Tag: middle east

Game Of Chess: US Prepares Next Move With More B-52s, Warships To Middle East 

It’s been a week since Israeli fighter jets pounded high-value Iranian military sites and assets with missiles and bombs. Iran has since delayed a retaliatory strike on Israel as the US presidential election is just days away, and now the US appears to be bolstering defense capabilities in the Middle East as regional war risks remain elevated. 

Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News on Friday that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered several B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft, refueling aircraft, and Navy destroyers to the Middle East. 

In a statement to Reuters, Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder said additional military assets will begin arriving in the region in the coming months. 

“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 measure necessary to defend our people,” Ryder said. 

The strategic positioning—think of it as a game of chess—of additional US military assets in the region in the very near term may only suggest broadening war risks after the US election cycle ends. In other words, the Pentagon may finally get serious about Iranian-backed Houthis, other Iranian proxies, and even Tehran, which have sparked chaos in critical maritime chokepoints.

Ryder said Austin’s latest order shows the “US capability to deploy worldwide on short notice to meet evolving national security threats.” 

One week ago, the US signaled defense guarantees to the Saudis – in the event Tehran or its proxies attempt to weaponize crude oil by targeting the Kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery (the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the world) with drone swarms or hypersonic missiles. 

Austin revealed last month that B-2 stealth bombers targeted underground Houthi weapons storage facilities – indeed, a message to Tehran.

“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Austin said at the time, adding, “The employment of US Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrates US global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere.”

On Saturday morning, Iran’s supreme leader threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” … 

Meanwhile, the geopolitical risk premium in Brent crude oil has all but evaporated. 

But will that all change after the US presidential election?

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Israel’s War on Journalism

There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas.

They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors.

Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.

And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination.

At least 134 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992. 

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.  

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza.

Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

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Israel is acting with the same tools against Gaza, Lebanon and now starting in Syria

Because of the time limits I have at the moment, I will provide shorter posts until I can get internet and computer usage for long enough to follow up with a full article. This section of an article by the editor of Lebanese media outlet Al Akhbar, Ibrahim Al Amin provides a succinct and accurate description of what Israel’s agenda is in the region:

“Yesterday the clown Hochstein returned from a new show. To be honest, the problem is not with the man who does what is good for him or what is required of him, but with those who still listen to him and take him seriously, With those who believe that the Americans are in a position to pressure Israel to stop the war in Lebanon.”

“In practice we are facing one truth and that is that Israel is acting with the same tools against Gaza and against Lebanon. It started the same thing in Syria and is preparing to move to Iraq and then to Yemen. Netanyahu does not hide his continued preparations to strike Iran. Those who demand to separate the arenas do not want to understand that what Israel is doing with the support of the United States, Britain, Germany, and with the partnership of several Arab countries, is the unification of the arenas by force.”

“Since this is the case, the resistance project is the only option and the alternative is life or death by starvation in oppression and humiliation. And anyone who continues to accuse the resistance (Hezbollah) of being responsible for what is happening should know that from now on he is a partner in this aggression.”

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Netanyahu’s Boss: Ultimate Goal is for a ‘Greater Israel’ from Damascus to Saudi Arabia

Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist Israeli finance minister, said it is “written” that Israel’s future is its expansion to Damascus and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, according to a French documentary titled: “Israel: Extremists in Power.”

“It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” he said in the documentary, according to The New Arab.

Smotrich is an Israeli settler who has argued that it is moral to starve Gazans. He admitted that Israel will not achieve its goals quickly, but rather “little by little.”

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NATO Disgraces Itself in Azerbaijan

Two years ago this October, Azerbaijan committed what had been, until the Israeli rampage of the past year, among the most egregious cases of ethic cleaning since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when in the matter of days its armed forces took control of the Armenian enclave Nagorno Karabakh in which 120,000 Christian Armenians were forced to flee the land which had been their home for centuries. 

In the months that followed, Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, claimed that “present-day Armenia is our land.” An agreement reached between Armenia’s U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Aliyev ceded four Armenian villages to Azerbaijan the following April.

Fast forward to the last week of September, when the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Kristina Kvien, attended a memorial service the Armenians who died fighting Azerbaijan. To mark the occasion, the U.S. embassy issued a statement that read, in part, that “the United States is committed to working with the Armenian government to assist those who have lost their homes and livelihood.”

Yet such sentiments are difficult to take seriously when roughly a week later NATO sent a high-level delegation to Baku to kiss Aliyev’s ring.  According the contemporaneous reporting from Sergei Melkonian, a Research Fellow at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia, “In just four days of October this year, Azerbaijan held two high-level meetings with NATO representatives,” including meetings between the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan, Karim Valiyev, and the director general of the NATO International Military Staff, Lieutenant General Janusz Adamczak, in which they discussed, according to a statement released by NATO, “a new framework for cooperation with Azerbaijan with a special focus on defense education, interoperability, resilience and defense capacity building.” That a Pole like Adamczak finds himself, on behalf of an American-led alliance, supporting Islamist aggression against a Christian nation shows just how deep the rot goes in the West. 

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Do they WANT American Troops to Die?

Biden Administration mismanagement – or worse – from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 US troops and multiple US military bases in the region with targets on their back.

Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the US right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of WWIII. And rather than take a sober look at actual US national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.

According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden Administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden Administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon. 

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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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