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
You Must be Kidding!
Adventures in an American World of
Frustration
By Tom Engelhardt
September 23, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Tom
Dispatch"
-
Recently, sorting through a pile of old
children’s books, I came across a volume,
That Makes Me Mad!, which brought
back memories. Written by Steve Kroll, a
long-dead friend, it focused on the
eternally frustrating everyday adventures of
Nina, a little girl whose life regularly
meets commonplace roadblocks, at which point
she always says… well, you can guess from
the title! Vivid parental memories of
another age instantly flooded back – of my
daughter (now reading such books to her own
son) sitting beside me at age five and
hitting that repeated line with such
mind-blowing, ear-crushing gusto that you
knew it spoke to the everyday frustrations
of her life, to what made her mad.
Three decades later, in an almost
unimaginably different America, on picking
up that book I suddenly realized that,
whenever I follow the news online, on TV, or
– and forgive me for this but I’m 72 and
still trapped in another era – on paper, I
have a similarly Nina-esque urge. Only the
line I’ve come up with for it is (with a tip
of the hat to Steve Kroll) “You must be
kidding!”
Here are a few recent examples from the
world of American-style war and peace.
Consider these as random illustrations,
given that, in the age of Trump, just about
everything that happens is out-of-this-world
absurd and would serve perfectly well. If
you’re in the mood, feel free to shout out
that line with me as we go.
Nuking the Planet:
I’m sure you remember Barack Obama, the guy
who entered the Oval Office pledging to
work toward “a nuclear-free world.” You
know, the president who traveled to Prague
in 2009 to say
stirringly: “So today, I state clearly
and with conviction America’s commitment to
seek the peace and security of a world
without nuclear weapons… To put an end to
Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role
of nuclear weapons in our national security
strategy, and urge others to do the same.”
That same year, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize largely for what he might still do,
particularly in the nuclear realm. Of
course, that was all so 2009!
Almost two terms in the Oval Office later,
our peace president, the only one who has
ever called for nuclear “abolition” – and
whose administration has retired
fewer weapons in our nuclear arsenal
than any other in the post-Cold War era – is
now
presiding over the early stages of a
trillion-dollar modernization of that
very arsenal. (And that trillion-dollar
price tag comes, of course, before the
inevitable cost overruns even begin.) It
includes
full-scale work on the creation of a
“precision-guided” nuclear weapon with a
“dial-back” lower yield option. Such a
weapon would potentially bring nukes to the
battlefield in a first-use way, something
the U.S. is proudly
pioneering.
And
that brings me to the September 6th
front-page story in the New York Times
that caught my eye. Think of it as the icing
on the Obama era nuclear cake. Its
headline: “Obama Unlikely to Vow No
First Use of Nuclear Weapons.” Admittedly,
if made, such a vow could be reversed by any
future president. Still, reportedly for fear
that a pledge not to initiate a nuclear war
would “undermine allies and embolden Russia
and China… while Russia is running practice
bombing runs over Europe and China is
expanding its reach in the South China Sea,”
the president has backed down on issuing
such a vow. In translation: the only country
that has ever used such weaponry will remain
on the record as ready and willing to do so
again without nuclear provocation, an act
that, it is now believed in Washington,
would create a calmer planet.
You
must be kidding!
Plain Old Bombing:
Recall that in October 2001, when the Bush
administration launched its invasion of
Afghanistan, the U.S. was bombing no other
largely Islamic country. In fact, it was
bombing no other country at all. Afghanistan
was quickly “liberated,” the Taliban
crushed, al-Qaeda put to flight, and
that was that, or so it then seemed.
On
September 8th, almost 15 years later, the
Washington Post
reported that, over a single weekend and
in a “flurry” of activity, the U.S. had
dropped bombs on, or fired missiles at, six
largely Islamic countries: Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. (And
it might have been seven if the CIA hadn’t
grown a little rusty when it comes to the
drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal
borderlands that it’s launched repeatedly
throughout these years.) In the same spirit,
the president who swore he would end the
U.S. war in Iraq and, by the time he left
office, do the same in Afghanistan, is now
overseeing American bombing campaigns in
Iraq and Syria which are
loosing close to
25,000 weapons a year on those
countries. Only recently, in order to
facilitate the further prosecution of the
longest war in our history, the president
who
announced that his country had ended its
“combat mission” in Afghanistan in 2014, has
once again
deployed the U.S.
military in a combat role and has done the
same with the
U.S. Air Force. For that,
B-52s (of Vietnam infamy) were returned
to action there, as well as in
Iraq and Syria, after a decade of
retirement. In the Pentagon, military
figures are now talking about “generational”
war in Afghanistan – well into the 2020s.
Meanwhile, President Obama has personally
helped pioneer a new form of warfare that
will not long remain a largely American
possession. It involves missile-armed
drones, high-tech weapons that promise a
world of no-casualty-conflict (for the
American military and the CIA), and adds up
to a permanent global killing machine for
taking out terror leaders, “lieutenants,”
and “militants.” Well beyond official
American war zones, U.S. drones regularly
cross borders, infringing on national
sovereignty throughout the Greater Middle
East and parts of Africa, to assassinate
anyone the president and his colleagues
decide needs to die,
American citizen or otherwise (plus, of
course, anyone who happens to be
in the vicinity). With its
White House “kill list” and its “terror
Tuesday” meetings, the drone program,
promising “surgical”
hunting-and-killing action, has blurred
the line between war and peace, while being
normalized in these years. A president is
now not just commander-in-chief but
assassin-in-chief, a role that no
imaginable future president is likely to
reject. Assassination, previously an illegal
act, has become the heart and soul of
Washington’s way of life and of a way of war
that only seems to spread conflict further.
You
must be kidding!
The Well-Oiled Machinery of
Privatized War:
And speaking of drones, as
the New York Times
reported on September 5th, the U.S.
drone program does have one problem: a lack
of pilots. It has ramped up quickly in these
years and, in the process, the pressures on
its pilots and other personnel have only
grown, including post-traumatic
stress over killing civilians thousands
of miles away via computer screen. As a
result, the Air Force has been losing those
pilots fast. Fortunately, a solution is on
the horizon. That service has begun filling
its pilot gap by going the route of the rest
of the military in these years – turning to
private contractors for help. Such pilots
and other personnel are, however, paid
higher salaries and cost more money. The
contractors, in turn, have been hiring the
only available personnel around, the ones
trained by… yep, you guessed it, the Air
Force. The result may be an even greater
drain on Air Force drone pilots eager for
increased pay for grim work and… well, I
think you can see just how the well-oiled
machinery of privatized war is likely to
work here and who’s going to pay for it.
You
must be kidding!
Selling Arms As If There Were
No Tomorrow:
In a recent report for the
Center for International Policy, arms expert
William Hartung offered a
stunning figure on U.S. arms sales to
Saudi Arabia. “Since taking office in
January 2009,” he
wrote, “the Obama administration has
offered over $115 billion worth of weapons
to Saudi Arabia in 42 separate deals, more
than any U.S. administration in the history
of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The majority
of this equipment is still in the pipeline,
and could tie the United States to the Saudi
military for years to come.” Think about
that for a moment: $115 billion for
everything from small arms to tanks, combat
aircraft,
cluster bombs, and air-to-ground
missiles (weaponry now being used to
slaughter civilians in neighboring
Yemen).
Of
course, how else can the U.S. keep its
near monopoly on the
global arms trade and ensure that two
sets of products – Hollywood movies and U.S.
weaponry – will dominate the world’s
business in things that go boom in the
night? It’s a record to be proud of,
especially since putting every advanced
weapon imaginable in the hands of the Saudis
will obviously help bring peace to a roiled
region of the planet. (And if you arm the
Saudis, you better do no less for the
Israelis, hence the mind-boggling
$38 billion in military aid the Obama
administration recently signed on to for the
next decade, the most Washington has ever
offered any country, ensuring that arms will
be flying into the Middle East, literally
and figuratively, for years to come.)
Blessed indeed are the peacemakers – and of
course you know that by “peacemaker” I mean
the
classic revolver that “won the West.”
Put
another way…
You
must be kidding!
The Race for the Generals:
I mean, who’s got the biggest…
…list of retired generals and admirals? Does
it surprise you that there are at least 198
retired commanders floating around in their
golden parachutes, many undoubtedly
still embedded in the military-industrial
complex on
corporate boards and the like, eager to
enroll
in the Trump and Clinton campaigns? Trump
went first,
releasing an “open letter”
signed by 88 generals and admirals who
were bravely standing up to reverse the
“hollowing out of our military” and to
“secure our borders, to defeat our Islamic
supremacist adversaries, and restore law and
order domestically.” (Partial translation:
pour yet more money into our military as The
Donald has
promised to do.) They included such
household names as Major General Joe
Arbuckle, Rear Admiral James H. Flatley III,
and Brigadier General Mark D. Scraba – or,
hey!, one guy you might even remember:
Lieutenant General William (“Jerry”) Boykin,
the
evangelical crusader who made the news
in 2003 by
claiming of a former Somali opponent, “I
knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew
that my God was a real God, and his was an
idol.”
Somehow, those 88 Trumpian military types
assumedly crawled out of “the rubble” under
which, as The Donald
informed us recently, the Obama
administration has left the American high
command. His crew, however, is undoubtedly
not the “embarrassment” he refers to when
talking about American generalship in these
years.
Meanwhile, the Clintonites
struck back with a list of
95, “including a number of 4-star
generals,” many directly from under that
rubble, and within the week had added 15
more to hit
110. Meanwhile, members of the
intelligence community and the rest of the
national security state, former presidential
advisers and other officials, drum-beating
neocons, and strategists of every sort from
America’s disastrous wars of the last 15
years
hustled to line up behind Hillary or The
Donald.
If
nothing else, all of it was a reminder of
the bloated size and ever-increasing
centrality of the post-9/11 national
security state and the military-industrial
complex that goes with it. The question is:
Does it inspire you with confidence in our
candidates, or leave you saying…
You
must be kidding!
Conflicts of Interest and
Access to the Oval Office:
Let’s put aside a
possible preemptive
$25,000 bribe to Florida’s attorney
general from the Donald J. Trump Foundation
to prevent an investigation of a scam
operation,
Trump “University.” If that “donation”
to a political action committee does turn
out to have been a bribe, no one should be
surprised, given that The Donald has long
been a walking
Ponzi scheme. Thanks to a recent
superb investigative report by Kurt
Eichenwald of Newsweek, consider
instead what it might mean for him to enter
the Oval Office when it comes to conflicts
of interest and the “national security” of
the country. Eichenwald concludes that Trump
would be “the most conflicted president in
American history,” since the Trump
Organization has “deep ties to global
financiers, foreign politicians, and even
criminals” in both allied and enemy
countries. Almost any foreign policy
decision he might make could hurt or enrich
his own businesses. There would, in essence,
be no way to divest himself and his family
from the international Trump branding
machine. (Think Trump U. writ large.) And
you hardly need ask yourself whether The
Donald would “act in the interests of the
United States or his wallet,” given his
prior single-minded pursuit of
self-enrichment.
So
much for conflicts of interest, what about
access? That, of course, brings up the
Clintons, who, between 2001 and the moment
Hillary announced her candidacy for
president, managed to take in
$153 million dollars (yes, that is not a
misprint) for a combined 729 speeches at an
average fee of $210,795. That includes
Hillary’s
20-minute speech to eBay’s Women’s
Initiative Network Summit in March 2015 for
a reported
$315,000 just a month before she made
her announcement. It’s obviously not
Hillary’s (or Bill’s) golden words that
corporate executives truly care about and
are willing to pay the big bucks for, but
the hope of accessibility to both a past and
a possible future president. After all, in
the world of business, no one ever thinks
they’re paying good money for nothing.
Do
I need to say more than…
You
must be kidding!
Of
course, I could go on. I could bring up a
Congress
seemingly incapable of passing a bill to
fund a government effort to prevent the Zika
virus from spreading wildly in parts of this
country. (You must be kidding!) I
could discuss how the media fell face first
into an SUV – NBC Nightly News,
which I watch, used the video of Hillary
Clinton stumbling and almost falling into
that van, by my rough count, 15 times over
four nights – and what it tells us about
news “coverage” these days. (You must be
kidding!) I could start in on the
constant polls that flood our lives by
confessing that I’m an addict and plan on
joining Pollers Anonymous on November 9th,
and then consider what it means to have such
polls, and
polls of
polls, inundate us daily, teaching us
about
favorable/unfavorable splits, and
offering endlessly varying snapshots of how
we might or might not vote and which of us
might or might not do it day so long before
we ever hit a voting booth. (You must be
kidding!) Or I could bring up the way,
after five years of assiduous “research,”
Donald Trump grudgingly
acknowledged that Barack Obama was born
in the United States and then essentially
blamed the birther movement on Hillary
Clinton. (You must be kidding!)
I
could, in other words, continue welcoming
you into an increasingly bizarre American
landscape of war and peace (without a
Tolstoy in sight).
Still, enough is enough,
don’t you think? So let me stop here and,
just for the hell of it, join me one last
time in chanting:
You must be kidding!
Tom Engelhardt is a
co-founder of the
American Empire Project and
the author of The United States of Fear
as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture. He is a
fellow of the
Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Follow
TomDispatch on
Twitter and join us on
Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch
Book, Nick Turse’s Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,
and Tom Engelhardt's latest book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt
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