This week, Joe Kent resigned as “National Counterterrorism Center Director,” a position directly under Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Unfortunately, thousands of progressives began spreading this quote approvingly. 

Two things are wrong here: One, Joe Kent is a hard-core white nationalist fascist—so why the f*ck are you celebrating him if you are against fascism. Two, and much more problematic: the truth is the opposite of what Joe Kent said. Israel’s main role in the world today is as chief enforcer for U.S. capitalist-imperialist domination in the Middle East. 

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is part of the long drive of western imperialism—and today that means mainly U.S. capitalism-imperialism—to control the strategic region of the Middle East. The Middle East contains over half a billion people and a huge proportion of the world’s oil and natural gas. The region itself is the meeting place of three continents and a strategic crossroads for trade—as we see today. The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel as a state and—especially since Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria and a number of other Arab states, where it succeeded in stealing whole swaths of land—Israel became the number one enforcer of overall U.S. imperialist interests in this volatile and hugely strategic region.

Over the past two decades or so, as the region itself has gone through changes, this has become more complex. There have been conflicting interests, and at times real differences and political clashes between the U.S. and Israel, including over how best to “contain” and isolate Iran and how to deal with the oppressed Palestinian population brutally dominated by Israel, to the point now of genocide. To give an example pertaining to Iran and its effort to get nuclear weapons: the U.S. wanted to isolate Iran internationally through economic sanctions and force it to sign a treaty with a strict schedule of inspections to make sure it could not make such a weapon. Israel thought such a treaty would not be enforceable and fought for direct military action. At times, these differences were sharp: but both the U.S. and Israel agreed on the strategic aim and “larger” goal of preventing Iran from challenging the U.S.-Israel nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

These are differences within the imperialist bloc headed by the U.S. The fact is that every U.S. president and major politician grasps and acts on the fact that Israel—this “western-oriented” and military powerful outpost in this crucial and volatile oppressed region—is strategically vital to maintaining U.S. domination of the region. For all their differences on other questions, both Biden and Trump (and later Kamala Harris) were ironclad in their support for Israel’s genocide. As we wrote in “Bastion of Enlightenment,” “with its massive nuclear arsenal, its European/U.S. level of technology, and a substantial section of its population enlisted in the 'logic' and immorality of Zionism, Israel plays an irreplaceable role enforcing U.S. interests.” 

And as Bob Avakian wrote nearly two years ago,

Maintaining Israel as a “western-oriented” state is of decisive importance for the U.S. imperialists, and in turn the Zionist (Jewish supremacist) nature of Israel is of critical importance in maintaining Israel as this bastion of support for U.S. dominance, especially in opposition to the influence of Iran—and beyond that Russia, and increasingly China—in this strategic region. [social media message #35, Ending Apartheid as Part of Ending All Oppression—South Africa is Not a “Model.”]

Every significant politician in the U.S. system sees and acts on this, whatever the (sometimes significant) differences over how to do this.

The Current War Is A Leap… But It Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere

In regard to the U.S.-Israeli drive to contain Iran, this is a leap—but it is not some out-of-the-blue development. As we wrote last week, this war 

is an outgrowth of 47 years of U.S. and Israeli efforts to contain, weaken, and sometimes to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. These efforts stretch from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war instigated and fueled by the U.S, to decades of crippling sanctions on Iran, to cyberattacks and assassinations of Iranian leaders, to direct U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and its allies over the past several years.

The Godfather and The Capo

Yes, Israel pursues its own interests within this arrangement and fights for the best possible deal from the standpoint of how it perceives those interests—but it is a deal within the larger imperial domination. In the criminal system that is worldwide imperialism, Israel is a capo, not a don. (In mafia speak, a "capo" is a leader who manages operations but is still subordinate. The "don" is the top leader and crime boss.) The capo has some independence and can even make suggestions—but at the end of the day, the don calls the ultimate shots. The point is, whatever role Israel may or may not have played in pushing for it, Trump and the people around him decided to go to war based on their assessment of how that war would or would not advance U.S. imperialist interests, both in its contention with powerful rivals like Russia and China and in its need to intensify its worldwide plunder and domination. 

Let’s say that Marco Rubio was telling the truth when he said on March 2 that the idea for this war came from Israel. So what? Israel—like an aggressive, risk-taking capo—pushes ideas and pushes limits; but with really high stakes, the ultimate decision lies with the don. Example: after the recent Israeli bombing of the Iranian portion of the South Pars gas fields (which Iran shares with the Arab country of Qatar closely allied to the U.S.), Iran bombed Qatar’s Liquefied Natural Gas works in response. Trump then laid down the law in an all caps social media post that there would be no more such attacks on the gas fields.

The current unprovoked criminal war against Iran has proven to be much thornier than Trump and the people around him expected. Where it goes is far from settled and is extremely dangerous well beyond what is now going on. But this war was not whim. The U.S. capitalist-imperialists confront important challenges to their system—including the growing influence and power of its imperialist rival China, which has growing ties to Iran and has been pushing out in the region—that has compelled such gambles. 

A Message To Progressives: Searching For Easy Ways Out And Grasping At Straws Will Lead To Disaster

At a time when the stakes are so very high, whether we scientifically understand the real causes behind all this will determine the future we get. 

Right now, there is a real divide within MAGA. This seems to be about how hardcore the open white supremacy should be, and touches on questions of the U.S.'s role in the world. This more open nazi section has found anti-semitism and outright Naziism an increasingly natural fit and an increasingly powerful lever with which to attract people and contend for influence. Others are more for continuing the mainstream fascist program of backing Israel along with using anti-semitic tropes for domestic political purposes. We should pay attention to such splits.

But that’s way different than uncritically promoting the analysis of a fascist because he claims that Israel pushed the U.S. into this war. America is not some innocent well-meaning entity getting tricked by the “devious Jews” in Israel, as Kent, et al see it; America is in fact the most blood-soaked empire in history, responsible for the murder of over 14 million people in unprovoked wars over the past 80 years alone! America was carrying out genocide and enslaving millions well before Zionism was even invented. 

People in this country have a special responsibility to stand up against the crimes being carried out by "our own government," not let U.S. imperialism off the hook—especially when it is terrorizing the whole world.

If you find yourself agreeing with the simplistic analysis of someone who’s a stone-to-the-bone fascist, maybe it’s time to step back and think. Simplistic ideas of causes—which yield simplistic solutions—are easier. But if you seriously want to end this, you have to dig deeper. The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has written:

To understand why we are confronted with the situation we are, it is necessary not merely to respond to—and in effect be whipped around by—what is happening on the surface at any given time, but to dig beneath the surface, to discover the underlying mainsprings and causes of things, and arrive at an understanding of the fundamental problem and the actual solution. This means coming to the scientific understanding that we are living under a system, and what that system actually is (the system of capitalism-imperialism); working to grasp the deeper relations and dynamics of this system and how this is setting the framework for how different sections of society spontaneously think and react to events in society and the world, and what is the possible way forward to transforming all of this in the interests of the masses of humanity and ultimately humanity as a whole. 

We have laid out some of what is a much larger analysis above. Elsewhere in this issue, we give some sense of how a revolution leading to a fundamentally different system—one guided by the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America by Bob Avakian—could lead to a whole different relation to the people of the world. The very contradictions that make the world so dangerously explosive also make revolution more possible than it is in “normal times”—but realizing that possibility depends on us… ALL of us. 

If you are serious about really getting to the roots of things—and really getting to the roots of what could actually solve this—then you need to dig into the method, the analysis, the strategy and the solution contained in the new communism brought forward by Bob Avakian.