The U.S. Is Accelerating Towards Disaster
By rushing more ships and planes to the region to bail out Netanyahu, the U.S. is accelerating towards disaster.
The U.S. is rushing more planes, ships and a submarine to the Middle East to try to shield the Israeli government from the expected retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah that it invited with its attacks in Tehran and Beirut. Harrison Mann, the former US Army major who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency to protest the government’s ongoing support for the war in Gaza, has some choice words for the administration about this:
It is clear there is no real plan underpinning the Biden administration’s decision to accelerate deployment of aircraft and warships to the Middle East. It’s simply more of the reflexive and unconditional support for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that has only encouraged reckless escalation towards a wider war. Netanyahu would not have killed senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials in Beirut and Tehran last week – leading to the wounding of US troops in a reprisal attack – if he wasn’t confident that the US navy would be dispatched immediately after to protect him from the consequences of his actions. Ten months into this war, it’s time to think harder about why we’re putting troops in harm’s way.
That more US service personnel have not been killed in this conflict is nothing short of a miracle. Like the armed drone that struck a barracks full of sleeping personnel in October, but turned out to be a harmless dud, the current turn of events is more the result of dumb luck than any measure of strategic discipline or good planning [bold mine-DL]. It is a wonder that the conflict hasn’t already escalated into a ruinous full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah that drags in the US and Iran.
But our dumb luck is running out.
By rushing more ships and planes to the region to bail out Netanyahu, the U.S. is accelerating towards disaster. Biden’s inflexible, ideological support for Israel may get a lot of American soldiers and sailors killed and injured in the coming months. U.S. support for the war in Gaza was already a moral and strategic catastrophe, and soon it may lead to another costly, unnecessary war.
The U.S. and Israel expect that retaliatory strikes could be coming as soon as this week.