...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like it would be incredibly easy for the propaganda to go all-out on "OUR BRAVE FREEDOM-DEFENDING SOLDIERS ARE BEING VICIOUSLY ASSAULTED BY ISLAMIC IRANIAN-STYLE TERRORIST MILITIAS AND WE NEED TO HAVE AN EXTREMELY STRONG RESPONSE" if there was actually appetite for this, so the extremely conspicious lack of real rage about the fact that several US bases are being hit with drones/missiles every week (and saying that soldiers have only been injured and not killed) suggests to me that the United States does not want a war in the Middle East.
The issue is that I just don't think they're in any kind of position for it, and can't be for a pretty long time. The staging of substantial numbers of troops, let alone invasions, take several months to prepare everything for. Sure, they can bomb Iran with planes from their aircraft carriers I guess, but like... then what? Iran has an entire army there trained in asymmetric warfare for this exact scenario, while you have Burger King-eating soldiers whose major battle experience is shooting brown children and dronestriking weddings and then writing books about how it made you kinda sad. I think we're just generally seeing a rapid breakdown in American deterrence projection as their military advantages are mitigated and their stockpiles are depleted by various conflicts, but nobody in the American establishment will obviously ever admit this, so they have to pretend that they can respond when they just cannot, at least not especially meaningfully if you actually want to defeat Iran and their allies and proxies and not just, like, kill a lot of civilians. Gaza is a microcosm of this problem.
America simply does not have a military that can actually win wars, and hasn't for a long time. This isn't an accident, it's a consequence of the worship of the profit motive creating overpriced shitty gizmos because those generate profit, not things that reliably work and can be mass produced easily. Having a military that can't win wars is actually fine a lot of the time though, because you can still a) cause sufficient internal chaos through bombing or paying off terrorist groups to basically cripple that country for a generation or more without requiring a formal military defeat and surrender of that country (Libya, Syria); b) send enough military gear to a vassal country to indefinitely prolong a war at a comparatively low level because you don't care if they win, so much as cause damage to your enemies (Saudi Arabia, Ukraine); or c) use your intelligence networks to cripple countries before you declare war and then act like you pulled off some amazing military victory (Iraq).
Whether the same model of "We can lose this war so long as we do enough damage to the country that they're a non-factor for a while, because us "losing" never means that the United States itself experiences any physical damage because we're on the other side of the planet" can be applied to Iran, I'm not entirely sure, but given Iranian advances in drone and missile technology, it does appear to me that, as I said, American deterrence is steadily melting. Against China however, the US really is fucked, because it's unlikely (at least, it seems to me) that the United States could actually do substantial damage to China via aircraft bombing given advances in air defense technology, and China's abilities to take out American carrier groups. The best they could do is blockading naval supply routes, but China is actively working on mitigating that problem via land routes and agricultural deals with Russia. They would actually have to win that war.
this all assumes that people within the blob know that they can't win a war, but is that true? I would figure that these people are true believers - they really still think the US is invincible, can project power wherever it wants, beat anyone in a war in a few days, etc.
The only way for US planes to hit Mainland China and land again would be B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, either launched from Guam/Occupied Korea/Japan or refueled over the ocean. Those are in limited supply and every plane shot down would be extremely costly. Aircraft carriers can’t get within F-35 range without exposing themselves to carrier killer missiles.
The US are in a position for it. They haven't spent a single missile or bomb on Ukraine, which is what anything in the middle east will amount to, missiles and bombs dropped from fighter jets, helicopters and high altitude craft.
The issue is that they don't want to because they are trying to maintain a deterrent to China, and that deterrent requires a fully armed airforce capable of doing the fully armed response.
If they deplete stocks in the middle east, the calculation for China on Taiwan and the South China Sea completely changes for them. The US realistically believes that given the opportunity China would take it.
Without their full force the US would not be able to do anything about it. It will take 5 years to restock the Ukraine stocks for land war at minimum, that would apply to the airforce stocks if the middle east kicked off. That's what really matters to the US projection of power.