#israel used to refuse negotiations on the pretext that there was no one to negotiate with because they were in political danger if they

[wainswright]

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/blinken-says-hamas-signal-support-un-backed-gaza-truce-deal-is-hopeful-sign-2024-06-11/

You cannot say “hamas is one sidedly rejecting peace.”

[thethief1996]

700 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours and the airstrikes are more violent each night. Gaza's hospitals have fuel left for two more days. Israel only allowed aid into Gaza on the condition they didn't carry fuel. The Indonesian hospital has shut down already, because doctors have no supplies and no choice but to let the wounded die. They're calling it a collapse but the term doesn't do it justice.

Over a 100 incubator babies are at risk. There are 50.000 pregnant women in Gaza right now, and 5.500 due to give birth this month. Menstruating people are taking pills in order to stop their periods, because they do not have pads or water to maintain hygiene. Surgeons are operating without anesthesia. Water is not reaching Gazans because there's no electricity or fuel for water pumps.

There's no excuse for this. Israel justifies the airstrikes by saying they want to destroy Hamas infrastructure and release the hostages, but they have refused to negotiate for their release. Hamas informed Israel they wanted to release two elderly women without anything in return, and Israel refused. Netanyahu said they wouldn't take their own civilians back because it was "mendacious propaganda." When the hostages were finally released, Netanyahu prohibited the hospital from giving press releases. Yocheved Lifshitz went behind their backs and talked to the press anyway, saying she was treated very well by Hamas, but the government abandoned them. They're being used as straw men. Israel is conditioning the entry of fuel to the release of hostages and yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, when Hamas proposed to exchange 50 hostages for fuel they denied. IDF officials have said they fear the release of more hostages because that might withhold the order to their ground invasion. They do not care as long as they can use the hostages as a pretext for their slaughtering.

There's a turning tide for Palestine in public support. Support for Israel was built through decades of propaganda and we are making a dent into it. Zionists are desperate, holding zoom meetings to promote zionism, but we have to do so much more. We have to shame people in power into supporting the Palestinian cause.

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices, looking to inform yourself from the sources. Palestinians have asked of us only that we share, tweet and post, over and over. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera

Anadolu Agency

Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement

Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)

Al-Shabaka (twitter / instagram)

Mariam Barghouti (twitter / instagram)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza

Take action. You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting (don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. Only boycott additional brands if you can):

Carrefour

HP

Puma

Sabra

Sodastream

Ahava cosmetics

Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate. Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London. Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN GERMANY: Here's a toolkit to contact your representatives by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN IRELAND: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN POLAND: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN DENMARK: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN SWEDEN: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Global calendar

USA calendar

Australia calendar

Here are upcoming events:

CANBERRA/NGUNNAWAL, AUSTRALIA – Wed Oct 25, 11 am, National Press Club. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cyh1xy1BMrU/

OXFORD, ENGLAND – Wed Oct 25, 12:15 pm, Cornmarket. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/CykroKeInz3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

SMITH COLLEGE (US) – Wed Oct 25, 12 pm, Chapin Lawn. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/CymT8f5vnHN/?img_index=1

ST CATHERINES, ON ( CANADA) – Wed Oct 25, 6 pm, 61 Geneva St Info: https://www.facebook.com/events/889319005528757/

TORONTO, CANADA – Wed Oct 25, 5 pm, Sidney Smith Hall. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/CyjVbpGvva8/

SANT CUGAT, CATALONIA, SPAIN – Thurs Oct 26, 6 pm, Davant l’Ajuntament. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/CynL834tgg9/?img_index=4

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – Fri Oct 27, 7 pm, Federation Square. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cyhyd0vhP8t/

LIVORNO, ITALY – Sat Oct 28, 2:30 pm, Piazza Cavour. Info https://www.instagram.com/p/CyiWJ06MXpM/

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (US) – Sat Oct 28, 1 pm, Lake Street and Minnehaha.

ROME, ITALY – Sat Oct 28, Rome. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cyi7ey-MMs1/?img_index=1

ROME, ITALY – Sat Nov 4, Rome. Info TBA: https://www.instagram.com/p/CyndKUitnMU/

WASHINGTON, DC (USA) – Sat Nov 4, 12 pm, White House. Info: https://www.instagram.com/p/CyiecRtr9-B/

Wollongong: Rally at Crown Street Mall Amphitheatre on 21 Oct at 1 PM

Melbourne: Blak and Palestinian Solidarity Rally at Victorian Parliament House Steps on 25 Oct at 6 PM

HOUSTON: Thursday, October 26th, 5:45PM, Rice University, Central Quad

VANCOUVER: OCT 28 at 2PM, Vancouver Art Gallery

KITCHENER: Wednesday October 25th at 5 PM at CBC Kitchener

SANTA ANA: 20 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana, CA 92701, October 25th at 5:30 pm

TORONTO: WED. OCT 25 at 7PM at Queen's Park

[CAR RALLY] WASHINGTON D.C: Wednesday 10/25 outside the US State Department on the 23rd Street side

Feel free to add more.

[redbards]

Palestine Conference in Berlin impeded by police - Here's what happened

[translated from Perspektive Online, 14. April 2024]

The so-called "Palestine Congress", at which the role of Germany in the ongoing Gaza war would be discussed, was harassed and made impossible by the Berlin police shortly after it began. For weeks, bourgeois German press and politicians stirred up a smear campaign.

On Friday, April 12, after just a few hours and only one full speech, the event scheduled for the whole weekend was ended and banned by the police under enormous repression. The "Palestine Congress" was supported and organized by a broad alliance of left-wing and Palestine solidarity groups.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza and the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the aim was to discuss the legal, humanitarian and political context of the situation in Palestine and Israel and, in particular, the German state's support for the Israeli war. The congress was held under the slogan "Palestine accuses" - "accused" was the German state.

Since the mobilization and ticket sales for the three-day event began, a wave of hostility, racism and even outright incitement has poured over the organizers and their environment. There was talk of a "hate congress" and that the "anti-Semites of the world" wanted to gather in Berlin. As a result, the congress with lectures and workshops had its venues cancelled several times after pressure was exerted on the organizers. As the culmination of the repression in the run-up to the event, a ban on the congress was demanded.

Start of the event - Repression comes to a head

On Friday morning, a few hours before the start of the congress, a press conference was convened. Among other things, the goals and demands of the organizers were stated: A ceasefire in the current Gaza war, humanitarian aid as well as the opening of the border and a stop to German arms deliveries to Israel.

The first provocations already took place outside the press conference rooms. A small pro-Israeli counter-demonstration gathered on a street corner. The police presence was enormous. Some journalists from the media outlets, that had previously been actively involved in the smear campaign against the congress, turned up and demanded entry to the press conference. However, there was only limited space in the small rooms.

An "alliance against anti-Semitic terror" jointly opposed the event. In a statement from the critics they claimed that glorification of terror and calls for the destruction of Israel were to be expected. The alliance is backed by various organizations such as the Amadeu Antonio Foundation as well as politicians from the FDP, SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU and Left Party.

Repression at the venue

The congress was due to begin at 2 p.m. in an office building in Berlin-Tempelhof. Here, too, the police were on site in advance with dozens of police vans. Around 800 tickets had been sold for the congress and participants began to gather in front of the venue. However, the police quickly decided, under various pretexts, that only around 250 people would be allowed into the room.

When the congress started delayed by several hours, there were more police officers than participants in the room, according to eyewitnesses. The police unilaterally defined the waiting ticket holders in front of the building as an unregistered assembly and began to read out instructions and directly threaten to evict them. In the end, the assembly was registered and people started shouting Palestine solidarity slogans out of necessity, but also out of conviction. The police refused to negotiate and banned all other people from entering the event.

The congress itself then also fell victim to state repression: the police used the pretext of potential "incitement of the people" as early as the second item on the program to ban the entire congress. The rooms were stormed, the electricity was cut off and arrests were made.

The reason was a stream with the Palestinian academic Salman Abu Sittah. The German government banned several guest speakers from entering the country. The politician Yannis Varoufakis, the surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitteh, who is active in Gaza, and the well-known journalist Ali Abunimeh also faced entry bans.

"They take our rooms, we take the streets".

The congress was subsequently canceled by the organizers. It was impossible to hold a congress under these conditions. Instead, a demonstration through the center of Berlin was called for Saturday afternoon. The slogan was: "They take our rooms, we take the streets".

The protest camp in front of the Bundestag also received a massive influx of people as a result of the events. People from different backgrounds have been camping there for several days against Germany's complicity in the Gaza war on the side of Israel. The protesters spoke of a "error by the police" and a historic "Day 1 after the Palestine Congress". How the resistance will now develop remains to be seen. There will probably not be another congress.

[32427minden]

A team of 85 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Peru on June 3 to help the Andean nation tackle the coronavirus pandemic. That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced another tightening of the sanctions screws. This time he targeted seven Cuban entities, including Fincimex, one of the principal financial institutions handling remittances to the country. Also targeted was Marriott International, which was ordered to cease operations in Cuba, and other companies in the tourism sector, an industry that constitutes 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP and has been devastated globally by the pandemic. It seems that the more Cuba helps the world, the more it gets hammered by the Trump administration. While Cuba has endured a U.S. embargo for nearly 60 years, Trump has revved up the stakes with a “maximum pressure” strategy that includes more than 90 economic measures placed against the nation since January 2019. Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, called the measures “unprecedented in their level of aggression and scope” and designed to “deprive the country of income for the development of the economy.” Since its inception, the embargo has cost Cuba well over $130 billion dollars, according to a 2018 estimate. In 2018-2019 alone, the economic impact was $4 billion, a figure that does not include the impact of a June 2019 Trump administration travel ban aimed at harming the tourist industry. While the embargo is supposed to have humanitarian exemptions, the health sector has not been spared. Cuba is known worldwide for its universal public healthcare system, but the embargo has led to shortages of medicines and medical supplies, particularly for patients with AIDS and cancer. Doctors at Cuba’s National Institute of Oncology have had to amputate the lower limbs of children with cancer because the American companies that have a monopoly on the technology can’t sell it to Cuba. In the midst of the pandemic, the U.S. blocked a donation of facemasks and COVID-19 diagnostic kits from Chinese billionaire Jack Ma. Not content to sabotage Cuba’s domestic health sector, the Trump administration has been attacking Cuba’s international medical assistance, from the teams fighting coronavirus today to those who have travelled all over the world since the 1960’s providing services to underserved communities in 164 countries. The U.S. goal is to cut the island’s income now that the provision of these services has surpassed tourism as Cuba’s number one source of revenue. Labeling these volunteer medical teams “victims of human trafficking” because part of their salaries goes to pay for Cuba’s healthcare system, the Trump administration convinced Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil to end their cooperation agreements with Cuban doctors. Pompeo then applauded the leaders of these countries for refusing “to turn a blind eye” to Cuba’s alleged abuses. The triumphalism was short lived: a month after that quote, the Bolsonaro government in Brazil begged Cuba to resend its doctors amid the pandemic. U.S. allies all over the world, including in Qatar, Kuwait, South Africa, Italy, Honduras and Peru have gratefully accepted this Cuban aid. So great is the admiration for Cuban doctors that a global campaign has sprung up to award them the Nobel Peace Prize. The Trump administration is not just libelling doctors, but the whole country.  In May, the State Department named Cuba as one of five countries “not cooperating fully” in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The main pretext was the nation’s hosting of members of Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN). Yet even the State Department’s own press release notes that ELN members are in Cuba as a result of “peace negotiation protocols.” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the charges dishonest and “facilitated by the ungrateful attitude of the Colombian government” that broke off talks with the ELN in 2019. It should also be noted that Ecuador was the original host of the ELN-Colombia talks, but Cuba was asked to step in after the Moreno government abdicated its responsibilities in 2018. The classification of Cuba as “not cooperating” with counterterrorism could lead to Cuba being placed on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, which carries tougher penalties. This idea was floated by a senior Trump administration official to Reuters last month. Cuba had been on this list from 1982 to 2015, despite that fact that, according to former State Department official Jason Blazakis, “it was legally determined that Cuba was not actively engaged in violence that could be defined as terrorism under any credible definition of the word.” Of course, the United States is in no position to claim that other countries do not cooperate in counterterrorism. For years, the U.S. harbored Luis Posada Carriles, mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban civilian airplane in 1976 that killed 73 people. More recently, the U.S. has yet to even comment on the April 30 attack on the Cuban Embassy in Washington D.C., when a man fired on the building with an automatic rifle. While there are certainly right-wing ideologues like Secretary Pompeo and Senator Rubio orchestrating Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, for Trump himself, Cuba is all about the U.S. elections. His hard line against the tiny island nation may have helped swing the Florida gubernatorial campaign during the midterm elections, yet it’s not clear that this will serve him well in a presidential year. According to conventional wisdom and polls, younger Cuban-Americans – who like most young people, don’t tend to vote in midterms – are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. embargo, and overall, Cuba isn’t the overriding issue for Cuban-Americans. Trump won the Cuban-American vote in 2016, but Hillary Clinton took between 41 and 47% percent of that electorate, significantly higher than any Democrat in decades. As an electoral strategy, these are signs that Trump’s aggression towards Cuba may not pay off. Of course, the strategy might not be just about votes but also about financing and ensuring that the Cuban-American political machinery is firmly behind Trump. The strategy has certainly not paid off when it comes to achieving the goal of regime change. The Trump administration is arguably farther from achieving regime change in Cuba now than the U.S. has ever been in over 60 years of intervention. During Trump’s tenure, Cuba calmly transitioned from the presidency of Raul Castro to that of Miguel Díaz-Canel. In 2019, Cuban voters overwhelmingly ratified a new constitution. These aren’t signs of a country on the brink of collapse. All Trump has achieved is making life more difficult for the island’s 11 million inhabitants, who, like people all over the world, have been battered by the economic impact from coronavirus. Tourism has collapsed. Income from remittances has tanked (both because of new U.S. restrictions and less income in the hands of the Cuban diaspora). Venezuela, once a major benefactor, is mired in its own crisis. But Cuba’s economy, which was forecast to contract by 3.7% before the pandemic hit, has been through worse, particularly during the 1991 to 2000 economic crisis known as the “special period” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A change in the White House would bring some relief, although Joe Biden has staked a rather ambivalent position, saying he would restore relations as President Obama did, but adding that he was open to using sanctions as punishment for Cuba’s support to the Venezuelan government. It’s clear that from now until November, and perhaps for four more years, the Trump administration will pummel its island neighbor. Cuba will continue to seek global condemnation on the blockade (the 2019 UN vote was 187 against vs 3 in favor—the U.S., Brazil and Israel) and continue to show what a good neighbor looks like. It responded to these latest provocations in the way that only Cuba does: with more global solidarity, sending Covid-19 healing brigades to Guinea and Kuwait a day after the June 3 round of sanctions. A total of 26 countries now have Cuban medical personnel caring for their sick. That is the kind of goodwill that money just can’t buy and it greatly presents a stark contrast to the Trump administration’s shameful behavior during the pandemic. Back in March, as Cuban doctors arrived in Italy, former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa tweeted: “One day we will tell our children that, after decades of movies and propaganda, at the moment of truth, when humanity needed help at a time when the great powers were in hiding, Cuban doctors began to arrive, without asking anything in return.” Medea Benjamin is an author/activist, and cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK. Leonardo Flores is a Latin American policy expert and a campaign coordinator with CODEPINK. For more on the Nobel Prize for Cuban Doctors campaign, see www.cubanobel.org.

https://countercurrents.org/2020/06/trump-hammers-cuba-while-cuba-cures-the-sick/

[yeltsinsstar]

Some of the US interventions in the Middle-East since 1945

1949: Syria:

The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za'im, who became President of Syria on April 11, 1949. Za'im had extensive connections to CIA operatives.

1952: Egypt

Project FF  or Fat Fucker was a Central Intelligence Agency project in Egypt, aimed at pressuring King Farouk into  political reforms. The project was masterminded by CIA Director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, CIA operative Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt Jr., and CIA Station Chief in Cairo Miles Copeland, Jr. However, due to the unwillingness of Farouk to change, the project moved to support his overthrow, and Roosevelt secretly met with the Free Officers Movement, which overthrew Farouk in a coup d'état led by General Mohammed Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser on 23 July 1952.

1953: Iran

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, (known in Iran as the "28 Mordad coup") was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 19, 1953, orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot") and the United States (under the name "TPAJAX Project").

1956–1957: Syria 

In 1956 Operation Straggle was a coup plot against Syria. The CIA made plans for a coup for late October 1956 to topple the Syrian government. The plan entailed takeover by the Syrian military of key cities and border crossings. The plan was postponed when Israel invaded Egypt in October 1956 and US planners thought their operation would be unsuccessful at a time when the Arab world is fighting "Israeli aggression." The operation was uncovered and American plotters had to flee the country. 

In 1957 Operation Wappen was a coup plan against Syria. A second coup attempt the following year called for assassination of key senior Syrian officials, staged military incidents on the Syrian border to be blamed on Syria and then to be used as pretext for invasion by Iraqi and Jordanian troops, an intense US propaganda campaign targeting the Syrian population, and "sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities" to be blamed on Damascus. This operation failed when Syrian military officers paid off with millions of dollars in bribes to carry out the coup revealed the plot to Syrian intelligence. The U.S. Department of State denied accusation of a coup attempt and along with US media accused Syria of being a "satellite" of the USSR.

There was also an assassination plot later, called "The Preffered Plan", in 1957 against many leaders in Syria. There would be a Free Syria committee set up and outside invasion would be encouraged. However this plan was never put through 

1958: Lebanon 

The U.S. launched Operation Blue Bat in July 1958 to intervene in the 1958 Lebanon crisis. This was the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine, according to which the U.S. was to intervene to protect regimes it considered threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt. 

1959: Iraq

The October 1959 assassination attempt on Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim involving a young Saddam Hussein and other Ba'athist conspirators may have been a collaboration between the CIA and Egyptian intelligence. (There are conflicting reports on this one.)

1963: Iraq 

Similar conflicting reports over US involvement in the February 1963 Iraqi coup.

1972–1975: Iraq 

The U.S. secretly provided millions of dollars for the Kurdish insurgency supported by Iran against the Iraqi government. The U.S. role was so secret even the US State Department and the U.S. "40 Committee," created to oversee covert operations, were not informed. The troops of the Kurdish Democratic Party were led by Mustafa Barzani. Notably, unbeknownst to the Kurds, this was a covert regime change action the US wanted to fail, intended only to drain the resources of the country. The U.S. abruptly ceased support for the Kurds in 1975 and, despite Kurdish pleas for help, refused to extend even humanitarian aid to the thousands of Kurdish refugees created as a result of the collapse of the insurgency.

(Note that Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds is not the first time the US has done so).

1977–1988: Pakistan 

Operation Fair Play was the code name for the 5 July 1977 coup by Pakistan Chief of Army Staff General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, overthrowing the government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The coup itself was bloodless, and was preceded by social unrest and political conflict between the ruling leftist Pakistan Peoples Party government of Bhutto, and the right-wing Islamist opposition Pakistan National Alliance which accused Bhutto of rigging the 1977 general elections. In announcing the coup, Zia promised "free and fair elections" within 90 days, but these were repeatedly postponed on the excuse of accountability and it was not until 1985 that ("party-less") general elections were held. Zia himself stayed in power for eleven years until his death in a plane crash.

The coup was a watershed event in the Cold War and in the history of the country. The coup took place nearly six years after the 1971 war with India which ended with the secession of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. The period following the coup saw the "Islamisation of Pakistan" and Pakistan's involvement with the Afghan Mujahideen (funded by US and Saudi Arabia) in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

1979–1989: Afghanistan 

In what was known as "Operation Cyclone," the U.S. government secretly provided weapons and funding for a collection of warlords and several factions of Jihadi guerrillas known as the Mujahideen of Afghanistan fighting to overthrow the Afghan government and the Soviet military forces that supported it. Although Operation Cyclone officially ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, U.S. government funding for the Mujahideen continued through 1992, when the Mujahideen overran the Afghan government in Kabul. 

1994–2000: Iraq (post Gulf War)

The CIA launched DBACHILLES, a coup d'état operation against the Iraqi government, recruiting Ayad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord, a network of Iraqis who opposed the Saddam Hussein government, as part of the operation. The network included Iraqi military and intelligence officers but was penetrated by people loyal to the Iraqi government. Also using Ayad Allawi and his network, the CIA directed a government sabotage and bombing campaign in Baghdad between 1992 and 1995, against targets that—according to the Iraqi government at the time—killed many civilians including people in a crowded movie theater. The CIA bombing campaign may have been merely a test of the operational capacity of the CIA's network of assets on the ground and not intended to be the launch of the coup strike itself. The coup was unsuccessful, but Ayad Allawi was later installed as prime minister of Iraq by the Iraq Interim Governing Council, which had been created by the U.S.-led coalition following the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. As a non-covert measure, the U.S. in 1998 enacted the "Iraq Liberation Act," which states, in part, that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," and appropriated funds for U.S. aid "to the Iraqi democratic opposition organizations."

2003 to present: Iraq 

 The USA invades Iraq after falsely claiming Iraqi involvement in 9-11 and that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. See: Iraq War 

2006–07: Palestinian territories 

The U.S. government pressured the Fatah faction of the Palestinian leadership to topple the Hamas government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The Bush Administration was displeased with the government that the majority of the Palestinian people elected in the January Palestinian legislative election of 2006. The U.S. government set up a secret training and armaments program that received tens of millions of dollars in Congressional funding, but also, like in the Iran-contra scandal, a more secret Congress-circumventing source of funding for Fatah to launch a bloody war against the Haniyeh government. The war was brutal, with many casualties and with Fatah kidnapping and torturing civilian leaders of Hamas, sometimes in front of their own families, and setting fire to a university in Gaza. When the government of Saudi Arabia attempted to negotiate a truce between the sides so as to avoid a wide-scale Palestinian civil war, the U.S. government pressured Fatah to reject the Saudi plan and to continue the effort to topple the Haniyeh government. Ultimately, the Haniyeh government was prevented from ruling over all of the Palestinian territories, with Hamas retreating to the Gaza strip and Fatah retreating to the West Bank.

2006–present: Syria 

Since 2006, the State Department has funneled at least $6 million to the anti-government satellite channel Barada TV, associated with the exile group Movement for Justice and Development in Syria. This secret backing continued under the Obama administration, even as the US publicly rebuilt relations with Bashar Al-Assad. 

This was followed by intervention in the Syrian Civil War, in part to combat ISIS/ISIL, with the USA supporting Syrian & Iraqi Kurdish forces. The US, under the Trump administration then abandoned the Syria Kurds to a Turkish intervention in 2019.

2007: Iran

In 2007, the Bush administration requested and received funding from Congress for covert actions in Iran that, according to a presidential finding that Bush signed, had the goal of undermining Iran's religious leadership. 

2011: Libya

The United States has been active in post-2011 Libya with the military carrying out sporadic airstrikes and raids in the country, predominantly against Islamist groups. 

2015–present: Yemen

The U.S. has been supporting the intervention by Saudi Arabia in the Yemeni Civil War. The Yemeni Civil War began in 2015 between two sides, each claiming at that time to support the legitimate government of Yemen.

The U.S. military provides targeting assistance and intelligence and logistical support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign, including aerial refueling. The US also provides weapons and bombs, including, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, cluster bombs outlawed in much of the world and used by Saudi Arabia in the conflict. The United States also supports the war effort on the ground with Green Berets on the Yemen border with Saudi Arabia tasked initially to help the Saudis secure the border and later expanded to help locate and destroy Houthi ballistic missile caches and launch sites in what Senator Tim Kaine called a “purposeful blurring of lines between train and equip missions and combat.” The US has been criticized for providing weapons and bombs knowing that Saudi bombing has been indiscriminately targeting civilians and violating the laws of war.

[genelutz]

Chomsky “A hideous atrocity”

“A Hideous Atrocity”: Noam Chomsky on Israel’s Assault on Gaza & U.S. Support for the Occupation

Hideous. Sadistic. Vicious. Murderous. That is how Noam Chomsky describes Israel’s 29-day offensive in Gaza that killed nearly 1,900 people and left almost 10,000 people injured. Chomsky has written extensively about the Israel/Palestine conflict for decades. After Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Chomsky co-authored the book “Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians” with Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé. His other books on the Israel/Palestine conflict include “Peace in the Middle East?: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood” and “The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians.” Chomsky is a world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 50 years.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To talk more about the crisis in Gaza, we go now to Boston, where we are joined by Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years. He has written extensively about the Israel-Palestine conflict for decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Forty years ago this month, Noam Chomsky published Peace in the Middle East?: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood. His 1983 book, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, is known as one of the definitive works on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Professor Chomsky joins us from Boston.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Noam. Please first just comment, since we haven’t spoken to you throughout the Israeli assault on Gaza. Your comments on what has just taken place?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises in what they delicately call “mowing the lawn.” That means shooting fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage that you’ve constructed for them, after which you go to a period of what’s called “ceasefire,” which means that Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel concedes, while Israel continues to violate it. Then it’s broken by an Israeli escalation, Hamas reaction. Then you have period of “mowing the lawn.” This one is, in many ways, more sadistic and vicious even than the earlier ones.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what of the pretext that Israel used to launch these attacks? Could you talk about that and to what degree you feel it had any validity?

NOAM CHOMSKY: As high Israeli officials concede, Hamas had observed the previous ceasefire for 19 months. The previous episode of “mowing the lawn” was in November 2012. There was a ceasefire. The ceasefire terms were that Hamas would not fire rockets—what they call rockets—and Israel would move to end the blockade and stop attacking what they call militants in Gaza. Hamas lived up to it. Israel concedes that.

In April of this year, an event took place which horrified the Israeli government: A unity agreement was formed between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah. Israel has been desperately trying to prevent that for a long time. There’s a background we could talk about, but it’s important. Anyhow, the unity agreement came. Israel was furious. They got even more upset when the U.S. more or less endorsed it, which is a big blow to them. They launched a rampage in the West Bank.

What was used as a pretext was the brutal murder of three settler teenagers. There was a pretense that they were alive, though they knew they were dead. That allowed a huge—and, of course, they blamed it right away on Hamas. They have yet to produce a particle of evidence, and in fact their own highest leading authorities pointed out right away that the killers were probably from a kind of a rogue clan in Hebron, the Qawasmeh clan, which turns out apparently to be true. They’ve been a thorn in the sides of Hamas for years. They don’t follow their orders.

But anyway, that gave the opportunity for a rampage in the West Bank, arresting hundreds of people, re-arresting many who had been released, mostly targeted on Hamas. Killings increased. Finally, there was a Hamas response: the so-called rocket attacks. And that gave the opportunity for “mowing the lawn” again.

AMY GOODMAN: You said that Israel does this periodically, Noam Chomsky. Why do they do this periodically?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Because they want to maintain a certain situation. There’s a background. For over 20 years, Israel has been dedicated, with U.S. support, to separating Gaza from the West Bank. That’s in direct violation of the terms of the Oslo Accord 20 years ago, which declared that the West Bank and Gaza are a single territorial entity whose integrity must be preserved. But for rogue states, solemn agreements are just an invitation to do whatever you want. So Israel, with U.S. backing, has been committed to keeping them separate.

And there’s a good reason for that. Just look at the map. If Gaza is the only outlet to the outside world for any eventual Palestinian entity, whatever it might be, the West Bank—if separated from Gaza, the West Bank is essentially imprisoned—Israel on one side, the Jordanian dictatorship on the other. Furthermore, Israel is systematically driving Palestinians out of the Jordan Valley, sinking wells, building settlements. They first call them military zones, then put in settlements—the usual story. That would mean that whatever cantons are left for Palestinians in the West Bank, after Israel takes what it wants and integrates it into Israel, they would be completely imprisoned. Gaza would be an outlet to the outside world, so therefore keeping them separate from one another is a high goal of policy, U.S. and Israeli policy.

And the unity agreement threatened that. Threatened something else Israel has been claiming for years. One of its arguments for kind of evading negotiations is: How can they negotiate with the Palestinians when they’re divided? Well, OK, so if they’re not divided, you lose that argument. But the more significant one is simply the geostrategic one, which is what I described. So the unity government was a real threat, along with the tepid, but real, endorsement of it by the United States, and they immediately reacted.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Noam, what do you make of the—as you say, Israel seeks to maintain the status quo, while at the same time continuing to create a new reality on the ground of expanded settlements. What do you make of the continued refusal of one administration after another here in the United States, which officially is opposed to the settlement expansion, to refuse to call Israel to the table on this attempt to create its own reality on the ground?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, your phrase “officially opposed” is quite correct. But we can look at—you know, you have to distinguish the rhetoric of a government from its actions, and the rhetoric of political leaders from their actions. That should be obvious. So we can see how committed the U.S. is to this policy, easily. For example, in February 2011, the U.N. Security Council considered a resolution which called for—which called on Israel to terminate its expansion of settlements. Notice that the expansion of settlements is not really the issue. It’s the settlements. The settlements, the infrastructure development, all of this is in gross violation of international law. That’s been determined by the Security Council, the International Court of Justice. Practically every country in the world, outside of Israel, recognizes this. But this was a resolution calling for an end to expansion of settlements—official U.S. policy. What happened? Obama vetoed the resolution. That tells you something.

Furthermore, the official statement to Israel about the settlement expansion is accompanied by what in diplomatic language is called a wink—a quiet indication that we don’t really mean it. So, for example, Obama’s latest condemnation of the recent, as he puts it, violence on all sides was accompanied by sending more military aid to Israel. Well, they can understand that. And that’s been true all along. In fact, when Obama came into office, he made the usual statements against settlement expansion. And his administration was—spokespersons were asked in press conferences whether Obama would do anything about it, the way the first George Bush did something—mild sanctions—to block settlement expansions. And the answer was, “No, this is just symbolic.” Well, that tells the Israeli government exactly what’s happening. And, in fact, if you look step by step, the military aid continues, the economic aid continues, the diplomatic protection continues, the ideological protection continues. By that, I mean framing the issues in ways that conform to Israeli demand. All of that continues, along with a kind of clucking of the tongue, saying, “Well, we really don’t like it, and it’s not helpful to peace.” Any government can understand that.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke to foreign journalists yesterday.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Israel accepted and Hamas rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal of July 15th. And I want you to know that at that time the conflict had claimed some 185 lives. Only on Monday night did Hamas finally agree to that very same proposal, which went into effect yesterday morning. That means that 90 percent, a full 90 percent, of the fatalities in this conflict could have been avoided had Hamas not rejected then the ceasefire that it accepts now. Hamas must be held accountable for the tragic loss of life.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, can you respond to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?

NOAM CHOMSKY: [inaudible] narrow response and a broad response. The narrow response is that, of course, as Netanyahu knows, that ceasefire proposal was arranged between the Egyptian military dictatorship and Israel, both of them very hostile to Hamas. It was not even communicated to Hamas. They learned about it through social media, and they were angered by that, naturally. They said they won’t accept it on those terms. Now, that’s the narrow response.

The broad response is that 100 percent of the casualties and the destruction and the devastation and so on could have been avoided if Israel had lived up to the ceasefire agreement after the—from November 2012, instead of violating it constantly and then escalating the violation in the manner that I described, in order to block the unity government and to persist in their policy of—the policies of taking over what they want in the West Bank and keeping—separating it from Gaza, and keeping Gaza on what they’ve called a “diet,” Dov Weissglas’s famous comment. The man who negotiated the so-called withdrawal in 2005 pointed out that the purpose of the withdrawal is to end the discussion of any political settlement and to block any possibility of a Palestinian state, and meanwhile the Gazans will be kept on a diet, meaning just enough calories allowed so they don’t all die—because that wouldn’t look good for Israel’s fading reputation—but nothing more than that. And with its vaunted technical capacity, Israel, Israeli experts calculated precisely how many calories would be needed to keep the Gazans on their diet, under siege, blocked from export, blocked from import. Fishermen can’t go out to fish. The naval vessels drive them back to shore. A large part, probably over a third and maybe more, of Gaza’s arable land is barred from entry to Palestinians. It’s called a “barrier.” That’s the norm. That’s the diet. They want to keep them on that, meanwhile separated from the West Bank, and continue the ongoing project of taking over—I can describe the details, but it’s not obscure—taking over the parts of the West Bank that Israel intends—is integrating into Israel, and presumably will ultimately annex in some fashion, as long as the United States continues to support it and block international efforts to lead to a political settlement.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Noam, as this whole month has unfolded and these images of the carnage in Gaza have spread around the world, what’s your assessment of the impact on the already abysmal relationship that exists between the United States government and the Arab and Muslim world? I’m thinking especially of all the young Muslims and Arabs around the world who maybe had not been exposed to prior atrocities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, first of all, we have to distinguish between the Muslim and Arab populations and their governments—striking difference. The governments are mostly dictatorships. And when you read in the press that the Arabs support us on so-and-so, what is meant is the dictators support us, not the populations. The dictatorships are moderately supportive of what the U.S. and Israel are doing. That includes the military dictatorship in Egypt, a very brutal one; Saudi Arabian dictatorship. Saudi Arabia is the closest U.S. ally in the region, and it’s the most radical fundamentalist Islamic state in the world. It’s also spreading its Salafi-Wahhabi doctrines throughout the world, extremist fundamentalist doctrines. It’s been the leading ally of the United States for years, just as it was for Britain before it. They’ve both tended to prefer radical Islam to the danger of secular nationalism and democracy. And they are fairly supportive of—they don’t like—they hate Hamas. They have no interest in the Palestinians. They have to say things to kind of mollify their own populations, but again, rhetoric and action are different. So the dictatorships are not appalled by what’s happening. They probably are quietly cheering it.

The populations, of course, are quite different, but that’s always been true. So, for example, on the eve of the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, which overthrew the Mubarak dictatorship, there were international polls taken in the United States by the leading polling agencies, and they showed very clearly that I think about 80 percent of Egyptians regarded the main threats to them as being Israel and the United States. And, in fact, condemnation of the United States and its policies were so extreme that even though they don’t like Iran, a majority felt that the region might be safer if Iran had nuclear weapons. Well, if you look over the whole polling story over the years, it kind of varies around something like that. But that’s the populations. And, of course, the Muslim populations elsewhere don’t like it, either. But it’s not just the Muslim populations. So, for example, there was a demonstration in London recently, which probably had hundreds of thousands of people—it was quite a huge demonstration—protesting the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. And that’s happening elsewhere in the world, too. It’s worth remembering that—you go back a couple decades, Israel was one of the most admired countries in the world. Now it’s one of the most feared and despised countries in the world. Israeli propagandists like to say, well, this is just anti-Semitism. But to the extent that there’s an anti-Semitic element, which is slight, it’s because of Israeli actions. The reaction is to the policies. And as long as Israel persists in these policies, that’s what’s going to happen.

Actually, this has been pretty clear since the early 1970s. Actually, I’ve been writing about it since then, but it’s so obvious, that I don’t take any credit for that. In 1971, Israel made a fateful decision, the most fateful in its history, I think. President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace treaty, in return for withdrawal of Israel from the Egyptian Sinai. That was the Labor government, the so-called moderate Labor government at the time. They considered the offer and rejected it. They were planning to carry out extensive development programs in the Sinai, build a huge, big city on the Mediterranean, dozens of settlements, kibbutzim, others, big infrastructure, driving tens of thousands of Bedouins off the land, destroying the villages and so on. Those were the plans, beginning to implement them. And Israel made a decision to choose expansion over security. A treaty with Egypt would have meant security. That’s the only significant military force in the Arab world. And that’s been the policy ever since.

When you pursue a policy of repression and expansion over security, there are things that are going to happen. There will be moral degeneration within the country. There will be increasing opposition and anger and hostility among populations outside the country. You may continue to get support from dictatorships and from, you know, the U.S. administration, but you’re going to lose the populations. And that has a consequence. You could predict—in fact, I and others did predict back in the ‘70s—that, just to quote myself, “those who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration, international isolation, and very possibly ultimate destruction.” That’s what’s—that’s the course that’s happening.

It’s not the only example in history. There are many analogies drawn to South Africa, most of them pretty dubious, in my mind. But there’s one analogy which I think is pretty realistic, which isn’t discussed very much. It should be. In 1958, the South African Nationalist government, which was imposing the harsh apartheid regime, recognized that they were becoming internationally isolated. We know from declassified documents that in 1958 the South African foreign minister called in the American ambassador. And we have the conversation. He essentially told him, “Look, we’re becoming a pariah state. We’re losing all the—everyone is voting against us in the United Nations. We’re becoming isolated. But it really doesn’t matter, because you’re the only voice that counts. And as long as you support us, doesn’t really matter what the world thinks.” That wasn’t a bad prediction. If you look at what happened over the years, opposition to South African apartheid grew and developed. There was a U.N. arms embargo. Sanctions began. Boycotts began. It was so extreme by the 1980s that even the U.S. Congress was passing sanctions, which President Reagan had to veto. He was the last supporter of the apartheid regime. Congress actually reinstated the sanctions over his veto, and he then violated them. As late as 1988, Reagan, the last holdout, his administration declared the African National Congress, Mandela’s African National Congress, to be one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world. So the U.S. had to keep supporting South Africa. It was supporting terrorist group UNITA in Angola. Finally, even the United States joined the rest of the world, and very quickly the apartheid regime collapsed.

Now that’s not fully analogous to the Israel case by any means. There were other reasons for the collapse of apartheid, two crucial reasons. One of them was that there was a settlement that was acceptable to South African and international business, simple settlement: keep the socioeconomic system and allow—put it metaphorically—allow blacks some black faces in the limousines. That was the settlement, and that’s pretty much what’s been implemented, not totally. There’s no comparable settlement in Israel-Palestine. But a crucial element, not discussed here, is Cuba. Cuba sent military forces and tens of thousands of technical workers, doctors and teachers and others, and they drove the South African aggressors out of Angola, and they compelled them to abandon illegally held Namibia. And more than that, as in fact Nelson Mandela pointed out as soon as he got out of prison, the Cuban soldiers, who incidentally were black soldiers, shattered the myth of invincibility of the white supermen. That had a very significant effect on both black Africa and the white South Africa. It indicated to the South African government and population that they’re not going to be able to impose their hope of a regional support system, at least quiet system, that would allow them to pursue their operations inside South Africa and their terrorist activities beyond. And that was a major factor in the liberation of black Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we have to break, and we’re going to come back to this discussion. We’re talking to Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Professor Noam Chomsky. I want to turn to President Obama speaking Wednesday at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Long term, there has to be a recognition that Gaza cannot sustain itself permanently closed off from the world and incapable of providing some opportunity, jobs, economic growth for the population that lives there, particularly given how dense that population is, how young that population is. We’re going to have to see a shift in opportunity for the people of Gaza. I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama yesterday. Noam Chomsky, can you respond?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, as always, for all states and all political leaderships, we have to distinguish rhetoric from action. Any political leader can produce lovely rhetoric, even Hitler, Stalin, whoever you want. What we ask is: What are they doing? So exactly what does Obama suggest or carry out as a means to achieve the goal of ending the U.S.-backed Israeli siege, blockade of Gaza, which is creating this situation? What has it done in the past? What does it propose to do in the future? There are things that the U.S. could do very easily. Again, don’t want to draw the South African analogy too closely, but it is indicative. And it’s not the only case. The same happened, as you remember, in the Indonesia-East Timor case. When the United States, Clinton, finally told the Indonesian generals, “The game’s over,” they pulled out immediately. U.S. power is substantial. And in the case of Israel, it’s critical, because Israel relies on virtually unilateral U.S. support. There are plenty of things the U.S. can do to implement what Obama talked about. And the question is—and, in fact, when the U.S. gives orders, Israel obeys. That’s happened over and over again. That’s completely obvious why, given the power relationships. So things can be done. They were done by Bush two, by Clinton, by Reagan, and the U.S. could do them again. Then we’ll know whether those words were anything other than the usual pleasant rhetoric.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talking about separating rhetoric from actions, Israel has always claimed that it no longer occupies Gaza. Democracy Now! recently spoke to Joshua Hantman, who’s a senior adviser to the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a former spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Ministry. And Hantman said, quote, “Israel actually left the Gaza Strip in 2005. We removed all of our settlements. We removed the IDF forces. We took out 10,000 Jews from their houses as a step for peace, because Israel wants peace and it extended its hand for peace.” Your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, several points. First of all, the United Nations, every country in the world, even the United States, regards Israel as the occupying power in Gaza—for a very simple reason: They control everything there. They control the borders, the land, sea, air. They determine what goes into Gaza, what comes out. They determine how many calories Gazan children need to stay alive, but not to flourish. That’s occupation, under international law, and no one questions it, outside of Israel. Even the U.S. agrees, their usual backer. That puts—with that, we end the discussion of whether they’re an occupying power or not.

As for wanting peace, look back at that so-called withdrawal. Notice that it left Israel as the occupying power. By 2005, Israeli hawks, led by Ariel Sharon, pragmatic hawk, recognized that it just makes no sense for Israel to keep a few thousand settlers in devastated Gaza and devote a large part of the IDF, the Israeli military, to protecting them, and many expenses breaking up Gaza into separate parts and so on. Made no sense to do that. Made a lot more sense to take those settlers from their subsidized settlements in Gaza, where they were illegally residing, and send them off to subsidized settlements in the West Bank, in areas that Israel intends to keep—illegally, of course. That just made pragmatic sense.

And there was a very easy way to do it. They could have simply informed the settlers in Gaza that on August 1st the IDF is going to withdrawal, and at that point they would have climbed into the lorries that are provided to them and gone off to their illegal settlements in the West Bank and, incidentally, the Golan Heights. But it was decided to construct what’s sometimes called a “national trauma.” So a trauma was constructed, a theater. It was just ridiculed by leading specialists in Israel, like the leading sociologist—Baruch Kimmerling just made fun of it. And trauma was created so you could have little boys, pictures of them pleading with the Israeli soldiers, “Don’t destroy my home!” and then background calls of “Never again.” That means “Never again make us leave anything,” referring to the West Bank primarily. And a staged national trauma. What made it particularly farcical was that it was a repetition of what even the Israeli press called “National Trauma ’82,” when they staged a trauma when they had to withdraw from Yamit, the city they illegally built in the Sinai. But they kept the occupation. They moved on.

And I’ll repeat what Weissglas said. Recall, he was the negotiator with the United States, Sharon’s confidant. He said the purpose of the withdrawal is to end negotiations on a Palestinian state and Palestinian rights. This will end it. This will freeze it, with U.S. support. And then comes imposition of the diet on Gaza to keep them barely alive, but not flourishing, and the siege. Within weeks after the so-called withdrawal, Israel escalated the attacks on Gaza and imposed very harsh sanctions, backed by the United States. The reason was that a free election took place in Palestine, and it came out the wrong way. Well, Israel and the United States, of course, love democracy, but only if it comes out the way they want. So, the U.S. and Israel instantly imposed harsh sanctions. Israeli attacks, which really never ended, escalated. Europe, to its shame, went along. Then Israel and the United States immediately began planning for a military coup to overthrow the government. When Hamas pre-empted that coup, there was fury in both countries. The sanctions and military attacks increased. And then we’re on to what we discussed before: periodic episodes of “mowing the lawn.”

AMY GOODMAN: We only—Noam, we only have a minute.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, at this point, a lot of the U.S. media is saying the U.S. had been sidelined, it’s now all about Egypt doing this negotiation. What needs to happen right now? The ceasefire will end in a matter of hours, if it isn’t extended. What kind of truce needs to be accomplished here?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, for Israel, with U.S. backing, the current situation is a kind of a win-win situation. If Hamas agrees to extend the ceasefire, Israel can continue with its regular policies, which I described before: taking over what they want in the West Bank, separating it from Gaza, keeping the diet and so on. If Hamas doesn’t accept the ceasefire, Netanyahu can make another speech like the one you—the cynical speech you quoted earlier. The only thing that can break this is if the U.S. changes its policies, as has happened in other cases. I mentioned two: South Africa, Timor. There’s others. And that’s decisive. If there’s going to be a change, it will crucially depend on a change in U.S. policy here. For 40 years, the United States has been almost unilaterally backing Israeli rejectionism, refusal to entertain the overwhelming international consensus on a two-state settlement.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue our conversation post-show, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Provoked by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not believe they deserve any.

This, of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.

In my unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.

Well, to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population, are now facing imminent death by starvation.

And the Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary of state,      Condoleezza Rice       bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason that there were none to be found.

Nor did anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.

Speaking of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a base for firing rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile little or nothing of the billions in aid being poured into Gaza—some of it from wealthy American Jewish donors—went to improving the living conditions of the general populace. Which did not prevent a majority of those ordinary Palestinians from supporting Hamas, under whose leadership this order of priorities was more faithfully followed than it was under Fatah, its slightly less militant rival.

As for the monumental injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians, it consists largely of losing territory in the war they themselves provoked in 1967, and the refusal of their demand that every inch of it be returned to them by the Israeli victors in that war. Such demands have always been known and universally denounced as revanchism or irredentism, most recently over the Russian seizure of Crimea. But where Israel is concerned, everything goes topsy-turvy, so that Palestinian irredentism is universally supported.

The accompanying and equally great injustice allegedly suffered by the Palestinians is that they have been denied a state of their own. But this hardly qualifies as unique, given that dozens of other ethnic groups—the Kurds being the most prominent—are in the same boat.

In any event, this "injustice" is also self-inflicted, since three times in the past 15 years the Palestinians have refused offers of a state on most of the territory taken by Israel in 1967 and with Jerusalem as its capital. They have justified these refusals by one pretext or another, but as anyone willing to look can see, what they truly want is not a state of their own living side by side with Israel but a state that replaces Israel altogether.

With this we come to the main reason I believe that the Palestinians do not deserve any sympathy, let alone the astonishing degree of it they do receive (and not least from many of my fellow Jews). It is that ever since the day of Israel's birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet—here we go topsy-turvy again—for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself "anti-Zionism" but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Nor, alas, is it only the leaders of the Palestinians who harbor this evil intent. As revealed by poll after poll, as well as by the elections that led the way for Hamas to take power in Gaza, a decisive majority of the Palestinian people does so as well. No doubt this is the fruit of relentless indoctrination from above, but the damage has been done, and the end result is what it is.

Indeed, the best that can be said of both Palestinian leaders and led is that many of them no longer imagine—as did      Gamal Abdel Nasser,       the former president of Egypt—that they have the power to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea. Therefore they are now willing to give up pursuing the goal of genocide and to settle for the more modest objective of politicide—that is, to get rid of the Jewish state by transforming it, through various "peaceful" means like the "right of return," into a state with a Palestinian majority.

I for one pray that a day will come when the Palestinians finally let go of the evil intent toward Israel that keeps me from having any sympathy for them, and that they will make their own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state in their immediate neighborhood. But until that day arrives, the "peace process" will go on being as futile as it has been so many times before and as it has just proved once again to be. Another thing that never changes: When John Kerry testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was the Israelis he blamed for this latest diplomatic fiasco.

       Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).

[armeniaitn]

Our primary task is to ensure the self-defense of Nagorno-Karabakh and its people: Armenian PM meets French lawmakers

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/our-primary-task-is-to-ensure-the-self-defense-of-nagorno-karabakh-and-its-people-armenian-pm-meets-french-lawmakers-63822-25-10-2020/

Our primary task is to ensure the self-defense of Nagorno-Karabakh and its people: Armenian PM meets French lawmakers

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received a French parliamentary delegation in visit to Armenia. The Prime Minister thanked them for visiting Armenia at this difficult time and for standing by the Armenian people.

“Indeed, we feel your presence and support not only when you are physically by our side, but also throughout your activities. I would like to express my sincere appreciation of French President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts. He was the first international leader to speak about this situation in the language of truth, clearly stating that Syrian mercenaries are involved in the war against Karabakh, and that Turkey is the main instigator behind the war,” Nikol Pashinyan said, noting that he keeps in close touch with the President of France.

Coming to the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Prime Minister said it remains tense on the frontlines. “In fact, under various pretexts Azerbaijan has declined the international efforts aimed at achieving a ceasefire. By and large, the state of affairs is as follows. Any compromise acceptable to Armenia turns out to be unacceptable for Azerbaijan. This is not something novel: we could witness that approach all the way through the peace talks. I can cite the example of 2011 to make it clear that this is not a surprise for us. In 2011, when the well-known Kazan process was going on, the Republic of Armenia accepted the proposed compromise. There was a mutually agreed text of settlement, but Azerbaijan suddenly toughened its position and refused to sign it at the very last moment” Nikol Pashinyan said.

According to the Prime Minister, the international community is looking forth to a compromise-based negotiated settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, which the Armenian side understands.

“Compromise implies that both sides should show some flexibility with regard to their initial benchmarks, but the point is that when Armenia makes its share of concession, the next moment the situation becomes unacceptable for Azerbaijan, which sets forth higher claims. This is what eventually led to renewed hostilities. We can actually witness the same situation in this war, starting with the Moscow statement. Another agreement was reached, brokered by President Macron, which yet again was undermined by Azerbaijan,” Pashinyan said, noting that here, too, Turkey played a decisive role, because every time a ceasefire is being discussed, the Turkish Foreign Minister or the President state that Azerbaijan should not stop fire.

“This is an important nuance, since we can see that not more than 1/3 of military operations are actually controlled by the President of Azerbaijan, considering that Turkish servicemen, Turkey-backed terrorists and mercenaries are involved in the ongoing hostilities,” Nikol Pashinyan emphasized. The Prime Minister added that Armenia’s views on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remain the same.

“We think that there is no military solution to the issue. We must find a compromise. Armenia is ready for compromise just as it was before, but the main impediment is that any situation that is acceptable to Armenia in the logic of compromise becomes unacceptable for Azerbaijan which, strong with Turkey’s support, demands more and more. It is unclear how far they will go with such one-sided claims and where the limit of their appetite is. Therefore, following this logic, our primary task is to ensure the self-defense of Nagorno-Karabakh and its people, so that we could come to a truly diplomatic solution of the conflict,” Nikol Pashinyan concluded.

The Prime Minister answered a number of questions of interest to the French MPs, during which he referred to the discussions held with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, Turkey’s destructive policy, its regional aspirations, Israel’s indirect involvement in the Karabakh-Azerbaijani conflict, and the Armenian people’s expectations from the international community.

The Premier stressed that the determination of the status of Artsakh and the exercise of the right to self-determination remain a matter of primary concern for the Armenian people.

The members of the French parliamentary delegation thanked Prime Minister Pashinyan for detailed discussion and went on to inform him that they were set to leave for Nagorno-Karabakh to get a first-hand view of the situation on the spot.

Read original article here.

[xtruss]

Opinion // Palestine

Palestine: The Third Way Forward

The Palestinians are not powerless. There is much they can do to stop Israeli expansionism.

— By Marwan Bishara | May 18, 2020 | Al Jazeera English

Love for all: Palestine! There is no Isra-hell but “Forever Palestine.” Demonstrators place a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, September 4, 2019

Since the catastrophic Arab failure in the 1948 and 1967 wars led to total Israeli control over historic Palestine, the Palestinians have been trying to recover their losses, but to no avail.

Refugees and prisoners in their own homeland, they have tried armed struggle and peaceful negotiations with equal vigour, but have failed to get justice or attain peace.

Both strategies entailed great sacrifice and major concessions, but ultimately neither led to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli domination.

Worse, Israel's appetite for expansion has grown with every Palestinian concession, and now its delusion of invincibility is driving it to illegally annex almost a third of what the Palestinians assumed would be their future state.

Regardless of whether it actually formalises its de facto annexation or not, Israel is already radically and unilaterally changing the reality on the ground.

So now what? What to do? What not to do?

The right diagnosis is half the cure

It is important to remember that contrary to newspeak there is no "Palestine problem" but rather an "Israeli colonial problem" - the region's last colonial problem - and the Palestinians may prove to be its only solution.

Since its creation at the end of the 19th century, Zionism has mutated from arguably a legitimate Jewish national movement in Europe to a European colonial enterprise in the eastern Mediterranean.

It led, among other things, to a century-long conflict, multiple wars and hatred, fuelled by ethnic cleansing, dispossession and the displacement of millions of people.

Since then, increased Israeli colonisation, especially in the occupied West Bank, devolved into a reprehensible system of apartheid.

Interestingly, apartheid was born in South Africa in 1948, the same year the Palestinian catastrophe began, and it ended in 1994, a year before apartheid basically started in Palestine with the Oslo-II agreement, which divided the occupied territories into bantustans.

Like South Africa, Israel should be induced to produce its own FW de Klerk to end its apartheid. Such a leader would find the Palestinians ready to reconcile and together with Israel build a better future.

And like South Africa, this does not mean ending Israel. It means liberating Israel from its paranoid garrison mindset that sees hegemony as the only way to survive.

Considering we are all one human race, apartheid is ultimately about hegemony, despite its racial or other pretexts.

It follows that the struggle against apartheid must be a universal, indivisible struggle for justice and freedom - one that opposes anti-Semitism, as it does colonial Zionism.

But what shape and path should it take?

Palestinians have already begun to think about and debate new ideas to end apartheid, which deserve further study and development.

But before we get into what the Palestinians need to do, let us look into what they should not do.

What Not to Do

Surrender is not an option. Do not even think about it.

Accepting the so-called "deal of the century" put forward by US President Donald Trump and his ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to surrender to Israeli hegemony. It means living in captivity in perpetuity.

Without surrender, there is no victory. As long as the Palestinians do not lose, Israel cannot win.

Refusing to give up or give in may not be easy, but it has proven effective in frustrating Israel's plans, and restraining certain Arab regimes' predilection for mischief.

Do not despair. Time and history are on your side.

It may not seem that way judging from Israel's visible confidence, (read arrogance), but even though it is a self-proclaimed country of "immigrants", it has been bleeding hundreds of thousands of emigrants, mostly to the US.

And a high 40 percent of Israelis are thinking of emigrating, as countless Palestinians risk their lives to reclaim their right of return.

It is the same story repeated over and over again. Most if not all colonial powers lost to the weaker indigenous population over the past century. So will Israel.

To that end, Palestinians have wisely framed their cause in legal terms and extracted many UN resolutions condemning Israel's violations of international law.

But international law does not deter the strong or save the weak, certainly not when the US flashes its veto at the mere mention of Israel.

Just do not depend on it. Depend on yourselves. And forget about the UN convening an international peace conference without American blessing.

Do not beat yourselves up too much. Be reasonable.

Yes, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has made its share of mistakes, but the Palestinians are not responsible for the contempt and incompetence of certain Arab regimes, or the cynicism of Western powers, especially the US appeasement of Israel.

And stop with the self-pity.

You cannot motivate and energise depressed people. It will not kill you to smile. The best laughs are those mixed with tears. There is much to dread, but there is much more to dream about.

Do not underestimate the moral weight of your cause in the Arab world and beyond, regardless of what the doubters say.

No matter how many dictators recognise Israel, a belligerent apartheid state will never achieve true legitimacy or security regionally.

Never.

Arabs see the struggle for justice in Palestine as a symbol and extension of their own fight for justice.

Syrians, Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians and others may be engrossed in their own tragedies, as they must be, but polls consistently show that, collectively, Arabs see Palestine as their foremost cause in the struggle against colonialism.

Do not forget that.

Israel has always tried to separate Palestinians from Palestinians and the Palestinians from their Arab neighbourhood.

Do not allow it and do not engage in secret negotiations.

There are more than a few ways to connect and bridge the geographic divide.

As war and diplomacy come to a dead end, and as Israel dashes forward arrogantly grabbing and annexing more Palestinian land, speak up and do not let Netanyahu and Trump get off easy.

Try not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Try not to look back. Look ahead. Look for a third way forward.

Reinventing Palestinian Unity

The lopsided peace process has been terribly divisive for the Palestinians. It is what asymmetrical peace processes do. Therefore, abandoning it must lead to some form of national unity.

The dreadful competition between the main political factions has thus far proven detrimental to national unity and elections have been no less divisive.

Instead of uniting against the occupation, the factions have been preoccupied with managing it.

While Fatah and Hamas continue to insist on holding onto their "strongholds", the separated bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, some suggest the establishment of an overall political umbrella, perhaps a reformed and expanded PLO, to unite all the Palestinians around the undisputed cause of justice.

But this will require a new generation of Palestinians to step up and take over from the predominantly septuagenarian and octogenarian leadership to chart a fresh, new way forward.

All bureaucratic tasks and responsibilities, whether on the level of the National Authority or the municipalities should be left to technocrats, chosen on the basis of merit not partisanship.

This requires a great deal of maturity, ingenuity and dynamism.

Another interesting idea is for Palestinians to unite behind multiple strategies, instead of being divided behind one failed strategy of negotiations.

This tactical decentralisation means "popular mobilisation" where each Palestinian community should be able to design and embrace strategies of struggle according to its abilities and circumstances.

Palestinians in Gaza may want to retain their deterrence capabilities to defend against another Israeli assault, and Jerusalemites may want to strengthen their city's Palestinian presence and character.

Likewise, Palestinians in Israel may want to transform Israel's binationality from demographics to politics. The Palestinians in Jordan may want to work with Jordanians to block Israel's attempt to make their country the alternative Palestinian state. And the Palestinians in exile may want to promote the cause in foreign capitals. And so on.

These micro strategies should be continuously synchronised and synergised as integral parts of the national struggle for justice and liberation as a whole.

Palestinians should no longer be satisfied with passive "steadfastness". They need to reactivate and re-energise the popular base.

Boosting Palestinian Immunity

Comprising almost half the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the Palestinians need to immunise themselves against persistent Israeli repression and marginalisation.

Palestinians need to offset Israel's new attempts at dividing and ostracising them by improving business infrastructure and economic life to help people endure.

They need to expand on one of their greatest recent achievements, namely institution building.

This entails deflating an inflated bureaucracy by ending corruption and nepotism and creating partnerships between the public and private sector to improve economic planning and infrastructure development.

Currently, one-third of the national budget goes to the security apparatus, more than both the health and education sectors receive. Given that it serves Israeli more than Palestinian security, there is no reason why it should continue to consume so much of the Palestinian budget.

Boosting national immunity is also about boosting individual immunity in everyday life.

And there is no immunity without national and personal dignity.

A Palestinian may be able to block or defy the humiliation of an Israeli soldier, but may still find him/herself powerless when humiliated by a fellow (armed) Palestinian. Such humiliation is emotional and leads to indifference, even betrayal. This must stop.

And there is no dignity without work. This means there needs to be job creation, the expansion of good productive employment, so that poor Palestinians are not forced to slave away at Israeli settlements.

Palestinians are some of the most educated people in the region. Modest investment in human capital could yield great national advantage in the long run.

Rebuilding Alliances

As the PLO hedged its bets exclusively on the US-led peace process, it abandoned much of the international solidarity movement.

Today, Palestinians need to rebuild links to European, Latin American, African and other foreign solidarity movements. These would be essential for their struggle moving forward, just as they were in ending apartheid in South Africa.

Moreover, and unlike many forgotten indigenous populations, Palestinians are not alone. They are part of a vast Arab region, and can draw strength and solace from your Arab hinterland.

Palestinians also have a special connection to the Islamic world, much of which has suffered terribly from Western colonialism.

It is paramount to confront Israel's peddling of religious justification for its occupation with civic and universal, not religious, arguments.

All colonial enterprises of the past several centuries have used varying degrees of religious justification, and Palestine has been the focal point of interest for all three Abrahamic religions.

But treating Palestine as a "promised land" or "a waqf" turns the divine from a peacemaker to a real estate broker.

Palestine belongs to all its inhabitants, especially its indigenous people.

Cultivating Jewish Partners

Winning Jewish support for justice and freedom in Palestine is imperative to dispel Israeli propaganda, and indispensable to roll back Israeli hegemony

Just as white people participated in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and in the civil rights movement in the US, Jews are indispensable in the struggle against apartheid in Palestine.

Throughout their history, Jews have been the victims of racism, suffering greatly from European anti-Semitism. And for long, they have been at the forefront in the fight against racism.

This week, for example, I read an obituary titled, "Denis Goldberg Man of Integrity: South African Freedom Fighter, Anti-Zionist Jew, and True Mensch" written by Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist about a comrade who had passed away. Reflecting on Goldberg's lifelong anti-racism struggle, Karsils emphasised: "As an anti-Zionist Jew he came to view Israel's colonial-racism as akin to apartheid South Africa."

I know many such people, having worked closely with Jewish academics, students, journalists, feminists, editors, publishers, lawyers, unionists, and activists on various progressive causes including that of free Palestine.

Palestinians must take down anyone who peddles anti-Jewish slogans in their name and build on increasing Jewish resentment towards an Israeli leadership that does terrible things in their name.

When former US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders accused Netanyahu of "reactionary racism" and grew even more popular in the process, it showed just how far the American Jewish community and the Democratic Party have gone, bearing in mind that most American Jews vote Democrat, not Republican.

Palestinians need to nourish this new spirit and synergy to counter the Israeli-inspired campaign equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. After all, Jews were the first to oppose Zionism.

A new Palestinian-Jewish partnership must fight Israeli injustice tooth and nail, exposing the Israeli government's malign attempts to label movements like Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) as anti-Semitic.

In short, and as I argued recently, it is high time for a Palestinian-Jewish spring.

The Endgame

The evolution of this renewed struggle in its totality will determine the outcome - two states or one binational state, not the opposite.

The continuing debate about the singularity or duality of states is not only premature, it may prove divisive and debilitating.

Israel will certainly oppose a one-state solution with the same if not stronger determination it opposes a sovereign Palestinian state with.

The sooner the Palestinian leaders realise there are no short cuts or off-the-shelf solutions the better they will be prepared for the long haul.

That is why the Palestinian endgame should be justice and freedom. They are not only an attainable goal that everyone will rally behind, but also a prerequisite for peace and security in the region.

They require changing Israel's calculus, not defeating it, or destroying it, as Israeli leaders whine and warn.

This is how major powers gave up their colonialism and how South Africa ended its system of apartheid. They were forced to reconsider the calculus of gain and loss.

In this way, Netanyahu's Israel cannot have all the land and all the security. It cannot continue to live by the sword and preach Kumbaya to the Palestinians.

In short, it cannot have its cake and eat it too.

If history is any guide, Israel will end its occupation just as all colonial powers of the past century ended theirs.

The sooner the better for both Palestinians and Israelis.

— Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/health/vaccines-blocked-as-deadly-cholera-raged-across-yemen/

Vaccines blocked as deadly cholera raged across Yemen

In the summer of 2017, a plane chartered by the United Nations idled on the tarmac at an airport in the Horn of Africa as officials waited for final clearance to deliver half a million doses of cholera vaccine to Yemen. Amid the country’s ruinous war, the disease was spiraling out of control, with thousands of new cases reported each day.

The green light for the plane to head to northern Yemen never came. The U.N. wasn’t able to distribute cholera vaccines to Yemen until May 2018 and the outbreak ultimately produced more than 1 million suspected cholera cases — the worst cholera epidemic recorded in modern times and a calamity that medical researchers say may have been avoided if vaccines had been deployed sooner.

U.N. officials blamed the canceled flight on the difficulties in distributing vaccines during an armed conflict. But officials with knowledge of the episode told The Associated Press that the real reason was that the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen refused to allow the vaccines to be delivered, after spending months demanding that the U.N. send ambulances and other medical equipment for their military forces as a condition for accepting the shipment.

The cancellation of the shipment was just one of the setbacks that aid agencies faced in battling the cholera epidemic, which has killed nearly 3,000 Yemenis.

Relief workers and government officials said they have seen repeated indications that insiders in both the Houthi government in the north and the U.S.-backed government in the south have skimmed off money and supplies for cholera vaccination and treatment and sold them on the black market. In some cases, treatment centers for people who had contracted cholera existed only on paper even though the U.N. had disbursed money to bankroll their operations, according to two aid officials familiar with the centers.

The AP’s examination of the efforts to fight the disease in Yemen drew on confidential documents and interviews with 29 people, including aid officials previously based in the country and officials from health ministries run by both the Houthi rebels and the internationally recognized government in the south. Almost all of these individuals — including six relief and health officials who say the Houthis were responsible for cancellation of the 2017 vaccine shipment — spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation.

“Both the Houthis and the government of Yemen were trying to politicize cholera,” an aid official told the AP.

“The Houthis are taking advantage of U.N. weakness,” the official said. “Corruption or aid diversion and all of this are because of the U.N.’s weak position.” Relief workers know that if the U.N. speaks out, the official said, “their visas will be denied and they would not be allowed back in the country.”

Cholera spread across Yemen in late 2016 and throughout much of 2017 and 2018. It ebbed late last year, but has again picked up in 2019. A new surge in the disease has produced roughly 150,000 reported cholera cases and nearly 300 deaths since the start of this year. The first cholera vaccine drives in Yemen didn’t start until May 2018 in the south and August 2018 in the north, aid and health officials told the AP.

Ali al-Walidi, the deputy health minister in southern Yemen, and Youssef al-Hadri, the spokesman of the Houthi-run Health Ministry in the north, both deny there were delays in getting cholera vaccines into Yemen at the start of the outbreak.

Al-Hadri said claims that the Houthis blocked the shipment of vaccines into Yemen are false.

“This is all baseless, and I challenge the agencies to say this officially,” he said.

Geert Cappelaere, the Middle East director for UNICEF, the U.N. children’s relief agency, declined to blame any particular group for halting the 2017 shipment.

“What is important is that the vaccines that needed to get in have ultimately gone in and have reached the people who needed to be vaccinated,” he said. “Has this been simple and easy? Absolutely not. Each shipment has been problematic to get in because of the long approval time” and because of “skepticism among the authorities on both sides” about the value of cholera vaccines.

——

A RAVAGED LAND

More than half of Yemen’s hospitals and other health facilities have been damaged or destroyed since the war began in 2015, after Houthi forces overran much of the country and Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, with backing from the United States, launched airstrikes and imposed blockades on rebel-held territory.

The conflict has killed more than 60,000 people and much of Yemen has been on the edge of famine. An AP investigation published in December revealed that factions on all sides of Yemen’s war have blocked food aid from going to groups suspected of disloyalty, diverted it to front-line combat units or sold it for profit on the black market.

More than 19 million of Yemen’s 29 million people don’t have access to adequate health care, and more than 17 million don’t have clean water, according to the U.N. Those are prime conditions for the spread of cholera, a disease caused by feces-tainted water and food. Cholera can kill swiftly if untreated, its victims drained by diarrhea, vomiting and fever.

The first significant cholera outbreak came in late 2016, leading to more than 25,000 suspected cases and killing at least 129. Soon after, in April 2017, the disease erupted again, this time spreading at an even more furious pace. Within two months, more than 185,000 suspected cases and 1,200 deaths were reported. One local aid worker in northern Yemen recalls house after house with dying children, their small bodies racked by severe diarrhea.

When U.N. officials tried to rush in oral vaccines to halt the spread, some Houthi officials claimed vaccines were ineffective. A few circulated messages on social media asserting that vaccines could be harmful to children. Four aid officials and a former Houthi health official said that some rebel leaders suggested that the vaccination plan was a plot by the U.S. and Israel to use Yemenis as guinea pigs.

A former senior official in the Houthi Health Ministry said the concerns over the vaccines’ safety were a pretext. Rebel leaders had a list of demands and tried to bargain with U.N. officials for money and equipment, he said.

During weeks of negotiations over the vaccine program, the rebels demanded that U.N. officials send X-ray machines and other items they could use to treat their wounded fighters on the front lines, according to the former health ministry official and three aid officials.

Al-Hadri, the spokesman for the Houthi-run Health Ministry, denied that Houthi authorities demanded medicine and medical equipment to be used in treating front-line soldiers. Cappelaere, UNICEF’s Middle East chief, said he had no knowledge of aid officials bargaining with authorities in Yemen in the effort to import cholera vaccines.

——

THE SHIPMENT

Finally, in July 2017, U.N. officials believed they had the go-ahead to bring in cholera vaccines. Half a million doses were loaded onto a plane in the tiny African republic of Djibouti.

At the last minute, hard-liners in the Houthi-controlled Health Ministry told the U.N. they would not allow the plane to land.

Publicly, the U.N. blamed the change of plans on security and logistical challenges involved in delivering immunizations across Yemen’s conflict-torn landscape. A spokesman for the U.N.’s World Health Organization said at the time that delivering vaccines “has to make sense” in terms of the conditions on the ground, adding that the vaccine doses intended for Yemen would likely be re-routed to places that “might need them more urgently.”

U.N. officials sent the shipment to South Sudan in central Africa, where the disease had recently erupted. The cholera outbreak in South Sudan left 436 dead but was declared over by early 2018, largely due to the introduction of vaccines during the outbreak’s early stages.

The outbreak in Yemen went on unabated.

Hager Taher, a 27-year old mother of two, was one of hundreds who died from cholera in the months after the vaccine delivery into the country had been called off. Taher was in the last days of pregnancy, living in the village of al-Ghareb, an impoverished area in the Houthi-controlled northern province of Hajjah, when she began vomiting and showing cholera-like symptoms.

The only health center in the village of nearly 1,200 people was a building with two rooms and few beds. As the number of suspected cholera cases grew, local authorities used a school to receive patients, who had to lie on the floor in the empty classrooms.

Taher was sent to a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the city of Abs. She soon developed complications and was moved to another hospital nearby. It was there, in September 2017, that she died. Her child was born alive but died four days later.

“It’s God’s will,” her husband, Mohammed Hassan, told the AP. “There’s nothing to do.”

Taher was one of 16 people reported to have died from cholera in her district in Hajjah. Hundreds more were infected.

“The district was gulped up by cholera,” said Ibrahim al-Masrahi, a health worker in charge of gathering epidemic surveillance reports.

By the end of 2017, the number of reported cholera cases in Yemen had surged past 1 million, with more than 2,200 deaths. The spread of the disease waned for a time, but rebounded again in the spring and summer of 2018, adding another 370,000 reported cases and 500 more deaths.

U.N. officials continued struggling to find a way to get cholera vaccines into the country.

Houthi officials held a succession of meetings throughout much of 2017 and into 2018 to consider the science and policy questions relating to vaccines. In the spring of 2018, after science panels approved bringing cholera vaccines into rebel territory, Health Minister Mohammed Salem bin Hafez gave U.N. officials the go-ahead to bring in nearly 900,000 doses of cholera vaccine, according to documents obtained by the AP.

Then two of his deputies, both of them well-connected within the Houthi leadership, said the shipment couldn’t proceed, asserting that there were still more bureaucratic hurdles before the vaccines’ “safety and security” could be assured, according to the documents.

As a non-Houthi, bin Hafez didn’t have the power to overrule the decisions of the two deputies who supposedly were working under him. He wrote a letter to the prime minister of the Houthi-controlled government, Abdel-Aziz bin Habtour, detailing how the delivery of vaccines had been once again been put off.

“I am washing my hands of the consequences of these irresponsible actions,” bin Hafez’s letter said. He told the prime minister that he was “putting the matter between your hands” in the hope the government would “take the necessary measures to use aid in a proper way and create proper work conditions for international and local aid agencies.”

A month later, bin Hafez left his post and fled Houthi territory.

Abdel-Aziz al-Daylami, one of the Health Ministry deputies that bin Hafez blamed for holding up the delivery of vaccines, denied that he had stopped the shipment.

“No, there was no rejection, but we had reservations,” he told the AP. “We thought that the vaccines would be useless” if they were deployed without more efforts to ensure clean water and reliable sanitation systems.

“We worried that if the vaccine campaigns failed, people would turn against the use of vaccines and that would be disastrous,” he said.

———

ONLY ON PAPER

As Houthi authorities debated the use of vaccines in the north, the U.N. was also working to get cholera vaccines into the country via the government in the south.

But this plan was also marred by delays — and by questions about possible corruption.

After the U.N. was able to get a shipment of vaccines into the southern city of Aden in May 2018, the Health Ministry for the U.S.- and Saudi-backed government there put together teams to raise awareness and administer the vaccines.

But some of the vaccination teams existed only on paper and many workers on the teams never received the full stipends budgeted for them under the program, two aid officials told the AP. The two officials said authorities in the south prevented aid workers from visiting the districts where immunization campaigns were taking place, making it impossible for them to monitor what was happening on the ground and verify how aid money was being used.

In the wake the vaccination campaign in the south, the Houthis broke the logjam in the north. They agreed to allow cholera vaccines into some areas under their control. Immunization drives were launched in three rebel-held districts in August and September 2018.

A senior official who worked with the Houthi-run Health Ministry at the time noted the U.N. had agreed to some of the rebels’ wish list of additional medical supplies and equipment, including the purchase of 45 ambulances for the ministry. The ambulances were then sent to the front lines for the military’s use, the ex-official said.

Beyond vaccine drives, concerns emerged in both the north and south about whether patients who had already contracted the disease were getting medical treatment targeted for them.

Some centers set up to treat cholera victims weren’t functional even though UNICEF and the WHO had provided funding to government authorities and nongovermental groups to cover costs of setting them up and running them, according to two aid officials familiar with the centers.

One of those two aid officials said he was told there were nine cholera treatment centers in Aden. He could find only two. “The rest didn’t exist,” he said.

Another concern in north and south was whether relief organizations were getting accurate counts of the number of people sickened with cholera in various parts of the country. Two aid officials and a former official with the Houthi-controlled Health Ministry said authorities exaggerated the number of cholera cases to increase the amount of international aid money.

A December 2018 study of the Yemen outbreak by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that some overreporting was likely due to health workers whose livelihoods depended on money paid by the U.N. Many of the workers hadn’t received their government salaries in years and believed that the cholera centers where they worked would be closed and aid money stopped if they didn’t report enough suspected cases.

Still, even with overreporting, the outbreak of cholera was “massive,” Paul B. Spiegel, the lead author of the study and director of the university’s Center for Humanitarian Health, told the AP.

Another study, published in December 2018 in the journal BMC Public Health, called the epidemic “the largest cholera outbreak in epidemiologically recorded history.”

The report said the scale of Yemen’s outbreak “most likely” could have been avoided or managed if enough cholera vaccines had been deployed earlier in the conflict. It added that even if a large shipment had come into the country early enough, getting the vaccine to those who needed it might not have been possible, given the “deeply chaotic situation” across war-torn Yemen.

More than 2.5 million doses of the cholera vaccine have been transported into Yemen by the U.N. since mid-2018. It’s unclear how many of them have been administered to people in target populations. Two Houthi officials confirmed to the AP that nearly 1.2 million doses remain stored in warehouses in Sanaa, the rebels’ capital. The Health Ministry there plans to distribute those doses soon in two northern districts, one of the officials said.

A senior aid official said the continuing cholera crisis remains a way for the Houthis rebels to cultivate global sympathy for their struggle against the U.S.-backed and Saudi-led coalition, whose bombing campaign has been blamed for helping to create the conditions that caused the outbreak.

“If you resolve cholera, what are the headlines?” he said. “They managed to control the narrative because it’s easy to blame the coalition and not them and they always show up as victims.”

Al-Hadri, the spokesman for the Houthi-controlled Health Ministry in Sanaa, called that nonsense. It is international aid officials, he said, who are raking in donations and benefiting from disease and suffering inside the Middle East’s poorest country.

“They are profiting from the Yemen crisis and begging in the name of Yemen,” he said. “They need the Yemeni crisis more than we need them.”

———

The AP’s reporting on the war in Yemen is supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Sanctions left and sanctions right. Financial mostly, taxes, tariffs, visas, travel bans, confiscation of foreign assets, import and export prohibitions and limitations; and also punishing those who do not respect sanctions dished out by Trump, alias the US of A, against friends of their enemies. The absurdity seems endless and escalating exponentially, as if there was a deadline to collapse the world. Looks like a last-ditch effort to bring down international trade in favor of — what?  Make America Great Again? – Prepare for US mid-term elections? Rally the people behind an illusion? – Or what? All looks arbitrary and destructive. All is, of course, totally illegal by any international law or, forget law, which is not respected anyway by the empire and its vassals, but not even by human moral standards. Sanctions are destructive. They are interfering in other countries sovereignty. They are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship. Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights, this very body is silent. Out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire?  Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals? Imagine Turkey – sudden massive tariffs on aluminum (20%) and steel (50%) imposed by Trump, plus central bank currency interference had the Turkish Lira drop by 40%, and that ‘only’ because Erdogan is not freeing US pastor Andrew Brunson, who faces in Turkey a jail sentence of 35 years for “terror and espionage”. An Izmir court has just turned down another US request for clemency, however, converting his jail sentence to house arrest for health reasons. It is widely believed that Mr. Brunson’s alleged 23 years of ‘missionary work’ is but a smoke screen for spying. President Erdogan has just declared he would look out for new friends, including new trading partners in the east – Russia, China, Iran, Ukraine, even the unviable EU, and that his country is planning on issuing Yuan-denominated bonds to diversify Turkey’s economy, foremost the country’s reserves and gradually moving away from the dollar hegemony. Looking out for new friends, may also include new military alliances. Is Turkey planning to exit NATO? Would turkey be ‘allowed’ to exit NATO given its strategic maritime and land position between east and west?  Turkey knows that having military allies that dish out punishments for acting sovereignly in internal affair spells disaster for the future. Why continue offering your country to NATO, whose only objective it is to destroy the east, the very east which is not only Turkey’s but the world’s future? Turkey is already approaching the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and may actually accede to it within the foreseeable future. That might be the end of Turkey’s NATO alliance. What if Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China and many more countries not ready to bow to the empire, would jail all those spies embedded in the US Embassies or camouflaged in these countries’ national (financial) institutions, acting as Fifth Columns, undermining their host countries’ national and economic policies? Entire cities of new jails would have to be built to accommodate the empire’s army of criminals. Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie and out of fear of being sanctioned, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become?  Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”. That’s what we have become – a herd of pigs. Fortunately, Russia too has moved away so far already from the western dollar-controlled economy that such sanctions do no longer hurt. They serve Trump and his cronies as mere propaganda tools – show-offs, “we are still the greatest!”. Venezuela is being sanctioned into the ground, literally, by from-abroad (Miami and Bogota) Twitter-induced manipulations of her national currency, the Bolívar, causing astronomical inflation – constant ups and downs of the value of the local currency, bringing the national economy to a virtual halt. Imported food, pharmaceuticals and other goods are being deviated at the borders and other entry points, so they will never end up on supermarket shelves, but become smuggle ware in Colombia, where these goods are being sold at manipulated dollar-exchange rates to better-off Venezuelan and Columbian citizens. These mafia type gangs are being funded by NED and other similar nefarious State Department financed “NGOs”, trained by US secret services, either within or outside Venezuela. Once infiltrated into Venezuela – overtly or covertly – they tend to boycott the local economy from within, spread violence and become part of the Fifth Column, primarily sabotaging the financial system. Venezuela is struggling to get out of this dilemma, which has people suffering, by de-dollarizing her economy, partly through a newly created cryptocurrency, the Petro, based on Venezuela’s huge oil reserves and also through a new Bolivar, in the hope of putting the brakes on the spiraling bursts of inflation. This scenario reminds so much of Chile in 1973, when Henry Kissinger was Foreign Secretary (1973-1977), and inspired the CIA coup, by “disappearing” food and other goods from Chilean markets, killing legitimately elected President Allende, bringing Augusto Pinochet, a horrendous murderer and despot, to power. The military dictatorship brought the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of people and lasted until 1990. Subjugating Venezuela might, however, not be so easy. After all, Venezuela has 19 years of revolutionary Chavista experience and a solid sense of resistance. Iran is being plunged into a similar fate. For no reason at all, Trump reneged on the five-plus-one pronged so-called Nuclear Deal, signed in Vienna on 14 July 2015, after almost ten years of negotiations. Now, of course, driven by the star-Zionist Netanyahu – new and ‘the most severe ever’ sanctions are being imposed on Iran, also decimating the value of their local currency, the Rial. Iran, under the Ayatollah, has already embarked on a course of “Resistance Economy”, meaning de-dollarization of their economy and moving towards food and industrial self-sufficiency, as well as increased trading with eastern countries, China, Russia, the SCO and other friendly and culturally aligned nations, like Pakistan. However, Iran too has a strong Fifth Column, engrained in the financial sector, that does not let go of forcing and propagating trading with the enemy; i.e., the west, the European Union, whose euro-monetary system is part of the dollar hegemony, hence posing similar vulnerability of sanctions as does the dollar. China – the stellar prize of the Big Chess Game – is being ‘sanctioned’ with tariffs no end, for having become the world’s strongest economy, surpassing in real output and measured by people’s purchasing power, by far the United States of America. China also has a solid economy and gold-based currency, the Yuan which is on a fast track to overtake the US-dollar as the number one world reserve currency. China retaliates, of course, with similar ‘sanctions’, but by and large, her dominance of Asian markets and growing economic influence in Europe, Africa and Latin America, is such that Trump’s tariff war means hardly more for China than a drop on a hot stone. North Korea – the much-touted Trump-Kim mid-June Singapore summit – has long since become a tiny spot in the past. Alleged agreements reached then are being breached by the US, as could have been expected. All under the false and purely invented pretext of DPRK not adhering to her disarmament commitment; a reason to impose new strangulating sanctions. The world looks on. It’s normal. Nobody dares questioning the self-styled Masters of the Universe. Misery keeps being dished out left and right, accepted by the brainwashed to-the-core masses around the globe. War is peace and peace is war. Literally. The west is living in a “peaceful” comfort zone. Why disturb it?  If people die from starvation or bombs, it happens far away and allows us to live in peace. Why bother?  Especially since we are continuously, drip-by-steady drip, being told it’s right. In a recent interview with PressTV I was asked why does the US not adhere to any of their internationally or bilaterally concluded treaties or agreements? Good question. Washington is breaking all the rules, agreements, accords, treaties, is not adhering to any international law or even moral standard, simply because following such standards would mean giving up world supremacy. Being on equal keel is not in Washington’s or Tel Aviv’s interest. Yes, this symbiotic and sick relationship between the US and Zionist Israel is becoming progressively more visible; the alliance of the brute military force and the slick and treacherous financial dominion, together striving for world hegemony, for full spectrum dominance.  This trend is accelerating under Trump and those who give him orders, simply because “they can”. Nobody objects. This tends to portray an image of peerless power, instilling fear and is expected to incite obedience. Will it? What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the one-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering, killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent example – causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters? This behavior by the dying empire is driving allies and friends into the opposite camp – to the east, where the future lays, away from a globalized One-World-Order, towards a healthy and more equal multi-polar world. – It would be good, if our world body, the members of the United Nations, created in the name of Peace, would finally gather the courage and stand up against the two destroyer nations for the good of humanity, of the globe, and of Mother Earth. http://clubof.info/

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on https://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/demise-dollar-hegemony/

Sanctions, Sanctions, Sanctions – the Final Demise of the Dollar Hegemony?

by Peter Koenig

Sanctions left and sanctions right. Financial mostly, taxes, tariffs, visas, travel bans – confiscation of foreign assets, import and export prohibitions and limitations; and also punishing those who do not respect sanctions dished out by Trump, alias the US of A, against friends of their enemies. The absurdity seems endless and escalating – exponentially, as if there was a deadline to collapse the world. Looks like a last-ditch effort to bring down international trade in favor of — what? – Make America Great Again? – Prepare for US mid-term elections? – Rally the people behind an illusion? – Or what?

All looks arbitrary and destructive. All is of course totally illegal by any international law or, forget law, which is not respected anyway by the empire and its vassals, but not even by human moral standards. Sanctions are destructive. They are interfering in other countries sovereignty. They are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship.

Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights – this very body is silent – out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire? – Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals?

Imagine Turkey – sudden massive tariffs on aluminum (20%) and steel (50%) imposed by Trump, plus central bank currency interference had the Turkish Lira drop by 40%, and that ‘only’ because Erdogan is not freeing US pastor Andrew Brunson, who faces in Turkey a jail sentence of 35 years for “terror and espionage”. An Izmir court has just turned down another US request for clemency, however, converting his jail sentence to house arrest for health reason. It is widely believed that Mr. Brunson’s alleged 23 years of ‘missionary work’ is but a smoke screen for spying.

President Erdogan has just declared he would look out for new friends, including new trading partners in the east – Russia, China, Iran, Ukraine, even the unviable EU, and that his country is planning issuing Yuan-denominated bonds to diversify Turkey’s economy, foremost the country’s reserves and gradually moving away from the dollar hegemony.

Looking out for new friends, may also include new military alliances. Is Turkey planning to exit NATO? Would turkey be ‘allowed’ to exit NATO – given its strategic position maritime and land position between east and west? – Turkey knows that having military allies that dish out punishments for acting sovereignly in internal affair – spells disaster for the future. Why continue offering your country to NATO, whose only objective it is to destroy the east – the very east which is not only Turkey’s but the world’s future? Turkey is already approaching the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and may actually accede to it within the foreseeable future. That might be the end of Turkey’s NATO alliance.

What if Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China – and many more countries not ready to bow to the empire, would jail all those spies embedded in the US Embassies or camouflaged in these countries’ national (financial) institutions, acting as Fifth Columns, undermining their host countries’ national and economic policies? – Entire cities of new jails would have to be built to accommodate the empire’s army of criminals.

Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie – and out of fear of being sanctions, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become? – Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”. That’s what we have become – a herd of pigs.

Fortunately, Russia too has moved away so far already from the western dollar-controlled economy that such sanctions do no longer hurt. They serve Trump and his cronies as mere propaganda tools – show-offs, “we are still the greatest!”.

Venezuela is being sanctioned into the ground, literally, by from-abroad (Miami and Bogota) Twitter-induced manipulations of her national currency, the Bolívar, causing astronomical inflations – constant ups and downs of the value of the local currency, bringing the national economy to a virtual halt. Imported food, pharmaceuticals and other goods are being deviated at the borders and other entry points, so they will never end up on supermarket shelves, but become smuggle ware in Colombia, where these goods are being sold at manipulated dollar-exchange rates to better-off Venezuelan and Columbian citizens. These mafia type gangs are being funded by NED and other similar nefarious State Department financed “NGOs”, trained by US secret services, either within or outside Venezuela. Once infiltrated into Venezuela – overtly or covertly – they tend to boycott the local economy from within, spread violence and become part of the Fifth Column, primarily sabotaging the financial system.

Venezuela is struggling to get out of this dilemma which has people suffering, by de-dollarizing her economy, partly through a newly created cryptocurrency, the Petro, based on Venezuela’s huge oil reserves and also through a new Bolivar – in the hope of putting the breaks on the spiraling bursts of inflation. This scenario reminds so much of Chile in 1973, when Henry Kissinger was Foreign Secretary (1973-1977), and inspired the CIA coup, by “disappearing” food and other goods from Chilean markets, killing legitimately elected President Allende, bringing Augusto Pinochet, a horrendous murderer and despot to power. The military dictatorship regime brought the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of people and lasted until 1990. Subjugating Venezuela might, however, not be so easy. After all, Venezuela has 19 years of revolutionary Chavista experience – and a solid sense of resistance.

Iran – is being plunged into a similar fate. For no reason at all, Trump reneged on the five-plus-one pronged so-called Nuclear Deal, signed in Vienna on 14 July 2015, after almost ten years of negotiations. Now – of course driven by the star-Zionist Netanyahu – new and ‘the most severe ever’ sanctions are being imposed on Iran, also decimating the value of their local currency, the Rial. Iran, under the Ayatollah, has already embarked on a course of “Resistance Economy”, meaning de-dollarization of their economy and moving towards food and industrial self-sufficiency, as well as increased trading with eastern countries, China, Russia, the SCO and other friendly and culturally aligned nations, like Pakistan. However, Iran too has a strong Fifth Column, engrained in the financial sector, that does not let go of forcing and propagating trading with the enemy, i.e. the west, the European Union, whose euro-monetary system is part of the dollar hegemony, hence posing similar vulnerability of sanctions as does the dollar.

China – the stellar prize of the Big Chess Game – is being ‘sanctioned’ with tariffs no end, for having become the world’s strongest economy, surpassing in real output and measured by people’s purchasing power, by far the United States of America. China also has a solid economy and gold-based currency, the Yuan – which is on a fast track to overtake the US-dollar as the number one world reserve currency. China retaliates, of course, with similar ‘sanctions’, but by and large, her dominance of Asian markets and growing economic influence in Europe, Africa and Latin America, is such that Trump’s tariff war means hardly more for China than a drop on a hot stone.

North Korea – the much-touted Trump-Kim mid-June Singapore summit – has long since become a tiny spot in the past. Alleged agreements reached then are being breached by the US, as could have been expected. All under the false and purely invented pretext of DPRK not adhering to her disarmament commitment; a reason to impose new strangulating sanctions. The world looks on. Its normal. Nobody dares questioning the self-styled Masters of the Universe. Misery keeps being dished out left and right – accepted by the brainwashed to-the-core masses around the globe. War is peace and peace is war. Literally. The west is living in a “peaceful” comfort zone. Why disturb it? – If people die from starvation or bombs – it happens far away and allows us to live in peace. Why bother? – Especially since we are continuously, drip-by-steady drip being told its right.

In a recent interview with PressTV I was asked, why does the US not adhere to any of their internationally or bilaterally concluded treaties or agreements? – Good question. – Washington is breaking all the rules, agreements, accords, treaties, is not adhering to any international law or even moral standard, simply because following such standards would mean giving up world supremacy. Being on equal keel is not in Washington’s or Tel Aviv’s interest. Yes, this symbiotic and sick relationship between the US and Zionist Israel is becoming progressively more visible; the alliance of the brute military force and the slick and treacherous financial dominion – together striving for world hegemony, for full spectrum dominance. This trend is accelerating under Trump and those who give him orders, simply because “they can”. Nobody objects. This tends to portray an image of peerless power, instilling fear and is expected to incite obedience. Will it?

What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the one-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering – killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent examples, causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters?

This behavior by the dying empire is driving allies and friends into the opposite camp – to the east, where the future lays, away from a globalized One-World-Order, towards a healthy and more equal multi-polar world. – It would be good, if our world body, the members of the United Nations, created in the name of Peace, would finally gather the courage and stand up against the two destroyer nations for the good of humanity, of the globe, and of Mother Earth.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog; and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

The Prime Minister of Lebanon's Unnerving Interview

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/the-prime-minister-of-lebanons-unnerving-interview/

The Prime Minister of Lebanon's Unnerving Interview

In the Middle East, the parlor game of the moment is guessing whether Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister—or is it ex-prime minister?—is literally, or only figuratively, a prisoner of his Saudi patrons. In a stiff interview from an undisclosed location in Riyadh on Sunday, Hariri did little to allay concerns that he’s being held hostage by a foreign power that is now writing his speeches and seeking to use him to ignite a regional war. He insisted he was “free,” and would soon return to Lebanon. He said he wanted calm to prevail in any dispute with Hezbollah, the most influential party serving in his country’s government.

Since Hariri was summoned to Saudi Arabia last week and more or less disappeared from public life as a free head of state, rumors have swirled about his fate. On November 4, he delivered a stilted, forced-sounding resignation speech from Riyadh. Michael Aoun, Lebanon’s president, refused to accept the resignation, and Hezbollah—the target of the vituperative rhetoric in Hariri’s speech—deftly chose to stand above the fray, absolving Hariri of words that Hezbollah (and many others) believe were written by Hariri’s Saudi captors.

The bizarre quality of all this aside, the underlying matter is deadly serious. Saudi Arabia has embarked on another exponential escalation, one that may well sacrifice Lebanon as part of its reckless bid to confront Iran.

Foreign influence seeps through Middle Eastern politics, nowhere more endemically than Lebanon. Spies, militias, and heads of state, issue political directives and oversee military battles. Foreign powers have played malignant, pivotal roles in every conflict zone, from Iraq and Syria to Yemen and Libya. Lebanon, sadly, could come next. Even by the low standards of recent history, the saga of this past week beggars the imagination, unfolding with the imperial flair of colonial times—but with all the short-sighted recklessness that has characterized the missteps of the region’s declining powers.

Saudi Arabia, it seems, is bent on exacting a price from its rival Iran for its recent string of foreign-policy triumphs. Israel and the United States appear ready to strike a belligerent pose, one that leaders in the three countries, according to some reports, hope will contain Iran’s expansionism and produce a new alignment connecting President Donald Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The problems with this approach are legion—most notably, it simply cannot work. Iran’s strength gives it a deterrence ability that makes preemptive war an even greater folly than it was a decade ago. No military barrage can “erase” Hezbollah, as some Israel war planners imagine; no “rollback,” as dreamed up by advisers to Trump and Mohamed bin Salman, can shift the strategic alliance connecting Iran with Iraq, Syria, and much of Lebanon.

Saudi Arabia, as the morbid joke circulating Beirut would have it, is ready to fight Iran to the last Lebanese. But the joke only gets it half right—the new war reportedly being contemplated wouldn’t actually hurt Iran. Instead, it would renew Hezbollah’s legitimacy and extend its strategic reach even if it caused untold suffering for countless Lebanese. Just as important, a new war might be biblical in its fire and fury, as the bombast of recent Israeli presentations suggests. But that fire and fury would point in many directions. Iran’s friends wouldn’t be the only ones to be singed.

Saudi Arabia’s moves have gotten plenty of attention in the days since Mohamed bin Salman rounded up his remaining rivals, supposedly as part of an anti-corruption campaign. Hariri was caught in the Saudi dragnet around the same time. It seemed puzzling at first: For years, Saudi Arabia had been angry with Hariri and his Future Movement, its client in Lebanon, for sharing power with Hezbollah rather than going to war with it. Riyadh was clearly displeased with Hariri’s pragmatic positions. He had learned the hard way, after several bruising political battles and a brief street battle in May 2008, that Hezbollah’s side was the stronger one. Rather than fuel a futile internecine struggle, Hariri (like the rest of Lebanon’s warlords) opted for precarious coexistence.

Once it became clear that Hariri could do nothing to prevent Hezbollah’s decisive intervention in the Syrian civil war, Saudi Arabia cut off funding for Hariri, bankrupting his family’s billion-dollar Saudi construction empire. It also ended its financial support for the Lebanese army, cultivating the impression that it considered Lebanon lost to the Iranians and Hezbollah.

Now, Saudi Arabia has steamed back into the Lebanese theater with a vengeance. It dismisses Hezbollah as nothing but an Iranian proxy, and, in the words uttered by Hariri in his resignation speech, wants to “cut off the hands that are reaching for it.” In what must be an intentional move, it has destroyed Hariri as a viable ally, reducing him to a weak appendage of his sponsors, unable to move without the kingdom’s permission. Mohamed bin Salman won’t even let him resign on his home soil. If Hariri really were free to come and go, as he insisted so woodenly in his Sunday night interview, then he would already be in Beirut. Even his close allies have trouble believing that threats against his life prevent him from coming home, and the Internal Security Forces, considered loyal to Hariri, denied knowledge of any assassination plot.

The Saudis have fanned the flames of war, seemingly in ignorance of the fact that Iran can only be countered through long-term strategic alliances, the building of capable local proxies and allies, and a wider regional alliance built on shared interests, values, and short-term goals. What Saudi Arabia seems to prefer is a military response to a strategic shift, an approach made worse by its gross misread of reality. In Yemen, the Saudis insisted on treating the Houthi rebels as Iranian tools rather than as an indigenous force, initiating a doomed war of eradication. The horrific result has implicated Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the United States, in an array of war crimes against the Yemenis.

Hariri has clearly tried to balance between two masters: his Saudi bosses, who insist that he confront Hezbollah, and his own political interest in a stable Lebanon. On Sunday night, he appeared uncomfortable. At times, he and his interviewer, from his own television station, looked to handlers off camera. The exchange ended abruptly, after Hariri implied that he might take back his resignation and negotiate with Hezbollah, seemingly veering from the hardline Saudi script. “I am not against Hezbollah as a political party, but that doesn’t mean we allow it to destroy Lebanon,” he said. His resignation does nothing to thwart Hezbollah’s power; if anything, a vacuum benefits Hezbollah, which doesn’t need the Lebanese state to bolster its power or legitimacy.

One theory is that the Saudis removed Hariri to pave their way for an attack on Lebanon. Without the cover of a coalition government, the warmongering argument goes, Israel would be able to launch an attack, with the pretext of Hezbollah’s expanded armaments and operations in areas such as the Golan Heights and the Qalamoun Mountains from which they can challenge Israel. Supposedly, according to some analysts and politicians who have met with regional leaders, there’s a plan to punish Iran and cut Hezbollah down to size. Israel would lead the way with full support from Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Short of seeking actual war, Saudi Arabia has, at a minimum, backed a campaign to fuel the idea that war is always possible. But such a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran would upend still more lives in a part of the world where the recently displaced number in the millions, the dead in the hundreds of thousands, and where epidemics of disease and malnutrition strike with depressing regularity. Short of direct war, Riyadh’s machinations will likely produce a destabilizing proxy war.

If Hariri were a savvier politician, he could have used different words; he could have refused to resign, or insisted on doing so from Beirut. But he is an ineffective leader in eclipse, unable to deliver either as a sectarian demagogue or a bridge-building conciliator. Saudi Arabia’s plan to use him to strike against Iran will fail. Just look at how willfully it has misused and now destroyed its billion-dollar Lebanese asset. It’s a poor preview of things to come in the Saudi campaign against Iran.

Original Article:

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[nothingman]

By Alfred W. McCoy | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – –

The superhighway to disaster is already being paved.

From Donald Trump’s first days in office, news of the damage to America’s international stature has come hard and fast. As if guided by some malign design, the new president seemed to identify the key pillars that have supported U.S. global power for the past 70 years and set out to topple each of them in turn. By degrading NATO, alienating Asian allies, cancelling trade treaties, and slashing critical scientific research, the Trump White House is already in the process of demolishing the delicately balanced architecture that has sustained Washington’s world leadership since the end of World War II.  However unwittingly, Trump is ensuring the accelerated collapse of American global hegemony.

Stunned by his succession of foreign policy blunders, commentators — left and right, domestic and foreign — have raised their voices in a veritable chorus of criticism. A Los Angeles Times editorial typically called him “so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality” that he threatened to “weaken this country’s moral standing in the world” and “imperil the planet” through his “appalling” policy choices. “He’s a sucker who’s shrinking U.S. influence in [Asia] and helping make China great again,” wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman after surveying the damage to the country’s Asian alliances from the president’s “decision to tear up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal in his first week in office.”

The international press has been no less harsh. Reeling from Trump’s denunciation of South Korea’s free-trade agreement as “horrible” and his bizarre claim that the country had once been “a part of China,” Seoul’s leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, expressed the “shock, betrayal, and anger many South Koreans have felt.” Assessing his first 100 days in office, Britain’s venerable Observer commented: “Trump’s crudely intimidatory, violent, know-nothing approach to sensitive international issues has encircled the globe from Moscow to the Middle East to Beijing, plunging foes and allies alike into a dark vortex of expanding strategic instability.”

For an American president to virtually walk out of his grand inaugural celebrations into such a hailstorm of criticism is beyond extraordinary. Having more or less exhausted their lexicon of condemnatory rhetoric, the usual crew of commentators is now struggling to understand how an American president could be quite so willfully self-destructive.

Britain’s Suez Crisis

Blitzed by an incessant stream of bizarre tweets and White House conspiracy theories, observers worldwide seem to have concluded that Donald Trump is a president like no other, that the situation he’s creating is without parallel, and that his foreign policy is already a disaster without precedent. After rummaging around in history’s capacious closet for some old suit that might fit him, analysts have failed to find any antecedent or analogue to adequately explain him.

Yet just 60 years ago, a crisis in the ever-volatile Middle East overseen by a bumbling, mistake-prone British leader helped create a great power debacle that offers insight into the Trumpian moment, a glimpse into possible futures, and a sense of the kind of decline that could lie in the imperial future of the United States.

In the early 1950s, Britain’s international position had many parallels with America’s today. After a difficult postwar recovery from the devastation of World War II, that country was enjoying robust employment, lucrative international investments, and the prestige of the pound sterling’s stature as the world’s reserve currency. Thanks to a careful withdrawal from its far-flung, global empire and its close alliance with Washington, London still enjoyed a sense of international influence exceptional for a small island nation of just 50 million people. On balance, Britain seemed poised for many more years of world leadership with all the accompanying economic rewards and perks.

Then came the Suez crisis. After a decade of giving up one colony after another, the accumulated stress of imperial retreat pushed British conservatives into a disastrous military intervention to reclaim Egypt’s Suez Canal.  This, in turn, caused a “deep moral crisis in London” and what one British diplomat would term the “dying convulsion of British imperialism.” In a clear instance of what historians call “micro-militarism” — that is, a bold military strike designed to recover fading imperial influence — Britain joined France and Israel in a misbegotten military invasion of Egypt that transformed slow imperial retreat into a precipitous collapse.

Just as the Panama Canal had once been a shining example for Americans of their nation’s global prowess, so British conservatives treasured the Suez Canal as a vital lifeline that tied their small island to its sprawling empire in Asia and Africa. A few years after the canal’s grand opening in 1869, London did the deal of the century, scooping up Egypt’s shares in it for a bargain basement price of £4 million.  Then, in 1882, Britain consolidated its control over the canal through a military occupation of Egypt, reducing that ancient land to little more than an informal colony.

As late as 1950, in fact, Britain still maintained 80,000 soldiers and a string of military bases astride the canal. The bulk of its oil and gasoline, produced at the enormous Abadan refinery in the Persian Gulf, transited through Suez, fueling its navy, its domestic transportation system, and much of its industry.

After British troops completed a negotiated withdrawal from Suez in 1955, the charismatic nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser asserted Egypt’s neutrality in the Cold War by purchasing Soviet bloc arms, raising eyebrows in Washington. In July 1956, after the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower had in response reneged on its promise to finance construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Upper Nile, Nasser sought alternative financing for this critical infrastructure by nationalizing the Suez Canal.  In doing so, he electrified the Arab world and elevated himself to the top rank of world leaders.

Although British ships still passed freely through the canal and Washington insisted on a diplomatic resolution of the conflict, Britain’s conservative leadership reacted with irrational outrage. Behind a smokescreen of sham diplomacy designed to deceive Washington, their closest ally, the British foreign secretary met secretly with the prime ministers of France and Israel near Paris to work out an elaborately deceptive two-stage invasion of Egypt by 250,000 allied troops, backed by 500 aircraft and 130 warships.  Its aim, of course, was to secure the canal.

On October 29, 1956, the Israeli army led by the dashing General Moshe Dayan swept across the Sinai Peninsula, destroying Egyptian tanks and bringing his troops to within 10 miles of the canal. Using this fighting as a pretext for an intervention to restore peace, Anglo-French amphibious and airborne forces quickly joined the attack, backed by a devastating bombardment from six aircraft carriers that destroyed the Egyptian air force, including over a hundred of its new MiG jet fighters. As Egypt’s military collapsed with some 3,000 of its troops killed and 30,000 captured, Nasser deployed a defense brilliant in its simplicity by scuttling dozens of rusting cargo ships filled with rocks and concrete at the entrance to the Suez Canal.  In this way, he closed Europe’s oil lifeline to the Persian Gulf.

Simultaneously, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, backed by Washington, imposed a cease-fire after just nine days of war, stopping the Anglo-French attack far short of capturing the entire canal. President Eisenhower’s blunt refusal to back his allies with either oil or money and the threat of condemnation before the U.N. soon forced Britain into a humiliating withdrawal. With its finances collapsing from the invasion’s soaring costs, the British government could not maintain the pound’s official exchange rate, degrading its stature as a global reserve currency.

The author of this extraordinary debacle was Sir Anthony Eden, a problematic prime minister whose career offers some striking parallels with Donald Trump’s. Born into privilege as the son of a landholder, Eden enjoyed a good education at a private school and an elite university. After inheriting a substantial fortune from his father, he entered politics as a conservative, using his political connections to dabble in finance. Chafing under Winston Churchill’s postwar leadership of the Conservative Party, Eden, who styled himself a rebel against hidebound institutions, used incessant infighting and his handsome head of hair to push the great man aside and become prime minister in 1955.

When Nasser nationalized the canal, Eden erupted with egotism, bluster, and outrage. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser,” Eden berated his foreign affairs minister. “I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered, and if you and the Foreign Office don’t agree, then you’d better come to the cabinet and explain why.” Convinced that Britain was still the globe’s great power, Eden rejected sound advice that he consult fully with Washington, the country’s closest ally. As his bold intervention plunged toward diplomatic disaster, the prime minister became focused on manipulating the British media, in the process confusing favorable domestic coverage with international support.

When Washington demanded a ceasefire as the price of a billion-dollar bailout for a British economy unable to sustain such a costly war, Eden’s bluster quickly crumbled and he denied his troops a certain victory, arousing a storm of protest in Parliament. Humiliated by the forced withdrawal, Eden compensated psychologically by ordering MI-6, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, to launch its second ill-fated assassination attempt on Nasser. Since its chief local agent was actually a double-agent loyal to Nasser, Egyptian security had, however, already rounded up the British operatives and the weapons delivered for the contract killers proved duds.

Confronted with a barrage of angry questions in Parliament about his collusion with the Israelis, Eden lied repeatedly, swearing that there was no “foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt.” Protesters denounced him as “too stupid to be a prime minister,” opposition members of parliament laughed openly when he appeared before Parliament, and his own foreign affairs minister damned him as “an enraged elephant charging senselessly at… imaginary enemies.”

Just weeks after the last British soldier left Egypt, Eden, discredited and disgraced, was forced to resign after only 21 months in office. Led into this unimaginably misbegotten operation by his delusions of omnipotence, he left the once-mighty British lion a toothless circus animal that would henceforth roll over whenever Washington cracked the whip.

Trump’s Demolition Job

Despite the obvious differences in their economic circumstances, there remain some telling resonances between Britain’s postwar politics and America’s troubles today. Both of these fading global hegemons suffered a slow erosion of economic power in a fast-changing world, producing severe social tensions and stunted political leaders. Britain’s Conservative Party leadership had declined from the skilled diplomacy of Disraeli, Salisbury, and Churchill to Eden’s bluster and blunder.  Similarly, the Republican Party has descended from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and George H.W. Bush to a field of 17 primary candidates in 2016 who promised to resolve an infinitely complex crisis in the Middle East through a set of incendiary policies that included making desert sands glow from carpet-bombing and forcing terrorists to capitulate through torture. Confronted with daunting international challenges, the voters of both countries supported appealing but unstable leaders whose delusions of omnipotence inclined them to military misadventures.

Like British citizens of the 1950s, most Americans today do not fully grasp the fragility of their status as “the leader of the free world.” Indeed, Washington has been standing astride the globe as a superpower for so long that most of its leaders have almost no understanding of the delicate design of their country’s global power built so carefully by two post-World War II presidents.

Under Democratic President Harry Truman, Congress created the key instruments for Washington’s emerging national security state and its future global dominion by passing the National Security Act of 1947 that established the Air Force, the CIA, and two new executive agencies, the Defense Department and the National Security Council. To rebuild a devastated, war-torn Europe, Washington launched the Marshall Plan and then turned such thinking into a worldwide aid program through the U.S. Agency for International Development meant to embed American power globally and support pro-American elites across the planet. Under Truman as well, U.S. diplomats forged the NATO alliance (which Washington would dominate until the Trump moment), advanced European unity, and signed a parallel string of mutual-defense treaties with key Asian allies along the Pacific littoral, making Washington the first power in two millennia to control both “axial ends” of the strategic Eurasian continent.

During the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower deployed this national security apparatus to secure Washington’s global dominion with a nuclear triad (bombers, ballistic missiles, and submarines), a chain of military bases that ringed Eurasia, and a staggering number of highly militarized covert operations to assure the ascent of loyal allies worldwide. Above all, he oversaw the integration of the latest in scientific and technological research into the Pentagon’s weapons procurement system through the forging of the famed “military-industrial complex” (against which he would end up warning Americans as he left office in 1961).   All this, in turn, fostered an aura of American power so formidable that Washington could re-order significant parts of the world almost at will, enforcing peace, setting the international agenda, and toppling governments on four continents.

While it’s reasonable to argue that Washington had by then become history’s greatest global power, its hegemony, like that of all the world empires that preceded it, remained surprisingly fragile. Skilled leadership was required to maintain the system’s balance of diplomacy, military power, economic strength, and technological innovation.

By the time President Trump took his oath of office, negative, long-term trends had already started to limit the influence of any American leader on the world stage.  These included a declining share of the global economy, an erosion of U.S. technological primacy, an inability to apply its overwhelming military power in a way that achieved expected policy goals on an ever more recalcitrant planet, and a generation of increasingly independent national leaders, whether in Europe, Asia, or Latin America.

Apart from such adverse trends, Washington’s global power rested on such strategic fundamentals that its leaders might still have managed carefully enough to maintain a reasonable semblance of American hegemony: notably, the NATO alliance and Asian mutual-security treaties at the strategic antipodes of Eurasia, trade treaties that reinforced such alliances, scientific research to sustain its military’s technological edge, and leadership on international issues like climate change.

In just five short months, however, the Trump White House has done a remarkable job of demolishing these very pillars of U.S. global power. During his first overseas trip in May 2017, President Trump chastised stone-faced NATO leaders for failure to pay their “fair share” into the military part of the alliance and refused to affirm its core principle of collective defense. Ignoring the pleas of these close allies, he then forfeited America’s historic diplomatic leadership by announcing Washington’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord with all the drama of a reality television show. After watching his striking repudiation of Washington’s role as world leader, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told voters in her country that “we must fight for our future on our own, for our destiny as Europeans.”

Along the strategic Pacific littoral, Trump cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact on taking office and gratuitously alienated allies by cutting short a courtesy phone call to Australia’s prime minister and insulting South Korea to the point where its new president won office, in part, on a platform of “say no” to America. When President Moon Jae-in visited Washington in June, determined to heal the breach between the two countries, he was, as the New York Times reported, blindsided by “the harshness of Mr. Trump’s critique of South Korea on trade.”

Just days after Trump dismissed Moon’s suggestion that the two countries engage in actual diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang, North Korea successfully test-fired a ballistic missile potentially capable of reaching Alaska or possibly Hawaii with a nuclear warhead (though experts believe Pyongyang may still be years away from effectively fitting such a warhead to the missile).  It was an act that made those same negotiations Washington’s only viable option — apart from a second Korean War, which would potentially devastate both the region and the U.S. position as the preeminent international leader.

In other words, after 70 years of global dominion, America’s geopolitical command of the axial ends of Eurasia — the central pillars of its world power — seems to be crumbling in a matter of months.

Instead of the diplomacy of presidents past, Trump and his advisers, especially his military men, have reacted to his first modest foreign crises as well as the everyday power questions of empire with outbursts akin to Anthony Eden’s.  Since January, the White House has erupted in sudden displays of raw military power that included a drone blitz of unprecedented intensity in Yemen to destroy what the president called a “network of lawless savages,” the bombardment of a Syrian air base with 59 Tomahawk missiles, and the detonation of the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb on a terrorist refuge in eastern Afghanistan.

While reveling in the use of such weaponry, Trump, by slashing federal funding for critical scientific research, is already demolishing the foundations for the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower’s successors, Republican and Democratic alike, so sedulously maintained for the last half-century. While China is ramping up its scientific research across the board, Trump has proposed what the American Association for Advancement of Science called “deep cuts to numerous research agencies” that will mean the eventual loss of the country’s technological edge. In the emerging field of artificial intelligence that will soon drive space warfare and cyber-warfare, the White House wants to reduce the 2018 budget for this critical research at the National Science Foundation to a paltry $175 million, even as Beijing is launching “a new multi-billion-dollar initiative” linked to building “military robots.”

A Future Debacle in the Greater Middle East

With a president who shares Sir Anthony Eden’s penchant for bravura, self-delusion, and impulsiveness, the U.S. seems primed for a twenty-first-century Suez of its own, a debacle in the Greater Middle East (or possibly elsewhere). From the disastrous expedition that ancient Athens sent to Sicily in 413 BCE to Britain’s invasion of Suez in 1956, embattled empires throughout the ages have often suffered an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle, a misuse of armed force known technically among historians as micro-militarism. With the hubris that has marked empires over the millennia, the Trump administration is, for instance, now committed to extending indefinitely Washington’s failing war of pacification in Afghanistan with a new mini-surge of U.S. troops (and air power) in that classic “graveyard of empires.“

So irrational, so unpredictable is such micro-militarism that even the most fanciful of scenarios can be outpaced by actual events, as was true at Suez. With the U.S. military stretched thin from North Africa to South Korea, with no lasting successes in its post-9/11 wars, and with tensions rising from the Persian Gulf and Syria to the South China Sea and the Koreas, the possibilities for a disastrous military crisis abroad seem almost unending. So let me pick just one possible scenario for a future Trumpian military misadventure in the Greater Middle East.  (I’m sure you’ll think of other candidates immediately.)

It’s the late spring of 2020, the start of the traditional Afghan fighting season, and a U.S. garrison in the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is unexpectedly overrun by an ad hoc alliance of Taliban and Islamic State guerrillas. While U.S. aircraft are grounded in a blinding sand storm, the militants summarily execute their American captives, filming the gruesome event for immediate upload on the Internet. Speaking to an international television audience, President Trump thunders against “disgusting Muslim murderers” and swears he will “make the desert sands run red with their blood.” In fulfillment of that promise, an angry American theater commander sends B-1 bombers and F-35 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of Kandahar believed to be under Taliban control. In an aerial coup de grâce, AC-130-U “Spooky” gunships then rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire. The civilian casualties are beyond counting.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques across Afghanistan and far beyond. Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. In isolated posts across the country, clusters of Afghan soldiers open fire on their American advisers in what are termed “insider” or “green-on-blue” attacks. Meanwhile, Taliban fighters launch a series of assaults on scattered U.S. garrisons elsewhere in the country, suddenly sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops not just in Kandahar, but in several other provincial capitals and even Kabul.

Meanwhile, angry over the massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the anti-Muslim diatribes tweeted almost daily from the Oval Office, and years of depressed energy prices, OPEC’s leaders impose a harsh new oil embargo aimed at the United States and its allies. With refineries running dry in Europe and Asia, the world economy trembling at the brink of recession, and gas prices soaring, Washington flails about for a solution. The first call is to NATO, but the alliance is near collapse after four years of President Trump’s erratic behavior. Even the British, alienated by his inattention to their concerns, rebuff his appeals for support.

Facing an uncertain reelection in November 2020, the Trump White House makes its move, sending Marines and Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. Flying from the Fifth Fleet’s base in Bahrain, Navy Seals and Army Rangers occupy the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia, the ninth largest in the world; Kuwait’s main oil port at Shuaiba; and Iraq’s at Um Qasr.

Simultaneously, the light carrier USS Iwo Jima steams south at the head of a task force that launches helicopters carrying 6,000 Special Operations forces tasked with seizing the al-Ruwais refinery in Abu Dhabi, the world’s fourth largest, and the megaport at Jebel Ali in Dubai, a 20-square-mile complex so massive that the Americans can only occupy its oil facilities. When Teheran vehemently protests the U.S. escalation in the Persian Gulf and hints at retaliation, Defense Secretary James Mattis, reviving a plan from his days as CENTCOM commander, orders preemptive Tomahawk missile strikes on Iran’s flagship oil refinery at Abadan.

From its first hours, the operation goes badly wrong. The troops seem lost inside the unmapped mazes of pipes that honeycomb the oil ports.  Meanwhile, refinery staff prove stubbornly uncooperative, sensing that the occupation will be short-lived and disastrous. On day three, Iranian Revolutionary Guard commandos, who have been training for this moment since the breakdown of the 2015 nuclear accord with the U.S., storm ashore at the Kuwaiti and Emirate refineries with remote-controlled charges. Unable to use their superior firepower in such a volatile environment, American troops are reduced to firing futile bursts at the departing speed boats as oil storage tanks and gas pipes explode spectacularly.

Three days later, as the USS Gerald Ford approaches an Iranian island, more than 100 speedboats suddenly appear, swarming the carrier in a practiced pattern of high-speed crisscrosses. Every time lethal bursts from the carrier’s MK-38 chain guns rip through the lead boats, others emerge from the flames coming closer and closer. Concealed by clouds of smoke, one finally reaches an undefended spot beneath the conning tower near enough for a Revolutionary guardsman to attach a magnetic charge to the hull with a fateful click. There is a deafening roar and a gaping hole erupts at the waterline of the first aircraft carrier to be crippled in battle since World War II.  As things go from bad to worse, the Pentagon is finally forced to accept that a debacle is underway and withdraws its capital ships from the Persian Gulf.

As black clouds billow skyward from the Gulf’s oil ports and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of imperial Britain to brand this “America’s Suez.” The empire has been trumped.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, out in September from Dispatch Books.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Alfred W. McCoy

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: In September, Dispatch Books will publish the next in our line-up of explorations of imperial America: Alfred McCoy’s remarkable In the Shadows of the American Century. Kirkus Reviews has praised it as “sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike, offering no likely path beyond decline and fall.” Among the impressive range of comments we’ve gotten on it come two from Pulitzer Prize winners. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, writes that McCoy “persuasively argues for the inevitable decline of the American empire and the rise of China… Let’s hope that Americans will listen to his powerful arguments.” And historian John Dower states that the book “joins the essential short list of scrupulous historical and comparative studies of the United States as an awesome, conflicted, technologically innovative, routinely atrocious, and ultimately hubristic imperial power.” As with all his work since the CIA tried to stifle his classic first book, The Politics of Heroin, back in the early 1970s, McCoy’s is leading-edge stuff and a must-read, so reserve your copy early by clicking here. Tom]

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

PBS NewsHour: “News Wrap: U.S. forces kill Abu Sayed, ISIS leader in Afghanistan”

via Informed Comment

[clubofinfo]

Expert: This week, following the recent announcement of a new National Defense Strategy that focuses on conflicts with great powers and a new arms race, the Pentagon announced an escalation of nuclear weapons development. The United States’ military is spread across the world, including several dangerous conflict areas that could develop into an all-out war, possibly in conflict with China or Russia. This comes at a time when US empire is fading, something the Pentagon also recognizes and the US is falling behind China economically. This is not unexpected considering that one year ago President Trump sought an inaugural parade that put tanks and missiles on display. New National Defense Strategy Means More War, More Spending The new National Defense Strategy announced last week moves from the ‘war on terror’ toward conflict with great powers. Michael Whitney, writing about the conflict in Syria, puts it in context: Washington’s biggest problem is the absence of a coherent policy. While the recently released National Defense Strategy articulated a change in the way the imperial strategy would be implemented, (by jettisoning the ‘war on terror’ pretext to a ‘great power’ confrontation) the changes amount to nothing more than a tweaking of the public relations ‘messaging’. Washington’s global ambitions remain the same albeit with more emphasis on raw military power. The move from military conflict against non-state actors; i.e., ‘terrorists’, to great power conflict means more military hardware, massive spending on weapons and a new arms race. Andrew Bacevich writes in American Conservative that war profiteers are popping open the champagne. Bacevich writes the ‘new’ strategy is placed in the false claim that the US is “emerging from a period of strategic atrophy.” The claim is laughable as the US has been in never ending war with massive military spending throughout the century: Under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump, U.S. forces have been constantly on the go. I’m prepared to argue that no nation in recorded history has ever deployed its troops to more places than has the United States since 2001. American bombs and missiles have rained down on a remarkable array of countries. We’ve killed an astonishing number of people. The new strategy means more spending on weapons to prepare for conflict with Russia and China. Not bothering with reality, Secretary of Defense JimMattis claimed: “Our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. And it is continually eroding.”  He described the Pentagon’s plans for ‘procurement and modernization’; i.e. the arms race that includes nuclear, space and traditional weapons, cyber defense and more surveillance. The Pentagon announced its Nuclear Posture Review on February 2, 2018. The review calls for updating and expanding the nuclear arsenal in order to respond to perceived threats, in particular by “great powers,” e.g. Russia and China, as well North Korea and others. Peace Action described a review written by Dr. Strangeglove, adding: “The expansion of our nuclear arsenal called for in the Nuclear Posture Review would cost the American taxpayers an estimated $1.7 trillion adjusted for inflation over the next three decades.” Bachevich concludes “Who will celebrate the National Defense Strategy? Only weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, lobbyists, and other fat cat beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex.” To further the glee of weapons makers, Trump is urging the State Department to spend more time selling US weapons. Escalating Conflicts Risk War Globally In his first year as president, Donald Trump handed over decision-making power to “his generals” and as expected, this resulted in more “warfare, bombing and deaths” in his first year than the Obama era. There has been “an almost 50 percent increase of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria during Trump’s first year in office, leading to a rise in civilian deaths by more than 200 percent compared with the year before.” Trump has also broken the record for special forces, now deployed in 149 countries or 75 percent of the globe.  So much for ‘America First.’ Many areas risk escalation to full-scale war, including conflict with Russia and China: Syria: The seven-year war in Syria, which has killed 400,000 people, began during Obama’s presidency under the guise of destroying ISIS. The real goal was removal of President Assad. This January, Secretary of State Tillerson made the goal clear, saying that even after the defeat of ISIS the US would stay in Syria until Assad was removed from office. The US is moving to Plan B, the creation of a de facto autonomous Kurdish state for almost one-third of Syria defended by a proxy military of 30,000 troops, mainly Kurds. Marcello Ferrada de Noli describes that in response, Syria aided by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah “continues victorious and unabated in its pursuit to retake the full sovereignty of its nation’s territory.” Turkey is moving to ensure no Kurdish territory is created by the US. North Korea: The latest dangerous idea coming from the Trump military is giving North Korea a “bloody nose.” This schoolyard bully talk risks a US first strike that could create war with China and Russia. China has said if the US attacked first it would defend North Korea. This aggressive talk comes when North and South Korea seek peace and are cooperating during the Olympics. The Trump era has continued massive military exercises, practicing attacks on North Korea that include nuclear attacks and assassination of their leadership. The US did take a step back and agree not to hold such war games during the Olympics. Iran: The US has sought regime change since the 1979 Islamic Revolution removed the US’s Shah of Iran. The current debate over the future of the nuclear weapons agreement and economic sanctions are focal points of conflict. While observers find Iran has lived up to the agreement, the Trump administration continues to claim violations. In addition, the US, through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and other agencies, is spending millions  annually to build opposition to the government and foment regime change, as seen in recent protests. In addition, the US (along with Israel and Saudi Arabia) is engaged in conflict with Iran in other areas, e.g. Syria and Yemen. There is regular propaganda demonizing Iran and threatening war with Iran, which is six times the size of Iraq and has a much stronger military. The US has been isolated in the UN over its belligerence toward Iran. Afghanistan: The longest war in US history continues after 16 years. The US has been hiding what is happening in Afghanistan because the Taliban has an active presence in about 70 percent of the country and ISIS has gained more territory than ever before resulting in the Inspector General for Afghanistan criticizing DoD for refusing to release data. The long war included Trump dropping the largest non-nuclear bomb in history and resulted in allegations of US war crimes that the International Criminal Court seeks to investigate. The US has caused devastation throughout the country. Ukraine: The US supported coup in the Ukraine continues to cause conflicts on the Russian border. The US spent billions on the coup, but documents outlining the Obama administration’s involvement have not been released. The coup was complete with Vice President Biden’s son and John Kerry’s long term financial ally being put on the board of the Ukraine’s largest private energy company. A former State Department employee became Ukraine’s finance minister. The US continues to claim Russia is the aggressor because it protected its Navy base in Crimea from the US coup. Now, the Trump administration is providing arms to Kiev and stoking a civil war with Kiev and western Ukraine against eastern Ukraine. These are not the only areas where the US is creating regime change or seeking domination. In another strange statement, Secretary of State Tillerson warned Venezuela may face a military coup while winking that the US does not support regime change (even though it has been seeking regime change to control Venezuelan oil since Hugo Chavez came to power). Tillerson’s comment came as Venezuela negotiated a settlement with the opposition. Regime change is the mode of operation for the US in Latin America.  The US supported recent questionable elections in Honduras, to keep the coup government Obama supported in power. In Brazil, the US is assisting the prosecution of Lula, who seeks to run for president, in a crisis that threatens its fragile democracy protecting a coup government. In Africa, the US has military in 53 of 54 countries and is in competition with China, which is using economic power rather than military power. The US is laying the groundwork for military domination of the continent with little congressional oversight — to dominate the land, resources and people of Africa. Opposition to War and Militarism The anti-war movement, which atrophied under President Obama, is coming back to life. World Beyond War is working to abolish war as an instrument of foreign policy. Black Alliance for Peace is working to revitalize opposition to war by blacks, historically some of the strongest opponents of war. Peace groups are uniting around the No US Foreign Military Bases campaign that is seeking to close 800 US military bases in 80 countries. Peace advocates are organizing actions. The campaign to divest from the war machine kicks off from February 5 to 11 highlighting the economic cost of war. A global day of action against the US occupation of Guantanamo Bay is being planned for February 23, the anniversary of the US seizing Guantanamo Bay from Cuba through a “perpetual lease” beginning in 1903. A national day of action against US wars at home and abroad is being planned for April. And Cindy Sheehan is organizing a Women’s March on the Pentagon. There are many opportunities to oppose war in this new era of “Great Power” conflict. We urge you to get involved as you are able to show that the people say “No” to war. http://clubof.info/