[lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 16 05:27:09 PST 2009


shag carpet bomb wrote:


> Back in 2001, when I was reading a lot of neocon literature as part of
> my then job, I remember reading some lengthy for pol screed at PNAC.
> I've forgotten the author and too lazy to look. But what he wrote was
> something like: The reason why it's imperative that we have military
> bases in the Middle East is so that we can rid ourselves of dependence
> in Israel. Anathema to this author, was any type of dependence or
> alliance with _any_ nation. A sign of weakness! Bad.

I remember a few PNAC types arguing that if we got military bases in Iraq we wouldn't need to depend on Saudi Arabia anymore - not Israel. It's hard for me to picture them saying that about Israel. In their eyes Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocracy that we have an unhealthy dependence on. For one thing, the alliance occasionally forces us to make critical noises about Israel. Israel, on the other hand, is a glorious democracy with which we have an entirely natural and organic alliance. Plus, they sometimes argued that since ObL's big complaint was about US forces in holy Saudi Arabia, pulling out those forces would reduce terrorism or something. (Via appeasement!)


> Obviously, this is only one approach to an imperialist foreign policy,
> but why isn't this a view that expresses an imperial interest: the
> u.s. needs Israel as an ally in order to, as andie once put it long
> ago, to keep the u.s.'s finger on the carotid artery of the region.
> Get military bases in Iraq, no need to depend on Israel. p0wn Iraq,
> and therefore no dependency on Iraq -- cause the u.s. p0wns Iraq -- or
> so went their fantasy.
I don't totally understand what you're saying. I was saying there's no obvious imperial interest in supporting Israel the way America does. You seem to be saying, maybe it's in the imperial interest to eliminate our dependence on Israel. Okay, maybe, but that would tend to support what I was saying, no?


>
> in the quoted passage, above, you use a condition for "imperial
> interests" and that was "conventionally defined." What are
> unconventionally defined imperial interests?

I wrote that because I don't believe there is such a thing as a national or imperial "interest" in the way realists or Leninists tend to think about it. They tend to treat the interests as if they were objective, whereas I think they're subjective, or constructed.

SA



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