Dangers Of Escalation

I want to continue with the theme of the dangers of regional war, which threaten the American Empire in the Middle East. The dynamics of the Israeli war of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians—not just Hamas, but Palestinians—have always been such that, in the current period, it would not remain confined to the borders of Palestine. And not even just to the immediate area. We’re seeing that already. The US aligned itself unconditionally with Israel at the start, and is now finding it difficult to impossible to place limits on Israel’s atrocius conduct. To put this in perspective, here are the first few paragraphs from a post at Naked Capitalism. The logic of the state of Israel as a Jewish ethno-religious state demands the ethnic cleansing of all Palestine, and that is why Israel adamantly rejects any “Two State Solution”:

The No-State Solution Becomes More and More Real as Israel’s Permanent Nakba Continues

In 1948, the Syrian historian Constantin Zurayk used the Arabic word Nakba (Catastrophe) to refer to the forced removal of Palestinians from their lands and homes by the newly formed Israeli state (in his August 1948 book, Ma’na al-Nakba or The Meaning of the Nakba). A decade ago, in Beirut, I met with the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury—then editor of the Arabic-language Journal of Palestinian Studies, who told me that the Nakba of 1948 was not an event but part of a process. “What we have is a Permanent Nakba, which means that this catastrophe has been continuous for the Palestinians,” he said. Since 1948, Palestinian political movements and intellectuals have argued that the logic of the Israeli state has been to expel the Palestinians from the region between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. This policy of expulsion to create an ethno-religious Jewish State of Israel is what Khoury meant by the Permanent Nakba.

On November 11, 2023, Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said something startling to the press. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” he said. “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” said this former director of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet. In the first week of November, Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu was on Radio Kol BaRama, whose interviewer ruminated about dropping “some kind of nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there.” Eliyahu replied, “That’s one way. The second way is to work out what’s important to them, what scares them, what deters them… They’re not scared of death.” Israel, the minister said, should retake all of Gaza. What about the Palestinians? “They can go to Ireland or deserts,” he said. “The monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.” This language of annihilation and dehumanization has become normal among the cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu from his cabinet, but he did not rebuke his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant who called Palestinians “human animals.” This is the broad attitude of the Israeli high officials, who are now on record with this kind of language.

… Having pushed 1.8 Palestinians into the south, the Israelis now began to bomb that part of Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient humanitarian aid to enter Gaza meant that nine out of 10 Palestinians are living without food for days on end (some told the UN World Food Program that they had not eaten in 10 days). This total war by Israel has pushed the majority of Palestinians in Gaza down toward the Egyptian border. Under cover of this war, the Israelis have also moved aggressively into the West Bank to deepen the Permanent Nakba in that part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The recent incident of Israeli occupation forces gunning down three of their own, highlights the genocidal mentality of the IOF in Gaza. Listen to Danny Davis on this:

Rather than comment further on this, I’ll switch to an interview with Doug Macgregor and George Galloway, which I’ve transcribed in signficant part, below. It begins with a segment on Russia. That actually fits in to the overall theme of escalation. The same people, the Neocons, who have made the US complicit in Nakba 2023 are those who got us into the Ukraine debacle and the debacle of Great Power relations generally. As Macgregor says, they’re not letting go of to pivot to war on Palestinians—they want both. This hubristic overreach is part of the danger of what many fear is the coming escalation of the US/Israel war on Palestinians into a wider regional war that could draw in Russia, China, and Iran—and possibly more. Leading into the transcript, I want to link to a podcast—unfortunately, you’ll need to click on the time stamp to get to the 11 minute podcast.

Will Schryver @imetatronink

#Londinium90AD:  Gaius and Germanicus measure that Lavrov sees Russia defeating NATO as it defeated Napoleon and the Hitlerites. Michael Vlahos. Friends of History Debating Society. @Michalis_Vlahos

5:56 PM · Dec 15, 2023

Michael Vlahos makes two important points, and the second point directly links what’s happening in Ukraine to the Middle East and the prospects for escalation. First, Russia has convincingly explained to the Russian people the narrative that their war in Ukraine is not a neocolonial war of conquest—it’s yet another reprise of Russian wars of resistance against a hostile and aggressive West. In the more recent past that has been a British, French, and German project, further back there were the Turks, Swedes, and Poles. This is an equivalent of the Great Patriotic War. Second, Russia, via its world class diplomacy—something Neocons eschew in favor of bullying—has also convinced most of the world of the justice of their cause. This is especially true in the Middle East, where most countries have gravitated toward Russia as a champion to help them out from under the thumb of an imperial West bent on never ending cultural and economic subjugation of the region. Keep that thought in mind as we go to the Macgregor/Galloway transcript:

INTERVIEW: A Washington vanity project

DM: I'm surprised President Putin hasn't offered to reimburse London and Washington for the cost of sending all the retired generals over there to advise them, because they've been [Putin's] greatest assets. It's been stupidity on stilts--an unwillingness to see how profoundly warfare has changed, a desire to see Russians as mediocre and subhuman.

Wait a minute. The Neocons portraying Russians as subhuman, brutal, stupid, worthy of national destruction. Isn’t that the same Neocon language of dehumanization that they apply to Arabs—as they wage genocidal war? Yes, these wars are connected.

It's outrageous nonsense. It was never true and, now, as I'm sure you're aware, we've poisoned the well with Russia for at least a decade or more. I can't imagine why the Russians would pay any attention to anything we say. Everything we've told them was a lie. Everything we've done has been aimed at subverting them and alienating them. I think that's a serious mistake. I hope we can get a new generation of political leaders in there that can turn it around. But that's, in my judgment, the worst part. The rest of the world now knows we're weak and I think that weakness is going to be on display increasingly in the future--and I would include the Middle East. We are not the power we were 30 years ago--not even close.

Well, the Neocons have consistently lied to the American people since Desert Storm and weapons of mass destruction—why would they cavil at lying to subhuman Slavs? They never think these lies could come back to bite them, they just move on to new lies—but, like turtles, it’s lies all the way down. Now Galloway pivots smoothly to the Middle East.

GG: I was in the UAE when President Putin arrived. You could see, you could feel, palpably, the extent to which friends and allies of the West have begun to reorientate towards the the East. In so far as we struggled mightly to lift a huge stone we really have dropped it on our own feet, haven't we? Russia is stronger and richer, Russia is stronger and militarily more powerful, its prestige has grown, its Armed Forces now tried and tested. It's a thoroughgoing disaster, and the leaders who led us into it really ought to pay a price if democracy means anything.

DM: You've got to get people informed, and this is something that's acutely lacking in the United States. ... If you ask [Americans] about what's happening in the Middle East they sort of shrug their shoulders--they're not terribly interested, they think this is a minor dust up that will soon be over, as was the case on previous occasions with the Israelis and the Arabs. Here in the United States it was easy to convince people that Russians were bad simply because of the Cold War. All you had to do was dust off the Cold War propaganda and throw it at them.

That was, in fact, the logic of the Russia Hoax against Trump, as well. Play into the lingering Cold War propaganda. Galloway will next move the conversation to the Red Sea and Yemen.

Now you have the same problem, unfortunately, with Muslim Arabs. We've been fighting them for years: 'the hell with them, let's hope the Israelis do a great job,' with no understanding of the situation, of the humanitarian dimension, and no real interest. This is all going to come back and and harm us in the long run, but for the moment strategically it's not having any impact here. Nothing is penetrating the American public.

GG: You know far more about warfare than I, but when I look at the situation in the Gulf, in the Red Sea, it looks to me like the asymmetrical warfare, in which the common man can inflict wholly disproportionate damage and cost on his enemy. The Houthis, for example, a ragged ass army, a kind of Taliban on wheels, now have the ability to bring shipping in the Red Sea to a halt, at a cost of uncountable billions of dollars for people having to sail their ships around a continent [Africa] instead, or pay insurance at an exorbitant price because there's a pretty good chance the Houthis will stick a missile up your jumper if you sail past them.

Pictures are good:

DM: The Houthis have, actually, practically shut down the Suez Canal for much of the commercial traffic. That's a tremendous achievement. People are now sailing all the way around the Cape [of Good Hope] to avoid going through the Red Sea. I'm waiting for someone in Washington to make the decision to commit five or 10,000 Marine infantry or something to land in Yemen. Based on the British experience in Yemen I can only imagine that that would be a very unrewarding experience, dealing with the Houthis and running around in the mountains down there. ... We go in with a sledgehammer, and then we wonder why nobody likes this and everybody wants us out. We have no friends today in Iraq, nobody in Syria wants us except some of the Kurds--and it's not even all the Kurds, it's a minority of them. We've managed to alienate the Iranians, the Turks, as well as all of the Arabs, so I think we're in for a long war. People think the Israelis will finish up in Gaza over the next few weeks. "Finish up" means expel or kill everybody who's left. Now they're going to pump some seawater into the tunnels. I'm sure that'll get rid of some of them--in addition to destroying the water table and making the place unlivable.

But I see this dragging on. Today the world is different. The people in this region are better educated, they have access to technology, and they know what's happening. Hundreds of millions of people--Turks, Arabs, Iranians, Egyptians--everyone knows what's happening. Anyone who thinks that this is going to end soon is wrong. I think this is the beginning of a very dangerous period and, frankly, I think the Israelis have grossly underestimated the impact of their actions. And at the same time we don't seem to understand it. We're sitting out there on board our aircraft carriers waiting for the word to fly strikes, and we're trying very hard to to split the Lebanese government from Hezbollah, cutting deals and agreements in the hope that that will keep Hezbollah out. But in the long run I don't see that happening. I think things are going to get worse, particularly in the spring. We may have a pause, a temporary ceasefire, but this is going to turn into a long, ugly war that none of us are going to like.

GG: As I watch the decline, steep and rapid, of your president, this is not a well man. As we say in Scotland, you would not send that man out for a loaf, never mind to rule and govern the most powerful country in the world of. How much more of this can the American people put up with?

DM: I don't think [anyone believes] that Biden is governing anything. Whatever he says, whatever he signs, is put in front of him by other people. The other people [those doing the actual governing] are committed to two [sic] things:

• They're committed to the extension of this war in Ukraine;

• They're committed to unlimited spending;

• They're committed to backing whatever is required in the Middle East that Israel demands.

[These people] control events. The American people, as I said, aren't paying a great deal of attention right now. It it will take something major to get their attention, something that hits them at home. We've got problems here, no mistake. We have open borders, rising criminality. Lots of Americans are saying, 'Sure, we like the Israelis, but why are we sending all of this money to Israel and Ukraine when we have open borders, when when we can't even maintain effective Armed Forces, when people won't join it?' All this diversity, inclusion, and equity is killing us ...

We've lost our our way. we've lost our sense of purpose, we've lost our sense of identity, and all of these things are going to come out in in the months ahead. I hope that we can weather this and recover, but right now we are admittedly in a lot of trouble. We are not in a position to wage a major regional war, and no one should exclude the possibility that that could happen.

There are a lot of people in Washington working closely with Jerusalem to spark a war with Iran. That would be, in my judgment, both unnecessary and catastrophic. Anyone who thinks that Russia will stand by and watch us destroy Iran is crazy, and the Chinese at this point have enormous investments in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. They depend heavily on the oil and gas. They don't want to see that shut down. The simple truth is this: No one in the region--in the near East or Southwest Asia or Eastern Europe--wants a war. Except us.

A number of commenters have brought up the issue of all the trip wires that we have in place in the Middle East, almost any of which could conceivably lead to serious escalation, with foreseeably dangerous consequences. Those tripwires include the Red Sea situation as well as all the US military bases in the region. In this next video, barely five minutes in length, Danny Davis makes an impassioned case for a rationalization of our military deployments to bring them in line with our actual national security needs:

Though Israel risks losing Western support, Netanyahu does not appear to be relenting on any front

For reference, I grabbed this map from the video:

Finally, an excerpt from a longer tweet on the military situation for Israel in Gaza:

For a week now, the Israeli army has not moved an inch in Gaza

On the other hand, they have a huge number of casualties among the officers according to official reports of the Israeli Army.

According to the numbers, even 27% of the Israeli officers were eliminated, or more precisely 108 in number.

According to Al Jazeera, 5 colonels, 8 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, 43 majors, 41 captain and 11 lieutenants are among the eliminated. The majority of these are officers in elite teams.

What is happening to them?

Snipers are happening to them. With the brutal bombardment, they turned Gaza into sniper nests for Hamas, who are now hunting the officers. What's funny and interesting is that most of these officers are kids just over 20 years old.

The myth narrative has been that the IOF is a highly professional army. It’s not, and seasoned observers with real military creds have been aware of this for a long time—since at least 2006, when the IOF attempted to invade Lebanon and ran into Hezbollah. The young age of these officers is also very telling. It tells you that they are very inexperienced. And these are the elite.

Widening the war to include Lebanon, Syria, Iran, fill in the blank, is not going to help anything. Probably even the Neocons are coming to that realization—belatedly. But the longer we hang around that neighborhood, the more likely that bad things will come of it.