This past week, president Biden gave an important speech on US foreign policy. He included a pledge to scale back US military involvement in the war that has destroyed the nation of Yemen.
However, as with every political speech, Biden’s words were measured
US President Joe Biden speaks about foreign policy at the State Department in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2021. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
carefully. In fact, they hid as much as they revealed — perhaps more.
While any reduction in US war investment is worth cheering, Biden’s verbal hedging was a deliberate strategy to appease peace activists while leaving lots of room for war-hawks to maneuver.
Those who care about the fate of the Yemeni people still have a lot of word to do.
Abby Martin does a good job of parsing the president’s words. Watch and listen as she explains the issues below:
Below is an excerpt, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above.
In case anyone was worried about the new Democratic administration getting serious about peace and fair-mindedness in the Middle East, have no fear. Biden is here!
The Biden administration continues the good old fashioned saber rattling and bullying tactics that have made US gunboat diplomacy famous around the world.
Although all US intelligence agencies confirm that Iran was always in full compliance with the terms of the (JCPOA) nuclear treaty, president Trump unilaterally torpedoed the treaty anyway.
Trump then imposed additional economic sanctions on Iran. Why? Because Trump’s evangelical base believes anything and everything the Israeli government says about its neighbor-states.
Israel hates Iran. So, evangelicals hate Iran. Thus, Trump black-balled Iran, despite its innocence.
After WE withdrew unilaterally for no good reason, any reasonable person could be forgiven for assuming that the US should apologize for its petulance, reenter the treaty, and THEN talk with Iran about how we will move forward.
But, no. The USA never apologizes and must always be the dominant, authoritative player.
Thus, America’s bipartisan instincts for war-mongering and gunboat diplomacy are just too strong for this Democratic administration to resist. So, once again, Israeli demands for regional hegemony dictate Biden’s strategy for Iran.
And don’t forget: Israel has a large nuclear arsenal with warheads targeted on major Iranian cities. Israel also assassinates Iranian scientists willy nilly, bombs Iranian facilities inside the country, and kills Iranian soldiers in Syria (who are there at Syrian invitation).
Have no fear, Biden will remain as irrational as Trump. Here is the promised excerpt:
A close analysis of recent statements by members of President Joseph Biden’s foreign policy team indicates his administration has already signaled its intention to treat negotiations with Iran as an exercise in diplomatic coercion aimed at forcing major new concessions extending well beyond the 2015 nuclear agreement. The policy could trigger a renewed US-Iran crisis as serious as any provocation engineered by the Trump administration.
Although the Biden team is claiming that it is ready to bring the United States back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Iran comes into full compliance first, it is actually planning to demand that Iran give up its main source of political leverage. Thus, it will require Iran to cease its uranium enrichment to 20 percent and give up its accumulated stockpile of uranium already enriched to that level before the United States has withdrawn the economic sanctions that are now illegal under the JCPOA deal.
Meanwhile, the Biden team is planning to hold on to what it apparently sees as its “Trump card”— the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran oil exports that have gutted the Iranian economy.
But the Biden strategy faces a serious problem: Iran has already demanded all sanctions imposed after the JCPOA took effect must be ended before Iran would return to compliance. Iran expects the United States, as the party which initially broke the agreement, to come into compliance first.
The Biden administration is banking on a scenario in which Iran agrees to cease its enrichment to 20% and reverse other major concessions Iran made as part of the 2015 agreement.
The Biden team then states it would start a new set of negotiations with Iran, in which the United States would use its leverage to pressure Iran into extending the timeline of its major commitments under the deal. Further, Tehran will be required to accept a modification in its missile program, as European allies have urged.
The Biden team’s Iran strategy was not hastily cobbled together just before inauguration. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan outlined it in an interview last June with Jon Alterman, the Middle East program direct at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You can get some early wins on the nuclear program but tie long-term sanctions relief to progress on both [nuclear and other issues] files,” Sullivan explained.
He gives special attention to the Senate confirmation hearing for Biden’s nominee as Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Naturally, it is not the least bit surprising to see the Biden presidency kick -off another business-as-usual Democratic administration. After all, every presidential candidate lies. Remember how Trump promised that Mexico would pay for his border wall?
But Mr. Lawrence reminds us that despite the corporate media’s (excepting Fox) decision to applaud Biden as America’s post-Trump savior (though, we ought not forget how much money president Trump brought to these
Antony Blinken with President Biden
outlets with their wall-to-wall coverage of his every faux pas — and there were many) he is essentially an old-style, moderate Republican at heart, who will continue to shovel coal into the gaping furnaces of neo-liberal economics, corporate control over US politics, and American imperialism around the world.
Welcome to the new Democratic administration.
Here is an excerpt:
It was inevitable that President Joe Biden would betray numerous of his campaign promises — and those that mattered most to wide-eyed voters who put him in office. The speed at which he and his people have revealed their treachery is nonetheless stunning.
No, there will be no comprehensive stimulus plan until at least the spring, if then. No, relief checks are not “going out the door immediately,” and no, they will not be for the $2,000 to which Biden committed his administration. As to Biden’s health care reforms, one can hardly believe one’s eyes and ears.
As Andrew Perez and Julia Rock reported in Jacobin last week, Biden’s plans are literally lifted from a letter health-insurance lobbyists recently sent Capitol Hill legislators. The promised public option is out the window. Health care “secure for all?” These people do have bridges they intend to sell you.
All this within a few days of Biden’s ascendancy. It’s not much different on the foreign policy side, so let’s draw the old lesson. You can have democracy at home or empire abroad, but you can’t have both. We will continue to suffer the latter under Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Those drawn into thinking the Biden regime would conduct America’s affairs abroad decently and humanely and in principled fashion will now discover they have been savagely sucker-punched. Those who understood from the outset that Biden’s people would go nowhere near the essential, determining questions of exceptionalism, universalism, and our consequent dedication to empire will be repelled but not surprised as the policy framework is revealed.
In this case, the moment of truth came even before Biden’s inauguration. His saccharine inauguration speech last Wednesday, with its Hallmark-card calls for unity, was quite secondary to the confirmation hearings the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the previous day. . .
. . . Among Blinken’s many rather sad-to-witness “Yes sirs,” two standout: his finely chiseled endorsement of Pompeo’s reckless assassination a year ago of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered military commander (“Taking him out was the right thing to do”), and his approval of the Trump administration’s decision to send lethal arms to the manically corrupt regime in Kiev (“Senator, I support providing that lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine,” when the Obama administration, from which he comes, did not.)
Late last year, Blinken appeared on “Intelligence Matters,” the podcast run by Michael Morrell, the coup-mongering former deputy director at the Central Intelligence Agency and now — of course — a regular commentator on the televisions news networks. In their exchange, the two took up the question of our “forever wars” and Biden’s well-advertised commitment to ending them. Here is a snippet from Blinken’s remarks:
“As for ending the forever wars, large-scale deployment of large, standing U.S. forces in conflict zones with no clear strategy should and will end under his [Biden’s] watch. But we also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless wars with large-scale, open-ended deployment of U.S. forces with [sic], for example, discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces to support local actors. In ending the endless wars we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brushstroke.”
This is what we are in for these coming years, the hyper-rational irrationality of the middling technocrat. There will be adjustments at the margin, reconsiderations of method. There will be no consideration whatsoever of America’s hegemonic objectives—of the imperial project.
The Las Vegas casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, died on January 11, 2021.
Donald Trump with Sheldon Adelson. Adelson reportedly contributed $75 million to Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign.
Adelson (and his Israeli born wife) was a fanatical political Zionist who, sadly, was the living embodiment of the old antisemitic slander that Jews all secretly loved Israel more than their country of residence.
Occasionally, caricatures — even slanderous caricatures — can be true.
Israeli apartheid is not limited to the Occupied Territories.
Apartheid reigns within Israel’s recognized borders as well.
Israel is NOT “the only democracy in the Middle East” because Israel is not a democracy.
As I show in my forthcoming book exposing the many errors of Christian Zionism, Israel is actually an extremely rigid ethnocracy. That is, a hierarchical state where one ethnic group (Jews) exercises the legal privilege of systematically discriminating against everyone else in the state (primarily Palestinians).
This is much more than a story about Adelson’s control over the Republican party. It is an expose in how big money donors, CEOs, and corporations are able to control American politics, including our foreign policy.
Below is an excerpt from Kane’s article, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
WITH THEdeath of 87-year-old billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party has lost its biggest benefactor.
A Palestinian girl sits inside a room of her family’s building which was damaged by Israel’s bombing attack in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Adelson’s legacy, however, will live on for generations, not only in his Israeli-born wife Miriam, who is expected to continue giving millions of dollars to the Republican Party, but in the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Adelson’s top concern. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” Adelson said in 2017.
More than anyone else, Adelson can claim credit for transforming the GOP into a party devoted to bolstering Israel’s military occupation and its expansion of West Bank settlements. And the Israeli
Israeli settlers regularly harass and attack Palestinians. They are typically protected by Israeli soldiers.
right, also bankrolled by Adelson, saw many of its political aspirations realized under Donald Trump’s presidency, a political turn that has fractured the long-standing bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state.
Adelson’s most important political conviction was that the Israeli right must be supported. The 19th-richest American used his $35 billion fortune to ensure that the GOP’s policy goals united with the Israeli right’s. In a 2010 speech, Adelson, a U.S. Army veteran, lamented that “the uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.” He added: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . .
. . . FROM 2008 TO 2016, Adelson opposed President Barack Obama at every turn, backing John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed attempts at defeating him and bankrolling the groups that fiercely wanted to defeat Obama’s Iran policies. In 2013, Adelson suggested that Obama launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Obama instead pursued his landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which he sealed in 2015.
But Adelson’s crowning achievements were yet to come. During the 2016
Israel’s Apartheid/ Annexation wall. As you see, the wall did not stop suicide bombers from entering Israel.
presidential primary, after all the GOP candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to meet with the casino magnate as part of what’s known as the “Adelson primary,” Adelson appeared to back Sen. Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk thought to be a top contender for winning the nomination. The casino magnate was said to be wary of Trump, who had demurred on whether he backed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital in a speech to the Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition. For his part, Trump, in October 2015, mocked Rubio for being Adelson’s “perfect little puppet.”
. . . Adelson wanted Trump to torpedo diplomacy with Iran; Trump backed out of the Iran deal in May 2018. Adelson believed the U.S. Embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; Trump did so, also in May 2018. (In September 2020, Adelson bought the U.S ambassador’s beach-view residence in the affluent Israeli city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv for $67 million, ensuring that the next U.S. ambassador won’t have a place to live near the old location of the U.S. Embassy.) Adelson wanted the U.S. to legitimize Israel’s policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; Trump did so in January 2019, reversing long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy that saw settlements as illegitimate obstacles to peace because they make a geographically viable Palestinian state impossible.
CBN News reported on one of president Trump’s final edicts in declaring
Pro-life demonstrators participate in the 47th annual “March for Life” in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2020. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Friday, January 29 National Sanctity of Human Life Day.
“The pro-life organization Operation Rescue named the president its pro-life person of the year for 2020, saying:
“The Malachi Award is given by Operation Rescue every year to recognize individuals who sacrificially work to advance the cause of protecting the pre-born. …during President Trump’s administration, he has done more to protect unborn lives than any other president in U.S history.”
NATIONAL SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE DAY, 2021
– A PROCLAMATION BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA –
– DONALD J. TRUMP –
“Every human life is a gift to the world. Whether born or unborn, young or old,
(Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
healthy or sick, every person is made in the holy image of God. The Almighty Creator gives unique talents, beautiful dreams, and a great purpose to every person. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we celebrate the wonder of human existence and renew our resolve to build a culture of life where every person of every age is protected, valued, and cherished. . .
“. . . Since my first day in office, I have taken historic action to protect innocent lives at home and abroad. . .
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: People gather for the 47th March For Life rally on the National Mall where U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the crowd. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
“. . . As a Nation, restoring a culture of respect for the sacredness of life is fundamental to solving our country’s most pressing problems. When each person is treated as a beloved child of God, individuals can reach their full potential, communities will flourish, and America will be a place of even greater hope and freedom.”
The hypocrisy of this statement is glaring, even though the same accusation could be laid at the feet of every presidential administration. After all, hypocrisy is at the heart of American politics.
However, as an American evangelical, I am always troubled by the anti-abortion movement’s hypocrisy in calling itself pro-life. For, as I and many others have said before, groups like Operation Rescue are anti-abortionactivistsNOT pro-life activists.
It is no small difference. Words matter.
Standing up for the sanctity of all human life everywhere is nowhere to be found on the agenda of evangelical activists. Neither was it a concern of Donald Trump’s.
In fact, Donald Trump’s total disregard for human life — other than his own — has been obvious over the past 4 years. The list of his anti-life actions is too long to cover here, so I will give only a few examples.
Lisa Montgomery, the first federal prisoner executed in 67 years. She also suffered acute mental illness.
the final weeks of his presidency. Trump’s last minute execution spree has killed more federal prisoners (including one mentally ill woman) than any previous president. (Yes, I believe every Christian, every American, must object to the death penalty.)
I could talk about Trump’s anti-life border policies — separating refugee families; losing track of children taken from their parents; keeping children in holding pens; arresting legitimate asylum seekers, labeling them as illegals, and then sending them back to their countries where they will face certain death.
These are not the actions of a pro-life president.
But I want to focus my attention on only one specific humanitarian scandal that has been enormously worsened by Trump’s policies: the war in Yemen.
For more than five years, Yemenis have faced near-famine conditions while enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already caused233,000 deaths, including 131,000 deaths from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.
Systematic destruction of farms, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation plants and health-care facilities has wrought further suffering. Yemen is resource-rich, but famine continues to stalk the country, the UN reports. Two-thirds of Yemenis are hungry and fully half do not know when they will eat next. Twenty-five percent of the population suffers from moderate to severe malnutrition. That includes more than two million children.
Her bruised eyes still swollen shut, Buthaina Muhammad Mansour, believed to be four or five, doesn’t yet know that her parents, five siblings and uncle were killed when an air strike flattened their home in Yemen’s capital. The air strike, which killed at least 12 civilians. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah SEARCH “STRIKE MANSOUR” FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH “WIDER IMAGE” FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY. Matching text: YEMEN-SECURITY/AIRSTRIKE – RC1BFFB8F240
All of this blood is on American hands.
And if American church-goers were genuinely pro-life, we would be emphatically anti-war. We would be marching in the streets, pressuring the president to stop the bloodshed anywhere and everywhere that American power is killing, maiming, and suppressing the Image of God in this world.
But, then, that behavior would require us first to truly believe in the “sanctity of all human life” — which we obviously do not.
Sadly, few American evangelicals care about places like Yemen because we are a painfully provincial and ignorant people, too distracted by the obnoxious glitterati of commercialized, Christian success stories to look beyond our own self-centered existence.
The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).
In this case, the real enemy happens to be Iran, even though it’s the Yemeni people who now have the privilege of suffering from American terrorism in their own country.
Our sub-contractor in this horrific proxy war is Saudi Arabia, a long-time enemy of Iran — which makes outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s audacious accusations about Iran now providing safe harbor for Al Qaeda terrorists a laughable, buffoonish statement that should not only have set his pants on fire but left his body an ash heap on the podium.
(Perhaps I should stop being so surprised when infamously dishonest people like Mike Pompeo attend DC Bible studies and offer smiling testimony to their devout, evangelical, Christian faith.)
Even worse, the State Department has recently declared the Houthi/Yemeni group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.
The fact of the matter is that WE, the good old US of A, are the real terrorists who are destroying, not just Yemen, but a host of suffering nations around the globe.
As a radical, Salafist, jihadist, Sunni organization, Al Qaeda originated in Saudi Arabia. They are sworn enemies of the Shia nation, Iran.
So, Al Qaeda now happily works with us (as we happily work with them) in assisting their countrymen, the Saudis, to destroy the people of Yemen.
Saudi Arabia has been slaughtering people in Yemen, largely civilians, since 2015. Its #1 financier and weapons supplier is none other than the USA.
In March 2019 both houses of Congress passed a bill requiring the US to end its financial support and military involvement the Yemen war.
But President Donald J. Trump vetoed that bill as an “unnecessary” and “dangerous” attempt to weaken his powers to make war.
How very pro-life of him…
Thus, the slaughter in Yemen continues with the help of US intelligence services, covert ops, training, money, fighter jets, missiles, bombers, and other US military equipment.
The war-torn country of Yemen is in the midst of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world thanks in large part to a Saudi-led war fueled by American weapons. Now, as the war nears its six-year anniversary in March, any hopes for a diplomatic resolution have faded faster than the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outgoing administration recently announced plans to designate the Houthi rebels, the principal force battling both the Saudi-led Coalition and al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, as a foreign terrorist organization. The move effectively eliminates any ray of hope for the more than 24 million people struggling for survival amid war, siege, famine, and countless diseases and epidemics, according to the United Nations.
The largest humanitarian crisis in the world, made possible and sustained by United States of America. (Also see Juan Cole’s article at Informed Comment.)
Yemeni mother and child.
These tragic events illustrate the obscenity which lies at the heart of American politics, our foreign policy, and the evangelical, Christian nationalism that perpetuates the anti-life lies of American exceptionalism.
While purportedly Christian news organizations such as CBN prostitute themselves by offering establishment propaganda about a pro-life president and American evangelicals, here are a few hard, cold, truths to be faced:
Evangelicals, by-in-large, are not pro-life people. We may be anti-abortion people. But we then use that pro-life label like an infant’s pacifier to sooth ourselves into a comfortable, conscienceless coma allowing us to ignore the slaughter of foreign innocents.
American is not a great, humanitarian nation. Rather, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The United States is the greatest purveyor of death, violence, and destruction in the world today.” (My favorite line from his anti-Vietnam war speech; a speech that is rarely included in the bastardized memorials touted on MLK Day).
No, electing Christians to political office does not improve anything. In fact, it only confirms the doctrine of total depravity. Mike Pompeo is only one of millions of Donald Trump’s loyal, evangelical enablers.
Christian support for Trump was the equivalent of an anti-spiritual hysteria spread like a virus within the church. I pray that the fever will break soon.
For years, the Religious Right insisted that voting Christians into high office was the solution to America’s problems. But Mike Pompeo (and his numerous minions now scattered throughout DC bureaucracy) is only the latest poster-child for how very, very wrong-headed that idea has always been.
We may debate when exactly life begins. But we can all agree that a fully human life has entered this world with the delivery of a new baby.
Sadly, however, evangelical pro-lifers behave as if life ends at birth. Why else would anyone care more about the unborn than those who have been born?
Genuine members of the Kingdom of God will honor the sanctity of all human life everywhere; will work to defend those lives globally; and will seek to stop the deliberate destruction of human life anywhere and everywhere.
No. Neither president Trump nor the evangelical church in America have ever been noteworthy defenders of the sanctity of human life.
In fact, American foreign policy relishes trampling upon the Image of God without a second thought.
Many have taken to warning about the internal threats to American democracy.
I do believe those threats are real.
But Australian blogger, Caitlin Johnstone, has some insight into the American proclivity to misidentify the real threats to our society while also
Caitlin Johnstone
polishing our national myth of American exceptionalism.
I like Caitlin because she always goes for the juggler, which would be obnoxious were she not so good at offering such precise diagnoses of our national problems.
To stop the exacerbation of Trumpism the talking heads are recommending internet censorship, regulations on media, new domestic terror laws, literally anything they can possibly think of except changing the conditions which gave rise to Trumpism.
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The most imminent threat to US democracy is not Russia, nor fascist insurrectionists, but the fact that US democracy is entirely fictional. Saying US democracy is being threatened is like saying Grinches are a critically endangered species.
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The previous president intervened in the primary to appoint his right-hand man as his chosen successor. That successor will be installed in a five-day, star-studded celebration surrounded by a sea of barbed wire and heavily armed soldiers. What “democracy” is under attack, exactly?
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No, the Capitol riot was not “karma” for America’s international coups and regime change interventions.
Karma would be the US actually reaping what it sows.
Karma would be the US government toppled and replaced with a foreign puppet regime, and millions of Americans killed.
Karma would be tens of millions of Americans displaced by widespread violence.
Karma would be the US becoming a failed state where people are again sold as slaves.
Karma would be nuclear bombs dropped on US cities.
Karma would be America’s forests soaked with Agent Orange.
Karma would be mass executions of Americans in sports stadiums.
Karma would be massacres of entire towns.
Karma would be foreign soldiers raping and killing civilians with impunity.
Karma would be foreign-backed extremists mutilating Americans to death and publicly displaying their corpses.
Karma for US interventionism would be for America to collapse and burn in chaos and torture.
That would be “karma”.
That would be the chickens coming home to roost.
I am not saying it would be a good thing if this happened. It most definitely would not.
I am saying the US must cease brutalizing the world.
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We now know for a fact that monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations can be pressured by the plutocrat-controlled political/media class to silence political factions online. Good thing there’s no way this can possibly go wrong.
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When you realize that corporations are America’s real government, the whole “it isn’t censorship if it’s a private company doing it” argument is seen for the joke that it is. It’s also completely specious, because the government is directly involved in the censorship.
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Soon social media will just be an app that sends everything you say to the FBI and gives you regular notifications that the government is your friend, and then everyone will finally be happy.
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Back before he was silenced Assange tweeted “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”
I think of this quote often.
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The mass media have earned every bit of the contempt the public has for them. Every little bit of it.
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Rightists suck at conspiracy analysis because their worldview requires an elite cabal planning and orchestrating all evil dynamics, whereas leftists understand that many (though not all) of those dynamics will unfold on their own in a system where human behavior is driven by profit-seeking. In situations where you are ideologically prohibited from blaming the obvious culprit capitalism, you’ll come up with all kinds of other wacky explanations.
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The best most reliable way to accurately predict what will happen in a given situation is to ignore whatever laws, trends and dynamics everyone else is pointing at and just assume the most powerful people will find a way to get whatever it is they want somehow. Doesn’t mean elites always win, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should stop fighting. It’s just the most reliable way to accurately guess what will happen in a given situation, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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Sectarian feuds in the online left always boil down to “the whole system is rigged against the people” lefties versus “we can work with the oligarchic empire to advance our interests” lefties.
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The US empire has two faces: the plastic smiling one based in Hollywood, and the blood-spattered one based in DC, Arlington and Langley. If you live in wealthy western nations you’re presented with the former. If you live in the Middle East or the Global South you get the latter.
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One of the weirdest things in my life these days is watching people enthusiastically arguing that they should receive less assistance from their government. Never until I began commenting on US politics was this ever a part of my life. The brainwashing there is out of this world.
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If a political party always succeeds at advancing sick agendas and always fails at advancing healthy agendas, it’s because it only exists to advance sick agendas.
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Victory for your revolutionary political goals won’t be a victory for the ego. If you are sincere about this, you want your marginalized viewpoint to become mainstream and mundane. You want your insight and understanding to become as common as grass. You can’t be in this for you.
A lot of revolutionary-minded types get a sense of coolness and specialness from their marginalized ideology. It makes them feel good to be uniquely right about things. But that attitude will actually get in the way if your goals are attained and your views become mainstream.
If you are sincere about this stuff and not just in it for egoic masturbation (many are), you can’t keep a lot of identity wrapped up in being the underdog, in being fringe and marginalized. Because the ultimate goal is to be the exact opposite.
With the exception of president-elect Biden’s verbal commitment to rejoin the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — the nuclear arms agreement president Obama signed with Iran — I see little reason to be optimistic about Biden’s approach to foreign policy and America’s endless wars.
Joe has predictably stacked his cabinet picks with corporate war-mongers who never saw a new weapons system or a foreign intervention they didn’t love.
Below you can watch Abby Martin’s survey (about 10 min.) of these individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
As Abby notes, “You just couldn’t find a nicer gang of war criminals.”
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
For a more wide-ranging analysis, listen to Aaron Mate’s interview with retired Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson (22 min.) below or click here:
Gideon Levy, intrepid Israeli journalist for Haaretz newspaper
Gideon Levy is one of the bravest and most honest journalists in Israel. He writes for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Here is his most recent article on the Israeli army and its brutal treatment of Palestinian children.
I have visited the Al-Arroub refugee camp and spent a pleasant afternoon with a family there. All three sons had been arrested, beaten by Israeli soldiers. One had been shot. All for no particular reason:
Last week, we were in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, searching for an open area in which to sit, for fear of the coronavirus. There wasn’t one. In a camp in which house touches house, whose alleys are the width of a man and strewn with garbage, there’s nowhere to sit outside. One can only dream of a garden or a bench; there isn’t even a sidewalk. This is where Basel al-Badawi lives. A year ago, soldiers shot his brother dead, before his eyes, for no reason. Two weeks ago, Basel was snatched from his bed on a cold night and taken, barefoot, for questioning. We sat in his family’s cramped home and realized there was no “out” to go to. While we were there, Israeli soldiers blocked the entrance to the camp, as they occasionally do, arbitrarily, and the sense of suffocation only grew.
Basel Al Badawi in his home, with photo of Omar hanging on the wall, in Al Arroub refugee camp, November 2020. Credit: Alex Levac
This is Basel’s world and this is his reality. He is 16, a bereaved brother, who was abducted from his bed in the dark of night by soldiers. He has nowhere to go to except for school, which is closed for part of the week due to COVID-19. Basel is free now, more fortunate than certain other children and teenagers. Around 170 of them are currently detained in Israel. Other children are shot by soldiers, wounded and sometimes killed, with no distinction made between children and adults – a Palestinian is a Palestinian – or between a life-threatening situation and a “public disturbance.”
On Friday they killed Ali Abu Alia, a 13-year-old boy. It was a lethal shot to the abdomen. No one could remain indifferent to the sight of his innocent face in photographs, and his last picture – in a shroud, his face exposed, his eyes closed, as he was carried to burial in his village. Ali, as he did every week, went with his friends to demonstrate against the wild and violent outposts that sprouted out of the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, taking over the remaining land of his village, al-Mughayir. There is nothing more just than the struggle of this village, there is nothing more heinous than the use of lethal force against protesters and there is no possibility that shooting Ali in the abdomen could have been justifiable. In Israel, of course, no one showed any interest over the weekend in the death of a child, one more child.
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian teenager Ali Abu Alia during his funeral in the village of Mughayir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on December 5, 2020. Credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP
Up until the current school year, around 50 children from the shepherding community of Ras a-Tin studied at the school in al-Mughayir, the village of the deceased boy. They had to walk about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) each day, round trip, to attend. This year their parents, with the help of a European Commission aid organization based in Italy, built them a modest, charming school in the village. Israel’s Civil Administration is threatening to demolish it, and in the meantime it is harassing the pupils and teachers with surprise visits to check whether the toilets had been, God forbid, connected to a water pipe – in a village that was never connected to the power grid or the water supply. The children of Ras a-Tin must have known Ali, their former classmate, now dead.
The children did not know Malek Issa, of Isawiyah, in East Jerusalem. The 9-year-old boy lost an eye after it was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer. On Thursday the Justice Ministry department that examines allegations of police misconduct announced that no one would be charged in the shooting, after 10 months of intensive investigation. It was enough for the policemen involved to claim that stones had been thrown at them, perhaps one of them hit the boy. But no video shows stones being thrown, nor is there any other evidence of this. Ali’s killers can also sleep in peace: No one will prosecute them. All they did was to kill a Palestinian child.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy who was wounded in Isawiyah at Hadassah Ein-Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, on February 18, 2020.Credit: Ohad Ziegenberg
These and many other incidents are taking place during a period that is among the quietest in the West Bank. This is the terror taking place, committed by the state. When we hear of such incidents in vicious dictatorships – children who are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, one boy who was shot in the eye, another who was shot and killed – it sends shivers down our spine. Shooting at demonstrators? At children? Where do such things happen? Not in some faraway land, but rather just an hour’s drive from your home; not in some dark regime, but in the only democracy.
What would you think of a regime that allows the shooting of children, that abducts them in their sleep and razes their schools? That’s exactly what you must think of the regime here in our country [Israel].
In her own inimitable way, Caitlin Johnstone captures the impending ethos
Caitlin Johnstone
of a Biden presidency in her latest blog post, “Biden Will Likely Be Worst Than Obama. The Left Must Lead the Backlash, or the Right Will.”
I agree with her analysis. Here is an excerpt:
It looks like a safe bet that Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20th after successfully campaigning on returning the murderous and oppressive Orwellian US empire back to its pre-Trump “normal”.
The problem with this, apart from the obvious fact that it was an embarrassingly close victory only made possible by the Covid outbreak, is that returning to the pre-Trump “normal” is returning to the exact positions which created Trump. It’s like using a time machine to prevent a train wreck, but only going back to one millisecond before the train wreck occurred.
It is clear that Trump’s election was the result of the easily exploited dissatisfaction caused by years of neoliberal austerity at home and neoconservative bloodshed abroad which Obama forcefully expanded and facilitated throughout two terms as president. . .
And from all appearances it looks like Biden is going to be worse.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States remains the only nation to have used
Hiroshima after the bomb
nuclear weapons in warfare.
Brett Wilkins, an independent journalist who often writes for Common Dreams, has a good article at Antiwar.com which tells the story, I suspect, from a new perspective for many readers. It is entitled “Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Every American should also know and remember that we used nuclear weapons offensively when it was unnecessary.
With the passage of time comes more and more evidence about the past.
Over the years, a great deal of evidence has come to light underscoring the
Nagasaki, September, 1945.
fact that almost everything Americans have always been told about America’s justification for wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth in two nuclear conflagrations are lies.
In fact, not only has the story always been false, it was known to be false at the time but was perpetuated as a part of a US domestic propaganda campaign.
Below is an excerpt of Wilkins’ excellent article:
Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”
Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.
“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”
lecturer for over 30 years. He recently published a piece at Consortium News entitled, “
a democracy.
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” 
enduring a naval blockade and routine aerial bombardment. The United Nations estimates the war has already 
The Yemeni civil war is another among America’s several proxy wars where we use others to do our bidding and kill our “enemies” (whether or not they have ever done anything to us).
group that is fighting against the US/Saudi-backed rebels “a terrorist organization,” opening the flood gates even wider for US military attacks in the future.
individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
