Monthly Archives: October 2024

Military Affairs

EU Should ‘Prepare for War’ with Russia – New Defense Commissioner

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via Sputnik

The EU and Russia could face one other on the battlefield in less than a decade, MEP Andrius Kubilius, the newly appointed EU Commissioner for Defense and Space said this week. The former Lithuanian prime minister has been known for his hardline stance on relations with Moscow.

The bloc must ramp up its defense production and stock up reserves to be able to “defend itself,” said Kubilius, who is currently a member of the European People’s Party group in the EU Parliament, which presented its strategic paper on defense on Wednesday.

“If you want peace, prepare for war,” the MEP said, commenting on his group’s initiative calling for a “European Defense Union” and encouraging investments in the “defense technology of the future.”

“We must be ready to meet Russia militarily in six to eight years,” Kubilius maintained. “The EU, in complementing NATO and together with its Member States, must boost defense production, stock up reserves and continue helping Ukraine,” he added.

According to the MEP, Brussels’ adversaries were “watching … closely” whether the bloc was going to “succeed or fail” in this endeavor.

Kubilius led Lithuania’s government twice: between 1999 and 2000 and between 2008 and 2012. Since 2019, he was an MEP and a member of the EPP group. The politician has repeatedly called on Brussels to adopt a tougher stance in relations with Moscow and to slap Russia with additional sanctions.

In 2021, even before the start of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, he prepared a report on relations with Russia, which called for sanctions, the reduction of trade and other measures, including going as far as to not recognize the Russian parliament that was elected that year. Moscow slammed the report as nothing but an attempt to meddle in Russia’s internal affairs, adding that the document was biased and factually wrong.

In 2023, Kubilius penned another document suggesting the EU adopt a new sweeping strategy to pursue a “change of power in Russia,” saying it would work with “democratic forces” in and outside the country to topple the current leadership and establish a “transitional government.” The report also proposed issuing a new “democracy passport” and “special visa arrangements” for Russian opposition activists residing in the EU.

Moscow blasted the special passport initiative as a move resembling Nazi practice dating back to World War II. At that time, those willing to cooperate with the occupying force were granted special documents that served as passports.

Kubilius was not, however, the only EU politician to claim that the EU could find itself in a state of war with Russia in the coming years. In February, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius claimed in an interview with Bloomberg that Russia may attack NATO “in five to eight years.”

German chief of defense General Carsten Breuer also highlighted the “paramount” importance of making the country’s military ready within the next five years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that Russia has never had plans to attack NATO.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Israeli Rampage, a New U.S. Proxy War?

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by Gilbert Doctorow

The Israeli rampage in the Middle East is in fact a new U.S. proxy war to avenge its humiliations there in the last two decades

Today I was given the opportunity to set out a very different explanation of U.S. policy in the developing regional war in the Middle East/West Asia from what my peers are saying, or from what I myself would have said two weeks ago.

The generally accepted view on the U.S.-Israeli relationship in this war was repeated earlier today by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a widely watched military expert.  He said that it appears the U.S. is now flying blind in the region, or to put it another way is on auto-pilot, following two steps behind Israel.

However, by his own acknowledgment, the successful Israeli bombing of the Hezbollah headquarters and decapitation of its leadership in downtown Beirut was made possible only by direct United States  support. The 86 two-ton bombs dropped on the residential buildings to tear deep underground and do the job were American supplied. The intelligence on the whereabouts of the intended victims was provided by the United States, which also brought its AWACS into play off the coast of Lebanon long enough to provide actionable information to the Israelis for their strike.

Let us put it another way:  the United States provided Israel with what it needed to do what the United States wanted done. After the confirmed killing of the 30 years plus leader of Hamas, US. officials said the dead man had the blood of American servicemen on his hands and it was good that he had been eliminated.

Then let us consider what Western media are reporting about the limits that Washington is putting on Israel’s coming retaliatory strike at Iran for the ballistic missiles that Iran fired at military targets in Israel a day ago. We are told that Joe Biden has warned Netanyahu against hitting any nuclear sites in Iran. That radical solution to the Iranian nuclear weapons program would surely bring the Russians directly into the conflict given that they are about to sign a comprehensive cooperation agreement later this month with a defense component that effectively makes the countries allies. Since the Americans are duty bound to defend Israel, they would then be fighting Russia, the nuclear superpower, something that the Biden administration is loathe to do. The Israelis are also being instructed not to hit oil and gas installations in Iran since that would drive up global energy prices and do great harm to the chances of the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Does this not sound like Washington’s prohibition on Kiev’s use of ATACMS, Storm Shadow and other long range Western supplied missiles against the heartland of Russia?  In both cases, the beneficiary of U.S. military support is being deprived of the possibility of doing great harm to its enemy in a war for survival. The explanation for this similarity is ready to hand: the Israeli rampage in the Middle East is being directed from Washington in the same way as Kiev’s invasion of Kursk and other military operations against Russia are directed from Washington.

Washington is now ready to see Netanyahu fight to the last Israeli to tame the neighborhood for the sake of its Big Brother across the Atlantic.  The destruction of the neighborhood by ‘our boy’ in Jerusalem is surely seen by the Neocons who still control the levers of power in Washington as suitable retribution for the humiliations the United States experienced in each of the wars it has ignited or joined in the Middle East over the past two decades. Clipping the wings of Iran has been not only an obsession of Netanyahu; it has been an obsession of successive U.S. administrations since that of Jimmy Carter.  Let us remember that the USA is a vengeful and cruel superpower.

I say the Jewish State is being asked to fight to the last Israeli in the knowledge that Israel is being destroyed economically and politically while committing genocide in the neighborhood. The Israeli economy is taking enormous losses from this war which has barely begun, not from destruction of infrastructure by the enemy, as in the case of Ukraine, but by loss of access to shipments of essential raw materials inputs for production, in loss of manpower to operate production since the Israeli army is a nation at arms.

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I take the analytical approach to the Middle East conflict set out above following the logic that the Kremlin used to explain its decision to change its nuclear doctrine a week ago. They have lowered the threshold on use of nuclear weapons and specifically state that they may respond with nuclear arms if attacked by a non-nuclear power that is assisted in the aggression against Russia by a nuclear power.  That overturns the normal prohibition on use of these weapons against non-nuclear states and moves the threat also to the nuclear co-belligerent, meaning the USA.

The reason for this change is that the Kremlin sees that the United States has moved away from its longstanding doctrine of global nuclear attack using its triad. With the advances of Russian weaponry, the States understand that an attempted decapitating blow would not prevent Russia from still launching a massively destructive counter blow using unstoppable hypersonic missiles. So, instead, Washington is pursuing proxy wars aimed at decapitating the nuclear capabilities of an adversary like Russia but leaving the States at one remove and claiming to be uninvolved.

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I fully understand that the contrarian view of the relationship between Israel and the USA set out above will meet objections from those who insist that Israel has bought up Congress through its lobbying activities. Reconsidering the actual relations today is only held up by the vanity of these objectors.

There are also other objectors to what I have proposed who ask incredulously how the USA could approve of the Israeli genocide in Gaza which has killed over 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.  To this I answer firstly that the continued supply by Washington to Israel of the munitions necessary to carry out the genocide speaks for itself.

But I have another argument to add to this. I ask the objectors to open their minds to the reality of a vengeful superpower that has itself committed mass murder of civilians on a far vaster scale. We may put to a side the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as something from the distant past.  But what about the entirely illegal invasion of Iraq undertaken by George Bush which killed perhaps as many as 1,000,000 civilians when the American forces stormed through the country on a wave of ‘shock and awe.’ Or what about the way tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq were allowed to die in the decade before the invasion for lack of medicines caused by U.S. sanctions on the Hussein regime?

Anglozionism

Iran Attacked Israel Only After U.S. Rejected Its Moderate Stance

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via Moon of Alabama

Yesterday a massive barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles hit Israel. It came after months of serious Iranian efforts (vid) to achieve better relations with the U.S. had failed. Israel had managed to sabotage those efforts to the detriment of its U.S. ally.

To understand what has happened – and, more importantly, why this attack was launched today – we need to look back.

On May 20 2024 then President of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter accident.

New elections were held in Iran and, to the astonishment of many, Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, won with a decent majority. Pezeshkian is a specialist in cardiac surgery with no experience in foreign policy. He had campaigned on reconnecting with the ‘West’, the lifting of sanctions on Iran and a generally more liberal policy.

On July 30:

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated along with his personal bodyguard in the Iranian capital Tehran by an apparent Israeli attack. Haniyeh was killed in his accommodation in a military-run guesthouse after attending the inauguration ceremony for Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.

The assassination of Haniyeh was a major offense against the sovereignty of the the Islamic Republic of Iran. It also was a personal offense against Masoud Pezeshkian’s presidency.

The Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini and the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) wooed to retaliate for the strike. But the new president still argued to not retaliate but to seek accommodation through negotiations. He, at that time, still hoped that the U.S. would arrange for a ceasefire in Gaza and wanted to avoid that Iran would be blamed for a failure of those negotiations.

President Pezeshkian continued his moderate course. On September 23, during a his participation in the UN General Assembly in New York, he again put out feelerstowards a new accommodation with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear program:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Monday emphasized his openness to a new international agreement over his country’s nuclear program — a subject that has fueled global tensions for years, risking potentially catastrophic warfare between Iran and the U.S.
…
Asked about restoring nuclear negotiations, Pezeshkian said through a translator: “I do hope we can … reach an agreement.”
…
He said Iran upheld its end of the nuclear deal unlike the U.S. — an assessment most outside experts share, though there are some long-standing concerns about Iranian compliance — and pointed to American diplomats saying time and again that a cease-fire deal in Gaza that can boost stability across the Middle East is just a week away.

Within Iran the moderated course was seen with suspicion:

The lack of trust specifically affects the calculus of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he continued, in a tacit acknowledgment that the unelected Khamenei has the final say on Iran’s policies.

“His Eminence says, ’They say one thing, do another,” Pezeshkian said. The president promoted engagement with the outside world as he sought votes from Iranians, noting that easing sanctions could boost the economy amid popular unrest in the country, and in August, Khamenei gave him a cautious green light to bargain with the U.S. Another power center in the country — the elite Revolutionary Guard — is extremely leery of such talks.

Four days later Israeli air-strikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah and a major architect of the Iran led Axis of Resistance. Several other Hizbullah leaders as well as the deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Abbas Nilforoushan, were also killed in the strike.

Pezeshkian noted rather bitterly that the order by the Israeli Prime Minister Natanyahoo to kill Nasrallah had been given from New York:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the international community will not forget that the order for Israel’s terrorist act to assassinate Secretary General of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was issued from New York.
…
In a message of condolences on Saturday, Pezeshkian said the United States cannot absolve itself of complicity with the Zionists in the terror attack against the Hezbollah chief.

The assassination of Nasrallah demonstrated that Pezeshkian’s politics of moderation had failed.

After arriving back in Tehran Pezeshkian’s tone had changed:

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran says the world should know that the blood of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his companions will continue to boil and turn into a bulwark against tyranny and oppression.
…
Addressing a cabinet session on Sunday, Pezeshkian said it is imperative for Tehran to give a “decisive” response to the criminal Israeli regime.

Iran’s plans for retaliating against Israel required coordination with its allies. On Monday, September 30, Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin happened to be in Tehran for long planned talks about economic cooperation:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says the implementation of critical projects between Iran and Russia will produce a huge capacity to counter cruel Western sanctions against the two countries.
…
in his remarks, the Iranian president warned that Israel is intensifying tensions with the direct support of the United States in order to prepare the ground for increasing the presence of the United States in the region.This poses a “common threat to the interests of the regional countries and nations,” he said.
…
The Russian premier expressed concern over the escalation of tensions in the region and said the US supports mounting conflicts in different parts of the world with the purpose of securing its own interests.

Therefore, he emphasized, independent countries like Iran and Russia, should accelerate cooperation to counter such measures.

Moscow was thereby likely informed of upcoming strikes against Israel. China was likewise assured and informed:

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran says the traditional friendship between the Iranian and Chinese nations has evolved into “deep, stable, and strategic” relations.“I express my desire to work alongside Your Excellency to further develop comprehensive relations between Iran and China,” President Pezeshkian stated in his message to President Xi Jinping, written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

A few hours later, after Mishustin had left, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a volley of some 250 ballistic missiles towards Israel:

Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces:Among our targets were Israel’s 3 main airbases, Mossad’s terror HQ, Radar sites, and gathering sites of armoured vehicles around the Gaza Strip, responsible for the genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense was unable to interdict a significant number of Iran’s missiles.

Elijah J. Magnier @ejmalrai – 17:06 UTC · Oct 1, 2024Over 250 Iranian ballistic hit #Israel. Many buildings in Israel are damaged. The possibility of a regional war is growing. Israelis expected to retaliate and Iran will retaliate to the retaliation. …

Verified videos show dozens of impacts of Iranian missiles against targets in Israel. Several strikes hit near the Mossad headquarter in Tel Aviv. Allegedly a gas platform of the coast of Ashkelon was also hit. Video shows that it is engulfed in fire.

Other targets were likewise destroyed:

A massive Iranian ballistic missile strike on targets in Israel launched on October 1 has targeted Nevatim Air Base, among other key targets in the country. The facility hosts both of the Israeli Air Force’s F-35 fifth generation fighter squadrons, and was previously intended to host a third squadron of the fighters after they were delivered. Iranian media sources have reported that the facility was “completely destroyed” in the attack. Footage from Israel has confirmed the impact of dozens of ballistic missiles which Israel’s air defence network failed to shoot down, with targets impacted including the headquarters of the intelligence agency Mossad, located in Tel Aviv which was levelled by the attack.

Remarkably there are no reports of any civilian casualties.

Israel and Iran have now issued threats and counter-threats of further escalation.

But most importantly will be the stand the U.S. government is going to take.

Joining Israel an open war against Iran, which Netanyahoo has wanted to achieve for some time, would bog down the U.S. in another unwinnable war in the Middle East that would hurt its interests for years to come.

It would give time to China and Russia to expand their multilateral coalition to the further detriment of U.S. supremacy.

Military Affairs

Letter from Prison

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IGOR STRELKOV (letter fragment):
Regarding the question of assessments/analysis of the situation — I still receive too little information for reliable “tactical” forecasts. “Strategically” “everything is bad” — if the “bet on Trump” (in my opinion — initially a failure, but I do not insist on 100% reliability of my opinion) “does not work out”, — then the next year (or even the end of the current one) will become a very serious test for our state.

I have repeatedly voiced the reasons for this even before my arrest (and long before it):

— the “imitation” style of leadership and state administration led to the fact that “on paper” the Russian Federation looked extremely impressive in all respects (including in terms of military power). In reality, a significant part of our power (in some places — very significant) turned out to be “inflated”. And now the needs of the war far exceed the capabilities of our military-industrial complex, and the war has long ago “eaten up” or is “eating up” all the reserves of new weapons.

The same applies to trained human resources, which for 2.5 years were spent (and are still being spent) as if they were endless and inexhaustible. While the main “ready” (and relatively painlessly torn away from the economy) war has already “eaten up” without a trace.

— the wretchedness (to the point of complete absence) of strategic planning and the lowest quality of tactical planning have already led us to a complete impasse (both in strategy and tactics), loss of initiative to the state of “amoebic reaction to irritants” — i.e. The military and industrial machines react to problems that have arisen only at the moment when these problems have already become critically dangerous.

— There was no talk of making any long-term forecasts 2.5 years ago, and there is none now (which is not surprising, given the “amazing preservation of old reliable personnel” in all the main VIP positions, except, perhaps, (and even then, only partially) the Ministry of Defense. There is either no search for a way out of the impasse at all (which is logical, since the level of necessary intelligence and competence significantly exceeds that available to the said VIP officials), or we are simply unable to discern it (due to the lack of visible results, even preliminary ones.

— The time to correct the grossest mistakes (which our enemies in the West and the so-called “Ukraine” kindly provided us with due to their own incompetence and degradation) was not even “wasted” — it was simply “missed.” And now it is practically gone. The general systemic military-political crisis will very soon turn into a military-economic one. Perhaps — following the example of 1917, and on it will be “superimposed” by the growing fatigue from the senseless and unclear (in terms of goals) war on the part of the population. And without real strategic (and not tactical – carried out according to the principle of “Trishkin’s caftan”, as now) changes and measures – we will face extremely unpleasant consequences, the quantity and quality of which will constantly increase (in terms of negative consequences for the state and the country as a whole).

This is all I want/can write for now.

With respect, I am waiting for letters and reports,

I. V. Girkin
09/28/2024, Kirovo-Chepetsk