Geopolitics And More: Israel Lobby Wavers? Poland, Africa, Russia And World War T

Early in the morning here there are lots of interesting short takes. Let’s go!

I’m lifting this from MoA, who is excerpting John Mearsheimer. What’s really important about this—which follows hard on the heels of revelations that Israel is taking major casualties in Gaza, and is staging Hamas “surrenders” in war crime fashion—is that “J-Street”, which is a major component of the Israel Lobby, is alarmed at the war crime revelations coming out of Gaza. They can see where this is leading in American politics. The J-Street people aren’t humanitarians, but they can see which way the wind is blowing:

Death and Destruction in Gaza

What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important organization in the Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”

Let me elaborate.

First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70 percent of whom are children and women.
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Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that can be brought into Gaza.
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Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust.
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Fourth, Israel is not just killing, wounding, and starving huge numbers of Palestinians, it is also systematically destroying their homes as well as critical infrastructure – to include mosques, schools, heritage sites, libraries, key government buildings, and hospitals.
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Fifth, Israel is not just terrorizing and killing Palestinians, it is also publicly humiliating many of their men who have been rounded up by the IDF in routine searches.
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Sixth, although the Israelis are doing the slaughtering, they could not do it without the Biden administration’s support.
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Seventh, while most of the focus is now on Gaza, it is important not to lose sight of what is simultaneously going on in the West Bank. Israeli settlers, working closely with the IDF, continue to kill innocent Palestinians and steal their land.
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As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?

By any meaningful standard, this is America’s criminal war. Another one of our criminal wars. J Street knows this, and they know that sooner or later they and Israel will be blamed for what’s happening:

Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Israel is Isolating the US.

Macgregor continues to believe that, even if Netanyahu is dumped, we are cruising toward a regional war that only Israel wants—if it can drag the US in.

MoA also has a post that covers pretty much the same ground we did yesterday, but with some nice additions:

Palestine - Occupation Forces Have Serious Losses

This line from Ynet News was amusing, as real news of Israeli casualties and lack of meaningful military success—as opposed to civilian slaughter—seeps out:

In Gaza itself, the military [IOF] is amazed at the scale of Hamas' strength in the region, …

Knowledgeable military experts are asking, How could they possibly be surprised at this? We thought Israel had a professional military and professional intelligence! And yet Netanyahu’s government continues to claim it will soon take on Hezbollah—a certifiably bad idea, even if Israel gets its wish of direct US combat involvement.

Turning to Poland, a key NATO country, Tom Luongo tweets this morning:

The EU wins a round. Scratch Polish resistance off the 2024 Bingo Card.

He’s referring to the fact that Donald Tusk, EU darling, has finally been allowed to form a government. Before the election it had been supposed that the ruling Law and Justice party—still Poland’s largest party—would find the right wing support to form a coalition government. What happened was a coalition called The Third Way, which was largely made up of Law and Justice defectors, joined with Tusk. The reality appears to be that the opposition to Law and Justice is heavily based on disgust with its bullying style of politics—which extends to relations with neighboring countries like Germany and Hungary. However, most of The Third Way members of parliament (the Sejm) are actually ideologically conservative on major issues. For this reason, Tusk’s government is likely to be weak. I’ve seen predictions that it won’t last more than six months, especially as pressure on Poland builds from many sides.

Luongo also notes developments in Africa, in Niger. Desperately impoverished Niger had long been looted of its resources by France, for pennies on the dollar, er, Euro. That’s changing:

Francesco Sassi @Frank_Stones

Niger will soon become an oil exporter after the commissioning of the longest oil pipeline in the whole Africa, reaching Benin's Port of Seme. The project has been realised with the support of China amid international sanctions vs in the aftermath of the recent coup

6:36 AM · Dec 12, 2023

That pipeline that you see taking a sharp left turn toward the Gulf of Guinea had been supposed to take a sharp right turn across Algeria’s Sahara to the Mediterranean and on to France. Niger—and the key here is China—is gaining control over its resources and its destiny. Sanctions imposed on poverty stricken Niger by the neocolonial West, but China comes to the rescue. Hmmmm. That sort of thing makes it hard for the West to argue to poor but resource rich countries that China is the bad guy. Who’s running US foreign policy, anyway? Oh yeah, the same people enabling mass slaughter in Gaza.

Larry Johnson and Alastair Crooke have returned from a week at a Multipolarity conference in Moscow, and both appeared with Judge Napolitano yesterday. Crooke had some sobering reflections on America’s relations with Russia—which Neocons have systematically torn down with the help of compliant legislators. Here’s a partial transcript/summary of that conversation. Of particular interest is what Crooke views as the real root cause of the West’s war on Russia—this is World War T. Yeah, rhymes with Three. He also says something similar to what I mentioned recently: how similar the situation in the West is, in key respects, to the period before the Bolshevik revolution. The Bolsheviks, however, are our rulers:

Alastair Crooke: Dark Lessons Learned in Russia.

AN: Alastair, you spent a week in Moscow. What is the status of US - Russia diplomatic relations as we speak?

AC: They've reached a nadir--they're much worse than I expected to find them. I knew there were problems. I remember being told by the deputy defense minister some time ago that relations were deteriorating, that the treaties, the channels of communication, were all being stopped and blocked, but I was very surprised to find it's worse than during the Cold War. The enmity is palpable. The enmity between the interlocutors from the West and the sense of seeing Russia as the enemy--as something for which there's no desire for discourse--was really striking and very dangerous. I think the Russians appreciate that it's dangerous, because there are very few guardrails. There are no treaties, really. Most of the treaties involving weapons of mass destruction and missiles have now been put into suspension or cancelled, so there are no contacts. What is more, they don't see many prospects of those contacts being reset. There have been one or two initiatives by the west, from America, from people to come and speak with them, but it's quite clear to the Russians that these people are just individuals--they have no mandate, they don't represent anything. I mean, you can have a chat with them but there is still this downward spiral. ...

AN: What in your view is the genesis of all this? Is it American military aid to Ukraine, American political leaders failing to see the conflagration in Ukraine from the Russian side, the American Cold War mentality that Russia's the descendant of the Soviet Union and wants to reconstruct imperial Soviet lands?

AC: Many of those things that you've just mentioned, particularly the sense that Russia is somehow becoming another Soviet Union and an Empire and having aspirations to take over parts of other lands--for which there's absolutely no evidence at all. But I think really something much more basic, which is that what Russia stands for runs completely counter to what our new rulers hold. Our rulers want to disembed us from gender, from family, from all forms of of collective [community?] being. Russia stands for the opposite. Russia stands for the family, it stands for Orthodox religion, it stands for patriotism and nationalism. Russia is abhorrent to the new moral order that is being constructed in America and in Europe, which wants diversity, gender fluidity--all of these things. Russia represents the opposite. I said to them, 'Sometimes it must feel to you, when you're talking to the West, as if you're trying to talk to the Bolsheviks of 1917.' You do see a lot of rainbow ribbons being worn by people in the west, unaware of the full intention of the cultural revolution that is unfolding around us.

AN: What are the risks for the Russians, as they recognize this radical disparity in culture, as they recognize that every one of their Russian boys that was killed in Ukraine was killed with an American piece of shrapnel, or an American artillery round, or American small arms rounds that the American government just gave to Ukraine?

Yes, the new American way of war—give weapons to others to fight with. Ukraine, Israel …

AC: Quite clearly it's not just the United States because, as they said to me, 'There's no one in Europe to whom we can talk.' There are politicians, but none of them have any sort of knowledge of Russia or any empathy for Russia at all. Two of those states are nuclear armed powers and nuclear weapons are widely dispersed around Europe. So they're very concerned. The thing that Putin does think about a lot is how to avoid a conflict developing that could to the use of either tactical or major nuclear weapons.

I’ll bring this post to a close with a few links. First, readers may have heard about this the other day:

Big Serge @witte_sergei

Major air defense failure in Kiev. Sounds like dozens of Russian missiles struck before Ukrainian defenses could react or even activate the air raid siren.

9:03 PM · Dec 10, 2023

The scale of the attack and the obvious use of hypersonic missiles strongly suggests important targets. Andrei Martyanov offers a plausible explanation—along with an interesting reference to the expulsion of CIA operatives from Spain. Yes, Spain.

Patriot PAC3 Is Having...

... a very bad time against Kinzhals.

A Peculiar Bit.

Lastly, this highly recommended discussion between Danny Davis and John Mearsheimer.

John Mearsheimer - Ukraine Crumbling under Russia's Relentless Assaults. How Long can Kyiv Survive?"

While I believe Mearsheimer’s views on Ukrainian - Russian enmity need to be more nuanced, it’s still excellent. What I mean is this. Ukraine should not be viewed as either a political or cultural unity. The US expended years and huge sums of money in empowering a combination from hell of Western Ukrainian radical anti-Russian (and anti-Polish and anti-Hungarian) nationalists with Jewish Ukrainian oligarchs (including but not limited to Ihor Kolomoyskyi) to install anti-Russian governments in Ukraine—against the voted preferences of Ukrainians. A prelude to plunder that is being derailed by Putin.