Biden Must Choose Between a Ceasefire in Gaza and a Regional War
In
the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we
have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are
legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen,
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all
dangerous escalations.
In
fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war,
while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter
and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.
We
are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the
release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to
recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors
are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.
A
near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of
images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the
slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the
largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in
the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans
per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and
children.
Israel
has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is
only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000
pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza
and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the
survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as
“voluntary emigration.”
People
throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for
the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn
Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to
directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the
Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from
Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on
international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the
attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.
In
response, the Biden administration,
without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing,
including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has
contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also
act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an
“international coalition.”
President
Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade,
but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia
dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year
war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces.
Yemenis
naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million
Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging
Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas,
Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to
build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic
missiles.
The
Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops
its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a
ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to
deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.
The
United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four
neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S.
and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran,
which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of
the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem
Soleimani in January 2020.
On
January 20th, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5
Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now
deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has
reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the
demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Iran
has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of
Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan.
Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim
that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad
spy agency.
Eleven
Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and
the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real
estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of
working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to
Israel via Turkey.
The
targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of
two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit
both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s
newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that
equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century
European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.
Iran
launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer
to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to
Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a
warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks
on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their
aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.
At
the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against
Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested
U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime
Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of
aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation…
at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding
conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”
After
its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United
States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The
last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year
was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.
Since
then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its
wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is
to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000
bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians
and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground.
In
Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But
after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new
recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to
authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more
Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats
large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens.
Now,
in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would
be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza
is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and
may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion
of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and
proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a
vengeance.
Biden
can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and
watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his
own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to
insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.
Ironclad Support For Starving, Blinding, Shattering Children
Harrowingly,
confoundingly, Gaza’s horrors grow. Israel kills 250 people a day, attacks
hospitals, bombs survivors in tents, blocks over 75% of humanitarian aid from
reaching a place where “every single person is hungry,” a quarter are starving,
most are cold, 60,000 are maimed. At a beleaguered hospital, a visiting
Canadian doctor just saw 15 amputations a day; he himself removed 10 eyeballs
ruptured by shrapnel from children as young as two. As we watch, he mourns,
“Humanity has failed these people.”
By
now the litany likely numbs, but still: To date, Gaza’s Ministry of Health
estimates over 25,490 people have been killed, at least 10,000 of them
children, and over 63,354 wounded, many permanently disabled. In the last 24
hours, at least 195 Palestinians were killed and 354 injured. Intent on
“suffocating” Gaza’s health system – after having razed hundreds of medical
clinics, killed over 340 doctors or nurses, and left 350,000 ill patients
without medication – Israeli forces have now encircled Khan Younis and are
bombing areas around Nasser Hospital, the only major hospital still functionial
in the south. Doctors Without Borders report a “catastrophic” situation: Wards
packed with thousands of injured patients, hallways full of displaced,
traumatized people, bullets striking inside the hospital, staff feeling the
ground shake under heavy bombardment as debris falls on them from ceilings,
shrapnel hitting the grounds and a sense of panic” made worse by the presence
of Israeli tanks and forces blocking all exit routes.
The
savagery goes on. Israeli troops also stormed smaller Al-Khair and Al-Amal
Hospitals, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, where they arrested
medical staff and blocked ambulances from recovering bodies. Israel’s project
of “systematically obliterating” Gaza hasn’t stopped with hospitals: They also
destroyed 1000 of about 1200 mosques and recently blew up Israa University,
Gaza’s last surviving institution of higher learning, in their march toward
cultural genocide. This week, they bombed displaced families living in tents in
Al-Mawasi neighborhood outside Khan Younis, killing at least 40 and injuring
more; they also bombed families sheltering in Al-Mawasi school and four other
nearby sites housing up to 30,000 homeless people. So far they’ve somehow
refrained from bombing the million Palestinians, half of Gaza’s population,
crammed into plastic tent camps in Rafah – a “pressure cooker environment (of)
utter chaos, pervasive fear and anger (where) everyone is hungry and cold” –
but give them time.
Other
things “the most moral army in the world” has done: Fired on desperate,
displaced people trying to bury their murdered relatives on hospital grounds or
in any space they can find; dug up and vandalized graves in cemeteries,
claiming to be looking for hostages; and with widespread famine imminent, fired
on hundreds of starving civilians outside Gaza City who’d gathered to await
U.N. trucks carrying food, killing and injuring a number of them. One father
said he’d walked for 8 miles to find some food for his five hungry children; he
survived, but didn’t get any flour. With the genocidal rhetoric of Israel
leaders inexorably oozing down to soldiers on the ground, troops have also
filmed themselves gleefully plundering houses, smashing toys and setting fire
to humanitarian supplies meant for desperate Gazans – who receive such an
obscenely miniscule fraction of what’s required to save lives that one UNICEF
director likens the situation to “trying to drip assistance through a straw to
meet an ocean of need.”
One
UN official says Israel this month has blocked 18 of 21 deliveries of food,
medicine, water and other supplies to Northern Gaza. Others say it’s turned
back 22 of 29 aid convoys, denied access to 95% of fuel and medicine
deliveries, and allowed in just 98 truckloads in three months vs. 500 trucks a
day before Oct. 7. One expert warns Israel has so brutally used food, fuel and
especially water as “weapons of war” that more Gazans could die of thirst and
diseases from contaminated water than from military attacks, rendering Gaza,
now more than ever, “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”
Meanwhile, despite proof of their charges, Israel lies: “Find someone that
loves you as much as Israel loves lying.” COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of the Occupation,
insists there’s no limit to aid getting in, or any other problem. “There is no
hunger in Gaza, and for sure the population is not being starved,” said “Col.
A.” He helpfully added, “Don’t forget this is an Arab population whose DNA is
to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”
Racist
Israeli leaders offer the same blind denial on a Palestinian state – “The blood
of our sons was not spilled so a terrorist state would be established” – and
Netanyahu has repeatedly doubled down on Israeli control “over the entire area
west of Jordan,” aka “from the river to the sea.” His genocidal intransigence
persists despite Biden’s sporadic, disingenuous “handwringing” about the
devastation he somehow never acknowledges is wrought by billions in American
arms; despite fiery Israeli protests – “Only Graveyards Will Be Named After
Netanyahu”; despite analysis from even the Wall Street Journal that Israel has
killed just 20-30% of Hamas’ fighters and will never destroy even most of their
tunnels; despite global condemnation and a lawsuit at the Hague. Still,
confoundingly, infuriatingly, the U.S State Department, which has twice
bypassed Congress to facilitate the slaughter and plans to continue, declares,
“Our supprt for Israel remains ironclad.” Oh grievous, bloody, complicit
America. Wrong side of history, again.
And
so we witness the awful, scorched-earth remains of “one of the most beautiful
cities in the world,” of a resilient people who even after years in an open-air
prison sought “hope for a life that is worth living,” but who now mourn, “There
is nothing left here.” Except, of course, suffering and unending loss. “I don’t
think people understand the human tragedy, the scope of it,” laments Dr. Yasser
Khan, a Canadian eye surgeon who just returned from an eight-day humanitarian
mission, organized by WHO and NGO Rahma Worldwide, at European Hospital in Khan
Younis. For the last 18 years, Khan has worked in 40 countries around the
world. Gaza, his first active war zone, yielded the worst devastation ever:
Drones humming, bombs dropping, mass chaos, screams, “the most gruesome
injuries imaginable” – skull fractures, burn injuries, multiple limbs missing,
eyes gouged, “shrapnel faces” – in a deluged hospital full of children shaking,
starving, bleeding, blinded, in shock, everywhere: “That’s what a war on civilians
does.”
European
Hospital once held 250; it now tries to tend over 2,000 critical patients,
along with 20,000 displaced people camped on floors and in halls under
impromptu plastic shelters. Exhausted doctors sleep when they can in on-call
rooms, as did Khan; they have all lost families, friends, homes. They work
amidst incessant blasts; they’ve learned to identify drones, tanks, missiles.
Without beds, most patients lie on the floor, in pain, getting infected, with
respiratory and GI illness rampant: “Everyone has that Gaza cough.” They arrive
stunned, bloody, pulled from rubble, carried from explosions; doctors first
focus on head injuries, missing limbs, other trauma damage. Khan saw many
amputations – 15 on one day – usually without pain medication. Two teenage boys
had massive injuries; doctors did an an above-groin amputation on one; both
died, “but they tried.” A woman caught in a blast was burned, with both arms
fractured; she had both legs amputated. She’d lost her husband and three
children; when she died; Khan thought it “a mercy.”
After
trauma cases, doctors turn to shrapnel faces – red dots with fragments of
steel, wood, concrete from explosions that come too fast to cover the face –
and, often, eyeballs. Skin can heal, notes Khan, but once a foreign object hits
an eye, “it’s basically gone.” About 90% of those caught in blasts get eye
injuries; Khan took out about 10 eyes – 6 in one day – all shattered by
shrapnel. Many he removed from children – 2, 6, 11, 13, 16 years old – left
blind or disfigured. The most difficult for him was a six-year-old girl, the
same age as his daughter, named Aseel: “I saw this tiny soul sitting there…A
piece of concrete shrapnel had lodged in her socket. I took the eye out…Her
whole life has changed. What did she do to deserve that?” He also treated a two-year-old
boy with cerebral palsy and no remaining family; he’d already had an eye
removed, but the wound was infected. Above all, he says, “It’s a war on
children. And Israeli forces know this – that when a bomb’s going to drop,
children are going to die or get maimed or lose arms and legs and parents.”
In
the face of “a dehumanization (of) historic proportions,” Khan says,
Palestinians retain their humanity. At a hospital full of orphaned, injured,
still-buoyant kids, adults who’ve lost everything vow to care for them like
their own. Amidst the blood and chaos, depleted health care workers “treat each
patient as the only patient, and do their best to save them, no matter how bad
it is.” Khan, meanwhile, will never again look at numbers – like 200 dead a day
– without thinking of “each individual who died in front of me.” And he
agonizes over the fate of the many thousands “abandoned by the world, their
whole civilzation destroyed…What will happen when this is over? It is
unacceptable.” We thank Dr. Nozhat Choudry, cousin to Dr. Khan, for reaching
out to share his story. And we thank them both for their grace and heart, for
their unwillingness to follow a mandate to “give life for life, eye for eye.”
“I pray for peace for both Israelis and Palestinians,” Choudry wrote at the end
of his last missive. “God bless you, Nozhat.”
The United States and Israel are Blowing Up the Mideast to
Conceal Their Disastrous Defeat in Gaza
The
United States and Israel have only one reasonable option left, and that is to
end the genocide in Gaza by calling an immediate ceasefire, according to
Iranian Professor Mohammad Marandi.
The
longer this horror goes on, the worse it will get for Washington and its
Israeli client state.
But
here’s their self-defeating dilemma. The U.S. and Israel seem incapable of
making that rational decision because they are desperate to conceal the utter
defeat that the U.S. and Western-backed Israeli regime have already incurred in
Gaza.
The
mounting military losses for Israeli troops in Gaza are correlated with the
increasing missile strikes on Yemen by the United States (and Britain).
This
deranged dynamic is leading to a wider all-out war in the Middle East region,
one where the U.S. and Iran become direct antagonists.
If
the United States and Israel go down that path, and it looks increasingly
inevitable, then they are facing a definitive defeat, contends Prof Marandi.
Iran
and its formidable allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere have
the military capability to deliver a crushing blow.
The
“Axis of Resistance” cannot be defeated militarily. Marandi points out that
Israel has failed to eliminate the Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza after
more than three months of non-stop bombardment with unlimited military and
political support from the United States.
The
horrendous slaughter of civilians – women and children torn apart day after day
– is only exposing the abysmal criminality of the Israeli state and its Western
patrons. It is an irredeemable loss of political and moral credibility in the
eyes of the world, including among the majority of Western citizens.
The
exposure of rank hypocrisy, duplicity, and barbarous criminality is fatal for
the Western powers and their Israeli client.
If
the U.S. and Israel escalate to a wider war in the coming weeks they will be up
against much stronger opponents who will undoubtedly destroy them. Marandi
implies that the firepower seen so far from various resistance groups is only a
fraction of what lies in store by the enemies of the U.S. and Israel.
In
addition to military firepower, there is the catastrophic consequence of global
economic ruination for the United States and its Western allies, who are
already riven with political and economic crises.
An
important distinction, Marandi argues, is that the U.S. is not haplessly being
manipulated by Israel and its Machiavellian leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
He
contends that the U.S. ultimately holds “the leash on its Israeli attack dog”.
The bombing of Yemen and assassinations by the United States across the region
all indicate a deliberate policy of war escalation by Washington.
There
are contradictions, of course, such as the Biden administration reportedly
expressing concern about the risk of a wider war with Iran if U.S. troops get
killed in Iraq or Syria.
But
the U.S. as an imperial power is irrational. It is trying to assert imperial
power by ramping up war, even though war is leading to its historic collapse.
Nevertheless,
Professor Marandi confidently asserts that Iranians are not afraid of a
nuclear-armed U.S. or Israel. “In my lifetime, apartheid South Africa collapsed
and nuclear weapons didn’t save it,” he notes. The same fate is awaiting
Israel, he adds.
He
predicts the Israeli state is facing terminal collapse from its own internal
corruption and incorrigible lawlessness perpetrated over eight decades with
full-on Western complicity. Israel is not a viable independent state, he points
out. It would fall apart without continuous U.S. and European support.
The
United States and Western powers who have tied themselves to the criminality of
the Zionist regime are also doomed by the latest phase of genocide in Gaza.
The
world has watched this genocide live on TV. Israel, the United States, and its
Western partners are pariahs in the eyes of the world. That is the basis for
their ultimate and irreparable defeat.
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