Patrick Lawrence: “Israel does ‘the wet work.’”
The notion of a distant ally serving as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” seems to be nearly as old as aircraft carriers. It means a usefully located landmass, typically but not always an island, that cannot be scuttled and can serve as a forward base for the projection of force. Over the decades, various hegemonic powers have been especially fond of the term. British and American war planners used Midway and Malta as aircraft carriers of this kind during World War II. After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Cold Warriors in Washington thought Taiwan might serve in the same way.
Closer to our time, Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan’s nationalist premier during the Reagan years, famously pledged to make his country America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific.” This was in 1983, just as President Reagan was intently re-escalating tensions with the Soviet Union after a period of détente. Reagan and his national-security people—neoconservatives very prominent among them—were especially fond of aircraft carriers made of land. While serving as Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig called Israel “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk.”
There is a useful lesson in this history. Haig, a four-star general who had also served as chief of staff in the Nixon White House, understood: The Zionist state exercises extraordinary influence in Washington by way of what we call the Israel lobby: There can be no underestimating this. But Israel is at bottom an instrument of American power, just as Japan has been since its 1945 defeat: It is peripheral, not metropolitan—the machine, not the operator.
There has been a running debate on this topic in the year that has passed since the events of 7 October 2023. The Biden regime’s limitless supply of lethal weapons to terrorist Israel’s military as it prosecutes its genocidal campaign against Palestinians has revived an argument that Israel, rather than serving as a client state in West Asia, in fact dictates U.S. policy in the region. Given Donald Trump’s professed loyalty to the Zionist cause, his election victory on 5 November is likely to prolong this discussion. But as I have commented elsewhere, appearances once again deceive. The thought that “the Jewish state” tells America what to do is no more true or even plausible in Israel’s case than it is in Japan’s.
There are a lot of dazed liberals among us since Trump trounced Kamala Harris at the polls. In strictly political terms, the sky has fallen for the Democrats now that their insulting joy-and-vibes story has failed to carry the most incompetent presidential candidate in my memory to the White House. But I am with Larry Fink, oddly enough, on one point. “I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime,” the chief executive at BlackRock told a conference of money-center executives shortly before the vote. “The reality is over time it doesn’t matter.”
Fink had in mind financial regulation, capital gains exemptions, corporate taxation rates, and other such matters, surely. Here I transplant his remark to another sphere. Neoconservatives—the hawks, unilateralists, and interventionists who rose to prominence in Washington onward from the late 1960s—ran the Biden regime’s national-security policies, and they would have run a Harris White House had any such thing come to be. Given the prominence of Zionists in the neocon cliques, nowhere has their influence been more evident than Washington’s policies toward Israel and West Asia altogether. And they are not going anywhere now.
Over the weekend, Trump let it be known via his Truth Social media site that neither Nikki Haley nor Mike Pompeo, two dedicated neocons who served during his first administration, will serve in his second. Let us not allow delusions to tempt us. As Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute reported in Consortium News a couple of weeks before the elections, all signs suggest neoconservatives will again figure prominently when Trump returns to the White House.
Neoconservatives, it is well to remind ourselves, are not in the habit of letting America’s clients dictate to them. They are in the habit of imposing American dominance on others irrespective of all legalities or norms or notions of common decency. And their givenness to letting proxies on the ground do the wet work, as the phrase goes in intelligence circles, is well documented. One need look no further than the Biden regime’s shameful encouragement of the Israelis’ terror campaign in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, for a case in point.
What will the Biden regime, neoconservative to the core, leave behind in West Asia when it passes into history come 20 January? Let us review the recent record. It is from this that Trump’s people, whoever they turn out to be, will pick up when Biden’s people go home.
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For the past year, and far longer if you want to extend the frame, Israel has displayed to the world a daring indifference to international law and any idea of humane norms as it continues to escalate its barbarities. The most recent of its numerous assassinations —of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s Politburo; Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, and just lately Yahyah Sinwar, Hamas’s military commander—prompted many calls for Israel to step back, to de-escalate, to move toward settlement accords with the Palestinians and the Lebanese. The Zionist regime has done exactly the opposite. In apparent defiance of its Western sponsors, Israel has now begun to prosecute, well beyond Gaza, what Prime Minister Netanyahu calls, honestly enough in this case, Israel’s “seven-front war.” Please note my “apparent.” I will return to the matter of appearances and underlying realities.
It is difficult to say when this new phase of Israeli terrorism began, although the assassinations just noted can be read now as harbingers of what we now witness. In late August the Israel Defense Forces began a series of new assaults in the West Bank that suggests its intent—over time, with less air power and ostentation—is to duplicate there what it has done in Gaza. On 1 October the I.D.F. launched its ground-and-air invasion of Lebanon. This has since extended to bombing sorties as far north as Beirut.
After the murder of Yahyah Sinwar 16 October, the Biden White House urged Netanyahu, conspicuously as ever, to declare the I.D.F.’s savagery in Gaza a success. “Take the win!” was Biden’s advice as quoted in corporate media. If this is not a seal of approval rendered sideways, I would have to hear an interpretation otherwise. The brutalities against Palestinians struggling to survive in the Strip have but worsened. Shaaban al–Dalou, a malnourished 19–year old, was burned alive while on an intravenous drip the day before Sinwar’s assassination. And in death he, al–Dalou, now bears a message worldwide: As Jonathan Cook put it in what remains to me the best commentary I have read on the crisis that began a year ago 7 October, “The humanitarian catastrophe Israel has engineered in Gaza has no precedent in the modern era.”
The world has wondered for years whether the Israelis will attack Iran, which the Zionist regime has long considered its archenemy in the region. It took Israel 25 days to retaliate after the Islamic Republic’s 1 October missile attack on Israel in response to Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination. It was, once again, a carefully calibrated operation. The I.D.F., we must note, did exactly what the Biden White House asked when it, the I.D.F., avoided hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities and its extensive oil-production infrastructure.
But if Tel Aviv and Tehran remain in tit-for-tat territory, the prospect of a decisive Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic is still closer to a “when” than an “if.” And I would say the odds are likely to worsen as Trump reoccupies the White House. Any such aggression against Iran, especially if Trump blesses it, would bear implications so extensive as instantly to transform the regional war Israel is obviously intent on waging into a global conflict.
Again to be noted: As Israel contemplated its reply to Iran’s retaliation of 1 October, Biden’s national-security people made their approval implicitly but very clear, notably by sending the I.D.F. an advanced missile-defense system and the technicians needed to operate it. This, to lend specificity to the above-noted point, is the kind of thing Biden’s neocons will leave to Trump’s.
The Biden regime has for months, and always quite publicly, urged the Israelis to moderate their conduct, to seek negotiations, to avoid civilian casualties, to avoid open conflict with Hezbollah, not to invade Lebanon, and so on. It has shed what we Americans call “crocodile tears” when media report the deaths of children. Not long into the I.D.F.’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Lebanon, a U.S. envoy, in Beirut for talks, stated that the front the Israelis had opened had “escalated out of control.” Amos Hochstein serves the Biden White House as a special emissary in West Asia; preposterously enough, he is Israeli-born, an I.D.F. veteran, and holds dual Israeli and American citizenship.
We should brush quickly past a superficial reading of Hochstein’s remark to find its deeper meaning. It was not at all a protest, the exclamatory complaint of an observer who is critical of Israel for igniting and expanding a dangerous conflict. It was the assertion of a figure, not trained as a diplomat but serving as one, to the effect that, as this conflict proceeds, the power he serves proposes not to stop it but to manage it carefully to achieve the desired result.
Just before Hochstein flew to Beirut to meet senior Lebanese officials—this was 21 October—Axios, a digital publication in the U.S., reported on a plan for a settlement with Lebanon, and by extension the international community, that the Israelis had submitted to the Biden regime the previous week. Among its demands, Axios reported, two are of the highest significance. One, the I.D.F. would remain on the ground in southern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah permanently. The document terms this “active enforcement.” Two, the Israeli Air Force would operate freely in Lebanese airspace.
The Israelis have named this document Plan 1701, which puts it in the needed context. The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1701 in August 2006, wherein the U.N.S.C. authorized the Lebanese army and Blue Helmuts personnel, called the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, to enforce a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “We are talking about 1701 with increased enforcement,” an Israeli official told Axios.
Among the infinite number of preposterous statements the Israelis impose upon the world, this ranks high among them. Plan 1701 is nothing less than a frontal attack on the U.N.’s authority and, in the bargain, Lebanese sovereignty. Alert readers will note that the I.D.F. had by this time been attacking UNIFIL forces and facilities on the ground in southern Lebanon for some days. Let us not feign surprise. As Netanyahu made clear during his extravagantly offensive speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September—“a swamp of anti–Semitic bile” was among his choicer insults—Israel’s hatred of the U.N. and all it stands for, international law above all, is visceral, without limit, and by all appearances incurable.
And let us remind ourselves that Washington’s neoconservatives share Netanyahu’s contempt. Remember when the Bush II regime named John Bolton U.S. ambassador to the U.N.—a pointedly offensive appointment? The new envoy declared shortly after arriving that the top ten floors of the Secretariat in New York could be removed and it would make no difference. Bolton is a lot like Trump, even if the two of them would vigorously object to the comparison: They both say the quiet part aloud, as we now put it.
While the Biden regime has said nothing publicly in response to Plan 1701, the timing of the Hochstein visit to Beirut is notable in this connection. Axios reported that Hochstein’s purpose was to “discuss the Israeli demands” with Najib Mikati, Lebanon’s acting premier, and other senior officials. We have had no further word of the U.S. position, although there have been hints here and there in the press that some version of Plan 1701 is now on the table. If this is so, and even if negotiations produce modifications to the plan, it will make the U.S. complicit as Israel sets about destroying Lebanese sovereignty, the U.N.’s authority, and the legitimacy of international law.
A caveat here. Axios was founded eight years ago by professional journalists who came out of mainstream media, and it has since earned a very mixed reputation. The “journalist” who wrote the Plan 1701 piece, Barack David, requires the quotation marks: David is an Israeli who has previously served in the I.D.F. and in Unit 8200, a very powerful Israeli intelligence agency. David’s current associations with both are not clear. But he has proven, while at Axios, to be a reliable apologist for even the worst of Zionist Israel’s brutalities. It is possible, if not likely, that David’s piece on Plan 1701 was intended as Israeli promotional material. Alan MacLeod, an excellent investigative journalist at MintPress News, brought David’s identity to light in a very well-reported piece published a few weeks back.
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The headline atop The New York Times’s report on the Hochstein talks in Beirut was “U.S. Tries to End War in Lebanon That Biden Envoy Calls ‘Out of Control.’” This is nothing close to accurate, as I have suggested. It is merely an example of how mainstream American media, The Times well in the lead, dedicate themselves to obscuring Washington’s true view of the crisis that now spreads through West Asia and its true relations with its unsinkable carrier in the region.
Official Washington, the media that serve it, and the research institutes that do a great deal of its thinking will continue to show us the perspiration that breaks out on their brows as the Israelis proceed with their savage war against its neighbors. The reality is very different and not at all difficult to explain: It may look as if Israel acts in defiance of Washington’s wishes—just as it is supposed to look—but this is calculated appearance. There is no such defiance, in my interpretation. The Zionist regime is simply doing the wet work in behalf of U.S. policy across West Asia. Israel’s indifference to international law and humanity’s accepted norms is a local reflection of America’s.
Context and some history are necessary to an understanding of this reality. We find both as we consider the role of neoconservatives in the formation and execution of U.S. foreign policy in West Asia. This influence has been especially pronounced during the post–Cold War decades and, certainly, since the events of 11 September 2001.
Neoconservatism has its roots in the 1940s, when figures such as Irving Kristol were students at City College, where, amid a celebrated interim of intellectual ferment, neoconservative thinking can be said to have congealed into a sort of informal movement. As a matter of cultural history, City College, located in Upper Manhattan, was where a large number of New York Jews received their higher educations during and subsequent to Kristol’s time. I note this detail not as a matter of anti–Semitic thematization but as a matter of fact, one that is significant for its bearing on the present crisis: As neoconservatives began, in later years, to assume positions of power and influence, Zionists or Zionist fellow travelers with unreserved sympathies for Israel were prominent among them. The Israel lobby, to put a complex matter simply, was never far.
A singular moment in the evolution of the neoconservative movement came in 1997, with the formation of the Project for a New American Century. Dick Cheney, the future vice-president, William Kristol, Irving’s son and an influential voice in Washington media, and Robert Kagan, another neocon commentator and an advocate of a vigorously interventionist foreign policy, were among its founders. P.N.A.C.’s power grew quickly to astonishing proportions. Nearly a dozen P.N.A.C. members held senior foreign policy positions in the administration of George W. Bush.
The events of 11 September proved a considerable boost for P.N.A.C. and the broader neoconservative movement. Both advocated, strenuously and with obvious success, invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. The ambition here was exceptionally large: The neocons, who had by this time put a lasting stamp on U.S. policy, saw Operation Iraqi Freedom as America’s move to implant democracy in the region and, as the phrase still has it, “remake the Middle East.”
The notion of remaking West Asia in the American image has over the years acquired various critics, some in organizations that once favored such aspirations. This is due to the policy framework’s many failures and messes. Foreign Policy, the quarterly journal, published “The U.S. Needs a New Purpose in the Middle East” last June. The Council on Foreign Relations put out a paper titled “It’s Time to Renew America’s Purpose in the Middle East” on the same day—celebrating the thinking of the same scholar, Steven Cook. The post–Cold War decades were “marked by costly and unrealistic efforts,” Cook argues. “It’s time to ditch romantic ideals of remaking the region.” The project is to settle on “a set of achievable goals” determined according to a stricter conception of American interests.
You get this kind of thing routinely out of Washington: sweeping rhetoric urging profound change but amounting to calls for adjustments in the grand plan to preserve American hegemony in whatever region may be at issue. Let us nonetheless find use in the critiques of these organizations and their publications by making of them a mirror: In it we see the full, unfortunate extent to which the neoconservative project continues to define America’s ambitions in the region and so the fundamentals of American policy.
The Biden regime has not once condemned Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, or its attacks on the U.N. presence there, or the Israelis’ flouting again and again of international law. It was less than a month ago that the Biden White House authorized the Pentagon to send Israel the advanced missile-defense system mentioned earlier, known as Terminal High–Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, along with 100 troops trained to operate it. This cannot be read as other than tacit approval of the Israelis’ apparent plans to attack Iran—and a signal that the U.S. will support such a reckless campaign.
Neither is there any alternative way to read Israel’s role as the executor, for now and for who knows how long, of American policy. All that it is doing—even if Washington would like it to act with less brutality—is in keeping with America’s established objectives. Israel proposes to make itself a sort of regional hegemon: This is just as the U.S. wants it to be, just as the neoconservative cliques envision the future. The Zionist regime’s indifference to international law and humanity’s accepted norms is a local reflection of America’s.
We witness, to make this point another way, a West Asian version of “the international rules-based order” the U.S. will continue to impose upon the world until it is forced, one or another way, to stop. Zionist extremism is useful in this cause, just as the neoconservatives once found al–Qaeda useful and the Islamic State after it.
Bibi Netanyahu is effectively a surfer, riding the wave neoconservatives and their allies set in motion decades ago. Remember when he addressed a joint session of Congress, last July, for the fourth time? He got 72 ovations, 60–odd of them standing: I know, I counted. Let us understand that moment as it was. Congress was not applauding a leader. It was applauding a loyal servant. As the Biden regime departs and Trump’s arrives, it is important to be perfectly clear on this point.
Is it fair to say neoconservatism is what America got instead of the promise of the Kennedy years? This seems to me a sad but valid judgment if we consider the movement’s genesis and history. It follows, however horrible the thought, that Donald Trump is what America gets in 2024 instead of a never-arrived political descendant of the Kenndys, Jack and Bobby, and all they came to stand for before they met their ends.
