Since the Second World War a cornerstone of American policy has been control of Middle East energy resources, the greatest geopolitical prize in the modern world. Control, not just access, was what was demanded by all US administrations, Republican and Democrat, because control of those resources gave the US control of any economic competitor.
And the principal threat to U.S. control has always come from what the US called "domestic radicalism" -- the dangerous idea amongst the peoples of the oil-producing regions that their natural wealth should be used for their benefit, rather than for that of the corporations and the economic elites to whom the US might assign it. And the chief form of "domestic radicalism" was Arab nationalism. To guard against it, the US constructed (and took over from Britain) a series of repressive Arab governments, the family dictatorships around the Persian Gulf, with Saudi Arabia at their head.
Since it launched a war and destroyed the center of Arab nationalism in 1967, Israel's job in America's "overall framework of order," in Kissinger's phrase, was to guarantee that those conservative Arab governments were protected from their most dangerous enemy -- their own populations. Israel was to be the final bulwark against the dangers that would be posed to US control if "domestic radicals" came to power in one of the oil-producing states.
For that reason (and not because of some imagined invincibility of the pro-Israel lobby), the US is willing to provide Israel with vastly more money and support than it gives to any other country in the world. To discourage the threat of progressive Arab nationalism, the US and Israel have on occasion been willing to fund even Islamicist movements (Hamas and the Mujahideen) that they saw as counters to it. Consistent US/Israeli policy has been largely successful in destroying secular Arab nationalism as it existed two generations ago -- and replacing it with religious fundamentalism.
Those on the American Right (and elsewhere) who think that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog have got it quite wrong: the dog is firmly in control. Israeli governments, whether Labor or Likud, do nothing without the approval of their American paymasters. Noam Chomsky offers three recent examples, beginning with the first Bush administration:
"--The Bush #1 case involved $10 million in loan guarantees, which Israel was using (illegally, but with US connivance) for settlement in the territories. The Shamir government was doing it in a brazen way that annoyed Baker-Bush. Bush suspended the guarantees, ... Israel returned to the preferred Labor-style hypocrisy ('thickening settlements,' 'natural growth,' etc.) and all was well.
"--In 2000, Israel's highly militarized high-tech economy was counting heavily on a huge sale of Phalcon air war technology to China. The US didn't like it. Barak said Israel would never back down. Clinton told them quietly, 'Sorry, no.' End of story.
"--Sharon's siege of Arafat in Ramallah was interfering with Bush administration efforts to garner support for the war on Iraq. The orders came quietly from Washington. Same [result]."
Israel's military usefulness to the US is not limited to the Middle East. In two of the worst examples -- campaigns in which the US government was hampered by political pressure at home -- Israel carried out the bidding of its patron. In the 1970s, at the request of the Carter administration, Israel transferred war-planes to Indonesia to aid in the suppression of the East Timorese, a massacre comparable to those in Cambodia. In the 1980s, Israeli military advisors aided the Reagan administration in genocidal campaigns in Guatemala (for which Clinton later apologized, with monstrous inadequacy).
Chomsky refers to Israel as "virtually an offshore US military establishment." An Israeli journalist recently described the country as "an army with a state, not state with an army," and that army is "almost an offshoot of the Pentagon," Chomsky adds. He points out, "Unfortunately for Israel, it's coming to resemble the US in other ways. It approximates the US in having the highest inequality in the industrial world, and its social welfare system, once impressive, is visibly declining. It may end up being almost a caricature of the worst features of American society. These are consequences of the choice of confrontation and dependency rather than peaceful integration into the region, fateful choices decades ago." It also makes the Israeli polity dependent on war: Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US, is quoted as saying recently to Israel's Military Radio (GALATZ), "The postponement of the war against Iraq is against the Israeli interests."
On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Michael Pollak wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3 2003, Chris Kromm wrote:
>
> > One doesn't have to search too hard to find out why the U.S. supports
> > Israel. Senator Jesse Helms, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman from
> > 1995 to 2001, put it succinctly in the Middle East Quarterly in 1995:
> > "Israel is at least the equivalent of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the
> > Middle East. Without Israel promoting its and America's common
> > interests, we would be badly off indeed."
>
> The only problem wiht that idea is that that isn't true. Remember
> Gulf War I? Remember what a big help Israel was? The only way it
> could help was not to do anything. We couldn't even use its bases.
> And that's even more telling in the build-up for Gulf War II, when
> we've really been short of countries with bases -- and still we can't
> use theirs. Saudi Ar
>
> If they can't do us any good at times like this, what military use are
> they? None. Saudia Arabia had based and troops in Gulf War I.
> Bahrain is doing big service now. Israel is militarily useless to us.
>
> It's remarkable how many people repeat that Helms idea as if it were
> true, though.
>
> Michael
>