Global Research

“The fight in the U.S. is to fight for a real authentic democracy! It is a struggle to shift power from this repressive minority government – this ruling class that is committed to war and rep repression. To shift power away from them to the people – to the masses of the people! Because if not, we allow for these forces to continue. They will represent and are representing an existential threat to global humanity. And I don’t think that is an exaggeration.”

– Ajamu Baraka. From this week’s interview.

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“Unprecedented” was the term used by one Presidential historian in reference to the 2024 election campaign.

Some developments arising during the past few months:

• The President facing calls from his own party not to run for re-election due to his awkward aging moments.
• A candidate shot during a campaign stop.
• The President stepping down and nominating his vice-president to run for President. [1]
• The first African-American, Asian-American female to run for office.
• A prominent third party candidate, originally running for one dominant party steps down and endorses the candidate for the other dominant party! [2]

Let us also reflect on the fact that this election running at close to $15.9 billion is bound to be the most costly in history! [3]

Another factor is the current state of foreign policy. There are two major wars on the world stage, one instigated by NATO against Russia and one fought by Israel, with the support of the United States. One war is too costly for the Republicans to continue to finance in Ukraine, the other too immoral for a significant number of Democrats to support at all.

And then there is Iran striking Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on Beirut killing the Hezbollah leader and the operations commander for the Israeli [Islamic?] Revolutionary Guards Force (IRGC) overseas arm, the Quds Force. Israel seems to expect that the U.S. will side with them in a war with Iran [????] [that statement is misleading, look at the history, Israel does not decide] which would according to some military analysis be very, very costly for the U.S. Does anyone remember Jim Carville’s famous 1992 expression “It’s the economy stupid!” ? [4][5][6]

But in the corridors of power, where there are decisions being made to advance power and prospects for some, we can pretty much ignore the many soundbites cluttering up the consciousness of the age. Major changes are about to happen, regardless of who wins the gold ring, that may mean less privacy rights, less freedoms, less income benefits, and a whole lot more surveillance setting us on the path to Orwell’s 1984. [7]

With less than a month to go before the ballot boxes are counted, the Global Research News Hour is taking a look at how the election is affecting affairs on a global stage, the prospect of seeking salvation in either wing of the “Republicrat” Uniparty, and the promise of using third party candidates as an option.

In the first half hour, we hear from Dimitri Lascaris, a prominent lawyer, journalist and activist. He comments on the foreign affairs question, and the hopes for ordinary people on November 5. In our second half hour, we are joined by Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, who explains that what both parties have to offer are not of interest to the common working man and woman. Finally, we get a visit from journalist and author Matthew Ehret who brings up the bankers coup which almost took place in the early 1930s and explains that the climate is ripe for a similar development today.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, a journalist and an activist. From 2004 to 2016 he was a member of Canada’s leading class action law firm Siskinds LLP. He now works pro-bono legal cases. In 2020, he ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada and placed second with  45.5% of the membership.

Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition. In 2016, he ran for Vice President on the Green Party ticket.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Consider helping this process by making a donation to the RTF or becoming a Patreon supporter to the Canadian Patriot Review.

(Global Research News Hour episode 444)

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Transcript of Dimitri Lascaris, October 9, 2024:

Global Research: Well, just before addressing the election question, you have, as I mentioned, they’ve been to Lebanon four times since the October 7th attack.

And as you predicted, the war has expanded. And after being mostly done with Gaza, they’re assaulting Lebanon with now more firepower than at any time since 1982. Israel managed to explode walkie-talkies and pagers, a move that surprised many people, and Israel has killed a few leaders, key leaders.

Benjamin Netanyahu then said that the Lebanese people can liberate their country by turning on Hezbollah. Now, is Israel more fierce than we contemplated a year ago? What are Lebanese people on the ground telling you about their situation?

Dimitri Lacaris: Well, it certainly depends on which Lebanese person you’re talking to. Lebanon is, I think it’s fair to say, historically has been a fairly sectarian society.

There are strong divisions in the society, even now, many years after the horrible civil war came to an end. And, you know, you’re likely to get fairly different answers and sometimes radically different answers, depending upon whether you’re speaking to somebody who is Shia, a Shia Muslim, or a Sunni Muslim, or a Christian, an Orthodox Christian, or a Falange Christian, or somebody who’s secular, who’s atheist. But I think, basically, there is, amongst the large majority of the population, I think this much I can say with confidence, a lot of anger towards Israel, probably less sympathy for Israel than there has ever been after a year of, you know, countless unspeakable atrocities being visited upon the Palestinian people.

And now, you know, the Israeli military evidently trying to turn the southern part of Beirut, Dahiya, into Gaza. Secondly, I think there’s probably a higher degree of unity amongst the various factions in Lebanese society vis-a-vis this war than there has been in the past. They’re trying to divide them, but I think the Israelis and the Americans are actually achieving the opposite outcome.

They are creating a higher sense of unity in terms of opposing the United States and Israel in the region. So, for example, the leader of the Druze, who typically has not been a supporter of Nasrallah and Hezbollah before Nasrallah’s assassination, expressed support for Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel and its attacks on its military bases. And when I’ve been there, I’ve spoken to people who come from the Christian community, people who are secular nationalists, supporters of the SSNP, the Syrian Social National Party or Nationalist Party, who are very supportive of Hezbollah, even though they’re not Shia Muslims.

But there are people, especially if you go further north in the country, away from the southern border, who feel that the country is being dragged into a war that it desperately doesn’t need because of the economic crisis and the ferocity of Israel’s attacks by Hezbollah’s resistance on the southern border. And they’d rather, they’re not unsympathetic necessarily to the Palestinian people, but they just rather keep out of it and let the Palestinians and the Israelis work it out for themselves. I would say at this stage, my sense is that that sentiment is felt by a minority of the Lebanese population.

And most of them are very angry with Israel and want Israel once and for all to be defeated.

GR: The election is influencing foreign policy-making and that they are concerned about the reaction of swing voters. I mean, why are both candidates for the Democrats and the Republicans holding up this war on the part of Israel when a sizable chunk of the electorate, I mean, you could see it in the streets, is concerned about Palestinians, international law and genocide?

DL: Well, you know, there’s a school of thought, Michael, that the Israel lobby controls the United States government.

I really am not a big fan of this theory. I understand there is evidence to support it. It’s not like there isn’t any evidence that the Israel lobby is extremely powerful and influential, but does it actually have so much power that it can force the US government to engage in a regional war that will do immense damage to the global economy and to interests in the region, and potentially, depending upon how that war is handled, result in the deaths of many US soldiers? I don’t think so.

I don’t think the Israel lobby has that much power. What we’re witnessing today, in my opinion, is just another example of a broader phenomenon in US politics, and that is that the US government does not, generally speaking, not just with respect to the wars escalating in West Asia, it generally does not do what the people of the United States want it to do. The US government is run by a very wealthy elite, which Bernie Sanders describes as the billionaire class.

Others refer to them as the oligarchs. You could also refer to them collectively, along with the corporations they control, as the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower did in January of 1961, three days from the end of his second term, warning of the power of the military-industrial complex. This is who controls the US government, and those people believe, I think wrongly, that their interests will be served and their power will be enhanced.

They don’t give a damn what the American people think, that their interests and their power will be enhanced if they can destroy the axis of resistance in West Asia, and I think they believe they can do it. That’s what’s going on here. The Israel lobby doesn’t have to force these people to do anything because their agenda is the same as that of Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire Israeli political elite.

It’s the destruction of any resistance to US-Israeli hegemony in West Asia. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not that the Israel lobby is forcing the US into a war that the Biden administration is doing everything desperately to avoid, which is the message we’ve been hearing, both from anonymous sources in the administration and from their spokespersons like Matthew Miller and Blinken and this character Amos Hochstein that’s supposed to be their envoy to Lebanon who formerly served in the Israeli military.

We really are trying to de-escalate the situation, and boy, that guy Netanyahu is a tough hombre, and Israel’s a sovereign nation, and we can’t tell Israel what to do. It’s a sovereign country. This is all nonsense.

It’s complete and utter nonsense.

GR: Of course, we don’t discount the propaganda as well, but Iran is being drawn into the war with Israel, and Israel thinks that the US will join in at some point. If the attack on Iran comes soon and then Iran fires back, then we see that whole trigger, that kind of a domino effect that essentially could result in what could be the October surprise of this election, essentially starting World War III in this sense.

Is that one of the things that’s holding back Israel from taking any stand? Would they be so compelled to support Israel that they will engage in the attack on Iran?

I don’t know. Should that happen? The pushback against Iran, it can affect Americans in the region, and it could have a devastating effect even on the economy. What do you think?

DL: Well, let me just say, first of all, that the Americans are fully engaged in this war.

Who provided the bunker buster bombs that annihilated an entire block in southern Beirut and killed Hassan Nasrallah? The Americans did. Of course, Israel couldn’t have done that without the United States. There were credible reports that at the time of the bombing that led to the killing of Nasrallah, there were two US Air Force AWACS operating off the coast of Lebanon, and that they temporarily turned off their transponders, and that this was very unusual behavior on their part.

Afterwards, the Biden administration made the preposterous claim that they didn’t know that the little country in West Asia that depends on the United States government for its very existence, its survival right now, was going to do something that was insanely provocative and kill Nasrallah. This is nonsense. They knew, and they not only knew, they helped them do it.

The Americans helped Israel do it. So, let’s just be clear. We need to dispense with this, as I said, what I call nonsense that we’re hearing in this Kabuki theater, that the US is standing back and Israel is acting on its own.

They’re partners in this crime and this series of crimes. The question is whether… Still, your question is a very important question, which is, will they step it up and actually help Israel to attack Iran? It’s very difficult to say right now. I think there’s a lot of things going on.

One of them is that this Iranian missile attack on October 1st, despite all the hoopla and the triumphalism we’re hearing from the West, Biden stood in front of the press and said with a straight face that the missile attack had been effectively defeated. That is bullocks, folks. That’s bullocks.

There are videos, which have been authenticated by the corporate media in the United States, showing that dozens of ballistic missiles struck Israel’s most heavily defended military bases, air bases, in particular, the Nevatim Air Base. The Western media calculated that the Nevatim Air Base suffered 32 strikes, 32 strikes. There was layer after layer of air defense.

The very best air defense capabilities that the West has were deployed in a layered system to protect that air base, and they nonetheless struck it 32 times. They didn’t fire anything close to their maximum capacity. They could have fired a much larger number of salvos, each consisting of a much larger number of missiles.

Right now, I don’t think that everybody in the Israeli government and the Pentagon is crazy. I think there are actually some people in there who at least have the good sense to say, the Iranians have just demonstrated to us that they can strike anything in Israel, because that’s what they did. They can strike anything and they can destroy anything in Israel, including the Dimona nuclear reactor.

There’s no reason to think if they can strike Nevatim 32 times in one attack, they can almost certainly strike Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. There have to be people who are reflecting upon this. That’s number one.

Number two, we’re only less than a month away from the election, and I think a full-blown war, especially if there is an attack in the next couple of weeks before the voting by the Biden administration, I think we can expect that Iran is going to deliver a much more devastating blow on Israel than it had up until now. If it’s clear to the Iranians that the Americans participated in it, in the attacks on Iran, they will strike American military bases in the Middle East. How is that going to play with the American public? Is that going to actually enhance Kamala Harris’s chance of re-election? I don’t know.

I think that’s highly doubtful. I think that they are reflecting upon this right now, and there’s a lot of vigorous debate going on between the administration and the Netanyahu regime as to the timing of any response, the nature of any response, whether the US will directly and overtly participate in that response. And my sense is, could be wrong, they have not come to a decision.

And I think they’re in a real quandary, Michael. They’re in an extremely difficult quandary. What do they do now? In the background, we should mention also, they have not, despite the fact they’re saying, we’re turning our attention away from Gaza, they have not defeated Hamas.

Hamas is still a deadly fighting force. The Israelis in the last couple of weeks have announced casualties in combat in Gaza. They have a lot of troops committed there.

They’re slaughtering people en masse. They’re continuing to do that, particularly in the north of the Gaza Strip. And they’re taking a beating in South Lebanon.

Almost immediately upon announcing a ground, they didn’t announce a full-blown invasion. They were ambiguous about what the nature of the ground offensive was going to be. But it appears to have been quite limited.

And almost immediately, the Israelis were forced to reveal that eight of its soldiers were killed on the border. And there was a video circulating, which I saw, it’s a grisly video showing the dead Israeli soldiers lying on the ground and the Hamas fighters celebrating their victory. So they have to be worried about that.

What if Israel takes another kick in the teeth in South Lebanon over the next several weeks, just as it did in the course of five weeks of brutal fighting in 2006? And how is that going to affect the whole mix? They’re in a world of pain right now, the Americans and Israelis. And frankly, despite all of their triumphalism, I don’t know what they’re going to do to get themselves out of this mess.

GR: Dimitri, I guess I got to spend at least a couple of minutes talking about the Ukraine war, that other war front.

Biden seems more prepared to launch new weapons against Russia than Trump. And I believe it was in September that I think Scott Ritter had been commented that became a needle’s breath approach to going into nuclear war, because launching those weapons deep into Russia would be considered an attack by NATO. And then you have that kind of a collapsation into a nuclear threat.

So Trump, whatever else you have to say about him, it might improve matters because he’s not willing to spend more money on this war. And therefore, Ukraine, that would collapse a lot faster. I mean, what do you think? Is it possible that electing Trump might actually lessen the threat of a nuclear war?

DL: Well, maybe he will actually carry out his promise to bring that war to an end.

He certainly could do it. It’s very simple. He has to say, I mean, the two most important things is that Russia gets to retain the territories it’s annexed, not just those it occupies, but the additional territory that it has annexed the whole of Kherson, Zaporozhia, and the Donbass, and Luhansk, and it gets to keep Crimea, and Ukraine stays out of NATO.

If he agrees to that, this war is over. Essentially, those are the principal demands of the Russian Federation, and he might do it. He might force, and he could easily force the Zelensky regime to make those concessions, because it, like Israel, depends upon the United States for its very survival.

So, of course, that would decrease dramatically the risk of a nuclear war in Ukraine. But the problem is that Trump is probably going to increase the risk of a nuclear war in West Asia. He’s incentivizing.

This is the man who destroyed the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, which the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran was respecting. This is the man who murdered Qasem Soleimani, the top general of Iran in Iraq, in a flagrant act of war. This is the man who pulled the United States out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was a cornerstone of nuclear management and nuclear nonproliferation.

Russia is not going to allow Iran to be destroyed. It’s not. They have a very close defense relationship, and they’re on the verge of signing a mutual defense pact.

I don’t think China’s going to allow it either. At the end of the day, will the world be safer overall, assuming that Trump actually carries out his promises in foreign policy? I don’t know, Michael. It’s a hard call.

Either way, whether Trump wins or Kamala Harris wins, and I want to point out, it really is telling that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris. Tells you all you need to know. That psychopathic warmonger who dragged the United States into a criminal war of aggression against Iraq with all of its disastrous consequences and oversaw a torture regime and talked openly about attacking Iran, he endorsed Kamala Harris.

Whoever wins that election, we are in a very, very dangerous place.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.