Tag: perpetual war

Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency

CONFRONTED WITH AN endless list of well-documented Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration has responded with overwhelming support for a genocidal war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza. For more than two months, the White House has engaged in a public campaign of gaslighting as it has feigned concern over the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents while simultaneously maintaining the flow of weapons, intelligence, and political cover to an Israeli regime that has made clear its intent to “flatten” Gaza and force its intentionally dehumanized survivors into an ever-shrinking killing cage.

President Joe Biden, facing historically low popularity heading into the 2024 election, reportedly now wants Israel to move to a “less kinetic” phase of its war by early next year. This is simply the latest effort by the administration to recast the public narrative about its consistent support for slaughter.

Ten weeks into this industrial-scale rampage, more than 25,000 Palestinians are dead, including nearly 10,000 children. Two dozen hospitals have been attacked by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces and some 300 health workers have been killed. Nearly 100 journalists have died under Israel’s bombs and attacks. Not even the Catholic Church in Gaza has been spared from Israel’s war crimes. On December 16, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women taking shelter in the Holy Family church in Gaza, spurring Pope Francis to state bluntly that Israel is committing acts of terrorism.

Gazans have been systematically denied the most minimal vital necessities. International aid organizations, warning of starvation and the spread of infectious disease, have repeatedly begged for an immediate ceasefire. And it has been the U.S., and the U.S. alone, that has insured that this would not happen. “The United States and Israel have never been more determined and aligned in our shared values, our shared interests and our shared goals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as he stood alongside U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week in Tel Aviv. “Our common enemies around the world are watching, and they know that Israel victory is the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.”

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Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis

Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.

The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.

The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.

Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.

The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.

The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.

Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.

They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.

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Why Hasn’t The U.S. Struck Back After Red Sea Anti-Ship Attacks?

My inbox has been flooded with people wanting to know why the United States has not retaliated against Houthi forces in Yemen after repeated anti-ship attacks near the Bab el-Mandeb strait — the critical funnel that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf Of Aden. It’s an entirely fair question and the answer is not as simple as some would make it seem. So let’s dig into it.

One prevailing viewpoint is that the Houthis will ‘only understand force’ and that the United States needs to hit them back. Some declare that this should have happened after the first weapons were launched at ships, but especially now.

The blanket notion of ‘hitting them back’ includes a huge spectrum of potential responses. These range from reactive, proportional responses to much more comprehensive and prolonged campaigns, with various velocities of escalation that can be overlaid on such operations. It’s not like the United States hasn’t done exactly this before and American forces have been kinetically engaged in Yemen on and off for many years. In addition, the U.S. military has provided other forms of support to the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in the past. So there is a clear precedent for some sort of military response.

But, at the same time, the current circumstances are certainly different than any in the past and are drastically more complex with much farther-reaching potential consequences. The entire region is on extreme edge. Iran and its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon have not yet entered the Israel-Hamas conflict with full force, but there is still the possibility they might. Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria are also already a near-daily occurrence. The Houthis alone have the ability to drastically increase attacks on U.S. forces in the region, but more on that in a moment.

Simply put, one major spark could set off a much larger fire that could be very challenging to contain.

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Space Force chief: Timing of Chinese spaceplane launch “no coincidence”

China has launched its top-secret military spaceplane for a third time, days after the US military’s winged spacecraft was grounded for several weeks due to problems with its SpaceX rocket.

Observers believe China’s spaceplane looks much like the US military’s X-37B, a reusable craft that Pentagon officials are similarly tight-lipped about. But there’s a distinction in that US officials will publicly discuss, at least in broad terms, the purpose of the X-37B and release images of the spacecraft.

The US military has two X-37Bs in its inventory, each with a cargo bay that could fit a large refrigerator. They resemble small space shuttles, with dimensions about one-quarter those of NASA’s retired shuttle orbiters. The X-37B spaceplanes have flown in space six times, logging missions as long as two-and-a-half years, thanks to deployable solar panels that generate power for greater endurance.

The seventh X-37B flight was supposed to launch this week from Florida, but officials called off the launch to resolve technical issues with its Falcon Heavy rocket.

Then, on Thursday, China sent its own spaceplane aloft on a Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China. The Long March 2F is typically used to launch Chinese astronaut crews into orbit but has been modified to accommodate China’s unpiloted robotic spaceplane inside its payload fairing.

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Here Is What Each Of The Navy’s Ship-Launched Missiles Actually Costs

Many of America’s warships set sail absolutely packed with missiles. A single Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser has 122 Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS) cells, each of which can handle one of a wide array of individual missiles, or four Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSMs). Even America’s carriers are bristling with missile-based point defenses. While the capabilities the Navy’s array of ship-launched missiles provides are fairly well known, at least conceptually, the staggering cost of each of these weapons is not. Now, just as we did with air-launched weapons and decoy flares, we aim to change that. 

The War Zone has collected the latest unit costs of these weapons to give readers a sense of just how much it is spending to arm its fleet. It should be stressed that these are the prices for just the individual weapons and the figures do not factor in any future spending on support services, modifications, upgrades, or past spending on the weapons’ development. 

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The Myth That Putin Was Bent on Conquering Ukraine and Creating a Greater Russia

There is a growing body of compelling evidence showing that Russia and Ukraine were involved in serious negotiations to end the war in Ukraine right after it started on 24 February 2022. These talks were facilitated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and featured detailed and candid discussions on the terms of a possible settlement.

By all accounts, these negotiations, which took place in March-April 2022, were making real progress when Britain and the US told Ukrainian President Zelensky to abandon them, which he did.

Coverage of these events has focused on how foolish and irresponsible it was for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to put an end to these negotiations, given all the death and destruction that Ukraine has suffered since then – in a war that Kyiv is likely to lose.

Yet an especially important aspect of this story regarding the causes of the Ukraine war has received little attention. The well-entrenched conventional wisdom in the West is that President Putin invaded Ukraine to conquer that country and make it part of a Greater Russia. Then, he would move on and conquer other countries in eastern Europe. The counter-argument, which enjoys little support in the West, is that Putin was mainly motivated to invade by the threat of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. For him and other Russian elites, Ukraine in NATO was an existential threat.

The negotiations in March-April 2022 make it clear that the conventional wisdom on the war’s causes is wrong, and the counter-argument is right, for two main reasons. First, the talks were directly focused on satisfying Russia’s demand that Ukraine not become part of NATO and instead become a neutral state. Everyone involved in the negotiations understood that Ukraine’s relationship with NATO was Russia’s core concern. Second, if Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would not have agreed to these talks, as their very essence contradicted any possibility of Russia conquering all of Ukraine. One might argue that he participated in these negotiations and talked a lot about neutrality to mask his larger ambitions. There is no evidence, however, to support this line of argument, not to mention that: 1) Russia’s small invasion force was not capable of conquering and occupying all of Ukraine; and 2) it would have made no sense to delay a larger offensive, as it would afford Ukraine time to build up its defenses.

In short, Putin launched a limited attack into Ukraine for the purpose of coercing Zelensky into abandoning Kyiv’s policy of aligning with the West and eventually bringing Ukraine into NATO. Had Britain and the West not intervened to scotch the negotiations, there is good reason to think Putin would have achieved this limited objective and agreed to end the war.

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Murder

On the BBC, the Daily Politics show – which consists of discussion between senior British MPs – does not discuss Palestine at all, because the British political class supports the genocide, so for them there is nothing to discuss.

Also in Jabalia, the Israelis today destroyed the last remaining bakery.

It is worth stating why this is plainly a genocide in Gaza:

1) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure which supports the civilian population, including water treatment, electricity, sewerage systems, bakeries and fishing boats;

2)  Deliberate destruction of almost all medical facilities;

3) Deliberate destruction of educational facilities, from universities to primary schools;

4) Deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of civil society, including Supreme Court, Parliament, Ministries and Council buildings and deliberate destruction of administrative records;

5) Deliberate blocking of food aid inducing mass starvation;

6) Massive and indiscriminate bombardment. In wars the general percentage of children among those killed varies from 6 to 8 percent. In Ukraine it is 6 percent. In Gaza it is 42 percent. This is indiscriminate destruction of an ethnic group;

7) Mass executions of civilians;

8) Acts of dehumanisation of the Palestinians, including parading prisoners naked for public and media show and humiliation, beating and sexually abusing them;

9) Forced mass movement of population;

10) Deliberate targeting of religious and cultural heritage buildings;

11) Deliberate targeting of intellectual leadership, including journalists, doctors, poets, university lecturers and senior administrators;

12) Numerous declarations of open genocidal intent from the President and Prime Minister down through almost the entire fabric of both civilian and military establishment.

This is the official definition of Genocide in international law, from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

On Tuesday I attended a session called by Palestine at the United Nations in Geneva. Over 120 states attended. While the formal session consisted of statements of national position with few surprises, I was able to discuss with a large number of delegates in the corridors why the Genocide Convention has not been activated triggering a reference to the International Court of Justice.

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Europe is ‘Entering an Era of Wars’, Top Security Forum Warns

The comfortable era of prosperity and the welfare state under the protective umbrella of American defence is ending and Europe needs to “switch to a war economy”, the director of a top European security forum warns.

The United States is drifting away from Europe as a new generation of voters and politicians focus on the Asia Pacific region rather than over the Atlantic, and European states need to start urgent work to prepare for a future era of increased conflict without American firepower to fall back on, Professor Katarzyna Pisarska of the Warsaw Security Forum has told a top German newspaper.

The political scientist painted a bleak picture of the future for Die Welt, noting that fundamental changes in American society — like demographic change, for instance — is going to make holding Washington’s attention in the future more difficult. She told the paper: “For many younger Americans, including a generation of politicians, Europe is little more than an open-air museum. You feel and are actually closer to Asia and the Pacific region. China is the biggest geopolitical threat for them.

“…The USA is changing, demographically. There has been hardly any immigration from Europe for many decades, but from Asia and of course Latin America. This also changes the priorities of politics.”

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Newly Formed Operation Prosperity Guardian To Protect Red Sea Shipping

During his visit to the Middle East next week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will announce the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new international effort deal with Houthi threats, a U.S. military official told The War Zone. That information comes as U.S. and British warships shot down drones the Houthis launched in a wave from Yemen early Saturday morning local time, marking the latest escalation of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

The Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Carney downed 14 drones today, a U.S. military official told The War Zone. The Type-45 destroyer HMS Diamond downed one drone targeting merchant shipping in the Red Sea with a Sea Viper missile, U.K. Defense Secretary Grant Shapps said in a statement. It was the first time the Royal Navy shot down an aerial target in anger since the First Gulf War in 1991 when the Type 42 Destroyer HMS Gloucester destroyed an Iraqi Silkworm missile bound for a U.S. warship.

The two destroyers, which were in constant communications, shot down the drones during a 45-minute attack wave near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the official told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

While the British say the drones were attacking a merchant ship, the Carney engaged the drones because there were so many at once they were deemed a threat to the ship, the official said.

The official declined to say what weapons the Carney used because the U.S. does not want the Houthis to be able to figure out its munitions stocks.

In a Tweet, CENTCOM stated the drones “were shot down with no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries. Regional Red Sea partners were alerted to the threat.”

Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare’e said today that the Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels launched a wave of drones toward Israel, but did not mention either warship.

Today’s drone intercepts come a day after the Houthis set two cargo ships in the Red Sea ablaze and threatened a third vessel. Two of the world’s largest shipping companies, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, told us they were temporarily pausing transits into the Red Sea as a result of the Houthi attacks. You can read more about those incidents in our story here.

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