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
US-Turkey Lurch to World War in Syria
By Finian Cunningham
September 24, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "SCF"
- Following
US President Barack Obama’s dubious stellar
performance this week at the UN General
Assembly recounting a litany of lies for
almost one hour before the eyes of the
world, it was the turn of Turkey’s leader
Recep Tayyip Erdogan to insult humanity’s
intelligence.
Like his American ally, who
inverted reality by claiming that
US war crimes against numerous nations were
a virtuous legacy, Erdogan performed a
similar spellbinding conjuring trick. In his
address to the UN, the Turkish president said his
military has rendered peace to the Middle
East region by invading Syria last month.
Can you imagine Adolf Hitler
declaring to the then League of Nations that
Germany had just invaded Poland to restore
peace to Europe? It is astounding, when you
think about it, how the august international
forum in New York City indulged Erdogan and
Obama with such polite attention, when they
are both responsible for the supreme war
crime of aggression against the sovereign
state of Syria?
Turkish and American troops
are occupying a 100-km wide swathe of
northern Syria after they both launched
Operation Euphrates Shield on August 24,
with tanks and warplanes in support of
ground forces.
Syria and Russia have both
expressed concern over the incursion, with
Damascus denouncing it as a violation of its
sovereignty and territorial integrity.
American warplanes have been violating
Syrian sovereignty for nearly two years.
Just because Turkey and the US claim that
the latest operation is aimed at fighting
the ISIS terror network, that still does not
confer legitimacy.
Four weeks on from the US and
Turkey launching the incursion into Syrian
territory, Ankara says that it is expanding
its occupation.
Earlier this week, Erdogan said his
troops would push further south into Syria
to take a total area of 5,000 square kms –
about five times the area already under its
present control. In Orwellian jargon, the
Turkish-US forces are labelling the annexed
territory as «safe zones». Exactly to whom
this is being made «safe» for is not yet
clear.
While in New York City, the
Turkish leader urged the
US to step up its military cooperation with
Ankara to, as he put it, «finish off Daesh
[ISIS]» in Syria. Erdogan is pushing
Washington even harder to get onboard with
the long-held Turkish objective of setting
up «no fly zones» in the occupied northern
Syrian territory.
Erdogan also hinted that he
expected a Clinton presidency to be more
gung-ho about escalating military
involvement, and in particular implementing
no fly zones. Hillary Clinton has already
said that she would take a more hostile line
towards Syria and Russia, going as far as
declaring she would deploy military force to
oust President Bashar al-Assad.
It is notable that Erdogan is
making his appeals solely to Washington for
greater military intervention «to finish off
Daesh» in Syria. Surely, if Turkey was
serious about this stated objective then it
would be entreating Russia to join forces,
given that Russia has shown itself to be the
most effective military power against the
terror groups, after it was requested to
intervene by the Syrian government last
year.
That Erdogan wants to go it
alone with the US on his supposed
«anti-terror» mission in Syria points to an
ulterior agenda. That agenda is nothing less
than war on Syria.
Using the pretext of
«fighting terrorism» is a risible cover for
the fact that Turkish and American military
forces are illegally operating on Syrian
soil. And as they expand their presence
towards the northern Syrian city of Aleppo,
what should become apparent is that these
two NATO members are involved in an full-on
invasion of Syria.
Forget about ISIS or any
other terror outfit that Washington and
Ankara are publicly claiming to be
combatting. Turkish media last year exposed the
Erdogan government’s cross-border weapons
supply to illegally armed insurgents in
Syria. The notoriously «porous» Turk border
is porous because that is part of Ankara’s
covert war on Syria, in league with
Washington and other NATO members, Britain
and France, as well as the Wahhabi
terror-funding Saudi regime.
Russian military surveillance
footage has also proven that
the Turkish authorities were colluding with
terror groups in running oil-smuggling
operations, until, that is, Russian aviation
forces obliterated this Erdogan war racket.
The so-called Free Syrian
Army (FSA) militias that Turkish military
are collaborating with in their latest
offensive into Syrian territory are equally
complicit in horrific crimes of terrorism as
the more infamous ISIS and Al Nusra
extremists. The FSA terror gangs are
sanitized in the Western media as some kind
of «vetted opposition». But they were
involved, for example, in the massacre at
Kassab in Latakia Province back in March
2014, along with the Al Qaeda
throat-slitters and Turkish military
support.
For Turkey to claim now to be
working with FSA militias to «cleanse»
border areas from «terrorists» is a derisory
illusion.
Far more conceivable is that
Erdogan’s Ankara regime feels that the
US-led «regime change» plot against Syria is
facing defeat at the hands of the Syrian
army bolstered by Russia, Iran and
Hezbollah. The battle for Aleppo is the last
stand for the foreign-backed proxy army of
terror gangs, which were unleashed on Syria
in March 2011 for the purpose of waging
covert war for regime change.
The US-led criminal
conspiracy against Syria is failing, largely
due to Russia’s intervention a year ago this
month. In 12 months, the tide of war has
been turned in favor of the Syrian state’s
victory against the foreign-backed
insurgency.
Given the grim prognosis for
the regime-change conspirators, Turkey and
the US appear prepared now to ratchet up
direct military intervention. In short, they
are moving to fully-fledged war on Syria.
Erdogan seems to be using the
failed coup in
his country in mid-July as added leverage on
Washington. Reeling from Turkish accusations
that the US was somehow complicit in aiding
the coup attempt (probably overblown),
Washington seems keener to accommodate
Erdogan’s demands over Syria.
During negotiations with
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at
the UN this week, US Secretary of State John
Kerry was talking the language of Erdogan
by calling for
no fly zones around Aleppo as a condition
for restoring a shattered ceasefire.
Erdogan’s Turkey has always
been the most belligerent protagonist among
the US-led gang of state terror-sponsors.
After the failed coup, Erdogan appeared to
abandon the secret war agenda towards his
southern neighbor. The Turkish president
went on a charm offensive towards Russia and
Iran, the main allies of Syria. He even
muted earlier bellicose demands for regime
change against Assad. That apparent
conciliatory attitude was short-lived
though. Maybe it was a foil to catch Russia
and Iran off guard when Erdogan ordered his
tanks to roll over the Syrian border. It
seems so.
As the rhetorical smoke and
mirrors clear away, what should be evident
is that Turkey and the US are openly at war
with Syria. That puts in proper context the massacre of
Syrian troops at Deir ez-Zor last weekend by
US warplanes. American claims of it being an
«accident» are as ridiculous as other
tenuous American claims of «fighting
terrorism».
If the analysis presented
here is correct, then the startling
conclusion is that a world war is underway,
with Russia and the US being pitted against
each other.
And if we are honest, we
would have to admit that that war has been
coming for a long time, a war that
Washington bears responsibility for.
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