The US & Israel Sitting in a Tree

The wrong, stupid focus.

The World’s Big Dog
I don’t know exactly where or when I lost my hardness for making Iran pay, but it was probably very recently. Much longer ago, before Stuxnet, I grew weary of most domestic excuses for foreign intervention, but not because I’m a peacenik, but because we’ve been singly incapable as a populist democracy of electing serious thinkers. Instead we’ve been waiting impatiently for genius to go viral. Genius does not go viral of its own accord, Rulers stick their thick fingers onto the [populist] Algorithm.

Still, I kept geopolitical matters close at hand because, having met something of a dosh point, I saw very little by the way of domestic affairs that I could vote myself richer. In short, I hated crap like Obamacare which cost me money, but since I had enough money I didn’t bother to invest much passion. Similarly there has been very little that threatens me and mine with two major exceptions:

1. The likelihood that the federal debt implodes the USD.

2. The likelihood that enemies foreign and domestic explode the USA with WMD.

Little else is existential. Rather it shows up in my strategy as more focus on the madness that makes either of those two more likely. Even so, I have expected that both foreign and domestic partners of the US would curb us from killing those golden goose properties that make America good, if not great. If the US, geopolitically is anything we are a great big dog with capacities to be very nice and fetch you big things. Or chew your arm off.

What this has to do with Israel is basically this. Of all the territorial ambitions of the 20th Century Allies, the US has done little more than annex and protect some dozen atolls, small islands and whatnot. But where we did stick our neck out was in a reasonable adjudication of saving German Jews (and others) from complete annihilation. Quite frankly I wish the idiots in Washington would pay much more attention to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, but that’s another story. We made friends with West Germany, kind of a no-brainer give Operation Paperclip, and we made the kind of friends with Japan, few of today’s Americans have enough home training to replicate anywhere. Thank you General Douglas MacArthur. If you saw what we’ve allowed at your namesake park in Los Angeles, you’d disown it. Now I hear the US may disown Diego Garcia, tangential to this story. Despite all of this, we have been reasonably steadfast in that fractionally true post-facto accounting of our war powers that we owe Israel protection. This is, to my reckoning, a general sentiment as well as a treaty alliance. The bottom line is that America doesn’t go chasing territory around the world. Instead we are a condescending guard dog.

What Me Worry?
Now growing up in Los Angeles, where we don’t have a Jewish Problem, I had no reasons to think my way out of conceptual dead-ends or engage in ethnic hatred deprogramming. For me, previous to last October, all I ever did was count the number of dead in the various Intifadas, which was coincidently about the same number of black Americans killed in the history of lynching, both were slightly more than the number killed on 9/11 all of which were an order of magnitude smaller than the number of American suicides. The approximate number is 3,000 (total) with 30,000 suicides (per annum) in the USA.

So when it came to every debate online about how horrible lynching was and what politics it justifies, how devastating the Intifada was and what politics it justifies my response was basically that statistically you are than 10x more likely to kill yourself than for an Israeli to kill a Palestinian, or for some white supremacist to lynch you. In other words, shut up Karen, I don’t have time for your petty whining. It doesn’t register. Come back when you want to talk about…oh how about the Janjaweed Militia?

All told this is why I ignore most domestic politics and much prefer studying military history. How many people die? I understand that I do so in a culture that has a completely vapid context for the phrase ‘body count’, but that’s what counts for me. I think that it’s a bit too much to ask for most Americans to carry the context of a Christopher Hitchens to engage in what didn’t used to be but now sounds like transcendent matters. Actual geopolitics.

Nevertheless, an open comments section is something I used to maintain but is now reserved for my paying subscribers. I may need to rethink that given what juices are now flowing over one matter I have attended for over a decade which is the matter of Iranian Nukes. You can examine that here:

• The End of the Islamic Bomb

• The Iranian Nuclear Annex

I didn’t expect that Israel would be the tip of a spear abetting the widespread kinetic destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities — a spear powered by American muscle. But I have expected them to be that coalmine’s canary. So that stuff comes as no surprise. What has come as a surprise, escalating the possibility of existential crisis #2 above, is the cyclic spread of anti-semitism on American university campuses and society. This is the kind of foolish idiocy people like me can only see because of the unique ability of social media to reveal a million moronic selfies. Thanks Apple, I think.

The Peacenik Proviso
I expect humans to conflict. We are territorial, period. We are, unlike other creatures, not completely bound by genetics, but enabled by mimetics. But our mimetics work in service of our genetics and genetics don’t work unless the inferiors die. So don’t get all excited about downloading (or uploading as it were) your brain into indestructible hardware. The vast majority of us won’t. Life finds a way. Science itself is a tool for human ends and human ends are destructive often enough such that we have to think about it. We have evolved fear and loathing for very good reasons. Please stop pretending you are a Jedi. You will use Sith means to serve your genes.

When people are ready to set buildings and each other on fire, then it’s time to be serious. Short of that it’s just politics and journalism, most of which is misleading and ineffective. Politics and journalism never stop and are always out of control. War, on the other hand, does stop. I’m one of those students of military history that says war only stops when one side has been pacified, meaning someone has been forced into a position of losing the will to fight. Sometimes that is through a wise withdrawal, but all too often it is through incapacitation. IE, you have not only exhausted your will to fight back, but you have lost your capacity to fight back. That doesn’t mean the peace will be a good peace. Ask Eastern Europe under the Soviets. Ask Gazans in Egypt.

My point is simple. Expect war. There will always be blood until somebody runs out of it, or is run out of town.

Two False Lenses Of Necessity
”Middle East Peace” is probably one of the most obnoxious phrases in the English language. It’s probably the most trouble you can invoke without being obscene, because it’s something everybody claims to want, but like cleaning grease traps at McDonalds, it’s something we just wish somebody else would do. But because we always want fries with our convenient fast food diplomacy, we don’t like to admit that we Americans are inherently part of the reason all that nasty grease exists. This gives our fast food appetites two convenient lenses of necessity to look at the problem of Middle East Peace. The first is that we are forced to look at the very existence of the State of Israel as a key. The second is that we we are forced to look at Israel’s relationship to Palestinians as key. Basically, for my entire life these have been the two contexts. I think they are both forced and wrong.

The first focus begs the question of whether it is reasonable to have an ethnostate. That’s a dead-end question, because if Israel has a right to be an ethnostate, then the Palestinians have a right to be an ethnostate. Then that begs the question of whether or not Palestinians are actually an ethnic group and if Israel is actually or practically an ethnostate. In other words it’s a garden of forking paths of false equivalences. Then the can of worms starts with Jews vs Muslims, neither of which are ethnics, as well as why Denmark is left out of the ethnostate equation.

The second focus begs the question of whether or not the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is even materially relevant to Middle East Peace. As if the some resolution of that should be the single measure of what defines peace in whatever you consider to be the Middle East.

I’m going to leave all that hanging, as it only goes around in circles. All these questions are defensive. It leaves people believing they have to defend victims. All the geopolitical punters want to be the Savior.

‘Heroics’ after the fact.

The Arab World
Someone provoked me into looking at Egypt. That matters because Egypt is the home of the Arab Spring or al-marar al-Arabi. It seems to me that the most important matter in the Middle East with whether or not any group of Arab states can emerge into some kind of equilibrium that doesn’t require us Americans to start yet another sequel to the franchise of excuses of the sort that don’t satisfy us or ‘them’, whomever they might be.

I’ll say the they is the Arab League. That’s 22 nations and 473 million people. The economic juggernaut is Saudi Arabia of course, and the largest population is in Egypt followed by Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Morocco. So now let us consider this nice GenAI table and ask ourselves what Israel has to do with it.

And Iran is out of the picture. There is nothing contrived about this aggregation. It is the Arab League, and as my interlocutor implies, though he may dispute or contrast with me here, Egypt’s fate is key. That’s where the biggest chunk of people are and they are not doing so well economically.

Now what I didn’t do is insert anything about their ideologies or forms of government. That is because I believe that to be economically bound, now that the Arab Spring has taken place. Let me remind you that there were in the neighborhood of 650,000 deaths in the Syrian civil war that began 13 years ago. But which governments emerge and how their rulers engage the region and the world will have a significant effect on that part of the world. And I’m saying that is completely independent of the strange American and Israeli love/hate affair.

It seems to me that a multipolar world is inevitable, but that opinion has not been recently amped up or researched. I just know that when I hear ‘free trade’ and ‘global policeman’ as if they are mutually exclusive, I’m not hearing wisdom. Then again, what does the Arab World want to trade with the free world besides mineral wealth? I’d say it might trade in the virtue of stability and that starts at home. Easier said than done. But see how many of those nations have no particular government dog in some pit with the IDF or the Israeli population. Why shouldn’t Egypt be the third leg in the stool of Middle East stability? Do any American Rulers have a ten year horizon?

I don’t see a precarious balance here. I’m not obsessed with Israel. I’m not triggered by the word Zionism. FWIW, I’m more concerned with Central American & Mexican cartels.