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 US-directed Assault on Mosul and
Imperialist Hypocrisy
By James Cogan
October 17, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"WSWS"-
The
long-planned, US-directed offensive to
recapture the northern Iraqi city of Mosul
from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
has begun. On Monday morning, Iraqi Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi declared on
national television: “Today, I declare the
start of these victorious operations.”
The
assault on Mosul starkly raises the
boundless hypocrisy of US and European
resolutions in the United Nations, and
incessant media coverage, accusing
Russian-backed Syrian forces of “war crimes”
against civilians as they attempt to retake
the eastern sectors of Aleppo from Islamist
militias. In Iraq, the US, its allies and
its puppet government in Baghdad have begun
a savage onslaught against a far larger
city, in which as many 1.5 million
civilians, including 600,000 children, are
trapped.
Lise Grande, the United Nations’
humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told the
New York Times on the weekend: “The
United Nations is deeply concerned that in a
worst-case scenario, the operation in Mosul
could be the most complex and largest in the
world in 2016, and we fear as many as one
million civilians may be forced to flee
their homes.”
The
New York Times nevertheless
welcomed “The Coming Battle for Mosul” in
its October 14 editorial. It declared that
the city must be “liberated” from
“terrorists’ rule”—regardless of the human
cost. Barely two weeks ago, its editorial
page labelled Russia an “outlaw state”
because it was supporting an assault in
Aleppo that “threatens the lives of 250,000
more people.”
The
difference between the two battles, as far
as the imperialist hypocrites are concerned,
is that the Islamist extremist groups under
attack in Aleppo are being supported and
used by Washington and the European powers
to attempt to overthrow the Russian-backed
Syrian government. Civilian casualties are
therefore “war crimes.”
ISIS, by contrast, is considered an obstacle
in Washington because it used the weapons
and recruits it gained as a result of US
intrigues in Syria to seize large parts of
western and northern Iraq in 2014,
threatening the pro-US puppet regimes in
Baghdad and the Kurdish region. Any
civilians killed in the process of
recapturing Mosul will therefore be brushed
aside as “collateral damage.”
In
both Syria and Iraq, US objectives are the
same: asserting its dominance over the key
oil-producing region of the world.
Mosul is being attacked by up to 20,000
Iraqi Army personnel and 10,000 Kurdish
Peshmerga troops, reinforced by some 6,000
Iraqi police, thousands of anti-ISIS
Christian, Turkmen and Sunni militia
fighters and thousands more militia members
loyal to the Shiite-based political parties
that control the Baghdad regime.
Behind the scenes, the US military is
monitoring and effectively commanding the
onslaught. American, British, French,
Australian and Jordanian jet fighters and
helicopters are providing air support to the
disparate government forces. US Marine and
French Army units are giving artillery fire
support. Hundreds of American, British,
Australian, German and Italian special
forces and “trainers” are involved in the
battle, advising Iraqi and Kurdish units and
directing air and artillery attacks.
Every atrocity for which the Russian regime
and its Syrian client state are responsible
in Aleppo will be matched, and most likely
exceeded, by the US-backed forces in Iraq.
Past experience, including the assault
earlier this year on the western Iraqi city
of Fallujah, leave little doubt as to the
outcome of the attack on Mosul. Entire
suburbs will be reduced to rubble from both
the air and the ground, regardless of how
many desperate civilians are hiding in their
homes. The city’s electricity, water and
sewerage systems will be destroyed. Medical
services and transport networks will be
rendered dysfunctional.
The
destruction of Mosul and enormous toll in
civilian casualties are being justified in
advance as unavoidable, due to fanatical
ISIS resistance. The estimates of the number
of ISIS militants still in the city range
from just a few thousand to over 10,000.
Lurid accounts have appeared of extensive
preparations by ISIS for protracted,
street-to-street fighting. US and Iraqi
officials, citing Mosul residents, have told
media that buildings and cars have been
rigged with explosives, minefields laid and
roadblocks erected on the main
thoroughfares. A tunnel network has
allegedly been constructed linking various
areas of the city.
Mosul, to recall the reported 1968 US
military statement in regard to the
Vietnamese town of Bến Tre, must be
destroyed “to save it.”
The
indifference toward the lives and well-being
of the city’s population is revealed in the
leaflets that were dropped, in the tens of
thousands, over the city on Saturday night.
According to a Reuters report, one leaflet
advised: “Keep calm and tell your children
that it [the bombardment] is only a game or
thunder before the rain… Women should not
scream or shout, to preserve the children’s
spirit.” Another ominously warned: “If you
see an army unit, stay at least 25 metres
away and avoid any sudden movements.”
The
Iraqis who survive their “liberation” from
ISIS by US-led forces will be forced to flee
the unliveable ruins of the city for
overcrowded and inadequate refugee camps. No
serious preparations, such as pre-built tent
cities with hospitals, food and water
supplies, have been made to cope with such a
situation. Aid agencies fear that tens of
thousands will die from injury, exposure,
disease, dehydration or starvation.
The
assault on Mosul will join the long list of
horrors and crimes that have been inflicted
on the Iraqi people by US imperialism and
its military machine over a period of more
than 25 years, in Washington's quest for
hegemony over one of the most resource-rich
and strategically significant regions of the
world.
The
thousands who die will join those who lost
their lives as a result of the 1991 Gulf
War, the subsequent sanctions imposed on
Iraq, the legacy of depleted uranium weapons
contamination, the 2003 invasion, the
murderous Sunni-Shiite sectarian warfare
that was deliberately provoked by the US
occupation forces, and the predations of the
US-backed Iraqi government after most
American troops were withdrawn in 2010-2011.
Credible estimates place the cumulative
death toll over a 25-year period at well
over 1.5 million and as high as two million.
Since 2003 alone, at least four million
Iraqis have been internally displaced or
forced to flee the country as refugees.
The
defence of the masses of Iraq and the Middle
East against imperialist oppression must be
at the very forefront of the struggle for an
international anti-war movement of the
working class, based on a revolutionary and
socialist perspective. |
