BY JOHN CLARKE
The attack on Iran has added considerably to the scale on which a current of left opinion has gone over to the notion that Israel is the driving force when it comes to conflict in the Middle East and that the US is being led by the nose. This is a false picture but there is no question that there are elements of the present situation that it is able to draw on. There is actually a significant, though partial, misalignment between Israel’s objectives and those of US imperialism.
Going back to Obama’s Pivot to Asia, there is a desire on the part of the US to reduce the focus on the Middle East and place more emphasis on containing the rising power of China. Trump’s America First brand of imperialist strategy takes much the same view. Last November’s US National Security Strategy actually suggested (very prematurely) that the Middle East had become far more stable and that the US would need to deploy fewer resources to maintain that stability, while enjoying the profits that were generated for investors in the region.
The goals that Israel is pursuing, however, are anything but helpful when it comes to regional stability. Its colonial project of dispossession has now entered a phase of brutal and reckless endgame. Moreover, it wants to achieve the status of undisputed regional hegemony by systematically pulverising and destabilizing the surrounding countries. A series of broken and internally warring ‘failed states’ would be to Israel’s liking. We have seen that in the case of Syria and now in the assaults on Lebanon and Iran.
The US is also pursuing an agenda of regional domination but, unlike Israel, it places emphasis on stability and wants to be able to devote much less attention and resources to the Middle East, in order to contain the Chinese threat and focus on greatly a intensified control of its ‘backyard’ in Latin America. It wants accords and ‘normalization’ between Israel and the authoritarian client states it props up throughout the region. In the case of Iran, the US wants to crush its ability to pursue interests that run counter to its own interests just as much as Israel does but the present assault on the country was the result of a huge and incompetent miscalculation on the part of the Trump administration. The ‘Venezuelan option’ of taking out some leaders and obtaining compliance from the surviving representatives of the regime, has utterly failed.
This debacle will produce a whole number of major consequences and one of these must be that the distinct and partly contradictory objectives of Israel and the US will be thrown into sharper relief. The objectives of the secure domination of a stable and prosperous region, on the one hand, and a destabilized region, kept in line by a Zionist Sparta, can’t be reconciled and one must prevail at the expense of the other. Certainly, since the advent of the Gaza Genocide, Israel has been able to pursue its aims with no serious moves by its sponsors to limit it. It is also true that any US administration that curtailed support for Israel would face huge pressure from powerful domestic supporters of the Zionist project. Most importantly, Israel’s imperial sponsors are deeply committed to preserving their garrison state in the region and greatly fear what would result if it suffered a major defeat. Nonetheless, it is the US and not Israel that is the dominant global predatory power. Israel can only exist with the support that it receives from the US and its key allies.
When the dust clears from the attack on Iran, the folly of imagining that a knockout blow and regime change could be obtained in Iran at low cost will be resoundingly clear. The incompatibility between the agendas of managed stability and perpetual strife will have to be addressed. Should the fundamental interests of US imperialism and the objectives of its major armed investment in the region be lined against each other, there isn’t a lobbyist in the world who is influential and well-connected enough to ensure that Israel gets its way.