“To my Israeli friends,” said Biden, “this is no doubt a day of relief and reminiscence, similar to the scenes witnessed throughout the United States after President [Barack] Obama ordered the raid to kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011.”

This appears to be the first time a senior U.S. official has publicly admitted that Obama did in fact “order the raid to kill” Bin Laden. Official accounts previously maintained the fiction of a kill-or-capture mission, in which US troops were to capture Bin Laden alive if possible, but were forced to kill him. 

Biden also implied that people all over the United States had publicly celebrated the death of bin Laden, but that was not true. A few thousand people gathered at the site of the World Trade Center in New York and in front of the White House, but, unless they were watching those gatherings on cable news, most Americans did not witness the mythical nationwide “scenes” Biden described.

At the time, US media reflected the public’s mixed feelings about bin Laden’s assassination more truthfully than Biden did. An NPR article titled, “Is it Wrong to Celebrate Bin Laden’s Death?” quoted a beer-drinking “reveler” at the World Trade Center site who questioned what they were all doing there. “It’s weird to celebrate someone’s death,” she said. “It’s not exactly what we’re here to celebrate, but it’s wonderful that people are happy.”

An article in The Atlantic described the gathering at the White House as “surreal,” saying it was “jubilant and fiercely American, but, other than that, it did not know what it was.” The author, Alexis Madrigal, wrote that the only focal points for the gathering were a few roving TV cameras. Many in the crowd were Georgetown students, who led chants of “USA, USA”, and “Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye,” interspersed with renditions of the Georgetown fight song. When the students flagged, Washington Capitals hockey fans stepped up, chanting “Caps, Caps, Caps.”

Related Reading

Now It’s Clear, Osama bin Laden Won the War on Terror

“There were no transcendent moments,” Madrigal observed, “Perhaps people did their own private accounting, but as a public, we were loud and boorish and silly. We treated the killing of a man who promoted the killing of thousands of Americans like a game with no consideration of the past or future costs.”

Biden’s linking of Yahya Sinwar’s killing to Bin Laden’s relied on the mythical, potted version of American history peddled by cable news and corporate politicians like himself, his Vice President Kamala Harris and his predecessor Donald Trump.

 Whatever they say becomes the news, and what really happened in the real world is swept down the memory hole as in George Orwell’s 1984. Their version of reality is a dumbed-down, politicized view of the world tailored for political TV ads and teleprompters, leaving Americans hopelessly misinformed about the world we live in, and dangerously so in times of real crisis.

It is no wonder that young people who want to understand the crisis in Gaza turn directly to firsthand accounts and images of the genocide to find out what our “leaders” and the “news” refuse to tell or show us.

So how should we see Yahya Sinwar?

The context in which Americans hear “Hamas” from politicians and the media defines it as a “terrorist” group, setting the stage for Biden to claim that killing its leader “proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes.”

The whole premise of America’s war on “terror” was that terrorism is the product of religious indoctrination and an irrational view of the world that leads people to “hate our freedom.” The warmongers used this framing to deprive the public of the natural ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and apply the “golden rule”: to treat others the way we would want them to treat us.

After 76 years of gradual genocide in Palestine, there are Palestinian exiles all over the world, including in the United States. Many Americans know Palestinians and know that they are remarkably patient and tolerant people. They have lived under successive occupations, by the Ottoman Turks, the British and now the Israelis. They have never been quick to resort to armed resistance, and many still reject it and continue to work peacefully toward their liberation.

But to deny that they have a legitimate right to resist the militarized theft of their homeland by Israel, after 76 years of seeing it invaded, seized, occupied and annexed, piece by piece, is not “justice.” It is a historic injustice.

Related Reading

My Experience Working Alongside a Former Member of Hamas

To say that Israel “has a right to defend itself” cannot possibly justify the genocidal mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, every day for the past year, now escalating yet again in northern Gaza. Israel does have a right to defend itself — that is a truism — but only within the limits of necessity and proportionality, and not in Gaza, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July, international law requires Israel to withdraw its forces from all the territories it occupied in 1967, including Gaza.

So, if the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal military occupation by Israel, who is to lead that resistance? Hamas emerged as the leading resistance group after the previous Fatah government let Israel use the 1990s Oslo Accords as cover to keep building Israeli settlements all over the land it was supposed to withdraw from and return to the Palestinians. 

The failure of the Oslo Accords persuaded most Palestinians that they needed new leadership, and so they elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian parliament in 2006, with Ismail Haniyeh, also now killed by Israel, as prime minister. 

The Hamas government rejected the previous government’s recognition of Israel, its renunciation of armed resistance and its commitments under the Oslo Accords. This was met with international opposition led by Israel and the United States, who imposed economic sanctions while continuing to support and fund President Mahmoud Abbas and an unelected Fatah government in the West Bank. 

Fighting between Fatah and Hamas killed 600 people and left the elected Hamas government in power in Gaza, with Abbas and Fatah in control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The fog of war on October 7, 2023

Israel tightened its economic blockade of Gaza and conducted regular bombing campaigns and invasions of Gaza that killed 1,965 people in 2008 and 2009, and 2,327 in 2014. By the time it launched its full-scale genocide in October 2023, Israel had already killed 7,087 Palestinians since 2008. 

Hamas’s breakout from Gaza on October 7, 2023, was initially a well-planned military operation that surprised Israel’s defense forces and the whole world. But it went badly wrong when the Israeli military crumbled and militiamen from different Palestinian groups found themselves confronting civilians in kibbutzes and thousands of young people at the Nova music festival.

It is still impossible to be sure how many civilians the Palestinians really killed that day, and how many more were killed by Israeli forces responding to the break-out with overwhelming force. Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun have documented how Israel activated its “Hannibal Directive,” under which Israeli forces were ordered to kill their own people rather than allow them to be taken to Gaza as prisoners. Israeli forces also destroyed homes in kibbutzes with both Palestinian militants and Israeli civilians still inside them.

Of the 780 unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7, Palestinians are presumed to have killed hundreds, while Israeli military forces killed hundreds more. The Israeli military deployed far more powerful weapons than the Palestinians, including 8 Apache attack helicopters, 2 F-16 and 2 F-35 warplanes, 2 Hermes drones and 23 Merkava tanks. 

If an accurate count were to be made, it is entirely possible that the Israeli forces killed more civilians than the Palestinians did, as well as some of the 374 Israeli troops, police and security forces who were also killed that day.

After a year of brutal, indiscriminate, criminal Israeli assaults, the fact that Hamas is still an effective military force defending Gaza reveals a high level of military organization and discipline, which stands in sharp contrast to the Israeli-propagated image of a bloodthirsty rabble on an undisciplined killing spree on October 7. 

It is also still unclear how many of the Palestinians who surged into Israel that day were fully trained Hamas special operations forces, how many were members of other armed groups, and how many were just stunned Palestinian civilians excitedly joining an unexpected jailbreak. So we also don’t know how many civilians were killed by each of these different groups of Palestinians.

Conclusion

What Yahya Sinwar and the Palestinians of Gaza have shown the world for the past year is that they will never surrender their rights to self-determination and the universal protections of international law. And, when all else fails, as it has for 67 years, some of them will continue to turn to armed resistance, a right that most Americans would passionately uphold if the United States was militarily invaded and occupied like Palestine.

On the US and Israeli side, our governments and armed forces have shown the world that they are prepared to commit genocide, arguably the most serious international crime of all, before they will give up their insatiable ambitions to impose their will on the world by military force.  

The last thing Yahya Sinwar did before he was killed by an Israeli tank shell was to pick up a stick and throw it at an Israeli drone. To the last, he understood the power and symbolism of resistance.His example will endure as an inspiration to oppressed people everywhere, but especially throughout the Global South.

In July, a UN panel of human rights experts hailed the ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation must end. “The Court has finally reaffirmed a principle that seemed unclear, even to the United Nations: Freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable,” the experts said.

Like Nelson Mandela, who led the movement against apartheid in South Africa, Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and other martyred Hamas leaders, though branded terrorists by Western leaders, will live on in the hearts of many.Biden and Netanyahu, on the other hand — like Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s “father of apartheid” — are more likely to be remembered as brutal colonialists who tried to hold back the tide of history. Verwoerd’s government sentenced Nelson Mandela to life in prison in 1964 for planning a revolution that Mandela and his people eventually won. Yahya Sinwar’s people will continue their struggle, until they too win their freedom, from the river to the sea.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Biden Calls Sinwar a Terrorist, but He Was a Leader and a Martyr appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire … That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

Conditioning human beings to kill

This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of US Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a World War I veteran and the chief combat historian of the US Army in World War II. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with US troops in the Pacific and Europe, and he documented his findings in his book Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.

One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of US troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.

Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.

Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into US military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.

How military indoctrination affected US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan

That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent US wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the US hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the US occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist crimes in the US and labeling Iraqis who resisted the US invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”

A Zogby poll of US forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of US troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington. Three years into the US occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading US troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.

The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court-martial testimony in the rare cases when US troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court-martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”

War in the age of Iraq syndrome

US combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257 killed) were only a fraction of the US combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,686), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in World War II. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.

And yet, US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the US, leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The US government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of US ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.

After the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand US global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. 

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the US Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Madeleine Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.

“There is a refrain …” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”

During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country — the majority of countries — would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the one billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this — what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”

When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of US military force. 

Instead, the response of the US political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of US ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” US support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and now Ukraine and Palestine.

The absence of large numbers of US casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars — until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.

Proxy wars are no less destructive than other wars

The results of these US proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining US “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world. 

In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of US military and economic power, whether by US wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions.

Now, the US-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the administration prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza. 

In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”

Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: A Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read aloud in parliament. It ended, “On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”  

As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the US must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” US leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own. 

Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving US forces, US proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making US wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.

Neither the changes to US military training since World War II nor the current US strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.

If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all. 

If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends and “allies” in other countries. 

We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the UN Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post This Is How America Manipulates People Into Killing appeared first on Fair Observer.

The top priority of Russian airstrikes in Ukraine has been to destroy as many of these weapons as possible before they reach the frontlines of the war. Therefore, it is not clear how militarily effective these massive arms shipments really are. The other leg of US “support” for Ukraine are economic and financial sanctions against Russia, whose effectiveness is also highly uncertain.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is visiting Moscow and Kyiv to try to kick start negotiations for a ceasefire and a peace agreement. Since hopes for earlier peace negotiations in Belarus and Turkey have been washed away in a tide of military escalation, hostile rhetoric and politicized war crimes accusations, Guterres’ mission may now be the best hope for peace in Ukraine.  

This pattern of early hopes for a diplomatic resolution that are quickly dashed by a war psychosis is not unusual. Data on how wars end from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) make it clear that the first month of a war offers the best chance for a negotiated peace agreement. That window has now passed for Ukraine. 

An analysis of the UCDP data by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that 44% of wars that end within a month conclude with a ceasefire and peace agreement rather than the decisive defeat of either side. This percentage decreases to 24% in wars that last between a month and a year. Once wars rage on into a second year, they become even more intractable and usually last more than ten years.

CSIS fellow Benjamin Jensen, who analyzed the UCDP data, concluded, “The time for diplomacy is now. The longer a war lasts absent concessions by both parties, the more likely it is to escalate into a protracted conflict… In addition to punishment, Russian officials need a viable diplomatic off-ramp that addresses the concerns of all parties.”

To be successful, diplomacy leading to a peace agreement must meet five basic conditions:

First, all sides must gain benefits from the peace agreement that outweigh what they think they can gain by war.

US and allied officials are waging an information war to promote the idea that Russia is losing the war and that Ukraine can militarily defeat Russia, even as some officials admit that such a war could last several years.

In reality, neither side will benefit from a protracted war that lasts for many months or years. The lives of millions of Ukrainians will be ruined. Russians face the specter of another Afghanistan-style military quagmire, as the Soviet Union and, more recently, the US experienced in Afghanistan. 

In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a peace agreement already exist. They are fourfold. First, Russian forces withdraw from Ukraine. Second, Ukraine promises neutrality and becomes an independent buffer state between NATO and Russia. Third, all Ukrainians get the right of self-determination, including those in Crimea and Donbas. Finally, all parties conclude a regional security agreement that protects everyone and prevents new wars. 

Both sides are essentially fighting to strengthen their hand for concluding an eventual agreement along the above lines. How many people must die before the details can be worked out across a negotiating table instead of over the rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities?

Second, mediators must be impartial and trusted by both sides.

The US has monopolized the role of a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for decades, even as it openly backs and arms one side and abuses its UN veto to prevent international action. This has been a transparent model for endless war.  

Turkey has so far acted as the principal mediator between Russia and Ukraine, but it is a NATO member that has supplied drones, weapons and military training to the latter. Both sides have accepted Turkey’s mediation, but can Turkey really be an honest broker? 

The UN could play a legitimate role, as it is doing in Yemen, where the two sides are finally observing a two-month ceasefire. But even with the UN’s best efforts, it has taken years to negotiate this fragile pause in the war.    

Third, the agreement must address the main concerns of all parties to the war.

In 2014, the US-backed overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government and the massacre of  protesters in Odessa led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The first Minsk Protocol agreement in September 2014 failed to end the ensuing civil war in Eastern Ukraine. A critical difference in the Minsk II agreement in February 2015 was that representatives of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk republics were included in the negotiations, and the agreement succeeded in ending the worst fighting and preventing a major new outbreak of war for 7 years.

There is another party that was largely absent from the negotiations in Belarus and Turkey: the women of Russia and Ukraine, who make up half the population of both countries. While some women are fighting, many more can speak as victims of and refugees from a war unleashed mainly by men. The voices of women at the table would be a constant reminder of the human costs of war and that the lives of women and children are at stake.    

Even when one side militarily wins a war, the grievances of the losers as well as unresolved political and strategic issues often sow the seeds of future wars. As Jensen of CSIS suggested, the desires of US and Western politicians to punish and gain strategic advantage over Russia must not be allowed to prevent a comprehensive resolution that addresses the concerns of all sides and ensures a lasting peace.     

Fourth, there must be a step-by-step roadmap to a stable and lasting peace that all sides are committed to.

The Minsk II agreement led to a fragile ceasefire and established a roadmap to a political solution. But the Ukrainian government and parliament, under first Petro Poroshenko and then Volodymyr Zelensky, failed to take the next steps that Poroshenko agreed to in Minsk in 2015. These included passing laws and bringing constitutional changes to permit independent, internationally-supervised elections in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with autonomy within a federalized Ukrainian state.

Now that these failures have led to Russian recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics’  independence, a new peace agreement must revisit and resolve their status, and that of Crimea. The agreement must do so, in ways that all sides will be committed to, whether that is through the autonomy promised in Minsk II or formal, recognized independence from Ukraine. 

A sticking point in the peace negotiations in Turkey was Ukraine’s need for solid security guarantees to ensure that Russia won’t invade Ukrainian territory again. The UN Charter formally protects all countries from international aggression, but it has repeatedly failed to do so when the aggressor wields a veto in the Security Council. So how can a neutral Ukraine be reassured that it will be safe from attack in the future? And how can all parties be sure that the others will stick to the agreement this time?

Fifth, outside powers must not undermine the negotiation or implementation of a peace agreement.

Although the US and its NATO allies are not active warring parties in Ukraine, their role in provoking this crisis through NATO expansion and the 2014 Ukrainian uprising, supporting Kyiv’s abandonment of the Minsk II agreement and flooding Ukraine with weapons, make them an “elephant in the room” that will cast a long shadow over the negotiating table, wherever that is.

In April 2012, Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general, drew up a six-point plan for a UN-monitored ceasefire and political transition in Syria. But at the very moment that the Annan plan took effect and UN ceasefire monitors were in place, the US, NATO and their Arab monarchist allies held three “Friends of Syria” conferences, where they pledged virtually unlimited financial and military aid to the Al Qaeda-linked rebels they were backing to overthrow the Syrian government. This encouraged the rebels to ignore the ceasefire, and led to another decade of war for the people of Syria. 

The fragile nature of peace negotiations over Ukraine make success highly vulnerable to such powerful external influences. The US backed Ukraine in a confrontational approach to the civil war in Donbas instead of supporting the terms of the Minsk II agreement, and this has led to war with Russia. Now Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavosoglu, has told CNN Turk that unnamed NATO members “want the war to continue,” in order to keep weakening Russia.

The time for peace is now. 

How the US and its NATO allies act now and in the coming months will be crucial in determining whether Ukraine is destroyed by years of war, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, or whether this war ends quickly through a diplomatic process that brings peace, security and stability to the people of Russia, Ukraine and their neighbors.

If the US wants to help restore peace in Ukraine, it must diplomatically support peace negotiations, and make it clear to its ally, Ukraine, that it will support any concessions that Ukrainian negotiators believe are necessary to clinch a peace agreement with Russia. 

Whatever mediator Russia and Ukraine agree to work with to try to resolve this crisis, the US must give the diplomatic process its full, unreserved support, both in public and behind closed doors. It must also ensure that its own actions do not undermine the peace process in Ukraine as they did the Annan plan in Syria in 2012. 

One of the most critical steps that US and NATO leaders can take to provide an incentive for Russia to agree to a negotiated peace is to commit to lifting their sanctions if and when Russia complies with a withdrawal agreement. Without such a commitment, the sanctions have no moral or practical value as leverage over Russia and are only an arbitrary form of collective punishment against its people, and against poor people everywhere who can no longer afford food to feed their families. As the de facto leader of the NATO military alliance, the US position on this question will be crucial. 

So policy decisions by the US will have a critical impact on whether there will soon be peace in Ukraine, or only a much longer and bloodier war. The test for US policymakers, and for Americans who care about the people of Ukraine, must be to ask which outcome US policy choices are likely to lead to and ensure that they support a path to peace.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Could the US Bring Peace to Ukraine? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The US and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not. 

The Bitter Fruits of US Intervention

Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. US sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments. 

Meanwhile, US-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a US and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.     

But the risks and consequences of the US Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?

Mutually Assured Destruction

This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the US and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians and neutrals alike.           

In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating, “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

US nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a US “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.

The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the US would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” 

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The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the US, allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on US or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a US nuclear first strike.     

So, as the US Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the US use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China. 

For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the US or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the US and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.

To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between US and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.

NATO countries, led by the United States and UK, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.

Nuclear Risks Escalate 

The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Joe Biden to escalate the US role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.

Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than US forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like US “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every US war. 

The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine. 

But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.

Since the US and the USSR blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between US and Soviet officials. 

But the US has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also published detailed analyses of how specific technological advances in US nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war. 

Peace Dividend Lost

The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. US officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of US and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.

As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the US and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancy from 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.

President Vladimir Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against US and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government. 

Russia worked with the US to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the US role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging US-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.

The Cold War Is Back  

It is the epitome of official insanity that US, NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy. 

While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The US and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.

Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for US imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya. 

If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.

This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior. 

If Americans just echo US propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take. 

But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together. 

A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The MADness of the Resurgent US Cold War With Russia appeared first on Fair Observer.

Pandemic Family Life: The Struggles Behind Closed Doors

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Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the coronavirus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,983 confirmed cases and 53 deaths. However, more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (UK) and Delta (India) variants.

Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.

COVID-19 Variants

This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.

A new study published in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha, Beta (South Africa) and Delta variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID-19 virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the United Kingdom. 

The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in Britain and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The UK, which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21, but that is now in question.    

China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The US and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 6 to 8 million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures. 

Vaccinating the World

Now, the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries that have good supplies of doses postpone vaccinating healthy young people and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild. President Joe Biden has announced that the US is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through COVAX, the WHO’s global vaccine-sharing program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed. 

Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) TRIPS rules, formally known as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. But that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the UK, Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a TRIPS Council meeting on June 8-9 must agree to waive patent monopolies.

Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are US allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy. So far, Biden’s team has taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the nuclear deal with Iran, and war-crime-fueling weapons peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest.

Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion — 3% of the annual US budget for weapons and war — to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two progressives in Congress have signed a letter addressed to President Biden to urge him to fund such a plan.

If the world can agree to make and distribute a people’s vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud. The ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity. For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) warns that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries that profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint. 

Neoliberalism

That is the very meaning of laissez-faire — to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us or even for life on Earth. As economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all. Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19^th-century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21^st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.     

Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the US political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply coopts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.

But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced. 

In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Sebastian Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So, the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.

In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments. In 2003, former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the US-led invasion “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While American forces and US-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next 17 years. Now, maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.

In Bolivia, also in 2019, a US-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election and Morales’ Movement for Socialism (MAS) party was restored to power. Now, Luis Arce, the economy minister under Morales, is Bolivia’s president.

Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the 22^nd century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The World Needs a People’s Vaccine appeared first on Fair Observer.