War and Peace

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

JB

War and Peace