More On Neocon Adventures--And Screwups

Let’s get right into this with Ukraine. Ray McGovern, in a recent interview, recalled Putin’s expressed views on the Neocons, about a year ago. Briefly, he thinks the Neocons are crazy and have no real grasp on reality. Many readers may remember this, but it’s worth repeating in the context of our recently repeated remarks on Putin’s confident, pleased appearance in public. As McGovern says, what Putin thinks really does matter. Putin is constitutionally cautious and the craziness of the Neocons undoubtedly had an effect on his actions. But now he clearly believes he has this situation figured out. I include in this mini-transcript McGovern’s initial remarks on Gaza:

Putin Pleased? - Ukraine vs. Gaza - Lloyd Austin's to Kiev - Murder of Seth Rich | Ray McGovern

13:46

When I hear myself saying that [that the Neocons could actually decide to deploy tactical nukes] I say, 'Well, that's crazy!' But I'll finish with this. Putin was asked about these guys--and that's the word he used--he was asked this at Valdai more than a year and a month ago, October 27th, 2022. A questioner in one of these long Q&As--I think he was Serbian--said, "Mr President Putin, the US leadership is picking a major fight with China at the same time as they're fighting Russia in Ukraine. What do you make of that?" And Putin--who almost always speaks extemporaneously in these Q&A sessions--said: "Originally I thought that there must be some sort of clever ploy behind this, something that I didn't quite understand. But I no longer think that. I think they're just crazy, and I think it's pure and simple arrogance and a feeling of impunity." Period, end quote. So, crazy, arrogance, impunity.

Well, if the Kremlin reads Biden's latest speeches or watches them on CNN they know that Biden is still saying the US is not only 'exceptional' but 'indispensable'. I think he still believes that and I think these people who are working for him are not willing--if they're even able to understand what's really going on--to say, "Mr President, we're not indispensable anymore. Matter of fact, we're losing in Ukraine, it's really bad in Gaza, and the Chinese are buzzing our ships and our planes. So, Mr President, it's a little different than we told you in the beginning.” I don't think they have the guts to do that, or maybe they don't believe it themselves. So it doesn't matter what I say. You heard what Putin said when he was asked that question. It does matter what he thinks, so I think he's confident.

...

Russia's going to do what it sees in its interest, what it's necessary to do to protect itself, and that may come to real trouble if these "crazy people" in Washington do some untoward things that force Putin's hand, and the hand of his close friend Xi Jinping.

17:15

To put this in some sort of context, Putin undoubtedly feels confident in part because he sees collective West collectively coming to the view that they have lost against Russia in Ukraine. It’s over except for the cope—so the UK says they’ll continue their sanctions on Russia “after the conflict” and the US is pushing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia. The UK doesn’t seem to understand that Russia will have something to say about when the conflict ends, and that Russia sees the UK as at war with Russia. Similarly, the Neocons in DC don’t seem to understand that all signs are that Russia will simply decline to negotiate with the Kiev regime short of unconditional surrender. But, again, Russia fully understands that it’s the American Empire that’s at war with Russia, and so will insist on negotiations with the American Empire.

Now, briefly, McGovern responds to a question regarding casualties in Gaza:

Q: Ukraine and Gaza--how do you see the contrast between these two conflicts in terms of casualties that we've been witnessing in Ukraine and now in Gaza.

A: In Gaza you have a genocide. Do not blanch at that word. People say, 'But Israel has a right to defend itself!' Not in Gaza, folks, not in Gaza. Gaza is occupied territory. Everyone acknowledges that under international law Israel is responsible for protecting the people in Gaza, not for killing them. Okay? Now, if you want to believe that Israel has the right to protect itself by committing genocide in Gaza, just think back a little [to] World War II.

18:01

A prominent political scientist and geopolitical thinker summarizes a view that is increasingly shared around the world:

Stephen Walt @stephenWalt

Dec 9

As a realist, I recognize that sometimes there are tradeoffs between legitimate security interests and moral considerations. That said, I am finding it hard to understand how any senior U.S. foreign policy officials can look at themselves in the mirror today.

Two tweets sum up the situation in the US, on the American front, the efforts to suppress dissent which are falling flat:

Black in the Empire @blackintheempir

Israel is in a panic

Nothing is working

Calling people antisemites, the staged videos, fake pictures, threatening people's jobs, attempts at censorship, lies and propaganda are all failing

You hid the truth for 75 years, and your cruelty today has helped wake up the world

Norman Finkelstein @normfinkelstein

Make no mistake about it. In order to stifle dissent from Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, the Jewish billionaire class has launched the most concerted assault on academic freedom in the history of our country.

Here’s an interesting selection of excerpts from Zerohedge regarding the Netanyahu regime’s efforts to suppress news in Israel (which has included targeting of journalists):

Israeli Troop Deaths Surpass 100 in Gaza, Thousands Wounded As Hospitals Deal With 'Tsunami Of Traa'

However, Haaretz alongside other publications have speculated that the real casualty figure is much higher ...

But an examination of hospital records by the Israeli newspaper showed "a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals."

The Haaretz report concluded that the number of wounded soldiers are in actuality at least twice as high as the army’s numbers. This would put the true figure in the thousands. Other Israeli publications have pointed to further indicators that casualties are bigger than what's being published...

Israel's YNet on Gaza losses: "More than 2,000 new IDF disabled since the beginning of the war: 'We have not been through anything like this.'

Every day the rehab wing takes in about 60 new wounded, and the tsunami of traa is still ahead of us." https://t.co/XxIs27Rxnt

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlenthal) December 11, 2023

Limor Luria, deputy director general and head of the ministry's Rehabilitation Department, told Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that at least 2,000 Israeli soldiers had been declared disabled, with health officials "in a hurry to release the wounded so it can admit new patients".

"We have never faced something like this," Luria said, adding that 5,000 soldiers had been wounded since the start of the fighting.

Israel's military has published a series of videos and images showing the mass arrest of what it says are Hamas members, which has unleashed international criticism and outrage given many of those rounded up are believed to be civilians:

Now I’ll present a remarkable interview between Daniel Davis and Max Blumenthal. Hats off to Davis, who came into this interview well prepared to engage with the very articulate Blumenthal. The full interview is a bit over half an hour in length. It’s riveting. However, I’ve prepared a brief transcript of about four minutes near the beginning which I believe readers will be interested in—it’s about US politics:

DD: Joining us today we have Max Blumenthal, who is the editor-in chief of The Grayzone.com. Max is also an award-winning author of several books, most recently Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. Welcome to the show, Max.

MB: Good to be here--that was my least recent book.

DD: I'm sorry I got that wrong but it's one of the most interesting. What was the gist, the bottom line of what the Republicans did to themselves?

MB: I wrote that book in 2009. I'd probably have to write "Democratic Gomorrah" now, about what the Democrats are doing to themselves. That book really encapsulated the collapse of the George W. Bush wing of the Republican party, and which you can see through the exploits of Nikki Haley and Mike Pence and everyone who tries to get on stage to challenge Donald Trump. They really embrace the old school politics that fused the Christian Right and the Neoconservative wing of the Republican party. [That messaging is] not really falling on fertile soil with the Republican base after the housing crisis [2007] and the various catastrophic wars in the Middle East, and so you've seen since then, in my last book, I kind of explained this in The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump, how the Neoconservative wing that animated Bush's foreign policy has transitioned into the Democratic party, and how these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq actually brought Donald Trump to office. Donald Trump was really the first candidate, period, to challenge the post 9/11 Wars directly and speak to the moral injury that so many in the Red States had experienced, because they disproportionately fought these wars.

DD: Right, yeah, and you see that with the latest Republican, debate the other day, where especially Nikki Haley and some others are still trying to push that same line of, You gotta go and punch Iran. So, yeah, it's not really helpful. Vivek Ramaswamy hammered Nikki Haley on her inability to even name the three regions, she called them provinces, where she wanted Americans to go fight and die in eastern Ukraine.

MB: That's really the essence of the kind of candidate that the Neocons seek out. They always want someone who's a governor, who has no foreign policy experience, and they become their Rent-a- brain and tell them which countries to bomb. Nikki Haley, as someone with at least the title of UN Ambassador on her resume, one would think that she would be a little bit more knowledgeable about that, but she seems much more fluent in the the Neocon let's-go-bomb-somebody routine. Chris Christie's the same way. I remember actually running into John Bolton in Atlanta on their endless monorail. Bolton was just sitting there--this is before he had his big Fox gig and was in the Trump Administration so he wasn't really that popular of a figure--and I said: "Who do you want for president?" This was 2008. He said, "I want a governor. I think we need a governor. Chris Christie is going to be my guy. [Bolton] was basically saying, Chris Christie is the least fluent on foreign policy and I'll just be able to get him to bomb Iran, and that's precisely what he said to me.

DD: Wow, and he certainly tried to do that with Trump on Iran. Fortunately, Trump didn't bite.

MB: Yeah, he [Bolton] just sabotaged everything else, though.

DD: True. We can talk a lot about that, talk about some of the North Korea stuff that Bolton screwed up that Trump could have done some good, but I digress. we're here to talk about the Israel Hamas situation here, and you've done a lot of good work here lately. I want to dig into some of that.

I’ll end this with a lengthy quote from a very well written Amazon review—the review was written in 2014—of another major book by Blumenthal. Major both figuratively and literally—it’s 500 pages long: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

Zionism's founding document, "The Jewish State" written by Theodor Herzl in 1896, suffered from one oversight as noted by the Israeli historian Benny Morris: "Herzl's attitude towards Palestine's Arabs was that of the garden-variety European imperialist towards native populations. …

Herzl's oversight might be explained by the fact he had never visited the area prior to writing his book, …

These fatuous visions were soon shattered by the Arab revolt of 1921 leading to a more muscular approach advocated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky's "The Iron Wall" published in 1923. An excellent writer and speaker who cut to the chase, a few of his words are worthy of repetition: "As long as the Arabs feel that there is the last hope of getting rid of us they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread an butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall... If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some 'rich man' benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf... Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot."

“Some rich man benefactor.” Presumably, in 1923 Jabotinsky was unable to envision a bought and paid for global hegemon named Uncle Sam.

What has transpired in the century-plus since Herzl's initial impetus is the conflict between Zionism's ideals and the harsher realities of Jabotinsky's "gun Zionism," a grinding ethnic cleansing project of the indigenous population justified by democratic ideals. To, finally, get to the point at hand, Blumenthal's book, this is a series of fairly short - and very well written - essays about his real life experiences in Israel beginning in 2009, a period marked by the political rise of Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer and airport baggage handler from Moldavia who founded the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party in 1999, who teamed up with Netanyahu's Likud Party to set a new agenda that might be summed up in one of their followers' favorite phases, "Death to Arabs." Israel's political history, not unlike ours, has been characterized as battles between "the left" and "the right," albeit for the Palestinians a difference without a distinction, but at least in Knesset legal wrangles the leftists advanced arguments smacking of democratic ideals - and the Israeli Supreme Court often rendered decisions that were even-handed. A movement to the Hard Right began with the disintegration of the USSR.

As you read this next paragraph, put yourself in the position of being a citizen of a country whose government opens its borders to all comers who flood into what used to be your country against your will. Oh, wait …

How about this. Place yourself in the position of dispossessed Palestinians who nevertheless make up no less than half the population of Greater Israel. The government of Greater Israel, which has dispossessed you, gets its “rich man benefactor” Uncle Sam to fund a flood of foreigners in an attempt to submerge you demographically:

In the early 1990s a million Soviet citizens emigrated to Israel, in part financed by the USA: Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker were adamantly opposed to a $10 billion loan guaranty to hasten this influx, but the bought-and-paid for members of Congress saw otherwise, voting overwhelmingly for the aid package as this would "promote peace in the region." The Russian immigrants, many of whom were quickly spirited to West Bank settlements such as Ariel, appear to have a near-universal visceral hatred of Arabs, a bias clearly reflected in Lieberman's agenda. What Blumenthal describes in rather chilling detail is the ascent of the Likud-Yisreal Beiteinu block in the Knesset where draconian new laws are passed to silence all opposition (including the Supreme Court) to an accelerated ethnic cleansing project. Worse yet, opposition parties, such as the middle-road Kadima Party, have become mute. Arab Knesset members still willing to fight on are easily silenced by new "laws" that make any mention of civil or political rights a "threat to national security" with the appropriate prison sentence. Blumenthal describes a dystopian security state that reaches down to the minutest levels of Israeli society as the country speeds up its project to cleanse the land of it indigenous inhabitants - with the unquestioned backing of the U.S. Congress.

There’s some irony in the development of Greater Israel into a dystopian security state in the name of “democracy”. The Israel Lobby likes to call Israel “the only Middle Eastern democracy,” implying that Israel is a country like America. Sadly, America, too, has developed into a “dystopian security state,” thanks in large part to the Neocon influence.