On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country’s High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what’s known as the “reasonability” standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end, demonstrated with remarkable determination against such radical legislation. And that measure was only one part of a wide-ranging redesign of the court system unveiled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January, which deeply alarmed his critics.

As exemplified by prominent world historian Yuval Noah Harari, such protestors warned that limiting the functions of the highest court, in a land with a parliamentary system largely lacking other checks and balances, represented a big stride toward a future autocracy. After all, dangers abound in a nation with a one-chamber legislature, lacking the equivalent of a Senate, that elects the prime minister as the instrument of its will.

The central motivation for that legislation, however, lay not in domestic politics but in the desire of extremists in the cabinet to ensure that the courts won’t be able to interfere with their plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian land on the West Bank and perhaps someday soon simply annex that occupied territory. Under such circumstances, members of the far-right Religious Zionist Party were recently excoriated by Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israeli intelligence, as Israel’s “Ku Klux Klan.”

Reasonability, Fraud, and Occupation

The Israeli supreme court had invoked what’s called “the reasonableness doctrine,” rooted in British common law, to strike down Netanyahu’s January appointment of Aryeh Makhlouf Deri as Minister of Health and the Interior in his ever more extreme cabinet. Deri, a Moroccan-Israeli, leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, largely comprised of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry, like himself. Deri has often been in trouble with the law. He was, in fact, given a three-year jail sentence in 1999 for fraud and bribery. In 2022, he was facing a possible conviction for tax fraud by the High Court of Justice, which could have resulted in jail time and a seven-year ban on political activity. According to the justices of that court, Deri promised to retire from politics to avoid being sentenced, a vow on which he later reneged.

Netanyahu managed to keep Shas in his current coalition despite its loss of that important cabinet seat. Indeed, he still needs its support to stay in power. Over time, the Shas Party has swung far to the right on the Israeli political spectrum, while taking an ever-harder line in favor of expanding Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. It is now inhabited by some three million stateless Palestinians whose land continues to be usurped. The Shas leadership has shifted to ever stronger support for Jewish settlements on the West Bank in large part because of the increasing proportion of Israeli squatters there who hail from the Haredim or Ultra-Orthodox religious tradition. They had already become about a third of all West Bank settlers by 2017.

In the Israeli system, the Ultra-Orthodox pay little in taxes, are subsidized to study the Bible, and are exempted from military service. Moreover, as a group, thanks to their tendency to have large families, they have grown to about 13% of the Israeli population. They place a substantial burden on the state, which, in recent years, has responded by giving them inexpensive housing on Palestinian land.

At the left-leaning +976 Magazine, journalist Ben Reiff recently pointed out that Minister of Justice Yariv Levin, a long-time factotum in Netanyahu’s Likud Party and a driving force behind the recent attack on the judiciary, justified his actions primarily in terms of the Palestine issue. He singled out High Court decisions that prevented the blackballing of individuals who supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel movement for the country’s apartheid-style policies toward the Palestinians or who backed “refuseniks,” Israeli soldiers who decline to serve as part of an occupation force in the Palestinian West Bank. Levin also complained bitterly about court rulings requiring that Palestinians be treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions. One conclusion from Reiff’s reporting is that there will be ever more blackballing of critics of the occupation by the present government.

The High Court (Sometimes) Recognizes the Rights of Palestinians

Another step Netanyahu has said he would like to implement is to allow a simple majority in the Knesset to overrule any High Court rulings striking down legislation as inconsistent with the country’s basic laws on human rights, passed in the 1990s. Among the grievances of the particularly extremist Greater Israel faction in the cabinet is that court’s dependence on international law in some of its rulings against “Illegal settlements” — those established by militant vigilantes on West Bank land owned by Palestinian families for centuries.

Over the years, the High Court has, in fact, ruled in favor of numerous settlements, while drawing on aspects of Ottoman, British, and international law to do so. Ottoman law, for instance, permitted the state to assume ownership of fallow land. On that basis, the court has, in the past, allowed the Israeli state to declare swathes of the Palestinian West Bank “state land.” It mattered little that an occupying state settling its citizens on such territory gravely breached the Geneva Convention IV and the 2002 Rome Statute that acts as a charter for the International Criminal Court.

In other words, all such settlements should be illegal. Palestinians often protest, to no avail, that land designated by authorities in Tel Aviv as ownerless and fallow is, in fact, private property and has even been recently cultivated. Once it officially becomes state land, however, the court has indeed permitted Israeli citizens to build on it, which is how most Israeli settlements on the West Bank came to be. The court considers such Jewish-only housing projects “legal” under Israeli law.

Although those settlements on the West Bank are often depicted as a volunteer and private activity, the Israeli government has long provided subsidies and other incentives to people moving into such remarkably low-rent settlements and continues to do so to this day. Because so many Ultra-Orthodox men, with their limited educations (and incomes), are unemployed, they are especially open to such obvious opportunities.

Although once upon a time many illegal Israeli settlements were swiftly dismantled by the Israeli army, some survived and began lobbying the government for recognition. In 2017, the Knesset took a radical step, passing a law that allowed the Israeli state to expropriate Palestinian land at will and used that power to legalize 16 previously illegal squatter-settlements. In 2020, the High Court shocked Knesset right-wingers by striking down that very law and explicitly stating that Israeli sovereignty simply didn’t apply to West Bank Palestinians who were under occupation and must be treated in the context of international law on military occupations. The Court even cited Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees occupied persons respect for their dignity and family rights.

“Sovereignty and Settlement”

That ruling, with its explicit denial of Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories, proved a genuine shock to the political right and underlies its ongoing Knesset campaign to neuter the courts. Extremist Bezalel Smotrich, now both minister of finance and responsible for the Palestinian West Bank, was deeply angered by that High Court ruling. He insisted that the only acceptable response would be “passing the bill allowing the Knesset to override the courts immediately.” As it happens, his own home was built on private Palestinian land just outside the municipal limits of the “legal” settlement of Kedumim. The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported in June 2020 that then-speaker of the Israeli parliament, Yariv Levin, lashed out, claiming the High Court had “once again today trampled, as is its unacceptable tradition, Israeli democracy and the basic human rights of many Israeli citizens.” As for Netanyahu, at the time he suggested that the problem of illegal settlements would best be resolved by a formal Israeli annexation of a large area of the Palestinian West Bank.

The way the High Court held that Israel has no sovereignty over the West Bank deeply offended the members of the extremist Religious Zionism bloc led by Smotrich, including its coalition partner, the Jewish Power Party led by extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is now Israel’s minister of national security). Under the circumstances, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that their platform for the November 2022 parliamentary election centered on “sovereignty and settlement” — that is, sovereignty over and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank. Indeed, they claimed that Palestinian agricultural and building projects in their own villages were “expansionist” and vowed to act quickly to curtail them.

Having joined Netanyahu’s ruling coalition since that election, they have now acquired substantial power to pursue the goal of halting Palestinian economic life. Smotrich even called for a Palestinian village to be wiped off the map of the West Bank. Though he later backpedaled under pressure, the lawless extremity he and a significant part of Netanyahu’s coalition today represent should be all too obvious.

Given that the High Court stands in the way of such lawlessness, despite its own frequent betrayal of Palestinian rights, the extremists are determined to gut it. Significant numbers of those who responded to the recent mass demonstrations against Netanyahu’s court decision with counterdemonstrations were bussed in from the squatter-settlements, many of them Haredim.

The Imperiled Rights of Women, LGBTQ+, and Minorities in Israel

Although the right wing’s primary motivation for eviscerating the authority of the courts had to do with the urge to take fuller control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the changes already implemented and still contemplated by Prime Minister Netanyahu and crew have dire implications for all too many Israeli citizens as well. As a start, more than 20% of them are persons of Palestinian heritage. Think of them as Palestinian-Israelis (on the model of “Italian-Americans”), though they are called “Arab Israelis” in Hebrew. Some 60 laws and administrative decrees have already ensured that they remain second-class citizens. In 2018, in fact, the Knesset explicitly deprived them of “sovereignty,” reserving it for Jewish Israelis alone (while stripping Arabic of its previous designation as an “official language”).

Admittedly, on occasion, the High Court has ruled in favor of equal rights for Israelis of Palestinian heritage. It did, for instance, allow government funding of their religious communities and school administration. In most other instances, however, it repeatedly rebuffed their demands for equal treatment under the law, which helps explain why they have largely been absent from the enormous demonstrations that have shaken the country every week since January. Still, Palestinian-Israeli community activists are alarmed that the Knesset’s removal of court oversight when it comes to the reasonableness of administrative appointments could prove a carte blanche for far more active discrimination against Muslim and Christian Palestinian-Israelis.

Despite a distinct lack of concern for Palestinian rights, centrist and secular Jewish Israelis are in no doubt about the serious impact the Netanyahu government’s gutting of the judiciary could have on their lives. That explains why a quarter of the country has participated in those huge, ongoing demonstrations and 58% of all Israelis want the government to stop trying to curtail the power of the courts.

Haaretz reports that women fear such power could lead the present right-wing government to put authority over alimony and child support in the hands of all-male rabbinical courts, block the government from signing onto the Istanbul Convention for the Prevention of Violence against Women, and increase gender segregation at beaches, parks, and the Wailing Wall. It might even move to reduce any commitment to their very presence on governmental bodies.

Similarly, LGBTQ+ Israelis, who had, through their activism, secured ever more rights in Israel since the repeal of the country’s “sodomy laws” in 1988, feared that their freedoms might be reversed by the most homophobic government in the country’s history. That self-described “proud homophobe” Bezalel Smotrich typically supports a law that would exempt religious people from being charged with discrimination if they decline to provide a service on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Corruption

Although the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, and minorities are obviously on the line, another pressing concern for those protesting the limits being imposed on judicial authority is the growth of government corruption, which could have a striking impact on the country’s future. Netanyahu is already on trial for accepting bribes (a trial he’s tried to legislate away). He also wanted to make the notoriously corrupt Aryeh Makhlouf Deri his deputy prime minister and may now proceed with that plan.

A Netanyahu government unconstrained by the courts could engage in favoritism in contracts, licenses, and legislation of all sorts. The fear of such things has led 28% percent of Israelis, including a surprising number of young married professionals, to admit that they are at least considering leaving the country. Many claim they fear that “the government is going to take their money.” Although 600,000 to a million Israelis are typically out of the country at any time, studying or working elsewhere, they usually do come home sooner or later. Now, however, relocation agencies report that such returns are plummeting. There has also been a 20% drop in immigration to Israel this year and that shortfall would undoubtedly be even more serious were it not for the Russian Jews fleeing their ever more unstable, war-embroiled country. Reuters reports that investors in the usually vibrant Israeli high-tech sector that accounts for about 14% of the country’s $500 billion gross domestic product are now keeping about 80% of their new start-ups abroad. Many tech companies have also moved both their bank accounts and some of their assets out of the country.

Meanwhile, the protests — with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets every Saturday evening — continue, with demonstrators experiencing increasing police brutality. Masked cops are arbitrarily beating them up and aiming water cannons at their heads, sometimes using “skunk water” — a putrid chemical that sticks to your clothing and skin — to disperse them.

Once upon a time, such tactics were honed to a kind of grim perfection to repress Palestinians on the West Bank. Now, the Israeli opposition is discovering that such brutalization of indigenous West Bank villagers has boomeranged and the government has begun to deal with them as it once did with stateless Palestinian demonstrators. Consider this the new Israeli reality: the 56-year-long brutal occupation of the Palestinian Territories has come home to roost and Israel is now occupying itself.

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces. After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact, done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian, for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the Kurds once called the Ava Mezin, “the Great Water,” it is now a shadow of its former self.

Fording the Tigris

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe in horror, at certain places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to. They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause the flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, two oil men and climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has put 400 billion — yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

Climate Breakdown, Iraqi-Style

The United Nations has now declared oil-rich Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns, will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south” in Muthanna governorate, has dried up, a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it, “I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass 50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F), among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. Iraqi temperatures are, in fact, two to seven times higher than average global temperatures and that means greater dryness of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18% of the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal with staggering numbers of explosives left in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions of waterways, “Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.” Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics that did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no ISIL.

Dust and More Dust

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.” And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi government warned that particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds of Iraqis to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast, week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit 300 by 2050.

A little over half of Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes the impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022. Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes Yashue Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq recently announced that its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water that has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms have also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support, while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters quote Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying, “The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a [government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill our needs.”

Water as Women’s Work

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power, Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women already spend at least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting at the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are likely to outrun our “carbon budget,” the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the dire climate impacts that have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Juan Cole, China Hangs Washington Out to Dry in the Middle East

In some sense, the most recent events in the Middle East, described vividly today by TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, should be seen as yet more fallout from Washington’s version of the Ukraine war. I’m thinking, of course, about how, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and crew decided to invade a country that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaeda associates and presented no danger whatsoever to the U.S. Who could forget Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld telling an aide in the ruins of the just attacked Pentagon on September 11, 2001: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

That “and not” was most distinctly Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. From there, of course, it just went downhill. If there’s a difference, in criminal terms, between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the American invasion of Iraq, it might only be that Ukraine was, at least, a neighboring country. Iraq was a truly distant land. Today, 20 years later, there are still thousands of American troops in Iraq and neighboring Syria, while victory in what came to be known as “the global war on terror” was never in sight.

In fact, from George W. Bush to Donald Trump — who, I suspect, would never have been elected president without this country’s disastrous twenty-first-century wars — to the aged Joe Biden, ours has long been a tale of self-imposed imperial decline and, in a country that still “invests” more money in its military than the next 11 countries combined, it has yet to end by any means. Meanwhile, in that region where so much of the disaster began, Iran is evidently coming ever closer to having the know-how necessary to produce nuclear weapons and China is now the rising power. But let Juan Cole explain how the once-upon-a-time “American century” is now playing out in the Middle East. Tom

China and the Axis of the Sanctioned

How America's Divide-and-Rule Strategy in the Middle East Backfired

A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a seismic shock in Washington. There was the Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party standing between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban. They were awkwardly shaking hands on an agreement to reestablish mutual diplomatic ties. That picture should have brought to mind a 1993 photo of President Bill Clinton hosting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn as they agreed to the Oslo Accords. And that long-gone moment was itself an after-effect of the halo of invincibility the United States had gained in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming American victory in the 1991 Gulf War.

This time around, the U.S. had been cut out of the picture, a sea change reflecting not just Chinese initiatives but Washington’s incompetence, arrogance, and double-dealing in the subsequent three decades in the Middle East. An aftershock came in early May as concerns gripped Congress about the covert construction of a Chinese naval base in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally hosting thousands of American troops. The Abu Dhabi facility would be an add-on to the small base at Djibouti on the east coast of Africa used by the People’s Liberation Army-Navy for combating piracy, evacuating noncombatants from conflict zones, and perhaps regional espionage.

China’s interest in cooling off tensions between the Iranian ayatollahs and the Saudi monarchy arose, however, not from any military ambitions in the region but because it imports significant amounts of oil from both countries. Another impetus was undoubtedly President Xi’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, that aims to expand Eurasia’s overland and maritime economic infrastructure for a vast growth of regional trade — with China, of course, at its heart. That country has already invested billions in a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and in developing the Pakistani Arabian seaport of Gwadar to facilitate the transmission of Gulf oil to its northwestern provinces.

Having Iran and Saudi Arabia on a war footing endangered Chinese economic interests. Remember that, in September 2019, an Iran proxy or Iran itself launched a drone attack on the massive refinery complex at al-Abqaiq, briefly knocking out five million barrels a day of Saudi capacity. That country now exports a staggering 1.7 million barrels of petroleum daily to China and future drone strikes (or similar events) threaten those supplies. China is also believed to receive as much as 1.2 million barrels a day from Iran, though it does so surreptitiously because of U.S. sanctions. In December 2022, when nationwide protests forced the end of Xi’s no-Covid lockdown measures, that country’s appetite for petroleum was once again unleashed, with demand already up 22% over 2022.

So, any further instability in the Gulf is the last thing the Chinese Communist Party needs right now. Of course, China is also a global leader in the transition away from petroleum-fueled vehicles, which will eventually make the Middle East far less important to Beijing. That day, however, is still 15 to 30 years away.

Things Could Have Been Different

China’s interest in bringing to an end the Iranian-Saudi cold war, which constantly threatened to turn hotter, is clear enough, but why did those two countries choose such a diplomatic channel? After all, the United States still styles itself the “indispensable nation.” If that phrase ever had much meaning, however, American indispensability is now visibly in decline, thanks to blunders like allowing Israeli right-wingers to cancel the Oslo peace process, the launching of an illegal invasion of and war in Iraq in 2003, and the grotesque Trumpian mishandling of Iran. Distant as it may be from Europe, Tehran might nonetheless have been brought into NATO’s sphere of influence, something President Barack Obama spent enormous political capital trying to achieve. Instead, then-President Donald Trump pushed it directly into the arms of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation and Xi’s China.

Things could indeed have been different. With the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, brokered by the Obama administration, all practical pathways for Iran to build nuclear weapons were closed off. It’s also true that Iran’s ayatollahs have long insisted they don’t want a weapon of mass destruction that, if used, would indiscriminately kill potentially vast numbers of non-combatants, something incompatible with the ethics of Islamic law.

Whether one believes that country’s clerical leaders or not, the JCPOA made the question moot, since it imposed severe restrictions on the number of centrifuges Iran could operate, the level to which it could enrich uranium for its nuclear plant at Bushehr, the amount of enriched uranium it could stockpile, and the kinds of nuclear plants it could build. According to the inspectors at the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran faithfully implemented its obligations through 2018 and — consider this an irony of our Trumpian times — for such compliance it would be punished by Washington.

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei only permitted President Hassan Rouhani to sign that somewhat mortifying treaty with the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in return for promised relief from Washington’s sanctions (that they never got). In early 2016, the Security Council did indeed remove its own 2006 sanctions on Iran. That, however, proved a meaningless gesture because by then Congress, deploying the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, had slapped unilateral American sanctions on Iran and, even in the wake of the nuclear deal, congressional Republicans refused to lift them. They even nixed a $25 billion deal that would have allowed Iran to buy civilian passenger jets from Boeing.

Worse yet, such sanctions were designed to punish third parties that contravened them. French firms like Renault and TotalEnergies were eager to jump into the Iranian market but feared reprisals. The US had, after all, fined French bank BNP $8.7 billion for skirting those sanctions and no European corporation wanted a dose of that kind of grief. In essence, congressional Republicans and the Trump administration kept Iran under such severe sanctions even though it had lived up to its side of the bargain, while Iranian entrepreneurs eagerly looked forward to doing business with Europe and the United States. In short, Tehran could have been pulled inexorably into the Western orbit via increasing dependence on North Atlantic trade deals, but it was not to be.

And keep in mind that Israeli Prime Minister (then as now) Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied hard against the JCPOA, even going over President Obama’s head in an unprecedented fashion to encourage Congress to nix the deal. That effort to play spoiler failed — until, in May 2018, President Trump simply tore up the treaty. Netanyahu was caught on tape boasting that he had convinced the gullible Trump to take that step. Although the Israeli right wing insisted that its greatest concern was an Iranian nuclear warhead, it sure didn’t act that way. Sabotaging the 2015 deal actually freed that country from all constraints. Netanyahu and like-minded Israeli politicians were, it seems, upset that the JCPOA only addressed Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program and didn’t mandate a rollback of Iranian influence in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, which they apparently believed to be the real threat.

Trump went on to impose what amounted to a financial and trade embargo on Iran. In its wake, trading with that country became an increasingly risky proposition. By May 2019, Trump had succeeded handsomely by his own standards (and those of Netanyahu). He had managed to reduce Iran’s oil exports from 2.5 million barrels a day to as little as 200,000 barrels a day. That country’s leadership nonetheless continued to conform to the requirements of the JCPOA until mid-2019, after which they began flaunting its provisions. Iran has now produced highly enriched uranium and is much closer to being capable of making nuclear weapons than ever before, though it still has no military nuclear program and the ayatollahs continue to deny that they want such weaponry.

In reality, Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” did anything but destroy Tehran’s influence in the region. In fact, if anything, in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq the power of the ayatollahs was only strengthened.

After a while, Iran also found ways to smuggle its petroleum to China, where it was sold to small private refineries that operated solely for the domestic market. Since those firms had no international presence or assets and didn’t deal in dollars, the Treasury Department had no way of moving against them. In this fashion, President Trump and congressional Republicans ensured that Iran would become deeply dependent on China for its very economic survival — and so also ensured the increasing significance of that rising power in the Middle East.

The Saudi Reversal

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices spiked, benefiting the Iranian government. The Biden administration then imposed the kind of maximum-pressure sanctions on the Russian Federation that Trump had levied against Iran. Unsurprisingly, a new Axis of the Sanctioned has now formed, with Iran and Russia exploring trade and arms deals and Iran allegedly providing drones to Moscow for its war effort in Ukraine.

As for Saudi Arabia, its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, recently seemed to get a better set of advisers. In March 2015, he had launched a ruinous and devastating war in neighboring Yemen after the Zaydi Shiite “Helpers of God,” or Houthi rebels, took over the populous north of that country. Since the Saudis were primarily deploying air power against a guerrilla force, their campaign was bound to fail. The Saudi leadership then blamed the rise and resilience of the Houthis on the Iranians. While Iran had indeed provided some money and smuggled some weapons to the Helpers of God, they were a local movement with a long set of grievances against the Saudis. Eight years later, the war has sputtered to a devastating stalemate.

The Saudis had also attempted to counter Iranian influence elsewhere in the Arab world, intervening in the Syrian civil war on the side of fundamentalist Salafi rebels against the government of autocrat Bashar al-Assad. In 2013, Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia joined the fray in support of al-Assad and, in 2015, Russia committed air power there to ensure the rebels’ defeat. China had also backed al-Assad (though not militarily) and played a quiet role in the post-war reconstruction of the country. As part of that recent China-brokered agreement to reduce tensions with Iran and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia just spearheaded a decision to return the al-Assad government to membership in the Arab League (from which it had been expelled in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring revolts).

By late 2019, in the wake of that drone attack on the Abqaiq refineries, it was already clear that Bin Salman had lost his regional contest with Iran and Saudi Arabia began to seek some way out. Among other things, the Saudis reached out to the Iraqi prime minister of that moment, Adil Abdel Mahdi, asking for his help as a mediator with the Iranians. He, in turn, invited General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Jerusalem Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, to Baghdad to consider a new relationship with the House of Saud.

As few will forget, on January 3, 2020, Soleimani flew to Iraq on a civilian airliner only to be assassinated by an American drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on the orders of President Trump who claimed he was coming to kill Americans. Did Trump want to forestall a rapprochement with the Saudis? After all, marshaling that country and other Gulf states into an anti-Iranian alliance with Israel had been at the heart of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords.”

The Rise of China, the Fall of America

Washington is now the skunk at the diplomats’ party. The Iranians were never likely to trust the Americans as mediators. The Saudis must have feared telling them about their negotiations lest the equivalent of another Hellfire missile be unleashed. As 2022 ended, President Xi actually visited the Saudi capital Riyadh, where relations with Iran were evidently a topic of conversation. This February, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Beijing by which time, according to the Chinese foreign ministry, President Xi had developed a personal commitment to mediating between the two Gulf rivals. Now, a rising China is offering to launch other Middle Eastern mediation efforts, while complaining “that some large countries outside the region” were causing “long-term instability in the Middle East” out of “self-interest.”

China’s new prominence as a peacemaker may soon extend to conflicts like the ones in Yemen and Sudan. As the rising power on this planet with its eye on Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa, Beijing is clearly eager to have any conflicts that could interfere with its Belt and Road Initiative resolved as peaceably as possible.

Although China is on the cusp of having three aircraft carrier battle groups, they continue to operate close to home and American fears about a Chinese military presence in the Middle East are, so far, without substance.

Where two sides are tired of conflict, as was true with Saudi Arabia and Iran, Beijing is clearly now ready to play the role of the honest broker. Its remarkable diplomatic feat of restoring relations between those countries, however, reflects less its position as a rising Middle Eastern power than the startling decline of American regional credibility after three decades of false promises (Oslo), debacles (Iraq) and capricious policy-making that, in retrospect, appears to have relied on nothing more substantial than a set of cynical imperial divide-and-rule ploys that are now so been-there, done-that.

Who remembers anymore that, in 2003, we were Vladimir Putin? Today, our cable and social-media news feeds are blanketed with denunciations of the president of the Russian Federation for his lawless and brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken met briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New Delhi on March 2nd, he told him in no uncertain terms, “End this war of aggression.”

Putin himself, however, has a longer memory. In the speech that launched his “special operation,” he pointedly denounced the U.S. for “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” Then he added, “We witnessed lies made at the highest state level and voiced from the high U.N. rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss in human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

Yes, it’s true, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, that war is long forgotten here. No one in the Biden administration today cares that it ruined what credibility America had as a pillar of international order in the global south and gave Putin cover for his own atrocity. So, sit back for a moment and let me take you on a little trip into a long-lost all-American world.

Mission (Un)Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, arrayed in Top Gun gear, President George W. Bush sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a fighter jet and was flown to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier then stationed just off the coast of San Diego. No rationale drove this high-priced jaunt save the visuals his propaganda team hoped to generate.

Then, from that ship’s deck beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished,” he made a televised speech about the invasion of Iraq he had ordered less than two months earlier. Bush proudly announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Of course, neither assertion would prove faintly true. In fact, some 2,500 U.S. troops are still stationed in Iraq to this day, aiding in the fight against leaders of that country’s former Baath Party government who have now become fundamentalist guerrillas. And keep in mind that those troops remain there even though the Iraqi parliament has asked them to leave.

The rest of Bush’s speech deserves more infamy than it’s attained. The president declared, “Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” Dream on, but of course Bush gave that “Mission Accomplished” speech to whitewash a war of aggression as a routine instrument of presidential policy. Describing the ramshackle, fourth-world country of Iraq then as “dangerous” and “aggressive” was as hyperbolic as Putin’s categorization of Volodomyr Zelenksy’s Ukraine as a “Nazi” state.

Note, however, that one phrase was missing from Bush’s Napoleonic screed about forcibly spreading “democracy” and “freedom” with that new tool, “precision warfare,” and that was, of course, “international law.” At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the International Military Tribunal had observed,

“War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

And, of course, the United Nations charter forbids military aggression. It allows war only in self-defense or if the Security Council authorizes it.

On the deck of that aircraft carrier, however, Bush had the nerve to say: “When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength and kindness and goodwill.”

In fact, Iraqis had spent a significant part of the twentieth century trying to get British colonialists out of their country and it was hardly surprising that, in 2003, so many of them didn’t see such virtues in the forces that had invaded their land. The U.S. military personnel on the ground I talked to, then or later, often spoke of the sullen, angry gazes of the Iraqis they encountered. One acquaintance of mine, Lieutenant Kylan Jones-Huffman, sent me a message that very summer in which he described sitting in the back of a troop transport with other American forces on a road in southern Iraq and being passed by a truckload of armed Iraqis. One of them squinted sourly at them and lifted his rifle menacingly. Kylan said he just patted his M1 rifle, returning the threat.

A Navy reservist and Middle East specialist, he planned on a post-military academic career, having completed a Ph.D. in history. Insightful and easy-going, a crafter of exquisite haiku poetry, Kylan promised to be an exciting colleague for me. He told me he was being sent from Bahrain to brief the military brass in the city of Hillah in southern Iraq. On the evening of August 21, 2003, as I was watching CNN, on the scroll at the bottom of the screen I noticed an American had been shot dead in Hillah and that left me uneasy. The next day I learned that Kylan had indeed been the victim, killed by a young Iraqi as he waited in a jeep at an intersection. It was an elbow to the gut that left me in tears — and it still hurts to tell the story.

He was, in fact, one of more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other “War on Terror” locales, along with 8,000 Pentagon contractors. And that’s not even to mention the more than 30,000 veterans of those conflicts who later committed suicide. One of them took my class on the modern Middle East at the University of Michigan. Well-informed and good-natured, he nevertheless couldn’t survive to the end of the semester, given whatever demons his experiences over there had burdened him with. In fact, for those still thinking about Iraq, the gut-punches of that war never stop.

And don’t forget the more than 53,000 American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured badly enough in battle to end up in a hospital. About 10% of them had wounds on an injury severity scale of nine or greater, suffering, according to one National Institutes of Health study, from horrors that included traumatic brain damage, open wounds, chronic blood-clotting, and burns.

Corpse Patrols

And all of that was nothing compared to what the U.S. military did to Iraqis.

It should come as no surprise that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the other architects of one of America’s biggest foreign-policy fiascos in its 246 years of existence could support the bald-faced lie that they had invented a new kind of warfare that didn’t produce significant civilian deaths or casualties. Mind you, they also told serial whoppers about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to the al-Qaeda terror group and his supposedly active biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Contrary to President Bush’s glib assertions, the death toll in Iraq only burgeoned as the fighting went on. American planes routinely struck targets in densely populated Iraqi cities. Some American troops committed massacres, as did Blackwater mercenaries working for the U.S. military. During the civil war of 2006-2007 that emerged from the American occupation of the country, the Baghdad police had to establish a regular corpse patrol dispatched at the beginning of each workday to load up carts with human remains tossed in the streets overnight by rival sectarian militias.

In the years just after the Bush invasion, one Iraqi widow from the southern port city of Basra told me that her family barely avoided being attacked by members of a destitute, displaced Marsh Arab tribe then running a protection racket in the city. The family’s escape cost them all the cash they had on hand and required them to provide a feast for the tribesmen. Determined to try to improve the situation, the man of the household ran for public office. One day, he had just gotten into his car to go campaigning when a masked assailant suddenly appeared and shot him point blank in the head. His tearful widow told me that she could never get over the sight. And such events were hardly uncommon then.

By the time the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the terrorist cult that emerged from the U.S. occupation of the country, finally went down to defeat in 2019, Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that some 300,000 Iraqis had died “from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces.” Several times that number were wounded or crippled. Hundreds of thousands of widows lost their family breadwinners and some of them were reduced to a lifetime as beggars. Even larger numbers of children lost one or both parents. And keep in mind that such figures don’t include Iraqis who died from indirect but war-related causes like the breakdown of the provision of potable water and electricity thanks to U.S. bombing raids and damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The American Example in Iraq

In the first phase of the war, during the Bush years, four million Iraqis were displaced, some 1.5 million leaving the country and the rest internally. Many could never return home. One evening in the summer of 2008, while interviewing Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan, I had dinner with a professional couple, an architect and a physician. I mentioned that the worst of the civil war seemed to be over and asked if they planned to return to Baghdad. The man was a Sunni, his wife a Shiite. She explained that their home had been in an upscale Shiite district and they feared returning since so many neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed of the rival sect.

Another man — call him “Mustafa” — was then in exile in the slums of East Amman. The members of his Sunni Iraqi family, denied work permits, were living off their dwindling savings. His wife was thinking of taking in sewing to make ends meet. Mustafa explained that he had gotten an envelope in the mailbox of his old Baghdad apartment from a militant Shiite militia, saying that if he and his family were still there in 24 hours, they would be dead. So, he and his wife had immediately packed everything they could fit into their car, awakened the children, and driven the nine hours to Amman. Mustafa hesitated. He looked around and lowered his voice. He had, he said, gotten threatening mail even in Jordan and moved to another apartment. The militia still had its eyes on him and had likely penetrated the expatriate Iraqi community. So, no, he and his wife couldn’t, he assured me, go home to Baghdad.

Under the Americans, there was no security for anyone. Two decades ago, Bush appointees dissolved the old Iraqi army and failed to train an effective new one or institute professional policing. I visited Baghdad in May 2013 during the interregnum between the two American campaigns in Iraq, to attend an international conference. We were taken by our kind Iraqi hosts to the National Museum and out to nice restaurants. To do so, however, we had to pile into white vans surrounded by Iraqi army vehicles, which strong-armed all the other traffic out of the way and ensured that our convoy never came to a standstill and so wouldn’t be the target of an ambush.

Bush’s disastrous war of aggression was a gift that just keeps giving. The disruption of Iraqi society and its government by that invasion ultimately paved the way for ISIL to take over 40% of that country’s territory in 2014. Six million Iraqis fled the brutal cultists and a million and a half of them are still displaced. Some fled to Turkey, where their lives were only recently devastated by the February 2023 earthquakes.

Today, the coffers of the Iraqi state treasury are empty, even though the country should have earned $500 billion in oil revenues since 2003. Corruption and inefficiency have become a hallmark of the new order. The unstable government installed by the U.S., dominated by Shiite religious parties, has gone through three prime ministers since 2018. Journalist Jonah Goldberg’s confidence that Iraqis would come to love the new constitution crafted under American rule in 2005 was woefully misplaced. He exemplified the pro-war intellectuals who insisted that their right-wing politics endowed them with superior judgment when it came to a country about which they, in fact, knew next to nothing.

In Iraq itself in recent years, young crowds have repeatedly gone into the streets to demand that the government once again provide basic services. The current prime minister, Mohammad Shia al-Sudani, is close to the Iran-backed militias that now play an outsized role in Iraqi politics. If anyone won the Iraq War, in fact, it was Iran.

Economists had estimated that the cost of the Iraq War to the United States, once you added in care for wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, had already reached $6 trillion even before the ISIL campaign of 2014-2019. Without the sums squandered in Iraq, our national debt would still be below our annual gross national product, putting us in a much more favorable economic position in 2023. As in today’s Russia, in the zeros of this century a war mentality fostered a fierce intolerance of dissent and of difference on the right, which is still unfolding.

One of the mantras of the U.S. government today, facing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, is the championing of “the United Nations Charter” and a “rules-based international order.” That stands in contrast, of course, to what Washington now sees as the true international outlaw on Planet Earth, Putin’s Russian Federation. The Russian economy has been treated as the Iranian one was, subjected to relentless sanctions and boycotts. A Senate resolution sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called on the International Criminal Court, the authority of which the U.S. doesn’t even recognize, to put Russian officials on trial for war crimes.

Graham was one of the chief cheerleaders of the equally illegal Iraq War. Hypocrisy on such a scale is hardly impressive for a country still seeking to be the global power on this planet. In retrospect, on the 20th anniversary of the nightmarish decision to invade Iraq, we’ve lost more than our credibility in the Global South or a true commitment to international law. As a country, we lost our moral compass and now, amid Russian crimes in Ukraine, it seems that we have also lost all memory of the path we paved and the example we set in Iraq, as well as the crimes that went with it.

The Declaration of Independence begins with the famous words, crafted by Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Stephen Greenblatt argued in Swerve: How the World became Modern that Jefferson’s conception of the “pursuit of happiness” can be directly traced to Epicurean philosopher Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a manuscript of which had been unearthed in the sixteenth century in a German monastery. Lucretius’ work begins with a paean to the goddess of beauty and love, Venus, who, he says inspires the very fecundity of spring itself.

The Trump Supreme Court self-evidently does not believe in these principles of liberty and pursuit of happiness, on which the United States was founded. The justices hold that we have no right to personal autonomy or bodily privacy and liberty, and that an alliance of Evangelicals and Catholics in state houses can legislate the most intimate details of our lives.

The justices draw on a scam called “originalism” to argue that the constitution now means what it meant to the framers in the 18th Century, which ought to make these originalists turn to professional, academic historians. They do not, and the naive historiography to which we have been treated by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in recent weeks would earn any of my undergraduates an “F.”

Since they’re so hung up on the eighteenth century, it is worth considering what the first generation of Americans thought about abortion.

Eighteenth-century Americans believed that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness included freedom from unwanted pregnancies during the first 16-18 weeks, and had their own equivalents of mifepristone and misoprostol, the abortion pill, which taken together will end a pregnancy.

In one of his books, Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers and a framer of the constitution, included a text that provided instructions for using herbs to “restore the courses,” that is, to start menstruation back up, i.e. they were abortifacients

The University of Mary Washington blog pointed out that Thomas Jefferson noted the use of abortifacients by American Indians, and was not in the least censorious about it, writing in Notes on the State of Virginia:

They [Native Americans] raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after.

In the eighteenth century, women were not considered pregnant until the quickening, when they felt the fetus moving within them, typically around 18 weeks. Before month five, it was common for women to have abortions. These were performed by instrument or by herbs. The instruments were applied to “remove a blockage” that was “interfering in menstruation.” Herbs were used to restore menses (emmenagogues) or as abortifacients (often in practical terms these were the same thing). Abortifacients were discussed in classical medical texts like Hippocrates and Galen and by the Muslim physicians who were widely read in the medieval and Renaissance era, such as Avicenna and his Canon (Qanun Ibn Sina). It is true that abortions after the quickening were considered homicide, but typically not before.

It is likely that some early colonists learned of the abortifacients used by American Indians. In addition, the practical knowledge of enslaved West African midwives, some of them from Muslim societies, was also deployed on American plantations by the slaveholders, with older enslaved females in the household used as abortionists.

In addition, enslaved persons sometimes used cotton root in an attempt to abort their own pregnancies, aware that the child would be born to a life of drudgery and might well be sold off from its parents down the river. Slaveholders, aware of this practice, would force their enslaved workers to drink an antidote daily to prevent the abortifacient from working. So there was a war of herbal remedies, like something out of the science fiction novels (often set in slave societies) of Olivia Butler.

I’m just speculating here, but just as Evangelical biblical literalism has roots in an early American attempt to justify slavery, you have to wonder if the strain that views abortions so negatively goes back to these slaveholder attitudes about children being the wealth and private property of the patriarch.

Cheryl Lans, Lisa Taylor-Swanson and Rachel Westfall note in Science Direct:

Household slaves served as informal medical practitioners in some homes (Tannenbaum, 2012). Granny midwives attended childbirths on some slave plantations as a cost-saving measure for the owners, but sometimes acted as abortionists (Vaughan, 1997). Vaughan (1997) records the plants or plant-based products used by slaves to abort, and several are discussed in this paper: tansy, catnip, thyme, horse mint, rue, pennyroyal, cedar berries, Origanum vulgare, Thuja occidentalis, oil of savin, leaves of Juniperus virginiana, fruit of Juniperus communis, Cimcifuga racemosa, Caullophyllum thalictroides, Actea rubra, Helleborus viridis, Leonotis leonurus, Trillium undulatum, Trillium sessile, Trillium erectum and Cunila origanoides.

So if we are going back to the eighteenth century now, abortion should be legal everywhere until the 16th week at least, in accordance with the Founding Fathers’ notion of the quickening, and abortifacients like the abortion pill should be available for legal use until the 16th week, as well.

But we are not actually going back to the eighteenth century, since “originalism” is a scam. We are being delivered into the hands of high-tech, 21st-century authoritarians who have invented the personhood of the blastocyte and are using it for the purposes of neo-patriarchy. In that regard, this Evangelical dictatorship has some firm resemblances to the Taliban in Afghanistan, who are not “medieval” either, but very much a movement of contemporary counter-modernity. Ironically, Muslims in general have, and all along had, much more liberal views on abortion than the American Religious Right.

Coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has succeeded in blocking the part of President Biden's Build Back Better bill that would have moved the U.S. electricity grid quickly to green energy.

This development is very bad news for the earth, since human beings burning coal, petroleum and natural gas contribute the bulk of the 6.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide that the United States farts out into the atmosphere every year, and which is causing the earth rapidly to heat up to uncomfortable levels. Although the U.S. only has 4% of the world's population, it is responsible for 20% of global CO2 emissions. And that is just today. Through modern history, only Britain has been more of a carbon hog than America.

Although we have poisoned the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that do not permit the sun's heat to escape back out into space at the same rate it used to, we have a cushion. The world's oceans absorb carbon dioxide. They will take in all the extra CO2 industrial civilization has put up there. There are two downsides, though. The oceans will become more acidic and that will kill a lot of marine life. And, the oceans have a limit to how much carbon dioxide they can absorb. If we exceed that limit, then whatever CO2 we put up there afterwards will stay in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, keeping the earth hot.

We're near to exceeding the limit?

We're near to exceeding the limit.

In fact, one man, Joe Manchin, likely just single-handedly put us over the limit. We needed to green our electric grid as soon as humanly and technologically possible. Manchin won't let us do that. The average surface temperature of the earth is not going to rise only 2.7° F. (1.5° C.). It is going to be more, and it is going to be for millennia.

It is hard to get people to understand what we're doing to the earth and to our children and grandchildren by burning coal and gas for electricity and petroleum for transportation. They are, typically, however easy to mobilize if someone points to an attacking enemy on the horizon.

So let me just point out that Manchin and the Big Carbon corporations that fund him are weakening America's economy and infrastructure in the face of China.

China's President Xi Jinping has just announced, Bloomberg reports, the world's largest wind-and-solar farm. This gargantuan facility will generate 400 gigawatts when it is finished, and 200 gigawatts of capacity will be built by 2025.

You know how much solar capacity the United States now has? 100 gigawatts. And how much wind? 125 gigawatts. So by 2025, if China's plans are realized, just this one facility in the western desert will match the entire wind-and-solar capacity of the U.S. as it now stands. And then by a few years later it will double it. One facility.

Not only that, but researchers from Harvard, Tsinghua University in Beijing, Nankai University in Tianjin and Renmin University of China in Beijing have found that China is on the cusp of a tipping point. By 2025, unsubsidized solar power with battery storage everywhere in China will be cheaper than coal. Indeed, solar plus battery is already cheaper than coal in 3/4s of the country. Especially given drops in the cost of battery storage, the paper concludes that China can get 43% of its total power from solar at less than 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour by 2060, making the Communist Party's current plans for decarbonization by then plausible. Coal is usually figured at 5 cents a kilowatt hour, and solar plus battery is already less than that.

Harvard Engineering School's "News and Events" quotes one of the co-authors, Chris P. Nielsen, the executive director of the Harvard-China Project, as saying that most people now understand that decarbonizing is key to fighting the climate emergency. He adds, "Not as many realize that decarbonizing the power system is the linchpin, especially as more sectors become electrified, and that accommodation by the grid of renewable variability is the toughest part of the puzzle. It's a huge breakthrough, and not just for China, if storage can make solar power grid-compatible at a competitive cost."

The power system must be transformed, that is the provision of electricity. That is exactly what China is pushing full speed ahead on, and which Manchin just foiled in the U.S.

So what happens if you green the power system?

Shi Chen, the co-first author of the paper told "News and Events:"

"Our research shows that if costs continue to decline, especially for storage, there could be opportunities to power vehicles, heat or cool buildings, or to produce industrial chemicals, all using solar energy. This would extend the climate and environmental benefits of solar energy far beyond the power sector as traditionally conceived."

Far beyond the power sector. He is talking about a quantum leap in China's industrial infrastructure.

Furthermore, if you solarize the whole electric grid and use panels plus battery storage to power cars and for cooling and heating buildings, you will put enormous demands on your research and development teams to make cheaper and more efficient solar panels and batteries. China's massive push in this direction will position it to be the market leader in the essential technology of the future, a technology in which it already has an edge. China dominates some 60% of the global solar panel market and is the major producer and consumer of electric cars. We could all be driving Chinese electric cars because their companies got the benefits of massive public investment and consumer buying.

The United States, having been derailed from any similar push by Mr. Manchin, won't be putting nearly as much money into the green energy sector and risks being left in the dust by Beijing.

On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian territories.Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.

Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.

The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.

It has been impossible for anyone to stop Israel's repeated and serious crimes against the Palestinians because the United States backs them to the hilt and is deeply implicated itself in keeping Palestinians stateless. (The "two-state solution" long since became geographically impossible, and invoking it and an alleged "peace process," as the Biden administration does, is just a way of keeping the Palestinians from enjoying any human rights).

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cynically called the ruling "anti-Semitic," in the ultimate debasement of a term that has otherwise been central to human rights struggles.

Filistin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) quotes Rami Abdu, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, as saying that the International Criminal Court announcement that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories represents a victory, won by many sacrifices, for justice, freedom, and ethical values in the world. It is, he said, the fruit of a Palestinian struggle that has lasted decades to win recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

As a result, he said, Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation and to see the perpetrators tried in the Hague. He cautioned, however, that "the decision does not mean the end of the road, and the task will not be easy. The hope is that the Biden administration will adopt a different course from its predecessor, and will refrain from putting any pressure on the court."

In spring of 2020, then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext for being able to target justices and staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions because they were looking into alleged crimes by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. These outrageous and ineffectual sanctions have been lifted by the Biden administration.

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute circulated to U.N. member states in the late 1990s and finalized in 2002. The United States and Israel refused to sign or to recognize the court's jurisdiction. Some 123 countries have, however, ratified the treaty and so incorporated it into their national law.

The court can take up cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and apartheid committed by officials in the signatory states. It can apply sanctions to individuals in those governments after trying them. It does not sanction states but individuals. So far its cases have been entirely from Africa.

But the court's hands are usually tied with regard to non-signatory governments. It cannot move against their officials unless the United Nations Security Council forwards a case to them. Thus, when the murderous regime of Muammar Gaddafi attacked civilians in winter-spring of 2011 during the Arab Spring youth revolt, the Security Council referred the case to the ICC. Its justices considered evidence against Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Gaddafi, as well as interior minister Abdullah Sanusi. Arrest warrants were issued by the court for these individuals on June 27, 2011.

The state of Palestine led by Mahmoud Abbas had little hope of the U.N. Security Council asking the ICC to look into Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, since the United States almost always uses its veto to protect Israeli officials from sanctions for their illegal occupation policies in the Palestinian territories that they grabbed beginning in 1967.

The Palestinian David very carefully and with foresight therefore moved to join the International Criminal Court. The first obstacle they faced is that court members have to be members of the United Nations. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the eclipse of Labor in favor of the far, far-right Likud and its offshoots, Israel's policy against the Palestinian people has been predicated on preventing Palestinians from ever having a state. They are to be kept stateless and deprived of the basic human rights that come with citizenship in a state.

So, Palestine sought the same status at the U.N. as is enjoyed by the Vatican, of permanent observer state. The General Assembly can grant this status, and did so for Palestine in 2012. Permanent observer states cannot vote, but they are not voiceless and can attend sessions. Palestine's prerogatives were expanded in 2019 when the Group of 77 at the U.N. elected it their chairman that year.

In 2015, the state of Palestine (as the U.N. calls it) acceded to the International Criminal Court and recognized its jurisdiction in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.

This is like three dimensional chess on the part of the Palestinians. Because they now have what is called in the law "standing." They are a permanent observer state at the U.N. and they are signatories to the Rome Statute.

Now just one step was left, which was to take to the ICC those Israeli officials operating in the Palestinian Territories in such a way as to violate the Rome Statute. Palestine did not hurry to do so, hoping that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu would see the legal peril and become more reasonable. But Netanyahu kept stealing their land and urging Trump to cut their funding (which he did), and by 2019 the Palestinians concluded that they had nothing left to lose by filing a claim.

The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, declared a delay while she sought reassurances that the court had jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

A little over a year later, she has been assured that it does, given the recognition of the Palestine Authority as the government of those region in the Oslo Accords.

As Mr. Abdu said, this step is more the beginning of something rather than its end. Netanyahu will attempt to obstruct the workings of the court. But this is a great day for the international rule of law, and all believers in human rights should rejoice.

Bonus Video: From 5 months ago: "Palestine takes Israel's war crimes to ICC" | News Bulletin | Indus News