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the film could play an important role in reminding us of how unresolved this whole chapter of our history really is. We know Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Add to that the recent news of the Islamic State now controlling large parts of Iraq and you have got a generation of veterans who bear an incredibly unique burden.

We would do well to begin separating these debates and recognizing the difference between those who tell war stories on screen and those who were actually there. And even more, remembering that those who send the country to war are often disconnected from the ones who end up fighting.

Ukrainian soldiers here at the front line were jolted by the suspension, too. While the aid was restored in time to prevent any military setbacks, it took a heavy psychological toll, they said, striking at their confidence that their backers in Washington stood solidly behind their fight to keep Russia at bay.

Ukraine has fought back with repeated appeals for aid, diplomatic pressure, Western sanctions against Russia — and with an army that is holding on by its fingernails.

Both sides use heavy artillery, but the only piece of American military aid at the position was a much-prized infrared spotting scope for night fighting. Soldiers also carry American tourniquets in their medical kits, used to stanch bleeding.

“Our allies help us, but the hard and dirty work we do ourselves,” Lieutenant Molchanets said.Even the most sophisticated weapons the United States offers are of little use here — at least, not in the way they are intended.

In 2018, the Trump administration authorized sales to Ukraine of a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile called the Javelin, reversing an Obama administration policy of supplying only non-lethal aid.

The Trump administration provided the missiles on the condition that they not be used in the war, Ukrainian officials and American diplomats have said, lest they provoke Russia to slip more powerful weaponry to the separatists.

The American military aid suspension hurt Ukraine in another way as well, Ukrainian officials said: It signaled their weakness, just as they were trying to project strength in negotiations with the Russians and needed solid backing from Washington.Since taking office in May, Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has wanted the United States to take a more active role in pressuring Russia to withdraw its forces from eastern Ukraine — which the Kremlin does not even acknowledge are there — and accept a peace deal to end the conflict.

Mr. Trump has also showed a clear desire for a peace deal on Ukraine, part of his longstanding effort to remove an issue that has driven a wedge between Russia and the West, and has made his cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin harder to defend.

But Mr. Trump has not pressed Russia and sided with Ukraine in the negotiations in the way Mr. Zelensky has urged. To the contrary, at a news conference in New York last month, Mr. Trump backed away from Mr. Zelensky and his troubles in the war, telling the Ukrainian leader, “I really hope you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.”

Mr. Zelensky wants to move the Ukrainian front line back — from a few hundred yards away from the separatists to about 1,000 yards in several locations, including around the town of Zolote, the site of Lieutenant Molchanets’s position.Separatist forces are also supposed to pull back in these areas, to put both sides out of sniper range and reduce skirmishing, paving the way for settlement talks.The problem in the town Zolote — and what has set off protests here and in Kiev — is that pulling back will leave some neighborhoods in front of the army’s new trenches, exposing them to the enemy side.

at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month.  Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.  In America.

  It is utterly inconceivable that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is planning a coup d’etat against President Obama, and the Congress, to install herself as Supreme Ruler of the United States of America.

There, however, are real signs that the Department bureaucrats are running amok.

Why, indeed, should the federal government not be deploying armored personnel carriers and stockpiling enough ammo for a 20-year war in the homeland?  Because it’s wrong in every way.

 President Obama has an opportunity, now, to live up to some of his rhetoric by helping the federal government set a noble example in a matter very close to his heart (and that of his Progressive base), one not inimical to the Bill of Rights: gun contro

The federal government can (for a nice change) begin practicing what it preaches by controlling itself.

Across Kiev and beyond, personal barriers that once defined the limits of behavior are crumbling, pushing this fractured but, until a few weeks ago, proudly peaceful nation into a spiral of chaos.

“What have humanism and pacifism ever brought to any nation?” he asked, clutching a battered metal shield and a metal rod, his soot-blackened face covered by a brown balaclava. “Revolutions are violent.”

“Nationalism is what I believe in,” said the man, who gave his name only as Nikolo. “The nation is my religion.”

But while the ranks of the protesters are diverse, the young men like Nikolo are the foot soldiers in a deepening civil conflict, the steel that refuses to bend under the pressure of thousands of riot police officers, volleys of live ammunition, snipers on rooftops and the looming threat of martial law.

The sotni provide a quasi-military discipline to the opposition’s street muscle. The commanders of the hundreds meet with other leaders of bands of young men under the umbrella of the Maidan Self Defense organization, which is led by Andri Parubi, a member of the opposition party Fatherland, though his control over some of the right-wing street groups appears tenuous at times.

But if these groups, whose members are far outnumbered by nonviolent protesters and also by the police, were the only ones driving Ukraine’s opposition to Mr. Yanukovych, the president could easily have defeated them weeks ago. Behind them stands a mass of others who recoil at pugnacious nationalism and scenes of mayhem but who now stand shoulder to shoulder with outfits like Right Sector, enraged that security forces resorted to violence to crack down on what had been a mostly peaceful protest in the mold of the Orange Revolution of 2004.

“We have a genetic memory of fascism here,” said Anatoly Skripnik, a businessman in the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Many protesters played down the role that the quasi-military nationalist groups, and history, are playing in the confrontation. “Some from the west are nationalists,” said Nikolai Visinski, an artist, standing on a barricade Thursday evening. “But we are all united in wanting a change of government. You don’t hear people yelling about Stepan Bandera. People just want to live in a free country.”

"I was wrong," he said. "I acted on my emotions."

Yanukovych did not answer several questions about whether he would support Russia — which has deployed tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border — moving into Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians, the justification Putin used to take Crimea.Continue reading the main story Why movie streaming sites so fail to satisfy Also in Tech » Apple's war on Samsung has Google in crossfire At Mozilla, a chief's support of gay marriage ban causes conflict Continue reading the main story Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

scrappily clad in plaid shirts as well as camouflage gear, and armed with hunting rifles alongside their ancient AK-47s.

On October 11, more than 100 parachutes floated down through the night sky over northern Syria

The United States is trying to help relieve the shortage of supplies.

The YPG, a Kurdish group of some 30,000 fighters, is the senior partner in the Syrian Democratic Forces, which also includes some smaller Arab and Christian groups

instalment in a new U.S. strategy

failure

pallet of ammunition.

A Kurdish commander in the province of Hasakah confided

"train and equip"

raw courage of YPG fighters, nor of the Kurdish Women's Defense Unit (YPJ) that fights alongside them.

"They throw themselves into battle, have no sense of covering fire, just charge at the enemy," said a Dutch veteran who is now a sniper with the YPG.

Just weeks ago, a massive vehicle bomb blew up the entrance to the YPG headquarters here.

The camp appears to have been occupied by an elite squad of suicide bombers,

Kurds, Assyrian Christians, different Arab tribes. They fight together and against each other.

e.Other Arabs here resent that the Kurds were slow to join the insurgency against the regime, preferring to sit it out. Even now, the YPG co-exists with a substantial contingent of Syrian soldiers inside Hasakah city. "We have nothing to do with them, though sometimes we have an agreement not to encroach on an area," Commander Lawand told CNN inside the YPG's bombed headquarters. "We are the real opposition to the regime, but first we must fight the terror groups."That's just what the U.S. wants to hear. In the wake of its failed efforts to train and equip moderate rebel groups elsewhere in Syria, there is a lot riding on the Kurds and their Arab allies. American airstrikes were instrumental in helping the Kurds save the city of Kobani on the Turkish border and then pushing ISIS back. In a country of shifting alliances, it's a proven partnership.

“One Boogaloo movement follower indicated the building with the snipers would need to be blown up in order to protect Boogaloo fighters in the event of a gun battle during the event,” the report states. Another planned to “put colored duct tape on the back of his body armor to appear as law enforcement and cause confusion.”

“Boogaloo movement supporters believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, anti-government actions leading to a civil war,” explained the alert issued by the FBI Minneapolis field office in December. 

The anti-government militia members arrested in October for allegedly plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are also believed to have been tied to the boogaloo movement. 

“The idea behind it was to have a huge showing of firearms and...for it to take place all across the U.S.,” Holt told Yahoo News, adding that “this is among the first major national events that has come out of the boogaloo movement.”

“This is a boogaloo movement organized call to arms that’s been spreading with increasing velocity outside of its usual communities,” said Holt, noting that he’s recently observed flyers for the Jan. 17th rallies circulating among many militia groups online, as well as “some run-of-the-mill Trump supporting groups and, interestingly enough, re-open protest.” 

“I feel like the FBI and DHS completely fell down on the job before the sixth…which was embarrassing, frankly, given all the stuff that was on the web,” she said. “So I’m glad that they’re taking this seriously, because they need to.”

There appeared to be no immediate breakthroughs to ease tensions on the Ukraine question, as the U.S. emphasized a need for diplomacy and de-escalation, and issued stern threats to Russia on the consequences of an invasion.

the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures,

At the White House, Sullivan said, “It was a useful meeting,” allowing Biden to lay out in candid terms where the US stands.

A top U.S. envoy, Victoria Nuland, said a Russian invasion of Ukraine also would jeopardize a controversial pipeline between Russia and Germany.

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov dismissed the sanctions threat during a conference call with reporters.

He described the presidents’ video conference as “candid and businesslike,” adding that they also exchanged occasional jokes.

Biden said the U.S. would also “provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians … and we would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation.”

Ukrainian officials charged Russia had further escalated the smoldering crisis by sending tanks and snipers to war-torn eastern Ukraine to “provoke return fire” and lay a pretext for a potential invasion.

The Russian leader also proposed to lift all mutual restrictions on diplomatic missions and help normalize other aspects of bilateral relations, the Kremlin said. Sullivan said the leaders would direct their staffs to continue negotiations on that.

The leader-to-leader conversation — Biden speaking from the White House Situation Room, Putin from his residence in Sochi —was one of the most important of Biden’s presidency and came at a perilous time. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia has massed 70,000 troops near the Ukraine border and has made preparations for a possible invasion early next year.

Politically in Washington, Republicans are framing this moment as a key test of Biden’s leadership on the global stage. Biden vowed as a candidate to reassert American leadership after President Donald Trump’s emphasis on an “America first” foreign policy.

But Republicans say he’s been ineffective in slowing Iran’s march toward becoming a nuclear power and has done too little to counter autocratic leaders including China’s Xi Jinping and Putin.“

Putin apparently sees the current situation as a moment to readjust the power dynamic of the U.S.-Russia relationship, analysts agree.

Beyond Ukraine, there are plenty of other thorny issues on the table, including cyberattacks and human rights. Before the call, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said U.S.-Russian relations are overall in “a rather dire state.”

“Russia has never planned to attack anyone,” Peskov said. He characterized the Biden-Putin call as a “working conversation during a very difficult period,” when “escalation of tensions in Europe is off the scale, extraordinary.”

“Candles give me anxiety. We spent so much time studying by candlelight after school.”

“It’s a collective trauma in Lebanon, and a complex trauma, because we aren’t talking about one thing, but many events that people have lived through,” said Ghida Husseini, my former therapist in Lebanon who specializes in trauma. “It’s the war, it’s the stress of losing your livelihood and not feeling secure.”

The war lasted for 15 years, until 1990. Tired of waiting, the nation accepted a blanket amnesty for a shaky peace. We watched as militia leaders traded in their blood-soaked fatigues for designer suits and started running the country.

Now we find ourselves waiting, again, as those war criminals-turned-politicians have mismanaged the country — an ongoing banking crisis has seen the currency shed over 90 percent of its value — and skirted responsibility for an explosion at Beirut’s seaport in the summer of 2020.

Reminders of a past war are now staples of the present decay.

“I remember sitting on a mattress as a kid, surrounded by candles. There’s a feeling of being trapped. There is no TV. No music. No electricity. You can’t go outside, it’s too dangerous. All there is — is cards.”

One night, as Raoul slept — his bedroom window had the dining table nailed to it, to protect against snipers — bombing started. His mother cried out for him, looking frantically until they found Raoul, then 5, crying while hugging a framed photo of the Virgin Mary that had fallen from the wall, praying for his life. He developed a stutter after that.

Yet every summer, no matter what happened — an Israeli invasion, the suicide bombing that killed hundred of U.S. Marines — we went back, to be with our family, to hold their hands and say: We have not abandoned you. It was the most twisted of survivor’s guilt

Many are left wondering how their adult lives would be better if their childhoods had been different.

Decades later, sunsets are one of the sources of trauma for him, still.

Because it meant night was coming. And nighttime meant shelling.

“I could have been a better person, a stronger person, maybe wiser, with less fear,” he said. “Especially the fear. Because fear is trauma. I’m a grown man and I'm afraid to walk in the dark. Because to me, the dark is war.”

Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.

People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.

They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.

Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.

The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.

In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.

What does Hamas want?

Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.

The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.

Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.

there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.

‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.

Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel

Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.

In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.

the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.

In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic

it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.

Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.

Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.

But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.

Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.

The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.

not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.

Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.

Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.

But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.

Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.

Danger of miscalculation

The Brics+ ideology

The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.

the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.

Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.

For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:

with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.

I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.

A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.

the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.

The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.

The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.

There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.

In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.

And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.

This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.

we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:

One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent

The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.

that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.