This is not Gaza, this is a picture of Western liberal civilization. This is a world where the Western liberal intellect sees genocide as the future for the human race, where opposing voices are suppressed, DDoS cyberattacked or simply de-platformed by the security state, where military doctrine is no longer politics by other means but destruction for the purpose of profit, in other words this is the fascist world of an American empire that has lost legitimacy in a spectacular way over events in Gaza. Into the fray the United Nations Rapporteur (UNR), Francesca Albanese has fired her report “Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”. Its importance is that it insists, based on evidence, on defining what is going on in Palestine, not just in Gaza, but in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, especially in its prisons, where Palestinians are being beaten to death, as genocide. [See Dec 15 postscript on Amnesty International formally making the same claims in a recent report]

The UNR report addresses a situation in Gaza which ninety-nine American medical doctors have written is extremely urgent. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already ruled that the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal , which has been hailed as momentous, not just for Palestinians, but for a system of international law under siege from the bizarrely fungible and self-serving American ‘rules-based-international order.’ However, more important is the case pending at the ICJ (192), launched by South Africa on 29 December 2023, charging Israel with genocide against the Palestinian people, which led to the ICJ issuing a “provisional measures” order on 26 January 2024 for Israel to stop the killing in Gaza.

This order was ignored by Israel but reaffirmed with “additional measures” on 28 March, and again on 24 May. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2728 was passed with none against and one abstention (the US), the next day (25 May). It demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all hostage and for ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs, and further demanded that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain. The resolution also reiterated earlier demands for the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale, in line with international humanitarian law as well as resolutions 2712 (2023) and 2720 (2023). Israel also ignored this resolution. A demand is not optional. It is compulsory. If the United Nations had an independent army, it would be licenced to invade Israel and bring it to book.

The US may have allowed UNSC resolution 2728 to pass, but it would never allow it to be brought to book. Israel is a tool of US imperialism. For the same reason, the US also goes to lengths to protect Israel’s leadership from any legal fallout, and this is important. With the inexplicable delays surrounding the demand for issuance of arrest warrants by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Karim Khan, concerns are rising that personal pressure on ICJ judges might be applied that would indefinitely postpone final judgement. This seems to be happening in regard to the ICC, where sexual misconduct charges against Khan have been raised that are raising the spectre of the Julian Assange situation repeating itself. Albanese’s UNR report, and the vast amount of evidence that it includes, is therefore crucially important in adding weight to ICJ case 192.

The fact that many countries have joined South Africa (“intervened”) in this case is also adding weight. Nicaragua, Colombia, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Türkiye, Chile, The Maldives and Bolivia have joined the case. The Organisation of Islamic Countries, the Arab League, Egypt, Jordan, Venezuela, Brazil, Belgium, Ireland, and Norway have either made formal statements supporting South Africa’s case or are in the process of applying to intervene. Latin American countries have been at the forefront of action against Israel. Their leaders and intellectuals have a particular and instinctive understanding of the kind of state that Israel is. After David Ben-Gurion’s meeting with the CIA in April 1951, in which the Zionist leader offered his country’s services as a gun for hire, Israel became an active participant in Latin America’s death squads. Since then, Israel has essentially been an enforcer in the developing world in the pay of the CIA especially but also of other Western security services.

The veil that has kept the leading role of United States in this war hidden has suddenly been drawn aside. All the countries supporting or lining up to join ICJ case 192 now see America in the driving seat in the Gaza genocide and Israel merely its tool. Establishing in law that the treatment of the Palestinians is genocide is ironic given that Israel is a self-declared Jewish ethno-state. This now will also affect the United States and the legitimacy of its hegemonic status directly and this is where judging the killing fields in Gaza a genocide will become a powerful step in a final process in the deligitimation of the American empire.

Section 1 looks at how the Islamophobia industry arose, which is integral to shaping the vicious basis on which the American empire defined a world of ‘human animals‘ on which to leverage itself after the fall of communism, and how the decision on genocide in IJC case 192 will undermine this industry.

Section 2 discusses how the relationship between the Islamophobia industry and Pentagon Capitalism, the pen and the gun of the empire, will be affected by the revolution in weapons technology that is challenging the dominance in the world of the American military industrial complex.

Section 3 discusses the progress of the war in Gaza and in Lebanon, why the Democrats have lost their lead in the US elections, and how Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will differ from the perspective of the future of the world.

1. Islamophobia: it’s all about power and money, not about human beings.

After the collapse of communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, anti-Islamic rhetoric was proposed by Zionist ideologues as central to America’s vision of itself as a unipolar power. Let us see how this arose from a particular American political framework, and the way this industry developed.

The political framework: The American polity is not a parliamentary system. The eighteenth century design of American political institutions made for a system in which legislators are elected on personality not policy. In addition, the extreme concentration of wealth in the United States and the idiosyncratic forming of capitalism as a social (rather than economic) class of capitalists with interlocking corporate directorships at its core, and associated family links to private schools and expensive clubs, led to this class distilling a power élite that would determine policy through a policy-planning network of privately funded think-tanks, policy committees, councils, institutes, and policy organisations.

Where the committee system in Congress was originally designed to maintain some degree of democratic control over policy making, well intentioned reforms in 1970 gave the policy-planning network of the capitalist social class a stranglehold over this process. Finally, in 2010 the Citizens United decision at the Supreme Court against the Federal Electoral Commission opened the floodgate for corporate lobbyist money and this consolidated the process whereby house representatives and senators in the US Congress became mere political ciphers just paid to vote one way or another, rather than responsible politicians deliberating on policy. The policy-planning network thus acquired pre-eminence over the legislative sector.

The Islamophobia Industry: All industries are depicted as having founders, Bell – the phone, Edison – electricity, Marconi – radio, although there are always arguments and counter-claims. There is a lot going for the idea that Samuel Huntington founded the Islamophobia industry. Huntington was a meek academic who glorified militarism, saw apartheid South Africa as a “satisfied state,” and wrote in a Trilateral Commission (TC) report that there was too much democracy in America, without explaining really what that meant.

What does this industry produce? If a large society is to be marshalled towards a particular set of goals, an intellectual class articulates society’s ideas and values, so that individuals within that large society are able to act in a more-or-less coordinated way. That is how liberal capitalist societies have functioned ever since they broke out of their feudal relationships. Following those ideas and values, members of society obey a particular “social order,” and thus legitimate it. If some rebel, this is an attempt at de-legitimation.

If, however, a particular group of people are going to be disadvantaged over another group of people within the social order, this has somehow to be factored into society’s legitimating intellectual constructs.

An important example of this is what John Locke did when he set up slave colonies in America for his bosses. He was secretary for the Proprietors of Carolina from 1669 to 1675, and as secretary and treasurer of the English Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations. In the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Locke writes: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever’ (Locke 1993: 230).  Locke wrote this corporate document at the exact same time as his political text the Two Treatises of Government, where he actually does the legitimating. After raising the hue and cry of the bourgeois class against the absolute rule of kings, calling submission to them ‘vile slavery,’ he then goes on to justify the slavery nevertheless of some, by building a picture of a dehumanised non-European (human animals), ending by describing ‘the perfect condition of slavery, which is [justified as] the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive (2.4.24).’

As Ibram Kendi has written authoritatively, racism is about power. White supremacy is not about white, it is about supremacy: “white” is the ticket into the club. When in the 1950s and 60s, suburbs exploded around America’s cities and Anglo-Saxon whites migrated, East European and Jewish communities migrated with them and suddenly became “white,” when they hadn’t been before. The black and the brown were the “Other,” and the main occupants of the inner cities. 

With the fall of communism in the 1990s and the irrelevance of the Truman doctrine, America became a country in search of a new direction. The policy-planning network went into overdrive to find one. The first person who attracted attention was State Dept. official Francis Fukuyama with his 1989 “End of History” thesis that saw all countries in the world on an unstoppable convergence to becoming liberal democracies. His teacher, Samuel Huntington disagreed with this pacific thesis and came up with the conflictual 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” argument.

Initially, this wasn’t particularly anti-“Islamic,” but soon Huntington became enamoured an article that a musty Jewish orientalist, Bernard Lewis, had written in 1990 called “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Lewis wrote that Muslims were mostly characterised by their intense jealousy of ‘Western freedom.’ So Huntington began proposing that the main conflict of the “West” was going to be with “Islam” although there were also other civilizations (Confucian, Slavic-Orthodox, Japanese etc…). Huntington spent a lot of time analysing and dissecting ethnographic maps of the world according to his whims , deciding which bits to include in which civilization. This gave the meek academic a head-spinning sense of power.

Huntington’s thesis would become interwoven with the ambitions of the oil industry, the defence sector and the Israeli Likud party: a potent combination. It became a hit largely through the efforts of an extremely well-connected PhD student of his, Fareed Zacharia, an Indian-American (not a native American, but someone from India), who worked variously as editor of Foreign Affairs, the main print organ of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR), where he printed Huntington’s 1993 article, then at Newsweek, Time, Washington Post and The Atlantic.

Huntington had been a member of the Trilateral Commission (TC), David Rockefeller’s globalisation think-tank (which launched the neoliberal revolution or “shock doctrine” in Chile under Pinochet in 1973), along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. Where Carter had been elected on an anti-Vietnam antiwar ticket, Brzezinski soon turned the born-again Christian president into a committed defence hawk.

Both Huntington and Brzezinski had both been part of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), whose members were dedicated to nominate Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, a senator very close to the arms industry (known as “the senator from Boeing”), as the Democratic Nominee for the 1976 election. But Carter won that nomination, upon which the live corpses of the leaders of the 1950s Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), Eugene Rostow and Paul Nitze, were disinterred to put the naked outside pressure on Carter that Brzezinski, as an insider, couldn’t do in the same way.

The importance of the CDM was that it had as members all those so-called “neoconservatives” who switched sides and joined the Reagan administration in 1980: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz and Paul Wolfowitz. Other policy organisations besides the CFR, TC and CDM also linked all these people with Huntington, Brzezinski and Zacharia. Their collective hero was Scoop Jackson (died 1983) and their creed, his belief in maximalist aggressive foreign policy and his love of Israel for its “lightning” defeat of the Arabs in 1967.

Jackson’s personal aides, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Charles Horner, and Douglas Feith became instrumental in the two crucial strategic documents of the American unipolar world that crafted America’s future around the Islamophobic approach to world affairs that Huntington and Lewis had theorised.

The first was Wolfowitz’s 1992 strategy paper Defence Planning Guidance for Fiscal 1994- ’99 (DPG 1992) commissioned by Dick Cheney, Bush Sr.’s Defense Secretary. This paper stressed the ‘moral influence’ and ‘cost effectiveness’ of America’s security umbrella for the majority of the world’s regions. There was no mention of Israel in the DPG, except in the context of a potential peace process between Israel and the Arab countries now that Iraq’s apparent ambitions had been contained by Bush Sr.’s 1991 First Gulf War (known as Desert Storm).

That war would be the Pentagon’s first display of its transition to digital warfare and guided missiles technology pioneered by William Perry when he was still Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. The confidence in American technological supremacy amongst the country’s elites rose sharply as Japan’s economic powerhouse was overtaken during the 1980s with a Pentagon-mentored digital revolution and its Silicone Valley startups. To add insult to injury, Bush Sr. made Japan pay for the majority of the costs of Desert Storm, on the basis that the US was protecting its oil future supplies. The unipolar world had arrived. Its jugular ran in the oil fields of the Middle East.

The second strategic document was the report A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm written originally for Netanyahu’s Israeli government in 1996 by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others. This report had the idea of “re-shaping the Middle East” through a rolling series of regime changes through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. This report put a new spin on DPG 1992 for Dick Cheney, as Bush II’s vice-president, when he described “neoconservative ideology” as a foreign policy that relied on proxies, seeks régime change, and frames the use of force in terms of “democracy promotion”.

Cheney was a member of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America as were all the writers of A Clean Break, which was written the year after Yitzak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli settler, for his role in launching the peace plan with Palestine and the Oslo Accords. After the 1995 assassination, Zionism could be turbo-charged, from a leftish-wing concept of building a home for Jews (with some residual liberal narrative), to a red-in-the-tooth right-wing idea of settler colonial erasure of native populations.

All of the figures involved in this process were deeply involved in the Islamophobia industry. Zionism was to be fashioned now to become the obverse of the Islamophobia coin. Zionism always had been more-or-less associated with imperialism, ever since Lord Palmerston and his obsession for protecting Britain’s route to India. Now in the digital, Apache-helicopter video-game age, this was going to become an exact fit, engineered in Washington. Money was gushing from the oil and defence sectors into the bank accounts of the Islamophobes. Huntington’s books sold, and his lecture tours became massively popular. The cash register of Islamophobes in general has been ringing constantly. Until now.

2. Revolutions in weapons technologies and their impact on geopolitics.

A Hezbollah Kornet anti-tank missile adapted for long ranges hits an Israel radar and listening post (above picture).

So-called “Muslims” entered the digital age and, like all motivated challengers over history, they would adapt weapons and the technologies of warfare more effectively than their originators and – this is the killer aspect – would produce it all much more cheaply. The advances in the capabilities of all the members of the Axis of Resistance have surprised.

Pentagon capitalism is about power and money. The quandary that the defence sector in the United States faces is that, as report after report have indicated, digital technology was not used to its true potential. Legacy weaponry should have been retired and old management systems changed. Top of the range weapons systems that produce the most profit for contractors and that represent prestige items for bureaucratic cadres may have been revolutionised and become the subject of massive expenditure, but not basic equipment or how warfare is actually conducted. If the Pentagon applied a Houthi-model of warfare, contractors couldn’t possibly make any money. Not only would contractors have to fold, the American welfare system known as Pentagon Capitalism would collapse, as would the whole purpose of NATO.

So military dominance, real or perceived, to justify expenditure on Pentagon capitalism’s high-ticket holy cows, especially the F-35 stealth fighter, have been what the current war in the Middle East has been about, especially in the context of the rising use of drones and hypersonic missiles by the countries of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran [see *post-script on hypersonics]. Suffering stunning losses from the Gazan attack on the 7 October 2023, and fearing for his future as leader of the Zionist state as a result, Netanyahu instinctively knew how to remain in power and how to get backing from the United States on the basis of the imperial imperative that American weaponry could not ever be seen to lose.

The American response to the new situation was driven by American anger at the outcome of the Aqsa Flood attacks, their negative impact on the prospects for the Biden Corridor, and the refusal of Palestinians more generally to be written out of the region’s future. However, from the start, there were two different American approaches to this unfolding war. The “imperial” lobby, which was discussed in earlier articles on this site as being led by William Burns in the executive and Chuck Schumer in the legislature, was differentiated from the “Zionist” lobby, which in turn was led by Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Biden himself.

Where the imperial lobby had as an overarching goal the success of the Biden Corridor which, at its core, demanded a consolidation of America’s hold on Saudi Arabia. This would have to comply with the desert kingdom’s demands for a Palestinian state and thus the pursuit of a “Two State solution,” more as a formality than a substantive affair, with the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas waiting in the wings to be anointed imperial duke. The Zionist lobby had, in complete contrast, as an overarching goal, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and it would be exactly this that Blinken would promote across the Arab world on his feverish shuttle diplomacy in the weeks following the 7 October attacks, to the total shock of Arab leaders.

Following the Zionist approach was convenient also for Netanyahu’s aim to maintain his longevity and that of the right-wing coalition that he had formed and that had espoused the idea of ethnic cleansing. He could thus stay in power and maintain his immunity from prosecution for past crimes. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would be then couched in the setting of maximalist military goals that could and would never be achieved. The “elimination of Hamas” may seem to be a military goal, but given that Hamas would never be a military organisation but rather an expression of the will of the Gazans, it translated directly into a project for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Launching the ground invasion that the Pentagon seemingly advised against, required greater and greater commitments to be made to the war, resulting in greater and greater numbers of deaths and injuries among Gazan civilians. Between the initial ground invasion on 13 October 2023 up to the Rafah Offensive of May 2024, failure to stop successful insurgent activity and the shaming of American weaponry by Hamas or to find the Israeli hostages, meant having to find one excuse after another to extend the military operation and the continuous and destructive bombing of Gaza.

Netanyahu then invited himself to address Congress in the US on 24 July, essentially to get the backing for expanding the war into Lebanon, where Hebollah had been pursuing a limited war in support of Hamas, and to plug the idea of rolling the destruction of Hezbollah out to an out-and-out destruction of Iran. At every stage of his expansion of the war, Netanyahu would fail against his antagonists on the ground, but then he would always succeed in expanding to the next stage on the argument that American weaponry must not be seen to lose.

Almost endless and unvetted (technically illegal) supplies of heavy ammunition poured from the United States into failed military offensives destructive of civilians (human animals) and life in general. All the warnings through the press, through news outlets like Axios, that the United States was setting red lines, were lies as would be the myriad publicized attempts at seeking a negotiated solution as US elections approached. Native Americans had coined the term “forked-tongue” to describe the methods of the American administrations and its generals. They were the original human animals. The United States has been directly complicit in genocide.

3. The War, its progress and US elections

Since the Aqsa flood attack and the failure of Israel after more than twelve months of fighting to quell Gazan resistance, it has become quite clear that Israel is not capable of defending itself, let alone launch the kind of ground invasion of the entire Middle East that Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is tabling as the ultimate “Zionist” plan. Just in this last month, Netanyahu ordered the final solution in Gaza that was called “the General’s Plan,” which aimed to starve Gazans to death and ethnically cleanse north Gaza for “settlement” by Israelis, anxious to start a life amongs the bones and the dust of Palestinians.

At this point, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of al-Aqsa Flood, decided that his job in Gaza had essentially been done. He left the tunnels and went out in a flame of glory fighting alongside his foot soldiers. Soon after Sinwar’s death, the Qassam brigades took the most prized scalp of the Israeli force charged with the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza. Then, on the tail of further catastrophic Israeli defeats in Gaza, the (retired) General in question, who had been the author of the “General’s Plan,” Giora Eiland, tuned around and wrote in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that the Israeli government should now reach terms with Hamas.

One loses count of the number of ex-generals and ex-prime ministers of Israel who have written the same. In fact, a number of them wrote to the New York Times, asking Congress to “disinvite” Netanyahu from his July 24^th visit, knowing that only further disaster lay in store – for Israel.

And they were right. The total inability of Israeli forces to achieve Netanyahu’s maximalist goals in Gaza, meant that he could only avoid a reckoning by expanding the war. Having legislated for the creation of a national guard of armed settlers, Israel’s security minister, Ben Gvir, was given licence by his cabinet to attack and ethnically cleanse the population of the West Bank. This has now translated into a series of disasters.

Then what had become a tired and weakened Israeli army was ordered to attack Lebanon. They would reluctantly obey orders on the basis that they might regain some degree of self-respect.

It has to be remembered that Hezbollah had activated this front, not with the intention of destroying Israel, as Netanyahu’s narcissistic rantings would have it, but to encourage Israel to come to terms with Hamas in Gaza – to stop the war.

When Netanyahu raised the stakes by demanding an attack on Lebanon, it was immediately clear that the United States would have to do the heavy lifting for its proxy. It was no longer a matter of just supplying weapons. American intelligence helped to locate Hassan Nasrallah. The eighty 2000lb bunker-busting bombs used to kill him that destroyed 6 buildings in Beirut in the process, were American, and were delivered with American logistics based at sea.

Now that it has become clear that the war in Lebanon cannot be won, there is intense pressure to end it with political pressure by destabilising Lebanon. More on that below.

The United States now owns the Lebanese quagmire: It is clear from the sequence of recent events that the US had planned for some time to take out Hezbollah as a principal obstacle to its imperial ambitions. The pager and walkie-talkie explosions, which killed 500 people and injured 4,500 others (mainly support and health services workers in the Shiite community) had been set up three years earlier. It was hoped that this, followed by the shock of Hassan Nasrallah’s dramatic death, and that of all the top leaders of the party at the same time, would lead to Hezbollah’s unravelling. It didn’t. Nasrallah, it seems, had planned for such an event, if not worse (a nuclear attack). Indubitably shaken by the sequence of events, Hezbollah nevertheless survived with its vast arsenal intact underground. It promoted the next rank in line to take over.

American Plan B then kicked in. This was the plan to cause such extensive damage, dislocation and internal displacement in Lebanon’s Shiites areas in southern, eastern and northern Lebanon with rolling air strikes, that a sectarian divide would ensue and civil war follow. One and half million people were displaced from their homes over a ten day period.

This, it was thought, would cow Lebanon’s political leadership into submission and acceptance of a plan to appoint a new president allied to the United States, such as the general in charge of the toothless Lebanese army funded and controlled by the United States, Joseph Aoun. US Ambassador to Lebanon, Lisa Johnson, is seeking help from potential “opposition” figures amongst Sunnis, but mainly from the Maronite community in Lebanon, coordinating several political/diplomatic visits by White House Middle East Envoy and ex-Israeli officer, Amos Hochstein, to try to impose a political solution on Lebanon to sideline Hezbollah and the Shiite community.

It is now a month since Nasrallah’s assassination. But five mechanised divisions, supplemented by an extra division of reservists, thrown at Lebanon by Israel, have failed to make any headway against organised resistance. Uncowed Lebanese political leaders, led by Nabih Berri, speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, shrugged off American threats, while relying on Hezbollah’s effective defence, in order to strengthen their hand in negotiations [see **post-script: 3 November on Nabih Berri]. Day after day, the Israeli army registers stark defeats on the front line, while Israel lays itself open to constant lethal attacks from resistance missiles and drones across its logistical support lines and even arms manufacturing facilities. An attack drone was in fact recently guided to Netanyahu’s bedroom window, although the Israeli leader appeared to have taken cover in the government’s emergency underground bunker.

The impossibility of imposing a political solution on Lebanon: None of this surprises. But it is surprising that US intelligence has failed to understand the change that has taken place in the Lebanese as a people, over the decades of aggression from Israel, as US diplomats seek to intervene in Lebanese poltics.

The map above shows the traditional sectarian divide in Lebanon. The major groups are the Shiites (27%), Sunnis (27%) and Maronites (21%).

No longer does a Lebanon exist where, during the invasion of 1982, Israel could count on a Maronite Phalangist fighting force as allies, or a Lebanon that during the 2006 Israel attack, a majority of political interests still existed that could tip the scales against the Shiite community and Hezbollah.

What emerges today is a picture of displaced refugees from Shiite areas being welcomed in parts of Lebanon other than their own, and by a new sense of solidarity and friendship between Sunni and Shi’a, reflecting a divide that has evaporated in Lebanon, as fast as it has in the Middle East as a whole, eliciting the worst fears of the Islamophobia industry over the demise of its most important weapon: divide and rule. But this is not all. Even within the Maronite Christian community, new and unlikely spokespeople for national unity have arisen that support Hezbollah’s resistance against imperialist aggression. Indeed, each Israeli aggression has brought the Lebanese people closer together, forging new and lasting bonds.

As US diplomats try to intervene in Lebanese politics, however, we have to remember how the United States generated divisions in Ukraine, and eventually a war there, by putting extremist neo-Nazi groups in power in a coup in February 2014. Lebanon has a completely different history, yet the US “playbook” remains the same.

The problem the United States faces in rolling out its political plan for Lebanon comes from a contradiction of having kept the Lebanese army as a toothless operation for so long, in order to keep it from ever posing a threat to Israel. As a result of this policy it logically also poses no threat to the two heavily armed and well organised Shiite resistance organisations, Hezbollah, and the Amal movement, as well as to the several smaller Sunni militias that have also been fighting alongside the Shiite forces.

Suddenly declaring an “emergency” in order to be able to put General Joseph Aoun in charge will achieve very little, since the Lebanese army’s soldiers and junior officers are resentful of the American and Israeli control they have had to suffer over the decades. The likely outcome of such an American political project is simply chaos; chaos that will spread across the immediate neighbourhood, including and especially to Israel.

The enigma of Iranian and Israeli missile strikes and counter-strikes: When it came to Netanyahu’s plan to crawl out of his strategic cul-de-sac in Gaza, the West Bank and then Lebanon by expanding the war to Iran, things would be different. How different though is still not completely clear.

The 13 April drone and missile attacks on Israel (“True Promise One”) in retaliation for Netanyahu’s unprovoked Damascus Embassy bombing and his assassination of Ismail Haniyya, whilst the Hamas leader attended the inauguration of the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, was an affair which Iran and the United States clearly stage managed. As was the Israeli response to this first Iranian attack, which was so small, it was simply shrugged off.

The second confrontation with Iran involved the much more costly Iranian response “True Promise Two”. This would be in retaliation for the Nasrallah assassination, and it occurred even as US and Iranian diplomats were starting to negotiate peace terms at the UN in New York with Pezeshkian who, as a “reformist,” had come to power on the sincere desire to repair ties with the United States. Pezeshkian, however, was truly shaken and angered by the deception. He then turned around and agreed to support the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC)’s second Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel of 1 October.

The Israeli response to True Promise Two is where the “enigma” lies in this series of events. During the long pause in which the Israeli air force was planning its next response, Israel’s plans for this new attack were leaked by a source in the United States. What ultimately took place was that 100 F-35s took off over Jordan and then turned back on having travelled 100 km into Iraq. Some of the aircraft fired their weapons (air launched ballistic missiles ALBMs) just before their return. The range was inadequate for their missiles to reach their targets. The job of hitting the famous Parchin base, an old military base of no particular value, which the Israelis, however, have obsessed over for years, was left to a group of small drones and quadcopters to carry out.

The end result of this Israeli retaliation was underwhelming, although the Israeli media would carry full colour front pages with the names and faces of the “brave and glorious pilots” who claimed they had taken out Iran’s air defences, and set the Iran’s military production back years. The extreme gap between reality and hype was so wide that explanations became necessary.

Clearly, the US leak meant that there must have been some disagreement in the course of the Israeli American discussions. Likely Netanyahu was going to break America’s red lines yet again. But this time it looks like something else happened.

Alistair Crooke has brought together the diverse elements of this story. Israel was preparing to attack military targets in three waves. The first wave was dedicated to destroying Iran’s air defences, before two further waves of aircraft would go on to hit their targets. But the first wave turned back 100 km into Iraq because they encountered an anomaly: an unknown air defence system had locked onto their aircraft. Iran appeared to have an air defence system that can detect and consequently destroy stealth aircraft.

Such a system, one can only assume, was supplied or developed with Russia under what Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has announced as a “strategic comprehensive treaty between Russia and Iran.”

Just like Russia originally developed hypersonics in response to Aegis and other missile defence systems Bush Jr. sought to ring around Russia, it would seem that this new air defence system is a response to the multi-trillion dollar F-35 stealth fighter programme, Pentagon Capitalism’s final offering to the gods. If this is indeed the case, quite extraordinary geopolitical implications follow.

Going back to the main argument, and irrespective of whether Iran has or does not have air defences that can detect stealth aircraft, the United States clearly does NOT want a full scale war with Iran. If the ultimate aim is to secure Saudi Arabia into the empire, the means to do that certainly does not lie on a path which will include Iran blockading the straits of Hormuz and cause massive oil shortages through attacks on oil and gas fields that would not only cripple the desert kingdom, but cause a total collapse in world stock markets and thus the second almost total disappearance of imperial money since the crash of 2008.

The idea of any retaliatory strike on Iran would always have to be a stage managed one if possible that would maintain the perception of dominance for American weaponry. This has now backfired given the events described above. This perception of a decline in dominance is adding a crucial extra layer to the perception of the fading of American hegemony, resulting from the Biden administration’s subscription to Netanyahu’s Zionist strategy of genocide.

It must be galling for Washington élites to watch how their stock has fallen in Saudi eyes. On Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi’s recent stop over in Riyadh, plans were laid for Saudi-Iran joint military exercises in the Persian Gulf. True Promise Two was followed by Saudi condemnation of the Israeli non-retaliation retaliation, while Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Farhan insisted on keeping ‘brotherly ties’ going with Iran through thick and thin. Whatever happens now, a new “re-drawn” Middle East looks, from the Saudi perspective, to become one without Israel at its centre.

The US Elections and Gaza’s future: Until Gaza, the US elections were for the Democrats to lose. We can tell that from the 2022 Midterm elections. An expected Republican “red wave” failed to materialise. Republicans only narrowly won the House due to their party’s unusual performance in the four largest states: Texas, Florida, New York and California. But Democrats crucially increased their seats in the Senate by one, having won races in critical battleground states. This was a good outcome for Biden who, at 44%, had historically low personal approval ratings. 

Statistically speaking, Biden’s election outcome was unique, given that the main problem at the time was inflation, a huge negative for incumbents. The youth component came out in force for Democrats, however, to protect abortion rights from new conservative Supreme Court rulings and in support of Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme. The older population, the component that cared more about inflation, stayed at home. They weren’t especially driven to go out and vote against the Democrats. While Kevin McCarthy talked austerity on behalf of Republicans, Biden struck a pro-union stance, especially on the Amazon strike, which counted in his favour for that demographic.

But the most important factor contributing to Biden’s success was the enormous amount of money his legislative agenda had poured into the economy with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (COVID-19 Stimulus Package), and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law). The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the “reshoring” and industrial policy CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 would have barely had time to have an effect by November 2022 at the time of the Midterms. By now, November 2024, their effects should have contributed to the popularity of the Democrats which, according to the polls, they did before Gaza.

All told the Biden Democrats poured $4 trillion into the American economy in the last four years in the heaviest legislative programme this century. The Tea Party movement from which the Trump MAGA movement emerged, exploded in the wake of the 2008 crash, when the entire financialised business eco-system around the housing market, on which the American economy had come to depend, collapsed. This eco-system had been created by the New Democrats and Bill Clinton in the 1990s by giving with one hand (legislating massively for easy credit), while taking away with the other, cutting welfare (The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) in reaction to pressure from the Gingrich-led Republican right, and exporting jobs by signing the free trade NAFTA deal in 1993 and bringing China into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

The Biden legislative programme is thus the first time there has been a major turnaround in the American economy since Obama. The Democrats looked like they were going to reap the reward in these 2024 elections. If there continued to be strength in the MAGA movement in light of all this, this would be attributed to the more exclusively cultic and racist rather than economic basis of support for Trump.

But here is the key point: if Harris for the Democrats and Trump for the Republicans are neck and neck in the polls, then it is GAZA that is taking away the progressive youth, the black and and Arab voting base of the Democrats. Both the Trump and Harris campaigns are wooing Arab-Americans with promises on Gaza.

Whoever comes into power (and this is far too close to call) is going to have to decide what to do about Netanyahu who, under Biden, has effectively taken over as the supremo of the United States empire. Would the next president of the United States want this to continue?

Netanyahu rescued the “Zionist” strategy for the Middle East on his 24^th July visit and speech to Congress. The idea was that he was going to save the reputation of American weapons, a reputation that had been trashed on 7 October 2023 on his watch, and that continued to be trashed thereafter as he expanded the war.

So Netanyahu has led the empire into failure after failure in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and, more significantly, into what looks like a geopolitical bear trap in Iran. Already the Israelis are talking about another attempt at striking Iran. This is the road to catastrophe… for America and its vassal states in the West.

The road to a new world order perhaps comes after the old international order is destroyed, however painful that may be. Already Israel’s illegal actions and the United States support of them have rendered the United Nations system, established at the close of WWII, redundant. António Guterres’ pensive face at the BRICS summit in Kazan on 22 October, where a unanimous decision was taken to try to reform the international system, seems to be telling us that it is time for drastic change.

This secretary general of the United Nations is banned from visiting Israel and UNWRA, a crucial arm of the United Nations that has protected Palestinian refugees expelled from their country, is about to become a terrorist organisation under Israeli Law.

Trump or Harris? The American political system produces mere executors for the plutocracy within whose policy-making network all policy is debated and decided. It is unlikely that Harris would be able, as president, to declare independence from the Islamophobic neoconservative spider’s web that has dominated the Biden administration. Trump in this sense is more independent than Harris, but see below.

It is significant that the BRICS summit agreed unaminously to proceed with a strategy of reform of the UN system, rather than the creation of an entirely new and alternative system that would divide the world. Harris, as a trained lawyer, familiar with the international legal system, would represent a more credible counterparty in negotiations in reform. Trump would not. This is why Putin has stated he would prefer to have a Harris rather than a Trump presidency.

Trump also looks like the more pro-Zionist of the two given his 2017 moves over the Jerusalem embassy and granting Israel rights over the Golan heights, against international law. Actually it wasn’t a belief in Zionism that prompted Trump to act this way but simply the fact that Sheldon Adelson gave him $100 million. Sheldon Adelson has died. His widow has now given him $100 million once again. Meanwhile, Netanyahu does everything in the negotiations over Gaza to negatively affect Kamala Harris’ election chances. Something doesn’t feel right.

*P.S.: Hypersonic missiles evade all current anti-missile defence systems for two reasons. (i) They are much faster (15-22 Mach) than the current generation of defensive interceptors (6-8 Mach). It is very difficult to remedy this because the speed of a missile is partly determined by the distance is has to travel. By definition, interceptors travel shorter distances than attacking missiles. (ii) They can change trajectory and thus upset radar calculations. Note, furthermore, that the Houthi missiles that evaded US THAAD systems and hit Saudi oil installations in 2019, were not hypersonic (< 5 Mach).

**P.S.: 3 Nov: During the last negotiations Netanyahu bombed speaker Berri’s home town of Tyre, to no effect.

P.S. 15 Dec: To Francesca Albanese’s UN Report on defining Israeli action Gaza as “genocide,” we can now add Amnesty International’s own formal announcement of the action in Gaza as “genocide.”