https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/patrick-lawrence-lost-fearful-in-the-middle-east/
Lost & Fearful in The Middle East
Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday may be the taker of the cake.
As the ordnance fell on 85 targets in seven locations, many of them outposts of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, our addled president felt compelled to insist, “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.”
How many times have we heard this since these latest operations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen began? Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has said the same thing in the same words. Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, has, too. So has Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. So has John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman.
Once we are finished counting, we can consider the astounding stupidity that has led the Biden regime into this impossible contradiction. Reflecting the president’s compulsive support for Israel over the whole of his political life, the U.S. has incautiously stayed with the Zionist state as it seeks to widen the war all the way to Iran by way of Lebanon and Syria.
Now, as the war runs straight up to the Islamic Republic’s borders, Biden and his people take to insisting they do not want that wider war the Israelis are bent on provoking.
I honestly cannot think of other occasions in the history of American foreign policy that match this one for its sheer… what? … the sheer botch of it. There must be some, or many given America’s conduct these past seven decades, but they do not come readily to mind.
Escalation, to take the most obvious problem, is not the right way to deescalate. You cannot begin bombing other nations — illegally, let’s not forget — while killing noncombatants in the process (as the Iraqis and Syrians have charged), and tell them in simultaneous statements that you do not wish to provoke conflict.
Well, you can, but you cannot expect to be taken seriously.
‘Illusory Truth Effect’
I start to think the Biden administration now resorts to one of the propagandist’s cardinal rules: Say something nonsensical often enough and people, even intelligent people, will begin to believe it. Psychologists have called this the illusory truth effect since researchers at Villanova and Temple universities discovered this common vulnerability among us in the late–1970s.
The reiteration effect has long worked on Americans, diabolically enough. But one of Joe Biden’s most fundamental failings is his assumption that he can sell abroad the sort of nonsense he has sold Americans for 50–odd years. I do not exaggerate when I suggest this misapprehension is one of the core defects of the Man from Scranton’s foreign policies.
A second, related problem merits brief consideration. To insist that the U.S. does not seek a region-wide war while bombing other nations amounts to asking others not to retaliate. It is to say, in effect, “We want to restore our failed deterrence policy. Please let us deter you.” Alastair Crooke, in a well-reasoned piece published last Friday, calls this “a form of militarized psychotherapy.”
This amounts to a gamble only a nation on its back foot would take. The Biden regime is likely to win it with the Iranians, who continue to abide by a longstanding policy of “strategic patience,” as Muhammad Sahimi, a prominent commentator on Iranian affairs, argued in a piece published Saturday in The Floutist.
But the Yemeni Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have already signaled they have no intention of changing course. Other groups active in Iraq and Syria are likely to follow the Houthis’ lead: It will persist, not desist, in my read.
I take the administration at its word when it insists it does not want another war on its hands, even if it seems to have no idea how to avoid the risk of starting one. It is simply too overexposed across the Middle East — too many bases, too burdened with a hardware-heavy war machine, musclebound, and altogether too vulnerable.
All the recent attacks on U.S. ships, ground facilities and personnel have unexpectedly exposed this weakness. And this brings us to what most fundamentally motivates Biden and the instant peaceniks who faithfully repeat what he says. (Or does he faithfully repeat what they tell him to say?)
What we have heard this past week is an implicit confession of fear at the top of America’s foreign policy cliques. If these people have bungled policy to an extent that may be unprecedented in the postwar decades, as suggested above, they find themselves, in consequence, utterly lost and afraid in the funhouse of their making.
History’s clock just chimed again, if I am right about this.
Israel’s Control Over Washington
Biden is a schlemiel on the foreign policy side, as his record makes amply clear. But as argued previously in this space, it is not clear anyone else occupying the White House could have done much better these past months.
America is in its late-imperial phase, as we must always remember, and Israel controls almost every elected official in Washington to one or another degree. There is no way to conduct sound policy so long as the cliques in Washington insist on working within this circumstance instead of advancing beyond it.
The please-don’t-fight-back attacks the U.S. now conducts daily are but the front end of a strategy the administration wants to advance in the Middle East, we now read. As advertised in a pair of recent pieces in The New York Times, this is to be “New! Improved” just like the old laundry detergents.
In this case (as in so many others) we can read the Times as entirely in its role as messenger passing down the word from Washington’s upper reaches to the populace below. These pieces “what you need to know,” as the Times puts it in all those obnoxious headlines.
Patrick Kingsley, Jerusalem bureau chief, and Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent, previewed the new theme 10 days ago in a piece headlined, “How Leaders and Diplomats Are Trying to End the Gaza War.” As envisioned, this process has three tracks: negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza, “reshaping the Palestinian Authority” to assume power in post–Hamas Gaza and getting Israel to accept a Palestinian state in exchange for formal relations with Saudi Arabia.
Four days later Tom Friedman published “A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big.” It looks to me as if Kingsley and Wong gazumped everyone’s favorite Times columnist. Undeterred, Friedman cites his own reporting while repeating the substance of Kingsley and Wong’s.
Friedman also posits a three-track strategy. The first is “a strong and resolute stand on Iran, including a robust military retaliation against Iran’s proxies.” This we now witness, although “strong and resolute” seems a stretch.
Then comes “an unprecedented U.S. diplomatic initiative to promote a Palestinian state” and, finally, “a vastly expanded U.S. security alliance with Saudi Arabia, which would also involve Saudi normalization of relations with Israel.”
There are more “ifs” and qualifiers in these two pieces than you’ve had hot dinners. “If the administration can pull this together — a huge if,” Friedman writes. There are so many “significant obstacles,” “divisive issues” and “long shots” that you have to wonder why these pieces were written and published.
‘Biden Doctrine’
Straight off the top, anyone who still traffics in a two-state solution featuring an independent Palestine is at this point unable to face reality and discouraging others from doing so.
No such entity is any longer possible — nor was one, in my view, ever desirable. The Israelis, in any event, will never agree to an independent Palestine: The Netanyahu regime makes this clear every chance it gets.
What is this “reshaping the Palestinian Authority” all about? What does such a project even mean? Who will do the reshaping? Into what? And out of what? The PA at this point droops under its own sclerosis and corruption. Who is going to put it in charge of Gaza — by what mechanism? How is a “demilitarized Palestinian state” — Friedman’s phrase — to bear responsibility for its national security?
As to the Saudis, there seems to me nothing in these three tracks that has any chance of drawing them into formal relations with Israel. There has been too much desecration and murder these past four months for Washington — “the power trying to stitch it all together” — to come anywhere near reaching the end of this “track.”
Tom Friedman’s name for the “strategic thinking” pencil-sketched here is “a Biden Doctrine.” Let us suppress our splutters and leave our Tom to the grandiosity he prefers. There are several realities to consider as we assess these proposals.
One, at issue in these various tracks are geopolitical power and empire management, nothing more. What is the intent of the policy supposedly now in formation? Tell me it is anything other than the creation of a puppet regime comprised of malleable compradors in a hopelessly fragmented “Palestine.” Tell me execution of the policy the Times outlines will not entail a festival of bribery and coercion across the region.
Two, and related to the first point, there is no more place in this “strategic thinking” for any kind of Palestinian democracy or freedom than there is in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Read the Times’ copy, listen to the quoted sources: Where in any of it do Palestinians breathe or walk around or have anything to say? Shame on these two reporters, their columnist colleague, their editors and every source they cite: They participate in the same dehumanization that has defined American policy on the Palestine question for decades.
Do you think Palestinians and those who support their cause do not see these things? Do you think they do not read these policies in outline as essentially unserious?
I am convinced the Times’ reports accurately reflect an effort in Washington to find a way forward out of the utter mess Biden and his people have made for themselves. But to call what is apparently afoot a Biden Doctrine is to put lipstick on a pig.
These people seem to have no clue how to devise a genuinely useful policy. Fear, after all, inhibits all thought of innovation.
The Gaza crisis is a text in which we can read that genuine diplomacy, based on knowledge of the perspectives of others, will come to define our century more than mere power. It tells us, too, that Washington, as of now, has neither the intention nor ability to live and act well in this new time.
Comment to article:
" “Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday may be the taker of the cake… ‘As the ordnance fell… our addled president felt compelled to insist, “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world’.”
The Resident was not lying. The White House et al does NOT seek conflict anywhere in the World. Not at all. All They want is total surrender… to ‘The Empire of The Indispensable Nation!’ Neat and clean. No muss and fuss. Just surrender to us and we’ll all get alone fine! See, we can be FRIENDS! Partners!’
The Indispensable Nation only lives for Peace. The Peace found in all others giving up. The quiet and silence of full capitulation by others. The joys found in Submission. And getting others to Submit.
In fact, one sarcastically might posit that United States Incorporated has only been about Peace all through its existence. And the way to Peace is apparently to be involved in wars and conflicts almost without a single break in the action for as long as US Inc has existed.
US Inc was born in war. It sustains itself in war. It furthers its aims and goals in war. It knows not how to live without war. In fact, it believes there IS no life without war. There is no National mythos or mission statement that does not have war as its central plank. The Way to Life is… War. (?)
Edwin Starr told us years ago in a now-famous anthem, “War, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”
Well he was wrong, apparently, War is good for EVERYTHING. Or so we are conditioned into believing. And most of America believes just that. Because Americans may say they want peace… but have never learned how to live peacefully even among themselves. Conflict in the World. Conflict in your Town. Conflict in your Workplace. Conflict in your Family. And most of all… Conflict within Ourselves. Because what is Inside is what manifests Outside. You cannot have Peace in the World if you know not Peace within yourself. Within your soul. And our souls are deeply troubled.
“Say something nonsensical often enough and people, even intelligent people, will begin to believe it.”
That has worked for years. That is the secret sauce that Predators and Abusers among us stumbled upon years ago as a Holy Grail of social manipulation and engineering and the commandeering of people’s thoughts, beliefs, deeds, and actions.
Nonsense works. Lies work. As much as the World revolves around war and conflict… it is powered by belief in nonsense and fabrications. If you took lies out of the World right this moment… things would collapse around you like a house of cards tumbling down. Lies power this Planet. Lies compete for our sanity. And the use of lying has become a winning strategy in all life stations… including our religious institutions.
“The Gaza crisis is a text in which we can read that genuine diplomacy, based on knowledge of the perspectives of others, will come to define our century more than mere power.”
The Gaza crisis is a lens that illuminates deep pathologies that run our World. It strips away illusions about the true nature of people and Nations. It reveals how insensitive (or not) we are to the pain and suffering of others. It reveals how deeply one has drunk down the Kool-Aid of submission and devotion to self-declared Chosenites who seek rule over all persons and things. In short, the Gaza crisis strips each of us naked to reveal what is truly under our hood.
And just like when some of us strip down in front of the mirror… what we might see is not pretty. For when you strip away the clothing and the lies and the conflicts and the refusals to see… what remains is what’s real. And that picture today is just too horrifying for our World – and ourselves – to process.
Looking in the mirror is the first step. What you do right after that is what counts most. "
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/hyper-imperialism-dangerous-threat-humanity/5849172
Hyper-imperialism – A Dangerous Threat to Humanity
Fiona Edwards of No Cold War examines a new study from the Tricontinental Institute which presents a clear analysis that it is the US which poses the greatest threat to humanity today
Landmark new study from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights provides an illuminating analysis of the world situation today.
Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage makes a compelling case that imperialism, integrated by United States, operates as a highly organised, unified, militarised bloc of countries in the global North which aims to dominate the countries of the global South, the majority of humanity.
Due to the relative economic decline of the US-led bloc compared to the global South, including China, the US is increasingly forced to rely on its continuing lead in military power as it attempt to maintain global dominance.
“The bottom line is that there is one world system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc,” writes Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute. Indeed, the study comprehensively demolishes any notion that the United States is engaged in an “inter-imperialist rivalry” with Russia or China.
In the case of China the US regards the rise of this “socialist independent” country, an economic superpower with an economy now larger than the US’s in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, as an existential threat to its global hegemony.
Hyper-Imperialism shows the US’s aggression towards Russia is because it is a “strongly sovereign seeking” country and therefore unwilling to subordinate itself to Washington. Russia and China, both powerful countries, have become closer in recent years. “The dual defeat of Russia and China” is identified as the principal goal of the US’s international strategy.
This US strategic agenda was strongly echoed in January 2024 in a speech by Britain’s Defence Secretary Grant Shapps who said:
“The era of the peace dividend is over … in five years’ time we could be looking at multiple theatres [of war] involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.”
There is a significant danger that should such a global confrontation take place, it could escalate into a nuclear war with the potential to destroy human civilisation.
The responsibility on the international anti-war movement to provide the clearest leadership in opposing this US-led war drive is obvious.
Hyper-Imperialism is an invaluable resource for the movement because it offers an extremely clear explanation of the dangerous world situation we face today, which can be drawn upon to strengthen the understanding and anti-imperialist orientation of the movement.
US Imperialism Is the Main Enemy
Hyper-imperialism presents a clear analysis that it is the US which poses the greatest threat to humanity, with its dominance of on the means of destruction.
The study cites ground-breaking research showing that the US’s military spending is more than twice the amount acknowledged by the US government — at a staggering $1.5 trillion in 2022.
The US has 902 overseas foreign military bases “heavily concentrated in bordering regions or buffer zones around China.”
The extent of the US’s military power extends further due to Washington’s control of the global North as “an integrated military, political, and economic bloc composed of 49 countries.” This means that the US controls, through Nato and other means, an astounding 74.3 per cent of all military spending globally.
The contrast between the US and China is also astonishing. The US spends 21 times more on its military per person than China does. China has one foreign military base compared to 902 US foreign military bases.
These facts entirely disprove the idea, adopted by some sections of the Western left, that both the US and China represent a “threat” to humanity and the world faces an “inter-imperialist rivalry.” The main threat to humanity clearly emanates from Washington not Beijing.
A Unified Imperialist Bloc
A central point made in Hyper-Imperialism is that the world is today is not defined by “inter-imperialist rivalry,” that the contradictions between imperialist countries now are “non-antagonist and secondary” with “Germany, Japan, France and all other imperialist powers” subordinating their interests on essential issues to those of the US.
The Nato-proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and Israeli offensive in Gaza are identified as key developments that have consolidated “an integrated, military focused imperialist bloc” which aims to “maintain a grip on the global South” and “dominate Eurasia” — a part of the world that has escaped the US’s control. It is also reflected in Europe’s increasing subordination to Washington’s new cold war offensive against China.
This reflects a fundamental change in the organisation of the global North. In previous global crises of the imperialist system, as shown in World War I and World War II, there was a violent clash between imperialist powers and the global South, including socialist forces, operated in that overall context.
Today the main contradiction is between a unified imperialist bloc led by the US against the global South as whole, including socialist states.
Of course contradictions within the imperialist global North camp continue to exist, and progressives should attempt to exploit these, but they are of a secondary character.
The Rise of the China and the Global South
The US’s increasing military aggression is a response to immense global shifts in recent decades, accelerated following the financial crash of 2008, which has seen the power of the global North eroded in many spheres, including economically, diplomatically and technologically.
Such developments strike against the core of the world order as it has existed for centuries. As Hyper-Imperialism strikingly puts it: “For the first time in over 600 years, there is now a credible economic and political alternative to the domination of world affairs by the Europeans and their descendant white-settler colonial states. First, is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation, and multilateralism, emerging from the global South.”
The emergence of China as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, the rise of the global South and the growth of projects for South-South economic development are thoroughly analysed. The relative decline of the US and wider global North is also examined.
Hyper-Imperialism is clear to stress, however, that unlike the global North, the global South is not a unified bloc.
What is emerging is “new mood” in the global South that has seen the global South increasingly reject the US’s aggressive foreign policy agenda. This has been very evident in the US/Nato proxy war in Ukraine against Russia which the global South has refused to support, instead continuing to cooperate economically with Russia and advocating for a peaceful resolution of the conflict not escalation.
The global South has also strongly pushed for ceasefire in Gaza, isolating the US and Israel at the UN general assembly on multiple occasions. South Africa’s decision to take a case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice is another example of the independent mood in the global South.
The US is desperate to stop the rise of China and the increasing independence of the global South. Hyper-Imperialism warns that “there is a clear and present danger that imperialism will continue its militarist path and rely on its military dominance to offset its growing relative economic and political decline.”
The most important task for progressives today is to build the broadest possible movement against this US-led attack on humanity. Hyper-imperialism is a must-read for those who want to sharpen their understanding of the key threat facing the world.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/02/09/a-dementia-patient-can-be-president-because-it-doesnt-matter-who-the-president-is/
A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn’t Matter Who The President Is
So it turns out the dementia symptoms Biden’s supporters have long dismissed as a “stutter” are actually exactly what they look like.
The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.”
Hur reports that in interviews Biden couldn’t even remember things as fundamental as the years of his term as vice president, or when his son Beau died. Hur also writes that Biden’s memory had gotten worse between the aforementioned recorded 2017 interviews and the interviews with the president last year.
In short, the president’s brain don’t work. It’s shot. The “leader of the free world” has rusted out gray matter. It’s like swiss cheese in there.
And it is indeed getting worse. During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice.
If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.
Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.
Which is a bit of a problem for Americans who would like to change certain aspects of their government’s behavior, like for example the backing of an active genocide in Gaza. Whose conscience do they work to appeal to if the person they were told is in charge actually isn’t? Who do they vote for if the people who really call the shots aren’t even on the ballot?
The fact that the US president has dementia exposes the uncomfortable truth that the functioning of the empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it.
The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is run not by the official elected government of that nation, but by unelected empire managers who filter in and out of each administration and maintain a steady presence in government agencies and government-adjacent institutions. These empire managers form alliances with corporate powers and working relationships with the many nations, assets and partners who function as members of the undeclared US empire.
Which means there’s not really any way for Americans to vote their way out of this mess. If you have a problem with genocide, militarism, economic injustice, authoritarianism, or any other crucial building block for the US-centralized power structure, you will never be permitted to have any influence over those things through the official electoral system. Voting in western “democracies” is done to give us the illusion of control, like letting a toddler play with a toy steering wheel while you drive so they can feel like they’re participating.
That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, just that there’s no way out of this mess that involves voting. We’re already seeing pro-Palestine activists throwing significant obstacles in the operations of Israeli weapons dealers, and the push to educate and inform the public about what’s happening in Gaza has caused Israel to lose control of the narrative so severely that it’s now resorting to desperate online influence ops. Measures like this can be implemented across the board to bring about the end of the imperial power structure. Once enough people begin turning against the empire, using the power of our numbers to force real change will quickly move from impossible to possible to likely to inevitable.
But we’ve got to stop hanging all our hopes on the electoral system first. Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote. But don’t let that performative ritual distract you from the real project: to wake up our fellow humans and begin forcing real change.
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