The American Bear

Sunshine/Lollipops

US Promises Israel: New Iranian President Will Be Met With Hostility

Last month, US officials were greeting the election of Reformist candidate Hassan Rohani as Iran’s next president as a hopeful sign, while simultaneously patting themselves on the back and taking credit for his election.

But if Rohani was really the candidate the US wants, they have a funny way of showing it, as US diplomats are now reassuring Israelis that the US will treat Rohani with intense hostility, and will up the sanctions and threats against Iran going forward.

The promises appear designed to assuage Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who fears that Rohani’s election has spoiled his assorted war plans and has been railing about the need to threaten Iran more often every chance he gets.

Hagel Says Israel Has Right To Commit Crime Of Aggressive War | Steve Hynd

When a nation launches an attack on another which hasn’t attacked it, that is a war of aggression as defined by Nuremberg, and a clear war crime. Calling such preventative warfare “self-defense” is taking on board the Bush regime’s justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

Welcome to Obama’s second term, and his hard-fought-for pick for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, Although he warned that it would be premature for Israel to attack Iran, he also said that the US recognizes the same threat (which doesn’t as yet exist) from Iran, and recognized Israel’s right to attack whenever it wants to, for whatever reason it wants to.

Hagel stressed repeatedly that Israel has a sovereign right to decide for itself whether it must attack Iran. He made no mention of the possibility that an Israeli attack would draw the U.S. into the conflict and lead to a wider regional war.

“Israel will make the decision that Israel must make to protect itself, to defend itself,” Hagel said as he began a weeklong tour of the Middle East.

I repeat – absent an actual and provable attack on Israel by Iran which would serve as a causus belli for retaliation, any such Israeli attack would be a war crime of the most heinous kind. The Obama administration just rubber stamped its approval for that crime even as it is saying Israel shouldn’t go forward with such an attack.

Yet officials from both Israel and the U.S. have threatened several times over the last decade, perhaps scores of times, to attack Iran with no causus belli other than an admittedly non-existent nuclear weapon. Both have also made it clear they and regional allies are arming for such an attack.

Thanks, Blood and Iron Lady | A tiny revolution

A few people may still remember that Margaret Thatcher (who in 1981 privately wrote she was “very pleased” to sell as many British weapons as possible to Iraq) played a key role in the first Gulf War:

Thatcher Reminds Bush: ‘Don’t Go Wobbly’

On Aug. 2, 1990, the morning after Iraq occupied Kuwait, Mr. Bush told reporters:

“We’re not contemplating intervention. I’m not contemplating such action.

Then he flew to Aspen, Colo.

There he met Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister. They talked for hours.

That afternoon, at a joint press conference, Mr. Bush condemned “naked aggression” and said he was considering “the next steps needed to end the invasion.”

But what essentially no one remembers today is that, in a weird way, Thatcher also played a key role in the Second Gulf War:

According to [favored Bush family biographer Mickey] Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.”

Beyond that, Thatcher also directly called for the invasion of Iraq in a July 17, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Don’t Go Wobbly

Saddam must go…It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD.

The Iranian Nuclear Will o' the Wisp | Tom Engelhardt

Had you searched for “Israel, nuclear weapons” at Google News in the wake of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this: “Obama: Iran more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon” (CNN), “Obama vows to thwart Tehran’s nuclear drive” (the Times of Israel), Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran (the San Angelo Times), “US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran’s plutonium-producing reactor” (Associated Press), “Obama says ‘there is still time’ to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute; Netanyahu hints at impatience” (NBC), “Iran’s leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks” (Fox).

By now, we’re so used to such a world of headlines — about Iran’s threatening nuclear weapons and its urge to “wipe out” Israel — that we simply don’t see how strange it is. At the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia (theoretically because of sequester budget cuts), the U.S. continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest-sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever-tightening sanctions, its skies filled with U.S. spy drones, its offshore waters with U.S. warships. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv in the first cyberwar in history. As early as 2007, the U.S. Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross-border activities, assumedly using U.S. special operations forces — and that’s only what’s known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near-apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called “regime change.” (Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre-Iraq-invasion moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran”?)

And all of this is due, so we’re told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one because it doesn’t exist, and most observers don’t think that Tehran is in the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it — if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject — is a nuclear will-o’-the-wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal. And yet, in that shaky, increasingly destabilized country, such an existing arsenal has to qualify as a genuine and growing regional danger.

Similarly, you can read endlessly in the mainstream about President Obama’s recent triumphs in the Middle East and that Iranian nuclear program without ever stumbling upon anything of significance about the only genuine nuclear arsenal in the vicinity: Israel’s. On the rare occasions when it is even mentioned, it’s spoken of as if it might or might not exist. Israel, Fox News typically reports, “is believed to have the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Mideast.” It is, of course, Israeli policy (and a carefully crafted fiction) never to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. But the arsenal itself isn’t just “believed” to exist, it is known to exist — 100-300 nuclear weapons’ worth or enough destructive power to turn not just Iran but the Greater Middle East into an ash heap.

To sum up: we continue to obsess about fantasy weapons, base an ever more threatening and dangerous policy in the region on their possible future existence, might conceivably end up in a war over them, and yet pay remarkably little attention to the existing nuclear weapons in the region. If this were the approach of countries other than either the U.S. or Israel, you would know what to make of it and undoubtedly words like “paranoia” and “fantasy” would quickly creep into any discussion.

From the introduction to “Obama Walks the High Wire, Eyes Closed” by Ira Chernus

The evidence has long been compelling that the primary fuel of what the US calls terrorism are the very policies of aggression justified in the name of stopping terrorism. The vast bulk of those who have been caught in recent years attempting attacks on the US have emphatically cited US militarism and drone killings in their part of the world as their motive. Evidence is overwhelming that what has radicalized huge numbers of previously peaceful and moderate Muslims is growing rage at seeing a continuous stream of innocent victims, including children, at the hands of the seemingly endless US commitment to violence. The message sent by America’s invisible victims

What we have here is another potential [Aaron] Swartz-type situation where every incentive is telling prosecutors to go after [Matthew] Keys as aggressively as they did Swartz, if not more so.

Is One Act of Cyber Vandalism Worth 25 Years in Jail? - NationalJournal (via brooklynmutt)

I’m not really sure how prosecutors can, in good conscience, indict someone over allegations that literally ultimately resulted in a single article on the LA Times website appearing in its edited version for only 30 minutes and attach the maximum penalties of 25 years in prison and/or a $750,000 fine to a conviction. That type of prosecutorial overkill is an acceptable way to intimidate someone to reveal information about Anonymous? That’s not what our justice system was designed to do.

(via mohandasgandhi)

(via randomactsofchaos)

The U.S. Scorched Earth Policy, Ten Years After Iraq Invasion | Glen Ford

When the United States invaded Iraq on March 17, 2003, the Bush regime hoped to forestall America’s impending economic eclipse through ruthless deployment of its last remaining global advantage: a war machine so huge and technologically advanced, it accounted for half the world’s military spending. The strategic aim of the unprovoked assault, broadly outlined by the Project for the New American Century and telegraphed in numerous Pentagon leaks, was to block the rise of any challenge to U.S. imperial supremacy in the foreseeable future.

Iraq, which the Republican administration believed was ripe for a relatively quick and painless plucking, would serve as a base for U.S. power projection throughout the Arab world and deep into formerly Soviet Central Asia, a region of vast energy reserves that was “still in play” in terms of competition with Russia, China, India and Iran. The U.S. military would thrust itself into the contested region, blocking the natural progression of trade and political relations between eastern and western Eurasia, and unambiguously establishing the United States as the “New Rome” – the permanent arbiter of global affairs. The rise of China would be both slowed and politically quarantined, through a robust U.S. presence.

The larger goal was to prevent America’s long-term economic decline – no secret, even then – from resulting in the loss of global strategic supremacy. The “New Rome” might be in an advanced state of deindustrialization and increasingly uncompetitive in trade, its “soft power” utterly exhausted, but aggressive deployment of its awesome war machine would allow the U.S. to remain the “indispensable nation,” the permanent hegemon.

Iraq was much more than an imperial episode; it was supposed to be an epochal game-changer – the equivalent of George Bush slamming his fist on the global game board, upsetting all the pieces, and then putting them back in ways that ensured U.S. dominance. China, and all the other emerging powers of a world seeking independent routes of development – checked!

As I wrote in Black Commentator on the evening that Shock and Awe broke over Baghdad:

“We are all assembled, the world’s people, awaiting the Pirates’ lunge at history. The Bush men have made sure we pay rapt attention to their Big Bang, their epochal Event, after which the nature of things will have changed unalterably to their advantage – they think. The Bush men are certain of our collective response, convinced that once we have witnessed The Mother of All War Shows, humanity will react according to plan, and submit.”

As we predicted, Bush had “reached too far.” His engines of war ultimately failed to “harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy, to leapfrog over the contradictions of their parasitical existence into a new epoch of their own imagining.”

The eventual defeat and withdrawal at the hands of Iraqi irregulars and civil society was catastrophic to U.S. prestige. So much face was lost, it required that the Empire put a new, Black face forward, so as to resume the game under (cosmetically) new circumstances.

A cunning liar emerged from the duopoly pack, a slick young man who claimed to oppose “dumb” wars while pledging undying dedication to U.S. supremacy in the world. And much of the world let its guard down. [continue]

Centcom Chief Rejects Diplomacy, Says Iran Must Be ‘Brought to Its Knees’

becauseithinktoomuch:

Speaking to Congress today, Central Command leader Gen. James Mattis insisted sanctions are not successful against Iran, and suggested that diplomacy had been all but useless, insisting that Iran’s “history of deceit” meant they could never be trusted at any rate.

Mattis conceded that he is “paid to take a rather dim view of the Iranians,” which is putting it mildly, and sought to stop short of criticizing the administration’s current tack, saying he “basically” supports the current direction vis-a-vis Iran.

Rather he said the goal was for Iran to be “brought to its knees” and that “open” warfare was just one of a few different options that he is considering to that end, though he insisted there was a plan ready to go on attacking Iran. He did not specify what the other options were, but the US had been engaged in covert warfare against Iran for years.*

Mattis went on to hype the “threat” posed by Iran’s “nuclear industry,” insisting that the nation could be the spark that sets off a disastrous region-wide conflict. Given the general’s own comments, it seems a safe bet that the US would be the ones firing the first shots in any such conflict.

* Some of those options include (so far):

Unleashing cyberattacks on Iranian industrial controllers

or

Training an exiled Iranian cult and, with the assistance of Israel’s Mossad, using said cult to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists

or, who knows? Death by robot?

(via randomactsofchaos)

Why we must resist Netanyahu and the hawks' reckless push for war on Iran | Murtaza Hussain

“If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind … the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”

The above quote – from a speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a joint session of the United States Congress – is notable not only for its sense of urgency and dire threat, but also for the date on which the speech was given: 10 July 1996. That was far from the first time Netanyahu had sounded the alarm for the need to take drastic action against a purportedly imminent Iranian nuclear weapon: in a 1992 address to the Israeli Knesset, he declared, “within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb” – an assertion he repeated without irony in 1995, when, in his book Fighting Terrorism, he again predicted full Iranian nuclear weapons capability within “three to five years”.

This past Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his belief that ongoing nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations were futile and represented merely an effort by Iran to “buy time” to develop a nuclear weapon. Coming from an individual with nearly 20 years of public statements consistently citing the purported imminence of such a weapon, this is a questionable statement to say the least. But given the present atmosphere of heightened tension surrounding this issue, such comments are particularly dangerous and revealing.

Continue

Revealed: Stuxnet “beta’s” devious alternate attack on Iran nuke program | Ars Technica

Researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen version of Stuxnet. The discovery sheds new light on the evolution of the powerful cyberweapon that made history when it successfully sabotaged an Iranian uranium-enrichment facility in 2009.

Stuxnet 0.5 is the oldest known version of the computer worm and was in development no later than November of 2005, almost two years earlier than previously known, according to researchers from security firm Symantec. The earlier iteration, which was in the wild no later than November 2007, wielded an alternate attack strategy that disrupted Iran’s nuclear program by surreptitiously closing valves in that country’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Later versions scrapped that attack in favor of one that caused centrifuges to spin erratically. The timing and additional attack method are a testament to the technical sophistication and dedication of its developers, who reportedly developed Stuxnet under a covert operation sponsored by the US and Israeli governments. It was reportedly personally authorized by Presidents Bush and Obama.

Also significant, version 0.5 shows that its creators were some of the same developers who built Flame, the highly advanced espionage malware also known as Flamer that targeted sensitive Iranian computers. Although researchers from competing antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab previously discovered a small chunk of the Flame code in a later version of Stuxnet, the release unearthed by Symantec shows that the code sharing was once so broad that the two covert projects were inextricably linked.

“What we can conclude from this is that Stuxnet coders had access to Flamer source code, and they were originally using the Flamer source code for the Stuxnet project,” said Liam O’Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response. “With version 0.5 of Stuxnet, we can say that the developers had access to the exact same code. They were not just using shared components. They were using the exact same code to build the projects. And then, at some point, the development [of Stuxnet and Flame] went in two different directions.”

[…]

The 600K worth of code found in Stuxnet 0.5 is highly modular, just as it was in the 500K Stuxnet 1.0. The encryption algorithms, string objects, and logging functions in the earlier version are almost identical to those of Flame. In contrast, the later Stuxnet version largely eschewed the development conventions of Flame, as Stuxnet developers adhered more to the so-called tilded platform shared with Duqu, another piece of sophisticated espionage malware that targeted Middle Eastern computer systems.

Most significantly, the earlier Stuxnet version contained an alternate method of sabotaging Iran’s nuclear-enrichment process, the details of which had never been fully understood. It injected malicious code into the instructions sent to 417 series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by the German conglomerate Siemens. Natanz engineers used the PLCs to open and shut valves that fed Uranium hexafluoride, or UF6 gas, into centrifuge groupings. Stuxnet 0.5 closed specific valves prematurely, causing pressure to grow as much as five times higher than normal. Under those conditions, the gas would likely turn into a solid and destroy the centrifuges, possibly even the sensitive equipment used to develop them. [continue]

Does Obama really want a deal with Iran? | Pepe Escobar

Almaty, Kazakhstan, is in the eye of the volcano next Tuesday, when the P5+1 - the five permanent UN Security Council members, US, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany - meet again with an Iranian delegation over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The record shows that all 16 US intelligence agencies know Tehran is not working on a nuclear weapon. [Not that the intelligence matters, Iran is acting within its rights as a signatory to the NPT - TAB] In a real negotiation, there would be a credible US offer on the table. There is none. This suggests what Washington really wants is to maintain - and turbo-charge - its harsh sanctions package.

Let’s review the mechanism of this “negotiation”. Only a couple of weeks ago, on February 6, a new provision of US sanctions turned the screw on what has been known so far as the “gold-for-gas” trade.

Ankara has been paying Tehran in Turkish lira for its imported gas; Iran then used the money - held in Turkish Halkbank - to buy gold. Now the new sanctions strictly impose what Iran is allowed to buy with its Turkish lira; only food, medicine and industrial products.

Right on cue, Western corporate media again gloated how Iran is “frozen out of the global banking system”. Yet there’s absolutely no guarantee these latest sanctions will work.

Gold will still be part of the picture. A Turkish bank may be threatened with exile from the Western-controlled financial system. But Russian - and Chinese - banks will cautiously find a way to circumvent this, and fill the void. As for Iran, it has decades-old experience of being sanctioned to death - and adapting to it.

Turkey will still need to import natural gas from Iran - at 40 percent, its number one supplier. The other major supplier is Russia; for all of Prime Minister Erdogan’s erratic behaviour, Ankara would never commit the strategic suicide of depending on only one energy source.

So the only loser in this scenario will be Turkey. Why? Because Washington says so.

Now look at Washington’s offer to Tehran; we suspend the gas-for-gold sanctions if you completely shut down the underground Fordow uranium enrichment plant. Not by accident, Fordow would be the most difficult to destroy among Iran’s installations in the event of that perennial “all options are on the table” - a US/Israeli attack.

Right on cue, on Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry, via spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast, went straight to the point; “Lately they have said ‘Shut down Fordow, stop (uranium) enrichment, we will allow gold transactions’… They want to take away the rights of a nation in exchange for allowing trade in gold.”

Thus Tehran has duly noted that Washington is not offering to lift UN sanctions; nor lifting unilateral US and EU sanctions; nor ending what amounts to economic war against Tehran - one of the key themes I detailed in this interview by young Iranian journalist Kourosh Ziabari.

No “gas-for-gold” for Iran is, for all practical purposes, an attempt to revive the ghastly “oil-for-food” in place in Iraq up to the 2003 US invasion/occupation.

And yet, even under a de facto Western trade blockade, the leadership in Tehran will still be plugged into Asian-wide markets - with the added incentive, from the point of view of vast swathes of the developing world, of moving deeper along the path of ditching the petrodollar. [READ]

Despite Lack of Proof, US to Attack Chinese Hackers in Retaliation

becauseithinktoomuch:

Despite a formal denial from the Chinese government and a conspicuous lack of proof that they were behind recent hacking incidents, the Obama Administration is said to be planning an “unprecedented counter-attack” against China for them.

Retaliation in the “cyber-warfare” front would seem to normally be a covert action, and thus one would figure the US wouldn’t telegraph its plans ahead of time, but the Obama Administration has made much in recent weeks of its right to launch unilateral cyberwars, and seems eager to go public with the fact that it is doing so.

Officials in the US and Britain have repeatedly accused China of launching such attacks, but the evidence behind such claims is circumstantial at best, and by and large comes from starting with the assumption that China is doing so and trying to make the evidence fit that assumption.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of this public US attack on China is not the vague justification, but how China is liable to retaliate, since there will be no doubt who is to blame in that case. The US has made clear in the past that it might respond to a cyber-attack with conventional military strikes, but China has never said what it would do but is likely to want to set a precedent that it won’t tolerate such public moves against it.

Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense | Glenn Greenwald

[…] It is the US - not Iran, Russia or “terror” groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times’ David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: “From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons.” In fact, Obama “decided to accelerate the attacks … even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet.” According to the Sanger’s report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:

“Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.”

The US isn’t the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It’s the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama’s cyber-attack on Iran “marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet.”

Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: “by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility.” That’s why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger’s source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.

This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of “cyber-security” is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It’s all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It’s the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It’s how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined. [++]

The Bully on the Block (Iran is not)

From Nick Turse:

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which the United States is a regional power, not a superpower. A world in which the globe’s mightiest nation, China, invades Mexico and Canada, deposing the leaders of both countries. A world in which China has also ringed the Americas, from Canada to Central America, with military bases. A world in which Chinese officials openly brag about conducting covert operations against and within the United States. A world in which the Chinese launch a sophisticated and crippling cyber attack on America’s nuclear facilities. A world in which the Chinese send spy drones soaring over the United States and position aircraft carrier battle groups off its shores. What would Americans think? How would Washington react? Perhaps something like Iran’s theocratic leadership today. After all, Iran has seen the United States invade its neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan, announce covert operations against it, surround it with military bases, fly drones over it, carry out naval operations off its coast, conduct a gigantic build-up of military forces all around it, and launch a cyberwar against it.

Imagine again, in this alternate universe, that China forged military alliances throughout the Americas, pulling Mexico and Canada, as well as Caribbean and Central American nations into its orbit. Imagine that it started selling advanced military technology to those countries. How might the U.S. government and its citizens respond?

It’s a question worth pondering given Washington’s recent actions. Last month, for instance, the U.S. quietly announced plans to further flood the Middle East with advanced weaponry. According to November notices sent by the Pentagon to Congress, the Department of Defense intends to oversee a $300 million deal with Saudi Arabia for spare parts for Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and Humvees, and another for $6.7 billion in new advanced aircraft. Add to this a proposed sale of $9.9 billion in Patriot missiles to Qatar, a $96 million deal with Oman for hundreds of Javelin guided missiles, and more than $1.1 billion in Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles for the United Arab Emirates. And this was on top of deals struck earlier in the year that include a $63 million sale of Huey II helicopters to Lebanon, $4.2 billion in Patriot missiles for Kuwait, a $3 billion agreement to arm Qatar with advanced Apache attack helicopters, more than $1 billion in upgrades for Abrams tanks belonging to Morocco’s military, and the sale of $428 million worth of radar equipment and tactical vehicles to Iraq.

From Nick’s introduction to “Mr. President, tear down this wall” by Pepe Escobar (via TomDispatch)

Be clear about this: what we are witnessing – and are about to witness – in Gaza, as in Afghanistan, and in the drone-pocked regions of Pakistan, and in Yemen, Somalia, Mali and in other areas around the world: all of this, in every instance, represents a vast, irreparable, unspeakably tragic defeat for humankind – and incredible, unspeakable pain for real human beings. It is a defeat, in every instance, a failure – of nerve, of spirit, of intellect, of empathy; it is a show of weakness – no matter how many of the ‘enemy’ you kill; it is a display of ignorance, fear and barbarity. Again, just be clear: if you support it – or support those who support it – this is what you are supporting. Chris Floyd, On the Eve: Last Thoughts Before the Latest Invasion of Gaza