Roundup For People Looking For Stuff To Read

Can’t find enough reading material on the internet? I can help! That is, if your interests coincide with mine.

For example, if you’re wondering, how in the world did we get involved in Yemen, or did this just pop up out of the blue? This article will give you some background. It’s a good illustration of the dangers of thinking that the world needs us to run it, and of how getting involved in regional disputes can and will come back to bite us in all sorts of unexpected ways:

Another Mideast War Beckons America

Joe Biden is dangerously close to letting Gaza and Yemen spiral into a major global conflict.

However, Washington has been indirectly fighting the Yemeni insurgents for more than eight years. In 2015, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates invaded their impoverished neighbor, joining a struggle the roots of which ran back a decade or more. They wanted to restore a friendly regime ousted by the previous president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in league with Ansar Allah, a Shia movement also known as the Houthis. 

A struggle with roots going back more than a decade? Does that suggest to you that we probably didn’t really have a clue what we were getting involved in? And what could possibly go wrong with backing the militarily inept Saudis and Emiratis? Just about everything.

Although both sides deserved to lose, it was the Saudis and Emiratis who turned a domestic battle into an international crisis. The U.S. had no cause to join the fight. Saleh, overthrown in 2011 during the Arab Spring, had previously cooperated with Washington. Ansar Allah was hostile to America, but the group did not target the United States. More importantly, the Houthis opposed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group’s most active chapter. 

Right off the bat we found ourselves supporting AQAP. Not a good look for the world’s self proclaimed Terrorism Warrior.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration, desperate to secure the KSA’s acquiescence to nuclear negotiations with Iran, supported the invasion. Washington provided warplanes, maintenance, munitions, intelligence, and, for a time, aerial refueling. Even so, the homegrown insurgents—soon without Saleh, with whom they had a deadly falling out—largely won the fight on the ground, aided by Iran, which was only too happy to bleed its royal adversary. The Saudi and Emirati invaders were primarily responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

So Gaza isn’t the only or the first time we found ourselves supporting what amounted to a genocide. Seems almost like a pattern forming. It’s a good read.

Next, what most people know best about Yemen—except maybe for its excellent coffee—is that it’s full of people who fire missiles at ships, shutting down major shipping routes and driving prices up. But how do the Houthis know what ships to target? John Helmer can tell you, if you’re interested. My personal bet is that the Houthis are getting some very savvy advice and intel assistance, but who knows? Maybe chewing khat somehow hones intel analytical skills, although I tend to doubt it:

Because of Israel’s War Against Palestine, There Are No Innocent Ships at Sea

Since the start of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, it has been the claim of the Israelis, their lawyers,  and allies that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, so they say that killing them all is neither a genocide nor a war crime.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said it in India in October. US Congressman Brian Mast said it, following the Israeli lead. The US Navy analyst who spied for Israel and served half a life in US prison for his treason has declared it in print. A French-Israeli lawyer has argued the legality on French television.

The reply the Arab militaries fighting against Israel have made is that there is no innocent oil tanker or container ship moving within missile or drone range of Israel, the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean unless it can prove it. This answer by the Ansar Allah government of Yemen, aka the Houthi military, is that they will attack any vessel which they know to be owned or controlled by Israel through its shipping families, companies, and their cutouts.

As a result, Houthi drone and missile attacks have exposed the elaborate scheme of corporate camouflage and false-flagging which Israel has been employing to conceal the vessel identities  and movement of its international shipping operations. The Anglo-American maritime industry media, privy to these secrets, have not published them. The mainstream western press remains in the dark.

There is much more at stake. The effectiveness of the Houthi ship targeting campaign has so threatened the movement of vital cargoes into and out of Europe that shipping, port, and military officials in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece are now trying to avert a commercial disaster for themselves by arranging secret safe-passage deals with Yemen and Iran in exchange for which they are applying a blockade on Israel’s cargoes, vessels and ports.

This is the secret which is torpedoing the Pentagon’s multinational Red Sea naval escort plan, called OPERATION PROSPERITY GUARDIAN. As the secrecy of Israeli shipping companies spills out, along with the secret dealmaking of the international shipowners with the Houthis,  American shipowners are already complaining bitterly at being cut out of the profits.  “If the main beneficiary of the operation,” editorializes gCaptain of California, a leading US maritime platform, “is one of the largest shipping corporations in the world [Denmark’s Maersk], then there is a question of whose prosperity is Operation Prosperity Guardian truly guarding?”

Just how accurate is Houthi targeting of concealed Israeli shipping connections?

The answer to that question is, pretty darned accurate—and Helmer provides examples. The accuracy depends on tracing the ownership of vessels through all sorts of corporate and financial subterfuges. I have a shrewd idea that the Iranians are pretty good at that.

Here’s a long article that reviews a book that maintains that the technical tools for implementing our dystopian future, living in a suffocating surveillance state, are being developed in Israel. We’re all Gazans now! it turns out.

Book Review: Antony Loewenstein, “The Palestine Laboratory”

The review is quite lengthy and somewhat loosely organized, but here are some excerpts that show what interested me:

While Israeli weapons and surveillance development is boosted by its use on Palestinians, it is also far from the only country using or developing such capabilities. There exists the possibility that Israel is just ahead of the curve in its widespread deployment of occupation technology, but the authoritarian capitalism it practices is spreading along with the technologies it uses to advance such a system. Reading Loewenstein’s account of the proliferation of such tech left me wondering what’s to prevent Gaza and the West Bank’s present becoming the future for many societies?

But whether a state is classified as a neoliberal surveillance state, ethnonationalist authoritarianism, multicultural authoritarian capitalism, or something else, they are becoming more like Israel as they use the same population control technologies, according to Loewenstein.

Who are the “Gazans” in these various cases?

Whether it’s racist or multicultural plunder or crackdowns on religious minorities, dissidents, migrants, or a permanent underclass, it is anyone the ruling class of a particular country deems in need of being controlled or eradicated.

One example is how Israeli surveillance company Cellebrite sells its phone-hacking tools to countless police departments across the US.

Take Oosto, formerly AnyVision. It’s an Israeli company that merges AI with facial recognition and biometrics and targets all Palestiniians across the West Bank. According to Loewenstein, Oosto “operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers.”

And there’s Cellebrite, the Israeli digital intelligence behemoth whose products include the Universal Forensic Extraction Device hacking tool.

Companies around the world have a financial incentive to pursue population control technologies as that is what the ruling class and their governments demand.

M. K. Bhadrakumar has a review of Putin’s recent speech in which:

Putin lifts the fog of war in Ukraine

Actually, I suspect that the plain spoken Putin may have been yanking a few chains in his speech, but here’s the gist, excerpted from the longer article. It provides a nice counterpoint to the Western narratives:

The leitmotif of Putin’s speech is that this is a war that Russia never sought but was imposed on it by the US. Putin had listed last year in February five clear-cut objectives of the Russian military operation — security of the Russian population; de-nazification of Ukraine; demilitarisation of Ukraine; striving for a friendly regime in Kiev; and, non-admission of Ukraine into NATO. These are of course interlocked objectives. The US and its allies know it but continue to pretend otherwise with their focus in the proxy war has been a military victory and regime change in Russia. 

Putin’s message is that any new Western narrative on the war is doomed to meet with the same fate as the previous one unless there is realism that Russia cannot be militarily defeated and its legitimate interests are recognised. 

The heart of the matter is that the West all along perceived Ukraine as a geopolitical project targeting Russia. Today, even with defeat staring at its face, the West’s priority lies in forcing Russia to agree to a ceasefire on the basis of the existing line of contact without any geopolitical or strategic obligations on the part of Washington or the transatlantic alliance — which, de facto, would mean leaving the door for the rearmament of the battered Ukrainian military and for Kiev’s accession to NATO through the back door. 

Suffice to say, the discredited agenda of using Ukraine as a pawn to pursue the West’s anti-Russian policy is still very much around. But Moscow will not fall for the US’ trap a second time, risking another war that may erupt at a time that suits NATO. 

Unsurprisingly, Putin’s speech paid great attention to revving up Russia’s defence industry to meet any military exigencies that might arise. But towards the end of his speech, Putin also dwelt on Russia’s politico-military options under the circumstances. 

On the military side, clearly, Russia will press forward the attritional war to its logical end of pushing the Ukrainian military into a strategic dead-end, which would mean seeking tactical improvements along the frontline, undermining Ukraine’s economic potential, inflicting military losses, and boosting Russia’s own defence industry on a scale that tips the balance of forces to weigh against any military adventures by the NATO.  

OK, in this next two paragraphs I believe Putin is yanking Polish chains. I don’t for a moment believe that Poland wants to reincorporate large areas full of Ukro-Nazis. The Poles can be difficult to deal with, but in the end they’re not stupid. They know that Putin’s claim that “many” Ukrainians are dying to return to being governed from Warsaw is nonsense. Moreover, tying in Stalin’s transfer of formerly Polish dominated areas of Ukraine to the USSR with the transfer of ““eastern German lands, the Danzig Corridor, and Danzig itself” to Poland is a huge red flag for Poles. The Danzig Corridor was supposed to have been settled after WW1, not by Stalin. IMO, Putin is openly suggesting that, if the Poles don’t wise up and act reasonably, Russia could do a deal with Germany that would run very much against Polish interests.

In the final analysis, Putin asserted, Russia is determined to reclaim the “vast historical territories, Russian territories, along with the population” that the Bolsheviks transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet era. However, he drew an important distinction as regards the “western lands” of Ukraine (west of Dnieper) that are a legacy of World War II over which there could be territorial claims from Poland, Hungary and Romania, which at least in the case of Poland is also linked to the transfer of “eastern German lands, the Danzig Corridor, and Danzig itself” following the defeat of the Third Reich. 

Putin took note that “people who live there (western Ukraine) – many of them, at least, I know this for sure, 100 percent – they want to return to their historical homeland. The countries that lost these territories, primarily Poland, dream of having them back.” 

…

Putin concluded saying that if the final arbiter is military prowess, that explains why Russia is focusing on a “strong, reliable, well-equipped, and properly motivated Armed Forces” backed by a strong economy and “the support of the multi-ethnic people of Russia.” 

There is a strong likelihood of Russian military operations moving further westward toward the Dnieper in the coming months, well beyond the four new territories that joined the Russian Federation last year — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhia, and Kherson. In the absence of any negotiated settlement, Russia may choose to unilaterally “liberate” those southern regions of Ukraine that were historically part of Russia, which would presumably include Odessa and the entire Black Sea coast, or Kharkov to the north of the Donbass region. 

Russia is expecting that the combat capabilities of the Ukrainian forces will sharply diminish in the near future and the army faces difficulty already to get new recruits. That is to say, through the year ahead, the balance of forces at the front will shift due to the Ukrainian military’s heavy losses and the drop in Western aid, and, at some point, Ukraine’s defences will begin to crumble.     

So, there we have it, from the horse’s mouth.