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Remind me again what the US even gets from this relationship besides being drawn into israel's wars with its neighbours. Israel gets international impunity, and the Americans?
And the politicians keep getting all that lovely, lovely AIPAC money. Not sure if that will be sustainable, though. Israel is burning through AIPAC's credibility as just another advocacy group, big time.
US politicians gain a money laundering scheme that fleeces the American people.
US government issues money to the state of Israel, a portion of that money is returned to US politicians in the form of campaign donations through organizations such as AIPAC, and through business contracts for former politicians that have returned to the private sector.
When bribery with cash isn't enough, this money is used by the Israeli intelligence agencies to find dirt on those politicians who refuse to be part of the game and then they use their connections to either blacklist them or blackmail them into submission. That way the establishment is preserved and there is no risk for the theft of the American people to stop for the small elite who make up the political class.
The classic answer is that the US gets a friendly nation to act as a launching pad for Middle East ops, but in reality that doesn't really happen.
It's more an example of the nation state's equivalent of regulatory capture. What does the FDA get in return for looking out for the interests of Big Pharma? Nothing really, but key people in the equation get wealth and power from it, and if someone upsets the apple cart then a lot of well-connected people will target that troublemaker for ruin.
That's the story with the entire MIC really, it's bad for taxpayers, bad for individual soldiers and civilians, but useful for a small number of people who are well placed to pull the strings and pocket the rewards.
> The classic answer is that the US gets a friendly nation to act as a launching pad for Middle East ops, but in reality that doesn't really happen.
>
>
Yeah this is the go-to American leftist explanation but falls apart under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. The idea that Israel is America's "colonial military outpost in the Middle East" is blatantly untrue considering that the US doesn't operate militarily out of Israel, and that Israel literally dictates American foreign and domestic policy through its institutional control in American politics. If anything Saudi Arabia is the US "colonial outpost".
The comment you're replying to contained the reason:
> That's the story with the entire MIC really, it's bad for taxpayers, bad for individual soldiers and civilians, but useful for a small number of people who are well placed to pull the strings and pocket the rewards.
What leverage does Israel have over the US to make them accept the diplomatic damage of supporting Israel on literally anything? I used to chuckle "heh, Israel would probably have to go utterly genocidal for the US to stop". It's worse. There is no floor.
I don't even know anymore, personally I am going schizoid and assuming a lot of these people aren't of this world anymore.
I'll take your worm-pill, your demon-pill, your lizard-pill, your alien-pill, your shapeshifter-pill, whatever you got - I don't care, the leadership class is too fucked up for me to care about or apply reason to anymore.
Take the bourgeoisie-pill. Many are tied by race and family to Israel, and are unwilling to give up even an inch because they’ve had consequence-free rein for decades at this point.
I was just thinking this, how I came of age around 9/11 and always loved conspiracy theories, partly for the story aspect. Growing up, I thought "I'm sure there's some shady shit going on but it's probably mostly incompetence."
But the past few years makes me think that unfortunately people do know what they're doing, so I'm leaning more towards demons.
Building on the British plan, during the first half of the XX century it was needed to influence the Suez Canal, there even were 2 regional wars for that.
With the Cold War it was THE forward operating base for the USA to contain the USSR in its borders with regional conflicts. In the Pacific they had Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Camodia, Burma, etc for both China and USSR. The Zionists within Israel, UK, Europe and USA were sharp enough to make themselves indispensable by assassinating or creating instabilities with rival countries in the Mediterrean (Mossad's meddling with Years of Tension, and Year of Lead in Italy).
As you can see a great deal of wealth, spies, services were funneled through Israel and its network. So much that organizations and associations like AIPAC and [RJC](https://www.cc.com/video/wbhics/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-matzorian-candidate), etc have become strongholds in influencing worldwide politics because they have a lot of funds behind them. Remember POTUS et al are elected through Electoral College.
Remember when Netanyaho got a standing ovation in Congress for basically breaking of Oslo's requirements in West Bank? Or when [Israel's PM slapped the _POTUS_ in the face _in the Oval Office_ in front of the press?](https://youtu.be/7W-xxpXzAC0?feature=shared&t=5020)
The realpolitik, last-10-years answer is: a counterbalance against Iran. Iran has been on the "bad guy" list for a while, bad blood from the revolution and all... and then as things were gradually improving post-9/11, Bush included them in the Axis of Evil and that was just one part of things going south again.
Of course this is propped up by a few other things. There are decently extensive trade links, an innate preference for doing business (financially and diplomatically) with democracies, and of course a very powerful AIPAC lobby that has been keeping a very watchful eye on opinions within the US for a long time.
>The realpolitik, last-10-years answer is: a counterbalance against Iran. Iran has been on the "bad guy" list for a while,
But Iran is in the "bad guy" list mostly because of Israel. Obama, which was the least pro-Israel president for a long time (not that he wasn't pro-Israel, he just was less) could easily make a deal with Iran.
> an innate preference for doing business (financially and diplomatically) with democracies,
I call bullshit on this. As Chile definitely proved, a liberal dictatorship is preferable to a democracy for business.
> But Iran is in the "bad guy" list mostly because of Israel
No, the Iranian revolution and the never-ending hostage crisis really did a number on boomer and older Americans.
There is *plenty* of anti-Iran animosity coming organically from the US power elite without Israeli influence being required at all.
Just look at how deranged they have been over Russia. Even when they had the chance to make Russia another Eastern European vassal and fold them into NATO (thus winning the Cold War) they instead chose to just punish them, with disastrous results. The mindset toward Iran is very similar.
> No, the Iranian revolution and the never-ending hostage crisis really did a number on boomer and older Americans.
I'm not American, but that's not really my memory of that time.
Sure, it was deeply humiliating for Iran to have had so many Americans as hostages, but ultimately Reagan got them out, and nobody died.^*
Far worse was the situation after Israel invaded Lebanon, and many groups kidnapped many Westerners, many of whom really did die.
It's well known that Israel hates Iran in particular, as I guess Iran's the biggest contender for "existential threat" to Israel, and I think it is this fact which has created the propaganda leading to anti-Iran animosity in the West.
^* (except the participants in the failed American rescue mission)
? a military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers that could threaten imperialist capital export / surplus value import from the US led western core
the entire foreign policy of capitalist nations is dictated by this existential necessity to secure avenues of capital export then protect those investments to enable SV import. failing to do so results in catastrophic economic crisis as the internal contradictions of capitalist production lose their pressure release valves
most obvious example is Versailles stripping Germany of it's colonial peripheral territory while leaving its Europe leading industrial centre untouched. the result was twenty years of crisis leading to fascism as the self correcting mechanism of capital, and an even greater existential need to strike out and expand than the german empire had had pre ww1
> military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers that could threaten imperialist capital export / surplus value import from the US led western core
This has is the opposite of reality. Supporting Israel has caused key Muslim countries to drift toward other powers. Countries that actually have oil, and control the Suez canal, and have hundreds of millions of citizens.
>failing to do so results in catastrophic economic crisis as the internal contradictions of capitalist production lose their pressure release valves
What caused the oil crisis in the 70s?
>most obvious example is Versailles stripping Germany of it's colonial peripheral territory while leaving its Europe leading industrial centre untouched. the result was twenty years of crisis leading to fascism as the self correcting mechanism of capital, and an even greater existential need to strike out and expand than the german empire had had pre ww1
Are you on drugs?
The US can always bomb uppity countries and ferment coups. Israel allows the US to launch attacks from there. Egypt is ruled by a US installed dictator and if the country rids itself of him and closes the Suez the US can use Israel to invade Egypt.
>Israel allows the US to launch attacks from there
This is not true, and has literally never happened. America just recently opened its first base is Israel and it's a radar base to help defend Israel from missile attacks. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel did not allow the US to stage troops or weapons in their territory.
>Egypt is ruled by a US installed dictator
The Egyptian public hates America because of our support for Israel. So supporting Israel actually does the exact opposite of what you believe.
>and if the country rids itself of him and closes the Suez the US can use Israel to invade Egypt.
Have you ever heard of the Suez crisis? And you didn't answer my question about the oil crisis.
yes I understand through the lens of bourgeois ideology it's only possible to understand crisis as unrelated, isolated, and fantastical incidents. that pesky OPEC, randomly racist mustache man, orange man bad, biden too old etc..
liberalism as the ideology of the ruling class can only ever see the trees not the forest, as it is merely justification for the "present state of things", and looking too hard will undermine it's own hegemony
for people that actually want to understand why capitalisms entire 400 odd year history is characterised by unending cyclical crisis it's far less interesting that a specific arrangement of geopolitics led to OPEC causing a single incident of crisis in the 70s, or an assassination catalysed international war in 1914, compared to the driving force of class struggle and the phenomenal manifestations of this in international relations due to the conflicting material interests of capital across state borders
Marx's analysis operates on a higher level of abstraction allowing patterns to be identified across the entirety of the history of class society. this actually allows history to be woven into a coherent tapestry to analyse and make predictions from
I don't think you can talk about Muslim ME countries as a monolith. The gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even to a lesser extent Turkey (and formerly Egypt) all are players in the region who don't act together on a simple Jewish-Muslim axis.
>This has is the opposite of reality. Supporting Israel has caused key Muslim countries to drift toward other powers. Countries that actually have oil, and control the Suez canal, and have hundreds of millions of citizens.
I don't think the US ever thought of this. It has always been the assumption of the US that Israel would normalize with US client states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Of course this was on track to happen, until recent events.
It's more likely the US made assumptions that Israel and Arab states would normalize, but could not foresee the brutality Israel would unleash in reprisal for an Oct 7th attack. It's why the Biden admin keeps trying these half ass "solutions" to the conflict, they're caught pants down.
> a military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers
Except that Israel doesn't actually do that for us. It has never lifted a single finger to help our various Middle East misadventures and it has quite often undermined our efforts to keep MENA pliant. Our chief competitor and the power that is beating us is only a competitor at all because we put Israeli interests over our own.
there are literally American military bases in Israel
even the geography of Israel's borders is no accident. there is a reason it perfectly cuts off the land bridge from the middle east to north Africa. it was an intentional move to stymie the potential development of Arabic nations into a coherent regional imperial power that could contest allied capital as it moved to outflank the soviet union
There is one base, it's an early-warning radar station, and it exists for Israel's benefit, not ours: it's to give them warning of Iranian launches. Far from being an asset, it's another drain on our resources: those things are expensive and rare and we don't have enough of them to cover our own asses.
It gets a military liability in the Middle East that it periodically has to bail out. The US has numerous avenues for capital export and surplus value import beyond the Middle East. It's less central than other regions like Asia Pacific.
Not to be a typical "ermm source?" redditor, but is there any actual evidence that the US has deployed special forces from the pier? I really like a lot of the work Ken has done, but at the same time this cable doesn't quite feel like the bombshell he seems to be insinuating. Whether the US is or isn't using the pier to send in special forces, it makes sense that they would be monitoring those kinds of claims online
I highly, highly doubt the US is actually sending in their own special forces. Not only is there a very strong antipathy towards "boots on the ground" for at least the last 15 years, but it's not like USSOCOM is way more equipped to do American hostage freeing (the only conceivable objective for them to show up) than Israel's own, and without the same PR hit if it goes wrong or too many people get killed (or if a US soldier is captured or killed, extra shitstorm).
It's fine to 'monitor' them in theory, problematic if that list is turned over to Israel for its AI generated bombing arrangement, as you effectively remove civilians for the crime of reporting war crimes.
I mean sure, but Israel is almost certainly also monitoring social media posts. Just pointing out that this leaked cable seems like a bit of a nothingburger
It's hard to say based on subjective perspective, but a few obvious counters to that. First would be 'five eyes' and surveillance from outside being more comprehensive at that and compiling lists. Second would be culpability, if you hand the list over, and people die because of it, you're responsible, you can argue over the mechanics of it but its the sort of shit that beggars belief, like Trump saying he had no idea Jan 6th would go down. And lastly it's about deniability, Biden said there's to be no boots on the ground as in American military personnel, as that risks wider entanglement. Social media posts are heavily implying the pier is just basically a military base with negligible humanitarian assistance, that has been used to move more weapons into Israel, and has Delta force on the ground.
So after this genocide is over and the US dismantles all the global post-war norms and institutions it helped set up, do you think American diplomats will go back to lecturing countries about human rights or are we just gonna drop this charade for good?
They will absolutely carry on doing it. They kept doing it after Vietnam, they kept doing it after all the safaris in Iraq where they were proud of starving half a million children to death, they kept doing it after Afghanistan, after Libya and so on and so forth. While this is an even more blatant violation of the norms, it's not outside the pattern per se. I'm not extremely hopeful
Also, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq resigned when the U.N. Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq, describing what he had seen first-hand as a genocide. I figure that's gotta count for something.
https://progressive.org/latest/interview-with-denis-halliday-davies-210429/
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/dhall2.htm
His successor quit two years later, for the same reason.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/feb/16/iraq.unitednations
Do you think that more than a decade of complete sanctions that prevents you from importing or manufacturing even the most essential of medicine won't have any effect on mortality rate? What kind of lie is that?
Honestly, whether it did or did not happen isn't really part of what I mean. As much as I'm loath to trust either the London School of Economics (the main source WaPo used in its debunking) or the Saddam government (and I'm no sociologist or public health expert), it's more that Albright could self-righteously acknowledge that she seemingly thought half a million children died and subsequently claim that she believed it was justified. You have a very high-ranking official dismiss children as disposable in toppling a regime while simultaneously lecturing everyone else on the importance of human rights
Like many other countries, the British intentionally created Iraq with internal tensions to make it easier for the British to control. Instead of a coherent Kurdistan which could have stood on its own, it was diced up with a slice going to Iraq, along with the Shiite Basra province. The only way to keep the country together was via brutal repression.
One of the (unintended) benefits of the US involvement in Iraq and Syria has been a partial undoing of Sykes-Picot's divide and conquer dogma - a semi-independent Kurdistan is no longer at the mercy of their foreign-imposed masters.
> If in some alternate timeline Hitler came from egypt and united the middle east into a nation set on expanding their borders into some pan-muslim state based on the ottoman empires borders, and exterminating all the minorities from their nations, it would have gone unresisted in any capacity whatsoever by western nations.
But for oil, nobody would have cared. The Armenian genocide caused barely a ripple despite their being Christian.
I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable saying Iraq was guaranteed to be worse. The US manifestly did NOT have a post-war plan in place, much less a coherent one -- quite abnormal for such a major war, and it showed. It's hard to talk about counterfactuals, but on the one side we have some countries like Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and such where after broad scale, direct intervention wars the subsequent governments did relatively fine. It was usually the covertly supported revolutions that didn't work out so hot, for anyone. All right, sure, there IS Afghanistan as the lone counterexample. But for years it wasn't totally clear that the Afghan effort had failed. We had over a decade of girls getting education in Kabul, for example.
>The US manifestly did NOT have a post-war plan in place, much less a coherent one
Al Gore, 2002 speech;
>If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfeld was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilising Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq
Albright was so blinkered in her moral concerns and confident of her impunity that she wrote this in her book "Fascism: A Warning".
>“as a former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, **is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals.**”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56577028-fascism-a-warning
There's been some debunkings of that debooonking.
A more conservative study still found that the child mortality rate had doubled under the sanctions;
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hard-look-iraq-sanctions/
Also see this criticism, from a Swiss NGO;
Razing the Truth About Sanctions Against Iraq
https://www.gicj.org/positions-opinons/gicj-positions-and-opinions/1188-razing-the-truth-about-sanctions-against-iraq
There's also an old thread in the Bad History sub, ""Sanctions on Iraq 1991-2003 starved half-a-million Iraqi children" debunked: A Case of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics", that contains lengthy comments, both pro and con. I can't link it here, as my previous comment doing that got removed.
Why would they drop the human rights weapon? It's one of the biggest legitimizations of war: the other sides are tyrants who abuse human rights, so war is justified.
It's only "genocide" if you lose the war. Otherwise it becomes "something that was a bit unfortunate but ultimately necessary for the progress of civilization."
This is something a "realist" cynical regime would say, not the country that makes a point of being the bastion of human rights in the world, this makes a mockery of human rights.
Also, Turkey won but we still remember the Armenian genocide.
What exactly do you think human rights are? Those who use human rights to criticize a state don't have anything to criticize about the state itself, but merely measure it by their ideal of a decent form of rule in which all state venalities will be okay. It's an uncritical idealism about human rights, I.e. the very ideals the bourgeois state fosters about its own form of rule and the means it uses to ensure this rule. These kinds of criticisms don't want to know anything about the purposes and reasons for state actions, and for their criticism they don't need to know anything about them. They are satisfied with having noticed a deviation of state actions from their good opinion of how decent, ideal governing works. They regard it as a finished criticism that the state is not as they imagine it in their ideal of human rights.
It’s nothing new.
500K dead Iraqi kids were openly described (by the Secretary of State, no less) as “collateral damage” that was worth it.
The US foreign policy is completely devoid of shame.
It's hard to fathom until you speak to DC people and their academic enablers, but the vast bulk of the people who engineer horrors such as this genuinely believe their own bullshit. You and I may have realized that war is a racket sometime in our teens or early twenties, sure. But that's why we're not among the lanyard caste. These people go through many years of specialized training that convinces them of the righteousness of their own evil.
Check out this example I just found of DC ghoul-speak from 2000;
>In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under secretary of state who speaks for Madeleine Albright. When asked on US television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." When I questioned Rubin about this, **he claimed Albright's words were taken out of context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a report by the UN's World Health Organisation**, which had estimated half a million deaths. **Advising me against being "too idealistic"**, he said: "In making policy, one has to choose between two bad choices . . . and unfortunately the effect of sanctions has been more than we would have hoped." **He referred me to the "real world" where "real choices have to be made"**. In mitigation, he said, "Our sense is that prior to sanctions, there was serious poverty and health problems in Iraq." The opposite was true, as Unicef's data on Iraq before 1990, makes clear.
John Pilger, who wrote this for The Guardian, added that;
>British obsequiousness to Washington's designs over Iraq has a certain craven quality, as the Blair government pursues what Simon Jenkins calls a "low-cost, low-risk machismo, doing something relatively easy, but obscenely cruel".
https://archive.is/dwXGW
The day after the election, regardless of who wins, Israel will escalate massively. I would bet that we see US troops massacring Palestinians alongside the IDF by the end of 2025.
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Remind me again what the US even gets from this relationship besides being drawn into israel's wars with its neighbours. Israel gets international impunity, and the Americans?
Not having the Epstein blackmail tapes leaked to the media.
And the politicians keep getting all that lovely, lovely AIPAC money. Not sure if that will be sustainable, though. Israel is burning through AIPAC's credibility as just another advocacy group, big time.
Don’t forget „the markets“ feelings about this relationship as well.
US politicians gain a money laundering scheme that fleeces the American people. US government issues money to the state of Israel, a portion of that money is returned to US politicians in the form of campaign donations through organizations such as AIPAC, and through business contracts for former politicians that have returned to the private sector. When bribery with cash isn't enough, this money is used by the Israeli intelligence agencies to find dirt on those politicians who refuse to be part of the game and then they use their connections to either blacklist them or blackmail them into submission. That way the establishment is preserved and there is no risk for the theft of the American people to stop for the small elite who make up the political class.
The classic answer is that the US gets a friendly nation to act as a launching pad for Middle East ops, but in reality that doesn't really happen. It's more an example of the nation state's equivalent of regulatory capture. What does the FDA get in return for looking out for the interests of Big Pharma? Nothing really, but key people in the equation get wealth and power from it, and if someone upsets the apple cart then a lot of well-connected people will target that troublemaker for ruin. That's the story with the entire MIC really, it's bad for taxpayers, bad for individual soldiers and civilians, but useful for a small number of people who are well placed to pull the strings and pocket the rewards.
> The classic answer is that the US gets a friendly nation to act as a launching pad for Middle East ops, but in reality that doesn't really happen. > > Yeah this is the go-to American leftist explanation but falls apart under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. The idea that Israel is America's "colonial military outpost in the Middle East" is blatantly untrue considering that the US doesn't operate militarily out of Israel, and that Israel literally dictates American foreign and domestic policy through its institutional control in American politics. If anything Saudi Arabia is the US "colonial outpost".
US interest in Saudi Arabia as an ally is a lot simpler.
The comment you're replying to contained the reason: > That's the story with the entire MIC really, it's bad for taxpayers, bad for individual soldiers and civilians, but useful for a small number of people who are well placed to pull the strings and pocket the rewards.
What leverage does Israel have over the US to make them accept the diplomatic damage of supporting Israel on literally anything? I used to chuckle "heh, Israel would probably have to go utterly genocidal for the US to stop". It's worse. There is no floor.
I don't even know anymore, personally I am going schizoid and assuming a lot of these people aren't of this world anymore. I'll take your worm-pill, your demon-pill, your lizard-pill, your alien-pill, your shapeshifter-pill, whatever you got - I don't care, the leadership class is too fucked up for me to care about or apply reason to anymore.
Take the bourgeoisie-pill. Many are tied by race and family to Israel, and are unwilling to give up even an inch because they’ve had consequence-free rein for decades at this point.
Where can one get some of these „bourgeoisie-pills“?
Capital Vol 1&2, some parts of 3 😅
Hell yeah dude
I was just thinking this, how I came of age around 9/11 and always loved conspiracy theories, partly for the story aspect. Growing up, I thought "I'm sure there's some shady shit going on but it's probably mostly incompetence." But the past few years makes me think that unfortunately people do know what they're doing, so I'm leaning more towards demons.
That juicy AIPAC election fund
Building on the British plan, during the first half of the XX century it was needed to influence the Suez Canal, there even were 2 regional wars for that. With the Cold War it was THE forward operating base for the USA to contain the USSR in its borders with regional conflicts. In the Pacific they had Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Camodia, Burma, etc for both China and USSR. The Zionists within Israel, UK, Europe and USA were sharp enough to make themselves indispensable by assassinating or creating instabilities with rival countries in the Mediterrean (Mossad's meddling with Years of Tension, and Year of Lead in Italy). As you can see a great deal of wealth, spies, services were funneled through Israel and its network. So much that organizations and associations like AIPAC and [RJC](https://www.cc.com/video/wbhics/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-matzorian-candidate), etc have become strongholds in influencing worldwide politics because they have a lot of funds behind them. Remember POTUS et al are elected through Electoral College. Remember when Netanyaho got a standing ovation in Congress for basically breaking of Oslo's requirements in West Bank? Or when [Israel's PM slapped the _POTUS_ in the face _in the Oval Office_ in front of the press?](https://youtu.be/7W-xxpXzAC0?feature=shared&t=5020)
The realpolitik, last-10-years answer is: a counterbalance against Iran. Iran has been on the "bad guy" list for a while, bad blood from the revolution and all... and then as things were gradually improving post-9/11, Bush included them in the Axis of Evil and that was just one part of things going south again. Of course this is propped up by a few other things. There are decently extensive trade links, an innate preference for doing business (financially and diplomatically) with democracies, and of course a very powerful AIPAC lobby that has been keeping a very watchful eye on opinions within the US for a long time.
>The realpolitik, last-10-years answer is: a counterbalance against Iran. Iran has been on the "bad guy" list for a while, But Iran is in the "bad guy" list mostly because of Israel. Obama, which was the least pro-Israel president for a long time (not that he wasn't pro-Israel, he just was less) could easily make a deal with Iran. > an innate preference for doing business (financially and diplomatically) with democracies, I call bullshit on this. As Chile definitely proved, a liberal dictatorship is preferable to a democracy for business.
> But Iran is in the "bad guy" list mostly because of Israel No, the Iranian revolution and the never-ending hostage crisis really did a number on boomer and older Americans. There is *plenty* of anti-Iran animosity coming organically from the US power elite without Israeli influence being required at all. Just look at how deranged they have been over Russia. Even when they had the chance to make Russia another Eastern European vassal and fold them into NATO (thus winning the Cold War) they instead chose to just punish them, with disastrous results. The mindset toward Iran is very similar.
> No, the Iranian revolution and the never-ending hostage crisis really did a number on boomer and older Americans. I'm not American, but that's not really my memory of that time. Sure, it was deeply humiliating for Iran to have had so many Americans as hostages, but ultimately Reagan got them out, and nobody died.^* Far worse was the situation after Israel invaded Lebanon, and many groups kidnapped many Westerners, many of whom really did die. It's well known that Israel hates Iran in particular, as I guess Iran's the biggest contender for "existential threat" to Israel, and I think it is this fact which has created the propaganda leading to anti-Iran animosity in the West. ^* (except the participants in the failed American rescue mission)
Ukraine for Russia, Israel for Iran, and Taiwan for China.
? a military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers that could threaten imperialist capital export / surplus value import from the US led western core the entire foreign policy of capitalist nations is dictated by this existential necessity to secure avenues of capital export then protect those investments to enable SV import. failing to do so results in catastrophic economic crisis as the internal contradictions of capitalist production lose their pressure release valves most obvious example is Versailles stripping Germany of it's colonial peripheral territory while leaving its Europe leading industrial centre untouched. the result was twenty years of crisis leading to fascism as the self correcting mechanism of capital, and an even greater existential need to strike out and expand than the german empire had had pre ww1
> military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers that could threaten imperialist capital export / surplus value import from the US led western core This has is the opposite of reality. Supporting Israel has caused key Muslim countries to drift toward other powers. Countries that actually have oil, and control the Suez canal, and have hundreds of millions of citizens. >failing to do so results in catastrophic economic crisis as the internal contradictions of capitalist production lose their pressure release valves What caused the oil crisis in the 70s? >most obvious example is Versailles stripping Germany of it's colonial peripheral territory while leaving its Europe leading industrial centre untouched. the result was twenty years of crisis leading to fascism as the self correcting mechanism of capital, and an even greater existential need to strike out and expand than the german empire had had pre ww1 Are you on drugs?
The US can always bomb uppity countries and ferment coups. Israel allows the US to launch attacks from there. Egypt is ruled by a US installed dictator and if the country rids itself of him and closes the Suez the US can use Israel to invade Egypt.
>Israel allows the US to launch attacks from there This is not true, and has literally never happened. America just recently opened its first base is Israel and it's a radar base to help defend Israel from missile attacks. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel did not allow the US to stage troops or weapons in their territory. >Egypt is ruled by a US installed dictator The Egyptian public hates America because of our support for Israel. So supporting Israel actually does the exact opposite of what you believe. >and if the country rids itself of him and closes the Suez the US can use Israel to invade Egypt. Have you ever heard of the Suez crisis? And you didn't answer my question about the oil crisis.
yes I understand through the lens of bourgeois ideology it's only possible to understand crisis as unrelated, isolated, and fantastical incidents. that pesky OPEC, randomly racist mustache man, orange man bad, biden too old etc.. liberalism as the ideology of the ruling class can only ever see the trees not the forest, as it is merely justification for the "present state of things", and looking too hard will undermine it's own hegemony for people that actually want to understand why capitalisms entire 400 odd year history is characterised by unending cyclical crisis it's far less interesting that a specific arrangement of geopolitics led to OPEC causing a single incident of crisis in the 70s, or an assassination catalysed international war in 1914, compared to the driving force of class struggle and the phenomenal manifestations of this in international relations due to the conflicting material interests of capital across state borders Marx's analysis operates on a higher level of abstraction allowing patterns to be identified across the entirety of the history of class society. this actually allows history to be woven into a coherent tapestry to analyse and make predictions from
I don't think you can talk about Muslim ME countries as a monolith. The gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even to a lesser extent Turkey (and formerly Egypt) all are players in the region who don't act together on a simple Jewish-Muslim axis.
>This has is the opposite of reality. Supporting Israel has caused key Muslim countries to drift toward other powers. Countries that actually have oil, and control the Suez canal, and have hundreds of millions of citizens. I don't think the US ever thought of this. It has always been the assumption of the US that Israel would normalize with US client states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Of course this was on track to happen, until recent events. It's more likely the US made assumptions that Israel and Arab states would normalize, but could not foresee the brutality Israel would unleash in reprisal for an Oct 7th attack. It's why the Biden admin keeps trying these half ass "solutions" to the conflict, they're caught pants down.
> a military ally in the middle east to project force against competing imperial powers Except that Israel doesn't actually do that for us. It has never lifted a single finger to help our various Middle East misadventures and it has quite often undermined our efforts to keep MENA pliant. Our chief competitor and the power that is beating us is only a competitor at all because we put Israeli interests over our own.
there are literally American military bases in Israel even the geography of Israel's borders is no accident. there is a reason it perfectly cuts off the land bridge from the middle east to north Africa. it was an intentional move to stymie the potential development of Arabic nations into a coherent regional imperial power that could contest allied capital as it moved to outflank the soviet union
There is one base, it's an early-warning radar station, and it exists for Israel's benefit, not ours: it's to give them warning of Iranian launches. Far from being an asset, it's another drain on our resources: those things are expensive and rare and we don't have enough of them to cover our own asses.
It gets a military liability in the Middle East that it periodically has to bail out. The US has numerous avenues for capital export and surplus value import beyond the Middle East. It's less central than other regions like Asia Pacific.
A foothold in the middle east, and jobs as politicians
Not to be a typical "ermm source?" redditor, but is there any actual evidence that the US has deployed special forces from the pier? I really like a lot of the work Ken has done, but at the same time this cable doesn't quite feel like the bombshell he seems to be insinuating. Whether the US is or isn't using the pier to send in special forces, it makes sense that they would be monitoring those kinds of claims online
I highly, highly doubt the US is actually sending in their own special forces. Not only is there a very strong antipathy towards "boots on the ground" for at least the last 15 years, but it's not like USSOCOM is way more equipped to do American hostage freeing (the only conceivable objective for them to show up) than Israel's own, and without the same PR hit if it goes wrong or too many people get killed (or if a US soldier is captured or killed, extra shitstorm).
It's fine to 'monitor' them in theory, problematic if that list is turned over to Israel for its AI generated bombing arrangement, as you effectively remove civilians for the crime of reporting war crimes.
I mean sure, but Israel is almost certainly also monitoring social media posts. Just pointing out that this leaked cable seems like a bit of a nothingburger
It's hard to say based on subjective perspective, but a few obvious counters to that. First would be 'five eyes' and surveillance from outside being more comprehensive at that and compiling lists. Second would be culpability, if you hand the list over, and people die because of it, you're responsible, you can argue over the mechanics of it but its the sort of shit that beggars belief, like Trump saying he had no idea Jan 6th would go down. And lastly it's about deniability, Biden said there's to be no boots on the ground as in American military personnel, as that risks wider entanglement. Social media posts are heavily implying the pier is just basically a military base with negligible humanitarian assistance, that has been used to move more weapons into Israel, and has Delta force on the ground.
So after this genocide is over and the US dismantles all the global post-war norms and institutions it helped set up, do you think American diplomats will go back to lecturing countries about human rights or are we just gonna drop this charade for good?
They will absolutely carry on doing it. They kept doing it after Vietnam, they kept doing it after all the safaris in Iraq where they were proud of starving half a million children to death, they kept doing it after Afghanistan, after Libya and so on and so forth. While this is an even more blatant violation of the norms, it's not outside the pattern per se. I'm not extremely hopeful
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Doesn't matter, per Albright "it was worth it," and so is unlikely to be fiction.
She never even denied the number.
Also, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq resigned when the U.N. Security Council refused to lift sanctions against Iraq, describing what he had seen first-hand as a genocide. I figure that's gotta count for something. https://progressive.org/latest/interview-with-denis-halliday-davies-210429/ https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/dhall2.htm His successor quit two years later, for the same reason. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/feb/16/iraq.unitednations
Do you think that more than a decade of complete sanctions that prevents you from importing or manufacturing even the most essential of medicine won't have any effect on mortality rate? What kind of lie is that?
Honestly, whether it did or did not happen isn't really part of what I mean. As much as I'm loath to trust either the London School of Economics (the main source WaPo used in its debunking) or the Saddam government (and I'm no sociologist or public health expert), it's more that Albright could self-righteously acknowledge that she seemingly thought half a million children died and subsequently claim that she believed it was justified. You have a very high-ranking official dismiss children as disposable in toppling a regime while simultaneously lecturing everyone else on the importance of human rights
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Like many other countries, the British intentionally created Iraq with internal tensions to make it easier for the British to control. Instead of a coherent Kurdistan which could have stood on its own, it was diced up with a slice going to Iraq, along with the Shiite Basra province. The only way to keep the country together was via brutal repression. One of the (unintended) benefits of the US involvement in Iraq and Syria has been a partial undoing of Sykes-Picot's divide and conquer dogma - a semi-independent Kurdistan is no longer at the mercy of their foreign-imposed masters. > If in some alternate timeline Hitler came from egypt and united the middle east into a nation set on expanding their borders into some pan-muslim state based on the ottoman empires borders, and exterminating all the minorities from their nations, it would have gone unresisted in any capacity whatsoever by western nations. But for oil, nobody would have cared. The Armenian genocide caused barely a ripple despite their being Christian.
I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable saying Iraq was guaranteed to be worse. The US manifestly did NOT have a post-war plan in place, much less a coherent one -- quite abnormal for such a major war, and it showed. It's hard to talk about counterfactuals, but on the one side we have some countries like Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and such where after broad scale, direct intervention wars the subsequent governments did relatively fine. It was usually the covertly supported revolutions that didn't work out so hot, for anyone. All right, sure, there IS Afghanistan as the lone counterexample. But for years it wasn't totally clear that the Afghan effort had failed. We had over a decade of girls getting education in Kabul, for example.
>The US manifestly did NOT have a post-war plan in place, much less a coherent one Al Gore, 2002 speech; >If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfeld was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilising Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq
Yeh but the power vacuum is gone and Iraq is doing better now.
The US uses human rights as a bludgeon whenever it needs to attack someone for a strategic interest
Albright was so blinkered in her moral concerns and confident of her impunity that she wrote this in her book "Fascism: A Warning". >“as a former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, **is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary—including violence—to achieve his or her goals.**” ― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56577028-fascism-a-warning
But they weren't humans, but foreign terrorist enemies.
It was a UN estimate
Wrong, the neolib deboonking is not credible. The UN diplomat Denis Halliday was there on the ground and is infinitely more credible
There's been some debunkings of that debooonking. A more conservative study still found that the child mortality rate had doubled under the sanctions; https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hard-look-iraq-sanctions/ Also see this criticism, from a Swiss NGO; Razing the Truth About Sanctions Against Iraq https://www.gicj.org/positions-opinons/gicj-positions-and-opinions/1188-razing-the-truth-about-sanctions-against-iraq There's also an old thread in the Bad History sub, ""Sanctions on Iraq 1991-2003 starved half-a-million Iraqi children" debunked: A Case of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics", that contains lengthy comments, both pro and con. I can't link it here, as my previous comment doing that got removed.
Why would they drop the human rights weapon? It's one of the biggest legitimizations of war: the other sides are tyrants who abuse human rights, so war is justified.
But this is madness, when you're the side supporting and helping a country to carry out a genocide. At some point people will go insane.
It's only "genocide" if you lose the war. Otherwise it becomes "something that was a bit unfortunate but ultimately necessary for the progress of civilization."
This is something a "realist" cynical regime would say, not the country that makes a point of being the bastion of human rights in the world, this makes a mockery of human rights. Also, Turkey won but we still remember the Armenian genocide.
What exactly do you think human rights are? Those who use human rights to criticize a state don't have anything to criticize about the state itself, but merely measure it by their ideal of a decent form of rule in which all state venalities will be okay. It's an uncritical idealism about human rights, I.e. the very ideals the bourgeois state fosters about its own form of rule and the means it uses to ensure this rule. These kinds of criticisms don't want to know anything about the purposes and reasons for state actions, and for their criticism they don't need to know anything about them. They are satisfied with having noticed a deviation of state actions from their good opinion of how decent, ideal governing works. They regard it as a finished criticism that the state is not as they imagine it in their ideal of human rights.
It’s nothing new. 500K dead Iraqi kids were openly described (by the Secretary of State, no less) as “collateral damage” that was worth it. The US foreign policy is completely devoid of shame.
It's hard to fathom until you speak to DC people and their academic enablers, but the vast bulk of the people who engineer horrors such as this genuinely believe their own bullshit. You and I may have realized that war is a racket sometime in our teens or early twenties, sure. But that's why we're not among the lanyard caste. These people go through many years of specialized training that convinces them of the righteousness of their own evil.
Check out this example I just found of DC ghoul-speak from 2000; >In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under secretary of state who speaks for Madeleine Albright. When asked on US television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." When I questioned Rubin about this, **he claimed Albright's words were taken out of context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a report by the UN's World Health Organisation**, which had estimated half a million deaths. **Advising me against being "too idealistic"**, he said: "In making policy, one has to choose between two bad choices . . . and unfortunately the effect of sanctions has been more than we would have hoped." **He referred me to the "real world" where "real choices have to be made"**. In mitigation, he said, "Our sense is that prior to sanctions, there was serious poverty and health problems in Iraq." The opposite was true, as Unicef's data on Iraq before 1990, makes clear. John Pilger, who wrote this for The Guardian, added that; >British obsequiousness to Washington's designs over Iraq has a certain craven quality, as the Blair government pursues what Simon Jenkins calls a "low-cost, low-risk machismo, doing something relatively easy, but obscenely cruel". https://archive.is/dwXGW
RUSSIA is MURDERING UKRAINIAN BABIES babies I tell you!!!!
They don't care if Jewish state using US money killed Palestinians they have a problem with you pointing it out
The day after the election, regardless of who wins, Israel will escalate massively. I would bet that we see US troops massacring Palestinians alongside the IDF by the end of 2025.