Tag Archives: USA

NATO and the USA by Edward Horgan

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Introduction: Edward Horgan is an inveterate letter writer and part of the art of letter writing is being succinct and on the ball. We carry here a letter written, and published, in early April concerning NATO:

“It would benefit humanity if Trump were to pull out of NATO.

US President Trump has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. If he does so, this will be one of his very few actions as President that would benefit humanity. However, he is unlikely to follow through on this threat, and his successor would likely reverse any such decision. NATO should have been disbanded shortly after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. NATO was founded in 1949 the same year that the USSR developed its first nuclear weapon, and it claims that it defended western Europe during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons have terrorised all of humanity since the US first used them in its double-tap war crime nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons, humanity has never been more threatened with extinction.

In the meantime, the US has misused NATO as the equivalent of a global criminal protection racket in its series of resource wars of aggression, beginning with the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 in contravention of the UN Charter and of NATO’s own Charter. These wars have killed millions of people, especially women and children, wreaked havoc with the environment and left multiple countries in chaos.

Trump is now accusing his erstwhile ‘allies’ of failing to support the illegal US/Israeli attacks on Iran and elsewhere, while at the same time threatening to annex NATO member Canada and Denmark’s Greenland territory. Trump is annoyed because three large NATO members, France, Spain and Italy have imposed severe restrictions on US military use of their airports or overfly their territories. Neutral Switzerland and Austria have done likewise.

Our Irish Government, while claiming to be neutral, is recklessly allowing aircraft associated with the US military to use Shannon airport and fly through Irish airspace, thereby being complicit in genocide and war crimes. It is failing to support the UN and the proper rule of international laws. Basic morality should ensure that preventing the killing of hundreds of thousands of children is prioritised over Irish economic interests.”

Editorials: Shannon and Iran, Food security and sovereignty

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Shannon Airport and Iran

Lies and excuses

Both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Helen McEntee, have seen it necessary to state that Shannon Airport is not being used by the USA in relation to the USA and Israel’s war on Iran. Perhaps this is so. But we do not actually know since the Irish state refuses to search US planes at Shannon, accepting assurances from a state which is headed by a Liar in Chief. In any case Shannon is still being used as a de facto US military base and the USA in regard to its military policies is clearly a rogue state – especially so under President Trump but under most other presidents too. Ireland has not even had the courage of Spain – a NATO member – in banning US military flights and use of bases and this says something clear about Ireland’s supposed neutrality.

The Irish state is supporting a regime which kills – murders – with impunity. This is disgraceful from any moral or ethical standpoint and obviously a negation of neutrality. And still the state makes excuses and accepts lies, and lies itself. And the USA would not use Shannon unless it was advantageous to its enormous global military empire. Transporting troops is an essential part of any military engagement and the fact of whether there is or is not military equipment being transported as well does not take from the facilitation of war by allowing troops to pass through.

Government inaction is even more bizarre given Helen McEntee’s and Micheál Martin’s restrained but implicit criticism of US policies in the Middle East. Helen McEntee even stated that she agreed with President Connolly’s assessment of recent events in the Middle east as a breach of international law. She also stated “I am deeply concerned that the US and Israel have decided to launch widespread armed conflict against Iran at this time.” Micheál Martin said that Ireland always believed that conflict should be resolved through diplomacy and negotiation, in line with the UN Charter and international law. However it is cowardice that neither would explicitly say USA actions were illegal or take action over Shannon.

Helen McEntee has also said that the Government has “no reason to believe” the US is using Irish airspace as part of its operations linked to the war in Iran – something which they actually have no way of knowing. Micheál Martin said similar things to his Minister for Foreign Affairs but stated that false claims about Shannon would damage Shannon airport itself. This is incredible. His concern about damage to Shannon shows no concern about ‘damage’ – obliteration – to those on the receiving end of US warmaking. He did admit that it was difficult to investigate if the USA was breaking the rules – another incredible statement because if he and the government had the courage they could routinely search all planes at Shannon which might be carrying weaponry. This is aside from the fact that allowing the transmission of troops is also breaking Irish neutrality.

In relation to all of this Niamh Ní Bhriain, writing in the Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41811128.html made the powerful point that “This failure to call out blatant violations of international law, and name those responsible for them, highlights precisely why we cannot trust the Government to decide on overseas troop deployment, and underscores why we must protect the Triple Lock. If the Government can’t say that a war is illegal, how can it decide whether to deploy troops to it?”

Meanwhile Belfast International Airport at Aldergrove (15 miles from Belfast to the west) is used freely by UK and US militaries with US flights refuelling there which go directly to the Gulf, presumably with war supplies. Aldergrove is thus directly complicit in the US-Israeli onslaught on Iran and the atrocities which have taken place as part of that. As the North is part of the United Kingdom which belongs to NATO, there are no legal grounds to object beyond facilitating wars illegal under international law – but there are huge ethical and moral grounds to do so.

In relation to the USA and Israeli war on Iran (and by the latter on Lebanon) more generally it is clear that US-Iranian negotiations were on the cusp of success, or at least a good chance of it, when Trump decided to bomb Iran into hell. International observers have stated as much. Presumably Trump, emboldened by his ‘success’ (from his point of view) in Venezuela, thought a couple of days bombing would overthrow the theocratic regime in Iran; he clearly wasn’t listening to advice, including from Gulf states. He knew best, as always. But military attacks tend to strengthen the regime in a country being attacked. Another factor is presumably that the US government decided to back Israeli bombing which was going to happen anyway. The environmental costs of war are also extremely severe, an issue of no concern to Trump but another nail in the coffin of a stable climate.

Whether Donald Trump will have a TACO moment (Trump Always Chickens Out) or will continue to exacerbate the complete mess he has got the region and the world into remains to be seen. Saving face may be his primary objective at this stage. The USA projects itself as a world peacekeeper when historically it has been a warmaker. Western states need to cotton on to this and no more so than a supposedly neutral state on the western extremity of the continent of Europe. Meanwhile everyone suffers from the economic fallout of the war, and poor people and countries most of all. The repercussions of this astoundingly stupid war have only just begun, most drastically for the families of those killed and for the displaced in Lebanon and Iran.

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Food security and sovereignty

The related issues of food security and food sovereignty tend to trundle on in the background, raised and discussed by groups like Afri, Feasta and some organic growers or educators but never or seldom reaching mainstream concern, even when a war, such as the current USA-Israel onslaught on Iran, disrupts the global economy. However you do not need to be a doomsday merchant to have concern in this whole area. Food security is just that, being secure in your food supply with adequate quality and nutrition. Food sovereignty is having control of your food growing, supply and distribution and not being dependent on outside corporations or multinationals who can turn the screw on you as soon as bid you the time of day. While these are major issues in poor countries (seed sovereignty was saved in Kenya with a contribution to that made by Clare O’Grady Walshe) this is also an urgent issue for Ireland.

The world has – just – avoided nuclear war which would herald a nuclear winter and possibly the starvation of most of the people on the globe. If that particular apocalypse comes about we are pretty much all doomed. However there are all sorts of lesser scenarios where food chains are at risk. One of these is clearly regional warfare not escalating to nuclear but which nevertheless manages to cause major disruption – the Iran war is an example of the kind of thing possible. Global heating will affect many, primarily poor, countries in their food production and it is hard to know what the repercussions will be. There are all sorts of unexpected circumstances which can, and will, arise, including natural disasters which may affect our ‘bread’ basket. And given the likely food crisis arising from global heating, as crops become impossible to grow though excessive heat and insufficient moisture, it is incumbent on us to be proactive in providing more, varied, food ourselves in an ecological and sustainable way.

Ireland exports food but it is mainly meat and dairy products. We are highly dependent on food imports for much of our diet. We might be all right for a bacon and cabbage diet (and that bacon may come from intensive factory-farming) but for most of what we eat today we are dependent on international trade, and most of that on a ‘just in time’ basis – meaning there are no stocks to fall back on. It is also true that a vegan or vegetarian diet, or at least a low meat consumption one, is an important contribution to avoiding global heating. Of course it may be more efficient ecologically for some crops to be grown in warmer countries than Ireland but these are at risk in crisis situations, and the supply of local seasonal food for our diet is the most sensible option.

Encouraging citizens to grow their own food is part of an appropriate response, and the 2024 law to have local councils provide community garden and allotment spaces in the Republic is a good one (all councils are obliged to be active in working on this and Ireland lags way behind other European countries in provision). The respective governments should be seeing what they can do to encourage responsible and diverse agriculture – not the intensive animal variety which has led, for example, to the destruction of Lough Neagh (still not being sorted out). But there could also be a lot more imagination applied, for example in public planting of trees to include a substantial number of fruit trees – birds and insects will benefit from these even if we humans do not. Education in sustainable and organic horticulture is never more needed,

This is all before we even broach the topic of Ultra Processed Foods, bad for us and often bad for the environment. Exercising food sovereignty and denying the power of large multinationals to control food and thereby control people’s (ill) health and livelihoods will be an ongoing struggle.

We live in a very uncertain world. We may wish for stability but we are unlikely to find it, and global heating will disrupt a huge amount of what we have previously taken for granted. We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet in terms of (forced) migration. We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet in terms of disruption to food production and food supplies. We would be wise to plan ahead while we can so that we are in a better place to ride out the coming storms – and not, as a rich country, be taking the food that belongs on poor people’s plates elsewhere if and when food supplies dry up.

Editorial: USA, rogue state extraordinaire

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We have previously disputed and tried to debunk the common western idea that, prior to Donald Trump becoming president of the USA that there was such a thing as a just, liberal post-World War II ‘world order’. This was a US and western fiction. Biden and Obama used drone or other attacks to kill who they wanted. The USA – and others such as the UK – helped destabilise Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through their attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Going back a generation or two, the USA killed many millions in Vietnam and Cambodia for absolutely no logical purpose and with no positive result except its own perceived interests.

Any analysis of the history of the USA has to conclude that while its foundation was ‘anti-colonialist’, its establishment in pushing aside and often exterminating the first nations, and its actions against Mexico, when expanding its boundaries was undoubtedly imperialist. Now we are again told, by the US State Department, that “This is OUR hemisphere” after the attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. This was not the way to bring human rights to Venezuela. And the USA is not ‘America’.

While the attack on Venezuela was limited, with perhaps forty people killed, the idea that one country can intervene where it likes in its own interests and force a country to act as dictated to is extremely dangerous – the idea that it was to control drugs supply if a fictional fig leaf and there were many other ways to do that. The question is of course – who will be next? If the cowardly western nations with their supposed high minded ideals fail to condemn Trump then the Donald will conclude that he can act with impunity, certainly in his ‘own’ hemisphere but elsewhere as well – Africa, the Middle East, who knows.

It is ironic, though partly based on his own musings, that Trump was seen initially as an ‘isolationist’ president. With failures at home on the cost of living, for example, he may have turned to foreign military ventures as a way to distract and show his power. The problem is not just what he has done and may do but what Putin and Xi may conclude from such events. If one military superpower, admittedly the pre-eminent one, can act like this, why should Russia and China restrain themselves from acting accordingly? The USA is not the only rogue superpower, it seems to go with the territory. The fact the world is looking at a possible military takeover of Greenland by the USA is evidence of current international lawlessness and dangers.

Imperialism always has its self justifications and often there is some truth in them. The British Raj brought a railway system to India, essential for movement of goods and people, but it did so to enable control and its economic gain. Maduro has been a brutal tyrant who needed replaced along with his regime – but do we really think the USA was acting out of the goodness of its heart to control drugs and liberate the people of Venezuela? The USA likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman but it is a world bully. And what the outcome will be in Venezuela is far from certain beyond suborning itself to the demands of the US president; will the people be any freer or less poor and the country more democratic? The answer to these questions is ‘currently unlikely’.

Ireland is heavily dependent economically on US multinationals and investment. That does not mean it should not take action – it means it is morally obliged to do so. The least it can do is express strong disagreement with the US action as well as ban the US military from the use of Shannon Airport (or anywhere else in the Republic) to avoid actively facilitating US military control and further rogue actions around the world. Moral cowardice is too weak a term to apply to Irish governments over the last few decades in regard to Shannon; it is reprehensible political failure of the worst kind to support such a violent, rogue state as the USA. Irish inaction on this is woefully shameful especially when most citizens want to see Ireland playing a positive, neutral role in world affairs rather than supporting militaristic ventures by a country which acts in such a destructive way.

However there is another way in which governments and often people in Ireland and Europe are avoiding what is really happening in the world and especially in Europe itself. The drift to armed conflict with Russia is like the drift into the First World War. There is a massive lack of understanding of conflict and how it develops – and a massive lack of understanding of how conflict can be de-escalated without perpetuating injustice or simply acquiescing to might-is-right approaches. Western Europe seems intent on continually adding fuel to the fire – and the Irish government is now a fellow traveller with that approach.

Of course there are dangers emanating from Russia but many of those dangers come from western European approaches and responses to that country and its brutal and autocratic leader – whose personal emergence came not only through the re-emergence of political patterns in Russia but also western approaches to that country at and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is cruelly ironic that with all our 21st century knowledge of science, technology, and some human sciences, we as a world know so little about creating a peaceful world through creative means of dealing with conflict. As with global heating, closing our eyes and hoping the issue will go away can be, literally, fatal. We have the ready means to destroy what civilisation we have and yet we seem content to tread the same weary path to self-destruction. Homo ‘sapiens’ may be a misnomer.

The greeting to wish people a ‘peaceful New Year’ seems both wildly appropriate and inappropriate when we find ourselves where are are now. We do have the means, through nonviolence and creative approaches to conflict and global heating, to deal with the big issues but what we need are the political will and direction to take the path to peace and not the path to oblivion. As peace, green and human rights activists we can do what we can but we need to have a larger, wider movement with national-cultural support and governments that look, listen and learn. l

Readings in Nonviolence: Leaks reveal reality behind U.S. propaganda in Ukraine

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Introduction

In ‘the West’ we are fed a very distorted picture of the war in Ukraine – not as distorted as in Russia but very partisan and partial nevertheless. Truth may not always be the first casualty of war but it is certainly an early casualty, indeed it can be discarded well before hostilities begin. If we are not rooting for Putin then we should not be biding with Biden either.

This article by well known US peace activist Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies tries to look behind the headlines and between the propaganda lines at some of the dreadful reality of what is taking place and what the USA is up to. It does not however go into whether the USA is using the Ukraine war as a way to attempt the isolation of Russia and undermine its power as part of geopolitical one upmanship. Of course the USA may support Ukrainian freedom from Russian control but what else is going on?

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By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies – (TRANSCEND Media Service)

The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”

What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.

The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of the promising peace negotiations it blocked in April 2022.

We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake, in which the Biden administration capitulated to the warmongering, since-disgraced U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that current U.S. policy is compounding that mistake at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives and the destruction of even more of their country.

In most wars, while the warring parties strenuously suppress the reporting of civilian casualties for which they are responsible, professional militaries generally treat accurate reporting of their own military casualties as a basic responsibility. But in the virulent propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, all sides have treated military casualty figures as fair game, systematically exaggerating enemy casualties and understating their own.

Publicly available U.S. estimates have supported the idea that many more Russians are being killed than Ukrainians, deliberately skewing public perceptions to support the notion that Ukraine can somehow win the war, as long as we just keep sending more weapons.

The leaked documents provide internal U.S. military intelligence assessments of casualties on both sides. But different documents, and different copies of the documents circulating online, show conflicting numbers, so the propaganda war rages on despite the leak.

The most detailed assessment of attrition rates of troops says explicitly that U.S. military intelligence has “low confidence” in the attrition rates it cites. It attributes that partly to “potential bias” in Ukraine’s information sharing, and notes that casualty assessments “fluctuate according to the source.”

So, despite denials by the Pentagon, a document that shows a higher death toll on the Ukrainian side may be correct, since it has been widely reported that Russia has been firing several times the number of artillery shells as Ukraine, in a bloody war of attrition in which artillery appears to be the main instrument of death. Altogether, some of the documents estimate a total death toll on both sides approaching 100,000 and total casualties, killed and wounded, of up to 350,000.

Another document reveals that, after using up the stocks sent by NATO countries, Ukraine is running out of missiles for the S-300 and BUK systems that make up 89% of its air defences. By May or June, Ukraine will therefore be vulnerable, for the first time, to the full strength of the Russian air force, which has until now been limited mainly to long-range missile strikes and drone attacks.

Recent Western arms shipments have been justified to the public by predictions that Ukraine will soon be able to launch new counter-offensives to take back territory from Russia. Twelve brigades, or up to 60,000 troops, were assembled to train on newly delivered Western tanks for this “spring offensive,” with three brigades in Ukraine and nine more in Poland, Romania and Slovenia.

But a leaked document from the end of February reveals that the nine brigades being equipped and trained abroad had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15% trained. Meanwhile, Ukraine faced a stark choice to either send reinforcements to Bakhmut or withdraw from the town entirely, and it chose to sacrifice some of its “spring offensive” forces to prevent the imminent fall of Bakhmut.

Ever since the U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbas in 2015, and while it has been training them in other countries since the Russian invasion, NATO has provided six-month training courses to bring Ukraine’s forces up to basic NATO standards. On this basis, it appears that many of the forces being assembled for the “spring offensive” would not be fully trained and equipped before July or August.

But another document says the offensive will begin around April 30th, meaning that many troops may be thrown into combat less than fully trained, by NATO standards, even as they have to contend with more severe shortages of ammunition and a whole new scale of Russian airstrikes. The incredibly bloody fighting that has already decimated Ukrainian forces will surely be even more brutal than before.

The leaked documents conclude that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial gains.

The documents also reveal serious deficiencies on the Russian side, deficiencies revealed by the failure of their winter offensive to take much ground. The fighting in Bakhmut has raged on for months, leaving thousands of fallen soldiers on both sides and a burned out city still not 100% controlled by Russia.

The inability of either side to decisively defeat the other in the ruins of Bakhmut and other front-line towns in Donbas is why one of the most important documents predicted that the war was locked in a “grinding campaign of attrition” and was “likely heading toward a stalemate.”

Adding to the concerns about where this conflict is headed is the revelation in the leaked documents about the presence of 97 special forces from NATO countries, including from the U.K. and the U.S. This is in addition to previous reports about the presence of CIA personnel, trainers and Pentagon contractors, and the unexplained deployment of 20,000 troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Brigades near the border between Poland and Ukraine.

Worried about the ever-increasing direct U.S. military involvement, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has introduced a Privileged Resolution of Inquiry to force President Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military personnel inside Ukraine and precise U.S. plans to assist Ukraine militarily.

We can’t help wondering what President Biden’s plan could be, or if he even has one. But it turns out that we’re not alone. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a “total breakdown” between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community.

Hersh’s sources describe a pattern that echoes the use of fabricated and unvetted intelligence to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan are by-passing regular intelligence analysis and procedures and running the Ukraine War as their own private fiefdom. They reportedly smear all criticism of President Zelenskyy as “pro-Putin,” and leave U.S. intelligence agencies out in the cold trying to understand a policy that makes no sense to them.

What U.S. intelligence officials know, but the White House is doggedly ignoring, is that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, top Ukrainian officials running this endemically corrupt country are making fortunes skimming money from the over $100 billion in aid and weapons that America has sent them.

According to Hersh’s report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.

Hersh writes that, in January 2023, after the CIA heard from Ukrainian generals that they were angry with Zelenskyy for taking a larger share of the rake-off from these schemes than his generals, CIA Director William Burns went to Kyiv to meet with him. Burns allegedly told Zelenskyy he was taking too much of the “skim money,” and handed him a list of 35 generals and senior officials the CIA knew were involved in this corrupt scheme.

Zelenskyy fired about ten of those officials, but failed to alter his own behavior. Hersh’s sources tell him that the White House’s lack of interest in doing anything about these goings-on is a major factor in the breakdown of trust between the White House and the intelligence community.

First-hand reporting from inside Ukraine by New Cold War has described the same systematic pyramid of corruption as Hersh. A member of parliament, formerly in Zelenskyy’s party, told New Cold War that Zelenskyy and other officials skimmed 170 million euros from money that was supposed to pay for Bulgarian artillery shells.

The corruption reportedly extends to bribes to avoid conscription. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel was told by a military recruitment office that it could get the son of one of its writers released from the front line in Bakhmut and sent out of the country for $32,000.

As has happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the wars the United States has been involved in for many decades, the longer the war goes on, the more the web of corruption, lies and distortions unravels.

The torpedoing of peace talks, the Nord Stream sabotage, the hiding of corruption, the politicization of casualty figures, and the suppressed history of broken promises and prescient warnings about the danger of NATO expansion are all examples of how our leaders have distorted the truth to shore up U.S. public support for perpetuating an unwinnable war that is killing a generation of young Ukrainians.

These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and the United States can amass wealth and power.

The only way this will stop is if more and more people get active in opposing those companies and individuals that profit from war – who Pope Francis calls the Merchants of Death – and boot out the politicians who do their bidding, before they make an even more fatal misstep and start a nuclear war.

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lTaken from https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/04/leaks-reveal-reality-behind-u-s-propaganda-in-ukraine/

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, and a researcher with CODEPINK. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of “War in Ukraine: Making sense of a senseless conflict”, OR Books, November 2022. The CODEPINK website is at https://www.codepink.org/ A photo of Medea Benjamin speaking at the 2018 Dublin conference on US/NATO bases appears at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/45250495004/in/photolist-2bWCBEm

Editorials: Forever war, A notion once again

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Perpetual, forever war

The analysis seems to be that Vladimir Putin is settling in for a long haul on the war in Ukraine, a ‘forever war’, see e.g https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/28/putin-prepares-russia-for-forever-war-with-west-as-ukraine-invasion-stalls?CMP=share_btn_link However, given his control of the media and the lack of any rights for citizens, this is not too bad an outcome for him. Of course he would have preferred a blitzkrieg which would have had his soldiers proudly promenading through Kyiv after a week or two – as many expected to do – but that did not happen. Instead, making an unvirtue of necessity, he can use the rhetoric of ‘national survival’ as a means to justify repression and uber-nationalism. As long as oil revenues don’t disappear he can certainly try to ride the storm, and his efforts at oil market diversification are bearing fruit, or should we say dollars, even if western sanctions are biting.

But Putin is a late comer to the concept of ‘forever war’, something which the USA and its NATO allies have been practising for years. What was ‘the war on terror’ if not a justification for ‘forever war’? One difference is that ‘in the west’ the mass sacrifice of soldiers is unacceptable and the alternative used is bombing the hell out of places and using remote warfare that does not require your own side to be lambs to the slaughter. Of course drone and missile use is now an integral part of warfare everywhere but the massive death toll of Russian (including Wagner) soldiers would not be contemplated in the west because there would be uproar and the upturning of governmental tables. Russia may have lost more than twice the total number of US soldiers killed in the whole of the Vietnam war, plus many seriously wounded.

Why are there 800 or more US military bases around the world? The US may see itself as the world’s policeman but that is a self justification for throwing its weight about. What were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq about? If they were about ‘democracy’ and ‘human and women’s rights’ then a very different course of action would have been followed, both in not going to war and, if they did, policies afterwards. And so far as 9/11 is concerned if they were going to attack anyone it should have been their repressive and violent ally, Saudi Arabia. US interests come first, and last, in its foreign policy, wars and warmaking.

The EU is part of this militarisation too. Its commitment to developing the arms trade, and funding of same, is a crying shame or should we say crime against humanity. Its work on the gradual evolution of an EU army is the development of an army for a superpower. It is increasingly becoming the European wing of NATO. It may all be dressed up in fancy language, and the threat of Russia currently used to justify it (but it was happening well, well before any Russian treat to Ukraine) but if NATO had not expanded into eastern Europe (as promised to Russia at the time of the fall of communism) then there almost certainly would not have been any Russian threat – or if the anti-communist NATO had itself disbanded. That and a policy of fair dos for Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine, through implementation of the Minsk agreements, would almost certainly have prevented the current war. And once the war started ‘the west’, including blustering Boris, vetoed any serious talks with Russia.

The more armaments are developed and the higher the expenditure on the military, the more insecure the world will be, and the risks of nuclear war have certainly not gone away, they have just been waiting in the wings. The needs of the world, for economic justice worldwide and the elimination of the armageddon of global warming, are so great that we are struggling for the wrong things. Insecurity grows from the barrel of a gun. A secure world is where there is economic justice and climate security (insofar as we can possibly achieve that now); we need human security not military insecurity.

Instead we are offered the chimera of forever war. It is not dissimilar to a version of George Orwell’s 1984. And that is a terrible place to exist. Maybe enough of us do love the Big Brother of US, NATO, EU and Russian militarism (respectively) to enable the MADness (‘Mutually Assured Destruction’) to continue. But some of us will resist and point to a better future without the military monoliths, their threats to humanity and their current assault on economic and ecological progress through eating scarce financial and other resources and adding considerably to global warming.

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Northern Ireland

“A notion once again”

Northern Ireland is still a very unsettled place, that should be obvious. Even the concept of what is democracy continues to be up for grabs; harder line unionists see the Northern Ireland Protocol as an assault on their Britishness while most of the rest (an arithmetic majority) want the return of devolved government to deal with the dire problems heaped up and getting worse. Educational and health outcome are rather better in the Republic than the North for example (see e.g. David McWilliams in The Irish Times 4/3/23).

Some Northern Ireland unionists still want to be the tail wagging the UK dog. That position passed once Boris Johnson won a stomping parliamentary majority using his bluster and lies and Tory dependence on the DUP bloc at Westminster was no more. It is clear from the relatively easy passage for Rishi Sunak of the so-called Windsor Framework that Northern Ireland issues and unionist angst and anger is about as important as the issue of how many angels can dance on a pin head – first of all it does not rate as an issue, and if it did then it is not considered important in the overall British context. This is difficult for unionists in a variety of ways because it is obvious that other British interests (e.g. getting Brexit done sufficiently to have reasonable relations with the EU) trump their concerns.

A poll in the Belfast Telegraph 10/3/23 showed 67% of people in the North back the Windsor Framework deal but only 16% of DUP voters – and 73% of DUP voters proclaim they are opposed to it. How Jeffrey Donaldson and the DUP leadership will square that circle, with Jim Allister of the TUV breathing down their neck (just as the DUP breathed down the neck of the Ulster Unionist Party) remains to be seen. Now 54% of unionists as a whole are recorded as wanting the DUP to stay out of the Assembly and Executive until further changes are made or the deal is torn up. The DUP committee of senior party figures set up by Donaldson to consider what to do has reported but there is no smoke of any kind emanating yet on the matter. The DUP practised an ‘in, out and shake it all about’ approach after the Good Friday Agreement which served their interests well; they might try something similar again although there is arguably less wriggle room now.

Of course the return of the Assembly and Executive at Stormont would be the start of the next crisis, whatever that will be, because as night follows day the crises will continue. But the biggest crisis is simply the inability of the system to make decisions and plan in a reasonable manner; some of this may be inherent in the primary division in Northern Ireland but some is a result of the current consociational system in place. Obviously ending the ability of one party to block the system functioning would be progress but the use of more advanced and inclusive voting, such as the Modified Borda Count, could facilitate more effective, collective decisions.

A recent poll on the ‘middle ground’ of those who proclaim to be non-nationalists and non-unionists showed that in relation to the border a considerable majority would currently vote to stay part of the UK (53% would stay in the UK, only 19% opt for Irish unity, Belfast Telegraph 4/3/23). All this means that it is currently not so so much the possibility of ‘a nation once again’ in the near future as only a notion (of a nation) once again. If it is this ‘middle ground’ who will decide the constitutional status in the event of a referendum (given the relative balance between nationalists and unionists), unionists should take this to heart in the sense of relaxing a bit about the immediate future, while Sinn Féin pushing for a border poll is pointless posturing.

However this current balance within the ‘middle ground’ could change over the medium term particularly if the Republic had a coherent plan on unification and what it would mean which shows respect for all the people of the North, and an economic plan which showed how the current British exchequer subsidy to the North would be replaced. The Irish government’s refusal to even look at the topic might be for good reasons (avoiding stoking conflict in the North) but is unhelpful on a wider level since what would or could be in a united Ireland is subject to wildly fluctuating interpretations. At the moment people are comparing the reality they know with an indefinable non-entity.

It has also been very noticeable in recent weeks that loyalist paramilitarism and feuding haven’t gone away. While small republican paramilitary groups primarily pose a threat to the police and ‘security forces’ (though also to civilians as in what tragically happened to Lyra McKee), loyalist paramilitaries at the moment are mainly a threat to the communities where they exist and who they purport to serve, as well as themselves. In addition to dealing in drugs many deal in the dregs of Troubles sectarianism.

The intelligent unionist response would be to make Northern Ireland politics work and deliver for people, along with an acceptance that Northern Ireland is, was, and shall be different to the rest of the UK for a variety of reasons – not least that partition created a then unassailable majority and a humiliated minority (though there will be no unassailable majority, certainly in the near future, the majority-minority position is in the process of being reversed). Compromise and prosperity are the way for unionists to try to continue the link with Britain now that they are no longer a political majority. Whether the Act of Union has been compromised (and as has been previously pointed out in these pages, said Act was only passed through massive corruption) may be important to some unionists but to no one else.

It is of course possible that the DUP will re-enter Stormont after the May local government elections are safely out of the way, and see how they can still make their points on the Northern Ireland Protocol. While the Assembly restarting should be welcomed it will be a rather stale and not a fresh start (and the previous ‘Fresh Start’ restart was not a fresh start either!). Stormont is symbolically placed on a hill, a grandiose building as the parliament for a relatively small statelet; the hill which Northern Ireland has to climb to get out of all its current malaises is far, far higher.