Their Fight, Not Ours

As the West goes to war against Yemen, Alex Gourevitch examines the demented character of Washington’s imperial policy in the Middle East and its remoteness from Americans’ national interest.

In a recent comment, President Biden admitted that American attacks on the Houthis in Yemen were not working but that they would continue anyway. It is tempting to dismiss these kinds of statements as mere verbal radiation thrown off by a rapidly decaying brain. It is senseless because there is no deeper, organizing set of thoughts to hold together what Biden says. But Biden was giving unwitting voice to the nihilistic character of American foreign policy. In line with establishment practice, Biden has accepted every escalation and even welcomed opportunities for regional intensification, despite the fact that Americans have no real interest in deeper military involvement, never mind in Israel’s brutal reprisals against Palestinians.

At every step, Israel has prosecuted its war in a maximally provocative way. It has carried out attacks in Gaza with utter disregard for civilian death and displacement. Israel has deliberately antagonized Egypt by pushing roughly two million Palestinians towards its border. Having exchanged fire across the Lebanese border with Hezbollah, it then chose in early January to raise the stakes by carrying out a drone strike in a dense, urban neighborhood in Beirut to assassinate a Hamas leader. Unsatisfied with the limited response by regional powers, Israel then launched missile strikes in another regional capital – Damascus – killing Iranian military advisers and Syrian personnel. While Israel has been bombing Syria off and on since the civil war there, in the context of the actions in Gaza, this was clearly a provocation. This relentless poking and prodding has no genuine military justification, especially since it is a distraction from Netanyahu’s stated aim of eliminating Hamas. But it does involve a kind of political calculation: instigate reprisals to turn Israel’s problem into everyone else’s. At every step, Israel has pressed to make their war the West’s war, in part by making it look like one of the West’s sprawling forever wars.

Given the context, there has been remarkable restraint from the other side. While there were some protests and marches in capitals like Beirut and Tehran, and Hezbollah fires the perfunctory rockets, the actual military response has been decidedly muted. There have been a few scattered drone attacks on US bases, but hardly the mass mobilization or major military movements one might have expected given the scope of Israel’s retributive violence. The few attacks on US targets have looked more like the symbolic acts of regional governments who do not want to look totally unresponsive. The reasons for the relative restraint are complex. But no doubt one major reason is that just about every major regional Arab and Muslim government, from Iran to Saudi to Egypt, has spent recent decades moving away from direct support for the Palestinians and towards rapprochement with Israel and the US, for the sake of other geopolitical and economic objectives. These autocratic governments have to maintain some degree of popular support by appearing to be pro-Palestinian, but they think they have far more to win from potential diplomatic efforts like trade arrangements, peace deals, and diplomatic rapprochement. 

The Israelis have nevertheless succeeded in drawing Yemen’s militant Houthis into the relative political vacuum left by other regional powers’ unwillingness to respond. And that escalation has in turn succeeded in drawing the West into the fighting because the Houthis have engaged in a strategic, rather than merely symbolic response to Israel. The Houthis claim is that their actions are enforcing international law against a genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. Shutting down shipping lanes causes significantly more chaos and inconvenience than a few drones or rocket attacks. The economic costs are not irrelevant to American policy. There is a degree to which the Biden administration has bombed the Houthis to defend the free flow of oil and Amazon packages through the Red Sea. But what is intolerable to Biden, above all, is the Houthis claim to be enforcing international law – including the covenant against genocide. It is a long-standing position of the US that international law and morality is universal but its enforcement is particular: at American discretion. Bombing the Houthis is about protecting the legal and moral standing of American power. Biden can call the Houthis pirates if he wants, but their Red Sea operation is no different from any of the American-led humanitarian interventions. In that respect, the Houthis claim to use military force in the name of international law is no more admirable than the Americans. 

If bombing the Houthis advances the interest of an imperial government, it only harms the national interests of American citizens. For one, Biden has effectively gone to war with the Houthis without any Congressional authorization or even any serious effort to justify it to the public. Despite official denials that it is at war, it has already murdered hundreds of Houthis and conducted numerous air attacks. Biden has since announced plans that the Washington Post describes as ‘a sustained military campaign targeting the Houthis in Yemen’. This after the administration already repeatedly bypassed Congress to send billions in arms to Israel. Going to war without Congressional or proper legal authority may be a long-standing trend in American foreign policy, but it is not some obtuse, legal technicality. It is an indication that Americans have lost control over their own foreign policy. 

This loss of control is one major way we have been led to fight pointless wars, with no clear end – or even enemy – at the cost of billions of dollars, leaving only destruction and chaos in their wake. The citizenry of a democracy does not benefit when their government has slipped the grasp of their control, especially when it is in an area as high stakes as war. Yet that is how imperial policy-making works. There are certainly some who benefit, like defense contractors and private security firms, but they are not the ones who drive these decisions. Above all, it is the infamous Blob, that oleaginous mass of think tankers, media commentators, DC careerists, and public officials, who constantly seek out these opportunities to grandstand on the global stage. Biden’s Middle East policy is grotesque precisely because it lacks any objective force: he cannot even present Americans with some cold, hard power facts that force unwelcome decisions on us; there is no direct threat, no possibility of a growing attack or invasion, not even a convincing indirect security concern the US might have. The most he can do is meddle. Or, as in this case, trail along behind his allies’ provocations until an enemy is finally provoked into action, who can then be named a security threat – even an outlaw – and inflated into a reason for the US to insert itself into the chaos it has created. That is why the Biden administration is at war with the Houthis, dragging the rest of us into yet more nihilistic confrontation. 

In the face of Israel’s retributive violence against Palestinians, and wanton relationship to its neighbors, it is easy to imagine that the most important issue at hand is sympathy for the victims of Israeli brutality. But the primary issue facing those of us in the US is to get control of our own government. The global instability that the Biden administration pursues, not just in the Middle East but elsewhere, such as when provoking forever war in Ukraine, might have some short-term political benefits for Biden and the Blob. But it is all political costs for us. We should be against a foreign policy conducted in the imperial rather than national interest. Recovering that kind of control over American diplomacy would be a genuine act of political solidarity with all those who suffer from the chaotic meddling of American governments that will do anything to avoid the needs and demands of their own population.

It is appears that there might be just enough lingering democratic pressure to force Biden to change course. He has reportedly told Netanyahu to end the Gaza war well before the US election because Biden fears hostility to the war among younger voters might cost him too much. How concerned Biden actually is, and how much more Biden is willing to do beyond a terse phone call, remains to be seen. Nor is it clear how Netanyahu will respond to pressure. But even if the democratic pressure of declining support for Israel alters Biden’s approach, that will not by itself bring US foreign policy in line with the interests of its people. Hostility to Israeli policy in the US as elsewhere is driven by a demand for humanitarian intervention against war crimes and ongoing atrocities. That kind of demand only involves America in a different way of meddling in and policing the Middle East. It is another form of foreign policy conducted in the imperial rather than national interest. It is, moreover, contingent on redirecting the aims of the imperial presidency, rather than recovering institutionalized, democratic control over diplomacy and war.

The real challenge is that this imperial structure of decision-making expresses a wider political decay. A genuinely democratic first step would be to demand Congressional authorization of any current or future use of military force. But post-World War II history is littered with moments when Congress has willingly delegated broad, ill-defined war-making powers to the executive, so that the president may more or less do what he wants. The famous Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which Congress passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, was only the most recent of such episodes. The United States has not formally declared war since 1942. Elected officials in both parties have been willing partners in the president’s foreign dalliances. Legislators have preferred underspecified delegations of war-making powers to more formal declarations of war because the latter would require Congress to take greater responsibility for foreign policy. Those same representatives would have to periodically renew those formal declarations. Which means they would have to supervise the conduct and funding of the war, assess objectives, and decide whether war should go on. That duty to govern is just the kind of responsibility our representatives don’t want. So the democratic atrophy that Biden represents extends back in time and deep into America’s political system. A democratic foreign policy will not come from the existing political class. It will have to come from a people’s movement.