The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Handle
With Care: American Psycho System A
'Co-worker Of God'
By
Finian Cunningham
September 22, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "RT"
- US President Barack Obama made
his eighth – and final – address to the
United Nations General Assembly this
week. What a relief, not to be subjected
to any more florid speeches filled with
vacuous, psychopathic lies.
Unfortunately, his successor – whoever
that is – will pontificate more of the
same. For the American psycho
power-system is delusional about being a
force for good.
As
usual, Obama delivered
another one of his soaring rhetorical
pirouettes. The American
Conjurer-in-Chief presented a sweeping
vista of history that was a travesty of
reality. Sweeping American global crimes
under a carpet of lies.
“I say all this not to
whitewash the challenges we face,”
he declared at one point, without a
trace of irony that that was exactly
what he was doing.
What is nauseating about an American
president standing up in front of the
world’s nations at the opening of the UN
annual assembly is not merely having to
tolerate listening to such venal
verbiage. It is an insult to common
human intelligence to witness such
brazen falsification of world conflicts
– and specifically the sickening
self-exoneration of American
responsibility.
With patronizing, syrupy
cant, Obama urged nations and world
leaders to “work together” in
order to resolve conflicts by
“our commitment to
international cooperation rooted in the
rights and responsibilities of nations.”
Obama even had the gall
to quote Martin Luther King by calling
on nations to join with the United
States as
“co-workers of God”.
But how can any nation possibly combine
constructive efforts with a superpower
that is so deluded about its systematic
criminality?
In
his address, Obama referred to a host of
wars, flash-points and security
problems. He mentioned Ukraine, Syria,
the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock,
tensions in the South China Sea, North
Korea’s nuclear weapons, alleged Iranian
nuclear ambitions, Middle East
instability, racism, sectarianism,
fundamentalism and ISIL terrorism.
In
front of the world, Obama had the
audacity to blame Russia of
“attempting to recover lost glory
through force” by purportedly
threatening Ukraine, the Baltic region
and Europe.
“After all, the people of
Ukraine did not take to the streets
because of some plot imposed from
abroad,”
claimed Obama, in a breathtaking denial
of how the US and European Union
actually destabilized the country in
2013-2014, leading to a CIA-backed coup
d’état and an ongoing war in eastern
Ukraine.
In
virtually every conflict cited by Obama
it can be factually counterposed that US
intervention has played a critical role
in unleashing hostilities and tensions
with a death toll exceeding millions of
victims. Yet all he would admit, with
astounding understatement, was that the
US has “made our share of mistakes”
over the past 25 years since the end of
the Cold War.
We
don’t have space or patience to rebut
every one of the falsehoods spouted by
Obama at the UN. But let’s take a few.
Syria’s “tragic civil war” is
not due to a sectarian regime abusing
its power, as he makes out. The nearly
six-year war is the result of US-led
efforts to destabilize a pluralist Arab
democracy for regime change towards a
puppet willing to serve American
hegemonic “core interests” in
the region. This criminal US objective
is in violation of international law,
including Washington’s covert support
for proxy terrorist insurgents.
Obama deplores “fundamentalism”
and the rise of “medieval” ISIL
terrorism without a hint of shame that
seven decades of US strategic collusion
with the medieval fundamentalist Saudi
dictatorship has spawned ISIL and other
Islamist terror networks.
Pres Obama closes 48 min speech
saying "all of us can be
co-workers with God" and that
all governments and the UN
"should accept this."
The mentality of extremism and sectarian
intolerance that Obama rhetorically
condemns is a major plank in US foreign
policy to destabilize the Middle East
for its own hegemonic needs. And this
week as the head-chopping Saudi regime’s
air force slaughtered 20 civilians in
the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, the
Wahhabi monarch in Riyadh was rewarded
with yet another US arms deal worth
$1.15 billion – one of over 40 such arms
deals under Obama administrations worth
a total of $115 billion.
On
the Palestinian struggle for
self-determination, the American
president lectured Palestinians to
“reject incitement and recognize the
legitimacy of Israel”. For token
balance, he added that Israel
“cannot permanently occupy and settle
Palestinian land.” But permanently
occupying and usurping Palestinian land
is the modus operandi of the Israeli
government, whose unwavering sponsorship
by Washington was only last week
testified to by the release of $38
billion in US military aid over the next
decade.
Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of
the recent disclosure from former US
Secretary of State Colin Powell that
Israel has 200 nuclear missiles
targeting Iran. Instead, however, Obama
singled out Iran and North Korea as
having sinister nuclear designs.
Obama talked about “protecting
allies” in Europe from Russian
aggression and made a veiled swipe at
China for stoking territorial tensions
in the South China Sea. When in reality,
it is US-led NATO military build-up on
Russia’s borders and Washington’s
muscle-flexing in Asia that is driving
the world to an all-out war between
nuclear-armed states.
“But I believe America
has been a rare superpower in human
history insofar as it has been willing
to think beyond narrow self-interest,”
intoned the 44th occupant of the White
House with a straight face. “And as
a consequence, I believe we have been a
force for good,” he added.
In summing up, Obama
appeared to misspeak:
“Let me conclude by
saying that I recognize history tells a
different story than the one that I’ve
talked about here today.”
You can say that again.
As
he narcissistically regaled the Assembly
with delusion American virtues, one
would hardly know that the American
“co-worker of God” is
simultaneously bombing seven countries:
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,
Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
The world’s instability over the past 25
years can be traced directly to the
invasion of Iraq under President Herbert
Walker Bush in 1991, and from then on to
an unrelenting criminal US policy of
military intervention around the globe
in dozens of countries, including former
Yugoslavia and the Balkans and across
the Middle East.
Obama solemnly exalts the
“rule of law” and
“multilateral constraints” and yet
in the same breath the mendacious,
contradictory Commander-in-Spiel
declares Washington’s unilateral
prerogative to pursue its
“core interests”.
That is the kernel of the problem.
American power sees itself as above
international law. It is only bound by
the interests of its ruling class of
Wall Street and corporate oligarchs.
And, as history shows, that power is
prepared to wage war, destroy other
nations and exterminate millions of
human beings in order to gratify its
interests.
At the UN, Obama warned:
“And so I
believe that at this moment we all face
a choice. We can choose to press forward
with a better model of cooperation and
integration. Or we can retreat into a
world sharply divided, and ultimately in
conflict.”
The sense of urgency is appropriate. But
the choice facing the world is whether
the rampant lawlessness of American
power can be deactivated in a safe way
that avoids a world war igniting.
And what makes that task especially
fraught with danger is that the American
psycho actually thinks itself a
“co-worker of God”.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has
written extensively on international
affairs, with articles published in
several languages. For over 20 years he
worked as an editor and writer in major
news media organizations, including The
Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now
a freelance journalist based in East
Africa, his columns appear on RT,
Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation
and Press TV.
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