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 Outcry over Syria... Tears Followed By
NATO Bombs
By Finian Cunningham
September 29, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "SCF"
-
The crescendo of US-led
condemnations against Syria and Russia over
alleged humanitarian crimes in Syria grows
louder by the day. The eerie sense is that
this «outcry» is being orchestrated as a
prelude to a NATO-style intervention in
Syria.
Such a NATO maneuver would
follow the template for former Yugoslavia
and Libya, leading to greater civilian
deaths, territorial disintegration, a surge
in regional terrorism and more international
lawlessness by Western states.
The concerted, emotive
appeals over the past week – bordering on
hysteria – indicate a propaganda
campaign coordinated between Washington and
its Western allies, the mass media and the
US-led NATO military alliance.
It was US ambassador the
United Nations Samantha Power who led the
chorus of accusations against
Russia and its Syrian ally, using the
Security Council emergency meeting last
weekend to condemn «barbarism» of renewed
violence around the northern Syrian city of
Aleppo. Britain and France piled in with
more unsubstantiated condemnations of war
crimes, as did shameless UN officials, Ban
Ki-Moon, the secretary general, and Staffan
de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy to Syria.
Few people would countenance
war, but surely Syria has the sovereign
right to defend its nation from a
foreign-fueled war on its territory. In all
the lachrymose lecturing from the likes of
Samantha Power, the pertinent question of
who started this war in the first place gets
lost in rhetorical fog.
Days later, NATO civilian
chief Jens Stoltenberg issued a statement denouncing Russia
and Syria for «blatant violation of
international laws» in Aleppo, adding that
the military actions by both were «morally
totally unacceptable».
All the while, Western news
media outlets have run saturation coverage
of what they depict as a humanitarian hell
in Aleppo, the strategic Syrian city where
the final throes of the country’s nearly
six-year war seem to be playing out.
The New York Times published an
article with the gut-wrenching headline:
‘The Children of Aleppo, Syria, Trapped in a
Killing Zone’.
It goes on to say: «Among the
roughly 250,000 people trapped in the
insurgent redoubt of the divided northern
Syrian city are 100,000 children, the most
vulnerable victims of intensified bombings
by Syrian forces and their Russian allies.»
In a separate article, euronews.com reports:
‘Nowhere to hide’ – volunteer describes
conditions inside Aleppo’.
The implication in the
Western mass media is that Syrian and
Russian air forces are bombarding
indiscriminately across civilian districts
of the city. The same desperate tone and
bias is ubiquitous in all Western media
outlets.
However, if we ascertain the
sources for this saturation information, it
turns out to be a limited range of anonymous
«activists», or the Western-funded group
known as the White Helmets, which purports
to be a humanitarian response network, but
which in actual fact is integrated with
illegally armed insurgents, including the al
Qaeda terror organization Jabhat al Fatah al
Sham (al Nusra Front), as writer Rick
Sterling details.
Western TV news outlets are
routinely using video footage from the White
Helmets, supposedly taken in the aftermath
of air strikes on Aleppo. This is an
astounding abdication of any journalistic
ethics of independence and impartiality.
These same media outlets
rarely, if ever, carry reports from the
western side of Aleppo where a six-fold
greater population – 1.5 million – live in
government-held districts, compared with the
«rebel-held» eastern quarter.
As independent writer Vanessa
Beeley recently reported, some
600,000 people fled to the western side of
Aleppo from the al Nusra-dominant stronghold
on the eastern side. According to medics
quoted by Beeley, the majority of the
population in the eastern quarter are being
held hostage as human shields by the
insurgents, or as the Western governments
and media call them «moderate rebels» and
«activists». There are also credible witness
reports of terrorists shooting at people
fleeing from the east through humanitarian
corridors set up by the Syrian government.
In recent weeks, hundreds of
civilians in the western districts of Aleppo
have been killed from indiscriminate
shelling and sniping by militants from the
eastern side.
When do you ever hear or read
the Western media reporting on those crimes?
You don’t, because that would unravel the
propaganda narrative aimed at demonizing,
criminalizing and delegitimizing the Syrian
government and its Russia ally.
And a key leitmotif of the
official Western narrative is to create the
perception that innocent civilians in Aleppo
are being slaughtered by Syria and Russian
forces. Both Damascus and Moscow reject claims
that they are targeting civilian areas.
Moscow has vehemently refuted Western claims
that it is committing war crimes. Even the
normally jingoistic US outlet Radio Free
Europe quotes a
legal expert from Amnesty International as
saying that there is no evidence to indict
Russia of such crimes.
And because the
anti-government militants restrict access to
their stronghold, including for UN aid
agencies, it is hard to verify the claims
and footage coming out of there. Which
notwithstanding has not restrained Western
media from broadcasting the information
verbatim.
The Western mantra of
«humanitarian crisis» and «war crimes» has
the unmistakable connotation of contriving a
public acceptance of certain policy
objectives that Washington and its allies
are striving for. At the very least, one of
those objectives is to create a political
atmosphere whereby Syria and Russia are
obliged to comply with calls for no-fly
zones, as recently demanded by US Secretary
of State John Kerry. So far, Syria and
Russia have rebuffed any such initiative,
saying that it would give succor to the
illegally armed groups who are now
decisively in retreat.
Still, a more far-reaching
objective could be Washington and its allies
fostering a public mandate for military
intervention by the NATO alliance. The
outcry over «humanitarian suffering» in
eastern Aleppo is a repeat of the
«responsibility to protect» (R2P) ploy which
NATO invoked to previously intervene and
dismember former Yugoslavia in the late
1990s, and a decade later in Libya in 2011.
The US official inimitably
qualified for such a political objective is
Washington’s ambassador at the UN – Samantha
Power. Her recent diatribes against Russia
show a total disregard for diplomatic or
legal protocol. Suffused with
self-righteousness and selective
«humanitarian» concern, Power is evidently
leading a media campaign to mandate a NATO
force being deployed to Syria’s Aleppo in
order to «protect the children trapped in a
killing zone» as the New York Times
might put it.
Forty-six-year-old Power has
made her entire professional career out of
formulating the «R2P» doctrine that has in
the past well-served Washington’s
imperialist goals.
As a young reporter in the
1990s, Power wrote one-sided screeds about
ethnic cleansing and genocide in the
Balkans, which conveniently demonized
Serbia, culminating in the NATO bombing of
Belgrade in 1999 and the subsequent carve up
of Kosovo to become a NATO base. For this
service to imperial interests, she was
subsequently rewarded with a professorship
at Harvard University and a
Pulitzer-prize-winning book about genocide,
a book which eminent scholars like Edward
Herman have debunked as
a load of plagiarism and self-serving
historical distortions.
The fiery, Irish-born Power
was later promoted by President Barack Obama
as an advisor on his National Security
Council. It was in this position that she
pushed the policy of NATO bombing Libya in
2011 with a reprise of her «R2P» doctrine.
These NATO military assaults
facilitated by emotive appeals to
«humanitarian values» have since been shown
to be reckless violations of international
law amounting to foreign aggression. Earlier
this year, the late Serbian leader Slobodan
Milosevic was officially
exonerated over war crimes allegations,
charges that NATO had leveled to justify its
bombardment of his country. Also, earlier
this month a British parliamentary
committee denounced former
prime minister David Cameron for his
involvement in the NATO intervention in
Libya as being unfounded on claims that then
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was preparing
to slaughter residents in the city of
Benghazi.
But it was s0-called «liberal
hawks» like Samantha Power who were
instrumental in providing political and
moral cover for Washington and the NATO
military to conduct these illegal foreign
invasions and regime changes under the
pretext of protecting human rights and
civilian lives.
Obama assigned his useful
apparatchik Samantha Power to the United
Nations in August 2013, where she has proven
to be completely out of her depth in terms
of diplomatic finesse. She has infused her
position on the Security Council with
anti-Russian vitriol in the pursuit of
Washington’s hegemonic interests, regardless
of international law or objective historical
analysis.
The «humanitarian» propaganda
drumbeat over Aleppo belies the facts and
circumstances of Washington’s covert war for
regime change in Syria. A dirty war in which
it and its NATO allies have colluded with a
proxy army of terrorist gangs, as this
recent German media report by
Jurgen Todenhofer confirms.
Faced with a losing covert
war in Syria, through the defeat of its
terror proxy forces, it appears that
Washington is striving for a more robust
intervention in the guise of NATO military
deployment, perhaps as «peacekeepers»
overseeing a no-fly zone, as seen previously
in Libya with disastrous results.
Emoting about humanitarian
concerns is a well-worn prelude for NATO
barbarism on behalf of Washington’s
geopolitical interests. Crocodile tears
followed by bombs. And no better person to
carry out this subterfuge than UN ambassador
Samantha Power.
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