Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Middle East Page 2 of 16

The Weird Pro-Biden Messaging

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On January 17, 2024

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Democrats, Democrats never change.

It’s all, “well yes, Biden is bad, especially that *cough* Gaza thing, but, ummm, Trump will be worse. So hold that nose, crawl up to the cesspit and vote Biden.”

I mean, I’ve always been anti-lesser evil, but is there any line?

We’re talking a full blown genocide, with deliberate starvation of the population. Only one working hospital remains in Gaza and it is under attack as I write this. If you want to, and you have a strong stomach, you can find such fun videos as a father who is a doctor amputating his own daughter’s leg, on his kitchen table, without anaesthetic. (There is no anaesthetic left in Gaza, all surgery is without anaesthic. Welcome to Hell.) Babies died abandoned in incubators and Palestinians running to get food from aid trucks are gunned down by quad-copter drones.

Israel couldn’t do this without the US, which has been in constant bomb and missile airlift mode since it started. Further, the only person who could stop the genocide with a single phone call is Joe Biden.

But sure, vote for him because Trump would be worse. Vote for a genocider.

There will be some commenters, I bet, who say, “but Trump would be worse: he’d support the genocide and do other bad things.”

Possibly true.

“Vote Beelzebub, he is 3% less bad than Satan.”

Let’s explain basic politics in a democracy (the same rules apply in non-democracies, with slight adjustments.)

You have power if you can deliver voters, volunteers or money in sufficient quantities to make a difference, and no one can get those voters, volunteers or dollars without going thru you.

That is it, that is all. If you want to have influence on policy, you must have enough voters/money/volunteers who will only make that difference if they get what they want and who will absolutely work against you if they don’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s single payer or “don’t genocide”. If enough people won’t say “you don’t get what you want from me if I don’t get what I want from you” then you have no power. None.

The right has power because they will absolutely vote against and work against people who cross them and are loyal to those who do what they want. Say what you want about Trump and the right: he gave them the abortion ban they’ve been wanting for generations. He did that. They got what they wanted from him, the single most important thing they wanted.

“Progressives”? No principles. They believe in nothing. There is no red line they will not cross, no slight or betrayal they will not forgive if it is wrapped in a smarmy right wing Democrat’s lying lips.

Fortunately, in this case, there are lot of Muslims in Michigan, a battleground state. And apparently there is a red line for them, “you killed my relatives!!!!!” So there’s a good chance Biden will lose, even if the usual suspects whine that he’s better than Trump, even if he did everything he could to make a genocide happen.

But until there is a voting/giving/volunteering bloc with actual principles which aren’t garbage and which they can’t be cajoled out of with empty promises and lies and “but he’s even worse!”, no one’s getting a better country or world, for that matter.

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The Sun Sets Slowly—Then Quickly

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On January 14, 2024

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And there are moments when you realize it is setting:

The people of the mountain have checkmated the people of the sea. As commenter VietnamVet wrote:

The Five-eyes Oceanic Empire is dying before our eyes. UK, Canada, Australia, and the USA (let alone New Zealand) simply do not have armament or manpower to occupy Yemen to push the Houthi back far enough from the Gate of Grief at the mouth of the Red Sea to reopen the Suez Canal to western shipping. A global logistic choke point has closed. The second, the Panama Canal, is limiting ships due to the drought.

The American and UK navies both have manpower shortages. When the aircraft Carrier Gerald Ford left the region, it was already vastly undermanned:

In the face of a massive shortage of Navy sailors, America’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), has downsized, cutting the crew aboard by hundreds of sailors.

The cuts appear to be deep and dramatic. Over the past six months to a year, some 500 to 600 sailors have left the USS Ford and not been replaced. In fact, the USS Ford has shed so many crew members that the ship’s company (core crew members that operate the vessel) is now below the Ford-class Carrier Program’s original Acquisition Program Baseline objective of 2,391 billets—a goal set back in 2004 that many observers considered unrealistic.

On top of this, ships can only store so many missiles. Every missile salvo reduces the amount of time before they have to return to base. America and Britain have been sending vast numbers of missiles to Israel and Ukraine and western manufacturing capacity is vastly below what is needed to refill stocks.

Meanwhile the Yemenis live in a mountainous country and their missiles are all mobile. It is impossible to take them out just with naval power: boots on the ground are necessary: a full invasion and occupation, in fact and that just isn’t happening: the US might be able to do it by going all out, but it would have nothing left for anywhere else.

So fundamentally, the US can’t invade and it can’t stop the Yemenis from shooting missiles. It might be able to bomb a lot, but that won’t stop the Yemenis: the endured one of the longest and most brutal bombing campaigns of the last hundred years just recently.

The US — the West, doesn’t have deterrence. We can’t do anything to the Ansar Allah which will make them back down and we don’t have the ability stop them by main force.

Trying to stop them by main force has made the situation worse: now even more vessels can’t enter the Red Sea—commercial cargo lines are not going to chance being shot up.

America is a naval empire. It, like the old British empire, rests on being able to keep the shipping lines open and on using naval power (and air power) to hurt nations while those nations can’t fight back. In the 19th century the Brits would park ironclads off the coast and just pound cities, and there was nothing those cities could do in return.

This is, then, one of the key moments in the end of Western hegemony. The point at which we no longer have deterrence; at which we can no longer “big foot” other nations.

The end of Western dominance is close, very close. I can taste it, like a hint of salt on a sea breeze. The Chinese are only behind in a few technological areas. Once other nations can get everything they need from China/Russia and other lesser nations they will be free to throw off the Western order, because the new and improved missiles make “stand off and bomb” far less effective than it used to be.

They don’t have to be scared of us, and soon they won’t need us.

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Conditions For Israeli Loss

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On January 10, 2024

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The condition for loss by the Resistance is clear: Palestinians are ethnically cleansed further, ideally (from the Israeli point of view,) out of Palestine entirely.

How does the resistance win? It’s unlikely to be marching thru Tel Aviv, although I don’t think that’s necessarily impossible given how small Israel is and how incompetent its military at everything but aerial bombardment.

Collapse of the Settler Project: Israel currently has about a quarter million internal refugees. The settlements near the Lebanese border have been evacuated. People say Hezbollah is doing nothing or little, but in fact they’ve cause the Israelis serious problems. Without settlers, Israel cannot complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, plus a lot of the economy is based on settler expansion.

Tourism Collapse: Israel relies a lot on tourism. Strangely  war is bad for tourism, and they’ve lost 80% of their tourists.. If this war goes on for another year or more (the way Sharon is talking), well…

Too Many Dual Citizens Leaving: About 10% of the Israeli population has dual citizenship, but these are often the most economically important citizens, especially engineers and scientists. If they don’t feel safe, they don’t have to stay.

Military Mutinies: Israel’s military is reliant on calling up civilians when they expect mass combat. Those civilians don’t want to stay in the military for long periods, and their families don’t actually want them shot up.

Budgetary and Economic Problems. If Israel can’t pay its bills, well its got problems.

Historically states collapse when the violent enforcers refuse to work or are defeated.

Basically, the Israeli project requires people to trust the Israeli government and the IDF to keep Israel safe. If people don’t feel safe, well, those who can leave, the settler project collapses and companies outside Israel are far less willing to set up business in Israel or to even contract with Israeli businesses.

Israel seems to be skating towards war with Hezbollah, with both sides angling to be able to say the other side started it.

But Israel can’t “win” a war with Hezbollah. It’s impossible. In the last war when Hezbollah was much weaker, Israel was never able to stop the missiles, and Hezbollah has far more and better missiles now and more troops, plus a huge drone fleet. The missiles have the range to hit anywhere in Israel. Tel Aviv will get hit. Yes, Israel can flatten large chunks of Lebanon, but it can’t stop Hezbollah from doing the same to Israel.

Fundamentally, Israel has lost much of its deterrence. Yes, it can still stop a full invasion, but it can’t stop constant missile attacks.

Pretty hard to run a prosperous country people who have other options want to live in if you’re constantly being hit by missiles.

The only way to get out of this would be to make genuine peace: but genuine peace can only be made by giving up the settler project and the idea of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state, and that’s a loss condition to both Israel’s leadership and most of their population.

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Assassination Will Not Help Israel

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On December 29, 2023

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This is sheerest stupidity:

Nothing will change about Iran’s policy, or to how well it is carried out. Not a thing.

The problem with American leaders is that they don’t believe in anything enough to die for it. Oh, they have beliefs, the beliefs of a leech (which is unfair to leeches, which are, unlike ticks, largely beneficial to their hosts.) They really, really believe in neoliberalism, because it has made them filthy rich.

But die for it, except in the sense of “destroy the world for profit?”

No.

The leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran to a lesser extent, have beliefs they are willing to die for, personally, not just send other people to die for.

Further, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian army (especially the Revolutionary Guards) are ideological organizations. From top to bottom, they believe in more or less the same things. You could kill the top 99 leaders of those orgs, and Mr. would not be that much different.

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In our society and our organizations, corporate or military or civil service, the people at the top have significantly different beliefs from the people in the middle, who have different beliefs from those at the bottom.

Further, because in our organizations there is vast infighting, because there isn’t any consensus beyond “make money” or “get power”. In organizations where, in fact, everyone isn’t pulling in more or less the same direction (if perhaps fighting a bit over “how to get there) leadership matters. The interests of employees in corps are not the same as executive interests. They don’t want the same things, or benefit from the same policies.

None of this applies significantly to Hezbollah or Hamas, to Ansar Allah (the Houthis) or (to a lesser extent) to the Revolutionary Guard. You could kill Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah tomorrow and it would make very little difference.

Leaders of genuine ideological organizations (we’re going to discuss this more in the future) do not have the calculus of late capitalists “leaders.” They do not think the same way. they do not feel the same way. And the organizations they run have genuine missions that the leaders and followers both believe in.

It’s been so long since we had almost any of that in our society that we don’t get how it works. Even NGOs aren’t like that: I know NGO workers and professional staff: they believe, but the people who run the NGOs don’t, actually, and don’t act in alliance with their values, morals and ethics.

Assassinating leaders of ideological orgs doesn’t matter. They just keep going.

This, plus the fact that the Israeli army is incompetent and low moral, is why Israel can’t “destroy” Hamas or Hezbollah.

As the master once wrote, “first make yourself invincible, then wait for your enemy’s moment of vulnerability.”

Israel has already lost. In truth, for those with eyes to see, in 2006 we learned they had already lost. Now it’s just about when and how much suffering.

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Things Are Going Much Worse For Israel In Gaza Than The Official Reports

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On December 22, 2023

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I always thought that the official casualty numbers from Israel, both for their own soldiers and for how many Hamas they’ve killed were dubious. But now we’re getting confirmation. Likewise against Hezbollah.

Sure they have:

Against Hezbollah:

And (actually only one battalion.)

And

x

None of this is definitive, of course. But I just as am not seeing evidence suggesting Israel is winning the military fight. Yes, they’ve grabbed some territory, leveled a lot of buildings and killed a ton of civilians, but a guerilla resistance doesn’t fight hard for territory, and reports are that they don’t have solid control of areas they’ve taken.

Israel’s army is just crap, and Hamas is far more motivated and seems more skilled. Videos of Hamas ambushing tanks which didn’t have infantry screens are numerous, for example. What’s holding Hamas back is that, in fact, they don’t have a lot of Iranian equipment: their equipment is basic and a lot of it seems to be home made.

Truly embarrassing.

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Half Of Gaza’s Population Is Now Starving

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On December 21, 2023

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And 90% aren’t eating every day.

The US could stop this tomorrow, Israel is a small country completely dependent on America.

The only country really doing anything to help is Yemen. They have been attacking Israeli associated freighters whether Israeli flagged or not (but not any freighter that is not owned or heading to Israel.) The US has been protecting this Israeli freight and has announced a campaign to stop them and keep the Red Sea open with twelve partners, none of whom are on the Red Sea: Britain, France, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the Seychelles and Bahrain.

As a result of the Yemeni campaign the six largest shipping companies have all decided not to send any ships thru the Red Sea and thus thru the Suez canal. This means they have to go around Africa adding time and cost.

The Yemeni statement on the US threats (it’s really a US operation, the rest of the nations are there to pretend it’s multinational) is sad, in the sense that this is the only truly moral nation in the world in relation to Palestine..

Muhammad Al-Bukhaiti: Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire world, our military operations will not stop unless the genocide in Gaza stops and food, medicine, and fuel are allowed to enter its besieged population, no matter the sacrifices it costs us.

As I’ve said before, the only nation really going all out to fight the Israeli and US genocide in Gaza is Yemen. (Honorable mention to Malaysia, who have closed their ports to all Israeli ships. It’s not much, but given their location there’s little they can do and to Hezbollah.)

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Never again, eh?

What’s going on in Palestine is a clear genocide, using starvation and water shortages as a tool. I said day one that the blockade concerned me more than the bombing. Combined with the hospital destruction campaign, I’m surprised there isn’t a plague in Palestine yet, but clearly one is desired by Israel.

Israel has also been mouthing off about invading southern Lebanon. I don’t see how that can work for them, they failed last time they tried and Hezbollah is stronger now and has enough missiles to absolutely devastate Israel. Hezbollah has been clear that if Israel does wholesale civilian bombing in Lebanon the way it has in Gaza, they will retaliate in kind.

But really, there’s a genocide going on, and almost no one is trying to stop it. Starvation, thirst, mass bombing, the deliberate targeting of hospitals and reporters.

Oh, and Edrogan. Shut up. You keep talking, but you never do anything. Turkey has a huge military and could help if it wanted to (for example, by doing air drops of aid, telling Israel that if they try to stop them, it’ll be considered an act of war.)

The Palestinians are on their own. Hezbollah’s helping a little. Yemen as much as they can, and almost everyone else is doing nothing. The US is actively aiding and abetting, and Canada, America’s new poodle, is right there cheering them on.

Never again, eh.

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Why Israel Is Performing So Badly Against Hamas

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On December 5, 2023

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It has become clear that Israeli forces are not succeeding at taking out Hamas. Israel’s own estimate of Hamas casualties from October 7th to the ceasefire was one to two thousand Hamas deaths. This is almost certainly an overstatement, for obvious reasons.

Maps of the Israeli invasion show control of a fair chunk of Northern Gaza, but it isn’t full control: they still get attacked by Hamas in most of these areas. Videos of Hamas attacks often show amazing levels of Israeli incompetence, most often lack of infantry screens for tanks.

The reason is simple. For decades the Israeli army has primarily been used as a paramilitary occupation force: they shoot, bomb and beat up civilians who can’t fight back. You become good at what you do, and when it comes to terrorizing civilians, the Israelis are top-notch. It’s why they train police forces and paramilitary forces around the world, including in America and India.

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But if you specialize in beating up people who can’t fight back: in sniping civilians, bulldozing houses, raiding civilians homes and so on, well, you aren’t going to be good at fighting military forces.

On top of this Hamas’s military wing has only one real job: to fight Israel. So a force optimized for beating up civilians (the IDF) is fighting a force which while woefully under-equipped, is optimized for fighting them.

Israel’s main reason for damn near indiscriminate bombing is because they want to ethnic cleanse and/or genocide Palestinians. But another reason is that they suck at fighting Hamas, and so “mowing the grass” is all they really can do: it’s all they really know how to do. For a couple generations now, the IDF’s main strategies against enemies in areas they don’t control has been bomb, bomb away and their strategy in areas they do control has been raids, beatings, snipers, bulldozers and so on.

The IDF is just hyper-optimized for fighting people who can’t fight back effectively, and unfortunately for them, Hamas is optimized for fighting the IDF.

It should be added that this is a specific example of a general rule: occupation armies become weak (they also become brutal and stupid). It’s one of the reasons why you should never use your army as an occupation force for any significant length of time.

If you must occupy for long periods, you should have a separate organization which is not under the same command. And your military should despise that organization and consider them dishonorable scum. If it’s any other way, your military will be useless when you face a real enemy.

Update:

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Good Guys And Bad Guys In Gaza

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On November 29, 2023

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Some facts have become clear over the duration of the Israeli/Gaza conflict of 2023.

  • The initial Hamas attack did not have a lot of atrocities committed, despite Israeli claims. No widespread rape, no baby killing and few civilian casualties caused by Hamas. Hamas’s targets were military, plus grabbing hostages and most of the civilian casualties seem to have been caused by indiscriminate Israeli fire, some due to calousness, some due to panic and some due to the Samson doctrine that states Israel will not allow hostages to be taken.
  • Hamas treated its captives humanely. Israel routinely tortures and sexually humiliates theirs.
  • Israel attacked multiple hospitals and deliberately forced them to shut, while cutting off all water, power and food. The population pyramid of known casualties very closely follows the Gaza population pyramid, and the most common age of those killed was five. Most dead were women and children, which means they weren’t soldiers and couldn’t be.
  • Israel is clearly engaging ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Support for Israel has come primarily from the West: the US and most European nations, with Ireland and to a lesser extent, Spain, being exceptions. The US sent tons of aid, appears to have had soldiers on the ground, and aided in targeting of civilians. They intercepted missiles from Yemen and generally did everything they could to help Israel kill as many Gazans as possible.

The Europeans have cracked down heavily on any pro-Palestinian protests, with the Germans being worst in class. The Germans have learned the exact wrong lesson from the Holocaust, they believe it means they must support Israel no matter what, not that genocide and ethnic cleansing are bad.

Only two large groups have really supported Gaza: Yemen and Hezbollah. Yemen has fired missiles and captured shipping ultimately owned by Israel. Hezbollah has attacked many military targets in Northern Israel and forced Israel to keep about a third of its army, including many of the best units on its border.

No one else has done anything meaningful. The Arab countries and Turkey talked a big game, but they had the leverage of oil and refused to use it.

This is a reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.

So, who are the “bad guys?” Pretty clearly those committing and supporting the genocide. In order, Israel, the US, and Europe/Canada.

Who are the good guys? We’ll leave out Hamas, though frankly, I consider them an armed liberation movement: freedom fighters, and they should probably be on the list. Remember the Israeli mass murder didn’t start October 7th.

So: Hezbollah, Yemen, Ireland (since they were under a lot of pressure). And that’s about it.

Civilians around the world and especially in America who protested in vast numbers are due a lot of credit. It’s fairly clear that the ceasefire occurred because Biden couldn’t take any more popularity loss.

I think it’s important to point this out. If you’re helping commit a genocide, you’re bad. If you’re trying to stop one, you’re good.

 

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