Over the course of the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict, the mainstream media slavishly toed the Bush administration’s line about what a hapless conduit for outside forces Lebanon is. If we are to believe them, Iran, Syria, and even Russia were the master puppeteers behind Hezbollah’s defiance of Israel and America, and Nasrallah was nothing but a marionette. But why haven’t any of the major media outlets stopped to investigate who’s got their fingers up Israel’s and America’s synchronized asses?

Earlier this year, Harvard professor Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer wrote a very compelling study that concluded that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has had such an undue amount of influence in American political affairs that it’s actually caused America to jeopardize its own security in order to advance Israel’s interests. AIPAC is widely acknowledged as one of America’s most powerful lobby groups. In addition to its very deep pockets, which it uses to grease most every palm in the House and Senate, the group also has pervasive ideological support among most prominent neo-cons (like Frum, Perle, and Cheney, to name a few) and Christian evangelicals, who are the real cornerstone of American Zionism.

Unlike the majority of American Jews (80% of whom vote Democrat and support some kind of compromise solution), most of the 60 million or so evangelicals are opposed to returning any of the occupied territories to the Palestinians or making any conciliatory gestures towards Lebanon, Syria, or Iran. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the Evangelical Armageddon-based agenda. As Janet Parshall, leading evangelical Republican broadcaster, and friend of Dick Cheney, put it, “As soon as the missiles started flying between Israel and Hezbollah, [it was cause to celebrate because] these are the times we've been waiting for. This is straight out of a Sunday school lesson.” As far as she and her constituents are concerned, one person’s abject misery is another’s stepping-stone to the pearly gates.

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that, especially since 9/11, the centerpiece of American Middle East policy has been its unwavering support for Israel. It is, in fact, quite bizarre that Israel, an affluent 1st world nation, is America’s number one recipient of foreign aid, and receives around $3 billion in assistance every year. And unlike the usurious loans America makes to genuinely needy Third World nations, Congress continues to allow Israel to simply default on its commitments, even as the American deficit continues to spiral out of control. Walt and Mearsheimer argue that AIPAC’s economic and ideological influence has become so insidious that it’s become more or less impossible for American politicians to even gently criticize Israeli policy, even when such policy has become a rallying call for both Al Qaeda and the Shia Crescent, both of which view Israel and America as soldered at the hip. As one Hill staffer put it, no matter what happens, "we can count on well over half the House—250 to 300 members—to do reflexively whatever AIPAC wants." It should be noted that the study was not without hyperbole. This was most evident in Walt and Mearsheimer’s overestimation of AIPAC’s role in instigating the war. Though influential members did lobby in favour of the war, so too did the hawktailing oil and infrastructure interests (Exxon, BP, Shell, Halliburton, and Bechtel, to name a few) that are so well-represented in this administration. On this point, Noam Chomsky commented that the study was overly-simplistic because it creates the illusion of a US government that is still “untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility,” with its otherwise uncorrupted Wilsonian impulses simply derailed by “an all-powerful [Zionist] force that it cannot escape.” The truth is, in fact, much more complex than an evil Zionist conspiracy.

Had Walt and Mearsheimer investigated the matter more thoroughly, they would have discovered that the Zionist lobby is merely one dimension of an elaborate conflation of very powerful and deeply-embedded interests that benefit from Israel’s favoured position. One of the most influential beneficiaries is the weapons industry. In fact, most US “aid” that goes to Israel is done so on the strict condition that it go toward weapons purchases from American weapons corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. It is, in fact, little more than a covert form of corporate welfare. But because these merchants of war have shrewdly made a point of building factories in so many congressional districts and have so much money to throw around, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would dare voice any dissent against them. And even when Israeli politicians have requested fewer weapons and more direct forms of aid, their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

Historically, the only lobbies that posed any tangible opposition to Israel were the allied Saudi and oil lobbies. But the top Saudis are relatively compliant with the bottom line as long as America continues to prop up their regime (and those Saudis who most oppose American-Israeli policy prefer more covert means of dissent such as financing Al Qaeda).

Big Oil, on the other hand, is entering into an enormous, but little-publicized, partnership with Israel that will transform the state into a significant oil hub. On July 13 of this year, just one day before Israel began bombing Lebanon, Israel joined a conglomerate of oil interests led by BP and financed by the World Bank in inaugurating the world’s second largest oil and gas pipeline. The BTC pipeline is an enormous circuit connecting Baku, Azerbaijan’s rich, high-quality Caspian oil fields, to Ceyhan, on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, by way of Tbilisi, Georgia. In terms of the geostrategic chessboard, the overt purpose of the BTC is to cut Russia and Iran out of the Caspian energy loop while cementing the circuit of American protectorates and ramping up global oil production and distribution (it is projected to carry one million barrels per day by 2009).

And Israel, which is to play an integral role in this circuit, has announced a plan to build a heavily-policed energy corridor connecting Ceyhan and the Tipline, Israel’s oil pipeline. The new corridor will carry not only oil and gas but also water and electricity to Israel’s ultra-dependent desert oases. And perhaps more importantly, the Tipline will carry oil to the Red Sea port of Eilat, where it will be picked up by supertankers and transported to Asia’s power-hungry market.

Economist Michael Chossudovsky notes that while Israel’s proposed underwater pipeline routes from Turkey “do not overtly encroach on the territorial sovereignty of Lebanon and Syria, the development of alternative land based corridors (for oil and water) through Lebanon and Syria would require Israeli-Turkish territorial control over the Eastern Mediterranean coastline through Lebanon and Syria.” And the presumed need for such a corridor may be one of the hidden objectives behind Israel’s and America’s bellicosity towards Lebanon and Syria.

In a move that lends some weight to Chossudovsky’s hypothesis, Russia has responded to this hyper-militarization of the Mediterranean by making a massive weapons sale to Damascus and announcing a new naval base in Tartus, Syria, a mere 30 km from the Lebanese border.

If there is any truth to Chossudovsky’s claims, the Cold War has most certainly been revived and “Israel is now part of the Anglo-American military axis, which serves the interests of the Western oil giants in the Middle East and Central Asia.” But this isn’t your parents’ Cold War. It’s a whole different ball of wax. With Peak Oil, American military overextension in the Middle East, the proven effectiveness of Gueveran guerilla warfare against even the most advanced militaries, and the evolution of the anti-American/Israeli axis connecting Russia, China, the Shia crescent, and South America, the playing field is wide open.

And if progressives want to achieve some kind of meaningful foothold in this increasingly unwieldy world scene, it’s going to require some kind of substantive recognition of the foolhardiness of condensing everything that’s wrong with it and projecting it onto these two-dimensional figures who claim to re-present us. In spite of his affected cowboy swagger, Bush is not John Wayne. But you’ve got to give him credit. It’s a great persona for a draft-dodging Connecticut aristocrat who needs to project the image of self-authorized captain of the universe.

No, the Bushes, Harpers, and Olmerts of this world aren’t steering this ship. At best, they’re servile first mates. And, despite superficial differences, we have no reason to expect much more autonomy from the likes of McCain, Giuliani, or Clinton. The real power resides in the forces that prop them up and the forces that oppose them. In these choppy waters, only time will tell whether the rigid Anglo-American-Israeli ship can weather the storms that lie ahead.

danadleman@gmail.com

danadleman@gmail.com