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
Aleppo The Worst Humanitarian Disaster Since
WWII? Not So Fast, Mr. Kerry
By John Wight
October 18, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"RT"-
The
propaganda offensive unleashed against
Russia by Washington and its allies has
moved beyond satire and entered the realm of
farce.
At
the conclusion of their most recent meeting in
London over the ongoing conflict in
Syria, specifically the operation being
carried out by Syrian government forces
and Russia in Aleppo, US Secretary of
State John Kerry spoke to the press in
words that will not be treated kindly in
the court of history.
“We are outraged by what is happening in
Aleppo, which is in year 2016, beginning
of the 21st century, horrendous step
back in time to a kind of barbarianism,
a use of force that is an insult to all
of the values that the United Nations
and most countries believe should guide
our actions,” Kerry said.
It
should be borne in mind that John Kerry
speaks for a country which since the
beginning of the 21st century has been
responsible for a military mission in
Afghanistan, where today the Taliban has
never been stronger and in which ISIS
now has a foothold, and for turning Iraq
and Libya into failed states, unleashing
an ocean of death, misery, human
suffering, and chaos in the process.
It is more than enough to expose the
moral high ground upon which the US
and its allies have occupied over
Syria as a dung heap of hypocrisy
and double standards.
As
for the barbarism against which John Kerry
declaims, it has engulfed Syria and its
people courtesy of the destabilization of
the region wrought by Washington during the
aforementioned wars and military
interventions, producing a refugee crisis of
staggering scale and triggering the
proliferation of terrorism in Syria,
throughout the wider region, and across the
world. Indeed it is interesting to note the
hypocrisy when Salafi-jihadists unleash
indiscriminate violence in Europe or the US
they are described as terrorists, but when
they do likewise in Syria they are described
as rebels.
John Kerry, it is clear, would prefer us to
start the clock in 2016 when it comes to the
current crisis and chaos in Syria. He wants
to wipe Washington’s slate clean of the
utter shambles and perfidy of its presence
in a region it has long viewed as a giant
chessboard, upon which its people are
regarded as nothing more than pawns in their
game. But do so and we insult the memory of
the countless men, women, and children who
have perished in the inferno begun by the US
and its international and regional proxies
in service not to human rights or democracy,
as they claim, but hegemony and domination.
In
his statement in London, John Kerry went on
to opine, “It's [Aleppo] a humanitarian
disaster that is the largest humanitarian
disaster since World War Two.”
The claim that the military operation to
liberate Aleppo from those responsible
for reducing it to a living hell for its
citizens is “the worst humanitarian
crisis since the Second World War” is
simply ludicrous. Here we need to remind
Mr. Kerry of the destruction of North
Korea in a US
bombing campaign so devastating that
not one building was left intact. Then
there is the destruction, decimation,
and disaster visited on the people of
Vietnam in a brutal imperialist war in
which US atrocities were a daily
occurrence - a war in which John Kerry
served but later denounced.
Perhaps the Secretary of State also forgot
about Cambodia, where after a mass bombing
campaign conducted against the country and
its people by the United States in the 1970s
the Khmer Rouge emerged to carry out their
project of Year Zero. There is also the claim that
the US and its UK ally provided covert
support for these fanatical killers and
torturers upon the liberation of Cambodia by
the Vietnamese in 1979 to contend with.
Space prohibits us from adding further
examples to this litany of US foreign policy
disasters and military operations since the
Second World War - the various coups, proxy
wars, and covert operations around the world
engaged in by Washington – but even without
those included it stands as a withering
indictment of John Kerry’s attempt to tar
Russia with the brush of war crimes.
It
is more than enough, however, to expose the
moral high ground upon which the US and its
allies have occupied over Syria as a dung
heap of hypocrisy and double standards.
The
only question that matters when it comes to
the conflict in Aleppo, and Syria in
general, is who is responsible for
prolonging it and who is serious when it
comes to ending it?
The
Syrian people, supported by Russia, are
engaged in a struggle for the survival of
their country as a secular non-sectarian
state in which minority communities that
have existed in al-Sham (the ancient name
for the Levant and Syria) for millennia are
not threatened with genocide and extinction.
At the point at Russia’s involvement in the
conflict began in 2015, the country was in
serious danger of being tipped over the
cliff.
Despite the inordinate courage and tenacity
of the Syrian Army and its allies,
resistance to the country’s invasion by
hordes of fanatical Islamist jihadists,
supported by US regional allies, was
beginning to crack. In fact it is no
exercise in hyperbole to state that Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, and other countries were
circling Syria like vultures over a wounded
animal, waiting to descend.
It
is worth remembering also that the presence
of Russian military forces in Syria is in
full accordance with international law – as
per Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN
Charter. Unlike the US, UK, and other
international actors in the conflict, Russia
joined the conflict at the request of the
country’s legitimate government.
Furthermore, it is a government that enjoys
the support of
a people who well understand the difference
between reform and ruin.
But
let us return to John Kerry, who concluded
his statement in London by saying, “And it
could stop tomorrow morning, tonight if
Russia and the Assad regime were to behave
according to any norm or any standard of
decency, but they've chosen not to. Instead
we see what can only be described as crimes
against humanity taking place on a daily
basis."
Here, again, the US Secretary of State is
guilty of dissembling and distortion. The
conflict to liberate Aleppo could end
tomorrow if the US placed serious pressure
on its regional allies to stop supporting
terrorism in Aleppo as well as in Syria as a
whole. It will end when Washington and
London stop the charade of maintaining there
exists an army of ‘moderate rebels’ in
Aleppo and across Syria, distinct in
ideology and method from ISIS, Nusra Front,
and Al-Qaeda. The Syrian people are way
beyond the stage of being able to afford to
make any distinction between moderate
head-chopping fanatics and
their extremist counterparts.
The
truth is that John Kerry and his British
counterpart Boris Johnson – whose call for
public protests to be staged outside the
Russian embassy in London recently was more
in tune with the legacy of Benito Mussolini
than his political inspiration Winston
Churchill - are engaged in a determined
effort to demonize Russia and Syria not in
order to see an end to the suffering of the
people of eastern Aleppo, as they assert,
but in response to a military operation that
moves ever closer to liberating them. |
