Is the United States at War in the Middle East?

I love how there’s at least one comment every day either from Congress or the Fake News about how we need to support Israel against Hamas terrorism, but we don’t want to get dragged into another war.

Which is all well and good if you define being involved in a war only in terms of troopers’ feet being on the ground.

But what if the country you are supporting doesn’t need any help from your troops but wouldn’t be able to carry out a successful military strategy without getting its hands on everything else which is needed to fight a war?

You don’t fight and win a war just because you have a well-trained military force like the IDF. You need guns, you need ammo, you need vehicles, you need computers, you need all that good stuff which the country doing the fighting either has to manufacture itself or get the equipment from somewhere else.

Guess where Israel gets most of its stuff needed to fight a war? They get it from us. Put a dot after each of those two letters and you get the U.S., okay?

The rifles carried by IDF troopers are made over here, and the Administration has just informed Congress that 24,000 rifles and other semi-automatic and automatic small arms worth a total of $30 million are on their way.

The airplanes used by the Israeli Air Force are F-35 Lightning II jets manufactured by Lockheed-Martin, the choppers are AH-64 Apache birds made by Boeing and UH-60 Black Hawks made by Sikorsky. When I drive down to New York on the Merritt Expressway, I pass the Sikorsky plant and can see the newly built Black Hawks sitting out on the tarmac, ready and rearing to go.

The latest and greatest American armament being used by Israel, however, isn’t a helo or a gun. It’s a self-propelled rocket called the Arrow-3 which knocks enemy missiles out of the sky and was sent over from the United States in 2017 to replace an earlier system known as Arrow-2.

The Arrow missile system is just a small piece of the armaments that Israel has bought from the United States since the arms embargo we imposed on Israel in 1948 was lifted in 1973. Nobody’s willing to come up with an exact figure, but estimates are that Israel buys between $3 billion and $4 billion in military equipment from the U.S, every year.

How does a small country like Israel afford to spend so much money on ammo and guns? Actually, they get the money from the U.S., which sends Israel more than $3 billion each year in what is referred to as ‘foreign aid.’ Allegedly, this ‘aid’ is also used for humanitarian purposes — yea, right.

So, we send Israel the cash which they then use to pay American military contractors for their goods. It’s a win-win both ways. Incidentally, part of the deal is that Israel also tells the U.S. military how these American-made weapons perform when they are used real-time because such reports are much more instructive than just setting up a battlefield simulation using video and TV.

Between drones, missiles, rockets and ‘smart’ bombs, warfare today is mostly an exercise in technology with fewer and fewer ‘boots on the ground.’ I love how Netanyahu says that Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza, as if there will be anything left in Gaza other than rubble and dust.

Remember a guy named Curtis LeMay? He was head of our Strategic Air Command during the Viet Nam war, and defined SAC’s mission as “bomb ’em back to the Stone Age.”

Which is what seems to be the Israeli response to Hamas — a joint U.S.–IDF exercise without the United States military committing a single trooper — woman or man.

If you think we are still trying to decide whether our country is at war in the Middle East, think again.