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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
 

The Real Humanitarian Crisis is Not in

Aleppo

By Paul Craig Roberts

October 17, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - Why do we hear only of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not of the humanitarian crisis everywhere else in Syria where the evil that rules in Washington has unleashed its ISIL mercenaries to slaughter the Syrian people?  Why do we not hear about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian vassal are slaughtering Yemeni women and children?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Libya where Washington destroyed a country leaving chaos in its place?  Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, ongoing now for 13 years, or the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan now 15 years old?

The answer is that the crisis in Aleppo is the crisis of Washington losing its ISIL mercenaries to the Syrian army and Russian air force.  The jihadists sent by Obama and the killer bitch Hillary (“We came, we saw, he died”) to destroy Syria are being themselves destroyed.  The Obama regime and the Western presstitutes are trying to save the jihadists by covering them in the blanket of “humanitarian crisis.”

Such hypocrisy is standard fare for Washington.  If the Obama regime gave a hoot about “humanitarian crisis,” the Obama regime would not have orchestrated humanitarian crisis in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen.

We are in the middle of a presidential campaign in the US and no one has asked why the US is determined to overthrow a democratically elected Syrian government that is supported by the Syrian people.

No one has asked why the White House Fool is empowered to remove the president of Syria by siccing US-supplied jihadists, which the presstitutes misrepresent as “moderate rebels,” on the Syrian people.

Washington, of course, has no acceptable answer to the question, and that is why the question is not asked.

The answer to the question is that Washington’s strategy for destabilizing Iran and then the Muslim provinces of the Russian Federation, former Soviet central Asia, and the Muslim province of China is to replace stable governments with the chaos of jihadism.  Iraq, Libya, and Syria had stable secular societies in which the government’s strong hand was used to prevent sectarian strife between Muslim sects. By overthrowing these secular governments and the current effort to overthrow Assad, Washington released the chaos of terrorism.

There was no terrorism in the Middle East until Washington brought it there with invasions, bombings, and torture.

Jihadists such as those that Washington used to overthrow Gaddafi appeared in Syria when the British Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama’s planned invasion of Syria. As Washington was prevented from directly attacking Syria, Washington used mercenaries.  The prostitutes that pretend to be an American media obliged Washington with the propaganda that the jihadist terrorists are Syrian democrats rebelling against “the Assad dictatorship.”  This transparant and blatant lie has been repeated so many times that it now is confused with truth.

Syria has no connection whatsoever to Washington’s original justification for introducing violence into the Middle East.  The original justification was 9/11 which was used to invade Afghanistan on the fabrication that the Taliban was shielding Osama bin Laden, the “mastermind,” who at the time was dying of renal failure in a Pakistani hospital.  Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset who was used against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  He was not the perpetrator of 9/11.  And most certainly, neither were the Taliban.

But the Western presstitutes covered up for the Bush regime’s lie, and the public was deceived with the phrase that we must “defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.”

Of course, Muslims were not going to attack us at home. If Muslims are a threat, why does the US government keep bringing so many of them here as refugees from Washington’s wars against Muslims?

9/11 was the neoconservatives “new Pearl Harbor” that they wrote they needed in order to launch their wars in the Middle East. George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury said that the topic of Bush’s first cabinet meeting was the invasion of Iraq.  This was prior to 9/11.  In other words, Washington’s wars in the Middle East were planned prior to 9/11.

The neoconservatives are zionists. By reducing the Middle East to chaos they achieve both of their goals.  They remove organized opposition to Israeli expansion, and they create jihadism that can be used to destabilize countries such as Russia, Iran, and China that are in the way of their exercise of unilateral power, which, they believe, the Soviet collapse bequeathed to the “indispensable nation,” the USA.

Osama bin Laden, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, was dying, not directing a terror war against the US from a cave in Afghanistan. The Taliban were focused on establishing their rule in Afghanistan, not on attacking the West. After blowing up weddings, funerals, and childrens’ soccer games, Washington moved on to Iraq.  There was no sign of Iraqi beligerance toward the US. UN weapons inspectors said that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but Washington did not hear.  The whores who comprise the American media helped the Bush regime create the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud going up over America if the US did not invade Iraq.

Iraq had no nuclear weapons and everyone knew it, but facts were irrelevant.  There was an agenda at work, an undeclared agenda.  To advance its agenda that the government did not dare reveal, the government used fear.  “We have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”

So Iraq, a stable, progressive country was reduced to ruins.

Libya was next. Gaddafi would not join Washington’s Africa Command.  Moreover, China was developing the oil fields in eastern Libya.  Washington was already troubled by Russia’s presence in the Mediterranean and did not want China there also.  So Gaddafi had to go.

Next Assad was set up with faked evidence that he had used chemical weapons against the rebellion that Washington had started.  No one believed the transparant Washington lie, not even the British Parliament.  Unable to find support to cover an invasion, Killary the Psychopath sent the jihadists Washington used to destroy Libya to overthrow Assad.

The Russians, who until this point had been so naive and gullible as to trust Washington, finally figured out that the instability that Washington was brewing was directed at them.  The Russian government decided that Syria was their red line and, at the request of the Syrian government, intervened against the Washington-supported jihadists.

Washington is outraged and is now threatening to commit yet another criminal violation of the Nuremberg Standard with blatant aggression against Syria. Such an ill-advised step would bring Washington into military conflict with Russia and by implication with China.  Before Europeans enable Washington to initiate such a dangerous conflict, they had best consider the warning from Sergey Karaganov, a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy and Defense council:  “Russia will never again fight on its own territory. If NATO initiates an encroachment against a nuclear power like ourselves, NATO will be punished.”

That the government of the United States is criminally insane should frighten every person on earth.  Killary-Hillary is commited to conflict with Russia.  Regardless,  Obama, the presstitutes, and the Democratic and Republican establishments are doing everything in their power to put into the Oval Office the person who will maximize conflict with Russia.

The life of the planet is in the hands of the criminally insane. This is the real humanitarian crisis.

Note:  Lt. General Michael Flynn, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency stated in an interview that the creation of ISIS was “a willful Washington decision.”  See, for example.

The DIA warned that ISIS would result in a Salafist principality over parts of Iraq and Syria. The warning went unheeded as the neoconservative Obama regime saw ISIS as a strategic asset to be used against Syria.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts editor of was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are Dissolution of The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

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