The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality
Wednesday, February 14th, 2024, By Robert C. Koehler, m http://commonwonders.com/the-war-on-gaza-public-relations-vs-reality/
For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us — the onlooking and supportive patriots — war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption.
At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The reality of war should never directly confront the official PR of those waging it. If it does, God help the war industry!
But that’s what’s happening now, as public support for U.S. complicity in Israel’s devastation of Gaza diminishes, indeed, starts turning to outrage. Official spokesmen for the Biden administration, such as John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, are forced to start mixing apologetic language in with their unwavering support for the bombing and murder of civilians . . . excuse me, Israel’s right to defend itself.
“Civilian deaths are happening, and happening at a rate that obviously we’re not comfortable with,” Kirby said in a New Yorker interview. “But,” he quickly added, “it doesn’t mean that they are intentionally trying to wipe the people of Gaza off the map the same way that Hamas wants to wipe the Israeli people off the map.”
Wow, Israel’s actions and official declarations of intent to obliterate Palestine are making the U.S. government uncomfortable. (But Hamas is still the bad guy.) Oh, if only fragments of actual truth about the war could penetrate such an interview. For instance:
And it was mostly — I mean, the majority of the patients that I treated were children, anywhere from the age of 2 to 17. I mean, I saw horrific eye and facial injuries that I’ve never seen before, eyes shattered in two 6-year-old children with shrapnel that I had to take out, eyes with shrapnel stuck inside, facial injuries. I saw orthopedic injuries where — you know, limbs just cut off and dangling. I saw abdominal injuries that were just horrific. And it was just mass chaos. There were children on the floor, unattended to, with head trauma, people suturing patients without anesthesia on the ground. It was just mass chaos and really horrific, horrific scenes.”
The speaker is Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist recently back from a humanitarian mission at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, near Rafah. He was interviewed by Democracy Now! I wish John Kirby could have been there.
The hospital, he said, was “about 300, 400 percent over capacity. There was patients and bodies lying all over the hospital floor, inside and outside. They had orthopedic devices coming from their legs or their arms. They were getting infected, they were in pain, because they were on the floor, so the conditions weren’t very sterile. And if they survived amputation the first time, the infection would get them . . .”
His words go on and on. OK, you (I mean Kirby) might say, this is war. People get hurt. But Israel has to “defend itself.”
This is self-defense?
“They have killed over 300 or 400 healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics. Ambulances have been bombed. This has all been a systematic sort of — you know, by destroying the healthcare system, you’re contributing to the genocide.”
Khan also notes: “They’ve attacked the sewage system, the water system, so the sewage mixes with the drinking water. And you get diarrheal diseases, bacterial diseases. You know, cholera, typhoid is not far away. Hepatitis A is epidemic there now. They’re living in cramped spaces.”
And it gets even more insane: “What’s going on is now there’s 10,000 to 15,000 bodies that are decomposing. So, it’s raining season right now in Gaza. So all the rainwater mixes with the decomposing bodies, and that bacteria mixes with the drinking water supply, and you get further disease.”
Israel has the right to defend itself. But come on, guys, be a little bit more careful. Kill fewer children. Try not to poison the water. You might say this is public relations with a limp. Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to “refrain” from taking action that could be considered genocidal and, good God, “take measures to improve the humanitarian situation for Palestinian civilians in the enclave,” as Reuters reports.
But it’s war itself — regardless of “intent” — that is causing this hell. The act of war, the weapons of war, the political-economic structure of the globe that is based on endless war and domination, seems never to face serious condemnation, at least not in any official sense. But if we feed war, we feed hell.
Perhaps there’s one bit of recent news about a challenge to the global war industry, and its public relations perpetrators, that isn’t simply a scream from the political margins or cries from the victims. It’s the Transatlantic Civil Servants’ Statement on Gaza, a statement, released on Feb. 2, signed by more than 800 civil servants from the United States, the European Union and about a dozen European countries, declaring: “It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments’ Policies Are Wrong.”
The statement declares the Gaza pummeling “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century.” And it calls on its countries to halt all military support to Israel and use their leverage “to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages” and “develop a strategy for lasting peace.”
A strategy for lasting peace? That’s another way of calling for an end to war. It’s about time.
Another $61 billion to kill more Ukrainians in an unnecessary and losing war
The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine.
The Biden-Schumer Plan to Kill More Ukrainians JEFFREY D. SACHS, Feb 08, 2024, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-biden-schumer-plan-to-kill-more-ukrainians
President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and U.S. taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.
The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.
$61 billion is not nothing. This worse-than-useless outlay would exceed the combined budgets of the U.S. Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program.
Almost exactly 10 years ago this month, Biden did much to put Ukraine on the path to disaster. This is well known to those who have looked carefully at the facts but is kept hidden from view by the White House, the Senate Democrats, and the mainstream media that back Biden. I have previously provided a detailed chronology, with hyperlinks, here.
Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush, Sr. and his German counterpart Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. When the Soviet Union disbanded in December 1991, with Russia as the successor state, American leaders decided to renege.
President Bill Clinton began NATO expansion over the vociferous opposition of top diplomats like George Kennan and the opposition of his own Secretary of Defense, William Perry. In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski upped the ante, with a plan for NATO to expand all the way to Ukraine. He famously wrote that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power.
Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear that NATO expansion to Ukraine is understandably the reddest of Russian redlines.
In 2007, President Vladmir Putin stated that NATO enlargement to that date was a cheat on the 1990 promise, and that it must go no further. Despite these clear warnings, including by his own diplomats, George W. Bush Jr. committed in 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea.
William Burns, now CIA director, and then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, wrote a famous memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet,” explaining that Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement was across Russia’s political spectrum. Most Ukrainians themselves were also firmly against the plan, favoring neutrality over NATO membership. The Ukrainian Rada declared Ukraine’s state sovereignty in 1990 on the basis of becoming “a permanently neutral state.” In 2009, the people of Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych, who ran on a platform of neutrality.
In early 2014, the U.S. decided to help bring down Yanukovych in a coup. This was standard U.S. deep-state operating procedure, one used on dozens of occasions around the world. he CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and NGOs like the Open Society Foundation went to work in Ukraine. The point person was Victoria Nuland, who was first Richard Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy advisor, then George Bush Jr.’s ambassador to NATO, then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, and by 2014 Assistant Secretary of State.
This time, the Russians caught the conspiracy on tape, in an intercepted call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State). Nuland explains to Pyatt that Vice President Joe Biden will help choose and cement the post-coup government. The 2014 Ukraine team, including Biden, Nuland, Jake Sullivan (then and now Biden’s national security advisor), Geoffrey Pyatt, and Antony Blinken (then the deputy national security advisor), remains the Ukraine team today.
It is a team of bunglers. They thought that Yanukovych’s overthrow would quickly usher in NATO expansion. Instead, ethnic Russians in Ukraine virulently rejected the Russophobic post-coup government that was installed by Nuland, and called for autonomy of the ethnically Russian regions. In a referendum, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
Obama, Biden, and their team armed the post-coup government to attack the ethnically Russian regions, thinking this would be the end of it. Yet the regions resisted. Ukraine and the breakaway regions signed the Minsk Agreements to bring an end to the fighting and give constitutional autonomy to the ethnically Russian Donbas. The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council, but the U.S. privately agreed with the Ukrainian government that it was okay to ignore it.
In 2021, after 7 years of fighting and more than 14,000 deaths in the Donbas, Putin called on newly elected President Biden to stop NATO enlargement and engage in negotiations with Russia over mutual security arrangements. Biden rejected Putin’s call to end the gambit of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
In February 2022, Putin launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) invasion to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality. Within a month, a framework agreement to end the fighting was reached between Ukraine and Russia, based on Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine. Biden stepped in to stop the deal, with the U.S. informing Zelensky that the U.S. would not support neutrality.
Biden and team had still more failed tricks up their sleeve. They firmly believed that U.S. financial sanctions—freezing Russia’s assets and cutting it out of the SWIFT banking system—would cripple the Russian economy and cause Putin to relent. In fact, they expected that the ensuing economic crisis would topple him. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.
Then they expected that NATO weaponry would trounce Russia on the battlefield. That too did not happen. Then they expected that Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” in the summer of 2023, backed by Pentagon and CIA planners, would defeat Russia. Instead, Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and wounded—its military hardware destroyed.
The entire war, including the loss of Ukrainian territory, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and the utter waste of more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to date, could easily have been avoided.
Now, Biden and Schumer want to throw more Ukrainian lives and more tens of billions of dollars at this glaring failure. They want to do this in a rushed vote, without any Congressional let alone public oversight, without hearings, and without any strategy. The fact is they want to save Biden from the embarrassment of a decade of puerile and failed plotting, at least until the November election.
There remains one answer for Ukraine’s security: diplomacy and neutrality. That solution doesn’t cost lives or money. It was Ukraine’s choice before the 2014 coup and again in 2022 until stopped by Biden. It is the path that Biden and the Senate Democrats still refuse to take.
Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.
WANT TO KNOW INFO, 31 Jan 24
Over the last 20+ years, WantToKnow.info has summarized over a thousand news articles on deep corruption within our military and intelligence systems. Going deeper, we have gathered a comprehensive collection of verifiable resources, videos, books, and declassified government documents. In this information center, we’ll present a sobering investigation into the US war machine: what it is, who benefits, and who pays the price. The true impacts of US military-intelligence activities in countries all over the world are examined, from World War II to our present moment in time.
Conflict, war, and perceived national security threats provide a common focus for military and CIA partnership. Military activity is heavily informed by CIA intelligence, and public support for this activity is secured by pro-war narratives and voices flooding our media system. What is really going on behind closed doors and on the battlefields is rarely covered in the news, if only for a brief glimpse.
The mainstream press often downplays how ineffective, harmful, and wasteful our current national security strategy is. Over the past century, the CIA’s covert actions have led to countless deaths, human rights abuses, and the undemocratic toppling of numerous foreign governments. While entrenched bureaucracy may be responsible for some of these government agency failings, deeper covert actions within our government have led to chaos and suffering in America and all over the world. Major cover-ups and horrific crimes within the military-intelligence complex continue to remain largely hidden from public awareness.
What is presented in this information center will likely be challenging, sad, and shocking for those who want to know. Yet real information can be empowering. It helps us understand the root causes of human and environmental suffering: the money, players, and belief systems that drive the machine. It invites us to question authority in healthy ways, across political differences. Yet most importantly, challenging information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these injustices to light—fueling open dialogue and constructive action.
Unaccountable Military Spending
The military keeps a lot of little things secret. Most people know the phrase “follow the money.” Unfortunately, following the money is impossible when it comes to keeping track of the flow of US taxpayer dollars at the Pentagon. The US military has consistently failed to keep track of the money it spends. As the defense budget speeds towards $1 trillion, the Pentagon failed an independent audit of its accounting systems for the sixth consecutive year in 2023.
In 2022, the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. That figure increased in 2023, with the department insufficiently documenting 63% of its now $3.8 trillion in assets. We’ve covered the shocking extent of military waste and trillions missing from US DoD accounts since 2003, as documented here.
In 2021, President Joe Biden declared that the United States was “not at war” for the first time in 20 years. However, this is far from the case. Even members of Congress are uninformed about the presence of US military forces in countries all over the world. This is partly due to the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted in 2001, which allows for secret operations primarily conducted by the CIA. Investigations have indicated that the United States has pumped millions into fighting more than a dozen “secret wars” over the last two decades. Since 2008, the US has supported at least nine coups in African countries, with a vast network of military bases scattered across the continent.
Going deeper, military black budgets are even more challenging to calculate. Military black budgets fund classified government programs, psychological operations, special forces operations, occult shoulder patches created for top secret programs, and other clandestine military activities. Former intelligence contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast network of over a dozen spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, funded by a $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013. When the US Space Force was created in 2019, an investigation by Forbes revealed how much of the US Air Force budget was shrouded in secrecy, where “literally hundreds of line items in the proposed budget” were classified.
Arms Industry Corruption
Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons.
— Arundhati Roy
The US dominates the global arms sales industry. Data released in 2023 indicates that the U.S. sold weapons to nearly 60 percent of the world’s authoritarian nations in 2022. Year after year, half of the Pentagon budget doesn’t go to those fighting on the battlegrounds. It goes to corporate weapons contractors who profit lavishly from war. As one defense executive flat-out told Reuters at Europe’s biggest arms fair, “war is good for business.”
From the Middle East, Ukraine, China, Saudi Arabia, and to Nigeria, US arms sales have done little to promote stability and democracy in geopolitically impacted regions. Read an incredibly comprehensive report by The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which illustrates how US arms sales have only fueled unnecessary conflict and war.
Powerful banks like JP Morgan Chase and asset management firms like Blackrock and Vanguard have emerged as major players in the business of war. Some of the world’s biggest banks fund the deadly cluster bomb trade, even as more than 100 countries have banned the unethical use of cluster bombs.
These powerful financial entities are top shareholders of weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Together, the arms industry and the elite financial sector receive more federal money than most federal agencies. In 2022, Lockheed Martin received $106 from the average taxpayer, which is four times more than what taxpayers spent on primary and secondary education. Few Americans would support these war profiteers if they knew where their tax money was going.
Roughly two-thirds of current conflicts — 34 out of 46 — involve one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases U.S. arms sales to combatants in these wars are modest, while in others they play a major role in fueling and sustaining the conflict. Of the U.S.-supplied nations at war, 15 received $50 million or more worth of U.S. arms between 2017 and 2021. This contradicts the longstanding argument that U.S. arms routinely promote stability and deter conflict. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………..more https://www.wanttoknow.info/military-intelligence-corruption-information
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 