Informative interview with Alastair Crooke. He does this every Monday with Judge Napolitano.
WOW! Someone ought to download and publish it everywhere.
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and other Related Conflicts in the Middle East (read the rules in the first post)
- Thread starter phrozenflame
- Start date
You misunderstood my argument.
The Arab ruling class - like all ruling class - care only about remaining part of the ruling class. Engaging in overt conflict with Israel is a strategy with extremely limited payoff and extreme personal risk. Dominance of power hierarchy is a (mathematical) game of limiting exposure to own risk and expanding it for your rivals. It's a game of ruthless survival, not ruthless conquest. The winners who used conquest strategy are by far statistical outliers, not the norm.
Even successfully erasing Israel from the map is no guarantee of Caliphate - which would be the only payoff worth the risk. Why take extreme risks when extreme payoff already flows from under the sands? Or alternatively it doesn't, and Israel has none of its own to justify the expense of war.
US can use Israel to put interal pressure on the Arab elites. The nastier Israel is, the angrier the people are at their elites, and the less secure the elites feel at home because nobody wants to be the scapegoat in the game of avoiding risk.
Furthermore the anti-Israeli attitudes of the population are neither constructive nor genuine. The anti-Israeli sentiment in the Arab world is primarily driven by religious outrage against perceived Jewish encroachment on Islam's holy sites. The personal plight of Palestinians is of little importance because the entire Middle East is filled with such plight - either of Arabs living in states consumed by conflict (Iraq, Syria, Yemen etc) or of thousands of de facto slaves (often other Muslims) brought to the Gulf states to work risky or menial jobs (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait). The national cause of Palestinians is almost entirely ignored because it doesn't fit into the worldview of Arab societies. The only state actor interested in Palestine as a nationalist project was Egypt under Nasser but only as part of its broader vision for Pan-Arab nationalism with Palestine as one of its constituent republics. Syria and Jordan only wanted land securing access to water. Other Arab states needed an external enemy to maintain authoritarian rule.
A significant portion of anti-Israeli sentiment in ME is based on religions or ethnic hatred that uses Zionism as a convenient excuse. In psychological terms it disproportionately attracts sociopaths and narcissists - very much like Zionism itself does. That is also a characteristic trait of polarisation dynamics. The only meaningful difference is between those on polarised extremes and those trapped in the middle, and not between the polar extremes themselves.
Palestine is also a distant cause to overwhelming majority of Islamic Arab states. Egypt, Jordan and Syria are the only adjacent societies - within 100-200km range. and their attitude to Palestinians is mixed. The distance from West Bank to Baghdad or Medina is closer to 1000km which is comparable to the distance from Poland's border to Donbas or Crimea. If you can tell the difference to the attitudes of Poles toward conflict in Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 then it reflects the mental proximity of the conflict. 2014 was "over there". 2022 was "over here". Palestine is popular "over there" and unpopular "over here". It's convenient justification to virtue signal or express anger. It's not a meaningful or important cause for the majority in each state.
Once you understand that, and the tremendous hypocrisy of Arabs and Muslims toward Palestine you will understand better why Israel was able to keep doing what they've been doing for so long. It's not US support. It's Arab betrayal. In 1973 Gulf states only cared about Palestine to justify higher oil prices.
There is a very concrete reason - the pathological nature of the regime in Iran.
Khomeini was a psychopath as well a narcissistic megalomaniac and he established a political structure on internal and external conflict which reflected is distorted worldview and egotistical idiosyncrasies. Consequently Iranian regime will collapse without an external threat. It is only made worse by the fact that Islamic Republic was superimposed over an imperial monarchy that was already torn apart by multiple problems. Iranian theocracy is not flawed because it's a religious regime. It's flawed because it's a revolutionary one. Islamic Iran's situation is the analogue of Soviet Union replacing Imperial Russia and collapsing as soon as the aggressive authoritarian structure was relaxed.
Or to use a more culturally relevant analogy - Islamic Iran is not the Muhammad's Caliphate or the Rashidun Caliphate - it is the Umayyad Caliphate. If you know the history you know why it fell and how.
Khomeini was not a genius. He was insane.
Israel lobby formed in the 1990s, not the 1980s. On the other hand the 1980s foreign policy was informed by the first generation of neoconservatives who should not be confused with the "Israel lobby". While many of their positions seem similar to casual observers they are not the same. Neoconservatives are Democrats who supported the American imperial project and saw better hopes for it within the Republican party after Democrats began turning leftward in the 1970s. That's when the pro-war/anti-war shift in US politics occurs. It's also the transition period between the fifth (New Deal Era) and sixth (Neoliberal Era) party system in US politics.
Neoconservatives used Israel as an excuse to push their agenda but if you pay attention to dates you will see that during neoconservative administrations Israel did not expand significantly and even retreated from Gaza. Israel gained more while Democrats held the WH and Senate in the 1990s - it prevented the formation of Palestinian state under Oslo accords.
Israel lobby has the position that it does due to the progressing internal corruption and structural decay of American political system. It's an inverted pyramid of inert decay and extreme stimulus. As American politics becomes polarised and ineffective only the most extreme stimulus can trigger a reaction. That stimulus is Israel being governed by increasingly radical right-wing coalitions which are consequence of similarly increasingly polarised and ineffective Israeli political system.
The lobby seems all-powerful because it's one of the few things that are coherent across party lines in the current decaying chaotic state of US politics. It is the only structure that seems to act and have results regardless of party position. It's a busy fly on top of a dying elephant. The elephant no longer has the strength to do anything and you think it's the fly's doing.
The fact rockets from Gaza still fire at Tel Aviv after a whole year of ground fighting shows how much of a spectacular failure the ground operation has been. They haven’t been able to defeat Hamas and they still are delusional to fight Hezbollah in south Lebanon and fighting Iran all at once. Israel is really stretching itself thin hoping the US saves them.
It seems IDF ground force is as incompetent as Mossad is brilliantly effective, what a strange combo. As underhanded Mossad's MO is they are really the MVP on Israel side.
However assassinating their enemies leader does not seems to translate to battlefield advantages, Hezbollah still maintain unit cohesion despite the lost of their leader and they're mauling the Israelli hard. As far as defensive operation is concerned each units can more or less operate independent from central command.
The only thing that is accomplished by killing their leaders is having no one to negotiate, that is, these organizations have learned to operate headless. They already have their supply chains and strategic goals established like DNA in the organization.
I expect to be disappointed and then horrified, but I am still hoping that Israel doesn't launch some sort of strike that causes a global conflict over Israel and Iran.
That’s how I feel. The economic and global implications is massive. I live in the US and if gas is $12 a gallon there will be blood in the street. I don’t want economic collapse to happen. And Israel is an irrational nuclear power that if they perceive they are losing or the US is losing will go nuclear. They don’t abide by global norms. Basically Nazi Germnay with nukes. It’s insane that the US government is allowing Israel to go along with this. Previous administrations would have had it a stop to this crisis back in December and January. Yet here we are one year latter on the cusp of a conflagration all over fucking Israel. Because Netanyahu doesn’t want to go to jail. Historians are going to have a field day about this. My only hope is enough regional nations tell Israel hell no they can’t use their airspace to bomb Iran which would discourage them from doing it. However it’s a fleeting hope. This war has only escalated in every level the last 12 months.
Yup, my biggest fears is the crazies in charge of Israel using nuclear weapons against Iran in the event of a massive Iranian missile strike.