“You asked for miracles, I give you the F.B.I.” So said Hans Gruber, one of the greatest movie villains of all time, played to perfection by the late Alan Rickman. Gruber and his gang are thieves posing as terrorists and need to defeat an electromagnetic lock protecting hundreds of millions of dollars in securities. Although they are unable to do so themselves, Gruber tells his hacker, Theo, not to worry.
What does Gruber know that Theo does not? He knows the U.S. federal government and what local cop Al Johnson calls their “universal terrorist playbook.” The F.B.I. arrives on the scene of the supposed terrorist hostage situation and immediately orders a reluctant city employee to shut down power for ten square blocks of Los Angeles in order to cut off power to the target building. The worker complies and power to the building and the electromagnetic lock protecting the securities is cut off.
One can’t help but laugh as the criminals gleefully charge into the vault to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But it is no laughing matter that this is a perfect metaphor for U.S. foreign policy in general, and Middle Eastern policy in particular.
In the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden effectively said the same thing as Gruber. Knowing he could never invade or otherwise fight the United States in its own hemisphere, he said he intended instead to provoke the U.S. into invading the Middle East where it could be defeated in a war or attrition, just as he and his fellow Mujahideen had previously defeated the Soviets. That provocation came on September 11, 2001.
It is unclear if Bin Laden was actually involved in the attacks. But they were certainly carried out by likeminded people and Bin Laden had no problem with allowing Americans to assume he was the mastermind. The attacks did just what Bin Laden hoped they would do – get the U.S. to run the “universal terrorist playbook,” meaning going to war in the Middle East where its soldiers could be killed more easily, and its finances drained.
Twenty-three years later, the big, dumb U.S. empire hasn’t learned a thing. In those two decades, federal government debt has skyrocketed from less than $6 trillion to over $30 trillion. Interest on the debt alone is now over $1 trillion per year. And what have American taxpayers, present and future, received for this enormous expenditure? The Taliban has been replaced with the Taliban. Iraq now has a Shiite government that is allied closely with Iran – the same Iran whose “influence in the region” Washington constantly warns against. Libya now has the most vibrant slave trade in African history.
The real tragedy here is success or failure in any of these endeavors doesn’t affect the lives of people living in the United States one way or another. It’s just a giant rip off that funnels trillions to connected defense contractors while allowing lifelong bureaucrats in the Administrative and Deep States to continue in the delusion that they’re running the world when instead they’re running the U.S. into the ground.
“Big Johnson” from Die Hard exemplifies these would be masters of the universe perfectly. He displays the precise combination of unbridled arrogance and cluelessness as he condescends to the local rubes while being played like a fiddle by Gruber as do the Tony Blinkens and Victoria Nulands of real-world D.C. Every faction in the Middle East has played the empire for its own ends while the empire stumbles around the region like a drunk looking for a brawl. Both Israel and its regional enemies have done so, often simultaneously. So have Washington’s supposed Islamic allies. The empire sees itself as James Bond; in reality its more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Puppies and pretty girls beware.
Just as it was becoming impossible to deny the empire’s proxy war in Ukraine is lost, along comes another one.
How convenient.
Of course, we heard the usual pronouncements from U.S. politicians about their commitment to “our close ally Israel,” meaning their commitment to send billions of dollars to them, most of which will be spent with American defense contractors.
Anyone familiar with my writing over the past two decades can probably guess my position: no, not a penny. However, I also expressed my opposition to the empire dictating to Israel about how to respond. That’s the real reason for the foreign aid, besides enriching defense contractors. The empire buys compliance with its wishes.
For expressing these opinions, I was immediately called “antisemitic” on social media. If the source of this smear was the shrieking neocon harpy, Nikki Haley, or anyone of her ilk, I wouldn’t even bother to respond. But since some of this is coming from friends, both of the real world and social media variety, I thought I would write about this from a personal perspective.
I consider myself first and foremost an American. But like every American who ever lived, including “native Americans” [sic], my ancestors came from other countries. As you may have surmised from my surname, the ancestors on my father’s side came from Ireland.
So, how could an Irish American possibly understand having your country violently attacked by terrorists? Those of you with historical knowledge beyond three weeks ago are already chuckling. For the rest, Ireland was embroiled in a violent civil war for a large part of the 20th century. A religiously inspired, non-governmental paramilitary group launched frequent terrorist attacks on both government officials and civilians alike. They assassinated people. They kidnapped people. They bombed parades. You may remember a U2 song about one such incident. Good tune.
Peace was finally established in the 1990s, before I had formed much of a political philosophy. But were it still going on today, I would oppose any aid by the U.S. government to either side of the dispute and any U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of Ireland.
I suppose that makes me “anti-Celtic” to the terminally limbic currently parroting the empire’s “antisemitic” slur against me or anyone else who opposes U.S. involvement in the current conflict in Israel.
Let me say for the record that I do not hate my fellow Irishmen. That does not follow from my mere opposition to taxing Americans to subsidize them. Nor does my criticism of the Irish government’s abysmal Covid policies translate to hatred for the Irish people. One would think this goes without saying. Apparently, it doesn’t.
I can imagine there are some who consider my analogy a poor one. After all, Ireland is a “western” country of “white people” and can’t compare to what the Israelis are facing in the Middle East. While I don’t share that view, I will respond to it.
Perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but my mother’s ancestors came from Lebanon. Specifically, they were part of the Maronite Christian majority of that country before large influxes of Palestinian Muslims in 1948 and 1967. Some of my mother’s ancestors had already come to America to escape Ottoman rule before WWI. Her own parents came in the late 1920s after a financial crisis cleaned out my industrialist grandfather. But many are still there.
Beirut was once called, “The Paris of the Middle East.” It was a breathtakingly beautiful city in a country with a 5,000-year history of advanced civilization. It was all but destroyed by the same people the Israelis are fighting today.
I have relatives who were killed or displaced during the bloody civil war that raged in Lebanon 1975-90. Violence continues in Lebanon to this day thanks to the presence of Islamic paramilitary groups like Hezbollah (which is also a political party). It is not an exaggeration to say that Lebanon’s and Israel’s problems are virtually identical.
Still, I disapprove of the previous U.S. interventions in Lebanon and would oppose any new subsidies or interventions there in the future, even if ostensibly to rid Lebanon of the violent fanatics who have destroyed it. This doesn’t mean I hate my fellow Lebanese any more than I hate the Irish or the Jews, for that matter. It’s simply a political position. And it’s the right one, for several reasons.
First, I am in a political relationship (whether I like it or not) with 330 million or so other Americans, most of whom do not have familial relationships with people in Ireland or Lebanon. Said political relationship does not give me the right to force them to defend the countries of my ancestors any more than it gives them the right to do likewise to me.
I would consider it especially bad behavior on my part to try to shame other Americans into involving themselves in the affairs of other countries because I happen to have relatives there. And it would be foolhardy of them to allow me to do so.
Second, we already have quite a bit of data on the results of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and those data are not difficult to interpret. Every intervention has been an unmitigated disaster, without exception yielding results precisely opposite of the stated goals. Every. Single. One. And in return for this long train of debacles, American taxpayers have received nothing but $30 trillion in debt and an economy disproportionately skewed towards producing weapons of war that add nothing to their quality of life.
There is no reason to believe it’s going to be any different this time.
Lastly, for those naïve enough to believe the U.S. government’s involvement in this affair is humanitarian or based on any sympathy for the Jewish people, it isn’t. This is pure imperial politics, nothing more. The empire wishes to maintain its hegemony and this conflict will help it do that. It never stopped fighting the Cold War against Russia, despite the fall of the USSR.
Operating under the “Whoever controls Eurasia controls the world” thesis, the empire has done everything it can to keep Russia from establishing economic relationships with Europe or the Middle East. Thus the “humanitarian” regime-change operations in Syria and Ukraine throughout this century, in countries which “coincidentally” are home to Russia’s only warm water ports on this side of the world.
This is also the reason for the disproportionate hatred of Iran. Were Iran and Syria to form a “Shiite corridor” in the Middle East, Russia would have an opportunity to exert enormous influence in the region. That the Iraq War made this corridor far more possible by handing Iraq to the Iran-friendly Shiites is proof that the empire can be both evil and stupid at the same time.
Were Russia still supplying Europe with most of its energy through the Nordstream pipelines, the empire’s control over Eurasia would be seriously threatened.
So, the empire badgered the Russians into invading Ukraine and now has a proxy war in the Middle East to, at the very least, keep that region in a state of chaos, making it difficult for Russia (or China) to strengthen relationships there.
It’s also an opportunity for another large scale rip off of the American taxpayer. Notice that the media are already preparing the American public that this will be a “long war” that will require America’s full support. Translation: we’re about to lose Ukraine as a funding vehicle and we’re going to pivot back to the Middle East.
The empire will send billions to Israel because it wants Israel to respond to the Hamas attack in a way that will benefit the empire, not the Israeli or American people.
This not a binary choice between U.S. support or the destruction of Israel as a nation. Israel is a rich country with a modern military, including over 200 nuclear warheads. It could crush the Palestinians in Gaza in a single day and is capable of defeating every hostile nation in the region.
The empire doesn’t want that. It wants its “long war,” meaning years of funding, with complicated rules of engagement for the Israelis so that everyone can tell themselves the lie that they are not killing civilians. Meanwhile the empire can go on sucking the lifeblood out of both Israeli and American taxpayers for the benefit of its corporate partners.
One might be tempted to think it is at least a good thing that the empire restrains Israel. After all, no one wants to see the whole region turned to glass, no matter how heinous the attacks on Israel may have been.
Neither does Israel. When the war is over and the enemy defeated, Israel still has to go on existing in the region. It does them no good to create a desert around their country. Absent U.S. involvement, Israel would have to tailor its response to its consequences. It must do enough to eliminate the threat, if possible, while not going so far as to alienate the rest of the region.
Contrary to neocon talking points, Israel is not “surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction.” Egypt tried to warn Israel about the Hamas attack. Its government has no more love for the Palestinians than Israel does. Much progress has been made between Israel and its Muslim neighbors in the past decade. It is not in Israel’s nor its neighbors’ interests to return to 1967.
It is not in American taxpayers’ interest to be involved in this conflict. Americans are constantly told Israel is a “key ally” but are never told how they benefit from this alliance. They don’t. The empire benefits. And like every other empire in human history, its interests run contrary to those of its citizens.
Like Great Britain before it, America became the richest country in the world with a limited government and a free market economy. Also like Great Britain, it is bankrupting itself trying to maintain a global empire. Adding a proxy war in Israel to the debacle in Ukraine might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (no pun intended).
