After watching all the militarism, weaponry, and xenophobic pseudo-patriotism of our Memorial Day celebrations, I began wondering why so few question our destabilizing military adventurism in the Middle East and our continuing embrace of overwhelming military power. Our policies in the Middle East have long been and continue to be irrational, hypocritical, and blatantly destructive. And now comes word that the US, in order to protect Israel from having to reveal its nuclear arsenal, is refusing to sign the document produced by a conference on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Is there no one among the powerful in Washington or in the mainstream media with the wisdom and courage to denounce the sheer self-contradictory idiocy of our policies on the Middle East and on nuclear weapons? Not even Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown, all of whom I admire, have done so. Maybe Russ Feingold, the only one of our politicians who had the courage to vote against the Patriot Act, will do so now that he’s running for the Senate. As for now, there’s just a vacuum. I’m no expert on the Middle East, but even I can see the absurdity of our current policies.
Of course, our bungling Middle East policy goes way back—back to at least 1948 with the division of Palestine and the brutal dispossession of Palestinians. But I’m not concerned so much about past bungling as about our current bungling. Will we never learn from history? Do we not realize the destruction we have caused, that by our intervention we have destabilized not just whole countries, but the entire region? After, in effect, creating ISIS by our disastrous and illegal occupation of Iraq, we have adopted a policy toward that brutal organization that is at best self-contradictory. We, of course, regard ISIS as an enemy. We also regard as enemies the bitter enemies of ISIS, Syrian President Assad and Shiite Iraq, maintaining sanctions against the latter and supporting “moderate” rebels (i.e. ISIS) against the former.
So while providing ISIS with arms through so-called “moderate” anti-Assad rebels, we meanwhile work with ISIS’s chief source of funding, support, and religious training, the Saudis, to pressure Iran, the most powerful regional enemy of ISIS. Of course, we would not think of pressuring the Saudis to stop supporting ISIS; no, the Saudis, like Pakistan, which continues to support radical Islam, are our allies. Nor would we think of allying with Iran to defeat ISIS; Iran is our enemy. And of course Israel and Saudi Arabia would disapprove were we to enter into any kind of alliance with Iran. So we mumble about this new danger in the Middle East while deliberately avoiding any discussion of its real causes or its possible solutions.
Our sanctions against Iran have long seemed to me sheer hypocrisy. The US, the only nation in the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon, the nation with arguably the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, the nation that has started more wars, killed more people, and probably caused more human misery than any other over the past seventy years and that is regarded internationally as the most dangerous in the world has the temerity to punish the Iranian people because their government might consider producing a nuclear weapon. Never mind that Iran’s strongest regional enemies, Pakistan and Israel, have at least 80 nuclear weapons each. And now the US, deliberately scuttles non-proliferation talks because they call for a UN organized Middle East disarmament conference that might force Israel to reveal its 80-400 nuclear weapons.
Never mind that everyone knows Israel has nuclear weapons and that such a Middle East disarmament conference is part of earlier non-proliferation agreements to which the US agreed. We must not under any circumstances embarrass Israel! In an article in Truthout that I strongly recommend, Joseph Gerson writes, “So much for President Obama's commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world.”
During the cold war the asinine doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” had the appropriate acronym—MAD. The acronym still fits. Are not Middle East and nuclear weapons policies the most self-contradictory idiocy imaginable? So where is the outrage in our media? Where among our politicians?