The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
The Illusion of US Power in the Middle East
By Gareth Porter
October 11, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- With the collapse of the US-Russian
ceasefire agreement and the resumption and
escalation of the massive Russian bombing
campaign in Aleppo, the frustration of hawks
in Washington over the failure of the Obama
administration to use American military
power in Syria has risen to new heights.
But
the administration’s inability to do
anything about Russian military escalation
in Aleppo is the logical result of the role
the Obama administration has been playing in
Syria over the past five years.
The
problem is that the administration has
pursued policy objectives that it lacked the
means to achieve. When Obama called on
President Bashar al-Assad to step down in
September 2011, the administration believed,
incredibly, that he would do so of his own
accord. As former Hillary Clinton aide and
Pentagon official Derek Chollet reveals in
his new book, The Long Game,
“[E]arly in the crisis, most officials
believed Assad lacked the necessary cunning
and fortitude to stay in power.”
Administration policymakers began using the
phrase “managed transition” in regard to US
policy toward the government, according to
Chollet. The phrase reflected perfectly the
vaulting ambitions of policymakers who were
eager to participate in a regime change that
they saw as a big win for the United States
and Israel and a big loss for Iran.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be
out front pushing for a United Nations
Security Council resolution calling for a
“transition” in Syria.
But
US regional Sunni allies - Turkey, Qatar and
Saudi Arabia - would provide the arms to
Syrian fighters. The only US role in the war
would be a covert operation devised by then
CIA director David Petraeus to provide
intelligence and logistical assistance to
those allies, to get arms to the groups
chosen by the Sunni regimes that would pay
for them.
Of
course there were those, led by Clinton
herself, who wanted to go further and create
a “no-fly zone” where the insurgents could
be trained and operate freely. But Obama,
supported by the US military leadership,
would not support that invitation to war.
The US was going to play the great power
role in Syria without getting its hands
dirty with the arming of an opposition
force.
But
within a few months it was already clear
that the administration’s “managed
transition” had gone terribly wrong.
Al-Qaeda, firmly ensconced in Iraq, had
begun to show its hand in a series of
attacks in Damascus and elsewhere in Syria.
By August 2012, it was widely recognised
that the jihadists were rapidly taking over
the anti-Assad war.
Ed
Hussein of the Council on Foreign Relations
observed in the Christian Science Monitor
that Syria was becoming “a magnet for
jihadis globally,” just as Iraq had become
after the US invasion. The Defense
Intelligence Agency identified al-Qaeda, the
Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood as the
three major strains in the rapidly growing
anti-Assad war.
Within a few months it was already clear
that the administration’s “managed
transition” had gone terribly wrong.
Furthermore the administration knew that
Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were sending
weapons, including shoulder-launched
anti-tank RPGs not to secular groups but to
Islamic extremist groups in Syria, who were
bound to work with al-Qaeda and other
jihadists. Chollet, who was working on Syria
for Clinton’s policy planning office and
later moved to the Pentagon, recalls that
the administration was “concerned” that “the
wrong elements of the opposition – the
extremists, some affiliated with al-Qaeda,
were being strengthened".
'Skin in
the game'
One
might expect the administration then to call
a halt to the whole thing and clamp down on
its allies, especially Turkey, which was the
main entry point for arms pouring into
Syria. Instead, as Chollet recounts, Clinton
and the then CIA director, Leon Panetta,
were pushing for a major CIA programme to
create, train and arm a Syrian opposition
force – not because it would prove decisive
to the outcome but because it would give the
United States “leverage” with its Sunni
allies by acquiring “skin in the game”.
Obama rejected that argument about
“leverage” in 2012, but then reversed
himself in 2013 under the pressure of the
allegations of use of chemical weapons by
the government. Like so much of what passes
for justification of aggressive US military
and paramilitary activities around the
world, the argument made no sense. The
leverage the United States has with Turkey,
Qatar and Saudi Arabia is the range of
political-military and economic benefits
that each of them derives from a formal or
de facto alliance with the United States.
I
asked Chollet recently why the CIA’s ginning
up our own anti-Assad forces in Syria would
give the United States more “leverage” over
Sunni allies. His reply was: “Because then
the whole thing would collapse around us!”
But
of course the growing US “skin in the game”
didn’t give the administration leverage over
the Sunni allies’ policies in Syria; it did
exactly the opposite, making the US
complicit in the Sunni project of using the
jihadists and Salafists to maximise the
pressure for the overthrow of the Syrian
regime. Not a shred of evidence has ever
surfaced suggesting that the US has done
anything to pressure its allies to cut off
the channels of arms that were strengthening
the al-Qaeda-linked militant group, al-Nusra
Front.
As
a result, the Sunni arms-to-jihadists
strategy and the US support for “moderates”
were two parts of a broader
political-diplomatic strategy of pressure on
Assad to step down. As former US ambassador
Robert Ford observed in February 2015, “For
a long time” the administration had “looked
the other way” while the US-supported forces
were coordinating with Nusra Front.
Russian intervention
That strategy was upended when the Russians
intervened forcefully in September 2015.
Obama, who was firmly committed to avoiding
any direct conflict with Russia over Syria,
vetoed any threat to use force in Syria in
response to the Russian intervention. For
almost a year, Obama relied on cooperation
with the Russians as his primary
political-diplomatic strategy for managing
the conflict, producing two ceasefires that
ultimately failed.
The
fate of those two ceasefires has revealed
more fully the illusory nature of the great
power role the US has pretended to play this
past year. Kerry committed the United States
to two ceasefire agreements based on the
premise that the United States could
separate the armed groups that the CIA had
armed and trained from the Nusra Front-led
military command. The reality was that the
United States had no real power over those
groups because they were more heavily
dependent on their jihadist allies than on
the United States for their continued
viability.
But
underlying that failure is the larger
reality that the Obama administration has
allowed its policy in Syria to be determined
primarily by the ambitions of its Sunni
allies to overthrow Assad. The
administration has claimed that it never
favoured the destruction of Syrian
institutions, but that claim is contradicted
by its acquiescence in the Sunni allies’
support of Nusra Front.
US
complicity in the hundreds of thousands of
deaths in the Syrian war, and now in the
massive civilian casualties in the Russian
bombing of Aleppo, does not consist in its
refusal to go to war in Syria but in its
providing the political-diplomatic cover for
the buildup of the al-Nusra Front and its
larger interlocking system of military
commands.
A
US administration that played a true
superpower role would have told its allies
not to start a war in Syria by arming
jihadists, using the fundamentals of the
alliance as the leverage. But that would
have meant threatening to end the alliance
itself if necessary – something no US
administration is willing to do. Hence the
paradox of US power in the Middle East: in
order to play at the role of hegemon in the
region, with all those military bases, the
United States must allow itself to be
manipulated by its weaker allies.
- Gareth
Porter is an independent
investigative journalist and winner of the
2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is
the author of the newly published Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear
Scare. |
