Israel’s aspirations to become the region’s transportation hub have taken a hit. The maritime and land blockade against Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza is working, as one of Israel’s main plans for a prospective “land bridge” connecting the Gulf countries with Israel and Europe has suffered an irrevocable setback. The Israel-centered India Middle East Europe Economic Corridors project (IMEC)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor. Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”. Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.
The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception. In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found. The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers and the zealous, are rarely called out. The memorial statements crow with amnesiac sweetness, and all the time, those same planners will be happy to add to the numbers of the fallen.
The events of April 25, known in Australia as Anzac Day, are saccharine and tinged about sacrifice, a way of explicating the unmentionable and the barely forgivable. But make no mistake about it: this was the occasion when Australians, with their counterparts from New Zealand as part of the Australian New Zealand Corps, foolishly bled on Turkish soil in a doomed campaign. Modern Australia, a country rarely threatened historically, has found itself in wars aplenty since the 19th century.
The Dardanelles campaign was conceived by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and, like many of his military ventures, ended in calamitous failure. The Australian officers and politicians extolling the virtues of the Anzac soldiers tend to ignore that fact – alongside the inconvenient truth that Australians were responsible for a pre-emptive attack on the Ottoman Empire to supposedly shorten a war that lasted in murderous goriness till November 1918. To this day, the Turks have been cunning enough to treat the defeated invaders with reverence, tending to the graves of the fallen Anzacs and raking in tourist cash every April.
For the Australian public, it was far better to focus on such words as those of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett written on the occasion of the Gallipoli landings: “There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights.” Ashmead-Bartlett went on to note the views of General William Birdwood, British commander of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli: “he couldn’t sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials”. They “where happy because they had tried for the first time and not found wanting.”
In March 2003, these same “colonials” would again participate in the invasion of a sovereign state, claiming, spuriously, that they were ridding the world of a terrorist threat in the form of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction were never found, and whose subsequent overthrow led to the fracturing of the Middle East. Far from being an act of bravery, the measure, in alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, was a thuggish measure of gang violence against a country weakened by years of sanctions.
When options to pursue peace or diplomacy were there, Australian governments have been slavish and supine before the dictates and wishes of other powers keen on war. War, in this context, is affirmation, assertion, cleansing. War is also an admission to a certain chronic lack of imagination, and an admission to inferiority.
The occasion of Anzac Day in 2024 is one acrid with future conflict. Australia has become, and is becoming increasingly, an armed camp for US interests for a war that will be waged by dunderheads over such island entities as Taiwan, or over patches of land that will signify which big power remains primary and ascendant in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific. It is a view promoted with sickly enthusiasm by press outlets and thinktank enclaves across the country, funded by the Pentagon and military contractors who keep lining their pockets and bulking their accounts.
Central to this is the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States, which features a focus on nuclear powered submarines and technology exchange that further subordinates Australia, and its tax paying citizens, to the steering wishes of Washington. Kurt Campbell, US Deputy Secretary of State, cast light on the role of the pact and what it is intended for in early April. Such “additional capacity” was intended to play a deterrent role, always code for the capacity to wage war. Having such “submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances [would have] enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances”. That’s Taiwan sorted.
Ultimately, the Australian role in aiding and abetting empires has been impressive, long and dismal. If it was not throwing in one’s lot with the British empire in its efforts to subjugate the Boer republics in South Africa, where many fought farmers not unlike their own, then it was in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam, doing much the same for the United States in its global quest to beat off atheistic communism. Australians fought in countries they barely knew, in battles they barely understood, in countries they could barely name.
This occasion is often seen as one to commemorate the loss of life and the integrity of often needless sacrifice, when it should be one to understand that a country with choices in war and peace decided to neglect them. The pattern risks repeating itself.
The post Anzac and the Pageantry of Deception first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
US state department says law could drive away foreign investment while David Cameron described it as ‘dangerous and worrying’
Human rights groups and diplomats have criticised a law passed by the Iraqi parliament over the weekend that would impose heavy prison sentences on gay and transgender people.
The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that the law on passed Saturday “threatens those most at risk in Iraqi society” and “can be used to hamper free-speech and expression”. He warned that the legislation could drive away foreign investment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
By not responding to decades of Israel’s provocations with an attack on Israeli soil, Iran displayed patience. The Islamic Republic rulers realized the provocations were becoming harsher, more damaging, and without stopping; it was time to respond. Their response was notable; a mild rebuke that showed power and unwillingness to harm civilians, unlike the offensive attacks by Israel’s military and intelligence that have killed Iranian civilians and military personnel.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda mechanism omits the tens of previous illegal and damaging attacks inflicted upon Iran and charges Iran with cruel and threatening behavior that requires a strong reply. Already, members of England’s parliament (MP) obeyed the Zionist call for action with outrageous pleas to assist Israel against “Iran’s genocidal actions,” and “attempt to interrupt the peace.”
One person is injured and that is genocide. Tens of thousands of Gazans killed and no reference to genocide. Mayhem in the Middle East since the first Zionist set foot in Palestine and one relatively harmless attack disturbed the peace. Are these MPs real people or artificial intelligence? How can they run for office and be elected?
A common thread exists in US actions of aggressive behavior toward nations that have not threatened the security of the United States, such as 21st-century Iraq and Iran. The common thread weaves nations that were or are antagonists of apartheid Israel. All, except Iran, have been subdued by the U.S. What Israel wants, Israel gets, and Israel convinced the United States to eliminate the foes of the Zionist Republic. Americans died and Americans paid for efforts that had scarce benefits to U.S. citizens. Iran is now the last nation standing and Israel is coercing the U.S. to perform its usual duty — get rid of Iran. Look at the record.
Sudan
Deposed Sudan leader, Omar al-Bashir, made it clear. “Israel is our enemy, our number one enemy, and we will continue calling Israel our enemy.” Israel also made its relationship with Bahir clear by destroying a Sudanese arms factory suspected of producing chemical weapons for Hamas. Times of Israel reports that “Over the years, there have been reports of the Israelis continuing to aid South Sudanese rebels during Sudan’s second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005.” Israel’s assistance to the rebels enabled South Sudan to secede and weaken Bashir. The Times of Israel also reports that “Miniature Israeli flags hang from car windshields and flutter at roadside stalls, and at the Juba souk in the city’s downtown, you can buy lapel pins with the Israeli flag alongside its black, red and green South Sudanese counterpart.”
Link of a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, who resided in Sudan, prompted the US State Department to add Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed economic, trade, and financial sanctions on Sudan. These sanctions occurred despite none of the extremists engaging in terrorist activities while in Sudan. Bashir offered extradition or interviews of arrested al-Qaeda operatives and allowed access to the extensive files of Sudanese intelligence. According to a CIA source, reported in the Guardian, Sept 30, 2001, “This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.”
The U.S. Congress heightened the insurrection in Sudan’s Darfur province by passing amendment H.Con.Res.467 — 108th Congress (2003-2004), amended 07/22/2004, which “States that Congress declares that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide, and urges the Administration to refer to such atrocities as genocide.” The amendment gathered world opinion against the Sudanese government. Although the public accepted the figure of 400,000 killings of people in Darfur, this genocide had no verification of the number of killings, no displayed mass graves, and no images of a great number of bodies.
Before he left the U.S. State Department, former US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stated on ABC News online, November 9, 2005, “It’s a tribal war. And frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of Sudanese.”
A peace agreement ended the second Sudanese civil war in 2005. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became independent and reduced Sudan to a pipeline for South Sudan oil. After Sudan became a diminished state, barely able to survive, the United States lifted economic and trade sanctions. Independent South Sudan fared worse — involved in its civil war, human rights violations, and social and economic turmoil. Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed [South Sudan] “Government security forces and armed groups perpetrated serious human rights abuses, including killings, acts of sexual violence, abductions, detention, torture and other ill-treatment, the recruitment and use of children, and destruction of civilian property.” The U.S. government did not criticize the human rights violations of the friend of Israel.
On October 23, 2020, Israel and Sudan agreed to normalize relations
On April 6, 2021, the Sudanese cabinet approved a bill abolishing the 1958 law on boycotting Israel.
The once wealthy Sudan, flowing with minerals and gushing with oil had the possibility of becoming a strong and vibrant African nation. US policies of countering terrorism, assisting South Sudan rebels, and interfering in the Darfur civil war contributed to preventing that outcome and provided Israel with a friendly Sudan that no longer assisted the Palestinians.
Libya
Libya’s leader, Mohammar Qadhafi, has been quoted as saying on April 1, 2002, “Thousands of Libyans are ready to defend the Palestinian people.” In that speech he called for a Pan-Arab war against the state of Israel’s existence and demanded “other Arab leaders open their borders to allow Libyans to march into Palestine, to join the Palestinian uprising.” In the speech, Gaddafi claimed he would not recognize Israel as a state.
The United States used Gadhafi’s support for radical revolutions as a reason to have strained relations with Libya. Sanctions soon followed. In March 1982, the U.S. Government prohibited imports of Libyan crude oil into the United States and expanded the controls on U.S. originated goods intended for export to Libya. Licenses were required for all transactions, except food and medicine. In April 1985, all Export-Import Bank financing was prohibited.
On April 14, 1986, the United States launched air strikes against Libya in retaliation for “Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.” Five military targets and “terrorism centers” were hit, including Gadhafi’s headquarters.
After Libya halted its nuclear program, renounced terrorism, accepted responsibility for inappropriate actions by its officials, and paid appropriate compensation to the victims’ families for the bombing of a US commercial airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, the United Nations (UN) lifted sanctions, the U.S. terminated the applicability of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act to Libya, and President Bush signed an Executive Order terminating the national emergency, which ended economic sanctions. All was going well until 2011.
Despite the lack of clarity of the 2011 rebellion against Gadhafi and specious reasons for NATO and US roles to defend the rebels, the U.S. government cut ties with the Gadhafi regime, sanctioned senior regime members, and, together with several European and Arab nations, managed to convince the UN Security Council to authorize intervention in the conflict. The intervention demolished the Gadhafi regime and enabled the rebels to obtain victory, another fallen nation that was an outspoken antagonist of Israel, and, still, in 2024, an embattled nation.
Egypt
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel to reclaim territories they had lost in the Six-Day War. With Israeli troops seriously outnumbered and facing near-certain defeat at the hands of the Soviet-backed nations, President Nixon ordered an emergency airlift of supplies and materiel. “Send everything that will fly,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger. The American airlift enabled Israel to launch a decisive counterattack that pushed the Egyptians back across the Suez Canal.
In a briefing, Scuttle Diplomacy: Henry Kissinger and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, by Salim Yaqub, Woodrow Wilson Center, Dr. Yaqub argued that “Kissinger’s pivotal role as the intermediary allowed him to feign neutrality while secretly supporting the Israelis, and to turn the peace negotiations into a long series of small confidence building steps which would give the appearance of progress that Egypt required to come to an agreement with Israel, but which would allow Israel to keep most of the Syrian and Palestinian land gained after the 1967 Six-Day War.”
Prime Minister of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the U.S. normalized relations with previously combative Egypt. The most populous and leading nation of the Arab world, the principal defender of Arab rights, which had waged several wars with Israel, no longer posed a threat to Israel and became a weakened observer to the hostilities affecting the Middle East.
Syria
Israel and Syria battled from day one of the UN 181 Proclamation that recommended partition of the British Mandate.
The U.S. never favored the Assad regime and cut relations. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil, the Syrian Government tried limited cooperation with the U.S. War on Terror. Syrian intelligence alerted the U.S. of an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a hang glider loaded with explosives into the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Syria was also a destination for U.S. captives outside of its borders in its rendition program. According to U.S. officials, as reported by Nicholas Blanford, in a Special to The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2002, ”Syrian information was instrumental in catching militant Islamists around the world.”
Syria’s descent into near oblivion started with its civil wars, in which foreign fighters (ISIS and al-Nusra) entered Syria from NATO’s Turkey (no retribution to Turkey for allowing ISIS to enter Syria), and a multitude of insurgents fought with and against one another until Assad, with assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, overcame the insurgencies. WikiLeaks, in 2011, released diplomatic cables between the U.S. embassy in Damascus and the State Department, which revealed the U.S. had given financial support to political opposition groups and their related projects through September 2010.
ISIS is defeated and a limping Assad government barely survives as a splintered nation. Bombed almost daily by Israeli missiles and planes, the hopelessly weak Syria cannot retaliate. With assistance from the U.S., Syria’s threat to Israel has been neutralized.
Iraq
Justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a spurious reason that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be silenced was so absurd that another reason was sought. Security school scholars argued a joint threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argued preservation and extension of U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. When in doubt bring in liberal democratic ideals.
The interventionists conveniently forgot that Saddam Hussein was a restraint to Iran and a deterrent to Radical Islamists. With Hussein removed, Iran lost its restraint. Bordering on Iraq and spiritually attached to Iraq’s Shi’a population, Iran became involved in the commercial, economic, and political future of Iraq, an event that U.S. strategists should have known.
The invasion of Iraq and disposal of a Saddam Hussein regime, which had prevented al-Qaeda elements from establishing themselves, exposed Iraq’s porous borders to Radical Islamic fighters. Founded in October 2004, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) emerged from a transnational terrorist group created and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His cohorts entered through Jordan, while al-Qaeda forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a haven in Iraq. Meanwhile, fighters trained in and wandering through the deserts of Saudi Arabia hopped planes to Istanbul and Damascus and worked their way across Syria into Iraq. Disturbed by the U.S. invasion and military tactics, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Al Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic Caliphate, transformed himself from a fun-loving soccer player into a hardened militant and helped found the militant group Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ), which countered the U.S. military in Iraq.
Spurious reasons and obvious counterproductive results leave doubts that the original explanation and rationales for the invasion were correct. A more valid reason involves the neocons in the Bush administration who were closely identified with Israel in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the office of the vice president, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who aggressively advanced the case for the invasion. Some backups to that theory,
Haaretz, Apr 03, 2003, “White Man’s Burden,” Ari Shavit, “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish (ED: Avid Israel supporters), who were pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
In The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad echoes the case.
The road to Iraq was paved with neoconservative intentions. Other factions of the US foreign policy establishment were eventually brought around to supporting the war, but the neocons were its architects and chief proponents.
Ahmad quotes a remark attributed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” He also quotes former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan who contended, “The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.”
A 1996 report, Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, prepared by neoconservatives at the Jerusalem-based think tank, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, many of whom held vital positions in the George W. Bush administration, lends substance to the charge that the invasion of Iraq served Israel’s interests.
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship….Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
Participants in the Study Group included Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader, James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates, Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser later served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration at the time of the Iraq invasion. The others were allied with organizations that promoted Israel’s interests.
Two observations:
(1) Why were Americans prominent in an Israeli Think Tank and why were they advising a foreign nation?
(2) Note that the thrust of the report is to advise Israel to have a “clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity, and mutuality.” This has been the modus operandi of the Netanyahu administrations.
Another ember that warmed the neocon’s heartfelt devotion to Israel; The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years. “Bombing Iraq Isn’t enough. Saddam Hussein must go,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC neocon directors wrote in the 1998 New York Times.
No “smoking gun” firmly ties the neocons devoted to Israel together with using the United States military to eliminate another Israel antagonist. The argument is based upon it being the best, most factual, and only reason the war could have been wanted.
Iran – Last Nation Standing
The Islamic Republic may not be an exemplary nation, but there is no evidence or reason for the U.S. accusations that Iran is a destabilizing, expansionist nation, or leading sponsor of international terrorism. Why would it be – there are no external resources or land masses that would be helpful to Iran’s economy, Iran has not invaded any nation, and its few sea and drone attacks on others are reactions from a perception that others have colluded in harming the Islamic Republic and its allies. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of expanding his social ideology never got anywhere and died with him. Subsequent leaders have been forced to reach out to defend their interests and those of their friends, but none of these leaders has pursued an expansionist philosophy or wants the burden that accompanies the task — enough problems at home.
No matter what Iran does, the US perceives Iran as an enemy and a threat to not only the Middle East but to world order. All this hostility, despite the facts that (1) the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, almost equal to the amount that the United States pledged at the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, (2) according to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, played a “decisive role in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands of wanting 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government,” (3) Iran arrested Al-Qaeda agents on its territory and, because Al-Qaeda linked the Shiite Muslims, represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders, Zionists, and Jews as its most bitter enemies, had ample reason to combat terrorist organizations, and (4) Iran has no reason for or capability of attacking the U.S .or its western allies.
Being vilified for inadequate reasons is followed by Iran not being praised for significant reasons. President Trump, in his January 8, 2020 speech, argued the U.S. had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remains defeated. Trade the U.S. with Iran and Trump’s speech would be correct.
The U.S. spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and leadership from its Major General Qasem Soleimani, recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and played a leading role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Iran and Soleimani were key elements in the defeat of ISIS.
What reward did Solemani receive for his efforts? When his convoy left Baghdad airport, a drone strike, perpetrated by U.S. military, assassinated Major General Solemani and nine other innocent people on January 3, 2002. UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, reported the U.S. had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to life to justify the attack.
As usual, Israel used the U.S. to satisfy its desires. “Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months,” President Trump said about the coordination to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. “We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack. I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. We were disappointed by that. Very disappointed…But we did the job ourselves, with absolute precision … and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Why do these protectors of the realm want Iran destroyed — they fear Iran may act as a deterrent to their future aggression. Iran cannot win a war with a nuclear weapon or any weapons; it can only posture and threaten use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Its principal antagonists, Israel, United States, and Saudi Arabia have elements that shield themselves from a nuclear attack by Iran. Israel’s small size makes it likely that fallout from a nuclear weapon will endanger the entire region, especially Iran’s allies. Any nuclear strike on Israel will be countered with a torrent of nuclear missiles that will completely wipe large Iran off the map and without fallout causing harm to neighboring nations. With little to gain and everything to lose, why would Iran engage in nuclear aggression?
Netanyahu’s scenario follows a pattern of using American lives and clout to further Israel’s interests and decimate its adversaries. Survey the record — destruction of Iraq, destruction of Sudan, destruction of Libya, destruction of Egypt, destruction of Syria. and now Iran. Only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries will be left standing, remaining in that position as long as they show no threat to Israel.
The destructions visited upon the described nations have done little to advance US security and economy. Therefore, the reason for the actions and US support of Israel must be political —politicians coopted by catering to the religious right community and other Israel defenders. US administrations are willing to sacrifice American lives and give exorbitant financial assistance to Israel in trade for electoral support from Israel’s backers.
The present confrontations between Iran and Israel have escalated. Those who believe Israel’s few drones over Isfahan concluded retaliation for Iran’s excessive number of missiles and harmless result in the attack on Israel might be mistaken. The drones may have only tested Iranian defensive capability. More, much more provocations may happen.
Due to US aggressive tactics, the antagonists to Israel have fallen and Iran is the last nation standing.
The post Last Nation Standing ─ Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Time (4/14/24)
This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed.
Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged.
But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful.
We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’
Prometheus Books (2024)
Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books.
The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on <i>Spy for No Country</i> appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Jury trial against military contractor CACI over ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton abuses’ comes 20 years after scandal broke
The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day that the photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed to the public, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolize the treatment of detainees in the US “war on terror”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot. Christmas crackers are less important than the new year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like the newborn into the information world. The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often aged and seasoned numbers, whiskered by storage and grey with cataloguing.
On January 1, the NAA diligently followed a long standing convention of releasing a stash of cabinet documents running into 240 from the Howard government, a period in Australian history when finance ruled with raffish vulgarity, and critical adventurers of conscience were anesthetised and told to get a mortgage. John Howard, Australia’s dull, waxwork prime minister, reminded his voters that Australia’s links to Asian countries were less important than the sigh-heavy attention from Washington.
What was particularly interesting in this disgorging of material was the focus on Australia’s foolish, negligent and even criminal contribution to the war on Iraq in 2003. Even more interesting was how little the files said about the reasons for Australia’s commitment to the invasion. Much of this was occasioned by the omission of 78 records that would otherwise have been in the original 2020 transfer to the archives.
Canberra is the city of smudged politicians, unnervingly clean air and endless meetings, but the omission of documents troubled Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, given that they concerned the invasion. He even went so far as to order an inquiry. In true capital fashion, it was done with reserve and caution, the broom being of the “one of us” school. Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), not to mention being on the government’s retainer as a consultant, became the broom in question.
In subsequent recommendations as to why the omission of the documents had taken place, Richardson advanced the less than controversial thesis that the NAA include documents from the National Security Committee (NSC), a fixture of the Howard government.
On March 14, the Archives, as if prodded, released certain NSC documents relevant to the Iraq invasion. In the incomplete release, Australia as empire’s obedient, perfumed appendage becomes almost ridiculously evident. On January 10, 2003, the Defence Minister Robert Hill, along with the defence force chief, identified the need for deploying some personnel from the Australian Defence Force within a month “on the likely time-frame for possible military action against Iraq” as indicated by US Central Command. The meeting also reveals that ADF forward units were already designated from a list agreed upon by the NSC on August 26 and December 4, 2002. The thrill for imminent war was palpable.
Howard, at the same meeting, promised that committing ADF forces required the consideration of all cabinet members, also noting that he had “foreshadowed to the governor-general the general direction of steps under consideration by the government in relation to Iraq”. But the governor-general of the time, the eventually doomed Peter Hollingworth, was subsequently told by the prime minister that involving him in the decision to invade Iraq was needless; the ADF could be deployed under the provisions of the Defence Act.
A minute dated March 18, 2003 makes mention of the full cabinet’s authorisation of the invasion, though hardly anything else. There is, however, a submission from the defence minister “circulated in the cabinet room on 17 and 18 March” intended to convince cabinet on possible military operations in Iraq. In anticipation of a formal request to commit troops, the ADF had already been authorised to pursue “prudent contingency planning” on the matter. The two stated war aims of Washington are outlined (vassal, take note): “regime change” and crippling Iraq’s “delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)”. On this point, the Howard government dawdles, if ever so slightly, notably on the issue of regime change, admitting, ultimately, that “this may be a desirable, even inevitable, outcome of military action”.
The now infamous memorandum of advice authored by the first assistant secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney-General’s department is also to be found. The memorandum offers the shakiest of justifications for invading Iraq, also drawing from unsubstantiated reasons from their UK counterparts. It was subsequently and rightly excoriated by an irate Gavan Griffith, the then unconsulted Solicitor-General. Not only were both bits of legal advice “entirely untenable”, they were also “arrant nonsense”, furnishing “no threads for military clothes.” Nothing from President George W. Bush’s remarks had revealed any desire “to clothe American action with the authority of the Security Council.” Thuggish unilateral action seemed the order of the day.
For Griffith, certain omissions were almost unpardonable. What, for instance, of such authorities as Canberra’s veteran authority, Henry Burmester, the former head of the Office of International Law, subsequently appointed Chief Counsel of the AG’s department. Or for, that matter, of the now late James Crawford of Cambridge University, commonly retained for the giving of advice on international law. Cautious experience had been elbowed out in favour of the gun.
The latest documents from the NSC are more sleet than snow. They do confirm that the parliamentary system, more than ever, should be involved in reining in the wild impulses of war makers. In the meantime, drawing up an indictment for Howard to stand trial in the International Criminal Court is overdue. The same goes for a number of his cabinet. We would not want them to go stale before justice.
The post Predictable Outcomes: Australia, the National Security Committee, and Invading Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and “de-radicalizing” the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains “freedom of action” to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.
After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:
reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)
Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:
‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’
(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)
In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.
Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.
We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:
Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.
We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’
The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.
None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.
None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:
Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.
(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)
Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:
does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.
For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:
Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.
Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:
In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.
Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:
A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.
Scarr continued:
Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.
What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.
You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.
Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:
In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)
For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:
These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.
Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.
Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”
Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:
What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?
Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.
On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:
This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.
Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.
The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.
To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:
jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.
Oborne expanded:
As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.
The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.
He continued:
It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)
Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.
By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.
Establishment Alarm At Public Protest
In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:
The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:
Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.
Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.
It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.
In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.
On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:
As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.
He added:
The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.
Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:
Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.
‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.
A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.
Sinclair observed that:
This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.
Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth
One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).
The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.
Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’
She added:
Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.
Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:
Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.
They added:
By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.
Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.
Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.
The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:
one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.
In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’
The song observes movingly:
Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is true
It concludes on an uplifting note:
Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —One fine day
That one fine day is still within our reach.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.
After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:
reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)
Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:
‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’
(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)
In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.
Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.
We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:
Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.
We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’
The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.
None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.
None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:
Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.
(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)
Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:
does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.
For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:
Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.
Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:
In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.
Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:
A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.
Scarr continued:
Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.
What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.
You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.
Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:
In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)
For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:
These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.
Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.
Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”
Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:
What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?
Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.
On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:
This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.
Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.
The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.
To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:
jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.
Oborne expanded:
As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.
The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.
He continued:
It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)
Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.
By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.
Establishment Alarm At Public Protest
In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:
The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:
Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.
Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.
It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.
In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.
On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:
As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.
He added:
The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.
Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:
Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.
‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.
A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.
Sinclair observed that:
This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.
Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth
One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).
The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.
Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’
She added:
Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.
Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:
Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.
They added:
By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.
Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.
Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.
The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:
one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.
In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’
The song observes movingly:
Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is true
It concludes on an uplifting note:
Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —One fine day
That one fine day is still within our reach.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Domestic and international terrorism have caused havoc in several nations. Each nation exhibits a unique approach to combatting terrorism; each nation exhibits a unique outcome from its approach. Examining types, causes, approaches, and outcomes of wars on terrorism in four nations — United States, Israel, China, and Russia — discloses successful strategies, self-destructive strategies, and strategies that deceive the public and terrorize others with impunity. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are not always allied; terrorist actions are not always due to terrorists.
Depending on perspective, the word “terrorism” ─ the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government ─ can be falsely labeled and falsely applied. Those who exhaust peaceful protests against oppression and provocation lash out at their oppressor and inflict damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. Not understanding the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed have unfavorably skewed the responses and led to more terrorism.
United States
United States administrations exhibited a strange method for repelling terrorists — let them enter an area, establish themselves, become strong, and commit atrocities, and then attack them — the spider approach. Muhammad Atta and his eighteen partners freely entered the United States, studied how to go up and not come down, and did their dirty deeds.
After facing several terrorist situations during the 1990s, the September 11, 2001 bombings compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. The U.S. government used one strategy to respond to terrorism ─ brute force.
Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attack the U.S. breathes easier, no terrorism on its mainland, and the major terrorist organizations — al Qaeda and ISIS — decimated. From appearances, the U.S. applied an effective counter-terrorism strategy and contained terrorism. Not quite. U.S. strategy expanded terrorism and moved terrorism into parts of Africa. The reduction in terrorism came mainly from the efforts of other nations.
By blending its battles against terrorism with preservation of American global interests, the U.S. initially expanded terrorism. The battles to overcome terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former beginning and ending with undefined meaning and the latter having no relation to terrorism.
U.S. assistance to Pakistan intelligence during the Soviet/Afghan war indirectly supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden, financed his activities, and helped create the al-Qaeda network.
U.S. manufacture of terrorists continued during Clinton’s administration. Battles between U.S. and Somali forces weakened Somali leadership. From an imposed anarchy in Somalia, al-Shabaab eventually emerged. In 2023, the militant group continues its violent insurgency in Somalia.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in moving bin Laden from a grim and arduous perch in a rugged and isolated mountain to a comfortable villa in Pakistan, from where he was eventually captured and killed. Other than that accomplishment, the 20-year incursion into Taliban territory accomplished nothing positive — the Taliban returned to power and, thanks to the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, other terrorist groups operate within its boundaries. In August 2022, the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri residing in Kabul and killed him in a drone strike.
By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. After the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq from Pakistan and formed ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (AQI ).
AQI was responsible for its downfall. Sunni tribes revolted at al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and the “Iraqi surge,” with assistance from U.S. troops, inflicted heavy losses on the al-Qaeda organization. Stability returned to Iraq until the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the remnants of AQI, and took advantage of growing resistance to U.S. troops in Iraq and discontent with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Baghdadi formed a force that captured about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
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Contributed by Sémhur, Flappiefh – Own work from Near East topographic map-blank.svg by Sémhur ; data from the New York Times.
President Barack Obama and his administration share blame for the creation of ISIS, allowing its recruitment throughout the world, not preventing recruits from entering Syria, its rapid capture of territory, and expansion into a caliphate. Former President Donald Trump exaggerated the claim that his administration was the primary force in defeating ISIS. U.S. airpower, which killed too many civilians and was not always welcome, helped; other groups liberated the ISIS dominated areas.
· Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mainly composed of Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, backed by U.S. airpower, liberated Raqqa.
· Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian airpower, recaptured Aleppo.
· Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen, and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes, drove ISIS from Mosul.
Amnesty international lists 1,600+ civilians dead from the war in Raqqa and between 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed in the battle for Mosul, mostly from U.S. air attacks. Foreign Policy estimates that “8,000 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in Mosul’s Old City. Include other parts of the city where the battle raged and the estimates of buildings damaged or destroyed are as high as 138,000.”
The irony of Trump’s Trumpism is his assassination of a person responsible for ISIS’ defeat, Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani. The U.S. contributed to ISIS’ initial successes by training an inept Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left the city to a small contingent of ISIS forces that equipped itself with captured weapons. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. The disasters energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force (PMF). With cooperation from Iran and leadership from Major General Qassim Soleimani, the PMF recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually played a role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Instead of receiving praise for his efforts, Major General Qassim Soleimani, who was never responsible for any terrorist activity, was eliminated as an arch-terrorist. Who committed the terrorism in his death? Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped out of the joint assassination plan at the last minute and left President Chump holding the bag.
NATO, with the U.S. providing air force and ballistic missile support, played the decisive role in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained Radical Islam and its terrorist activities. Militants from Libya flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq, and added to ISIS ranks. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM led the 2013 attack on a gas facility in southern Algeria; individuals trained in Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; and Boko Haram spread havoc throughout northern Nigeria.
Another defect in U.S. strategy ─ Osama bin Laden left no doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks.
During the 1990s, two documents,”Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.
[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.
So now they come to annihilate . . . this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula
From Pakistan, through Egypt to North Africa and Nigeria, and South to Somalia and Kenya, al-Qaeda, Daish, and a multitude of terrorist organizations perform daily bombings, killings, and insurrections, a result of policies of all U.S. administrations since the “gipper” assumed the presidential office.
Israel
Israelis have been victims of many terrorist attacks; few of these attacks have been performed by terrorists. The great magnitude has been done by Palestinians who had exhausted the means to overcome their oppression. To express their oppression and popularize their cause, they have lashed out at their oppressor and inflicted damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. The terrorist actions are mostly revenge attacks due to provocations, succeeding Israeli military and civilian terror attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians.
Depicting Israel as a nation that has suffered excessive terrorism is a mischaracterization. More correct is that by magnitudes more than any nation, not even close, Israel is the major terrorist nation in the world. Look at the record. In almost every country of the world, apartheid Israel has committed terrorist actions.
Begin with the 1948-49 war against the Palestinians. From Wikipedia:
According to several historians, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 war. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Aryeh Yizthaki lists 10 major massacres with more than 50 victims each.
The newly established Israeli government continued its aggression against the Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian communities, ethnically cleansing 1.1 million Palestinians, and forcing them into displaced persons and refugee camps.
Israel followed the ethnic cleansing by instituting apartheid and continually terrorizing West Bank and Gazan Palestinians with provocative terror attacks.
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Gaza before Oct. 7-Courtesy of ABC News
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Gaza after Oct. 7-Courtesy of Aljazeera
Going beyond its borders, Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon and used terror attacks on the Lebanese population.
Going worldwide, Israel uses its intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate foreign scientists, military hardware suppliers, Palestinian activists, and those who harmed Israelis.
Israel displays a dual strategy in the war on terrorism. Building walls to separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, restricting travel between Israel and its occupied territories, scrutinizing entry at checkpoints, and cleverly surveilling all Palestinians have prevented terrorism within Israel. Provoking Palestinians into committing terrorist acts and stimulating settlers to make revenge “price tag” attacks against Palestinian communities and the military to wage war against the terrorists is the other side of the coin.
The violence committed against the Palestinians emits a backlash from worldwide supporters of the Palestinians and causes harm to Jews. The backlash is converted into spurious charges of anti-Semitism and used to justify Israel’s actions.
Add it up and Israel is an apartheid country, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people, a triple combination that no nation in all history has been able to equal. The Israeli government and its worldwide public relations machine convince the world it is an innocent victim of Hezbollah terrorists, Hamas terrorists, anti-Semites, surviving Nazis, liberal misfits, and disoriented people who cannot get out of the way of bullets and bombs. Western governments pay no heed to the triple play.
Russian Federation
A reported 1,312 terrorist attacks caused 1,179 Russian deaths between 2007 and 2021 and gripped the Russian Federation. After peaking in 2009, attacks and deaths in Russia consistently declined to only one attack and two deaths in 2021. Three of the major attacks happened when Chechen insurgents attacked apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, killing 200 people and injuring several hundred; on October 23, 2002, when Chechen insurgents attacked the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and an estimated 129 people were killed during the rescue operation, and during September 1–3, 2004, when Chechen and Ingush insurgents attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and held more than 1,100 hostages. A careless rescue operation caused more than 300 deaths, including 186 children.
Terrorism arose from a combination of extremist ethno-nationalist and Islamist militants from North Caucasus’s republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya. The dual nature of terrorism ─ people seeking more autonomy and extremists seeking more Islam complicated the Kremlin’s strategy to combat terrorism.
In retaliation for Chechnya terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, a name whose roll from the lips has an endearing quality. Massive and indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages that caused high civilian casualties, herding of people into camps, extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances occurred from both sides and made it difficult to ascertain, who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys.’ Which side was more guilty of terrorism?
Vladimir Putin registered his name, ruthlessness, pragmatism, and authority by resolving the Chechnya terror crisis. He followed Abraham Lincoln’s pattern of using force and making friends with the enemy. Putin convinced Akhmad Kadyrov, Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s, to switch sides. Kadyrov later became the President of the Chechen Republic. Grozny has been rebuilt and Chechnya exists on multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Moscow.
Grozny
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Recognizing that Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus were loosely allied with al-Qaeda’s network and many traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the Russian president realized that joining Syria in its civil war against ISIS was a means of preventing the Islamic extremists from extending their reach. Decimating the central authorities of the terrorist campaigns would subdue the morale and incentives of the al-Qaeda “look-alikes” on Russian soil. Without having to use Russian ground troops, and air force pilots not facing challenges in the sky, support of the be-sieged al-Assad regime was a “win-win proposition for Moscow. Putin’s strategy to combat terrorism has been successful — ISIS and al-Qaeda are mostly gone from the Arab lands of the Middle East (still in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa) and the Russian Federation has had no terrorist attacks in the last two years.
China
A shadowy and shifting group of Uyghur separatists is responsible for terrorism committed against Chinese authorities and citizens. Incomplete statistics from The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China show that “from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.” From 1990 to 2001 the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which proposes the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state, “was responsible for over 200 acts of terrorism, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.”
Two of the reported and more serious terrorist attacks.
On May 22, 2014, five terrorists drove two SUVs through the fence of the morning fair of North Park Road of Saybagh District, Urumqi, into the crowd and detonated a bomb that claimed the lives of 39 and left 94 injured.
On 1 March 2014, a group of 8 knife-wielding terrorists attacked passengers in the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, Yunnan, China, killing 31 people, and wounding 143 others. The attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers at random.
A more complete description of the terrorist attacks is available in an article by The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.
As the terrorist attacks rose, Beijing had one strategy ─ ruthlessly seek out the perpetrators. “In the period 2013–2017 police arrested 330,918 in the province, 7.3 percent of total arrests in China. This compares to 81,443 arrests in the previous five years. In March 2019, Chinese officials said that they had arrested more than 13,000 militants in Xinjiang since 2014.”
Realizing their strategy had developed into a “tit-for-tat” operation, where each blow against the terrorist apparatus was countered by a blow against Chinese, the Chinese government changed its strategy. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism in Xinjiang and combined the use of force with initiatives that integrated the Uyghur populations into Chinese society and improved their standard of living. The new strategy has been successful — no reported terror attacks in recent years, the GDP of a stagnant Xinjiang province increased from 963 billion yuan in 2016 to 1,774 billion yuan in 2022, and the unemployment rate decreased from 2.48 percent to 2.04 percent during the same interval.
While Western media accuses China of destroying mosques, the Xinjiang Islamic Association states, “There are some 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang. Many in the region were built in the 1980s and 1990s or earlier, but some of these mud-and-brick structures (ED: the demolished Kargilik’s Grand Mosque was a mud-and-brick structure) or small buildings were not well maintained or repaired. They became unsafe for religious activities and posed a serious threat in the event of an earthquake. The mosques were also inadequately designed, making worship difficult.”
Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque
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Before Renovation
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After Renovation
Conclusion
Terrorism’s principal strategy is to inflict pain, pain, and more pain on a civilian population until the civilian population’s government agrees to their demands. Governments may care but always place national interests above that of the local population. The struggle to overcome terrorism has had two principal strategies
(1) Give ‘em nothing and fight them until the death, and
(2) Use force to keep terrorism contained and offer benefits that will satisfy some grievances and lower the temperature until the heat becomes normal.
The United States pursued the ‘fight until death’ strategy. After excessive deaths from the ongoing terrorism and civilians caught in the battles, the U.S. appears to have won the war; terrorism in the Middle East has declined to an acceptable level.
Israel has pursued a strategy of “we can outdo all terrorist attacks by being more terrorist than the terrorists.” Pushing the oppressed Palestinians into terrorist attacks enables Israel to respond tenfold to the attack on its populace. Terrorizing opposition in other nations is neatly performed by false charges of anti-Semitism, cyber attacks, and, when necessary, Mossad hitmen.
Russia went from ‘fight until death’ to offering the leaders of domestic terrorism a good bribe and letting them take care of it. Total force was used against international terrorism. Both strategies have been successful.
China departed from brute force to a more conciliatory strategy that recognized the wants of the Uyghurs and devised plans to satisfy the population. Most successful of all of the strategies.
Each nation that confronts terrorism may have unique characteristics that shape the terrorism and the response to it. This investigation shows that Chinese President Xi-Jinping eventually realized the exact nature of the terrorism his country was experiencing and accepted a plan that quickly solved the problem. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was pragmatic and changed his stance as events unfolded. Soon afterward, Russia had no more terrorism.
For Israel, terrorism is part of the daily diet. Israel commits terrorism, Israel invites terrorism, Israel commits terrorism, Invites terrorism, on and on until there will be none.
The United States invited terrorism by helping Pakistan’s intelligence fortify Osama bin Laden, not listening to the al-Qaeda leader’s grievances, and invading Iraq. In 1998, bin Laden demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula and voiced objections to a U.S. foreign policy that armed Israel. Did U.S. troops need a base in Saudi Arabia? Why has the U.S. had close ties with the apartheid country, which is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Assuredly, the date 9/11 would just be another day on the calendar if U.S. administrations understood the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Rafah, the last refuge in southern Gaza. Photo credit: MENAFN
On February 7, 2024, a U.S. drone strike assassinated an Iraqi militia leader, Abu Baqir al-Saadi, in the heart of Baghdad. This was a further U.S. escalation in a major new front in the U.S.-Israeli war on the Middle East, centered on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but already also including ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and the U.S. and U.K.’s bombing of Yemen.
This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.
What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.
When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.”
The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.
The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.< A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases.
Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.”
Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.
From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.”
Three days later, Orla would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared.
But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.
Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.
Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.
Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”
After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.
The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.
While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The post US Chooses Genocide Over Diplomacy in the Middle East first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A deadly U.S. drone strike in Baghdad late Wednesday drew swift criticism from Iraqi officials and foreign policy analysts, who warned that the Biden administration’s repeated attacks are further inflaming regional tensions and putting civilians at risk. Yehia Rasool, a spokesperson for the Iraqi military, said in a statement early Thursday that the U.S. “conducted a blatant assassination through…
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U.S. officials have said they believe air strikes on dozens of Iranian-linked sites in Syria and Iraq late on February 2 in retaliation for the killing of three U.S. troops in northwest Jordan were successful and warned more strikes will follow, as Baghdad expressed anger and concerns persisted of widening conflict in the region.
U.S. President Biden had warned of imminent action after a drone attack at a U.S. base in Jordan killed three U.S. service members on January 28.
Washington blamed Iran and its supply of weapons to militia groups in the region.
Reports said the U.S. strikes had hit seven locations, four in Syria and three in Iraq.
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement released shortly after the attacks that “our response began today,” adding, “It will continue at times and places of our choosing.”
“The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond,” he added.
General Yehia Rasool, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani accused the United States of a “violation” of Iraqi sovereignty with potentially “disastrous consequences for the security and stability of Iraq and the region.”
After a previous U.S. air strike in Baghdad, Sudani asked for the 2,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn — a sensitive bilateral topic.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the United States “did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes” but did not provide details. He said the attacks lasted about 30 minutes and included B-1 bombers that had flown from the United States.
Kirby said defense officials would be able to further assess the strikes’ impact on February 3.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, which has extensive contacts inside Syria, said at least 18 pro-Iran fighters had been killed in a strike near Al-Mayadeen in Syria.
U.S. Central Command earlier confirmed the strikes, saying its forces “conducted air strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States,” it said, adding that it had struck “command and control operations, centers, intelligence centers, rockets, and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicle storages, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces.”
Syrian state media said there had been a number of casualties in several sites in Syria’s desert areas along the border with Iraq.
U.S. officials have said that the deadly January 28 attack in Jordan carried the “footprints” of Tehran-sponsored Kataib Hizballah militia in Iraq and vowed to hold those responsible to account at a time and place of Washington’s choosing, most likely in Syria or Iraq.
On January 31, Kataib Hizballah extremists in Iraq announced a “suspension” of operations against U.S. forces. The group said the pause was meant to prevent “embarrassing” the Iraqi government and hinted that the drone attack had been linked to the U.S. support of Israel in the war in Gaza.
Biden has been under pressure from opposition Republicans to take a harder line against Iran following the Jordan attack, but said earlier this week that “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said Tehran “will not start any war, but if anyone wants to bully us, they will receive a strong response.”
Biden on February 2 witnessed the return to the United States of the remains of the three American soldiers killed in Jordan at a service at the Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
The clashes between U.S. forces and Iran-backed militia have come against the background of an intense four-month military campaign in Gaza Strip against the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist group Hamas after a Hamas attack killed at least 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.
Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen have also waged attacks on international shipping in the region in what they call an effort to target Israeli vessels and demonstrate support for Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to his fifth round of crisis talks in the region from February 3-8, with visits reportedly planned to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and the West Bank in an effort to promote a release of hostages taken by Hamas in its brutal October 7 raids.
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
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U.S. officials have said they believe air strikes on dozens of Iranian-linked sites in Syria and Iraq late on February 2 in retaliation for the killing of three U.S. troops in northwest Jordan were successful and warned more strikes will follow, as Baghdad expressed anger and concerns persisted of widening conflict in the region.
U.S. President Biden had warned of imminent action after a drone attack at a U.S. base in Jordan killed three U.S. service members on January 28.
Washington blamed Iran and its supply of weapons to militia groups in the region.
Reports said the U.S. strikes had hit seven locations, four in Syria and three in Iraq.
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement released shortly after the attacks that “our response began today,” adding, “It will continue at times and places of our choosing.”
“The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond,” he added.
General Yehia Rasool, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani accused the United States of a “violation” of Iraqi sovereignty with potentially “disastrous consequences for the security and stability of Iraq and the region.”
After a previous U.S. air strike in Baghdad, Sudani asked for the 2,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn — a sensitive bilateral topic.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the United States “did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes” but did not provide details. He said the attacks lasted about 30 minutes and included B-1 bombers that had flown from the United States.
Kirby said defense officials would be able to further assess the strikes’ impact on February 3.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, which has extensive contacts inside Syria, said at least 18 pro-Iran fighters had been killed in a strike near Al-Mayadeen in Syria.
U.S. Central Command earlier confirmed the strikes, saying its forces “conducted air strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States,” it said, adding that it had struck “command and control operations, centers, intelligence centers, rockets, and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicle storages, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces.”
Syrian state media said there had been a number of casualties in several sites in Syria’s desert areas along the border with Iraq.
U.S. officials have said that the deadly January 28 attack in Jordan carried the “footprints” of Tehran-sponsored Kataib Hizballah militia in Iraq and vowed to hold those responsible to account at a time and place of Washington’s choosing, most likely in Syria or Iraq.
On January 31, Kataib Hizballah extremists in Iraq announced a “suspension” of operations against U.S. forces. The group said the pause was meant to prevent “embarrassing” the Iraqi government and hinted that the drone attack had been linked to the U.S. support of Israel in the war in Gaza.
Biden has been under pressure from opposition Republicans to take a harder line against Iran following the Jordan attack, but said earlier this week that “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said Tehran “will not start any war, but if anyone wants to bully us, they will receive a strong response.”
Biden on February 2 witnessed the return to the United States of the remains of the three American soldiers killed in Jordan at a service at the Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
The clashes between U.S. forces and Iran-backed militia have come against the background of an intense four-month military campaign in Gaza Strip against the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist group Hamas after a Hamas attack killed at least 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.
Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen have also waged attacks on international shipping in the region in what they call an effort to target Israeli vessels and demonstrate support for Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to his fifth round of crisis talks in the region from February 3-8, with visits reportedly planned to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and the West Bank in an effort to promote a release of hostages taken by Hamas in its brutal October 7 raids.
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
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Welcome back to the China In Eurasia Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China’s resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.
I’m RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here’s what I’m following right now.
As Huthi rebels continue their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the deepening crisis is posing a fresh test for China’s ambitions of becoming a power broker in the Middle East – and raising questions about whether Beijing can help bring the group to bay.
Finding Perspective: U.S. officials have been asking China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Huthis, but according to the Financial Times, American officials say that they have seen no signs of help.
Still, Washington keeps raising the issue. In weekend meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan again asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to play a “constructive role” in stopping the attacks.
Reuters, citing Iranian officials, reported on January 26 that Beijing urged Tehran at recent meetings to pressure the Huthis or risk jeopardizing business cooperation with China in the future.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that China would want to bring the attacks to an end. The Huthis have disrupted global shipping, stoking fears of global inflation and even more instability in the Middle East.
This also hurts China’s bottom line. The attacks are raising transport costs and jeopardizing the tens of billions of dollars that China has invested in nearby Egyptian ports.
Why It Matters: The current crisis raises some complex questions for China’s ambitions in the Middle East.
If China decides to pressure Iran, it’s unknown how much influence Tehran actually has over Yemen’s Huthis. Iran backs the group and supplies them with weapons, but it’s unclear if they can actually control and rein them in, as U.S. officials are calling for.
But the bigger question might be whether this calculation looks the same from Beijing.
China might be reluctant to get too involved and squander its political capital with Iran on trying to get the Huthis to stop their attacks, especially after the group has announced that it won’t attack Chinese ships transiting the Red Sea.
Beijing is also unlikely to want to bring an end to something that’s hurting America’s interests arguably more than its own at the moment.
U.S. officials say they’ll continue to talk with China about helping restore trade in the Red Sea, but Beijing might decide that it has more to gain by simply stepping back.
1. ‘New Historical Heights’ For China And Uzbekistan
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev made a landmark three-day visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi, engaged with Chinese business leaders, and left with an officially upgraded relationship as the Central Asian leader increasingly looks to China for his economic future.
The Details: As I reported here, Mirziyoev left Uzbekistan looking to usher in a new era and returned with upgraded diplomatic ties as an “all-weather” partner with China.
The move to elevate to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from a “comprehensive strategic partnership” doesn’t come with any formal benefits, but it’s a clear sign from Mirziyoev and Xi on where they want to take the relationship between their two countries.
Before going to China for the January 23-25 trip, Mirziyoev signed a letter praising China’s progress in fighting poverty and saying he wanted to develop a “new long-term agenda” with Beijing that will last for “decades.”
Beyond the diplomatic upgrade, China said it was ready to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan across the new energy vehicle industry chain, as well as in major projects such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower.
Xi and Mirzoyoev also spoke about the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, with the Chinese leader saying that work should begin as soon as possible, athough no specifics were offered and there are reportedly still key disputes over how the megaproject will be financed.
2. The Taliban’s New Man In Beijing
In a move that could lay the groundwork for more diplomatic engagement with China, Xi received diplomatic credentials from the Taliban’s new ambassador in Beijing on January 25.
What You Need To Know: Mawlawi Asadullah Bilal Karimi was accepted as part of a ceremony that also received the credential letters of 42 new envoys. Karimi was named as the new ambassador to Beijing on November 24 but has now formally been received by Xi, which is another installment in the slow boil toward recognition that’s under way.
No country formally recognizes the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, but China – along with other countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – have appointed their own envoys to Kabul and have maintained steady diplomatic engagement with the group since it returned to power in August 2021.
Formal diplomatic recognition for the Taliban still looks to be far off, but this move highlights China’s strategy of de-facto recognition that could see other countries following its lead, paving the way for formal ties down the line.
3. China’s Tightrope With Iran and Pakistan
Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region, as I reported here.
Both Islamabad and Tehran have since moved to mend fences, with their foreign ministers holding talks on January 29. But the incident put the spotlight on what China would do if two of its closest partners entered into conflict against one another.
What It Means: The tit-for-tat strikes hit militant groups operating in each other’s territory. After a tough exchange, both countries quickly cooled their rhetoric – culminating in the recent talks held in Islamabad.
And while Beijing has lots to lose in the event of a wider conflict between two of its allies, it appeared to remain quiet, with only a formal offer to mediate if needed.
Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me this approach reflects how China “shies away from situations like this,” in part to protect its reputation in case it intervenes and then fails.
Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, added that, despite Beijing’s cautious approach, China has shown a willingness to mediate when opportunity strikes, pointing to the deal it helped broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.
“It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves,” he told me. “So [Beijing] might be relieved now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t step up if needed.”
China’s Odd Moment: What do the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s slowing economy have in common? The answer is more than you might think.
Listen to the latest episode of the Talking China In Eurasia podcast, where we explore how China’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union is shaping the country today.
Invite Sent. Now What? Ukraine has invited Xi to participate in a planned “peace summit” of world leaders in Switzerland, Reuters reported, in a gathering tied to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
Blocked, But Why? China has suspended issuing visas to Lithuanian citizens. Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis confirmed the news and told Lithuanian journalists that “we have been informed about this. No further information has been provided.”
More Hydro Plans: Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Energy and the China National Electric Engineering Company signed a memorandum of cooperation on January 24 to build a cascade of power plants and a new thermal power plant.
There’s no official word, but it’s looking like veteran diplomat Liu Jianchao is the leading contender to become China’s next foreign minister.
Wang Yi was reassigned to his old post after Qin Gang was abruptly removed as foreign minister last summer, and Wang is currently holding roles as both foreign minister and the more senior position of director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office.
Liu has limited experience engaging with the West but served stints at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and currently heads a party agency traditionally tasked with building ties with other communist states.
It also looks like he’s being groomed for the role. He recently completed a U.S. tour, where he met with top officials and business leaders, and has also made visits to the Middle East.
That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.
Until next time,
Reid Standish
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A militia group that the Biden administration blamed for the deadly attack on U.S. forces stationed at a shadowy base in Jordan said Tuesday that it would stop targeting American troops in Iraq, a move that could clear the way for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers more than two decades after the 2003 invasion. “We announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation…
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Premise
Consider this paradox: without the Soviet Union (U.S.-designated nemesis since 1917), the United States would have never succeeded at placing the planet under its unilateral grip—often referred to by U.S. imperialists as the “new world order”. Or, rephrased differently, a world whereby the U.S. wants to rule unchallenged. This how it started: first, forget the Soviet Politburo—Mikhail Gorbachev practically annulled its role as the supreme decision-maker body of the Soviet Communist Party before proceeding to dismantle the Soviet state. In sequence, he, his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, other anti-communists in his inner circle, and the Yeltsin group were the material instruments in the downfall of the USSR thus leading to U.S. success.
By a twist of events, with its unrelenting policy of economic, geopolitical, and military pressure to submit the new Russia to its will, the United States effectively forced it to intervene in Ukraine many years later. After 33 years from the dismantling the Soviet Union (first by Gorbachev’s contraptions of perestroika and glasnost, and then by Yeltsin’s pro-Western free-marketers), Russia is now breaking up the monstrous American order it helped create. Today, it seems that Russia have reprised its founding principles in the world arena—not as an ideologically anti-imperialist Soviet socialist republic, but as an anti-hegemonic capitalistic state.
The process for the U.S. world control worked like this: taking advantage of Gorbachev’s dismantlement of the socialist system in Eastern Europe and his planned breakup of the USSR, the United States followed a multi-pronged strategy to assert itself as the sole judge of world affairs. The starting point was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. With the success of its two-stage war to end that occupation (Operations: Desert Shield, 1990, and Operation: Desert Storm, 1991) the United States achieved multiple objectives. Notably, it removed the USSR completely from the world scene even before it was officially dismantled, and it put Iraq and the entire Arab world under its effective control, and it tested its new world order.
Far more important, with a considerably weakened Russia taking the seat of the USSR at the Security Council, the United States finally completed its takeover of the United Nations. Although the hyperpower is known for routinely operating out of the international norms and treaties, and has myriad methods to enforce its influence or control over foreign nations, it is a fact that whoever controls the Security Council can use its resolutions—and their ever-changing interpretations— as authorization for military interventions in the name of so-called collective international legality.
Still, it is incorrect to say that the United States has become the omnipotent controller without considering the other three permanent members of the Security Council: Britain, France, and China. First, aside from being the two states with a known history of imperialism and colonialism, Britain and France are NATO countries. As such, they pose no threat to U.S. authority. This leaves China. (For now, I shall briefly discuss China’s role vis-à-vis the U.S. taking control of the Security Council after the demise of the USSR, while deferring its relevance to U.S. plans in Ukraine to the upcoming parts)
China has been rising as world power since the early 1990s onward. That being said, China’s world outlook has been consistently based on cooperation and peace among nations. China is neither an imperialist nor expansionist or interventionist state, and its claim on taking back Taiwan is historical, legal, and legitimate. That being said, China’s abstention from voting on serious issues is seriously questionable. Interpretation: China seems primarily focused on building its economic and technological structures instead of antagonizing U.S. policies that could slow its pace due to its [China] growing integration in the global capitalistic system of production. Consider the following two Western viewpoints on China’s voting practices:
Observation: but the period 2000–2006 was the post-9/11 Orwellian environment in which the United States broke all laws of the U.N. and turned the organization into its private fiefdom. Does that mean China had caved in to U.S. pressure and subscribed to its objectives? Based on its history, ideals, stated foreign policy principles, and political makeup, my answer is no. Yet, we do know that China has often been moving alongside U.S. objectives—by remaining silent on them. Examples include the U.S. 13-year blockade of and sanctions on Iraq (starting in 1990 and theoretically ending after the U.S. invasion in 2003), as well post-invasion occupation that is lasting through present by diverse ways and methods.
Observation: by abstaining, China seems playing politics and patently taking sides with Washington on critical issues. Is china conspiring, in some form, with the U.S. for selfish reasons? Are there other reasons?
No science is needed to prove that China is neither fearful of the United States nor subservient to it or uncertain about its own great place in the world. Simply, China favors dialogue over confrontation and patience over nervous impulses. Although such conduct may unnerve some who want to see China stand up to the hyper-imperialist bully, the fact is, China is no hurry to play its cards before the issue of Taiwan is resolved. Still, by its own problematic actions at the Security Council, China is not a dependable obstacle to U.S. plans. Of interest to the anti-imperialist front, however, is that China’s voting record on Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has left dire consequences on those nations.
Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine: Dialectics
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was calculated and consequential. It was calculated based on symmetric response to U.S. long-term planning aiming at destabilizing it. The consequentiality factor is significant. Russia’s action did not precede but followed a protracted standoff with Ukraine following U.S.-organized coup in 2014. Not only did that coup topple the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovych, but also veered Ukraine’s new rulers toward a fanatical confrontation with Russia and ethnic Russians—a sizable minority in Donbass.
Could comparing U.S. and Russian reactions to each other’s interventions shed light on the scope of their respective world policies? How does all this apply to Ukraine? First, Ukraine is not a conflict about territory, democracy, sovereignty, and all that jargon made to distract from the real issues and for the idle consumption of news. Second, to understand the war on Ukraine, we need to place Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in a historical context that —at least since the dismantlement of the USSR.
Premise
The study of reactions by political states to military interventions and wars is an empirical science. By knowing who is intervening, who is approving, and who is opposing, and by observing and cataloging their conduct vis-à-vis a conflict, we can definitely identify pretexts, motives, and objectives. For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the reaction of the United States, key European countries, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan were unanimously approving—and supporting with instigation, money, weapons, and logistics. The Soviet Union on the other hand, called for dialogue, negotiation, and other ways to end the conflict.
In the Iraq-Iran War, the U.S., Europe, and Israel wanted the war to continue so both would perish by it. Henry Kissinger the top priest of U.S. Zionism simplified the U.S. objective with these words, “The ultimate American interest in the war (is) that both should lose”. Consequently, Western weapons sales to both contenders skyrocketed—war is business. The Arab Gulf states, for example, financed and wanted Iraq to defeat Iran—its revolutionary model threatened their feudal family systems of government. They also looked for surgical ways to weaken Iraq thus stopping its calls for the unification of Arab states.
It turned out, when the war ended after eight years without losers and winners, that U.S. and Israel’s objective evolved to defeat Iraq that had become, in the meanwhile, a regional power. The opportunity came up when Iraq, falling in the U.S. trap (April Glaspie’s deception; also read, “Wikileaks, April Glaspie, and Saddam Hussein”) invaded Kuwait consequent to oil disputes and debts from its Gulf-U.S.-instigated war with Iran. As for Iran, it became the subject of harsh American containment and sanction regimes lasting to this very date.
Another example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the USSR, China, Arab States, and countless others only condemned but did nothing else as usual, Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, approved and sent his marines to break up the Palestinian Resistance and expel it from Lebanon, which was an Israeli primary objective.
United States: Reaction to the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
When the USSR intervened in Afghanistan in 1979, that country became an American issue instantly. Cold war paradigms played a paramount role in the U.S. response. Not only did the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia’s money) invent so-called Islamist mujahedeen against the Russian “atheists” (operation Cyclone), but also created ad hoc regional “alliances’—similar to those operating in Ukraine today—to counter the Soviet intervention.
Russia: Reaction to U.S.’s many interventions and invasions
When Lyndon Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic (1965), when Ronald Reagan mined the Nicaraguan ports (1981-85), and when George H.W. Bush invaded Panama (1989) and moved its president to U.S. prisons, the USSR reacted by invoking the rules of international law—albeit knowing that said law never mattered to the United States. The Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev stated that the invasion is “A flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and norms of relations among states”.
But did he do anything to hold the U.S. accountable? Gorbachev knew well that words are cheap, and that from an American perspective such charter and norms are ready for activation only when they serve U.S. imperialist purpose. The U.S., of course, did not give a hoot to Gorbachev’s protestation—and that is the problem with Russian leaders: they avoid principled confrontation with the futile expectation that the United States would refrain from bullying Russia. One can spot this tendency when Russian leaders kept calling U.S. and European politicians “our partners” while fully knowing that the recipients are probably smirking in secret.
Another catastrophic example is Gorbachev’s voting (alongside the United States) for the U.N. Resolution 678 to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait by January 15, 1991. According to my research, that was the first time in which a resolution came with a deadline. Meaning, the United States (and Gorbachev) were in a hurry to implement Bush’s plan for world control.
Not only did the Gorbachev regime approve Resolution 678, but also approved all U.S. resolutions pertaining to Iraq since the day it invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The statement is important. It means that Gorbachev’s role was structurally fundamental in allowing the United States to become the de facto “chief executive officer” of world affairs. At the same time, his role was also the material instrument in turning Russia into a U.S. vassal for over two decades since the dissolution of the USSR. [After becoming a former president of a superpower, Gorbachev made a living by taking commissioned speeches at various U.S. universities and think tanks]
From attentively reading Resolution 678, it is very clear that the objective was not about the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Decisively, it was about the disarming of Iraq for the sake of the Zionist entity in Palestine. In fact, the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991 was never meant just to end that occupation by dislodging Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It was enacted to destroy Iraq’s civilian structures and infrastructures, its army, and its nascent military industry including its nuclear capabilities.
The point: Gorbachev as a convert from communism to capitalism closed his eyes to U.S. objectives in Iraq and the world—these were unimportant to his plan since he obviously tied a deeply altered USSR to the wheel of U.S. imperialism while thinking he and his regime still mattered. With that, he doomed future Russia to protracted hardship and the world to suffer at the hands of U.S. violent imperialists and Zionists.
The Example of Libya: Zionist hyper-imperialist Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011. [For the record, the Jerusalem Post (top publication in the Zionist state) called Obama, “An insider’s view: Eight years watching the first Jewish US president”. (Describing Obama as Jewish is irrelevant. He was a Zionist at the service of Israel via a constructed career powered by opportunism and sycophancy) Obama’s bombing of Libya is testimony to Russia’s betrayal of just causes when that suits its calculations.
Russia of Dmitry Medvedev (and Putin as his prime minister) explicitly accepted the U.S. plan by not vetoing UNSC 1970, and UNSC Resolution 1973 that declared the whole of Libya a No-Fly Zone. Once the resolution was passed, the U.S. (and NATO) transformed it at once into a colossal bombing of that country. (Debating whether Russian’s general conduct toward U.S. tactics was an expression of pragmatism, concession, collusion, or weakness goes beyond the scope of this work. I reported on Lavrov’s statement on the Libyan issue further down in this series.)
As for the United States, a fascist Hillary Clinton disguised as an “intelligent diplomat” epitomized the U.S. role for government change in Libya as follows. Referring to the brutal murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Obama’s Secretary of State said, “We came, we saw, he died”. Aside from theatrically debasing Mark Anthony’s famous victory exclamation with her crazed laughter, Clinton’s “WE” confirmed the basics: Odyssey Dawn was a code name, not for a romantic beginning for Libya but for Obama’s imperialist war to conquer its oil and depose its leader.
Two other events are significant for their long-term implications: U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Regardless of U.S. pretexts, Russia reacted to each invasion differently. In the case of Afghanistan, it sided with the United States in spite of the fact that Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban had nothing to do with the still very much suspicious attack on the United States on September 11, 2021. It is imperative to recall what Tony Blair said prior to the Anglo-American invasion. Media and public records of the British government can confirm that Blair thundered to the Taliban, “Surrender Bin Laden, or lose power”. The Taliban offered to comply if the U.S. could prove that Bin Laden was behind the attack. The U.S. never responded—it just invaded.
In the case of Iraq, Russia, together with France and Germany, vehemently opposed the planned invasion but only within the realm of the UNSC. The U.S. and Britain invaded nevertheless. Aside from protesting, however, neither Russia nor any other country took any punitive action against the top two imperialist powers. More than that, Russia of the first Putin presidency sent neither weapons nor money to Iraq and Afghanistan to help them fight the invaders. Germany and France did the same. Was that for “solidarity” with invaders or fear from U.S. retribution?
What is worse, Russia and China had even accepted the U.S.‑imposed U.N. resolution 1483 that crowned the United States and Britain as the occupying powers of Iraq. That acceptance is a moral, historical, and legal blunder that the passing of time will never erase. This how it should be interpreted politically: with the passing of that resolution, Russia and China had not only legalized the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq, but also lent international legitimacy to the invasion and it is false motives.
A question: why did not the United States and Britain try to declare themselves as the occupying powers of Afghanistan? The answer is prompt: look no farther than the Zionist Israeli project to re-shape and control Iraq and other Arab countries via the United States. Accordingly, Afghanistan is not relevant to this scheme.
To close, I’m not suggesting that interventions by any country are tolerable as long as “A” can do whatever “B” does or vice versa, or, as long as they do not stand in the way of each other. That would void the struggle for a just world system where natural states could enjoy independence and security. Rather, to address persistent questions on the current configuration of the world order, we must tackle first the issue of exclusive entitlement. That is, we like to know according to what rule Russia, China, or any other country should remain mute while the dictatorial, violent hyper-empire continues staking its claim to arrange the world according to its vision? If this rule turns out to be by means of fire, death, and printed money, then we may finally understand the miserable situation of the world today and find all possible means to end it.
It is no small matter, but the “indispensable nation” [Madeleine Albright’s words] seems to think it deserves this exclusivity. American biblical preachers, hyper-imperialists, multi-term politicians, think tanks, proselytes of all types, military industry, and neophyte politicians seeking promotions within the system, and, before I forget, Zionist neocon empire builders often declare that the U.S. is predestined to rule over others. Biden, a self-declared Zionist has recently re-baptized the notion of U.S. ruling over others when he declared that the U.S. must lead the new world order.
Another Subject: American ideologues of permanent wars persistently talk about what appears to be a fixed target: Ukraine must win and Russia must lose. What hides behind such frivolous theatrics? First off, why Ukraine must win and Russia must lose? Stating so because Russia intervened in Ukraine is non sequitur. The United States, Britain, France, and Israel have been punching the world with invasions for decades without anyone being able to stop them. Ineluctably, therefore, there should be fundamental reasons for wanting to see Russia lose.
To begin, U.S. tactics to frame wars in terms of winning and losing is at the very least childish and makes no sense. Further, whereas waging wars of domination are built on a hypothetical model that ends with “we win they lose”, the resulting indoctrination paradigm is invariably translated into an ideological construct whereby winning is a sign of power and losing is a sign weakness. Again, that makes no sense. One could lose not out of weakness or could win not out of strength. In endless situations, winning or losing in any field is a function of varied dynamic and static forces leading to either outcome by default.
In real context, the fabricated philosophy pivoting around the must-win scenario while discarding potential devastating reactions by a designated adversary is of paramount significance to understand the dangerous mindset of American politicians and war planners. As they prepare pretexts for a war by choice, they completely jump over the possibility that an opposite response could devastate them. How does the process work?
The post Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 3 of 16) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
One word characterizes United States foreign policy – counterproductive.
Major U.S. foreign policy decisions after World War II — Vietnam War, Lebanon intrusion, Somalia incursion, Afghan/Soviet War, Afghan occupation, Iraq War, support for Shah of Iran, and Libyan Wars — have been counterproductive, not resolving situations and eventually harming the American people. The one-sided relationship the United States has with Israel is another counterproductive policy that is harmful to the American public
Persistent attention to Israel and its dubious position in the world may seem overkill, except this attention is one of the most important, mortally affecting the U.S. public. Until a complete report of fatal relations with Israel is placed on the desks of U.S. congresspersons and they act positively upon the contents, attention to the issue is incomplete and peril continues. Surveying U.S. policies that favored Israel collects a horrendous list of American fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against fortress America.
Two questions. How have the expensive arrangements, Velcro attachments, and highly supportive measures for Israel benefitted the United States? What has Israel done for Americans, not for American politicians, but for those who vote them into office? A convenient means for obtaining the answer is to have a leading “think tank” in the United States supply the information. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which “seeks to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East and to promote the policies that secure them” has a 2012 article on the topic, “Friends with Benefits: Why the U.S.-Israeli Alliance Is Good for America,” by Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, Nov 7, 2012, and is a likely source. Some of its major recommendations:
U.S.-Israeli security cooperation dates back to heights of the Cold War, when the Jewish state came to be seen in Washington as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East and a counter to Arab nationalism….Israel remains a counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism. It has prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region by thwarting Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs.
(1) The reason the Soviet Union acquired influence in the Middle East was Washington’s refusal to sell arms to the Arab nations, while “indirectly supplying weapons to Israel via West Germany, under the terms of a 1960 secret agreement to supply Israel with $80 million worth of armaments.“ Less secret deliveries of MIM-23 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in 1962 and M48 Patton tanks in 1965 told the Arab nations they could not collaborate with a government that armed their principal adversary and they should seek military assistance elsewhere.
(2) Arab nationalism has developed, and developed, and developed; so, how did Israel counter Arab nationalism? Did Israel stimulate Arab nationalism?
(3) What has Israel done to protect others as a “counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism?” The answer is nothing. Radical forces, political Islam, and violent extremism emerged immediately after Israel’s formation and grew, and grew, as Israel grew.
(4) Iraq and Syria sought nuclear weapons to counter Israel’s nuclear weapons developments, which the U.S. could have and should have prevented. No nukes in Israel; no nukes in Syria or Iraq. Why did the U.S., dedicated to preventing nuclear proliferation, allow Israel to obtain the atomic bomb?
Dozens of leading U.S. companies have set up technology incubators in Israel to take advantage of the country’s penchant for new ideas. In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region, having recently eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the top market there for American products.
(1) U.S. companies have subsidiaries worldwide and hire talent in all nations. What’s significant about Israel?
(2) “In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region…” Was that good? In 2022, U.S. exports to Israel were $20.0 billion and imports were $30.6 billion, adding $10.7 billion to Washington’s trade deficit, not a good economic statistic. Without Israel’s trade, the U.S. exported $83 billion in goods and services to Middle East nations and had a trade surplus of $5.3 billion, a better statistic.
U.S. companies’ substantial cooperation with Israel on information technology has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success. At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year. If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli researchers.
These bites of public relations win the all-time Pinocchio award. Is The Washington Institute a legitimate “think tank” or a covert lobby?
(1) “Israel has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success.” Next, we’ll hear that Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Whitney.
(2) “At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year.” Intel has 131,000 employees in 65 countries — 11,000 in Israel, 12,000 in China, and approximately 7,500 employees at its 360-acre Leixlip campus in Ireland. The company develops the processors, not the country or specific engineers; it can develop the same processors anywhere in the world and has capably developed its major microprocessors for 45 years in the good old United States of America.
(3) “If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli researchers.” Another Pinocchio award. Let’s be more accurate: “If you’ve been scammed in a financial transaction, had your messages hacked, or had someone purchase an item with your PayPal account, thank Israeli researchers.”
In its one-sided presentation, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy does not show the U.S.-Israeli alliance is good for America. The Institute has not considered the other side, the harm that Israel has visited upon its most essential partner. Reality shows the U.S. government and its people have dealt with Israel in a suicidal manner and in a zero-sum game, where the U.S. is the “zero,” or actually minus, and Israel receives the sum of all the benefits.
Recognition of Israel
From its inception, Israel betrayed the United States and the U.S. betrayed its commitment to a just and peaceful post-WWII world. President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the new state, only 11 minutes after its declaration, did not consider its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah militias against civilian populations, and certified the exclusion of a Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked who represented the 400,000 indigenous Palestinians in the declared Israeli state that was almost equal in population to the 600,000 Jews, most of whom were recent immigrants and not decidedly permanent.
Suez Canal War
Several years later Israel again betrayed its principal benefactor. While President Eisenhower attempted to broker a peace agreement between Egypt and France and Great Britain that would resolve the crisis emerging from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Israel held secret consultations with the British and French. Considering Nasser a threat to its security, desirous of incorporating the Sinai into its small nation, and with a plan to extend Israel to the Litani River in Lebanon, Israel devised a strategy with the two European powers that permitted its forces to invade Egypt and advance to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Pretending to protect the vital artery, Britain and France parachuted troops close to the canal. An enraged Eisenhower threatened all three nations with economic sanctions, which succeeded in having all three militaries withdraw their forces and relinquish control of the canal to Egypt.
Six-Day War
The six-day war brought the first American blood in the U.S. commitment to Israel. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel patrolling in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 17 nautical miles off the northern Sinai coast. The crew suffered thirty-four (34) killed and one hundred seventy-three (173) wounded. A declassified Top Secret report details the CIA version of the attack and exonerates Israel by claiming mistaken identity. This has not satisfied USS Liberty survivors, who felt Israeli pilots had many opportunities for proper identification and performed the attacks to prevent the ship from obtaining important intelligence information.
1973 Yom Kippur War
Next came the 1973 Yom Kippur War and an economic catastrophe for the American people. The U.S. maintained it needed Israel to offset Soviet influence in the Arab world. The combined Egyptian and Syrian attempt to retake lands lost in the 1967 war prompted the Nixon administration to use taxpayer money and supply massive shipments of weapons to the beleaguered Israel state. An excuse for providing the armaments shipments ─ Israel might use the Samson option and nuke its adversaries ─ is regarded as a manipulation to pacify opponents of the arms deliveries. The controversy is reported in Wikipedia.
Dayan raised the nuclear topic in a cabinet meeting, warning that the country was approaching a point of “last resort.” That night, Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton-of-TNT(84 TJ) tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles at Sdot Micha Airbase and F-4 Phantom II aircraft at Tel Nof Airbase. They would be used if absolutely necessary to prevent total defeat, but the preparation was done in an easily detectable way, likely as a signal to the United States. Kissinger learned of the nuclear alert on the morning of 9 October. That day, President Nixon ordered the commencement of Operation Nickel Grass, an American airlift to replace all of Israel’s material losses.
The U.S. contribution in enabling Israel to achieve a decisive victory resulted in an oil embargo that drove up oil prices, set Americans into a frantic rampage in trying to keep their cars on the road, a stagnant economy, and huge inflation, which the Federal Reserve stopped by raising interest rates to record highs and led to the 1982 recession.
Lebanon War
Despite a truce with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and wanting to rid Lebanon of the PLO and Syrian dominance in Lebanon affairs, Israel used a failed assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, as an excuse to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Where Israel went, U.S. diplomacy was sure to follow, and the U.S. joined a multinational peacekeeping force.
U.S. presence in Lebanon had detractors. On April 18, 1983, a car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in West Beirut, killing dozens of American foreign service workers and Lebanese civilians. On October 23, 1983, after U.S. gunships in the Mediterranean shelled Syrian-backed Druze militias in support of the Christian government, a truck crashed through the front gates of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and exploded. Beirut barracks were destroyed and 241 marines and sailors were killed in the explosion. Soon after, President Reagan withdrew all U.S. forces from Lebanon.
International Terrorism
For several decades, al-Qaeda, the most prominent international terrorist organization, posed the most serious threat to America’s peace and stability. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda associates bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa. Twelve Americans were among the two hundred and twenty-four people who died in the terrorist actions. Three years later, the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. caused 2,750 deaths in New York and 184 at the Pentagon. Forty more Americans died when one of the hijacked planes crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. In addition, 400 police officers and firefighters perished in attempts to rescue people and extinguish the fires at the New York Trade Center.
Where did it all start? Why, and how did master terrorist Osama bin Laden develop his plans? There is no one factor, but, in several documents, bin Landen mentions Zionist control of Middle East lands and its oppression of an Arab population as significant factors. America’s support for Israel was one of bin Laden‘s principal arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the last sentences of a “Letter to America.”
Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.
During the 1990s, two other documents,“Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.
[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.
So now they come to annihilate … this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
Afghanistan
The hunt for Osama bin Laden and efforts to annihilate the al-Qaeda organization led to the invasion of Afghanistan and a twenty-year clash between the U.S. and the Taliban. Result: 2,402 United States military deaths, 20,713 American service members wounded, and Taliban regaining control.
Iraq
It’s difficult and punishing to agree with Osama bin Laden, but he may be correct or have a perspective that needs more examination. Did Bush order the invasion of Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which any child could ascertain he could not possibly have, or did the Neocons, Israel’s voice in the administration, convince him to use Americans, their resources, and their money to rid the Middle East of Israel’s most formidable enemy? Was George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq another example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests? Other international terrorist operations emerged during the Iraq war and brought U.S. military personnel into more battles. Finally, in 2019, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the best-equipped and largest of all the terrorist factions, which caused havoc in Syria and Iraq, was defeated, and international terrorism moved out of the Middle East and into parts of Africa.
Iran
It is taken for granted that Iran and the United States are natural enemies, except the hostility may be manufactured and the factory might be in Tel Aviv. Iran has a government and internal problems that disturb the U.S., but so do many other nations, especially Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. maintains relations with these nations. Confrontations have occurred and are escalating and that demands toning down rather than ratcheting up, and more diplomatic confrontations to prevent the physical confrontations. Sanctions that harm Iran’s economy and people, assistance to Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists, and use of the powerful computer worm, Stuxnet, to cause mayhem in Iran’s nuclear program are counterproductive provocations. The U.S. has no specific problem with Iran that cannot be ameliorated. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and incursions into the Haram al-Sharif are problems that Iran has with Israel, and they cannot be ameliorated until the oppression stops. Cunningly, Israel has tied its problems with the Islamic State to U.S. problems with Iran and uses the U.S. to challenge Iran.
Other
· In defiance of U.S. restrictions and the U.S. supplying Israel with advanced military equipment, Israeli companies sold weapons to China without a permit.
· The U.S. gives Israel the sum of $3.1 B every year to purchase advanced weapons, from which Israel became a major exporter of military equipment and has been able to compete effectively with its patron.
· Israeli governments have scoffed at all U.S. entreaties to halt settlement expansion, even insulting then Vice-President Joe Biden by authorizing settlement expansion one day before Biden arrived for talks.
· Two Navy SEALs are missing and assumed dead after a maritime operation to intercept weapons from Iran heading to Houthi fighters. This episode is a result of the U.S. participating in Israel’s war against Gaza.
· The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been attacking air bases housing U.S. and Iraqi troops in western Iraq “as a part of a broad resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as a response to Israel’s operations in Gaza.”
Toward the Abyss
The verdict is clear; the United States derives no benefit from its close relationship with Israel. Maybe, during the confusing Cold War, desk strategists determined the Soviets had an influence with Middle Eastern nations and thought it wise to have a place where the Pentagon would be welcome. Soviet influence disappeared after the 1979 Camp David Accords; Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement and Soviet diplomats and military vanished from the desert sands.
From September 11, 2001, to October 7, 2023, the U.S. continually suffered fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against Fortress America. Why did U.S. administrations pursue a “special relationship” with Israel and find themselves victims of the “war on terror” and involved in numerous wars? The current U.S. administration, which did not use its clout to prevent the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, has permitted Israel’s self-inflicted problems to bring the U.S. people into supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people, promoting the U.S. as the leading killer of indigenous peoples.
It took a long time to turn the murmurs of genocide in Palestine into a forceful expression that others would accept and fearlessly repeat. Murmurs of sabotage and treason by elected government officials are being heard, but they are legal terms for crimes, and, legally, U.S. legislators’ activities may not be considered in those categories. Treachery is a better word, gaining federal office by treacherous means — pandering to those that represent the interests of a foreign power to obtain campaign funds and press coverage — and using that office to satisfy the wants of the foreign power, despite the damage done to American constituencies. Past and present U.S. executives and legislators are guilty of treachery and that word should be shouted in the halls of Congress. Sound the alarm, get them out before it is too late, and elect into office those who represent the American people and not a foreign government. MAGA – MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN.
Aiding the genocide has put the U.S. in severe moral decline; escalating internal divisions are leading to social and political decline; and an economy that can no longer compete in the international markets, together with increasing resistance to use of the dollar, is leading to economic decline. The signs of civil strife have yet to appear and when they do they will push the U.S. off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss.
The post Toward the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.
— André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.
On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:
‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’
The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials.
But such a view is deemed too extreme for respectable BBC discourse. Even today, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg glibly notes:
Labour nerves still jangle over what went so terribly wrong in Iraq, even after all these years.
The implication, endlessly channelled by the BBC, is that a ‘disastrous miscalculation’ occurred, rather than an international war crime leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis; a crime for which no western leader, or their media cheerleaders, has ever been tried in court. That outcome, in any serious responsible society, would have been more fitting than mere ‘jangling nerves’ among politicians.
But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. This transformation is a power-serving alchemy turning the base metal of brutal realpolitik into the gold of benign intention, all for public consumption.
Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:
In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.
— Chomsky, Interventions, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p. 101.
It does not matter how frequently, or how horrifically, this benevolent claim is violated by Western countries, journalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.)
The list goes on and on. You might well ask: at what point do supposedly astute, well-informed, senior editors and political correspondents simply stop regurgitating government propaganda; even start challenging it? How much blood has to be spilled, how many lives lost, how much vital infrastructure – homes, hospitals, power plants – destroyed by ‘our’ weaponry, with ‘our’ diplomatic, political and economic support?
But, of course, serious media challenge of elite power is highly unlikely. ‘Successful’ media professionals are fed through an industrial filter system that rewards steady adherence to state-approved narratives. As Chomsky once so memorably told a discombobulated Andrew Marr:
I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’
Misleading The Public Is State Policy
In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observed:
a basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.
— Curtis, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, Vintage, London, 2004, p. 3.
He added:
in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.
— Ibid., p. 3.
This is especially true when it comes to Western terrorism. But what exactly is terrorism? The definition from a US army manual is:
The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.
— Chomsky, ‘The new war against terror’, talk given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 October 2001.
By this definition, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:
The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.
— Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.
The US-UK-supported genocidal attacks by Israel on the people of Gaza, now extending to over 100 days, have made it ever more difficult for politicians and managers of public perception to maintain the myth of western benevolence and a ‘global rules-based order’.
The Financial Times reported last October:
Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.
The FT article continued:
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “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.”
The senior G7 diplomat added:
What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?
Why indeed.
Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, observed recently that:
I think this notion of international rules is very comfortable for some people to use when it suits them but they don’t believe in international rules when it doesn’t suit them. Because they don’t apply international rules or law equally in all circumstances.
She added:
You can’t say because Ukraine has been invaded, suddenly sovereignty is important, but it was never important for Palestine.
To put it bluntly, the notion of the West upholding a rules-based international system is a blood-drenched myth.
Gaza – A War ‘To Save Western Civilisation’
Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The case was brought under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. On 28 October last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he compared the Palestinians to the Biblical people of Amalek. In the first Book of Samuel, God commanded King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel:
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
We could find no reference to Netanyahu’s genocidal comparison of the Palestinians to the Amalekites on the BBC News website.
Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. In other words, over 70 per cent of those killed are women and children. Around four per cent of Gaza’s population has either been killed, wounded or is missing under rubble.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. These include many families who have been displaced multiple times, forcibly and repeatedly moved to try to flee Israel’s bombardment. But, as the UN has warned, there is no safe place in Gaza. Oxfam reported that Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, exceeding the daily death toll of any other major 21st century conflict. Many more lives are at risk from hunger, disease and cold, warned Oxfam.
As of 30 December, about 65,000 residential units in Gaza had been destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 housing units had been damaged, meaning that over half a million people will have no home to return to. Thirty out of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals are not functioning, and the remaining six are only partially functioning.
Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:
Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.
Cook pointed out that it is significant that South Africa has brought the case of genocide against Israel. Both countries ‘bear the trauma of Europe’s long history of racial supremacism, but each has drawn precisely opposite lessons.’ As Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, said:
We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the genocidal attacks on Gaza as a war ‘to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilisation.’ As the political writer Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, Herzog was right; but not in the way he intended. She explained:
The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.
Johnstone continued:
For centuries western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.
She added:
What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.
A BBC News report on the ICJ proceedings was titled, with fake balance, ‘South Africa’s genocide case against Israel: Both sides play heavy on emotion in ICJ hearing’. This was a distortion of the truth: the South African case was presented with dignity, clarity and forensic detail. As the BBC conceded deep in its report, it was Israel who made a strong appeal to emotions, displaying the images of 132 missing Israelis – most of them still being held hostage in Gaza. But, as Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted of Israel’s legal case:
Its repeated invocation of Hamas’s horrible 7 October attack and alleged genocidal aspirations are irrelevant because atrocities by one side do not justify genocide by another. Its argument of self-defence is beside the point because a legitimate defence does not allow genocide.
BBC News marked one hundred days of the current phase of the Israel-Palestine crisis with a classic example of propaganda bias. The BBC website headlined a major 3,000-word piece on the October 7 attacks. Underneath, there was a tiny link to a one-minute video of footage from Gaza that clearly underplayed the level of destruction. This is called BBC ‘impartiality’.
True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:
South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.
Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:
I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.
He added:
I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. Actually, if I remember correctly, that question started with a few words, “Just a quick one”. And then the question was asked and Kirby responded in this utterly disgusting way when the most important issue on the planet is in front of him, and couldn’t do more than one dismissive, phony and false statement. But then there’s no follow-up [by the journalists at the press briefing]. Then they move on to the next topic. And the next topic.
Sachs continued:
Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. That’s why I was grateful for today’s [ICJ] court proceedings because there were hours to put forward the evidence. There is a detailed legal complaint. There are dozens of countries that have supported this. But the US government is all spin, all propaganda, and all attempt at narrative control.
This is, of course, standard behaviour for the world’s major perpetrator of terrorism.
The Language Of Genocide
Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. Last month, Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the highly-respected Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths.
They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. Philo and Berry noted that:
The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
But more importantly:
The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.
Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, once observed that what is routinely missing from BBC coverage is that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land:
demeans and degrades people: not just the killing and the destruction, but the humiliation, the attempt to crush the human spirit and remove the identity; not just the bullet in the brain and the tank through the door, but the faeces Israel’s soldiers rub on the plundered ministry walls, the trashed kindergarten; the barriers to a people’s work, prayers and hopes.
Emre Azizlerli, a former senior BBC producer, said recently via X (formerly Twitter):
I worked there for over 20 years. Internal boards determine who gets promoted by a panel of the applicant’s superiors. The political likes and dislikes of those at the very top easily trickle down in this chain mechanism all the way down to how producers behave, since everyone wants to please their boss to move ahead.
No wonder that a Morning Star tribute to the late John Pilger, who reported on Palestine over many years, noted that his death ‘leaves a void’, adding:
There are few investigative journalists of his courage or integrity. And designedly so. From the censorship of “hostile” voices across the internet to the outrageous incarceration of Julian Assange, every effort is being made to stamp out independent journalism.
Throughout his career, Pilger drew attention to the role of the media as ‘an appendage of established power’. Addressing a conference last March, organised by the Morning Star, he called for:
urgent debate and activism around the issue of the media… the media was rarely a friend of working people, but there were spaces for independent journalists in the mainstream.
He continued:
My own career is testament to that. Until a few years ago I worked in mainstream newspapers — in later years the Guardian mainly — but the Guardian like the others is now closed to independent thinking and honest journalism… we need to understand that the media is now fully integrated into an extremist state, and that working people must look elsewhere — to the Morning Star, yes, and to oases on the internet where good journalism flourishes.
Pilger often cast a sceptical eye on those whom we are supposed to regard as the best journalists working in the major news media. They are nevertheless performing a propaganda role by demarcating the permissible limits of reporting. For example:
BBC reporter, Jeremy Bowen, who talks about a war between Israel and Hamas. Bowen knows that’s wrong. It’s an attack on an occupied people by the occupier, Israel, backed by great powers.
State-corporate journalism – BBC News is a prime example – is far removed from the mythical notion of reporting the truth to the public. As the playwright John McGrath once wrote:
The gentlemen at the head of the powerful opinion-forming corporations do not wish to have their articulate mediation of reality disturbed by a group of people going around with a different story, seeing events from a different perspective, even selecting different information. Still less do they wish to have the population at large emerging from their mental retreat – the inner exile of the powerless and alienated – and demanding a share of power, of control, of freedom.’
— McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, Nick Hern Books, 1981, pp. 89-90.
We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.
The post Gaza: A Brutal Demonstration Of “Western Values” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Military actions by various actors across the Middle East are compounding fears that Israel’s assault on Gaza is escalating into a full-blown regional war. In recent days, the United States has carried out strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen who have resumed their attacks on container ships in the Red Sea; Iran has struck targets in northern Iraq, Syria and Pakistan; while Hezbollah and Israel…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The International Court of Justice. Photo credit: ICJ
On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Israel is trying to bomb Gaza into oblivion and scatter the terrorized survivors across the Earth, meeting the Convention’s definition of genocide to the letter.
Since countries engaged in genocide do not publicly declare their real goal, the greatest legal hurdle for any genocide prosecution is to prove the intention of genocide. But in the extraordinary case of Israel, whose cult of biblically ordained entitlement is backed to the hilt by unconditional U.S. complicity, its leaders have been uniquely brazen about their goal of destroying Gaza as a haven of Palestinian life, culture and resistance.
South Africa’s 84-page application to the ICJ includes ten pages (starting on page 59) of statements by Israeli civilian and military officials that document their genocidal intentions in Gaza. They include statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, five other cabinet ministers, senior military officers and members of parliament. Reading these statements, it is hard to see how a fair and impartial court could fail to recognize the genocidal intent behind the death and devastation Israeli forces and American weapons are wreaking in Gaza.
The Israeli magazine +972 talked to seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials involved in previous assaults on Gaza. They explained the systematic nature of Israel’s targeting practices and how the range of civilian infrastructure that Israel is targeting has been vastly expanded in the current onslaught. In particular, it has expanded the bombing of civilian infrastructure, or what it euphemistically defines as “power targets,” which have comprised half of its targets from the outset of this war.
Israel’s “power targets” in Gaza include public buildings like hospitals, schools, banks, government offices, and high-rise apartment blocks. The public pretext for destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is that civilians will blame Hamas for its destruction, and that this will undermine its civilian base of support. This kind of brutal logic has been proved wrong in U.S.-backed conflicts all over the world. In Gaza, it is no more than a grotesque fantasy. The Palestinians understand perfectly well who is bombing them – and who is supplying the bombs.
Intelligence officials told +972 that Israel maintains extensive occupancy figures for every building in Gaza, and has precise estimates of how many civilians will be killed in each building it bombs. While Israeli and U.S. officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty figures, intelligence sources told +972 that the Palestinian death counts are remarkably consistent with Israel’s own estimates of how many civilians it is killing. To make matters worse, Israel has started using artificial intelligence to generate targets with minimal human scrutiny, and is doing so faster than its forces can bomb them.
Israeli officials claim that each of the high-rise apartment buildings it bombs contains some kind of Hamas presence, but an intelligence official explained, “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” As Yuval Abraham of +972 summarized, “The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.”
Two days after South Africa submitted its Genocide Convention application to the ICJ, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich declared on New Year’s Eve that Israel should substantially empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and bring in Israeli settlers. “If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration,” Smotrich said, “if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza, and not two million, the whole discourse on “the day after” will be completely different.”
When reporters confronted U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller about Smotrich’s statement, and similar ones by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Miller replied that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have reassured the United States that those statements don’t reflect Israeli government policy.
But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s statements followed a meeting of Likud Party leaders on Christmas Day where Netanyahu himself said that his plan was to continue the massacre until the people of Gaza have no choice but to leave or to die. “Regarding voluntary emigration, I have no problem with that,” he told former Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon. “Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in. And we are working on it. This is the direction we are going in.”
We should have learned from America’s lost wars that mass murder and ethnic cleansing rarely lead to political victory or success. More often they only feed deep resentment and desires for justice or revenge that make peace more elusive and conflict endemic.
Although most of the martyrs in Gaza are women and children, Israel and the United States politically justify the massacre as a campaign to destroy Hamas by killing its senior leaders. Andrew Cockburn described in his book Kill Chain: the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins how, in 200 cases studied by U.S. military intelligence, the U.S. campaign to assassinate Iraqi resistance leaders in 2007 led in every single case to increased attacks on U.S. occupation forces. Every resistance leader they killed was replaced within 48 hours, invariably by new, more aggressive leaders determined to prove themselves by killing even more U.S. troops.
But that is just another unlearned lesson, as Israel and the United States kill Islamic Resistance leaders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, risking a regional war and leaving themselves more isolated than ever.
If the ICJ issues a provisional order for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanity must seize the moment to insist that Israel and the United States must finally end this genocide and accept that the rule of international law applies to all nations, including themselves.
The post A Chance to Hold Israel and the US to Account for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear. As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war. As the war continues, so do those statements.
As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”. But the revised Israeli approach did not “reflect any changes in the south”. The monstrous death toll, in short, would continue to rise.
As Washington feigns a reproachful attitude to the IDF’s grossly lethal tactics, claiming success in restraining them, another, failing front is also being pursued in the Arab world and beyond. As Israel’s great defender, the US is attempting to hold back fury and consternation as the dirty deeds by their favourite ally in the Middle East are being executed.
Blinken’s latest round of travelling has the flavour of swinging by tetchy neighbours to see how they are faring in the sea of blood and acrimony. The itinerary includes Istanbul, Crete, Amman, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Al-’Ula, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, Manama and Cairo. The State Department’s media release on January 4 outlines the obsolete agenda any sensible diplomat would do best to discard. “Throughout his trip, the Secretary will underscore the importance of protecting civilian lives in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza; securing the release of all remaining hostages; our shared commitment to facilitating the increased, sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and the resumption of essential services; and ensuring that Palestinians are not forcibly displaced in Gaza.”
So far, Palestinians are being massacred by the IDF in Gaza, forcibly deprived of life-saving humanitarian assistance and essential services in a sustained act of strangulation while being forcibly displaced. They are being oppressed, harassed and murdered by vigilante Israeli settlers in the West Bank, even as the army looks the other way.
It follows that Blinken is telling tall stories and hoping that legs carry them far. They are also being told as proceedings before the International Court of Justice instituted by South Africa commence to determine whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza satisfies the definition of genocide in international law.
The strategy becomes clearer in the second part of the disingenuous traveller’s agenda. Blinken “will also discuss urgent mechanisms to stem violence, calm rhetoric, and reduce regional tensions, including deterring Houthi attacks on commercial shopping in the Red Sea and avoiding escalation in Lebanon.”
The Houthi attacks and the increasingly violent situation in Lebanon serve as golden distractions for Washington, since they give the Biden administration room to simultaneously claim to be preventing a widening of the conflict while permitting Israel’s butchery to continue.
Corking the conflict, however, is not proving such a success. The war is widening, even if reporting on the subject remains sketchy in the negligently lazy news outlets of the Anglosphere. In addition to the bold moves of the Houthis and escalating violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon come ongoing, harrying efforts from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. An Al-Mayadeen report on January 7 took note of an announcement from the group, also known as the Iraqi al-Najuba Movement, that it had fired an al-Arqab long-range cruise missile at Haifa “in support of our people in Gaza and in response to the massacres committed by the usurping entity against Palestinian civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”
A spokesperson for the Iraqi Resistance, Hussein al-Moussawi, was bullish in claiming that the group had the capacity to strike targets beyond Haifa. Conditions to develop the group’s weapons had also been “favourable”.
In a separate statement, the Islamic Resistance also revealed that its fighters had targeted an Israeli base on the occupied Golan Heights, usin drones. To this can be added drone attacks on the US army base of Qasrok, located in the countryside of Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq. The base continues to host US forces.
Perhaps the greatest canard of all in this briefest of trips by Blinken is the continued, now absurd claim, that Washington is committed “to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps towards the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”
In his remarks to President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken showed the hardened ignorance that will ensure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue in some form. In his mind, a “reformed” Palestinian Authority will take over the reins of a ruined Gaza (“effective responsibility”) whatever the residents of Gaza think.
Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state. Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table. The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints. And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.
The post Tall Tales and Murderous Restraint: Blinken on Gaza and Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
They are unlikely to be revelatory, will shatter no myths, nor disprove any assumptions. Cabinet documents exist to merely show that a political clique – the heart of the Westminster model of government, so to speak – often contain the musings of invertebrates, spineless on most issues such as foreign policy, while operating at the behest of select interests. Hostility to originality is essential since it is threatening to the tribe; dissent is discouraged to uphold the order of collective cabinet responsibility.
The recent non-story arising from the cabinet documents made available as to why Australia participated in a murderous, destructive and most probably illegal war against Iraq in 2003 proves that point. The documents available showed, for instance, that a country, without mandatory parliamentary consultation, can go to war under the stewardship of a cabal influenced by the strategic interests of a foreign government. The Howard government, famously buried in the fatty posterior of the US imperium, was always going to commit Australian military personnel to whatever military venture Washington demanded of it. (In some cases, even without asking.)
It was modish to suggest during the “Global War on Terror” that governments with fictional weapons of mass destruction might pass them on to surrogate non-state actors. It was fashionable to misread intelligence material alleging such links, and, when that intelligence did not stack up, concoct it, as Tony Blair’s government happily did, sexed-up dossiers and all, in justifying Britain’s participation in the mauling of Iraq.
The larger story in the recent documents affair over Iraq was what documents were withheld from the provision to the Australian National Archives in 2020. In his January 3 press conference, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese outlined the process. Normally, cabinet documents would be released two decades after their creation. Such documents are provided to the Archives three years in advance by the government of the day. But on this occasion, 78 were omitted from the transfer, enabling Albanese to point the finger firmly at his predecessor, Scott Morrison. (Those documents have since been transferred to the Archives.)
In Albanese’s view, “Australians have the right to know the basis upon which Australia went to war in Iraq. Australians lost their lives during the conflict and we know that some of the stated reasons for going to war was not correct in terms of the weapons of mass destruction that was alleged Iraq had at the time.” Australians, he went on to say, had “a right to know what the decision-making process was”.
The mistake in question had to be corrected, and the Archives had to release the documentation provided to them. A constricting caveat, however, was appended to the declaration: the release of the documents had to “account for any national security issues […] upon the advice of the national security agencies.”
The caveat is a good starting point to suggest that this documents saga, and the restrictions upon the disclosure of the missing 78 Cabinet records, are set to continue. For one thing, Albanese has added to the farce of secrecy by commencing an independent review that is barely worth that title. The review is to be chaired by the very sort of person you would expect to bury rather than find things: Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
Richardson’s appointment continues a practice of partisan control over a process that should be beyond the national-security fraternity. There are fewer strings of accountability, as would apply, say, to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. There are no terms of reference outlined. Short of simply being a political manoeuvre that might cast a poor light on the previous government’s practices, it is unclear what Richardson’s purpose really is apart from justifying the retention of any of the said documents from public view.
Either way, he will be on a tidy sum for the task, something which he is becoming rather used to. As The Klaxon reports, Richardson has been well remunerated by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) for previous work. A $50,000-a-month contract was awarded to him last year for “strategic advice and review” between August 2 and October 31. The department refuses to state what it was for, preferring the insufferably vague justification of some “need for independent research or assessment”. Be on guard whenever the term “independent” is coupled with “inquiry” or “assessment” in an Australian government context.
A media release from the PM&C further notes that no department official or Minister has a direct role in the release or otherwise of the documents in question; the Archives will have the final say on whether those documents will be released or otherwise, whatever Albanese says. Researchers, transparency activists and those keen on open government, are almost guaranteed disappointment, given the habitual secrecy and dysfunction that characterises the operation of that body.
If there is a true lesson in this untidy business for the Albanese government, it must surely lie in the need to debate, discuss and dissent from matters that concern the entanglement of Australia, not merely in foreign wars but in alliances that cause them. That, sadly, is a lesson that is nowhere being observed. Howard’s crawling disposition has found its successor in Albanese’s obsequiousness, in so far as foreign conflicts are concerned. Wherever the US war machine is deployed, Australia will hop to its aid with gleeful obedience.
And as for anything to do with revealing the Australian decision-making process about the decision to invade, despoil and ruin yet another Middle Eastern state in 2003, one is better off consulting records from the White House and the US State Department.
The post Circle of Secrecy: The Iraq War’s Missing Cabinet Documents first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When war criminals can daub canvasses in blithe safety, rake in millions of dollars in after dinner speeches and bore governments to death with their shoddy words of wisdom, the world is not so much as it should be, but merely as it is. Former US President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and tag along bore, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, remain at large, despite their respective countries wagging fingers of disapproval at authoritarian regimes for defying the rules-based international order. Never a more fitting trio in terms of abusing international law could you find.
In 2003, this culpable troika sneered, ignored and soiled such international institutions as the United Nations, the rule of law, the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, and a number of conventions, by invading Iraq. The country, weakened and crippled by years of sanctions, leaving its hospital system crushed with bulky lists of dead children (all worthwhile, according to the late former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright), was apparently a mortal threat to Western civilisation.
The Baathist regime, led by Saddam Hussein, was purportedly armed to the teeth with a doomsday inventory of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that he was bound to use at any given moment against freedom loving types in Washington, London and Canberra. (It is true he had previously had such weapons, much of it supplied by Western arms corporations with the blessing of intelligence agencies such as the CIA.) He had, apparently, refused to disarm, obdurate in the face of United Nations weapons inspectors. And he had flirted with those evil representatives of cataclysmic eschatology, al-Qaida, despite being hostile to such millenarian groups. The report card, spottier than ever in the shadow of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the United States, suggested that he had to go. The results: lusty sectarian violence, a catastrophically devastating, often imbecilic occupation by US-led forces, the seeds of emboldened fundamentalism, the offshoot movements such as Islamic State, and multigenerational trauma.
With another new year beckoning, the Australian National Archives have released approximately 240 cabinet papers from 2003 on the decision-making process behind a number of policy decisions. A few snippets are offered regarding road to war. Cabinet’s National Security Committee had kept an eye on developments in Iraq, though the released materials do little to reveal what, precisely, took place in conversations between Howard and Bush.
In September 2002, one document notes how “cabinet noted an oral report by the prime minister on his discussion with the president of the United States on the American position in relation to efforts by Iraq to secure and maintain weapons of mass destruction.” A fortnight later, the then-foreign minister Alexander Downer, is noted as furnishing cabinet with an “oral report” regarding “developments” regarding the proposed UN Security Council resolution on the Saddam regime’s “possession of, and attempts to secure or maintain, weapons of mass destruction, and on the prospects for passage of the resolution”. That such oral revelations were not accompanied by thick, detailed submissions, is telling about the obedient, inevitable train of thinking afflicting the Howard government. A war, started by Washington, would come, and Canberra would be along for the ride.
By March 2003, Howard was demanding action. He informed members of his cabinet that Bush had issued Saddam with an ultimatum of thuggish import. “Saddam Hussein and his sons,” the US president stated, “must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”
Howard was drunk with intelligence assessments from the United States, including such claims that Iraq had put out feelers for yellowcake in Niger. Couple this with such stretched confections as non-state terrorist actors, hankering for WMD spoils from sponsor states, and the prime minister was swooning. In 2013, his cringeworthy apologia given to the Lowy Institute reflected on the fictitious Niger angle as “unmistakable” in its “strength”. Had it been accurate – a sly way of escaping the prosecutor’s legal brief – and Saddam “left in place, only to provide WMDs to a terrorist group, for use against the US, the Administration would have failed in its most basic responsibility to protect the nation.” When crooks of state are found out, they tend to cite public duty as appropriate justification.
As far as legality for any military intervention outside the formal channels of authorisation of a UN Security Council, Howard was armed with a memorandum signed by a first assistant secretary from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and his equivalent from the Attorney-General’s Department. Fantastically and irresponsibly, the cod ordinary advice suggested that Australian involvement in an invasion would be entirely legal, given the Saddam regime’s recalcitrance in not allegedly complying with previous Security Council resolutions. It seems that the public servants in question, instead of offering a panoramic view about the pitfalls of a dangerous adventure in the Middle East, were merely keen to satisfy the bloodletting urges of their political paymasters.
The cabinet minute from March 18, 2003 showed agreement from the Attorney-General with the spurious reasoning of the first assistant secretaries. It also noted that the Australian Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, holder of that old office of the British empire as the monarch’s representative, had been consulted. Approval from him, however, was not mandatory.
Cabinet, won over with no evident demurral, and previously buttered up by oral reports, approved the measure to commit Australia to another failed military mission of murderous, bungling incompetence. The United States would receive no resistance in getting its pound of Australian flesh for an illegal enterprise, and the Australian public, many of whom had participated in some of the largest anti-war demonstrations the country had ever seen, would be ignored.
The post Criminal Assumptions: The Howard Cabinet and Invading Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
OBITUARY: By Peter Boyle and Pip Hinman of Green Left
Sydney-born investigative journalist, author and filmmaker John Pilger died on December 31, 2023.
He should be remembered and honoured not just for his impressive body of work, but for being a brave — and at times near-lone — voice for truth against power.
In early 2002, the “war on terror”, launched by then United States President George W Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attack, was in full swing.
After two decades, more than 4 million would be killed in Iraq, Libya, Philippines, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere under this bloody banner, and 10 times more displaced.
The propaganda campaign to justify this ferocious, US-led, global punitive expedition cowed many voices, not least in the settler colonial state of Australia.
But there was one prominent Australian voice that was not silenced — and it was John Pilger’s.
‘Breaking the silence’
On March 10 that year, Sydney Town Hall was packed out with people to hear John speak in a Green Left public meeting titled “Breaking the silence: war, propaganda and the new empire”.
Outside the Town Hall, about 100 more people, who could not squeeze in, stayed to show their solidarity.
Pilger described the war on terror as “a war on world-wide popular resistance to an economic system that determines who will live well and who will be expendable”.
He called for “opposition to a so-called war on terrorism, that is really a war of terrorism”.
The meeting played an important role in helping build resistance in this country to the many US-led imperial wars that followed the US’ bloody retribution exacted on millions of Afghans who had never even heard of the 9/11 attacks, let alone bore any responsibility for them.
That 2002 Sydney Town Hall meeting cemented a strong bond between GL and John.
GL is proud to have been the Australian newspaper and media platform that has published the most articles by John Pilger over the years.
Shared values
For much of the last two decades, the so-called mainstream media were always reluctant to run his pieces because he refused to obediently follow the unspoken war-on-terror line.
He refused to go along with the argument that every military expedition that the US launched (and which Australia and other loyal allies promptly followed) to protect privilege and empire were in defence of “shared democratic values”.
The collaboration between GL and John was based on real shared values, which he summed up succinctly in his introduction to his 1992 book Distant Voices:
“I have tried to rescue from media oblivion uncomfortable facts which may serve as antidotes to the official truth; and in doing so, I hope to have given support to those ‘distant voices’ who understand how vital, yet fragile, is the link between the right of people to know and to be heard, and the exercise of liberty and political democracy …”
GL editors have had many exchanges with John over the years. At times, there were political differences. But each such exchange only built up a mutual respect, based on a shared commitment to truth and justice.
The last two decades of John’s moral leadership against Empire were inadvertently confirmed a few weeks before his passing when US President Joe Biden warned Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu not to repeat the US’ mistakes after 9/11.
“There’s no reason we did so many of the things we did,” Biden told Netanyahu.
Focus on Palestine struggle
John had long focused on Palestine’s struggle for self-determination from the Israeli colonial settler state. He condemned Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign of Gaza and, on X, praised those marching for “peaceful decency”.
He urged people to (re)watch his 2002 documentary film Palestine is Still The Issue, in which he returned to film in Gaza and the West Bank, after having first done so in 1977.
John was outspoken about Australia’s treatment of its First Peoples; he didn’t agree with Labor’s Voice to Parliament plan, saying it offered “no real democracy, no sovereignty, no treaty between equals”.
He criticised Labor’s embrace of AUKUS, saying it was about a new war with China, a campaign he took up in his documentary The Coming War on China. While recognising China’s abuse of human and democratic rights, he said the US views China’s embrace of capitalist growth as the key threat.
John campaigned hard for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s release; he visited him several times in Belmarsh Prison and condemned a gutless Labor Prime Minister for refusing to meet with Stella Assange when she was in Australia.
He spoke out for other whistleblowers, including David McBride who exposed Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
Did not mince words
John did not mince words which is why, especially during the war on terror, most mainstream media refused to publish him — unless a counterposed article was run side-by-side. He never agreed to this pretence of “balance”.
John wrote about his own, early, conscientisation.
“I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal,” he said on the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century — Vietnam.
“I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.”
John Pilger will be remembered by all those who know that facts and history matter, and that only through struggle will people’s movements ever have a chance of winning justice.
Republished with permission from Green Left Magazine.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Protesters wave Palestinian, Lebanese, and Hezbollah flags and hold a picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah during a Palestine solidarity rally in Lebanon. (Credit: GETTY IMAGES)
While Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been frantically shuttling around the Middle East trying to stop the Israeli conflict in Gaza from exploding into a regional war, the United States has also sent two aircraft carrier strike groups, a Marine Expeditionary Unit and 1,200 extra troops to the Middle East as a “deterrent.” In plain language, the United States is threatening to attack any forces that come to the defense of the Palestinians from other countries in the region, reassuring Israel that it can keep killing with impunity in Gaza.
But if Israel persists in this genocidal war, U.S. threats may be impotent to prevent others from intervening. From Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, the possibilities of the conflict spreading are enormous. Even Algeria says it is ready to fight for a free Palestine, based on a unanimous vote in its parliament on November 1st.
Middle Eastern governments and their people already see the United States as a party to Israel’s massacre in Gaza. So any direct U.S. military action will be seen as an escalation on the side of Israel and is more likely to provoke further escalation than to deter it.
The United States already faces this predicament in Iraq. Despite years of Iraqi demands for the removal of U.S. forces, at least 2,500 U.S. troops remain at Al-Asad Airbase in western Anbar province, Al-Harir Airbase, north of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, and another small base at the airport in Erbil. There are also “several hundred” NATO troops, including Americans, advising Iraqi forces in NATO Mission Iraq (NMI), based near Baghdad.
For many years, U.S. forces in Iraq have been mired in a low-grade war against the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that Iraq formed to fight ISIS, mainly from Shia militias. Despite their links to Iran, the armed groups Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and other PMFs have often ignored Iranian calls to de-escalate attacks on U.S. forces. These Iraqi groups do not respect Iran Quds Force leader General Esmail Qaani as highly as they did General Soleimani, so Soleimani’s assassination by the United States in 2020 has further reduced Iran’s ability to restrain the militias in Iraq.
After a year-long truce between U.S. and Iraqi forces, the Israeli war on Gaza has triggered a new escalation of this conflict in both Iraq and Syria. Some militias rebranded themselves as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and began attacking U.S. bases on October 17. After 32 attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, 34 more in Syria and 3 U.S. airstrikes in Syria, U.S. forces conducted airstrikes against two Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in Iraq, one in Anbar province and one in Jurf Al-Nasr, south of Baghdad, on November 21, killing at least nine militiamen.
The U.S. airstrikes prompted a furious response from the Iraqi government spokesman Bassam al-Awadi. “We vehemently condemn the attack on Jurf Al-Nasr, executed without the knowledge of government agencies,” al-Awadi said. “This action is a blatant violation of sovereignty and an attempt to destabilize the security situation… The recent incident represents a clear violation of the coalition’s mission to combat Daesh (ISIS) on Iraqi soil. We call on all parties to avoid unilateral actions and to respect Iraq’s sovereignty…”
As the Iraqi government feared, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq responded to the U.S. airstrikes with two attacks on Al-Harir airbase on November 22 and several more on November 23rd. They attacked Al-Asad airbase with several drones, launched another drone attack on the U.S. base at Erbil airport, and their allies in Syria attacked two U.S. bases across the border in northeastern Syria.
Short of a ceasefire in Gaza or a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, there is no decisive action the U.S. can take that would put a stop to these attacks. So the level of violence in Iraq and Syria is likely to keep rising as long as the war on Gaza continues.
Another formidable and experienced military force opposing Israel and the United States is the Houthi army in Yemen. On November 14, Abdul-Malek al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthi government in Yemen, asked neighboring countries to open a corridor through their territory for his army to go and fight Israel in Gaza.
The Houthi Deputy Information Secretary Nasreddin Amer told Newsweek that if they had a way to enter Palestine, they would not hesitate to join the fight against Israel, ”We have fighters numbering hundreds of thousands who are brave, tough, trained and experienced in fighting,” Amer said. “They have a very strong belief, and their dream in life is to fight the Zionists and the Americans.”
Transporting hundreds of thousands of Yemeni soldiers to fight in Gaza would be nearly impossible unless Saudi Arabia opened the way. That seems highly unlikely, but Iran or another ally could help to transport a smaller number by air or sea to join the fight.
The Houthis have been waging an asymmetric war against Saudi-led invaders for many years, and they have developed weapons and tactics that they could bring to bear against Israel. Soon after al-Houthi’s statement, Yemeni forces in the Red Sea boarded a ship owned, via shell companies, by Israeli billionaire Abraham Ungar. The ship, which was on its way from Istanbul to India, was detained in a Yemeni port.
The Houthis have also launched a series of drones and missiles towards Israel. While many members of Congress try to portray the Houthis as simply puppets of Iran, the Houthis are actually an independent, unpredictable force that other actors in the region cannot control.
Even NATO ally Türkiye is finding it difficult to remain a bystander, given the widespread public support for Palestine. President Erdogan of Türkiye was among the first international leaders to speak out strongly against the Israeli war on Gaza, explicitly calling it a massacre and saying that it amounted to genocide.
Turkish civil society groups are spearheading a campaign to send humanitarian aid to Gaza on cargo ships, braving a possible confrontation like the one that occurred in 2010 when the Israelis attacked the Freedom Flotilla, killing 10 people aboard the Mavi Marmara.
On the Lebanese border, Israel and Hezbollah have conducted daily exchanges of fire since October 7, killing 97 combatants and 15 civilians in Lebanon and 9 soldiers and 3 civilians in Israel. Some 46,000 Lebanese civilians and 65,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border area. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned on November 11, “What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”
How will Hezbollah react if Israel resumes its brutal massacre in Gaza after the brief pause is over or if Israel expands the massacre to the West Bank, where it has already killed at least 237 more Palestinians since October 7?
In a speech on November 3, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah held back from declaring a new war on Israel, but warned that “all options are on the table” if Israel does not end its war on Gaza.
As Israel prepared to pause its bombing on November 23, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian held meetings in Qatar, first with Nasrallah and Lebanese officials, and then with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
In a public statement, Amirabdollahian said, “the continuation of the ceasefire can prevent further expansion of the scope of the war. In the meeting with the leaders of the resistance, I found out that if Israel’s war crimes and genocide continue, a tougher and more complicated scenario of the resistance will be implemented.”
Amirabdollahian already warned on October 16 that, “The leaders of the resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to do whatever it wants in Gaza and then go to other fronts of the resistance.”
In other words, if Iran and its allies believe that Israel really intends to continue its war on Gaza until it has removed Hamas from power, and then to turn its war machine loose on Lebanon or its other neighbors, they would prefer to fight a wider war now, forcing Israel to fight the Palestinians, Hezbollah and their allies at the same time, rather than waiting for Israel to attack them one by one.
Tragically, the White House is not listening. The next day, President Biden continued to back Israel’s vow to resume the destruction of Gaza after its “humanitarian pause,” saying that attempting to eliminate Hamas is “a legitimate objective.”
America’s unconditional support for Israel and endless supply of weapons have succeeded only in turning Israel into an out-of-control, genocidal, destabilizing force at the heart of a fragile region already shattered and traumatized by decades of U.S. war-making. The result is a country that refuses to recognize its own borders or those of its neighbors, and rejects any and all limits on its territorial ambitions and war crimes.
If Israel’s actions lead to a wider war, the U.S. will find itself with few allies ready to jump into the fray. Even if a regional conflict is avoided, the U.S. support for Israel has already created tremendous damage to the U.S. reputation in the region and beyond, and direct U.S. involvement in the war would leave it more isolated and impotent than its previous misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The United States can still avoid this fate by insisting on an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. If Israel will not agree to that, the U.S. must back up this position with an immediate suspension of arms deliveries, military aid, Israeli access to U.S. weapons stockpiles in Israel and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Palestine.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Guardian has long promoted itself as a valiant publisher of news and analysis that holds the powerful to account. It is a thing of wonder that the Guardian appends the following comment beneath news pieces:
Our quality, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more.
For over twenty years, Media Lens has shown how false is this claim.
A new, significant example occurred just last week. On 15 November, the paper removed Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?
The deleted text was an English translation of bin Laden’s letter, first published on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda, in November 2002, over one year after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Guardian website published a full translation on its website on 24 November 2002. The letter, addressed to the American people, contains a detailed list of grievances against the US shared by many in the Muslim world, explaining what motivated the 9/11 attacks.
The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues.
To properly understand why this response is so remarkable, and why it was quickly followed by an Orwellian act of Guardian censorship, requires some vital context.
‘They Hate Us For Our Freedoms’
In a recent edition of System Update, a widely-watched online politics programme, the US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the belief system of most Americans, of all ages:
The people who live in the United States believe and are told that we are a nice, good, benevolent, democratic, free country. We don’t want to bother anyone in the world. We’re not here to conquer anyone. To the extent that we involve ourselves in the world, it’s to help; like we’re doing now in Ukraine, we’re told. We just want to spread democracy, want to defend people…So, why would anyone possibly want to perpetrate an attack on the United States of that brutality and savagery? Americans rightly wanted to know.
Greenwald continued:
And they were fed a complete bullshit answer: by the neocons, by the media, by the government: “They hate us for our freedoms”.
The letter was written by bin Laden, who was loudly blamed for the attacks by the US and other governments, and who was extrajudicially executed by US special forces in Pakistan in May 2011. Greenwald pointed out that there are interviews with bin Laden where he had spelled out the grievances explaining the actual reasons why many in the Muslim world hate the United States.
Greenwald added:
And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.
As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:
The now blatant US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza – and the genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks on Palestinians – seemingly underpins the explosion on social media of attention directed towards bin Laden’s letter. Young Americans are waking up to the fact that the US has long supported Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians.
Another significant factor is the awful realisation among young American people, especially, that US government policy has made them targets as retribution for the crimes committed by Washington.
“Removed Document”: Guardian Censorship
So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? The decision was ‘explained’ in a piece by Blake Montgomery, the tech editor for Guardian US in New York City. In fact, the headline, and most of the article, focused on TikTok:
TikTok “aggressively” taking down videos promoting Bin Laden “letter to America”.
The Guardian quoted TikTok:
Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got on to our platform.
But what did the article report about the Guardian itself?
In response to the letter’s renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: “The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.”
Significantly, the Guardian article closed with a statement from the White House, as though this should be literally the last word on the matter:
There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.
As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.
In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear.
Piling irony upon irony, one article that the Guardian has not removed from its website, is the fake front-page ‘news’ story in November 2018 claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, supposedly held secret talks with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Such reprehensible journalism unjustly besmirched Assange’s reputation and may well have been part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign in advance of his forcible removal from the embassy by British police in April 2019, to be thrown in Belmarsh Prison where he remains to this day, awaiting likely extradition to the US.
What about the Guardian’s decision to redirect readers to their 2002 news article that ‘contextualised’ the letter? The article was titled, ‘Osama issues new call to arms’, and was written by Jason Burke, then the Guardian’s chief reporter and now the paper’s international security correspondent. The opening sentence made explicit the state-friendly pitch adopted throughout:
A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the “Islamic nation” as “eager for martyrdom”.
Burke continued:
Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as “jumpy”.
Recall that this article was published in November 2002, as the West was mounting a propaganda blitz to ‘justify’ its imminent invasion of Iraq which began in March 2003.
Burke added:
Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West.
But which grievances? Surely the Guardian would spell out several examples from this ‘lengthy list’? Amazingly Burke did not cite any of them, other than bin Laden’s ‘sustained attack on the “immorality” of Western society.’
In other words, the Guardian article that supposedly ‘contextualised’ bin Laden’s letter, which the paper has now removed, does nothing of the sort, obscuring US crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan and elsewhere.
Because the letter had gone viral, but then been removed, the most viewed link on the Guardian at one point last week (on 15 November) was actually, ‘Removed – document’; the place-marker with its risible ‘explanation’ that the Guardian had provided.
As Greenwald noted:
Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.
And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.
One of our recent media alerts focused on the phenomenon of Orwellian ‘memory-hole journalism’. That the Guardian had been caught in the act, arguably attracting even more attention to what it had tried to conceal (known as the ‘Streisand effect’), is noteworthy.
What is so encouraging about the fact that this went viral among young people is that it suggests they are beginning to look beyond the benevolent platitudes of US government public relations and are seeking to understand the reasons why so many people around the globe hate, not US ‘freedoms’, but US foreign policy.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With four years passing since the Tishreen Uprising in Iraq, the echoes of the protests for justice, accountability, and a better future still resound within the nation. However, these demands have remained largely unmet, overshadowed by a grim reality of enforced disappearances and a lack of accountability for the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.
The anti-government protests, which began in October 2019, were met with excessive force by Iraqi security forces, leading to numerous deaths, injuries, and the disappearance of activists, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have highlighted the grim aftermath, shedding light on the tragic stories of those forcibly disappeared.
Successive Iraqi governments have promised justice, but these pledges have largely remained unfulfilled. Investigations into the atrocities have been meager and far from meeting international standards. The families of the disappeared, courageously seeking answers, have been met with threats and intimidation, preventing them from pursuing justice. Tragically, in some cases, family members advocating for their missing loved ones have themselves become victims of violence.
Despite assurances and promised investigations, the lack of transparency has further compounded the issue. Committees formed to investigate these violations have failed to deliver the much-needed truth or justice. While reparations have been provided to some families, it falls short of addressing the core issue of accountability for the crimes committed.
The plight of the disappeared persists. Names and faces of those missing continue to haunt their families and communities. Many have been abducted without a trace, their loved ones left in anguish, seeking answers from authorities who have yet to provide any substantial information.
The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances has raised concerns and urged the Iraqi government to take urgent steps. Incorporating enforced disappearance as a distinct crime in domestic law and implementing recommendations for addressing disappearances are imperative. Civil society organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), among others, have urged the Iraqi government to take immediate action and address the devastating issue of enforced disappearances.
Iraq stands at a critical juncture, where justice for the disappeared remains a pressing concern. The voices of those who sought change through peaceful protests continue to resonate. Yet, their absence underscores the urgency of the situation. The Iraqi government must heed the calls for justice, uphold human rights, and ensure accountability for the disappeared protesters, bringing closure to their families and the nation.
The post Seeking Justice for Iraq’s Disappeared Protesters: A Continuing Struggle appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
