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By Paul Craig Roberts

Press Club Of Mexico Awards Paul Craig Roberts International Medal For Journalism Excellence

Last week in Mexico at the annual awards conference of the Club De Periodistas De Mexico I was given the International Award For Excellence In Journalism. In my speech I emphasized that Truth is the country of real journalists. Unlike presstitutes, the loyalty of real journalists is to Truth, not to a government or corporate advertiser. Once a journalist sacrifices Truth to loyalty to a government, he ceases to be a journalist and becomes a propagandist.

The speech is published in English and Spanish here: http://vocesdelperiodista.mx/nacional/discurso-completo-del-doctor-paul-craig-roberts-ingles-y-espanol/
The translators missed a few bits. Here is the intact speech:

Truth Is Our Country
Paul Craig Roberts
Club De Periodistas De Mexico, March 12, 2015

Colleagues,

Thank you for this recognition, for this honor. As Jesus told the people of Nazareth, a prophet is without honor in his own country. In the United States, this is also true of journalists.

In the United States journalists receive awards for lying for the government and for the corporations. Anyone who tells the truth, whether journalist or whistleblower, is fired or prosecuted or has to hide out in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, like Julian Assange, or in Moscow, like Edward Snowden, or is tortured and imprisoned, like Bradley Manning.

Mexican journalists pay an even higher price. Those who report on government corruption and on the drug cartels pay with their lives. The Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has as an entry a list by name of journalists murdered in Mexico. This is the List of Honor. Wikipedia reports than more than 100 Mexican journalists have been killed or disappeared in the 21st century.

Despite intimidation the Mexican press has not abandoned its job. Because of your courage, I regard this award bestowed on me as the greatest of honors.

In the United States real journalists are scarce and are becoming more scarce. Journalists have morphed into a new creature. Gerald Celente calls US journalists “presstitutes,” a word formed from press prostitute. In other words, journalists in the United States are whores for the government and for the corporations.

The few real journalists that remain are resigning. Last year Sharyl Attkisson, a 21-year veteran reporter with CBS resigned on the grounds that it had become too much of a fight to get truth reported. She was frustrated that CBS saw its purpose to be a protector of the powerful, not a critic.

Recently Peter Oborne, the UK Telegraph’s chief political commentator, explained why he resigned. His stories about the wrongdoings of the banking giant, HSBC, were spiked, because HSBC is an important advertiser for the Telegraph. Osborne says: “The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-i-have-resigned-from-the-telegraph/5432659

Last summer former New York Times editor Jill Abramson in a speech at the Chautauqua Institution said that the New York Times withheld information at the request of the White House. She said that for a number of years the press in general did not publish any stories that upset the White House. She justified this complete failure of journalism on the grounds that “journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself to be a patriot.”

So in the United States journalists lie for the government because they are patriotic, and their readers and listeners believe the lies because they are patriotic.

Our view differs from the view of the New York Times editor. The view of those of us here today is that our country is not the United States, it is not Mexico, our country is Truth. Once a journalist sacrifices Truth to loyalty to a government, he ceases to be a journalist and becomes a propagandist.

Recently, Brian Williams, the television news anchor at NBC, destroyed his career because he mis-remembered an episode of more than a decade ago when he was covering the Iraq War. He told his audience that a helicopter in which he was with troops in a war zone as a war correspondent was hit by ground fire and had to land.

But the helicopter had not been hit by ground fire. His fellow journalists turned on him, accusing him of lying in order to enhance his status as a war correspondent.

On February 10, NBC suspended Brian Williams for 6 months from his job as Managing Editor and Anchor of NBC Nightly News.

Think about this for a moment. It makes no difference whatsoever whether the helicopter had to land because it had been hit by gun fire or for some other reason or whether it had to land at all. If it was an intentional lie, it was one of no consequence. If it was a mistake, an episode of “false memory,” why the excessive reaction? Psychologists say that false memories are common.

The same NBC that suspended Brian Williams and the journalists who accused him of lying are all guilty of telling massive lies for the entirety of the 21st century that have had vast consequences. The United States government has been, and still is, invading, bombing, and droning seven or eight countries on the basis of lies told by Washington and endlessly repeated by the media. Millions of people have been killed, maimed, and displaced by violence based entirely on lies spewing out of the mouths of Washington and its presstitutes.

We know what these lies are: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Assad of Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Iranian nukes. Pakistani and Yemeni terrorists. Terrorists in Somalia. The endless lies about Gaddafi in Libya, about the Taliban in Afghanistan. And now the alleged Russian invasion and annexation of Ukraine.

All of these transparent lies are repeated endlessly, and no one is held accountable. But one journalist mis-remembers one insignificant detail about a helicopter ride and his career is destroyed.

We can safely conclude that the only honest journalism that exists in the United States is provided by alternative media on the Internet.

Consequently, the Internet is now under US government attack. “Truth is the enemy of the state,” and Washington intends to shut down truth everywhere.

Washington has appointed Andrew Lack, the former president of NBC News, to be the chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. His first official statement compared RT, Russia Today, the Russian-based news agency, with the Islamic State and Boko Haram. In other words, Mr. Lack brands RT as a terrorist organization.

The purpose of Andrew Lack’s absurd comparison is to strike fear at RT that the news organization will be expelled from US media markets. Andrew Lack’s message to RT is: “lie for us or we are going to expel you from our air waves.”

The British already did this to Iran’s Press TV.

In the United States the attack on Internet independent media is proceeding on several fronts. One is known as the issue of “net neutrality.” There is an effort by Washington, joined by Internet providers, to charge sites for speedy access. Bandwidth would be sold for fees. Large media corporations, such as CNN and the New York Times, would be able to pay the prices for a quickly opening website. Smaller independent sites such as mine would be hampered with the slowness of the old “dial-up” type bandwidth. Click on CNN and the site immediately opens. Click on paulcraigroberts.org and wait five minutes.

You get the picture. This is Washington’s plan and the corporations’ plan for the Internet.

But it gets worse. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which attempts to defend our digital rights, reports that so-called “free trade agreements,” such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (and the Trans Atlantic Partnership) impose prison sentences, massive fines, and property seizures on Internet users who innocently violate vague language in the so-called trade agreements.

Recently, a young American, Barrett Brown, was sentenced to 5 years in prison and a fine of $890,000 for linking to allegedly hacked documents posted on the Internet. Barrett Brown did not hack the documents. He merely linked to an Internet posting, and he has no prospect of earning $890,000 over the course of his life.

The purpose of the US government’s prosecution, indeed, persecution, of this young person is to establish the precedent that anyone who uses Internet information in ways that Washington disapproves, or for purposes that Washington disapproves, is a criminal whose life will be ruined. The purpose of Barrett Brown’s show trial is to intimidate. It is Washington’s equivalent to the murder of Mexican journalists.

But this is prologue. Now we turn to the challenge that Washington presents to the entire world.

It is the nature of government and of technology to establish control. People everywhere face the threat of control by government and technology. But the threat from Washington is much greater. Washington is not content with only controlling the citizens of the United States. Washington intends to control the world.

Michael Gorbachev is correct when he says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that has happened to humanity, because the Soviet collapse removed the only constraint on Washington’s power.

The Soviet collapse released a terrible evil upon the world. The neoconservatives in Washington concluded that the failure of communism meant that History has chosen American “democratic capitalism,” which is neither democratic nor capitalist, to rule the world. The Soviet collapse signaled “the End of History,” by which is meant the end of competition between social, political and economic systems.

The choice made by History elevated the United States to the pre-eminent position of being the “indispensable and exceptional” country, a claim of superiority. If the United States is “indispensable,” then others are dispensable. If the United States is exceptional, then others are unexceptional. We have seen the consequences of Washington’s ideology in Washington’s destruction of life and stability in the Middle East.

Washington’s drive for World Hegemony, based as it is on a lie, makes necessary the obliteration of Truth. As Washington’s agenda of supremacy is all encompassing, Washington regards truth as a greater enemy than Russians, Muslim terrorists, and the Islamic State.

As truth is Washington’s worst enemy, everyone associated with the truth is Washington’s enemy.

Latin America can have no illusions about Washington. The first act of the Obama Regime was to overthrow the democratic reformist government of Honduras. Currently, the Obama Regime is trying to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina.

As Mexicans know, in the 19th century Washington stole half of Mexico. Today Washington is stealing the rest of Mexico. The United States is stealing Mexico via financial imperialism, by subordinating Mexican agriculture and self-sustaining peasant agricultural communities to foreign-owned monoculture, by infecting Mexico with Monsanto’s GMO’s, genetically modified organisms, seeds that do not reproduce, chemicals that destroy the soil and nature’s nutrients, seeds that leave Mexico dependent on Monsanto for food crops with reduced nutritional value.

It is easy for governments to sell out their countries to Washington and the North American corporations. Washington and US corporations pay high prices for subservience to their control. It is difficult for countries, small in economic and political influence, to stand against such power. All sorts of masks are used behind which Washington hides US exploitation–globalism, free trade treaties . . .

But the world is changing. Putin has revived Russia, and Russia has proved its ability to stand up to Washington.

On a purchasing power basis, China now has the largest economy in the world.

As China and Russia are now strategic allies, Washington cannot act against one without acting against the other. The two combined exceed Washington’s capabilities.

The United States government has proven to the entire world that it is lawless. A country that flaunts its disrespect of law cannot provide trusted leadership.

My conclusion is that Washington’s power has peaked.

Another reason Washington’s power has peaked is that Washington has used its power to serve only itself and US corporations. The Rest of the World is dispensable and has been left out.

Washington’s power grew out of World War 2. All other economies and currencies were devastated. This allowed Washington to seize the world reserve currency role from Great Britain.

The advantage of being the world reserve currency is that you can pay your bills by printing money. In other words, you can’t go broke as long as other countries are willing to hold your fiat currency as their reserves.

But if other countries were to decide not to hold US currency as reserves, the US could go broke suddenly.

Since 2008 the supply of US dollars has increased dramatically in relation to the ability of the real economy to produce goods and services. Whenever the growth of money outpaces the growth of real output, trouble lies ahead. Moreover, Washington’s policy of imposing sanctions in an effort to force other countries to do its will is causing a large part of the world known as the BRICS to develop an alternative international payments system.

Washington’s arrogance and hubris have caused Washington to ignore the interests of other countries, including those of its allies. Even Washington’s European vassal states show signs of developing an independent foreign policy in their approach to Russia and Ukraine. Opportunities will arise for governments to escape from Washington’s control and to pursue the interests of their own peoples.

The US media has never performed the function assigned to it by the Founding Fathers. The media is supposed to be diverse and independent. It is supposed to confront both government and private interest groups with the facts and the truth. At times the US media partially fulfilled this role, but not since the final years of the Clinton Regime when the government allowed six mega-media companies to consolidate 90% of the media in their hands.

The mega-media companies that control the US media are GE, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. (GE owns NBC, formerly an independent network. News Corp owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and British newspapers. Disney owns ABC. Time Warner owns CNN.)

The US media is no longer run by journalists. It is run by former government officials and corporate advertising executives. The values of the mega-media companies depend on their federal broadcast licenses. If the companies go against the government, the companies take a risk that their licenses will not be renewed and, thus, the multi-billion dollar values of the companies fall to zero. If media organizations investigate wrongful activities by corporations, they risk the loss of advertising revenues and become less viable.

Ninety percent control of the media gives government a Ministry of Propaganda, and that is what exists in the United States. Nothing reported in the print or TV media can be trusted.

Today there is a massive propaganda campaign against the Russian government. The incessant flow of disinformation from Washington and the media has destroyed the trust between nuclear powers that President Reagan and President Gorbachev worked so hard to create. According to polls, 62% of the US population now regards Russia as the main threat.

I conclude my remarks with the observation that there can be no greater media failure than to bring back the specter of nuclear war. And that is what the US media has achieved.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

16 March, 2015
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Mickey Z.

Officially termed an “incident” (as opposed to a “massacre”), the events of March 16, 1968, at My Lai — a hamlet in South Vietnam — are widely portrayed and accepted to this day as an aberration. While the record of U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia is far too sordid and lengthy to detail here, it’s painfully clear this was not an isolated “incident.”

Not even close…

In fact, on the very same day that Lt. William Calley entered into infamy (he would later explain: “We weren’t there to kill human beings, really. We were there to kill ideology”), another company entered My Khe, a sister subhamlet of My Lai. That visit has been described as such:

“In this ‘other massacre,’ members of this separate company piled up a body count of perhaps a hundred peasants — My Khe was smaller than My Lai — ‘flattened the village’ by dynamite and fire, and then threw handfuls of straw on corpses. The next morning, this company moved on down the Batangan Peninsula by the South China Sea, burning every hamlet they came to, killing water buffalo, pigs, chickens, ducks, and destroying crops. As one of the My Khe veterans said later, ‘what we were doing was being done all over.’ Said another: ‘We were out there having a good time. It was sort of like being in a shooting gallery.’”

Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering-up the My Lai killings, put it succinctly in 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”

Of the 26 U.S. soldiers brought up on charges related to My Lai, only Calley was convicted. However, his life sentence was later reduced to three and a half years under house arrest.

Never forget, comrades: This is what we’re up against.

He evacuated them to safety

Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. wanted to fly choppers so badly that after a four-year stint in the Navy, he left his wife and two sons behind to re-up into the Army and train as a helicopter pilot. Thompson arrived in Vietnam on Dec. 27, 1967, and quickly earned a reputation as “an exceptional pilot who took danger in his stride.”

In their book, Four Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim also describe Hugh Thompson as a “very moral man. He was absolutely strict about opening fire only on clearly defined targets.”

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson’s sense of virtue would be put to the test.

Flying in his H-23 observation chopper, the 25-year-old Thompson used green smoke to mark wounded people on the ground in and around My Lai. Upon returning a short while later after refueling, he found that the wounded he saw earlier were now dead.

Thompson’s gunner, Lawrence Colburn, averted his gaze from the gruesome sight.

After bringing the chopper down to a standstill hover, Thompson and his crew came upon a young woman they had previously marked with smoke. As they watched, a U.S. soldier, wearing captain’s bars, “prodded her with his foot, and then killed her.”

What Thompson didn’t know was that by that point, Lt. Calley’s Charlie Company had already slaughtered more than 560 Vietnamese. Most of the victims were women, children, infants, and elderly people. Many of the women had been gang-raped and mutilated. All Thompson knew for sure was that the U.S. troops he saw pursuing civilians had to be stopped.

Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Thompson ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children. Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in.

With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23.

Never forget, comrades: This is how we can choose to be.

#shifthappens

Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism.

15 March, 2015
World News Trust

By Robert Barsocchini

Telesur:

The International Court of Justice (CIJ) ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-based oil company Chevron US $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld.

The money will benefit about 30,000 Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous.

Background from Amazon Watch:

In 1964, Texaco (now Chevron), discovered oil in the remote northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as the Oriente; the East. The indigenous inhabitants of this pristine rainforest, including the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Kichwa and Huaorani tribes, lived traditional lifestyles largely untouched by modern civilization.

They had little idea what to expect or how to prepare when oil workers moved into their backyard and founded the town of Lago Agrio, or “Sour Lake”, named after the town in Texas where oil company Texaco was founded.

In a rainforest area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, Chevron carved out 350 oil wells, and upon leaving the country in 1992, left behind some1,000 open-air, unlined waste pits filled with crude and toxic sludge. Many of these pits leak into the water table or overflow in heavy rains, polluting rivers and streams that tens of thousands of people depend on for drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing. Chevron also dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater called “produced water” – a byproduct of the drilling process – into the rivers of the Oriente. At the height of Texaco’s operations, the company was dumping an estimated 4 million gallons per day, a practice outlawed in major US oil producing states like Louisiana, Texas, and California decades before the company began operations in Ecuador in 1967. By handling its toxic waste in Ecuador in ways that were illegal in its home country, Texaco saved an estimated $3 per barrel of oil produced.

A public health crisis of immense proportions grips the Ecuadorian Amazon, the root cause of which is massive contamination from 40 years of oil operations. Texaco [Chevron] dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater directly into the region’s rivers and streams depended upon for drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing. The contamination of water essential for the daily activities of tens of thousands of people has resulted in an epidemic of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and other ailments.

When Texaco arrived in Ecuador in 1964, the company found a pristine rainforest environment.

This story also has relevance to the US interest in exerting control over Venezuela, which has some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

Glenn Greenwald:

Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized).

A study conducted by the Universities of Portsmouth, Warwick and Essex recently found:

…foreign intervention in a civil war is 100 times more likely when the afflicted country has high oil reserves than if it has none.

…hydrocarbons were a major reason for the [US/UK/FR/CA] military intervention in Libya … and the current US campaign against Isis in northern Iraq.

“Before the Isis forces approached the oil-rich Kurdish north of Iraq, Isis was barely mentioned in the news. But once Isis got near oil fields, the siege of Kobani in Syria became a headline and the US sent drones to strike Isis targets”

The major political science study on the topic, conducted out of Cornell and Northwestern universities,recently found, after studying nearly 2,000 policy issues (essentially any issue one can imagine), that the majority of the US population has statistically zero influence on US policy, while the wealthiest portions of society – ie owners of corporations such as Chevron – essentially dictate policy – a political system called “oligarchy”.

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published researcher and writer who focuses on global force dynamics and also writes professionally for the film industry.

15 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alan Hart

If I had to express my hope in one sentence it would be this. A fourth term as prime minister for Netanyahu would see Israel becoming more and more isolated and could improve the chances of Western governments being moved to use the leverage they have to cause the Zionist (not Jewish) state to end its defiance of international law and denial of the Palestinian claim for justice.

Another way to put it would be to say Netanyahu is a disaster for Zionism so let’s have more of him.

A vision of the disaster Netanyahu’s leadership has been bringing on was put into words by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan when he addressed the anti-Netanyahu “Israel Wants Change” rally in Rabin Square on 7 March. He said:

QUOTE

Israel is surrounded by enemies. Enemies do not scare me; I worry about our leadership. I am afraid of our leadership… Netanyahu is dragging us down to a bi-national state and to the end of the Zionist dream.

UNQUOTE

It would not surprise me if Netanyahu’s unspoken and unspeakable response was something like, “That will not happen because we’ll resort to a final round of ethnic cleansing before it could happen.”

In my imagination Netanyahu shared his thoughts on how to defuse the demographic time-bomb of occupation with a group of deluded, neo-fascist Jewish settlers. One of them said, “Yes, and while we’re completing our ethnic cleansing programme we’ll blow up the Dome of the Rock.” Another said, “And we’ll chop off some Palestinian heads as Lieberman suggested.”

What Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman actually said when as leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party he addressed an election rally in Herzliya on 8 March was the following.

QUOTE

Whoever is with us should give everything as they wish. Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.

UNQUOTE

The question those words provoked in my mind was this.

If Israel continues on its present course will the future see the emergence of a Zionist equivalent of ISIS?

Because a two-state solution in the shape and form the Palestinians could accept has long been dead, killed by Israel’s colonization of the occupied West Bank, an enterprise best described as on-going ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth, a bi-national state is the only hope for a political resolution of the conflict.

The creation of a bi-national state would put under one territorial roof the land of Israel prior to the 1967 war, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In theory and principle a real and true by-national state would be one in which ALL of its citizens enjoyed equal political and all other civil and human rights.

Because the day is approaching when the Arabs of Israel-Palestine will outnumber the Jews, the creation of a bi-national state would therefore lead the de-Zionization of Palestine and, to quote to Meir Dagan again, “the end of the Zionist dream”.

Question: If Netanyahu stays in power, and given that he is not remotely interested in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept whether in two states or one, what are his options for defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation and keeping Zionism alive?

The strategy he has been working on for many months is to have Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah leader in Gaza, replace Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority

In Gaza Dahlan plotted with Israel and its American protector to destroy Hamas. But things didn’t go as planned. Hamas became aware of the Israeli and American backed Dahlan coup in-the-making and launched a pre-emptive strike to drive Fatah’s forces out of the Gaza Strip.

Then, in June 2011, Dahlan was expelled from Fatah because of the widespread belief, given voice by Abbas, that he, Dahlan, was the one who did Mossad’s bidding and administered the polonium that killed Arafat.

Three months later, fearing that Dahlan was plotting against him, Abbas ordered the Palestinian police to raid his home and arrest his private armed guards. (No doubt some of them were Israeli assets).

In the past year or so, in regular contact with one or two of Netanyahu’s most trusted aides, Dahlan has been planning his comeback and is seeking to replace Abbas as president of the PA.

What does Netanyahu think Dahlan could do for Zionism?

My guess is that be believes President Dahlan would be prepared to use force to compel the Palestinians to accept whatever crumbs they were offered from Zionism’s table – a few Bantustans here and there which they could call a state if they wished.

Though such a scenario might play well in Netanyahu’s warped mind, it is totally divorced from reality (par for his course). There is no power on earth or anywhere else that could force the occupied and oppressed Palestinians to surrender to Zionism’s will. Their incredible almost superhuman steadfastness for the past 67 years says so.

It follows that if the elections about to take place give him the opportunity to cobble together a new coalition to enable him to continue in office as prime minister, Netanyahu will have to come up with another way of defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation and the real threat it poses to the existence of the Zionist state.

On the basis of his performance in recent weeks I think it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Netanyahu would begin a fourth term as prime minister by entertaining the hope that the creeping transformation of anti-Israelism into anti-Semitism will gather momentum and cause more and more European Jews to flee to Israel.

In my view that’s most unlikely to happen on the scale that would be necessary to defuse the demographic time-bomb of occupation, and that would leave Zionism with only one option – a final round of ethnic cleansing.

A pretext for it could easily be created by half a dozen Israeli agents dressing up as Palestinian terrorists and killing 30 or 40 or more Jews in what would be a bog standard false flag operation. In response Israel’s military might would be fully mobilized to drive the Palestinians off the occupied West Bank. Those who didn’t flee to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or wherever would be killed. Butchered. And if Lieberman’s wish was granted, some would be beheaded.

Question: If the Zionist Union coalition wins more Knesset seats than Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party (the polls suggest that it will), and IF (it is a big if) its leader Isaac Herzog could then put together a majority that would enable him to replace Netanyahu as prime minister, would that improve the prospects for peace on terms that would provide the Palestinians with an acceptable amount of justice?

Despite the fact that I believe Herzog really meant what he said when he declared that it was “not too late for peace” and that (unlike Netanyahu) he would put real effort into getting a real peace process going, my answer is NO. The truth is that Herzog as prime minister would not be allowed by Israel’s right wing in all of its manifestations to deliver enough in the way of withdrawal from occupation to satisfy the Palestinians’ minimum demands and needs.

So, I say, defeat for Netanyahu and victory for Herzog would result in an injection of false and phoney optimism into the international politics of the conflict. We would have President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and others telling us that a new page had been turned and that the door to peace was now open.

And that would be nonsense.

If there is ever to be a real peace process it has to start with the governments of the major powers, led by the one in Washington DC, putting Israel on notice that if it does not end its defiance of international law and continues its occupation and colonization of the West Bank it will be isolated and sanctioned.

In my view the prospects of governments being prepared to use the leverage they have to try to cause Israel to be serious about peace on the basis of justice for the Palestinians and security for all would be significantly improved if Netanyahu remains in power.

Another way of putting it would be to say that Netanyahu, unbalanced if not clinically mad, is, actually, the best public relations man for the Palestinians and their cause!

The latest and the last of the pre-election polls conducted in Israel indicate that Herzog’s Zionist Union will win four more seats in the Knesset than Netanyahu’s currently ruling Likud party, but… According to The Times of Israel all of Israel’s analysts are of the view that Netanyahu is almost certain to be more successful than Herzog in putting together a new ruling coalition.

Also worth noting is that of the 1230 Israelis polled, 43% said they wanted Netanyahu to remain as prime minster and 35% preferred Herzog.

Because of Israel’s proportional and very bizarre election system – it enables parties with only three or four seats to make or break governments and therefore gives them enormous bargaining power – the haggling to determine who will be Israel’s next prime minister will probably go on for weeks. My guess is that Herzog will be unable to put together a big enough coalition to give him a majority in the Knesset and that Netanyahu will get a fourth term as prime minister.

For the reasons stated above I hope I am right.

Footnote

When I was thinking about the political haggling that will follow Israel’s elections to determine who will be prime minister, I recalled a comment made to me many years ago by a very dear Jewish friend. He said, “If two Jews were stranded on an uninhabited desert island there would three synagogues!”

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

15 March, 2015
Alanhart.net

 

By Eric Zuesse

The issue is whether to supply weapons to Ukraine.

On Friday, March 13th, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced, referring to himself in the third person, that:

“The Head of State has informed that Ukraine had contracts with a series of the EU countries on the supply of armament, inter alia, lethal one. He has reminded that official embargo of the EU on the supply of weapons to Ukraine had been abolished.”

In other words: Some EU nations, and he is keeping secret for now the identity of which ones, have contracted to supply to Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ or ‘ATO,’ weapons to assist Ukraine in its ‘Anti Terrorist Operation.’

Then, on Saturday, March 14th, Russian Television, Russia’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC and America’s PBS, headlined “Poroshenko: 11 EU states struck deal with Ukraine to deliver weapons, including lethal,” and added further details, besides (presumably from Russian-Government intelligence) the specific number (11) of the nations that would be supplying weapons to Ukraine.

There are 28 member-nations in the EU. Apparently, 17 of them do not want to sell weapons to the Ukrainian Government. That’s 17 EU nations which are apparently siding with Russia in opposing the extermination of the residents in the region of the former Ukraine, Donbass, where the residents had voted 90% for the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, whom the Obama Administration overthrew in a violent coup in February 2014 under the cover of the “Maidan” anti-corruption demonstrations.

11 EU nations want to exterminate those residents and are supplying weapons that will assist in the effort. However, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko (who was elected not by all of Ukraine but only by voters outside Donbass and especially in Ukraine’s northwest, but who still claims to represent and to be the legal President of the residents in Donbass, whom he’s bombing) refuses to identify which ones they are.

Thus, a minority of the EU nations are assisting the U.S. to exterminate the residents in Donbass.

Meanwhile, during the past few days, German Economic News has specifically identified the following EU nations that are strongly opposed to this supplying of weapons to Ukraine: Spain, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, France, and Slovakia.

Furthermore, Italy is increasing its cooperation with Russia.

And, early in January, the Czech Republic made clear its separation from the U.S. on this matter.

But that’s only 9 of the 17 EU nations that openly oppose the U.S. Probably most of the remaining 8 are silent on account of their recognition how fateful their actual abandonment of the U.S. could turn out to be, and so they want to leave all options open, for as long as they can — and since they still can.

Moreover, Germany lost 40 billion Euros, over $40 billion, in 2014 because of Obama’s sanctions against Russia, and other EU nations have also been enormously harmed by them. Angela Merkel wants to end sanctions and knows that this cannot happen until the U.S. stops its proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine.

However, the U.S. aristocracy has benefited from these sanctions. For example, U.S. arms manufacturers are booming now, and so are the former U.S. (and still strongly Republican-Party-backing) mercenary firm Blackwater, now called Accademi.

Moreover, on March 11th, German Economic News reported that:

“Ukraine will increase the share of military expenditure in GDP from 1.25 to 5.2 percent and spend $ 3.8 billion, the Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalia Jaresko [who is an American financier whom the Obama regime placed into that Ukrainian-Government post] says. The defense orders were received mostly by US companies like Network Technologies Corporation.
Jaresko announced on Tuesday that Ukraine plans to increase its national defense spending this year to 5.2 percent of GDP. Last year, that proportion was 1.25 percent of GDP. In sum, 2015 is planned to spend a total of 3.8 billion dollars on armaments.”

So: “The Americans have stopped the EU efforts to lift the sanctions against Russia.” This has intensified the split between the U.S. and EU.

However, though European governments are very harmed by what the U.S. Government is doing, some of Europe’s aristocrats are benefiting from it, and they have considerable influence within their own governments.

The politically extremely knowledgeable, superb classical pianist, Valentina Lisitsa, who was born in Kiev but now resides in North Carolina, was interviewed by German Economic News on 19 January 2015; and the following excerpt provides insight on this matter, and also on some of the far-right American political connections:

“German economic news: Who benefits from the war in the Ukraine?

Valentina Lisitsa: People on all levels. For example the arms companies, it will benefit the EU States, which are monopolized by a nontransparent hysteria, pushing to modernize their existing weapons arsenals. But even small government officials in Ukraine earn money; they take kickbacks from Ukrainians who buy their freedom from military service.
There are many mercenaries [the euphemism for them is ‘volunteers’] on both sides, and the private companies that are behind these guys make enormous profits. You have mercenaries from various nations on both sides. But it is interesting to observe that no one is attacking the coal mines and factories of the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov [Ukraine’s richest person] in the Eastern Ukraine. Akhmetov sees with both sides to arrange that he will suffer no economic disadvantage. He supports both sides.

German economic news: A former Commander of the battalion of Azov was appointed the Chief of police of Kiev. How is it possible that a radical rightist receives such an important position?

Valentina Lisitsa: There are two aspects. First of all, the Azov battalion is indeed a radical right-wing organization. In the course of the civil war, Azov members have participated in numerous atrocities. It is not an exaggeration to say that Azov members are as brutal as ISIS members. These are not average Ukrainians. They are indoctrinated and are at the service of the oligarchs.
The second issue is more complicated. In Ukraine, there are the so-called Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) Dnipropetrovsk. This is a private college, emerged from the very many bureaucrats of the Ukrainian State [as it devolved from communism]. However, the facility is known for anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia and right-national ideas. David Duke is a graduate of the MAUP Academy, and did also an apprenticeship there. Duke is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and was an active high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. He is a world-renowned anti-Semite. MAUP also receives donations from Saudi Arabia.
If you consider the second aspect, it may not surprise you that a person such as ex-Azov Commander Vadim Troyan was appointed the Kiev Chief of Police.”

So: Obama chose the nazis to run Ukraine because they’re committed to destroying Russia, and because they’re also amenable to being controlled by the aristocracy. Decent Europeans are appalled, and they’re the majority of Europeans; but because of the extreme media-censorship in the United States, where virtually all ‘news’ media that have a significant-sized audience are owned (or minority-controlled) by members of the American aristocracy, which benefits from weakening Europe and destroying Russia, there are only few Americans who even know about what is happening (except the U.S. propaganda, which demonizes Putin, and which is controlled by the U.S. Government on behalf of America’s aristocrats).

The closer that things get to an irreversible harm to Russia that would spark a nuclear attack against the United States — and possibly also against Europe — the bigger the split within the EU will become, and some nations might also leave NATO and ally directly with Russia, or else go neutral, in order to avoid America’s nazi (i.e., racist-fascist, anti-Russian) leadership. After all: Europe suffered greatly from Hitler’s Nazis. No major nation supports Ukraine’s nazis to the extent that America does.

Would the U.S. then militarily target such a former ally? Might the U.S. attack Italy, for example? Might the U.S. attack France? Might the U.S. attack Germany? If U.S. forces are still in those countries, which will almost certainly be the case, such attacks would be extremely unlikely, and they wouldn’t be nuclear ones. Only Russia would get the nuclear bombs, if and when there will be a WW III. The U.S. and Russia would be destroyed, and everyone else would envy them, for their being already dead.

More and more people in Europe are coming to know how dangerous the United States Government is. In 2013, it was already recognized, even in Europe, as being by far the most dangerous government on the planet — and this was before the coup in Ukraine. (That poll from WIN/Gallup has not been repeated — or at least not publicly — since 2013, and wasn’t much publicized even at the time, because it was sponsored largely by the U.S. Government, which didn’t like the results and didn’t want them to become generally known. For example, the poll, of 65 countries, found that, in Ukraine in 2013, “33 percent of respondents choose the U.S. as the greatest danger, compared to just five percent who picked Russia.” This did not fit the line that the U.S. Government and its aristocrats’ servants in the American ‘press’ indoctrinate into the American people. In other words: right before the coup in Ukraine, far more Ukrainians thought that the U.S. was scary than thought that Russia was. Americans’ views of foreign affairs are almost exactly the opposite of reality. For more about the systematically deceived American public, see this, and this. Every high school student in America should look at those shockingly realistic videos. It might even help to make the U.S. become a democracy again, if a WW III doesn’t destroy everything and thus simply eliminate all progress.)
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

15 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

On this video from Fox ‘News’:

At 3:30, Lou Dobbs asks the Fox Noise military analyst: “What do you expect” in Ukraine?
At 3:35 he answers: “In the Ukraine, the only way that the United States can have any effect in this region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians … killing so many Russians that even Putin’s media can’t hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags.”

Well, anyway, there is a Republican ‘news’ operation: “Start killing Russians.” They hate Russians so much the hate practically bleeds from them, even in public. Democratic Party ‘news’ operatives are so much more subtle about it, such as “A military solution to this problem is not going to be forthcoming.” But they too demonize Russians and portray Putin as the super-demon. They’re just more subtle about their war-mongering and promotion of the international aristocracy, than Republicans are.

What the Fox ‘expert’ was specifically promoting there, to “Kill Russians,” is actually what the regime that Obama imposed upon Ukraine had been installed in order to do. And, so, immediately when they took power in late February of 2014, they demonized ethnic Russians and threatened to kill all Russians. They then intensively bombed the ethnic Russian region of Ukraine, as a starter to get rid of Russians and pro-Russians everywhere.

However, Fox’s ‘expert’ was suggesting to kill Russian troops inside Ukraine, which wouldn’t have been quite as heartless as what the Obama-coup-regime in Ukraine is actually doing (and which Fox and all of U.S. TV ignore): slaughtering the residents in the conflict-zone. The only snafu with that idea of killing Russian troops in the conflict-zone is: they aren’t there. The few Russian soldiers that actually had been in the conflict-zone, briefly, back in August of 2014, soon left and are no longer there. On 29 January 2015, Ukraine’s top general admitted, “No Russian Troops Are Fighting Against Us,” though mercenaries and/or volunteer fighters from many countries (including from the U.S.) were fighting on both sides (America’s were mercenaries, fighting for the Ukrainian Government). So: Fox’s ‘information’ was six months out-of-date, and had been valid only seven months ago, and for less than a month even then. That’s the trash that Fox Noise puts forth, but it’s really not much worse than CNN etc. American national ‘news’ media are virtually all propaganda-media.

The Fox commentator simply cannot fathom that when the Ukrainian Government started bombing the cities and villages in the region of Ukraine that rejected the coup-government — the Donbass region — many of its men took up arms and became unwilling soldiers in order to protect their families, friends, and towns and villages, against the bombers and the other invaders. The Donbass defenders are not Russian soldiers. They’re overwhelmingly the natives there — the ones that are still alive and haven’t fled.

Such commentators as this crude and callous man at Fox have no idea, no concept, how much higher is the motivation to fight when what one is fighting against is invaders, and what one is fighting for is the land on which one has lived one’s whole life and where one’s parents spent their whole lives. Bullies don’t think about things from the victim’s standpoint. And Fox’s commentator viewed things from a bully’s perspective.

Yes, Russia provides military advice and training (to the victims’ side), just as the U.S. provides military advice and training (to the invading side), but is that a crime when Russia does it? It’s a crime when America does it, because America (via its stooge-regime) is the invader, and because Ukraine (by virtue of its proximity to Russia) has at least as much strategic importance to Russia today as Cuba did to the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. What’s the crime here is America’s determination to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, right on Russia’s border — and that’s the reason behind that coup in Ukraine (and the head of Stratfor called it “the most blatant coup in history,” but you didn’t read about that coup in places such as TIME or The New York Times). (Oh, they called it a victory for democracy. That’s like 1984 ‘democracy.’) And Putin should demand that the U.S. get out of Russia’s neighborhood. If Russia surrounded the U.S. with its bases, would we stand for it? Why should they?

Communism is over. The only reason for what Obama is doing in Ukraine is conquest. It’s raw; it is fascist, but in pretty words.

Many of Europe’s leaders don’t have the stomach for that disgusting crime which America’s President and Congress are perpetrating against Russia — first, the coup, and then the genocide against the residents in Donbass. So, there is resistance in the EU (though not in the U.S., which shows how virtually total is the propaganda here — it’s like a dictatorship).

Right now, the man whom Victoria Nuland of Obama’s State Department appointed on 4 February 2014 (18 days before the coup), to lead the post-coup Ukrainian government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is still determined to destroy Russia. But if this fact, alone, isn’t enough to get the decent nations in Europe to abandon the U.S. and even to leave both NATO and the EU and maybe to join with Russia if necessary to do so, then we are all headed for a nuclear war, because the psychopathy reigning at the very top of the U.S. Government is really extreme and has careened out of control. Never before in history has an American President installed an outright nazi government, anywhere.

What’s shown on Fox Noise is merely a more-honest version of that psychopathy, but the psychopathy is just as bad on the more subtle ‘liberal’ side. (And also see this.)

The only thing that can even possibly restrain it now is Europe’s abandonment of it — and of the U.S. And, if that’s simply too much to ask from Europe, then there will be curtains soon for all of planet Earth, because Putin won’t be able to tolerate much longer the American Government’s surrounding Russia with its and NATO’s military bases and missiles.

When Obama took over Ukraine, in February 2014, Putin had to respond, and he did. (Russia is being punished for responding, but the U.S. isn’t being punished for the coup and ethnic cleansing that Russia is only responding to. In international affairs, there is no justice.) But if America doesn’t reverse itself now and just back off, the entire world will suffer enormous consequences. America won’t need to apologize; tyrannical regimes don’t do that. What’s needed instead is for the tyranny to stop, and only Europe and Japan possess the ability to get this country to do that.

The American Presidents from Reagan on, and certainly after Reagan, have consistently followed this plan of encircling and choking-off Russia, and have by their actions defined America throughout this time as the supreme rogue nation, and its ‘news’ media are all just part of that propaganda-operation, for lying this nation into so many invasions, which destroy so many nations. Either the super-rogue will stop, or the world will stop.

Because things have gotten to such a point that either America will be stopped peacefully by its allies abandoning it, or else America will be stopped violently by Russia preemptively nuclear-attacking it, which will destroy the whole world.

The fate of the world is in the hands of America’s allies, who must quickly become former allies.

The world’s big bully on the block needs to become isolated; he needs to lose his gang. That’s what needs to happen, now.

In Gallup’s only international poll on the subject (in 2014), which surveyed 66,000 people in 65 nations, the U.S. was overwhelmingly the most frequently cited nation as being “the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” And that was before the coup, and before the ethnic cleansing, which have placed the world clearly on the path to nuclear annihilation. Russia wasn’t even among the top seven nations that were mentioned in that poll. But now the big bully on the block is going after him. Will the bully’s friends join in? Let’s hope not. Let’s hope they’ll abandon him — and quickly.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

14 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Robert Barsocchini

Military Aid Harming Ukraine Peace Process

Having reached a tenuous peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia (without the US), Germany is realizing and announcing that, indeed, the US does not seem intent on peace.

McClatchy reports that German government officials have “recently referred to U.S. statements of Russian involvement in the Ukraine fighting as ‘dangerous propaganda’”. In light of US propaganda and military support for Kiev, Germany even asked outright whether “the Americans want to sabotage the European mediation attempts in Ukraine led by Chancellor Merkel?”

While there is agreement in the West that Russia does support the Ukrainian democrats whose elected leader was violently overthrown with US and European support (the US supports numerous groups,including anti-Semitic neo-Nazis and Islamic extremists, around the world, in addition to illegal US invasions), Germany and other European governments say US officials such as US Gen. Breedlove and Obama’s asst. sec. state for Europe, the notorious Victoria Nuland, “have been exaggerating the extent of Russian involvement in the conflict.”

Breedlove, for instance, is issuing untrue statements – lies – for the purpose of “playing to” – propagandizing – “an American audience”, which European officials say “doesn’t advance peace efforts”, another polite way of saying it conspicuously impedes them.

Since being caught red-handed and forced to address the issue of their “exaggerated claims” about Russia’s involvement in doing something the US does continually, a US official responded anonymously and changed the US tune, trying now to shift focus away from the exact numbers, about which the US was previously so adamant.

Ukrainian officials have made similar claims, on scores of occasions announcing an all out Russian military “invasion” of Ukraine.

The exposures by the German government of US [and thereby Kiev’s] lies, notes Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz, “may finally be the explanation … for how US[/Kiev] claims of huge Russian military presences never come with any pictures…” except ones that have been plastered on the front of the New York Times and then debunked as fraudulent and later retracted, deep inside the paper – see Robert Parry‘s “NYT Retracts Russian Photo Scoop”.

As part of what European officials say is sabotaging the peace process, the US is now providing another $75 million worth of aid to Kiev, including 230 Humvees. This is in addition to the $120 million already given to Kiev’s forces by the US.

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published researcher and writer who focuses on global force dynamics and also writes professionally for the film industry.
14 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Robert Parry

Almost eight months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine – creating a flashpoint in the standoff between nuclear-armed Russia and America – the U.S. intelligence community claims it has not updated its assessment since five days after the crash, reports Robert Parry.

espite the high stakes involved in the confrontation between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States over Ukraine, the U.S. intelligence community has not updated its assessment on a critical turning point of the crisis – the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 – since five days after the crash last July 17, according to the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On Thursday, when I inquired about arranging a possible briefing on where that U.S. intelligence assessment stands, DNI spokesperson Kathleen Butler sent me the same report that was distributed by the DNI on July 22, 2014, which relied heavily on claims being made about the incident on social media.

So, I sent a follow-up e-mail to Butler saying: “are you telling me that U.S. intelligence has not refined its assessment of what happened to MH-17 since July 22, 2014?”

Her response: “Yes. The assessment is the same.”

I then wrote back: “I don’t mean to be difficult but that’s just not credible. U.S. intelligence has surely refined its assessment of this important event since July 22.”

When she didn’t respond, I sent her some more detailed questions describing leaks that I had received about what some U.S. intelligence analysts have since concluded, as well as what the German intelligence agency, the BND, reported to a parliamentary committee last October, according to Der Spiegel.

While there are differences in those analyses about who fired the missile, there appears to be agreement that the Russian government did not supply the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine with a sophisticated Buk anti-aircraft missile system that the original DNI report identified as the likely weapon used to destroy the commercial airliner killing all 298 people onboard.

Butler replied to my last e-mail late Friday, saying “As you can imagine, I can’t get into details, but can share that the assessment has IC [Intelligence Community] consensus” – apparently still referring to the July 22 report.

A Lightning Rod

Last July, the MH-17 tragedy quickly became a lightning rod in a storm of anti-Russian propaganda, blaming the deaths personally on Russian President Vladimir Putin and resulting in European and American sanctions against Russia which pushed the crisis in Ukraine to a dangerous new level.

Yet, after getting propaganda mileage out of the tragedy – and after I reported on the growing doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about whether the Russians and the rebels were indeed responsible – the Obama administration went silent.

In other words, after U.S. intelligence analysts had time to review the data from spy satellites and various electronic surveillance, including phone intercepts, the Obama administration didn’t retract its initial rush to judgment – tossing blame on Russia and the rebels – but provided no further elaboration either.

This strange behavior reinforces the suspicion that the U.S. government possesses information that contradicts its initial rush to judgment, but senior officials don’t want to correct the record because to do so would embarrass them and weaken the value of the tragedy as a propaganda club to pound the Russians.

If the later evidence did bolster the Russia-did-it scenario, it’s hard to imagine why the proof would stay secret – especially since U.S. officials have continued to insinuate that the Russians are guilty. For instance, on March 4, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland fired a new broadside against Russia when she appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In her prepared testimony, Nuland slipped in an accusation blaming Russia for the MH-17 disaster, saying: “In eastern Ukraine, Russia and its separatist puppets unleashed unspeakable violence and pillage; MH-17 was shot down.”

It’s true that if one parses Nuland’s testimony, she’s not exactly saying the Russians or the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine shot down the plane. There is a semi-colon between the “unspeakable violence and pillage” and the passive verb structure “MH-17 was shot down.” But she clearly meant to implicate the Russians and the rebels.

Nuland’s testimony prompted me to submit a query to the State Department asking if she meant to imply that the U.S. government had developed more definitive evidence that the ethnic Russian rebels shot down the plane and that the Russians shared complicity. I received no answer.

I sent a similar request to the CIA and was referred to the DNI, where spokesperson Butler insisted that there had been no refinement in the U.S. intelligence assessment since last July 22.

But that’s just impossible to believe. Indeed, I’ve been told by a source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts that a great deal of new information has been examined since the days immediately after the crash, but that the problem for U.S. policymakers is that the data led at least some analysts to conclude that the plane was shot down by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military, not by the rebels.

Yet, what has remained unclear to me is whether those analysts were part of a consensus or were dissenters within the U.S. intelligence community. But even if there was just dissent over the conclusions, that might explain why the DNI has not updated the initial sketchy report of July 22.

It is protocol within the intelligence community that when an assessment is released, it should include footnotes indicating areas of dissent. But to do that could undermine the initial certitude that Secretary of State John Kerry displayed on Sunday talks shows just days after the crash.

Pointing Fingers

Though the DNI’s July 22 report, which followed Kerry’s performance, joined him in pointing the blame at the Russians and the ethnic Russian rebels, the report did not claim that the Russians gave the rebels the sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down the plane.

The report cited “an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; it claimed that Russia “continues to provide training – including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia”; and its noted the rebels “have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”

But what the public report didn’t say – which is often more significant than what is said in these white papers – was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.

The assessment also didn’t say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia, despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or other large vehicles.

I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S. analysts who also couldn’t say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.

The Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of a Ukrainian ‘Defector.’”]

The Russian Case

The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored – or ridiculed – their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a Ukrainian jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.

Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.

The Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had “evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,” according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.

Lysenko added: “To disown this tragedy, [Russian officials] are drawing a lot of pictures and maps. We will explore any photos and other plans produced by the Russian side.” But Ukrainian authorities have failed to address the Russian evidence except through broad denials.

On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.

“As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information,” the group wrote. “As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence.”

But the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.

Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-Russian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]

German Claims

In October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.

And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BND’s briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8. But none of the BND’s evidence was made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]

When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by “high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the “dog-not-barking” issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.

In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing on MH-17.

Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).

But what is perhaps most shocking of all is that – on an issue as potentially dangerous as the current proxy war between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States, a conflict on Russia’s border that has sparked fiery rhetoric on both sides – the office of the DNI, which oversees the most expensive and sophisticated intelligence system in the world, says nothing has been done to refine the U.S. assessment of the MH-17 shoot-down since five days after the tragedy.

Consortium News
15 March 2015

 

By Dick Platkin and Jeff Warner

“Our alliance with America is transitory.”
Israeli writer Amos Oz in the March 8, 2015, Los Angeles Times

For those who carefully follow the relationship between the governments of the United States and Israel, the dust-up over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015,anti-Iran speech to a joint session of Congress comes as no surprise. In fact, we think the handwriting has been on the wall since last year, and it was predicted by Jeffrey Goldberg in his October 2014 article in The Atlantic. Despite the content of Netanyahu speech,according to Ha’Aretz the underlying issues have much more to do with the construction of an apartheid Greater Israel than with Iran’s nuclear program.
In an attempt to put Netanyahu’s Congressional speech about Iran into a historical and political context, we describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We also analyze several scenariosin which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when, not if, the US government is no longer willing or able to support Israel’s long-term settlement program in the occupied territories. In essence, we try to explain how the decline of US dominance in the Middle East, including reengagement with Iran, means that Israel’s occupation is not sustainable. Our analysisalso offers many new political opportunities to anti-occupation activists in the wake of U.S. decline.

Greater Israel on the Road to Apartheid: Israel today, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is effectively a single state, referred to as Greater Israel by its architects and supporters. Many analysts, such as Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD),have pointed out that this de facto single state is quickly developing a system of apartheid in the territories Israel captured in 1967 during the Six Day War. In contrast, the areas within Israel’s 1948-1967 Green Line boundaries have legal and quasi-legal segregation, but not yet full-blown apartheid. Furthermore, the legal structure of this emerging apartheid state differs between those areas annexed by Israel after the Six Day War (East Jerusalem andGolan Heights) and the territories remaining under direct and indirect military control (West Bank and Gaza Strip). Israeli civil authorities govern all those living in the former, while Palestinians living in the occupied areas are controlled by the Israeli military, unlike adjacent Israeli settlers, who are governed by the same civil authorities running the Israeli state within the Green Line.

To date over 500,000 Israeli Jews have been moved into the neighborhoods of annexed East Jerusalem and into the occupied West Bank. In most cases they are protected by the Israeli military in heavily fortified towns and cities, euphemistically called “settlements” by the press and even most opponents, although more critics are now referring to them as colonial outposts.

An obvious consequence of the rapid construction of Greater Israel is the deliberate geographical and political demise of a viable two state solution, an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. This is because a sovereign Palestinian state is incompatible with an Israeli stateoccupying the same territory and maintaining an authoritarian military regime that implants and protects hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish settlers.

There are also parallel political factors that block the emergence of a Palestinian state, as defined by the Oslo Accords, most importantly the recent frankness of Israeli officialswho openly oppose a two state solution, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu during those rare moments when he is not deflecting attention away from settlements and toward Iran. On July 11, 2014, he declared, “There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we [Israel] relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan [meaning the West Bank].”

Other political factors include the rapid growth of extremely right-wing and often religious Israeli political parties and factions, such as the Price Tag group, which engages in systematic violence against Christian and Palestinian property. These movements have not only infiltrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)but also violently intimidatedIsraeli moderates still committed to a two-state solution. The most important political factor is, however, the U.S. government’s carte blanche, bi-partisanmaterial and political support for Greater Israel, especially lethal Israeli military attacks designed to weaken Palestinian national aspirations, in particular Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014).

Despite occasional press statements from the White House and State Department critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu and expanded Israeli civilian outposts and towns in the areas intended for the Palestinian state (by numerous UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords) are unhelpful, the day-to-day construction of Greater Israel’s “facts on the ground” has the full backing of the United States government, including both Republican and Democratic administrations. Israel’s reliance on a great power is not a new phenomenon, as Prof. Avi Shlaim pointed out in his 2001 book The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, ”This has always been Israel’s modus operandi, as it was for the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.”

In the late 1890s Theodor Herzl focused on building a Jewish state under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire. The first major step towards a Jewish state, however, came in 1917 when Chaim Weizmann successfully obtained the Balfour Declaration from the British government in the midst of World War I, prior to the British victory over the Ottoman Empire. The USSR and its client Czechoslovakia later provided life-saving military support to Israel during the 1948 war. The French subsequently armed Israel for the 1967 war, and the United States has been Israel’s primarybenefactor ever since.

Jeff Halper made a similar point in his 2005 essay entitled “Israel as Extension of American Empire.” He wrote, “Israel’s leading position in this [U.S.] military alliance, has global implications, but is also gives Israel the military strength and political umbrella needed to transform its Occupation into annexation while advancing the Pax Americana over the Middle East.”

In the past 48 yearsthe U.S. government backing for Greater Israel has included extensivefinancial support, grants and transfers of military hardware and technology, intelligence sharing, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, tax-exempt status for private donations to settler organizations, permission for U.S. citizens to join the Israeli military, and mind-numbing repetition of Israeli government talking points. This support is essential for Israel to maintain its post-1967 annexations and occupations, which, cumulatively results in the de facto construction of an apartheid state.

U.S. Decline in the Middle East: There is afly in this ointment, however,and it is the slow and uneven decline of the United State in the Middle East, as expressed by its growing inability to influence events and successfully project power throughout the region. True, the United States has been the dominant power in the Middle East since it supplanted the British, beginning in the1950s. Throughout this entire period the U.S. has built an enormous network of military bases, directly and indirectly waged many wars, and supporteda host of oppressive regimes, includingIsrael, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, mostly characterized by neoliberal economic policies that favor a small elite at the expense of the general public.

Many people believe this Pax Americana is permanent because the U.S.can still unleash massive death and destruction, mostly from the air. But, despite this enormous firepower, the United States has been totally unable to transform Middle East blood baths into political victories, whether through its own wars in Iraq and Libya, or through its historic proxies, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

American decline is evidenced by manymilitary and political failures in this region and elsewhere:

· Its bloated military has not been able to decisively win any war since WW-II, most recently its failed invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush and Obama administrations, and its faltering fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, and possibly Libya.

· Its former regional hegemon for the Persian Gulf, Iran, successfully bolted from US domination in 1979 and has been at odds with the United States ever since. Furthermore, the present nuclear negotiations between the U.S and Iran indicate that some foreign policy realists are finally coming to terms with the U.S. government’s declining political influence in the Middle East. In fact, it is this fledgling realignment of U.S. policy in the region, not Iran’s nuclear programs, that so alarms Israeli rightists, such as Netanyahu. They know that Greater Israel demands unwavering support from the U.S. government.

· Its foremost regional ally in the Middle East, Israel, has not unwilling to use its vast arsenal of American military hardware to assist the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, or areas of Sunni Jihadist activity, most notably the Islamic State in Syria. For that matter, Israel has not even succeeded in defeating two small Islamic forces in adjacent areas, Hezbollah and Hamas, despite inflicting enormous death and destruction on Lebanon and Gaza. As “gratitude” for continued U.S supportof these assaults, the Israeli government has openly disparaged the U.S.President, Vice President, and Secretary of State. It even attempted to interfere in American elections, supporting Republican Mitt Romney for President in the 2012. And, most recently Israel bypassed traditionaldiplomatic protocol by wangling an invitation for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak directly to Congress, without first contacting the White House.

· The United States has employed hundreds of drone attacks against perceived threats in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far, this high tech version of Whack-a-Mole has not made the slightest difference in these countries, other than assisting the recruiting drives of Jihadist groups, especially the Islamic State.

· The United States has had few successes in influencing events in the Arab Spring, such as keeping its loyal satrap, Hosni Mubarak, in power in Egypt. Meanwhile, its one direct military intervention related to the Arab Spring, Libya, is an unmitigated disaster, including the murder of the US Ambassador by one of the country’s many warring Islamic militias, which now includes the Islamic State.

· Finally, in Syria, the uprising against the Assad regime is totally beyond the reach of the United States or its regional allies, Israel, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. Instead, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Monarchies have supported the Sunni Jihadist opposition to Assad, a tactic that has directly led to the explosive growth and military successes of the Islamic State against the US client state of Iraq.

· In desperate efforts to maintain the government the U.S. installed in Iraq, the “coalition” attacks on the Islamic State in Syria have made the U.S. an ally of Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, while it now totally at odds with its former ally Turkey, which favor the Sunni opposition to Assad. Meanwhile Israel periodically attacks Hezbollah, a military ally of Assad and Iran.

· Finally, as the US coalition against the Islamic State unravels, President Obama is asking Congress to authorize direct U.S. military intervention.

 

The Trajectory of Decline: Like the French and British empires that preceded it in the Middle East, U.S.imperial declinedoes not have a smooth trajectory, butit will profoundly impact countries and non-state actors across the entire region, from Morocco to Pakistan. When the “American Century” finally draws to a close, the unraveling of the existing order will accelerate, and there will be dramatic repercussions in many areas, including Israel-Palestine. The waning of U.S. power means that at some point the U.S. government will either be technically unable or politically unwilling to sustain Greater Israel. Israel’s eventual loss of support from the region’s currenthegemonic power – presaged by the pushback against Netanyahu’s speech to Congress — will become a critical barrier to itslong-term consolidationof an apartheid state.

At present the U.S. government’s backing for the construction of Greater Israel is maintained by the power of the Israel lobby. But, according to Peter Beinert, the lobby’s power is declining as the older leaders of the Jewish component of the Israel Lobby are replaced by younger Jewish-Americans with more liberal, egalitarian, secular, and humanistic political values. This insight was recently repeated by Ha’Aretz columnist Ari Shavit, who wrote:

However, our common values don’t accord with the removal of Arabs from buses in Judea and Samaria, with the undermining and neutralization of the (Israeli) Supreme Court, or with the constant and perplexing settlement drive. An Israel that occupies, settles and discriminates is not an Israel that the United States can continue to back indefinitely.An Israel that insists on behaving like a bull in a china shop will sooner or later lose the support of America’s younger generation. This won’t happen next week or next month, not even next year. But it will happen. If the head-trippers in Israel continue on their path, the collapse will inevitably come.

The coming generation of Jewish American leaderswill not blindly accept Israel’s continued dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, especially as cracks in the U.S. foreign policy establishment regarding Israel and Palestine, including the Israel Lobby itself, become more public, as evidenced by their response to Netanyahu’s scheduled address to Congress. Furthermore, younger Jewish leaders will become increasingly uncomfortable with the rise of Israel’s religious-tinged, xenophobic nationalism, including the harassment of governmental critics, because it reminds them of the racism and political repression they associate with fascism. In their case, pointing a finger at Iran will not succeed in counteracting their distress with Israel.

As the influence of the Israel lobby ebbs,including from Christian Zionists, it will be less able to convince the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon to maintain their unconditional, bi-partisan political, military, intelligence, and financial support for Greater Israel.

In addition to the decline of the Israel Lobby, there are several other factors slowly undermining the U.S. government’s support for Israeli apartheid. Within the foreign policy establishment there is a clear consensus to repair relations with Iran and shift US military forces from the Middle East to China, often called “The Pivot to Asia.” Other secondary factors include growing Palestinian opposition to Greater Israel, as evidenced by the IDF’s inability to defeat Hamas, even with full US support, as well as broad international Palestinian solidaritygroupsundertaking economic and cultural boycotts of Israel. In addition, the divestment movement is finally gaining traction, as indicated by the Presbyterian Church’s recent divestment decision. So far there have been no U.S. Government sanctions against Israel, but the calls for such sanctions can now be heard, such as in Chris Hedge’s column at Truthdig.com at the beginning of Decisive Edge. Later Noam Chomsky made a similar call when he recently spoke at the United Nations.

Without the US government’s full support, it is extremely unlikely that a politically isolated Israel could sustain an increasingly repressive apartheid regime by itself. Israeli apartheid, even more thanits current annexations and occupation, depends on major military, financial, diplomatic, and media support from an outside power. For the foreseeable future Israeli prosperity and technology is simply not powerful enough to fill the void, especially because the country has so much internal economic inequality and political discontent to overcome.

Furthermore, once the role of the United States weakens, there is no other global power on the horizon — not the EU, China, or Russia — that would readily replace theU.S. lifeline to an apartheid Israeli state. While these forces would quickly fill voids throughout the Middle East created by the demise of the United States, their priority would be securing petroleum reserves and shipping routes, not propping up a politically isolated Israeli pariah state.

The Collapse of Greater Israel – Some Scenarios: Long before U.S. government support for Greater Israel withers away, Palestinian resistance will likely shift from demands for a sovereign Palestinian mini-state to campaigns for civil, economic, and political rights within Greater Israel. As the Palestinian struggle for equal rights garners support from progressive Israelis sharing a common egalitarian political and economic agenda, and as well as international support, the stage will be set for the rapid and turbulent unraveling of Greater Israel. If we also factor in the long and cyclical history of anti-racist and anti-war movements in the United States, domestic opposition to the US government’s support for Greater Israel could also become a significant factor accelerating the country’s retreat from the Middle East, including the likelihood of a U.S. military conflict with Iran.

When this day of reckoning finally comes, several scenarios are likely. The rights-based Palestinian struggle, combined with the loss of U.S. government support, points to a bumpy transition to several alternative one-state formulas: a single, non-ethnocratic democratic state (like South Africa) or a bi-national state. Ian Lustick explored these one state options in the New York Times, as did John Mearsheimer in his 2012 lecture at the Palestine Center.

The reaction to these one-state proposals and campaigns — mostly Palestinian, but also from alternative Israeli voices– for a liberal unitary state, could unleash several wildly different responses among Israelis. Liberal Zionists like Amos Oz, Peter Beinart, Ari Shavit, and Uri Avnery, hope that once Jewish Israelis fully understand that a single democratic state — regardless of the exact model — would have a non-Jewish majority, they will realize that – like South Africa — this is the moment for serious compromise. Given their determination to maintain a Jewish majority state to protect them from their fears of a future Holocaust — as emphasized by Avi Shavit in his 2013 book My Promised Land, The Triumph and tragedy of Israel — the Israeli government would reluctantly abandon Greater Israel. It would then be forced to finally accept a sovereign Palestinian state alongside an Israeli Jewish state within its 1967 boundaries. If this scenario prevailed, the Israeli government would have finally complied with the Oslo Accords, the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, renewed in 2007 and 2013.

Furthermore, the two-state solution would be more robust if it emerged as part of a Palestine-Israel economic confederation, as described by Jeff Halper in 2007. If this confederation provided for the free exchange of labor and capital, as the European Union does, citizens of both the Jewish and the Palestinian states would be able to live and work anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean coast. This would, in theory, allow Jews to live in the Biblically significant West Bank, and Palestinians to return to the remnants of their ancestral villages within Israel’s abandoned Green Line.Josef Avesar describes a different confederation model, based on legal factors, in his 2011 book, “Peace, A Case for an Israeli Palestinian Confederation.”

Besides these peaceful outcomes emerging from the collapse of apartheid Greater Israel, there are also grim, violent scenarios.

The downside of Israel finally implementing a two-state solution is that it would mean the forced transfer of about 150,000 to 500,000 settlers into Israel proper, or leaving them in place to become Palestinian citizens. Either option could spark a Jewish civil war, accompanied by many attacks onIsraeli soldiers and atrocities against Palestinians that are certain to trigger equally violent reactions. This scenario is extremely foreboding, and it cannot be dismissed considering the amounts of settler violence against both Palestinians and Israel soldiers in recent years, already carefully documented by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization.

A pariah Israel state may also indulge in a devastating last stand that would lead to wide-scale destruction of everything and everyone within its boundaries. This might be a modern version of the Samson story in which he brought destruction to the Philistines through his own suicide. If Greater Israel’s last stand combined with a regional war in which the United States and its other Middle East proxies, such as Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia joined forces, perhaps against Iran, WW III scenarios must be considered a possible outcome.

Another destructive possibility is the collapse of the Israel state and Palestinian communities through a massive out-migration of modern, secular Israelis and Palestinians. This could produce two failed states: on one side a Jewish population of zealous nationalists and ultra-orthodox Jews, and on the other side extremist Islamic Palestinians.

In order to assure that a non-destructive outcome emerges, it is essential that we fully analyze the peaceful rather than apocalyptic outcomes. While we still can, we need to spell-out these peaceful options in detail, and pursue practical ways to promote them in both the US and in Israel-Palestine.

In fact, in a recent article Noam Chomsky came to these same conclusions and argued that the primary political focus of Americans concerned about Israel and Palestine must be the US government. In his words, “There is every reason to expect it [Greater Israel] to persist as long the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can no higher priority than working to change US policies.”

Historian Chalmers Johnson addressed the American side of the declining American empire and how anti-war activists can effectively oppose the descent of a globally declining US empire into horrific military spasms. He wrote, “The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of its missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner, rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overreach, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.” Johnson then went on to outline a 10 step political program, including many grass roots initiatives, to finally tame U.S. militarism, including support for proxies, such as Israel.

Next Steps: Civic efforts, as described by Chalmers Johnson, can affect how the United States government reacts to its decline in the Middle East, and how that decline affects Israel-Palestine. His goal is to assure that the United States will retreat in an orderly way, modeled after the decline of the Soviet Union in 1999, and not resort to a violent last gasps of desperate military adventures to maintain its failing hegemony. These efforts, as outlined below, should also work to assure that Israel-Palestine transforms into an egalitarian one-state or two-state solution, avoiding mayhem in the process.

· Emphasize BDS sanctions by calling for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the entire region, including Israel, but also countries like Saudi Arabia.

· Follow the lead of Josh Ruebner (national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation),as well as the October 2012 Christian Clergy letter to lobby Congress, tocall for the United States to enforce the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.

· Fuse Israel-Palestine rallies, marches, and vigils with general anti-war and anti-police violence actions, such as Muslim and Black Lives Matter. These issues should be treated in a unified, not isolated manner.

· Clarify that sensible U.S. policies toward Israel-Palestine are just one element of sensible policies toward the entire Middle East, such as sanctions on shipments of U.S. military hardware to states that violate United Nations resolutions or use the equipment againsttheir civilian populations

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Los Angeles-based Levantine Cultural Center and the nationalconference of the U.S Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation in San Diego.Please send any comments and questions to info@lajewsforpeace.org.

Richard (Dick) Platkin is a founding member of LA Jews for Peace and also serves on the U.S. board of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD-USA). His writing on Middle East topics includes a critical review of Jeremy Ben Ami’s A New Voice for Israel for the Levantine Review. Platkin is also a city planner and sociologist, with three decades of professional experience in urban planning, applied social research, and college teaching.

Jeff Warner, Ph.D., is a Jewish peace activist in Los Angeles, active in the Cousin Club of Orange Country and LA Jews for Peace, where many of his articles are posted.
13 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

Washington has begun delivering military hardware to Ukraine as part of NATO’s ongoing anti-Russian military build-up in eastern Europe, escalating the risk of all-out war between the NATO alliance and Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it would transfer 30 armored Humvees and 200 unarmored Humvees, as well as $75 million in equipment, including reconnaissance drones, radios and military ambulances. The US Congress has also prepared legislation to arm the Kiev regime with $3 billion in lethal weaponry.

Washington is at the same time deploying 3,000 heavily armed troops to the Baltic republics, near the Russian metropolis of St. Petersburg. Their 750 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles are slated to remain behind after the US troops leave. This handover is aimed at “showing our determination to stand together” against Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Major General John O’Connor said in the Latvian capital, Riga.

Washington is pressing ahead despite stark warnings from Moscow that it views massive weapons deliveries by NATO to hostile states on its borders as an intolerable threat to Russian national security.

“Without a doubt, if such a decision is reached, it will cause colossal damage to US-Russian relations, especially if residents of the Donbass [east Ukraine] start to be killed by American weapons,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said last month. He called NATO’s plans “very worrying,” adding: “This is about creating additional operational capabilities that would allow the alliance to react near Russia’s borders… Such decisions will naturally be taken into account in our military planning.”

The decision is also sharpening tensions between Washington and Berlin, which backs the current policy of sanctions and financial strangulation of Russia, but opposes moves that threaten all-out war with Russia.

Visiting Washington yesterday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged a continuation of the strategy of “economic and political pressure” on Russia. Arming Ukraine, could “catapult (the conflict) into a new phase,” he warned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.

The mood in broad sections of the American ruling elite has turned increasingly hysterical, however, after the Kiev regime’s defeat prior to last month’s ceasefire in Ukraine negotiated by German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian officials in Minsk.

In a comment denounced by the Russian Foreign Ministry, retired Major General and TV pundit Robert Scales declared, “It’s game, set, and match in Ukraine. The only way the United States can have any effect in the region and turn the tide is to start killing Russians.”

This week, Pentagon and Congressional officials called for Washington to arm Kiev, pressing for faster action from the White House. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey are pressing for large-scale weapons deliveries to Kiev, as are leading members of Congress from both big-business parties.

“I applaud President Obama for sending a strong signal both to the people of Ukraine as well as to the Kremlin,” said Democratic Senator Dick Durbin. “But more can and must be done for Ukraine, including defensive weapons as soon as possible.”

“The fact that it appears that the president may have made a commitment to [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel while she was here, or the German ambassador, not to do that certainly has created a lot of concern on both sides of the aisle,” said Republican Senator Bob Corker.

“I don’t buy this argument that, you know, us supplying the Ukrainian army with defensive weapons is going to provoke Putin,” said Democratic Senator Chris Murphy.

With a toxic combination of maniacal aggression and thoughtlessness, the NATO alliance is lurching towards a war with Russia that could destroy the entire planet. Warnings about US policy from Berlin, which itself has led the European imperialist powers in supporting the February 2014 putsch in Kiev and backing the Kiev regime’s bloody war in east Ukraine, have at most a tactical character. The only force that opposes war is the working class, in America and Europe and internationally.

Despite Berlin’s misgivings as to US policy, the NATO alliance is pursuing its escalation against Russia. At a press conference Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and NATO Supreme Commander of European forces General Philip Breedlove laid out the ongoing military build-up across eastern Europe. They spoke at the Supreme command Headquarters of Allied Personnel in Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, which oversees NATO operations in Europe.

Stoltenberg declared that due to the Ukraine crisis, NATO has to “expand its collective defense, as it has never done since the end of the Cold War… We will double the rapid response force from 13,000 soldiers to 30,000. We will equip the rapid response force with a spearhead of 5,000 men, which will be ready to deploy within 48 hours. And we will establish six command centers in the Baltic states and three other eastern European countries.”

Referring to NATO member states’ pledge to massively increase defense spending at the recent Wales summit, Stoltenberg pledged to “keep up the momentum.” Besides the escalation in the Baltics, naval exercises are taking place in the Black Sea, and NATO is preparing for the largest exercises for many years, with 25,000 men, in southeastern Europe.

Breedlove said he had never seen greater “unity, readiness and determination within NATO to tackle the challenges of the future together.” He was sure that this would continue.

In reality, tensions between Washington and its European allies, above all Germany, have increased in recent weeks. In its latest edition, Der Spiegel reports that Berlin is angry that “Washington’s hardliners are inciting the conflict with Moscow, first and foremost the supreme commander of NATO in Europe.”

The German Chancellor’s office criticized Breedlove for “dangerous propaganda” and making “imprecise, contradictory and even untruthful” statements.

“I wish that in political matters, Breedlove would express himself more cleverly and reluctantly,” commented a foreign-policy specialist of the Social-Democratic Party, Niels Annen. Instead, NATO has “repeatedly spoken out against a Russian offensive in the Ukraine conflict precisely at the point when in our view, the time was right for careful optimism.”

According to Der Spiegel, the US-German dispute is “fundamentally because the transatlantic partners [have] different objectives… While the German-French initiative [a reference to the Minsk peace agreement] aimed to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, for the hawks in the American administration it is about Russia. They want to push back Russia’s influence in the region and destabilize Putin’s rule. Their dream goal is regime change in Russia.”

German imperialism backed the coup in Ukraine, using the crisis to create political conditions for it to rearm within the framework of NATO and pursue its economic and geostrategic interests in eastern Europe militarily. It fears an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, however, as it could expand into all-out war between NATO and Russia, for which the German army is not yet ready.

13 March, 2015
WSWS.org