The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
September 21, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- Does free college threaten our
all-volunteer military? That is what
Benjamin Luxenberg, on the military blog War
on the Rocks says. But the real question
goes beyond Luxenberg's practical query,
striking deep into who we are and what we
will be as a nation.
Unlike nearly every other developed country,
which offer free or low cost higher
education (Germany, Sweden and others are
completely
free; Korea's flagship Seoul National
University runs about $12,000 a
year, around the same as Oxford),
in America you need money to go to college.
Harvard charges
$63,000 a year for tuition, room, board
and fees, a quarter of a million dollars for
a degree. Even a good state school will
charge
$22,000 for in-state tuition, room and
board.
Right now there are only a handful of paths
to higher education in America: have
well-to-do parents; be low-income and smart
to qualify for financial aid, take on
crippling debt, or...
Join the military.
The
Post-9/11 GI Bill provides up to $20,000
per year for tuition, along with an
adjustable living stipend. At Harvard that
stipend is $2,800 a month. Universities
participating in the Yellow
Ribbon Program make additional funds
available without affecting the GI Bill
entitlement. There are also the military
academies, such as West Point, and the
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, commonly
known as
ROTC, which provide full or near-full
college scholarships to future military
officers.
Overall,
75 percent of those who enlisted or who
sought an officer’s commission said they did
so to obtain educational benefits. And in
that vein, Luxenberg raises the question of
whether the lower cost college education
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton
proposes is a threat to America's
all-volunteer military. If college was
cheaper, would they still enlist?
It
is a practical question worth asking, but
raises more serious issues in its trail. Do
tuition costs need to stay high to help keep
the ranks filled? Does unequal access to
college help sustain our national defense?
Of
course motivation to join the service is
often multi-dimensional. But let's look a
little deeper, and ask what it says about
our nation when we guarantee affordable
higher education to only a slim segment of
our population. About
seven percent of all living Americans
were in the military at some point. Less
than 0.5
percent of the American population
currently serves. Why do we leave the other
99.95 percent to whatever they can or can't
scrape together on their own?
The
issue of how to pay for broader access to
higher education always comes up, and was
used by Hillary Clinton to knock down some
of Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders'
more aggressive proposals. Republican White
House candidate Donald Trump may bring up
the same question in the upcoming debates
about Clinton's more modest plans.
Money does matter, but what the country can
get for its money is also important. We’ll
leave aside the not-insignificant question
of how so many other developed nations
manage to pay for their citizen’s education,
and stay in America.
As
a kind of thought experiment, let's begin by
rounding off the military higher education
benefit, tuition and living stipend, to
$53,000 a year. We’ll note a single F-35
fighter plane costs $178
million.
Dropping just one plane from inventory
generates 3,358 years of college money. We
could pass on buying a handful of the
planes, and a lot of people who now find
college out of reach could go to school.
The
final question many people will be asking at
this point is one of entitlement. What did
those civilians do that the United States
should give them college money?
Ignoring the good idea of expanding
“service” to include critical non-military
national needs, the answer is nothing. If we
started giving out the funds today, those
civilians did nothing for them. But maybe it
is more important than that.
Security is defined by much more than a
large standing military (and that does not
even touch the question of how, say, an
eight year occupation of Iraq made America
more secure). The United States, still
struggling to transition from a soot and
steel industrial base that collapsed in the
1970s to something that can compete in the
21st century, can only do so through
education. More smart people equals more
people who can take on the smarter jobs that
drive prosperity. It is an investment in one
of the most critical forms of infrastructure
out there – brains.
To
be sure, the issue of how much the United
States should spend on defense, and how that
money should be allotted, is complex. But
the changes to spending discussed here exist
far to the margins of that debate: the
defense budget is some
$607 billion, already the world’s
largest by far. The cost of providing
broader access to higher education would be
a tiny fraction of that amount, far below
any threshold where a danger to America’s
defense could be reasonably argued.
No
one suggests veterans should have their
benefits reduced. But for a nation that can
clearly afford to pay for a broader base of
accessible higher education if it wants to,
it seems very wrong to simply leave the
nation's future to a Darwinian system of
financial survival
Peter Van Buren, who served in
the State Department for 24
years, is the author of "We
Meant Well: How I Helped Lose
the Battle for the Hearts and
Minds of the Iraqi People,” a
look at the waste and
mismanagement of the Iraqi
reconstruction, and "Ghosts of
Tom Joad: A Story of the #99
Percent." His next book,
available May 2017, is “Hooper’s
War: A Novel of WWII Japan.”
