John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY TOM O’CONNOR IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“Iran to Hold Naval Drills with Russia, Signed ‘Unprecedented’ Agreement to Expand Military Ties — Iranian Admiral
“Drills to be held soon in the Indian Ocean at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz”
I'm glad to read of such expanded cooperation between Iran and Russia. Friends and allies are so important when threats approach. Maybe there’s room for a little optimism.
The United States seems determined to upset the Gulf region and perhaps tip it into war. When you create enough risk and uncertainty in a place, war can happen even if you had not intended it.
It is all so unnecessary, so destructive, and just plain unreasonable. What possibly is America’s motive for ripping up a working international agreement, imposing severe and illegal sanctions, and sending warships and bombers to intimidate a country following its legal obligations and attacking no one?
Analyzed calmly, there are no genuine American interests at risk in Iran. But Israel deeply resents Iran's regional influence and wants it reduced, and it doesn’t much care how that is achieved or what terrible conditions are imposed on Iran’s eighty-or-so million citizens.
Israel’s attitude towards Iran has nothing to do with threats. That claim is just emotion-laden propaganda to help Israel get what it wants. There never has been a real threat from Iran, a country which has started no wars or hostilities in its modern history. And besides, since when do non-nuclear states seriously threaten nuclear ones? It just doesn’t happen.
The sudden new hostilities, wave after wave of them, hurled at Iran have only to do with Israel's drive to dominate its region, to be its most influential country, with no one around to disagree or object to what it does.
Israel strives to be a miniature replica in the Middle East of what America is in the world. Hardly a worthy or admirable goal for anyone else concerned. It’s just plain old imperialism, all dressed-up as something else.
It wouldn’t happen were there anyone to restrain Israel, but there isn’t. Just as no one has ever insisted Israel get back to its original borders. In case you hadn’t noticed, Israel is a rather odd state with absolutely no defined borders, somewhat resembling an ever-spreading puddle.
It is a state which works constantly to increase the area under its control. It is what historically we would call an “aggressor nation,” but there is no one around with any authority to make that charge and give it force.
So, Israel takes land from Palestinians, from Syrians, and, in the near past, from Lebanon, and it promotes hostilities it regards as advantageous to its interests, such as those against Iraq and Syria or now those against Iran.
The United States has never seriously played the role of restraining Israel or insisting on its borders, and it doesn’t allow anyone one else, such as the United Nations, to do so either. Indeed, for decades, the United States has attacked and diminished the United Nations. It has many reasons for doing so, but Israel’s situation is a big one.
Israel’s insistence that it should have more influence in the region than Iran rather resembles Luxemburg feeling it should have more influence in Europe than Germany. The population ratios are not dissimilar, but of course, when you are a special colony of the United States, you speak with a much louder voice.
Israel very much is a de facto colony of the United States. It does some of America's dark tasks and provides an American pied-a-terre in the Middle East. It is subsidized by a huge flow of American public and private funds plus many special advantages it has been granted, from free trade and the flow of technology to the receipt of very large contracts and easy access to the highest officials.
The hard-nosed establishment in Washington – people who have killed many millions in meaningless colonial wars since WWII, variously estimated at 8 to 20 million – are hardly the types to be influenced by biblical tales or sentimental considerations.
And they are hardly the types to protect people for humanitarian reasons, as they’ve proved a number of times by standing back from authentic genocides in Rwanda, in Indonesia, and in Cambodia, just letting the killing go on until it stopped.
The establishment employs sentimental tales to look like good guys while carrying on with what pretty much is ruthless colonial work. Of course, those tales motivate ordinary citizens of Israel, and motivated citizens are useful.
The closest historical equivalent we have to what we see with the United States and Israel perhaps was the past relationship between France and Algeria. Algeria actually became a legal part of metropolitan France.
But Israel’s location, both in the very heart of the Middle East and on the Mediterranean Sea, makes it more geopolitically significant than Algeria could be to France, especially since America itself is so very far away.
Israel’s population - its influential people and their investments are able to move freely between the two places almost as though Israel were a state of the union - also endows it with special properties, including heavy influence back in the “mother country.”
It furthers ties and connections that the population is mainly of European and North American descent. There’s nothing Middle Eastern about schmaltz or gefilte fish or bagels or long black overcoats and fedoras.
How ironic it is that the invasion of Iraq – always an Israeli project, having nothing to do with oil, but a great deal to do with the tireless advocacy of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu - destroyed what was in many ways the Middle East's most advanced society, leaving room for Iran to increase its influence and connections instead.
The people who advocate playing with the lives of millions of others in imperial wars and coups often have no idea what the final outcome of their acts will be, which is just one of many arguments against America’s violent imperial practices.
America has done little else but make an unholy mess of country after country with its wars in the Middle East. From Israel’s cynical point of view, making messes of those countries is just fine since it means removing their influence for many years to come.
So now, Israel wants something done about Iran. What a truly destructive force Israel has been and continues to be.
