Over the weekend, the Washington Post was the latest to publish a claim that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the threat of launching a war with Iran solo as a way to pressure Donald Trump into the disastrous war he has now embroiled the United States in. It’s at least the fifth piece of evidence now suggesting that the United States was pushed into this war by Israel, and that the very military support that Washington provides Israel has served as the mechanism to do it.
It’s tempting to see this as a deliberate way to dump responsibility for this horror show onto Israel and divert it away from the US president, who ordered it, and the US foreign policy establishment as a whole, which has salivated over a war with Iran for decades. But we have mounting evidence that Israel bears a huge amount of responsibility. Which raises the question: If Israel was indeed able to successfully trigger a US-Iran war, is any ceasefire or lasting peace possible here without Israel’s approval? This is particularly relevant to an American public that foots the bill for Israel’s war-making.
According to the Post, Netanyahu, “increasingly alarmed” that Trump might actually solve the Iran issue peacefully, repeatedly rushed to Washington over the past few months to make sure he went to war instead. A “key component of his drive to war,” reports the Post, was telling Trump that Israel would go ahead and attack Iran with or without his help, which “led Trump to believe an Israeli attack was inevitable” and that his best option was to go along with it.
“Trump felt like he didn’t have a choice,” someone who understood the president’s thought process told the paper.
This account closely mirrors an earlier report by the New York Times, published a day after the war’s start, that likewise has Netanyahu deathly afraid that peace is going to break out and doing a full-court press on Trump to push him into war instead, including by threatening to go…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
