The deployment includes multiple fighter jet squadrons and personnel to support them
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, September 30, 2024
The Pentagon said Monday that the US is sending a โfew thousandโ additional troops to the Middle East to bolster security and prepare to defend Israel if needed, The Associated Press has reported.
The deployment will include squadrons of F-15, F-16, F-22, and A-10 fighter jets and the personnel needed to support them. The squadrons were initially set to deploy to the Middle East so that other fighter jets could rotate out, but now they will all stay to increase US air power.
The deployment comes after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah and the Israeli slaughter of hundreds of Lebanese civilians since Israel dramatically escalated its bombing campaign in Lebanon last week. The US support for Israelโs attacks on Lebanon could provoke attacks on US forces in the region, or the US could directly intervene to defend Israel.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the deployment is for โthe protection of US forces,โ not to assist in evacuations. Last week, Singh said the US was bolstering its forces in the region โshould we need to come to the defense of Israel.โ
On Sunday, the Pentagon announced Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered an aircraft carrier strike group and an amphibious assault group to stay in the region. The Pentagon also issued a warning to Iran on Sunday, saying Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin โmade clear that should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people.โ
Mourners carry the bodies of people killed in Israeli airstrikes on el-Karak in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa valley, during their funeral on September 27, 2024.
(Photo: Hassan Jarrah/AFP via Getty Images)
“The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan,” said the Michigan Democrat.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Saturday had notably different responses to Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, which killed hundreds of people including key Hezbollah leaders.
“Our country is funding this bloodbath,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media Saturday morning, sharing a post from Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker with videos of the Israeli assault on Lebanon that began Friday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.
“Sending more of our troops and bombs to the region is not advancing peace,” added Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and a leading critic of Israel’s yearlong genocide in the Gaza Strip. “The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu’s genocidal plan.”
In the post shared by Tlaib, Thakker noted that “the U.S. was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand,” which “comes just one day after [the] U.S. released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel.”
Tlaib also shared that her office is fielding “desperate calls” from U.S. citizens who are struggling to leave Lebanon. She declared that “the mission of the U.S. Department of State is to protect Americans, and they are failing AGAIN.”
Biden, meanwhile, began his Saturday afternoon statement by noting that Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which the Iran-backed Lebanese political and paramilitary group confirmed earlier in the dayโa development that elevated fears of a broader regional war.
“Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror,” Biden said. “His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”
The president continued:
The strike that killed Nasrallah took place in the broader context of the conflict that began with Hamas’ massacre on October 7, 2023. Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a “northern front” against Israel.
The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups. Just yesterday, I directed my secretary of defense to further enhance the defense posture of U.S. military forces in the Middle East region to deter aggression and reduce the risk of a broader regional war.
Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means. In Gaza, we have been pursuing a deal backed by the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon. It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.
While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) thanked Biden “for standing with our democratic ally Israel,” journalists from around the world and other critics highlighted that his statement “has not a word on civilian casualties.”
Ali Abunimah, director of The Electronic Intifada, was among those who pointed out that Biden said the “assassination of Nasrallah, in an Israeli massacre that killed hundreds, ‘is a measure of justice for his many victims.'”
“Utterly depraved, and by this twisted, criminal Biden logic, those who tried to assassinate Trump were also instruments of ‘justice,” Abunimah said, referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican nominee for the November election.
Middle East expert Assal Rad said: “Biden calls massive bombs in a densely-populated area that leveled six apartment buildings in Lebanon ‘a measure of justice.’ The torching of international law and the precedent that is being set should terrify us all.”
Rad also slammed Biden’s cease-fire call, saying: “This is nonsense. You can’t provide the funding and weapons to continue the conflict *without* conditions, twist humanitarian law to give Israel total impunity, and reject every international institution that seeks accountability, and then say your ‘aim is to de-escalate.'”
Others recalled Israel’s 2004 assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, which also killed seven other people. The administration of former Republican U.S. President George W. Bushโwho launched the global War on Terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacksโdidn’t issue a forceful condemnation like some European leaders, but a spokesperson for the State Department said at the time that “we are deeply troubled” by the attack.
As’ad Abukhalil, a Lebanese American professor at California State University, Stanislus, declared Saturday that “there has been no U.S. president EVER who has unconditionally allowed unrestrained Israeli savagery in the Middle East as Biden has done.”
Abukhalil warned that “the U.S. will suffer for years to come from the policies of Biden in the Middle East,” which he described as “more far-reaching [than] Bush’s.”
Biden, a Democrat, was initially seeking reelection in November, but after a disastrous summer debate performance against Trump, he passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. After putting out Biden’s Saturday statement, the White House released a similar one from Harrisโwhich was also lauded by AIPAC.
“Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands. Across decades, his leadership of Hezbollah destabilized the Middle East and led to the killing of countless innocent people in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and around the world. Today, Hezbollah’s victims have a measure of justice,” Harris said. “I have an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel. I will always support Israelโs right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.”
“President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” she added. “We have been working on a diplomatic solution along the Israel-Lebanon border so that people can safely return home on both sides of that border. Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.”
In response, Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, executive director at the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding, said: “Like Biden, not a word from the VP , from the candidate of joy & freedom, about the 1,000+ Lebanese men, women and children Israel obliterated. Not a word about hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced, entire city blocks destroyed. We don’t exist as human beings to this [administration].”
Responding to both statements on social media, the anti-war group CodePink said that the Biden-Harris administration “believes flattening a residential area with… bombs is ‘justice.'”
Julian Assange on board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, following his release from prison, June 25, 2024
JULIAN ASSANGE will address the Council of Europe next week to give evidence following a report highlighting the implications of his detention on human rights and the freedom of journalism.
The Pace inquiry report found that the WikiLeaks founder qualified as a political prisoner and called on Britain to conduct an independent review into whether he was exposed to inhuman or degrading treatment while incarcerated.
Thorhildur Sunna Avarsdottir, report author and general rapporteur for political prisoners, emphasises how Mr Assangeโs case is a high-profile example of transnational repression.
The report discusses how governments employ legal and extra-legal measures to suppress dissent across borders, posing significant threats to press freedom and human rights.
Mr Assange will give testimony before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on October 1, making it his first since before his imprisonment in 2019.
Campaigners have said that his appearance before Europeโs foremost human rights and treaty-setting body emphasises the broader implications of his case.
President Biden delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and claimed that he was working to bring a โgreater measure of peace and stability to the Middle Eastโ even though his administration continues to provide full-throated support for Israelโs genocidal war in Gaza and its escalations in Lebanon.
Biden acknowledged that โinnocent civiliansโ in Gaza are โgoing through hell,โ a situation he helped create by providing a constant flow of weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023. An Israeli Air Force official recently said that without US support, Israel could only sustain military operations in Gaza for a few months.
The president said it was time for Hamas and Israel to finalize the terms of a hostage and ceasefire deal, but US officials have admitted that thereโs no chance of an agreement before Bidenโs term ends on January 20, 2025. Biden could force Israel to accept a deal by withholding military aid, but thereโs no sign heโs willing to take that step.
US President Joe Biden delivered remarks at the United Nations (John Wong/EYEPRESS)
Discussing the situation between Israel and Hezbollah, Biden said, โFull-scale war is not in anyoneโs interest. Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible.โ His comments came a day after Israel launched a massive bombardment against southern and eastern Lebanon, killing over 500 people, mostly civilians.
Biden claimed that his administration is โworking tirelesslyโ to achieve a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah. But the US backed the latest Israeli escalation and is deploying more troops to the Middle East as a show of support. US military aid and promises to defend Israel in the event of a major regional war have emboldened Israel to escalate in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib expressed disappointment with Bidenโs comments about Lebanon and said the US was the only country that could stop the escalations. โIt was not strong. It is not promising and it would not solve this problem,โ Bou Habib said. โI (am) still hoping. The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.โ
In his address, Biden also called for countries to stop arming the opposing sides in the war in Sudan. โThe world needs to stop arming the generals, to speak with one voice and tell them: Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now,โ he said.
A day earlier, the Biden administration named the UAE a โmajor defense partnerโ as Abu Dhabi is funneling weapons into Sudan to arm the Rapid Support Forces and fuel the war. The designation will give the UAE access to more sophisticated US weapons and military technology.
Lebanese Health Minister Dr. Firass Abiad told The New York Times on Tuesday that the โoverwhelming majority, if not all,โ of the people killed and wounded by Israelโs bombardment in Lebanon on Monday were civilians.
The latest health toll from Lebanonโs Health Ministry puts the number of killed by the Monday bombing at 558, which includes 50 children and 94 women. Nearly 2,000 were wounded in the attack.
The Times notes that Lebanonโs Health Ministryโs figures have historically been viewed as reliable. The ministry is not run by Hezbollah but is overseen by the Lebanese government and collects its data using an emergency operations center that gathers casualty figures from private and state-run hospitals.
Israel targeted residential areas of southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, claiming Hezbollah missiles were being hidden inside houses. The Israeli military said that it hit more than 1,600 targets, and experts say itโs one of the heaviest single-day bombings in modern warfare. The toll in Israelโs bombardment is about half of the toll for the entire 2006 Lebanon War, which lasted 34 days.
โPrior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,โ Emily Tripp, director of the monitoring group Airwars, told the Times. โThere is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.โ
The US supported the Israeli bombardment despite previously claiming it opposed escalation and is sending more troops to the region as a show of support. Israeli strikes continue to hit Lebanon on Tuesday, and Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel in response.
Israel plans to humiliate Iran and its allies to an extent that a full-on regional war, in which the United States will fight alongside them, becomes inevitable.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing a joint session of U.S. Congress on July 24. (C-Span screen shot)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is desperate to keep war simmering along and to draw the U.S. closer and closer to him. At the same time he cannot send ground forces into South Lebanon where they will take massive casualties.
Israel can assassinate, it can employ indiscriminate terrorism and it can bombard from the air, and it has done all these things against Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But Israel cannot destroy Hamas or Hezbollah, cannot get back its hostages from Gaza and cannot make Northern Israel safe for its colonialists.
Nothing Israel is doing in any way advances those declared objectives and in fact makes all of them increasingly unlikely ever to be attained.
But as U.S. President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, accept and reinforce every single escalation and every single illegality, Israelโs stranglehold on its Western vassal politicians gets ever stronger.
Those have now all (including both U.K. Labour and Conservative ministers) supported illegality well beyond the stage where there is any going back. They have now to hope that they will be โjustifiedโ by military victory.
The Iraq war shows that however illegal the war, if you win you get to write โ or at least interpret โ the rules of international law. I wish I could come up with good counter-examples. โJusticeโ is visited only upon losers.
A U.S. Marine inspecting a roadside scene near Haditha, Iraq, where five unarmed civilians were killed on Nov. 19, 2005. (Unknown U.S. Marines and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service via the Washington Post, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
But the problem for Netanyahu, former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, et al., is that just what victory looks like, nobody seems in the least clear.
We appear to be locked into a hideous distortion of existentialism, where the killing of Arabs of any age and sex is in itself the path of virtue and a reason for living.
Israelโs TikTok army of child-killers, rapists and lingerie-flaunters will take heavy casualties if it advances into Lebanon. It is currently launching intense air attacks, but it cannot destroy Hezbollah that way, not even were it to triple the colossal amount of explosive it has dropped on Gaza.
Netanyahuโs strategy of assassinations and deadly stunts appears to be an attempt to goad Hezbollah out of their own territory into a suicidal advance into Israel. But Hezbollahโs leader Hassan Nasrallah is not falling for it.
It is worth stressing that, contrary to the propaganda, in the last year Israel has hit Lebanon with five missiles for every one sent by Hezbollah.
Meantime the United Kingdomโs claims to respect international law are exposed as an utter sham as it failed to vote for the UNGA Resolution giving effect to the International Court of Justiceโs Advisory Opinion on Israelโs occupation of Palestinian Territory.
The ICJโs ruling that the occupation is itself an illegal act, and that states must do nothing which can assist Israel to maintain it, sets out a clear legal status quo which the U.K. is equally clearly breaking.
When the ICJ decision came out on July 19, the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office statement was as follows:
โWe have received the Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice on Friday 19 July and are considering it carefully before responding. The UK respects the independence of the ICJ.โ
The promised response has never come; unless you take the failure to vote at the U.N. General Assembly for the implementation of the ICJ ruling as the response.
The decision to suspend 8 percent of arms export licenses for Israel was framed not in terms of this ICJ ruling โ which logically can only require the cessation of all arms sales to Israel โ but more broadly in terms of unspecified possible breaches of international humanitarian law.
In its โexplanation of voteโ at the U.N. General Assembly, the U.K. deliberately ignored a key tenet of the ICJ Opinion. The U.K. stated:
โโฆ our abstention reflects our unwavering determination to focus on efforts to bring about a peaceful and negotiated two-state solutionโฆ ,โ
This ignores the ICJ ruling that Israel must leave the occupied territories before any negotiations. An occupied people cannot negotiate with, in effect, a gun held at their head. That is explicitly why the ICJ did not accept that the Oslo Accords alienated any Palestinian rights in international law.
The U.K. is still โ directly contrary to the ICJ โ attempting to maintain that Palestineโs right not to be occupied was signed away at Oslo.
British military flights, weapons supplies and intelligence cooperation with the Israel occupation continue unabated. Starmerโs total support for Israel is now a fixed part of the governing landscape, as the failure to condemn the terrorist device attacks on Lebanon makes clear.
The U.S. and U.K. are now hopelessly yoked to a Netanyahu nihilist strategy of which the primary aim is to retain his own power and immunity from prosecution by permanent conflict, of a kind which makes his allies ever more complicit and which will rope them into active military support.
That requires constant Israeli aggression against an axis of resistance that has so far refused to be provoked into major conflict. Israelโs plan is to humiliate Iran and its allies to an extent that a full-on regional war becomes inevitable, in which the United States will fight alongside them โ and very probably the Sunni Arab regimes too, I am extremely sorry to say.
This is plainly madness that is entirely against the interests of the Western powers themselves. But their politicians, including very directly Biden and Starmer, are so compromised by Zionist-lobby money that there appears to be no escape, short of popular revolt in the West.
The West is bound to Israel by the simple, unalloyed mechanism of cash paid to politicians. That is the truth.
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.
An Iraqi family watches U.S. soldiers in in Baquba early June 28, 2007. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)
–
A report called Body Count has revealed that at least 1.3 million people have lost their lives as a result of the US-led โwar on terrorโ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Itโs a report which should have made front page news across the world.
Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, have produced figures for the number of people killed from September 11, 2001 until the end of 2013.
The findings are devastating: the in-depth investigation concludes that the โwar on terrorโ has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan. As awful as that sounds, the total of 1.3 million deaths does not take into account casualties in other war zones, such as Yemen – and the authors stress that the figure is a โconservative estimateโ.
โThe total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely,โ the executive summary says.
Islam is a religion, a great religion, but it is not a political ideology for multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies of the present times. It contains some golden principles such as equality, fairness and justice that are applicable in politics because such universal principles are recognised as the pillars of democracy and open society. But that does not mean religion, any religion for that matter, can be an alternative to democratic form of government because this inevitably leads to the concentration of power and influence in the hands of some potentates and despots. This has been the case in the the Middle Ages where the Church dominated states and it became a symbol of tyrannical rule and oppressive practices. It is quite so in some Islamic countries where dynastic despots and oligarchs rule by using Islam for their own ends and state oppression.
It’s not difficult to see that different people have different interpretations of Islam. Historically, there has never been any unanimity of views in Islam on a range of issues. During the formative period of the Islamic Caliphate after 632 C.E. differing and mutually exclusive interpretation of Islamic state and Islamic rule had soon started to take shape when the community split along the Sunni-Shia lines. Such differences have multiplied over the course of fourteen centuries. Even within the Sunnis different schools of thought emerged and there is no way they can ever be reconciled. Nor, can the Sunni and Shia concepts of what constitutes Islamic ruler be reconciled because of the differing concepts that underlie Caliphate (Sunni) and Imamate (Shia).
When some people dare to give their opinions, which do not repeat the centuries-old stereotypes they are attacked for their heretical views by the orthodox and rigid literalists of traditions. They assume only they have the ‘true’ version of Islam; therefore, only they are the ones who can rightfully speak on behalf of God and Islam while all the others are groping in the darkness of ignorance and suffering from the malaise of modern Western ideas of democracy and human rights. However, it is essential to explain that democracy is a form of government in which the will of the population of a country is decisive in forming policies that advance the cause of the citizens in social, religious, economic and political matters. In a genuine democracy this will reflects the actual needs of the people but in a bogus democracy the form of democracy is used to further individual or particular interests while paying lip-service to the values of democracy.
A United Nations investigator has demanded that the US publish classified documents regarding the CIAโs human rights violations under former President George W. Bush, with hopes that the documents will lead to the prosecution of public officials.
Documents about the CIAโs program of rendition and secret detention of suspected terrorists have remained classified, even though President Obamaโs administration has publicly condemned the use of these โenhanced interrogation techniquesโ. The US has not prosecuted any of its agents for human rights violations.
UN investigator Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, said that the classified documents protect the names of individuals who are responsible for serious human rights violations.
On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority.
Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o’ bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 February by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel.
Ironically, on 30th February Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist gang, Irgun, brazenly announced the Zionist immutable dogma, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised… Jerusalem was and forever will be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Peace and Justice Post 
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