The agreement is based on the terms of United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the previous Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006. The truce will be enforced by 5,000 to 10,000 Lebanese troops and the UN’s 10,000-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeeping force, which has operated in that area since 1978 and includes troops from 46 countries.

The truce has broad international support, including from Iran and Gaza’s Hamas leaders. Israel and Hezbollah were apparently glad to take a break from a war that had become counterproductive for them both. Effective resistance prevented Israeli forces from advancing far into Lebanon, and they were inflicting mostly senseless death and destruction on civilians, as in Gaza, but without the genocidal motivation of that campaign.

People all over Lebanon have welcomed the relief from Israeli bombing, the destruction of their towns and neighborhoods and thousands of casualties. In the Lebanese capital of Beirut, people have started returning to their homes.

In the south, the Israeli military has warned residents on both sides of the border not to return yet. It has declared a new buffer zone (which was not part of the truce agreement) that includes 60 villages north of the border, and has warned that it will attack Lebanese civilians who return to that area. Despite these warnings, thousands of displaced people have been returning to south Lebanon, often to find their homes and villages in ruins.

Many people returning to the south still proudly display the yellow flags of Hezbollah. A flag flying over the ruins of the Lebanese city of Tyre has the words, “Made in the USA,” written across it. This is a reminder that the Lebanese people know very well who made the bombs that have killed and maimed thousands of them.

The truce’s success seems unlikely

There are already many reports of ceasefire violations. Israel shot and wounded two journalists soon after the truce went into effect. Then two days after the ceasefire began, Israel attacked five towns near the border with tanks, fired artillery across the border and conducted airstrikes on southern Lebanon. On December 2, as a UN peacekeeper told CNN that Israel had violated the truce “roughly a hundred times,” Hezbollah finally retaliated with mortar fire in the disputed Shebaa Farms area. Israel responded with heavier strikes on two villages, killing 11 people.

An addendum to the truce agreement granted Israel the right to strike at will whenever it believes Hezbollah is violating the truce, giving it what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “complete military freedom of action,” which makes this a precarious and one-sided peace at best.

The prospect for a full withdrawal of both Israeli and Hezbollah forces in 60 days seems slim. Hezbollah has built large weapons stockpiles in the south that it will not want to abandon. Netanyahu himself has warned that the truce “can be short.”

Then there is the danger of confrontation between Hezbollah and the Lebanese military, raising the specter of Lebanon’s bloody civil war, which killed an estimated 150,000 people between 1975 and 1990. 

So violence could flare up into full-scale war again at any time, making it unlikely that many Israelis will return to homes near the border with Lebanon, Israel’s original publicly stated purpose for the war.

The truce agreement was brokered by the United States and France, and signed by the European Union, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. France was a colonial power in Lebanon and still plays a leading role in UNIFIL, yet Israel initially rejected France as a negotiating partner. It seems to have accepted France’s role only when French President Emmanuel Macron’s government agreed not to enforce the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant against Netanyahu if he comes to France.

The United Kingdom also signed the original truce proposal on November 25, but doesn’t appear to have signed the final agreement. The UK seems to have withdrawn from the negotiations under US and Israeli pressure because, unlike France, its new Labour government has publicly stated that it will comply with the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant. However, it has not explicitly said it would arrest them.

Netanyahu justified the truce to his own people by saying that it will allow Israeli forces to focus on Gaza and Iran, and only die-hard “Security” Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir voted against the truce in the Israeli cabinet.

While there were hopes that the truce in Lebanon might set the stage for a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s actions on the ground tell a different story. Satellite images show Israel carrying out new mass demolitions of hundreds of buildings in northern Gaza to build a new road or boundary between Gaza City and North Gaza. This may be a new border to separate the northernmost 17% of Gaza from the rest of the Gaza Strip, so Israel can expel its people and prevent them from returning, hand North Gaza over to Israeli settlers and squeeze the desperate, starving survivors into an even smaller area than before.

Syria complicates the conflict

And for all who had hopes that the ceasefire in Lebanon might lead to a regional de-escalation, those hopes were dashed in Syria when, on the very day of the truce, the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise offensive. HTS was formerly the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. It rebranded itself and severed its formal link to al-Qaeda in 2016 to avoid becoming a prime target in the US war in Syria, but the US still brands it a terrorist group.

By December 1, HTS managed to seize control of Syria’s second largest city, Aleppo, forcing the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian allies onto the defensive. With Russian and Syrian jets bombing rebel-held territory, the surge in fighting has raised the prospect of another violent, destabilizing front reopening in the Middle East.

This may also be a prelude to an escalation of attacks on Syria by Israel, which has already attacked Syria more than 220 times since October 2023, with Israeli airstrikes and artillery bombardments killing at least 296 people.

The new HTS offensive most likely has covert US support, and may impact US President-elect Donald Trump’s reported intention to withdraw the 900 US troops still based in Syria. It may also impact his nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard is a longtime critic of US support for al-Qaeda-linked factions in Syria, so the new HTS offensive sets the stage for an explosive confirmation hearing, which may backfire on Syria hawks in Washington if Gabbard is allowed to make her case.

Arab and Muslim state strategies

Elsewhere in the region, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and war on its neighbors have led to widespread anti-Israel and anti-US resistance.

Where the US was once able to buy off Arab rulers with weapons deals and military alliances, the Arab and Muslim world is coalescing around a position that sees Israel’s behavior as unacceptable and Iran as a threatened neighbor rather than an enemy. Unconditional US support for Israel risks permanently downgrading US relations with former allies, from Iraq, Jordan and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) government has maintained a blockade of the Red Sea, using missiles and drones against Israeli-linked ships heading for the Israeli port of Eilat or the Suez Canal. The Yemenis have defeated a US-led naval task force sent to break the blockade and have reduced shipping through the Suez Canal by at least two-thirds, forcing shipping companies to reroute most ships all the way around Africa. The port of Eilat filed for bankruptcy in July, after only one ship docked there in several months.

Other resistance forces have conducted attacks on US military bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and US forces have retaliated in a low-grade tit-for-tat war. The Iraqi government has strongly condemned U.S. and Israeli attacks on its soil as violations of its sovereignty. Attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria have flared up again in recent months, while Iraqi resistance forces have also launched drone attacks on Israel.

An emergency meeting of the Arab League in Cairo, Egypt on November 26 voted unanimously to support Iraq and condemn Israeli threats. US–Iraqi talks in September drew up a plan for hundreds of US troops to leave Iraq in 2025 and for all 2,500 to be gone within two years. The US has outmaneuvered previous withdrawal plans, but the days of these very unwelcome US bases must surely be numbered.

Recent meetings of Arab and Muslim states have forged a growing sense of unity around a rejection of US proposals for normalization of relations with Israel and a new solidarity with Palestine and Iran. At a meeting of Islamic nations in Riyadh on November 11, Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin-Salman publicly called the Israeli massacre in Gaza a genocide for the first time.

Arab and Muslim countries know that Trump may act unpredictably and that they need a stable common position to avoid becoming pawns to him or Netanyahu. They recognize that previous divisions left them vulnerable to US and Israeli exploitation, which contributed to the current crisis in Palestine and the risk of a major regional war that now looms over them.

On November 29, Saudi and Western officials told Reuters that Saudi Arabia has given up on a new military alliance with the US, which would include normalizing relations with Israel. It is opting for a more limited US weapons deal.

The Saudis had hoped for a treaty that included a US commitment to defend them, like treaties with Japan and South Korea. That would require confirmation by the US Senate, which would demand Saudi recognition of Israel in return. But the Saudis can no longer consider recognizing Israel without a viable plan for Palestinian statehood, which Israel rejects.

On the other hand, Saudi relations with Iran are steadily improving since they restored relations 18 months ago with diplomatic help from China and Iraq. At a meeting with new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Qatar on October 3, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan declared, “We seek to close the page of differences between the two countries forever and work towards the resolution of our issues and expansion of our relations like two friendly and brotherly states.”

Prince Faisal highlighted the “very sensitive and critical” situation in the region due to Israel’s “aggressions” against Gaza and Lebanon and its attempts to expand the conflict. He said Saudi Arabia trusted Iran’s “wisdom and discernment” in managing the situation to restore calm and peace.

The ball is in Trump’s court

If Saudi Arabia and its neighbors can make peace with Iran, what will the consequences be for Israel’s illegal, genocidal occupation of Palestine, which has been enabled and encouraged by decades of unconditional US military and diplomatic support?

On December 2, Trump wrote on Truth Social that if the hostages were not released by the time of his inauguration, there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East.” “Those responsible,” he warned, “will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.”

Trump and many of his acolytes exemplify the Western arrogance and lust for imperial power that lies at the root of this crisis. More threats and more destruction are not the answer. Trump has had good relations with the dictatorial rulers of the Gulf states, with whom he shares much in common. If he is willing to listen, he will realize, as they do, that there is no solution to this crisis without freedom, self-determination and sovereignty in their own land for the people of Palestine. That is the path to peace, if he will take it.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Truce in Lebanon: Can Diplomacy Rise from the Ruins? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine. Rubio has come close to Trump’s position on that matter, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the US is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”

But in all the other hotspots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones. Here are eight reasons why he would make a dangerous secretary of state:

Rubio’s obsession with Cuban regime change will sink any chance of better relations there

Like other Cuban-American politicians, Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve the people of his parents’ homeland into submission.

It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Batista’s executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

When President Barack Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero-tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the US and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the US blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.” Two months earlier, Rubio introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the US “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the US-dominated Western banking system.

These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the US Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his secretary of state wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the US.

Applying Rubio’s anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors

Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home has served him so well as a US politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Argentinian President Javier Milei and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. He rails against progressive ones, from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the popular Mexican former President López Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, Rubio has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019, he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaidó as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Joe Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 US-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people. He also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the US this past August. This was a response to decades of US interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in January 2022.

Rubio’s major concern in this part of the world now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the second-largest trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the US, China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics. Meanwhile, US politicians like Rubio still see Latin America as the US’s “backyard.”

While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the US government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for US relations in the region.

Rubio insists that the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel

Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberately placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

In November 2024, when CODEPINK asked if Rubio would support a ceasefire, he replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Adolf Hitler.

In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The US will find itself extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of US policy.

Rubio’s enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead the US to war

Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including calls for more and more sanctions. He believes the US should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and claims that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says the goal of US policy should be regime change in Iran. This would set the stage for war.

While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

Rubio is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby

Rubio has reportedly received over $1 million in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last five years. When he last ran for re-election in 2022, he was the third-largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

Rubio was also the fourth-largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry. He’s even more beholden to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda. Therefore, it is unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.

Rubio is so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him — twice

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today — it is the challenge that will define not just this century, but my generation and every generation represented here in this room today — that challenge is not climate change, it’s not the pandemic, it’s not the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the US to bar Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses — abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.

The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice: once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first US secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the United Kingdom’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but doesn’t know how to escape them

Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

The US has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. Officials from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to Rubio himself have warned that using the US financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate. These include new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

While other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal US sanctions, the nominee for secretary of state remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

Rubio wants to oppress US free speech

Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at US universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” Rubio said.

The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed. He instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

Rubio expects US citizens to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of Chinese connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.

Conclusion: Rubio is a dangerous choice for secretary of state.

On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the straw man he has falsely set up.

Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio is no exception. He has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in US politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as secretary of state.

His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the US must get its way or else. Additionally, other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve US relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the United Nations Charter requires.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Eight Reasons Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State appeared first on Fair Observer.

The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s TODAY Show, saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”

On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to US security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.

Any attempt by Trump to stop US military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic Party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher-ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.

So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries and NATO to keep the US in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.

Netanyahu prepares for US support

The Middle East, however, is a trickier situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham Accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the US embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional US support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis. 

Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut US weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt. Additionally, a recent UN human rights report showed that 70% of the people killed by those US weapons are women and children.

Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the US election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant. He has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

Other powerful voices, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the US transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.

A US war with Iran would be catastrophic

The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible. This will confront Trump with a horrific humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people. The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.

Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater US involvement to help them “finish the job.”

The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy and ordered the killing of the country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking it in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on US military wargames he was involved in. He predicts that such a war could last ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer the country. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. Once unleashed, the conflict would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving US ground forces in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand-mile-long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink US warships.

But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. They believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.

Biden could de-escalate the Middle Eastern conflict, but won’t 

By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken by phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.

So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a US–Israeli war on Iran.

Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities. That would be the most certain path to a full-scale war.

Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. She led the aggressive questioning of US university presidents at an antisemitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.

While Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.

If he wanted to, Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon and work through US partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.

But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite: actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.

We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the war in Ukraine towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most voters have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris. There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal US–Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people’s needs — not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”

Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most US citizens than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely-recognized corruption of the US political system. Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy. Regardless, most US citizens understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working citizens or the future of the planet.

US militarism trumps peace

Michael Moore has published a flier titled, “This Is America.” It shows that large majorities of US citizens support liberal positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics. Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third-party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic US political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most voters agree with them.

War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society. They have real-world, everyday impacts that kill or maim people and destroy homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the US political system has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago. It uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country. Apart from brief wars in the 1980s and 1990s to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, the US military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins.

Far from being an effective vehicle to project US power, unleashing the brutality of the war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine our international standing in the eyes of our neighbors. After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”

As with so many of the US’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than that of war and peace.

For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed US wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 and 2020 and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers retaliated to defeat Bernie. They fought more aggressively there than they ever did to win elections against the Republicans or oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.

In August 2024, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. In 2013, on the Republican side, in response to the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years, however, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not an official one for peace; the closest we have is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which treats it as just one of several topics.

After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map. He tried everything, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea. Trump is now running against President Joe Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately.

Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump. But most US citizens know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from US atrocities overseas.

Trump and Harris have blood on their hands

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of President Barack Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which may have killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the US and its allies dropped over 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.

Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” “We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. “Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone.” If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.

In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.

On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working toward a ceasefire that, as Stein and many others have said, the US could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the US military even more “lethal.”

The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more US citizens to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in the US since the Iraq War.

We must stand for peace

The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of US citizens whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads. It is not a failure of activism or organizing.

Whomever we vote for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue. We must grow stronger, smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.

The elephant in the room will still be US militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

No US citizen should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the US claims to support in other countries. We must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda and make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A No-Win Dilemma for United States Peace Voters appeared first on Fair Observer.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of encouragement from the United States, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives. Israel is blowing thousands to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. Every person it kills or forces out and every building in a neighboring country it demolishes opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask which of them will be next.

Israel attacks UNIFIL

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors — it is at war with the entire world. The nation is especially threatened when the world’s governments convene at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law. Like every other country, Israel is legally bound by the rules of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and other multilateral treaties.

In July, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If Israel fails to comply, as expected, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures. These could include an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). This peacekeeping force’s thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia and political party in Lebanon.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later crashed into its gates, destroying them. On October 15, an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower in what UNIFIL described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time Israel has attacked the soldiers of UNIFIL. The force has the worst death toll of any of the UN’s 52 peacekeeping missions since 1948. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China. The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, as have other Palestinian and Lebanese groups. In fact, 337 UN peacekeepers from all over the world have perished trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not face repeated Israeli invasions. 

A full 50 countries contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel works to dismantle UNRWA

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The vulnerable United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), staffed by unarmed civilians, is under an even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has bombed and fired on UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel, killing nearly 230 workers.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan. They forcibly seized much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

In 1949, the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel. The state’s most aggressive, racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force — the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the US, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of “Greater Israel” that include all the land it illegally occupies. Meanwhile Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Israel has long desired to dismantle UNRWA. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” and called for its elimination.

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of involvement. The agency immediately suspended those workers, and many countries pulled their UNRWA funding. However, a UN report later found that Israeli authorities did not provide “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations. Since this revelation, every country that previously supported UNRWA except the US has restored its funding.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset. One aims to ban the organization from operating in Israel, another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law and a third to brand the agency as a terrorist organization. Israeli members of parliament are also proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to aid the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

The US obstructs resolution

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the world’s nations coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems. One of these problems is the endless crisis that Israel’s actions are causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, the whole planet.

Now Israel wants to ban UN Secretary General António Guterres from even entering the country. AsIsrael invaded Lebanon on October 1, Iran responded to a series of Israeli attacks and assassinations by launching 180 missiles at Israel. Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring him persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the US has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN. It has used its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

US obstruction offers no solution. As chaos grows and spreads and the US’s unconditional support gradually pulls it deeper into the conflict, this policy can only fuel the crisis.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror. Many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. US leadership helped build these mechanisms in 1945 so that the world would never again be consumed by global conflict and genocide after World War II.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to US obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political power balance in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Israel’s Surging War on the World appeared first on Fair Observer.

If Israel, predictably, fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Palestine and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling that these resolutions are based on, then the General Assembly could go a step further.

It could convene an emergency session to take up what is called a Uniting for Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel — or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.

The ICJ ruling against Israel

The September 18 vote comes in response to a historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”

The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with the claim that “the Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories or make them part of Israel.

The violence is not limited to Gaza

While Israel used its somewhat embellished account of the October 7 events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.

Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.

Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have killed at least 700 people, including 159 children. The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the US and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.

In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, its records are incomplete. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre ends soon.

Traditional allies may turn against Israel and the US

Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”

US President Joe Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The US has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.

By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, US officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.

This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.

Diverging plans for Gaza’s future

In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.

China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.

Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.

The UN can break out of its inertia

As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.

Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States armed Israel to the teeth, it vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.

The ability of one permanent member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system. When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another US ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.

The US stands uniquely in Gaza’s way

Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights. For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.

In the crisis in Gaza, its military alliance with Israel involves the US directly in the crime of genocide, as it provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The US also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.

The supply chain for the US arsenal of genocide crisscrosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.  

The US role is greater than complicity — it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form. And it is precisely because of the essential US role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.

Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on their government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to its neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.

It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite in opposition to Israel and the US to save Palestine. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the UN in the aftermath of World War II in 1945.

Even the catastrophic US-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action. But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can the World Save Palestine from US-Israeli Genocide? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The details of NATO’s agenda for the summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. NATO will drag its members into the US Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia. It will then unveil new initiatives to spend US tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.

But the main feature of this event will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.

On its face, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll, “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% chose the “support” option. Only 8% chose “oppose” while 24% chose “not sure.”

While President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the conflict, they have repeatedly rejected negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.

The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with. This is exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.

Defying the UN Charter “for peace”

As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, what the US and NATO are doing is prohibited by the UN Charter. Their rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI. As it says in Article 33(1):

“The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.”

But NATO’s leaders are not visiting Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. Quite the contrary, in fact. At a June meeting in preparation for the summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support of Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”

The effort will be headquartered at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany and involve almost 700 staff. Some describe it as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case former President Donald Trump wins the election and tries to draw down US support.

At the summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace,” Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”

NATO hasn’t learned from Afghanistan

The summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership. This move guarantees the conflict will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.

As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout 20 years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.

There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The US and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.

When the US and NATO finally admitted defeat and withdrew their forces from Afghanistan in 2021, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly. The US–NATO war machine simply moved to its next “challenge.” It learned nothing and made political hay out of abject denial.

Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” That Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster fire is a promising sign for the country’s future.

In an article titled, “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” Mark Episkopos from the Quincy Institute think tank wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close.” He concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”

This was a trap set by the US and UK, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies as well. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the US and UK committed a grave misdeed. They escalated what could have been a short conflict into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.

Turkish leaders and diplomats complained about how their US and British allies undermined their peacemaking. France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.

How NATO can truly bring peace

When NATO leaders meet in Washington, DC, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of their mission. They should examine how an organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruin. The fundamental question is this: Can NATO ever truly strive for peace? Or will it always be a dangerous, subservient extension of the US war machine?

We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world. It is an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.

There is only one way NATO could be a real force for peace. It must declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its Soviet counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991: It must finally dissolve what Secretary Austin should’ve called “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”
However, the population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and leave on its own. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine. We hope you will join us, in person or online, in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post We Need to Challenge NATO’s Insidious War Summit in Washington appeared first on Fair Observer.

The full details of the US proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting ceasefire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed. 

As former Israeli Labor Party Prime Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he tends to agree and he’s told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you after you return all the hostages?”

Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest US ceasefire proposal. It has only the word of US officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.

The US perpetuates Israel’s war

The basic disagreement that US President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and US governments do not.

Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to — Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent ceasefire, or Biden by ending or suspending US weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without US military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit. 

The US is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a ceasefire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan US leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the US Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.

The US seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world. That includes large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council.

But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the US has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the world’s growing outrage.

The US and Israel have a dark history together 

This pattern of US support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding. Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan. The Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed this. 

The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to one million people in the Nakba — the mass displacement of Palestinians during and after the 1948 Arab–Israeli war — have been meticulously documented. Despite this, an extraordinary propaganda campaign is in place to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that these horrors never happened.

The US was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948. It played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Dwight D Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956. But Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded US leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.

Unconditional US support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics. It has encouraged increasingly extreme, racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries. They will do so wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.

Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the US’s monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the US’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world.

Uniting for peace

But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this US monopoly. The UN and neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians, as well as their human and civil rights, have not established legitimate, impartial mediation.

Qatar mediated a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023. It has since been upstaged by US moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The US consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive.

The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A full 144 countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the US veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.

One way the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.

Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore ceasefire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ. A Uniting for peace resolution, however, could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the US still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the US, too.

A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate. It would shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting ceasefire that the whole world demands.

It is time for the UN and neutral countries to push Israel’s US partner in genocide to the side. Legitimate international authorities and mediators must take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The United States Is Palestine’s Greatest Obstacle appeared first on Fair Observer.

The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials — National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas ❤️Biden” — as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the US to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and of course, Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly, as we will see, by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that US weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under US law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself the green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired US artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A US official likewise confirmed to The Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the US and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore US qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the US has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A deluge of American bombs

During World War II, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the US and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of US arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of US-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the US began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells. 

The US supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

General Dynamics is the largest US bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

Slightly more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 Magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes — obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns, are another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians. Israel also used its Apaches to kill a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from US-made components. One of the first two US arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the US has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. US Marines used the same rockets in coordination with US airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire US-made tank shells. The US State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel. 

US shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year. 

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the US monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for US merchants of death is clearly more important to members of Congress than fully funding Head Start program for children in low-income families or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of US grenade launchers, Browning machine guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Gaza encampments take on the merchants of death

The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

Many of the huge US factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to US military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies. 

The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from US institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier US war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the US war machine. 

The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the US role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Arsenal of Genocide: This Is What the US Is Supplying Israel appeared first on Fair Observer.

The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, our trainers briefed us about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” they insisted. 

The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships – one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers – will reach Gaza and accomplish the mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government caves to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany and prevents the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and our ten boats were stalled in the country. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

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Another possibility is that the ships take off, but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, and then arrest, imprison and eventually deport us. 

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, the Israeli military stopped a flotilla of six boats in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, they killed nine passengers, and one more later succumbed to his wounds. 

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face — from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades — and we were told that the Israeli commandos will be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then, we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed? 

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated rifles, dragging us across the floor and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

Who’s involved in the effort?

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers is from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group. 

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the US, there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired US Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the US invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the US is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for Congress in 2022. Arraf was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous — it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks — but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations. 

The US government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while US President Joe Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

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Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the US, we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion for Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support. 

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will the Freedom Flotilla, Now in Istanbul, Reach Gaza? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Lavender assigns every man in Gaza a numerical score from one to a hundred, based mainly on cell phone and social media data. It automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system known as “Where’s Daddy?” to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

Collateral damage

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place a man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched when he comes home.

The officers believe the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families is of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip. 

The officers who spoke to +972 explained that, in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses. So, these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The AI is new. The kill lists are not.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in US wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala — to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.

Just as US weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and US military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of World War II. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front.

Gehlen and the Fremde Heere Ost had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet prisoners of war from all over the USSR and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns. All this to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA, welcomed them. He sent them back to Pullach, in occupied Germany, to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. After the formation of West Germany, the Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, or Federal Intelligence Service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

The CIA soon recruited other allies around the world. After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by US Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International reported that Iran had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief,” and that estimates of the number of political prisoners ranged from 25,000 up to 100,000.

In Guatemala, a 1954 CIA coup replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, US special forces aided the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the US embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the US role in the massacre in Indonesia. She spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad — there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

The CIA enlisted computers in its assassination schemes

Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the US role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.  

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000. 

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the ‘hunter-killer’ teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc.,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom — that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the US defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people. 

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system  and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor.

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the US provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists. 

The US School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them — and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.

When the US transferred the same methods to its hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A US officer explained to Newsweek that US and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the US Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the US-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua. 

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed interior minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America. 

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the Western media absurd cover stories such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Automated targeting

Meanwhile, US special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cell phone numbers mined from captured cell phones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cell phones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior US commanders told The Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Barack Obama put McChrystal in charge of US and NATO forces in 2009, and his cell phone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011. 

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cell phone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the US and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians. 

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cell phones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Davies has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead. 

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Old Strategy, New Technology: How Israel Uses AI-Generated Kill Lists appeared first on Fair Observer.

The assumption of the US political elite that Biden had a viable plan to defeat Russia and restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders has proven to be one more triumphalist American dream that has turned into a nightmare. Ukraine has joined North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Yemen and now Gaza as another shattered monument to America’s military madness.

Biden has no Plan B

This could have been one of the shortest wars in history, if Biden had just supported a peace and neutrality agreement negotiated in Turkey in March and April 2022 that already had champagne corks popping in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian negotiator Oleksiy Arestovych. Instead, the US and NATO chose to prolong and escalate the war as a means to try to defeat and weaken Russia.

Two days before Biden’s State of the Union speech, Secretary of State Blinken announced the early retirement of Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, one of the officials most responsible for a decade of disastrous US policy toward Ukraine.

Two weeks before the announcement of Nuland’s retirement at the age of 62, she acknowledged in a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the war in Ukraine had degenerated into a war of attrition that she compared to the First World War and admitted that the Biden administration had no Plan B for Ukraine if Congress didn’t cough up $61 billion for more weapons.

We don’t know whether Nuland was forced out, or perhaps quit in protest over a policy that she fought for and lost. Either way, her ride into the sunset opens the door for others to fashion a badly needed Plan B for Ukraine.

If we don’t find another solution soon, we may be headed for a world war

The imperative must be to chart a path back from this hopeless but ever-escalating war of attrition to the negotiating table that the US and Britain upended in April 2022 — or at least to new negotiations on the basis that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy defined on March 27, 2022, when he told his people, “Our goal is obvious: peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.” 

Instead, on February 26, in a very worrying sign of where NATO’s current policy is leading, French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that European leaders meeting in Paris discussed sending larger numbers of Western ground troops to Ukraine. 

Macron pointed out that NATO members have steadily increased their support to levels unthinkable when the war began. He highlighted the example of Germany, which offered Ukraine only helmets and sleeping bags at the outset of the conflict and is now saying Ukraine needs more missiles and tanks. “The people that said ‘never ever’ today were the same ones who said never ever planes, never ever long-range missiles, never ever trucks. They said all that two years ago,” Macron recalled. “We have to be humble and realize that we (have) always been six to eight months late.”

Macron implied that, as the war escalates, NATO countries may eventually have to deploy their own forces to Ukraine, and he argued that they should do so sooner rather than later if they want to recover the initiative in the war. 

The mere suggestion of Western troops fighting in Ukraine elicited an outcry both within France — from extreme right National Rally to leftist La France Insoumise — and from other NATO countries. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that participants in the meeting were “unanimous” in their opposition to deploying troops. Russian officials warned that such a step would mean war between Russia and NATO.

But as Poland’s president and prime minister headed to Washington for a White House meeting on February 12, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told the Polish parliament that sending NATO troops into Ukraine “is not unthinkable.” 

Macron’s intention may have been precisely to bring this debate out into the open and put an end to the secrecy surrounding the undeclared policy of gradual escalation toward full-scale war with Russia that the West has pursued for two years.

Macron failed to mention publicly that, under current policy, NATO forces are already deeply involved in the war. Among many lies that Biden told in his State of the Union speech, he insisted that “there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine.” 

However, the trove of Pentagon documents leaked in March 2023 included an assessment that there were already at least 97 NATO special forces troops operating in Ukraine, including 50 Britons, 14 Americans and 15 French. Admiral John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, has also acknowledged a “small US military presence” based in the US Embassy in Kyiv to try to keep track of thousands of tons of US weapons as they arrive in Ukraine. 

But many more US forces, whether inside or outside Ukraine, are involved in planning Ukrainian military operations, providing satellite intelligence and playing essential roles in the targeting of US weapons. A Ukrainian official told The Washington Post that Ukrainian forces hardly ever fire HIMARS rockets without precise targeting data provided by US forces in Europe.

All these US and NATO forces are most definitely “at war in Ukraine.” To be at war in a country with only small numbers of “boots on the ground” has been a hallmark of 21st-century US war-making, as any navy pilot on an aircraft carrier or drone operator in Nevada can attest. It is precisely this doctrine of “limited” and proxy war that is at risk of spinning out of control in Ukraine, unleashing the World War III that Biden vowed to avoid.

The United States and NATO have tried to keep the escalation of the war under control by deliberate, incremental escalation of the types of weapons they provide and cautious, covert expansion of their own involvement. This has been compared to “boiling a frog,” turning up the heat gradually to avoid any sudden move that might cross a Russian “red line” and trigger a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. But, as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned in December 2022, “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.”

Inching toward a war that nobody wanted

We have long been puzzled by these glaring contradictions at the heart of US and NATO policy. On one hand, we believe Biden when he says he does not want to start World War III. On the other hand, that is what his policy of incremental escalation is inexorably leading towards. 

US preparations for war with Russia are already at odds with the existential imperative of containing the conflict. In November 2022, the Reed-Inhofe Amendment to the 2023 fiscal year National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) invoked wartime emergency powers to authorize an extraordinary shopping list of weapons like the ones sent to Ukraine, and approved billion-dollar, multi-year no-bid contracts with weapons manufacturers to buy 10 to 20 times the quantities of weapons that the United States had actually shipped to Ukraine.

Retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian, the former chief of the Force Structure and Investment Division in the Office of Management and Budget, explained, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

So, the United States is preparing to fight a major ground war with Russia, but the weapons to fight that war will take years to produce, and, with or without them, that could quickly escalate into a nuclear war. Nuland’s early retirement could be the result of Biden and his foreign policy team finally starting to come to grips with the existential dangers of the aggressive policies she championed. 

Meanwhile, Russia’s escalation from its original limited “Special Military Operation” to its current commitment of 7% of its GDP to the war and to weapons production has outpaced the West’s escalations, not just in weapons production but in manpower and actual military capability.

One could say that Russia is winning the war, but that depends what its real war goals are. There is a yawning gulf between the rhetoric from Biden and other Western leaders about Russian ambitions to invade other countries in Europe and what Russia was ready to settle for at the talks in Turkey in 2022, when it agreed to withdraw to its pre-war positions in return for a simple commitment to Ukrainian neutrality. 

Despite Ukraine’s extremely weak position after its failed 2023 offensive and its costly defense and loss of Avdiivka, Russian forces are not racing toward Kyiv, or even Kharkiv, Odesa or the natural boundary of the Dnipro River. 

Reuters Moscow Bureau reported that Russia spent months trying to open new negotiations with the United States in late 2023, but that, in January 2024, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate over Ukraine.

The only way to find out what Russia really wants, or what it will settle for, is to return to the negotiating table. All sides have demonized each other and staked out maximalist positions, but that is what nations at war do in order to justify the sacrifices they demand of their people and their rejection of diplomatic alternatives. 

Serious diplomatic negotiations are now essential to get down to the nitty-gritty of what it will take to bring peace to Ukraine. We are sure there are wiser heads within the US, French and other NATO governments who are saying this too, behind closed doors, and that may be precisely why Nuland is out and why Macron is talking so openly about where the current policy is heading. We fervently hope that is the case, and that Biden’s Plan B will lead back to the negotiating table, and then forward to peace in Ukraine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Are We Stumbling Into World War III in Ukraine? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The mass slaughter on both sides in this long battle was a measure of the strategic value of the city to both sides, but it is also emblematic of the shocking human cost of this conflict. The war has degenerated into a brutal and bloody war of attrition along a nearly static front line. Neither side made significant territorial gains in the entire 2023 year of fighting, with a net gain to Russia of a mere 188 square miles, or 0.1% of Ukraine.

And while it is the Ukrainians and Russians fighting and dying in this war of attrition with over half a million casualties, it is the United States, with some its Western allies, that has stood in the way of peace talks. This was true of talks between Russia and Ukraine that took place in March 2022, one month after the Russian invasion, and it is true of talks that Russia tried to initiate with the United States as recently as January 2024.

The US and the UK pushed for a long war

In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey and negotiated a settlement that should have ended the war. Ukraine agreed to become a neutral country between East and West, on the model of Austria or Switzerland, giving up its controversial ambition for NATO membership. Territorial questions over Crimea and the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would be resolved peacefully, based on self-determination for the people of those regions.

But then the US and UK intervened to persuade Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to abandon neutrality in favor of a long war to militarily drive Russia out of Ukraine and recover Crimea and the Donbas by force. American and British leaders have never admitted to their own people what they did, nor did they try to explain why they did it.

So it has been left to everyone else involved to reveal details of the agreement and the US and UK’s roles in torpedoing it: President Zelenskyy’s advisers and Ukrainian negotiators; Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Turkish diplomats; Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was another mediator; and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who mediated with Russian President Vladimir Putin for Ukraine.

The US sabotage of peace talks should come as no surprise. So much of US foreign policy follows what should by now be an easily recognizable and predictable pattern, in which our leaders systematically lie to us about their decisions and actions in crisis situations, and, by the time the truth is widely known, it is too late to reverse the catastrophic effects of those decisions. By then, thousands of people have paid with their lives, nobody is held accountable, and the world’s attention has moved on to the next crisis, the next series of lies and the next bloodbath — which in this case is Gaza.

But the war grinds on in Ukraine, whether we pay attention to it or not. Once the US and UK succeeded in killing peace talks and prolonging the war, it fell into an intractable pattern common to many wars. Ukraine, the United States and the leading members of the NATO military alliance were encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times into continually prolonging and escalating the war and rejecting diplomacy, in spite of ever-mounting, appalling human costs for the people of Ukraine.

US and NATO leaders have repeated ad nauseam that they are arming Ukraine to put it in a stronger position at the “negotiating table,” even as they keep rejecting negotiations. After Ukraine gained ground with its much-celebrated offensives in the fall of 2022, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley went public with a call to “seize the moment” and get back to the negotiating table from the position of strength that NATO leaders said they were waiting for. French and German military leaders were reportedly even more adamant that that moment would be short-lived if they failed to seize it. 

They were right. US President Joe Biden rejected his military advisers’ calls for renewed diplomacy, and Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive wasted its chance to negotiate from a position of strength, sacrificing many more lives to leave it weaker than before.

On February 13, 2024, the Reuters Moscow bureau broke the story that the United States had recently rejected a new Russian proposal to reopen peace negotiations. Multiple Russian sources involved in the initiative told Reuters that Russia proposed direct talks with the United States to call a ceasefire along the current front lines of the war. 

Instead of negotiating something with Ukraine that the US might later veto, this time Russia approached the United States directly before involving Ukraine. There was a meeting of intermediaries in Turkey, and a meeting between Secretary of State Blinken, CIA Director Burns and National Security Adviser Sullivan in Washington, but the result was a message from Sullivan that the US was willing to discuss other aspects of US–Russian relations, but not peace in Ukraine.

Russia was better prepared than the West to fight a long war

And so the war grinds on. Russia is still firing 10,000 artillery shells per day along the front line, while Ukraine can only fire 2,000. In a microcosm of the larger war, some Ukrainian gunners told reporters they were only allowed to fire 3 shells per night. As Sam Cranny-Evans of the UK’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a military think-tank, told the Guardian, “What that means is that Ukrainians can’t suppress Russian artillery any more, and if the Ukrainians can’t fire back, all they can do is try to survive.”

A March 2023 European initiative to produce a million shells for Ukraine in a year fell far short, only producing about 600,000. US monthly shell production in October 2023 was 28,000 shells, with a target of 37,000 per month by April 2024. The United States plans to increase production to 100,000 shells per month, but that will take until October 2025. Meanwhile, Russia is already producing 4.5 million artillery shells per year.

After spending less than one-tenth of the Pentagon budget over the past 20 years, how is Russia able to produce 5 times more artillery shells than the United States and its NATO allies combined?  

RUSI’s Richard Connolly explained to the Guardian that, while Western countries privatized their weapons production and dismantled “surplus” productive capacity after the end of the Cold War in the interest of corporate profits, “The Russians have been…subsidizing the defense industry, and many would have said wasting money for the event that one day they need to be able to scale it up. So it was economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”

Biden has been anxious to send more money to Ukraine — a whopping $61 billion — but disagreements in the US Congress between bipartisan Ukraine supporters and a Republican faction opposed to US involvement have held up the funds. But even if Ukraine had endless infusions of Western weapons, it has a more serious problem: Many of the troops it recruited to fight this war in 2022 have been killed, wounded or captured, and its recruitment system has been plagued by corruption and a lack of enthusiasm for the war among most of its people.

In August 2023, the government fired the heads of military recruitment in all 24 regions of the country after it became widely known that they were systematically soliciting bribes to allow men to avoid recruitment and gain safe passage out of the country. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel reported, “The military registration and enlistment offices have never seen such money before, and the revenues are being evenly distributed vertically to the top.”

The Ukrainian parliament is debating a new conscription law with an online registration system that includes people living abroad and penalties for failure to register or enlist. Parliament already voted down a previous bill that members found too draconian, and many fear that forced conscription will lead to more widespread draft resistance, or even bring down the government.

Oleksiy Arestovych, Zelenskyy’s former spokesman, told Unherd that the root of Ukraine’s recruitment problem is that only 20% of Ukrainians believe in the anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism that has controlled Ukrainian governments since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in 2014. “What about the remaining 80%?” the interviewer asked. 

“I think for most of them, their idea is of a multinational and poly-cultural country,” Arestovych replied. “And when Zelenskyy came into power in 2019, they voted for this idea. He did not articulate it specifically but it was what he meant when he said, ‘I don’t see a difference in the Ukrainian-Russian language conflict, we are all Ukrainians even if we speak different languages.’”

“And you know,” Arestovych continued, “my great criticism of what has happened in Ukraine over the last years, during the emotional trauma of the war, is this idea of Ukrainian nationalism which has divided Ukraine into different people: the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers as a second class of people. It’s the main dangerous idea and a worse danger than Russian military aggression, because nobody from this 80% of people wants to die for a system in which they are people of a second class.”

If Ukrainians are reluctant to fight, imagine how Americans would resist being shipped off to fight in Ukraine. A 2023 US Army War College study of “Lessons from Ukraine” found that the US ground war with Russia that the United States is preparing to fight would involve an estimated 3,600 US casualties per day, killing and maiming as many US troops every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in twenty years. Echoing Ukraine’s military recruitment crisis, the authors concluded, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

US war policy in Ukraine is predicated on just such a gradual escalation from proxy war to full-scale war between Russia and the United States, which is unavoidably overshadowed by the risk of nuclear war. This has not changed in two years, and it will not change unless and until our leaders take a radically different approach. That would involve serious diplomacy to end the war on terms on which Russia and Ukraine can agree, as they attempted to do in March 2022.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post After Two Years of War in Ukraine, It’s Time for Peace appeared first on Fair Observer.

the US-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 US and UK’s bombing of Yemen.

This latest US attack followed the US 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, US 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, US President Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Israeli Prime Minister 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 29,000 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.

A fraught situation in Iraq

The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the US 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. US officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi resistance attacks on US bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against US targets on January 30 after they killed three US 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 US bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on US 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 US bases. 

Tragically, because the US failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the US 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 US forces and the Islamic resistance in his country “mission impossible.” 

Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected US attacks, resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on US bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest US base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the US bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that US 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,” BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.” 

Three days later, Guerin would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the US 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 US 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 US 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. Al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of US forces, while US officials insist that 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 US troops and to peace in the region.

The US is losing its grip

Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the US 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 US troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks — unless, of course, the US 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 US 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 US foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that US 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 US’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 US government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of US occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Chooses Genocide Over Diplomacy in the Middle East appeared first on Fair Observer.

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

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 US complicity, its leaders have been uniquely brazen about their goal of destroying Gaza as a haven of Palestinian life, culture and resistance.

Evidence of genocidal intent

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 Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, five other cabinet ministers, senior military officers and members of the Knesset. Reading these statements, one finds it 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 +972 Magazine spoke 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 US-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 Magazine 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 US officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty figures, intelligence sources told +972 Magazine 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 Bezalel Smotrich declared 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 US State Department spokesman Matt Miller about Smotrich’s statement and similar ones by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Miller replied that 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 assault 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 Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN. “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.”

Israel is repeating a terrible pattern

We should have learned from America’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that bombings and mass killings rarely lead to political victory or success. More often, they only feed deep resentment and desires for justice or revenge that make peace 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. In his book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, Irish journalist Andrew Cockburn described how, in 200 cases studied by US military intelligence, the US campaign to assassinate Iraqi resistance leaders in 2007 led in every single case to increased attacks on US 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 US troops. 

But that is just another unlearned lesson as Israel and the United States kill Islamist 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.

While the case will not be decided soon, we might expect a ruling on the provisional measures by next month or sooner.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post South Africa Prosecutes Israel for Genocide at The Hague appeared first on Fair Observer.

But if Israel persists in this genocidal war, US 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 1.

Related Reading

A Genocide Expert Makes Sense of War Crimes in Gaza

The US is facing a credibility crisis in the Middle East

Middle Eastern governments and their people already see the United States as a party to Israel’s massacre in Gaza. So any direct US military action will be seen as an escalation on the side of Israel. It would be more likely to provoke further escalation than to deter it.

The US already faces this predicament in Iraq. Despite years of Iraqi demands for the removal of US forces, at least 2,500 American 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, based near Baghdad.

For many years, US 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 US 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.

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After a year-long truce between US 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 US bases on October 17. After 32 attacks on US bases in Iraq, 34 more in Syria and three US airstrikes in Syria, US forces conducted airstrikes on November 21 against two Kata’ib Hezbollah bases in Iraq, one in Anbar province and one in Jurf Al-Nasr, south of Baghdad, killing at least nine militiamen.

The US 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 US airstrikes with two attacks on Al-Harir airbase on November 22 and several more on November 23. They attacked Al-Asad airbase with several drones and launched another drone attack on the US base at Erbil airport. Their Syrian allies attacked two US bases across the border in northeastern Syria.

Short of a ceasefire in Gaza or a full US withdrawal from Iraq and Syria, there is no decisive action the US 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.

Regional actors in Yemen, Turkey, Lebanon and Iran contemplate intervening in Gaza

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 and the internationally recognized Yemeni government for many years, and they have developed weapons and tactics that they could bring to bear against Israel. Soon after al-Houthi’s statement, Houthi 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 Western politicians and journalists 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 member Turkey is finding it difficult to remain a bystander, given the widespread public support for Palestine. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 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, Hezbollah and Israel have conducted daily exchanges of fire since October 7, killing 107 combatants and 24 civilians in Lebanon and 9 soldiers and 4 civilians in Israel. Some 55,000 Lebanese civilians and 65,000 Israelis have been displaced from the border area. On November 11, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned, “What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”

How will Hezbollah react as Israel resumes its brutal massacre in Gaza after the brief pause 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.

On November 23, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said, “If Israel’s war crimes and genocide continue, a tougher and more complicated scenario of the resistance will be implemented.”

Amirabdollahian had 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 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.

The US is ignoring the warning signs

Tragically, the White House is not listening. On November 24, the day after Amirabdollahian’s speech, US President Joe 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.” On December 7, he blamed Hamas for the breakdown of the pause.

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 US warmaking. 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 US will find itself with few allies ready to jump into the fray. Even if a regional conflict is avoided, the US support for Israel has already created tremendous damage to its reputation in the region and beyond, and direct American involvement in the war would leave it more isolated and impotent than its previous misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq did. 

The US 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 US must back up this position with an immediate suspension of arms deliveries, military aid, Israeli access to US weapons stockpiles in Israel and diplomatic support for Israel’s war on Palestine. 

The priority of US officials must be to stop Israel’s massacre, avoid a regional war and get out of the way so that the UN and other nations can help negotiate a real solution to the occupation of Palestine.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post US Threats Aren’t Creating Peace in the Middle East appeared first on Fair Observer.

This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence, simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.

How the US government hides its wars from its public

The most devastating campaign the US military has waged in recent years dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria and other areas occupied by ISIS. An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa was even more totally destroyed.

The shelling of Raqqa was the heaviest US artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War, yet it was barely reported in the US corporate media. A recent article in The New York Times about the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD suffered by US artillerymen operating 155 mm howitzers, which each fired up to 10,000 shells into Raqqa, was appropriately titled “A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence from the Pentagon.”

Shrouding such mass death and destruction in secrecy is a remarkable achievement. When British playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, in the midst of the Iraq War, he titled his Nobel speech “Art, Truth and Politics,” and used it to shine a light on this diabolical aspect of US warmaking.

After talking about the hundreds of thousands of killings in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua, Pinter asked:

Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

But the wars and the killing go on, day after day, year after year, out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Did you know that the United States and its allies have dropped more than 350,000 bombs and missiles on 9 countries since 2001 (including 14,000 in the current war on Gaza)? That’s an average of 44 airstrikes per day, day in, day out, for 22 years.

Israel cannot hide its sins as well as the US

Israel, in its present war on Gaza with children making up more than 40% of the more than 11,000 people killed to date, would surely like to mimic the extraordinary US ability to hide its brutality. But despite Israel’s efforts to impose a media blackout, the massacre is taking place in a small, enclosed, densely-populated urban area (often called an open-air prison), where the world can see a great deal more than usual of how it impacts real people. 

Israel has killed a record number of journalists in Gaza, and this appears to be a deliberate strategy, like when US forces targeted journalists in Iraq. But we are still seeing horrifying video and photos of daily new atrocities: dead and wounded children, hospitals struggling to treat the injured and desperate people fleeing from one place to another through the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Another reason this war is not so well hidden is because Israel is waging it, not the United States. The US is supplying most of the weapons, has sent aircraft carriers to the region, and dispatched US Marine General James Glynn to provide tactical advice based on his experience conducting similar massacres in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq. But Israeli leaders seem to have overestimated the extent to which the US information warfare machine would shield them from public scrutiny and political accountability. 

Unlike in Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa, people all over the world are seeing video of the unfolding catastrophe on their computers, phones and TVs. Netanyahu, Biden and the corrupt “defense analysts” on cable TV are no longer the ones creating the story, as they try to tack self-serving narratives onto the horrifying reality we can all see for ourselves.

The US has conditioned the world to accept war crimes

With the reality of war and genocide staring the world in the face, people everywhere are challenging the impunity with which Israel is systematically violating international humanitarian law.

Michael Crowley and Edward Wong have reported in The New York Times that Israeli officials are defending their actions in Gaza by pointing to US war crimes, insisting that they are simply interpreting the laws of war the same way that the United States has interpreted them in Iraq and other US war zones. They compare Gaza to Fallujah, Mosul and even Hiroshima.

But comparing Israel’s war crimes to the US war crimes that Israel is imitating is no defense. And it is the world’s failure to hold the United States accountable that has emboldened Israel to believe it too can kill with impunity.

The United States systematically violates the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force, manufacturing political justifications to suit each case and using its Security Council veto to evade international accountability. Its military lawyers employ unique, exceptional interpretations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which the universal protections the Convention guarantees to civilians are treated as secondary to US military objectives. 

The United States fiercely resists the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court to ensure that its exceptional interpretations of international law are never subjected to impartial judicial scrutiny.

When the United States did allow the ICJ to rule on its war against Nicaragua in 1986, the ICJ ruled that its deployment of the “Contras” to invade and attack Nicaragua and its mining of Nicaragua’s ports were acts of aggression in violation of international law, and ordered the United States to pay war reparations to Nicaragua. When the United States declared that it would no longer recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ and failed to pay up, Nicaragua asked the UN Security Council to enforce the reparations, but the US vetoed the resolution.

Atrocities like the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of German and Japanese cities to “unhouse” the civilian population, as Winston Churchill called it, together with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi holocaust, led to the adoption of the new Fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, to protect civilians in war zones and under military occupation.

On the 50th anniversary of the Convention in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for monitoring international compliance with the Geneva Conventions, conducted a survey to see how well people in different countries understood the protections the Convention provides. 

They surveyed people in twelve countries that had been victims of war, in four countries (France, Russia, the UK and the US) that are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and in Switzerland where the ICRC is based. The ICRC published the results of the survey in 2000, in a report titled, The People on War Report. The survey asked people to choose between a correct understanding of the Convention’s civilian protections and a watered-down interpretation of them that closely resembles that of US and Israeli military lawyers.

The correct understanding was defined by a statement that combatants “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone.” The weaker, incorrect statement was that “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible” as they conduct military operations. Between 72% and 77% of the people in the other UNSC countries and Switzerland agreed with the correct statement, but the United States was an outlier, with only 52% agreeing. In fact 42% of Americans agreed with the weaker statement, twice as many as in the other countries. There were similar disparities between the United States and the others on questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war.

In US-occupied Iraq, the United States’ exceptionally weak interpretations of the Geneva Conventions led to endless disputes with the ICRC and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which issued damning quarterly human rights reports. UNAMI consistently maintained that US airstrikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law. 

For instance, its human rights report for the second quarter of 2007 documented UNAMI’s investigations of 15 incidents in which US occupation forces killed 103 Iraqi civilians, including 27 killed in airstrikes in Khalidiya, near Ramadi, on April 3, and 7 children killed in a helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province on May 8.

UNAMI demanded that “all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi-National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”

A footnote explained, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”

UNAMI also rejected US claims that its widespread killing of civilians was the result of the Iraqi Resistance using civilians as “human shields,” another US propaganda trope that Israel is mimicking today. Israeli accusations of human shielding are even more absurd in the densely populated, confined space of Gaza, where the whole world can see that it is Israel that is placing civilians in the line of fire as they desperately seek safety from Israeli bombardment.

The bombardment must stop

Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza are echoing around the world: through the halls of the United Nations, from the governments of traditional US allies like France, Spain and Norway, from a newly united front of previously divided Middle Eastern leaders and in the streets of London and Washington. The world is withdrawing its consent for a genocidal “two-state solution” in which Israel and the United States are the only two states that can settle the fate of Palestine.

If US and Israeli leaders are hoping that they can squeak through this crisis, and that the public’s habitually short attention span will wash away the world’s horror at the crimes we are all witnessing, that may be yet another serious misjudgment. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950 in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism.

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Israel Copies US Propaganda To Mask Its Illegal Bombing appeared first on Fair Observer.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN Ambassador, responded with utter disdain. He accused those who voted for the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting “the defense of Nazi terrorists” over Israel. In Gaza, Israel responded to this global call for a truce by escalating its bombing and expanding its ground invasion.

And the US supplies this carnage. American weapons help Israel continue its genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 10,000 Palestinians — 40% of them children. The onslaught has destroyed hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools. Gaza is now nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in three weeks than all other global conflicts have since 2019. Despite these atrocities, the US corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support of Israel.

Further, the UN vote illustrates that Israel and the US are diplomatic outliers. The mere 12 countries that sided with them in the General Assembly were four from Central Europe (Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Hungary); two from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay) and six small island nations in the Pacific (Fiji, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Tonga).

This means not a single country from Western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean or the Middle East voted with them. Many traditional US allies — France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland and New Zealand — voted for the truce. Other US allies like the UK, Germany, Canada and Japan were among the 45 countries that abstained.

Voters demand a ceasefire

Diplomatic isolation is not the only problem facing Israel and the United States. Their governments are also out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis made a discovery: Public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65% on October 17 to only 29% a week later.

Like the rest of the world, Israelis are watching the horrors of this massacre. They have realized that their government has no plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas. This endeavor may well be unachievable no matter how many Israeli soldiers, captured prisoners and Palestinian civilians it is ready to sacrifice.

The US populace also wants the ordeal to end. A Data for Progress poll published on October 20 found that 66% of Americans wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.” They insisted that it should “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.”

Support was across party lines. A staggering 80% of Democrats agreed with the poll’s statement. This should have been a wake-up call for a Democratic administration and Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Evidently, Congress slept through the alarm. On October 24, with a vote of 412 to ten, it passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. This was a green light for the anticipated escalation that followed.

On October 16, Representative Cori Bush introduced the Ceasefire Now Resolution, which called for “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” By October 30, however, only 18 members of Congress had cosponsored it. The Republican-led House instead voted to spend $14.5 billion to resupply Israel with weapons. The new Speaker, Mike Johnson, coupled this to an equivalent cut in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, but 12 Democrats still voted for it.

US policies cause chaos

One cannot exaggerate the US government’s impotence in containing the chaos its policies have unleashed. The US embassy in Beirut has posted a message that all its citizens should leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on US government assistance.” It also states that they must sign a promissory note to reimburse the government if it helps them evacuate.

The US government’s massive investments in destructive power have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world. It instead directs them to a Department of State webpage titled, “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”

The current international isolation of the US stands in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s global welcome. When he defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election, he claimed he would make things right. He promised a new era of US diplomacy, an end to US wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the planet’s most serious problems. Alas, he has not upheld any of these pledges. He continues Trump’s increases in military spending and illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba and a dozen other countries. Simultaneously, he has shifted Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive and escalated catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine. Biden’s policies are surely the worst of all worlds.

US leadership weakens like pro-Israel propaganda

Alternatives to American “leadership” have finally begun to emerge. The UN Security Council is immobilized by self-serving US and Russian vetoes, while exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the Group of Seven (G7) and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. But now the world is turning to more representative fora to more honestly debate our common problems and find new solutions. These include the UN General Assembly, the Group of 20 (G20), the Group of 77 (G77) and BRICS. Regional groupings like the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States are also gaining strength.

As the world comes together to build a post-neocolonial, multipolar world, US propaganda is losing its power to mold people’s views of new crises. Israeli and US officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza. However, these numbers are meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and accepted by the World Health Organization, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work there.

In a show of misguided favoritism, US officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones. This bias only increases US isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda. People and governments around the world have taken note of this.

On October 18, King Abdullah II of Jordan, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas canceled a meeting with Biden after an apparent Israeli attack that killed hundreds of people, all sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, with what looked like an airburst bomb. Biden validated Abdullah II, el-Sisi and Abbas’s decision by doing exactly as they feared: He publicly claimed that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian fighters killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Israel on October 7. The prisoners they brought back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians, for the express purpose of conducting a vast prisoner exchange. Families of these captives are asking Israel to prioritize their safety over prosecuting its war on Gaza. They want Israel to cease the offensive and exchange Palestinian captives held in Israeli jails for the Israeli ones, even if it plans to resume the assault afterward.

Palestinian officials have identified over 10,000 people killed in Gaza. Israeli officials, on the other hand, have so far only identified 1,087 of the 1,300–1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on 7 October. Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a webpage hosting photos, names, ages and some personal details of the identified people who were killed in Israel. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians and media have painted the Palestinian attack as a civilian massacre. It may surprise Westerners to learn that at least 381 of the 1,087 identified casualties were soldiers, police and security officers.

On top of that, Haaretz’s records raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including Biden, claiming that Israeli soldiers found 40 dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are seven children below the age of ten among the 706 civilian dead identified in Haaretz. However, the youngest was four years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we do not know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims. After all, Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.

A mediator no more

The fall of the Soviet Union left the US with no rival to act as a check on its leaders’ unbridled, often unrealistic ambitions for global power. Since then, the US has squandered a historic chance to build a peaceful, just and sustainable country, with shared prosperity for us and our global neighbors. Our leaders’ illusion of military superiority has been a poison pill that has undermined every aspect of post-Cold War US foreign policy. It has led them down a dead end from which they can no longer imagine any alternative to fighting and killing, or arming their proxies to fight and kill. The consequences of these policies have become so deadly and destabilizing that they sabotage the US’s position in the world and leave it increasingly isolated.

Apart from the US, the world is remarkably united behind the goal of ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it has occupied since 1967. The US should cease fueling the Israeli occupation with endless weapons and stop diplomatically shielding Israel from international efforts to end the occupation. The US has utterly failed to mediate and be an honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side. It must now step aside to allow real mediators to intervene.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The post The US, Complicit In Gaza Slaughter, Now Stands Isolated appeared first on Fair Observer.

If, unlike many of his predecessors, President Biden actually wanted to be guided by accurate intelligence (which is by no means certain), his nomination of former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns as CIA Director was an encouraging appointment, although puzzling. It removed Burns from the State Department’s policymaking chain of command, but put him in a position where his decades of diplomatic experience and insight might help to guide Biden’s decisions, especially over the crisis in US relations with Russia. Burns, fluent in Russian, lived and worked at the US Embassy in Moscow for many years, first as a political officer and later as US Ambassador.

It is hard to find Burns’ fingerprints on Biden’s Russia policy or on the conduct of NATO’s war in Ukraine, where US policy has run headlong into precisely the dangers Burns warned his government about, in cables from Moscow spanning more than a decade. We cannot know what Burns tells the president behind closed doors. But he has not publicly called for peace talks, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley has done — although to do so would be highly unusual for a CIA director.

Calls for a moderate approach with Russia

In the current environment of rigid pro-war, anti-Russian orthodoxy, if Bill Burns publicly voiced some of the concerns he expressed earlier in his career, he might be ostracized, or even fired, as a Putin apologist. But his dire warnings about the consequences of inviting Ukraine to join NATO have been quietly tucked in his back pocket, as he has condemned Russia as the sole author of the catastrophic war in Ukraine, without mentioning the vital context that he has so vividly explained over the past 30 years. 

In his memoir The Back Channel, published in 2019, Burns confirmed that Secretary of State James Baker had indeed assured Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that there would be no expansion of the NATO alliance or forces “one inch to the east” of the borders of a reunified Germany. Burns wrote that, even though the pledge was never formalized and was made before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russians took Baker at his word and felt betrayed by NATO enlargement in the years that followed. 

When he was political officer at the US Embassy in Moscow in 1995, Burns reported that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” When in the late 1990s President Bill Clinton’s administration moved to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, Burns called the decision premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage, a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades,” he wrote. 

After serving various posts in the Middle East, including ambassador to Jordan, in 2005 Burns finally got the job he had been eyeing for years: US ambassador to Russia. From thorny trade issues to the conflict in Kosovo and missile defense disputes, he had his hands full. But the issue of NATO expansion was a source of constant friction. 

It came to a head in 2008, when officials in the Bush administration were pushing to extend a NATO invitation to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest NATO Summit. Burns tried to head it off. Two months before the summit, he penned a no-holds-barred email to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, parts of which he quoted in his book.

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests,” Burns wrote. “At this stage, a MAP [Membership Action Plan] offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze … It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

In addition to this personal email, he wrote a meticulous 12-point official cable to Secretary Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which only came to light thanks to a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable dump in 2010.

Dated February 1, 2008, the memo’s subject line, all caps, could not have been clearer: NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES. 

In no uncertain terms, Burns conveyed the intense opposition from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior officials, stressing that Russia would view further NATO eastward expansion as a potential military threat. He said that NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, was “an emotional and neuralgic” issue but also a strategic policy issue. 

Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene—a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Six years later, the US-supported Maidan uprising provided the final trigger for the civil war that Russian experts had predicted. 

Burns quoted Lavrov as saying that, while countries were free to make their own decisions about their security and which political-military structures to join, they needed to keep in mind the impact on their neighbors, and that Russia and Ukraine were bound by bilateral obligations set forth in the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, in which both parties undertook to “refrain from participation in or support of any actions capable of prejudicing the security of the other side.” 

Burns said a Ukrainian move toward the Western sphere would hurt defense industry cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, including a number of factories where Russian weapons were made, and would have a negative impact on the thousands of Ukrainians living and working in Russia and vice versa. Burns quoted the prediction of Aleksandr Konovalov, director of the Institute for Strategic Assessment, that this would become “a boiling cauldron of anger and resentment among the local population.” 

Russian officials told Burns that NATO expansion would have repercussions throughout the region and into Central and Western Europe. It could even cause Russia to revisit its arms control agreements with the West. 

In a rare personal meeting Burns had with Putin just before leaving his post as ambassador in 2008, Putin warned him that “no Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia. We would do all in our power to prevent it.” 

Good counsel that went unheeded

Despite all these warnings, the Bush administration plowed ahead at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest. Given objections from several key European countries, NATO set no date for membership, but it issued a provocative statement, saying, “We agreed today that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.” 

Burns was not happy. “In many ways, Bucharest left us with the worst of both worlds—indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat,” he wrote.

While Ukraine still has hopes to formally enter NATO, Ukraine’s former defense minister Oleksii Reznikov says that Ukraine has already become a de facto member of the NATO alliance that receives NATO weapons, NATO training and all-round military and intelligence cooperation. The intelligence sharing is directed by the CIA chief himself, who has been shuttling back and forth to meet with his counterpart in Ukraine. 

A much better use of Burns’s expertise would be to shuttle back and forth to Moscow to help negotiate an end to this brutal and unwinnable war. Would that make him a Putin apologist, or a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize? What do you think?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is the Head Of the CIA a Useful Idiot, or a Peacemaker? appeared first on Fair Observer.

They claim to be enforcing Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, which states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” By their reasoning, Russia violated Article 2.4 by invading Ukraine. Thus, any compromise or negotiated settlement is unconscionable, regardless of the consequences of prolonging the war.

Other countries have called for a peaceful diplomatic resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, with all aspects of the conflict to be settled at the negotiating table, based on the preceding article of the UN Charter, Article 2.3: “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

These countries also refer to the purposes of the UN, defined in Article 1.1, which include the “settlement of international disputes” by “peaceful means.” They also point to the dangers of escalation and nuclear war as an imperative for diplomacy to quickly end this war.

As the Amir of Qatar told the General Assembly, “A long-term truce has become the most looked-for aspiration by people in Europe and all over the world. We call on all parties to comply with the UN Charter and international law and resort to a radical peaceful solution based on these principles.”

Climate, the West and war

This year, the General Assembly has also been focused on other facets of a world in crisis: the failure to tackle the climate catastrophe, the lack of progress on the Sustainable Development Goals that countries agreed to in 2000, a neocolonial economic system that still divides the world into rich and poor and the desperate need for structural reform of a UN Security Council that has failed in its basic responsibility to keep the peace and prevent war.

Successive speakers highlighted the persistent problems related to US and Western abuses of power: the occupation of Palestine, cruel and illegal US sanctions against Cuba and many other countries, Western exploitation of Africa that has evolved from slavery to debt servitude and neocolonialism, and a global financial system that exacerbates extreme inequalities of wealth and power across the world.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva spoke on Ukraine:

The war in Ukraine exposes our collective inability to enforce the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. We do not underestimate the difficulties in achieving peace. But no solution will be lasting if it is not based on dialogue. I have reiterated that work needs to be done to create space for negotiations… The UN was born to be the home of understanding and dialogue. The international community must choose. On one hand, there is the expansion of conflicts, the furthering of inequalities and the erosion of the rule of law. On the other, the renewing of multilateral institutions dedicated to promoting peace.

After a bumbling, incoherent speech by President Biden, Colombian President Gustavo Petro took the stage:

We are not thinking about how to expand life to the stars, but rather how to end life on our own planet. We have devoted ourselves to war. We have been called to war. Latin America has been called upon to produce war machines, men, to go to the killing fields. 

They’re forgetting that our countries have been invaded several times by the very same people who are now talking about combatting invasions. They’re forgetting that they invaded Iraq, Syria and Libya for oil. They’re forgetting that the same reasons they use to defend Zelenskyy are the very reasons that should be used to defend Palestine. They forget that to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, we must end all wars.

But they’re helping to wage one war in particular, because world powers see this suiting themselves in their game of thrones, in their hunger games, and they’re forgetting to bring an end to the other war because, for these powers, this did not suit them. What is the difference between Ukraine and Palestine, I ask? Is it not time to bring an end to both wars, and other wars too, and make the most of the short time we have to build paths to save life on the planet?

… I propose that the United Nations, as soon as possible, should hold two peace conferences, one on Ukraine, the other on Palestine, not because there are no other wars in the world — there are in my country — but because this would guide the way to making peace in all regions of the planet, because both of these, by themselves, could bring an end to hypocrisy as a political practice, because we could be sincere, a virtue without which we cannot be warriors for life itself.

Petro was not the only leader who upheld the value of sincerity and assailed the hypocrisy of Western diplomacy. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines cut to the chase:

Let us clear certain ideational cobwebs from our brains. It is, for example, wholly unhelpful to frame the central contradictions of our troubled times as revolving around a struggle between democracies and autocracies. St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a strong liberal democracy, rejects this wrong-headed thesis. It is evident to all right-thinking persons, devoid of self-serving hypocrisy, that the struggle today between the dominant powers is centered upon the control, ownership, and distribution of the world’s resources.

On the war in Ukraine, Gonsalves was equally blunt: 

… War and conflict rage senselessly across the globe; in at least one case, Ukraine, the principal adversaries — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia — may unwittingly open the gates to a nuclear Armageddon… Russia, NATO, and Ukraine should embrace peace, not war and conflict, even if peace has to rest upon a mutually agreed, settled condition of dissatisfaction.

Calls for peace from Europe to Africa

The Western position on Ukraine was also on full display. However, at least three NATO members (Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain) coupled their denunciations of Russian aggression with pleas for peace. Katalin Novak, the President of Hungary, said:

… We want peace, in our country, in Ukraine, in Europe, in the world. Peace and the security that comes with it. There is no alternative to peace. The killing, the terrible destruction, must stop as soon as possible. War is never the solution. We know that peace is only realistically attainable when at least one side sees the time for negotiations as having come. We cannot decide for Ukrainians about how much they are prepared to sacrifice, but we have a duty to represent our own nation’s desire for peace. And we must do all we can to avoid an escalation of the war.

Even with wars, drought, debt and poverty afflicting their own continent, at least 17 African leaders took time during their General Assembly speeches to call for peace in Ukraine. Some voiced their support for the African Peace Initiative, while others contrasted the West’s commitments and expenditures for the war in Ukraine with its endemic neglect of Africa’s problems. President Joao Lourenço of Angola clearly explained why, as Africa rises up to reject neocolonialism, peace in Ukraine remains a vital interest for Africa and people everywhere:

In Europe, the war between Russia and Ukraine deserves our full attention to the urgent need to put an immediate end to it, given the levels of human and material destruction there, the risk of an escalation into a major conflict on a global scale and the impact of its harmful effects on energy and food security. All the evidence tells us that it is unlikely that there will be winners and losers on the battlefield, which is why the parties involved should be encouraged to prioritize dialogue and diplomacy as soon as possible, to establish a ceasefire and to negotiate a lasting peace not only for the warring countries, but which will guarantee Europe’s security and contribute to world peace and security.

Altogether, leaders from at least 50 countries spoke up for peace in Ukraine at the 2023 UN General Assembly. In his closing statement, Dennis Francis, the Trinidadian president of this year’s UN General Assembly, noted, “Of the topics raised during the High-Level Week, few were as frequent, consistent, or as charged as that of the Ukraine War. The international community is clear that political independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity must be respected, and violence must end.”

[Bella Bible edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post World Leaders Speak Up for Peace In Ukraine Amidst Global Crisis appeared first on Fair Observer.

So, based on Biden’s own definition of US war aims, his policy is failing. Tragically, it is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, not Americans, who are paying the price with their limbs and their lives. 

This result was far from unexpected. Early in the year Pentagon documents, since leaked, had a bleak assessment of the likelihood of Ukrainian success. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself postponed the offensive in May to avoid what he called “unacceptable” losses. 

The delay allowed more Ukrainian troops to complete NATO training on Western tanks and armored vehicles, but it also gave Russia more time to reinforce its anti-tank defenses and prepare lethal kill zones along the 700-mile front line.

Now, after two months, Ukraine’s new armored divisions have advanced only 12 miles or less in two small areas, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. Twenty percent of newly deployed Western armored vehicles and equipment were reportedly destroyed in the first few weeks of the new offensive as British-trained armored divisions tried to advance through Russian minefields and kill zones without demining operations or air cover. 

Meanwhile, Russia has made similar small advances toward Kupyansk in eastern Kharkiv province, where land around the town of Dvorichna has changed hands for the third time since the invasion. These tit-for-tat exchanges of small pieces of territory, with massive use of heavy artillery and appalling losses, typify a brutal war of attrition not unlike the First World War.

Missed chances for peace

Last spring, peace talks in Turkey appeared promising, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson encouraged Ukraine to stay in the fight for the long haul in a surprise visit. Just three days after this Western intervention in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that talks were at “a dead end,” and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, has since said that the US and UK “blocked” negotiations.

Ukraine’s military successes in the provinces of Kharkiv and Kherson the following autumn provoked serious debate within NATO over whether it was the moment for Ukraine to return to the negotiating table. As reported by Italy’s La Repubblica, NATO leaders saw the capture of Kherson as providing the opportunity they had been waiting for to try to negotiate a peace agreement from a position of Ukrainian strength.

On November 9, 2022, the very day that Russia ordered its withdrawal from Kherson, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where the interviewer asked him whether the time was now ripe for negotiations. The general expressed hope that leaders might be able to seize the opportunity provided by the winter slowdown in fighting to negotiate.

General Milley compared the situation to the First World War, explaining that leaders on all sides understood by Christmas 1914 that that war was not winnable, yet they fought on for another four years, multiplying the million lives lost in 1914 into 20 million by 1918, destroying five empires and setting the stage for the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

Milley underscored the point of his cautionary tale by noting that, as in 1914, “… there has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable through military means. And therefore, you need to turn to other means … So things can get worse. So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it, seize the moment.”

But Milley and other voices of experience were ignored.

At Biden’s February State of the Union speech in Congress, General Milley’s face was a study in gravity, a rock in a sea of misplaced self-congratulation and ignorance of the real world beyond the circus tent, where the West’s incoherent war strategy was not only sacrificing Ukrainian lives every day but flirting with nuclear war. Milley didn’t crack a smile all night, even when Biden came over to glad-hand after his speech.

No US, NATO or Ukrainian leaders have been held accountable for failing to seize that moment last winter, nor the previous missed chance for peace in spring, when Western leaders rejected a near-agreement, mediated by Turkey and Israel, that could have brought peace based on the simple principle of a Russian withdrawal in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. Nobody has demanded a serious account of why the West let these chances for peace slip through their fingers. 

The West has no idea what it is doing

Whatever their reasoning, the result is that Ukraine is caught in a war with no exit. When Ukraine seemed to have the upper hand in the war, NATO leaders were determined to press their advantage and launch another offensive, regardless of the shocking human cost. But now that the new offensive and weapons shipments have only succeeded in laying bare the weakness of Western strategy and returning the initiative to Russia, the architects of failure reject negotiating from a position of weakness.

So, the conflict has fallen into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which all parties to the fighting—Russia, Ukraine and the leading members of the NATO military alliance—have been encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times into prolonging the war and rejecting diplomacy. In doing so, they are willing to bear not only the appalling human costs but the rising danger of a wider war and the existential risk of nuclear confrontation.

The reality of war is laying bare the contradictions of Western policy. If Ukraine is not allowed to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength or from a position of weakness, what stands in the way of its total destruction?

And how can Ukraine and its allies defeat Russia, a country whose nuclear weapons policy explicitly states that it will use nuclear weapons before it will accept an existential defeat? 

If, as Biden himself has warned, any war between the United States and Russia, or any use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, would most likely escalate into full-scale nuclear war, where else is the current policy of incremental escalation and ever-increasing US and NATO involvement intended to lead?

Are they simply praying that Russia will implode or give up? Or are they determined to call Russia’s bluff and push it into an inescapable choice between total defeat and nuclear war? 

Hoping, or pretending, that Ukraine and its allies can defeat Russia without triggering a nuclear war is not a strategy. 

In place of a strategy to resolve the conflict, the United States and its allies welded the natural impulse to resist Russian aggression to a plan to prolong the war indefinitely. The results of that decision are hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties so far and the gradual destruction of Ukraine by millions of artillery shells fired by both sides.

Since the end of the first Cold War, successive US governments, Democratic and Republican, have made catastrophic miscalculations regarding the United States’ ability to impose its will on other countries and peoples. Their naive assumptions about American power and military superiority have led to this fateful, historic crisis in US foreign policy.

Now, Congress is being asked for another $24 billion to keep fueling this war. They should instead listen to the majority of Americans, who, according to the latest CNN poll, oppose more funding for an unwinnable war. They should heed the words of the declaration by civil society groups in 32 countries calling for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers all of humanity.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The West’s Disastrous Decision to Reject Peace in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

But it was not to be. Instead, the Global South leaders were forced to sit and listen as their hosts announced their latest plans to tighten sanctions against Russia and further escalate the war by sending US-built F-16 warplanes to Ukraine. 

The G7 summit stands in stark contrast to efforts of leaders from around the world who are trying to end the conflict. In the past, the leaders of Turkey, Israel and Italy have stepped up to try to mediate. Their efforts were bearing fruit back in April 2022, but were blocked by the West, particularly the US and UK, which did not want Ukraine to make an independent peace agreement with Russia. 

Now that the war has dragged on for over a year with no end in sight, other leaders have stepped forward to try to push both sides to the negotiating table. In an intriguing new development, Denmark, a NATO country, has stepped forward to offer to host peace talks. On May 22, just days after the G-7 meeting, Danish Foreign Minister Lokke Rasmussen said that his country would be ready to host a peace summit in July if Russia and Ukraine agreed to talk. 

Many Peace Initiatives

“We need to put some effort into creating a global commitment to organize such a meeting,” said Rasmussen, mentioning that this would require getting support from China, Brazil, India and other nations that have expressed interest in mediating peace talks. Having an EU and NATO member promoting negotiations may well reflect a shift in how Europeans view the path forward in Ukraine.

Also reflecting this shift is a report by Seymour Hersh, citing US intelligence sources, that the leaders of Poland, Czechia, Hungary and the three Baltic states, all NATO members, are talking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the need to end the war and start rebuilding Ukraine so that the five million refugees now living in their countries can start to return home. On May 23, right-wing Hungarian President Viktor Orban said, “Looking at the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it’s obvious that there is no victory for poor Ukrainians on the battlefield,” and that the only way to end the conflict was for Washington to negotiate with Russia. 

Meanwhile, China’s peace initiative has been progressing, despite US trepidation. Li Hui, China’s special representative for Eurasian affairs and former ambassador to Russia, has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskyy, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and other European leaders to move the dialogue forward. Given its position as both Russia’s and Ukraine’s top trading partner, China is in a good position to engage with both sides.

Another initiative has come from Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is creating a “peace club” of countries from around the world to work together to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. He appointed renowned diplomat Celso Amorim as his peace envoy. Amorim was Brazil’s foreign minister from 2003 to 2010, and was named the “world’s best foreign minister” in Foreign Affairs magazine. He also served as Brazil’s defense minister from 2011 to 2014, and is now President Lula’s chief foreign policy advisor. Amorim has already had meetings with Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and was well received by both parties.

On May 16, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other African leaders stepped into the fray, reflecting just how seriously this war is affecting the global economy through rising prices for energy and food. Ramaphosa announced a high-level mission by six African presidents, led by President Macky Sall of Senegal. He served, until recently, as Chairman of the African Union and, in that capacity, spoke out forcefully for peace in Ukraine at the UN General Assembly in September 2022. 

The other members of the mission are Presidents Nguesso of Congo, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Musevini of Uganda and Hichilema of Zambia. The African leaders are calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine, to be followed by serious negotiations to arrive at “a framework for lasting peace.” UN Secretary-General Guterres has been briefed on their plans and has “welcomed the initiative.”

Pope Francis and the Vatican are also seeking to mediate the conflict. “Let us not get used to conflict and violence. Let us not get used to war,” the Pope preached. The Vatican has already helped facilitate successful prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, and Ukraine has asked for the Pope’s help in reuniting families that have been separated by the conflict. A sign of the Pope’s commitment is his appointment of veteran negotiator Cardinal Matteo Zuppi as his peace envoy. Zuppi was instrumental in mediating talks that ended civil wars in Guatemala and Mozambique. 

Will any of these initiatives bear fruit? The possibility of getting Russia and Ukraine to talk depends on many factors, including their perceptions of potential gains from continued combat, their ability to maintain adequate supplies of weapons, and the growth of internal opposition. But it also depends on international pressure, and that is why these outside efforts are so critical and why US and NATO countries’ opposition to talks must somehow be reversed.

The US rejection or dismissal of peace initiatives illustrates the disconnect between two diametrically opposed approaches to resolving international disputes: diplomacy vs. war. It also illustrates the disconnect between rising public sentiment against the war and the determination of US policymakers to prolong it, including most Democrats and Republicans. 

Give Peace a Chance

A growing grassroots movement in the US is working to change that: 

• In May, foreign policy experts and grassroots activists put out paid advertisements in The New York Times and The Hill to urge the US government to be a force for peace. The Hill ad was endorsed by 100 organizations around the country, and community leaders organized in dozens of congressional districts to deliver the ad to their representatives. 
• Faith-based leaders, over 1,000 of whom signed a letter to President Biden in December calling for a Christmas Truce, are showing their support for the Vatican’s peace initiative.
• The US Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents about 1,400 cities throughout the country, unanimously adopted a resolution calling on the President and Congress to “maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war as soon as possible by working with Ukraine and Russia to reach an immediate ceasefire and negotiate with mutual concessions in conformity with the United Nations Charter, knowing that the risks of wider war grow the longer the war continues.”

• Key US environmental leaders have recognized how disastrous this war is for the environment, including the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war or an explosion in a nuclear power plant, and have sent a letter to President Biden and Congress urging a negotiated settlement. ​​
• On June 10-11, US activists will join peacemakers from all over the world in Vienna, Austria, for an International Summit for Peace in Ukraine. 
• Some of the contenders running for president, on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, including Robert F. Kennedy and Donald Trump. 

The initial decision of the United States and NATO member countries to try to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion had broad public support. However, blocking promising peace negotiations and deliberately choosing to prolong the war as a chance to “press” and “weaken” Russia changed the nature of the war and the US role in it, making Western leaders active parties to a war in which they will not even put their own forces on the line.

Must our leaders wait until a murderous war of attrition has killed an entire generation of Ukrainians, and left Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position than it was in April 2022, before they respond to the international call for a return to the negotiating table? 

Or must our leaders take us to the brink of World War III, with all our lives on the line in an all-out nuclear war, before they will permit a ceasefire and a negotiated peace? 

Rather than sleepwalking into World War III or silently watching this senseless loss of lives, we are building a global grassroots movement to support initiatives by leaders from around the world that will help to quickly end this war and usher in a stable and lasting peace. Join us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The World Presses to End the War in Ukraine: Can the US Agree? appeared first on Fair Observer.

While condemning Russia’s invasion, the statement provides a more objective account of the crisis in Ukraine than the US government or The New York Times has previously presented to the public, including the disastrous US role in NATO expansion, the warnings ignored by successive US administrations and the escalating tensions that ultimately led to war. 

The statement calls the war an “unmitigated disaster,” and urges President Joe Biden and Congress “to end the war speedily through diplomacy, especially given the dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.”

This call for diplomacy by wise, experienced former insiders—US diplomats, military officers and civilian officials—would have been a welcome intervention on any one of the past 442 days of this war. Yet their appeal now comes at an especially critical moment in the war.

Ukraine Is in a Tough Spot

On May 10, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he is delaying Ukraine’s long-awaited “spring offensive” to avoid “unacceptable” losses to Ukrainian forces. Western policy has repeatedly put Zelenskyy in near-impossible positions, caught between the need to show signs of progress on the battlefield to justify further Western support and arms deliveries and, on the other hand, the shocking human cost of continued war represented by the fresh graveyards where tens of thousands of Ukrainians now lie buried.

It is not clear how a delay in the planned Ukrainian counter-attack would prevent it leading to unacceptable Ukrainian losses when it finally occurs, unless the delay in fact leads to scaling back and calling off many of the operations that have been planned. Zelenskyy appears to be reaching a limit in terms of how many more of his people he is willing to sacrifice to satisfy Western demands for signs of military progress to hold together the Western alliance and maintain the flow of weapons and money to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s predicament is certainly the fault of Russia’s invasion, but also of his April 2022 deal with the devil in the shape of the then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson promised Zelenskyy that the UK and the “collective West” were “in it for the long run” and would back him to recover all of Ukraine’s former territory, just as long as Ukraine stopped negotiating with Russia.

Johnson was never in a position to fulfill that promise and, since he was forced to resign as prime minister, he has endorsed a Russian withdrawal only from the territory it invaded since February 2022, not a return to pre-2014 borders. Yet that compromise was exactly what he talked Zelenskyy out of agreeing to in April 2022, when most of the war’s dead were still alive and the framework of a peace agreement was on the table at diplomatic talks in Turkey.

Zelenskyy has tried desperately to hold his Western backers to Johnson’s overblown promise. But short of direct US and NATO military intervention, it seems that no quantity of Western weapons can decisively break the stalemate in what has degenerated into a brutal war of attrition, fought mainly by artillery and trench and urban warfare. 

An American general bragged that the West has supplied Ukraine with 600 different weapons systems, but this itself creates problems. For example, the different 105 mm guns sent by the UK, France, Germany and the US all use different shells. And each time heavy losses force Ukraine to re-form survivors into new units, many of them have to be retrained on weapons and equipment they’ve never used before.

Despite US deliveries of at least six types of anti-aircraft missiles—Stinger, NASAMS, Hawk, Rim-7, Avenger and at least one Patriot missile battery—a leaked Pentagon document revealed that Ukraine’s Russian-built S-300 and Buk anti-aircraft systems still make up almost 90 percent of its main air defenses. NATO countries have searched their weapons stockpiles for all the missiles they can provide for those systems, but Ukraine has nearly exhausted those supplies, leaving its forces newly vulnerable to Russian air strikes just as it prepares to launch its new counter-attack.

Diplomacy Is the Only Way Forward

Since at least June 2022, Biden and other US officials have acknowledged that the war must end in a diplomatic settlement, and have insisted that they are arming Ukraine to put it “in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” Until now, they have claimed that each new weapons system they have sent and each Ukrainian counter-offensive have contributed to that goal and left Ukraine in a stronger position.

But the leaked Pentagon documents and recent statements by US and Ukrainian officials make it clear that Ukraine’s planned spring offensive, already delayed into summer, would lack the previous element of surprise and encounter stronger Russian defenses than the offensives that recovered some of its lost territory last fall. 

One leaked Pentagon document warned that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” concluding that it would probably make smaller territorial gains than the fall offensives did.

How can a new offensive with mixed results and higher casualties put Ukraine in a stronger position at a currently non-existent negotiating table? If the offensive reveals that even huge quantities of Western military aid have failed to give Ukraine military superiority or reduce its casualties to a sustainable level, it could very well leave Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position, instead of a stronger one.

Meanwhile, offers to mediate peace talks have been pouring in from countries all over the world, from the Vatican to China to Brazil. It has been six months since the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, suggested publicly, after Ukraine’s military gains last fall, that the moment had come to negotiate from a position of strength. “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” he said.

It would be doubly or triply tragic if, on top of the diplomatic failures that led to the war in the first place and the US and UK undermining peace negotiations in April 2022, the chance for diplomacy that General Milley wanted to seize is lost in the forlorn hope of attaining an even stronger negotiating position that is not really achievable. 

If the United States persists in backing the plan for a Ukrainian offensive, instead of encouraging Zelenskyy to seize the moment for diplomacy, it will share considerable responsibility for the failure to seize the chance for peace, and for the appalling and ever-rising human costs of this war.

The experts who signed The New York Times statement recalled that, in 1997, 50 senior US foreign policy experts warned the then president Bill Clinton that expanding NATO was a “policy error of historic proportions” and that, unfortunately, Clinton chose to ignore the warning. Biden, who is now pursuing his own policy error of historic proportions by prolonging this war, would do well to take the advice of today’s policy experts by helping to forge a diplomatic settlement and making the United States a force for peace in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post US National Security Experts Now Call for Peace in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony. 

Kennedy observed that military power follows economic power. Rising economic powers develop military power to consolidate and protect their expanding economic interests. But once a great power’s economic prowess is waning, the use of military force to try to prolong its day in the sun leads only to unwinnable conflicts, as European colonial powers quickly learned after the Second World War, and as Americans are learning today.

While US leaders have been losing wars and trying to cling to international power, a new multipolar world has been emerging. Despite the recent tragedy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the agony of yet another endless war, the tectonic plates of history are shifting into new alignments that offer hope for the future of humanity. Here are several developments worth watching:

De-dollarizing global trade 

For decades, the US dollar was the undisputed king of global currencies. But China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and other nations are taking steps to conduct more trade in their own currencies, or in Chinese yuan. 

Illegal, unilateral US sanctions against dozens of countries around the world have raised fears that holding large dollar reserves leaves countries vulnerable to US financial coercion. Many countries have already been gradually diversifying their foreign currency reserves, from 70% globally held in dollars in 1999 to 65% in 2016 to only 58% by 2022.

Since no other country has the benefit of the “ecosystem” that has developed around the dollar over the past century, diversification is a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has helped speed the transition. On April 17, 2023, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that US sanctions against Russia risk undermining the role of the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. 

And in a Fox News interview, right-wing Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented that, within five years, the United States may no longer be able to use the dollar to bully other countries because “there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

BRICS’s GDP leapfrogs G7’s GDP 

When calculated based on Purchasing Power Parity, the GDP of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is now higher than that of the G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan). The BRICS countries, which account for over 40% of total world population, generate 31.5% of the world’s economic output, compared with 30.7% for the G7, and BRICS’s growing share of global output is expected to further outpace the G7’s in coming years.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested some of its huge foreign exchange surplus in a new transport infrastructure across Eurasia to more quickly import raw materials and export manufactured goods, and to build growing trade relations with many countries.

Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative Strategic Genius, Arrogant Overreach or Something Else?

Now the growth of the Global South will be boosted by the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, under its new president Dilma Rousseff, the former president of Brazil.

Rousseff helped to set up the BRICS Bank in 2015 as an alternative source of development funding, after the Western-led World Bank and IMF had trapped poor countries in recurring debt, austerity and privatization programs for decades. By contrast, the NDB is focused on eliminating poverty and building infrastructure to support “a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for the planet.” The NDB is well-capitalized, with $100 billion to fund its projects, more than the World Bank’s current $82 billion portfolio.

Europe moves towards “strategic autonomy”

On the surface, the Ukraine war has brought the United States and Europe geostrategically closer together than ever, but this may not be the case for long. After French President Macron’s recent visit to China, he told reporters on his plane that Europe should not let the United States drag it into war with China, that Europe is not a “vassal” of the United States, and that it must assert its “strategic autonomy” on the world stage. Cries of horror greeted Macron from both sides of the Atlantic when the interview was published.

But European Council President Charles Michel, the former prime minister of Belgium, quickly came to Macron’s side, insisting that the European Union cannot “blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States.” Michel confirmed in an interview that Macron’s views reflect a growing point of view among EU leaders, and that “quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron.”

Latin America leans left

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, which has served as a cover for US domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. But nowadays, countries of the region are refusing to march in lockstep with US demands. The entire region rejects the US embargo on Cuba, and Biden’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from his 2022 Summit of the Americas persuaded many other leaders to stay away or only send junior officials, and largely doomed the gathering. 

With the spectacular victories and popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, progressive governments now have tremendous clout. They are strengthening the regional body CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) as an alternative to the US-dominated Organization of American States. 

To reduce reliance on the US dollar, South America’s two largest economies, Argentina and Brazil, have announced plans to create a common currency that could later be adopted by other members of Mercosur — South America’s major trade bloc. While US influence is waning, China’s is mushrooming, with trade increasing from $18 billion in 2002 to nearly $449 billion in 2021. China is now the top trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and Brazil has raised the possibility of a free-trade deal between China and Mercosur.

Chinese influence rises in the Middle East

One of the false premises of US foreign policy is that regional rivalries in areas like the Middle East are set in stone, and the United States must therefore form alliances with so-called “moderate” (pro-Western) forces against more “radical” (independent) ones. This has served as a pretext for America to jump into bed with dictators like the Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and a succession of military governments in Egypt.

Now China, with help from Iraq, has achieved what the United States never even tried. Instead of driving Iran and Saudi Arabia to poison the whole region with wars fueled by bigotry and ethnic hatred, as the United States did, China and Iraq brought them together to restore diplomatic relations in the interest of peace and prosperity.

Healing this divide has raised hopes for lasting peace in several countries where the two rivals have been involved, including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and as far away as West Africa. It also puts China on the map as a mediator on the world stage, with Chinese officials now offering to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, as well as between Israel and Palestine.

Why Saudi Arabia and Iran Are Making Out Now

Saudi Arabia and Syria have restored diplomatic relations, and the Saudi and Syrian foreign ministers have visited each others’ capitals for the first time since Saudi Arabia and its Western allies backed al-Qaeda-linked groups to try to overthrow President Assad in 2011.

At a meeting in Jordan on May 1st, the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia agreed to help Syria restore its territorial integrity, and that Turkish and US occupying forces must leave. Syria may also be invited to an Arab League summit on May 19th, for the first time since 2011.

Chinese diplomacy to restore relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is credited with opening the door to these other diplomatic moves in the Middle East and the Arab world. Saudi Arabia helped evacuate Iranians from Sudan and, despite their past support for the military rulers who are destroying Sudan, the Saudis are helping to mediate peace talks, along with the UN, the Arab League, the African Union and other countries.

Multipolar diplomatic alternatives to US war-making

The proposal by Brazilian President Lula da Silva for a “peace club” of nations to help negotiate peace in Ukraine is an example of the new diplomacy emerging in the multipolar world. There is clearly a geostrategic element to these moves, to show the world that other nations can actually bring peace and prosperity to countries and regions where the United States has brought only war, chaos and instability.

While the United States rattles its saber around Taiwan and portrays China as a threat to the world, China and its friends are trying to show that they can provide a different kind of leadership. As a Global South country that has lifted its own people out of poverty, China offers its experience and partnership to help others do the same, a very different approach from the paternalistic and coercive neocolonial model of US and Western power that has kept so many countries trapped in poverty and debt for decades.

This is the fruition of the multipolar world that China and others have been calling for. China is responding astutely to what the world needs most, which is peace, and demonstrating practically how it can help. This will surely win China many friends, and make it more difficult for US politicians to sell their view of China as a threat.Now that the “newer world order” that Paul Kennedy referred to is taking shape, economist Jeffrey Sachs has grave misgivings about the US ability to adjust. As he recently warned, “Unless US foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly to World War III.” With countries across the globe building new networks of trade, development and diplomacy, independent of Washington and Wall Street, the United States may well have no choice but to finally “adjust sensibly” to the new order.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can the US Adjust Sensibly to a New Multipolar World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the context of the not-so-cold war between the US, NATO and Russia, any of these borders is a potentially dangerous flashpoint that could trigger a new crisis, or even a world war. But a key difference with the Finnish border is that it comes within about 100 miles of Severomorsk, where Russia’s Northern Fleet and 13 of its 23 nuclear-armed submarines are based. This could well be where World War III will begin, if it has not already started in Ukraine.

In Europe today, only Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and a handful of other small countries remain outside NATO. For 75 years, Finland was a model of successful neutrality, but it is far from demilitarized. Like Switzerland, it has a large military, and young Finns are required to perform at least six months of military training after they turn 18. Its active and reserve military forces make up over 4% of the population – compared with only 0.6% in the US and 83% of Finns say they would take part in armed resistance if Finland were invaded.

Russian invasion made Finland more pro-NATO

Only 20-30% of Finns have historically supported joining NATO, while the majority have consistently and proudly supported its policy of neutrality. In late 2021, a Finnish opinion poll measured popular support for NATO membership at 26%. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, that jumped to 60% within weeks and, by November 2022, 78% of Finns said they supported joining NATO.

As in the US and other NATO countries, Finland’s political leaders have been more pro-NATO than the general public. Despite long-standing public support for neutrality, Finland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1997. Its government sent 200 troops to Afghanistan as part of the UN-authorized International Security Assistance Force after the 2001 US invasion, and they remained there after NATO took command of this force in 2003. Finnish troops did not leave Afghanistan until all Western forces withdrew in 2021, after a total of 2,500 Finnish troops and 140 civilian officials had been deployed there, and two Finns had been killed.

A December 2022 review of Finland’s role in Afghanistan by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs found that the Finnish troops “repeatedly engaged in combat as part of the military operation that was now led by NATO and had become a party in the conflict,” and that Finland’s proclaimed objective, which was “to stabilize and support Afghanistan to enhance international peace and security” was outweighed by “its desire to maintain and strengthen its foreign and security policy relations with the US and other international partners, as well as its effort to deepen its collaboration with NATO.”

In other words, like other small NATO-allied countries, Finland was unable, in the midst of an escalating war, to uphold its own priorities and values, and instead allowed its desire “to deepen its collaboration” with the US and NATO to take precedence over its original aim of trying to help the people of Afghanistan to recover peace and stability. As a result of these confused and conflicting priorities, Finnish forces were drawn into the pattern of reflexive escalation and use of overwhelming destructive force that have characterized US military operations in all its recent wars.

As a small new NATO member, Finland will be just as impotent as it was in Afghanistan to affect the momentum of the NATO war machine’s rising conflict with Russia. Finland will find that its tragic choice to abandon a policy of neutrality that brought it 75 years of peace and look to NATO for protection will leave it, like Ukraine, dangerously exposed on the front lines of a war directed from Moscow, Washington and Brussels that it can neither win, nor independently resolve, nor prevent from escalating into World War III.

Finland’s success as a neutral and liberal democratic country during and since the Cold War has created a popular culture in which the public are more trusting of their leaders and representatives than people in most Western countries, and less likely to question the wisdom of their decisions. So the near unanimity of the political class to join NATO in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine faced little public opposition. In May 2022, Finland’s parliament approved joining NATO by an overwhelming 188 votes to eight.

The problematic nature of NATO membership

But why have Finland’s political leaders been so keen to “strengthen its foreign and security policy relations with the US and other international partners,” as the Finland in Afghanistan report said? As an independent, neutral, but strongly armed military nation, Finland already meets the NATO goal of spending 2% of its GDP on the military. It also has a substantial arms industry, which builds its own modern warships, artillery, assault rifles and other weapons. 

NATO membership will integrate Finland’s arms industry into NATO’s lucrative arms market, boosting sales of Finnish weapons, while also providing a context to buy more of the latest US and allied weaponry for its own military and to collaborate on joint weapons projects with firms in larger NATO countries. With NATO military budgets increasing, and likely to keep increasing, Finland’s government clearly faces pressures from the arms industry and other interests. In effect, its own small military-industrial complex doesn’t want to be left out.

Since it began its NATO accession, Finland has already committed $10 billion to buy American F-35 fighters to replace its three squadrons of F-18s. It has also been taking bids for new missile defense systems, and is reportedly trying to choose between the Indian-Israeli Barak 8 surface-to-air missile system and the US-Israeli David’s Sling system, built by Israel’s Raphael and the US’s Raytheon.

Finnish law prohibits the country from possessing nuclear weapons or allowing them in the country, unlike the five NATO countries that store stockpiles of US nuclear weapons on their soil – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Turkey. But Finland submitted its NATO accession documents without the exceptions that Denmark and Norway have insisted on to allow them to prohibit nuclear weapons. This leaves Finland’s nuclear posture uniquely ambiguous, despite President Sauli Niinistö’s promise that “Finland has no intention of bringing nuclear weapons onto our soil.”

The lack of discussion about the implications of Finland joining an explicitly nuclear military alliance is troubling, and has been attributed to an overly hasty accession process in the context of the war in Ukraine, as well as to Finland’s tradition of unquestioning popular trust in its national government. 

Perhaps most regrettable is that Finland’s membership in NATO marks the end of the nation’s admirable tradition as a global peacemaker. Former Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, an architect of the policy of cooperation with the neighboring Soviet Union and a champion of world peace, helped craft the Helsinki Accords, a historic agreement signed in 1975 by the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada and every European nation (except Albania) to improve detente between the Soviet Union and the West. 

Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari continued the peacemaking tradition and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his critical efforts to resolve international conflicts from Namibia to Aceh in Indonesia to Kosovo (which was bombed by NATO). 

Speaking at the UN in September 2021, Finnish President Sauli Niinistö seemed anxious to follow this legacy. “A willingness of adversaries and competitors to engage in dialogue, to build trust, and to seek common denominators – that was the essence of the Helsinki Spirit. It is precisely that kind of a spirit that the entire world, and the United Nations, urgently needs,” he said. “I am convinced that the more we speak about the Helsinki Spirit, the closer we get to rekindling it – and to making it come true.“ 

Of course, it was Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine that drove Finland to abandon the “Helsinki Spirit” in favor of joining NATO. But if Finland had resisted the pressures on it to rush into NATO membership, it could instead now be joining the “Peace Club” being formed by Brazilian President Lula to revive negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Sadly for Finland and the world, it looks like the Helsinki Spirit will have to move forward without Helsinki.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Peacemaker Finland Is Now Part of Nuclear NATO appeared first on Fair Observer.

The title of Parsi’s article, “The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,” refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s use of the term “indispensable nation” to describe the US role in the post-Cold War world. The irony in Parsi’s use of Albright’s term is that she generally used it to refer to US war-making, not peacemaking.

Make war, not peace 

In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President Clinton’s threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East, she was confronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting.

Albright claimed, “..if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”

Albright’s readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, “What’s the use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell wrote in his memoirs, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”

But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the “fucking crazies” as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003. 

For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the “crazies” at every turn. Albright and the neocons’ exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the US political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator. 

Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the US chose to join a Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also applies, most notoriously, to the US blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure.

For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union’s successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey’s promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia. 

Are you with us or against us?

But neutrality has become anathema to US policymakers. George W. Bush’s threat, “You are either with us or against us,” has become an established, if unspoken, core assumption of 21st century US foreign policy.

The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem. 

The US corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.

Most US politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or twelve packed into Albright’s vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in uniform, and “we have to use force.” 

Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years. 

All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.

Peace is not an option

It is no wonder that Americans think the world’s problems are insoluble and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a “peace club” of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace. 

During his election campaign and his first year in office, President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote in 2020 that Biden’s effort to “rebuild a decimated State Department” should include setting up a “mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in waging peace.”

Biden’s meager response to this call from Vertin and others was finally unveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia’s diplomatic initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine. The State Department’s new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. This is the extent of Biden’s token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse—War, Famine, Conquest and Death—run wild across the Earth.

As Zach Vertin wrote, “It is often assumed that mediation and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But that is not the case: Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly technical, tradecraft in its own right.”

The mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a world threatened and intimidated by their own country’s trillion dollar war machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the US government. 

By contrast, the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20 team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs has a staff of 4,500, spread all across the world.

The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department’s top priorities are not to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait. Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join US-led war coalitions and buy US weapons, to mute calls for peace in international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in US proxy wars.

The result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe and mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Make War, Not Peace: Frightening US Policy on Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

While the US was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering US empire. 

Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused US entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.

Neoconservative Ideas of Regime-Change

The architects of the US invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century. 

The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate US “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”  

Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. US military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of US interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries. 

For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the US neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.      

And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of US aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over US foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.

Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of US foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the US State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.

PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Joe Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead US role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.

Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending US assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.

Biden Administration Persists with Neoconservative Policies

It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of US (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.

What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of US foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.

At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq. 

In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”

Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”

So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”

But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years. 

The US record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the US never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And US leaders—including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Scary Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

Western sanctions would erect a new Iron Curtain, hundreds of miles to the east of the old one, separating an isolated, defeated, bankrupt Russia from a reunited, triumphant and prosperous West. Not only has Russia withstood the economic assault, but the sanctions have boomeranged–hitting the very countries that imposed them.

The Losers

Western sanctions on Russia reduced the global supply of oil and natural gas, but also pushed up prices. So Russia profited from the higher prices, even as its export volume decreased. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that Russia’s economy only contracted by 2.2% in 2022, compared with the 8.5% contraction it had forecast, and it predicts that the Russian economy will actually grow by 0.3% in 2023. 

On the other hand, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by 35% or more, despite $46 billion in economic aid from generous US taxpayers, on top of $67 billion in military aid. 

European economies are also taking a hit. After growing by 3.5% in 2022, the Euro area economy is expected to stagnate and grow only 0.7% in 2023, while the British economy is projected to actually contract by 0.6%. Germany was more dependent on imported Russian energy than other large European countries so, after growing a meager 1.9% in 2022, it is predicted to have negligible 0.1% growth in 2023. German industry is set to pay about 40% more for energy in 2023 than it did in 2021.

The United States is less directly impacted than Europe, but its growth shrank from 5.9% in 2021 to 2% in 2022, and is projected to keep shrinking, to 1.4% in 2023 and 1% in 2024.

The Winners

Meanwhile India, which has remained neutral while buying oil from Russia at a discounted price, is projected to maintain its 2022 growth rate of over 6% per year all through 2023 and 2024. China has also benefited from buying discounted Russian oil and from an overall trade increase with Russia of 30% in 2022. China’s economy is expected to grow at 5% this year.

Other oil and gas producers reaped windfall profits from the effects of the sanctions. Saudi Arabia’s GDP grew by 8.7%, the fastest of all large economies, while Western oil companies laughed all the way to the bank to deposit $200 billion in profits: ExxonMobil made $56 billion, an all-time record for an oil company, while Shell made $40 billion and Chevron and Total gained $36 billion each. BP made “only” $28 billion, as it closed down its operations in Russia, but it still doubled its 2021 profits.

As for natural gas, US LNG (liquefied natural gas) suppliers like Cheniere and companies like Total that distribute the gas in Europe are replacing Europe’s supply of Russian natural gas with fracked gas from the United States, at about four times the prices US customers pay, and with the dreadful climate impacts of fracking. A mild winter in Europe and a whopping $850 billion in European government subsidies to households and companies brought retail energy prices back down to 2021 levels, but only after they spiked five times higher over the summer of 2022.

While the war restored Europe’s subservience to US hegemony in the short term, these real-world impacts of the war could have quite different results in the long term. French President Emmanuel Macron remarked, “In today’s geopolitical context, among countries that support Ukraine, there are two categories being created in the gas market: those who are paying dearly and those who are selling at very high prices… The United States is a producer of cheap gas that they are selling at a high price… I don’t think that’s friendly.”

An even more unfriendly act was the sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines that brought Russian gas to Germany. Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the United States, with the help of Norway—the two countries that have displaced Russia as Europe’s two largest natural gas suppliers. Coupled with the high price of US fracked gas, this has fueled anger among the European public. In the long term, European leaders may well conclude that the region’s future lies in political and economic independence from countries that launch military attacks on it, and that would include the United States as well as Russia.

The other big winners of the war in Ukraine will of course be the weapons makers, dominated globally by the US “big five”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Most of the weapons so far sent to Ukraine have come from existing stockpiles in the United States and NATO countries. Authorization to build even bigger new stockpiles flew through Congress in December, but the resulting contracts have not yet shown up in the arms firms’ sales figures or profit statements. 

The Reed-Inhofe substitute amendment to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act authorized “wartime” multi-year, no-bid contracts to “replenish” stocks of weapons sent to Ukraine, but the quantities of weapons to be procured outstrip the amounts shipped to Ukraine by up to 500 to one. Former senior OMB official Marc Cancian commented, “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine]. It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future.”

Since weapons have only just started rolling off production lines to build these stockpiles, the scale of war profits anticipated by the arms industry is best reflected, for now, in the 2022 increases in their stock prices: Lockheed Martin, up 37%; Northrop Grumman, up 41%; Raytheon, up 17%; and General Dynamics, up 19%.  

Food, Fertilizer and Fuel Crisis for Global South

While a few countries and companies have profited from the war, countries far from the scene of the conflict have been reeling from the economic fallout. Russia and Ukraine have been critical suppliers of wheat, corn, cooking oil and fertilizers to much of the world. The war and sanctions have caused shortages in all these commodities, as well as fuel to transport them, pushing global food prices to all-time highs. 

So the other big losers in this war are people in the Global South who depend on imports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine simply to feed their families. Egypt and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, while a dozen other highly vulnerable countries depend almost entirely on Russia and Ukraine for their wheat supply, from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Laos to Benin, Rwanda and Somalia. Fifteen African countries imported more than half their supply of wheat from Russia and Ukraine in 2020. 

The Black Sea Grain Initiative brokered by the UN and Turkey has eased the food crisis for some countries, but the agreement remains precarious. It must be renewed by the UN Security Council before it expires on March 18, 2023, but Western sanctions are still blocking Russian fertilizer exports, which are supposed to be exempt from sanctions under the grain initiative. UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told Agence France-Presse on February 15 that freeing up Russian fertilizer exports is “of the highest priority.”

After a year of slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, we can declare that the economic winners of this war are: Saudi Arabia, ExxonMobil and its fellow oil giants, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. 

The losers are, first and foremost, the sacrificed people of Ukraine, on both sides of the front lines, all the soldiers who have lost their lives and families who have lost their loved ones. But also in the losing column are working and poor people everywhere, especially in the countries in the Global South that are most dependent on imported food and energy. Last but not least is the Earth, its atmosphere and its climate—all sacrificed to the God of War.  That is why, as the war enters its second year, there is a mounting global outcry for the parties to the conflict to find solutions. The words of Brazil’s President Lula da Silva reflect that growing sentiment. When pressured by US President Joe Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, he said, “I don’t want to join this war, I want to end it.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Winners and Losers of Big Economic War Over Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as US forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”

Spin and Lies Make a Comeback

Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies. 

Fair is Foul: In Ukraine Fairer Can Also Be Fouler

It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.

Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, “What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?” He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.   

But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired US tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.” 

Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war. 

Back to the Future: World War I Again?

General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition,” and compared it to World War I, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side. 

Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that The New York Times (NYT) editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the US and NATO’s real war aims? 

“Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?” asked General Vad. He concluded, “There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine’s military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life.”

Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the NYT eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this “stronger position” look like? 

When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.

A False Narrative of War

The US media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations.

Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp From the Ukraine War?

Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”

Advisers to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5, 2022. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.

The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.

The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic “white hats vs black hats” narrative, in which Russia’s guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West’s innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the US and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince’s drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.

Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.” The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous “senior European environmental official” saying, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”

It took former NYT investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower’s account of how US Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.

The White House predictably dismissed Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction”, but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.

Eisenhower Was Right

President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:

The US broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of “historic proportions.” Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as “the beginning of a new cold war.”

NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the US Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

The US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014. This installed a government that only half of Ukraine’s people recognized as legitimate. The coup led to the disintegration of the country and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.

The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine’s military to recover Donbas by force.

During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. US and U.K. officials claimed these were “false flag” attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.

After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The U.K.’s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and US Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to “weaken” Russia.

What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that US political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Ukraine: How Lies Fuel a New Bloody War of Attrition appeared first on Fair Observer.

So far, the debate about peace talks to resolve the conflict has revolved mostly around what Ukraine and Russia should be prepared to bring to the table in order to end the war and restore peace. However, given that this war is not just between Russia and Ukraine but is part of a “New Cold War” between Russia and the US, it is not just Russia and Ukraine that must consider what they can bring to the table to end it. The US must also consider what steps it can take to resolve its underlying conflict with Russia that led to this war in the first place. 

The US Broke Promises Not to Expand NATO

The geopolitical crisis that set the stage for the war in Ukraine began with NATO’s broken promises not to expand into Eastern Europe, and was exacerbated by its declaration in 2008 that Ukraine would eventually join this primarily anti-Russian military alliance. 

Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp From the Ukraine War?

Then, in 2014, a US-backed coup against Ukraine’s elected government caused the disintegration of Ukraine. Only 51% of Ukrainians surveyed told a Gallup poll that they recognized the legitimacy of the post-coup government, and large majorities in Crimea and in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces voted to secede from Ukraine. Crimea rejoined Russia, and the new Ukrainian government launched a civil war against the self-declared “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The civil war killed an estimated 14,000 people, but the Minsk II accord in 2015 established a ceasefire and a buffer zone along the line of control, with 1,300 international OSCE ceasefire monitors and staff. The ceasefire line largely held for seven years, and casualties declined substantially from year to year. But the Ukrainian government never resolved the underlying political crisis by granting Donetsk and Luhansk the autonomous status it promised them in the Minsk II agreement. 

Now former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande have admitted that Western leaders only agreed to the Minsk II accord to buy time, so that they could build up Ukraine’s armed forces to eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force.

In March 2022, the month after the Russian invasion, ceasefire negotiations were held in Turkey. Russia and Ukraine drew up a 15-point “neutrality agreement,” which President Zelenskyy publicly presented and explained to his people in a national TV broadcast on March 27th. Russia agreed to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since the invasion in February in exchange for a Ukrainian commitment not to join NATO or host foreign military bases. That framework also included proposals for resolving the future of Crimea and Donbas.

But in April, Ukraine’s Western allies, the US and UK in particular, refused to support the neutrality agreement and persuaded Ukraine to abandon its negotiations with Russia. US and British officials said at the time that they saw a chance to “press” and “weaken” Russia, and that they wanted to make the most of that opportunity. 

The US and British governments’ unfortunate decision to torpedo Ukraine’s neutrality agreement in the second month of the war has led to a prolonged and devastating conflict with hundreds of thousands of casualties. Neither side can decisively defeat the other, and every new escalation increases the danger of “a major war between NATO and Russia,” as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently warned. 

Peace Talks, Not More War

US and NATO leaders now claim to support a return to the negotiating table they upended in April, with the same goal of achieving a Russian withdrawal from territory it has occupied since February. They implicitly recognize that nine more months of unnecessary and bloody war have failed to greatly improve Ukraine’s negotiating position.

Instead of just sending more weapons to fuel a war that cannot be won on the battlefield, Western leaders have a grave responsibility to help restart negotiations and ensure that they succeed this time. Another diplomatic fiasco like the one they engineered in April would be a catastrophe for Ukraine and the world.

So what can the US bring to the table to help move towards peace in Ukraine and to de-escalate its disastrous Cold War with Russia?

Like the Cuban Missile Crisis during the original Cold War, this crisis could serve as a catalyst for serious diplomacy to resolve the breakdown in US-Russian relations. Instead of risking nuclear annihilation in a bid to “weaken” Russia, the US could instead use this crisis to open up a new era of nuclear arms control, disarmament treaties and diplomatic engagement.

Making Sense of Vladimir Putin’s Long Game

For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has complained about the large US military footprint in Eastern and Central Europe. But in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US has actually beefed up its European military presence. It has increased the total deployments of American troops in Europe from 80,000 before February 2022 to roughly 100,000. It has sent warships to Spain, fighter jet squadrons to the UK, troops to Romania and the Baltics, and air defense systems to Germany and Italy. 

Even before the Russian invasion, the US began expanding its presence at a missile base in Romania that Russia has objected to ever since it went into operation in 2016. The US military has also built what The New York Times called “a highly sensitive US military installation” in Poland, just 100 miles from Russian territory. The bases in Poland and Romania have sophisticated radars to track hostile missiles and interceptor missiles to shoot them down. 

The Russians worry that these installations can be repurposed to fire offensive or even nuclear missiles, and they are exactly what the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union prohibited, until President Bush withdrew from it in 2002. 

While the Pentagon describes the two sites as defensive and pretends they are not directed at Russia, Putin has insisted that the bases are evidence of the threat posed by NATO’s eastward expansion.

Fair is Foul: In Ukraine Fairer Can Also Be Fouler

Here are five steps the US could consider putting on the table to start de-escalating these ever-rising tensions and improve the chances for a lasting ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine:

1. The US and other Western countries could support Ukrainian neutrality by agreeing to participate in the kind of security guarantees Ukraine and Russia agreed to in March, but which the US and U.K. rejected.

2. The US and its NATO allies could let the Russians know at an early stage in negotiations that they are prepared to lift sanctions against Russia as part of a comprehensive peace agreement. 

3. The US could agree to a significant reduction in the 100,000 troops it now has in Europe, and to removing its missiles from Romania and Poland and handing over those bases to their respective nations.

4. The US could commit to working with Russia on an agreement to resume mutual reductions in their nuclear arsenals, and to suspend both nations’ current plans to build even more dangerous weapons. They could also restore the Treaty on Open Skies, from which the US withdrew in 2020, so that both sides can verify that the other is removing and dismantling the weapons they agree to eliminate.

5. The US could open a discussion on the removal of its nuclear weapons from the five European countries where they are presently deployed: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey.

The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic “Security Dilemma”

If the US is willing to put these policy changes on the table in negotiations with Russia, it will make it easier for Russia and Ukraine to reach a mutually acceptable ceasefire agreement, and help to ensure that the peace they negotiate will be stable and lasting. 

De-escalating the Cold War with Russia would give Russia a tangible gain to show its citizens as it retreats from Ukraine. It would also allow the US to reduce its military spending and enable European countries to take charge of their own security, as most of their people want. 

US-Russia negotiations will not be easy, but a genuine commitment to resolve differences will create a new context in which each step can be taken with greater confidence as the peacemaking process builds its own momentum.

Most of the people of the world would breathe a sigh of relief to see progress towards ending the war in Ukraine, and to see the US and Russia working together to reduce the existential dangers of their militarism and hostility. This should lead to improved international cooperation on other serious crises facing the world in this century–and may even start to turn back the hands of the Doomsday Clock by making the world a safer place for us all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Five Simple Steps for US to End Toxic Russia-Ukraine War appeared first on Fair Observer.

It was a rare admission from someone so involved in the war, and reflects the dichotomy in recent statements between US and NATO political leaders on one hand and military officials on the other. Civilian leaders still appear committed to waging a long, open-ended war in Ukraine, while military leaders, such as the US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, have spoken out and urged Ukraine to “seize the moment” for peace talks.

Retired Admiral Michael Mullen, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair, spoke out first, maybe testing the waters for Milley, telling ABC News that the US should “do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.” 

Asia Times reported that other NATO military leaders share Milley’s view that neither Russia nor Ukraine can achieve an outright military victory, while French and German military assessments conclude that the stronger negotiating position Ukraine has gained through its recent military successes will be short-lived if it fails to heed Milley’s advice.

So why are US and NATO military leaders speaking out so urgently to reject the perpetuation of their own central role in the war in Ukraine? And why do they see such danger in the offing if their political bosses miss or ignore their cues for the shift to diplomacy?

A Study Reveals a Terrible US Dilemma

A Pentagon-commissioned Rand Corporation study published in December, titled Responding to a Russian Attack on NATO During the Ukraine War, provides clues as to what Milley and his military colleagues find so alarming. The study examines US options for responding to four scenarios in which Russia attacks a range of NATO targets, from a US intelligence satellite or a NATO arms depot in Poland to larger-scale missile attacks on NATO air bases and ports, including Ramstein US Air Base and the port of Rotterdam.

These four scenarios are all hypothetical and premised on a Russian escalation beyond the borders of Ukraine. But the authors’ analysis reveals just how fine and precarious the line is between limited and proportionate military responses to Russian escalation and a spiral of escalation that can spin out of control and lead to nuclear war. 

The final sentence of the study’s conclusion reads: “The potential for nuclear use adds weight to the US goal of avoiding further escalation, a goal which might seem increasingly critical in the aftermath of a limited Russian conventional attack.” Yet other parts of the study argue against de-escalation or less-than-proportionate responses to Russian escalations, based on the same concerns with US “credibility” that drove devastating but ultimately futile rounds of escalation in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other lost wars.

US political leaders are always afraid that if they do not respond forcefully enough to enemy actions, their enemies (now including China) will conclude that their military moves can decisively impact US policy and force the United States and its allies to retreat. But escalations driven by such fears have consistently led only to even more decisive and humiliating US defeats. 

In Ukraine, US concerns about “credibility” are compounded by the need to demonstrate to its allies that NATO’s Article 5—which says that an attack on one NATO member will be considered an attack on all—is a truly watertight commitment to defend them.

So US policy in Ukraine is caught between the reputational need to intimidate its enemies and support its allies on the one hand, and the unthinkable real-world dangers of escalation on the other. If US leaders continue to act as they have in the past, favoring escalation over loss of “credibility,” they will be flirting with nuclear war, and the danger will only increase with each twist of the escalatory spiral.  

As the absence of a “military solution” slowly dawns on the armchair warriors in Washington and NATO capitals, they are quietly slipping more conciliatory positions into their public statements. Most notably, they are replacing their previous insistence that Ukraine must be restored to its pre-2014 borders, meaning a return of all the Donbas and Crimea, with a call for Russia to withdraw only to pre-February 24, 2022, positions, which Russia had previously agreed to in negotiations in Turkey in March.

A Time for Realism?

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Wall Street Journal on December 5th that the goal of the war is now “to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.” The WSJ reported that “Two European diplomats… said [US National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan recommended that Mr. Zelenskyy’s team start thinking about its realistic demands and priorities for negotiations, including a reconsideration of its stated aim for Ukraine to regain Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.”

The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic “Security Dilemma”

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In another article, The Wall Street Journal quoted German officials saying, “they believe it is unrealistic to expect the Russian troops will be fully expelled from all the occupied territories,” while British officials defined the minimum basis for negotiations as Russia’s willingness to “withdraw to positions it occupied on February 23rd.”

One of Rishi Sunak’s first actions as UK Prime Minister at the end of October was to have Defence Minister Ben Wallace call Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for the first time since the Russian invasion in February. Wallace told Shoigu the UK wanted to de-escalate the conflict, a significant shift from the policies of former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

A major stumbling block holding Western diplomats back from the peace table is the maximalist rhetoric and negotiating positions of President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government, which has insisted since April that it will not settle for anything short of full sovereignty over every inch of territory that Ukraine possessed before 2014.

But that maximalist position was itself a remarkable reversal from the position Ukraine took at cease-fire talks in Turkey in March, when it agreed to give up its ambition to join NATO and not to host foreign military bases in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to its pre-invasion positions. At those talks, Ukraine agreed to negotiate the future of Donbas and to postpone a final decision on the future of Crimea for up to 15 years.

The Financial Times broke the story of that 15-point peace plan on March 16, and Zelenskyy explained the “neutrality agreement” to his people in a national TV broadcast on March 27, promising to submit it to a national referendum before it could take effect. 

But then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened on April 9 to quash that agreement. He told Zelenskyy that the UK and the “collective West” were “in it for the long run” and would back Ukraine to fight a long war, but would not sign on to any agreements Ukraine made with Russia. 

This helps to explain why Zelenskyy is now so offended by Western suggestions that he should return to the negotiating table. Johnson has since resigned in disgrace, but he left Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine hanging on his promises. 

In April, Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but only the US publicly took a similar position, while France, Germany and Italy all called for new cease-fire negotiations in May. Now Johnson himself has done an about-face, writing in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on December 9 only that “Russian forces must be pushed back to the de facto boundary of February 24th.”

Johnson and Biden have made a shambles of Western policy on Ukraine, politically gluing themselves to a policy of unconditional, endless war that NATO military advisers reject for the soundest of reasons: to avoid the world-ending World War III that Biden himself promised to avoid. 

US and NATO leaders are finally taking baby steps toward negotiations, but the critical question facing the world in 2023 is whether the warring parties will get to the negotiating table before the spiral of escalation spins catastrophically out of control.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can NATO and the Pentagon Find a Diplomatic Off-Ramp From the Ukraine War? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba proposed a “peace summit” in February to be chaired by UN Secretary General Guterres, but with the precondition that Russia must first face prosecution for war crimes in an international court. On the other side, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov issued a chilling ultimatum that Ukraine must accept Russia’s terms for peace or “the issue will be decided by the Russian Army.”    

But what if there were a way of understanding this conflict and possible solutions that encompassed the views of all sides and could take us beyond one-sided narratives and proposals that serve only to fuel and escalate the war? The crisis in Ukraine is in fact a classic case of what International Relations scholars call a “security dilemma,” and this provides a more objective way of looking at it. 

Understanding the Security Dilemma

A security dilemma is a situation in which countries on each side take actions for their own defense that countries on the other side then see as a threat. Since offensive and defensive weapons and forces are often indistinguishable, one side’s defensive build-up can easily be seen as an offensive build-up by the other side. As each side responds to the actions of the other, the net result is a spiral of militarization and escalation, even though both sides insist, and may even believe, that their own actions are defensive. 

In the case of Ukraine, this has happened on different levels, both between Russia and national and regional governments in Ukraine, but also on a larger geopolitical scale between Russia and the United States/NATO.

The very essence of a security dilemma is the lack of trust between the parties. In the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis served as an alarm bell that forced both sides to start negotiating arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms that would limit escalation, even as deep levels of mistrust remained. Both sides recognized that the other was not hell-bent on destroying the world, and this provided the necessary minimum basis for negotiations and safeguards to try to ensure that this did not come to pass.

After the end of the Cold War, both sides cooperated with major reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but the United States gradually withdrew from a succession of arms control treaties, violated its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and used military force in ways that directly violated the UN Charter’s prohibition against the “threat or use of force.” US leaders claimed that the conjunction of terrorism and the existence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons gave them a new right to wage “preemptive war,” but neither the UN nor any other country ever agreed to that.

US aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was alarming to people all over the world, and even to many Americans, so it was no wonder that Russian leaders were especially worried by America’s renewed post-Cold War militarism. As NATO incorporated more and more countries in Eastern Europe, a classic security dilemma began to play out. 

President Vladimir Putin, who was elected in 2000, began to use international fora to challenge NATO expansion and US war-making, insisting that new diplomacy was needed to ensure the security of all countries in Europe, not only those invited to join NATO. 

The former Communist countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO out of defensive concerns about possible Russian aggression, but this also exacerbated Russia’s security concerns about the ambitious and aggressive military alliance gathering around its borders, especially as the United States and NATO refused to address those concerns. 

In this context, broken promises on NATO expansion, US serial aggression in the greater Middle East and elsewhere, and absurd claims that US missile defense batteries in Poland and Romania were to protect Europe from Iran, not Russia, set alarm bells ringing in Moscow. 

The US withdrawal from nuclear arms control treaties and its refusal to alter its nuclear first strike policy raised even greater fears that a new generation of US nuclear weapons were being designed to give the United States a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.

On the other side, Russia’s increasing assertiveness on the world stage, including its military actions to defend Russian enclaves in Georgia and its intervention in Syria to defend its ally the Assad government, raised security concerns in other former Soviet republics and allies, including new NATO members. Where might Russia intervene next?

As the United States refused to diplomatically address Russia’s security concerns, each side took actions that ratcheted up the security dilemma. The United States backed the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014, which led to rebellions against the post-coup government in Crimea and Donbas. Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. 

Even if all sides were acting in good faith and out of defensive concerns, in the absence of effective diplomacy they all assumed the worst about each other’s motives as the crisis spun further out of control, exactly as the “security dilemma” model predicts that nations will do amid such rising tensions.

Of course, since mutual mistrust lies at the heart of any security dilemma, the situation is further complicated when any of the parties is seen to act in bad faith. Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor, recently admitted that Western leaders had no intention of enforcing Ukraine’s compliance with the terms of the Minsk II agreement in 2015, and only agreed to it to buy time to build up Ukraine militarily.

Diplomacy, the Only Way Forward

The breakdown of the Minsk II peace agreement and the continuing diplomatic impasse in the larger geopolitical conflict between the United States, NATO and Russia plunged relations into a deepening crisis and led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials on all sides must have recognized the dynamics of the underlying security dilemma, and yet they failed to take the necessary diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis. 

Peaceful, diplomatic alternatives have always been available if the parties chose to pursue them, but they did not. Does that mean that all sides deliberately chose war over peace? They would all deny that. 

Yet all sides apparently now see advantages in a prolonged conflict, despite the relentless daily slaughter, dreadful and deteriorating conditions for millions of civilians, and the unthinkable dangers of full-scale war between NATO and Russia. All sides have convinced themselves they can or must win, and so they keep escalating the war, along with all its impacts and the risks that it will spin out of control. 

President Joe Biden came to office promising a new era of American diplomacy, but has instead led the United States and the world to the brink of World War III.         

Clearly, the only solution to a security dilemma like this is a cease-fire and peace agreement to stop the carnage, followed by the kind of diplomacy that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and successive arms control treaties. Former UN official Alfred de Zayas has also called for UN-administered referenda to determine the wishes of the people of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.

It is not an endorsement of an adversary’s conduct or position to negotiate a path to peaceful coexistence. We are witnessing the absolutist alternative in Ukraine today. There is no moral high ground in relentless, open-ended mass slaughter, managed, directed and in fact perpetrated by people in smart suits and military uniforms in imperial capitals thousands of miles from the crashing of shells, the cries of the wounded and the stench of death.

If proposals for peace talks are to be more than PR exercises, they must be firmly grounded in an understanding of the security needs of all sides, and a willingness to compromise to see that those needs are met and that all the underlying conflicts are addressed. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Ukraine Crisis Is a Classic “Security Dilemma” appeared first on Fair Observer.

Here are eight reasons why this holiday season too offers the potential for peace and a chance to move the conflict in Ukraine from the battlefield to the negotiating table.

1. The first, and most urgent reason, is the incredible, daily death and suffering in Ukraine, and the chance to save millions more Ukrainians from being forced to leave their homes, their belongings and the conscripted menfolk they may never see again. 

With Russia’s bombing of key infrastructure, millions of people in Ukraine currently have no heat, electricity or water as temperatures drop below freezing. The CEO of Ukraine’s largest electric corporation has urged millions more Ukrainians to leave the country, ostensibly for just a few months, to reduce demand on the war-damaged power network. 

The war has wiped out at least 35% of the country’s economy, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. The only way to halt the meltdown of the economy and the suffering of the Ukrainian people is to end the war. 

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2. Neither side can achieve a decisive military victory, and with its recent military gains, Ukraine is in a good negotiating position.

It has become clear that US and NATO military leaders do not believe, and possibly have never believed, that their publicly stated goal of helping Ukraine to recover Crimea and all of Donbas by force is militarily achievable.

In fact, Ukraine’s military chief of staff warned President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in April 2021 that such a goal would not be achievable without “unacceptable” levels of civilian and military casualties, leading him to call off plans for an escalation of the civil war at that time. 

Biden’s top military advisor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, told the Economic Club of New York on November 9, “There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word, not achievable through military means…” 

French and German military reviews of Ukraine’s position are reportedly more pessimistic than US ones, assessing that the current appearance of military parity between the two sides will be short-lived. This adds weight to Milley’s assessment, and suggests that this could well be the best chance Ukraine will get to negotiate from a position of relative strength.

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3. US government officials, especially in the Republican Party, are starting to balk at the prospect of continuing this enormous level of military and economic support. Having taken control of the House, Republicans are promising more scrutiny of Ukraine aid. Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who will become Speaker of the House, warned that Republicans would not write a “blank check” for Ukraine. This reflects the growing opposition at the base of the Republican Party, with a Wall Street Journal November poll showing that 48% of Republicans say the US is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 6% in March. 

4. The war is causing upheavals in Europe. Sanctions on Russian energy have sent inflation in Europe skyrocketing and caused a devastating squeeze on energy supplies that is crippling the manufacturing sector. Europeans are increasingly feeling what German media call Kriegsmudigkeit. 

This translates as “war-weariness,” but that is not an entirely accurate characterization of the growing popular sentiment in Europe. “War-wisdom” may describe it better. 

People have had many months to consider the arguments for a long, escalating war with no clear endgame—a war that is sinking their economies into a recession—and more of them than ever now tell pollsters they would support renewed efforts to find a diplomatic solution. That includes 55% in Germany, 49% in Italy, 70% in Romania and 92% in Hungary. 

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5. Most of the world is calling for negotiations. We heard this at the 2022 UN General Assembly, where one after another, 66 world leaders, representing a majority of the world’s population, eloquently spoke out for peace talks. Philip Pierre, prime minister of Saint Lucia, was one of them, pleading with Russia, Ukraine and the Western powers “to immediately end the conflict in Ukraine, by undertaking immediate negotiations to permanently settle all disputes in accordance with the principles of the United Nations.”

As the Amir of Qatar told the Assembly, “We are fully aware of the complexities of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the international and global dimension to this crisis. However, we still call for an immediate ceasefire and a peaceful settlement, because this is ultimately what will happen regardless of how long this conflict will go on for. Perpetuating the crisis will not change this result. It will only increase the number of casualties, and it will increase the disastrous repercussions on Europe, Russia and the global economy.”

6. The war in Ukraine, like all wars, is catastrophic for the environment. Attacks and explosions are reducing all kinds of infrastructure–railways, electrical grids, apartment buildings, oil depots–to charred rubble, filling the air with pollutants and blanketing cities with toxic waste that contaminates rivers and groundwater. 

The sabotage of Russia’s underwater Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany led to what may have been the largest release of methane gas emissions ever recorded, amounting to the annual emissions of a million cars. The shelling of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, including Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Europe, has raised legitimate fears of deadly radiation spreading throughout Ukraine and beyond.

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Meanwhile, US and Western sanctions on Russian energy have triggered a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, giving them a new justification to increase their dirty energy exploration and production and keep the world firmly on course for climate catastrophe. 

7. The war has a devastating economic impact on countries across the world. The leaders of the world’s largest economies, the Group of 20, said in a declaration at the end of their November summit in Bali that the Ukraine war “is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy — constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity and elevating financial stability risks.”

Our long-standing failure to invest the relatively small proportion of our resources required to eradicate poverty and hunger on our otherwise rich and abundant planet already condemns millions of our brothers and sisters to squalor, misery and early deaths. 

Now this is compounded by the climate crisis, as entire communities are washed away by flood waters, burned out by wildfires or starved by multi-year droughts and famines. International cooperation has never been more urgently needed to confront problems that no country can solve on its own. Yet wealthy nations still prefer to put their money into weapons and war instead of adequately addressing the climate crisis, poverty or hunger. 

8. The last reason, which dramatically reinforces all the other reasons, is the danger of nuclear war. Even if our leaders had rational reasons to favor an open-ended, ever-escalating war over a negotiated peace in Ukraine – and there are certainly powerful interests in the weapons and fossil fuel industries that would profit from that – the existential danger of what this could lead to absolutely must tip the balance in favor of peace.

We recently saw how close we are to a much wider war when a single stray Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile landed in Poland and killed two people. Zelenskyy refused to believe it was not a Russian missile. If Poland had taken the same position, it could have invoked NATO’s mutual defense agreement and triggered a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. 

If another predictable incident like that leads NATO to attack Russia, it can only be a matter of time before Russia sees the use of nuclear weapons as its only option in the face of overwhelming military force.

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For these reasons and more, we join the faith-based leaders around the world who are calling for a Christmas Truce, declaring that the holiday season presents “a much-needed opportunity to recognize our compassion for one another. Together, we are convinced that the cycle of destruction, suffering and death can be overcome.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Eight Reasons Why Now is a Good Time for a Ukraine Ceasefire and Peace Talks appeared first on Fair Observer.

Reed and Inhofe’s idea is to tuck their wartime amendment into the FY2023 National Defense Appropriation Act (NDAA) that will be passed during the lameduck session before the end of the year. The amendment sailed through the Armed Services Committee in mid-October and, if it becomes law, the Department of Defense will be allowed to lock in multi-year contracts and award non-competitive contracts to arms manufacturers for Ukraine-related weapons.

Plans to Spend Big on Weapons

If the Reed/Inhofe amendment is really aimed at replenishing the Pentagon’s supplies, then why do the quantities in its wish list vastly surpass those sent to Ukraine? 

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Let’s do the comparison: 

1. The current star of US military aid to Ukraine is Lockheed Martin’s HIMARS rocket system, the same weapon US Marines used to help reduce much of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, to rubble in 2017. The US has only sent 38 HIMARS systems to Ukraine, but Senators Reed and Inhofe plan to “reorder” 700 of them, with 100,000 rockets, which could cost up to $4 billion.

2. Another artillery weapon provided to Ukraine is the M777 155 mm howitzer. To “replace” the 142 M777s sent to Ukraine, the senators plan to order 1,000 of them, at an estimated cost of  $3.7 billion, from BAE Systems.

3. HIMARS launchers can also fire Lockheed Martin’s long-range (up to 190 miles) MGM-140 ATACMS missiles, which the US has not sent to Ukraine. In fact the US has only ever fired 560 of them, mostly at Iraq in 2003. The even longer-range “Precision Strike Missile,” formerly prohibited under the INF Treaty renounced by Trump, will start replacing the ATACMS in 2023, yet the Reed-Inhofe Amendment would buy 6,000 ATACMS, 10 times more than the US has ever used, at an estimated cost of $600 million. 

4. Reed and Inhofe plan to buy 20,000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from Raytheon. But Congress already spent $340 million for 2,800 Stingers to replace the 1,400 sent to Ukraine. Reed and Inhofe’s amendment will “re-replenish” the Pentagon’s stocks 14 times over, which could cost $2.4 billion.

5. The US has supplied Ukraine with only two Harpoon anti-ship missile systems — already a provocative escalation — but the amendment includes 1,000 Boeing Harpoon missiles (at about $1.4 billion) and 800 newer Kongsberg Naval Strike Missiles (about $1.8 billion), the Pentagon’s replacement for the Harpoon.

6. The Patriot air defense system is another weapon the US has not sent to Ukraine, because each system can cost a billion dollars and the basic training course for technicians to maintain and repair it takes more than a year to complete. And yet the Inhofe-Reed wish list includes 10,000 Patriot missiles, plus launchers, which could add up to $30 billion.

Why So Much Spending?

ATACMS, Harpoons and Stingers are all weapons the Pentagon was already phasing out, so why spend billions of dollars to buy thousands of them now? What is this really all about? Is this amendment a particularly egregious example of war profiteering by the military-industrial-Congressional complex? Or is the US really preparing to fight a major ground war against Russia?  

Our best judgment is that both are true.

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Looking at the weapons list, military analyst and retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian noted: “This isn’t replacing what we’ve given [Ukraine].  It’s building stockpiles for a major ground war [with Russia] in the future. This is not the list you would use for China. For China we’d have a very different list.”

President Joe Biden says he will not send US troops to fight Russia because that would be World War III. But the longer the war goes on and the more it escalates, the more it becomes clear that US forces are directly involved in many aspects of the war: helping to plan Ukrainian operations; providing satellite-based intelligence; waging cyber warfare; and operating covertly inside Ukraine as special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries. Now Russia has accused British special operations forces of direct roles in a maritime drone attack on Sevastopol and the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. 

As US involvement in the war has escalated despite Biden’s broken promises, the Pentagon must have drawn up contingency plans for a full-scale war between the US and Russia. If those plans are ever executed, and if they do not immediately trigger a world-ending nuclear war, they will require vast quantities of specific weapons, and that is the purpose of the Reed-Inhofe stockpiles. 

At the same time, the amendment seems to respond to complaints by the weapons manufacturers that the Pentagon was “moving too slowly” in spending the vast sums appropriated for Ukraine. While over $20 billion has been allocated for weapons, contracts to actually buy weapons for Ukraine and replace the ones sent there so far totaled only $2.7 billion by early November. 

“A Demand Signal” for Industry

So the expected arms sales bonanza had not yet materialized, and the weapons makers were getting impatient. With the rest of the world increasingly calling for diplomatic negotiations, if Congress didn’t get moving, the war might be over before the arms makers’ much-anticipated jackpot ever arrived.

Mark Cancian explained to DefenseNews, “We’ve been hearing from industry, when we talk to them about this issue, that they want to see a demand signal.”

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When the Reed-Inhofe Amendment sailed through committee in mid-October, it was clearly the “demand signal” the merchants of death were looking for. The stock prices of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics took off like anti-aircraft missiles, exploding to all-time highs by the end of the month.

Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, decried the wartime emergency provisions in the amendment, saying it “further deteriorates already weak guardrails in place to prevent corporate price gouging of the military.” 

Opening the doors to multi-year, non-competitive, multi-billion dollar military contracts shows how the American people are trapped in a vicious spiral of war and military spending. Each new war becomes a pretext for further increases in military spending, much of it unrelated to the current war that provides cover for the increase. Military budget analyst Carl Conetta demonstrated (see Executive Summary) in 2010, after years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, that “those operations account(ed) for only 52% of the surge” in US military spending during that period.

Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers’ Union now calculates that the base Pentagon budget will exceed $1 trillion per year by 2027, five years earlier than projected by the Congressional Budget Office. But if we factor in at least $230 billion per year in military-related costs in the budgets of other departments, like Energy (for nuclear weapons), Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Justice (FBI cybersecurity), and State, national insecurity spending has already hit the trillion dollar per year mark, gobbling up two-thirds of annual discretionary spending.

America’s exorbitant investment in each new generation of weapons makes it nearly impossible for politicians of either party to recognize, let alone admit to the public, that American weapons and wars have been the cause of many of the world’s problems, not the solution, and that they cannot solve the latest foreign policy crisis either. 

Senators Reed and Inhofe will defend their amendment as a prudent step to deter and prepare for a Russian escalation of the war, but the spiral of escalation we are locked into is not one-sided. It is the result of escalatory actions by both sides, and the huge arms build-up authorized by this amendment is a dangerously provocative escalation by the US side that will increase the danger of the world war that Biden has promised to avoid.

After the catastrophic wars and ballooning US military budgets of the past 25 years, we should be wise by now to the escalatory nature of the vicious spiral in which we are caught. And after flirting with Armageddon for 45 years in the last Cold War, we should also be wise to the existential danger of engaging in this kind of brinkmanship with nuclear-armed Russia. So, if we are wise, we will oppose the Reed/Inhofe Amendment.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post New Congressional Amendment Benefits War Profiteers, Risks World War III appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the first weeks of the war, the United States and NATO countries sent weapons to Ukraine to try to prevent Russia from quickly defeating Ukraine’s armed forces and conducting a US-style “regime change” in Kyiv. But since that goal was achieved, the only goals that President Zelenskyy and his Western allies have publicly proclaimed are to recover all of pre-2014 Ukraine and decisively defeat and weaken Russia. 

These are aspirational goals at best, which require sacrificing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainian lives, regardless of the outcome. Even worse, if they should come close to succeeding, they are likely to trigger a nuclear war, making this the all-time epitome of a “no-win predicament.”

At the end of May, President Biden responded to probing questions about the contradictions in his Ukraine policy from The New York Times Editorial Board, replying that the United States was sending weapons so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

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But when Biden wrote that, Ukraine had no position at any negotiating table, thanks mainly to the conditions that Biden and NATO leaders attached to their support. In April, after Ukraine negotiated a 15-point peace plan for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a peaceful future as a neutral country, the United States and United Kingdom refused to provide Ukraine with the security guarantees that were a critical part of the agreement. 

As now disgraced British prime minister Boris Johnson told President Zelenskyy in Kyiv on April 9th, the “collective West” was “in it for the long run,” meaning a long war against Russia, but wanted no part in any agreement between Ukraine and Russia. 

Undeclared goals for perennial war?

In May, Russian forces advanced through Donbas, forcing Zelenskyy to admit, by June 2nd, that Russia now controlled 20% of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory, leaving Ukraine in a weaker, not a stronger position.

Six months after Secretary Austin declared in April that the new goal of the war was to decisively defeat and “weaken” Russia, President Biden is rejecting calls for a new peace initiative. So the US and the UK had no reservations about intervening to kill peace talks in April. Now that they’ve sold President Zelenskyy on fighting an endless war, Biden insists that he has no say in the matter if Zelenskyy rejects peace negotiations. 

But it is axiomatic that wars end at the negotiating table, as Biden acknowledged to The New York Times. The perennial thorny question for war leaders is “When to negotiate?” The problem is that, when your side seems to be winning, you have little incentive to stop fighting. But when you appear to be losing, there is no incentive to negotiate from a weak position either, as long as you believe that the tide of war will sooner or later shift in your favor and improve your position. That was the hope on which Johnson and Biden convinced Zelenskyy to stake his country’s future in April.

Now Ukraine has launched localized counter-offensives and recovered parts of its territory. Russia has responded by throwing hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into the war and starting to systematically demolish Ukraine’s electricity grid.

The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives – which he has no moral claim over – that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas Russia controls. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which US taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and millions of Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war. 

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Thanks to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the US mass media, most Americans have no inkling of the deceptive way that Biden and his bubble-headed British allies cornered Zelenskyy into a suicidal decision to abandon promising peace negotiations in favor of a long war that will destroy his country.

The horrors of the war, the contradictions in Western policy, the blowback on European energy supplies, the specter of famine stalking the Global South and the rising danger of nuclear war are provoking a worldwide chorus of voices urgently calling for peace in Ukraine.

The media’s complicit silence

If you’re on a media diet of the thin gruel that passes for news in America these days, you may not have heard the calls for peace from UN Secretary General Guterres, Pope Francis or the leaders of 66 countries speaking at the UN General Assembly in September, representing the majority of the world’s population.     

But there are also Americans calling for peace. From across the political spectrum, from retired military officers and diplomats to journalists and academics, there are “adults in the room” who recognize the dangerous contradictions of US policy on Ukraine. They are joining leaders from around the world in calling for diplomacy and peace.

Jack Matlock served as the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, from 1987 to 1991, after a 35-year career as a Soviet specialist in the US Foreign Service. Matlock was at the embassy in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis, where he translated critical messages between US President John Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

On October 17, 2022, in an article in Responsible Statecraft titled “Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine,” Ambassador Matlock wrote that as principal arms supplier to Ukraine and the sponsor of the most punitive sanctions on Russia, the United States “is obligated to help find a way out” of this crisis. The article concluded, “Until… the fighting stops, and serious negotiations get underway, the world is headed for an outcome where we all are losers.”

Another veteran US diplomat who has spoken out for diplomacy over Ukraine is Rose Gottemoeller, the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 after she served as President Obama’s senior adviser on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Gottemoeller recently wrote in the Financial Times that she sees no military solution to the crisis in Ukraine, but that “discreet talks” could lead to the kind of “quiet bargain” that resolved the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.

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On the military side, Admiral Mike Mullen was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011. After President Biden chatted at a fundraising party about the war in Ukraine leading to nuclear “Armageddon,” ABC interviewed Mullen about the danger of nuclear war. “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen replied. “It’s got to end, and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was the director of the Earth Institute and now the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He has been a consistent voice for peace in Ukraine ever since the invasion. In a recent article on September 26, titled “The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control,” Sachs quoted President Kennedy in June 1963, uttering what Sachs called “the essential truth that can keep us alive today:”

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” said JFK. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Sachs concluded, “It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO… The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.”

Even Henry Kissinger, whose own war crimes are well documented, has spoken out on the senselessness of current US policy. Kissinger told the Wall Street Journal in August, “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

The fiasco of the progressives’ withdrawn letter

In the US Congress, after every single Democrat voted for a virtual blank check for arming Ukraine in May, with no provision for peacemaking, Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal and 29 other progressive Democratic Representatives recently signed a letter to President Biden, urging him to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority.” 

Unfortunately, the backlash within their own party was so blistering that within 24 hours they withdrew the letter. Siding with calls for peace and diplomacy from all over the world is still not an idea whose time has come in the halls of power in Washington DC.

This is an extremely dangerous moment in history. Americans are waking up to the reality that this war threatens us with the existential danger of nuclear war, a danger most Americans thought we had survived once and for all at the end of the First Cold War. Even if we manage to avoid nuclear war, the impact of a long, bloody war will destroy Ukraine and kill millions of Ukrainians, cause humanitarian catastrophes across the Global South, and trigger a long-lasting global economic crisis. 

That will relegate all humanity’s urgent priorities – from tackling the climate crisis to hunger, poverty and disease – to the back-burner for the foreseeable future.

There is an alternative. We can and must resolve this conflict through peaceful diplomacy and negotiation, to end the killing and destruction and let the people of Ukraine live in peace.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Chorus for Peace in Ukraine Sings Louder appeared first on Fair Observer.

It is widely acknowledged that US and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of US intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with US and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.

On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020. 

It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.  

Constant escalation has created a no-win situation

Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. 

Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in US policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.  

In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20%.

How have we gone from ruling out direct US and NATO involvement in the war to US involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20% chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?    

The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat? 

And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves US and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.

The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls—but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.

Mistakes by the West have escalated conflict

Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between US and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.

But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.

That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.   

US Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.   

On May 23, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new US-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from The New York Times (NYT) Editorial Board. A NYT editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new US policy:

“Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”

The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”

President Joe Biden leaves many questions unanswered

A week later, Biden replied to the NYT in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” 

Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited US support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the NYT asked about the US endgame in Ukraine, the limits to US involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.

As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.  

The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the US military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Big Danger After Biden’s Broken Promise on Russia appeared first on Fair Observer.

Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine. Wars do not follow scripts, and Russia, Ukraine, the US, NATO and the EU have all encountered unexpected setbacks.

Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict.

Russia-Ukraine Negotiations Almost Succeeded

For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the framework and the political will were there.

Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.

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The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on self-determination for the people of those regions. The future security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its territory.

On March 27, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a national TV audience, “Our goal is obvious—peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible.” He laid out his “red lines” for the negotiations on TV to reassure his people he would not concede too much, and he promised them a referendum on the neutrality agreement before it would take effect.

Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise to conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each month that a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes entrenched and positions harden.

The US and UK Torpedoed Chances of Peace

The abandonment of that early peace initiative stands as one of the great tragedies of this conflict, and the full scale of that tragedy will only become clear over time as the war rages on and its dreadful consequences accumulate.

Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the UK and US governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace. During the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “surprise visit” to Kyiv on April 9th, he reportedly told Zelenskyy that the UK was “in it for the long run,” that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that the “collective West” saw a chance to “press” Russia and was determined to make the most of it.

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The same message was reiterated by US Defense Secretary Austin, who followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25th and made it clear that the US and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but were now committed to using the war to “weaken” Russia. Turkish diplomats told retired British diplomat Craig Murray that these messages from the United States and United Kingdom killed their otherwise promising efforts to mediate a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution.

In response to the invasion, much of the public in Western countries accepted the moral imperative of supporting Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression. But the decision by the US and UK governments to kill peace talks and prolong the war, with all the horror, pain and misery that entails for the people of Ukraine, has neither been explained to the public, nor endorsed by a consensus of NATO countries. Johnson claimed to be speaking for the “collective West,” but in May, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy all made public statements that contradicted his claim.

Addressing the European Parliament on May 9, French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “We are not at war with Russia,” and that Europe’s duty was “to stand with Ukraine to achieve the ceasefire, then build peace.”

Meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House on May 10, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi told reporters, “People… want to think about the possibility of bringing a ceasefire and starting again some credible negotiations. That’s the situation right now. I think that we have to think deeply about how to address this.”

After speaking by phone with President Vladimir Putin on May 13, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted that he told Putin, “There must be a ceasefire in Ukraine as quickly as possible.”

But American and British officials continued to pour cold water on talk of renewed peace negotiations. The policy shift in April appears to have involved a commitment by Zelenskyy that Ukraine, like the UK and US, was “in it for the long run” and would fight on, possibly for many years, in exchange for the promise of tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons shipments, military training, satellite intelligence and Western covert operations.

Misgivings About the War Increase in the US

As the implications of this fateful agreement became clearer, dissent began to emerge, even within the US business and media establishment. On May 19, the very day that Congress appropriated $40 billion for Ukraine, including $19 billion for new weapons shipments, with not a single dissenting Democratic vote, The New York Times (NYT) editorial board penned a lead editorial titled, “The war in Ukraine is getting complicated, and America isn’t ready.”

The NYT asked serious unanswered questions about US goals in Ukraine, and tried to reel back unrealistic expectations built up by three months of one-sided Western propaganda, not least from its own pages. The board acknowledged, “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.… Unrealistic expectations could draw [the United States and NATO] ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war.”

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More recently, warhawk Henry Kissinger, of all people, publicly questioned the entire US policy of reviving its Cold War with Russia and China and the absence of a clear purpose or endgame short of World War III. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger told The Wall Street Journal.

US leaders have inflated the danger that Russia poses to its neighbors and the West, deliberately treating it as an enemy with whom diplomacy or cooperation would be futile, rather than as a neighbor raising understandable defensive concerns over NATO expansion and its gradual encirclement by US and allied military forces.

Far from aiming to deter Russia from dangerous or destabilizing actions, successive administrations of both parties have sought every means available to “overextend and unbalance” Russia, all the while misleading the American public into supporting an ever-escalating and unthinkably dangerous conflict between our two countries, which together possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

After six months of a US and NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, we are at a crossroads. Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each day that passes.

The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end, find reasonable political solutions to Ukraine’s political divisions, and seek a peaceful framework for the underlying geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia and China.

Campaigns to demonize, threaten and pressure our enemies can only serve to cement hostility and set the stage for war. People of good will can bridge even the most entrenched divisions and overcome existential dangers, as long as they are willing to talk — and listen — to their adversaries.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Peace Talks Essential as War Rages on in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

As we recently reported, the US and its allies have dropped over 337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone. Senior US Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first 24 hours of US bombing in Iraq in 2003.

The US-led campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria bombarded those countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, the heaviest bombing anywhere in decades. US military officers told Amnesty International that the US assault on Raqqa in Syria was also the heaviest artillery bombardment anywhere since the Vietnam War. 

Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the US and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million. About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.

Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A UN assessment mission reported that 70-80% of buildings were destroyed or damaged. Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent.

How Not to Prevent More Massacres

The Pentagon promised to review its policies on civilian casualties in the wake of these massacres, and commissioned the Rand Corporation to conduct a study titled, “Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications For Future Conflicts,” which has now been made public. 

Even as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the premise of the Rand Corp study is that US forces will continue to wage wars that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas, and that they must therefore try to understand how they can do so without killing quite so many civilians.

The study runs over 100 pages, but it never comes to grips with the central problem, which is the inevitably devastating and deadly impacts of firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas like Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Sanaa in Yemen or Gaza in Palestine.  

The development of “precision weapons” has demonstrably failed to prevent these massacres. The US unveiled its new “smart bombs” during the First Gulf War in 1990-1991. But they in fact comprised only 7% of the 88,000 tons of bombs it dropped on Iraq, reducing “a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a pre-industrial age nation” according to a UN survey.. 

Instead of publishing actual data on the accuracy of these weapons, the Pentagon has maintained a sophisticated propaganda campaign to convey the impression that they are 100% accurate and can strike a target like a house or apartment building without harming civilians in the surrounding area. 

However, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the editor of an arms trade journal that reviews the performance of air-launched weapons, estimated that 20 to 25% of US “precision” weapons missed their targets. 

Even when they do hit their target, these weapons do not perform like space weapons in a video game. The most commonly used bombs in the US arsenal are 500 lb bombs, with an explosive charge of 89 kilos of Tritonal. According to UN safety data, the blast alone from that explosive charge is 100% lethal up to a radius of 10 meters, and will break every window within 100 meters. 

That is just the blast effect. Deaths and horrific injuries are also caused by collapsing buildings and flying shrapnel and debris – concrete, metal, glass, wood etc. 

A strike is considered accurate if it lands within a “circular error probable,” usually 10 meters around the object being targeted. So in an urban area, if you take into account the “circular error probable,” the blast radius, flying debris and collapsing buildings, even a strike assessed as “accurate” is very likely to kill and injure civilians. 

US officials draw a moral distinction between this “unintentional” killing and the “deliberate” killing of civilians by terrorists. But the late historian Howard Zinn challenged this distinction in a letter to the New York Times in 2007. He wrote,

“These words are misleading because they assume an action is either ‘deliberate’ or ‘unintentional.’ There is something in between, for which the word is ‘inevitable.’ If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not ‘intentional.”’ 

Does that difference exonerate you morally? The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”

US Impunity and Western Double Standards

Americans are rightfully horrified when they see civilians killed by Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but they are generally not quite so horrified, and more likely to accept official justifications, when they hear that civilians are killed by US forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Gaza. The Western corporate media play a key role in this, by showing us corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, but shielding us from equally disturbing images of people killed by US or allied forces.

While Western leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for war crimes, they have raised no such clamor to prosecute US officials. Yet during the US military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) documented persistent and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions by US forces, including of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention that protects civilians from the impacts of war and military occupation.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups documented systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, including cases in which US troops tortured prisoners to death. 

Although torture was approved by US officials all the way up to the White House, no officer above the rank of major was ever held accountable for a torture death in Afghanistan or Iraq. The harshest punishment handed down for torturing a prisoner to death was a five-month jail sentence, although that is a capital offense under the US War Crimes Act.  

In a 2007 human rights report that described widespread killing of civilians by US occupation forces, UNAMI wrote, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.” 

The report demanded “that all credible allegations of unlawful killings be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force.”

Instead of investigating, the US has actively covered up its war crimes. A tragic example is the 2019 massacre in the Syrian town of Baghuz, where a special US military operations unit dropped massive bombs on a group of mainly women and children, killing about 70. The military not only failed to acknowledge the botched attack but even bulldozed the blast site to cover it up. Only after a New York Times exposé years later did the military even admit that the strike took place.  

So it is ironic to hear US President Joe Biden call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to face a war crimes trial, when the US covers up its own crimes, fails to hold its own senior officials accountable for war crimes and still rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2020, Donald Trump went so far as to impose US sanctions on the most senior ICC prosecutors for investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan.

The Rand study repeatedly claims that US forces have “a deeply ingrained commitment to the law of war.” But the destruction of Mosul, Raqqa and other cities and the history of US disdain for the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and international courts tell a very different story.

We agree with the Rand report’s conclusion that, “DoD’s weak institutional learning for civilian harm issues meant that past lessons went unheeded, increasing the risks to civilians in Raqqa.” However, we take issue with the study’s failure to recognize that many of the glaring contradictions it documents are consequences of the fundamentally criminal nature of this entire operation, under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the existing laws of war. 

We reject the whole premise of this study, that US forces should continue to conduct urban bombardments that inevitably kill thousands of civilians, and must therefore learn from this experience so that they will kill and maim fewer civilians the next time they destroy a city like Raqqa or Mosul.

The ugly truth behind these US massacres is that the impunity senior US military and civilian officials have enjoyed for past war crimes encouraged them to believe they could get away with bombing cities in Iraq and Syria to rubble, inevitably killing tens of thousands of civilians. 

They have so far been proven right, but US contempt for international law and the failure of the global community to hold the US to account are destroying the very “rules-based order” of international law that US and Western leaders claim to cherish. 

As we call urgently for a ceasefire, for peace and for accountability for war crimes in Ukraine, we should say “Never Again!” to the bombardment of cities and civilian areas, whether they are in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or anywhere else, and whether the aggressor is Russia, the US, Israel or Saudi Arabia.

And we should never forget that the supreme war crime is war itself, the crime of aggression, because, as the judges declared at Nuremberg, it “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It is easy to point fingers at others, but we will not stop war until we force our own leaders to live up to the principle spelled out by US Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson:

““If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the US does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.””

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post From Mosul and Raqqa to Mariupol and Bucha, Killing Civilians Is a Crime appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the context of the Russian invasion, the post-2014 Ukrainian government’s problematic relationship with extreme right-wing parties and neo-Nazi groups has become an incendiary element on both sides of the propaganda war, with Russia exaggerating it as a pretext for war and the West trying to sweep it under the rug. 

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The reality behind the propaganda is that the West and its Ukrainian allies have opportunistically exploited and empowered the extreme right in Ukraine, first to pull off a coup amidst anti-government protests in 2014 and then by redirecting it to fight separatists in eastern Ukraine. And far from “denazifying” Ukraine, the Russian invasion is likely to further empower Ukrainian and international neo-Nazis, as the conflict attracts fighters from around the world and provides them with weapons, military training and the combat experience that many of them are hungry for.

The Extreme Right in Ukraine

Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Svoboda party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the US-backed coup in February 2014. During an infamously leaked phone conversation before the Ukrainian government’s ouster, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the new government. 

At that time, previously peaceful protests in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, gave way to pitched battles with police and armed marches to try to break through barricades and reach parliament. Members of Svoboda and the newly-formed Right Sector militia, led by Dmytro Yarosh, battled officers, spearheaded marches and raided a police armory for weapons. By mid-February 2014, these men with guns were the de facto leaders of the Maidan protests.

We will never know what kind of political transition peaceful protests alone would have led to in Ukraine or how different the new government would have been if a peaceful process had been allowed to take its course, without interference by the US or violent right-wing extremists. But it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the February 21 agreement negotiated by European foreign ministers, under which then-President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and the Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on parliament that overthrew the government.

Ukrainian Leaders

Since 1991, Ukrainian elections had swung back and forth between leaders like Yanukovych, who is from Donetsk and had close ties with Russia, and Western-backed leaders like Viktor Yushchenko, who was elected in 2005 after the Orange Revolution that followed a disputed election. Ukraine’s endemic corruption tainted every government, and public disillusionment with whichever leader and party won power led to a see-saw between Western and Russian-aligned factions.

In 2014, Nuland and the US State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as prime minister of the new government. He lasted two years, until he, too, lost his job due to endless corruption scandals. Petro Poroshenko, the new president, lasted a bit longer, until 2019, even after his personal tax evasion schemes were exposed in the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers.

When Yatsenyuk became prime minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as deputy prime minister, and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Andriy Parubiy — who founded the fascist Social National Party that went on to become Svoboda — was appointed chairman of parliament, a post he held for the next five years. Tyahnybok ran for president in 2014, but he only got 1.2% of the votes and was not reelected to parliament.

Ukrainian voters turned their backs on the extreme right in the 2014 elections, reducing Svoboda’s 10.4% share of the national vote in 2012 to 4.7%. Svoboda lost support in areas where it held control of local governments but had failed to live up to its promises, and its support was split now that it was no longer the only party running on explicitly anti-Russian slogans and rhetoric.

Azov Battalion

After Yanukovich was toppled, the Right Sector helped to consolidate the new order by attacking and breaking up anti-coup protests, in what Yarosh described to Newsweek as a war to “cleanse the country” of pro-Russian protesters. This campaign climaxed on May 2, 2014, with the massacre of 42 protesters in a fiery inferno, after they took shelter from Right Sector attackers in the Trades Unions House in Odessa.

After protests evolved into declarations of independence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas in the east, the extreme right in Ukraine shifted gear to full-scale armed combat. The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for fighting its own people, so the government formed new National Guard units to do so. The Right Sector formed a unit, and neo-Nazis also dominated the Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov Battalion, which was incorporated into the National Guard in 2014, that led the new government’s assault on the self-declared republics in eastern Ukraine and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces. 

The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics of Donbas, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014.

US Representative Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end military aid to the Azov Battalion. In September 2017, the House amended the Defense Appropriations Act to ban military aid to the militia, but it is not clear how effective it ban has been. Since the Azov Battalion is fully integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces, it would take targeted efforts by US forces in Ukraine to ensure it does not receive the same weapons and support as other units. Today, in the midst of a war and a huge influx of US military aid, that would seem to be almost impossible.

In 2019, the Soufan Center, which tracks terrorist and extremist groups around the world, warned, “The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.” The center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others. 

Violent foreign extremists with links to Azov include Brenton Tarrant, who massacred 51 worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019, and several members of the US Rise Above Movement who were prosecuted for attacking counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Other Azov veterans have returned to Australia, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the UK and other countries, according to the Soufan Center.   

Despite Svoboda’s declining success in national elections, neo-Nazi and extreme nationalist groups linked to the Azov Battalion have maintained power on the street in Ukraine and in local politics in the nationalist heartland around Lviv, a city in the west of the country. After President Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in 2019, the extreme right allegedly threatened him with removal from office, or even death, if he negotiated with separatist leaders from Donbas and followed through on the Minsk Protocol. Zelensky ran for election as a peace candidate, but under threat from the right, he refused to even talk to Donbas representatives, whom he dismissed as terrorists.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States reversed Barack Obama’s ban on weapons sales to Ukraine. Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric raised new fears in Donbas and Russia that he was building up Ukraine’s forces for a new offensive to retake Donetsk and Luhansk from separatists.  

Neoliberalism in Ukraine

The civil war in eastern Ukraine, combined with the government’s neoliberal economic policies, created fertile ground for the extreme right. The new government imposed more of the same neoliberal “shock therapy” that was imposed throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s. In 2015, Ukraine received a $40-billion IMF bailout. Part of the deal, Tony Wood explains in an article for the N+1 website, would include privatizing state-owned enterprises, reducing public sector employment by 20%, cutting health-care benefits and cutting investment in public education.

Coupled with Ukraine’s endemic corruption, these policies led to the profitable looting of state assets by the corrupt ruling class and to falling living standards and austerity measures for everybody else. The post-2014 government upheld Poland as its model, but the reality was closer to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. Ukraine’s GDP plummeted between 2012 and 2016, making it the poorest country in Europe.

As elsewhere, the failures of neoliberalism have fueled the rise of right-wing extremism and racism. Now, the war with Russia promises to provide thousands of alienated young men from around the world with military training and combat experience, which they can then take home to terrorize their own countries.

The Soufan Center has compared the Azov Battalion’s international networking strategy to that of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. US and NATO support for the Azov Battalion poses similar risks as their support for al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria 10 years ago. Those chickens quickly came home to roost, of course.

Right now, Ukrainians are united in their resistance to Russia’s invasion. But we should not be surprised when the Western alliance with extreme right-wing proxy forces in Ukraine, including the infusion of billions of dollars in sophisticated weapons, results in similarly violent and destructive blowback.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Presence of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.

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US President Joe Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion on February 24, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in the east of Ukraine. Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, consistent with incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. With nearly 700 OSCE ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as American and British officials claimed.

Whether the shell-fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war in eastern Ukraine or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend the DPR and LPR from those attacks, making it disproportionate and illegal. 

The New Cold War

In the larger context, though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

In December 2021, after a summit between Biden and his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with nine articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member, which is not on the table in the foreseeable future in any case. But the Biden administration brushed off Russia’s entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations.

So, why was negotiating a mutual security treaty so unacceptable that Biden was ready to risk thousands of Ukrainian lives — although not a single American life — rather than attempt to find common ground? What does that say about the relative value that Biden and his colleagues place on American vs. Ukrainian lives? And what is this strange position that the United States occupies in today’s world that permits a US president to risk so many Ukrainian lives without asking Americans to share their pain and sacrifice? 

The breakdown in US relations with Russia and the failure of Biden’s inflexible brinkmanship precipitated this war, and yet his policy externalizes all the pain and suffering so that Americans can, as another wartime president once said, “go about their business” and keep shopping. America’s European allies, who must now house hundreds of thousands of refugees and face spiraling energy prices, should be wary of falling in line behind this kind of “leadership” before they, too, end up on the front line.

NATO

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved. NATO should have been too since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes. 

In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovan President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial at The Hague charged with committing appalling war crimes under the cover of NATO bombing, including murder, torture and enforced disappearances. 

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Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. At the time, US Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in 30 declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.

The INF Treaty

After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has predictably come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. US nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the United Kingdom already have their own nuclear arsenals. US “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border. 

Another Russian request in its December proposal was for the US to join a moratorium on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. In 2019, both the United States and Russia withdrew from a 1987 treaty, under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Donald Trump, the US president at the time, pulled out of the INF treaty on the advice of his national security adviser, John Bolton.

None of this can justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine. 

Neutrality

There are many successful precedents, like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Costa Rica. Or take the case of Vietnam. It has a common border and serious maritime disputes with China, but Vietnam has resisted US efforts to embroil it in its Cold War with Beijing. Vietnam remains committed to its long-standing “four-nos” policy: no military alliances, no affiliation with one country against another, no foreign military bases and no threats or uses of force. 

The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres or a special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the United Nations. This will not be easy. One of the still unlearned lessons of other conflicts is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end war once it has started.

If or when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow all the people of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other NATO members to live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others. 

The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. 

We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States has committed in its own illegal wars.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The US Leaves Ukraine to Fight New Cold War With Russia appeared first on Fair Observer.

There are one or two positive developments, such as the renewal of Barack Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s initiative for a UN-led peace process in Afghanistan, where the United States is finally turning to peace as a last resort, after 20 years lost in the graveyard of empires.

By and large, though, President Joe Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past 20 years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of US foreign policy. In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Obama and Donald Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but, for the most part, delivered more endless war. 

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By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 and the normalization of relations with Cuba in 2014. So, progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice-president would lead him to quickly restore and build on the achievements of his former boss with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.

Instead, the Biden administration seems firmly entrenched behind the walls of hostility Trump built between America and its neighbors — from his renewed Cold War against China and Russia to his brutal sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and dozens of countries around the world. There is also still no word on cuts to a military budget that keeps on growing.    

Despite endless Democratic condemnations of Trump, President Biden’s foreign policy so far shows no substantive change from the policies of the past four years. Here are 10 of the lowlights.

1) Rejoining the Iran Nuclear Agreement

The administration’s failure to immediately rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — aka the Iran nuclear deal — as Senator Bernie Sanders promised to do if he had become president, has turned an easy win for Biden’s promised commitment to diplomacy into an entirely avoidable diplomatic crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 and the imposition of brutal “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran were broadly condemned by Democrats and US allies alike. But now, Biden is making new demands on Iran to appease hawks who opposed the agreement all along, risking an outcome in which he will fail to reinstate the JCPOA. As a result, Trump’s policy will effectively become Biden’s policy. The administration should reenter the deal immediately, without preconditions.

2) Waging Bombing Campaigns

Also following in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has escalated tensions with Iran and Iraq by attacking and killing Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria who played a critical role in the war against the Islamic State (IS) group. US airstrikes have predictably failed to end rocket attacks on deeply unpopular American bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution to close over a year ago.

US attacks in Syria have been condemned as illegal by members of Biden’s own party, reinvigorating efforts to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that presidents have misused for 20 years. Other airstrikes the Biden administration is conducting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are shrouded in secrecy, since it has not resumed publishing the monthly airpower summaries that every administration has published since 2004 but which Trump discontinued in 2020.

3) Refusing to Hold Mohammed bin Salman Accountable

Human rights activists were grateful that President Biden released the intelligence report on the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that confirmed what we already knew: that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved the killing. Yet when it came to holding him accountable, Biden choked. 

At the very least, the administration could have imposed the same sanctions on Mohammed bin Salman, including asset freezes and travel bans, that the US imposed on lower-level figures involved in the murder. Instead, like Trump, Biden is wedded to the Saudi dictatorship and its diabolical crown prince.

4) Recognizing Juan Guaido as President of Venezuela

The Biden administration missed an opportunity to establish a new approach toward Venezuela when it decided to continue to recognize Juan Guaido as “interim president,” ruled out talks with the Maduro government and appeared to be freezing out the moderate opposition that participates in elections. 

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The administration also said it was in “no rush” to lift the Trump sanctions. This was despite a recent study from the Government Accountability Office detailing the negative impact of sanctions on the economy and a scathing preliminary report by UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan, who noted their “devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela.” The lack of dialogue with all political actors in Venezuela risks entrenching a policy of regime change and economic warfare for years to come, similar to the failed US policy toward Cuba that has lasted for 60 years.

5) Following Trump on Cuba Instead of Obama

On Cuba, the Trump administration overturned all the progress toward normal relations achieved by President Obama. This included sanctioning the Cuban tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members, putting Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and sabotaging the country’s international medical missions, which were a major source of revenue for its health system.

We expected Biden to immediately start unraveling Trump’s confrontational policies. But catering to Cuban exiles in Florida for domestic political gain apparently takes precedence over a humane and rational policy toward Cuba.

Biden should instead start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, make travel easier and work with the Cuban health system in the fight against COVID-19, among other measures.

6) Ramping Up the Cold War With China

Biden seems committed to Trump’s self-defeating Cold War and arms race with China, talking tough and ratcheting up tensions that have led to racist hate crimes against East Asian people in the United States.

But it is the US that is militarily surrounding and threatening China, not the other way round. As former President Jimmy Carter patiently explained to Trump, while the United States has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21^st-century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty.

The greatest danger of this moment in history, short of all-out nuclear war, is that this aggressive military posture not only justifies unlimited US military budgets, but it will gradually force China to convert its economic success into military power and follow the Americans down the tragic path of military imperialism.

7) Failing to Lift Sanctions During a Pandemic

One of the legacies of the Trump administration is the devastating use of US sanctions on countries around the world, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. UN officials have condemned them as “crimes against humanity” and compared them to “medieval sieges.” 

Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden could easily lift them. Even before taking power, his team announced a thorough review, but months later, it has yet to make a move. 

Unilateral sanctions that affect entire populations are an illegal form of coercion — like military intervention, coups and covert operations — that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They are especially cruel and deadly during a pandemic, and the Biden administration should take immediate action by lifting broad sectoral sanctions to ensure every country can adequately respond to the health crisis.

8) Doing Enough for Yemen

Biden appeared to partially fulfill his promise to stop US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen when he announced that the US would stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia. But he has yet to explain what that means. Which weapons sales has he canceled?

We think he should stop all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, enforcing the Leahy Law, which prohibits military assistance to forces that commit “gross human rights violations,” and the Arms Export Control Act, under which imported US weapons may be used only for legitimate self-defense. There should be no exceptions to these US laws for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt or other allies around the world.

The US should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and rebuild its devastated country. A recent donor conference netted just $1.7 billion in pledges, less than half the $3.85 billion needed. Biden should restore and expand funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American financial support to the UN, the World Health Organization and World Food Program relief operations in Yemen. He should also press the Saudis to reopen the air and seaports and throw US diplomatic weight behind the efforts of UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to negotiate a ceasefire.

9) Backing Diplomacy With North Korea

Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy. It became an obstacle to the diplomatic process underway between Korean leaders Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Moon Jae-in of South Korea. So far, Biden has continued this policy of Draconian sanctions and threats.

The Biden administration should revive the diplomatic process with confidence-building measures. This includes opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families, permitting US humanitarian organizations to resume their work when COVID-19 conditions permit, and halting US-South Korea military exercises and B-2 nuclear bomb flights.

Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the US side and a commitment to negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. This would pave the way for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire and deserve.

10) Reducing Military Spending

At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved. Instead of a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” the military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of September 11, 2001, to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011, the US accounted for nearly half of global military spending, far outstripping its own peak during the Cold War.

Now, the military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for further record military budgets that are setting the stage for World War III.

Biden must dial back US conflicts with China and Russia and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with at least the 10% cut that 93 representatives and 23 senators already voted for in 2020. In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Representative Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the US military budget, to free up resources we sorely need to invest in health care, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.

A Progressive Way Forward

These policies, common to Democratic and Republican administrations, not only inflict pain and suffering on millions of our neighbors in other countries, but they also deliberately cause instability that can at any time escalate into war, plunge a formerly functioning state into chaos or spawn a secondary crisis whose human consequences will be even worse than the original one.

All these policies involve deliberate efforts to unilaterally impose the political will of US leaders on other people and countries, by methods that consistently only cause more pain and suffering to the people they claim — or pretend — they want to help.

President Biden should jettison the worst of Obama’s and Trump’s policies and instead pick the best of them. Trump, recognizing the unpopularity of US military interventions, began the process of bringing American troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, which Biden should follow through on.  

Obama’s diplomatic successes with Cuba, Iran and Russia demonstrated that negotiating with US enemies to make peace, improve relations and make the world a safer place is a perfectly viable alternative to trying to force them to do what the United States wants by bombing, starving and besieging their people. This is, in fact, the core principle of the United Nations Charter, and it should be the core principle of Biden’s foreign policy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post 10 Problems With US Foreign Policy Under Biden appeared first on Fair Observer.

The military’s incredible record of systematic failure — most recently its final trouncing by the Taliban after 20 years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan — cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in US foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress’ budget priorities.

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Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation’s resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection. Members of Congress still see it as a “safe” political call to carelessly whip out their rubber-stamps and vote for however many hundreds of billions in funding that lobbyists have persuaded the Armed Services Committee to cough up. 

National Security

Let’s make no mistake about this: Congress’ choice to keep investing in a massive, ineffective and absurdly expensive war machine has nothing to do with “national security” as most people understand it or “defense” as the dictionary defines it. US society does face critical threats to our security, including the climate crisis, systemic racism, erosion of voting rights, gun violence, grave inequalities and the corporate hijacking of political power. But one problem we fortunately do not have is the threat of attack or invasion by a rampant global aggressor or, in fact, by any other country at all. 

Maintaining a war machine that outspends the next 12 or 13 largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe. This is because each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States’ overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to US interests anywhere in the world — even when there is no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of US military power.

While the challenges we face in this century require a genuine commitment to international cooperation and diplomacy, Congress allocates only around $50 billion, less than 10% of the Pentagon budget, to the diplomatic corps of our government: the State Department. Even worse, both Democratic and Republican administrations keep filling top diplomatic posts with officials indoctrinated and steeped in policies of war and coercion, with scant experience and meager skills in the peaceful diplomacy we so desperately need. 

This only perpetuates a failed foreign policy based on false choices between economic sanctions that UN officials have compared to “medieval sieges,” coups that destabilize countries and regions for decades, and wars and bombing campaigns that kill millions of people and leave cities in rubble, like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

“Peace Dividend”

The end of the Cold War was a golden opportunity for the United States to reduce its forces and military budget to match its legitimate defense needs. The American public naturally expected and hoped for a “peace dividend.” Even veteran Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee in 1991 that military spending could safely be cut by 50% over the next ten years.    

But no such cut happened. US officials instead set out to exploit the post-Cold War “power dividend,” a huge military imbalance in favor of the United States, by developing rationales for using military force more freely and widely around the world. During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

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In 1999, as secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, Albright got her wish, running roughshod over the UN Charter with an illegal war to carve out an independent Kosovo from the ruins of Yugoslavia. The UN Charter clearly prohibits the threat or use of military force except in cases of self-defense or when the UN Security Council takes military action “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” This was neither. When UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Albright his government was “having problems with our lawyers” over NATO’s illegal war plan, Albright crassly told him to “get new lawyers.” 

Twenty-two years later, Kosovo is one of the poorest places in Europe and its independence is still not recognized by many countries. Hashim Thaci, Albright’s hand-picked main ally in Kosovo and later its president, is awaiting trial in an international court at The Hague, charged with war crimes, murder, torture and enforced disappearances under cover of NATO bombing in 1999.

Clinton and Albright’s gruesome war set the precedent for more illegal US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, with equally devastating and horrific results. But America’s failed wars have not led Congress or successive administrations to seriously rethink the US decision to rely on illegal threats and uses of military force to project American power all over the world, nor have they reined in the trillions of dollars invested in these imperial ambitions. 

Instead, in the upside-down world of institutionally corrupt US politics, a generation of failed and pointlessly destructive wars have had the perverse effect of normalizing even more expensive military budgets than during the Cold War. They have also reduced congressional debate to questions of how many more of each useless weapons system they should force US taxpayers to foot the bill for.

The Military-Industrial Congressional Complex

It seems that no amount of killing, torture, mass destruction or lives ruined in the real world can shake the militaristic delusions of America’s political class, as long as the “military-industrial-congressional complex” — reportedly the original wording of Dwight Eisenhower’s speech — is reaping the benefits. 

Today, most political and media references to the military-industrial complex refer only to the arms industry as a self-serving corporate interest group on a par with Wall Street, Big Pharma or the fossil fuel industry. But in his farewell address in 1961, Eisenhower explicitly pointed to, not just the arms industry, but the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” Eisenhower was just as worried about the anti-democratic impact of the military as the arms industry. Weeks before his speech, Melvin A. Goodman claims, Eisenhower told his senior advisers, “God help this country when somebody sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” His fears have been realized in every subsequent presidency.

According to Milton Eisenhower, the president’s brother, who helped him draft his farewell address, Ike also wanted to talk about the “revolving door.” Early drafts of his speech, Goodman writes, referred to “a permanent, war-based industry,” with “flag and general officers retiring at an early age to take positions in the war-based industrial complex, shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” He wanted to warn that steps must be taken to ensure “that the ‘merchants of death’ do not come to dictate national policy.” 

As Eisenhower feared, the careers of figures like Generals Lloyd Austin and Jim Mattis now span all branches of the corrupt military-industrial complex conglomerate: commanding invasion and occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; then donning suits and ties to sell weapons to new generals who served under them as majors and colonels; and finally reemerging from the same revolving door as cabinet members at the apex of American politics and government.

The Complicity of Congress

So, why does the Pentagon brass get a free pass, even as Americans feel increasingly conflicted about the arms industry? After all, it is the military that actually uses all these weapons to kill people and wreak havoc in other countries. Even as it loses war after war overseas, the US military has waged a far more successful one to burnish its image in the hearts and minds of Americans and win every budget battle in Washington. 

The complicity of Congress, the third leg of the stool in Eisenhower’s original formulation, turns the annual battle of the budget into the “cakewalk” that the war in Iraq was supposed to be, with no accountability for lost wars, war crimes, civilian massacres, cost overruns or the dysfunctional military leadership that presides over it all. There is no congressional debate over the economic impact on America or the geopolitical consequences for the world of uncritically rubber-stamping huge investments in powerful weapons that will sooner or later be used to kill our neighbors and smash their countries, as they have for the past 22 years and far too often throughout our history.

If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public’s natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War of 1853-56, the Russians called British troops “lions led by donkeys.” That is an accurate description of today’s US military.  

Sixty years after the farewell address, exactly as Ike predicted, the “weight of this combination” of corrupt generals and admirals, the profitable “merchants of death” whose goods they peddle, and the senators and representatives who blindly entrust them with trillions of dollars of the public’s money, constitute the full flowering of Eisenhower’s greatest fears for our country.

Eisenhower concluded that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” That clarion call echoes through the decades and should unite Americans in every form of democratic organizing and movement building, from elections to education and advocacy to mass protests, to finally reject and dispel the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial-congressional complex.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Congress Gives the Nod to the Military-Industrial Complex appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Climate Around Climate Is Far From Sunny

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Yet the planet has, so far, only warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. We already have the technology we need to convert our energy systems to clean, renewable energy. Doing so would create millions of good jobs for people all over the world. So, in practical terms, the steps we must take are clear, achievable and urgent. 

The greatest obstacle to action that we face is our dysfunctional, neoliberal political and economic system and its control by plutocratic and corporate interests, which are determined to keep profiting from fossil fuels even at the cost of destroying the Earth’s uniquely livable climate. The climate crisis has exposed this system’s structural inability to act in the real interests of humanity, even when our very future hangs in the balance.      

Looking at COP26

So, what is the answer? Can COP26 in Glasgow be different? What could make the difference between more slick political PR and decisive action? Counting on the same politicians and fossil fuel interests (yes, they are there too) to do something different this time seems suicidal, but what is the alternative?   

Since Barack Obama’s Pied Piper leadership in Copenhagen and Paris produced a system in which individual countries set their own targets and decided how to meet them, most countries have made little progress toward the aims they set in Paris in 2015. Now, they have come to Glasgow with predetermined and inadequate pledges that, even if fulfilled, would still lead to a much hotter world by 2100.

A succession of UN and civil society reports in the lead-up to COP26 have been sounding the alarm with what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called a “thundering wake-up call” and a “code red for humanity.” In Guterres’ opening speech at COP26 on November 1, he said that “we are digging our own graves” by failing to solve this crisis.

Yet governments are still focusing on long-term goals like reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050, 2060 or even 2070. These targets are so far in the future that they can keep postponing the radical steps needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Even if they somehow stopped pumping greenhouse gases into the air, the amount of GHG in the atmosphere by 2050 would keep heating up the planet for generations. The more we load up the atmosphere with GHG, the longer their effect will last and the hotter the Earth will keep getting.

Wealthy Nations

The United States has set a shorter-term target of reducing its emissions by 50% from their peak 2005 level by 2030. But its present policies would only lead to a 17% to 25% reduction by then. The Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), which was part of the Build Back Better Act, could make up a lot of that gap by paying electric utilities to increase reliance on renewables by 4% year over year and penalizing utilities that don’t. But on the eve of COP26, US President Joe Biden dropped the CEPP from the bill under pressure from Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and their fossil fuel puppet masters.

Meanwhile, the US military, the largest institutional emitter of GHG on Earth, was exempted from any constraints whatsoever under the Paris Agreement. Peace activists in Glasgow are demanding that COP26 fix this huge black hole in global climate policy by including the US war machine’s GHG emissions, and those of other militaries, in national emissions reporting and reductions. At the same time, every penny that governments around the world have spent to address the climate crisis amounts to a small fraction of what the United States alone has spent on its nation-destroying war machine during the same period.

China now officially emits more CO2 than the United States. But a large part of China’s emissions are driven by the rest of the world’s consumption of Chinese products, and its largest customer is the United States. An MIT study in 2014 estimated that exports account for 22% of China’s carbon emissions. On a per capita consumption basis, Americans still account for three times the GHG emissions of the Chinese and double the emissions of Europeans.

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Wealthy countries have also fallen short on the commitment they made in Copenhagen in 2009 to help poorer countries tackle climate change by providing financial aid that would grow to $100 billion per year by 2020. They have provided increasing amounts, reaching $79 billion in 2019, but the failure to deliver the full amount that was promised has eroded trust between rich and poor countries. A committee headed by Canada and Germany at COP26 is charged with resolving the shortfall and restoring trust. 

When the world’s political leaders are failing so badly that they are destroying the natural world and the livable climate that sustains human civilization, it is urgent for people everywhere to get much more active, vocal and creative. The appropriate public response to governments that are ready to squander the lives of millions of people, whether by war or ecological mass suicide, is rebellion and revolution. Non-violent forms of revolution have generally proved more effective and beneficial than violent ones. 

Demanding Action

People are rising up against this corrupt neoliberal political and economic system in countries all over the world, as its savage impacts affect their lives in different ways. But the climate crisis is a universal danger to all of humanity that requires a universal, global response. 

One inspiring civil society group on the streets in Glasgow during COP26 is Extinction Rebellion, which proclaims: “We accuse world leaders of failure, and with a daring vision of hope, we demand the impossible. … We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for.” Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups at COP26 are calling for net-zero emissions by 2025, not 2050, as the only way to meet the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed to in Paris.

Greenpeace is calling for an immediate global moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and a quick phase-out of coal-burning power plants. Even the new German coalition government, which is expected to include the Green Party and has more ambitious goals than other large wealthy countries, has only moved up the final deadline on Germany’s coal phaseout from 2038 to 2030.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is bringing indigenous people from the Global South to Glasgow to tell their stories at the conference. They are calling on the northern industrialized countries to declare a climate emergency, to keep fossil fuels in the ground and end subsidies of fossil fuels globally.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) has published a new report titled “Nature-Based Solutions: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” as a focus for its work at COP26. It exposes a new trend in corporate greenwashing involving industrial-scale tree plantations in poor countries, which corporations plan to claim as “offsets” for continued fossil fuel production. 

The UK government that is hosting the conference in Glasgow has endorsed these schemes as part of the program at COP26. FOE is highlighting the effect of these massive land-grabs on local and indigenous communities and calls them “a dangerous deception and distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis.” If this is what governments mean by “net-zero,” it would just be one more step in the financialization of the Earth and all its resources, not a real solution.

As it is hard for activists to get to Glasgow for COP26 during a pandemic, activist groups are simultaneously organizing around the world to put pressure on governments in their own countries. Hundreds of climate activists and indigenous people have been arrested in protests at the White House in Washington, and five young Sunrise Movement activists began a hunger strike there on October 19. 

US climate groups also support the “Green New Deal” that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced in Congress. The bill, known as H.Res. 332, specifically calls for policies to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and currently has 103 co-sponsors. It sets ambitious targets for 2030 but only calls for net-zero by 2050.

The environmental and climate groups converging on Glasgow agree that we need a real global program of energy conversion now as a practical matter, not as the aspirational goal of an endlessly ineffective, hopelessly corrupt political process. 

“Blah, Blah, Blah”

At COP25 in Madrid in 2019, Extinction Rebellion dumped a pile of horse manure outside the conference hall with the message, “The horse-shit stops here.” Of course, that didn’t stop anything, but it made the point that empty talk must rapidly be eclipsed by real action. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, has hit the nail on the head, slamming world leaders for covering up their failures with “blah, blah, blah,” instead of taking real action. 

Like Thunberg’s “School Strike for the Climate,” the climate movement in the streets of Glasgow is informed by the recognition that the science is clear and the solutions to the climate crisis are readily available. It is only political will that is lacking. This must be supplied by ordinary people — from all walks of life — through creative, dramatic action and mass mobilization, to demand the political and economic transformation we so desperately need. 

The usually mild-mannered Secretary-General Guterres made it clear that street heat will be key to saving humanity. “The climate action army — led by young people — is unstoppable,” he told world leaders in Glasgow. “They are larger. They are louder. And, I assure you, they are not going away.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post COP26: Can People Power Save the World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

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Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, six more than Donald Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, health care, clean energy or fighting poverty.

The Military Budget

The 2022 military spending bill (the National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending. This is a $37-billion increase over last year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill, but don’t expect too much of a debate there either. Most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine. 

Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Representative Sara Jacobs to strip $24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board 10% cut (with exceptions for military pay and health care).  

After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020. It is only 10% below the post-WWII record set by George W. Bush in 2008 under the cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War US president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his absurd claims that Barack Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military. 

As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget. 

Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the 10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez amendment, which garnered support from only 86 Democratic representatives and was opposed by 126 Democrats and every Republican.

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Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over 60% of discretionary spending.

“How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to money for people, never to money for war. Rational policymaking would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, health care and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan. 

A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education, 17,200 in health care, 16,800 in the green economy, or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments. 

Tragically, the only form of Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democrats in Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year based on the Maryland poll. 

Why the Disconnect?

So, why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Dwight Eisenhower’s infamous military-industrial complex has become more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

The military-industrial complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next 13 military powers. This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.

The five largest US arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions. These companies have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions. Altogether, 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the military-industrial complex, and their senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So, it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.

The corporate consolidation, dumbing down and corruption of US media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect. 

There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a fascinating 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled, “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.” The study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”

The authors made a counterintuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”

This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisers to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’ anti-democratic foreign policy. Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.

On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”

Resources for the Public

It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional Clerk’s office make it easier than ever to do so.

Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records. GovTrack.us lets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress. Progressive Punch tracks votes and rates representatives on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at CODEPINK Congress. Open Secrets enables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.

When members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt military-industrial complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents. 

The Hall of Mirrors study should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed. Members of the public should beware of assuming that their representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.

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Looking ahead to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China. 

As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon — and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy. While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in health care and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Congress Fights Over Childcare But Not the Military appeared first on Fair Observer.

But the US is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled, “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.” The article was a rare acknowledgment in the American corporate media that the US has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis. 

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The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the US defeat in Afghanistan should be ringing alarm bells inside the head of every American, warning us that we have allowed our government to spend trillions of dollars waging war, chasing shadows, selling arms and fueling conflict all over the world, while ignoring real existential dangers to our civilization and all of humanity. 

The world’s youth are dismayed by their parents’ failures to tackle the climate crisis. The BBC reports that a new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in 10 countries around the world found that many of them think humanity is doomed and that they have no future. Three-quarters of the young people surveyed said they are afraid of what the future will bring, and 40% said the crisis makes them hesitant to have children. They are also frightened, confused and angered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis. As the BBC reported, they “feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.” 

America Lags Far Behind

Young people in the US have even more reason to feel betrayed than their European counterparts. America lags far behind Europe on renewable energy. European countries started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 40% of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20% of electric power in the US. 

Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24%. The United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2% more than it did in 1990. In 2019, under the Trump administration, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than ever before in its history.

NATO, our politicians and the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic promote the idea that the United States and Europe share a common “Western” culture and values. But our very different lifestyles, priorities and responses to this climate crisis tell a tale of two very different, even divergent economic and political systems. The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is not controversial in Europe. But in America, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving “disinformation” campaigns by fossil fuel companies and other vested interests. While the Democrats have been better at listening to the scientists, let’s not forget that, while Europe was replacing fossil fuels and nuclear plants with renewable energy, the Obama administration was unleashing a fracking boom to switch from coal-fired power plants to new plants running on fracked gas. 

Why is the US so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? Why does each US car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely-accessible public transportation, as Europe does? 

We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, health care, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries?

One answer is the enormous amount of money the US spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.

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The US spends far more of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the military than any of the other 29 NATO countries — 3.7% in 2020 compared to 1.77%. While the US has been putting intense pressure on NATO countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only 10 of them have done so. Unlike in the US, the military establishment in Europe has to contend with significant opposition from liberal politicians and a more educated and mobilized public.  

From the lack of universal healthcare to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries, the US government’s under-investment in everything else is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities. This leaves America struggling to get by on what is left over after the US military bureaucracy has raked off the lion’s share — or should we say the “generals’ share”? — of the available resources.

Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 amount to only about 30% of the money spent on militarism. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years and is not enough.  

Climate vs. the Military

On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget if we are to correct the US government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden administration has so far failed to do. 

The reality of America’s 20-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the US claims that the recent arms build-up by China now requires Washington to spend even more. China spends only a third of what the US spends. What is driving China’s increased military spending is its need to defend itself against the ever-growing US war machine that has been “pivoting” to the waters, skies and islands surrounding its shores since the Obama administration.

Biden told the UN General Assembly that “as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate a dangerous arms race with China that the US started in the first place, reveals just how far Biden has to go to live up to his own rhetoric, on diplomacy as well as on climate change.   

The United States must go to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps the UN and less-developed countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, quickly convert to a net-zero renewable energy economy and help developing countries to do the same. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.

That will require the United States to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia. Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures and the militarism that led to them would free up the US to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the US government’s disastrous response to them. That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.  

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Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the US response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy. 

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.” 

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“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.” 

“Insurgent Math”

Even the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the US created 10 new enemies. Thus, the so-called global war on terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it. 

By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place. In Libya and Syria, only 10 years after 9/11, US leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11 by recruiting and arming al-Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

The US response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. Lincoln Chafee, the only Republican senator who voted against the war on Iraq, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted in 2002 for the US to invade Iraq paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House. 

Failure in Afghanistan

Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the US defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the 9/11 attacks. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war. 

Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against the war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut US military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every US taxpayer $20,000, one would think that Representative Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for health care, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proved worthless, as President Biden has acknowledged. 

Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by the US and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see. 

But the different paths chosen by American and Chinese leaders are not predestined. Despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the US corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than their country’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in US foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the people.

Weapons and More Weapons

The perennial handicap that has dogged US diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” 

Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force. 

The rote declarations of US leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the US development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

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By contrast, US leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain US “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. 

A “new American century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Adolf Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.  

America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s US war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.    

Time to Get Serious

But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard. 

First, we must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues.

Second, we must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the US war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”  

Third, we must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending” US vital interests, humanitarian intervention, the war on terror and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” — whose rules only apply to others but never to the United States. 

Finally, we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including US weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes, and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia. 

Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will the US Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the US Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan central bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government led by the Taliban of funds it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services. Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic. 

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The US and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage — economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban. 

Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.

US Spending in Afghanistan

To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war in Afghanistan was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide health care, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. The reality is quite different and not so hard to understand.

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The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the US-led military occupation, drop tens of thousands of bombs and missiles, pay private contractors and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years. 

Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for US soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq already amount to over $350 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for both of those US-led wars could eventually reach another trillion dollars over the next 40 years.

So, what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was, as per Al Jazeera, documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Corruption

The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total US spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, health care, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid. But, as in Iraq, the government the US installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.

Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in the country, as opposed to a particular feature of the US-led occupation, but this is not the case. TI noted that “it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.” Those administrations would include the Taliban government that US and NATO invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the US-supported precursors of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, health care and women’s rights.

A 2010 report by Anthony H. Cordesman, a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan,” chastised the US government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability. The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with US dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.

Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and health care. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low-quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors. 

Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary US goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet Afghan government’s control. As TI reported, the US “has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”

Poverty and Freezing Funds

The endless violence of the US-led occupation and the corruption of the Afghan government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three-quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.

Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery, but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.

Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than 2 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.  

Yet instead of atoning for their role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three-quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP. 

In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second: economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of US economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran. 

After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 38 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the conflict that the US inflicted on them. This is coupled with a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of COVID-19. 

The US should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in American banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now-defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.

Rethinking Its Place

Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan. The Americans then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults — its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries — it held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow. 

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If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at other models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; a renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate disaster. 

The US can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Ending the US Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty appeared first on Fair Observer.

While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Stephen Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly US officials prepared to plunge our nation into the graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden] … Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

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So, within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior US officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the US president, George W. Bush, to use military force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” 

In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive US administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks. 

Speaking Out

The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. She compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed: “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.” 

In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but he privately promised the Defense Policy Board chairman, Richard Perle, that Iraq would be their next target.

In the days after September 11, the US corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed. But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but it was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

“Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 [sic] people?

Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

Ferencz: We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

Clark: So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.”

The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Lee and Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism. 

Making a Statement

On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why We Say No to War and Hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and one of these authors (Medea Benjamin). The statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan. 

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The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States, but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” Benjamin wrote that “a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.” The analysis was correct and the predictions were prescient. The media and US politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of lying, delusional warmongers.

What leads to catastrophes like the US war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices, but that the political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Lee, Ferencz and the 15 writers and activists. 

That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control US politics on a bipartisan basis.  

In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them. 

Another War

Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of US military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the US post-Cold War “power dividend.” 

Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” As secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal US invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of US foreign policy.

But after spending trillions of dollars and killing countless numbers of people, the abysmal record of US war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited conflicts to recover small neo-colonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait. Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic.

So, our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional US political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among long-time US allies in Europe and its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

Change the Way We Live

On October 19, 2001, Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

Now that dropping tens of thousands of bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live. 

We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Then, we should pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the US military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.” 

Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What About Those Who Were Right on Afghanistan? appeared first on Fair Observer.

It is horrific to watch the death, destruction and mass displacement of thousands of terrified Afghans and the triumph of the misogynist Taliban that ruled the nation 20 years ago. But the fall of the centralized, corrupt Afghan government propped up by the West was inevitable, whether this year, next year or 10 years from now.     

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US President Joe Biden has reacted to America’s snowballing humiliation in the graveyard of empires by once again dispatching US Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to Doha, Qatar, to urge the government and the Taliban to seek a political solution. At the same time, the US has dispatched B-52 bombers to attack at least two of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.

In Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, the bombing has already reportedly destroyed a high school and a health clinic. Another B-52 bombed Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province and the home of the infamous warlord and accused war criminal Abdul Rashid Dostum, who is now the military commander of the US-backed government’s armed forces. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that US Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships are also still operating in Afghanistan. 

The Fall of the Afghan Army

The rapid disintegration of the Afghan forces that the US and its Western allies have recruited, armed and trained for 20 years at a cost of nearly $89 billion should come as no surprise. On paper, the Afghan national army has 180,000 troops. In reality, most of them are unemployed Afghans desperate to earn some money to support their families but not eager to fight their fellow citizens. The army is also notorious for its corruption and mismanagement. 

The army and the beleaguered and vulnerable police forces that man isolated outposts and checkpoints around the country are plagued by high casualties, rapid turnover and desertion. Most troops feel no loyalty to the corrupt US-backed government and routinely abandon their posts, either to join the Taliban or just to go home. When the BBC asked General Khoshal Sadat, the national police chief, about the impact of high casualties on police recruitment in February 2020, he cynically replied: “When you look at recruitment, I always think about the Afghan families and how many children they have. The good thing is there is never a shortage of fighting-age males who will be able to join the force.” 

But a police recruit at a checkpoint questioned the very purpose of the war, telling the BBC’s Nanna Muus Steffensen: “We Muslims are all brothers. We don’t have a problem with each other.” In that case, she asked him, why were they fighting? He hesitated, laughed nervously and shook his head in resignation. “You know why. I know why,” he said. “It’s not really our fight.”

Since 2007, the jewel of US and Western military training missions in Afghanistan has been the Afghan commando corps or special operations forces, who comprise only 7% of Afghan national army troops but reportedly do 70% to 80% of the fighting. But the commandos have struggled to reach their target of recruiting, arming and training 30,000 troops. Poor recruitment from Pashtuns, the largest and traditionally dominant ethnic group, has been a critical weakness, especially from the Pashtun heartland in the south. 

The commandos and the professional officer corps of the Afghan army are dominated by ethnic Tajiks. This community consists of the successors to the Northern Alliance, which the US supported against the Taliban 20 years ago. As of 2017, the commandos are estimated at only 21,000. It is not clear how many of these Western-trained troops now serve as the last line of defense between the US-backed puppet government and total defeat. 

The Taliban’s speedy and simultaneous occupation of large amounts of territory all over the country appears to be a deliberate strategy to overwhelm and outflank the government’s small number of well-trained, well-armed troops. The Taliban have had more success winning the loyalty of minorities in the north and west than government forces have had to recruit Pashtuns from the south, and the government’s small number of well-trained troops cannot be everywhere at once.

US Fighter Jets

But what of the United States? Its deployment of B-52 bombers, Reaper drones and AC-130 gunships is a brutal response by a failing, flailing imperial power to a historic, humiliating defeat. 

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The US does not flinch from committing mass murder against its enemies. Just look at the US-led destruction of Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. How many Americans even know about the massacre of civilians that Iraqi forces committed when the US-led coalition finally took control of Mosul in 2017? This came after Donald Trump, while campaigning in 2015, said that the US should “take out the families” of Islamic State fighters.

Twenty years after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld committed a full range of war crimes — from torture and the deliberate killing of civilians to the “supreme international crime” of aggression — Biden is clearly no more concerned than they were with criminal accountability or the judgment of history. But even from the most pragmatic and callous point of view, what can continued aerial bombardment of Afghan cities accomplish, besides a final but futile climax to the 20-year-long slaughter of Afghans by tens of thousands of American bombs and missiles?

The intellectually and strategically bankrupt US military and CIA bureaucracy has a history of congratulating itself for fleeting, superficial victories. The US quickly declared victory in Afghanistan in 2001 and set out to duplicate its imagined conquest in Iraq two years later. Then, the short-lived success of the 2011 regime change operation in Libya encouraged the US and its allies to let al-Qaeda affiliates loose in Syria, spawning a decade of intractable violence and chaos and the rise of the Islamic State (IS). 

In the same manner, Biden’s unaccountable and corrupt national security advisers seem to be urging him to use the same weapons that obliterated the Islamic State group’s urban bases in Iraq and Syria to attack Taliban-held cities in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is not Iraq or Syria.  First, fewer Afghans live in cities. Second, the Taliban’s base is not in major cities, but in the rural areas where the other three-quarters of Afghans live. Despite support from Pakistan over the years, the Taliban are not an invading force like IS, but an Afghan nationalist movement that has fought for two decades to expel foreign invasion and occupation forces from their country. 

In many areas, Afghan forces have not fled from the Taliban, as the Iraqi army did from IS in 2014, but joined them. On August 9, the Taliban occupied Aybak, the sixth provincial capital to fall, after a local warlord and his fighters reportedly agreed to join forces with the Taliban.

That very same day, the government’s chief negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, returned to Doha for further peace talks with the Taliban. His American allies must make it clear to him, his government and the Taliban that the US will support every effort to achieve a peaceful political transition. 

The New Syndrome

But the United States must not keep bombing and killing civilians to provide cover for the Afghan government to avoid difficult but necessary compromises at the negotiating table to bring peace to the long-suffering, war-weary people of Afghanistan. Bombing Taliban-occupied cities and the people who live in them is a savage and criminal policy that President Biden must renounce.           

The defeat of the US and its allies in Afghanistan now seems to be unfolding even faster than the collapse of South Vietnam between 1973 and 1975. The public takeaway from the US defeat in Southeast Asia was the “Vietnam syndrome,” an aversion to overseas military interventions that lasted for decades.

As we approach the 20^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we should reflect on how the Bush administration exploited the US public’s thirst for revenge to unleash this bloody, tragic and utterly futile war in Afghanistan. The lesson of America’s experience in that country should be a new “Afghanistan syndrome,” a public aversion to war that prevents future US military attacks and invasions, rejects attempts to socially engineer the governments of other nations, and leads to a new and active American commitment to peace, diplomacy and disarmament.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Biden Must Call Off the Bombing of Afghan Cities appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Taliban are rapidly expanding their control over hundreds of districts in Afghanistan, usually through negotiations between local elders, but also by force when troops loyal to the Kabul government refuse to give up their outposts and weapons. A few weeks ago, the Taliban controlled a quarter of the country. Now it’s a third. They are taking control of border posts and large swathes of territory in the north of the country. These include areas that were once strongholds of the Northern Alliance, a militia that prevented the Taliban from unifying the country under their rule in the late 1990s. 

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People of goodwill all over the world hope for a peaceful future for the people of Afghanistan, but the only legitimate role the United States can play there now is to pay reparations, in whatever form, for the damage it has done and the pain and deaths it has caused. Speculation in the US political class and corporate media about how the US can keep bombing and killing Afghans from “over the horizon” should cease. The US and its corrupt puppet government lost this war. Now it’s up to the Afghans to forge their future. 

Iraq

So, what about America’s other endless crime scene: Iraq? The US corporate media only mention Iraq when our leaders suddenly decide that the over 150,000 bombs and missiles they have dropped on Iraq and Syria since 2001 were not enough, and dropping a few more on Iranian allies there will appease some hawks in Washington without starting a full-scale war with Iran.

But for 40 million Iraqis, as for 40 million Afghans, America’s most stupidly chosen battlefield is their country, not just an occasional news story. They are living their entire lives under the enduring impacts of the neocons’ war of mass destruction.

Young Iraqis took to the streets in 2019 to protest 16 years of corrupt government by the former exiles to whom the United States handed over their country and its oil revenues. The protests were directed at the Iraqi government’s corruption and failure to provide jobs and basic services to its people, but also at the underlying, self-serving foreign influences of the US and Iran over every Iraqi government since the 2003 invasion.

A new government was formed in May 2020, headed by Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, previously the head of Iraq’s intelligence service and, before that, a journalist and editor for the Al-Monitor website. Kadhimi has initiated investigations into the embezzlement of $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues by officials of previous governments, who were mostly former Western-based exiles like himself. He is now walking a fine line to try to save his country, after all it has been through, from becoming the front line in a new US war on Iran.

Recent US airstrikes have targeted the Hashd al-Shaabi, known in English as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The PMF, which is made up of mostly Iraqi Shia armed groups, was formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State (IS). At the time, IS had seized territory spanning both Iraq and Syria, breaking the border between the two countries and declaring a caliphate. The PMF comprises about 130,000 troops in 40 or more different units. Most of them were recruited by pro-Iranian Iraqi political parties and groups. Now, the PMF is an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and is credited with playing a critical role in the war against IS.

Western media represent the PMF as militias that Iran can turn on and off as a weapon against the United States. But the PMF has its own interests and decision-making structures. When Iran has tried to calm tensions with the US, it has not always been able to control the PMF. General Haider al-Afghani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer in charge of coordinating with the PMF, recently requested a transfer out of Iraq. He complained that the PMF paid no attention to him.

Ever since the US assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and PMF commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020, the PMF has been determined to force the last remaining US occupation forces out of Iraq. After the killing, the Iraqi national assembly passed a resolution calling for US forces to leave Iraq. Following US airstrikes against PMF units in February 2021, Iraq and the US agreed in early April that American combat troops would soon depart. 

But no date has been set, no detailed agreement has been signed, many Iraqis do not believe US forces will leave, nor do they trust the Kadhimi government to ensure their departure. As time has gone by without a formal agreement, some PMF forces have resisted calls for calm from their own government and Iran and stepped up attacks on US forces. 

At the same time, the Vienna talks over the Iran nuclear agreement have raised fear among PMF commanders that Iran may sacrifice them as a bargaining chip in a renegotiated nuclear agreement with the United States. So, in the interest of survival, the commanders have become more independent of Iran and cultivated a closer relationship with Kadhimi. This was evidenced in Kadhimi’s attendance at a huge military parade in June to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the PMF’s founding. 

The next day, the US bombed PMF forces in Iraq and Syria, drawing public condemnation from Kadhimi and his cabinet as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. After conducting retaliatory strikes, the PMF declared a new ceasefire on June 29, apparently to give Kadhimi more time to finalize a withdrawal agreement. But six days later, some of them resumed rocket and drone attacks on US targets.

Whereas Donald Trump only retaliated when rocket attacks in Iraq killed Americans, a senior US official has revealed that President Joe Biden has lowered the bar, threatening to respond with airstrikes even when Iraqi militia attacks do not cause US casualties. But US air strikes have only led to rising tensions and further escalations by Iraqi militia forces. If American forces respond with more or heavier airstrikes, the PMF and Iran’s allies throughout the region can respond with more widespread attacks on US bases. The further this escalates and the longer it takes to negotiate a genuine withdrawal agreement, the more pressure Kadhimi will get from the PMF and other sectors of Iraqi society to show US forces the door.

The official rationale for the US presence and that of NATO training forces in Iraqi Kurdistan is that the Islamic State is still active. In January, a suicide bomber killed 32 people in Baghdad. The group still has a strong appeal to oppressed young people across the Arab and Muslim world. The failures, corruption and repression of successive post-2003 governments in Iraq have provided fertile soil.

Iran

But the United States clearly has another reason for keeping forces in Iraq, as a forward base in its simmering war on Iran. That is exactly what Kadhimi is trying to avoid by replacing US forces with the Danish-led NATO training mission in Iraqi Kurdistan. This mission is being expanded from 500 to at least 4,000 forces, made up of Danish, British and Turkish troops. 

If Biden had quickly rejoined the nuclear agreement with Iran after taking office in January, tensions would be lower by now and the US troops in Iraq might well be home already. Instead, Biden obliviously swallowed the poison pill of Trump’s Iran policy by using “maximum pressure” as a form of “leverage,” escalating an endless game of chicken the United States cannot win — a tactic that Barack Obama began to wind down six years ago by signing the JCPOA.

The US withdrawal from Iraq and the Iran nuclear deal are interconnected, two essential parts of a policy to improve US–Iranian relations and end Washington’s antagonistic and destabilizing interventionist role in the Middle East. The third element for a more stable and peaceful region is the diplomatic engagement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in which Kadhimi’s Iraq is playing a critical role as the principal mediator.    

The fate of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran deal is formally known, is still uncertain. The sixth round of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna ended on June 20 and no date has been set for a seventh round yet. Biden’s commitment to rejoining the JCPOA seems shakier than ever. Ebrahim Raisi, the president-elect of Iran, has declared he will not let the Americans keep drawing out the negotiations. 

In an interview in June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken upped the ante by threatening to pull out of the talks altogether. He said that if Iran continued to spin more sophisticated centrifuges at higher and higher levels, it will become very difficult for the United States to return to the original deal, which was signed in 2015 under Obama. Asked whether or when the US might walk away from negotiations, he said, “I can’t put a date on it, [but] it’s getting closer.”

What should really be “getting closer” is the US withdrawal of troops from Iraq. While Afghanistan is portrayed as the “longest war” the United States has fought, the US military has been bombing Iraq for most of the last 30 years. The fact that the US military is still conducting “defensive airstrikes” 18 years after the 2003 invasion and nearly 10 years since the official end of the war proves just how ineffective and disastrous this US intervention has been.

Biden certainly seems to have learned the lesson in Afghanistan that the US can neither bomb its way to peace nor install puppet governments at will. When pilloried by the press about the Taliban gaining control as US troops withdraw, Biden said: “For those who have argued that we should stay just six more months or just one more year, I ask them to consider the lessons of recent history.” He added: “Nearly 20 years of experience has shown us, and the current security situation only confirms, that ‘just one more year’ of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution but a recipe for being there indefinitely. It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”  

The same lessons of history apply to Iraq. The US has already inflicted so much death and misery on the Iraqi people, destroyed so many of its beautiful cities and unleashed so much sectarian violence and IS fanaticism. Just like the shuttering of the massive Bagram base in Afghanistan, Biden should dismantle the remaining imperial bases in Iraq and bring the troops home.

The Iraqi people have the same right to decide their own future as the people of Afghanistan. All the countries of the Middle East have the right and the responsibility to live in peace, without the threat of American bombs and missiles always hanging over their heads. 

Let’s hope Biden has learned another history lesson: that the United States should stop invading and attacking other countries.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post America’s Afghan War Is Over. But What About Iraq and Iran? appeared first on Fair Observer.