Tag: perpetual war

Third Russian Refinery Attacked By Ukraine In 3 Days

The overnight hours into early Sunday morning hours saw yet a third Russian refinery attacked by long-range Ukrainian drones since Ukraine abandoned a short-lived halt on energy site attacks.

Russia’s Kstovo oil refinery is ablaze, becoming the third refinery hit in just three days. What’s known as the “Lukoil-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez” oil refinery and the adjacent Novogorkovskaya combined heat and power plant in the city of Kstovo were impacted.

The complex is Russia’s fourth-largest refinery and its second-largest gasoline producer. Mulitple large fires reupted as a result of the strikes, across the industrial site.

“Residents in Kstovo began circulating footage of major blazes lighting up the skyline around 4:00 a.m. local time, reporting repeated loud detonations and low-flying drone engine sounds over the municipal industrial zone,” regional media reports.

Many inbound UAVs were observed penetrating the region’s air defenses, and images of dramatic scenes of large fires at the site quickly thereafter began ciculating.

Ukrainian media is acknwoledging and detailing the assault. Kyiv Post writes, “The installation manufactures high-octane automotive gasoline, diesel fuel, jet propulsion kerosene, bitumen, and specialized petroleum fractions utilized directly by Russian military logistics and heavy mechanized equipment.”

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Beyond Netanyahu: What Israel’s Election Means for Palestinians

In the past, many Palestinians and Arabs followed Israeli elections closely.

They did so not because they entertained illusions that a Zionist leader would deliver peace and justice, dismantle the occupation or remove illegal settlements. Rather, they feared that some Israeli leaders were worse than others. They hoped to avert the worst-case scenario.

Over time, however, that distinction gave way to the belief that all Israeli leaders were essentially the same. This is not pessimism. It is experience.

Consider, for example, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the Oslo peace process under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Between 1992 and 1995, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from 111,673 to 140,235 – a rise of more than 25 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, drawing on Israeli statistical records.

The same pattern continued under the Labor government of Ehud Barak.

Within his first six months, Barak’s government issued tenders for 3,196 settlement housing units, exceeding the annual average under his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government in June 2021 that included the Arab party Ra’am, settlement expansion continued unabated.

According to Peace Now, the Bennett–Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units during its first year, a 26-percent increase over the annual average recorded under previous Netanyahu governments.

The settlements are themselves a driving force behind the occupation. They require land, and therefore land confiscation; protection, and therefore an expanded military presence; water, roads and infrastructure, and therefore the appropriation of Palestinian resources. Together, these elements deepen dispossession and generate further Israeli violence.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the West Bank contained 645 Israeli settlement sites, outposts and other occupation installations by the end of 2025, including 350 settlement outposts.

The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that Israeli authorities targeted approximately 29,335 dunums of Palestinian land through declarations of so-called “state land” between October 2023 and August 2026—one of the largest waves of such land appropriation since Oslo.

By September 2026, the Commission had also documented the advancement or consideration of plans for more than 18,000 additional settlement housing units across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Alongside this expansion is the violence unfolding across the West Bank.

By the end of 2023, the West Bank had experienced its deadliest year for Palestinians since the UN began systematically recording casualties in 2005.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 23,827 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their property during 2025 alone. In the first seven months of 2026, settler attacks increased by 63 percent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year.

Typically, this violence, carried out by the Israeli occupation army and armed illegal settlers, is contextualized within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But violence in the West Bank also serves another purpose beyond collective punishment: the confiscation of Palestinian orchards, the annexation of land, the expansion of settlements and the crushing of Palestinian resistance, including nonviolent opposition to this colonial enterprise.

Any Israeli candidate in the October 27 elections who supports settlement expansion does so with full knowledge of its consequences: further dispossession, military occupation, annexation and violence.

The difference between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and politicians presented as less extreme, is often one of language, strategy and timing.

Former Israeli military chief and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, for example, openly supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite his reputation as a more ‘moderate’ alternative to Netanyahu.

What, then, about Gaza?

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Who is Making Billions from the Iran War?

At a campaign rally over the weekend, President Trump dismissed Americans’ concerns over high oil and gas prices, claiming that it’s a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars “we” are making from these higher prices.

“We’re making a fortune,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.”

People are paying a little bit more for gas, he explained, but it doesn’t matter because “we” are making so much money.

The question is, “Who is ‘we’?” We know it is not the American people. They are seeing wage stagnation, inflation, and more pain at the pump. An Economist/YouGov poll earlier this month found that inflation and prices are the top concern among Americans by a wide margin. And in second place were jobs and the economy.

The same poll asked Americans how they rate the state of the US economy and in first place – again by a long shot – was “poor.”

If “we” as in the American people were making hundreds of billions of dollars from the war, you would think these would not be their top two concerns.

But we understand what the President meant by “we.” He meant that part of the “private” sector directly or indirectly in bed with the government war machine. From oil companies to weapons manufacturers and everything in between, war and conflict drive up profits in well-connected corporations at the expense of the rest of us.

That is why we are in a constant state of war. Twenty years in Afghanistan and a similar length in Iraq. Endless bombing in places like Somalia. A twelve-year (and counting) proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Military bases and covert operations across the globe.

And if we find that the largest military budget in the world does not deliver enough actual weapons to win a war? Well, that’s all good too: just double military spending and accuse anyone who objects of not being patriotic!

“Private” companies with enormous political power – many of them revolving doors between government and business – “make so much money” on war, as Trump would say. Whether these wars produce US wins, loses, or stalemates, these corporations in bed with government always win. The money-printing machine makes sure the money cycles into government-favored companies, while campaign contributions are made to the politicians who support the wars.

And if you don’t support the wars? You get the Thomas Massie treatment.

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Burma’s Junta Bombs Civilian Targets While Inviting Rebels to Peace Talks

Burma’s new defense minister, Lieutenant General Yar Pyae, claimed at an October event that the air force’s bombing campaign serves peace. At the same event, the junta renewed its invitation to ethnic armed groups to join peace talks and called on the People’s Defense Force (PDF), the armed wing of the opposition National Unity Government, to lay down its weapons.

Yar Pyae, who also chairs the junta’s National Solidarity and Peacemaking Negotiation Committee, spoke three weeks after a military airstrike on a market in Kyauktaw, Rakhine State, killed 50 people, according to aid workers and the Arakan Army (AA). During the weekend of the event, junta airstrikes killed at least 27 civilians across five states and regions.

The invitation followed an earlier peace initiative accompanied by continued bloodshed. After Min Aung Hlaing took the title of president in April 2026, the junta announced a “100-Day Peace Initiative,” running from April 21 to July 31, and invited ethnic armed groups to Naypyitaw for talks. The UN Special Rapporteur’s latest report found that about 753 civilians were killed nationwide during that period, with the military and allied militias responsible for 89 percent of those deaths.

Airstrikes allow the military to attack territory its ground troops cannot hold. In Rakhine, where the junta has lost 14 of 17 townships, the UN Human Rights Office found that the military relied primarily on air power to prevent the AA from advancing on Sittwe and Kyaukphyu. The AA has also overrun a major regional military headquarters since launching its offensive in November 2023, according to Agenzia Nova. ACLED senior analyst Su Mon said the junta’s September offensive to retake territory in Rakhine had produced no battlefield gains.

The UN Human Rights Office’s annual report to the Human Rights Council, covering June 2025 through May 2026, identified airstrikes as the leading cause of civilian deaths in Burma. Open sources recorded at least 2,592 air attacks during that period, a 17 percent increase over the previous year. Aerial attacks accounted for 845 of the 1,241 civilian deaths the office recorded.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Burmese rights monitor cited by the UN office, counted at least 8,075 civilians killed by the military between the February 2021 coup and May 31, 2026, including 1,074 children. The office said military restrictions prevented verification of thousands more deaths.

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Inside the U.S. Army’s $2.2B plan to build microreactors at five bases

The U.S. Army recently announced plans to add nuclear microreactors at five military bases from New York to Texas as a reliable energy source independent of the commercial electric grid.

The decision comes as the Trump administration pushes hard to develop the next generation of nuclear power, including issuing billions in loans for large nuclear reactors to meet skyrocketing power demand from data centers and a pilot program to boost advanced reactor designs and projects for military and civilian use. No nuclear microreactors are supplying power to the commercial electric grid in the United States today.

Five companies selected by the Army will be awarded up to $2.2 billion over five years to own, construct, and operate the microreactors, provided they meet set performance milestones along the way. The Army expects that more than 20 nuclear microreactors will be built and operated.

Army and industry officials say microreactors offer a resilient power source for critical infrastructure at military installations in case the grid fails. Reactors can run for years without refueling.

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US Army Quietly Begins Drills That Will Chill You To The Bone

The U.S. Army has conducted military exercises involving the excavation of mass battlefield graves, preparing for a potential future war in which casualties could become so overwhelming that bringing fallen soldiers home promptly would no longer be possible.

The drills, dubbed Operation Dragon Covenant, were held in North Carolina earlier this month and brought together military engineers, chaplains, medical personnel, and fatality management specialists to practice burying large numbers of bodies in temporary battlefield trenches, Army Times reports.

Engineers reportedly used D6 bulldozers to excavate trenches capable of holding 20 bodies in roughly 75 minutes. Commanders calculated that a properly equipped engineering company could dig and cover trenches for 2,400 bodies in 24 hours of nonstop operations.

Sgt. 1st Class Delbert Ruede, a senior Army fatality management leader, acknowledged how unprepared the service had been.

“If we went to war tomorrow, we would be making this up as we went along. What we are doing here is taking a scientific, field-tested approach so that we can maintain positive control and respectfully care for our fallen,” he warned.

The U.S. Army also practiced what to do if traditional funerals aren’t possible, so Chaplains are preparing to bless entire burial sites at once.

“In a high-intensity, contested combat environment, fatality management teams cannot stop a 24-hour interment operation for individualized religious gravesite services,” Lt. Col. Ruska, chaplain for the 3rd CSC, told Army Times.

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Ukraine Shatters Strike Pause With Major Drone Attack On Russian Oil Refinery, Defying Trump

Russia’s sprawling Novokuibyshevsk Oil Refinery in the Samara region is on fire on Friday, after suffering what appear to be multiple and widespread hits of a Ukrainian drone attack wave, with several pillars of smoke rising high above the complex, and seen for miles.

Curiously, news of the fresh attack emerged just hours after the Wall Street Journal reported the Zelensky government had paused refinery strikes under pressure from the Trump administration.

WSJ’s reporting has been updated Friday morning in confirmation that “Ukraine struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region early on Friday, ending a two-week pause in refinery attacks that came amid heavy pressure from the Trump administration to halt such operations.”

The publication reviews, “Ukrainian forces last hit an oil refinery on Oct. 15, and had not struck Russian oil infrastructure of any kind since Oct. 20. The pause took place against a background of repeated demands by Trump and other U.S. officials to stop hitting refineries.”

Trump envoy Jared Kushner had reportedly asked Kiev to abide by a 30-day halt. President Zelensky later said he agreed to a brief pause in the strikes, but did so begrudgingly.

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Empire Without Guardrails: The Global Toll of U.S.-Israel Arrogance

Imperial systems historically fall by the weight of their insatiable greed, reckless wastefulness and institutional hubris. Today, the United States stands as the sole imperial power, with Israel – the last remaining colonizing state – serving as its vanguard in West Asia. Both are showing the first signs of fundamental decline. A single miscalculation can forge a new reality.  Driven by imperious delusions, the US and Israel launched deadly wars of choice against Iran in June 2025 and again in February 2026.  The folly of their acts was believing that Iran, a civilizational nation, could be easily defeated. Instead of a swift victory, the flawed assumption has triggered a wider regional quagmire and undermined America’s global power and credibility. After eight months of military and economic turmoil, the ongoing war is an existential crisis for both Iran and the United States. For 47 years, the United States and Israel have been a threat to Iran.  Tehran is mindful that Washington and Tel Aviv are bent on destroying the country, and that the war is an existential fight it must win. The start of Operation Epic Fury, on February 28, was the Islamic Republic’s 9-11. Iran also knows that it cannot continue to live with America’s threatening regional presence (40,000 to 50,000 U.S. soldiers stationed across at least 19 bases) and with the crippling economic sanctions that have hindered development. In addition, after a long track-record of betrayals, Iranian leaders are keenly aware that the U.S. is not interested in honest negotiations or peaceful coexistence. By starting an unprovoked war that violated international law, destroyed vital infrastructure, and killed 3,468 Iranians – including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, members of his family and senior leadership – Washington proved it cannot be trusted. Concurrently, the United States is desperately trying to hold onto its military and economic supremacy.  Both Washington and Tel Aviv had little idea when they started the war that they had set in motion a revolutionary shift, regionally and globally. The unrestrained devastation has shattered the illusion of U.S.-Israeli political, economic and military invincibility, that has remained unchallenged for 81 years. Since emerging as the strongest economy following World War II, the American empire has maintained its prosperity and hegemony through resource exploitation, global militarization, strategic partnerships with merciless regimes, the promise of trickle-down wealth and subtlety-managed domestic indoctrination. American supremacy has relied heavily on dollar hegemony. By making the U.S. dollar the default currency for global commerce, Washington secured an exaggerated structural advantage that has underpinned its wider geopolitical leverage. This is particularly true in West Asia, where the dollar, pegged to petroleum  – the currency used worldwide in the oil trade since the 1970s – has been employed to exert control over countries in the region. In July 1944, at Bretton Woods, a new international financial system, centered around the dollar, was established by the United States.  Countries agreed to link the value of their currency to the greenback, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created under U.S. leadership, governance and control. Because financial transactions are typically processed through U.S-dominated institutions, like SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), an electronic interbank payment platform, dollar dominance gives Washington expansive power to impose far-reaching sanctions against other countries and to freeze them out of the global economy. The United States has weaponized its currency by imposing sanctions and blocking perceived adversaries, like Iran, from SWIFT, using economic isolation to achieve economically what it has failed to do militarily. As the U.S. and Israel witness their historic chokehold over global resources and defense capabilities slip away, they have reacted with fierce ruthlessness against Palestinian resistance, Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen, who are fearlessly contesting their hegemony. For decades, the United States has preserved its global power through unholy alliances with Israel and through military and economic partnerships with authoritarian Arab regimes, tasked with containing regional opposition. The Zionist colony was originally embedded in West Asia to protect British imperial interests.  Following Britain’s decline, Israel secured another willing benefactor.  It has served America as a projection of U.S. power in the region for decades. Paradoxically, Tel Aviv’s long-sought war against Iran might actually trigger its own ruin, topple Arab dictators, and shatter America’s regional and global supremacy. The coordinated U.S.and Israeli attacks on Iran set off long-standing anti-imperialist sentiments across the region.  These revolutionary undercurrents emerged in 1979 when Iran rejected foreign domination, overthrew the U.S.-backed Pahlavi monarchy, and asserted its independent sovereignty. For 47 years, the U.S. has been conducting economic warfare against the Islamic Republic through comprehensive economically destructive sanctions. In 2008, Iran was cut off from CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System); and in 2012, all Iranian banks were disconnected from SWIFT. To counter the devastating effects of being cut off from the international financial network, Iran has been forced to change strategies and to seek alternative partners, specifically Russia and China. In an effort to overcome the impact of U.S. sanctions, Iran became a full member of China-led BRICS, joining Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in January 2024. Tehran has been urging the bloc to adopt alternative payment systems and national currency settlements to bypass the U.S. dollar and mitigate Western sanctions. The U.S.-Israel plan for reshaping the region was laid out long ago. In a 1996 policy document titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,”  senior national security officials, neoconservative hardliners, argued that Israel’s security would be best served, not through the pursuit of peace, but through “regime” change in surrounding countries, starting with Iraq, then Syria and finally Iran. The enduring geopolitical campaign to restructure West Asia by crushing resistance and establishing absolute U.S. and Israeli dominance finally reached its peak in 2026 with the Iran war. The urgency of “securing the realm” was reflected in a nativist speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered in the shadow of the Parthenon in Athens; significantly on October 7 (anniversary of the Palestinian rebellion in Gaza). In addition to extolling its virtues, Rubio stated that Western civilization was at a critical “inflection point” in which the U.S. and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion or face decline or irrelevance. One passage in particular reveals the jingoistic and arrogant path the United States has been on in West Asia for decades:

“And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decision we make will write the story of the next century.  The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude or decline.  We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all….We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains (translated as the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea), to reindustrialize our economy…to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.”

The U.S. and Israel have chosen the “unapologetic pursuit of national power” in the resource-rich region.  Only now have they met their asymmetrical military match in the Islamic Republic, Ansar Allah and Hezbollah, and in the determination of Palestinians to resist subjugation. The United States has demonstrated that it is incapable of equality; of being one nation among many. It irrationally insists on “maintaining its place at the head of the world,” no matter the cost in lives and treasure.

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US Journalist and Activist Detained After Israeli Settler Attack in West Bank

An American journalist and an activist who reportedly suffered a concussion from being beaten by armed Israeli settlers remained in detention Wednesday night, hours after Israeli police arrested them following the attack.

Adele Shoko, a Russian activist, reported that settlers had attacked her, Israeli-Russian activist Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, and US journalist Jasper Nathaniel late Wednesday in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, in the Masafer Yatta area of the occupied West Bank.

“They beat us, threatened to shoot us, stole Andrey’s phone and my glasses, and pepper-sprayed Jasper,” Shoko said on the social media platform X.

According to Shoko, Khrzhanovskiy was denied medical treatment after losing consciousness “several times in front of police.” He and Nathaniel were taken to a police station, where they remained hours later.

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Iran, the Midterms, and the Myth of Government by the People

With the Israeli election this week and America’s midterms next Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have reportedly spent weeks debating not whether to restart their war with Iran, but when they should do it.

Netanyahu reportedly wanted to renew the bombing before Israeli or American voters went to the polls. He has officially denied that, but it fits his well-documented strategy of using an ongoing war to shield himself from political and legal accountability.

Trump, meanwhile, has publicly ruled out another US attack until after November 3. But, according to several recent reports, the two governments are genuinely preparing for another major round of strikes once the American election is over.

Already, this episode has made the narrative put forward by both leaders even more ridiculous. After all, if renewed attacks on Iran are as necessary to protect the American people, as both have claimed, why would that necessity depend on whether those people have already voted?

The truth is, as I laid out here earlier this year, that the war on Iran is not a drastic but necessary measure to thwart an imminent threat from a rogue regime. It’s just another military action, on top of all the others our government is carrying out, that is beneficial for a coalition of unique, well-connected interest groups—from the Israeli politicians who want to direct American power towards weakening their main regional rival to the domestic weapons companies getting paid to restock America’s dwindling munitions stockpiles.

The narrative that Iran is months or even weeks away from starting a nuclear war with two far more heavily-armed nuclear powers; that they are not just willing but are actively trying as hard as they can to sacrifice their entire country to take out a few Israeli and American cities; and that this will be carried out with weapons and weapons-delivery technology that they do not possess and are not close to getting is obviously not the truth. But it is the most effective way the pro-war coalition has discovered so far for getting a sufficient portion of the public to at least passively accept a war they all want for reasons they’re not as willing to publicize.

That effectiveness, however, has clearly waned in recent months. Today, around two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s Iran policy, with widespread concerns growing about the impact on energy prices and all the terrible consequences that brings. This is a deeply unpopular war. And yet, it is set not only to continue but to escalate in the coming weeks.

This also highlights another, even more important aspect of this story that is getting far less attention than the war’s unpopularity: the sheer inadequacy of democratic elections as constraints on political power.

According to the standard narrative that most of us are taught growing up, for most of human history people have suffered under kings, oligarchs, and rulers of all kinds who used political power selfishly. Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small sliver of society, while everyone else was forced to live in either literal servitude or material conditions no better than servitude. However, this was supposed to have changed with the invention of democracy.

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