Senior advisor to the president, Jared Kushner, during a recent trip to Iraq. (Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro/Department of Defense/Flickr)
There have been plenty of stupid comments in the mainstream U.S. media since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Many have been along the lines of, “We expect this kind of political violence in the Mideast, or in a banana republic — not in our own democratic America.”
Such remarks betray a limited understanding of both the historic U.S. role overseas, and of America’s own history. Let’s start with a somewhat obscure but still revealing example, from Israel/Palestine. In 2006, the George W. Bush administration pressed the Palestinian Authority to hold new elections in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Jerome Slater (whose new book, “Mythologies Without End”, is an indispensable guide to truths in the Mideast), explains that Bush’s advisers assumed that “the PA would easily win.” But Hamas actually came in first. So Bush applied strong economic pressure, and also “began planning for a coup to overturn the election results.” Bush asked conservative Arab states to supply arms to the PA’s armed branch, led by Mohammed Dahlan.