There’s no question that the USA, since the early 1970’s, has sent a lot of money Israel’s way. Hundreds of billions, mainly in the form of military support. This dates back to the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Israel was hit with a surprise attack by Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations and almost succumbed to them. A massive, US heavy airlift effort by Nixon and Kissinger (who correctly saw the USSR’s hand in all this), helped them survive and after that there were no more questions about US support.

Prior to that Israel had managed to scrape up weapons from all over the world, although by 1967 she was heavily invested in French Mirage fighters. After Arab threats to its oil supply France rapidly backtracked on its support for Israel.

But amid all this US support there’s also that fact that they supply much weaponry to some of Israel’s potential enemies, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s this led to some serious fights in the US Congress, but it’s not such a big deal now as both nations have steadily sidled up to the Jews, recognising that they’re not the real threat compared to Islamic Jihadist groups and Iran. Kuwait especially saw this with their invasion by Saddam Hussein and the gleeful support of it by the Palestinians that they’d invited into their country over the years and who they had supported for decades with jobs, money and diplomacy. Following the end of the Gulf War Kuwait promptly booted out some 300,000 Palestinians.

And then there are stories like the following, resulting from people asking how it was possible that the supposedly formidable Mossad, Shin Bet and IDF could have missed the Hamas attack of October 7. Arrogance and hubris no doubt played a part, as it did in 1973, as well as the distractions of the political infighting over proposed changes to the Israel Supreme Court that roiled the nation over the last year. But it also doesn’t help when your spy networks are useless:

[In 2021] Lebanese security forces have uncovered more than 15 alleged Israeli spy networks, according to a report Monday by the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper.

According to the report, each of the rings operated independently across Lebanon and even Syria. The paper called the discovery “one of Lebanon’s biggest security operations” since 2009.

The link also mentions that the 2009 operation involved identifying two mid-ranking commanders inside the Hezbollah terrorist group, who promptly vanished from the face of the Earth.

How could it be that a nation wracked by terrorism, political infighting and economic problems could pull off such a counter-intelligence operation? The answer is the USA, starting back in the Bush 43 era:

Even though Lebanon was a virtual Iranian satrapy under the de facto control of Hezbollah, the Diplomatic SmartSet® reasoned that we needed to try to retain some influence. As a result, we began a program of providing training and equipment to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and their Internal Security Forces (ISF). It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what would happen. Still, the logical and foreseeable consequences of training the ISF when Iran politically dominated the country were beyond the grasp of a Harvard Kennedy School grad

Specifically you can thank Bush’s Super Brain Condoleezza Rice:

The first U.S. leader to make this fairytale the basis for U.S. policy was then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. During the 2006 Hezbollah war with Israel, Rice opposed an Israeli victory over Hezbollah. She insisted that the best way to push Hezbollah forces away from the border with Israel was by empowering the LAF to stand up to Hezbollah. 

The position was absurd on its face. As Rice was singing its praises at the Security Council, the LAF was acting as Hezbollah’s Signals Corps on the battlefield. Its units provided targeting information for the terror army’s missile crews. But reality was no match for Rice’s delusion. 

But this Bush idea has continued through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, to the point where by 2020, the US was spending $242 million annually in Lebanon, up from $213 million in Obama’s last year in office. As this report makes clear, the emergence of ISIS/ISIL pushed the whole thing even harder during the Obama years:

As Lebanon expert Tony Badran has painstakingly chronicled over the years, Obama based his “war against ISIS” on collaboration with both Iranian forces in Iraq and Syria and Hezbollah forces in Syria and Lebanon. In that “war” the LAF fought under Hezbollah command. In at least one battle, U.S. special forces working with the LAF did so under Hezbollah command.  

Obama’s support for Iran and Hezbollah provided effective immunity to both from Israeli aggression. Israel, after all, was the source of instability, because it was too powerful. If Israel attacked Hezbollah’s growing missile arsenal, or its battle-hardened terror forces at Israel’s doorstep, then Israel would upset the “balance” even more egregiously. Even worse, it would strengthen the “hardliners” in Hezbollah against the “pragmatists.” 

Rice’s reasoning morphed into Obama’s reasoning about enabling an Iran that is a small super-power that matches Israel and thereby provides the sort of stability to the Middle East that prevailed globally between the USA and USSR during the Cold War.

Has Obama ever read anything about the Cold War? We might have avoided nuclear conflict (only just), but there were plenty of wars, both largish (Korea, Vietnam, Israel-Arab) and small (countless) during that period. And at the end of all that death and destruction one of the super powers collapsed.

And Obama, and now Biden, want to emulate that on a smaller scale in the Middle East, hence all the billions of dollars sent to Iran and the softly, softly approach to her developing an atomic bomb.

And in the case of the Lebanon delusion it got worse during the Biden years. When Lebanon hit financial problems in 2022 that meant it couldn’t pay its soldiers the good old USA stepped in again via the Biden Administration who forked over $67 million in Foreign Military Financing to pay for salaries in the LAF and ISF and then another $72 million in 2023.

AYFKM?

What this also shows about the American system of foreign policy is not so much bi-partisanship as giant bureaucracies like the State Department that run on automatic – which is also true of their domestic policy.

In light of this news is it any surprise when reports emerged that the planning for the October 7 attack occurred not in Gaza but in Lebanon?