Since war and unspeakable horror enveloped the Gaza Strip in October 2023, and now increasingly the Occupied West Bank by the Zionist State of Israel, there are fears of it expanding to regional proportions. With recent drone attacks in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen by the United States, Israel’s chief backer, it appears the Middle East is sloping further to the verge of wider war.
Besides growing calls for a ceasefire and ending the U.S.-funded occupation of Palestine are also years-long demands to expel U.S. forces from the Middle East. With 30,000 U.S. troops across the region, America sent thousands of additional troops and warships to protect Israel. However, while possessing such might to back Israel, some Mideast observers say America is a declining power.
“Israel for the United States has been its ‘military base’ in the region,” said Dr. Wilmer Leon, a political scientist and commentator. Dr. Leon described America’s need for the Zionist state as a ‘United States aircraft carrier in the region,’ quoting Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state in the Ronald Reagan Administration. For America, Israel represents a significant strategic partnership in the Middle East.
For others it represents America’s tool of imperialism. President Joe Biden famously said that if Israel didn’t exist, “we would have created it.” His words describe the imperialist nature of the U.S.’s unshakable support for Israel, even despite what many charge as practicing genocide in the current war.
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“To a great degree we did create it, but now the United States finds itself unable to operate in what has come to be known as the U.S. policy of full spectrum dominance,” said Dr. Leon, referring to America’s global influence. “You can’t do it anymore,” he added.
A sign that things are not what they used to be for America is the increasing challenge from armed resistance groups in the region desiring America to leave. These are groups who found solidarity in an “axis of resistance” around the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli onslaught and see both America and Israel as pariahs and bloodshedders.
By Final Call presstime at least 28,000 people, including more than 12,150 children, and 8,300 women have been killed and more than 67,459 were injured, stated figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. And, according to various media reports, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens in the area of Rafah a Palestinian city in the southern Gaza Strip.
More than 100 people were killed due to Israeli airstrikes as warplanes targeted different areas of the city and helicopters fired machine guns along the border areas, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said early Feb. 12, reported CNN.
As death tolls rise in Gaza, recent military fights also took place around the region between the U.S. and militia forces in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. On Feb. 7, the U.S. sent a deadly drone attack on a neighborhood in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, in a targeted assassination of a leader in the Kataib Hezbollah militia. Three were killed in the vehicle, including Abu Baqir al-Saadi, a senior commander in Kataib Hezbollah.
The U.S. accused the militia of being a “proxy” of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and responsible for a late January drone assault on a U.S. military base at the Jordan/Syria border that killed three U.S. soldiers and injured dozens more. Iran has consistently refuted the accusations of involvement in the attacks on U.S. bases and denies any agenda to be at war with America.
Kataib Hezbollah announced days earlier it was suspending its operations against U.S. bases in response to the Iraqi government, which, before the killing of the U.S. soldiers, was holding talks with America about lessening U.S.-led coalition presence in Iraq.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani and top-ranking officials from both the Iraqi armed forces and the U.S.-led coalition met in Baghdad on January 27. Baghdad expects discussions to result in a timeline for reducing the presence of U.S. and other foreign forces in the country. America maintains 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq as part of the coalition against IS (Islamic State).
The assassination was one of several attacks that U.S. officials said were retaliatory for the soldiers’ deaths and other attacks on U.S. personnel in the region.
Since the start of the Israeli war in Gaza—there have been 165 attacks on U.S. bases and coalition forces by Iraqi-based Islamic resistance groups. Before Gaza triggered a backlash from resistance movements regionwide, many had longtime animosity toward the presence of America.
However, animosity crossed from verbal chest-thumping to drone attacks. President Biden ordered several attacks in Iraq and Syria within one month.
Mr. Biden maintains the hits are defensive and America “does not seek conflict” in the region or anywhere else. However, “It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” said Mr. Biden, in words that have become Washington’s tough-guy refrain. The saga is not new, and the resistance is pushing back in response.
“Let the American occupation and its ominous administration know that the Islamic Resistance will respond as it deems appropriate in time and place of its choosing,” read a Feb. 3 statement of the Al-Nujaba Movement, based in Iraq.
“You will leave Iraq humiliated and disgraced, without being mourned,” said the statement.
A Feb 2 statement from Hezbollah strongly condemned the “blatant American aggression” on Iraq and Syria.
“The American aggression on Iraq, Syria, and Yemen exposes the lies of American claims of not wanting to expand the conflict in the region. On the contrary, it contributes to fueling conflict, tension, and escalating wars in the region,” the statement said.
With hostilities escalating in an already volatile region, Mr. Biden was asked about U.S. claims that Iran is driving the anti-America attacks resulting in the deaths of service people. He answered, “We’ll have that discussion,” but clarified, “I do hold them responsible in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.” But added: “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
The verbal posture against war is contradictory to the targeted assassinations and drone attacks on Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni soil, say observers.
University of Tehran Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi said on the X platform that America is a destabilizing factor in the region and is very much involved with ISIS affiliates.
The U.S. occupation in Syria is illegal, Mr. Marandi posted on Feb. 8. “They have no right to “retaliate” because they have no right to be in Syria in the first place,” he added.
“Their occupation of Iraq is also illegal,” wrote Mr. Marandi. “By illegally murdering Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni citizens, the regime in Washington is foolishly increasing hatred towards the U.S. and its illegal occupation,” he wrote further.
America has no credibility on the Mideast streets while bombing three Mideast countries, it will continue unconditional help to Israel despite what is widely accepted as genocide and a Gaza holocaust. “In response to U.S. aggression, resistance to the U.S. occupation and Israeli genocide will grow,” Mr. Marandi contends.
Some say the anti-U.S. sentiment for her exit from the Middle East by actors boldly taking the offensive against the world’s strongest military, they deem an occupying army, is a sign of the times.
Two voices who have long warned about America’s fate in the region are the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and His National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Both men said America will lose the Middle East and subsequently will have to leave.
In a November 18, 2018, press conference from Tehran, Iran, while answering a question about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Minister Farrakhan warned America concerning her policies.
“My teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, taught me years ago that the policies of our government would bring about a war in the Middle East that would be a trigger to the greatest war that has ever been, the War of Armageddon, spoken of in the Bible,” said Minister Farrakhan.
“A reporter asked my teacher: Is America going to remain in the Middle East? And my teacher said, America is going to come out of the Middle East. And when they asked about war, he said, ‘yes, there would be war.’ And he said, ‘bloodshed in this area would be much,’” said Minister Farrakhan.
When the Muslim minister gave these remarks, President Donald Trump was in office. However, his warning is just as applicable in 2024 with Mr. Biden and whoever will win the upcoming November presidential race.
“I am begging our president and the government that supports him to be very, very careful because if the trigger of war in the Middle East is pulled by you, using your surrogates at the insistence of Israel, then the war will trigger another kind of war, which will bring China, Russia, all of the nations into a war and it bothers me to say this to you, Mr. President, but the war will end America as you know it,” warned Minister Farrakhan.
The blind arrogance and false invincibility America displays in the region are imperiling America closer to her demise as the greatest nation in the last 6,000 years.
Dr. Leon said the U.S. empire is dying. “We’re watching the last kicks of a dying mule,” he said. “The United States Empire is coming to an end and it’s doing everything in its power to maintain its own sense and perception of world dominance,” said Dr. Leon, “And the world is saying no more,” he added.
On February 25, Minister Farrakhan will address the subject, “What Does Allah The Great Mahdi and The Great Messiah Have to Say About the War in the Middle East?” in Detroit, Michigan, at the Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day Convention. For more information, visit noi.org.
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