Gut Feelings Make for Strategic Errors – U.S. Lured Into Battlescape in Gaza, Yemen and Now Iraq

China and Russia have been remarkably quiet, watching carefully the global tectonic plates shifting around in response to the ‘two wars’.

By Alastair Crooke

January 15, 2024

China and Russia have been remarkably quiet, watching carefully the global tectonic plates shifting around in response to the ‘two wars’ (Ukraine and Israel’s ‘multiwar’). Really it is not surprising; both states can sit back to simply watch Biden and his team persist with their strategic mistakes in Ukraine and in Israel’s multiple wars.

The interlacing of the two wars will, of course, shape the new era. There are substantive risks, but for now they can observe with comfort from afar as a climatic juncture in world politics unfolds, gradually raising the pace of the attrition to a circle of fire.

The point here is that Biden, at the centre of the storm, is no cool-headed Sun-Tzu. His politics are personal and highly visceral: As Noah Lanard has written in his forensic analysis of How Joe Biden Became America’s Top Hawk, his own team say it plainly: Biden’s politics is seated in his ‘kishkes’ – his guts.

That can be seen in the disdainful and graphic way in which Biden sneers at President Putin as an ‘autocrat’, and the way he talks about victims of the Hamas attack being massacred, sexually assaulted, and taken hostage, whilst “Palestinian suffering is left vague – if mentioned at all”. “I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all”, says Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

There is a long and reputable history of leaders making the right spur of the moment decision from their unconscious, without careful rational calculous. In the ancient world this was a highly prized quality. Odysseus exuded it. It was called mêtis. But this ability was contingent on having a dispassionate temperament and an ability to see things ‘in the round’; to grasp both sides to a coin, we would say.

Read more:

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/01/15/gut-feelings-make-for-strategic-errors-us-lured-into-battlescape-in-gaza-yemen-and-now-iraq/

PDF: AC15.1.2024

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See also

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https://new.thecradle.co/articles/the-west-bank-is-a-ticking-time-bomb

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The Chris Hedges Report with Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general who served in the Special Forces in the Israeli army, on the racist indoctrination and militarization of Israeli society

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https://afsaneyebahar.com/2024/01/14/20697859/

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The Case for Genocide

The International Court of Justice may be all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and genocide.

By Chris Hedges

January 12, 2024

https://afsaneyebahar.com/2024/01/13/20697840/

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