More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa

My latest series of interviews on podcasts and the texts which I set out on these pages to introduce the video links have stirred up a great deal of comment on my web platforms and of email letters sent directly to me. Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.

Others in my audience have not hesitated to say that they think I am wrong, and that indeed Prime Minister Netanyahu is leading Joe Biden & Company around by the nose, which just happens to be the consensus view in mainstream media.

Most of this discussion is not visible to the broad public.  However, the ‘Judging Freedom’ channel which has 450,000 subscribers and its host, Judge Andrew Napolitano put my proposition on the dog (USA) wagging the tail (Israel) to several of his best-known panelists in the 24 hours following my interview with him.  To be sure, my idea seemed so ‘contrarian’ that it demanded a response from the mightiest minds in the alternative media camp. They obliged. With one exception, the mightiest minds were dismissive of my interpretation in more respectful, less respectful ways.

The least polite, least professional dismissal was delivered by Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA official and member in good standing of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Before Judge Napolitano could finish setting out my point, Johnson broke into derisive laughter. He then called my analytic framework ‘nonsensical,’ and proceeded to explain that such a sophisticated policy as using Israel in a proxy war on Iran and the greater neighborhood was beyond the abilities of those at the top of the federal government who are utterly incompetent in managing their assistance to Kiev. To be sure, I never expected to hear such across-the-board condemnation of the feds by a fervent patriot, but life does have its surprises.

A more professional but intellectually lazy ‘nyet’ to my analytical tool came from Professor John Mearsheimer. He opined that I was just repeating a rejection of the power of AIPAC over U.S. policy set out more than a decade ago by Noam Chomsky. Perhaps he thought he was doing me a favor by placing me alongside Chomsky, the outstanding dissident, among foreign policy critics going back decades. However much I admire Chomsky’s co-written Manufacturing Consent, my estimation of Chomsky’s other very repetitive and self-plagiarizing books is less positive. See the respective chapter in my 2010 book Great American Post-Cold War Thinkers on International Relations.

No, professor Mearsheimer, what Chomsky said back then has little relevance today when new people at the top of the federal government face new challenges.

It is understandable that Mearsheimer will defend tooth and claw the idea that the Israeli Lobby controls the U.S. Congress and U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East which is totally supportive of Israel’s defensive and offensive actions. The good professor paid dearly in 2007 when he and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard made that case in a book that was heavily criticized by the leaders in the political science world at that time.  Their view has since become the general consensus and they are heavily invested in it.

Let us now look at the one guest interviewee on ‘Judging Freedom’, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who agreed with what I am saying about the proxy status of Israel with certain important qualifications that I indeed accept.

See

Colonel Wilkerson had and obviously still has highly placed contacts in both the military and civilian sides of the federal government. And well he might, given that he is among the Judge’s guests who reached the top levels in the U.S. government as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Colonel Wilkerson says that the view of Israel as a proxy to be used as required to serve U.S. interests in the region, i.e. to be directed by the United States, does not represent the whole of the U.S. government power structure but of certain elements within it, namely the Neocons, among whom Victoria Nuland is the most visible example. He goes on to say that there are a good number of such Neocons in the government since they were never chased out, never charged or brought to trial for the disasters that befell the countries the United States attacked at their urging and the losses of blood and treasure suffered by the United States itself as a result. No, these Neocons have remained close to the levers of power.

I readily agree with Colonel Wilkerson that the Neocons in the Deep State are not the only ideologues running the show in Washington.  As one perspicacious reader wrote to me, there is another big contingent at the federal level consisting of Liberals like Tony Blinken who think only in terms of America’s commitment to Israel’s survival and of its right to self-defense and who overlook the crimes against humanity that Israel is perpetrating using U.S. weapons. No doubt the personal factor of Jewish heritage in the case of Blinken and other fellow thinkers plays its own role, so that the self-destruction of the state of Israel by its pursuit of a faux self-defense does not seem to cross their minds.

Speaking in more general terms about foreign policy, the conflicting concepts and interests between Liberals and Neocons at the top levels of the government with respect to Israel are no different from the division between the loudest representatives of the United States on the world stage who speak only in terms of defending democracy and human rights, that is to say in Wilsonian terms, versus those whose hands are really on the levers of power, the practitioners of Realpolitik and national self-interest.

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Before closing this discussion, I am obliged to delve into the elephant in the room kind of issue that presents itself with particular relevance in the Alternative Media community:  anti-Semitism. I know that this is a mine field, and I will try my best to cross it without losing a limb or worse. But it begs to be addressed.

Regrettably, ever since the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago, Israeli and many American Jewish leaders have condemned the slightest expressions of sympathy for the civilian victims of Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza and now in Lebanon as tantamount to anti-Semitism. Leading American universities, including my own alma maters of Harvard and Columbia, have caved in to the outrageous demands of Jewish donors that they arrest and expel students and faculty who protest the atrocities.  In a word, anti-Semitism as a concept is being abused egregiously for the sake of pro-Israeli censorship.

Professor Mearsheimer’s emphasis on the Israeli Lobby as the controlling factor in United States policy towards the Middle East plays very nicely into what are real as opposed to phony anti-Semitic beliefs. His estimation of an all-powerful AIPAC and its destructive impact on U.S. foreign policy is music to the ears of those who say that the Anglo-Zionist gang runs the world and runs the United States in particular.

Now why would this be a special issue in the Alternative Media population?  Well, just look at the audience closely and you will understand me.

I have a bit of experience with this issue that goes back well beyond the year long mayhem wrought by Israel in its neighborhood.  My relevant experience goes back more than 10 years to when I began republishing essays about U.S.-Russian relations that I wrote on the web platform of La Libre Belgique, where they attracted a couple of hundred readers, onto the Moscow based platform called Russia Insider, where they attracted 40,000 or 50,000 readers each time. Russia Insider was then run by its American born editor Charles Bausman.  In those days Russia Insider was the one-of-a-kind place for publishing alternative news about Russia.

In general, about 1% of all readers of material published on the internet send in Comments, if this function is made available.  So it was with my articles in Russia Insider.  Such people are activists and do not represent all of the other 99% of readers.  But they do set the tone for the platform. If what these Comments express are too radical and off-putting, the readership will shrink.

In the case of Russia Insider, too many of the reader comments were by clearly antisocial people who happened to be based in the United States and hated their country. Still more, they hated the Anglo-Zionists whom they believed run the world.

Finally, Russia Insider was consumed by the hatred and anti-social behavior of the minority of readers who set the tone.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024