Tag: perpetual war

Reuters Revealed The Reason Why Niger Asked American Troops To Leave The Country

All the media hype about the reasons why this happened (ex: “Russian influence”) and the expected consequences (ex: “an upsurge in terrorism”) distract from the fact that this was entirely avoidable and only occurred because the US inexplicitly disrespected Niger despite having lost its leverage over it last summer.

Reuters cited an unnamed US official to report on Thursday that Russian troops are based in the same Nigerien military facility as American ones, which Secretary of Defense Austin later confirmed. Other outlets reported the same citing their own sources, and it’s unclear whether the same individual spoke to them too. In any case, what’s most interesting about their report is the remainder of what they said was revealed to them about the larger context within which this latest development is taking place.

According to them, “Niger’s move to ask for the removal of U.S. troops came after a meeting in Niamey in mid-March, when senior U.S. officials raised concerns including the expected arrival of Russia forces and reports of Iran seeking raw materials in the country, including uranium. While the U.S. message to Nigerien officials was not an ultimatum, the official said, it was made clear U.S. forces could not be on a base with Russian forces. ‘They did not take that well,’ the official said.”

In other words, the American military delegation arrogantly told their hosts that they don’t want Russian troops in close proximity to theirs, which prompted them to subsequently request their withdrawal. Niger wanted to cut the costs and time required for receiving Russian advisors, hence why it sought to base them in a separate hanger at the same facility as US troops outside the capital instead of building a new base. This pragmatic move was within Niger’s sovereign rights as a UN-recognized state.

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Israeli Officials Say Flow of US Weapons Is Uninterrupted Despite Report of Ammunition Delay

Israeli officials said on Sunday that the overall flow of US weapons shipments to Israel is “uninterrupted” despite a report from Axios that said the Biden administration put a hold on an ammunition shipment.

The Axios report cited two Israeli officials who said the hold on the ammunition raised “serious concerns” in the Israeli government, but the sources did not give a reason why the US delayed the shipment. CNN later reported that the pause had nothing to do with Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and wouldn’t impact future weapons shipments, meaning it doesn’t reflect a change in US policy.

“The stream of security shipments from the US to Israel is ongoing. While individual shipments might be delayed, the overall flow remains uninterrupted, and we are not aware of any policy suspending it,” an Israeli official told Ynet.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan cited a political source who said Israel “is not aware of any US decision regarding stopping or reducing military support to Israel.” The source added that it was “possible that one shipment or another will be delayed, but the flow continues, and we are not aware of a political decision to stop it.”

When asked about the paused ammunition shipment, a National Security Council spokesperson vowed the US would continue arming Israel. “The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the October 7 attacks, passed the largest ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, and will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself from the threats it faces,” the spokesperson told CNN.

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France Sends Troops to Ukraine Frontlines

France has officially deployed 100 soldiers of the Foreign Legion to the frontlines in Ukraine, where they will offer support to the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade.

Although the initial deployment is just 100 artillery and surveillance experts, around 1,500 French soldiers from the Legion are scheduled to be deployed in Ukraine.

President Macron has been repeatedly rebuffed in his calls for NATO countries to send troops to Ukraine. He has stated publicly that “nothing should be excluded” as a potential response by Ukraine’s NATO allies.

The official US position is still that it opposes sending troops to Ukraine, other than in an advisory role.

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Rebuilding Bombed-Out Gaza Could Take Into Next Century: UN

Gaza will need rebuilding on scale not seen since World War 2, the United Nations has said in a new report which seeks to assess the immense scale and scope of damage after almost seven months of war.

The report released by the UN Development Program (UNDP) said that Gaza needs “approximately 80 years to restore all the fully destroyed housing units” and that rebuilding all that’s been destroyed in the Strip could even drag into the next century.

“Unprecedented levels of human losses, capital destruction, and the steep rise in poverty in such a short period of time will precipitate a serious development crisis that jeopardizes the future of generations to come,” UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said in a statement.

The report tallies that some 80,000 homes have been fully destroyed while at least 370,000 have been damaged. The UN also indicated there’s a possibility that rebuilding could be completed by 2040, but only if “construction materials are delivered five times as fast as in the last crisis in 2021” and if there war were to immediately stop.

According to more via Reuters, “In a scenario where the war lasts nine months, poverty is set to increase from 38.8% of Gaza’s population at the end of 2023 to 60.7%, dragging a large portion of the middle class below the poverty line, the report said.”

One UN official referenced in international reports said that Israel’s bombardment of the Strip has resulted in a “moonscape” of destruction.

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UK Vows To Arm Ukraine For ‘As Long as It Takes’ – Commits $3.7BN Annually

The UK has committed to what might be called ‘forever aid’ in Ukraine’s defense, with British Foreign Secretary David Cameron newly promising $3.74 billion of annual military aid for Kiev for “as long as it takes”.

He unveiled the plan Thursday, and it marks the biggest commitment in foreign defense aid rollout for Britain thus far in the war (and perhaps in all of history), coming on the heels of the Biden administration also seeking to erect a 10-year plan to assist Ukraine which theoretically would lock in future US presidents as well.

“We will give 3 billion pounds every year for as long as is necessary. We’ve just really emptied all we can in terms of giving equipment,” Cameron told Reuters in an interview on a visit to the Ukrainian capital.

“Some of that [equipment] is actually arriving in Ukraine today, while I’m here,” he said. Alarmingly, he openly stated that the British government has no problem with Ukrainian forces using UK weapons to strike at targets inside Russian territory.

“Ukraine has that right. Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” Cameron said.

“It’s absolutely crucial, not just in terms of the weapons it will bring, but also the boost to morale that it will bring to people here in Ukraine,” the UK top diplomat continued in the remarks given upon his second visit to the war-ravaged country as foreign secretary.

Cameron was at one point asked whether a potential future Trump administration could negatively impact the flow of aid to the Zelensky government.

He responded: “It’s not for us to decide who the Americans choose as their president. We will work with whoever that is.” NATO officials have reportedly been attempting to “Trump-proof” any future aid.

Last Sunday, Zelensky himself signaled as much in a nightly video address, saying that he’s working with Washington on a bilateral security agreement which would last ten years. “We are already working on a specific text,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address. “Our goal is to make this agreement the strongest of all.”

“We are discussing the specific foundations of our security and cooperation. We are also working on fixing specific levels of support for this year and the next 10 years.”

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As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

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U.S. Government Helps Pro-Ukraine Media Spread Propaganda And Silence American Critics

Ukraine’s American-backed fight against Russia is being waged not only in the blood-soaked trenches of the Donbas region but also on what military planners call the cognitive battlefield — to win hearts and minds.

A sprawling constellation of media outlets organized with substantial funding and direction from the U.S. government has not just worked to counter Russian propaganda but has supported strong censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets, disseminated disinformation of its own, and sought to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer are among the critics on both the left and the right who have been cast as part of a “network of Russian propaganda.”

But the figures targeted by the Ukrainian watchdog groups are hardly Kremlin agents. They simply have forcefully criticized dominant narratives about the war.

Sachs is a highly respected international development expert who has angered Ukrainian officials over his repeated calls for a diplomatic solution to the current military conflict. Last November, he gave a speech at the United Nations calling for a negotiated peace.

Mearsheimer has written extensively on international relations and is a skeptic of NATO expansion. He predicted that Western efforts to militarize Ukraine would lead to a Russian invasion.

Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning independent journalist who has criticized not just war coverage but media dynamics that suppress voices that run counter to U.S. narratives.

“What they mean when they demand censorship of ‘pro-Russia propaganda’ is anything that questions the US/EU role in the Ukraine war or who dissents from their narratives,” Greenwald has observed.

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How to Deter a War with China Over Taiwan

Europe is suffering its largest land conflict since the Second World War in Ukraine. This fight could turn out to be a mere overture if war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait. Tensions are high: Congress recently approved $8.1 billion for Taipei and elsewhere in the Pacific, while the president has repeatedly said that he would defend Taiwan. That would put the United States into a conflict potentially like no other, with nuclear weapons at 10 paces.

Yet those most determined to escalate America’s involvement in the Russo–Ukrainian war insist that there is nothing to worry about. If only the U.S. holds firm in Ukraine, the Chinese will run for cover over Taiwan. Yet the claim that Beijing would fear Washington when the latter refuses to intervene on Kiev’s behalf, allowing Moscow’s aggression to advance, seems illogical at best. Indeed, Johns Hopkins’s Hal Brands warned that this stance may “have convinced Beijing that the United States just won’t fight a conventional war against a nuclear-armed rival.” Hence China’s ongoing nuclear build-up.

Worse, American policy seems more likely to encourage than discourage such a conflict. Rather than reassure the People’s Republic of China that its red lines won’t be crossed, the administration is stationing American forces in Taiwan, emphasizing that nation’s value in constraining China, and saying little as congressional leaders flaunt ties with Taipei. Leading Republicans, including a former secretary of state and national security adviser, advocate recognizing Taiwan as the Republic of China. It is almost as if Washington’s policy elite wants war with the PRC.

They shouldn’t. 

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Iran, US mutual delusions pave a path to war

For the umpteenth time, the U.S. and Iran have come close to an open war neither side wants.

The Israelis strike a building within the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, killing senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranians, with unintended irony, protest this violation of diplomatic premises, and almost start a war with Israel by launching hundreds of drones and missiles that the U.S., given ample warning, helps to inter­cept. The Israelis launch a counterstrike to demonstrate its ability to evade Iran’s defenses. That appears to end the exchange until the next round.

Sooner or later, if the U.S. and the Islamic Republic are going to avoid such a lose-lose conflict, the two sides will need to stop shouting and start talking. Forty-five years of exchanging empty slogans, accusa­tions, threats, and denunci­a­tions have accomplished little beyond furthering a few political careers and feed­ing a sense of self-righteousness. For suc­cessive U.S. adminis­trations, Iran remains a problem that will not go away.

To para­phrase Trotsky, “You may have no business with Iran; but Iran has business with you.” For Iran, the U.S. remains an obsession. The more Iran’s hated rulers denounce it, the more attractive it becomes — as both a role model and a destination — to a savvy popula­tion suffering from inflation, unemployment, and the stern, miso­gynistic dictates of an aging and ossified ruling elite.

The Islamic Republic, despite the wishes of many Iranians and their friends, is probably not going away soon. In the first months after the fall of the monarchy, the most-asked question in Tehran was, “When are THEY leaving?” (Inhaa key mirand?). Forty-five years later THEY are still in charge and show no signs of packing their bags.

Why should we talk to the Islamic Republic, when it has the appalling history that it does? Why should we talk when its overriding policy principle is, in the words of one Iranian official, “opposition to you”? We need to talk because talking (and listening) to an adversary means serving our national interests by communicating. Talking never means either approval of or affection for the Islamic Republic.

Talking to the Islamic Republic is not going to bring down that government, persuade the ruling clerics to step aside, or persuade them to stop repressing its women, musicians, journalists, lawyers, students and academics. Talking is not going to end the ruling clerics’ bizarre obsessions with con­trolling every trivial detail of Iranians’ private lives. What talking does is allow each side to present its point of view and to correct the dangerous “mythperceptions” that have prevented the U.S. and Iran from breaking out of a 45-year downward spiral of futility.

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Israeli Warplanes Strike Damascus As Iran Tensions Still On Edge

Israeli aircraft have reportedly attacked a location on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus late Thursday (local), a security source told Reuters.

Widely circulating images have emerged on social media showing plumes of smoke rising high over buildings which were struck. Syrian state media subsequently said that eight army soldiers were injured in the attack. 

The fresh Israeli aggression could be another targeted assassination operation against Iranian generals or IRGC officers, and certainly would also be intended to signal Israel remains undeterred by Iran’s April 13th attack, which was in retaliation for the prior Israeli attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus.

According to unverified social media reports: 

The Israeli attack against Syria targeted the building of the Syrian State Security branch in the “Najha” area in the Damascus countryside.

There has been some speculation that this is an Israeli response to the launch of rockets from the Syrian side towards the Golan Heights earlier in the day and week.

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