© Mohammed Saber/EPAAn Israeli army flare illuminating Gaza on 3 August.
Global revulsion at the mind-numbing carnage of Israel's onslaught on Gaza seems finally to have spurred some of the western political class to speak out. The resignation of Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister, in
protest against her government's "morally indefensible" stance, emboldened Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to demand the
suspension of arms export licences to Israel.
Last week it was Ed Miliband who condemned Israel's invasion and the prime minister's "
silence on the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians". Even the United States administration denounced its strategic protege's
"disgraceful" bombardment of a school, while Barack Obama described Palestinian suffering as " heartbreaking" - as if he had nothing to do with it.
Now that Israelis and Palestinians have arrived in Cairo to turn the ceasefire into something more long-lasting, perhaps it feels safer to take a stand. But a month of indiscriminate brutality in which 1,875 Palestinians and 67 Israelis have been killed is still presented, grotesquely, as a war of Israeli self-defence - rather than as a decades-long confrontation between occupier and occupied, in which western governments stand resolutely on the side of the occupier.
And while the overwhelming majority of Palestinian dead are civilians - 430 of them children - and 64 of the Israeli dead are soldiers, it is Hamas that is branded terrorist, rather than the Israeli armed forces armed with the most sophisticated targeting technology in the world.
It's only necessary to consider for a moment what the reaction would have been if the death toll had been the other way round to realise how loaded are the scales of western moral outrage and selective the appetite for action. And it's only by ignoring the entire history of the conflict that it can be portrayed as the result of some wearisome ancient ethnic hatred.
This week's centenary of the outbreak of the first world war should help. David Cameron claims it was fought for freedom.
In reality, it was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of imperial powers to carve up territories, markets and resources.Far from defending democracy or the rights of small nations, Britain and France ended the war divvying up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Iraq to Palestine. A century on, we're still living with the consequences.
Comment: Vladimir Putin, the judo master, is likely well aware of his tactical advantages. Vladimir Putin, the humanitarian, is valiantly trying to find a way through the horrors created by the imperial west which causes the least amount of suffering for all, not just the Russian people. But he's proven before that he will not hesitate to act when the moment is right.
War and conflict are ultimately about time and tempo. You have to analyze the American strategy designed to start war, and then analyze the Russian response and see how in each case, the Americans are being stymied. War should have started by now. In 1914, it would already have been raging.
The U.S. strategic wet dream is: Coup in Ukraine | Russia Invades Ukraine | America and Europe Declare War | Russia dies and we do the happy dance on their dead bodies.
The U.S. (who used this tactic in the 1980s against Russia) fully expected Russia to engage in the Ukraine. Russia did not. This is a missed tempo, because unless Russia invades Ukraine, the West has a problem.
The goal of America is to draw Russia into a war, NOW, TODAY. They need it. So actively denying them combat when they are strong is in the interest of Russia. This way Russia can continue to consolidate its position and dig in for the winter.
Oh, you forgot about that? Read Sun Tzu: weather is important!
America further needs a war to conceal its economic failure. Russia's response? It doesn't invade Ukraine, but hits America and the entire West where it hurts by creating an alternative international institutional framework - the BRICS bank in place of the IMF one, for example, which was immediately put into practice by accepting trade settlements with Eurasian partners in local currencies, instead of the dollar.
Meanwhile it partners with China to offload some of their American bonds (Belgium magically bought them up). Finally it puts the screws to Europe, which is already suffering economically and agriculturally by ensuring that their vegetables and fruit rot in warehouses.
While you may not think the U.S. will be hit, it will. Already, Poland is demanding the U.S. buy the fruit that Russia has banned. Now more European countries will ask, and if the U.S. says yes, it loses money. If the U.S. says no, it loses friends.
Putin is some kind of genius.
There are just so many ways that this is bad for the West and good for Russia.
These are not weak moves, they are establishing moves to have a good opening position should a shooting war really start. But also they want a good position should a new "cold war" start. So you can see that either option eventually has Russia with a more stable position. Certainly more stable than if they had followed this article's advice. Sorry PCR, but you are way off here.