Will Netanyahu Tempt Fate?
Will Iran War be Another October Surprise?
Will Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu
concoct a war with Iran? Not if they have a tenth of the sense they
were born with. But that’s not much consolation when we’re dealing, on
the one hand, with a vulture capitalist and one time Mormon bishop whose
flip flopping gives opportunism a bad name and, on the other, with a
fascistically inclined ethnocratic zealot on a mission from God.
Each of them is nefarious enough to tempt fate. To make matters worse, it turns out that the two of them are friends.
It doesn’t help either that Barack Obama, having publicaly endorsed
the Israeli view of Iran’s nuclear program, reinforced their pretext,
the one that media pundits in thrall to the Israel lobby have promoted
for years. Neither does it help that, despite overwhelming evidence
that it produces the opposite of the intended effect, it is now taken
for granted in Western capitals that it is good policy to wage or
threaten to wage disarmament wars – ostensibly to block nuclear
proliferation.
If we could be confident of the rationality of the parties involved,
there would be no cause for alarm. But can anyone reflecting on the
absurdity of American politics in the Bush-Obama era, or on Israeli
politics, not help but worry? In both countries, the left is a shell
and the center is spineless and insipid. Meanwhile, the right is not
just mindless but also dangerously full of what William ButlerYeats
called “passionate intensity.”
Therefore the irrational could come to pass. It isn’t likely because
the consequences would be so catastrophic, but it isn’t impossible
either.
* * *
As if to underscore the debasement of his character and the larger
political culture of which it is an integral part, watch how, between
now and November, Mitt Romney heaps praise on Ronald Reagan, the Son of
Man second only to the Son of God in the minds of the Republican
faithful.
As an opportunist ever on the lookout for opportunities, Romney knows
that praising Reagan can’t hurt with “moderates” either — especially
not when Obama Democrats chirp on about how Reagan’s was a
“transformative” presidency, and as they praise his “pragmatism” on
taxes and his willingness to accord amnesty to undocumented aliens.
They have a point: Reagan’s views on many of the current fixations of
the Republican base are closer to Obama’s than to the Republican Party
line today.
But the Reagan cult is not about the man, the so so actor and acting
President who served as an amiable figurehead for plutocrats intent on
rolling back organized labor and undoing the New Deal-Great Society
settlement. It is about a mythical figure whose character took shape in
the nether regions of the political culture during the Clinton years.
By 1998, the process had gone so far that few Democrats even bothered to
object when Bill Clinton renamed Washington’s National Airport for that
villainous (and already senile) scoundrel.
Even so, it would cost Democrats to venerate Reagan the way
Republicans do; so they seldom dare. Yet our two post-Reagan Democratic
presidents have done more than any
Republican could to implement the vision that has come to be associated
with his name. Their efforts were not ideologically driven. Unlike
Republicans, they have no beef with the social and economic advances
achieved in the middle decades of the twentieth century. To the very
considerable extent that they have acted as if they did, it is only
because that’s what the oligarchs who own them wanted them to do.
To the extent that Democrats in Congress have gone along, it has
mainly been a case of follow (or at least support) the leader. When
Republicans are in the White House, Democratic legislators are more
inclined to accord weight to the interests of the people who vote them
into office.
So when the Republicans are in the White House, the Democratic legislators act somewhat more like an opposition party (the Cheney Administration got EVERYTHING passed that it wanted to get passed, legislatively, until they went to mess with Social Security. Was there ever a time of bi-partisanship? WELL ... LBJ got a lot of important legislation passed early in his term.
How is it then that after eight years of Clinton and more than three
already of Obama, Social Security and Medicare are still intact? The
short answer is: we’ve been lucky.
After ending “welfare as we know it,” Clinton set out to take on
Social Security. He failed only because Republicans couldn’t resist
making a federal case out of his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. When
Obama, aiming to please deficit hawks, tried much the same, he
encountered a less salacious obstacle – obstinacy. If Obama proposed
it, Republicans were against it. (This is the wonderful thing about today's Republican Party's Congressional Critters. They are DUMB FUCKS! that don't appreciate that they've got (potentially) the greatest Republican President ever in office RIGHT NOW AT THIS MOMENT; the one (the annointed one capable of rolling back social security, Medicare, and Medicaid) And so they turned down a Grand
Compromise confected in the White House that Reagan could only have
dreamed of achieving. In a second Obama term, we may not be so lucky.
My point is not that the historical Reagan was a liberal at heart,
quite the contrary. It is that Obama and Clinton are, or might as well
be, “secret Republicans.”
And what about adherents of today’s Reagan cult? Since their antics
are of more clinical than political interest, the traditional compass
points of the political lexicon are inadequate. Political space, or
rather the end of it occupied by the hard core Republican base, has
become too unhinged for received concepts or traditional understandings
of party labels to be of use.
* * *
Some things don’t change, however. Politicians will be politicians,
whether or not the inmates are running the asylum; and attitudes about
their violations of civics lessons norms have remained consistent even
as the Democratic Party has veered rightward and the Republican Party,
leading the way, has flipped off the charts altogether.
Everyone despises Lee Atwater-Karl Rove style “dirty tricks.” That
level of sleaziness is fit only for the likes of Bush family operatives
or worse. But truly ballsy machinations, like the Kennedys’ involvement
with organized crime in the West Virginia primary in 1960 and their
conniving with the Daley machine to fix the election in Chicago later
that year, or the shenanigans that won the young LBJ a place in Congress
and the nickname “landslide Lyndon” are a different matter. Even
squeaky-clean liberals can’t help admiring exploits like these.
Democrats are loathe to admit it, but they yearn for the days when
their party still had a will to win, and when knowledge of the art of
putting in the fix had not yet been lost. That would have been long
before the year 2000, when the Gore campaign, inept and spineless, let
George W. Bush’s father’s friends snatch victory from the jaws of
defeat.
Back in the day, Republicans too had it in them to be magisterial
crooks. No one knows for sure what arrangements Richard Nixon made with
Vietnamese diplomats in Paris in 1968; all we can say for sure is that
the Vietnamese must have come to regret trusting Tricky Dicky. But
there is a line of thought that holds that, notwithstanding the
Democrats’ disarray after the police riots at their Chicago convention,
Hubert Humphrey might have won but for Nixon’s scheming.
But Nixon, according to received opinion, was a small-time operator
compared to Reagan. The mother of all October surprises, the archetype,
is the one the Reagan campaign is believed to have engineered in 1980
with the Ayatollahs in Tehran. In exchange for who-knows-what, they
supposedly got the Iranian authorities to agree not to release the
hostages being held in the American embassy until the moment Jimmy
Carter’s presidency gave way to the Gipper’s.
Cult adherents don’t like flaunting candidate Reagan’s treasonous
pursuits any more than Democrats like harping on Kennedy’s ribald
hijinks or his and Johnson’s shady dealings. But they do believe that
Reagan pulled off that greatest of all dirty tricks, just as surely as
they think that, as President, he commanded the Berlin Wall to come
tumbling down. The idea that their Idol came into office by sticking it
to his hapless predecessor is one of the glories of the Reagan legend.
It therefore behooves us to worry that candidate Romney, a Reagan acolyte in these later days of the primary season, might, in imitatio Dei,
have an October surprise of his own up his sleeve. Could Romney be
planning to have Israel drag the United States into another Middle
Eastern war by promising who-knows-what to Netanyahu in exchange for
defying Obama for the umpteenth time?
Bringing the world economy to ruin and wreaking havoc throughout the
Middle East might seem a high a price to pay just for again putting
Obama in a humiliating situation. But the only sure thing about Romney
is that he wants to be President, and that he will do anything within
his power, no matter how dangerous or dumb, to make it happen.
* * *
The likely consequences for Israel of a war with Iran would be even
worse than for the United States, and so one would think that an Israeli
government, even one led by the likes of Netanyahu, would be
disinclined to go along, much less to instigate what would in all
likelihood turn into a catastrophe for the Jewish state. Sane minds in
Israel agree. But with Netanyahu believing, not unreasonably, that he
has carte blanche from the American Congress to do as he pleases, and
with his known predilection for pushing Obama around, all bets are off.
It was Netanyahu, after all, who discovered, even before Republicans
did, that Obama has feet of clay and that, when challenged, he can be
counted on to back off. But surely even he does not believe his
propaganda. No one who is even minimally rational and informed – that
is to say, no one this side of the John McCain-Joe Lieberman-Lindsay
Graham axis – could possibly think that an Iranian bomb, much less the
capacity to build one, loses an “existential threat” to Israel.
Netanyahu is not that stupid. The real reasons for his war mongering have nothing to do with what he says.
The problem Netanyahu or any Israeli Prime Minister faces is that
there is only so much moral capital left to squeeze out of Holocaust
guilt. Much as Republican obstinacy merits admiration, one can only
marvel at how successful Zionists have been in maintaining that gift
that keeps on giving. Not only have they submerged Jewish identity
politics under its spell; they have even swept up into it all but the
most liberal and the most retrograde strains of contemporary Judaism.
But nothing lasts forever.
In the words of Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories: y’esh g’vul,
there are limits, limits to what their North American and European
enablers will permit the state of Israel to do to Palestinians and
others in the region to make up for what European fascists did to
European Jews before the state of Israel even existed.
Those limits have yet to register politically to a degree that would
worry Netanyahu and his comrades, but even they must realize that the
time for that to happen is long past due, and that no matter how much
Holocaust remembrance they can still drum up seven decades after the end
of World War II, public opinion is bound eventually to turn against the
idea that Hitler gave Israel a “get out of jail free” card that never
expires.
This is why Israel needs at least the specter of an existential
threat to maintain such international support as it has. It needs to
be able to present itself as the state of a people defending itself
against an enemy eternally bent on its annihilation. One might almost
say that if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, AIPAC would have had to
invent him.
The specter of impending annihilation is also useful for keeping
Israeli society from splintering apart. Countries under attack draw
together, and Israel is no exception. With Zionist convictions on the
wane and the Nazi Judeocide a distant memory, existential threats have
become a condition for the possibility of the Jewish state.
Threats of war are almost as useful as actual wars, especially if
they are or can be made to seem credible; and there is the advantage
that, as long as matters don’t get out of hand, no one needs to be
killed or maimed. Therefore, an Iranian bomb that doesn’t exist is a
godsend for Israel. Netanyahu has every reason to talk the specter up.
Ironically, his trusty, if unwitting, accomplices in the Iranian
government have been more than helpful in this endeavor. For their own
reasons, they talk an ominous line. It’s a win-win situation, so long
as it stays just talk. If Netanyahu can keep his wits about him, it
will. But that’s a big “if.”
* * *
Along with Turkey, Iran used to be Israel’s best friend in the Middle
East – not just under the Shah but in the decade that followed the
Iranian revolution too. This made sense for as long as both Israel and
Iran feared Soviet influence and the Iraqi army more than they feared
each other. That was the case until the Soviet Union imploded and the
first Bush’s Gulf War made Iraq militarily inconsequential.
Revolutionary Iran was an ally of Israel, but in its effort to become
a hegemon throughout the Islamic world, it took pains to present itself
as anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. In Israel, they knew enough to
focus on deeds, not words. It has only been since the geopolitical
context changed in 1991 that Israeli governments and their supporters
abroad have found it useful to promote the view that the Iranians really
mean what their most rabid spokesmen say.
* * *
Thus it is hardly the prospect of being “wiped off the map” that
worries Netanyahu and his co-thinkers. What they want is for “the
international community” – the usual designation for friends and vassals
of the United States – to prevent Iran from developing a deterrent to
Israel’s freedom of action in the Middle East. An Iranian bomb would be
an obstacle in the way of the untrammeled exercise of Israeli power,
much as the Soviet Union and a flourishing Iraq once were.
By Netanyahu’s lights, a powerful Iran would not be good for Israel.
From the moment the Shah fell, the foreign policy establishment in the
United States has also wanted Iran kept weak. Inasmuch as the
Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Iran’s hand in the
region, the stewards of the empire now have even more reason to want
Iran’s nuclear capacity expunged.
Romney is with them on this, and why not: moderates are on board and
the hard right, the current object of his pandering, is awash in
Islamophobia. Under neoconservative tutelage, it has become the
vanguard of the perpetual war party. Were he focused more on the world
he would have to operate in were his electoral campaign to succeed, he
would by now have second thoughts about a war with Iran. But, for the
time being, winning is all; and, to that end, bellicosity, in both word
and deed, makes sense.
But, of course, in the not very much larger scheme of things, it
makes no sense at all. To will the end is not always to will the means
thereto; not if the means would undermine ends one wills even more.
This is why an Iran war for an October Surprise would be unconscionably
reckless on both Romney’s and Netanyahu’s parts.
* * *
And yet! Romney wants to win in November and Netanyahu is almost as
eager to deny Obama a second term – not because he hasn’t been servile
enough but because he fears, not unreasonably, that Obama knows better,
and that, in the right circumstances, he might act on that knowledge.
I used to think that Netanyahu would have doubts about Romney too.
The problem, I thought, was not only that Romney is too unprincipled to
be a reliable ally, but also that, as a Mormon, he and the Christian
Zionists in the Republican base are not of one mind on who the Chosen
People are or where the Promised Land is. This theological difference
would also put his reliability in question.
I therefore thought that, of all the Republicans in contention as the
primary season reached its denouement, Romney was the worst from
Netanyahu’s point of view; or rather the second worst after Ron Paul.
Rick Santorum would be better, though he is a Catholic more popish
than the Pope, and the Vatican, for all harm it does in the world, is at
least sensitive to the Palestinians’ plight and dubious of Zionism’s
claims. One would think that that would lower Santorum’s appeal. But
not so much! Santorum is, after all, of a piece, morally and
intellectually, with the most benighted evangelical Protestants, and so,
from Netanyahu’s point of view, his popery can be forgiven.
Newt Gingrich, also a Catholic (of late) but a Southern Baptist at
heart, would be better still. However, to Netanyahu’s dismay, not even
Sheldon Adelson’s money could keep that miscreant’s campaign afloat.
I therefore thought that Netanyahu just might end up doing what Wall
Street did four years ago and may well do this year again if Romney
founders – let Obama be their “yes we can” man. He is not their first
choice but, as the song (suitably mangled) declares, if you can’t be
with the one you love, love or at least get by with the one you’re with –
if he’s desperate to be with you.
However my confidence in the likelihood that Netanyahu would go that route was shaken by the April 7 edition of The New York Times where I learned that he and Romney are old friends – practically soul mates.
It seems that in the mid-70s, they both worked as “corporate
consultants” at the Boston Consulting Group, where they formed a fast
and lasting friendship based on their “shared conservative ideologies”
and “the same profoundly analytical view of the world.” According to
the Times, they’ve not only kept in touch over the years but also advise one another when the occasion arises.
The good news, then, is that if these are the kinds of people who are
called upon to advise corporations at the pinnacles of the capitalist
system, the system cannot be long for this world. The bad news is that,
in the spirit of friends helping friends, those two could well conspire
not just to bring Obama down, but the world along with him. This would
be an October Surprise surpassing anything the maleficent Reagan could
have imagined, a surprise to end all surprises.
I’d be more worried than I am about what these brothers under the
skin might be cooking up were it not for the timing. October is too
late to start another “stupid war,” as Obama said of the Bush-Cheney war
in Iraq before he made it his own. A war so close to Election Day
would most likely strengthen the Commander-in-Chief’s position. For
Obama to own the devastation an Iran War would unleash would take time;
perhaps more time than there is between now and November.
It might have been otherwise had Romney sealed the deal sooner and if
his standing within his own party were more secure. In other words,
had “moderates” or at least saner plutocrats been calling the shots in
the GOP, we might now be closer to an outcome compared to which the
murder and mayhem Obama has superintended these past three and a half
years would almost seem benign.
The irony is palpable. In the end, it just might be that the
trajectory the campaign for the Republican nomination has taken thanks
to the out of control lunacy of the Republican base and the candidates
who represent its views is our best protection against a devastating
October surprise.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People.
He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of
Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
