The latest violence brings the Health Ministry’s death toll to 42,409
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 16, 2024
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that Israeli strikes across the Strip killed at least 65 Palestinians and wounded 140 in the previous 24-hour period.
The latest violence brings the ministry’s recorded death toll since October 7, 2023, to 42,409 and the number of wounded to 99,153. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza recently estimated in an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris that over 118,00 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, a toll that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege, such as starvation and disease.
People work to recover the dead body of a Palestinian boy from the rubble of a house hit in an Israeli strike in Gaza City on October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Israeli attacks on Wednesday included a strike on a home in Gaza City that killed at least five Palestinians and injured seven. The Palestinian news agency WAFA also reported a strike on a car in central Gaza that killed at least two Palestinians and injured several others.
The Israeli military has continued its assault and siege on northern Gaza, where it’s attempting to carry out an ethnic cleansing plan to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Workers at hospitals in the north have refused Israeli orders to evacuate and say they’re running out of food and medicine due to the tightening of the siege. In 12 days, health officials say at least 350 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the Jabalia refugee camp, where Israel has focused its attack.
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Thursday, October 17, 2024
Israeli Forces Kill 65 More Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Vijay Prashad: They Know What Real Bombing Means
Consortium News, October 11, 2024
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare.
Ayman Baalbaki, Lebanon, Untitled, 2020.
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement urging U.S. President Joe Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the tools to deter these threats.”
McCaul’s belligerent call came days after Israel used over 80 U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions on Sept. 27, to strike a residential neighbourhood in Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of civilians – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel dropped more of these “bunker buster” bombs than the United States military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
A former U.S. aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the U.S. Navy, reviewed the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the U.S. Naval Institute. In a very revealing article, Scarbro notes that Israel “seems to have taken a notably different approach to collateral damage than U.S. forces over the past few decades.”
While the U.S. has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian casualties or “collateral damage,” it is worth noting that even senior U.S. military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, “seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties.”
Bassim al-Shaker, Iraq, “Symphony of Death 1,” 2019.
Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza, and now Lebanon, with complete abandon — and even after the International Court of Justice ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — the United States has continued to arm the Israelis with deadly weaponry.
On Oct. 10, 2023, Biden said, “We’re surging additional military assistance,” which has amounted to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of genocide. In March, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. had “quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.”
These “small” sales fell below the minimum threshold under U.S. law which requires the president to approach Congress for approval (which anyway would not have been denied). These sales amounted to the transfer of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.
In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians — who had been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities themselves.
“In the first two weeks of the war,” The New York Times reported, “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.”
In March, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted,
“The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene.”
A 2016 report by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these weapons of mass destruction:
“These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings and kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of detonation. The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84 bomb are difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this weapon has a ‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is likely to kill people in the vicinity) of up to 360m.
The blast waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive effect; a 2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage as far as 800 metres from the point of impact.”
Ismail Shammout, Palestine, “Guardian of the Fire,” 1988.
I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a few metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex of these buildings with over 80 of these powerful bombs cannot be called “precise.”
Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare. On Sept. 23, Israel bombarded Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, Israel’s “intense airstrikes” displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.
The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand grenade (Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian Air Force on Nov. 1, 1911, onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli, Libya. A hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts, French and U.S. aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The ferocity of aerial bombing was understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his book, A History of Bombing (2003). In March 1924, U.K. Squadron Leader Arthur “Bomber” Harris authored a report (later expunged) about his bombings in Iraq and the “real” meaning of aerial bombardment:
“Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”
A hundred years later, these words of “Bomber” Harris aptly describe the kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.
André Masson, France, “There Is No Finished World,” 1942
You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these are part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be drawn.
Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria in April, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in July, the assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut in September, and the killing of several Iranian military officials.
Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli airstrikes against Lebanon have far outnumbered Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel.
Before the current wave of hostilities, by Sept. 10, Israel had killed 137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14 Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of 63,000 Israeli civilians.
There has been not only a quantitative difference in the number of strikes and death toll, but a qualitative difference in the use of violence. Violence that is directed largely at military targets, is permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.
Etel Adnan, Lebanon, Untitled, 2017.
Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her apartment in Ashrafieh, the “little mountain,” from where she could see the ships come in and out of the port.
When Etel Adnan died, the novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut was again bombarded, wrote that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem, “Beirut, 1982,” to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.
I never believed
that vengeance
would be a tree
growing in my garden
*
Trees grow in all directions
So do Palestinians:
uprooted
and unlike butterflies
wingless,
earthbound,
heavy with love
for their borders and their
misery,
no people can go forever behind
bars
or under the rain.
…
We shall never cry with tears
but with blood.
…
It is not on cemeteries that we shall
plant grain
nor in the palm of my hand
We are as angry as a storm.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
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Saturday, October 12, 2024
‘At Any Moment We Could Die’: Atrocities Mount as Israel Ramps Up Assault on Northern Gaza
An injured man carries the body of a child killed by an Israeli attack on the Jabilia refugee camp in northern Gaza on October 11, 2024.
(Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“People are starving,” said a Médecins Sans Frontières driver trapped in northern Gaza. “I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave.”
Jake Johnson. Common Dreams, Oct 12, 2024
The death toll from Israel’s latest ground and aerial assault on northern Gaza continued to mount on Saturday as the U.S.-armed military targeted the Jabalia refugee camp and other parts of the region, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, firing on those who try to flee, and blocking deliveries of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Israeli strikes on Jabalia homes and schools housing displaced people killed more than 20 Palestinians and wounded dozens more late Friday. Hours later, the Israeli military issued fresh evacuation orders for northern Gaza, instructing residents to move to a so-called humanitarian zone that Israel has repeatedly attacked.
Many have opted to remain in their homes as Israeli quadcopters and snipers target those attempting to escape the besieged and famine-stricken region. As Al Jazeera‘s Hind Khoudary explained Saturday, “Palestinians say they prefer dying in their homes because they believe that there is no place safe across the Gaza Strip, so even if they evacuate they might get killed on the way.”
Sarah Vuylsteke, project coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said Friday that “nobody is allowed to get in or out, anyone who tries is getting shot.”
MSF said five of its staffers were trapped in Jabalia and “fearing for their lives.” An MSF driver said that they were “staying at the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital, but [Israeli forces] bombed it,” killing roughly 20 people.
“I don’t know what to do, at any moment we could die,” said the MSF driver, identified as Haydar. “People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave.”
Video footage posted to social media shows the disturbing aftermath of an Israeli strike on a residential block in Jabalia:
One resident of northern Gaza told+972 Magazine that “quadcopter drones are hovering low over the streets, firing at anything that moves.”
“Snipers are positioned on rooftops, targeting anyone who steps outside,” said 27-year-old Mohammed Shehab. “At the same time, soldiers and tanks have pushed into the camp, demolishing homes and bulldozing roads and fields.”
The true death toll from Israel’s latest assault on northern Gaza is impossible to discern, given the difficulty of navigating the area amid relentless airstrikes and gunfire as well as fuel shortages caused by Israel’s siege.
“We are unable to count the number of massacres happening in Jabalia, and ambulances are unable to reach the calls due to the fuel shortage in northern Gaza,” wrote journalist Hossam Shabat, who is on the ground in northern Gaza.
One Palestinian trapped in northern Gaza said there are “dead bodies everywhere, and the wounded lie in the streets with no one able to help them.”
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned that as the international community looks on—and as U.S. military aid continues to flow—Israel is “accelerating the pace of its genocide against the Palestinians” by “carrying out mass and planned killings, as well as widespread forced displacements,” in northern Gaza.
“The Euro-Med Monitor field team received testimonies from citizens, who were able to reach Gaza City, about witnessing dead bodies lying in the streets,” the group said. “The Israeli army is systematically working to empty northern Gaza of its residents and force them to move to the south, recently issuing several evacuation orders and dropping leaflets demanding their evacuation.”
“The forcible deportation of a population is defined as a crime against humanity under the statute of the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations and the international community must intervene immediately to save tens of thousands of Palestinian residents in northern Gaza who face ethnic cleansing by Israel,” said Euro-Med. “Furthermore, the U.N. and international community have a legal and moral obligation to put an end to the horrific crime of genocide being committed by the Israeli occupation for the second year in a row now.”
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Friday, October 11, 2024
Philip Giraldi: Who Is In Charge of US Foreign Policy?
Is it Israel and its Powerful Lobby or The White House or No One at all?
Philip Giraldi • October 10, 2024
It probably would surprise no one to learn that there are several viewpoints among critics of the current wars devastating the Middle East regarding who is actually encouraging a growing bloody conflict which might soon involve at least six countries in the region. In simple terms, there is a school of thought that believes that Israel, backed by its various powerful diaspora lobbies, is defying world opinion to continue its slaughter of its indigenous Palestinians and neighboring Lebanese. In other words, it is all about Israel acting maliciously and badly. However, another viewpoint sees instead a neocon dominated United States foreign policy exploiting Israeli truculence and its hard right wing leadership to carry out American national objectives in the region, in a sense using Israel as its proxy and actually encouraging its bad behavior. Meanwhile, a third plausible examination of developments tends to meld the two approaches, suggesting that the US and Israel are in a conspiratorial cooperative relationship and are in full agreement regarding reducing the power of the Jewish state’s neighbors. That would make Israel the preeminent military power dominating the Persia Gulf and beyond to control a large chunk of the world’s energy resources while also benefiting American weapons manufacturers and other political and Wall Street constituencies.
The problem is that there is sufficient carefully selected evidence to support every point of view including an alternative suggestion that American foreign policy is broken, adrift and does not reflect any US national interest at all, witness the recent $8.7 billion aid package sent to a belligerent Israel when Americans were dying in North Carolina in the wake of a devastating hurricane for which FEMA only provided meager assistance because it claimed it had run out of money. The steady flow of money and weapons from the US to Israel suggests that the United States is for some reason supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of the war against Hamas when the White House could have ended the war in a day by cutting off that support. Alternatively, Israel might be seen as continuing its slaughter in spite of perhaps insincere US objections because it presumes that its powerful Lobby in the US will keep Joe Biden in line with an election coming up lest it weigh in heavily to help Donald Trump. And, of course, if the two nations are acting in collusion it could all be Kabuki with Washington and Tel Aviv cynically intending to do whatever it takes reshape the Middle East to Israel’s benefit. Take your choice of which scenario fits best.
One needs to determine what actually justifies the reality of a multiplicity of fronts, to include providing political cover in the UN, where the United States is interacting to support “greatest ally and best friend” Israel while at the same time constantly verbalizing the apparently false claim that it is trying to avoid the conflict’s expanding into a major conflagration that could engulf the entire region and beyond, driving up energy costs dramatically just for starters. Such a managed co-escalation might also increase the risks and costs geometrically as more players get involved, up to and including the possibility that Israel will opt to use its nuclear weapons to “defend” itself or to attack Iran, which is where both Russia and the United States might become involved in a nuclear exchange to defend their respective “friends.”
So what is the truth and what are the lies and who in Washington and/or Tel Aviv is calling the shots in the Middle East? And what do they really intend and how do they see it all ending? There are four obvious US government players who are on the ground and meeting with the key figures in the nations involved in the fighting as well as with those ostensibly engaged in the what are being called negotiations to put an end to the killing with a ceasefire acceptable to all parties. One must concede that their task is a difficult one at best as all parties to the peace talks recognize that the United States is not an unbiased intermediary given its total commitment to support Israel politically as well as with arms and money while freely labeling the Jewish state’s neighbors and opponents alike as “terrorists” and “autocrats.” The four would be composed of two obvious officials Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken while a third and fourth are not-so-well-known, consisting of special negotiator for the president Amos Hochstein and the White House Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk. Both Burns and Blinken have made numerous trips to the Middle East and Ukraine to convey the views of the president and make their own assessments of the situation on the ground after meeting with local officials. The role is rather unusual for Burns as a CIA Director normally operates behind the scenes and does not get involved in policy making, but Burns is not a typical director in that he has no background in intelligence. He was a highly regarded State Department officer who wound up as the US Ambassador to Russia. He very carefully worked through the nuances of the US-Russian relationship and was highly praised for explaining things from the Kremlin perspective so US planners would be able to understand very clearly the differing perspectives of the two nations. He described, for example, how very sensitive Russia was over the issue of Ukraine becoming part of NATO, a warning which was subsequently ignored by President Biden.
Blinken is, of course, better known as he served as Deputy Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration and is regarded as a particularly close associate of Joe Biden. As Secretary of State he has been a very active traveler throughout both the Middle East and Ukraine. Blinken is Jewish and is regarded as a protector of Israel, which is, of course, also the President’s frequently enunciated view. After the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah he said that the “World is safer without Nasrallah…” whereas most of the world would quite reasonably prefer to see Benjamin Netanyahu removed. Blinken also appears to favor preemptively attacking Iran to eliminate its nuclear energy program even though there is no evidence that it is weapons-development related. He has recently come under pressure for lying about two State Department reports that indicated very clearly that Israel has been deliberately starving and killing the Gazans by blocking US supplied food and medicine supplies at the border. One large convoy of trucks containing enough food to feed most of the local people who were in danger of dying from starvation was deliberately held up at the border until the food became rotten and had to be destroyed. Blinken lied both to Congress and to the American people about the Israeli policy, saying that blocking food supplies by Israel was not taking place. It was a consequential lie as people died and are continuing to die because of it and Blinken has paid no price for what must surely be considered a major war crime.
The third policy planner is an unusual individual Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Army. He has been designated as Biden’s personal roving ambassador in the Middle East with a particular brief to work to avoid the expansion of the Gaza fighting into Lebanon against Hezbollah. In that effort, he has obviously failed as both Israel and Lebanon now consider themselves to be at war. It is presumed that Hochstein is the “active arm” in the White House campaign to shield Israel from any harm initiated by its much abused neighbors. Why anyone would select an Israeli who is a product of the Israeli Army as a negotiator of some type among the nations that the Israelis have been victimizing for the past seventy-five years has to be considered an enduring mystery. It is perhaps another gimmick move by Biden to pretend that he is neutral in the conflict while doing everything he can to turn Netanyahu free to destroy or subject all his neighbors.
Which brings us to the fourth likely top planner National Security Council Coordinator for Africa and the Middle East Brett McGurk. McGurk has been a bipartisan fixture floating around the national security and diplomatic communities for a number of years with the reputation of being a “hardliner” particularly when dealing with Arabs, which is not to say that he has learned anything beyond the fact that if one wants to survive in Washington it pays to love Israel. It is interesting to note that the Biden Administration claims that it is working hard to achieve a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gaza but it continues to cover for Israel politically and provide it with the weapons and money to continue it genocidal activities as well as in support of its plan to occupy southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone.” Israeli media is already reporting that real estate agents are offering attractive properties for Jewish buyers in what is still Lebanon, just as Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been peddling exclusive sea front lots in Gaza. In other words, don’t believe anything coming out of the Biden Administration as evidence for anything as it appears that its “policy makers” and press spokesmen have acquired the Israeli tendency to lie about everything.
Politico has a recent piece on both Hochstein and McGurk and it does not make one feel warm and fuzzy about what the Biden administration is up to. The article is entitled: “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah -The officials urged caution and stressed the need for diplomacy. But the timing was right for such a military shift, they concluded”. It seems that the guys who are promoted by the Biden administration as peacemakers are anything but. Politico obtained insider information from a number of anonymous sources in both Washington and Israel and learned that Biden’s team has actually agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah. This tilt, contrary to what the White House has been preaching, produced a reaction from a number of Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials that such a move would drag the United States into the war, which is really what Netanyahu intended, but the shift in policy was approved anyway. One senior US official noted but dismissed the flaw in a policy of calling for peace while encouraging war as “Both things can be true — the US can want diplomacy and support Israel’s larger goals against Hezbollah. There’s clearly a line that the administration is toeing, it’s just not clear what that line is.”
In spite of concerns from some in the government that a reckless Israel will go too far and ignite a major regional war that could easily spread beyond the Middle East, Politico reports how Hochstein and McGurk worked “behind the scenes” to encourage Israel and they are now describing Israel’s Lebanon operations likely to include a major land invasion as a “history-defining moment” — one that will “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.” That would seem to confirm that the United States and Israel are in fact collaborating and the US is fully complicit and de facto supporting the genocidal intention of Netanyahu to make a new Greater Israel largely free of Arabs. For the US, the extra benefit gained from defeating Hezbollah will be that it ultimately weakens Iran, neocon Washington’s perpetual arch enemy, which relies on Hezbollah as a proxy and a resource for projecting power. Of course, it could all go the other way and the joint American-Israeli plan could come to naught. Hezbollah notably routed invading Israeli forces in south Lebanon back in 2006 and it is better trained and equipped now than it was then. And what happens if Israeli army is in trouble and the US is forced to act on its pledge to “defend” the Jewish state, thereby leading a small war to expand and include Iran and Russia? The ball will be in your court Mr. Biden, or possibly Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris. Consider carefully how you will play it but if you really do want a ceasefire, I wouldn’t send Blinken, Hochstein and McGurk around to do the negotiating.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Biden is letting Israel trap the US into war with Iran
One year after Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight
Paul R. Pillar, Oct 07, 2024
The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.
The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.
The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.
When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.
By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.
Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.
After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.
As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.
The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.
Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.
Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.
An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.
Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.
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An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.
The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.
The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.
Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.
None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.
Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.
Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.
Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.
An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.
An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.
An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.
Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.
It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
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Saturday, October 05, 2024
𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚 𝐒𝐚𝐲 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟏𝟖,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝
𝑇ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑, 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝐼𝑠𝑟𝑎𝑒𝑙𝑖 𝑐𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑚𝑠, 𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑠𝑎𝑤 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝐺𝑎𝑧𝑎
Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 3, 2024
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza over the past year published an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris on Thursday that detailed the horrors they witnessed and called for an end to US military support for Israel.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza is much higher than what Gaza’s Health Ministry is reporting, estimating it to be over 118,908.
“This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States,” the letter reads. “It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
The latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, at 41,788. The ministry’s figures only count the bodies that are brought to hospitals and morgues and don’t account for people missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
The American healthcare workers said that everyone in Gaza is either
sick, injured, or both. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza
is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker,
every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every
man, woman, and child,” the letter says.
Palestinians inspect
damages at Al Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces withdrew from the
hospital and the area around it following a two-week operation in Gaza
City on April 1, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
They said that almost every child under five they encountered “had both a cough and watery diarrhea.” Each signatory to the letter saw wounds in children that showed they were being purposefully targeted by the Israeli military.
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter reads. “It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, was quoted in the letter saying, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”
The healthcare workers said newborn babies were dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and attacks on hospitals. Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, said, “Every day, I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved.”
The healthcare workers said their Palestinian colleagues were targeted by Israeli forces and captured during Israeli raids on hospitals. “Many of these colleagues of ours were taken by Israel during the attacks. They all told us a slightly different version of the same story: in captivity, they were barely fed, continuously physically and psychologically abused, and finally dumped naked on the side of a road. Many told us they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of mistreatment and torture,” the letter reads.
Israel claims Hamas has used hospitals as “command centers,” but the letter said that none of its signatories saw any sign of militant activity. “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the letter reads.
The letter concludes with a plea for Biden and Harris to end US support for the genocidal war: “Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now!”
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Why is the United States leading the way in an unwinnable nuclear arms race?
The Dangerous Illusion of ‘Escalation Dominance’
(Image: Adobe)
Norman Solomon / TruthdigColumnist
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet and see what had become a global crematorium and unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khrushchev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the United States. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Sen. William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion — by Russian military and political elites — of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated — ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On Sept. 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems — programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan — formerly a supreme cold warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet, calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
A zero-sum view of the world.
A one-way ticket to omnicide.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
At the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Consider what President John Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to every office of Senate and House members, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence — it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles — or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”
Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 2016: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force.
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs — they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based arsenal.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
I want to close with some words from Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”
This article is adapted from the keynote speech that the author gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, 2024.
