War and Peace

JB

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The peace talks in Geneva this week have revealed the lack of seriousness of Russia and Trump and, perhaps, weaknesses here and there, not always at the same level of discussion. For instance, it is said that Trump wants half of the frozen Russian bank assets, those presumably destined to be reparations directly to Ukraine for rebuilding. That puts the talks into the oligarch category, the motto of which is: how much money can I make out of this mess? I guess we must suppose that all previous peace treaties have in some detail provided recompense—deserved or otherwise—to the ruling group, which for all of 19th and 20th century wars were oligarchs. It may well be that certain individuals will try to make themselves into oligarchs at the expense of Ukraine and peace.

Nothing Trump has said or done suggests that he is in favor of restoring Ukraine territories or guaranteeing their security. In fact, the United States is no longer supplying Ukraine with armaments. It could be said that the US is in the most neutral position ever in this war, and that would have ended Trump blackmail of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, except that Ukraine is hopeful of getting armament from the US, so it is willing to be a client of Trump. It is unclear what Trump will do the moment Russia invades Estonia or Latvia, NATO countries.

Putin has not varied in his demands of Ukraine ... and we must add ... his demands of EU and US to let him have his way. The new proposal continues the position that territory would be handed to Russia that they do not even control at present, but in round chunks, Lukhansk, Donbas, and Crimea, probably the connecting land—Mariupol to Kherson— as well.

Why Ukraine would be in Geneva considering such ideas eludes me, except to say, Ukrainian stamina may be waning. Having said that, in the larger picture the corollary to giving up major territory is that Ukraine fully intends to get it back later, which is to say this is not a peace treaty, but merely a truce arrangements like those that separated the warring parties at the 38th Parallel in Korea, or the 17th Parallel between North and South Vietnam.

Territorial concessions to Russia now might take a century to get back. Personally, I think much less time, but at the same time I think a "breather" period favors Russia more than it resuscitates Ukraine. So much depends on the US to get back into the fray. This means that Trump's longevity is a key factor, since he is unlikely to see the US position in any other way than through his own interests. We cannot afford to let this continue to happen on Trump's terms! The impeachment of Trump in January 2027 is probably too far away. If I were in Ukraine another full year of this is going to be too much. JD Vance, some say, is essentially an isolationist, so even if he were leaning toward helping Ukraine as successor President, it is doubtful he can see that Russia's defeat is necessary to a successful American retreat into itself. So, he must be impeached as well or be persuaded to listen to reason!

Listening to a podcast this morning I could not help but think of Russia's (and Russia's cynical allies in the White House: Kushner and Steve Witkoff) list of things they must have in the treaty as a Christmas list of a very mentally challenged child-like group of people. It is a list to which, when Russia is at last brought to be serious about stopping the war, they will point and say how much they are giving up in the final document. It is a delusion! Nay, anything short of restitution of all territory, especially Crimea and the Kherson to Mariopol stretch, is a fundamental betrayal of ourselves, Europe, and Ukraine.

We know that Trump has been seriously weakened. Much of what we now see from him and DHS and DOJ is meddling, not actual progress toward his takeover, much less the original MAGA agenda. Trump is first, last, and always out for himself. He will accept glory (as he sees it) up to a point, but as the window for him to escape to Argentina slowly closes, he will be trying to extort money from everything he touches to insulate himself for his last years.

The Russians (and their minions in the US White House) want to control NATO, that is, to restrict it permanently, preventing Ukraine from joining, and dictating rules about the frequency and composition of NATO exercises, and other matters. Clearly, that is not for Russia to dictate, nor for any treaty between Ukraine and Russia to codify. NATO controls itself and admits into its midst any country NATO sees fit ... and likewise will eject any if they think they are more trouble than they are worth. Every member represents a massive draw on security information.

But Russia is always there lurking, teasing, tossing internal enemies out of hotel windows, poisoning people on London and Berlin streets, and over-flying national boundaries to see what the counter-measure are and how fast they change. Putin is 73 years old. Let's say he will last another 12 years. During that time the opportunities for younger people in the Kremlin to advance are thwarted. The pressure they bring to bear in the next, say, two to five years will be revealing. They could change everything tomorrow, of course!

Russia is huge and it is unlikely to throw off the malign influence of the Orthodox Church, which has been in deep cahoots with the government for centuries, especially the Soviet 20th and currently. Russia is unlikely to throw off the vestiges of Slavophilism and Holy Russia that are key in the hearts of the not well-educated and among the large minor apparatchiki and much of the military officer corps. Russia is unlike Ukraine, and that means that westerners should not be gulled into believing the hidden premise behind Putin's notion that Ukraine is Russian.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukraine should have the last and final word on this attempt to end the war. EU and NATO must reassure him that Ukraine will not be betrayed or asked to accept humiliation from Russia. I worry intensely about the morale and their willingness to fight on. We are asking an awful lot of Ukraine for what are "precious" (abstract and probably partly unreasonable) reasons.

I think any decision to reject a confiscatory treaty should be accompanied by a deep deadly thrust into the iconic heart of the Kremlin itself—something that boldly removes certain players from the board, something the Russian, European, and US media can play for a week or longer. Perhaps also a strike at the Putin Estate in the South or the Russian White House on the banks of the Moskva River. The world needs to know that Zelenskiy is unbowed and that his government and people are vigorously real, and that they are what is between us and WWIII. That is a 99% certainty.

JB

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Trump ignores the Constitution and declares war on the Islamic Republic of Iran by non-nuclear, bunker-busting bombing three "nuclear sites" within that country and launching thirty missiles from US submarines to unknown targets, but presumably military command and control sites.

Trump did this against the strong opposition of a significant portion of his MAGA base and Republican members of Congress and 100% of Democrats there. He did so despite the dangerous (for him) rift this will have opened wider.

Bebe Netanyahu, PM of Israel is overjoyed. It is believed that Trump accepted at more-than-less face value strategic and tactical intelligence from Israel, rather than advice and wise counsel from the DNI, in spite of herself, to wait and see. Apparently, the Director of CIA is in the Trump camp.

Trump apparently is more alarmed at his poll numbers than the media have been able to discern. Yes, he has "always" wanted to be a wartime President, because he believes—from a responsible read of modern history—that wartime leaders have more elbow room and legal authority within their given contexts than do peacetime leaders.

Given the rousting of Senator Padilla last week and the assassination of the Minnesota state Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, and near assassination of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman, Trump apparently feels that the moment he is looking for to complete his coup d'etat is close.

He is an opportunist, so bombing Iran costs him very little in preparation, does not aggravate the restive in the US Jewish Community, although it probably does not pacify that group either.

How this plays forward is, in my view, entirely in the hands of the Democrats, who, if they cannot muster twelve Republicans in the House to rebel against Trump, flip the Speakership to Jeffries, and begin the impeachment of Trump, will have lost maybe the last golden chance to end this shit-show.

On Sunday when you are watching Trump's Saturday address to the nation, please pay very close attention to the face of VP Vance. There is another wrinkle to this saga!

JB

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9 December 2024

One of the evil things in American society is the willingness of large groups to obscure the truth of immoral and unlawful situations in which Americans are self-righteous, involved, and even conplicit. The list of such things is not short, but clear examples are the hideous treatment given to African slaves brought, bought, and oppressed for centuries, the hideous treatment given to the indigenous people of North and Central America, and the pervasive Christian dislike, deprecation, ostracism, and outright hatred of Jews. In these three instances the contemporary governments not only tolerated the activities of the public, but fostered, and participated in the ruin of thousands of human beings. President Andrew Jackson hated the indigenous. President Richard Nixon thought there were too many Jews in government and that Jews controlled the media. In the northern states there was a majority that did not support the abolitionists, but simply held their noses. Needless to say, the slave-holders quickly understood that raising baby slaves for work and profit was something in which they could participate. Such a person was President Thomas Jefferson, who "asked" that his deceased wife's mulato half-sister and his slave lie with him and to bear him children.

There are thousands and thousands of incidents and stories about the darkness in American culture, the overt willingness of many to be evil. When the Third Reich of the German People rose in the 1920's and 1930's the long standing cultural antisemitism of Europe found its legs, and the evil butchery of six million Jews by the Nazi Regime took place and set up a situation worldwide where Jews, bemoaned at a distance, were refused sanctuary in country after country for reasons no more complicated than pervasive anti-semitism. That included the self-righteous antisemitism of the US public and its government.

But when the Holocaust was revealed to the world, the horror of WWII expanded to the shame of everyone who had participated however actively or passively in centuries of antisemitic mores and folkways, but especially those whose activities against Jews were repressive and sometimes violent. President Harry S Truman was in charge. He was a typical midwesterner whose exposure to anti-semitism was modest to slight, but he bore the shame of the nation, indeed the world, when on May 14, 1948, eleven minutes after the Jews in Palestine declared the birth of Israel, the once and future sanctuary for Jews, he recognized their right to do so and the nation they had declared.

Israel was born in the shame of everyone else and in the face of the Palestinian people who, having been vassals of the Ottoman Empire for centuries and mandate subjects of the none-too-swift British Crown and government for three decades, found themselves without competent leadership to resist the postwar angst and exploitation of their situation, which was motivating Truman's eager mea culpa foreign policy, and through him the uneasy guilt hundreds of millions in Europe and the western hemisphere who bore some semblance of shame.

The situation seventy years later begs for an honest answer to why anti-semitism was and is so wide-spread. France entered the 20th c. with its Dreyfusards finally revoking the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, mentioned to underline the deep interests of Christians and especially Roman Catholics in the religious status quo ... or not. In other words a seething issue. Antisemitism begins in religious doctrine and emotion, but one Jewish American comedian put it thus: "Jews are hated because they believe themselves to be better than everyone else."

Needless to say, the Palestinians were played and played badly by their inept leaders and by the Israelis and the foreign offices of Europe and North America. The cauldron of righteous and self-righteous grievance in what had been Palestine, but was reorganized under the Jews as Israel, was a tempting mudpuddle visible to world players and exploited for real politic objectives by the Soviet Union, which had its own Jewish Problem, the Europeans, and the US. The history of skirmish and war in Israel is one where paranoia has been justifiable, but too often raised to the ranks of an cultural ideal. Iran, believing itself to be the righteous defender of the Muslim faith, (also a internecine quarreling religion), had taken up the causes of the Palestinians, clearly to annoy, perhaps to affect, the self-righteous nations "supporting" Israel, primarily the US, whose CIA had gone our of their way to depose PM of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.

This is the bare-bones outline of the context in which Hammas, an Iran-funded and trained rebel Palestinian movement, on October 7th, 2023, slaughtered and raped to death 1,200 Israelis and took some 251 hostages, infuriating the already criminally charged PM Bebe Netanyahu of Israel. Despite calls from everywhere, but especially the American White House, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bombed and rebombed, scourged and put to inevitable death tens and scores of thousands of innocents in Gaza, at least 44,000 dead, 100,000 wounded and dispossessed. Everyone but the majority of Israeli people and many Jews in the US have deplored this. But, the US has continued to support the Israeli IDF and government all the while.

Now the US, is perilously party to an actual genocide. says Amnesty International, the respected NGO promoter of human rights around the world. An occasion for reconsideration of Israel's right to continue to exist under its current form of government. But, moreover, an occasion for serious reconsideration of the foreign policy of President Joseph Biden in the US.

JB

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11 November 2024

I was lucky. Our ship was caught in pressure ice, a huge icefloe about 30 nautical miles wide and twice that long. Our accompanying icebreaker, USCGS Eastwind, had been squeezed upward and out of the ice. Then the wind shifted the pressure of the ice was no long popping rivet heads into our holds and threatening hull plates below the waterline, and the USS Edisto, also a "wind class" icebreaker arrived, chopped the Eastwind out, and then dragged us out and on our way to the Ross Sea, McMurdo Sound, and McMurdo Station and New Zealand's nearby Scott Base both waiting anxiously for our resupply. We had sailed through the Cuban Missile Crisis to get there. Later that year we were in Guantanamo Base when President Kennedy was assassinated.

My second ship was homeported for two years on the Mediterranean Sea, my year was in Naples, Italy. I was Navigator of the ship and never missed a rendezvous, but was Officer of the Deck (and Con) during General Quarters and Replenishments. One day the Soviet Cruiser, Sverdlov, showed up in our midst, that being two carrier task groups with accompanying cruisers, destroyers and the rest of the replenishment fleet. The Soviets tried to disrupt the operations but the senior flag officer ordered a response. It was an attack jet, probably a Phantom II, which zoomed toward the Soviet Cruiser toward its stern and when it crossed overtop of the ship about 150 feet off the water, it kicked in its afterburners directly over the stacks of the cruiser, which then went dead in the water with its engines snuffed by the shockwave we delivered.

My third ship —I was Operations Officer— was assigned to refueling duties in Tonkin Gulf and off the coast of South Vietnam, close off the coast, such that bamboo poles said to be VC mortar range markers passed down the side of our 644' highly flamable/explosive ship. We did our work from the DMZ to the Gulf of Siam. My fraternity little-brother, Roger Bove, was commander of a "swiftboat" in the Mekong River and was killed, and my fraternity brother David Dunkenberger was co-pilot of a rescue helicopter and was killed. And, the TOTAL IN-THEATER DEATHS 58,220 are now recorded.

I am currently reading War by Bob Woodward. So far I have read about the comments of Vladimir Putin with great interest. He is convinced that Ukraine, being the ancient mother of the tiny principalities that eventually coalesced into Muscovy while under the rule of the Mongol Golden Horde, and while Ukraine was over-run by Mongols and began its 15th century cultural separation from Russia, Rus slowly became the Russian state. Ukraine was eventually conquered and absorbed by Russia and began a significant role in the Russian Empire, bringing Russia into many wars with the Ottoman Empire, eventually into the Crimean War against European nations in the mid-1850s. Putin has staked his legacy on bringing west-leaning Ukraine back into what he thinks is the new Russian Empire. He is literally at war with the west over this, and has not dared to declare it, but is carrying out significant deadly operations in the west and North America.

With Trump in charge the question is whether Trump now sees Putin as a rival mob boss or a potential ally. Probably both. Putin will make a mistake in the next four years, relying on Trump's ignorance, but overlooking his cany mob boss mentality, and there will be hot war between us and many more dead American service members and even more civilians, millions.

Russia is by no mean the military, economic, or cultural leader in the world that the United States is, but it is tough and proud and will fight like hell against us. It's population, considerable less than half of the US —147,000 people— are riven and cowed by Putin's fear mongering, but they will fight on the ground, and Russia's nukes will fall on places we wonder whether we should respond in kind to. Eventually, Russia will either fail and drop out of the war or sue for peace, but the point is it will probably (49-51%) attempt to bomb us with large nuclear weapons, and I doubt Trump will see it coming.

JB

War & peace

13 October 2024

The New York Review of Books begins the October 17th issue with a harrowing article by Jessica T. Mathews titled "The Race that Can't Be Won". The point of the article is that we, especially as we elect a new President, are no longer dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev; we are dealing with a lesser being by far, Vladimir Putin, and now also with China's Xi Jinping, with non-proliferation a very, very sad shambles already. We live in appropriate fear of a loose nuke falling into the hands of jihadists or drug and human trafficking cartels. Worse, we are currently in a war in Ukraine and in Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, the likes of which defies rational thinking, but also which involves the next proliferant, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A few of us are still around with memories from duck-and-cover drills of the 1950's. I remember all the nearly three thousand of us abandoning our wooden desk defences for a sardine huddle in the high school basement outside the gym locker rooms, and my classmate, hitherto unknown to be epileptic, going off smack in the midst of all of us, each wondering if the Pentagon were two miles away or three. I feel for today's kids learning how to hide from military assault weapon-wielding angry child assassins.

Mathews describes a 1960 inspection or briefing at the Strategic Air Command HQ in Omaha. One of the guys from Washington asked what weapon the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan [designed to unite all four armed services under one nuclear engagement plan]) would be used on a named city in the Soviet Union about the size of Hiroshima. "The answer was one 4.5-megaton bomb followed by three 1.1-megaton bombs—a lunatic total of six hundred times the 12.5-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima."

That was at a time when the US had five times the number of deliverable weapons than the Soviet Union. Now, after the New Start treaty limiting the numbers of weapons, Russia and the US together have at total of 11,000 weapons with a proviso that each country may only deploy 1,550 of them at any moment, leaving the rest in storage, an 80%-95% reduction, designed to convince those paying for it, that we are no long stark-raving insane.

In 1947, as the nukes race was just beginning the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists started the Doomsday Clock. In 1991 after the START I treaty they set the clock at 11:43:00 pm. This year, 2024, they see the total of all issues around the threat of nuclear annihilation as 11:58:30 pm, ninety seconds left to save our sorry selves! They are counting Global Warming and our responses to it in their thinking. They are probably counting Donald J. Trump as well. But, are they counting Bebe Netanyahu?

Hard Right Israel is now the trigger. They have destroyed 42,000 children, women, and men in Gaza, while ramping up their terror regime in the West Bank, and now are decimating Hezbollah's nest and its surroundings in Lebanon. Iran has responded recently with nearly 200 ballistic missiles raining down on Israel itself, most intercepted, but by no means all. And, for that, Israel is planning a rejoinder assault on Iran, which will inevitably bring the entire region into conflict and push Netanyahu, whose main issue is staying out of jail for accepting bribes, extortion, etc., to nuke Iran's nuclear development facilities ... and while they are at it wipe out tens of thousands of Persian people.

The point: Trump is so obviously incapable of dealing with this situation that he is running against himself now. If he were to win, by some twist of planetary Fate, then the clock would go to 30 seconds remaining, in recognition of his complete ineptitude.

The essential point: When Kamala Harris becomes the next President, Jessica T. Mathews, the NYRB, and I am saying, there has to be a complete and thorough-going reorganization of our stance and policy vis a vis Israel, Russia, Iran, and China, with NATO into the bargain and India and Pakistan — the alternative fuse system for the day of Armageddon — brought in. Keep an eye out for signs that President Harris understands that the US Democratic Jewish demographic and her husband, need to consider the entire planet from now on. For most this will not be difficult.

Mathew's tells us that USAF and USN pilots and submariners have known for decades that their missions are one-way assignments. There will be no place to land their planes or dock their submarines on Day Two!

JB

Post Script: This essay was posted around noon (pdt) today. This evening around 8:45 "Nighwatch" episode of the series starring Tí:a Leoni, Madam Secretary, Season:4 Episode:22 was next in line as I binge this series. I watched and wondered why this essay and this video arrived in my consciousness on the same day. The story is a the perfect accompaniment to Jessica Mathews's article. I recommend it.

War and Peace

22 September 2024

Ben Taub, a staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine has a lengthy piece in the September 6th paper edition, titled "The Dark Time," and in the online edition "Russia's Espionage War in the Arctic" dated September 9, 2024. It is all about the northeastern part of Norway that abuts Russia's Kola Peninsula, where fabled Murmansk is and was the port where WWII supplies were given to Russia, and now where a very large number of Russian nuclear powered submarines armed with nuclear weapons call homeport, the serious part of the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet.

The Norwegians have mounted a semi-fictional video series about the confrontation between themselves and first Soviet and now plain Putin-era Russian FSB and naval forces on the ground in and near a small (3,500 pop.) town called Kirkenes. The reality is intelligence and counter-intelligence stuff, all the more darkly vivid for the hostile environment. The Russians are mapping the Norway's and NATO's sensitive communications and defense infrastructure. All of this is important because when Russia decides to launch against the west, the submarines will deploy from this area. But, moreover, missiles exchanged between the US and Russia will rise, and descend over the Artic.

Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West. "That's for sure—we are saying that openly," the Russian representative to the United Nations recently declared. Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute. They are acts of so-called hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. The strategy appears to be to push the limits of what Russia can get away with—to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear—and to paralyze Western governments by hinting at even more aggressive tactics. "They do it because they can do it," an air-traffic controller told me, of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. "Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don't stop accusing them of what you know they're doing, bad things will happen to you."

Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, its military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in Kirkenes, treating the area as "a laboratory," as the regional police chief put it to me. Some attacks were almost imperceptible at first; others disrupted everyday life and caused division among locals. To understand what was happening in her district, she started reading Sun Tzu.

Taub is a seasoned writer in subjects like this. He is not exaggerating. Were I younger and my commissioned officer status active, and my experience in really cold weather naval operations sought, I would be likely to visit Kirkenes and other parts of Finnmark state (of Norway).

Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5. In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines. A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe's largest arms manufacturers. Poland's interior minister said, "We are facing a foreign state that is conducting hostile and—in military parlance—kinetic action on Polish territory." Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltics are digging trenches at their borders and fortifying them, often with antitank obstacles known as "dragon's teeth." Finland cast aside seventy years of neutrality and nonalignment to join NATO; Sweden cast aside two hundred.

Obviously, Americans hear on the news that our military and diplomats are dealing with this, but are blissfully unaware that it very real and happening as I write this essay. The point being: we are not properly aware that we are at war with Russia, the hot part to come at any time they think they have the upper hand ... or are perilously close to a situation out from which Putin, his successor, or the generals cannot clearly see the Russian collosus surviving. Some of these people are fanatics!

JB

War and Peace

2 June 2024

Things That Cannot Be Undone

A complete genocide is an act that no one can undo. But, genocides are not like that. They happen in stages and escalate. They rarely, if ever, exterminate an entire people. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was something that turned the world to face an utterly new era in the struggles of mankind to exist wherever and whenever they wish. It was by no means a genocide, but almost 80 years later, we rock on a precipice of unimaginable horror still, wondering if it were a war crime. Maybe not.

Imaginable horrors abound. Aryeh Neier has written what amounts to an indictment in the June 6th edition of The New York Review of Books. He has come to this sad conclusion under self-imposed duress and amid shattered illusions about his people in Israel. The title of his article is Is Israel Committing Genocide. It is not "Is Netanyahu ..." or "Why is ..." or "What Other Than Genocide ...." The title is fashioned to facilitate the ugly ironic response that it is! He writes ...

Hamas’s operatives do not wear uniforms, and they have no visible military bases. Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population of Gaza, and its extensive network of tunnels provides its combatants the ability to move around quickly. Even if Israel’s bombers were intent on minimizing harm to civilians, they would have had difficulty doing so in their effort to destroy Hamas.

And yet, even believing this, I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.

As early as October 9 top Israeli officials declared that they intended to block the delivery of food, water, and electricity, which is essential for purifying water and cooking. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s words have become infamous: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The statement conveyed the view that has seemed to guide Israel’s approach throughout the conflict: that Gazans are collectively complicit for Hamas’s crimes on October 7. [emphasis added]

Some words cannot be unspoken. The Holocaust cannot be undone or forgotten. Recognition of Israel by President Truman cannot be undone, but one hoped then and now that the Jews in Palestine would try to get along with the people who already lived there. Certainly they must have known that belicosity was not why their god chose them from among the handful of other tribes in that small part of the world, the southern part of the Levant, or that god or no god, that violence always begets violence. But no.

Israel is the result of worldwide shame and also outright indifference for the plight of the Jews in the aftermath of WWI and WWII. The Christian religion in its many forms is responsible for much of the animosity that Jews received and subsequently earned in the two millennia of the Jewish Diasphora. One American stand-up comedian puts it succinctly: (paraphrase) "The reason no one likes us Jews is that we are better than everyone else. (rising laughter)"

But I do. I had a very fine Jewish roommate in college, a very, very nice Jewish lady roommate after my divorce, and my mentor and dissertation advisor at UCLA was a famous Jewish historian.

Having said that: I think that as long as Israel cannot be undone by those others of us who out of shame and indifference let them into the community of nations, we should not, by the same or other tokens, let them kill tens of thousands of Palestinians just to prove they can undo themselves whenever they set their minds to it. They have and, Mr. Biden, they must be brought to Justice!

JB

War and Peace

30 April 2024

"If Israel is to Survive ..." (Revised)

"Israel: The Way Out" in the New York Review of Books of May 9, 2024, by David Shulman is a MUST read. Shulman was born and raised in the US in Iowa, and now is an Israeli and professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His focus now is on the Gaza War, now nearly eight months long, with approaching 40,000 dead and innumerable military and civilians injured, and, he says, it has gone too far and at great peril to Israel itself. The Gaza War may become the trigger-war we have been dreading all this while.

Shulman, who has studied the Tamil in India through their long, bitter, bloody search for identity and voice, knows how to see Israel. He knows intimately the nature of human beings fighting endlessly for existence. He sees Israel as likely not to survive.

Half of me is from Lithuania of grand parents who fled that Russia-captured state at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. It was the time of pogroms carried out by thugs employed by the Third Section of the Tsar's own internal security organization, and sometimes by the Russian Army directly. Pogroms were aimed at Jews and Gypsies and hoped to roust political radicals in every riot and mass murder and arson event. The Lithuanian population was about 50% Roman Catholic and 50% Ashkenazim Jewish back then. Those are my cultural odds, two of four grand parents being from the Vilnius and South Lithuania area. There's lots of mixed evidence, tales and lies, and thanks to the Bolsheviks, few public records.

Jews have been deliberately despised in Europe since the rise of Christianity in Rome. It has been relentless and the response has been a mixure of feint hearted submission, of escape, of in-growing paranoia, nothing at all like Stockholm Syndrome, but rather tribal-clannish digging down into their religious solace as the Chosen People and their much better than average willingness to invest in themselves, especially through education. Among the Jews there are assimilationists and the opposite.

For those who survived the pogroms and other earlier and later forms of harassment, intimidation, and murder, the CBS Sixty-Minutes program on April 28th, about PTSD in American military families, struck me as illuminating the fate of Jews in Europe, specifically that they acquired "contagious PTSD," as CBS News put it in their context.

It occurs to me, at long last, that "Israel" has been suffering from PTSD since well before 1949, and the rightwing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is the apotheosis of that very thing, a cadre of leaders whose relief from the nightmares of Jewish history is to endlessly repeat it, wallow and wander in it, to defend themselves from equally deranged Arabs, but commit attrocities and murder to prove they can survive at any cost to their enemies.

Many Jews escaped to the Levant and the Holy Land during the late 19th and 20th centuries. They arrived as pale strangers speaking Hebrew and/or Yiddish and/or Russian and German predominantly. They arrived with courage and with self-certainty that mixed poorly with the remaining parts of the Turkic Ottoman Empire: the Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Arab bedouin and townspeople. These immigrant Jews bore the symptoms and reflexes of PTSD already, less visible in a world that only recognized "shell shock" and amputees, and buried everything else. After WWII and the Holocaust, there were millions, and the vestiges of horrors became stronger reflexes and slowly—among the prominant and militant—a way of life and credo. Trust no one ... ever!

Israel has fought for its life unlike the vast majority of nations. Their claim in the middle east was simply ancient history, but they decided given the chaos after the Ottomans to force the issue, and many died becoming Israeli, and those who killed them protecting their own native lands died as well, or one should say: as poorly!

Western Civilization was aghast upon learning of the Holocaust, but nations did not take in Jewish refugees, the United States among them. It was small wonder then that President Truman, with all but his signing hand tied by a continuing exclusionist Congress did recognize the State of Israel when (within mere moments) of it declaring itself and established the relationship the US has still today, but clearly for domestic political reasons more than any other, save for the guilt of turning its back on refugees.

There are, you already know, more US Jews than Israeli Jews. The US kind have the luxury of feeling the horror and the prideful moments of Israel, but without the PTSD, or with very little. The relationships of the two nations are wildly asymetric: size, wealth, power, religions, culture, passive guilt v. daily fluctuating terror. The idea that Israel could fail begins in Israel and not the United States, and so the notion of failure does not ring responsive chords in the US. But, what is it that could fail in Israel that would be disastrous to Israel?

Clearly the capitulation of the Israel Defense Forces would allow the destruction of Israel. Maybe also the political isolation of the IDF would have a destructive effect. Clearly the vast majority of the people calling Israel home do not want to be a garrison state, but rather live amicably with everyone else in the region.

The path to disintegration is already underway, as Shulman indicates. The question — the key ingredient for survival — has already been dealt a crucial blow. Confidence in the government is low, which means that confidence in the fabric of society and how the voters vote and pray is low. The IDF has killed 3000% more human beings than the Palestinians murdered on October 8th, vastly and ghastly more than the 2,000 number President Biden probably expected of them. Israel now, accordingly, has the lowest level of respect from the World than ever. They are all but isolated in their fever dream of militant righteousness. Their self-respect, being crucial, is next. The crumbling of their special ethos really does portend the end of their polity, their hope for a homeland. And with a few more bad decisions will, if Shulman is correct, collapse in ruin.

JB

War and Peace

3 April 2024

Incomprehensible

What is incomprehensible is the stance of my government, of my party, of my choice, standing by a medieval concept of sovereignty and pledge of friendship to Israel and her government and to Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of that government now pursuing what can only be described as a policy of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza ... and all others within striking distance of the IDF.

Joseph Robinette Biden, our President, is not stupid, so I have to imagine that the policy of our government to tolerate day after day the genocide taking place before our eyes is the better path for the United States and its citizens, presumably for Israel and its citizens, and for the "world order," such as it is.

The best estimates of the deaths due to this war are 1,200 Iraeli citizens (some bearing dual citizenships in Europe and North America), 250 Israeli hostages of Hamas, essentially unrecoverable, and 33,000 Gaza Palestinians. Rounding up to 1,500 and down to 30,000 that is a ratio of 20::1. This is a ratio of genocide!

Why is this the best policy? Let us presume that US intelligence in the region and the world generally is as good as it has been in Russia and Ukraine. Let us say that US policy is made by a group of men and women surrounding the President, with the President having but one, the loudest, voice. In consideration are the interests and goals of Saudi Arabia, the several Persian Gulf states, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran ... and their friends and enemies, so Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, India, and NATO, and non-state actors: Hezbollah and Hamas.

In that maze there are failed or close to it places like Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Hamas, already teetering on oblivion. Several are unlikely to participate in a larger regional war: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, "Russia." So some of NATO, including UK and US, will participate, loading the dice so that every event will be magnified and provocative.

It seems clear to me that Biden's national intelligence is telling him that a general war involving some or all of these countries will be very costly to the world economy, given that the MIDDLE East is strategically important to trade and petro-industrial interests around the world, and set a myriad of agendas back decades, perhaps a century, or more and annihilate millions of people.

There being millions more people of the Jewish faiths in the US than anywhere else in the world, the US has a very special responsibility to represent them fairly and respectfully.

Yet ... Israel scoffs at the US position and wisps of smiles drift across the face of Netayahu when he says "things like this happen in war." And still, we all know that things like murdering food-aid workers can be avoided. It looks on our televisions as if Netanyahu were provoking us, thus to free himself from any lingering agreements he might have with us respecting the future of Israel. (Were it not for US President Harry Truman there might not have ever been a modern Jewish state!) It looks like Biden's hope to keep the lid on a greater war is costing the lives of just one set of people—all of them trapped in Gaza.

US politics this year cannot risk significant defections in so-called battle-ground states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Arizona and Georgia and Pennsylvania or Nevada. If Trump were to win the US Presidential Election in November 2024 the world order would be turned on its head with millions losing all hope of survival and utter chaos to ensue. It seems like an insoluable problem, incomprehensible, except that an obvious solution does exist.

JB

War and Peace

3 February 2024

The Delicate Pathway Across the Mid-East

The United States responded Friday to the provocations of various local Iran-backed militia groups already shooting at and now killing American military personnel posted to keep ISIS from returning to power in the region. USAF and Naval air power have begun a series of strikes on Shia militias in Syria and Iraq intended to announce that the US will not abandon its own and its allies' interests in the region, and moreover, that by exclusion the US has avoided several obvious targets and Iran itself to make the point it does not want to engage in a full-scale war in the region — only an endless one where our adversaries get to play deadly games on their terms even during our election years.

Former CIA Directors, National Security Council members, NATO Supreme Commanders, actually one each, said on MSNBC that President Biden's balancing act pathway across the broken ground there is tricky. They did acknowledge that our principle regional ally is led by a man who fundamentally disagrees with US ideas for the region and is loudly proclaiming that ours and President Biden's ideas of a two-state solution are out of the question.

What is the question, you might ask? One of the above-mentioned experts said clearly that we ought to be reconsidering why we are there with troops still in Iraq and Syria. It is probably a permanent part of the Truman Doctrine that Israel, although it probably does not want to be one of the United States, should get at least as much federal support as many of the 50 main states of the Union.

George W. Bush and his VP Cheney set off a Desert Storm, a bewildering situation across the territory, once part of the Ottoman Empire and then administered for a generation by the geniuses at Whitehall and Eton, people of their era like the more recent PM who concocted Brexit and was eventually asked to leave government. The US also has no idea how to behave in the Middle East, having really pissed off Iran by overthrowing the Iranian government of its democratically elected PM, Mohammed Mosaddegh, who had the temerity to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, "built" by the Brits and Yanks. Clearly, when we overthrow the Netayahu government to get that thorn off our saddle we will have insulted a fierce rightwing JudeoFascist faction of his country for several generations, too.

The path ahead is full of potholes, landmines, treachery, and President Biden is our guy to lead us through it all. The past week dealing with the death of three US Army soldiers where Jordan, Iraq, and Syria meet and what the US response should be has left him exhausted and looking very unsteady. But,the regional war we have allowed to fester is now about to erupt into flames, news of which will dog the presidential election year like a really bad case of psoriasis, dementing, supporating, and perhaps even killing off our democracy. If a screen-writer or a retired historian could have imagined this, so could have a group of well-placed misogynist theocrats in Tehran.

But the thorn in our saddle is still there and the immediate, unanswered question is not why it is, but what kind of a thorn is it? Is it poisonous? We are accustomed in the educated part of our culture to feel comfortable with antagonistic points of view, but only up to a point. Beyond that point we tend to coast forward in the dialog, grudgingly strapping on our Colt 45's, ignoring warning signs that the dialog is about to erupt not into another High Noon metaphorical shoot out, but into modern mortal warfare combat, (or to complete the allusion above) to die from the effects of a poisonous thorn. So: Is it poisonous or not? The answer is unavailable to those who miss this point: as Tamsin Shaw puts it in her interesting two-book review in the New York Review of Books, "Ethical Espionage,"

Aside from the shock and horror everyone felt at the [October 7th Hamas] attacks and the terrible anticipation of what would befall Gaza in response, there were dumbfounded silences as people asked one another versions of the same question. Israel’s legendary security services, Mossad and Shin Bet, were reputed to be the best of the best, the "gold standard," as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden put it. Why hadn’t they known? [emphasis added]

It might be inconceivable to peace-loving folks that One-State-Bibi would have deadly malign intent for the Palestinians. He would have considered the larger implications of a one-state — "from the Jordan to the Sea" — solution. But, obviously, the one-state-Israel solution confines the Jews and their friends and the Palestinians into one polity, but not one culture. The Jewish population will control that government and the Palestinians will derrogate into an underclass. That is 100% guaranteed, given the three generations of Jewish politics so far historically represented in their governments. Netanyahu either believes that this is the better (if obvious) solution or he believes that the Palestinians will migrate to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, each of which does not want them. Yet, behold with your own eyes, the Hamas War begins with 1,200 Israelis slaughtered and 200 taken as hostages, and at this moment 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead, over half women and children, while Mossad and Shin Bet are blind to it all! So that this paragraph rhymes: it is inconceivable!

Genocide does not require the complete extinguishment of a people. It "only" requires that they are brought to their knees, disarmed, disenfranchized, belittled, and scorned as not quite advanced or educated or human enough to be given consideration.

It is inconceivable that Mossad and Shin Bet did not know. It is horrible to think that Netayahu would dare sacrifice 1,200 of his people to begin his genocide in earnest. But, look around! Twenty-five thousand Palestinians dead, thousands more seriously injured, millions homeless, the entire region brought to the kindling point of all-out war involving 646 million¹ — two thirds of a billion! — human beings, not to mention 3 Americans already killed!

We could kick this can down the road for another twenty years or four score, for who really knows? The chances of the issues ever resolving themselves, of Iran not achieving deliverable nuclear weapons, the possibility of the Red Sea being closed for the financial ruination of global economies, the utter destruction of "sacred" places, and the needless deaths of millions are all on the table. Clearly, buried in this heap of problems is the problem of the US relationship with Israel. We must address it now!

JB

War and Peace