Handicapping Israel’s 6th War on Lebanon

Franklin Lamb

For Israel, it’s widely predicted 6th war on Lebanon won’t be a repeat of June 1967, June 1973, or July 2006.

These days the US Congressional Israel lobby and its knee-jerk amen chorus are hyping what those still occupying Palestine refer to as its coming 3rd war in Lebanon. Reportedly, Israel is finalizing elaborate plans to once and for all eviscerate Hezbollah while accelerating the collapse of the Iranian theocracy with the claimed support of the White House and the Saudi block among many others.

According to a recent Lebanese public opinion poll Israel’s long expected invasion of Lebanon is also supported by approximately 80% of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims, roughly 60-65 % of Lebanon’s Christians and a lesser percentage of Druze and other sects. This, despite the certain massive infrastructure damage and loss of civilian lives that the next war with Hezbollah will entail. The certain widespread death and destruction apparently being an acceptable price to rid Lebanon of what they claim is Iran’s colonization and Hezbollah’s forced supplication of their country.

In point of fact, when Israel next invades Lebanon it will constitute its 6th war on Lebanon, the earlier ones it chooses to ignore being the 1978 South Lebanon invasion up to the Litani River, the June 1982 invasion and 18 year occupation of South Lebanon, the July 1993 “Operation Accountability” , a devastating week-long relentless attack on Lebanon, the 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath invasion of Lebanon and the 34 day July War of 2006. The latter killed more than 1300 Lebanese and wounded thousands while displacing more than one million Lebanese to Syria and elsewhere. Also killed in the July 2006 5th Israel-Lebanon war were 121 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians.

Mindful that the next Israel-Hezbollah war could break out at any moment due to miscalculation, failure in communication, or uncontrolled escalation, circumspection is warranted in weighing Hezbollah and Israel’s military and political prospects briefly noted below.

Two of Israel’s many challenges during its 6th war on Lebanon will be Hezbollah’s massive military build-up with thousands of precision weapons and the growing Iranian domination in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf. Both being constructed by Tehran to reach a strategic balance with Israel and gain the capability to massively damage Israel’s critical military assets and civilian infrastructure.

Israel, with less that 8% of Iran’s population and 3% of its size is also uniquely vulnerable to Hezbollah’s precision weapons given that it is a very small country with easily targeted infrastructures. For example, Israel’s electricity generation which produces roughly 16,000 MW of electricity clusters more than one-third (10 turbines) in only two well-known exposed locations which could be instantly destroyed by a small number of precision missiles. Hezbollah has exhibited to visitors its detailed maps of these facilities and many others which it also possesses for Israel’s natural gas infrastructure and its five sea water desalination facilities (which supply more than half of Israel’s drinking water) among many other exposed and easily targeted infrastructures as well as military bases and installations.

Israel must also decide exactly who during its next war its adversaries are. The obvious enemy is Hezbollah but increasingly perhaps also the Lebanese Republic. The reason is that Hezbollah has become the dominate political and military force in Lebanon.

For its part Israel has drawn red lines, including Hezbollah’s acquisition from Iran, and even its own production, of precision weapons inside Lebanon, as well as Iranian deployment to Syria for Hezbollah’s use of high impact Iranian weapon systems, including advanced surface-to-air missiles, coast-to-sea/coast missiles, and precision surface-to-surface missiles.

Unlike the July War of 2006, which some argue ended in more of less a draw, Hezbollah could draw on Iranian forces in Syria and according to Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in a widely criticized recent speech, scores of thousands of largely Shia People’s Mobilization Forces (PMF), also known as the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), from several countries in the region which it continues to help train, arm, command and sometimes fight alongside of. This major military asset, which could theoretically swarm northern and eastern Israel, did not exist in 2006 when Hezbollah and Israel last fought.

Another problem for Israel during its 6th war on Lebanon are Russia’s goals in Syria meaning that unleashed hostilities on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon could for any number of reasons spread into Syria. Israel-Hezbollah fighting that spreads into Syria, would likely interfere with Russian projects to establish its own order in Syria which surely would entail Russia having major influence on the warring parties conduct, restraint, and deployment as well as any settlement in Syria. Russia could well seek to thwart Israel’s political, strategic, and even operational freedom to act against Hezbollah along the Syria-Lebanon border so as to protect the Assad regime for its own future benefit. This could lead to Israel having to consider the Hezbollah, Syrian, and Lebanese theaters as one.

It’s true that Israeli public opinion suggests widespread support for another but less flawed war with Hezbollah than the 5th one in July of 2006, about which Israel’s military establishment has concluded that Israel relied too heavily on its air force wanting to spare ground troops.

Frankly, Tel Aviv officials and Israel lobby fanatics who claim that an Israeli 1967-like victory is possible and would achieve the elimination of Iran’s ambitions in the Levant and especially in Lebanon, while gutting Hezbollah while strengthening Israel’s regional deterrence appear somewhat delusional. The next war is a battle that will likely not be “won” by Israel and its realistic war aims will not match the damage it will suffer.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s Lebanese supporters are also increasingly having second thoughts about another Hezbollah-Israel war. Thirty years of “Resistance” hype has grown stale among a large segment of Lebanon’s Shia community who claim it’s irrelevant to their lives, where jobs and opportunities for their youth are scarce, and they being exploited by Hezbollah officials to advance Iranian not Lebanese interests.

In Hezbollah neighborhoods, its involvement in Syria, which began in 2011 on orders from Tehran has cost Lebanese Shia countless hundreds of well-paying jobs in the Gulf with many being expelled, amidst increased calls for all GCC countries to expel all Lebanese Shia. Sunni’s in Lebanon no longer hire Shia as before with the latter increasingly being insulted and referred to as “Persians.”

Increasingly vanishing from Lebanon’s Shia community, particularly among mothers, young wives, and families of its “martyrs” is the acceptance of the loss of as many as 3,500 of their sons, husbands and brothers to confront so-called “takfiri” in Syria. Nor do Hezbollah claims of taking revenge on “those who killed Hussein at Karbala” in 632 AD matter much anymore.

Photo courtesy of Maher Jalhoum 7/22/2017

The loss of a son for his mother surely exceeds all other deprivations including lack of freedom and security. No longer acceptable is the short lived praise from Hezbollah officials, an envelope with some cash as “compensation” plus assurances of spiritual redemption from Al-Sayeda Zainab, granddaughter of the Prophet Mohammad.

Terrorism for Profit

Robert Koehler

Donald Trump stands cluelessly at the edge of history, exemplifying everything wrong with the past, oh, 10,000 years or so.

The necessity for fundamental change in humanity’s global organization is not only profound, but urgent.

Trump’s latest outburst about North Korea’s nukes — threatening that country “with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which the world has never seen before” — creates a comic book Armageddon scenario in the media, except, of course, his power to launch a nuclear war on impulse is real.

What this makes clear to me is that no one should have the authority — the power — to declare any war whatsoever. The fact that this is still possible, so many decades into human awareness of war’s utter insanity, reveals the paradox that civilization remains economically tied to its own destruction.

Another icon of this paradox is Erik Prince, immensely wealthy mercenary, notorious founder of the terror organization Blackwater, who had cozy ties to the Bush administration back when the 21st century’s endless wars were just getting underway and now, with another unelected Republican in the White House, has recently made a grab at the business opportunity still represented by these wars:

Let’s privatize the quagmire!

Sixteen years on, the war in Afghanistan is the longest in American history, and presently in a state of “stalemate,” according to the mainstream consensus that unquestioningly justifies this country’s ongoing militarism. For instance: “The U.S. can’t win but can’t afford to lose,” USA Today opined in a recent editorial about Afghanistan, inanely demanding that Trump “at least should decide what to do next” and setting the stage for Prince’s business plan, which is to restructure and privatize the war.

In an op-ed a few days ago in that same publication, Prince wrote: “The option to simply abandon Afghanistan is enticing but in the long run would be a foreign policy disaster. The Kabul government would collapse. Afghanistan would be a rallying cry for global jihadists.”

And suddenly there it was, the American paradox in full splendor: Oh yeah, we’re fighting terrorists. We have to keep killing people, keep pouring trillions of dollars into our wars, because bad people are out there threatening us because they hate our freedoms. And the guy reminding us of this is the founder of Blackwater, private contractor in Iraq, whose mercenaries were responsible for one of the most shocking acts of lethal aggression — a.k.a., terrorism — of the early years of that war.

Blackwater contractors were accused of “firing wildly into cars stalled in midafternoon traffic at Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, pouring machine-gun bullets and grenades into crowds, including women clutching only purses and children holding their hands in the air,” as the Washington Post reminded us recently.

This act of carnage, in which 17 Iraqis were killed and 20 more injured, typifies what you might call American terrorism. It may, at some quasi-conscious level be religiously motivated. Indeed, Jeremy Scahill, reporting in 2009 for The Nation on the lawsuit filed on behalf of Iraqis harmed in the Nisour Square massacre, wrote that, according to a former Blackwater employee who testified in U.S. federal court during the trial:

“Prince ‘views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,’ and . . . Prince’s companies ‘encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.’ . . .

Furthermore, Scahill wrote,

“Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to ‘lay hajiis out on cardboard.’ Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as ‘ragheads’ or ‘hajiis.’”

This all fits quite horrifically into the definition of jihadism, or terrorism, but because it’s American, it brings something extra to the table as well. This is terrorism for profit. And it’s been going on for a long time, in a realm far bigger than that occupied by Erik Prince’s business interests. You could call it colonialism, or the domination complex. The world is ours. This is the “greatness” Trump sold to enough Americans to squeeze into the Oval Office.

Not only does he have no patience with a military stalemate in Afghanistan — “we aren’t winning, we’re losing” — but he can’t stand the fact that the shattered country’s mineral wealth isn’t in our hands.

At a recent, well-publicized meeting with his generals, Trump “lamented that China is making money off of Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in rare minerals while American troops are fighting the war,” according to NBC News. “Trump expressed frustration that his advisers tasked with figuring out how the U.S. can help American businesses get rights to those minerals were moving too slowly, one official said. . . .

“The focus on the minerals was reminiscent of Trump’s comments early into his presidency when he lamented that the U.S. didn’t take Iraq’s oil when the majority of forces departed the country in 2011.”

Trump leads a political system that’s still grounded in the colonial era. His reckless arrogance is its global face. He stares at the audacity of nuclear-armed North Korea and threatens to blow it to kingdom come, imagining that there will be profit to reap in the aftermath.

How Capitalist Central Banks Have Been Creating the Next Financial Crisis

Jack Rasmus

As central bankers, finance ministers, and government policy makers head off to their annual gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this August, 24-26, 2017, the key topic is whether the leading central banks in North America and Europe will continue to raise interest rates this year; another topic high on the agenda is when the three major central banks – the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England – might begin to sell off their combined $9.8 trillion dollar balance sheets that they accumulated since the 2008-09 banking crisis.

But the more fundamental question – little discussed by central bankers and academics alike – is what are the likely effects of further immediate rate hikes and/or commencement of central banks’ balance sheet reductions? The assumption is further rate hikes and sell-offs will have little negative impact on the real economy or financial markets. But will they? The effects of hikes and sell off will prove the opposite of what they predict.

Central banks in the US and Europe were grossly in error predicting in 2008 that massive liquidity injections and zero interest rates would re-stimulate their economies and return them to pre-crisis real GDP growth rates. They are now about to repeat a similar error, as they presume that raising those rates, and retracting excess liquidity by selling off balance sheets, will not have a significant negative impact on the real economy or financial markets.

Central banks’ balance sheets have been growing for almost nine years, driven by programs of zero-bound (ZIRP) interest rates and the introduction of firehose liquidity injections enabled by quantitative easing, QE, bond and other securities purchases.

After eight years, the official consensus among central bankers and government policy makers is that the 2008 shift to unlimited central bank liquidity and zero (or below) interest rates is now over. The front page business press and media lead story is that central banks are now about to embark collectively in a new direction – raising their benchmark rates and selling off their massive, bloated balance sheets. But don’t bet on it. They may find sooner, rather than later, that rates cannot be raised much higher and that balance sheets—now totaling $9.8 trillion for the US, UK and Europe alone—may not be reduced much, if at all, without provoking a further slowdown of their still chronically weak real economic recoveries, or without precipitating a serious contraction in equity, bond and other financial asset markets.

Globally, balance sheet totals are actually far greater than the $9.8 trillion accumulated to date by the big 3 central banks—the Fed, Bank of England, and European Central Bank. When other major central banks, like Switzerland’s, Sweden’s, Canada’s and others are added, it’s well more than $10 trillion. And then there’s the nearly $5 trillion balance sheet of the Bank of Japan and the more than $5 trillion of the People’s Bank of China. Worldwide, central banks’ balance sheets therefore exceed well over $20 trillion…with the total still growing.

It’s equally important to understand that the $20 trillion in central bank balance sheet debt essentially represents bad debt from banks, corporations, and private investors that was in effect transferred from their private balance sheets to the balance sheets of the central banks as a result of nine years of bailout via QE (quantitative easing), zero interest rate free money, and other policies of the central banks. The central banks bailed out the capitalist system in 2008-09 by shifting the bad debts to themselves. In the course of the last 9 years, the private system loaded itself up on still more debt than it had in 2007. Can the central banks, already bloated with $20 trillion bail out bankers and friends once again? That’s the question. Attempting to unload the $20 trillion to make room for the next bailout—as the central banks now propose to do—may result, however, in precipitating the next crisis. That’s the contradiction.

Attempting to sell off such massive balance sheet holdings will prove far more daunting than those central banks now anticipate. And their coordinated raising of interest rates risks precipitating another recession – given their fundamentally weak economies with chronic low bank lending, slowing investment, stagnating productivity, contracting public investment, and lack of real wage income gains. For the global economy has undergone a major structural change in recent decades that has been rendering central bank interest rate policies increasingly ineffective with regard to stimulating real investment and growth, while simultaneously contributing to further financial fragility as well.

The US Economy is Fragile and Weakening—Not Robust and Stable

All eyes are on the US central bank, the Fed, and what signals it gives at the Jackson Hole August 24-26 gathering, and the Fed’s subsequent policy committee in September. Will it continue to raise rates? Will it announce formally a schedule for balance sheet reduction in September? If the latter, will the announcement of sell-off be so minimal and token that it will generate a mere 0.25% hike in rates by year end 2018, as some pundits predict? Or will the psychological effects on investors – who have enjoyed eight years of record equity, bond, property, and derivatives asset price and thus extraordinary capital gains – consider the announcement as the signal to “cash in” and take their money and run, given the bubble levels already attained in equities, some bond markets, and real estate? And should the Fed continue to raise interest rates at a pace of 3 to 4 a year, what will be the impact on the US real economy?

Economic potholes are beginning to appear in a number of places. Bank lending to US business has declined sharply, now growing at only 2%; consumer loans for auto, mortgages and credit cards have halved over the past year; real investment and productivity have nearly collapsed; the so-called “Trump Bump” has dissipated; government investment has contracted below 2007 levels and infrastructure spending is still but a discussion envisioned for 2019 at the earliest, if at all; and job growth has been consistently low quality, resulting in wage stagnation or worse for the vast majority of the labor force.

In this unstable environment the Fed has nonetheless has announced plans to continue to raise interest rates and to begin selling off its balance sheet. The question is just how much and when? Consensus thinking at the Fed is that rates can continue rising 3 to 4 times a year at .25 basis points a crack through 2019 without serious negative effects. And that the Fed’s balance sheet can start selling off immediately in 2017, initially at a modest rate of $10 billion a month, accelerating further at a later date.

But these were the same central bankers who believed their QE and zero bound rate programs would return the US real economy to robust growth by 2010 but didn’t; who maintained the Fed’s massive liquidity injections would attain a 2% goods and services inflation rate, which it still hasn’t; who argued that once unemployment fell to 4.5% (in the US), wage growth and consumption would return to past trends and stimulate the economy, which has yet to occur; and who argued in 2008, also incorrectly, that Fed QE programs providing bankers virtually free money would stimulate bank lending and in turn real investment and growth. The Fed’s latest predictions could prove no more correct about the consequences of further rate hikes and balance sheet reductions than they were about QE, ZIRP, and all the rest for the past eight years.

It’s Not Your Grandpa’s Global Economy

To assume that selling off that magnitude of securities – even if slowly and over extended time – will not have an appreciable impact on nominal interest rates is the kind of assumption that resulted in previous predictive errors circa 2008 since the possible effects on investors’ psychological expectations of more rate hikes and balance sheet selling are completely unknown.

After eight years of treating symptoms and not the disease, the global financial system has become addicted to super-low rates and to continued central bank excess liquidity provisioning. What started in 2008 as a massive, somewhat coordinated central bank lender of last resort experiment – i.e. global bank bailout – has over the past eight years evolved into a more or less permanent subsidisation of the private banking and financial systems by central banks. The system has become addicted to free money. And like all addictions, the habit won’t be broken easily. That means central bankers’ plans to raise interest rates in the immediate months ahead will likely “hit a wall” well before the announced rate levels they are projecting. Plans to sell off balance sheets will almost certainly be limited to the US Fed for some time. The ECB and BOE – as well as Bank of Japan and others – will wait and see what the Fed does. The Fed will proceed at a snails pace that will represent little more than mere tokenism, and in the event of further slowing of real GDP growth, or US financial markets correcting in a major way, it will halt selling altogether. In short, there will be little Fed balance sheet reduction before the next recession, and a continued escalation of balance sheets by central banks globally. Central banks will enter the next recession with further bloated balance sheets.

After eight years of treating symptoms and not the disease, the global financial system has become addicted to super-low rates and to continued central bank excess liquidity provisioning.

The Fed is thus on the verge of another major disastrous monetary policy shift and experiment. It will be unable to raise interest rates as it has announced, by 3 to 4 times a year for the next two years. Nor will it be able to sell off much of its current balance sheet, since anything but token adjustments will accelerate rates even higher. In this writer’s opinion, the federal funds rate cannot be raised above 2%, or the 10 year Treasury yield much above 3%, without precipitating either a serious financial market correction or an abrupt slowing of real economic growth, or both.

What the eight years since the 2008-09 financial crash and great recession reveals is that the major central banks, led by the Fed, have painted themselves in a corner. The massive liquidity provided to their banking systems – engineered by zero rates and QEs – failed even to adequately bail out their banks. Today more than $10 trillion in non-performing bank loans still overhang the major economies, despite the more than $20 trillion added to their central bank balance sheets in just the past eight years.

The fundamental changes in the global economy and radical restructuring of financial, capital and labor markets have severely blunted central banks’ main monetary tool of interest rate management. Just as reduction of rates have little positive effect on stimulating real investment and economic growth, rising rates will have a greater negative impact than anticipated on investment and growth. The Fed and other central banks may soon discover this should they raise rates much faster and further or engage in more than token balance sheet reduction.

Central bankers at the Fed, the BOE and ECB will of course argue the contrary.

They will promise the economy can sustain further significant rate hikes and can commence selling its balance sheet without severe negative consequences. But these are the same people who in 2008 promised rapid and robust recovery from QE and ZIRP programs that didn’t happen. What happened was an unprecedented acceleration in financial asset markets as equity and bond prices surged for eight years, high end real estate prices rose to prior levels, derivatives boomed, gold and crypto-currencies escalated in value, and income inequality soared to record levels – all fueled by the massive $10 trillion central bank liquidity injections that drove interest rates to zero or below. And now they tell us they plan to raise those rates without serious negative effects. Anyone want to buy the Brooklyn bridge? I think they’re also trying to sell that as well.

The Tempest of American Power

Jason Hirthler

In Shakespeare’s late masterpiece, The Tempest, Antonio proposes murdering Alonso, the King of Naples, and seizing the throne. He remarks that he and his co-conspirator, Alonso’s son Sebastian, had been,

…cast again

(And by that destiny) to perform an act

Wherof what’s past is prologue; what’s to come,

In yours and my discharge.

(The Tempest 2.1.251-54)

That what is past is prologue is akin to saying that preceding events have set the stage or created the context for what is about to happen. The same idea aired by Antonio among his fellow conspirators in The Tempest is a surprisingly apt analogue for the imperial state, where the electoral options on offer are either imperialism or imperialism. Thus a Democratic administration is followed by a Republican administration and little changes in the deep, abiding imperial mission of the American empire. We discover that what Bush did was prologue for Obama’s presidency, and Obama’s for Trump’s. Despite the theatricality of the last year, and the disputed election of a risible carnival barker to the highest seat in the land, the march of the imperial corporate state moves ahead relatively unimpeded, building on the legacies of past leaders.

Yes, President Trump has occasionally delivered stirring glimpses of sanity during his turbulent tenure. He canceled the regime-change goal of the Syrian strategy. He canceled the CIA program to arm and train terrorists in Syria. He negotiated ceasefires with Vladimir Putin in Syria. These are positive steps and reflect the kind of anti-conflict mentality some people supported him for. And yet, he appears to have instructed or permitted the military to shift its focus to Iran and North Korea and Venezuela, and dangerously escalate the hostile overtures toward these nations. Sanctions are levied. Lindsay Graham has tabled the destruction of North Korea. John McCain has called for further arming Ukrainian fascists. Steve Mnuchin appeared waving a sheaf of sanctions aimed at “dictator” Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Congress is conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism with a new anti-BDS bill. Israel is removing one illegal settlement housing 40 settler-occupier families and replacing it with a 2000-unit settlement. The UN condemns it with its customary edgeless complaints. The UNSC falls silent. In other words, most everything on the foreign policy front is business as usual.

Business As Usual: Syria

Look at what is happening in Syria. An all-new Kurdistan will be carved out of northern Syria. It will be led by a puppet regime that permits American military bases, indeed some eight bases have already been established in north Syria. This has been the plan all along. It was even recommended in the Yinon Plan from 1982, a Zionist blueprint for controlling the Middle East, and which has either informed or confirmed Washington’s divide-destroy-and-rule strategy ever since. Obama sent special forces into northern Syria to ensure the Kurdish YPG and so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) would capture Raqqa before the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) did. John Kerry begged Moscow not to bomb al-Qaeda for similar reasons. The overarching objective: a not-so-Salafist principality on the edge of Syria and Iraq capable of a) weakening the secular Syrian state, b) running interference between Hezbollah and Iran, and c) launching destabilization activities and ultimately color revolutions in Iran and perhaps Russia beyond it.

The Kurds, of course, have been steadily romanticized as the perennially persecuted minority in the crucible of Middle East conflict. And now Washington has co-opted their desire for a state to insert itself into the vortex of Sunni-Shia confrontation. The YPG are supposedly the armed version of the PKK, the Kurdish organization in Turkey that is relentlessly at odds with Ankara. But the State Department considers the PKK a terrorist organization, and the YPG have been behaving like terrorists in northern Syria, to put it mildly, terrorizing Christians and seizing Arab territory to include in their blessed vision of holy Kurdistan. Not unlike the Zionist takeover of Palestine.

This was all predicated on the fine work of Barack Obama, who green lighted CIA and Pentagon plans to arm terrorists (euphemistically called ‘moderate rebels’), called for regime change in Damascus, injected special forces into the Syrian fire to guide the Islamist mercenaries, dropped tens of thousands of bombs across Syria and Iraq, and backed Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain, and other allies in various coordinated forms of destabilization.

Business As Usual: Venezuela

Look what’s happening in Venezuela. The economic chaos and street violence in Venezuela hasn’t been caused by President Rafael Maduro. Washington has dumped millions of dollars into the cesspool coffers of so-called opposition groups which, frustrated at the ballot box for most of this century, and being hostile to democracy in the first place (their 2002 and 2015 coup attempts both failed), have turned to violent insurgency to topple the popular Maduro government. The opposition have burned down one government building, bombed another. They have twice bombed federal police units. They have murdered Chavistas and lit them on fire. They have done everything in their power to provoke an authoritarian response from the government–anything that will further delegitimize the government, and generate a pretext for intervention. Both Mexico and Colombia have been recruited to help undermine Caracas, adding their own deeply dysfunctional signatures to a gruesome imperial intervention. Despite this, Donald Trump’s brooding Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, formerly Driller-in-Chief for Exxon, added some blathering nonsense to the fire, mumbling gravely about Maduro either leaving or “returning to the constitution.” An aide declared the OAS was a “coalition partner,” even though that organization’s charter prohibits interference of the kind the West is anxious to enact. Not to be outdone, CIA Chief Mike Pompeu contributed some seething drivel about being “hopeful there can be a transition in Venezuela” and his efforts in Mexico City and Bogota to co-opt those nations to back regime change.

Prevaricating think tanks like the Brookings Institute publish delusive arguments for using the Organization of American States to pressure Maduro out, then sweep in with a neoliberal loan package, which would doubtless contain all of the economic conditionalities desired by imperial finance, including increased foreign direct investment, heightened ownership caps for foreign capital, privatization of national assets at distressed prices with no consultation of the population. This last being a form of “accumulation by dispossession” that David Harvey calls a signal feature of neoliberal capitalism. All of the chaos, Brookings says, has been caused by Maduro and “his blind obsession for unlimited power.”

Is there support Washington’s argument that Maduro is a power-mad tyrant? It largely depends on what you think of the following actions: After the opposition took control of the National Assembly (NA) in 2015, a Maduro-leaning Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) removed three lawmakers on charges of voting irregularities, crucially preventing the opposition from assuming a supermajority. In 2016, the National Electoral Council (CNE) canceled a recall referendum against Nicolas Maduro after hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for the referendum were declared invalid by the CNE. In 2017, the TSJ later took over legislative powers from the NA (later restored) after NA refused to remove three assemblymen from Amazonas said the TSJ to have been fraudulently elected (vote-buying). Yet these representatives had been confirmed by the CNE, supposedly giving them parliamentary immunity. Maduro then called a Constituent Assembly vote by decree, rather than by referendum, as his predecessor Hugo Chavez had. The opposition boycotted the Constituent Assembly vote, ensuring those elected were mostly government supporters. The first act of the Constituent Assembly was to banish the Attorney General, who openly challenged Maduro.

In fact, whether Maduro hews to the constitution or not is little more than a sideshow for Washington. His actions must either be hysterically decried beneath the label of dictatorship, or obfuscated to justify the label of dictatorship. He’s a dictator no matter what he does. The West wants to unseat Maduro before the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly codifies social gains into the constitution. Maduro is the inheritor of a Bolivarian revolution that transformed  the nation under Hugo Chavez. Doubled economic growth. Doubled the caloric intake. Dramatically lowered severe poverty. Lowered unemployment. Reduced child malnutrition. Erased illiteracy. Drove grade school and higher education enrollment and graduation. Lifted incomes. And on and on. Even the World Bank concedes it. This frightens the crusty beltway puppet-masters because they forever fear the dread domino effect, when a successful social model spreads throughout the region. Thus Maduro must go.

The hostility toward Venezuela is also predicated on Barack Obama’s absurd declaration in 2015 that Venezuela is a grave threat to America’s national security. Obama’s view was built on George W. Bush’s efforts to overthrow Hugo Chavez in the early part of the century. Both men lavishly funded the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) established by Ronald Reagan as a Trojan Horse by which to covertly interfere in other countries.

Colonization and Causes

These are essentially class wars. Elite pit their pliant minions against the masses and their fledgling representative governments. And these class wars amount to little more than colonization by other means. We’re aren’t in a post-colonial era; colonization has just changed. The U.S. learned from British imperialism and has evolved its own arsenal of lighter-footprint templates for conquering the lands, leaders, and resources of target nations. There is tremendous continuity here, a kind of accretionary dynamic. Although straightforward wars of aggression are always ‘on the table,’ Washington sees the use of debt leverage, sanctions, NGO infiltration, opposition funding and electoral interference, drone assassinations, arming, training, and guiding proxy armies, and considerable air support as its preferred tactical suite for conquest and control. This keeps the ostensible footprint small and the plausible deniability large.

Colonization continues for two central reasons: the first reason is that there is bipartisan consensus for it–because both parties represent elite wealth, not ecumenical majorities. Popular opinion is not represented in Washington. George W. Bush perverted the political capital accrued from 9/11 to destroy half the Middle East, and it was Barack Obama who ensured we remained immersed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama who got the United States into Syria as well as Libya. One country is now a swamp of terrorist factionalism, the other a fractured state about to be partitioned. Likewise, the aggressive Republican action against Venezuela has received bipartisan support all along. Democrats and Republicans share objectives. They merely differ on tactics. Republicans still prefer boots on the ground and planting American flags in foreign soil. Very dramatic, old school, film-reel kind of imperialism. Democrats prefer covert action, the kind of shifty schemes engineered by Zbigniew Brzezinski that tend to destabilize through proxies, have the advantage of plausible deniability, and yet produce both chaos and blowback. Not that chaos is an unwanted result; it could be argued that it is our preference. Each administration builds on the work of the previous administration, regardless of the insignia on its lapel. For all in power, it is empire at all costs. That’s the bipartisan consensus.

The second reason colonization continues is because corporate media obscures it. The continued colonization of the planet is enabled by the colonization of the American mind. This is the ‘war before the war’ referenced by George Creel when he explained how he helped the Wilson administration turn Americans into a frothing mass hell-bent on sundering Hun conquests. The public must be conditioned to support the imperial project. The MSM functions as a rationalizing front organization for imperialism.

To this end, Democrat and Republican are relentlessly held up as examples of the wide spectrum of popular opinion we enjoy, rather than the narrow ideology a single war party. Their differences are proclaimed. We are led to believe that not only are we daily witness to a throaty, demotic debate on the issues of the day, but that the perspectives aired reflect the opinions of the average American. But they don’t (page 570 in particular). There’s nothing mainstream about the ‘mainstream’ media. The so-called mainstream expresses a fringe viewpoint. It relentlessly repeats the marginal POV of the one percent, the corporate profiteers for whom war is a boon and a blessing. This is how all propaganda functions–an obscure perspective is popularized through the capture of media channels. Not only are the viewsobscure, but they are consistently extreme. Only by co-opting massive communications firepower to make the case, as it were, can the ruling class convince the masses of a viewpoint that would never gain traction on its own merits.

The ‘mainstream’ stenographers write in calm, bloodless prose, the better to assure their readers that they are levelheaded, not fantasists who back one imperial usurpation after another. Their columns are tranquilizers that normalize the extremism of both the elite worldview and the imperial behavior of its foot soldiers. Then, when the true popular voice springs into the square to denounce the lies, he or she appears to onlookers as the real extremist, merely by virtue of his anger. And this is why Orwellian constructs blossom like an unkempt jungle in the mediascape. Democracy is tyranny. Voting is oppression. Marginal is mainstream.

And past is prologue, since what we have done before merely sets the stage for what we will do. The templates established by Carter and Brzezinski are taken up by Obama and Rice. Soros-funded schemes applied in Eastern Europe migrate to the tip of South America. There may be nothing new under the sun, but what’s new is the sun under which old things are given new life. Yesterday, Afghanistan. Today, Syria. Yesterday, Poland. Today, Venezuela. The final irony is perhaps that for those in the dystopian worlds of capital exploitation that lay beyond our borders, the opposite is often true–their future will not resemble their past. For many in Syria and Venezuela and Iraq and Libya, they may find themselves repeating an epigram scribbled on a wall in the war-torn Syrian town of Homs, “We were dreaming of the future, we’re now dreaming of the past.”

The Terrorism of Moral Indignation

Luciana Bohne

To be sure, the whole of Western culture is complicit, but what astounds is the complicity of what defines itself as left.  Notably, the complicity of those among the left’s comfortable and intellectual “tendencies,” usually called “liberals.”  But in general, a whole language has vanished from the Western left’s vocabulary: class struggle, international solidarity, peace among peoples, social justice, exploitation, poverty. They are so illiterate in left theory and experience that the call the ruling class’s booth on their faces, “the deep state.”  This today in the West is an amalgam (rather than a conscious political program) of a loose and dangerous left.  It dreams, if it dreams at all, of a revolution without struggle. The answer to that pietism is force.  Whole nations wiped off the face of the earth.

We now, on this loose left, trade in our critical faculties at the theatre of propaganda.  In return, the propaganda pounds, batters, and sequesters our emotions so that we end up identifying with the narrative of power. The narrative insists that the West has the Holy Grail. It insists that it has a messianic mission to improve the world by sharing the Grail’s liberal values. The old conceit of liberal humanism, thus, returns to occupy our psyche, and it’s the same liberal humanism that in the 19^th century enslaved the “lesser breeds” of the planet. Once again, we pick up the “white man’s burden” and his “civilizing mission” to lift up darkling  “junior Brothers” from “savagery” and “barbarism” into our magnificent, magnanimous, culturally superior self-image. Massacres, famines, epidemics, and genocides follow.

Who galvanizes the left today against imperialism as Fidel Castro did with his uncompromising demand at the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 that “the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries must stop”? “We hear a lot of talk about human rights,” he said in the 1970s, as Jimmy Carter’s White House launched the rhetoric of human rights, “but we have to talk about the rights of humanity.”

“The rights of humanity,” who remembers them? Chief among them the right to sovereignty, perhaps? The right to foreign non-interference? To living free of threats, sanctions, partition, dismemberment, balkanization, invasion, and occupation? To solving one’s own problems in one’s own country? To choosing one’s economic system? To refusing to become a protectorate of the Big Bully on the Potomac?

What happens when the “rights of humanity” are trampled? Since 1999, with Bill Clinton’s unauthorized war for secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia (reduced to Serbia and Montenegro by then), unopposed and even cheered by progressive segments of the loose left,

“Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes people and sucks the blood like a vampire.”

These are not the words of a contemporary leftist. These are the words of German socialist Karl Liebnecht, co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany, both murdered by the German social democrat state in 1919.  He was referring to WW I, which, alone among the social democrats in the parliament of 1914, he stood up to oppose.

We now, on the loose left, rally to the call of “human rights,” which are invariably being abused outside our national borders. You’d think we lived in the Promised Land, so convinced are we of the responsibility to protect “less fortunate” human beings abroad, who together with the injury of our sanctions and bombs have to endure the insult of our condescension.

We now, on the loose left, cannot see beyond the imbecility of our arrogance that we lack most of the rights said to be “human” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right here at home. A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) summarizes the inability of our society to protect its most vulnerable members, which measure alone judges the vibrancy of a democracy:

“Many US laws and practices, particularly in the areas of criminal and juvenile justice, immigration, and national security, violate internationally recognized human rights. Often, those least able to defend their rights in court or through the political process—members of racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, children, the poor, and prisoners—are the people most likely to suffer abuses.”

Our masters, who incarcerate at home 2.37 million people, the largest prison population in the world, “caused in part by mandatory minimum sentencing and excessively long sentences” (HRW) and detain twelve million people per year in county jails, raise our moral indignation against cherry-picked crusades for human rights abroad. They use this manufactured indignation as a license to attack and terrorize whole nations.

In Afghanistan, in 2001, we bombed to liberate women; we are still there, but we hear no more of the sorrow and the pity of women’s plight.  In Iraq, in 2003, we invaded to liberate Iraqis from the “dictator” Saddam Hussein, and one to two million Iraqis were liberated from their lives, millions more from their home and their country. Fallujah alone accuses—left more chemically poisoned than Hiroshima. In Syria, we claim to fight “to democratize” the country and at the same time the Isis cutthroats, but it took the legitimate Russian intervention to prevent a caliphate of cutthroats from ruling in Damascus.

In Yemen,

“In March [2015], a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states began a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. The US provided intelligence, logistical support, and personnel to the Saudi Arabian center planning airstrikes and coordinating activities, making US forces potentially jointly responsible for laws-of-war violations by coalition forces.” (HRW)

Most on the loose left ignored Obama’s crimes, among which the war in Yemen may rank as the most cynical, heartless, and inhuman. It even classifies as biological warfare, because bombing water treatment plants then leaving people to die of cholera epidemics cannot be called anything else. Meningitis cases are breaking out. Two UN aid flights to Sanaa are authorized to leave from Saudi Arabia every day for famine relief. Saudi Arabia is refusing fuel. No reason given, reports The Independent on 5 August. Saudi Arabia blockades the Yemen’s airspace. Yemen’s agony continues. No stirrings on the left.

So, too, they ignored Obama’s drone attacks on Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. So, too, they ignored this:

“The US restored full military assistance to Egypt in April [2015], despite a worsening human rights environment, lifting restrictions in place since the military takeover by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2013. Egypt resumed its position as the second-largest recipient of US military assistance, worth $1.3 billion annually, after Israel. In June, the US lifted its hold on military assistance to the Bahraini military despite an absence of meaningful reform, which was the original requirement for resuming the aid.” (HRW)

And this:

“In September [2015], Obama waived provisions of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to allow four countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—to continue to receive US military assistance, despite their continued use of child soldiers.” (HRW)

And this:

“Hundreds of thousands of children work on US farms. US law exempts child farmworkers from the minimum age and maximum hour requirements that protect other working children. Child farmworkers often work long hours and risk pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency banned children under 18 from handling pesticides. Children who work on tobacco farms frequently suffer vomiting, headaches, and other symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning.” (HRW)

The loose left now calls that grotesque excrescence in the White House a fascist, as if Trump had replaced an administration of enlightened humanitarians. They are calling for virtual presidenticide so that the rule of that enlightened international “vampire,” the Democratic Party, can be restored. But let me tell you: he’s only the last of the “fascists” in a long line since 1945. The loose left just hasn’t noticed because the loose left has no concept of class struggle. It has, therefore, no critical equipment to include imperialism—the war of the class of international imperialist on the class of colonial or semi-colonial peoples—in the catalogue of the crimes of fascism.

Our planners are not stupid. They know how to maintain their minority’s primacy by waging class war.  They not only exercise it on the “proletariat” at home but also across the map of the world.  In 1948, George Kennan, the architect of the policy of containment, which launched the Cold War, recommended inequality in international relations—that’s war by the imperialist class at the center against whole national peoples at the peripheries. Imperialism, therefore, is just another form of class war.

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.”  (Memo by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff. Written February 28, 1948, Declassified June 17, 1974)

By “we,” Kennan does not mean the 99% of Americans. He means the 1%. The foreign policy he recommends is class-vested and is kept secret, for practical reasons, from the rest of us for two decades. That’s because the resources to support this policy protecting the elite has to be extracted from the rest of us, and counted in losses to social welfare and progress. Class is a relation of power, in which one class determines the direction of the whole of society. This is one example.

Fascism has many faces, but the most constant is that of the supremacist delusion that the West is the carrier of “universal values” and that, as exclusive interpreter and custodian of these values, the West is obligated to act as watchdog of democracy and human rights throughout the globe.  In his inaugural address of January 1997, Bill Clinton assumed for the United States the planetary leadership of this humanitarian imperative:

“America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation. . . . May God strengthen our hands for the good work ahead, and always, always bless our America.”

This is not universalism; this is ethnocentric hubris. This is the terrifying message of one nation “uber alles.” This is totalitarian dogma. This is a profession of democratic faith without the slightest credibility because it does not aim at democratizing international relations but at subjecting them to the discipline and image of the “indispensible nation.” This, in one word, is imperialism–fascism in action. Karl Liebnecht saw it clearly, one-hundred years ago:

“In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other.”

Why can the loose left today not see it that way? Why does it abstract the concept of imperialism from the conduct of the Western political order, thus mutilating the totality of reality, especially the reality reserved to the peoples of colonial origins now being reinvaded, partitioned, looted, left to chaos? Why do they see a defense of “human rights” where others, especially the victims, see subjugation, neocolonialism, and imperialism? What blinds the moral vision of the left to the point of reserving the fascist brand to the crude jester, Trump, but denying it to the slick charmer Obama of the Drone-Kill-List, destroyer of Lybia and Syria, architect of regime change in Ukraine, advocate of war with Russia, harasser of China, enabler of Israel in its assault on Gaza, global spymaster, deporter-in-chief, most successful weapons salesman since 1945, including to that obscene abuser of human rights, autocratic Saudi Arabia?  This uneven distribution of the fascist brand insures that the next president will be another “fascist,” but more polished, “educated,” grinning confidently with sharp teeth from a shark’s mouth. Trump’s mouth pouts; the image does not inspire confidence.

It’s not that the evidence of the devastation by the “cyclone” or the “vampire sucking the blood” is lacking. Since Clinton assigned to the United States an “indispensible” role in the world, it has bloated its defense budget, embarked with allies and vassals on a war against a tactic (“terrorism”), covering up the war of re-colonization (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Chad), organized and led coups (Haiti, Honduras, Ukraine, Egypt, Venezuela), mounted “color revolutions” in the former republics of Eastern Europe, dispatched NATO to encircle Russia with aggressive missiles, threatened on a systematic basis North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran in violation of the UN Charter, bloodied the planet with countless uncounted corpses and blighted it with hordes of desperate refugees, blockaded and sanctioned whole countries at will, and virtually scrapped the edifice of  international law–which it had itself erected as a monument to liberal democracy after WW II– while claiming to be acting in defense of universal values. The country that imposed the strictest protectionist policies in the world in the 19^thcentury now recognizes no borders, no national sovereignty, no limits to its expansion.

What is to be done?

End imperialism. As long as imperialism and imperialist centers exist, so long there will be wars.  The politics of indignation; the campaigns for human rights do not oppose imperialism; they facilitate it.  One has to be either stupid or complicit if he cannot see that the US supports two states with the most egregious records of violations of human rights—Saudi Arabia and Israel—while demonizing the socially progressive government of Venezuela as a “dictatorship.”  One has to be either stupid or complicit to call for the removal of President Assad from Syria for being undemocratic, while installing a neo-fascist regime in Ukraine. One has to be either stupid or complicit to believe Iran is the sponsor of terror when all indications point to Saudi Arabia. And then there is Russia. There we risk thermonuclear war—the loss not just of human rights but the loss of life on the planet. We shall become death. That’s what we’re playing with when we consent to distributing human rights across the world to the sound of the crescendo of exploding bombs.

To begin the opposition to war and imperialism, we must start, at a minimum, with a demand to return to the cardinal principle in the Charter of the United Nations for the prevention of aggressive war by respecting the sovereignty of nations. No nation should claim “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) if all nations are equal before international law. That responsibility rests with the UN Security Council, in the interest of peace among nations, which alone has the monopoly on authorizing war. We must, therefore, refuse to empower Western state terrorism through the melodrama and emotionalism of moral indignation. We must remember that Hitler invaded countries on the pretext of defense of “human rights” of German minorities. We must remember, too, that the Charter’s defense of sovereignty was written in response to Hitler’s violation of “human rights” in the name of “human rights.” That his policy broke the peace among nations and set the world on fire. That the whole trauma ended with two mushroom clouds in the sky.

To begin a serious opposition to imperialism and war, we must re-create a sound left—a principled left– and denounce those agents of the fake left who contribute to the escalation of Western military aggression under the banner of “human rights” or any other liberal claptrap such as identity politics, which pleads for “respect” from the state instead of claiming class power, or the power to contrast the state’s foreign and domestic policies:

“These pseudo-left figures and organizations function as what amount to specialized NGOs, acting, much like the National Endowment for Democracy and its constituent elements, as political fronts and facilitators for the CIA and US imperialism.”

A sound left must re-discover, behind the lies and distortions written by its enemies, the theories, the practices, the language, the history, the science, and the errors (most important) of the left’s once living cultures and societies—a left that changed the world.  This left must extend the hand of friendship to systems of states that continue to survive in a hostile capitalist world with a socialist perspective. We live in an age of counter-revolutionary reaction in the West. Soon, we’ll forget that we are human and that we can make our own history. Shouldn’t we re-educate ourselves to a conscious, informed, organized, purposeful left or shall we let Hitler have the last word and a posthumous victory? “The problem of how the future . . . can be secured,” he wrote in Mein Kampf about Germany,  “is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.”