Israel’s Existential Threat » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
When Barack Obama won in 2008, there was a chance that the worst excesses of the Bush-Cheney era would finally be ended. Instead, we have just gotten more of the same, and worse.
Even the old malefactors are still at it. Some six years into the Age of Obama, they are finally recovering their stride.
Witness, for example, the unreconstructed neoconservatives who are still around causing trouble. Our media give them a platform, and so they keep at it. Remarkably, members of the Bush and Cheney families – reprobates all – are still at it too, and still drawing media attention.
But, by now, everyone else who gives the matter a moment’s thought realizes that starting the Iraq War was a colossal mistake.
Almost every decision the United States made in waging it was wrong-headed too; and it only got worse when the Obama administration took up where its predecessor left off.
In time, Obama did wind down overt combat operations; after seven years, there was little point in keeping them going.
But, by outsourcing most of the killing, his administration only continued the war and occupation in a different, less conspicuous, guise.
The ploy worked for a while because the United States was able to buy off most (evidently, not all) opposition, and because Obama kept the Iraqi government afloat with American taxpayers’ dollars.
And, on the home front, Obama was able to fool most of the people most of the time because, as per usual, the media didn’t do its job. Having been notoriously gung-ho since even before the Iraq War began, the media lost interest as soon as the murder and mayhem began to subside.
Because they couldn’t just ignore what was going on, they therefore took the lazy way out: repeating what the State and Defense Departments told them.
But now, thanks mainly to American ineptitude, the situation on the ground is changing. Suddenly, the occupation structure America contrived over the past decade is crumbling – along with the Iraqi regime itself. Sunni jihadists are on the march, and Shia militias are reconstituting. Civil war is brewing. Arguably, it has already begun.
How ironic that what the Americans put in place is now being replaced by what George Bush and Dick Cheney told the world the U.S. invaded Iraq to prevent: the establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the heartland of the Middle East!
Iraq is not the only country in peril. The Syrian civil war has already spilled over to its neighbor, and vice versa – putting the regional state system established after World War I in jeopardy.
For all this and more, American bungling is largely at fault. Bush and Cheney hadn’t a clue what they were getting into and neither they nor their successor were any better prepared to deal with the situation their machinations had conjured into being.
The question now is how to keep the instability they created in bounds.
Will it spill over into the entire region – into Lebanon, for example? Will it destabilize Jordan? Egypt is already deeply in turmoil. What will be the effect on it?
The one sure thing is that Israel will finally be facing a genuine existential threat.
Even if the threat can be confined just to its Syrian border, that will be more than enough; an out of control regional war waged by bitterly opposed parties who agree only on their hostility to the Israeli state comes as close as one can imagine to putting the seemingly impregnable security Israel provides its Jewish citizens in peril.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been crying wolf for so long that it has become his nature. Now he is about to get what he has been bleating about; and neither he, nor those who think like him, are going to like it one bit.
The consequences of the Bush-Obama Iraq War are coming due. One of those consequences – not the most dire, but certainly the most ironic – is that Israeli panic mongering will soon be overcome by events, putting Israel itself at more risk than it has ever been.
Be careful what you wish for – indeed!
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The Neo/Zio/Cons wanted and got regime change in Iraq.
Now what ¿¿
Tao Dao Man