When it comes to antisemitism, politicians in Australia are often quick to jump on the claim without waiting for evidence.

With notable and laudable exceptions like the Greens and independents such as Tasmanian federal MP Andrew Wilkie, it seems any allegation will do when it comes to the opportunity to imply Arab Australians, the Muslim community and Palestinian supporters are trying to destroy the lives of the Jewish community.

A case in point. The discovery in January this year of a caravan found in Dural, New South Wales, filled with explosives and a note that referenced the Great Synagogue in Sydney led to a frenzy of clearly uninformed and dangerous rhetoric from politicians and the media about an imminent terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.

• READ MORE: A Sydney caravan laden with explosives was a ‘fake terrorism plot’. Here’s what we know
• Other terror plot reports

It was nothing of the sort as we now know with the revelation by police that this was a “fabricated terrorist plot”.

As the ABC reported on March 10: “Police have said an explosives-laden caravan discovered in January at Dural in Sydney’s north-west was a ‘fake terrorism plot’ with ties to organised crime”, and that “the Australian Federal Police said they were confident this was a ‘fabricated terrorist plot’,” adding the belief was held “very early on after the caravan was located”.

One would have thought the political and media class would know that it is critical in a society supposedly underpinned by the rule of law that police be allowed to get on with the job of investigating allegations without comment.

Particularly so in the hot-house atmosphere that exists in this nation today.

Opportunistic Dutton
But not the ever opportunistic and divisive federal opposition leader Peter Dutton.

After the Daily Telegraph reported the Dural caravan story on January 29,  Dutton was quick to say that this “was potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history”. To his credit, Prime Anthony Albanese said in response he does not “talk about operational matters for an ongoing investigation”.

Dutton’s language was clearly designed to whip up fear and hysteria among the Jewish community and to demonise Palestinian supporters.

He was not Robinson Crusoe sadly. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told the media on January 29 that the Dural caravan discovery had the potential to have led to a “mass casualty event”.

The Zionist Federation of Australia, an organisation that is an unwavering supporter of Israel despite the horror that nation has inflicted on Gaza, was even more overblown in its claims.

It issued a statement that claimed: “This is undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date. The plot, if executed, would likely have resulted in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil.”

Note the word “undoubtedly”.

Uncritical Israeli claims
Then there was another uncritical Israel barracker, Sky News’ Sharri Markson, who claimed; “To think perpetrators would have potentially targeted a museum commemorating the Holocaust — a time when six million Jews were killed — is truly horrifying.”

And naturally, Jilian Segal, the highly partisan so-called “Antisemitism Envoy” said the discovery of the caravan was a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.

In short, the response to the Dural caravan incident was simply an exercise in jumping on the antisemitism issue without any regard to the consequences for our community, including the fear it spread among Jewish Australians and the further demonising of the Arab Australian community.

No circumspection. No leadership. No insistence that the matter had not been investigated fully.

As the only Jewish organisation that represents humanity, the Jewish Council of Australia, said in a statement from its director Sarah Schwartz on March 10 the “statement from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] should prompt reflection from every politician, journalist and community leader who has sought to manipulate and weaponise fears within the Jewish community.

‘Irresponsible and dangerous’
“The attempt to link these events to the support of Palestinians — whether at protests, universities, conferences or writers’ festivals — has been irresponsible and dangerous.” Truth in spades.

And ask yourself this question. Let’s say the Dural caravan contained notes about mosques and Arab Australian community centres. Would the media, politicians and others have whipped up the same level of hysteria and divisive rhetoric?

The answer is no.

One assumes Dutton, Segal, the Zionist Federation and others who frothed at the mouth in January will now offer a collective mea culpa. Sadly, they won’t because there will be no demands to do so.

The damage to our legal system has been done because political opportunism and milking antisemitism for political ends comes first for those who should know better.

Greg Barns SC is national criminal justice spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations social policy journal and is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The exercise, conducted in international waters by a cruiser, frigate and replenishment ship, involved what is said to have been poor notice given to Australian authorities on February 21. But the matter has rapidly burgeoned into something else: that what the Chinese task fleet did was mischievously remarkable, exceptional and snooty to convention and protocols. It is on that score that incontinent demagogy has taken hold.

Media outlets have done little to soften the barbs. A report by ABC News, for instance, notes that Airservices Australia was “only aware of the exercises 40 minutes after China’s navy opened a ‘window’ for live-fire exercises from 9.30am.” The first pickup of the exercises came from a Virgin Australia pilot, who had flown within 250 nautical miles of the operation zone and warned of the drills. Airservices Australia was immediately contacted, with the deputy CEO of the agency, Peter Curran, bemused about whether “it was a potential hoax or real.”

Defence Chief Admiral David Johnston told Senate estimates that he would have preferred more notice for the exercises – 24-48 hours was desirable – but it was clear that Coalition Senator and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson wanted more. Paterson had thought it “remarkable that Australia was relying on civilian aircraft for early warning about military exercises by a formidable foreign task group in our region.” To a certain extent, the needlessly irate minister got what he wanted, with the badgered Admiral conceding that the Chinese navy’s conduct had been “irresponsible” and “disruptive”.

Wu Qian, spokesperson for the China National Ministry for Defence, offered a different reading: “During the period, China organised live-fire training of naval guns toward the sea on the basis of repeatedly issuing prior safety notices”. Its actions were “in full compliance with international law and international practice, with no impact on aviation flight safety”. That said, 49 flights were diverted on February 21.

Much was also made about what were the constituent elements of the fleet. As if it mattered one jot, the Defence Force chief was pressed on whether a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine had made up the task force. “I don’t know whether there is a submarine with them, it is possible, task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines but not always,” came the reply. “I can’t be definitive whether that’s the case.”

The carnival of fear was very much in town, with opposition politicians keen to blow air into the balloon of the China threat across the press circuit. The shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie warned listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB of “the biggest peacetime military buildup since 1945”, Beijing’s projection of power with its blue-water navy, the conduct of two live-fire exercises and the Chinese taskforce operating within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Tasmania. Apparently, all of this showed the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to be “weak” for daring to accept that the conduct complained of was legal under international law. “Now that may be technically right, but that misses the deeper subtext, and that is China is now in our backyard, and they’ve demonstrated that we don’t have the will to insist on our national interest and mutual respect.”

There are few voices of sensible restraint in Australia’s arid landscape of strategic thinking, but one could be found. Former principal warfare officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Jennifer Parker, commendably remarked that this hardly warranted the title of “a crisis”. To regard it as such “with over-the-top indignation diminishes our capacity to tackle real crises as the region deteriorates.” Australia might, at the very least, consider modernising a surface fleet that was “the smallest and oldest we’ve had since 1950.”

Allegations that Beijing should not be operating in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, let alone conduct live-fire exercises in international waters, served to give it “a propaganda win to challenge our necessary deployments to North-East Asia and the South China Sea – routes that carry two-thirds of our maritime trade.”

The cockeyed priorities of the Australian defence establishment lie elsewhere: fantasy, second hand US nuclear-powered submarines that may, or may never make their way to Australia; mushy hopes of a jointly designed nuclear powered submarine specific to the AUKUS pact that risks sinking off the design sheet; and the subordination of Australian land, naval and spatial assets to the United States imperium.

Such is the standard of political debate that something as unremarkable as this latest sea incident has become a throbbing issue that supposedly shows the Albanese government as insufficiently belligerent. Yet there was no issue arising, other than a statement of presence by China’s growing navy, something it was perfectly entitled to do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Photograph Source: A.Savin – Free Art License

A little while back, I challenged a group of graduate students to find one article in the New York Times written in the last five years that had anything favorable to say about Russia. Their extensive research turned up one article published in 2021 that described the beneficial effects of global warming on cold countries. The piece was entitled, “How Russia Cashes In On Climate Change.” Other than that, the newspaper’s sizeable cadre of Russia specialists reported virtually nothing about Europe’s most populous nation other than stories picturing Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation as scheming plotters, corrupt and incompetent rulers, meddlers in other nations’ elections, brutal oppressors of their own people, and aggressive expansionists threatening everyone else’s independence and freedom.

One does not have to be an admirer of Mr. Putin or his right-wing regime to consider this coverage so unbalanced and Russophobic as to amount to a form of warmongering.  Consider a recent article by David Sanger and Steven Erlanger headlined “Gravity of Putin Threats is Dawning on Europe.” It is worth examining how this sort of journalism operates.

The story begins (and in many ways ends) by stating an assumption about Russia’s evil motives as a fact. According to the reporters, Putin “had a message” for the Western leaders gathered for a conference in Munich.  The message: “Nothing they’ve done so far – sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment – would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.”

There is no evidence cited for this “message” because it doesn’t exist, except as a metaphor. The authors’ assumption is that since Putin is a congenital aggressor, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and attempt to assert control over the Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are very likely a prelude to further aggression against other European states.  The source cited for this conclusion is NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who “referred repeatedly to recent intelligence conclusions that in three to five years Mr. Putin might attempt to test NATO’s credibility by attacking one of the countries on Russia’s borders, most probably a small Baltic nation.”

If this sentence does not leave you scratching your head, you’re not paying attention. What sort of “intelligence conclusions” project a possible attack by a great power in “three to five years”?  How reliable is this sort of prediction? Why would Russia mount such an attack on a NATO member – simply to “test NATO’s credibility”?  Wouldn’t they understand that to attack a “small Baltic nation” would activate the entire alliance?  And why, oh why, would the Times reporters accept and quote this fanciful speculation without asking Jens Stoltenberg, a well- known hawk and advocate of NATO expansion, to prove his case?

In fact, there is no evidence that the Russians are planning any such action, nor is there any reason for them to do so. Putin moved against Ukraine only after its elected pro-Russian government was overthrown in 2014 in a Western-backed revolt, the U.S. and NATO announced their intention to incorporate the nation into NATO, a civil war erupted in the Russian-speaking eastern provinces, and the United States declared Russia’s proposal to negotiate over perceived threats to its vital security interests a “non-starter.” Having lost more than 45,000 troops in the Ukraine war, the idea that Russian leaders would think of attacking an existing NATO member like Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland, thereby declaring war on all its other members including the U.S., is senseless.

But assumptions, however senseless, require their authors to produce some sort of evidence if they want to be considered minimally credible. Messrs. Sanger and Erlander therefore offer three pieces of information purporting to be evidentiary. First, they note that “Russia made its first major gain in Ukraine in nearly a year, taking the ruined city of Avdiivka, at huge human cost to both sides.” Next, they remark that “Aleksei A. Navalny’s suspicious death in a remote Arctic prison made ever clearer that Mr. Putin will tolerate no dissent as elections approach.” Finally, they refer to the U.S. discovery that “Mr. Putin may be planning to place a nuclear weapon in space” – an anti-satellite weapon that could “wipe out the connective tissues of global communications.”

Whew!  Are these Russians bad guys, or what? But notice how the allegations, even if true, fail to produce even a hint of aggressive intentions toward Europe.

The Russians are winning the war in Ukraine. Yes, this has been the case ever since the much-ballyhooed Ukrainian “counter-offensive” of summer 2023 failed to achieve its objectives. But do Russia’s gains in the Donbass region imply that they will attack Kyiv itself or invade some other nation? Clearly not. The last thing that Putin and his colleagues want is another major war. While the Biden regime blames Congress and an alleged shortage of ammunition for the fall of Avdiivka – an exercise in historical fiction – Times reporters continue to promote the paranoic notion that Putin is an incurable megalomaniac who simply can’t stop aggressing.  All this noise is intended to distract attention from the need for a negotiated settlement that recognizes Ukraine’s independence and right to join the EU, and the eastern provinces’ independence and right to join the Russian Federation.

Putin is responsible for Alex Navalny’s death. Again, this is true but irrelevant to the subject at hand. Whether or not Russian agents had anything to do with Navalny’s poisoning in 2020, the regime did try him on trumped up charges and did imprison him in a colony on the Arctic Circle, where he died at the age of 47. This was a tragedy but not a great surprise. With the brief exception of the Gorbachev regime (1985-1991), Russian rulers from the czars onward have often persecuted domestic dissenters, and Putin’s government is no exception. But this does not constitute a threat to Europe unless one is a neo-con ideologue trying to construct a neo-Cold War struggle between “democratic” and “authoritarian” blocs.

Please spare us a return to the political theology of Whitaker Chambers and the Dulles brothers! The idea that Putin is some sort of Hitlerian or Napoleonic adventurer with a messiah complex may seem convincing to some U.S. and NATO neo-cons, but most sensible people understand that it is a bias-ridden fantasy.

Russia is planning to put a nuclear anti-satellite weapon into space. Could be . . . but reporters from the Times and other journals manage to broadcast this charge by U.S. National Security chief John Kirby without either asking for proof or inquiring why Russian leaders would consider doing such a thing. As to proof, the alleged evidence for the alleged plan is, of course, “classified.” As to motive, could it be that the U.S. is using some of its more than 300 military satellites to convey intelligence on Russian troop movements to the Ukrainian military, which then uses it to kill Russian combatants? But no discussion of possible motives is to be found in these accounts. Nor is such discussion needed if one accepts the idea that Putin aggresses because he is an aggressor. After all, it makes little sense to inquire into the Devil’s motives for being devilish.

To summarize: the “evidence” for bad intentions toward Europe on the Russians’ part boils down to an assumption of their leader’s evil nature. Particularly notable is the absence of any other connective tissue binding together the three items that are said to create the Russian threat. The victory at Avdiivika, the death of Navalny, and the alleged anti-satellite weapon plan are unrelated pieces of information or speculation, but rattling them off in sequence (in a tone of grave concern) is intended to send the message that “the Russkies are coming! Circle the wagons!”

All of which makes one wonder what the New York Times considers “responsible journalism.” The accumulation of unrelated bits of information presented as evidence of an unprovable motivation is one of the oldest propaganda tricks on the books. Isn’t it time that journalists learned to be independent reporters and news interpreters rather than slavish mouthpieces for pro-war politicians and corporations? I have focused here on reporters for the Times, but television and radio journalists are, if anything, less inclined to think critically about such allegations than their print colleagues. Whether the topic is Putin’s Russia, China, or Iran, the unchallenged, unproved assumption is always that some demonically aggressive adversary is out to eat our lunch.

The problem with this approach, it should be clear, is not just that it creates an exaggerated sense of threat, but also that this produces an exaggerated pseudo-defensive response. Having failed to absorb Ukraine, as NATO threatened to do as early as 2008, that organization’s members are now arming to the teeth to “deter” a nonexistent Russian threat to Europe. Could this rearmament, combined with a refusal to negotiate security issues, be considered a serious threat by Russia? Certainly!  And so, the initial exaggeration of threat can end by producing a real threat and, quite possibly, a real war.

At times like this, one can only hope that a few sane leaders supported by a public tired of inflammatory rhetoric and needless killing will call a halt to jingoist assumptions of our own side’s essential innocence and the other side’s essential aggressivity. That these assumptions generate billions of dollars in profits for military-industrial corporations does not make them easy to extirpate. Even so, we can demand that journalists who ought to know better stop peddling these lies and exaggerations – and a growing number of clear-eyed citizens will say, “Amen!”

The post More Anti-Russian Hysteria From the New York Times appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard E. Rubenstein.

Twenty years after the United States under the administration of George W. Bush invaded Iraq, it is undeniable that the war was one of the biggest blunders in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The war was entirely one of choice; Iraq was not posing any significant threat to the United States and U.S. interests. The costs were huge. Estimates by academic experts of the war’s long-term monetary cost to the United States —covering everything from bullets to medical care for disabled veterans — are on the order of two to three trillion dollars.

The human costs have included more than 4,400 U.S. military personnel killed and another 32,000 wounded, many of them grievously. The human costs to innocent Iraqis were much higher, including an estimated 275,000-306,000 civilians killed as a direct result of war-related violence. These were some of the same Iraqis whose “liberation” was supposed to be an objective of the war. The Iraqis who survived did get rid of one dictator but were left with a devastated infrastructure and an unstable country wracked by civil war and insurgency.

Supposedly part of a “war on terror,” the U.S. war in Iraq increased international terrorism. The group known as Islamic State, which later seized control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria, began under a different name as a direct response to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and the sectarian strife that the war spawned. Sectarian conflict has been a large part of the instability that the U.S. invasion stimulated and that spread beyond Iraq. Among other regional repercussions was an increase in Iranian influence, with Tehran achieving a position in Iraq it never had while Saddam Hussein was in power.

It is easy to conclude that this war never should have been fought. The more useful rumination now, two decades later, is about the danger of a recurrence of the sorts of mistakes that led to this historic blunder. That danger, along several dimensions, is real.

Policy Without Process

Incredible as it may seem given the magnitude and consequences of the Iraq War, the decision to launch it was not preceded by any policy process. There certainly were discussions within the administration about selling the war, and some about implementing it, but there never was any National Security Council meeting, policy options paper, or anything else in the way of a policy process that addressed whether starting this war was a good idea. Hence there was no mechanism for bringing into a decision-making process all the considerations and analysis, including what the intelligence community provided, that assessed the invasion’s likely messy aftermath and constituted good reason to conclude that the invasion was a bad idea.

The fact that the Bush administration, which in other respects seemed to be at least as orderly as other administrations and had intelligent people occupying key positions, could launch a major offensive war in such a casual, process-free manner demonstrates how easily a damaging breakdown of order can occur. With other administrations, the danger of breakdowns of process and order leading to disastrous policies may be even greater. Not long ago, the nation spent four years under Donald Trump. Although “adults in the room” reportedly restrained some of Trump’s more destructive impulses, the picture of the Trump White House that has leaked out is predominantly one of chaos.

Congressional Inattention

With the Iraq War, the lack of a process to carefully examine the advisability of the invasion extended beyond the executive branch to the legislative branch. Congress did vote on a resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, but the debate preceding that vote was cursory and included no committee hearings. Longtime West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd lamented this congressional passivity, observing, “You can hear a pin drop. There is no debate. There is no discussion. There is no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.”

The intelligence community had prepared at the request of Congress an estimate on the then-salient issue of possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but hardly any members of Congress bothered to look at it. One of the few who did, Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, concluded from his reading of the estimate that the administration’s case regarding Iraqi weapons was weak. He was one of only 23 senators to vote against the war resolution.

Partisan politics played a role in Congress’s failure to seriously consider issues that should have been considered regarding the prospective war in Iraq. Most Democrats wanted to get past the matter quickly to return to domestic issues on which they felt more politically comfortable. Democrats who hoped to run for president did not want to be seen blocking an operation that evoked memories of their opposition to the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a popular military victory, 12 years earlier. For most Republicans, party loyalty trumped any doubts they had about the administration’s case for war. “If I’d gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I probably would have said, ‘Ah, bullshit,’” then-House Republican leader Richard Armey later recalled as his thinking after receiving a briefing from Vice President Richard Cheney that had left him unimpressed. “You don’t do that to your own people.”

Fast forward to the Congress of today, and there is scant ground for hope that in any comparable situation, its performance would be any better. While a Senate committee recently took a first step toward repealing the war resolution on Iraq that Congress rushed through 20 years earlier, that says little or nothing about what the congressional response would be about a different prospective war against a different enemy. Indeed, partisanship on Capitol Hill is as intense and all-consuming as ever. Any input from the intelligence community will not make an impression on at least one of the two parties, which, having disliked some politically inconvenient truths the community has voiced on other matters, has dedicated itself to discrediting the nation’s intelligence and security services rather than listening to them.

Persuading the Public

The selling of the Iraq War to the American public was an exploitation of mass gullibility. That feat was accomplished not so much through lies as through a rhetorical drumbeat that cultivated certain misperceptions among Americans. By August 2002, after several months of a pro-war campaign in which the administration’s rhetoric had repeatedly mentioned “Iraq,” “9/11,” and “al-Qaida” in the same breath, opinion polls showed a majority of Americans mistakenly believing that Saddam Hussein had been “personally involved” in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Current circumstances give little or no hope that the public response would be much different to the selling of some future untoward war. If anything, the nation has sunk even deeper into a post-truth era, with lies by the tens of thousands at the presidential level having been a major part of recent American political history. But again, it does not take outright lies to induce public misperceptions that could provide the necessary support for a misbegotten war.

An example is public misperception about nuclear activities in the Middle East and especially Iran — an obviously close counterpart to the issue 20 years ago about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Influenced by many expressions of concern about Iran’s nuclear program, and exacerbated by some sloppy journalism and commentary that sometimes refers to an Iranian “nuclear weapons program,” a 2021 poll found that 61 percent of Americans mistakenly believe that Iran has nuclear weapons — which, according to the most authoritative publicly expressed U.S. judgments, Iran does not have, nor is even currently trying to build. In the same poll, barely half of respondents said that Israel has nuclear weapons — which observers of the region universally agree Israel does have, and has had them for decades.

Thus, if the United States were to go to war against Iran on an anti-nuclear theme — or if Israel, nudged by careless U.S. statements, were to start such a war — many Americans would have as mistaken a view of the relevant circumstances as the mistaken views 20 years ago about Iraqi WMD. Backers of such military action against Iran undoubtedly would sell the war as an effort to keep nuclear weapons out of the Middle East, and many Americans would believe that sales pitch, even though that is not at all what would be happening. And just as a war in Iraq that supposedly was part of a war on terror ended up stimulating increased international terrorism, an attack on Iran that does not have nuclear weapons would likely provoke Iranian leaders to decide to build such weapons after all.

The selling of the Iraq War involved not just mass gullibility but also mass hysteria. The public outrage over the 9/11 terrorist attack provided the political atmosphere for neoconservatives to finally realize their dream of regime change in Iraq. The suddenly militant American public was in a mood to strike at foreign adversaries, even ones, like Iraq, whose supposed connection to the attack Americans had just suffered was fictional. The nationwide anger provided public support for aggressive actions that in more sober times would fail to gain such support.

It could happen again. Another big terrorist attack by foreign perpetrators on American soil is the most obvious, but not the only type of event that could lead to such a response. A less consequential but still suggestive recent episode concerns the Chinese spy balloon that overflew U.S. territory in February. Expressions of outrage and alarm on Capitol Hill and elsewhere pressured the Biden administration to respond not just with cancellation of diplomatic meetings but also with military force. It did so by using expensive air-to-air missiles three times to shoot down what probably were hobby balloons that had nothing to do with China.

Limits and Costs of Military Force

The Iraq War demonstrated hugely misplaced faith in what military force can accomplish. The neoconservative promoters of the war were trying to insert democracy into a foreign land through the barrel of a gun. As the ensuing violent sectarian strife in Iraq underscored, democracy does not work that way. To take root, democracy relies on the cultivation and practice of certain elements of political culture over years if not decades. And yet, dreams of salutary regime change continue to motivate hawkish voices calling for new offensive wars, most conspicuously regarding Iran.

Related to the absence of a policy process to consider the pros and cons of launching a war against Iraq was a failure by the war-makers to consider, fully and carefully, the follow-on consequences of invading and occupying that country, beyond toppling Saddam’s regime and what they assumed would be the smooth erection of a new and friendly regime. The resentment of a populace under foreign military occupation, with some of that resentment fueling insurgency, is historically more the rule than the exception. When the Bush administration reached a troop withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi regime in 2008, it was against a backdrop of increasingly forceful Iraqi demonstrations of anger over the humiliation and affront to sovereignty that the U.S. occupation represented. In any future war in which the United States struck offensively at a regime that it did not topple — as would likely be the case in an attack on Iran — the substantial follow-on costs would include forceful retaliation by that regime, at times and places of its choosing.

The Iraq War illustrated how resort to military force, regardless of what was the original political objective, makes security of the military force itself an objective and a source of vulnerability. In this regard, there is a direct line between the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago and much more recent tensions, punctuated by violent actions, between the United States and Iran. Iranian assistance to anti-occupation Iraqi insurgents — an insurgency that never would have occurred if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq — became a rationale for the Trump administration’s assassination of Quds Force commander Qassim Suleimani in 2020. Iranian retaliation for the assassination included missile strikes against bases in Iraq where U.S. troops, notwithstanding that 2008 withdrawal agreement, continue to be stationed.

Damage to U.S. Credibility and Influence

The failure of the makers of the Iraq War to consider broader follow-on consequences includes not only insurgency and retaliation but also effects of the war on the global standing of the United States and its ability to influence other states on other issues. Relevant to this failure is Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and the U.S. effort to sustain an international coalition in opposition. In defending his operation against U.S. criticism, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been quick to mention the U.S. invasion of Iraq and to accuse Washington of hypocrisy. To American ears, this rhetorical line is annoying whataboutism, but Putin has a point. What the United States did to Iraq in 2003 was just as much a war of aggression as what Russia did to Ukraine in 2022.

No amount of pointing out differences in objectives, circumstances, and conduct of these two conflicts can erase that fact. Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine, begun when nobody was attacking Russia, cannot be justified by any of the hypotheticals he raises about how Ukraine’s dealings with the West could somehow threaten Russia’s security in the future. But the selling of the Iraq War, begun when Iraq was not attacking any U.S. interests, also was based on hypotheticals. The main theme of President Bush’s sales pitch was that Saddam Hussein “could” give WMD to terrorists or “could” do something else scary.

Even more broadly, the failure to consider consequences for U.S. credibility and influence extends to the declared U.S. determination to uphold a “rules-based international order.” U.S. officials frequently invoke this phrase when criticizing or making demands of China. In no way can the offensive war against Iraq be seen as consistent with respect for a rules-based international order, or else the rules involved are strange rules. The Chinese, as well as others, would be justified in accusing the United States of hypocrisy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Paul Pillar.

The post Hysteria and the Solomon Islands-China Security Pact appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Despite an election campaign warming up, Senator Zed Seselja found time to tell Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.  The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.  He went on to “respectfully” urge the Solomon Islands to reject the security pact with China and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”

Having not convinced Honiara to change course, a range of reactions are being registered.  David Llewellyn-Smith, former owner of the Asia Pacific foreign affairs journal The Diplomat, took leave of his senses by suggesting that a Chinese naval base in the Solomons would see “the effective end of our sovereignty and democracy”.  In a spray of hysteria, he suggested that this was “Australia’s Cuban missile crisis”.

The Labor opposition, desperate to win office on May 21, are calling this one of the greatest intelligence failures since the Second World War, which perhaps shows their somewhat tenuous command of history.  Their leader, Anthony Albanese, seeking some safe mooring in a campaign that has lacked lustre, was particularly strident.  It was a chance to show that Labor was not shaky or wobbly on national security.  “The security agreement between China and the Solomons is a massive failure of our foreign policy,” stated the opposition leader as he campaigned in Bomaderry in southern New South Wales.  “We are closer here today to the Solomon Islands than we are to Perth.  That shows how strategic they are to Australia.”

This belligerent, simple note might have been stronger were it not for the fact that his deputy, Richard Marles, had previously made the unpopular suggestion that the Pacific islands were somehow sovereign entities who needed to be treated as such while China, in providing development assistance to them, should be “welcome” in offering it.  The goons of the Rupert Murdoch roundtable capitalised, hoping to find a Chinese Red under Marles’s bed.

Scratching for electoral gains, Labor thought that it was inappropriate to have sent the junior minister, as if that would have made much of a difference. Foreign Minister Marise Payne, it was said, should have been flown in to bully those misguided savages into submission.

In Australia, the message being fanned is that the deputy – in this case, Canberra – failed in the task, leaving it to the United States to come in and hold up what seemed like a sinking ship of strategy.  “The United States very much relies upon Australia and sees Australia as playing that key role in the Indo-Pacific,” lamented Albanese.  “Australia and Scott Morrison have gone missing.”

The Morrison government poured water on such criticism by suggesting a fair share of oriental deviousness at play.  Not only had the likes of Defence Minister Peter Dutton been advised by the intelligence fraternity to keep matters tame in terms of attacking the security pact; the agreement was the product of bribery.  On radio, Dutton responded to a question from 3AW host Neil Mitchell about the suggestion.  “You asked the question about bribery and corruption – we don’t pay off, we don’t bribe people, and the Chinese certainly do.”

This clean linen view of Australian conduct is fabulously ignorant, ignoring such inglorious chapters as the oil-for-food scandal which saw the Australian Wheat Board pay $300 million in kickbacks between 1999 and 2004 to the Iraq regime via Alia, a Jordanian trucking company.  These bribing arrangements, which breached UN Security Council sanctions imposed after Baghdad’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, were unmasked in 2005.

With Australia failing to change minds, the paladins of the US imperium prepared to badger and bore Honiara.  On the list: President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink; and National Security Affairs Indo-Pacific chief Kurt Campbell.  It seemed like an absurd gathering of heft for a small Pacific Island state.

The theme was unmistakable.  A bullying tone was struck in a message from National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, who seemed to forget the Solomons was not some ramshackle protectorate of the Five Eyes.  Officials from the US, Japan, New Zealand and Australia had “shared concerns about [the] proposed security framework between the Solomon Islands and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

At the Washington Post, Henry Olsen was trying to speak home truths about an empire facing rust and decline.  The unipolar world that came into being after the demise of the Soviet Union had ended.  “Our adversaries can fight back, and they are increasingly using every means at their disposal to push back against American influence.”

He went on to put focus upon the thin stretch of territory in the Pacific that has exercised so many in Washington and Canberra.  “Lose too many places such as the Solomon Islands, and the threat will start to get uncomfortably close to home.”  It was more prudent “to spend big and push outward now rather than to be boxed into a corner later.”  In other words, more bribery, the very thing tut-tutted by Dutton, was needed.

As for the Solomon Islands itself, divided, fragmented and vulnerable to internal dissent and disagreement, Sogavare is unrepentant.  “When a helpless mouse is cornered by vicious cats it will do anything to survive.”  He has already told his country’s parliament that there is no intention “to ask China to build a military base in Solomon Islands.”  He felt “insulted” by such suggestions and felt that there was only one side to pick: “our national security interest.”

His confidant and former prime minister Danny Philip also reminded critics barking about the lack of transparency over the Sino-Solomon Islands deal that they should know better.  “People in Australia know very little about Pine Gap in the middle of the desert, the military base of the United States.”  There were “agreements that open up all major ports in Australia that are not being seen by all the citizens of that country.”

Unfortunately for the government in Honiara, thoughts of invasion and pre-emptive action on the part of Australia, possibly with aid from the United States, cannot be ruled out.  Instead of being parked in an asylum of inoffensive obscurity, pundits such as Llewellyn-Smith are encouraging invasion and conquest.  Australia, he advocates in a refreshing burst of honest blood-filled jingoism, “should invade and capture Guadalcanal such that we engineer regime change in Honiara.”

Sovereignty for the Pacific was always a qualified concept for those exercising true naval power, and US-Australian conduct in recent weeks has made an utter nonsense of it.  At least some cavalier types are willing to own up to it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post House Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi tours Chinatown to debunk racial hysteria surrounding coronavirus – February 24, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Les Ouchida was born an American just outside California’s capital city, but his citizenship mattered little after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the 5-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942 and imprisoned far away in Arkansas.

They were among 120,000 Japanese Americans held at 10 internment camps during World War II, their only fault being “we had the wrong last names and wrong faces,” said Ouchida, now 82 and living a short drive from where he grew up and was taken as a boy due to fear that Japanese Americans would side with Japan in the war.

On Thursday, California’s Legislature is expected to approve a resolution offering an apology to Ouchida and other internment victims for the state’s role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066 establishing the camps was signed on Feb. 19, 1942, and 2/19 now is marked by Japanese Americans as a Day of Remembrance.

Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one of the roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California, the largest population of any state. The Democrat who represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los Angeles introduced the resolution.

“We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by example,” he said. “Unfortunately, in this case, California led the racist anti-Japanese American movement.”

A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the detentions were a result of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Five years later, the U.S. government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.

The money didn’t come close to replacing what was lost. Ouchida says his father owned a profitable delivery business with 20 trucks. He never fully recovered from losing his business and died early.

The California resolution doesn’t come with any compensation. It targets the actions of the California Legislature at the time for supporting the internments. Two camps were located in the state — Manzanar on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in central California and Tule Lake near the Oregon state line, the largest of all the camps.

“I want the California Legislature to officially acknowledge and apologize while these camp survivors are still alive,” Muratsuchi said.

He said anti-Japanese sentiment began in California as early as 1913, when the state passed the California Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese farmers who some in California’s massive agricultural industry perceived as a threat. Seven years later the state barred anyone with Japanese ancestry from buying farmland.

The internment of Ouchida, his older brother and parents began in Fresno, California. Three months later they were sent to Jerome, Arkansas, where they stayed for most of the war.

Given their young ages at the time, many living victims such as Ouchida don’t remember much of life in the camps. But he does recall straw-filled mattresses and little privacy.

Communal bathrooms had rows of toilets with no barriers between users. “They put a bag over their heads when they went to the bathroom” for privacy, said Ouchida, who teaches about the internments at the California Museum in Sacramento.

Before the last camp was closed in 1946, Ouchida’s family was shipped to a facility in Arizona. When the family was freed, they took a Greyhound bus back to California. When it reached a stop sign near their community outside Sacramento, “I still remember the ladies on the bus started crying,” Ouchida said. “Because they were home.”

The resolution, co-introduced by California Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido, makes a passing reference to “recent national events” and says they serve as a reminder “to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

Muratsuchi said the inspiration for that passage were migrant children held in U.S. government custody over the past year.

Ouchida said Japanese families like his always considered themselves loyal citizens before and after the internments. He holds no animosity toward the U.S. or California governments, choosing to focus on positives outgrowths like the permanent exhibit at the California Museum that provides an unvarnished view of the internments.

“Even if it took time, we have the goodness to still apologize,” he said.