US inflames war throughout the Middle East

Andre Damon

October 24, 2023

The United States, whose military has killed over one million people during illegal wars in the Middle East over the past quarter-century, is using Israel’s assault against the Palestinians to provoke a wider war throughout the region.

 

The US is surging troops, warships and aircraft to the Middle East. At least 10,000 sailors, soldiers and airmen have already been deployed to the region, and an unspecified number of troops—possibly in the tens of thousands—have been told to make ready to deploy.

The Biden administration has given its full support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians which is taking place through the mass bombing of civilians, killing between 300 and 400 people every single day, as well as the deliberate starvation and dehydration of the population.

At the same time, it is providing the weapons with which Israel is simultaneously carrying out attacks on Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, using American weapons and with American political, military and logistical support, is just one component of the US military escalation throughout the region.

On Saturday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced steps to “strengthen” the US military’s “posture in the region,” citing “escalations by Iran.” Austin said he was putting US missile defense systems on alert throughout the region and had placed an “additional number of forces on prepare to deploy order.”

The US military has asserted that over the past week troops stationed in Iraq have come under attack from what it claims are Iranian proxy forces.

“Iran is closely monitoring these events and, in some cases, actively facilitating these attacks and spurring on others who may want to exploit the conflict for their own good or for that of Iran,” said Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby on Monday.

In an interview on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared, “We expect that there’s a likelihood of escalation, escalation by Iranian proxies directed against our forces, directed against our personnel. We are taking steps to make sure that we can effectively defend our people and respond decisively if we need to.”

Blinken insisted, “This is not what we want, not what we’re looking for. We don’t want escalation.” He added, “We’ve also deployed very significant assets to the region, two aircraft carrier battle groups, not to provoke, but to deter.”

Blinken, as always, is lying. The escalation is on the part of the United States, which is flooding the Middle East with troops and weapons.

The United States, via its proxy, Israel, is bombing Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria in a deliberate effort to provoke Iran. It is surrounding Iran with warships and aircraft and threatening that any alleged attack against them will be used as a pretext to attack Iran.

The US maintains thousands of troops in Iraq following its brutal and illegal 2003 invasion of that country. US troops are similarly deployed illegally in Syria, in defiance of the Syrian government. All of these troops are poised to strike Iran at a moment’s notice.

Israeli officials continue to make threats against Lebanon. During a visit with troops on the border with Lebanon Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of “devastating consequences to Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon,” adding, “We’ll hit it with a force it can’t even imagine.” Israel has ordered the evacuation of over 200,000 people from its northern border.

On Sunday, Nir Barkat, Israel’s economy minister, threatened that if the war spills over into Lebanon, “We will not just retaliate to those fronts, but we will go to the head of the snake, which is Iran.”

The US and other imperialist media are, meanwhile, agitating for a direct military conflict with Iran. In an op-ed in The Economist, David Schenker, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, openly called for a military conflict with Iran. “More effective than financial tools, however, is military might. … Unfortunately, to forestall a widening of the war in Gaza, Washington may have no choice but to engage militarily.”

In his prime-time speech on Thursday, Biden presented a messianic vision of American global domination, claiming that American military and economic overlordship is the unifying principle in the world. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” Biden said.

He was more explicit in a campaign reception the next day, declaring, “We were in a postwar period for 50 years where it worked pretty well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. It needs a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.”

To say that the “postwar period” is over is effectively to declare a new period of world war. The Biden administration is escalating the war in the Middle East and threatening to directly attack Iran as part of what it sees as a globe-spanning conflict for world hegemony, stretching from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and the Pacific. American imperialism, confronted with the economic rise of China and the global decline of the US economy, sees war as the means to assert world domination.

The United States worked to provoke the war in Ukraine, with the aim of drawing Moscow into a proxy conflict aimed at “bleeding Russia white.” But two years on, Ukraine’s latest offensive has failed, and the United States is desperately seeking to escalate the conflict in order to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. At the same time, Washington is instigating a conflict with China over Taiwan and attempting to economically strangle China by blocking its access to advanced computer technology.

Biden’s call last week for $105 billion in additional military spending for all of these fronts marks a major step in the escalation of what is, in fact, the initial stages of a third world war.

The United States is confronting Russia and China, which are both nuclear-armed powers. Israel also possesses nuclear weapons, and at least one member of Israel’s parliament, Revital “Tally” Gotliv, has called for the use of the “doomsday weapon” in the present conflict. Washington’s escalation of military violence threatens human civilization.

But American imperialism’s stoking of world war confronts broad popular opposition. Over the past weekend, millions of people demonstrated on every inhabited continent in opposition to the US-Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. In London, 300,000 people took part in the city’s largest antiwar rally since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This developing anti-war movement must be deepened and expanded. The growing movement against war must be fused with the global strike movement by workers fighting to defend their jobs, wages and living standards. This requires the building of a socialist leadership in the working class, fusing the fight against war with opposition to the capitalist profit system.

 

The Tragedy of Dehumanization

BillBlum

October 23, 2023

 

In a video-taped lecture posted online last year by the international nonprofit organization Facing History and Ourselves, Holocaust scholar James Edward Waller relates a chilling anecdote about Franz Stangl, the Nazi commandant who ran the Treblinka extermination camp from September 1942 to August 1943.

At one point during his tenure, Stangl was asked by a group of condemned Jews, “Why did you beat us? Why did you strip us? Why did you spit on us? Why did you call us names? Because the only reason we were at Treblinka was to be put to death. You knew you were going to kill us, why put us through all the humiliation, all the dehumanization?”

Stangl replied, “Because it made it easier for my men to do what they had to do. The less human you were in their eyes, the easier it was for them to perpetrate the atrocities.”

Dehumanization has been a cornerstone of warfare and ethnic and religious conflict from time immemorial. The same malignancy is now spreading on both sides of the bloodletting in Gaza and Israel.

Founded in 1987 after the start of the First Intifada, Hamas has long promoted hatred of Jews. Its founding covenant, published in 1988, declared an uncompromising holy war to reclaim Palestine, and states. “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them,” it read. “Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised charter, proclaiming that it was at war only with Zionism and not the Jewish people. However, the surprise attack of Oct. 7, in which Hamas fighters massacred over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and took some 200 hostages into Gaza, including an estimated 30 children and 20 people over the age of 60, graphically demonstrates the contrary. The organization is still committed to the destruction of Israel, and called for a worldwide “day of rage” to take place on Oct. 13, exhorting Muslims to harm Israelis and Jews.

The current right-wing government of Israel led by Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu employs a comparable rhetoric of cruelty.

October 9 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “total siege” of Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, and no fuel, everything will be closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting against human animals and will act accordingly.”

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible [for the slaughter],” Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, added  in a speech rebroadcast on X (formerly Twitter) on October 13 to justify his government’s relentless retaliatory bombing campaign and blockade of Gaza.

In an interview with The Guardian, Ariel Kallner, a member of the Israeli parliament for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, was even more explicit, calling for a second “Nakba,” referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians after the 1948 war with Israel. “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” Kallner said.

As of this writing, Israeli airstrikes have killed over 5000 Gazans, and injured more than 15,273. The dead number at least 1,756 children and 976 women, according to the Palestinian health ministry. A staggering 1.4 million Gazans reportedly have been internally displaced from their homes. Thus far, Israel has resisted growing international calls for a cease-fire.

Tragically, it’s not just the bodies of the dead that keep piling up on both sides. The war has also dealt a crippling blow to the principle of universality — the idea that all human beings possess equal dignity and worth.

The ideal of universality is the animating principle behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 in the aftermath of the unspeakable horrors of World War II, the UDHR is divided into 30 articles, or subsections, outlining the rights of all people everywhere. These span the human-rights spectrum, encompassing the right to be free from torture and to seek asylum, along with the rights to freedom of expression, education, economic security, health care, housing, privacy, movement and equality before the law.

The UDHR also inspired the drafting of the Rome Statute of 1998 that led to the formation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002.

Unlike the older and better-known International Court of Justice, which is the principal judicial organ of the U.N. and hears disputes between nations, the ICC is a treaty-based institution that is legally independent of the U.N., and hears cases brought against individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and other “crimes against humanity.” Such offenses are meticulously defined by the Rome Statute, and include the deliberate killing of members of a racial, national, ethnic or religious group; murder of civilians; apartheid; torture; and the taking of hostages.

To date, 123 nations are parties to the Rome Statute, acceding to the ICC’s jurisdiction. Palestine, under the auspices of the Palestine Authority, not Hamas, joined the court in 2015. Israel, however, has steadfastly declined to ratify the Rome Statute and refuses to recognize the court’s authority, fearing that its leaders could face prosecution.

Despite Israel’s defiance (and that of the United States, which also has declined to ratify the Rome Statute), the Rome statute extends the ICC’s jurisdiction to crimes committed anywhere by citizens of its member states as well as crimes committed by anyone within the territory of a member state. As the ICC’s chief prosecutor told Reuters on Oct. 12, this means that the court has jurisdiction over potential war crimes committed by both Hamas militants in Israel and Israelis in Gaza.

In 2019, the ICC opened an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank, and, in 2021, the judges of the court determined there was jurisdiction to proceed with the case. The investigation will now expand and hopefully accelerate.

In the meantime, the atrocities can be expected to continue, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, driven by the impulse to dehumanize the enemy as the world watches in revulsion and anguish.