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
Pentagon Video Warns of “Unavoidable”
Dystopian Future for World’s Biggest Cities
By Nick Turse
October 14, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Intercept"
-
The
year is 2030. Forget about the flying cars,
robot maids, and moving sidewalks we were
promised. They’re not happening. But that
doesn’t mean the future is a total unknown.
According to a startling Pentagon video
obtained by The Intercept, the future of
global cities will be an amalgam of the
settings of “Escape
from New York” and “Robocop”
— with dashes of the “Warriors”
and “Divergent”
thrown in. It will be a world of
Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes —
brutal and anarchic supercities filled with
gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive
underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands
of malicious hackers.
At
least that’s the scenario outlined in
Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging
Complexity,” a five-minute video that has
been used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special
Operations University. All that stands
between the coming chaos and the good people
of Lagos and Dhaka (or maybe even New York
City) is the U.S. Army, according to the
video, which The Intercept obtained via the
Freedom of Information Act.
The
video is nothing if not an instant dystopian
classic: melancholy music, an ominous
voiceover, and cascading images of sprawling
slums and urban conflict. “Megacities are
complex systems where people and structures
are compressed together in ways that defy
both our understanding of city planning and
military doctrine,” says a disembodied
voice. “These are the future breeding
grounds, incubators, and launching pads for
adversaries and hybrid threats.”
The
video was used as part of an “Advanced
Special Operations Combating Terrorism”
course offered at JSOU earlier this year,
for a lesson on “The Emerging Terrorism
Threat.” JSOU is operated by U.S. Special
Operations Command, the umbrella
organization for America’s most elite
troops. JSOU describes itself as geared
toward preparing special operations forces
“to shape the future strategic environment
by providing specialized joint professional
military education, developing SOF specific
undergraduate and graduate level academic
programs and by fostering special operations
research.”
Megacities are, by definition, urban areas
with a population of 10 million or more, and
they have been a recent source of worry and
research for the U.S. military. A 2014 Army
report, titled “Megacities and the United
States Army,” warned that “the Army is
currently unprepared. Although the Army has
a long history of urban fighting, it has
never dealt with an environment so complex
and beyond the scope of its resources.” A
separate Army study published this year
bemoans the fact that the “U.S. Army is
incapable of operating within the megacity.”
These fears are reflected in the hyperbolic
“Megacities” video.
As
the film unfolds, we’re bombarded with an
apocalyptic list of ills endemic to this new
urban environment: “criminal networks,”
“substandard infrastructure,” “religious and
ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,”
“open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” and
a “growing mass of unemployed.” The list, as
long as it is grim, accompanies photos of
garbage-choked streets, masked rock
throwers, and riot cops battling protesters
in the developing world. “Growth will
magnify the increasing separation between
rich and poor,” the narrator warns as the
scene shifts to New York City. Looking down
from a high vantage point on Third Avenue,
we’re left to ponder if the Army will one
day find itself defending the lunchtime
crowd dining on $57
“NY Cut Sirloin” steaks at (the plainly
visible) Smith and Wollensky.
Lacking opening and closing credits, the
provenance of “Megacities” was initially
unclear, with SOCOM claiming the video was
produced by JSOU, before indicating it was
actually created by the Army. “It was made
for an internal military audience to
illuminate the challenges of operating in
megacity environments,” Army spokesperson
William Layer told The Intercept in an
email. “The video was privately produced
pro-bono in spring of 2014 based on
‘Megacities and the United States Army.’…
The producer of the film wishes to remain
anonymous.”
According to the video, tomorrow’s vast
urban jungles will be replete with
“subterranean labyrinths” governed by their
“own social code and rule of law.” They’ll
also enable a proliferation of “digital
domains” that facilitate “sophisticated
illicit economies and decentralized
syndicates of crime to give adversaries
global reach at an unprecedented level.” If
the photo montage in the video is to be
believed, hackers will use outdoor
electrical outlets to do grave digital
damage, such as donning Guy Fawkes masks and
filming segments of “Anonymous
News.” This, we’re told, will somehow
“add to the complexities of human targeting
as a proportionally smaller number of
adversaries intermingle with the larger and
increasing number of citizens.”
“Megacities” posits that despite the lessons
learned from the ur-urban battle at
Aachen, Germany, in 1944, and the
city-busting in
Hue, South Vietnam, in 1968, the U.S.
military is fundamentally ill-equipped for
future battles in Lagos or Dhaka.
“Even our counterinsurgency doctrine, honed
in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of
Afghanistan, is inadequate to address the
sheer scale of population in the future
urban reality,” the film notes, as if the
results of two futile forever wars might
possibly hold the keys to future success.
“We are facing environments that the masters
of war never foresaw,” warns the narrator.
“We are facing a threat that requires us to
redefine doctrine and the force in radically
new and different ways.”
Mike Davis, author of “Planet of Slums” and
“Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car
Bomb,” was not impressed by the video.
“This is a fantasy, the idea that there is a
special military science of megacities,” he
said. “It’s simply not the case. … They seem
to envision large cities with slum
peripheries governed by antagonistic gangs,
militias, or guerrilla movements that you
can somehow fight using special ops methods.
In truth, that’s pretty far-fetched. … You
only have to watch ‘Black Hawk Down’ and
scale that up to the kind of problems you
would have if you were in Karachi, for
example. You can do special ops on a
small-scale basis, but it’s absurd to
imagine it being effective as any kind of
strategy for control of a megacity.”
The
U.S. military appears unlikely to heed
Davis’s advice, however.
“This is the world of our future,” warns the
narrator of “Megacities.” “It is one we are
not prepared to effectively operate within
and it is unavoidable. The threat is clear.
Our direction remains to be defined. The
future is urban.”
Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The
Intercept, reporting on national security
and foreign policy. |
