I don't know if this is evidence of a class system or whether it's just US
foreign policy as it has been developing, particularly after World War 2.
Governments do as they choose in order to maintain power and that does involve
dominating natural resources to maintain their corporations and military. But
perhaps we should be spending more of our time and energy thinking about
nationalism, rather than all of it on the class system. If people were thinking
more in terms of international relations, rather than just about domestic
issues, maybe we'd have a real movement for peace.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2020 1:46 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: How the US helped push Lebanon to the brink of
collapse, and now threatens more sanctions
One more example that we live under a Class System. The actions of the
American Empire have very little to do with the needs of the Working Class, and
everything to do with the greed of the Upper Class.
Like a cancer, the Upper Class expands until it consumes everything in sight,
and then collapses, taking down the entire nation.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/13/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There's a Mint Cast podcast on this subject also with some additional
theories.
Miriam
LEBANONAugust 13, 2020
How the US helped push Lebanon to the brink of collapse, and now
threatens more sanctions
While the media blames the crisis in Lebanon solely on corruption, the
US government unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign to push regime
change and crush Lebanese resistance with sanctions and aggressive
hybrid warfare.
By Ben Norton
As the people of Lebanon suffer through one of the worst economic
crises in their nation’s conflict-ridden history, the Donald Trump
administration is exploiting the disaster to force regime change and
weaken Lebanese resistance groups.
A massive explosion on August 4 devastated Lebanon’s capital Beirut,
killing more than 150 people, wounding thousands, leaving hundreds of
thousands homeless, and ravaging a sizable chunk of the city.
The massive blast also destroyed Lebanon’s most important port, where
80 percent of food was imported into the country.
Even before the apocalyptic incident, Lebanon was enduring an economic
calamity that had caused hyperinflation and wiped out of the wealth of
much of the country, fueling widespread food shortages and 20-hour blackouts.
Lebanon’s economy is now in a state of total collapse. The value of
its national currency has plummeted by 80 percent, and more than half
of the population is languishing in poverty.
Political kingpins, activists, Western government-funded NGOs, and
international corporate media have blamed Lebanon’s problems solely on
corruption. And there is no question that widespread financial
impropriety and outright theft was a key factor in bringing the
country to such a dismal point.
But an even more important element that has been conveniently left out
of this picture is the role of the United States, and its allies in
Israel and Saudi Arabia, which have pursued a concerted policy of
destabilization, or what they call “maximum pressure.”
Washington has suffocated Lebanon and its neighbors with aggressive
economic warfare, explicitly aimed at paralyzing the country and
weakening Hezbollah, one of the most powerful and popular resistance
forces in the region, which has successfully resisted US and Israeli
interventionist designs, helped defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, and even
expelled the Israeli military after two decades of brutal military
occupation of south Lebanon.
Hezbollah has a political arm that is democratically elected, holding
12 seats in Lebanon’s parliament, and which has been a member of the
country’s governing coalition for a decade. Because of the resistance
movement’s presence in government, Washington and Tel Aviv have
refused to recognize the legitimacy of Lebanese democracy, and have
desperately pursued regime change.
The crushing sanctions Washington has imposed on Syria and Iran have
not only devastated the economies in the area; they have produced a
ricochet effect back in Lebanon, severing the country from regional
trading partners.
Then there is the nine-year Western-backed proxy war on the government
in Damascus, which has destabilized Lebanon’s neighbor and unleashed a
historic refugee crisis, putting enormous pressure on Beirut.
All of these factors have led to a catastrophe in Lebanon.
Trump administration pushes ‘maximum pressure’ campaign on Lebanon The
response of the Trump administration to the fateful Beirut blast was
more sanctions.
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12 that the US government
was preparing to impose new sanctions “against prominent Lebanese
politicians and businessmen in an effort to weaken Hezbollah’s influence.”
The newspaper noted that the blast “has accelerated efforts in
Washington to blacklist Lebanese leaders aligned with Hezbollah.” It
added that US officials see the post-explosion chaos as “an
opportunity to drive a wedge between Hezbollah and its allies as part
of a broader effort to contain the Shiite force backed by Tehran.”
Top US officials want to “turn the screws in Lebanon,” the Journal
reported.
It quoted an unnamed official who remarked, “I don’t see how you can
react to this kind of event with anything other than maximum pressure”
– a reference to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure”
campaign to bring about regime change in Iran.
Senior US officials remarked bluntly that they want Lebanon’s current
government to be replaced with a “technocratic” regime that shuns
Hezbollah.
This demand confirmed a 2019 report in The Grayzone by journalist
Rania Khalek, which detailed how Western-backed NGOs in Lebanon were
exploiting anti-corruption protests to advance a strategy to remove
Hezbollah from the country’s governing coalition and install
US-aligned, IMF-friendly technocrats.
The Wall Street Journal also acknowledged that the Trump
“administration’s existing sanction programs against Hezbollah” have
already “taken an economic toll” on Lebanon.
Washington has therefore made it clear that it has no problem pushing
Lebanon deeper into the economic abyss, to the edge of state collapse,
in hopes of neutralizing Hezbollah.
Washington’s all-out war on the ‘Resistance Axis’
The crisis in Lebanon cannot be understood outside of the wider
context of the overarching, obsessive US strategy aimed at crushing
what is known as the “Resistance Axis,” in which Hezbollah serves as a key
actor.
The ongoing, nearly decade-long war on Syria looms large in this situation.
When the US government and its allies in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and Turkey initiated a regime-change war against Syria in 2011 and
2012, Hezbollah immediately recognized the proxy conflict as an attack
on all resistance forces in the region, which would inevitably swallow
Lebanon as well.
So while Washington and the Wahhabi Gulf monarchies poured billions of
dollars into arming and training Salafi-jihadist rebels groups in
Syria, giving birth to ISIS and fueling the spread of al-Qaeda,
Lebanese Hezbollah helped to prevent state collapse in Damascus,
battling Western proxies that threatened to turn the country into a
failed state, as they did in Libya after the 2011 NATO regime-change war.
Some US lawmakers openly argued in Congress that it was a “good thing”
that ISIS and other Sunni extremists were attacking “Hezbollah and the
Shiite threat to us.” And an Israeli think tank funded by the US
government and NATO even insisted in 2016 that ISIS should not be
defeated, precisely because it could “be a useful tool in undermining”
Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.
Meanwhile, as Israel treated al-Qaeda militants in its hospitals and
Israeli officials said they preferred ISIS staying in power, Hezbollah
played a key role in the fight to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, both of
which had crossed from Syria into Lebanon and took over Sunni-majority
border towns, which they subsequently used as bases to launch attacks
on Shia- and Christian-majority Lebanese villages.
Hezbollah successfully expelled these extremist Salafi-jihadist
groups, and defended Lebanese sovereignty, in collaboration with
Christian militias, Sunnis and Druze, and the Lebanese national army itself.
Faced with its own failure in the military component of the war in
Syria, Washington then turned to full-scale economic warfare.
US economic warfare on Lebanon, Syria, and Iran In June, the US
government imposed a crushing unilateral coercive measures regime on
Syria known as the “Caesar” sanctions. The Grayzone editor Max
Blumenthal detailed how the US and European sanctions on Syria
effectively amount to a medieval-style siege of the entire country,
and all of the millions of civilians who live inside of it.
Humanitarian experts have even warned that the Western economic
warfare could unleash a famine. The United Nation Food and Agriculture
Organization’s Syria representative, Mike Robson, cautioned there may
soon be bread shortages in Syria. “There is already some evidence of
people cutting out meals,” he stated.
The economic blockade has also damaged the economy in Lebanon, which
has been virtually unable to do business with one of its most
important trading partners. In 2017, Lebanon was by far the largest
recipient of Syrian goods, receiving nearly 32 percent of its exports.
Now, the sanctions have made that exchange nearly impossible.
The US ambassador in fact explicitly stated that Lebanon would not be
allowed to buy energy from Syria due to the Caesar sanctions. The
US-imposed severance of the two neighbors has exacerbated the
electricity crisis in Lebanon, where there are often power shortages
for up to 22 hours per day.
The US economic blockade of Iran has also caused a fuel shortage in
Syria, forcing people to wait in lines for hours to get gasoline.
Moreover, Damascus had relied on the Beirut port for imports prior to
the explosion. Now that its crucial economic lifeline has been
destroyed, both Lebanon and Syria are facing extremely severe crises
and the serious possibility of famine.
A Syrian-American economist, financial analyst, and prominent online
commentator known by the pseudonym Ehsani told The Grayzone “there is
little doubt” that the Syria war has terribly impacted Lebanon’s
economy.
While disastrous, fiscally unsound policies overseen by the Lebanese
central bank – which is also heavily influenced by the US embassy –
played an important role in pushing the nation to the economic brink,
the war on Syria has also hurt the Lebanese economy “in a big way,”
Ehsani said.
“Economic growth clearly decelerated since 2011,” the start of the war
in Syria, he explained. “And it ground to a halt in the past few
years, leading up to the financial crisis. Between 2016 and 2019,
Lebanon’s economic growth was practically zero. And it kept declining
from its pre-2011 levels steadily.”
While corruption is an endemic problem in Lebanon, it has plagued the
country for decades. Yet a pivotal economic shift occurred with the
introduction of the US policy of exacerbating the crises in the region
to destabilize independent governments and weaken the Resistance Axis,
explained journalist Elijah J. Magnier, a war correspondent who has
covered the region for decades.
“The US sanctions crippled the Syrian economy due to the restriction
of the flow of cash, oil, and machinery needed to re-boost the local economy,”
Magnier told The Grayzone. “Moreover, the US presence in north-east
Syria and their control of the oil and gas prevented the country not
only from vital energy but also from the rich agriculture resources
the area is known for.”
“The US sanctions on Syria stopped all Arab and Gulf countries from
rebuilding the country and pushed back all possible financial investment,”
he said. “This has caused the devaluation of the local currency and
prevented the Lebanese market from offering an alternative to Syria
for fear of direct sanctions on the Lebanese government.”
Magnier added: “As far as it concerns Lebanon, the US asked a local
bank to collect over $20 billion in cash and to ship it abroad,
creating a real thirst for foreign currency in the country. Moreover,
the US imposed sanctions on wealthy Lebanese living abroad and on more
than one bank, injecting real fear among the population of being
accused of supporting terrorism or seeing their savings confiscated by the US
authorities abroad.
That has starved Lebanon of several billion dollars in cash that
family members used to send back home to their relatives.”
US boasts of impact of sanctions on Lebanon, and CENTCOM commander
visits While imposing de facto economic blockades on Syria and Iran,
the United States has hit Lebanon with several rounds of what it calls
“targeted sanctions.” These US Treasury sanctions on Lebanon have
sought to punish Hezbollah and its allies in the government and business
sector.
While Washington portrays targeted sanctions as supposed humanitarian
measures that do not hurt civilians, economic experts say this is
patently false.
Ehsani, the Syrian-American economist, told The Grayzone, “The effects
of the US sanctions on the region is to push most business
transactions underground. Lawless rogue elements typically fill the
void as more legitimate businesses exit the scene. Such legitimate
businesses do this because most global organizations opt to follow an
‘over-compliance’
posture
to avoid any chance of getting entangled in such transactions.”
US sanctions have also hurt Lebanon by “the loss of potential money
inflows that had fallen under significantly more scrutiny from US
Treasury,” Ehsani added. “How much of the average $7-8 billion yearly
inflow got affected by these sanctions is hard to ascertain.”
“While Western capitals speak of ‘smart sanctions,’ the fact is that
even industries exempt from sanctions tend to quickly fall under the
sanctions regime. This can be seen with importers of raw materials for
medicine for example,” he explained.
“What has been clear is that benign sanctions are a myth,” Ehsani said.
“Sanctions are akin to carpet bombing the standards of living of the
average citizen.”
Before the August 4 explosion, Washington itself acknowledged that its
sanctions were stinging Lebanon.
Just two weeks before the Beirut blast, the US government-run media
outlet Voice of America (VOA) celebrated the effect its coercive
measures were having. “US Sanctions on Syria Leave Hezbollah More Isolated in
Lebanon,”
it
gloated.
The VOA report noted that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had
described the US sanctions as part of an “economic war” aimed at
“starving both Syria and Lebanon.”
The neoconservative group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)
approvingly tweeted the VOA article, insisting that the resistance
“network is vast, but it can be reined in.”
This VOA report came on the heels of a quiet yet important visit that
the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Frank McKenzie,
took to Beirut on July 8, to pressure the Lebanese Army to distance
itself from Hezbollah and strengthen its bonds with the US military.
The US embassy in Lebanon reported that the CENTCOM commander met with
top Lebanese political and military officials. Lebanese President
Michel Aoun tweeted a photo of a meeting with McKenzie and the US
ambassador, Dorothy Shea.
Saudi monarchy-backed media outlet Al Arabiya reported gleefully on
the CENTCOM visit, chirping, “US general affirms support for Lebanon;
Hezbollah supporters burn Trump photos.”
The quiet US junket demonstrated that, on the eve of the Beirut blast,
Washington was already ratcheting up its pressure on Lebanon’s government.
Western governments, NGOs, and media try to pin Beirut blast on
Hezbollah The August 4 explosion appears to have been the result of
the explosion of thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate that the
Lebanese government confiscated from an abandoned ship in 2013 and
improperly stored at the Beirut port, violating safety protocol.
The Lebanese government, which resigned a week after the blast,
officially attributed the incident to negligence. But President Michel
Aoun acknowledged it could have possibly been the result an attack.
Some Beirut residents told Asia Times that they saw and heard military
aircraft flying overhead moments before the explosion.
Asia Times also reported, citing unnamed Western officials, “that
Western reconnaissance craft were in the skies above the Lebanese
coast at the time of the blasts,” although the officials denying carrying out
an attack.
A US Central Command official told Asia Times that the “cause of the
first fire/explosion is still an unanswered question,” adding that
there is no “actual evidence to support or confirm that” it was caused
by ammonium nitrate, and that “other alternatives” are possible.
Although the incident appears to have been an accident, some Lebanese
analysts have suggested the blast could have potentially been an
attack by Israel, which militarily occupied south Lebanon for more
than 20 years and waged a devastating war in 2006, brutally bombing
Lebanon and leaving more than 1,000 Lebanese dead and parts of the country in
ruins.
Israel violates Lebanon’s sovereign airspace on a daily basis. In
2019, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon reported an average
of 96.5 violations each month. UN Secretary-General António Guterres
even spoke out against the Israeli aggression, stating, “I reiterate
my condemnation of all violations of Lebanese sovereignty and my call
for Israel to cease its violations of Lebanese airspace.”
Despite the presence of Western aircraft during the explosion, the
history of Israeli attacks, and the constant Israeli violations of
Lebanese airspace, there has been a concerted campaign to try to pin
the blast on Hezbollah, waged by the US and Israeli governments, a
coterie of hawkish think tanks, and a sizable portion of the corporate media.
There is not even a scintilla of evidence linking Hezbollah to the
explosion. In fact, the Lebanese resistance group would have
everything to lose if it were involved.
But this didn’t stop the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank,
which is funded handsomely by the governments of the United States,
Britain, and United Arab Emirates, along with top weapons and oil
corporations. The Atlantic Council’s Gulf monarchy-backed Rafik Hariri
Center tried to link Hezbollah to the blast with nothing more than
insinuations.
Then there was the hawkish executive director of Human Rights Watch,
Kenneth Roth. Never one to let something like a death of evidence get
in the way of his mindless speculation about Washington’s foreign
adversaries, Roth immediately implied after the blast that Hezbollah
was responsible. He did not provide a shred of evidence; it was just
his gut instinct.
Pro-Western protesters in Lebanon have also seized on the chaos to
call for the dissolution of the Lebanese armed resistance.
Following the explosion, anti-Hezbollah groups took over Lebanese
government buildings and unfurled banners calling for Beirut to
demilitarize — an obvious demand for Hezbollah to put down its weapons
and end its fight against Israel.
The US embassy in Beirut openly welcomed these demonstrations,
tweeting openly, “We support them.”
US pledges ‘aid’ while intentionally exacerbating Lebanon’s economic
crisis Even as the Trump administration threatens to impose more
aggressive sanctions on Lebanon, seeking to punish forces that support
the Resistance Axis, the US government has pledged humanitarian aid to the
country.
Moments after the explosion, Washington put its public relations
operations into hyperdrive, seeking to portray itself as a noble protector of
Lebanon.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – the former CIA director who quipped,
“We lied, we cheated, we stole; we had entire training courses” –
promised support following the blast.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a
soft-power arm that Washington uses to destabilize foreign governments
it has targeted for regime change, announced it would be providing
Lebanon with humanitarian aid.
John Barsa, the hardline neoconservative Trump loyalist recently
installed as head of the USAID, who has explicitly used the ostensible
aid agency as a weapon to overthrow the progressive governments in
Latin America, announced support for Lebanon the next day.
US Central Command revealed that they were working with USAID to
distribute medical supplies to Lebanon.
Ironically, in the weeks before the explosion, as Lebanon’s government
begged for an economic lifeline, Washington was dragging its feet.
As millions Lebanese citizens struggled to put food on the table, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) also refused to play ball. This
baffled many international observers. Left unmentioned in coverage of
the IMF’s behavior was the de facto veto the US holds in the
organization, which it wields as a neoliberal instrument of Washington’s
economic power.
“The IMF conditions include privatization and taxes the Lebanese
society can’t afford,” the journalist Elijah Magnier explained to The
Grayzone.
“Moreover, the IMF is controlled by the US administration, which is
asking for a new government without Hezbollah. That is not feasible
because Hezbollah represents 13 MPs and enjoys the support of the
majority of the parliament.”
Magnier also emphasized that when Lebanon had assembled a new
government in the middle of the crisis, under Prime Minister Hassan
Diab, Washington waged a destabilization campaign.
“With the formation of a new government, the US boycotted it and
pressured Europe and the Gulf countries to cease any support, defining
it as ‘Hezbollah’s government,'” Magnier said. “These measures
contributed in the hectic financial situation in the country, which
was also triggered by decades of corruption and mismanagement by the
US friends who ruled Lebanon for all these years.”
The pro-Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) let the
cat out of the bag when it tweeted on August 9 that international
assistance to Lebanon following the explosion “must be conditioned on
the long-promised, long-avoided disarmament of Hezbollah.”
AJC made it clear that Western aid will be hung over Lebanon like a
sword of Damocles, adding, “Unless the malignant role of Iran’s terror
proxy is addressed there will never be meaningful change for the
people of Lebanon.”
Magnier also pointed out that the amount in international aid being
offered to Lebanon is relatively little. “35 countries gathered all to
offer to the UN and NGOs in Lebanon $300 million, the equivalent of
what Hezbollah spend in less than five months in the country, only on
salaries,” he said.
Meanwhile, as millions of Lebanese civilians suffer, financial
analysts expect the US campaign of economic warfare and “maximum
pressure” to only continue going forward.
“The sanctions policy are likely to stay,” Ehsani told The Grayzone.
“This policy is more acceptable to the average Western electorate than
direct military involvement. Policy makers are therefore likely to
make more use of them post the Iraq debacle. Regional governments and
average citizens will bear the brunt of this silent evisceration of
their economic well being.”