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
“What Russia is
sponsoring and doing [in Syria] is
not counter-terrorism it is
barbarism”
Samantha Power, US
Representative to the United Nations
October 04, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- The US representative to the United
Nations, Ambassador ‘Ranting Sam’
Samantha Power, accused the Russian and
Syrian governments of ‘barbarism’,
claiming Moscow or Damascus had attacked
an unarmed United Nations humanitarian
convoy delivering aid to civilians in
Aleppo. No evidence was presented. Rants
and threats do not require facts or
proof; they only require vehement
emotional ejaculations and compliant
mass propaganda organs.
‘Barbarians’, to be clear, evoke images
of leaders and groups, which abjure all
civilized norms and laws. They only
respond to armed force.
In
the present context Power’s charges of
barbarism against Russia and Syria was
used to justify the US aerial
bombardment of a Syrian army outpost,
which killed and maimed almost 200
government troops engaged in combating
ISIS terrorists and jihadi invaders.
In
other words, accusing Syrian soldiers of
‘barbarism’ was Ambassador Power’s
cynical way of dehumanizing the young
victims of an earlier and deliberate US
war crime.
Let’s analyze the appropriate context
for the use and abuse of the language of
‘barbarism’ - and its rightful
application.
Barbarism: the Deed
Over the past decade and a half, the US
and its allies have invaded, occupied,
killed, wounded and dispossessed over
ten million people, in countries from
Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya,
Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Military and
civilian officials have systematically
destroyed entire economies, fostered
ethno-religious wars, undermined ancient
community and family ties and placed
corrupt political puppets in power.
Promoted by the US, torture, arbitrary
arrest and incarceration have become the
norm creating lawless and chaotic
societies, which had once been
productive and stable. The shredding of
social structures has provokes massive
population flight, with millions of
desperate refugees fleeing invasions,
wars and total society breakdown. The
result of these deliberate imperial
policy decisions has been emptied cities
and neighborhoods, broken families,
destroyed lives and futures for many
millions of young Arabs and Muslims.
As
the human toll mounts and Western Europe
is flooded with the results of US
aggressive wars, the imperialists have
sharpened their shrill rhetoric,
labeling all of their adversaries and
critics as ‘accomplices in war crimes’,
and ‘barbarians’.
The greater and more sustained the
policy of wanton imperial pillage, the
more intense the frustration of its
leaders over its ultimate failures, and
the greater the recourse of its
‘diplomats’ to vituperative language.
Barbarism in Search of Barbarians:
The barbarism underlying the US and EU
imperial wars of conquest in the Middle
East is unmatched. The principal
adversaries to US aggression, Russia,
China and Iran, have not invaded any
sovereign countries, nor have they
provoked the desperate flight of
millions of refugees. Russia was invited
to aid its Syrian government ally
confronting an invasion of terrorist
mercenaries who are intent on dividing
the country. Crimea peacefully re-joined
Russia via elections. Moscow rejected
playing any military role in support of
Western wars against Iraq, Yemen and
Libya. None of this rose to the level of
US-EU barbarism.
In
Asia, the West has invaded and
devastated Viet Nam, the Philippines and
Afghanistan. Japan, now a US ally, had
invaded China, Korea and Southeast Asia.
China for its part has not engaged in
any imperial war of conquest for
centuries.
Iran has not invaded any country in
modern times. On the contrary, Iraq
invaded Tehran in the 1980’s with US
support and waged a decade-long war
which caused millions of casualties.
In
truth, if waging wars, staging
invasions, destroying whole societies
and causing millions of deaths are the
measure of barbarism, then the US,
Europe and Japan have been clearly
barbaric.
To
claim otherwise and follow the ranting
script of Ambassador Samantha Power is
to enter into a tunnel of hallucinations
where the language of liberal values
embellishes truly barbarian acts.
The entire language of politics has been
perverted and converted into an artifice
of self-delusion. Terrorist militias are
re-packaged as ‘rebels’ and ‘moderates’,
spreading barbarism from the imperial
Western center to the periphery. The
deliberate spread of terrorism is itself
a barbaric deed, which degrades the
status of Western powers.
Conclusion
In
ancient Greece, the barbarians were
those outside of the empire who did not
speak the language of civilization. They
were savage invaders seeking to pillage
the wealth and culture of the empire.
Today the barbarians emerge from inside
the empire and spread outward. The
imperial leaders have engaged in serial
wars of destruction and pillage, even as
their own societies and economies wallow
in ignorance, misery, debt, addiction
and criminality. Imperial barbarians
devastate whole cultures, erasing the
great historical legacy of ancient
civilizations like Iraq and Syria, while
imposing their culture of morons, drugs
and electronic gadgets, which has
already infantilized its own population.
The empire of barbarians is infested
with moneychangers and corrupt
speculators. They have debased the
entire legal system and legislative
bodies. The public space has become a
private latrine for the elite, closed to
any real public discourse and debate.
Electoral spectacles, rather than
reasoned debates, undermine republican
principles. Imperial conquerors,
enmeshed in a military metaphysic,
cannot reconstruct a devastated society
into a productive colony, nor can they
learn or benefit from the best and
brightest among its captives, as Rome
did with Greece, because it has sown
such destruction and salted the very
soil under the feet of its conquered
peoples.
The barbarian-imperial world order is
constantly at war with ‘others’ and can
never assimilate and learn from the
precious human treasures it has so
wantonly destroyed. It rules by terror
abroad and deceit at home. As so crudely
displayed by the imperial rants of
Ambassador Samantha Power, its oratory
at international forums reflect the
hysteria of mediocre functionaries:
mindless barbarians raving among
themselves in marbled echo chambers.
In
the end, the imperial barbarians will be
besieged by their own fleeing vassals
and puppets. When they finally confront
their own decay and internal dissolution
they have to decide whether to engage in
a last global conflagration or dismantle
the imperial barbaric order and choose
justice, law and civilization.
