Palestine Tet – 11 – Washington’s Jitters Over Israel’s “Delayed” Ground Offensive into Gaza. What’s the Deal? An argument for a Ceasefire

Palestine Tet – 11 – Washington’s Jitters.

Why call the series “Palestine Tet”?

In February, 1968, the late winter of that year, the Vietnamese revolutionaries – then called “terrorists”, “tools of Moscow, Peking” launched a surprise military offensive against the U.S. military and their Vietnamese proxies, referred later as “the Tet Offensive” which shifted the balance of power in the war towards Hanoi and exposed the lies that the Johnson Administration had been feeding the American people through its own agencies and a pliant mass media.

The cost to Vietnam was terrible. One source says that 50,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers died but I have read figures four times as high. As that same mainstream source noted at the time: “The offensive stunned the American public and sows increased doubts about America’s chances of winning the war.”

Actually the consequences were far more devastating. The myth that the United States was winning the war was permanently shattered.

So many of those “Vietnamese body counts” that General Westmorland was ticking off proved to be wildly exaggerated. Seeing the writing on the wall, that the United States was heading for defeat in Vietnam, shortly thereafter, his presidency in tatters over the Vietnam gamble, President Johnson announced that he would not run for the presidency again. The American electorate, tired of Democrats who talked peace while dishing out war, voted in one of the most rabid anti-communists and hard bitten reactionaries of the day, Richard Nixon.

Nixon promised the nation an undefined peace plan to extricate the nation from the savagery it has imposed upon that poor, largely agricultural nation that had just defeated the most powerful nation on earth at the time in an asymmetrical warfare contest that Washington, in its arrogance (and racism) had thought sure to win. … But they lost… Truth be know, got nothing short of trounced on the battlefield despite all their high tech fancy weaponry.

The United States was humiliated before the entire world and to this day has never gotten over that defeat.

Is there a parallel today?

Is there a parallel today with the shifting balance of power between Israel and Palestine. Did October 7, the day that Palestinian militias, Hamas, in coordination with a number of others, breaked the wall of “the world’s largest outdoor prison”  – Gaza – to launch a messy military offensive that took the lives of some 1500 or so Israelis in uniform as well as hundreds of civilians?

Washington and Tel Aviv can argue that there is no comparison between that February, 1968 Tet Offensive and the October 7, 2023 Palestinian military operation into Israel’s southern reaches. But some parallel’s do stand out and that rather strikingly. As with the Vietnamese Tet that caught the United Stats unawares, so it was with the October 7, military operation for Israel (and for Washington it appears). Whatever the reason for the initial intelligence failure, the Israeli government was, as the saying goes, “caught with its pants down”, it was embarrassed by the intelligence failure and even more embarrassed by the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) initial confused response.

There is no getting round the fact that in this operation, the Israeli’s were – if not militarily – but politically humiliated and defeated, the myth of their military invincibility destroyed in one operation by a military force no more than militia-sized standing up to one of the world’s most powerful militaries. In every other of the many confrontations between Israel and the Palestinians it was the Israelis who shaped and defined the battlefield, when the offensives would begin, what the targets would be, how long the the IDF would pound their adversaries into mincemeat, how long the offensive would last – several weeks, several months?- when the military “operation” would end. To a large degree it was Israel that would determine the terms, the parameters of the ceasefire.

But not this time. 

October 7 changed all that.

For the first time it is the Palestinian Resistance that “shaped the battlefield”, determined the parameters of the military offensive. Of course given the limited means available to them, theirs was more of a hit and run offensive of the kind that Mao Tse Tung – back in the day also labeled “a terrorist” by Washington – developed: strike where the enemy is weak, use surprise, military ingenuity and if possible retreat with weapons and hostages as prisoners. Other than the Tet Offensive, the Vietnamese did likewise: asymmetrical warfare, or as it is more commonly known, guerilla warfare, it is called.

At the heart of Hamas’ political success was its understanding that Israel (and Washington) in its arrogance (more precisely, its racism), Tel Aviv underestimated its opponents. Tel Aviv sneered at Palestinian military capability and believed with a belief bordering on religious fundamentalism, on the authority of its technical machine, its extensive communication and spying networks, its control of Palestinian internet space, etc. In this, the Netanyahu government was nothing short of blindsided. Literally.

Yep, the Biden Administration has the jitters and doesn’t know what to do? Concerning Israel’s “imminent” ground invasion of Gaza it’s been green light, red light, green light, red light. They don’t know what to do and neither does Netanyahu government at present. Although the Biden Administration has gone so far as to send $14 billion in aid to Israel and sent one of the largest armada’s in modern history to the Eastern Mediterranean, in both Washington and Tel Aviv circles of power have the jitters.

Washington’s Jitters

Washington’s Jitters are essentially about U.S. foreign policy swerving out of control worldwide. In the aftermath of a historic defeat in Afghanistan the result of a 20 year war on the Taliban that, in the end was a colossal failure, a failed effort to bring down the Putin government in Russia through the Ukraine War, an equally failed effort to engineer regime change in Iran, Washington’s shortsighted – if not downright stupid – antagonizing China over Taiwan, the crises in Africa (Ethiopia, Niger, Burkina Faso, etc) the last thing Washington needs is to get drawn into a major conflict in the Middle East. It is stretched too thin overall.

How will sending such a show of gunboat diplomacy resolve the situation (see diagram below). What used to be a show of force might be little more than a military dinosaur in today’s world, a sitting duck for missiles and irrelevant – or nearly so – experts say in the kind of asymmetrical conflicts pitting Israel against Hamas and/or Hezbollah in Lebanon. If it results in a major attack on Iran as some suspect, it could provoke attacks on U.S. bases all over the region which could be easy targets and not just from the Iranians. Their effectiveness in the current situation is questionable at best.

The prospect of an all round attack on U.S. bases is one of the reasons the Biden Administration is jittery. There is also an even more troubling prospect that in response to an all out Israeli ground offensive against Gaza that oil and natural gas producers would, as in 1973, cut off oil shipments to Europe and North America. That such a step would be taken is not known but it makes Washington even more jittery than U.S. military bases being bombed as it would through the entire global economy into a downward spiral. The Biden Administration is not talking about this prospect publicly but privately they are nervous, very nervous.

Annoyed by its inability to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and unsure if it (the U.S.) can sustain the damage from Iranian outgoing missiles to its bases and its fleet, Washington finds itself in a damned-if-it-does/damned-if-it doesn’t situation. One thing is for sure, if Washington unleashes the monstrous firepower (missile strikes, special forces operations) against Iran (or Syria) there will be some kind of regional military response that could seriously hurt Washington militarily.

Furthermore, the Biden Administration’s policies are not only bringing China and Russia much closer together. Fissures in the Middle East and more generalized Muslim world are shrinking, exemplified by the Chinese prompted reconciliation of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Arab World, despite many splits and divisions, is becoming more unified in support of the Palestinians. And Washington’s political capitol worldwide is reaching all time lows as are Biden’s ranking in the polls in the USA.

Israel is facing a similar dilemma. If its military, the Israeli Defense Fund (IDF) launches a full scale offensive into Gaza it risks provoking a regional war. Hezbollah, like it or not on Washington’s part) is a serious opponent. Although numbers are not available there are reports of hundreds of thousands of volunteers heading for Syria and Lebanon from Iraq and other points in the Arab world to join Hezbollah and the Assad government in Syria changing by their very presence the balance of power that Israel would be facing in the north. It is not for nothing that Netanyahu, despite strong pressures from below, keeps putting off a full scale invasion of Gaza. The Israeli leadership simply have no idea of how serious the regional and I might add international response might be, one that could be devastating.

Caught in a rapidly changing world, one in which the United States calls perhaps not all but most of the shots internationally to a more multipolar global reality neither Washington nor Tel Aviv know how to handle the situation and so they do what they have always do – bomb Gaza to smithereens while trying to avoid a ground offensive because neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can sustain military casualties politically. They appear to be applying old imperial/colonial methods to a changing world. More and more Israel appears to be following the same script that the French followed in Algeria and are heading for the same result.

There is an alternative: an immediate ceasefire, to stop the momentum for increased warfare in its tracks and beginning what will be a long and tedious process of coming up with a political solution, one that also stops Israel’s U.S. supported and financed policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and reverses the course of events from warfare spreading to peacemaking. How can anyone, even Madame Warmonger, be against that?

_______________________________

Palestine Tet – 3 – The Wounded Beast Syndrome

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” in one of the largest naval flotilla’s ever,