After Weeks of Telling Israel Not to Widen Gaza War, US Widens It to Iraq and Yemen
Americans finally getting sick of US warmongering
For weeks we’ve been reading articles and hearing broadcast reports about how the Biden administration, including President Biden himself and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as US Ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have been warning Israel not to cause or allow the war on Gaza to spread across the borders of Israel and its occupied territories into other parts of the Middle East.
Suddenly, the US Navy ships based in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, along with some British ships and planes (added no doubt to be able to call it a “coalition” effort}, have hit suspected Houthi militia targets in Yemen, making it the US itself, not Israel, that is “expanding the war.”
This act of war, ordered by President Biden without so much as a consultation with Congress, where progressive Democrats and Republicans are expressing outrage, is doubly dangerous because the Houthi militia being pummeled by the US and Britain are allies or and are supplied by Iran.
The US also rolled out another provocation — a rocket attack that killed the leader of a Hezbollah militia unit right in central Baghdad. As the headline over that story in the Washington Post put it: “US Strike in Baghdad Raises Specter of a Wider War.”
“Raises specter” indeed, and not just outside Israel’s and Palestine’s borders but potentially all the way across Europe and the Atlantic to the US.
Now admittedly, the US has long dismissed the laws of war, at least when it comes to applying them to its own criminal actions, from bombing hospitals to launching illegal wars or using outlawed weapons. But however cavalier Washington is about those laws, they are universal and they do say that when a country does violate them, using certain banned weapons for example, or invading a country that doesn’t pose an immediate threat to the attacker, the country that is the target of such violation has the right to respond in kind. So Americans ought to know that attacking a Hezbollah target who is under the protection of the Iraqi government in central Baghdad is actually inviting Iraq, the host country, or Hezbollah, the victim organization, to attack leaders in the US, either where its troops are based abroad (for example in Iraq) or even in D.C. Same goes for the US attacks on Houthi militia sites in Yemen. After enduring attack against their forces and the Yemeni people by Saudi Arabia for years (with US -supplied weapons and direct assistance)d, the Houthis, at this point, are warning that ”US interests” will now be retaliated against.
It’s easy to see how this kind of tit-for-tat escalation, initiated by a hubristic USA leadership, could quickly spiral out of control. Suppose the Houthis were to launch an anti-ship missile and sink or heavily damage a US Navy vessel in the Persian Gulf.
Would that lead to a violent US response the form of a major attack on Houthi forces across Yemen? Probably. And would such a US resprisal lead Iran to respond, either directly or through its various proxy forces in Syria or Iraq against US targets? Likely so too.
And while Israel appears to have shied away so far from widening its war against Palestinians to include a cross-border invasion by Israeli troops and tanks against the Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon, how do Biden and Blinken think their appeals to Israel to dial back their threats and to “reduce the killing of civilians in Gaza,” will be received now, with the US itself is stoking the flames of wider war?
Polls show that most Americans have not only turned against Israel’s brutal near total destruction of the captive territory of Gaza, where in just 100 days of this attack, one percent of that territory’s 2.3 million trapped residents have been killed, 40% of them children and another 30% women. On Jan. 13, 100,000 people gathered on the National Mall and then marched on the White House to demand that the US cease supporting and arming Israel in its genocidal war on Palestinians in the territories it occupies and controls — Gaza and the West Bank. (Note: Mondoweiss, citing American Muslims for Palestine, one of the lead organizers for the action, as claiming that the Washington demonstration and march had 400,000 people, which if correrct, would make it one of the largest antiwar demonstrations in the history of the nation’s capital city.)
Whether the total was 100-,00 or 400,000, it’s an astonishing turnaround from public US sentiment towards the mostly Muslim Palestinians — one which I never thought I’d live to see, given the long-standing US backing of Israel since its founding in 1948 and the accompanying common public Islamophobiaafter the 9-11 attacks..
The US public’s attitude towards US militarism abroad itself is today is allso undergoing a seismic shift. At least after the end of the Vietnam War, the general public attitude towards as wars and military actions used to be to reflexively “support the troops” and to dismissively call for bombing whatever country was the latest announced enemy of the US “into the stone age.” But now a recent poll shows that even in the case of the Russia-Ukraine War, which for two years had many Americans hanging Ukrainian flags from their windows, posting “I stand with Ukraine” lawn signs in their yards, and supporting tens of billions of dollars in weapons shipments to Ukraine intended to help their military “kill Russians,” a majority of Americans are now saying “Enough!” They are calling for a negotiated solution to that conflict too.
President Biden is in a very weak position, and his international bellicosity is clearly one of the things that has dragged his public support down to the historically low of 36% — the. lowest popularity rating of a president in 70 years (that includes the lows hit by Presidents Nixon and Carter). Of course there are other reasons people are turned off by Biden — his age, his boasting about things that aren’t really much to boast about, and his betrayal of causes he once ran on, for example stopping coastal drilling and taking action to reduce student debt. But while foreign policy only rarely rises to the top as an issue for Americans, the sheer brutality of Israel’s assault on the trapped Palestinian inmates of the Gaza open-air prison camp, and the threat posed by further US support for a war against nuclear-armed Russia — a war which hasn’t been going well for Ukraine despite over $100 billion in modern US weapons shivered its way — that could be what is happening now.
It’s time for Americans fed up with decades of US a militarist imperial foreign policy to really pour it on. Biden is starting to face being public shaming by protesters at his campaign events and press conferences who are calling him out for his blind support for Israel. If protests grow in Washington and other cities around the country and his polls continue to tank, something’s going to have to give. Where’s a peace candidate like Eugene McCarthy, whose entry in the 1968 presidential race against Lyndon Johnson and surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary led to Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek a second term?
Is this starting to reprise 1967 during the Vietnam War? That was when several hundred thousand angry and determined mostly young people descended on Washington on a late October weekend, stormed the mall of the Pentagon and sat there all night facing armed military police to demand an end to the war. Hundreds (myself included) were beaten and arrested by armed federal Marshalls and locked up in the Occoquan Federal Workhouse prison in Virginia for trespassing, resisting arrest and other charges.
Will younger Americans, even without a military draft to resist, pour out into the streets to demand peace and an end to the trillion-dollar-a-year US War and Empire agenda?
Biden seems to be trying to test that possibility.
Stay tuned…
I have always thought that the joke about the Irishman who encountered a fight was both funny and telling. He asked the two participants if their imbroglio was a family affair--or could anybody join in. History shows that the Irish enjoyed fighting either for fun and excitement or no holds barred sans trepidation.
Then there is Mahatma Gandhi of whom it is said that he only peacefully battled the British because guns were not available.
While I allow that is better to strategize and win a battle without all of the deplorable killing, it also makes sense to still have the wherewithal to annihilate the enemy if necessary. As for all of the guns our country seems awash in, by far the majority are in the hands of law abiding citizens. Of course the problem arises from our capitalist culture that is in its last throws as a hegemonic baron. Greed is our god and millions of people are being sacrificed on the alter of expediency. We are witnessing the toothless becoming ruthless and will need our guns and ammunition if for no other reason than protection.
I can tell you're not Irish.