Tag: Middle East

Trump Endorses Ethnic Cleansing

I could be wrong, but I have the feeling there might be something more going on here than the straightforward endorsement of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza it appears to be.

Donald Trump’s bold plan to have the U.S. take over Gaza and transform it from rubble into a Middle East ‘Riviera’ is sparking fears from foreign policy experts who warn it could lead to a bloody occupation if it actually took place.

Trump’s ambitious comments about the U.S. seizing an ‘ownership position’ in the territory – even by sending troops if necessary – had lawmakers and analysts wondering if his vision would plunge the nation into the potentially bloody role of occupying power amid an intractable conflict.

Although Trump said Middle East leaders ‘love’ the idea and that the 1.8 million Gazans he estimated would be relocated to other countries would embrace it, there was evidence that the proposal was not fully cooked when Trump floated it at a press conference.

After all, who is going to live there? Anyhow, as with everything Trump says, don’t pay too much attention to it unless and until he actually does it. This could just be a way of keeping the media looking one way until something else is done, especially given everything he’s actually done so far.

AC offers an intriguing observation.

 I think Netanyahu tried to pressure Trump into relocating the Gazans, cleaning up the explosives, and redeveloping the land so Israel could take it over, get the gas reserves under it and make a shipping channel to compete with the Suez Canal, and pissed Trump off. So Trump waited until this news conference and just announced there the US would take possession of Gaza, probably figuring we can establish a port there for the Navy, some listening posts, maybe even to monitor the Israelis, and a base to allow us to operate in the region. Netanyahu does not look pleased.

We’ll see. Considering how things have been going so far, at this point, the God-Emperor 2.0 merits a lot of our trust.

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The End of Foreign Aid

President Trump has ended US foreign aid. Most foreign aid, anyhow. One guess as to the exception…

The US State Department has issued a halt to nearly all existing foreign assistance and paused new aid, according to an internal memo sent to officials and US embassies abroad.

The leaked notice follows President Trump’s executive order issued on Monday for a 90-day pause in foreign development assistance pending a review of efficiencies and consistency with his foreign policy.

The United States is the world’s biggest international aid donor spending $68bn in 2023 according to government figures. The State Department notice appears to affect everything from development assistance to military aid.

It makes exceptions only for emergency food aid and for military funding for Israel and Egypt. The leaked memo’s contents have been confirmed by the BBC.

“No new funds shall be obligated for new awards or extensions of existing awards until each proposed new award or extension has been reviewed and approved,” says the memo to staff.

It adds that US officials “shall immediately issue stop-work orders, consistent with the terms of the relevant award, until such time as the secretary shall determine, following a review.”

It also orders a wide scale review of all foreign assistance to be completed within 85 days to ensure the aid adheres to President Trump’s foreign policy goals.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the US’s top diplomat – has previously stated that all US spending abroad should take place only if it makes America “stronger”, “safer” or “more prosperous”.

This is a good start, but it all needs to be shut down. Permanently. There is absolutely no justification for a single penny to be sent to any nation or state outside the United States, especially given the precarious financial state of the federal government. It was a serious oversight by the Founding Fathers not to ban any and all foreign aid, especially given their opinion of the deleterious nature of foreign entanglements.

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Ceasefire in Gaza

Whether the Gaza war was a genocide, a pyrrhic victory for Hamas, or the most humane invasion and occupation in military history, there aren’t a lot of people who are confident it will last. Simplicius contemplates why Netanyahu suddenly agreed to it after a series of rejections:

We can’t have particularly high confidence of it succeeding, particularly given that top Israeli officials like Ben-Gvir have already expressed their hopes that the deal will fail, and will undoubtedly give their most earnest try in undermining it in any way possible.

It also has little bearing on Israel’s continued strikes on various other surrounding countries, from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen. Israel even stepped up strikes on Gaza today, killing a reported dozen or so—one supposes they needed to sate their fill of bloodlust as consolation for the coming cessation of hostilities.

In fact, a report just earlier claimed that Israel even unleashed its first direct strike on Jolani’s troops: The Israeli Air Force has carried out its first strike on the forces of the terrorist group HTS, which has seized power in Syria.

The attack targeted a convoy of militants in the province of Quneitra to prevent them from getting closer to IDF forces on the ground. This was right around the time that Erdogan issued a loud rebuke toward Netanyahu, calling on him to stop striking Syria as tensions continue rising between Turkey and its Syrian proxies and Israel.

Erdogan: “The aggressive actions of the forces attacking Syrian territory, Israel, in particular, must come to an end as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will cause unfavorable outcomes for everyone.”

We’re left to speculate whether this rising new threat is chief amongst reasons for Netanyahu finally acquiescing to a ceasefire he rejected many times before. With the IDF’s continued dismal performance—in particular its major failure in incurring into Lebanese territory—Netanyahu may have chosen to reduce the burden of the multi-fronted war in order to free up resources to concentrate on the potential new threat from the Turkish-Syria axis.

The immediate situation looks much better for Israel than it has in years, if not decades. While the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah has been a failure, the unexpected success in Syria more than makes up for that. However, trading Syria for Turkey as an enemy would not appear to be strategically advantageous. Especially if – and it’s a big if – Erdogan leads Turkey out of NATO, strikes up an alliance with Iran and Russia, and joins BRICS.

At least at this point, the biggest winner in the Israeli-Palestinian-Syrian war looks like Turkey.

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Babylon Babbles

Forget Western civilization. When did the Jews ever have anything to do with any civilization? They’re still a literally nomadic tribe! Did they invent civilization when they were enslaved for four centuries in Egypt? When ten of the 12 tribes were carried off by the Assyrians? Or perhaps they invented Western civilization in Babylon while they were enslaved there? I don’t suppose they could have invented civilization when they were being ruled by the Medo-Persians or by Rome.

If we are to take their historic claims to the land of Israel by right of conquering the Canaanites seriously, then they’ve never been part of Western civilization at all, let alone responsible for any part of its invention. The fact that this historic land is in the Middle EAST would be the first clue there.

But Joel Berry does provide us with the useful service of conclusively disproving the ludicrous 115 average IQ fiction. The amusing thing is that these historical illiterates who take the Straussian Athens + Jerusalem metaphor literally don’t realize that it’s simply a metaphor that refers to Western philosophy and religion, not the actual cities or their historic residents.

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Wailing at the Roman Wall

Archeologists and historians have determined that the so-called “wailing wall” that we’ve been told was part of the Jewish temple destroyed in 70 AD actually belongs to a Roman castra built for the Roman garrison of Jerusalem.

We have two major problems here. First, Roman and Christian literary sources agree with Jesus that not one stone of the Temple was standing on another. How can we reconcile this with the fact that the walls of the alleged Temple Mount still have more than 10,000 stones standing upon another? Secondly, Josephus, an eyewitness, says that that the only major building that the Romans spared in 66-70 was their own imperial headquarter, the Roman fort called Fort Antonia, built by Herod the Great and named after his patron Mark Anthony. Where is this fort? Archaeologists have been digging for it in vain, and can’t even agree where it was located. Here is what Israeli archaeologist Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah has to say:

Surprisingly, despite the long duration of military presence in Jerusalem, … no archaeological remains have been attributed with certainty to the military camp and its site has not yet been identified. … One cannot underestimate the difficulty caused by the absence of irrefutable evidence of the Roman army camp in Jerusalem. … At this stage, there is no acceptable solution to the problem of the “lack of remains”.

Fort Antonia housed a legion, that would number at least 5000 men and about 5000 support personnel. Josephus tells us it was like a city in size, dominating the Jewish city. It was so large that troops could perform military maneuvers within the enclosure, in mock war training exercises. We know that Fort Antonia was not destroyed in 70 because it continued to house the Roman Legion X Fretensis until 289 AD, when the Legion was transferred to Ailat on the Red Sea.

So while the sources tell us that the Temple was demolished down to the bedrock and the Roman fort remained in use for 200 years, we are nevertheless asked to believe that the opposite happened: the huge fortified Roman fort disappeared entirely, while the Temple compound is still perfectly recognizable, with its four walls almost intact.

By some additional miracle, that alleged Temple compound, the Haram esh-Sharif on which now stands the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, fits the standard design and size of the Roman forts scattered throughout the empire, and built after the pattern of the Praetorian Camp in the northeastern part of Rome.

There is only one way to make sense of this absurd situation: the Roman fort has been mistaken for the Temple Mount. As Professor George W. Buchanan put it in a 2011 article for the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs: “While it has not been widely published, it assuredly has been known for more than 40 years that the 45-acre, well-fortified place that has been mistakenly called the ‘Temple Mount’ was really the Roman fortress — the Antonia — that Herod built.”

The more we learn, the more we learn that the mainstream version of history is fiction when it isn’t an outright fairy tale.

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Regional Power != Global Invincibility

A surprising number of would-be war analysts are putting far too much stock in Russia’s inability to prop up the Syrian regime against the combined assault of US, Israeli, Turkish, and jihadist forces. But Russia and China are both REGIONAL powers; their inability to dictate events in the Middle East, or in Africa, is no different than the inability of the USA to dictate events in Eastern Europe or the Red Sea. The further away from their industrial core where force is generated, the harder it is to deliver a sufficient amount.

But the logistical difficulties in a remote location should never be confused with an inability to generate the force in the first place, as Andrei Martynov illustrates:

Russia is outpacing the arms production of the entire EU after significantly ramping up its defense industry and despite Western sanctions, the bloc’s commissioner for defense and space, Andrius Kubilius, has said. Kubilius, a noted Russia hawk and two-time prime minister of Lithuania, was approved by the European Parliament last month as the EU’s first ever defense commissioner. In an interview on Friday with the RND media group, he called on the EU to significantly expand the production of conventional weapons such as artillery and infantry vehicles, as well as long-range and precision weapons amid what he called a Russian attack threat. “The Russians have expanded their arms industry to an unimaginable extent despite our sanctions,” Kubilius stated. Russia now produces “more weapons in three months than the entire European arms industry can produce, and in six months more weapons than the entire German army has,” he added. Kubilius also cited experts who, according to him, say that Russia now produces more tanks than it uses on the front lines in the Ukraine conflict.

I want to stress, that in the last few years, a very good man, who I will not name, because I respect him, no, he is not my acquaintance–was repeating ad nauseam that Russia “with the economy the size of Spain”. Sadly, there is no such profession as a “good man”, but for most people in the US “intel” community it is worth learning that Russia’s economy is the 4th economy in the world and, possibly, the third. I want to stress that GDP numbers circulating in the “intel” circles are crap invented in the combined West to hide its deindustrialization and financialization of own economies. US industrial base was in steady decline for decades now and realistically, with the exception of automotive industry (granted with huge pure assembly from import parts sector) and aerospace with naval construction… well, that’s about the most important US machine building sectors.

What changed the equation in Syria was the involvement of the Turks and their willingness to help Clown World depose the Assad regime. The Russians quite rightly assessed the situation as hopeless and extricated their forces as well as the Assad family without taking any losses; contrast that with the expense incurred by the futile Us and European attempts to preserve Ukraine and its Clown World regime. But Erdogan has long been open about his dream of rebuilding the Ottoman empire, and Syria is part of that former Ottoman territory.

A deluge of new evidence shows Turkey slowly fortifying its position as future hegemon of the region. As soon as Damascus fell, the director of the MIT—Turkey’s CIA equivalent—Ibrahim Kalin was spotted visiting Jolani, touring Damascus, as well as paying homage to the ancient Umayyad mosque. Several videos showed Jolani acting as personal chauffeur to Kalin, driving him around Damascus with an armed escort. Think about that: Jolani as personal driver to the head of Turkey’s top intelligence agency—that’s not to mention that Kalin was senior personal advisor to Erdogan and is member of his AK Party. So, Erdogan’s personal henchman is already shadowing Jolani, whispering in his ear—what can that mean? And what does that say about rumors that HTS had long ago cut ties with Turkey, with the same going for SNA/FSA/TFSA?

This is why Israel has already invaded southern Syria. In my estimation, Turkey poses a much more significant long-term military threat than Iran ever has, although I wouldn’t assume that Turkey won’t eventually ally with Iran against Israel when the Israeli-Turkish war eventually begins.

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Clown World Declares a Winner

Foreign Affairs declares Türkiye and Erdogan to be the winners of the sudden Syrian collapse:

In most capitals across the Middle East, the news of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall sparked immense anxiety. Ankara is not one of them. Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Chief among the rebel forces that ended Assad’s rule on Sunday is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the United Nations. Despite those designations, Turkey has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

All this has given Turkey influence over HTS. In October, Erdogan quashed plans for a rebel offensive in Aleppo; when rebel forces launched their campaign late last month, they likely did so with Erdogan’s approval. For years, Assad had been dragging his feet as Erdogan sought to mend ties with Damascus and repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees whose presence in Turkey undermined support for his ruling party. With Assad’s regional allies weakened by the Israeli campaign in Gaza and Lebanon, and Russia distracted in Ukraine, Erdogan saw an opportunity to force the Syrian leader to the table.

The rebels’ whirlwind success came as a surprise. Now, Assad is out of the picture altogether, and Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia—Turkey’s main rivals in Syria—are chastened; a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees; and Assad’s departure could even open a window for remaining U.S. troops to leave, fulfilling a long-sought goal of Ankara’s. If it can avoid the potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

Obviously Israel is one of the immediate winners; the Lebensraum advocates are already grabbing Syrian territory in the name of “self-defense”. But I’m not certain that convincing the rest of the world that any accommodation with the USA is impossible is likely to benefit the Netanhayu regime in the intermediate term.

Also, at some point, the Turkish desire for an Ottoman revival and Israeli dreams of a Greater Israeli Empire are bound to collide. And the numbers would appear to favor the Turks.

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The Liberal World Order is Over

Viktor Orban is correct, although ironically, it’s the fall of Syria, not Ukraine, that marks the end of the so-called Neo-Liberal Rules-Based World Order:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future.

“The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels.

EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant.” 

The rapacity with which Israel and Turkey are seizing Syrian territory, and the shamelessness with which the USA refuses to condemn their actions demonstrates that even those countries which are favored by Clown World can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense of what previously passed for “international law” any longer.

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Why Russia Quit on Syria

Andrei Martyanov’s citation of a Russian journalist helps explain why the Russians finally stopped protecting the Assad regime in Syria:

I do not feel sorry for the Syrian authorities. I remember too well how, back in 2012, we, Russian journalists, were “squeezed” at border control, with all our luggage turned inside out, and our cameras and photo cameras confiscated. Then they hounded us around the offices of various ministries, putting us through an unsolvable puzzle of obtaining various papers and permits. And Western reporters were practically carried around in their arms, trying to demonstrate their liberal views against the backdrop of the uprising in Daraa. These are not my personal grievances. This, among other things, was an expression of their attitude towards my country. Condescending, with rolled eyes and a disdainfully raised upper lip. Then we saved Syria in 2013, if anyone doesn’t remember. Obama was going to cover it with carpet bombing after the chemical provocation in Eastern Ghouta. And thanks to the efforts of Russian diplomacy, the catastrophe was averted. Postponed, as it turns out now. In 2015, we came to Assad’s aid again when the terrorists were five kilometers from the center of Damascus. And as best we could, we patched up this patchwork quilt, consisting of various religious, social, forbidden and not so forbidden pieces, between which contradictions grew.

Now Israel and Turkey will divide up whatever parts of the country ISIS-HTS are not allowed to keep. It appears the US military is already bombing their jihadist proxy army; one wonders how it is going to respond to the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan.

I would also keep an eye out for similarly sudden events in Ukraine; Martyanov and others believe Russia dropping its support for the Assad regime was traded for US dropping its support for the Kiev regime and that this was not necessarily the win for Clown World that it appears to be.

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The Dragon Stirs

If the events in the Middle East cause China to begin intervening with its military on behalf of its friends and allies, that is seriously going to alter the geopolitical math in that region.

China is “deeply concerned” about developments in Syria, where jihadist militants launched a surprise offensive last week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said on Monday. As Damascus’ “friend,” Beijing is prepared to take steps to prevent a further deterioration of the situation, he said.  

The Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, and allied militias launched a large-scale attack on government-controlled territory in northern Syria last Wednesday. The militants took over a number of towns and villages in the Aleppo, Idlib and Hama provinces.   

Syrian government forces, backed by Russian fighter jets, launched a counteroffensive on Thursday and successfully liberated several settlements over the weekend, reportedly eliminating hundreds of militants and thwarting their advance into central Syria. However, dozens of Syrian army service members were lost amid the heavy fighting, the Syrian General Command said in an earlier statement.  

“China is deeply concerned over the situation in northwestern Syria, and supports its effort to uphold national security and stability,” Lin told a press briefing on Monday. “As Syria’s friend, China is willing to make an active effort to avoid further deterioration of the situation in Syria,” the official said.   

China has the manpower to swamp every other military; the Red Army is an order of magnitude larger than anything currently in seen in the Ukrainian front, which is itself two orders of magnitude larger than the conflict in the Middle East.

We appear to be rapidly approaching hitherto-unimaginable levels of Fuck Around and Find Out.

UPDATE: Speaking of FAFO, China is also ready for the trade war too.

China announced Tuesday it is banning exports to the United States of gallium, germanium, antimony and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications, as a general principle, lashing back at U.S. limits on semiconductor-related exports… China is the biggest global source of gallium and germanium, which are produced in small amounts but are needed to make computer chips for mobile phones, cars and other products, as well as solar panels and military technology.

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