John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Iranian president announces another break from nuclear deal

“Landmark 2015 nuclear accord has all but collapsed”

 

This marks the fourth step Iran has taken at two-month intervals to reduce its obligations under a treaty Trump destroyed. Iran proceeds gradually, but it can hardly be expected to behave as though nothing has happened, and this gradual reduction of obligations is the only means it has to generate any pressure.

According to every international expert, Iran scrupulously followed all the rules of the nuclear treaty for four years.

Then Trump suddenly came along and ripped it up, despite there being a half dozen other signatories who disagreed with his wild claims and confirmed that Iran had been honoring its obligations.

Imagine just tearing up a legal business contract that half a dozen others were involved with, all on your own? Only, you see, in international affairs, there’s no court in which to sue or judge to offer a binding decision.

Trump then launched all-out economic war, with the harshest possible sanctions, on Iran’s 80 million people who had done nothing wrong.

He also threatened the country with fleets of warships and bombers, and in his blind raging used the word “obliterate” against them.

He appointed some of most disagreeable men in the United States to high posts, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who further raged against Iran.

Iran is absolutely doing the right thing here. It’s Trump, after all, who says there is no treaty.

Iran’s view is on record: it will happily talk to the United States if it halts its economic terror (there really being no other suitable term to describe America’s extreme behavior) and holsters its guns. I think most people can agree with the reasonableness of that.

The United States has yet to respond to reason.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Syrian Army Enters US/Kurdish-Held Northern Syria to Block Turko-Jihadi Offensive

To do what the Americans won’t”

_____________________________

Response to a comment saying, “Erdogan is about to lose a critical ally (Russia) if this operation persists. I believe a US-led coup against Erdogan is being developed. Russia has caught wind of it and I sense unless Syrian events change, Moscow won’t lift a finger to assist Erdogan.”

It’s impossible at this point to accurately understand the set of real relationships and forces at work here behind the scenes.

First, we have a genuine lunatic in the Oval Office, and one who has failed at almost everything he has tried.

And the (supposedly limited) invasion of northeastern Syria by Turkey, accommodated by American troops stepping aside almost as though by agreement, has now generated dramatic new changes. All American troops are now leaving the area, as are the limited number of other foreign troops, such as the French, Trump had managed previously to dragoon into support. The Syrian army has entered the region to protect the Kurds and oppose Turkey’s invasion. That last important step is the result of an agreement brokered by Putin.

Erdogan, while cunning and gifted in some matters and ruthless, is himself half-mad. Who else builds a thousand-room palace and shoots down a Russian fighter but a madman?

Putin is always thinking. And he uses the weaknesses as well as the strengths of his competitors and associates.

I wouldn’t doubt it at all if more coup plans were being brewed up in Washington, although it’s a little tough with Erdogan having put a good portion of Turkey’s generals and officials in prison, certainly any even suspected of the wrong kind of relationship with Americans, and having taken special measures at key American-Turkish contact points such as the big airbase, following the 2016 coup attempt.

If Putin can get something useful out of Erdogan still, and I think he can, he will protect him from American plots again. After all, that’s what Russia’s S-400 air-defense sale was about, with neither Washington nor Europe being able to turn the air-defense system off (during a coup) as they very much can do with the ones they sell abroad. And besides, Putin is one of the world’s great pragmatists, not anything like Trump who goes around waving his flag in people’s faces and telling everyone publicly just what he thinks of them.

Some have speculated that this whole event represents a clever scheme by Putin and Erdogan to boot the United States out of Syria.

I don’t embrace that, but it certainly isn’t impossible. Upcoming developments will tell us the truth. Putin wants Syrian territorial integrity for a number of reasons. He is restoring the Middle East’s confidence in Russia’s ability to help and to get jobs done, and he’s doing it during a period of people’s losing confidence in America’s dependability. There is also the matter of the future of Russia’s important naval and air bases in Syria being assured.

What Erdogan really hates in Syria is the idea of a Kurd-run entity. He is allergic to Kurds.

Well, you can either fight the entity or its sponsor, which, in this case, is the United States (at least in part on behalf of Israel, someone else Erdogan hates).

With the United States gone, visions of a Kurdish rump state are gone.

This does represent a significant regional defeat for Israel. It regarded the Kurdish rump state as getting at least something out of the larger Syrian proxy war it wanted and assisted, a war which has been lost.

I’m sure Putin is working very hard behind the scenes to have Erdogan halt his invasion. Syria and Russia could placate Erdogan with some special arrangements inside northeastern Syria, removing his concerns about Kurd proximity.

Of course, Erdogan’s concerns may well be, at least in part, excuses for the physical expansion of Turkey. We’ll have to see how hard Erdogan keeps pushing.

He has to recognize the potential for running up against Russian fighter planes and the world’s best anti-aircraft missiles if he puts the Syrians into serious jeopardy or in any way embarrasses Putin. Of course, Russia also has some its remarkable Spetsnaz special forces in Syria. They have been used for gathering a lot of intelligence needed for effective bombing campaigns, ones run a little more conscientiously than some of America’s really destructive efforts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Still others have speculated that the matter reflects a secret agreement between Turkey and the United States, a speculation fed by the timing of Turkey’s entry and America’s withdrawal. It certainly looks suspicious.

Turkey gets to do what it wants, within limits, to the Kurds, and America gets out from Syria altogether under the cover of not wanting to fight with a NATO ally, instead of having to make some big controversial policy announcement about leaving Syria that would anger Israel and its supporters.

I don’t embrace this notion, either, but it certainly is possible.

The idea would appear to be a little short-sighted by not considering Syria’s response and, of course, Russia’s, but being short-sighted is something both Trump and Erdogan have earned sound reputations for.

Russia has brokered the agreement between Syria and the Syrian Kurds, once again raising Russia’s status in the region. Now, if Russia can manage to stop Turkey’s advance by some combination of efforts not including direct conflict with Turkey, its status in the Middle East will be raised still higher, to begin overshadowing that of the United States, the United States having made blunder after blunder in its frantic and destructive Neocon Wars, as recognized by many.

I noted in a comment recently about Russian engineers having built a military-style bridge across the Euphrates River, the boundary for the region with rest of Syria, a bridge capable of supporting armored vehicles. They did so, apparently, in record time. So, it looks as though Putin was putting things together for the return of the Syrian army to the northeast region.

The United States has just announced that it is sending 3,000 troops plus some new missile systems to protect Saudi Arabia. I do think the added American troops and weapons are at least as likely about the Saudi Throne wobbling as any “threat” from Iran. All clear-thinking people know that there is no threat from Iran, unless you insist on regarding Iran’s mere continued existence as a threat.

The Saudi Crown Prince is starting to look as though he’s in real trouble on several fronts.

There’s still that recent, unexplained mystery of the old King’s trusted, loyal, chief bodyguard being murdered in Jeddah. At the same time, there was a huge fire at the new high-speed train station in Jeddah. We’ve not heard another word about that important matter.

Saudi Arabia is for American affairs a key element in the region, and not just for its oil and its support of the petrodollar. It has become an element in America’s brutal efforts to create a new Middle East, one where Israel is comfortably accommodated in its demands and excesses.

That last idea, accommodating Israel, is something that still would not sit well with most Saudis and perhaps some other members of the Royal Family, so the Crown Prince’s very close ties with Israel, something the United States greatly values him for, are not a public bragging point. He has done many things to earn that status with Israel, including his foolish war in Yemen, continuing the years-long Saudi interference in Syria, and generating serious antagonism towards Iran.

The Crown Prince’s special relationship with Israel is what permitted him to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of the latest American weapons, an unprecedented act by an Arab state. But he has used them badly, and he has burned through a lot of money.

He is, in a word, a bungler, an ambitious and ruthless man of no great talent and one with a lot of serious character flaws. Apart from an infamous brutal murder he undoubtedly commissioned, we see a record new rate of executions in Saudi Arabia, his arrogant and wastrel ways, and the Crown Prince is said to have been a regular at Jeffrey Epstein’s sex playground, which almost certainly was an Israeli-supported hi-tech honey-trap for producing lots of compromising photos of influential people.

The Crown Prince’s losing his place, one way or another, would threaten much of what America has ruthlessly worked towards in the region. Of course, from the view of even some inside Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince is regarded as a failure who has spent an awful lot of money achieving nothing but the shame of being successfully counterattacked twice by Yemen’s poor Houthi. The brutal Khashoggi murder, while deliberately overlooked by Trump and others who want to keep their Saudi relationship intact, brought waves of international condemnation.

The Royal Family has lots of Princes, and the current Crown Prince was not first in line. He made a lot of enemies with his clumsy early exploit of locking up a large number of wealthy Princes and making them pay him huge ransoms. Ransoms in the billions. The Crown Prince did effectively seize power, while his father, very old and said to be partly senile, formally remains King, but the usurper has not wielded the power well. He has enemies, and now they have every reason to say he is a failure.

Putin, by the way, is, as I write this, visiting Saudi Arabia and had a meeting with the old King to discuss various kinds of future proposed cooperation. He stays right on top of things.

It is also clear from statements coming out of Iran that that country has found a new sense of self-confidence in its brave efforts to face down America’s reckless assault – Trump’s tearing up an important working treaty, his launching almost a total economic war, and his intimidating Iran militarily with fleets and air power.

Iran’s new weapons have proved extremely effective, causing Saudi Arabia to regard it with new respect and to express a desire to avoid war, something it had seemed earlier rather cavalier about. And Iran is managing to export crude oil by various arrangements and subterfuges.

Trump’s failure in the Middle East has been close to total. His only real success might be said to be relations with Israel, but they only represent his airily giving away things that were not his legally to give, as recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of the legitimacy of Israel’s self-proclaimed annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

Other matters we’ve discussed – American troops leaving northeastern Syria, the success and stability of the Saudi Throne, Iran’s new resolve and military pride, America’s declining influence, Russia’s increasing influence – are considered important in Israel, and they represent nothing but failure, viewed in America’s own terms, not in any larger terms of justice and human rights and decency, all of which have absolutely no place in American foreign policy.

Trump, in yet one more of his many clownish flip-flops, has declared suddenly a number of serious punitive measures against Turkey, including a range of sanctions, big new tariffs, and a stop to important trade negotiations, demanding Turkey stop its invasion. If Turkey pays heed, Trump will have done Putin’s task for him.

Indeed, Trump spoke about being prepared to “destroy the Turkish economy,” the kind of violent language of which he is so fond. These measures reflect I think no principles on Trump’s part, but the heavy criticism he has received from fellow Republicans about what he has done in Syria. As I said, Israel cannot be happy, and I’m sure all of their contacts in Congress are hearing about it.

Even people not under the same influences as Republican politicians, people in the region who wanted to see America leave Syria, such as Iran, are not happy about the way Trump managed to do it, causing considerable misery and death (See my last comment, “A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST”)

But there is no talk of American forces opposing Turkey. Indeed, the withdrawal of troops goes right ahead. I think Trump views at least one small achievement in “getting out of the Middle East” as essential for his re-election.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump defends decision to pull U.S. troops back from Syrian-Turkish border

“Democratic and Republican lawmakers condemn decision, fear a Turkish offensive”

 

The only people who ever seriously fought the Jihadists in Syria are the Syrian Army, their Iranian allies, and their Russian allies.

America has many times used the excuse of Jihadists to stay somewhere in Syria where it doesn’t belong. It is not an ally of Syria and has never been given permission even to be there, let alone create military bases, train rebellious people, distribute weapons and supplies to them, and generally to encourage mayhem.

What it has really been doing in the Northeast is to assist the Syrian Kurds in opposing Syria’s government and encouraging the notion of a Syrian Kurd rump state. Anything to weaken Syria.

The amount of misinformation on the topic of Syria and its nasty war, a war deliberately created by outside interventions, is monumental, and with good reason since those responsible don’t want the world really to understand what has been going on. That is the way hybrid and proxy wars work.

The Syrian War was always about toppling a legitimate government by using proxy fighters. The proxies get plenty of publicity as “Jihadists” but they really are for the most part plain old recruited mercenaries playing theater parts. And of course, as with any army, the ordinary soldiers receive very little information about what it is all about. All of their pay and supplies has come from the informal coalition of Saudi Arabia and America and Israel and Britain and France and a Gulf State or two.

Every time an arms cache has been discovered by advancing Syrian forces, it contains weapons made in America or Israel or Bulgaria, a country from which the CIA often buys volume-discount weapons to send to interventions and coups.

The people in Washington who are upset by Trump’s move are using terms like “betrayal of allies.”

It’s ridiculous language if you know any history of the region, but most of the people using the words are themselves being dishonest, not telling people why they really want to assist the Kurds.

First, the Kurds are not allies. They do not even represent an organized state, although they always dream of creating one. They are scattered as a minority in many places of the region, almost like a large population of gypsies. Their fierce hope for a state makes it easy for someone like the United States to exploit them for undeclared purposes, as it has been doing now and has done previously.

Some people tried warning the Syrian Kurds about depending on the United States for help, but they wouldn’t listen. The region borders on Turkey, which has its own substantial and rebellious Kurdish population, and is simply never going to tolerate a Kurdish-run rump state on its border. It regards the idea as a serious security threat, given the aspirations of its own Kurds. So American notions have been at direct odds with Turkey’s interests from the start.

The United States has toyed with this notion about the Kurds in northeastern Syria as a kind of consolation prize for having lost the main war in Syria, the war using proxy forces to destroy the Syrian government. Hiving off an important segment of Syria, a place with crude oil reserves, would clearly hurt the country. Trying to reclaim it, even if eventually successful, would keep poor Syria in turmoil for years to come. Israel, unhappy about the main proxy war having been lost, was keen on the concept.

You do have to put the Syrian War into its proper context. It is part of the long series of Neocon Wars in the Middle East designed, more or less, to pave over everything anywhere near Israel. That’s what the meaningless term, “War on Terror,” going back to George Bush really was about. You cannot have a war on a method, clearly, but the term just managed to jumble things up enough for the public and to feature that witch-like incantation term, “terror,” so that America’s government would never have to account for what it was actually doing.

America had done a full-fledged traditional invasion of Iraq, complete with one pathetic ally to share the shame. It was a terribly bloody and destructive enterprise, and so for the other names on its list of countries in the Middle East to be paved over, it settled for proxy and hybrid efforts.

The invasion of Iraq was not only extremely costly, it produced waves of bad publicity and condemnation, something to be avoided when your public relations efforts focus on words like “democracy” and “freedom.” Proxy and hybrid hostilities allow you to put up smokescreens so that no one quite knows what you are doing. You can even blame other people.

Out of the immense destruction American bombing in half a dozen lands caused in a “War on Terror,” we did see, here and there, some few people seek reprisal and revenge against the very powerful who were abusing their power. Those few instances of “International Terror” served, almost like public relations stunts, to reinforce the government’s explanation of what all the killing was about.

The United States has betrayed the region’s Kurds before, going back to the days of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. American plotting got Iraq’s Kurds to rebel against Saddam, and they ended in a mass slaughter. Suggestions of American support vaporized.

Well, here we go again. Unless new steps are taken to avert it, Turkey is going to do the Syrian Kurds serious damage. This United States move serves also as an important gesture to Turkey about America respecting its interests. After all, America and Turkey have had a number of noisy, public disagreements recently.

No matter how difficult the United States sometimes finds accommodating Turkey’s Erdogan, in the end, it very much wants Turkey to remain in NATO. Its geographical location makes it almost a kind of capstone in NATO’s edifice.

It’s not clear how this will all turn out, but Israel, so immensely influential in Washington, is not happy with anything that could end in any degree of Syrian reunification.

The apocalyptic tone about Trump’s move used by Senator Lindsey Graham – one of the most tireless defenders in Washington of Israel’s narrow interests, so much so he frequently makes himself ridiculous – tells us all we need to know about Israel’s view. Israel does like, whenever possible, not to be heard commenting directly on American military decisions, so it uses proxies like Sen. Graham.

The Kurds, armed by America to fight against Syria, may be able to approach the Syrian government and invite them to take back the region, protecting them against the Turks. It is notable that Russian engineers just completed in record time a new military-style bridge crossing the Euphrates into NE Syria, one capable of supporting armored vehicles.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JONATHAN COOK IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“UK Israel Lobby Adds Muscle as US Lobby Weakens

“British politics are being plunged into a stifling silence on the longest example of mass human rights abuses sanctioned by the West in modern history”

 

Worth reading, as are most things Jonathan Cook writes.

But I’m not sure I accept his notion of The Lobby’s hold in the United States weakening in any way.

Yes, there finally are a few people in Congress who speak truth for the first time ever.

But look at the choke-hold Israel has on the county, despite those minor influences.

Many of Trump’s most senior appointments are people serving Israeli interests to a record degree – Bolton, Pompeo, Abrahams, Kushner, and others.

And look at the things, not his to legally dispose of at all, that Trump has “given” Israel. It’s shocking, but there are almost no voices in the United States saying so.

And by all accounts, Trump’s big “peace plan” could have been written by members of Netanyahu’s staff. There is no pretense of working with two sides to solve a problem involving two sides.

We have matters like Trump’s “Syria withdrawal” reduced to dust under Israeli influence, for there is no other serious known interest keeping American military, illegally, in northwestern Syria.

Israel just wants instability for Syria and to deprive that state of the use of its own resources. It’s just gangsterism, but America fully goes along.

And the steady drumbeat against law-abiding Iran is becoming deafening.

There is only one interest pushing this pointlessly destructive policy, Israel with its intense desire to dominate its region and benefit from all the favor of the United States in doing so.

America’s own long-term interests all dictate that it should work to establish good relations with Iran, a major and peaceful state with many things to offer in trade and friendship, but America cannot do so under Israel’s withering influence. It just keeps flagellating itself to exhibit its reverence towards one small and extremely belligerent state.

Israel is under absolutely no threat from Iran. It’s just empty rhetoric, an excuse for itself promoting threats and belligerence.

Imagine a non-nuclear state attacking a nuclear state such as Israel, one with a sizable arsenal? One, moreover, doubly protected by America’s nuclear arsenal. It’s a darkly laughable idea, but it is never laughed at by anyone in Washington, it is only ritualistically honored and repeated.

Israel’s destructive viewpoint prevails in almost all important matters. Even much of America’s intense Russophobia reflects stoking by Israeli interests. Israel simply views Russia, without saying so publicly, as a big stumbling block to the kind of American international dominance Israel would be very happy seeing.

There is not much to be hopeful about that I see. Perhaps, if Israel keeps so grotesquely over-playing its hand, there will be a backlash in the United States. But that’s only a “perhaps.” Americans, on the whole, just go right along with things, much resembling a herd of cattle quietly grazing in a pasture while just over the distant hills, vicious armies clash and threaten their future.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The Israeli Lobby Is the Deep State”

 

There is definitely some truth in the title.

At the least, the Israel lobby is a component of the American Deep State, working closely, intimately, with its other components, including the Senate, the Pentagon, CIA, and the State Department.

The Neocons, for example, are entrenched in major Washington departments and agencies, very much including the State Department and the Defense Department, and they are influential in policy. In Trump’s government, Neocons fill several cabinet posts, important ones.

(For those who do not know the term “Neocon,” it is short for Neoconservative and represents a small but influential American political movement with one of its main articles of faith being that the United States should not be shy about using military might to get what it wants in the world. They have openly advocated for various wars. The movement’s connection to Israel is in the fact that that article of faith works to Israel’s advantage in getting what it wants and in the fact that most of the prominent members of the movement are American Jews who keep Israel high in their considerations.)

It is all hard to sort out because Israel’s situation is complex and ambiguous, deliberately so. It is indeed a de facto Middle East colony of the United States, a very special kind of colony, one permitted the appearance and most of the activity of an independent state.

And Israel’s lobby is multifaceted. It certainly includes far more than just AIPAC, which is the main formal avenue for influencing political leaders and distributing campaign funds. There are a number of wealthy individuals, multi-billionaires, who make Israel a chief concern and make extremely large campaign donations as well as providing other services. There are literally lists of private organizations and foundations who work to influence opinions. And there are the chief members of America’s press and broadcasting, all of whom are dedicated to Israel’s welfare and never challenge its excesses.

Hollywood, too, does a lot of work to shape public opinion, even sometimes working directly for Israel, as with its annual big bash dinner to collect millions of dollars for the Israeli Army. It did a lot to support the White Helmets of Syria, who function, under the cover of being an NGO, as a propaganda film-making and advocacy group for Western bombing there. Recently, the luxurious gift bags given to all nominees at the Oscar Awards included a free five-star trip to Israel.

The entire Israel lobby in the United States is literally a kind of multi-corporate venture, quite a large one. It is able to bring pressures from many directions. President Truman, when he was being lobbied to recognize self-declared Israel in 1948, felt under the most intense, almost headache-inducing pressure. He told us so in his writing. Well, since then, the Israel lobby has done nothing but grow in sophistication and size. Now, after each national election, for example, there is a program of paid trips to Israel for all freshmen Congressmen, ostensibly friendly holidays but actually carefully planned information and influence and assessment sessions. Woe betide the new Congressman who turns down the invite or asks the wrong questions on the trip.

America defends even Israel’s worst bloody work because America’s establishment is literally embedded with Israel’s interests.

I admire young Omar’s courage, and I note she usually has a sweet smile on her face.

This is a sincere and kindly critic, but a critic indeed.

And that’s something you are not allowed to be in modern America. If you take the position of critic, you will pay a price, as Representative Ilhan Omar very much is being made to pay.

Her future sources of campaign funding will be hurt, as the Israel Lobby will go after any significant ones she has with suggestions of economic consequences for their businesses. Her mainline press coverage will be very unfriendly. She will be called “anti-Semitic” constantly. And any future opponent in her district will get some seriously focused support, not just in funds but in technical and expert support and in good press.

That is just the way it works. No lobby is better organized or more determined to get at its opponents. We’ve had various cases in the past of critical Congressmen being literally bulldozed. So, I hope her constituency connections are strong and resistant to pressure.

After all, America just fought a good fifteen years of the destructive Neocon Wars, mainly to remake the face of the Middle East for Israel’s benefit. It spent countless billions in a vast effort trying to turn Israel’s blood-soaked neighborhood into something resembling a smiling Ozzie and Harriet suburb of the 1950s.

About two million people have been killed in this “crusade” and millions of hopeless refugees created, refugees afterwards ignored and disparaged in America.

Week after week, Washington just ignores Israeli soldiers cowardly kneeling behind a fence while ambushing civilians, shooting children, women, journalists, and medics as well as others just demonstrating for some rights.

It ignores, too, what is clearly the world’s largest existing concentration camp, a place called Gaza, where people have deliberately been kept in misery for over half a century.

And Washington, that intense defender of private property everywhere, just ignores the vicious thefts and attacks of “settlers” and Israel’s own government in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Just imagine the reaction were a poor and deprived group of American blacks to behave the same way in the suburbs of a city, say, Chicago or Detroit?

The National Guard would be sent in immediately to shoot those taking or destroying property, something they have indeed done a number of times in the past during racial riots.

And Washington, which regards itself as a great defender of democracy, at least in its speeches, simply ignores, decade after decade, the fact that Israel’s government holds millions under its control who do not want to be under its control. It holds them without rights of any kind, without votes, and without enjoying the basic Western principle of rule of law.

It’s all beyond appalling, and then American officials go on and on with charges and accusations against a decent leader like President Maduro of Venezuela.

_____________________

Response to a comment saying almost half the bills passed in Congress this year mention Israel:

How about a State of the Union speech featuring Israeli interests? Bizarre.

George Washington, who started the practice of the State of the Union Speech, in his Farewell Address to the Nation, warned against “foreign entanglements,” and Israel is about as great an entanglement as you could come up with.

Trump has been Israel’s greatest willing helper.

Willing, that is, in return for the kind of support Omar will not receive, for the kind of support she is being harshly criticized for openly discussing. He literally can expect tens of millions of dollars for his 2020 campaign in return for such lawless acts as moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK BUCHANAN IN ANTIWAR

 

“Will Trump Hold Firm on Syrian Pullout?”

 

Well, it is hard to see Trump being “firm” on anything, except in statements admiring himself.

He is a fickle man.

And he has amply demonstrated cowardice. We’ve seen that quality over and over, and especially in his bullying.

Apart from Trump’s fickleness and the powerful opposition already hard at work against this decision – you can tell from various leaks, such as the one intended to embarrass him that the decision was taken without any consultation with advisors and cabinet and allies – this whole affair may prove a kind of elaborate hoax.

There were reports yesterday that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are sending troops and weapons to Kurdish areas American forces now occupy.

We also shouldn’t forget that France has forces in the area, and they’re not leaving as far as we can tell.

Could it be that we are just seeing substitutions for the departing American forces?

That’s an entirely different matter than a clean break with the illegal and murderous activity America has been engaged in.

It would amount only to a “technical” fulfillment of Trump’s campaign words.

One fact that tends to work against this idea is the sudden resignation of Mattis, but even that could fit. He may have opposed such an effort at substitution. He is not known as an especially imaginative man.

I have been pretty sceptical about the whole matter because it so clearly opposes two very active and powerful forces at work in Washington.

One is the American establishment’s new drive for global power with all that stuff about “full-spectrum dominance” from the Pentagon.

And the other is the Israel lobby, which carries a great deal of weight in Congress, at the Pentagon, and with Trump. He has come to be viewed as a great benefactor to Israel. It is difficult to see Trump having the backbone to deal with them as opponents, and they are very much opposed to this decision.

Netanyahu has relished the war in Syria, grinding away at people he hates, Assad and his Iranian allies, always wanting to make the Syrian territory occupied since 1967 on the Golan Heights an integral part of Israel, and at one point he was even eager to grab another slice of land next to the Golan.

But having largely lost the proxy war to the Syrian Army and Russia and Iran, I’m pretty sure he was counting on a back-up plan of de facto separation of the Kurdish region in the northeast which would significantly weaken Syria for the future, given that region’s oil wealth. Independent Kurds there would also be natural allies on another Syrian border.

That’s I think the main reason why the American troops were put there. Of course, this plan comes into direct conflict with Turkey, which has no tolerance for a Kurdish state anywhere near its borders. Turkey’s Erdogan accuses Kurds fighting in Syria of just being a branch of the Kurdish separatist movement inside Turkey, a movement he has brutally suppressed.

Trump said that the United States would no longer be the “policeman of the Middle East,” but it has never served the role of policeman, except in its own imagination.

Its role has been as praetorian guard to regimes it favors and as open threat to those it does not favor. Police enforce laws, but the only “laws” that the United States enforces in the region are its own political biases.

Every regime America defends is at least as lawless and brutal as any it opposes, and I certainly count Israel in that category because the rule of law does not exist on the territory it occupies and is ignored in all of Israel’s efforts to bolster its position in the region, from several thousand assassinations to illegal bombing sorties by the hundreds in neighboring countries.

Law is in great part about stability and legitimacy, and Israel’s efforts have done little beyond promoting instability for others. That indeed has been a goal for much of Israel’s activity, to render others unstable or even chaotic while it sits in a heavily-armed crusader fortress. And where instability hasn’t been a goal, it has supported the relative comfort of absolutism in its neighbors, as in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

The long war in Syria and several other ugly matters in the Middle East are largely Israeli projects, carried out in covert cooperation with Saudi Arabia and America and Britain and France. Syria’s War is not a true civil war.

Of course, there were originally elements of legitimate opposition, but their relatively small numbers were drowned out by mercenaries and foreign intervention by bombing, missiles, and special operations. Assad has always been supported by all the powerful segments of Syrian society and by a majority of people. He is a unifying and stabilizing force. Just look at the army’s long, grueling loyalty through all of this. And minorities, such as Christians, tend to see Assad as their protector.

Ever since Afghanistan, America has regularly adopted a strategy of using proxies. The Northern Alliance – the pre-existing local political opposition to the Taleban, one, mind you, containing much of the same brutality and backwardness as the Taleban – did most of the fighting on the ground in Afghanistan while the United States did what it does best, bomb people. Variations on the theme have been used in Libya and Syria.

The events at Benghazi, Libya, so embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, also were related to this concept of proxy war. The American Ambassador was involved in recruiting cutthroats and shipping weapons from war-torn Libya to promote more hell in Syria. Some of the cutthroats saw the Ambassador himself as a good target for whatever reason. That is the real reason the attack has never been scrutinized for the public.

In Syria, we have several phony jihadi groups, who are in fact paid mercenaries. Any genuine Islamic radicals would have had as their first targets Israel and the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, but we never see that. We see these groups – ISIS, al-Nusra, others – attacking only people Israel hates.

We also see weapons caches of stuff from Israel and the United States discovered, time and again, by the Syrian Army as it advances. We’ve even seen Israeli and American helicopters move some of the leaders of these thugs at critical moments. Some of the wounded have been treated at hospitals in northern Israel.

And we have the phony White Helmets, aligned with al-Nusra and effectively in the business of promoting increased American and British bombing through propaganda films and provocative acts, all done while carrying on with a much-publicized image of brave rescuers. This dirty outfit was formed by France and is financed by Britain, two governments pretty much as heavily influenced by the Israel lobby as the government of the United States.

It would be wonderful if the withdrawal proves honest, but powerful groups in Washington don’t just fold their tents and ride off because a proven erratic President makes a sudden decision against their interests.

 

AFTERNOTE:

I notice in news the next day a story on Trump’s having spoken of “the slow and highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area” as reported of a telephone conversation with Turkey’s Erdogan. That’s a rather worrying, courtroom-lawyer kind of phrase. We’ll see.

ADDITIONAL AFTERNOTE:

On the day after Christmas, Trump, making a visit to troops in Iraq said:  “In fact we could use this as the base if we wanted to do something in Syria,”  The United States has several bases in Iraq and is said to have about 5,000 troops.

The number being withdrawn from Syria is about 2,000. Whether they also will go to Iraq is not known, but NATO fairly recently called for a larger effort at stabilization in Iraq.

ADDITIONAL FOOTNOTE:

It has been reported that the American military recently built two new bases in Iraq along the Syrian border.

So, it does appear that Trump’s controversial decision about leaving Syria has a lot less to it than meets the eye.

But that would be in keeping with the noise and lack of substance of virtually everything the man does.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Labour antisemitism row was created by Israel trade union boss suggests”

 

He’s absolutely right. Please recall that Netanyahu himself stuck his nose into the affair, even getting what he was charging quite wrong.

The head of Israel’s Labour Party also butted in with a letter that was published.

And there have been other voices from Israel.

It truly has been the most blatant interference in the internal political affairs of another state, making anything Putin has been accused of look silly.

The “anti-Semitism” line does not give people a free pass to do things that are recognized everywhere as completely unacceptable.Israel hates Corbyn for two facts.

One, he is a “Leftie” and Israel’s government hates “Lefties” in general because they invariably speak to concerns over human and democratic rights in the world.

And, two, he has a balanced view of the Mideast and treats Palestinians as though they were full human beings with fair claims to decent and equal treatment.

Now, those are truly terrible things Corbyn stands accused of, aren’t they? I am sure he would plead guilty.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN GOV’TSLAVES

 

“US media’s silent complicity in Israeli massacre in Gaza”

____________________________

Response to a comment saying Israel was the Jewish homeland and Palestinians don’t belong there:

Your comment is really uninformed and straight from a script.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Ashkenazi, the people who run modern Israel and the people who provided most of the early Zionist movement, in fact are a Germanic people whose native language is Yiddish, a dialect of German.

As a people, DNA tests show they arose no more than a thousand years ago.

They have no relationship, except sharing their religious beliefs, with the Biblical Hebrews. The Hebrew language was perpetuated by distant Jewish religious schools in exactly the way Arabic is perpetuated in distant Muslim religious schools. Muslims believe they should read Koran in its original, if possible. Jews believe the same thing about Torah.

If anyone qualifies as what remains of the ancient Hebrews of two thousand years ago, it is the Palestinians themselves.

The Romans never removed the Hebrews from their province despite rebellion. It was not the Roman practice in its conquests to do so, and the Romans, really good record-keepers, left no record of the Hebrews being sent packing. It would have been a pretty big operation, and it would have caused ripples and disturbance all over the Empire, but there is absolutely no record.

After all, Jewish people embrace many myths and stories with little basis other than tradition, just as all religious groups do. There is no record of Jews as slaves in Egypt. Not a single word or artifact. The name Moses is indeed said to be from the Egyptian. There is no record of King David. And of course, there is no record of Jonah or Lot’s Wife or a hundred other matters.

The entire Askenazi story of Jews wandering the world after expulsion from the Holy Land is just that, a story.

It ties them into the Hebrews they mimic, but it just has no basis in fact, anymore than all those earlier Hebrew stories have.

The Ashkenazi, a Central and Eastern European people, were undoubtedly converted to Judaism by Hebrews long ago who saw the blazing success of Christianity in its evangelism – Christianity having started as one of many Jewish sects and splinter groups going back to the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls – and for a while, the Hebrews seem to have copied the Christians’ evangelical efforts in hopes of having their always fairly small community grow.

That is almost certainly how we ended up with small groups of Jews in a number of scattered places, including even Africa.

Even were it true that today’s Jews were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews – and it emphatically is untrue – what possible and reasonable claim to Palestine would they have after two thousand years of supposed absence.

Surely, no more than the Greeks would have claiming part of Turkey for having won the Trojan War three thousand years ago, as described in Homer’s Iliad. And there are countless other examples of ancient events – wars and movements of peoples – which, if admitted into ways of settling modern boundaries and affairs, would turn the world into chaos, just as the Middle East has been turned into chaos by Israel.

This would all be laughable, basing land claims and rights in the 21^st century on questionable events from one group’s ancient holy book, were it not so tragic.

You claim what is not yours, and you claim it based on 2500-year old religious texts saying some “God” gave it to you. What a promising standard for 21st century arrangements.

The silliness only goes unchallenged because many in the West feel guilty over the Holocaust and are more than happy to see yet a different party, the poor Palestinians, be provided as sacrificial lambs to angry Jewish people. The whole modern re-creation of Israel is precisely about that and little more.

The Holocaust – used as a way to justify modern Israel and to defend its many brutal excesses – occurred on another continent, Europe, and it involved one set of German people abusing another set of Germanic people, the Ashkenazi. The Palestinians, in Western Asia, had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

But they were in a very weak and vulnerable position owing to European colonialism, so they were made to pay.

Just imagine an arrogant government official in Britain vaguely promising – and the Balfour declaration’s wording is indeed vague – a Jewish homeland to some Zionists whose help was needed by Britain in WWI, a homeland which was already the home of other people, although of course the British ruled it as part of their long efforts to keep a passage to India, the Crown Jewel of their Empire.

The declaration has no basis in proper law, was entirely arbitrary and self-serving, and yet that little note is kept in Israel today in a glass display case as though it were the American Declaration of Independence.

No, the Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, yet it is the Palestinians who were made to pay a great price, and they are paying still. Generations of occupation and abuse, countless attacks and debasements and assassinations, deprivation of all the norms of civilized life. No rights, no citizenship, no freedom of movement.

The leaders of today’s Israel seem to have learned only one thing from their grandparents’ terrible abuse at the hands of the Nazis, and that is how to copy them in many of their horrible behaviors to get what you want.

Gaza, to any unbiased eye, is just a vast concentration camp, one allowed to endure for more than half a century in misery.

But everyone in the West is intimidated against saying so, intimated by the constantly-repeated slur of “anti-Semitism” and by the power of the United States, a world bully today behind whose skirts Israel hides.

Of course, the United States is happy with the situation. It did not have to take all those Jewish refugees it very much had shown that it did not want, having turned boatloads away before the killing of the Holocaust was started. And given today’s arrogant and hyper-aggressive world-imperial United States, Israel provides it a handy colony and pied-a-terre in the Middle East.

It’s all a pretty inglorious chapter in modern history.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON INVESTMENTWATCH

 

“Did you know that On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy intelligence ship, was attacked in international waters? The attack killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173. And we still give billions per year to the aggressor”

There is no question of Israel’s responsibility in attacking the USS Liberty, of course, but I’ve often wondered whether there was some kind of complicity by Lyndon Johnson.

He was a very dark and devious man. Played dirty politics his entire career, including his very first election in Texas which he won by vote fraud. And he sure wasn’t reluctant to see people killed, launching, as he did, the mindless Vietnam War in which an estimated 3 million Vietnamese were killed eventually, a true holocaust.

I’ve never understood the way he just shut everything down right after the attack – called off emergency responders and made no big diplomatic storm over the event and made no great effort to make Israel pay for what it had done, pay in any way.

It was the chance of a lifetime to put Israel in its proper place, a small nation with defined borders. Instead, his response allowed Israel to grow into a Frankenstein monster. His is a great burden of guilt for Israel’s next fifty years of brutal abuse.

It doesn’t make sense, especially considering his volatile temperament. I think his reasons have never been examined, but I know there were reasons. He had a motive, if nothing other than a huge secret effort to buy him off by the Israel Lobby.

It has been speculated that Israel’s knowledge of Johnson’s complicity in President Kennedy’s assassination was used to shut him up. This is distinctly possible, however, while we know the Warren Commission’s version of the assassination was a complete fantasy, we do not know just what really happened. Johnson was from the beginning a highly plausible suspect, but we do not have the necessary proof.

Israel’s motive for the attack is quite clear. They wanted to turn their armor in the south to head north, something they had been advised against.

So, they shut down the American intelligence ship. This, of course, also shut down reporting of Israel’s atrocities in Sinai, which the ship’s gear would have picked up.

Israel was in such a mad rush to turn the armor around, the army just machine-gunned all the Egyptian prisoners of war they had in Sinai. Hundreds of them.

But for Israel, this was from the beginning a war of conquest. It was carefully planned, and Israel knew it could win against the disorganized Arab states that it had deliberately provoked a number of times leading up to the actual conflict.

Of course, fifty years later, we all still live with the hideous results, seeing millions live with absolutely no rights, no citizenship, no votes, constant abuse, and even the degrading insult of having additional homes and farms stolen periodically.

Moshe Dayan, the victorious general of the Six Day War, made numerous statements to the effect of Israel’s having to make the Palestinians feel miserable enough, they would leave.

Well, Israel certainly has done its part in making millions miserable, but they greatly underrated the courage and stamina of the Palestinians, who are not leaving.

Here are some details of the event: http://www.rense.com/general39/pilot.htm