War or Cake?

Writing on the issues of Israel and Iran, Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Gaza etc., is of course a naturally risky business, because there is just no knowing what catastrophe might befall the world between anything being written now and it being published in a few hours’ time.

And catastrophe right now should be an expectation.

Given the volume of chatter between Israel and the US (and its poodles) about attacking Iran - a favorite theme of Israeli politicians for several decades - and given the proven capability of Iran to cripple Israeli infrastructure, as it demonstrated, sample fashion, on October 1st, it is difficult to understand why Iran does not immediately strike pre-emptively.

To wait for Israel to strike first is to run the risk that the Israeli strike would be sufficient to make it impossible for Iran to retaliate in the massive way that it has threatened. And that would be, will be, very bad news for the entire region.

To explain both this unreal caution on the part of Iran, as well as Israel’s slow execution of its threats to Iran is largely to engage in speculation.

We do know that Netanyahu and the US have seen the necessity for some kind of consultation, and that the two leaders, with Kamala Harris, have spoken in recent days. But it is quite clear that this US administration will do nothing to reduce its military support for Israel. This is because Israel is indeed a US proxy, even if the behavior of that proxy is sometimes a vexation to the US (as just documented by court historian Bob Woodward in his latest book, appropriately titled “War”).

If Israel was not simply a proxy but just another historical headwind of unalloyed and wilful evil, then the US would long ago have shut down the flow of arms to Israel. Which in turn also begs the question of when does a US President and his administration act as anything other than as a servant to the incubus of the National Security State, currently in the firm grip of mainly unelected (and a few elected) Neocons, largely dependent on arms manufacturers (enjoying the greatest boom period in a very long time) and the Israeli lobby.

So far as Iran is concerned, we can ponder the extent to which the pro-Western factions in Iran constrain bold decision-making in foreign policy; we can wonder about the extent of the continuing popularity of the theocratic regime and the coercive potential of the IRGC; we can ask whether the Iranian theocracy ties its own hands by what in other contexts would be a laudable commitment to ethics; we can ask ourselves many other questions as to the real depths of its weapons stockpiles. Most importantly we can try to assess the weight of Russian aid and advice to Iran at this moment, and the extent to which Russia is prepared to fight a two-front existential war that might either distract from or might even contribute to its current crushing of Ukraine and attritional depletion of the weapons stocks of both Europe and the US.

In the list of items of wishful-thinking, indeed, we should ponder just how far Russia, a nation of only some 150 million, can sustain the weight of hope invested in it by the dissident communities of the West, who need to see in Russia a meaningful, avanguardist ally of China, and the two of these giant enterprises as good-faith apostles of a plausible BRICS revolution that will actually benefit the world.

So far as Israel is concerned, and the fact that as of my writing today on the morning of Friday October 11 (California time) we can ask whether the regime was shaken by the extent of the success of the Iranian strike on October 1st and, in the light of this, needs more time for reflection and preparation while it does its best to push back Hezbollah and attack UN peace-keeping forces in southern Lebanon, while continuing its utter devastation of Gaza (so that Jared Kushner can build flashy new Mar-a-Lagos for his plutocratic friends along the Gazan beaches).

Speaking of which, why are not these UN “peace-keeping” forces attacking IDF aggressors, and why are they not properly equipped for this purpose? Yes, the UN is itself, of course, a paper tiger, one whose executive operations have long been coopted by Western neoliberal orthodox ideology of globalist-capitalist authoritarianism.

And as far as the US is concerned, Netanyahu must surely be weighing the US presidential election in a few weeks’ time. Trump may not be a maniacal fascist who feeds on the blood of dismembered children, like Netanyahu, but he has not yet met one he does not think he can get on with. Harris, by strong contrast, until now has seemed intellectually conventional, dependent, weak and submissive but there may be something interesting in her choice of foreign policy advisors (see below) that has begun to worry Netanyahu, notwithstanding the poor chances of success such advisors will experience as the National Security State steamrollers their ideas.

Unlike Netanyahu, the US does have to worry to some extent that the electorate may contain some normal, compassionate human beings who are going to be extremely upset if they see the odious senile/warrior Biden hybrid - through culpable negligence and stupidity - unleash an eternity of terror in the Middle East, far worse than any the US, along with its pal Israel, has been able to conjure to this point in time.

The following article in Foreign Policy by Michael Hirsh (Hirsh) received insufficient attention when published in August this year. He refers to the thinking of Harris’s national security advisor, Philip Gordon, and deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner (Lissner authored An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order, in 2020 book).

The basic message of the Lissner book (co-authored with Mirs Rapp-Hooper, who is currently Biden’s National Security Council director for East Asia and Oceania) is that the USA should give up on strategic primacy and the “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order.’” It is time, they write, for the US - its unipolar moment long gone - to give up its self-declared messianic goal of transforming the world in its image. It should instead focus on the things that most matter (which I would list as, first, safety of the planet from global warming, environment destruction and pollution, pandemics, gross inequality, food contamination and other such concerns, and secondly, prosperity for all.

No more containment, no more ideological crusades (a lesson taken from China?) but rather an “accessible global commons.”

Gordon’s 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, dissects 70 years of failure of US policy in the Middle Eat that started with the overthrow of democratically elected President Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, about which I have written many times in these posts. He concludes that regime change, at least since Germany and Japan at the end of World War 2, almost never works. Instead, it has actually contributed to the rise of China and Russiaan - an argument of the 2020 book, here cited by Hirsh, by David Kilcullen The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.

In these works cited by Hirsh we see the final accommodation into a wing of the US Establishment of at least three or more decades’ of fierce condemnation by dissidents and critics of the idiocies of US hegemony. I don’t believe we can trust this accommodation for one moment- it seems to sit quite happily sitting next to pro-Zelenskiy adulation - but it is at least somewhat better informed than anything that the antediluvian primordial capitalist swamp that is all that the Trump team has to offer.