Two Must-Reads by Patrick Cockburn and Gareth Porter

A couple must-reads from the weekend are Patrick Cockburn's "Misreporting Iraq and Syria" and an interview of Gareth Porter by Dennis Bernstein, "The Double Standard on Yemen’s Suffering."

Cockburn drives home the complete breakdown of journalistic standards in the Western media when it came to reporting on East Aleppo. Qaeda-spread rumors of atrocities perpetrated by Syrian government forces were immediately and uncritically whisked to the front page.

The big takeaway from Cockburn's piece is that Western reporting on Syria in general and East Aleppo in particular has been outsourced to jihadis. No independent, secular journalists remain in "opposition" territory. So for every Anne Barnard story you read where she communicates with an "anti-government activist" via Skype, that's likely a Nusra fighter being featured in the "newspaper of record." As Cockburn reminds us,

Since at least 2013 it has been too dangerous for journalists to visit rebel-held areas because of well-founded fears that they will be kidnapped and held to ransom or murdered, usually by decapitation. Journalists who took the risk paid a heavy price: James Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 and executed by Islamic State in August 2014. Steven Sotloff was kidnapped in Aleppo in August 2013 and beheaded soon after Foley. But there is tremendous public demand to know what is happening in such places, and news providers, almost without exception, have responded by delegating their reporting to local media and political activists, who now appear regularly on television screens across the world. In areas controlled by people so dangerous no foreign journalist dare set foot among them, it has never been plausible that unaffiliated local citizens would be allowed to report freely.

In East Aleppo any reporting had to be done under licence from one of the Salafi-jihadi groups which dominated the armed opposition and controlled the area – including Jabhat al-Nusra, formerly known as the Syrian branch of al-Qaida. What happens to people who criticise, oppose or even act independently of these extremist groups was made clear in an Amnesty International report published last year and entitled ‘Torture Was My Punishment’: Abduction, Torture and Summary Killings under Armed Group Rule in Aleppo and Idlib. Ibrahim, whom al-Nusra fighters hung from the ceiling by his wrists while they beat him for holding a meeting to commemorate the 2011 uprising without their permission, is quoted as saying: ‘I heard and read about the government security forces’ torture techniques. I thought I would be safe from that now that I am living in an opposition-held area. I was wrong. I was subjected to the same torture techniques but at the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra.’

The fact that groups linked to al-Qaida had a monopoly on the supply of news from East Aleppo doesn’t necessarily mean that the reports in the press about the devastating effects of shelling and bombing were untrue. Pictures of flattened buildings and civilians covered in cement dust weren’t fabricated. But they were selective. It’s worth recalling that – according to UN figures – there were between 8000 and 10,000 rebel fighters in East Aleppo, yet almost none of the videos on TV ever showed any armed men. Western broadcasters commonly referred to the groups defending East Aleppo as ‘the opposition’ with no mention of al-Qaida or its associated groups. There was an implicit assumption that all the inhabitants of East Aleppo were firmly opposed to Assad and supported the insurgents, yet it’s striking that when offered a choice in mid-December only a third of evacuees– 36,000 – asked to be taken to rebel-held Idlib. The majority – 80,000 – elected to go to government-held territory in West Aleppo. This isn’t necessarily because they expected to be treated well by the government authorities – it’s just that they believed life under the rebels would be even more dangerous. In the Syrian civil war, the choice is often between bad and worse.

The second half of Cockburn's article is devoted to the media blackout of the U.S.-led siege of Mosul, what Cockburn calls the largest urban combat theater post-WWII.

Media blackout is one of the points Gareth Porter makes in his interview. The Saudi's are starving Yemen with critical assistance of the United States. Thirty-one percent of children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, a.k.a., starvation. Without U.S. logistical support the Saudi coalition could not maintain its blockade. Do news consumers in the U.S. get treated to that fact? Hardly ever.

Porter concludes the interview by mentioning how Iran is especially impacted by Trump's immigration ban and how deeply intertwined Saudi Arabia is with the U.S. deep state, which is in turn largely privatized:

DB: Now, I notice that the Saudis didn’t make the Trump [immigration] ban list. Although there would be a lot of good reasons why they might be on it. Can you put that in context?

GP: Yeah. If there was a ban that reflected the degree of risk, relative degree of risk, let’s not call it the absolute degree, but the relative degree of risk from people trying to gain entry into the United States from the Middle East, you would certainly have to say that Saudi Arabia was the top risk because of the number of jihadists who have come from Saudi Arabia, and have gone to, of course, Syria, as well as Iraq, to participate in those jihadist campaigns.

And, of course, as you say, Saudi Arabia is not included. The fact is, of course, that that list of countries whose people are banned from coming into the United States is entirely political, yet includes Iran which is, of course, not a risk at all. There’s simply no basis for saying that there’s the slightest risk from Iran because it has not, in fact, been at war with the United States. Because it has been an ally of the United States against the jihadists in those countries where the United States faces the greatest risks… the countries from which the Unites States faces the greatest risks.

DB: But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from going and sort of implementing its policies particularly focused on… there are a number of Iranians now really directly impacted, right?

GP: That’s right. I mean, Iranians have been severely impacted by this. Students, of course, the largest number of graduate students in American universities from the rest of the world, as I understand it, are Iranians, at this point, certainly higher education, the higher levels of education. 

And so, many, many Iranians now have been caught in trying to get back to the United States, or who needed to visit home, from American universities, and this was a very serious problem for them. But I would just add that, you know, clearly this administration is not basing its first major foreign policy decision on the situation in the Middle East, or the degree of risk. But it’s basing it on the appeal to the constituency that elected Donald Trump.

DB: Alright, and just, again, to step back a little bit, the situation on the ground in Yemen at this moment is dire. And, is there any attempt at a truce, a treaty? There’s a lot of focus on Syria.

GP: Right. There have been negotiations going on now for many months, between the Houthis on one side, and the Yemeni government that was put into power, put back into power, by the Saudis and their coalition, after the war began.

Well, after the war began, these negotiations have been stalled because the Saudi supported officials in those negotiations have essentially refused to allow the Houthis to basically hold onto their weapons, until the process is completed. I mean, they have been demanding a prior giving up of weapons before the settlement is reached, in terms of the political part of it. So, we’re still not close to, as I understand it, to actually having a peace agreement, and a durable ceasefire.

And the United States, you know, the Obama administration, was at least trying to push the Saudis to be a bit more reasonable. But, I’m sorry to say that the problem we face here is that the U.S. government, (and I’m quite sure that the Trump administration will not be very different, if at all, from the Obama administration in this regard) the permanent government, the national security government or the “permanent war government,” as I call it, of the United States is so dependent, or shall we say so cozy with the Saudis, particularly, that they have basically screwed up Syria, they have destabilized and caused a terrible humanitarian crisis in Syria, then they went and did the same thing in Yemen, by supporting the Saudis.

Why did they do it? Because the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA all have sweetheart deals with the Saudis which are worth a great deal of money. Both sale of arms and basically selling of intelligence services to the Saudis are at the heart of this. And also, of course, there’s access to bases that… at least the base in Bahrain, the naval base in Bahrain, which the United States covets, the U.S. Navy covets. And, therefore, the Saudis control that base, and that’s another thing that the permanent war state isn’t unwilling to give up.

DB: And this is big business in the context of the Pentagon.

GP: It is.

DB: By the way, what are the corporations… who are we talking about now… who are happy about this?

GP: Well, you’re talking about all of the major arms suppliers. The big four, the big five of aircraft, aerospace companies who have been able to sell more weapon systems to the Saudis because of the political relationship that exists between the United States and the Saudi government. Those people are obviously very concerned, and very happy about the situation. But when you talk about big business it’s not just the private companies.

What I have found, just to summarize… the conclusion that I’ve come to in my study of the permanent war state, is that what we used to think of as a state bureaucracy has morphed into a combination of state bureaucracy and private contractors. They have merged so totally that there’s no distinction anymore. The lines have been blurred. And the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSA are all now, basically, more like corporations than they are public services, or state services, to the American people.

Obama Impugns Menendez's Virtue + U.S. Mendacity on Iran's Nuclear Program + KSA Spotlighted for Flogging Blogger + Dying Oceans

A juicy morsel this morning from Michael Shear, "Obama and Senator Robert Menendez Spar on How to Handle Iran," about a mano-a-mano face-off between the feckless POTUS Obama and the ultra-corrupt AIPAC shill Bob Menendez. It took place yesterday during a Senate Democrat Issues Conference at the Baltimore Hilton. According to Shear,

[Obama's] exchange with Mr. Menendez occurred near the end of a question-and-answer session after Senator Angus King of Maine — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — asked for an update to the nuclear talks.

According to one of the senators and another person who was present, the president urged lawmakers to stop pursuing sanctions, saying such a move would undermine his authority and could derail the talks. Mr. Obama also said that such a provocative action could lead international observers to blame the Americans, rather than the Iranians, if the talks collapsed before the June 30 deadline.

The president said he understood the pressures that senators face from donors and others, but he urged the lawmakers to take the long view rather than make a move for short-term political gain, according to the senator. Mr. Menendez, who was seated at a table in front of the podium, stood up and said he took “personal offense.” 

Mr. Menendez told the president that he had worked for more than 20 years to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and had always been focused on the long-term implications. Mr. Menendez also warned the president that sanctions could not be imposed quickly if Congress waited to act and the talks failed, according to two people who were present.

There you have it, assuming the account is accurate: POTUS acknowledging that Iranian sanctions are donor driven, and in response, Bob Menendez, a prime recipient of AIPAC largesse and a co-sponsor of legislation calling for additional sanctions against Iran, bolts upright and claims his integrity has been impugned.

For a helpful summary of U.S. perfidy in regards to Iran's nuclear program take a moment to read Gareth Porter's "Four Ways the West Got the Iran Nuclear Issue Wrong." From the outset the idea that Iran has been secretly pursuing nuclear weapons has been a canard:

The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.

Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired. 

But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.

Porter goes on to list several obvious and egregious U.S. intelligence blunders. But the principal argument for the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program is the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa:

The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.

That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.

The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has landed some unwelcome attention over its flogging of a blogger, Raif Badawi. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, yesterday called for a halt. Nicholas Kristof devoted a column, "An Islamic Reformer, Lashed," to it the other day, placing Badawi's flogging in the proper context of KSA's support for Islamic fundamentalism, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and Free Speech. It is hard for the United States to make a stink over human rights and press freedom in nations it regards as adversaries (Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela et al.) when a principal ally, if not the principal ally, is caning a blogger 50 lashes every Friday until 1000 lashes have been meted out (19 more Fridays, the end of May).

Fariborz Saremi has a piece, "Iran’s Changing Role," about the Islamic Republic's improved status among Gulf Cooperation Council member states relative to KSA and Bahrain:

Political and economic relations between the smaller Gulf states and Iran are rather diverse: Kuwait and Iran, for example have had positive relations since 1991 and are currently expanding their economic ties. Oman and Qatar have a long history of fairly good relations towards Iran. While the UAE has had a troublesome relation with Iran in the past, in particular due to the three island dispute, their relationship is currently improving. All this indicates that Saudi Arabia might not be able to hold its own house together when it comes to confrontation with a regional power like Iran. Many GCC states welcomed the election of President Rouhani but remain skeptical about the depth of change in Tehran especially the overall influence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Before signing off, let's quote at length from Carl Zimmer's "Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says" about a big, new study published yesterday in Science, "Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean":

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years. Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble. Whales may no longer be widely hunted, the analysis noted, but they are now colliding more often as the number of container ships rises.

Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000. Seabed mining has the potential to tear up unique ecosystems and introduce pollution into the deep sea.

The oceans are so vast that their ecosystems may seem impervious to change. But Dr. McClenachan warned that the fossil record shows that global disasters have wrecked the seas before. “Marine species are not immune to extinction on a large scale,” she said.

Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species, the new analysis also found.

The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands. For example, the moa, a giant bird that once lived on New Zealand, was wiped out by arriving Polynesians in the 1300s, probably within a century.

But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.

Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.

Species began going extinct at a much faster pace. Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land. But the authors of the new study found that documented extinctions are far rarer in the ocean.

Before 1500, a few species of seabirds are known to have vanished. Since then, scientists have documented only 15 ocean extinctions, including animals such as the Caribbean monk seal and the Steller’s sea cow.

While these figures are likely underestimates, Dr. McCauley said that the difference was nonetheless revealing.

“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said. “It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”

Iran Nuclear Deal No Chickenshit

From my perch in the early morning dark of a 100-plus-year-old apartment building, located in a city by the sound that used to be known for its jets and now is synonymous with an online retail giant, the tectonic plates of global governance seem to be grinding into motion. A slight realignment is in the offing. What are the signs?

To begin with let's start with the ridiculous, the "chickenshit" feud between USG and Israel over anonymous disparaging comments made by an Obama official to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine about Bibi Netanyahu's manliness. As Jodi Rudoren summarized in a story the other day, "Israel Jabs Back After U.S. Official Calls Netanyahu a Coward," the barroom beer-muscle persiflage is all about a deal with Iran over its nuclear program:

Israeli politicians spent most of Wednesday responding with outrage and concern to an article in The Atlantic quoting a senior American official calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “coward” — and also using a more colorful but vulgar synonym that starts with “chicken.” Mr. Netanyahu and his allies denounced such a personal attack as inappropriate, while his critics declared it evidence of the dangerous deterioration of the state’s most treasured alliance that Mr. Netanyahu has caused.

Then, in late afternoon, a senior Israeli official offered a new spin. “It appears that someone in the administration is trying to pre-empt Prime Minister Netanyahu’s criticism of an imminent and highly problematic deal with Iran,” said the official, speaking on the condition that he not be named, since that is how this game is played. “It is a transparent attempt to discredit the messenger instead of dealing with the substance of his criticism.”

It would be easy to write all this off as what Aaron David Miller, a veteran Washington observer on all things Middle East, called “the nanny-nanny-boo-boo kindergarten school,” where “they call each other names.” But there are serious underlying differences in Israel and the United States regarding the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, and the downward dip between their leaders comes at a critical juncture. 

With a Nov. 24 deadline looming, Israelis have watched, with rising concern, signs of an international deal that would allow Iran to preserve at least some of its nuclear program and would bring about the lifting of crippling economic sanctions. Worse for Jerusalem, President Obama’s aides have indicated that they will try to bypass a vote on the deal in Congress, where Israel’s support is strongest and Mr. Netanyahu has occasionally made direct appeals. 

Mr. Netanyahu, who has spent much of his career arguing that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel, insists that allowing Iran to continue to enrich uranium at any level leaves it on the threshold of producing a bomb, and that a flawed deal is worse than no deal. 

“There is no way to bridge this gap, because whatever is acceptable to America is not acceptable to us,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser. “So there could be some kind of deliberate attempt to put Netanyahu in some kind of uncomfortable position, so when he says whatever he says in a month, it will be less relevant or attract less attention.”

The magisterial Gareth Porter outlines the deal taking shape between Iran and the P5+1 (the UN Security Council permanent five members plus Germany) in an article that appeared yesterday on the Counterpunch web site, "Is an Iranian Nuclear Deal in the Works? A Compromise on Enrichment":

US and Iranian negotiators are working on a compromise approach to the issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which the Barack Obama administration has said in the past Iran was refusing to make concessions on. 

The compromise now being seriously discussed would meet the Obama administration’s original requirement for limiting Iran’s “breakout capability” by a combination of limits on centrifuge numbers and reduction of Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium, rather than by cutting centrifuges alone. 

That approach might permit Iran to maintain something close to its present level of operational centrifuges. 

The key to the new approach is Iran’s willingness to send both its existing stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) as well as newly enriched uranium to Russia for conversion into fuel for power plants for an agreed period of years. 

In the first official indication of the new turn in the negotiations, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Marzieh Afkham acknowledged in a briefing for the Iranian press October 22 that new proposals combining a limit on centrifuges and the transfer of Iran’s LEU stockpile to Russia were under discussion in the nuclear negotiations. 

The briefing was translated by BBC’s monitoring service but not reported in the Western press. 

Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, who heads the US delegation to the talks, has not referred publicly to the compromise approach, but she appeared to be hinting at it when she said on October 25 that the two sides had “made impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable”. 

Despite the new opening to a resolution of what had been cited for months as the main obstacle to a comprehensive agreement, the negotiations could nevertheless stall in the final weeks over the timing of sanctions removal. 

Iran’s willingness to negotiate such arrangements with the US delegation will depend on Russia’s agreement to take the Iranian enriched uranium. 

The beginning of discussions on the new approach was reported in September – just days after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Russian President Vladimir Putin had met to discuss key issues in Iranian-Russian cooperation on the building of two nuclear power plants and fuel supply for Bushehr.

Russia is the key to any successful bargain over Iran's nuclear program. But what about the New Cold War? Isn't this an impediment to securing Russia's help? As James Kanter reports, "Ukraine and Russia Reach Accord on Natural Gas Deliveries," one of the main casus belli of the New Cold War, Europe's vulnerability vis-a-vis its dependence on Russian natural gas, has been resolved, at least nominally:

BRUSSELS — Russian and Ukrainian officials reached an agreement on Thursday night to resume Russian deliveries of natural gas to prevent shortages over the winter. 

The deal caps months of laborious talks under the aegis of European Union authorities on how much, and how soon, Ukraine needed to pay Russia for gas it has already consumed, and on the terms for future deliveries. 

The standoff between Moscow and Kiev also prompted concerns in Europe that Russian gas piped across Ukraine, a former Soviet state, could be interrupted.

The particulars of the deal are as follows:

• Ukraine will pay $3.1 billion by the end of the year to cover its outstanding debts. These payments are based on a price of $268.50 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas.

• Going forward Ukraine will purchase "Russian gas at a cost of $378 per 1,000 cubic meters until the end of the year, and at a cost of $365 per 1,000 cubic meters from January to March next year."

Of course, this assumes a lot. To begin with, can Ukraine come up with the loot? Secondly, is the government in Kiev stable enough to last until March?

In any event, the deal signed is significant. The health of Gazprom is inseparable from the rise of Russia under Putin; hence, Moscow has always been preoccupied with making sure the crisis in Ukraine doesn't impact the long-term soundness of the energy giant's operations.

There is one more development that augurs a global tectonic shift is underway -- Egyptian bulldozing of homes in the Sinai along the Gaza border. According to a story yesterday by the superb reporter Kareem Fahim written in tandem with Merna Thomas, "Egypt Flattens Neighborhoods to Create a Buffer With Gaza":

CAIRO — With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gazain a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier. 

The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.

That assault was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.

*** 

The border clearing came as the authorities have signaled a growing determination to expand their security reach throughout Egypt, to counter militants, they say, but also to crush outbreaks of ordinary dissent, rights advocates say. It was also the latest instance of the government using the overwhelming force of its security apparatus to confront what it sees as a threat to Egypt’s existence, whether the growing strength of militants or the demonstrations by thousands of Islamists during the overthrow of the government of Mohamed Morsi. 

Some of the recent measures, including a crackdown on university protests and a presidential decree issued Monday putting public facilities like power stations and roads under the protection of the military, were “confirmation of a conviction we have had for months,” said Gamal Eid, the head of the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights Information. “Egypt is solidifying the rule of the police and the military,” he said.

There have been two responses to the Arab Spring by the U.S. chaos-inducing unipolar system of global governance. One, is co-optation by means of Wahhabi-exported Salafists. This is on display in Libya and Syria. The other, in states to be maintained whole and not cracked into pieces, there is the Sisi option, a massive police state crackdown on any dissent. Egypt is leading the way on this with fulsome support from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and, regardless of a bit of meek pro forma mewling, the United States.

Israel cannot pursue another Operation Protective Edge-type genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. One more and the BDS Movement will reach critical mass. Now what appears to be in the offing is a plan by Israel to create a "Greater Gaza." As Jonathan reported in September, "Is there a plan to force Palestinians into Sinai?"

Desperately overcrowded, short on basic resources like fresh water, blockaded for eight years by Israel, with its infrastructure intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing campaigns, Gaza looks like a giant pressure cooker waiting to explode. 

It is difficult to imagine that sooner or later Israel will not face a massive upheaval on its doorstep. So how does Israel propose to avert a scenario in which it must either savagely repress a mass uprising by Palestinians in Gaza or sit by and watch them tear down their prison walls? 

Reports in the Arab and Israeli media – in part corroborated by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas – suggest that Egypt may be at the heart of plans to solve the problem on Israel’s behalf. 

This month Israeli media reported claims – apparently leaked by Israeli officials – that Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, had offered the Palestinian leadership the chance to annex to Gaza an area of 1,600 sq km in Sinai. The donated territory would expand Gaza fivefold. 

The scheme is said to have received the blessing of the United States. 

‘Greater Gaza’ plan 

According to the reports, the territory in Sinai would become a demilitarised Palestinian state – dubbed “Greater Gaza” – to which returning Palestinian refugees would be assigned. The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas would have autonomous rule over the cities in the West Bank, comprising about a fifth of that territory. In return, Abbas would have to give up the right to a state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

The plan, which would most likely result in significant numbers of Palestinians moving outside the borders of historic Palestine, was quickly dismissed as “fabricated and baseless” by Egyptian and Palestinian officials.

It could be that what we are looking at here is an elaborate game of musical chairs. Peace with Iran will be achieved at the price of a Greater Gaza solution to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The future of the caliphate in all this seems to be in the form of Sunnistan, which the odious Thomas Friedman riffed on this week in the disinformation manifesto, "ISIS and Vietnam." Sunnistan, so the thinking goes, is to balance Kurdistan and Shiastan.