View from Washington: Time to pull the plug on Trump and Netanyahu – No U.S. interest is served in allowing political domination by Israel

President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House. Who looks like the boss?
Photo: The White House

Secretary of State and National Security Marco Rubio has perhaps revealed some aspects of the process whereby the war against Iran came about. Israel sees the destruction of Iran as a top national priority, so one might assume that the United States under Trump would go along with that presumption, notes Philip Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for ‘The National Interest’.

It is generally believed that a war to destroy Iran such as it is now has been on the cards ever since the twelve-day war directed against it in June of last year. Per Rubio, the timing this time around was based on Israel’s insistence that if the US did not join in an attack Israel would go it alone. There was concern in Washington that that would mean Iranian retaliation against US bases in the region whether the US was an attacker or not, so the decision was made to join Israel and preempt any Iranian “aggression.”

Donald Trump somehow has reversed the Rubio explanation by stating that he himself forced the issue and pushed the Israelis to start of the war, not the other way around, but it appears to have been a typical Trump misspeak based on ignorance of what actually occurred.

That actually suggests that Israel “mousetrapped” Trump into going to war for them. Rubio’s case for going to war, which contradicted what the U.S. intelligence community was reporting, was inevitably unchallenged and is in a political sense derived from how, for decades in the United States, absolute support for Israel without questioning its motives or intents has been a solid bipartisan government consensus.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump have in fact both financed and armed Israel’s more recent and continuing destruction of Gaza, which would not be possible without the resources coming from the White House. A similar destruction of Iran is anticipated to “turn it into Gaza,” according to at least one leading Israeli politician. Americans who criticize the White House’s devotion to Israel are meanwhile routinely subject to reputation destruction through being labeled as antisemites, which is currently underway with journalist Tucker Carlson and Congressman Tom Massie.

All of this has led to a growing movement among Americans to end the war, whatever it takes and a particular focus has been on Israel being recognized as the driving force that produced the U.S. involvement in the conflict in the first place. So perhaps it is a good time to pull the plug on the U.S. relationship with Israel, which costs a fortune, will undoubtedly lead to piles of dead American soldiers, and which provides absolutely no benefit to the American people.

George O’Neill, writing in The American Conservative describes how “This gangster foreign policy isn’t just illegal; it’s bankrupting us morally and financially. We’ve poured trillions of dollars into these ventures, amassing a debt greater than any country’s GDP. The Greater Israel dream, with its expansionist zeal, drags us into perpetual conflict, and foreign lobbies wield our military like a personal militia.”

Both Donald Trump and his Israeli friend Bibi have their fingers on their respective nuclear triggers and both have exhibited behavior that one might describe as reckless and, in its manifestation, “potentially catastrophically dangerous.” The Israelis even have a doctrine for the use of their weapons called the “Samson Option” which inter alia consists of Israel’s undeclared but long-assumed nuclear last-resort policy of massive retaliation that involves their nuking not only threatening hostile neighbors but also countries elsewhere in the world that did not do enough, in their reckoning, to help or protect them.

...Posters have appeared on the walls of Washington asking: For whose interests did these American boys die?