3/1/24

 Friday, March 1, 2024

In bed at 9, awake on the LZB at ???, back to bed at ???, up at 2 with dull, persistent shoulder pain, unable to sleep.  32°,  high of 44°, sunny morning, cloudy afternoon ahead, wind 13 mph, 9-14/25.  February and this winter have been the warmest on record in Milwaukee.  Sunrise at 6:26, sunset at 5:41, 11+14.  Solar noon at 12:03, altitude 40°.

Pain.  Considerable pain in my left shoulder during the night and on awakening.  Big disappointment after the cortisone injection on Tuesday.  I also had problematic CPP, and RP yesterday.

I'm grateful  

What am I to think of America's role in Ukraine and in Gaza?  How can we not believe that the United States is deeply, culpably complicit in the catastrophic death and suffering occurring in Gaza?  The visual evidence of the latest atrocity has been provided by the Israeli government itself: grainy, black-and-white aerial drone photos of hundreds or thousands of Palestinians swarming relief trucks carrying flour meant to stave off the starvation that is threatening many or perhaps most Gazans.  They are starving not only because Israel's war on them has destroyed their economic infrastructure, including food availability, but also because the government of Israel is intentionally hindering the provision of food supplies by humanitarian resources.  This is to say that Israel is starving tens of thousands of people on purpose, designedly.   The sight of swarms of Palestinians desperately seeking food is distressing enough, but what are we to think of IDF soldiers firing live rounds into many of them?  The news about the incident is fragmentary.  The IDF admits it fired into the crowd but said its soldiers  'felt threatened' and that most of the casualties were caused by stampeding mobs.  Hospital personnel say many of the injured that they have treated have gunshot wounds.  Who to believe?  What to believe?  That 'the first casualty of War is Truth' has become a truism.  We know for sure that we can't trust our own government to speak the truth (witness Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan), so why should we believe Israel's government?  Regardless, one thing we do know for sure is that the United States has been and still is Israel's chief enabler in raining death and destruction throughout Gaza.  Despite pieties about 'the rules of war' and 'international law' and 'minimizing civilian casualties' from Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, and Austin, we keep providing Israel the instruments of death and destruction that it uses to destroy Gaza and Gazans and to keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under conditions of oppression, persecution, and apartheid.  

In the grisly field of war statistics, where individual human beings with parents, children, aunts uncles and friends are reduced to numbers,  we see that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, militants but mostly civilians, 242 Israeli IDF fighters have been killed and well more than 30,000 Palestinians.  That's about 125 Palestinians killed for every Israeli fighter.  If we add in the 1200 Israeli civilians slaughtered by Hamas and the 240 or so hostages seized to the 242 soldiers killed, we still have a kill ratio of about 18 Palestinians killed for each Israeli.

Here's Fareed Zakaria in this morning's WaPo:

 . . .  American policy on the Gaza war now appears hapless, ineffective and immoral. The image of U.S. officials wringing their hands about civilian casualties while providing ever-more weapons is grotesque. The image of a president of the United States mumbling words such as “indiscriminate” and “over the top” to describe Israel’s bombings suggests weakness and passivity.

 Here's Tom Friedman in the NYT on 2/27:

I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.

 Israel's 'victory' over Hamas will be temporary, illusory, and Pyrrhic.   America's loss in world opinion is incalculable.

RE Ukraine, I am reminded of something I recall Columbia U. Professor Jeffrey Sachs said in an interview: "No nation should ever rely on the United States as an ally."  It seems to be true that the Ukrainian army is rationing not only artillery shells but also bullets as it endures carpet bombardment by the massively larger and more amply supplied Russian army.  It seems to me that the Ukrainians have already lost their war with the Russians and the approximately 20% of their former territory.  Neither the NATO countries nor the U.S. are willing to risk European or American blood in the war and probably with good reason.  Nor are they willing or perhaps capable of endlessly pouring money down a rat hole in a hopeless cause.  Putin has in large measure won his "special military operation" and has secured de facto ownership of Eastern Ukraine oblasts with the land bridge to Crimea.  I think it's all over but the shouting unless Putin wants to secure even more Ukrainian land and population before he calls it quits.  If things continue as they are now, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will be assigned much of the blame for "losing Ukraine," but we have to wonder whether we have already poured too much of our borrowed money into the war.  And we have to ask who was most benefitted by our backing of Zelensky and Ukraine and Netanyahu and Israel if not America's military-industrial complex which received most of the funds appropriated for those two wars.