Submitted by Steve Brown
Perhaps under cover of impeachment hearings in Washington or perhaps due to the appointment of Naftali Bennett as Defense Minister the hot war between Israel and Syria escalated dramatically on the night of November 19th.
Israel’s military repeated its usual claim that missiles were fired at Israel from Syria (detected at Mt Hermon) and all incoming were defeated by a short-range missile defense system given to Israel by the United States. Israeli sources claim that one ‘Iranian rocket’ had targeted a ‘snowy ski resort’ and was shot down, however no independent source will verify that claim or that the destroyed missile was Iranian-made.
In its retaliatory response, Israel attempted to strike twenty-three targets around Damascus on November 19th, conducting air strikes from Lebanese airspace over Marjaayoun. One source states that nine targets near Damascus were struck by Israeli missiles and that a potentially larger attack was deterred by electronic warfare counter-measures.* If confirmed, that represents a less-than 50% success ratio for the Israeli strikes.
Israel’s provocative military escalation in the region comes at a crucial time. The Israeli government is evidently deadlocked between its principles, and the suggestion that a unity government will prevail seems remote with a third election looming. Some analysts have hailed the governmental deadlock as a good thing – perhaps delaying Israel’s annexation of the West Bank – despite Israeli leaders appealing to their settler right wing and Olim base by engaging in ever more violent militarist behaviour. To support this point, Netanyahu just appointed religious right-wing militant extremist Naftali Bennett as Defense Minister.
While Bennett’s predecessor was certainly no peace-monger, the appointment of Bennett coincides with escalating extremist militancy inside the Likud regime. Concurrent with Bennett’s appointment Israel immediately carried out its stated national policy of state-sponsored political assassinations with an air strike on the home of Abu al-Ata in Gaza, killing him and his wife. Sectarian Palestinian militants then retaliated with rocket fire into Israel which led to more Israeli air strikes on Gaza.
Likewise, Iraq and Lebanon are still beset by political and economic issues as we examined in Syria is Lost.. Lebanon’s Gold is Next and Syria continues to suffer heavily from conflicts of foreign interest, although the situation has improved since the US withdrawal there. Consequently, an overall pattern emerges favourable to the goals of the US-Israeli-Saudi Axis in spreading unrest throughout the region.
Presently Washington wishes to ignore the decades-long mess it worked to create in the Middle East and Afghanistan and concentrate on its own domestic attempt at a coup d’etat. Sacrificing the Republic on behalf of their Neoliberal and Neoconservative controllers is the most noble thing Warfare State Democrats can achieve (at least in their opinion) via their fake impeachment spectacle.
Certainly Democrats must understand that this fake impeachment process will ultimately lead nowhere, but does allow democrats to push their Russiagate and Ukrainegate nonsense on the public. Correspondingly Israel, the US military, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia pursue their own militarist foreign policy agendas well outside the US public eye at this time, so long as the US media impeachment scandal continues to unfold.
Impeachment-gate is either a made-up attempt to weaken the president politically or is something far more sinister. Prima facie it appears that global political power at its highest level understands that ‘something is rotten in Denmark’ – and in its Empire – and is using Impeachment-gate as political cover for the goals that their entrenched ideologues in State have been pursuing ever since August of 1953. And it is likely that their ordained ultimate undoing is unknown even to themselves, even if Powell just hinted otherwise.
Yes, Impeachmentgate is highly illustrative of the same continuing pattern of duplicity, disinformation, subversion and Revisionist history we have seen from Washington for at least seventy years now… and that the rest of the world has been forced to endure for just as long.
*The Israeli press has stated that their military possesses “new technology” to overcome EW measures, but this has been a consistent mantra from the Israeli press for many years.
Steve Brown is the author of “Iraq: the Road to War” (Sourcewatch) editor of “Bush Administration War Crimes in Iraq” (Sourcewatch) “Trump’s Limited Hangout” and “Federal Reserve: Out-sourcing the Monetary System to the Money Trust Oligarchs Since 1913”; Steve is an antiwar activist, a published scholar on the US monetary system, and has appeared as guest contributor to The Duran, Fort Russ News, Herland Report, The Ron Paul Institute, and Strategika51
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