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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

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.

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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