At War For Zionism

 At War For Zionism

Jim Kavanagh

So this is happening—the USraeli war on Iran that, in an essay in October 2023, I saw as the inevitable denouement of Israel’s Gaza ethnic cleansing offensive. The inevitable result of this attack is going to be a regional, if not global, conflagration that will likely create economic and political upheaval around the world (including crisis in the U.S.), probably involve the use of nuclear weapons, and certainly will effect a dramatic change in the balance of geo-political power.

Everyone is aware of the enormous collection of American military assets amassed against Iran. The U.S. has drawn down military potential in other important world theaters, including warships, warplanes, and tankers. Something like 40% of the available U.S. naval fleet and 37% of the AWACS fleet are deployed for this attack. They’re taking air-defense assets from South Korea!

Some of us understand that this enormous strike force is in play because Iran itself has formidable military capabilities, and the Pentagon knows it. Many knowledgeable people have warned that Iran, a large, mountainous country of >90 million people with a strong economic and military infrastructure, is a much larger and harder target than Iraq, or Syria, or Libya. Iran has already shown, in the 12-day war, that its missile inventory can outlast initial attacks, deplete Israeli air defenses, and strike with precision. Iran is also now much better prepared, with substantial support from Russia and China, including important air defense, ISR, and global positioning assets.

The military conflict is underway, each side has the ability to inflict serious damage on the other, and the various speculations about who has what advantage will soon be resolved on the battlefield. I’ll just say, with most observers, that I think the longer the fight goes on, the worse it will get for USrael, which—politically, as least as important as militarily—does not want and cannot sustain a prolonged war.

Donald Trump is certainly counting on a quick, low-American-cost “victory.” He has initiated the kind of regime change war that he promised to end, one that >70% of the American people oppose. Any prolonged resistance, any need to deploy more (especially ground) forces, any dire economic consequences, any significant number of casualties—results that are, I think, in some combination inevitable—will be a military and political disaster for him. The Israelis have different political considerations, but they, too, cannot sustain a prolonged conventional war against a country as big and strong as Iran.

Let’s be clear about what the purpose of this war is, and what the prospects for its resolution are.

First, and most important for American opponents of this war to emphasize and repeat constantly: This is a Zionist war. It is a war for Israel and Zionism. The United States and the American people have no reason to attack Iran. There is nothing for them in it. And they know it. More than 70% of Americans oppose it. Over four election cycles, the American people have soundly rejected regime-change wars, especially in the Middle East, and that rejection was a foundational element of the Trump-MAGA campaign itself. Iran poses no threat to the United States. The various rationales—from notional nuclear weapons to monarchist “democracy”—don’t deserve a moment of consideration. They are as patently phony as Bush’s were for Iraq, and everybody knows it. Nobody wanted this war but Netanyahu and Israel.

Netanyahu explicitly thanked, “my friend, US President Donald Trump, for “allow[ing] us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” Not an American project, but one Netanyahu wished for for 40 years that could not have been done unless the U.S. “allowed” it. Now the U.S. is doing it for and with him.

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, acknowledges, with full confidence that it will be accepted as a sufficient explanation, that the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was going to, and Donald Trump, the President of the United States, said that “he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.” There are no more powerful American political leaders. For them, for the whole of the American political and media elite, Israel leads and America follows—America cannot conceive of doing anything but follow. Like a dog on a leash.

Here’s what I said in my August 2024 essay foreseeing how Israel was going to walk the U.S. into war on Iran.

Israel is acting with particular contemptuous disregard for the country on whom it most depends, the United States. Israel has only slightly less contempt for Americans than it does for Palestinians. Israel considers Palestinians needless, expendable subhumans. Israel considers Americans unfortunately necessary fools who don't, and don't want to, understand the core of the Zionist colonial project and its necessarily eliminationist policy toward the Palestinians, about whose essential savagery equality-obsessed Americans are hopelessly naive.

Israel thinks of Americans the way a supercilious avant-garde artist thinks of his/her vulgar wealthy patrons. It has to keep its indispensable supporters believing it shares their appreciation of the purely decorative prettiness of things like human rights, peace, living side by side in mutual respect with other peoples, etc., so that they will continue to subsidize the truly important and transgressive Zionist artistry, whose beauty they will never understand.

Israel has been confident of its ability to play its patron in that way, because,  as Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have said many times: “America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction” and  “We have the Senate,  the Congress, and a strong Jewish lobby on our side.” And he is right.  (And don’t forget the Zionist-committed media.) It’s hard to find a ward more contemptuous of its patron than Israel, or a patron more submissive to its ward than the United States.

In fact, Israel is so confident of its ability to get the American government to go along with anything it wants that it has completely dispensed with any effort at prettifying its grotesqueries:

 “Look, we are, as we announced, committing genocidal ethnic cleansing with no limits, deliberately slaughtering and starving children every day, carrying out airstrikes and destructive assassinations in foreign capitals, etc. If you want to continue pretending to yourselves and your citizens that there’s such a thing as fundamentally humanitarian ‘liberal Zionism,’ that we’re interested in ‘ceasefires’ and ‘two-state solutions’ and such—anything other than getting rid of the Palestinians and consolidating Jewish supremacy throughout our promised land—-while we blatantly kill the primary negotiator you want us to talk to, you go right ahead. Keep writing your thoughtful op-eds and expressing your ‘frustration’ and ‘tension’ with us.  Just understand that we are going to continue killing anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at any time of our choosing, until we’ve put down all potential enemies of our colonial project, and we don’t give a damn about what you think about that.  Your job is to keep sending us the weapons we need and bring your soldiers and armies into a major war to protect us from the inevitable blowback from the countries we attack. Capisce?”

To which the Blue and Red bitches—-Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance, RFK, Jr.—-leading the American and Western political pack, bark, “Yes, sir. Your war is our war. We will do anything to protect the Zionist project!” Has anyone ever seen a more pathetically obsequious, self-demeaning political leadership?

So, the American polity—-its dog-trained leadership and its starting-to-yap-back but still too dog-trained populace—-is walking into war. Being walked into war on the Zionist leash. There will be a lot of yelping once their noses are rubbed in it.

Like a dog on a leash. The only revision I would make, happily, is that the populace is now not just yapping but snapping back much more widely and forcefully. Tucker Carlson sees it clearly:

https://x.com/clashreport/status/2026982223019180046?s=20

The purpose of this war is to “regime change” Iran for the sake of Israel, to remove Iran as the last principled anti-Zionist state in the region that’s capable of materially supporting  the Palestinian resistance and resisting the Zionist Greater Israel project. Israel cannot achieve this on its own. Iran is too strong and getting stronger. It needs American military power to do the job for Zionism. We must incessantly repeat that, as well as every Iranian, every American life lost in this war is a sacrifice on the altar of Zionism.

This, in a context where Israel is losing support from the American people. Americans have been learning, from watching the genocide in Gaza and educating themselves on social media, that the Zionism they’ve been taught to take for granted as a virtuous and integral part of “America” itself is actually a vicious, ethno-religious supremacist colonialist program, an enemy of the truth of human equality we as Americans hold to be self-evident.

For the first time, the Gallup poll shows Americans more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis:

https://x.com/tparsi/status/2027374216123715790?s=20

This erosion of support for Israel and Zionism is definitely not yet reflected in the political and media elite of this country, but the fear of Zionists—especially given the erosion of socio-economic life for most people—is that it inevitably will be. Thus, the “desperate urgency when it comes to war with Iran” that’s driving the Zionist interests and the “no more regime change wars” administration they bankroll and control. The American people don’t get what they want, but, as Donald Trump has boasted many times, Miriam and friends do.

It’s not that the Trump administration is uniquely driven by Zionist interests, but it is now quite susceptible to embracing the boldest and riskiest tasks assigned by Zionism because Donald is in thrall to the legend of self- and American exceptionalism in his own mind, as well as to Zionist ideology and Miriam’s money.

As was explicitly recognized by the Canadian Prime Minister, the Trump administration, self-smitten by actions like the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela and his wife, is, clueless and careless about the consequences, dramatically ripping the mask off the lawless aggression of the U.S. imperialist state, and abandoning the hypocritical “fiction” of the “rules-based order” it claimed to preside over for the past 30 years. When asked by the New York Times how he thought he could achieve regime change in Iran, Trump “refer[red] repeatedly to his experience in Venezuela,” saying: “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.” Perfectly clueless.

Trump, with typical American ignorance and arrogance, thinks that “regime change” is something like bringing in a new coach for the football team. The Israelis, understanding more about the depth and complexity of a strong 1600-year-old culture irreducible to simple neocon formulae, know that they've gotten the Americans into a big, messy, and difficult conflict. The Israelis know they are not just going to substitute one leadership team for another in Tehran, with the imaginary masses rising up to welcome the imaginary American “democracy” they've been yearning for; the Israelis know that there are going to be tens of millions of Iranians of religious and nationalist conviction who will fight any such imposed “transition.”

There’s a reason Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth cannot articulate a coherent purpose and a coherent strategy to achieve it. Whatever the American leadership thinks it is doing, it is Israel’s agenda it is serving. Israel’s purpose is to remove Iran as an anti-Zionist power in the region. Sure, Israel would welcome any government in Iran—ayatollahs, Pahlavis, republicans, Islamists, secular, “democratic,” or “authoritarian”—that accepts the legitimacy of the Zionist colonial enterprise in Palestine and its absolute hegemony in the region, and that would disarm itself of any military capability to resist anything Israel wants to do. Israel would accept any “Abraham Accords” regime in Iran.

But Israel is also not stupid enough to think that’s going to happen—not in four or five weeks, and probably not ever in any stable way. They know neither they nor the Americans can occupy and control the country as a protectorate, as in Iraq. So, Israel is not looking here to get a new government into Tehran; it is looking to destroy the Iranian polity tout court, to create a situation of collapse and chaos, a dismembered, chaotic non-state of warring factions, à la Libya or Gaza.

https://x.com/Hoffman8Jon/status/2028896281695858706?s=20

That is why Israel is deliberately bombing schools and hospitals. As in Gaza, Israel seeks to destroy, and make difficult to reconstruct, the social infrastructure that holds society together. That is a big task, that’s going to meet fierce resistance from Iran and (I hope) from populations across the Arab and Islamic world that will threaten to overthrow reactionary USrael-controlled regimes, as well as (I really hope) from Iran’s powerful geopolitical allies. Israel’s got the United States fully participating in this regional and global disaster, while dreaming some other impossible dream.

This war is a world-changing conflict, a historical inflection point. Six months from now, likely after the first use of nuclear weapons since WWII, we will be living in a very different world.

There are two ways this can go.

One way is that USrael will succeed in their objective of subduing Iran for Zionism—either by inciting a coup by corrupted military forces or by breaking apart the Iranian regime and polity with multi-front military and political attacks, reducing the country to a chaotic state, impotent to resist Israeli hegemony and the extension of the Zionist Greater Israel Project. This will mean Iran is stripped of its nuclear enrichment program, its missile program, its IRGC, and its independence. This will also mean defeating any related resistance actions that might come from Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the Houthis in Yemen, or the Shia population of Bahrain.

In that case, Israel will have secured regional hegemony for a long time, and will go on to permanently occupy South Lebanon, Gaza, and annex the West Bank and expel or kill most of its Palestinian population. Israel is already acting to make this so, gathering a force of 100,000 reservists to invade Southern Lebanon. Greater Israel, from the river (Euphrates) to the river (Nile) to the river (Litani).

In that case, it would be a significant strategic defeat for Iran and for the world—certainly for any “multipolar” notion thereof. The United States will have significantly re-established its supremacy as the power that shapes the world order via its ruthless use of military aggression in blatant, explicit defiance of all international law and norms. And the U.S. will proceed to use that power to bully its way around the world, until and unless it runs into the wall of a military power that imposes an unexpected and decisive defeat on it.

The other way this can go is that Iran maintains its political unity and military capability in the face of massive aerial attack, and confronts USrael with the choice of backing off or entering into a long attritional war that demands the use of ground forces and will still end in political disaster and humiliation.

Per Kissinger’s remark about Vietnam: If Iran doesn’t lose, it wins; if USrael doesn’t win, it loses. If USrael forces pull back at any point, leaving Iran’s political regime, its nuclear enrichment program, its missile program, its general military capability, its IRGC, and its independence intact, Iran has won.

In that case, the U.S. in the world and Israel in the region (especially if it has failed to defeat Hezbollah and other resistance forces) will have suffered an undeniable and irreversible loss of hegemonic power that will reverberate throughout the entire (and certainly the Arab and Islamic) world. It would be a major strategic defeat for USrael.

Either way, the world will be different. This is an inflection point.

I think, and I hope, that the second outcome is more likely than the first. I also think we have to confront a couple of necessary elements in how this situation will unfold.

First of all, which of those results occur will be sorely dependent on how clearly Iran and the allies it needs understand, and how uncompromisingly they fight for, those stakes. Either Iran or USrael will be forced to back down, via actions on the battlefield that cannot be avoided by negotiations. USrael is not a rational actor, does not respect--has explicitly renounced--any laws or rules of engagement. It will back off only if the material, political, and body-count cost becomes too high. Any illusions that a full-on, determined fight can be avoided will be fatal.

Second, it is difficult to imagine how either outcome can occur without a world war and the likely use of nuclear weapons.

Is it possible that Russia and China (the latter of which strongly “supports Iran in safeguarding its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity and national dignity”) would watch Iran be subjugated, destroyed, and/or dismembered, allowing USrael to assert full authority over a BRICS country, all of West Asia, and really the world, without intervening? Do they not realize that would be a strategic defeat for them? (We might include countries like Turkey and Pakistan, too, but let’s keep it simple.)

But if they do intervene to prevent an Iranian defeat, how so? With what means? It would have to involve at least a severe economic and diplomatic rupture, but, again, USrael would not care about that, so to be effective it would require an assertion of military force. That’s a world war, without limits, very quickly.

The alternative scenario is at least as dangerous. If Iran stands strong and USrael finds itself on the back foot, forced to conclude it’s impossible to subdue Iran at an acceptable cost, Israel will nuke Iran. I have no doubt. And anyone who thinks Israel will allow itself to be forced out of this conflict—in defeat, leaving Iran intact—without using every weapon at its disposal is kidding themselves.  That’s why they have those weapons, and they’ve been itching to use them—precisely in a situation like this, precisely to demonstrate, as Moshe Dayan said: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother’….We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

John Kriakou has said that Israel got Trump to bomb Iran last June by threatening to nuke Iran if he didn’t. And perhaps such a threat is behind Rubio’s “We had to attack Iran because Israel was going to” justification. I’ve always said that Israel would ultimately play their American patsies like that—threatening to use nukes if the U.S. didn’t join them in attacking iran, and when the U.S. joins them, use the nukes anyway, confident that the U.S. will never back out and abandon Israel once involved. That’s the situation we are in now.

But if Israel uses nuclear weapons to stave off what would be a major strategic defeat in this Iran war, what then do the other world powers do? Can Russia and China (and other countries) just let that slide and live in the world where USrael imposes its will through such means?  Must they not respond with appropriate force, whatever that means? We are on the edge of nuclear world war.

I am convinced that the only thing that might stop Israel from using nukes in such a circumstance is if Russia or China or Pakistan let it be known that if Israel did, it would be nuked in response. I say “might” because Israel has those nukes to use against anyone, including any powerful country that might think of forcing the Zionist state to accept a strategic  defeat in such an important project as this war on Iran. Per the Samson Option, as described by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld twenty years ago: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.”  No country is immune to an Israeli nuclear attack.

This is an incredibly dangerous historical moment—more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, because the aggressive party, USrael, is more pathological than any of the parties in 1962. I do not know exactly how, but the world will be different in six months, if it’s still here. I do know that the world will never know peace until the Zionist project is defeated and removed from the world stage.

In that regard, it’s important to note that this is an inflection point for Zionism itself. The Zionist project has been and continues to be dependent on its American patron—on the support of the U.S. government, and therefore on the support of the American people. The American people—right, left, and center—know this is a war for Israel, and that every dollar and life lost in it, will be for the benefit of no one and nothing but Israel and Zionism.

Indeed, they have come to realize that all the dollars and lives spent in all the post-9/11 regime-change wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, et. al., were for the benefit of Zionism, and they are sick of it.

https://x.com/mtgreenee/status/2028473888829579652?s=20

1https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/2028856556423422009?s=20

 So, if this conflict results in a relatively easy—i.e., of little cost to the U.S.—defeat of Iran, Zionism may get a reprieve from its current decline among the American people. In the much more likely scenario—already happening!—wherein the conflict spreads, demands more U.S. money and materiel, takes more American lives, creates multiple political crises around the world demanding more U.S. resources and attention, instigates economic crisis at home that exacerbates extant social immiseration, that will likely accelerate the rejection of Zionism by the American public that’s well underway, and we may finally see that rejection mirrored in political results.

One of the two worst things that can happen to Zionism is the loss of American support. (The other is the increasing impossibility of a comfortable, non-conflictual colonial life in Israel, leading to net Jewish emigration and a general realization among Western Jews that there is really nothing for them to defend, let alone look forward to, in a state of religious nationalist fanatics.)

I’ve used the term “USrael” throughout because that’s what it is: a compound entity whose purpose is to ensure the Zionist project. There will be no autonomous “United States” until and unless it is extricated from that conjunction

The takeaway:

This is a war for Zionism. Every casualty is a person killed for Zionism.

It is a world-historical inflection point. The world will be different six months from now, according to the outcome.

Either Iran or USrael will suffer a significant, irreversible strategic defeat. The determination of Iran and its allies will be a crucial factor.

This conflict is very unlikely to end without a world war and the use of nuclear weapons.

There will be no peace in the world until the Zionist project is defeated and deleted.

Unfortunately, we’re mostly relegated to the role of spectators as the conflict plays out.  But it is the duty of every decent human being, as s/he can, to stand, and work, for the defeat of USrael.

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