Trump Hurls the US Deeper into a Quagmire

The President as Netanyahu's catspaw

Making sense of the world becomes ever more difficult. A Pakistani delegation visits the White House and within a day, the Pakistan government announces it is nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, notwithstanding his support for Netanyahu’s allegedly genocidal bombing campaign against Gaza and continued land grabs in the West Bank. The very next day, Trump launches a new war, the US v Iran.

This latest addition to Western attacks on Middle East nations may be seen as further proof of the US as Netanyahu’s catspaw, as Asia Sentinel reported on June 14. Or it may be seen as part of a long tradition, dating back almost a century and a half of western attempts to present local rulers as villains and try to have them overthrown whether in the interests of oil companies, the Suez Canal or the carving out and expansion of a new state, Israel, populated mainly by immigrants from Europe.

In 1882, the British attacked Egypt with the aim of controlling the Suez Canal and extracting payment for the debts the Egyptian government had accumulated, partly the costs of building the canal.

Come the First World War, the British, in efforts to turn Arab kings and sheikhs against their Ottoman overlords, promised Arabs independence and the role in particular of the Hashemite rulers of the Hijaz. In a cynical effort to attract the support of European and American Jews for the war in Europe the British then promised to create in Palestine a “national home for the Jewish people” on the understanding that “nothing would be done which may prejudice the civil and religious right of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” – the 90 percent. Almost simultaneously, the British and French agreed a deal which would give the latter a free hand in Syria. The Hashemites were later rewarded with the kingdom of Iraq and Trans-Jordan but lost Hijaz to King Saud of Arabia.

The British took over Palestine and, by enabling large-scale immigration of Jews, promoted the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39 which saw several thousand Arabs killed, a few hundred Jews and British and also saw the cooperation of the Jewish militia Haganah with the British. However, later British attempts to limit Jewish immigration saw the radical group, Irgun and the Stern Gang take to the assassination of British officials such as Lord Moyne, a minister responsible for the Middle East in Cairo in 1944, These terrorist organizations included two future prime ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir.

In 1948, the UN voted to partition Palestine as favored by the Jewish minority, US influence just prevailing in a chamber then with few Asian or African members but many small Latin American ones. The well-organized Jewish forces won the ensuing war while the King of Transjordan seized the area of the West Bank, which remained in Arab hands.

Eight years later, Egypt’s President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, leading to a joint Israel-Britain-France invasion which briefly seized Sinai and the Canal before US pressure forced withdrawal – though leaving Israel with passage through the straits of Tiran.

But the US had meanwhile sown the seeds for conflict with Iran which had elected a moderate nationalist lawyer, Mohammad Mosaddeq, as prime minister. His policies included nationalizing the main oil producer, the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company (now British Petroleum). The CIA, with some British help, instigated a coup which overthrew and imprisoned Mosaddeq and many more, and so enabled Shah Reza Pahlavi to exercise executive power, which he proceeded to do with increasing ruthlessness for the next 26 years. His overthrow in 1979 by a coalition of Islamic, liberal middle class, and leftist groups was eventually to see the Islamists of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei emerge supreme.

Their position had been strengthened by the 1979 hostage crisis when a US military mission had failed in an attempt to secure the release of diplomats held hostage in the US embassy. The hold of the Islamists and their Revolutionary Guard was further strengthened by resistance to invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an invasion backed at times by US money, arms, and intelligence. This was not covert but openly discussed. Iraq’s eventual failure to make gains led to peace in 1988. But peace left Iraq with huge debts, including to neighboring Kuwait with whom it also had a border dispute.

This now brought the US into the 1990-91 war against its former friend. Quick victory in the first Gulf War saw President George H.W. Bush wisely walk away from attempting to decide Iraq’s future. Twelve years later, his son was to use a concocted story of weapons of Saddam possessing or planning weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq again. This was an even more brazen confection than the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 by which President Lyndon B. Johnson justified the use of US troops in Vietnam. Overthrowing Saddam was easy enough, but was followed by nearly a decade of internal conflicts which killed about 5,000 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqis.

But now the focus is back on Iran, although it has never stopped. Implacable US hostility has continued regardless of other events and, for instance, despite the fact that Iran never gave any support to the Taliban's long fight against US attempts to remake another Middle East country, its neighbor Afghanistan.

Trump’s first administration tore up a nuclear agreement with Iran signed by the US and other powers restricting Iran’s nuclear development out of what appeared to be a fit of pique that it had been cobbled together by his predecessor, Barack Obama. That nuclear development was initiated not by the Islamist government but by the Shah, who enjoyed cordial relations with Israel but considered Iran, as a major country and long civilization, to have as much right to nuclear capability as its neighbors.

Fast forward to today and Trump is following up on a war begun by Netanyahu as a so-far successful attempt to divert attention from the horrors he has inflicted on Gaza and keeping himself in power through endless conflict. For Israel, this is what it likes to think of as a pre-emptive war, but in practice is one of aggression at a time when it sees a convenient moment and the power balance is in its favor, thanks to its own nuclear weapons and seemingly limitless US support.

Thus, the war of 1967 was launched against Egypt allegedly over its announced (but never implemented) closure of the Tiran Strait. After conquering Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, under the unanimously agreed Security Council resolution 242, accepted by Israel and the relevant Arab states, it was required to withdraw from all territories. All had to accept others’ territorial integrity.

Israel returned Sinai, but held onto the Golan Heights and, after years of talking of a two-state solution for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the reality, thanks in part to US vetoes of any resolution critical of Israel, no progress has been made. The current Israeli government – and supported by the current US ambassador – has its eyes set on the whole West Bank.

Unanswered is how the Jewish state is to deal with the seven million Palestinians (a number roughly equal to Israel’s Jewish population) now more or less under its thumb, other than expulsion. Given the US track record in the region, Washington would probably support treating these people as it once did the Cherokees, Seminoles, and more. After all, God was on their side. Manifest Destiny and the Promised Land are too similar for comfort.