Tag Archives: #US

Together Iran and Israel are destroying Biden’s Middle East policy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 3, 2024

U.S. policy regarding the crises in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, is hanging by a thread. Reckless actions by America’s closest partner, Israel, and primary adversary, Iran, are demolishing Washington’s goal of containing the conflict to Gaza. Tehran and Israel are both driving the region towards a multi-front conflict and war of missiles that could draw in the US. This is precisely what US President Joe Biden has been striving to avoid.

Last year, soon after October 7, the Biden administration concluded that US interests could probably withstand anything arising, strictly from the Gaza war. But they feared getting dragged into a conflict that would pose untold risks.

Therefore, Mr. Biden developed a policy of conflict containment. The virtual carte blanche Washington gave Israel regarding Gaza was intended to help him restrain Israel, particularly in Lebanon.

For many months, it appeared to be working. Despite the emergence of flashpoints in Syria and Iraq, and Red Sea piracy by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Israel was focused on Gaza rather than Lebanon and fighting wasn’t spreading disastrously.

Ironically, the principal threat to this US imperative has come from Israel rather than Iran. In the week following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began pressing for a major offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject these demands and focus on Hamas. A similar scenario was repeated at least twice.

But Israel sought two imperatives that were unavailable in Gaza. Both Israel and Iran assessed that Tehran had pocketed strategic benefits at the expense of Israel, Hamas and, above all, the Palestinians. That equation couldn’t be altered in Gaza, which has no meaningful importance to Tehran, and especially since Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and an unreliable ally that broke with the “axis” completely over the Syrian war.

The Israeli state badly needed a “win” to recuperate national security institutions whose reputations were damaged by the breathtaking failures on October 7. Mr. Netanyahu needed an unequivocal “victory” to restore his own reputation in advance of any future investigation into those failures.

Neither goal was going to be absolutely achieved by fighting Hamas. Instead, taking the fight decisively to Hezbollah, the prototypical and most potent of Iran’s Arab militias, offered the potential for both. But until recent weeks, Israel was largely content with gradual escalation against Hezbollah that made Washington distinctly nervous but never threatened to force the regional war the US was seeking, at virtually all costs, to avoid, although there were obviously making such a disaster ever more plausible.

When Israel’s operation in Rafah marked the end of the primary war against Hamas and transformed the continued conflict in Gaza into an amorphous counter-insurgency rather than a conceptually-coherent campaign against clearly-identified targets, Israel’s attention began to shift back north.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah expressed genuine interest in a US-proposed compromise in which the Lebanese militia would agree to withdraw its fighters and heavy equipment seven or eight km north of the border. Israel was demanding at least 20km while Hezbollah was insisting on an elusive and implausible ceasefire in Gaza.

Instead, Israel steadily increased pressure against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria, while Mr Netanyahu rebuffed the intensified US efforts to achieve a four-week ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Hezbollah’s interworkings was the key to a series of devastating assassinations of much of that organisation’s key leadership while thousands of its operatives and associates were killed or debilitated by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing air campaign severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure and equipment, including its all-important rocket launchers. These assets are crucial to Iran, serving as the primary deterrent against any attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

The remarkably successful campaign culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his key deputies. But it was followed by precisely what Washington had, for a year, focused on preventing: an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

While it is being marketed as “limited” and “targeted,” – and therefore implicitly not supposed to be the beginning of a new, open-ended Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon as a “security buffer zone” – Washington understands from its own bitter experiences that such adventures are easy to launch but difficult to end or even contain.

After months of perceived passivity, Tehran finally intervened with a large-scale rocket and missile attack against civilian targets deep into Israel and the headquarters of its intelligence services. While the attack has been deemed unsuccessful by Washington, it’s unlikely that Israel will accept Mr. Biden‘s renewed calls for restraint any more than it has so many other such calls over the past few months.

The Israelis knows that the weeks before a presidential election are a time of maximum impunity from US pressure, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of this. Washington’s reticence was on full display when Mr. Biden bizarrely stated he “would not object” if Israel ended its invasion and eased its bombardment.

Israel seems unlikely to react with restraint. And the Biden administration is divided, with some senior figures privately encouraging Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran, while others increasingly fear that Mr. Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a military confrontation with Tehran and at last secure his long-sought goal of maneuvering Washington into intervening on Israel’s behalf and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US has the firepower to potentially set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a decade or more, while Israel probably doesn’t.

But Mr. Biden has little to work with. He’s clearly unwilling to exercise the kind of US leverage that could keep Israel in check. He must now hope that Iran and Hezbollah will seek an understanding with Israel to remove militia forces from the border area, even though Israel may no longer be in any mood to compromise.

If the Israelis persist, and Iran and Hezbollah won’t employ “strategic patience” and back down, the nightmare of a multi-front regional war that could force Washington’s hand in defence of Israel – particularly in the month before a crucial election – may become a reality. This is a profound threat to US interests and goals, and would constitute the complete meltdown of Mr. Biden’s entire approach to the crises started by Hamas a year ago.

The US Supreme Court’s reputation is tarnished not without reason

This op-ed was published by The National on June 19, 2024

For several years, I have been explaining in these pages that the Supreme Court is the most corrupt major US national institution. The religious extremism in the court’s majority has now been compounded by levels of self-dealing by Justice Clarence Thomas warranting an unprecedented Justice Department criminal investigation. The whole judicial branch of government is thus in utter crisis.

On the ideological side, Mr. Thomas recently ruled for the court that “bump stock” kits don’t convert semi-automatic weapons into machineguns, when that’s all that they are for. The court is in the process of scandalously legalizing the practically unregulated ownership of fully automatic assault rifles designed only to kill many people efficiently.

Mr. Thomas’s noted extremism is being outdone by Justice Samuel Alito.

First, it was revealed that an upside down US flag was flown at his home shortly after the January 6 insurgency. That shocking misuse of the flag was widely associated with the pro-Trump insurgents seeking to abolish US democracy.

This ought to be grounds for resignation. But Mr. Alito has blamed his wife, insisting “I am not fond of flying flags”, but she is.

Even if he’s telling the truth, he has certainly surpassed grounds for recusal on 2020 election-related cases. But he refuses to consider recusing himself, even though any reasonable person would have rational grounds to doubt his impartiality in such cases – which is the standard.

Unfortunately, unlike all other courts in the country, the Supreme Court is effectively immune from any ethics enforcement, and the extremist right-wing majority is taking heavy advantage of that to continue unheard-of ideological and financial shenanigans.

Mr Alito was audio taped by a journalist posing as a conservative supporter – a distasteful and arguably unethical tactic – enthusiastically agreeing that it was time for Americans to return to “godliness”, in civic life.

The US, however, is not a Christian or “godly” country but one that upholds the neutrality of government on religious beliefs. This is clearly illustrated by the US Constitution itself, in the notes on its composing convention by founding American statesman James Madison, and in some of the young republic’s earliest treaties – most notably the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, composed under George Washington and ratified under John Adams, the second US president.

The US Supreme Court’s current five-vote radical religious majority – all Catholic extremists – rejects this proud tradition, precisely as Mr. Alito confirmed to his unscrupulous interlocutor. The questionable tactics of a self-appointed investigator is of little national significance. But the stated radicalism, fully borne out by his other comments in the past and, especially, rulings coming from him and his four religiously extremist colleagues, is deeply alarming.

The attack on reproductive freedom, which appears poised to extend itself at the national level to sweeping restrictions, if not outright prohibitions, on contraception and in vitro fertilization (as in Alabama, whose Supreme Court Chief Justice invoked God’s will and religious dogma as his main argument in a recent ruling, pushing hard in that direction), is plainly based entirely on religious sentiments and not law.

The five Catholic extremists who stripped American women of this long-standing constitutional right were plainly motivated by their own personal spiritual convictions, which ought to have no place in constitutional jurisprudence. This is faith-based dogma, not constitutional law.

Mr. Thomas has even written that the court ought to revisit all privacy-based rulings from the past half-century that derived from the original reproductive rights ruling, Roe V Wade. This puts into question all manner of laws pertaining to LGBTQ Americans, in addition to a range of restrictions on government-enforced religious observance in schools and elsewhere, and even the invalidity of laws prohibiting interracial marriages (such as Mr. Thomas’s own).

Mr. Thomas has long cast a pall of financial misdeeds over the court with his history of unreported “gifts” from wealthy right-wing benefactors with broad-ranging stakes in any number of existing and potential cases. It has been recently revealed that over the past 20 years Mr. Thomas received at least 103 “gifts” valued at more than $2.4 million, mostly in the form of luxury vacations, loans that may or may not have been repaid, and other largesse.

That is not strictly speaking illegal, but failing to report such “gifts” is, since the public has a right to know about them. Mr. Thomas has accumulated a vast track record of “overlooking” to report as required huge amounts of money from very ideological wealthy right-wing activists. And, like Mr. Alito, Mr. Thomas has refused to recuse himself from 2020 election-related cases, even though his wife, the Republican activist Ginni, was a well-connected and ardent proponent of any number of schemes to prevent Mr. Biden from duly taking office despite his election victory.

Both men insist that they are not their wives, which is true, that they never discuss such matters with their wives, which is highly unconvincing, and that there is no basis for recusal. The opposite is true.

Both Mr. Alito and Mr. Thomas have no business ruling on any case even remotely related to the outcome of 2020 election by the standards that would be enforced on any other judge in the country. Mr. Thomas’s pattern of concealing almost $2.5 million in undisclosed gifts from wealthy benefactors is so extensive and prolonged it warrants a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. This is not a matter of a few oversights. It is a pattern of corruption and self-dealing that calls into question the integrity of the court and the judicial system.

Not since before the Second World War has the US been confronted with a highly aggressive and extremist court majority that’s badly out of step with the national viewpoint, and, even more disturbingly, at least one justice who may well have crossed the line into outright corrupt criminality.

Chief Justice John Roberts, a relatively moderate conservative who is said to be focused on the institutional health and legacy of the court he leads, has long since lost control of it and doesn’t seem to have been doing much to stanch the bleeding.

What was patently true years ago is now far more obvious: the Supreme Court appears to have emerged as simultaneously the most extreme and the most corrupt major national institution. For the US, that’s a historic disaster.