Tag: perpetual war

Israeli Military Lists Returning Hostages as Least Important Goal for Gaza

The Israeli military has listed the return of the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza as its least important goal in its plans for an escalated assault on the Strip, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, retrieving the hostages was placed last in a list of six objectives. Those goals include:

  1. Defeating Hamas
  2. Operational control over the territory
  3. Demilitarizing the territory
  4. Striking Hamas government targets
  5. Concentrating and moving the population
  6. Returning the captives

News of the Israeli military’s goals comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that retrieving the hostages was not his priority, something that’s been clear for a long time but hasn’t been explicitly stated by the Israeli leader until last week.

The Israeli military finalized plans for the expanded offensive, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariot,” on Tuesday and Wednesday after the government approved the escalation.

The purpose of the expanded assault is to achieve the full Israeli military occupation of Gaza and concentrate the entire civilian population into a tiny area of southern Gaza with the goal of forcing them to leave to achieve ethnic cleansing.

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US Intel Agencies Ordered To Target Greenland As Takeover Plotting Intensifies

In the latest indicator of President Trump’s determination to close America’s biggest-ever land acquisition by whatever means necessary, US intelligence agencies have been directed to step up their efforts to gather information about Greenland, Denmark and their internal political dynamics, according to two people “familiar with the effort” who leaked the news to The Wall Street Journal.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at the leaks: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.” Opting against similar fire-breathing, National Security Council spokesman James Hewitt was restrained: “The president has been very clear that the U.S. is concerned about the security of Greenland and the Arctic,” he told the Journal.

According to the Journal’s sources, the directive came last week by way of a “collection emphasis message,” sent by several senior intelligence officials to subordinate agency leaders. As its name implies, this type of message shapes the priorities with which assets are assigned to various intelligence missions. The agencies are now tasked with:

  • Gathering information about Greenland’s independence movement
  • Assessing Greenlanders’ sentiments about US extraction of its wealth of resources
  • Identifying backers of a US takeover of the island — in both Greenland and Denmark 

It’s not clear which of the intel community’s many tools — which include spy satellites, drones, communications surveillance and covert operatives — will be used to harvest information about political movements and individuals in Greenland and Denmark. 

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Trump ramps up push for U.S. strikes in Mexico as drug cartels fight each other

President Donald Trump has escalated his public calls for military action against the Mexican drug cartels as they face intense infighting and struggle to adapt to his military buildup at the southern border. Though Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has resisted direct American military intervention, Trump has renewed the push as the situation appears ripe for some kind of decisive action.

American troops have not been deployed to Mexico for combat purposes since 1916, in pursuit of Mexican bandit/revolutionary Pancho Villa following his attack on Columbus, New Mexico. Led by Brigadier General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, the 10,000-strong expeditionary force failed to capture Villa and withdrew in 1917.

Sheinbaum, over the weekend, said that Trump had offered to deploy American military personnel to Mexico to help her combat the cartels, but that she had refused him.

“How can we help you fight drug trafficking? I propose that the United States military come in and help you,” she quoted him as saying. “And you know what I said to him? ‘No, President Trump.’” She further said that Mexican “sovereignty is not for sale” and that she had told him “we can work together, but you in your territory and us in ours.”

Trump himself confirmed that he had made the offer on Monday, but said “she is so afraid of the cartels she can’t even think straight.”

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Palantir Partners with NATO on Controversial AI Project Maven

In late March, the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) and Palantir Technologies Inc. announced a new agreement for the Palantir Maven Smart System NATO (MSS NATO) to be deployed by NATO’s Allied Command Operations (ACO).

Palantir was co-founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, the Technocrat-Zionists who also happen to be Steering Committee members of the Bilderberg Group.

The new deal will see NCIA partner with Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and Palantir to deliver Maven Smart System NATO to the Warfighter. A move which NCIA general manger Ludwig Decamps says will provide “customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance” and allow NATO to “operate effectively and decisively.”

The Maven Smart System (MSS) uses AI-generated algorithms and memory learning capabilities to scan and identify enemy systems.

Palantir’s MSS NATO makes use of “cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI)” for core military operations, including using large language models (LLMs) for generative and machine learning.

Shon Manasco, Senior Counselor at Palantir Technologies, said the arrangement with NCIA and SHAPE will “bolster deterrence by deploying an AI-enabled warfighting platform”.

General Markus Laubenthal, SHAPE Chief of Staff, said Maven will allow NATO to be “more agile, adaptable, and responsive to emerging threats”.

SHAPE is the headquarters and commander of NATO’s ACO based near Mons, Belgium.

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India Confirms Strikes On Pakistan’s “Terrorist Camps”; Pakistan Claims 5 Jets Shot-Down

India confirmed early Wednesday that it had conducted strikes on Pakistan, two weeks after more than two dozen civilians were killed in a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.

India said it had struck Pakistan after gathering evidence “pointing towards the clear involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists” in last month’s attack on civilians in a tourist area in Kashmir.

It said that its military actions on Wednesday had been “measured, responsible and designed to be nonescalatory in nature.” 

It added that it had targeted only “known terror camps.”

India’s defense ministry said in the statement that nine sites had been targeted in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. 

“Our actions have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature,” it said in a statement, calling it “Operation Sindoor.”

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Joint US-Israeli air raids hit major Yemeni cities

US and Israeli airplanes conducted joint airstrikes late on 5 May on the Yemeni cities of Sanaa and Hodeidah, in response to the Yemeni Armed Forces’ (YAF) attack on Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on Sunday.

“The United States bombed Sanaa and Israel bombed Hodeidah,” Israel’s Channel 12 reported, citing officials who said that the Israeli raids in Yemen are being coordinated with Washington “while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is overseeing the Israeli attack from the Ministry of Defense building.”

Dozens of warplanes reportedly took part in the western aggression against Yemen.

Despite the intensity of the attacks, a security official told Channel 13 News that Monday’s operation is “merely a repetition of the past.”

“We do not expect the airstrikes to stop Houthi missile launches, and the Air Force is also preparing for a possible Houthi response,” the unnamed official is quoted as saying.

Earlier in the day, US and British warplanes carried out seven airstrikes in Al-Hazm District, located in Yemen’s Al-Jawf Governorate, northeast of Sanaa. Additionally, US aircraft carried out three strikes in the Al-Sawad area of Sanhan District within Sanaa Governorate.

Monday’s blitz against the Arab world’s poorest nation occurred one day after the YAF targeted Ben Gurion Airport with a hypersonic ballistic missile and announced the start of an aerial blockade until Israel ends its siege of Gaza.

“The blessed strike proves the development that [Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi] spoke of, confirms the failure of the defense systems in the region and the entity, and confirms the continued failure of the US aggression to stop the Yemeni support for Gaza,” Member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council Mohammed Ali al-Houthi declared on Monday.

This is the sixth Israeli air strike against Yemen since July 2024, following over 400 attacks by the YAF on Israel since the start of the genocide in Gaza.

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It Was Never About Hostages. It Was Never About Hamas.

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.

“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal. In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”

Nothing the prime minister said here is true or valid — unless by “enemies” he means “all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

Netanyahu has been fairly transparent about the fact that Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is neither freeing the hostages nor defeating Hamas, but seizing Palestinian territory and removing its Palestinian inhabitants. He has openly said that Israel will occupy Gaza via military force, completely ruling out the possibility of any form of Palestinian government for the enclave. He has openly said he wants to enact President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, which explicitly entails removing “all” Palestinians and never allowing them to return.

So they’ve made this perfectly clear. This isn’t about Hamas, except insofar as an armed resistance group will make it difficult to forcibly remove all Palestinians from Gaza. And it certainly isn’t about hostages.

And yet, bizarrely, this is how the western political-media class continues to frame this onslaught. They call it Israel’s “war with Hamas”, when it’s nothing other than an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation. They prattle on about October 7, hostages, and terrorism, even though it has already been made abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with any of those things. They act as though the admission was simply never made.

There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about hostages and Hamas after the US and Israel said the goal is the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They told you what this is really about. They said it. With their face holes. They said it right to you. End of debate.

Israel has been seeking ways to purge Gaza of Palestinians for generations. That’s all this has ever been about. Not October 7. Not hostages. Not Hamas. Not terrorism. Everything about Israel’s operations in Gaza have indicated that their real goal is to remove Palestinians from a Palestinian territory and not to free hostages or defeat Hamas. And then when Trump took office, they started openly admitting it.

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Ukraine’s battlefield position is deteriorating fast

The election of U.S. President Donald Trump changed U.S. policy toward Ukraine from “as long as it takes” to seeking a negotiated peace settlement. These negotiations will be driven by the battlefield reality. The side holding the biggest advantage gets to dictate the terms. This gets more complicated if there is no ceasefire during the negotiations and the battlefield remains dynamic. Belligerents may conduct offensive operations while negotiations are progressing to improve their bargaining position. Historically in many conflicts, peace negotiations lasted years, even as the war raged on, such as during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thus, the balance of power, measured in resources, losses and quality of strategic leadership are critical to the outcome of negotiations.

For Western powers, this carries serious consequences. They have staked their reputation on this conflict and with it, the fate of the rules-based world order. The Global South and the multipolar world order is waiting in the wings to take over. Failure to achieve victory has the potential to fatally undermine that order and remove the West from global leadership, which it has enjoyed for the last several centuries.

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The Department of Empire, and Its Bloated Imperial Budget

Language and repetition of the same is so important. We hear about the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Pentagon budget and we think little of it. The DoD, of course, used to be called the Department of War until 1947, a far more telling and accurate name, and there wasn’t a Pentagon until we built one during World War II. In the old days, the Army fought the Navy for which service would get more money in the War Budget, with the Navy usually winning as America sought to control the seas as a means of dominating trade and “intercourse” among nations.

Those were more honest times when retired generals like Smedley Butler wrote in the 1930s that he’d served as a “gangster” for capitalism. Butler was a Marine who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor, so it wasn’t easy for the imperialists to smear him, though they certainly tried (as they did to David M. Shoup, another Marine Corps general and Medal of Honor recipient who turned against the Vietnam War in the 1960s).

Anyhow, I just saw at Antiwar.com that President Trump is proposing a $1.01 trillion budget for the Pentagon for FY2026, a 13% increase in imperial spending. Trump, of course, is proud of reaching the Trillion Dollar threshold. Big numbers have always appealed to him.

It doesn’t seem to matter who is president, whether it’s Biden or Trump, Democrat or Republican, when it comes to the Department of Empire and its bloated imperial budget. For that is what it is, a budget that seeks to sustain and enlarge America’s imperial domain. If you add other costs related to imperial dominance, such as interest on the national debt due to war spending, VA costs, nuclear weapons, and the like, the true imperial budget soars toward $1.7 trillion yearly.

No matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

The Pentagon tries to disguise the enormous waste of this imperial budget by speaking of it as an “investment,” but imagine an “investment” that you’re involved in which fails seven audits in a row. How likely would you be to see this as anything other than theft?

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Will We See Mushroom Clouds Over Kashmir?

One of the world’s, oldest and most dangerous conflicts went critical this past week as nuclear armed India and Pakistan traded threats of war. The Kashmir conflict is the oldest one before the UN.

In my book `War at the Top of the World’ I warned that the confrontation over Kashmir, the beautiful mountain state claimed by both Islamabad and Delhi, could unleash a nuclear war that could kill millions and pollute the planet.

After three wars and many clashes, it seemed the two bad neighbors had allowed the Kashmir dispute to fade into the background as their relations slightly improved.

Then came the murder last week of 26 Indian tourists at Pahalgam, a Kashmir beauty spot, by Muslim insurgents. Kashmir was roughly divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. The larger part of Kashmir was annexed by Indian troops as the entire region was scourged by massacres and rapine.

As a result, India’s portion of Kashmir became the only Muslim majority state in India. Kashmiri Muslims have waged a bloody struggle since the 1980’s to leave India or join Pakistan. Today, 500,000 Indian troops and an equal number of paramilitary police garrison the restive province.

I’ve been under fire three times on the Line of Control that separates the two Kashmirs and at 15,000 feet altitude on the remote Siachen Glacier. I was with Pakistani President Musharraf after he tried to seize Kargil which lies above Kashmir.

The outside world cared little about the India-Pakistan conflict until both Delhi and Islamabad acquired nuclear weapons. Their ‘hatred of brothers’, as I called it, pits fanatical Hindus against equally ardent Muslims who share centuries of hatred and are being whipped up by politicians.

Right wing Hindu militants in Delhi demand reunification of pre-1947 ‘Mother India.’ Pakistan has about 251 million citizens; India has 1.4 billion and a much larger GDP. Pakistan would be unable to resist a full-bore attack by India’s huge armed forces. So, it relies on tactical nuclear weapons to compensate for the dangerous imbalance.

But both sides nuclear arsenals are on hair-trigger alert and pointed at the subcontinent’s major cities. A decade ago, the US think tank Rand Corp estimated an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange would kill three million immediately and injure 100 million. Such damage would pollute most of the region’s major riverine water sources all the way down to Southeast Asia.

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