How obscenely ironic. Embassies traditionally symbolize diplomacy and peace. The opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem was occasioned by a grotesque baptism of murder of Palestinians, heralding wider war in the Middle East.
Not only that, but on the very anniversary of one of the most shameful episodes of ethnic cleansing and dispossession over the past century – the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe for Palestinians – the US government is brazenly siding with the heirs of that historic violence, the Israeli state.
Trump’s wholesale abandonment of any shame in endorsing Israeli violations against Arab historic rights is an incitement to regional conflagration.
It’s hard to express the horror. Israeli snipers shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, while some 100 kilometers away in Jerusalem, US dignitaries and evangelical pastors were blessing the opening of Washington’s new embassy as ‘God’s work’.
US President Donald Trump’s policy in the Middle East, if you could call it “policy”, has descended into absolute lunacy. No wonder, most European states stayed away from the US reception for unveiling its new diplomatic center.
Trump’s reckless disregard for Palestinian-Israeli peace is plunging the region into a blood bath. This week’s incendiary snub to Palestinians and the wider Arab region followed his tearing up of US obligations to the Iran nuclear accord. That violation of an international treaty has left diplomats from Europe, Russia, China and Iran scrambling to salvage a deal, which if it falls apart will unleash more instability and even war in the Middle East.
When Trump announced in December the moving of his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem it was roundly rebuked at the United Nations. The move violates decades of international consensus that Jerusalem should be a shared capital between Palestinians and Israelis pending the outcome of peace negotiations.
Trump said his decision was merely a “reflection of reality”. Cynically, it marks US acquiescence to illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
To be fair, Washington’s decision to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem was made over 20 years ago in 1995. Presidents Clinton, GW Bush and Obama opted to delay the actual move, claiming that such a move depended on progress in peace talks. Trump has now put into action legislation that was already on the books.
But what his declaration signifies is the jettisoning of any pretense by the US of being an “honest broker” between Israelis and Palestinians. Palestinian leaders now refuse to even engage with US officials, such is their disgust.
Paradoxically, Trump is helping to clarify the situation. The US is openly backing Israeli conquest of Palestinian territory and oppression of Palestinians. Washington is now transparently complicit in criminal Israeli policy rather than hiding behind a facade of mediation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump this week for “making Israel great again”. With typical chutzpah, Netanyahu urged other nations to follow suit, absurdly claiming that by relocating their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem they would facilitate peace.
The perverse logic, as proven already by the US policy, is that any chance of peace between Palestinians and Israelis is being utterly destroyed.
The hellish conditions that Palestinians are subjected to under relentless Israeli occupation are driving them to the desperate act of lining up in their thousands under the fire of Israeli snipers.
Over the past six weeks since Gaza’s population began the “Great Return March” some 50 unarmed protesters have been murdered by Israeli live fire. On the day of the US Embassy opening, dozens of more civilians were shot dead, within hours of the Jerusalem ceremony.
Israeli commanders have openly admitted that a shoot-to-kill tactic is being used whereby soldiers are even targeting children who dare to approach a separation barrier on Gaza’s eastern border with Israeli-held territory.
The Gaza protests were organized by ordinary Palestinians to highlight their desperate plea against a barbaric occupation and prevention of residents returning to their historic homes, including in Jerusalem. Some 70 per cent of Gaza’s population are descended from refugees who were displaced by Israeli settlers in the 1948 pogroms and later in the 1967 War.
Under Israeli siege, which the UN has described as illegal, Gazans are prevented from moving out of the coastal strip. Some two million people – half of whom are under 18 years old – subsist in unlivable conditions. Over 90 per cent of Gaza’s water supply is contaminated, electricity is available for only a few hours per day, fisherman are prevented from going beyond a few miles from the shore where human sewage runs directly into the sea.
As American historian Norman Finkelstein points out, Gaza is being tormented by military occupation, an inhuman blockade, massacres conducted with impunity by Israeli military, and children being poisoned. It is this context of genocide in which the recent protests are taking place.
Those protests were organized to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declared foundation on May 14, 1948. The next day, May 15, is what the Palestinians and many supporters around the world prefer to focus on – the Catastrophe.
Trump’s decision to open the US Embassy in Jerusalem this week could not be more provocative and criminally insane.
It truly is a shockingly callous display of US support for seven decades of barbaric oppression against Palestinians and the wider Arab region.
Jerusalem is seen as a holy site for Muslims and Christians. Washington’s acquiescing to Israel’s declaration of the city as “undivided capital” of the Jewish Israeli state is an outrageous blow to hundreds of millions of people from other faiths. As well as a vandalistic swipe at world opinion based on ordinary principles of justice, morality and compassion towards the long-suffering Palestinian people.
Europe bears a heavy responsibility for the plight of Palestinians. After Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006, the EU and the US both moved to sanction the new Hamas government owing to its refusal to recognize the state of Israel. The Israeli siege on Gaza has thus been perpetrated with the complicity of the EU and the US, albeit the latter appearing more brazenly complicit under Trump.
European governments may be discomfited by Trump’s strident contempt for Palestinian rights and international law. But they have contributed to the present deterioration in the Middle East by pandering towards Washington’s policies of sponsoring Israeli occupation, as well as sponsoring reactionary Arab client regimes like Saudi Arabia, and fomenting illegal wars and regime-change operations.
Trump’s impetuousness and ignorance – no doubt encouraged by multi-million-dollar donations from rich Jewish Americans like Sheldon Adelson – has set the US on a collision course with the Arab masses from his insolent indifference to their rights. As if that could not be any more combustible, Trump is pushing the same Israeli-Saudi despot agenda of hostility towards Iran, as evinced by the nuclear accord sabotage.
Europe has for too long tied itself to the shipwreck that is US policy in the Middle East. Surely, European governments must realize by now that if explosive violence and conflict is to be avoided in the Middle East, they must abandon the US shipwreck and begin asserting an independent foreign policy.
A genuine peace process advocating for long-neglected Palestinian rights, and repudiating US attempts to collapse the Iran nuclear accord are two immediate matters for the Europeans to claw back some sanity and respect – before it’s too late.
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May 14, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | European Union, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Introduction
For some time, critics of President Trump’s policies have attributed them to a mental disorder; uncontrolled manic-depression, narcissus bullying and other pathology.
The question of Trump’s mental health raises a deeper question: why does his pathology take a specific political direction?
Moreover, Trump’s decisions have a political history and background, and follow from a logic and belief in the reason and logic of imperial power.
We will examine the reason why Trump has embraced three strategic decisions which have world-historic consequences, namely: Trump’s reneging the nuclear accord with Iran; Trump’s declaration of a trade war with China; and Trump’s meeting with North Korea.
In brief we will explore the political reasons for his decisions; what he expects to gain; and what is his game plan if he fails to secure his expected outcome and his adversaries take reprisals.
Trump’s Strategic Framework
The underlying assumption of Trump’s strategic thinking is that ‘power works’: the more intransigent his posture, the greater his belief in a unipolar world based on US power. As a corollary, Trump interprets that any ally, adversary, competitor who seeks negotiations, reciprocity or concessions is ‘weak’ and should be pressured or forced to concede greater concessions and further retreats and sacrifices, up to the ultimate goal of surrender and submission. In other words, Trump’s politics of force only recognizes counter-force: limitations in Trump’s policies will only result when tangible economic and military losses and costs in US lives would undermine US imperial rule.
Reasons Why Trump Broke the Peace Accord with Iran
Trump broke the accord with Iran because the original agreement was based on retaining US sanctions against Iran; the total dismantling of its nuclear program and calling into question Iran’s limited role on behalf of possible allies in the Middle East.
Iran’s one-sided concessions; trading military defense for market opportunities encouraged Trump to believe that he could intimidate Iran militarily by closing all its markets.
Trump views President Rohani as a rug seller not a military strategist. Trump believes that an economic squeeze will lead President Rohani to sacrifice his allies in Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen (Houthi), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (Shia) and to dismantle its ICBM defense strategy.
Trump pursues the strategic goal of weakening Iran and preparing a regime change, reverting Iran into a client state – as it was prior to the 1979 revolution under the Shah.
The second reason for Trump’s policy is to strengthen Israel’s military power in the Middle East. The Trump regime is deeply influenced by the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the US, dubbed ‘the Lobby’.
Trump recognizes and submits to Zionist-Israeli dictates because they have unprecedented power in the media, real estate, finance and insurance (FIRE). Trump recognizes the ZPC’s power to buy Congressional votes, control both political parties and secure appointments in the executive branch.
Trump is the typical authoritarian: at the throat of the weak, citizens, allies and adversaries and on his knees before the powerful ZPC, the military and Wall Street. Trump’s submission to Zionist power reinforces and even dictates his decision to break the peace accord with Iran and his willingness to pressure France, Germany, the UK and Russia to sacrifice billion-dollar trade agreements with Iran and to pursue a policy of pressuring Teheran to accept part of Trump’s agenda of unilateral disarmament and isolation. Trump believes he can force the EU multi-nationals to disobey their governments and abide by sanctions.
Reasons for Trump’s Trade War with China
Prior to Trump’s presidency, especially under President Obama, the US launched a trade war and ‘military pivot’ to China. Obama proposed the Trans-Pacific Pact to exclude China and directed an air and naval armada to the South China Sea. Obama established a high-powered surveillance system in South Korea and supported war exercises on North Korea’s border. Trump’s policy deepened and radicalized Obama’s policies.
Trump extended Obama’s bellicose policy toward North Korea, demanding the de-nuclearization of its defense program. President Kim of North Korea and President Moon of South Korea reached an agreement to open negotiations toward a peace accord ending nearly 60 years of hostility.
However, President Trump joined the conversation on the presumption that North Korea’s peace overtures were due to his threats of war and intimidation. He insisted that any peace settlement and end of economic sanctions would only be achieved by unilateral nuclear disarmament, the maintenance of US forces on the peninsula and supervision by US approved inspectors.
Trump’s unilateral declaration of a trade war against China accompanied his belief that military threats led to North Korea’s “capitulation” – its promise to end its nuclear program.
Trump slapped a trade tariff on over $100 billion dollars of Chinese exports in order to reduce its trade imbalance by $200 billion over two years. He demanded China unilaterally end industrial ‘espionage’, technological ‘theft’ (all phony accusations) and China’s compliance monitored quarterly by the US.
Trump demanded that China not retaliate with tariffs or restrictions or face bigger sanctions.
Trump threatened to respond to any reciprocal tariff by Beijing, with greater tariffs, and restrictions on Chinese goods and services.
Trump’s goals seek to convert North Korea into a military satellite encroaching on China’s northern border; and a trade war that drives China into an economic crisis.
Trump believes that as China declines as a world economic power, the US will grow and dominate the Asian and world economy.
Trump believes a successful trade war will lead to a successful military war. Trump believes that a submissive China, based on its isolation from the ‘dynamic’ US market, will enhance Washington’s quest for uncontested world domination.
Trump’s Ten Erroneous Thesis
Trump’s political agenda is deeply flawed!
Breaking the nuclear agreement and imposing harsh sanctions has isolated Trump from his European and Asian allies.
His military intervention will inflame a regional war that would destroy the Saudi oil fields. He will force Iran to pursue a nuclear shield against US-Israeli aggression and lead to a prolonged, costly and ultimately losing war.
Trump’s policies will unify all Iranians, liberals and nationalist, and undermine US collaborators.
The entire Muslim world will unify forces and carry the conflict throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Tel Aviv’s bombing will lead to counter-attacks in Israel.
Oil prices will skyrocket, financial markets will collapse, industries will go bankrupt.
Trump’s sanctions and military aggression against Iran will lead to mutual economic destruction.
Trump’s trade war with China will lead to the disruption of the supply chain which sustains the US economy and especially the 500 US multi-nationals who depend on the Chinese economy for exports to the US.
China will increase domestic consumption, diversify its markets and trading partners and reinforce its military alliance with Russia.
China has greater resilience and capacity to overcome short-term disruption and regain its dominant role as a global economic power house.
Wall Street will suffer a catastrophic financial collapse and send the US into a world depression.
Trump’s negotiations with North Korea will go nowhere as long as he demands unilateral nuclear disarmament, US military control over the peninsula and political isolation from China.
Kim will insist on the end of sanctions, and a mutual defense treaty with China.
Kim will offer to end nuclear testing but not nuclear weapons. After Trump’s reneged on the Iran deal, Kim will recognize that agreements with the US are not trustworthy.
Conclusion
Trump’s loud, threatening gestures are a real danger to world peace and justice. But his assumptions about the consequences of his policy are deeply flawed. There is no basis to think his sanctions will topple the Iranian regime; that Israel will survive unscathed from a war with Iran: that an oil war will not undermine the US economy; that Europe will allow its companies to be frozen out of the Iran market.
Trump’s trade war with China is dead in the water. He cannot find alternative production sites for US multi-nationals.
He cannot freeze China out of the world market, since they have links with five continents.
Trump cannot dominate North Korea and force it to sacrifice its sovereignty on the basis of empty economic promises to lift sanctions.
Trump is heading for defeats on all counts. But he may take the American people into the nuclear abyss in the process.
Epilogue
Are Trump’s threats of war part of a strategy of bluff and bombast designed to intimidate, in order to secure political advantages? Is Trump playing the Nixon-Kissinger ‘madman’ tactic, in which the Secretary of State tells adversaries to accept his ‘reasonable’ demands or face the worst from the President? I don’t think so.
Nixon, unlike Trump, was not led by the nose by Israel. Nixon, unlike Trump, was not led by pro-nuclear war advisers. Nixon, in contrast to Trump, opened the US to trade with China and signed nuclear reduction agreements with Russia.
Nixon successfully promoted peaceful co-existence.
Trump is a master of defeats.
© Copyright 2018 by AxisofLogic.com
May 14, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | North Korea, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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The International Monetary Fund issued a report analyzing possible inflation tendencies and warned of devaluation and drastic price increases. German analysts have commented on the issue in interviews with Sputnik.
“Things are getting more expensive,” Jochen Stanzl, a chief market analyst at the Frankfurt-based CMC Markets told Sputnik.
According to Stanzl, the important question — if the inflation occurs — is whether “central banks will be able to deal with it.”
“I believe central banks won’t be able to raise the rates as fast as they need to,” he said, adding that this is where the core problem lies.
His point of view is supported by Munich-based financial analyst Dimitri Speck.
“We are living in a heavily over-indebted world economy,” he told Sputnik.
“The global economy has never had such a high debt as now. And this debt, apparently, cannot be reduced by regular repayments, but rather by inflation or by the expropriation of private savings,” the expert argued.
According to Speck, inflation is a consequence of state action aimed at “creating demand” and “preventing banking crises.”
It is also used to “stimulate economy in the short run” and to wage wars.
“War is a very common reason for inflationary surges,” the analyst said. “I think this spending trend will gain force. The US is being hit first. The dollar is still the world’s leading currency. In Germany this tendency is, so far, not so evident,” Speck concluded.
In April, the IMF issued a report called “Global Financial Stability Report April 2018: A Bumpy Road Ahead” that warns of devaluation and inflation tendencies in the US economy, which could trigger a global domino effect. Experts warn that the inflation will cause a dramatic rise in costs of living, while income will also lose its value.
May 13, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics | United States |
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In an exclusive interview with Kathimerini, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied that the Syrian Army used chemical weapons against civilians, while taking aim at both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump.
Saying that Syria gave up its chemical arsenal in 2013, Assad said the
“Western narrative started after the victory of the Syrian Army, not before.”
He accused Erdogan of being “affiliated” with the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement and called Turkish troops “terrorists” over their intervention in Afrin.
As for Trump, who has called Assad an “animal,” the Syrian leader said it did not bother him “because I deal with the situation as a politician, as a president.”
Alexis Papachelas: There have been accusations from the US and the Europeans about the use of chemical weapons, and there was an attack after that. What is your response to that? Was there a chemical attack? Were you responsible for it?
President Bashar al-Assad: First of all, we don’t have a chemical arsenal since we gave it up in 2013, and the international agency for chemical weapons conducted investigations about this, and it’s clear or documented that we don’t have any. Second, even if we did have, we wouldn’t use them, for many different reasons. But let’s put these two points aside, let’s presume that this army has chemical weapons and it’s in the middle of the war; where should it be used? At the end of the battle? They should use it somewhere in the middle, or where the terrorists made an advancement, not where the army finished the battle and the terrorists gave up and said, “We are ready to leave the area,” and the army is fully in control of that area. So the Western narrative started after the victory of the Syrian Army, not before. When we finished the war, they said, “They used chemical weapons.”
Second, the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in a crammed area with a population like Douma – the supposed area, it’s called Douma and they talk about 45 victims – when you use WMD in such an area, you should have hundreds or maybe thousands of victims. Third, why do all the chemical weapons – the presumed or supposed chemical weapons – only kill children and women? They don’t kill militants. If you look at the videos, it’s completely fake. I mean, when you have chemical weapons, how could the doctors and nurses be safe, dealing with the chemical atmosphere without any protective clothes, without anything, just throwing water at the victims, and the victims become OK just because you washed them with water. So, it’s a farce, it’s a play, it’s a very primitive play, just to attack the Syrian Army, because… Why? That’s the most important part: When the terrorists lost, the US, France, the UK and their other allies who want to destabilize Syria lost one of their main cards, and that’s why they had to attack the Syrian Army, just to raise the morale of the terrorists and to prevent the Syrian Army from liberating more areas in Syria.
AP: Are you saying that there was a chemical attack and someone else is responsible, or that there was nothing there?
PBA: That’s the question, because the side who said – allegedly – that there was a chemical attack, had to prove that there was an attack. We have two scenarios: Either the terrorists had chemical weapons and they used them intentionally, or maybe there were explosions or something, or there was no attack at all, because in all the investigations in Douma, people said, “We didn’t have any chemical attack, we didn’t see any chemical gas or smell any,” and so on. So, we don’t have any indications about what happened. The Western narrative is about that, so that question should be directed at the Western officials who said there was an attack. We should ask them: Where is your concrete evidence about what happened? They only talk about reports. Reports could be allegations. Videos by the White Helmets – the White Helmets are funded by the British Foreign Office – and so on.
AP: In a tweet, US President Donald Trump described you as “animal Assad.” What is your response?
PBA: Actually, when you are president of a country, you have first of all to represent the morals of your people before representing your own morals. You are representing your country. Does this language represent the American culture? That is the question. This is very bad, and I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s a community in the world that has such language. Second, the good thing about Trump is that he expresses himself in a very transparent way, which is very good in that regard. Personally, I don’t care, because I deal with the situation as a politician, as a president. It doesn’t matter for me personally; what matters is whether something would affect me, would affect my country, our war, the terrorists, and the atmosphere that we are living in.
AP: He said “mission accomplished in Syria.” How do you feel about that?
PBA: I think maybe the only mission accomplished was when they helped ISIS escape from Raqqa, when they helped them, and it was proven by video, and under their cover. The leaders of ISIS escaped Raqqa, going toward Deir ez-Zor just to fight the Syrian Army. The other mission accomplished was when they attacked the Syrian Army at the end of 2016 in the area of Deir ez-Zor when ISIS was surrounding Deir ez-Zor, and the only force was the Syrian Army. The only force to defend that city from ISIS was the Syrian Army, and because of the Americans’ – and of course their allies’ – attack, Deir ez-Zor was on the brink of falling into the hands of ISIS. So, this is the only mission that was accomplished. If he’s talking about destroying Syria, of course that’s another mission accomplished. While if you talk about fighting terrorism, we all know very clearly that the only mission the United States has been carrying out in Syria is supporting the terrorists, regardless of their names, or the names of their factions.
AP: He also used such language with the North Korean leader, and now they’re going to meet. Could you potentially see yourself meeting with Trump? What would you tell him if you saw him face to face?
PBA: The first question you should ask is: What can you achieve? The other: What can we achieve with someone who says something before the campaign, and does the opposite after the campaign, who says something today, and does the opposite tomorrow, or maybe in the same day? So, it’s about consistency. Do they have the same frequency every day, or the same algorithm? So, I don’t think that in the meantime we can achieve anything with such an administration. A further reason is that we don’t think the president of that regime is in control. We all believe that the deep state, the real state, is in control, or is in control of every president, and that is nothing new. It has always been so in the United States, at least during the last 40 years, at least since Nixon, maybe before, but it’s becoming starker and starker, and the starkest case is Trump.
AP: When will you accomplish your mission, given the situation here in Syria now?
PBA: I have always said, without any interference, it will take less than a year to regain stability in Syria; I have no doubt about that. The other factor is how much support the terrorists receive, which is something I cannot tell you, because I cannot predict the future. But as long as it continues, time is not the main factor. The main factor is that someday, we’re going to end this conflict and we’re going to reunify Syria under the control of the government. When? I cannot say. I hope it’s going to be soon.
AP: There has been some criticism lately, because you apparently have a law that says that anybody who doesn’t claim their property within a month cannot come back. Is that a way to exclude some of the people who disagree with you?
PBA: No, we cannot dispossess anyone of their property by any law, because the constitution is very clear about the ownership of any Syrian citizen. This could be about the procedure. It’s not the first time we have had such a law just to replan the destroyed and the illegal areas, because you’re dealing with a mixture of destroyed and illegal suburbs in different parts of Syria. So, this law is not about dispossessing anyone. You cannot, I mean even if he’s a terrorist. Let’s say, if you want to dispossess someone, you need a verdict by the judicial system – you cannot make it happen by law. So, there’s either misinterpretation of that law, or an intention, let’s say, to create a new narrative about the Syrian government in order to rekindle the fire of public opinion in the West against the Syrian government. But about the law, even if you want a procedure, it’s about the local administration, it’s about the elected body in different areas, to implement that law, not the government.
AP: It is clear that your biggest allies in this fight are Russia and Iran. Are you worried they might play too important a role in the future of the country after this war is over?
PBA: If you talk about my allies as a president, they are the Syrian people. If you talk about Syria’s allies, of course they’re the Iranians and the Russians. They are our strongest allies, and of course China that supported us politically in the Security Council. As for them playing an important role in the future of the country, these countries respect Syria’s sovereignty and national decision making and provide support to insure them. Iran and Russia are the countries which respect Syria’s sovereignty the most.
AP: It’s been a few years since you visited Greece. Your father had a very close relation with some of the Greek political leaders. How have the relations been between Greece and Syria these days, and what kind of message would you like to send to the Greek people?
PBA: At the moment, there are no formal relations between Syria and Greece; the embassies are closed, so there are no relations. At the same time, Greece wasn’t aggressive towards what happened in Syria. It always supported a political solution, it never supported war or attacks against Syria. You didn’t play any role to support the terrorists, but at the same time, as a member – and an important member – of the EU, you couldn’t play any role, let’s say, in refraining the other countries from supporting the terrorists, violating the international law by attacking and besieging a sovereign country without any reason, without any mandate by the Security Council. So, we appreciate that Greece wasn’t aggressive, but at the same time, I think Greece has to play that role, because it’s part of our region. It is part of the EU geographically, but it’s a bridge between our region and the rest of Europe, and it’s going to be affected, and it has been affected by the refugee situation, and terrorism now has been affecting Europe for the last few years, and Greece is part of that continent. So, I think it’s normal for Greece to start to play its role in the EU in order to solve the problem in Syria and protect the international law.
AP: How about Turkey? Turkey invaded part of your country. You used to have a pretty good relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. How is that relationship now after the Turkish invasion?
PBA: First of all, this is an aggression, this is an occupation. Any single Turkish soldier on Syrian soil represents occupation. That doesn’t mean the Turkish people are our enemies. Only a few days ago, a political delegation visited from Turkey. We have to distinguish between the Turks in general and Erdogan. Erdogan is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe he’s not organized, but his affiliation is toward that ideology, I call it this dark ideology. And for him, because, like the West, when the terrorists lost control of different areas, and actually they couldn’t implement the agenda of Turkey or the West or Qatar or Saudi Arabia, somebody had to interfere. This is where the West interfered through the recent attacks on Syria, and this is where Erdogan was assigned by the West, mainly the United States, to interfere, to make the situation complicated, again because without this interference, the situation would have been resolved much faster. So, it’s not about personal relations. The core issue of the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world is to use Islam in order to take control of the government in your country, and to create multiple governments with this kind of relationship, like a network of Muslim Brotherhoods, around the world.
AP: At an election campaign rally this week, he said that he’s going to order another incursion into Syria. How are you going to respond to that if it happens?
PBA: Actually, Erdogan has supported the terrorists since the very beginning of the war, but at that time, he could hide behind words like “protecting the Syrian people,” “supporting the Syrian people,” “supporting the refugees,” “we are against the killing,” and so on. He was able to appear as a humanitarian president, let’s say. Now, because of these circumstances, he has to take off the mask and show himself as the aggressor, and this is the good thing. So, there is no big difference between the head of the Turkish regime sending his troops to Syria and supporting the terrorists; this is his proxy. So, we’ve been fighting his army for seven years. The difference between now and then is the appearance; the core is the same. At that time, we couldn’t talk about occupation – we could talk about supporting terrorists – but this time we can talk about occupation, which is the announcement of Erdogan that he’s now violating the international law, and this could be the good part of him announcing this.
AP: But how can you respond to that?
PBA: First of all, we are fighting the terrorists, and as I said, the terrorists for us are his army, they are the American army, the Saudi army. Forget about the different factions and who is going to finance those factions; at the end of the day, they work for one agenda, and those different players obey one master: the American master. Erdogan is not implementing his own agenda; he’s only implementing the American agenda, and the same goes for the other countries in this war. So, first of all, you have to fight the terrorists. Second, when you take control of more areas, you have to fight any aggressor, any army. The Turkish, French, whoever, they are all enemies; as long as they came to Syria illegally, they are our enemies.
AP: Are you worried about a third world war starting here in Syria? I mean, you have the Israelis hitting the Iranians here in your own country. You have the Russians, you have the Americans. Are you concerned about that possibility?
PBA: No, for one reason: Because fortunately, you have a wise leadership in Russia, and they know that the agenda of the deep state in the United States is to create a conflict. Since Trump’s campaign, the main agenda was against Russia, create a conflict with Russia, humiliate Russia, undermine Russia, and so on. And we’re still in the same process under different titles or by different means. Because of the wisdom of the Russians, we can avoid this. Maybe it’s not a full-blown third world war, but it is a world war, maybe in a different way, not like the second and the first, maybe it’s not nuclear, but it’s definitely not a cold war; it’s something more than a cold war, less than a full-blown war. And I hope we don’t see any direct conflict between these superpowers, because that is where things are going to get out of control for the rest of the world.
AP: Now, there’s a very important question about whether Syria can be a unified, fully sovereign country again. Is that really possible after all that has happened?
PBA: It depends on what the criteria of being unified or not is. The main factor to have a unified country is to have unification in the minds of the people, and vice versa. When those people look at each other as foreigners, they cannot live with each other, and that is where you’re going to have division. Now, let’s talk about facts and reality – not my opinion, I can tell you no, it’s not going to be divided, and of course we’re not going to accept that, but it’s not about my will or about my rhetoric, to say we’re going to be unified; it’s about the reality.
The reality, now, if you look at Syria during the crisis, not only today, since the very beginning, you see all the different spectrums of the Syrian society living with each other, and better than before. These relationships are better than before, maybe because of the effect of the war. If you look at the areas under the control of the terrorists, this is where you can see one color of the Syrian society, which is a very, very, very narrow color. If you want to talk about division, you have to see the line, the separation line between either ethnicities or sects or religions, something you don’t see. So, in reality, there’s no division till this moment; you only have areas under the control of the terrorists. But what led to that speculation? Because the United States is doing its utmost to give that control, especially now in the eastern part of Syria, to those terrorists in order to give the impression that Syria cannot be unified again. But it’s going to be unified; I don’t have any doubt about that.
AP: But why would the US do that if you’re fighting the same enemy: Islamic terrorism?
PBA: Because the US usually has an agenda and it has goals. If it cannot achieve its goals, it resorts to something different, which is to create chaos. Create chaos until the whole atmosphere changes, maybe because the different parties will give up, and they will give in to their goals, and this is where they can implement their goals again, or maybe they change their goals, but if they cannot achieve it, it’s better to weaken every party and create conflict, and this is not unique to Syria. This has been their policy for decades now in every area of this world.
AP: Looking back, do you feel you’ve made any mistakes in dealing with this crisis and the civil war, when it started?
PBA: If I don’t make mistakes, I’m not human; maybe on a daily basis sometimes. The more you work, the more complicate the situation, the more mistakes you are likely to make. But how do you protect yourself as much as possible from committing mistakes? First of all, you consult the largest proportion of the people, not only the institutions, including the parliament, syndicates, and so on, but also the largest number of people, or the largest part of society, to participate in every decision.
While if you talk about the way I behaved toward, or the way I led, let’s say, the government or the state during the war, the main pillars of the state’s policy were to fight terrorism – and I don’t think that fighting terrorism was wrong, to respond to the political initiatives from different parties externally and internally regardless of their intentions, to make a dialogue with everyone – including the militants, and finally to make reconciliation. So, about the pillars of our policy, I think the reality has proven that we were right. As for the details, of course, you always have mistakes.
AP: How much is it going to cost to reconstruct this country, and who is going to pay for that?
PBA: Hundreds of billions, the minimum is 200 billion, and according to some estimates it’s about 400 billion dollars. Why is it not precise? Because some areas are still under the control of the terrorists, so we couldn’t estimate precisely what the figure is. So, this is plus or minus, let’s say.
AP: There has been a lot of speculation. For example, people say in order for a political solution to be viable, you might have to sacrifice yourself for the good of the country. Is that something that has crossed your mind?
PBA: The main part of my future, as a politician, is two things: my will and the will of the Syrian people. Of course, the will of the Syrian people is more important than my will, my desire to be in that position or to help my country or to play a political role, because if I have that desire and will and I don’t have the public support, I can do nothing. After seven years of me being in that position, if I don’t have the majority of the Syrian people’s support, how could I hold it for more than seven years now, with all this animosity from the strongest and the richest countries? Who supports me? If the Syrian people are against me, how can I stay? So, when I feel that the Syrian people do not want me to stay anymore, of course I have to leave without any hesitation.
AP: A lot of blood has been spilt. Can you see yourself sitting across from the opposition and sharing power in some way?
PBA: When you talk about blood, you have to talk about who spilt that blood. I was president before the war for 10 years. Had I been killing the Syrian people for 10 years? No, definitely not. So, the conflict started because somebody, first of all part of the West, supported those terrorists, and they bear the responsibility for this war. So first of all the West, who provided military and financial support and political cover, and who stood against the Syrian people, who impoverished the Syrian people and created a better atmosphere for the terrorists to kill more Syrian people. So, part of the West, mainly France, UK, and US, and also Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey are responsible for this part. Of course blood has been spilt – it’s a war – but who’s responsible? Those who are responsible should be held accountable.
May 13, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | France, Syria, Turkiye, United States |
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WASHINGTON – With the 2018 Congressional midterm elections approaching, Republicans – eager to keep their control of both houses of Congress – have been seeking lucrative donations that would give Republican candidates an advantage in the lead-up to November.
On Thursday, those efforts paid off in a big way as the top Republican congressional political action committee (PAC), the Congressional Leadership Fund, secured a massive $30 million donation from Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s massive donation will account for just over 41 percent of all donations made to the group since January 2017.
According to Politico, the deal was brokered in part by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) even though, as a federally elected official, he is not permitted to solicit such eight-figure donations from private donors. In order to get around this inconvenience, Ryan briefly left the room while Norm Coleman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who was also present at the meeting, asked Adelson for the funds during Ryan’s conveniently timed absence, and thus secured the multi-million dollar contribution.
Adelson’s willingness to help the GOP stay in power come November is unsurprising. The Republican mega-donor gave heavily to the Trump campaign and Republicans in 2016, donating $35 million to the former and $55 million to the top two Republican Super PACs, the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund, during that election cycle.
Getting what he paid for, and more
After investing so heavily in the GOP in 2016, Adelson’s decision to again donate tens of millions of dollars to Republican efforts to stay in power is a direct consequence of how successfully Adelson has been able to influence U.S. policy since Trump and the GOP rode to victory in the last election cycle.
In his media appearances and past interviews with journalists, Adelson has always made it clear that he is a “one-issue voter” and that his central concern is always Israel. Adelson’s belief that Trump would be “good for Israel” was the main driver behind his decision to spend more than $90 million on helping Trump and other Republicans win in the last election.
While Trump’s campaign promises – particularly those populist and anti-war in nature – have rung hollow, the President has notably fulfilled his campaign promises that were of prime importance to Adelson. Those promises were the moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Adelson has aggressively promoted and is even helping to finance, and removing the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Adelson has also been successful in installing Iran war-hawks and pro-Israel stalwarts in the top government positions. Adelson-supported appointees include Nikki Haley, long-time recipient of Adelson campaign funds who now serves as U.S. ambassador to the UN; Mike Pompeo, former CIA director who has advocated for bombing Iran and now serves as secretary of state; and John Bolton, a close confidante of Adelson’s who is now National Security Adviser. Adelson was also instrumental in removing Pompeo and Bolton’s predecessors, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster, from their respective posts, due to their support for JCPOA.
If anything, Trump’s presidency has shown that, while Trump has left the promises he made to his base largely unfulfilled, he gladly keeps the promises made to his biggest donor. Adelson’s new donation to the Congressional Leadership Fund shows that he has been extremely pleased with the performance of Trump and the Republican Party.
An alarming vision and a hard line bordering on insanity
Though Adelson has successfully used his donations to obtain policy decisions he has long desired, his work is still not done. Adelson, like many of the government officials he has put into power, is an advocate of a U.S./Israel war with Iran. With the U.S. out of JCPOA and now set to promote regime change as part of its official Iran policy, the foundation is quickly being laid for a military confrontation with Iran. Israel, whose leadership is also funded by Adelson, is also busy preparing for a major conflict with Iran.
Adelson’s perspectives on U.S. foreign policy, particularly towards Iran, are alarming, given that his influence on U.S. politics is set to grow in the wake of his latest donation to the Republican party. For instance, in 2015, Adelson advocated for a U.S. nuclear attack on Iran without provocation, so the U.S. could “impose its demands [on Iran] from a position of strength” during the negotiations that eventually led to the JCPOA.
Per Adelson’s plan, the U.S. would drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of the Iranian desert and then threaten that “the next one is in the middle of Tehran” to show that “we mean business.” Tehran, Iran’s capital, is home to nearly 9 million people, with 15 million more in its suburbs. Were Tehran to be attacked with nuclear weapons, an estimated 7 million would die within seconds. Any sort of diplomatic engagement with Iran, according to Adelson, is “the worst negotiating tactic I could ever imagine.”
Adelson has also given millions of dollars to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-war think tank whose “experts” on Iran have pushed for pre-emptive military strikes targeting the country as well as blockades on food and medicine to Iranian civilians. He also has contributed nearly one-third of all donations to the anti-Iran group, United Against Nuclear Iran.
With a $30 million dollar infusion during a difficult and critical midterm election, the Republican party – with Trump still at the helm – will likely show its gratitude towards its most generous benefactor by continuing to heed his beck and call, including driving the U.S. to support a major military confrontation with Iran.
May 12, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Middle East, Paul Ryan, Sanctions against Iran, Sheldon Adelson, United States, Zionism |
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This weekend the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) celebrates its 60th anniversary. On May 12, 1958, Canada and the US officially signed their most significant bilateral military accord.
The Cold War agreement was supposed to defend the two countries from an invasion by Soviet bombers coming from the north. But, the Berlin Wall fell three decades ago and NORAD continues. In fact, the agreement was renewed indefinitely in 2006.
Initially NORAD focused on radar and fighter jets. As technologies advanced, the Command took up intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and space-based satellites.
Thousands of Canadian military personnel support NORAD’s operations. One hundred and fifty Canadians are stationed at NORAD’s central collection and coordination facility near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hundreds more work at regional NORAD outposts across the US and Canada and many pilots are devoted to the Command. A Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) general is deputy commander of NORAD and its commander-in-chief is a US Air Force general.
In the lead-up to its establishment newly elected Prime Minister John Diefenbaker faced “heavy pressure from the military” to back the agreement. Then chairman of the chiefs of defence staff, Charles Foulkes, later admitted to a House of Commons defence committee that “we stampeded the incoming Conservative government with the NORAD agreement.”
Before NORAD’s creation the RCAF had been expanding ties to the US command in Colorado Springs and misled the politicians about the scope of these efforts. In Dilemmas in Defence Decision-Making: constructing Canada’s role in NORAD, 1958 – 96 Ann Crosby points out that the RCAF pursued NORAD discussions secretly “in order to address the politically sensitive issues without the involvement of Canadian political representatives.”
While the Canadian Forces frame the alliance as an exclusively military matter, NORAD’s political implications are vast. The accord impinges on Canadian sovereignty, influences weapons procurement and ties Canada to US belligerence.
External Affairs officials immediately understood that NORAD would curtail sovereignty. An internal memo explained, “the establishment of NORAD is a decision for which there is no precedent in Canadian history in that it grants in peace time to a foreign representative operational control of an element of Canadian Forces in Canada.” Under the accord the Colorado-based commander of NORAD could deploy Canadian fighter jets based in this country without any express Canadian endorsement.
For over a decade the US commander of NORAD effectively controlled nuclear tipped Bomarc missiles based near North Bay, Ontario, and La Macaza, Québec. According to the agreement, the Canadian battle staff officer on duty in North Bay would receive authorization from the Colorado Springs commander, “allow[ing] for the release and firing of nuclear armed Bomarc missiles without specific Canadian government authorization.”
NORAD also deepened the US military footprint in Canada. As part of the accord, the US set up the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line across the Arctic in the late 1950s. NORAD also drove Ottawa to formally accept US Bomarc missiles in 1963. According to Crosby, the agreement that laid the basis for NORAD effectively – unbeknownst to Prime Minister Diefenbaker – committed Canada to acquiring US nuclear weapons for air defence.
NORAD has pushed the CF towards US arms systems. It’s also heightened pressure to add and upgrade radar, satellite, jets, vessels, etc. In the late 1950s the RCAF pushed for interceptor jets so Canada could be “a full partner in NORAD”. Air Marshal Hugh Campbell explained that “if Canada was not providing any effective weapons in the air defence system… Canada could no longer be a full partner in NORAD.” More recently, CBC reported that Canada may be “compelled to invest in technology that can shoot down cruise missiles as part of the upcoming overhaul of the North American Aerospace Defence Command.”
NORAD is presented as a defensive arrangement, but that can’t be taken seriously when its lead actor has 1,000 international bases and special forces deployed in 149 countries. Rather than protect Canada and the US, NORAD supports violent missions led by other US commands. In 1965 NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment sharing for US commands stationed worldwide (United States European Command, United States Pacific Command, United States Africa Command, etc.).
NORAD has drawn Canada into US belligerence. During the July 1958 US invasion of Lebanon NORAD was placed on “increased readiness” while US troops checked secular Arab nationalism after Iraqis toppled a Western-backed King (at the same time British troops invaded Jordan to prop up the monarchy there).
In a higher profile incident, Canadian NORAD personnel were put on high alert when the US illegally blockaded Cuba in October 1962. This transpired even though Prime Minister Diefenbaker hesitated in supporting US actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
During the 1973 Ramadan/Yom Kippur/Arab–Israeli War NORAD was placed on heightened alert. Washington wanted to deter the USSR from intervening on Egypt’s behalf.
NORAD systems offered surveillance and communications support to the 1991 war on Iraq. They also supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The same can be said for US bombing in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, etc.
Unfortunately, public opposition to NORAD has largely dried up. While anti-war activists won the NDP over to an ‘out of NORAD’ position in the 1960s, the party’s current defence critic recently complained that the Trudeau government hasn’t done more to strengthen the bilateral military accord. In November Randall Garrison criticized the Liberals for failing to follow its defence policy review’s recommendation to upgrade a multi-billion dollar early-warning radar system used by NORAD. In a story headlined “Conservatives, NDP call on Liberal government to match rhetoric with action on NORAD” Garrison told the Hill Times, “so they put in that they are going to replace it, and that’s certainly the biggest thing we need to do in terms of our cooperation with NORAD, [but] I don’t see the follow through down the road on it, in terms of planning, implementation, or budgeting.”
As NORAD turns 60, it’s time to rekindle opposition to this odious accord.
May 12, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Canada, NORAD, United States |
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Much of the study of Islamophobia is directed at the social and political causes and manifestations, including religious and political dimensions and racist characteristics. However, Islamophobia is also used as a strategic tool or weapon; i.e., in pursuit of national agenda.
Many of us are familiar with Islamophobic movements within the Buddhist majority in Myanmar (against the Rohingya minority), and within Hindu nationalist parties in India. It is important to note, however, that it is characteristic of these movements that they direct their Islamophobia against particular groups of Muslims within their own societies, and are less concerned with creating an international movement against Islam.
This is what makes the case of Israel unique. Although Israel, like Myanmar and India, seeks to marginalize and ultimately eliminate a specific population of Muslims – in this case the mostly Muslim Palestinians – part of its strategy for doing so includes encouraging and fostering Islamophobia internationally. Thus, for example, Israel has successfully pursued strong military and diplomatic ties with the governments of Myanmar and India, and especially the Islamophobic movements within those countries.
It is clear, therefore, that Islamophobia within Israel is not only a matter of organized bigotry and social hatred, which one finds in other societies, but also of instrumentalizing or weaponizing Islamophobia as a strategic tool to legitimize and justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the territories under Israel’s control, as well as to support Israeli aggression towards other mostly Muslim countries in the region. Promoting and fostering Islamophobia internationally helps to increase and solidify international support for the Zionist genocidal project. It is therefore treated as an important tool of Israeli and Zionist international influence.
My attention was first brought to this fact in casual but unusual circumstances. In early 1993 my family and I were on vacation at a Club Med in France where there were also Israeli intelligence officers and their families. I got into a discussion with one in particular, who said that with the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam would replace communism as the new enemy. It sounded a bit far-fetched, but in retrospect he knew what he was talking about, and more important, he was in a position to help make it happen, which of course it did.
The groundwork was laid much earlier. As Deepa Kumar at Rutgers University reports, the effort to tie Islam to terrorism started at a Zionist funded neoconservative conference on international terrorism in 1979. Then, after a second such conference in 1984, “both US neocons and Zionists worked together to convince Western policy makers that ‘Islamic terrorism’ would replace communism as the West’s next great threat. By tying Islam to terrorism, neocons would gain political cover for their imperialistic ambitions in the Middle East, and Zionists would benefit from garnering Western sympathies for their struggle against Palestinian ‘terrorism.’”
Since then, researchers like Sarah Marusek, David Miller and others have cataloged international Zionist networks that sponsor Islamophobic propaganda and policies. The work of Pamela Geller and the so-called American Freedom Defense Initiative is one of the well-known examples. Geller’s anti-Islam billboards and bus advertisements are familiar to many, as well her so-called “Muhammed Art Exhibit and Contest” in Garland, Texas in 2015, resulting in the police killing of two armed men.
Geller is hardly alone, however. According to the Center for American Progress, the US has six major organizations that manipulate Islamophobia in order to further US support for Israel. These are the Center for Security Policy, the Society of Americans for National Existence, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch, Stop Islamization of America, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Sarah Marusek includes even more groups in her paper entitled “The Transatlantic Network: Funding Islamophobia and Israeli Settlements”, published in the anthology, What is Islamophobia?
These organizations constitute a network, as Marusek says, but the complete network is much wider and more diverse than the assets concerned with promoting Islamophobia. They are known as the sayanim, the Hebrew word for helpers or assistants, and are composed of Zionists who have achieved important and useful positions in societies from which they can exercise powerful initiatives, especially when they operate in concert. Thus, for example, friendly journalists can work with lobbyists and others to quickly and massively spread influence, information, analysis and disinformation that are useful to Israel.
Such initiatives require coordination, intelligence, strategic planning, covert action, technical assistance, and other expertise. For many years, the sayanim were coordinated by the Mossad. However, following a 2010 report from the influential Reut Institute (a prestigious strategic think tank in Israel), organizational changes were made that moved such responsibility to the Ministry of International Relations, Intelligence and Strategic Affairs – better known as the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The report also notes that there are as many as 4,000 sayanim in each of the major centers of power and influence, such as London and New York. A concentration of sayanim in important sectors of society that inform the public, such as film, entertainment, journalism, education and social media permits them to help shape public opinion.
In line with Reut Institute recommendations, the Strategic Affairs Ministry has grown in size and secrecy over the last decade. Reut projected that Israel’s main strategic threat would no longer be to its military security but rather to its image and influence in other countries, especially the US and Europe. According to this view, BDS was to be regarded as a serious threat, as well as the human rights NGOs, Palestine solidarity groups and the critical alternative press. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs was therefore selected to coordinate a major new effort to combat this perceived threat.
The Strategic Affairs Ministry has informally been called the Hasbara Ministry, using the Hebrew word for explanation or propaganda. It certainly is that, but also much more. The reorganization of the Strategic Affairs Ministry can be compared in scope to that of the Homeland Security Department. A lot of security and intelligence functions were transferred from or shared with Mossad. The Ministry became responsible for propaganda, influence and manipulation in other countries. Coordination of the sayanim became part of its purview, as did thousands of students who were paid or received scholarships in return for haunting social media and the comments sections of websites. The purpose was to dominate the media, insofar as possible, in countries vital to Israel’s plans and intentions, and to sway public opinion toward outcomes determined by Israel’s strategic goals.
Many readers are familiar with the “Brand Israel” campaign. Its function, suggested by the Reut Institute, is to mold Israel’s image in the media of the US and other countries. Its tactics are PR on steroids, such as, for example, slipping subliminal questions into the Jeopardy quiz program and idyllic holy land vacations into Wheel of Fortune, but permeating nearly everything we see, hear and read in film, entertainment, journalism, education and social media for the purpose of molding public opinion. With enough effort of this kind, we will presumably think of Israel as Disneyland.
Another example is Facebook and the personal collaboration between Mark Zuckerberg and Benjamin Netanyahu. After a meeting with Netanyahu, Zuckerberg hired a former employee at the Israeli embassy in Washington to be in charge of censoring so-called “fake news” on Facebook. Only Facebook has the actual figures of who gets censored, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that a lot more anti-Zionists than Zionists are affected. Similarly, Islamophobic postings and Tweets seem to be at least somewhat resistant to censorship compared to ones that are labeled anti-Semitic (which are often merely critical of Israel).
But it’s not just about making Israel look like the good guys. Demonizing and dehumanizing Muslims also helps to justify Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, as well as its belligerent policies toward its mainly Muslim neighboring countries. A successful program of Islamophobia helps to support Israel’s pogroms of Palestinians in Gaza, its settlements in and economic strangulation of the West Bank, its invasions of Lebanon, its attacks against Syria, and its promotion of US wars against Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Making the US military a proxy for Israel greatly multiplies Israel’s capability, which is why Israel and its US lobby are working hard to create a new international war against Iran.
In order to provide the Strategic Affairs Ministry with all possible means of making such operations possible and successful, it has been assigned some important intelligence functions, including black ops and psy-ops capabilities, which used to be the exclusive purview of the Mossad. This gives the ministry greater capability to engage in digging up or inventing dirt about people it wants to harm or discredit, especially in the BDS movement and other pro-Palestinian groups.
The hand of the Strategic Affairs Ministry is not always obvious, and it takes care to shun the light. But occasionally its actions become known, as with the Aljazeera exposé of Israeli operative Shai Masot, working from the Israeli embassy in London and coordinating the actions of British citizens working with Israel. He coached them on how to demonize and “take down” members of parliament, including the Foreign Office Minister, Alan Duncan, who was considered insufficiently supportive of the effort to suppress BDS.
Al Jazeera has produced a similar exposé on the workings of Israel and its US lobby, but the release has been indefinitely delayed, which may be an indication of Israel’s power and influence and the effectiveness of the operations coordinated by the Strategic Affairs Ministry. Nevertheless, a glimpse of such operations can be seen in the 2004 espionage indictments against AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. The indictments were ultimately dropped, partly because sensitive information would have to be revealed in order to successfully prosecute the cases (or perhaps that was just the excuse used to cover the fact that Tel Aviv gets to decide who gets prosecuted, not Washington).
France can be considered an extreme case. People have been arrested there for wearing a Free Palestine T-shirt. PayPal and several large banks in France recently closed the accounts of all organizations that support BDS, which has been ruled anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is broadly defined, as you can see, and it is illegal in France. You can be fined or jailed for practicing it.
But not for Islamophobia. Islamophobia is free speech but anti-Semitism is racism. In fact, the French equivalent of AIPAC, known as CRIF, has publically declared that “Islamophobia is not a form of racism. We have long drawn attention to the danger of conflating Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. To do so would impede all criticism of Islam, such that the fundamental rights of [other] religions could not be respected. The CRIF will therefore block all resolutions against Islamophobia”.
The writings of Jacob Cohen are instructive in this regard. He has published a remarkable and very comprehensive exposé on the promotion of Islamophobia in France, including the actions of Israeli operatives and French Zionist organizations. But there’s a catch. In order to publish it in France without being arrested or sued, he has to disguise it as very thinly veiled fiction, in this case O.P.A. Kabbalistique sur les Nouveaux Indigènes. It is available only in French, but even in that language you have to know the persons and groups to which he refers with pseudonyms, and few outsiders know the French scene well enough to recognize more than a handful of them.
So what can we conclude from all this information about the involvement of Israel and the Zionist movement in sponsoring Islamophobia? The point is that some sources of Islamophobia are not attitudes or social structures. We have to face the fact that there is a very potent, resourceful, well organized and well funded international movement that sees Islamophobia as a strategic tool in pursuit of its national interest. For this reason, it is largely impervious to education or negotiation or legal considerations.
In fact, Israel is also pursuing an apparently contradictory effort to encourage interfaith cooperation between Jews, Muslims and Christians, but with the same goal in mind. That goal is to blunt criticism of Israel, whether by getting people to hate Muslims and thereby endorse Israel’s belligerence and ethnic cleansing, or by pressuring Muslims not to criticize Israel out of concern for potentially offending their Jewish brothers and sisters. Since the two strategies are aimed at different populations, I suppose that they might be able to work simultaneously. This is often how PR campaigns work.
The point is that in all the efforts at fostering tolerance and understanding we are faced with an adversary that is working quite diligently in the opposite direction for reasons that have nothing to do with how they view Islam as a religion or Muslims. This is therefore a different type of challenge in trying to overcome Islamophobia.
• This article is a revised version of a paper read at the 9th Annual Islamophobia Conference in Berkeley, California, April 29, 2018.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
May 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Facebook, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Nearly everyone loses by President Donald Trump’s decision on Tuesday to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) relating to Iran’s nuclear energy program and to reinstate the “highest level” of sanctions while also threatening secondary sanctions on any country that “helps” the Iranians. The whole world loses because nuclear proliferation is a disaster waiting to happen and Iran will now have a strong incentive to proceed with a weapons program to defend itself from Israel and the United States. If Iran does so, it will trigger a regional nuclear arms race with Saudi Arabia and Egypt undoubtedly seeking weapons of their own.
Iran and the Iranian people will lose because their suffering economy will not now benefit from the lifting of sanctions and other economic inducements that convinced it to sign the agreement in the first place. And yes, even the United States and Israel will lose because an agreement that would have pushed back by ten or fifteen years Iran’s timetable if it were to choose to develop a weapon will now be reduced to a year or less. And the United States will in particular lose because the entire world will understand that the word of an American president when entering into an international agreement cannot be trusted.
The only winners from the withdrawal are President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will enjoy the plaudits of their hardline supporters. But their victory will be illusory as the hard reality of what they have accomplished becomes clear.
Failure of JCPOA definitely means that war is the only likely outcome if Tel Aviv and Washington continue in their absurd insistence that the Iranians constitute a major threat both to the region and the world. A war that might possibly involve both the United States and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel would devastate the region and might easily have potential to escalate into something like a global conflict.
The decision to end the agreement is based on American domestic political considerations rather than any real analysis of what the intelligence community has been reporting. Deep-pocketed Iran-hating billionaires named Sheldon Adelson, Rebekah Mercer and Paul Singer are now prepared to throw tens of millions of dollars at Trump’s Republican Party to help it win in November’s midterm elections.
Those possessed of just a tad more foresight, to include the Pentagon and America’s European allies, have strongly urged that JCPOA be continued, particularly as the Iranians have been fully in compliance, but there is a new team in Washington. America’s just-confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not exactly endorse the ludicrous Israeli claim made by Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks ago that Iran has a secret weapons of mass destruction program currently in place, but he did come down hard against the JCPOA, echoing Trump in calling it a terrible agreement that will guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapon. The reality is quite different, with the pact basically eliminating a possible Iranian nuke for the foreseeable future through degradation of the country’s nuclear research, reduction of its existing nuclear stocks and repeated intrusive inspections.
The failure of the JCPOA is not about the agreement at all, which is both sound and workable. There is unfortunately an Israeli-White House construct which assumes that Iran is both out to destroy Israel, for which no evidence has been revealed, as well as being singularly untrustworthy, an odd assertion coming from either Washington or Tel Aviv. It also basically rejects any kind of agreement with the Iranian government on principle so there is nowhere to go to “fix” what has already transpired.
The United States has changed in the past seventeen years. The promotion of policies that were at least tenuously based on genuine national interests is no longer embraced by either political party. A fearful public has allowed a national security state to replace a constitutional republic with endless war as the inevitable result. Presidents once constitutionally constrained by legislative and judicial balance of power have successfully asserted executive privilege to become like third world dictators, able to make war without any restraint on their ability to do so. If America survives, historians will no doubt see the destruction of the JCPOA as the beginning of something new and horrible, where the government of these United States deliberately made a decision to abandon a beneficial foreign treaty to instead opt for a path that can only lead to war.
May 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, JCPOA, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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The Turning on Russia Series
In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same. The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests, was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand. At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation ; “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.” But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.
With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and Committee on the Present Danger would set about to make American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East, interchangeable.
The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.
Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour declaration of 1917. This long term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.
It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”
Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse “farm teams” including liberal Catholics… populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest… With the exception of Middle East strategy… there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons… the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”
Add to that the abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II – the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948 – and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.
Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”
The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.
Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.
Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right-wing. By the 1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stoner Saunder’s describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.”
But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable. In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream; the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.’”
The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.
As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism – it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists… The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”
Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”
In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”
Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
May 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | AIPAC, JINSA, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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This all happened by accident. This isn’t who we are. We didn’t mean it. Honest.
Gina Haspel is almost certainly going to be the next director of the CIA. This shouldn’t happen, but it will.
For those unfamiliar: Haspel was deputy head of the Agency under now-secretary of state Mike Pompeo. But that wasn’t her first job. She also oversaw the CIA torture programme in a secret black-site in Thailand. In 2005 she was promoted (probably because she’s really good at torturing people), and was then in charge of the CIA’s global network of torture sites.
This makes her a terrible person, but probably quite a good CIA agent.
Just to be clear, this is not a theory a rumor or a smear. Nobody debates these facts. This was her job. She supervised torture camps.
The response in the press is pretty disheartening, to be honest. Or, at least would have been, before reading the news and being outraged became my full-time unpaid job.
NBC said it makes her a “controversial” figure.
This story, from CNBC, went with a beautifully disgusting headline:
Trump picks Gina Haspel as first female CIA director—her history with torture could hamper her confirmation
Her “history with torture” doesn’t mean she should be in prison, doesn’t mean she’s an inhuman monster, doesn’t even make her exempt from government office, no. It just might be a bit of a complication. Like a drunk-driving conviction or an affair with a porn star. Torturing people is an embarrassing faux pas.
CNN reports:
She could be the first woman ever to run the CIA
… deciding to headline her genitalia rather than her long history of breaking international law. I would suggest “She could be the first torturer to ever run the CIA” as a better headline. It is, unfortunately, not true… but that’s never stopped CNN before.
The HuffPo at least has the sense to be seemingly undecided about it, just not in the way that you’d think:
Gina Haspel’s dark past makes her a complicated figure for feminists to support.
“Complicated” to support, is an interesting phrase. Some might have gone with “impossible” or “morally repugnant”. Trying to turn this into some kind of ethical quandary for feminists is offensive. Rather like the Guardian’s pitiful attempts to show the sympathetic side of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib torture pictures.
Speaking of The Guardian… our trusty friend has a new story on Haspel today… its headline?
Gina Haspel must atone for her past to become CIA director
They don’t exactly say how one “atones” for a past as a professional torturer, but then this is The Guardian. There’s not to reason why, there’s just to puff out comfy certitude.
It refers to the detention and torture of people who were never charged or faced trial as “one of the darker chapters in modern US history”… which feels so much like simultaneous under and over statement, it’s actually hard to correct.
It’s NOT one of the darker chapters in US history, ancient or recent. But only because of everything else The Guardian refuses to report on. Torturing a few hundred people is nothing compared to starving 500,000 Iraqi children to death, when you think about it.
The Western press tend to talk about torture as if it was a temporary blip, an accident. A speed bump on our moral high-road. It is none of those things. The West LOVES torture, we have a long tradition of it. The CIA wrote handbooks on it in the 1960s. America tortured people for decades before they got caught. They claim to have stopped now, but they would have claimed they never started… before the leaks happened. It’s almost certainly still going on. Believing otherwise is just naive.
Our side tortures people. People who probably don’t know anything and never did anything.
… not that being guilty or having information justifies torture. That’s the rhetorical trap the media sets around torture. The debate about “effectiveness”.
We don’t ban torture because it doesn’t work, just like we don’t eat babies because it’s expensive and we don’t ban slavery because it’s really hard to find good chains. Even addressing the pragmatic angle is inappropriate. Torture is wrong, and a civilised society does not question that fact.
Of course, the “moral ambiguities” around torture are only for our side. The other side have no ambiguity. If they use torture – even only allegedly – then they are evil. Assad’s (thus far theoretical) torture prisons are one of the reasons we should invade Syria. (You remember, Amnesty International recreated one using echo-location). Unfounded accusations of torture have been levelled at Cuba and Venezuela over the years too.
It’s “torture” when they do it, you understand. Not “enhanced interrogation”. It’s “not who we are”, but it IS who THEY are.
For all that, Barack Obama remains the only modern leader to publicly admit to the use of torture. Remember that when the pronouncements about “our enemies” start flying around.
We have documented, and confessed, cases of using torture. Assad and Putin, Tehran and Beijing, Venezuela and Cuba, do not.
And the people who carried out this torture? They’re getting promoted.
Imagine Putin admitted the FSB tortured Chechens who had committed no crimes, and then appointed one of the torturers as head of the FSB. Would our press demand he “atone” for his dark past? Would we call him a “controversial” figure? Or would there be long editorials about Russia “thumbing their noses at international norms”?
Gina Haspel is a war criminal. The Hague was literally made for people like her. But she will never be charged, she will never be tried, she will never be hanged. Because she’s one of OUR monsters, doing dark deeds for our side. She will face no reckoning from us, instead we ask only that she “atone”, whatever that means.
It is so easy to forgive the crimes of the monsters you create.
May 9, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Human rights, United States |
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The United States is so far doing virtually no trade with Iran anyway. In 2017 total US exports to Iran were just 138 million dollars, and total imports a mere 63 million dollars, figures entirely insignificant to the US economy. By contrast, for the EU as a whole imports and exports to Iran were each a very much more substantial 8 billion dollars in 2017 and projected to rise to over 10 billion dollars in 2018.
There is one very significant US deal in the pipeline, for sale of Boeing aircraft, worth $18 billion dollars. It will now be cancelled.
Which brings us to the crux of the argument. Can America make its will hold? Airbus also has orders from Iran of over US$20 billion, and it is assumed those orders will be stopped too, because Airbus planes contain parts and technology licensed from the US. It is possible, but unlikely, that the US could grant a waiver to Airbus – highly unlikely because Boeing would be furious.
Now even a $20 billion order is probably in itself not quite big enough for Airbus to redevelop aircraft to be built without the US parts or technology (which constitute about 8% of the cost of an airbus). But the loss of a $20 billion order on such capricious grounds is certainly big enough for Airbus to look to future long term R & D to develop aircraft not vulnerable to US content blocking. And if Iran were to dangle the Boeing order towards Airbus too, a $38 billion order is certainly big enough for Airbus to think about what adaptations may be possible on a timescale of years not decades.
Read across from aircraft to many other industries. In seeking to impose unilateral sanctions against the express wishes of its “old” European allies, the USA is betting that it has sufficient global economic power, in alliance with its “new” Israeli and Saudi allies, to force the Europeans to bend to its will. This is plainly a very rash act of global geopolitics. It is perhaps an even more rash economic gamble.
We are yet to see the detail, but by all precedent Trump’s Iran sanctions will also sanction third country companies which trade with Iran, at the least through attacking their transactions through US financial institutions and by sanctioning their US affiliates. But at a time when US share of the world economy and world trade is steadily shrinking, this encouragement to European and Asian companies to firewall and minimise contact with the US is most unlikely to be long term beneficial to the US. In particular, in a period where it is already obvious that the years of the US dollar’s undisputed dominance as the world currency of reference are drawing to a close, the incentive to employ non-US linked means of financial transaction will add to an already highly significant global trend.
In short, if the US fails to prevent Europe and Asia’s burgeoning trade with Iran – and I think they will fail – this moment will be seen by historians as a key marker in US decline as a world power.
I have chosen not to focus on the more startling short term dangers of war in the Middle East, and the folly of encouraging Saudi Arabia and Israel in their promotion of sustained violence against Iranian interests throughout the region, as I have written very extensively on that subject. But the feeling of empowerment Trump will have given to his fellow sociopaths Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Salman bodes very ill indeed for the world at present.
I shall be most surprised if we do not see increased US/Israeli/Saudi sponsored jihadist attacks in Syria, and in Lebanon following Hezbollah’s new national electoral victory. Hezbollah’s democratic advance has stunned and infuriated the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia but been reported very sparsely in the MSM, as it very much goes against the neo-con narrative. It does not alter the positions of President or Prime Minister, constitutionally allocated by religion, but it does increase Hezbollah’s power in the Lebanese state, and thus Iranian influence.
Iran is a difficult country to predict. I hope they will stick to the agreement and wait to see how Europe is able to adapt, before taking any rash decisions. They face, however, not only the provocation of Trump but the probability of a renewed wave of anti-Shia violence from Pakistan to Lebanon, designed to provoke Iran into reaction. These will be a tense few weeks. I do not think even Netanyahu is crazy enough to launch an early air strike on Iran itself, but I would not willingly bet my life on it.
The problem is, with Russia committed to holding a military balance in the Middle East, all of us are betting our lives on it.
May 9, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia, United States, Zionism |
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Against all common sense, moral considerations and international law, U.S. President Donald Trump tonight decided to place the United States outside the international so-called community and isolate itself, not Iran.
He withdrew the United States from what is one of the most important negotiated peace-oriented agreements that have ever been signed: the one that prevents Iran (if it has ever wanted to) from acquiring nuclear weapons: The Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, JCPOA, of July 2015 – all about this agreement and its text here).
Noteworthy is that the nuclear deal is incorporated into international law by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, even though the U.S. already at that point stated – as an exceptionalist state – that it did not consider the deal binding for it.
With the exception of Germany, the deal was negotiated – cynically, of course – by countries which have themselves thousands of nuclear weapons.
It never mentioned the only state in the region that possesses them, against international law in the form of UN resolutions and, additionally, has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That state is Israel whose nuclear weapons Western politicians and their loyal, politically correct media omit mention of – as systematically and uniformly as if orchestrated by an invisible hand from above.
Back in 2014-15, many of us stated that the alternative to a negotiated deal would be war. I am still of the belief that President Trump’s announcement tonight will turn out to be a declaration of war on Iran. A series of developments since then in the Middle East point dangerously in the same direction.
Towards the end, his speech was extremely bellicose and one long systematic violation of the UN Charter’s Article 2.4 that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
Without a doubt, both the decision itself, the way it was announced as well as the threats stated relating to the future was nothing but a series of indisputable violations of the UN Charter. For all practical purposes he seems also to question that Iran has the right to self-defence according to the UN Charter’s Article 51.
It cannot be deemed acceptable that the U.S. or Israel or any other country can deny Iran a right to have conventional missiles and other military equipment, at least not as long as other countries – including these two exceptionalist and nuclear-armed countries – have much more of such weapons themselves and there are no international agreements that prohibit such types of weapons.
Who has and who has not honoured the JCPOA?
It’s the United States that has never honoured its commitments according to the JCPOA: Old sanctions not lifted fully, new sanctions installed, and control by the US Treasury of all currency exchange that takes place via the dollar with the aim of punishing corporations and banks that trade and invest in Iran.
Towards the end, Trump declared his admiration for and non-conflict with the Iranian people.
But since 1979 his country has done everything in its power to cause troubles, economic in particular, to the Iranian people. He seems to now have a perverse joy in announcing new sanctions and – well, at the end of the long road kill people: Remember the 13 years of sanctions on Iraq that killed more innocent Iraqis than the military invasion and occupation did? Trump’s sanctions are open-ended.
In contrast to this, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and all other experts, Iran has fulfilled its side of the agreement in every detail.
CNN states on the page where the announcement was made: “Note: The Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense have all said in last two months they are complying with the deal.” (“They” being the Iranians, JO).
Trump’s reference to Israeli PM Netanyauhu’s stand-up comedian-like speech a few days ago only shows how incredibly little evidence his administration has as that speech has been debunked completely by a series of independent experts, including Gareth Porter here. In addition, it was 1992 when Mr. Netanyahu first began talking about Iran attempting to go nuclear.
No wonder the West talks about fighting fake because others use fake. No wonder it blames others for international law violations. It’s called psycho-political projection of one’s own dark sides. And nuclear weapons and threats and lies belong to the dark sides.
Why Iran is not a threat
Unfortunately for the US militarist foreign policy circles, Iran is not a threat to the US or its allies. It pure nonsense.
For more than 250 years Iran has not invaded anyone – not exactly a record the West and Israel can match. Iran is in Syria fighting the terrorism which the U.S. allegedly fights too since 9/11 2001 (with the marvelous result that 17 years later 80 times more people worldwide are being killed in political terror actions than back then).
Iran is in Syria upon invitation by the legitimate government of Syria and, thus, in compliance with international law. So is, by the way, Russia. Whereas every other state or group – NATO allies, friends like Saudi Arabia and Israel on Syrian land, sea and air territory or through money, weapons and terrorism-support are involved through gross violation of international law, including the UN Charter.
Is Iran a big military power?
To judge that, let’s see what the just published figures by SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, tell.
The military expenditures of Iran with 80+ million people and a huge territory is US$ 15 billion. In the event of an attack on Iran, it may – may… – be supported by Russia or China but that is unlikely.
Who must Iran perceive as the likely coalition to attack it? It depends of course on who starts it – if Israel should start it, it would hardly do so without a prior green light by the U.S. and its commitment to help out. Saudi-Arabia is now the third largest military power in military expenditure terms, i.e. larger than Russia.
Israel’s military expenditures are US$ 16 billion – larger than Iran’s with a population about 1/10 of Iran. And, remember, Israel has nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia has been building up against Iran for a long time and built a coalition. Saudi military expenditures stand at US$ 69 billion. Oman’s are US$ 9 billion. Bahrain US$ 1 billion. So, a little dependent on one’s geo-political assumptions and hypotheses, we arrive at Iran US $ 15 billion against 16+69+9+1 = 95 or a 15:95 regional ratio.
It’s inconceivable that the U.S., France and the U.K. would not intervene. Indeed, the U.S. tonight declared war on Iran.
The military expenditures of the United States stand at US$ 610 billion, France at US$ 69 billion and the United Kingdom at US$ 47 billion.
So, is Iran a threat? Is Iran likely to start a war?
No matter what you might otherwise think of Iran, it is not a threat. It knows very well that it has 4 nuclear weapons states against it and a group of adversaries and Iran-hating leaderships whose combined military expenditures are, roughly speaking and according to the latest figures, a combined US$ 820 billion and way more technically sophisticated. And it knows that while its own military expenditures are US $ 16 billion – that the combined, thinkable international coalition that could get involved in a war in and around Iran is 55 times more resourceful in military terms.
So forget it. It’s exemplary fake foreign policy nonsense.
They are neither mentally ill nor suicidal in Tehran. In addition, in sharp contrast to almost all its potential military enemies, it is defensive in is military posture and foreign policy. Iran has gained strength in the region mostly because Western/NATO countries have produced one devastating, predictable war fiasco after the other.
Will the friends of the U.S. have the civil courage to speak up and take action now?
Will the NATO allies and EU friends – who have been woefully incapable of showing solidarity with Iran by standing up against the United States’ permanent non-commitment to and violation of the JCPOA – now be able to change course?
Why have they so submissively and leaderlessly avoided setting down their feet and saying to Washington: Dear friend, we will take action against you if you withdraw from the JCPOA because that step endangers all of us, could release a new round of violence, make the Second Cold War with Russia even colder and send millions of refugees our way. That will be our red line, a concept you surely understand!
Did NATO/EU really believe that President Macron’s and Chancellor Merkel’s pathetic appeasement attempts – such as talking in favour of a new agreement because the JCPOA “is not enough” – at the White House stage would charm and persuade Trump and his war-mongering, neo-con, militarist team with obsessed Iran-haters such as Trump, Bolton and Pompeo?
Of course: Neither NATO allies – or a country such as Sweden for that matter – will show the necessary civil courage to stand up against Donald Trump’s reckless de facto war declaration on Iran tonight. They will talk and express concern, in the best of cases.
For years, they have taken order from His Master’s Voice, their state-financed institutional researchers and military academy experts have had about the same freedom of creativity as their former colleagues had in the German Democratic Republic, at the time. Loud and clear criticism of U.S. foreign policy still a taboo?
For how long? With how much more pain brought down on innocent people in foreign lands?
And it is anyhow too late now. NATO/EU allies have not dared to speak truth to the Captain:
“The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”
-Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” (1965)
The major ones likely to stand with Iran in this dark hour are Russia and China.
And Iran will need – and deserves – our sympathy. If there ever was a case for the need of standing with the Iranian people, this is it.
They have suffered more than enough over decades – yes due to the domestic corruption and economic mismanagement but in particular due to these suffocating sanctions. And it is the people – anywhere and therefore in Iran too – who will pay the highest price, as did – and still do – the Serbian people, the Afghan people, the Iraqi people, the Libyan people, the Syrian people and the Yemeni people, to mention a few.
Whether the – deceptively “soft” sanctions which over years turn into Weapons of Mass Destruction – or bombings, invasions, arms trade, splitting of sovereign states and other war crimes: the innocent citizens who never touched a gun are always and without exception those who suffer most.
Nobody believes a word of your statement about your respect and admiration of the Iranian people, Mr. Trump. With this step you obviously could not care less about their welfare and the peace of the region.
What should ideally be done now?
Just a few – non-violent – ideas that reflect what should be relevant to discuss objectively and in proportion to the violation of international law and ignorance of the common global good that the U.S. by its president’s statement is solely responsible for:
+ Allies and friends of the U.S. impose selected economic sanctions on the U.S. leadership to not only talk but show that they mean business.
+ Allies and friends of the U.S. summon the U.S. ambassadors to their countries for hard talk.
+ Allies and friends threaten to close U.S. military bases in their countries and demand withdrawal of U.S. troops (and secret forces) from them.
+ Everybody begin to practice civil disobedience against the U.S. by trading, investing and otherwise cooperating with Iran, its people and institutions. After all, the U.S. is now deliberately trying to bully everybody else in whose interest it is to cooperate in various ways with Iran. If enough countries, corporations and banks just ignore the U.S. threats, the U.S. legal system will not be able to handle all these cases.
+ More countries should now decide to trade oil in other currencies than the US dollar.
+ Citizens around the world go visiting Iran, see and hear for themselves what the well-educated, cultured, hospitable and discussion-happy Iranians are truly like – because the mainstream media and politicians have provided close to no information about the people, culture, history – and suffering – of the Iranian people but only conveyed negative perspectives and images conducive to confrontation and future warfare.
+ In addition: people-to-people exchanges below and above the state level is always peace-promoting and, secondly – it’s way more difficult to accept military activity against countries you know from your own experience and in which you have made friends. So, as much citizens diplomacy as possible! Now!
– All until the U.S. backs down from its new sanctions, stops violating international law also verbally in its dealings with Iran and, finally, accepts that other countries do what is in their interest vis-a-vis Iran without Washington’s intimidation, threats or other preventive actions. If you leave a deal because you think it is in your interest, you cannot also influence its outcome and legitimately prevent others from acting in their best interest. It’s as simple as that!
Was this a declaration of war?
I think: Yes. However, the U.S. doesn’t bother about declaring war, it just does them.
From now on the U.S. will invent reasons for confronting Iran, accusing Iran, threatening Iran. It will feel more free to do so being outside the deal. The only countries that are happy about the announced policy are those already ganging up against Iran.
The rest of the world will distance themselves or condemn this step – but it is not likely that the U.S. will listen. It’s constitutionally unable to, seeing itself as the Exceptionalist, Chosen Country, the global ruler. # 1 in a system tends to teach and not learn…
It doesn’t necessarily mean war on Iran tomorrow. I hope by all my heart that I’m wrong and it will never happen.
But given Trump’s decision and all the other events and trends and coalition-building against Iran since 2015, it is much much more difficult from today to ignore the risk of a US-led attack or war on Iran.
We must remember that the US conflict with Iran is not only about nuclear weapons but also about a long and very conflictual relationship since the CIA-led coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 (who had the cheek to believe that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranians). It’s about today’s Syria, Israel, Saudi-Arabia and, since yesterday, Iran-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And – perhaps less easy to grasp but perhaps most importantly – it’s about the decline of US Empire worldwide and, therefore, an ever-increasing reliance on that last power dimension where the U.S. is still second to none: the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex.
The hammer will be used if it is the only tool in the toolbox no matter the problem to be fixed.
As a postscript, here is an interview with me on Iran’s international PressTV made nine hours before President Trump’s announcement. Another will follow that was made right after it and as a comment also on Iranian President Rouhani’s very balanced, moderate reaction to it.
May 9, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, JCPOA, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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