Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Israel was “trying to [minimize] civilian casualties. But unfortunately, we’re not successful.” The prime minister’s statement comes as the UN warns that the Israeli fuel embargo of Gaza could cause widespread starvation in the besieged enclave.
In an interview with CBS News on Thursday, the Israeli Prime Minister said Tel Aviv was trying to wipe out Hamas with minimal civilian casualties. He stated, “That’s what we’re trying to do: minimal civilian casualties. But unfortunately, we’re not successful.”
Netanyahu went on to blame Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza. “Any civilian death is a tragedy. And we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way, while Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way,” he argued.
The Israeli leader says his forces have taken steps to warn civilians of upcoming strikes. “So, we send leaflets, [we] call them on their cell phones, and we say: ‘leave’. And many have left,” Netanyahu said.
In the first weeks of the Israeli military campaign, Tel Aviv instructed Gazans to move to the southern half of the strip. However, at least some who fled their homes were killed while trying to evacuate. After fleeing, numerous Gaza residents have been unable to locate basic resources and were forced to return to their homes.
On Wednesday, Israel began instructing Palestinians in southern Gaza to evacuate. It is unclear where the people could go.
Since Israel started bombing Gaza six weeks ago, at least 11,000 civilians, including 4,500 children, have been killed. The UN reports, The UN reports “One in every 57 people living in the Gaza Strip has been killed or wounded.” Dozens of journalists and doctors are among the dead. Over 100 UN staff members have been killed.
In June U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was on a long desired trip to China. Just 24 hours after a somewhat positive statement of the meeting came out Biden blew it by calling Xi Jinping a ‘dictator’.
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning called Mr Biden’s remarks “extremely absurd and irresponsible”. Speaking at a regularly scheduled press conference on Wednesday, she said that the comments were “an open political provocation” that violated diplomatic etiquette.
Yesterday President Xi Jinping of China met U.S. President Joe Biden near San Francisco.
President Xi Jinping noted that there are two options for China and the U.S. in the era of global transformations unseen in a century: One is to enhance solidarity and cooperation and join hands to meet global challenges and promote global security and prosperity; … … and the other is to cling to the zero-sum mentality, provoke rivalry and confrontation, and drive the world toward turmoil and division. The two choices point to two different directions that will decide the future of humanity and Planet Earth.
Xi wanted to chose the first path. But shortly after their meeting Biden walked on the second.
We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In America we’ve seen it intermittently in both directions on racial issues just in this century. It seems related to an intolerant, zero-nuance, take-no-prisoners, and glib attitude among many contenders over racial, religious, and ethnic controversies.
Now it is showing itself in ugly group chants and more personal communication calling for violence against Jews and Arabs, and perhaps even direct harassment and assault. A couple of people have died. Anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism should be off-limits. Regardless of the target, the unrestrained hostility is frightening on many counts, not least of which is its ominous implications for spontaneous social /market cooperation.
I couldn’t possibly know whether these clashes are common or just fringe opportunism — let’s hope the latter. In the heat of a controversy it is possible to misread innocent events and words. The principle of charitable interpretation ought to apply unless solid evidence to the contrary revokes it. We should also be aware that government officials and the news media, for obvious reasons, might be inclined to exaggerate.
The point is that much could be at stake if impressions are not exaggerated — including the trust and cooperation that characterize market-oriented societies. Social strife can have severe consequences. Even public demonstrations can create rippling animosity.
We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In America we’ve seen it intermittently in both directions on racial issues just in this century. It seems related to an intolerant, zero-nuance, take-no-prisoners, and glib attitude among many contenders over racial, religious, and ethnic controversies.
Now it is showing itself in ugly group chants and more personal communication calling for violence against Jews and Arabs, and perhaps even direct harassment and assault. A couple of people have died. Anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism should be off-limits. Regardless of the target, the unrestrained hostility is frightening on many counts, not least of which is its ominous implications for spontaneous social /market cooperation.
I couldn’t possibly know whether these clashes are common or just fringe opportunism — let’s hope the latter. In the heat of a controversy it is possible to misread innocent events and words. The principle of charitable interpretation ought to apply unless solid evidence to the contrary revokes it. We should also be aware that government officials and the news media, for obvious reasons, might be inclined to exaggerate.
The point is that much could be at stake if impressions are not exaggerated — including the trust and cooperation that characterize market-oriented societies. Social strife can have severe consequences. Even public demonstrations can create rippling animosity.
On Wednesday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord revealed that the Department of Defense had failed its sixth audit in a row, with no significant improvements over the last year.
“We are working hard to address audit findings as well as recommendations from the Government Accountability Office,” McCord said in a statement. “The Components are making good progress resulting in meaningful benefits, but we must do more.”
In a repeat of last year’s audit, just one in four of the Pentagon’s auditing units received a clean bill of financial health, though auditors made some progress in accounting for the agency’s $3.8 billion in assets. McCord said that a clean audit likely remains years away, according to Reuters.
The Pentagon remains the only federal agency to have never passed an audit. Its failure to make significant progress has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called for an independent audit of the department.
“The recent failure of the Pentagon’s 6TH audit couldn’t make it clearer that we need accountability & transparency,” Paul posted on X. “No institution is above scrutiny, especially the DoD [with] the largest budget of ANY [federal] agency.”
Ukraine, South Korea, Britain and Germany which form half of the list of the world’s strongest armies, do not operate without Uncle Sam’s expressed permission.
This recent Infographics post listed the world’s top ten military powers. In pole position was Russia, followed by the United States and China. Making up the rest of the field in this order, from fourth to tenth, were Israel, South Korea, Ukraine, Iran, Britain, Germany and Turkey.
First off, the United States is no more an autonomous actor than was the Roman Empire or, indeed, the British Empire at its height and Israel, Ukraine, South Korea, Britain and Germany which, between them, form half of that list, do not operate without Uncle Sam’s expressed permission. Thus, although Ukraine has put up a good show against the Russian women and children it has been slaughtering for over a decade now, that genocide would have to stop this very day, if the United States and its British, German and sundry other satrapies willed it. Though Ukraine is a very successful criminal enterprise, it is not a military power of any consequence.
Having Russia and Iran on that list is reminiscent of how NATO’s media hyped up the Iraqi military here, here, here, here, here, here and here before its criminal genocide in Iraq. Although Iran necessarily has had to develop a range of defensive weapons’ systems, the next twelve months will show how effective they are in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran itself. Much more dangerous to Uncle Sam and its Israeli monster child is how Iran has used soft power, diplomacy and the like, to forge an anti-imperialist alliance across The Fertile Crescent and beyond. China’s can can dancers should be, at the very least, taking copious notes.
For what it is worth, I expect the United States and its Israeli bastard child to bomb Gaza, Southern Lebanon, Syria and Iran itself the same way the Yanks bombed the Củ Chi tunnels, Cambodia and Laos. It is, as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman explained, the reason God loves the US Marine Corps: like Israel, to which we shall return, they kill everything they see. And, like Israel, they get away with it time and again.
South Korea is an odd addition to this list. The role of the Korean peninsula is to act as a buffer between Russia and China to the north and Japan to the South. Should things really kick off against China’s can can dancers, South Korea would once again have its hands full containing their cousins to the north. In the bigger scheme of things, they ain’t, to coin Humphrey Bogart, a hill o’ beans in this crazy world.
Japan, which didn’t make the cut, is a different prospect. Not only have they one of the world’s very best navies but the Yanks are training them to do a Pearl Harbor on the Chinese. As that would provoke a robust reaction from the lethargic Chinese, all bets would be off as regards who is North East Asia’s top dog. Certainly, Chinese reaction would be a good reason to avoid Japan’s cherry blossom season, which would be a shame.
One problem in assessing Japan’s military might is that the United States deliberately ensured that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan would all be but vassals, mere Asian spokes to its own imperial plans and that the United States would remain the hub from where key Asian decisions would be made. Though that has worked admirably since 1945, let’s see how that works out when the Chinese get really rattled and, say, lob barrages of missiles into down-town Tokyo.
The Chinese, for their part, want to be the reincarnation of Churchill’s Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. If China wishes to be a great power, it should start acting like one and not just parrot cliches at the United Nations about Gaza, or whatever else happens to be the topic of the day. Nobody, least of all the Palestinians, needs recycled speeches from the Chinese. Until they are prepared to send Chinese troops to Lebanon and Syria to help Russia defend the territorial sovereignty of those two countries, they should do us all a favour and just shut the fuck up.
If China is in some sort of loose alliance with Iran and Russia, then it should act accordingly with regard to whatever common goals they have. Alliances work best when all parties agree upon what they should do and how their various roles are demarcated. It is not the job of Iranian and Russian soldiers to die in Syria, Ukraine or anywhere else whilst the Chinese just line up contracts to keep their businesses ticking over and, if the Chinese continue to think and act that way, they are planting the seeds of their own destruction.
Every Russian child, I imagine, is well aware that the people and land of Russia soundly defeated the two greatest armies Western Europe ever assembled against their forefathers. Although the Wehrmacht was a first-class army, it should be remembered that they quickly knocked over the French which, prior to September 1939, had the world’s largest and greatest army.
But they did that by blitzkrieg, by their novel lightning war methods which suited them, not by the horrendous slog fest they and their allies stupidly immersed themselves into on the Eastern Front, which was best described by German Colonel Bernd von Kleist as an elephant killing massed colonies of Red Army ants, before being eaten to the bone by ever more colonies of those same Red Army ants.
But, in fairness to the Wehrmacht, constant and unremitting war is what their leaders’ ideology demanded. We see that same rabid ideology rampant amongst America’s Republican and Democratic Parties who think that their greatest (GI) generation’s trick of giving the least and getting the most can be replicated again, just as it was in the First and Second World Wars.
Had the Russian Army folded in Ukraine, it is possible those unearned good times could have returned to Yankee land but that was not to be and so it is again the turn of Palestinian children for NATO’s abattoir. And certainly, Palestinian babies in Gaza’s intensive care units make much easier and, one could say, more traditional American targets than do Chechen troops in Ukraine.
The first step is to admit that the majority from both parties has a taxation-without-representation problem. The next steps are to slash spending and repudiate debt.
A debt-commission sideshow would frustrate this course of action that we need from elected representatives. It would provide cover for the worst of them and bring further delay and destruction to us.
Speaker Mike Johnson said early on that his first priority was to fund the national government. He got this priority dead wrong. His first and only priority needs to be to secure our rights.
Upon becoming speaker, Mike Johnson told the current house of representatives, “We are going to establish a bipartisan debt commission to begin working on this crisis immediately.”
Commissions
But commissions are problems. The key to rapidly surfacing better information and increasing freedom is well-advised extensive change, rapidly performed. Commissions are substitutes for action.
Even simple actions that would just move the Overton window towards freedom would beat freezing that window into place right where it is.
Making a commission bipartisan makes it even more intransigent. The 1981-1982 GoldCommission produced a superb minority report but was compromised in a way that was bipartisan—it was compromised both by its Democrats and by its Republicans other than Lewis Lehrman and Ron Paul.
Spending, debt, and other deprivations are the work products produced by the majorities. For a commission to be high-functioning, the commission’s majority would need to be made up of people who are currently in the minority. These people must be intellectually prepared to understand what to do, and emotionally prepared ready lay it out.
In commissions, like in all committees, the more-principled members compromise their principles to cater to the less-principled members. Committees bury accountability. They help make problem behaviors continue forever.
President Reagan would have done far better to have just convened both houses of that earlier congress and insisted that all of them on one side, versus the Gold Commission’s expert witness Murray Rothbard on the other side, simply debate what legislation would best deliver the gold standard that the Constitution already requires.
If Johnson is determined to have his commission, he must staff it so its majority is drawn from the minority of members who will advance actions that the current majority would block. Also, he should commission it to focus not on the symptom, debt, but on the cause, spending.
Spending
An honest appraisal of the problem has to begin with coming clean that governments are the ultimate free-riders. They take enormous fractions of the value we produce. They produce very little. They do this inefficiently, not disciplined by customers. Even at the most elemental level of criminal justice, they at best block provenprivate adjudication and substitute their monopoly justice. They are parasites.
Across 235 years, congresspeople, both using smaller committees and as committees of the whole, have logrolled pork into massive spending bills, egregiously violating the separation of power by grabbing executive power from presidents and setting themselves up as plural executives.
Their Congressional Budget Office sequesters away their “current-status reports” on appropriation bills, saying only that the office is “currently developing a plan to make more of the account-level analysis of appropriation bills publicly available in an accessible format.”
Congresspeople only selectively release crumbs that make the congresspeople them sound good. The big picture is revealed only after the voting is done and the spending plans are, in practice, irreversible.
John Bolton National Security Advisor to the United States (R) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in Kyiv, Ukraine. 24-08-2018
In August 2022, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton in retaliation for the U.S. killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
But the “hitman” hired to target Bolton was an FBI informant. This was reported Sunday night by 60 Minutes, which glossed over that fact and treated the Bolton-assassination plot as legitimate.
“Lucky for Bolton, the assassin was an FBI informant,” the news show reported, painting the assassination plot as a legitimate threat.
However, DOJ charging papers show that the “plot” was largely contrived, and that Bolton was never in actual danger. Moreover, the DOJ has claimed the man who tried hiring the FBI informant was a member of Iran’s IRGC-QF, but charging papers show that investigators never confirmed that fact.
To top it off, it turns out that a key FBI official overseeing this contrived Bolton-assassination plot was Steven D’Antuono—the same official who led the Detroit field office during the dubious Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot before being transferred to head the DC field office during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest-turned-riot.
According to DOJ charging papers, the man who attempted to assassinate Bolton is Iranian national Shahram Poursafi, who was charged but has not been arrested, presumably because he’s in Iran.
FBI special agent Randi Beck said in an affidavit that he believes Poursafi is a member of the IRGC-QF because he “did not deny” the affiliation, and because he found one picture of Poursafi wearing a jacket with an IRGC-QF patch. The FBI provided no other evidence that Poursafi is actually an IRGC-QF member.
Did anyone ask you—or at least Congress—if it was O.K. to go to war again in the Middle East? After literal decades of fighting in that troubled part of the world, it looks like the U.S. is, without discussion, never mind vigorous debate, already at war in various sub-theaters of someone else’s conflict. See if anything that’s going on seems like war to you.
The U.S. is flying drones over Gaza. The Pentagon says the unmanned aerial vehicle flights began after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and are being conducted “in support of hostage recovery efforts.” The drone missions are also providing “advice and assistance” to Israel. A total of seven different aircraft are flying across the region, four of them per day, passing information to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The U.S. is also supplying precision-guided munitions, fighter aircraft, and air defense capabilities, such as interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome counter-drone systems, to the IDF.
U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are in Israel. Officials anonymously told the New York Times several dozen special operators are on the ground working with the FBI, the State Department, and other U.S. government hostage recovery specialists. A senior Pentagon official told the “Forever Wars” blog that SOF are preparing for “contingencies,” which may include the active retrieval of hostages from Hamas. The U.S. previously said it has sent military advisers to help Israel. Christopher Maier, an assistant secretary of defense, indicated other soldiers have also been deployed. “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things,” Maier said.
Two American veteran-run organizations, the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) and Save Our Allies, sent roughly two dozen volunteers, all former special operators, into Israel and Egypt to support evacuations. Each volunteer was chosen based on them having experience working with Egyptians or Israelis.
The volunteers arrange for local nationals to provide food and medical supplies to trapped Americans, and they have interfaced with the Egyptian military personnel who ultimately have to approve Americans’ departure. The special operations volunteers also coordinate directly with the IDF to ensure Americans are not targeted. They call their work “shepherding” and forswear a kinetic role. SOAA staff are also in Tel Aviv helping to coordinate evacuations. The volunteers’ actions, particularly working with the Egyptian and Israeli forces, come very close to off-limits traditional governmental roles, though the groups deny that.
So if it sometimes seems as though the US has no actual morals or values regarding human rights, it’s because that is precisely the case. You see things like White House spokesman John Kirby crying about civilians dying in Ukraine yet shrugging indifferently at civilians dying in Gaza because his tears are cynical weapons used to advance US interests on the world stage, not a normal empathetic response to human suffering.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been repeatedly refusing to tell the press whether he believes Israel has been following the laws of war in Gaza.
Here’s a transcript from an exchange with The Hill’s Niall Stanage at a White House press conference on Tuesday:
Stanage: You said today, as you’ve said a number of times, about the importance of the laws of war being upheld. Israel has killed around 11,000 Palestinians. Around two thirds of those are women and children. The situation in the hospitals is dire. Israel has dropped an astronomical amount of ordnance in very built-up areas. Is Israel, in your view, abiding by the laws of war? And if it is, how do you come to that conclusion?
Sullivan: Well, as I said yesterday, I — Jake Sullivan, standing here — am not in a position to be judge and jury to make that determination. It’s a legal determination. What I can do is state for you the clear policy of the Biden administration, which we have been unequivocal about from the beginning of this conflict. And that is that even though Hamas is using civilians as human shields, is burrowing into civilian areas with its rocket emplacements that they are continuing to launch every single day at civilian areas in Israel, that puts an added burden on the IDF but it does not lessen their responsibility to act in ways that separate terrorists from civilians and does everything in their power to protect civilian lives.
Stanage: But the —
Sullivan: That is — that was the case. That remains the case today. That is the message that we’ve said publicly and we communicate to our Israeli counterparts privately —
Stanage: But —
Sullivan: — and we do that on a daily basis.
Stanage: I’m just trying to be clear, though. The administration’s view is that the IDF is doing that?
Sullivan: What I’ve told you is that I am not in a position to give you a legal determination to your question. I am not in a position to do that. What I’m in a position to do is to state the U.S. government position on how Israeli operations should be conducted. And that is what I have done. That is what I continue to do. That is what I can do from this podium.
President Biden and his administration have said that Israel *should* abide by the laws of war.
But, as the death toll mounts, does the White House think Israel *is* doing so?
I asked National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan today.
Sullivan performed the same evasive dance routine during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, telling host Dana Bash “I’m not going to sit here and play judge or jury on that question” when asked if Israel is operating according to the rules of war.
It was funny because Bash’s question arose from Sullivan’s own assertion that Israel has a “responsibility to operate according to the rules of war”; Sullivan asserted that this was Israel’s responsibility on his own, but then immediately refused to say whether or not that was actually happening.
Of course, Sullivan has only been performing these freak show contortions with regard to questions about the criminality of governments which align themselves with the interests of Washington; he’s been directly and repeatedly accusing Russia of war crimes in Ukraine without the slightest bit of hesitation from the early days of the conflict.
You see this glaring inconsistency over and over again in US foreign policy, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or which party is in control. The criminality of US allies gets ignored, downplayed and frantically obfuscated, while the criminality of US enemies gets spotlighted, exaggerated, and pushed to the forefront of international attention.
We’re seeing this inconsistency illustrated today by Hillary Clinton, who just published a think piece with The Atlantic war propaganda outlet forcefully defending Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, after spending the last two years tweeting things like “If Russian leadership would rather not be accused of committing war crimes, they should stop bombing hospitals.”
Speaking of former US secretaries of state, it’s probably worth mentioning here that a leaked 2017 State Department memo addressed to then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson explained that this inconsistency regarding the criminality of US allies vs US enemies is actually a standing policy within the inner workings of the US government.
The leaked memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching the political neophyte Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.
