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With the assassination of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah and a number of the Hizbullah senior leadership in Beirut – expressly without prior warning being given to the Pentagon – Netanyahu fired the start gun on an implicit Israeli widening of war to – using Israel’s term – the ‘octopus’ tentacles’: Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ansarullah in Yemen; the Syrian government and the Iraqi Hash’ad A-Shaabi forces.

Well, after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh and part of Hizbullah’s leadership cadre (including a senior Iranian general), Iran – demonised as the ‘octopus head’ – entered the conflict with a volley of missiles that targeted airfields, military bases and the Mossad HQ – but intentionally caused no deaths.

Israel thus made the U.S. (and most of Europe) partners or accomplices to a war now definitively cast as neo-imperialism versus the whole of the non-West. Palestinians – the global icons of the aspiration for national liberation – were to be annihilated from historic Palestine.

Further, the bombing in Beirut, and Iran’s riposte to it, now ranges Israel backed and materially supported by the U.S. vs Iran, backed and materially supported by Russia. Israel, the military correspondent of Yedioth Ahronoth warns, ‘must go crazy and strike Iran – because striking Iran “will end the current war”’.

Plainly, it marks the end to ‘playing nice’ – of incrementally escalating, one calculated step after another – as if playing chess with an opponent who calculates similarly. Both now threaten to take a hammer to the chess board. ‘Chess is over’.

It seems that Moscow too, understands that ‘chess’ simply cannot be played when the opponent is no ‘adult’, but a reckless sociopath ready to sweep away the board – to gamble all on an ephemeral ‘great victory’ move.

Looked at dispassionately, either the Israelis are inviting their own demise by over-extending across seven fronts. Or their hope lies with invoking the threat of their demise as the means to bring in the United States. As with Zelensky in Ukraine, there is ‘no hope’ unless the U.S. adds its fire-power decisively – both Netanyahu and Zelensky assume.

So, in West Asia the U.S. is now supporting, no less, than a war against humanity per se, and against the world. This clearly cannot be in America’s self-interest. Do its power-broker Panjandrums realise the possible consequences for it to stand against the World in an act of gross immorality? Netanyahu is betting his house – and now the West’s – on the outcome of his roulette table ‘bet’.

Is there a sense amongst the Panjandrums that the U.S. is betting on the wrong horse? Whilst it seems there are some contrarians placed at a high level in the U.S. military who do have reservations – as in every ‘war game’ the U.S. loses in the Near East – their voices are few. The wider political class clamours for revenge on Iran.

The dilemma of why there are so few opposing voices in Washington has been addressed and explained by Professor Michael Hudson. Hudson explains that matters are not so simple; that context is missing. Professor Hudson’s reply is paraphrased below from two long commentaries (here and here):

“Everything that’s happened today was planned out just 50 years ago, back in 1974 and 1973. “I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ‘76. I sat in on meetings with Uzi Arad, who became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor after heading Mossad. I worked very closely with Uzi there … I want to describe how the whole strategy that led to the United States today, not wanting peace, but wanting Israel to take over the whole Near East, took shape gradually.

“On one occasion, I brought my mentor, Terrence McCarthy, to the Hudson Institute, to talk about the Islamic worldview, and every two sentences, Uzi would interrupt: “No, no, we’ve got to kill them all”. And other people, members of the Institute, were also just talking continually about killing Arabs”.

The strategy of using Israel as the regional battering ram to achieve U.S. (imperial) objectives was worked out essentially in the 1960s by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was nicknamed ‘the Senator from Boeing’ for his support for the military-industrial complex. And the military-industrial complex backed him to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was too twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 1972 and 1976 Presidential elections.

Well, he was backed by Herman Kahn too, who became the key strategist for U.S. hegemony in the Hudson Institute.

Initially, Israel didn’t really play a role in the U.S. plan; Jackson (of Norwegian descent) simply hated communism, he hated the Russians, and had a lot of support within the Democratic Party. But when all of this strategy was being put together, Herman Khan’s great achievement was to convince the U.S. Empire builders that the key to achieving their control in the Middle East was to rely on Israel as its foreign legion.

And that arms-length arrangement enabled the U.S. to play the role, Hudson says, of the ‘good cop’, whilst designating Israel to play its role as ruthless proxy. And that’s why the State Department turned over management of U.S. diplomacy to Zionists – to separate and distinguish Israeli behaviour from the claimed probity of U.S. imperialism.

Herman Khan described the virtue of Jackson for Zionists to Professor Hudson as precisely that he was not Jewish, a defender of the military complex and a strong opponent of the arms control system that was underway. Jackson fought against arms control – “we’ve got to have war”. And he proceeded to stuff the State Department and other U.S. agencies with neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Douglas Fife, among others), who, from the beginning, planned for a permanent worldwide war. The takeover of government policy was led by Jackson’s former senate aides.

Herman’s analysis was systems analysis: Firstly, define the overall aim and then work backwards.“Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians [into] strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years”.

“The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties”, Hudson notes.

“And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now – is all based on the “strategic hamlets” idea from the Vietnam war: the fact that you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was pioneered in Vietnam”.

If you analysed these neo-cons, Hudson relates,

“they had a virtual religion. I met many at the Hudson Institute; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. And they picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neo-cons adapted this and said, “No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire – it’s going to expand, and expand and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”.

The Scoop Jackson neo-cons were brought in – from the beginning – to do exactly what they’re doing today. To empower Israel as America’s proxy, to conquer the oil-producing countries, and make them part of greater Israel.

“And the aim of the United States was always oil. That meant the United States had to secure the Near East and there were two proxy armies to do it. And these two armies fought together as allies, down to today. On the one hand, the al-Qaeda jihadis, on the other hand, their managers, the Israelis, hand in hand”.

“[W]hat we’re seeing is, as I said, a charade that somehow what Israel is doing is “all Netanyahu’s fault, all the fault of the Right-wing there” – and yet from the very beginning they were promoted, supported with huge amounts of money, all of the bombs they needed, all the armaments they needed, all the funding they needed … All of that was given to them precisely to do exactly what they’re doing today”.

“No, there can’t be a two-state solution because Netanyahu said, “We hate the Gazans, we hate the Palestinians, we hate the Arabs – there cannot be a two-state solution and here’s my map,” before the United Nations, “here’s Israel: there’s no one who’s not Jewish in Israel – we’re a Jewish state” – he comes right out and says it”.

Hudson then gets to the bottom of it all. He points us to the fundamental game-changer: Why it is difficult for the U.S. to change its approach – the Vietnam War had shown that any attempted conscription by western democracies was not viable. Lyndon Johnson in 1968 had to withdraw from running for election precisely because everywhere he would go, there would be non-stop stop-the-war demonstrations.

The ‘bedrock’ which Hudson underlines, is the understanding that western democracies no longer can field a domestic army through conscription. ‘And what that means is that today’s tactics are limited to bombing, but not occupying countries.Thus, Israel – whose forces are limited – can drop bombs on Gaza and Hezbollah, and try to knock out things, but neither the Israeli army, nor any other army, would really be able to invade and try to take over a country, or even south Lebanon – in the way that armies did in World War II – so the U.S. drew the lesson. It turned to proxies’.

“So what is left for the United States? Well, I think there’s only one form of non-atomic war that democracies can afford, and that’s terrorism [i.e positively seeking huge collateral deaths]. And I think you should look at Ukraine and Israel as the terrorist alternative to atomic war”, Hudson suggests.

The bottom line, he notes, is what then does this imply with Israel continuing to insist on engaging the U.S. in its regional war? The U.S. is not going to send troops. It can’t do that. The ruling cadre have tried terrorism and the result of terrorism is to align the rest of the world against the West, appalled by the wanton killing and by the breaking of all of the rules of war.

Hudson concludes, “I don’t see Congress being reasonable. I think that the State Department and the National Security Agency and the Democratic Party leadership, with its basis in the military-industrial complex, is absolutely committed”.

The latter might say “Well, who wants to live in a world where we can’t control? Who wants to live in a world where other countries are independent, where they have their own policy? Who wants to live in a world where we can’t siphon off their economic surplus for us? If we can’t take everything and dominate the world, well, who wants to live in that kind of a world?”

That’s the mentality with which we’re dealing; ‘Playing nice’ won’t change that paradigm. Failure does.