Professor Garcia: governments should prioritize the common good over military spending

Denise Garcia (Northeastern University, Boston, Mass) is an academic who advises the United Nations on arms control and the military uses of artificial intelligence  and robotics. Highlights from her article, Redirect military budgets to tackle climate change and pandemics follow.

She opens: “The old world order, in which governments build arsenals to protect the state, is clearly not delivering what people need. According to the Global Peace Index, levels of peace have fallen by 2.5% since 2008. The index measures 23 indicators — including military expenditure and ease of access to small weapons — in 163 independent states and territories, ranking them according to their level of peacefulness. The drop in peace levels is despite an increase in military spending globally, to a record US$1.9 trillion in 2019”.

Despite threats to human existence from climate change, biodiversity loss and a pandemic that’s devastating economies and paralysing societies, countries still spend recklessly on destructive weapons for wars they will never fight.

Some nations, including Iceland and Costa Rica, don’t have armies. This year, Costa Rica became one of the first countries to have stopped and then reversed deforestation, with a goal of becoming carbon neutral; it is also one of the first to adopt a tropical carbon tax.

To recover from the costs of the pandemic, estimated at up to $82 trillion over the next 5 years (see go.nature.com/2q5jtyf), governments should focus their spending on stimulus packages for decarbonization, health, education and the environment.

The arms trade is lucrative: sales by the world’s leading arms-producing companies reached $420 billion in 2018. Everything from small arms, tanks and aircraft to military goods and services are sold in legal and illegal markets. They end up on the streets and in the hands of militant organizations such as Al-Qaeda. The result? In 2017 (the latest year for which data are available), some 464,000 people died in 2017 through homicides, and 89,000 individuals died in armed conflicts globally.

The five countries with the largest defence budgets, unprepared for Covid, were hit hard

The United States, China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia together accounted for almost two-thirds (62%) of global military expenditure in 2019, and US, Indian and Russian rates of infection are some of the highest so far, with the United States topping both lists. Their arms were no defence against Covid.  Germany and New Zealand spend around 1% of GDP and have so far fared much better in the pandemic.

By 2050, almost 100 million people could be forced to migrate from coastal areas and other places that will become uninhabitable as a result of climate change (see go.nature.com/3agzsij).

In 2019, fires in the Amazon rainforest raged towards the ‘point of no return’ at which the whole forest ecosystem could collapse. The Amazon is the largest reservoir of biodiversity on Earth; in economic and social terms, from food to jobs, homes and health, its loss has been put at about $3.6 trillion. Biodiversity loss also exposes people to new viruses.

The real enemy is upon us. The frequency of heatwaves, droughts, forest fires, floods and hurricanes has quadrupled over the past four decades, and is rising.  All of these call for approaches to national defence that are genuinely centred around human security.

Professor Garcia has long argued that nations should prioritize ‘human security for the common good’ over military spending, ensuring people can live to their full potential – and that governments need to accept that their concept of national security sustained by a military–industrial complex is anachronistic and irrelevant.

 

 

 

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The real enemies are upon us: big armies will hinder, not help: Denise Garcia

Ben Chacko describes Britain’s arms manufacturers exports, especially to war zones, as ‘the gift that keeps on giving’.

An elderly Ukrainian woman looks on after Russian shelling in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 29, 2022

The top 100 arms companies continue to grow amid the pandemic

Sales of arms and military services by the industry’s 100 largest companies totalled $531 billion in 2020—an increase of 1.3% in real terms compared with the previous year, according to new data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The arms sales of the top 100 arms companies in 2020 were 17% higher than in 2015—the first year for which SIPRI included data on Chinese firms. This marked the sixth consecutive year of growth in arms sales by the Top 100.

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade estimates that the real value of arms to Saudi Arabia is over £23bn, while the value of sales to Britain’s despotic allies is nearly £25bn.

To give a sense of scale, Chacko adds, £1bn is about the amount of money spent on agency and locum doctors in the NHS.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Chatham House speech was published in The Spectator (2017)

It stated that – if elected in 2019 – Labour would have re-examined the arms export licensing regulations to ensure that all British arms exports are consistent with Britain’s legal and moral obligations.

Export licences for arms when there is a clear risk that they will be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law would not have been granted.

Weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia, when the evidence of grave breaches of humanitarian law in Yemen is overwhelming, would have been immediately halted.

Vested interests then combined to ensure that profit-threatening Corbyn (still regularly cited by Boris Johnson) was not elected

Professor Denise Garcia (right), an academic who advises the United Nations on arms control and the military uses of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, wrote in Nature (August 2020):

“The real enemy is upon us. The frequency of heatwaves, droughts, forest fires, floods and hurricanes has quadrupled over the past four decades, and is rising. By 2050, almost 100 million people could be forced to migrate from coastal areas and other places that will become uninhabitable as a result of climate change (see go.nature.com/3agzsij). . .

“Big armies haven’t helped countries to fight COVID-19 — precisely the opposite. The five countries with the largest defence budgets were unprepared and were hit hard. The United States, China, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia together accounted for almost two-thirds (62%) of global military expenditure in 2019, and US, Indian and Russian rates of infection are some of the highest so far, with the United States topping both lists”.

Is the tide turning in the United States, offering a major correction to escalating militarism and an atrophying welfare state?

In the Jacobin, Stephen Semler reports that Representatives Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) — co-chairs of the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus — introduced legislation to draw down US military spending which has been referred to the Committee on Armed Services. The People Over Pentagon Act would cut the Department of Defense budget by $100 billion and reinvest the money in nonmilitary federal programs – a first step in funding human needs rather than padding the bottom lines of weapons contractors.

Professor Garcia: “Britain should end foreign military adventures forthwith and address its social, economic and environmental challenges. The real enemy is upon us – redirect military budgets to tackle climate change and pandemics”.

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Medical research adds reports of Gazans living with injuries from explosives – some delivered by air – to the ‘defence’ toll

Sarah Wilkinson and Milly Arnott, who had friends in Palestine, were charged with criminal damage to the UAV Engines factory of Israeli-owned Elbit Systems in Shenstone and found not guilty. Judge Marcus Waites said the defendants believed Palestine was an important issue and believed in what they were doing.

There is a graphic description by Sebastien Roblin in America’s high-profile Forbes Magazine of the fatal, destructive effects of the ‘asymmetric war’ between the technologically advanced Israeli Defense Force and Hamas which governs the Gaza Strip, ‘a small, isolated and impoverished coastal enclave with a population of 2 million’.

Thousands of civilian Palestinians in Gaza who have survived numerous military incursions by land and air, bear war-related traumatic injuries caused by explosive weapons – some delivered by Israeli drones.

Btselem: over 5800 Palestinians wounded in 7 motths of protest

Information about the long-term suffering of injured Gazans has been published in the BMJ ; the clinical study of medical findings in war-related traumatic amputation patients, was conducted in the main clinical centre in Gaza, Al-Shifa Hospital,

Among 254 Palestinian patients in Gaza with war-related extremity amputations were subgroups of patients presenting a variety of alarming symptoms and findings. 94 patients received further diagnostic clinical exploration, radiology imaging and clinical chemistry laboratory tests at the main clinical centre in Gaza, the Al-Shifa Hospital.

• Nine out of ten of the referred patients were young (median 31.5 years) males (88/94, 92.6%).
• Ultrasound imaging revealed that 19 of 90 patients (20%) had fatty liver infiltration, 3 patients had lung nodules and 10 patients had lung atelectasis on chest CT.
• Twelve had remaining shrapnel(s) in the chest, five patients had shrapnel(s) in the abdomen and one in the scrotum.
• We found shrapnel(s) in the amputation stumps of 26 patient’s amputated limbs, while 8 patients had shrapnel in the non-amputated limb.
• Three patients had liver lesions.
• Nineteen patients had elevated liver enzymes,
• 32 patients had elevated erythrocyte sedimentation rate
• and 12 were anaemic.
• Two patients tested positive for hepatitis C virus
• and three were positive for hepatitis B virus (HBV).
• One of the 19 patients with fatty liver tested positive for HBV.
• Two of the patients with fatty liver infiltration had elevated glycated haemoglobin levels and confirmed diabetes mellitus type II.
• Nearly half (44, 8%) had remaining metal fragments from explosives of unknown composition harboured in various parts of their bodies. All patients identified with lesions and nodules are being followed up locally.

The researchers concluded that it is unclear to what extent the injuries sustained by modern weaponry may increase survivors’ risks of negative long-term health effects and serious illness. They cannot anticipate the long-term health consequences of living with metal residuals from explosive weapons embedded in body organs and tissue.

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The May airstrike demolishing Gaza’s al-Jalaa building will be investigated by the ICC

On 3 March 2021, the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories in the state of Palestine.

The Middle East Monitor (MEM)  thinks that the ICC decision gives some reason to believe that ‘accountability is looming on the horizon’. Palestinians also hope that Israel’s impunity will end and that its extremist government and illegal settlers will no longer be allowed to commit such acts across the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction and says it is capable of investigating any possible wrongdoing by its army. It asserts that the investigation  is unfair and politically motivated.

America’s Associated Press (AP) has called on Israel to make public the evidence it used to justify the May bombing of the al-Jalaa building

At the end of October, speaking at a conference hosted by Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies about the importance of public perception during military conflicts. Maj. Gen.(res.) Nitzan Alon, the former head of IDF Operations admitted:

“Bringing down the tower with the AP offices was equivalent to a self-inflicted ‘public relations terror attack’ and an own goal, in our view. Not everyone in the IDF believes this, but I am convinced that this was a mistake. The operational benefit was not worth the damage that it caused diplomatically and in terms of perception”.

Palestinians inspect their destroyed houses following overnight Israeli air strikes in town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, in May 2021

Though due to a warning the building was evacuated and no lives were lost, the case for a war crime could cite the further long-term economic damage done by the May attacks. Many jobs were lost with the closure of companies sited in the building and many families were displaced. Human Rights Watch pointed out that there will be serious, long-lasting economic damage to the Palestinians who lived, worked, shopped, or benefited from businesses based there .

 

 

 

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Airstrike was a “tragic mistake”: Gen. Frank McKenzie (US Central Command)

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement late Friday that the United States will make “condolence payments” to families of Afghan civilians killed by mistake in U.S. drone strike on August 29. File photo courtesy the U.S. Department of Defense.

CNN reports that Pentagon press secretary John Kirby (above) said in a statement last week that a senior Pentagon official held a virtual meeting about a potential compensation payment for the family of Zamarai Ahmadi, an Afghan civilian who was one of 10 people killed in a US drone strike in late August. Ahmadi’s two year old niece, Malika, as well as her uncle, her seven cousins, and another child were killed in the strike.

The discussion with Steven Kwon (right), founder and head of Nutrition and Education International, the US non-profit charity that employed Ahmadi, focused on a compensation payment for his family and their desire to relocate to the United States. Kirby said no formal agreement has been reached at this stage.

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, said that the strike was a tragic mistake and that Mr. Ahmadi and others who were killed were innocent victims who bore no blame and were not affiliated with ISIS-K or threats to US forces.”

The Defense Department, which handles compensation payments through its regional combatant commands, has not been able to speak directly with Ahmadi’s family because there are no US troops in Afghanistan to lead the discussion.

Also complicating the conversation is the family’s desire to relocate to the United States, a decision handled by the State Department, not the Pentagon. At the end of September, Kirby said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would support the relocation of the family to the United States. Kahl reiterated that support during the meeting with Kwon.

Dr. Kwon told Mr. Ahmadi’s story of working with NEI over many years, providing care and lifesaving assistance for people facing high mortality rates in Afghanistan. NEI’s Dr. Kwon’s pledge to honour the memory of Ahmadi (left) and his family members and others who were killed in the strike,” Kirby said.

Ahmadi was one of 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, killed in a drone strike during the final days of the US evacuation and withdrawal from Afghanistan. Initially, the Pentagon defended the strike, pointing to secondary explosions as proof that there was explosive material in Ahmadi’s car.

Nearly three weeks later, the leader of US Central Command, Gen. Frank McKenzie, admitted that the strike was a “tragic mistake” following an investigation into the facts and circumstances around the strike, led by Lt. Gen. Sami Said, Inspector General of the Department of the Air Force.

This is just one of hundreds of tragic ‘mistakes’ – usually downplayed or  denied.

What can justify such losses of human life?

 

 

 

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Afghanistan: Could Pakistani drones hit the Panjshir Valley?

 

A reader in Wales drew attention to this BBC article

Claims have emerged that in recent days Pakistani drones have been used to help the Taliban, by targeting anti-Taliban positions.

One of the sources was an Afghan journalist, Tajuddin Soroush, who says he was told by Panjshir Governor Kamaluddin Nizami, “that Pakistan had bombed the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan with drones.”

Iranian and Indian media have had reports alleging Pakistani involvement, including in some cases using misleading photos said to show Pakistani military hardware.

The claims have been dismissed by Pakistan, as well as by the Taliban. A spokesman for the Pakistani armed forces, General Babar Iftikhar, told the BBC they were “complete lies” and called it “irrational propaganda from India”.

“Pakistan has nothing to do with what is happening inside Afghanistan, be it Panjshir or anywhere else.”

The full article with details of Pakistan’s drone-manufacturing capability may be read here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58480299

 

 

 

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Growing opposition to the allied airstrikes in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq

The UK is supporting US airstrikes in Yemen, Syria and Iraq which are killing civilians. The Saudi-led coalition appears to be responsible for 67% of reported civilian casualties in the war in Yemen.

ReliefWeb reports that Saudi-led coalition airstrikes, assisted by the UK and US militaries, appear to be responsible for 67% of reported civilian casualties in the war in Yemen, and are the cause of the majority of explosive violence against children.

Between 2015 and 2020, at least 3,153 children have died in Yemen and 5,660 children have been injured, according to a report by UNICEF. On average, 50 children are killed and 90 are wounded or permanently disabled each month. The vast majority are harmed by explosive weapons with wide area effects.

20 March 2021 – “A growing wave of violence across Yemen continues to take a devastating toll on children, with eight children confirmed killed and 33 more injured in a series of attacks since the beginning of the month*.

More than 100 international human rights organisations have called on US President Joe Biden to stop using drone attacks and air strikes outside of recognised battlefields. 

They made the call in a letter penned on Thursday in response to recent missile strikes on targets in Syria and Iraq, at the end of June, in which a child and three civilians were killed along with four anti-Isis fighters. Iraq is “studying all legal options” after this attack which has been condemned by regional leaders and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, as a “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security”.

The American Civil Liberties Union published the letter and its signatories;  an extract follows:

Friendly fire 

NBC reports that U.S. forces carried out airstrikes earlier this year against the same Iran-backed militias that the Pentagon said were behind a rocket attack in northern Iraq. The rocket attack killed a Filipino contractor working with an American-led military coalition and injured six people, including a Louisiana National Guard soldier and four American contractors.

The Pentagon press secretary John Kirby called these air strikes in Iraq and Syria an act of self-defence, justified to the US public – and the world – by the September 11 2001 al-Qaida attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

In July 2016, the Times reported that the Obama administration released a document, compiled by US investigators Dana Lesemann and Michael Jacobson, known as “File 17”, which contains a list naming three dozen people, including the suspected Saudi intelligence officers attached to Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. which connects Saudi Arabia to the hijackers

Newsweek has found a continuing conspiracy of silence among high former U.S. and Saudi officials about the attacks. “9/11 changed the whole world.” It not only led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracturing of the Middle East and the global growth of Islamic militantism.

As Professor Garcia has written, Britain should end foreign military adventures forthwith and address its social, economic and environmental challenges.  Many other voices are urging governments to stop spending billions of dollars on weapons and protect citizens from the real threats they face.

 

 

 

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Britain’s shame: supplying components enabling Turkey to bomb its own citizens

Link: https://politicalcleanup.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/britains-shame-supplying-a-crucial-component-enabling-turkey-to-bomb-its-own-citizens

Israeli air strikes on eastern Syria add 57 to the 380,000+ killed during the Syrian conflict

An article released by Agence France-Presse in Beirut and circulated to the world-wide media earlier this montd, said that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported that Israeli air strikes on eastern Syria killed 57 Syrian army forces and allied Iran-backed fighters.

An Israeli army spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by AFP. Israel rarely acknowledges individual strikes but has done so when responding to what it describes as aggression inside Israeli territory.

Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers which revealed the US government had lied to the American public about the Vietnam war, had warned that Donald Trump and Israel could increase attacks against Iran and its regional allies in the final days of the US president’s tenure. Trump’s administration had given unprecedented US support to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nicholas Heras, of the Institute of the Study of War said that in the dying days of the Trump administration, Netanyahu had been trying to do as much damage as possible to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in Syria before Biden took office.

The war in Syria has killed more than 387,000 people and displaced millions.

 

 

 

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Seek accountability for the deaths of the innocent men, women and children unwittingly caught up in wars the west has chosen to fight

For many years, ordinary men, women and children, at work at home and at school or in hospital are being killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and other countries, ignored by the mainstream ‘news’ media which prefers to feed the public with trivia about the Royal family and celebrities often featured in the Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’ (short section, right). 

Ten years ago AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH described the statistics for civilian deaths caused by pro-Government forces in Afghanistan as ‘simply appalling’:

“UN figures show that between January 2006-October 2009 2,139 civilians died in such circumstances (which is over 50% of the total killed by insurgents during the same period!). The number injured by NATO and its allies is not recorded, though it is likely to considerably outweigh the numbers of those killed”.

The author, Steve Beauchampé, pointed out that whilst fatalities and injuries amongst NATO forces are assiduously compiled and regularly reported in the British media, the coalition does not appear concerned enough to monitor the number of civilians they kill.

These deaths and injuries are ‘diminished and dismissed as collateral damage, the inevitable consequences of war’.

Many are killed by missile strikes; weapons launched from fighter planes, or increasingly from unmanned ‘Drone’ aircraft, the person who terminated or shattered their lives being safely ensconced in front of a computer screen in a US military base 8,000 miles away in Nevada, never seeing or hearing their mutilated victims or the effects of their actions, driving home to their family once their working day is over.

Nowhere is the description of the management of modern warfare better illustrated than in Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright’s account of his two months spent with US Marines during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 shows graphically how there are both competent and incompetent soldiers at all levels of the military hierarchy. Some were fearless and heroic, a credit to their country, some were way out of their depth, yet their judgments often meant the difference between life and death for those Iraqi civilians they encountered.

In Iraq as a whole, a substantial number of civilians (more than the current total for Afghanistan) perished at the hands of the very people who claimed to be their liberators.

Yet it seems few people of importance or influence in the west take the situation anything like seriously enough – certainly not politicians, newspaper editors nor radio or television news producers. Indeed one of the US’s first acts after invading Iraq was to arrange for the interim government they installed to grant immunity from prosecution for American military personnel for atrocities, including:

• families executed in cars when the driver failed to stop quickly enough at checkpoints;
• wedding parties blown up following inaccurate intelligence reports,
• houses, bomb shelters, educational establishments and even hospitals blasted to kingdom come

Civilian casualties are always high in military conflicts (usually higher than those suffered by the armed forces) and NATO‘s record is no worse than that of other armies in this regard. But there must be a line of accountability, especially in a world where those responsible for the killings claim such technical superiority and absolute moral authority.

If we can hold inquiries and apportion blame over the deaths of British service personnel then the least we can do is seek accountability for the killings by NATO forces of those innocent men, women and children unwittingly caught up in wars that the west chose to fight.

Or do their lives count for less?

 

 

 

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