General Clark: U.S. ground troops are now “prepared to die for the Jewish state”

A Kuwaiti newspaper made a dramatic claim over the weekend that got zero attention in the U.S. media.

The Kuwaiti daily Al-Jarida on Saturday reported that the US and Israel are working on a plan to attack Syrian targets in the near future.
According to the report, Jerusalem and Washington are disappointed in the way Russia has handled the Syrian war, and are planning to operate in the region in order to prevent Iran from gaining a stronger foothold in Syria.

That story may or may not mean something by itself.
However, there was an article in the Jerusalem Post one day earlier that buttresses this story in the most alarming way. The article concerned a joint military exercise between Israel and the U.S., Juniper Cobra, the largest joint US-Israeli air-defense exercise, but the interesting part was at the very bottom of the article.

Washington and Israel have signed an agreement which would see the US come to assist Israel with missile defense in times of war and, according to Haimovitch, “I am sure once the order comes we will find here US troops on the ground to be part of our deployment and team to defend the State of Israel.”

And those US troops who would be deployed to Israel, are prepared to die for the Jewish state, Clark said.

“We are ready to commit to the defense of Israel and anytime we get involved in a kinetic fight there is always the risk that there will be casualties. But we accept that – as every conflict we train for and enter, there is always that possibility,” he said.

This in itself is a scary enough of a statement. I seriously doubt that a single American boy joined the U.S. military with the intention of dying for Israel.
However, there is one inference in this article that trumps them all.

However, more troubling than the fact that U.S. troops stand ready to die at Israel’s behest was Clark’s assertion that Haimovitch would “probably” have the last word as to whether U.S. forces would join the IDF during war time. In other words, the IDF will decide whether or not U.S. troops become embroiled in the regional war for which Israel is preparing, not the United States. Indeed, Haimovitch buoyed Clark’s words, stating that: “I am sure once the order comes we will find here U.S. troops on the ground to be part of our deployment and team to defend the state of Israel.”

What do you think it does to the chances of your nation going to war if you have the choice of sending in someone else's soldiers to do the dying?

It was only last week that I mentioned how Trump was considering new military action against the Syrian government. Just today, warmongering monster Nikki Haley warned that Washington "remains prepared to act if we must" in Syria (but not in Afrin).

Just to be clear on the situation, the U.S. established it's first permanent military base in Israel a few months ago.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

I just wish they would do it on someone else's dime.

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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
thanatokephaloides's picture

@Pluto's Republic

I don't care who they die for.

I just wish they would do it on someone else's dime.

I care who's doing the dying! I don't want America's blood or treasure wasted in the Israel/Palestine clusterfuck!

We need those resources here at home!

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

@thanatokephaloides
We've spilled way too much blood in the ME already.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@thanatokephaloides

My Subject: I don't care who they die for.
Your Subject: I care who's doing the dying.

Do you see what you did there? You twisted my words to use as a halo over your head.

The majority of them are contractors earning six figures. The rest are volunteers who are well aware that the US is at war — and they're also in it for the money and opportunity. It's privatized slaughter. They are hired as serial killers.

They have a choice.

We don't have a choice. We must pay every penny of this out of our pockets. If they didn't sign up to be part of the US military's global murder and mayhem, this whole thing would end.

I'd like a choice.

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@Pluto's Republic always a "choice" for those constrained by resources into joining up. How cool to blame those brainwashed by the same propaganda we all supposedly care about debunking here, and how nice to feed the propaganda that all have a "choice." Personally, I will not lay the blame for this country's military idiocy at the feet of those who feel they have no other choice.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

Pluto's Republic's picture

@lizzyh7

Those soldiers were essentially taken by force and pushed into the military. They cannot be independent free men in a predatory capitalist system because that path was blocked to those without social advantages. What choice did they really have? I silently witnessed this along with everyone else.

There is little they could have done differently. They were born into it and didn't know how to escape their fate. But many will come through just fine. They will get some education and a secure job. They are in high demand in all the nation's police forces, large and small. They're trained to deal with enemy combatants. And they know how to use all the new military equipment.

Today, 24 of them went to their bedrooms and blew their brains out with their service revolvers, despite their new status. They saw things; did thing.... Tomorrow 24 more will do the same. This happens each and every day in the United States to those who signed on to this nightmare. It never stops. This outcome is a real thing. We built that.

I really don't like this turn of events. I like to think we could have been better than this.

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@Pluto's Republic @Pluto's Republic

The majority of them are contractors earning six figures. The rest are volunteers who are well aware that the US is at war — and they're also in it for the money and opportunity. It's privatized slaughter. They are hired as serial killers.

They have a choice.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't think anyone would be keen on joining today's US military if they had any realistic alternatives they could choose from.

I've experienced significant setbacks in my own life for being a non-veteran -- and in my case that was by the military's own choice more than mine! And those setbacks would have meant jail time or worse had I been stupid enough to breed.

Now, the contractors pulling six figures; that's another matter.

We don't have a choice. We must pay every penny of this out of our pockets. If they didn't sign up to be part of the US military's global murder and mayhem, this whole thing would end.

No, it wouldn't. We'd just go back to involuntary servitude in name -- the draft -- rather than the de-facto involuntary military servitude we have now via the economy.

I'd like a choice.

I would, too. For all of us.

EDIT: Quoting snoopydawg:

"I too am tired of our troops dying for Israel and us paying for Israel's wars. They have their own military and apparently enough money to give their citizens universal health care and we pretty much give them their bombs and stuff so they can damn well pony up their own money."

And their own blood, too.

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

Pluto's Republic's picture

@thanatokephaloides

We'd just go back to involuntary servitude in name -- the draft -- rather than the de-facto involuntary military servitude we have now via the economy.

They won't go draft because they know the people would revolt before they lert themselves be forced to throw their kids into that meat grinder. That door is shut.

Risking your life in the foreign murder fields in hopes of getting a secure job someday — has become normalized in the US. It seems reasonable to to most folks, even here. It's like the Hunger Games. It is a vile and savage dystopia, but it is our dystopia.

I think you make a valid argument when you say that young people have no other hope for a decent life but to risk their own lives to go off and murder foreigners and destroy their nations. Realistically, that's the only good choice for the lower classes, at least. I don't blame the war on them. They have no choice. We face the same kind of "choice" in every Presidential election.

All over the world, young men would like to escape conscription. They want no part of it. In the 1960s — many young men didn't want to go slaughter the Vietnamese people because they were on good terms with Russians. But they didn't have a choice and would dearly have loved one. We should discuss what they died for every day. They died for absolutely nothing. Their parents were from an authoritarian generation of conformists, who had just gone through the McCarthy era, and the Big Fear was on them. Some country wanted a different economic system than ours. The horror. We had to go kill them all. I don't think the nation ever recovered from that experience.

We raise people until they're adult citizens. We educate them so they are able to make certain important decisions. We tell them what is moral and what is right and what is universal. And the first choices they make is what this country becomes.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

The majority of them are contractors earning six figures.

The mercenaries who sign up to go kill people for money can face karmic justice for all I care. This goes for the defense company's CEOs, every member of congress who decide to send our military into countries that have not threatened us in any way and many others who have no problem with killing people in other countries. I wish that young people had more options to keep them out of the military. The PTB have rigged the economy for this and other reasons.

ETA There are many families who have been in the military for generations and they breed USA patriotism from the cradle to the grave. These are the type of people who join the military knowing full well what is really going on in regards to the bogus reasons for wars. These people did have a choice on whether to join or not.

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mimi's picture

@Pluto's Republic
First, no matter if you are a poor guy/gal or could do something else with your life than signing up in the military, it's very easy for a skilled recruiter to sense out the emotional and psychological indecisiveness in the to be recruited youngster's mind and cuddle their emotional set-up to finally convince them that it might be their best and even very honorable and only option to join the military and sign a contract. Money can be a factor, but doesn't have to be.

That recruiter's work is rather unethical, because no one, who has not been put into a combat situation, in which the soldiers had no other option than to "shoot and kill" those his military leadership has declared "the enemy", can imagine beforehand how that feels and can't imagine that it would ever happen to them and how it would make them feel for their whole life. It's the most unrecognized and denied threads of thoughts, I believe.

The soldiers who enlisted imo deny and ignore and don't know what MIGHT happen to them during combat. But the psychologically trained recruiter does. And he abuses this knowledge of what this combat activity really means by 'not talking about it' and convince a to-be-recruitee of all the other 'honorable' things his service would entail instead. This recruiting business is one of the worst propaganda-driven activities based on the psychological exploitation of the human mind. That is the reason why I support a mandatory military service for all, because imo it's the only way to make recruiting and it's propaganda based on exploitation of psychological conditions of the recruitees as well as 'buying attempts' by the recruiters with 'bonus' and other monetary rewards, superfluous. You should not recruit. Everybody has undergo a mandatory military service to make the process fair and make any military activity legal only in defensive wars after being attacked by a foreign entity.

I think when your own country, your own livelihood, your own family is attacked and bombarded, the reaction to defend yours and your family is a natural reaction. (btw it is also a natural reaction to run away from the bombardments and therefore become a refugee to another country, who needs to be respected by the host countries, who take those refugees in - something Merkel stood up for and was imo wrongly criticized for). Defense of your own livelihood doesn't have to be 'declared an honorable service'. It's innate to defend yourself when you are attacked and your life threatened. It shouldn't be a matter of propaganda based recruitment or financial rewards.

The problem is that the US miliary doesn't defend the US population on the US territory from attacks from outside, but it messes around overseas and tries to figure out who should be defended and helped with their military might and who should be the enemy. They shouldn't do that, imo. It never works. It's not their own population that has been attacked and it's not their own territory. There is and was a reason why one of the slogans heard so often in the past in foreign countries was "Ami go home".

That slogan was not Anti-Americanism, as "the Ami" didn't fight in their OWN homeland, but in other folks' homelands and therefore a reaction that was reasonable to make from the pov of those who lived under the American military presence. That's what make their soldiers' 'honorable services' anything but honorable, when the 'Ami's presence' overseas is more than a potential 'mutual assured destruction', but actually starts destructing, ie throw bombs. And those US soldiers, who experienced the change from being a 'non shooting and non bombing' soldier in an overseas US military base to one that is bombing and shooting, feel like shit and feel guilty and many are broken for life because of it. Accusing them for having made the wrong choice just breaks them a little more. What for?

Any tribe and human being has to live somewhere and they do. They have a natural 'home territory'. I think it takes a generation or two to make a refugee feel "at home" in his host country to may be thinking his host country has become his home country and there might be several generation's ambivalence about it. But if that "home" is taken away from them, they will defend it. It's normal. No propaganda methods of the psychological kind necessary to convince someone to fight for his own survival, when it's taken away from them by someone other than their 'own tribe'. Has been like this for ever. Tribal feelings are innate. People group themselves into 'tribes' or 'identity groups', something you can't really change.

The only difference I see in the various 'identity groups' is that some are based on genes that you have no control over to have and are visible, and the other ones are 'chosen self-identifying groups" that the person who has chosen those identity group they have a choice over. (and this right to choose they shouldn't be denied to make). Bit I believe in cases of fighting and dying for survival those identity groups that are based on genetics and not over self-identifying groupings, many people believe they would have a choice over, are seen differently in their importance to fight over. At least that's the answers to those polling questions I have heard quite often among the average populations.

I believe you can argue as long as you want against those 'tribal feelings', but it never works on the long run, when your 'tribe' or 'identity group' has been attacked for no reason. The first thing people do is pointing out 'who has started to attack and who oppresses whom'. And then you have the mess, if the tribal or identity group is based on genes that you yourself have no choice over. As you can't change your genes' visible markers, you 'tribal' feelings of belonging turn into racism and sexism and other battles over ethnic markers. There you go ... and the mess is declared then "as the new normal" to fog the whole situation even more and find an excuses.

It doesn't work.
.

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mimi's picture

@Pluto's Republic
(PS. I fell asleep while writing this yesterday night and I see that this subject has been extensively reacted to, but I still post it now for the record).

I care for who they die for and who they have to kill and in this case they would die for and kill off people they never should be asked dying for or asked to kill. And on top of it they would ordered and ask forthat more or less by a country that is not their's, just because their own military leaders are too chicken to "not help Israel to come to their defense".

Isn't there a video when General Clark said that?

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@mimi

I've been pouring over early textbooks and handbooks on "psycho-politics" that supposedly came out of Germany and Russia. The US is using those (we brought a lot of Nazis back to the US following World War II to share their knowledge) to create this crucible of poverty and environmental stressors from which we grow a culture of a certain type of future soldier. Neuroscientists are only now discovering the brain damage done to children brought up in US inner-city poverty. These psychopathic hormone-juiced young men were laboratory designed to carry out our savagery around the world. Why else would such a wealthy nation insist on these vast pockets of degrading poverty? It sickens society as a whole.

The military preys on victims of this poverty, enlists them, and sends them to boot camp where they break them. They then give them powerful weapons and teach them how to kill efficiently. At the same time, they put them (and the rest of society) through intense psycho-political programming. That was the German-Russian technique, supposedly.

One of these books has been read into the Congressional Record. Twice. But that was a long time ago, before the McCarthy hearings. Just before, as I recall.

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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

Well, if our generals don't want to sufficiently cooperate, they (TPTB) can always put our troops under Israeli command (to die directly for Israel instead).
This is wild speculation, but are US generals (other than general Clark) beginning to dissent against our involvement in the Syrian situation?

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Mike Taylor

snoopydawg's picture

Israel is trying to ‘suck America into’ Iranian war that could lead to world war

I think They’re going to keep this in the air to start with. You’re going to see some bombing. In the next six months, I think they’re going to take Lebanon on, they’re going to take Hezbollah on in Syria and Lebanon. When that doesn’t work or when Hezbollah presents them as they did in July 2006, with some new options in terms of what Hezbollah can do to them– and maybe even the Lebanese armed forces do, too– it might get tricky. There might be armored formations, ground units, infantry and so forth, and that’s when the door opens for general conflict…

We put the base there [in Sept. 2017, on Mashabim Air Base near Dimona, Israel] for the same reason we have trip-wired forces in other places. We put the base there so that there can be no question in the minds of the American people when the president directs U.S. forces into Israel equipped to go into Syria. Because we will have been attacked. The disposition of that base is just sitting on an Israeli air base, and we put the stars and stripes up and declared it a U.S. air base. It’s four Patriot batteries as far as I know. But it’s there, and it’s US territory. So when missiles start flying, or God forbid the IRGC actually tries to put guerrillas into Israel proper, then we are being attacked too. And so when we go to Congress– if Trump feels like he has to go to Congress. He isn’t going to have to probably. Congress is going to be demanding that the president take action.

I too am tired of our troops dying for Israel and us paying for Israel's wars. They have their own military and apparently enough money to give their citizens universal health care and we pretty much give them their bombs and stuff so they can damn well pony up their own money.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@snoopydawg

I too am tired of our troops dying for Israel and us paying for Israel's wars. They have their own military and apparently enough money to give their citizens universal health care and we pretty much give them their bombs and stuff so they can damn well pony up their own money.

I read them all. That kind of anti-war anti-austerity thinking is a big, big reason that Hillary lost. It was a time when people wanted the country to be something different. They wanted to hear about moving toward peace instead of endless war. They wanted to believe they could have human rights like health care. That was a message that came only from the Outsider candidates. The people wanted to use the nation's income to make the US a utopian paradise. Free education for future citizens so they can build a better country. Wow. Where do I sign?

Trump ran to the Left of Hillary. It's a fact.

I think in their hearts the people realized those possibilities didn't exist. It was a last hurrah. The "government" had already gone its own way down a path where they will eventually be forced to ask the world to pretend that the US can actually repay its debt to them. Will the world agree to pretend and continue to extend credit? That's the moment that will define the way Americans will live in the future.

The nobility is risking everything we have for Empire. Double or nothing.

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The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
snoopydawg's picture

@Pluto's Republic

You're right that once upon a time people wanted the wars to end and the money for them to be invested in us instead. Was 9/11 the catalyst that made people forget about this and decide that payback was a good option?

We know that one of Obama's jobs was to kill the anti war movement which he did. He also killed many other things that people once wanted. You are also right that Trump was elected because people rejected what Hillary was offering and they wanted to believe that Trump would deliver what he was selling. But were they really anti austerity? The nimrods here in Utah are happy with our legislators who didn't raise the minimum wage because it's not supposed to be a living wage or something like that. If people don't have enough money to live on then they need to go to school and then get a better job. Plus they hate people who rely on social programs because they think that they are defrauding them. "I don't want my taxes going to people who just sit around all day. I have to work for a living and they should too." I'm thinking that when they say that, they're thinking of blacks and illegal immigrants.

I sure wish I had some answers for how we get people to stop worshipping the military and cops and start thinking about all the innocent people we're killing for resources, not freedom or democracy.

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Lenzabi's picture

that as a result of being devastated by civil war that Syria had the power to attack anyone else outside their borders. That is some mighty fine, pure grade A manure I smell of the Military Industrial Grade quality BS they are cranking out.

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So long, and thanks for all the fish