Helena Cobban – Globalities

Syria’s collapse and the global balance

Helena CobbanDecember 13, 2024December 13, 2024Global balance, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above image shows some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel this week.

Over the past 17 days, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia– not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.

The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)

A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)

But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark– and as of now, only dimly predictable– repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.

After the Trump win: The fierce urgency of Palestine in U.S. political life

Helena CobbanNovember 16, 2024November 16, 2024Gaza, Palestinians, U.S. politics

These past days of hearing Trumpworld roll out the President-elect’s expected nominations for positions in the foreign policy/defense space have been harrowing indeed. As human-rights expert Craig Mokhiber remarked about the choice of far-right bully Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the UN:

Other countries send diplomats to serve as UN Ambassadors. The US always sends AIPAC-approved Israel shills. And, this time, one who is also an abrasive, bigoted, far-right clown…

The expected nominations of uber-Zionist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, latter-day “crusade” supporter Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and so on have been equally disturbing. (One possible bright spot was the report of “First Buddy” Elon Musk having met with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, back on Monday.)

Trump is an unstable, idiosyncratic decision-maker. Although most of his prospective nominations are extremely concerning, we still have zero idea of how he will actually wield his power once he returns to the White House January 20. During his first term in office he fairly frequently over-ruled his own cabinet members, or axed them at short notice. It’s also good to recall the number of times he has railed against foreign wars and the costs of overseas bases, etc.

My grandkids and my vote. Go Greens!

Helena CobbanNovember 3, 2024November 3, 2024Climate crisis, Diplomacy, Military-industrial complex, U.S. policy

The news from Gaza continues to be unspeakably disturbing. The UN’s humanitarian agencies haven’t even been able to get enough data to compile their longstanding weekly info-roundup from Gaza. The images, the news that we are able to get all add up to a vile record of a deliberate– sometimes even gleefully pursued– campaign by Israel’s military to destroy the lives and life-supporting infrastructure of the enclave’s whole Palestinian population.

And this genocide is being pursued with the unstinting support (military, financial, political) of my government here in the United States, and other like-minded “Western” governments.

So we have this presidential election going on here this week. For the longest time I was in a complete funk about it. In our political system here, there are only two “plausible” options to vote for. And either of these two candidates will, if elected, most likely bring only continued– or perhaps even exacerbated– misery to the indigenous peoples of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the rest of West Asia. I have long felt unable to vote for either of them.

Hence, the funk.

One of my progeny started needling me about this. “But Mom! Think about how how long women in America fought to get the right to vote and how important voting has always been in our family! Think about your grandchildren and the kind of world we are all building for them!”

Washington’s Israeli Rottweiler: Is it on or off the leash?

Helena CobbanOctober 11, 2024October 11, 2024Uncategorized

In the 40-plus years I’ve been studying the US-Israeli relationship up close, my views of its dynamics have changed (as have the dynamics themselves.) However, one view of the relationship that has lasting validity and some inherent elasticity of its own is to view Israel as a sometimes out-of-control attack dog that over the past few decades has been built and sustained overwhelmingly through the support of– and as perceived longterm investment for– the U.S. military-industrial-governance complex.

But has the Rottweiler now slipped the leash and started to turn on its master?

Some thoughts on today’s perilous situation in West Asia and the world

Helena CobbanOctober 5, 2024October 6, 2024Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Hamas, Israel, Persian Gulf, Qatar, U.S. policy, West Asia

Back in October of last year, I was already writing that Israel, in its reactions to Hamas’s breakout of October 7, was acting in a distinctly unhinged manner. I suppose you could perhaps understand that, given that within just 2-3 hours on that Saturday morning, the Hamas fighters and their allies destroyed the Israeli military’s entire “Southern Command” along with the aura of deterrent invincibility that Israel has counted on since its founding– through acts of extreme violence and ethnic cleansing– back in 1947-48.

It is now clear, however, that (like, I believe many other people) I seriously underestimated the sheer depth of the derangement to which large numbers of Jewish Israelis succumbed on that day, and in which they have been mired ever since. I have only watched a portion of Al-Jazeera’s excellent 80-minute investigation into the extent of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But much of what their team pulled together so cogently there has already been widely known. Not just the deliberate blocking of food and other vital necessities to the beleaguered population 2.3 million Gazans, but also the use of massive (and US-supplied) 1,000-lb and 2,000-lb bombs against urban areas, the deliberate destruction of broad swathes of urban infrastructure, the widespread forcing of Palestinian civilians to act as human shields, the attacks on hospitals, the systematized use of torture in prisons and detention facilities– and also the gleeful self-glorification with which so many Israeli soldiers have share their images of these acts quite freely and proudly on global social media.

At least the Nazis seemed a bit embarrassed by what they were doing inside their concentration and extermination camps. They built high walls around them and worked hard to keep their actions well away from public view. Not so, the very large numbers of Israeli soldiers who seem happy to share the records of their inhumanity very widely… and then seem to suffer no reprimands or disciplining from their superiors. Those superiors, indeed, at many levels of the Israeli military and at some of the highest levels of the government, seem pretty happy to have those acts of brutality widely displayed. I think it is supposed to have a deterrent effect on Israel’s potential rivals or foes. But this blatant brutality also seems designed to signal to Israel’s own domestic public that, “Hey look, we are re-establishing our deterrence! You should all be proud of us!”

…

So the genocide in Gaza and its many attendant brutalities grinds on. And Pres. Joe Biden has never taken the few simple steps it would take to end it. Such as: Simply ending the flow of US arms to Israel. Simply ordering the US military in the region to end its round-the-clock provision of vital operational intel to the Israeli military. Simply going to the UN Security Council and joining (rather than blocking) the global consensus that the conflict in Gaza has to end, right now.

Instead, throughout the past year, he has prevaricated, endlessly. His alleged “Red Lines” against Israeli escalation have simply dissolved, time after time after time. So PM Netanyahu has continued to push his luck and see how far he could go. He indicated to Biden back in spring that he would support the three-phase ceasefire-for-hostages deal that was the on the table. Then he went back to his cabinet and said of course he didn’t support it. (Biden was left hanging out to dry, after even persuading the rest of the Security Council to adopt his plan.)

In early April, Netanyahu and the hawks with which he surrounds himself considerably upped the regionwide ante when they ordered the assassination by air attack of two senior Iranian generals who were located in a diplomatic facility in Damascus, Syria. No U.S. response. So on July 30-31, Netanyahu ordered the killing in Beirut of Hizbullah military chief Fuad Shukr and also the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s over-all political head, Ismail Haniyeh. That, at a time when Biden administration claimed it was still working hard to negotiate the ceasefire-for-hostages deal for Gaza– and his prime negotiating partner in that effort was none other than Haniyeh itself.

What a humiliating position Netanyahu and his cronies had put Biden into. If Biden had wanted to retain any credibility at all for the role of the United States as a competent and trustworthy mediating force, then he should have punished Netanyahu immediately for that deeply provocative act. (See “cut off arms”, etc, above.)

But nothing.

For their part, both Hamas and the Iranians acted with great strategic restraint. Hamas stayed in the ceasefire negotiations and appointed a new Secretary General. The Iranian government said it would respond to the gross July 31 violation of its sovereignty at a time and place of its choosing, but it would hold its response in check for a while so as not to interrupt the (hopefully) continuing effort to secure the Gaza ceasefire.

Then eight days ago on September 28, Netanyahu– while sitting in the UN headquarters in New York, no less– ordered another extremely serious Israeli provocation: the use of a clutch of U.S. bunker buster bombs to demolish four buildings in Beirut underneath which the Israelis had (accurately) assessed that Hizbullah’s secretary-general Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was located.

At that point, the Iranian government, for whom Hizbullah and its very competent long-time head had long been key allies, decided the time for a firm response– though not the complete abandonment of strategic patience– had come.

On Tuesday evening (October 1), the Iranian forces launched a barrage of around 200 ballistic missiles across the intervening areas of Arab lands and targeted them, with remarkable accuracy, on four or five key military installations inside Israel.

The Israeli government, which as I well know exercises very tight censorship over the reporting of any journalists working inside the country, whether local or foreign, tried to downplay the effects and effectiveness of that missile barrage. But numerous Israelis living near the targeted facilities had their cellphone and their social-media accounts at the ready; and they very widely shared both the clips of the missiles raining down on the bases and the sounds of their own amazement and fear that this was happening. Those clips were all over the internet. See some of them, gathered by the WaPo’s Evan Hill, here.

Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah happened to be in Jordan that evening. In the EI livestream on Wednesday he recalled the previous evening he had learned from Al-Jazeera that Iran had just launched its missiles. So he went up to the roof of his family home in Amman:

“We went up on the roof to watch and everyone was outside on their roofs and balconies cheering. And there’s lots of social media showing that people were celebrating all over Jordan, just as they were in Palestine… And it struck me that if this had been during the daytime, we probably would not have seen very much because the sky would have been too bright. And I don’t know if there were specific tactical or technical reasons why Iran carried out the attack after dark. But one clear result of that is that millions of people across the region witnessed it with their own eyes.

“And if that was Iran’s intention to make it visible in such a spectacular way, then it was a really brilliant move from a public relations standpoint.”

He also noted that of the large number of missiles flowing over Amman, he saw only a few attempts by interceptors to stop them. Pres. Biden very speedily got on the air-waves to assure Americans and Israelis that the air-defense operations against the missiles had been very effective, but the evidence from both Jordan and from Israel showed that this was clearly not the case.

—-

Pres. Biden is now caught in a politically fraught trap that is almost wholly Made In Israel. PM Netanyahu has been “playing” him for a sucker for many years now, and most especially since last October. And when Netanyahu and his cabinet undertook teach step in the series of escalatory provocations that they’ve launched since early April, they must have thought that– especially in a presidential election year here in the United States– they “had Biden exactly where they wanted him.”

But over those past few months, too, the government of Iran has shown considerable strategic wisdom. It acted with restraint in the (very limited) response it launched in mid-April to Israel’s killings of its generals in Damascus. It kept the focus tightly on the need to win the ceasefire deal for Gaza.

But that restraint, like the inaction/complicity of Washington in the face of Israel’s many provocations, served merely to encourage Israel’s many successive escalations. Clearly, the Israelis’ killing of Nasrallah was a tipping-point for Tehran. Tehran’s actions in response to it have thus far been impressively focused and strategic:

The missile attacks launched Tuesday evening were impressive in size and capability but were tightly targeted on military facilities– including three key air-bases and the HQ’s of intel/spy agencies.
The very next day, Wednesday, Iran’s president, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, visited Doha, where he had key meetings with the Emir of Qatar, with the Saudi Foreign Minister, and with representatives of other GCC leaders.
Yesterday, Friday, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i delivered the first public sermon he has given for more than four years, assuring the congregation of tens of thousands who attended that Iran was ready for any response.

Within the past two days many voices have been raised in the United States and Israel calling for further, harsher punishment of Iran. Donald Trump has called for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hawkish voices in Israel and the US have called for attacks on Iranian oil facilities. But through their assured and smart regional diplomacy, the Iranians appear for now to have prevented any such escalation– acts that would, if carried out, bring both the global economy and the whole worldwide political balance into extreme jeopardy. (Not to mention the possibility of the bodies of many of the 40,000 members of the US military now strung out throughout West Asia, being brought home in body bags.)

Not a great thing for Pres. Biden and his sidekick Kamala Harris to have happen on the eve of a consequential national election.

I am not privy, of course, to whatever Pres. Biden might have said to Netanyahu and other Israelis in recent days. By Biden’s own (somewhat muddled) telling, he has “been discussing various responses” to the Iranian missile barrage with the Israelis. But the fact that the Iranians have lined up an impressive coalition of Arab parties to stand with them in the present face-off certainly constrains whatever Washington or Tel Aviv might be able to do. (As it very likely constrained whatever their two militaries were able to do to try to intercept the Iranian missiles back on Tuesday night.)

The skimpy nature of the international support Biden thought he could count was also indicated when he mumbled something about “the G7” all supporting his actions on Iran– though the G7 is supposed to be only an economic-affairs bloc… In the current international environment, and in the face of repeated, serious Israeli provocations, not to mention genocide and war-crimes, it seems that not even NATO could agree to line up behind the US-Israel alliance.

For their part, of course, the Chinese must be quietly congratulating themselves on having pulled off a significant Saudi-Iranian rapprochement in March last year; and Beijing, Moscow, and many other non-NATO powers must have notice that the United States’ global standing has taken such a steep nose-dive throughout the past year…

—-

My current expectation, then, is for no large-scale US or Israeli retaliation against Iran within the immediate future. (I may be wrong. I hope not.) But meantime, the Israeli military will be redoubling its efforts to do what it knows best, which is genocide, genocide, genocide. And not just in Gaza, but also now in Lebanon to a very significant degree, and also in the West Bank.

The onset of winter will be particularly harsh for the barely surviving Palestinian population of Gaza. But so long as Washington continues to dominate the whole world system, then those families and amazing people will continue to be abandoned to their fate.

Israel’s deadly escalations in Lebanon & their background

Helena CobbanSeptember 23, 2024September 23, 2024Israel, Lebanon

There is so much to be said about the horrrendous escalations that Netanyahu’s government and military have been undertaking in Lebanon since the grotesque, booby-trapped pager attack they launched September 17. First, my deepest condolences to all those families, individuals, and communities devastated by these escalations. (Those impacted by them do include many Israelis caught in Hizbullah’s blowback to Netanyahu’s escalations. But the carnage on the Lebanese side thus far seems to have been far, far more serious and widespread.)

Prior to September 17, there was a precarious balance of deterrent terror between Israel and Hizbullah– one that the Hizb had established back in 2006 when it successfully and speedily cleaned the Israeli military’s clock as the outcome of Israel’s last major escalation in Lebanon. But clearly, in the lead-up to last week’s “pager attack” and the other escalations that speedily followed it, Netanyahu had taken a decision to majorly upset that deterrent balance.

Sec0nd, it’s worth noting that Netanyahu’s decision(s) to escalate at this point came in the context of the political battles he has been fighting both at home, and internationally– primarily to avoid being held accountable for the numerous, very serious domestic-political and laws-of-war violations for which he is responsible.

Also worth noting: the ease with which Netanyahu has brushed aside– in Lebanon as in Gaza– any attempt by Joe Biden to be even a minimally effective “mediator” in these conflicts.

American “mediation” is now seen worldwide as a cracked and empty vessel.

…Since people in the “West” do not know much about Hizbullah except what they are told by the corporate media, I thought it worthwhile to dig back through some of the books on the topic — and some of my own writings on the topic–that I’ve found useful over the years.

Israeli society, institutions continue to implode

Helena CobbanAugust 3, 2024August 3, 2024Gaza, Global balance, Israel, West Asia

Just quickly, here are some of my thoughts on the implosion of key Israeli institutions, and to some extent of Jewish-Israeli society itself, that has recently been unfolding at near-warp speed:

On Monday we had the showdown at two military bases in Israel between Israel’s military police and rightwing protesters incensed that the MPs had detained some of the grunts who’d been guarding Israeli prisoners there, on grounds that the guards had committed gross acts of cruelty against the detainees, including rape. (The “right to rape” protesters, some of whom are shown above, were joined and egged on by their backers from within both the Netanyahu government and the serving military.)
On the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, we had the Israeli military/spy services undertaking two highly provocative assassinations– of Hizbullah military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut and of Hamas’s over-all political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
On Wednesday, we had the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk publicly releasing the crucial report on the abuses Israel has been committing against the thousands of Palestinians it has detained– from Gaza, the West Bank, and from inside Israel– since October 7. (One can surmise that it had been an earlier briefing on those findings to the Israeli military chiefs that had led to them trying to rein in some of the worst abuses, through the actions they tried to undertake on Monday.)
On Thursday and Friday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that, in response to the tensions in West Asia that Israel’s assassinations had sparked, it would be sending large new naval and other forces to the region and the bodies of water abutting it…

Israel’s ever-wily PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been working overtime to try to direct attention away from the schisms that are visibly opening up between, for example, his country’s military leadership and its police, or between those same military leaders and himself as PM. This “Wag the Dog” motivation for him– working in close coordination, of course, with the military leadership that he still so deeply distrusts– to authorize the launching on Tuesday night of the two highly escalatory attacks against Arab leaders in distant capitals, is certainly one explanation for why he/they launched them. (Though perhaps not a complete explanation.)

USA takes sledgehammer to international law

Helena CobbanJuly 25, 2024July 26, 2024Diplomacy, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, U.S. policy, Uncategorized, United Nations3 Comments

The great artist Michaelangelo completed his “David” and some other seminal works before he turned 30. Imagine if, a few decades later, he had carried a sledgehammer along to where “David” stood in Florence’s most famous public square, and set about smashing his masterpiece to pieces…

That is, roughly, analogous to the story of what the U.S. government has been doing in recent years– and more intensively, over recent months– to the whole structure of international law that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt so painstakingly crafted at the end of World War 2.

The past seven days have seen two momentous events. On July 19, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the highest court in the whole world, adjudicating only conflicts between states, not individuals, issued a landmark judgment to the effect that, inter alia:

Chaos, collusion, and catastrophe: Biden and the genocide in Gaza

Helena CobbanJuly 6, 2024July 6, 2024Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Palestinians, U.S. policy2 Comments

Pres. Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate sent waves of horror through all supporters of the U.S. Democratic Party and spurred a gathering wave of Democratic activists at all levels desperate to find a way to replace him at the head of the party ticket in the upcoming election. After the debate, numerous groups of other influential Biden supporters including big political donors and several of the “Western” allies who interacted with him at last month’s G-7 summit in Italy came forward to say that recently many of them had also seen signs of a marked decline in his cognitive functioning.

It is now increasingly clear that, as he has been (allegedly?) working to end the intense, genocidal crisis in Gaza, Biden has been operating in a mental cloud cuckoo-land of his own creation, untethered from any ability to comprehend either what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians in Gaza or– more crucially– the fairly simple steps that he could take to end the crisis by insisting on Israeli compliance with the terms of the 3-phase ceasefire+hostage deal that has clearly been attainable since March or April.

The most charitable thing one can say about Biden’s performance regarding the genocide in Gaza is that he has been operationally AWOL from being able to run U.S. policy in response to the crisis, and that Washington’s very muddled actions and inactions regarding the crisis have instead been the result of ad-hoc decisions taken by his– extremely unqualified– staffers. Those would be primarily his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and his National security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Neither of those men has any longstanding basis of expertise, wisdom, or judgment that is independent of the role they have both played for the overwhelming bulk of their careers, as staff members for a Joe Biden chronically seeking re-election, whether in the Senate, in the Vice President’s office– or now in the White House: yes, the very White House that is now in such deep chaos.

Israel’s path to defeat: The implications

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2024June 23, 2024Gaza, Global balance, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians, West Asia6 Comments

The image above is a still from footage a Hizbullah drone recently shot of a key Israeli naval base in Haifa

Today, nearly nine months into Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the evidence is mounting that the country’s political-military leadership is on a path to serious defeat not only in Gaza but also more broadly in its decades-long contest against West Asia’s Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.” This fact is only just starting to receive some glimmers of recognition in the corporate media in the West. (Interestingly, one of the few to give it any public acknowledgment at all has been lifelong Zionist apologist Tom Friedman, who did so in some key portions of this June 18 column. Most of the other Zionist apologists who are deeply embedded in the US elite are still publicly spinning fairy tales of “an imminent defeat for Hamas.”)

The defeat towards which the Israeli leadership is currently hurtling is, as I noted, not only in Gaza, where numerous, apparently well-coordinated, cells of armed resisters have been making smart use of the rubble to which the Israeli military has reduced most of the Strip’s buildings, as well as their own tunnels, to launch well-prepared and often lethal attacks on Israel’s tanks, APCs, and snipers across the length and breadth of the Strip… and where Israel’s grotesquely genocidal attacks and other policies have notably failed to turn the population against Hamas. (Find more on the evidence for that key political fact, below.) But this defeat looms also in the ever-tense, but until now somewhat controlled, confrontation Israeli forces have been engaged in in the North, against Hizbullah fighters who are considerably more lethally armed than the Hamas fighters of Gaza and who have continued to upgrade their capabilities almost continuously in the 18 years since they last inflicted a decisive defeat on Israel’s military, in summer 2006.