Netanyahu's speech to Congress is a reproduction of Bush Jr.'s defeated strategy

In his morally bankrupt speech to both the speaker Netanyahu and his audience of US Congressmen last Wednesday, 7/24/2024, Netanyahu reproduced the strategy of declaring war on “terrorism” that US President Bush adopted in 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks, as Netanyahu considered the war of extermination he is waging against the Palestinians in Gaza to be a response to the October 7 attacks.

Despite Bush’s declaration of war on terror, anyone who read his declaration realized that the real enemy targeted by this war was “radical Islam,” which, according to President Bush’s assessment, was the intellectual foundation from which Al-Qaeda was launched. Netanyahu did the same in his last speech when he declared, nearly ten months after the start of the war of extermination against the Palestinians, that it was a war on radicalism, and that removing radicalism from Palestine/Gaza was the ultimate goal of the war and one of the indicators of measuring success in achieving his “absolute victory.”

It took America more than five years to realize that victory over “terrorism” is an unattainable goal, and that America has fallen into the trap of terrorism, as George Friedman argued in his book (Empire and Republic in a Changing World), as it employed almost all of its resources in a futile war at the expense of allocating these resources to confront other threats such as those included in Russian and Chinese ambitions, which prompted President Obama in 2008 to drop the term war on terror and begin reconciliation with the Islamic world, as was evident in his meetings with representatives of the American Muslim community, his speeches at the universities of Istanbul and Cairo, and most importantly in the shameful withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, then the return of the Taliban movement, which was eliminated and eradicated from power in Afghanistan.

In fact, the applications of the war on terror strategy deepened Bush’s strategic confusion, when his war on “terrorism” expanded to include Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was not a friend of Al-Qaeda, and more importantly, was secular and not Islamist. Netanyahu does the same by classifying the Palestinian Authority, which is affiliated with the Fatah movement, by saying (No to Hamastan and no to Fatahstan), which means that the concept of radicalism does not stop at the borders of extremist Islam only, but rather extends beyond that to include Palestinian nationalism as a whole.

What is striking here is that after the defeat of the American war strategy on “terrorism” was proven, Netanyahu is adopting it again, but this time under the title of the war on radicalism, which indicates on the one hand that Netanyahu and his government are not willing to respond to internal and external pressures to stop the war soon, or that his war will stop at the borders of Gaza only, and on the other hand indicates that the fate of his strategy will not be far from the fate of Bush Jr.’s strategy, even if Netanyahu and his government are betting that Abrahamism is the cure for Islamic extremism and Palestinian nationalism.

Netanyahu and his government are not willing to respond to internal and external pressures to stop the war soon, or his war will stop at the Gaza borders only.