The US rarely has ‘unblemished’ partners so it will pour more defensive weapons into Saudi Arabia despite outrage over Khashoggi and Yemen, Pentagon chief James Mattis admitted as the nation handed the kingdom a big new deal.
The most-recent major US-Saudi arms deal was rolled out on Wednesday. Riyadh is seeking to get THAAD air defense missile systems, and the terms of the purchase were quietly formalized this week, the State Department announced. Under the $15 billion contract, Riyadh will receive 44 THAAD launchers, missiles and related equipment.
The news of a yet another lucrative contract came the very same day Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to defend the kingdom against the mounting anger in the Senate over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the bloody war in Yemen. Speaking at a closed-door briefing, they explained that Saudi Arabia is simply too important to scrap existing bonds.
The Pentagon’s chief called Riyadh “fundamental” to regional and Israeli security, as well as crucial for the US’ own interests.
“We are seldom free to work with unblemished partners,” Mattis bluntly admitted. He went on to argue that the ties with the kingdom “cannot be dismissed” even as Washington condemned Khashoggi’s death.
The officials also came out of their way to shield Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, against the allegations that he might have been in on the plan to kill Khashoggi all along.
“We have no smoking gun the Crown Prince was involved, not the intelligence community or anyone else. There is no smoking gun,”Mattis told reporters. Pompeo agreed with him, claiming there is “no direct reporting” connecting MBS with the order to kill the journalist.
Their statements seemed to run contrary to the CIA. According to media reports, intelligence officials, in fact, have believed “for weeks”that there is no way that Jamal Khashoggi’s murder could have happened without the Crown Prince’s approval.
Earlier, President Donald Trump went even further, suggesting that “maybe” MBS “had knowledge” of Khashoggi’s killing. But that still doesn’t change much. As Trump poignantly explained, it would we “foolish” to ditch the $450 billion of investments the Saudis promised the US. He singled out the $110 billion of existing arms contacts Washington can’t afford to lose, especially to rivals Russia and China. The president also praised the Arab kingdom as the centerpiece in the fight against arch-nemesis, Iran.
Washington’s steadfast defense and loyalty to Saudi Arabia is nothing new. Over the years, numerous rights groups have been begging the White House to stop aiding Riyadh, citing its abysmal track record on human rights. Before the Khashoggi case shocked the world and launched the Saudis in a PR nightmare, there was the dissident Raif Badawi. The creator of the blog ‘Free Saudi Liberals’ was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for criticizing the government. Human rights campaigners called on the kingdom’s Western allies, including the US, to pressure it into releasing Badawi. Washington’s efforts to have the dissident freed went little beyond the generic statements of “concern.”
In the case of Khashoggi, the US sanctioned 17 Saudi officials but fell short of targeting the country’s leadership. The criticism of the nation’s ruling royal family is largely absent from the rhetoric coming from the White House. And when it does, it gets sandbagged with praise of the kingdom’s strategic role in the region. The US, nevertheless, stays true to the long-standing tradition of backing its principal ally in the Middle East. It does so despite multiple allegations and reports of human rights abuses by Riyadh.
Similarly, little to no action was taken to address the harrowing reports on the kingdom’s role in the bloody conflict in Yemen. The US-made weapons and military gear is frequently used during the Saudi-led bombing campaign which regularly claims lives of civilians, the rights groups warm. Yet, Riyadh’s status as a close and valuable ally effectively deterred politicians in Washington from attacking the Gulf nation.
Only on Wednesday did the US senators vote to launch debates whether the state should stop supporting the Saudi war in Yemen. Several lawmakers earlier penned a letter urging Trump to investigate the role of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Khashoggi’s death.
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At first glance, it may seem like a positive move. The Trump administration and London are both putting pressure on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to implement a ceasefire in Yemen’s atrocious war. Washington and London are also calling for warring sides to enter into peace negotiations within a month.
What’s wrong with that, you may ask? Well, as Houthi rebels who took over Yemen at the end of 2014 are saying, the country has been under aggression for the past three years from a Saudi-led coalition supported militarily by the US, Britain and France. The unrelenting war on the poorest country in the Middle East has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades, with over half of the population – some 14 million people – at risk of starvation, according to the UN.
Therefore, the appropriate legal and moral course of action now is not merely a ceasefire or talks. It is for the Western-backed Saudi, Emirati coalition to immediately halt its criminal aggression against Yemen. In short, stop the foreign interference in Yemen’s sovereign affairs.
US Secretary of State James Mattis and Britain’s Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt appear to be impelled by humanitarian concern for the massive human suffering in Yemen with their recent calls for cessation of hostilities.
But a more nuanced reading of their exhortations suggest that the real concern is to burnish the blood-soaked image of the Saudi coalition that their governments support, and, secondly, to inveigle the Houthis into a negotiations framework that will result in undue foreign influence over Yemen’s politics.
Last week, Washington announced that it was suspending mid-air refueling flights for Saudi and Emirati warplanes that have been pounding Yemen since March 2015, which has resulted in a horrendous death toll among civilians. The indiscriminate killing of the Saudis and Emirati air strikes has been amply documented, albeit downplayed by Western media. The latter keep repeating a figure of 10,000 dead in Yemen – a figure which has bizarrely remained unchanged for at least the past two years. The real death toll from air strikes is unknown but likely to be near 50,000.
American, British and French military support for the murderous operations in Yemen should have stopped months, even years ago, if official humanitarian concerns were genuine.
The question is: why the sudden effort by Washington and London, as well as Paris, to call for a ceasefire and follow-on political talks?
One factor, no doubt, is the barbaric murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by assassins linked to the House of Saud. Turkish authorities believe that Khashoggi was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, his body hacked to pieces and dissolved in industrial-strength acid. Audiotapes obtained by the Turkish authorities have implicated the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder plot against the dissident journalist.
The gruesome details of Khashoggi’s killing and the blatant lies that the Saudi rulers have issued to cover up their barbarity have heaped immense pressure on Washington, London and Paris over their close ties with the House of Saud. Public outrage has demanded that sanctions be imposed on Riyadh, such as cancelling multi-billion-dollar arms deals.
It seems significant that the acute disgrace over the appalling Khashoggi affair and the association of the US, British and French governments with such a despotic Saudi regime has in turn prompted these Western powers to mount a damage-limitation exercise in public relations.
This is where the Yemen war provides an opportunity for the Western powers and their Saudi clients to salvage their tarnished public image.
By pushing for a ceasefire in Yemen, Washington, London and Paris can claim to be “getting tough” with the Saudis for the sake of alleviating “humanitarian suffering”. By appearing to respond to the Western calls for a ceasefire, the Saudis can then also claim they are relenting out of humane concern.
However, such pleas have not stopped Saudi and Emirati-backed militia on the ground besieging the Yemeni port city of Hodeida on the Red Sea, for which 80-90 per cent of the entire population in the country rely on for food and other vital supplies. In other words, the Western-backed Saudi coalition is using starvation tactics to bring the Houthi rebels and the wider Yemeni population to their knees. That is a monstrous war crime.
What Mattis is calling for in terms of ceasefire is for all heavy weapons in Yemen to be put under the control of United Nations peacekeepers. Washington is also demanding that the Houthis rebels withdraw from the country’s border with Saudi Arabia, from where the rebels have mounted missile attacks which have gravely harassed the Saudis, including in the capital Riyadh. The Houthis have struck Saudi territory in response to the air strikes.
So, what the Americans, British and French are striving for is, firstly, a respite from the sordid publicity over the Khashoggi killing. If the “humanitarian appeal” over Yemen succeeds to placate Western public outrage, then these governments will be able to continue business-as-usual selling the Saudi regime lucrative weapons contracts.
Secondly, by drawing the Houthi rebels into “peace negotiations” that will also burnish the Western and Saudi public image, as well as – equally importantly – forcing the rebels into accepting a compromise on their revolutionary government. By entering negotiations with the Saudi-backed remnants of the exiled Yemeni leader Mansour Hadi, the Houthis will inevitably have to accept making concessions and allowing an accommodation with the ousted, discredited regime.
Mansour Hadi, who has been living in exile in Saudi Arabia since the Houthis seized power, was reviled by most Yemenis for his corruption and being a puppet of the Saudis and Americans. His exiled clique is routinely and mendaciously referred to by Western media as the “internationally recognized government of Yemen”.
When he fled the country in ignominy in early 2015, the Houthi rebels had succeeded in spearheading a popular revolt. The rebels profess a branch of Shia Islam, but there was every indication that they had a relatively democratic program for pluralist governance.
The Saudi and American sponsors of the ousted Mansour Hadi reacted to the overthrow of their puppet by launching an air war on Yemen in late March 2015 – a war which has continued unremittingly ever since, with Britain and France also joining the profitable slaughter by suppling warplanes and missiles.
Another lie told by Western media is that the rebels are proxies of Iran, a lie which is used to “justify” the Western-backed criminal war against the country. Iran supports the Houthis diplomatically, but there is no evidence of arms supplies. Even if there was, so what? That wouldn’t justify aerial bombardment of the country and its people.
The devastation inflicted on Yemen and its people has largely been ignored by Western news media. Despite the lack of coverage, the Western public have nevertheless become aware of the horror and their governments’ complicity. Harrowing images of skeletal children dying from starvation and lack of basic medicines have shamed Washington, London and Paris into taking some action, however despicably inadequate and long overdue.
The recent impetus for a ceasefire and talks in Yemen coming from the US and its Western allies is not due to humanitarianism. It’s a cynical PR exercise to whitewash bloodied images – both theirs and that of their Saudi client regime. The Yemen war has been shown to be a sickening charnel house in a futile bid for Western regime change against the Houthi revolution. By forcing the Houthis into negotiations, the Western powers hope to achieve their regime change objective by another tactic – and gain PR capital at the same time.
If Washington, London and Paris were really serious about ending the suffering in Yemen, they would simply demand that the aggression stops immediately, so that the Yemenis are allowed to determine their own political future without foreign interference. But the Western powers will not do that because their interference in Yemen, along with the Saudis, is the very reason why this criminal war of aggression started and grinds on.
In the Department of Defense authored summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States for 2018, Secretary James Mattis quite succinctly sets out the challenges and goals of the U.S. military in the immediate future. Importantly, he acknowledges that the U.S. had become far too focused on counter-insurgency over the past two decades, but he seems to miss the causation of this mission in the first place. U.S. foreign policy, and its reliance on military intervention to solve all perceived problems, regime change and imperialist adventurism, resulted in the need to occupy nations, or destroy them. This leads to the growth of insurgencies, and the strengthening of long simmering religious radicalism and anti-western sentiment in the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. military willfully threw itself headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies were willing to engage in. They obviously had not reflected upon the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, nor the nature of their new enemies. As casualties mounted due to roadside IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers hidden amongst civilians, the U.S. military and the defense industry were forced to find ways to protect soldiers and make vehicle less vulnerable to these types of attacks. This resulted in vehicles of every description being armored and new IED resistant vehicles being designed and fielded in large numbers. This in turn, equated to a vast amount of time, effort and money. It also focused both the U.S. military services and the defense industry away from fighting conventional wars against peer adversaries.
After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S. leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals. They funded and armed these groups, provided clandestine training, and facilitated the logistical movement of fighters and weapons into a sovereign nation to cause its disintegration. In these two examples they decided not to occupy these countries, but to destroy all semblance of ordered society and replace it with brutally violent chaos. The U.S. political and military leadership seems to have learned that their past adventurism resulted in costly occupations, yet instead of refraining from using the military option as a tool to alter geopolitical realities they did not like, they merely opted to abandon the responsibility of occupation and reconstruction all together.
Benghazi, Libya. An example of democratic progress and stability in North Africa courtesy of U.S. led “humanitarian intervention”.
While Secretary Mattis describes the “near peer” nations China and Russia as “revisionist powers”, it was not these nations that made the irresponsible and reckless decisions that have weakened the U.S. military establishment, nor aim to revise the ill-conceived and executed catastrophes of their American “peers”. They have reached a state of military and technological parity with, and in many cases a position of superiority vis a vis the United States, because they exercised better judgement over the past two decades, invested their time, talent and treasure in developing powerful conventional and nuclear forces, and refrained from using their national defense assets to punish their perceived adversaries in such a way that more damage was caused to themselves. In many ways, the poor example of the United States and its ill-conceived military expeditions, influenced both Russia and China to advance along different paths. Now, without recognizing and acknowledging the failures of leadership and decision making that have lead the U.S. military to a weakened state, the United States has declared that it is now in a period of strategic competition with the two other strongest kids on the block.
In order to understand how Secretary Mattis has come to such a declaration, we have to look at the U.S. military decisions, actions, mistakes, and failures of leadership at the highest levels that have brought us to this point. A brief analysis of the resultant metamorphosis of the United States military from a robust and balanced conventional fighting force, backed up by a viable nuclear deterrent into a force obsessed with occupation and counterinsurgency must be conducted. This must be followed by a study of how the U.S. military has decided to invest its extensive funding, the weapons systems it has pursued, and how it envisions that it is best suited to protect the national security interests of the state. Finally, a comparison must be conducted of the capabilities of its declared strategic adversaries. A conclusion can then be made regarding the ability of the United States military to successfully engage and defeat these adversaries in a future conflict.
Imperial Expansion, Regime Change and Occupation
When the Soviet Union dissolved in December of 1991, a global power vacuum was immediately created. Regardless of the many assurances given to the Gorbachev government (which were finally revealed in the December 2017 National Security Archive releases of official NATO correspondence) that NATO would not expand and that the former Soviet federated states would be included in the established European economic and security apparatus, the United States immediately embarked on a policy of NATO expansion and economic exploitation of post-Soviet territories.
Just scant months earlier, the United States deployed military forces to Saudi Arabia as the backbone of an international coalition to confront and reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This resulted in Operation Desert Shield, the greatest deployment of combined military forces on the part of the U.S. military since the Vietnam War. By January of 1991, not even a month since the U.S.S.R. ceased to be, Operation Desert Shield transitioned to Operation Desert Storm, with the invasion of Iraq and Kuwait. The conventional military power utilized by the U.S. was greatly effective, and most combat systems worked extremely well on the battlefield. Air superiority was soon absolute, as the Iraqi Air Force largely left the skies uncontested. The great success of Operation Desert Storm largely gave the military planners of the Pentagon a false sense of superiority, which as we shall see, led to a number of wrong assumptions and poor decisions being made regarding the future development and transformation of the U.S. military.
M1A2 Abrams tank platoon advancing during Operation Desert Storm. The armored combat vehicles of the U.S. Army proved very effective against a far inferior opponent in this conflict, yet they proved capable and reliable. Logistical requirements; however, did prove to be a challenge.
The first post-Cold War military “humanitarian intervention” conducted by the U.S. was the Yugoslavian civil conflict interdiction of 1995. Predicated upon escalating ethnic atrocities, the NATO intervention was actually designed to make the fracturing of the former Yugoslavian Republic permanent, and to establish a number of pro-NATO, or pro-U.S.-Atlantic establishment nations on the Balkan periphery of Russia. Slovenia became a NATO member state in 2004, followed by Croatia in 2009, and then Montenegro in 2017. At the same time that a civil war was raging in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, the U.S. and its Gulf State allies fomented and aided Islamic insurgencies in the Caucasus Republics of the newly comprised Russian Federation in an attempt to further weaken and encircle it. At the conclusion of U.S. intervention in the Balkans, which included the deployment of U.S. ground forces as part of multiple NATO-led operations including Operation Joint Endeavor, Operation Joint Guard and Joint Forge in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Kosovo Force (KFOR), the United States would de facto create the statelet of Kosovo. As many as 43,000 NATO troops were serving as part of these operations at any given time between 1995 and 2002.
U.S. Camp Bondsteel in the U.S. sponsored protectorate of Kosovo located in southwestern Serbia. The intervention in Kosovo had nothing to do with humanitarian concerns as usual, but in establishing a permanent military foothold in the Balkans.
As I have described and explained in an earlier analysis entitled “U.S. Army Armored Vehicle Developments in the 21st Century; The Future Combat System gives way to Mobile Protected Firepower”, although the U.S. military leadership was pleased with the performance of its legacy armored vehicles and weapons systems in both Operation Desert Storm and its Operation Joint Endeavor, it was not satisfied with the amount of time required to deploy large combined Arms units via available sealift and airlift capacity. The complex logistics involved in mobilizing and moving heavy armored units does not lend well to rapid deployments, especially over significant distances. Even pre-deployment of heavy armored equipment, either in host countries or loaded in sealift vessels kept on stand-by at forward deployed bases (such as Diego Garcia) or berthed at major seaports of the continental United States, present a whole host of logistical challenges.
The desire to streamline U.S. military logistics, and to create a fighting force that was more rapidly deployable, flexible and yet maintained the highest levels of lethality, and that leveraged advanced information technologies and communications systems led to the genesis of the Future Combat System (FCS). Embracing the FCS concept, the Army set very high deployment goals, which would prove to be unattainable. General Eric Shinseki, then Chief of Staff of the Army, stated that the Army would strive to attain the ability to deploy a combat brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours, a full division within 120 hours, and no less than five divisions in 30 days. Then Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was a vocal supporter of the FCS concept. The U.S. Army would eventually pursue the FCS program, the largest defense acquisition program in U.S. military history with a price tag of approximately $200 billion USD. The program was eventually cancelled in 2009, yet its influence in transforming the U.S. Army have proven substantial, and have had a negative influence on the Army’s ability to fight near peer adversaries in today’s warfighting environment.
The United States military would become a force for invasion and occupation during the Neo-Con era spanning from 2000 to the present. BY 2003, the U.S. was once again invading Iraqi territory, this time during Operation Iraqi Freedom. By this time the U.S. Army had partially realized some aspects of FCS, mainly in the area of rapidly deploying combat ready forces of the Brigade size. Operation Iraqi Freedom was envisioned as a rapid invasion utilizing highly mobile, self-contained, combined-arms combat teams supported by overwhelming airpower. The Iraqi military was far weaker in 2003 than it had been in 1991. It was a shadow of its former self and had been repeatedly targeted over the intervening decade, especially its air-defense and command and control networks. A combined ground force of approximately 148,000 men was deployed and ready for offensive operations in approximately a month and a half. Ground operations of the invasion lasted from March 20th until May 1st, 2003. The initial victory was impressive, but it soon became quite obvious that there was no realistic and pragmatic plan to occupy the country and render aid to a stable and capable new government.
What followed was a time of crisis for the U.S. military. When the U.S. soldiers were not greeted as liberators, and a number of organized and ruthless anti-occupation insurgencies formed, some motivated my patriotism, some my tribal and religious factions, and still others by terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, the soldiers tasked with the occupation of Iraq were woefully unprepared for the task asked of them. U.S. troops deployed to a nation whose minimal civil infrastructure they had just destroyed, were tasked with reconstruction and nation building in a country producing a growing anti-occupation insurgency on many different levels. Convoys and patrols were increasingly the targets of ambushes by insurgents operating along key roadways and within urban centers. Light vehicles and military transports were targeted and destroyed in significant numbers, and the crews had no protection from weapons ranging from small arms and RPGs to extremely powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The Bush administration at the time, who had claimed that the U.S. troops would be widely embraced as liberators, began to scramble for ways to reduce the mounting U.S. casualties. The answer was to add armored protection to all existing vehicles, whether they be HMMWVs, or the LMTVs and HEMMTs of the logistics units. Adding armor to logistical support vehicles not meant to see front line combat greatly reduced their fuel efficiency (of great importance in the logistics arm) and was only accomplished at great cost. The U.S. Army only had one armored security vehicle in active service at this time, the M1117, albeit in small numbers. The decision was made to armor the ubiquitous HMMWV and to give it the tasks of armored patrol, internal security and crowd control vehicle. The HMMWV was designed and used quite effectively as a light utility vehicle and had always performed well in such a role; however, it was never intended for the roles it was called upon to perform after 2003.
An Obsession with MRAPs
A number of different armor packages were developed for the HMMWV, mainly to increase the likelihood of crew survivability. The armored Hummer was merely a stopgap until purpose-built armored vehicles could be developed and fielded in greater numbers. Although effective against high caliber small arms, shrapnel and mines, the M1117 was fielded in very limited numbers in 2003 with military police units, mostly in security duties on U.S. military installations. Large orders of the vehicle were placed after the 2003 Iraq invasion, and the number grew from approximately 50 to over 1,800 units in active service.
M1117 at the head of a column of HMMWVs and an LMTV halted along a road in Iraq sometime after the 2003 invasion.
The U.S. military enlisted the help of both the U.S. and international defense industry to produce an armored vehicle that could better serve the needs of an army now faced with occupying not only one rebellious nation, but two. Between 2003 and 2007, the U.S. military would suffer increasing casualties in both the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres of occupation. In the case of Afghanistan, casualties would continue to increase until 2010 before decreasing over consecutive years. Most of these casualties were the result of ambushes with IEDs. Such attacks increased six fold from 2003 to 2007.
The DOD would award billions of dollars in contracts for Mine Resistant Ambushed Protected vehicles (MRAP) between 2003 and the present. The total acquisition cost of the various MRAPs ordered and put into service conservatively exceeds $45 billion USD. The U.S. military has no less than seven different types of MRAPs in service as of today, more than any other nation by far. As the U.S. has reduced its active footprint in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it has sold many of these vehicles to local security forces, and even U.S. domestic police forces, as they are of little use on a contested battlefield where the U.S. military would be fighting a conventional conflict with a powerful adversary. The following list details the main types of MRAPS in use by the U.S. military and costs associated:
M-ATV
The genesis of the MRAP All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) was the desire to gain both the IED level protection of an MRAP and the mobility of a lighter all-terrain vehicle. It was realized early on that the armored M1114 HMMWV variant sacrificed much of its off road performance with the addition of heavy armor plate, yet failed to provide adequate protection. A purpose-built light MRAP was called for. Oshkosh Corporation was awarded the initial $1 billion USD contract to supply the new M-ATV to the U.S. Army, USMC, Air Force and Special Operations Command (which employs special operations elements of all the military services) in mid-2009. The initial contract order grew four fold within a few years, and total M-ATVs produced to date has approached 10,000 units of different variants. The acquisition cost not corrected for inflation likely exceeds $4 billion USD, and additional contracts have been awarded to update and refit all units retained in U.S. service. Many units have since been handed over to allied governments in the Middle East and Europe at far reduced prices. NATO recipients include both Poland and Croatia. Both the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia have made use of the M-ATV in the conflict in Yemen, and have lost a significant number in combat.
Comparative size of the armored HMMWV and the M-ATV. The ubiquitous “Hummer” was never meant to be an armored car, and hundreds were destroyed by IEDs in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cougar
The Cougar is a much more robust vehicle than the M-ATV, resembling a heavily armored truck. It comes in a 4 x 4 and larger 6 x 6 version, with several variants based on these two platforms, depending on the intended role. The Cougar was developed by Force Protection, Inc. in 2004. The company was later acquired by General Dynamics in 2011. The Cougar was rushed into service after a very simple and rudimentary testing program in 2004, as the U.S. military wanted thousands of MRAPs for service in Iraq as soon as possible. The Cougar can trace its lineage to earlier South African designed and fielded vehicles, and was also adopted into British and Canadian service as well.
The Cougar was produced in great numbers between 2004 and 2010 for the U.S. military, with further orders filled by the British military, who have fielded the Cougar in at least 4 different variants. A number of Cougars have also be gifted to other NATO countries with contingents serving in Afghanistan. The U.S. military spent approximately $2.5-3.0 billion USD to acquire its Cougars, and additional funds have been spent to upgrade the roughly 20% of the surviving fleet selected to remain in service.
British Army variants of the 4×4 and 6×6 Cougar (Mastiff and Ridgeback) in a convoy protecting military transports in Afghanistan.
Caiman
Probably the most cost effective MRAP to be developed to meet the requirements of the MRAP Vehicle Program is the Armor Holdings (since acquired by BAE Systems) Caiman. The Caiman initially shared 85% of its construction components with the Stewart & Stevenson/Oshkosh family of military tactical vehicles (FMTV). This family of light to medium trucks have been produced since the early 1980s, with over 74,000 units of varying configuration put into service. This commonality of construction reduced manufacturing, maintenance and inventory carrying costs. The total cost of the Caiman contract (including a later contract to upgrade and improve vehicles to the Multi-Terrain Vehicle standard) amounted to over $1.15 billion USD. The United States sold 1,150 Caiman MRAPs that had been put in surplus status to the U.A.E. to aid in their operations in Yemen.
MaxxPro
Manufactured by Navistar Defense, a subsidiary of the Navistar International Corporation, the MaxxPro MRAP is based on a commercial truck chassis and makes use of a bolt-on armor construction as much as possible. This reduces manufacturing cost when compared to welded construction, and allows for easier repair in the field. Approximately 9,000 MaxxPro MRAPs were built for the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Air Force. At an average per unit cost of $515,000 USD, the Maxxpro cost the United States military over $4.6 billion USD, not counting a number of upgrade contracts. Of the 9,000 units constructed and delivered, the U.S. military services announced in 2013 the intension of keeping only a third of these units in service beyond 2014.
Buffalo MPRC
The largest MRAP in the U.S. inventory, the Buffalo was designed as an IED and mine clearance vehicle. Manufactured by Force Protection Inc., it is based on the Casspir MRAP that has been in service with the South African Army for decades. The Buffalo in a 6×6 armored vehicle with a maximum service weight of 25,000 kgs. (56,000 lbs.). After building the first 200 units, the Buffalo was upgraded to the A2 standard in 2009, after which an additional 450 units were produced. Over 750 total Buffalos have been produced in total, with 650 of these in service with the U.S. military at a cost of over $1 billion USD.
Force Protection Buffalo IED and Mine Clearance MRAP removing an explosive devise by use of its articulated, hydraulically-operated claw.
The Buffalo’s origins are clearly a response to the dangers posed by a prolonged military occupation in an environment of active guerilla warfare. It was based on a proven design, and has been extremely effective in its intended role. The traditional vehicle for mine clearance or IED disposal would normally be an MBT fitted with mine clearance apparatus. The Buffalo is cheaper to manufacture, maintain and operate than an MBT, and is slightly more flexible in a multitude of environments. It also can accommodate 12 soldiers in addition to a normal crew of two.
Nyala RG-31/33
Manufactured by Land Systems OMC (BAE Land Systems) of South Africa and FNSS of Turkey, the RG-31/33 NyalaMRAP is produced in a 4×4 (RG-31) and 6×6 (RG-33) version to meet the requirements of the Mine Resistant Ambushed Protected Vehicle Program. Although used by the U.S. military in the highest numbers (almost 2,000 vehicles), ten other nations use this MRAP to some degree. The USMC ordered 1,385 of the Mark 5E variant, and operate more RG-31s than any other military service. The total cost of RG-31/33 acquisition is easily in excess of $2.7 billion USD.
JLTV
The most ambitious of all of the MRAP programs, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) is meant to replace the HMMWV in use by all of the U.S. military branches. Although the design of the new vehicle is meant to allow it to exceed at a number of military tasks, it is at its core a mine resistant, ambush protected vehicle. The JLTV is suited to take over the tasks of light armored reconnaissance, armored security, special operations, utility and convoy protection. The JLTV is meant to be flexible enough to perform all of these tasks and its very design allows for the upgrading or downgrading of armor and weapons systems tailored to the task required.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated in 2015 that the total acquisition cost of the JLTV across all services would likely be $53.5 billion USD, with a total of 5,500 units for the UMC and 49,099 for the U.S. Army requested. In 2016, the Department of Defense claimed that the total cost of the program would be reduced due to revised unit costs and corrected “cost estimate methodologies”; however, past experience has proven that the Pentagon is usually quite bad when it comes to managing finances. The procurement timetable proposed has the first JLTVs being delivered beginning in 2018, and not being completed until 2040 for the U.S. Army. The 5,500 units requested by the USMC should be delivered between 2018 and 2022.
The JLTV program clearly embodies the U.S. military’s fixation on its experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan with occupation and the resultant insurgencies motivated by inevitable anti-U.S. and anti-Western sentiments. Invaders are never seen as liberators, but always as subjugators and occupiers. Occupiers are never safe, as the frontline is everywhere. The U.S. military reacted to protect itself by armoring everything. Light utility vehicles and logistics transport of all categories were armored for protection. Only a nation that plans to invade and occupy other countries, and that will find itself always in a hostile environment will require so many MRAPs and armored transports. No other major military in the world has decided to follow this new U.S. model. Perhaps that is due to the fact that the main duty of their armed forces is to fight defensively in defending their own territory. Armies of national defense have no need to prepare themselves to fight a hostile native population.
A side-by-side comparison of an unarmored HMMWV and an armored JLTV. The new vehicle is twice as heavy as the standard HMMWV.
The JLTV is an armored, all-terrain monster that can carry a payload between 1,600 and 2,300 kgs. (3,500 – 5,100 lbs.), weapons as large as the SHORAD (Short Range Air Defense variant of the Hellfire missile) or the 30mm M230LF automatic cannon, and provide crew survivability in most IED attacks. The DOD has decided to replace both MRAPs and the HMMWV family of utility vehicles with the new JLTV platform. The JLTV is equipped with a 6.6 liter diesel V8 which can generate at least 300 horse power. The vehicle weighs in at between 14,000 and 15,639lbs. depending on the variant. By comparison, the unarmored HMMWV weighed in at 7,700 lbs. fully loaded and made use of a diesel V8 (some models used a turbo diesel) generating a maximum 190 hp. Even considering greater efficiencies achieved through modern internal combustion engine technology, a vehicle that weighs twice as much and requires greater horsepower will lead to higher fuel consumption and require higher levels of maintenance.
Counter Insurgency
Not only did the U.S. military experience with occupation and counterinsurgency shape the armored vehicle procurement projects and design priorities of future armored vehicle acquisitions, but it also resulted in an over-focusing of resources toward a traditionally elite, limited and specialized subset of conventional fighting forces; special operations. All effective modern national defense forces operate a small cadre of special operations units. These units are made up of highly motivated, highly trained and highly skilled soldiers who can perform any number of military tasks, but are specifically focused on asymmetrical, hybrid and very specialized warfare subsets. They complement and enhance conventional fighting forces, and often act as significant force multipliers in any conflict.
Prior to the U.S. wars of occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States operated a robust special operations force comprising of units from all services. The considerable investment in these highly selective forces, the high standards demanded, and the extremely difficult training requirements have always kept these forces small; however this has changed a great deal over the past 17 years. The need for soldiers with a skill set specific to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan lead to increased focus and demand on special operations. From 2001 to the present, the special operations forces under the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) have expanded from 42,800 to approximately 63,500 today. Special operations specific funding has grown four fold in the same time period, from $3.1 billion USD to $12.3 billion USD. According to SOCOM, an average of 8,300 special operators are deployed in missions in as many as 149 nations across the globe on a weekly basis, and 70 nations on any given day.
U.S. Special Operations Command has access to uniquely qualified units from across all branches of the U.S. military.
There is little doubt that the Pentagon’s over-focus on counterinsurgency (the State Department is guilty here as well) has lead to U.S. military adventurism involving it in the internal conflicts of 75% of the countries of the world. Does this clandestine military involvement in the civil or regional strife of most of the planet really have anything to do with U.S. national security? Does it make the U.S. any safer, or is it only creating more enemies? SOCOM has even deployed assets to clandestinely train amongst the civilian population of the United States itself, a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
This disproportional over-emphasis on special operations has resulted in an atrophying of more traditional martial structures and establishments. While the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have stayed at the forefront of modern armor and artillery development, and have advanced the related tactics, the United States has fallen far behind. Even the Peoples Liberation Army has made great strides in these conventional warfare realms in comparison to the United States. The United States surely has the economic resources, and the technical capability to close the gap, but the focus of the military needs to be realigned toward conventional warfighting.
Secretary Mattis has obviously recognized the need to focus higher procurement towards conventional forces, as well as fund R&D efforts into better field artillery, rocket artillery, armored fighting vehicles such as the AMPV, and a new main battle tank (MBT). In identifying near peer adversaries as the greatest national security threat, Secretary Mattis realizes that the U.S. must waste no time in closing the technological and quality gap that now exists between the conventional fighting forces of the United States and Russia and China respectively.
A Navy in Disarray
While the ground forces of the United States have suffered from two decades of occupation and counterinsurgency, which has morphed them from a balanced, combined arms conventional fighting force, into a force obsessed with IEDs, insurgents and guerilla warfare, the U.S. Navy seems to have lost any idea of its national security role. After two decades of enjoying uncontested control of the seas and the ability to use aircraft carrier-borne airstrikes to pummel inferior adversaries, none of which possessed a viable navy or air force, nor a modern air defense network or shore-based anti-naval capability, the U.S. Navy has seemed determined to sail further into the realm of irrelevancy in any future conflict. Unless it intends to engage in battle against significantly weaker opponents, the U.S. Navy will not possess an advantage over its two most powerful possible adversaries, Russia and China.
The United States Navy has not engaged in a major naval engagement with a major adversary since the closing days of World War Two. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union largely kept one another at bay, with very close competition leading to significant advancements in naval warfare. They did not engage in any verified hostile actions. Although the U.S. Navy engaged in combat with Libyan military forces in 1986 in the Gulf of Sidra, as well as sunk a small force of Iraqi Navy vessels of small displacement at the “Battle of Bubiyan” (not really much of a battle at all and UK Navy helicopters did most of the fighting), these engagements were largely one-sided and no one could ever say that the outcomes were a surprise. Regardless, the U.S. Navy apparently has decided that it is an indomitable force that can go wherever it pleases and no one can stand in its way. Such hubris and arrogance are one of the reasons why it is in such poor shape today. The other reason must surely be attributed to a military industrial complex that has sold the service on an expensive pipe dream of wonder weapons that have failed to live up to their hype. All to the tune of huge profits. The following are the most egregious examples:
The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)
Based on a flawed concept from the start, of a small surface combatant that could make use of modularity to tailor it to specific tasks as opposed to a traditional multi-purpose design, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was largely doomed for a number of reasons. Two different designs were awarded contracts, the trimaran Independence Class designed by General Dynamics, and the mono-hull Freedom Class designed by Lockheed Martin. The decision to produce two different designs to meet the needs of a single class should have been seen as problematic. Here the Navy accepted the responsibility and costs associated with maintaining two different platforms, with separate maintenance needs and schedules, not to mention two separate training programs for LCS crews.
The concept of the LCS was also divergent in many respects, and quite frankly, too much was expected of a ship that was smaller in size than a conventional frigate. The U.S. Navy expected the vessels to marry significant striking power, with modularity tailored to just about every form of modern naval warfare, and new networking and information technologies that would reduce the required crew to a minimum. What resulted was what those serving in the force would begrudgingly coin the “Little Crappy Ship”. The aluminum and composite (Independence Class) and lightweight steel (Freedom Class) hulls of the ships provide little armored protection, offensive striking power is far from adequate for either surface warfare or fire support for forces deployed inland, the platform has yet to meet anti-submarine requirements, and the reduced crew size has been determined to be unmanageable.
This image of the construction of USS Independence LCS-2, clearly illustrates the aluminum structure of the hull. Aluminum offers little armored protection, burns vigorously at high temperature, and led to increased corrosion of steal propulsion components in areas where the dissimilar metals were in close proximity below the waterline.
As a result of its overwhelming failure to meet the expectations of the U.S. Navy or Congressional oversight, the total fleet size of LCS vessels has been reduced from the original 50 planned down to 32. Project cost overruns, a number of high profile system failures, and the smaller fleet size have resulted in a total cost of $12.4 billion USD for the first 26 vessels. The U.S. Congress capped the per-unit cost at $480 million per ship, bringing the theoretical total cost to $15.5 billion USD. All for a ship that has a minimal chance of surviving most modern naval combat scenarios. There is little wonder why the U.S. Navy has decided to start building a multi-purpose frigate, dubbed the FFG(X), to pick up where the LCS has failed.
DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class
If the LCS was not a huge and unequivocal disappointment, then the much vaunted stealth destroyer, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class was a total embarrassment and unmitigated failure. Envisioned as a high-tech game changer, the DDG-1000 was supposed to make use of powerful new technologies, overwhelming firepower, and massive power generation, all wrapped in stealth that would render it invisible. Although designed as a multi-mission surface combatant, added emphasis was put on naval surface fire support (NSFS) while operating in littoral waters. Due to a number of factors, mostly the exorbitant cost of the program, the Navy is now trying to find a role for the Zumwaltclass vessels.
Originally, the Navy intended to build 32 of these stealth destroyers, yet the exorbitant initial cost plus huge cost overruns led the Navy and the U.S. Congress to reduce the fleet to 24, then 16, then 7, and finally to only 3 vessels. Correspondingly, the cost per vessel increased tremendously, as did the cost of all class-specific systems including weapons systems, power generation and propulsion systems. Cost per vessel stands at over $7.5 billion USD.
The 155mm Mark 51 advanced gun system (AGS) deck guns designed specifically for the DDG 1000s were made to fire guided rounds over a range in excess of 80 nautical miles, with a circular error probable (CEP) of just 50 meters (160ft.). Each DDG 1000 is equipped with two AGS on the forward deck. These guns were designed to strike shore targets accurately from coastal waters in support of allied ground forces and amphibious landing forces. Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems developed the Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) for use in the AGS, but due to the now 3 vessel fleet, the per unit cost of each LRLAP had risen to over $800,000 USD. The Navy had already procured 90 rounds before the decision was made to cease purchasing the rounds due to the prohibitive costs.
The DDG-1000 utilizes the same MT-30 Rolls Royce gas turbine engines as the Freedom Class LCS vessels; however, in the case of the destroyers the gas turbine is linked to a massive electrical grid that not only powers the electric motors that propel the vessel, but just about every other system onboard, including the weapons systems. The arrangement is proving problematic, as the first two vessels in class have both experienced main engine failures and damages. The USS Michael Monsoor DDG-1001 suffered damage to the turbine blades of one of its main engines during sea trials in February of this year. The MT-30 engine will have to be replaced at the cost of $20 million USD. The USS Zumwalt DDG-1000 famously broke down during its transit from Maine to San Diego and had to be towed from the Panama Canal to its new home port.
The U.S. Navy is now struggling to find a new niche for the DDG-1000s. Now that its NSFS mission is a non-starter, it is being adapted as a platform to strike inland targets with land-attack cruise missiles (LACM) and engage other surface ships with an anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM) that has yet to be accepted into the service. The DDG-1000s lack a strong anti-air warfare (AAW) capability, and would thus be tied to other fleet components such as the Arleigh Burke Class DDG-51s and Ticonderoga Class CGs which have strong AAW capabilities. In an attempt to utilize the USS Zumwalt, the Navy has added legacy weapons systems, radars and communications antennas to the stealthy superstructure, undoubtedly negating its minimal radar signature. It remains to be seen what munitions will be provided for the two AGS turrets, as no munitions other than the cost prohibitive LRLAP exist.
The latest revision of the DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class lead vessel’s once smooth and unblemished superstructure is now marred by various external sensory and communications arrays. Two rear deck guns for close-in defense have also been added.
CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford Class
As if the U.S. Navy was not content with wasting $38 billion USD on the failed LCS and DDG-1000 programs, an even more grandiose undertaking was envisioned for the service that would revolutionize the all too important and largely obsolete “super carrier”. It is a widely accepted fact that the U.S. Navy has been obsessed with the aircraft carrier since World War II and the pivotal naval battles between the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy. This obsession is alive and well to this day, seemingly immune to the realities of modern missile technology, especially in regard to guidance, speed, range, and the advent of armed and semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) of increasing lethality.
The U.S. Navy embarked on a program to replace the existing Nimitz Class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers currently comprising the central component of the aircraft carrier strike groups (ASG), of which the service operates 10 (with the additional CVN-65 Enterprise in reserve), in 2005 with the advanced construction of CVN-78. In 2008 the U.S. Navy signed a contract with Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding worth approximately $5.1 billion USD to build the first in a series of four such carriers. The goal is to build each carrier in four year periods under the current funding schedule. The Gerald R. Ford Class was supposed to take advantage of a number of new technologies and experience significantly improved efficiencies in aircraft carrier operations over the preceding Nimitz Class.
While the initial cost estimate for CVN-78 was around $10 billion USD (U.S. Congress had caped it at $10.5 billion USD in 2007), the total cost for the vessel has exceeded $13 billion USD as of May of this year when it was revealed that the Advanced Weapons Elevator and a main thrust bearing had suffered damage in sea trials and required repair. The CVN-78 is by far the most expensive warship ever constructed. In a controversial move, it was decided to try and incorporate a number of new, unproven systems in the new design. In retrospect, this decision was bound to result in cost overruns and a more problematic breaking-in period. New systems integrated into the Gerald R. Fordinclude an electro-magnetic launching system (EMALS), advanced aircraft arresting system, advanced weapons elevator system, dual band radar (DBR), and a more powerful nuclear reactor.
There was much discussion in the Navy regarding the wisdom of introducing so many new technologies in a single platform. Many senior officers argued that there were bound to be serious delays in working through both the foreseeable and unforeseeable problems associated with rendering so many new technologies operational. This opinion turned out to be of merit, as the Gerald R. Ford immediately experienced problems with just about all of its new systems. The vessel has experienced two main propulsion malfunctions over the past year, the advanced arresting gear has proven unreliable, and the EMALS (as well as other “critical systems”) has displayed “poor or unknown reliability” according to the Navy Operational and Test Evaluation Force. In early testing, the EMALS was unable to launch F-18 strike aircraft at weights even close to a full combat load. All of these problems or shortcomings were revealed during sea trials and the vessel returned to shipyard in Newport News, Virginian on July 15th, 2018 to undergo extensive repairs and improvements.
In should have been of little surprise to most naval architects, engineers, and naval line officers who have held vessel commands, that the above mentioned problems were inevitable. The big question is why the leadership of the Navy decided upon such a platform at all. What is the point of investing so much money and effort into such a large and advanced vessel, regardless of the unproven nature of many of the critical systems, when aircraft carriers have become so vulnerable to modern anti-ship missiles? Of even greater significance, why invest so much in a new carrier and not invest in increasing the range and striking power of the carrier air wing? An aircraft carrier is worthless without a powerful and flexible air wing element.
Carrier Air Wing Vulnerabilities
As much as President Trump and various administration officials and Senators tout the power of the U.S. military, often citing an increasing defense budget as an indicator of strength, efficiency and effectiveness, there is little doubt that U.S. naval aviation has atrophied over decades of misuse, neglect and poor decision making at the highest levels. U.S. naval aviation is arguably in its worse state since the opening days of the Pacific Theatre of operations during the Second World War. Not only is it in disrepair, but it is ill-equipped for a fight against a peer adversary.
Let us address the first issue, the ever shrinking air wing with its shrinking range. In the last decade of Cold War naval competition between The U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the Nimitz Class aircraft carriers deployed with nine, or even ten squadrons of fixed-wing aircraft. Today, that has been reduced to six. Of greater importance, the only aircraft utilized for combat operations is the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet with all of its inherent shortcomings, most importantly its limited operational range of 370 nautical miles (full strike combat weapons load and fuel). The aircraft it replaced, the A-7 Corsair II and A-4 Skyhawk in the Navy and the F-4 Phantom in the USMC, all had much longer operational ranges and all but the A-4 had greater weapons payload capacity. The F/A-18 is a jack of all trades and a master of none. In an attempt to lower costs (although few combat aircraft has ever operated at lower cost than the A-4 Skyhawk) by using one airframes for all roles, the U.S. Navy has put all of its eggs in one basket, and that basket is not up to the task. This is not to say that the F/A-18 Hornet and F-/A-18E/F Super Hornet are poor aircraft. The plane merely cannot do all of the things asked of it as well as many other aircraft. What has resulted, is an aircraft carrier air wing that is less capable in all respects, and cannot compete and excel in a future conflict with a peer adversary.
This image clearly illustrates the ordinance payload capacity of the A-4 Skyhawk. It could carry 9,900lbs. of munitions on 5 external hardpoints. It had an effective combat radius from an aircraft carrier of over 700 miles, and a maximum range of 2,000 miles.
Although the improved F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is significantly larger than its predecessor, and gains about 100 nautical miles in range due to larger internal fuel capacity, it still lacks the required range needed to protect its carrier. Not surprisingly, even though there was a better option, the Navy decided to use F/A-18s for aerial refueling duties as well. The S-3 Viking had been kept in service as a carrier borne aerial tanker, having given up its original role as an ASW aircraft, and was superior to the F/A-18 in this respect. Although most S-3s in service still have approximately 12,000 hours of service life left on their airframes, the Navy pushed ahead with their retirement in 2009. With a much greater range than the F/A-18 and a fuel capacity of 16,000 lbs., the S-3 was a better and far cheaper solution. The fact that it was a far cheaper option was probably its downfall. Profit drives the U.S. military industrial complex, not efficiency or performance.
The only fixed wing aircraft that operate from U.S. Navy aircraft carriers today are the F/A-18 Hornet, F/A-18E Super Hornet and E-2C and E2-D Hawkeye AEW&C aircraft.
The second issue, which is perhaps more damning, is the fact that the F/A-18 squadrons that the Navy relies on to conduct almost all carrier air wing duties including attack/strike missions, air superiority, fleet defense, buddy refueling, anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and surveillance, are in an alarming state of disrepair. The Navy announced in February of 2017, that two thirds, or 62% of all F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets were unserviceable due to maintenance issues. Twenty-seven percent of these aircraft were undergoing major maintenance depot work, not minor or preventive maintenance. Of the 542 total F/A-18 and E/F-18 Hornets, only 170 were mission capable. Fast forward one year and a new and increased defense budget, and the Navy is still a long way from solving the shortfall in available replacement parts just to meet normal maintenance requirements. The decision was also made to take 140 of the oldest single seat Hornets (A/C variants) in the Navy and either cannibalize them for parts or transfer them to USMC squadrons that are experiencing similar maintenance issues. In the case of the USMC, they have been waiting so long for new F-35Bs that their legacy F-18s are falling into disrepair.
Maintenance crews performing repairs on an F/A-18 aboard a carrier. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps must address the maintenance crisis plaguing the services, yet the problem cannot be remedied at this level. Only a reduction in the tempo of deployments, flight operations or the provision of added funding will alleviate the issue which will be determined by the White House and Congress.
Has anyone asked the question, “What good is an advanced, gigantic aircraft carrier with an air wing that is limited in range and capability?” If the U.S. Navy does manage to get the first three Gerald R. Ford Class carriers in service, how many F/A-18E Super Hornets will be mission capable to fly from them? Will the F-35C and F35B Joint Strike Fighters meant to complete the complement of strike and fighter aircraft going to finally be available for deployment? Seeing that the F-35 does not close the “missile gap” that threatens U.S. aircraft carriers in general, is the Navy soliciting the defense industry to produce a carrier-borne aircraft, whether manned or unmanned, to correct this obvious weakness? Russian and Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles and hypersonic cruise missiles can strike U.S. CSGs long before their aircraft can get within range of striking the territories of either of these near peer adversaries. This “missile gap” will not be rectified anytime soon.
The One-Size-Fits-All Fighter Aircraft
After a short review of the Navy’s decision to settle on a single airframe to fill all of the roles of the carrier air wing, it should come of little surprise that the Pentagon would come to a similar decision on a much broader scale. A cursory study of combat aviation history has proven that there is no one-size- fits-all solution to the many combat functions performed by military aviation. It appears that the decision to introduce a multi-role fighter making use of many new technologies and heavily reliant on stealth to be effective in modern aerial warfare for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and USMC was more about making huge profits for the defense industry and providing jobs to American workers than it was about providing the U.S. military with a superior tool.
The story of the development of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a cautionary tale of a weapons development program that was ill conceived and soon spiraled out of control. Perhaps the most controversial and scandalous of any such program, the JSF is the costliest weapons program in world history. Newly revised estimates from the Pentagon put the cost of development and procurement of the 2,056 fighters that the DOD wants at $406.1 billion USD. The total cost to procure these aircraft and maintain them over the 20 year life span of the aircraft exceeds $1.5 trillion USD.
While the F-35A first flew in 2006, the only U.S. military branch to declare the F-35 operation and to use it in combat is the USMC. The F-35 was developed from the outset for export to allied nations, and Israel has used the F-35 for strikes against targets in Syria. It is important to note that Israel has relied heavily on its decades old squadrons of F-15 and F-16 multi-role aircraft to bear the brunt of most combat missions. Approximately 300 units of all versions have been produced so far for both the U.S. military and foreign militaries, yet only Israel and the USMC have declared the aircraft combat ready. A major issue facing the program is the fact that aircraft manufacturing began years before the plane was deemed fit for operational deployment, largely because so many deficiencies have been identified and have had to be rectified. This was the result of concurrency, a procurement process that allowed for production of the aircraft prior to final approval of the design. It was agreed that all deficiencies identified would eventually be addressed and rectified in airframes already manufactured at a later date in order to bring them up to the latest standard.
Not only has the F-35 not attained wide operational status seventeen years after its first flight, but it has pulled an exorbitant amount of funding from existing, combat proven aircraft. What could have been done to maintain and improve existing squadrons of F-15 Eagles, F-16 Fighting Falcons, A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, and F/A-18 Hornets currently in varying states of disrepair and serviceability? The idea of replacing all of these front line aircraft with the F-35 is laughable. What kind of imperial hubris and institutional tunnel vision could have led to such an ill-advised decision? The answer is the institutionalized corruption and waste of the U.S. military industrial complex. It continues to leave the United States less protected, and sends American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen into combat with increasingly less capable weapons.
Atrophy and Exhaustion
The U.S. military has been engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan for over seventeen years. The disastrous invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and counterinsurgency operations in a host of nations including, but not limited to Yemen, Somalia, Niger and Nigeria, have all taken a toll on the U.S. military. Not only has a great deal of military hardware been destroyed, but a great deal of equipment has been worn out and essentially must be retired from service. More importantly, the constant deployments have undermined the personnel needs of all services, with thousands of men having been killed or physically and psychologically maimed for life. Tens of thousands of the most skilled commissioned and non-commissioned officers have left the services, many of them having served multiple combat deployments.
The fact that 62% of U.S. Navy’s F-18s are not mission capable is not an anomaly. In 2017, approximately 72% of all U.S. Air Force aircraft were not flight worthy. Many of the airframes are quite old, yet well within their engineered service life, but most are in need of maintenance. Both the Navy and Air Force claim that there is not enough money in their respective budgets to procure the needed spare parts to keep these aircraft flying. One would wonder that if this is the case, why tens of billions of dollars are being poured into new aircraft when existing fleets are being left in disrepair. The decisions being made in the upper echelon of the DOD are quite perplexing for the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen struggling to keep weapons and vehicles ready for action.
The U.S. Army finds itself looking for buyers of surplus MRAPs, vehicles of little utility in a major conventional war with a peer adversary, while at the same time lacking spare parts and munitions for armored vehicles and artillery systems. While the Army has made some progress in procuring the first of the 49,099 JLTVs it wants, it is far behind in all other armored vehicle procurement and development programs. BAE has delivered the first batch of 29 AMPVs to the U.S. Army for extensive testing before the decision can be made to start low rate initial production (LRIP). Once the LRIP begins, it is estimated that BAE will be able to produce approximately 262 units annually, unless the company’s main manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania is expanded. The initial contract is worth $1.6 billion USD. The Army wants at least 3,000 AMPVs of six different main variants to replace the thousands of M113 armored vehicles still in service. The M113 first saw service in 1962 and a replacement for the venerable vehicle has been required for decades.
Defense Secretary James Mattis made it crystal clear in his National Defense Strategy that the U.S. must rebuild its conventional warfare capabilities. The U.S. Army’s proposed 2019 budget lays bare the new priorities of a service facing a major transition in priorities. Procurement of tracked combat vehicles, as well as artillery rounds, rockets and missiles account for much of this latest budget request. Procurement is up by 18.4% over the previous year, with procurement of weapons and tracked vehicles up 84% over the previous year. Although upgrading of the M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer to the M109A7 level is down by 56% compared to 2018, procurement of 155mm artillery rounds is up a whopping 800%.
The percentage of total procurement directed toward weapons and tracked combat vehicles in the 2019 proposed budget denotes that the U.S. Army recognizes its weakness in conventional warfighting capability.
This chart clearly shows the desire on the part of the U.S. Army to upgrade and rearm conventional capabilities. 155mm artillery rounds and Army Tactical Missile System upgrades to the M207 MLRS are at the top of the list, followed by MBT upgrades and acquisition of new AMPV vehicles.
As the U.S. Army attempts to rebuild its aged and depleted armored brigade combat teams and conventional and rocket artillery, the U.S. Navy and Air Force are facing their own challenges. The Navy finds itself in a position that is far from enviable, but was very easy to predict. Having dumped $38 billion USD into two failed new classes of warships and a further $13 billion into a new aircraft carrier that will likely not become operational until 2022, the service is currently in the process of realigning its priorities. The service is struggling to procure the new VirginiaClass SSN and Columbia Class SSBNs that are required to ensure the viability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent triad well into the foreseeable future. These defensive weapons programs, which are integral to U.S. national security, could have benefitted greatly from the $50 billion wasted on the LCS, DDG-1000 and Gerald R. Ford programs. Russia and China have spent the same time wasted by the U.S. Navy on updating and modernizing their own submarine forces, chiefly their ballistic missile submarines.
Institutional Corruption
If one had to identify the main reason behind the utter failure of the U.S. political establishment and military leadership, both civilian and in uniform, to identify and prioritize weapons programs and procurement that was truly in line with the national defense needs of the country, it would be the institutional corruption of the U.S. military industrial complex. This is not a fault of one party, but is the inevitable outcome of a thoroughly corrupted system that both generates and wastes great wealth at the expense of the many for the benefit of the few.
Massive defense budgets do not lead to powerful military forces nor sound national defense strategy. The United States is the most glaring example of how a nation’s treasure can be wasted, its citizens robbed for generations, and its political processes undermined by an industry bent on maximizing profitability by encouraging and exacerbating conflict. At this point it is questionable that the United States’ could remain economically viable without war, so much of its GDP is connected in some way to the pursuit of conflict.
There is no doubt that the War Department was renamed the Department of Defense in an Orwellian sleight of hand in 1947, just a few years after end of World War II. The military industrial complex grew into a monolith during the war, and the only way to justify the expansion of the complex, was by finding a new enemy to justify the new reality of a massive standing military, something that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids. This unlawful state of affairs has persisted and expanded into a rotten, bloated edifice of waste. Wasted effort, wasted wealth and the wasted lives of millions of people spanning every corner of the planet. Tens of thousands of brave men and women in uniform, and millions of civilians of so many nations, have been tossed into the blades of this immoral meat grinder for generations.
President Donald Trump was very proud to announce the largest U.S. military budget in the nation’s history last year. The United States spent (or more accurately, borrowed from generations yet to come) no less than $874.4 billion USD. The declared base budget for 2017 was $523.2 billion USD, yet there are also the Overseas Contingency Operations and Support budgets that have to be considered in determining the total cost. The total DOD annual costs have doubled from 2003 to the present. Yet, what has the DOD really accomplished with so much money and effort? Very little of benefit to the U.S. tax payer for sure, and paradoxically the exorbitant waste of the past fifteen years have left every branch of the U.S. military weaker.
The U.S. Congress has the duty and responsibility of reigning in the military adventurism of the executive branch. They have the sole authority to declare war, but more importantly, the sole authority to approve the budget requests of the military. It is laughable to think that the U.S. Congress will do anything to reign in military spending. The Congress and the Senate are as equally guilty as the Executive in promoting and benefitting from the military industrial complex. Envisioned as a bulwark against executive power, the U.S. Congress has become an integral component of that complex. No Senator or Representative would dare to go against the industry that employs so many constituents within their state, or pass up on the benefits afforded them through the legalized insider-trading exclusive to them, or the lucrative jobs that await them in the defense industry and the many think tanks that promote continued prosecution of war.
Possible Reforms
It would be quite simple for the U.S. Department of Defense to rectify the current endemic problems that have rendered it weaker and less prepared for a major conventional conflict with a peer adversary. The greater challenge is transforming the relationship between the federal and state governments back to the constitutionally intended one, and to dissolve the powers of the now allied executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. This would undermine the ability of the military industrial complex to coerce the nation into working against the interests of the states and the citizenry. The military industrial complex and the Deep State that serves it can only exist when power is greatly concentrated in a federal system.
For the sake of argument, if the political will could be found to work against the military industrial complex in the interests of true national defense and fiscal responsibility, the following steps could be taken immediately to rectify the many problems facing the military services of the United States:
The U.S. Army
Abandon the obsession with counterinsurgency and occupation and realign the focus of the Army on the defense of the homeland and a handful of historical allies. Rebuild the Army as a lean and well-equipped conventional fighting force. The most highly trained and experienced cadres of special operations forces should be retained, with other members dispersed to more conventional infantry, airborne and reconnaissance units. Most of these men would be moved to reserve status. Personnel should be cut by at least 25%, the majority retained moved to reserve status, and many overseas bases and operations ceased. The focus should be on defense of the nation’s own territories, while also safeguarding the economic interests and maritime trade lanes that are the lifeblood of any nation.
All legacy systems that have proven capable and efficient on the modern battlefield should be refurbished and upgraded to the most modern standard. The M2 Bradley modernization program should be continued, and the AMPV program given increased priority so that the thousands of M113 vehicles can finally end their 56 year tour of duty. MRAP inventories should be reduced to the very minimum and all surplus units sold off to recoup some of the expense incurred in their procurement and the money directed into offsetting procurement costs of new AMPVs and JLTVs.
The JLTV platform is a modular, easily upgradable light tactical vehicle that can be tailored to fit the mission. Although most units should be the basic utility variant, many will need to be acquired to fill the roles of light armored reconnaissance, armored security, convoy security, and light special operations vehicles. An air-droppable airborne armored fighting vehicle should be developed based on the JLTV. The U.S. airborne forces have lacked any real armored fighting vehicle that can accompany them in parachute operations since the M551 was retired in 1996. An up-armored JLTV equipped with a 30mm autocannon would serve as a good stopgap until a purpose built tracked vehicle could be designed. The venerable and ubiquitous HMMWV should maintain its utility role in all non-combat formations, as well as the basis for the Avenger light anti-aircraft missile system for years to come.
Of greatest importance is the rejuvenation of the armored and mechanized units of the U.S. Army. The M1126 Stryker family of wheeled armored vehicles cannot bear the weight of a conventional conflict with either Russia or China. The M1A2SepV3 MBT upgrade, including the addition of the Trophy APS should be afforded adequate funding, yet the greatest need of the Army is the replacement of the M113 in combat units. The U.S. Army’s proposed 3,000 unit procurement of AMPVs is a good start.
The artillery arm of the U.S. Army must gain the attention it has lacked since the dissolving of the Soviet Union and the success of Operation Desert Storm. U.S. military planners and the leadership of the DOD must realize the continued importance of both conventional and rocket artillery on the modern battlefield. The U.S. Army only operates two self-propelled artillery systems, the M109 Paladin and M270 MLRS. This is not necessarily a bad thing as long as both systems are maintained, upgraded and fielded in sufficient number. The M109A7 upgrade program must gain greater funding in the immediate future.
The U.S. Navy
The LCS and DDG-1000 programs are a national disgrace and should be declared as such. The two existing DDG-1000s should be used as test beds for future engineering and weapons systems. The third vessel should be cancelled immediately. As for the LCS, the existing fleet should be used for littoral patrol duties, and all units currently under construction or planned should be cancelled. Enough money has been wasted on these horribly conceived and even more horribly manifested examples of the monumental corruption and waste so integral to the U.S. defense industry.
Freedom Class LCS (background) and Independence Class LCS (foreground). Arguably two of the most monumental failures of warship design in modern history. A cautionary tale of waste and ineptitude.
The FFG(X) program to design a modern yet conventional multi-purpose frigate for the U.S. Navy should be fully embraced. The new frigate should adhere to the traditional naval warfare duties of a frigate and should be designed to sufficiently fulfill a balance of AAW, ASW, and surface warfare missions. In conjunction, priority should be given to procurement of the new DDG-51 Arleigh Burke Flight III. The Arleigh Burke has been the backbone of the U.S. Navy since it entered service. It is a well-designed, balanced, flexible and powerful naval combatant of significant displacement. It puts the LCS and the Zumwalt to shame in every respect, and has existed as a symbol of U.S. Navy power and presence across the length and breadth of the globe since 1991.
It is almost unconscionable that with the richest and most accomplished history of aircraft carrier aviation under its belt, that the U.S. Navy could not come up with a better design for the next generation of CVNs than the Gerald R. Ford Class. Perhaps the namesake of the lead vessel in the class was well chosen, as President Ford was far from a memorable performer; however, the wisdom of the entire program from its very inception must be questioned. The U.S. Navy must outgrow the “super carrier” fixation. There is a future for aircraft carriers, yet on a far different pattern than what the U.S. Navy has operated for the past 50 years.
The greatest area of concern for the U.S. Navy is the weakness of the carrier air wing, a weakness that will not be fundamentally corrected by the introduction of the F-35 in U.S. Navy and USMC service aboard U.S. carriers. A new, longer range fleet defense aircraft akin to a modern F-14 Tomcat must be developed. In addition, a new attack aircraft must be developed with a range that exceeds that of the F-18 Super Hornet by a factor of 100%. It is hard to believe that the F-4 Skyhawk had an operational combat radius exceeding 700 miles (2,000 mile maximum range), twice that of a Super Hornet. Additionally, the S-3 Viking must be re-tasked as a carrier borne aerial tanker, and the many airframes now mothballed, yet with thousands of hours of use left, need to be repurposed to this task. The current carrier air wing as it stands, even with the introduction of the F-35, is of little utility against a peer adversary such as Russia or China.
S-3 Viking in use as a carrier borne aerial refueling tanker. Even without significant modification, this stout little aircraft can carry 16,000 lbs. of fuel. The US Navy has 108 of these aircraft sitting in storage at a military aircraft storage facility in Arizona.
The United States must acquire both an SSN and SSBN to replace the Los Angeles and Ohio Class vessels that are approaching the end of their service lives. There is no greater defensive role for the U.S. Navy in ensuring the security of the nation than the continued operation of its attack and ballistic missile submarine forces. Both Russia and China understand this, and have greatly modernized their own submarine forces. Much of the success they have achieved in pushing the envelope of submarine design was due to their intense competition with a U.S. Navy submarine force that was always at the cutting edge of sub-surface warfare.
Conclusion
The United States stands at a crossroads in many respects, and the nation’s military equally so. All empires experience a period of over-expansion, military, economic and political over-reach and imbalance. The United States has followed in the wake of the many imperialist endeavors before it, with apparently little lessons having been learned. Imperialism is the inevitable result of power devoid of wisdom and humility. A nation borne out of a revolution against empire and absolutism has itself devolved into a much more dangerous and immoral avatar of its former oppressor. This must change.
While Defense Secretary Mattis clearly acknowledged the need to transform the U.S. military and realign it in a direction more focused on fighting and winning a conventional conflict with the near peer adversaries he identified as Russia and China, one can only hope that he realizes how the U.S. military that he served in for decades, got to the deplorable state that it now finds itself in. The greatest enemy that the U.S. military has fought for the past seventy years is undoubtedly the military industrial complex that it is an integral component of. The Soviet Union, North Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria were never as much of a threat to the U.S. Armed Services as the corrupt military industrial complex and the Deep State that serves as its guardian.
The United States military is in the weakest state of material strength and readiness since the conclusion of the Cold War. The conventional ground forces of the Army have been transformed into a force bent on occupation and counterinsurgency. Its heavy armored formations are in a state of disrepair and material inferiority vis-a-vis its most capable theoretical adversaries. The cornerstone of American power projection and intimidation, the aircraft carrier strike groups, are a sad shadow of their former self. The carrier air wing, the entire reason that an aircraft carrier exists in the first place, has devolved into a tool of increasingly limited utility, with an ever diminishing reach.
The corrupt military industrial system that permeates every facet of American economic, political and even cultural life has sucked the very lifeblood from the nation, eroded its morality, bankrupt its economic future, and stolen a generation of its most patriotic and selfless sons and daughters. While James Mattis acknowledges the challenges facing the national security of the United States, he clearly misattributes the blame and misidentifies the very real adversary. Russia and China are not existential threats to the continued welfare of the American state. James Mattis need only look in the mirror to see the real threat, for he has come to represent the cabal of special interests that enslaves the nation and constitution he has pledged to serve, and holds the remainder of the world equally hostage.
There is very little chance that the reforms mentioned in this analysis will be adopted, or that the United States will move in a direction that brings it back to its inception as a constitutional republic. The interests of the military industrial complex in promoting conflict, and maximizing financial profit will continue to steer the United States military, and the nation as a whole, on an unsustainable and self-destructive path. There is little doubt that if the Deep State pushes the nation to war against Russia or China, and likely an alliance of the two, that the United States military has ever been in a weaker position. Such a conflict would be of no benefit to any of the nations concerned, yet many potential flash points exist that could lead to a conflict, including the South China Sea, Syria or Ukraine. As the United States plays catch-up after decades of military adventurism, China and Russia have spent that same time patiently and judiciously gathering their strength. The scenario of a one-sided victory in favor of the United States is pure fantasy, existing only in the daydreams of the emperor who wears no clothes.
Earlier this week, Defense Secretary James Mattis called for an immediate ceasefire in Yemen. In the course of this, he demanded an end to fighting, and an immediate halt to all airstrikes against populated areas.
Sanaa was mostly hit with airstrikes, while locals reported heavy clashes around Hodeidah, a vital port city that Saudi forces have been massing around all week. In no case is there any indication that a ceasefire is starting.
Saudi and UAE officials have yet to comment on the US call for a ceasefire and peace talks at all. The only response at all from their camp was from Yemeni officials backed by the Saudis, who embraced the idea of peace talks, but similarly showed no signs of stopping fighting in the meantime.
– كان لافتاً ما أدلى به وزير الدفاع الأميركي جيمس ماتيس حول صيغة لوقف الحرب في اليمن، فهو لم يوجه دعوة سياسية بل أعدّ روزنامة عملية حدّد لها سقفاً بثلاثين يوماً لوقف النار وبدء التفاوض السياسي، من دون أن يكلّف نفسه عناء زيارة الرياض والتشاور مع القيادة السعودية كشريك استراتيجي في المنطقة، وفقاً لوصف سابق لماتيس وللرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب. فكلام ماتيس الأقرب للأمر العسكري موجّه لكل من السعودية والإمارات، بوقف الحرب. والباقي دعوة ومطالب للقيادة اليمنية ولأنصار الله خصوصاً بقبول مقايضة وقف العمليات العسكرية السعودية والإماراتية، مقابل وقف قصف الصواريخ على المناطق السعودية. وهي دعوة لقيت رداً واضحاً من أنصار الله بربط كل بحث بوقف الحرب بأن يكون شاملاً وفي المقدمة يأتي فك الحصار.
– التوازن الجديد في اليمن بات واضحاً بعد الموقف الأميركي، وهو يمنح أنصار الله الموقع المقرر بالتوازي مع واشنطن التي أعلنت وضع يدها على قرار السعودية والإمارات ومَنْ معهما من اليمنيين. وواضح أن مسقط ستدير التفاوض بين الفريقين الأميركي واليمني، والواضح أيضاً أن واشنطن تقوم بذلك بعدما فرضت ضريبة التطبيع على مسقط لقاء جائزة الدور التفاوضي، لكنها تدرك بمعزل عن كون علاقة أنصار الله بإيران ليست علاقة تبعية، أن المعادلات الجيوسياسية في المنطقة جعلت من حرب السعودية والإمارات في اليمن مدخلاً لامتلاك عناصر تفوّق بوجه إيران في البحار واليابسة والممرات والمضائق المائية، وأن الحديث الأميركي عن الحاجة للسعودية في المواجهة مع إيران لا تجد لها ترجمة بمثل ما تقدّمه الحرب على اليمن، ووقف الحرب بقرار أميركي سيجد نفسه ملزماً بالتفاعل مع المطالب والشروط اليمنية بفك الحصار، تعني إحالة الدور السعودي رسمياً إلى التقاعد، خصوصاً في ما تسميه واشنطن بالمواجهة مع إيران.
– عملياً، لا يغيب عن بال واشنطن، ومن دون تنسيق تفاوضي بين أنصار الله وإيران، أن شروط وقف الحرب لن تتضمّن نزع الصواريخ البالستية من أيدي أنصار الله، وأن وهم الإشراف الدولي عليها إعلامي، وأن الدعوة لإدارة ذاتية مؤقتة للمناطق اليمنية لن يقبله أنصار الله، وأن الطريق ستكون مفتوحة نحو حكومة مؤقتة تمهّد لانتخابات، وأن مسار الوضع في اليمن لن يكون مغايراً لمصير الوضع في سورية، حيث خسارة أميركا للحرب على الدولة السورية المستقلة، سيكون كافياً لإعلان انتصار إيران. فما يهمّ إيران وفقاً لما تكتب الصحف الأميركية وتقول مراكز الدراسات التي تعتمدها الإدارة الأميركية في رسم سياساتها، هو أن يكون على حدود فلسطين دولة سورية مقاتلة قادرة ومستقلة، وأن يكون على مياه الخليج والبحر الأحمر دولة يمنية مؤمنة بالاستقلال الوطني، لا تضعها واشنطن تحت إبطها مباشرة أو بالواسطة السعودية. وهذا ما تدرك واشنطن أنه حاصل بمجرد وقف الحرب التي جاءت لمنع حصوله.
– يثير مسار العقوبات الأميركية وتزامنها مع ما يشكل عملياً رسالة انفتاح يمنية هامة على المصالح الإيرانية، وبوابة تفاوض تفتح بواسطة مسقط، التساؤل عن مدى قناعة واشنطن بالذهاب إلى المواجهة مع إيران، ودرجة الثقة بالعقوبات لتطويع إيران، بعدما صارت مجرد ضرورة تفاوضية، حيث حجر الرحى في المواجهة الذي تشكله السعودية يجري إخراجه من الحلبة مضرّجاً بجراحاته؟
رغم كل الضجيج الإعلامي الأميركي الموحي بتقدم محور الشر المطلق على تحالف قوى المقاومة وأصدقائها، فإن الوقائع على الأرض وموازين القوى الميدانية تشي بتراجع اندفاعتهم القتالية وتقهقر إرادتهم أمام اصطفافات نصرنا المبين وعزم أصدقائنا الدوليين المضي قدماً في معادلة الردع الاستراتيجي..!
وإليكم بعض مؤشرات وقرائن خيباتهم الميدانية:
قام وزير الحرب الأميركي، الجنرال جيمس ماتيس، يوم أمس الاول باتخاذ قرار يقضي بسحب أربعة أفواج من بطاريات صواريخ الباتريوت الأميركية، المرابطة في «الشرق الأوسط» لمواجهة تزايد التهديدات الروسية والصينية التي تواجه القوات العسكرية الأميركية بشكل عام والقوات الجوية والصاروخية الدرع الصاروخية بشكل خاص.
حيث إن كلتا الدولتين تمتلك قدرات صاروخية تهدّد بالقضاء على وسائل الدفاع الجوي الأميركية، من خلال زيادة الدولتين من حجم قواتهما الصاروخية التي تبلغ سرعة صواريخها خمسة أضعاف سرعة الصوت.
وبموجب هذا القرار فإن القيادة المركزية الأميركية، ومقرها الرئيسي في فلوريدا، والفرعي الخاص بـ«الشرق الاوسط» وآسيا ومقره الدوحة/ قطر، والذي تبلغ أمر العمليات المذكور أعلاه، سوف تقوم بسحب فوجي باتريوت من الكويت وفوج من البحرين وفوج رابع من الأردن.
علماً أن أمر العمليات لم يتضمن أي إشارة الى الأماكن التي سيتم نشر هذه المنظومات فيها، بينما أكدت مصادر عسكرية غير أميركية أن فوجين من هذه المنظومات سيتم نقلهما الى افغانستان في حين سيتم نقل الفوجين الآخرين الى رومانيا.
أما عن أسباب موجة الرعب، التي اجتاحت المسؤولين الإسرائيليين وأنصارهم السعوديين والإماراتيين، فإنها تعود إلى أن ماتيس قد اتخذ قراره هذا بعد يومين فقط على إعلان وزير الدفاع الروسي، الجنرال شويغو، عن قرار روسيا تزويد الجيش السوري بأربع كتائب صواريخ دفاع جوّي من طراز / اس 300/، والتي قد تتضاعف الى ثمانية عند الحاجة، بالإضافة الى ان هذا القرار قد اتخذ بعد الخطاب التصعيدي، الذي مارسه الرئيس الأميركي ووزير خارجيته ومستشاره للأمن القومي، خلال الأيام الثلاثة الماضية ضد إيران. وهو ما دفع الإسرائيليين والسعوديين والإماراتيين الى تفسير الموقف الأميركي على أنه مادة موجهة للاستهلاك الإعلامي الداخلي استعداداً لانتخابات الكونغرس النصفية القادمة. الامر الذي يجعل الدعم الأميركي الموعود أشبه بالسراب.
وفِي ظل موجة الرعب هذه، وتكرار اتصالات المسؤولين في الدول المتزلزلة المشار اليها أعلاه، مع المسؤولين في فرع القيادة المركزية في الدوحة وامتناع هؤلاء المسؤولين عن التعليق على سحب الباتريوت او إعطاء أي تفسير لهذه الخطوة، فقد اضطرت وزارة الدفاع الأميركية الى إصدار تصريح، على لسان ناطق باسم القيادة المركزية في فلوريدا وليس الناطق باسمها ، وهو الكابتن بيل اوربان Cpt. Bill Urban، الذي قال: «إن القوات الأميركية ستبقى منتشرة في مواقعها لتنفيذ أي مهمة او مواجهة أي طارئ في المنطقة» أي منطقة انتشارها في الشرق الأوسط .
وتابع الكابتن بيل اوربان قائلاً: «إن القيادة المركزية الأميركية ملتزمة بقوه بالعمل مع حلفائنا وشركائنا تأمين استقرار وأمن المنطقة» يقصد الشرق الأوسط .
أما ما زاد الطين بلة، فهو ما سمعه نتن ياهو من سيد البيت الأبيض، خلال اجتماعهما اليوم أمس على هامش اجتماعات الجمعية العمومية للأمم المتحدة، حيث أبلغ ترامب نتن ياهو بما يلي :
صفقة القرن ستكون جاهزة للتداول خلال ثلاثة أشهر.
أنه يرغب في التوصل الى حل للقضية الفلسطينية خلال ولايته الاولى على أساس الدولتين.
أن على «إسرائيل» أن تقدّم تنازلات للطرف الآخر الفلسطينيين .
وهذا ما جعل نتن ياهو، رغم سماعه كلاماً معسولاً من ترامب كقوله إنه يقف مع «إسرائيل» 100 ، يزيد من خيبة أمله في السياسة الأميركية الضبابية، حيث إنه تلقى ضربة ثانية، وفِي اليوم نفسه، بعد ضربة الباتريوت.
والحبل على الجرار، في تراجع واضمحلال أهمية الدور الإسرائيلي في المنطقة، رغم كل الضجيج الإعلامي الذي يوحي بغير ذلك. خاصة أن الرحيل الأميركي نحو الشرق الأقصى سيتواصل، بل سيتصاعد، ما يعني مزيداً من الوضوح لهزيمة الولايات المتحدة ومشاريعها في «الشرق الأوسط» وانتصار محور المقاومة المدعوم بقوة من روسيا وإيران. وذلك لأن روسيا وإيران قد حققتا نصراً استراتيجياً، على صعيد الصراع الدولي الذي كانت تقوده الولايات المتحدة ضد روسيا بهدف تطويقها وعزلها عن الصين وإثارة المشاكل الداخلية فيها وإسقاطها كدولة اتحادية موحدة والسيطرة على ثرواتها وأراضيها..!
الحالة نفسها المقرّرة ضد إيران التي كانت ولا تزال تواجه المخططات الأميركية نفسها والهادفة الى إسقاط نظام الجمهورية الإسلامية فيها، وذلك في إطار الاستعدادات الأميركية لتطويق الصين وتعزيز حشدها الاستراتيجي على حدود الصين الغربية وحدود روسيا الجنوبية الغربية تعزيزاً لمواقع الولايات المتحدة في مواجهة الصين في مرحلة لاحقة.
بين حشدنا الاستراتيجي وحشدهم المضاد ثمة فارق كبير هو الذي سيحسم نهاية المعارك ألا وهو قوة الإرادة والعزم والاستقامة التي يتميّز فيها عنصرنا البشري عن عنصرهم، كما أثبتت كل المعارك التي خضناها ضدهم في السنوات الأخيرة…!
Comment:
Amidst a plethora of op-eds that point toward the probability of a major upcoming conflict in Syria vis-à-vis Idlib and go on to suggest such a scenario would carry the potential of turning into an escalated war between the West and Russia, Tom Luongo presents a drastically different opinion.
Sometimes when I step back from the overwhelming flow of geopolitical insanity I’m reminded of the old adage that coming close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. To which, I always add, “And nuclear war.”
I’ve been watching the build up to the operation to liberate Idlib in Syria which includes the endless neocon and Israeli moral preening warning Assad against using chemical weapons with a sense of detachment. And I keep thinking to myself, “Do they really think we’re that stupid?”
Three times the chemical weapons canard has been used to justify further aggression against Syria and three times a full-blown U.S. invasion has been averted. First, by Vladimir Putin’s deft diplomacy, and General Dunford’s refusal to implement a ‘no-fly zone’ in 2013, and then during the Trump years with ineffectual air strikes on Syrian airbases.
How much of that ineffectuality of those airstrikes were designed by Defence Secretary James Mattis to avoid a wider conflagration and how much was Russian EW/missile defence is anyone’s guess.
The truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle.
That is why everyone who is worrying about the U.S.’s blustering over Syria’s Idlib campaign needs to take a big step back and think the scenario through.
Because the neoconservatives and Israel are forcing the situation to its crisis point, thinking they can manipulate the headlines and the levers of power to still eke out a victory in Syria that will allow them to continue on their quest to destroy Russia first and conquer the rest of Asia after that.
And they are willing to blackmail us with the threat of WWIII over 50,000 head-chopping mercenaries to get their cookie.
However, when you factor in the men actually in charge of the U.S. military chain of command, Trump and Mattis, and you realize the lengths to which Mattis’ field commanders have gone to avoid direct confrontation with Russian forces, you come to the conclusion that the men who will actually fight this war the neoconservative provocateurs and laptop bombardiers are clamouring for won’t actually pull the trigger.
The reasons for this are manifest:
First, the potential for the conflict to go nuclear is too high for rational men to take that chance. Mattis and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu are hard-bitten, no-nonsense men. Neither underestimates the other’s resolve to defend their men and national interests.
So, once the shooting starts expect it to get ugly quick. Therefore it is unlikely to get to that point.
Second, there is no profit in that kind of escalation for the people who profit from war.
The banks and the military weapons makers thrive in low-intensity, frozen conflicts which keep sales flowing and governments indebted to pay for them.
In an age of nuclear weapons, proxy wars fought by mercenaries with drones are far more profitable than any large-scale invasions. I hate to say this but from a discounted cash flow perspective Lockheed-Martin wants predictability to cover their quarterly dividends to shareholders more than they want to bring about the supposed Zionist plan for Greater Israel.
Sorry to burst everyone’s conspiracy theories.
Third and most importantly, the U.S. cannot afford a non-nuclear confrontation with Russia that punctures the illusion of U.S. military superiority. Too much of the world’s confidence in the dollar itself rests in the U.S.’s ability to project power and defend its interests militarily.
This confidence is a mixture of that military capability and the U.S.’s traditional position of a country with an excellent legal framework within which to do business. It is fashionable among geopolitical critics, myself included, to get caught up in the rhetoric and projection of a sclerotic and weakening United States, but legally it is still one of the best places on earth to do business.
But, as Martin Armstrong pointed out recently, Trump’s domestic opposition has openly declared sedition against him this week in the New York Times. Former Secretary of State, John Kerry, is doing the talk show circuit calling for a constitutional crisis over Trump allegedly being unfit for office. And George Soros is paying protesters to disrupt the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
If allowed to run its course to impeachment in the event of the Republicans losing control of the House in November, this would be a death blow to the U.S.’s reputation as a nation of laws rather than a nation of men. The U.S. dollar would not recover from such a blow to its credibility, especially in light of Trump’s nearly-unhinged use of sanctions and threats of tariffs, weaponizing the dollar indiscriminately.
And this is why Vladimir Putin openly showed his hand to the world in March. Strategically, he let everyone know that any confrontation between Russia and the U.S. would result in the U.S losing its status as the world’s pre-eminent military power.
This is why the neocons and the U.S./U.K. Deep State have been so adamant in accelerating its provocations against Russia. They have to present us with the Faustian bargain of WWIII before Russia has these weapon systems fully deployed.
It’s also why Trump and Mattis are allowing them to have their head. It feeds Trump’s “Art of the Deal” strategy for negotiations while also allowing him the opportunity to save face after Idlib is liberated regardless of whether another chemical weapons attack is staged.
I think we won’t see one here.
The way out of Syria for the U.S. with its face-saved is to thunder and bluster, threaten fire and brimstone just like Trump did with Kim Jong-un and use that to explain why Assad showed restraint and didn’t use chemical weapons this time.
I can even see Trump tweeting something about three strikes and he would be out.
Once Idlib is liberated Mattis will happily begin pulling vulnerable troops out of al-Tanf and Afghanistan. That’s why I believe he went there to the surprise of the CIA house-organ Washington Post last week.
And then the neocon and Israeli muddying of the waters will move to the Geneva talks, but we’ll cross that Rubicon when it approaches.
August 14, 2018 (Tony Cartalucci – NEO) – As atrocities and scandal begin to mount regarding the US-backed Saudi-led war on the impoverished nation of Yemen, the involvement and hypocrisy of the United States and other Western backers is coming to full light.
Global condemnation of Saudi airstrikes on civilian targets has brought public attention to Washington’s role in the conflict – a role the Western media has attempted to downplay for years. It is ironic, or perhaps telling, that alternative media outlets targeted as “Russian influence” are leading coverage of Yemen’s growing humanitarian catastrophe.
US Denies Role in Proxy War That Couldn’t be Fought Without It
In a recent press conference, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis – when asked about the US role in the Yemeni conflict in regards to Saudi atrocities – would claim:
We are not engaged in the civil war. We will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Mattis himself would lobby US Congress earlier this year to continue US support for Saudi-led operations in Yemen.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis made a personal appeal to Congress on Wednesday not to restrict the United States’ support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen, as the sponsors of a privileged resolution to end Washington’s involvement announced that the Senate would vote on the matter next week.
Support includes US intelligence gathering for Saudi operations, the sale of of US weapons to the Saudi regime, and even US aerial refueling for US-made Saudi warplanes dropping US-made munitions on Yemeni targets selected with the aid of US planners.
In essence, the US is all but directly fighting the “civil war” itself.
Abetting War Crimes, Sponsoring Terrorists to What End?
As to why the US believes it must continue supporting a proxy war Saudi Arabia is fighting on its behalf – beginning under US President Barack Obama and continuing in earnest under current US President Donald Trump – the Washington Post could conclude (emphasis added):
The war in Yemen has inspired much controversy in Congress, as lawmakers have questioned why the United States has involved itself so closely on the Saudi-backed side of a civil war against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel forces. Successive presidential administrations have presented the campaign as a necessary component of the fight against terrorism and to preserve stability in the region. As Mattis put it in his letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, “withdrawing U.S. support would embolden Iran to increase its support to the Houthis, enabling further ballistic missile strikes on Saudi Arabia and threatening vital shipping lanes in the Red Sea, thereby raising the risk of a regional conflict.”
However, Mattis, his colleagues, and his predecessors have categorically failed to explain how Iran constitutes a greater threat to either US or global security than Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is a nation admittedly sponsoring Al Qaeda worldwide, including in Yemen as revealed by a recent Associated Press investigation, and the nation which both radicalized the supposed perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City and Washington D.C. and from which most of the supposed hijackers originated from.
If Iran is indeed waging war against Saudi Arabia and its terrorist proxies in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, the real question is – why isn’t the United States backing Tehran instead?
The obvious answer to this question reveals the crumbling moral authority of the United States as the principled facade it has used for decades falls away from its hegemony-driven agenda worldwide.
The US and its allies created the “War on Terror” and intentionally perpetuated it as a pretext to expand militarily around the globe in an attempt to preserve its post-Cold War primacy and prevent the rise of a multipolar alternative to its unipolar “international order.” It has done this not only at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives across the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, it has done it at the cost of trillions of taxpayers’ dollars and the lives of thousands of America’s own soldiers, sailors, aviators, and Marines.
Canada Too
A recent row between Canada and Saudi Arabia over supposed “human rights” concerns appears to be a vain attempt to salvage the credibility of at least some nations involved in the now 7 year long war – the last 3 years of which has seen direct military intervention by Saudi Arabia, its partners, and its backers – including Canada.
The spat appeared to have been sparked last week when Canada’s foreign ministry expressed its concern over the arrest of Saudi civil society and women’s rights activists, in a tweet that echoed concerns previously voiced by the United Nations. Saudi Arabia swiftly shot back, making plans to remove thousands of Saudi students and medical patients from Canada, and suspending the state airline’s flights to and from Canada, among other actions.
The Guardian would also claim:
…the US said it would remain on the sidelines while Saudi officials lashed out at Canada over its call to release jailed civil rights activists.
Canada’s feigned concern for “human rights” in Saudi Arabia comes at a time when the Canadian government continues approving of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms sales to Riyadh. This includes small arms and armored personnel carriers Saudi forces are using in their ongoing invasion and occupation of neighboring Yemen.
The feigned divide between Ottawa and Washington over Saudi human rights violations is overshadowed by years of commitment by both North American nations in propping up the Saudi regime, and aiding and abetting the very worst of Riyadh’s human rights abuses unfolding amid the Yemeni conflict.
Canada’s apparent role is to help compartmentalize the worst of the West’s decaying moral authority, containing it with the US, and taking up a more prominent role in the West’s industrialized “human rights” and “democracy” leveraging racket.
While Canadian armaments help fuel genocide in Yemen – Canadian diplomats around the world fund agitators and directly meddle in the internal political affairs of foreign nations predicated on promoting “human rights” and “democracy.”
In Thailand for example, the US has receded into the shadows, allowing Canada, the UK, and other European nations to openly engage in political meddling on their behalf. US funding and support continues, but the public face of Western “outrage” is increasingly becoming Canadian, British, and Northern European.
However, Canada faces the same problem that has permanently eroded American credibility. And as its role in perpetuating real human rights abuses worldwide continues to be exposed, its feigned concern over token or even manufactured human rights concerns will increasingly appear hypocritical and hollow, undermining the West’s collective ability to leverage and hide behind human rights and democracy to advance their self-serving agendas.
Mattis: Putin Is Trying To “Undermine America’s Moral Authority”
By Caitlin Johnstone
At a graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America’s moral authority,” and that “his actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.”
A casual glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has no “moral authority” of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that the exchange is anything close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it’s getting and simply protecting its own interests from the interests of geopolitical rivals, it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique threat to the world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia is being toward the west, it gets even more laughable.
In order to believe that the US has anything resembling “moral authority” you have to shove your head so far into the sand you get lava burns, but that really is what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things the Russian government has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything but an indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America’s unelected power establishment has been inflicting upon the world, so they need to weave a narrative about “moral authority” in order to give those accusations meaning and relevance. And, since the notion of America having moral authority is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven of threads of fantasy and denial.
Establishment anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It’s sustained by the talking heads of plutocrat-owned western media making the same unanimous assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of voice without presenting any evidence or engaging with the reality of what Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals believe that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their government, but don’t believe for example that America is ruled by a baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not the other. They could have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy narrative and had just as much success.
In reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can’t just come right out and tell the public that they’re dangerously escalating tensions with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US government and is trying to take over the world.
Of equal interest to the Defense Secretary’s “moral authority” gibberish is his claim that Putin’s actions “are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.”
I mean, like… what? So Russia isn’t challenging America militarily and isn’t taking any actions to attempt to, but it’s trying to, what, hurt America’s feelings? All this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean things about it behind its back? How does a guy named “Mad Dog” get to be such a thin-skinned little snowflake?
I’m just playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to “undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by the plutocrat-owned media. As we’ve been discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers babbling about “Russian propaganda” and Putin’s attempts to “undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” all that they are saying is that the plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to do that.
More and more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly consciously examined instead. This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with our species moving out of its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I am greatly encouraged by what I am seeing.
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This article was originally published by “Medium“ –
Mad Dog Mattis, the destroyer of Raqqa, frets about losing moral authority
It’s parallel universe time when US Pentagon chief James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis complains that America’s “moral authority” is being undermined by others – specifically Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
This is the ex-Marine general who gained his ruthless reputation from when illegally occupying US troops razed the Iraqi city of Fallujah in the 2004-2005 using “shake and bake” bombardment of inhabitants with banned white phosphorus incendiaries.
A repeat of those war crimes happened again last year under Mattis’ watch as Pentagon chief when US warplanes obliterated the Syrian city of Raqqa, killing thousands of civilians. Even the pro-US Human Rights Watch abhorred the repeated use of white phosphorus during that campaign to “liberate” Raqqa, supposedly from jihadists.
These are but two examples from dense archives of US war crimes committed over several decades, from its illegal intervention in Syria to Libya, from Iraq to Vietnam, back to the Korean War in the early 1950s when American carpet bombing killed millions of innocent civilians.
For Mattis to lament during a speech at a naval college last week that America’s moral authority is being eroded by Putin is a symptom of the delusional official thinking infesting Washington.
According to Mattis, the problem of America’s diminishing global reputation has nothing to do with US misconduct – even though the evidence is replete to prove that systematic misconduct. No, the problem, according to him, is that Russia’s Putin is somehow sneakily undermining Washington’s moral authority.
Mattis told his audience: “Putin aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic model and attempts to undermine America’s moral authority.” He added that the Russian leader’s “actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.”
The US Secretary of Defense doesn’t elaborate on how he thinks Russia is achieving this dastardly plot to demean America. It is simply asserted as fact. This has been a theme recycled over and over by officials in Washington and Brussels, other Western government leaders and of course NATO and its affiliated think-tanks. All of which has been dutifully peddled by Western news media.
It is classic “in denial” thinking. The general loss of legitimacy and authority by Western governments is supposedly nothing to do with their own inherent failures and transgressions, from bankrupt austerity economics, to deteriorating social conditions, to illegal US-led wars and the repercussions of blowback terrorism and mass migration of refugees.
Oh no. What the ruling elites are trying to do is shift the blame from their own culpability on to others, principally Russia.
American political analyst Randy Martin says that Mattis’ latest remarks show a form of collective delusion among Western political establishments and their aligned mainstream news media.
“What a powerful delusion Mattis and Western leaders like him are encumbered with,” says Martin. “The US undercuts and compromises its own avowed beliefs and ideals because it has lost any moral integrity that it might have feasibly pretended to have due to decades of its own criminal foreign conduct.”
The analyst added: “America’s so-called moral authority is the free pass it gives itself to topple democracy in Ukraine, replacing it with neo-Nazis; it has turned economically prosperous Libya into a wasteland, after murdering its leader Muammar Gaddafi; it funds and openly sponsors the MKO terror group in Iran for regime change in Tehran; and it is neck deep in fueling the Saudi coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen.”
Despite this litany of criminality committed by the US with the acquiescence of European allies, Washington, says Martin, “preaches a bizarre doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’ and somehow arrogates a moral right to dominate the world. This is the fruit of the diseased minds of sociopaths.”
This week, three headline-making issues speak volumes about America’s declining moral authority.
First, there are the harrowing scenes of thousands of migrant children being ripped away from parents at the Mexican border, forcibly housed in wire cages, sobbing relentlessly from the trauma. There has been an outcry around the world over the heartless “zero-tolerance” policy by the Trump administration. The United Nations condemned it as “unconscionable”.
One editorial writer for the Washington Post called Trump’s policy “barbarous”, and said it was inflicting “great damage to the fabric of our democracy”.
Secondly, the Trump administration is recklessly pushing ahead with a trade war against China and its Western allies. The unilateral imposition of tariffs by the White House in disregard for international trade laws has prompted European officials to deplore how Trump is “undermining the global rules-based system”.
Thirdly, there is widespread horror at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen where millions of civilians are in danger of starving to death due to the US-backed Saudi and Emirati offensive on the critical port city of Hodeida.
Lastly, the US withdrawal this week from the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council, which UN ambassador Nikki Haley lambasted for being a “cesspool of prejudice” against Israel, caused consternation that Washington was cynically trying to shut down criticism of its support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.
In all three issues, US global standing is tarnished by its own policy-making, decisions and conduct. Increasingly, Washington is becoming the full-fledged rogue regime that many observers had already concluded it was from decades of illegal wars and subterfuges. What is different now is that the rogue image is becoming impossible to not notice or to conceal by self-serving propaganda and myths that the Western media indulged in for decades.
Mattis’ protests about the US losing its moral authority are more to do with a growing fear of one’s own nakedness. Like the emperor who had no clothes, the naked ugliness of American global power is becoming more and more exposed.
Arguably, it is not a case of US power becoming more malevolent or wayward over time. That has always been the case; only in the past the perniciousness was handily concealed by an efficient, servile news media.
With increasing global communications and alternative sources of news and analysis, the erstwhile media monopoly that the US enjoyed along with its Western lackeys is no longer dominant. Western public in particular have more information sources to allow a more critical, independent assessment of their governments and the official narratives. This is why the supposed “moral authority” of the US government is being challenged. People are seeing through the veil of lies and misinformation, and making the correct conclusions.
Not only no clothes, but the emperor’s hands are covered in blood from massive crimes against humanity and atrocious wars of aggression that were previously denied or hidden.
One suspects that what’s really agitating Mattis and other apologists for US illegal wars and malevolent conduct is that the unvarnished truth is being told by alternative sources.
America’s purported “moral authority” is not being lost. It never had any in the first place. What’s being lost is the illusion of authority
الهجوم النهائي لقوات حلف المقاومة على مواقع المسلحين الإرهابيين في أرياف القنيطرة ودرعا، وصولاً إلى حدود الجولان وما بعد بعد حدود الجولان والحدود الأردنية بات قاب قوسين أو أدنى…!
في هذه الأثناء تلقى رئيس الوزراء الإسرائيلي ووزير حربه رسالة سرية نقلت إليهما بواسطة الطرف الروسي، تضمّنت تحذيراً شديد اللهجة لـ»إسرائيل» من التدخل، بأيّ شكل من الأشكال في المعارك المقبلة، وإلا فإنّ الردّ لقوات حلف المقاومة على أي استفزاز «إسرائيلي» سيكون أقسى بكثير مما يتوقعه العدو…!
في هذه الأثناء، فإنه وعلى الرغم من عاصفة الضجيج التي يثيرها رئيس الوزراء الإسرائيلي، في تناغم مع تصريحات تصدر على الموجة نفسها من الجنرالات العسكريين والأمنيين الأميركيين، حول العديد من المواضيع المتعلقة بالعدوان الأميركي الإسرائيلي الرجعي «العربي» على سورية، فإنّ انتصارات الجيش السوري وحلفائه مستمرة على كلّ الجبهات متجاهلة كلّ التهديد والعويل الأميركي الإسرائيلي السعودي والذي يتمحور حول ما يطلقون عليه «توسّع النفوذ الإيراني» في سورية وغيرها من الدول العربية.
ولكن عاصفة الضجيج هذه لم تتمكن من إخفاء الهزائم المتلاحقة التي يتكبّدها المعسكر الصهيوأميركي المعادي لحلف المقاومة، ولا هي قادرة على تهدئة روع القادة العسكريين والأمنيين والسياسيين الإسرائيليين الذين انتقلوا الى القدس المحتلة، لعقد اجتماعاتهم في النفق أو مركز القيادة المحصّن ضدّ كلّ أنواع الأسلحة والمُقام في باطن الأرض عند المداخل الغربية لمدينة القدس، وذلك منذ بداية شهر أيار الماضي.
فكيف لنتن ياهو، الذي يهدّد بإخراج إيران من كلّ سورية وليس فقط من الجنوب السوري، ويهدّد بضرب الجيش السوري، أن يكون رامبو في الإعلام ويختبئ تحت الأرض في الوقت نفسه خوفاً من صواريخ الجيش السوري وحلفائه!؟
إنّ هذا الواقع يؤكد مجدّداً هزيمتكم الميدانية أيها الصهاينة وكذلك هزال المعنويات الداخلية والتي تجعلكم تعيشون حالة خوف دائم، والتي تعزّزت بعد المستجدات التالية:
أولاً: فشل الاجتماع، الذي عُقد بين رئيس أركان الجيش الروسي، الجنرال فاليري غيراسيموف، ورئيس هيئة الأركان المشتركة للجيوش الأميركية، الجنرال جوزيف دانفورد، والذي عقد يوم 8/6/2018 في هلسنكي، عاصمة فنلندا، في التوصل الى أيّ صيغة مشتركة، بين الطرفين، لانتشار الجيش السوري في جنوب سورية، وكذلك موضوع تمركز وحدات مقاتلة من حزب الله إلى جانب مستشارين عسكريين إيرانيين، يدّعي الطرف الأميركي الإسرائيلي أنهم ليسوا كذلك وإنما هناك وحدات من الحرس الثوري الإيراني تنتشر مع وحدات الجيش السوري ويرتدي أفرادها اللباس العسكري السوري للفرقة الرابعة والخامسة وقوات الحرس الجمهوري السوري، حسب «المعلومات الاستخبارية» التي تحدّث عنها الجنرال الأميركي خلال الاجتماع. وهي بالطبع معلومات ملفقة سبق أن نفى صحتها الرئيس السوري بشارالأسد شخصياً، بالإضافة الى وزير الخارجية وليد المعلم.
وهذا يعني:
ـ أنّ الطرف الروسي رفض الاقتناع بما ساقه الطرف الأميركي من تلفيقات حول طبيعة القوات العسكرية المنتشرة في الجنوب السوري، خاصة أنّ القيادة الروسية على علم تام، بحكم التنسيق الدقيق بين القيادتين الروسية والسورية، بكافة التفاصيل العسكرية المتعلقة بمختلف الجبهات السورية، وبالتالي فهي على وعي كامل بأنّ ما طرحه الجنرال الأميركي ليس الا تخرّصات وخرافات.
ـ رفض الجانب الروسي التدخل في قرار سيادي سوري بحت أو مناقشته او الموافقة على تدخل الطرف الأميركي «الإسرائيلي» في ذلك، واعتبار الموضوع خارج نطاق البحث، ما يعني رفضاً روسياً واضحاً لابتزازات الطرف، الأميركي الإسرائيلي المهزوم، ودحضاً لادّعاءات نتن ياهو وغيره أنّ هناك خلافاً روسياً ـ إيرانياً حول المشاركة العسكرية الإيرانية في صدّ العدوان الذي تتعرّض له سورية منذ ما يزيد على سبع سنوات.
ثانياً: فشل تصريحات وزير الحرب الأميركي، الجنرال جيمس ماثيس، التي أدلى بها على هامش اجتماعات وزراء دفاع حلف شمال الأطلسي في بروكسل يوم 9/6/2018، في تهدئة روع الإسرائيليين وتخفيف شعور قيادتهم السياسية والعسكرية بالهزيمة واقتراب موعد استعادة الجولان السوري المحتلّ وصلاة قوات حلف المقاومة قريباً في المسجد الأقصى المبارك.
تلك التصريحات التي قال فيها الوزير الأميركي بأنّ ما يُطلق عليه التحالف الدولي لمحاربة الإرهاب سيستمرّ في محاربة داعش، وأنّ القوات والقواعد الأميركية باقية في سورية حتى إلحاق الهزيمة الكاملة بداعش، أيّ أنه يقول للإسرائيليين بصريح العبارة إننا باقون لحمايتكم ولا داعي لقلقكم.
ولكن الوزير الأميركي يعلم أكثر من غيره، كما يعلم الجنرالات العسكريون والأمنيون الإسرائيليون، أنّ كلامه بعيد عن الواقع، وأنه غير قادر على الحفاظ لا على قواعده العسكرية الاحتلالية في سورية، ولا على توفير الأمن لقاعدته العسكرية على أرض فلسطين والتي تسمّى «إسرائيل»، وانّ مَن يحدّد بقاء القوات غير السورية على التراب الوطني السوري هو القيادة السياسية السورية، ممثلة بشخص الرئيس بشار الأسد، بصفته القائد الأعلى للقوات المسلحة السورية، والذي ينطلق قراره من موازين القوى في الميدان والوسائل القتالية اللازمة لإنهاء الوجود الإرهابي المسلح والمدعوم من قوات وقواعد الاحتلال الأميركية في التنف والحسكة وغيرها من مناطق الشمال الشرقي السوري.
ثالثاً: أنّ الخزعبلات والتفاهات والتضليلات، التي تصدر عن هذا المهرّج المسمّى بنيامين نتن ياهو، والتي كان آخرها ما صدر عنه عصر يوم 10/6/2018 من ادّعاءات بأنّ «إسرائيل» متفوّقة في مجال تنقية المياه ومواجهة الجفاف وأنها مستعدة لتقديم العون التكنولوجي للشعب الإيراني لمساعدته في تنقية المياه ومواجهة شحّها في إيران…!
وبأقواله هذه فإنّ نتن ياهو لا يمارس الخديعة على الشعب الإيراني فقط، وإنما يمارس الكذب على كلّ شعوب العالم بادّعاءاته هذه وإنكاره أنّ تخفيف أزمة المياه في فلسطين المحتلة لا يرجع إلى عبقرياته واختراعاته التكنولوجية والمائية الهيدروليكية وانما يعود ذلك، وبكلّ بساطة، الى سرقة المياه الفلسطينية الأردنية السورية اللبنانية من نهر الأردن وروافده ومن بحيرة طبريا الفلسطينية السورية. وهو ما نجم عنه جفاف نصف البحر الميت الجنوبي، الذي كان يتغذّى بالمياه من نهر الأردن، الذي لم يعد نهراً بعد تحويل مجراه وسرقة مياهه من قبل أسلاف نتن ياهو.
لذلك، فإننا نقول له إنّ الشعب الإيراني الذي يمتلك آلاف العلماء، في كافة مجالات العلوم بما فيها العلوم النووية، ليس بحاجة لك ولا لأكاذيبك وادّعاءاتك الزائفة. كما أنّ هذه الترّهات لن تنجح في تهدئة روعك أنت وقيادتك العسكرية والأمنية وليست قادرة على إعادة الطمأنينة الى قلوب المستوطنين الإسرائيليين.
رابعاً: استدعاء وزارة الحرب الإسرائيلية، وبشكل عاجل، جنود الاحتياط لترك بيوتهم ومراكز عملهم والالتحاق بالجبهة فوراً، وذلك عقب ما قالت عنه مصادر عسكرية إسرائيلية إنه اقتراب بدء هحوم الجيش السوري وحلفائه على جبهتي القنيطرة ودرعا في الجنوب السوري، ذلك الاستدعاء، وحسب بيانات وزارة الحرب الإسرائيلية، الذي يهدف الى عرقلة الهجوم السوري إذا لم يكن ممكناً احتواؤه…!
مما يعني أنّ قيادة جيشك، أيّها الطاووس الأجوف، لم تعُد تواجه خطر تقدّم قوات حلف المقاومة لتحرير الجليل الأعلى من الاحتلال، وإنما أصبحت تواجه جبهة تشمل مستوطنات وسط الجولان، مثل مستوطنة ميروم جولانMerom Golan، ومستوطنات جنوب الجولان مثل مستوطنة ميفو حمه Mevo Hama ومستوطنة تل كاتسرين TEL Katsrin، وكذلك مستوطنات جنوب غرب بحيرة طبريا مثل مستوطنة دجانيا الف Deganya Alef ومستوطنة دجانيا باء Deganya Bet، وغيرها من المستوطنات الواقعة في تلك المنطقة وصولاً الى مدينة بيسان وغيرها من المدن الفلسطينية المحتلة، جنوب بحيرة طبريا وغربها.
وهذا يعني أنّ حديث مستوطنيك، على طول خطوط المواجهه، لن يدور حول ما أطلقته من بروباغندا تضليلية فارغة حول شحّ المياه في إيران، وإنما سيدور حديثهم في مستوطنات وسط الجولان حول ما إذا كانت القوات السورية، التي ستدخل المستوطنات وتحرّرها من جيشك، هل ستكون هذه القوات من الفرقة المدرعة الرابعة في الجيش السوري أم من وحدات حزب الله؟
بينما سيدور حديث مستوطنيك في مستوطنات جنوب الجولان وجنوب غرب بحيرة طبريا حول ما إذا كانت القوات، التي ستدخل المستوطنات وتحرّرها من احتلالكم، ستكون من الحرس الجمهوري السوري فقط أم أنها ستشمل أيضاً قوات النمر المعزّزة بوحدات من الفرقة المدرّعة الخامسة في الجيش السوري ووحدات من لواء أبو الفضل العباس في قوات الدفاع الوطني السوري؟
هذه ستكون محاور حديث أولئك المستوطنين الذين تقوم بخداعهم وتعرّضهم لأخطار الحروب والدمار. كما أنّ ما يطلبونه منك ليس حلّ مشكلة المياه في إيران وانما إيجاد مأوى لهم عندما تعترف بهزيمتك ويبدأ تفكيك «إسرائيل» بعد تحرير معظم فلسطين التاريخية من قبل قوات حلف المقاومة وعودة أهلها الفلسطينيين إلى ديارهم التي هجّروا منها قبل سبعين عاماً.
كفّوا عن الكذب والخداع واعترفوا بهزيمتكم وابدأوا بتنظيم انسحابكم المنظم من فلسطين قبل اضطراركم إلى الانسحاب تحت النار، الأمر الذي سيضاعف خسائر «جبهتكم الداخلية» عشرات المرات.
The US does not shy away from openly threatening its allies and friends into submission. America’s major defense partners could face tough sanctions for purchases of Russian military equipment. Since January 29, the US has been imposing punitive measures under the CAATSA on foreign entities and individuals who cooperate with Russia in the field of defense or intelligence gathering. Congress is not inclined to give the administration the right of waiver to make an exception from the rule for some close allies. Despite that, many of them remain adamant in their intent to purchase the weapons they need from Russia.
Washington is exerting pressure on Turkey to make it abandon the plans to purchase Russia S-400 Triumf state-of-the-art air defense systems. So far, Ankara stood tall refusing to bow. US Congress is already considering the proposals on halting US arms sales to that country.
Unlike Turkey, India is not a NATO ally but its desire to acquire the Triumf triggers a negative reaction in the US. American lawmakers not only express concern over the planned deal but also issue warnings that sensitive American military technology may be banned from being shared with India in future. According to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, “There is a lot of concern in the US administration and Congress with the S-400.” India’s decision will be made final before the October Russia-India summit. During the informal talks in Sochi in May 2018, President Putin and Prime Minister Modi discussed the ways to get around the US potential sanctions when the deal goes through. Both countries have pledged to jointly create a plan to keep it out of CAATSA. New Delhi has just concluded price talks on the S-400 deal with Moscow, saying it will go ahead, no matter what the US says or does.
Those who follow the news on arms trade know well that India is interested in purchasing 22 American Predator Guardian drones for its Navy. It’s also willing to acquire the weapon the US has not sold anyone so far: 80-100 Avenger (Predator C) armed drones for the Air Force. The price may be as high as $8 billion. The F-16 production on Indian soil is also in doubt. All these projects are questioned as the US sticks to its guns implementing the “do it or else” policy. But it will hardly work with India, a nation known for its independent foreign policy. It has never bowed to any pressure from outside since its independence.
Iraq, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Morocco, Indonesia and Vietnam are among the countries threatened by sanctions if they go on with the plans to purchase Russian weapons. Many of them are particularly interested in the S-400. There is a catch here. If you make an exemption, others will feel humiliated and demand waivers too, but if you punish nobody then what is CAATSA for? Perhaps, the entire policy of punishing others in case of non-compliance with US laws is fundamentally wrong. It may not push Russia out of the international arms market but rather make its products a commercial success. After all, it’s an open secret that the S-400 is much more capable than the US Patriot air-defense system.
Turkey is told that if it buys Russia arms, the US won’t sell it F-35 aircraft. India may not get drones in case it purchases the S-400s. The essence is the same: sovereign countries are to be deprived of their right to have the best. They’d better be satisfied with what the US imposes or face punitive measures for daring not to comply. But many of them will not. For instance, there is little doubt that the pressure will make US-Indian relations hit a rough patch.
Defense Secretary James Mattis sought waivers for allies buying Russian weapons but failed to persuade Congress to give the administration this right. Besides, State Secretary Mike Pompeo holds a different view on the issue.
The “arms twisting” approach is prevalent in US foreign policy and even NATO allies are no exception. According to The Times, President Trump is expected to scale back America’s commitments or even issue an ultimatum over further American involvement in Europe.
No world leaders taking part in the St. Petersburg’s economic forum (SPIEF-2018) in May were happy about the US ultimatums as well as the sanctions against Russia, especially at a time it is leaving recession behind and oil prices are going up. The complains were made heard and concerns voiced at the conference held in the country, which is the prime target of American attacks. Nobody admired the trade wars the US has unleashed. May was the month the US stepped up its attacks on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline – the project Germany, Austria and some other European countries want to go through so much.
Israel was the only country to greet the US withdrawal from the Iran deal. Nobody endorsed the President Trump’s decision to cancel the meeting in Singapore with the North Korean leader (it may still take place, the talks are underway).
The US and its European allies appear to go separate ways on defense. On May 27, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called for a European operation in North Africa to stem the immigrants’ flows. Austria will take over the EU Presidency for six months starting in July. The idea has been being floated since a long time ago. Europe’s main security concern is the protection of its borders, not taking part in US ventures in faraway places or provoking Russia by deploying forces near its borders. The EU is gradually moving to its own deterrence and defense posture, which may not necessarily meet US interests.
The US policy of diktat will backlash, bringing together those who are threatened by US sanctions. The EU is about to fight back, Turkey sticks to its guns, India has refused to bow. American allies will have to work out their own approaches to international problems, using quite different instruments to achieve the desired goals. The US global standing will be weakened. By trying to isolate others America will isolate itself. But the addiction to teach, dictate and bark orders is too great to get easily rid of. It takes time to realize that the times have changed. What worked well yesterday has become counterproductive today.
President Trump has cancelled the Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un. He cited North Korea’s “hostility” as the reason, while using language that leaves open room for future reconciliation.
North Korea then sent back a respectful letter, which Trump described as “warm and productive.” I expect the situation to continue improving, as both sides seem to want negotiations, despite the malign influence of spoilers like National Security Advisor John Bolton.
The media, on the other hand, immediately interpreted Trump’s cancellation and the breakdown of negotiations as proof of North Korea’s bad-faith and intransigence, that it is not serious about its commitments, and that Kim was simply “playing” the victimized US.
A little recap of the actual recent events is therefore in order.
The US Scuttles Peace
North Korea has recently made a number of important concessions. It had agreed to halt its missile tests and has made good on that commitment. It also agreed to accept the end-goal of denuclearization as a prerequisite of negotiations. These were the two main preconditions the US was demanding.
Furthermore, it recently released a number of US prisoners as a further show of good-will, and has completed the destruction of its only known nuclear test site, which foreign journalists were allowed to witness.
It has also pulled-back from its earlier position regarding the US-South Korean military drills, instead accepting that they will take place.
The US, in turn, had scaled back the military drills to not include “strategic assets”, meaning nuclear-capable aircraft. As well, it halted its position of enmity against the North. This can be seen in the marked shift from the beginning of the year when tensions were mounting and the threat of nuclear war was over the horizon.
In short, North Korea made extension concessions, while the US made extremely minor ones. Essentially, the US halted an already illegitimate posture of threatening to destroy a small nation which poses it no threat, while continuing highly threatening military drills, albeit ones that didn’t come with the threat of nuclear destruction attached. However, there were concessions on both sides and the chance of a possible peace settlement was therefore hopeful.
Recently, William J. Perry, who was directly involved in the 1994 negotiations between North Korea and the Clinton administration, described how the success of the current round of negotiations depends on building a mutual “sense of trust” and good faith on both sides.
Its important to note that the 1994 negotiations were the first time the US seriously pursued diplomacy with the North, which proved to be the only strategy that has ever yielded results. The US was able to obtain a temporary halt to the North’s nuclear development. When the Bush administration came in and rejected diplomacy in favor of its own brand of “maximum pressure”, the progresswas undermined and North Korea went on to obtain nuclear weapons and to further build up its arsenal.
How did the administration take Perry’s advice and enhance the “sense of trust” in the face of multiple North Korean good-faith concessions? First, John Bolton, who was a key figure in the Bush administrations derailment of Clinton’s North Korea diplomacy, demanded complete capitulation from North Korea while threatening to destroy the country.
In an interview, Bolton said the US was pursuing the “Libya model” for the negotiations. Libya gave up its nuclear program following US pressure, which then freed the US to later attack and destroy the country. Libya is therefore an example of US duplicity and a testament to the necessity of possessing a nuclear deterrent to ward off US aggression. Evoking the “Libya” model was a barely-disguised threat against North Korea and an effort to derail the negotiations.
Secondly, the US conducted more threatening military drills along the North’s border, which the US would of course find threatening if similar drills were conducted by Russia or China along the Canadian border. This time, the drills were to include nuclear-capable B-52’s, a reneging of the previous US concession to scale back the drills.
According to reports, the original decision to include the B-52’s was done against the will of South Korea, which, if true, exemplifies the neo-colonial relationship the US exerts over its South Korean client, erroneously described as a mutually-beneficial “alliance” in the media.
With these moves, the US tarnished the mutual trust and good-faith that had been building, and North Korea responded by denouncing Bolton and threatening to cancel the Trump-Kim summit. The North was taking advantage of how badly Trump wanted the summit to take place; his desire to be seen as “the great statesmen” and a purveyor of world peace, a leader deserving of the Nobel prize.
The media responded to North Korea’s letter by proclaiming it was proof of the North’s subterfuge and untrustworthiness, blaming them for the breakdown of trust. The obvious effect of these kinds of narratives being to support state power and provide ideological cover to policies aimed only at power projection; to shield policymakers from scrutiny about what they are actually doing in the world, making aggressive actions seem defensive and justified.
In response to North Korea’s denunciation of Bolton and the US’ threats, the administration began to back off. It cancelled the participation of the B-52’s and attempted to roll back comments about the “Libya model.” Trump also walked-back his public demands of complete and immediate denuclearization, saying that a gradual denuclearization was perhaps a possibility.
However, at the same time Trump issued a new threat, saying that if no deal was reached the Libya model would be back on and the US would engage in “total decimation” of the country. In short: either make a deal or we’ll murder you.
Vice President Pence then doubled-down on this by evoking Trump’s ultimatum while directly threatening the country, saying that if they don’t make a deal it will “end like the Libyan model ended” for them.
North Korea responded by lashing out against Pence, saying that it will not be intimidated and will not capitulate to unilateral US demands. The press, again, latched onto this as proof of North Korean intransigence. Journalists cited what they called North Korea’s threat of nuclear war as proof that it was being aggressive. In reality, the statement was much less dramatic and contained no threat:
“Whether the US will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States,” North Korea’s vice foreign minister wrote.
Not mentioned was how the US had threatened to “totally decimate” their country first, the North’s response therefore being incredibly mild. Also not mentioned was how North Korea has a no-first-use nuclear policy while the US maintains the right to a first strike. Nor that the entire reason for the North even having nukes in the first place is to ward off a US attack, a position that is only further justified by continued US threats and intransigence.
North Korea essentially responded by saying: we’ll accept negotiations, not demands and threats. So if you’d like to go back to threatening us with nuclear destruction, then we’ll respond without backing down.
So, while North Korea employs vitriolic and insulting language, in actuality their position is entirely understandable and has remained consistent throughout the years.
The Unsayable Reality
The core issue of the entire North Korea situation is, and has been, the threat of US attack.
The US divided Korea in pure colonial fashion. It “decimated” its population during the Korean War, burning down “every town in North Korea” while erasing at least 13.5% of its population. It followed this with economic and political strangulation, which is partly responsible for the starvation and famine that has transpired throughout the country’s history, as is conceded in the internalUS record.
Throughout all of this, the US maintained a posture of threatening hostility against the North, repeatedly threatening them with nuclear attack. In response to this existential threat, North Korea developed a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to US aggression. This has repeatedly been the assessment of US intelligence, and was recently reiterated by James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence.
The position of the US during the negotiations has been one of demanding that North Korea give up its only means of defense against US aggression.
When officials evoke the “Libya model” or demand full denuclearization as a prerequisite, they are demanding that North Korea give up its defenses without any recognition of the country’s legitimate security concerns; that it essentially bow on its knees in complete capitulation to US diktats, which would likely mean the eventual destruction of its country.
It may not seem like much to us in America that our government decimated their population during the Korean War, or that their nation is under existential threat from US power, but it means something to North Koreans. Although Western pundits and analysts in effect have no skin in the game one way or the other – the only way the US is threatened by North Korea is if it launches an attack against them first, provoking a defensive response – for North Koreans and people living on the Korean peninsula it is a matter of life and death, especially when US policymakers threaten their security by making threats, ultimatums, and attempting to fly nuclear-capable aircraft along the peninsula.
Yet for the ideological indoctrinators who service state power, i.e. journalists and “experts”, nothing short of complete North Korean capitulation is acceptable. Anything less and its “proof” of North Korean subterfuge, intransigence, and deviousness.
It is literally unsayable to discuss the relevant history and the core root of the problem. It cannot be said that the US is the aggressor, that the threat of US aggression is the main reason behind North Korea’s nuclear deterrent. These blasphemies contradict the ideological doctrines that the US is always defensive, that it always has the right to threaten or use force and violence against the world, while the world does not have the right to defend themselves against it.
So, while the system of propaganda—commonly referred to as the “free press”—will do everything in its power to back up Trump’s claim of the US simply responding to North Korean “hostility”, the reality shows something entirely different.
Steven Chovanec is an independent journalist and analyst based in Chicago, Illinois. He has a bachelor’s degree in International Studies and Sociology from Roosevelt University, and has written for numerous outlets such as The Hill, TeleSur, MintPress News, Consortium News, and others. His writings can be found at undergroundreports.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @stevechovanec.
The original source of this article is Global Research
«صفقة القرن» مشروع سياسي ارتدادي تصفوي، صاحبه دونالد ترامب. عنوانه تصفية قضية فلسطين لمصلحة الكيان العنصري الاقتلاعي الصهيوني.
العنوان وحده لا يلخّص مضمون المشروع. ثمة أبعاد له وأغراض لا تقلّ خطورة عن تصفية قضية فلسطين، بل لعلها أخطر وأشمل ويمكن إجمالها بتصفية قضية العرب، بما هي قضية حريتهم وتحررهم ونهضتهم ووحدة بلادهم وحقهم في العدالة والتنمية والفعل الحضاري.
هذا المشروع الارتدادي التصفوي المتكامل صبّ ترامب أخيراً على نيرانه المتأججة زيتاً باعترافه بالقدس عاصمةً لـِ «اسرائيل» ونقْل سفارتها اليها. رَفَد ذلك لاحقاً بما أسماه «مبادرة سلام معدّلة» تنصّ على عودة الطرفين الفلسطيني والإسرائيلي الى التفاوض على قضايا الحل النهائي وترْك ملف القدس الى المرحلة النهائية. الفلسطينيون عموماً، شعباً وتنظيمات، رفضوا «صفقة القرن». تردّد ان محمود عباس رفض مبادرة السلام المعدّلة. الهجوم الصهيو-أميركي مستمر ومتطاول، وفي مواجهته تتصاعد مقاومةٌ فلسطينيةٌ متعاظمة في الوطن والشتات.
الهجوم الصهيو – أميركي متعدد الجبهات. ها هو يمتد في هذه الآونة الى سورية وعبرها الى إيران. وزير الحرب الإسرائيلي افيغدور ليبرمان شدّ رحاله الى واشنطن، حيث اجتمع الى وزير الدفاع جيمس ماتيس ومستشار الامن القومي جون بولتن وبحث معهما ما وصفه، بأنه «التوسّع الإيراني في الشرق الأوسط، خصوصاً في سورية». هدّد قائلاً: «كل موقع نرى فيه محاولة لتموضع إيران عسكرياً في سورية سندمره، ولن نسمح بذلك اياً كان الثمن».
في موازاة تهديدات ليبرمان، أبرز مندوب «اسرائيل» في الامم المتحدة ما زعم انه «خريطة تبيّن ان إيران جنّدت اكثر من 80 الف مقاتل شيعي في سورية، وأن قاعدة التدريب تبعد نحو ثمانية كيلومترات عن دمشق». ألا توحي مزاعمه بعدوان وشيك؟
وزير الدفاع ماتيس أعلن خلال جلسة استماع في لجنة شؤون القوات المسلحة داخل مجلس الشيوخ أن الولايات المتحدة «تعتزم توسيع محاربة «داعش» من خلال إشراك دول المنطقة … ونحن لا نسحب قواتنا الآن، وأنا واثق أننا سنأسف اذا سحبناها … والفرنسيون ارسلوا قوات خاصة الى سورية لتعزيز مهمتنا خلال الأسبوعين الماضيين، وستشاهدون جهداً جديداً في وادي الفرات في الايام المقبلة».
من الواضح، إذاً، أن ثمة ترتيبات عملية يقوم الأميركيون بإعدادها لتنفيذ خطة واسعة النطاق في وادي الفرات تبدأ من شمال شرق دير الزور وقد تنتهي في أطراف محافظة الحسكة. اللافت في هذا المجال، انطلاق عملية واسعة لنقل مقاتلي «داعش» و«النصرة» الذين ارغموا على الانسحاب من دوما وسائر قرى غوطة دمشق الشرقية الى بلدات وقرى وادي الفرات بغية تحشيدهم وتنظيمهم في وحدات مقاتلة تعمل الى جانب قوات سورية الديمقراطية الكردية «قسد» المتعاونة مع القوات الأميركية والقوات الفرنسية الخاصة التي جرى نشرها أخيراً شمال وادي الفرات.
الى ذلك، لا يستبعد مسؤولون سوريون وروس أن تتمحور أغراض الخطة الأميركية في إقامة كيان انفصالي شرق الفرات قوامه عشائر عربية تديرها قيادات سورية موالية للسعودية. كما لا يستبعدون ايضاً أن تنطوي هذه الخطة على إقامة كيان كردي سوري منفصل عن حكومة دمشق المركزية بغية تعزيز دور الأطراف السورية المعارضة في أية مفاوضات قد تجري لاحقاً للبحث في تسوية سياسية للأزمة.
للهجوم الصهيو – أميركي وجهان إقليمي ودولي يتمثّلان بالضغوط التي تمارسها «إسرائيل» في اميركا واوروبا من اجل إلغاء الاتفاق النووي مع إيران. ترامب يبدو متجهاً الى اعتماد خيار الإلغاء بعدما بات واضحاً أن إيران لن توافق على أي تعديل لنص الاتفاق وأن غالبية دول اوروبا ترى مصلحتها في الإبقاء عليه.
إذا ركب ترامب رأسه وألغى الاتفاق، ماذا ستكون خطوته التالية؟
ثمة احتمالان: الاول، ان تقوم ادارة ترامب بفرض عقوبات اضافية قاسية على إيران والضغط على دول اوروبا لمجاراتها في هذا السبيل. الثاني، ان تقوم اميركا بالتحالف مع فرنسا وبريطانيا وبعض دول الخليج، بعمليات عسكرية متصاعدة لإرهاق إيران في سورية وصولاً الى إخراجها منها. ذلك يؤدي، في رأي أنصار هذه المقاربة، الى تحقيق هدفين إستراتيجيين: حماية «اسرائيل» وإبقاء يدها هي العليا في غرب آسيا، وإضعاف نفوذ روسيا ما يساعد اميركا واوروبا ودول الخليج على الاستئثار بالمكاسب المرتجاة من مرحلة إعادة إعمار سورية بعد الحرب.
الى ذلك، تميل القيادات المتشددة في «الدولة العميقة» داخل الولايات المتحدة كما قيادات اليمين الإسرائيلي الحاكم الى الاعتقاد بأن روسيا ستتهيّب مواجهة التحالف الاميركي الاوروبي – الخليجي في الساحة السورية مخافةَ الوقوع في مستنقع استنزافٍ طويل الأمد لا طاقة لها على احتماله. كما تعتقد هذه القيادات بأن لا تداعيات عسكرية خطيرة لقيام إيران بالردّ على أطراف التحالف المعادي بالعودة الى تخصيب اليورانيوم بنسبةٍ مئوية عالية لعدم جدواه ولكونها ملتزمة دينياً وسياسياً بموقف المرشد الراحل الامام الخميني بتحريم صنع اسلحة نووية.
كيف تراها تردّ روسيا وإيران؟
بات واضحاً أن موسكو حزمت أمرها وقررت تزويد سورية بمنظومةَ دفاعٍ جوي متطورة من طراز S-300 من شأنها إعاقة حركة سلاح الجو الإسرائيلي وربما تكبيده خسائر فادحة في حال تصعيد اعتداءاته داخل الأراضي السورية. إيران تبدو مصممة، وقادرة، على مواجهة الاعتداءات الإسرائيلية على قواعد تمركزها في سورية، بل على الردّ في العمق الإسرائيلي اذا اقتضى الأمر. وثمة بين المتخصصين في الشؤون الإيرانية مَن يعتقد ان تصعيد لهجة العداء الصهيو – أميركي والمباشرة في ترجمته على الأرض سيدفع القيادة الإيرانية العليا الى إعادة النظر بموقفها السلبي من صنع قنبلة نووية، وذلك باتجاه تصنيع أحد أسلحة الدمار الشامل لتحقيق توازنٍ فاعل في الردع كاللجوء، في الاقل، الى تصنيع اسلحة نووية تكتيكية للمدى القصير ووضعها في متناول مقاتلي قوى المقاومة السورية واللبنانية والفلسطينية الامر الذي يُلحق بالكيان الصهيوني خسائر بشرية ومادية لا تُحتمل.
قيادات «إسرائيل» تدرك هذه المخاطر والعواقب الهائلة، لذا يدعو بعضها الى استباق المصيرالكارثي لكيانها الهشّ بشنّ حربٍ تدميرية شاملة على إيران في الحاضر طالما ميزان القوى ما زال يميل لمصلحة «اسرائيل» بفضل دعم الولايات المتحدة قبل أن تنجح إيران في المستقبل المنظور، وبدعم من حلفائها، بتحقيق توازنٍ رادع وكاسرٍ لإرادة «اسرائيل» واميركا معاً.
«اسرائيل» لن تتخذ بالتأكيد قرار الحرب على إيران إلاّ بموافقة اميركا وبدعمٍ سخي منها، وربما بشرط مشاركتها فيها. العقل والمنطق يجزمان بأن أميركا لن تنزلق الى اتخاذ قرارٍ جنوني من هذا الطراز، لأنه ما زال في أروقة «دولتها العميقة»، ولا سيما في الكونغرس والبنتاغون، من العقول والإرادات ما يعصمها من نزق ساكن البيت الابيض وغلّه الأسود.
هكذا يتضح ان «صفقة القرن» منطلقها فلسطين ومحورها سورية ومنتهاها إيران، فهل كثير على قوى المقاومة في مشرق العرب اختصار مسار الآلام باجتراح نهاية قريبة للحرب الدائرة في سورية وعليها؟
On the other were the forces of Grand Khan Ahmed bin Küchük, who had come to lay waste to Moscow and instruct the impudent Prince Ivan to mend his ways.
For weeks the two assembled hosts glared at one another, each wary of crossing the water and becoming vulnerable to attack by the other. In the end, as though heeding the same inaudible signal, both withdrew and hastily returned home.
Thus ended more than two centuries of the Tatar-Mongol yoke upon the land of the Rus’.
Almost immediately upon reports of the staged chemical attack in Douma on April 7, speculation began as to the likely response from the west – which in reality meant from the United States, in turn meaning from President Donald J. Trump. Would Trump, who had repeatedly spoken harshly of his predecessors’ destructive and pointless misadventures in the Middle East, and who just days earlier had signaled his determination to withdraw the several thousand Americans (illegally) stationed in Syria, see through the obvious deception?
Or, whether or not he really believed the patently untrue accusations of Syrian (and Russian) culpability, would Trump take punitive action against Syria? And if so, would it be a demonstrative pinprick of the sort inflicted almost exactly a year earlier in punishment for an obvious false flag chemical attack in Idlib? Or would we see something more “robust” (a word much beloved of laptop bombardiers in Washington) aimed at teaching a lesson to both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Prince Ivan III’s obstreperous heir Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Assad was an “animal.” Putin, Russia, and Iran were “responsible” for “many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack” – “Big price to pay.”
Around the world, people mentally braced for the worst. Would a global conflagration start in Syria with an American attack on Russian forces? A grim trepidation reminiscent of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gripped the hearts of those old enough to remember those thirteen days when the fate of all life on our planet was in doubt.
Certainly there were enough voices in the US establishment egging Trump on. Besides, at home he still had the relentless pressure of the Mueller investigation, intensified by the FBI’s April 9 raid on his lawyer Michael Cohen. Trump’s only respite from the incessant hammering was his strike on Syria last year.
During the first Cold War both American and Soviet forces took great care to avoid direct conflict, rightly afraid it could lead to uncontrolled escalation. But now, in this second Cold War, western commentators were positively giddy at the thought of killing Russians in Syria…
…or rather killing more Russians, citing the slaughter of a disputed number of contractors (or “mercenaries” as western media and officials consistently called them, implying they deserved to have been exterminated). That’ll teach ‘em not to tangle with us! It was unclear whether the warning from Russian Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov that
Russia would respond against an attack by striking both incoming weapons as well as the platforms that launched would be taken seriously.
After a slight softening of tone by both Trump and Defense Secretary General James “Mad Dog” Mattis on April 12, during which a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was approaching Douma to conduct an on-site examination, there emerged a slim ray of hope that Trump would step back from acting on the transparently false provocation. (The slimness of any such hope was illustrated by the fact seemingly the most restrained of Trump’s advisers was somebody nicknamed “Mad Dog.”)
When on the evening of Friday the Thirteenth (Washington time) news came that the US had initiated military action, together with France and (the country Russia had accused of staging the Douma fraud) the United Kingdom, many feared the worst. The hasty timing was clearly aimed at preempting the arrival of the OPCW inspectors.
Of greater concern was the extent of the assault?
If Russians were killed, Gerasimov was serious.
As it turned out, the worst didn’t come. World War III didn’t happen. Or hasn’t – yet.
In fact nothing much happened at all. According to the official US reports, something over a hundred missiles were launched at three targets. All missiles reached their targets – “Mission Accomplished!” The other side, however, claimed to have shot down roughly 75 percent of the incoming Tomahawks.
In the end, the damage was even less than from the follow-up to Idlib last year. No one was reported killed, neither Syrian nor Russian nor Iranian. Western governments claimed to have struck a serious blow at Syria’s chemical weapons capability. Syrians and Russians scoffed that the missiles had hit empty buildings and that Syria had no CW to hit since 2014, as certified by the OPCW.
In the aftermath of the missile show, media carried unverified reports that Trump had wanted a stronger campaign but deferred to Mattis’s caution, no doubt reflecting the views of professional military men who didn’t want to find out whether Gerasimov was bluffing. Mattis also reportedly wanted Congress to vote on any action before it was taken but was overruled by Trump.
“Whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria,” writes Patrick Buchanan. “We are going deeper in. Trump’s commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and blood-soaked Middle East wars and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is ‘inoperative’.”
That’s clear from the comments of US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. She states that America won’t disengage until three objectives have been met: that
ISIS has been defeated (a pretext, since ISIS is on the ropes and remains alive only because of hostile actions taken by the US and others against Syria); Damascus is finally deterred from using chemical weapons (a falsehood, since they don’t have any); and Iran’s regional influence is blocked (which means we’re staying in effect permanently in preparation for a larger war against Iran and perhaps eventually Russia).
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has suggested troops from his country would participate. Aside from whether Riyadh can spare them from their ongoing task of wrecking Yemen, Saudi personnel are likely to become a prime target for Syrians itching to get a crack at their chief tormenters over the past seven years.
So was anything really settled on April 13? On this occasion the West chose not to “cross the river,” much as Khan Ahmed’s force declined to do in 1480. For their part, the Russians in Syria, like their ancestors on the Ugra, were on defense and had no need to risk offensive action.
Unfortunately, unlike the “the great standing on the Ugra River,” which resolved the question of Russian independence and sovereignty in that era, nothing has been resolved now. The question remains: will the US peacefully relinquish its position as the sole arbiter of authority, legality, and morality in a unipolar world in favor of a multipolar order where Russia’s and China’s legitimate interests and spheres of influence are respected? Or will we continue to risk plunging mankind into a global conflict?
Syria remains a key arena where one path or the other will be taken to finally wrap up what US Army Major Danny Sjursen calls “Operation Flailing Empire.” The irony is that peacefully “losing” our pointless and dangerous attempt to rule the world would only be to Americans’ benefit. That’s what Trump promised in 2016. He hasn’t delivered and it’s increasingly doubtful he can.
In the end, the threat of World War III hasn’t vanished. It has just been postponed.
The US led bombing raid on Syria on April 13th came at an odd time. The civil war in Syria has basically been won by Assad, and in response to the calming of tensions, President Trump said on April 4 that he intended to withdraw US troops from Syria. Three days later, Assad allegedly used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians and from there talk of war began to be openly encouraged by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Almost immediately, some skepticism arose as to why Assad would use chemical weapons after the war was essentially won. US Secretary of Defense General Mattis was reduced to saying he ‘believed’ there had been a chemical attack. In any case the rationale for bombing Syria on April 13 was weakened by the fact that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was due to arrive in Syria to examine the claim of chemical weapons use on April 14, the day after the US led bombing. Bombing in advance of the arrival of inspectors seems a bit like an attempt to cut off verification.
Another strange part of the narrative was how suddenly unified our ordinarily discordant US elected leaders were on the necessity of bombing Syria. Certainly, the timing might have been useful for Trump, stealing headlines just as Comey’s tell all book came out, but then Trump’s presidency has, since its inception, run at a 3 scandal a day pace. Rather than covering up scandals, Trump seems instead to revel in the publicity. The Democrats, even the leaders of the so-called resistance, offered no resistance to the bombing plan other than to grumble about the potential future need for congressional approval. When both sides of our political spectrum converge on what seems to be an awful idea located in the middle east it is hard not to suspect that Israel is somehow involved.
But why would Israel prefer a civil war next door, fought by Assad against shifting Islamic factions, some no doubt more hostile to Israel than Assad? I think I can point to a possible reason. During the ‘67 war, Israel took 2/3 of the Golan Heights from Syria. Although the UN and others still classify the land as ‘occupied,’ in 1981, Israel declared its control of the entire territory and the population of the Golan Heights is now at least half Israeli. While Israel has claimed that it took additional land in ’67 and after to act as a buffer zone around Israel, the resource rich Golan Heights have provided Israel with much more than a buffer zone. “In fact, the Golan Heights contributes a quenching one-third of Israel’s entire water supply.”
The Golan Heights has also provided Israel’s first major oil find. Afek Oil and Gas, a division of Genie Oil has obtained oil rights for the huge oil fields in the Golan Heights. The company crowed in a letter to investors that, “Billions of barrelsof Israeli oil had been tapped [in the Golan Heights.]”
Genie Oil has powerful political connections. Rupert Murdock, Vice President Cheney, Jacob Rothschild and Larry Summers are among its Board Members. The ex-chairman of Genie Energy’s former parent company, IDT Corp., is Ira Greenstein, a family friend of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Greenstein currently works on the White House staff.
In 2017, US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke met with the far-right Israeli politician and head of Afek Oil, Efraim Etiam. Etiam has called Israeli Arabs a “cancer” and said that “we will have to kill all [the Palestinians].” The meeting gave an apparent, and probably an actual US seal of approval to Afek’s oil extraction from disputed territory that the international community has explicitly said does not belong to Israel.
So why does Israel prefer a civil war to peace so close to its water and oil bonanza? I would guess that Israel does not want a strong leader to challenge its right to the spoils of war. There appears to be a tentative coalition of Turkey, Russia, Iran and Syria. While no one since 1999 has seriously challenged Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, Israel seems to prefer a neighbour consumed with internal fighting to a strong Syria that may be part of a powerful coalition.
The UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) provides powerful evidence that Israel has undertaken to keep Syria is a state of conflict. UNDOF’s reports have shown the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ to be quite democratic in handing out aid to armed rebel groups, including the official Al-Qqaeda affiliate in Syria. Israel has claimed the aid is ‘humanitarian,’ but that claim contrasts with Israel’s official stated policy to “let both sides bleed” in order to prolong the war for as long as possible so as to weaken Syria and its allies.
So, the US, the UK and France bombed Syria on the basis of an unproven claim of chemical warfare and, if the bombing raid proves successful, the only real practical outcome might be to prolong a brutal civil war in Syria so that Israel’s claim to water and oil rich land will be unlikely to be challenged.
BEIRUT, LEBANON (4:10 A.M.) – Minutes ago, the U.S., France, and the U.K. launched a barrage of cruise missiles towards rural Damascus, causing massive explosions near the Dumayr Airbase in the easternThe Dumayr Airbase is the military installation the Syrian Air Force used to launch airstrikes on the East Ghouta during Operation Damascus Steel.
The Syrian Air Defense has responded in a bid to down the cruise missiles; however, many cruise missiles have already struck the area.
Al-Masdar previously reported that the Dumayr Airbase was the likely target because the airstrikes on the East Ghouta were launched from this site.
BEIRUT, LEBANON (4:20 A.M.) – The U.S. Coalition has expanded their strikes over Syria this morning, striking a number of locations near the Syrian capital of Damascus.
According to Al-Masdar’s field correspondent in Damascus, the U.S. Coalition just struck Jaramana, Barzeh, Dumayr, and several sites in rural Damascus.
Al-Masdar’s correspondent added that the cruise missiles are raining nonstop over the Damascus countryside, with some reports of attacks in the western province of Tartous.
• رئيس هيئة الاركان الاميركية : لقد تم استهداف النقاط المحددة لنا والعملية انتهت في سوريا • الإخبارية السورية: المضادات الجوية السورية تتصدى لصواريخ معادية في منطقة “دنحة” بريف حمص الغربي. • ماتيس : ليس لدينا تخطيط لاي غارات جديدة ويعود القرار لترامب • التلفزيون السوري : الدفاعات الجوية السورية تسقط 13 صاروخا” بمنطقة الكسوة في ريف دمشق • انباء ان الهجمات الأمريكية تسفر عن إصابة منطقة برزة بدمشق ومبنى الأبحاث العلمية • فرنسا: ماكرون: أعطيت الأوامر بتدخل الجيش الفرنسي مع أميركا وبريطانيا في سوريا • الدفاعات الجوية السورية تتصدى للعدوان الأمريكي البريطاني الفرنسي على سورية. • ترامب : الضربات محدودة وموجهه • ترامب: نحن نتحرك مع بريطانيا وفرنسا • ترامب يعلن عن عملية عسكرية جارية في سوريا • ترامب يعلن عن ضربة دقيقة تجري الآن • سماع دوي انفجارات في العاصمة السورية دمشق
US Defense Secretary James N. Mattis. IMAGE: Michaela Rehle / Reuters
On April 12, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis revaled that no decision had been reached by President Donald Trump about a strike on Syria. Mattis added that the U.S. is still waiting to see the evidence of a chemical attack.
“We are not engaged on the ground there, so I cannot tell you that we have evidence, though we certainly had a lot of media and social media indicators that either chlorine or sarin were used,” Mattis said.
He also complained that Russia and Syria had allegedly opposed the investigation.
The Defense Secretary said that the US “will not know from this investigating team that goes in, if we can get them in, if the regime will let them in, we will not know who did it.”
“They can only say that they found evidence or did not, and each day that goes by as you know it is a non-persistent gas so it becomes more and more difficult to confirm. So that is where we are at right now.”
It looks that the Defense Secretary accidentally forgot that Russia and Syria had been first to suggest an independent investigation of the Dmoua incident and to invite OPCW investigators that are set to arrive Syria this week.
The administration of US President Donald Trump is once again considering new “military action” against the Syrian government, the Washington Post reported on March 5 citing unnamed officials.
According to the newspaper, President Trump, Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Adviser Herbert McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis met last week to discuss new strikes in response to what they call chemical weapons attacks by government forces in Eastern Ghouta.
On February 25, activists and media linked to militant groups operating in Eastern Ghouta claimed that Damascus had used chlorine gas in the militant-held area. These reports allegedly triggered the White House to consider new military action in Syria. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the Pentagon denied that such a meeting had taken place.
On March 6, the White Helments, a notorious organization operating in areas controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militants, reported that government forces had conducted a new chlorine gas attack in Eastern Ghouta allegedly injuring 30 people.
It’s interesting to note that reports about alleged chemical attacks started appearing during a rapid advance by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam and Faylaq al-Rahman.
By March 7, SAA troops had liberated a large area, including farms near the towns of Misraba and Beit Sawa. The town of Hammouriyah had reportedly surrendered to the SAA and government troops had started entering it. The town of Rayhan, which had been a key militant stronghold in the northeastern part of the pocket, had also been liberated by the SAA.
The militants’ defense is rapidly collapsing. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its counterparts can only be be rescued by some stroke of luck. For example, US missile strikes on Damascus triggered by alleged chemical attacks by the SAA. HTS-linked media are doing all they can to achieve this goal.
On March 6, the Russian Ministry of Defense offered militants a safe passage out of the besieged area via an open corridor.
“The Russian Reconciliation Center guarantees the immunity of all rebel fighters who take the decision to leave Eastern Ghouta with personal weapons and together with their families,” the ministry said adding that vehicles would “be provided, and the entire route will be guarded.”
However, a spokesman for Faylaq al-Rahman publicly rejected the proposal saying that Aleppo will not be repeated. Militants still prevent locals from using the safe corridor to leave the besieged area.
According to Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko, Head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Warring Parties, by March 6 only 17 people had managed to leave Eastern Ghouta via the Al-Wafideen humanitarian corridor.
On the same day, an An-26 military transport plane crashed near the Russian Hmeimim airbase. According to the defense ministry, 39 people died in the crash. Six crew members and 33 people were on board, all of them military personnel. The incident could have been caused by a technical malfunction.
In the area of Afrin, the Turkish Army and the Free Syrian Army captured 7 villages, including Tall Hamu, Shirkan, Metinli and Qatma, from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Considering the recent advances, Turkish forces are now attempting to isolate the YPG-held city of Afrin from the northeastern and western directions.
The torrent of reckless false accusations against Russia made by the US and its NATO allies is hitting warp speed.
This week saw more baseless allegations of Russian cyber attacks on American elections and British industries.
There were also crass claims by US officials that Russia was behind so-called sonic attacks on American diplomats in Cuba.
Then a Dutch foreign minister was forced to resign after he finally admitted telling lies for the past two years over alleged Russian plans for regional aggression.
Elsewhere, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson claimed this week during a tour of the Middle East that “the primary goal” of his nation’s involvement in Syria is “to defeat” Islamic State (Daesh) terrorism.
This is patently false given that the US forces illegally occupying parts of Syria are launching lethal attacks on Syrian armed forces who are actually fighting Islamic State and their myriad terrorist affiliates.
Meanwhile, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley accused Russia of blocking peace efforts in Syria – another audacious falsehood to add to her thick compendium of calumny.
Perhaps the most barefaced falsehood transpired this week when French President Emmanuel Macron candidly admitted that his government did not have any proof of chemical weapons being used in Syria.
“Today, our agencies, our armed forces have not established that chemical weapons, as set out in treaties, have been used against the civilian population,” said Macron to media in Paris.
His admission follows that of US Defense Secretary James Mattis who also fessed up earlier this month to having no evidence of chemical weapons being deployed in Syria.
“We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,” said Mattis to reporters at the Pentagon. “We do not have evidence of it.”
Yet, only a few weeks ago, the French and US government were condemning Syrian President Assad for alleged use of chemical weapons by his forces. France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also accused Russia of bearing responsibility because of its alliance with Damascus.
But now we are told that the French and US governments do not, in fact, have any evidence concerning chemical weapons in Syria.
This is in spite of US President Donald Trump unleashing over 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the Arab country last April in purported reprisal for the “Syrian regime” dropping chemical munitions on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province on April 4 2o17.
Macron went on to make the absurd declaration this week that “if” chemical weapons were found to be used then he would order military strikes on Syria.
Both Syria and Russia have categorically and repeatedly rejected claims of using chemical weapons, pointing out that Syria’s stockpile was eliminated back in 2014 under a UN-brokered deal.
When Mattis said “we have reports from the battlefield” he was referring to groups like the CIA covertly-sponsored terrorist outfit Al Nusra Front and their media outlet, the so-called White Helmets.
Western news media footage over the past two weeks seemingly depicting Syrian and Russian air strikes on civilian areas is sourced from the White Helmets. This group is embedded with Al Nusra.
The same warped narrative claiming Syrian and Russian violations during the liberation of Aleppo from the terrorists at the end of 2016 is being played out again in East Ghouta and Idlib. And again the Western news media are amplifying the dubious propaganda from the likes of the White Helmets as if it is independent, verified information.
This week in Paris Abdulrahman Almawwas, the so-called vice president of the White Helmets, which also go by the name of Syria Civil Defense, told the Reuters news agency that France and other NATO powers must intervene in Syria.
“It’s time to take real action and not just talk about red lines,” said Almawwas, who was clearly disappointed after hearing Macron’s admission of no evidence for chemical weapons.
Tellingly, the White Helmets’ envoy was hosted by senior French government officials while in Paris, including Macron’s chief diplomatic advisor, according to Reuters.
He also went on to complain – unwittingly – that the White Helmets have received less funding from foreign governments this year compared with last year.
Reuters reported: “Almawwas said the group’s financing for 2018 from foreign governments [sic] had dropped to $12 million from $18 million a year earlier.”
According to the White Helmets’ own website, the foreign governments whom they receive financing from include: the United States, Britain, France, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Canada, among others.
In other words, this so-called humanitarian relief organization is a NATO-sponsored entity, which evidently operates freely in areas of Syria controlled by Al Nusra and other internationally proscribed terror groups.
And this is the same “source” which has been used by the NATO governments and Western news media to disseminate claims about Syrian state forces using chemical weapons against civilians – claims which senior US and French officials are now belatedly negating.
What we have here is demonstrable peddling of falsehoods and lies by Western governments and their news media.
Not just with regard to the war in Syria, but on a range of other international incendiary issues, as noted above.
Accusing Russia of aggression, nuclear threats, sabotaging elections, targeting civilian infrastructure which could “kill thousands and thousands” (British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson last month), or any number of other wild allegations, is symptomatic of sociopathic lying by Western governments.
The reckless falsehoods and lies espoused by the US and its European allies are made possible because of the reprehensible servility of Western media not holding to account the wild claims that they willfully disseminate.
This relentless propagation of lies is an appalling incitement to tensions, conflict and war.
Engaging in war fever is not only irresponsible. It is in fact a war crime, according to Nuremberg legal standards.
محمد صادق الحسيني
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 