Former US diplomat Profitdriven foreign policy American weapons enabled Gaza genocide

Former US diplomat: Profit-driven foreign policy, American weapons enabled Gaza genocide

TEHRAN — Hala Rharrit spent 18 years inside the United States State Department. She gave her adult life to American diplomacy. In April 2024, she walked away. She became the first American diplomat to resign publicly over the Biden administration’s actions in Gaza.

More than two years later, she views the institution she left behind as a hollowed-out machinery masking a profit-driven war apparatus.

In an interview with Middle East Eye published on August 31, Rharrit detailed a bureaucracy that systematically ignores war crimes, enriches military contractors, and treats Arab lives as expendable.

Her verdict leaves no room for ambiguity. American diplomacy in the Middle East is dead.

The receipts of complicity

Shortly after October 2023, Rharrit assumed a unique role as the Arabic-language spokesperson.

She says she refused orders to go on television and repeat State Department talking points that ignored Palestinian casualties and destroyed hospitals. Instead, she says she began compiling daily snapshots.

These intelligence briefs summarized Arabic-language media coverage and social media reactions, documenting the visual evidence of the carnage.

According to Rharrit, the reports traveled high up the chain of command. They reached an interagency task force, the assistant secretary for global public affairs, and the seventh floor where Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat.

Rharrit says she stuffed them with viral images of emaciated children and rubble. Career diplomats privately praised her.

Then the directive changed. In January 2024, the Bureau of Global Public Affairs told her the daily snapshots were no longer required. Washington had seen enough.

“At that point, it became evidence, right, of the war crimes,” Rharrit said. “It became evidence of everything that the administration actually did know. We’ve got the receipts. We know exactly what you knew when you knew it.”

A despicable public relations stunt

Recent media appearances by former Biden officials framing themselves as conflicted bystanders draw sharp contempt from Rharrit.

Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and former spokesperson Matthew Miller have publicly expressed regret or conceded that Israel committed war crimes. Rharrit rejects this narrative outright.

“They’re so disgusting,” she said. “Those individuals, particularly Jake Sullivan and a handful of others, actually had the power to save human lives. They actually had the power to stop unconditional arms assistance to Israel.”

The scale of the destruction required Washington’s material support. “The Israelis were not killing the Palestinians by themselves,” she noted.

“The Israelis were killing the Palestinians with American bombs, with American jets, with American everything. We enabled it 100%. They enabled it 100%.”

She categorized their belated apologies as a cynical strategy born out of polling data.

Americans turned against forever wars. The former officials are simply trying to salvage their reputations to secure future employment.

The profit over people paradigm

Rharrit describes U.S. foreign policy through a strict financial lens. The military-industrial complex dictates outcomes. Democratic and Republican establishments both run on defense money.

The “Gaza pier” provides the clearest example of this structural greed. The project cost American taxpayers roughly $250 million. It functioned for barely 20 days.

It saved no one. The parallel airdrop campaign actually killed Palestinians when parachutes failed to open.

“Jake Sullivan did exactly what he was tasked to do,” Rharrit explained. “He made rich people richer. That was his mandate.”

This paradigm requires constant war. A destabilized West Asia allows Israel to pursue territorial expansion while U.S. military contractors secure endless government funding.

The Minab school massacre

This profit-driven model directly paved the way for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Rharrit sees the two wars as a single continuous front.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sold Washington faulty intelligence, promising easy regime change and access to Iranian oil.

The tactical execution mirrored the worst of the Gaza campaign. Rharrit pointed directly to the American strike on an elementary school in Minab. The U.S. murdered at least 155 civilians in the attack, including over 120 children.

She dismisses the possibility of an intelligence failure or accidental targeting. The U.S. military possesses incredibly precise imaging capabilities. According to Rharrit, the strategy was intentional.

“We took straight out of the Israeli playbook of going straight after school, going straight after children,” she said. The strike was designed as a double-tap operation. “That means we hit. We waited for more people to come, and in this case, it was parents and teachers and other kids, and we hit again.”

The war failed its strategic objective. Rather than sparking a revolution against the Iranian government, the massacre unified the population against foreign aggression.

Now, Rharrit watches her former colleagues go on television to intellectualize the war on Iran. None of them mention the dead children in Minab.

‘They got over Iraq; they’ll get over this, too’

Before finalizing her exit from the government, she met with a highly influential State Department official.

Rharrit says she delivered a final warning. The unconditional support for Israeli atrocities was spawning a dangerous wave of anti-Americanism across the Arab world.

The official offered a chilling response. “They got over Iraq. They will get over this, too,” the official told her, referencing the Arab public.

Over one million Iraqis died due to U.S. sanctions and the subsequent military invasion. That conversation cemented Rharrit’s realization that human life held zero weight in Washington’s strategic calculations.

She harbors no regrets about walking away from her career.

“I am grateful every single day when I wake up that I resigned, that I’m free,” she said. “Nothing for me is worth me [sic] selling my soul.”

source: tehrantimes.com