theintercept | Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”
johnhelmer | If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of
the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of
how events developed, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three
vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:
— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and
intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human
intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence
services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence
capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].
— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive
Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the
direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].
— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech,
expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The
construction of the barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive
manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate.
Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of
their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis. Considering
the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had
relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the
territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.
The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless.
Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost
unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s]
technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to
respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli
forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical
vulnerability.
As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological
solutions, methods, and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being
waged by people, not by machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal
and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat.
Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex
systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the
system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic.
[*] The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006 and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine)
also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection
of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an
information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the
Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.
[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff
plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them,
followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists
against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel
Aviv. Click. On Saturday night, October 28,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence
services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war
plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu
then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of
the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military
leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.
[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said:
“We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the
peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who
organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it
has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers
act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United
States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global
instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is
also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees
it, understands it, even according to trends in the global economy – is
weakening, losing its position. The American-style world, with one
hegemon, is being destroyed, is leaving, gradually but steadily going
into the past…The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired,
including through social networks, not least from the territory of
Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services. I want to
ask myself in this regard: is it possible to help Palestine by trying to
attack the Tats and their families? Tats, by the way, are the titular
nation in Dagestan. Palestine can only be helped in the fight against
those who are behind this tragedy. We, Russia, are fighting them as part
of a special military operation, it is with them – both for ourselves
and for those who strive for real, true freedom.”
timesofisrael | Bias against homelands can hurt minorities in the Diaspora. Prejudices
against Africans (‘primitives,’ ‘hotheads’) devalue Black migrants
around the world. Prejudices against Asians (‘mystical people’)
dehumanize Asian migrants the world over. But propaganda against Israel
hurts Jews in their Diaspora like no other minority. Zionism is to Jews
what feminism is to women. Men who ‘like women but not feminists’ show
they don’t like women; rather, they like being served. Jews and Gentiles
who ‘like Jews but not Zionists’ show they like Jews as long as they
feel scared all the time so that they can be manipulated to serve and
comfort the Gentile powers to be; but not when they are independent and
proud of themselves.
Judaism laid much of the foundation of all Monotheism (One G^d),
Science (One Universe), and Democracy (Equality) in the world. That’s
why hatred of Jews is the ultimate ungratefulness, throwing mud on
Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Einstein, and Herzl. And therefore, the Holocaust
doesn’t compare to any other genocide, Armenian included—though they
are all horrific.
It seems that Intersectionality was designed to promote
Antisemitic. It advocates comparing oppressions and seeing how they are
all interwoven. Because Antisemitism is so unique, and because Jews are
kept hostage by the top level of societies (and blamed for all ills), it
often ends up uniting all oppressed groups against the Jews, the
victims of the oldest hatred.
And so, you see there is reason not to just regard Antisemitism
as one of the forms of Racism. Jews-oppression is too specific. It’s a
special bigotry.
NYPost | Secretary of State Antony Blinken dressed his 4-year-old son as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a Halloween event with President Biden on the White House lawn Monday night.
Biden gave the young “Zelensky,” who wore a dark green sweatshirt, a
box of M&Ms bearing the presidential seal — after asking Congress
earlier this month to give another $61.4 billion for the real deal, on top of $113 billion already appropriated to help Kyiv resist Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.
Blinken was accompanied by his wife, Biden’s White House cabinet
secretary Evan Ryan, and their 3-year-old daughter, who was dressed in
the Ukrainian flag’s blue-and-yellow scheme.
The top US diplomat’s grandfather, Moritz Blinken, was born in
Ukraine’s capital, then part of the Russian empire, in 1900 and
immigrated to the US with his family as a 4-year-old.
Blinken’s ancestors were, like Zelensky, Ukrainian Jews.
catyjohnstone | Propagandists
are used to having a lot more wiggle room to work with than this.
They’re used to interfacing with a complex matrix of narrative and
manipulating it to distort the public’s understanding of what’s going
on. But raw video footage of a mother clutching the tattered remains of a
child is not narrative. Satellite images of powdered city blocks are
not narrative. It’s just reality. Right there in your face.
Western civilization is dominated by propaganda. The “freedom” and “democracy” we think we have is an illusion that has been carefully cultivated by those who manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote by mass-scale psychological manipulation
— as Chomsky says, propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to
a totalitarian state. A mind-controlled dystopia is not some dark
future that awaits humanity if things go terribly wrong for us; it is already presently the case.
The Gaza massacre throws a big fat monkey wrench in all that, because the raw data
coming out of it is so transparently horrifying that no amount of
narrative spin can make it look acceptable. The fact that the US and its
allies are helping Israel murder children by the thousands is a giant
glitch in the narrative matrix.
The
longer this continues, the more people are going to wake up out of the
propaganda-induced coma the empire has had them in all their lives. The
more people are going to realize that their government is not what it
has been pretending to be and the media have not been telling them the
truth about the world. As the western empire backs the slaughter of
thousands of children, the discrepancies between what the propaganda
tells us about our society and what our society actually is are being
brightly illuminated.
By
murdering thousands of children in Gaza, the empire has exposed its
true face in front of everyone. And the people aren’t liking what they
see.
Eyes are opening everywhere. People are being radicalized in record numbers. The streets are being flooded with protesters.
Very inconvenient questions are being asked. Rigorous scrutiny is being
applied in places it was seldom applied before. Light is shining in
through cracks that weren’t there before.
This
is all so, so horrible and so, so painful to watch day in and day out.
But something is moving underneath it all. Something big. The empire has
done irreparable harm to its ability to keep everyone sleeping and
complacent going forward. A healthy world may be in our future yet.
Aurelian2022 | In reality, the relationship between the use of force and the
attainment of a defined political objective is a highly complex, inexact
and uncertain art, and is much easier to explain theoretically than to
do in practice. It implies a whole series of complicated, asserted
relationships that don’t necessarily exist tidily in real life. To begin
with, of course, you need to have a defined political objective, which
is agreed, practicable and measurable. Bombing somebody, or firing off
some shells like the French ship, is not an objective in itself, and is
often indistinguishable from a display of pique to make yourself feel
better. What the military call the “end-state” has to be clearly
distinguishable from the current state, not to mention better than it,
or there is no point in pursuing it.
You also have to be
reasonably sure of how the political end-state will play out, or you
could be in a worse situation than you were at the start. This implies a
realistic knowledge of the political situation you are trying to
affect, and what the political consequences of your military actions
might be. So the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 was
intended to humiliate the government of Slobodan Milosevic by forcing
the surrender of Kosovo, and so remove him from power in the elections
the following year. It was assumed that the government that replaced his
would be grateful to NATO for bombing them, and would adopt a
pro-western, pro-NATO stance. What was not anticipated (well, except by
those of us who were paying attention) was that Milosevic would be
brought down by nationalist agitation, and replaced by a hard-line
nationalist President, Kostunica. And as for the idea that a teetering
Gaddafi, perhaps on the point of being overthrown in 2011, could be
pushed over the brink by western intervention, leading to a stable,
pro-western democratic system … well if there is a stronger word than
“catastrophic” to put before “misunderstanding” let’s by all means use
it. Oh, and let’s not even get into the political fantasies of western
capitals about what would follow the forced resignation of Vladimir
Putin.
So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing
looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it?
It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the
wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to
the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of
governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of
itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a
political obligation to do something, whatever
that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for
evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as
the French showed in Beirut in 2006.
The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have
been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say
that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as
often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about
“deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a
justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is
that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is
to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at
least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you
keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you
don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations,
there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully
employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and
more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large
targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m
assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the
bombardment of Gaza itself.)
In turn, this reflects the
effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical
attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike
devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as
the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no
longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the
US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran,
Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively
given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert
over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot
for US military power to actually do, either.
In any event,
even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political
vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For
the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if
Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then
theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks
to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to
itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack
agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause
massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not
make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the
stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that
investment in jeopardy now.
There is certainly every chance
that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an
unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is
that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their
interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do
with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more
mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask
yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries
could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic
depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably
“none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could
do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional
political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of
damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut
off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By
contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk,
would be enough to drive the US out of the region.
I think we
can draw some general lessons from these examples, which in turn may
help us understand how the current Gaza crisis may eventually resolve
itself. We can start by recalling that the theory of using military
power to achieve political end-states is important, but primarily as a
limitation. That’s to say that, whilst military action without a
political objective is pointless, the mere fact of starting military
action towards a declared political end-state doesn’t mean that you will
automatically get there. You still have to do the hard work of turning
the one into the other, and it’s that that I want to talk about now.
Consider
a political end-state of some kind. It doesn’t have to be heaven on
earth or for that matter the surrender of your enemy. It can be
something simpler, such as an enforceable decision by your neighbour to
stop supporting separatist groups in your country. So let’s assume you
define that political end-state, which we’ll call P(E). Now the first
thing to say is that this political end-state must actually be
politically (not just militarily) possible. It must be within the
capacity of the other government to agree to, or failing that the
balance of political forces at the end of the conflict must at least
make it possible. It is pointless and dangerous to attempt to force a
country or a political actor do do something that is beyond their power
to do; not that this hasn’t been attempted often enough.
Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1980's: 'We have the US Senate, the Congress and a record strong Jewish lobby on our side. We have a huge influence over them, America won't force us into anything' pic.twitter.com/zQXUEEyae0
strategic-culture | The Biden administration is becoming increasingly edgy about the
crisis in Gaza and what the objectives are for the Netanyahu war camp.
Most of all, its worried that it is being carefully coaxed into a war
between Israel and Iran which even the hapless U.S. president knows is
not somewhere he wants to go, regardless of how far he is away from his
re-election campaign. Netanyahu, for his part, is not even sure himself
if he actually wants to launch a ground offensive and a number of top
analysts are even predicting that he even won’t go ahead with it, given
what’s at stake and the history of such initiatives in the past.
Politically, he is not at all in a good place right now and the attack
on October 7th in many ways, while buying him time in office
and allowing him freedom from corruption investigations, is a
double-edged sword which will dismember him when Israelis’ patience runs
out. Most blame him for the attacks and kidnappings in the first place
so he has a limited amount of political bandwidth to work with.
His strategy seems to be more about playing it cool and letting time
take its toll. Even though he doesn’t have too much time himself, Biden
has much less. The stranglehold that Netanyahu has on Biden tightens
each day, when it is clear that Biden doesn’t have the patent ability to
invoke a ceasefire and do what most U.S. presidents should do: behave
like a superpower. This, apparently will have to be left to the two real
superpowers who tend to do more and talk less: China and Russia. For
the moment both Biden and Netanyahu are both waiting for a miracle to
happen which allows for a ceasefire to happen without Netanyahu losing
face. Biden could simply insist that Netanyahu stops the campaign and
then at least Bibi could say to the world “this is what the U.S. has
asked us to do”. But even in this setup, there would be a price to pay
for Biden and his administration elsewhere.
As more and more Iranian militias build up on the Syrian-Israel border
and the narrative heats up between Hezbollah and Israel, everyone in
fact is looking for a stroke of luck to throw the entire gruesome
slaughter out of sync. Biden could do this. He could be bold and
courageous and show real élan on the world stage. But that’s just not
what he does. Despite being an old school neocon and being a huge
advocate for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, these days he has lost his
mojo. He simply doesn’t know what he wants with Israel, a country which
he always professed to being a great supporter of, but whose present
administration is not where Biden wants U.S. foreign policy to be.
Many experts question what actually is at the heart of the
U.S.-Israel relationship and the 3bn dollars it hands to Israel each
year in military aid? For a long time, it was the special relationship
that Israel cherished while it, Israel, acted on behalf of the U.S. in
the region and was there just in case Arab countries lost their way in
their token allegiance to U.S. hegemony. At the very least it was an
outpost.
thecradle | Hamas has called on the millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as the whole Arab world and all lands of Islam, to unite. Slowly but surely, a pattern may be discerned: could the Arab world – and great swathes of Islam – be on the verge of significantly uniting to avenge their own “century of humiliation” – much as the Chinese did after WWII with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? Beijing, via its sophisticated diplomacy, is certainly hinting at it to key players, even before the ground-breaking, Russia-China brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement was struck earlier this year. That by itself won’t thwart the perpetual US neocon obsession to bomb critical infrastructure in Iran. Worth less than zero when it comes to military science, these neocons ignore how Iranian retaliation would – accurately – target each and every US base in Iraq and Syria, with the Persian Gulf an open case.
Peerless Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov has shown what could happen to those expensive American iron bathtubs in the Eastern Mediterranean in case of an Israeli-threatened attack on Iran. Moreover, there are at least 1,000 US troops in northern Syria stealing the country’s oil – which would also become an instant target. Ali Fadavi, IRGC’s deputy commander-in-chief, cut to the chase: “We have technologies in the military field that no one knows about, and the Americans will know about them when we use them.” Cue to Iranian hypersonic Fattah missiles – cousins to the Khinzal and the DF-27 – traveling at Mach 15, and able to reach any target in Israel in 400 seconds. And add to it sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW). As confirmed in Moscow six months ago, when it comes to military interconnection, the Iranians told the Russians at the same table, “whatever you need, just ask.”
The same applies vice-versa, because the mutual enemy is one and the same. The heart of the matter in any Russian-Iran strategy is the Strait of Hormuz, through which transits at least 20 percent of the world’s oil (nearly 17 million barrels a day) plus 18 percent of liquified natural gas (LNG), which amounts to at least 3.5 billion cubic feet a day. Iran is able to block the Strait of Hormuz in a flash. For starters, that would be some sort of poetic justice retribution for Israel aiming to gobble up, illegally, all the multibillion-dollar natural gas discovered offshore Gaza: this is, incidentally, one of the absolutely key reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Yet the real deal will be to bring down the Wall Street-engineered $618 trillion derivative structure, as confirmed for years by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as independent Persian Gulf energy traders.
So when push comes to shove – and way beyond the defense of Palestine and in a scenario of Total War – not only Russia-Iran but key players of the Arab world about to become members of BRICS 11 – such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE – do have what it takes to bring down the US financial system anytime they choose. As an old school Deep State higher up, now in business in Central Europe, stresses: “The Islamic nations have the economic advantage. They can blow up the international financial system by cutting off the oil. They do not have to fire a single shot. Iran and Saudi Arabia are allying together. The 2008 crisis took 29 trillion dollars to solve but this one, should it happen, could not be solved even with 100 trillion dollars of fiat instruments.” As Persian Gulf traders told me, one possible scenario is OPEC starting to sanction Europe, first from Kuwait and then spreading from one OPEC country to another and to all countries that are treating the Muslim world as enemies and war fodder.
There aren't that many influential voices who are steadfastly denouncing the massive amounts of resources that are constantly being sent by Washington to other countries to fuel their wars, when there are so many pathologies/struggles Americans face.
responsiblestatecraft | In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line
by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is “the
indispensable nation.” This is indeed the belief by which the U.S.
foreign and security establishment lives and works.
As
Biden’s speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment
justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to
make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob
pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For
however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be
excused if they take place as part of America’s “indispensable” mission
to lead the world towards “freedom” and “democracy.”
It
is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims
about the “Rules-Based Order” cannot answer this question. In the
Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a
different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at
even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in
doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really
serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a
superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.
In
this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has
succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the
U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that
of providing stability.
Instead, it has all too often acted a
force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of
Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria
as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of
externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every
lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby
plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of
northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by
repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal
with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely
equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing
through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious
effort to promote a settlement.
Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed
the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through
its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately
helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.
This
strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also
carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United
States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.
And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated:
More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and
Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than
30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed
by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion
subsequently expended in the “Global War on Terror.”
The invasion of Gaza and the intent to destroy Hamas appear to be political aims,
since the former will be extremely costly, particularly in soldiers’
lives to a casualty-averse IDF, and the elimination of Hamas is not
attainable. The point Alex Christoforu made in his show today, that the
US with its much greater resources, has not been able to eliminate Al
Qaeda, is confirmed in a Financial Times comment, Israel must know that destroying Hamas is beyond its reach.
Many military experts, including former Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis,
Douglas Macgregor, and Scott Ritter, have warned that it will be very
difficult for the IDF to engage in this kind of urban clearing
operation, particularly given its scale versus the IDF’s limited
experience and the largely reservist status of the majority of its
forces. Foreign Affairs, the premier US foreign policy publication, just
released a grim prognosis in How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat?Fighting Hamas in Gaza Will Be Difficult and Costly. Key sections:
A potential ground assault into Gaza…would entail
horrendously difficult tactical conditions, including room-to-room
combat and tunnel warfare that would lead to massive casualties. It
would require fighting on the ground, in the air, and at sea—fighting
that must be done in a carefully synchronized fashion. Combat will be
slow and grinding, and the resulting devastation will almost certainly
test international support for Israel’s invasion…
Urban combat is slow, grinding, destructive, environmentally
devastating, and horrendously costly in human life—especially for
civilians. It involves house-by-house, block-by-block fighting that
soaks up troops and firepower in enormous quantities, as every room,
street corner, rooftop, sewer, and basement must be secured before the
next can be taken. Such combat is particularly dangerous for junior
combat leaders, who must constantly expose themselves in order to see,
communicate with, and command their soldiers…
…for soldiers and civilians in the midst of urban fighting, the
danger, the fatigue, the sense of perpetual threat from every direction,
and the horror of close-range hand-to-hand combat all take an immense
physical and psychological toll. Battles tend to be confused, fleeting
(measured in seconds), and short range, with targets often closer than
50 yards. Troops may be focused on the house or room they are fighting
in, but at the same time they may also be targeted from a distance by
mortar crews, snipers, and drone operators.
There is a lot more along these lines.
Several points seem noteworthy. First, as is evident even from this
short extract, Foreign Affairs acts as if a ground operation is not a
given, when there are reports of large numbers of Israeli tanks and
troops newly positioned nearby and more expected. Second is that it
bangs on about the findings of “NATO researchers” and of creating a
“combined-arms effect.” As we saw in Ukraine, forces trained to supposed
NATO standards were found by the Ukraine military to perform less well
than ones that used what NATO derided as more primitive approaches
better suited to battle conditions.
Third, and perhaps most important, this article does not give much
consideration about how the extensive Gaza tunnel system vastly
complicates this operation. Readers are welcome to correct me, but my
strong impression is that not only has there never been a clearing
operation in this large a setting, there has also never been one that
has had to contend with such an extensive tunnel system.
The IDF may be correct in its belief, or one might say hope, that
bunker busters can destroy most if not all of it and also detonate
stored munitions. There was alleged evidence of that happening, with
Jacob Dreizen posting a video of a presumed bunker buster then producing
successive explosions from below ground a meaningful distance from the
strike site.
Counterpunch | Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025],
the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S.
forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to
respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report
there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer
groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD];
Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”
In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds”
against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the
agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown”
weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted
armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical”
weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent
“societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”
Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”
“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”
The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the
express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and
actions.
A U.S. Army document
on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as
potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from
drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the
possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the
commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space
Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the
international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion
and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army
Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.
“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is
becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action
are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also
said
that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP
3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and
information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch
operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and
defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related
actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from
Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”
“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”
The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are
the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some
police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that
enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.
In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will
be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit
exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson
threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels
Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.
In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads:
“The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state
resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant
poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for
dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered
populations.”
The
President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches
from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary
line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of
Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of
State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The
world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t
lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to
take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests
and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This
idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America
as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and
doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take
America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is
bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”.
America itself is hardly in one piece.
It isn’t true that the
world doesn’t organize itself without top down leadership from a power
sitting in America’s “place”. Indeed, what would it mean for America’s
“place” to be vacant and free for another power to fill, the specter
conjured by Blinken? Does America disappear from the map when it elects
Donald Trump President? The United States is always present in one form
or another, even as an absence in international discussions - as was the
case, for instance in the 1920s.
America’s power -
potential or realized - is a force that world politics has been built
around for just over a century. In the book Deluge
I argued that 1916 was the moment that this became indisputably true.
The Presidential election of that year was the first followed by the
world in the way that the world will follow the 2024 election.
Whoever
governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a
post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of
global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial
organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system
and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global
finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global
central bank.
It is also true that American leadership and
military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is
not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.
For the
most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken
say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about
the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and
Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario
in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic,
disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding
as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will
overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually
sits in the Oval Office.
American democracy, the system that
produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently
evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about
America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world
affairs.
WaPo | On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza
as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective
punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as
“a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”
That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch,
professor of political science and international affairs at George
Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is
difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international
norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal
invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.
While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes
to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more than 2 million
people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are
running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech,
Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in
their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who
only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing
to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries
which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.
But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If
the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the
world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war,
principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to
Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal
disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director
for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.
A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies
told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so
cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign
governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in
blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on
condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief
journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s
strategy relies on.”
In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What
we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our
credibility,” a senior Group of Seven diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”
It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community —
but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process
between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are
paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the
Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde.
“In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is
perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing
their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security
is at stake in Ukraine.”
The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up
the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the
Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost. … Forget about rules, forget
about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
MoA | Today we live in multilateral world. We see Russia, China and many
smaller countries united in their will to preserve their rights and
security. The cold-war is gone. The somewhat unilateral decades which
had followed it are now over. We are in need a new world order.
In the U.S. that penny has finally started to drop.
It has not yet reached the ground. We do not know on which side it will land.
Two days ago U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at a campaign even. Among lots of the usual blah-blah this paragraph stood out:
We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked
pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. Sort of run out
of steam. It needs a new — a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.
There it is - one can see the penny, slipping out of his hand and falling down.
The time for the U.S. to preserve some of its influence in the rising new world order is short:
Look, we’re at an inflection point in history — literally an
inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the
next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or
five decades look like. And that’s — that’s a fact.
It should be noted that the "damn good" post-war 50-year
peace that Biden spoke about arose as a result of the most brutal war in
the history of mankind. It also appeared due to the agreements of the
USSR and the United States, which essentially divided the spheres of
influence in Europe.
If we proceed from this historical context, then Biden, it
turns out, offers either to win a military victory over the Russian
Federation and China, with which the United States is currently at
enmity, or to negotiate with them and arrange a "new Yalta" with the
division of spheres of influence.
On which side will the penny land? The side of a new global war? Or on the side of new negotiations?
We do not know.
---
Putin had predicted that the pursuit of unilateral power would
automatically lead to the end its pursuer. As Biden acknowledges, the
U.S., in its delusion, is ripping itself apart.
Prior to the campaign event Biden had given a public speech from the White House.
The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of
speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that
extraordinary line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in
February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken
gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we
don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country
tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our
interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of
“America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that
place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power
will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy
circle.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.
He describes the negative global consequences of delusional U.S. thinking to then muse about the outcome:
What is the impact of a dysfunctional US political system,
where the more reasonable wing of the ruling elite cling to ideas about
America’s role that are systematically self-deluding. You could say that
hypocrisy is normal. It is the besetting sin of liberalism. But in
light of the scale of looming global problems and the shift in the
balance of power that has already taken place, let alone that which may
still to come, how long can this tension be maintained and what will be
the price?
He seems to ask if the now falling penny will ever hit the ground:
The only thing that seems for sure is that we should avoid falling into the trap of what I’ve called fin-fiction
or fin-fi, which assumes that because these tension seem unbearable
they must therefore resolve in some logical way, for instance in the
speculation over the end of dollar hegemony, or what appears be the
Biden fantasy of a return to the normality of American leadership.
I am skeptical even of invoking terms like “interregnum”, signifying a temporary hiatus between orders of power.
What gives us confidence that our current situation is temporary and that some new order, like the old, will emerge?
Is that not another version of the kind of thinking that says the
world “needs organizing” by a power sitting at the head of the table -
in “America’s place”?
That question, to me, seems to miss what multilateralism really
means. It does not mean unilateralism with a different country in the
lead. It means a somewhat democratic UN system, with an expanded
Security Council that includes the large population countries of each
continent.
It means to follow international law.
Will the U.S. come back into that system? Or does it need a global war to decide the outcome?
.@joerogan is deeply concerned by the dehumanizing rhetoric emanating from both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict and genuinely fearful that escalating tensions in the Middle East could lead to Global Thermonuclear War.
MOA | Israel is a colonial settler state in permanent conflict with the suppressed natives.
It thought it could survive in that state, or even extend its
settlements, by deterring opposing forces with its superior military.
Hamas has breached that deterrence myth by inflicting, in one day,
more casualties in Israel than it had experienced in any previous wars.
Natanyahoo is under pressure to restore the deterrence, to again provide the Zionists with a feeling of superiority.
He can not do that.
Any land attack in Gaza means urban warfare in an already destroyed
city with large underground facilities. During the taking of Bakhmut the
Wagener forces had in total some 40,000 casualties (dead and wounded).
The other side had more than 70,000. What price would the IDF have to
pay to 'destroy Hamas'?
The other factor is of course Hizbullah and other resistance groups,
which may well attack Israel from the north and various other
directions. Hizbullah has loudly said it would do so should the IDF
enter Gaza. It has some 100,000 missiles - more than enough to exhaust
Israel's air defenses. Its longest reach missiles can attack any major
city within Israel. There have already been daily fire exchanges at the
norther border.
The 2006 war in Lebanon has shown that Hizbullah is dug in and very
able to defend itself. It has since gained more experience by fighting
ISIS in Syria. Neither U.S. air force attacks nor a land force invasion can hinder Hizbullah from firing its missiles.
(Syria, as well as Iran, will not intervene in the war unless they are directly attacked.)
Netanyahoo must attack Gaza to restore deterrence. He can not attack
Gaza because the urban warfare would cause large Israeli casualties. He
can not attack Gaza because Hizbullah would then destroy the myth of the
superior settler state even more than Hamas has done so far.
Israel, with the help of the U.S., has tried to push the population
of Gaza into Egypt. From Egypt's standpoint that would be a humanitarian
solution, at least as long as others pay for it. But it would cause a
serious strategic problem. Resistance by Hamas and others against Israel
would continue indefinitely, but Egypt would be held responsible for
it. It can not and will not take on that burden.
Netanyahoo's next idea was to starve Gaza. But the world will not let
him do that. At least not beyond a certain point. Even the UN Secretary
General has visited the Rafah crossing. Other global organizations, like the WHO and ASEAN, have spoken up. Pictures of starving people will make it impossible for the west to support that 'solution'.
Meanwhile Hamas fighters will continue to sit in their tunnels, ready
to defend their land, and likely with enough provisions to hold out for
months.
Israeli settlers, with the support of the IDF, are rampaging through
the West Bank. They are killing more Palestinians and further enrage the
global public against their deeds. This will escalate.
Israel's decision making is paralyzed. It will for now continue to
talk of a ground invasion but will not launch one. It will also continue
to starve Gaza.
But something will soon break. At any minute there might be a new
large atrocity in Gaza or a pogrom in the West Bank. Any miscalculation
in the north could launch that front into a hot war. Hizbullah could
start to 'preemptively' invade Israeli proper.
But Israel's Jewish public is still demanding a war of revenge. It
still needs the restoration of its deterrence and superiority.
But what if that turns out to be impossible to achieve?
Well. Then something else must change.
As Adam Shatz summarizes in the London Review of Books:
The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish
Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can
win an Algerian-style liberation war: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs
are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party,
drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can
save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a
real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic
hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal
citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a
single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this
solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater
catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.
1. President Joe Biden’s statement regarding the bombing of the
hospital in Gaza was from a misfired Palestinian rocket is totally
ridiculous and absurd.
2. Why should there be any doubt that the blast of the Al Ahli Arab
hospital is from an Israeli air strike as the murderous regime had been
attempting to wipe Palestinians and Gaza out of existence since last
week.
3. In fact, Israel had been after the Palestinians all the time, if
not wipe out the Palestinians altogether, for the past 70 years and
suddenly now, after launching air strikes day and night, Palestinians
blames for the blast on the hospital.
4. Biden’s narrative is based on feedbacks from Nethanyahu and Pentagon.
5. Obviously Nethanyahu lies about everything. And if Biden wants to
use Pentagon to give credence to his narrative, we have not forgotten
how Pentagon and other American institutions lied about the existence of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.
6. A more recent lie is about Biden claiming to have seen pictures of Hamas beheading babies.
7. Indeed, the White House had withdrawn the statement, admitting
that there was no proof of such a deed. The question is how Biden could
blatantly lie in the first place and with a straight face.
8. The crux of the matter is that all these atrocities committed by
Israel on the Palestinians stems from the American support for Tel Aviv.
9. If the American Government withdraws its support for Israel and
stop all military aids to the regime, Israel would not have carried out
the genocide and mass murders of Palestinians with impunity.
10. The United States government needs to come clean and tell the
truth. Israel and its IDF are the terrorists. The United States is
blatantly supporting terrorists. So what is the United States?
Off-Guardian | “We need a new approach to digital identity”, so say the authors of an “Agenda Article” for the World Economic Forum, published on the 28th of September.
Digital ID has been in the news a lot lately, obscured for the past week in the mist of the Israel-Hamas situation.
Just last week, Forbes Australia published it’s guide to what “Australians need to know” about digital IDs, and 9News reported that they could be in place as soon as next year.
Meanwhile, also in Australia, the world’s 21st largest bank is
changing its terms and conditions to allow it to “de-bank” customers.
The National Australian Bank’s “revised” terms and conditions go into force on November 1st and include, in clause 11: “NAB may close your account at any time at its discretion”.
The reasons NAB would consider enforcing clause 11 make for interesting reading [emphasis added]:
NAB can take a range of things into account when exercising its rights and discretions. These can include:
[…]
(e) NAB’s public statements, including those relating to protecting vulnerable persons, the environment or sustainability;
(f) community expectations and any impact on NAB’s reputation;
So – as of November 1st – NAB reserves the right to de-bank you if
you get cancelled, or say something they don’t approve of about climate
change or “vulnerable people”.
In the UK, just two days ago, it was reported the government is
planning to upload every passport photo in their records to a facial
recognition database.
Just yesterday India announced the launch of trial wholesale digital currency, and the South China Morning Post reported a new “hard-wallet” for SIM-based CBDC payments, a joint project between the Bank of China and Chinese telecommunications giants.
Back to Australia, where it was reported on October 12th that
Mastercard and the Reserve Bank of Australia had “successfully trialled”
the interoperability of CBDC systems, whilst ensuring that “the pilot CBDC can be held, used, and redeemed only by authorised parties“.
Mastercard’s report also notes that the benefits of CBDCs are “programmability, transparency, and compliance”.
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