In Iran, Israel’s morbid military cult now has the US fully in its grip
In this catastrophic war of choice, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, god only knows where Israel and the US will drag the world next
Jonathan Cook
March 5
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The admission this week by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.
Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing US soldiers to retaliation.
Rubio stated: “The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.
In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force – the “supreme international crime”, according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.
Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the US acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to US soldiers being harmed.
Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the US should have attacked Israel, not Iran.
Paper tiger
But Rubio’s comment begged a further question: Why didn’t Washington simply tell Israel it was forbidden from starting a war against Iran without US approval?
After all, Israel would be incapable of mounting any kind of attack on Iran without the critical support provided by the US.
Israel has had to rely on help from US military bases dotted around the region, as well as the Arab states that host those bases.
The attack would have been quite inconceivable without the backup of a massive armada of US war ships sent to the region by Trump.
Israel can withstand Iranian retaliation only because it gets a degree of protection from missile interception systems provided and funded by the US.
And on top of all that, Israel is regional hegemon only because it gets massive subsidies from the US – worth many billions of dollars a year – to preserve it as one of the strongest militaries in the world.
In other words, Israel would have found it impossible to wage war on Iran alone. It is a paper tiger without the US.
Rubio’s comment suggested one of two possibilities: either that the US, with the strongest military in world history, is under the thumb of the tiny state of Israel; or that Trump has made his own military, the strongest-ever, servile to Israel.
Whichever it is, it is hard to square with Trump’s repeated assertion that he is putting America First.
This point is so glaringly obvious it is presumably the reason why Rubio was forced to walk back his comments the next day. Meanwhile, Trump hurriedly suggested it was he who had forced Israel’s hand to attack Iran, not the other way round.
Geopolitical insanity
The more likely truth is not that Israel forced Trump’s hand. It is that he was seduced by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s false claim that an attack on Iran would be a cakewalk – if they struck at a moment when they could be sure of killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Such a decapitation strike, Trump was led to believe, would be a repeat of his Venezuela “success”, when he kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas to bring him to trial in New York.
In Venezuela, the flagrant flouting of international law by the US was intended to be the equivalent of pointing a loaded shotgun at the head of Maduro’s replacement, Delcy Rodriguez. Do as we say, or the new president gets it from both barrels.
Netanyahu knew exactly how to sell Trump, still giddy on the noxious fumes of this lawbreaking venture, the idea that he could repeat the exercise in Iran. The ayatollah’s successor would similarly be putty in his hands.
Which is why, in this catastrophic war of choice by the US and Israel, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore a little geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, or the US succeeds without paying a fearsome price, god only knows where Israel and Washington will drag the world next.
The world’s fate, in a real sense, is Tehran’s hands.
‘Israelisation’ of the US
What the joint attack on Iran demonstrates most clearly is how much Netanyahu has succeeded over the past quarter of a century in “Israelising” Washington and the Pentagon.
The US has always waged illegal wars of aggression. It has always been more gangster than global policeman. But just because Washington was run by ruthless criminals, it did not mean it was incapable of getting still more deranged, still more psychopathic.
That is what Netanyahu has been working on. And Trump is now giving full rein to the Israelisation of the US. The clues are everywhere.
On Wednesday secretary of war Pete Hegseth – the traditional title of “secretary of defence” presumably sounded too law-abiding – dropped any pretence of being the good guy.
He insisted US forces were acting “without mercy” and that the Iranian regime “are toast”. The US would deliver “death and destruction all day long”.
The previous day he had set out the game plan: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
This isn’t the traditional rhetoric of US administrations seeking to flaunt the West’s superior values, or claiming to be on a civilising mission to the rest of the world.
This is the rhetoric of colonial arrogance, of the same military medievalism long espoused by Israeli leaders.
Hegseth sounded all too much like General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister in the 1960s. He famously set out Israel’s overarching military doctrine: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
‘Mad dog’ tactics
Before its attack, the US had spent years trying to starve the people of Iran into an uprising, just as Israel blockaded and starved the people of Gaza for some 16 years on the assumption that they would be encouraged to overthrow Hamas.
The strategy failed in both cases. Why? Because it ignored the simplest of facts: that the people being abused are human beings, who will always choose freedom and dignity over degradation and subordination.
Now led by the nose into a humiliating war of attrition with Iran, the US is lashing out like a “mad dog” – just as Israel did in Gaza after it was humiliated by Hamas’ one-day breakout from the concentration camp Israel had created for Palestinians there.
Hegseth’s “no rules of engagement” means the US is now open about the fact that all of Iran has been turned into a free-fire zone, just as Gaza was.
Which explains why one of the first targets of the US and Israeli strikes was a primary school where more than 170 people were killed, most of them children under the age of 12.
According to reports even in the rightwing Telegraph newspaper, US and Israeli attacks have already created an “apocalypse” in Tehran. Essential civilian infrastructure is being targeted, such as hospitals, schools and police stations. Residential areas are being carpet-bombed, and food and medical supplies are rapidly running out.
Rubio has vowed that much worse is to come.
The US has evidently been captured by the depraved logic of the Dahiya doctrine, which Israel developed in its repeated attacks on Lebanon and further refined over two and a half years in Gaza.
Smouldering ruin
The Dahiya doctrine goes much further than simply the idea of asymmetric warfare inherent to attacks by a stronger party on a weaker party.
Under the doctrine, civilian casualties are no longer unfortunate “collateral damage” from strikes against military assets. Rather, the civilian population are treated as no less legitimate targets of attack than military infrastructure.
For Israel, the Dahiya doctrine grew out of an acceptance that there were no meaningful war aims that Israel could achieve in its battles against the Palestinians it ruled over or against Hizbullah’s resistance in Lebanon.
Israel was unsatisfied simply with pacifying the Palestinians. It knew they could not be pacified indefinitely, given that it had no intention of ever arriving at a political settlement with them. The fabled two-state solution was purely for western consumption; it never had any meaningful constituency of support in Israel.
Rather, Israel’s goal was to use overwhelming and indiscriminate violence to terrify the Palestinians into ethnically cleansing themselves from the region, as had partially occurred in 1948.
Similarly, in Lebanon, where the Dahiya doctrine was first developed, the goal was not to reach a political accommodation with Hizbullah through a show of force. Hizbullah had made clear it would never resign itself to watching the Palestinians erased from their homeland.
The goal was to wreak so much pain on Lebanon that other religious sects would turn on Hizbullah and plunge the country into protracted civil war, leaving Israel free to get on with the expulsion – and now genocide – of the Palestinian people.
Under the Dahiya doctrine, Israel implicitly acknowledged that it was not fighting simply against militants but against the wider society from which those militants were drawn. It had to accept that there could be no victory, no surrender, assessed in traditional military terms. So what it had to do instead was leave a smouldering ruin.
Time and again, Israel has used massive firepower on civilian infrastructure and residential areas to break the will of a society – to drive it back into “the Stone Age”, to use the terminology of Israeli generals – so that the population would expend their energies on survival rather than resistance.
This is what Hegseth and Rubio are now declaring as Washington’s war aims in Iran. A wilful, savage demonstration of mass destruction to no purpose other than the demonstration itself.
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Morbid pathology
This is not a winning strategy, military or political. It is not even a failed strategy. It is the morbid pathology of a cult.
Which explains a flood of complaints over the initial days of Tump’s war on Iran from US soldiers about their commanders. There have been at least 110 so far, according to reporting by Jonathan Larsen here on Substack.
In one to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a non combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.
The Department of War under Hegseth, an evangelical Christian who believes the West is on a “crusade” against Islam, appears to be riding roughshod over First Amendment rules against proselytizing within the armed forces.
The theocratisation of US armed forces is not new. George W Bush spokes in terms of a “crusade” against terror nearly a quarter of a century ago. But the process appears to have reached a point now that the top ranks of the US chain of command are deeply imbued with an evangelical fervour for war in which Israel plays a central part.
Mikey Weinstein, the president of MRFF and an Air Force veteran who served in Ronald Reagan’s White House, told Larsen his group had been “inundated” with soldiers reporting the “euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”
In “End Times” beliefs, based on the Book of Revelations, a terrible battle between good and evil takes place at Armageddon – a site in present-day northern Israel – which leads to the Messiah’s return to Earth and a Great Rapture in which believing Christians rise up to be with God.
Weinstein added: “Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world eschatology.”
The word of God
Central to these beliefs is the gathering of Jews, as God’s Chosen People, into the Land of Israel – a much larger area than that covered by the modern state of Israel.
For Christian fundamentalists such as Hegseth and a growing number of US commanders, Israel is the catalyst for the End Times.
For very obvious reasons, Israel has been nuturing its ties with the huge numbers of Christian fundamentalists in the US. They are politically active – their vote secured the presidency for Trump – and they treat Israel as a critically important domestic issue rather than a foreign policy matter.
SubscribedThey are eager for Israel to seize wide swathes of the Middle East, and largely indifferent about what that entails for the Palestinians or the other peoples of the region.
This all neatly dovetails with the ideology espoused by Netanyahu and the Israeli military command, which years ago was taken over by the same religious-extremist zealots who lead the violent settler movement that systematically attacks Palestinians in the West Bank and steals their land.
As the Israeli military launched its genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu urged soldiers on by telling them they were fighting the nation of Amalek – the enemy of the ancient Israelites.
In the Bible, God commanded King Saul to carry out the total annihilation of the Amalekites, putting to death every single man, woman, child and infant, as well as all livestock.
As can be seen in the erasure of Gaza, Israeli soldiers accepted their mission quite literally. After all, they were not just carrying out Netanyahu’s orders, but an order from God.
‘Clash of civilisations’
Netanyahu has not relied solely on the sacralisation of indiscriminate warfare by his own and the US army. He has also cultivated a wider, racist, anti-Muslim mood in the US and Europe to smooth Israel’s path as it levels large parts of the Middle East.
He has vigorourly promoted the idea of a “clash of civilisations”, the idea that a “Judeo-Christian West” is engaged in a permanent, joint war against the supposed barbarism of the Islamic world.
The synergy between a US military in thrall to Christian fundamentalism and an Israeli military in thrall to a biblically inspired Jewish supremacism is all to clearly on show now in Iran.
This combined military juggernaut has no interest in safeguarding human rights.
It recognises no distinction between civilian and military targets.
It prioritises its own soldiers’ safety – as enforcers of God’s providence – over the civilians those soldiers are attacking.
And it believes, in crushing the life out of the people of Iran, it is advancing divine will.
This is the true face of the war machine that upholds “western civilisation”. These are the real values the West is fighting for in Iran. The rest is a smokescreen.
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