In Lebanon Carnage, Biden Deepens US ‘Obligation’ to Israeli Aggression

ANGLO AMERICA, 30 Sep 2024

Aaron Maté – TRANSCEND Media Service

Photo by JOSEPH EID/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel has killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, emboldening a US-backed war for hegemony in which Arab civilians are an open Israeli target.

28 Sep 2024 – One week after Israel began its US-backed rampage in Gaza last October, President Biden was asked by CBS News if fueling a Middle East conflict on top of the proxy war in Ukraine was “more than the United States can take on at the same time.”

“No,” Biden shot back with indignation. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world.” Not only does the US “have the capacity to do this,” Biden intoned, “we have an obligation to. We are the ‘essential nation’… And if [we] don’t, then who does?”

In an overlooked comment, Biden gave his blessing not only to an Israeli scorched-earth campaign in Gaza, but Lebanon as well. For Israel, Biden said, “going in” and “taking out the extremists” in “Hezbollah… up north” along with “Hamas down south… is a necessary requirement.”

As the first anniversary of Biden’s hegemonic démarche approaches next month, the US is playing the “essential” role that he envisioned. Israel’s current bombardment of Lebanon, which has killed (at least) hundreds of people — including Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah — and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, is the direct result of Biden’s self-conceived “obligation” to Israeli aggression.

Since it began launching rockets at the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms on Oct. 8^th and then expanded its targets to within Israel itself, Hezbollah has stressed that its goal is to pressure Israel into a permanent Gaza ceasefire. Just as Biden proclaims an “obligation” to fuel two regional conflicts, Hezbollah — a group founded in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon — proclaims the same duty to resist Israeli hegemony, which has killed tens of thousands of Lebanese in the last 42 years. Hezbollah’s intervention for Gaza, which displaced tens of thousands in Israel, has been limited in scale. Of more than 10,200 cross-border attacks in the last year, about 81 percent were carried out by Israel.

During this period, the Biden administration has adopted a strategy of pretending to pressure Israel all while offering it the weaponry and diplomatic cover to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and make it unlivable for survivors; expand its long-running terror and land theft in the West Bank; regularly bomb Syria; and now pursue its longstanding intent to destroy Hezbollah, the main force in the region that can significantly fight back.

As in Gaza, Israel is pursuing its goals by terrorizing Lebanon’s civilian population, and not for the first time. It was in Lebanon where Israel formalized a policy of deliberately targeting civilians known as the “Dahiya Doctrine”, named after the Beirut suburb pulverized by Israel during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

“What happened in the Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is shot at,” IDF chief of general staff Gadi Eizenkot, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet until recently, explained in a 2008 interview. “We will subject it to disproportionate force and cause enormous damage and destruction. We don’t consider them to be civilian villages but military bases.”

Major General Giora Eiland, the influential former head of Israel’s National Security Council, later explained that in future conflicts, “the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are the things that can have the most effect on the conduct of Hezbollah.” Accordingly, Eiland advised, the next Israeli assault on Lebanon should “bring about the elimination of the Lebanese military, destruction of infrastructure, and extreme suffering to the civilian population.” In 2006, he noted, “[t]he only good thing that happened…was the relative damage caused to Lebanon’s population,” because the “destruction of thousands of homes ‘innocents’ preserved some of Israel’s deterrent power.”

On Friday, Israel continued its assault on Lebanon’s population by dropping US-made 2,000-pound bombs on at least six residential buildings in Dahiya, killing an unknown number of civilians along with Nasrallah himself.

In a statement, Biden welcomed Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader as “a measure of justice for his many victims.” Biden made no mention of the many Lebanese civilian victims killed alongside Nasrallah during Israel’s ongoing, US-armed campaign. Biden also affirmed that he “fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups,” and has ordered the Pentagon to “further enhance the defense posture of U.S. military forces in the Middle East region.” Along with deploying more troops to safeguard Israeli aggression, the US this week handed the Israeli military an additional $8.7 billion in weapons. These US weapons supplies, a grateful Israeli Defense Ministry noted last month, “are crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

For the umpteenth time, Biden paid to lip service to a negotiated ceasefire, claiming that his “aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means.” Concurrently, maintaining a year-long performance in which the president pretends to be “frustrated” with Israel while giving it carte blanche to commit mass murder, anonymous Biden aides claimed that he was privately “expressing increased frustration” about being “humiliated” by Netanyahu, who had just abandoned a US-French proposal for a 21-day ceasefire on the Israel-Lebanon border.

Beyond these ritual face-saving gestures, the Biden administration’s real outlook was quietly relayed to the New York Times. In an article headlined “Strike on Hezbollah Deepens Disconnect Between Biden and Netanyahu,” US officials acknowledged that there is in fact no disconnect at all.

Deep into the article, the Times cited Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the White House to “end its counterproductive calls for a cease-fire” and welcomed Nasrallah’s death as “a major step forward for the Middle East.” Inside the Biden administration, the Times reported, “there were some… who agreed with the latter assessment.” Killing Nasrallah and “wiping out much of Hezbollah’s war-making capacity, could present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally break the Iran-backed terrorist group’s stranglehold on Lebanon, some U.S. officials reasoned.” As a result, “a cease-fire deal… could be reached now on more advantageous terms.”

When it comes to weakening Hezbollah, these opportunity seizing US officials have ample grounds to be optimistic. Israel’s ability to assassinate Nasrallah and many top deputies in recent weeks, along with the indiscriminate “pager” attacks that wounded and maimed thousands, underscored that Israel has penetrated Hezbollah in unprecedented fashion, with devastating results. Hezbollah’s top ally, Iran, has so far given every indication that it wants to avoid a regional war. And Syria, another key ally in the “axis of resistance”, has been decimated by a decade-long, CIA-led dirty war and an ongoing US military occupation/sanctions regime that preserves the suffering.

But Hezbollah’s supposed “stranglehold on Lebanon” is not the sole product of military power. In a deeply divided country, Hezbollah enjoys a base of support because it has long resisted Israeli aggression against both Lebanon and the Palestinian people. Undoubtedly, there are Lebanese who question Hezbollah’s post-Oct. 7^th decision to intervene on Gaza’s behalf. This intervention has not only failed to deter the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, but has now culminated in Israel expanding its terror campaign deeper into Lebanon.

Just as Israel and its US sponsor used the Oct. 7^th attack to destroy Gaza and restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power”, they now hope to use Hezbollah’s intervention to wipe it out for good. The calculation in Washington and Tel Aviv is that their joint commitment to aggression against civilians will re-establish “deterrence” and a ceasefire “on more advantageous terms.” Those terms mean a region wherein Hezbollah no longer resists Israeli-US dominance, and ordinary civilians have been sufficiently terrorized into submission.

Apologists for US-Israeli aggression will argue, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken did Friday, that Israel has the iron-clad “right to deal with existential threats to its security and enemies across its borders with the avowed intent to destroy Israel.” Yet as Hezbollah exemplified in intervening for Gaza, Israel only faces security threats because of its foundational commitment to destroying Palestinians’ right to self-determination and stealing their land. Rather than allow for Palestine’s existence, Israel has opted to ignore countless UN resolutions, international legal opinions, and Arab League peace offers to enforce the world’s longest-running military occupation and assault any force that stands in the way.

If the US had an obligation to genuine security for everyone, it would join the rest of the world and cease its support for Israeli aggression and occupation. Instead, indifferent to – if not emboldened by – the sight of countless more Arab civilians murdered with US-made bombs, Biden has opted to deepen his government’s essential role.

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Aaron Maté is a journalist with The Grayzone, where he hosts “Pushback.” He is also a contributor to Real Clear Investigations and the temporary co-host of “Useful Idiots.” In 2019, Maté won the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media for Russiagate coverage in The Nation.

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