The Indian Panorama

Tag: Belén Fernández

  • The United States is already at war

    The United States is already at war

    Tagline: And it is very much a willing belligerent in a conflict of its own making

    And while many an international observer has sounded the alarm that the US could now be “dragged” into a regional war – warnings that will only increase after the Iranian missile attack – in reality the US is not really being “dragged” anywhere. Rather, the US is in a position entirely of its own making. And the fact of the matter is that the US is already at war.

    By Belén Fernández

    Yesterday, (October 1) Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s assassination in Beirut of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah last week and its assassination in Tehran of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in July.

    United States President Joe Biden instructed the US military to assist Israel in neutralizing the missiles – not that Israel is not already equipped with various layers of ultra-sophisticated protection against incoming projectiles, which permit it to go about slaughtering folks left and right while suffering minimal damage in return.

    During a news briefing at the White House, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that US naval destroyers had “joined Israeli air defense units in firing interceptors to shoot down in-bound missiles”. Praising the “professionalism” of the Israeli military, Sullivan also lauded the “skilled work of the US military and meticulous joint planning in anticipation of the attack”.

    Of course, not once has it occurred to the Biden administration to meticulously thwart Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where officially more than 41,000 people have been killed in less than a year although the true death toll is without a doubt exorbitantly higher. Nor has the oh-so-skilled US military deemed it necessary to interfere in the wanton butchery currently going down in Lebanon, where Israel just killed more than 700 people in less than a week. And while many an international observer has sounded the alarm that the US could now be “dragged” into a regional war – warnings that will only increase after the Iranian missile attack – in reality the US is not really being “dragged” anywhere.

    Rather, the US is in a position entirely of its own making. And the fact of the matter is that the US is already at war.

    To be sure, even prior to the launch of the genocide, the US habit of flinging billions of dollars at the Israeli military on an annual basis long ago made it transparently complicit in Israeli efforts to disappear Palestine. Since October 7, the billions have only multiplied, despite Biden’s intermittent squawking about cutting off the supply of certain offensive weaponry to Israel. In August, the Biden administration approved a $20bn weapons package to its Israeli partner in crime. And on September 26, the Reuters news agency reported Israel’s announcement that “it had secured an $8.7 billion aid package from the United States to support its ongoing military efforts and to maintain a qualitative military edge in the region”.

    The package was said to include “$3.5 billion for essential wartime procurement… and $5.2 billion designated for air defense systems including the Iron Dome anti-missile system, David’s Sling and an advanced laser system”.

    In other words, Israel will be increasingly well-poised to “defend” itself against legitimate responses to its own actions – actions that quite literally qualify as terrorism.

    In the end, it’s not rocket science: the financial and military support consistently extended to Israel by the US does not denote a country that is being “dragged” into a conflict. It denotes a country that is, for all intents and purposes, an active belligerent in the conflict.

    The US also lent a helping military hand to Israel back in April when Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles in response to a lethal Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. On this occasion, too, Iran was widely cast in the role of terrorist aggressor – and never mind the retaliatory nature of its action.

    It is meanwhile helpful to recall that the US has for decades done a fine job of “dragging” itself into regional war – the 2003 US pulverization of Iraq comes to mind – so it should come as no surprise to once again find the country front and center against a backdrop of mass slaughter. From American drone attacks on weddings in Yemen to rush shipments of bombs to the Israeli military in 2006 to aid in the ravaging of Lebanon, it seems the US has never met a Middle Eastern conflict it was not excited about. And although the Biden administration continues to claim ad nauseam that it desires a ceasefire in Gaza, the road to a ceasefire in a case of genocide does not go through billions upon billions of dollars in weaponry to the genocidal party.

    At the briefing on Tuesday, Sullivan warned that: “There will be severe consequences for this attack and we will work with Israel to make that the case.””. Sullivan also stressed that this was a “fog of war” situation, and that he reserved the right to “amend and adjust as necessary” his initial assessment. But in the fog of the latest war one thing, at least, is clear: the US is already a primary belligerent.

    (Belén Fernández is Al Jazeera columnist. the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.
    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.)
    (First published in Al Jazeera)

  • The US is no country for old men

    Elderly Americans struggle to survive in a country that seeks to extract profit from them till the very end.

    A lonely old man (File photo)

    To be sure, the loneliness and isolation that so often attends old age in the US does nothing to increase life expectancy; nor does the unique stigma that US “culture” attaches to ageing. As the American Psychological Association (APA) has noted, institutionalized ageism in the United States entails a “host of negative effects, for people’s physical and mental wellbeing and society as a whole”.

    By Belén Fernández

    Shortly prior to his death from prostate cancer in August of this year at the age of 72, my father emerged from a state of muteness to recite, with a burst of energy, the 1927 poem, Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That is no country for old men.”

    My mother, my uncle, and I were present for the impromptu performance, which took place in my father’s bed in Washington, DC, where he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy treatments that had been forced upon him by profit-oriented doctors had accelerated his demise.

    This was but one of many poems my father had memorized as a young man intent on honing his intellectual credentials; my mother and uncle – who in their youth had also fallen under the influence of my dad’s cerebral pursuits – joined in on the lines they remembered. Having completed his vehement recitation, my father resumed his generally mute state, which was thereafter punctuated only by intermittent outbursts about wanting to die.

    I have no way of knowing what was going through my dad’s mind during that final poetic eruption, but the first line of the Yeats poem did seem to be a fitting commentary on the country in which we found ourselves – the one where we had all been born and the one my parents and I had spent years avoiding. My mom and dad had only relatively recently returned to reside in the homeland after nearly eight years in Barcelona; I had flown into Washington in August from Turkey, which was one of my regular stops in a 20-year self-imposed exile.

    Indeed, my father’s final months had merely confirmed that the US is “no country for old men”. Counterproductive chemotherapy treatments were but one of the ways he had been milked for all he was worth, before being turned over as prey to the lucrative realm of funeral and cremation services.

    For example, for a one-month prescription of the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, a medication developed with none other than US taxpayer money, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – i.e., more than many people in the United States earn in several months. For folks lacking the means to pursue healthcare and other basic needs, US capitalism can be deadly, too.

    And while US society specializes in oppressing a wide range of demographics – minus, of course, the elite minority that thrives on acute inequality – the treatment of the elderly is particularly cynical. Having outlived their labor-based exploitability as cogs in the capitalist machine, older people become decaying objects from which profit must continue to be extracted until the very last minute.

    According to the results of a West Health-Gallup survey published in 2022, approximately one in four Americans aged 65 and older and three in 10 Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 said they had sacrificed basic needs, such as food, to pay for healthcare.

    The study found that older women and Black Americans were disproportionately affected and that punitive health care costs constituted a significant source of stress in the daily lives of older Americans, with stress naturally only exacerbating existing medical issues.

    Add vampire-like insurance companies to the mix, and the panorama becomes ever more morbid. The prohibitive fees associated with many programs – coupled with insurance outfits’ frequent refusal to cover lifesaving treatments – means that life itself continues to be a privilege and not a right in the United States.

    Then there’s the $34bn assisted-living industry, which a recent Washington Post investigation revealed to be plagued by wanton neglect despite charging an average of $6,000 a month per resident. Since 2018, the Post reported, more than 2,000 residents have wandered off unnoticed from such facilities, and nearly 100 of them have died after doing so.
    So much for “assisted living”.
    To be sure, the loneliness and isolation that so often attends old age in the US does nothing to increase life expectancy; nor does the unique stigma that US “culture” attaches to ageing. As the American Psychological Association (APA) has noted, institutionalized ageism in the United States entails a “host of negative effects, for people’s physical and mental wellbeing and society as a whole”.

    Granted, loneliness and isolation are often lifelong afflictions for inhabitants of the so-called “land of the free”, where the collective mental wellbeing is hardly helped by a dog-eat-dog insistence on individual success at the expense of communal and family bonds and the conversion of human beings into consumerist automatons.

    And the cutthroat, transactional nature of existence in the US culminates, appropriately, with elderly bodies being put up for grabs by pharmaceutical companies, nursing homes, and the corporate racket known as the US healthcare system.

    That said, the US is, in fact, a fine country for some old men – such as former warmongering diplomat Henry Kissinger, who perished at home in Connecticut in November at the ripe old age of 100 after spending a good part of his life causing the deaths of countless people worldwide.

    Not long after my father’s death in August, I fell into conversation with a Bolivian man in his 50s who had resided in Washington for more than two decades and who expanded on the “no country” theme. He planned to stick it out for another 10 to 15 years before returning to his home city of Cochabamba, he told me, because he couldn’t afford to be old in the US.

    And while the US may be “no country for old men”, it’s not much of a country for anyone else, either.
    (Belén Fernández is an Al Jazeera columnist)