First Putin. Now We're Netanyahu's Bitch.
Israel needs the US if it's to realize its dream of mopping up Iran. For Trump, though, is just another ploy to distract the media away from his failings.
With few exceptions, major military conflicts are distractions weak leaders engage in to bolster their popularity.
We saw this in the 1980s when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher started a 10-week war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands and the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands.
It was so “successful,” our own president at the time, Ronald Reagan, decided to try to boost his own flagging poll numbers the following year with an invasion of the small Caribbean island nation of Grenada.
Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush’s approval rating spiked after American-led forces drove Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait. (It’s interesting to note that we had been previously allied with Iraq and supplied its then-leader Saddam Hussein with weapons he was using in his war against Iran — which we were also arming at the same time. See the history of the Iran-Contra scandal.)
To his biographer, Bush’s son, George W. Bush, criticized his father’s decision not to occupy Iraq, admitting in 1999 — before running for president:
One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade — if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.
As president, Bush rode the wave of post-9/11 nationalism into an illegal war on Iraq, a country that never attacked us and posed no threat to American security. All those “weapons of mass destruction” Saddam Hussein had been supposedly stockpiling never materialized, and then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, made billions in no-bid military contracts.
They were re-elected in 2004 with the aforementioned “capital” they tried — and failed--spending on privatizing Social Security.
So…are we ready to go to war again?
Before you respond, you must know this wouldn't be a war to defend ourselves from an existential threat to our way of life and security.
It wouldn’t be a war against a country that attacked us.
It would be waged under the same dubious circumstance in which we fought in Iraq.
It would be because two failing administrations needed something to take the focus off their criminality.
The United States could very well be on the verge of serving as the militarily unprepared Israel’s proxy in bombing Iran, and it would all be because corrupt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and our incompetent convicted felon need to get the heat off their failing policies.
It’s bad enough Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is feeding marching orders to the former slumlord host of Celebrity Apprentice lest something potentially compromising and embarrassing accidentally get out. Now it seems the adjudicated sexual assaulter is ready to assume responsibility for Netanyahu’s latest foreign policy blunder.
Will it work this time?
It’s never failed before, but has the illegitimate Pennsylvania Avenue squatter so tarnished his brand we’re on to the con?
HuffPost correspondent Akbar Shahid Ahmed explained on Democracy Now! this week:
Donald Trump, while saying that he was a “peace through strength,” antiwar president, we haven’t seen him solve any of the wars that he said he would address — Ukraine, Gaza. In fact, now there’s a new war unfolding on his watch. And he hasn’t brought back any of these military deployments.
What this tells us, really, is that because he’s, A, kind of crippled the federal government, he’s undermined the State Department, there’s chaos at the top ranks of the Pentagon, there isn’t even capacity in the Trump administration to deescalate at this point; and, B, Trump didn’t really have a clear strategic doctrine, right? For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the goal of an attack on Iran, and, frankly, a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, that’s been a long-standing goal. He’s wanted that for decades. Netanyahu, through the Biden administration, before Trump entered office, was able to amass more and more American support. And I think he looked at this and said, “This is my moment. Trump can’t stop me. I’ve had a clear goal.”
Furthermore, as Contrarian writers Jennifer Rubin and Wendy Sherman ask:
Trump has made it very clear that he has no real plan of action regarding the conflict between Israel and Iran. He’s claimed that no one knows what he’s going to do, but does anyone really think he knows what he’s going to do?
If Netanyahu’s long-standing goal is to work, he needs the United States because he does not have a “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” (“MOP”)—a “bunker-busting” 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy weapons of mass destruction buried in mountains or deep below ground—of his own. It’s the only way to eradicate Iran’s subterranean nuclear complex, and only a B-2 bomber can transport it. Only we have it. Israel doesn’t.
So naturally, Israel would be thrilled if the US took up its cause.
Interestingly, this comes one week after the pathetic North Korean-esque military parade that nationwide “No Kings” protests overshadowed. The orange child playing president didn’t get the media reception he intended, but by playing this “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” game, he is now for sure. Got to give him credit, one thing he’s good at is this cat-and-mouse bait and switch he engages in every time he promises to make a decision about something “in two weeks”.
Is he going to follow in predecessors’ “little war” strategy to save face?
Nothing would make Netanyahu happier.
And where is Iran’s ally Russia in all this? Daddy Vladdy is being uncharacteristically silent. According to a recent analysis in the New York Times:
Mr. Putin…doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons and also wants to keep improving relations with President Trump, who has called on Iran to make a deal on its nuclear program to end the attacks. Russia is also benefiting from a spike in oil prices since the attack began. Analysts say Mr. Putin is unlikely to become involved militarily in the conflict or to arm Tehran too aggressively. In part, this caution arises from fear of alienating the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, two increasingly important partners for Moscow that wouldn’t welcome a more powerful Iran. But it’s also because his forces are already tied down in Ukraine.
According to John Erath, senior policy director for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the attention-starved pretend US president is supposedly waiting “two weeks” to make a decision to bomb or not upon a request from Moscow since nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran gave Iran time to experiment with nuclear technology. Russia, for example, built the Bushehr nuclear power plant in 2007 and has plans to build eight more.
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin announced an agreement with Israel to protect 200 scientists working at Bushehr on behalf of Rosatom, Russia's state energy company.
Will we or won’t we?
Since Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO), it’s unlikely he will make the most egregious foreign policy blunder in recent decades.
I guess we’ll know “in two weeks”.