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It’s common to say that Iran wants to fight Israel or the United States “to the last Arab.” Just last week, an Israeli army spokesman used exactly that phrase to describe Iranian proxy warfare. After all, Iran has so far managed to keep its own casualties limited while its Arab allies face down massive Israeli airpower and decapitation campaigns.
So when I heard that phrase in a totally different context on the Blowback podcast, I did a double take. After agreeing to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973, the United States continued to fight a proxy war in neighboring Cambodia, then called the Khmer Republic. In February 1975, The New York Times accused National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger of preparing “to fight to the last Cambodian.” A month later, a member of Congress complained that Washington “continues to pursue this war to the last Cambodian to achieve an unattainable stalemate.”
As the walls closed in on the Khmer Republic, a U.S. official in Phnom Penh said the quiet part out loud. “You guys think you know everything, but I've got orders to fight to the last Cambodian,” Ambassador John Gunther Dean blurted out at reporters on April 11, a day before U.S. forces evacuated the capital, according to Blowback. What followed was a four year long bloodbath. I’ve written before about what U.S. officials did and did not do to contribute to the genocidal violence of the Khmer Rouge.
Proxy warfare is not some special invention of the Iranian mind, and even the specific tactics echo throughout history. Over the past few days, Iranian jetliners have repeatedly turned back while en route to Lebanon, reportedly because Israel accused them of carrying weapons. If true, Iran would be following a well-worn path from the Vietnam War.
As I’ve written before, the CIA used a front airline called “Air America” to smuggle guns in the guise of humanitarian aid to Hmong militias. (Coupling the guns with the aid also forced them to fight lest they risk starvation.) The history Alfred McCoy caused a stir by reporting that the CIA was even allowing its proxies to smuggle drugs through Air America.
And the famous photo of the Americans evacuating their embassy in Vietnam on a military helicopter? That’s a misconception. It was actually Air America evacuating a CIA safehouse.
There’s another phrase — “green light” — that came back up during the Iranian-Israeli proxy war. Rather than the Vietnam War, it harkens to the more recent Syrian civil war. Amos Hochstein, the U.S. envoy and Israeli army veteran who reportedly egged on Israel’s military campaign against Lebanon, took to social media last week to defend himself. The United States “did not ‘green light’ military operations in Lebanon,” he wrote.
That was the same defense that the Trump administration gave after encouraging a Turkish invasion of Syria in October 2019. The administration, which had persuaded Syria Kurdish forces to dismantle their fortifications and had reportedly drawn up a color-coded map of which areas that Turkey would be allowed to take over, then made a show of threatening sanctions and telling Turkey to limit its operations. Several U.S. officials used the “no green light” phrase.
Brett McGurk, then a U.S. envoy for Syria, had resigned from the Trump administration over the two-faced nature of Trump administration policy towards the Syrian Kurds. He was since brought back to the Biden administration to oversee the Middle East — and was reportedly Hochstein’s partner in encouraging the Israeli-Lebanese war.
'When you sit to dine with a ruler, note well what is before you,
And put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.
Do not crave his delicacies, for that food is deceptive.” - Proverbs 1:3