Tag: perpetual war

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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Report: Shin Bet Warned of Possible Hamas Assault Hours Before October 7 Attack

Approximately three hours prior to the Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on October 7, Shin Bet warned other elements of the police and security establishment that a potential assault emanating from the besieged Gaza Strip could be imminent.

The Kan public broadcaster and Channel 12 news reported the internal security service sent a “top secret” notification to the National Security Council, Mossad, and police that Israeli SIM cards Shin Bet had previously circulated within the group’s ranks as part of an operation had been activated “in a number of Hamas battalions.” There was no solid quantification of how many SIM cards were activated in the warning, but as the Times of Israel notes each battalion presumably contains hundreds of fighters.

The Shin Bet operation involving the cards was launched to provide an early warning for future Hamas attacks against Israel. The automatically generated alert was sent to situation rooms staffed 24 hours a day, contradicting past police claims about never receiving any warning, per Israeli media.

The Nova music festival held just outside the Gaza concentration camp went on as scheduled despite the alert, where concertgoers were subsequently slaughtered by Hamas as well as the IDF, which reportedly implemented a mass Hannibal Directive.

The Hannibal Directive is a policy of the Israeli military to kill their own soldiers when taken hostage, so as to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips by various resistance groups. However, on October 7, this order was extended to include Israeli civilians potentially kidnapped by Hamas. The group managed to abduct roughly 250 hostages and bring them back to the Strip.

Israeli police and Shin Bet are at odds over who is to blame, some sources told Kan that the internal security service should have raised a stronger alarm while other officials argue police did not pay the warning sufficient attention. Shin Bet’s warning said the activity demonstrated “unusual accumulation and, given additional suspicious signs, could be an indication of Hamas attack activities.”

The Times notes, “despite the warning, the security establishment maintained an outlook that Hamas was not capable or interested in carrying out a massive attack on the country.” Adding, “no action was taken” based on the Shin Bet alert. As the Jerusalem Post reported last year, this cavalier attitude was shared by commanders within Israel’s apartheid army who were admonished by their lookouts that suspicious activity was ongoing near the border before the attack.

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Israel delays Iran retaliation after US intelligence leak

Israel has delayed its retaliatory strike against Iran because of a leak last week of potentially sensitive military information from the US.

The leak revealed Israel’s well-advanced plans to respond to a salvo of nearly 200 Iranian ballistic missiles fired against it earlier this month, which was a retaliation by Tehran for Israel’s attacks on its Middle Eastern proxy groups.

The top-secret document was published on a pro-Iranian Telegram channel last Friday and appeared to be a US assessment of Israel’s likely response, based on satellite imagery and other intelligence.

It made reference to Golden Horizon and Rocks, two Israeli air-launched ballistic missiles.

Israel is concerned the leak could help Iran predict certain patterns of attack. It has been forced to develop an alternative plan, one that requires detailed war gaming before any order is given, The Times understands.

“The leak of the American documents delayed the attack due to the need to change certain strategies and components,” an intelligence source with knowledge of Israeli deliberations said. “There will be a retaliation, but it has taken longer than it was supposed to take.”

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If You’re Worried About Fascism, Worry About War

There’s another controversy about whether former President Donald Trump praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in private. In a New York Times interview published Tuesday, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelley claimed that Trump said, “Hitler did some good things.” The same day, The Atlantic reported that Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” citing anonymous sources. Trump’s campaign has denied both reports. These allegations, which have come up before, fit a liberal argument that Trump is a dangerous would-be dictator in the making.

Whether or not the specific reports are true, the discussion often misses an important historical fact. A large part of the Nazi political program was about revenge for losing a past war. Germany and its allies not only turned their guns on their own people, but focused heavily on military glory through conquest. Anyone concerned with the danger of fascism today has to understand the role that militarism played back then.

Hitler was not able to seize control simply because he was skilled at riling up mobs. The Nazi movement took root in soil poisoned by the economic collapse and political chaos caused by losing World War I. Most people understand that Hitler overthrew the weak and chaotic Weimar Republic, but many do not know how that chaos was directly related to the war.

World War I ended for Germany in 1918 with a revolution and counterrevolution. After it became clear that the war was hopeless, the country suffered a mutiny by sailors who didn’t want to fight anymore, which turned into a nationwide uprising, forcing the German emperor to step down. As the new German republic tried to hash out peace terms, the far left and far right armed themselves to fight over the future of the country.

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Harris embrace of Cheney goes back to World War I

“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about byan online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

One could find similar consternation withAmerican liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.

The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.

This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated bythe public debate betweenColumbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.

Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd theAmerican political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucraciesthat would undermine democracy.

While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.

Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitledUntimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on asolid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.

While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.

Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a fewstrident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of theformerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.

The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism,one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.

After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.

Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.

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Ukrainian Troops Increasingly Refusing Orders, Desertion Rates Explode

The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has opened 51,000 cases of desertion through the first nine months of 2024. The number of soldiers abandoning their posts is likely to double last year’s total. 

The Times of London reported data from the Ukrainian government showing that “51,000 criminal cases were initiated for desertion and abandonment of a military unit between January and September of this year.”

El Pais previously noted that 45,000 Ukrainians were being prosecuted for desertion from the start of the year through August. Al-Jazeera says the number is at least 30,000 desertions. 

At the start of the year, Kiev was estimated to have between 500,000 and 800,000 active-duty soldiers and an additional 300,000 reservists.

The Ukrainians have also sustained casualties fighting to defend from Russian advances and amid Kiev’s Kursk invasion. 

Kiev has struggled to fill its ranks with fresh soldiers, leading Ukraine to drop its conscription age from 27 to 25. As Kiev is still facing manpower shortages, American politicians are pushing Ukraine to drop draft age to 18. Responsible Statecraft has reported:

Despite no evidence of victory on the horizon, the Republican senator is urging Ukrainian lawmakers to pass a mobilization bill that would force more Ukrainian citizens to be drafted into the military. Currently, men under 27 are exempted from the draft. Graham has a problem with that.

…Graham told reporters, “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27. You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27.”

“We need more people in the line,” he said.

Ukraine has also resorted to allowing prisoners to leave jail if they join the military.

One Ukrainian who deserted told the Times that prison was a better option than the military because “at least in prison, you know when you will be able to leave.”

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Are North and South Korea escalating toward war?

A series of escalatory events on the Korean peninsula have intensified tensions between the two Koreas in recent weeks.

On October 13, Seoul and Pyongyang exchanged harsh verbal threats of military action over alleged drone incursions from South Korea into the northern capital. According to North Korea’s claim, the South Korean drone scattered anti-regime propaganda leaflets across Pyongyang.

Exactly who was behind the drone infiltrations remains unclear, but analysts have speculated that the South Korean military or South Korea-based anti-North activists could be involved.

The incident prompted Pyongyang to order its border troops to prepare for military retaliation if South Korean drones were to infiltrate again, threatening a “horrible disaster.” In turn, Seoul also put its frontline military on high alert, with a defense ministry statement that “if North Korea inflicts any harm on the safety of South Koreans, that day will be the end of the North Korean regime.”

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Biden’s ‘leadership’ is blowing the lid off two wars

President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.

The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.

The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.

What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.

Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.

Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.

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Journalists Find No Evidence of Israeli Claim That Hezbollah Money Stash Is Under Beirut Hospital

Journalists were given unrestricted access to the Sahel General Hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs after the Israeli military claimed a Hezbollah money and gold stash was hidden in a bunker underneath the building.

A BBC journalist reporting from the hospital’s basement levels said the staff opened any doors and cabinets the reporters wanted to open. Journalists were also able to explore anywhere in the building on their own, and no evidence of a Hezbollah money stash was found.

Israel first made the claim in a video on Monday night, prompting the hospital to evacuate patients over fears they would be bombed. “We were here at the hospital working, treating patients, and then the video came out,” Dr. Omar Mneimne, who works at the hospital, told The National. “Obviously, we [have been] living in terror for the past 24 hours.”

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

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