Seymour Hersh:

An expert on international negotiations recently gave me a blistering assessment of the ceasefire that some leading American newspapers have hailed as a significant step toward peace. The Western media has fostered hope that a similar agreement can be reached with the diminished Hamas leadership to bring the surviving October 7 hostages, if there are any, home from Gaza.

“It is a bizarre agreement,” the expert told me. “There are no signatory parties on behalf of Country A, Country B. It is not even an agreement. It’s an announcement by the US and France that they understand X, Y and Z. It’s all about what the US and France understand but not the obligations of the parties.”

The expert said that the ceasefire is in no way “legally binding and has no duration … but US officials have said it is designed to be permanent.” The peace, if it comes, will be monitored by soldiers of the reinvigorated Lebanese Armed Forces, whose formerly demoralized troops were recently described by the Economist as one of the few respected institutions left in a chronically fragmented country. Adding to the complications, the expert said, is the fact that most LAF soldiers “view Israel as the enemy, especially since Israel is burning one-third of the country to the ground. The army will never let itself be used against Hezbollah. LAF was always a force for internal security . . . just as [are] all Middle Eastern armies the US controls and arms and trains. . . . And if the US cares so much about the LAF then why is it letting the Israelis kill LAF soldiers and officers?”

The expert was referring to the fact that the Israeli military and air force have continued their attacks in southern Lebanon under the auspices of a side ceasefire agreement between the US and Israel that permits such attacks to take place up to fifteen miles north of the border with Israel, and sometimes miles beyond that limit if intelligence warrants them. The agreement also enabled those who had fled their homes in northern Israel and southern Lebanon to return. Roads on both sides of the border have been filled by those desperate to return home. Many of the returning Lebanese are Shia supporters of Hezbollah.

Reports in the Western media largely depict the near daily Israeli bombing in Lebanon as primarily aimed at Hezbollah targets. Not so, said the expert, who has been monitoring the Middle East for decades. “Israeli jets were not bombing Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon,” he told me. “They were destroying every Shia village and neighborhood in the country. They were destroying hospitals, schools and mosques and social and financial institutions, and they were targeting ambulance drivers and emergency healthcare workers.”

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The Biden administration, he said, “has not been engaged in diplomacy. It has just been delivering Israeli ultimatums demanding that Hezbollah and Lebanon surrender.”

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What is to happen, I asked, to the two million or so Palestinians still being bombed and starved and deprived of clean drinking water or any semblance of decent housing and sanitation, with no sign of support from the Arab and Western world and no way to flee Gaza?

The answer, in essence, was a question: What happened to the American Indians in the plains of the Dakotas?

György Varga, NachDenkSeiten:

Russland hat den entsprechenden Punkt des Budapester Memorandums in seine erneuerte Nukleardoktrin aufgenommen. Das Datum der Unterzeichnung der russischen Doktrin durch Präsident Putin (19. November) fiel mit dem Tag zusammen, an dem amerikanische ATACMS-Raketen (300 Kilometer Reichweite) unter amerikanischer Führung auf Ziele in Russland abgefeuert wurden.

Volodymyr Ishchenko:

It is really difficult to argue that the war is still a kind of “people’s war” if the majority of Ukrainian men actually do not want to fight. The extent to which they are ready to articulate this position depends also on their fear of repression. It’s difficult to say this within the Ukrainian public sphere – that kind of criticism exists mostly in closed chats, “friends-only” Facebook accounts, and so on, and is only very cautiously articulated in publications.

Craig Murray:

The Lebanese government have recorded 51 breaches of the ceasefire by Israel in three days.

The United States and its allies have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation – a FTO in US legal parlance. The USA – which is set up as the arbiter of the ceasefire – therefore views any military action by Israel against anyone or anything deemed “Hezbollah”, anywhere and anytime, as a legitimate counter-terrorism operation.

The USA therefore simply takes the view – and the UK will take the same view – that each and every attack by Israel is not a violation of the ceasefire, but legitimate counter-terrorism.

There is no doubt of this whatsoever.

Lebanon can do nothing to monitor or prevent the reinforcement of Israeli positions in Southern Lebanon (spoiler – Israel has no intention of ever withdrawing) because the ceasefire stipulates not only that the Israeli army has sixty days leisure to leave Southern Lebanon, but that in that sixty days the Lebanese armed forces cannot enter the areas Israel is occupying: including not taking control of their own Southern border and thus they cannot check what troops and weapons Israel is moving across unopposed.

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The United States holds all of the cards. The Lebanese Armed Forces are the only army I can think of in modern history which “remained neutral” when their country was invaded. The Lebanese Armed Forces are literally in the pay of the United States.

This is a complex country. The truth is that the majority of the soldiers of the Lebanese Army would in fact defend their country against Israel given half the chance, while their leadership has other ideas entirely and has US-backed political ambitions.

The United States is a party to the conflict. The bombs falling on Lebanese heads are American bombs, dropping from American planes. The United States is put in charge of the “peace” by this Agreement. The current US Imperial hegemon is having its coat carried by the former colonial power France, in exchange for which honour France granted immunity to Netanyahu for war crimes.

Branko Milanović:

Before I try to answer the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay, and we can use it freely. Nobody cares. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs, it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of the class structure of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state, and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.