Antiwar.com recently published an article jointly written by Institute Director Scott Horton and this author (Weeks). The piece, “Strategic Treason: The Empire Fetes Man Who Killed US Troops,” discussed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s trip to New York City, which took place last week.
Al-Sharaa once went by the war name “Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.” He fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during Iraq War 2. The man personally killed American troops. Yet Washington supported Jolani when he took his Jihad to Syria and helped lead a protracted dirty war to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government. Now the Empire outright partners with him.
Last week, al-Sharaa extended one of his blood-soaked hands to embrace Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and President Donald Trump.
Now, of course, this is not what the American People want. This is what Israel wants. As we are constantly lectured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: his country’s wars are America’s wars.
This should shock the American consciousness to its core because, in fact, Israel’s enemies are Al Qaeda’s enemies. Israel’s target is the so-called Axis of Resistance, which includes Tehran, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas. Whereas America’s coalition is made of the Resistance Axis’ enemies: Israel, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.
Hence, Washington’s unconditional bipartisan support for Israel’s effort to set the entire region ablaze during the Joe Biden and Trump administrations has led to a vastly more powerful Al Qaeda. The butchers of New York City now control Damascus. a major Arab capital city, with U.S. support.
“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen…A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice,” Biden declared last December before describing Al Qaeda’s victory as a “historic opportunity.” Likewise, Netanyahu dubbed the fall of Damascus to Al Qaeda “a historic day in the history of the Middle East.” The Israeli leader publicly took credit for the regime change during a visit to the illegally occupied Golan Heights, gloating that “this is a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.”
The American people, on the left and right, are always characterized as hopelessly divided, unable to reach a consensus on any of the day’s myriad hot-button issues. But now there is one exception: Israel. This is an entirely new phenomenon in American politics, which has seemingly crashed the Israeli PR machine.
Poll after poll over these last two years has demonstrated an increasing shift where majorities among both self-identified Democrats and indeed Republicans, particularly young conservatives, are now decidedly against America’s “special relationship” with Israel.
The parasitic pariah state, and its nakedly genocidal project in Gaza, which is now being expanded to the illegally occupied West Bank, has never been more universally unpopular. Israel’s days on the U.S. dole are numbered.
This poses a unique threat to the Blob (the foreign policy establishment), which thrives on domestic division, allowing both parties to get away with immiserating both working- and middle-class Americans on behalf of the Empire and its brutal, corrupt satellites, epitomized by Tel Aviv.
Luckily for the hawks, during a college event in Utah, Charlie Kirk was recently executed. He was shot in the neck while discussing gun violence and the Second Amendment. Both sides, left and right, played their roles perfectly. Before Kirk’s body was cold, right-wingers called for war on the entire American left, and an assortment of moronic liberals, as well as leftists, callously cheered and mocked the deceased conservative activist’s slaying.
Predictably, our Israel First Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is now using Kirk’s death as a PR prop to increase U.S. military recruitment. This comes as preparations are being made for what will surely be a catastrophic continuation of Washington’s unconstitutional war with Iran.
This is especially egregious because Kirk —although he ultimately backed U.S. strikes on Iranian civilian nuclear sites — had repeatedly made clear his vehement opposition to a potential U.S.-led “regime change war” against Iran. In a worst-case scenario, such a war could retrigger the draft, which, shamefully, was never abolished following the Vietnam War, in which nearly 60,000 American boys were slaughtered.
Nothing scares Netanyahu, Trump, America’s Zionist billionaire oligarchs, and their dutiful media stooges more than an organized, invigorated, and united American youth opposing U.S. troops fighting what they perceive to be Israel’s wars.
We have witnessed the immense costs of such destructive policies during the roughly $3 trillion Iraq war, in which, depending on when you stopped counting, at least one million Iraqis were killed. Additionally, thousands of American troops lost their lives, while tens of thousands more returned home as completely broken men and committed suicide.
If the draft is reactivated, it would not be the first time a dictatorship has conscripted young men to fight and die in a needless war against Iran. In 1979, America’s old friend Saddam Hussein conscripted young Shi’ite boys to invade the Islamic Republic as a way of preventing the spread of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution next door.
Evenly split on both sides, the Iran-Iraq war saw approximately one million Iraqis and Iranians killed over the next decade. The war would perhaps never have taken place absent U.S. support for Baghdad and its notorious assistance in helping Hussein acquire chemical weapons. He unleashed these diabolical weapons on Iranian cities, targeting civilians and soldiers alike.
In Horton’s Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, we find that Hussein was intent on forcing young Iraqis to fight as a way of cementing their ethnic and national identities lest, given their devotion to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, they emulated the Persians next door and launched their own Islamic revolution.
Saddam was a Sunni Muslim. Despite being only 20 percent of the population, Sunnis dominated the national government. This government ruled over the 60 percent Shi’ite super majority. The Persian Muslims next door in Iran were Shi’ites. Saddam feared Shi’ite solidarity and in fact, many Iraqi Shi’ites fled their nation when he launched the war to fight on Iran’s side.
Similarly, in America today, the majority of Americans oppose U.S. support for Israel and its genocidal project. However, we, the majority, are dominated by a powerful minority of Zionist billionaires and their well-funded lobbyists, pro-Israel foreign policy apparatchiks and war profiteers, as well as a bipartisan coalition of corrupt Israel First politicians and presidents. Together, these nefarious forces act as a dictatorship, especially regarding what is ostensibly U.S. foreign policy.
A U.S. war on Iran would be a nightmare for the American people but would benefit Israel tremendously, or at least its government. This tracks with the thesis that Israel controls the United States. That, of course, is the thesis’s maximalist version. There are more qualified versions, from the Israeli government controls the U.S. government to the Israeli government has a great deal of influence over U.S. Middle East policy. Versions of this thesis are put forth by Patrick Buchanan, Norman Finkelstein, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Max Blumenthal, and Aaron Maté.
There is also the antithesis: The United States controls Israel. In this geopolitical model, Israel is a tool of the United States Imperial Government (USIG). It is a military enforcer in the Middle East, existing as a massive U.S. aircraft carrier; “Airstrip3” after Britain and Japan. Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Ilan Pappé put forth versions of this thesis.
The tension between the above thesis and antithesis provides a space for our intervention:
Thesis: Israel controls the United States
Antithesis: The United States controls Israel
Synthesis: Coalitional Zionists dominate Washington, D.C. and beyond, but the U.S. national government dominates the Israeli government at the corporate agent level.
Donald Trump is surrounded by Zionists, and they are extremely influential within the U.S. national security apparatus. In fact, they dominate throughout what veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern has called the MICIMATT (Military Industrial Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank) Complex.
As arch neoconservative Norman Podhoretz bluntly explained in the 1970s, Zionists are committed to keeping D.C. engaged in the business of empire so that Washington is always capable and available to crush Israel’s rivals in the Middle East and beyond.
The Zionists are engaged in a high-stakes project of shaping the symbolic order of our society so that it remains eternally, unquestioningly pro-Israel. The neoconservatives, Israel’s fifth column in America, have led the push for every war over many decades.
So, within the American National government and throughout centers of power and influence within our society, Zionists are extremely prominent. All of that empirical data tracks with the model of our thesis that Israel controls America. However, at the more profound collective action level, our antithesis that America controls Israel gains traction when viewed through the discourse of corporate agency. Here, it becomes immediately apparent that the United States government is a corporate agent that towers above the corporate agent that is the Israeli government.
The fact that the Zionists must come to America, the heart of the Empire, and work within the structure of the U.S.government reveals this dynamic. For an illustrative juxtaposition, consider the relationship between the U.S. government and the British government. Similar to our organized criminal enterprise with Israel, this is also dubbed a “special relationship.”
But according to the American historian Stephen Kotkin, that’s just being polite. Britain is America’s bitch. Now that’s our characterization; some of our colleagues prefer the term “puppet.”
But given that the United Kingdom is sending people to prison for Facebook posts now, we feel comfortable calling it a bitch, and certainly that characterization tracks with Britain’s history as a subservient sidekick to the clearly dominant American Empire.
After sharing this idea with U.S. soldiers who have engaged in combat, this author (Weeks) was told that when these men deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere, the British were there as well, only because the Americans were there.
In other words, British troops just go along with whatever America wants. That’s why no one claims that the British government controls Washington, D.C. The ubiquitous consensus is that the U.S. government dominates the British government. London is a vassal within Washington’s global imperial order.
Now, in the Brits’ case, we don’t see London filled with Americans who are dual citizens who served in the U.S. military and now wear their U.S. uniform to their job as a member of parliament, or work as an advisor to the Prime Minister, or fill key positions within the ministry of defense, or in military intelligence, or whatever they call their state department. This is because the real power lies in Washington. That’s the center of the Empire, not Tel Aviv. The fact that all these Zionists need to come to D.C. undermines the thesis that Israel controls America.
Yes, our national government is filled with Zionists who routinely put the interests of Israel above the American people’s interests. Or at least they prioritize what they perceive to be the interests of Israel above virtually anything else.
We should confront and interrogate that reality, and forge a stronger anti-imperialist, antiwar, anti-Zionist movement. For it is not enough to merely oppose the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Although doing so, especially in mass movements, is a heroic act of collective moral rebellion and such activism is most imperative.
But our synthesis allows us to do that while recognizing why the Zionists must come to Washington, because D.C. is where the true imperial power is located. Therefore, that is precisely where it must be defeated.
