America's Wars In The Middle East
I once stated publicly that it was easy to demonstrate
that supporting Israel has not blessed America and a pastoral colleague saw my
statement, and sought me out to query me about this. He said he would love to
get together and grill me about how I could make such a statement when it is
clear that America is the greatest nation on earth, and therefore, he asserted
that I probably did not have a credible leg to stand on. As you have seen,
though, from my previous two parts of this series, not only is this argument
able to be sustained, once you start investigating this subject it becomes easy
to see that the idea that standing with Israel has blessed America is not only
wrong, it actually becomes quite absurd the more that you look.
I should note before I go any further that I do not write
these arguments with any intended antagonism towards America. Quite the
opposite actually. America is a great nation that has achieved much good in the
world over time. And it saddens me to see such a great nation diminished by such
bad ideas. It is also worse that a great source of this problem stems from
heterodox teachings from the evangelical church in the United States,
especially. The church has a lot to answer for in the way it has mislead Americans
on so many topics. From prosperity heresy to giving a shroud of cover for
forever wars in the Middle East, the Church has done a lot of damage in America
and has blasphemed the name of Christ in the process.
And it is without dispute that the Church is largely to blame
for this. As Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe notes, “The Christian and Jewish
lobbies for Israel, at least until now, were deemed the most important ones by
Israel. And extraordinarily, it seeks their help in gaining legitimacy in this
century as well.”[1]
Without the evangelical church’s focus on artificially restoring the nation of
Israel this effort would not have been possible. This support for Israel did
not just spring up after the fact, as some people assume. As Pappe notes,
“Zionism began as an
evangelical Christian concept and later an active project. It appeared as a
religious appeal to the faithful both to aid and be prepared for the ‘return of
the Jews’ to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there as the fulfilment
of God’s will. But soon after, the Christian involved in this campaign
politicised this ‘theology of return’, once they realize that similar notion
had begun to emerge among European Jews, who despaired of finding a solution to
the never-ending anti-Semitism on the continent. The Christian desire to see a
Jewish Palestine convinced with a similar European Jewish vision in the late
nineteenth century.
For Christian and Jewish
supporters of Zionism, Palestine, as such did not exist. In their minds, it was
replaced by the ‘Holy Land’ and in that ‘Holy Land’, from the very beginning,
there was no indigenous population, only a small community of faithful Christian
and pious Jews…”[2]
These deniers of the existence of Palestine amongst
Jewish and Christian Zionists exist still to this day, as you have probably
seen. You may have even been one yourself once. I once was one of them until
the plain reading of history broke that spell for me. But from the very
beginning this effort to recreate the nation of Israel in Palestine, or the
land of Canaan, was a joint Jewish and Christian effort. That is not to say
that all Jews and Christians supported it, but that large segments of both
sides have been working behind the scenes and publicly to get this done. This
is well documented,
“US President Woodrow
Wilson’s support for the Balfour Declaration would not have been so strong if
not for his view of America as the new Zion and support for Christian
restorationism, the idea of a Jewish return to the Promised Land. From the time
of the Puritans, Americans saw their country as having religious significance.
Thousands of towns were given biblical names and colleges made Hebrew a
mandatory part of their curricula. Restorationism was voiced by American
leaders as early as second president John Adams, who wrote in a letter: “I
really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.” [3]
I know for many of you reading this you are aware of this
evangelical support helping prop up Israel from the beginning. But I have had
people deny it to me, so I feel like it needs to be thoroughly established.
This support is both well documented and widely so. Therefore, the entire
project of modern Israel can legitimately be seen as a test case for the idea
that standing with Israel brings blessings to those who support it. And in
America’s case, this is clearly not what has happened.
One of the results of America’s close standing with
Israel has been to get it sucked into an ongoing round of forever wars in the
quagmire of the Middle East. This was obviously going to happen, because it was
only through British Imperial might that pre-1948 Jewish migration was able to
increase its presence in the land. As was noted,
“Jabotinsky wrote in 1925,
“you must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide a
garrison on your behalf…. Zionism is a colonizing venture and, therefore, it
stands or falls on the question of armed forces.”81 At least initially, only
the armed forces provided by Britain could overcome the natural resistance of
those being colonized.[4]
The myth that someone does not exist is most easily
disproven when that person smacks you in the nose. And that is precisely what
the Palestinians did to British Imperial efforts. They did not accept being
told they were non-existent and irrelevant and they did not want to be overcome without a fight.
Eventually Israelis would take the lead in these efforts, but the continued
ongoing support of more powerful nations was just the given expectation. The
King-Crane commission, delegated to investigate the establishment of Israel in
Palestine made this exact assessment,
“Told by representatives of
the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete
dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the course
of turning Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none
of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could
be carried out except by force of arms,” and all considered that a force of
“not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to execute this program. In
the end, it took the British more than double that number of troops to prevail
over the Palestinians in 1936 through 1939. In a cover letter to Wilson, the
commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government decided to
support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing
the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a
Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”82 The commission
thereby accurately predicted the course of the subsequent century.”[5]
That which does not exist does not fight back. As Khalidi
notes,
“Balfour did “not think that
Zionism will hurt the Arabs,” and initially seemed to believe there would be no
significant reaction to the Zionists taking over their country. But in the
words of George Orwell, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid
reality, usually on a battlefield,”83 which is precisely what happened on the
battlefield in the Great Revolt, to the Palestinians’ lasting detriment.”[6]
Israel thanked Britian for its efforts in establishing an
increased Jewish presence in the Mandate era in Palestine with terror attacks.[7] But we will maybe come
back to that in a future post.
For now, we should note that even before the nation of
Israel was set up America was warned that to support it, practically, meant a
massive military presence in the region. The British underestimated how hard
this would be and suffered for it. America has too. While I do not hesitate to
state that I support the existence of a state for Israel, because I believe
that every nation should have its own sovereign state to govern its people, still,
it must be stated that for many Christians the Zionist dream is very much a
Utopian vision, and Utopias are always a dangerous quest. The dream was that
the land was a basically an uninhabited land that was largely populated by
Jewish people since time immemorial, and therefore, there is no reason why a
Jewish state should not be able to settle across the land of Abraham. The
reality is that since the Roman times the Jewish population in then
Syria-Palestine and then just Palestine was a tiny minority and whoever wanted
to take the land away from Arab rule would have a heavy fight on their hands
from the Palestinian people, who were numerous, and had been there in some
cases just as long.[8]
And this is exactly what has taken place. As noted above, “…if the American
government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,
they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since
only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”
This prediction also gives us a window through which to
explain America’s disastrous 20th and early 21st century
Middle Eastern foreign policy. America has lurched from defeat to defeat in the
region, with the exception of the first Iraq war[9], largely because its Middle
Eastern policy has been Israeli centric and irrational.
Jeffrey Sachs, economist, public policy analyst, former
Harvard and current Columbia University professor, notes,
“For 30 years the Israel
Lobby has induced the U.S. to fight wars on Israel’s behalf designed to prevent
the emergence of a Palestinian State. Netanyahu, who first came to power in
1996, and has been prime minister for 17 years since then, has been the main
cheerleader for U.S.-backed wars in the Middle East. The result has been a
disaster for the U.S. and a bloody catastrophe not only for the Palestinian
people but for the entire Middle East.
These have not been wars to
defend Israel, but rather wars to topple governments that oppose Israel’s
oppression of the Palestinian people.”[10]
Americans, and the world really, have been lied to about
these wars across the years. At the heart of this American aggression in the
Middle East has been America’s close ties to Israel, and particularly Benjamin
Netanyahu. As Sach’s notes,
“What is shocking is that
Washington has turned the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu
for his disastrous wars. The history of the Israel lobby’s complete takeover of
Washington can be found in the remarkable new book by Ilan Pappé, Lobbying
for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024).
Netanyahu repeatedly told
the American people that they would be the beneficiaries of his policies. In
fact, Netanyahu has been an unmitigated disaster for the American people,
bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing
in the world, making the U.S. complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing
the world closer to World War III.”[11]
You’ll recognize in my references that I quote that
mentioned book above. Netanyahu has had an incredible personal influence over
American policy in the last three decades. As can be seen by this except from
his book Fighting Terrorism,
“The cessation of terrorism
must therefore be a clear-cut demand, backed up by sanctions and with no prizes
attached. As with all international efforts, the vigorous application of
sanctions to terrorist states must be led by the United States, whose leaders
must choose the correct sequence, timing, and circumstances for these actions.”[12]
Netanyahu outlined his belief that it was necessary for
the United States to lead the effort to topple calcitrant governments around
the Middle East. Look at the countries he noted, in 1995 mind you, that the
United States needed to deal with, “The international terrorist network is thus
based on regimes—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s
Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as the Sudan.”[13] Such is the influence of
this one man that his determination of how America should lead the way in
fighting against his enemies became American foreign policy in large measure up
to the present day.
This influence in the American political system came in
many forms, but particularly through the Neo-Conservative Plan for the a New
American Century (PNAC).[14] PNAC “set forth a new
agenda for foreign and military policy…” for conservatives to push in the
Clinton era, that would bolster American support for the conservative party,
increase the power of the military industrial complex in American politics, and
lay out a strategy for creating American dominance in the Middle East.[15] The PNAC came to power in American politics through
the second Bush administration. The aim of this lobby was to diminish the
influence of Paleo-conservatives and other non-interventionist conservatives in
the Republican party, to allow the conditions for American to establish a
“pax-Americana” and military dominance over the world.[16]
The group was mainly made up of secular
Neo-Conservatives, and other foreign policy hardliners. However, it did have a
Christian influence as well,
“Albeit sparsely
represented, right-wing social conservatives closely associated with the
Christian Right constituted another important sector in the PNAC coalition.
Among those representing the social conservative faction were Gary Bauer, former
director of the Family Research Council and current president of American
Values; former Vice President Dan Quayle; and two other prominent cultural
warriors: Steve Forbes and cofounder of Empower America, former Representative
Vin Weber.”[17]
PNAC was calling for America to deal with the problems of
Iraq and Taiwan while Clinton was still president. But they got their moment to
shine in the days of Bush jnr.
Have you ever wondered why America invaded Iraq because
hijackers from Saudi Arabia, who were probably hiding in Afghanistan at the
time and who had nothing to do with Hussein, attacked America?[18] Well, here is your
answer,
“On Sept. 20, 2001 PNAC sent
a an open-letter to President Bush that commended his newly declared war on terrorism
and urged him not only to target Osama bin Laden but also other “perpetrators,”
including Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah. The letter made one of the first
arguments for regime change in Iraq as part of the war on terror. According to
the PNAC letter, “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in
some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does
not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of
terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute
an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”[19]
It is because this is what the Neocons wanted. And they
got their war. And as Sachs has noted, this was all outlined by Netanyahu in
his book about how to fight terrorism. The idea was that all you had to do was
topple difficult governments and put the people you want in charge and this
would stop terrorism. Boy does that sound stupid now in the light of hindsight.
What if those governments even moderately represented the thinking of their
people? What if the people just took issue to being invaded by westerners with
rainbow flags and feminist messaging? Yet, this effort to stand with Israel and
topple these governments has directed much of American foreign policy for the
last three decades.
Look at this,
“The most recent PNAC
report, Iraq: Setting the Record Straight, is an apologia for the disastrous
invasion and war. It concludes that President Bush’s decision to act “derived
from a perception of Saddam’s intentions and capabilities, both existing and
potential, and was grounded in the reality of Saddam’s prior behavior.” The
PNAC report blames the reporting on the UN inspection teams and U.S. government
statements that “left wide gaps in the public understanding of what the
president faced on March 18, 2003, and what we have learned since.” Also PNAC
charges that administration critics “selectively used material in the
historical record to reinforce their case against the president’s policy.” In
other words, rather than recognizing what we now know—that much of the intelligence
presented to the public to justify the attack was false—it insists that the
president made the right choice and makes no apology for its own role in urging
the administration to invade Iraq.1”[20]
America was lied into the war and about the reasons for
the war. And people worked this out pretty early on.
This article I am quoting from here was written in 2006
and already they were noting the damage that the Neo-conservative policies had
done to America and its Middle Eastern policy. Today, we see it has gotten much
worse, and currently is escalating. PNAC lost its influence over time, however,
American involvement in the Middle East continued. In large part because of the
belief by many in America that the United States will be blessed if it stands
with Israel. This was even stated recently by American House Speaker Mike
Johnson.[21]
America has become more radical in its outspoken support
for Israel as the situation in the Middle East has escalated out of control.[22]
Now that we have established that America’s wars in the
Middle East stem in large part from its support for Israel, let’s ask the
question: have these wars blessed America? No! Objectively not. America has
grown increasingly in debt because of the expenditure of these wars.[23] The war in Iraq has also cost
America more than 2 trillion dollars, just by itself, and this figure could end
up being over 6 trillion over the next few decades.[24] The way the war on terror
has been fought has caused many American liberties to be taken from them. It
has involved itself in torture programs, and has killed countless people around
the Middle East. The death toll on America’s hands in Iraq alone is deplorable.
And America has been rapidly losing its standing around the world as a result
of these wars. It is no longer viewed as a liberator state, but as a violently
aggressive one.
The Bible says explicitly, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
But America has not been making peace in the region, it has been making war
against foreign peoples who may not be on our team religiously or morally, but
who have not attacked America or Australia. Therefore, these wars are
illegitimate wars of aggression. This a clear sign of a country given over to a
curse. In this case, ever increasing bloodshed. God judged Egypt, Assyria,
Babylon, Greece, Syria and many other nations in the Bible for the bloodshed
they caused in far off foreign lands. What does the Bible say about countries
which invade other lands and take their spoils,
“9 Proclaim to the
strongholds in Ashdod and to the strongholds in the land of Egypt, and say,
“Assemble yourselves on the mountains of Samaria, and see the great tumults
within her, and the oppressed in her midst.” 10 “They do not know how to do
right,” declares the Lord, “those who store up violence and robbery in their
strongholds.” 11 Therefore thus says the Lord God: “An adversary shall surround
the land and bring down[a] your defenses from you, and your strongholds shall
be plundered” (Amos 3:9-11).
Is it a coincidence that the nation that respects very
few borders in the world cannot protect its own borders? No. A nation without
borders is hardly a nation, and God has taken away security from American
borders in large numbers. How can you attack other nations across the Middle
East, a far away region, and expect not to have spiritual curses because of
this?
Israel has a right to exist and to defend its people. So
to, though, do the Palestinians. We, and Americans, have no right nor moral
standing to get involved. And in the case of America, getting involved has led
it to commit grievous sins of violence against many countries. Not only has
standing with Israel not blessed America, it has caused it to go down a very
dark path indeed. One that was predicted, mind you, as we noted already but
read it again,
“In a cover letter to
Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government
decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are
committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by
force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”82 The
commission thereby accurately predicted the course of the subsequent century.”[25]
The people who wrote this had far more wisdom than many
Christians today. Till next time.
List of References
[1]
Ilan Pappe, 2024, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, Oneworld
Publications, preface.
[4] Khalidi,
Rashid . The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: The International Bestseller (p.
51). Profile. Kindle Edition.
[6] Ibid,
Khalidi, p. 52.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
[9]
Though its success their probably led to its failure later on, as it grew over
confident.
[18]
Yes, I know. I know. Another time, another article.
[25]
Khalidi, Rashid . The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: The International
Bestseller (pp. 51-52). Profile. Kindle Edition.
