War with China

How Primed for War Is China?

by Dan Lieberman / February 20th, 2024

Don’t want to spoil your weekend, but the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has picked Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s article, How Primed for War Is China, as a top commentary. AEI states: “The likelihood of war with China may be the single-most important question in international affairs today.

FP knows how to start an article and capture attention ─ start with words that startle the audience.

If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be?

Not worried about war at all. I am concerned that FP and AEI circulations of fabrications may lead to China deciding it’s had enough of the trashing, cash in its treasury holdings that finance U.S. trade debt (already started), use reserves to purchase huge chunks of United States assets, diminish its hefty agricultural imports from Yankee farms, and enforce its ban of exports of rare earth extraction and separation technologies  (China produces 60 percent of the world’s rare earth materials and processes nearly 90 percent). In short, we should worry that by not cooperating with China, the Red Dragon may decide to no longer bother with Washington’s inanities and use its overwhelming industrial power, with which the U.S. cannot compete, to sink the U.S. economy.

Another question comes to mind. “What will a war with China resemble?”

Will the U.S. military load ships in Los Angeles with soldiers and ship them across the Pacific to land on the shores of China? Things have changed since May 1840, when the British fleet proceeded up the Pearl River estuary to Canton and occupied the city. I doubt another D-day landing will be possible.

Will the U.S. Air Force pound the Chinese mainland into submission? Will a nation, knowing that China will retaliate, permit the U.S. to launch aircraft from its soil? Hardly likely.

Will it be a nuclear war? Mutual mass destructions are not advisable.
Could be a cyber war, but who cares if computers get hurt?

To buttress its rash assumption, FP introduces an assortment of unproven and ambiguous statements, passed off as facts.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades.
China is abetting Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine and massing forces on the Sino-Indian border.
Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined.

By FP’s admission, which appears later in the article, it was about time China started building (not massing) its military forces. FP states that with “a pathetic air force and navy prior to the 2000s, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have amounted to a ‘million-man swim.’” China had a weak military and, with Washington rattling the saber, it was wise to strengthen armed might.

Notice that unlike the U.S., which is aiding and abetting in the genocide of the Palestinian people by assisting Israel, FP only accuses China of abetting Russia in brutalization. Score a big one for China. FP is confused. On December 20, 2022, Times (of London) scare headlined: Indian army (not Chinese) masses on Chinese border after soldiers clash. It is possible that Beijing sent 100 soldiers (mass number) to reinforce those who had fought the small skirmish with Indian troops.

The dishonorable manner in which “authoritative” commentators present their arguments bothers me They frame all reporting to suit agendas and satisfy their audiences. It shows in the sentence, “Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined,” making it seem that China is doing something unusual and must be doing it for nefarious reasons. The “objective” FT commentators omit significant details of their argument.

• Except for India, China has a population almost equal to all of the Asian nations that need a strong military force.
• China has a GDP almost equal to the GDP of all the Asian nations that need a strong military force. Besides,
• Unlike other Asian nations, China has a GDP that can afford a stronger military force.
• China borders 14 countries and already has had small wars with a few of them — Russia, India, and Vietnam — and friction with others in the area.
• Unlike other Asian nations, China faces constant U.S. threats.

The historical graphs on military buildup describe the “military buildup” differently.
Note: Watch the scales in the left graph, some from the right, others from the left.

• In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures have remained constant.
• In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures are the least of the surveyed nations.
• The U.S. already had a superior fighting force when China started its buildup and the U.S. is still spending three times that of China.

The sentence, “Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands,” intrigued me. Making a controversial statement without backup data is not credible. Apparently, FP does not have a demanding customer base. Nor is the statement true; the United States, the world’s foremost democracy has fought wars almost every year in its existence, and big ones. Two thriving democracies, Great Britain and France have been involved in great wars. Who and where are the personalist dictators involved in wars?

What reasons does China have for going to war? FP cites four factors.

These four factors—insecure borders, a competitive military balance, negative expectations, and dictatorship—help explain China’s historical use of force, and they have ominous implications today.

Insecure borders? Some frictions, but presently well contained. Who is going to war over a bunch of rocks in the ocean and fishing rights? The parties may hurl invectives, throw stones, or use water cannons, like teenagers at beach parties. No cannons with munitions, that’s for sure,

FP claims that because the military balance in Asia has shifted to China that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. FP does not realize what China realizes ─ it will also suffer losses in a war and its military balance is a defensive strategy.

The negative expectations mean that as “China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening — a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past.” Nations, revisionist and non-revisionist, and mostly the former, have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment. A “darkening economic outlook” — couched words ─ is far, far from a depression, not unusual for any country and certainly not for China, which has had almost uninterrupted growth for 40 years. Darkening economic growth for China is welcome growth for most nations.

“China turned into a personalist dictatorship (more dubious and couched words) is of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.” A previous paragraph contested this argument. Add to the refutation the observation that several American presidents have declared small wars without permission of Congress and large wars based on false information. Spanish-American War (sinking of the ship, The Maine), Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacked U.S. warships in Tonkin Bay Resolution), and Iraq War (Iraq had weapons of mass destruction) are a few examples.

When in doubt, bring in Taiwan, which FP does.

In short, the United States must wield a credible ability to defend Taiwan and, at the same time, offer a credible pledge that it aims to prevent either side from unilaterally changing the status quo.

My subjective opinion is that if Chinese troops slipped into Taiwan overnight and recaptured the province, the Taiwanese in the countryside would hardly notice. Urban dwellers may sense something different and wouldn’t be bothered — government officials would be Chinese, police would be Chinese, everyone would be speaking Mandarin, all signs and media would be in Mandarin, all foods would be Chinese, Taiwanese would see no change in their TV preferences, and Chinese would fly back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. One big difference ─ no American military advisors and no signs of Yankee go home.

FP concludes with an inspiring message.

A powerful but troubled China is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety the United States and its friends can muster to prevent a slide into war.

The sentence begs word changes.

A powerful but troubled America is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety China and its friends can muster to prevent America from pushing China into war.

The reason the revised sentence has more legs is that capitalist nations have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment — in efforts to regain markets and resources. Unable to overcome the competition, war has previously happened and can happen again.

I have a suspicion that the authors of the article own a factory that produces nuclear bomb shelters. Can anyone confirm?

Wars on Terrorism

United States, Israel, China, and Russia Counter-attack

by Dan Lieberman / February 19th, 2024

Domestic and international terrorism have caused havoc in several nations. Each nation exhibits a unique approach to combatting terrorism; each nation exhibits a unique outcome from its approach. Examining types, causes, approaches, and outcomes of wars on terrorism in four nations — United States, Israel, China, and Russia — discloses successful strategies, self-destructive strategies, and strategies that deceive the public and terrorize others with impunity. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are not always allied; terrorist actions are not always due to terrorists.

Depending on perspective, the word “terrorism” ─ the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government ─ can be falsely labeled and falsely applied. Those who exhaust peaceful protests against oppression and provocation lash out at their oppressor and inflict damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. Not understanding the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed have unfavorably skewed the responses and led to more terrorism.

United States

United States administrations exhibited a strange method for repelling terrorists — let them enter an area, establish themselves, become strong, and commit atrocities, and then attack them — the spider approach. Muhammad Atta and his eighteen partners freely entered the United States, studied how to go up and not come down, and did their dirty deeds.

After facing several terrorist situations during the 1990s, the September 11, 2001 bombings compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. The U.S. government used one strategy to respond to terrorism ─ brute force.

Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attack the U.S. breathes easier, no terrorism on its mainland, and the major terrorist organizations — al Qaeda and ISIS — decimated. From appearances, the U.S. applied an effective counter-terrorism strategy and contained terrorism. Not quite. U.S. strategy expanded terrorism and moved terrorism into parts of Africa. The reduction in terrorism came mainly from the efforts of other nations.

By blending its battles against terrorism with preservation of American global interests, the U.S. initially expanded terrorism. The battles to overcome terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former beginning and ending with undefined meaning and the latter having no relation to terrorism.

U.S. assistance to Pakistan intelligence during the Soviet/Afghan war indirectly supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden, financed his activities, and helped create the al-Qaeda network.

U.S. manufacture of terrorists continued during Clinton’s administration. Battles between U.S. and Somali forces weakened Somali leadership. From an imposed anarchy in Somalia, al-Shabaab eventually emerged. In 2023, the militant group continues its violent insurgency in Somalia.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in moving bin Laden from a grim and arduous perch in a rugged and isolated mountain to a comfortable villa in Pakistan, from where he was eventually captured and killed. Other than that accomplishment, the 20-year incursion into Taliban territory accomplished nothing positive — the Taliban returned to power and, thanks to the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, other terrorist groups operate within its boundaries. In August 2022, the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri residing in Kabul and killed him in a drone strike.

By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. After the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq from Pakistan and formed ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (AQI ).

AQI was responsible for its downfall. Sunni tribes revolted at al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and the “Iraqi surge,” with assistance from U.S. troops, inflicted heavy losses on the al-Qaeda organization. Stability returned to Iraq until the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the remnants of AQI, and took advantage of growing resistance to U.S. troops in Iraq and discontent with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Baghdadi formed a force that captured about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Contributed by Sémhur, Flappiefh – Own work from Near East topographic map-blank.svg by Sémhur ; data from the New York Times.

President Barack Obama and his administration share blame for the creation of ISIS, allowing its recruitment throughout the world, not preventing recruits from entering Syria, its rapid capture of territory, and expansion into a caliphate. Former President Donald Trump exaggerated the claim that his administration was the primary force in defeating ISIS. U.S. airpower, which killed too many civilians and was not always welcome, helped; other groups liberated the ISIS dominated areas.

·         Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mainly composed of Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, backed by U.S. airpower, liberated Raqqa.

·         Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian airpower, recaptured Aleppo.

·         Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen, and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes, drove ISIS from Mosul.

Amnesty international lists 1,600+ civilians dead from the war in Raqqa and between 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed in the battle for Mosul, mostly from U.S. air attacks. Foreign Policy estimates that “8,000 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in Mosul’s Old City. Include other parts of the city where the battle raged and the estimates of buildings damaged or destroyed are as high as 138,000.”

The irony of Trump’s Trumpism is his assassination of a person responsible for ISIS’ defeat, Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani. The U.S. contributed to ISIS’ initial successes by training an inept Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left the city to a small contingent of ISIS forces that equipped itself with captured weapons. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. The disasters energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force (PMF). With cooperation from Iran and leadership from Major General Qassim Soleimani, the PMF recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually played a role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Instead of receiving praise for his efforts, Major General Qassim Soleimani, who was never responsible for any terrorist activity, was eliminated as an arch-terrorist. Who committed the terrorism in his death? Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped out of the joint assassination plan at the last minute and left President Chump holding the bag.

NATO, with the U.S. providing air force and ballistic missile support, played the decisive role in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained Radical Islam and its terrorist activities. Militants from Libya flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq, and added to ISIS ranks. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM led the 2013 attack on a gas facility in southern Algeria; individuals trained in Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; and Boko Haram spread havoc throughout northern Nigeria.

Another defect in U.S. strategy ─ Osama bin Laden left no doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks.

During the 1990s, two 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

From Pakistan, through Egypt to North Africa and Nigeria, and South to Somalia and Kenya, al-Qaeda, Daish, and a multitude of terrorist organizations perform daily bombings, killings, and insurrections, a result of policies of all U.S. administrations since the “gipper” assumed the presidential office.

Israel

Israelis have been victims of many terrorist attacks; few of these attacks have been performed by terrorists. The great magnitude has been done by Palestinians who had exhausted the means to overcome their oppression. To express their oppression and popularize their cause, they have lashed out at their oppressor and inflicted damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. The terrorist actions are mostly revenge attacks due to provocations, succeeding Israeli military and civilian terror attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians.

Depicting Israel as a nation that has suffered excessive terrorism is a mischaracterization. More correct is that by magnitudes more than any nation, not even close, Israel is the major terrorist nation in the world. Look at the record. In almost every country of the world, apartheid Israel has committed terrorist actions.

Begin with the 1948-49 war against the Palestinians. From Wikipedia:

According to several historians, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 war. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Aryeh Yizthaki lists 10 major massacres with more than 50 victims each.

The newly established Israeli government continued its aggression against the Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian communities, ethnically cleansing 1.1 million Palestinians, and forcing them into displaced persons and refugee camps.

Israel followed the ethnic cleansing by instituting apartheid and continually terrorizing West Bank and Gazan Palestinians with provocative terror attacks.

 

Gaza before Oct. 7-Courtesy of ABC News

Gaza after Oct. 7-Courtesy of Aljazeera

Going beyond its borders, Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon and used terror attacks on the Lebanese population.

Going worldwide, Israel uses its intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate foreign scientists, military hardware suppliers, Palestinian activists, and those who harmed Israelis.

Israel displays a dual strategy in the war on terrorism. Building walls to separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, restricting travel between Israel and its occupied territories, scrutinizing entry at checkpoints, and cleverly surveilling all Palestinians have prevented terrorism within Israel. Provoking Palestinians into committing terrorist acts and stimulating settlers to make revenge “price tag” attacks against Palestinian communities and the military to wage war against the terrorists is the other side of the coin.

The violence committed against the Palestinians emits a backlash from worldwide supporters of the Palestinians and causes harm to Jews. The backlash is converted into spurious charges of anti-Semitism and used to justify Israel’s actions.

Add it up and Israel is an apartheid country, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people, a triple combination that no nation in all history has been able to equal. The Israeli government and its worldwide public relations machine convince the world it is an innocent victim of Hezbollah terrorists, Hamas terrorists, anti-Semites, surviving Nazis, liberal misfits, and disoriented people who cannot get out of the way of bullets and bombs. Western governments pay no heed to the triple play.

Russian Federation

A reported 1,312 terrorist attacks caused 1,179 Russian deaths between 2007 and 2021 and gripped the Russian Federation. After peaking in 2009, attacks and deaths in Russia consistently declined to only one attack and two deaths in 2021. Three of the major attacks happened when Chechen insurgents attacked apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, killing 200 people and injuring several hundred; on October 23, 2002, when Chechen insurgents attacked the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and an estimated 129 people were killed during the rescue operation, and during September 1–3, 2004, when Chechen and Ingush insurgents attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and held more than 1,100 hostages. A careless rescue operation caused more than 300 deaths, including 186 children.

Terrorism arose from a combination of extremist ethno-nationalist and Islamist militants from North Caucasus’s republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya. The dual nature of terrorism ─ people seeking more autonomy and extremists seeking more Islam complicated the Kremlin’s strategy to combat terrorism.

In retaliation for Chechnya terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, a name whose roll from the lips has an endearing quality. Massive and indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages that caused high civilian casualties, herding of people into camps, extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances occurred from both sides and made it difficult to ascertain, who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys.’ Which side was more guilty of terrorism?

Vladimir Putin registered his name, ruthlessness, pragmatism, and authority by resolving the Chechnya terror crisis. He followed Abraham Lincoln’s pattern of using force and making friends with the enemy. Putin convinced Akhmad Kadyrov, Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s, to switch sides. Kadyrov later became the President of the Chechen Republic. Grozny has been rebuilt and Chechnya exists on multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Moscow.

Grozny

Recognizing that Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus were loosely allied with al-Qaeda’s network and many traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the Russian president realized that joining Syria in its civil war against ISIS was a means of preventing the Islamic extremists from extending their reach. Decimating the central authorities of the terrorist campaigns would subdue the morale and incentives of the al-Qaeda “look-alikes” on Russian soil. Without having to use Russian ground troops, and air force pilots not facing challenges in the sky, support of the be-sieged al-Assad regime was a “win-win proposition for Moscow. Putin’s strategy to combat terrorism has been successful — ISIS and al-Qaeda are mostly gone from the Arab lands of the Middle East (still in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa) and the Russian Federation has had no terrorist attacks in the last two years.

China

A shadowy and shifting group of Uyghur separatists is responsible for terrorism committed against Chinese authorities and citizens. Incomplete statistics from The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China show that “from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.” From 1990 to 2001 the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which proposes the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state, “was responsible for over 200 acts of terrorism, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.”

Two of the reported and more serious terrorist attacks.

On May 22, 2014, five terrorists drove two SUVs through the fence of the morning fair of North Park Road of Saybagh District, Urumqi, into the crowd and detonated a bomb that claimed the lives of 39 and left 94 injured.

On 1 March 2014, a group of 8 knife-wielding terrorists attacked passengers in the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, Yunnan, China, killing 31 people, and wounding 143 others. The attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers at random.

A more complete description of the terrorist attacks is available in an article by The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.

As the terrorist attacks rose, Beijing had one strategy ─ ruthlessly seek out the perpetrators. “In the period 2013–2017 police arrested 330,918 in the province, 7.3 percent of total arrests in China. This compares to 81,443 arrests in the previous five years. In March 2019, Chinese officials said that they had arrested more than 13,000 militants in Xinjiang since 2014.”

Realizing their strategy had developed into a “tit-for-tat” operation, where each blow against the terrorist apparatus was countered by a blow against Chinese, the Chinese government changed its strategy. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism in Xinjiang and combined the use of force with initiatives that integrated the Uyghur populations into Chinese society and improved their standard of living. The new strategy has been successful — no reported terror attacks in recent years, the GDP of a stagnant Xinjiang province increased from 963 billion yuan in 2016 to 1,774  billion yuan in 2022, and the unemployment rate decreased from 2.48 percent to 2.04 percent during the same interval.

While Western media accuses China of destroying mosques, the Xinjiang Islamic Association states, “There are some 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang. Many in the region were built in the 1980s and 1990s or earlier, but some of these mud-and-brick structures (ED: the demolished Kargilik’s Grand Mosque was a mud-and-brick structure) or small buildings were not well maintained or repaired. They became unsafe for religious activities and posed a serious threat in the event of an earthquake. The mosques were also inadequately designed, making worship difficult.”

Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque

Before Renovation

After Renovation

Conclusion

Terrorism’s principal strategy is to inflict pain, pain, and more pain on a civilian population until the civilian population’s government agrees to their demands. Governments may care but always place national interests above that of the local population. The struggle to overcome terrorism has had two principal strategies

(1)    Give ‘em nothing and fight them until the death, and

(2)    Use force to keep terrorism contained and offer benefits that will satisfy some grievances and lower the temperature until the heat becomes normal.

The United States pursued the ‘fight until death’ strategy. After excessive deaths from the ongoing terrorism and civilians caught in the battles, the U.S. appears to have won the war; terrorism in the Middle East has declined to an acceptable level.

Israel has pursued a strategy of “we can outdo all terrorist attacks by being more terrorist than the terrorists.” Pushing the oppressed Palestinians into terrorist attacks enables Israel to respond tenfold to the attack on its populace. Terrorizing opposition in other nations is neatly performed by false charges of anti-Semitism, cyber attacks, and, when necessary, Mossad hitmen.

Russia went from ‘fight until death’ to offering the leaders of domestic terrorism a good bribe and letting them take care of it. Total force was used against international terrorism. Both strategies have been successful.

China departed from brute force to a more conciliatory strategy that recognized the wants of the Uyghurs and devised plans to satisfy the population. Most successful of all of the strategies.

Each nation that confronts terrorism may have unique characteristics that shape the terrorism and the response to it. This investigation shows that Chinese President Xi-Jinping eventually realized the exact nature of the terrorism his country was experiencing and accepted a plan that quickly solved the problem. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was pragmatic and changed his stance as events unfolded. Soon afterward, Russia had no more terrorism.

For Israel, terrorism is part of the daily diet. Israel commits terrorism, Israel invites terrorism, Israel commits terrorism, Invites terrorism, on and on until there will be none.

The United States invited terrorism by helping Pakistan’s intelligence fortify Osama bin Laden, not listening to the al-Qaeda leader’s grievances, and invading Iraq. In 1998, bin Laden demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula and voiced objections to a U.S. foreign policy that armed Israel. Did U.S. troops need a base in Saudi Arabia? Why has the U.S. had close ties with the apartheid country, which is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Assuredly, the date 9/11 would just be another day on the calendar if U.S. administrations understood the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed.

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.

 

Israel Is Assaulting Hospitals in Gaza with Full U.S. Support

Hospitals should be places of healing, not theaters of war.

by Kathy Kelly / February 20th, 2024

Many decades ago in Chicago, my favorite of several part-time student jobs was operating the “old-style” telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a classroom style desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Over the course of four years, on weekends and evenings, “security” at the hospital generally consisted solely of Frank and me. Fortunately, nothing much ever happened. The possibility of an attack, invasion or raid never occurred to us. The notion of an aerial bombardment was unimaginable, like something out of “War of the Worlds” or some other sci-fi fantasy.

Now, tragically, hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank have been attacked, invaded, bombed and destroyed. News of additional Israeli attacks is being reported on a daily basis. Last week, Democracy Now! interviewed Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and eye surgeon who recently returned from a humanitarian surgical mission at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza. Dr. Khan spoke of bombings taking place every few hours resulting in a constant influx of mass casualties. The majority of patients he treated were children from age 2 to 17. He saw horrific eye injuries, shattered faces, shrapnel wounds, abdominal injuries, limbs severed above the bone, and traumas caused by drone launched laser guided missiles. Amid the overcrowding and chaos, health care workers tended to patients while lacking basic equipment, including anesthesia. Patients lay on the ground in unsterile conditions, vulnerable to infection and disease. Most of them also suffered from severe hunger.

Normally, a child who undergoes an amputation faces as many as twelve additional surgeries.  Khan wondered who would do the follow-up care for these children, some of whom have no surviving relatives?

He also noted sniper fire prevented doctors from going to work. “They’ve killed health care workers, nurses, paramedics; ambulances have been bombed. This has all been systematic,” Khan explained. “Now there are 10,000 to 15,000 bodies decomposing. It’s the rainy season right now in Gaza so all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply and you get further disease.”

According to Khan, Israeli forces have kidnapped forty to forty-five doctors, specifically targeting specialists and hospital administrators. Three health care professional organizations have issued a statement  expressing deep concern that the Israeli military has abducted and unlawfully detained Dr. Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.

On February 19, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions in the Nasser hospital after Israel ordered evacuation of Palestinians from the complex. “There are still more than 180 patients and 15 doctors and nurses inside Nasser,” he said. “The hospital is still experiencing an acute shortage of food, basic medical supplies, and oxygen. There is no tap water and no electricity, except a backup generator maintaining some lifesaving machines.”

Eight years ago, in October of 2015, the United States military destroyed Afghanistan’s Kunduz hospital, run by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). For more than an hour, a C-130 transport plane repeatedly fired incendiary devices at the hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit, killing 42 people. Thirty-seven additional people were injured. “Our patients burned in their beds,” read the MSF’s in-depth report. “Our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

The horrific attack outraged war resisters and human rights groups. I remember joining a group of activists in upstate NY who assembled outside a hospital emergency room with a banner proclaiming “To bomb this site would be a war crime.”

In 2009, on a smaller, yet still horrific scale, I witnessed an Israeli onslaught in Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” In the emergency room of the Al Shifa hospital, Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an orthopedic surgeon, described experiences similar to  Khan’s. This surgeon grew up in Chicago, very close to the neighborhood where I lived. I asked him what he would want me to tell our neighbors back home. He listed a litany of horrors and then he stopped.  “No,” he said. “First, you must tell them that U.S. taxpayer money paid for all of these weapons.”

Taxpayer money feeds the bloated, swollen Pentagon budget. U.S. Senators, last week, cowed by AIPAC, decided to send Israel an additional $14.1 billion to boost military spending. Only three Senators voted against the bill.

From Palestine, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, wrote on X:: “The scary part is not that Israel is planning the forcible transfer of the Palestinians it hasn’t slaughtered, but that the so-called ‘civilized world’ is allowing it to happen. The ramifications of this coordinated evil will haunt its collaborators for generations to come.”

At Forkosh Hospital in the 1970s, I had a mirror to see what was happening behind my back, but everyone on earth can see, directly, the horror of U.S. support for a genocidal event happening on our watch.  Gravely distorted versions of what occurred on October 7th, cannot – even if believed – justify the scale of the horrors being reported in Gaza and the West Bank each day.

The U.S. government continues enthusiastically to bankroll Israel’s systemic and inhumane destruction of Gaza. U.S. advisors make feeble attempts to suggest Israel should pause or at least try to be more precise in their attacks. In its quest for hegemonic superiority, the United States tears into ever tinier shreds whatever remains of a commitment to human rights, equality and human dignity.

What kept Forkosh Hospital secure, decades ago, was a social contract that presumed safety for a small hospital serving the local population.

If we can’t find the morality to stop supplying weapons for ongoing Israeli onslaughts against Gaza and its places of healing, we may find we have created a world in which no-one can count on upholding basic human rights. We may be creating intergenerational wounds of hatred and sorrow from which there will never, ever be any safe place to heal.

 Smoke rising after an Israeli air strike on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 3, 2024
Photo Credit:  Shutterstock

 Palestinian Red Crescent first aid waiting to receive bodies from Al-Najjar Hospital in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, on January 10, 2024
Photo Credit: Shutterstock

• A version of this article first appeared on The Progressive website.

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is the board president of World BEYOND War (worldbeyondwar.org) and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. (merchantsofdeath.org) Read other articles by Kathy.

Genocidal DNA: Depravity, Evil and Cowardice in the “West” as well

by Jeremy Salt / February 17th, 2024

(L) with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Photo: via President Biden Twitter Page)

Western moral cowardice feeds this war as much as the arms flown or shipped into Israel by the US in a continuous cycle.

Everything that needs to be said has been said. Some of the worst crimes since 1945 are being committed in Gaza by soldiers following the orders of a genocidal government and military command.

The details are inhumane, sickening and repulsive in the extreme. This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction in detail of Gaza, its homes, shops, hospitals, schools, universities, government offices, mosques, churches and its food, water and medical supplies and – so far –  about 100,000 of its people, slaughtered or maimed mostly by missile fire.  

People elect politicians to govern on their behalf. They get the power, the prestige, the salaries, the free travel, the generous pension fund and the black cars. In return, they are expected to make the right decisions on behalf of the people, right domestically and in foreign policy and right morally. 

What we are seeing now in the global ‘west,’ while the people of Gaza are being butchered, is a total abandonment of that moral responsibility. Not one government has stepped forward to unequivocally condemn Israel for its crimes. 

With people everywhere in the ‘west’ horrified at the images of total inhumanity coming out of Gaza, the gulf between them and their governments widens every day. 

Only the historical victims of the crimes committed in the past by these same governments have defended the Palestinians. South Africa launched the case for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other global south governments soon followed.  

Genocidal DNA

This can hardly be regarded as coincidental. It is as if there is something in the DNA of genocidal settler-colonial societies, past and present, that creates the unspoken bond between them. After all, Israel is only doing what they all have done. 

From these governments, we hear the call for Israel to abide by international law, in its own interests, as if that should be the priority and not the lives of the Palestinian people it is slaughtering day after day.   

These statements keep calling for the laws protecting Palestinians and their rights to be respected, as if the politicians are blind to the mass of evidence that Israel has never respected them and has no intention of respecting them now.   

Its crimes are celebrated by the jeering soldiers committing them. These are mostly young people, blowing up apartment blocks, schools and universities, firing missiles into hospital compounds, firing on ambulances, killing nurses and paramedics, blowing the arms and legs off children and sniping at civilians as they try to hide or as they are on the road trying to escape.  

Alongside all of this is the sadism of individual soldiers bullying, torturing and humiliating their captives. What kind of terrible poison has been injected into their minds that they can behave like this?   

Closing Their Eyes

Close to 30,000 Palestinian men, women and children had been murdered by the middle of February. That is not the true figure because thousands of others lie dead under the rubble. Almost half of the 30,000 are children. Tens of thousands more have been maimed for life, and 17,000 – last count – have no families to look after them because everyone has been killed except for them.

Try to imagine this happening in your country.  Does it make any difference that these children are being slaughtered somewhere else?  

It is hard to imagine that anyone could close their eyes to the mass killing of children, but that is precisely what western governments are doing. They are gravely concerned, so they say, but not so gravely concerned that they take action to stop what they see, genocide being livestreamed every day.  

They talk in measured, calm voices. The prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have just put out a joint statement saying they are alarmed “at the diminishing safe space for civilians” with no mention of who is deliberately diminishing a “space” that is completely unsafe.  

They call for a ceasefire, the emphasis not on stopping genocide but on stopping Hamas, which “must release the hostages, stop using Palestinians as a human shield and lay down its arms.” 

No such demands are made of Israel. While blaming Hamas, the statement avoids any mention of Israel as the architect of the crimes described by the ICJ as plausibly adding up to genocide.

There is no evidence that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields. There is plenty of evidence that Israel does. These three “world leaders” refer only to the “heinous acts” of October 7, and not to the infinitely more heinous acts of the occupying army, if heinous is the word they want to use. 

There is not a flicker of outrage in any of the statements put out by western governments. There is so much they could do to stop the slaughter. They could cut relations with Israel. They could boycott it at every level. They could stop sending it arms, as at least one or two are doing. They could initiate moves to throw it out of the UN. They could call for a multinational force to be sent to Gaza to protect the Palestinians, but they do none of these things.    

An Overriding Lesson

Behind the thin hypocritical cover of their concern for the Palestinians, the statement by the three prime ministers is no more than a deferential signal being flashed  to Israel and its lobbyists in their countries is that “we stand with you.” 

The longer the slaughter lasts, the quicker it falls down the agenda in the news cycle, to the point now where it is being normalized. Only the exceptionally depraved makes the headlines, not the normally depraved, as the world wakes up after another night of mayhem and murder in the Gaza Strip.

Western moral cowardice feeds this war as much as the arms flown or shipped into Israel by the US in a continuous cycle. The politicians can’t say they don’t know because they do know.  Refusing to condemn evil,  they are complicit in it and will themselves stand condemned in the eyes of history.  

The overriding lesson from the past 75 years should be clear: Israel will not stop unless it is stopped. There is no point any more in asking, in pleading with Israel to stop killing people and remove itself from occupied land, because while Israel hears it does not listen.  It does exactly what it wants to do.  

Accordingly, if there is to be any kind of peace – a laughable concept right now – there can be no more asking: Israel has to be told what to do or face the consequences.  

As it is a standing threat to regional and world peace, if it is not stopped the west, somewhere down the line, will face the consequences, too.

Israel has had its chances to make peace over the decades and wasted them all.  There’s nothing left now, no two states or one shared state, only ground zero: ‘them or us.’ 

Even as Netanyahu moves to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza, taking the nakba of the past 75 years an inhumane stage further, the west remains supine, accepting his lies about an “evacuation” from Rafah.  

The fact that the Egyptian government is building a walled “compound” in Sinai capable of holding 100,000 people, but undoubtedly filling with many more as the Palestinians are terrorized into flight, is prima facie evidence of complicity in what has always been Israel’s final solution to the “Palestine problem.”

If the Palestinians are driven into Sinai, the pointer will then turn in the direction of the “axis of resistance,” which has indicated that any attempt to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza would be its red line.  

Constantly attacked or threatened with attack by Israel and the US, it has long been preparing for a war which it  regards as inevitable. As its enemies take the same view, an expanded war seems only a question of time. 

Israel already bombs Syria every other day, has repeatedly threatened Iran with attack, is currently engaged in a border war with Hezbollah and has been threatening to ‘copy paste’ Gaza into Beirut.  

This would be a war massively more vicious and destructive than any fought with Israel so far. The outcome of such a collision would determine the future of the Middle East for the next century.

• Article first published in The Palestine Chronicle.

Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Read other articles by Jeremy.

Why Do We Love Consumerism?

by Yanis Iqbal / February 20th, 2024

De-linking from the dominant ideological themes of capitalist society is a difficult task. The globalization of capital under the regime of neoliberal deregulation has allowed consumerism to establish a pervasive presence throughout the world. Even if we get to know harrowing information about the inequalities and injustices of the reining consumption model, we don’t enact a radical transformation of our personality. The response to anti-capitalist information remains confined to a momentary reaction of repulsion. Even as new mental data enters our consciousness, the latter continues to remain in a passive state. The inflow of enlightened knowledge settles into a tiny corner of our mind, failing to penetrate the structure of our comportment. Though we know that humanity is headed towards extinction due to the imperative of profit-maximization, we still can’t shake off the gravitational pull exercised by the latest expensive commodity on the market. There is a divide between what we know and what we do. In fact, this divide is systematically taught to people from the very moment they enter into the education system: the importance of knowing (in the form of reading, writing, discussing etc.) is limited by the extent to which it contributes to what can be done in the exam hall. Thus, knowledge is never autonomous; it is already circumscribed by the specific questions that will be printed on the exam paper. Ideology under capitalism operates in a similar way: the consumer can think whatever they want, they can acquaint themselves with knowledge that is critical of the bourgeoisie, but they always follow the rule of commodity consumption.

The general form of intellectual subjectivity can be defined by the framework of capitalist consumption. Consumers are faced with whatever lies in front of them, in the atmosphere that surrounds them. The thing is a fixed object that is to be taken and used up. What is important to note here is the social setting that this implies: interactions happen in such a way that I can actively see the commodity and then buy it for my use. When I am walking on the street, I am repeatedly confronted with shops and advertisements that prominently display different commodities. So, capitalist consumption is a practical arrangement of human bodies and commodities in such a way that they are materially joined to each other in an all-encompassing spatio-temporal landscape. That’s why intellectual enlightenment fails to have any actual effect on the consumer: no matter how aware I am of the depravity of the capitalist system, my own life is organized in such a way that it is completely dependent upon bourgeois standards of excellence. The feeling of comfort and happiness derived from the consumption of a commodity is not a mere illusion: in the capitalist system, those who have socially desired commodities do command reverence from others. The body of the rich person is a confident one, as they are sure that others will envy them and talk to them in an ingratiating manner. Subaltern masses will always be there to dutifully obey their orders. This is the physical substratum of politics: the historical arrangement of bodies determines whose words and actions will have the capacity to influence those of others.

In a capitalist society, the private ownership of the means of production signifies that the bourgeoisie has the access to the socio-cultural infrastructure that determines the level of social recognition. When I don’t have access to this class-based resource, I am excluded from the dominant form of recognition: no one will pay attention to me, no one will listen to my words or respond to my actions. Consider this phenomenological scenario. The rich person who steps out from their luxurious car, who walks arrogantly towards the five-star hotel, is the center of the local social relations. Buildings, roads, clothes, food, vehicles etc. – all these elements of the social landscape, modalities of interacting with other people and things, are in the hands of the rich person. The structure of interaction – the arrangement of objects and bodies – is such that they will always be able to assertively undertake their various actions of driving, eating, walking, talking etc. Those who are not rich will be situated at the peripheries of the social landscape; their bodies don’t possess any capacity to meld with the five-star hotel, with the absurdly priced car, with the exorbitant food. For them, there is no synchrony. They live in constant chaos and dissonance: their very existence is in contradiction with the hegemonic way of living. The poor are a menace to be avoided and eliminated. Rich people, on the other hand, exist in a tight interlinkage with their social environment. The built environments, the historically accumulating ecosystems of opulence, have special slots for the bourgeoisie. Card access elevator systems, wherein authorized individuals use a key card or access card to activate and operate elevators, is a prime example of the social slotting that operates in bourgeois circles. The smoothness of the card stands for the untarnished security of the rich person, their perfect integration into the metallic exclusivism of the elevator. Far from the masses, the capitalist stands cocooned in the silence of the elevator, in the undisturbed aura of monetarily secured mobility.


The organization of social atmospheres around the needs and desires of the bourgeoisie means that the allure of consumerism is structurally rooted in material structures of interaction, in the physicality of bodies and objects in contact with each other. Seeing an affluent person, we feel attracted towards them because their harmonious intermeshing with social ecosystems contrasts with our own sense of discomfort in a world made for the rich. Even if we are aware how unsustainable and destructive the bourgeois lifestyle is, we nonetheless crave the comportment of synchrony that is contained in the existence of the capitalist. Engrained in the regularized rhythms of consumerist fantasy, of the security embodied in the commodity, we remain unconsciously attached to capitalist society. How to break this attachment? For this, we require revolutionary practice instead of theoretical knowledge. We need to construct alternative spaces of resistance, actually existing communities of association in which, no matter how fleetingly, one can touch the sensibilities of a different way of relating with others and the world. These spaces are opposed to the exclusivism of class divisions, wherein bodily comportments desire elitist power, the power to be the sole nucleus of social settings, to make the world revolve around oneself.

Revolutionary desire doesn’t want the social ecosystem to be carved for itself. Instead, it realizes how a de-centered world allows a dynamic interdependency and inter-structuration of the existing elements, wherein the identity of the self is transformed by the continuously evolving totality of others. When I talk to someone not for the purpose of careerist social networking but for the conviction-laden, passionate words we both share, I thread together a non-monetary economy of free labor, where conversations keep revealing something new to us. There is no bourgeois synchrony here. There is only the revolutionary mutation of everything that exists. Through these restructured associations, we will experience how humanity can enjoy new capacities based on multifarious ways of socio-natural metabolism. This is qualitatively different from bourgeois synchronization: instead of aping the practices of the bourgeoisie, we explore different ways of living that are experientially richer than the one-dimensional consumptive model of capitalism. No matter how small, revolutionary politics should always strive towards the creation of micro-communist zones, where we can see the world in terms of the vast human potentialities that it contains. There are infinite ways in which we can relate to each other not for the sake of money but for the sake of what the other stands for, for the ways in which their independent actions can enhance our own independence. In these dark times of neoliberal fascism, it is essential that we start building liberated zones of communism.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. Read other articles by Yanis.