work, they should be hammered with sanctions. He does not explain why sanctions, which disproportionately hurt the people he expects to rise up, will bring about any real change.
Stephens cites two of his buddies Ken Weinstein of the Hudson Institute and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), who are apparently experts on how to squeeze Iran. Weinstein prefers exposing the misdeeds of the Mullahs to anger the Iranian people while Dubowitz prefers punitive sanctions “for corruption.”
The article does not reveal that Weinstein and Dubowitz are long time critics of Iran, are part of the Israel Lobby and just happen to be Jewish, as is Stephens. The Hudson Institute and the FDD are leading neocon and pro-Israel fronts. So my question becomes, “Why Iran?” The often-heard Israeli complaint about its being unfairly picked on could reasonably be turned on its head in asking the same about Iran. In fact, Iran compares favorably with Israel. It has no nuclear weapons, it does not support any of the Sunni terrorist groups that are chopping heads, and it has not disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people that it rules over. The fact is that Iran is being targeted because Israel sees it as its prime enemy in the region and has corrupted many “opinion makers” in the U.S., to include Stephens, to hammer home that point. To be sure, Iran is a very corrupt place run by people who should not be running a hot dog stand, but the same applies to the United States and Israel. And there are lots of places that are not being targeted like Iran that are far worse, including good friend and ally of both Jerusalem and Washington, Saudi Arabia.
Oddly enough Stephens, Weinstein and Dubowitz do not get into any of that back story, presumably because it would be unseemly. And, of course and unfortunately, the New York Times opinion page is not unique. An interesting recent podcast interview by Politico‘s Chief International Affairs correspondent Susan Glasser with leading neoconservatives Eliot Cohen and Max Boot, is typical of how the media selectively shapes a narrative to suit its own biases. Glasser, Cohen and Boot are all part of the establishment foreign policy consensus in the U.S. and therefore both hate and fail to understand the Trump phenomenon. Both Cohen and Booth were vociferous founding members of the #NeverTrump foreign policy resistance movement.
Boot describes the new regime’s foreign policy as “kowtow[ing] to dictators and undermin[ing] American support for freedom and democracy around the world,” typical neocon leitmotifs. Glasser appears to be in love with her interviewees and hurls softball after softball. She describes Boot as “fantastic” and Cohen receives the epithet “The Great.” The interview itself is remarkably devoid of any serious discussion of foreign policy and is essentially a sustained assault on Trump while also implicitly supporting hardline national security positions. Cohen fulminates about “a very serious Russian attack on the core of our political system. I mean, I don’t know how you get more reckless and dangerous than that,” while Boot asks what “has to be done” about Iran.
Pompous ass Cohen, who interjected in the interview that “and you know, Max and I are both intellectuals,” notably very publicly refused to have any part in a Trump foreign policy team during the campaign but later when The Donald was actually elected suggested that the new regime might approach him with humility to offer a senior position and he just might condescend to join them. They did not do so, and he wrote an angry commentary on their refusal.
Hating Trump is one thing, but I would bet that if the question of a hardline policy vis-à-vis Russia or the Jerusalem Embassy move had come up Cohen and Boot would have expressed delight. The irony is that Trump is in fact pursuing a basically neocon foreign policy which the two men would normally support, but they appear to be making room for Trump haters in the policy formulation process to push the national security consensus even farther to the right. Indeed, in another article by Boot at Foreign Policy he writes “I applaud Trump’s decisions to provide Ukraine with arms to defend itself from Russian aggression, to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, to send additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and to accelerate former President Barack Obama’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State.” Cohen meanwhile applauds the embassy move, though he warns that Trump’s success in so doing might embolden him to do something reckless over North Korea.
Perhaps one should not be astonished that leading neocons appearing in the mainstream media will continue to have their eyes on the ball and seek for more aggressive engagement in places like Iran and Russia. The media should be faulted because it rarely publishes any contrary viewpoint and it also consistently fails to give any space to the considerable downside to the agitprop. It must be reassuring for many Americans to know that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is preparing itself to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the United States and it will be sharing information on the appropriate preparations with the American people. There will be a public session on how to prepare for a nuclear explosion on January 16th.
CDC experts will consider “planning and preparation efforts” for such a strike. “While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps,” the Center elaborated in its press release on the event.
That the United States should be preparing for a possible nuclear future can in part be attributed to recent commentary by the “like, really smart” and “very stable genius” who is the nation’s chief executive, but the fuel being poured on the fire for war is from the very same neocons who are featured in the mainstream media as all-purpose experts and have succeeded in selling the snake oil about America’s proper role as aggressor-in-chief for the entire world. It would be an unparalleled delight to be able to open a newspaper and not see Bret Stephens, Eliot Cohen, Max Boot or even the redoubtable Bill Kristol grinning back from the editorial page, but I suppose I am only dreaming.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
China is planning to build its second foreign naval base in Pakistan following the ribbon cutting ceremony for its first overseas base in Djibouti last July.
Sources close to the People’s Liberation Army have confirmed to the South China Morning Post that a Chinese naval port is being built at a strategic location on Pakistan’s southern coast.
“China needs to set up another base in Gwadar for its warships because Gwadar is now a civilian port,” Zhou Chenming, a Chinese military analyst, told the South China Morning Post on Friday. “Gwadar port can’t provide specific services for warships,” Zhou said; hence the need for a new base.
Gwadar is less than 50 miles east of the Pakistan-Iran border and sits in Balochistan Province, where fiercely independent Baloch nationalists have waged guerrilla wars against both the Pakistani and Iranian governments. “Public order there is a mess,” Zhou said.
“China and Pakistan have found common ground in terms of maritime interest in the region,” Pakistani analyst Sheikh Fahad says. “Gwadar port can be used for joint naval patrols in the Indian Ocean, further increasing the naval outreach of China and Pakistan in the region. Gwadar port will increase the countries’ naval movements and further expand defense cooperation, especially in the naval field,” Fahad noted.
In mid-December, Lawrence Sellin, a retired US Army Reserve colonel, reported for the Daily Caller that high-ranking Chinese and Pakistani officials had met in Beijing to discuss future projects.
Last June, a Pakistani diplomat said China’s help was needed as an “equalizer,” pointing to the naval base as all-but-inevitable. “Previously it was the US and Saudi Arabia… Now it’s China,” the diplomat told NBC. A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman later dismissed the report as “pure guesswork,” but now it seems the port will, in fact, be built.
Experts have noted that India is keeping a close eye on the development of China-Pakistan relations. “China finds it very useful to use Pakistan against India and ignore India’s concerns, particularly on terrorism issues. That has created a lot of stress in the relationship between Beijing and Delhi,” Rajeev Ranan Chaturvedy, a researcher at the National University of Singapore, told SCMP.
But “Indian naval capabilities and experience in the Indian Ocean region are fairly good — much better than Pakistan and China,” Chaturvedy said.
It just might be that the two Koreas are figuring out a way to avoid war, much to the anger and chagrin of President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment, who are obviously increasingly viewing war as inevitable and even in the best interests of the United States.
Why, even the U.S. mainstream press, which oftentimes seems to operate as an ex officio spokesman for the U.S. government, appears irritated over North Korea’s initiation of talks with South Korea. The press describes North Korea’s overtures not as an attempt to avoid war but instead as a cynical attempt to “drive a wedge” between the United States and South Korea.
Actually, it’s President Trump, who is obviously upset that the Koreas are marginalizing him, that is using his ridiculous and dangerous tweeting abilities to further provoke North Korea, with the obvious intent of “driving a wedge” between North Korea and South Korea, a wedge that could conceivably sabotage talks between them.
Let’s first get to the root of the problem in Korea. That root is the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. national-security branch of the government, i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA. That’s the reason there is a crisis in Korea. That’s the reason why war could suddenly break out, killing hundreds of thousands of people and more if it the war turns nuclear.
The U.S. government and its acolytes in the mainstream press say that the problem is with North Korea’s nuclear development program.
Balderdash! The problem is with the Pentagon’s and CIA’s decades-old aim to effect regime change in North Korea, a Cold War aim that they have never been able to let go of. That’s why the Pentagon has some 35,000 troops stationed in South Korea. That’s why they have regular military exercises over there. That’s why they have those bomber fly-overs. They want regime change, bad, just like they still do in Cuba and Iran, and just like they wanted (and got) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and so many other countries.
That’s why North Korea wants nuclear bombs — to protect its communist regime by deterring the United States from attacking and fulfilling its decades-old aim of regime change. North Korea knows that a nuclear deterrent is the only thing that might deter the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking.
The nuclear deterrent strategy certainly worked for Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, that stopped the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking and invading the island again and even caused President Kennedy to vow that the Pentagon and the CIA would not again invade the island.
North Korea also has seen what happens to impoverished Third World regimes that don’t have nuclear weapons, like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. They go down quickly to defeat and regime change at the hands of an all-powerful First World country.
Here’s the big point: Korea is none of the U.S. government’s business. Never has been and never will be. The Korean conflict was always nothing more than a civil war. A civil war in an Asian country is none of the U.S. government’s business. It wasn’t in the 1950s when the war broke out. It still isn’t. Korea is the business of the Korean people.
Keep in mind also that U.S. interventionism into the Korean War was always illegal under our form of constitutional government. The Constitution, which the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA, swear to uphold, requires a congressional declaration of war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against North Korea. That means that U.S. troops and CIA agents had no legal right to kill anyone in Korea, not with rifles, artillery, carpet bombing, or with the use of germ warfare against the North Korean people.
The Pentagon and the CIA claimed that it was necessary to illegally intervene in Korea because the communists were coming to get us. It was a lie, just as the entire Cold War was a lie. It was all just one great big fear-mongering racket to solidify the power and control of the military and intelligence services over the American people.
Those 35,000 U.S. troops in Korea today have no business being there, not only because the communists are still not coming to get us but also because they are simply the outgrowth of the original illegal intervention in the 1950s. The Pentagon has those troops there for one reason and only one reason: No, not to defend and protect the South Korean people, who are of minor importance to U.S. officials compared to the United States, but rather to serve as “tripwire” to guarantee U.S. involvement should war once again break out between the two Koreas.
In other words, no congressional deliberation on a declaration of war on whether to get involved should war break out. No national debate. Once tens of thousands of troops are automatically killed, the United States is, as a practical matter, stuck, trapped, committed. That’s why the Pentagon and the CIA have those troops there — to box in the American people — to deprive them of a choice on whether to get involved in another land war in Asia or not.
That makes U.S. soldiers in Korea nothing more than little pawns. Their assigned role is to die in order to ensure that Congress has no say on whether the U.S. gets involved in another land war in Asia. The Pentagon and the CIA, not Congress, remain in charge.
Why hasn’t the U.S. already attacked North Korea? One big reason: China. It says that if the United States starts the war, it’s coming in on the side of North Korea. China has lots of troops that could easily be sent into Korea to fight against U.S. forces. It also has a nuclear capability that can easily hit the United States.
So, that leaves Trump and his national security establishment doing their best to provoke North Korea into “firing the first shot,” or at least making it look like they have fired the first shot, like what happened at the Gulf of Tonkin or what the Pentagon hoped to accomplish with Operation Northwoods and a concocted war against Cuba.
If Trump can successfully taunt, tease, antagonize, and provoke North Korea into attacking first, then he and his national-security establishment can exclaim, “We’ve been attacked by the communists! We’re shocked! We’re innocent! We have no choice but to protect America by carpet-bombing North Korea again, this time with nuclear bombs.”
And as long as it’s not the United States that suffers the death and destruction, it will all be considered acceptable. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be dead. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans will also be dead. Both countries will be devastated. But the United States will remain intact and, equally important, will no longer be threatened by North Korea’s growing nuclear capability. It will all be considered a victory as far as the United States is concerned.
That’s why the South Koreans are smart in agreeing to talk to North Korea. If they were really smart, they would give Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA the boot. The best thing South Korea could ever do is immediately kick out every U.S. soldier and every CIA agent out of their country. Send them packing back to the United States.
Sure, Trump would be hopping bad, just as the Pentagon and the CIA would be. So what? It would be the best thing that could ever happen to Korea, the United States, and the world.
At a ‘press gaggle’ at the Pentagon on Friday, US Defence Secretary James Mattis revealed that there isn’t going to be any withdrawal from the Syrian conflict. The Trump administration, on the contrary, plans to expand the presence by deploying diplomats and contractors to the north of Syria. Mattis called this a shift “from what I would call an offensive, terrain-seizing approach to a stabilizing” one.
That is to say, he explained, while the diplomats would work toward the “initial restoration of services” and to manage and administer rebuilding cities, the Pentagon will “bring in contractors” for training people on how to clear IEDs” (improvised explosive devices), etc. and alongside there will be a continuing military component to the US presence that “would move our diplomats around, protect them.” Mattis insisted that there is a “demarcation line” separating the US military zone in north and northeastern Syria, which the “Russian regime” and Syrian government are well aware of and are tacitly respecting so far.
Evidently, the US will continue its alliance with the Syrian Kurdish militia (known as YPG) in northern Syria, including the supply of weapons. The US defense spending bill for 2018 has made provision for sending weapons worth $393 million to US partners in Syria. Overall, $500 million, which is an increase of $70 million over 2016) is the allocation for Syria under ‘Train and Equip’ requirements. The budget mentions the opposition forces supported as a part of the train and equip program in Syria as 25,000 strong. The figure will now go up to 30,000 in 2018. Besides, the US and British military are training several hundred militants to create a New Syrian Army to fight the Syrian government forces in the south. (According to Russian estimates, most of the recruits are from ISIS and al-Qaeda groups.)
To be sure, the US’ ‘regime change’ agenda in Syria is back on track. But the Syrian conflict is also transforming as another template of a broader regional confrontation with Iran (and Russia) in the Middle East. The petard of Iran is useful to encourage the Sunni Arab petrodollar states to bankroll the war and overall make the US military interventions in the Middle East to be “self-financing”. (Mattis said, “We’ve got a lot of money coming from international donors for this, including Syria.”)
Meanwhile, this also means that the wars in Syria and Yemen are going to get fused at the hips, as it were. While the Obama administration was inclined to acknowledge that Iran’s interference in the war in Yemen, if at all, has been very minimal, the Trump administration has swung to the other extreme and brands the war as quintessentially a manifestation of Iran’s expansionist policies in the region. This creates the raison d’etre for more direct US intervention in the war in Yemen.
That makes it two full-bodied wars. Then, there is half a war to be added, which is in the nature of the Trump administration’s agenda to generally push back at Iran anywhere and everywhere (eg., Iraq, Lebanon), and, if possible, to bring about a ‘regime change’ in Tehran. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post last week, the US and Israel have set up 4 working groups to advance their “joint work plan” against Iran. This decision has been taken apparently at a secret meeting at the White House in Washington two weeks ago and will be put into the pipeline in 2018.
These two and a half wars become three and a half wars if we are also to add the Afghan war, which is entering its 17th year in 2018. The US has upped the ante by seeking a military solution to the Afghan war, disregarding the saner advice that a political solution is the best way out. The big question is whether 2018 will witnesses a US-Pakistani showdown.
A report in the New York Times on Friday hinted at the Trump administration “strongly considering whether to withhold $255 million in aid that it had delayed sending to Islamabad… as a show of dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s broader intransigence toward confronting the terrorist networks that operate there.” Evidently, the US’ capacity to leverage Pakistani policies is touching rock bottom. The next step could be to deliver on the threat to punish Pakistan. If that happens, there will be hell to pay.
Indeed, in the above cauldron, one hasn’t included the succession in Saudi Arabia, which can likely happen during 2018; the growing instability in Egypt; the continuing anarchy in Libya; or the Saudi-Qatar rift and the consequent unraveling of the GCC. Who says the US is about to cut loose from the Middle East and escape to the ‘Indo-Pacific’? Do not overlook that an overarching priority of the US’ Middle East strategy is also to evict Russia from the region as it managed to do in the early 1970s so as to contain the bear in its lair in Eurasia.
The Open Skies Treaty (OST) is in jeopardy. Signed in 1992 and in force since 2002, the treaty, a fundamental trust-building measure, permits its 34 ratified member-states to conduct observation flights over one another’s territory while capturing aerial imagery of military personnel and materiel. The compliance is monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Over 1,200 flights have been conducted worldwide through the treaty, which allots active and passive quotas to the signatory states based on the size of their territories. Over the past 15 years, the US and Russia have made a combined 165 flights.
On Dec. 28, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Russia limits the scope of US military observation flights over its territory starting from Jan. 1, 2018. Moscow cancels overnight stops at three airfields for US observation planes, as well as scraps a number of bilateral agreements that were made to facilitate observation flights. The step is taken in response to US curbs on similar Russian flights over Hawaii and Alaska coming into force on the first day of 2018. The restrictions are reversible and could be lifted if the US backtracked on its policies.
In September, the US warned Russia that the restrictions on flights over the Kaliningrad region – a non-contiguous section of Russian territory squeezed between Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea – were seen as a violation of the treaty. Russia restricted flights over the Kaliningrad region because some parties to the treaty crossed the length and breadth of the flight path, causing problems in the use of the region’s limited airspace and to the Kaliningrad international airport. It prompted Moscow to restrict the maximum flight distance over the Kaliningrad Region to 500 kilometres without changing the total flight distance of 5,500 km and hence coverage of Russia’s territory. The regulation does not run contrary to the OST or the signatories’ subsequent decisions. The flight range of 500 km is sufficient for observing any part of the region. The US, Canada, Turkey and Georgia have established restrictions within the treaty on flying over their territories.
Russia has been accused of the unlawful denial to permit observation flights in the 10 kilometer border area of the so-called Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But the two entities are sovereign states recognized as such by Russia. The Open Skies Treaty states that the flights must not violate a ten-kilometer corridor along the border of another state.
Another accusation said Moscow overused the force majeure provision to change the coordinated plans of observation flights due to flights made by the country’s leaders in close proximity to the planned paths of observation flights. But the provision was invoked only once.
Why has the US chosen to keep Russian surveillance aircraft away from Alaska and the Hawaii? Alaska is home to four air bases, three naval facilities, Minuteman III ICBMs sites. On November 2, the military finished installing the 44thGround-based Interceptor (GBI) at the Missile Defense Complex at Fort Greely, Alaska, completing the deployment of 14 additional GBIs ordered by President Obama in 2013. Hawaii is where United States Air Force Hickam Air Force Base and the Naval Station Pearl Harbor as well as the Pacific Missile Range Facility are located.
Actually, it’s not a severe blow; Russia can use satellites to observe these areas. But it’s a start. The restrictions could unleash a chain reaction to bury the treaty as part of a broader process of arms control erosion. For instance, Georgia has closed its skies to Russian observation flights in a clear and gross violation of the OST. It calls the 2018 flights into question. The decision could be explained by the desire to conceal from observers the construction of military facilities.
The Open Skies Treaty continues to be a valuable instrument for security and stability at the time of arms control crisis. The OST enhances transparency and [reduces] the risk of war. With the treaty in force, the US gains as much as Russia but by having provoked Moscow into taking retaliatory measures it has made one more step to make the world slide into an unfettered arms race.
The invasion of Iraq was unforgivable. It remains unforgivable. It will always be unforgivable. Its architects should be tried in The Hague and imprisoned, and nobody who helped inflict that unfathomable evil upon our world should ever be employed anywhere they could do any more damage or mislead anyone else. All behaviors of the mainstream media, US intelligence agencies and US defense agencies should be viewed through the lens of those unforgivable lies and murders forevermore, and nobody should ever take them at their word about anything ever again.
Instead what has actually happened is that nothing whatsoever has changed since the invasion, Americans still take it on faith that Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Un are world-threatening enemies in sore need of ousting, and bloodthirsty psychopaths like Max Boot who have been consistently wrong about everything are still hailed as experts worth listening to.
Oh yeah, and now they’re being adored as progressive heroes.
Boot, who is a PNAC signatory and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article yesterday in Foreign Affairs which perfectly matches the newfound love of progressivism in his neocon soulmate Bill Kristol. The article, titled “2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege”, details in halting, equivocation-laden prose the months-long journey into awakening that this lying warmonger claims to have experienced during the Trump administration.
This spectacularly evil man, who wrote an essay titled “The Case for American Empire” just weeks after 9/11 in which he called in plain English for America to “unambiguously to embrace its imperial role,” is now seeing his latest essay shared eagerly by Democrats everywhere enthusiastically exclaiming “Look! See? This conservative gets it!”
I’m seeing some progressives arguing that Boot’s sudden public recognition of his white male privilege is intrinsically worthy of praise and acceptance, and that the proper response is to applaud him for it, not spit in his face. These people are wrong. Max Boot did not have some personal epiphany about race and gender dynamics which he felt like sharing in Foreign Policy magazine (the obvious place everyone goes for publication of their enlightening insights into privilege and inequality); Max Boot is courting Democrats because his war-hungry ideology is being increasingly rejected by Republicans.
If you want to see why neocons are courting Democrats with increasing desperation, check out the response to Boot’s latest essay by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who has come to align with the popular anti-interventionist sentiments of Trump’s base, or Carlson’s debate with Boot on his show back in July:
Meanwhile what have Democrats been doing? Supporting escalations with Russia based on accusations with no evidence that are reported as fact by the mainstream media in the exact sort of manic, violent, fact-free climate we saw in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (an invasion that Max Boot says nobody needs to repent for). Resistance hero Keith Olbermann says he owes George W Bush and John McCain an apology for the times he disagreed with them, and MSNBC’s Joy Reid openly admitted that she prefers people like Boot as allies instead of actual leftists and progressives:
One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]
~ Joy Reid
Reid’s comments are typical of the way the cult of anti-Trumpism has mainstream Democrats swooning over Bush-era neocons like they’re the Kennedys reincarnated instead of a bunch of child-butchering war profiteers. Just check out the top comments under this “Gosh I’m so woke all of a sudden!” tweet by neocon psychopath Bill Kristol.
In reality, nothing Trump has done in his administration so far is anywhere remotely close to as evil as the invasion of Iraq. The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become.
It was just in 2012 that these same Democrats were laughing along with their president at the Russia fearmongering of Mitt Romney.
Neoconservatism first rose to prominence in the 1970s, and right off the bat one of its key principles was an opposition to detente with the USSR. This never changed. Not when neocons moved from the Democratic party to the Republican party, not when the Soviet Union fell, and not when neocons began migrating back from the Republican party to their old home in the Democratic party. Neocons have always been fixated on the world-threatening agenda of aggressively crushing Russia, and today the Democrats have picked up that flag and run with it right alongside them.
Which is why now we have depraved psychopaths like Max Boot and Bill Kristol acting out the bizarre performance of suddenly woke progressives. Their new Democratic buddies have already helped them resurrect the cold war on the same amount of evidence as was needed to manufacture support for the Iraq invasion, and with a little tweaking they hope to eventually convince them to help satiate their bloodlust in Iran and Syria as well.
The neocons don’t oppose Trump because he is evil, they oppose Trump because he isn’t evil enough. The slight bit of inertia he’s been placing on their death cult has been enough for them to pivot full-scale toward the Democratic party, which they hope to rebuild and lead into power with full sympathy for all the wars on their infernal wish list.
The extremely influential neocon think tank Project for a New American Century’s most well-known publication, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century”, argued extensively in the year 2000 that America’s victory in the Cold War against the USSR means the US must step into a planetary leadership role and maintain that leadership role by any means necessary, including military force.
“As the 20th century draws to a close,” PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles reads, “the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”
The answer to this question came after 9/11: yes, yes it does. The New American Century has seen an immense increase in military interventionism across the globe to ensure the hegemony of the US dollar and prevent Russia and China from climbing the global power ladder unchecked.
That’s all we’re seeing here in Woke Max Boot and Woke Bill Kristol. Neoconservatism has always been an ideology/military-industrial complex war profiteering scheme which advocates bullying and sabotaging all governments that could pose a threat to the planetary dominance of the US power establishment, and lately rank-and-file Republicans have been proving less useful in facilitating that agenda than rank-and-file Democrats. So they’re saying and doing whatever they need to in order to win the approval of the Dems.
The good thing to have come out of #Brexit and #Trump? Discovering new alliances with people you might once have thought only adversaries https://t.co/dDhhXGTwpB
Brave piece and thank you @MaxBoot:
“ People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.” https://t.co/XqLSIinwOy
It’s not okay to be a neoconservative. In a healthy world, being a neocon would carry as much social weight as being a child molester or a serial killer. These people should not be embraced, they should be recoiled from. Always.
Until Democrats turn away from neoconservatism, the fact that they don’t should be pointed to at every opportunity. The correct response when any Democrat tries to tell you about Russia or Syria is “Get out of here with that Saddam-has-WMDs filth, neocon.”
That omnicidal death cult deserves nothing but our most sincere revulsion.
As we head into a pivotal mid-term election year, it is clear the Democratic Party establishment has not learned a key lesson from the 2016 election. That is, that many of the party’s former and current constituents reject the party’s establishment leadership and its lackluster program. These voters are looking for alternatives. In 2016, en masse they deserted the party for a new kind of politics they found in Bernie Sanders and some saw in Donald Trump.
Voters passed judgment on the leading figures of both parties. Distrust and discontent disrupted politics as usual. The opportunity to fill this void with left-of-center electoral initiatives abound. It starts with building on the momentum of Bernie Sanders’s campaign that resonated with tens of millions. In some fashion or another, ready or not, the 2018 midterm elections must become an arena of struggle for peace, economic security and racial justice.
Sanders’ leadership in 2016, and still today, falls short in two key areas to meet this challenge. First, during his campaign he did not offer Americans a bold new foreign policy. To start with, a plan to end the war on terrorism and the foreign military adventures that have made us less safe and destabilized and laid waste to a dozen nations. Secondly, after November, instead of calling for discussion on forming a new political party he and his advisors chose to form yet another 501c entity, Our Revolution, primarily as a vehicle to move the Democratic Party to the left. It would behoove Sanders to reconsider both choices. The Democratic Party’s electoral structure is certainly a vehicle for advancing progressive and even left candidates, but the party’s owners are not likely to hand over its bank accounts to Sanders, labor unions and people’s organizations.
Months after the elections the Clinton-Obama-Pelosi centrists still hold the reins and drive a shameless hubris as they scramble to blame someone for the party’s declining appeal and its 2016 losses. No, it was not Obama and Clinton’s support of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) or Bill Clinton’s betrayal of labor unions on NAFTA. It was not due to Hillary’s use of the term “super predators” in 1996 to describe black youth involved in criminal activity. No, it was not the shortcomings of the bureaucratic, insurer-friendly Obamacare.
No, it was the Russian television network Russia Today brainwashing its 8 million American viewers. No, it was Russian cyber meddling in the election, for which months later we have zero evidence. Same goes for alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. No, the loss was due to FBI director James Comey’s late in the game letter to congress about Clinton’s emails. No, it was WikiLeaks alleged release, in collaboration with Russia, of emails showing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) sought to derail Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Which, as we learned was the case.
After a full-court media campaign to convince Americans of Russian meddling, many remain skeptical. In a May 2017 CBS poll, 55 percent of Americans considered the allegations a distraction that “get in the way of getting things done.” In October, 41 percent still agree they were a distraction.1
Clinton again blamed Bernie Sanders in her post-election book tour, dubbed by some The Denial Tour. “His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election….” Not exactly the kind of message designed to heal and unify the party going into 2018 elections. Since polls show Bernie is the most admired politician in America, topping 70 percent, to say her grumbling is a political misstep for the party is an understatement.
Yet, even as Clinton’s own poll ratings dropped to 30 percent, she continued to maintain the loss was due to something other than an uninspiring campaign and the neo-liberal, anti-working class politics the Democratic Party’s centrist leadership has pedaled for 30-plus years. Clinton even blamed the Democratic National Committee (DNC), led by a loyal Clinton supporter, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, saying it “…was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong.”2
A crisis of legitimacy
Both Sanders and Trump’s campaigns rode on a crisis of legitimacy in the two parties. Today, only 18 percent of voters consider themselves strong Democrats. The no longer Grand Old Party is slightly worse off at 15 percent. So far, Trump maintains most of his loyal voter support, which we should keep in mind, is only around 25 percent of the total electorate.
The attendant political volatility arising from the 2016 election combined with numerous international crises, presents an opportunity for demagogic appeals to patriotism, xenophobia and racism to deepen and spread. At the same time, it is an opening to advance a working-class political and economic program to provide meaningful, concrete solutions to address people’s grievances and discontents. A program, we might call a Sanders plus program, the plus being a plan for peace.
The Sanders wing of the Democrats is hesitant, waiting. Will Sanders break with the party? Be sidelined? Clearly, Sanders is taking on the establishment, pushing his economic program of social benefits, but it appears his aim is to reform or take over the party. A tough job when those hanging on to power, did not mention Sander’s program until September, when 15 Democratic senators finally endorsed single-payer national health insurance. In the House, progressive Democrats have signed on Bernie’s program for free post-secondary education, paid parental leave and expanding social security. However, there is little evidence of serious actions being taken on the part of the leadership to rally Americans behind the legislation. After Sanders introduced his single-payer bill, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders, notably Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, told voters they do not support single-payer. Again, the failure of the leadership to learn the lessons of 2016.
Understandably then, Americans give the leadership low marks when it comes to presenting alternatives to Trump’s reactionary program. A Washington Post – ABC News poll in late October this year found only 28 percent of voters thought the Democrats were offering real alternatives.3 Nearly one half of Democratic responders and 65 percent of independents said the leadership was just criticizing Trump. One attempt to launch an alternative program failed miserably.
The Democrats “Better Deal” falls flat
In July, a Pelosi–Schumer road show unveiled the party’s alternative to the Trump-GOP program: “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.” In a Washington Post, Op-ed, Pelosi said the Deal, “represents a renewed Democratic commitment to the hard-working men and women across the United States who have been left out and left behind for too long.” It rained hard in Berryville, Virginia that day, the site of show. Reviews rained even harder on the Democrat’s proposal. It made no mention of Sanders’ far-reaching social benefit program that would lift up the left out. Their effort to make a splash with the working class was drowned in empty words, rhetorical promises and contrived apologies for abandoning working-class voters.
If Schumer, Pelosi, Clinton et al wanted to rebuild the party they only need reach out to the millions who responded to Sanders program for expanding social benefits at the expense of the billionaire class. Instead all we hear is Russia, Russia, Russia. Some pundits allege the Democratic leadership is tone-deaf to political reality, but their silence is due to an unwillingness to break with their corporate sponsors any more than are the masters of the once Grand Old Party. Instead both parties, and institutions in their orbits, are worried Americans are losing faith in the long-standing institutions of the limited “democracy of the few” embodied by the two-party capitalist system.
In January, Linda Chavez, a former Reagan cabinet member turned media pundit, put it this way in her New York Post column: “Democracy can only exist as long as the people trust its institutions. The greatest calamity of this election cycle has been the weakening of that trust.” Another reading of her statement is both Sanders and Trump upset the well painted façade of democratic governance. Neither candidate could be trusted to be loyal administrators of the bi-partisan imperialist foreign policy and neo-liberal economic program of capitalism.
While Chavez may lament this decline, those seeking a more just, peaceful society have an opportunity to step into this vacuum and begin building a new political party responsive to, and with, our nation’s multi-national working class, white and blue collar, youth and students. The massive discontent with politics as usual offers fertile ground. The first step is to agree on a working-class program for economic security, peace and racial justice. The next is to bring it into the 2018 mid-term election and beyond.
Resolutions at the AFL-CIO Convention in October showed emerging sentiment among labor union leaders for independence from the two parties and for renewing the idea of a Labor Party. A resolution calling for a pro-worker agenda and “an independent political voice,” stated: “The time has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils.”4
According to the People’s World reporting from the convention, 50 delegates met for a discussion on the idea of a Labor Party.5 Postal Workers President Mark Dimondstein led a convention floor discussion and roused an applause when he said: “The Democratic Party was not delivering anything even when it had control of the White House, the Congress and the Senate.” This echoed the position of another resolution on electoral politics that concluded that: “continuing to follow the same model, expecting different results, is not an effective strategy for labor.”6
Help wanted: political leaders who stand for something
Propelling the urgency for bold alternatives in 2018 and beyond is that another capitalist economic crisis is looming on the horizon. Absent an alternative such a crisis will enlarge the opening for demagogic solutions like those offered by Trump’s GOP, as well as, austerity measures authored by the corporate allies of both parties. Might it be possible that Our Revolution will find an independent political footing to meet this challenge? Might progressive labor unions unite with people’s movements and Our Revolution to meet this challenge? These possibilities deserve urgent attention if we are to prevent Trump’s new GOP from consolidating power.7
Single-payer advocates welcomed senate Democrats finally getting behind Medicare for all legislation, but there is a steep hill to climb to win over skeptical workers fed up with just about every establishment Democrat. Democratic Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio said, in a New York Times interview in June, following the loss of Jon Ossoff in Georgia, that the party had become “toxic” in much of the country as voters see Democrats as “not being able to connect with the issues they care about.”8
In the same article D. Taylor, the president of the union Unite Here, representing hospitality workers across the country said, “Millions of Americans are desperate to be led by political leaders who stand for something, are willing to take risks, and are willing to tell the truth and engage Americans where they live. That just isn’t happening.” Labor unions and people’s movements who wait for the Democratic Party to make it happen will still be waiting in 2024. Now is the time to build and organize the mass sentiments revealed by the Sanders’ campaign. It’s no time to hesitate or go slow. It is time to take bold risks with confidence and trust that people will respond.
Although the Tim Ryans of the Democratic Party are not likely to call their own foreign policy “toxic,” 2016 showed millions of voters were concerned about Hillary Clinton’s aggressive support of military interventions. Sanders’ repeated criticism of her record resonated broadly with young people, progressives and among the working class. In the fall, Trump even told his voters at rallies that a vote for Hillary would be a vote for more war.
Yet, since the election the Democratic leadership has lent tacit support to Trump’s military budget increases and his ratcheting up of aggression against Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and China. Particularly egregious is the support of both parties’ leaders, for Saudi Arabia’s murderous war against the people of Yemen. Aggression that began with support from the Obama Administration. Not a word of criticism, except for a handful of progressive Democratic officials.
An electoral counter to such dangerous jingoism requires fielding dozens of congressional candidates on a program for peace. This is the glimmer of rationality that peace-loving, oppressed and war-torn peoples around world desperately await U.S. activists to initiate in the citadel of imperialism. Left and progressive organizations that avoid this work shirk their international responsibilities.
A good place to start is to press candidates and incumbents to support a new direction in foreign policy as advanced by AFL-CIO resolution: War is not the Answer.9 It calls on the president and congress “to bring the war dollars home and make our priority as a nation rebuilding this country’s crumbling infrastructure, creating millions of living wage jobs and addressing human needs such as education, health care, housing, retirement security and jobs. Furthermore, it calls “for a foreign policy based on international solidarity of all workers, mutual respect of all nations and national sovereignty…”
If candidates won’t sign on, challenge them. Pressure them. Americans are tired of war. The AFL-CIO resolution reflects this sentiment. Make 2018 a struggle for peace. General election and primary challengers running on a plan for peace may not win, but such a presence is urgently needed to elevate the struggle for peace, economic security and racial justice.
CNN, Chris Cillizza, Editor-at-large. “In election blame game, it’s time for Hillary Clinton to take her share,” June 1, 2017.
Washington Post. “Trump’s approval rating remains historically low and confidence has declined.” Washington Post-ABC News poll, October 29-November 1, 2017. November 13, 2017.
The leitmotif of the US foreign policy in 2018 is going to be a last-ditch attempt to “contain” Russia’s resurgence on the world stage. The US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s “yearender” in the New York Timeson Wednesday makes this abundantly clear. Tillerson singled out China, Russia and Iran but had the harshest words reserved for Russia. This is what he wrote:
On Russia, we have no illusions about the regime we are dealing with. The United States today has a poor relationship with a resurgent Russia that has invaded its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine in the last decade and undermined the sovereignty of Western nations by meddling in our election and others’. The appointment of Kurt Volker, a former NATO ambassador, as special representative for Ukraine reflects our commitment to restoring the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Absent a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine situation, which must begin with Russia’s adherence to the Minsk Agreements, there cannot be business as usual with Russia.
Tillerson was surprisingly laid-back regarding China. He mentioned the key issues – Beijing’s leverage on North Korea, trade, intellectual property rights, and “troubling military activities in the South China Sea and elsewhere”. But he viewed China’s rise from a long-term perspective, “carefully” managing the relationship “for the next 50 years.” In Tillerson’s words,
A central component of our North Korea strategy is persuading China to exert its decisive economic leverage on Pyongyang. China has applied certain import bans and sanctions, but it could and should do more. We will also continue to pursue American interests in other areas of our relationship, including trade imbalances, intellectual property theft and China’s troubling military activities in the South China Sea and elsewhere. China’s rise as an economic and military power requires Washington and Beijing to consider carefully how to manage our relationship for the next 50 years.
Of course, Beijing reacted nicely:
“China and the US share a wide range of common interests in spite of some differences. However, our common interests far outweigh our differences. China-US cooperation conforms to the fundamental interests of both countries and the world at large, and cooperation is the only right choice for us. When it comes to disagreements, we shall strive to resolve them in a constructive way on the basis of mutual respect so as to avoid disrupting the long-term development of bilateral relations. We hope that the US could work with China to focus on cooperation and manage differences on the basis of mutual respect so that bilateral relations can move forward in a sound and steady way.”
Ukraine will be the “hotspot” in US-Russia relations next year. 2017 is ending with the Trump administration removing restrictions on supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine. The Rubicon has been crossed. Russia will be closely watching how the US military aid to Kiev develops. Russia will resist any US attempt to shift the military balance in Donbass.
Meanwhile, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the US might impose punitive sanctions against Russia next year. Herman Gref, the chief executive of Sberbank and an influential voice among Moscow elites, told Financial Times newspaper this week that if such stricter sanctions – against Russian oligarchs and/or state-owned corporations – are imposed, it will “make the Cold War look like child’s play.”
In an interview with Interfax on Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow relies on “pragmatic approaches and realistic assessments” vis-à-vis the US. “We do not entertain any illusions… We will respond to any hostile actions against Russia and our citizens in the way that is best for us… In fact, the sooner certain American politicians get rid of the illusions that Russia can be cowed by restrictive measures or a show of force, the better it will be for everyone, including themselves.”
The point is, the US has no leverage over Russia – or China and Iran for that matter. Tillerson’s essay conveys the impression of a ineffectual superpower. Even the reference to Pakistan betrayed weariness:
“Pakistan must contribute by combating terrorist groups on its own soil. We are prepared to partner with Pakistan to defeat terrorist organizations seeking safe havens, but Pakistan must demonstrate its desire to partner with us.”
The US has no credible road map. Indeed, the cool war with China will continue, but Indian pundits shouldn’t get excited that 2018 will be a “kinetic” year. The Trump administration has no control over shaping that cool war. Basically, the US has 3 options: contain China’s rise as a military power; roll back China’s economic influence through a US-led regional alliance such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement; or, accept China’s rise and share the liberal international order with it as participant. But Washington has no identifiable strategy.
Suffice to say, it will be in the Eurasian and Middle East theatres – the two are inter-related too – where the US will get bogged down. Make no mistake, Russia is determined to push through a settlement in Syria in 2018. And it will be a bitter pill for the Beltway establishment to swallow. Moscow announced this week that the Tartus naval base and the Hmeimim airbase in Syria are being expanded as permanent bases with the capacity to deploy nuclear ships and aircraft. It signals a power projection far beyond anything that the Soviet Union achieved in the Middle East.
With a renewed 6-year term as president after the 18th March election in Russia, Vladimir Putin will be an alpha male. By the way, the election date itself is hugely symbolic, dripping with strategic defiance of the US – 18th March is the date Crimea rejoined Russia four years ago!
In light of the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea bringing frequent comparisons to the Cuban Missile Crisis and discussion of hypothetical worst-case scenarios, it’s worth reviewing the United States’ record and examining whether North Korea is really the belligerent nuclear menace the world needs to liberate itself from. As critics of American foreign policy have noticed, the United States’ leaders, its media and its citizens never quite seem to recognize the full consequences of their country’s actions in other regions, or investigate its long history of conflict with North Korea.
To begin in chronological order, touring around the globe, it’s been noted by international relations scholars and historians that the Korean War is partly known as “The Forgotten War” because Americans have largely forgotten “the utter ruin and devastation” the United States inflicted upon North Korea. It’s not widely known that the United States’ own leaders have admitted to have “killed off” approximately 20% of North Korea’s population throughout the war by targeting “everything that moved.” Or that the United States destroyed more cities in North Korea than it did in Germany or Japan during World War II by dropping more bombs than it did throughout the entire Pacific Theatre. When there were few urban targets left to bomb, the United States began to bomb dams that supplied water for the production of rice—one of the quintessential food commodities in Asia—which led to mass starvation during and after the war. While Americans may not remember the carnage across the other side of the world, North Koreans have never forgotten the destruction on its own peninsula, nor the American threats to use nuclear weapons during the war which first inspired Kim Il-Sung to obtain his own nuclear deterrent decades ago.
Looking at events throughout the next few decades, it’s apparent that American policymakers either fail to consider, or disregard, how their duplicitous dealings and illegal military interventions across the world could inspire smaller countries like North Korea to seek more cost-effective and credible deterrents to an American invasion than large standing armies, in the form of nuclear weapons.
While American officials compare the situation in North Korea with the 1960s Cuban Missile Crisis by depicting North Korea as an irrational and unpredictable adversary willing to initiate nuclear destruction, the real comparison lies in the United States’ refusal to live under the same threat it subjects to other countries, which forms a straight line of continuity to the present.
Historians have long known that John F. Kennedy lied to the American public by claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administrations had allowed a dangerous missile gap to grow in the Soviet Union’s favor, despite the opposite being the case. And that Nikita Khrushchev was inspired to equalize the balance of power by dispatching Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuba upon learning that the United States had stationed its nuclear weapons near the Soviet Union in Turkey, and to deter the United States from launching an invasion of Cuba. This fear of invasion was a justifiable concern considering the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the previous year and the CIA’s ongoing Operation Mongoose at the time, which tried to undermine the Castro regime through assassination attempts and sabotage.
However, the United States found the mere perception of an even playing field intolerable as it dispatched a naval blockade, considered an act of war in international law, to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. All of this happened despite Kennedy’s own assessment that the blockade would increase the probability of war to climb as high as 50%. We now know that even top-level decision makers like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were rendered speechless decades later upon learning that both the United States and Cuba had severely underestimated the risk of nuclear war at the time.
In the end, nuclear war was barely averted by the heroism of Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov, who disobeyed orders to to launch a nuclear torpedo in response to his superiors’ panic over depth charges dropped by American ships during the blockade. The United States struck a deal with the Soviet Union to lift the blockade, provide a promise not to invade Cuba and to secretly remove the missiles in Turkey in exchange for the public removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. The mere semblance of a rational quid pro quo was unacceptable to the United States, which insisted on the risky optics of humiliation in order to reinforce its hegemonic principles that Cuba had no right to possess a deterrent to what seemed like an imminent American invasion, and that the United States should enjoy an offensive nuclear capacity denied to the Soviet Union.
Later on during the Reagan era, the United States illegally invaded Grenada to enact regime change in 1983, while simultaneously ratcheting up the annual joint United States-South Korea war games simulating possible invasions of North Korea near its borders. Kim Il-Sung was reportedly unsettled by the idea that the United States could perceive the tiny spice island of Grenada as a threat, and feared that nothing less than a nuclear deterrent would be sufficient to keep Pyongyang outside the crosshairs of Washington. Three years after the invasion of Grenada, the North Korean regime established its Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry to formally declare its intent to develop a nuclear weapons program, which exists to this day.
Moving towards the twenty-first century, the Bush 43 administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in March 2003, which had long given up Iraq’s nuclear weapons despite the Bush 43 administration’s lies about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), would serve as one example of a dictatorship being toppled due to the lack of a credible nuclear deterrent. Another example would follow with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who announced that Libya would also give up its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles in addition to its infant nuclear weapons program in December 2003. Even though George W. Bush celebrated Libya’s decision at the time, declaring that the world should take away the lesson that “leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations,” the succeeding Obama administration would go on to deliver the exact opposite lesson by assisting in the ouster of Gaddafi in 2011. Observing the situation in Libya, a North Korean official at the time explicitly remarked that the “Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson,” claiming the West’s deal with Libya was “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”
More towards the present, President Trump’s decision to “decertify” the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in October—despite worldwide acknowledgment that Iran has fully kept its side of the deal—has led some journalists to note that it’s more accurate to report that the United States was reneging on its JCPOA commitments, drawing parallels with its inconsistent foreign policy in Libya. The United States’ refusal to honor its agreement has bolstered the popularity of the hardline Iranian view that the United States and Saudi Arabia can’t be trusted.
There is remarkable irony in the United States betraying its JCPOA commitments considering the previous hysteria claiming that Iran was “the gravest threat to world peace,” despite not having invaded a single country in over 200 years. It’s a little known fact that Iran’s own Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Javad Zarif, actually critiqued the JCPOA because it didn’t go far enough towards ensuring peace in the Middle East—calling on Israel to join Iran in establishing a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East—which Iran incidentally first proposed to the UN General Assembly in 1974.
The irony is only heightened when we consider that the United States possesses an additional obligation to engage in good faith efforts towards establishing a NWFZ in the Middle East as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as the Bush administration’s appeal to UN Security Council Resolution 687 to provide some pseudo-legal basis for its invasion of Iraq—claiming that Iraq had failed to live up to the resolution’s obligation to disarm itself of WMDs—when Article 14 of Resolution 687 called for the elimination of Iraqi WMDs for the explicit purpose of creating a NWFZ in the Middle East.
Aside from North Korea, another nuclear power the United States is presently antagonizing is Russia, which has led some observers to liken the current relationship to be that of a new Cold War for quite some time. One can recite a litany of American provocations against Russia ranging from the still unproven allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the United States’ proven interference in Russian elections, from the hypocritical accusations of war crimes in Syria that the American-backed rebel forces seeking regime change also committed, to the Obama administration’s use of deceit in persuading Russia not to veto a UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya, which would teach Vladimir Putin the “lesson” that weakness and compromise would be exploited by the United States.
But these examples ignore the United States’ more direct contributions to heightened nuclear tensions with Russia. Despite the Bush 41 administration’s verbal “iron-clad guarantees” made to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward,” in exchange for the reunification of West and East Germany in 1990 and agreements to halt the arms race, ban chemical weapons and drastically reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, succeeding administrations began to treat Russia as a defeated nation who “lost” the Cold War ever since.
The succeeding Clinton administration would proceed to illegally bomb Serbia and violate prior promises by expanding NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries, tarnishing the Russian population’s perception of the United States. Currently, NATO’s eastern expansion has reached Russia’s borders with NATO troops deployed in Poland and the Baltic States, which would be analogous to the United States finding Mexico, Cuba, Canada and most of South America welcoming Russian bases and troops in a military alliance against it. Notwithstanding the barrage of propagandistic charges of “Russian aggression,” NATO’s expansion and the Obama administration’s support for a violent coup ousting pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is responsible for provoking Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Crimea.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama administration’s placement of ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems near Russian borders was a continued reversal of the short-lived Nixon-Ford administrations’ policy of détente. It’s common knowledge among nuclear strategists around the world that BMD systems are offensive weapons by nature—designed to secure a nuclear first-strike advantage by neutralizing the threat of retaliatory nuclear strikes—and serve as a “Trojan Horse” for the militarization of outer space, as BMD systems depend on satellites that must be protected from the anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons readily available to other nations. The threat BMD systems pose to international stability was what led the United States and the Soviet Union to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972.
The ABM Treaty was promptly violated by the Reagan administration’s infamous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” program—a large subsidy for American high-tech industry under the guise of its fantastical aims of constructing orbiting “battle platforms,” with uranium and plutonium powered hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons—with the ABM Treaty later being unilaterally abrogated by the Bush 43 administration in 2001. Concerns about the destabilizing effects of deploying BMD systems have already materialized with Russia recently testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) designed to penetrate them.
But even critics of dishonest American foreign policy around the globe for fostering North Korea’s distrust often neglect to mention the history of the United States reneging on its commitments with North Korea itself. The Clinton administration was able to get North Korea to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994-2002) through the Agreed Framework of 1994, signed an additional agreement to mutually cease bearing “hostile intent,” and had indirectly worked out another deal to buy all of its medium and long-range missiles until the Bush 43 administration named North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil,” threatening it with the possibility of “preemptive” war.
In spite of this setback, the Bush 43 administration was able to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons under the six-party talks in 2005—in return for a light-water nuclear reactor for its medical and energy needs and an end to aggressive rhetoric—only for the same administration to quickly undermine the agreement by renewing its threats of force, withdrawing its offer of a light-water reactor and freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks.
The situation has only deteriorated under the Trump administration with its destabilizing statements and policies around the world, which is increasing pressure on other nations to pursue nuclear weapons. President Trump and his fellow Republicans have illegally threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and cause its “extinction.” Despite the corporate media’s frequent barrage of misleading headlines implying that the North Korean leadership won’t surrender its nuclear weapons under any circumstances—and refusal to report the timing of North Korea’s missile tests in the context of the annual joint American and South Korean war games simulating nuclear first-strikes, invasions, and assassinations of the North Korean leadership near its borders—the truth is that North Korea has repeatedly offered to give up its nuclear weapons program. The Trump administration has rejected China and North Korea’s numerous proposals to freeze North Korea’s nuclear and missile program in exchange for ceasing the threatening joint war games. It’s possible that the offers are insincere and that North Korea can’t be trusted to follow through on its commitments, but the point remains that diplomacy hasn’t been seriously pursued and that the United States’ own trustworthiness is hardly any better.
While there are some differences between the Trump administration’s foreign policy and its predecessors’, the United States’ general pursuit of overwhelming supremacy in all terrains of warfare including land, air, sea and outer space (also known as “full-spectrum dominance”), has remained largely intact. President Trump has called for a tenfold expansion of the United States’ nuclear stockpile in spite of the numerous arms reduction treaties the United States is committed to. His administration is also rushing to enact Obama administration programs to “modernize” the “nuclear triad,” estimated to cost over $1 trillion across three decades, to improve precision targeting and reducing blast yields to make nuclear first-strikes more thinkable.
The “Trojan Horse” for the militarization of space represented by the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) BMD system in South Korea—to secure a nuclear first-strike advantage against China and North Korea—is expected to trigger a new arms race in the region in addition to another arms race for space weapons. Despite virtually universal support for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) Treaty in the UN since 1985, including Russia and China, the United States has continually refused to negotiate the PAROS Treaty in the UN’s Conference on Disarmament because of its large technical advantages in BMD systems and potential space weaponry.
South Koreans and American military officials, academics, and journalists are certainly correct to note that North Korea’s “realist” foreign policy has remained remarkably consistent and predictable in comparison to President Trump’s unpredictability and frequent commitments to keeping “all options on the table.” However, to imagine that the Trump administration’s unpredictable posture regarding nuclear weapons is a large deviation from the norm of past administrations is a mistake. The United States has consistently refused to adopt a “no-first-use” pledge in order to keep the option of a nuclear first-strike open. A 1995 STRATCOM report entitled the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence during the Clinton administration mentioned that it would be detrimental for the United States to portray itself as “too fully rational and cool-headed,” and recommended that it project an “irrational and vindictive” national persona with some “potentially ‘out of control’” elements instead.
The hegemonic principles are consistent: the United States and its allies should possess an offensive nuclear capacity to destroy their enemies denied to other nations, and can flout international law and their foreign obligations on a whim.
The North Korean government is a contemptible and authoritarian regime that’s justly condemned for its numerous human rights violations, but as foreign policy critics like Noam Chomsky have pointed out, there’s no logical connection between a regime’s domestic brutality and the threat it poses abroad. Although the United States is increasingly degenerating into an impoverished and totalitarian society with its own internal human rights abuses, there’s no doubt that American citizens enjoy a greater degree of liberties than North Koreans. There’s also little question that the United States has unleashed far more violence and aggression abroad. The latest international poll found that the United States is considered to be the greatest threat to world peace, beating out all other competitors—including North Korea—by decisive margins. A casual examination of the United States’ record abroad can yield similar damning conclusions: the United States is the world’s nuclear menace, not North Korea.
Joshua Cho is a recent graduate of Boston College, aspiring journalist and former intern at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
This is a classic example of flip-flop policy. In November, the US promised Turkey to stop arming Kurdish militias in Syria after the Islamic State was routed. Brett McGurk, the US Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State, explained that after the urban fighting in Raqqa was over “adjustments in the level of military support” would be made. “We had to give some equipment – and it’s limited, extremely limited – all of which was very transparent to our NATO ally, Turkey,” he said during a special briefing on December 21. In June, the US told Turkey it would take back weapons supplied to the Kurdish the People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in northern Syria after the defeat of Islamic State.
But sophisticated weapons will continue to be sent to Syria in 2018, including thousands of anti-tank rocket launchers, heat seeking missiles and rocket launchers. The list of weaponry and equipment was prepared by US Department of Defense as part of the 2018 defense budget and signed by Trump of Dec. 12. It includes more than 300 non-tactical vehicles, 60 nonstandard vehicles, and 30 earth-moving vehicles to assist with the construction of outposts or operations staging areas. The US defense spending bill for 2018 (“Justification for FY 2018 Overseas Contingency Operations / Counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Train and Equip Fund”) includes providing weapons worth $393 million to US partners in Syria. Overall, $500 million, roughly $70 million more than last year, are to be spent on Syria Train and Equip requirements. The partners are the Kurds-dominated Syria Democratic Forces (SDF). The YPG – the group that is a major concern of Turkey – is the backbone of this force.
The budget does not refer to Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) but instead says “Vetted Syrian Opposition”. According to the budget list, there are 25,000 opposition forces supported as a part of the train and equip program in Syria. That number is planned to be increased to 30,000 in 2018. The arming of Kurdish militants with anti-tank rockets is a sensitive topic because of Turkey’s reliance on its armored Leopard tanks in northern Syria.
Talal Sillo, a former high-ranking commander and spokesperson of the US-backed SDF, who defected from the group last month to go to Turkey, divulged details of the US arming the Kurdish group.
The list does not detail which vetted Syrian groups will receive certain pieces of equipment. In northern Syria, there is the SDF, including the YPG, and the Syria Arab Coalition — a group of Arab fighters incorporated into the SDF. The Maghawir al-Thawra and Shohada al-Quartayn groups are operating in the southeastern part of Syria. They are being trained by US and British instructors at the al-Tanf border crossing between Syria and Iraq.
Besides the SDF and the groups trained at al-Tanf, the US is in the process of creating the New Syria Army to fight the Syrian government forces. The training is taking place at the Syrian Hasakah refugee camp located 70 kilometers from the border of Turkey and 50 kilometers from the border of Iraq.
Around 40 Syria opposition groups on Dec. 25 rejected to attend the planned Sochi conference on Syria scheduled to take place in January. They said Moscow, which organizes the conference, was seeking to bypass the UN-based Geneva peace process, despite the fact that UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said that Russia’s plan to convene the congress should be assessed by its ability to contribute to and support the UN-led Geneva talks on ending the war in Syria. If fighting starts, these groups are likely to join the formations created by the US.
So, the United States not only maintains its illegal military presence in Syria and creates new forces to fight against the Syrian government, it appears to be preparing for a new war to follow the Islamic State’s defeat. The continuation of arming and training Kurdish militias will hardly improve Washington’s relations with Ankara, while saying one thing and doing another undermines the credibility of the United States as a partner.
‘Violence is not the way.’ How often did we hear Tony Blair say it? We know that violence should not be the way but we know that it is often is. The ‘we’ definitely does not include Blair, an architect of extreme violence in the Middle East. We know from history that violent states can often leave the peaceful with nothing left but violence to stop them going any further. This is the paradoxical trap in human behavior: the violent can ultimately impose violence on the peaceful.
We would be deluding ourselves if we think that such a point has not been reached with Israel or has not been almost reached; we have to leave open the slim possibility that somehow it will come to its senses and do what it could have done decades ago, make peace with the Palestinians and through them with the Arab and Muslim worlds and, in fact, with the world in general, but this does not seem likely.
The Zionist leaders knew from the beginning that the only way they could take Palestine would be through war. Jabotinsky was blunt about it, Ben-Gurion honest only in his private correspondence: only by fire and sword could Israel be created out of Palestine and having stepped on this path Israel has never stepped off it.
Over seven decades it has waged war after war: against the Palestinians, against Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, against any state, organisation or individual that gets in its way. It has massacred, assassinated and bombed ambulances, hospitals, schools, UN compounds and apartment blocks. It has never shown concern for the human lives it takes: on the contrary, one of its pilots even joked when asked how he felt when firing a missile at an apartment building in Gaza. His reply was that he felt a ‘slight tremor’ in the wings of his plane.
Over the years Israel’s rabbis and generals have declared all Palestinians as the enemy or as cancers, snakes and cockroaches to be crushed or cut out. The Palestinian enemy even includes the children not yet born, giving Golda Meir nightmares when she went to bed, not knowing how many Palestinians might have been born by the time she woke up.
These frightful sentiments are reflected on the street and in the mainstream culture, in polls showing hatred of Palestinians, even amongst schoolchildren, and in the unending violence of West Bank settlers. The soldiers and border police who protect these settlers do what they like, knowing they will not be punished, or punished so lightly that the punishment only adds insult to injury to the victim and his/her family. The murder of Abd al Fatah al Sharif as he lay wounded in the streets of Hebron last year and the recent murder by a sniper of the wheelchair-bound Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, whose legs were severed by an Israeli missile strike on Gaza in 2008, are not brutal anomalies but entirely consistent with Israel’s violent history.
Destroying the enemy before he becomes too strong has been Israel’s guiding maxim since 1948. Egypt was kept off balance by repeated attacks across the armistice line before the tripartite aggression of 1956. That failed because of the intervention of the US once British treachery was revealed. Israel then reverted to more attacks across the armistice line before the attack of 1967 on Egypt and Syria. The myth of invincibility lasted only until the first week of the 1973 war, during which Israel’s forces were routed in Sinai. Had Sadat not betrayed Hafez al Assad they would have been driven off the Golan Heights as well, but that still would have left the probability of direct intervention by the US to save Israel from the consequences of its own folly.
This was the last war Israel fought against a regular army. Its ‘wars’ on Lebanon and Gaza were no more than military onslaughts on a mostly defenseless population and even then it could not win them. Gaza has managed to stand upright despite the carnage of Israel’s attacks and in Lebanon the uprooting of the PLO in 1982 only cleared the way for a Shia resistance taking political and military shape in the form of Hezbollah. By 2000 this guerrilla army had driven the Zionists out of southern Lebanon and in 2006 it heaped further humiliation on them when they returned, which brings us to considerations of the present situation.
The first is that Israel’s geopolitical situation is not what it was. The days when Israel could call on the sympathy of the world, as an allegedly beleaguered little state threatened with extinction, have long since gone. With the exception of the US and its hangers-on, the world knows what Israel is, a bully.
In the Middle East Israel’s geopolitical situation is not what it was either. The treaties it has signed with Egypt and Jordan are moribund. The popular antagonism to Israel in both countries is as strong now as the day these treaties were signed, and probably even stronger following Trump’s inflammatory statement, the killing of Ibrahim Abu Thuraya and the powerful stand taken by a Palestinian teenager, Ahad Tamimi, in slapping the face of a Zionist soldier.
Militarily, Israel’s decline could be charted on a graph. The slide since 1967 has been slow but continuous. Yes, Israel has nuclear weapons and intermittently sends out signals that it is prepared to use them, as it did in 1973. Yes, it has supreme air power but even this has not been sufficient to give it the victories it wants and as Israel’s intelligence and military chiefs know, Israel’s enemies are working all the time on the means of countering Israel’s technological superiority. The Zionist media might jeer at Hasan Nasrallah but Israel’s military commanders do not.
Israel has tried to destroy Hezbollah but has failed. It has tried to intimidate Iran through the assassination of its scientists and repeated threats of military attack but it has failed, even with the additional weapon of US sanctions. The law of unintended consequences has prevailed: the attempt to destroy Syria has also failed, ultimately, despite the massive destruction and loss of life, and so has the attempt to destroy Iraq, which is regaining its shattered unity under a Shia-dominant government close to Iran and sympathetic to Hezbollah. The collapse of Kurdish secessionism is another blow to Israel. The obverse of these failures is the growing military strength of Hezbollah and Iran, far greater now than a decade ago.
It is for these reasons that the Middle East is facing perhaps the most dangerous moment in its modern history. Psychologically, strategically, Israel cannot allow the present situation to continue unchecked, cannot allow Hezbollah and Iran to grow even stronger in the coming years. It must reassert its military dominance and all the signals pouring out of the political and military establishment indicate that after a year of intensive preparations it is ready to go. The target will be Lebanon, which Israel’s propagandists are portraying as no more than a Hezbollah enclave manipulated by Iran, which Israel will want to draw into the conflict. The war will be one of massive destruction, with Israel’s ministers differing only on whether Lebanon is to be bombed back to the Stone Age (Yisrael Katz) or the Middle Ages (Naftali Bennett).
Israel’s war preparations in the past year include the biggest land maneuvers for two decades. Held in northern occupied Palestine right on the armistice line with Lebanon the ‘Light on the Grain’ maneuvers in September, 2017, began with the evacuation of civilians in the region. An estimated 30,000-40,000 soldiers and reservists were involved, in 20 brigades, with jet fighters, helicopters, drones, submarines, gunboats and patrol boats providing backup and reconnaissance for troops on the ground. Electronic warfare, the use of robot fighters in tunnels and mock battles with soldiers wearing ‘enemy’ uniforms and carrying fake explosive belts were all on the agenda. The exercises were based on the assumption of a ten-day war with Hezbollah. According to Walid Sukkariya, a retired Lebanese general and member of parliament, the number of soldiers deployed indicated the deployment of 150,000 troops in a real war.
In November, 2017, the largest aerial exercise in Israel’s history was held in southern occupied Palestine. This multilateral two-week ‘Blue Flag’ exercise involved about 1000 pilots from nine countries, including, for the first time in the history of such maneuvers, Germany. Hundreds of jet fighters flew an estimated 1000 missions from the Uvda base as the ‘blue’ forces ‘attacked’ the ‘red alliance’, an unspecified enemy whose pilots, however, were all given an Arabic name. Helicopters, drones and UAVs were used: electronic warfare was central to the maneuvers, as was the assumption that the ‘enemy’ would be armed with SAMs and MANPAD missile launchers.
Offshore, Cyprus has been used by Israel as it prepares for its next war. In March, 2017, Israel and the government of southern Cyprus staged the three-day ‘Onsilos-Gedeon’ military maneuvers in and over a large area around Nicosia. In June an estimated 500 Israeli soldiers, many from the ‘elite’ Egoz unit, along with 100 soldiers from the Cypriot National Guard took part in a two- week war exercise in the Troodos mountains, where the terrain is similar to southern Lebanon. The combat involved ‘fighting’ above and below ground, fighting in dense bush in mountainous terrain and airborne maneuvers night and day. The aerial component included five Israeli squadrons, C130 transport planes, Blackhawk helicopters and Unit 669, whose core mission is to rescue pilots and soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.
In late October, 2017, Cypriot-Israeli military ‘cooperation’ moved to southern occupied Palestine, where soldiers from the Cypriot National Guard and the Egoz unit staged exercises held over two weeks at the Tzeelim military base. The focus was on urban warfare in the setting of a mock ‘Arab’ town.
These ongoing military maneuvers are part of a new strategic (military and commercial) axis developing in the eastern Mediterranean between Israel, Cyprus and Greece and drawing in other countries because of the lucrative profits that will eventually come from the deep sea natural gas deposits drilled by southern Cyprus in its Aphrodite field and Israel in its Leviathan and Tamar fields 140 kms from the coast of occupied Palestine. Haifa.
The military engagement with Israel and the holding of maneuvers on Cypriot soil which, for Israel, are clearly directed at an ‘Arab’ enemy, have caused consternation in the ranks of the Cypriot opposition. In June the Akel party noted that the Troodos mountains had been chosen for their similarity to the topography of southern Lebanon. It said the exercises had involved Cyprus in dangerous war games ‘with an army that has been an occupying power for 50 years in the Palestinian territories.’ The militarization of cooperation with Israel was dangerous to Cyprus and regional peace.
The scale of these exercises leaves no room for doubt that Israel is not merely upgrading and monitoring its military preparedness but actively preparing for war. The alarm bells have been sounding continuously for the past year: according to Channel Two, given access to Israeli positions along the armistice line with Lebanon, Israel is preparing for ‘a very violent war.’ Already in 2008 the then head of the Zionist military’s northern command, now the chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, presented the ‘Dahiya doctrine’, focusing on the massive damage that would be done in areas associated with Hezbollah. According to Eisenkot: ‘In every village from which Israel is fired upon we will apply disproportionate force against it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. It is a plan and it has been approved.’
Dahiya, of course, was the largely Shia suburb of Beirut pulverized from the air by Israel in 2006. Others think the ‘doctrine’ should be applied even more widely. In the words of education minister Naftali Bennett, uttered in March, 2017, ‘The Lebanese institutions, its infrastructure, airports, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese army bases, they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out. That’s what we should already be saying to them and they would know that if Hezbollah fires missiles at the Israeli home front this will mean sending Lebanon back to the Middle Ages.’ From Bennett this is not empty rhetoric. After all, in 1996 it was he who called in the artillery barrage that killed more than 100 people, half of them children, in the UN compound at Qana, southern Lebanon; ‘I am proud of how I functioned during operation Grapes of Wrath’, he remarked later. ‘Leave the warriors alone.’ After all, again, it was Bennett who once said ‘I have killed lots of Arabs in my life and there is no problem with that.
According to intelligence minister Yisrael Katz, speaking this December with a Saudi newspaper, ‘What happened in 2006 will be a picnic compared to what we can do now. I remember a Saudi minister saying they will send Hezbollah back to their caves in southern Lebanon. I am telling you that we will return Lebanon to the Stone Age … and bury Nasrallah under the rocks.’ These are genocidal threats, plain and simple, and both Iran and Hezbollah are preparing for the onslaught. Hezbollah has already said it has missiles that can reach any part of occupied Palestine and has hinted that ports and refineries would be among the targets in any coming war.
Nasrallah’s response to these threats, made in his address marking the 10th of Ashura in October this year, warrants attention because he is not a man to indulge in idle talk. This was a long speech in which he distinguished Judaism from Zionism, in which he said the Jews brought to Palestine from all over the world were cannon fodder in a British-western colonialist war against the Arabic and Muslim people of the region and were still serving as fuel for US policies.
Addressing ‘Jewish scholars, their eminent personalities, their thinkers’ he warned that Netanyahu is leading ‘your people’ in Palestine to annihilation and destruction. He was working with Trump to tear up the agreement with Iran and push the region into a new war but neither he nor his government and military officials had an accurate picture of what awaited them if they started another war. ‘That is why I call first of all on Jews except the Zionists to detach their considerations from Zionist calculations which will only lead them to their final destruction. I call on all those who came into occupied Palestine believing the promises that they would find the land of milk and honey, I call on them to leave Palestine and go back to the countries from which they came so they do not become mere fuel in any war to which the stupid Netanyahu will lead them. For if Netanyahu launches a war in this region there may be no more time for them to leave Palestine and there may be no safe place for them in occupied Palestine.’ Such a war could bring about ‘the end of all things for you and for the Zionist entity.’
This was possibly the strongest and most direct speech Nasrallah has ever made. The confidence in what he had to say suggests that Hezbollah has attained or developed weaponry that Israel may find it hard to counter. The speech indicates that after more than seven decades, Nasrallah fully understands that the conflict with Israel is rapidly moving towards the existential level of either/or: either Hezbollah will be destroyed and Iran crippled or Israel will suffer blows of such magnitude as to threaten its survival. Right now this may seem improbable but history is nothing if not a trickster, especially for those who make their calculations on the basis of power they will never lose. For either side defeat is not an option: Israel is preparing to fight a war of unprecedented savagery to finish off its enemies and they are ready to defend themselves and (as Nasrallah has warned) take the war into enemy territory. This seems close to the point at which we now stand, without anyone in the ‘international community’ putting on the brakes to stop the momentum towards war.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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