Meanwhile...

 

Meanwhile in Lebanon

 It's getting much worse.

That's something OUR leaders won't say.

Aside from economic power, we now appear to be ceding moral authority to China, of all places.

Peace for Gaza but not for Lebanon

 And by "peace" I mean a possible pause in attacks.*

*UPDATE 04:27 pm:

It's not wrong

 Although, I think "uncle" would be more appropriate.

When will they ever learn?

You can click the letter to get a larger image.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Israel policy fodder for Trump

Watch for this to appear in Trump ads and speeches.

Jad Haidar is a US Marine Corps veteran who enlisted after 9/11. He was awarded a Purple Heart after he was twice hit by an IED, suffering severe concussions and a traumatic brain injury, in Iraq. For years, he’s required daily assistance due to his debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s now stranded in Lebanon, unsure of if he and his family will get out.

Haidar is among 7,000 Americans who have sought information from the US about leaving Lebanon amid Israel’s strikes across the country.

[...]

The US Embassy in Beirut on Sept. 27 said it was not evacuating US citizens and suggested those looking to leave the country book and pay for a commercial flight. On Wednesday, the State Department said it organized a flight from Beirut to Istanbul that carried around 100 Americans and their family members. Haidar was not on that flight, but he says he was told by State Department officials they were trying to get him on a plane to Istanbul on Thursday. He would be on his own once there. They have yet to provide more details, and regardless, Haidar says he feels “abandoned” and disappointed in how he’s been treated by his own government.

[...]

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents Haidar, in an Instagram video, called it a “disgrace” that her team has had “to call and beg” the State Department to help get Haidar and more than 140 people in her district out of Lebanon. “We need to do better. We knew this was going to happen. We had no plans to get Americans out.”

  Zeteo

And would Trump suddenly be on Tlaib's side?  If it wins him votes, he would.  He just wouldn't mention the part about Tlaib.  Only that the Biden administration is stranding American Marines and their families.

And, this...

And I don't doubt it for a second.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rubbing America's face in it

Israel-Lebanon in a nutshell

I'll say it again: Never argue with Mehdi Hasan. He knows what he's talking about.  

Pathetic Blinken "answer"

As Mehdi Hassan might say: Don't stop asking until he answers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08:55 am:

UPDATE 09/27/2024:

Meanwhile in Lebanon

And, it's not just pagers...

UPDATE 09/20/2024:

Israeli war crimes continue unabated

Unfit and dangerous

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Any bets?

The Trump administration is withholding more than $100 million in U.S. military assistance to Lebanon that has been approved by Congress and is favored by his national security team, an assertion of executive control of foreign aid that is similar to the delay in support for Ukraine at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

The hold came up in impeachment testimony by David Hale, the No. 3 official in the State Department, according to the transcript of the closed-door hearing released this week. He described growing consternation among diplomats as the administration would neither release the aid nor provide an explanation for the hold.

“People started asking: What's the problem?” Hale told the impeachment investigators.

As with the Ukraine assistance, the Office of Management and Budget has not explained the reason for the delay. However, unlike Ukraine, there is no suggestion that President Donald Trump is seeking “a favor” from Lebanon to release it, according to five officials familiar with the matter. The White House and OMB have declined to comment on the matter.

  NBC

OK, I'll suggest it: he's seeking "a favor."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Update on protests in Chile and Lebanon

Tens of thousands of protesters in Lebanon have attempted to form a human chain running across the entire country to symbolise newfound national unity.

Demonstrators planned to join hands from Tripoli to Tyre, a 170km (105-mile) chain running through the capital, Beirut, as part of an unprecedented cross-sectarian mobilisation.

Tension has mounted in recent days between security forces and protesters, who have blocked roads and brought the country to a standstill to press their demands for a complete overhaul of the political system.

  Guardian

Maybe we need to take their lead.

The news out of Chile is not good.

[Christopher] Madrid, a 25-year-old student, was shot last Monday by Chilean army troops as he marched in a street protest near the Catholic University in central Santiago.

[...]

“The soldier was about 40m away. He looked at me and fired,” said [...] Madrid, pointing to the patch above his right eye. “I swung away and the bullet grazed [my forehead] and came out, left a scar of four or five centimetres.”

[...]

“There was a journalism student who was beaten so badly she could not talk, or remember her name. Her whole body was bruised after being kicked and clubbed,” said Felipe Hernández, a law student. “We had a woman yesterday with a broken jaw – the soldiers broke it with a rifle butt.”

[...]

“Lots of people were going down with head wounds,” explained Madrid as he waited impatiently in Posta, a dilapidated health clinic where dozens of gunshot victims were being treated, including a close friend, shot three times in the head and once in the leg with “balines” – marble-sized bullets that are rarely fatal but can puncture a lung or take out an eye.

Shots in the head can be fatal, no matter what the projectile.

Meanwhile, in the streets the shootings continue unabated. “So many protesters are being shot in the eye,” a healthcare worker told the Chilean investigative news site CIPER. At the eye trauma unit of Posta, where protesters with eye injuries are taken, “the situation is atrocious,” she said. “Many patients have their eyes shattered. We have never had so many ruptured eyes at once. The rubber bullets and the buckshot don’t kill, but they pierce the eye. All the patients have a poor chance of regaining vision. Many eyes have been lost.”

[...]

The lack of basic medical treatment for the largely working-class victims of gunshot wounds was notable inside Posta, as staff described shortages of supplies in the public health facilities and emphasised the gulf between services at this run-down structure and the gleaming private clinics just 10km away.

[...]

Resources are so limited that physicians and nurses must decide whether to withhold supplies for patients near death in favour of those with a better chance of survival.

[...]

President Sebastián Piñera had declared that the authorities “are at war” with those who are marching, but yesterday he announced a cabinet reshuffle and said he would ease the military-enforced curfew.

[...]

Chilean TV news broadcasts have so censored images that the stations have been surrounded by angry crowds. The once esteemed Televisión Nacional de Chile was forced to protect its headquarters with platoons of heavily armed soldiers to prevent protesters from seizing their broadcast facilities.

[...]

[T]he official figure stands at 470 people shot.

Santiago Chile:

"Hundreds of thousands" is a better heading.

Global protests against economic inequality

In Chile:

In Lebanon:



UPDATE

Lebanon tango

The Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, has said he is suspending the resignation that he announced two weeks ago from Saudi Arabia, easing a crisis that had deepened tensions around the Middle East.

[...]

The unusual nature of Hariri’s surprise resignation on 4 November prompted fears that he had been forced to leave office under the orders of his regional backers.

It came against a backdrop of a regional power tussle between Saudi Arabia and Iran and renewed Saudi condemnation of Hezbollah, Hariri’s partners in government.

[...]

Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, had argued that he would not accept Hariri’s resignation unless he presented it in person, saying that he was acting on the assumption that Hariri had been held in Riyadh against his will.

Hariri said he presented his resignation to Aoun at the presidential palace, but then responded to Aoun’s request to take more time for consultations, “hoping it will constitute a serious introduction for [national] dialogue”.

[...]

Top Lebanese officials accused Hariri’s patron, Saudi Arabia, of forcing his resignation and detaining him in the kingdom for days. The Lebanese rallied around Hariri, unanimously calling for his return from Saudi Arabia in what became an embarrassment to the kingdom.

Hariri’s announcement suggests that Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince realised he had overreached by firing Hariri, which constituted another failed move to try to counter Iran.

His resignation was followed by a steep escalation in Saudi statements against the Lebanese government, which includes Hezbollah.

  Guardian

This is the closest analysis I've seen of what's going on with Saudi Arabia to matching the interview Jeremy Scahill conducted with Rami Khouri, journalism professor at the American University of Beirut. The bottom line that I got out of it was that Saudi's bin Salman desperately needs a win (much like Trump) and hoped to cause a destabilization of Hezbollah by this latest move, and Khouri indicates that attempting to destabilize Hezbollah is a mistake, an endeavor bound to lose.

Not to mention: is bin Salman blind to the consequences for his own country of further destabilization of the Middle East?  Oh, wait.  We have our own "leader" who's blind to anything he might cause to happen that isn't directly related to his own personal gratification and petty grievances - someone who blunders about throwing wrenches and insults everywhere he goes.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In coup news...

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s military said early Wednesday that it had taken custody of President Robert Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state and one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, in what increasingly appeared to be a military takeover in the southern African nation.

[...]

The office of President Jacob Zuma of South Africa said in a statement that Mr. Zuma and Mr. Mugabe had spoken. Mr. Mugabe “indicated that he was confined to his home but said that he was fine,” the statement said.

[...]

General Moyo — who was not widely known to the public but who was considered close to the commander of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga — warned that “any provocation will be met with an appropriate response.”

  NYT

Lebanese President Michel Aoun has said that the country's prime minister, Saad al Hariri, is being detained in Saudi Arabia against his will - despite Mr Hariri's reassurances he will return home soon.

"Nothing justifies that Saad al Hariri has not returned to Lebanon in 12 days. We consider that he has been detained," President Aoun told reporters on Wednesday. The comments are his most direct criticism of Saudi Arabia in the crisis to date.

  UK Independent

With the tacit backing of his father, Saudi Arabia’s 32-year-old crown prince has established himself as the most powerful figure in the Arab world, rushing into confrontations on all sides at once.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the arrest of 11 princes in his royal family and nearly 200 members of the Saudi business elite, and has begun to take power from the kingdom’s conservative clerics. He has blockaded neighboring Qatar, accused Iran of acts of war and encouraged the resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister. And in Yemen, his armed forces are fighting an Iranian-aligned faction in an intractable war that created a humanitarian crisis.

The crown prince has moved so quickly that American officials and others worry that he is destabilizing the region.

  NYT

The region hasn't been stable in decades. What they worry about is whether he'll continue supporting the US as been Saudi custom, also for decades.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Saudi purge extends to Lebanon

When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening of 3 November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his mobile phone and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime minister silenced.

[...]

On Friday 3 November, he was in a cabinet meeting in Beirut. Then he received a call, asking him to see King Salman of Saudi Arabia. Hariri, who like his assassinated father Rafiq, holds Saudi as well as Lebanese citizenship, set off at once. You do not turn down a king, even if you saw him a few days’ earlier, as Hariri had. And especially when the kingdom owes Hariri’s “Oger” company as much as $9bn.

[...]

Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s “Night of the Long Knives” did indeed begin at night, only hours after Hariri’s arrival in Riyadh. So what on earth is the crown prince up to?

[...]

Mohamed bin Salman [...] is liquidating his enemies – the arrests, needless to say, are supposedly part of an “anti-corruption drive.”

Put bluntly, he is clawing down all his rivals and – so the Lebanese fear – trying to destroy the government in Beirut, force the Shia Hezbollah out of the cabinet and restart a civil war in Lebanon.

[...]

But more extraordinary matters were to come. Out of the blue and to the total shock of Lebanese ministers, Hariri, reading from a written text, announced on Saturday on the Arabia television channel – readers can guess which Gulf kingdom owns it – that he was resigning as prime minister of Lebanon.

[...]

He certainly did not anticipate what happened to him. Indeed, Hariri had scheduled meetings in Beirut on the following Monday – with the IMF, the World Bank and a series of discussions on water quality improvement; not exactly the action of a man who planned to resign his premiership. However, the words he read out – scripted for him – are entirely in line with the speeches of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and with the insane President of the United States who speaks of Iran with the same anger, as does the American Defence Secretary.

[...]

There will be no complaints from Washington or London, whose desire to share in the divvying up of Saudi Aramco (another of the crown prince’s projects) will smother any thoughts of protest or warning.

  UK Independent

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Obama's Serious Syria Errors

President Barack Obama has long been under fire from the US national security elite and the media for failing to intervene aggressively against the Assad regime.

  Middle East Eye

And lambasted constantly in media and political circles for "inaction" in Syria, which would be laughable if it weren't pathetic. Action, I suppose, doesn't include funding, arming and advising. (And, in September, running an air strike on the Syrian army.)

But the real strategic blunder was not that Barack Obama didn’t launch yet another war in Syria, but that he decided to go along with the ambitions of America's Sunni allies to create and arm a Syrian opposition army to overthrow the regime in the first place.

[...]

[A] former [anonymous] official revealed that when Obama made the first move toward supporting the arming of Syrian opposition forces, the president failed to foresee the risk of a direct Iranian or Russian intervention on behalf of the Syrian regime in response to an externally armed opposition – because his advisors had failed to take this likelihood into account themselves.

[...]

Obama’s advisers assumed instead that neither Iran nor Russia would do more than offer token assistance to keep Assad in power, so there was no risk of an endless, bloody sectarian war.

I find this almost impossible to believe. How could they not foresee such an event? The entire world has known about the American Project for a New American Century  (PNAC) created in the run-up to the GW Bush administration with one of its stated goals being to take control over Syria. Syria has been seen for decades in the Middle East as a deterrent to attacks from Israel. Did they think Russia and Iran would just stand back and watch? And, if they did realize it would draw them into the conflict, it suggests that they intended it.

The former administration official confirmed the recollections of both former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Pentagon official Derek Chollet that Obama’s advisers believed Assad’s fall was inevitable.

Some of those advisers believed Assad lacked the “cunning and fortitude” to remain in power, as Chollet put it.

Just as they believed Hillary's coronation was inevitable. Bubbles are bad places from which to govern.

Obama did make a statement [in the summer of 2011] suggesting that Assad should step aside, but he made it clear privately that he had no intention of doing anything about it. “He viewed it as simply a suggestion, not a hard policy,” the ex-official said.

But soon after that, a bigger issue arose for the administration’s policy: how to respond to pressure from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar for a US commitment to help overthrow Assad.

Countries who were counting heavily on a Hillary Clinton presidency which would announce a no-fly zone in Syria, further increasing the chance of a direct confrontation between Russia and the US.

Apparently to assuage the dissatisfaction of the Sunni allies, then-director of the CIA David Petraeus devised a plan, which Obama approved, to help move the small arms from Libyan government stocks in Benghazi to Turkey.

Confirming the 2014 story by Seymour Hersh, the ex-official recalled: “It was highly secret but officials involved in the Middle East learned of the programme by word of mouth.”

The combination of those two policy decisions committed Obama – albeit half-heartedly - to the armed overthrow of the Assad regime.

[...]

Obama and his advisers blundered on Syria in thinking that they were not getting into a high-risk war situation.

I would say that's an extremely large blunder, to the point of almost being unbelievable.

But there is a deeper level of explanation for the willingness of Obama and his advisers to go along with the inherent risk of another regime change policy – even if Obama was half-hearted about it at best and limited direct US involvement in it.

The administration was unwilling to be at cross-purposes with its Sunni allies, the former official recalled, because of the direct US military interests at stake in its alliances with those three states: the Saudis effectively controlled US access to the naval base in Bahrain, Turkey controlled the airbase at Incirlik, and Qatar controlled land and air bases that had become central to US military operations in the region.

Now that sounds more like it. They knew, but they decided the risk was worth it. Besides, if we don't stay involved in war, our economy will sink like a stone. It's barely hanging on as it is, and the next financial crash will need a big cushion.

This Gareth Porter article outlines the entire Syria debacle, including how the US once again became a partner with a terrorist organization in the Middle East, and is definitely worth the read if you're fuzzy on the details.

By the way, Donald Trump said America will no longer be in the regime change business when he's in the White House.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that was just another lie to get elected. It might not happen in the beginning, but it will happen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Smarter Brother

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.