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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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America's alliance with Israel has been catastrophically costly economically, diplomatically, militarily, reputationally... tapping an IDF volunteer as VP of the United States is not a display of competence. It's a display of being captured by foreign influence.

The current logic of US alignment with Israel is A) counterbalancing Iran, which would be our enemy anyways and B) keeping them out of Russia’s orbit.

Jews are unpopular in the Arab world but actually Arab elites seem able to live with Israel, and none of these countries are democratic enough to have to worry about populist candidates. Israel isn’t notably unpopular in the places the US actually needs popular support.

Quite right. The Arab Oil Shock was a direct result of US military aid to Israel. Massive economic damage there. Osama Bin Laden's Islamic extremism was to a significant extent motivated by treatment of Palestinians as he correctly realized that expensive US military aid to Israel was being used against them (and Lebanon + others).

And then there was the Iraq War which is still explained as a kind of mysterious anomaly. Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on. They provided false intelligence about WMDs. There were all kinds of generals and knowledgeable figures who said things like 'Oh of course we know that the US isn't threatened if Iraq acquires nuclear weapons but Israel certainly is'.

Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on.

Hmmm….

In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.

Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.

I recall that Sharon told Putin (who was leading a push for WMD inspectors to verify whether Iraq did have WMDs) that the time for inspections was over, it was too late. His spokesman Ra'anan Gissen certainly went around spruking the WMD story.

Netanyahu was publishing op-eds calling for war. Foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."

Netanyahu was of course in favor of the war, and promoted to Bush his own fake intelligence in a way that (as the source of the quote I quoted discusses actually) that bypasses both Mossad and Sharon.

Sharon said a lot of things to a lot of people. Perhaps he didn't want to be seen as too strongly endorsing a US invasion of an Arab state. We do know that he was working with zionists in Bush's cabinet to help launder pro-invasion information to the administration:

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

A former IDF brigadier general also criticized Israeli intelligence along similar lines.

"Catastrophic" compared to what?

American neutrality in the decision of Jews to create their ethnostate in the middle of the Arab world. They chose it, they can defend it themselves- not at the economic, military, and diplomatic expense of the United States. It's not too late for America to course-correct, but our "Democracy" will never provide a ticket that is skeptical of the alliance. You either get to vote for the ticket which is already agitating for war with Iran, or the ticket poised to tap an IDF Volunteer as VP. "Democracy", right?

The US was neutral for the first couple decades of Isreal's existence becaus the US was trying to cozy up to Syria and Egypt to keep them out of the Soviet orbit.

It wasn't until 1962 that JFK lifted the embargo prohibitting Isreal from purchasing US arms and by which time the Isrealis had already fought two wars against the Arab world without US help.

This idea you seem to have that US relations with the arab world would be cordial and the middle east peaceful it weren't for those medlesome Jews displays a deep ignorance of both the diplomatic and economic realities of the 20th century (cough oil and the Cold War) as well as the centuries of cultural conflict both within the Arab world and between the Arabs and the West preceding it.

our "Democracy" will never provide a ticket that is skeptical of the alliance

It might at some point in the future. The reason why it doesn't now is, roughly speaking, because more voters either support the alliance, or don't care much about it one way or another and are willing to just continue with the status quo, than oppose it.

This is true even on the Democratic side. Biden, who supports the alliance, won more primary votes than any anti-alliance contender in the primaries. Which does not necessarily mean that the Democratic voter base is for the alliance, it is more that even for most anti-alliance Democratic voters, it is not among the top issues that they care about so they are willing to throw their anti-alliance feelings to the curb and vote for the Democrats anyway.

Granted, a major part of why Biden won is that he seemed more electable than his primary opponents, and in our winner-takes-all electoral system that is a major concern for many people. However, if enough Americans were against the alliance, there would be enough electable anti-alliance politicians that this would not be an issue like it was with Biden.

The fraction of Americans for whom the alliance is truly a top political issue is simply not that big. So I would not necessarily agree with you putting "democracy" in quotes, because to me the US' attitude to the alliance seems to not necessarily be the outcome of undemocratic forces. Certainly undemocratic forces, like pro-Israel lobbying, contribute to it, but at the same time, if the majority of Americans truly wanted to leave the alliance, and it was one of their top political goals, I have a hunch that the US would leave the alliance.

This might actually happen at some point in the future, if anti-alliance sentiment in the US continues to grow.

Often the reasoning becomes circular. Israel helps the US against US enemies. The enemies are enemies due to conflicts caused by Israel.

A good alternative approach is that of China. They buy oil from Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis. No trillion dollar wars and yet they have consistently gotten their oil. They even managed to get Iran and Saudi to join BRICS together.

As an aside, I am peeved by people referring to Saudi Arabia as "Saudi", which is a pseudo-Arabic attributive adjective analogous to a more native "Saudian" (e.g. belonging to the House of Saud, its ruling dynasty). This is as if you chose to refer to the USA as "United", or the USSR as "Soviet" - "Nazi Germany even managed to get America and Soviet to join forces".

In Arabic don't they usually shorten it to السعودي (As-saudi - "The Saudi")?

It's more like saying "America" than saying "The United." The alternative would be calling it "Arabia," which sounds rather archaic in English.

That would be surprising to me if true - I'd expect as-Saudiyyah (السعوديّة) just because gendered languages don't usually forget the grammatical gender of an omitted or implied word (and Arabia is feminine). However, I can't claim to be familiar with real casual usage since my only qualifications are a couple of college classes and general language nerdery.

You're right, it should be السعوديّة, the feminine form (from المملكة العربية السعودية - "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia"). This or السعودي (masculine adjective form) is what I usually hear from Arabs in casual conversation.

Well as you gesture it’s how they refer to themselves and to their country “I’m going back to Saudi this week” etc, so it is what it is.

Right, I did notice Arabs doing this in English, but that doesn't do anything to reduce the feeling of wrongness about the English use to me.

I could imagine the reason they do it is a combination of mistranslation (Arabic definite articles distribute over all attributes/modifiers, so "Saudian" Arabia is literally "the Arabia the Saudian"; hence no distinction is made between attributives ("Saudian (...)") and nominalizations ("the Saudian")) and calque (as they famously like referring to things and people by nisbah/belonging epithets, like al-Baghdadi/"the Baghdadian").

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