The American Dog Still Wags the Israeli Tail
Nothing is out of control. Everything is going according to plan.
A recent episode of Al Jazeera’s “The Bottom Line” featured Matthew Duss, a former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders, who challenged the mainstream notion that the Biden administration, or even the US more broadly, is trying and failing to contain Israeli aggression. This is a narrative that minimises US agency and responsibility, and deserves to be challenged. This interview was better than most of the analysis out there, but still not, to my mind, fully satisfactory.
The Mainstream View
The mainstream presentation of the issue, to which Duss and Clemons are responding, puts Israel firmly in the driving seat, with the US being “dragged” into a war it doesn’t want, according to the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, in an article he wrote called “The two forces at work on Biden-Netanyahu phone call.” These two forces, which he presents as in conflict with one another, pushing in opposite directions, are US objectives and Israeli objectives. The US wants peace, but Israel wants to take the opportunity to wound “its mortal enemy”, Iran, while its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas are weakened and distracted.
But just last week, Vice President Harris, who was also on the call, described Iran as America’s greatest adversary. Is the international editor at the BBC really sounaware of what Harris — who may soon be America’s next president, thinks? It seems unlikely. But that kind of mental gymnastics and deceit by omission is built into the highly politicised world of legacy media. He knows his lines, and he knows what not to say.
The ABC (the Australian one) casts the phone call in a similar light, discussing “the tension in the US-Israel relationship.” But perhaps the best example of this narrative is the interview of Atlantic staff writer and Biden biographer, by CNN’s Bianna Golodryga, which makes the greatest pretence of interrogating this narrative. She even asks what would happen if the US were to “withhold necessary weapons” (my italics). But then suggests that rather than restraining Israel, this might have “the opposite effect”, reminding her guest and her viewers that Netenyahu has said he would continue the war “with or without US support”. With the hard question thus softened up, she nods along while he responds that “Israel is fighting in its national interest so whatever the United States does is not simply going to dictate policy, there’s no switch that can be flipped.”
So the position they both seem to land on is that Israel would continue the war without US support. With what bombs? With what bullets? With what spare parts for their tanks and planes?
These people aren’t stupid. They just act like it.
Duss on Al Jazeera
The segment starts with a question posed by the host, Steve Clemons:
It’s a popular refrain here in Washington, US strategy in the Middle East is an epic failure. But hold on for a minute. What if America’s decision makers knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what would happen as they enable Israel and green-light all its actions?
His guest, Matthew Duss, responds mostly in the affirmative.
The United States has… considerable ways to put pressure on Israel, mainly through the provision of military aid. We give extraordinary amounts of military aid that has really, um, you know, sped up over the course of this war, given the amount of armaments and ammunition that Israel is going through as they’ve just been pummeling Gaza. And at no time, except for one suspension of the largest bombs, did Biden even consider using that tool to change Israeli Behaviour
The largely performative “suspension” to which Duss refers, affected one shipment, but as Reuters reports, citing unnamed officials, the flow of weapons was not seriously affected, despite these ongoing shipments being, as Duss notes, a violation of US law.
This is not just a catastrophe in Gaza”, Duss says later in the interview “but a growing regional catastrophe, and one which I think will be paying the costs and consequences for many years to come.”
But for whom, exactly, is it a disaster? Peace would have consequences too.
Israel’s job, the role it plays in the US system of global domination, is that of regional spoiler. Destabilisation is a feature, not a bug. What would a stable middle east look like? In whose interests would this stability be? How would America benefit from all this peace?
He goes on:
I’m really concerned that you know there does seem to be there’s clearly a sense in Washington, like this sense of exaltation that is just dangerously and terrifyingly reminiscent of you know the leadup to the Iraq War. This sense that, well, by dint of our enormous power or Israel’s enormous military power we’re essentially going to reshuffle the deck, uh, in the middle East and kind of rearrange um all all you know you know the security arrangement in the Middle East in a way that’s more beneficial to us. And it’s really kind of staggering For those of us who lived through that that we would have to relearn this lesson it will not work. Israel clearly has enormous capabilities they’ve they’ve scored a number of very very impressive tactical victories I don’t think anyone could deny that but what we’ve seen you know year after year after decade after decade in that region is that both the United States and Israel have utterly failed to you turn these tactical victories into strategic wins and that is what we still have yet to see from either the us or Israel of is any explanation of how we’re how this ends
Oh Matthew — you sweet innocent child — it never ends. Why would it end?
My View
There are 300 million Arabs. They have immense energy reserves. They are positioned at the centre of the Eurasian World Island, and across the top of Africa, and all around the world’s most strategic shipping routes including the Suez Canal. Were they to form a united bloc, they would immediately take a leadership role among the world’s billion plus Muslims.
In my recent speech at a local protest, I talked about my experiences during the 2006 war in Lebanon.
A point of dark humour was the fact that the US was making a big public show of shipping aid to Lebanon during the bombing. The aid included tents, to house the people whose homes had been destroyed by the bombs they shipped to Israel.
Those bombs, by the way, literally said “made in America” on them. Those words were printed on the steel that becomes shrapnel, that trauma surgeons have to cut out of little children’s bodies.
Years later, I would be working in Egypt during the Arab Spring, and I would see those same words, “made in America”, on the tear gas canisters fired to disperse crowds in Tahrir square.
We should understand Israeli aggression in this context, as an extension of western, especially American, violence.
It’s the Israelis actually, who are millions of human shields, used by the west as cover in order to move military hardware into the region, with the goal of preventing the emergence of a united Arab nation, which would be a significant geopolitical rival.
As a much younger, more vital, more honest Joe Biden put it “Were there not an Israel, America would have to go out and invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”.
At the Core of US foreign policy is the “clash of civilisations” thesis, as articulated by “political scientist” Samuel P Huntington.
Was Iraq a failure? Depends what the goal was. If the goal was to smash the place up, kill a bunch of Arabs, and keep the people of the region off balance, living in fear, then it was a huge success.
What about the coup that removed Mohamed Morsi, the only elected head of state in Egypt’s millennia of history carried out by a military that is entirely dependent on US weapons, parts, training and intelligence support? Another big whoopsie? Why did Roosevelt meet with Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in 1945, three years before Israel existed? Why did the US side with the Egyptians against the British, French and Israelis during the Suez Crisis of 1956?
In every case the answer is simple. The US acted to enhance its own power in the region, as part of the project of building a unipolar world, where it acts as a defacto world government. Power wants more power.
The Israelis might be willing agents of US power, with their own motives and ideas. And there’s no question of the power that AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups wield in Washington.
But all that works in perfect harmony with, not against, the overall thrust of US foreign policy, which is framed as a zero-sum, civilisational conflict.
