By Robert Fantina, Counterøpunch, Oct 11, 2023

The world awoke on October 7 to the news that so-called ‘militants’ in the Gaza Strip had entered Israel, killed 40 people and injured hundreds of others. (The figures now stand at more than 900 Israelis killed and 2806 wounded.) In retaliation, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel is at war with Gaza. The death toll on both sides has skyrocketed since the news initially broke.

It must be remembered that Palestinians in Gaza, along with those in the West Bank and Jerusalem, have suffered for decades at the hands of the brutal, internationally-illegal and internationally-condemned Israeli occupation of Palestine. Israel has the most advanced weaponry on the planet, much of it provided by the United States. Israel also receives billions of dollars in aid annually from the U.S., compared to the trivial amount of aid it provides to Palestine.

Palestine, on the other hand, with no army, navy or air force, must rely on what it can cobble together in the way of weapons, to resist the occupation. Norman Finklestein, son of Holocaust survivors and an ardent advocate of Palestinian rights, refers to Hamas ‘rockets’ as ‘enhanced fireworks’. And under international law, an occupied people can resist the occupation in any way possible, including armed struggle. In this situation, as is nearly always the case in the Palestine-Israel ‘conflict’, it is Israel, not Palestine, that is in violation of international law.

A ‘conflict’ cannot be considered a war when it is between a rich nation with one of the most powerful militaries on the planet, and a poor, occupied country lacking any but the most rudimentary military facilities. The Palestinians in Gaza, ruled by the democratically-elected government of Hamas, are resisting the brutal, demoralizing occupation, and Israel, ruled by the most extreme right-wing government in its history of brutal right-wing governments, is continuing its policy of slow but ongoing genocide.

President Joe Biden and other Western leaders proclaim, once again, that Israel has a right to defend itself. Yet there is never any discussion about Palestine’s right to defend itself from the ongoing, deadly oppression it suffers daily at the hands of Israel. The aggressor cannot be seen as defending itself from its victim. That Israel is an apartheid regime can no longer be doubted, despite the denials of Biden and other government leaders. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and other international human-rights organizations have documented this fact in painful detail.

United States government officials frequently proclaim their desire for peace in the Middle East. Yet the U.S. continues to not only finance Israeli brutality, but also protect it from consequences on the world stage by exercising U.S. veto power nearly every time the United Nations Security Council seeks to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law and crimes against humanity.

Current efforts by the U.S. to broker an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel will not lead to peace in the Middle East. Millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East are displeased by their governments’ establishing diplomatic relations with Israel during the Trump administration. Monarchies and dictatorships creating alliances may benefit their government leaders, but do nothing for the people who have limited, if any, say in the governments that rule them. Biden and other government leaders, in the U.S. and around the world, ignore the simmering and growing hostility of millions of people who oppose Israel’s racist policies and the governments that support them.

True peace in the Middle East is not difficult to achieve. The steps to doing so are clear: the U.S. must tie any aid to Israel to that country’s adherence to international law. That includes removing all illegal settlers; the concept that Israel is creating ‘facts on the ground’ is worthless. Stolen property does not eventually become owned by the thief; when the theft is discovered, the property must be returned. According to international law, the settlements are illegal.

Additionally, when the U.N. Security Council proposes resolutions that condemn Israeli violations of international law, the U.S. must vote in support of those resolutions. Israel, by its own behaviors, increases its reputation as an international outlaw, and the U.S. does nothing to enhance its own reputation by supporting it.

The people throughout Palestine, and especially in Gaza today, experience horrific living conditions due to the Israeli occupation. The U.N. predicted in 2012 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, yet over 2,000,000 people still live there, despite the sporadic availability of electricity, limited drinking water, unemployment at record highs and poverty rampant.

Major news outlets are treating this as a ‘terrorist’ act, Israel’s ‘9-11’, and not the response of a people who have suffered greatly under the brutal hand of an occupying nation for decades. They decry Palestinian violence, as they ignore that of Israel. Few, if any, journalists question Israeli bombing of hospitals and schools, or even the bombing of United Nations refugee shelters. They don’t question the brutality of killing rock-throwing teenagers, or the nightly raids of homes in the West Bank, where the houses are ransacked by IDF soldiers, and all the males over the age of 11 taken into custody. No, perhaps because those victims are always Arab and usually Muslim, crimes against them don’t matter.

The latest onslaught by Israel will only worsen these horrific conditions. The world community must demand the liberation of the Palestinians, and Israel must be held accountable for its crimes.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Propaganda, Lies and False Flags: How the U.S. Justifies its Wars.

Palestinians inspect the rubble of the West mosque destroyed after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike at Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, early October 9, 2023

COMMUNIST parties from around the globe laid the blame for the escalation of resistance by Hamas in Gaza over the weekend firmly at the door of the Israeli occupying forces.

by Roger McKenzie, Morning Star, Oct. 9, 2023

The Palestinian People’s Party said on Sunday that the rapid escalation between Hamas and the Israelis “confirms beyond any doubt that security, stability and peace in the region and the world cannot be achieved unless the Palestinian people obtain their legitimate rights.”

The Communist Party of Israel (MKI) and Hadash blamed the “criminal occupation policy of the far-right Netanyahu government,” and said it posed “grave dangers” for peace in the region.

They said that full responsibility for the escalation should be placed “on the fascist right-wing government.”

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths insisted there would be no peace in the region until the Israeli state ends its illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and ceases its ‘slow strangulation’ of the Gaza Strip.”

He added: “Instead of demanding that Israel negotiates with the representatives of the Palestinian people to create an independent, sovereign Palestine alongside a sovereign and secure Israel, the United States, Germany and Britain continue to arm Tel Aviv’s state terrorists to the teeth.”

This came amid a widespread outpouring of support across the world for the Palestinians. Demonstrations were held on Sunday across towns and cities across the US, Europe, Britain and in the Arab world.

But Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip from the air and vowed to lay total siege to the impoverished, Hamas-ruled territory in the wake of an unprecedented weekend incursion.

Israel’s much-vaunted military and intelligence apparatus was caught completely off guard by Hamas’s attack.

In retaliation Israeli forces targeted mosques and residential buildings.

Palestinian media have suggested that Israeli forces have employed the poisonous substance white phosphorus on heavily populated districts in Gaza.

Around 700 people have been reported killed in Israel and nearly 500 in Gaza, a besieged enclave of 2.3 million Palestinians bordering Israel and Egypt.

Palestinian militant groups claimed to be holding over 130 people captured in Israel and dragged to Gaza.

The United Nations security council held an emergency meeting behind closed doors on Sunday, but failed to agree to any actions.

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, called for a ceasefire and meaningful negotiations, which have been “stalled for decades.”

Chinese ambassador Zhang Jun insisted ahead of the meeting that it was vital for all parties “to come back to the two-state solution.”

A short comment from last year

—Nasir Khan, October 10, 2022

Israel as a colonial settler state was created primarily by British imperialists with the help of other Western powers. Its ideology, Zionism, was an extreme brand of ethnoreligious superiority. As a result, the Zionist rulers of Israel were free to expand in Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, using its military power and terror. They had done this systematically and consistently even before 1948 when Israel was formally established.

What is important for us to keep in mind is the fact all this has been and is because of the unconditional support of the United States, Britain and other Western powers for the Zionist rulers of Israel. Now, under US pressure and its bargaining power, many Arab despots, kings, emirs and dictators have joined the West as friends of Israel, thus ignoring the legitimate national rights of the people of Palestine whose land is in the hands of the rulers of Israel.

The revolving door between the Defense Department and the weapons industry spins — a new report offers ways to slow it down.
Reporting | Military Industrial Complex

William Hartung & Dillon Fisher, Responsible Statecraft, Oct 05, 2023

At a time when the Pentagon budget is soaring towards $1 trillion per year and debates about how to respond to the challenges posed by Russia and China are front and center, it is more important than ever to make an independent assessment of the best path forward.

Ideally, this would involve objective analysis by unbiased experts and policy makers grounded in a vigorous public conversation about how best to defend the country. But more often than not, special interests override the national interest in decisions on how much to spend on the Pentagon, and how those funds should be allocated.

One practice that introduces bias into the shaping of defense policy is the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry. The movement of retired senior officials from the Pentagon and the military services into the arms industry is a longstanding practice that raises serious questions about the appearance and reality of conflicts of interest. Mostly because employing well-connected ex-military officers can give weapons makers enormous, unwarranted influence over the process of determining the size and shape of the Pentagon budget.

A 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 1,700 senior government officials had taken positions in the arms industry over a five year period, an average of well over 300 per year. And a new report from our organization, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, found that this practice is particularly pronounced among top generals and admirals. In the past five years, over 80% of retired four-star generals and admirals (26 of 32) went on to work in the arms sector as board members, advisers, lobbyists, or consultants.

For example, Boeing recruited the former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson following his retirement from government service. The admiral joined the company’s board of directors within two months of his retirement ceremony. Boeing was the Pentagon’s sixth largest contractor in Fiscal Year 2022, with total prime contracts awards amounting to $14.8 billion.

Another prominent example of a four-star officer going to work for a top contractor is retired Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he retired in September 2019. Five months later Dunford joined the board of directors of Lockheed Martin.

The most recent batch of retired four-stars are not only seeking employment with the big contractors, they are also branching out to work for small and mid-size companies that focus on cutting edge technology, like next-generation drones, artificial intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity.

For example, the former head of Africa Command, General Stephen Townsend (U.S. Army, Ret.), joined a company called Fortem Technologies, which is dedicated to airspace awareness and defense against drones. General Mike Murray, former head of the U.S. Army Futures Command, went onto the boards of three emerging defense tech firms — Capewell, Hypori, and Vita Inclinata. And both former Chief of the National Guard Bureau head Gen. Joseph L. Lengyel and former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William K. Lescher went to work for AI firms upon leaving government service.

If past experience is any guide, this new influx of former military officials into the arms sector will distort Pentagon spending priorities and promote higher military budgets than would be the case absent their influence on behalf of their corporate employers.

As documented in our new report and in prior analyses by the Project on Government Oversight, there are numerous examples of senior military officials who have advocated for dysfunctional weapons while in government and then gone on to work for the companies that produced those systems. In addition, former military officers have played central roles in preventing the Pentagon from divesting itself of weapons it no longer wants or needs, like the overpriced, underperforming, and strategically unnecessary Littoral Combat Ship. The prevalence of this kind of activity is hard to track because of the limited information available about what retired military officers do once they join the arms industry.

The most comprehensive proposal for addressing the problem of the revolving door is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act,” which includes a number of the measures outlined below.

At a minimum, to limit the undue influence of retired four-stars and the potential conflicts of interest that result from the post-service employment of former military officers, the following measures should be taken:

Bar four-star officers from going to work for companies that receive $1 billion or more in contracts with the Pentagon annually.

Extend “cooling off periods” before retired officials can go to work for the arms industry to four years. This would ensure that key contacts or key information that the official may have been privy to while serving would not provide an outsized advantage.

Increase transparency through accurate reporting on the post-government employment of retired military officials, including a requirement that defense contractors report their interactions with relevant government officials.

Expand the definition of lobbying. Current lobbying restrictions and laws allow consultants, board members, and other corporate officials to act as advocates for the arms industry without being defined as lobbyists, thereby allowing them to avoid relevant restrictions that would otherwise apply.

There’s too much at stake, both in taxpayer dollars and our future security, to let conflicts of interest and special interest politics shape the Pentagon budget. The time for Congress to act to reduce the influence of the revolving door is now.
William Hartung
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Dillon Fisher
Researcher in the Quincy Institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program

Caitlin Johnstone, October 01, 2023 – Information Clearing House – There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.

At an event in Kyiv which hosted 250 “defense” industry corporations from 30 different countries on Friday, President Zelensky gave a speech urging war profiteers to open factories in Ukraine to cut out the middleman of securing and delivering so many weapons from abroad. This is an investment that the arms industry would ostensibly have plenty of time to set up, given that western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.

Zelensky’s speech twice made use of the phrase “defense-industrial complex”, and used the phrase “arsenal of the free world” no fewer than three times.

“Ukraine is developing a special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex,” Zelensky said. “To give all the opportunities to realize their potential to every company that works for the sake of defense — in Ukraine and with Ukraine or that wants to come to Ukraine.”

“Right now, the most powerful military-industrial complexes are being determined, as are their priorities and the global standard of defense. All of this is being determined in Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted with photos from the event.

This move has been accompanied in recent weeks by some of the most appalling mass media headlines that I have ever seen, all geared toward normalizing the military industrial complex in the eyes of the public.

In an amazingly awful Wall Street Journal op-ed titled titled “In Defense of the Defense Industry” and subtitled “Populists of the right and left attack U.S. companies that make weapons. Who do they think protects us?”, Future of Capitalism’s Ira Stoll argues that the military industrial complex is actually a wonderful thing we should all love and support.

“The weapons industry protects America and its allies, keeping us safe from ruthless enemies who would otherwise exterminate or enslave us,” Stoll writes. “Raytheon helps make weapons systems that defend Israeli civilians against attacks from Iran-backed terrorist groups. These include the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles. Raytheon also produces the Javelin antitank missile that Ukraine has used against Russian armor and the early-warning radars that would detect incoming missiles aimed at the U.S.”

Stoll does not name the alternate universe he is describing in which the US military is used to keep Americans safe rather than to advance imperial interests abroad.

Another recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair” and subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield” glorifies the way war machinery is being field tested on human bodies to the benefit of war profiteers.

“The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald. “Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.”

A Reuters article from two weeks ago titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” gushes over how much money is being raked in by arms manufacturers as a result of this war, with one unnamed arms industry executive telling Reuters, “War is good for business.”

Just the other day CNN anchor Erin Burnett followed up some clips of “far right lawmakers” voicing their opposition to funding for the Ukraine proxy war by pausing to explain to her audience that this funding is actually good for Americans, because it goes straight into the US arms industry.

“It’s worthwhile with all of this gaining some steam in public perception to be clear on some facts,” Burnett said. “First and foremost, the vast majority of this money is going to American companies and jobs, right, because those are the people that are making the Abrams tanks, the ammo and everything else. And you take Lockheed Martin, which makes the HIMARS, that have been core to Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the company announced it’s going to increase its workforce in Camden, Arkansas, by 20 percent, just because of this new demand.”

“That money is going to America,” Burnett added. 

All this propaganda energy is going into normalizing the act of war profiteering because if you let the idea stand on its own, it would make people scream in horror. The fact that a deliberately-provoked war is being used as a giant field demo to show prospective buyers and investors how effective various weapons systems can be at ripping apart human bodies in order to profit from all this death and destruction is more nightmarish than anything any dystopian novelist has ever come up with.

Ukraine is a giant advertisement for weapons of mass slaughter, and the cost of that corporate ad is not money but human blood. If you look right at this thing it absolutely chills you to the bone. Which is why so much effort is being poured into making sure people don’t look at it.

Caitlin’s articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out herpodcast, throwing some money into her hat on PatreonorPaypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. New book! Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or PDF/ebook. – All works co-authored with her husband Tim Foley. https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au

Jonathan Cook, October 3, 2023

Jonathan Cook responds to Cheney’s warning against the re-election of Donald Trump.

U.S. soldiers near a burning oil well in the Rumaila oil field, Iraq, April 2003. (U.S. Navy)

By Jonathan Cook
MintPress News

There is not much to thank Dick Cheney for. But perhaps he deserves credit for one thing: illustrating how effectively our political systems can rehabilitate even the most monstrous of moral monsters.

Just watch this short clip that went viral on X (formerly Twitter), in which Cheney warns against the re-election of Donald Trump. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has proven a big hit with Democratic party supporters, those who once reviled Cheney for his role in invading Iraq.

In the video, Cheney declares: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

That is almost certainly wrong, even judged in narrow, parochial terms that only consider U.S. domestic concerns. The damage unleashed by Cheney — and the shockwaves that continue to ripple abroad and at home two decades on — surely qualify him as an even greater menace.

But current U.S. President Joe Biden should be in the running, too. He has risked all of our lives in Ukraine by playing a game of nuclear chicken with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Before grappling with such issues further, let’s offer a brief recap for those for whom the 2003 Iraq war is a distant memory.

Cheney was vice-president during George W. Bush’s presidency – and the man who actually ran the show.

Cheney and Bush in the White House bunker on Sept. 11, 2001, after returning to the White House from Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska. (U.S. National Archives)

While Bush struggled to form complete sentences — much as Biden does today — but looked all-American in his vintage leather jacket, the ghoulish Cheney went about arranging the destruction of entire countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq, on behalf of the military-industrial complex.

Untold millions of people in the Middle East died, were made homeless, or were driven across borders through his deceptions. Those wars, though catastrophic for the Middle East, were exceptionally lucrative for corporate interests invested in the West’s war industries.

Not least among them was Halliburton, which Cheney had headed until he became vice president. Following the invasion, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion contract in Iraq – without a competitive tender.

Cheney continued to retain large stocks in the company while it was helping to plunder Iraq’s resources, including its oil.

He did not just trash Iraq and Afghanistan. He intensified the dark sectarian forces unleashed in the 1980s by the “Great Game” clash of imperialism between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in Afghanistan that spawned the mujahideen and later Al-Qaeda.

The destruction of Iraq, in particular, launched the death cult of the Islamic State, which would gain a more significant footprint every time the U.S. meddled in the Middle East, from Libya to Syria.

If anyone can rightly be described as a monster, if anyone should be in the dock at The Hague accused of the “supreme international crime” of launching a war of aggression, it is Dick Cheney. More so than the ridiculous, strutting Bush Jr.

Short Memories

Jan. 31, 2003: Bush and Blair addressing the media after privately discussing the invasion of Iraq. (White House/Paul Morse, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

But if we are considering how our political systems are designed to shorten memories so that not only can monsters walk among us, but they are celebrated and profit year after year from their crimes, then Tony Blair deserves a dishonorable mention.

If anyone is as politically and morally monstrous as Cheney, it is the vainglorious, power-worshipping British prime minister of that period. While Bush sold the neocon plan for Iraq’s destruction in a leather jacket, Blair sold it to Europeans – or at least those who were gullible enough to take him seriously – in crisp white shirts and power suits.

Blair’s role was to fill in the credibility gaps of the inarticulate, posturing Bush. Blair was the brains to Bush’s brawn.

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Blair fronted the diplomatic push. He made measured but impassioned appeals for action to the public. And most especially — with the “dodgy dossier” of intelligence lies cribbed straight from the internet, claiming that Saddam Hussein could hit Europe with his stockpile of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in little more time than it takes to have a shower – he excelled at fear-mongering.

It is hard not to notice how the treatment of Blair and Cheney exemplifies our skewed political and moral priorities, even after much of the dust has settled in Iraq and across the Middle East.

May 2006: A disabled 28-year-old Iraqi woman seeking medical attention after losing both of her legs during combat operations by Coalition Forces against insurgents in 2005 in her hometown near the Iraq-Syria border. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

The clamor grows daily for Putin to be dragged to the Hague war crimes court for invading neighboring Ukraine. In March, the International Criminal Court even issued an arrest warrant for him to be tried over the alleged forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

There is, of course, no arrest warrant for either Blair or Cheney, even though in the hierarchy of war crimes, their roles are almost certainly worse. Putin at least has an argument that his invasion was provoked by NATO’s efforts to move weapons ever closer to Russia’s border, undermining Moscow’s nuclear deterrent.

By contrast, no one ever refers to the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq as “unprovoked,” even though it undoubtedly was. The “dodgy dossier” was packed with lies. There were no WMD in Iraq, as U.N. inspectors had warned. And Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al-Qaeda. Every pretext for the invasion was disinformation — just as it was intended to be.

For this reason alone, the rent-a-quote Blair has been remarkably careful to avoid discussing war crimes concerning the Ukraine war. Whatever allegations he makes against Putin could easily be turned against him three or fourfold. Instead, his focus has been simply on how to “defeat Russia.”

The man who, in power, so loudly and childishly framed world events as a clash of civilizations — in which the West was always on the side of the angels — speaks now in hushed tones about the manufactured moral crusade of the day: Ukraine.

Swamp Creature

But it is far worse than the lack of an arrest warrant and trial. In Blair’s case, the media continued to treat him with reverence. His opinion is sought out. In no media interview is he ever confronted with the evidence that easily proves he committed the supreme crime against humanity in invading Iraq.

And worse still, his crime has actually been subsumed within his brand, becoming a selling point. He is an international statesman, an Elder, and the head of a think-tank empire, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He now has 800 staff dedicated to advancing his policies in 40 countries.

The truth is that, despite his official rehabilitation by the media and fellow politicians, much of the British public reviles Blair. This is why, by necessity, the power he wields — possibly greater than when he was Britain’s prime minister — operates entirely in the shadows.

 Blair representing his Institute for Global Change at an international internet conference in 2018. (Web Summit, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Blair, like Cheney, is still every bit as much of a swamp creature, a peddler of concealed corporate interests — from the oil industry and arms makers to the parasitic bankers that feed off the asset-stripping the other two excel in — as he was when he invaded Iraq.

One of his main clients is Saudi Arabia, a regime that has used its oil riches to bomb civilians in Yemen year after year and to finance poisonous religious extremist movements that have helped to wreck entire countries.

His institute, representing corporate interests such as bankers JP Morgan and Swiss insurance behemoth Zurich, can now bypass even the minimal democratic accountability Blair was subjected to as prime minister.

Behind the scenes, Blair was the one advocating on behalf of his corporate clients for many of the science-busting Covid policies the U.K. government adopted, and he continues to push hard for the roll-out of digital identification technologies and investment in artificial intelligence.

His Brave New World privacy-destroying tech agenda, shared with the billionaire class, from Bill Gates to George Soros, is barely scrutinized.

This is why his brand grows, even as his credibility with the British public remains rock bottom.

Grandpa of Politics

Across the Atlantic, the dull-witted George W. Bush may not have managed to establish an institute of comparable standing in his name. Still, efforts to rehabilitate his image among the public have been more successful. His very gormlessness has been rebranded as down-to-earth affability, honesty and kindliness.

In 2003, Bush’s simple-mindedness offered Cheney and the West’s war industries the “plausible deniability” they needed to shelter behind. The destruction of Iraq could be excused as an unfortunate, well-intentioned cock-up — a “humanitarian war” that turned out badly — rather than another colonial-style resource grab by corporate America.

Bush, like Cheney and Blair, an indisputable war criminal who puts anything done by Russia’s Putin in the shade, has not paid any price for his crimes. Instead, courtesy of the establishment media, he has been refashioned as the kindly grandpa of U.S. politics.

Bush delivers the eulogy at the funeral for his father on Dec. 5, 2018, at the Washington National Cathedral. (White House, Andrea Hanks)

When they come, obituaries will not focus on the Iraqi families incinerated by the Shock and Awe bombing campaign he greenlighted on entirely bogus grounds. They will show him reaching out to hand a sweet to Michelle Obama, wife of a supposed political rival, at John McCain’s memorial service and again at his father’s funeral.

It is a tender, bipartisan moment meant to serve as a stark, juxtapositional reminder that Trump supposedly exists outside this club of the great and good.

We are meant to forget that before Trump entered politics, there were plenty of photos of him rubbing shoulders at elite parties with the Bush and Clinton political dynasties.

Image-laundering is a staple of our political systems. It is why most of the billionaire-owned media have continued to treat Biden deferentially, dismissing his glaring cognitive difficulties simply as evidence of a lifelong stutter, even as the president is regularly caught on video not only going off-script but losing any sense of where he is or what he should be doing.

It took the rightwing, Rupert Murdoch-owned “Sky News,” which prefers that Biden be replaced with a Republican, to give a flavor in the mainstream of how severe Biden’s physical and mental decline is. Even then, it was Murdoch’s distant Australian operation that took the gloves off. In truth, the public image assigned to our leaders is force-fed into our subconscious – like stuffing a goose before slaughter – by a corporate media embedded in the same web of corporate interests that oils the tank treads of the West’s war machine.

High-Wire Act

Cheney’s claim that Trump is some anomaly in U.S. politics is so plainly nonsense. Or at least it is in the sense that Cheney means it.

True, Trump is an outlier. As a narcissist operating in the always-on, digital era — one in which distinctions between news and celebrity have been eroded — Trump happily suns himself in the glare of publicity.

He is a paradox: a political showman and a shadowy corporate deal-maker. These combined roles make this a high-wire act, one in which the safety net of plausible deniability is removed.

He is no different from a corrupt Cheney, a corrupt Gates, or a corrupt Soros. Except unlike them, Trump has given the swamp an incentive — at least a temporary one — to expose him, not least because he cannot be rebranded as a philanthropist or elder statesman.

Elon Musk is treading a similar, reckless path — unless he can be corralled back into line. Once best known and loved for producing “planet-saving” electric cars, he has turned unlikely, and increasingly loathed, whistleblower, highlighting the corrupt ties between social media corporations and the intelligence services.

But the idea of good and bad billionaires is yet more misdirection.

There is no way to become that rich without being entangled in the inherently corrupt world of transglobal capital movements, without carrying out secretive corporate operations that depend on the collaboration of resource-rich states and their similarly corrupt elites.

Any billionaire could face their own Russiagate if their rivals willed it. Each certainly deserves it. But only in Trump’s case is the incentive strong enough to carry it through.

Why? Because Trump found a replacement for the safety net. He exploited the paradox at the heart of his brand by presenting himself as the insider-outsider, the rich man fighting for poor, white America, the billionaire taking on the media owned by and enriching his best friends. He sold himself as the opposition to the swamp he feeds off.

Trump’s act, his man-of-the-people posturing, made it impossible for the swamp to rehabilitate him, as it has done Cheney and Bush. To acquit him would be to indict itself.

This is why the swamp is now trying to drown him in legal entanglements to keep him out of the White House.

Soaked in Blood

White and red flags, representing Iraqi and American deaths respectively, on the campus of Oregon State University in May 2008 as part of the traveling Iraq Body Count exhibit. (Parhamr, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) 

The paradox is coming full circle. Trump draws his political power from the crowd, from the mob. If Trump was less of a narcissist, was he more of a political strategist, was he the Hitler so many imagine him to be, he could harness that support, mobilize it, beat back the swamp’s onslaught and protect himself.

He would be able to browbeat his corporate friend-rivals into submission. But Trump is no Hitler. So the swamp is winning: it is crushing Trump legally and politically. It will seek to bog him down in legal difficulties to sap him of political momentum.

But as is the danger with all paradoxes, the picture could yet grow more complex. The more the swamp tries to drown Trump, the more credibility it breathes into his showman’s bogus claim that he is standing up for the little guy. But also, and more dangerously, the more the swamp makes itself visible.

Trump’s vanquishment inevitably comes at a heavy price: focusing public attention on the reality that a tiny, corrupt corporate elite has rigged the system to maintain its power and enrichment.

It should not have needed someone like Trump to have made this explicit. The arch-criminals Blair, Bush and Cheney are all soaked in blood. The fact that their images have been so wholly laundered that they are publicly treated as whiter than white should have been proof that we are being subjected to a sustained campaign of gaslighting.

So long as swamp creatures like Cheney can direct our gaze exclusively at Trump, they grow in power. They can keep waging wars, keep stealing resources, keep bombing children – and keep getting richer.

The system they built to maintain their power needs to be overthrown. But that cannot be achieved so long as only Trump – not Bush, Blair and Cheney – is facing the dock.

Jonathan Cook is a MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

September 29, 2023 – Information Clearing House

During the disastrous Vietnam War, it was said that the US government treated the public like a mushroom farm: keeping it in the dark and feeding it with manure.  The heroic Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers documenting the unrelenting US government lying about the war in order to protect politicians who would be embarrassed by the truth.  A half century later, during the Ukraine War, the manure is piled even higher. 

According to the US Government and the ever-obsequious New York Times, the Ukraine war was “unprovoked,” the New York Times’ favorite adjective to describe the war.  Putin, allegedly mistaking himself for Peter the Great, invaded Ukraine to recreate the Russian Empire.  Yet last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg committed a Washington gaffe, meaning that he accidentally blurted out the truth. 

In testimony to the European Union Parliament, Stoltenberg made clear that it was America’s relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine that was the real cause of the war and why it continues today.  Here are Stoltenberg’s revealing words:

“The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second-class membership. We rejected that. 

So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.” 

To repeat, he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.  

When Prof. John Mearsheimer, I, and others have said the same, we’ve been attacked as Putin apologists.  The same critics also choose to hide or flatly ignore the dire warnings against NATO enlargement to Ukraine long articulated by many of America’s leading diplomats, including the great scholar-statesman George Kennan, and the former US Ambassadors to Russia Jack Matlock and William Burns.

Burns, now CIA Director, was US Ambassador to Russia in 2008, and author of a memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet.”  In that memo, Burns explained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the entire Russian political class, not just Putin, was dead-set against NATO enlargement. We know about the memo only because it was leaked.  Otherwise, we’d be in the dark about it.

Why does Russia oppose NATO enlargement?  For the simple reason that Russia does not accept the US military on its 2,300 km border with Ukraine in the Black Sea region. Russia does not appreciate the US placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Russia also does not welcome the fact that the US engaged in no fewer than 70 regime change operations during the Cold War (1947-1989), and countless more since, including in Serbia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Ukraine.  Nor does Russia like the fact that many leading US politicians actively advocate the destruction of Russia under the banner of “Decolonizing Russia.” That would be like Russia calling for the removal of Texas, California, Hawaii, the conquered Indian lands, and much else, from the U.S.  

Even Zelensky’s team knew that the quest for NATO enlargement meant imminent war with Russia.  Oleksiy Arestovych, former Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine under Zelensky, declared that “with a 99.9% probability, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.” 

Arestovych claimed that even without NATO enlargement, Russia would eventually try to take Ukraine, just many years later. Yet history belies that.  Russia respected Finland’s and Austria’s neutrality for decades, with no dire threats, much less invasions.  Moreover, from Ukraine’s independence in 1991 until the US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, Russia didn’t show any interest in taking Ukrainian territory.  It was only when the US installed a staunchly anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime in February 2014 that Russia took back Crimea, concerned that its Black Sea naval base in Crimea (since 1783) would fall into NATO’s hands. 

Even then, Russia didn’t demand other territory from Ukraine, only fulfillment of the UN-backed Minsk II Agreement, which called for autonomy of the ethnic-Russian Donbas, not a Russian claim on the territory.  Yet instead of diplomacy, the US armed, trained, and helped to organize a huge Ukrainian army to make NATO enlargement a fait accompli. 

Putin made one last attempt at diplomacy at the end of 2021, tabling a draft US-NATO Security Agreement to forestall war.  The core of the draft agreement was an end of NATO enlargement and removal of US missiles near Russia.  Russia’s security concerns were valid and the basis for negotiations.  Yet Biden flatly rejected negotiations out of a combination of arrogance, hawkishness, and profound miscalculation. NATO maintained its position that NATO would not negotiate with Russia regarding NATO enlargement, that in effect, NATO enlargement was none of Russia’s business. 

The continuing US obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical.  The US would object—by means of war, if needed—to being encircled by Russian or Chinese military bases in the Western Hemisphere, a point the US has made since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.  Yet the US is blind and deaf to the legitimate security concerns of other countries.  

So, yes, Putin went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to Russia’s border. Ukraine is being destroyed by US arrogance, proving again Henry Kissinger’s adage that to be America’s enemy is dangerous, while to be its friend is fatal.  The Ukraine War will end when the US acknowledges a simple truth: NATO enlargement to Ukraine means perpetual war and Ukraine’s destruction.  Ukraine’s neutrality could have avoided the war, and remains the key to peace.  The deeper truth is that European security depends on collective security as called for by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), not one-sided NATO demands.  

Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.   Article sent to Other News by the author. September 19, 2023

The current secretary-general’s position on resistance is just the latest manifestation of the UN’s long record of dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands

By Joseph Massad

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City last week (AFP)

October 01, 2023 – Information Clearing House – A few weeks ago, Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, condemned Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial military occupation as “terrorism”.

Wennesland is the latest in a long line of Norwegian diplomats whose views have guided Norwegian policy towards Israeli settler-colonialism and Palestinian resistance since World War Two. This record includes Norwegian officials who held UN positions, not least of whom was the first UN Secretary-General, Trygve Lie.

During a press conference earlier this month ahead of the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to a question on whether the Palestinian people have the right to resist the occupation. While he did not quote Wennesland verbatim, he declared that the Palestinians must only follow Gandhi’s example in resisting:

“Let’s not forget the example of Gandhi. I think it’s important to recognise, to fully recognise the rights of the Palestinian people. I think it’s important to condemn any attempt to undermine the two-state solution, construction of settlements, eviction of Palestinian families and many other aspects. But, I do not think that it is with violence that the Palestinians will be able to better defend their interests. That is my humble opinion.”

Humble his opinion is not, especially as he heads the very organisation that dispossessed the Palestinian people and legitimised (and continues to legitimise) the colonial theft of their homeland, which was brought about not solely by the machinations of the US and European powers, but also by UN personnel whose achievements in that regard continue to be celebrated today.

Like Wennesland, Guterres continues the tradition of UN officials furthering the oppression of the colonised Palestinians.

‘Sympathy’ for the Zionists

In August 1948, in the middle of the Zionist invasion of Palestine, the UN, under the leadership of the passionately pro-Zionist Secretary-General Lie, had dispatched the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte to mediate a ceasefire between the Israelis and the neighbouring Arab countries. But Bernadotte was assassinated in September by members of the terrorist and pro-fascist Jewish group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang.

Bunche’s sympathy for the Zionists was in line with the pro-Zionist bias of the UN and the US government he served

He was replaced by his deputy, the African-American intellectual and former US government operative, Ralph Bunche, who, after Bernadotte’s murder, was the one who negotiated the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

In 1941, Bunche had become the highest-ranking Black official in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. During his stint at the OSS, he wrote a series of propaganda pamphlets and handbooks for US military campaigns in North and West Africa. To control the local African populations, Bunche recommended that the US employ “carefully chosen American Negroes” who “could prove more effective than whites, owing to their unique ability to gain more readily the confidence of the Native”.

He was also in charge of preparing US soldiers for the African countries where they were to be stationed and advised them not to express their racial (read: racist) views. 

By the late 1940s, Bunche had been appointed as special assistant to the Secretary-General’s representative to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (Unscop). While the leaders of the Palestinians, represented by the Arab Higher Committee, refused to meet with Unscop or grant it legitimacy when it arrived in Palestine in the summer of 1947, Bunche was wined and dined by the Zionists, especially by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. He also met secretly with the then fugitive and wanted terrorist Menachem Begin, with whom he maintained secret and “warm” contacts later, and whom he told, according to Begin’s account: “I can understand you. I am also a member of a persecuted minority.”

Bunche did not mince words when he declared in regard to the Zionists: “I have had a purely personal sympathy for their cause.” It was Bunche who drafted the Unscop report based on which the 1947 UN Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly in November.

Meanwhile, Bunche’s boss, Lie, had been meeting secretly with representatives of the Jewish Agency almost daily at his home after April 1947. He even went as far as passing “top secret British intelligence to the Jewish Agency” through a Norwegian UN official in Jerusalem, whom he had previously appointed.

While Bernadotte was selected by the General Assembly on 14 May 1948 to be the UN “Mediator in Palestine”, Bunche was appointed by Lie as “Chief Representative of the General Secretary in Palestine”. Lie was so partial towards Israel that he advised the Israelis on how to deal with Bernadotte during the negotiations. Bunche knew well that Lie “was anything but objective on major issues such as Palestine”.

Yet Bunche’s sympathy for the Zionists was in line with the pro-Zionist bias of the UN and the US government he served. It was also in line with Bernadotte’s, for whom impartiality meant treating the Zionist colonists and the colonised natives as equals who had equal claims to Palestine.

‘Palestine Arabs lose’

Bunche described the Arab leaders as “children” and the Jewish leaders as “much more intelligent and sensible”. When the Israelis attacked him and Bernadotte for not allowing them to seize more territories in their conquest of Palestine, he was accused of being an “anti-Semite”.

The ultra-Zionist WEB Du Bois joined the pro-Israeli chorus in the US and Israeli press and, in an infamous speech he delivered to the American Jewish Congress, apologised “in the name of the American Negro for the apparent apostasy of Ralph Bunche…to the clear ideas of freedom and fair play, which should have guided the descendant of an American slave”. Du Bois added that Bunche was linked to the alleged “disgraceful betrayal” of the Jews by the US State Department. Bunche never forgave him, especially when Du Bois himself was targeted in 1951 by the US Justice Department for his opposition to the Cold War.

Bunche negotiated the armistice agreements between the Israelis and the neighbouring Arab countries in the first seven months of 1949, mostly in Rhodes, Greece. Expectedly, they were to the advantage of the Israelis in all cases, though with a good liberal’s acknowledgement that the agreements represented “another deal, and as usual the Palestine Arabs lose”.

For his efforts in advancing the settler-colonial Israeli regime and its expansion of its territories, Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 (the first Black man to ever do so). His defence of the US despite its white supremacist system of government remained constant, so much so that the 1960s Black radical student movement labelled Bunche an “Uncle Tom”.

Similarly, Adam Clayton Powell (who as a Protestant pastor had travelled to Palestine in 1938 during the Great Palestinian Revolt and wrote a pro-Zionist Orientalist book about his trip) and Malcolm X had both called him “an international Uncle Tom”.

Given Bunche’s celebration of the racist settler-colonial American democracy as “the greatest experiment in the history of human society”, his position on the Palestinians was hardly anomalous. Bunche also understood that European and US support for Jewish settler-colonialism was rooted in their anti-Semitism, writing that they “will support Jewish Agency claims for a Jewish State as a means of dumping world Jewry on the Arabs”.

He further quoted the Canadian delegate to Unscop, Ivan Rand of the Canadian Supreme Court, who supported a Jewish State in Palestine “so we can dispose of them [the Jews] once and for all and they won’t be bothering us all the time”.

Still, Bunche did not identify with the Palestinians as also the victims of European Jewish racism and colonialism. Rather, he identified with the Palestinians’ killers and usurpers as they had been the victims of European Christian anti-Semitism. It was as though identifying with European Jews was only possible through supporting Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine.

Unlike Bunche or Du Bois, Malcolm X, who was highly influenced by the Bandung Conference of 1955 and Third World anti-colonial struggles, was clear when he wrote in his famed article “Zionist Logic” that what the Zionists had done to the Palestinians would be as legal and moral as for Black people in the Americas to return to Africa, dispossess the Africans living there, and establish a nation for themselves there:

“There are over 100 million of our people in the western hemisphere who are of African origin. Just because our forefathers once lived here in Africa would this give Afro-Americans the right to come back here to the mother continent to drive the rightful citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanganyika, or Uganda from their cities, confiscate all their property for ourselves and set up anew Afro-American nations…as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine? According to this warped Zionist logic, all the whites would be forced to leave the entire western hemisphere, and those two vast continents turned back to the original owners, the American Indians.”

Unlike the African diaspora, European Jews, of course, did not go to Europe from Palestine but were European converts to Judaism. Malcolm X ridiculed the religious-based claims of the Zionists to Palestine and wondered if Ralph Bunche was “the Messiah of Zionism”. Yet Bunche continues to be celebrated at the United Nations today, with a new adulatory biography of his life published earlier this year.

The recent condemnation of Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” and Guterres’s advice that the Palestinians abandon armed resistance to unrelenting Israeli colonial violence are just the latest manifestations of the UN’s long record of dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands and expecting them to go on hunger strikes and write letters of protest in response.

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News, September 30, 2023

That weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and provoked war is nightmarishly depraved. 

Ukrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Caitlin Johnstone

A heartbreaking graphic is going around right now showing the almost microscopic changes that have occurred to the frontline of the war in Ukraine this year despite nonstop death and destruction of unfathomable horror the entire time.

The graphic comes from a New York Times article titled “Who’s Gaining Ground in Ukraine? This Year, No One,” which eventually gets around to acknowledging that Russia has actually gained more ground than Ukraine in 2023 despite Kiev’s much-hyped counteroffensive, which began in June.

“When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the Times reports.

As “Left I on the News” noted on Twitter, this contradicts the titular claim in another New York Times article published last week under the headline “Ukraine Has Gained Ground. But It Has Much Further To Go.”

As the map of gains and losses shows, so much has been given up for so very, very little. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those little blips on the map.

Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on Earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are spreading across the land, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come.

The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I.

And all for what? Essentially nothing. A few inches gained here, a few inches lost there. The meaninglessness of it all is probably one of the reasons why military-aged Ukrainian men have been fleeing and attempting to flee the nation in droves to avoid conscription.

And now we see Western officials and media outlets telling us all to prepare for this war to drag on for years, potentially into the 2030s. 

This nonsensical violence, which even the head of NATO now admits could have been avoided by simply ceasing to amass a Western military threat on Russia’s doorstep, is scheduled to drag on as long as possible for no grander reason than the advancement of U.S. strategic interests.

This news from The New York Times comes out at the same time as a Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.”

“The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald.

“Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.”

If you contemplate those words the meaning is so deeply evil it will give you nightmares. The fact that weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and deliberately provoked war is one of the most depraved things you can possibly imagine, and is a clear sign that we are living in a profoundly sick society.

This is so, so ugly, and it’s slated to get even uglier — these freaks haven’t even gotten started on China yet. The sooner this monstrous power structure can be brought to its knees, the better it will be for everyone.