The State is 'Moi' as strategic conflation

One aspect of the latest 'intervention' by the US in Iran on Israel's behest is how it has highlighted the age-old strategy of governments conflating themselves and the state. In the current West Asian theatre, this involves all three parties conflating and separating government and country when it suits them. Both the US and Israel have taken pains to let the world know that they discriminate Iran's theocratic government (of the Islamic Republic) from the country populated by Iranians, many of them hostile towards its own repressive government. The Trump regime has gone one step further by stating that its attack on Iran was not directed at the Ali Khamenei-led 'sacro-oligarchy', but specifically targeted the latter's nuclear weapons facilities. Israel is less open to making such 'theological' distinctions.

Less apparently, the same conflation applies to Israel and the US. Benjamin Netanyahu's and Donald Trump's regimes may have been elected via democratic means. But that also makes them custodians, not synonyms, of the state. Separating the wheat of state from the chaff of its ruling dispensation is notoriously difficult. Who is one dropping bombs on? On 'assets' of regimes, or people governed in their name? Proclamations of 'we are not against the people' but against the 'regime' is SOP. With Gaza, Netanyahu-Tel Aviv-Israel has done away with such cherry-picking, synonymising Palestinians in the ghetto with the likes of Hamas, making all Gazans ripe for reprisal and liquidation.

States are enduring entities: abstract, institutionalised and ostensibly impartial. Governments, by contrast, are their momentary custodians. By presenting themselves as the very embodiment of state, governments shield their actions from scrutiny and dissent - causing institutional corrosion. To critique them, becomes tantamount to treason. Netanyahu's Israel, Khamenei's Iran and Trump's America embody this L'Etat, c'est moi (I am the state) strategy. Something that almost all other governments do, thankfully, not all with such success.