The U.S. government has made no protest against the latest […] terrorist war crimes against Lebanon, after a day when Israeli bombs and rockets killed 500 Lebanese people. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to arm and support Israel. Donald Trump cheers on Benyamin Netanyahu. The Pentagon has sent more troops to the region.

Then, according to reports repeated in U.S. media, the Israelis used 80 of the U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, “bunker busters,” to kill Hezbollah Secretary- General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 28. Both Biden and Harris called this war crime a “measure of justice.” That means U.S. imperialism supplied the weapons and gave the murder political support — even as the U.S. officials claimed to be urging de-escalation and negotiation.

Even before Israel’s new round of mass terrorism, there had been no indication during the entire period after October 7, 2023, that the U.S. government would withhold its support from Israel. Despite Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian population of Gaza — a genocide observed by billions of people worldwide — Washington supported the Zionist state.

During that entire period of the slaughter in Gaza, the U.S. government has continued to fund weapons to keep the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) fully supplied. U.S. diplomats have given Israel full protection in the United Nations. The people of most of the world have observed the U.S. government’s complicity in genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murders of civilians, including tens of thousands of children.

This situation is no surprise. Except for the aftermath of the 1956 British/French/Israeli seizure of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula, the U.S. has supported Israel in every war crisis situation during the 76 years of Israel’s existence with arms, intelligence and diplomacy.

It is hard to imagine a situation in which the U.S., the Pentagon, the CIA and the U.S. State Department would withdraw support from Israel. This is especially true if there were any possibility that the Israelis might be defeated, because such a defeat would encourage the liberation struggle in the region and threaten key interests of U.S. imperialism.

Elements in the U.S. military or civilian leadership may oppose involving the U.S. military in an Israeli initiative, because a wider war in West Asia would weaken U.S. intervention elsewhere. They might argue that NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine with Russia is more important or that China presents the biggest danger to U.S. world hegemony.

But there are certainly elements in the U.S. state apparatus or in the government (for example, the Congress members who gave standing ovations to Netanyahu) who agitate for a war against the Axis of Resistance and especially against Iran. These elements even urge the Israeli offensive as a way of convincing those forces Washington considers its “enemies” that no crime is too great for Israel or the U.S. to commit. Israeli aggression then becomes part of the U.S. offensive against Russia and China.

All of Washington’s strategists consider Hezbollah, the Syrian government in Damascus, the Ansarullah forces in Yemen, the guerrillas in Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran — called the Axis of Resistance — enemies of [neo]imperialist interests.