Yves here. Juan Cole contends that Israel, operating as a US airbase with a country appended, is the vehicle for the two nations practicing aerial imperialism in the Middle East. But I wonder if this particular embodiment is approaching its sell-by date faster than most realize.<\/p>\n
Israel, like the US, is unduly fond of using manned aircraft for power projection. It also enjoyed a veneer of technological superiority which as proven to be uneven when tested. I recall one of the YouTubers, I think Larry Wilkerson, saying that Israel was believed to have the most effective air defense system in the world and being very much surprised when Iran demonstrated conclusively that it could penetrate it and deliver precision strikes. <\/p>\n
Of course, Israel and the US have been operating in a theater where their opposition has mainly been in sandals with AK-47s and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Hence the embarrassment of taking blows from the Houthis with a stock of merely-pretty-good missiles, mountainous terrain in which to bunker themselves, and adept use of decoys to bleed off some of the West\u2019s strikes. <\/p>\n
Admittedly, and this may be an old-fashioned view, securing territory requires boots on the ground or local governments\/stooges acting in that capacity. But air campaigns are more than sufficient to create failed states. But how is that a good idea, particularly if that failed state is in your neighborhood? The much-bemoaned and politically destabilizing if economically-convenient-for-many immigrant influx into the US is due to a significant degree to our regime change efforts in Central America. <\/p>\n
By Juan Cole.<\/a> Originally published at TomDispatch<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s and Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s nomination<\/a> of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his hands already crimson<\/a> with the blood of innocent Iraqis, to run post-war Gaza, brings to mind a distant era when London sent its politicians out to be viceroys in its global colonial domains. Consider Blair\u2019s proposed appointment, made (of course!) without consulting any Palestinians, a clear signal that the Middle East has entered a second era of Western imperialism. Other than Palestine, which has already been subjected to classic settler colonialism, our current neo-imperial moment is characterized by the American use of Israel as its base in the Middle East and by the employment of air power to subdue any challengers.<\/p>\n Swarming<\/strong><\/p>\n The odd assortment of grifters, oil men, financiers, mercenaries, White nationalists, and Christian and Jewish Zionists now presiding in Washington, led by that great orange-hued hotelier-in-chief, has (with the help of Germany, Great Britain, and France) built up Israel into a huge airbase with a small country attached to it. From that airbase, a constant stream<\/a> of missiles, rockets, drones, and fighter jets routinely swarm out to hit regional neighbors.<\/p>\n Gaza was pounded into rubble almost hourly for the last two years, only the first month of which could plausibly have been justified as \u201cself-defense\u201d in the wake of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Even the Palestinian West Bank, already under Israeli military rule, has been struck<\/a> repeatedly from above. Lebanon has been subject to numerous bombings<\/a> despite a supposed ceasefire, as has Syria<\/a> (no matter that its leader claims he wants good relations with his neighbor). Yemen, which has indeed fired missiles at Israel to protest the genocide in Gaza, has now been hit endlessly by the Israelis, who also struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites and other targets last June.<\/p>\n Some of the Israeli bombing raids or missile and drone strikes were indeed tit-for-tat replies to attacks by that country\u2019s enemies. Others were only made necessary because of Israeli provocations, including its seemingly never-ending atrocities in Gaza, to which regional actors have felt compelled to reply. Many Israeli strikes, however, have had little, if anything, to do with self-defense, often being aimed at civilian targets or at places like Syria that pose no immediate threat. On September 9th, Israel even bombed Qatar<\/a>, the country its leaders had asked to help negotiate with Hamas for the return of Israeli hostages taken on October 7th.<\/p>\n In short, what we\u2019re now seeing is Israel\u2019s version of air-power colonialism.<\/p>\n Typically, its fighter jets bombed<\/a> the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on August 28th, assassinating northern Yemen\u2019s prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahwi, along with several senior members of the region\u2019s Houthi government and numerous journalists. (Israeli officials had previously boasted<\/a> that they could have killed the top leadership of Iran in their 12-day war on that country in June.)<\/p>\n In reality, Tel Aviv is now shaping governments of the Middle East simply by wiping their officials off the face of the earth or credibly threatening to do so. Israel has also had an eerie hand in shaping outside perceptions of developments in the region by regularly assassinating<\/a> journalists, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon and as far abroad as Yemen. However, by failing to come close to subduing the region entirely, what Tel Aviv has created is a negative version of hegemony rather than grasping any kind of positive leadership role.<\/p>\n Negative Imperialism<\/strong><\/p>\n The massive June bombardment of Iran by Israel and the United States, destroying civilian nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow, came amid ongoing diplomatic negotiations in Oman. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for civilian uses and no credible evidence<\/a> was presented that Tehran had decided to militarize its program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned both sets of strikes as severe violations of the U.N. charter and of its own statutes. They also posed public health concerns<\/a>, mainly because of the release of potentially toxic chemicals and radiological contaminants.<\/p>\n Those attacks, in short, were aimed at denying Iran the sort of economic and scientific enterprises<\/a> that are a routine part of life in Israel and the United States, as well as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Several of those countries (like Israel) do, of course, also have nuclear weapons, while Iran does not. In the end, Tehran saw no benefit in the 2015 nuclear deal its leaders had agreed to that required it to mothball 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program. Indeed, President Trump functionally punished the Iranian leadership for complying with it when he imposed maximum-pressure sanctions in May 2018 \u2014 sanctions largely maintained by the Biden administration and in place to this day.<\/p>\n Those dangerous and illegal air strikes on Iran should bring to mind nineteenth-century British and Russian resistance to the building of a railroad by Iran\u2019s Qajar dynasty, a form of what I\u2019ve come to think of as \u201cnegative imperialism<\/a>.\u201d In other words, contrary to classic theories of imperialism that focused on the domination of markets and the extraction of resources, some imperial strategies have always been aimed at preventing the operation of markets in order to keep a victim nation weak.<\/p>\n After all, Iran has few navigable waterways and its economy has long suffered from transportation difficulties. The obvious solution once upon a time was to build a railroad, something both the British and the Russians came to oppose out of a desire to keep that country a weak buffer zone between their empires. Iran didn\u2019t, in fact, get such a railroad until 1938.<\/p>\n In a similar fashion, twenty-first-century imperialism-from-the-air is denying it the ability to produce fuel for its nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The United States, Europe, and Israel are treating Iran differently from so many other countries in this regard because of its government\u2019s rejection of a Western-imposed imperial order in the region.<\/p>\n Popular movements and revolts brought the long decades of British and French colonial dominance of the Middle East to an end after World War II. The demise of colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states was, however, never truly accepted by right-wing politicians in either Europe or the United States who had no interest in confronting the horrors of the colonial age. Instead, they preferred to ignore history, including the slave trade, economic looting, the displacement or massacre of indigenous populations, the mismanagement of famines, and forms of racist apartheid. Worse yet, the desire for a sanitized history of the colonial era was often coupled with a determination to run the entire deadly experiment all over again.<\/p>\n The framers of the ill-omened Global War on Terror\u2019s nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq during the administration of President George W. Bush would openly celebrate what was functionally the return of Western colonialism. They attempted to use America\u2019s moment as a hyperpower (unconstrained by great power competition after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991) to attempt to recolonize the Greater Middle East.<\/p>\n Predictably, they failed miserably. Unlike their nineteenth-century ancestors, people in the global south are now largely urban and literate, connected by newspapers and the internet, organized by political parties and nongovernmental outfits, and in possession of capital, resources, and sophisticated weaponry. Direct colonization could now only be achieved through truly genocidal acts, as Israeli actions in Gaza suggest \u2014 and, even then, would be unlikely to succeed.<\/p>\n \u201cWe Destroyed the Villages by Air Patrols\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n No wonder imperial powers have once again turned to indirect dominance through aerial bombardment. The use of air power to try to subdue or at least curb Middle Easterners is, in fact, more than a century old. That tactic was inaugurated<\/a> by the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti during his country\u2019s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Libya in 1911. Aerial surveillance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti fitted detonators to two-pound grenades, dropping them on enemy camps. Though he caused no injuries, his act, then seen as sneaky and ungentlemanly, provoked outrage.<\/p>\n The ruthless British subjugation of Palestine, aimed at \u2014 this should sound eerily familiar today \u2014 displacing the indigenous population and establishing<\/a> a European \u201cJewish Ulster\u201d there to bolster British rule in the Middle East, also deployed air power. As Irish parliamentarian Chris Hazzard observed<\/a>, \u201cHerbert Samuel, hated in Ireland for sanctioning Roger Casement\u2019s execution and the internment of thousands following the Easter Rising in 1916 \u2014 would, as Britain\u2019s first High Commissioner in Palestine, order the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Palestinian protestors in 1921 (the first bombs dropped from the sky on Palestinian civilians).\u201d<\/p>\n The most extensive use of aerial bombardment for imperial control, however, would be pursued<\/a> by the British in Mesopotamia, which they derogatorily called \u201cMespot.\u201d The fragile British occupation of what is now Iraq from 1917 to 1932 ended long before imperialists like then-Secretary of State for War, Air, and the Colonies Winston Churchill thought it should, largely because the armed local population mounted a vigorous resistance to it. A war-weary British public proved unwilling to bear the costs of a large occupation army there in the 1920s, so Churchill decided to use the Royal Air Force to keep control.<\/p>\n Arthur \u201cBomber\u201d Harris, a settler in colonial Rhodesia, who joined the British Air Force during the first World War, was then sent to Iraq. As he wrote<\/a>, \u201cWe were equipped with Vickers Venon and subsequently Victoria aircraft\u2026 By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were nearly the first post-war long-range heavy bombers.\u201d He did not attempt to gild the lily about his tactics: \u201c[I]f the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary.\u201d That, as he explained, was far less expensive than using troops and, of course, produced no high infantry casualty counts of the sort that had scarred Europe\u2019s conscience during World War I.<\/p>\n Colonial officials obscured the fact that such measures were being taken against a civilian population in peacetime, rather than enemy soldiers during a war. In short, the denial that there are any civilians in Palestine, or in the Middle East more generally, has a long colonial heritage. It should be noted, however, that, in the end, Great Britain\u2019s aerial dominance of Iraq failed, and it finally had to grant that country what at least passed for independence in 1932. In 1958, an enraged public would finally violently overthrow the government the British had installed there, after which Iraq became a nationalist challenger to Western dominance in the region for decades to come.<\/p>\n Of course, Harris\u2019s air power strategy, whetted in Mesopotamia, came to haunt Europe itself during the Second World War, when he emerged as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command and rose to the rank of air chief marshal. He would then pioneer<\/a> the tactic of massively bombarding civilian cities, beginning with the \u201cthousand bomber\u201d raid on Cologne in May 1942. His \u201ctotal war\u201d air campaign would, of course, culminate<\/a> in the notorious 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which devastated eight square miles of the \u201cFlorence of Germany,\u201d wiping out at least 25,000 victims, most of them noncombatants.<\/p>\n Terror from the Skies<\/strong><\/p>\n In the end, the way Bomber Harris\u2019s deadly skies came home to Europe should be an object lesson to our own neo-imperialists. At this very moment, in fact, Europe faces<\/a> menacing drones no less than does the Middle East. Moreover, unlike genuine international leadership, the Frankenstein monster of negative hegemony in the Middle East stirs only opposition and resistance. Despite Israel\u2019s technological superiority, it has hardly achieved invulnerability. Poverty-stricken and war-ridden Yemen has, for instance, managed to all but close<\/a> the vital Red Sea to international shipping to protest the genocide in Gaza and has hit Israel with hypersonic missiles, closing<\/a> the port of Eilat. Nor, during their 12-day war, did Iran prove entirely helpless either. It took out Israel\u2019s major oil refinery<\/a> and struck key<\/a> military and research facilities. Instead of shaking the Iranian government, Israel appears to have pushed Iranians to rally around the flag. Nor is it even clear that Iran\u2019s stockpile of highly enriched uranium was affected.<\/p>\n Most damning of all, Israel\u2019s ability to inflict atrocities on the Palestinians of Gaza (often with U.S.-supplied weaponry<\/a>) has produced widespread revulsion. It is now increasingly isolated, its prime minister unable even to fly<\/a> over France and Spain due to a fear of an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest. The publics of the Middle East are boiling with anger, as are many Europeans. In early October, Italy\u2019s major labor unions called a general strike, essentially closing the country down<\/a> to protest Israel\u2019s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, a group of ships attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. As with Bomber Harris\u2019s ill-starred domination of Iraq, terror from the skies in Gaza and beyond is all too likely to fail as a long-term Grand Strategy.<\/p>\n Copyright 2025 Juan Cole<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tomdispatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Screenshot-2024-11-04-at-11.33.28\u202fAM.png\")
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