LETTER: Israel knows its attacks always have US support

The ongoing events in the Middle East should be viewed in a historical context. After World War 1 Great Britain created Iraq,  dominated Iran, Egypt and Sudan, and held a League of Nations mandate over Palestine.

After World War 2 the British were pushed out, with the connivance of the US, a process that started with the 1945 Bitter Lake meeting between King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and US president Franklin D Roosevelt.

Then followed the creation of Israel, the Suez crisis and the Aden emergency. The US needed  oil, not just for domestic consumption but to secure dollar domination via the creation of petrodollars after the “Nixon Shock”.

Now the US is losing influence. The reasons for this include the US’s self sufficiency in oil and gas through fracking, which have made the area less important. The Syrian, Libyan, Iraqi and now Iranian wars have unsurprisingly intensified nationalisms, which hate all things American.

Israel, the regional pariah, attacks neighbours knowing it will always have US support. It has made sure of this in two ways. It’s Aipac lobby controls both Congress and the Senate. It also seeks to influence US presidents directly.

In the 1960s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first leader, was obsessed with getting “The Bomb” to give insurance against overwhelming attack. Resisted by president John F Kennedy, Israel achieved this goal shortly after his assassination. Thereafter a foundation of Israel’s regional policy has been to prevent neighbours from achieving similar status. It is also driven by a need for oil, and manipulated president George W Bush into invading Iraq.

Now President Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-war ticket, has supported the Israeli attack on Iran. Could it be that there are compromising photographs from the Mossad-run Epstein Island honeypot, as alluded to by an angry Elon Musk recently?  

Ironically, when US influence in the Middle East disappears, so too will the dollar’s reserve currency status and, unfortunately, the state of Israel itself.  

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

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