Tag Archives: Jordan

The World’s Gyre

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Bu Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The U.S. is edging closer to war with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, a state security agency composed of armed groups, some of which are close to Iran, but which for the main are Iraqi nationalists. The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad, Wednesday that killed three members of the Kataeb Hizbullah forces, including a senior commander. One of the assassinated, al-Saadi, is the most senior figure to have been assassinated in Iraq since the 2020 drone strike that killed senior Iraqi Commander al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani.

The target is puzzling as Kataeb more than a week ago suspended its military operations against the U.S. (at the request of the Iraqi government). The stand down was widely published. So why was this senior figure assassinated?

Tectonic twitches often are sparked by a single egregious action: the one final grain of sand which – on top of the others – triggers the slide, capsizing the sandpile. Iraqis are angry. They feel that the U.S. wantonly violates their sovereignty – showing contempt and disdain for Iraq, a once great civilisation, now brought low in the wake of U.S. wars. Swift and collective retaliation has been promised.

One act, and a gyre can begin. The Iraqi government may not be able to hold the line.

The U.S. tries to separate and compartmentalise issues: AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade is ‘one thing’; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated ‘another’. But all know that such separateness is artificial – the ‘red’ thread woven through all these ‘issues’ is Gaza. The White House (and Israel) however, insists the connecting thread instead to be Iran.

Did the White House think this through properly, or was its latest assassination viewed as a ‘sacrifice’ to appease the ‘gods of war’ in the Beltway, clamouring to bomb Iran?

Whatever the motive, the Gyre turns. Other dynamics are running that will be fuelled by the attack.

The Cradle highlights one significant shift:

“by successfully obstructing Israeli vessels from traversing the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Ansarallah-led Sanaa government has emerged as a powerful symbol of resistance in defence of the Palestinian people – a cause deeply popular across Yemen’s many demographics. Sanaa’s position stands in stark contrast to that of the Saudi and Emirati-backed government in Aden, which, to the horror of Yemenis, welcomed attacks by U.S. and British forces on 12 January”.

“The U.S.–UK airstrikes have prompting some heavyweight internal defections … a number of Yemeni militias previously aligned with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, consequently switched allegiance to Ansarallah … Disillusionment with the coalition will have profound political and military implications for Yemen, reshaping alliances, and casting the UAE and Saudi Arabia as national adversaries. Palestine continues to serve as a revealing litmus test throughout West Asia – and now in Yemen too – exposing those who only-rhetorically claim the mantle of justice and Arab solidarity”.

Yemen military defections – How does this matter?

Well, the Houthis and AnsarAllah have become heroes across the Islamic World. Look at social media. The Houthis are now the ‘stuff of myth’: Standing up for Palestinians whilst others don’t. A following is taking hold. AnsarAllah’s ‘heroic’ stance may lead to the ousting of western proxies, and so to dominate that ‘rest of Yemen’ they presently do not control. It seizes too, the Islamic world imagination (to the concern of the Arab Establishment).

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of al-Saadi, Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad chanting: “God is Great, America is the Great Satan”.

Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture?

The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing – and now has claimed the most central tenet in the ‘Biden strategy’ for resolving the crisis in Gaza. The ‘dangle’ of Saudi normalisation with Israel was viewed in the West as the pivot – around which Netanyahu would either be forced to give up on his maximalist security control from the River to the Sea mantra, or see himself pushed aside by a rival for whom the ‘normalisation bait’ held the allure of likely victory in the next Israeli elections.

Biden’s spokesperson was flagrant in this respect:

“[We] … are having discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia … about trying to move forward with a normalization arrangement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So those discussions are ongoing as well. We certainly received positive feedback from both sides that they’re willing to continue to have those discussions”.

The Saudi Government – possibly angry at the U.S. recourse to such deceptive language – duly kicked the plank out from beneath the Biden platform: It issued a written statement confirming unequivocally that: “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops – and all Israeli occupation forces are withdraw from the Gaza Strip”. The Kingdom stands by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in other words.

Of course, no Israeli could campaign on that platform in Israeli elections!

Recall how Tom Friedman set out how the ‘Biden Doctrine’ was supposed to fit together as a interlinked whole: First, through taking a “strong and resolute stand on Iran” the U.S. would signal to “our Arab and Muslim allies, that it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner … that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region; Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price”.

The second strand was the Saudi dangle that would inevitably pave the path into the (third) element which was the “building of a credible legitimate Palestinian Authority as … a good neighbour to Israel …”. This “bold U.S. commitment to a Palestinian state would give us [Team Biden] legitimacy to act against Iran”, Friedman foresaw.

Let us be plain: this trifecta of policies, rather than gel into a single doctrine, are falling like dominoes. Their collapse owes to one thing: The original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence across Gaza’s civil society – ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the U.S. and Europe.

How did this happen? Because nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion).

The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.

So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited.

The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on.

The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante. Some 75 years after the founding of the Israeli state, as former Israeli negotiator, Daniel Levy, has. noted:

‘[We are back to] “the “banal debate” between the U.S. and Israel over “whether the bantustan shall be repackaged and marketed as a ‘state’”.

Could it have been different? Probably not. The reaction comes from deep in Biden’s nature.

The trifecta of U.S. failed responses paradoxically has nonetheless facilitated Israel’s slide to the Right (as evidenced by all recent polling). And has – absent a hostage deal; absent a Saudi credible ‘dangle’; or any credible path to a Palestinian State – precisely opened the path for the Netanyahu government to pursue his maximalist exit from collapsed deterrence through securing a ‘grand victory’ over the Palestinian resistance, Hizbullah, and even – he hopes – Iran.

None of these objectives can be achieved without U.S. help. Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit?

The incongruity, coming as it does, at a moment when the West’s Ukraine Project is imploding, suggests that Biden may see himself needing some ‘grand victory’, as much as does Netanyahu.

Arab regimes collude with Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza

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By By Jean Shaoul

Source: Defend Democracy Press

As Israel’s fascist government prepares to launch a massive ground invasion to take over Rafah city, discussions are now under way about setting up 15 campsites—each with around 25,000 tents—across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, to house the million-plus Palestinians that have taken refuge in the city.

These tent cities are to be funded by the United States and Arab despots and operated by the butcher of Cairo, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt and other Arab regimes are in effect providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ability to claim he has assured the “safe passage” he said he would provide so that the planned ground invasion could take place. As Netanyahu again declared as Israel mounted a massive aerial bombardment of the city, his real goal is “total victory”—which means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest into the desert.

That such proposals could even be discussed with the Arab regimes confirms that their collusion with Israel’s genocidal offensive against Gaza, from day one, has now become direct participation in its ethnic cleansing through a second Nakba.

Israel has already killed at least 29,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, buried thousands more under the rubble, and displaced approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people. The majority are now sheltering in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt where they face famine, lack access to clean water and medical care and the imminent prospect of extermination.

Egypt: Israel’s border guard

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 104 million people and the key frontline state, has for decades played a criminal role as a direct accomplice in Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians and its de facto border guard.

Since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has extended its ties with Tel Aviv, importing natural gas from Israel for refining and re-export, coordinating security over their shared border and the Gaza Strip, maintaining Israel’s blockade on Gaza, and strictly limiting the movement of people and goods across its borders after Hamas took control in 2007. Egypt stood by when Israel launched murderous assaults on the besieged enclave in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, the 2018-29 Great March of Return and 2021.

When the Gaza offensive started in October, Israel’s “wartime proposal” to push Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert was met with a furious response from Cairo. However, this was not out of any concern for the Palestinians but because of what El-Sisi called “Gaza’s existential threat to Egypt’s national security.” If a million Gazans crossed the border, he warned, this would lead to a resurgence of Islamist “militancy” in Sinai.

When El-Sisi refers to a resurgence of Islamist militancy, he means a renewal of the mass popular opposition known as the 25 January Revolution, which in 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring”, ended Mubarak’s personal rule. On July 3, 2013, the junta was able to resume power in a military coup thanks to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois liberal opposition and their pseudo-left appendages in the Revolutionary Socialists, who provided leading personnel for the anti-Islamist Tamarod movement through which the military and its billionaire backers prepared the political ground for the coup. El-Sisi has brutally crushed all dissent ever since and the last thing he wants is millions of displaced and angry Palestinians to act as the focus for broader political opposition to his regime, to US imperialism and all its allies in the region.

The army has already fortified the concrete border wall with Gaza, installing barbed wire to prevent the Palestinians from crossing into the Sinai and deploying troops and 40 tanks along the border.

El-Sisi, speaking at a press conference on October 18 with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo, argued that Israel could move Gaza’s Palestinians to Israel’s Negev desert instead of Sinai “until Israel is capable of defeating Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, Palestinians could return to their homeland.”

Reports are circulating, citing the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, that Egypt is constructing an eight-square-mile walled enclosure in northern Sinai to host Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza, though this is described as a “contingency plan” in the event Palestinians succeed in breaching the reinforced border.

But wherever the de facto concentration camps being discussed are eventually established, Egypt and the other Arab regimes involved are giving a greenlight for mass murder in Rafah. On Sunday, with breathtaking cynicism Egyptian officials, responding to these latest proposals for tent cities, told Israel that they would not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Army Radio also said that Egypt had emphatically denied reports it might pullout of its 1979 Camp David treaty if Israel attacked Rafah.

All the oil-rich despots are working openly with Israel to enable it to pursue its genocidal war, even deepening their ties to ensure Israel can continue the war without hindrance. They cover their treachery with crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and appeals for an urgent meeting of the toothless UN Security Council that is subject to Washington’s veto “to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian disaster for which everyone who supports the aggression is responsible.”

Jordan: Repressing Palestinian protests

Jordan has played the most open role in repressing popular opposition to Israel. It shares a long border with Israel and is home to over 2.2 million registered Palestinian refugees driven there by wars between 1947 and 1967, and their descendants. Around half of its 11 million population are of Palestinian descent, of whom around two thirds have been granted citizenship, but they face discrimination while nearly 400,000 still live in 10 refugee camps. Jordan has maintained a “cold peace” with Israel following a US Clinton administration-brokered normalization treaty in 1994.

The Jordanian government has banned protests along its border with the West Bank and clamped down on protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it has “arrested or harassed” over 1,000 pro-Palestine protesters who have called for the Jordanian government to take action against Israel. Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said “Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly to tamp down Gaza-related activism.”

Last week, the authorities arrested activist, Khaled al-Natour, after he shared posts calling for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of the government’s heightened crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, under a controversial new cybercrime law. According to Amnesty International, the vaguely worded law, passed in August, gives the government huge latitude to crack down on free speech and has been used to arrest and charge at least six political activists for their “social media posts expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments or criticizing the authorities’ policies towards Israel and advocating for public strikes and protests.”

Arab regimes keeping Israel’s economy running

Jordan, along with several other Arab states, is also playing a central role in keeping Israel’s economy functioning during the war.

According to Israel’s television Channel 13, the United Arab Emirates-based PureTrans FZCO and Israel-based Trucknet, which provides logistics technology for the Arab shipping companies, are transporting vital goods, including food, plastics, chemicals and electronic devices and components, between Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port and Haifa port, via roads passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The route was established prior to the Gaza offensive. In June, Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, announced plans to develop the route, stating on X/Twitter that “the overland transportation of the goods will shorten the time by 12 days and greatly reduce the existing waiting time due to the wire problem. We will do it and we will succeed.” In September, Trucknet signed a shipping agreement with the UAE and Bahrain.

The plans also include a railway line, yet to be agreed, linking the UAE and Israel with a high-speed train service between Israel’s northern city of Beit She’an and southern port of Eilat on the Red Sea.

The route has assumed greater strategic significance since October and especially because of Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, helping Israel circumvent the shipping blockade and cutting the 14-day sea route around the Cape to four days.

Acutely conscious of the mass opposition within its already restive population to Israel’s genocidal war, Jordan denied that goods were being transported to Israel via its territory. But television reports showing trucks from the UAE crossing Jordanian territory to reach Israel exposed this lie, sparking anger and demonstrations against Jordan’s ‘shameful land bridge’ to Israel.

The Dubai-Haifa “land corridor” was in fact first mooted in 2017 by Israel’s transport minister Yisrael Katz and highlighted at the signing in 2020 of the Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain–and later with Sudan and Morrocco–that ended the participants’ long-standing economic boycott of Israel. It made apparent Israel’s economic ties with the Gulf states that had long been kept under wraps.

The Accords not only signified the ditching of their long defunct adherence to securing a “two-state solution,” even as Netanyahu threatened to annex one third of the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. It crucially paved the way for trade and investment deals with Tel Aviv, particularly in arms, technology and cyberware, and Israel’s broader economic integration into the region begun clandestinely after the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Saudi Arabia and the planned war against Iran

Bahrain could only sign up to the Accords with the tacit consent of its paymaster in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is now directly involved in the Dubai-Haifa corridor as part of its efforts to extract as many concessions as possible from Washington, including a defence agreement, commitment of “security” support, arms and fighter jets and help with a civilian nuclear program, even as it expanded its economic and political links with China to strengthen its bargaining position.

The land corridor is a key concern for the US and European imperialist powers. It is aimed at positioning the Israeli port of Haifa as a major gateway to Europe, altering the political and economic map of the region by bypassing the Red Sea and furthering Israel’s integration into the Gulf states’ economies.

Haifa would be the linchpin of the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major transport infrastructure project aimed at integrating India, the Gulf and Europe while avoiding Iran, which would bring India closer to US imperialism and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Oman’s Salalah Port, which has extensive ties with India, could also become part of the new network.

The project, which excludes Turkey, the largest non-oil economy in the Middle East, has aroused Ankara’s wrath, with government officials saying that the most suitable route for east-west trade passes through Turkey not Greece. It also undermines Egypt’s Suez Canal that is already suffering financial losses from the diversion of shipping round the Cape, intensifying its economic and social crisis.

The Arab regimes now account for one quarter of Israel’s $12.5 billion defence exports. Leaders from the UAE have also reiterated their commitment to the Abraham Accords, with UAE presidential foreign affairs adviser Anwar Gargash telling a conference in Dubai last month, “The UAE has taken a strategic decision, and strategic decisions are long-term.”

The bilateral flow of goods has exploded, expanding from $11.2 million in 2019 to $2 billion, excluding software, from January to August 2023, according to Israel’s UAE ambassador. The UAE-Israel partnership deal that came into force last year lowered tariffs with the aim of increasing bilateral trade to $10bn within five years. While far less than Israel’s trade with the European Union and Turkey, this is nevertheless far more than Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan.

As Israeli CEOs told the Financial Times, amid the Gaza genocide it has been “business as usual,” with new investment plans going ahead and the UAE’s airline continuing its flights to Tel Aviv even as others cancel theirs.

While Saudi Arabia was never a “frontline state” in the Arab Israeli conflict, in October 1973 it led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ban on the export of oil to those countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Arab Israeli War. The war began after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. Only Iraq and Libya did not take part in the oil embargo that was lifted in March 1974, by which time the price of oil had risen nearly threefold, massively increasing the oil states’ wealth and reactionary political influence in the region.

50 years later, there has been no mention of a similar embargo in defence of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, indicating the monarchies’ backing for Israel’s war, paid for and planned by the Biden administration, to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich region and suppress all opposition to Washington and its regional allies and to their own regime.

Israel’s war on Gaza has done nothing to derail Washington’s long-running efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A potential Saudi-Israel deal is a crucial part of its bid to settle the Gaza conflict with Riyadh indicating its willingness to proceed with discussions. For their part, the US and UK have consolidated the reversal of their previous opposition to Riyadh’s war to unseat the Houthis in Yemen, launching hundreds of aerial strikes on the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping linked to Israel aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its war and blockade of Gaza.

The Arab regimes, whose populations hold them in contempt, have made a pact with the devil: support for Israel—and by implication US imperialism—in return for Washington’s commitment to back their “security” in the event of a new “Arab Spring” or mass movement to unseat them, and to wage war against Iran, which has backed opposition forces to their rule, as part of its preparations for war on China.

Stupid Macho U.S. Electioneering Will Push Biden Into Doomed War

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Predictably, Joe Biden is being flayed by the Republicans over the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan by Iraqi militants.

The Democrat president is slammed for being weak and a coward by his political opponents.

Donald Trump, his main Republican rival, mocked Biden as a “loser” and said the attacks on U.S. troops were because of the president’s “weakness and surrender”.

Nikki Haley, the other Republican vying for the presidential election this year, also taunted Biden for showing spinelessness toward Iran. She called for direct retaliation on the Islamic Republic “with the full force of American strength”. Logically, that could imply the use of nuclear weapons.

Unanimously across the mainstream U.S. political spectrum, it was assumed that Iran was ultimately responsible for the deadly attack on the U.S. military base on Sunday in Jordan where three military servicemen were killed and 34 were reportedly wounded, according to early reports.

The attack was claimed by Iraqi militants, the Kata’ib Hezbollah, as part of an umbrella group known as the Islamic Resistance. The militants are believed to be an alliance of militias based in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen. The latter two include Hezbollah and the Ansar Allah movement also known as the Houthis. All are allied with Iran. But each is understood to have its own agency in directing and executing operations.

These groups have carried out hundreds of attacks on U.S. and Israeli bases since October 7 when Israel launched its offensive on Gaza following the deadly raid on Israel by Hamas. The Yemenis bring a maritime dimension to the region-wide resistance with the ongoing targeting of U.S. and other ships in the Red Sea area.

Iran has denied that it was involved in the latest attack on the U.S. base in Jordan. Tehran also denies it is behind the Yemeni operations in the Red Sea.

Iran and the resistance groups say they are an anti-imperialist alliance that is united by opposition to the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. These groups are not “Islamist” in the mold of Islamic State and its hardline Sunni (Wahhabi or Takfiri) offshoots. Far from it. The resistance groups were galvanized to defeat the Islamists which have been fomented and supported covertly by the United States for its regime change war in Syria. That proxy war was defeated after Russia intervened in 2015 in support of Syria.

The Americans are locked into a downward spiral created by their own flawed logic and cumulative imperialist occupation in the region.

Even President Biden has accused Iran of being responsible for the killing of the three U.S. military personnel. Biden vowed to respond at a time of “our choosing”.

So, Washington unquestioningly determines that Iran is the master culprit. That means the U.S. has committed itself to going after Tehran without any evidence or realistic understanding of where such a direction is leading. That is, how bad it could get for the Americans.

In a U.S. election year shaping up to be more fraught than ever, and with Biden facing dwindling poll numbers, the White House incumbent is highly susceptible to being goaded by Republican adversaries.

Trump has already been hammering Biden for being weak and frail. With the Middle East turning into a cauldron over the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, the Commander-in-Chief is cornered to show mettle. Biden is a hostage of stupid macho politics and bankrupt American imperialism. Diplomacy is simply not an option for the empire, according to its own logic and delusions.

After the deadly drone strike on the U.S. base in Jordan, Republican Senator Tom Cotton dialed up the revenge with the usual warmongering ranting and raving: “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating retaliation against Iran’s terrorist force… Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Biden’s inaction was the problem because it was emboldening enemies in the Middle East, saying: “The time to start taking this aggression seriously was long before more brave Americans lost their lives.”

How hilarious that Biden is scoffed at for being dovish. During his long career, he has been one of the most warmongering politicians in Washington. He backed the U.S.-led NATO wars in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and presently in Ukraine. The only thing cowardly about Biden is that he is a craven tool of the military-industrial complex and a pathetic psychopath.

Biden is also known for his bad temper and macho knee-jerk character. We can be quite certain that the Republican taunts about his supposed pusillanimous policy in the Middle East will get his hackles up. Biden has already taken a reckless militarist position over supporting Israeli aggression. The shocking mass killing of over 26,000 Palestinian civilians under a brutal blockade of starvation has shocked the world and in particular Arab and Muslim people. And yet Biden has not paused in his “unwavering support” for Israel.

Biden has led U.S. imperialism out of the quagmire of Afghanistan into an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East. With the goading by his equally brainless political rivals, the Americans are plowing further into disaster.

With over 50 military bases strung across the Middle East in 10 countries and with over 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region, the Americans are sitting ducks for the resistance. The advent of drones and newer missile technology is a new realm of warfare the Americans have not adapted to with their land garrisons in remote deserts and gaudy warships.

The death of three U.S. troops has long been on the cards. The stupid American politicians think they are going to get revenge. They have no idea what is coming to them given the long history of U.S. aggression, provocation, and illegal occupation in the region. The support of Israel’s genocide, the heartrending scenes of children being torn apart by American bombs, the bombing of Yemen – the poorest Arab country – the crazed threats to Iran, the insufferable American arrogance, and decades of impunity are all now welling up in the Middle East.

The stupid American politicians are digging a hole for themselves and have no awareness of how to reverse it. Democrats, Republicans, Biden, Trump, and so on, they are all a ship of fools.

The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse

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Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous. 

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator. 

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.  We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you.  The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. 

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.” 

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza. 

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank. 

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.  

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military. 

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018. 

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority —  an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu. 

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.  

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7. 

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

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.