In bid to blow up nuclear talks, US imposes sanctions, steals Iranian oil

Bill Van Auken

With Washington deliberately stoking tensions that could trigger all-out military clashes with both Russia and China, there is every indication that it is simultaneously seeking to blow up Iranian nuclear talks, setting the stage for a dangerous new escalation of conflict in the Middle East.

On the eve of the resumption of talks in Vienna between Iran and the P4+1 (the four permanent members of the UN Security Council still nominally party to the agreement plus Germany), along with indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, the Biden administration has carried out a series of flagrant provocations.

On Tuesday, the US Treasury and State Departments piled on a set of new sanctions against Iranian government entities and officials on the grounds of alleged “human rights” abuses. These come on top of the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign imposed by the Trump administration in 2018 after it unilaterally abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) vessels cross the path of US warships in Persian Gulf.

The US sanctions regime amounts to an economic blockade of Iran, targeting countries and companies daring to do business with the nation of over 85 million people and resulting in deepening poverty for the Iranian masses, while severely hindering the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has inflicted over 130,000 recorded deaths.

The Biden administration has maintained Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign in place, continuing actions that against Iran that are tantamount to a state of war.

On Wednesday, the US Justice Department announced that it had carried out the “successful forfeiture” of 1.1 million barrels of Iranian petroleum products seized by the US Navy from four tankers bound for Venezuela. Seized in separate acts of US piracy in the Arabian sea were Iranian weapons, including surface-to-air and anti-tank weapons, allegedly bound for Yemen to aid Houthi rebels in their protracted struggle against the US-backed forces of the Saudi monarchy.

The proceeds from the “forfeitures”—court orders allowing the government to sell seized goods—amounted to nearly $27 million, according to the DOJ.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that US Defense Secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin (ret.) will meet with his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz today “to discuss the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and shared concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear provocations and destabilizing actions in the region.”

Mossad chief David Barnea is also in Washington for meetings with US intelligence chiefs on Iran. The Israeli officials are pushing for a joint military campaign with the United States. No doubt they presented their American counterparts with a menu of options ranging from an escalation of Tel Aviv’s assassination campaign against Iran’s scientists and sabotage of its facilities, to strikes against Iranian interests elsewhere in the Middle East and all the way to an all-out war.

Senior Israeli military officials visited the Pentagon’s Central Command headquarters in Florida at the end of last month for detailed discussions on Iran. The Israel Defense Forces reported that the two sides “deepened their operational preparedness and strategic discussions.”

Israel has engaged in increasingly bellicose threats and actions against Iran in apparent coordination with Washington’s provocations. Early Tuesday morning, Israeli warplanes carried out missile strikes against Syria’s Mediterranean port of Latakia, blowing up containers in a cargo area and igniting a blaze. Israeli officials claimed the containers held weapons bounded for Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq. The Latakia port is Syria’s main lifeline to the outside world and it is used by both Iranian and Russian vessels.

Israel is preparing major exercises over the Mediterranean in the coming spring designed to rehearse a major bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, the Kan broadcasting network reported. The drill would include dozens of warplanes, including F-15s, F-35s and F-16s, as well as spy planes and refueling jets, flying 1,000 kilometers to simulate the distance to Iran.

Earlier this year, Tel Aviv publicly announced a $1.5 billion program to prepare for an attack on Iran and obtain weapons, including bunker-busting bombs, to destroy Iranian underground nuclear facilities.

Amid US-Israeli talks on confronting the Iranian “nuclear threat,” the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution Monday calling for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East by a vote of 178-1. Israel cast the sole opposing vote, with the US and Cameroon abstaining. Iran was among those voting in favor.

While Israel maintains a nuclear arsenal and has rejected all international nuclear treaties and inspection regimes, CIA director William Burns, speaking on Monday before the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council, acknowledged that the agency “doesn’t see any evidence that Iran … has made a decision to weaponize” its nuclear program.

In advance of Thursday’s talks in Vienna, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “the runway is getting very, very short” for achieving a negotiated settlement with Iran. Blinken has repeatedly threatened that “all options are on the table” if a deal is not struck.

In an interview with Reuters last Friday, Blinken charged that Iran “does not seem to be serious about doing what’s necessary to return to compliance” with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the 2015 agreement is known.

This imperialist arrogance turns reality on its head. It was not Iran that sabotaged the JCPOA, but rather Washington. When the Trump administration tore up the agreement in 2018, Tehran remained in full compliance with the agreement’s demands that it curtail up to 80 percent of its civilian nuclear program and submit to an unprecedentedly intrusive international inspections regime.

This was despite the fact that the US never offered any significant sanctions relief. Tehran continued to maintain its strict observance of the agreement’s terms for another year after the US abrogation, taking steps to increase its levels of uranium enrichment and stockpiles only after it had become clear that the Western European signatories to the JCPOA would do nothing to challenge Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The Iranian government’s position is clear. Washington deserted the agreement, not Tehran. It must return to compliance by lifting sanctions, and then Iran will roll back its nuclear activities.

The Biden administration, however, has sought to put the onus on Iran, demanding even further concessions in return for the US returning to the accord. Blinken has stated US demands for an accord that is “stronger and longer.” This would include both Iran’s scrapping its missile program and ceding its influence in the Middle East to Washington’s continued drive to assert US hegemony over the oil-rich region.

Tehran has also called for the US to provide guarantees that it will not pull out of the deal once again, given a shift in the political winds in Washington. The Biden administration’s ability to push a binding treaty through the US Senate is virtually nil.

Given the scant prospect of genuine sanctions relief from Washington, Tehran has little motivation for accepting new concessions.

While the “pivot to Asia” initiated under the Obama administration was supposedly a shift of US military might from the decades of wars in the Middle East toward confronting China, every region of the globe, and the Middle East in particular, remains a battlefield.

Under the impact of the US economic blockade and Western Europe’s complicity, Tehran has forged closer ties to Beijing, signing an agreement earlier this year that guarantees China discounted oil exports for the next 25 years in exchange for some $400 billion in investment under the Belt and Road initiative.

Whatever the motivation advanced by the Biden administration for military confrontation with Iran, it will be bound up with the drive toward global war with China.

Confronted with growing class struggle within the United States, amid unprecedented levels of social inequality that have deepened as the ruling elite has enriched itself amid the mass death of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US ruling class is driven toward war as a means of directing the irrepressible contradictions of US capitalism outward in an explosion of military violence, in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific and internationally.

US: No money for COVID tests, blank check for the military

Andre Damon

On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki rejected the idea of sending free COVID-19 tests to all Americans to protect against the dangerous new Omicron variant, pressing reporters, “How much would that cost?”

At wholesale prices of approximately $1 per test (the going price in Germany), it would cost approximately $329 million. Sending every single American a COVID-19 test would cost the equivalent of less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the military budget, the largest in history, passed Friday by the US House of Representatives.

In other words, the military budget is 2,000 times more expensive than this critical measure to protect Americans against COVID-19, the single greatest threat to their lives, more deadly than cancer, heart disease, smoking and auto accidents.

The massive budget weighs in at $740 billion, with another $28 billion thrown in for the US Department of Energy to develop additional nuclear weapons.

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly boasted of his record military budgets. But this budget is tens of billions of dollars larger than anything ever passed under Trump—a budget far, far larger than even the Biden administration or Pentagon asked for.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, the summary of which alone is over 600 pages, was released just six hours before the overwhelming majority of lawmakers in both parties voted on it.

An F-35 production line (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

Included in the bill are, to quote the official summary of its weapons systems:

• “$4.9 billion for Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, an increase of $2.9 billion to build three guided missile destroyers in fiscal year 2022.”
• “A $4.7 billion increase for shipbuilding, including 5 additional battle force ships: 2 destroyers, 2 expeditionary fast transports, and 1 fleet oiler”
• “$3.1 billion for the Columbia-class submarine program, an increase of $130 million, for industrial base development and expansion in support of the Virginia and Columbia shipbuilding programs.”
• “$6.6 billion for the procurement of two Virginia-class submarines and advance procurement of future submarines, including an additional $200 million to expand the submarine industrial base.”
• “$4.4 billion for the F-35A program, including an increase of $175 million for the purchase of F135 power modules and the resources to begin upgrading the fleet to TR-3/Block 4 capability.”

• “$1.0 billion for 12 F/A-18E/F aircraft”

It includes further lump-sum appropriations for “great power” conflicts against Russia and China:

• “Extends and modifies the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) to realign DOD efforts towards PDI objectives and identifies approximately $7.1 billion in FY22 investments [to counter China]”
• “Increases funding by $50 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which authorizes the Secretary of Defense, with the concurrence of the Secretary of State, to provide security assistance and intelligence support to military and other security forces of the Government of Ukraine [as part of a military-buildup challenging Russia]”

But the largest portion of the bill deals with funding the United States multi-trillion-dollar nuclear buildup, focusing on the creation of smaller, more “usable” nuclear weapons:

• “Authorizes $20.2 billion for the activities of the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration]”
• “Authorizes $6.48 billion for the Department of Energy’s defense environmental cleanup activities”

Commenting on this bloated handout to defense contractors, journalist and historian Fred Kaplan asked, “Did anyone even look at the massive defense budget before passing it?”

Kaplan added, “No officials or lawmakers have spelled out why the budget—which includes $740 billion for the Pentagon and $28 billion for the Energy Department’s nuclear-weapons programs—needs to be quite this huge.”

Kaplan adds,

Critics of government spending on domestic programs frequently complain about “throwing money at a problem.” Yet that is exactly what Congress is doing with the defense budget. When Biden submitted his infrastructure and Build Back Better plans, a few legislators from both parties got together with the White House to pare down their size, narrowing the definition of “infrastructure,” reordering priorities, and questioning the urgency of some needs. One can argue about the final result, but Congress subjected Biden’s plan to legitimate oversight and analysis.

There has been almost no oversight or analysis of this defense budget.

With inflation soaring to levels unseen in decades, all US fiscal spending is being reviewed with a fine-tooth comb. The vast majority of social spending projects, including child care and student loan forgiveness that Biden campaigned on, are being thrown out the window, based on the claim that additional government spending will contribute to inflation.

And yet, when it comes to the military, anything goes. The generals simply get everything on their Christmas wish list and then more in the form of unspecified and unenumerated slush funds.

The dominant thinking driving this insane level of military spending was outlined in a new book by Elbridge Colby, a lead author of the US 2018 national defense strategy, as well as the 2018 essay, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.” In his latest book entitled The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, Colby writes,

Pandemics do not put geopolitics on hold; power politics exists even during and after such outbreaks. They may even intensify geopolitical competition. … This means that, while the effort and expense required to control the threat of pandemic disease may be very great, these efforts do not logically trade against national security requirements.

But, as economists like to say, “All dollars are green.” A $70 million spent on an F-35 is 70 million Americans who do not get a COVID-19 test.

What is behind America’s binge in military spending? As the World Socialist Web Site warned in October, “Under conditions of deepening social, political and economic crisis, dominant sections of the American ruling class see a conflict with China as a mechanism for enforcing ‘national unity,’ which means, in practice, suppressing and criminalizing domestic opposition.”

If American capitalism cannot afford to protect the population from COVID-19, it at least has the resources to use a foreign conflict as a pretext for a crackdown at home.

Bank for International Settlements raises concerns over financial system

Nick Beams

As speculation on Wall Street and other stock markets roars ahead, researchers and analysts are continuing to delve into the events of March 2020 when global financial markets plummeted at the start of the pandemic and had to be rescued with a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve.

So far, while some of the causes for the meltdown, which was centred in the $22 trillion US treasury market, have been identified, no solution has been advanced.

The latest institution to examine the crisis is the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the umbrella organisation for central banks, which published a major analysis in its quarterly review issued earlier this week. It called for greater regulation of non-banking institutions, in particular bond funds, that have come to play an increasingly significant role in global financial markets over the past decade.

A graph on the BIS website (bis.org)

The bulk of the review is made up of highly technical details of the operations of the financial system but the conclusions of the analysis were clearly summed up in a foreword by Agustin Carstens, the general manager of the BIS.

He began by noting that non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs), such as bond funds and hedge funds, have “massively increased their footprint” since the global financial crisis of 2008. It is estimated that this virtually unregulated non-bank sector now accounts for nearly half of all financial assets.

Carstens claimed these institutions offered a broad range of investment and funding opportunities and represented a “healthy source of diversity” in financing.

At least that is the case when markets are operating normally, and things appear to be going well. It is a very different story when they are not.

“When things go wrong,” he continued, “NBFIs can trigger or amplify market stress.” This was the case at the start of the pandemic.

“In March 2020 and in previous episodes of market turmoil, the NBFI sector amplified stress through inherent structural vulnerabilities, notably liquidity mismatches and hidden leverage. With system-wide stability under threat, massive central bank support was necessary to restore the calm. Such repeated occurrences suggest that the status quo is unacceptable.”

Carstens said fundamental adjustments were needed in the regulatory framework for NBFIs to make it fit for purpose.

In his summary of the March 2020 crisis, when the US treasury market, the basis of the global financial system froze—at one point there were no buyers for US government debt—Carstens pointed to one of the fundamental contradictions of all capitalist markets. This is, what may be rational behavior for an individual participant can be irrational for the system as a whole.

When considering the system as a whole it was necessary to zoom out from the trees and consider the forest, he said.

“The overall system may be unstable even if individual institutions, considered on a standalone basis, may appear stable. In other word, actions that seem prudent from the viewpoint of individual institutions may destabilise the system.”

This is what took place in March 2020. Faced with demands from investors for redemptions, NBFIs tried to obtain cash by selling assets under conditions where all sought “first mover advantage”—that is, moving out before others decided to do the same. The process was similar, Carstens noted, to a depositors’ run on a bank.

Faced with actual or the threat of withdrawals, fund mangers tend to hoard liquidity or liquidate assets.

“But what is prudent from their point of view has potentially negative repercussions for the system” and protecting the viability of individual funds “exacerbates the system-wide liquidity shortage.” These mechanisms “were at play in March 2020.”

The BIS review also noted that concerns for financial stability were rising in the world of cryptocurrencies or what it termed decentralised finance (DeFi).

Carstens noted that, in what he called the crypto ecosystem, problems had so far surfaced mainly in the form of frequent and sizeable price crashes. “Whether such fragilities are limited to this ecosystem or can spill over to the traditional one is still unclear.”

However, the danger should not be underestimated because “as history confirms anything that grows exponentially is unlikely to remains self-contained and thus merits the closest attention.”

As was noted in the body of the review, if DeFi were to become widespread, “its vulnerabilities might undermine financial stability.” And the disruptions could be severe “because of the high leverage, liquidity mismatches, built-in interconnectedness and the lack of shock absorbers such as banks.”

The massive borrowing undertaken by NBFIs is also a source of destabilisation. The archetypal example is the use of leverage by hedge funds and asset managers for the purchase of securities with borrowed funds. This included the use of repos—very short-term, often overnight, procurements of cash—that are used to finance bets in financial markets.

“More recently,” Carstens noted, “leverage has become high and pervasive in the DeFI world too. In such a context, price drops and increases in measured risks may make the lender call in a loan or charge a higher haircut, inducing forced selling.”

Leverage was also pervasive in private markets which have gained ground in the recent period. Here risk-taking is procyclical. That is, investments increase when stock markets do well, and liquidity is ample, but increase instability when there is a downturn.

“Such risk-taking has contributed to the recent accumulation of debt in the system at large and may have broader financial stability implications, not least because banks fund private market operations and investors.”

The central thrust of the policy prescriptions outlined in the review was a call for greater regulation of NBFIs.

But here Carstens was forced to acknowledge great obstacles, particularly in the case of the crypto world, or DeFi.

“Regulatory challenges may appear insurmountable in the case of DeFi, which is designed to avoid central oversight and rulemaking,” Carstens wrote.

However, the problems confronting would-be regulators do not stop there because financial markets respond to increased controls by seeking new strategies to get round them. Carstens described regulatory efforts as a “continuing endeavour” and the task has “no clear beginning and no clear end.”

“People inevitably want highest returns and higher liquidity. The financial system will try to deliver, in part by adapting to regulation [that is, seeking to get round it] as it evolves. All this inevitably raises system-wide risks,” Carstens wrote.

Recent history provides a graphic example of this process. After the global financial crisis of 2008, which centred on the banks, new regulations were introduced in the US which somewhat constricted their activities in the treasury market.

But these actions only led to the growth in the activity of NBFIs which played a major role in the crisis of March 2020, and are now at the centre of the continuing threat of another meltdown.

The ongoing reports on the fragile state of the global financial system, including the latest review from the BIS, have major implications for the struggles of the working class.

Firstly, they reveal the essential driving force of the homicidal policies of all capitalist governments in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their fear, as was revealed so clearly at the outset, is that any meaningful public health measures, based on science, will precipitate a collapse of the financial house of cards.

Secondly, they make clear that at any time an adverse event in the financial system, such as a wrongly placed bet by a hedge fund or some other financial institution, could trigger a chain reaction, bringing about a collapse of the entire system with incalculable economic consequences, including a depression and mass unemployment.

Billionaires increased wealth by $3.6 trillion in 2020, as millions died from global pandemic

Trévon Austin

The World Inequality Report 2022, released by the global research initiative World Inequality Lab, found that the COVID-19 pandemic has widened the financial gap between the rich and poor to a degree not seen since the rosy days of world imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

The world’s billionaires enjoyed the steepest increase in their share of wealth last year since the World Inequality Lab began keeping records in 1995, according to the study released Tuesday. Billionaires saw their net worth grow by more than $3.6 trillion in 2020 alone, increasing their share of global wealth to 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, the pandemic has pushed approximately 100 million people into extreme poverty, boosting the global total to 711 million in 2021.

“Global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century,” the report said. “Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between western countries and their colonies.”

People ride their bikes past a homeless encampment set up along the boardwalk in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, June 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The report showed the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population takes 52 percent of global income, compared to the 8 percent share of the poorest half. On average, an individual in the top decile earns $122,100 (€87,200) per year, while a person from the poorest half of global earners makes $3,920 (€2,800) a year.

Global wealth inequality is even more pronounced than income inequality. The poorest half of the world’s population only possess 2 percent of the total wealth. In contrast, the wealthiest 10 percent own 76 percent of all wealth, with $771,300 (€550,900) on average.

The ultra-rich have siphoned a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the last few decades. The top 1 percent took 38 percent of all additional wealth generated since 1995, whereas the bottom 50 percent have only captured 2 percent of it. The wealth of the richest individuals has grown between 6 to 9 percent per year since the mid-1990s, compared to the global 3.2 percent average.

Inequality levels vary across the regions. In Europe, the top decile takes about 36 percent of income share, while it holds 58 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. However, inequalities between countries have declined in the last two decades, whereas inequality within “rich” countries has risen sharply. In the United States, the top 1 percent owned 35 percent of the country’s wealth, approaching Gilded Age levels of inequality.

This massive accumulation of capital has come at the expense of public wealth over the last four decades. The share of wealth held by public actors is close to zero or negative in “rich” countries, indicating that the totality of wealth is privately owned, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The report also studied connections between wealth inequality and inequalities in contributions to climate change, showing the top 10 percent of emitters are responsible for close to 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom half produces 12 percent of the total. This disparity is also seen within nominally rich countries. The bottom half of the population in Europe, East Asia, and North America is responsible for an average of 3 to 9 metric tons of emissions per person a year. This contrasts sharply with the emissions of the top 10 percent in these regions: 29 metric tons in Europe, 39 in East Asia, and 73 in North America.

Given this diverse and severe inequity, the authors of the report propose a series of “modern progressive taxes” on wealth used to invest in education, health, and ecological restoration.

But such a path is a dead end; All the official and semi-official institutions of government are subordinated to the interests of the financial aristocracy and serve to constrain and block any measure that threatens their hoards of wealth.

This is demonstrated by the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with governments around the world declaring the pandemic over and eliminating remaining protective measures. Rather than being driven by concern for public health, the actions of governments have been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of the upper echelons of society.

New Omicron alarm: Significant drop in protection for doubly vaccinated individuals

Benjamin Mateus

In a much-anticipated press release yesterday, Pfizer/BioNTech explained that in preliminary laboratory studies the antibodies from individuals recently vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine showed significantly reduced effectiveness. People fully vaccinated could not mount the same level of antibodies (called neutralization titers), needed to prevent breakthrough infections, as they did against previous variants.

The manufacturers of the vaccine wrote, “Sera from individuals who received two doses of the current COVID-19 vaccine did exhibit, on average, more than a 25-fold reduction in neutralization titers against the Omicron variants compared to wild-type [original ancestor], indicating that two doses of BNT162b2 may not be sufficient to protect against infection with the Omicron variant.”

Puseletso Lesofi prepares to sequence COVID-19 omicron samples at the Ndlovu Research Center in Elandsdoorn, South Africa Wednesday Dec. 8, 2021. The centre ls part of the Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, which discovered the omicron variant. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

The press statement noted that the third dose, better known as a booster, appeared to increase effectiveness against the Omicron variant enormously: “A more robust protection may be achieved by a third dose as data from additional studies of the companies indicate that a booster with the current COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech increases the antibody titers by 25-fold.” 

Additionally, they remarked that T-cell immunity did not appear to be impacted by the mutations in the Omicron variant, meaning that the vaccines may continue to protect people from severe disease even if the risk of breakthrough infection is considerable.

The implication here is that in an Omicron-dominant pandemic, fully vaccinated will now mean that three doses are required. That would mean that the 3.33 billion people (42.6 percent) on the planet who have received only two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are only partially vaccinated. Currently, only 217 million people, or close to 3 percent of the world’s population, have received a booster and therefore can be considered fully vaccinated. Hypothetically, such a distinction would have immense implications on the movement of people, air travel, and, more specifically, criteria for return to work and school.

In a new study released in preprint form by South African scientists, the Omicron variant caused a 41-fold decline in neutralization titers for someone who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, compared to the D614G variant first identified in Wuhan, China. 

Corroborating the Pfizer data, the principal author of the study, virologist Dr. Alex Sigal, Ph.D., who is leading the team of researchers that first identified Omicron, remarked that the variant’s ability to escape was incomplete, meaning that people previously infected or vaccinated could still mount a response against infection with the new strain, but he recommended vaccination and boosters to protect against severe disease.

A report by German virologist Dr. Sandra Ciesek from University Hospital Frankfurt analyzed the serum of individuals who had received three doses of Pfizer’s vaccine (boosted), comparing the impact of the Delta and Omicron variants. She found a 37-fold reduction in neutralization in the Omicron group, a far worse result than Pfizer’s own test.

Figure 1 Neutralization of Omicron versus ancestral virus in participants previously vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine

When she looked at the serum of individuals who had received only two doses of Pfizer, Moderna, or a mix with AstraZeneca six months previously, there was no measurable neutralization at all. In other words, the older vaccines had become completely ineffective against Omicron.

Dr. Zoë Hyde, an epidemiologist and biostatistician in Perth, Western Australia, responding to Dr. Ciesek’s Tweet, wrote, “I won’t sugar-coat things. This is a disaster. People vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer-BNT vaccine likely have no protection against infection with the Omicron strain. Protection after three doses has likely taken a big hit as well.”

Immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi explained that the breakthrough infections would mean that there will be little control of transmission of Omicron from the vaccines. He added, “Vulnerable people who did not respond well to vaccination could be infected by another person even if all parties were vaccinated,” and this is in the context of the current recommendations by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Protection) about lax mask policies for the vaccinated and the oft-repeated statements about knowing so much about this virus.

Barely a month into the beginning of the Omicron pandemic, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that an “offshoot [designated BA.2] of the Omicron coronavirus variant could be more difficult to distinguish from other strains with routine PCR tests, making it harder to track the global spread of the heavily mutated virus.” 

As Dr. Sarah Otto, a professor in evolutionary biology at the University of British Columbia, had explained, “The S-gene dropout,” which helped researchers and public health officials track Omicron in the early days and verify its higher spread than Delta, is not being picked up in the BA.2 offshoot. Without sequencing, it will be hard to track Omicron cases instead of Delta or other variants. 

Despite assurances that these new subtypes are of no immediate concern, they do not pose the immediate critical questions: What qualities will the next strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, after Omicron, possess? And when will it emerge? 

Dr. Leonardi said that it would be highly essential to continue emphasizing air quality, ventilation and respirators as the US goes into an unprecedented surge of Omicron and Delta outbreaks across the country.

On the news of these recent concerning findings, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” admitted, “When we see real-world data, [it] will determine if the Omicron is well covered by the third dose and for how long. And the second point, I think we will need a fourth dose … [and] with Omicron, we need to wait and see because we have very little information. We may need it faster.” The “faster” refers to projections he had made that a fourth shot would be needed a year after the boosters. 

Figure 2 Weekly hospital admissions in Gauteng

Despite these alarming reports, many public health officials and media pundits have suggested that Omicron will cause only mild disease and advocated allowing the new variant to rapidly infect everyone across the globe regardless of their vaccine status, in the hopes that such a horrific maneuver could quicken the exit out of the pandemic. 

Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Public Health at Brown University and vocal critic of the idea that COVID-19 supposedly does not impact children, Tweeted, “First, we have plenty of evidence that Omicron will spread easily, quickly, and far. We should expect, globally, relatively large waves of infections. How will people fare? It depends on who you are.” In group one, the unvaccinated and not recently infected, how will they fare, he asks. “They are likely to get infected with Omicron at very, very high rates. Many of them will get sick. I hope, but doubt, that the virus will be mild for them.” This includes 4.45 billion people across the globe that are awaiting their turn for these life-saving measures. 

In his usual cavalier attitude, speaking on “Good Morning America,” Dr. Jha offered this unsavory advice, “Omicron is not going to be dominant in the US probably until January. It’s just in small numbers still. For most Americans, if you’re fully vaccinated, especially if you’re boosted, I think travel is pretty reasonable, pretty safe.” And he made this public health message in the face of a seven-day average of more than 120,000 daily infections and a daily average death rate of 1,300. Daily hospitalizations for COVID-19 are now back up to 62,500.

As for the severity of the disease with the Omicron variant, hospitalizations in Gauteng province in South Africa, where the Omicron epidemic continues to surge, have seen new admissions doubling every five days and have already reached 31 percent of the previous peak, belying claims that the variant is less dangerous than Delta. Cambridge University Professor Ridhwaan Suliman explained that hospitalizations lag cases by up to three weeks, “and reporting delays need to wait a week to understand actual hospital admissions for the previous week.”

The active promotion of the spread of Omicron is Trump’s malign neglect on steroids—social murder on an unprecedented scale. Far from an end to the pandemic, spreading the infection will only ignite further variants that have repeatedly been selected for their ability to improve on their capacity to evade immunity. Vaccine makers are now beginning to closely study Omicron in case an “escape variant” emerges—a new strain that can completely evade immunity from current vaccines and previous infections.

Is There Rule of Law in Iraq?

Belkis Wille

“Armed groups,” “paramilitary forces,” “groups following the orders of another country.”

Human rights advocates in Iraq use these descriptions all the time when we refer to the men with guns behind the killings, abductions, and torture of protesters, activists, journalists, and communities seen to have been close to ISIS in Iraq.

In recent days we have seen these men go further than ever before, including a brazen effort on November 7 to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in his home, using three armed drones.

Many don’t dare go further in identifying who exactly these men are, the groups they belong to, and who they are getting their orders from — at least not in public. But on October 25, in a courtroom in Basra, someone finally came out and said it.

And what he said raises a bigger question: Can the Iraqi state even provide the rule of law?

Explosive Revelations About the Murder of Two Journalists

In a nutshell, his testimony indicated that the militias called Popular Mobilization Forces, which were formed to help defeat ISIS and some of which have close ties to Iran, may be calling the shots in Iraq and are independent of — and more powerful than — the government.

On that day, a judge at Basra Criminal Court presided over an investigative hearing for Hamza Kadhim al-Aidani, accused of killing two people on January 10, 2020: Ahmed Abdul Samad, a Dijlah TV reporter, and Safaa Ghali, his cameraman. The local media widely covered al-Aidani’s conviction for the murders and subsequent death sentence handed down on November 1.

What the media covered less, and the government refused to comment on, were the explosive statements al-Aidani made during the hearing.

Two people who attended said that al-Aidani, a Basra police commissioner, admitted that he was also a member of an abusive Popular Mobilization Forces unit formally under the control of the prime minister.

He said he fought with the group to retake the city of Fallujah from the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2016. He admitted that he was a member of a so-called “death squad” and was involved in the killing of the two journalists, the sources said. He said he and team members used the local PMF Commission (the PMFs’ governing body) office in Basra to plan the killings and hide their cars and weapons after the fact.

The court witnesses told Human Rights Watch that Al-Aidani told the judge the police had not arrested the head of his squad within the PMF unit but instead allowed him to flee the country. This was the man, he said, who killed the journalists in front of him. He said that the man told the team that the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had issued a fatwa (a religious legal ruling) that journalists covering protests with calls against Iran and the PMF, and those inciting the protests, should be killed.

He said they targeted Samad because he had covered a protest on December 13, 2019, on a street that the PMF had renamed Khamenei Street in 2019. During the protest, demonstrators burned a large picture of Khamenei that the PMF had hung up on the street. Samad, in his coverage, asked viewers why the street was not instead renamed after an Iraqi leader. The judge ultimately said that he would not include this detail in the record.

Al-Aidani’s apparent comments, and the fact that he was standing trial alone, raise another question. Where were the other suspects connected with this case?

In February, the authorities had said they arrested four people who were behind the killings. But as many questions as his comments raised, they also provided clear and disturbing answers — including just how powerful the PMFs are in Iraq, if they can even give a police commissioner orders to carry out extrajudicial killings.

Out of Control Militias

The PMFs were originally formed in 2014 as informal armed groups outside the state structure to combat the advance of ISIS.

After the collapse of the Iraqi army, Iraq’s parliament voted in November 2016 to incorporate the PMFs into the government’s armed forces. At the time, groups like mine expressed concern that this step might mean letting the fox into the henhouse. But diplomats and senior Iraqi officials assured us in meetings that we were seeing it all wrong. Instead, this was a move to break up these units, by integrating their fighters into state structures that answered to the prime minister as commander-in-chief. This would, they said, break the PMFs’ power.

But that is not what happened. The PMFs have remained independent entities, some with varyingly strong ties to Iran, some pursuing their vision of nationalism, and some pursuing criminal motivations aimed at capturing control of money, oil, and other resources. In addition, the PMFs have been able to infiltrate and control parts of the state security structure.

The result of this is a state in which some of its own fighting and law enforcement units do not answer to the government nor have an interest in protecting the integrity of its structures. They are driven by entirely different motivations.

Large-scale popular protests that began in 2019 demonstrate the way in which the PMFs flaunt government directives. After the initial days of demonstrations in October, and a mounting death toll of protesters, then-Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi publicly ordered his forces not to use live ammunition against people in the streets. And yet armed forces continued to fire live rounds into the crowds, killing protesters.

Through my engagements with the government, I never got the sense that Abdul-Mahdi was lying to the public, but why then was a clear order from the commander-in-chief being ignored?

The truth is that the forces firing on people were either not listening to his orders, or they were receiving orders from elsewhere. Al-Aidani’s testimony in court suggests that there might be some truth to this terrifying prospect.

The Rule of Law in Doubt

When Human Rights Watch documents unlawful killings in Iraq, we call on the authorities to hold those responsible to account, in line with the government’s obligations under international and national law.

But what can the state authorities now do about such groups? I remember the first time I used the phrase “failed state,” when speaking about Iraq, in 2020. A diplomat was asking what I thought could be done to address this wave of killings of protesters and activists, in the context of impunity.

The impunity was caused not necessarily because of a lack of will by judicial authorities to hold killers accountable, or indeed a lack of information as to who is responsible for these assassinations. More often it was caused by the authorities’ knowledge that these groups can easily subvert any and all attempts by the government to hold them accountable.

Al-Aidani’s testimony really does raise the question of whether the Iraqi is able to enforce the rule of law on its streets. If the answer to that is no, or even maybe, the real question is where we go from here.