Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
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twitter thread (nitter alt) about the deteriorating US situation in the Middle East
They all think it's still 2003, with no notion of constraints, nor any respect for or even knowledge of the US' enemies. ... The Iraqis are at the heart of this crisis, and nobody in the official US sphere is talking about it openly. Every "retaliation" for Iraqi attacks on US bases is taking place in... Syria. Now why is that? Is it because the US doesn't care about Iraq and just wants an excuse to go after Assad again? No. Blinken flew under the cover of night into Baghdad, wearing a fucking flak vest, specifically to try to convince the Iraqi government to do something to stop all these attacks!
The reason the US is attacking "Iranian" warehouses in Syria to deter attacks by Iraqis - without EVER mentioning them by name - is because the US deep state is scared shitless of an Iraqi quagmire. The Iraqis go out and officially declare war on US. The US response? Silence. There's constantly escalating attacks inside Iraq. Rockets, drones, now IEDs against US convoys. The Iraqis are totally open about this, they're saying in public "we're at war with the US! We're gonna kick them out!" and Lloyd Austin goes up and pretends these Iraqis don't exist!
... a core feature of the US army today is that it is basically close to unusable, de facto. The US Army has a couple of massive problems right now: first, it's got a HUGE manpower deficit, especially in combat arms. Second, it can't really move very easily! Moving an army corps is a lot of work: it requires a lot of airlift, or - more preferrable - sealift. But US sealift capacity has atrophied immensely since the 90s. Getting an US armor division to Iraq today is a lot more difficult than it once was, due to lowered capacity.
I don't want to dive too deeply into army-specific problems in this thread, so I'll just get to the upshot: the US doesn't have enough men to really put "boots on the ground" in a serious conflict, nor the transport capacity to do so. It's not just a lack of political will. ... the US is basically down to a small garrison presence. You can back that up with air power, but on the ground, the US posture is a few islands of hundreds or thousands of Americans... in a sea of hostile arabs. These arabs have modern small arms. Some of them have night-vision equipment. But most of all, they have heavy stand-off weaponry: Burkan ("Volcano") rockets, used to great effect in Syria, Iranian suicide drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and iranian SAMs.
To further complicate the fairly terrible ground situation, American airpower in the region is very vulnerable. Most Americans still think they have this factory-fresh, high tech air force, but that's not been the case for decades. The workhorses - F16, F15, F-18 - are ancient ... the same kinds of planes used by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. And the Houthis have shot down a lot of Saudi jets. So even the Yemenis - the second most poor country in the region - can now realistically challenge US airpower, using iranian-made SAMs. Today, America has neither the fiscal space or the productive capacity to really deal with airframe attrition ... US bases in the region can now be attacked by stand-off weaponry, and it's long been a known problem that the USAF has never seriously adapted to the idea that airfields can simply be contested by enemy stand-off weaponry from afar. F-35 stealth doesn't work on the ground. ... the entire dynamic of the US actually using airpower in the region has now potentially changed, and changed in a very ominous, depressing way. Carriers can now be hit by anti-ship cruise missiles and drones, which are becoming widely available in the region. Are they guaranteed to work? No. But they're not guaranteed to fail either. Airbases can be hit with cruise missiles and drones; just ask the Americans at Al-Harir!
All of this means that Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon and Tony Blinken at State are in a very, very shitty position right now, to say the least. The openly declared war against the US in Iraq is basically being shoved under the rug, because the US can't afford to admit it exists! To uninformed Americans, the US is still a completely dominant, invincible force. America only loses because it gives up; its planes are invincible, its technology supreme, its forces, untouchable. But this fantasy is a product of the US military's isolation from civilian life. For people inside the military, the view is very different ... Thus, if Lloyd Austin goes up there and says "okay, the Iraqis are attacking us now", he is going to be inundated with calls from moronic GOP politicians and uninformed US civilians to "unleash the American magic!!!" or "teach the arabs why we don't have healthcare lol!!!".
But in reality, that moment in time has passed, and it's not coming back. If Austin goes up there and admits that, admits that the US is now severely limited in what it can do and how much it can fight, he'll lose his job. What's worse, the US will lose imperial prestige! That prestige is fantastically important, for many reasons. Partly, it serves as deterrence against people picking further fights with the US. Partly, it makes the current - completely unsustainable - budget deficits somewhat manageable in the short term. I could go on, but I hope I've made my point by now. The Iraqis are, as the American saying goes, pissing all over the American pant-leg right now. The Iraqis themselves are saying "we're pissing on you, America!", but America is forced to say "No no no, it's just raining!"
It's perhaps somewhat exaggerating how bad things really are, but there's still a lot of interesting points, especially the stuff about air power. Back in the olden days, you did need to actually fly your own planes over the enemy airbases to disable them, but this is no longer the case thanks to advances in missile technology, and the proliferation of cheap missiles among even militia groups means that forces which normally couldn't maintain their own airforce can now still manage to strike at far-away targets, and do so with munitions significantly cheaper than what they'll be destroying. And of course, there's the important logistical reality that Western commentators systematically ignore - how capable is the US, really, at deploying a large ground force, and doing so quickly? Not supplying another military, not flying around and bombing the occasional target, not sending in some special forces team to do a raid, but a proper army corps, of several divisions, the way they were once able to do in Iraq? Even back then, there was still a lot of preparation involved, the invading force didn't just materialize in Kuwait one day, so how capable of repeating that would they be now?
F-35 stealth doesn't work on the ground.
More like
F-35
stealthdoesn't workon the ground.The idea of trying to combine 3 seperate aircraft (multirole air force fighter, VTOL, and navy carrier aircraft) into one aircraft with three variants, to increase profits, was never going to work.
it's long been a known problem that the USAF has never seriously adapted to the idea that airfields can simply be contested by enemy stand-off weaponry from afar.
Fucking how is the pentagon this inept? I know they're incompetent morons but how did they never study a way to deal with the idea that a stationary target is vulnerable?
Though honestly that thread gives me some hope. The Great Satan may be more brittle than we expected. It's crumbling from within and is rapidly losing its ability to project its power. It's still massively dangerous but maybe its demise will come sooner than later. Internal contradictions and collapse in the face of widespread Arab rebellion and Chinese ascendancy may be its death knell. God help all of us who are trapped in the belly of this brazen bull; the fires are lit.
how did they never study a way to deal with the idea that a stationary target is vulnerable
I guess they still haven't realized the danger of ballistic missiles, or at least the fact that cheap, mass-produced missiles can still be very effective - American missile designs are, in typical MIC fashion, way too expensive, and thus the kind of thing that's going to be way out of the reach of poorer countries.
Because of this, they probably assume that airfields are only going to be targeted by planes, which combines with another faulty assumption, one that undergirds a lot of NATO doctrine - unchallenged air superiority. If the only thing that can hit your bases is planes, and you're going to completely destroy your opponent's air power (because... you just will, obviously, no point in asking what happens if you don't), then everything's fine. Plus, poorer countries are going to struggle with maintaining a large airforce too, so when fighting in the Middle East there probably won't be all that many enemy planes to deal with.
That's the key thing about missiles and drones, and why they're such an important factor here - they give smaller military forces the capability to strike distant targets. You don't need an expensive-to-maintain air fleet and network of bases, just a few of your guys and a truck to carry the munitions to a good spot for launching them, and you can deal a decent bit of damage. But the Americans are so complacent that they haven't really caught up with this reality yet.
It really feels like missiles and drones are to the early 21st century as trenches and machine guns were to the early 20th.
And as we can see in Ukraine, trenches are useful again. Hell, Hamas' tunnels are just roofed trenches if you think about it. Cover from rockets is pretty vital
artillery remains the king of the battlefield
Tunnels never stopped being good
I think the US is also very confident, or at least claims to be very confident, in it's ability to using point defense weapons to protect bases. All those fancy radar guided guns that can shoot down rockets and missiles and mortars. I have been informed by extremely confident people that carrier battle groups are 100% invulnerable because thier point defenses are just sooooooo good. *eyeroll*
Too bad the point defense weapons can’t look up, where ballistic missiles come from.
The total victory during the 1991 Gulf War - during which thousands of Soviet-built Iraqi tanks were destroyed while the US itself sustained near zero losses - gave them an unmatched confidence about their own military capability.
In a few months’ time, the USSR would dissolve (I’ve heard that the US victory in Iraq gave the Soviet leadership quite a shock), thus ended the great rivalry between the two superpowers. China wasn’t even a thing to worry about yet.
America has won. US weaponry had demonstrated such supremacy that its greatest adversary of the Cold War couldn’t even stand a single blow of America’s mighty sword. The politicians began to ask among themselves: “do we really need to buy more of those weapons? we have no more enemies left to fight!”
The military industrial complex now faces the contradiction of being rendered irrelevant as the curtain of the Cold War falls. The only way to continue the grift is to bait the federal government into investing in super-expensive, over-ambitious projects, that which generates an endless spiral where hundreds of billions of dollars of budgetary spending could sink into.
Thus we have such programs as F-35 that never really quite work, and requires endless upgrades that eventually caused the government to overspend its original budget by more than 200%, still with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, the MIC derives their short-term profit from the stock market, ushering in the era of the financialization of military industry. Managed by Wall St bankers, the business is no longer one that manufactures functional weaponry (to fight whom? the Russians?? lol) but one massive grift economy where stock dividends for the shareholders reign supreme.
Those Iraqi T-72 tanks were export models that were even further downgraded, that didn't have the features and modernisation that equivalent Soviet tanks had, such as reactive armour and night vision systems. When they went up against the US domestic model M1 Abrams tanks with all the bells and whistles, they got crushed. Though the vast majority of Iraqi tanks were destroyed by A-10 Warthog attack aircraft after coalition forces secured air superiority. Of the 1350 Iraqi tanks destroyed in the battle of Norfolk, 900 of them were destroyed by A-10 aircraft. It was not an accurate representation of how the Soviet T-72B tanks would have faired in an actual war.
I know it's Quora, but it's a good explanation about why the Iraqi T-72s performed poorly
We've seen something similar, though on a much smaller scale, when export model Saudi Arabian M1 Abrams tanks get destroyed by the Houthis. It's not a representation of how the latest US M1 Abrams tanks would fair in a hypothetical war. Export tanks in general lack features.
Can't the US just hire out mercenaries?
That worked out great for Rome right? Also they've already been doing that for over 20 years
Time to reset the Rome counter
The Great Satan is weaker than it has ever been! I just want somebody to hurry up and humiliate the American armed forces like the IDF just got humiliated, burst the bubble of American imperial power once and for all
like, come on Ansar Allah, sink a carrier already