WSWS International Editorial Board

The World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board condemns the war crimes conducted by the Israeli regime’s homicidal rampage in Gaza, which is being carried out with the full support of the United States and all the imperialist powers. We call on workers and youth throughout the world to mobilize protests to demand these war crimes be stopped.

The aim of the Israeli onslaught is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and to render Gaza dysfunctional and uninhabitable. The Netanyahu regime intends to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, a fact that is confirmed by the announcement late Thursday that Israel is demanding that the 1.1 million people living in northern Gaza evacuate within 24 hours. It is, in effect, sending Gazans on a death march.

This is a genocidal project. There are 2.2 million people in Gaza, which has one of the highest population densities in the world. Half of the population, some one million people, are younger than the age of 18. Trapped from leaving with the closure of border crossings into Israel and Egypt, they face systematic starvation, constant bombardment, and the prospect of an imminent invasion.

Since launching its savage onslaught on Gaza Saturday, the Israeli Defense Forces have dropped 6,000 bombs weighing some 4,000 tons on the enclave. According to Palestinian health authorities, 1,417 people have been killed, half of whom are women and children, but the death toll is undoubtedly far higher. The AP released video of the Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, with a population of 116,000 packed into 1.4 square kilometers. The AP noted that the camp had been “razed to the ground” by Israeli airstrikes.

The Netanyahu regime has cut all electricity, water, and fuel supplies to Gaza, an act of collective punishment that is itself a war crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross warned Thursday that “hospitals risk turning into morgues” as their fuel-powered generators run out and Israel refuses to open humanitarian corridors to evacuate the seriously ill and injured. Life support for babies in incubators and elderly patients has been turned off.

Chilling remarks from across the Israeli political establishment make clear that these horrendous acts are just the beginning of what can best be described as Operation Mass Murder.

Speaking Wednesday after the confirmation of an emergency government with opposition leader Benny Gantz, Netanyahu stated that “every Hamas man is a dead man.” The militant nationalist group that led Saturday’s assault on Israel won the support of over 400,000 Gazans in the 2006 election, underscoring that Netanyahu would have to order the slaughter of hundreds of thousands to carry out his threat. Gantz was no less bloodthirsty, declaring that it was “time for war” and that Israel intends to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.”

These are statements that echo those of the Nazi regime in Germany, whose leaders were hanged at Nuremberg. When the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in early 1943 against Nazi occupation, followed one year later by the Polish resistance, Hitler’s regime flattened the city in a manner comparable with the destruction of Gaza that is now in its early stages.

The Biden administration and the media, justifying the slaughter, attempt to portray Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians as an inexplicable outrage, expressing nothing else than “pure evil.” But the fact is that the rebellion was provoked by decades of relentless oppression by the Israeli government against the Palestinians.

Just two months ago, nearly three thousand, predominantly Jewish public intellectuals from all over the world signed a letter under the headline, “Elephant in the Room,” which described the conditions that preceded the attack from Hamas. They referred to “the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”

The letter continued, “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

All of this is now being deliberately suppressed. A totally false, lying narrative is being concocted, according to which Israel is the victim of Nazi-style attacks from the Palestinians, who in fact have been oppressed and subjected to repeated bombardments and massacres for decades. The Israeli government and its supporters are seeking to exploit the Holocaust to justify their own genocidal crimes.

The Israeli massacre has the full support and encouragement of the imperialist powers in Europe and the United States. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu Thursday, as the invasion is being planned, to declare his full support for Israel. Asked in an interview with NBC News whether there were any “red lines” that Israel might cross, Blinken responded that he was “not going to get into any of the operational details, and again, we’re determined to support them.”

In other words, Israel has a blank check for anything it does. In a joint press conference with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Blinken declared: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.” Blinken’s explicit association of his personal religion with his official role as a representative of the US government exposes his indifference to and ignorance of the constitution-based separation of church and state. His statement provides grist for antisemitic propaganda, as it falsely associates all Jewish people with the crimes of the Netanyahu regime.

If he were speaking honestly, Blinken would have said, “I come to Israel not only as US Secretary of State, but also as an accomplice in the destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of Palestinians.”

Blinken’s trip followed US President Joe Biden’s speech Tuesday, denouncing the Palestinian uprising as the expression of “pure unadulterated evil.” Speaking Thursday on the sidelines of the NATO Defense Ministers Summit in Brussels, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that “no conditions” would be placed on how weapons supplied to Israel by the US are used.

As the imperialist powers wage ever more openly a war against the world, even the remnants of bourgeois democracy are being dispensed with. Protests in support of the Palestinians were banned this week across Europe and North America, with participants demonized by the authorities as supporters of “terrorism.”

On the college campuses, right-wing Zionists are attempting to create an atmosphere of terror and threats. Student groups and individuals who have spoken out against Israeli crimes have had their names and personal information released and publicized. At a rally at Brooklyn College yesterday, a member of the New York City Council, Inna Vernikov, showed up brandishing a firearm to intimidate students.

To those who accuse opponents of Israeli crimes of being antisemitic, we say that the Israeli government consists of a pack of fascists. This includes Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has ordered his ministry to purchase 10,000 assault rifles to arm right-wing settler militias. Ben-Gvir had previously been convicted of racist incitement for chanting “Death to Arabs” and for supporting a terrorist group.

As for the US and European powers, they are aligned with fascists in Ukraine, exemplified in the standing ovation given last month by the Canadian Parliament, along with representatives from all the G7 countries, for Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS, which was responsible for the massacre of Jews under the direction of Nazi Germany.

The Israeli onslaught on Gaza must be seen in the context of the escalating US-NATO war against Russia, the initial stage of world war. The imperialist redivision of the world will assume the form not just of conflicts between countries, but an ever more direct and violent war against masses of people. The ruling elites in all the capitalist countries, moreover, face an intersecting series of economic, social and political crises which they are seeking to divert through an explosion of military violence.

The ruling class believes that the media is presenting public opinion, but support for the Palestinians is widespread among the population throughout the world, and strikes and protests by workers are on the rise in every country. Within Israel, the Netanyahu regime has confronted sustained opposition from the working class over the past year to its drive to gut democratic rights and establish an authoritarian regime.

The working class must intervene to stop the massacre by demanding an immediate halt to the supply of weapons to Israel. Mass protests and demonstrations should be organized in every city and college campus to demand an end to the murderous onslaught.

These demands are inseparable from the broader struggle to put an end to the intolerable conditions faced by the Palestinians and all forms of oppression around the world, which requires the development of a mass movement in the international working class for socialism.

The political class internationally, with one voice, put out statements supporting “Israel’s right to self-defence,” a right they grant to the oppressor but deny to the oppressed.

A Palestinian boy and Israeli soldier in front of the Israeli West Bank Barrier. August, 2004. (Justin McIntosh, Wikipedia, CC BY 2.0)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

There have been decades of photos of dead Palestinian women and children, and kids being beaten, humiliated and imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. The historic killing rate in this “conflict” has been fairly consistent at about 40:1. 

None of this ever caused more than a raised eyebrow and a mild tut-tut from the western “liberal” Establishment. I can’t recall camera crews ever pursuing any Zionist politicians down the street demanding that they use the word “condemn” of the latest Israeli atrocity.

The paroxysm of hatred in the political and media class, unleashed by a single day of the boot being on the other foot is instructive. It is particularly instructive in their near complete unanimity — what percentage of the discussion on broadcast TV or radio have you heard this last 48 hours given over to Palestinian or pro-Palestinian voices?

Yet it is very plain from social media that the public is by no means as unanimous in their support of Israel as are the political and media class. 

But then the public are not bought and paid for.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

Demonstration in support of Palestinian resistance, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Oct. 10. (Corinna Barnard)

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Thus the “Indian Mutiny” became a Victorian tale of rape and murder of British women and of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Thus the Mau Mau were evil butchers and the IRA were terrorists, which is the modern term of art for those resisting evil and foreign rule.

The Israeli ambassador to the U.N. on Monday described the Hamas fighters as “animal like.” This of course is not true. They are people, but people who have been crazed by unbearable levels of injustice and oppression.

I am extremely sorry for all those who die, as in all wars. I am sorry even for the deaths of individual Israeli soldiers, and more so for all the innocents who died and are now dying. 

But I will not condemn Hamas. 

For this I do not even need to delve into the backstory of Hamas’ initial sponsoring by Israel to split Fatah. They have grown well past that. I do not condemn Hamas because the resistance of the Palestinian people is a reflex response to their slow genocide.

Yes it is an inchoate and violent response. Of course I wish it did not harm innocent victims.

The people I do condemn are the political class internationally who, with one voice, put out statements supporting “Israel’s right to self-defence,” a right they grant to the oppressor but deny to the oppressed. 

Those are the people who need to be condemned.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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.