John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MIKE SHEDLOCK IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Orders at Boeing Drop to a 16-Year Low, Making a Trump War on Airbus That Much More Likely

“Another excuse for Trump to expand economic conflict onto Euro-poodle ‘allies’”

 

How to run a once-great company into the ground.

Cutting corners and lying…and ending with causing many deaths.

You might say that’s the story for the entire United States in its activities abroad.

Cutting corners and lying…and ending with causing many deaths.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALAN MACLEOD IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Government, in Their Own Words”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/20/how-journalists-demonize-venezuelas-government-in-their-own-words/

 

A very interesting piece.

And anyone expects truth in anything from America?

Inside and outside the country, Americans walk through a dense haze of lies.

It resembles a science-fiction tale, but it is real.

It’s what happens when you have an empire instead of a country.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CAITLIN JOHNSTONE IN SOUTH FRONT

 

“US NEEDS TO OCCUPY SYRIA BECAUSE OF KURDS OR IRAN OR CHEMICAL WEAPONS OR OIL OR WHATEVER”

 

The author does miss the point.

The Syrian War has always been about toppling or at least dividing Syria.

And that is an objective which has been strongly advocated and materially supported by Israel for years.

Well, the long and costly proxy war in Syria is mainly over, and it was lost by Israel’s side.

Israel has pressed Trump to keep at least something which hurts Syria’s interests.

And facing re-election and in need of lots of funds from lobby interests, Trump is glad to accommodate.

The occupation of Syrian oil fields is his response.

The huge job of reconstruction is ahead, and Syria is to be deprived on its own territory of a valuable resource.

Trump has always acted unhelpfully on all matters related to Syrian reconstruction.

He is, without question, the most faithful American president to Israel’s narrow interests since Lyndon Johnson.

After all, he gave away what was not his to give, Jerusalem and the Golan, he arbitrarily tore up a working treaty with Iran and started immense hostilities against its 80 million people, and he appointed dangerous fanatics like Bolton and Pompeo to high office.

While a weak article on the whole, the following little crescendo of American excuses for being in Syria is very effective:

“We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because the Syrian government was massacring its people. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria in order to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because Assad used chemical weapons. We were told that the US must occupy Syria to fight ISIS. We were told that the US must continue to occupy Syria to counter Iranian influence. We were told the US must continue to occupy Syria to protect the Kurds. Now the US must continue to occupy Syria because of oil.”

Over time, though, I think the American hold on the oil fields is not sustainable.

It even works against American interests in the Middle East with the appearance of open piracy by America’s military in a region extremely sensitive about the ownership of natural resources, given a not-so-distant history of European colonialism.

With Russian influence rising and American influence waning in the region, it would be pretty foolish over any extended period to hang on to this booty.

But the superficial explanation for occupying the oil fields gave Trump something to crow about – and being a crude man, crowing and bellowing about nasty things are activities he actually enjoys – instead of telling the simple truth about Israel’s influence and interests.

No heavy-duty American supporter of Israel’s interests admits in public to such things because the cumulative effect over time of a great many such admissions would be to cast Israel in a very poor light.

During all the years and vast destruction and cost of the Neocon Wars in the Middle East, we rarely heard the reason for them articulated, at least from any significant American political figure.

However, there was a moment when George Bush – after his invasion of Iraq in 2003, and having heard that Ariel Sharon was lobbying for another country to be invaded – was quoted along the lines of, “Jeez, I invaded Iraq for him. What more does he want?”

The quote was not given big play but was in some of the corporate press, and it is one of the fundamental pieces of evidence we have concerning the true nature of America’s bloody efforts in the Middle East over the last fifteen years or so.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump’s direct engagement with North Korea is the first big idea on the file in decades

“Much as only President Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump could go to North Korea”

 

Concerning any international issue, it, of course, never hurts to talk.

But what seems so obvious and fitting a concept as talking has never really taken hold in Washington. Never.

Does America talk to Venezuela? Does America talk to Iran? Does America talk to Syria? Does it talk to Cuba? Does America talk to Nicaragua? Does it even talk much with Russia? Or China?

No, America seems to prefer shouting at people, telling them what it wants to see them doing, and very frequently, it threatens them.

It does that not just with its unilaterally-declared opponents – countries regarded as opponents for no other reason than that they follow their own national interests rather than putting America’s first – it does it also with friends and allies, countries like Germany or Turkey or the EU or India.

Such countries receive somewhat less harsh treatment, but they are told what they may buy and from whom, and they are told to enforce the American domestic laws called sanctions as though they had some international legitimacy beyond the threat of military force and financial blackmail used to enforce them, and they are just generally told what is expected of them in a great many matters.

It is arrogant and patronizing behavior, as any impartial witness may plainly see in an instant, but America is used to being arrogant and patronizing on a rather colossal scale, treating whole regions that way, the Middle East being a prime example where not one country does not receive orders and expectations from Washington.

We’re seeing a whole new round of arrogant and patronizing behavior right now with Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” flim-flam marketing operation. The fate of millions of people, held for decades against their will by Israel, enjoying no rights of any kind, not even the right to secure home and farm ownership, and subjected to life-long abuse and harassment with check-points, passes, line-ups, and raids – all offered with a keen eye to making them so miserable they’ll want to leave – is somehow to be settled without so much as consulting them.

It is an operation in which tens of billions of phantom dollars (there being no actual funds held by anyone) from America’s Gulf State tyrant friends are supposed to generate, over a period of many years, a new Palestinian prosperity, without changing any of the realities which now keep Palestinians down.

An operation led by an extremely arrogant man whose very position reflects his father-in-law’s nepotism and distrust of outsiders plus an intimate friendship with the Palestinians’ most vindictive enemy, the current Prime Minister of Israel. Kushner is a man, moreover, possessing absolutely no suitable expertise, education, or experience, and a man who, early on, pronounced from on high that the Palestinians were in fact not ready to govern themselves. Sounds very promising, does it not?

Of course, a great irony of Washington’s ordering other countries about is that so often Washington’s orders are badly misguided and its expectations unrealistic. They prove to be damaging long-term because Washington simply does not understand local realities, realities that will still be there decades later. It refuses to do so if they don’t fit into Washington’s idea of how things should be. It is a form of madness. And of course, repeated enough times, it confirms the old saying about, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

There are many examples. Perhaps the most glaring is Afghanistan and a nearly twenty-year war against the Taliban that has utterly failed. Countless lives and huge amounts of wealth have been squandered on pointless destruction. America never has understood what the Taliban are. They are not “terrorists,” they are not outsiders imposing themselves on others, a role pretty much reserved for America itself. No, they are simply one of the natural divisions in the society. Expecting them to go away is like expecting Baptists or Democrats in America to go away.

And the Taliban had no role in 9/11. They gave refuge to a devout Muslim by the name of Osama bin Laden whose native country, Saudi Arabia, greatly disliked him. When the United States demanded his extradition after 9/11, the Taliban only asked for some evidence, providing credible evidence being a normal part of every proper international extradition request. The United States said no and shortly invaded the place. That is how much sense the war in Afghanistan made from the very start.

America bombed the crap out of the country while its local ally, the clans of the Northern Alliance, traditional opponents of the Taliban, did most of the fighting on the ground. America terrorized countless towns and villages with heavily-armed patrols breaking into homes and removing the men for brutal interrogation, it installed another government, one from members of the Northern Alliance, no more admirable to Western eyes than the Taliban, and it committed, or allowed others to commit, a great many atrocities.

Along the way, in toppling the Taliban government, America released massive new waves of hard drugs into the world, drugs the Taliban had suppressed with its ban on growing opium poppies. The damage of that is felt to this day with large supplies lowering street prices and increasing addictions while urban gang wars are waged over turf, often making news of a weekend’s shooting toll in major American cities resemble reports from a war. A toll of as many as sixty or so shot in one weekend in Chicago, as just one example, has become common.

But did the United States defeat the Taliban? No, they remain a major player with whom the United States only now finally holds serious secret negotiations. Did they even capture bin Laden? No, he was finally murdered years later in Pakistan but even then, only because of a betrayal, not American military or intelligence skill.

Did the United States, after all of that, ever even prove to us that bin Laden was “the mastermind” of 9/11? No, it has never provided genuine evidence of anything, including what actually happened on 9/11. To this day, we honestly do not know. Yet none of that prevented it starting a long and unproductive war, a war it still has not extricated itself from.

(On 9/11 and the lack of any coherent explanation for it, see: https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/john-chuckman-comment-a-survivor-says-even-the-simplest-questions-around-911-have-not-been-answered-by-government-yes-and-some-disturbing-truths-around-those-events-the-saudi-arabian-nonsense/ )

Do we have some sense of déjà vu here, as in going back to the ten-year long mass slaughter in Vietnam which proved only that a poor but determined people can defeat the United States so long as it refrains from using atomic weapons? It certainly threw everything else it had at the Vietnamese, killing an estimated three million of them and leaving their country a nightmare of Agent Orange, landmines, and bomb craters.

That kind of ugly stuff unfortunately characterizes much of the foreign affairs history of the United States since WWII. One colonial war after another, and none of them achieving much except a great deal of death and destruction. Hatreds and hostilities on a grand scale serving no purpose other than to enforce America’s claim to the world that it is free to do as it damn well pleases anywhere.

There are lots of other examples. All the years of severe hostilities and genuine acts of terror against Cuba, and, more than half a century later, these are being stoked up yet again, Washington not able to absorb the fact that what people in other places want to do with their lives and resources may well be at odds with what America demands.

The seventy years of horror in Israel/Palestine provide another example. The United States could have put an end to all of that at any time by declaring proper borders and enforcing them, but it didn’t, and it still doesn’t. It just allows a long and destructive set of hostilities continue unimpeded, every once in a while, dabbling in some kind of silly “peace process” theatrics. In this case, America is involved through the American colonial identity of Israel and what it attempts to do in the Middle East. And America makes sure there are mountains of armaments to do it with.

For some reason Trump has chosen to talk to North Korea, but I’m not sure it has a great deal of meaning. After all, this is Donald Trump we are talking about here.

The same man leaked secret British diplomatic papers have just revealed is viewed as “inept,” “incompetent” and “erratic.” His policies towards Iran are actually called “incoherent.” I think we knew those things before the leak of state papers, but it is still nice to have confirmation.

I do think that apart from talking, Trump has totally failed in North Korea with what he originally aimed for, denuclearization. The North might make some concessions in exchange for American concessions, but it is not going to give up its nukes, and I think America’s establishment may be starting to understand that.

North Korea will not give up on its nukes, especially now that America is seen so clearly as a country which does not honor legal contracts, as in the glaring examples of tearing-up the Iran nuclear agreement and tearing-up the INF Treaty with Russia. That last is a terribly important treaty for Europe to avoid becoming the immediate battleground in a nuclear conflict. What incentive is there for a country like North Korea?

With its well-equipped army on the southern border and its regular war games and with nuclear weapons stashed in Japan and Guam, America represents a serious, ongoing threat to the North, and the North would be foolish to give up all its weapons. The United States has made no concessions to reduce the ever-present threat it represents while making all kinds of extreme demands.

Indeed, I think it is largely the credible nature of the North’s deterrent that saved it from Trump’s initial huge wave of gunboat diplomacy with aircraft carriers and nuclear bombers everywhere, just exactly what we now see arrayed against non-nuclear, law-abiding Iran.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Jared Kushner’s Palestine ‘Peace’ Plan Is the Lie of the Century”

 

Hanan Ashrawi’s comment about the “peace plan” has it right.

In summary form, she said: Lift the siege, quit stealing our resources, allow Palestinians freedom of movement and control of their borders and airspace and waters, and then watch them build a vibrant, prosperous economy as a free people.

And never to be forgotten are Kushner’s earlier words about Palestinians not being ready to govern themselves.

He displayed a totally colonial attitude, resembling something from the heyday of 19^th century imperialism. Arrogant and patronizing.

But, in a sense, Kushner’s ugly words were fitting, too, because, in so many ways, Israel is a colony of the United States, a very special one with extraordinary privileges, but still a colony.

Floated by huge subsidies to serve as America’s pied-a-terre in the Middle East.

And the locals are not really welcome, except when serving as low-cost household help.

_____________________________

Response to a comment about how creepy Kushner looks:

Jared Kushner is indeed a rather creepy type, cold, generally unsmiling.

And definitely effete-looking. Almost elfin in some photos.

But what other kind of person could be married to Ivanka?

She’s a character right out of Dostoevsky, a madwoman who has no sense of her own madness, and she just keeps imposing it on others as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

A woman with the abilities and attitudes of a small store clerk who believes she should be listened to by some of the world’s leading intellectual and political figures and frequently butts-in on their deliberations just to tell them so.

And someone who looks in a mirror every few minutes because there is no one else she so admires.

That last being a quality very much shared with her disturbed and disturbing father.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LARISON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” Blows Up in His Droopy Face

“If Iranians are ever going to talk to the US again they have to restore their leverage first”

 

Yes, who negotiates with a gun to his head? Only someone who is defenseless, but that certainly does not characterize Iran.

By what degradation of language are such proposals as America’s even called “negotiation”?

What we see is an effort to conduct international relations along the lines of the age-old Mafia protection racket: pay-up or something really bad is going to happen to you. That is world leadership in the twenty-first century?

It sets a terrible precedent, just as Trump’s tearing-up a valid, working treaty did. A treaty which involved the interests of a number of other states, none of whom agreed with Trump. The interests of five permanent members of the Security Council plus those of Germany and the EU are involved.

Yet Trump felt entitled just to ride roughshod over all of them?

Imagine a businessman suddenly ripping-up a written, multi-party contract, one already in force and operating smoothly for about four years? Here we see precisely that situation, except the international sphere lacks the courts and law enforcement which protect contracts in any advanced country.

Who can trust the United States? What is its word worth? Very little apparently, which of course only compounds the current situation with Iran, just as it does the one with North Korea. Ultimately, the question arises, who will want to do business with the United States? Given America’s relative economic decline in the world, that is just the opposite of what it should communicate to the world’s people to foster investment and trade.

The attitude which should prevail is the one, ironically, we see in Russia: open for business, reasonable, “right this way, partners.” I say “ironically” because not all that many years ago, Russia was a country understood as understanding none of those things.

Now, it very much is the United States of Donald Trump which understands none of those things.

The author’s points are valid, but there are yet more.

The mob running the White House wants Iran to “throw the kitchen sink” into a new deal. What was a clear nuclear-upgrading treaty should become a “and a number of other things” treaty.

At the very least, they want Iran’s missile technology degraded or removed.

A ridiculous expectation in today’s world of missile defense and satellite launching and ultimately all kinds of important projects in space. Much of future scientific work and even manufacturing will be done in space.

Iran has a lot of smart young educated people who want to pursue careers in science or technology and build companies. Why should they be arbitrarily excluded?

Of course, all the grotesque pressure comes ultimately from Israel, by way of American oligarchs who make massive campaign contributions when their terms are met, and through the dedicated efforts of government-service apparatchiks like Bolton and Pompeo.

Israel has worked tirelessly to hurt Iran as a rival for influence in the region. It has nothing to do with genuine security, as Israel pretends. Non-nuclear countries do not attack nuclear ones, and Iran has committed no aggression of any kind in its modern history.

The only kind of security involved is Israel’s sense of security in doing whatever it pleases to anyone anywhere in the region without effective objection, a miniature replica of America’s global behavior.

In a bitter irony, the invasion and destruction of Iraq, done largely at the behest of Israel (Ariel Sharon was a long and fervent advocate) in a terribly bloody war with at least a million deaths, actually increased Iran’s relative influence in the region. So much for the foresight of those who play with the lives of others as though they were game pieces.

What a way for America to run a country and try running the world – almost rabid efforts at destroying someone’s economy accompanied by grotesque threats and terrible displays of war machines, all reflecting no more worthy purpose than securing campaign contributions and political allies back home. And it comes at the same time America conducts a massive trade war with China and a huge campaign of vilifying Russia and hurting its interests. Then there are the smaller destructive works underway such as those in Venezuela. And all the vast and impetuous mass of sanctions and tariffs involved affect everyone else of consequence too.

The whole crisis further highlights America’s relative decline. The country’s leadership – and it’s not just Trump, although he is by far the loudest and most uncouth – has become openly arbitrary and demanding in efforts to counteract its decline, and no one responds well to that. Iran will certainly resist, assisted, hopefully, by such powerful associates as China and Russia and even India.

But Europe, too, is feeling the unwarranted pressure and the unfairness, the effort to skew the entire planet’s affairs in America’s favor. It is undoubtedly thinking hard about future relations with the United States.

If Trump’s efforts do not lead to war, they may very well lead to international economic collapse with all the tariffs and sanctions and reduced volumes of trade plus the threat to oil transport. But if, somehow, we avoid either of those outcomes, I think there can be no question this impossibly arrogant and ignorant President has effectively “greased the rails” for the emerging multi-polar world, one which effectively will end America’s privileged and much-abused authority.

Trump’s legacy will not have been to “make America great again,” whatever that slogan is supposed to mean, but to speed the very changes in the world to which the slogan was a response

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK LAWRENCE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Regrouping the Nuclear Dealmakers

“There are three good reasons for Iran to go back to the table”

 

I couldn’t agree less.

Go back to the table? That reads like mainstream corporate output.

Iran has done nothing, except lawfully abide by its nuclear agreement for four years, something affirmed by every expert and major country on earth.

The United States arbitrarily ripped up a valid, working international agreement, and did so consulting no one beforehand. Its own major allies do not even accept its action.

The United States also has severely attacked Iran’s economy with sanctions. Severely.

Such sanctions, used frequently now by the United States, are nothing more than coercive efforts to apply American law universally, ignoring local and international laws. It is America ignoring the rule of law, simply the West’s most important civilising principle.

On top of those destructive acts, the United States now has clearly threatened war. The threat, whether intended to actually be carried out or not, is totally in violation of international law.

How does anyone “negotiate” with people who have taken such steps?

What is the meaning of “negotiation” under dire threat?

It’s really an exact repeat of behavior seen in the late 1930s from Germany against states such as Czechoslovakia. Hitler would suddenly throw terrifying rages during talks with high officials and scream the gravest threats, trying to set them completely off balance, to get his way. Sound familiar?

No one should validate that approach to international affairs. It is the very opposite of what the world requires for peace and security and stability. After four years of faithfully abiding by an international agreement, Iran, suddenly, should enter new negotiations, facing new and unrelated demands from an impulsive and dangerous man whose only real motivation, as we shall see, is his own domestic political situation?

What Trump did to create this situation is simple and sleazy. In serious fear of impeachment and other threats to his security in office, he approached some exceedingly wealthy people in the United States for support and reassurance, people whose chief concerns are with other matters.

He received money and support for his re-election in 2020 and for any possible attempt at his impeachment, undoubtedly. Seriously big money.

But he was required to pay a price. That price included ripping-up a valid, working international agreement, appointing frighteningly dangerous men like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to important offices, and being seen as very solicitous of Israel’s views about a country that it has always deeply resented as a competitor for regional influence, Iran.

This is a country that has never represented any real threat to Israel – ever hear of a non-nuclear country attacking a nuclear one? – although Israel has made many threats against it, even once spending a small fortune during Obama’s time planning and preparing for a large surprise (non-nuclear) attack, and Israel has carried out, over the years, a number of murderous dark ops against Iran.

So, the whole world must now pay in fear and apprehension for Trump’s becoming comfortably tucked into office? That really is what America’s ghastly behavior towards Iran represents. The Congress, of course, will not interfere in any matter touching Israel – every successful member of Congress being either already beholden to Israel’s lobby or deeply fearful of offending it – so, it just quietly stands back, allowing Trump his own way, literally, a madman in charge.

And a law-abiding country, one that has never attacked anyone in its entire modern history, Iran, is supposed to validate the vicious prejudices and demands of a country, Israel, that has been almost continuously at war for seventy years? One that has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once? One which holds at least five million people as desperate captives and has held them for almost an entire lifetime? One that has an illicit nuclear arsenal and substantial stocks of poison gas? A country that refuses to cooperate with any international arms control and one that stands in violation of dozens of United Nations’ Resolutions and international laws?

Makes sense to me.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO GIVE UNQUALIFIED SUPPORT TO ISRAEL?

 

It means supporting a man who has never once been directly elected by people. A man with a perpetual minority who rules through deals with other smaller minority parties, most of which are about as prejudiced and anti-democratic as you will find anywhere on the planet.

Only recently, there were reports of Netanyahu’s trying to strike a deal for some restrictions on women being on streets in return for the support of an ultra-orthodox party whose enlightenment values are zero. He didn’t succeed, but not for lack of trying, so he has called another election.

This is also a man whose entire record is fanatical, stained many times over with the blood of thousands and thousands of people, people in Gaza, on the Mediterranean Sea, in the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and it is overwhelmingly the case that his victims have been civilians, a great many of them women and children.

A man not interested in peace as most people understand it but with the “peace” that comes in dominating others. He also has always shown an inclination to steal yet more of the property of others than he already has. His desire to dominate is why he has such a shared spirit with Donald Trump, why they admire each other. Of course, It would not be so if these two political scorpions had to share the same political arena.

Netanyahu’s years-long aggressive struggles for dominance and expansion may not have been anything on a scale with the world wars in Europe, but they have been unceasing, persistent, and bloody. And they all have been concerned with similar goals as the brutal wars in Europe, suppressing people you don’t like and taking their property. In philosophical and ethical terms, Netanyahu represents the same values as the jackboot crowd.

But you cannot look at this man’s drives and efforts only inside the geography of Israel and Palestine.

Here is a keen supporter of the bloodiest tyrant we have seen in a while, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. A man who slaughters women and children in Yemen, who slaughters women and children in Syria, a man who openly has opponents brutally murdered, who oppresses the Shia Muslim minority in his own country, and a man supporting record numbers of bloody executions, including the executions of some teen-agers.

Netanyahu is also a keen supporter of President (Generalissimo) el-Sisi in Egypt, a man who holds Egypt’s only former elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in prison under death sentence. A man who regularly imprisons and tortures opponents by the hundreds and sometimes shoots people in the streets. Countless people rot in jails, forgotten. He is a man who was secretly sponsored to become leader of Egypt by Netanyahu. Indeed, it is known that a good deal of pressure was applied to Obama to help topple Egypt’s only democratically-elected government, that of Morsi, because Netanyahu simply loathed it.

Netanyahu is a man who has supported America’s long series of bloody, offensive wars in the Middle East, the so-called Neo-con Wars, whose purpose, through massive amounts of killing, has been to create “a rebirth of the Middle East,” one along lines acceptable to Israel and its imperial protector, the United States. He has been deeply involved in supporting such terrorists as al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria, both directly and through support of the efforts of Saudi Arabia, a country which has secretly paid much of the costs of the dirty work of these terrorists.

Over the years, many caches of Israeli-made weapons have been uncovered by Syria’s army. And Netanyahu openly has served wounded terrorists in Northern Israeli hospitals as well as at times having hundreds of them shifted around from one location to another by helicopter. His objectives in Syria have always been to make permanent Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights, to expand that holding even further, with, if possible, another slice of Syria, and to see the reasonable leader of the religiously-pluralistic society, Syria, eliminated and replaced by someone more along the lines of the Arab leaders he so fervently embraces.

Now, he has underway one of his biggest projects, either the toppling of Iran or the start of a war against it, a war led by the United States with Israel just enjoying the show from the sidelines. He has, inside Israel, vociferously taken credit for guiding Donald Trump on the destructive course he has taken.

This is an extremely dangerous project, a threat to all the people of the region, but Netanyahu is able, as is so often the case with various dirty projects, to keep his head down and let others assume center stage. The United States endorses such behavior because it knows how much antipathetic feeling there would be against Israel were it obvious to everyone who really leads the charge. And a Donald Trump is just the kind of warped personality only too happy to take credit for anything, no matter how destructive, which casts him in the light of someone who gets things done.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ASS’AD ABUKHALIL IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“THE ANGRY ARAB: Iran’s Military Options

“As’ad AbuKhalil weighs Iran’s position at a dangerous point in U.S. relations, but says the prospects of war are not as high as Gulf regimes and Israel want them to be”

 

Why does the author use the term “regime” right from the beginning, repeating it several times?

It is the government of Iran.

Using the word “regime” in that fashion represents classic American propaganda mode and is off-putting for continuing with the article.

Poor choice or hidden agenda?

______________

Response to a comment saying, “Any analysis that is based on the notion that Israel wants war lacks credibility, because it defies logic”:

Then how do you explain almost continuous war for seventy years?

And Israel is the cause of far more war than just the many it has been at the center of.

The horrible American Neocon Wars, killing a couple of million people and creating millions of refugees, are Israeli-inspired.

Ariel Sharon and others were pitching for them, behind the scenes, many years ago.

And it is very important to recognize that while some Israelis might not want war with Iran, that clearly is not the case for their dreadful government, especially if it can manage to arrange it so America and its allies do all the fighting while Netanyahu sits back, with his feet up, watching the show on television with a big bowl of popcorn.

“These Arab nations are armed to the teeth by China, Russia, and the US. Note that it is Iraq, not Israel, that gets the lion’s share of US aid. In spite of impossible odds, Israel persists in surviving.”

Quite inaccurate. The Arab states are not armed at all on the same level with Israel. Just to start with, none have nuclear arsenals.

And it is important to recognize Israel is the most subsidized entity on earth. The total of all its public and private subsidies, coming in many shapes and forms, is like nothing ever seen before.

 “US involvement in the Mideast is about protecting US oil interests in the region. Period. Israel is a separate issue”

No, it is not. Israel is de facto a colony of the United States in the region, a rather peculiar colony and one covered in religious myths and legends, but still a colony serving most of the purposes colonies have always served.

That is precisely why it so subsidized and privileged with many special arrangements from free trade to being given all kinds of large contracts.

Israel has been a tremendously hostile force from the start because it adopted the “iron wall” notion of dealing with its neighbors instead of trying to establish good relationships.

The only nations in the region Israel has good relations with are those ruled by absolute kings and tyrants, ones loyal to American policy. Israel pretty much hates and fears democracy in the Arab world and is a major factor in working against it on many fronts.

Israel played a large secret role in the overthrow of Egypt’s first elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, and it despises Hamas in part because it has worked as a democratic party. Israel is much more comfortable with an unelected figure like Mahmoud Abbas, even though, as is its way with all Palestinians, it often treats him with contempt.

That’s because Israel has so little in common with its neighbors. It is populated largely by people of European origin – the Ashkenazi Jews – and will always feel rather alien in the region. Holding several million Arabic people as seemingly-perpetual prisoners also certainly does not work towards any kind of relationship with neighbors.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN INVESTMENTWATCH

 

“Manchester Bomber Was Product of West’s Libya/Syria Intervention”

 

All of what we call “international terror” or “Muslim extremist terror” is nothing but blowback from America’s Neocon Wars and outrageous actions in the Middle East.

The only exceptions to that statement involve the gangs of mercenary thugs the U.S. and its allies have supported in places like Syria and Libya.

Such gangs – variously named ISIS or Al-Nusra and still others – are no different to the gangs and armies of mercenaries which have been used in countless imperial wars before, except they don’t wear uniforms and they make big noises about matters other than the real purpose of their filthy work.

It is all a big theatrical production, courtesy of support and funding and supplies from the United States, Israel, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and with support from willing helpers like Britain and France.

For example, were ISIS (aka, Daesh) really what it has claimed to be, a fanatical Muslim terror group, clearly it would attack Israel and Israeli interests, but it never does. Never.

Or it would attack the fat princes running Saudi Arabia, princes who in their private lives are well-known for ignoring the strictures of the very conservative Islam they claim to follow. It is only the poor people of Saudi Arabia who are left with those strict rules. And, of course, since now for years since 9/11, the Saudis have worked secretly hand-in-glove with the Israelis, this fact would make them doubly a target.

But again, Saudi Arabia and its horrible elites are never targets for such supposed radical fundamentalist terrorists.

The poor people of Syria, though, people governed by a fairly reasonable government, are targets. With at least a third of a million having been killed and countless injured and made homeless.

And so were the poor people of Libya targets, people previously governed by a man who gave them everything from free education to good water and peace and are now reduced to bloody chaos.

Every once in a while, some of the victims of, or sympathizers against, all of this paid state terror do manage to carry out an attack in revenge for what has been done to them or their families or homes. Such exactly is the nature of the attacks in Paris and this Manchester attack.

They are classic terror operations, but they are not the acts of mindless fanatics. They are works of revenge in response to immense injuries having been inflicted by Western authorities.

Britain and France both have long worked with the United States in actually assisting the paid mercenary “terrorists” working to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria. They supply weapons, they fly missions to destroy Syrian infrastructure, and they give special forces support – all while pretending to fight terror.

And do they really believe, while they fool much of their own populations with dishonesty and propaganda through the ever-accommodating corporate press, that no one else notices what they are doing?

In addition to fifteen years of horror in the Neocon Wars, burning and bombing their way through the Middle East, killing at least two million people, we have the terrible suppurating wound of Palestine and Israel’s terrible treatment of millions, always defended and protected by the United States and by those same governments in Britain and France.

How anyone believes that you can do what Israel and the United States have done without ugly consequences is beyond me. You can only oppress and abuse millions for so long without consequences. That is just human nature.

Of course, the Neocon Wars themselves largely relate to Israel. The United States has been trying to literally re-create the Middle East so that it might come to resemble some American suburban place for Israel’s benefit. Ozzie and Harriet’s charming suburb of the 1950s, or a contemporary American gated community complete with golf courses, so that migrants from America and Europe can pretend they have done nothing wrong to millions they oppress.

It is a horrible set of policies and acts absolutely no different in nature and quality to the works of tyrants of the 1930s or of places like Apartheid South Africa. Only the numbers of lives destroyed are less. Ethnic-cleansing, mass terror, mass killing, treating millions like cattle – that, with no exaggeration, represents the work of the United States and Israel for fifteen years.

I have never understood how rights-loving average Americans can view with indifference a bloody spectacle where even the ownership of a home or farm is not secure and where millions are penned-up as though in prison and, now, where millions are sent running in terror from cities being bombed to become despised refugees.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN YOURNEWSWIRE

 

I think Kennedy is right only in small part. The pipeline is indeed something the establishment would like to create and that Assad has opposed.

But war in Syria, like Iraq, is part of a grand plan to re-mold the Middle East into Israel’s liking and secure its hegemony there.

Politicians like Kennedy would never discuss it for fear of offending America’s powerful Israel Lobby.

A kind of giant cordon sanitaire has been abuilding around Israel for years, and at an immense cost in human lives.

We have comments over the years from high American officials suggesting support for the concept.

Condi Rice once brutally called the screams of the hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq something to the effect of the screams of a new-born Middle East.

George Bush once candidly remarked on how much more Sharon demanded in the Middle East, saying something like I already invaded Iraq for him and how much more does he want?

In Iraq, American forces directly invaded, blatant aggression, and to the shock of much of the world.

In Libya and Syria and Yemen, surrogates – mercenaries and fanatics – were used with secret support, a very dirty business.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON SPUTNIK

 

What many readers in Russia undoubtedly do not understand is Washington’s election campaign finance rules and their relationship to special interest groups like the Israel lobby and the never-ending turmoil of Israel-Palestine.

There are basically – despite a complex web of rules – no limits on money given to candidates for election to office.

The Supreme Court, under the influence of decades of conservative appointments, has ruled that money is free speech.

Well, you could not come up with a more corrosive rule for democracy if you tried.

The best organized and financed special interest in the United States – the Israel lobby – is able essentially to buy the loyalty of most congressmen and senators and presidential candidates.

That sounds like exaggeration, but it absolutely is not.

Money is so important in Washington elections because you must travel extensively, buy television air-time, have professional commercials produced, commission endless polls and studies, and purchase the services of costly experts. It all precisely resembles the marketing and selling of a product by a great multi-national company rather than an exercise in democracy.

This is especially true of American presidential elections, which effectively stretch out over a year including primaries and caucuses.

A year of spending like a drunken sailor!

Imagine the vast costs?

That is the American presidential campaign system in a nut shell.

This system achieves several things. One, an entrenched, well-financed special interest can stay entrenched indefinitely. Two, all the serious candidates – those with hundreds of millions in their pockets from donors and the promise of more (the Hillary Clintons or Jeb Bushes) – are effectively vetted by their existing establishment donors. They are safe bets on key matters. Nothing can really change, including major policies. The system is built to achieve that result.

Then along comes an ambitious character like Donald Trump who can finance his own campaign, there being very few people who have or are willing to spend a billion dollars of their own on a campaign.

This is part of what makes the Israel lobby in the U.S. extremely suspicious of him. Then add the fact that he is very independent-minded and says America should get along with Russia and China and that it shouldn’t be in places like Syria, and a form of panic ensues.

I dislike most of Trumps’ views, but on the Middle East and some foreign policy he could represent important and overdue change. The Israel lobby understands that and already on many fronts is getting ready for one ugly fight. We see former New York Mayor, and billionaire, Bloomberg talk of running as an independent, The Weekly Standard, voice of Neo-cons and the Israel lobby is screaming about Trump, and some newspapers have already engaged in underhanded stuff like reporting that a distant relative of Anne Frank’s says “Trump sounds like Hitler.”

If Trump gets the nomination, there’s going to be a really dirty fight with the Middle East at its center, but Trump’s opponents will not openly make the Middle East the issue as it is much safer with the general public and easier to talk about Trump’s sometimes wild words and more extreme ideas. But the intensity of the fight will be about the Middle East.

It will be an interesting political year.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

An accurate assessment, but an unpopular one.

From the beginning I have explained and advocated the same view, the view of relatively powerless people taking violent action against great injustices.

But governments and the large mainline news media which invariably support them have filled the atmosphere with Islamophobic nonsense to such an extent that it is blindly accepted by many.

Being a humanist with loyalty to no religion, I have no special brief for Islam.

But I am a person who has little toleration for injustice, and American policies after WWII are nothing if not one long series of injustices.

A very wise woman once said, in answer to the question of what distinguishes a good, democratic society, that it was whether the people lived with a sense of justice.

I cannot agree more with that profound and simple observation.

But we see very little justice from the foreign policy of the United States. We see, quite to the contrary, the imposition, over and over again, of injustice, on an international scale being much as one would experience in an old society where deliberate injustice is maintained as the ordinary state of affairs.

Global affairs, if we are to support democratic values and humane dealings, must also feature justice. It is no less required.

But so many people recognize that that is not the situation, and they include not only people living in the artificial reality of the Middle East maintained by the United States but people in Europe and North America who find it difficult even to have good public discussions of the matter.

The United States through NATO and its tremendous financial and economic power is remarkably capable of keeping these issues off the public agenda.

Sometimes, as in Egypt, an eruption simply gets too big to suppress, and the U.S. takes great hypocritical noises about democracy and the people’s desires, but it never does this automatically, and at the same time it throws its support to inevitable change (really as a form of emergency measure and damage control) in a place like Egypt, it is bombing people and supporting repression of people with the same kind of demands for freedom in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

And even in Egypt, what do we see now? Basically a military junta taking immense amounts of time to change anything meaningful, hoping to let people’s energy and dreams dissipate. And it is the United States supporting the effort.

So much for the land of the free, a slogan that always has been more slogan than reality. Free people do not enslave others. Genuine democratic states do not do deals with dictators and just wink at gross injustice. But America is a land where all the vaunted assertions of the Constitution end right at the shoreline. The horrors of Guantanamo, 90 miles off shore, are just fine. And increasingly, with terrible invasions of privacy and police-state laws about “terror” even on shore America becomes a less democratic place daily.

Terror has become a word very similar to what the ghastly Joe Stalin meant when he spoke of “wreckers,” one of his signal words for new waves of state terror in the Soviet Union.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESI stopped watching Frontline years ago.

There were too many tame programs with no real analysis, the documentary content-equivalent of PBS’s nature specials, as that on apes narrated by Charlie Sheen.

And, several times, more hard-hitting items were removed from their schedule. Shameful.

Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, PBS executives started wetting their pants and reducing the network to fluff. Their anchor news show, the News Hour, was reduced to arguments between political party chairmen saying nothing and tame news coverage.

However the scene you describe, Clive, is strong stuff, and should tell Americans something, but there are none so blind….

Of course, there is the reason why there can be no victory in Afghanistan.

I’m not even sure what the Military-Industrial bureaucrats mean by “victory.” Afghanistan reduced to an Illinois suburb with shopping centers and SUVs in the driveways of homes?

The U.S. went there for vengeance, and that is what it got. It killed tens of thousands, including an estimated 50,000 just in Kabul.

It did this with horrible weapons and carpet bombing, and to minimize American casualties on the ground, it let the nasty people in the Northern Alliance do most of the legwork. It also participated in horrible war crimes against Taleban prisoners, as the 3,000 who disappeared, buried in the desert after having been suffocated in vans, a la early Nazi experiments with mass killings.

Once the U.S. had a technical victory – actually nothing but dispersing the Taleban to the hills – it did not know what to do, and it still does not.

Its troops have used brutal techniques – never likely to be shown on Frontline or any other American television. Years of special forces thugs going from village to village, knocking down doors, holding guns on families, and taking away men from households.

And every time it calls an air strike, civilians die.

Now it is spreading its horror into Pakistan, having quietly intimidated the Pakistan government into cooperating in matters that are not really their interests.

I, of course, recall that wonderful achievement of America’s during its pointless holocaust in Vietnam of de-stabilizing the neutral government of Cambodia and helping pave the way for the “killing fields” which it did absolutely nothing to stop.

Indeed, when the brave Vietnamese went in and stopped the horror, American bureaucrats stood, arms folded, saying I told you so, it’s the domino theory at work.

Colonial wars are not legitimate “policy” in the 21st century, and, as good students of history know, wars generally solve nothing.

The great irony is that the Taleban never attacked anyone, had nothing to do with 9/11, yet the U.S. has made them into an enemy.

They are, of course, a major part of the population of Afghanistan, an absurdly poor and backward place, while the U.S. military with all their shiny G.I Joe equipment are occupiers. No one likes occupiers ever, except those who profit by trading with them, as the prostitutes of Paris in 1941.

Afghanistan is a hopeless disaster of America’s own making, and the soldier you describe, Clive, is a perfect symbol of the hopelessness of the entire crusade.