Tag: middle east

Greater Israel and America’s Holy War

A recent video going viral shows Israel’s Finance Minister saying that the Jewish state must extend into Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. But he’s been saying this for over a year.

“Look, the Jordanians, for starters, did not like the statement, but even less the setting of the stage, with Smotrich's giving the statement, it gave the address with on the podium was a map of Greater Israel that includes parts of modern day Jordan. And that's what got Aman, to blast the statement. They said that his actions constituted an act of reckless incitement, as well as a violation of international norms and the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan.

The deputy speaker of Jordanian Parliament took it a step further, calling on, the Jordanian military, to quote, "take up arms" and saying that all options should be on the table for Jordan, given the extremist, statements.”
~ i24NEWS (Israel)

Some Israeli soldiers wear the Greater Israel patch on their uniforms. Many Israelis believe it is prophesied by god. And the radical American Prophecy Christians agree.

“But what I'm saying is I believe eventually our borders will extend from Lebanon to the great desert, which is Saudi Arabia, and then from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. And who's on the other side of the Euphrates? The Kurds and the Kurds are our friends. So we have the Mediterranean behind us, the Kurds in front of us, Lebanon, which really needs the umbrella of protection of Israel. And then we're going to take, I believe we're going to take, Mecca, Medina, and Mount Sinai and purify those places.”
~ Avi Lipkin

“You know, it's going to happen.”
~ Gary Stearman (Prophecy Watchers)

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has said that he wants his country to become a “big Israel.” And while young Ukrainians are sacrificed for the US State Department war with Russia, Jewish settlers from Israel are setting up homes in their place.

We are told that Israel is defending themselves from Hamas. But a leaked telegram from Israel states that Hamas served as a useful counter group against the PLO.

In 2019 Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.”

The CIA, MI6, Mossad, and their intelligence counterparts, have a long history of fostering terrorist groups and using them as the boogeyman to sell non-stop illegal wars in the Middle East.

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A Year of War in the Middle East Cost Americans Nearly $23 Billion

War is not cheap, especially not the past year of Middle Eastern wars. While Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and others pay with their lives by the tens of thousands, Americans are paying much of the financial cost of keeping the violence going.

A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.

“The United States can walk and chew gum at the same time, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters on October 13, 2023. “U.S. security assistance to Israel will flow in at the speed of war.”

But the U.S. military itself has also burned through expensive ammunition dealing with the spillover of the war into Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

And the study’s time frame doesn’t include the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, which prompted even more U.S. military deployments to the region, or Iran’s October 1 missile attack on Israeli military bases. During the latter incident, the U.S. Navy says it fired “about a dozen interceptors” at the Iranian missiles. “Assuming they were SM-3 interceptors, that represents the production run for an entire year, at a cost of about $400 million total,” Middlebury Institute professor Jeffrey Lewis noted on social media.

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Why Israel Can’t Win

“Israel” is quite proficient at killing people. In less than a year they have killed 40,000 civilians in Gaza, and last week killed 2,000 more in Lebanon. Unofficial estimates of the real death toll in Gaza, as opposed to the officially recovered, counted, and identified bodies, exceed 200,000.

As they slaughter vast numbers of women and children under the flimsiest excuses, the Zionists also kill the political and diplomatic leaders with whom wiser leaders would be negotiating. They apparently have not considered that for each civilian they kill, dozens of furious survivors and onlookers become long-term anti-Zionist combatants-in-waiting. And they don’t seem to realize that martyring political and diplomatic leaders gives fighters added incentive to up their game, and leaves them no option but to do so. That’s why, in the wake of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s attempted invasion of Lebanon has been shockingly (to the Zionists) unsuccessful.

Randomly murdering tens of thousands of civilians, or assassinating a handful of leaders, superficially looks like tactical success. Richie Allen seemed to think that Israel’s terrorist attack on non-combatants associated with Hezbollah via exploding pagers was an impressive achievement.* As I told him, just about anybody who really wants to randomly murder that number of people, or more, can do so if they so choose. The fact that Israeli leaders employed such an elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme to mass murder noncombatants—to counterproductive strategic effect—reveals the Israelis as psychopathic idiots and shameless war criminals, not geniuses.

The appearance of tactical success achieved by Israel’s pointless murders conceals a colossal strategic failure. The root of that failure is simple: Netanyahu has no idea what he is trying to achieve, other than keep the war going so he can stay in office and out of prison. His extremist coalition parters, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, do have a vision—“exterminate Amalek”—but since this is 2024, not the Bronze Age, that isn’t going to happen. Israel can kill a small fraction of today’s “Amalek” but for every Amalek they kill, ten or a hundred more will spring up. Long before Israel killed even 5% of its current Amalek enemies it would have transformed most of the world’s 8 billion non-Jews into a new, even more angry and determined Amalek.

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Israel’s So-Called Seven Front War

From my CNN feed this morning:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country faces war on seven fronts and called them the “enemies of civilization.” Heavy Israeli airstrikes pounded southern Beirut overnight, with the military saying it was targeting Hezbollah.

Wow. And I thought a two-front war was bad.

Netanyahu is a war criminal. And whether it’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, U.S. leaders bow before him, giving him all the weapons, military cover, and diplomatic cover he needs to wage his so-called seven-front war.

Let’s not forget the rapturous applause Netanyahu received on his recent appearance before Congress. Half the Congress allegedly hates the other half, but they sure came together to profess their love of Netanyahu and Israel.

Maybe Netanyahu and Israel are the “enemies of civilization”? Perish the thought.

Israel is at pains to portray its neighbors as uncivilized even as Israeli bombing produces scenes like this one.

That scooter just might be Hezbollah. Maybe Israel can rig it with explosives and remotely detonate it in another one of their “precision” attacks, like all those pagers exploding in “precise” ways.

CNN, of course, always reports the Israeli perspective. Rarely if ever do you hear the Arab perspective, the Persian perspective, the Palestinian perspective. Why listen to the “uncivilized,” right?

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Biden Is Sleepwalking Toward War in Ukraine and Middle East

Without US military support, neither Ukraine nor Israel could sustain the wars they are fighting at present. From the first day Russia invaded, Ukraine has relied heavily on US arms, intelligence, and even targeting to defend itself. Similarly, Israel has relied on billions of dollars of American weapons to wage its massive campaign in Gaza. An Israeli war with Hezbollah would rely on even more extensive US assistance in defending Israel from rockets and other ordnance, as well as trying to deter Iran.

The United States has interests in Ukraine and Israel, but that interest is not identical with either country’s interest in itself. Still, the Biden administration has seemed incapable of speaking up for American interests where they differ from those of its partners. Washington seems like a passive spectator of escalation in both conflicts, despite the implications for Americans.

In Ukraine, early on in the war National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pronounced, “[O]ur job is to support the Ukrainians. They will set the military objectives. They will set the objectives at the bargaining table.” He added that “we are not going to define the outcome of this for the Ukrainians. That is up for them to define and us to support them in.”

Initially, the administration did not follow this principle. They declined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests for the United States to enter the war via a no-fly zone. Similarly, when Zelensky blamed Russia for an errant missile that killed Polish citizens, the Biden administration publicly made clear that it was a Ukrainian air-defense missile that killed the Poles, again declining the opportunity to escalate the conflict. And when Ukrainians planned a massive attack in Moscow on the first anniversary of the war, the Americans told them not to.

More recently, Kyiv has decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. When Zelensky decided to strike Russian early warning radars that detect incoming nuclear strikes last spring, there is no indication they let the Americans know in advance, leaving an anonymous US official to worry to the Washington Post that the strikes could lead Russia to “think it has a diminished ability to detect early nuclear activity against it.” Similarly with Ukraine’s ground invasion of Russia. Apparently afraid the Americans would either say no or leak the plan, Kyiv did not notify Washington it was about to invade Russian territory.

A similar dynamic has taken place during Israel’s war in Gaza. The invasion of Rafah was the one instance where the administration did something material to try to constrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it didn’t work. The administration delayed a shipment of bombs to convey its opposition to the campaign. Israel invaded anyway, and the Biden administration ultimately released part of the delayed shipment.

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Ukrainian Lines Collapsing In East With World’s Attention On Middle East War

Moscow’s wide-reaching offensive in eastern Ukraine has continued making steady gains, as looming major war between Israel and Iran has largely taken over the news cycle and daily headlines.

Currently Russian forces have advanced to merely within a few a few kilometers of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistical hub in the region. As we’ve highlighted before, the collapse of Pokrovsk will likely portend a Russian takeover of the whole of Donetsk. 

On Wednesday the Ukrainian army announced that it has fully withdrawn from the eastern town of Vuhledar, describing that it abandoned the area after being almost fully encircled, and coming under heavy Russian artillery bombardment.

“The High Command gave permission for a maneuver to withdraw units from Vuhledar in order to save personnel and military equipment and take up a position for further operations,” a Ukrainian unit deployed there said in a Telegram post.

It cited specifically the “threat of encirclement” and heavy troop losses, and there are reports that Russian forces had already taken control of Vuhleda by the time the Ukrainian announcement was made.

Vuhleda is a significant achievement, and suggests Russia forces will continue to plow through Ukrainian defenses, given it was dubbed a “fortress” city given its long having heavily-fortified surroundings and being in an upland position.

Even The Daily Beast recently underscored that while President Zelensky was pitching his ‘victory plan’ in Washington, his forces were suffering loss after loss:

On a visit to the U.S. last week, Volodymyr Zelensky gave the hard sell to his “Victory Plan” for Ukraine. In meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and an awkward encounter with former President Donald Trump, the Ukrainian leader insisted his country could still–with Western help–emerge victorious in its long-running war with Russia.

…After two and a half years of war, soldiers are tired. The same soldiers who gave Vladimir Putin’s forces a bloody nose after the February 2022 invasion, and pushed the invaders from Kyiv and Kharkiv, say they are under-equipped and complain that they are being ordered to carry out impossible missions as Kyiv struggles to supply the military with new recruits and acquire more Western weapons to ward off Russian advances.

The same report has said that in some instances entire battalions are refusing orders from command centers as they see them as “suicide missions”.

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Let’s talk about… “WWIII” trending again, as war in ME expands

The year-old Israeli-Hamas war is, we are told, spreading across the region. Following Israel’s bizarre “pager  attack” last month the IDF have “shifted focus” to Lebanon.

Two days ago an Israeli strike on Beirut is said to have levelled six buildings and “wiped out” the entirety of Hezbollah’s leadership.

Yesterday, Iran responded by firing “hypersonic” missiles at Tel Aviv that either breached the Iron Dome missile defense system or did NOT breach it depending on who you ask.

Today, Israeli troops are reportedly crossing into Lebanon to fight on the ground. Iran is expected to continue to respond.

Reports claim over a million Lebanese – around one fifth of the entire population – have fled their homes due to Israeli bombing. A very large number indeed.

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Disabled refueler exposes fragility of US mission in Middle East

A U.S. Navy oil tanker running aground off the coast of Oman isn’t a huge event. The fact that it is the only tanker to refuel American warships in a Middle East conflict zone, is.

In fact, this only underscores the fragility of the Navy’s logistic systems at a time when the U.S. has chosen to lean in on an aggressive military posture when it may not have the full capacity to do so, and it may or may not be in the national interest for the Navy to be conducting these operations in the first place.

The first is a question for Naval experts, many of whom may not feel comfortable second guessing the mission. So let’s tackle that one first.

The issue: according to a statement by the U.S. Navy, “USNS Big Horn sustained damage while operating at sea in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations overnight on Sept. 23. All crew members are currently safe and U.S. 5th Fleet is assessing the situation.”

The Big Horn is a 33-year-old Kaiser class refueler. This ship is owned by the Navy and is operated by civilian mariners under the U.S. Sealift Command. These ships are responsible for getting jet fuel out to the carrier’s fighter planes and replenishments to the other escort ships at sea — in this case, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, which has been serving in the Arabian Sea area since August. It includes the flagship carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the air wing (including 5th generation F-35s) and three destroyers.

It is the only replenisher nearby, making refueling tricky for the strike group, which is busy in the throes of a fight with the Houthis. The Lincoln had been accompanied by the Theodore Roosevelt strike group which had departed the area in mid-September, according to reports.

Sal Mercogliano, in his “What’s Going on With Shipping?” podcast last week laid out where the other refuelers currently assisting other Navy assets are in the world right now: the Mediterranean, Singapore, the Western Pacific, two on the West Coast of the U.S., one on the Southern coast at Norfolk, and a number that are being fixed or ready for decommissioning at various shipyards across the globe. There aren’t many to spare.

“What this means is that the ability of the U.S. Navy to deploy and sustain its battle groups is very precarious,” Mercogliano points out. “So to support U.S. battle groups, whether it’s an amphibious group or a strike group, requires vessels that can go from forward bases, fuel up, and bring the fuel, ammunition, dry cargo out to them.”

“You don’t have a lot of back backup in this and that’s a big problem,” he added, “because if you don’t have backup, when you lose a ship like Big Horn, you’ve got to scramble to fix it.”

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Did the Abraham Accords Pave the Way for Total War?

The Abraham Accords, the U.S.-sponsored alliance between Israel and several Arab states, were supposed to get the United States out of the Middle East. At least, that’s what many conservative proponents argued.

In 2020, neoconservative writer Michael Doran argued in Tablet magazine that the accords were an agreement to “step up and bear more of the burden so that America can step back.” Two years later, the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Affairs claimed that the accords were allowing Washington “to gradually withdraw from the Middle East to focus its efforts and resources on the Pacific Ocean, the rise of China, and the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) has even made this strategy a large part of his foreign policy pitch. A few months before being nominated as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance told the antiwar Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft that “combining the Abraham Accords approach with the enduring defeat of Hamas” will ensure that “Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”

That’s not how former Trump administration official Jared Kushner, a key architect of the accords, sees it. Over the weekend, he posted an essay to social media arguing that the United States should build on the “Abraham Accords breakthrough” by backing an Israeli war in Lebanon, and hinted that the time is ripe for a wider U.S. war. “Iran is now fully exposed,” he wrote, adding that “it’s not only Israel’s fight.”

Of course, the Trump administration has never pretended that the Abraham Accords were meant to allow U.S. disengagement; then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragged about unlocking more “defense cooperation.” The Biden administration itself promised a permanent U.S. military commitment to Abraham Accords member Bahrain in order to entice Saudi Arabia to join the alliance.

But Kushner’s essay moves the goalposts from a defensive commitment to an offensive one. It’s now hard to pretend that the vision is anything less than a regime change campaign on the scale that old-fashioned neoconservatives could only dream of.

Kushner wrote his essay in response to the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia backed by Iran, had been engaged in a low-grade border war with Israel for the past year. Israel decided to assassinate Nasrallah after he kept demanding an end to the Israeli war in Gaza in exchange for a ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli official told NBC.

The Israeli army is now beginning a ground incursion into Lebanon, after the Biden administration reportedly talked Israel out of a full-on ground invasion. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted at even larger plans, calling Nasrallah’s assassination “Operation New Order” and stating that the fall of the Iranian government “will come a lot sooner than people think.”

Nasrallah’s assassination “is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel,” Kushner wrote. “The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job. It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight,” he added.

Kushner added that Iran is the “main issue between Lebanon and Israel” and brought up Hezbollah’s role in killing U.S. Marines in 1983, during the last U.S. military intervention in Lebanon.

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US Bolsters Forces in Middle East, Issues Warning to Iran

The Pentagon on Sunday announced steps to bolster its forces in the Middle East amid Israel’s non-stop bombardment of Lebanon.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the US will reinforce its “air-support capabilities” in the coming days and said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “increased the readiness of additional US forces to deploy, elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies.”

Ryder said Austin also ordered the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group to stay in the region. The USS Wasp Amphibious Ready Group / Marine Expeditionary Unit will also continue to operate in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ryder also issued a warning to Iran in the statement. “Secretary Austin stressed that the United States is determined to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict,” he said.

“Secretary Austin made clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people,” Ryder added.

The US has been vowing to defend Israel from any potential Iranian attack, and the Pentagon said last week that was one purpose of maintaining an increased force posture in the region.

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