Angelina Jolie proves that beauty and goodness do not go hand in hand. Only in fairy tales. And that beauty can often be used to hide and promote evil. Especially when the beauty in question is hampered by a fair dose of stupidity and narcissism.

NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg and actress Angelina Jolie have joined forces to project the US-led war alliance as a progressive role model for gender politics and a “leading protector” of women’s rights.Their op-ed in the Guardian last weekend, “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”, is presented as a joint mission to secure the “fundamental promise in the UN Charter of equal rights and dignity for women.”

One rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Written in defence of an organisation that is the primary source of warmongering, by its leader and chief propagandist and an Ayn Rand devotee and self-styled “humanitarian”, the op-ed could be mistaken for satire.

Claiming that NATO was founded to safeguard “the freedom of its peoples”, the authors assert that, for 70 years, the US-led bloc has stood for the “defence of democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law and the UN Charter.”

In fact, from its foundation in April 1949 until the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in July 1991, NATO’s role was dictated by confrontation with the Soviet Union. To this end, it not only fomented a nuclear arms race but was involved in numerous conflicts and interventions from the Korean War to Cuba.

With the juridical liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO’s aggressive stance became more overt as it mounted direct military operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and, more recently, Libya and Syria aimed ultimately at encircling, and dismembering Russia and China.

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives as a result and millions more have been injured and displaced. These wars, moreover, have been accompanied by the evisceration of all pretence at maintaining democratic norms—including extraordinary rendition and targeted assassinations by drone strikes, not to speak of the gutting of civil liberties “at home.”

This has been the case irrespective of the lofty claims of “humanitarian intervention” and the citing of a “Responsibility to Protect” that accompanied these wars. It is a matter of fact that wherever NATO goes, abject misery and horror follows.

Stoltenberg/Jolie’s article represents a desperate attempt to rebuild NATO’s threadbare credibility in the face of this record.

Sexual violence is “one of the prime reasons” for female oppression, the op-ed argues, and this “accounts in large part for why it is often more dangerous to be a woman in a warzone today than it is to be a soldier.”

“[C]onflicts in which women’s bodies and rights are systematically abused last longer, cause deeper wounds and are much harder to resolve and overcome.”

The essential political aim of such claims is to argue that “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice. NATO can be a leader in this effort.”

One would not normally engage in an argument over who suffers most in war. After all, the overwhelming majority always suffer in war. That is why anyone guided by humanitarian and democratic impulses seeks to prevent it. But Stoltenberg and Jolie do not possess an ounce of such sensibilities between them.

An estimated 31,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan alone since 2001 and upwards of 30,000 in Libya since the invasion of 2011, to take just two examples.

An exact breakdown of these figures along gender lines is difficult to obtain. The casualties will undoubtedly include many women, and an untold number of children who are especially vulnerable to IEDs and the catastrophic breakdown of health and welfare provision that invariably accompanies war.

Such surveys that have been carried out, however, show that the assertion that women are at greater or particular risk from conflict, and that this is why NATO as the guarantor of gender equality, must intervene, has no foundation in fact.

A report by the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Armed Conflict Deaths disaggregated by Gender (2009), for example, used different datasets and investigated different conflicts and time periods to try and establish who is more likely to be the casualties of war. It is most significant because it was researched in line with UN-led efforts to focus on gender.

It cites several studies, involving deaths in conflicts in more than 13 countries, from Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo to Kosovo. While their findings varied, all showed a higher prevalence of violent deaths or from war-related trauma among men. The general conclusion, the IPRI found was that “men are more likely to die during conflicts, whereas women die more often of indirect causes after the conflict is over.”

In cases of sexual violence, moreover, reality is not nearly as one-sided as Stoltenberg/Jolie make out. An authoritative study by Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project, Male Rape and Human Rights, notes that sexual violence against men has been used as a “weapon of wartime or political aggression” in numerous countries, with up to 80 percent of male political prisoners in several conflicts surveyed reporting sexual torture and rape.

Significantly, it cites Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where US soldiers forced detainees “into acts such as nude posing in piles, group masturbation, and simulated sex, several of which were photographed. Other detainees were sodomized and some had electrical wires attached to their genitals.”

Male rape and sexual torture are reportedly rife in Libya following the NATO-backed invasion, which saw former leader Muammar Gaddafi sodomised with a bayonet and then murdered by western-allied forces.

Stoltenberg/Jolie couldn’t care less. They are not out to prevent conflict, but are seeking a pretext to create it. Thus, in a modern day-twist to the “white man’s burden”, they advocate the fight for “cultural change” and “gender equality” through the barrel of a gun.

The article appeared against the backdrop of a vicious, anti-democratic campaign over sexual harassment piloted in Hollywood—America’s “Scarlet Letter” moment. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the “Me Too” movement represents an effort by an affluent section of the middle class to achieve a greater share of privileges and wealth.

Stoltenberg/Jolie are now attempting to utilise the same type of self-absorption and indifference to social inequality amongst this constituency to build support for militarism and war.

Their appeal is a weaponisation of feminism in the service of NATO and of imperialist reaction. This is especially necessary when the imperialist alliance is preparing even greater crimes that threaten humanity with a new world war, fought with nuclear weapons.

Only last month, NATO agreed plans for a major military escalation in Europe, including two new military command centres. While Stoltenberg claimed this was necessary due to Moscow’s “aggression”, it is NATO that is provocatively building up its military forces along Russia’s borders, including the deployment of thousands of troops.

It is to conceal its predatory aims that Stoltenberg/Jolie attempt to recast NATO as a tool of female emancipation.

NATO will integrate “gender issues into its strategic thinking”, reinforce a “culture of integration of women throughout the organisation, including in leadership positions”, promote “the role of women in the military”, and deploy “gender advisers to local communities”, where “NATO’s female soldiers are able to reach and engage with local communities,” they write.

Without a trace of shame, the op-ed targets Ukraine and Syria as in particular need of NATO’s gender crusade. This on behalf of an organisation that supported fascists in the first conflict, and worked with Islamic extremists, such as the Al Nusra front in the other.

So much for women’s rights! Their white-wash of NATO, this imperialist thieves’ kitchen, should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

By Andre Damon
15 December 2017

Ron Chernow: Grant, Penguin Press: New York 2017.

Ron Chernow’s new biography of Ulysses S. Grant is an account and analysis of the life of the Civil War general, two-time US president and memoirist.

Chernow’s task in writing Grant’s biography was complicated. Not only did his life span hairpin turns in American social and political history, but Grant was, and continues to be, one of the most unfairly calumniated individuals in American politics.

To make things more difficult, Grant was a unique personality: A general who hated the sight of blood, an abstemious alcoholic, an eloquent writer famous for his silence, a morally upright man who spent his last decades surrounded by corruption.

It is a testament to the success of Chernow’s book that out of this mass of political, historical and personal complexities an integral picture of Grant and his age emerges. Chernow’s biography serves as a complement to Grant’s memoirs, helping to provide political and personal context to Grant’s firsthand account of the Civil War.

Asked how he intended to write the biography of a man who has already written a very highly regarded autobiography, Chernow replied that he chose to “zero in on the silences.” To anyone already familiar with Grant’s career and writings, this approach is very engaging, adding a great deal of the human factor to Grant’s sparse and stoical prose.

Chernow’s research is meticulous, and his wealth of anecdotes and small details brings the characters of Grant’s story to life. But he does not let the sweep of history get lost in minutia and keeps his narrative centered on broad historical themes.

The book reflects renewed historical interest in Grant following Ronald C. White’s American Ulysses released last year, and preceding an annotated re-release of his memoirs by Harvard University.

Grant in 1864

Among the most striking features of Grant’s life is that he seemed to be almost a different person at different times. Here was a man who had seen years of failure and despair in the period following the Mexican war, yet within a matter of years was elevated to a place in world history almost as indispensable to the success of the Union war effort as Abraham Lincoln himself.

During Grant’s two terms as president, even as he struggled desperately to hold onto his principles, his name was sullied by the corruption that pervaded America’s gilded age, with its railroad swindles, filthy financial frauds and despoiling and genocide against the Indians.

He was a man of his time, but not one who rose above it. When dominant sections of the American bourgeoisie lifted themselves to heroism in the Civil War, he was their greatest hero. When they plumbed the moral and political depths, he sank with them.

Born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Grant was the son of a socially aspiring Methodist tanner and abolitionist who was able to secure a place for him at the US Military Academy at West Point, over the young man’s objections. At West Point, Grant had a middling record, despite his proficiency in mathematics and extraordinary gifts at horsemanship.

Upon graduation, Grant married Julia Dent, a scion of St. Louis slaveholders, who would be his lifelong companion.

Despite his desire to serve in the cavalry, Grant was assigned to an infantry regiment as quartermaster before the outbreak of the Mexican War, where he served with distinction.

Grant's memoirs

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his memoirs, Grant recalled his opposition to the Mexican War. “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He later argued that it led to the expansion of slave-holding territory in the United States and was a direct cause of the Civil War.

“The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War,” he wrote. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

After the conclusion of the Mexican War, Grant was stationed in the Pacific Northwest, where, isolated from his family and burdened by his meager army pay, he invested in several failed business ventures before resigning from the army in 1854.

His resignation marked the beginning of a low point in Grant’s life. Although Grant excises his personal tribulations from his memoirs, Chernow’s biography makes clear that Grant suffered from depression and alcoholism, both of which he succeeded in vanquishing in later years.

Over the next several years, Grant struggled as a farmer in Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois. He came to rely on assistance from his slave-owning father-in-law. The future president worked alongside his wife’s slaves and hauled and hawked firewood on the St. Louis streets. While temperamentally adverse to slavery, Grant voted for Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 election. However, he came to support Lincoln in the 1860 election, though he was unable to vote due to residency restrictions.

The outbreak of the war led to a head-spinning reversal in his fortunes, bringing out his latent talents. Grant, appointed to lead recruitment efforts in his town of Galena, Illinois, quickly raised and trained a company. He was promoted to brigadier general on the strength of his military experience, his competence and the support of his patron Elihu B. Washburne.

After opening up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers to Union traffic through bold combined offensives in the battles of Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson, Grant found himself uncharacteristically on the defensive when his command, consisting mostly of raw troops, was surprised by a Confederate attack in the Battle of Shiloh, fought April 6–7, 1862.

At the end of the first day of fighting, Grant’s Army of Tennessee had lost ground and abandoned its camps and provisions. Despite what looked like a crushing defeat, and though he spent the night under an oak tree in the pouring rain, Grant maintained his mental clarity and indefatigable optimism.

Chernow writes:

Wrapped in his greatcoat, Grant returned to the haven of the nearby oak tree with its spreading canopy of branches. Sherman found him standing there, streaming with rain, hat pulled low over his face, collar upturned, holding a lantern and chewing a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman remarked. “Yes,” replied Grant with a drag on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow though.” The statement expressed Grant’s intestinal fortitude, which communicated itself to his officers. He had already told Sherman that when both sides seem defeated in battle, the first to assume the offensive would surely win.

Armed with this indomitable spirit, Grant and Sherman rallied the Union troops, greatly strengthened by overnight reinforcements, and secured a victory in the second day of fighting, though at horrendous cost.

Chernow writes:

Everyone was stunned by the scale of carnage at Shiloh, which posted a new benchmark for mass slaughter… Men who survived it could never scrub its harrowing imagery from their memories. Americans found it hard to comprehend the dimensions of the losses, which were beyond any historical precedent. Of more than one hundred thousand soldiers who pitched into the fray, twenty-four thousand had been killed or wounded—a casualty count dwarfing that of the battle of Waterloo. Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War combined.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter Shiloh, Grant secured a series of triumphs in the Western theater, culminating in the tactically masterful victories at Vicksburg, which gave the North control of the Mississippi River, and Chattanooga, which secured control of Tennessee.

Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation clarified the political aims of the war: it was to be henceforward explicitly a conflict to decide the fate of slavery in the United States. This political turning point set the stage for a re-shuffling of the army’s command structure.

Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, coming at approximately the same time as General Meade’s victory at Gettysburg, marked a turning point in the Union war effort, which had heretofore been hamstrung by ineffective generalship, personified by the Democrat George B. McClellan.

Grant’s extraordinary successes gave Lincoln the opportunity to place a political ally at the head of the Union army. Grant saw eye to eye with Lincoln on emancipation and the use of African-American troops to fight the South, and opposed any talk of an early peace.

So complete was their unanimity on fundamental political issues that when one interlocutor asked Lincoln about the chances of Grant running to oppose him on the Republican ticket, the latter replied, “He is fully committed to the policy of emancipation and employing Negro soldiers; and with this policy faithfully carried out, it will not make much difference who is president.”

With the substantial leeway given to Grant by Lincoln, the newly appointed lieutenant general was able to assemble the team of military leaders who won the war, including the brilliant William Tecumseh Sherman and the cavalry officer Philip Sheridan, both of whom shared Grant’s penchant for bold offensive operations.

The personnel shake-up allowed Grant to pursue, for the first time, an integrated strategy for the entire Northern war effort. While he and Meade pushed back and pinned down Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, Sherman and Sheridan were able to cut off vast swaths of Southern territory, destroying the logistical basis of Lee’s army and slowly strangling it, leading Lee’s army to surrender on April 9, 1865.

While the Union victory seems, in hindsight, to be a strategic masterstroke, up close it looked like one great horrible slaughter. Grant was valued by Lincoln because he, unlike other generals, was willing to fight grueling offensive operations. He led a campaign of total war, including economic war against the civilian population of the South.

As Sherman and Sheridan ravaged Georgia and the Carolinas, requisitioning, burning and destroying anything of substantial economic value, Grant pushed Lee back, mile by mile, toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, at the cost of rivers of blood and piles of corpses.

But all of it was entirely justified. Lincoln, the politician who waged the deadliest war in American history, is warmly remembered as the president who freed the slaves, and valued as America’s most humane leader.

The anti-democratic political movement that expressed itself in Southern secession did not surrender with Lee. Rather, it took a different form, manifesting itself in a wave of violence against the Republican Party and freed blacks. Among the most monstrous of these actions was the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, but it also took the form of murderous rampages by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan, aimed at terrorizing and disenfranchising freed slaves.

The shocking extent of Klan violence in the post-Civil War period is rarely taught in schools. As Chernow writes, “Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath.”

Lincoln’s assassination left Andrew Johnson in the White House, who quickly moved to conciliate the South by turning a blind eye to the lynching of freed slaves and Southern Republicans. This set the stage for his impeachment by the House of Representatives and the Senate’s failure to convict him. The Republican Party, under Grant, won the presidency in 1868.

Grant pursued a muscular policy of defending freed blacks, including passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, granting blacks equal protection under the law and the right to vote, and the enforcement of these amendments by federal troops.

Frederick Douglass

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his policy won Grant the praise of his political ally, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who called him “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.”

But even as Grant firmly pursued racial equality, support for his policy was being undermined by dramatic changes in American society. Propelled by the massive development of industry and a speculative boom that followed the war, inequality was soaring amid a mass of ill-gotten wealth in what Mark Twain christened the “Gilded Age.”

As the railroads raced toward America’s West Coast, together with the mining and heavy industry that accompanied them, the Republican Party became ever more directly the party of Wall Street and the railroads. Despite Grant’s personal respect for and defense of the American Indians, US industry demanded their expulsion and extermination. Figures such as Sherman, whose troops sang “John Brown’s Body” as they marched through the South freeing slaves during the Civil War, now argued openly for genocide against the Indians.

The working class, meanwhile, emerged onto the scene with a series of militant strikes. While Grant showed an admirable tenacity in the defense of black civil rights, and sought to pursue a policy of peace toward American Indians, he consistently took the side of business in regard to labor struggles. Commenting from abroad about the 1877 railroad strike, Grant wrote, “My judgment is that it should have been put down with a strong hand and so summarily as to prevent a like occurrence for a generation.”

As the class struggle grew red hot, the great majority of the American bourgeoisie realized that, in their conflict with their mortal class enemy, the democratic ideals, including racial equality which animated the Civil War, would have to go. It was the peculiarity of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant to have held on to the egalitarian ideals in relationship to slavery and the freed slaves—for which he had fought far longer than his contemporaries—and for this he was viciously denounced by them.

Grant in later life

The general corruption of American society and government manifested itself repeatedly within Grant’s cabinet, a fact that was not helped by Grant’s relative political inexperience and his overly trusting character, leading to a succession of scandals. Grant’s Democratic and “Liberal Republican” opponents would use these corruption scandals to implicitly criticize what they thought was his unjustified concern with the murder of Southern blacks and Republicans by the KKK.

Allegations of corruption became a dog-whistle summons to attack Reconstruction, extrapolating on the lie that the Northern occupation of the South was aimed at enriching corrupt Yankee “carpetbaggers.” By the end of his second term in office, Grant was tormented by his inability to defend Southern blacks from violence, resulting from the fact that support for such a policy had simply evaporated within the Republican Party.

Chernow writes:

Grant’s personal tragedy was simultaneously an American tragedy. … Grant reflected on the deep changes wrought in northern Republican circles. He predicted … that the northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South as well as “future mischief of a very serious nature. … It requires no prophet to foresee that the national government will soon be at a great disadvantage and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost. … I do not wish to create unnecessary alarm, nor to be looked upon as a prophet of evil, but it is impossible for me to close my eyes in the face of things that are as plain to me as the noonday sun.”

This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.

He adds:

Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the same time, historians of the “lost cause” school engaged in apologias for the South’s conduct in the Civil War. They argued that the cause of the war was “states’ rights,” not slavery, built up Robert E. Lee to superhuman status and heaped scorn on Grant as a “drunken butcher.” These lies were embraced even in the North and remain a major influence in history textbooks to this day.

Following the end of his second term, Grant embarked upon a world tour that left him one of the most well traveled and cosmopolitan men of his generation. Upset in his hopes for a third term, Grant retreated to private life, where his entire fortune was swindled away by a Gilded Age Bernie Madoff named Ferdinand Ward, who traded on Grant’s prestige to set up a massive Ponzi scheme. That year, Grant developed throat cancer. Sherman, his friend, declared that “Wall Street killed him.”

Mark Twain

And yet, on his death bed, Grant succeeded in writing a great piece of American prose in the form of his memoirs. His aim was to earn enough from their publication to support his beloved family.

Published by his friend Mark Twain, his memoirs were a massive literary and financial success. Twain ranked them with Julius Caesar’s commentaries, praising Grant’s “clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness,” and his “fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike.”

In his memoirs, Grant gave one of the clearest summations of the causes of the Civil War ever written, of which the following is only a sample:

The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United State will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that “A state half slave and half free cannot exist.” All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down…

In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution.

Grant finished his memoirs while battling throat cancer

Upon Grant’s death, Frederick Douglass eulogized, “In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”

The great tragedy of Grant’s life, as Chernow points out, is that he could not hold out alone against his age. It was during Grant’s post-war lifetime that the anti-democratic and reactionary character of the capitalist system and the bourgeois class, which had already made itself so plainly manifest throughout Europe in the crushing of the 1848 uprisings, made itself undeniably manifest in America.

Thenceforward, the cause of social progress in America would be associated with the struggle against capitalism and led by the working class.

by LUCIANA BOHNE, COUNTERPUNCH

Photo by zeevveez | CC BY 2.0

You have to admire the cynical brilliance of the electoral mummery of the United States, which yielded Donald Trump for president. From the point of view of the enterprising Robinson Crusoe-like US establishment, the “slurring” upstart, possibly godless brute, Man Friday, though as rich as Croesus, has usurped the management of the Exceptional Island of United States together with the imagined god-blessed shining city on the hill.

This is a performance. Though President Friday is merely the open and concentrated expression of their predatory economic vulgarity, the Crusoe establishment cry out hypocritically, “Why has God done this to me? What have I done to be thus used?” Despite their protestations, President Friday does exactly what any Republican or Democrat President Crusoe would have done (and nefariously has done for the last four decades in domestic and foreign policy), but the convenience of an oafish, crude, and politically-incorrect President Friday is that his outrageous policy pronouncements, though no effective departure from the bi-partisan consensus of the last forty years, can be publicly disowned.

Trump will be remembered as “the president of plausible deniability.” This effect is nowhere more evident than in Trump’s foreign policy.

Take his latest apparent debacle over Jerusalem. Trump’s declaration of the corpus separatum (“separate body”) of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, on the surface an arbitrary, unnecessary, decidedly unlawful, and irrational action is plaintively lamented domestically, sententiously denounced abroad by those ever-treacherous European vassals, and vehemently protested by the leading US comprador-clients in the Arab-Muslim world.

But what’s the complaint? According to the gated elite of the “international community,” that clod, Trump, has made an “ill-considered” decision, which breaks with decades of US neutrality on the “most sensitive issue” in the Middle East and damages a “peace process” which has been fixed at infinity for decades.

What “neutrality”? To begin with, the historic occupation of the land of Palestine by the Zionist settlers could not have survived without the support of British imperialism and its post-war heir, American imperialism.  On 9 November of 1917, two days after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and only weeks before they “liberated” from the czar’s files and released to the world the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement infamously divvying up the Ottoman imperial region in the Middle East between Britain and France, British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, publicly promised to grant the land of Palestine to the Zionist organization’s planners to reconstitute Palestine as a Jewish National Home.

It could have worked, but unfortunately the Arab Palestinians rebelled. They owned 91 percent of the land in Palestine against 7 percent owned by Palestinian Jews, including land acquired by the Zionist Palestine Agency (a special branch of the World Zionist Organization) since 1917 for projected settlement of Jewish immigrants. The Arab Revolt of 1936-39 in Palestine, demanding independence from the British Mandate and an end to Jewish immigration and land purchase, forced the British Foreign Office to embark on the proposal for a two-state solution, which eventually resulted in 1948 in the awarding of 60 percent of Palestine to Israel; 40 percent to Palestine —with the immediate recognition of the independent state of Israel and only a nebulous provisional status for Palestine.

Eventually, the sun finally set on the British Empire. Already in 1953, while France was busy with a war losing colonial Indochina (1954) and was setting to lose a war in colonial Algeria (1962), Britain, hobbled over to Washington, begging bowl in hand, to plead for help in overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mossadegh. Washington agreed, provided London handed over 40 percent interests in Persian Oil. The CIA conducted a coup, which resulted in the Pahlavi Shah’s Iran becoming America’s imperially scenographic and bloody watchdog in the Middle East for two and a half decades.  The “Suez-Canal Crisis” of 1956 marked the official expulsion of the British Empire from the world’s map, when, along with France, it was unceremoniously sent packing by the new hegemon in the region and the world, the United States. Israel, which had colluded with Britain and France against Nasser’s Egypt, got the message of whose coat tails it should now clutch to continue the expropriation and colonization of Palestine, but it took the 1967 “Seven-Day War” for the United States to start plunking serious ready on the Israeli military—today, 3 billion dollars per year—as an able and divisive police force obstructing Arab unity and cutting short Arab secular nationalism by manipulating the Palestinian issue.

As to the “peace process”: it has been a repetitive, time-buying negotiating ruse to permit the consolidation of Israeli take-over of the Occupied Territories. One-hundred years since the Balfour Declaration and fifty years since UN Resolution 242 mandating Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 war (which Israel renamed “Disputed Territories,” in order to elude Geneva Conventions and ignore Resolution 242), Israel’s unique anomaly in today’s neo-colonial practice of subordinating Third World spaces by economic means consists in being an example of classic 19^thcentury European colonialism: a colonizing, racist, segregationist settlers’ state.

Because international law and human rights declarations are all on the side of the Palestinians in their right to resist occupation and fight for independence, “neutrality” is hardly an issue.  However, in the fifty years since 1967, the United States’ has assumed the mantle of  “honest broker” in the neutrality charade called “the peace process,” inviting the whole “international community” and the Palestinians themselves to support a two-state solution, while doing nothing to stop Israel’s illegal construction of colonies in the Occupied Territories, the confiscation of Palestinian lands, the demolition of Palestinian houses, the multitudinous policies and measures of ethnic cleansing, the humiliation of checkpoints and Israeli-only roads, the ghetto walls, and the periodic terror bombings of Gaza, tank invasions of Palestinian enclaves and refugee camps, mass  arrests, searches, and detentions—an occupation UN Special Rapporteur, Richard Falk, has classified as “an affront to international law.”

If Trump’s allegedly precipitous declaration to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has neither terminated a non-existent policy of US neutrality nor interrupted the virtual mirage of the peace process, why, exactly, has he done it? Is it because he’s “stupid”? After all, shortly after issuing his declaration he disowned it, saying the American embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would not happen for at least six months. Taking advantage of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, providing for an executive prerogative of consecutive six months for delaying the move, he acted exactly the way his predecessors, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, had acted: sustaining the move in principle but delaying it to safeguard the equilibrium of US alliances with both Arab and Israeli clients (Senator Bob Dole had sought but failed to make the move mandatory). According to the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the executive delay is valid as long as the President “determines and reports to Congress in advance that such suspension is necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States.”

He’s not stupid (in the self-congratulatory and comforting sense)—that’s the conceit of those Democrats who follow Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump’s constituency as “a basket of deplorables.” What’s been “stupid” is the pursuit by the Bush-Obama administration of the plan to attack seven Middle-Eastern countries in five years. Apart from wrecking several countries, committing war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the plan has stalled in Syria at the end of the Obama administration. What’s “stupid” is that Trump inherits and presides over a blocked US strategy in the Middle East.

The US-Israeli-Saudi axis has been defeated in the attempt to “re-stabilize” the Middle East in their interests—significantly through the agency of Isis in Syria and Iraq. This defeat has strengthened Iran as a regional power, lately consolidated by Iran’s winning alliance with Hezbollah and Russia in Syria. The disastrous consequences of the Bush-Obama Middle-Eastern misadventures now require a drastic change of course.  If the road to Iran can no longer pass through Damascus, why not try through Jerusalem? Why not use the Jerusalem card to provide the Arab satrapies with a diplomatic excuse to officialize the subterranean alliance lately become de-facto, for example, between Israel and Saudi Arabia? If the US recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, well, that becomes a fact on the ground. It means the US has taken sides; it means an unambiguous alliance between the US and Israel against Iran. Can the Arab satrapies reject the opportunity to join the alliance when the objective is Iran and its fabulous spoils? After all, it used to be said that if America sneezes, the world catches cold, so when Trump coughed up the snot that “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel,” his advisors may well have calculated that the Arab leaders would catch bronchitis and seek the remedy in Tel Aviv. It may not matter that the mucous was immediately wiped off: the blip of the White House’s proclamation may provide enough diplomatic cover to justify an official alliance with Israel in the quest to overwhelm Iran.

Or so the White House’s thinking goes: an Arab-Israeli NATO with a capital in Jerusalem. The world laughed when “stupid” Trump floated the idea of an “Arab NATO” in Riyadh April last. But here it is, the bizarre scenario acknowledged by that CIA rag, the Washington Post .

Trump’s Jerusalem gamble is thus less about the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace than about whether Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran can be achieved in its absence. Israel’s tacit cooperation with Gulf states against Iran, long kept in the shadows, has increasingly been brought into the open despite the absence of Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Jerusalem gambit may well force a public reckoning over this semiprivate alignment.

The Washington Post’s analysis acknowledges that Trump’s move on Jerusalem is a gamble. It drops the comedy of the “peace process,” the US fake persona of the “honest broker,” and the whole charade of neutrality. It privileges one side in the former equilibrium of alliances—Israel’s—and coerces the Arab sides to formally accept the imbalance, holding the carrot of Tehran at the end of the nasty stick.

Will the deal work? Only time will tell, but it is certainly a sign of American decline in diplomacy and power in the Middle East, since it points to its inability to “govern” regional allies with even the former appearance of neutrality. It sanctions the historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, who wanted East Jerusalem as the capital of their promised future state. Their capital expropriated, how serious is the promise of a state? And in apartheid Israel, what choice do they have but to rise up or submit?  The only things we can expect from this change of course are, therefore, increased tension, violence, illegality, while Iran remains—and fortunately for the feeble peace of the world—a wild, desperate, and madly obstinate long shot.