Biden Must Choose between a Ceasefire in Gaza and a Regional War

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 25th, 2024

Houthi-affiliated Yemeni coastguard patrols the Red Sea, flying Palestinian and Yemeni flags. [Credit: AFP]

In the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.

In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.

We are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.

A near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children.

Israel has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”

People throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.

In response,  the Biden administration, without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international coalition.”

President Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces.

Yemenis naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.

The Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.

The United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

On January 20, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Iran has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.

The targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.

Iran launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.

At the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”

After its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.

Since then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground.

In Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens.

 Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance.

Biden can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. 

Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Toward the Abyss

United States’ fatal relationship with Israel

by Dan Lieberman / January 24th, 2024

One word characterizes United States foreign policy – counterproductive.

Major U.S. foreign policy decisions after World War II — Vietnam War, Lebanon intrusion, Somalia incursion, Afghan/Soviet War, Afghan occupation, Iraq War, support for Shah of Iran, and Libyan Wars — have been counterproductive, not resolving situations and eventually harming the American people. The one-sided relationship the United States has with Israel is another counterproductive policy that is harmful to the American public

Persistent attention to Israel and its dubious position in the world may seem overkill, except this attention is one of the most important, mortally affecting the U.S. public. Until a complete report of fatal relations with Israel is placed on the desks of U.S. congresspersons and they act positively upon the contents, attention to the issue is incomplete and peril continues. Surveying U.S. policies that favored Israel collects a horrendous list of American fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against fortress America.

Two questions. How have the expensive arrangements, Velcro attachments, and highly supportive measures for Israel benefitted the United States? What has Israel done for Americans, not for American politicians, but for those who vote them into office? A convenient means for obtaining the answer is to have a leading “think tank” in the United States supply the information. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which “seeks to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East and to promote the policies that secure them” has a 2012 article on the topic, “Friends with Benefits: Why the U.S.-Israeli Alliance Is Good for America,” by Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, Nov 7, 2012, and is a likely source. Some of its major recommendations:

U.S.-Israeli security cooperation dates back to heights of the Cold War, when the Jewish state came to be seen in Washington as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East and a counter to Arab nationalism….Israel remains a counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism. It has prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region by thwarting Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs.

(1) The reason the Soviet Union acquired influence in the Middle East was Washington’s refusal to sell arms to the Arab nations, while “indirectly supplying weapons to Israel via West Germany, under the terms of a 1960 secret agreement to supply Israel with $80 million worth of armaments.“ Less secret deliveries of MIM-23 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in 1962 and M48 Patton tanks in 1965 told the Arab nations they could not collaborate with a government that armed their principal adversary and they should seek military assistance elsewhere.
(2) Arab nationalism has developed, and developed, and developed; so, how did Israel counter Arab nationalism? Did Israel stimulate Arab nationalism?
(3) What has Israel done to protect others as a “counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism?” The answer is nothing. Radical forces, political Islam, and violent extremism emerged immediately after Israel’s formation and grew, and grew, as Israel grew.
(4) Iraq and Syria sought nuclear weapons to counter Israel’s nuclear weapons developments, which the U.S. could have and should have prevented. No nukes in Israel; no nukes in Syria or Iraq. Why did the U.S., dedicated to preventing nuclear proliferation, allow Israel to obtain the atomic bomb?

Dozens of leading U.S. companies have set up technology incubators in Israel to take advantage of the country’s penchant for new ideas. In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region, having recently eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the top market there for American products.

(1) U.S. companies have subsidiaries worldwide and hire talent in all nations. What’s significant about Israel?
(2) “In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region…” Was that good? In 2022, U.S. exports to Israel were $20.0 billion and imports were $30.6 billion, adding $10.7 billion to Washington’s trade deficit, not a good economic statistic. Without Israel’s trade, the U.S. exported $83 billion in goods and services to Middle East nations and had a trade surplus of $5.3 billion, a better statistic.

U.S. companies’ substantial cooperation with Israel on information technology has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success. At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year. If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli  researchers.

These bites of public relations win the all-time Pinocchio award. Is The Washington Institute a legitimate “think tank” or a covert lobby?

(1)    “Israel has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success.” Next, we’ll hear that Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Whitney.
(2)    “At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year.” Intel has 131,000 employees in 65 countries — 11,000 in Israel, 12,000 in China, and approximately 7,500 employees at its 360-acre Leixlip campus in Ireland. The company develops the processors, not the country or specific engineers; it can develop the same processors anywhere in the world and has capably developed its major microprocessors for 45 years in the good old United States of America.
(3)    “If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli researchers.” Another Pinocchio award. Let’s be more accurate: “If you’ve been scammed in a financial transaction, had your messages hacked, or had someone purchase an item with your PayPal account, thank Israeli researchers.”

In its one-sided presentation, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy does not show the U.S.-Israeli alliance is good for America. The Institute has not considered the other side, the harm that Israel has visited upon its most essential partner. Reality shows the U.S. government and its people have dealt with Israel in a suicidal manner and in a zero-sum game, where the U.S. is the “zero,” or actually minus, and Israel receives the sum of all the benefits.

Recognition of Israel

From its inception, Israel betrayed the United States and the U.S. betrayed its commitment to a just and peaceful post-WWII world. President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the new state, only 11 minutes after its declaration, did not consider its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah militias against civilian populations, and certified the exclusion of a Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked who represented the 400,000 indigenous Palestinians in the declared Israeli state that was almost equal in population to the 600,000 Jews, most of whom were recent immigrants and not decidedly permanent.

Suez Canal War

Several years later Israel again betrayed its principal benefactor. While President Eisenhower attempted to broker a peace agreement between Egypt and France and Great Britain that would resolve the crisis emerging from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Israel held secret consultations with the British and French. Considering Nasser a threat to its security, desirous of incorporating the Sinai into its small nation, and with a plan to extend Israel to the Litani River in Lebanon, Israel devised a strategy with the two European powers that permitted its forces to invade Egypt and advance to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Pretending to protect the vital artery, Britain and France parachuted troops close to the canal. An enraged Eisenhower threatened all three nations with economic sanctions, which succeeded in having all three militaries withdraw their forces and relinquish control of the canal to Egypt.

Six-Day War

The six-day war brought the first American blood in the U.S. commitment to Israel. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel patrolling in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 17 nautical miles off the northern Sinai coast. The crew suffered thirty-four (34) killed and one hundred seventy-three (173) wounded. A declassified Top Secret report details the CIA version of the attack and exonerates Israel by claiming mistaken identity. This has not satisfied USS Liberty survivors, who felt Israeli pilots had many opportunities for proper identification and performed the attacks to prevent the ship from obtaining important intelligence information.

1973 Yom Kippur War

Next came the 1973 Yom Kippur War and an economic catastrophe for the American people. The U.S. maintained it needed Israel to offset Soviet influence in the Arab world. The combined Egyptian and Syrian attempt to retake lands lost in the 1967 war prompted the Nixon administration to use taxpayer money and supply massive shipments of weapons to the beleaguered Israel state. An excuse for providing the armaments shipments ─ Israel might use the Samson option and nuke its adversaries ─ is regarded as a manipulation to pacify opponents of the arms deliveries. The controversy is reported in Wikipedia.

Dayan raised the nuclear topic in a cabinet meeting, warning that the country was approaching a point of “last resort.” That night, Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton-of-TNT(84 TJ) tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles at Sdot Micha Airbase and F-4 Phantom II aircraft at Tel Nof Airbase. They would be used if absolutely necessary to prevent total defeat, but the preparation was done in an easily detectable way, likely as a signal to the United States. Kissinger learned of the nuclear alert on the morning of 9 October. That day, President Nixon ordered the commencement of Operation Nickel Grass, an American airlift to replace all of Israel’s material losses.

The U.S. contribution in enabling Israel to achieve a decisive victory resulted in an oil embargo that drove up oil prices, set Americans into a frantic rampage in trying to keep their cars on the road, a stagnant economy, and huge inflation, which the Federal Reserve stopped by raising interest rates to record highs and led to the 1982 recession.

Lebanon War

Despite a truce with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and wanting to rid Lebanon of the PLO and Syrian dominance in Lebanon affairs, Israel used a failed assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, as an excuse to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Where Israel went, U.S. diplomacy was sure to follow, and the U.S. joined a multinational peacekeeping force.

U.S. presence in Lebanon had detractors. On April 18, 1983, a car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in West Beirut, killing dozens of American foreign service workers and Lebanese civilians. On October 23, 1983,  after U.S. gunships in the Mediterranean shelled Syrian-backed Druze militias in support of the Christian government, a truck crashed through the front gates of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and exploded. Beirut barracks were destroyed and 241 marines and sailors were killed in the explosion. Soon after, President Reagan withdrew all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

International Terrorism

For several decades, al-Qaeda, the most prominent international terrorist organization, posed the most serious threat to America’s peace and stability. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda associates bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa. Twelve Americans were among the two hundred and twenty-four people who died in the terrorist actions. Three years later, the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. caused 2,750 deaths in New York and 184 at the Pentagon. Forty more Americans died when one of the hijacked planes crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. In addition, 400 police officers and firefighters perished in attempts to rescue people and extinguish the fires at the New York Trade Center.

Where did it all start? Why, and how did master terrorist Osama bin Laden develop his plans? There is no one factor, but, in several documents, bin Landen mentions Zionist control of Middle East lands and its oppression of an Arab population as significant factors. America’s support for Israel was one of bin Laden‘s principal arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the last sentences of a “Letter to America.”

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

During the 1990s, two other documents,“Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.

[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.

So now they come to annihilate … this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Afghanistan

The hunt for Osama bin Laden and efforts to annihilate the al-Qaeda organization led to the invasion of Afghanistan and a twenty-year clash between the U.S. and the Taliban. Result: 2,402 United States military deaths, 20,713 American service members wounded, and Taliban regaining control.

Iraq

It’s difficult and punishing to agree with Osama bin Laden, but he may be correct or have a perspective that needs more examination. Did Bush order the invasion of Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which any child could ascertain he could not possibly have, or did the Neocons, Israel’s voice in the administration, convince him to use Americans, their resources, and their money to rid the Middle East of Israel’s most formidable enemy? Was George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq another example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests? Other international terrorist operations emerged during the Iraq war and brought U.S. military personnel into more battles. Finally, in 2019, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the best-equipped and largest of all the terrorist factions, which caused havoc in Syria and Iraq, was defeated, and international terrorism moved out of the Middle East and into parts of Africa.

Iran

It is taken for granted that Iran and the United States are natural enemies, except the hostility may be manufactured and the factory might be in Tel Aviv. Iran has a government and internal problems that disturb the U.S., but so do many other nations, especially Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. maintains relations with these nations. Confrontations have occurred and are escalating and that demands toning down rather than ratcheting up, and more diplomatic confrontations to prevent the physical confrontations. Sanctions that harm Iran’s economy and people, assistance to Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists, and use of the powerful computer worm, Stuxnet, to cause mayhem in Iran’s nuclear program are counterproductive provocations. The U.S. has no specific problem with Iran that cannot be ameliorated. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and incursions into the Haram al-Sharif are problems that Iran has with Israel, and they cannot be ameliorated until the oppression stops. Cunningly, Israel has tied its problems with the Islamic State to U.S. problems with Iran and uses the U.S. to challenge Iran.

Other

·         In defiance of U.S. restrictions and the U.S. supplying Israel with advanced military equipment, Israeli companies sold weapons to China without a permit.

·         The U.S. gives Israel the sum of $3.1 B every year to purchase advanced weapons, from which Israel became a major exporter of military equipment and has been able to compete effectively with its patron.

·          Israeli governments have scoffed at all U.S. entreaties to halt settlement expansion, even insulting then Vice-President Joe Biden by authorizing settlement expansion one day before Biden arrived for talks.

·         Two Navy SEALs are missing and assumed dead after a maritime operation to intercept weapons from Iran heading to Houthi fighters. This episode is a result of the U.S. participating in Israel’s war against Gaza.

·         The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been attacking air bases housing U.S. and Iraqi troops in western Iraq “as a part of a broad resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as a response to Israel’s operations in Gaza.”

Toward the Abyss

The verdict is clear; the United States derives no benefit from its close relationship with Israel. Maybe, during the confusing Cold War, desk strategists determined the Soviets had an influence with Middle Eastern nations and thought it wise to have a place where the Pentagon would be welcome. Soviet influence disappeared after the 1979 Camp David Accords; Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement and Soviet diplomats and military vanished from the desert sands.

From September 11, 2001, to October 7, 2023, the U.S. continually suffered fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against Fortress America. Why did U.S. administrations pursue a “special relationship” with Israel and find themselves victims of the “war on terror” and involved in numerous wars? The current U.S. administration, which did not use its clout to prevent the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, has permitted Israel’s self-inflicted problems to bring the U.S. people into supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people, promoting the U.S. as the leading killer of indigenous peoples.

It took a long time to turn the murmurs of genocide in Palestine into a forceful expression that others would accept and fearlessly repeat. Murmurs of sabotage and treason by elected government officials are being heard, but they are legal terms for crimes, and, legally, U.S. legislators’ activities may not be considered in those categories. Treachery is a better word, gaining federal office by treacherous means — pandering to those that represent the interests of a foreign power to obtain campaign funds and press coverage — and using that office to satisfy the wants of the foreign power, despite the damage done to American constituencies. Past and present U.S. executives and legislators are guilty of treachery and that word should be shouted in the halls of Congress. Sound the alarm, get them out before it is too late, and elect into office those who represent the American people and not a foreign government. MAGA – MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN.

Aiding the genocide has put the U.S. in severe moral decline; escalating internal divisions are leading to social and political decline; and an economy that can no longer compete in the international markets, together with increasing resistance to use of the dollar, is leading to economic decline. The signs of civil strife have yet to appear and when they do they will push the U.S. off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss.

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

Paradise: A Dystopian Anti-Capitalist Gem

by Carlos L. Garrido / January 25th, 2024

​The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade.

The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you read that correctly, the life of the working poor (especially the large migrant populations – a phenomenon, as Immanuel Ness shows, integral to modern imperialism) is literally sold to the rich. Max is one of these salesmen. He is exceptional at his job, which is introduced to us as he tries to convince an 18-year-old migrant kid that he should sell him 15 years of his life for 700 thousand bucks. His family has been living in dire poverty since they arrived in the country, so this loss of life is presented as a gain. Now, Max tells them they will have enough money to live better in the years to come. Following this scene, Max is awarded employee of the month (Aeonian of the Year), showing us how capable he is at sucking the life of the poor to keep the rich alive. This award celebrates the 276 years he was able to collect.[1]

Aeon (the company’s name) comes from the Greek ὁ αἰών, which originally meant a lifespan of 100 years. With time, it came to be understood also as vital force (a sort of Élan vital a la Bergson), life, or being. This is, after all, what the company is taking from the working poor to give to the elite. As Max’s working class father-in-law notes, the rich are living longer as the poor (who are unable to pay for the service even with a lifetime of saving) die younger. Because of the enormity of the company, they have their own private militia (which they will use towards the end of the film) and a tremendous power over the state’s judicature. Everything they are doing is perfectly legal, as the father-in-law tells Max. (Interestingly, socialist China is the leading international force behind the attempt to ban these life-year transfers.)

The company pitches the selling of life as an opportunity, as a ‘winning of the lottery’. Their advertisement is filled with phrases like ‘choose your dreams,’ ‘when you give time, life recompenses you,’ ‘your time, your opportunity, your choice.’ The company’s president, Sophie, tells us of how great it would have been if some of the great poets, composers, scientists, etc. could have lived decades longer. Now with Aeon’s services they can!

How can we not think here of Stephan Jay Gould’s famous quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In the Paradise universe, how many geniuses are never able to actualize their potential because of the material conditions of their existence? How many of these, perhaps wealthier in their potential to serve humanity than the wealthy scientists and artists, are forced to give their life years to the rich to get by?

This dystopic society terrifies us because we know that if our society ever achieved such technological development, it would be used and legitimized in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t take much imagination for us to see the homologies already present, even though we lack the technology the movie is centered around.

It is already scientifically established that the wealthier live longer than the poor. Studies which have followed the lives of twins have shown how the richer sibling consistently lives significantly longer. The rich have the capacity to access healthier foods, better medical services, and to free themselves from the life-sucking stresses and traumas of not knowing how one will pay the bills at the end of the month (for the latter point, see the work of Gabriel and Daniel Mate in The Myth of Normal). An MIT study showed that “in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.” These statistics are only intensified when we take into account the inequalities of life expectancies between the rich of imperialist countries and the poor of imperialized countries.

The wealth that the capitalist vampires suck from the working poor is life itself. “Capital is dead labour,” as Marx tells us, “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Capitalist exploitation is already, like life-year selling in Aeon, the sucking of the Aeon (vital force) of the working class to accumulate capital for the elite. The inequality of life expectancy is merely a reflection of the relations of production and the exploitation at the root of capital accumulation. Each pole is dialectically interconnected; the rich get richer and live longer because the poor are poor and live less, destroying their bodies to accumulate capital for the wealthy.

Research has shown that we have developed the productive forces to the point of only needing to work around 3 hours a day (15 hours a week). The 3-hour workday prediction of John Meynard Keynes, only an aspirational ideal decades earlier for Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, has today become materially possible. The impediment to its realization is rooted in social, not material incapacity. It is the capitalist mode of social life, with profit as its sole goal and purpose, which prevents this freeing up of humanity’s time and potential. Its relations of production are a fetter on human life and culture, not just on the forces of production. Under a different mode of life, with a modus operandi for society other than capital accumulation, we could radically reduce the socially necessary labor time and increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time. As I’ve argued before, the absence of its actualization is “not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.” But until then (that is, until socialism can freely develop without pressures from the global imperialist system), we will continue to slavishly give more than a decade worth of work hours (90000 on average) working in alienating jobs that make our bosses richer while we stay poor and triply exploited. Is this not, like in Paradise, the giving up of decades of our life to making the rich not only richer, but capable of living significantly longer than us?

The way Aeon defends its practices are also reminiscent of apologists for wage slavery. It is, after all, presented as a ‘choice,’ something we ‘consent’ to. But as with wage slavery, what is the alternative? Can I expect anything other than death if, born into a working family, I decide not to commit my life to being exploited through wage slavery? How would I obtain the necessaries of life if I object to spending labor power in enriching someone else? Under capitalism this is impossible. The choice is between a slavish life of being exploited and death. As socialist thinkers (utopian and Marxists) have criticized from the start, this is really no choice at all. Perhaps there is a slight bit of choice in deciding who exploits us (for instance, Walmart or Amazon), but what does this amount to other than the capacity to pick our slave masters? Is this really what we want to herald as pillars of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’? Likewise, for those who sell their life-years to Aeon, the ‘choice’ is one between unlivable poverty and a fractioned lifespan with a better living standard. This is hardly a ‘choice’ at all.

Aeon also describes selling your life-years as akin to winning the lottery. Is this not, like we see today, a linguistic whitewashing which puts a pretty terminological veil upon a horrific practice? For instance, how we call civilian deaths ‘collateral damage,’ or US state department propped up terrorists ‘moderate rebels’. In relation to work, a similar romanticizing language is operative. Today the growing precarity of a gigifying workforce is pitched as ‘flexibility’. As I have argued before:

The last four decades of neoliberal capitalism has been a continuous disempowerment of workers through the cutting of benefits, stagnating of wages, and repression of unionization efforts. The gig economy takes this even further, through an employer’s complete removal of responsibility for workers. By categorizing workers as ‘independent contractors’, the ‘flexibility’ they continuously speak of is one that is only for them. Flexibility for the capitalist entails the removal of responsibilities for his workers, and subsequently, increasing profits for him. But for the worker – regardless of how much the capitalist’s propaganda says they are now ‘flexible’ and ‘free’ – flexibility means insecurity, less pay, and less benefits. Like in sex, flexibility for the worker here only means he can get screwed more efficiently.

Aeon’s immense resources also allow it to advance its practices, regardless of how unethical they might be, into the sphere of legality. Everything it is doing is perfectly legal. It is accepted under bourgeois ‘justice’, where justice is indistinguishable from the interests of the economically dominant class. Today readily available cancer drugs like Imbruvica are priced at 16 thousand dollars a month, something only the ultra-rich can afford. In the US, 45,000 people die a year because they do not have insurance. Any sane society (as opposed to a deeply irrational one centered on upholding the interests of capital accumulation) would consider the activities of the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex criminal. However, because the American state is the state of their class (i.e., the big monopoly capitalists), their profit-rooted class interests are consistently upheld to the detriment of the majority of Americans.

Aeon’s capture over their society’s judicature is simply a particular form of how the state and its institutions have always functioned. The state in general doesn’t exist. What exists is particular types of states, corresponding to various modes of life holding one or another class in an economically dominant position – a dominance the state is tasked with reproducing. “The modern state,” as Marx and Engels write in 1848, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When profitable technology like Aeon’s develops, the state’s judicature adapts it to the existing framework of bourgeois legality. As Marx and Engels write in 1846,

Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property.

Paradise, all in all, puts a mirror up to our capitalist societies. It shows us, through the medium of a new technological development, the barbarity of the logic operative in our mode of life. A barbarity, of course, which is historical, not eternal. It is something we can overcome when the class struggles for the conquest of political power by working people succeed.

First published in the Midwestern Marx Institute.

Note

[1] This review will focus on the more general social critiques operative in the movie. There are no ‘spoilers’ here, so feel free to read even if you intend to watch the movie afterwards.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). Read other articles by Carlos.

 

Mesmeric Weapons: South Africa’s Nuclear Program

by Binoy Kampmark / January 26th, 2024

The lessons of the South African nuclear weapons program are deep, profound and largely ignored by non-proliferation dogmatists.  They show that a regime, even one subject to sanctions and exiled to the diplomatic cold room, can still show aptitude and resourcefulness in creating such murderous weapons.  The white regime of Apartheid South Africa was marginalised, the globe’s notorious pariah, yet managed to chug along, developing a formidable arsenal with external aid and local resourcefulness.  Where there is a pathological will, there will be a way.

The South African example also shows that members of the nuclear club are an easily rattled lot.  The admission of new members is almost never allowed, tickets rarely granted.  If they do, they tend to be done in the breach of a perceived understanding, roguish challengers to the status quo of accepted nuclear-weapons states.

Such an understanding, for decades, has been one of the great confidence tricks of international relations, with the clubbable nuclear powers essentially promising the eventual dismantling of their nuclear arsenals on the proviso that non-nuclear weapon states resist the urge of acquiring them.  The result: club members retain their hideous arsenals, modernise and refurbish them with avid seriousness, leaving concerned non-club members either unilaterally defy the status quo (North Korea) or flirt with the prospect of doing so (Iran).

The parallels between South Africa and North Korea are disturbingly and relevantly cogent.  They also yield other lessons.  For example, if unpopular on the international stage or caught in the crosshairs of a dispute, never claim to have no weapons.  If anything, claim to have more, not fewer.  Keep such matters close to the chest.

On August 6, 1977, US President Jimmy Carter received a message from Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev.  “According to information received, the Union of South Africa (USA) is completing work on the creation of a nuclear weapon and the carrying out of the first experimental nuclear test.”  To permit the apartheid state to acquire such weapons would “sharply aggravate the situation on the African continent and, as a whole, would increase the danger of the use of nuclear weapons.”  The policy of nuclear non-proliferation, he warned, would be imperilled, necessitating “energetic efforts toward the goals of preventing the emergence of new nuclear states and barring the proliferation of nuclear danger.”

On August 18 that same year, an interagency study coordinated by representatives of the US intelligence community considered the policy considerations of a South Africa nuclear test, suggesting that “domestic political concerns would argue in favor of testing; and that these concerns weigh more heavily than foreign policy considerations in a decision whether or not to test”.  That said, there was “no over-riding pressure” on the country’s leadership to test a weapon with any sense of urgency.  A more “flexible approach” was being countenanced.

This was not intended to give the non-proliferation sorts any cheer.  “While we thus ascribe some flexibility, or ‘give,’ to the South African position regarding the timing of a test, we do not see any circumstances which would lead to a termination of their long-standing program to develop a nuclear weapon.”  There was “no credible threat” posed by the West to discourage Pretoria from pursuing a test; indeed, they might have the opposite effect.

Brezinski, in a memorandum to Carter, advises that Washington should “get as much information about what the South Africans are really doing, as soon as possible, and before the Lagos Conference where this will be a key issue.”  Doing so would involve “a demand for an on-site inspection of the Kalahari site,” and carried out preferably as a joint US-French effort, and if not, unilaterally by the US.  “We will not however wait for the French.  It was judged useless to try to get IAEA participation.”  Such views reveal snatches of Brezinski’s prickly disposition towards international bodies, preferring, as other national security advisors before and after him have, a freer hand for US power.  Such agencies, when required, could be sneered at.

To show that he was also alert to the ceremonial deceptions that accompany diplomacy, Carter scrawled on the same document, “Zbig – what we want is: no test – If they have to lie about what their plans were, let them do so – Let them save face.”  The testing, and the lying, duly followed.

Another aspect of the South African nuclear weapons program was its near perfect conditions of secrecy – at least when it came to knowledge among members of the US intelligence community.  Throughout the phases of weapons development, there remained a persistent ignorance about how advanced the program was.  Pretoria was also insistent in not joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would have brought them into an international regulatory orbit.  Staying outside the NPT regime meant that the program could also flourish without harassment.

Through the 1980s, the apartheid state faced something of a paradox.  Domestically, its political-social system was proving increasingly unsustainable.  Internationally, Pretoria found Carter’s successor far more accommodating.  This was all part of President Ronald Reagan’s notion of “constructive engagement,” another term for calculated hypocrisy.  It was a hypocrisy that enabled smuggling to thrive, with outside companies and entities keen to make a buck with the apartheid regime.  But as the nuclear enterprise thrived, the political system was ailing.

In 1993, South Africa’s last apartheid President F.W. De Klerk announced that all six operational nuclear weapons had been dismantled.  This reassured Western intelligence officials that a country controlled by the revolutionary African National Congress would never benefit.  A nuclear-armed Apartheid South Africa, officially condemned for its racialist regime, retained often clandestine collaborative ties with the United States, Israel and a number of European states, including West Germany.  But a South African nuclear state run by a black administration was simply too horrendous a notion, an intolerable aberration to the club.  Imagine, for instance, the possibility, as the London Sunday Times (August 15, 1993) put it, of South Africa becoming a supplier of enriched uranium “either to Libya, Iran, or the Palestine Liberation Organization, all of which gave the movement support during the years in exile.”

The scenario is certainly worth imagining.  Libya would not have been attacked in 2011 under the feeble, fraudulent pretence of humanitarian intervention, leaving the rump state that it is today.  A terrified Israel, having ironically aided Pretoria’s own nuclear efforts (it takes one apartheid state to know another), would have been kept in check and compelled to make concessions as never before to the Palestinians.  Adding Iran to the mix would have fed the calculus of terror.

As things transpired, a small group of engineers and scientists who had links with the program, rather than any enterprising ANC official, did moonlight on the proliferation stage.  They included Gotthard Lerch, Gerhard Wisser, Daniel Geiges and Johan Meyer.  Between the mid-1980s and 2004, the group supplied centrifuge equipment to Pakistan, Libya, India, and, it is suggested, Iran and North Korea.

Subsequent studies have seen South African denuclearisation as a miracle, an exemplar of good, humane conscience.  “The case of South Africa shows that nuclear disarmament is possible even after a country has built nuclear weapons,” write David Albright and Andrea Stricker in their 2016 study on the program.  “Its extensive cooperation allowed a rigorous verification of denuclearization by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which were aided and supplemented by nations with a special stake in ensuring that all of South Africa’s weapons were dismantled and the highly enriched nuclear uranium accounted for.”  But other lessons of the project are equally significant: Why acquire these horrific yet mesmeric weapons in the first place, and under what conditions?

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Brazil Offers $1.3 Billion in Subsidies for Shipbuilding Sector

ALL CAPITALI$M IS $TATE CAPITALI$M

File image courtesy Wilson Sons

PUBLISHED JAN 25, 2024 11:22 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

In line with Brazil’s pledge to restore its offshore shipbuilding industry, the state-backed Merchant Marine Fund (MMF) has approved $1.3 billion to support local shipyards in delivering new orders and other waterways infrastructure. During this funding round, priority will be on construction of Offshore Support Vessels (OSVs), according to Brazil’s national syndicate for shipyards Sinaval

The largest proportion of the funding around $930 million will be set apart for newbuilds and vessel repair projects. Of this amount, Wilson Sons Shipyard in Guarujá will get the highest share of $853 million, aimed at supporting construction of 10 Platform Supply Vessels (PSV) for CMN Offshore Brasil. 

Another $116 million will be given to Detroit Brasil Shipyard for construction of two multipurpose PSVs, for Starnav Maritime Services, a sister company of the same yard.

An additional $34 million will also be allocated to Wilson Sons to build three Azimuth Stern Drive (ASD) tugboats, with FIFI-1 Fire Fighting System. Marlin Servicos Ambientais will get $18 million for construction of another 12 tugboats.

The MMF also approved more than $183 million for upgrades and maintenance of vessels at major Brazilian yards.

On the campaign trail almost two years ago, Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva promised he would “reactivate the oil and gas industry” and "resume shipbuilding in the country” for job creation.

The state-owned oil giant Petrobras will help revitalize shipbuilding by awarding more contracts to local companies, mainly to dismantle old oil platforms and build OSVs. Last year, Transpetro - Petrobras’ oil transportation company - launched a program for its fleet renewal, which will see the company order 25 new vessels. The company added that its goal is to have most of the vessels be built in Brazil.

Since 2020 the Directing Council of the Merchant Marine Fund (CDFMM) has significantly increased shipbuilding subsidies. The priority of the funding has been to boost the country’s OSVs fleet.

 

Maersk Christens its First 16,000 TEU Methanol-Powered Container Ship

Image courtesy A.P. Moller-Maersk

PUBLISHED JAN 25, 2024 11:08 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

Maersk Line has christened its first 16,000-TEU dual-fuel methanol container ship, and it will be known as the Ane Maersk. 

The vessel is named after Ane Maersk Mc-Kinney Uggla, chair of A.P. Moller Holding and the A.P. Moller Foundation, the controlling shareholder in A.P. Moller Maersk. Until 2022 she was vice-chair of A.P. Moller Maersk, but has passed her responsibilities at the firm to her son Robert, the current chairman. 

The new class of ships represents a new direction for Maersk, and a bold one. Ane Maersk is the world's second methanol-fueled boxship, after the smaller Laura Maersk, which was delivered last year. The larger vessel class has an unusual design for a boxship of this size, with a narrow deckhouse placed far forward and a funnel on the port quarter, maximizing deck space.
 
?Ane Maersk will deploy next month on the AE7 service string from Asia to Europe. The ship can run on either methanol or bunker fuel as needed, and Maersk said that she will begin her voyage on a "green" methanol fuel (meeting Maersk's specification for "green"). 

Maersk said that it continues its work to source supplies of low-carbon methanol for 2024-25; the supply chain for this fuel does not yet exist at scale, and Maersk is building it from the ground up with in-house clean fuel investments and partnerships. It will need fuel for 17 more "methanol-enabled" vessels of Ane Maersk's size.

"[Ane Maersk] is a visual and operational proof of our commitment to a more sustainable industry. With Ane Mærsk and her sister vessels we are expanding our offer to the growing number of businesses aiming to reduce emissions from their supply chains,” says Vincent Clerc, Chief Executive Officer of A.P. Moller-Maersk.

Maersk has inspired other carriers to invest in methanol-capable or methanol-ready tonnage. Last year, methanol was the most-ordered option for dual-fuel propulsion, exceeding LNG, according to DNV. 

 

Red Sea Security Crisis Affects a Widening Swath of the Global Economy

Bad for business: a Houthi missile exit hole in the boot top of the bulker Zografia (Suez Canal Authority)

PUBLISHED JAN 25, 2024 10:04 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

Persistent Houthi missile attacks in the Red Sea are affecting a widening spectrum of maritime commerce, spreading beyond liner shipping to include the wet bulk, dry bulk, car carrier and LNG trades. The Iranian-backed attacks are beginning to impose real costs on Western economies, like elevated prices for LNG in Europe. 

"The Houthis’ actions in the Red Sea are sending reverberations across the global economy, and are felt in almost every facet of our lives," said U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro at a forum in London on Thursday. 

Container ships continue to eschew the Red Sea/Suez route in favor of the far longer circuit around the Cape of Good Hope. According to digital forwarder Flexport, more than 500 boxships have used a different route around Africa since the Houthis began launching attacks. 

The disruption means skipped calls for big Mideast ports, and at least one full service string cancellation. THE Alliance, comprised of ONE, Hapag-Lloyd, Yang Ming and HMM, has announced the suspension of its dedicated Asia-Red Sea service. This rotation connected China and Southeast Asia with Jeddah, Aqaba and Sokhna - but no longer. 

Customers in Europe and the U.S. East Coast will also be feeling the pinch. The diversions around the Cape of Good Hope are adding 10 days or more to boxship voyage times, soaking up unused ship capacity and driving up charter rates for idle ships. The tightened market affects shippers: according to Freightos, Asia-Europe box rates have nearly tripled since early December.

Ocean carriers may have been the first and most visible operators to quit the Red Sea, but the security risk is beginning to trickle down to other sectors. On Monday, there wasn't a single car carrier in the Red Sea, Gram Car Carriers chairman Ivar Myklebust said at a London conference this week. 

Bulkers are also affected, and at least two - the Zografia and Genco Picardy - have actually been hit. Mining giant BHP reports that some of its charter vessel operators do not want to use the Red Sea route anymore because of this security risk. Most of its east-west volume already goes by the Cape route, so this only has an effect at the margins, but a BHP executive noted that about seven percent of global dry bulk traffic passes through Suez. 

LNG carriers are also shying away from the Red Sea, including the vessels used by top-three exporter QatarEnergy. Europe sources about 13 percent of its LNG supply through the Red Sea/Suez Canal, much of it from Qatar. The diversion of these ships around Africa has the potential to affect the price of LNG in Europe in the long run, according to Rystad, depending on EU demand for gas. 

Tanker operators are also looking for the exits in increasing numbers - even for cargoes associated with Russia. According to energy intelligence firm Vortexa, three Aframax tankers carrying Russian fuel oil to Asia have recently reversed course in the Med and diverted away from the Suez Canal, headed for Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope instead. Russia's foreign policy views on the Israel-Hamas conflict are broadly aligned with Houthi political objectives, and this is a rare instance of Russian-chartered ships avoiding the security risk in the Red Sea. 

China, which also has overlapping policy positions with the Houthis, is apparently growing concerned with the disruption. Reuters reports that China is pressuring Iran to bring its Houthi proxy forces to heel and cease attacking commerce, or risk losing Chinese investment. Iran is widely believed to supply the missile and drone technology that Houthi forces use for the attacks, as well as the targeting intelligence and technical guidance required, and the White House has openly called for China to intercede with Tehran. Chinese policymakers have an interest in reestablishing Red Sea security because of the effects on trade, a mainstay of the slowing Chinese economy. 

 

Australia's Disappearing Surface Combatant Fleet

File image courtesy Australian Ministry of Defence

PUBLISHED JAN 21, 2024 11:16 AM BY THE STRATEGIST

 

As Australia awarded itself an ill-thought-out peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, the impact fell hardest on the Navy’s surface combatant fleet. Arguably no element was thought through more thoroughly for the 1987 defence white paper than the fleet. Having decided not to acquire an aircraft carrier, the surface combatants were recognized as central to our maritime defense.

The white paper called for a force of three guided missile destroyers (DDGs) and six guided missile frigates (FFGs). With them, though still to be selected, were eight Anzac class frigates, which entered service between 1994 and 2005.

That made a force of 17 surface combatants.

This was not an ad hoc decision. It was a calculation of the force needed to work in the various points of entry through the archipelago to Australia’s north. Studies suggested we needed 20 ships but there was not the money. It was hoped New Zealand would acquire four frigates and that might fill the gap. Critically, as the white paper mentioned repeatedly, the whole force structure was not Cold War related. It was about the character of our region in the medium term. The paper argued that we should relieve the US of the burden of interposing its own forces in the defence of our approaches. Our maritime defense was central to that self-reliance.

Of the 17 vessels planned for those chokepoints, the subsequent 30 years saw the three DDGs and then the six FFGs retired. The Navy’s three Hobart class air warfare destroyers (AWDs) were to replace the three DDGs. Instead, the three AWDs replace the six FFGs as well, nine ships in all. If we built six more AWDs, experience and efficiencies would make them relatively cheap, and our force would look quite formidable. Some could be optimised for anti-submarine warfare which would mean that the current defence minister, who bears no responsibility for any of this, would not be faced with his most troubling decision, the future of the Hunter Class frigate program.

The previous government ended our 30-year Gulf and Red Sea commitment, removing the challenges of maintaining and crewing the Anzacs on their long patrol. During the Iraq war, HMAS Anzac became the first RAN ship to fire its gun in anger since Vietnam as it supported the British landing on the Al Faw Peninsula.

The Australian has reported that consideration is being given to withdrawing HMAS Anzac and two of its sisters from the order of battle. This would reducing costs and help relieve chronic crew shortages for the remainder of the fleet. Instead of 17 ships, we would have eight. In the current effort to keep the maritime highway through the Red Sea open in the face of attacks by Houthi missiles and drones any of these ships could be deployed but the mission is more difficult than the previous tasks. The Anzacs could protect themselves but would find it difficult to protect others. The Navy’s three AWDs, able to integrate seamlessly with US systems, would be as effective as any other of its type there. The government has made clear that its decision to commit support personnel rather than a ship is based on its consideration of what must now be our priorities.

This clearly does not trouble the US in any major way as it was pleased to announce Australia as part of the coalition force.

What has gone wrong over 30 years? Clearly reduction of financial resources stands at the top. It suggests that commitment to self-reliance was skin deep. We took a post-Cold War peace dividend like all our allies. In our case it was not justified, at least against the 1987 strategic underpinning of our defense.

The world in the early 1990s looked full of hope. China was viewed in benign terms with great expectations of a constructive contribution to the global economy. Defense planners are supposed to be bleak, but we missed the most important strategic development of the 1990s. That was the agreement between China and the Soviet Union, and then Russia, to delimit their boundary conflict that in 1969 saw a battle between them on the Ussuri River in which 30,000 died. It has been claimed that President Nixon was asked by the USSR if the US would mind it using nuclear weapons. The US did mind. That agreement shifted the Chinese focus on land and nuclear forces from its northeast to its southwest. China could now emerge as a serious maritime power.

A further factor that moved our focus on the surface fleet was the emergence of the Middle East in a way that took us away from our emphasis on defending the country and our approaches. Paradoxically for us, that was preceded by the major role Australia played in Timor’s independence. That strategic expeditionary task for our ground forces and the Navy saw attention focus on acquiring large amphibious ships.

The Middle East created situations engaging all our armed services, both logistic and combat elements including Afghanistan and two wars in Iraq, one which saw Saddam Hussein overthrown, the other the struggle against ISIS. More broadly, counter-terror after the 9/11 atrocities in the US, underpinned the priority the struggle was given.

Though these engagements were expensive, they were easily doable with a budget in the region of 1.5 to 1.8% of GDP which was nothing like the cost of nine surface combatants. Psychologically the highly praised activity of our serving personnel left a sense that we had what we needed and with a highly satisfied main ally.

An odd interlude in this was a decision to move away from equipping the Anzacs with a helicopter that had no ASW capability, the Sea Sprite. This was the product of an aborted effort to jointly build an offshore patrol vessel with Malaysia. The vessel could not carry the much more capable Seahawk Romeo. I remember a former chief of naval staff, the now late Admiral Michael Hudson, being furious as we continued to pursue the Sea Sprite. The whole point of the Anzacs was anti-submarine warfare in our approaches. Had we forgotten why we acquired them? That was rectified by the cancellation of the Sea Sprite and the introduction of the Romeos in 2008.

The Red Sea struggle has demonstrated that future wars might well require more capable warships to protect sea lanes from land-based threats. The USN is now focusing greater attention on numbers. Small, heavily armed ships and unmanned surface and underwater systems are being rapidly developed and we are interested.

The problem is, though defense spending is rising, the priorities are many. We have immediate problems. All the armed forces have expensive items on the table and severe personnel issues. We can’t afford any mistakes and we must not be trapped by the long term. We are acquiring the future capital ship—nuclear-powered attack submarines—but that is long term. Our ally is filling our gaps in the short term. We can’t afford a long-term solution in our surface fleet as well. Hopefully, as the government addresses our surface fleet needs, it will have that in mind.

Kim Beazley is a senior fellow at ASPI. He served as Australia’s defense minister from 1984 to 1990 and as ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2016. 

This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here. 

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

 

Two Killed at Pakistani Breakers as HK Convention Promises Improvements

Two people were killed working on the bulker which beached in Pakistan in December (NGO Shipbreaking)

PUBLISHED JAN 25, 2024 7:11 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

The death of two workers at a Pakistan shipbreaking yard last week is again being used as an opportunity to call attention to the need to enforce safety at the yards and reforms for the industry. The deaths come less than two months after Pakistan, a long-term holdout, finally accepted the Hong Kong Convention which calls for stricter safety standards in shipbreaking.

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform which has long advocated for improved safety reported the tragic accident at the Dewan Shipbreaking PVT lot in Gadani Pakistan. They are reporting that two workers were crushed by a heavy iron plate on January 16 during the dismantling operation on the bulk carrier Catherine Bright. The 77,800 dwt vessel built in 1998 had last been registered in Panama. It was sold to the intermediary Oman-based Maritime International Transport & Trading and arrived in Pakistan at the beginning of December.

Pakistan’s National Trade Union Federation the NGO reports has long raised concerns about the administration of the industry and government enforcement. The union is calling for an investigation of this latest accident. The union accuses authorities of negligence saying there continues to be a lack of compliance with occupational health and safety standards in the shipbreaking sector. According to the NTUF, the absence of safety measures at the Gadani beaching yards forces workers to carry out their duties under extremely dangerous conditions, which knowingly puts their lives at risk.

"For over two decades, we've persistently urged South Asian authorities to relocate the shipbreaking industry to designated areas with better facilities, ensuring worker safety and preventing pollution. Ignoring this urgent need risks more tragic loss of life. It's time authorities recognize that the profits gained by yard owners and shipping companies are made at the expense of both humans and coastal environments,” said Sara Rita da Costa, Project Officer for NGO Shipbreaking Platform.

Pakistan became the last nation to officially adopt the Hong Kong Convention in December 2023. They followed Bangladesh which formally adopted the rules governing ship recycling in June 2023, after Turkey and India. This means that all the major countries which have recycling operations, representing 95 percent of the tonnage sent for scrap, have adopted the convention which officially goes into force in late June 2025, 16 years after it was first presented.

The convention is designed to ensure greater safety in the process as well as attention to the environmental concerns. It places a greater responsibility on the ship owner and even the builder as well as the ship recycling facilities, flag States, port States, and recycling States, according to the IMO. Governments will be required to ensure that recycling facilities under their jurisdiction comply with the requirements of the convention, which includes a specific plan for each ship. 

It also requires safety standards and ships to carry on board an inventory of hazardous materials. The trade group BIMCO calculated that around 23,000 ships will need between 2025 and 2030 to develop an inventory. They reported that approximately 30,000 ships already have an inventory of hazardous materials in place.

The deaths last week again highlight the dangerous nature of the operations. However, industry leaders hailed the move to begin enforcing the convention in hopes that it will continue to improve the standards global for the shipbreaking business.