Tag: perpetual war

Prepping Readers to Accept Mass Slaughter in Lebanese ‘Strongholds’

Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.

The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”

Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.

I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”

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The long road to Beirut now Israel has bombed Syrian borders

On Thursday 7th of November I set off for Beirut. I could no longer use the direct road through the Masnaa border with Lebanon. Israel has now bombed the road at least twice reducing the stretch between the Syrian and Lebanese border to rubble. The US influence (on behalf of Israel) in Lebanon has prohibited any attempts by the Lebanese or Syrian side to repair the road. Israel has threatened to bomb it again if either side tries to restore operations.

The blue dotted line is the usual route which is fast and efficient. The purple dotted line is the route now needed to reach Beirut from Damascus. Israel has also bombed several points and bridges on the Homs western route so it is necessary to head for Tartous further north on the coast and then turn south to reach the border.

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Five Reasons Why Trump Should Revive The Draft Russian-Ukrainian Peace Treaty

Trump has everything to gain by picking up where everyone left off over two and a half years ago.

The Wall Street Journal’s report that Trump wants to create a Western-patrolled DMZ along the Line of Contact (LOC) for freezing the Ukrainian Conflict, which was analyzed here and here, dangerously runs the risk of escalating tensions with Russia to the point of a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis. It would therefore be much better for him to revive the draft Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty from spring 2022 instead.

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10 Obstacles To Trump’s Reported Plan For Western/NATO Peacekeepers In Ukraine

It was recently assessed that “The Clock Is Ticking For Russia To Achieve Its Maximum Goals In The Ukrainian Conflict” after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump plans to organize a Western/NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine without the US’ participation in order to freeze the conflict. This is obviously a lot easier said than done.

Here’s what can offset this scenario by either delaying it long enough for Russia to end the conflict on its own terms or capsizing Trump’s plan completely:

1. The Europeans Fear A Direct Kinetic Escalation With Russia

France’s tough talk earlier this year about conventionally intervening in the conflict and Poland subsequently refusing to rule out its participation as well mask the Europeans’ fear of a direct kinetic escalation with Russia. Trump will have to masterfully leverage the US’ influence over them and NATO as a whole in order to coerce his country’s European partners into putting their security on the line by going through with this risky plan. It could always backfire, after all, and inadvertently spark World War III.

2. Public Opinion In The Polish Lynchpin Is Strongly Against This

It’s difficult to imagine a Western/NATO peacekeeping mission in Ukraine without Poland’s leading participation, but public opinion is strongly against this after a reputable survey over the summer showed that 69% of Poles are opposed to dispatching troops to that neighboring country in any capacity. As mutual Polish-Ukrainian mistrust worsens as explained here, here, and here, it’ll become a very tough sell, plus Poles fear that they’ll once again be exploited by the West while getting nothing at all in return.

3. Trump’s Prior Rhetoric About Article 5 Doesn’t Inspire Confidence

Another hurdle that’ll have to be overcome is regaining confidence in Trump due to his prior rhetoric about Article 5 after he declared in February that the US won’t protect those NATO members who haven’t spent at least 2% of their GDP on defense. He even threatened that “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.” Even though most now meet that target, they might still fear that he’ll attach more strings to Article 5, which they’ll rely on for defense if they participate in this mission.

4. It’s Unclear Exactly What Trump Would Do If Russia Hit NATO Troops

Trump will also have to convince NATO members that his response to Russia hitting their troops will balance the line between fulfilling Article 5’s perceived commitments while avoiding an escalation that could spiral into World War III. They also need to be sure that he’ll go through with it and not back down. Moreover, this would have to be clearly communicated to Russia too, who he’ll have to deter. There’s a lot that can go wrong anywhere along this sequence of events so its success can’t be taken for granted.

5. NATO Is Unprepared For A Prolonged Non-Nuclear Hot War With Russia

Even in the extremely unlikely scenario that neither Russia nor the US resorts to nukes in the event of direct kinetic exchanges between them, then NATO would be unprepared for waging a prolonged non-nuclear hot war with Russia. It’s losing the “race of logistics” by far, no progress was made during the last NATO Summit on the “military Schengen” for facilitating such movements eastward, and the bloc only has 5% of the air defenses needed to protect itself. NATO might therefore ultimately lose to Russia.

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Netanyahu Admits Israel Behind Pager Explosion Operation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted Israeli responsibility for the Hezbollah pager explosion operation that kicked off the war on the north along the Lebanese border.

At today’s government meeting, Netanyahu acknowledged responsibility for the pager operation against Hezbollah for the first time, reported Amir Tsarfati.

“Senior security officials and the political leadership overseeing them opposed both the pager operation and Nasrallah’s elimination,” he said.

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Iran Denies That It Is Trying to Murder Trump, But…

Now we’ve gone and hurt their feelings. As Rick Moran detailed Friday, the U.S. government has charged three men, including one Iranian, with plotting to assassinate Donald Trump at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), in revenge for the 2020 killing of IRGC top dog Qasem Soleimani. The Iranians, however, are hotly denying this, claiming that it’s a malicious invention of the Biden-Harris Justice Department. And when it’s a choice between the Iranian mullahs and the regime’s gang of authoritarian prevaricators at the “Justice” department, who are you gonna believe? 

Fox News reported Saturday that “Iran’s Foreign Ministry dismissed a report released by the Department of Justice on Friday stating that it thwarted an Iranian plot to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump.” A spokesman for the foreign ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, “categorically dismissed allegations that Iran was involved in attempts to assassinate former and current US officials.” Baghaei thundered that the Justice Department’s report was “completely baseless and rejected,” and even claimed that similar allegations in the past have likewise been “firmly denied and proven false.”

Who does Baghaei think is behind all this lying? Why, the Jews, of course. He said that the American claims of an Iranian assassination plot against Trump were ” a malicious conspiracy orchestrated by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, aimed at further complicating the issues between the US and Iran.” He assured the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran “remains committed” to using “all legitimate and legal means” to “restore the rights of the Iranian nation.” What rights has the Iranian nation lost? Baghaei didn’t get into that, and with good reason, since the only beef the Iranian regime really has with Israel is that it’s a Jewish state. Israel has never impinged upon Iran’s rights or threatened it in any way.

Trust in the U.S. government is so low these days that Baghaei’s claims found at least one notable taker. Political commentator and “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams said: “I hate to say it, but I believe Iran over the United States on this topic. It would have been stupid for Iran to be behind it. It is normal for the United States to blame the wrong people.”

Adams may not be aware, however, that while the Iranians are denying it now, but they’ve admitted in the past that they were trying to kill Trump. In Feb. 2023, Fox News reported that Iran had renewed its threats against Trump and the others, and even stated them in Islamic religious terms. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace force, declared: “God willing, we are looking to kill Trump [and] Pompeo… and military commanders who issued the order should be killed.”

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Multipolarity and Its Potentials for Peace

For the past several decades, as the leader of a unipolar world, all diplomatic pathways to peace went through Washington. Any negotiated settlement had to be an American led negotiated settlement. But enforcing hegemony means not being impartial. It means rewarding one side with weapons and diplomatic support and coercing the other with sanctions and the threat of war. Dreams of being an immortal hegemon have resulted in policies that led to the death of diplomacy. All diplomatic pathways may have gone through Washington, but few, if any, have arrived at peace.

But as the world slowly but inexorably evolves from unipolarity to multipolarity, multiple pathways to diplomacy and peace are also evolving. If enforcing hegemony means opposing and isolating enemies, resulting in blocs that prevent diplomatic talks and negotiated settlements, multipolarity means rejecting blocs and the requirement to align ideologically and consistently with a hegemon in favor of nurturing relationships with multiple countries based on particular issues. And maintaining relations with opposing countries means being able to talk to both sides and act as an honest mediator instead of as a dishonest and partial broker.

The birth of multipolarity is revealing emerging signs of an evolving diplomatic landscape in which powers other than the U.S. can play a role and influence diplomacy and negotiated settlements. China and Russia, the two countries most nurturing multipolarity, are two powers that are growing into that role.

In Ukraine, the U.S. has not only tried and failed at diplomacy, it has actively blocked it. It is China, China’s BRICS partner Brazil and its aspiring BRICS partner Turkey that have led the way in encouraging diplomacy. In the Middle East, U.S. diplomacy has been abysmal enough to have alienated much of the Global South that hungrily awaits multipolarity.

But there are small signs that the decades of American monopoly on stewardship of the Middle East are adjusting to the new multipolar reality. While the U.S. still dominates ceasefire discussions between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the involved parties have shown an interest in involving Russia, with Israel having asked Russia to participate in the discussions.

Interest in injecting Russia into the situation comes from fading U.S. hegemony and emerging multipolarity. Newsweek reports that the initiative comes “at a time when Washington’s leadership in the Middle East has been increasingly called into question” while Russia is “ a world power with ties to nearly every major stakeholder.”

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MIT suspends student and bans magazine for article opposing Gaza genocide

Last Friday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) issued an immediate “interim” suspension of graduate student Prahlad Iyengar for penning an article titled “On Pacifism” in an MIT student magazine, Written Revolution, opposing Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza. The publication itself has been banned from campus.

Zionist groups and the MIT administration have falsely claimed the article incites violence and have attempted to paint Iyengar as a terrorist. The article, which appeared in the fifth edition of the magazine, which is an American Sociological Association-recognized publication, does nothing of the sort as is obvious from the text of the article itself which is academic in character.

The World Socialist Web Site opposes this flagrant attack on free speech and academic freedom and calls on workers, students and youth to demand the immediate rescinding of all administrative measures against Iyengar.

As Iyengar wrote in a statement opposing the ban, “The administration has also banned Written Revolution outright, meaning students who disseminate or read this publication on campus may face discipline.” Some students reading the magazine were approached by the police. According to a recording of the call made to police, it was to stop the handing out “banned pamphlets.” Students face Orwellian disciplinary actions for distributing or merely reading the article on campus. 

The suspension and ban represent an escalation of the bipartisan campaign led by the Biden administration and Democratic Party against opposition on the campuses to the Gaza genocide. It takes place after over 186,000 people in Gaza have been massacred by Israel, according to an estimate by The Lancet from July. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned that everyone in northern Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying,” while there is a massive and unprecedented amount of photographic and video evidence both from the victims and killers themselves on social media documenting the genocide, which could correctly be described as the first live-streamed genocide in history.

Iyengar, a second-year electrical engineering Ph.D. student, was summarily banned from campus under the bogus justification that he presented an immediate risk of violence, with the administration falsely claiming his article supports “terrorism.” This was done solely on the basis of anonymous allegations by Zionist students’ claims that statements in the article “could be interpreted as a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT.” The rule for interim banning of students is ostensibly aimed only at those who actually present a risk of violence, like those suspected of rape, murder or assault. This is clearly not the case.

Essentially no evidence has been presented beyond a People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine poster being used as an illustration in Iyengar’s article. The administration falsely used this to claim that the article supported terrorism. The banning opens a veritable Pandora’s Box of avenues for censorship, meaning all manner of media from textbooks and dictionaries which have pictures of real or supposed “terrorist” organizations to documentaries and non-fiction books and even news articles in the mainstream press could be banned.

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Criminalizing UNRWA: How Israel Is Delegitimizing the United Nations

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading of two bills that effectively ban the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) from carrying out “any activity” in Israel and occupied Palestine.

Simply put, the decision is catastrophic, because UNRWA is the main international body responsible for the welfare of millions of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and throughout much of the region.

Israel followed its decision by attacking and damaging an UNRWA office in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. It was the Israeli government’s way of demonstrating its seriousness regarding the matter.

This is not the first time that Israel has pursued an anti-UNRWA agenda and, contrary to claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israel officials, the decision is not linked to the current genocidal war on Gaza, or the unfounded claims that UNRWA supports ‘terrorism’.

An independent review commissioned by the UN revealed that Israel “made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations”, but that it “has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.”

Israeli claims, however, did a great deal of damage to the organization, as 13 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and Italy, withheld badly needed funds which were helping Gaza stave off a horrific famine.

Eventually, most of these countries reinstated their financial support, though without apologizing to the Palestinians who were adversely impacted by these countries’ initial, unfair decision.

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Massive Chinese Anti-Drone High-Power Microwave Weapon Emerges

Ahuge truck-mounted system is one of at least three large mobile ground-based high-power microwave directed energy weapons, primarily intended to down drones, at this year’s Zhuhai Airshow. This underscores a global explosion of demand for counter-drone capabilities, as well as China’s steady progress in the development, fielding, and exporting of microwave and laser directed energy weapons.

Officially known as the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, the Zhuhai Airshow also provides an opportunity for Chinese and foreign companies to showcase ground-based and maritime offerings. Pictures and videos of various aircraft and other systems have been steadily emerging ahead of the event’s formal opening next week.

The imagery that has appeared online already amid the Zhuhai preparations includes a promotional video from state-run firms China South Industries Group Corporation (CSGC) and Norinco that features footage of two high-power microwave directed energy weapons, as well as other air defense systems.

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