WARHAWKS AND REPUBLICANS ARE ON THE RISE AGAIN FOR THEIR SECOND ATTEMPT AT CREATING A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY

One could be forgiven for thinking that the election of a popular Democrat president in 2008 who had promised peace and an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the world could have looked forward to peaceful days ahead. Instead the war in Iraq has backfired on the US and has led directly to the mess the Middle East now finds itself in as the Islamic State (IS) spreads its poison across the region. All that President Obama seems to have achieved is to postpone what now seems to be the inevitable explosion that will likely occur after he has gone.

Obama’s failure to stabilise the Middle East stems directly from his inability to insist that Palestine be given statehood in a territory that is not subordinate to Israel in any way. His protests to Israel over settlement building in the West Bank have been completely ignored. His failure to see that Netanyahu and his fellow right-wing Zionists within the Israeli government have never had any intention of allowing Palestine to become a sovereign state – despite the pretence of ‘talks’ that kept Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and later John Kerry needlessly on the go for years – has brought only misery and poverty to the Palestinian people as the Israelis destroyed their homes in the
Gaza Strip and taken their freedom and lands in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the ‘Arab Spring’ saw the disintegration of Syria, Libya and Egypt. As the Syrian civil war turned into something akin to the Spanish Civil War where foreign fighters flocked to fight governments and then each other as it degenerated into a bloodbath where thousands died, Obama was unable to prevent Iraq from being sucked into the vortex of so-called ‘Islamic extremism’.

Obama’s failure was his inability to see how inevitable this all was. Obama’s inability to resist Israeli demands that the Syrian revolution against President Bashir al-Assad be supported by the US meant that the violence there escalated out of control as the various factional interests fighting against al-Assad’s government began to polarise into powerful groups that eventually coalesced into what we see there today; a pseudo-religious anarchical-fascist phenomenon that seems to be growing exponentially. And initially all this was allowed to happen because of Israel and America’s support for just about anyone fighting al-Assad and his allies Hezbollah and Iran.

Now the situation has become almost out of control. Feeding the so-called ‘Islamists’ is the US and their allies’ air attacks against IS in Iraq and Syria which seems to achieve nothing except infuriate the extremists to the point where they become ever more blood-thirsty in the lands they occupy and threaten to attack those countries that attack them using violent acts of terrorism. Right-wing Western governments, including Canada, New Zealand and Australia, have pledged support to the effort to confront IS thus exposing the peoples of those nations to retaliation.

Obama has found himself in a strange place where he knows that Americans are fed up with war. Iraq cost America dearly. Obama knows he can’t go to war again for Israel as Netanyahu has demanded. Iran is not Iraq. While Iran supports al-Assad in Syria, Obama has kept that issue away from his attempts to find a way to ensure Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Obama, rightly, regards diplomacy and negotiation as the way to settle the issue while the Republican warhawks, the neoconservatives and the Christian Zionists of the Western world together with the right-wing Zionists of Israel would prefer to use force. They regard Iran’s nuclear program as an ‘existential threat’ to Israel.

For years Israel has accused Iran of having a nuclear weapons program and that Iran is hell-bent on ‘wiping Israel off the map’. Netanyahu has not let go of this meme and now, as Obama’s presidency comes into its final months before in the run up to the 2016 Presidential elections, the warhawks in both the US and Israel begin clamouring again for action against Iran.

Helping their cause is the rampant growth of IS atrocities, military successes, and apparent attraction of their cause to Muslim youths trapped in a Western world that they see as Islamophobic and which has evolved into a vicious cycle of mutual hatred – one that ultimately the disaffected youth that are caught up in it cannot win. It is only a matter of time before the Western nations led by a Republican US government dominated by warhawks and neoconservatives go all out to crush IS in its tracks.

Meanwhile, Israel, buoyed by both a renewed militarism in the US and a revitalised alliance with Israel that would characterise a Republican administration, would, with the full support of the US and its Western allies, deal with its own enemies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

For the warhawks, Republicans and their extreme right-wing allies both in Israel and within the Western world, the up-coming elections in Israel and the 2016 presidential elections will be crucial.

In Israel, the 17 March elections will likely return a staunchly pro-Zionist government into office no matter who wins – and one should remember that virtually the entire Israeli political system is right-wing compared to other so-called Western democracies. One should not be lulled into thinking that any party in Israel labelled as ‘left-wing’ is actually left-wing. The reality is that it’s simply not as right-wing as many of the ultra-nationalist extreme right-wing parties that envisage a Greater Israel free off all Arabs and including an annexed Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Neoconservatives in the US are already promoting their preferred Republican candidates with Jeb Bush being seriously backed by the big money donators. Scott Walker is also in the Republican frame being backed by the neoconservatives.

On 20 January 2017 the world’s political landscape is likely to suddenly change for the worse if a foreign policy focussed Republican wins the presidential election, a right-wing nationalist Israeli government is formed after the coming 17 March elections, and no significant inroads towards the defeat of IS has occurred.

For the people of the US, while they’d prefer to keep out of wars, the atrocities being committed in the Middle East by IS may prove to be a tipping point for many voters who may find a Republican promise to put an end to the reign of IS hard to resist. They may well fall again for the promise of a quiet Middle East once Iran and IS have been dealt with – just as they did in 2003.

As the Obama years draw to a close and his promises of a lasting peace shattered, so the warhawks, neocons and their allies around the world with their delusions of Western Exceptionalism will once again bring the world to the brink of catastrophe in the Middle East – and possibly even beyond the brink.