The Arab nations didn't take the Israel bait. Now US is getting kicked out of the region.
Troops in Gaza
The Neocon faction that's been firmly embedded in US foreign policy establishment for more than three decades now had predicted how World War III might erupt. Frank Gaffney, whom I mentioned in this report earlier this week, predicted that US defense of Israel against an alliance of Muslim powers would trigger World War III which would not be confined to the Middle East and which could involve the use of nuclear weapons (see: Gaffney: Rise of Sharia Rule Will Bring War to the Middle East, NewsMax, October 24, 2011).

Was the WWIII outbreak war-gamed and planned?

The very fact that such a prediction was even articulated suggests that the scenario has been war-gamed and probably even planned. It should therefore not be a stretch to consider whether what had happened in Israel last month wasn't an attempt to detonate that scenario. There are a number of dots to connect in relation to these events that suggest this.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas attack on Israel, US, Britain and other NATO member states began amassing their fleets and military aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Such a large concentration of forces would be a massive overkill if their objective was simply to help Israel against a terrorist group holed up in the tiny Gaza strip. Preparation for a wider regional war would better explain such large and speedy mobilization.

The teamwork

Both Netanyahu's government and Hamas did their part to escalate the conflict: in addition to bombing Gaza, Israel launched a number of attacks against Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and even an "accidental" strike on targets in Egypt. US forces also launched strikes on Syria. For its part, Hamas called for the Muslim world to unite in a holy war against Israel. Recall, Hamas is the creation of Israel and western deep state structures which has been lavishly funded and supported, principally by western-allied Qatar, but also by Israel and western powers.

Five days after they lit the fuse on 7 October, Hamas leader and founder Khaled Mashal published a video message appealing to Muslims worldwide, asking them to carry out Jihad and become martyrs for Al-Aqsa. He urged Muslims to spill their blood for Palestine and even asked religious leaders to issue a fatwa compelling Muslims to take part in the holy war against Israel. Mashal himself wasn't exactly volunteering: he sent his appeal from Qatar where he is safe from the mayhem he unleashed in Gaza.
Phoney Palestinian
© Alex Krainer's TrendCompassThe phoney Palestinian patriot calls for a global jihad.
Mashal has no links to Gaza since he never actually lived there. He was born in the West Bank, raised in Jordan and Kuwait and over the years operated from Jordan, Syria, Qatar and Egypt and his loyalties lay with his paymasters. Fortunately, apart from a handful of lone-wolf attackers, the Muslim world largely ignored the fake Muslim and even faker Palestinian patriot Mashal. In the weeks that followed the war's outbreak, Muslim world backed away from the impulse to attack Israel, and even Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah declined to open a new front from Lebanon.

In short, they didn't take the bait. Had muslim countries united to attack Israel, many western nations would have united to defend her, and might even have been able to do so with substantial popular support. Instead, using a variety of paramilitary forces in the region, the Muslim powers began to attack US bases in Syria and Iraq. Instead of ensnaring the Muslim world in a devastating war escalation, the US itself has become ensnared in a trap that could ultimately force it out of the region entirely.

Trump's anti-imperial legacy

The presence of US troops in Iraq is illegal: in January 2020, the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution demanding that US troops leave the country, but Biden's Neocons didn't respect Iraq's lawmakers demands. US presence in Syria is also illegal and their key European allies withdrew support for US occupation of Syria after President Trump openly said that the troops would remain there to "take the oil" rather than bring freedom and democracy to the country.

I believe that this was very deliberate on Trump's part. After his attempt to withdraw US troops from Syria was sabotaged, he retaliated against his political enemies by keeping the troops there but removing all acceptable justifications from their occupation of Syria. As a consequence, the US will find it very hard to find support for any war escalation in the region, except in London. Meanwhile, the pinprick attacks on US military bases and outposts are reportedly continuing relentlessly on a daily basis and the US troops have found themselves cut off from their supply lines and are suffering significant casualties.

The changing political landscape

The political changes in the region have been equally unfavorable and the US has been consistently excluded from discussions about the war in Israel and the region's future security architecture. The consequences of all these developments could prove dire for the American and European interests in the region, which are very considerable. Large parts of the Middle Eastern energy resources still constitute western banking interests' collateral which necessitates military enforcement. There's no question that if the US/UK/NATO lose their arbitration role in the region, that collateral will be lost. The world might be fine, but the west is in trouble.

The consequences will be dire, including the risk of financial collapse which will force western central banks to resort to the one crutch they have to stave off collapse: printing ever widening rivers of fiat as a measure of last resort. That measure itself has predictable consequences: runaway inflation. In "Economic Consequences of Peace," in 1919 John Maynard Keynes wrote as follows:
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
A century later, we are living in a very different reality from that in which Keynes wrote those words. Even the Neocons, back when they were amusing themselves by thinking up World War III scenarios didn't dream that their unipolar Project for the New American Century would collapse like a house of cards and that China and Russia would emerge as alternative anchors of security architecture on the Eurasian continent. Slowly but surely the emerging multipolar world seems to be prevailing as the western ship of fools sails into its hurricane of overdue consequences.