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By Prof. Vandana Shiva

15 Jan 2020 – Diversity is the Hindustan Way.

India’s civilisation is based on diversity and interconnectedness in nature and culture.

We grow gardens of diversity. We weave garlands of love.

Our National Anthem is an ode to the diversity of the land from the mountains of the Himalaya to the Vindhayachal range, from the mighty Yamuna and Ganga to the oceans.

We sing how diversity of cultures and religions came to India from the East and West “Weaving Garlands of Love”.

Indian National Anthem | Jana Gana Mana | Full Song | With Lyrics

English Translation

You rule the minds of all people
and control India’s future.
Your name brings joy to Punjab, Sind, Gujarat and Maratha;
and Dravida and Orissa and Bengal. (regions in India)
It echoes in the Vindhya and Himalayan hills,
and mixes with the music of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers.
It is also sung by waves of the sea.
We pray for your blessings
and sing your praise.
We look forward to your best wishes.
And we wish Victory, victory, victory for you.

We are of the Earth, in our diversity. The Earth gives us citizenship.

Our first identity is as Earth Citizens, an Earth Family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam), sharing the planet with other species. We did not impose on ourselves the burden of Anthropocentrism, of separation from and superiority over other species. The Empire was based on the illusion of the superiority of one species, one race, one religion, one gender. It was also an Empire over what were declared to be “lesser creatures”, to be exploited and exterminated. The Monoculture of the Mind is the basis of Empire.

Separation is the basis of Empire.Fragmenting and fracturing interconnected, autopoietic, self organised systems is the basis if Empire. Denial of completeness is rupture of relationships that sustain individuals in community, farmers and their land, humans and the earth. Division is the ground for extractivism. Extractivism is the foundation of Empire.

There has been a continuous war against our biodiversity in nature and culture diversity by past and present empires. The extractive economy of the 1% is based on the Monoculture of the Mind and it creates monocultures.

The biodiversity of our forests and farms has been replaced by monocultures of commercial timber and commodity crops. The forest is reduced to a mine for timber and pulp. The biodiversity of our farms has been reduced to monocultures of commodities which are desertifying the soil, impoverishing our farmers, and spreading hunger and malnutrition. Tribals rise. Peasants rise. The 1% then uses the tried and tested policies of Divide and Rule to rupture and tear apart the rich weave of our cultural diversity to defend the Empire.

The British Empire was established by the East India Company, chartered in 1600, to conquer and colonise India through military force, and take over of our resources, economy and trade. From accounting for 25 % of the global economy, we were reduced to 2 % by the time the British left. Our generous land was ridden by famines and impoverishment of the people. The atrocities and exploitation of the Company Raj (Company Rule ) led to the uprising of 1857, India’s first Independence movement, which ended the rule of the first corporation, the East India Company. We could drive out the East India company because we were united for freedom and justice in our diversity.

The memorial of martyrs of the 1857 war of independence at Meerut which I visited during our “Freedom Pilgrimage” to commemorate 100 years of the Champaran Satyagraha, shows how Muslims and Hindus gave their lives for India’s freedom.

As, Shashi Tharoor writes in the Era of Darkness “the sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Moghul monarch had alarmed the British who did not take long to conclude that dividing two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenged continuance of Empire. Lord Elphistone, the Governor of Bombay advised London that “Divide et Impera” was the old Roman maxim and it should be ours” (pg 120 Tharoor )

The cultural technologies of Divide and Rule are part of the violence that Empires use to maintain their rule in times of dissent and resistance. Partitions, compulsory registration on the basis of religion and race, and using the Census to construct artificial, fragmented, negative identities are at the core of the arsenal to hold on to power.

India’s movements against imperialism continued after 1857, and were strongest in Bengal. In 1905 the British viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, divided Bengal on the basis of religion to strangle the intensifying nationalist movement ,and implement the Empire’s Divide and Rule policies, The nationalist movement protested against the partition of Bengal through Swadeshi (self making and autonomous) and boycott of the import of British goods. This is how Swadeshi was born as the nationalist movement against economic imperialism and its divisive policies.

India’s very tragic partition into Pakistan and India built on the earlier division of Bengal and a result of the divide and rule policy of the Empire.

Around the same time as the partition of Bengal, the Empire was dividing South Africa on the basis of race.

After the Boer war, when Transvaal became part of the Empire, the Government passed an Asiatic Ordinance on Aug 22, 1906.

As Gandhi writes in his book ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’ “I saw nothing in it but hatred of Indians. It seemed to me that if the ordinance was accepted, it would spell absolute ruin for the Indians of South Africa…better die than submit to such a law”

The ordinance required that every man, woman or child of eight years or upwards, entitled to reside in the Transvaal, must register his or her name with the Registrar of Asiatics and take out a certificate of registration. Indians who failed to apply for registration, forfeited their right to residence and could be sent to prison or deported. Indians were required to produce the certificate of registration for police officers whenever and wherever required. Failure to show the certificate could send you to prison.Police officers could enter private houses in order to inspect certificates.

Hindus and Muslims in South Africa joined hands to fight the laws for compulsory registration which were called the Black Act. They refused to register. After 8 years of non cooperation, the Empire had to withdraw the restrictions.

The South African Satyagraha against the race based compulsory registration of Indians was Gandhi’s first Satyagraha.

Gandhi’s ideas of freedom through Swaraj and Satyagraha were shaped by the struggles in South Africa.

But the urge of the Empire to Divide and Rule continued . It was institutionalised as the Apartheid regime in 1948 The Africaans word, apartheid, meaning “Separateness” or the state of being apart It was first articulated in 1929. Mandela and others who fought against Apartheid were imprisoned for decades. Thousands died. The apartheid system was abolished in 1994.

The world celebrated the end of apartheid as the beginning of a new age of our consciousness as one humanity, with no place for race based and religion based separation and division.

However, the empires tools of apartheid and separation keep coming back in new forms. And anti apartheid struggles which celebrate diversity also emerge in each age and every place where diversity is threatened.

The spirit of human freedom, in and through diversity, cannot be extinguished inspite of repeated, brutal attempts to destroy freedom and diversity.

Divide and rule policies of the British Empire included the attempts to change the census from one based an occupation and place , which creates positive and real identities, to one based on artificial constructions of fixed and mutually exclusive caste and religious identities, and then dividing people on the basis of these constructions, violently removing the shared identity of culture, community, place.

It is not that India had not undertaken enumerations of the population before the British. But these enumerations, like Ain-i Akbari, took relationships and diversity into account. The Empire used the census to construct essentialised, polarised, artificial religious identities. As a Government resolution stated; “the basis of the classification should be religion” (Gottschalk, Religion, Science and Empire, Pg 203). The mutually exclusive antagonistic categories of Hindu (referred to as “Gentoo”) and Muslim (referred to as “mussalman”) are constructs of Empire. People had multiple identities, and religion was not the most dominant at the social level. Identities of occupation were dominant. They would put ‘mali’ (gardner), not muslim. People often saw themselves as Hindu Muslim, because Hindu merely referred to a geographical indicator – the people of the land beyond the Indus. Hindus and Muslims prayed at the same shrines. “The Satya Narain of the Hindu is the Satya Pir of the Bengali Musalman”. Bengali muslims used the same language, dressed the same way (pg 204 Gottschalk). And diversity is India’s being. A diversity so rich that no box, no standardised category, no monoculture, can contain it. Every attempt at forcing it into a box has involved violence, and failure.

Government officials argued that census operations directly aggravated communalism (Religion , Science and Empire , Peter Gottschalk , Oxford University Press ,,2013 , pg 195)

The consequences of this reduction of diverse, multiple, shared, positive identities, into negatively constructed, reductionist, religious identities are at the root of much violence in our times. It is part of the Divide and Rule strategy of today’s Empire.

Oneness is based on the consciousness that we are interconnected, we are interbeings, ecologically and culturally. When we do pranayama we say So Hum – you are, therefore I am. There is no “other”.

Instead of identity flowing positively from who we are, the work we do , the place we live in and spaces we occupy, the relationships we nurture and which nurture us, Empire destroys our work, uproots us from our homes making us all refugees, tears apart our relationships and actual identities, and fills the vacuum by negative, fragmented, cultural identities constructed and externally imposed by Empire. The externally defined and imposed identities of Empire are negative, defined not by who we are but who we are not.

The Empire of the 1% destroys identity and meaning that flow from work and place, dividing societies and manufacturing enemies, to Divide and Rule everything, everywhere.As Samuel Huntington wrote “I cannot know who I am till I know who I hate”. The Empire is defined by who our enemy is. We witness this today with the threat of a war against Iran, and the continued wars in Iraq and Syria. We see it with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica becoming the machinery of the manufacture and unaccountable dissemination of hate to hijack democracy in a digital world. The currency and commodity of the Empire is hate.

In these times of limitless greed and manufactured division and hate, we resist by living and thinking through, and with, our diversities as one humanity on one planet.

We grow gardens of Diversity. We weave garlands of love.

Prof. Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers.

20 January 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Countercurrents Collective

A super-rich one percent of the world’s population has accumulated twice as much wealth as the remaining 90 percent, said a new report by Oxfam, a global charity. The report has been released on January 20, 2020 on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The gap between the filthy rich and the rest of humanity has reached grotesque proportions, according to the report.

The report, Time to Care, focuses on the largely unpaid care work many women and girls take upon themselves.

The report said: The world’s top 22 richest men have now more wealth than all the women in Africa.

It added: At the bottom of the economy, women and girls, especially women and girls living in poverty and from marginalized groups, are putting in 12.5 billion hours every day of care work for free, and countless more for poverty wages. Their work is essential to our communities. It underpins thriving families and a healthy and productive workforce.

The report said: This great divide is based on a flawed and sexist economic system that values the wealth of the privileged few, mostly men, more than the billions of hours of the most essential work – the unpaid and underpaid care work done primarily by women and girls around the world. Tending to others, cooking, cleaning and fetching water and firewood are essential daily tasks for the wellbeing of societies, communities and the functioning of the economy. The heavy and unequal responsibility of care work perpetuates gender and economic inequalities.

It said: This broken economic model has accumulated vast wealth and power into the hands of a rich few, in part by exploiting the labor of women and girls, and systematically violating their rights.

Only 2,153

There are only 2,153 billionaires in the world, according to the report, but their wealth matches that of more than 4.6 billion people, or about 62 percent of the world’s population, estimated to stand at 7.7 billion.

The gap between the wealthy and all those who fare less well looks even more prominent if to compare the combined income of the richest of the rich – the top one percent – to that of some 6.9 billion people.

According to the report, the one-percenters boast more twice as much wealth as nearly 90 percent of the global population.

It said: At the top of the global economy a small elite are unimaginably rich. Their wealth grows exponentially over time, with little effort, and regardless of whether they add value to society.

Tax the rich

Oxfam said: The only way to tackle inequality is to raise taxes. Taxing additional 0.5 percent of wealth of the top 1 percent over the next decade will provide governments with enough funds to create 117 million of jobs in health, education, elderly care and other sectors.

It said: Governments must act now to build a human economy that is feminist and values what truly matters to society, rather than fuelling an endless pursuit of profit and wealth. Investing in national care systems to address the disproportionate responsibility for care work done by women and girls and introducing progressive taxation, including taxing wealth and legislating in favor of carers, are possible and crucial first steps

It added: One reason for these outsized returns is a collapse in taxation of the super-rich and the biggest corporations because of falling tax rates and deliberate tax dodging. At the same time, only 4% of global tax comes from taxation of wealth, and studies show that the super-rich avoid as much as 30% of their tax liability. Extremely low corporate taxation helps them cream the profits from companies where they are the main shareholders; between 2011 and 2017 average wages in G7 countries increased by 3%, while dividends to wealthy shareholders grew by 31%.

While Oxfam did not call any names in its report, it appeared to have taken a thinly-veiled jab at Amazon CEO and founder of Blue Origin space company Jeff Bezos, the on-and-off planet’s richest man, who, however, slipped to the second place this week, behind the chairman and CEO of French luxury giant LVMH Bernard Arnault.

Less than $5.50 a day

The report cited World Bank estimates: Almost half of the world’s population lives on less than $5.50 a day, and the rate of poverty reduction has halved since 2013.

The Oxfam report said: Many people are just one hospital bill or failed harvest away from destitution. Inequality is one of the major reasons for this; a huge share of global income growth consistently accrues to those at the top, leaving those at the bottom further and further behind.

The report cites Thomas Piketty and his team: Between 1980 and 2016, the richest 1% received 27 cents of each dollar of global income growth. This was more than twice the share of the bottom 50%, who secured only 12 cents of every dollar.

The report said:

• If you saved $10,000 a day since the building of the pyramids in Egypt, you would have one-fifth the average fortune of the 5 richest billionaires.
• If everyone were to sit on their wealth piled up in $100 bills, most of humanity would be sitting on the floor. A middle-class person in a rich country would be sitting at the height of a chair. The world’s two richest men would be sitting in outer space.
• The monetary value of women’s unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least $10.8 trillion annually – three times the size of the world’s tech industry.
• The very top of the economic pyramid sees trillions of dollars of wealth in the hands of a very small group of people, predominantly men. Their wealth is already extreme, and our broken economy concentrates more and more wealth into these few hands.
• Recently some commentators have asked whether it would be better for the world to ‘abolish billionaires’, suggesting that they are a sign of economic sickness rather than economic health.
• It has been estimated that one-third of billionaire wealth exists because of inheritance. Such levels of inheritance have created a new aristocracy that undermines democracy. Once secured, the fortunes of the super-rich take on a momentum of their own; the wealthiest people can simply sit back and watch their wealth grow, with the help of highly paid accountants who have delivered them an average annual return of 7.4% on their wealth over the last ten years. Despite admirably committing to give his money away, Bill Gates is still worth nearly $100bn, which is twice what he had when he stood down as head of Microsoft.
• As well as doing care work for free at home, many poor women also work providing care for others, for example as domestic workers, who are among the most exploited workers in the world. Just 10% of domestic workers are covered by general labor laws to the same extent as other workers, and only around half enjoy equal minimum wage protection. More than half of all domestic workers have no limits on work hours under national law. In the most extreme cases of forced labor and trafficking, domestic workers find themselves trapped in people’s homes with every aspect of their lives controlled, rendering them invisible and unprotected. It is estimated that globally, the 3.4 million domestic workers in forced labor are being robbed of $8bn every year, equating to 60% of their due wages.
• Recognize unpaid and poorly paid care work, which is done primarily by women and girls, as a type of work or production that has real value.
• Reduce the total number of hours spent on unpaid care tasks through better access to affordable and quality timesaving devices and care-supporting infrastructure.
• Redistribute unpaid care work more fairly within the household and simultaneously shift the responsibility of unpaid care work to the state and the private sector.
• Represent the most marginalized caregivers and ensure that they have a voice in the design and delivery of policies, services and systems that affect their lives. Change is possible. From Engna Legna Besdet bringing together Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon, to the Domestic Workers Rising campaign in South Africa, women are demanding change and claiming their rights. And governments are starting to listen. Uruguay’s groundbreaking national integrated care enshrines the right to care and be cared for, as well as care workers’ rights, and New Zealand introduced a celebrated wellbeing budget in 2019. But more action is needed.
• Over the past decade leading academics, and even mainstream economic institutions such as the IMF, have produced robust evidence of the corrosive effects of inequality. Affected communities, activists, women’s rights organizations and faith leaders have spoken out and have campaigned for change around the world. Recent protests, for example against inequality and climate chaos, from Chile to Germany, are huge.
• Mainstream economic meetings, such as those of the IMF and the World Economic Forum, have placed economic inequality on their agendas time and again. However, the inequality crisis remains fundamentally unaddressed. The reality is that most world leaders are still pursuing policy agendas that drive greater gaps between the haves and the havenots. Leaders like President Trump in the USA and President Bolsonaro in Brazil are exemplars of this trend, offering regressive policy menus like tax cuts for billionaires, obstructing measures to tackle the climate emergency or turbo charging racism, sexism and hatred of minorities. Crucially, today’s economic system is built on sexism.

Recommendations

Oxfam has proposed the following six actions to help realize the rights of carers and to start closing the gap between unpaid and underpaid care workers and the wealthy elite who have profited most from their labor.

The report’s recommendations are:

1)Invest in national care systems to address the disproportionate responsibility for care work done by women and girls:

Governments must invest in cross-governmental national care systems, in addition to investing in and transforming existing public services and infrastructure. National care systems must include the provision of universal access to safe water, sanitation and domestic energy systems, and investments to deliver universal childcare, eldercare and care for people with disabilities. These should also include access to quality healthcare and education, as well as the provision of universal social protection, such as pensions and child benefits. As part of national care systems governments must ensure a minimum of 14 weeks of paid maternity leave and the progressive realization of one year of paid parental leave, including a phase of use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave.

2)End extreme wealth to end extreme poverty: Extreme wealth is a sign of a failing economic system. Governments must take steps to radically reduce the gap between the rich and the rest of society and prioritize the wellbeing of all citizens over unsustainable growth and profit, to avoid a world that caters only to a privileged few and consigns millions of people to poverty. Governments must take bold and decisive steps by taxing wealth and high incomes and cracking down on loopholes and the inadequate global tax rules that allow rich corporations and individuals to escape their tax responsibilities.

3)Legislate to protect the rights of all carers and secure living wages for paid care workers:

As part of their national care systems, governments must ensure legal, economic and labor market policies are in place to protect the rights of all carers and paid care workers, in both formal and informal sectors and monitor their implementation. This must include ratifying ILO Convention 189 on the protection of domestic workers and policy to ensure that all care workers are paid a living wage and working towards the elimination of gender wage gaps.

4) Ensure that carers have influence on decision-making processes:

Governments must facilitate the participation of unpaid carers and care workers in policy-making fora and processes at all levels, and invest resources into collecting comprehensive data that can better inform policymaking and evaluate the impact of policies on carers. This should be alongside consulting women’s rights actors, feminist economists and civil society experts on care issues, and increased funding for women’s organizations and movements working to enable their participation in decision-making processes. These measures are important building blocks of national care systems.

5) Challenge harmful norms and sexist beliefs:

Harmful norms and sexist beliefs that see care work as the responsibility of women and girls lead to an unequal gendered distribution of care work, and perpetuate economic and gender inequality. As part of their national care systems governments need to invest resources to challenge these harmful norms and sexist beliefs, including through advertising, public communication and legislation. Further, men need to step up to equally fulfill their responsibilities on care work to address the disproportionate amount of care done by women within households and communities.

6) Value care in business policies and practices: Businesses must recognize the value of care work and sustain the wellbeing of workers. Further, they should support the redistribution of care through the provision of benefits and services such as crèches and childcare vouchers and ensure living wages for care providers. Companies and business should assume their responsibility for contributing to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by paying their fair share of taxes, implementing family-friendly employment practices such as flexible working hours and paid leave, and using progressive advertising and public communication to challenge the gendered distribution of care work.

A broken economy

The report said:

“If the economic system is left to distribute the fruits of growth so unevenly, we will never eliminate poverty.”

“Unequal and unbridled growth is also unsustainable and makes it impossible to live within the environmental boundaries of our planet.”

“Economic inequality is also built on gender inequality, and the majority of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid are women. Women and girls are more likely to be found in poorly paid and precarious employment, and they do the bulk of unpaid and underpaid care work.”

“The dominant model of capitalism actively exploits and drives traditional sexist beliefs that disempower women and girls, counting on them to do this work, but refusing to value them for it.”

Commenting on the findings, Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said that while unpaid or poorly paid care work mostly done by women serves as the “hidden engine” that fuels the global economy, “broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women.”

20 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

Following the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Shiite Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad International Airport, the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament Speaker and the Iraqi Parliament have demanded that the US Alliance forces leave Iraq. The US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany have rejected the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand, with the US threatening to instantly collapse the Iraqi economy by a banking freeze if Iraq insists on US Alliance withdrawal from its territory.

(1). US Alliance violates Iraqi sovereignty and rejects the Iraqi Parliament’s Quit Iraq demand.

Iraqis were outraged by the criminal murder by drone missile attack of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani (Iranian hero, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps), Shiite Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (deputy commander of the Shiite Popular Mobilisation Forces, PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi), and 8 other people by the Americans at Iraq’s Baghdad International Airport on 3 January 2020. These blatantly criminal assassinations were followed by international outrage and massive demonstrations by Iraqis and Iranians. The Iranians launched missile attacks on 2 American air bases in Iraq that were carefully designed as a retaliatory “slap on the face” without any American casualties that would have brought massively deadly and disproportionate retribution from nuclear terrorist America – and indeed fortunately nobody was killed.

Leading Iraqi Shiite politician and Iraqi PM Abdul Mahdi stated (3 January 2020): “The assassination of an Iraqi military commander is an aggression on Iraq as a state, government and people” [1]. Iraq’s Speaker of Parliament, Mohammed al-Halbousi (Iraq’s leading Sunni Arab politician) condemned the US assassinations as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty (4 January 2020): “Put an end to U.S. presence [in Iraq]… Yesterday’s targeting of a military commander in Iraq’s armed forces near Baghdad international airport is a flagrant breach of sovereignty and violation of international agreements. Iraq must avoid becoming a battlefield or a side in any regional or international conflict”[2]. The Iraqi Parliament passed the following resolution (5 January 2020): “The government commits to revoke its request for assistance from the international coalition fighting Islamic State due to the end of military operations in Iraq and the achievement of victory. The Iraqi government must work to end the presence of any foreign troops on Iraqi soil and prohibit them from using its land, airspace or water for any reason” [3]. The Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi protested continuing violations of Iraqi sovereignty by the Americans in a phone call to US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the Iraq PM’s office stating (9 January 2020): “The prime minister said American forces had entered Iraq and drones are flying in its airspace without permission from Iraqi authorities, and this was a violation of the bilateral agreements” [4].

The racist, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and exceptionalist Americans rejected the foreign withdrawal demands by the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament Speaker, and the Iraqi Parliament. Thus Mafia-style thug and serial war criminal, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, bluntly rejected the Iraqi demands, indicating that US troops would remain (9 January 2020): “We are happy to continue the conversation with the Iraqis about what the right structure is. Our mission set there is very clear. We’ve been there to perform a training mission to help the Iraqi security forces be successful and to continue the campaign against ISIS, to continue the counter-Daesh campaign. We’re going to continue that mission but, as times change and we get to a place where we can deliver upon what I believe and what the president believes is our right structure with fewer resources dedicated to that mission, we will do so” [4].

Gangster Trump has justified the assassinations on the basis of non-specific and non-disclosed security threats against Americans, this being reminiscent of George W. Bush’s (false) assertions (backed by UK PM Tony Blair and Australia’s PM John Howard) in 2003 about Iraqi possession of (actually non-existent) “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD). According to the New York Times (11 January 2020): “Mr. Trump issued bellicose threats to destroy Iran if it retaliated, including cultural treasures in violation of international law, touching off international outrage and forcing his own defense secretary to publicly disavow the threat, saying it would be a war crime. Mr. Trump was largely alone on the world stage. No major European power, not even Britain, voiced support for the drone strike, even as leaders agreed that General Suleimani had blood on his hands. As Le Monde, the French newspaper, put it, the rift signaled “a new stage in the trans-Atlantic divorce over the Middle East”” [5]. Predictably serial invader, serial occupier, serial war criminal, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and Islamophobic Apartheid Israel supported the war criminal US attack on Iraq [5].

Trump was outraged by the Iraqi Parliament’s demand for US Alliance withdrawals and declared: “[If US forces asked to leave] we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before”[6]. The Americans have always used sanctions, theft and economic blackmail as adjuncts to the routine recipe of subversion, assassinations, coups, bombing, invasion and genocide. The US warned Iraq that it could block Iraqi access to an account that Iraq’s central bank holds with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and which is economically vital for Iraq [6-8]. The Central Bank of Iraq’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank was set up in 2003 following the war criminal, US-led invasion and all Iraqi oil revenues go to that account that presently sits at $35 billion. $1-2 billion is withdrawn from this Federal Reserve Bank account each month for Iraqi government and commercial transactions, and accordingly blocked access would collapse the Iraqi economy [6-8].

While the war criminal US refuses to withdraw its forces from Iraq and serial war criminal and US lackey Australia likewise refuses to withdraw its circa 300 troops (mainly in the Taji base near Baghdad, as well as some guarding diplomats in the Baghdad Green Zone), Germany has cut down its forces, the UK has relocated some 50 personnel out of the Baghdad Green Zone but still has about 400 troops in Iraq, and Canada has withdrawn “some” of its 500 soldiers in Iraq to Kuwait [9].

The deadly consequences of Donald Trump’s decision to launch (likely Australian-targeted ) missiles from drones at Baghdad International Airport can be summarized thus: 12 killed in the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, at least 56 killed in a stampede at the funeral of General Qassem Soleimani in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman, and 176 passengers and crew killed (one third Canadians) in the Ukrainian passenger jet shot down in a terrible mistake by an Iranian-fired missile from a very nervous Iranian defence Surface to Air Missile (SAM) battery defending Teheran in the context of acute and deadly US threats to Iran [10, 11]. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has quite rightly expressed indignation and demands for transparency and justice over the plane tragedy [12]. However Zionist-subverted and US lackey Canada does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, has a long record of US- and Zionist-backed antipathy towards Iran, has emplaced sanctions against Iran and is likely to use the passenger jet tragedy and its forces in Iraq to support the US in a continuing, variously hot and cold and 4 decade US War on Iran [13]. Under criminal and deadly US Sanctions, presently an estimated 71,000 Iranians die avoidably from deprivation each year or 195 such deaths per day [14, 15].

Decent people around the world legitimately fear the horrendous consequences of a full-blown US and US Alliance military attack on Iran. However 4 million Iranians have already died from violence, 1 million, or from sanctions-imposed deprivation, 3 million, in a 4-decade US War on Iran. Further, while Iran leads the world in interdiction of opiate drugs from US-occupied Afghanistan, this flood of US-protected opiates has killed 33,000 Iranians and the 5.2 million people who have died worldwide in a US-imposed Opiate Holocaust inescapably linked to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to 90% in 2007 [16]. One notes that the WW2 Jewish Holocaust was associated with 5-6 million Jews killed by the German Nazis through violence or imposed deprivation.

(2). Serial war criminal and US lackey Australia refuses to Quit Iraq as demanded by the Iraqi Parliament – Australia’s 7th Iraq War in a century?

As UK lackeys and thence US lackeys, gung-ho and racist White Australians have invaded 85 countries over the last 2 centuries [17]. By way of comparison, over the last 1,000 years the British have invaded 193 countries, France 82, the US 72 (52 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25, Apartheid Israel 12, Iraq 2 (both greenlighted by the US), China 2, North Korea arguably zero (0) , and Iran zero (0) since the time of the Sasanian Empire 1,300 years ago [14, 17-22]. Australia has been involved in 6 Iraq wars, specifically (1) UK invasion of Iraq in WW1 (1914-1918), (2) UK operations in Iraq in WW2 (1939-1945), (3) the deadly Sanctions War against Iraq (1990-2003), (4) the Gulf War (1990-1991), (5) invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003-2011), and (6) the war on ISIS in Syria and Iraq (2014-). War is the penultimate in racism and genocide is the ultimate in racism. Australia’s refusal to accede to the Iraqi Parliament’s demand that the US Alliance forces, including Australian forces, leave Iraq may mark the commencement of Australia’s 7th Iraq War since the genocidal British Empire’s invasion of Iraq in 1914.

British interest in Iraq came from discovery of oil in adjacent Iran in the 1900s. Western violation of Iraq commenced with the British invasion in 1914 during WW1. Assuming excess mortality of Iraqis under British rule or hegemony (1914- 1948) was the same as for Indians under the British (interpolation from available data indicate Indian avoidable death rates in “deaths per 1,000 of population per year” of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950) [23]), one can estimate from Iraqi population data [24] that Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation under British occupation and hegemony from 1914-1950 totalled about 4 million. UK lackey Australia was variously involved via its air force and navy in enforcement of British rule over Iraq in this period.

On the occasion of US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 the Australian ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia’s equivalent of the mendacious UK BBC) reported that “The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead” [25]. In contrast, the expert and eminent US Just Foreign Policy organization estimates, based on the data of expert UK analysts and top US medical epidemiologists, 1.5 million violent deaths in the Iraq War (2003-2011) [26-29] and UN data indicate a further 1.2 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation in this period [14, 15]. Violent deaths and avoidable deaths from violently -imposed deprivation in the Gulf War (1990-1991) and Sanctions period (1990-2003) totalled 0.2 million and 1.2 million, respectively [30]. Accordingly, Iraqi deaths from violence (1.7 million) or war-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) in the period 1990-2011 totalled 4.6 million [31].

The US ostensibly withdrew from devastated Iraq in 2011 but returned with a vengeance in 2012 to help Syria, Iraq and Iran deal with ISIS in Syria and Iraq that has been associated with about 0.1 million violent Iraqi deaths, most notably in devastated Mosul [32] and twice US-demolished Fallujah, the City of Mosques [33]. One notes that the ruthless and barbarous ISIS subverted and took over the Sunni insurgency in Iraq against the corrupt, violent, US-installed Al Maliki Government, and similarly ISIS came to dominate the US Alliance-backed Sunni insurgency against the Assad Government in Syria [32, 33]. UN data indicate about 0.3 million avoidable Iraqi deaths from deprivation in the period 2011-2020.

Thus ignoring Iraqi deaths associated with the US-backed Iraq-Iran War, one can estimate about 9 million Iraqi deaths from UK or US violence or imposed deprivation in the century after the 1914 invasion of Iraq by Britain, this constituting an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide [31]. These terms are not used lightly. “Holocaust” means the death of a huge number of people. According to Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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” [30, 34-38]. The ruler is responsible for the ruled. The huge avoidable deaths of Iraqis under the British, Americans and the US Coalition is evidence of gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that state unequivocally that an Occupier must provide its conquered subjects with life-preserving food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” [39].

(3). Australia’s war criminal refusal to leave Iraq as unequivocally demanded by the Iraqi PM, Parliamentary Speaker and Parliament.

As set out above, the Iraqi PM, Speaker and Parliament have unequivocally demanded that foreign troops leave their devastated land. However the serial war criminal Americans and their serial war criminal lackeys, the UK, Canada, Germany and Australia, refuse to leave. Australian PM Scott Morrison (8 January 2020): “The situation overnight has stabilised… The cessation of those immediate hostilities that we saw yesterday and the nature of the statement also issued [by US President Donald Trump] today, as well as the [US-supplied] intelligence that we have, means that we are in a position to continue to undertake the mission that we have set for ourselves in the Middle East” [40].

The Labor Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, would not comment on any withdrawal of Australian forces from Iraq before getting a [US-provided] security briefing (8 January 2020): “These things should not be done on the run. This is potentially a very serious matter. Indeed, I have said though, that there shouldn’t be a further escalation by any party” [40]. Since the US CIA-backed Coup that removed reformist Labor PM Gough Whitlam from power in 1975 [41], the craven, US lackey Labor position has been “all the way with the USA” lest it anger the Americans or the king-making, US-owned Murdoch media empire that has captured 70% of Australian daily city newspaper readers.

The Labor Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong (8 January 2020): “Labor notes the worrying reports of events currently unfolding in Iraq. These attacks are deeply concerning and we continue to call on all sides to exercise restraint. Labor will be seeking briefings, including on the safety of our ADF members and diplomatic staff who are operating in the Middle East. Tomorrow, Labor’s Shadow National Security Committee will meet to discuss the situation in the region. Whilst these tensions are ongoing it is essential that the Government takes all steps necessary to maximise the safety and security of all deployed Australian personnel” [42].

Interestingly the Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, evidently understands basic International Law about war crimes and has begged the Iraqi Government to permit Australian forces to stay (7 January 2020): “We urge the Iraqi government to ensure the coalition is able to continue its vital work with Iraq’s security forces in countering the shared threat of Daesh [ISIS]. We understand the resolution passed by Iraq’s Parliament is non-binding, absent formal approval by the government in Baghdad” [43].

The UN Charter is very clear about foreign forces being in another country – it can only happen (1) through invitation by the country, (2) in response to invasion of another country by that country, or (3) with the permission of the UN Security Council. In this instance the Iraqi PM, the Parliamentary Speaker and the Iraqi Parliament have unequivocally demanded that the foreign forces should leave.

In Australia’s 6 Iraq Wars involving Australian and US Alliance forces in Iraq only three (3) met the standard defined by the post-WW2 UN Charter, specifically (1) the disgracefully UN-approved and genocidal Sanctions war against Iraq (1990-2003; 1.7 million Iraqi deaths from imposed deprivation, half them children), (2) the UN-sanctioned Gulf War in response to the US greenlighted Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990-1991; 0.2 million violent Iraqi deaths), and (3) the War on ISIS in Iraq by invitation of the US-installed Al-Maliki Government (2014 onwards; the big cities of Mosul (population 2 million) and Fallujah (population 300,000) demolished by the US Alliance; about 0.1 million and 0.3 million Iraqi deaths from violence and deprivation, respectively [14, 30, 32, 34-38]. One notes that the estimates of 0.3 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation since 2011 is probably an underestimate since the US-installed Al Maliki Government has an appalling record of understating horrendous medical statistics e.g. absurdly claiming that Iraqi infant mortality declined as a consequence of sanctions, invasion and devastation [44] and claiming that rates of spontaneous abortion, still births and congenital birth defects in devastated and toxin contaminated areas of post-invasion Iraq were normal, contrary to the shocking findings of expert non-Iraqi Health Ministry researchers [45, 46].

However the Iraqis have withdrawn that invitation and have unequivocally demanded the withdrawal of foreign forces. Yankee go home! US Coalition go home! Aussies go home! If they stay they are violating the most fundamental International law: do not invade and occupy other counties. Indeed it was for such crimes that German leaders and generals were hung after the post-WW2 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. One notes that the US lackey Germans and Canadians have responded to the situation by relocating “some” of their forces out of Iraq, notwithstanding the Iraqi Parliament’s demands. In 1945 the conquered Germans adopted what can be described as a CAAAA (C4A) protocol involving Acknowledgement of the crimes, Apology for the crimes, Amends for the crimes and Assertion “Never again” to anyone. Germany and Canada were not directly involved in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq but have now evidently decided as US lackeys to join serial war criminal America, UK and Australia in illegally occupying Iraq. Evidently the post-WW2 de-Nazification of Germany was insufficient.

As a cowardly, degenerate, serial war criminal and genocidal US lackey, Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars, atrocities that have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation [14]. The Australian Liberal Party-National Party Coalition (that has egregiously mis-ruled Australia since 2013) supported Australian involvement in all of these atrocities while Labor supported all but the Vietnam War and the 2003-2011 Iraq War. This degenerate and war criminal collusion between serial war criminal America and serial war criminal Australia is continuing.

(4). Australian, US and UK respect for parliamentary democracy and law at home but contempt for democracy and International Law abroad.

Australia is one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies and has a splendid, world’s-best system of compulsory, one-person-one-vote, preferential voting that ensures that a winning candidate must either receive over 50% of the vote, or failing that, gain over 50% of the “2-party-preferred vote” based on counting the “second preferences” of all the unsuccessful candidates. In contrast, in first-past-the -post systems as in the UK and US, depending on how many people bothered to get out of bed and vote, a small proportion of the electorate, say 30%, could elect a government that was hated by most of the population. However, as with many things about Australia (and the US and UK), the surface of the rock appears very nice, but look underneath and one can be appalled [47, 48]. Thus Australia has an Upper House or Senate that can veto decisions of the popularly-elected Lower House, or House of Representatives. However all the 6 States of Australia have the same number of Senators (12) and Tasmania (population 0.5 million) has the same number of Senators (12) as New South Wales (population 7.5 million) or Victoria (population 6.4 million), this prompting outspoken former Labor PM, Paul Keating, to describe the Senate as “unrepresentative swill”.

Nevertheless there is great respect for parliamentary decencies and conventions. Thus the Australian Speaker is appointed (usually from the dominant party) to keep order in the House of Representatives and is prepared to throw Government or Opposition MPs out of the House if they misbehave by being abusive, disruptive or noisy. (I remember attending a big party with my dear late wife Zareena (née Zareena Lateef) in a neighbouring country that was attended by the eminent and charming then Speaker of that country’s parliament – he had to phone for a taxi so we accompanied him to the roadside to keep him company, and were surprised and amused when he phoned for a taxi and simply stated “This is the Speaker”).

However when the Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament , the Iraqi Prime Minister (PM) and indeed the Iraqi Parliament as a whole demanded that foreign troops get out of Iraq there was no such respect from Australia and the other Anglosphere or European members of the US Coalition (US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany) who all simply refused (Canada and Germany only moving “some” forces from Iraq for security reasons).

The Australian Liberal Party-National Party Coalition and now to a significantly lesser extent Labor (collectively known as the Lib-Labs) fervently support nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel. Indeed Australia is second only to Trump America and is just above Zionist-subverted Canada as a supporter of the Apartheid Israeli rogue state. Democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel determines that of its circa 7 million Indigenous Palestinian subjects (who despite over 70 years of continuous ethnic cleansing and genocide by the Zionists now represent about 50% of Apartheid Israel’s subjects) 74% are prevented from voting for the government ruling them i.e. egregious, criminal and intolerable Apartheid ) [47-58]. Australia respects one-person-one-vote democracy at home (or at least has done so since 1967 when Indigenous Australians were finally “counted” as citizens and thence able to vote). MPs and political candidates who support Apartheid Israel and hence the obscenity of Apartheid are simply unfit for public life in a one-person-one-vote democracy. This shows US lackey Australia’s utter contempt for democracy abroad as in a similarly fundamental way does Australia’s military involvement in all post-1950 US Asian wars (racist atrocities that have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from war-imposed deprivation) [14]. Indeed Australian Intelligence agents helped the US overthrow the democratically elected Chilean Government on 9-11 in 1973 (page 163 [59]).

(5). War is the penultimate in racism and genocide is the ultimate in racism. Why the ongoing US devastation of Iraq?

War is the penultimate in racism and genocide is the ultimate in racism as illustrated by the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (9 million Iraqi deaths from violence or imposed deprivation since the British invasion in 1914) [30]. Indeed the 21st century Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide [60] has involved 32 million Muslims killed by violence, 5 million, or through imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people [44, 61]. Decent people may well ask why is it that America and its rich Anglosphere and Western European allies are still making war on Iraq and indeed on a swathe of other countries from West Africa to Pakistan? Why not, for example, have Iraq invaded and occupied by Switzerland that is closer to this war-torn region than the US and has a major interest in these countries as banker to its rulers and establishments? Why not nearly 200 other countries for any number of possible inventive reasons? The US and its allies dress up exceptionalist American war making in terms of the “war on terror”, “global security”, “bringing freedom and democracy”, and America’s “onerous burden” as a “global policeman” etc. The US always needs an excuse for war but the “terror” excuse is wearing thin because the US and the countries of the US Alliance have variously backed jihadi and other non-state terrorists around the world (e.g. death squads throughout Latin America, church-bombing gangs in Ecuador, Gladio in Europe and jihadis in Libya, Yemen, Kosovo, Syria, and Afghanistan. Indeed jihadi non-state terrorists are a great asset for US imperialism because every jihadi atrocity provides an excuse for disproportionately vastly more destructive US violence against defenceless Muslim populations [62]. Indeed fundamentalist America has trashed secular governance, modernity, democracy, women’s rights and children’s rights in the Muslim World [63].

Why the ongoing US devastation of Iraq? The most succinct answer to the question is simply: oil. Thus from the Right, Alan Greenspan (leading Republican economist, chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, and servant of four US presidents): “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” [64]. And on the Left, Professor Noam Chomsky (eminent linguistics expert and anti-racist Jewish American human rights activist at 101-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2009): “There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that if we can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world” [65].

US lackey Australia is helping the US occupy 2 devastated countries (Iraq and Afghanistan ), blockade Somalia and bomb 7 countries (Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) by targeting illegal US drone strikes via the joint Australia-US electronic spying base at Pine Gap in Central Australia [66]. Indeed it is quite possible that via Pine Gap US lackey Australia was involved in the deadly targeting of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Shiite Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and their 8 associates at Baghdad International Airport that has brought the Middle East the brink of another genocidal war and has already cost the lives of the 176 passengers and crew of Ukrainian Airways Flight 752.

The serial war criminal US subverts and perverts all countries and to that end has about 700 bases in over 70 countries, including my own country, Australia [67]. President Donald Trump has been impeached and now faces trial in the Senate over allegedly withholding a huge US arms supply to Ukraine in order to get a Ukrainian investigation into the conduct of his likely opponent for the presidency, Democrat Joe Biden, and Joe Biden’s son. This alleged “quid pro quo” – allegedly rewarding a foreign power for investigating possible “dirt” on a domestic American political opponent – is utterly trivial compared to the routine deadly bullying by the US of all countries around the world. It is utterly trivial in comparison with the war criminal refusal of the US and its war criminal Anglosphere and European allies to leave devastated Iraq when asked to do so by the Iraqi PM, the Iraqi Parliament Speaker and the Iraqi Parliament , this refusal being accompanied by the US threat to instantly collapse the Iraqi economy by blocking access to its Federal Reserve banking account if the Iraqi Government keeps on insisting on this withdrawal. What is utterly galling about the Impeachment is how the Americans (the serial war criminal Democrats in this instance) hypocritically cloak themselves with a veneer of “upholding the law”. America carries a big stick. Reformist Australian Labor PM Gough Whitlam excited hatred from the US and its traitorous Australian allies over the Pine Gap spying base in Central Australia and was rapidly removed in a CIA-backed Coup in 1975 [41, 59, 69].

Just as the world has responded massively to the “How dare you!” expostulation over the worsening Climate Emergency of 16-year old climate activist Greta Thunberg at the UN, so one hopes the world will likewise respond to the words of 13-year old Iraqi girl, Sarah, whose family were refugees to a Baghdad refugee camp from the first US demolition of Fallujah (2004): “What does America want from us? Why did they destroy our homes? This is not their home, this is our home. Why did they come here and force us to live like this? The bombing went all day and all night. They made us homeless, they made us wander from house to house to ask if anyone can help us. Why did they come here? I want them to go” (page 118 [33]).

Final comments.

The US and its cowardly and war criminal allies have never been taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the invasion, occupation and genocidal devastation of Iraq that killed 2.7 million Iraqis through violence, 1.5 million, or war-imposed deprivation, 1.2 million [30]. My complaints to the ICC were of course ignored by that racist, holocaust-complicit and genocide-complicit organization (see [30]). However by refusing to leave Iraq the US and its war criminal allies are simply adding to the immense crime of the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide . My own country, Australia, was intimately involved in the war criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Indeed John Valder, former National President of the conservative Australian Liberal Party (the party of Australia’s present PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison aka Scam-o, Scheme-o, Skim-o or Scum-o) declared (2004): “Bush, Blair, and Howard, as leaders of the three members of the coalition of the willing, inflicted enormous suffering on the people of Iraq. And, as such, they are criminals. I believe the only deterrent to a repetition of the Iraq situation is punishment in some form as war criminals” [70].

Anti-racist Jewish British writer Harold Pinter in his 2005 Literature Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech stated (2005): “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice” [71]. 2.9 million? More than enough, I would have thought.

Decent people around the world are fed up with the war criminal exceptionalism of the US and its degenerate, serial war criminal Allies (Australia, UK, Canada, France, Germany and nuclear terrorist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel). Decent people throughout the world and in Australia will act by (a) informing everyone they can, (b) by urging and applying Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against a war criminal US and its war criminal allies, and (c) by declaring :”Yankee go home ” and an end to the presence of US Alliance forces in other nations. Decent Australians will demand removal of mother- and child-violating US forces from Australia, utterly reject the serial war criminal, US lackey Coalition, vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last.

References.

[1].  Spencer Neale, “Iraqi Parliament vows to “put an end to US presence” in country”, Washington Examiner, 3 January 2020: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/iraqi-parliament-vows-to-put-an-end-to-us-presence-in-country .

[2]. “Iraqi Parliament Speaker condemns U.S. air strike: statement”, Reuters, 4 January 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-blast-speaker/iraqi-parliament-speaker-condemns-us-air-strike-statement-idUSKBN1Z21BD .

[3]. Arwha Ibrahim, “Iraqi Parliament calls for expulsion of foreign troops. Vote comes after PM Abdul Mahdi recommended Parliament take urgent measures to expel foreign troops from Iraq”, Al Jazeera,  6 January 2020: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/iraqi-parliament-calls-expulsion-foreign-troops-200105150709628.html .

[4]. “US dismisses Iraq request to work on a troop withdrawal plan”, Hurriyet Daily News, 11 January 2020: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/us-dismisses-iraq-request-to-work-on-a-troop-withdrawal-plan-150825 .

[5]. Peter Baker et al, “Seven days in January: How Trump pushed U.S. and Iran to the brink of war”, New York Times, 11 January 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/us/politics/iran-trump.html .

[6]. “Iraq warns of collapse if Trump blocks oil cash”, Bangkok Post, 13 January 2020:  https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1834699/iraq-warns-of-collapse-if-trump-blocks-oil-cash .

[7]. “Iraq warned to keep US troops o risk financial blow –WSJ”, Al Jazeera, 12 January 2020: https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/iraq-warned-troops-risk-financial-blow-wsj-200111164246245.html .

[8]. Ian Talley and Isabel Coles, “U.S. warns Iraq it risks losing access to key bank account if troops told to leave. Loss of access to New York Fed account, where international oil sale revenue is kept, risks creating cash crunch in Iraq’s financial system”, Wall Street Journal, 11 January 2011:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-warns-iraq-it-risks-losing-access-to-key-bank-account-if-troops-told-to-leave-11578759629 .

[9]. Patrick Wintour and Dan Sabbagh, “Germany cuts troop numbers in Iraq after Suleimani killing. Decision follows call by Iraqi parliament for withdrawal of US forces”, Guardian, 8 January 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/07/germany-cuts-troop-numbers-in-iraq-after-suleimani-killing .

[10]. “Dozens killed in stampede at Qassem Soleimani’s funeral in Iran”, Al Jazeera, 8 January 2020: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/dozens-killed-stampede-soleimani-funeral-iran-state-tv-200107093406578.html .

[11].Martin Rivers, “The downing of flight 752 in Iran is a tragedy of complacency. Lessons from the 2014 Malaysian Airlines disaster were not heeded. Now 176 more people are dead”, Guardian, 14 January 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/13/downing-flight-752-tragedy-complacency-airlines .

[12]. “Canada-Iran relations”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Iran_relations .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel bombing Syria & Iraq – hotting up deadly  4-decade US war on Iran”, Countercurrents, 14 August 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/08/apartheid-israel-bombing-syria-iraq-hotting-up-deadly-4-decade-us-war-on-iran .

[14]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes a succinct history  of every country and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ .

[15]. “UN Population Division. World Population Prospects 2019”: https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/ .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “US-imposed Opiate Holocaust – US protection of Afghan opiates has killed 5.2 million people since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 10 August 2019: https://countercurrents.org/2019/08/us-imposed-opiate-holocaust-us-protection-of-afghan-opiates-has-killed-5-2-million-people-since-9-11  .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm .

[18]. Gideon Polya, “The US Has Invaded 70 Nations Since 1776 – Make 4 July Independence From America Day”, Countercurrents, 5 July, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm .

[19]. Gideon Polya, “British Have Invaded 193 Countries:  Make  26 January ( Australia Day, Invasion Day) British Invasion Day”, Countercurrents, 23 January, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230115.htm .

[20].Gideon Polya, “President Hollande And French Invasion Of Privacy Versus French Invasion Of 80 Countries Since 800 AD”, Countercurrents, 15 January, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150114.htm  .

[21]. “Stop state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/ .

[22]. “State crime and non-state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/statecrimeandnonstateterrorism/  .

[23]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna wins Cambridge Prize”, MWC News, 20 November 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/14978-economist-mahima-khanna.html .

[24]. “Iraq Population”: http://www.populstat.info/Asia/iraqc.htm  .

[25].  “US military marks end of its Iraq war”, ABC News,  16 December 2011: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-15/us-military-marks-end-of-its-war-in-iraq/3733982  .

[26]. “Just Foreign Policy”: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq .

[27]. ORB (Opinion Research Business), “January 2008 – Update on Iraqi Casualty Data”, January 2008: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88 .

[28]. Les Roberts, “Les Roberts: Iraq’s death toll far worse than our leaders admit”, Uruqnet: 14 February 2007: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=30670&s2=16 .

[29]. G. Burnham, R. Lafta, S. Doocy and L. Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey”, The  Lancet 2006 Oct 21;368(9545):1421-8: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17055943 .

[30]. “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[31]. Gideon Polya, “12th Anniversary Of Illegal Iraq Invasion – 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation”, Countercurrents,  23 March, 2015: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya230315.htm

[32]. Gideon Polya, “Mosul Massacre latest in Iraqi Genocide”, Countercurrents, 24 July 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/07/mosul-massacre-latest-in-iraqi-genocide-us-alliance-war-crimes-demand-icc-bds

[33]. Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn, “The Sacking of Fallujah. A people’s history”, University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.

[34]. UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[35]. “Genocide in Iraq Volume I . The case against the UN Security Council and member states” by Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and  Tarik Al-Ani (foreword by Professor Joshua Castellino; Clarity Press, Atlanta).

[36]. Gideon Polya ““Genocide in Iraq, The Case Against UN Security Council And Member States”. Book review”,  Countercurrents, 8 February, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080213.htm .

[37]. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani, “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State” (Clarity Press, 2015).

[38]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The obliteration of a modern state” By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani”, Countercurrents, 15 March 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm .

[39]. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/380 .

[40]. Jack Snape, “Scott Morrison confirms Australian troops will remain in Iraq after Iran’s missile attack on US bases”, ABC News, 9 January 2020: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-09/scott-morrison-australia-military-mission-iraq-iran/11855490 .

[41]. John Pilger, “The British-American Coup that ended Australian independence”, Guardian, 23 October 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence .

[42]. Penny Wong, 8 January 2020: https://www.pennywong.com.au/media-releases/safety-of-our-adf-and-diplomatic-personnel-in-iraq/ .

[43]. Bevan Shields, “”Don’t throw us out”: Australia plans to stay in Iraq but plans for the worst”,  Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 2010: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/don-t-throw-us-out-australia-pleads-to-stay-in-iraq-but-plans-for-the-worst-20200106-p53pcy.html .

[44]. Gideon Polya, “Paris atrocity context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm .

[45]. Chapter 6, Aftermath” in  Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn, “The Sacking of Fallujah. A people’s history”, University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.

[46]. Neel Mani (Director of the World Health Organisation’s Iraq programme between 2001-2003 ,  “Iraq: politics and science  in post-conflict health research”, Huffington Post, 15 October 2014: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/neel-mani/iraq-politics-and-science_b_4098231.html.

[47]. John Dugard, “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the crime of Apartheid”, Audiovisual Library of International Law: http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cspca/cspca.html .

[48]. “Boycott Apartheid  Israel”: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottapartheidisrael/.

[49]. Gideon Polya, “70th anniversary of Apartheid Israel & commencement of large-scale Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents, 11 May 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/11/70th-anniversary-of-apartheid-israel-commencement-of-large-scale-palestinian-genocide/ .

[50]. Gideon Polya, “Democratic One-State Solution (Unitary State, Bi-National State) for post-Apartheid Palestine”, Countercurrents, 22 December 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/12/22/democratic-one-state-solution-unitary-state-bi-national-state-for-post-apartheid-palestine/ .

[51] “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .

[52]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian Genocide & Australia’s Aboriginal  Genocide compared”, Countercurrents, 20 February 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/02/20/apartheid-israels-palestinian-genocide-australias-aboriginal-genocide-compared/  .

[53]. Gideon Polya, “Israeli-Palestinian & Middle East conflict – from oil to climate genocide”, Countercurrents, 21 August 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/08/21/israeli-palestinian-middle-east-conflict-from-oil-to-climate-genocide/ .

[54]. Gideon Polya, “End 50 Years Of Genocidal Occupation & Human Rights Abuse By US-Backed Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents,  9 June  2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/06/09/end-50-years-of-genocidal-occupation-human-rights-abuse-by-us-backed-apartheid-israel/ .

[55]. Gideon Polya, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights & Palestinians. Apartheid Israel violates ALL Palestinian Human Rights”, Palestine Genocide Essays, 24 January 2009: https://sites.google.com/site/palestinegenocideessays/universal-declaration-of-human-rights-palestinians .

[56]. United Nations, “Israel’s settlements have no legal validity, constitute flagrant violations of international law, Security Council reaffirms.   14 delegations in favour of Resolution 2334 as United States abstains”, 23 December 2016: https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm .

[57]. Gideon Polya, “Is UN Security Council Resolution 2334 the beginning of the end for Apartheid Israel?””, Countercurrents, 28 December 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/12/28/is-un-security-council-resolution-2334-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-apartheid-israel/ .

[58]. Gideon Polya, “Anti-racist Jewish humanitarians oppose Apartheid Israel & support UN Security Council resolution 2334”, Countercurrents, 13 January 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/01/13/anti-racist-jewish-humanitarians-oppose-apartheid-israel-support-un-security-council-resolution-2334/ .

[59]. Brian Toohey, “Secret. The making of Australia’s security state”, Melbourne University Press, 2019.

[60]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .

[61]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[62]. Gideon Polya, “US Profits From Jihadist Terrorism”, Countercurrents, 19 November, 2004: http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya191104.htm .

[63]. Gideon Polya, “Fundamentalist America Has Trashed Secular Governance, Modernity, Democracy, Women’s Rights And Children’s Rights In The Muslim World”, Countercurrents,  21 May, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya210515.htm .

[64]. Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters, “Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m”, The Observer, 16 September 2007: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline .

[65]. Noam Chomsky quoted in Sherwood Ross, “Chomsky: Iraq invasion “major crime” designed to control Middle East oil”, The Public Record, 3 November 2009:  http://pubrecord.org/nation/5953/chomsky-invasion-major-crime/ .

[66]. Philip Dorling, “Australian intelligence “feeding data” for deadly US drone strikes”, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 May 2014:http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australian-intelligence-feeding-data-used-for-deadly-us-drone-strikes-20140526-38ywk.html .

[67]. David Vine, “Where in the world is the US military”, Politico, July/August 2015: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321 .

[68]. Jules Dufour, “The worldwide network of US military bases”, Global Research, 1 July 2007: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases-2/5564 .

[69]. William Blum, “Rogue State”.

[70]. “Howard is a war criminal,, says former colleague”, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 July 2004: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/18/1090089035899.html .

[71]. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and Politics”, Countercurrents, 8 December 2005: http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades.

16 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

A seemingly ordinary news story, published in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on January 7, shed light on a long-forgotten, yet crucial, subject: Israel’s so-called “firing zones” in the West Bank.

“Israel has impounded the only vehicle available to a medical team that provides assistance to 1,500 Palestinians living inside an Israeli military firing zone in the West Bank,” according to Haaretz.

The Palestinian community that was denied its only access to medical services is Masafer Yatta, a tiny Palestinian village located in the South Hebron hills.

Masafer Yatta, which exists in complete and utter isolation from the rest of the occupied West Bank, is located in ‘Area C’, which constitutes the larger territorial chunk, about 60%, of the West Bank. This means that the village, along with many Palestinian towns, villages and small, isolated communities, is under total Israeli military control.

Do not let the confusing logic of the Oslo Accords fool you; all Palestinians, in all parts of the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the besieged Gaza Strip, are under Israeli military control as well.

Unfortunately for Masafer Yatta, and those living in ‘Area C’, however, the degree of control is so suffocating that every aspect of Palestinian life – freedom of movement, education, access to clean water, and so on – is controlled by a complex system of Israeli military ordinances that have no regard whatsoever for the well-being of the beleaguered communities.

It is no surprise, then, that Masafer Yatta’s only vehicle, a desperate attempt at fashioning a mobile clinic, was confiscated in the past as well, and was only retrieved after the impoverished residents were forced to pay a fine to Israeli soldiers.

There is no military logic in the world that could rationally justify the barring of medical access to an isolated community, especially when an Occupying Power like Israel is legally obligated under the Fourth Geneva Convention to ensure medical access to civilians living in an Occupied Territory.

It is only natural that Masafer Yatta, like all Palestinians in ‘Area C’ and the larger West Bank, feel neglected – and outright betrayed – by the international community as well as their own quisling leadership.

But there is more that makes Masafer Yatta even more unique, qualifying it for the unfortunate designation of being a Bantustan within a Bantustan, as it subsists in a far more complex system of control, compared to the one imposed on black South Africa during the Apartheid regime era.

Soon after Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, it devised a long-term stratagem aimed at the permanent control of the newly-occupied territories. While it designated some areas for the future relocation of its own citizens – who now make up the extremist illegal Jewish settler population in the West Bank – it also set aside large swathes of the Occupied Territories as security and buffer zones.

What is far less known is that, throughout the 1970s, the Israeli military declared roughly 18% of the West Bank as “firing zones”.

These “firing zones” were supposedly meant as training grounds for the Israeli occupation army soldiers – although Palestinians trapped in these regions often report that little or no military training takes place within “firing zones”.

According to the Office for the UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Palestine, there are around 5,000 Palestinians, divided among 38 communities that still live, under most dire circumstances, within the so-called “firing zones”.

The 1967 occupation led to a massive wave of ethnic cleansing that saw the forced removal of approximately 300,000 Palestinians from the newly-conquered territory. Many of the vulnerable communities that were ethnically cleansed included Palestinian Bedouins, who continue to pay the price for Israel’s colonial designs in the Jordan Valley, the South Hebron Hills and other parts of occupied Palestine.

This vulnerability is compounded by the fact that the Palestinian Authority (PA) acts with little regards to Palestinians living in ‘Area C’, who are left to withstand and resist Israeli pressures alone, often resorting to Israel’s own unfair judicial system, to win back some of their basic rights.

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 between the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli government, divided the West Bank into three regions: ‘Area A’, theoretically under autonomous Palestinian control and consisting of 17.7% of the overall size of the West Bank; ‘Area B’, 21%, and under shared Israeli-PA control and ‘Area C’, the remainder of the West Bank, and under total Israeli control.

This arrangement was meant to be temporary, set to conclude in 1999 once the “final status negotiations” were concluded and a comprehensive peace accord was signed. Instead, it became the status quo ante.

As unfortunate as the Palestinians living in ‘Area C’ are, those living in the “firing zone” within ‘Area C’ are enduring the most hardship. According to the United Nations, their hardship includes “the confiscation of property, settler violence, harassment by soldiers, access and movement restrictions and/or water scarcity.”

Expectedly, many illegal Jewish settlements sprang up in these “firing zones” over the years, a clear indication that these areas have no military purpose whatsoever, but were meant to provide an Israeli legal justification to confiscate nearly a fifth of the West Bank for future colonial expansion.

Throughout the years, Israel ethnically cleansed all remaining Palestinians in these “firing zones”, leaving behind merely 5,000, who are likely to suffer the same fate should the Israeli occupation continue on the same violent trajectory.

This makes the story of Masafer Yatta a microcosm of the tragic and larger story of all Palestinians. It is also a reflection of the sinister nature of Israeli colonialism and military occupation, where occupied Palestinians lose their land, their water, their freedom of movement and eventually, even the most basic medical care.

These harsh “conditions contribute to a coercive environment that creates pressure on Palestinian communities to leave these areas,” according to the United Nations. In other words, ethnic cleansing, which has been Israel’s strategic goal all along.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

16 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andrew Korybko

The latest MH17 documentary, “MH-17: In Search Of Truth” by Ukrainian SBU whistleblower Vasily Prozorov, shares some shocking truths about that tragedy which strongly make the case that the UK conspired with Kiev to take down that civilian aircraft as part of a preplanned Hybrid War plot against the Donbas rebels that was also intended to frame Russia as the West’s main geopolitical competitor.

Ukrainian SBU whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Prozorov released a documentary about the MH17 tragedy late last month titled “MH-17: In Search Of Truth“, which true to its name shares some shocking truths about what transpired on that fateful summer day back on 17 July, 2014. His investigative work relies on his personal knowledge of the events surrounding that affair (including through his contacts at the time), classified documents, eyewitness reports, and logic to strongly make the case that the UK conspired with Kiev to take down that civilian aircraft as part of a preplanned Hybrid War plot against the Donbas rebels. The nearly 40-minute-long documentary is worth watching in full, but for those who aren’t able to at the moment yet are still interested in learning more about this cover-up, what follows is a brief summary of some of the most important points raised in his documentary.

MH-17: In Search of Truth

Prozorov draws attention to how suspicious it was that supposedly leaked recordings from rebel leaders allegedly implicating them in the tragedy were shared on social media within hours of MH17 being shot down. Ukrainian law has very strict bureaucratic guidelines for declassifying wiretapped evidence which couldn’t have been followed in less than a few days’ time at the absolute earliest, strongly suggesting that the recordings were faked in advance by the country’s SBU security service after intercepting voice samples of the alleged suspects ahead of time. The purpose in doing so was to immediately take control of the narrative per the preplanned Hybrid War plot of delegitimizing the Donbas rebels’ cause by framing them as “terrorists” and thus preventing a possible Russian military intervention in their support like was widely speculated to be in the planning stages around that time, but that last-mentioned point will be returned to in a moment.

The next one that Prozorov talks about is how Kiev’s claims that its armed forces weren’t in the combat area during that time are unconvincing since he proves that the battle lines were actually very fluid. Not only are there eyewitness reports to this effect, but also evidence of their tire tracks going back and forth all throughout the area, as well as countless ration wrappers proving that presence of the armed forces and their allies there. This is very important since part of Kiev’s defense rests in its insistence that even if the BUKs under its control were deployed somewhere near the front lines (which will also be returned to later on in this analysis), they allegedly weren’t close enough to shoot down MH17. Prozorov, however, proved that this isn’t true since the Ukrainian Armed Forces freely moved all around the area and could easily have been within striking distance of the aircraft at the time of the tragedy.

One of the more interesting tidbits that Prozorov revealed in his documentary was his participation in a conference at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine on 8 July, 2014, focusing on making amendments to the country’s so-called “anti-terrorist” legislation. He vividly recalls overhearing an exchange between Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Col. Gen. Mikhail Koval and an unknown Defense Ministry representative right after the event ended. Prozorov remembers how the representative expressed his fear (which was widespread at the time) that Russia was preparing a military intervention in support of the Donbas rebels which he was worried would crush Kiev’s forces in the region. Koval, however, reassured his interlocutor by telling him that he heard hints that something will soon happen which will pose a serious challenge to Russia’s alleged plans. Nine days later, MH17 was shot down.

In response to the obvious question about how that happened, Prozorov begins by explaining that Donbas’ airspace wasn’t forcibly closed by Kiev unlike what one would ordinarily expect a responsible state to do. This created ample opportunities for the organizers to prepare their provocation since international aircraft continued to transit over the conflict region for convenience’s sake. Facilitating their preplanned plot, Prozorov points out how a radiolocation station in Donbas’ Artemovsk was mysteriously disabled a month before MH17 was shot down. He notes that it could have pinpointed where the BUK missile came from had it been active at the time of the tragedy and wonders aloud why the Ukrainian media didn’t make a fuss out of blaming the rebels back then. His answer is that the third regiment of the Special Operation Forces of Ukraine were responsible, suggesting that these sabotage experts carried out their operation to cover Kiev’s future tracks.

Another relevant fact that Prozorov discusses in his documentary is that the US didn’t immediately release the satellite evidence that they claimed to have from the day of the tragedy. He believes that this was done in order to give the perpetrators enough time to finalize their “alternative facts” in the immediate aftermath of what happened and not accidentally screw everything up for them. In addition, he questions why the Joint Investigative Team (JIT) didn’t accept the evidence that was promptly provided by the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) from the crash site, as well as why it took the Dutch investigators months to show any real interest in the wreckage. These curious observations give credence to the claim that many of those tasked with investigating the incident weren’t impartial and instead wanted to push a very specific preplanned narrative. It’s also strange that the Malaysian authorities were initially marginalized by the intelligence-led investigative team.

Prozorov shared some very important information about the role that the 156th anti-aircraft regiment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces played in MH17’s downing, too. He spoke to two former conscripts who served with the unit during that time but have since defected to the rebels. They explained how their forces counted a BUK among their armaments and were deployed to the Donbas front lines prior to being mysteriously withdrawn from combat service despite the widespread fear that summer that Russia was about to militarily intervene in the conflict. Officers and contract soldiers then accompanied the BUK to a so-called “training range” while the conscripts were ordered to remain at base. It was only later that they learned from their colleagues who were physically there that the BUK was actually deployed to the combat area and had fired at least one missile right at the time that MH17 was shot down.

There’s some pretty intriguing evidence that Prozorov shared in his documentary about suspected British involvement in all of this as well. He relied on a document to prove that that chief of the counterintelligence department Major General Valery Kondratyuk accompanied two British secret service agents and others to the Donbas operational area on 22 June, 2014 for a one-day visit, after which all of the SBU representatives left except for Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Burba, who remained with Kiev’s British “guests”. Prozorov happens to know Burba since the latter replaced him and his colleagues there earlier that month, and he says that Burba participated in the MH17 plot together with the foreign agents. Afterwards, Kondratyuk and Burba’s careers “coincidentally” experienced meteoric success, with the former becoming the chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate before being replaced by the latter and then becoming the presidential deputy chief of staff.

Two other pieces of evidence also point to British involvement. The first is that Peter Kalver, the Australian intelligence agent tasked with leading his country’s investigative expert group in Donbas, used a British phone number. That would be strange in and of itself since he’s an Australian working in Ukraine, but when combined with what was previously revealed, it suggests that British secret involvement was even more far-reaching than initially suspected and raises questions about how many other less-important “investigative” figures might also have been connected to the UK. As for the second piece of evidence, Prozorov mentions that the UK-based “investigative journalism website” Bellingcat (funded in part by the Open Society Foundation and National Endowment For Democracy) was founded just days before the incident and then suddenly became the primary source of accusations against Moscow, making one wonder whether it’s actually an intelligence infowar front.

Wrapping everything up, Prozorov concludes his documentary by reviewing his main points, namely that MH17’s downing was a meticulously preplanned plot by the Ukrainian and British security agencies to pin the blame for this false flag attack on the Donbas rebels, all with the intent of portraying them as “terrorists” and thus also make it politically impossible for Russia to militarily intervene in their support like was widely suspected to be in the planning stages during that summer. There was also the grander intention of framing Russia as the West’s main geopolitical competitor. All of this is relevant to still keep in mind since the JIT’s judicial proceedings will begin in March 2020, thus returning the issue back to the international spotlight as the perpetrators attempt to absolve themselves by convincing the world that the innocent suspects are guilty. Altogether, Prozorov’s documentary is extremely insightful and worth watching in full if one finds the time.

*

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

5 January 2020

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Peter Koenig

Why doesn’t the U.S. respect the decision made by the Iraqi Parliament and move out of Iraqi territory? – The short answer is, because the US doesn’t respect anybody’s – any country’s – decision or sovereignty, as long as it doesn’t meet their objectives.

Now, the US is steadfast and will not leave the region. Already President Assad has requested that the US leave Syrian territory. They didn’t. The stakes are too immense for the US. It has all to do with their move towards world hegemony by territory and by finance – meaning by the US dollar.

The conflict with Iran is not over. By any means. We are just experiencing a respite for regrouping – and subsequently continuing and escalating the conflict. US bases in Iraq and military presence, at present more than 5,000 troops, are the most convenient means of force against Iran.

Other than controlling the rich and highly strategic territory of the Middle-East as an important step towards world hegemony, the US continuous presence in the region also has to do with profits for the war industry and with the price and control of hydrocarbons, especially gas.

We have seen, soon after the cowardly murder of General Qassem Suleimani, the share values of the war industry jumped up, of course in anticipation of a hot war – and huge weapons sales. The war industry profits insanely from killing. Wars and conflicts are increasingly what drives the western economies. Already in the US the war industry and related industries and services make up for about half of the country’s GDP. The US economy without war is unthinkable. Therefore, the Middle-East is a perfect eternal battle ground – a sine qua non for the west. War is addictive. The western economy is already addicted to it. But most people haven’t realized that – yet. Revolving and renewed conflicts and wars is a must. Imagine, if the US were to leave the Middle-East, PEACE might break out. This is not admissible. Soon, your job my depend on war – if you live in the west.

Then there is the Iranian gas. Daily 20% to 25% of all the energy consumed to drive the world’s economy – including wars – transits through the Golf of Hormuz which is controlled by Iran. Immediately after the heinous murder on General Suleimani, the oil and gas prices spiked by about 4%, later declining again. This, in anticipation of a major conflict which could have Iran reduce her gas production, or block the passage of Hormuz. In either case a collapse of the world economy could not be excluded.

As a parenthesis – it is so absolutely necessary that the world frees itself from this nefarious source of energy – hydrocarbons – and converts to other, cheaper, cleaner and FREER sources of power to drive our industries and activities. Like solar energy of which Mother Earth receives every day more than 10,000 time what it needs for all her industrial and creative activities on every Continent.

The US, with a flailing multi-trillion fracking industry which just failed the European market, due Russian gas via Nord Stream2, and just inaugurated Turkstream, would like to control the price of hydrocarbon, so as to revive the highly indebted fracking industry. What better way than to control Iran, and her enormous reserves of gas, shared with Qatar?

Then there is the close alliance between Iran and China – China being Iran’s largest customer of gas. China is perceived by Washington as a deadly competitor, and barring her from the energy that makes China’s economy thrive, is one of those devilish objectives of the United States. They are unable to compete on an even playing field. Cheating, lying and manipulating has become part of their, and the western life style. It is deeply ingrained in western history and culture.

Of, course there are other ways of supplying China with the hydrocarbons she needs. Russia with the world’s largest gas reserves, could easily increase her supplies.
In brief, the US is unlikely to leave the Middle-East, although some generals – and even some high-ranking Pentagon brass – believe this would be the smartest thing to do – they see the light, and the light is not war, but PEACE.

What could Iraq do to get the US out of Iraq and eventually out of the Region? After all, the Iraqi Parliament has taken a majority decision to regain Iraq’s sovereignty and autonomy, without foreign troops. Most countries with troops stationed in Iraq respect that decision. Denmark, Australia, Poland and Germany are preparing to move their troops out of Iraq. Only the UK with her 800 military men and women decided for now to stay alongside the US.

Iraq may want to strengthened her alliance with Russia and China, hereby increasing the pressure on the US to honor Iraq’s sovereign request for the US to leave. How much that would take to materialize, if at all, is a difficult question to answer. Maybe ‘never’. Except, if the US-dollar hegemony over western economies can be broken. And at the moment, a strong down-turn of the dollar’s role in the world economy is showing, as the western world is increasingly seeking ways to de-dollarize her economy and to associate with the East, led by China and Russia, where de-dollarization is advancing rapidly.

When that happens, chances are that the US of A’s dictates over the nations of the world will be mute, will not be listened to anymore, and that Washington will have to rethink its future – and very likely a US presence in the Middle-East will be history.

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

11 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Robert Inlakesh

We have now entered 2020, the year in which experts at the United Nations (UN) once predicted Gaza would become unlivable. But the sad reality is not only that those same experts said that Gaza was already unlivable in 2017, but that now the population of 2 million residing in Gaza are under the real threat of genocide.

Sara Roy of Harvard University’s Centre for Middle Eastern studies, who is considered the leading scholar on Gaza’s economy, has written that “innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned in Gaza by the water drink and likely by the soil in which they plant.” So let us break down that statement, based upon the data available to us.

The population of the Gaza Strip is over 2 million strong, more than 50% of which are children (18 and under). Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s water is undrinkable with only the upper 10% of Gaza’s population having access to clean water according to the UN. If we take these statistics and we look at them critically that would mean that according to conservative estimates only 40% of Gaza’s children are consuming water that is fit for human consumption. This means that parents in the Gaza Strip are forced to make the decision to allow their children to drink contaminated water in order for them to survive.

Israel which has enforced its illegal blockade of Gaza since 2006 – although Zionist propagandists claim it started in June of 2007, which is incorrect – is under international law required to provide Gaza with the ability to sustain itself. Gaza is not a State; it is not a sovereign territory in of itself. According to the UN Gaza constitutes part of what is called the Palestinian occupied territories, with the focus here being on the word “occupied.”

According to the 4th Geneva Convention, Israel is required under International Law to provide the ability for Gaza and the West Bank to sustain an environment of livability. Israel will argue, however, that Gaza specifically is not occupied; that it withdrew in 2005. However it still controls the population registry, the entries and exits, all imports and exports, the electromagnetic sphere, the armistice lines (what Israel calls the border), the territorial waters, airspace as well as having a monopoly on the electricity in Gaza. Israel controls Gaza through and through; meaning that if Israel does not declare an occupation, it is a de facto annexation of the territory.

In excess of 108,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage water flows into the Mediterranean Sea from Gaza. This is due to a lack of power for Gaza’s desalination plant and the lack of building material required to expand, both of which are due to Israel’s policies towards the besieged coastal enclave. The situation is so bad that not only is Gaza’s sea water heavily contaminated, leading to deaths as recently as last year, but also Israel’s Askalan (Ashkelon) based desalination plant periodically halts operations due to the pollution, showing that Israel is willing to put the purification of 20% of its own water at jeopardy in order to punish the Gaza Strip.

Rising from the problem of water contamination is also disease. Gidon Grumberg, the founder and director of Israel’s ‘Ecopeace’, told the Jerusalem post in 2016 that Gaza is a ticking time bomb for cholera and typhoid epidemics. Since then there have been repeated calls for a change to be made to Gaza’s lack of clean water by various experts. If a change is not made in 2020 then Gaza could become a hotbed for disease the way that Yemen has, again due to an illegally imposed blockade.

Beyond the water problem are also numerous other issues plaguing Gaza, all of which are again due to Israel’s illegally imposed – for nearly 15 years now – siege. Upwards of 80% of Gaza’s population are reliant upon international food aid in order to survive, with Israel enforcing a policy of “putting the people of Gaza on a diet,” entailing that Israel counts the minimum caloric intake for the Gazan population to stay alive. Israel of course controls the food aid coming into the Gaza Strip and even makes a profit off of it. The restrictions Israel applies to food coming into Gaza is also used as a political tool in order to punish the Palestinians for their acts of resistance against Israel.

The conservative estimates, according to the United Nations, also indicate that Gaza’s youth unemployment rate is close to hitting 70% with an overall unemployment rate recorded to be at around 50%. Israel also has repeatedly blocked Palestinian cancer patients from entering Israel in order to receive life-saving treatment. Not only this, but due to the lack of power in Gaza, cardiac monitors and X-ray machines become unreliable. In the first half of 2019, the Gaza Health Ministry, which has a regular budget of $40 million a year, had only 10 million dollars worth of supplies available to them and in July (2019) declared a warning of an unprecedented shortage of medicine and medical supplies. According to the World Health Organization 39% of Gaza applications for cancer patients to exit the blockaded Strip were “unsuccessful” in 2018.

Gaza’s population is subjected to sewage regularly flooding, after rainfall, into the streets and causing sickness, especially amongst the poorer population. Even the more well-off, financially, of Gaza’s population, whom of which reside in areas such as Gaza City (North East Gaza), are losing their wealth. Specifically the residents of the al-Rimal area, who are viewed by many as living in an area of prestige are having to flee to places like Istanbul, or become refugees abroad and are losing their families assets due to an absence of income.

Gaza currently survives on a few hours of electricity per day, this is due to the fact that Israel put a cap on the amount of electricity it allows into Gaza, as well as the fact that Israel has bombarded and destroyed Gaza’s electrical grid and power plants, on various occasions. The sole, partially destroyed by bombardment, power plant in Gaza is also in a semi-operational state due to the cutting of diesel fuel from the Strip in early 2018, after the Palestinian Authority stopped paying for the fuel.

As of February 2018, the Gaza Strip has been in a “state of emergency.” Enduring, since the beginning of the siege, eight large-scale military offensive massacres by Israel, with hundreds of smaller bombardments coming in between.

A 17 year old in Gaza would have experienced Israeli internal occupation, a 15 year long ever tightening siege, 8 large scale massacres, hundreds of other attacks, three wars, the constant buzzing of drones, the deaths of friends and family, temporary or permanent displacement and the list goes on and on.

To top this all off, when the people of Gaza rose up in their hundreds of thousands non-violently, beginning on the 30th March (2018), they were ignored by the world which has done nothing to stop Israel for its murder of 330+ unarmed demonstrators and the injuring of approximately 40,000. Until now, the demonstrations are still ongoing on a weekly basis and no Israeli soldiers have been killed or sustained any serious injuries.

According to International Law, the people of Gaza have every right to use armed force in order to struggle for self determination and to end the siege. Israel has no claim to a “right of self defence”, just as rapist would have no claim to a right of self defence against their rape victim, and the next time we hear of Israel’s “right” in anyway to use force, we must know that whoever repeats this is contradicting the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Aviv Kochavi said recently in a speech pertaining to a future war against Gaza, that Israel will target electrical, agricultural and other structural components, which according to Israel contribute to keeping Hamas – Gaza’s governing Party – afloat. This means that if Israel does begin a new massacre (war) against Gaza – or Hamas as they will claim – then it will mean that all the statistics listed off above will accelerate to unprecedented numbers and that Gaza will become even more uninhabitable.

The only questions now left to be answered are, what will stop Israel from completely genociding the people of Gaza? and how will the worlds future generations look at us today for allowing this holocaust to occur against the people of Palestine. One million Palestinian children are being systematically poisoned by Israel and there is nothing but deafening silence.

Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer and political analyst, who has lived in and reported from the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

2 January 2020

Source: www.presstv.com

By Peter Koenig

Interestingly, after the US attack on Iraqi Militia fighters on 31 December 2020, and the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, on 2 January, the first thing President Trump could come up with, was bragging that it was him who gave the order to murder the popular military leader. General Qassem Suleimani, was the commander of the Iranian special Quds Force. The Quds Force was created during the Iran–Iraq War as a special unit from the broader Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It has the mission of liberating Muslim land, especially al-Quds, from which it takes its name – “Jerusalem Force“, in English.

General Suleimani was killed by a US drone. He was not only the most popular and prominent military officer in Iran, but he was also influential and respected throughout the Middle East.He was chief in training Iraqi forces who eventually defeated ISIS in Iraq within less than a year, when the US and NATO estimated it would take at least 3 years. General Suleimani, along with Russia was also instrumental in training the Syrian armed forces with the objective of defeating ISIS / IS / DEASH in Syria, and they succeeded. This US act of impunity, the General Suleimani killing, was unmistakenly targeted with precision and as such a clear declaration of war on Iran.

Trump expected applause from the public at large. Let’s not forget he is entering the year 2020 of his re-election… that’s what he wants. So, he needs increased popularity and approval ratings.To be reelected, he, like others before him, doesn’t shy away from committing murder or entering a new war, killing millions. That’s what American Presidents do to win elections. That’s what Obama has done. He entered the Presidency with two ongoing US wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – when he left office the US was engaged in seven wars around the globe, in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Plus, numerous proxy-conflicts, meaning, they are fought by mercenaries and / or US trained, funded and armed terrorists, i.e. ISIS / DAESH, Islamic State (IS) and whatever other names the empire gives its agents of terror to confuse the world. And let’s not forget, the algorithmically manipulated regime-change elections in Latin America and Europe, the steady NATO advances with new military bases encircling Russia and China, including the stationing of more than 50% of the US Naval force in the South China Sea.

Most of the US Presidents are elected on the basis of their aggression, planned or ongoing, on how much they are willing to kill around the world – and how well they are representing the interests of the US War Industry — and, of course, the Israeli AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). In other words, Americans who go to the polls, are duped into believing they are electing a president, when in reality their president had been pre-selected by a small group of elitists, representing the key US interests, the War Industry, Big Finance, Big Oil, Big Pharma – and who else, of course, the State of Israel.

The unarmed Iraqi protests and attack on 31 December on the US Embassy in Bagdad was a response to a US assault on Militia Iraqi forces on 29 December – leaving at least 25 dead and more than 50 wounded.

The US has absolutely no business in Iraq. Not now, not ever – nor in Syria, nor anywhere else in the Middle East –for that matter, outside the frontiers of the United States of America. Its as simple as that.

And the world, the UN the UN Security Council should act accordingly.

The boundless US aggression must be stopped.

The world has become used to it – and, for the most part, is just silent. The ABNORMAL has become normal. That must be reversed.

Yes, the Iranian Government warned of retaliation. Understandably. However, that is precisely what Washington and the Pentagon wants; that’s what they were provoking, with this assassination of General Suleiman, and earlier with confiscated oil tankers and tanker attacks in the Gulf. The US hawks are just waiting for Iraq to retaliate, so they can attack in full force – or ask Israel to attack in full force with US backing, of course.

Knowing how the US is acting around the world with impunity – and especially in the countries they want to dominate – Iran has to count with the worst. So far, Iran has been acting wisely with a lot of restraint, not to risk MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction, in other words, a World War scenario.

A retaliation must be well-thought out – and foremost not be obvious. It must be strategic with long-term impact not the short-term face-saving military act. In the long-term, non-aggression, non-confrontation – the contrary of what Washington is seeking – may prevail. Let the American war hawks continue shadow boxing.
What the Middle East and world is dealing with, is a dying beast – that’s what the US empire has become. The beast, in its last breath, is lashing out round itself no matter how many other countries it pulls with it into the abyss, no matter how many people are killed in the process.

What will be the world’s reaction to this open and flagrant murder? – Do not expect much from the US-submissive West, especially the Europeans.

However, Iran can certainly count on Russia and China and on a number of other allies. And in the UN on the more than 120 non-aligned countries, that also stand behind Venezuela and Cuba, and now behind Evo Morales.

This is important. These unaligned countries are now in the majority of the UN body of member states. They have to speak out in the Security Council, as well as in the General Assembly. This case of US impunity should be elevated to world attention. Therefore,Iran may want to call a special UN General Assembly Meeting to discuss the case. It would show where the UN stands – and would accordingly provide Iran with more leverage on their reaction.

Iran cannot elevate this case high enough on the world stage. So that each and every nation realizes that their own sovereignty is at risk – is every day at risk – of being annihilated by the wannabe World Hegemon – the self-declared Exceptional Nation, US of A.

Only united this monster can be beaten.

Washington is weak, knows no long-term thinking, no long-term strategy – lives off instant gratification. This works for a while, by sheer military force, but not forever.

Russia and China have now far advanced precision weaponry – and are allies of Iran, short-term thinking may be a suicide mission.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist.

5 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.

The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport, also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.

A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.

Iran, which has vowed “harsh retaliation,” is already reeling under the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel were wounded. The U.S. responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child’s play.

Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.

So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.

The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will not cooperate with Washington if the U.S. goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump administration’s view that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.

A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a new order would undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.

5 January 2020

Source: countercurrents.org