‘Dr Strangelove’ planned Israel’s current war expansion policy 50 years ago

Israeli Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s determined effort to expand the war that started in Gaza a year ago, into a regional war involving Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen, is widely viewed as an attempt to force the United States into the conflict directly. Washington appears reluctant, however, not dissimilar to the way the White House is always urging Netanyahu to exercise restraint in his attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, which he seemingly ignores.

Except, just as it is Washington supplying the bombs Netanyahu is dropping against Washington’s supposed advice, experienced observers contend that it is America’s broader aims for the region that Netanyahu’s aggression is helping to pursue. According to US geopolitical analyst and economist Michael Hudson, 50 years ago American strategists, including the real-life Dr Strangelove, planned out Washington’s aims for the region, which Hudson knows, because he was there.

In a 14 October 2024 article in The Unz Review, “Israel Does What It Does; It Was Always Planned This Way”, former MI6 officer and leading Arabist Alastair Crooke—who has had 30 years’ experience in directly negotiating between the leading antagonists in the core Middle east conflict—highlighted Michael Hudson’s account of his time at the Hudson Institute in the early 1970s to explain current events involving Israel. The Hudson Institute is an influential neoconservative and neoliberal think tank founded in 1961, based in Washington, DC.

“So, in West Asia the US is now supporting, no less than a war against humanity per se, and against the world”, Crooke wrote. “This clearly cannot be in America’s self-interest.” So why are there so few dissenting voices in Washington? Because the US strategy is to use “Israel as the regional battering ram to achieve US (imperial) objectives”, Crooke said, quoting Michael Hudson from a 14 January 2024 YouTube interview titled “Gaza: The Strategic Imperative”:

“Everything that’s happened today was planned out just 50 years ago, back in 1974 and 1973”, Hudson explained. “I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ’76. I sat in on meetings with Uzi Arad, who became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor after heading Mossad. I worked very closely with Uzi there … I want to describe how the whole strategy that led to the United States today, not wanting peace, but wanting Israel to take over the whole Near East, took shape gradually.

“On one occasion, I brought my mentor, Terrence McCarthy, to the Hudson Institute, to talk about the Islamic worldview, and every two sentences, Uzi would interrupt: ‘No, no, we’ve got to kill them all’. And other people, members of the Institute, were also just talking continually about killing Arabs”. 

Dr Strangelove

Hudson was employed at the Hudson Institute for his economics expertise in balance of payments. His employer was the institute’s founder Herman Kahn, the real-life inspiration for the Dr Strangelove character in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film who delights in nuclear war. Crooke described Kahn as the “key strategist for US hegemony in the Hudson Institute”, who backed US Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, known as the “Senator for Boeing” for his fierce support of the military-industrial complex, and the so-called godfather of the neocons who launched the careers of notorious neocons who dominated the George W. Bush administration, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others.

Crook explained: “Herman Khan described the virtue of [Scoop] Jackson for Zionists to Professor Hudson as precisely that he was not Jewish, a defender of the military complex and a strong opponent of the arms control system that was underway. Jackson fought against arms control—‘we’ve got to have war’.”

Scoop Jackson’s neocons took over US government policy, especially the State Department, to do exactly what is happening today, said Crooke: “To empower Israel as America’s proxy, to conquer the oil-producing countries, and make them part of greater Israel.”

Hudson said this is what he saw Herman Kahn plan 50 years ago: “Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians [into] strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years.

“The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimises the domestic casualties.

“And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now—is all based on the ‘strategic hamlets’ idea from the Vietnam war: the fact that you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was pioneered in Vietnam.”

According to Hudson, America’s aim was always oil, which meant securing the Near East, and Washington had two proxy armies to do it—al-Qaeda jihadis, and “their managers” in Israel. He called the Western governments blaming the right-wing Israeli government for the state of the conflict a “charade”, because “from the very beginning they were promoted, supported with huge amounts of money, all of the bombs they needed, all the armaments they needed, all the funding they needed … All of that was given to them precisely to do exactly what they’re doing today”.

The western “democracies” can no longer field domestic armies through conscription, Hudson explained, so “today’s tactics are limited to bombing, but not occupying countries”, and the United States has “turned to proxies”, i.e. Israel (and Ukraine), which he called “the terrorist alternative to nuclear war”. However, the danger is that with Netanyahu continuing to push for direct US engagement in his regional war, and Washington’s unwillingness to send troops, the 50-year strategy being played out currently can only lead to Dr Strangelove’s ultimate fantasy—nuclear war.

By Robert Barwick, Australian Alert Service, 30 October 2024