Giving Thanks We're Not All Dead Yet (but could be, any moment)
Israeli-Hezbollah Ceasefire?
The Hill reported this morning November 26:
“The Israeli government is expected to shortly announce its agreement to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon that will begin Wednesday morning, according to a source familiar.
The announcement is expected following a vote taking place among Israel’s security Cabinet Tuesday evening local time.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to announce the agreement, followed by President Biden making an on-camera message about the ceasefire”.
Later on, at 11:30am California Time I noticed this update from the New York Times:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put his weight behind a deal mediated by U.S. and French diplomats to end the fighting. The Israeli military kept up the pressure with heavy strikes in and around Beirut.” Netanyahu is quoted as sayint that ““With the full understanding of the United States, we are preserving full military freedom of action — if Hezbollah breaks the agreement and seeks to arm itself, we will attack.”
The main things to watch out for are: on what conditions is Israel signing this, in relation to its power to continue to molest the peoples of Southern Lebanon, the ease with which its troops can stay in, or return to, Lebanon?
Significantly, news of the pending agreements occurs the day following significant damage in Tel Aviv caused by Hezbollah rockets as well as continuing Hezbollah attacks on Haifia and northern Israel, as Israel continues to murder large numbers (3,500) citizens in and around Beirut, southern Beirut and southern Lebanon, and to murder Palestinian men, women and children (primarily women and children) in Gaza, where the official tally of those killed now exceeds 44,000, and well as well over 100,000 wounded. These figures are significant undercounts of the actual numbers of those who have died or who have been wounded in direct or indirect consequence of Israeli attacks. The deal comes in the wake of mounting evidence that the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon has involved it in fierce fighting and many casualties (over 800 IDF dead and several thousand wounded).
The ceasefire, assuming it is agreed and respected, has no direct bearing on the prospects of Israel’s determination to force the US to fight a war with Iran on its behalf, a war in which Russia and China will very likely be involved, directly or indirectly. The imaginable scale of this conflict might in itself be expected to impose common sense on all parties in a manner that is similar to how events are unfolding in Ukraine. It can be in nobody’s interest for a nuclear war to break out, as there is every reason to believe that even the exchange of a few modern nuclear weapons would be sufficient to destroy the entire human species.
Yet Israel says that one merit of the ceasefire with Hezbollah is that Israel can then concentrate on the threat it claims Iran poses.
Just before I completed my post today towards 2:00pm, the following came through from The Hill:
“The Israeli government is expected to shortly announce its agreement to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon that will begin Wednesday morning, according to a source familiar. The announcement is expected following a vote taking place among Israel’s security Cabinet Tuesday evening local time.
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking ahead of the expected agreement, said Israel had pushed Hezbollah “back decades.” He said calm on the northern border is needed to focus attention on Iran, provide rest for troops and replenish stocks, and isolate Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“With the United States’ full understanding, we maintain full freedom of military action. If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack,” Netanyahu said. “If it tries to rebuild terrorist infrastructure near the border, we will attack. If it launches a rocket, if it digs a tunnel, if it brings in a truck carrying rockets, we will attack.”
Terms include a 60-day truce where Israel would withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon and Hezbollah would withdraw its troops north of the Litani River in Lebanon. During that time, the Lebanese army and an international United Nations peace-keeping force would deploy to the areas of the border zone and a new enforcement mechanism, overseen by the United States, would ensure that Hezbollah and Israel remain outside the area. Two previous Hezbollah conditions were for Israel to stop all attacks on Lebanon and preserve Lebanese sovereignty.
A Passing Note on Western Insanity
It wasn’t enough that the West insisted on pressing against Russian borders in the most aggressive ways short of actual war, that it should have recruited a dwarf comedian in Ukraine to press home its RAND wet-dream of dismembering Russia for the benefit of Western corporations, that it should have provoked Russia not only to warn of its nuclear capability but also, just a few days ago, of the lethality of non-nuclear weapons that it has been developing since the 1960s (after all, what good is a nuclear war if nobody can win it?), and whose development it resumed after Trump took the West out of the intermediate nuclear treaty in 2018.
No, none of this is enough.
The West now talks blithely of providing Ukraine with tactical nuclear weapons; Britain and France, with tiny armies (215,050 and 333,000 respectively, including reserves - fewer than the total number of Ukrainian dead so far), brag about sending soldiers (well, more soldiers) to Ukraine.
The Biden administration, having green-lighted the firing by “Ukaine” (equals NATO) of US ATACAMS, UK Storm Shadows and, now, French Scalps and, possibly, under a new German governent in February 2025, German Tauruses, is moving quickly to throw the final $7 billion from the package approved for Ukraine by Congress back in the Spring to Kiev.
Various dissident military experts chatter on alternative media in excitement about Russia’s Oreshnick as a “game changer,” even though the Dnipro attack merely took out a factory, was only a test and Russia does not currently claim to have more than “a stockpile" of these weapons.
Gilbert Doctorow is skeptical about claims to the novelty of the Oreshnik:
“The Oreshnik is an intermediate range variant based on operational principles that were already incorporated into ICBMs that Russia produced and put on active duty back in 2018. I have in mind the Sarmat, which has in its nosecone perhaps a dozen Avangard hypersonic missiles each of which is individually targetable. Those Avangard on board follow a glide path and reach a velocity of 20 times the speed of sound (Mach) before hitting their targets with either conventional or more typically nuclear warheads”.
If there is novelty here, suggests Doctorow, it lies in the fact that it, unlike the Sarmat that is fired from silos, the Oreshnik is a solid fuel rocket that is launched from mobile launchers that can be moved around and hidden under camouflage as required. Therefore, its possible destruction in a preemptive first strike by some adversary is far more problematic. Even without explosives on board, Doctow continues, the Oreshnik has the force at impact to destroy everything below it to a depth of 200 meters.
“This means that the bunkers used in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine by US and NATO officers coordinating the military operations, and also the bunkers now protecting Mr. Zelensky and his war criminal confederates are entirely vulnerable to Russian attack at the time of Moscow’s choosing”.
Putin’s Passion
The Bell, no friend of Russia, provides some background to the Oreshnik within the overall narrative of Russian development of hypersonic missiles, the direct result, we should note, of Bush’s withdrawal of the USA from the ABM Treaty in 2002.
But The Bell is not at all concerned about whether hypersonic weapons generally or the Oreshnik in particular might, as many believe, have checkmated the West. No, The Bell is eager to find further evidence of what it would like us to believe is the police state represented by modern Russia. I would suggest that The Bell’s claim that Russian scientists engaged in hypersonic research have spent the last few years working under the constant threat of prison, should be swallowed with a hefty dose of salt if their best source is the BBC.
“Since 2018, when Putin unveiled the hypersonic missiles, at least 12 scientists have been jailed on charges of treason. Three of them have subsequently died, the BBC Russian service wrote. The physicists were accused of passing state secrets to European countries that Russia considers “unfriendly”, as well as to “friendly” nations such as China. In private conversations, FSB officers said that arrests were ordered from “on high”, lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told the BBC.”
Game-Changer Checkmate?
Neither the US nor Europe appear to have acknowledged in any way that the Oreshnik is a game-changer; all they have acknowledged is that Russia has committed to one further step on the escalatory ladder to which they, the West, are planning the next.
Are there serious adults who believe a nuclear war is winnable? Among the West’s ruling classes, it would appear so. But even if they only think they are merely playing at matching macho struts, they are exponentially increasing the chances of mistakes that could lead to nuclear war, in a context where they cannot predict with certainty what it is that others will do.
Ordinary people have nothing whatsoever to gain from this madness. The “extraordinary” people to whom they owe their craven allegiance appear to be motivated by an odious mixture of lust for vast new territories and mineral wealth (so as, in the case of the West, to pay off otherwise unpayable debt), hatred and fear. And a great bid dollop of utter stupidity.
The waning but desperate Biden generation, senile but seething, claim they are “Trump-proofing.”
The most that can be said of Trump is that he does not want to see more extravagant waste of American wealth on the losing cause of Ukraine, now governed by an illegimate and egregiously corrupt regime. Trump well understands (and said so directly back in 2016) that it is far better for the US to nurture good relations with Russia than to push Rush and China together in a firm alliance.
Yet this is what has now actually happened under Biden, in the shape of an alliance that will prove itself to be very durable, given that the single most important thing that Russia and China now understand is that the West is irredemiably untrustworthy, infinitely pompous and pontifical and criminal to boot.
But, as I have recently argued, it is a grave mistake to find comfort in Trump’s supposed aversion to war. What “aversion”? Trump may not be the first to pick up the cudgels but he is adept at setting the stage for wars:
“Should we now refer to Donald Trump as the IT Man (idiot Trump), the man who sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine in December 2017, imposed tariffs on China and applied the brakes to globalization in March 2018, destroyed the JCPOA treaty with Iran in May 2018, whitewashed Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan Heights in March 2019; withdraw the US from the intermediate nuclear treaty in August 2019; and ordered the assassination of Iranian major general Soleimani in January 2020?”
Trump signals his intention to bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine. He has openly acknowledged the conflict to be a proxy war initiated by NATO against Russia.
But there is strong reason to doubt that he has a remotely sufficient hand with which to entice Russia, winning on the battlefields, into any form of “frozen conflict” that is not totally contrary to Russian security interests or totally uninteresting to the new, multipolar world that is emerging as we speak.
Refilling the Cup of Insanity
This we shall soon find out but, in the meantime Trump has not been slow to refill to the brim the cup of insanity now so characteristic of a West in decline.
What is even the mere threat of forcing - and using military personnel to do the forcing - between 11 to 23 million residents (of whom an estimated 11 million are undocumented; goodness knows who Trump thinks comprises the remaining 12 million) of the US out of the country, if it is not insane?
That is to say, seriously, egregiously, medically, ethically, strategically insane at a cost, it is estimated, of over $300 billion, although the count of money doesn’t even get to the starting line of explaining why this is insane. Mere contemplation of the machinery of compulsion, detention and expulsion would deter even the least sane.
And where are these people to go exactly?
Generations who have been correctly schooled in the memory of how tariff wars in the 1930s were major contributors to the global economic depression of that decade, leading in turn to the very hot conflicts of World War Two that in turn accounted for the deaths of anywhere in the range of 21 to 80 million people, can only look on aghast in the face of Trump’s initiation of a tariff war with China in his first administration, his gleeful trashing of the global economy with sanctions, and now his threats to impose very high tariffs on imports from America’s “friends”, such as Mexico, or Canada, or Western Europe (already prompting threats of retaliation by Mexico’s new president).
Is this not too, insane? And then to stuff his new Cabinet with inexperienced, loudmouthed, genocide-loving, Zionist fanatics for war with Iran?
EU Into the Long Night
But the world hardly needs to depend on Donald Trump to establish insanity as its leading political meme. In the wake of a likely US pull-out from Ukraine under Trump the European Union, in a bid for centralization, war powers and debt load that is itself a symptom of madness, wishes it to be known that it is bracing to go it alone into the dark night.
For the World Socialist Web Site, Alex Lantier reports that London and Paris are planning a large-scale ground intervention in Ukraine. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot has demanded that European countries, many of them already in, or on the precipice of, recession, massively increase defense spending. And even if nuclear war with Russia does not wipe out the entirey of mankind, Lantier notes that it will trigger a bitter confrontation with the European working class.
“President Emmanuel Macron financed his last major increase to France’s military budget last year by slashing pensions. He imposed these cuts by decree, without a parliamentary vote, ordering riot police to assault mass strikes and protests, ultimately relying on France’s corrupt union bureaucracies to call off the struggle.Finding billions of pounds and euros needed to prepare the British, French and other European militaries for an armed stand-off against Russia in Ukraine would require further deep social attacks on European workers..
“Such plans face overwhelming popular opposition, above all in the working class. Earlier this year, a Eurasia Group poll found that 91 percent of Americans and 89 percent of Western Europeans oppose a NATO ground intervention into Ukraine. Nonetheless, the European imperialist powers are proceeding precisely with such plans”.
The braggodocio of the UK and France mask potential schims within Europe. This is in part about who is to earn what is fondly thought of as the glory of victory over Russia; it is partly about how Europe hopes to divide up the spoils of a vanquished Ukraine (already mortgaged, though, to BlackRock); it is partly about who gets what in the highly unlikely event that Europe gets to divide up the Russian Federation.
The French army, writes Lantier, is working on plans minimizing the role of Germany, Europe’s dominant economic power.
“Plans for a European intervention in Ukraine “raises the question of the leadership of this military coalition. Germany currently appears considerably weakened by its domestic political difficulties,” Le Monde wrote, citing the IFRI’s Tenenbaum: “France and the UK, the only two nuclear powers in Europe, would therefore play a key role. The Baltic States, Poland and the Scandinavian countries also appear to be essential candidates.”
Anatol Lieven today questions whether European leaders even understand the basis of their fanaticism
“If you ask most members of European think tanks to define the specifically British, or French, or Danish interests in the Ukraine War, they are not merely incapable of answering, they clearly regard the very question as somehow illegitimate and disloyal to the U.S.-mandated “rules-based order.
But the America to which these Europeans are loyal is the old U.S. foreign and security establishment — not the America of Trump, which they do not understand and deeply hate and fear (just as they do their own populist oppositions)”.
Russian Economy
Ben Aris of Intellinews has done his best recently to starve the Russian economy of hope, as I discussed in a recent post of mine. But today (Aris) he cites a CASE review that finds that Russia’s economy has been battered by sanctions and high inflation, but that there is no chance of a major economic crisis occurring anytime in the next three to five years [https://case-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/case-241112-en_fin2_compressed.pdf].
“The reports general conclusion is that “Russia has been able to withstand the blow caused by the Western sanctions due to a combination of factors, including its well-developed market economy, its indispensable position as a supplier of primary commodities to the global market, highly professional responses by its government officials, and the West’s inability to isolate Russia on the international stage.”
“An unbiased assessment of Russia’s economic capabilities presented in the report excludes almost any chances of a serious crisis caused by internal factors in at least three-to-five-years perspective,” the report concludes, running counter to the predictions that Russia’s economy will run into a brick wall in 2025”.
But such good news cannot be enough to exonerate the existentially evil Russia that is the stuff of all good neocon horror stories. Instead, what has happened is that:
“Sanctions have created a new class of Bandit Counties that champion massive violations of intellectual property rights, illicit foreign trades and the use of non-traditional forms of international settlements”.
Imagine the horror of such a perverse outcome as a “non-traditional form of international settlement!!” Better to acknowledge, as does this CASE report, that:
“Viewing all of this as merely a way to circumvent sanctions is extremely short-sighted, as the Kremlin has set its sights on fundamentally undermining the existing system and has reasonable grounds for hoping to succeed.”