Tag: Middle East

Neocons are Back

And they’re rolling the dice. Now that the neocon faction that controls Harris has succeeded in pushing aside the Six Bidens and gaining control of the US military, it appears that the second front of WWIII is about to kick off in earnest. Michael Hudson comments on what looks like joint US-Israeli preparations for war with Hezbollah and Iran:

You say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years…

So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.

And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win.

Well, the reality is they’re going to lose wherever they go, unless there’s atomic war and the chessboard is thrown over. And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.

So I’m very worried that the neocons are going to say there will never be a better or at least a less worse time to go to war in the Near East than right now. That seems to be what is leading the trigger, and even the military has said every way that they’ve gamed out the military sequence there, America loses. They’re not going to lose as bad now as they will in the future. And this is very dangerous, given the whole mindset that they have, and the mindset that they have to control the Near East, or else the rest of the world will not be neoliberalized.

That’s been my assumption as well. Next year is not going to be any easier. Five years from now is not going to be any easier. Time is on the side of the sovereign nations, so Clown World has to act now if it is going to act at all. I was hoping that Trump would come in to preside over a soft collapse, but that option appears to have pretty much disappeared with the assassination and the JD Vance selection.

It will be interesting to see how Russia and China react to this. Very interesting indeed. Because if the US military is sufficiently committed on this front, it won’t have much ability to interfere in Europe or in Asia.

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Green Flag Confirmed

Netanyahu and the Israeli government knew all about the planned Hamas attacks, but permitted them to take place without warning the Israeli public or permitting the IDF to stop them:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned in mid-September that Hamas was planning to invade the country and capture more than 200 hostages, Israel’s Kan broadcaster reported on Monday.

Three weeks before Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, the IDF’s intelligence directorate compiled a report stating that the Palestinian militants were training for a large-scale invasion of the Jewish state, Kan has claimed, citing anonymous security sources. The document allegedly warned that dozens of Hamas commandos would take part in the raid, which would be aimed at bringing between 200 and 250 hostages back to Gaza.

Several thousand Hamas fighters carried out the actual October 7 assault, killing around 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages back to Gaza.

According to Kan’s sources, Hamas members had been spotted practicing attacks on mock IDF outposts, rehearsing how to capture military and civilian hostages, and training how to handle the captives once they were detained in Gaza. The document reportedly made its way to senior officials in the IDF’s Gaza Division, but was “completely ignored,” Kan stated.

Kan is not the first source to claim that Israel was forewarned about the October 7 attack. Within days of the assault, Egyptian intelligence officials said that they had repeatedly warned the Israeli government that Hamas was planning “something big” in the days leading up to October 7, but that these warnings were ignored in West Jerusalem.

As to why Netanyahu allowed the attacks to take place, we can only speculate. But Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that the Hamas attacks were permitted in order to give the Israeli government an excuse to whip up support for ethnically cleansing Gaza of the resident Palestinians.

Which raises some fascinating historical questions. After all, if the Israeli government was willing to sacrifice thousands of lives in exchange for Gaza, how many lives were the Zionists of the 1930s and 1940s willing to sacrifice in order to be granted a claim to Palestine?

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The War in the North

Despite having failed to finish off Hamas, Israel is seriously contemplating launching a war with Hezbollah, which Simplicius expects will have serious ramifications for Ukraine:

A biblical red glow torments the skies of northern Israel, which now burns with a Zionist’s zeal for Palestinian land, after a series of Hezbollah strikes. The gods of war are smiling favorably on the coming summer, as flashpoints all across the globe heat up. And the mother of all of them threatens to engulf the region in even more flame with the announcement that Israel could launch the long-awaited war against Hezbollah by mid-June, with rumor claiming the Knesset may vote to take action as early as tonight.

This happens to convolve with a host of other ponderous developments, which include Russia’s slow buildup for a large-scale escalation in the north. If Israel truly kicks off another massive war to its own north, it could be the final nail in Ukraine’s coffin.

Recall that in a short 4 months, we will have reached the 1 year anniversary of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its meandering war against Hamas. If in almost a full year of fighting, Israel can make no real headway against the comparatively tiny Hamas, how long would it take for them to tame Hezbollah in what can only be expected to be a far more ‘high intensity’ conflict?

You can be sure that every available Western munition—particularly of the artillery variety—will be routed to Israel and Ukraine will be historically screwed at the key moment of Russia’s largest scale maneuvers. It would be the ultimate irony should Ukraine fall as consequence of Israel’s actions—but alas, Zelensky and Netanyahu appear locked into parallel fates: both require the continuation of war to survive their political crises.

And the big question remains: when will China – or in its delusions of military supremacy, the USA – elect to open the Asian front.

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European States Recognize Palestine

What’s considerably more significant is the fact that the Chinese and Russians are publicly hailing the three recognitions of the sovereign Palestinian state:

In a historic move expected to quell the flames of war in the Middle East, Ireland, Norway and Spain announced the recognition of a Palestinian state on Wednesday. The move is hailed by Chinese experts as representing an overdue correction of “a previously skewed balance,” while bringing the Palestinian question, which had intentionally been obscured before, back to the center stage.

Experts believe the decision may trigger a global wave of recognition for the state of Palestine, not only in support of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people but it will also exert significant international pressure on Israel’s aggressive practices.

However, they noted that there is still a long way to go for the actual establishment of a Palestinian state, and the root of the problem preventing the realization of the two-State solution lies in the bias and indulgence of the US.

None of this is actually about the lands historically taken by force from the Palestinians, of course, anymore than the war in Ukraine is about who rules over Kiev. But it’s another front in the global war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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Sometimes Tropes are True

SHOT: “Any suggestion that other considerations were involved in the decision-making process is completely false, and the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print… saying Jews ‘wielded their money & power in an effort to shape American views’ is offensive on so many levels.”

CHASER: Two Republican congressmen have introduced legislation that would provide the same employment and economic protections to Americans serving in the Israeli military as US citizens who get deployed to serve in the US military. Around 23,380 American citizens are currently serving in the Israeli army, according to a February report by The Washington Post.

To the contrary, any U.S. citizen who serves in the armed forces of any foreign nation, including Israel, should have his U.S. citizenship automatically revoked, be permanently expelled from the United States, and face criminal charges of treason if he enters U.S. territory in the future.

This is precisely why dual-citizenship needs to be made illegal again, as it was for most of U.S. history. No wonder the Clown World edition of the USA is a powder keg just waiting for a series of events to set it off. No nation that has been invaded and occupied to such a comprehensive extent has ever survived intact.

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Did Clown World Go 1 for 2

The President of Iran is confirmed to have been killed in a helicopter crash:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed after a helicopter carrying him and other officials crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday.

Raisi, 63, was confirmed dead by Iranian media today along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Governor of Eastern Azerbaijan province Malek Rahmati and Tabriz’s Friday prayer Imam Mohammad Ali Alehashem.

Two pilots and three other Iranian officials and security guards also perished in the crash.

Now, we don’t know that the crash wasn’t simply an accident. Helicopters are the second-most-dangerous form of air travel after those weird Ospreys that the U.S. Marines insist on trying to use. But the death of a high-ranking national leader coming so soon after the failed assassination of the Slovak Prime Minister looks more than a little suspicious.

A lot of people are assuming that Israel was responsible, but it’s premature to try assigning any responsibility at this point. I, personally, tend to doubt it, especially since Iran has demonstrated its ability to hit precision targets in Israel, so I find it hard to imagine Netanyahu giving any orders that would make him look like a legitimate target for reprisal in the world’s eyes.

If it was an assassination and not an accident, I think it’s much more likely the act of neoclowns not only have long sought an active war between Iran and the USA and also need an excuse to extricate themselves from a losing situation in Ukraine.

That being said, the correct answer may be 1 for 3:

Military leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DR Congo) said they have put down an attempted coup in a dramatic Sunday incident which included a large shootout erupting in the capital of Kinshasa. At least three men have been reported killed, with two being police officers which engaged a team of armed attackers. The third deceased is said to be one of the gunman. A government spokesman has stated “The armed men attacked the Kinshasa residence of Vital Kamerhe, a federal legislator and a candidate for speaker of the National Assembly of DR Congo, but were stopped by his guards.”

“The Honorable Vital Kamerhe and his family are safe and sound,” the spokesman announced on X. The attempted assassination failed, with the “situation under control” – according to the military, but the whole murky incident is raising eyebrows in the West as the army says it has detained some suspects who hold US and Canadian passports.

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Two Years in the Making

The Green Flag conducted by the IDF on October 7th was almost certainly decided back in 2021:

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation on 9 May, providing further details of the alleged intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to launch Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October successfully.

The investigation concluded that leaders in the army refused to consider or prepare for the possibility of a Hamas ground invasion of Israel and instead focused on the threat from Hamas missile attacks.

As a result, the army ceased collecting intelligence on low and mid-level Hamas commanders and their activities, the investigation claimed.

The decision to focus intelligence gathering on only a few top Hamas commanders was made in 2021 following a battle with Hamas called “Operation Guardian of the Walls.”

“From that moment,” says an intelligence officer who at that time held a significant position in the Southern Command, the army “had no interest in gathering intelligence on Hamas forces and senior and prominent commanders in the organization, or on their training.”

Though Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, was openly carrying out exercises to break through the Gaza border fence to attack Israeli settlements and military bases, Israel’s military leadership assumed any breach of the wall was impossible and therefore focused its resources on identifying Hamas rocket launch sites.

Haaretz states that during the Hamas attack on 7 October, the “border fence was revealed to be semi-imaginary” and that fighters from Hamas’ elite Nukhba brigade breached it at 44 different points.

Less than two years earlier, Brigadier General Eran Ofir, head of the border administration, had declared that due to the border fence and accompanying surveillance and automatic machine gun turrets, “it is impossible to pass into the territory of the State of Israel.”

According to the Haaretz report, the Israeli army held two exercises in previous years to prepare for the possibility of Hamas breaching the border before the fence’s completion.

The first was in 2016 and involved responding to a Hamas raid that would use cars, motorcycles, and paragliders to breach the fence into Israel and then move toward the southern settlements (kibbutzim), around which army soldiers were deployed.

However, a security source who participated in the exercise stated that it was soon stopped without any clear plan to prevent such an attack.

“After a few hours, Edelstein decided to stop when the ‘enemy’ had already reached the Ad Halom junction in the north [near Ashdod] and others had reached Kiryat Gat in the south – without the Southern Command and the Gaza Division knowing how to respond,” the source said.

Despite the failure of the exercise, the army leadership opposed holding a second training in 2019 and insisted on focusing on Hamas’ missile capabilities.

Any officers warning of a possible Hamas ground invasion were either ignored or ridiculed.

The dictum of “people – no, launchers – yes” was advanced by the entire line of the senior command, Haaretz writes.

The Israeli newspaper reports as well that the army withheld resources from the Military Intelligence Directorate, the Southern Command, and the Gaza Division to prepare to defend against a ground invasion.

It’s now obvious that the plan was to permit an attack of sufficient weight to provide a justification for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The IDF response was slow, not due to any surprise, but because the army leadership knew exactly what was happening and the plan called for them to provide the attackers with enough time to run amok before returning back into their own territory with their hostages.

Those who claim this sort of thing is impossible are in total denial of basic human history. Most, though not all, governing elites are just as willing to spend civilian blood as they are to pay a price in soldiers’ lives in order to accomplish their objectives. The only lives they aren’t willing to risk are their own. Look at Ukraine, for example. If the Kiev regime had any concern whatsoever for the Ukrainian people’s lives, it never would have attacked the Donbass, or tried to wage war against Russia.

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The Gazacaust is Bad PR

Mitt Romney is bewildered. He can’t figure out why Israel is suddenly getting all this bad PR when all they’re doing is defending themselves from an attack that took place seven months ago.

Social media is partially responsible for the widespread international criticism of Israel’s conduct during its military campaign in Gaza, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has suggested. The top American diplomat made the comment during an exchange with Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday.

Romney asked Blinken why “the PR [has] been so awful” for Israel amid the conflict in Gaza. “Why has [Palestinian armed group] Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel,” he said. “Typically, the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here?” Romney said.

The Secretary of State recalled that when he started working in Washington in the early 1990s “everyone did the same thing,” which was reading newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and watching national news networks to get information about world events.

But now, in the 2020s, “we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond” and social media “has dominated the narrative,” he said.

Now, I’m no marketing expert, but it strikes me that the combination of a) mass graves being found in Gaza, b) unprecedented crackdowns on college protesters, and c) passing anti-Constitutional laws to threaten anyone who objects to genocide is not particularly amenable to positive public relations.

When you’ve lost Scott Adams to the point that he is dropping more F-bombs than an Iranian drone strike, it can’t be long before you lose the rest of the Boomers.

UPDATE: The IDF expanded its defensive operations with airstrikes on the city of Rafah tonight.

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Turkey Cuts Ties with Israel

The Gazacaust continues to have global ramifications:

The Turkish government has suspended all trade with Israel in response to the Gaza war, the Trade Ministry in Ankara said in a statement posted on social media on Thursday.

Türkiye has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics since the conflict with Hamas broke out in October. The suspension of all export and import operations has been introduced in response to the Jewish state’s “aggression against Palestine in violation of international law and human rights,” the statement read.

Ankara will strictly implement the new measures until Israel allows uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the document added.

This is significant, because Turkey is not only a member of NATO, but it has historically been one of the more friendly nations in the Dar al-Islam to Israel. And while we can’t rule out the USA deciding to sanction Turkey, it’s further evidence that US diplomatic efforts are in a serious state of crisis.

Passing anti-speech laws and anti-boycott laws in US states isn’t going to matter much if the greater part of the planet refuses to economically engage with Israel.

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The Failed Counterstrike

Pepe Escobar reports that Israel tried to nuke Iran in response to the massive drone strike, but the F-35 carrying the bomb was shot down by Russian air defenses:

From a very high level intel source.

In Asia.

NOT Russia-China.

Although the strategic partnership, of course, exchanges at the highest level 24-7.

Confirmed and re-confirmed.

It will be great to know what Sy Hersh hears from his Beltway sources.

Here we go.

Israel initially chose to respond with extreme force.

An F-35 loaded with a nuclear bomb was sent east over Jordan.

The mission: cause a high-altitude detonation over Iran that would provoke a surge in the high-capacity power lines, crippling Iran’s electric grid, as well as disabling all electronic devices.

An EMP attack.

However… as the Israeli F-35 was leaving Jordanian airspace it was shot down by the Russian Air Force.

Hence the publicised version of the Israeli counter response was such a travesty.

In the end all sides decided not to publicise the real news – to de-escalate what could well turn into WWIII.

I think it is absolutely foolish to express any opinion at all about the veracity of this report. There is no question that the Netanyahu government is sufficiently daring and/or desperate to risk an EMP attack; Netanyahu is almost certainly also willing to risk trying to nuke the center of Tehran if he thought he could get away with it without fatal consequences for Israel.

While it could just be fiction or disinformation, the nature of the reported attack being more of a restrained warning, a limited escalation, tends to lend to the credibility of the report. And Escobar has been reasonably reliable in the past, so there is no reason to dismiss him simply because the scary n-word happened to be involved. Moreover, this is exactly the end result that I, and other observers, have expected would happen in the event that Israel attempted some sort of air strike against Iran.

Larry Johnson thinks the reported scenario is unlikely, but I don’t find his reasoning to be even remotely compelling. Given the ranges at which Russian air defenses are operating over Ukraine, the idea that Russia could not have tracked a lone Israeli F-35 and shot it down in part of the crowded real estate in the Middle East nominally under U.S. air control does not strike me as even remotely difficult or improbable. That doesn’t mean that he’s not correct; as I said, I refuse to express any opinion at all about the likelihood of an event about which I have literally zero information.

If legitimate, I think this report is very encouraging, as it indicates a) the Israelis are not overconfident about their ability to utilize their nuclear weapons and are not going to go all-in on the first hand, b) the Russians are exerting their superior air defense capabilities to prevent unnecessary escalation in the Middle East, and c) Iran is exhibiting the same sort of patience that is required to see out the inevitable collapse of Clown World that has been demonstrated by Russia and China.

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