Tag Archives: geopolitics

Biden, Israel’s accomplice in Gaza, pretends to be a bystander

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While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

On October 15th, President Biden took umbrage at a suggestion that his administration could not back both the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza at the same time.

 “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation… in the history of the world,” Biden told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”

Three months and well over 20,000 defenseless Palestinians slain later, the self-declared leader of the most powerful nation in the history of world now claims to be a helpless bystander.

According to four US officials, Biden is “increasingly frustrated” and “losing his patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected “most of the administration’s recent requests related to the war in Gaza,” Axios reports. “The situation sucks and we are stuck,” one official complained. “The president’s patience is running out.” Another official fumes that “there is immense frustration” in the Oval Office. According to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen: “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger. They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”

Van Hollen is correct that the administration is getting slapped in the face by Israel. But he omits that Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.

As Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon explained last month, any US demand of Israel’s military is perfunctory. “They didn’t agree to a ground invasion — we invaded,” Danon said. “They didn’t agree to [attacking] Al-Shifa hospital — we ignored their request. They wanted a pause without hostages — we didn’t accept that. We have no American ultimatum. There is no deadline from the US.”

The US not only imposes no conditions on its support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, but has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons for it. After all, this administration professes to have “no red lines” when it comes to Israeli aggression, and is fronted by a president who has declared that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.

While Biden and his aides now pretend to have their hands tied, their instrumental role is undeniable. “Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future,” former US diplomat Patrick Theros writes. “A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.”

“If you want to use your leverage, use your leverage,” former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy says of Biden’s stance. “You’ve chosen to give Israel a blank check.”

That choice continues. In meetings with Israeli officials on Nov. 30th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed his counterparts that they had “weeks, not months” to “wrap up combat operations at the current level of intensity,” US officials later told the New York Times. Upon a return visit to Israel this week, Blinken again touted his push for what he called “the phased transition of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” That “transition” to a “lower-intensity phase,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday, “is coming here very, very soon.”

But away from the news cameras, the posture changes. A senior US official now explains to the Washington Post that it’s in fact “pointless to urge them [the Israelis] to change.” Accordingly, “Washington’s priority has now shifted to tolerating Israel’s high-intensity operation throughout January, while insisting instead that it downgrade the tempo in February.”

In other words, the US has decided to tolerate Israel’s genocidal tempo in Gaza as normal. From Washington’s point of view, saving thousands of Palestinian lives from murder at the hands of US-supplied weaponry would be pointless.

Biden is so committed to continuing the Gaza slaughter that he has even expanded the war zone to Yemen. In a statement announcing his authorization of US strikes last week, Biden declared that he was acting to protect “freedom of navigation” and the “free flow of international commerce.” Since mid-November, the group that controls most of Yemen, Ansar Allah (misleadingly known in the US as the Houthis), has been targeting commercial ships – primarily those with Israeli links – passing through the Red Sea in a bid to compel the Israeli government to halt its assault on Gaza. By contrast with Israel’s operations, which has an official death toll of 23,000 and counting, Ansar Allah has not killed anyone. It even lost at least ten fighters in a US counterattack on December 31st. As Biden noted, Ansar Allah’s main impact has been to threaten “weeks of delays in product shipping times.” (Others estimate that the delay time can in fact be counted in days).

As in Gaza, the ultimate targets of US aggression in Yemen are civilians. While the Pentagon claims to be targeting Ansar Allah’s military capabilities, the “greater risk from the air attacks is likely borne by ordinary Yemenis,” the New York Times notes. This risk to ordinary Yemenis is consistent with longstanding US policy, specifically the current Biden team’s 2015 decision under President Obama to green-light the Saudi-led war on Yemen that has caused the ensuing humanitarian crisis. Around 21 million Yemenis – two-thirds of the country – rely on aid for survival, while more than four million are internally displaced.

In facing “one of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities,” the Times adds, Yemen faces “a dubious distinction now shared by Gaza.” Given its critical support for Israel’s assault, the US therefore has the dubious distinction of fueling two of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities.

Because of Israel’s blockade and military assault, the risk of famine in Gaza is “growing by the day,” Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official now warns. “As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety.” For Gaza’s civilians – more than 90% of them displaced — “dignified human life is a near impossibility.”

According to one anonymous official with Israel’s occupation authority for Gaza (COGAT), the lack of dignity for Palestinians in Gaza is a genetic trait. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” the official told Haaretz. “…There were stockpiles of food in Gaza. Don’t forget that this is an Arab, Gazan population whose DNA is to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”

It is apparently in the White House DNA to share its Israeli client’s avowed bigotry. In a statement Sunday night, President Biden marked “100 days of captivity” for the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden’s emotional message failed to even mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, wounded, and displaced under US-backed Israeli assault over that same period.

“No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden said of the hostages. By refusing to acknowledge them, Biden is affirming via omission that he believes the exact opposite — and in fact infinitely worse — for Gaza’s two million Palestinian hostages. After 100 days of genocide, the people of Gaza are fated to endure continued atrocities as a direct result of US policy, no matter the Biden team’s ongoing effort to pretend otherwise.

How the U.S. Regime Carries Out Its Oppression

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

HOW IT DOES DOMESTIC OPPRESSION

On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, says the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

HOW IT DOES FOREIGN OPPRESSION

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

On 17 June 2015, I headlined “THE WHO’S WHO AT THE TOP OF THE COUP” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia, “he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

CONCLUSION

The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

War Propaganda Intensifies as US Mainstream Media Calls for War on Iran to Stop the “Axis of Resistance”

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Remember when the mainstream media especially FOX News was calling for an attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein and the Bath Party was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)?  FOX News was the main cheerleader for the US and its European allies to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein.  To be fair, CNN and MSNBC and other news outlets were also cheerleading for war, but FOX News was clearly, the loudest voice.  Today, FOX News is at it again with other right-wing media networks who have been also calling for the US and its allies to bomb Iran to stop the Axis of Resistance that includes Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraqi resistance groups and now Yemen, with the Houthi rebels who have been launching missile attacks against Israeli and Western commercial ships in the Red Sea in support of Gaza. 

Fox News senior strategic analyst, who a former General with the US Army, Jack Keane, a war hawk who served as an advisor to manage the US occupation of Iraq and a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.  Keane is also chairman of AM General, a heavy vehicle and automotive manufacturer that produces military Humvees for civilian and military use.  Recently, Keane spoke on FOX News regarding the 60 + strikes conducted by US and British fighter aircraft on Yemen.  The main points he made on the FOX network was that US and its British allies already had their targets pinpointed due to Centcom, the US central command, “they were likely tracking the Houthis were trying to hide some of this capability for the last few days.  But we got excellent surveillance there, and likely we will, we are able to determine whether they are moving a lot of this, they will finish the assessment, believe me, I think if there is capability there, that is still significant, we should reattack and then we got to remind ourselves what’s really happening here.” 

Keane went on to say that Iran is “the center of gravity”, therefore it must be attacked to stop its proxies in the region:

The center of gravity for the aggression in the Middle East that we’re experiencing is Iran. We have said this time and time and time again, and to deter the proxies themselves by hitting them will not be sufficient.  We have got to go after Iran themselves by hitting them will not be sufficient.  We have got to go after Iran, they are, as I mentioned, the center of gravity, Centcom has a table of targets that they have provided to the administration in how to go about doing that comprehensively to shut down their support for these proxies that has got to be high on our list.  And what that really means Brian, we have got to re-set the strategy in dealing with Iran in the region and admit the fact that this thing has failed.  When they came in, they removed the Trump sanctions.  Iran’s flush with oil money now, as a result of it, they went after the nuclear deal.  That failed    

Keane is not the only psychopath who wants World War III, another frequent quest on FOX News, Lindsey Graham who is South Carolina’s Republican Senator and a Pro-Israel activist was quoted in a FOX News article, ‘Lindsey Graham calls for warning Iran of retaliation if Hamas escalates, tells ‘Squad’ to ‘shut the hell up’ reported that the “South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham castigated the far left’s “appeasement” of Iran’s regime, which he said has not prevented attacks by Hamas against Israel, telling the Palestinian-friendly “Squad” contingent in Congress to “shut the hell up.”  On America Reports, a show produced by FOX News, Graham said that “The only way you’re going to keep this war from escalating is to hold Iran accountable. How much more death and destruction do we have to take from the Iranian regime? I am confident this was planned and funded by the Iranians.”

Sounding like a far-right Israeli politician, Graham also said that “Hamas is a bunch of animals who deserve to be treated like animals” he added that “Israeli forces should use this opportunity to invade Palestinian territory and “dismantle” the militant group.”  Graham used the Hitler comparison to the Hamas’ resistance as “an effort to kill Jewish people on par with that of former German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.” 

In 2005, a few years after Iraq was already invaded and destroyed, Pew Research found that FOX News was more biased in reporting on the war in Iraq than CNN and MSNBC, “measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air” and that “the news channel was also decidedly more positive in its coverage of the war in Iraq, while the others were largely neutral. At the same time, the story segments on the Fox programs studied did have more sources and shared more about them with audiences.”  This does not mean CNN and MSNBC is innocent nor any better on the lead-up to the war on Iraq, but FOX News is surely on the frontline when it comes to war propaganda. 

Iran is the ultimate prize for the neocons in Washington and Israel.  Israel wants to get the US military into another war but this time to attack Iran.  They are using the mainstream media that they control to gain support from the US population who are clueless about what is happening in the Middle East.  FOX News is a major part of the propaganda machine, so they will continue to call for another major war to appease their Zionist masters in Israel. 

In an article published in 2003 by The Guardian that was correctly titled, ‘Their Master’s Voice’ on Rupert Murdoch, the owner of FOX News said that “you have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him.”   It goes on to say how much influence Rupert Murdoch, who is a neocon at heart, has in his media empire:

Murdoch is chairman and chief executive of News Corp which owns more than 175 titles on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. His television reach is greater still, but broadcasting – even when less regulated than in Britain – is not so plainly partisan. It is newspapers which set the agenda

What was Murdoch’s agenda during the war in Iraq? In an interview in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, one of the newspapers that Murdoch owns, said that “We can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam…I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it.” He was also asked about another war criminal-at-large and former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair:

I think Tony is being extraordinarily courageous and strong… It’s not easy to do that living in a party which is largely composed of people who have a knee-jerk anti-Americanism and are sort of pacifist. But he’s shown great guts as he did, I think, in Kosovo and various problems in the old Yugoslavia”

Fox News is cheerleading for another war but this time against Iran who is not Iraq.  Iran has the capabilities to hit every US base in the Middle East especially those in Iraq and Syria. It has a formidable military that is ready to defend their territorial integrity. If the US and their Israeli counterparts decide to attack Iran, rest assured, the entire Middle East would erupt and they would support Iran and that will be the end of all US bases in the region and possibly, the end of a 75-year-old occupation of Palestine.      

FOX News has supported every war, it has supported every assassination of foreign military and political leaders, and it has supported every regime change operation on all corners of the globe.  There is nothing “Fair and Balanced” with FOX News and their paid propagandists who basically work for Military arms manufacturers, major corporations, the right-wing part of the American and European political establishment and of course, Israel. 

This is dangerous war propaganda all over again, we can call it, Iraq 2.0., but this is much worse because this coming war will involve many countries and resistance groups, especially those in the Middle East.   

U.S. Interventionism in Latin America is to Blame for Ecuadorian Civil War

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Deteriorating social conditions, dollarization and lack of punishment for criminals have been key aspects of Ecuadorian politics since the U.S.-led regime change in the country.

By Lucas Leiroz

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In South America, a new scenario of hostilities is emerging. A civil war began in Ecuador, with the local government declaring martial law and a state of “internal armed conflict” in response to several terrorist attacks carried out by drug trafficking groups. At first, this seems like a simple domestic security issue, with no major geopolitical relevance. However, analyzing the case in depth, it is possible to see that the conflict situation is a direct result of U.S. interventionist actions in Latin America.

Ecuador has been going through an extremely turbulent political and economic period over the last seven years. In 2017, Lenin Moreno was elected president in the country as an ally of Rafael Correa. Combining elements of the socialist left with Catholic conservatism, Correa was the leader of the so-called “Citizen Revolution”, having promoted important social reforms over ten years, making the country one of the most prosperous and safe in South America.

Moreno was elected with the promise of continuing Correa’s legacy, having broad popular approval due to the endorsement given to him by his predecessor. However, once coming to power, Moreno undid the legacy of the Citizen Revolution, breaking with Correa and launching a radical neoliberal wave strongly supported by the U.S. Not only that, Moreno was also a key factor in consolidating a reactionary wave across South America, having even sent weapons and war equipment to Bolivia in 2019 in order to support Jeanine Añez’s coup d’état.

The neoliberal shock policy implemented by Moreno and his successor Guillermo Lasso had a brutal social impact in Ecuador. In addition to poverty, unemployment, inflation and other problems in the economic sphere, neoliberal measures also brought with them an exponential increase in crime. The country’s safety indexes quickly dropped. The number of homicides jumped from 970 in 2017 to 4800 in 2022. The country went from being the safest in South America to becoming the most dangerous one, consolidating a drastic social change with catastrophic impacts.

During his years in government, Rafael Correa had implemented both economic measures to reduce social inequalities and strong punitive actions against criminals, halting the growth of the organized crime in the country. He, however, failed to reverse Ecuador’s economic dollarization, which had been implemented before his rise to power. Correa had plans to change Ecuador’s monetary policy, but Moreno’s “soft coup d’état” prevented such a project from being advanced.

It is known that dollarized economies are preferred by drug trafficking cartels and criminal organizations since the absence of exchange mechanisms makes it easier for illegal money to circulate in society, mainly through money laundering schemes. In this sense, since dollarization in 2000, the Ecuadorian authorities have had many difficulties in controlling the illegal economic flow in the country, and this has only gotten worse as criminal networks have gained even more power in the country since Moreno’s neoliberal shock.

Regarding the criminal scenario, Ecuador is known for being a region disputed by Colombian and Mexican cartels. Several gangs operate in Ecuador as proxies for foreign cartels. The country’s location is strategic for the drug market in the southern direction of the continent, which is why Mexican and Colombian traffickers (who control the illegal Latin American market) compete for Ecuadorian territory and back local armed militias to achieve their objectives. In addition, Ecuador is located between Peru and Colombia, which are the two largest global producers of cocaine, further increasing the strategic interest of the Ecuadorian territory for drug trafficking.

Neoliberalism in Ecuador has made the state incapable of controlling the activities of foreign groups in the country, as well as preventing local citizens – increasingly poor and vulnerable – from being co-opted by illegal networks. The result was the emergence of a brutal conflict, with the authorities completely losing control of the situation.

The current outbreak of violence began after the state reacted to the escape from prison of Adolfo Macías — known as “El Fito” — leader of the “Los Choneros” gang. The government declared a state of emergency and tried to impose a siege on the criminals, but suffered several brutal retaliations, with members of Fito’s gang capturing the University of Guayaquil, invading a live TV studio, and even bombing hospitals and public facilities. Furthermore, prisons were captured by criminals, with officers being held hostage, tortured and even hanged. The barbaric scenario led President Daniel Noboa to declare war on the “domestic enemy”, calling on the armed forces to act.

Currently, the streets of Ecuador are the scene of brutal urban warfare, with soldiers facing heavily armed narco-terrorists in intense attrition. The power acquired by criminal groups in the country is impressive, which shows how the impotence of a neoliberal state can have devastating consequences for national security.

It is important to emphasize that U.S.-born Daniel Noboa does not appear to be a skilled politician to reverse this situation completely. He came to power in a tense electoral scenario, in which gangs actively participated in political disputes, even being involved in the murder of a candidate. Noboa is a liberal politician who is extremely aligned with the U.S., and is not interested in resuming Correa’s policies, in addition to suffering a lot of pressure from criminal groups – which have a broad institutional infiltration.

However, it is desirable that at least the public situation in the country returns to normal in some way. The use of military force is the correct way to neutralize gang violence, but it is not the key to solving the drug trafficking problem. To truly undermine the power of criminal networks, it is necessary to implement illiberal policies that reduce poverty, removing ordinary citizens from the sphere of influence of drug trafficking in the country’s periphery. Furthermore, it is necessary to de-dollarize the economy and establish a sovereign currency and exchange rate policy, which make the work of drug trafficking more difficult through strict control of financial flows.

Noboa will certainly not be able to end the drug trafficking problem, as he is not willing to follow the illiberal path, but there is hope that, with the use of force, he will be able to return to normality at some point in the future. After suffering losses on the battlefield, gangs may agree to secretly negotiate a peace agreement with the government to end hostilities on both sides. This will have a positive aspect, as it will put an end to fighting, but it will also have a catastrophic characteristic, as it will definitely turn Ecuador into a Narco-State, where criminal gangs negotiate with the government and act in an institutional manner.

If the U.S. had not intervened in Correa’s Citizen Revolution, perhaps the situation in Ecuador would be different today. But, with neoliberalism and dollarization, the only possible result is a scenario like the current one.

Biden and Netanyahu Agree on Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The agreement, which has been arranged through National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in the White House and Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu, is that poor countries with corrupt leaders will be bribed to accept forced immigrants from Gaza so as to cleanse it in order to carry out settlement of Jews into that area, after Gaza’s post-war reconstruction, which will be done by the Governments of Israel and U.S., by paying contractors from both countries to ‘make the desert bloom’ there for the incoming Jews.

On January 3rd, the Times of Israel — which was founded by the late gambling casino mega-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who had been the chief donor to the political careers of both Netanyahu and Trump, and so the newspaper that he created has well-connected sources inside Israel’s Government — headlined “Israeli officials said in talks with Congo, others on taking in Gaza emigrants”, and reported:

The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister-site Zman Yisrael reports that Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.

“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells Shalom Yerushalmi.

Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”

Saying education to hatred will continue in Gaza and further attacks on Israel are only a matter of time, she added: “The Gaza problem is not just our problem. The world should support humanitarian emigration, because that’s the only solution I know.”

Yesterday Washington panned far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir for advocating the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza.

“This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

This is consistent with the news earlier regarding both Biden and Netanyahu, that Netanyahu will be ethnically cleansing Gaza while Biden will give lip-service to criticizing it but will continue to set no conditions upon the U.S. Government’s supplying of weapons and of military intelligence to Israel’s forces to carry out the ethnic cleansing there. Both Netanyahu and Biden, meanwhile, will be arm-twisting at the U.N. General Assembly to gain approval for the forced-resettled-in-Africa Gazans to receive aid from U.N. agencies, in order to keep down the refugees’ maintenance-costs in those countries, sufficiently so as to avoid rebellions by those receiving countries’ publics that might result from tax-increases for those receiving Governments to pay for those immigrants who will have become relocated there.

As I reported earlier, the previous plan by both Netanyahu and Biden was to expel the 2.3 million Gazans to either Egypt or Jordan, but on October 16th and 17th both of those Governments refused to participate. This is what has now led to the negotiations with the Governments of “the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.” If the Biden and Netanyahu team cannot find lands to cooperate, then whatever Gazans survive the bombardments and siege might be simply starved to death, in which case the end-result will be a genocide against the Gazans, instead of merely an ethnic cleansing of them. So: the current plan might not be the final plan, the final solution to the Gazan problem.

US-British Attacks on Yemen a Portent for Wider War

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By Brian Berletic

Source: New Eastern Outlook

In the opening weeks of 2024, the US and British unilaterally launched several large-scale missile and air strikes on targets in territory held by Ansar Allah (referred to as the “Houthis” across the Western media) in Yemen.

The strikes follow a campaign of missile strikes and boardings conducted by Ansar Allah against commercial shipping destined to and from Israel in response to Israel’s ongoing punitive operations in Gaza.

While the stated purpose of the US-British strikes are to protect commercial shipping, hostility of any kind in the Red Sea is likely to prompt international shipping companies to continue seeking out and using alternative routes until fighting of any kind subsides.

Indeed, according to Euronews Business, despite the US-British strikes on Ansar Allah, the CEO of Maersk, responsible for one-fifth of global maritime shipping, believes safely transiting the Red Sea is still months away.

Despite the political posturing that accompanied these attacks, strategically, they will do little to impact Ansar Allah’s fighting capacity. The political movement possesses a formidable military organization that has weathered years of full-scale war waged against it by a Saudi-led Arab coalition, backed by both the US and UK.

Not only did the US and UK encourage Saudi Arabia to sustain an air and ground war against Yemen, both Western nations contributed directly to Saudi Arabia’s war efforts.

The New York Times in a 2018 article titled, “Army Special Forces Secretly Help Saudis Combat Threat From Yemen Rebels” admitted that US special forces were operating, at a minimum, along the Saudi-Yemeni border, assisting Saudi Arabia’s armed forces in choosing targets.

The same article admits that the US was also lending assistance related to “aircraft refueling, logistics and general intelligence sharing.”

The Guardian in a 2019 article titled, “‘The Saudis couldn’t do it without us’: the UK’s true role in Yemen’s deadly war,” admitted to the scope of support provided by the UK to Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen. It included supplying weapons and munitions, thousands of maintenance contractors, pilot training, and even sending British troops to fight alongside Saudi soldiers in Yemen itself.

The scale of both Saudi Arabia’s own war on Yemen and the scale of US and British assistance to Saudi Arabia, including through the use of thousands of contractors and hundreds of soldiers on the ground, dwarfs the current missile and air strikes conducted by the US and British from the Red Sea. Even if the US and British significantly expanded their current missile and air strike campaign, it would still pale in comparison to the war that has been waged against Yemen in recent years.

Clearly then, the current US-British strikes on Yemen hold little prospect of deterring Ansar Allah, so why is the US and British carrying out these strikes anyway?

Washington’s True Motives for Striking Yemen 

CNN in an article titled, “US and UK carry out strikes against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen,” would claim:

For weeks, the US had sought to avoid direct strikes on Yemen because of the risk of escalation in a region already simmering with tension as the Israel-Hamas war continues, but the ongoing Houthi attacks on international shipping compelled the coalition to act.

Yet, because the strikes only ensure shipping in the Red Sea remains obstructed and because the strikes themselves have little hope of impacting Ansar Allah strategically, the only other explanation as to why the US launched them was to specifically raise “the risk of escalation in the region.”

Ansar Allah’s ally, Iran, has been the target of US-sponsored regime change operations for decades. Entire policy papers have been written by US government and corporate-funded think tanks, including the Brookings Institution and its 2009 paper, “Which Path to Persia?,” detailing options to achieve regime change including through deliberate attempts to draw Iran into a war by both covert action within Iran, and through attacks on Iran’s network of regional allies.

The Brookings paper admits:

“…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)”

Preceding the US-British missile and air strikes on Yemen, the US has carried out strikes on Iranian allies across the region, including in Syria and Iraq. Israel, with US-backing, has also carried out attacks across the region on Iranian allies, specifically on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

There was also recently a terrorist bombing inside of Iran, likely carried out by one of several terrorist organizations sponsored by the US to carry out just such attacks, as per the Brookings paper’s own suggestion regarding “ratcheting up cover regime change efforts inside Iran.” It should be noted that elsewhere in the Brookings paper the option of using known terrorist groups to carry out US-backed “insurgency” is afforded an entire chapter (Chapter 7, Inspiring an Insurgency – Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups). 

Together, this constitutes a strategy of attempting to degrade Iranian allies in the region ahead of a wider conflict, and as a means of provoking and thus drawing Iran itself into that wider conflict.

So far, Iran has exhibited tremendous patience. Iran, as both Russia and China who face similar US policies of encirclement and containment, knows time works in its favor. Iranian patience has already served Tehran well. It has afforded it the ability to diplomatically resolve tensions between itself and Saudi Arabia through Chinese mediation. It has also allowed Iran to continue building up not only its own military capabilities, but those across its network of allies in the region, leading to a gradual shift in the balance of power in Tehran’s favor.

Washington realizes this. This time next year, if events continue to unfold as they have in recent years, Iran will only be stronger and the US more isolated in the region. The US faced a similar problem of waning primacy in Europe, using its proxy war in Ukraine against Russia as a means of reasserting itself over Europe. Washington likely imagines it can use a similar strategy to reassert itself over the Middle East while using a regional conflict to collectively weaken and thus subordinate the nations therein.

Only time will tell if the US is as “successful” in the Middle East as it was in Europe. Already many factors are working against the US, but from Washington’s perspective, it isn’t paying the price for any of these conflicts – the regions these conflicts are fought in are paying that price. As long as Washington is absolved from any direct cost in such a foreign policy, it will continue pursuing it until it is finally and fully denied the means to continue doing so.

When Yemen Does It It’s Terrorism, When The US Does It It’s “The Rules-Based Order”

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We are ruled by murderous tyrants. By nuclear-armed thugs who would rather starve civilians to protect the continuation of an active genocide than allow peace to get a word in edgewise. 

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The Biden administration has officially re-designated Ansarallah — the dominant force in Yemen also known as the Houthis — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity. 

The White House claims the designation is an appropriate response to the group’s attacks on US military vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, saying those attacks “fit the textbook definition of terrorism.” Ansarallah claims its actions “adhere to the provisions of Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” since it is only enforcing a blockade geared toward ceasing the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza.

One of the most heinous acts committed by the Trump administration was its designation of Ansarallah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT), both of which imposed sanctions that critics warned would plunge Yemen’s aid-dependent population into even greater levels of starvation than they were already experiencing by restricting the aid that would be allowed in. One of the Biden administration’s only decent foreign policy decisions has been the reversal of that sadistic move, and now that reversal is being partially rolled back, though thankfully only with the SDGT listing and not the more deadly and consequential FTO designation.

In a new article for Antiwar about this latest development, Dave Decamp explains that as much as the Biden White House goes to great lengths insisting that it’s going to issue exemptions to ensure that its sanctions don’t harm the already struggling Yemeni people, “history has shown that sanctions scare away international companies and banks from doing business with the targeted nations or entities and cause shortages of medicine, food, and other basic goods.” DeCamp also notes that US and British airstrikes on Yemen have already forced some aid groups to suspend services to the country.

So the US empire is going to be imposing sanctions on a nation that’s still trying to recover from the devastation caused by the US-backed Saudi blockade that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths between 2015 and 2022. All in response to the de facto government of that very same country imposing its own blockade with the goal of preventing a genocide.

That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up a blockade to try and stop an active genocide, that’s terrorism, but when the US empire imposes a blockade to secure its geostrategic interests in the middle east, why that’s just the rules-based international order in action.

It just says so much about how the US empire sees itself that it can impose blockades and starvation sanctions at will upon nations like Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea for refusing to bow to its dictates, but when Yemen imposes a blockade for infinitely more worthy and noble reasons it gets branded an act of terrorism. The managers of the globe-spanning empire loosely centralized around Washington literally believe the world is theirs to rule as they will, and that anyone who opposes its rulings is an outlaw.

What this shows us is that the “rules-based international order” the US and its allies claim to uphold is not based on rules at all; it’s based on power, which is the ability to control and impose your will on other people. The “rules” apply only to the enemies of the empire because they are not rules at all: they are narratives used to justify efforts to bend the global population to its will.

We are ruled by murderous tyrants. By nuclear-armed thugs who would rather starve civilians to protect the continuation of an active genocide than allow peace to get a word in edgewise. Our world can never know health as long as these monsters remain in charge.

The Transition

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Many institutions have no convincing justification for their own existence.

By Robert Gore

Source: Straight Line Logic

Western civilization is characterized by its institutions. Its foundations have been government, organized religion, the military, science, technology, business, academia, media, art, and entertainment. Institutions have been bulwarks of order and have enabled Western civilization to reach unprecedented plateaus of achievement and prosperity. Now, they’re under assault and crumbling, which has been often noted and decried but usually not analyzed or understood as the outcome of an epochal transition.

Institutions have been the victim of their own success. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have put goods, services, wealth, data, and choices in billions of hands in what amounts to an historical blink of an eye, less than two centuries. The average American lives better and longer than royalty did back in monarchy’s heyday and has more personal power. Kings and emperors of yore could order people around and toss them in dungeons, but they couldn’t hop on the Internet and communicate with someone on the other side of the planet or hop on a freeway and journey five hundred miles in a day.

Institutions’ loss has been individuals’ gain, and many of the latter are questioning the necessity of the former. Institutions are staring into an abyss. Many, including governments, do not have convincing justifications for their own existence. They offer little to average people and in many cases they’re a net negative, imposing nothing but burdens. Their leaders are solely devoted to furthering their own prerogatives and power. Now, institutions are fighting a rearguard action to halt or slow a transition that at best will dramatically reduce their power and could mean their extinction.

COVID, climate change, foreign wars, censorship, woke, open borders, surveillance, and digital passports and currencies are Last Gasp efforts to preserve institutional status, wealth, and power. The institutions have responded to their own drum roll with what vigor they can muster, but those causes inspire vapid virtue signaling, not authentic passion. Their only wellspring of true passion is hatred for anyone who believes differently, who challenges their science, propaganda, and mendacity, and, more broadly, their right to dictate and coerce, and to cancel, punish or execute anyone not toeing their line.

Their objective failures—many of which count in their corrupt reckonings as successes—are manifest. The COVID response, particularly vaccines’ deaths and adverse events, completely discredited governments, public health, institutional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, and social and mainstream media, while inflicting severe collateral damage on official “science,” big business, and central banks. The institutions are regrouping under the banner of climate change, but it’s clear from the pushback they’re already receiving that their agenda can only be implemented through violence and high-tech totalitarianism.

Repeated failures and ever-mounting resistance would seem to be enough to doom their totalitarian designs. Unfortunately, in their desperation and hatred, the willingness of the elite to wage actual, kinetic war on the rest of us shouldn’t be underestimated. While the COVID vaccine death toll numbers in the millions, war still has no rival for murderous effectiveness. However, offensive violence is no solution.

Nuclear weapons changed warfare in a way that’s not generally recognized. The threat that a global nuclear conflagration could eliminate humanity rendered their use a high-risk proposition. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945 remain the only wartime use of nuclear weapons. Under the umbrella created by nuclear weapons’ unemployability, technological advances have fueled the development of a staggering array of armaments that has decisively shifted the military balance from offensive to defensive warfare.

World War II was the last major war in which an offensive, or, more correctly, a counter-offensive, won. The allied powers repelled the axis powers, but at huge cost. Industrial-scale, mechanized warfare’s awesome destructive power left all the major participants except the U.S. in ruins, their populations decimated.

Offensive military power has become enormously expensive relative to the defensive technologies and strategies that can be employed against it. Since World War II, there have been few successful invasions. Both sides were stymied in the Korean War. U.S. invasions have been a string of disasters since Vietnam. Afghan goat herders defeated both the Soviets and the U.S.

On the cusp of victory in Ukraine, the Russian Special Military Operation would seem to belie the trend of offensive failures. However, the Russians have actually won by playing defense. They moved through their major objective, the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population speak Russian. Many of them want to be part of Russia and hate the Ukrainian government, which has waged war on them since the 2014 coup. Consequently, the Russians were supported by the local population.

This past year featured a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to drive the Russians back from Donbass and retake the Crimean peninsula. NATO and Ukrainian strategists refused to recognize that their offensive was akin to sending cavalry units against machine-gun and artillery emplacements. They were up against an opponent well-armed with land mines, state-of-the-art field artillery and long-range missiles, air cover, and surveillance and attack drones. The Russian military, which has a long tradition of waging defensive warfare, employed a complex three-layer defense. The Ukrainians rarely progressed through even the first layer, impaling themselves on the tip of the Russian spear and taking massive losses.

The successful Russian strategies and tactics will be, or should be, studied by military analysts in the U.S. However, what’s most important is that those tactics implicitly acknowledge a truism central to the transition in progress. High-cost offensive warfare can be stymied and often defeated with relatively low-cost defensive weaponry and asymmetric warfare.

It can be argued that an offensive against the world’s most powerful military was obviously doomed, although nobody in the Western brain trust made that argument before the Ukrainians attacked. What truly signals the dawning of a new age have been the repeated successes since World War II of guerrilla or insurgent warfare against ostensibly much more powerful forces.

The Russians learned their lesson from the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. The U.S. government hasn’t learned anything from its string of failures. In Washington, nothing succeeds like failure. Its unconditional backing of Israel’s attempted elimination of Palestinians in Gaza finds it doubling down on what hasn’t worked.

The Israelis recognize a grim reality of fighting an insurgency on insurgent territory: To win, it’s not enough to kill the guerrillas; the guerrilla-friendly local population must be eliminated as well. The Israelis’ campaign has been merciless: destroying structures, killing Palestinian civilians, and making life intolerable for the survivors. The Israeli aim is to drive the Palestinians from Gaza and Israel for good. This meets international-law definitions of genocide and has been rightly decried around the world.

What will it mean if Israel fails? The Israelis may well reduce Gaza to rubble, but that would not be mission accomplished. Rubble provides excellent cover for guerrilla strikes. Hamas’ extensive tunnels indicate that it has prepared for this war for years. In all probability, it launched the October 7 attack to get things going. Israel’s negligence detecting and responding to that attack may have been intentional, indicating that it, too, wanted the war it now has.

Hamas has a network of allies across the Middle East. Israeli and U.S. forces and maritime commerce are under attack in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. Yemen’s Houthis have already bottled up the Red Sea. It would be an easy matter for Iran to do the same in the Persian Gulf. Control of maritime commerce at important choke points calls into question a plank as central to the American Empire as it was to the British Empire before it: control of the world’s seas and oceans.

What happens if an American-led flotilla tasked with keeping the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf open comes under a swarming missile and drone attack, plus electronic warfare that disrupts its command and control capabilities, and destroyers or aircraft carriers are sunk? Missiles, drones, and cyber disruption cost a pittance compared to battleships, and it would then be apparent that they make conventional surface naval power a paper shark. The vessels in their watery grave would send the same message as the tanks smoldering on Ukraine’s battlefields.

The power of governments rests on their ability to use violence to control populations. Yawning cost disparities, decentralized technologies, and asymmetric warfare have rendered much of conventional offensive power vulnerable or obsolete, marking an historic, tectonic transition in the relationships between governments and governed. This is no secret, particularly in the non-Western world.

Across the globe, insurgents are taking the measure of governments and finding them wanting. Governments that are not feared cannot govern. As they confront their limitations, they will, being governments, make their situations worse.

The American government has a problem not shared by many others. Its potential insurgents—urban, suburban, and rural—are armed to the teeth. They already control many of the cities (see “Ants at the Picnic, Part Two”). Heavily indebted Washington cannot command the resources necessary to subjugate the population. It gets stretched thinner with each new dollar of debt, each new tax, each new institutionalized corruption, each new illegal migrant, each new substitution of gobbledygook ideology for rationality, and each new foreign intervention. Recognition of Washington’s weakness is behind the talk of secession and some states’ defiance of its dictates.

Washington’s weakness is shared by many Western governments, although most of them don’t have to contend with armed opposition. They do have to contend with increasingly restive populations, which by sheer force of numbers can upend existing political arrangements. It is delusional to think that these beleaguered national governments can be replaced by a confederated or unitary global government that could then exercise effective control.

The imposition of global government would entail an invasion by an outside force of millions of globally dispersed localities. The global force would encounter the same problem Israel faces in Gaza. Overt and covert opposition could number in the billions.

The globalists would have to contend with organized insurrection, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism, as well as random riots, criminality, and widespread disorder. They would have to resort to the Israeli “solution” in Gaza—mass extermination. While they are relying on propaganda, subversion, electronic control, and biological warfare, perhaps only nuclear weapons could achieve genocide at the necessary scale. Don’t put it past them. Don’t put it past the insurgents to acquire their own nukes.

Short of nuclear conflagration, the world will continue to devolve towards institutional failure, popular disillusionment, mounting rage, and chaotic fragmentation and balkanization. Today’s dinosaur governments are unable to exercise control, and many of them are slated for extinction. They will not be replaced by an even larger and more unwieldy dinosaur—global government—which is only the last, desperate hope of the fading regime. Instead, the vacuum created by failed governments will be filled by those proficient in decentralized violence. Those who have relied on centralized authority for their livelihoods, power, and status will find their worlds turned upside down. Many will not survive the transition.

Assume crash positions.