It is hardly contentious now to argue that, for many years, one of the prime strategic goals of the US has been the deliberate creation of chaos on the borders of enemies or potential enemies. It is therefore not accurate to argue that the US doesn't know what it is doing when chaos is what results. One example is the situation in Ukraine. In the twisted mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski (and that of his neocon descendants) there was a definite rationale in the infiltration of former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Ukraine and Armenia, and the attempt to do the same in the Central Asian 'stans' and Belarus (which have failed). In forcing Russia into fighting a war with fellow Slavs, the end result mattered less than the frustration of unity in the core of the Eurasian heartland, and the death of as many Slavs as possible. Your analysis assumes far too much good faith and maturity on the part of US strategists, who have always taken a scorched earth approach to the maintenance of hegemony.
Or, for that matter, having learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that nation-building is slow, expensive and hard, not to mention it quickly turns unpopular, the Empire simply turns to nation-destroying. Nation-destroying is relatively cheap, quick and politically painless.
Though I agree with your central point, I've taken the view that to see the USA as a monolthic enitity likely underestimates the complexity. I view the USA's body politic more as a set of competing cabals and interests who negotiate and inch towards a policy which is neither strategic in nature nor focused on what is achievable in the outside world, but which is do-able in whatever corridors of power exist inside the USA - bearing in mind who controls the levers of power at that moment and what their domestic political interests demand. This includes real politicians, but also deep state agencies, the media and others like the MIC. Maybe hence the USA's seemingly inability to negotiate with anyone but itself? It simply tries to sell or impose its internally generated view. ??? But who the hell are you supposed to negoiate with when dealing with the USA these days?
I agree with you when it comes to the broad sweep of domestic policy, but when it comes to foreign policy there has been remarkable uniformity of intention and policy over the course of many decades. This is true across the West - whichever party gets into power, foreign policy remains broadly the same. This is precisely why the political establishment across the West has always worked hard to keep out foreign policy dissidents, such as Trump, Corbyn or the AfD, and has always shut down genuine debate at the popular level. Let the masses have their tax freezes on a pint of beer, or their new hospitals - foreign policy is too important to allow even a smidgeon of democracy.
This seems a confusing description. There are already plenty of "dissidents" in the corridors of power, while you imply - though I do not believe you mean it - that Trump, Corbyn and the AfD are wrongfully excluded: well, in Corbyn's case that is of course true, but foreign policy had little to do with it.
And that is the general problem with your argument: foreign policy is not of much interest to most people in larger, secure states, and trying to run a political campaign round it is rarely successful - Brexit or Bush's war on terror are dreadful examples.
I'm sorry, who are these foreign policy 'dissidents' in the corridors of power? Can you name a single senior Conservative MP who does not parrot the received view of Russia, or genuflect to NATO, despite the fact that is in our national interests, as a small trading nation, to cultivate good relationships with all - particularly rising powers who can supply us with cheap energy and cheap products? Is there anyone in power who is honest enough to acknowledge that the fabled 'special relationship' with the US is leading Britain to sabotage any hope of decent relations with the global majority (I refuse to use the patronising and inaccurate term, 'Global South'), and exposing us to ridicule and contempt? We should make no mistake - if any MP ever dared to voice such thoughts, they would be first ostracised and then drummed out of their party. Matters are more extreme in the UK political scene, it is true, but they are certainly not much better elsewhere in the West. One could point to countless examples of dissenters being persecuted for their heretical views.
You have completely missed my point, which is that if ordinary people are not interested in foreign policy, it is largely because they have never been educated about just how crucial it is. They have never been sufficiently well-informed about global economics and politics to realise that most domestic policy is ultimately downwind of the parameters determined by foreign policy choices. It also does not help that Western elites have laboured to present their set of favoured policies as so incontrovertibly correct as to prohibit any debate. The universal tactic of recent years is to work to shut down any dissent on foreign policy before it gets going, by smearing anyone who disagrees with the received wisdom (as a 'Putin stooge' or 'terrorist apologist' or similar). In this they have been aided by the catastrophic deterioration in the quality of geopolitical information that is accessible to the average person. If one analyses foreign policy coverage in the media over the last 40-years, it has become almost completely superficial at best, and non-existent at worst. It is also devoid of the historical context that would facilitate critical reflection. Nations and their leaders are portrayed as crude caricatures, and conflicts are routinely misrepresented. The coverage of the Ukraine War, for just one example, has hit new journalistic lows, with the bulk of it being downright lies, repeatedly exposed as such as events unfold. Thus, Western readers were repeatedly told that Russia was about to run out of missiles, an assertion, based on zero evidence, that continued to be repeated ad nauseum despite being utterly disproved by events. Overall, foreign policy coverage in the West does not exist to inform, but to propagandise the prescribed collection of prejudices. There is certainly no space for nuance or self-reflection. The fact that ordinary people are not encouraged to have anything more than a Janet and John level appreciation of foreign policy is not an accident - it is the deliberate cultivation of the fallacy that we little people shouldn't worry our pretty heads about foreign policy as it doesn't concern us.
By the way, you have plainly forgotten that a British general opined to a major British newspaper that a coup would be a strong possibility if Corbyn even got into power, because of his opposition to the normal support of US-sponsored regime change and gunboat diplomacy (my words, not his, but the meaning was plain). Here is an extract from an article published in 2018 which discusses the affair:
"On May 8, the Daily Telegraph asked, “Could an Army coup remove Jeremy Corbyn—just as it almost toppled Harold Wilson?”
"Written by Paul Carter for the de facto house organ of the Conservative Party, the article makes clear that discussions on such a course of action in the event of a Labour victory under Corbyn are ongoing.
"The article begins by noting, “Only one week after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, a serving general of the Army warned of a direct and public challenge if a future Prime Minister Corbyn jeopardised the country’s security: ‘The army wouldn’t stand for it ... people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.’”
"Carter refers to an article published by the Sunday Times in September 2015, after Corbyn had routed his Blairite leadership opponent with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters. The newspaper cited an anonymous “senior serving general” that in the event of Corbyn becoming prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny.” Elements within the military would be prepared to use “whatever means possible, fair or foul,” the officer declared. He warned, “ You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident , pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”
I don't think the army were too bothered about the prospect of increased health spending and free broadband - it was Corbyn's foreign policy they disliked.
Thank you for this, er voluminous response. I think I may in my turn have expressed my myself less than clearly.
a) disagreements within the UK Foreign Office are legion, and of MPs and leader writers with the FO even more so. And you seem to have missed Brexit, which incurred a modest amount of internal disagreement in Civil Service, in political parties and their leaderships &c. But to take a couple of examples from across the ocean, you may be aware of disagreements in both Defence and State Departments with Biden's approach to Israel (just as there are widespread criticisms of von der Leyen over Israel and elsewhere, e.g. Tunisia). But back in 2020 there was an internal conflict of interest over an arms ale to Saudi Arabia (https://www.justsecurity.org/71983/a-conflict-of-interest-raises-questions-for-state-departments-top-lawyer/);
and you will be aware of disagreements between the Defence Department and the White House over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And never mind the Republicans switch from isolation to global activism and back to isolationism, just looking at the varied reaction to Trump's sorties into foreign affairs would dispel any suggestion of monolithic élites.
b) Corbyn: There have been any number of military people who at one time or another have suggested that the army should run the country. Of course in some nations with less well-developed constitutional and societal constraints, that is all too possible; but for several hundred years the UK has been fairly resistant to such dreams, despite the dislike of some in the security services for Harold Wilson for instance.
c_ On your main point, I did not dispute that foreign policy issues were kept from the public (Brexit again, or if you prefer Vietnam in both France and the US, or indeed UK imperialism generally). But, as someone remarked elsewhere in this discussion, Göring
suggested: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." ("Germany reborn", 1934 - sorry, not bothered to check the original - though also attributed to "Nuremberg Diary" by G.M. Gilbert ) While at his trial he remarked that you can manipulate whole nations with fear - which does not have to be internal state oppression, but also fear of the outsider, the other -cf. the populist claims about immigration throughout Europe for the last forty years, or America pre-WWll et al.
But that foreign policy can be extensively discussed with history and context in large-scale public debate needs the stimulus of urgent social needs, such as Vietnam deaths for the US or France, or for the latter the bloody campaign for Algérie Française. Do you really think many are going to read the Minsk agreements and try to put even them in context ?
I think that we both have good points to make, but at different levels. Of course you are right that there is dissent within certain parameters, and I am right that the overall framework is so rigid as to be virtually impossible to bend. I'm more bothered about the latter because I am deeply concerned that the UK has been on the wrong track for at least the last four hundred years, and given that we are coming to the end of a long cycle of Western dominance it is a particularly bad time to be intransigent! Failure to change course in the next few years is going to be catastrophic for our prosperity, but of course nothing is going to change.
Speaking as an American, I do not think that the current ruling elites have any goals what so ever, but wealth, power, and prestige or status, with the needs or desires of the vast majority of Americans, say over 90%, meaning nothing.
Since it is corruption, incompetence, and looting, all the way down, with the various cabals fighting for their scraps, the government's ability to do anything has almost evaporated. This means there cannot be any long term planning or goals excepting to keep the grift operating, ensure that you have one of the chairs when the music stops, and to keep the average mark (or American) down and under control. These elites are trying to create chaos to loot, but not too much that they cannot win the competition and survive. The existence of the American mililtary requires at least a semi functional country as well. They seem to be unable to see that there is growing pushback from the immiserated population, which in the United States is heavily armed, plus several oncoming world wide disasters of the kind that tend to end not just empires, but civilizations. But their goal of a perpetual state of looting required the perpetual degradation of society, nation, country, and now civilization, which has created so much chaotic degradation, that they cannot see.
To restate this, I think that they are less Machiavellian politicians and more stupidly suicidal gangsters. Unfortunately, we all have to live, or try to at least, with their incipient suicides. I think most Americans would be okay losing this damn kakistocratic empire, which is drowning us all, if it meant we just had a functional society, or even better, a nation as rich and capable as the one that existed before the Cold War and the current empire.
This is a common theme in Aurelien's writings. I choose to attribute it not to an intent to deceive, but a product of experience having worked within the imperial blobs alongside those who really did believe what you and I consider to be "their own bullshit".
Even though I assign darker, more coherent motives to those involved at the highest levels, I always look forward to reading him.
(A particularly annoying example of this was an article on Russia/Ukraine that turned a blind eye to RAND's "unbalancing russia" paper. Ah well a difference of perspective. I'm just some random outsider anyway)
I was at some pains to distinguish between genuine, complex and detailed strategies on the one hand, and hopes, aspirations, and mere fantasies on the other. During the Cold War there were various political figures (mostly, but not exclusively) in the US, advocating a conflictual policy with Russia. On some occasions, and for periods of time, these groups managed to seize control at least partly of western policy, and do various things.Later, they were replaced by others. All you can say is that there was a general climate of hostility against the Soviet Union, but no consistent policy.
The same applied after 1989, and especially after 2000. There was historic suspicion of Russia, and a shambolic policy of NATO enlargement that was never seriously thought through. But at the same time there were closer economic and political relations, and the French were even selling a couple of naval vessels to the Russians in 2014. NATO was almost exclusively occupied with its own survival, with expanding and finding new roles, with Bosnia and then with Afghanistan.
Now of course governments don't say this. In speeches and documents (I've written some) all governments claim to have strategies and policies over the long term ("it has been our consistent policy over many years ...") rather than admitting the truth, which is that most government activity is reactive and confused. There's a whole branch of rhetoric dedicated to trying to pretend that the sudden reversal of policy you've just undertaken is in fact consistent with what you were doing before. But nobody believes this. Sometimes governments actually produce "strategies" in the form of big thick books, soon enough replaced by other big thick books saying different things. Likewise, high-level officials often claim (and may genuinely believe) that they are pursuing consistent strategies rather than running from crisis to crisis. But there's seldom much to it: I recall a senior British diplomat being asked many years ago what British security strategy was. "Well, it's based around our membership of NATO" was the response, and that was basically all we got
So proponents of the belief that, for example, there was a long-term strategy to provoke war with Russia, rather than a criminally inept series of misjudgments, have to postulate the existence of a John Buchan-like cabal of powerful decision-makers with a secret long-term plan and massive resources: a stereotype that's existed for several hundred years in popular culture, under different names. And some of these people make decisions, write articles, give speeches etc. when they are able to do so. But this is not a plan any more than getting drunk each weekend is a plan:it's just a habit. Such people can influence policy from time to time, but, if there had ever been a consistent plan for war with Russia using Ukraine, they would have maintained a large western military industrial complex, continued to have large military forces in Europe, developed weapons and doctrine suitable for high-intensity land war in Europe, and massive stocks of materiel to go with them. They would also have paid very close attention to developments in Russian military technology, and avoided any economic dependence on Russia . They did none of these things, and so were almost comically unprepared for the crisis when it came, even if it was the realisation of the fantasies of a certain number of people.
Just a word on the RAND paper, which has confused many people. It was written in 2018: we don't now who it was intended for, who read it or if it had any influence. But what's obvious is that it is recommending a series of actions which were NOT being done at that point, otherwise there would have been no point in. producing the paper. Hey, here's some good ideas for over-extending Russia that haven't been tried. What about Ukraine? Absent a time machine, a 2018 report whose ideas may or may not have been influential, cannot be a description of policy before the Report was even written. Once you understand this, things fall into place.
Sadly, I don't have time to write a full critique of your comment, but there is one point that I want to pick up on. You say that if the West had been serious about pursuing a war with Russia using Ukraine, they would have been more assiduous about gathering intelligence about what the Russians were up to, and more careful to preserve their own industrial capacity. However, this kind of comment betrays the prejudice of the rational person who cannot grasp the irrationality and incompetence of others.
Let us address the intelligence problem first. If you listen to experts on US intelligence, such as Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, they all agree that there has been a serious deterioration in the quality of intelligence in the last decades, partly due to the politicisation of the services, and partly due to the practice of farming out intelligence gathering to parties with every incentive to lie. So the notion that the US has even been capable of gathering useful intelligence about Russia contains many unfounded assumptions which are negated by the facts on the ground. The fact is that the CIA has farmed out its intelligence gathering to the SBU, and published as gospel every garbage report they produced. In other words, there has been no competent intelligence throughout the whole operation.
Secondly, if you study the history of WW2, you will note that Hitler made exactly the same mistakes with regard to Russia as the US and its allies have made in the last years - consistently underestimating and belittling Russia, and expecting it to cave in response to Western pressure. Indeed, it is well understood that the Western plan was to quickly collapse the Russian economy with sanctions, and force it to capitulate on Western terms. There was never any thought that a long war would result, just as Hitler assumed that he would 'kick in the door' and that the USSR would collapse. I and others would argue that the similarities between Hitler and the current anti-Russian front are not merely cosmetic - they are both based on deeply seated, anti-Slavic prejudices, that have found their most recent manifestation in the Western-backed ideology that Ukrainians are not really Slavs that should ally with their brother Russians, but descendants of Germanic people who belong with the West. There is plenty of NATO-funded Ukrainian propaganda in Ukrainian schools, pushing this kind of deeply unpleasant, racially motivated garbage. One does not have to go to Ukraine to find this kind of visceral hatred of Russians, either - sometimes the mask slips, and it is apparent in the speeches of Western politicians, too.
Thirdly, it is true that a rational power would have made a better fist of preparing for a land war with Russia. But again, your arguments are faulty. You imply that NATO did not invest enough money in the prospective war with Russia, and therefore was not serious. However, NATO has invested a great deal in weapons, and in particular in arming and training their proxy army in Ukraine. It has poured vast sums into doing both of those things., both before the war, and after it started. We should not forget that the Ukrainian army was the largest in Europe apart from the Russian army, at the beginning of 2022, and every cent came from NATO. It was just unfortunate for NATO that all the training in the world would not be able to compensate for the relative weakness in Ukrainian artillery, or that its miracle weapons turned out to be over-hyped, fragile and ineffective against the new battle realities of drone warfare, hypersonic weapons and sophisticated air defence. Warfare has changed irrevocably, and a NATO which only knows COINTEL techniques, and has always relied heavily on air superiority which they no longer have, has proved woefully unprepared for it. It has not helped that NATO and Ukraine have been more focused on winning the propaganda war than the war on the battlefield, and have consistently made terrible decisions, in order to win empty PR victories - decisions that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, quite unnecessarily. There are so many examples of this that one is spoilt for choice, but a good example is sending waves of men to have their legs blown off running through mine-infested terrain, in a vain attempt to storm defensive lines during the recent 'counter-offensive'.
Lastly, you refer to the failure to build up the military industrial capacity of the West as proof that the West were not serious about war. Again, you are assuming a level of understanding amongst Western politicians that plainly does not exist. All the policy papers written by Western military strategists in recent decades have assumed that the age of industrial warfare was over, and that the limited production capacities in the West were irrelevant. Western politicians are not industrialists, scientists or engineers who understand the exigencies of turning out large quantities of ammunition at short order. Very few of them have any experience in these fields in a civil capacity, let alone in a military one. A few (more honest) Western generals have even admitted that they now realise that all their assumptions about the future of warfare were mistaken. It would be an even greater mistake not to take these admissions at face value.
I don't recognise the picture you paint of a West that blundered its way into a conflict that it did not plan for. It is belied by every single fact available. I'm really trying to find something, anything, that would support your argument, but I can't think of a single thing. It seems to me that your argument boils down to a prejudice that a serious West could not possibly have made so many mistakes, so if the West failed, it must have been because it wasn't serious. But if we are going to analyse policy, those kind of assumptions simply won't do. There is all the difference in the world between a West that has got itself into a mess through a series of unhappy accidents, and a West that has got itself into a mess because its malevolence has completely outstripped its competence. We are definitely talking about the latter, and the evidence for that is all about us.
I think you are getting at the distinction between "strategy" and "fantasy" that Aurelien was making. Rational and competent people do the former. Lunatics drunk on sense of their omnipotence and omniscience do the latter. We don't have the former in the West. We have some people who fancy themselves visionaries and leaders who fall into the latter. Then we have a bunch of hangers on who don't think to get involved in strategy-building because they are lazy and incompetent, doing so is bad for their careers, or they have no means to affect policy anyway so they don't bother--or many other reasons. The lunatics may engage in "planning": they typically scheme about how to eliminate the presumed evildoers who maliciously get in the way of their grand plans that would stand as the testiment to their genius and greatness, thinking that everything will go their way when their "enemies" are gone. These plans may even be ingenius in their limited scope. But they invariably rest on myopia and narcissism. The hangers on, even if they are actually sonewhat competent don't defy them because there's nothing to be gained from it. Maybe for the good of the nation, the world, and the world? Well, then we return to another running theme that Aurelien has written extensively on: the modern "Liberal" world has only individuals working for their own gains. They have no nation, they don't care for the world, and they are not really human.
So, in a sense, we might be seeing something even greater: the Western Liberal world of "rational" self serving individualists collapsing under its own internal contradictions.
I totally agree with your reasoning as to why Aurelien persists with his rose-tinted view of Western elite motivations. It reminds me of the Straussian tripartite division of society - the drones at the bottom, the cognoscenti at the top who perpetrate and understand the nature of the 'noble lies', and the gentlemen who are conned into supporting or giving credence to those lies by virtue of their naivety and idealism. The lies always exist as cover for the lust for power and wealth that is the perennial truth of the psychopath class. Of course, it is more complicated that that (there are always gradations, and the icy rationality of Brzezinski is not at all the same as the rampant narcissism of Hillary Clinton). Thus, there may be members of the elite who become so embroiled in the noble lies that they come to half-believe them themselves, meaning that there is less of a distinction between the elites and the gentlemen. Then the former's stated motivations might therefore pass as genuine, to commentators. Yet there are so many sources now which belie the public justifications that one would have to be wilfully blind to ignore them - the RAND paper you mentioned being one of them. But people are wilfully blind, because it is just too frightening for people to grasp that other people really don't think like them, and that those others would shoot them in a heartbeat if it gave them some advantage.
I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses at all. I think he’s clear that he has a low opinion of their ability to think so clearly and have, rational long term-goals with serious plans for implementation.
They keep and foment conflicts not as a part of a long term and interlocking plan, but for the sake of doing something. They can keep them simmering and then sometimes grab the opportunity to escalate when the conductions are right. But they always fail to capitalize on the escalation in the grand scheme. Because they don’t have an actual plan. It’s more banal than good and evil; it’s a matter of mere competence.
Absolutely agree. As you say, having a long-term plan does not mean that all those who execute it fully understand it, or know about it, or can deliver it with any competence. Moreover, just because there is a long-term plan it doesn't make it rational. In any case, we should define 'rational'. Some would argue that it is perfectly rational to plot the destruction of potential rivals, whilst others would disagree. Going back to the notion of a long-term plan, it seems to me wilfully perverse not to see the long-term plan in the maintenance of an empire, for example, or the maintenance of alliances. If we can acknowledge the hand of planning in such acts, why do we believe that nations have suddenly become averse to planning when it comes to weakening their enemies?
"The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now."
I think you underestimate the stupidity of Joe Biden.
About Russia, it is baffling that most people don't understand tha Putin, actually, was the Pro-West guy in Russian politics. That bridge has be burn however.
It is hilarious, a stronger, united Russia is going to emerge from the stupid attempts to weaken it with the ukraine.
The claim that there is no long-term strategic political goal, nor a flexible means of achieving it, in the Zionist Project seems to me to be willfully blind. On too many occasions to count, the leaders of the state of Israel have explicitly stated that their long-term goal is the expulsion of all non-Jews, specifically Arab Muslims, from the historic lands of Biblical Israel (or Judea and Samaria, if you like).
The government has agreed to a UN partition, it has negotiated a Palestinian Authority, it has promised no longer to allow settlers on Palestinian lands, in every case failing to fulfill the promises, in service of the longterm goal, as articulated -- exclusive control of historic Israel.
You could call it, in fact, a striking example of just what Aurelian is asking for in terms of the use of military force toward a political endpoint.
thank you for this article and of course for all the previous ones. The combination of thoughtful analysis and irony that does not degenerate into sarcasm makes reading your articles a pleasure and sometimes an enlightenment. Reading them, one can experience the useful function of humour in helping to deal with challenging situations. If I may use this expression "a challenging situation" to describe a geopolitical crisis and an "on the brink of World War III" feeling. I would like to share a quote from this novel with you in the context of this "before the war" feeling translated from German.
...When the war begins, you can know that, but when does the pre-war begin? If there were rules about that, you'd have to pass them on. In clay, buried in stone, handed down. What would it say? It would say, among other things: "Do not be deceived by your own."
Can I ask you for reading recommendations? You keep mentioning Derrida and Foucault. Perhaps you could share with your readers a list of five or ten books or articles that you found particularly enlightening? A bit The Economist slightly primitive style of top ten or top five lists of all sorts, a simplification of over-complex reality. Still, with all the limitations, I think many readers would be very grateful for such a recommendation from you. May be in your next article.
The wanton slaughter of Jews by Hamas and the celebration of that slaughter by the people of Gaza leaves me in no doubt that the Palestinians want to exterminate the Jews in their midst. Israel responds harshly to terrorist attacks and to invaders. In 1948, Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state. They lost. They also lost in 1956, 1967, and 1973. The 1982 and 2006 Lebanon wars, precipitated by terrorist attacks on Israel, were inconclusive. The Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations in 1948 so they became Judenrein. I use the term to remind people that those who want to exterminate Jews are following in the footsteps of the Nazis. Hamas' charter quotes the prophet in its call to Jihad against the Zionists.
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Since Muslims believe the Koran is the word of God revealed to Muhammed then everything in it is true. Some also believe the Hadith have the same status although there is dispute as to which Hadith are authentic (i.e. an actual report of the words or actions of Muhammed), good (i.e likely to be true) or weak. That being said, the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk, evidently take the exhortations in their holy texts to kill Jews quite literally.
Israel, the West Bank and Gaza was not owned by the so-called Palestinian people. They were part of the Ottoman empire for centuries and ceded to the British when Turkey lost WW1. Gaza was ruled by Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Israel occupied it after the 1967 war and withdrew in 2007. Arafat himself was born in Egypt. He founded Fatah which aimed to remove Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state.
Israel has taken land since 1948, but only after all-out war was declared against it. The losers in WW1 and WW2 all lost territory, That's what happens in war. Ukraine is going to lose a lot of territory to Russia and it will never be returned, at least while NATO exists.
I referred to Mann's hocky stick since you repeated the main claim of its creators; that the warming during the industrial era is rapid and unprecedented. Interestingly, Mark Steyn called the hocky stick fraudulent and Mann sued him for libel. After a decade, the case has finally come to trial before a DC jury. Which means, since DC juries are 90% Democrats, Mann will probably win and the case will be appealed to SCOTUS.
The IPCC, in its third review said "The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year." That statement was based solely on Mann's hocky stick.
Mark Steyn wrote a book that has chapters written by eminent scientists that all debunk Mann's hocky stick.
1. Combining temperature records derived from proxy records (tree rings) with actual temperature data.
2. Using dubious statistical methods that always yield a hocky stick shape.
3. Using an incredibly small cherry-picked set of trees as his dataset.
Steyn reports:
"I wonder how many of those who regard it as an authoritative graph of global climate across the centuries are aware that its hockey-stick shape for the entire hemisphere depends on two clumps of trees: some California bristlecones, and some cedars from the Gaspé Peninsula - or rather, for the years up to 1421, just one cedar from the Gaspé Peninsula."
Did you know that? Those few trees were all it took for Mann to eliminate the MWP and LIA from the climate record.
Mann did release his code and data in 2006, long after the damage had been done.
The placement of weather stations by urban heat sinks has an impact on the temperatures being recorded, This was verified experimentally.
I checked your links supporting Mann. When I see "New Scientist", "Forbes", "BBC", "Reuters" etc in the URL I know I'm going to a hard-left source. I'd rather listen to actual scientists, including those who contributed essays to Steyn's book. For example,
PROFESSOR WILLIAM HAPPER, PHD Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a member of the US Government’s group of independent scientific advisors JASON, for whom he pioneered the development of adaptive optics. Recipient of the Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, the Herbert P Broida Prize, and a Thomas Alva Edison patent award. Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association
PROFESSOR DAVID R LEGATES, PHD Professor of Geography and former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware. Former Delaware State Climatologist, Coordinator of the Delaware Geographic Alliance and Associate Director of the Delaware Space Grant Consortium. Author of peer-reviewed papers published in The International Journal of Climatology, The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and other journals.
PROFESSOR IVAR GIAEVER, PHD Winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson, “for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids”. Professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and Professor Emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Recipient of the Oliver E Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Physical Society and the Zworykin Award from the National Academy of Engineering. Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
PROFESSOR RICHARD MULLER, PHD Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics. Founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Co-creator of accelerator mass spectrometry and one of the first scientists to measure anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Proponent of the Nemesis hypothesis, which argues that the Sun could have a so far undetected dwarf star. Recipient of the Alan T Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation.
Even Mann's former allies are sick of him and his hocky stick. They include:
PROFESSOR KEITH BRIFFA, PHD Emeritus Professor and former Deputy Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Lead author of Chapter Six (Paleoclimatology) of Working Group I of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) Former associate editor of Boreas, Dendrochronologia and Holocene.
PROFESSOR PHIL JONES, PHD Director of the Climatic Research Unit and Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. Member of the editorial board of Climatic Change and formerly of The International Journal of Climatology. Recipient of the Royal Meteorological Scociety’s Mill Prize, the World Meteorological Organization’s Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award, and the European Geosciences Union’s Oeschger Medal.
Thank you, very thought-provoking. War is a ghastly thing, but seems humans drift into it - or are drifted - the famous Göring point of "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
So, here we are, facing wars, and as usual, attackers are unjust (terrorists to boot!), and peacemakers are Putin-lovers or antisemites. Earlier Aurelien reviewed styles of war, and the current illusion about the rules of war. Ultimately war is about survival for those who have the bad fortune to end up in it. And obviously, being told we are being attacked is as good as the real thing, so modern war has the football-fan aspect to it in addition to actual war. Fear-reflexes are definitely the deepest programming of all living creatures, so some really effective de- or re-programming is required. Religions have been maybe partly attempts to re-program, but have ended up being just more fodder for the fear-hate-war cycle. It is maybe one of the core questions we are here for: can we live together, as couples, families, tribes, races, nations, religions, parties etc? Can there be a we even when there is difference? A we without the demand of sameness? What would it take, to be able to live as different as we are, without collapsing into demands of sameness?
IMO, FWIW, this is excellent, accurate sitrep. I have the feeling, as always, that our host pulls a punch or three right at the end, rather as a diplomat's habit. However, the political-military analysis of both Ukraine and Israel is, IMO, FWIW, on target.
One low-importance quibble: Russia is not in war condition in Ukraine, only SMO condition. War condition would look very differently from what we see today. I would expect Russian war condition to include Zircon / Kinzhal / Sarmat salvos visiting the US Capitol, the UK Parliament, and the DE Bundestag, for starters, since those are the "decision-making centers" of The USofA, The UK, and Germany. (They write the checks.) In addition, Russia forms her border against the western peninsula of Eurasia on the line of The Elbe.
I submit that the punch pulled by our host is that it's over for Israel as a nation state and for The USofA as dominant in the community of nations. "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." We're in that territory now, with both feet walking forward.
I so enjoy these pieces, Aurelien - thank you! I have the sense of peering over the shoulder of one who has worked through the endless nitty gritty of all these fine-sounding rhetorical flourishes by politicians, pointing out the endless flaws and gaps and inconsistencies that are so obvious as soon as actual thought and experience are applied. For those of us upon whom the rhetoric has been poured without respite, with little access to reality, your pieces are a revelation and a great satisfaction.
Thank you for articulating a justification for my feeling of hopelessness over U.S. foreign policy.
Is the U.S. goal to drive Gaza's medical services back to the Middle Ages? Inflicting cholera is the point?
Then Ukraine, what was the wet dream that motivated both burning money and depleting military stockpiles? The AFU marching on Moscow? Was there really belief that NATO's ISR would knuckle under Russia? Because if there was a remote chance that could occur, then those NATO AWAC planes are gonners, along with the surveillance satellites.
We have leaders who discount the simple constraint of logistics much less have any consideration of those of us who must suffer their ill considered plans. We are ruled by fools!
<<...This applies equally to the speculation about mediation. OK, between who and whom? What would the purpose of the mediation be? >>
Mediation between the elected representative bodies of the people of Gaza/occupied territories and the Israeli government
The purpose of the mediation is to 1) stop Israel from mass murdering civilians via bombing 2) stop Israel from murdering civilians when they're not actively bombing 3) force Israel to open border crossings for FUEL, FOOD and WATER, 3) decide via mediation whether Israel may continue as a country at all, and if yes, that its nukes be removed and its military severely reduced or eliminated, 4) that the people of Gaza and the occupied territories are given back a significant portion of the land that was stolen from them by Israel, and THEY decide whether it would be better to allow Israel to remain (if it then had to play by normal rules) or to evict them completely. I can't imagine many Israelis remaining once their enormous security blanket is removed.
I must admit, the fact that you are not harping about morality and rights is refreshing.
I probably need to think much more about your comments but it seems that you are ignoring the elephant in the room. Does the theory of “Umm Al Qura” mean anything to you? Can you see Iran's role, not only in the current conflict with Hamas but also in an attempt to dominate the whole area by gaining control of weakened populations (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen), and if they are not weak at the moment Iran has time and money to infiltrate and weaken then from within. So Israel's (and the US) problem is not with Hamas in Gaza, but how to stop that project from erasing it from the map.
The real fight is in the north (both Lebanon and Syria and Iraqis crossing the border to Syria), and the big question is when it will erupt: now, in spite of the US substantial military presence, or later, in a couple of years. I don't think Israel planned any of those conflicts and now it is just fighting to survive, literally. Though a fight for survival doesn't mean just staving the enemy from your border. It could mean delivering a very painful blow that will buy you many years of quiet. Remember that in the case of Lebanon, Israel got a relatively quiet border for 17 years.
* There are a few good and informative video presentations about the theory of “Umm Al Qura” on this channel https://www.youtube.com/@AlwataniaTV
The only rational long-term goal for both sides -- both of which want ALL of Palestine, from the river to the sea -- is to make life so unpleasant for the population of the other side that most of them emigrate, leaving too few people behind to sustain the struggle. The Israelis are somewhat more restrained by their culture from the more overt methods of terror, but in partial compentation, have more force at their disposal when they can use it.
"The Israelis are somewhat more restrained by their culture from the more overt methods of terror", what an astonishingly ahistorical and utterly incorrect statement! Please go do some reading of the terror attacks of the Stern Gang and Irgun - for example the King David Hotel terrorist attack, and of course the terror ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, and the everyday terrorization of the Palestinian people (shooting children, raping women, torturing etc.). The Israelis have outdone the Palestinians in terrorism many times over, and certainly have no cultural restraints. You sound like some British establishment type complaining about the lack of proper culture and restraints of the Mau Mau in Imperial Kenya.
Nobody wants the people of Gaza. The Egyptians certainly don't. The Jordanians don't. Remember Black September when Jordan fought a war against Arafat's PLO and drove them out of Jordan in 1970. Iran doesn't want a bunch of trouble-making Sunnis in its own backyard.
Maybe Syria and Lebanon might take them in, although that would stretch their limited resource..
The Israelis aren't going anywhere. The recent outpouring of anti-Semitism around the world following the Hamas attack on Israel is proof to them that they need their homeland, a region occupied by Jews for thousands of years. They lived alongside Muslims and Christians relatively peacefully even under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
What Aurelian didn't cover is the fact that Gaza depends on Israel for water, electricity and other goods and services.
Israel controls Gaza's northern and eastern borders. Egypt guards Gaza's Southern border with a wall that goes deep underground and Egypt does not want anybody from Gaza moving into Egypt. El-Sisi and the Egyptian people hate the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an offshoot of the organization. Hamas used the aid money it received from a gullible world to build weapons and tunnels and train its fighters. What it did not do is build any infrastructure to supply electricity and water so it is dependent on Israel for both. Israel can deprive Gaza of electricity indefinitely and limit the supply of water. So, one option is a blockade of Gaza until such time as Hamas is removed by the people of Gaza. That could be done through an election and holding an election could be a condition for restoring electricity and water. The last election in Gaza pitted Hamas against the PLO. While the PLO is no friend of Israel, it appears to have accepted that Israel isn't going anywhere and would likely win such an election.
Nobody wants to facilitate the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine, so awful for the Israelis that the Palestinians and their allies wont make the theft of their land easy. The West is growing relatively weaker vs. the Rest, the Arab world much stronger vs. Israel. The Israeli's will be going somewhere, its just a matter of time given how much hatred they have stored in the Arab world. Their dreams of "Brooklyn by the Mediterranean" will turn into a nightmare, with the more skilled and multi-passported finding other places to live as things get continuously worse. They will only have their ethnic cleansing apartheid selves to blame.
There never was a Palestine as a country or a people. Before WW1, it was a region under the control of the Ottoman empire. Jews, Muslims and Christians all lived there. After WW1, it became a British Protectorate. After WW2, the UN divided the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab countries reacted by expelling all Jews from their countries. The Jews fled, many to Israel, leaving their homes and property behind.. The Arab countries told the Muslims to leave Israel and return after the Jews had been exterminated. The Arab countries then launched a war against Israel and lost. The Arabs who left ended up in refugee camps. As the King of Jordan said, if the Arabs had accepted a two state solution in 1948, they would have had their own country and peace.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is an antisemitic lie pushed by terrorist organizations, such as the PLO and Hamas, and parroted by their useful idiots in the West. In reality, Israel has a large Muslim population and they enjoy the same rights as other Israelis. They can vote and they have representation in the Knesset. The only differences between Jews and Muslims in Israel is that Jews must serve in the military and Muslims can opt out.
You are wrong about apartheid being an anti-semitic lie, read Yesh Din or B'Tselem, Amnesty International &c. There is indeed a considerable Arab (not all Muslim) population in Israel, and they do not have equal rights with Jewish Israelis. You may also find helpful such summaries such as Wikipedia on apartheid in Israel. I fear you are wilfully misleading your audience or you are lamentably ignorant.
Your sources are notorious for promoting leftist propaganda. Wikipedia cannot be trusted on any controversial topic, be it climate science, genders studies or politics, A veritable army of leftists work constantly to remove any entry that doesn't comport with their ideology. My wife has a Wikipedia entry which grossly misrepresents her. It is impossible to fix it; as soon as you try, someone switches it back. Amnesty International is a hard left organization that always sides against Israel and the US.
During the Apartheid era in South Africa, not one person of color was in the government, mostly because they weren't allowed to vote. In Israel today, there are Arabs in the Knesset and Arabs are allowed to vote. Currently there are 10/120 Arabs in the 23rd Knesset, For reasons that have mothing to do with apartheid, that number dropped from 17 in 2020.
I am sorry you mistrust the hard left, if you think that consists of such as Amnesty - which I would remind you is an organisation centred on what is legal and does not "take sides" against a country, only against aspects of that country's behaviour if thought necessary. Of course you may feel that is going too far, in which case I hate to think how you must view the United Nations.
In Israel some Arabs only are allowed to vote, and as you note there are now only 10 Arab MKs, less than 10% of members,while Arab citizens form something over 20% of the population. The fall in representation has nothing to do with apartheid, of course. And you may be unaware of the 2018 Nation State law which describes Israel as the natino-sate of the Jewish people, which seems to leave little room for Druze, Arabs or anyone else. And I am not going to detail the countless petty but important persecutions of where one may live, what one may do, &c if one is Arab, but I am sure you will be delighted to rehearse them for me, to show that Arabs really are equal in Israel.
c_ I regret that your wife's Wikipedia entry is being assailed by malicious untruth tellers. Do give me a link so that I can check this out. Meanwhile your criticism of Wikipedia on, e.g. climate science is misplaced. I am merely a statistician, but I cannot find anything in the English-language article with which strongly to disagree, including on climate change - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
Another detailed and pretty extensive write up posing many questions that almost no one in the media is asking. I am continually dismayed at the way our major Western public facing media trivialize almost everything. I subscribe to a number of geopolitical advisory services and most are posing similar questions about what the Israelis are "saying" they will do and what may be going on behind the scenes. Current split is 50% seeing an Israeli Gaza incursion with the other half seeing no incursion and / or an attack on Hezbollah. All see this as a lost cause for everyone involved, especially Hamas. I can only assume Hamas leadership are lacking in intelligence (brain wise) and compassion for the individuals in Gaza who are bearing the brunt of this response OR they are so religiously indoctrinated with hatred, that neither their own lives, nor that of their fellow Gazans, matter one jot.
I also notice how the Ukraine conflict has (almost) slipped to page 3 behind Gaza and the ongoing Republican "farce" in the House. Yet Russian attacks / probing seem to be occurring all along the entire line of control (... er sorry, different part of the world) in the Donbas region. This feels like a last fling there before something bigger, but we shall soon find out. Finally I await with interest the outcome of the Biden Administration $100 billion to Ukraine / Israel. Without that support both Ukraine and Israel are in deep trouble.....
It is interesting to read this now the fighting has continued well over 120 days. I think tactically the Israeli military is overachieving compared to this and other commentators though of at the time. Their ability to identify and dismantle Hamas' tunnel network and kill/capture their operatives without maximal Israeli casualties has been very impressive. Strategically though people are now acknowledging that there is a no "Day After" plan because the Israeli government is so divided and many of the strategic problems existing pre-October 7 still exist and have been exacerbated. The linking of Saudi recognition of Israel, Arab-funded reconstruction of Gaza, and a Palestinian State all seem the most sensible steps. However the devil will be in the details specifically who owns Jerusalem.
It is hardly contentious now to argue that, for many years, one of the prime strategic goals of the US has been the deliberate creation of chaos on the borders of enemies or potential enemies. It is therefore not accurate to argue that the US doesn't know what it is doing when chaos is what results. One example is the situation in Ukraine. In the twisted mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski (and that of his neocon descendants) there was a definite rationale in the infiltration of former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Ukraine and Armenia, and the attempt to do the same in the Central Asian 'stans' and Belarus (which have failed). In forcing Russia into fighting a war with fellow Slavs, the end result mattered less than the frustration of unity in the core of the Eurasian heartland, and the death of as many Slavs as possible. Your analysis assumes far too much good faith and maturity on the part of US strategists, who have always taken a scorched earth approach to the maintenance of hegemony.
Or, for that matter, having learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that nation-building is slow, expensive and hard, not to mention it quickly turns unpopular, the Empire simply turns to nation-destroying. Nation-destroying is relatively cheap, quick and politically painless.
Libya is the template here. Not Iraq.
Absolutely!
Though I agree with your central point, I've taken the view that to see the USA as a monolthic enitity likely underestimates the complexity. I view the USA's body politic more as a set of competing cabals and interests who negotiate and inch towards a policy which is neither strategic in nature nor focused on what is achievable in the outside world, but which is do-able in whatever corridors of power exist inside the USA - bearing in mind who controls the levers of power at that moment and what their domestic political interests demand. This includes real politicians, but also deep state agencies, the media and others like the MIC. Maybe hence the USA's seemingly inability to negotiate with anyone but itself? It simply tries to sell or impose its internally generated view. ??? But who the hell are you supposed to negoiate with when dealing with the USA these days?
I agree with you when it comes to the broad sweep of domestic policy, but when it comes to foreign policy there has been remarkable uniformity of intention and policy over the course of many decades. This is true across the West - whichever party gets into power, foreign policy remains broadly the same. This is precisely why the political establishment across the West has always worked hard to keep out foreign policy dissidents, such as Trump, Corbyn or the AfD, and has always shut down genuine debate at the popular level. Let the masses have their tax freezes on a pint of beer, or their new hospitals - foreign policy is too important to allow even a smidgeon of democracy.
@Anna Zimmerman
This seems a confusing description. There are already plenty of "dissidents" in the corridors of power, while you imply - though I do not believe you mean it - that Trump, Corbyn and the AfD are wrongfully excluded: well, in Corbyn's case that is of course true, but foreign policy had little to do with it.
And that is the general problem with your argument: foreign policy is not of much interest to most people in larger, secure states, and trying to run a political campaign round it is rarely successful - Brexit or Bush's war on terror are dreadful examples.
I'm sorry, who are these foreign policy 'dissidents' in the corridors of power? Can you name a single senior Conservative MP who does not parrot the received view of Russia, or genuflect to NATO, despite the fact that is in our national interests, as a small trading nation, to cultivate good relationships with all - particularly rising powers who can supply us with cheap energy and cheap products? Is there anyone in power who is honest enough to acknowledge that the fabled 'special relationship' with the US is leading Britain to sabotage any hope of decent relations with the global majority (I refuse to use the patronising and inaccurate term, 'Global South'), and exposing us to ridicule and contempt? We should make no mistake - if any MP ever dared to voice such thoughts, they would be first ostracised and then drummed out of their party. Matters are more extreme in the UK political scene, it is true, but they are certainly not much better elsewhere in the West. One could point to countless examples of dissenters being persecuted for their heretical views.
You have completely missed my point, which is that if ordinary people are not interested in foreign policy, it is largely because they have never been educated about just how crucial it is. They have never been sufficiently well-informed about global economics and politics to realise that most domestic policy is ultimately downwind of the parameters determined by foreign policy choices. It also does not help that Western elites have laboured to present their set of favoured policies as so incontrovertibly correct as to prohibit any debate. The universal tactic of recent years is to work to shut down any dissent on foreign policy before it gets going, by smearing anyone who disagrees with the received wisdom (as a 'Putin stooge' or 'terrorist apologist' or similar). In this they have been aided by the catastrophic deterioration in the quality of geopolitical information that is accessible to the average person. If one analyses foreign policy coverage in the media over the last 40-years, it has become almost completely superficial at best, and non-existent at worst. It is also devoid of the historical context that would facilitate critical reflection. Nations and their leaders are portrayed as crude caricatures, and conflicts are routinely misrepresented. The coverage of the Ukraine War, for just one example, has hit new journalistic lows, with the bulk of it being downright lies, repeatedly exposed as such as events unfold. Thus, Western readers were repeatedly told that Russia was about to run out of missiles, an assertion, based on zero evidence, that continued to be repeated ad nauseum despite being utterly disproved by events. Overall, foreign policy coverage in the West does not exist to inform, but to propagandise the prescribed collection of prejudices. There is certainly no space for nuance or self-reflection. The fact that ordinary people are not encouraged to have anything more than a Janet and John level appreciation of foreign policy is not an accident - it is the deliberate cultivation of the fallacy that we little people shouldn't worry our pretty heads about foreign policy as it doesn't concern us.
By the way, you have plainly forgotten that a British general opined to a major British newspaper that a coup would be a strong possibility if Corbyn even got into power, because of his opposition to the normal support of US-sponsored regime change and gunboat diplomacy (my words, not his, but the meaning was plain). Here is an extract from an article published in 2018 which discusses the affair:
"On May 8, the Daily Telegraph asked, “Could an Army coup remove Jeremy Corbyn—just as it almost toppled Harold Wilson?”
"Written by Paul Carter for the de facto house organ of the Conservative Party, the article makes clear that discussions on such a course of action in the event of a Labour victory under Corbyn are ongoing.
"The article begins by noting, “Only one week after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, a serving general of the Army warned of a direct and public challenge if a future Prime Minister Corbyn jeopardised the country’s security: ‘The army wouldn’t stand for it ... people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.’”
"Carter refers to an article published by the Sunday Times in September 2015, after Corbyn had routed his Blairite leadership opponent with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters. The newspaper cited an anonymous “senior serving general” that in the event of Corbyn becoming prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny.” Elements within the military would be prepared to use “whatever means possible, fair or foul,” the officer declared. He warned, “ You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident , pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”
I don't think the army were too bothered about the prospect of increased health spending and free broadband - it was Corbyn's foreign policy they disliked.
Thank you for this, er voluminous response. I think I may in my turn have expressed my myself less than clearly.
a) disagreements within the UK Foreign Office are legion, and of MPs and leader writers with the FO even more so. And you seem to have missed Brexit, which incurred a modest amount of internal disagreement in Civil Service, in political parties and their leaderships &c. But to take a couple of examples from across the ocean, you may be aware of disagreements in both Defence and State Departments with Biden's approach to Israel (just as there are widespread criticisms of von der Leyen over Israel and elsewhere, e.g. Tunisia). But back in 2020 there was an internal conflict of interest over an arms ale to Saudi Arabia (https://www.justsecurity.org/71983/a-conflict-of-interest-raises-questions-for-state-departments-top-lawyer/);
and you will be aware of disagreements between the Defence Department and the White House over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And never mind the Republicans switch from isolation to global activism and back to isolationism, just looking at the varied reaction to Trump's sorties into foreign affairs would dispel any suggestion of monolithic élites.
b) Corbyn: There have been any number of military people who at one time or another have suggested that the army should run the country. Of course in some nations with less well-developed constitutional and societal constraints, that is all too possible; but for several hundred years the UK has been fairly resistant to such dreams, despite the dislike of some in the security services for Harold Wilson for instance.
c_ On your main point, I did not dispute that foreign policy issues were kept from the public (Brexit again, or if you prefer Vietnam in both France and the US, or indeed UK imperialism generally). But, as someone remarked elsewhere in this discussion, Göring
suggested: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." ("Germany reborn", 1934 - sorry, not bothered to check the original - though also attributed to "Nuremberg Diary" by G.M. Gilbert ) While at his trial he remarked that you can manipulate whole nations with fear - which does not have to be internal state oppression, but also fear of the outsider, the other -cf. the populist claims about immigration throughout Europe for the last forty years, or America pre-WWll et al.
But that foreign policy can be extensively discussed with history and context in large-scale public debate needs the stimulus of urgent social needs, such as Vietnam deaths for the US or France, or for the latter the bloody campaign for Algérie Française. Do you really think many are going to read the Minsk agreements and try to put even them in context ?
lgerian revolt by
I think that we both have good points to make, but at different levels. Of course you are right that there is dissent within certain parameters, and I am right that the overall framework is so rigid as to be virtually impossible to bend. I'm more bothered about the latter because I am deeply concerned that the UK has been on the wrong track for at least the last four hundred years, and given that we are coming to the end of a long cycle of Western dominance it is a particularly bad time to be intransigent! Failure to change course in the next few years is going to be catastrophic for our prosperity, but of course nothing is going to change.
"foreign policy is too important to allow even a smidgeon of democracy.' and what is the explanation for that??
Perhaps I should let Anna speak for herself, but what she wrote appears to be an accurate description of the way those in charge see things.
That isn't intended as an endorsement.
Speaking as an American, I do not think that the current ruling elites have any goals what so ever, but wealth, power, and prestige or status, with the needs or desires of the vast majority of Americans, say over 90%, meaning nothing.
Since it is corruption, incompetence, and looting, all the way down, with the various cabals fighting for their scraps, the government's ability to do anything has almost evaporated. This means there cannot be any long term planning or goals excepting to keep the grift operating, ensure that you have one of the chairs when the music stops, and to keep the average mark (or American) down and under control. These elites are trying to create chaos to loot, but not too much that they cannot win the competition and survive. The existence of the American mililtary requires at least a semi functional country as well. They seem to be unable to see that there is growing pushback from the immiserated population, which in the United States is heavily armed, plus several oncoming world wide disasters of the kind that tend to end not just empires, but civilizations. But their goal of a perpetual state of looting required the perpetual degradation of society, nation, country, and now civilization, which has created so much chaotic degradation, that they cannot see.
To restate this, I think that they are less Machiavellian politicians and more stupidly suicidal gangsters. Unfortunately, we all have to live, or try to at least, with their incipient suicides. I think most Americans would be okay losing this damn kakistocratic empire, which is drowning us all, if it meant we just had a functional society, or even better, a nation as rich and capable as the one that existed before the Cold War and the current empire.
If the neocons are good at nothing else, they are very good at bureaucratic infighting.
This is a common theme in Aurelien's writings. I choose to attribute it not to an intent to deceive, but a product of experience having worked within the imperial blobs alongside those who really did believe what you and I consider to be "their own bullshit".
Even though I assign darker, more coherent motives to those involved at the highest levels, I always look forward to reading him.
(A particularly annoying example of this was an article on Russia/Ukraine that turned a blind eye to RAND's "unbalancing russia" paper. Ah well a difference of perspective. I'm just some random outsider anyway)
Let me see if I can dispel some confusion.
I was at some pains to distinguish between genuine, complex and detailed strategies on the one hand, and hopes, aspirations, and mere fantasies on the other. During the Cold War there were various political figures (mostly, but not exclusively) in the US, advocating a conflictual policy with Russia. On some occasions, and for periods of time, these groups managed to seize control at least partly of western policy, and do various things.Later, they were replaced by others. All you can say is that there was a general climate of hostility against the Soviet Union, but no consistent policy.
The same applied after 1989, and especially after 2000. There was historic suspicion of Russia, and a shambolic policy of NATO enlargement that was never seriously thought through. But at the same time there were closer economic and political relations, and the French were even selling a couple of naval vessels to the Russians in 2014. NATO was almost exclusively occupied with its own survival, with expanding and finding new roles, with Bosnia and then with Afghanistan.
Now of course governments don't say this. In speeches and documents (I've written some) all governments claim to have strategies and policies over the long term ("it has been our consistent policy over many years ...") rather than admitting the truth, which is that most government activity is reactive and confused. There's a whole branch of rhetoric dedicated to trying to pretend that the sudden reversal of policy you've just undertaken is in fact consistent with what you were doing before. But nobody believes this. Sometimes governments actually produce "strategies" in the form of big thick books, soon enough replaced by other big thick books saying different things. Likewise, high-level officials often claim (and may genuinely believe) that they are pursuing consistent strategies rather than running from crisis to crisis. But there's seldom much to it: I recall a senior British diplomat being asked many years ago what British security strategy was. "Well, it's based around our membership of NATO" was the response, and that was basically all we got
So proponents of the belief that, for example, there was a long-term strategy to provoke war with Russia, rather than a criminally inept series of misjudgments, have to postulate the existence of a John Buchan-like cabal of powerful decision-makers with a secret long-term plan and massive resources: a stereotype that's existed for several hundred years in popular culture, under different names. And some of these people make decisions, write articles, give speeches etc. when they are able to do so. But this is not a plan any more than getting drunk each weekend is a plan:it's just a habit. Such people can influence policy from time to time, but, if there had ever been a consistent plan for war with Russia using Ukraine, they would have maintained a large western military industrial complex, continued to have large military forces in Europe, developed weapons and doctrine suitable for high-intensity land war in Europe, and massive stocks of materiel to go with them. They would also have paid very close attention to developments in Russian military technology, and avoided any economic dependence on Russia . They did none of these things, and so were almost comically unprepared for the crisis when it came, even if it was the realisation of the fantasies of a certain number of people.
Just a word on the RAND paper, which has confused many people. It was written in 2018: we don't now who it was intended for, who read it or if it had any influence. But what's obvious is that it is recommending a series of actions which were NOT being done at that point, otherwise there would have been no point in. producing the paper. Hey, here's some good ideas for over-extending Russia that haven't been tried. What about Ukraine? Absent a time machine, a 2018 report whose ideas may or may not have been influential, cannot be a description of policy before the Report was even written. Once you understand this, things fall into place.
Sadly, I don't have time to write a full critique of your comment, but there is one point that I want to pick up on. You say that if the West had been serious about pursuing a war with Russia using Ukraine, they would have been more assiduous about gathering intelligence about what the Russians were up to, and more careful to preserve their own industrial capacity. However, this kind of comment betrays the prejudice of the rational person who cannot grasp the irrationality and incompetence of others.
Let us address the intelligence problem first. If you listen to experts on US intelligence, such as Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, they all agree that there has been a serious deterioration in the quality of intelligence in the last decades, partly due to the politicisation of the services, and partly due to the practice of farming out intelligence gathering to parties with every incentive to lie. So the notion that the US has even been capable of gathering useful intelligence about Russia contains many unfounded assumptions which are negated by the facts on the ground. The fact is that the CIA has farmed out its intelligence gathering to the SBU, and published as gospel every garbage report they produced. In other words, there has been no competent intelligence throughout the whole operation.
Secondly, if you study the history of WW2, you will note that Hitler made exactly the same mistakes with regard to Russia as the US and its allies have made in the last years - consistently underestimating and belittling Russia, and expecting it to cave in response to Western pressure. Indeed, it is well understood that the Western plan was to quickly collapse the Russian economy with sanctions, and force it to capitulate on Western terms. There was never any thought that a long war would result, just as Hitler assumed that he would 'kick in the door' and that the USSR would collapse. I and others would argue that the similarities between Hitler and the current anti-Russian front are not merely cosmetic - they are both based on deeply seated, anti-Slavic prejudices, that have found their most recent manifestation in the Western-backed ideology that Ukrainians are not really Slavs that should ally with their brother Russians, but descendants of Germanic people who belong with the West. There is plenty of NATO-funded Ukrainian propaganda in Ukrainian schools, pushing this kind of deeply unpleasant, racially motivated garbage. One does not have to go to Ukraine to find this kind of visceral hatred of Russians, either - sometimes the mask slips, and it is apparent in the speeches of Western politicians, too.
Thirdly, it is true that a rational power would have made a better fist of preparing for a land war with Russia. But again, your arguments are faulty. You imply that NATO did not invest enough money in the prospective war with Russia, and therefore was not serious. However, NATO has invested a great deal in weapons, and in particular in arming and training their proxy army in Ukraine. It has poured vast sums into doing both of those things., both before the war, and after it started. We should not forget that the Ukrainian army was the largest in Europe apart from the Russian army, at the beginning of 2022, and every cent came from NATO. It was just unfortunate for NATO that all the training in the world would not be able to compensate for the relative weakness in Ukrainian artillery, or that its miracle weapons turned out to be over-hyped, fragile and ineffective against the new battle realities of drone warfare, hypersonic weapons and sophisticated air defence. Warfare has changed irrevocably, and a NATO which only knows COINTEL techniques, and has always relied heavily on air superiority which they no longer have, has proved woefully unprepared for it. It has not helped that NATO and Ukraine have been more focused on winning the propaganda war than the war on the battlefield, and have consistently made terrible decisions, in order to win empty PR victories - decisions that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, quite unnecessarily. There are so many examples of this that one is spoilt for choice, but a good example is sending waves of men to have their legs blown off running through mine-infested terrain, in a vain attempt to storm defensive lines during the recent 'counter-offensive'.
Lastly, you refer to the failure to build up the military industrial capacity of the West as proof that the West were not serious about war. Again, you are assuming a level of understanding amongst Western politicians that plainly does not exist. All the policy papers written by Western military strategists in recent decades have assumed that the age of industrial warfare was over, and that the limited production capacities in the West were irrelevant. Western politicians are not industrialists, scientists or engineers who understand the exigencies of turning out large quantities of ammunition at short order. Very few of them have any experience in these fields in a civil capacity, let alone in a military one. A few (more honest) Western generals have even admitted that they now realise that all their assumptions about the future of warfare were mistaken. It would be an even greater mistake not to take these admissions at face value.
I don't recognise the picture you paint of a West that blundered its way into a conflict that it did not plan for. It is belied by every single fact available. I'm really trying to find something, anything, that would support your argument, but I can't think of a single thing. It seems to me that your argument boils down to a prejudice that a serious West could not possibly have made so many mistakes, so if the West failed, it must have been because it wasn't serious. But if we are going to analyse policy, those kind of assumptions simply won't do. There is all the difference in the world between a West that has got itself into a mess through a series of unhappy accidents, and a West that has got itself into a mess because its malevolence has completely outstripped its competence. We are definitely talking about the latter, and the evidence for that is all about us.
"... a West that has got itself into a mess because its malevolence has completely outstripped its competence. "
well said! -a.v.
I think you are getting at the distinction between "strategy" and "fantasy" that Aurelien was making. Rational and competent people do the former. Lunatics drunk on sense of their omnipotence and omniscience do the latter. We don't have the former in the West. We have some people who fancy themselves visionaries and leaders who fall into the latter. Then we have a bunch of hangers on who don't think to get involved in strategy-building because they are lazy and incompetent, doing so is bad for their careers, or they have no means to affect policy anyway so they don't bother--or many other reasons. The lunatics may engage in "planning": they typically scheme about how to eliminate the presumed evildoers who maliciously get in the way of their grand plans that would stand as the testiment to their genius and greatness, thinking that everything will go their way when their "enemies" are gone. These plans may even be ingenius in their limited scope. But they invariably rest on myopia and narcissism. The hangers on, even if they are actually sonewhat competent don't defy them because there's nothing to be gained from it. Maybe for the good of the nation, the world, and the world? Well, then we return to another running theme that Aurelien has written extensively on: the modern "Liberal" world has only individuals working for their own gains. They have no nation, they don't care for the world, and they are not really human.
So, in a sense, we might be seeing something even greater: the Western Liberal world of "rational" self serving individualists collapsing under its own internal contradictions.
Just like cold war was won without major war, isn't it possible to weaken russia without massive weaponry?
Wasn't Ukraine in sights once all the countries around it were in NATO/EU?
Also who wins a contest between a bunch of rich and powerful nations and russia, just like the cold war was , and russia is less power than USSR?
Thank you for this.
I totally agree with your reasoning as to why Aurelien persists with his rose-tinted view of Western elite motivations. It reminds me of the Straussian tripartite division of society - the drones at the bottom, the cognoscenti at the top who perpetrate and understand the nature of the 'noble lies', and the gentlemen who are conned into supporting or giving credence to those lies by virtue of their naivety and idealism. The lies always exist as cover for the lust for power and wealth that is the perennial truth of the psychopath class. Of course, it is more complicated that that (there are always gradations, and the icy rationality of Brzezinski is not at all the same as the rampant narcissism of Hillary Clinton). Thus, there may be members of the elite who become so embroiled in the noble lies that they come to half-believe them themselves, meaning that there is less of a distinction between the elites and the gentlemen. Then the former's stated motivations might therefore pass as genuine, to commentators. Yet there are so many sources now which belie the public justifications that one would have to be wilfully blind to ignore them - the RAND paper you mentioned being one of them. But people are wilfully blind, because it is just too frightening for people to grasp that other people really don't think like them, and that those others would shoot them in a heartbeat if it gave them some advantage.
I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses at all. I think he’s clear that he has a low opinion of their ability to think so clearly and have, rational long term-goals with serious plans for implementation.
They keep and foment conflicts not as a part of a long term and interlocking plan, but for the sake of doing something. They can keep them simmering and then sometimes grab the opportunity to escalate when the conductions are right. But they always fail to capitalize on the escalation in the grand scheme. Because they don’t have an actual plan. It’s more banal than good and evil; it’s a matter of mere competence.
I should say that i dont find the two explanations mutually exclusive. To me it seems like a bit of grand evil design and a lot of resultant flailing.
Absolutely agree. As you say, having a long-term plan does not mean that all those who execute it fully understand it, or know about it, or can deliver it with any competence. Moreover, just because there is a long-term plan it doesn't make it rational. In any case, we should define 'rational'. Some would argue that it is perfectly rational to plot the destruction of potential rivals, whilst others would disagree. Going back to the notion of a long-term plan, it seems to me wilfully perverse not to see the long-term plan in the maintenance of an empire, for example, or the maintenance of alliances. If we can acknowledge the hand of planning in such acts, why do we believe that nations have suddenly become averse to planning when it comes to weakening their enemies?
Completely agree I find Aurelien's defense of western elites to be the biggest hole in his reasoning. Your point about the RAND paper is spot on.
"The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now."
I think you underestimate the stupidity of Joe Biden.
About Russia, it is baffling that most people don't understand tha Putin, actually, was the Pro-West guy in Russian politics. That bridge has be burn however.
It is hilarious, a stronger, united Russia is going to emerge from the stupid attempts to weaken it with the ukraine.
So true.
The claim that there is no long-term strategic political goal, nor a flexible means of achieving it, in the Zionist Project seems to me to be willfully blind. On too many occasions to count, the leaders of the state of Israel have explicitly stated that their long-term goal is the expulsion of all non-Jews, specifically Arab Muslims, from the historic lands of Biblical Israel (or Judea and Samaria, if you like).
The government has agreed to a UN partition, it has negotiated a Palestinian Authority, it has promised no longer to allow settlers on Palestinian lands, in every case failing to fulfill the promises, in service of the longterm goal, as articulated -- exclusive control of historic Israel.
You could call it, in fact, a striking example of just what Aurelian is asking for in terms of the use of military force toward a political endpoint.
Oh, there is a strategy, all right.
Just that the West (less so, Israel) cannot say it out loud.
Outstanding piece. Well done.
Dear Aurelien,
thank you for this article and of course for all the previous ones. The combination of thoughtful analysis and irony that does not degenerate into sarcasm makes reading your articles a pleasure and sometimes an enlightenment. Reading them, one can experience the useful function of humour in helping to deal with challenging situations. If I may use this expression "a challenging situation" to describe a geopolitical crisis and an "on the brink of World War III" feeling. I would like to share a quote from this novel with you in the context of this "before the war" feeling translated from German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(novel)
...When the war begins, you can know that, but when does the pre-war begin? If there were rules about that, you'd have to pass them on. In clay, buried in stone, handed down. What would it say? It would say, among other things: "Do not be deceived by your own."
Can I ask you for reading recommendations? You keep mentioning Derrida and Foucault. Perhaps you could share with your readers a list of five or ten books or articles that you found particularly enlightening? A bit The Economist slightly primitive style of top ten or top five lists of all sorts, a simplification of over-complex reality. Still, with all the limitations, I think many readers would be very grateful for such a recommendation from you. May be in your next article.
The wanton slaughter of Jews by Hamas and the celebration of that slaughter by the people of Gaza leaves me in no doubt that the Palestinians want to exterminate the Jews in their midst. Israel responds harshly to terrorist attacks and to invaders. In 1948, Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state. They lost. They also lost in 1956, 1967, and 1973. The 1982 and 2006 Lebanon wars, precipitated by terrorist attacks on Israel, were inconclusive. The Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations in 1948 so they became Judenrein. I use the term to remind people that those who want to exterminate Jews are following in the footsteps of the Nazis. Hamas' charter quotes the prophet in its call to Jihad against the Zionists.
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Since Muslims believe the Koran is the word of God revealed to Muhammed then everything in it is true. Some also believe the Hadith have the same status although there is dispute as to which Hadith are authentic (i.e. an actual report of the words or actions of Muhammed), good (i.e likely to be true) or weak. That being said, the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk, evidently take the exhortations in their holy texts to kill Jews quite literally.
Israel, the West Bank and Gaza was not owned by the so-called Palestinian people. They were part of the Ottoman empire for centuries and ceded to the British when Turkey lost WW1. Gaza was ruled by Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Israel occupied it after the 1967 war and withdrew in 2007. Arafat himself was born in Egypt. He founded Fatah which aimed to remove Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state.
Israel has taken land since 1948, but only after all-out war was declared against it. The losers in WW1 and WW2 all lost territory, That's what happens in war. Ukraine is going to lose a lot of territory to Russia and it will never be returned, at least while NATO exists.
I referred to Mann's hocky stick since you repeated the main claim of its creators; that the warming during the industrial era is rapid and unprecedented. Interestingly, Mark Steyn called the hocky stick fraudulent and Mann sued him for libel. After a decade, the case has finally come to trial before a DC jury. Which means, since DC juries are 90% Democrats, Mann will probably win and the case will be appealed to SCOTUS.
The IPCC, in its third review said "The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year." That statement was based solely on Mann's hocky stick.
Mark Steyn wrote a book that has chapters written by eminent scientists that all debunk Mann's hocky stick.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0986398330/amazon0156-20/
Mann's sins include:
1. Combining temperature records derived from proxy records (tree rings) with actual temperature data.
2. Using dubious statistical methods that always yield a hocky stick shape.
3. Using an incredibly small cherry-picked set of trees as his dataset.
Steyn reports:
"I wonder how many of those who regard it as an authoritative graph of global climate across the centuries are aware that its hockey-stick shape for the entire hemisphere depends on two clumps of trees: some California bristlecones, and some cedars from the Gaspé Peninsula - or rather, for the years up to 1421, just one cedar from the Gaspé Peninsula."
Did you know that? Those few trees were all it took for Mann to eliminate the MWP and LIA from the climate record.
Mann did release his code and data in 2006, long after the damage had been done.
The placement of weather stations by urban heat sinks has an impact on the temperatures being recorded, This was verified experimentally.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/03/big-news-verified-by-noaa-poor-weather-station-siting-leads-to-artificial-long-term-warming/
I checked your links supporting Mann. When I see "New Scientist", "Forbes", "BBC", "Reuters" etc in the URL I know I'm going to a hard-left source. I'd rather listen to actual scientists, including those who contributed essays to Steyn's book. For example,
PROFESSOR WILLIAM HAPPER, PHD Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a member of the US Government’s group of independent scientific advisors JASON, for whom he pioneered the development of adaptive optics. Recipient of the Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, the Herbert P Broida Prize, and a Thomas Alva Edison patent award. Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association
PROFESSOR DAVID R LEGATES, PHD Professor of Geography and former Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware. Former Delaware State Climatologist, Coordinator of the Delaware Geographic Alliance and Associate Director of the Delaware Space Grant Consortium. Author of peer-reviewed papers published in The International Journal of Climatology, The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and other journals.
PROFESSOR IVAR GIAEVER, PHD Winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson, “for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids”. Professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and Professor Emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Recipient of the Oliver E Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Physical Society and the Zworykin Award from the National Academy of Engineering. Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
PROFESSOR RICHARD MULLER, PHD Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics. Founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Co-creator of accelerator mass spectrometry and one of the first scientists to measure anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Proponent of the Nemesis hypothesis, which argues that the Sun could have a so far undetected dwarf star. Recipient of the Alan T Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation.
Even Mann's former allies are sick of him and his hocky stick. They include:
PROFESSOR KEITH BRIFFA, PHD Emeritus Professor and former Deputy Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Lead author of Chapter Six (Paleoclimatology) of Working Group I of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) Former associate editor of Boreas, Dendrochronologia and Holocene.
PROFESSOR PHIL JONES, PHD Director of the Climatic Research Unit and Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. Member of the editorial board of Climatic Change and formerly of The International Journal of Climatology. Recipient of the Royal Meteorological Scociety’s Mill Prize, the World Meteorological Organization’s Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award, and the European Geosciences Union’s Oeschger Medal.
Cheers.
Thank you, very thought-provoking. War is a ghastly thing, but seems humans drift into it - or are drifted - the famous Göring point of "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
So, here we are, facing wars, and as usual, attackers are unjust (terrorists to boot!), and peacemakers are Putin-lovers or antisemites. Earlier Aurelien reviewed styles of war, and the current illusion about the rules of war. Ultimately war is about survival for those who have the bad fortune to end up in it. And obviously, being told we are being attacked is as good as the real thing, so modern war has the football-fan aspect to it in addition to actual war. Fear-reflexes are definitely the deepest programming of all living creatures, so some really effective de- or re-programming is required. Religions have been maybe partly attempts to re-program, but have ended up being just more fodder for the fear-hate-war cycle. It is maybe one of the core questions we are here for: can we live together, as couples, families, tribes, races, nations, religions, parties etc? Can there be a we even when there is difference? A we without the demand of sameness? What would it take, to be able to live as different as we are, without collapsing into demands of sameness?
IMO, FWIW, this is excellent, accurate sitrep. I have the feeling, as always, that our host pulls a punch or three right at the end, rather as a diplomat's habit. However, the political-military analysis of both Ukraine and Israel is, IMO, FWIW, on target.
One low-importance quibble: Russia is not in war condition in Ukraine, only SMO condition. War condition would look very differently from what we see today. I would expect Russian war condition to include Zircon / Kinzhal / Sarmat salvos visiting the US Capitol, the UK Parliament, and the DE Bundestag, for starters, since those are the "decision-making centers" of The USofA, The UK, and Germany. (They write the checks.) In addition, Russia forms her border against the western peninsula of Eurasia on the line of The Elbe.
I submit that the punch pulled by our host is that it's over for Israel as a nation state and for The USofA as dominant in the community of nations. "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." We're in that territory now, with both feet walking forward.
I so enjoy these pieces, Aurelien - thank you! I have the sense of peering over the shoulder of one who has worked through the endless nitty gritty of all these fine-sounding rhetorical flourishes by politicians, pointing out the endless flaws and gaps and inconsistencies that are so obvious as soon as actual thought and experience are applied. For those of us upon whom the rhetoric has been poured without respite, with little access to reality, your pieces are a revelation and a great satisfaction.
Thank you for articulating a justification for my feeling of hopelessness over U.S. foreign policy.
Is the U.S. goal to drive Gaza's medical services back to the Middle Ages? Inflicting cholera is the point?
Then Ukraine, what was the wet dream that motivated both burning money and depleting military stockpiles? The AFU marching on Moscow? Was there really belief that NATO's ISR would knuckle under Russia? Because if there was a remote chance that could occur, then those NATO AWAC planes are gonners, along with the surveillance satellites.
We have leaders who discount the simple constraint of logistics much less have any consideration of those of us who must suffer their ill considered plans. We are ruled by fools!
<<...This applies equally to the speculation about mediation. OK, between who and whom? What would the purpose of the mediation be? >>
Mediation between the elected representative bodies of the people of Gaza/occupied territories and the Israeli government
The purpose of the mediation is to 1) stop Israel from mass murdering civilians via bombing 2) stop Israel from murdering civilians when they're not actively bombing 3) force Israel to open border crossings for FUEL, FOOD and WATER, 3) decide via mediation whether Israel may continue as a country at all, and if yes, that its nukes be removed and its military severely reduced or eliminated, 4) that the people of Gaza and the occupied territories are given back a significant portion of the land that was stolen from them by Israel, and THEY decide whether it would be better to allow Israel to remain (if it then had to play by normal rules) or to evict them completely. I can't imagine many Israelis remaining once their enormous security blanket is removed.
I must admit, the fact that you are not harping about morality and rights is refreshing.
I probably need to think much more about your comments but it seems that you are ignoring the elephant in the room. Does the theory of “Umm Al Qura” mean anything to you? Can you see Iran's role, not only in the current conflict with Hamas but also in an attempt to dominate the whole area by gaining control of weakened populations (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen), and if they are not weak at the moment Iran has time and money to infiltrate and weaken then from within. So Israel's (and the US) problem is not with Hamas in Gaza, but how to stop that project from erasing it from the map.
The real fight is in the north (both Lebanon and Syria and Iraqis crossing the border to Syria), and the big question is when it will erupt: now, in spite of the US substantial military presence, or later, in a couple of years. I don't think Israel planned any of those conflicts and now it is just fighting to survive, literally. Though a fight for survival doesn't mean just staving the enemy from your border. It could mean delivering a very painful blow that will buy you many years of quiet. Remember that in the case of Lebanon, Israel got a relatively quiet border for 17 years.
* There are a few good and informative video presentations about the theory of “Umm Al Qura” on this channel https://www.youtube.com/@AlwataniaTV
The only rational long-term goal for both sides -- both of which want ALL of Palestine, from the river to the sea -- is to make life so unpleasant for the population of the other side that most of them emigrate, leaving too few people behind to sustain the struggle. The Israelis are somewhat more restrained by their culture from the more overt methods of terror, but in partial compentation, have more force at their disposal when they can use it.
"The Israelis are somewhat more restrained by their culture from the more overt methods of terror", what an astonishingly ahistorical and utterly incorrect statement! Please go do some reading of the terror attacks of the Stern Gang and Irgun - for example the King David Hotel terrorist attack, and of course the terror ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, and the everyday terrorization of the Palestinian people (shooting children, raping women, torturing etc.). The Israelis have outdone the Palestinians in terrorism many times over, and certainly have no cultural restraints. You sound like some British establishment type complaining about the lack of proper culture and restraints of the Mau Mau in Imperial Kenya.
Nobody wants the people of Gaza. The Egyptians certainly don't. The Jordanians don't. Remember Black September when Jordan fought a war against Arafat's PLO and drove them out of Jordan in 1970. Iran doesn't want a bunch of trouble-making Sunnis in its own backyard.
Maybe Syria and Lebanon might take them in, although that would stretch their limited resource..
The Israelis aren't going anywhere. The recent outpouring of anti-Semitism around the world following the Hamas attack on Israel is proof to them that they need their homeland, a region occupied by Jews for thousands of years. They lived alongside Muslims and Christians relatively peacefully even under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
What Aurelian didn't cover is the fact that Gaza depends on Israel for water, electricity and other goods and services.
Israel controls Gaza's northern and eastern borders. Egypt guards Gaza's Southern border with a wall that goes deep underground and Egypt does not want anybody from Gaza moving into Egypt. El-Sisi and the Egyptian people hate the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an offshoot of the organization. Hamas used the aid money it received from a gullible world to build weapons and tunnels and train its fighters. What it did not do is build any infrastructure to supply electricity and water so it is dependent on Israel for both. Israel can deprive Gaza of electricity indefinitely and limit the supply of water. So, one option is a blockade of Gaza until such time as Hamas is removed by the people of Gaza. That could be done through an election and holding an election could be a condition for restoring electricity and water. The last election in Gaza pitted Hamas against the PLO. While the PLO is no friend of Israel, it appears to have accepted that Israel isn't going anywhere and would likely win such an election.
Nobody wants to facilitate the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine, so awful for the Israelis that the Palestinians and their allies wont make the theft of their land easy. The West is growing relatively weaker vs. the Rest, the Arab world much stronger vs. Israel. The Israeli's will be going somewhere, its just a matter of time given how much hatred they have stored in the Arab world. Their dreams of "Brooklyn by the Mediterranean" will turn into a nightmare, with the more skilled and multi-passported finding other places to live as things get continuously worse. They will only have their ethnic cleansing apartheid selves to blame.
There never was a Palestine as a country or a people. Before WW1, it was a region under the control of the Ottoman empire. Jews, Muslims and Christians all lived there. After WW1, it became a British Protectorate. After WW2, the UN divided the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arab countries reacted by expelling all Jews from their countries. The Jews fled, many to Israel, leaving their homes and property behind.. The Arab countries told the Muslims to leave Israel and return after the Jews had been exterminated. The Arab countries then launched a war against Israel and lost. The Arabs who left ended up in refugee camps. As the King of Jordan said, if the Arabs had accepted a two state solution in 1948, they would have had their own country and peace.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is an antisemitic lie pushed by terrorist organizations, such as the PLO and Hamas, and parroted by their useful idiots in the West. In reality, Israel has a large Muslim population and they enjoy the same rights as other Israelis. They can vote and they have representation in the Knesset. The only differences between Jews and Muslims in Israel is that Jews must serve in the military and Muslims can opt out.
@ Pat.
You are wrong about apartheid being an anti-semitic lie, read Yesh Din or B'Tselem, Amnesty International &c. There is indeed a considerable Arab (not all Muslim) population in Israel, and they do not have equal rights with Jewish Israelis. You may also find helpful such summaries such as Wikipedia on apartheid in Israel. I fear you are wilfully misleading your audience or you are lamentably ignorant.
Hear, hear!
Your sources are notorious for promoting leftist propaganda. Wikipedia cannot be trusted on any controversial topic, be it climate science, genders studies or politics, A veritable army of leftists work constantly to remove any entry that doesn't comport with their ideology. My wife has a Wikipedia entry which grossly misrepresents her. It is impossible to fix it; as soon as you try, someone switches it back. Amnesty International is a hard left organization that always sides against Israel and the US.
During the Apartheid era in South Africa, not one person of color was in the government, mostly because they weren't allowed to vote. In Israel today, there are Arabs in the Knesset and Arabs are allowed to vote. Currently there are 10/120 Arabs in the 23rd Knesset, For reasons that have mothing to do with apartheid, that number dropped from 17 in 2020.
I am sorry you mistrust the hard left, if you think that consists of such as Amnesty - which I would remind you is an organisation centred on what is legal and does not "take sides" against a country, only against aspects of that country's behaviour if thought necessary. Of course you may feel that is going too far, in which case I hate to think how you must view the United Nations.
In Israel some Arabs only are allowed to vote, and as you note there are now only 10 Arab MKs, less than 10% of members,while Arab citizens form something over 20% of the population. The fall in representation has nothing to do with apartheid, of course. And you may be unaware of the 2018 Nation State law which describes Israel as the natino-sate of the Jewish people, which seems to leave little room for Druze, Arabs or anyone else. And I am not going to detail the countless petty but important persecutions of where one may live, what one may do, &c if one is Arab, but I am sure you will be delighted to rehearse them for me, to show that Arabs really are equal in Israel.
c_ I regret that your wife's Wikipedia entry is being assailed by malicious untruth tellers. Do give me a link so that I can check this out. Meanwhile your criticism of Wikipedia on, e.g. climate science is misplaced. I am merely a statistician, but I cannot find anything in the English-language article with which strongly to disagree, including on climate change - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
If I can be of any more help, do say.
Incomplete sentences.
Another detailed and pretty extensive write up posing many questions that almost no one in the media is asking. I am continually dismayed at the way our major Western public facing media trivialize almost everything. I subscribe to a number of geopolitical advisory services and most are posing similar questions about what the Israelis are "saying" they will do and what may be going on behind the scenes. Current split is 50% seeing an Israeli Gaza incursion with the other half seeing no incursion and / or an attack on Hezbollah. All see this as a lost cause for everyone involved, especially Hamas. I can only assume Hamas leadership are lacking in intelligence (brain wise) and compassion for the individuals in Gaza who are bearing the brunt of this response OR they are so religiously indoctrinated with hatred, that neither their own lives, nor that of their fellow Gazans, matter one jot.
I also notice how the Ukraine conflict has (almost) slipped to page 3 behind Gaza and the ongoing Republican "farce" in the House. Yet Russian attacks / probing seem to be occurring all along the entire line of control (... er sorry, different part of the world) in the Donbas region. This feels like a last fling there before something bigger, but we shall soon find out. Finally I await with interest the outcome of the Biden Administration $100 billion to Ukraine / Israel. Without that support both Ukraine and Israel are in deep trouble.....
It is interesting to read this now the fighting has continued well over 120 days. I think tactically the Israeli military is overachieving compared to this and other commentators though of at the time. Their ability to identify and dismantle Hamas' tunnel network and kill/capture their operatives without maximal Israeli casualties has been very impressive. Strategically though people are now acknowledging that there is a no "Day After" plan because the Israeli government is so divided and many of the strategic problems existing pre-October 7 still exist and have been exacerbated. The linking of Saudi recognition of Israel, Arab-funded reconstruction of Gaza, and a Palestinian State all seem the most sensible steps. However the devil will be in the details specifically who owns Jerusalem.