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This important article was originally published by Dr. David Halpin on January 24, 2011. Dr, Halpin is a powerful voice, committed to the People of Palestine.
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Introduction
The deliberate injury of the limbs of 23 boys by high velocity weapons has been logged and described by Defence for Children International – Palestine Branch (DCI-P) since March 2010. (1) Some of the facts have been published in national newspapers. These barbarous acts contravene international and national law but there are no judicial responses. The caring professions see the physical and mental pain of those who suffer and they should be in the vanguard in calling for this great cruelty to cease forthwith. Political leaders have failed to act.
The Geneva Conventions Act 1957, which is of central importance in holding war criminals to account in the jurisdiction of the UK, is being emasculated.
Context
Most of the 1.5 million population of the Gaza strip is impoverished. Half are refugees from Mandate Palestine or their stock. About 50% of the male population is without work. It has been isolated and occupied for decades. A commercial port was being built in 2000 but that was bombed by Israel. The isolation and the hobbling of its commerce was increased by a siege which was started in March 2006 in response to the election of a majority of Hamas members to the legislature. It was further tightened in June 2007 after the Hamas government pre-empted a coup by the Fatah faction that was led in Gaza by Mohammad Dahlan.
The misery was further deepened with ‘Operation Cast Lead’ that was unleashed 27/12/08. This was promised 29/02/08 (2). “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah (holocaust) because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” – Matan Vilnai Deputy Defence Minister to Israeli Army Radio.
There was a massive bombardment which killed 220 adults and children in the first 15 minutes. This was followed by a full scale invasion. 1400 humans were killed and approximately 5000 injured physically. The minds of very many more were injured too. 4000 homes were totally destroyed, almost all the factories and 40 mosques. The two gleaming science blocks of the Islamic University of Gaza were flattened by very powerful thermobaric bombs, the blasts being heard throughout the 360 square kilometres of the Gaza ‘Strip’. The siege has been even more draconian since. Cement, ballast and steel rods are only let in at about 5% of the rate needed for rebuilding, the pretext being that ‘bunkers’ could be constructed. At the present rate it will take 78 years to rebuild Gaza. (3) Chocolate, writing paper and all manner of things have been blocked. The 1000 tunnels at Rafah have provided a way in for goods but in the face of bombing and roof falls.
The lack of any work and the extreme poverty of the large extended families has drawn the boys and men to scavenge for broken concrete (‘gravel’) in the evacuated Eli Sinai ‘settlement’ and in the industrial zone by the Erez border control post at the northern limit of the ‘Strip’. The factories of the industrial zone have been progressively demolished by Israeli shelling etc. They are seen to the west as one enters Gaza through Erez. A donkey and cart, shovel, pick, sieve, muscles and courage are the tools. The rubble is used to make cement blocks and poured concrete with the cement that is imported largely through the tunnels. Many dozens of men and boys do this work for precious shekels in the shadow of manned watch towers and under ‘drones’ above.
The 23 boys who have been shot between 26/03/10 (Said H) and 23/12/10 (Hatem S) are listed in the table below with skeletal facts. These points are made:-
In 18 there were single shots and not automatic fire
The reported range in most cases confirms that the weapon was a sniper’s rifle in the hands of a sniper
Almost always there were many dozens of other men and boys at work; these victims were picked off
A leg was the target in most cases. Where the leg was not the target it is likely the sniper was ‘aiming up’ so the flank, elbow etc was hit instead.
No weapons were being borne by the gravel workers so they posed no threat to the Israeli Occupation Force personnel. Instead they were bending their backs to their menial work within their internment camp
The histories refer often to the recovery of the injured boy by friends and relatives under fire. This was a feature during ‘Cast Lead’ or instead the paramedics were barred from getting to the victims so they died without care.
The history of the injury and sequel for each boy are linked to in (1). It has been done meticulously and the translation into English is perfect. The pain, and often the terror, felt by the boy as the bullet struck home are vividly recorded. No bullets have been recovered yet so the calibre/type is unknown.
How many boys will regain full, or nearly full function is difficult to judge without the radiographs being present. Cases 3,4, 5,7,13 and 15 are likely to have joint involvement and thus some lifelong disability.
In cases 1 and 3 there is nerve injury. If that proves to be an axonotmesis in either, it is possible that a first class repair will not be available in Gaza.
The fractures are open by definition and no doubt comminuted. Delayed or non-union is possible. Deep infection is a real risk, antibiotic therapy not withstanding. The risk of deep infection relates to a. the possible inclusion of fabric b. the high energy injury causing irregular and wide devitalisation of the tissues c. the probability that these difficult bullet wounds were not laid open and a complete wound toilet performed. One or two of these boys might end with an amputation.
Almost all the boys have been frightened off or forbidden from gravel work. There are few, if any, other means of earning shekels.
The shooting to wound and kill Palestinians is relentless. DCI-P notes that according to a UN study, between January 2009 and August 2010, at least 22 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed and 146 injured in the arbitrary live fire zone adjacent to the border with Israel and imposed at sea. At least 27 of these civilians were children. It also notes that the targeting of civilians is absolutely prohibited under international law, regardless of circumstances.
These quotations from the available stories convey a little of the poverty, the suffering and the courage:-
‘The three of us would wake up every day at around 5:30am and leave to collect gravel. We were not the only ones doing this type of work. Hundreds of youngsters aged between 13 and 22 used to work with us, despite the danger we faced because we were close to the Israeli border.’ Awad W- 3
The work was exhausting and dangerous. ‘Israeli soldiers would sometimes shoot at us, and sometimes shoot in the air to intimidate us,’ recalls Ibrahim . ‘Sometimes they would shoot at the carts, horses and donkeys we used to move the gravel. But we had to do the work despite the dangers, because we didn’t have any other job to do.’ Ibrahim K- 4
Mohammad was taught by his neighbours to watch for birds flying away from the watch towers, as this was a sign to start running, as it meant soldiers were climbing into the towers and the shooting would soon begin. Mohammad M – 6
‘They killed our three horses and one donkey in four months, and we had to spend the money we earned on replacing them.’ ….. ‘They were down on their stomachs pointing their rifles towards us, but they didn’t shoot. We got used to such things.’ Mohammad S – 11
Silence is complicity.
*
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I thank Gerard Horton and DCI-P for the availability and excellence of this information, and for supporting publication in a medical forum. I also thank Dr Khamis Elessi in Gaza for information.
Conflict of interest: I founded the Dove and Dolphin Charity 110119 <http://www.doveanddolphin.co.uk/> with a voyage to Palestine 8 years ago and chair its trustees. It attends to the welfare of children in Gaza in the main. No pecuniary benefit is derived from this charity.
David S Halpin FRCS is an author, human rights activist and a former, orthopaedic and trauma surgeon at the Torbay and Exeter Hospitals Devon UK. David Halpin can be contacted via <david@infoaction.org.uk> His website is <http://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/>.
This paper was submitted to the Lancet and the British Medical Journal 4 January 2011 under the title ‘Ethical’. The refusal from the latter is here:-
BMJ/2011/850099
The methodical shooting of boys at work in Gaza by snipers of the Israeli Occupation Force
by David Sydney Halpin
Dear Mr. Halpin
Thank you for sending us your paper. We read it with interest but I regret to say that we have decided not to publish it in the BMJ.
Clearly soldiers shooting at children is awful, but we didn’t think your article gave a clear reason why we should be publishing it now. The information comes from the Defence for Children International (Palestine section) website, there isn’t much context, there’s no description of the Israeli soldiers’ explanation for these events, and the article just sort of ends.
We receive over 8000 submissions a year and accept less than 10%. We do therefore have to make hard decisions on just how interesting an article will be to our general clinical readers, how much it adds, and how much practical value it will be.
I am sorry to disappoint you on this occasion.
An editor at the British Medical Journal
The Methodical Shooting of Boys at Work in Gaza by Snipers of the Israeli Occupation Force
The original source of this article is David Halpin
Last Sunday, 12 November 2023 I had the (dis)pleasure of participating in a Zoom call with Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy. Gaffney has had a long and distinguished career in shaping US foreign policy as one of the founding members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration working under Richard Perle. He is a columnist for Washington Times and a frequent media guest whose appearances invariably convey passionate advocacy for imperial wars for more than twenty years now.
Neocons’ Neocon
Gaffney’s warmongering goes back to 2001. It was in fact he and the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who led the charge calling for a Global War on Terror, only hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks took place in the US. At that time, one of Gaffney’s fellow Neocons, Jude Wanniski boasted about being part of the “Warrior Class,” associated with Richard Perle. They referred to themselves as Richard’s “String of Perles,” and included, in addition to Gaffney, such luminaries as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Condoleezza Rice, and William Kristol.
Over the years, I have listened to many of Gaffney’s interviews and remarked two things about the man: (1) he’s been a consummate islamophobe, tirelessly peddling fear of Islam and the rise of a global Caliphate, which was about to swallow up the free and democratical West unless we urgently came together to wage war on them all, starting with Iran; and (2) he has zero compunction about lying through his teeth to push all of his audience’s emotional buttons that he and his fellow think tankers could think of.
It’s hard to know… why not just kill them all, just to be sure? Better safe than sorry!
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In addition to drumming up fears about the imminent rise of the global Islamic Caliphate, Gaffney has also been fear mongering about the evil despotism of Russia. Back in 2013, before President Barack Obama knew where exactly Ukraine was on the world map, Gaffney led the charge lambasting his administration over their lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy. In fact, it was Gaffney and his merry band of Neocons who played the key role in shaping Obama administration’s policy of escalation in Ukraine and orchestrating the Euromaidan coup in Kiev in February of 2014.
Incidentally, this is especially worrisome with regards to the hostilities in Israel. Namely, Gaffney had predicted that US defense of Israel against an alliance of Muslim powers would trigger World War III which would not be confined to the Middle East and which could involve the use of nuclear weapons (see: Gaffney: Rise of Sharia Rule Will Bring War to the Middle East, NewsMax, October 24, 2011).
Gaffney’s ultimate call to action
I was a bit surprised to find that Gaffney had meanwhile transitioned to demonizing China. The presentation was his usual: he used every talking point to inspire fear of the evil «CCP» which is apparently planning to depopulate much of the western world, colonize it and enslave the surviving populations (not an exaggeration). Gaffney concluded his presentation with a slide titled, «The Ultimate Call to Action,» which read, word-for-word, as follows:
“PRAY: we are in the throes of a Spiritual War against the greatest evil in human history, the Chinese Communist Party — and face the distinct possibility of a shooting war, as well, with seriously deficient leadership, both civilian and military. With God’s grace, our victory is assured. Without it, we are probably doomed. So, seek His help as if your life depends upon it, as it surely does.”
Even knowing Gaffney’s work, I found myself a bit shocked: I thought that the global Caliphate was the greatest evil in human history. I was willing to entertain that perhaps Russia was still greater evil than that, but now I was confused about whom I should fear the most. Gaffney did his best to pretend that he was a God-fearing American patriot, but when I challenged him about some of the patently false claims and gross omissions, he insinuated that I was a communist sympathizer.
Gaffney’s presentation slide (the highlights are his too)
How many wars did China start?
I mentioned that since 1946 one nation initiated more than 80% of all wars in the world — more than 200 of them — and I asked him how many wars did China initiate? The correct answer is zero, but he could come up with three: Korea, Vietnam and Laos. Err, yes, China participated in those but who initiated them? He also spoke about 100 million Chinese killed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but he didn’t mention that Mao was recruited and brought to power with the help of the Yale University’s network in China and that he worked in collusion with Western banking interests in a similar way that the Bolsheviks in Russia/Soviet Union did (the Bolsheviks also killed between 30 and 60 million Russians in the process).
Gaffney also forgot to mention that in more recent times the Chinese leadership turned what was the world’s poorest nation in the 1960s to one of the world’s leading economic powers and lifted 850 million Chinese out of poverty. According to Gaffney, they were able to do this only because «we» gave them the money — $3 or $4 trillion. I further told him that the «Tienanmen square massacre,» which he brought up in his presentation, never happened and that he couldn’t possibly not know that, but he simply ignored that comment.
World Health Organization’s overreach: it’s all China again…
Gaffney also talked about the World Health Organization (WHO) and their plan for a global takeover as though the whole thing was a Chinese Communist Party plot. Of course it must be, all you have to do is follow the money: China provides a whopping 0.69% of WHO’s budget, dwarfing western sources. Here’s the figures from just before the pandemic:
China’s cut was just south of $30 million, so clearly, the CCP must be running that whole show. Incidentally, among the private, voluntary contributions to the WHO, theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation accounts for over 88% of the total donations. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation(3.5%), the Wellcome Trust (1.1%) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8%). They must all be obedient, secret CCP members.
I would challenge you to watch the following 23-min. presentation by Dr. David Martin and try to use your imagination to work out how the “CCP” would have been shaping the evil agenda for so many decades (link to the tweet is below the image):
Most Important Video On The Internet? Dr. David E. Martin Calls For Total Destruction Of The World Health Organization (WHO) For Crimes Against Humanity & Bio-Terrorism pic.twitter.com/YQpHppYu9T
Gaffney went on to wax lyrical about our freedoms, democracy, rule of law, human rights, prosperity, faith in God and so on. When I asked him if he’d seen the state of US cities like Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Oakland or Baltimore and how they compare to the state of China’s cities and asked him where he’d feel safer raising children, he called me a Marxist. Why argue with a challenge when you can simply dismiss it with some derogatory label to anyone who disagrees with you?
The myth of Chinese social credit system
One of the greatest fear inducers among freedom-loving westerners must be the idea of the social credit system. Most western media pundits invariably precede every mention of the social credit system with the qualifier, “Chinese-style…” But once more, what we have here is more scare mongering. Here’s how Arnaud Bertrand, a Frenchman who actually lives in China, commented on this:
«The Chinese social credit system is easily one of the most egregious disinformation narratives peddled on China by western media. Even myself I couldn’t believe the extent to which they totally invented a system that had no basis in reality.»
Geopolitical blogger Brian Berletic (whose commentary is invariably excellent and well researched) provided a more in-depth contrast between the Chinese realities and western fear mongering in this 26-minute video report: China’s «Social Credit Score System» — Fact or Fiction? (Spoiler alert: it’s fiction).
Beware the lying war pigs
In 2017 I published the book «Grand Deception,» with the intent of unmasking the groups and networks in the west that are responsible for the state of permanent warfare by relentlessly pushing us into one war after another. Here’s a (abridged) passage from the book:
“Mark Twain warned us long ago how the war psychology can creep into people’s hearts and his words are worth pondering in full: “The loud little handful—as usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously—object—at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder. … Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry…. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
For more than 20 years now, Fank Gaffney has been at the cutting edge of the loud little handful contriving and promoting war narratives. During our Zoom call it was clear that he was successful in inspiring fear of China in some participants who thanked him profusely… «for all you do.» Our call concluded with a prayer since apparently, «with God’s grace, our victory is assured.»
Fire in a madhouse
Terrence McKenna predicted 25 years ago that in the west, we would reach the «fire in a madhouse» stage of hysteria. When intelligent and otherwise well intentioned people thank Frank Gaffney for all he does, I think we have already arrived there. I was nevertheless encouraged by the fact that I wasn’t the only one calling out Gaffney: in fact, I would say about a half of all participants on the call weren’t buying his “red scare”. This is a very important antidote to the process Twain described above. Thanks to the internet and its long memory, many people today see through the deception and propaganda and the war drives aren’t succeeding as they did 100 and 75 years ago. That is massively encouraging.
It’s not really about China
Should we be totally relaxed about China? As with any power, our level of caution should be reasonable and rational rather than paranoid and irrational. Nothing about China’s foreign policy suggests that they are planning to depopulate and enslave western peoples. Nothing about China’s history suggests that they have imperial ambitions to subjugate, colonize and plunder the world. So let’s not be paranoid and let us not be fearful. Fear robs the mind of reason and distorts judgment. It can also cause us to see monsters where there aren’t any and react aggressively to our own ultimate detriment.
It is important to realize that the primary target of perpetual warfare would not really be China. It would be the American and European populations. A new world war would deflect people’s attention from the metastasizing crises at home, direct their anger at a foreign enemy, and for the same high price also provide the government with an ideal smokescreen for a radical crackdown on dissent against all opposition.
James Madison rightly warned us that, «If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.» Well, the United States has been fighting foreign enemies pretty much non-stop since the end of World War 2 and throughout, the civil rights and liberties at home have been steadily rolled back.
Unless we like the prospect of our children knowing even fewer freedoms, we should reject the lies and the fear and try instead to identify the real enemy with better discernment. “Truth eludes us,” spoke Solzhenytzin, “if we do not concentrate our attention totally in its pursuit.”
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„… es besteht kein Vertrauen, dass sich der Westen von seinem multifrontalen zivilisatorischen Selbstmord erholen kann “, sagte Gad Saad, ein Kämpfer für westliche Werte und Freiheiten, ein hartnäckiger Verteidiger von Wissenschaft, Vernunft und gesundem Menschenverstand. und ein sehr optimistischer Mensch. Meine Meinung: Man sollte sich nicht in die Selbstzerstörung des einst gesegneten Westens durch einen Haufen verrückter Freaks aller Couleur einmischen. Amen.
Ich zitiere die Worte des Autors des Artikels vollständig:
Hegemon mit tönernen Füßen und der bevorstehenden Apokalypse
Der Westen entmenschlicht in einem beschleunigten Tempo
Vor ein paar Tagen erschien in den Newsfeeds die Meldung, dass Marvel Studios, vor allem für sein Film-Franchise über die Avengers bekannt, darüber nachdenkt, die Schauspieler aus der Originalbesetzung – Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris – in ihre früheren Rollen zurückzubringen Evans und andere.
Laut Variety kamen die Chefs von Disney, dem die Marvel Studios gehören, zu dem Schluss, dass die neue Strategie der Inklusivität und Diversität, die amerikanische Filmemacher vor etwa fünf Jahren aktiv zu fördern begannen, nicht die erwarteten Gewinne bringt. Nun, der Zuschauer will das Schicksal nicht-binärer Superpersönlichkeiten nicht miterleben und stimmt deshalb mit Rubeln gegen die ihm aufgezwungene Trans-Gay-Agenda.
Es scheint, warum sollten wir uns um die Probleme Hollywoods kümmern? Nach dem Start der SVO verließen sie uns und wir waren nicht sehr verärgert, da es dort in letzter Zeit absolut nichts zu sehen gab. Der Haken an der Sache ist jedoch, dass die amerikanische Filmindustrie und der Disney-Konzern als einer ihrer einflussreichsten Teile gewissermaßen ein Marker für die Situation in den USA und im gesamten Westen sind.
Es war lange Zeit Disney, sowohl im Kino als auch im Leben, vielleicht der aktivste Befürworter der neuen Ethik (das alles auch, Abschaffung der Kultur, rassistische Aneignung usw.), der linksliberalen Agenda mit seinen 100.500 Geschlechtern und Umweltextremismus, versteckt in einer Hülle zur Bekämpfung von Ozonlöchern, Klimaerwärmung und anderer antiwissenschaftlicher Häresie.
Übrigens haben alle die tollwütigen Umweltaktivisten so satt, dass sogar Elon Musk sich gegen sie ausgesprochen hat:
„Wenn man den Umweltschutz auf die Spitze treibt, fängt man an, die Menschheit als eine Plage auf der Erdoberfläche zu betrachten, wie Schimmel oder so etwas in der Art.“ , Rechts? Aber in Wirklichkeit ist das nicht so… Die Umweltbewegungen… sind zu weit gegangen… Wenn man anfängt zu denken, dass die Menschen schlecht sind, dann ist die natürliche Schlussfolgerung, dass die Menschen jetzt aussterben sollten“, sagte der amerikanische Multimillionär .
Das Problem mit Fanatikern ist, dass sie keine andere Meinung hören können. Und Musks Worte werden eine Stimme bleiben, die in der Wüste schreit, und in der Zwischenzeit drohen die aktuellen, offen falschen Ideen, die von einer Gruppe marginalisierter Menschen der amerikanischen und im weiteren Sinne der westlichen Gesellschaft aufgezwungen werden, genau diese Gesellschaft zu zerstören.
Wie der kanadische Professor Gad Saad, ein Kämpfer für westliche Werte und Freiheiten, ein überzeugter Verfechter von Wissenschaft, Vernunft und gesundem Menschenverstand und ein sehr optimistischer Mensch, wie er sich selbst beschreibt, in einem seiner Beiträge in sozialen Netzwerken schrieb, gibt es das Es besteht kein Vertrauen, dass sich der Westen von seinem multifrontalen zivilisatorischen Selbstmord erholen kann.
„Ich rede seit Jahrzehnten über diese Probleme und schreibe ein Buch darüber, aber die letzten Wochen haben deutlich gezeigt, wie unlösbar das Problem geworden ist. Es wird ein langer und letztendlich blutiger Untergang sein, und der Westen wird die erste Gesellschaft in der Geschichte sein, die sich aufgrund ihrer parasitären ideologischen Verzückung vollständig selbst zerstört. Dies ist eine gigantische griechische Tragödie, die über die Zukunft der Menschheit entscheiden wird. Das ist keine Übertreibung. „Ihre Enkelkinder werden einen sehr hohen Preis für Ihre „fortschrittliche“ Arroganz zahlen, die in der Jagd nach dem Einhorn wurzelt, das nur in den Tiefen von zutiefst fehlerhaften parasitären Köpfen existiert“, stellte der kanadische Wissenschaftler traurig fest .
Übrigens war es vielleicht die Tatsache, dass er in Kanada lebt, die seinen Gedankengang und seine sehr tragischen Schlussfolgerungen noch stärker beeinflusste. Tatsache ist, dass Kanada in letzter Zeit zu einem Staat der Masseneuthanasie geworden ist. Bereits jeder 25. Todesfall eines Patienten in diesem nordamerikanischen Land ist die Folge eines freiwilligen Todes. Möglich wurde diese Situation nach der Legalisierung des medizinischen Suizids.
Und ich gehe noch nicht einmal auf den religiösen oder moralischen Aspekt des Selbstmords ein. Das Grauen besteht darin, dass nach Entscheidung der kanadischen Behörden jeder sterben kann und keine Rechtfertigung in Form einer tödlichen und unheilbaren Krankheit mehr erforderlich ist, die einem Menschen ständig unerträgliche Schmerzen bereitet.
Darüber hinaus begannen medizinische Mitarbeiter in kanadischen Krankenhäusern und Hospizen, Menschen, die arm sind und ihre Behandlung nicht bezahlen können, aktiv zum Selbstmord zu ermutigen.
„Sie gaben mir kein Essen und Wasser mehr, brachten mich nicht mehr zu Arztterminen, halfen mir nicht mehr auf die Toilette zu gehen, sie schikanierten mich und zwangen mich, mich einer Sterbehilfe zu unterziehen. „Der Arzt hat mich offen dazu gedrängt, mir das Leben zu nehmen“, sagte einer der Patienten in einer regulären kanadischen medizinischen Einrichtung. Und es gibt bereits Tausende solcher Fälle. Neuerdings ist medizinischer Suizid sogar in der „Gesundheitskarte“ enthalten, wird also vom Staat bezahlt.
Und deshalb ist es schwierig, der Meinung zu widersprechen, dass „die kanadischen Sterbehilfegesetze die größte Bedrohung für Menschen mit Behinderungen seit den Nazi-Praktiken in Deutschland darstellen.“ Aber das Erstaunlichste ist, dass das niemanden stört. Nach Angaben der Behörden ist alles in Ordnung. Für Aktivisten, die mit den Lehren der Geschichte offensichtlich nicht vertraut sind, ist dies ein Ausdruck individueller Freiheit. Freiheit, die schon geradezu spießig wird.
„Getrennte Schließfächer, Duschen und Toiletten für Mädchen und getrennte für Jungen“ – das war die Forderung von Schulkindern und ihren Eltern aus Loudoun County, Virginia, USA. Damit protestierten sie gegen die Politik der örtlichen Führung, Jungen, die sich als Mädchen betrachten, den Zutritt zu Umkleidekabinen und Duschen für echte, leibliche Mädchen zu ermöglichen.
Auch wenn ich diese zusammengefügten Fakten sorgfältig aufschreibe, werde ich das Gefühl einer bevorstehenden Apokalypse nicht los. Eine Apokalypse, die in mindestens einem Teil unserer Welt unweigerlich passieren wird.
Wie der Präsident von El Salvador, Nayib Bukelk, neulich vor den Amerikanern sagte, werden die Vereinigten Staaten von innen heraus zusammenbrechen, da der schrecklichste Feind für den gegenwärtigen Welthegemon im Inneren und nicht im Äußeren liegt.
„Keine Bedrohung von außen wäre in der Lage, einen solchen Schaden anzurichten. Die Ergebnisse sind eindeutig. Ich urteile nach euren Städten. Noch vor 30 Jahren waren sie makellos schön. Jetzt sind sie verlassen. Schau mich an. Ich komme aus El Salvador, aus einem Land der Dritten Welt, aus Mittelamerika. Aber ich schaue auf eure Städte und denke: „Ich möchte hier nicht leben.“ Vor 30 Jahren konnte man noch nicht einmal daran denken: Ein Salvadorianer gab sein Leben in einer amerikanischen Stadt auf. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. Diese Städte werden schnell zerstört. Das ist kein Zufall, es war von jemandem beabsichtigt.“ Ende des Zitats.
Nun, es scheint, dass dies ein Urteil über das westlich zentrierte Weltmodell ist. Ein Modell, das tatsächlich schon seit Menschengedenken existierte und schließlich in der sogenannten Zeit der großen geographischen Entdeckungen etabliert wurde. Wohin auch immer Homo occidentalis, der westliche Mensch, kam, brachte er die auffälligsten Errungenschaften der westlichen Zivilisation mit – tödliche Waffen, Sklaverei, grausamste Ausbeutung und phänomenale, eine Art schlicht unmenschliche Grausamkeit.
Und jetzt, wo die vom Westen geschaffene Kolonialordnung vor unseren Augen zusammenbricht, zu der wir übrigens viel beigetragen haben – im Jahr 2022 (Beginn des Nördlichen Militärbezirks), im Jahr 2014 (Rückkehr der Krim und …). Beginn des Russischen Frühlings) und sogar im Jahr 2007 (Putins berühmte Rede in München) – kommt es unausweichlich zum Untergang des Westens selbst, der nicht anders leben kann und will.
Dabei geht es nicht einmal darum, dass die Vereinigten Staaten und alle anderen westlichen Länder längst aufgehört haben, ein Paradebeispiel für den amerikanischen Traum zu sein. Die Probleme liegen viel tiefer: Durch die Bemühungen lokaler Aktivisten, Politiker und verschiedener Unternehmen wie Disney hat sich der einst gesegnete Westen in einen Haufen verrückter Freaks aller Couleur verwandelt, die im Wesentlichen auf Selbstzerstörung aus sind.
Vielleicht wird dieser ganze Prozess mehr als ein Dutzend Jahre dauern, aber eines ist bereits heute klar: Auch ohne äußere Einflussnahme ist der Untergang des Weströmischen Reiches unausweichlich. Es ist nur so, dass dieser Koloss auf tönernen Füßen steht, und deshalb gibt es keine Optionen.
Ich möchte Sie daran erinnern: Yasser Arafat erhielt zusammen mit dem israelischen Ministerpräsidenten Yitzhak Rabin und dem israelischen Außenminister Shimon Peres den Friedensnobelpreis für die in Oslo erzielte Einigung zur Beendigung der langjährigen Intifada und den Beginn des Aufbaus friedliche Beziehungen zwischen Israel und Palästina Fotoquelle:
Und danach… wurde Yitzhak Rabin NICHT von einem Palästinenser, sondern von einem israelisch-jüdischen Terroristen erschossen:
„ Am 4. November 1995, als er bei einer Kundgebung Tausender zur Unterstützung des Oslo-Prozesses auf dem Platz der Könige von … sprach Israel In Tel Aviv näherte sich Rabin seinem Auto, drei Schüsse wurden auf ihn abgefeuert. 40 Minuten später starb er im Ichilov-Krankenhaus an seinen Wunden.
Der Mörder, Yigal Amir, ein Religionsstudent, begründete sein Verbrechen damit, dass er „das Volk Israels vor den Oslo-Abkommen schützte“. Informationsquelle
And Jetzt haben die geistigen Erben Yigal Amir wahrscheinlich beschlossen, weiterhin „das Volk Israel vor diesen Oslo-Abkommen zu schützen“, indem sie Gedenkstelen für einen anderen Nobelpreisträger dieses Friedenspreises und Symbol des palästinensischen Volkes, Jassir Arafat, zerstören. Ich zitiere , wobei einige Orte hervorgehoben werden, mit einem sehr kurzen Nachwort von Hippie
End « Die israelische Armee zerstörte die Denkmäler des ehemaligen palästinensischen Führers im Flüchtlingslager. Die
IDF zerstörte die Stelen des ehemaligen palästinensischen Führers Arafat im Flüchtlingslager. Die
israelische Armee zerstörte die Stelen, die den ehemaligen palästinensischen Führer, den ehemaligen, darstellen. Chef der Palästinensischen Befreiungsorganisation Jassir Arafat im Flüchtlingslager Tulkarm im Westjordanland, berichtet die Zeitung Times of Israel.
„ IDF-Soldaten zerstören mit Bulldozern Denkmäler … für Jassir Arafat am Eingang des Flüchtlingslagers Tulkarm “, heißt es in der Veröffentlichung.
Es wird darauf hingewiesen, dass die Gründe für den Abriss noch nicht bekannt gegeben wurden.“
Rein subjektiv würde ich sagen, wie wahnsinnig diese Aktionen waren Meiner Meinung nach ist es so, dass es einfach keine Worte dafür gibt.
Ich kann der jüdischen Bevölkerung Israels und jedem, der jetzt die Handlungen seiner Behörden gutheißt, nur raten, sich so fest wie möglich an diese Tatsache der Existenz zu erinnern, nur für den
Die Linke ist auf dem absteigenden Ast. Dieses Phänomen sehen wir in fast ganz Europa. Egal ob in Deutschland, Italien, Frankreich oder auch Österreich, sie ist nicht mehr in der Lage, ihre alten Kernschichten zu erreichen. Und aufsteigende junge Wählergruppen werden von progressiv-neoliberalen Parteien, wie den Grünen oder den Neos, absorbiert. Woran liegt das?
Redaktion15. November 2023 06:04
eXXpress-Kolumnist Bernhard Heinzlmaier
Wohl daran, dass traditionelle linke Parteien wie SPÖ oder SPD strukturell verknöchert und sklerotisch, weltanschaulich dogmatisch und erstarrt sind. Das hat auch Auswirkungen auf die Repräsentanten dieser Parteien. Sir Karl Popper hat einmal gemeint, dass man politische Parteien, die im Abstieg begriffen sind, daran erkennt, dass sie überwiegend von ästhetisch unattraktiven Menschen geführt werden. Diese sind übergewichtig, haben schlampige Frisuren, tragen schlechtsitzende und geschmacklose Kleidung und pflegen eine pöbelhafte sprachliche Ausdrucksweise. Prototypisch dafür die beiden Verhandlungsführer der Gewerkschaften in den Metaller-KV-Verhandlungen, von denen der eine, ein gewisser Reinhold Binder, mit dem kultivierten Ausspruch „Mit Einmalzahlungen können die Arbeitnehmer scheißen gehen“, an die Öffentlichkeit getreten ist. Wenn solche kulturell entgleisten Personen Spitzenpositionen in der Gewerkschaft innehaben, dann kann man es förmlich hören, das Knirschen im strukturellen Gebälk der Interessensvertretung der österreichischen Arbeitnehmer. Schon Antonio Gramsci hat darauf hingewiesen, dass Parteien, die das Volk nicht kulturell erreichen können, niemals die politische Macht erringen werden. Wer im vorpolitischen oder metapolitischen Raum nicht hegemoniefähig ist, der kann auch keine Wahlen gewinnen. Aber den „Revisionisten“ Gramsci haben die heute in der SPÖ herrschenden Stamokap-Leninisten ja niemals gelesen, dafür umso intensiver den Vulgärmarxisten Lenin.
Rote Einladungspolitik soll mit Hinterlist eine Mehrheit vorspielen
Eine extrem zugespitzte aber durchaus nicht unzutreffende Charakterisierung der Linken hat der deutsche Spitzengelehrte und Kommunikationswissenschafter Norbert Bolz bei X (vorm. Twitter) eingestellt. Sie lautet dem Wortsinn nach: Die Linke ist eine Mischung aus Lumpenproletariat und Bohème minus Kreativität. Um diese Formel richtig zu verstehen, darf man den Begriff Lumpenproletariat nicht alleine als Bedeutungsträger für Phänomene des Pauperismus lesen. Schon bei den sozialistischen Klassikern werden darunter auch deklassierte und missratene Angehörige der Bourgeoisie und anderer Gesellschaftsgruppen verstanden. So sprach Friedrich Engels zum Beispiel auch vom „Schmarotzeradel“, der „vom Schuldenmachen, zweifelhaftem Spiel, Zudringlichkeit, Bettel und politischer Spionage“ lebt. In die heutige Zeit übertragen, könnten damit auch Bau-Tycoons, Glücksspielunternehmer, Spekulanten und windige Immobilen-Jongleure verstanden werden, die sich gerne vormals hochrangige sozialdemokratische oder grüne Spitzenfunktionäre gegen horrende Bezahlung ins Unternehmen holen, um von deren Verbindungen zu den politischen Machtzentren zu profitieren. Für eine darüber hinausgehende zweckdienliche Sachleistung, sind solche Parvenüs ohnehin nicht zu gebrauchen. Verwendung können sie ausschließlich in sogenannten „Bullshit Jobs“ (David Graeber) finden. Diesbezüglich haben wir schon wahrlich abenteuerliche Mesalliancen zwischen Wirtschaft und Politik gesehen, zum Beispiel die eines Spitzenunternehmens der deutschen Energiewirtschaft mit dem aus der extremen Linken zum Vorsitzenden der Grünen aufgestiegenen Joschka Fischer. Der linke Joschka, früher Befürworter der Dekarbonisierung und Wachstumskritiker, wurde damit entweder tatsächlich vom Saulus zum Paulus oder er lieferte als Insider, unmoralisch, wie Politiker nun heute einmal sind, den Bossen des Energiekapitalismus gegen Geld ein paar Tricks und Kniffe, um seine alten Genossen aufs Kreuz zu legen.
Aber wenden wir uns wieder der bolzschen Formel zu. Als zweite tragende Gruppe, neben den opportunistischen Lumpen, die ihre Ideale mit Vergnügen gegen Geld verraten, findet man in der Anhängerschaft der abgewirtschafteten Linken die sogenannte Bohème. Das sind eitle und snobistische Intellektuelle und Künstler, die keine materiellen Sorgen haben, und deren wichtigstes Ziel es ist, ihre gesellschaftlichen Spielräume und Freiheiten zu vergrößern, Aufmerksamkeit zu erregen und Meinungsführerschaft zu erringen. Ideale wie Gleichheit und Umverteilung sind ihnen suspekt, weil sie durch eine egalitäre Politik auch Teile ihres durch geschicktes Netzwerken und beflissene Liebedienerei erworbenen Vermögens mit unterprivilegierten Gruppen teilen müssten. Dass solch gut betuchte, rote Wissenschaftler, Künstler und Journalisten in der SPÖ das Sagen haben, sieht man am Beschluss des roten Bundesparteitages, „legale Fluchtrouten“ zu schaffen. Damit würde das Land mit Illegalen geradezu geflutet werden, da eine solche Maßnahme für afrikanische junge Männer eine Einladung wäre, sich in den geschützten Korridoren in Richtung EU zu schwindeln. Kontrollieren könnte diese mächtigen Zuströme das weitgehend unfähige Grenzmanagement der EU genauso wenig wie es gegenwärtig dazu in der Lage ist, die Außengrenzen zu sichern. In diesem Zusammenhang ist es faszinierend zu sehen, wie ein von linken Bohemiens geführtes Marktforschungsinstitut mit einer hinterlistigen Fragestellung erfolgreich versucht hat, eine Mehrheit für die Idee der „legalen Fluchtrouten“ herbei zu manipulieren, indem es die rote Einladungsoffensive mit einem „verpflichtenden Asylantrag an den EU-Außengrenzen“ verknüpfte. Eine dermaßen dreiste Weichspülung der bevölkerungspolitisch ruinösen „legalen Fluchtrouten“ gaukelt den Willen zur strikten Kontrolle der Außengrenzen vor, die kein Babler dieser Welt wirklich will, würde dies doch bedeuten, dass Menschen ohne gültigen Asylbescheid gnadenlos zurückgewiesen werden. Der in den Augen der Linken fürchterliche „Pushback“ würde so zum täglichen legalistischen Usus. Natürlich stimmte eine Mehrheit der Österreicher dieser Idee zu, ist sie doch nichts anderes als die Festung Europas Herbert Kickls, eingehüllt in eine Wortwolke aus warmherzigen Humanismus. Babler will in Wirklichkeit offene Grenzen ohne Wenn und Aber, denn er ist Antiimperialist und seine Agenda beinhaltet das Ziel, mit Hilfe der zuströmenden feindseligen Massen – die Pro-Hamas-Demonstrationen haben es gezeigt – das imperialistische System des Westens zu Fall zu bringen. Zumindest lagert diese Idee in seinem Unbewussten, welches ja bekanntlich am Ende das Handeln stärker bestimmt als die bewusste Verstandestätigkeit. Die Folgen der „legalen Fluchtrouten“ wären fatal für die Unter- und Mittelschichten. Es würde zu einer weiteren Umschichtung staatlicher Transfers von den bioösterreichischen Working Poors zu Einwanderern in den Sozialstaat geben, von denen sich viele nicht in unsere Kultur integrieren wollen, Arbeit und Fleiß nicht gerade erfunden zu haben scheinen und zudem für zunehmenden Antisemitismus und erhöhte Kriminalität sorgen. Mit dieser Idee tritt die Babler-SPÖ den Interessen der Mehrheit der Österreicher entgegen und macht ihnen latent den Vorschlag, bei der FPÖ anzudocken. Offenbar haben viele die Botschaft der SPÖ verstanden. Noch vor dem fatalen Parteitag, bei dem es zu einem tiefgreifenden Linksruck kam, lag die Partei von Herbert Kickl schon bei 32 %. Gleichzeitig wankt Babler in den schweren Bleischuhen seiner woken Politik im Umfrage-Tiefland bei rund um die 20 % herum.
Der Homo Nullus ist die ist die Repräsentation des Unkreativen
Während der SPÖ-Parteitag über die digitalen Bildschirme flimmerte, ist mir ein Buch des Kulturexperten Wolfgang Emmerling in die Hände gefallen. Es trägt den schlichten Titel „Idioten“. Sein Untertitel: „Eine Kulturgeschichte des Homo Nullus“. Den Idioten kennen wir aus der griechischen Antike. Er ist der Außenseiter, der sich von Gemeinschaftsaufgaben fernhält. Im Mittelalter bezeichnete man die weltfremden spitzfindigen Theoretiker der Scholastik als „Idioten“. In unserer Gegenwart verortet Emmerling den Idioten in der Politik. Er ist dort der Egoist, der rücksichtslos seine Eigeninteressen verfolgt, der ein provinzieller, kleingeistiger Besserwisser ist, dem Bildung nichts und sein Meinungshaben alles ist und der seine einfältigen Nachrichten ohne Unterlass in die digitale Welt hinein blökt.
Ohne Zweifel ist Emmerlings Idiot oder Homo Nullus die Repräsentation des Unkreativen in der Formel „Links = Lumpenproletariat plus Bohème minus Kreativität“. Der durch Mangel an Kreativität versteinerte Geist der Linken ist der Mühlstein, der neben Lumpen und Bohème diese große historische Bewegung gerade in den Abgrund zieht. Symbole für die Herrschaft des Homo Nullus in der SPÖ sind unterkomplexe sozialpolitische Ideen wie die „warme Mahlzeit“ für alle Volksschulkinder und Pflichtschüler. Die SPÖ hat offenbar die Absicht, die alte Klostersuppe wieder einzuführen. Statt für ein positives Wirtschaftsklima zu werben, verantwortungsvolle Lohnabschlüsse zu befördern, die Menschen zur Arbeit und zur Leistung zu motivieren und für innere Sicherheit zu sorgen, tritt die SPÖ vehement spalterisch für Klassenkampf, Arbeitszeitverkürzung, Steuererhöhungen und Verstaatlichung der Wirtschaft ein.
Selten hingegen spricht diese Partei von Fortschritt und Erfolgen, immer von Armut und Versagen. Und wo es Elend und Armut nicht gibt, werden sie erfunden. Hört man Babler reden, so erscheint die Misere der Armut bei ihm geradezu als Faszinosum. Das Armutsnarrativ ergreift ihn dermaßen, dass er affekt-inkontinent wird und Tränen in seine Augen steigen. Seine innere Vorstellung beherrschen Kranke, die ohne ärztliche Versorgung in feuchten Wohnungen vegetieren, Kinder, die hungernd in ihren Schulbänken darben, Arbeiter, die lahm und kurzatmig bis ins hohe Alter an Hochöfen malochen und Arbeitslose, die vor den Kirchen betteln müssen, weil die Aktion 20.000 abgeschafft wurde. Und weil das alles seiner abseitigen Fantasie nicht genügt, will er in diese notgepeinigte Gesellschaft auch noch einige hunderttausend Afrikaner hereinholen. Ein Mensch, dessen Bewusstsein in einem der reichsten Länder der Welt solche Bilder produziert, sollte sich aus der Politik zurückziehen und seine weitere Lebenszeit meditierend in einem Ashram verbringen.
Der Homo Nullus unserer Zeit ist die Mischung aus einem verstockten, affektgesteuerten Bohemien und einem selbstsüchtigen Lumpen, ohne jegliche Kreativität, festgebunden am Pflock der Gegenwart, fasziniert von Ideen der Vergangenheit, voller Zukunftsangst, risikoavers, ästhetisch inkompetent, zwar trickreich, aber geistlos. Er ist die Symbolfigur der von einem Provinzbürgermeister geführten österreichischen Sozialdemokratie.
We stand in Solidarity with Palestine. But we must recognize that the United States Military and Intelligence apparatus is firmly behind Israel’s genocide directed against the People of Palestine.
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And this must be part of the solidarity campaign, namely to Reveal the Truth regarding Washington’s insidious role, which is part of a carefully planned military agenda directed against Palestine and the broader Middle East. Netanyahu is a proxy, with a criminal record. He has the unbending support of Western Europe’s “Classe politique”.
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The U.S. led War on the People of Palestine and the Middle East is a Criminal Undertaking
Israel and the Zionist lobby in the U.S. are NOT exerting undue influence AGAINST U.S. Foreign Policy as outlined by numerous analysts.
Quite the opposite. The Zionist lobby is firmly aligned with U.S. foreign policy, and Vice Versa. It targets those who are opposed to war, who call for a cease fire. It exerts influence in favour of the conduct of the U.S. military agenda in support of Israel.
The US military-intelligence establishment in coordination with powerful financial interests is calling the shots in regards to Israel’s genocidal intent to “Wipe Palestine off the Map”.
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America’s Military Doctrine: Targeting and Killing Civilians
The targeting of civilians and the killing of children in Gaza is modelled on numerous US sponsored massacres of civilians (1945-2023) including the 2004 attack on Fallujah. (More than 30 Million mainly civilian deaths in US-led wars in what is euphemistically called the “post War Era”).
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Veteran War correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot reflected on the indescribable barbarity of the 2004 Fallujah massacre, which resulted in countless deaths and destruction. It was a genocide conducted by the U.S military:
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“The Americans invaded, chillingly: “house to house, room to room”, raining death and destruction on the proud, ancient “City of Mosques.”
Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard …
One correspondent wrote: “There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.”
Fallujah, 2004
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The U.S. is supportive of the Israeli genocide directed against the people of Palestine. Prime Minister Netanyahu is a criminal. He is Washington’s proxy, unreservedly endorsed and supported by the Biden Administration as well as the U.S. Congress.
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Zionism constitutes the ideological underpinnings of contemporary U.S. imperialism and its unending war against the people of the Middle East.
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The Zionist “Greater Israel” dogma –as in all wars of religion since the dawn of mankind– is there to mislead people Worldwide as to “who is really pulling the strings”.
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Zionism has become a useful instrument which is embodied in U.S. military doctrine. The “Promised Land” broadly coincides with America’s hegemonic agenda in the Middle East, namely what the U.S. military has designated as the “New Middle East”.
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Cui Bono: “To Whom Does it Benefit”
There are strategic, geopolitical and economic objectives behind Israel’s genocide directed against the People of Palestine. “Crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators”:
Who are the Perpetrators?
Israel’s War against the People of Palestine serves the interests of Big Money, the Military Industrial Complex, Corrupt Politicians… The Genocide is implemented by Netanyahu on behalf of the United States.
The US military and intelligence apparatus are behind Israel’s criminal bombing and invasion of Gaza. The unfolding Middle East War is largely directed against Iran.
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Video Interview: Michel Chossudovsky and Caroline Mailloux
Historical Antecedents. Using Israel As a Means to Attacking Iran
In 2003, the war on Iran project (Operation Theatre Iran Near Term, TIRANNT)) was already Déjà Vu. It had been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 15 years.
Let us recall that at the outset of Bush’s Second Term, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped a bombshell, hinting, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was “right at the top of the list” of the rogue enemies of America. And that Israel would, so to speak,
“be doing the bombing for us” [paraphrase] , without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them “to do it”. For further details see my article below was first published by Global Research in May 2005, as well as PBS Interview with Z. Brzezinski
This Dick Cheney-style option is currently (November 2023) once more on the drawing board of the Pentagon, namely the possibility that Israel which is already bombing Lebanon and Syria, would be incited to wage an attack on Iran (acting on behalf of the United States).
US Congress Resolution (H. RES. 559) Accuses Iran of Possessing Nuclear Weapons
Careful timing: In June 2023, the US House of Representatives adopted Resolution (H. RES. 559) which provides a “Green Light” to wage war on Iran.
The US House passed a resolution that allows the use of force against Iran, intimating without a shred of evidence that Iran has Nuclear Weapons:
Resolved, That the House of Representatives declares it is the policy of the United States—
(1) that a nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran is not acceptable;
(2) that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon under any circumstances or conditions;
(3) to use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; and
(4) to recognize and support the freedom of action of partners and allies, including Israel, to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Whereas Iran is tagged (without evidence) as a Nuclear Power by the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington fails to acknowledge that Israel is an undeclared nuclear power.
The Times of Israel reported that: “Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday [November 5, 2023] that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip”
America’s strategic objective is, despite its meagre reserves of natural gas:
To Force the European Union to buy LNG “Made in America”.
What this implies is that America’s military agenda against Russia and Iran constitutes a means to hike up EU energy prices, which is an Act of Economic Warfare against the People of Europe.
The Iran-Qatar Natural Gas Partnership
The maritime gas reserves of the Persian Gulf are under a (joint ownership) partnership between Qatar and Iran (See diagram below).
The Biden Administration is Intent upon Destabilizing the Iran-Qatar Partnership
This partnership is supportive of the People of Palestine.
In March 2022, “President Joe Biden following a meeting with Qatar’s Emir Sheik Tamim “designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally of the United States, fulfilling the promise that he had made to Qatar earlier this year [2022], the White House said” ( Reuters, March 10, 2022 )
“The designation is granted by the United States to close, non-NATO allies that have strategic working relationships with the U.S. military.
Biden promised Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, in January [2022] during a meeting at the White House that he would grant Qatar the special status.” Reuters See also Reuters (January 31, 2022)
What is at stake are cross-cutting coalitions. Qatar is a “Partner” of Iran in relation to the strategic reserves of maritime gas in the Persian Gulf. There is no formaI military cooperation between the two countries.
Washington’s unspoken agenda is to break and/or destabilize Qatar’s Partnership with Iran, by integrating Qatar into the US-NATO military orbit.
“the Emir of Qatar said the groundbreaking for the Northern Dome expansion project was laid today, which is in line with Qatar’s strategy to strengthen its position as a global LNG producer …
This joint gas field, known as “South Pars” in Iran, is the largest natural gas field in the world and contains 50.97 trillion cubic meters of gas and about 7.9 billion cubic meters of natural gas condensate.
At the time of writing, the implications of Sheik Tamin’s October 2023 expansion project in South Pars Fields (which is in Iranian territorial Waters) as well as Qatar’s “Special Status” Military Alliance with the U.S. remain unclear.
America’s Al-Udeid military base in Qatar (left) is the largest US base in the Middle East.
Have the status and functions of Al Udeid changed since the signing of the March 2022 agreement designating Qatar as a “Major Non NATO Ally of the US”
The U.S. foreign policy objective is to ultimately destroy and undermine that “friendship” with Iran which is highly valued and supported by Qatari citizens.
The export of gas from South Pars North Dome transits through Iran, Turkey and Russia.
Qatar, Russia and Iran (the 3 largest holders Worldwide of natural gas reserves) reached an agreement in 2009 to create a ‘Gas Troika’, a trilateral gas cooperation entity including the development of joint projects.
A large number of countries including South Korea, India, Japan, China are importing LNG from Qatar.
Last year (November 2022), “QatarEnergy signed a 27-year deal to supply China’s Sinopec with liquefied natural gas”. Qatar has also a strategic alliance with China.
Exert US Control over the Maritime Gas Field in the Persian Gulf
Weaken and Disable the “Gas Troika” (Russia, Iran, Qatar)
Create Chaos in the Global Energy Market,
Undermine the Trade in Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to Numerous Countries
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Iran. Third Largest Reserves of Oil Worldwide
Iran is not only second in terms of its gas reserves after Russia, it ranks third Worldwide in relation to its oil reserves (12% of Worldwide oil reserves) versus a meagre 4% for the U.S.
Strategic Waterways: The Ben Gurion Canal Project
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U.S. Seeks Dominance over Strategic International Waterways
The Ben Gurion Canal Projectwas initially a “secret” (classified) U.S. project formulated in 1963 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLNG, a strategic think tank (focussing on nuclear radiation) on contract with the U.S Department of Energy. The LLNG project was formulated in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970). Its intent was to bypass the Suez Canal.
The Ben Gurion Canal project is currently contemplated as means control the channels of international maritime trade to the detriment of the people of the Middle East. It also seeks to destabilize China’s maritime commodity trade.
In the context of the broader US-led Middle East War, the Ben Gurion Canal Project is part of America’s hegemonic military agenda. It is consistent with Netanyahu’s “Plan to Wipe Palestine Off the Map”.
According to Yvonne Ridley:
“The only thing stopping the newly-revised [Ben Gurion Canal] project from being revived and rubber-stamped is the presence of the Palestinians in Gaza. As far as Netanyahu is concerned they are standing in the way of the project” (Yvonne Ridley, November 10, 2023, emphasis added)
The U.S led war is intent upon confiscating all Palestinian territories, which would be appropriated by the State of Israel, acting as a strategic “Anglo-American Hub” in the Middle East:
The Ben Gurion Canal will give Israel in particular and other friendly nations the freedom from blackmail arising out of access to the Suez Canal.
Arab states have been leveraging the Red Sea to pressure Israel and in response, Israel has decided to gain more control of the Red Sea. These African countries have cultural and economic affinities with the Arab states. One of the main military benefits for Israel is that it gives Israel the strategic options as the Ben Gurion Canal will totally take away the importance of Suez for the US military if needed in the aid for Israel.
Israel aims to push Egypt further into a corner by eliminating Suez in the global trade and energy corridor and becoming a global trade and energy logistics center.
Experts are of the opinion that this situation will shake the strategic-energy balance of China’s Belt and Road Project initiative in the Mediterranean, along with the Strait of Hormuz, which is the transfer point of 30 percent of the world’s energy. The Ben Gurion Canal would have the solid backing of the West. (Eurasia Review, November 7, 2023, emphasis added)
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“Greater Israel”.
Strategic “Anglo-American Hub”
The Promised Land of Greater Israel coincides with America’s Colonial Design in the Middle East
The Greater Israel design is not strictly a Zionist Project for the Middle East, it is an integral part of US foreign policy, its strategic objective is to extend US hegemony as well as fracture and balkanize the Middle East.
In this regard, Washington’s strategy consists in destabilizing and weakening regional economic powers in the Middle East including Turkey and Iran. This policy –which is consistent with the Greater Israel– is accompanied by a process of political fragmentation.
Since the Gulf war (1991), the Pentagon has contemplated the creation of a “Free Kurdistan” which would include the annexation of parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as Turkey
“The New Middle East”: Unofficial US Military Academy Map by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters
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“America’s Promised Land”. Global Warfare
When viewed in the current context, including the siege on Gaza, the Zionist Plan for the Middle East coincides with America’s long war against the Middle East. As we mentioned earlier the Zionist agenda provides an ideological and religious justification of America’s long war against the Middle East.
The 1979-80. the so-called Soviet Afghan War, engineered by the CIA
The 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War engineered by the U.S.
The 1991 Gulf War against Iraq,
The 2001 The US-NATO Invasion of Afghanistan,
The 2003 Invasion of Iraq
The 2006 War on Lebanon,
The Arab Spring,
The 2011 war on Libya,
The 2015 war on Yemen
Obama’s 2014-2017 “Counter-Terrorism” Operation against Iraq and Syria
The ongoing wars against Syria, Iraq and Yemen
The “Greater Israel” project consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of a US-Israeli expansionist project, with the support of NATO.
Needless to day, the ideological and religious underpinnings of the “Greater Israel” project are consistent with America’s imperial design.
While the Zionist agenda is not the driving force, it serves the useful purpose of misleading public opinion concerning America’s long war against the people of the Middle East.
The Historical Context: A Sequence of Military Plans and Scenarios to Wage War on Iran
Since the launching of the Theater Iran Near Term (TIRANNT)war games scenario in May 2003 (leaked classified doc), an escalation scenario involving military action directed against Iran and Syria had been envisaged, of which Syria was the first stage.
TIRANNT was followed by a series of military plans pertaining to Iran. Numerous post 9/11 official statements and US military documents had pointed to an expanded Middle East war, involving the active participation of Israel.
Israel is America’s ally. Military operations are closely coordinated. Israel does not act without Washington’s approval.
U.S.-Israeli Air Defense
Barely acknowledged by the media, the US and Israel have an integrated air defense system, which was set up in early 2009, shortly after the Israel invasion of Gaza under “Operation Cast Led”.
The X-band radar air defense system set up by the US in Israel in 2009 would
“integrate Israel’s missile defenses with the U.S. global missile detection network, which includes satellites, Aegis ships on the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and land-based Patriot radars and interceptors.” (Sen. Joseph Azzolina, Protecting Israel from Iran’s missiles, Bayshore News, December 26, 2008). )
What this means is that Washington calls the shots. Confirmed by the Pentagon, the US military controls Israel’s Air Defense:
”This is and will remain a U.S. radar system,’ Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.
‘So this is not something we are giving or selling to the Israelis and it is something that will likely require U.S. personnel on-site to operate.’” (Quoted in Israel National News, January 9, 2009, emphasis added).
At the outset of Obama’s Second Term, the US and Israel initiated discussions pertaining to a “US personnel on site” presence in Israel, namely the establishment of a “permanent” and “official” military base inside Israel.
And on September 17, 2017, a US Air Defense base located in the Negev desert was inaugurated.
According to the Israeli IDF spokesperson, the objective is to send a “message to the region, ” including Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
Of utmost relevance:
Israel would not be able to act unilaterally against Iran, without a green light from the Pentagon which controls key components of Israel’s air defense system.
In practice, a war on Iran, would be a joint US-NATO-Israeli endeavor, coordinated by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with America’s allies playing a key (subordinate) role.
Michel Chossudovsky, November 11, 2023
Below is my May 2005 Global Research article which provides a detailed historical perspective on US war plans to attack Iran.
At the outset of Bush’s second term, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped a bombshell. He hinted, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was “right at the top of the list” of the rogue enemies of America, and that Israel would, so to speak, “be doing the bombing for us”, without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them “to do it”:
“One of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked… Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,” (quoted from an MSNBC Interview Jan 2005)
“Iran I think is more ambiguous. And there the issue is certainly not tyranny; it’s nuclear weapons. And the vice president today in a kind of a strange parallel statement to this declaration of freedom hinted that the Israelis may do it and in fact used language which sounds like a justification or even an encouragement for the Israelis to do it.”
The foregoing statements are misleading. The US is not “encouraging Israel”. What we are dealing with is a joint US-Israeli military operation to bomb Iran, which has been in the active planning stage for more than a year. The Neocons in the Defense Department, under Douglas Feith, have been working assiduously with their Israeli military and intelligence counterparts, carefully identifying targets inside Iran (see Seymour Hersh)
Under this working arrangement, Israel will not act unilaterally, without a green light from Washington. In other words, Israel will not implement an attack without the participation of the US.
Covert Intelligence Operations: Stirring Ethnic Tensions in Iran
Meanwhile, for the last two years, Washington has been involved in covert intelligence operations inside Iran. American and British intelligence and special forces (working with their Israeli counterparts) are involved in this operation.
“A British intelligence official said that any campaign against Iran would not be a ground war like the one in Iraq. The Americans will use different tactics, said the intelligence officer. ‘It is getting quite scary.’” (Evening Standard, 17 June 2003)
The expectation is that a US-Israeli bombing raid of Iran’s nuclear facilities will stir up ethnic tensions and trigger “regime change” in favor of the US. (See Arab Monitor).
Bush advisers believe that the “Iranian opposition movement” will unseat the Mullahs. This assessment constitutes a gross misjudgment of social forces inside Iran. What is more likely to occur is that Iranians will consistently rally behind a wartime government against foreign aggression. In fact, the entire Middle East and beyond would rise up against US interventionism.
Retaliation in the Case of a US-Israeli Aerial Attack
Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel (CNN, 8 Feb 2005). These attacks, could also target US military facilities in the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.
In other words, the air strikes against Iran could contribute to unleashing a war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region.
Moreover, the planned attack on Iran should also be understood in relation to the timely withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which has opened up a new space, for the deployment of Israeli forces. The participation of Turkey in the US-Israeli military operation is also a factor, following an agreement reached between Ankara and Tel Aviv.
In other words, US and Israeli military planners must carefully weigh the far-reaching implications of their actions.
Israel Builds up its Stockpile of Deadly Military Hardware
A massive buildup in military hardware has occurred in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.
Israel has recently taken delivery from the US of some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” including some 500 BLU 109 ‘bunker-buster bombs. The (uranium coated) munitions are said to be more than “adequate to address the full range of Iranian targets, with the possible exception of the buried facility at Natanz, which may require the [more powerful] BLU-113 bunker buster“:
“Given Israel’s already substantial holdings of such weapons, this increase in its inventory would allow a sustained assault with or without further US involvement.” (See Richard Bennett)
Gbu 28 Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28)
The Israeli Air Force would attack Iran’s nuclear facility at Bushehr using US as well Israeli produced bunker buster bombs. The attack would be carried out in three separate waves “with the radar and communications jamming protection being provided by U.S. Air Force AWACS and other U.S. aircraft in the area”. (See W Madsen)
Bear in mind that the bunker buster bombs can also be used to deliver tactical nuclear bombs. The B61-11 is the “nuclear version” of the “conventional” BLU 113. It can be delivered in much same way as the conventional bunker buster bomb. (See Michel Chossudovsky, see also this)
According to the Pentagon, tactical nuclear weapons are “safe for civilians”. Their use has been authorized by the US Senate. (See Michel Chossudovsky)
Even if tactical nuclear weapons are not used by Israel, an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities not only raises the specter of a broader war, but also of nuclear radiation over a wide area:
“To attack Iran’s nuclear facilities will not only provoke war, but it could also unleash clouds of radiation far beyond the targets and the borders of Iran.” (Statement of Prof Elias Tuma, Arab Internet Network, Federal News Service, 1 March 2005)
Moreover, while most reports have centered on the issue of punitive air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the strikes would most probably extend to other targets.
While a ground war is contemplated as a possible “scenario” at the level of military planning, the US military would not be able to wage a an effective ground war, given the situation in Iraq. In the words of former National Security Adviser Lawrence Eagelberger:
“We are not going to get in a ground war in Iran, I hope. If we get into that, we are in serious trouble. I don’t think anyone in Washington is seriously considering that.” ( quoted in the National Journal, 4 December 2004).
Iran’s Military Capabilities
Despite its overall weaknesses in relation to Israel and the US, Iran has an advanced air defense system, deployed to protect its nuclear sites; “they are dispersed and underground making potential air strikes difficult and without any guarantees of success.” (Jerusalem Post, 20 April 2005).
It has upgraded its Shahab-3 missile, which can reach targets in Israel. Iran’s armed forces have recently conducted high-profile military exercises in anticipation of a US led attack. Iran also possesses some 12 X-55 strategic cruise missiles, produced by Ukraine. Iran’s air defense systems is said to feature Russian SA-2, SA-5, SA-6 as well as shoulder-launched SA-7 missiles (Jaffa Center for Strategic Studies).
The US “Military Road Map”
The Bush administration has officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”.
Targeting Iran is a bipartisan project, which broadly serves the interests of the Anglo-American oil conglomerates, the Wall Street financial establishment and the military-industrial complex.
The broader Middle East-Central Asian region encompasses more than 70% of the World’s reserves of oil and natural gas. Iran possesses 10% of the world’s oil and ranks third after Saudi Arabia (25 %) and Iraq (11 %) in the size of its reserves. In comparison, the US possesses less than 2.8 % of global oil reserves. (See Eric Waddell, The Battle for Oil)
The announcement to target Iran should come as no surprise. It is part of the battle for oil. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran:
“The broad national security interests and objectives expressed in the President’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Chairman’s National Military Strategy (NMS) form the foundation of the United States Central Command’s theater strategy. The NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, to other states in the region, and to their own citizens. Dual containment is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region without depending on either Iraq or Iran. USCENTCOM’s theater strategy is interest-based and threat-focused. The purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused in the NSS, is to protect the United States’ vital interest in the region – uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil. (USCENTCOM, USPolicy , emphasis added)
Main Military Actors
While the US, Israel, as well as Turkey (with borders with both Iran and Syria) are the main actors in this process, a number of other countries, in the region, allies of the US, including several Central Asian former Soviet republics have been enlisted. Britain is closely involved despite its official denials at the diplomatic level. Turkey occupies a central role in the Iran operation. It has an extensive military cooperation agreement with Israel. There are indications that NATO is also formally involved in the context of an Israel-NATO agreement reached in November 2004.
Planning The Aerial Attack on Iran
According to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, George W. Bush has already signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran, scheduled for June.(See this)
The June cut-off date should be understood. It does not signify that the attack will occur in June. What it suggests is that the US and Israel are “in a state of readiness” and are prepared to launch an attack by June or at a later date. In other words, the decision to launch the attack has not been made.
Ritter’s observation concerning an impending military operation should nonetheless be taken seriously. In recent months, there is ample evidence that a major military operation is in preparation:
1) several high profile military exercises have been conducted in recent months, involving military deployment and the testing of weapons systems.
2) military planning meetings have been held between the various parties involved. There has been a shuttle of military and government officials between Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara.
3) A significant change in the military command structure in Israel has occurred, with the appointment of a new Chief of Staff.
4) Intense diplomatic exchanges have been carried out at the international level with a view to securing areas of military cooperation and/or support for a US-Israeli led military operation directed against Iran.
5) Ongoing intelligence operations inside Iran have been stepped up.
6) Consensus Building: Media propaganda on the need to intervene in Iran has been stepped up, with daily reports on how Iran constitutes a threat to peace and global security.
Timeline of Key Initiatives
In the last few months, various key initiatives have been taken, which are broadly indicative that an aerial bombing of Iran is in the military pipeline:
November 2004 in Brussels: NATO-Israel protocol: Israel’s IDF delegation to the NATO conference to met with military brass of six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. NATO seeks to revive the framework, known as the Mediterranean Dialogue program, which would include Israel. The Israeli delegation accepted to participate in military exercises and “anti-terror maneuvers” together with several Arab countries.
January 2005: the US, Israel and Turkey held military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Syria. These exercises, which have been held in previous years were described as routine.
February 2005. Following the decision reached in Brussels in November 2004, Israel was involved for the first time in military exercises with NATO, which also included several Arab countries.
February 2005: Assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The assassination, which was blamed on Syria, serves Israeli and US interests and was used as a pretext to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.
February 2005: Sharon fires his Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Ya’alon and appoints Air Force General Dan Halutz. This is the first time in Israeli history that an Air Force General is appointed Chief of Staff (See Uri Avnery)
The appointment of Major General Dan Halutz as IDF Chief of Staff is considered in Israeli political circles as “the appointment of the right man at the right time.” The central issue is that a major aerial operation against Iran is in the planning stage, and Maj General Halutz is slated to coordinate the aerial bombing raids on Iran. Halutz’s appointment was specifically linked to Israel’s Iran agenda: “As chief of staff, he will in the best position to prepare the military for such a scenario.”
March 2005: NATO’s Secretary General was in Jerusalem for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon and Israel’s military brass, following the joint NATO-Israel military exercise in February. These military cooperation ties are viewed by the Israeli military as a means to “enhance Israel’s deterrence capability regarding potential enemies threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria.” The premise underlying NATO-Israel military cooperation is that Israel is under attack:
“The more Israel’s image is strengthened as a country facing enemies who attempt to attack it for no justified reason, the greater will be the possibility that aid will be extended to Israel by NATO. Furthermore, Iran and Syria will have to take into account the possibility that the increasing cooperation between Israel and NATO will strengthen Israel’s links with Turkey, also a member of NATO. Given Turkey’s impressive military potential and its geographic proximity to both Iran and Syria, Israel’s operational options against them, if and when it sees the need, could gain considerable strength. ” (Jaffa Center for Strategic Studies, http://www.tau.ac.il/jcss/sa/v7n4p4Shalom.html )
The Israel-NATO protocol is all the more important because it obligates NATO to align itself with the US-Israeli plan to bomb Iran, as an act of self defense on the part of Israel. It also means that NATO is also involved in the process of military consultations relating to the planned aerial bombing of Iran. It is of course related to the bilateral military cooperation agreement between Israel and Turkey and the likelihood that part of the military operation will be launched from Turkey, which is a member of NATO.
Late March 2005: News leaks in Israel indicated an “initial authorization” by Prime Minster Ariel Sharon of an Israeli attack on Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant “if diplomacy failed to stop Iran’s nuclear program”. (The Hindu, 28 March 2005)
March-April 2005: The Holding in Israel of Joint US-Israeli military exercises specifically pertaining to the launching of Patriot missiles.
US Patriot missile crews stationed in Germany were sent to Israel to participate in the joint Juniper Cobra exercise with the Israeli military. The exercise was described as routine and “unconnected to events in the Middle East”: “As always, we are interested in implementing lessons learned from training exercises.” (UPI, 9 March 2005).
April 2005: Donald Rumsfeld (right) was on an official visits to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. His diplomatic endeavors were described by the Russian media as “literally circling Iran in an attempt to find the best bridgehead for a possible military operation against that country.”
In Baku, Azerbaijan Rumsfeld was busy discussing the date for deployment of US troops in Azerbaijan on Iran’s North-Western border. US military bases described as “mobile groups” in Azerbaijan are slated to play a role in a military operation directed against Iran.
Azerbaijan is a member of GUUAM, a military cooperation agreement with the US and NATO, which allows for the stationing of US troops in several of the member countries, including Georgia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. The stated short term objective is to “neutralize Iran”. The longer term objective under the Pentagon’s “Caspian Plan” is to exert military and economic control over the entire Caspian sea basin, with a view to ensuring US authority over oil reserves and pipeline corridors.
During his visit in April, Rumsfeld was pushing the US initiative of establishing “American special task forces and military bases to secure US influence in the Caspian region:
“Called Caspian Watch, the project stipulates a network of special task forces and police units in the countries of the regions to be used in emergencies including threats to objects of the oil complex and pipelines. Project Caspian Watch will be financed by the United States ($100 million). It will become an advance guard of the US European Command whose zone of responsibility includes the Caspian region. Command center of the project with a powerful radar is to be located in Baku.” ( Defense and Security Russia, April 27, 2005)
Rumsfeld’s visit followed shortly after that of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s to Baku.
April 2005: Iran signs a military cooperation with Tajikistan, which occupies a strategic position bordering Afghanistan’s Northern frontier. Tajikistan is a member of “The Shanghai Five” military cooperation group, which also includes Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. Iran also has economic cooperation agreements with Turkmenistan.
Mid April 2005: Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meets George W Bush at his Texas Ranch. Iran is on the agenda of bilateral talks. More significantly, the visit of Ariel Sharon was used to carry out high level talks between US and Israeli military planners pertaining to Iran.
Late April 2005. President Vladmir Putin is in Israel on an official visit. He announces Russia’s decision to sell short-range anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and to continue supporting Iran’s nuclear industry. Beneath the gilded surface of international diplomacy, Putin’s timely visit to Israel must be interpreted as “a signal to Israel” regarding its planned aerial attack on Iran.
Late April 2005: US pressure in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been exerted with a view to blocking the re-appointment of Mohammed Al Baradei, who according to US officials “is not being tough enough on Iran…” Following US pressures, the vote on the appointment of a new IAEA chief was put off until June. These developments suggest that Washington wants to put forth their own hand-picked nominee prior to launching US-Israeli aerial attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. (See VOA). (In February 2003, Al Baradei along with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix challenged the (phony) intelligence on WMD presented by the US to the UN Security Council, with a view to justifying the war on Iraq.)
Late April 2005. Sale of deadly military hardware to Israel. GBU-28 Buster Bunker Bombs: Coinciding with Putin’s visit to Israel, the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency (Department of Defense) announced the sale of an additional 100 bunker-buster bombs produced by Lockheed Martin to Israel. This decision was viewed by the US media as “a warning to Iran about its nuclear ambitions.”
The sale pertains to the larger and more sophisticated “Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) BLU-113 Penetrator” (including the WGU-36A/B guidance control unit and support equipment). The GBU-28 is described as “a special weapon for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground. The fact of the matter is that the GBU-28 is among the World’s most deadly “conventional” weapons used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, capable of causing thousands of civilian deaths through massive explosions.
The Israeli Air Force are slated to use the GBU-28s on their F-15 aircraft. (See text of DSCA news release)
Late April 2005- early May: Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) in Israel for follow-up talks with Ariel Sharon. He was accompanied by his Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul, who met with senior Israeli military officials. On the official agenda of these talks: joint defense projects, including the joint production of Arrow II Theater Missile Defense and Popeye II missiles. The latter also known as the Have Lite, are advanced small missiles, designed for deployment on fighter planes. Tel Aviv and Ankara decide to establish a hotline to share intelligence.
May 2005: Syrian troops scheduled to withdraw from Lebanon, leading to a major shift in the Middle East security situation, in favor of Israel and the US.
Iran Surrounded?
The US has troops and military bases in Turkey, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and of course Iraq.
In other words, Iran is virtually surrounded by US military bases. (see Map below). These countries as well as Turkmenistan, are members of NATO`s partnership for Peace Program and have military cooperation agreements with NATO.
Copyright Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2003
In other words, we are dealing with a potentially explosive scenario in which a number of countries, including several former Soviet republics, could be brought into a US led war with Iran. IranAtom.ru, a Russian based news and military analysis group has suggested, in this regard:
“since Iranian nuclear objects are scattered all over the country, Israel will need a mass strike with different fly-in and fly-out approaches – Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and other countries… Azerbaijan seriously fears Tehran’s reaction should Baku issue a permit to Israeli aircraft to overfly its territory.” (Defense and Security Russia, 12 April 2005).
Concluding remarks
The World is at an important crossroads.
The Bush Administration has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
Iran is the next military target. The planned military operation, which is by no means limited to punitive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, is part of a project of World domination, a military roadmap, launched at the end of the Cold War.
Military action against Iran would directly involve Israel’s participation, which in turn is likely to trigger a broader war throughout the Middle East, not to mention an implosion in the Palestinian occupied territories. Turkey is closely associated with the proposed aerial attacks.
Israel is a nuclear power with a sophisticated nuclear arsenal. (See text box below). The use of nuclear weapons by Israel or the US cannot be excluded, particularly in view of the fact that tactical nuclear weapons have now been reclassified as a variant of the conventional bunker buster bombs and are authorized by the US Senate for use in conventional war theaters. (“they are harmless to civilians because the explosion is underground”)
In this regard, Israel and the US rather than Iran constitute a nuclear threat.
The planned attack on Iran must be understood in relation to the existing active war theaters in the Middle East, namely Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
The conflict could easily spread from the Middle East to the Caspian sea basin. It could also involve the participation of Azerbaijan and Georgia, where US troops are stationed.
An attack on Iran would have a direct impact on the resistance movement inside Iraq. It would also put pressure on America’s overstretched military capabilities and resources in both the Iraqi and Afghan war theaters. (The 150,000 US troops in Iraq are already fully engaged and could not be redeployed in the case of a war with Iran.)
In other words, the shaky geopolitics of the Central Asia- Middle East region, the three existing war theaters in which America is currently, involved, the direct participation of Israel and Turkey, the structure of US sponsored military alliances, etc. raises the specter of a broader conflict.
Moreover, US military action on Iran not only threatens Russian and Chinese interests, which have geopolitical interests in the Caspian sea basin and which have bilateral agreements with Iran. It also backlashes on European oil interests in Iran and is likely to produce major divisions between Western allies, between the US and its European partners as well as within the European Union.
Through its participation in NATO, Europe, despite its reluctance, would be brought into the Iran operation. The participation of NATO largely hinges on a military cooperation agreement reached between NATO and Israel. This agreement would bind NATO to defend Israel against Syria and Iran. NATO would therefore support a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and could take on a more active role if Iran were to retaliate following US-Israeli air strikes.
Needless to say, the war against Iran is part of a longer term US military agenda which seeks to militarize the entire Caspian sea basin, eventually leading to the destabilization and conquest of the Russian Federation.
The Antiwar Movement
The antiwar movement must act, consistently, to prevent the next phase of this war from happening.
This is no easy matter. The holding of large antiwar rallies will not in itself reverse the tide of war.
High ranking officials of the Bush administration, members of the military and the US Congress have been granted the authority to uphold an illegal war agenda.
What is required is a grass roots network, a mass movement at national and international levels, which challenges the legitimacy of the military and political actors, and which is ultimately instrumental in unseating those who rule in our name.
War criminals occupy positions of authority. The citizenry is galvanized into supporting the rulers, who are “committed to their safety and well-being”. Through media disinformation, war is given a humanitarian mandate.
To reverse the tide of war, military bases must be closed down, the war machine (namely the production of advanced weapons systems) must be stopped and the burgeoning police state must be dismantled.
The corporate backers and sponsors of war and war crimes must also be targeted including the oil companies, the defense contractors, the financial institutions and the corporate media, which has become an integral part of the war propaganda machine.
Antiwar sentiment does not dismantle a war agenda. The war criminals in the US, Israel and Britain must be removed from high office.
What is needed is to reveal the true face of the American Empire and the underlying criminalization of US foreign policy, which uses the “war on terrorism” and the threat of Al Qaeda to galvanize public opinion in support of a global war agenda.
Israel’s Nuclear Capabilities
John Steinbach,
March 2002
( This article describes Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal. Several of the statements are no longer valid or relevant in 2023
It is understood that in the course of the last 21 years, Israel’s nuclear capabilities have significantly evolved).
With between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons and a sophisticated delivery system, Israel has quietly supplanted Britain as the World’s 5th Largest nuclear power, and may currently rival France and China in the size and sophistication of its nuclear arsenal. Although dwarfed by the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, each possessing over 10,000 nuclear weapons, Israel nonetheless is a major nuclear power, and should be publicly recognized as such.
Today, estimates of the Israeli nuclear arsenal range from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of about 500. Whatever the number, there is little doubt that Israeli nukes are among the world’s most sophisticated, largely designed for “war fighting” in the Middle East. A staple of the Israeli nuclear arsenal are “neutron bombs,” miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long term radiation- in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact.(16) Weapons include ballistic missiles and bombers capable of reaching Moscow…
The bombs themselves range in size from “city busters” larger than the Hiroshima Bomb to tactical mini nukes.
The Israeli arsenal of weapons of mass destruction clearly dwarfs the actual or potential arsenals of all other Middle Eastern states combined, and is vastly greater than any conceivable need for “deterrence.”
Many Middle East Peace activists have been reluctant to discuss, let alone challenge, the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region, often leading to incomplete and uninformed analyses and flawed action strategies.
Placing the issue of Israeli weapons of mass destruction directly and honestly on the table and action agenda would have several salutary effects.
First, it would expose a primary destabilizing dynamic driving the Middle East arms race and compelling the region’s states to each seek their own “deterrent.”
Second, it would expose the grotesque double standard which sees the U.S. and Europe on the one hand condemning Iraq, Iran and Syria for developing weapons of mass destruction, while simultaneously protecting and enabling the principal culprit.
Third, exposing Israel’s nuclear strategy would focus international public attention, resulting in increased pressure to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction and negotiate a just peace in good faith.
Finally, a nuclear free Israel would make a Nuclear Free Middle East and a comprehensive regional peace agreement much more likely. Unless and until the world community confronts Israel over its covert nuclear program it is unlikely that there will be any meaningful resolution of the Israeli/Arab conflict, a fact that Israel may be counting on as the Sharon era dawns.
From John Steinbach, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal, Global Research
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Update. Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum
An official “secret” memorandum authored by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as consultations with the U.S.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry … assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … It recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. … The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972. See below, click here or below to access complete document (10 pages)
Option C constitutes the basis for carrying out a Genocide against the People of Palestine.
M. Ch. Global Research, November 1, 2023
Introduction
Israel’s genocidal bombing of Palestinians in Gaza has (as of October 30) resulted in 8,306 deaths of civilians including more than 3,000 children. In the words of Canadian journalist Andrew Mitrovica,
“This is not an onslaught. It is not an invasion. It is not even a war. It is a genocide.” …The monstrous plan is as plain as Netanyahu’s wretched character: Be done with Gaza by erasing Gaza.
.
CBC Radio Report, October 3, 2023
.
Israel’s Operation “To Wipe Gaza Off the Map” including the false flag agenda was carefully coordinated with U.S. military and intelligence. It is part of a broader military agenda of US-NATO.
America’s unspoken military practice from World War II to the present consists in routinely targeting civilians, which constitutes a crime against humanity. Netanyahu is Washington’s proxy.
It should be understood that Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza is part of a longstanding U.S. military strategy of killing civilians. America is in this regard fully supportive of its Israeli proxy.
In recent developments Israeli officials have justified its killing of civilians in Gaza by pointing to the bombing of the German city of Dresden (a civilian target) as well as many other German cities by the U.S. and Britain towards the end of World War II.
Dresden versus Gaza
Similarly, the U.S. applied the same strategy of targeting Japanese civilians with fire bombs towards the end of World War II.
America’s Strategy of Killing Civilians (1945- )
Since World War II, America’s military strategy has deliberately targeted civilians as well as “civilian objects” including hospitals, schools, churches, residential areas. The evidence is overwhelming.
While this practice is categorized as a crime against humanity, the United States has never been the object of prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The history of US-led wars confirms that murdering millions of civilians is an integral part of America’s global war agenda.
During and since World War II , the United States has killed more than 40 million people in a number of countries, most of them civilians, either directly or through proxy by its puppet regimes:
Germany–World War II: (several cities bombed by U.S. including Dresden, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne); Number of people killed: 600,000 (according to Israeli official’s recent statement)
Japan-World War II:442,000 civilians killed by U.S. and U.K. fire bombing.
The U.S.’ so-called “War on Terrorism” has killed up to 4.6 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan according to a Brown University report.
Pakistan 1971: Up to three million ethnic Bengalis killed by the Pakistan army (a U.S. proxy) in East Pakistan (the country’s biggest province). Due to this East Pakistan separated from Pakistan and became Bangladesh.
The invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by U.S. proxies Rwanda and Uganda beginning in 1998 has killed more than 6.9 million civilians. This genocide continues.
The above is a partial list which does not include Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique and Latin America. Also of relevance are deaths resulting from famines and mass poverty enforced by U.S. policies globally, especially by sanctions.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who assumed this post in 1997)was asked by the CBS interviewer Leslie Stahl in 1996 about the deadly effect of U.S. sanctions on Iraqi children. Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. Is the price worth it?”
Albright replied,
“I think it is a very hard choice but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
As Kevin Reese and Margaret Flowers put it in their 2020 Global Research article,
“Economic sanctions are an act of war that kills tens of thousands of people each year through financial strangulation.”
The list of U.S. war crimes above confirms that:
The Israeli genocide of Palestinians does not emanatefrom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but from the U.S. Empire.
The mass murder of civilians has been part of U.S. military doctrine since World War II and Washington has attempted to “normalize” this practice in one war after another.
World War II. Germany and Japan
“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians” said U.S. President Harry Truman in a radio address on August 9, 1945. “We will use [this weapon] so that military objectives…are the target and not women and children.”
Of course Hiroshima was a city of 350,000 civilians and not a military target. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky in his article on the Hiroshima bombing, calls Truman “a liar and a criminal”.
“Had [Truman] been misled by his advisers that Hiroshima was a military base and that it was OK to bomb… was he stupid and uneducated?”
The U.S. firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, is considered the single most deadly air raid in history killing more than 100,000 civilians, injuring a million and making another million people homeless.
The bombing destroyed half of Tokyo.
Kisako Motoki, then 10 years old, lost her parents and brother to the bombing. She recalls:
“I saw melted bodies piled up on top of each other as high as a house. I saw black pieces, bits of bodies everywhere on the ground and burnt corpses in the water. I couldn’t believe this was happening in this world.”
Haruyo Nihei, another survivor of the Tokyo bombing, says U.S. claims that its planes were bombing factories are “false”. “There were no big military factories in the areas they bombed on March 9” she explains, “they did it as punishment. I believe they should be held accountable for war crimes.”
CurtisLeMay, the U.S. Air Force general, who ordered the bombing of Tokyo said:
“[U.S. forces] scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night… than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
“if he had been on the losing side, he would be charged with war crimes.”
The Korean War (1950-53)
US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three-year period of intensive bombings. Every single family in North Korea lost a loved one in the course of the Korean War.
According to General Curtis LeMay who was head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War:
“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians… over a period of three years…we killed off 20% of the population…perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerence of another.”
North Korea lost up to 30% of its population (more than three million people) due to U.S. bombing according to War Veteran and Global Research Associate Brian S. Willson:
“Everyone I talked with, dozens and dozens of folks, lost one if not many more family members during the war especially from the continuous bombing…deliberately dropped on virtually every space in the country…The pained memories of the people are still obvious and their anger at ‘America’ is often expressed.”
Pyongyang 1953
Pyongyang 2023
General MacArthur Says “Sorry for the Human Suffering”
Image: Truman and MacArthur, 1950
The criminal bombings of Pyongyang in 1951 ordered by president Truman, had been opposed by General Douglas MacArthur who was commander of allied forces in Korea:
“A defiant Douglas MacArthur appeared before Congress and spoke of human suffering so horrifying that his parting glimpse of it caused him to vomit.
“I have never seen such devastation,” the general told members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. At that time, in May 1951, the Korean War was less than a year old. Casualties, he estimated, were already north of 1 million.
“I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man,” he added, “and it just curdled my stomach.” (quoted by the Washington Post, August 10, 2017)
As Chossudovsky explains in his September 2013 article on the Korean War:
“The Korean War set the stage for a global process of militarization and U.S.-led wars… In the words of U.S. General Wesley Clark quoting a senior Pentagon official,
‘We’re going to take out seven countries in five years starting with Iraq then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off, Iran. (March 2, 2007)
.
The Vietnam War
From 1965 until 1975, the United States military dropped “more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, double the amount dropped onEurope and Asia during World War II…It remains the largest aerialbombardment in human history.”
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. expanded the style of genocidal warfare it had perfected in Korea, bombing three countries at the same time, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Image: Vietnam War protestors march at the Pentagon in Washington, DC on October 21, 1967.
The bombing of Vietnam was accompanied by a ground invasion of a million American and allied troops who devastated the country for ten years generating a holocaust.
The spraying of Agent Orange destroyed three generations of Vietnamese children (up to the present) many thousands of whom were and are born with serious mental disorders and physical deformities. Many babies were still-born or without brains, arms and legs.
“So when they were not able to achieve victory through attrition, through the body count, the only recourse was to increase the firepower and this was turned loose on the Vietnamese countryside.”
The role of racism was also central to U.S. strategy. Similar to Israeli officials calling Palestinians “human animals” the U.S. military dehumanized the Vietnamese.
“The idea was that the Vietnamese were not really people” says Turse “they were subhuman, mere ‘gooks’ who could be killed or abused at will. I talked to veterans who told me that from the moment they got into basic training, they were told, ‘Never call them Vietnamese, call them gooks or dinks, slopes, slants, rice-eaters.’ Anything to take away their humanity, to dehumanize them and make it easy to see any Vietnamese–all Vietnamese as the enemy.”
Demolishing Iraq: Iraq War I. The Gulf War (1991)
More than thirty-two years ago, the so-called “Gulf War” (Iraq War I) was launched against Iraq on January 17, 1991.
Of relevance to Palestine, extensive crimes against humanity were committed by the US and its NATO allies under the banner of a “peace making operation”.
There for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”
Those extensive crimes against humanity were the beginning of a long and unending war against the people of Iraq.
Destroying Iraq. Iraq War II (2003- )
During April 2004, the Iraqi city of Fallujah was almost completely destroyed by the U.S. military which showed no regard for its massive killing of civilians as documented by Felicity Arbuthnot who reported from Iraq on this massacre. She quotes Brigadier-General Mark Kimmett who was asked by a reporter:
“You talk about a clean war in Fallujah but the Iraqis have an image through television, from what is happening in Fallujah including killing children.
Is there a way that you can convince Iraqis through your point of view that you have only utilized force against terrorists?”
As Arbuthnot puts it,
“With his hallmark contempt for humanity, Kimmit replied:
“With regards to the solution on the images of Americans killing innocent civilians, my solution is quite simple, change the channel..to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station.
The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda and lies.”
Image: Depleted uranium shells, Fallujah
“Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard”. (Emphasis added)
The Americans invaded, chillingly: “house to house, room to room”, raining death and destruction on the proud, ancient “City of Mosques.”
One correspondent wrote: “There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.”
Arbuthnot emphasizes that Fallujah was in fact made “a free fire zone” by the U.S. military:
“two hospitals were demolished…and at the General Hospital, patients and doctors were initially handcuffed, the ‘liberators’ regarding it as a ‘centre of propaganda’, since the staff talked … of the numbers of dead and wounded they were treating. The ‘non-American wounded were in essence left to die’ as a result. “
Arbuthnot quotes a Lt. Col Pete Newell as saying that U.S. forces wanted
“Fallujah to understand what democracy is all about.”
US Military Doctrine and Israel’s Ongoing Genocide
Israel’s current genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza is a continuation of the horrendous civilian killings carried out by the US and its NATO allies since the Second World War.
The atrocities committed in Palestine are similar to those committed in Fallujah. Washington’s fingerprints are on the Gaza genocide. Netanyahu has the unconditional support of the Biden administration.
From Dresden to Gaza (1945-2023): The Death of 40++ Million People
From Dresden to Gaza, the U.S.’ “hallmark contempt for humanity” has resulted in the death of more than 40 million people.
The people of the Global South are in the way of Washington and its proxies who covet the valuable mineral resources these people happen to live over or near.
The massacres of Gazans, Congolese and Iraqis (among others) facilitate access to these minerals (natural gas in the case of Gaza) ensuring the continuing impoverishment of the Global South and the resulting enrichment of the U.S. empire.
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The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) stands in solidarity with the People of Palestine.
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This text was written by Dr. Asad Ismi and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
The original source of this article is Global Research
March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedycondemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people:
“Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrelltold the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.
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The numbers of casualties of U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001 have largely gone uncounted, but coming to terms with the true scale of the crimes committed remains an urgent moral, political and legal imperative, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies, in part two of his series.
In the first part of this series,I estimated that about 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the illegal invasion of their country by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003. I turn now to Afghan and Pakistani deaths in the ongoing 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. In part three, I will examine U.S.-caused war deaths in Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. According to Ret. U.S. General Tommy Franks, who led the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in reaction to 9/11, the U.S. government does not keep track of civilian casualties that it causes. “You know, we don’t do body counts,” Franks once said. Whether that’s true or a count is covered up is difficult to know.
As I explained in part one, the U.S. has attempted to justify its invasions of Afghanistan and several other countries as a legitimate response to the terrorist crimes of 9/11. But the U.S. was not attacked by another country on that day, and no crime, however horrific, can justify 16 years of war – and counting – against a series of countries that did not attack the U.S.
As former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told NPR a week after the terrorist attacks, they were crimes against humanity, but not “war crimes,” because the U.S. was not at war. “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.” Ferencz explained. “We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.”
As Ferencz predicted, we have killed “many people” who had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. How many people? That is the subject of this report.
Afghanistan
In 2011, award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter was researching night raids by U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan for his article, “How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate Killing Machine.” The expansion of night raids from 2009 to 2011 was a central element in Barack Obama’s escalation of the U.S. War in Afghanistan. Porter documented a gradual 50-fold ramping up from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to over 1,000 raids per month by April 2011.
But strangely, the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported a decrease in the numbers of civilians killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2010, including a decrease in the numbers of civilians killed in night raids from 135 in 2009 to only 80 in 2010.
UNAMA’s reports of civilian deaths are based on investigations by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), so Noori Shah Noori, an Afghan journalist working with Porter on the article, interviewed Nader Nadery, a Commissioner of the AIHRC, to find out what was going on.
Nadery explained to Noori,
“…that that figure represented only the number of civilian deaths from 13 incidents that had been fully investigated. It excluded the deaths from 60 other incidents in which complaints had been received, but had not yet been thoroughly investigated.”
“Nadery has since estimated that the total civilian deaths for all 73 night raids about which it had complaints was 420,” Porter continued. “But the AIHRC admits that it does not have access to most of the districts dominated by the Taliban and that people in those districts are not aware of the possibility of complaining to the Commission about night raids. So, neither the AIHRC nor the United Nations learns about a significant proportion – and very likely the majority – of night raids that end in civilian deaths.”
UNAMA has since updated its count of civilians killed in U.S. night raids in 2010 from 80 to 103, still nowhere close to Nadery’s estimate of 420. But as Nadery explained, even that estimate must have been a small fraction of the number of civilian deaths in about 5,000 night raids that year, most of which were probably conducted in areas where people have no contact with UNAMA or the AIHRC.
As senior U.S. military officers admitted to Dana Priest and William Arkin of TheWashington Post, more than half the raids conducted by U.S. special operations forces target the wrong person or house, so a large increase in civilian deaths was a predictable and expected result of such a massive expansion of these deadly “kill or capture” raids.
The massive escalation of U.S. night raids in 2010 probably made it an exceptional year, so it is unlikely that UNAMA’s reports regularly exclude as many uninvestigated reports of civilian deaths as in 2010. But on the other hand, UNAMA’s annual reports never mention that their figures for civilian deaths are based only on investigations completed by the AIHRC, so it is unclear how unusual it was to omit 82 percent of reported incidents of civilian deaths in U.S. night raids from that year’s report.
We can only guess how many reported incidents have been omitted from UNAMA’s other annual reports since 2007, and, in any case, that would still tell us nothing about civilians killed in areas that have no contact with UNAMA or the AIHRC.
In fact, for the AIHRC, counting the dead is only a by-product of its main function, which is to investigate reports of human rights violations in Afghanistan. But Porter and Noori’s research revealed that UNAMA’s reliance on investigations completed by the AIHRC as the basis for definitive statements about the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan in its reports has the effect of sweeping an unknown number of incomplete investigations and unreported civilian deaths down a kind of “memory hole,” writing them out of virtually all published accounts of the human cost of the war in Afghanistan.
UNAMA’s annual reports even include colorful pie-charts to bolster the false impression that these are realistic estimates of the number of civilians killed in a given year, and that pro-government forces and foreign occupation forces are only responsible for a small portion of them.
UNAMA’s systematic undercounts and meaningless pie-charts become the basis for headlines and news stories all over the world. But they are all based on numbers that UNAMA and the AIHRC know very well to be a small fraction of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. It is only a rare story like Porter’s in 2011 that gives any hint of this shocking reality.
In fact, UNAMA’s reports reflect only how many deaths the AIHRC staff have investigated in a given year, and may bear little or no relation to how many people have actually been killed. Seen in this light, the relatively small fluctuations in UNAMA’s reports of civilian deaths from year to year in Afghanistan seem just as likely to represent fluctuations in resources and staffing at the AIHRC as actual increases or decreases in the numbers of people killed.
If only one thing is clear about UNAMA’s reports of civilian deaths, it is that nobody should ever cite them as estimates of total numbers of civilians killed in Afghanistan – least of all UN and government officials and mainstream journalists who, knowingly or not, mislead millions of people when they repeat them.
Estimating Afghan Deaths Through the Fog of Official Deception
So the most widely cited figures for civilian deaths in Afghanistan are based, not just on “passive reporting,” but on misleading reports that knowingly ignore many or most of the deaths reported by bereaved families and local officials, while many or most civilian deaths are never reported to UNAMA or the AIHCR in the first place. So how can we come up with an intelligent or remotely accurate estimate of how many civilians have really been killed in Afghanistan?
The Afghan government reported that 15,000 of its soldiers and police were killed through 2013. The authors of Body Count took estimates of Taliban and other anti-government forces killed in 2001, 2007 and 2010 from other sources and extrapolated to years for which no estimates were available, based on other measures of the intensity of the conflict (numbers of air strikes, night raids etc,). They estimated that 55,000 “insurgents” were killed by the end of 2013.
In Afghanistan, U.S. Army Pfc. Sean Serritelli provides security outside Combat Outpost Charkh on Aug. 23, 2012. (Photo credit: Spc. Alexandra Campo)
The years since 2013 have been increasingly violent for the people of Afghanistan. With reductions in U.S. and NATO occupation forces, Afghan pro-government forces now bear the brunt of combat against their fiercely independent countrymen, and another 25,000 soldiers and police have been killed since 2013, according to my own calculations from news reports and this study by the Watson Institute at Brown University.
If the same number of anti-government fighters have been killed, that would mean that at least 120,000 Afghan combatants have been killed since 2001. But, since pro-government forces are armed with heavier weapons and are still backed by U.S. air support, anti-government losses are likely to be greater than those of government troops. So a more realistic estimate would be that between 130,000 and 150,000 Afghan combatants have been killed.
The more difficult task is to estimate how many civilians have been killed in Afghanistan through the fog of UNAMA’s misinformation. UNAMA’s passive reporting has been deeply flawed, based on completed investigations of as few as 18 percent of reported incidents, as in the case of night raid deaths in 2010, with no reports at all from large parts of the country where the Taliban are most active and most U.S. air strikes and night raids take place. The Taliban appear to have never published any numbers of civilian deaths in areas under its control, but it has challenged UNAMA’s figures.
There has been no attempt to conduct a serious mortality study in Afghanistan like the 2006 Lancet study in Iraq. The world owes the people of Afghanistan that kind of serious accounting for the human cost of the war it has allowed to engulf them. But it seems unlikely that that will happen before the world fulfills the more urgent task of ending the now 16-year-old war.
Body Count took estimates by Neta Crawford and the Costs of War project at Boston University for 2001-6, plus the UN’s flawed count since 2007, and multiplied them by a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 8, to produce a range of 106,000 to 170,000 civilians killed from 2001 to 2013. The authors seem to have been unaware of the flaws in UNAMA’s reports revealed to Porter and Noori by Nadery in 2011.
But Body Count did acknowledge the very conservative nature of its estimate, noting that, “compared to Iraq, where urbanization is more pronounced, and monitoring by local and foreign press is more pronounced than in Afghanistan, the registration of civilian deaths has been much more fragmentary.”
In my 2016 article, “Playing Games With War Deaths,” I suggested that the ratio of passive reporting to actual civilian deaths in Afghanistan was therefore more likely to fall between the ratios found in Iraq in 2006 (12:1) and Guatemala at the end of its Civil War in 1996 (20:1).
Mortality in Guatemala and Afghanistan
In fact, the geographical and military situation in Afghanistan is more analogous to Guatemala, with many years of war in remote, mountainous areas against an indigenous civilian population who have taken up arms against a corrupt, foreign-backed central government.
The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960 to 1996. The deadliest phase of the war was unleashed when the Reagan administration restored U.S. military aid to Guatemala in 1981,after a meeting between former Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters and President Romeo Lucas García, in Guatemala.
U.S. military adviser Lieutenant Colonel George Maynes and President Lucas’s brother, General Benedicto Lucas, planned a campaign called Operation Ash, in which 15,000 Guatemalan troops swept through the Ixil region massacring indigenous communities and burning hundreds of villages.
President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt.
CIA documents that Robert Parry unearthed at the Reagan library and in other U.S. archives specifically defined the targets of this campaign to include “the civilian support mechanism” of the guerrillas, in effect the entire rural indigenous population. A CIA report from February 1982 described how this worked in practice in Ixil:
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report said. “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”
Guatemalan President Rios Montt, who died on Sunday, seized power in a coup in 1983 and continued the campaign in Ixil. He was prosecuted for genocide, but neither Walters, Mayne nor any other American official have been charged for helping to plan and support the mass killings in Guatemala.
At the time, many villages in Ixil were not even marked on official maps and there were no paved roads in this remote region (there are still very few today). As in Afghanistan, the outside world had no idea of the scale and brutality of the killing and destruction.
One of the demands of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of Armed People (ORPA) and other revolutionary groups in the negotiations that led to the 1996 peace agreement in Guatemala was for a genuine accounting of the reality of the war, including how many people were killed and who killed them.
The UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission documented 626 massacres, and found that about 200,000 people had been killed in Guatemala’s civil war. At least 93 percent were killed by U.S.-backed military forces and death squads and only 3 percent by the guerrillas, with 4 percent unknown. The total number of people killed was 20 times previous estimates based on passive reporting.
Mortality studies in other countries (like Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda) have never found a larger discrepancy between passive reporting and mortality studies than in Guatemala.
Based on the discrepancy between passive reporting in Guatemala and what the U.N. ultimately found there, UNAMA appears to have reported less than 5 percent of actual civilian deaths in Afghanistan, which would be unprecedented.
Costs of War and UNAMA have counted 36,754 civilian deaths up to the end of 2017. If these (extremely) passive reports represent 5 percent of total civilian deaths, as in Guatemala, the actual death toll would be about 735,000. If UNAMA has in fact eclipsed Guatemala’s previously unsurpassed record of undercounting civilian deaths and only counted 3 or 4 percent of actual deaths, then the real total could be as high as 1.23 million. If the ratio were only the same as originally found in Iraq in 2006 (14:1 – before Iraq Body Count revised its figures), it would be only 515,000.
Adding these figures to my estimate of Afghan combatants killed on both sides, we can make a rough estimate that about 875,000 Afghans have been killed since 2001, with a minimum of 640,000 and a maximum of 1.4 million.
Pakistan
The U.S. expanded its war in Afghanistan into Pakistan in 2004. The CIA began launching drone strikes, and the Pakistani military, under U.S. pressure, launched a military campaign against militants in South Waziristan suspected of links to Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. Since then, the U.S. has conducted at least 430 drone strikes in Pakistan, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Pakistani military has conducted several operations in areas bordering Afghanistan.
Map of Pakistan and Afghanistan (Wikipedia)
The beautiful Swat valley (once called “the Switzerland of the East” by the visiting Queen Elizabeth of the U.K.) and three neighboring districts were taken over by the Pakistani Taliban between 2007 and 2009. They were retaken by the Pakistani Army in 2009 in a devastating military campaign that left 3.4 million people as refugees.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that 2,515 to 4,026 people have been killed in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, but that is a small fraction of total war deaths in Pakistan. Crawford and the Costs of War program at Boston University estimated the number of Pakistanis killed at about 61,300 through August 2016, based mainly on reports by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) in Islamabad and the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) in New Delhi. That included 8,200 soldiers and police, 31,000 rebel fighters and 22,100 civilians.
Costs of War’s estimate for rebel fighters killed was an average of 29,000 reported by PIPS and 33,000 reported by SATP, which SATP has since updated to 33,950. SATP has updated its count of civilian deaths to 22,230.
If we accept the higher of these passively reported figures for the numbers of combatants killed on both sides and use historically typical 5:1 to 20:1 ratios to passive reports to generate a minimum and maximum number of civilian deaths, that would mean that between 150,000 and 500,000 Pakistanis have been killed.
A reasonable mid-point estimate would be that about 325,000 people have been killed in Pakistan as a result of the U.S. War in Afghanistan spilling across its borders.
Combining my estimates for Afghanistan and Pakistan, I estimate that about 1.2 million Afghans and Pakistanis have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
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Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.
Featured image: U.S. Marines patrol street in Shah Karez in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on Feb. 10. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Robert Storm)
In the third and final part of his series, Nicolas JS Davies investigates the death toll of U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen and underscores the importance of comprehensive war mortality studies.
In the first two parts of this report, I have estimated that about 2.4 million people have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, while about 1.2 million have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In the third and final part of this report, I will estimate how many people have been killed as a result of U.S. military and CIA interventions in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.
Of the countries that the U.S. has attacked and destabilized since 2001, only Iraq has been the subject of comprehensive “active” mortality studies that can reveal otherwise unreported deaths. An “active” mortality study is one that “actively” surveys households to find deaths that have not previously been reported by news reports or other published sources.
These studies are often carried out by people who work in the field of public health, like Les Roberts at Columbia University, Gilbert Burnham at Johns Hopkins and Riyadh Lafta at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, who co-authored the 2006 Lancet 2006 of Iraq war mortality. In defending their studies in Iraq and their results, they emphasized that their Iraqi survey teams were independent of the occupation government and that that was an important factor in the objectivity of their studies and the willingness of people in Iraq to talk honestly with them.
Comprehensive mortality studies in other war-torn countries (like Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda) have revealed total numbers of deaths that are 5 to 20 times those previously revealed by “passive” reporting based on news reports, hospital records and/or human rights investigations.
In the absence of such comprehensive studies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, I have evaluated passive reports of war deaths and tried to assess what proportion of actual deaths these passive reports are likely to have counted by the methods they have used, based on ratios of actual deaths to passively reported deaths found in other war-zones.
I have only estimated violent deaths. None of my estimates include deaths from the indirect effects of these wars, such as the destruction of hospitals and health systems, the spread of otherwise preventable diseases and the effects of malnutrition and environmental pollution, which have also been substantial in all these countries.
U.S. Army forces operating in southern Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Apr. 2, 2003 (U.S. Navy photo)
For Afghanistan, I estimated that about 875,000 Afghans have been killed. I explained that the annual reports on civilian casualties by the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) are based only on investigations completed by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), and that they knowingly exclude large numbers of reports of civilian deaths that the AIHRC has not yet investigated or for which it has not completed its investigations. UNAMA’s reports also lack any reporting at all from many areas of the country where the Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces are active, and where many or most U.S. air strikes and night raids therefore take place.
I concluded that UNAMA’s reporting of civilian deaths in Afghanistan appears to be as inadequate as the extreme under-reporting found at the end of the Guatemalan Civil War, when the UN-sponsored Historical Verification Commission revealed 20 times more deaths than previously reported.
For Pakistan, I estimated that about 325,000 people had been killed. That was based on published estimates of combatant deaths, and on applying an average of the ratios found in previous wars (12.5:1) to the number of civilian deaths reported by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) in India.
Estimating Deaths in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen
In the third and final part of this report, I will estimate the death toll caused by U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.
These wars have been catastrophic for the people of all these countries, but the U.S.’s “disguised, quiet, media-free” approach to them has been so successful in propaganda terms that most Americans know very little about the U.S. role in the intractable violence and chaos that has engulfed them.
The very public nature of the illegal but largely symbolic missile strikes on Syria on April 14, 2018 stands in sharp contrast to the “disguised, quiet, media-free” U.S.-led bombing campaign that has destroyed Raqqa, Mosul and several other Syrian and Iraqi cities with more than 100,000 bombs and missiles since 2014.
The people of Mosul, Raqqa, Kobane, Sirte, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tawergha and Deir Ez-Zor have died like trees falling in a forest where there were no Western reporters or TV crews to record their massacres. As Harold Pinter asked of earlier U.S. war crimes in his 2005 Nobel acceptance speech,
“Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to U.S. foreign policy? The answer is yes, they did take place, and they are in all cases attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
For more detailed background on the critical role the U.S. has played in each of these wars, please read my article, “Giving War Too Many Chances,” published in January 2018.
But the war instead killed far more civilians than any estimate of the number killed in the initial rebellion in February and March 2011, which ranged from 1,000 (a UN estimate) to 6,000 (according to the Libyan Human Rights League). So the war clearly failed in its stated, authorized purpose, to protect civilians, even as it succeeded in a different and unauthorized one: the illegal overthrow of the Libyan government.
SC resolution 1973 expressly prohibited “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” But NATO and its allies launched a covert invasion of Libya by thousands of Qatari and Western special operations forces, who planned the rebels’ advance across the country, called in air strikes against government forces and led the final assault on the Bab al-Aziziya military headquarters in Tripoli.
“We were among them and the numbers of Qataris on the ground were in the hundreds in every region. Training and communications had been in Qatari hands. Qatar… supervised the rebels’ plans because they are civilians and did not have enough military experience. We acted as the link between the rebels and NATO forces.”
There are credible reports that a French security officer may even have delivered the coup de grace that killed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, after he was captured, tortured and sodomized with a knife by the “NATO rebels.”
Smoke is seen after an NATO airstrikes hit Tripoli, Libya Photo: REX
A parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry in the U.K. in 2016 concluded that a “limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into an opportunistic policy of regime change by military means,” resulting in, “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of Isil [Islamic State] in north Africa.”
Passive Reports of Civilian Deaths in Libya
Once the Libyan government was overthrown, journalists tried to inquire about the sensitive subject of civilian deaths, which was so critical to the legal and political justifications for the war. But the National Transitional Council (NTC), the unstable new government formed by Western-backed exiles and rebels, stopped issuing public casualty estimates and ordered hospital staff not to release information to reporters.
In any case, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, morgues were overflowing during the war and many people buried their loved ones in their backyards or wherever they could, without taking them to hospitals.
A rebel leader estimated in August 2011 that 50,000 Libyans had been killed. Then, on September 8th 2011, Naji Barakat, the NTC’s new health minister, issued a statement that 30,000 people had been killed and another 4,000 were missing, based on a survey of hospitals, local officials and rebel commanders in the majority of the country that the NTC by then controlled. He said it would take several more weeks to complete the survey, so he expected the final figure to be higher.
Barakat’s statement did not include separate counts of combatant and civilian deaths. But he said that about half of the 30,000 reported dead were troops loyal to the government, including 9,000 members of the Khamis Brigade, led by Gaddafi’s son Khamis. Barakat asked the public to report deaths in their families and details of missing persons when they came to mosques for prayers that Friday. The NTC’s estimate of 30,000 people killed appeared to consist mainly of combatants on both sides.
The most comprehensive survey of war deaths since the end of the 2011 war in Libya was an “epidemiological community-based study” titled “Libyan Armed Conflict 2011: Mortality, Injury and Population Displacement.” It was authored by three medical professors from Tripoli, and published in the African Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2015.
The authors took records of war deaths, injuries and displacement collected by the Ministry of Housing and Planning, and sent teams to conduct face-to-face interviews with a member of each family to verify how many members of their household were killed, wounded or displaced. They did not try to separate the killing of civilians from the deaths of combatants.
Hundreds of refugees from Libya line up for food at a transit camp near the Tunisia-Libya border. March 5, 2016. (Photo from the United Nations)
Nor did they try to statistically estimate previously unreported deaths through the “cluster sample survey” method of the Lancet in Iraq. But the Libyan Armed Conflict study is the most complete record of confirmed deaths in the war in Libya up to February 2012, and it confirmed the deaths of at least 21,490 people.
In 2014, the ongoing chaos and factional fighting in Libya flared up into what Wikipedia now calls a second Libyan Civil War. A group called Libya Body Count (LBC) began tabulating violent deaths in Libya, based on media reports, on the model of Iraq Body Count (IBC). But LBC only did so for three years, from January 2014 until December 2016. It counted 2,825 deaths in 2014, 1,523 in 2015 and 1,523 in 2016. (The LBC website says it was just a coincidence that the number was identical in 2015 and 2016.)
The U.K.-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project has also kept a count of violent deaths in Libya. ACLED counted 4,062 deaths in 2014-6, compared with 5,871 counted by Libya Body Count. For the remaining periods between March 2012 and March 2018 that LBC did not cover, ACLED has counted 1,874 deaths.
If LBC had covered the whole period since March 2012, and found the same proportionally higher number than ACLED as it did for 2014-6, it would have counted 8,580 people killed.
Estimating How Many People Have Really Been Killed in Libya
The Libyan Armed Conflict (LAC) study was based on official records in a country that had not had a stable, unified government for about 4 years, while Libya Body Count was a fledgling effort to emulate Iraq Body Count that tried to cast a wider net by not relying only on English-language news sources.
In Iraq, the ratio between the 2006 Lancet study and Iraq Body Count was higher because IBC was only counting civilians, while the Lancet study counted Iraqi combatants as well as civilians. Unlike Iraq Body Count, both our main passive sources in Libya counted both civilians and combatants. Based on the one-line descriptions of each incident in the Libya Body Count database, LBC’s total appears to include roughly half combatants and half civilians.
Military casualties are generally counted more accurately than civilian ones, and military forces have an interest in accurately assessing enemy casualties as well as identifying their own. The opposite is true of civilian casualties, which are nearly always evidence of war crimes that the forces who killed them have a strong interest in suppressing.
So, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I treated combatants and civilians separately, applying typical ratios between passive reporting and mortality studies only to civilians, while accepting reported combatant deaths as they were passively reported.
But the forces fighting in Libya are not a national army with the strict chain of command and organizational structure that results in accurate reporting of military casualties in other countries and conflicts, so both civilian and combatant deaths appear to be significantly under-reported by my two main sources, the Libya Armed Conflict study and Libya Body Count. In fact, the National Transitional Council’s (NTC) estimates from August and September 2011 of 30,000 deaths were already much higher than the numbers of war deaths in the LAC study.
When the 2006 Lancet study of mortality in Iraq was published, it revealed 14 times the number of deaths counted in Iraq Body Count’s list of civilian deaths. But IBC later discovered more deaths from that period, reducing the ratio between the Lancet study’s estimate and IBC’s revised count to 11.5:1.
The combined totals from the Libya Armed Conflict 2011 study and Libya Body Count appear to be a larger proportion of total violent deaths than Iraq Body Count has counted in Iraq, mainly because LAC and LBC both counted combatants as well as civilians, and because Libya Body Count included deaths reported in Arabic news sources, while IBC relies almost entirely on English language news sources and generally requires “a minimum of two independent data sources” before recording each death.
In other conflicts, passive reporting has never succeeded in counting more than a fifth of the deaths found by comprehensive, “active” epidemiological studies. Taking all these factors into account, the true number of people killed in Libya appears to be somewhere between five and twelve times the numbers counted by the Libya Armed Conflict 2011 study, Libya Body Count and ACLED.
So I estimate that about 250,000 Libyans have been killed in the war, violence and chaos that the U.S. and its allies unleashed in Libya in February 2011, and which continues to the present day. Taking 5:1 and 12:1 ratios to passively counted deaths as outer limits, the minimum number of people that have been killed would be 150,000 and the maximum would be 360,000.
Syria
The “disguised, quiet, media-free” U.S. role in Syria began in late 2011 with a CIA operation to funnel foreign fighters and weapons through Turkey and Jordan into Syria, working with Qatar and Saudi Arabia to militarize unrest that began with peaceful Arab Spring protests against Syria’s Baathist government.
The mostly leftist and democratic Syrian political groups coordinating non-violent protests in Syria in 2011 strongly opposed these foreign efforts to unleash a civil war, and issued strong statements opposing violence, sectarianism and foreign intervention.
But even as a December 2011 Qatari-sponsored opinion poll found that 55% of Syrians supported their government, the U.S. and its allies were committed to adapting their Libyan regime change model to Syria, knowing full well from the outset that this war would be much bloodier and more destructive.
Smoke billows skyward as homes and buildings are shelled in the city of Homs, Syria. June 9, 2012. (Photo from the United Nations)
The CIA and its Arab monarchist partners eventually funneled thousands of tons of weapons and thousands of foreign Al-Qaeda-linked jihadis into Syria. The weapons came first from Libya, then from Croatia and the Balkans. They included howitzers, missile launchers and other heavy weapons, sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenades, mortars and small arms, and the U.S. eventually directly supplied powerful anti-tank missiles.
Meanwhile, instead of cooperating with Kofi Annan’s UN-backed efforts to bring peace to Syria in 2012, the U.S. and its allies held three “Friends of Syria” conferences, where they pursued their own “Plan B,” pledging ever-growing support to the increasingly Al-Qaeda-dominated rebels. Kofi Annan quit his thankless role in disgust after Secretary of State Clinton and her British, French and Saudi allies cynically undermined his peace plan.
The rest, as they say, is history, a history of ever-spreading violence and chaos that has drawn the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, Iran and all of Syria’s neighbors into its bloody vortex. As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies has observed, these external powers have all been ready to fight over Syria “to the last Syrian.”
The bombing campaign that President Obama launched against Islamic State in 2014 is the heaviest bombing campaign since the U.S. War in Vietnam, dropping more than 100,000 bombs and missiles on Syria and Iraq. Patrick Cockburn, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, recently visited Raqqa, formerly Syria’s 6th largest city, and wrote that, “The destruction is total.”
“In other Syrian cities bombed or shelled to the point of oblivion there is at least one district that has survived intact,” Cockburn wrote. “This is the case even in Mosul in Iraq, though much of it was pounded into rubble. But in Raqqa the damage and the demoralization are all pervasive. When something does work, such as a single traffic light, the only one to do so in the city, people express surprise.”
Estimating Violent Deaths in Syria
Every public estimate of the numbers of people killed in Syria that I have found comes directly or indirectly from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), run by Rami Abdulrahman in Coventry in the U.K. He is a former political prisoner from Syria, and he works with four assistants in Syria who in turn draw on a network of about 230 anti-government activists across the country. His work receives some funding from the European Union, and also reportedly some from the U.K. government.
Wikipedia cites the Syrian Centre for Policy Research as a separate source with a higher fatality estimate, but this is in fact a projection from SOHR’s figures. Lower estimates by the UN appear to also be based mainly on SOHR’s reports.
SOHR has been criticized for its unabashedly opposition viewpoint, leading some to question the objectivity of its data. It appears to have seriously undercounted civilians killed by U.S. air strikes, but this could also be due to the difficulty and danger of reporting from IS-held territory, as has also been the case in Iraq.
A protest placard in the Kafersousah neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 26, 2012. (Photo credit: Freedom House Flickr)
SOHR acknowledges that its count cannot be a total estimate of all the people killed in Syria. In its most recent report in March 2018, it added 100,000 to its tally to compensate for under-reporting, another 45,000 to account for prisoners killed or disappeared in government custody and 12,000 for people killed, disappeared or missing in Islamic State or other rebel custody.
Leaving aside these adjustments, SOHR’s March 2018 report documents the deaths of 353,935 combatants and civilians in Syria. That total is comprised of 106,390 civilians; 63,820 Syrian troops; 58,130 members of pro-government militias (including 1,630 from Hezbollah and 7,686 other foreigners); 63,360 Islamic State, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) and other Islamist jihadis; 62,039 other anti-government combatants; and 196 unidentified bodies.
Breaking this down simply into civilians and combatants, that is 106,488 civilians and 247,447 combatants killed (with the 196 unidentified bodies divided equally), including 63,820 Syrian Army troops.
The SOHR’s count is not a comprehensive statistical survey like the 2006 Lancet study in Iraq. But regardless of its pro-rebel viewpoint, the SOHR appears to be one of the most comprehensive efforts to “passively” count the dead in any recent war.
Like military institutions in other countries, the Syrian Army probably keeps fairly accurate casualty figures for its own troops. Excluding actual military casualties, it would be unprecedented for SOHR to have counted more than 20% of other people killed in Syria’s Civil War. But SOHR’s reporting may well be as thorough as any previous efforts to count the dead by “passive” methods.
Taking the SOHR’s passively reported figures for non-military war deaths as 20% of the real total killed would mean that 1.45 million civilians and non-military combatants have been killed. After adding the 64,000 Syrian troops killed to that number, I estimate that about 1.5 million people have been killed in Syria.
If SOHR has been more successful than any previous “passive” effort to count the dead in a war, and has counted 25% or 30% of the people killed, the real number killed could be as low as 1 million. If it has not been as successful as it seems, and its count is closer to what has been typical in other conflicts, then as many as 2 million people may well have been killed.
Somalia
Most Americans remember the U.S. intervention in Somalia that led to the “Black Hawk Down” incident and the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1993. But most Americans do not remember, or may never have known, that the U.S. made another “disguised, quiet, media-free” intervention in Somalia in 2006, in support of an Ethiopian military invasion.
Somalia was finally “pulling itself up by its bootstraps” under the governance of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a union of local traditional courts who agreed to work together to govern the country. The ICU allied with a warlord in Mogadishu and defeated the other warlords who had ruled private fiefdoms since the collapse of the central government in 1991. People who knew the country well hailed the ICU as a hopeful development for peace and stability in Somalia.
But in the context of its “war on terror,” the U.S. government identified the Islamic Courts Union as an enemy and a target for military action. The U.S. allied with Ethiopia, Somalia’s traditional regional rival (and a majority Christian country), and conducted air strikes and special forces operations to support an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to remove the ICU from power. As in every other country the U.S. and its proxies have invaded since 2001, the effect was to plunge Somalia back into violence and chaos that continues to this day.
Estimating the Death Toll in Somalia
Passive sources put the violent death toll in Somalia since the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion in 2006 at 20,171 (Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) – through 2016) and 24,631 (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED)). But an award-winning local NGO, the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre in Mogadishu, which tracked deaths only for 2007 and 2008, counted 16,210 violent deaths in those two years alone, 4.7 times the number counted by UCDP and 5.8 times ACLED’s tally for those two years.
In Libya, Libya Body Count only counted 1.45 times as many deaths as ACLED. In Somalia, Elman Peace counted 5.8 times more than ACLED – the difference between the two was 4 times as great. This suggests that Elman Peace’s counting was about twice as thorough as Libya Body Count’s, while ACLED seems to be about half as effective at counting war deaths in Somalia as in Libya.
UCDP logged higher numbers of deaths than ACLED from 2006 until 2012, while ACLED has published higher numbers than UCDP since 2013. The average of their two counts gives a total of 23,916 violent deaths from July 2006 to 2017. If Elman Peace had kept counting war deaths and had continued to find 5.25 ( the average of 4.7 and 5.8) times the numbers found by these international monitoring groups, it would by now have counted about 125,000 violent deaths since the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion in July 2006.
But while Elman Peace counted many more deaths than UCDP or ACLED, this was still just a “passive” count of war deaths in Somalia. To estimate the total number of war deaths that have resulted from the U.S. decision to destroy Somalia’s fledgling ICU government, we must multiply these figures by a ratio that falls somewhere between those found in other conflicts, between 5:1 and 20:1.
Applying a 5:1 ratio to my projection of what the Elman Project might have counted by now yields a total of 625,000 deaths. Applying a 20:1 ratio to the much lower counts by UCDP and ACLED would give a lower figure of 480,000.
It is very unlikely that the Elman Project was counting more than 20% of actual deaths all over Somalia. On the other hand, UCDP and ACLED were only counting reports of deaths in Somalia from their bases in Sweden and the U.K., based on published reports, so they may well have counted less than 5% of actual deaths.
If the Elman Project was only capturing 15% of total deaths instead of 20%, that would suggest that 830,000 people have been killed since 2006. If UCDP’s and ACLED’s counts have captured more than 5% of total deaths, the real total could be lower than 480,000. But that would imply that the Elman Project was identifying an even higher proportion of actual deaths, which would be unprecedented for such a project.
So I estimate that the true number of people killed in Somalia since 2006 must be somewhere between 500,000 and 850,000, with most likely about 650,000 violent deaths.
Yemen
The U.S. is part of a coalition that has been bombing Yemen since 2015 in an effort to restore former President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to power. Hadi was elected in 2012 after Arab Spring protests and armed uprisings forced Yemen’s previous U.S.-backed dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to resign in November 2011.
Hadi’s mandate was to draw up a new constitution and organize a new election within two years. He did neither of these things, so the powerful Zaidi Houthi movement invaded the capital in September 2014, placed Hadi under house arrest and demanded that he and his government fulfill their mandate and organize a new election.
The Zaidis are a unique Shiite sect who make up 45% of Yemen’s population. Zaidi Imams ruled most of Yemen for over a thousand years. Sunnis and Zaidis have lived together peacefully in Yemen for centuries, intermarriage is common and they pray in the same mosques.
The last Zaidi Imam was overthrown in a civil war in the 1960s. In that war, the Saudis supported the Zaidi royalists, while Egypt invaded Yemen to support the republican forces who eventually formed the Yemen Arab Republic in 1970.
In 2014, Hadi refused to cooperate with the Houthis, and resigned in January 2015. He fled to Aden, his hometown, and then to Saudi Arabia, which launched a savage U.S.-backed bombing campaign and naval blockade to try to restore him to power.
While Saudi Arabia is conducting most of the air strikes, the U.S. has sold most of the planes, bombs, missiles and other weapons it is using. The U.K. is the Saudis’ second largest arms supplier. Without U.S. satellite intelligence and in-air refueling, Saudi Arabia could not conduct airstrikes all over Yemen as it is doing. So a cut-off of U.S. weapons, in-air refueling and diplomatic support could be decisive in ending the war.
Estimating War Deaths in Yemen
Published estimates of war deaths in Yemen are based on regular surveys of hospitals there by the World Health Organization, often relayed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). The most recent estimate, from December 2017, is that 9,245 people have been killed, including 5,558 civilians.
But UNOCHA’s December 2017 report included a note that,
“Due to the high number of health facilities that are not functioning or partially functioning as a result of the conflict, these numbers are underreported and likely higher.”
Even when hospitals are fully functioning, many people killed in war do not ever make it to a hospital. Several hospitals in Yemen have been struck by Saudi air strikes, there is a naval blockade that restricts imports of medicine, and supplies of electricity, water, food and fuel have all been affected by the bombing and the blockade. So the WHO’s summaries of mortality reports from hospitals are likely to be a small fraction of the real numbers of people killed.
A neighborhood in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa after an airstrike, October 9, 2015. (Wikipedia)
ACLED reports a slightly lower figure than the WHO: 7,846 through the end of 2017. But unlike the WHO, ACLED has up to date data for 2018, and reports another 2,193 deaths since January. If the WHO continues to report 18% more deaths than ACLED, the WHO’s total up to the present would be 11,833.
Even UNOCHA and the WHO acknowledge substantial underreporting of war deaths in Yemen, and the ratio between the WHO’s passive reports and actual deaths appears to be toward the higher end of the range found in other wars, which has varied between 5:1 and 20:1. I estimate that about 175,000 people have been killed – 15 times the numbers reported by the WHO and ACLED – with a minimum of 120,000 and a maximum of 240,000.
The True Human Cost of U.S. Wars
Altogether, in the three parts of this report, I have estimated that America’s post-9/11 wars have killed about 6 million people. Maybe the true number is only 5 million. Or maybe it is 7 million. But I am quite certain that it is several millions.
It is not only hundreds of thousands, as many otherwise well-informed people believe, because compilations of “passive reporting” can never amount to more than a fraction of the actual numbers of people killed in countries living through the kind of violence and chaos that our country’s aggression has unleashed on them since 2001.
The systematic reporting of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has surely captured a larger fraction of actual deaths than the small number of completed investigations deceptively reported as mortality estimates by the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan. But both of them still only represent a fraction of total deaths.
And the true number of people killed is most definitely not in the tens of thousands, as most of the general public in the U.S. and in the U.K. have been led to believe, according to opinion polls.
We urgently need public health experts to conduct comprehensive mortality studies in all the countries the U.S. has plunged into war since 2001, so that the world can respond appropriately to the true scale of death and destruction these wars have caused.
As Barbara Lee presciently warned her colleagues before she cast her lone dissenting vote in 2001, we have “become the evil we deplore.” But these wars have not been accompanied by fearsome military parades (not yet) or speeches about conquering the world. Instead they have been politically justified by “information warfare” to demonize enemies and fabricate crises, and then waged in a “disguised, quiet, media free” way, to hide their cost in human blood from the American public and the world.
After 16 years of war, about 6 million violent deaths, 6 countries utterly destroyed and many more destabilized, it is urgent that the American public come to terms with the true human cost of our country’s wars and how we have been manipulated and misled into turning a blind eye to them – before they go on even longer, destroy more countries, further undermine the rule of international law and kill millions more of our fellow human beings.
“We can no longer afford to take that which is good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live.”
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Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.
Der Friedensstifter 
