When Republicans invited Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress, the public might have wrongly concluded that lawmakers are worried about an existential threat to Israel. But Israel, with 100 nukes and growing, is the only state in the Middle East with such weapons, and it is backed by the United States, the only country on earth to have incinerated human beings with them. If anyone should be worried about nuclear weapons in the Middle East, it should be Iran.
In fact, when you look at a map of U.S. military bases in the Middle East, there aren’t many nations bordering on or near Iran that don’t have at least one U.S. military base in them: Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, the Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And the Fifth Fleet is all over the Persian Gulf. Iran is totally surrounded by the United States. And it is the United States Iran is preoccupied with, not Israel.
Netanyahu’s theatrical performance, and the recent letter by 47 GOP senators to Iran, are both part of a campaign to garner support for throwing more U.S. weight around in the Middle East – by people who have already destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, and created the vacuum that ISIS has stepped into. Now Iran is in their crosshairs. What country do they want to wreck next? Iran, apparently.
For the last 20 years Netanyahu has been whining that Iran is on the verge of destroying Israel. Each time he calls “wolf” he becomes that much less credible. Even Mossad, Israel’s security agency, calls his claims hogwash: Mossad reported recently that Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.” But by claiming an imminent existential threat, attention is deflected from the Likud’s reckless, racist policies and its illegal settlements. And, of course, Netanyahu’s address to Congress just so happened to occur during Israeli Prime Time right before an election.
But what’s in it for the Republicans and hawkish Democrats? Political cover. You might have thought the American public would have had enough war-mongering in the last two decades. But apparently not. One more questionable act of aggression wouldn’t be very popular. But by hiding behind “existential threats” to Israel and painting a defenseless David and an Iranian Goliath, the GOP and its neoconservative allies on both side of the aisle hope to galvanize support for future, reckless military actions.
Remember the Maine? Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction? Apparently no one remembers any of these bogus pretexts for war or the criminals who sold them. We keep on buying it. Again and again and again and again.
This was published in the Standard Times on March 18, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150318/opinion/150319473
Comments are closed.