On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Naji Dahi wrote:
> > The idea that Israel is a strategic asset for the US does not hold
> > water either.
>
> > 1. Israel is supposed to be buffer against Arab radicalism, but where
> > is that radicalism???
>
> Tell me why the Bush admin wants to redraw the political map of the
> Middle East, replacing the governments of Iraq, Iran, Syria...?
Because they're nuts. They don't realize how good they have it, and how much worse they can make it.
I think we have to be clear that just because an empire has a purpose doesn't mean its following its interests. Vietnam, for example. Formosa, for another. The same goes for grand plans. Even when examined through the lens of the most cold-blooded realpolitik, lots of what we did during the cold war wasn't in our interest. (George Kennan himself says the doctrine of containment these guys model themselves on was nuts.) Empires all think they are putting put their interests first, but they also all make big mistakes. That's why they fall. And before that, get weaker.
IMHO, if the US coldly and clear-sightedly followed its interests in the Middle East, it would have used 9/11 as an opportunity to make up with both Iran and Iraq.
Secondly, the phantastic and hubristic goals of the current administration don't explain the support of Israel by Clinton and his predecessors, so they don't really answer Naji's puzzle.
I think Naji is broadly right. Strategically, the US doesn't need Israel. And in the more expansive version of his explanation, I think he is right about many of the elements that go into explaining why we nonetheless back them so devoutly, although I would weight them differently and add several more. (The domestic angle is actually kind of fascinating from a history of national culture point of view.) But quite aside from rhetorical rasp, I think the main problem here is that we're missing the key element that Seth highlighted: the weight of inertia. It is of course not a physical force, but rather shorthand for a network of social and political relations that vary from case to case. But it is an indispensable factor in analyzing why we have the alliances we do, and it greatly changes the scope and amount of what needs to be explained. Taiwan, for example, has never done us a scrap of good either, and has been just as unruly as Israel. If we want to understand why we give such huge amounts of support to the one, and contemplate WWIII in defense of the other, we have to go back and see how these alliances developed in history, a history they then outlived.
(At least in the case of Israel, there was some geopolitical logic at the bottom of Camp David, part of which still pertains. In the case of Taiwan, from the viewpoint of cold blooded interest, the whole commitment was madness from its very inception at the start of the Korean war.)
Similarly inertia is playing a huge role in our inability to correct our relations with Iran and Iraq. One reason the current administration is contemplating a huge and costly and circuituitous and very uncertain way of fixing them is because it is constitionally incapable of seeing the obvious and direct route. Which I think used to be one of the capsule definitions of madness.
Michael