King of Israel

“Complex affairs inevitably require further thought; bear in mind the truth that the end is not obvious at the beginning”. This was the advice given in 5BC by Artabanus to his nephew King Xerxes of Persia, the most powerful nation on earth, when Xerxex was being urged by his advisors to retaliate against Athens.

The post 9/11 world saw a gung-ho Washington and its allies, ride roughshod over the Muslim world. They wrought genocidal death and destruction. As the ‘ummah’ stood subdued to submission, the exceptions were Iran and the Taliban.

Trump’s bestowed moniker ‘King of Israel’ was egged on by Sheldon Adelson aka ‘Trump's patron in chief’. The 87-year-old billionaire owns the Venetian and the Palazzo casino resorts in Las Vegas; his Marina Bay Sands in Singapore was the setting of the hit movie, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.

Adelson and his wife Dr Miriam have donated millions to the Trump presidential campaigns; both of them are intensely pro-Israel. As a quid pro quo, Adelson prevailed upon Trump to do away with any vestige of a Palestinian two-state solution. He terms the Palestinians “invented people whose sole purpose is to destroy Israel”. He also sees Iran as a danger to Israel and even called for a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran.

Adelson has often expressed regret that he could not “wear the Israeli military uniform rather than the American one he wore in World War 2”, and wishes his son becomes an Israeli army sniper. Trump awarded Dr Miriam with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed the prevailing sentiment by saying, “the award is being given to someone who has done nothing for her country besides being the wife of a Trump mega-donor”.

This mega-donor ensured the POTUS’ untethered appeasement of Israel. It translated into Trump’s reneging on Iran’s nuclear deal and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem on the eve of Israeli elections to boost Netanyahu’s reelection bid. He cut all aid to the Palestinians and closed their Washington diplomatic office while giving Israel 3.3 billion dollars in 2020 as military aid alone. He also enabled the de facto recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights along with declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist” organization.

Israel, with a reported 400 atomic bombs, acts as the perpetual Iran victim. It refuses to sign the NPT and nobody dares scrutinize its nuclear programme. It has invaded Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, attacked Iraqi facilities and sent assassins around the globe to eliminate those it deems as threats. Above all, it has usurped and rules the land which belonged to the Palestinians. However, it is Iran whose nuclear programme was certified as peaceful by the IAEA and which has never invaded a country in centuries that is perpetually in the unholy crosshairs.

This dichotomy has seen the murder of Iranian scientists, the Stuxnet computer virus and the extremely provocative murders of Gen Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The inhumanity is evident from the crippling sanctions that have seen millions of Iranians affected with even the present pandemic allowing no relief from these sanctions.

The Trump administration plans to further ratchet up this inhumanity by imposing weekly sanctions on Iran before the presidential transition takes place. Trump also recently sought options to strike Iran, an absurdity advised against by his military commanders. Reportedly, all these actions were worked out privately by Trump and Adelson.

Iran has shown great restraint despite these flagrant provocations. Looking for the smallest excuse, Trump, reminiscent of the fake Iraq WMD intel, accused Iran in June 2019 of torpedoing the Norwegian-owned Front Altair and the Japanese Kokuka Courageous in the Gulf of Oman. Yutaka Katada, CEO of the Kokuka Courageous operators, negated the accusation saying, “the damage could not have been caused by mines or torpedoes since the damage was above the ship’s waterline”.

Trump’s Iran policy is as big a disaster as his Yemen one. It accelerated the decline of US hegemony and saw China and Russia emerge as global leaders and peace-makers. Washington’s jingoistic mindset was evident with the likes of Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton boasting that the US could win against Iran in two strikes.

After making a series of ignominious decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was eventually forced to admit that “wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unanticipated consequences”. A testament to this reality, Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ in Afghanistan was followed by almost two decades of war. Today, Washington desperately seeks a face-saving exit despite its vaunted two-strike military might.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s ‘ Emerald City’ brilliantly encapsulates the delusional folly of the Iraq War which saw the banks of the Tigris become the graveyard of neocon hubris. He also laments: “For years, we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans; we should have focused on ours”. Analysts assert that war with Iran would dwarf the Iraq war in ferocity and destruction. It could ignite the whole region with many countries sucked up into the inferno.

Trump had many things in common with Bush apart from their ‘isms’. When told about Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires, Bush famously retorted, “History is for losers”; Trump remained as dismissive about Persian history. Let us hope President-Elect Biden sees things from a saner perspective rather than vying to be yet another King of Israel.

Iran may not be the most powerful country on earth today but as William Burns, veteran diplomat and President Carnegie Endowment for Peace put it, “false assumptions about how a muscular, unilateralist US approach can produce the capitulation or implosion of the Iranian regime is an assumption untethered to history”.

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Email: miradnanaziz@gmail.com