Thursday, November 14, 2024

The Choices That Australia Makes

November 14, 2024
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Indigenous leader Lidia Thorpe confronts King Charles III during his visit to Australia. (Screengrab from X.)

If you go to the bluff at Kings Park in Perth, Australia, you can overlook the Swan River and enjoy a remarkable view. Across the bay, there is a phalanx of steel and glass buildings that rise to the skies. Each of these buildings carries a sign that glistens in the sharp sun: BHP, Rio Tinto, Chevron, Deloitte, and others. Kings Park no longer survives merely with the patronage of the British King, who continues to claim sovereignty over Australia. Part of it is now named Rio Tinto Kings Park, needing the corporate profits from this enormous mining company to sustain its charms. Down one of the avenues of the park there are trees set apart by a few meters, and at the base of these trees are small markers for dead soldiers from past wars; these are not graves but remembrances that are crowned by Australian flags. The park brings together the three crucial pieces of Western Australia, this province of which Perth is the capital which is the size of Western Europe: the British monarchy, the mining companies and its affiliates, and the role of the military.

Of Kings

A few days before I arrived in Canberra, an aboriginal senator, Lidia Thorpe, interrupted the celebration of King Charles III to say, “You are not my king. This is not your land.” It was a powerful demonstration against the treatment of Australia ever since the arrival of English ships to the country’s east in January 1788. In fact, the British crown does claim title to the entirety of the Australian landmass. King Charles III is head of the 56-country Commonwealth and the total land area of the Commonwealth takes up 21 percent of the world’s total land. It is quite remarkable to realize that King Charles III is nominally in charge of merely 22 percent less than Queen Victoria (1819-1901).

The day after Senator Thorpe’s statement, a group of aboriginal leaders met with King Charles III to discuss the theme of “sovereignty.” In Sydney, Elder Allan Murray of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council welcomed the King to Gadigal land and said, “We’ve got stories to tell, and I think you witnessed that story yesterday in Canberra. But the story is unwavering, and we’ve got a long way to achieve what we want to achieve and that’s our own sovereignty.” When Captain James Cook (1770) and Captain Arthur Phillip (1788) arrived on this Gadigal land, they were met by people who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years. In 1789, a smallpox epidemic brought by the British killed 53 percent of the Gadigal, and eventually—through violence—they reduced the population to three in 1791. It is accurate, then, for Elder Murray to have said to the press after King Charles III left that “The Union Jack was put on our land without our consent. We’ve been ignored.” What remained were barrangal dyara (skin and bones, as the Gadigal would have said). Given the value of the land in Sydney, the Gadigal clan would today be one of the richest groups in the world. But apart from a few descendants who do not have title to the land, the ghosts of the ancestors walk these streets.

Of Minerals

Australia is one of the widest countries in the world, with a large desert in its middle section. Underneath its soil, which has been walked on by a range of Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years, is wealth that is estimated to be $19.9 trillion. This estimate includes the country’s holdings of coal, copper, iron ore, gold, uranium, and rare earth elements. In 2022, Australia’s mining companies—which are also some of the largest in the world—extracted at least 27 minerals from the subsoil, including lithium (Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium, annually providing 52 percent of the global market’s lithium).

On May 24, 2020, Rio Tinto’s engineers and workers blew up a cave in the Pilbara area of Western Australia to expand their Brockman 4 iron ore mine. The cave in the Juukan Gorge had been used by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people for 46,000 years and had been kept by them as a community treasure. In 2013, Rio Tinto approached the Western Australian government to seek an exemption to destroy the cave and to extend the mine. They received this exemption based on a law called the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972, which had been drafted to favor mining companies. Rio Tinto, with substantial operations in Western Australia and around the world, has a market capitalization of $105.7 billion, making it—after BHP (market cap of $135.5)—the second largest minerals company in the world (both Rio Tinto and BHP are headquartered in Melbourne). Hastily, BHP began to reconsider its permission to destroy 40 cultural sites for its South Flank iron mine extension in the Pilbara region (and after its investigation and conversation with the Banjima community) decided to save 10 sites.

Craig and Monique Oobagooma live in the northernmost homestead in Australia near the Robinson River. They are part of the Wanjina Wunggurr, whose lands are now used for the extraction of uranium and other metals and minerals. The uranium mines in the north are owned and operated by Paladin Energy, another Perth-based mining company that also owns mines in Malawi and Namibia. There is also a large military base in nearby Yampi. Craig told me that when he walks his land, he can dig beneath the soil and find pink diamonds. But, he says, he puts them back. “They are sacred stones,” he says. Some parts of the land can be used for the betterment of his family, but not all of it. Not the sacred stones. And not the ancestral sites, of which there are only a few that remain.

Of Militaries

In 2023, the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to preserve “critical minerals” for their own development and security. Such an agreement is part of the New Cold War against China, to ensure that it does not directly own the “critical minerals.” Between 2022 and 2023, Chinese investment in mining decreased from AU$1809 million to AU$34 million. Meanwhile, Australian investment in building military infrastructure for the United States has increased dramatically, with the Australian government expanding the Tindal air base in Darwin (Northern Territory) to hold U.S. B-1 and B-52 nuclear bombers, expanding the submarine docking stations along the coastline of Western Australia, and expanding the Exmouth submarine and deep space communications facility. All of this is part of Australia’s historically high defense budget of $37 billion.

In Sydney, near the Central Train station, I met Euranga, who lived in a tunnel which he had painted with the history of the Aboriginal peoples of Eora (Sydney). He had been part of the Stolen Generation, one in three Aboriginal children stolen from their families and raised in boarding schools. The school hurt his spirit, he told me. “This is our land, but it is also not our land,” he said. Beneath the land is wealth, but it is being drained away by private mining companies and for the purposes of military force. The old train station nearby looks forlorn. There is no high-speed rail in vast Australia. Such a better way to spend its precious resources, as Euranga indicated in his paintings: embrace the worlds of the Aboriginal communities who have been so harshly displaced and build infrastructure for people rather than for wars.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).

Thawing Russia-US Relations?

This originally appeared at Consortium News.

A former and future U.S. president talked with Vladimir Putin last Thursday! At least that is what The Washington Post reported today.

In a highly detailed account, the Post wrote:

“During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss ‘the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,’ one of the people said.”

Except on Monday, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, denied it ever happened.

As a follow-up, the Post was forced to report:

“Peskov called the story ‘completely untrue’ … ‘This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is now published, sometimes even in fairly respected publications. This is completely untrue. This is pure fiction, this is simply false information,’ he told the Russian news agency Interfax.”

Someone is lying here. The Post said it had five unnamed sources confirming the call and providing extensive detail of what was supposedly discussed. Trump has said nothing so far about whether such a call took place. But on Monday he posted a short Fox video on his Truth Social account showing the world leaders he has spoken to so far and Putin is not among them. Volodymyr Zelenksy of Ukraine is.

A Long- Time Coming

It has been two and a half years since a conversation between U.S. and Russian presidents.

That last conversation was held on Feb. 12, 2022. It ended badly – the readout showing there was no room for compromise, no room for a “deal” to stave off war in Ukraine.

The U.S. would not reverse its stance on inviting Ukraine into NATO; and went back on an earlier undertaking not to put offensive missiles in Ukraine. The Russians saw their core national security interests at stake, just as the U.S. had core interests in preventing Cuba from installing offensive missiles in 1962.

According to the Russian readout, Putin made clear that Joe Biden “did not really address non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems on Ukrainian territory.” Twelve days later, the Russians launched what they call their Special Military Operation.

The Biden administration knew this would happen. None other than NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg let that cat out of the bag (no doubt inadvertently) in a speech to the EU Parliament on Sept. 7, 2023:

“Putin’s precondition for not invading Ukraine was: No Ukraine in NATO. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent more NATO.”

Context: Reading the Readout

The Kremlin placed the readout of the Feb. 12, 2022 summit-call squarely in the context of a key Putin-Biden telephone conversation nine weeks earlier on Dec. 7, 2021. That virtual summit had been arranged abruptly, at Putin’s urgent request.

And so it came to pass that Biden was at home on holiday in Delaware – without his minders. As things turned out, he apparently reasoned that agreeing not to put offensive missiles in Ukraine made sense, given the threat Putin saw in that (and the fact that the US already had such emplacements in Romania and Poland).

The Russian readout from that Dec. 30, 2021 telephone call stated: “Joseph Biden emphasized that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine.” [Emphasis added.]

Biden administration officials, with the full cooperation of Establishment media, were able to obfuscate and suppress this key undertaking made by Biden when he was ‘home alone’, so to speak.

There was virtually no public reporting or comment. The only exception was former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, an ardent Ukraine fan, who quickly and quietly dismissed the readout as nothing new.

Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Signs of Thaw

A lot of water has flowed down the Dnieper River since February 2022. Much of it will be frozen thick on Jan. 20 when Donald Trump takes office. There are, however, already some tentative signs of a coming thaw in relations between the U.S. and Russia.

On Thursday, Putin publicly congratulated Trump on his victory, praising his “manly” response to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Kremlin spokesman Peskov told an interviewer there were “positive” signs for improved relations under a Trump presidency.

“Trump talked during his campaign about how he sees everything through deals, that he can make a deal that will lead everyone to peace. At least he talks about peace, not about confrontation and the desire to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” Peskov said.

Tempering expectations, Putin responded cautiously to a question at the Valdai conference in Sochi on Nov. 7. Asked what he expects from a second Trump administration, Putin replied, “I don’t know what will happen now. I have no idea.”

On Ukraine, nothing good will happen until Biden/Blinken/Sullivan can admit that what they have been saying for a year and a half is not true. Putin has not “already lost.” It is just the opposite. And his terms are correspondingly tough. On that basis, and only on that basis, will he be prepared “to deal.”

US ‘Exceptionalism’

Biden was fond of quoting former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s oft-stated belief that the U.S. was not only “exceptional” but also “indispensable.” It seems Biden and his acolytes, particularly Secretary of State Antony Blinken, may actually believe that.

What most observers have long since forgotten is that Putin called out Barack Obama on that very issue – precisely at a time when there was hope for increasing mutual trust. Putin placed a revealing op-ed about all this in The New York Times on Sept. 12, 2013.

In short, Putin persuaded Syria to let its chemical weapons be destroyed under U.N. inspection, and thus pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire when Obama agreed.

Obama later admitted that all of his advisers insisted he had to wage war on Syria because of a chemical attack near Damascus during the civil war there. It was a false-flag attack, and he sensed that. Obama was reluctant to start yet another overt war – this one on Syria. He told a lot of this story to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.

Syria’s chemical weapons were destroyed and war was avoided. And not only that. The possibilities had increased perceptively for growing trust, only to be dashed when Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and friends mounted a coup d’etat in Kyiv just six months later.

Here’s the last paragraph of the NYT op-ed by Putin on Sept 12, 2013. As we shall see, there are clear echoes of this in Putin’s talk on Friday at Valdai, 11 years later:

“My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

The Valdai Message

Putin addressing the Valdai Club on Friday. (President of Russia)

Is there a chance for resuscitation of this “growing trust” from 11 years ago? In his Valdai presentation Friday, Putin made abundantly clear what the new international situation – the new balance of power – will now require, especially as a very large part of the world is already in BRICS and arrayed against a lily white, Western minority.

Putin’s words on Friday are as interesting now as his New York Times op-ed was 11 years ago:

“The Western-centric world has embraced certain clichés and stereotypes concerning the global hierarchy. There is supposedly a developed world, progressive society and some universal civilization that everyone should strive to join – while at the other end, there are backward, uncivilized nations, barbarians. Their job is to listen unquestioningly to what they are told from the outside, and to act on the instructions issued by those who are allegedly superior to them in this civilizational hierarchy.

It is clear that this concept works for a crude colonial approach, for the exploitation of the global majority. The problem is that this essentially racist ideology has taken root in the minds of many, creating a serious mental obstacle to general harmonious growth. [Emphasis added.]

The modern world tolerates neither arrogance nor wanton disregard for others being different. To build normal relationships, above all, one needs to listen to the other party and try to understand their logic and cultural background, rather than expecting them to think and act the way you think they should based on your beliefs about them. Otherwise, communication turns into an exchange of clichés and flinging labels, and politics devolves into a conversation of the deaf.”

It is possible to hope that, on Ukraine at least, U.S.-Russian talks can quickly move beyond cliches and labels, to stop the killing. Mutual trust is also possible, but it will take some time to rebuild it.

Perhaps it helps to recall that it almost happened just 13 years ago.

— Joe Lauria contributed to this report.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a C.I.A. analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars?

When Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.

The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”

On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established, and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.

Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.

So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the U.S. in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.

The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders; and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.

Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.

Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the U.S. election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

Other powerful voices, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the U.S. transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.

The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting President Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people.

The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.

Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help them “finish the job.”

The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S.military wargames he was involved in.

Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war on Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand mile long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.

But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.

By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.

So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the most certain path to a full-scale war.

Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, and she led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at an anti-semitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.

So, while Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.

If he wanted to, President Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.

But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite–actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.

We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, with an updated edition due in February 2025.

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.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Thawing Russia-US Relations?

Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars?

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