Israel Matzav

Increased US - Israel military cooperation

As part of a report on increased cooperation between the IDF and the US military, the Wall Street Journal recounts this story of a recent joint exercise.

This month, about 200 U.S. Marines joined a battalion of Israeli soldiers for an all-night march through the Negev desert, the culmination of three weeks of joint drills. As dawn approached, they crept up on a mock village, an Israeli military-built recreation of a typical Palestinian hamlet, used for combat training.

Explosions, triggered by pyrotechnics engineers, shook the night. Soldiers from another Israeli unit, playing the role of Arab guerrillas, crouched in the fake village's narrow allies and empty cinderblock homes. They shouted "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is Great," and rattled off rounds of blank ammunition from machine guns at the invading U.S. and Israeli forces.

Behind a dune on the village's edge, a U.S. Marine company commander conferred with his Israeli counterpart before the two barked orders—the Marine in English, the Israeli in Hebrew—to soldiers scattered behind them. As dawn gave way to the Negev desert's grinding August heat, the forces battled house-to-house in mock battle, as Israeli and Marine generals watched on from the sidelines.

The exercise was the biggest U.S.-Israeli joint infantry exercise ever, according to officials. By comparison, at the same exercise last year, there were only around 20 U.S. Marines involved. In the fall, there will be an even bigger joint infantry exercise involving tanks and armored vehicles, officials said.

The problem is that there are two ulterior motives for this cooperation. One is for it to act as insurance that Israel does not go off and strike Iran on its own. And the other is to try to pry concessions to the 'Palestinians' out of Israel.

So is all this cooperation a good deal for Israel? Well, maybe. Another part of it is increased aid to Israel, which has been comes amid increased aid and arms sales to the Arab countries. That has to make you wonder what the US is trying to accomplish here. The Arab countries are even less likely to use those arms to protect themselves against Iran, although it is conceivable that they will use them against Israel in the future (God forbid) or that they will ultimately fall into the hands of terrorists.

It seems that it would be much cheaper and would have the advantage of not fueling an arms race if the US didn't increase the military aid, gave up on trying to get the 'Palestinians' to accept a state, and attacked Iran on its own.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:43 AM