Malcolm,
Re: (For reasons unknown to me the oil interests and Christian fundamentalists all love Israel !!???).
Let me take a stab at this. In reverse order:
The Christian fundamentalist mythology is based on Bible prophesy. They believe that congregating all the Jews in the Promised Land fulfills a part of the prophesy leading to the "Rapture", at which point all Jews must convert to Christianity or face eternal damnation.
This of course is all childish fantasy, but the power of religion over weak minds is a certainly a force to be reckoned with.
The second group, the "oil interests", are a more interesting group, intellectually, geopolitically and strategically. Their interest has been the key role that that Middle East oil plays in the market today, and has played for several decades. The great fear among the oil interests, and the strategic thinkers who are their handmaidens in Western governments, particularly the U.S., has been an obsession with "the Great Game" politics that were first espoused 100 years ago by the British imperialists.
Basically, the subsidization of Israel is designed to provide an irritant to the region, and prevent any and all efforts at the creation of a pan-Arabian state. The creation of Iraq, out of whole cloth, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was designed to create a counterforce to the possible ascendancy of the Syrians, the Turks or the Iranians. The creation of Israel prevented the expansion of Syria's sphere of influence through Palestine, as well as keeping Egypt's Nasser bottled up in the traditional Egyptian territories. The recent invasion of Iraq was not, as was claimed, based on WMDs, or on Saddam's supposed threats as a terrorist sympathizer. His real sin in the eyes of the Bush Administration and the oil interests was Hussein's desire to take up Nasser's messianic goal of uniting all the Arab states in one government. This goal of Arab unity is absolutely anathema to the strategic thinkers in Washington and Houston. We go to war to prevent such consolidations of power. Notice that when Saddam was fighting the Iranians, we were pals. When Saddam was conquering and consolidating other Arab lands he instantly became the greatest enemy of the United States, and of Israel.
The great threat to Western economies is that a strong pan-Arab nation state would control over 65% of the world's petroleum reserves*** and would thus be able to dictate price and terms to the Western powers for this vital resource. This monopoly would potentially be catastrophic for the West. Thus, the U.S. has given well over $80 Billion in mostly military aid to Israel since the inception of that state, by far the biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. And we turn a blind eye to Israel's development of nuclear arms, the genocidal activities of the IDF and the horrifying conditions that the Palestinians live in. After all, better for a couple million local farmers in the Middle East to suffer than to have the economies of the Western world in turmoil, eh?
Cheerio! Ray
***Oil Reserves: bp.com |
