Iraq: Sadr's Brief Uprising Bloodied Maliki's Nose (and Bush's)Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation
War on Iraq: As the smoke clears over new rubble in Iraq's second city, the big winners are the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr
Full Version: Snuffysmith's Blog - From November 29th forward
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Iraq: Sadr's Brief Uprising Bloodied Maliki's Nose (and Bush's)Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation
War on Iraq: As the smoke clears over new rubble in Iraq's second city, the big winners are the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr
<h1 style="margin: auto 0in;">FAS Launches Online Chemical Weapons Convention Archive to Mark 2nd Review Conference</h1> Today the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) launches an online compilation of more than 500 documents on the U.S. ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The Archive includes a timeline of CWC negotiations, a history of its signing and ratification, and current news and commentary on the CWC.
Cheryl Vos, FAS Biology Research Associate, will report daily from The Hague during the Second Review Conference, 7 – 18 April 2008, on the proceedings, plenary sessions and open forum.
The online archive’s “Document of the Day” feature will kick off with a letter submitted by former Secretary of Defense and current Vice President Dick Cheney to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The letter expresses Cheney’s deep opposition to U.S. ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and was read into the record by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger who, along with fellow former Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Caspar Weinberger, was present at the Committee hearing to provide testimony against the CWC.
“This website provides a much needed archive for documents, letters, and analysis of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” said Michael Stebbins, director of the biosecurity program at FAS. “It’s astonishing to read the vehement language used by our vice president urging Congress to reject the Chemical Weapons Convention.”
The CWC entered into force on April 29, 1997. The archive highlights accomplishments over the past 11 years, and arguments made for and against U.S. ratification in Congress. Many of the letters, petitions and reports have not been previously available online.
Visit the Chemical Weapons Convention Archive today.
Cheryl Vos, FAS Biology Research Associate, will report daily from The Hague during the Second Review Conference, 7 – 18 April 2008, on the proceedings, plenary sessions and open forum.
The online archive’s “Document of the Day” feature will kick off with a letter submitted by former Secretary of Defense and current Vice President Dick Cheney to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The letter expresses Cheney’s deep opposition to U.S. ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and was read into the record by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger who, along with fellow former Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Caspar Weinberger, was present at the Committee hearing to provide testimony against the CWC.
“This website provides a much needed archive for documents, letters, and analysis of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” said Michael Stebbins, director of the biosecurity program at FAS. “It’s astonishing to read the vehement language used by our vice president urging Congress to reject the Chemical Weapons Convention.”
The CWC entered into force on April 29, 1997. The archive highlights accomplishments over the past 11 years, and arguments made for and against U.S. ratification in Congress. Many of the letters, petitions and reports have not been previously available online.
Visit the Chemical Weapons Convention Archive today.
Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil 
With the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps showing how much control it has over the killing fields of Iraq, by stopping the fighting in the southern city of Basra, Iran has made both the Iraqi and United States governments look very foolish. Far beyond that, Iran has frustrated the joint US-British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which their strategy for establishing control over the fabulous oil wealth of southern Iraq will not work. - M K Bhadrakumar (Apr 2, '08)
LOS ANGELES TIMES
4/2/08
Muslim true/false
What you think you know about them is likely wrong -- and that's dangerous.
John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed
Winning hearts and minds -- the Bush administration, foreign policy wonks, even the U.S. military agree that this is the key to any victory over global terrorism. Yet our public diplomacy program has made little progress on improving America's image. Few seem to recognize that American ignorance of Islam and Muslims has been the fatal flaw.
How much do Americans know about the views and beliefs of Muslims around the world? According to polls, not much. Perhaps not surprising, the majority of Americans (66%) admit to having at least some prejudice against Muslims; one in five say they have "a great deal" of prejudice. Almost half do not believe American Muslims are "loyal" to this country, and one in four do not want a Muslim as a neighbor.
Why should such anti-Muslim bias concern us? First, it undermines the war on terrorism: Situations are misdiagnosed, root causes are misidentified and bad prescriptions do more harm than good. Second, it makes our public diplomacy sound like double-talk. U.S. diplomats are trying to convince Muslims around the world that the United States respects them and that the war on terrorism is not out to destroy Islam. Their task is made infinitely more difficult by the frequent airing of anti-Muslim sentiment on right-wing call-in radio, which is then heard around the world on the Internet.
Finally, public ignorance weakens our democracy at election time. Instead of a well-informed citizenry choosing our representatives, we are rendered vulnerable to manipulative fear tactics. We need look no further than the political attacks on Barack Obama. Any implied connection to Islam -- attending a Muslim school in Indonesia, the middle name Hussein -- is wielded to suggest that he is unfit for the presidency and used as fuel for baseless rumors.
Anti-Muslim sentiment fuels misinformation, and is fueled by it -- misinformation that is squarely contradicted by evidence.
Starting in 2001, the research firm Gallup embarked on the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind, spending more than six years polling a population that represented more than 90% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. The results showed plainly that much of the conventional wisdom about Muslims -- views touted by U.S. policymakers and pundits and accepted by voters -- is simply false.
For instance, Gallup found that 72% of Americans disagreed with this statement: "The majority of those living in Muslim countries thought men and women should have equal rights." In fact, majorities in even some of the most conservative Muslim societies directly refute this assessment: 73% of Saudis, 89% of Iranians and 94% of Indonesians say that men and women should have equal legal rights. Majorities of Muslim men and women in dozens of countries around the world also believe that a woman should have the right to work outside the home at any job for which she is qualified (88% in Indonesia, 72% in Egypt and even 78% in Saudi Arabia), and to vote without interference from family members (87% in Indonesia, 91% in Egypt, 98% in Lebanon).
What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are "completely justified." In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it's 2%.
Moreover, it's politics, not piety, that drives the small minority -- just 7% -- of Muslims to anti-Americanism at the level of condoning the attacks of 9/11. Looking across majority-Muslim countries, Gallup found no statistical difference in self-reported religiosity between those who sympathized with the attackers and those who did not. When respondents in select countries were asked in an open-ended question to explain their views of 9/11, those who condemned it cited humanitarian as well as religious reasons. For example, 20% of Kuwaitis who called the attacks "completely unjustified" explained this position by saying that terrorism was against the teachings of Islam. A respondent in Indonesia went so far as to quote a direct verse from the Koran prohibiting killing innocents. On the other hand, not a single respondent who condoned the attacks used the Koran as justification. Instead, they relied on political rationalizations, calling the U.S. an imperialist power or accusing it of wanting to control the world.
If most Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is much like other violent crime. Violent crimes occur throughout U.S. cities, but that is no indication of Americans' general acceptance of murder or assault. Likewise, continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. Indeed, they are its primary victims.
Still, the typical American cannot be blamed for these misperceptions. Media-content analyses show that the majority of U.S. TV news coverage of Islam is sharply negative. Americans are bombarded every day with news stories about Muslims and majority-Muslim countries in which vocal extremists, not evidence, drive perceptions.
Rather than allow extremists on either side to dictate how we discuss Islam and the West, we need to listen carefully to the voices of ordinary people. Our victory in the war on terrorism depends on it.
John L. Esposito is an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University. Dalia Mogahed is executive director of the Center for Muslim Studies at Gallup. They co-wrote Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
4/2/08
Muslim true/false
What you think you know about them is likely wrong -- and that's dangerous.
John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed
Winning hearts and minds -- the Bush administration, foreign policy wonks, even the U.S. military agree that this is the key to any victory over global terrorism. Yet our public diplomacy program has made little progress on improving America's image. Few seem to recognize that American ignorance of Islam and Muslims has been the fatal flaw.
How much do Americans know about the views and beliefs of Muslims around the world? According to polls, not much. Perhaps not surprising, the majority of Americans (66%) admit to having at least some prejudice against Muslims; one in five say they have "a great deal" of prejudice. Almost half do not believe American Muslims are "loyal" to this country, and one in four do not want a Muslim as a neighbor.
Why should such anti-Muslim bias concern us? First, it undermines the war on terrorism: Situations are misdiagnosed, root causes are misidentified and bad prescriptions do more harm than good. Second, it makes our public diplomacy sound like double-talk. U.S. diplomats are trying to convince Muslims around the world that the United States respects them and that the war on terrorism is not out to destroy Islam. Their task is made infinitely more difficult by the frequent airing of anti-Muslim sentiment on right-wing call-in radio, which is then heard around the world on the Internet.
Finally, public ignorance weakens our democracy at election time. Instead of a well-informed citizenry choosing our representatives, we are rendered vulnerable to manipulative fear tactics. We need look no further than the political attacks on Barack Obama. Any implied connection to Islam -- attending a Muslim school in Indonesia, the middle name Hussein -- is wielded to suggest that he is unfit for the presidency and used as fuel for baseless rumors.
Anti-Muslim sentiment fuels misinformation, and is fueled by it -- misinformation that is squarely contradicted by evidence.
Starting in 2001, the research firm Gallup embarked on the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind, spending more than six years polling a population that represented more than 90% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. The results showed plainly that much of the conventional wisdom about Muslims -- views touted by U.S. policymakers and pundits and accepted by voters -- is simply false.
For instance, Gallup found that 72% of Americans disagreed with this statement: "The majority of those living in Muslim countries thought men and women should have equal rights." In fact, majorities in even some of the most conservative Muslim societies directly refute this assessment: 73% of Saudis, 89% of Iranians and 94% of Indonesians say that men and women should have equal legal rights. Majorities of Muslim men and women in dozens of countries around the world also believe that a woman should have the right to work outside the home at any job for which she is qualified (88% in Indonesia, 72% in Egypt and even 78% in Saudi Arabia), and to vote without interference from family members (87% in Indonesia, 91% in Egypt, 98% in Lebanon).
What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are "completely justified." In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it's 2%.
Moreover, it's politics, not piety, that drives the small minority -- just 7% -- of Muslims to anti-Americanism at the level of condoning the attacks of 9/11. Looking across majority-Muslim countries, Gallup found no statistical difference in self-reported religiosity between those who sympathized with the attackers and those who did not. When respondents in select countries were asked in an open-ended question to explain their views of 9/11, those who condemned it cited humanitarian as well as religious reasons. For example, 20% of Kuwaitis who called the attacks "completely unjustified" explained this position by saying that terrorism was against the teachings of Islam. A respondent in Indonesia went so far as to quote a direct verse from the Koran prohibiting killing innocents. On the other hand, not a single respondent who condoned the attacks used the Koran as justification. Instead, they relied on political rationalizations, calling the U.S. an imperialist power or accusing it of wanting to control the world.
If most Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is much like other violent crime. Violent crimes occur throughout U.S. cities, but that is no indication of Americans' general acceptance of murder or assault. Likewise, continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. Indeed, they are its primary victims.
Still, the typical American cannot be blamed for these misperceptions. Media-content analyses show that the majority of U.S. TV news coverage of Islam is sharply negative. Americans are bombarded every day with news stories about Muslims and majority-Muslim countries in which vocal extremists, not evidence, drive perceptions.
Rather than allow extremists on either side to dictate how we discuss Islam and the West, we need to listen carefully to the voices of ordinary people. Our victory in the war on terrorism depends on it.
John L. Esposito is an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University. Dalia Mogahed is executive director of the Center for Muslim Studies at Gallup. They co-wrote Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
All we are saying is: the U.S. should take its own stated policy seriously.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naima...io_b_94927.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/3/161...4534/557/489655
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naima...io_b_94927.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/3/161...4534/557/489655
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
BBC Poll: Iran Only Country Viewed More Negatively Than Israel
Haaretz
April 2, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.j...subContrassID=1 Israel is viewed as the country with the second most negative influence on the world, according to a poll released recently by the BBC World Service.
Iran was considered to have the most negative influence, ranked lowest in world opinion at 54 percent - the same ranking it was given in a poll taken last year.
Israel's negative rating dropped this year from 57 percent to 52 percent, moving it from having the worst influence in world opinion to second most negative.
Pakistan was rated the country with the third most negative influence in the world.
The survey also found that world opinion of the United States has risen, with 35 percent of respondents finding it to have a positive influence, compared to 31 percent in the last poll.
According to the poll, Germany was considered to have the best influence on the world, with a positive score of 56 percent and a negative score of 18 percent.
Japan ranked closely behind Germany, with a positive score of 56 percent and a negative score of 21 percent - though respondents in neighboring Asian countries China and South Korea showed negative views.
The poll was conducted by the international agency GlobeScan along with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
Respondents were asked to rate Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the U.S. and the European Union as having positive or negative influence.
Haaretz
April 2, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.j...subContrassID=1 Israel is viewed as the country with the second most negative influence on the world, according to a poll released recently by the BBC World Service.
Iran was considered to have the most negative influence, ranked lowest in world opinion at 54 percent - the same ranking it was given in a poll taken last year.
Israel's negative rating dropped this year from 57 percent to 52 percent, moving it from having the worst influence in world opinion to second most negative.
Pakistan was rated the country with the third most negative influence in the world.
The survey also found that world opinion of the United States has risen, with 35 percent of respondents finding it to have a positive influence, compared to 31 percent in the last poll.
According to the poll, Germany was considered to have the best influence on the world, with a positive score of 56 percent and a negative score of 18 percent.
Japan ranked closely behind Germany, with a positive score of 56 percent and a negative score of 21 percent - though respondents in neighboring Asian countries China and South Korea showed negative views.
The poll was conducted by the international agency GlobeScan along with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
Respondents were asked to rate Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the U.S. and the European Union as having positive or negative influence.
The G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit and Nonproliferation by Taijiro Kimura:
The Group of Eight (G8) Summit will be held on July 7 to 9, 2008, in the Lake Toya area of Hokkaido, Japan. The Government of Japan, as chair, has presented the major themes of the Summit: (1) Environment and Climate Change; (2) Development and Africa, (3) World Economy; and (4) Political Issues, including nuclear nonproliferation. While climate change is a top priority, nonproliferation and the ongoing nuclear challenges of North Korea and Iran continue to be urgent tasks for the G8. Thus, at the Hokkaido Toyako Summit the G8 leaders should take action to strengthen the nonproliferation regime.
Taijiro Kimura, a Visiting Scholar in Carnegie's Nonproliferation Program, recommends the top five most important nonproliferation-related objectives for the G8. Read More
Nuclear Watchdog Gets China's Iran Intel(George Jahn, Associated Press)
Wednesday, April 2
China gave the International Atomic Energy Agency intelligence about Iran's nuclear program despite Beijing's opposition to harsh U.N. Security Council sanctions on Tehran, according to diplomats familiar with the matter.
China and Russia have acted as a brake within the Security Council, consistently watering down a U.S.-led push to impose severe penalties on Tehran. A Chinese decision to provide information for a probe into Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program could be a sign of growing international unease about the Islamic republic's denials that it never tried to make nuclear weapons.
Editor's Note: A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson later denied reports of China providing intelligence on Iran's nuclear program to the IAEA. Click here to read the full statement.
U.S. Says No New Deadline, No Meetings with N. Koreans
(Yonhap News)
Thursday, April 3
The U.S. State Department on Wednesday reaffirmed it did not set a new deadline with North Korea to disclose its nuclear activities, but pressed it to do so, saying the process is already "into overtime."
The State Department also said there were no plans as of Tuesday for the U.S. nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, to meet North Korean officials during his current Asia trip.
NATO to Endorse U.S. Missile Defense Plan
(Peter Baker, The Washington Post) Thursday, April 3
President Bush won support from NATO on Thursday for his plans to build a limited missile defense system in Eastern Europe, just hours before the scheduled arrival here of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who adamantly opposes it.
The joint statement to be released by NATO members later in the day will recognize the value of the plan to establish a sophisticated new radar facility in the Czech Republic and station 10 interceptor missiles in Poland as a hedge against potential threats from Iran or other Middle East nations, U.S. officials said. The statement is expected to explore the possibility of linking the system with European efforts and encouraging Russian participation.
Germany Seeks Compensation for Nuclear Phaseout
(Der Spiegel)
Wednesday, April 2
German Finance Minister Michael Glos wants the European Union to allow Germany to emit more greenhouse gases in exchange for decommissioning its nuclear power plants.
Glos, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union, outlined his argument in a letter to Germany Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who belongs to the center-left Social Democratic Party. In the letter, which was obtained by the German business daily Handelsblatt, Glos urges Gabriel to press the issue before the European Commission.
Editor's Note: Note the error in paragraph six of this article regarding the status of Germany's nuclear program: "Germany's nuclear energy program is the world's largest, and four of the world's five top-producing nuclear plants are located in the country."
US Nuclear Fuel Firms Sign Deal
(Nazar Kudrevsky, Kyiv Post)
Thursday, April 3
Two major US companies are getting a slice of Ukraine's vast atomic power market, offering a chance to reduce its dependency on Russia, currently its monopoly supplier of nuclear fuel.
On March 30, Westinghouse Electric Co. and Holtec International sealed contracts with Energoatom, the national nuclear power company, without disclosing details.
<a target="_blank" href="http://list.carnegieendowment.org/t/350837/160657/46594/0/" style="color: rgb(24, 14, 85);" class="link2">U.S. Alarmed as Some Exports Veer Off Course
(Eric Lipton, The New York Times)
Wednesday, April 2
Roadside bombings of American troops in Iraq were occurring with unnerving regularity when military investigators made a disturbing discovery: American-made computer circuits sold to a trading company in the United Arab Emirates had turned up in the bomb detonators.
That finding set off a clash with Washington last year when the Bush administration cited the diversion of the computer circuits to Iran, and eventually Iraq, as proof that the United Arab Emirates were failing to prevent American technology from slipping into the wrong hands. Administration officials said aircraft parts, specialized metals and gas detectors that have a potential military use had also moved through Dubai, one of the emirates, to Iran, Syria or Pakistan.
Mr. Hamilton is The Independent's comment editor. He articulates a question that is unheard here but becoming ever more widespread in Europe. It is a view with which the next administration must be prepared to contend.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ver-804013.html
Adrian Hamilton: Time to disband Nato now the Cold War is over?
Thursday, 3 April 2008
It was Harold Macmillan, ever shrewd in the ways of politics, who said that the only way to hold a successful summit was to have the communiqué already written before you arrived. On that reading, the Nato summit in Bucharest has all the elements of a truly miserable failure.
The participants are at odds over expansion to the East, with the US, backed by the new entrants, urging Georgian and Ukrainian membership against the public doubts of Germany and the vehement opposition of Russia. The core members are at odds over their individual contributions to the war in Afghan-istan. Even on what should be the relatively uncontentious issue of bringing Macedonia into the organisation, the Greeks are threatening to veto the move unless the new member changes its name.
If this were a family it would compete with the Royal Tenenbaums for disfunctionality. Of course it won't be allowed to end in a climax of slammed doors. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is regarded as far too important, and prestigious, for that. Indeed no Nato meeting is complete without a chorus of pronouncements by premiers, politicians and pundits stressing just how important the alliance is to the West and how, despite the end of the Cold War that was its raison d'etre, it is still needed more than ever in the post 9/11 world.
All true, no doubt – or at least in part. Nato has been an extra-ordinarily effective organisation in locking the US into Europe militarily and in containing the Soviet Union. But past pre-eminence is no guide to future purpose and it is the lack of definition of what Nato is for that is now producing all the strains.
With the Cold War the organisation had a defined enemy and a clear function – to defend Western Europe against conventional or nuclear assault. Without the Cold War it has no clear enemy or function, only the persistence of a well-honed military structure. The "War on Terror" proponents – President Bush with Gordon Brown padding along behind him – see that honed structure as a ready-made means of combating the new enemies in a world of Muslim extremism and nuclear proliferation. If Europe was its theatre of operations in the Cold War, Nato's role after 9/11 is, according to this doctrine, to go "out of theatre" to engage in operations in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa or wherever else a threat is perceived.
At the same time President Bush, in pursuit of his vision of "democracy" around the world and in search of a legacy for his failing presidency, wants to use Nato membership to secure the new democracies of the Orange and Rose revolutions. Hence his enthusiasm to start the process of entry for Ukraine and Georgia. Add to that a new President of France who wants re-entry to full military participation in Nato as a means to take France back to the heart of international decision-making, and you have more energy for movement in Nato than in a generation.
Only it is an energy without consensus or agreed direction. The reluctance of member states to send more troops to Afghanistan or to send them to the hot spots is not, as Washington would brief, a matter of cowardice or parsimony. It is because, for a number of European countries, there is no public support after Iraq for an operation which makes Nato troops into a white, Western occupying force charged with rooting out drugs, confronting local warlords and instituting civil reconstruction – tasks for which Nato troops are not trained and which make them participants in local rivalries.
In the same way President Bush, and the Ukrainian and Georgian leaders, would make eastward expansion into a matter of facing down Russia. But fear of Russia is not the main reason for German (and French, Belgian and Dutch) doubts. The problem is that expansion this far east would take Nato right into the middle of the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian speaking halves of Ukraine, never mind the problem of the breakaway parts of Georgia, disputes that could easily escalate into confrontation with Moscow. For the very reason that the two countries want membership, the organisation should be wary of it. For, as Moscow not unreasonably argues, if Russia is no longer regarded as the enemy, why are we doing it and in such haste?
This isn't a case of: if we didn't have Nato we'd have to invent it. The opposite is true. If we didn't have Nato we'd invent something quite different at this point. We would be involved in a different way, if at all, in Afghanistan. We'd be using membership of the EU as the means of securing the democracies of the former Soviet republics. And we'd be developing an independent European defence capability.
The fearful prospect at Bucharest is that, by allowing Nato to be driven in new directions without confronting the hard questions on its future, we are in danger of breaking the whole alliance on which it is founded.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ver-804013.html
Adrian Hamilton: Time to disband Nato now the Cold War is over?
Thursday, 3 April 2008
It was Harold Macmillan, ever shrewd in the ways of politics, who said that the only way to hold a successful summit was to have the communiqué already written before you arrived. On that reading, the Nato summit in Bucharest has all the elements of a truly miserable failure.
The participants are at odds over expansion to the East, with the US, backed by the new entrants, urging Georgian and Ukrainian membership against the public doubts of Germany and the vehement opposition of Russia. The core members are at odds over their individual contributions to the war in Afghan-istan. Even on what should be the relatively uncontentious issue of bringing Macedonia into the organisation, the Greeks are threatening to veto the move unless the new member changes its name.
If this were a family it would compete with the Royal Tenenbaums for disfunctionality. Of course it won't be allowed to end in a climax of slammed doors. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is regarded as far too important, and prestigious, for that. Indeed no Nato meeting is complete without a chorus of pronouncements by premiers, politicians and pundits stressing just how important the alliance is to the West and how, despite the end of the Cold War that was its raison d'etre, it is still needed more than ever in the post 9/11 world.
All true, no doubt – or at least in part. Nato has been an extra-ordinarily effective organisation in locking the US into Europe militarily and in containing the Soviet Union. But past pre-eminence is no guide to future purpose and it is the lack of definition of what Nato is for that is now producing all the strains.
With the Cold War the organisation had a defined enemy and a clear function – to defend Western Europe against conventional or nuclear assault. Without the Cold War it has no clear enemy or function, only the persistence of a well-honed military structure. The "War on Terror" proponents – President Bush with Gordon Brown padding along behind him – see that honed structure as a ready-made means of combating the new enemies in a world of Muslim extremism and nuclear proliferation. If Europe was its theatre of operations in the Cold War, Nato's role after 9/11 is, according to this doctrine, to go "out of theatre" to engage in operations in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa or wherever else a threat is perceived.
At the same time President Bush, in pursuit of his vision of "democracy" around the world and in search of a legacy for his failing presidency, wants to use Nato membership to secure the new democracies of the Orange and Rose revolutions. Hence his enthusiasm to start the process of entry for Ukraine and Georgia. Add to that a new President of France who wants re-entry to full military participation in Nato as a means to take France back to the heart of international decision-making, and you have more energy for movement in Nato than in a generation.
Only it is an energy without consensus or agreed direction. The reluctance of member states to send more troops to Afghanistan or to send them to the hot spots is not, as Washington would brief, a matter of cowardice or parsimony. It is because, for a number of European countries, there is no public support after Iraq for an operation which makes Nato troops into a white, Western occupying force charged with rooting out drugs, confronting local warlords and instituting civil reconstruction – tasks for which Nato troops are not trained and which make them participants in local rivalries.
In the same way President Bush, and the Ukrainian and Georgian leaders, would make eastward expansion into a matter of facing down Russia. But fear of Russia is not the main reason for German (and French, Belgian and Dutch) doubts. The problem is that expansion this far east would take Nato right into the middle of the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian speaking halves of Ukraine, never mind the problem of the breakaway parts of Georgia, disputes that could easily escalate into confrontation with Moscow. For the very reason that the two countries want membership, the organisation should be wary of it. For, as Moscow not unreasonably argues, if Russia is no longer regarded as the enemy, why are we doing it and in such haste?
This isn't a case of: if we didn't have Nato we'd have to invent it. The opposite is true. If we didn't have Nato we'd invent something quite different at this point. We would be involved in a different way, if at all, in Afghanistan. We'd be using membership of the EU as the means of securing the democracies of the former Soviet republics. And we'd be developing an independent European defence capability.
The fearful prospect at Bucharest is that, by allowing Nato to be driven in new directions without confronting the hard questions on its future, we are in danger of breaking the whole alliance on which it is founded.
NATO's Destined Failure
William Pfaff
Paris, April 4, 2008 – The NATO summit in Bucharest contributed nothing to an explanation of why there should still be a NATO. Once upon a time, as we know, it was created to keep the Russians out and the Germans down. To hear Washington, Ottawa and the Secretary General of NATO in Brussels, the problem now is to get the Germans up, rearmed, and ready to fight the Russians, should that come, as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Is this such a good idea? Nearly everyone in Europe, and certainly the Germans themselves, are content with a Germany without a general staff, whose army does peacekeeping, and builds bridges in developing countries.
They are also content with a Germany that does not consider that it has a national enemy, or any threat to its well-being other than inflation, global warming, genetically modified vegetables, and EU-imposed speed limits on the autobahn.
The commentator Robert Kagan famously described Western Europe as a postmodern paradise selflessly defended by the United States. But defended from what? He said at the time he wrote that America was defending Europe from Saddam Hussein and "the ayatollahs, Kim Jong Ils and Jiang Zemins [now departed]" with a Hobbesian realism (compared to Europe's Kantian lack of realism). Very few in Europe, then or now, really believe themselves threatened by these people. It's the United States that feels threatened.
This is the problem in NATO today. When George Bush addressed the alliance delegates on Wednesday, he added Darfur to the list of problems that his version of NATO must confront. He gave a fresh definition of the alliance and its mission: "It is no longer a static alliance focused on defending Europe from a Soviet tank invasion. It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world to help secure a future of freedom and peace for millions."
This is the ever-expanding NATO the United States wants. It is likely to continue pressing for this global NATO whatever the result of the presidential election in November. Global expansion is in the national DNA.
As that expansion happens, Australia, Japan, possibly India, and others will be pressed to join, and soon there will be the long-sought universal alliance of democracies, including some newcomers who are not quite so democratic, such as Ukraine and Georgia. The United States will head it all, leading the world towards an ever-more radiant future.
As long ago as 2003, Condoleezza Rice told the International Institute for Strategic Studies that an international system of balance of power among several major states produced competition and potential conflict, leading to war. "We tried this before," she warned. The answer, she said, is a global alliance of democracies, a global NATO.
Others tried global alliance before, when it was called Communism or imperialism, and it came to a bad end. This American effort will come to a bad end too, although one can hope for a less than disastrous one, just for the reason that sets it apart from the previous efforts: that it is voluntary.
There will have to be American pushing and shoving to get and keep the members of the League fighting in Afghanistan, Iran, Darfur, Somalia, Palestine, and whatever the other countries that come to be identified as terrorist-harboring, terrorist training-grounds, failing nations, rogue nations, or recruits to the Axis of Evil. But in the long run it won't work, simply because the democracies are democracies. They won't go along.
They won't do so, first of all, because few of them believe in such a world or want such a crusade. To reverse the application of what Condoleezza Rice said, nations have "tried this before," and it ended in war.
They also won't agree because the effort simply is not serious. It is constructed on political fantasies and counter-verities, and half-baked ideas. It's like George Bush's announcement before leaving Washington that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Malaki's sending his national army to Basra was "a defining moment in the history of free Iraq," restoring central government authority in Basra and ridding it of "criminal elements."
It was in fact a political power-play concerning oil and sectarian and electoral power in Basra. The army (even with hasty U.S. support) was quickly blocked by Moqtada al-Sadr's militia resistance. There was an uprising in Sadr City in Baghdad and bombardment of the Green Zone. Malaki's demands and threats that the militia hand over its arms were ignored. And everyone, including the Iraqi president's representatives, went to Qom, in Iran (for heaven's sake!) for the Iranians to establish a cease-fire in Basra.
Neither President Bush nor, it seems, anyone in the American command or embassy in Baghdad, knew what was going on, before, during, or after. But everyone knows now who controls Basra, and it's not Malaki's elected government, nor the American (or British!) army.
That's why there is not going to be a global Pax Americana imposed by NATO. Failure is built into the imperial project. Ask the Europeans, who have seen it all before.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
After five years of U.S. occupation, Iraq is destroyed as a country
By PATRICK COCKBURN
THE INDEPENDENT
"It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam," a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein said angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, might briefly venture into the city.
Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. and Iraqi governments claim that the country is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armored cars, each with three machine-gunners on the roof, raced out of the Green Zone through a heavily fortified exit, followed by sand-colored American Humvees and more armored cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bulletproof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have been carrying Maliki.
The precautions were not excessive, since Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. The Iraqi prime minister was only going to the headquarters of the Dawa party, to which he belongs and which are just half a mile outside the Green Zone, but his hundreds of security guards acted as if they were entering enemy territory.
Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shiite ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shiite wave a newer version, adopted by the Shiite-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.
The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.
More than most wars, the war in Iraq remains little understood outside the country. Iraqis themselves often do not understand it because they have an intimate knowledge of their own community, be it Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish, but little of other Iraqi communities. It should have been evident from the moment President Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein that it was going to be a very different war from the one fought by his father in 1991. That had been a conservative war waged to restore the status quo ante in Kuwait.
The war of 2003 was bound to have radical consequences. If Saddam was overthrown and elections held, then the domination of the 20 percent Sunni minority would be replaced by the rule of the majority Shiite community allied to the Kurds. In an election, Shiite religious parties linked to Iran would win, as indeed they did in two elections in 2005. Many of America's troubles in Iraq have stemmed from Washington's attempt to stop Iran and anti-American Shiite leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr filling the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam.
The U.S. and its allies never really understood the war they won that started on March 19, 2003. Their armies had an easy passage to Baghdad because the Iraqi army did not fight. Even the so-called elite Special Republican Guard units, well-paid, well-equipped and tribally linked to Saddam, went home.
Television coverage and much of the newspaper coverage of the war was highly deceptive because it gave the impression of widespread fighting when there was none. I entered Mosul and Kirkuk, two northern cities, on the day they were captured with hardly a shot fired. Burnt-out Iraqi tanks littered the roads around Baghdad, giving the impression of heavy fighting, but almost all had been abandoned by their crews before they were hit.
The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously, Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. There was later to be much bitter dispute about who was responsible for the critical error of dissolving the Iraqi army. But at the time the Americans were in a mood of exaggerated imperial arrogance and did not care what Iraqis, whether in the army or out of it, were doing. "They simply thought we were wogs," says Ahmad Chalabi, the opposition leader, brutally. "We didn't matter."
In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had Ph.D.s, about the virtues of democracy.
There was a further misconception that grew up at this time. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Hussein. He had been a cruel and catastrophically incompetent leader, who ruined his country. All Kurds and most Shiite wanted him gone. But it did not follow that Iraqis of any description wanted to be occupied by a foreign power.
Later Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the impression that overthrowing the Baathist regime necessarily implied occupation, but it did not. "If we leave, there will be anarchy," friends in the occupation authority used to tell me in justification. They stayed, but anarchy came anyway.
In that first year of the occupation, it was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing. Whenever there was an American soldier killed or wounded in Baghdad, I would drive there immediately. Always there were cheering crowds standing by the smoking remains of a Humvee or a dark bloodstain on the road. After one shooting of a soldier, a man told me: "I am a poor man but my family is going to celebrate what happened by cooking chicken." Yet this was the moment when Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were saying that the insurgents were "remnants of the old regime" and "dead enders."
There was also misconception among Iraqis about the depth of the divisions within their own society. Sunni would accuse me of exaggerating their differences with the Shiite, but when I mentioned prominent Shiite leaders they would wave a hand dismissively and say: "But they are all Iranians or paid by the Iranians." Al-Qaida in Iraq regarded the Shiite as heretics as worthy of death as the Americans. Enormous suicide bombs exploded in Shiite marketplaces and religious processions, slaughtering hundreds, and the Shiite began to hit back with tit-for-tat killings of Sunni by Shiite militia death squads or the police.
After the Sunni guerrillas blew up the Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, 2006, sectarian fighting turned into a full-blown civil war. Bush and Blair strenuously denied that was so, but by any standard it was a civil war of extraordinary viciousness. Torture with electric drills and acid became the norm. The Shiite Mehdi Army militia took over much of Baghdad and controlled three-quarters of it. Some 2.2 million people fled to Jordan and Syria, a high proportion of them Sunni.
The Sunni defeat in the battle for Baghdad in 2006 and early 2007 was the motive for many guerrillas, previously anti-American, suddenly allying themselves with American forces. They concluded they could not fight the U.S., al-Qaida, the Iraqi army and police and the Mehdi Army at the same time.
There is now an 80,000-strong Sunni militia, paid for and allied to the U.S. but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.
Patrick Cockburn writes for Britain's The Independent from Iraq.
By PATRICK COCKBURN
THE INDEPENDENT
"It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam," a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein said angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, might briefly venture into the city.
Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. and Iraqi governments claim that the country is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armored cars, each with three machine-gunners on the roof, raced out of the Green Zone through a heavily fortified exit, followed by sand-colored American Humvees and more armored cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bulletproof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have been carrying Maliki.
The precautions were not excessive, since Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. The Iraqi prime minister was only going to the headquarters of the Dawa party, to which he belongs and which are just half a mile outside the Green Zone, but his hundreds of security guards acted as if they were entering enemy territory.
Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shiite ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shiite wave a newer version, adopted by the Shiite-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.
The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.
More than most wars, the war in Iraq remains little understood outside the country. Iraqis themselves often do not understand it because they have an intimate knowledge of their own community, be it Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish, but little of other Iraqi communities. It should have been evident from the moment President Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein that it was going to be a very different war from the one fought by his father in 1991. That had been a conservative war waged to restore the status quo ante in Kuwait.
The war of 2003 was bound to have radical consequences. If Saddam was overthrown and elections held, then the domination of the 20 percent Sunni minority would be replaced by the rule of the majority Shiite community allied to the Kurds. In an election, Shiite religious parties linked to Iran would win, as indeed they did in two elections in 2005. Many of America's troubles in Iraq have stemmed from Washington's attempt to stop Iran and anti-American Shiite leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr filling the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam.
The U.S. and its allies never really understood the war they won that started on March 19, 2003. Their armies had an easy passage to Baghdad because the Iraqi army did not fight. Even the so-called elite Special Republican Guard units, well-paid, well-equipped and tribally linked to Saddam, went home.
Television coverage and much of the newspaper coverage of the war was highly deceptive because it gave the impression of widespread fighting when there was none. I entered Mosul and Kirkuk, two northern cities, on the day they were captured with hardly a shot fired. Burnt-out Iraqi tanks littered the roads around Baghdad, giving the impression of heavy fighting, but almost all had been abandoned by their crews before they were hit.
The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously, Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. There was later to be much bitter dispute about who was responsible for the critical error of dissolving the Iraqi army. But at the time the Americans were in a mood of exaggerated imperial arrogance and did not care what Iraqis, whether in the army or out of it, were doing. "They simply thought we were wogs," says Ahmad Chalabi, the opposition leader, brutally. "We didn't matter."
In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had Ph.D.s, about the virtues of democracy.
There was a further misconception that grew up at this time. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Hussein. He had been a cruel and catastrophically incompetent leader, who ruined his country. All Kurds and most Shiite wanted him gone. But it did not follow that Iraqis of any description wanted to be occupied by a foreign power.
Later Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the impression that overthrowing the Baathist regime necessarily implied occupation, but it did not. "If we leave, there will be anarchy," friends in the occupation authority used to tell me in justification. They stayed, but anarchy came anyway.
In that first year of the occupation, it was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing. Whenever there was an American soldier killed or wounded in Baghdad, I would drive there immediately. Always there were cheering crowds standing by the smoking remains of a Humvee or a dark bloodstain on the road. After one shooting of a soldier, a man told me: "I am a poor man but my family is going to celebrate what happened by cooking chicken." Yet this was the moment when Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were saying that the insurgents were "remnants of the old regime" and "dead enders."
There was also misconception among Iraqis about the depth of the divisions within their own society. Sunni would accuse me of exaggerating their differences with the Shiite, but when I mentioned prominent Shiite leaders they would wave a hand dismissively and say: "But they are all Iranians or paid by the Iranians." Al-Qaida in Iraq regarded the Shiite as heretics as worthy of death as the Americans. Enormous suicide bombs exploded in Shiite marketplaces and religious processions, slaughtering hundreds, and the Shiite began to hit back with tit-for-tat killings of Sunni by Shiite militia death squads or the police.
After the Sunni guerrillas blew up the Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, 2006, sectarian fighting turned into a full-blown civil war. Bush and Blair strenuously denied that was so, but by any standard it was a civil war of extraordinary viciousness. Torture with electric drills and acid became the norm. The Shiite Mehdi Army militia took over much of Baghdad and controlled three-quarters of it. Some 2.2 million people fled to Jordan and Syria, a high proportion of them Sunni.
The Sunni defeat in the battle for Baghdad in 2006 and early 2007 was the motive for many guerrillas, previously anti-American, suddenly allying themselves with American forces. They concluded they could not fight the U.S., al-Qaida, the Iraqi army and police and the Mehdi Army at the same time.
There is now an 80,000-strong Sunni militia, paid for and allied to the U.S. but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.
Patrick Cockburn writes for Britain's The Independent from Iraq.
Start another war? With what?
DAN K. THOMASSON
GUEST COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON -- Now and then predictions of a pending U.S. invasion of Iran still raise their ugly head on the Internet no matter how illogical or unsustainable. That secret plan scenario is most assuredly going to follow President Bush and his fellow plotters right out the door of the White House nine months from now.
The simple question to those propounding that and other allegations of planned U.S. aggression outside of Iraq and Afghanistan is: "Invade with what?"
The brutal truth is that both the Army and the Marine Corps have been so strained by the current campaigns they would have trouble engaging the security forces of Monaco. In fact, leaders of both services told a congressional subcommittee last week that readiness to meet demands outside the present conflicts is at the lowest level since the abandonment of the draft. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said the stress level inflicted by the current deployment threatens the viability of all-volunteer military.
When the 30,000-troop surge in Iraq and Afghanistan began, Cody told the Senate Armed Services Committee readiness panel, it "took all the strokes out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army." He added that even if the five brigades were pulled out of Iraq by July it would take some time before the Army could return to 12-month deployments for its troops -- a not very encouraging assessment for all those alleged secret plotters of more military adventures operating in Pentagon backrooms and allied think tanks around the Beltway.
If the Army can't do it, send in the Marines! Right, except that they aren't in much better shape. According to Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, the service's ability to train for other conflicts has been significantly damaged ("degraded" is the way he put it), mainly because of an increased presence in Afghanistan. He said that although his forces involved in the surge already have pulled out, some 3,200 of them are on their way to Afghanistan keeping the pressure on viability high. The pace of operations is "unsustainable," he said, noting that the corps has limited ability to command and supply a divided force.
These bleak reports are hardly surprising given the reliance on reservists and National Guard personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They come at a time when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is expected to testify to Congress that it will be necessary to temporarily halt troop withdrawals. This pause would likely bring howls of protest not only from Democrats and their presidential candidates but put even more stress on forces that have become increasingly resentful of extended and repeated tours.
Further complicating matters has been growing unrest in military families about extension of service beyond the enlistment contracts. Those who joined for specific terms have found their enlistments prolonged because of the war zone needs, a not uncommon practice during major conflicts. A new movie about this problem, "Stop Loss," is likely to stir more resentment and, some believe, hurt recruiting at a time the Army and Marines are trying to boost their active-duty rosters to 547,000 and 220,000 respectively.
It is doubtful that the abolition of the draft and the switch to all volunteers in the military following the long debacle in Vietnam anticipated fighting wars on two fronts while trying to maintain obligations in Europe and Asia. Moving from the huge draft-fed machine to the smaller, ostensibly more elite volunteer force was supposed to discourage military adventurism. Yet the requirements of occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting off insurgents have severely strained that concept. Both wars, if that is the proper term, have been going on longer than American involvement in World War II.
Does this support the argument for reinstating the draft? At this time, it would be politically unfeasible. But, as the experts told Congress this week, anything beyond the current level would require some major rethinking.
Meanwhile, all those Internet predictions of further military expeditions should be considered in the context of feasibility or the lack thereof. This coupled with a new report about the huge cost overruns in spending by the Pentagon on weapons of questionable effectiveness has put the Defense department and its military charges under more pressure than at any time since the fall of Saigon. It isn't a great picture, but it could change dramatically given the outcome of the November election.
Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.
DAN K. THOMASSON
GUEST COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON -- Now and then predictions of a pending U.S. invasion of Iran still raise their ugly head on the Internet no matter how illogical or unsustainable. That secret plan scenario is most assuredly going to follow President Bush and his fellow plotters right out the door of the White House nine months from now.
The simple question to those propounding that and other allegations of planned U.S. aggression outside of Iraq and Afghanistan is: "Invade with what?"
The brutal truth is that both the Army and the Marine Corps have been so strained by the current campaigns they would have trouble engaging the security forces of Monaco. In fact, leaders of both services told a congressional subcommittee last week that readiness to meet demands outside the present conflicts is at the lowest level since the abandonment of the draft. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody said the stress level inflicted by the current deployment threatens the viability of all-volunteer military.
When the 30,000-troop surge in Iraq and Afghanistan began, Cody told the Senate Armed Services Committee readiness panel, it "took all the strokes out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army." He added that even if the five brigades were pulled out of Iraq by July it would take some time before the Army could return to 12-month deployments for its troops -- a not very encouraging assessment for all those alleged secret plotters of more military adventures operating in Pentagon backrooms and allied think tanks around the Beltway.
If the Army can't do it, send in the Marines! Right, except that they aren't in much better shape. According to Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, the service's ability to train for other conflicts has been significantly damaged ("degraded" is the way he put it), mainly because of an increased presence in Afghanistan. He said that although his forces involved in the surge already have pulled out, some 3,200 of them are on their way to Afghanistan keeping the pressure on viability high. The pace of operations is "unsustainable," he said, noting that the corps has limited ability to command and supply a divided force.
These bleak reports are hardly surprising given the reliance on reservists and National Guard personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They come at a time when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is expected to testify to Congress that it will be necessary to temporarily halt troop withdrawals. This pause would likely bring howls of protest not only from Democrats and their presidential candidates but put even more stress on forces that have become increasingly resentful of extended and repeated tours.
Further complicating matters has been growing unrest in military families about extension of service beyond the enlistment contracts. Those who joined for specific terms have found their enlistments prolonged because of the war zone needs, a not uncommon practice during major conflicts. A new movie about this problem, "Stop Loss," is likely to stir more resentment and, some believe, hurt recruiting at a time the Army and Marines are trying to boost their active-duty rosters to 547,000 and 220,000 respectively.
It is doubtful that the abolition of the draft and the switch to all volunteers in the military following the long debacle in Vietnam anticipated fighting wars on two fronts while trying to maintain obligations in Europe and Asia. Moving from the huge draft-fed machine to the smaller, ostensibly more elite volunteer force was supposed to discourage military adventurism. Yet the requirements of occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting off insurgents have severely strained that concept. Both wars, if that is the proper term, have been going on longer than American involvement in World War II.
Does this support the argument for reinstating the draft? At this time, it would be politically unfeasible. But, as the experts told Congress this week, anything beyond the current level would require some major rethinking.
Meanwhile, all those Internet predictions of further military expeditions should be considered in the context of feasibility or the lack thereof. This coupled with a new report about the huge cost overruns in spending by the Pentagon on weapons of questionable effectiveness has put the Defense department and its military charges under more pressure than at any time since the fall of Saigon. It isn't a great picture, but it could change dramatically given the outcome of the November election.
Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.
The general and the trap
The George W Bush administration's missteps in Iraq will not be apparent in the shadowboxing among Washington's "best and brightest" when General David Petraeus, the "surge" commander in Iraq, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before congressional committees on Tuesday. And any debate focused on military success or failure is a trap, with Petraeus' testimony as the bait for unwary Democratic presidential hopefuls. - Ira Chernus (Apr 7, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD08Ak02.html
The George W Bush administration's missteps in Iraq will not be apparent in the shadowboxing among Washington's "best and brightest" when General David Petraeus, the "surge" commander in Iraq, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before congressional committees on Tuesday. And any debate focused on military success or failure is a trap, with Petraeus' testimony as the bait for unwary Democratic presidential hopefuls. - Ira Chernus (Apr 7, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD08Ak02.html
Withdraw from What?
Withdrawing from Iraq either on John McCain's schedule, or Hilary Clinton's, or even that of those who want out immediately, will solve nothing if we do not address far more fundamental problems in how we think about ourselves and the world. In an article that appeared in the April 2008 Armed Forces Journal, retired Air Force Colonel Chester Richards explains the fundamental decisions that would be required. The subjunctive case is necessary here, as no one in American politics even seems to acknowledge that such choices are called for.
This article appears in the just released April edition of Armed Forces Journal at http://www.afji.com/2008/04/3369506.
It is also reproduce below:
The fight for friends
U.S. national strategy should refocus from military operations to intelligence
BY CHET RICHARDS
Polls show that most non-Kurdish Iraqis blame the U.S. for the condition of their country and believe that their situations will improve after we leave. If, some five years after the invasion, this describes the mood of those we came to help, it suggests that we and the Iraqi people will obtain — at best — an Iraq that is worse off than it was before our occupation and one that could provide a breeding ground of resentment against American interests for as long into the future as we can imagine.
At worst, our withdrawal from Iraq could result in hundreds and possibly thousands of additional American casualties, the abandoning of billions of dollars of equipment, and the emergence of powerful and determined entities allied with Iran in the case of the Shiites, or with the most regressive political and social forces in the Middle East in the case of Arab Sunnis.
How did we get ourselves into this predicament? We cannot fault the efforts of the American military. Our armed services have suffered some 4,000 deaths and several times that many seriously injured. As a nation, we have supported the effort with a generational spending obligation that will likely top $2 trillion, including interest on the money we’ve borrowed to fight the war and what we will spend to care for our critically wounded service members.
There are two major reasons for our problems. One is that, in the words of retired British Gen. Rupert Smith, “Military force [today] is considered a solution, or part of a solution, in a wide range of problems for which it was not originally intended or configured.” Simply put, military forces — that is, conventional military forces — are intended to defeat other conventional military forces on the battlefield. Ours are the best in the world at that, but when we ask them to do other things, like stability operations, we shouldn’t be too surprised when they have problems.
So AFJ writer Ralph Peters is undoubtedly correct when he writes in “Dishonest doctrine” [December] about “killing those who need killing,” but he never explains why American troops should be the ones doing the killing or how, if we do, the Iraqis will ever recover the ability to do it themselves. Al-Qaida caused no problems for the Iraqi population before March 2003.
Which raises a second major reason for our problems: our refusal to think in terms of grand strategy. If you make this observation among policy groups, you will likely be greeted with beatific smiles and politely stifled yawns, but our emphasis on strategy — how to use military forces — at the expense of grand strategy — why to use military force — explains most of our problems.
Grand strategy is nothing more than the art of making more friends and allies than enemies. Grand strategy is why Hitler lost World War II: Many more people were willing to fight him than wanted to join him, which ultimately offset the battlefield brilliance of the Wehrmacht. Today, we need to concentrate on keeping the friends we have — no more denigrating an “old Europe” — while building our relationships in the developing world, where most terrorism is spawned.
People in the developing world, like people everywhere, need stable, functioning governments that enjoy a substantial degree of legitimacy. And these governments need to be integrated into what Thomas Barnett calls the world’s “functioning core.” Under these conditions, nonstate threats to security become manageable. They become seen as what they are — organized crime with an ideological veneer — and these can be dealt with through enhanced international cooperation on intelligence and law enforcement.
OCCUPATION TROUBLE
What does not seem to work, or work very reliably, is what British military historian Basil Liddell Hart derided as the “direct approach.” An intervention by foreign armies, even for the best political and humanitarian reasons, is still an invasion and an occupation. After a while, the locals are going to resent it and then resist it, as the fall of empires (including the Soviet Union) in recent years demonstrates. Some people, however, will tell you that Iraq could have turned out differently. If only they had been listened to, the Iraqis would be living in a prosperous, secular, Western-oriented democracy today. Perhaps, but the one thing that all who make such claims have in common is that they have never done it.
It is impossible to prove that an alternative occupation would have led to a more favorable outcome, as if the world could be replayed enough times to reach statistical significance. What data we do have suggests that occupiers should expect problems: A recently published study by Patricia Sullivan at the University of Georgia, for example, found that of 122 uses of military force by major powers against weak powers since the end of World War II, nearly two-thirds of those that needed “target compliance,” which includes occupations, were unsuccessful. It is impossible, in other words, for would-be occupiers to obey Sun Tzu’s injunction that victorious armies should win first and then, and only then, go into battle. We should not risk our blood and treasure, not to mention those of our intended beneficiaries, on such gambles.
The goal of American grand strategy should be, in the late strategist John Boyd’s pithy summary, to pump up our morale, deflate that of our opponents and attract the uncommitted to our cause. Do that and we “win first,” and usually will not feel compelled to invade anyone. Unfortunately, this blithe description of grand strategy hides a brutal game, for one element in attracting the world’s uncommitted is demonstrating that our cause is so compelling that we are not afraid to die for it. As historian Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem summarized modern conflict in his recent book, “The Changing Face of War”: “Compared to the willingness, or lack of it, in men (and women) to die for their cause, virtually all questions of policy, organization, doctrine, training and equipment pale into insignificance.”
It does not take a grand strategic genius to figure out which side in the “war on terror” is winning in this respect. Our military forces, as the casualty figures from Iraq and Afghanistan tragically show, are doing their part. However, walk into any airport in the U.S. and you see a nation that is scared to death. Some of these security measures are undoubtedly justified, but the sight of the citizens of the world’s greatest power meekly shuffling along in sock feet must make Osama bin Laden’s heart beat proud.
THE DEFENSE WE NEED
If the next administration is to go down in history as recovering from the mistakes of the early 21st century and setting the nation back on the path to prosperity and improved standards of living, we must place the use of armed force back into its proper context. When conducting external affairs, our emphasis must be on building a deep understanding of what is happening in the world and why — on achieving “objective perception.” With a clear and unbiased picture of what is going on, a little force at the right time and place can produce spectacular results without the risks of a prolonged occupation.
Refocusing the national security emphasis from military operations to intelligence would also allow significant reductions in the nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars we spend every year on the various aspects of our national defense. Stuffing the defense spending genie back into the bottle will also produce major benefits to the economy and to the quality of life in the country as a whole.
To put defense spending in perspective: If we could refund a half-trillion dollars to the taxpayers, we would put about $4,000 (tax free) back into the pocket of every household that filed a tax return for 2005. We would do that every year as far into the future as the budget-eye can see, and the amount would grow 10 percent or more each year, just as the defense budget has been growing for the last several years. By comparison, the one-time stimulus rebates recently passed by Congress and signed by the president will be, at most, $1,200, to be “paid for” by increasing the deficit.
While eliminating the entire defense budget is not realistic, you can get an idea of what is realistic by looking at what we spend on the Marine Corps. This force, which exceeds the capability of any opponent we might actually confront (i.e., excluding major nuclear powers and U.S. allies), costs about $30 billion per year. The Marine Corps budget, in fact, exceeds the combined military budgets of all the members of the “axis of evil,” plus all the countries of the Middle East that are not U.S. allies.
Although a Marine Corps-size force by itself would not constitute a complete defense capability — it would require additional ships and aircraft to move and support it, and there are some missions, such as nuclear deterrence, anti-piracy and some special missions, that it cannot perform — it lends credence to the idea that a budget in the $200 billion to $250 billion range could be both reasonable and effective. It would still be the largest national defense budget in the world — by a long shot. Plus, it never hurts to remind ourselves that we do have allies, and with a good grand strategy, we will have a lot more.
THE PAYOFF
Reducing the defense budget to rational proportions does not mean that we withdraw to our North American sanctuary and hope for the best. It does mean that we work to grow the family of nations that share a common view of security and place a high value on trade and other interactions with each other. And it means that we contain the dangers offered by the rest of the world — states and nonstates — through means appropriate to the dangers they represent.
Our everyday tools for this purpose include intelligence, law enforcement, trade, personal interaction (tourism, student exchanges, etc.) and diplomacy. Can military force be ruled out? Of course not. With a clear understanding of world dynamics, the military can be used adroitly to further national goals. Put another way, on rare occasions — for example, hostage rescue, reinforcing international law enforcement, and prevention of genocide — the core nations acting in concert may supplement the “soft” means with military actions that are — and are seen to be — unavoidable, rapid, daring and successful.
Withdrawing from Iraq either on John McCain's schedule, or Hilary Clinton's, or even that of those who want out immediately, will solve nothing if we do not address far more fundamental problems in how we think about ourselves and the world. In an article that appeared in the April 2008 Armed Forces Journal, retired Air Force Colonel Chester Richards explains the fundamental decisions that would be required. The subjunctive case is necessary here, as no one in American politics even seems to acknowledge that such choices are called for.
This article appears in the just released April edition of Armed Forces Journal at http://www.afji.com/2008/04/3369506.
It is also reproduce below:
The fight for friends
U.S. national strategy should refocus from military operations to intelligence
BY CHET RICHARDS
Polls show that most non-Kurdish Iraqis blame the U.S. for the condition of their country and believe that their situations will improve after we leave. If, some five years after the invasion, this describes the mood of those we came to help, it suggests that we and the Iraqi people will obtain — at best — an Iraq that is worse off than it was before our occupation and one that could provide a breeding ground of resentment against American interests for as long into the future as we can imagine.
At worst, our withdrawal from Iraq could result in hundreds and possibly thousands of additional American casualties, the abandoning of billions of dollars of equipment, and the emergence of powerful and determined entities allied with Iran in the case of the Shiites, or with the most regressive political and social forces in the Middle East in the case of Arab Sunnis.
How did we get ourselves into this predicament? We cannot fault the efforts of the American military. Our armed services have suffered some 4,000 deaths and several times that many seriously injured. As a nation, we have supported the effort with a generational spending obligation that will likely top $2 trillion, including interest on the money we’ve borrowed to fight the war and what we will spend to care for our critically wounded service members.
There are two major reasons for our problems. One is that, in the words of retired British Gen. Rupert Smith, “Military force [today] is considered a solution, or part of a solution, in a wide range of problems for which it was not originally intended or configured.” Simply put, military forces — that is, conventional military forces — are intended to defeat other conventional military forces on the battlefield. Ours are the best in the world at that, but when we ask them to do other things, like stability operations, we shouldn’t be too surprised when they have problems.
So AFJ writer Ralph Peters is undoubtedly correct when he writes in “Dishonest doctrine” [December] about “killing those who need killing,” but he never explains why American troops should be the ones doing the killing or how, if we do, the Iraqis will ever recover the ability to do it themselves. Al-Qaida caused no problems for the Iraqi population before March 2003.
Which raises a second major reason for our problems: our refusal to think in terms of grand strategy. If you make this observation among policy groups, you will likely be greeted with beatific smiles and politely stifled yawns, but our emphasis on strategy — how to use military forces — at the expense of grand strategy — why to use military force — explains most of our problems.
Grand strategy is nothing more than the art of making more friends and allies than enemies. Grand strategy is why Hitler lost World War II: Many more people were willing to fight him than wanted to join him, which ultimately offset the battlefield brilliance of the Wehrmacht. Today, we need to concentrate on keeping the friends we have — no more denigrating an “old Europe” — while building our relationships in the developing world, where most terrorism is spawned.
People in the developing world, like people everywhere, need stable, functioning governments that enjoy a substantial degree of legitimacy. And these governments need to be integrated into what Thomas Barnett calls the world’s “functioning core.” Under these conditions, nonstate threats to security become manageable. They become seen as what they are — organized crime with an ideological veneer — and these can be dealt with through enhanced international cooperation on intelligence and law enforcement.
OCCUPATION TROUBLE
What does not seem to work, or work very reliably, is what British military historian Basil Liddell Hart derided as the “direct approach.” An intervention by foreign armies, even for the best political and humanitarian reasons, is still an invasion and an occupation. After a while, the locals are going to resent it and then resist it, as the fall of empires (including the Soviet Union) in recent years demonstrates. Some people, however, will tell you that Iraq could have turned out differently. If only they had been listened to, the Iraqis would be living in a prosperous, secular, Western-oriented democracy today. Perhaps, but the one thing that all who make such claims have in common is that they have never done it.
It is impossible to prove that an alternative occupation would have led to a more favorable outcome, as if the world could be replayed enough times to reach statistical significance. What data we do have suggests that occupiers should expect problems: A recently published study by Patricia Sullivan at the University of Georgia, for example, found that of 122 uses of military force by major powers against weak powers since the end of World War II, nearly two-thirds of those that needed “target compliance,” which includes occupations, were unsuccessful. It is impossible, in other words, for would-be occupiers to obey Sun Tzu’s injunction that victorious armies should win first and then, and only then, go into battle. We should not risk our blood and treasure, not to mention those of our intended beneficiaries, on such gambles.
The goal of American grand strategy should be, in the late strategist John Boyd’s pithy summary, to pump up our morale, deflate that of our opponents and attract the uncommitted to our cause. Do that and we “win first,” and usually will not feel compelled to invade anyone. Unfortunately, this blithe description of grand strategy hides a brutal game, for one element in attracting the world’s uncommitted is demonstrating that our cause is so compelling that we are not afraid to die for it. As historian Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem summarized modern conflict in his recent book, “The Changing Face of War”: “Compared to the willingness, or lack of it, in men (and women) to die for their cause, virtually all questions of policy, organization, doctrine, training and equipment pale into insignificance.”
It does not take a grand strategic genius to figure out which side in the “war on terror” is winning in this respect. Our military forces, as the casualty figures from Iraq and Afghanistan tragically show, are doing their part. However, walk into any airport in the U.S. and you see a nation that is scared to death. Some of these security measures are undoubtedly justified, but the sight of the citizens of the world’s greatest power meekly shuffling along in sock feet must make Osama bin Laden’s heart beat proud.
THE DEFENSE WE NEED
If the next administration is to go down in history as recovering from the mistakes of the early 21st century and setting the nation back on the path to prosperity and improved standards of living, we must place the use of armed force back into its proper context. When conducting external affairs, our emphasis must be on building a deep understanding of what is happening in the world and why — on achieving “objective perception.” With a clear and unbiased picture of what is going on, a little force at the right time and place can produce spectacular results without the risks of a prolonged occupation.
Refocusing the national security emphasis from military operations to intelligence would also allow significant reductions in the nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars we spend every year on the various aspects of our national defense. Stuffing the defense spending genie back into the bottle will also produce major benefits to the economy and to the quality of life in the country as a whole.
To put defense spending in perspective: If we could refund a half-trillion dollars to the taxpayers, we would put about $4,000 (tax free) back into the pocket of every household that filed a tax return for 2005. We would do that every year as far into the future as the budget-eye can see, and the amount would grow 10 percent or more each year, just as the defense budget has been growing for the last several years. By comparison, the one-time stimulus rebates recently passed by Congress and signed by the president will be, at most, $1,200, to be “paid for” by increasing the deficit.
While eliminating the entire defense budget is not realistic, you can get an idea of what is realistic by looking at what we spend on the Marine Corps. This force, which exceeds the capability of any opponent we might actually confront (i.e., excluding major nuclear powers and U.S. allies), costs about $30 billion per year. The Marine Corps budget, in fact, exceeds the combined military budgets of all the members of the “axis of evil,” plus all the countries of the Middle East that are not U.S. allies.
Although a Marine Corps-size force by itself would not constitute a complete defense capability — it would require additional ships and aircraft to move and support it, and there are some missions, such as nuclear deterrence, anti-piracy and some special missions, that it cannot perform — it lends credence to the idea that a budget in the $200 billion to $250 billion range could be both reasonable and effective. It would still be the largest national defense budget in the world — by a long shot. Plus, it never hurts to remind ourselves that we do have allies, and with a good grand strategy, we will have a lot more.
THE PAYOFF
Reducing the defense budget to rational proportions does not mean that we withdraw to our North American sanctuary and hope for the best. It does mean that we work to grow the family of nations that share a common view of security and place a high value on trade and other interactions with each other. And it means that we contain the dangers offered by the rest of the world — states and nonstates — through means appropriate to the dangers they represent.
Our everyday tools for this purpose include intelligence, law enforcement, trade, personal interaction (tourism, student exchanges, etc.) and diplomacy. Can military force be ruled out? Of course not. With a clear understanding of world dynamics, the military can be used adroitly to further national goals. Put another way, on rare occasions — for example, hostage rescue, reinforcing international law enforcement, and prevention of genocide — the core nations acting in concert may supplement the “soft” means with military actions that are — and are seen to be — unavoidable, rapid, daring and successful.
Don't Betray Us, General: Admit That Iraq Keeps Getting Worse, And That The Surge Failed
By Tom Engelhardt, TheNation.com
War on Iraq: Gen. David Petraeus ought to level with the American public about the dire state of affairs in Iraq in his testimony to Congress this week.
If America Declines, Don't Expect Anyone to Talk About ItKevin Phillips, Viking Press
Is our political system too far gone to even discuss the predicaments of the volatile dollar, run-amok debt and Middle East disasters?
Hornberger’s Blog
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
What Motivates the Terrorists?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Immediately after 9/11, U.S. officials, led by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, announced that the attacks were motivated by hatred for America’s freedom and values.
Not so, responded we libertarians. Instead, the anger and hatred that people have in the Middle East for the United States is rooted in U.S. foreign policy, specifically the bad things that the U.S. government has done to people in that part of the world.
What libertarians were referring to were such things as the ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, the support of Saddam Hussein, the Persian Gulf intervention, the intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plants, the more than a decade of brutal sanctions, the statement by UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it,” the illegal and deadly no-fly zones, the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands, the support of authoritarian monarchies, and the unconditional financial and military support of the Israeli government.
Recently, eight British Muslim men were put on trial for terrorism in London. Consider the following statements made by these men, as reported in an article in last Saturday’s Washington Post:
“This is revenge for the actions of the U.S.A. in the Muslim lands and their accomplices, such as the British and the Jews.”
“This is a warning to the nonbelievers that if they do not leave our lands, there are many more like us.”
“Sheik Osama has warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed, and now the time has come for you to be destroyed.”
“Stop meddling in our affairs.”
“I say to you disbelievers that as you bomb, you will be bombed, and as you kill, you will be killed. And if you want to kill our women and children, then the same thing will happen to you.”
Now, I ask you: In all those statements, how much hatred for America’s (or Britain’s) freedom and values do you find? On the other hand, how much anger and hatred for U.S. (and British) imperial and interventionist foreign policy do you find?
At the very least, don’t the American people and the British people owe it to themselves to accept reality with respect to their governments’ foreign policies rather than live lives of falsehood and delusion? At least then, they would have a better grip on what their troops and citizenry are killing and dying for and what they are losing their liberty for.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
What Motivates the Terrorists?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Immediately after 9/11, U.S. officials, led by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, announced that the attacks were motivated by hatred for America’s freedom and values.
Not so, responded we libertarians. Instead, the anger and hatred that people have in the Middle East for the United States is rooted in U.S. foreign policy, specifically the bad things that the U.S. government has done to people in that part of the world.
What libertarians were referring to were such things as the ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, the support of Saddam Hussein, the Persian Gulf intervention, the intentional destruction of Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plants, the more than a decade of brutal sanctions, the statement by UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it,” the illegal and deadly no-fly zones, the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands, the support of authoritarian monarchies, and the unconditional financial and military support of the Israeli government.
Recently, eight British Muslim men were put on trial for terrorism in London. Consider the following statements made by these men, as reported in an article in last Saturday’s Washington Post:
“This is revenge for the actions of the U.S.A. in the Muslim lands and their accomplices, such as the British and the Jews.”
“This is a warning to the nonbelievers that if they do not leave our lands, there are many more like us.”
“Sheik Osama has warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed, and now the time has come for you to be destroyed.”
“Stop meddling in our affairs.”
“I say to you disbelievers that as you bomb, you will be bombed, and as you kill, you will be killed. And if you want to kill our women and children, then the same thing will happen to you.”
Now, I ask you: In all those statements, how much hatred for America’s (or Britain’s) freedom and values do you find? On the other hand, how much anger and hatred for U.S. (and British) imperial and interventionist foreign policy do you find?
At the very least, don’t the American people and the British people owe it to themselves to accept reality with respect to their governments’ foreign policies rather than live lives of falsehood and delusion? At least then, they would have a better grip on what their troops and citizenry are killing and dying for and what they are losing their liberty for.
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
For U.S., another top threat emerges in Iraq
Iranian-backed 'special groups' are now the greatest threat to American forces, Gen. Petraeus testifies. Some officials and experts disagree.
By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 10, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Ever since Army Gen. David H. Petraeus was appointed to oversee the U.S. military in Iraq more than a year ago, the primary enemy for his troops has been shifting.
When Petraeus left for Baghdad, the Pentagon considered radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr the gravest threat. Once he arrived, it switched to Sunni Arab extremists claiming affiliation with Al Qaeda, an old foe.
This week, things changed again. In two days of Capitol Hill testimony, Petraeus declared Iranian-backed "special groups" -- hardened fighters who are part of larger Shiite militias -- to be the "greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq."
The shifting U.S. view of its top enemy reflects both the changing nature of the conflict and the complexity of Iraq's array of armed groups. As threats from Sadr and the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq receded, others were magnified.
Despite new intelligence, officials can't agree whether it shows Iran in control of Iraq's Shiite factions or merely as one key player.
U.S. accusations that Iran is training and equipping Shiite militias in Iraq, which Tehran has long denied, are hardly new. But the suspected prominence of the special groups has been cast in a harsh new light by Iraqi Prime Minster Nouri Maliki's recent military offensive in the southern city of Basra. There, senior U.S. officers charged, these groups played a central role in fighting government troops to a standstill.
At the same time, Iran's suspected role in last month's fighting has sparked an intense debate within U.S. military and intelligence communities over how much control Tehran has over events in Iraq.
According to U.S. officials involved in Iraq policy, most government experts agree that last month's fighting enabled the United States to gather more detailed information about Iran's motives and operations in Iraq.
"I think the developments in Baghdad and Basra over the last couple of weeks have been very instructive on a number of levels," Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, testified this week as he accompanied Petraeus at the marathon hearings.
"Because the general level of violence is down, we could see, I think, much more sharply defined what Iran's role is in the arming and equipping of these extremist militia groups," Crocker said.
In their congressional testimony, Petraeus and Crocker suggested that Iran's role in last month's fighting, and in Iraq as a whole, extended well beyond directing the special groups and their fighters in Baghdad and Basra.
Most significantly, Petraeus agreed that Iran was able to play the role of mediator as last month's fighting spun out of control.
"Iran, at the end of the day, clearly played a role as an arbiter, if you will, for talks among all of the different parties," Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Such clout concerns some U.S. officials, who have argued that it illustrates Iran's ability to control levels of fighting even as the U.S. struggles for influence with the same groups.
But not all U.S. officials agree that Iran's role was pivotal. One defense official, who like several others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing intelligence assessments, contended that although Iran was involved in talks between the Maliki government and fighters loyal to Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, it in no way directed the actions of either side.
"Anybody would be concerned if we thought the Iranians were truly calling the shots on the Shia militias," said a senior military officer who had seen U.S. intelligence on the fighting. "I don't think they were calling the shots."
Trita Parsi, an Iranian expert at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, said the U.S. appeared to be overplaying Iranian links to justify high troop levels.
"I don't think this is all about Iran," Parsi said. "Crocker, in my view, is trying to portray this in such a way that . . . if we don't [stay], we'll be abandoning Maliki and giving him to Iran. It's not really working like that."
Also in dispute is the extent of Iran's ties to Sadr. Some analysts have argued that the influential cleric's repeated visits to Iran, and the fact that he did not return to Iraq during last month's fighting, is evidence that he has become co-opted by radical elements in Iran.
Such a view is controversial within the Pentagon, where Sadr has been viewed increasingly as an independent political player who potentially can be neutralized if co-opted by the U.S.
One American officer based in Baghdad said the military leadership there had been in regular contact with Sadr's political organization.
And several Pentagon officials said they thought the cleric remained a free agent who was being courted simultaneously by Maliki, Tehran and Washington.
"I have no evidence that Sadr is doing everything at the behest of the Iranians," the senior military official said. "Sadr is doing Sadr's bidding, and he's using the Iranians when it's meeting his interests. . . . I don't think Sadr wants to be an Iranian tool. I think he wants to have influence in and of his own right."
There is less disagreement over Iran's involvement with the special groups. According to U.S. officials involved in the debate, nearly all agree that the Quds Force, a unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard that is responsible for international operations, has been central to creating the special groups and are able to direct their operations inside Iraq.
Petraeus testified that Quds operatives have carefully selected fighters to become part of the special groups, largely recruiting from members of Sadr's militia. They then train, arm and pay them, enabling Quds to control their actions, the general said.
Petraeus added that he was preparing to make public intelligence, including information obtained from four of the group's "master trainers" captured by U.S. forces, that made Quds' ties clear.
He added that Quds had help from operatives affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political movement whose formidable militia is financed and supplied by Iran.
Crocker characterized those efforts as part of an overall Iranian strategy to create an organization similar to Hezbollah in Iraq that could serve as a proxy for Tehran's interests. He argued that without a continued U.S. military presence, such a plan could succeed.
"Iran has said publicly it will fill any vacuum in Iraq, and extremist Shia militias would reassert themselves," he said.
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
Times staff writers Julian E. Barnes, Paul Richter and Timothy M. Phelps contributed to this report.
Many of the critics of the war in Iraq and the broader policies of the Bush administration in the Middle East criticize them as "strategically bankrupt," but they fail to explain what they mean. They often argue they could do oh-so much better without explaining how, or even the basis upon which they would act - beyond platitudes such as "working with allies." One who has spent time thinking and writing about such issues is Franklin C. ("Chuck") Spinney, who is well known to those who have followed the Pentagon's program, policy, and budget foibles for the past three decades. Writing from the Mediterranean, Spinney (who is also a personal friend) gives us a more thoughtful perspective on "strategic bankruptcy" than we are accustomed to in the blather-sphere of Washington DC politics and think-tank-ery.
Spinney's comments and an illustrative article from the UK newspaper, The Guardian, follow:
The Bush/Cheney theory and practice of grand strategy can be summarized by the sound byte, "You are either with us or against us." But the art of grand strategy is far more subtle than this. The late American strategist, Col John R. Boyd (USAF Ret) evolved five criteria for synthesizing and evaluating a nation's grand strategy. From the perspective of the United States, Boyd argued that domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies should
- pump up our resolve and increase our solidarity,
- drain away the resolve of our adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion,
- reinforce the commitments of our allies to our cause and make them empathetic to our success
- attract the uncommitted to our cause or make them empathetic to our success.
- end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts
These criteria can be thought of as guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions. But it is obviously difficult to define policies that simultaneously conform to and strengthen to all these criteria. The challenge is particularly difficult for the unilateral military strategies and the coercive foreign policies so popular with the self-referencing foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle in Versailles on the Potomac. Military operations and political coercion are often destructive in the short term, and these destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term.
Moreover, the more powerful a country, the harder it becomes to harmonize the often conflicting criteria for a sensible grand strategy. Overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance which, in turn, carry a temptation to use that power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one's will to others breeds resentment. Thus, possession of overwhelming power increases the risk of going astray grand strategically. That risk is particularly acute for aggressive external actions, policies, and rhetoric that are designed to prop up or increase internal cohesion for domestic political reasons. Very often, the effects or military strategies or coercive foreign policies that are perceived as useful in terms of domestic political cohesion backfire at the grand-strategic level because they strengthen our adversaries' will to resist, push our allies into a neutral or even an adversarial corner, or drive away the uncommitted ... which together, can set the stage for continuing conflict.
The German invasion of France through neutral Belgium in 1914 is an classic example of how a policy shaped by inwardly focused strategic considerations (in this case, an inordinate fear of isolation and a two front war) can induce a self-referencing leadership elite into perpetrating a grand strategic disaster on the most colossal scale for the most "rational" of reasons.
Germany was not trying to conquer Belgium or France in WW I. But she became obsessed with the idea that it was necessary to attack and defeat the French army very quickly in order to knock France out of the war before France's Russian ally could mobilize in the East. The German leadership elite thereby convinced itself of the strategic need to invade a small neutral Belgium, but the obsession with military strategy blinded it to the grand strategic effects of such an invasion. In the event, the invasion of Belgium enraged the civilized world. It handed the British a propaganda windfall that the Brits milked to the hilt. Over the next four years, the Brits successfully constructed an image of Germany as being an unmitigated evil force (which was not the case in World War I). This, combined with continued grand strategic obtuseness on the part of German elite (e.g., the Zimmermann Telegram, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc.), served to effectively isolate Germany at the grand strategic level. Even America, with its large German population and considerable anti-British sentiment, rejected its long tradition of neutrality and joined Germany's enemies. No doubt the British grand strategic success during the war also helped also to fuel the arrogance that led to the excessively vindictive atmosphere at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, which ended the conflict on onerous terms that helped to sow the seeds of future conflict. By deviating from the criteria of sensible grand strategy in victory, Britain (and Italy and France) inadvertently helped to pave the way for the emergence of true evil in the form of Nazi Germany.
Today, the world is still paying a price for Germany's grand-strategic disaster in 1914 and Britain's ruthless grand-strategic exploitation of that disaster – the problems in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Russian heartland, and the Caucasus, to name a few, have roots reaching back to destruction of world order between the invasion of 1914 and vengeance of 1919. So perhaps the lesson is this: Whenever a great power fails to adequately consider the criteria shaping a sensible grand strategy, painful unintended consequences can linger for a very long time on a global scale.
Considering the five criteria for a sensible grand strategy, the analysis below suggests that Messrs. Bush and Cheney have learned nothing from their grand strategic blunders, and that their incompetent "with us or against us" grand strategy will continue to play out in a very unfavorable way in the Middle East. It argues that Cheney's belligerence and the administration's aggressive anti-Iran rhetoric are driving our Sunni allies into the arms of Russia. By extension such a grand strategic evolution could needlessly increase tensions with Russia and induce US support for an even more belligerent posture toward Syria, Lebanon,and Iran by Israel, making it even more difficult to resolve the Palestinian question. This does not bode well for the future ... at least until Cheney and Bush depart from the world scene and the US hopefully switches to a more sensible grand strategy that is more in line with Boyd's criteria.
Chuck Spinney
aboard s/v ChaliVentures
lying Marmaris, Turkey
Cheney cold-shouldered
Dick Cheney's belligerence and aggressive anti-Iran rhetoric is driving Arab nations into the arms of Russia
Robert Fox
Guardian
April 12, 2008 1:00 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert...shouldered.html
There is talk of new wars across the Middle East this summer - and there is nothing new about that. What is new is the reaction of America's closest allies in the Arab world to the latest outbreak of belligerent rhetoric. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Egypt, they have indicated they don't like the war talk from Vice-President Cheney and his team.
Furthermore, they're hedging their bets. While not exactly cosying up to Moscow they have opened up new lines of diplomacy with the Russians on a range of issues from regional security to nuclear technology, and joining the World Trade Organisation.
Israel has been carrying out a series of emergency civil defence drills, with officials warning of possible simultaneous attacks from Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories this summer.
On last month's tour of Middle Eastern capitals, Dick Cheney is reported to have blamed Iran and Syria as the primary sources for mischief in the Middle East. Both are seen as the sponsors of Hizbullah and Hamas. Damascus is the prime base for Sunni extremist groups now operating in Iraq, while Tehran is seen as the prime sponsor of trouble in the Shia communities.
And on top of all that there remain Iran's nuclear ambitions - with President Ahmadinejad announcing only a few days ago that the Iranian nuclear energy authority now has 6,000 more centrifuges up and running to enrich nuclear fuel.
The Cheney narrative of "not allowing Iran to go nuclear on my watch" has had its cover somewhat blown by recent revelations that the US has been talking quietly with Iran for some years.
One of the suggestions was that Iran would have fuel enriched outside the country, but a certain amount on enrichment could go in Iran itself, provided there is international supervision. The talks even looked at having an international approval and surveillance committee on which the Iranians said they would allow one American member.
Given the possibilities that some sort of dialogue between Washington and Tehran might bear fruit, the Arab powers were alarmed at the belligerence of Cheney's message and rhetoric on his recent tour. It sounded to them that he still very much wanted to attack Iran, or Syria, or both.
No sooner had Cheney departed than President Mubarak took off for Moscow to discuss cooperation on nuclear energy and programmes with the Russians. A few days after that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council States said they would open talks with Russia about WTO membership.
The inference is clear: the conservative Arab states now believe that, in the short to medium term at least, Russia is as good a bet for containing the ambitions of Shia Iran as a Republican regime in Washington. It will not have escaped their attention that some of the leading Iran-bashers of the Washington thinktank circuit, notably John Bolton and Robert Kagan have quit team Bush to join team John McCain.
So Russia is back in the Middle East and Mediterranean security game in a big way. Moreover it is also back in the oil security game in a big way. Moscow has just struck a big gas export deal through an alliance of its own Gazprom and Italy's ENI for the export of gas from Libya. It seems a similar deal with Algeria involving Gazprom and ENI is now on the cards.
By their misguided belligerency, Dick Cheney and co appear to have undone the legacy of their hero Ronald Reagan in isolating Russia at the end of the Cold War. It is even being whispered that the princes in Riyhadh want to sign an arms deal and defence pact with Moscow.
So Russia appears to be riding high in the Arab Middle East in a way that it hasn't since the days of Gamal Abdul Nasser and his vision of Pan-Arab socialism. Interestingly, we haven't been hearing too much from Vice-President Cheney these past few weeks.
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
Spinney's comments and an illustrative article from the UK newspaper, The Guardian, follow:
The Bush/Cheney theory and practice of grand strategy can be summarized by the sound byte, "You are either with us or against us." But the art of grand strategy is far more subtle than this. The late American strategist, Col John R. Boyd (USAF Ret) evolved five criteria for synthesizing and evaluating a nation's grand strategy. From the perspective of the United States, Boyd argued that domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies should
- pump up our resolve and increase our solidarity,
- drain away the resolve of our adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion,
- reinforce the commitments of our allies to our cause and make them empathetic to our success
- attract the uncommitted to our cause or make them empathetic to our success.
- end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts
These criteria can be thought of as guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions. But it is obviously difficult to define policies that simultaneously conform to and strengthen to all these criteria. The challenge is particularly difficult for the unilateral military strategies and the coercive foreign policies so popular with the self-referencing foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle in Versailles on the Potomac. Military operations and political coercion are often destructive in the short term, and these destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term.
Moreover, the more powerful a country, the harder it becomes to harmonize the often conflicting criteria for a sensible grand strategy. Overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance which, in turn, carry a temptation to use that power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one's will to others breeds resentment. Thus, possession of overwhelming power increases the risk of going astray grand strategically. That risk is particularly acute for aggressive external actions, policies, and rhetoric that are designed to prop up or increase internal cohesion for domestic political reasons. Very often, the effects or military strategies or coercive foreign policies that are perceived as useful in terms of domestic political cohesion backfire at the grand-strategic level because they strengthen our adversaries' will to resist, push our allies into a neutral or even an adversarial corner, or drive away the uncommitted ... which together, can set the stage for continuing conflict.
The German invasion of France through neutral Belgium in 1914 is an classic example of how a policy shaped by inwardly focused strategic considerations (in this case, an inordinate fear of isolation and a two front war) can induce a self-referencing leadership elite into perpetrating a grand strategic disaster on the most colossal scale for the most "rational" of reasons.
Germany was not trying to conquer Belgium or France in WW I. But she became obsessed with the idea that it was necessary to attack and defeat the French army very quickly in order to knock France out of the war before France's Russian ally could mobilize in the East. The German leadership elite thereby convinced itself of the strategic need to invade a small neutral Belgium, but the obsession with military strategy blinded it to the grand strategic effects of such an invasion. In the event, the invasion of Belgium enraged the civilized world. It handed the British a propaganda windfall that the Brits milked to the hilt. Over the next four years, the Brits successfully constructed an image of Germany as being an unmitigated evil force (which was not the case in World War I). This, combined with continued grand strategic obtuseness on the part of German elite (e.g., the Zimmermann Telegram, unrestricted submarine warfare, etc.), served to effectively isolate Germany at the grand strategic level. Even America, with its large German population and considerable anti-British sentiment, rejected its long tradition of neutrality and joined Germany's enemies. No doubt the British grand strategic success during the war also helped also to fuel the arrogance that led to the excessively vindictive atmosphere at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, which ended the conflict on onerous terms that helped to sow the seeds of future conflict. By deviating from the criteria of sensible grand strategy in victory, Britain (and Italy and France) inadvertently helped to pave the way for the emergence of true evil in the form of Nazi Germany.
Today, the world is still paying a price for Germany's grand-strategic disaster in 1914 and Britain's ruthless grand-strategic exploitation of that disaster – the problems in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Russian heartland, and the Caucasus, to name a few, have roots reaching back to destruction of world order between the invasion of 1914 and vengeance of 1919. So perhaps the lesson is this: Whenever a great power fails to adequately consider the criteria shaping a sensible grand strategy, painful unintended consequences can linger for a very long time on a global scale.
Considering the five criteria for a sensible grand strategy, the analysis below suggests that Messrs. Bush and Cheney have learned nothing from their grand strategic blunders, and that their incompetent "with us or against us" grand strategy will continue to play out in a very unfavorable way in the Middle East. It argues that Cheney's belligerence and the administration's aggressive anti-Iran rhetoric are driving our Sunni allies into the arms of Russia. By extension such a grand strategic evolution could needlessly increase tensions with Russia and induce US support for an even more belligerent posture toward Syria, Lebanon,and Iran by Israel, making it even more difficult to resolve the Palestinian question. This does not bode well for the future ... at least until Cheney and Bush depart from the world scene and the US hopefully switches to a more sensible grand strategy that is more in line with Boyd's criteria.
Chuck Spinney
aboard s/v ChaliVentures
lying Marmaris, Turkey
Cheney cold-shouldered
Dick Cheney's belligerence and aggressive anti-Iran rhetoric is driving Arab nations into the arms of Russia
Robert Fox
Guardian
April 12, 2008 1:00 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert...shouldered.html
There is talk of new wars across the Middle East this summer - and there is nothing new about that. What is new is the reaction of America's closest allies in the Arab world to the latest outbreak of belligerent rhetoric. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Egypt, they have indicated they don't like the war talk from Vice-President Cheney and his team.
Furthermore, they're hedging their bets. While not exactly cosying up to Moscow they have opened up new lines of diplomacy with the Russians on a range of issues from regional security to nuclear technology, and joining the World Trade Organisation.
Israel has been carrying out a series of emergency civil defence drills, with officials warning of possible simultaneous attacks from Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories this summer.
On last month's tour of Middle Eastern capitals, Dick Cheney is reported to have blamed Iran and Syria as the primary sources for mischief in the Middle East. Both are seen as the sponsors of Hizbullah and Hamas. Damascus is the prime base for Sunni extremist groups now operating in Iraq, while Tehran is seen as the prime sponsor of trouble in the Shia communities.
And on top of all that there remain Iran's nuclear ambitions - with President Ahmadinejad announcing only a few days ago that the Iranian nuclear energy authority now has 6,000 more centrifuges up and running to enrich nuclear fuel.
The Cheney narrative of "not allowing Iran to go nuclear on my watch" has had its cover somewhat blown by recent revelations that the US has been talking quietly with Iran for some years.
One of the suggestions was that Iran would have fuel enriched outside the country, but a certain amount on enrichment could go in Iran itself, provided there is international supervision. The talks even looked at having an international approval and surveillance committee on which the Iranians said they would allow one American member.
Given the possibilities that some sort of dialogue between Washington and Tehran might bear fruit, the Arab powers were alarmed at the belligerence of Cheney's message and rhetoric on his recent tour. It sounded to them that he still very much wanted to attack Iran, or Syria, or both.
No sooner had Cheney departed than President Mubarak took off for Moscow to discuss cooperation on nuclear energy and programmes with the Russians. A few days after that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council States said they would open talks with Russia about WTO membership.
The inference is clear: the conservative Arab states now believe that, in the short to medium term at least, Russia is as good a bet for containing the ambitions of Shia Iran as a Republican regime in Washington. It will not have escaped their attention that some of the leading Iran-bashers of the Washington thinktank circuit, notably John Bolton and Robert Kagan have quit team Bush to join team John McCain.
So Russia is back in the Middle East and Mediterranean security game in a big way. Moreover it is also back in the oil security game in a big way. Moscow has just struck a big gas export deal through an alliance of its own Gazprom and Italy's ENI for the export of gas from Libya. It seems a similar deal with Algeria involving Gazprom and ENI is now on the cards.
By their misguided belligerency, Dick Cheney and co appear to have undone the legacy of their hero Ronald Reagan in isolating Russia at the end of the Cold War. It is even being whispered that the princes in Riyhadh want to sign an arms deal and defence pact with Moscow.
So Russia appears to be riding high in the Arab Middle East in a way that it hasn't since the days of Gamal Abdul Nasser and his vision of Pan-Arab socialism. Interestingly, we haven't been hearing too much from Vice-President Cheney these past few weeks.
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
winslowwheeler@msn.com
GAO: Bush lacks strategy to wipe out bin Laden sanctuary
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
* Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration doesn't have a comprehensive strategy for eliminating Osama bin Laden's sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal region and preventing the region from being used for launching terrorist attacks on the United States, the investigative arm of Congress said Thursday.
President Bush and his senior lieutenants frequently claim that eradicating the threat that bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network poses to United States and its allies is their top national-security priority.
But in a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said there was no plan that "includes all elements of national power — diplomatic, military, intelligence, development assistance, economic and law enforcement support — called for by the various national-security strategies and Congress."
Al Qaida established its sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal region when bin Laden and his followers fled Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S.-led intervention.
"No comprehensive strategy for meeting U.S. national-security goals" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been developed even though the administration's counter-terrorism policy, congressional legislation and the mission of the National Counter-Terrorism Center mandate such an approach, the report says.
It says that the Bush administration has relied primarily on the Pakistani military to address the threat to American national security.
About 96 percent of some $5.8 billion that the United States provided to Pakistan from 2002 to 2007 to address the problem in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and adjoining districts has gone to reimbursing the Pakistani military for the costs of its operations, according to the report.
But Pakistan, which deployed 120,000 troops and paramilitary forces in the rugged Massachusetts-size region, has failed to eliminate al Qaida and allied militants based there even though it's killed and captured hundreds of extremists while losing about 1,400 of its own forces.
"It is appalling that there is still no comprehensive, interagency strategy concerning this critical region, and this lack of foresight is harming U.S. national security," said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, which requested the report.
ON THE WEB
The GAO report: http://hcfa.house.gov/110/GAO041708.pdf
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
* Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration doesn't have a comprehensive strategy for eliminating Osama bin Laden's sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal region and preventing the region from being used for launching terrorist attacks on the United States, the investigative arm of Congress said Thursday.
President Bush and his senior lieutenants frequently claim that eradicating the threat that bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network poses to United States and its allies is their top national-security priority.
But in a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said there was no plan that "includes all elements of national power — diplomatic, military, intelligence, development assistance, economic and law enforcement support — called for by the various national-security strategies and Congress."
Al Qaida established its sanctuary in Pakistan's tribal region when bin Laden and his followers fled Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S.-led intervention.
"No comprehensive strategy for meeting U.S. national-security goals" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been developed even though the administration's counter-terrorism policy, congressional legislation and the mission of the National Counter-Terrorism Center mandate such an approach, the report says.
It says that the Bush administration has relied primarily on the Pakistani military to address the threat to American national security.
About 96 percent of some $5.8 billion that the United States provided to Pakistan from 2002 to 2007 to address the problem in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and adjoining districts has gone to reimbursing the Pakistani military for the costs of its operations, according to the report.
But Pakistan, which deployed 120,000 troops and paramilitary forces in the rugged Massachusetts-size region, has failed to eliminate al Qaida and allied militants based there even though it's killed and captured hundreds of extremists while losing about 1,400 of its own forces.
"It is appalling that there is still no comprehensive, interagency strategy concerning this critical region, and this lack of foresight is harming U.S. national security," said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, which requested the report.
ON THE WEB
The GAO report: http://hcfa.house.gov/110/GAO041708.pdf
No Peace Without Hamas
By Mahmoud al-Zahar
17/04/08 "Washington Post" -- -- GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, is a founder of Hamas. He is foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19772.htm
By Mahmoud al-Zahar
17/04/08 "Washington Post" -- -- GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.
Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.
Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment -- in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.
Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled -- my first-born -- after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.
Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?
Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.
I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.
History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, is a founder of Hamas. He is foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19772.htm
Carter's Peace Mission:
There's way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
By Mike Whitney
19/04/08 "ICH" -- --- Jimmy Carter arrived in Syria today in an effort to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. He is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal. Carter has been severely criticized in the western media for meeting with Hamas and was snubbed by Israeli leaders during his stay in Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, all refused to meet with the former president. They believe that Carter's trip undermines Israel's current policy towards the Palestinians and will force them to negotiate with a group they think is a terrorist organization.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and has devoted his life to spreading democracy, human rights, and ending poverty. He has no interest in upstaging the Bush or Olmert. His only interest is stopping the bloodshed and ensuring security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Carter has been a good friend to Israel and doesn't deserve the chilly treatment he received. In 1978 Carter brought Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for negotiations which ended in a historic treaty. When negotiations stalled, Carter rushed to Cairo and helped Sadat and Begin work out a compromise. That ended the state of war between Eqypt and Israel and led to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula. The treaty has endured for 30 years. Israel is a safer place because of Jimmy Carter.
The official Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is both brutal and irrational. Hamas won in elections that were monitored by the international community and were declared "free and fair". They are the legitimate government in the occupied territories. Israel needs to accept that fact and move on. The real reason that Israel does not want to negotiate with Hamas has nothing to do with terrorism. Olmert has made this clear in an interview he gave as Minister of Industry and Trade in 2003:
"We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: we have been won over. We agree with [National Union leader Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote. The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote....The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
Olmert makes important point, that Israel feels that its future as a Jewish state is threatened by a "demographic time-bomb"; that if they fail to impose their own unilateral settlement on the Palestinians---by seizing land and creating de facto borders--Jews will eventually become a minority in Israel. This's the fear that's driving the policy, not racism or terrorism.
Olmert adds:
"Had I believed that there is a real chance of reaching an agreement, I would have recommended making an effort. But that is not the case. The choice we will be facing will be between less than a Geneva Accord -- which means a return to the 1967 border, the crushing of Jerusalem, and a struggle to our last breath to ward off the international pressure to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees into the shrinking State of Israel -- and a comprehensive unilateral move, and I stress the word comprehensive. Through such a move we will define our borders, which under no circumstances will be identical to the Green Line and will include Jerusalem as a united city under our sovereignty."
Olmert is merely implementing Ariel Sharon's policy of "disengagement" which cuts off all real dialog with the Palestinians and imposes a unilateral settlement. That's why Carter has been treated so brusquely; his trip just draws attention to the intransigence of Israeli policy.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar which clearly articulates the position of Hamas. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Al Zahar, whose 21 year old son, Hussam, was tragically killed three months ago in an Israeli air-strike, was studying finance and planned to become and accountant. Al Zahar lost another son and a son in law in 2003.
Al Zahar: "President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16's, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
Al Zahar claims that Israel has tried to negate the results of what was called "the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East" and used it to wage a new war against the people of Gaza; a war that was approved by the Bush White House.
"Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."
Al-Zahar then presents a litany of Palestinian grievances mixing in a bit of the conflict's bitter history:
"Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid."
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again." (Washington Post)
These are difficult issues and will require intensive negotiations before they can be resolved. But the present policy provides no path for resolution or reconcilliation; just more animosity and bloodshed. The Bush-Olmert plan is a failure; the killing has only increased.
Carter's trip is a reminder that there's still a way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
There's way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
By Mike Whitney
19/04/08 "ICH" -- --- Jimmy Carter arrived in Syria today in an effort to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. He is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal. Carter has been severely criticized in the western media for meeting with Hamas and was snubbed by Israeli leaders during his stay in Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, all refused to meet with the former president. They believe that Carter's trip undermines Israel's current policy towards the Palestinians and will force them to negotiate with a group they think is a terrorist organization.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and has devoted his life to spreading democracy, human rights, and ending poverty. He has no interest in upstaging the Bush or Olmert. His only interest is stopping the bloodshed and ensuring security for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Carter has been a good friend to Israel and doesn't deserve the chilly treatment he received. In 1978 Carter brought Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for negotiations which ended in a historic treaty. When negotiations stalled, Carter rushed to Cairo and helped Sadat and Begin work out a compromise. That ended the state of war between Eqypt and Israel and led to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula. The treaty has endured for 30 years. Israel is a safer place because of Jimmy Carter.
The official Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is both brutal and irrational. Hamas won in elections that were monitored by the international community and were declared "free and fair". They are the legitimate government in the occupied territories. Israel needs to accept that fact and move on. The real reason that Israel does not want to negotiate with Hamas has nothing to do with terrorism. Olmert has made this clear in an interview he gave as Minister of Industry and Trade in 2003:
"We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: we have been won over. We agree with [National Union leader Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote. The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote....The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
Olmert makes important point, that Israel feels that its future as a Jewish state is threatened by a "demographic time-bomb"; that if they fail to impose their own unilateral settlement on the Palestinians---by seizing land and creating de facto borders--Jews will eventually become a minority in Israel. This's the fear that's driving the policy, not racism or terrorism.
Olmert adds:
"Had I believed that there is a real chance of reaching an agreement, I would have recommended making an effort. But that is not the case. The choice we will be facing will be between less than a Geneva Accord -- which means a return to the 1967 border, the crushing of Jerusalem, and a struggle to our last breath to ward off the international pressure to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees into the shrinking State of Israel -- and a comprehensive unilateral move, and I stress the word comprehensive. Through such a move we will define our borders, which under no circumstances will be identical to the Green Line and will include Jerusalem as a united city under our sovereignty."
Olmert is merely implementing Ariel Sharon's policy of "disengagement" which cuts off all real dialog with the Palestinians and imposes a unilateral settlement. That's why Carter has been treated so brusquely; his trip just draws attention to the intransigence of Israeli policy.
On Friday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar which clearly articulates the position of Hamas. It is well worth reading in its entirety. Al Zahar, whose 21 year old son, Hussam, was tragically killed three months ago in an Israeli air-strike, was studying finance and planned to become and accountant. Al Zahar lost another son and a son in law in 2003.
Al Zahar: "President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16's, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.
Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.
Al Zahar claims that Israel has tried to negate the results of what was called "the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East" and used it to wage a new war against the people of Gaza; a war that was approved by the Bush White House.
"Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."
Al-Zahar then presents a litany of Palestinian grievances mixing in a bit of the conflict's bitter history:
"Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid."
A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again." (Washington Post)
These are difficult issues and will require intensive negotiations before they can be resolved. But the present policy provides no path for resolution or reconcilliation; just more animosity and bloodshed. The Bush-Olmert plan is a failure; the killing has only increased.
Carter's trip is a reminder that there's still a way out of this mess that doesn't involve slaughtering each others children
Carter Calls Gaza Blockade a Crime and Atrocity
By Jonathan Wright
18/04/08 "Reuters" -- -- -CAIRO - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the blockade of Gaza a crime and an atrocity on Thursday and said U.S. attempts to undermine the Islamist movement Hamas had been counterproductive.
Speaking at the American University in Cairo after talks with Hamas leaders from Gaza, Carter said Palestinians in Gaza were being “starved to death”, receiving fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa.
“It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. it’s a crime… I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on,” Carter said.
Israel has been blockading Gaza most of the time since Hamas took control of the impoverished coastal strip in June last year, allowing only basic supplies to enter.
Israel has not accepted Hamas proposals for a truce including an end to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and to Israeli attacks on Hamas personnel in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli officials say a truce would enable Hamas to rearm.
Carter said Israel and its ally the United States were trying to make the quality of life in Gaza markedly worse than in the West Bank, where the rival Fatah group is in control.
“I think politically speaking this has worked even to strengthen the popularity of Hamas and to the detriment of the popularity of Fatah,” he added. The United States has been trying to achieve the opposite outcome.
“EXAMPLE TO BE EMULATED”
Carter, who helped make peace between Egypt and Israel while president in the 1970s, said the Hamas leaders he has met so far told him they would accept a peace agreement with Israel negotiated by Mahmoud Abbas — the Fatah leader and Palestinian president — if the Palestinians approved it in a referendum.
Israel and the United States say they refuse to deal with Hamas as long as the Islamist movement does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence.
But Carter said Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, had to be involved in any arrangements that could lead to peace.
“One of the reasons I wanted to come and meet with the Syrians and Hamas was to set an example that might be emulated by others… I know that there are some officials in the Israeli government that are quite willing to meet with Hamas and maybe that will happen in the near future,” he added.
Carter’s talks in Cairo were with former Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar and former Interior Minister Saeed Seyam, who did not speak to reporters.
Zahar and Seyam came to Cairo on Wednesday after the Israeli authorities refused to let Carter into Gaza from the Israeli side. Carter has already met a West Bank leader from Hamas and is expected to meet overall leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus.
Earlier on Thursday, Carter met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. No details were available from either side.
© 2008 Reuters
By Jonathan Wright
18/04/08 "Reuters" -- -- -CAIRO - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the blockade of Gaza a crime and an atrocity on Thursday and said U.S. attempts to undermine the Islamist movement Hamas had been counterproductive.
Speaking at the American University in Cairo after talks with Hamas leaders from Gaza, Carter said Palestinians in Gaza were being “starved to death”, receiving fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa.
“It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. it’s a crime… I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on,” Carter said.
Israel has been blockading Gaza most of the time since Hamas took control of the impoverished coastal strip in June last year, allowing only basic supplies to enter.
Israel has not accepted Hamas proposals for a truce including an end to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and to Israeli attacks on Hamas personnel in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli officials say a truce would enable Hamas to rearm.
Carter said Israel and its ally the United States were trying to make the quality of life in Gaza markedly worse than in the West Bank, where the rival Fatah group is in control.
“I think politically speaking this has worked even to strengthen the popularity of Hamas and to the detriment of the popularity of Fatah,” he added. The United States has been trying to achieve the opposite outcome.
“EXAMPLE TO BE EMULATED”
Carter, who helped make peace between Egypt and Israel while president in the 1970s, said the Hamas leaders he has met so far told him they would accept a peace agreement with Israel negotiated by Mahmoud Abbas — the Fatah leader and Palestinian president — if the Palestinians approved it in a referendum.
Israel and the United States say they refuse to deal with Hamas as long as the Islamist movement does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence.
But Carter said Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, had to be involved in any arrangements that could lead to peace.
“One of the reasons I wanted to come and meet with the Syrians and Hamas was to set an example that might be emulated by others… I know that there are some officials in the Israeli government that are quite willing to meet with Hamas and maybe that will happen in the near future,” he added.
Carter’s talks in Cairo were with former Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar and former Interior Minister Saeed Seyam, who did not speak to reporters.
Zahar and Seyam came to Cairo on Wednesday after the Israeli authorities refused to let Carter into Gaza from the Israeli side. Carter has already met a West Bank leader from Hamas and is expected to meet overall leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus.
Earlier on Thursday, Carter met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. No details were available from either side.
© 2008 Reuters
Europe's Abdication of Responsibility
William Pfaff
Paris, April 17, 2008 – This must be the nadir of Europe's supposed ambition to play an independent role in the world. The nation that historically has claimed such a role for Europe, if not even for itself, France, now, under Nicolas Sarkozy, is knocking at NATO's membership door. The new French president asks that France be allowed to resume full NATO membership and be rewarded with a prestigious command appointment.
He is rather late. NATO now is an organization that no longer possesses much reason to exist, other than as a furnisher of auxiliaries in the conduct of an American national foreign policy of which the majority of NATO's members disapprove.
Of the faithful band of Atlanticists – Denmark, the Dutch, the British and the Canadians, all are seafaring powers. The British, Danes and Dutch have always felt themselves more a part of an Atlantic community than to the continental Europe to which the Danes and Dutch belong geographically.
This attachment goes far back. The English, after all, once had a Dutch king, William of Orange (in connection with the Glorious Revolution), and something like an economic union with Holland; and much before that they had a Danish King, Canute (1018-1035). The North Americans are actually the latecomers to the association, led by Britain until the waning of British power as a result of the first and second world wars. After that, the United States led.
Thus it is not particularly surprising that the British, Danes, Dutch, and Canadians would willingly follow NATO into its "out of area" adventures in what, in the better days of the Bush administration, was called the Greater Middle East.
It is equally unsurprising that most of the rest of European NATO held back from invading Iraq and taking on the Pathans (or Pushtoons) in Waziristan. The Germans have rebuffed every invitation to intervene in fighting either of America's wars of choice. The French have been in Afghanistan with a limited number of special force soldiers and an air unit, to keep an eye on what is going on.
Nicolas Sarkozy's seeming enthusiasm to send more troops to Afghanistan makes the French general staff in Paris uneasy. It also irritates French foreign policy commentators because they know that it is an illusion for Sarkozy to think that the U.S. and Britain would, in return, cede to France a major NATO command (while French generals might ask, "to command what?").
The British and Americans always mistrust the French, and despite their willingness to be courted and flattered by him (and the charming and well-bred Carla), they think Sarkozy looks even more untrustworthy (mistrustworthy, shall we say) than most -- if not fluky. His conduct in office has now made him unpopular with the French people who elected him, and with his own party's members in the National Assembly.
What Churchill once said of a pudding (dessert, in the American language) that displeased him, one can say of NATO today: "it has no theme." Its expansion works to reassure, possibly less than totally, the expansion countries against the Russian anger which NATO's expansion, and the project of anti-missile facilities in Poland and Czechoslovakia, provokes. There is no net gain.
Its engagement in Afghanistan divides the alliance. As both the Afghan intervention and the Iraq war are certain to fail, or be awkwardly unloaded from American shoulders if a Democrat wins the presidency, or escalated if John McCain is the new American president, the allies will likely find themselves involved in unpleasantness and risks over which they have little influence.
And this happens at a time which the European Union is itself so divided that it is impossible to see any chance of a serious European foreign policy or strategic military project. Europe is leaderless, Angela Merkel crippled by domestic political party divisions, Gordon Brown politically weak and drifting, uninterested in European or foreign policy issues; Silvio Berlusconi a nullity in matters like this; and Sarkozy alarming his fellow-Europeans as the French prepare to take over the European presidency in July.
All this at a moment when the globalized financial system is staggering under the weight of catastrophic mistakes at best, and cynical embezzlement at worst. The Middle Eastern crisis cries out for a European diplomatic and political intervention. There will be nothing useful from Washington until the presidential inauguration in 2009. And in the meantime the possibility exists that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might decide that, before leaving office, their work is not complete without "taking out" Iran.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
_______________________________________________
April 21, 2008
The Middle East: Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy
Part 1
by Justin Raimondo
Editorial note: What follows is the text of a speech delivered at the MidCoast Forum on Foreign Relations in Rockport, Maine, on April 21, 2008.
One would think that the title of my talk – "The Middle East: Turning the Page on U.S. Foreign Policy" – is fairly noncontroversial, as such things go. Yet the very idea of turning the page – that is, of making a significant change – in our policy in the region is considered heresy, and not only in foreign policy circles but in Washington, D.C., generally. The reason is because our Middle Eastern policy has become hopelessly politicized, locked into a formulaic and increasingly unrealistic stance highly detrimental to our national interest yet artificially maintained by one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
Before we turn the page on U.S. policy in the Middle East, we must turn the page on the Israel lobby – the single most decisive factor in shaping our actions and pronouncements in that part of the world.
That the Middle East is a touchy subject is a contention few would dispute. The touchiness, however, only extends in one direction. One has only to utter a single word critical of Israel, and immediately a whole chorus of voices rise up, in unison, speaking in terms meant to end, rather than begin, the discussion. A battery of activist organizations, watchdog groups, and lobbying groups in the guise of "think tanks" springs into action, as if on cue, and the heretic is silenced.
This kind of thing has been going on for years. However, the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, last year was the occasion for such a firestorm of vituperation that one would have thought its attackers were referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or some tract by David Duke. Indeed, both were invoked in all too many of the jeremiads unleashed at the authors of The Israel Lobby. In newspaper columns, editorials, and the book review sections of all the "respectable" magazines, with a few sterling exceptions, such as Foreign Policy magazine, two distinguished scholars were smeared as bigots and worse. John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of Chicago and is well-known as the dean of the American "realists" and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, whose reputation as a serious scholar has never been questioned – until now. Stephen Walt was the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and his academic credentials, too, have been considered nothing less than sterling – until now.
Professor Mearsheimer, whose pieces used to appear on the op-ed page of the New York Times with some regularity, has since been banished from that prestigious forum: not a single one of his articles has appeared in their pages since the publication of The Israel Lobby.
Walt, too, has been blacklisted. As the writer Philip Weiss related: "A year or so back, Walt said to me that when he took the Israel lobby project on, he forswore high government service; he realized it would be out of reach for him if he attacked this issue." Also, as Weiss points out, he "was biting the hand that feeds him, literally. His chair at Harvard is funded by Robert and Renee Belfer, who according to GuideStar.org are trustees of the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank Walt attacked in his paper."
Originally published in a shorter version by Harvard and put on the Kennedy School's Web site, "The Israel Lobby" paper was stripped of its Harvard logo at the insistence of Alan Dershowitz and others. The call to de-fund Walt's academic position went out. Weiss also relates that Walt "suffered some degree of social ostracism in Cambridge." And a campaign to censor the authors was launched: their invitation to speak before the Chicago Council for Global Affairs was rescinded at the last minute: their subject was "too hot to handle." In a letter to the Council board of directors, Mearsheimer and Walt relate the following:
"Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event. He said he felt 'extremely uncomfortable making this call' and that his decision did not reflect his personal views on the subject of our book. Instead, he explained that his decision was based on the need 'to protect the institution.' He said that he had a serious 'political problem,' because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the Council. 'This one is so hot,' Marshall maintained, that he could not present it at a Council session unless someone from 'the other side' – such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League – was on stage with us. At the very least, he needed to present 'contending viewpoints.' But he said it was too late to try to change the format, as the fall schedule was being finalized and there would not be sufficient time to arrange an alternate date. He showed little interest in doing anything with us in 2008 or beyond."
The argument made by the Lobby was that Mearsheimer and Walt were presenting views that could not be aired without an appropriate counterpoint: that if they were allowed to speak, Abe Foxman must be there, on hand to refute what can only be characterized, under the circumstances, as dangerous and even evil ideas. In other words, the authors of The Israel Lobby are purveyors of poison, and so we must have the antidote ready and in reach.
I want to emphasize that all this brouhaha over The Israel Lobby occurred before the book was even out. Prior to publication day, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago had all canceled events at which the authors were scheduled to speak.
The irony is that this illustrates, in rather vivid terms, a central thesis of the book. As Mearsheimer and Walt put it:
"The Lobby doesn't want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organizations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion."
When the book was finally released, the "hot" polemic everyone had anticipated was nowhere to be seen. Instead, The Israel Lobby turned out to be a cool, dispassionate look at the structure, identity, motivation, and machinations of the pro-Israel forces in this country, and specifically their power and influence within the Washington Beltway and over the three main levers of power: Congress, the executive, and the media. Written in the style of a disinterested observer, the prose is dull, almost plodding, as the authors relate, in excruciating detail, how the Lobby has distorted both the policymaking process and also the debate around these issues insofar as they impact the Middle East.
The Lobby's agenda is not only to secure more aid – both military and economic – than any other recipient of American largesse, but also to use American military power to reshape the Middle East to Israel's advantage: in Lebanon, where Hezbollah threatens Israeli security, to Syria, backer of Palestinian resistance groups, to Iraq – where Saddam Hussein once offered to pay compensation to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – to Iran, now the Lobby's main target, where the drive to acquire nuclear power has been declared an "existential threat" by Israeli leaders. Central to this agenda is the undermining of America's role as an honest Middle East peace broker when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Mearsheimer and Walt relate in detail, the Lobby has fought relentlessly against the establishment of a Palestinian state and against the very idea of a more balanced treatment of the issue in American policymaking circles. This has been the case ever since Bush the first caved on the question of Israeli settlements in Palestine, and when Bill Clinton took office, things got worse.
The Clinton administration sided with Israel all during the Camp David process, letting the Israelis see documents and edit them before they were available to the Palestinians. Clinton also kept the Arab states away from Camp David and assembled a team bereft of anyone with expertise in Arab politics. President Clinton took daily calls from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and his chief negotiator, Dennis Ross, was and is a partisan of Israel. In the end, Clinton had the chutzpah to blame Arafat, of all people, for the failure of the peace process.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration made an initial attempt to pressure Israel to pull in its expansionist policies. For the first time, George W. Bush advocated a separate Palestinian state. The Bush people put what the New York Times characterized as "enormous pressure" on Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government to make some sort of accommodation with the Palestinians.
The Israelis were in a panic: Sharon denounced U.S. efforts as an attempt to "appease the Arabs at our expense," likened Bush to Neville Chamberlain, and declared "We will not be Czechoslovakia!" It wasn't long before Israeli tanks were barreling into Hebron.
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In response to the Bush administration's post-9/11 initiatives in the Middle East, Israel launched a full-scale campaign to delegitimize Yasser Arafat, the elected leader of the Palestinians, and isolate the PLO and the Palestinian people. Israel and its American lobby made a concerted effort to equate Arafat with Osama bin Laden – and, furthermore, to convince Americans that the Israelis were engaged in a fight against terrorism similar to that in which the U.S. was engaged with al-Qaeda. The equation of al-Qaeda with the Palestinians did not quite fit, but the propaganda offensive was on full throttle. An open letter from the Project for a New American Century, signed by prominent neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Richard Perle, called on Bush to "fully support our fellow democracy," Israel, and demanded an end to all support for the Palestinians. An effort in Congress to cut Bush off at the pass was successful: in November, 89 senators sent a letter to the president hailing his decision not to meet with Arafat and demanding that the U.S. refrain from putting pressure on Israel not to launch fresh attacks on the Palestinian territories.
By late in the month, the administration had come around to the Lobby's point of view. When the Israelis attacked Palestinian positions in the Gaza strip, the U.S. said nothing. Sharon was visiting Bush at the time, and the meeting was friendly. No mention was made of U.S.-Israeli tensions, which had magically disappeared. The Israel lobby had chalked up a victory. The Karina A incident, in which a ship loaded down with Iranian arms was captured in the Red Sea, convinced Bush that the Palestinians were rearming with Iran's help. This, in spite of the fact that the ultimate destination of the ship was in dispute: it's likely the arms were headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Regardless of the truth of the matter, the Israelis won the day in Washington – and the Palestinians were once again isolated diplomatically. The American effort to engage with Arafat and restart the peace process was indefinitely stalled.
This did not put an end to the ongoing U.S.-Israeli contretemps. By late March, the Israelis were at it again: in response to a Hamas suicide bomber who killed 30 Israelis at a Passover Seder, they launched Operation Defensive Shield and took control of the occupied territories. The U.S. demanded Israeli withdrawal – and the Israel lobby went into action.
Their target was Colin Powell, then secretary of state, who was on a trip to the Middle East that included a visit with Arafat. Neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon went into action, determined to sabotage Powell's efforts. The neoconservative media started attacking Powell: David Brooks on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard, and the entire stable of neoconservative newspaper columnists went ballistic. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had made a special trip to America to make the case for Israel, announced that the Powell trip would not amount to a hill of beans. Powell, under constant pressure from the Lobby and its supporters, later described his trip as "ten of the most miserable days of my life." In the end, Powell was neutralized, and his efforts came to naught.
The other target of the Lobby's campaign was the president himself. Top Republican congressional leaders were mobilized: Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, and Dick Armey visited Bush in the White House and told him to lay off Israel. This was followed the Christian evangelicals, led by Jerry Falwell, who organized a massive phone campaign in support of Israel: Washington was deluged with calls, e-mails, letters, and faxes.
It worked.
[Part 2 will appear on Wednesday.]
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12717
The Middle East: Turning the Page on US Foreign Policy
Part 1
by Justin Raimondo
Editorial note: What follows is the text of a speech delivered at the MidCoast Forum on Foreign Relations in Rockport, Maine, on April 21, 2008.
One would think that the title of my talk – "The Middle East: Turning the Page on U.S. Foreign Policy" – is fairly noncontroversial, as such things go. Yet the very idea of turning the page – that is, of making a significant change – in our policy in the region is considered heresy, and not only in foreign policy circles but in Washington, D.C., generally. The reason is because our Middle Eastern policy has become hopelessly politicized, locked into a formulaic and increasingly unrealistic stance highly detrimental to our national interest yet artificially maintained by one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.
Before we turn the page on U.S. policy in the Middle East, we must turn the page on the Israel lobby – the single most decisive factor in shaping our actions and pronouncements in that part of the world.
That the Middle East is a touchy subject is a contention few would dispute. The touchiness, however, only extends in one direction. One has only to utter a single word critical of Israel, and immediately a whole chorus of voices rise up, in unison, speaking in terms meant to end, rather than begin, the discussion. A battery of activist organizations, watchdog groups, and lobbying groups in the guise of "think tanks" springs into action, as if on cue, and the heretic is silenced.
This kind of thing has been going on for years. However, the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, last year was the occasion for such a firestorm of vituperation that one would have thought its attackers were referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or some tract by David Duke. Indeed, both were invoked in all too many of the jeremiads unleashed at the authors of The Israel Lobby. In newspaper columns, editorials, and the book review sections of all the "respectable" magazines, with a few sterling exceptions, such as Foreign Policy magazine, two distinguished scholars were smeared as bigots and worse. John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of Chicago and is well-known as the dean of the American "realists" and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, whose reputation as a serious scholar has never been questioned – until now. Stephen Walt was the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and his academic credentials, too, have been considered nothing less than sterling – until now.
Professor Mearsheimer, whose pieces used to appear on the op-ed page of the New York Times with some regularity, has since been banished from that prestigious forum: not a single one of his articles has appeared in their pages since the publication of The Israel Lobby.
Walt, too, has been blacklisted. As the writer Philip Weiss related: "A year or so back, Walt said to me that when he took the Israel lobby project on, he forswore high government service; he realized it would be out of reach for him if he attacked this issue." Also, as Weiss points out, he "was biting the hand that feeds him, literally. His chair at Harvard is funded by Robert and Renee Belfer, who according to GuideStar.org are trustees of the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank Walt attacked in his paper."
Originally published in a shorter version by Harvard and put on the Kennedy School's Web site, "The Israel Lobby" paper was stripped of its Harvard logo at the insistence of Alan Dershowitz and others. The call to de-fund Walt's academic position went out. Weiss also relates that Walt "suffered some degree of social ostracism in Cambridge." And a campaign to censor the authors was launched: their invitation to speak before the Chicago Council for Global Affairs was rescinded at the last minute: their subject was "too hot to handle." In a letter to the Council board of directors, Mearsheimer and Walt relate the following:
"Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event. He said he felt 'extremely uncomfortable making this call' and that his decision did not reflect his personal views on the subject of our book. Instead, he explained that his decision was based on the need 'to protect the institution.' He said that he had a serious 'political problem,' because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the Council. 'This one is so hot,' Marshall maintained, that he could not present it at a Council session unless someone from 'the other side' – such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League – was on stage with us. At the very least, he needed to present 'contending viewpoints.' But he said it was too late to try to change the format, as the fall schedule was being finalized and there would not be sufficient time to arrange an alternate date. He showed little interest in doing anything with us in 2008 or beyond."
The argument made by the Lobby was that Mearsheimer and Walt were presenting views that could not be aired without an appropriate counterpoint: that if they were allowed to speak, Abe Foxman must be there, on hand to refute what can only be characterized, under the circumstances, as dangerous and even evil ideas. In other words, the authors of The Israel Lobby are purveyors of poison, and so we must have the antidote ready and in reach.
I want to emphasize that all this brouhaha over The Israel Lobby occurred before the book was even out. Prior to publication day, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago had all canceled events at which the authors were scheduled to speak.
The irony is that this illustrates, in rather vivid terms, a central thesis of the book. As Mearsheimer and Walt put it:
"The Lobby doesn't want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organizations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion."
When the book was finally released, the "hot" polemic everyone had anticipated was nowhere to be seen. Instead, The Israel Lobby turned out to be a cool, dispassionate look at the structure, identity, motivation, and machinations of the pro-Israel forces in this country, and specifically their power and influence within the Washington Beltway and over the three main levers of power: Congress, the executive, and the media. Written in the style of a disinterested observer, the prose is dull, almost plodding, as the authors relate, in excruciating detail, how the Lobby has distorted both the policymaking process and also the debate around these issues insofar as they impact the Middle East.
The Lobby's agenda is not only to secure more aid – both military and economic – than any other recipient of American largesse, but also to use American military power to reshape the Middle East to Israel's advantage: in Lebanon, where Hezbollah threatens Israeli security, to Syria, backer of Palestinian resistance groups, to Iraq – where Saddam Hussein once offered to pay compensation to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – to Iran, now the Lobby's main target, where the drive to acquire nuclear power has been declared an "existential threat" by Israeli leaders. Central to this agenda is the undermining of America's role as an honest Middle East peace broker when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Mearsheimer and Walt relate in detail, the Lobby has fought relentlessly against the establishment of a Palestinian state and against the very idea of a more balanced treatment of the issue in American policymaking circles. This has been the case ever since Bush the first caved on the question of Israeli settlements in Palestine, and when Bill Clinton took office, things got worse.
The Clinton administration sided with Israel all during the Camp David process, letting the Israelis see documents and edit them before they were available to the Palestinians. Clinton also kept the Arab states away from Camp David and assembled a team bereft of anyone with expertise in Arab politics. President Clinton took daily calls from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and his chief negotiator, Dennis Ross, was and is a partisan of Israel. In the end, Clinton had the chutzpah to blame Arafat, of all people, for the failure of the peace process.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration made an initial attempt to pressure Israel to pull in its expansionist policies. For the first time, George W. Bush advocated a separate Palestinian state. The Bush people put what the New York Times characterized as "enormous pressure" on Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government to make some sort of accommodation with the Palestinians.
The Israelis were in a panic: Sharon denounced U.S. efforts as an attempt to "appease the Arabs at our expense," likened Bush to Neville Chamberlain, and declared "We will not be Czechoslovakia!" It wasn't long before Israeli tanks were barreling into Hebron.
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In response to the Bush administration's post-9/11 initiatives in the Middle East, Israel launched a full-scale campaign to delegitimize Yasser Arafat, the elected leader of the Palestinians, and isolate the PLO and the Palestinian people. Israel and its American lobby made a concerted effort to equate Arafat with Osama bin Laden – and, furthermore, to convince Americans that the Israelis were engaged in a fight against terrorism similar to that in which the U.S. was engaged with al-Qaeda. The equation of al-Qaeda with the Palestinians did not quite fit, but the propaganda offensive was on full throttle. An open letter from the Project for a New American Century, signed by prominent neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, and Richard Perle, called on Bush to "fully support our fellow democracy," Israel, and demanded an end to all support for the Palestinians. An effort in Congress to cut Bush off at the pass was successful: in November, 89 senators sent a letter to the president hailing his decision not to meet with Arafat and demanding that the U.S. refrain from putting pressure on Israel not to launch fresh attacks on the Palestinian territories.
By late in the month, the administration had come around to the Lobby's point of view. When the Israelis attacked Palestinian positions in the Gaza strip, the U.S. said nothing. Sharon was visiting Bush at the time, and the meeting was friendly. No mention was made of U.S.-Israeli tensions, which had magically disappeared. The Israel lobby had chalked up a victory. The Karina A incident, in which a ship loaded down with Iranian arms was captured in the Red Sea, convinced Bush that the Palestinians were rearming with Iran's help. This, in spite of the fact that the ultimate destination of the ship was in dispute: it's likely the arms were headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Regardless of the truth of the matter, the Israelis won the day in Washington – and the Palestinians were once again isolated diplomatically. The American effort to engage with Arafat and restart the peace process was indefinitely stalled.
This did not put an end to the ongoing U.S.-Israeli contretemps. By late March, the Israelis were at it again: in response to a Hamas suicide bomber who killed 30 Israelis at a Passover Seder, they launched Operation Defensive Shield and took control of the occupied territories. The U.S. demanded Israeli withdrawal – and the Israel lobby went into action.
Their target was Colin Powell, then secretary of state, who was on a trip to the Middle East that included a visit with Arafat. Neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon went into action, determined to sabotage Powell's efforts. The neoconservative media started attacking Powell: David Brooks on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard, and the entire stable of neoconservative newspaper columnists went ballistic. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had made a special trip to America to make the case for Israel, announced that the Powell trip would not amount to a hill of beans. Powell, under constant pressure from the Lobby and its supporters, later described his trip as "ten of the most miserable days of my life." In the end, Powell was neutralized, and his efforts came to naught.
The other target of the Lobby's campaign was the president himself. Top Republican congressional leaders were mobilized: Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, and Dick Armey visited Bush in the White House and told him to lay off Israel. This was followed the Christian evangelicals, led by Jerry Falwell, who organized a massive phone campaign in support of Israel: Washington was deluged with calls, e-mails, letters, and faxes.
It worked.
[Part 2 will appear on Wednesday.]
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12717
http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=12716
War on Terror
Dangerously Counterproductive
by Ivan Eland At the passing of the 25th anniversary of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon – the first large suicide bombing to target Americans – the time is right to ask the perennial question: has the Bush administration's "war on terror" since 9/11 made Americans safer?
Although the Bush administration regularly boasts that its war on terror has been effective because no large terrorists attacks on U.S. soil have occurred since 9/11, such terrorism in North America has historically been a rare event. It's like bragging that efforts to prevent lightning strikes have succeeded because a dwelling has not been struck or burned. In fact, 9/11 was shocking to Americans not only because of the magnitude of the casualties, but because North America had seen very little terrorism coming from abroad. The last major international terrorist attack on U.S. soil was eight years before, in 1993 (also on the World Trade Center). Predictions of terrorist attacks are hard to make, but the dramatic surge in suicide bombings overseas since the Bush administration's war on terror began should increase our worries that another major attack could occur in the American homeland.
According to data from U.S. government terrorism experts, which were reported in the Washington Post, in 2000, the year before the war on terror began, 37 suicide attacks occurred worldwide. Since 9/11, the total climbed steadily to several hundred attacks in each of 2005 and 2006 and then exploded to a whopping 658 attacks in 2007. What's more, the attacks have occurred in dozens of countries on five continents. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, two-thirds of all suicide attacks since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals. In other words, the war has been disastrously counterproductive.
Although the American homeland has been fairly safe since 9/11, suicide attacks against U.S. facilities overseas, such as embassies and military assets, and allies have skyrocketed. So the Bush administration's bragging that its war on terror has made Americans safer is ludicrous.
In fact, the administration's war on terror has played right into Osama bin Laden's hands. A common strategy of terrorists is to strike the stronger aggressor, hope for an overreaction, and thus gain zealous recruits and funding for the terrorists' cause. Instead of using intelligence, law enforcement, and limited military and covert action in the shadows to capture or kill terrorists in a low-key way after 9/11, the administration's highly publicized cowboy invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were overreactions that must have put a smile on bin Laden's face. With a tin ear for why bin Laden was attacking the United States in the first place – the superpower's military presence and policy of political meddling in Muslim lands – the Bush administration has further inflamed Islamist radicals worldwide with more of the same. That two-thirds of suicide attacks since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals is a euphemistic way of saying that the U.S. government is largely responsible for the problem of anti-U.S. terrorism.
The Bush administration has vehemently and publicly denied what the empirical data point to by blaming anti-U.S. terrorist attacks on hatred of American freedoms. Polls taken in Islamic countries counter this viewpoint. The American people, as if supporting their local sports team against a rival, would prefer to buy into this administration's Tarzan-like foreign policy ("America good; others bad"). Instead, we should be engaging in the more difficult, soul-searching task of discovering the root causes of anti-U.S. terrorism. Americans could continue to give the benefit of the doubt to their government's aggressive foreign policies in the Middle East, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, but that would be a delusional and dangerous choice.
War on Terror
Dangerously Counterproductive
by Ivan Eland At the passing of the 25th anniversary of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon – the first large suicide bombing to target Americans – the time is right to ask the perennial question: has the Bush administration's "war on terror" since 9/11 made Americans safer?
Although the Bush administration regularly boasts that its war on terror has been effective because no large terrorists attacks on U.S. soil have occurred since 9/11, such terrorism in North America has historically been a rare event. It's like bragging that efforts to prevent lightning strikes have succeeded because a dwelling has not been struck or burned. In fact, 9/11 was shocking to Americans not only because of the magnitude of the casualties, but because North America had seen very little terrorism coming from abroad. The last major international terrorist attack on U.S. soil was eight years before, in 1993 (also on the World Trade Center). Predictions of terrorist attacks are hard to make, but the dramatic surge in suicide bombings overseas since the Bush administration's war on terror began should increase our worries that another major attack could occur in the American homeland.
According to data from U.S. government terrorism experts, which were reported in the Washington Post, in 2000, the year before the war on terror began, 37 suicide attacks occurred worldwide. Since 9/11, the total climbed steadily to several hundred attacks in each of 2005 and 2006 and then exploded to a whopping 658 attacks in 2007. What's more, the attacks have occurred in dozens of countries on five continents. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, two-thirds of all suicide attacks since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals. In other words, the war has been disastrously counterproductive.
Although the American homeland has been fairly safe since 9/11, suicide attacks against U.S. facilities overseas, such as embassies and military assets, and allies have skyrocketed. So the Bush administration's bragging that its war on terror has made Americans safer is ludicrous.
In fact, the administration's war on terror has played right into Osama bin Laden's hands. A common strategy of terrorists is to strike the stronger aggressor, hope for an overreaction, and thus gain zealous recruits and funding for the terrorists' cause. Instead of using intelligence, law enforcement, and limited military and covert action in the shadows to capture or kill terrorists in a low-key way after 9/11, the administration's highly publicized cowboy invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were overreactions that must have put a smile on bin Laden's face. With a tin ear for why bin Laden was attacking the United States in the first place – the superpower's military presence and policy of political meddling in Muslim lands – the Bush administration has further inflamed Islamist radicals worldwide with more of the same. That two-thirds of suicide attacks since 1983 have targeted U.S. policy goals is a euphemistic way of saying that the U.S. government is largely responsible for the problem of anti-U.S. terrorism.
The Bush administration has vehemently and publicly denied what the empirical data point to by blaming anti-U.S. terrorist attacks on hatred of American freedoms. Polls taken in Islamic countries counter this viewpoint. The American people, as if supporting their local sports team against a rival, would prefer to buy into this administration's Tarzan-like foreign policy ("America good; others bad"). Instead, we should be engaging in the more difficult, soul-searching task of discovering the root causes of anti-U.S. terrorism. Americans could continue to give the benefit of the doubt to their government's aggressive foreign policies in the Middle East, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, but that would be a delusional and dangerous choice.
TIME MAGAZINE – MIDDLE EAST BLOG
4/21/08
Would Obama end the U.S.-Iranian Cold War?
Scott MacLeod
After a week in Tehran speaking with politicians and analysts across the political spectrum, I came away with conclusions on two important issues. Iranians are confident if not over-confident in their overall strategic position, and are not so worried about a military strike before the Bush administration leaves office nine months from now.
And, as I have written in a time.com piece today, there's a widespread feeling that the election of Barack Obama may be an important opportunity to lessen or end U.S.-Iranian hostility. One of President Ahmadinejad's vice presidents told me that if he himself was an American voter, he might have cast his ballot for Obama.
On Iran's position in the region, Iranians pour on the irony in giving Bush much of the credit for bolstering Iranian fortunes--albeit, of course, unintentionally. They gleefully point out how Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toppled neighboring regimes that were the most hostile to Iran's interests. And they are keenly aware that the invasion of Iraq and bungling of the occupation has helped more than quadruple oil prices to more than $115 a barrel--which nicely provided the major oil-producing nation with vast windfall revenues to help cushion the effects of the Bush-driven U.N. sanctions against Iran. After one Iranian official ran down the list of Iran's geopolitical gains during the Bush administration, I felt compelled to jokingly respond by saying, "You're welcome!" That prompted quite a jolly laugh on his part.
Iranian officials believe that the Bush administration has the intention to attack Iran--Bush has repeatedly warned Iran about its alleged nuclear weapons program-- but at this point lacks the capability to do so. One official assured me that Iran had the capability to launch a powerful retaliatory attack--perhaps a reference to what mischief Iran could inspire through proxies against U.S. interests in Iraq and Israel, which could help fan flames of anti-Americanism throughout the Islamic world. But he also said that a bigger Iranian deterrent is what a U.S.-Iranian clash would do to the global economy through the disruption of the world's oil supplies. I spoke to a few analysts who expressed fear about a Bush attack, but compared to other Iranians they came off as either naive or as trying to promote Bush's war-mongering image in the Middle East. Officials and analysts close to the government seemed unanimous in almost completely dismissing the possibility.
I was struck by the extent to which Iranian officials are seeing positive signs in the prospect of Obama or even John McCain being elected president. McCain has a very negative image in Iran, partly because of his rather insensitive joking for an American leader about bombing Iran. At least 300,000 Iranian lives and perhaps many more were lost after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 and enjoyed support from the U.S. during an eight-year war. In 1988, a U.S. Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger flight en route to Dubai, killing the 290 people aboard. Nevertheless, Iranian officials are intrigued by recent statements by Henry Kissinger calling for direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations. Iranians believe that Kissinger is an influential advisor to McCain and they have great respect for Kissinger's weight in American foreign policy circles. It's easy to see how if Iranians decided to follow through with a "Grand Bargain" with the U.S., they would feel more comfortable and confident dealing with an American president who would involve a Kissinger in the process.
Yet, Obama is the candidate that Iranians much prefer. Besides reflexively sympathizing with an African-American with Islamic family roots, they believe Obama's personal experiences in that regard make him more understanding of the developing world and especially the Muslim world and hence more capable of approaching Iran with a better perspective and with more sincerity. They are also impressed with what they feel is Obama's diplomatic, respectful language, which they see as being in utter contrast with insulting U.S. rhetoric dominant during the Bush administration.
Some Iranian officials and analysts go so far as to say that Obama's election could be a historical turning point. As one Iranian put it to me, "This could be a moment of truth for the U.S. and for Iran." What he probably meant was that Obama's possible willingness to make a significant outreach to Iran could be what is needed to convince Iran's leadership that Washington is truly serious about ending the 30 years of hostile relations. In this view, Iran itself could never make the first move or provide the initial compromises, because Iran is the weaker party, and it is feared that concessions would simply embolden the stronger party to demand more. Looking back over the last four U.S. presidential terms spanning nearly 16 years, Iranians regard Bill Clinton as wishy-washy and Bush as strong hostile. Thus, a clear-cut diplomatic outreach by Obama would be a sea-change in American attitudes, from Iran's perspective.
Iranians believe such a bold diplomatic initiative by Obama would be a moment of truth for Iran in the sense that Iran's leadership would have to decide whether to continue its "controlled" hostility to the U.S., which it uses for domestic and international support, or bite the bullet and enter into a cooperative relationship entailing major compromises on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Iranians realize that another Obama may not come on to the American scene for quite a while, and that rejection of his olive branch--if one is indeed extended-- might inexorably push the region to the World War III that Bush has warned about. Although Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatullah Khamenei has the ultimate say, his moves are influenced by the winds blowing in Iranian politics. Iranians go to the polls in '09 when Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner, is likely to face a strong challenge from more pragmatic candidates, even from within the so-called fundamentalist camp. There's a feeling that McCain's election in the U.S. would aid Ahmnadinejad's re-election whereas an Obama or Hillary Clinton presidency may provide more ammunition to Iranian hopefuls arguing for a more pragmatic approach to the U.S.
Iranian officials were at pains to insist to me that they have no aggressive hegemonic plans for the MIddle East, that they are simply content to exploit the new strategic benefits they have gained thanks to the Bush administration's own goals in the region. They are eager to point out that except for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iranian and American interests in the region strongly converge. They say that both countries support the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki and would like to see stability in Iraq. One analyst said that Iran wanted the U.S. to succeed in Iraq, but not to succeed so much that Washington would then turn its sites on changing the regime in Tehran. Iran's interference in Iraqi affairs, the analyst suggested, was simply part of the U.S.-Iranian chess game. Furthermore, officials say that both countries are determined to curb the rise of extremist Sunni Muslim groups in the Middle East and prevent the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. As an oil exporting country, Iran is in sync with American desires to keep the oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian may have been correct in saying that an Obama presidency would be a moment of truth for the U.S., too--if he failed to decisively help defuse U.S.-Iranian tensions, it could auger against American standing in the Middle East for years to come. Yet, a serious American effort to achieve a rapprochement with Tehran--whether by Obama or whoever else is inaugurated U.S. president next January-- would clearly put Iran's true intentions to the test. Some in Iran want the confrontation to continue, both for ideological reasons and to strengthen their position in domestic politics. But other Iranian leaders clearly see advantages in a rapprochement with the U.S. Normal relations with the U.S. would consolidate Iran's strategic position in the region, make Iran the most significant, unchallenged power in the Muslim Middle East and strengthen Iran's economy by dramatically easing Iranian trade with the world.
4/21/08
Would Obama end the U.S.-Iranian Cold War?
Scott MacLeod
After a week in Tehran speaking with politicians and analysts across the political spectrum, I came away with conclusions on two important issues. Iranians are confident if not over-confident in their overall strategic position, and are not so worried about a military strike before the Bush administration leaves office nine months from now.
And, as I have written in a time.com piece today, there's a widespread feeling that the election of Barack Obama may be an important opportunity to lessen or end U.S.-Iranian hostility. One of President Ahmadinejad's vice presidents told me that if he himself was an American voter, he might have cast his ballot for Obama.
On Iran's position in the region, Iranians pour on the irony in giving Bush much of the credit for bolstering Iranian fortunes--albeit, of course, unintentionally. They gleefully point out how Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toppled neighboring regimes that were the most hostile to Iran's interests. And they are keenly aware that the invasion of Iraq and bungling of the occupation has helped more than quadruple oil prices to more than $115 a barrel--which nicely provided the major oil-producing nation with vast windfall revenues to help cushion the effects of the Bush-driven U.N. sanctions against Iran. After one Iranian official ran down the list of Iran's geopolitical gains during the Bush administration, I felt compelled to jokingly respond by saying, "You're welcome!" That prompted quite a jolly laugh on his part.
Iranian officials believe that the Bush administration has the intention to attack Iran--Bush has repeatedly warned Iran about its alleged nuclear weapons program-- but at this point lacks the capability to do so. One official assured me that Iran had the capability to launch a powerful retaliatory attack--perhaps a reference to what mischief Iran could inspire through proxies against U.S. interests in Iraq and Israel, which could help fan flames of anti-Americanism throughout the Islamic world. But he also said that a bigger Iranian deterrent is what a U.S.-Iranian clash would do to the global economy through the disruption of the world's oil supplies. I spoke to a few analysts who expressed fear about a Bush attack, but compared to other Iranians they came off as either naive or as trying to promote Bush's war-mongering image in the Middle East. Officials and analysts close to the government seemed unanimous in almost completely dismissing the possibility.
I was struck by the extent to which Iranian officials are seeing positive signs in the prospect of Obama or even John McCain being elected president. McCain has a very negative image in Iran, partly because of his rather insensitive joking for an American leader about bombing Iran. At least 300,000 Iranian lives and perhaps many more were lost after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 and enjoyed support from the U.S. during an eight-year war. In 1988, a U.S. Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger flight en route to Dubai, killing the 290 people aboard. Nevertheless, Iranian officials are intrigued by recent statements by Henry Kissinger calling for direct U.S.-Iranian negotiations. Iranians believe that Kissinger is an influential advisor to McCain and they have great respect for Kissinger's weight in American foreign policy circles. It's easy to see how if Iranians decided to follow through with a "Grand Bargain" with the U.S., they would feel more comfortable and confident dealing with an American president who would involve a Kissinger in the process.
Yet, Obama is the candidate that Iranians much prefer. Besides reflexively sympathizing with an African-American with Islamic family roots, they believe Obama's personal experiences in that regard make him more understanding of the developing world and especially the Muslim world and hence more capable of approaching Iran with a better perspective and with more sincerity. They are also impressed with what they feel is Obama's diplomatic, respectful language, which they see as being in utter contrast with insulting U.S. rhetoric dominant during the Bush administration.
Some Iranian officials and analysts go so far as to say that Obama's election could be a historical turning point. As one Iranian put it to me, "This could be a moment of truth for the U.S. and for Iran." What he probably meant was that Obama's possible willingness to make a significant outreach to Iran could be what is needed to convince Iran's leadership that Washington is truly serious about ending the 30 years of hostile relations. In this view, Iran itself could never make the first move or provide the initial compromises, because Iran is the weaker party, and it is feared that concessions would simply embolden the stronger party to demand more. Looking back over the last four U.S. presidential terms spanning nearly 16 years, Iranians regard Bill Clinton as wishy-washy and Bush as strong hostile. Thus, a clear-cut diplomatic outreach by Obama would be a sea-change in American attitudes, from Iran's perspective.
Iranians believe such a bold diplomatic initiative by Obama would be a moment of truth for Iran in the sense that Iran's leadership would have to decide whether to continue its "controlled" hostility to the U.S., which it uses for domestic and international support, or bite the bullet and enter into a cooperative relationship entailing major compromises on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Iranians realize that another Obama may not come on to the American scene for quite a while, and that rejection of his olive branch--if one is indeed extended-- might inexorably push the region to the World War III that Bush has warned about. Although Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatullah Khamenei has the ultimate say, his moves are influenced by the winds blowing in Iranian politics. Iranians go to the polls in '09 when Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner, is likely to face a strong challenge from more pragmatic candidates, even from within the so-called fundamentalist camp. There's a feeling that McCain's election in the U.S. would aid Ahmnadinejad's re-election whereas an Obama or Hillary Clinton presidency may provide more ammunition to Iranian hopefuls arguing for a more pragmatic approach to the U.S.
Iranian officials were at pains to insist to me that they have no aggressive hegemonic plans for the MIddle East, that they are simply content to exploit the new strategic benefits they have gained thanks to the Bush administration's own goals in the region. They are eager to point out that except for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iranian and American interests in the region strongly converge. They say that both countries support the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki and would like to see stability in Iraq. One analyst said that Iran wanted the U.S. to succeed in Iraq, but not to succeed so much that Washington would then turn its sites on changing the regime in Tehran. Iran's interference in Iraqi affairs, the analyst suggested, was simply part of the U.S.-Iranian chess game. Furthermore, officials say that both countries are determined to curb the rise of extremist Sunni Muslim groups in the Middle East and prevent the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. As an oil exporting country, Iran is in sync with American desires to keep the oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian may have been correct in saying that an Obama presidency would be a moment of truth for the U.S., too--if he failed to decisively help defuse U.S.-Iranian tensions, it could auger against American standing in the Middle East for years to come. Yet, a serious American effort to achieve a rapprochement with Tehran--whether by Obama or whoever else is inaugurated U.S. president next January-- would clearly put Iran's true intentions to the test. Some in Iran want the confrontation to continue, both for ideological reasons and to strengthen their position in domestic politics. But other Iranian leaders clearly see advantages in a rapprochement with the U.S. Normal relations with the U.S. would consolidate Iran's strategic position in the region, make Iran the most significant, unchallenged power in the Muslim Middle East and strengthen Iran's economy by dramatically easing Iranian trade with the world.
The Unspoken Truths
William Pfaff
Paris, April 22, 2008 – The gap between the actual making and execution of American national policy and the way in which it is reported and discussed is now so wide that the latter barely connects to the former. This is true not simply in media treatment of issues and in the presidential debate, but in how the national government itself thinks and acts.
It is not a matter of conspiracies, or expedient official lies or propaganda, as in the secret manipulation by the Pentagon of television and press. On many matters, even the people who do not know that they are lying are doing so.
Irresponsibility, individual careerism or cowardice, or ignorance on the part of those of us who belong to the media, undoubtedly contributes to this darkened national intelligence or consciousness.
The overall cause of self-suppression of public discussion of certain issues and the self-censorship by politicians, officials, "public intellectuals" and press, is a consensus that now exists among officials, politicians, publishers, media corporations and journalists that it is impolitic to recognize certain realities.
This is true even when national security, as such, is not involved. The nation has a certain image of itself. It is unprofitable to raise the possibility that this is not a true image.
Take a subject which everyone concerned with American foreign affairs knows about : the construction in Iraq of several huge, fortified, self-sufficient but vulnerable United States bases which the Pentagon prefers to describe as "enduring camps," but are meant to be permanent, serving a Pentagon strategy of regional military control that antedates the Bush administration.
Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women know about these bases, have served on them, and see perfectly well what they are for. Journalists infrequently visit them because they know that what they write is unlikely to be published, will make waves, and will identify them in a manner unlikely to help their careers.
The Pentagon's construction of a system of a "regional commands" as structure for possible military intervention or operations globally began under President Jimmy Carter. The plan will have originated in some study of future crises -- whether plausible or implausible being of no particular concern. It had bureaucratic sex-appeal, promising money and expanded Pentagon power.
In that, it resembles the periodic "national security strategy" statements supplied by the Pentagon to the White House. These characteristically foresee universal risk to the nation and propose measures to make American invulnerable and omnipotent.
Today the Pentagon's regional commanders are the most important American officials functioning outside the United States. Their funds, resources, and staff manpower, as well as the bases and troops under their orders, plus their bureaucratic and financial power base as agents of the Pentagon, make them Washington's true overseas proconsuls, recognized as such by foreign governments and foreign military establishments. The State Department's ambassadors, constitutionally charged to represent the U.S. abroad, are overshadowed and bureaucratically overpowered by them.
This is not the result of a new American militarism, as such. The Pentagon has simply done its duty, and Congress and successive administrations have approved. Military men are trained to seize the high ground, physical or bureaucratic, wherever they find it, prepare for all imaginable contingencies, and for all of the unimaginable ones they can persuade Congress to pay for. This adds up to a contingency plan to rule the world.
The Pentagon is at the disposal of the civilian government. The latter has only to ask, and the military will do it. It turns out that they sometimes cannot do the task successfully, as in the Iraq occupation shambles, the attempt to protect a permanent American client regime in Afghanistan, the emerging program to "go into" Waziristan to get the "bad guys" despite what the Pakistan government and people think, the new disaster in Somalia, and the failure to eliminate drug production in Colombia and Afghanistan. They give it all the good old West Point and Annapolis try. But this is not enough to realize policies that are fundamentally foolish, with unachievable goals.
In the presidential campaign, responsible people are reluctant to talk about this. Imagine the moderators of the disgraceful ABC Democratic primary debate last week asking the candidates how many permanent bases there are in Iraq, why they are there, and what they imply concerning the withdrawal promises made by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!
Imagine them asking about another reality known to everyone concerned with the matter, the fact that the policy of both Labor and Likud governments of Israel since 1967 has been to dominate Palestine and maintain and expand Israel's settlements there, despite ineffectual American objections. This, for Israel, has been a ruthless but reasonable policy, serving its perceived interests, but irreconcilable with U.S. Middle Eastern interests.
What is to be done about this? It would have been foolhardy for ABC's commentators even to have mentioned the matter. Jimmy Carter, who dared to pose the question, is being treated as a pariah by virtually all "responsible" people. Yet this could prove the biggest issue of war or peace that will face a new president. In the circles that claim the right to shape the American future there is guilty silence; but it is necessary that the silence on such matters to be broken.
© Copyright by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
William Pfaff
Paris, April 22, 2008 – The gap between the actual making and execution of American national policy and the way in which it is reported and discussed is now so wide that the latter barely connects to the former. This is true not simply in media treatment of issues and in the presidential debate, but in how the national government itself thinks and acts.
It is not a matter of conspiracies, or expedient official lies or propaganda, as in the secret manipulation by the Pentagon of television and press. On many matters, even the people who do not know that they are lying are doing so.
Irresponsibility, individual careerism or cowardice, or ignorance on the part of those of us who belong to the media, undoubtedly contributes to this darkened national intelligence or consciousness.
The overall cause of self-suppression of public discussion of certain issues and the self-censorship by politicians, officials, "public intellectuals" and press, is a consensus that now exists among officials, politicians, publishers, media corporations and journalists that it is impolitic to recognize certain realities.
This is true even when national security, as such, is not involved. The nation has a certain image of itself. It is unprofitable to raise the possibility that this is not a true image.
Take a subject which everyone concerned with American foreign affairs knows about : the construction in Iraq of several huge, fortified, self-sufficient but vulnerable United States bases which the Pentagon prefers to describe as "enduring camps," but are meant to be permanent, serving a Pentagon strategy of regional military control that antedates the Bush administration.
Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women know about these bases, have served on them, and see perfectly well what they are for. Journalists infrequently visit them because they know that what they write is unlikely to be published, will make waves, and will identify them in a manner unlikely to help their careers.
The Pentagon's construction of a system of a "regional commands" as structure for possible military intervention or operations globally began under President Jimmy Carter. The plan will have originated in some study of future crises -- whether plausible or implausible being of no particular concern. It had bureaucratic sex-appeal, promising money and expanded Pentagon power.
In that, it resembles the periodic "national security strategy" statements supplied by the Pentagon to the White House. These characteristically foresee universal risk to the nation and propose measures to make American invulnerable and omnipotent.
Today the Pentagon's regional commanders are the most important American officials functioning outside the United States. Their funds, resources, and staff manpower, as well as the bases and troops under their orders, plus their bureaucratic and financial power base as agents of the Pentagon, make them Washington's true overseas proconsuls, recognized as such by foreign governments and foreign military establishments. The State Department's ambassadors, constitutionally charged to represent the U.S. abroad, are overshadowed and bureaucratically overpowered by them.
This is not the result of a new American militarism, as such. The Pentagon has simply done its duty, and Congress and successive administrations have approved. Military men are trained to seize the high ground, physical or bureaucratic, wherever they find it, prepare for all imaginable contingencies, and for all of the unimaginable ones they can persuade Congress to pay for. This adds up to a contingency plan to rule the world.
The Pentagon is at the disposal of the civilian government. The latter has only to ask, and the military will do it. It turns out that they sometimes cannot do the task successfully, as in the Iraq occupation shambles, the attempt to protect a permanent American client regime in Afghanistan, the emerging program to "go into" Waziristan to get the "bad guys" despite what the Pakistan government and people think, the new disaster in Somalia, and the failure to eliminate drug production in Colombia and Afghanistan. They give it all the good old West Point and Annapolis try. But this is not enough to realize policies that are fundamentally foolish, with unachievable goals.
In the presidential campaign, responsible people are reluctant to talk about this. Imagine the moderators of the disgraceful ABC Democratic primary debate last week asking the candidates how many permanent bases there are in Iraq, why they are there, and what they imply concerning the withdrawal promises made by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!
Imagine them asking about another reality known to everyone concerned with the matter, the fact that the policy of both Labor and Likud governments of Israel since 1967 has been to dominate Palestine and maintain and expand Israel's settlements there, despite ineffectual American objections. This, for Israel, has been a ruthless but reasonable policy, serving its perceived interests, but irreconcilable with U.S. Middle Eastern interests.
What is to be done about this? It would have been foolhardy for ABC's commentators even to have mentioned the matter. Jimmy Carter, who dared to pose the question, is being treated as a pariah by virtually all "responsible" people. Yet this could prove the biggest issue of war or peace that will face a new president. In the circles that claim the right to shape the American future there is guilty silence; but it is necessary that the silence on such matters to be broken.
© Copyright by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
Back to the hard line on N Korea
The US White House's revelations on North Korea's apparent collaboration in building a nuclear reactor in Syria indicate a move by George W Bush administration hawks to hold Pyongyang to account, just when the State Department was poised to let the country off with a face-saving memorandum. Seoul will be pleased. For North Korea, it's time to rattle its sabers. - Donald Kirk (Apr 25, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/JD26Dg01.html
The US White House's revelations on North Korea's apparent collaboration in building a nuclear reactor in Syria indicate a move by George W Bush administration hawks to hold Pyongyang to account, just when the State Department was poised to let the country off with a face-saving memorandum. Seoul will be pleased. For North Korea, it's time to rattle its sabers. - Donald Kirk (Apr 25, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/JD26Dg01.html
THE ROVING EYE
Hillary, the war chick
It was a silly question to begin with, but Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton jumped in boots and all, saying if she were US president and Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, she would "obliterate" Iran. Clinton's positioning spells Imperial Washington in all its glory - and hubris. - Pepe Escobar (Apr 25, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD26Ak02.html
Hillary, the war chick
It was a silly question to begin with, but Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton jumped in boots and all, saying if she were US president and Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, she would "obliterate" Iran. Clinton's positioning spells Imperial Washington in all its glory - and hubris. - Pepe Escobar (Apr 25, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD26Ak02.html
BOOK REVIEW
The Fed's king of bubbles
Greenspan's Bubbles - The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve by William Fleckenstein
Alan Greenspan did not have to wait long before his reputation for guiding the US economy to a new age of economic prosperity was stripped of plausibility. The financial crisis now of global reach was underway well before his long tenure as US Federal Reserve chairman came to an end. The man's folly, and that of his obsequious inquisitors in Congress, is now fully exposed. - Julian Delasantellis
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj05.html
The Fed's king of bubbles
Greenspan's Bubbles - The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve by William Fleckenstein
Alan Greenspan did not have to wait long before his reputation for guiding the US economy to a new age of economic prosperity was stripped of plausibility. The financial crisis now of global reach was underway well before his long tenure as US Federal Reserve chairman came to an end. The man's folly, and that of his obsequious inquisitors in Congress, is now fully exposed. - Julian Delasantellis
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj05.html
Food prices dim biofuel glow
China's determination to promote biofuels as an alternative to polluting coal and oil is being undermined as growers of the core products find themselves squeezed by the rising cost of agriculture products and government control of fuel prices.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj03.html
China's determination to promote biofuels as an alternative to polluting coal and oil is being undermined as growers of the core products find themselves squeezed by the rising cost of agriculture products and government control of fuel prices.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj03.html
THE MOGAMBO GURU
Funding the food price fiasco
Is there no end to the blithe ignorance, the sheer insanity, the blind arrogance of the powers that be when they wonder what to do with other people's money? Such as the International Monetary Fund "tackling" rising food prices by having donor economies give other people money to pay those higher prices! Duh!
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj01.html
Funding the food price fiasco
Is there no end to the blithe ignorance, the sheer insanity, the blind arrogance of the powers that be when they wonder what to do with other people's money? Such as the International Monetary Fund "tackling" rising food prices by having donor economies give other people money to pay those higher prices! Duh!
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj01.html
The Carter Center - Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope
News & Publications
Trip Report by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan:
April 13-22, 2008
22 April 2008
Rosalynn, Jeff, and I arrived in Israel Sunday, 4/13/08, after a very exciting and successful election monitoring mission in Nepal (see prior trip report). Since Israel had declined to approve a previously planned visit by three of us Elders (Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, and me), I expected a similar negative reaction when I substituted this trip on behalf of The Carter Center. Sure enough, all my requests to meet with ministers of the government were publicly rejected and, more seriously, three requests from our Secret Service detail to work with Israeli security were rejected. This was our first experience of this kind in more than 125 foreign nations we've visited since leaving the White House. (After several news stories on this subject, when we returned to Israel, Shin Bet security met us at the airport and worked with us.)
We were met in Tel Aviv by Bob Pastor, former Congressman Steve Solarz, and Hrair Balian, who arrived on a plane furnished by Jeff Skoll, and we proceeded together to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. My first event was an extensive interview with Ha'aretz newspaper, and I was able to convince them that we were undeterred, that the challenges were the reason we decided on our trip, and to explain our reasoning and basic purposes. Luckily, in a democracy like Israel, there are numerous sources of information from private citizens who are experts on government policies and attitudes. Also, official Israeli policies are well known.
President Shimon Peres did agree to meet on a personal basis just with the members of our family, and we had a very pleasant and congenial exchange of ideas. Later, one of his aides reported untruthfully that it was a harsh exchange and that I was scolded by him about our plans to meet Hamas. Our next meeting was with Noam and Aviva Schalit, parents of the young Israeli soldier who has been held for about 18 months by the Palestinians in Gaza. We pledged to do our best to learn about his condition and to aid in his release.
After a much-needed rest, we began the next day with a breakfast briefing by two Israeli public opinion researchers on their latest information about Israeli Jews. To summarize, Israelis are fairly satisfied with the status quo, have little confidence in the peace negotiators on either side, are deliberately uninformed about the plight of the Palestinians, and (surprisingly) are much more concerned in the negotiations for peace with the Palestinians about the "right of return" than about settlements or Jerusalem. U.S. Consul General Jacob Walles gave us a briefing about the seemingly limited role the U.S. State Department plays in the Occupied Territories. The Israelis are very restrictive, costs of required security in the West Bank are high, and they do not have access to Gaza. We later learned from several sources that there are some fundamental differences between the State Department and the NSC/ White House, and as in most Administrations, the White House view prevails.
We had an informative meeting with Yossi Beilin, founder of the Meretz political party and co-author of the Geneva peace proposal. Soon after, to our surprise, he held a press conference and quoted me (accurately) on several subjects. Our next stop was Sderot, a town of about 20,000 that is near Gaza and has had about two Qassam missiles strike it each day for the past seven years, but the larger proportion has come in the last year. Thirteen people have been killed by the small and inaccurate rockets, and the town is traumatized by the daily attacks. The streets, playgrounds, etc. were empty, and about 3,000 residents have moved away. We looked at nearby Gaza from a hilltop and then had a long discussion with several citizens and Mayor Eli Moyal in his office. He said that there were two ways for a government to protect its people: by diplomacy or military action - and the Israelis were doing neither for his town. We toured the Berzilai hospital in Ashkelon, where trauma victims are brought from Gaza and Israeli communities, with no distinctions between Jews and Arabs. Psychological injuries are most prevalent.
After driving back to Tel Aviv, I spoke to an audience at an Internet convention and engaged in a forum discussion with Ha'aretz reporter David Landau. Our next meeting was with the families of the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah, who have had no indication of whether they are still alive.
Back at our hotel, we had an intriguing discussion with about a dozen distinguished Israelis, who have held major positions in intelligence, government, or the military or who are experts in their personal careers relating to the peace effort. At the end of the session, I felt that most of them approved of my pending visit with Hamas and Syria. Collectively, the group had many years of experience in dealing with the Palestinians and other Arabs, in addition to studying the attitude and history of Israelis over the years.
On Tuesday, 4/15, we drove to Ramallah, where Tim Rothermel in our Carter Center office hosted meetings. We were briefed by staff members of the Palestinian Authority who are advising negotiating teams, but found that they are excluded from the top tier of negotiating, either at the Abbas-Olmert level or even the discussion of "road map" issues. We received some interesting polling data from Dr. Nader Said, which showed no confidence in the current negotiations and rising anger. About 50 members of the diplomatic corps joined us for a reception, and seemed supportive of our mission. They were, almost by definition, sympathetic with the Palestinians.
Perhaps the most emotional event of our entire trip was a meeting with young people, mostly of college age. The description of their deprivations and persecution was appalling, and their determination and hope for a better life brought tears to our eyes. They and their families had had citizenship rights taken away even though born and raised in Ramallah, Jericho, or Nablus, just because they may have visited or studied elsewhere. Many relatives were imprisoned for years because of some non-violent political activity. Including women and children, the Israelis now hold 11,600 prisoners, and about 25 percent of the entire Palestinian populations have been arrested.
After a brief ceremony at Arafat's grave, we had an extensive discussion with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is a very impressive leader. Among other things, he expressed hope for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, but we knew that President Mahmoud Abbas has been told by the U.S. and Israel that the peace talks will end and all funding cut off if he makes this move. He emphasized, quite emotionally, "Unless America stops the Israelis from expanding settlements, there can be no peace. Not one more brick!" has become his mantra. The Prime Minister gave us some suggestions for our meetings with Hamas leaders.
We then had lunch with about a dozen distinguished Palestinian leaders from both political parties. I embraced Eyad Sarraj, a courageous human rights leader from Gaza, who I've known, but the press thought he was one of the people from Hamas, and it became a worldwide news story that I embraced a Hamas leader. (Of 43 Hamas candidates elected to the Palestinian parliament from the West Bank, 41 are in prison.) After other meetings during the afternoon, we returned to East Jerusalem for a session with the Israel-Palestine Business Council, a group attempting to demonstrate that trade and commerce between the two are both possible and profitable.
On Wednesday, we met first with Avigdor Liebeman, leader of "Israel Our Home." He believes that Jews and Arabs should be completely separated, with Israeli Arabs moved east into the West Bank and Jewish settlers returned back to Israel. We then met with the NGO Peace Forum, a room full of representatives from about 120 groups from Israel and Palestine who are striving for peace. As expected, they all supported our mission, and I advised them to concentrate their diverse efforts around the acceptance of the Geneva Accords.
U.S. General Dayton and his multinational staff gave us a briefing as best they could while avoiding all the subjects they are forbidden to discuss. He has been in the region for 2½ years, is obviously dedicated and competent, and has had to accommodate frequent changes in his assigned duties each time there have been different circumstances on the ground. A major project now is to train a professional security force in Jordan. They have just completed training of a 600-person battalion.
Our next meeting was quite interesting, with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industry and Trade Eli Yishai. He is leader of Shas, a conservative religious group of 11 Knesset members that is dedicated to peace – and holding on to all of Jerusalem. He was very interested in our mission, expressed no opposition, and asked us to help arrange a meeting with Hamas leaders for himself in order to orchestrate the release of Corporal Schalit. He was the only member of the Israeli cabinet willing to meet with me.
Our last stop before flying to Egypt was Hadassah Hospital, where wonderful medical work is being done and the main emphasis seems to be on peace between Israelis and Arabs. The patients and also the staff include Jews and Arabs from both Israel and Palestine.
In Cairo, we received an excellent briefing from U.S. Ambassador Ricciardone concerning U.S.-Egypt relations and the ongoing negotiations between Egypt and Hamas on behalf of Israel and the U.S. This was his last day on this assignment, and we attended a going-away reception for him.
Our first meeting on Thursday was with Osamah al-Baz, who was my key Egyptian negotiator at Camp David and the closest confidante of Anwar Sadat. Although no longer active in government, he is one of the wisest and most knowledgeable people I know. Next, we had an intriguing session with Chief of Intelligence Omar Soliman, who is in total charge of all the relations with Hamas. Through him, the U.S. and Israel are negotiating with Hamas while publicly denying any relationship. He was extremely impressive. His position gives him an excellent insight into the intricacies of Middle East political and military affairs.
During an elaborate luncheon with President Hosni Mubarak and his wife Suzanne (old friends), we discussed former times and how much Egypt has been blessed by the peace treaty with Israel. Not engaged in warfare, having their land and oil wells returned, and being a special friend of the U.S., Egypt is thriving. With the president and prime minister, I probed for some more tolerant policies toward non-violent and secular political opponents in coming elections.
Our meeting with Hamas leaders, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, Siad Siam, and Ahmed Yousef went on for more than three hours. Well briefed by Mr. Soliman, we made full use of this time. My primary goal was to induce them to stop all rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, to be flexible in negotiating for a prisoner exchange involving Schalit's release, to accept the basic control premises for the opening of the Rafah gate between Gaza and the Sinai, to be open to the idea of a possible non-partisan government of technocrats, and to agree to accept any agreement negotiated between Abu Mazen and Olmert provided it is then approved by Palestinians, perhaps in a referendum. I also delivered requests from Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yishai and Yossi Beilin to meet with Hamas leaders. It was an amicable and interesting discussion, and helped to prepare us for the meeting in Damascus with Mashaal. In all discussions, Rosalynn, Bob Pastor, and Congressman Solarz played a crucial role.
In the evening, I gave a lecture to a packed crowd at the American University of Cairo and an-swered their questions as frankly as I could.
On Friday, we flew to Damascus, where our first official event was a delightful luncheon with President Bashar al Assad and his wife Asma. Although I had known him as a college student, this was our first meeting since he inherited the office after his father died. In the meantime, Bob, Steve, and Hrair met with Foreign Minister Walid Mualem and his deputy, Faysal Mekdad. We then assembled at the presidential palace for a thorough discussion of all the important issues: Golan Heights, Lebanon, Iran, and U.S.-Syrian relations. Assad was very eager to resume peace talks with Israel, if strongly supported by the U.S. The only precondition would be public acknowledgement that the discussions were being held. The most significant discovery was the obvious personal strength and mastery of details by the young president. He also promised that all the seven imprisoned human rights activists would be released if they request clemency.
We then had a long meeting, before and after supper, with Mashaal and top leaders in the Hamas politburo. I pursued as forcefully as possible the same issues as before, including steps they might take to reduce tension, to resolve some current conflicts with Israel, and to enhance the prospects for progress in the peace talks underway between Israel and the Palestinians representing the PLO. Mashaal and I left before midnight, with Bob, Steve, and Hrair to continue detailed discussions with the remaining Hamas politburo members and to seek written understandings on the issues. We reassembled the following morning to continue our talks, and Mashaal and I agreed on wording of our points, which he said he would submit to the top Hamas leaders, including those from Gaza, and would give us their response to our proposals before our final press conference Monday morning in Israel.
Our plane had a flat tire, but we were given a substitute by President Assad and were able to proceed, on time, to Saudi Arabia. We first met with Prince Turki al-Faisal at the King Faisal Foundation, and were able to share information about our trip and his analysis of various issues of common interest. A major conference was underway at his center on how to resolve the Iraqi quandary. We then visited with King Abdullah for about 45 minutes, who interrupted his weekly session with private Saudi citizens. When I returned to our hotel suite, Saudi's ambassador to the U.S., H.E. Adel Al-Jubair , called to say that his majesty was making a nice contribution for our health work in Africa.
During the evening we had dinner with Prince Alwalid bin Talal and toured his estate. The next morning we proceeded to Jordan (in the prince's plane) for a visit with King Abdullah II, Foreign Minister Salah Eddin al Bashir, and other ministers. They were quite critical of Hamas, Syria, and Iran, but also with the lack of progress and apparent lack of commitment to the peace talks between Israel and Palestine. The king will express his concerns in an upcoming visit to Washington. After a meeting with Adnan abu Odeh we flew to Israel, where we finally received protection from Israel's superb security force. During the night, we received responses to our suggestions and questions from the com-bined Hamas leadership.
Monday morning we first met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and then Shas leader Eli Yishai, to whom we outlined the results of our trip. We prepared a presentation for me to make to a conference sponsored by the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations. Although repeating some of the above, this is the report, slightly revised, that I made to an audience mostly of Israeli leaders, foreign diplomats, and the news media:
"During the past eight days, we traveled to Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan and met with distinguished leaders of each nation – from government, business, academia, and civil society. We visited the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and a hospital in Ashkelon where we saw Israeli and Palestinian doc-tors treating patients from Israel and Palestine equally – a positive sign of what the future could hold if peace is achieved.
"We knew that some of our meetings – particularly with Hamas and the Syrian government – would be viewed negatively in some quarters. The problem is not that we met them, but that the U.S. and Israeli governments refuse to meet with them, making peace harder if not impossible to achieve.
"In Israel, we visited Sderot and Ashkelon and saw the despair and fear due to the barrage of rockets. Aiming these rockets at civilian communities is an act of terrorism, and we urged Hamas to stop. I also visited the Palestinian territories and spoke to families who have lost their loved ones through violence and imprisonment. Most others are impeded from going to work, to school, or to worship because of the intruding wall and a plethora of road blocks. This too is unacceptable.
"On this 60th anniversary of the independence of Israel, I acknowledge a personal sadness that, during 30 years since Camp David, only Jordan has recognized Israel. I am glad that President Bush and Secretary Rice have pledged to complete a peace agreement by the end of the year. I hope that such an agreement will set the stage for wider recognition of Israel and acceptance of a sovereign Palestinian state. Our talks in Syria have led us to conclude that peace with Israel could be within reach, with Syria being the next country to recognize Israel if an agreement is reached.
"Allow me to offer some tentative conclusions based on our many meetings:
1. Public Opinion: Despair. A substantial majority of Israeli and Palestinian citizens and political leaders share the view that the peace negotiations are not making any progress and are unlikely to succeed. Palestinians are convinced that the Israeli government is more focused on expanding settlements than in making peace. Israelis fear more Palestinian attacks. When hope for peace declines and frustration increases, some people begin to turn to violence as the only path, and recent public opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza suggest this is happening.
2. The State of Peace Talks and the Roadmap. Four levels of talks are occurring: (a) between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert on final status issues; (
between Ahmed Qurai and Tzipi Livni on the same issues, though in more detail; © between technical teams on both sides; and (d) among Prime Minister Fayyad, Minister Ehud Barak, and U.S. General Fraser on monitoring the roadmap. President Abbas recently deplored the lack of progress on the major status issues, and without concrete progress at that level there is no chance that the next two levels can be productive. Minister Barak did not even attend the recent session convened by General Fraser to review the roadmap. One possible reason is that he had nothing positive to report. Indeed, not only does there appear to be no progress on the final status issues, but there is regression on the roadmap. Since Annapolis, about 9,000 more settlements have been announced and are being expanded or built; more roadblocks and checkpoints have gone up; and Gaza is increasingly isolated as a prison for 1.5 million Palestinians. On the Pales-tinian side, according to U.S. General Dayton, there has been progress in the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority in the training of security forces.
3. Palestinian Desperation. The impression of no progress on final status issues, combined with the expansion of settlements and roadblocks, have left the Palestinians increasingly angry. In a meeting we had with young leaders in the West Bank, several mentioned a "third intifada," based on the feeling that peace is not possible and the facts on the ground are growing worse. They did not defend the position taken by some of their friends on the need for violence, but they understand it. The danger is that most Israelis seem unaware of this growing crisis.
4. Five Interlocking Conflicts. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies at the center of other crises or challenges in the Middle East: intra-Palestinian; Syria-Israel; Lebanon; and Iran's growing influence. While each crisis needs to be addressed on its own, none of them can be solved without addressing or at least taking account of the others.
5. Comprehensive Peace. For peace in the Middle East to be sustainable, it needs to be comprehensive. This means that one needs to relate each crisis to the other, but it also means that actors with an obvious stake in the conflict need to have a stake in finding a solution. Groups such as Hamas view themselves as seeking liberation, but their role is viewed by some as using terrorism to undermine the prospects for peace. Syria, which we believe is ready to negotiate peace with Israel and normal relations with the United States, should also be permitted a place in the overall peace process lest they seek to subvert it.
6. Neighbors. All of Israel's neighbors believe they have much at stake in the success of the negotiations. Egypt is mediating between Hamas and Israel, and Saudi Arabia and Jordan have played key roles in assisting the peace process. And yet all are deeply worried that the negotiations will not succeed, and the effect on the region will be devastating. In our meeting, King Abdullah II of Jordan stressed the absence of tangible progress in the ongoing peace negotiations, and especially the need for stopping the expansion of settlements.
"We did not come as mediators or negotiators, and have been careful not to interfere in the principal peace negotiations. But we think there is a role in listening closely to two excluded actors – Hamas and the Syrian Government – and offering ideas on ways that they could take a more productive road to peace. Our conclusion is that there are good reasons to believe that such a strategy can yield constructive involvement by them, but it will take considerable time and patience.
"Let me focus my remarks on the two most controversial sets of meetings.
Hamas. I understand why Israel and other governments are reluctant to engage Hamas. They have not yet agreed to accept Israel's peaceful existence; they have not renounced violence; and they do not accept previous peace agreements. In our judgment, Hamas should accept all three points, but we do not believe peace is likely and we are certain peace is not sustainable unless a way can be found to ensure that Hamas will not disrupt the peace negotiations.
"The current strategy of isolating and suppressing Hamas and persecuting the people of Gaza is not working. It only exacerbates the cycle of violence, and latest polls show that it increases the relative popularity of Hamas throughout Palestine. Some feel that my meeting with Hamas legitimized them, but their legitimacy came when a plurality of the Palestinian people voted for them in the 2006 elections, which I observed. Israelis know that Hamas won a majority of parliamentary seats, and a recent poll of Israeli citizens indicates strong support (64 percent) for direct Israel-Hamas talks.
"We have no illusions that our brief meetings will stop the violence or produce peace, but we needed to take that first step. It is clear from our conversations that their views, as well as those of Israelis, need to be tested by regular exchanges, such as occurred in the many years of Track II diplomacy with the PLO.
"Violence freezes adversaries in a counterproductive posture. Israelis think the Palestinians will never accept Israel and Palestinians believe that Israel will never accept a genuinely independent Palestine. We think both are wrong and trust Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas to find their path to a two-state solution.
"I met with Hamas leaders from the West Bank, Gaza, and Damascus. After all-day discussions among their leaders, they agreed that they would accept a two-state solution on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians – a departure from long-standing Hamas doctrine that refused to recognize the possibility of two states living side-by-side in peace. This may be a very significant change.
"Specifically, they agreed to these exact words: "If President Abbas succeeds in negotiating a final status agreement with Israel, Hamas will accept the decision made by the Palestinian people and their will through a referendum monitored by international observers, including those from the Carter Center, or by a newly elected Palestinian National Council by mechanisms agreed upon nationally, even if Hamas is opposed to the agreement. In order to ensure that the referendum can be debated and the choice by voters truly reflects the will of the Palestinian people, a national reconciliation and, in particular, between Fatah and Hamas will be necessary.
"Let me underscore the significance of the statement. It means that Hamas will not undermine Abbas' efforts to negotiate the agreement, and whatever position Hamas chooses to take on the agreement, Hamas will accept an agreement if the Palestinian people support it by a free vote. If the agreement calls for a two-state solution and the recognition of Israel and Palestine, Hamas will, in effect, accept Israel's right to exist in peace - if the people agree on the plan.
"Hamas leaders said they did not want violence, but they believed it was necessary to end the occupation. However, they did say they would consider alternative strategies, including non-violence, to achieve their goal of a sovereign Palestinian state.
"In our meetings with Hamas, we made the following additional points:
1. We pressed them hard on a cease-fire. They are negotiating with Egypt, and we urged them to move rapidly to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.
2. We proposed a rapid exchange of prisoners, involving the early transfer of Corporal Schalit to Egypt in exchange for a group of prisoners not guilty of serious crimes, including all the women and children. Hamas considered their negotiations through Egypt to be well advanced and including prisoners whose families had been promised a high priority on their list to be swapped. Mr. Mashaal assured us that Schalit is well and promised a new letter from him to his parents, to be delivered through The Carter Center. Also, Schalit will be transferred to Egypt as an intermediate step in the exchange.
3. Hamas urged that the border crossing at Rafah be reopened. The crossing would be monitored by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, the European Union, and Egypt. Final decisions would be made by Egyptian officials.
4. Hamas is prepared to consider with President Abbas an idea of creating a government of national consensus, with a unified and nonpartisan professional security force for the West Bank and Gaza. There would be a cabinet composed of technocrats belonging neither to Fatah or Hamas, but approved by both. This non-partisan group would govern until the scheduled elections in 2010.
5. The leaders of Hamas asked me to express their greatest concern with the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people and reiterated that the basis for peace would be the fulfillment of Palestinians' national right of self-determination and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
"Syria. Communications between Israel and the United States with Syria are almost non-existent, and relations have been strained when not hostile. The United States and Israel brand Syria as a supporter of terrorism through its cooperation with Iran and the funding and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Furthermore, the two governments view Syria as undermining the stability of Lebanon and the selection of a President. In our conversations, the Syrian government seemed determined to correct these allegations. Senior government officials pledged to complete an agreement on the Golan Heights and peace with Israel as soon as possible. The government took very seriously the recent comment by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he understood Syrian expectations, and he thought Syria understood Israeli expectations. Since the Syrian government considers that about 85 percent of the issues have been resolved in prior negotiations, it believes the agreement should be completed soon. In Syria's view, there has been agreement on the borders, riparian rights as they apply to the Sea of Galilee, security zones and the presence of international forces.
"The United States has three options. It can continue to oppose such peace talks, which will make it impossible to achieve peace. It can play a neutral role, but that won't be enough. Finally, the U.S. could play a positive and constructive role, as proposed by the Syrian government, and we hope it does. On Lebanon, Syria ac-knowledges that it has some influence but insists that it is no longer playing a large role, as it did when it had troops there, and that the key to the solution is a national dialogue in which the various parties reach a consensus. In effect, this means that on critical issues (constitutional, economic policy, security), the government should ne-gotiate an agreement with the opposition parties that represent 45 percent of the parliament, including Hezbollah.
"In brief, Syria has influence over four of the conflicts that we have been discussing: Syria-Israel; Israel-Palestine; Intra-Palestine; and Lebanon. A successful negotiation on each will have positive effects on the other, and conversely, failure to reach agreement on one would make it harder to solve the others. If there is an agree-ment between Israel and Palestine and reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, then there is no longer any need for Syria to help Hamas; and if there is a consensus on Lebanon, there is no need to support Hezbollah. And finally, if the United States decides to support the negotiations with Israel, then U.S. concerns with Syria's performance will be addressed.
"In Syria, we raised our concerns about the people imprisoned for signing the Damascus Declaration, and President Bashar al-Assad said that there were only seven still being held from the original 90 detained. He said that if they sought clemency, they would receive it. We also asked him about Guy Hever, the young Israeli soldier who has been missing since August 1997, and he said they had no evidence of his whereabouts. We asked about Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who were captured by Hezbollah at the beginning of the war. The Syrian government has no information on them.
Conclusion
"In conclusion, we agree with President Abbas' recent statement that the final status negotiations are moving so slowly, with so few obvious results, that it is very unlikely negotiations will be completed by the deadline at the end of the year. This conclusion is widely shared, and may prove to be tragic. The combination of little or no progress on final status issues and a regression on the roadmap issues – settlements, checkpoints, etc. – and the closure of Gaza – all this means that the frustration level among Palestinians may be reaching the boiling point.
"Therefore, it is essential that we find an alternative and that includes a ceasefire, exchange of prisoners, negotiations between Israel and Syria and some rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas.
"No important achievement has ever occurred in the Middle East without taking a risk. I hope the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the U.S. government are prepared to take risks for peace. The transformation of Israel in sixty years has been wonderful to behold. The next miracle for which we should all pray is the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state that will live in peace with Israel and will cooperate with all their neighbors for the future of the region and its children. The Holy Land is a place of miracles. It is time for the miracle of peace."
After answering a number of questions in the public forum, I had a number of interviews in-cluding CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox, Reuters, AP, AFP, Chicago Tribune, ABC, NPR, two Israeli TV channels, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and LA Times. Meetings with the leader of Arab Israelis, Ahmed Tibi, Yossi Beilin, and former Prime Minister Ben Amin concluded a very busy day. Still not having a private plane, we departed Israel about midnight on a Delta flight to Atlanta. As I had predicted to Bob Pastor and Steve Solarz, the entire trip was exciting, challenging, adventurous, adequately productive – and fun!
Copyright ©2006 The Carter Center. All Rights Reserved. cartercenter.org
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News & Publications
Trip Report by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan:
April 13-22, 2008
22 April 2008
Rosalynn, Jeff, and I arrived in Israel Sunday, 4/13/08, after a very exciting and successful election monitoring mission in Nepal (see prior trip report). Since Israel had declined to approve a previously planned visit by three of us Elders (Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, and me), I expected a similar negative reaction when I substituted this trip on behalf of The Carter Center. Sure enough, all my requests to meet with ministers of the government were publicly rejected and, more seriously, three requests from our Secret Service detail to work with Israeli security were rejected. This was our first experience of this kind in more than 125 foreign nations we've visited since leaving the White House. (After several news stories on this subject, when we returned to Israel, Shin Bet security met us at the airport and worked with us.)
We were met in Tel Aviv by Bob Pastor, former Congressman Steve Solarz, and Hrair Balian, who arrived on a plane furnished by Jeff Skoll, and we proceeded together to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. My first event was an extensive interview with Ha'aretz newspaper, and I was able to convince them that we were undeterred, that the challenges were the reason we decided on our trip, and to explain our reasoning and basic purposes. Luckily, in a democracy like Israel, there are numerous sources of information from private citizens who are experts on government policies and attitudes. Also, official Israeli policies are well known.
President Shimon Peres did agree to meet on a personal basis just with the members of our family, and we had a very pleasant and congenial exchange of ideas. Later, one of his aides reported untruthfully that it was a harsh exchange and that I was scolded by him about our plans to meet Hamas. Our next meeting was with Noam and Aviva Schalit, parents of the young Israeli soldier who has been held for about 18 months by the Palestinians in Gaza. We pledged to do our best to learn about his condition and to aid in his release.
After a much-needed rest, we began the next day with a breakfast briefing by two Israeli public opinion researchers on their latest information about Israeli Jews. To summarize, Israelis are fairly satisfied with the status quo, have little confidence in the peace negotiators on either side, are deliberately uninformed about the plight of the Palestinians, and (surprisingly) are much more concerned in the negotiations for peace with the Palestinians about the "right of return" than about settlements or Jerusalem. U.S. Consul General Jacob Walles gave us a briefing about the seemingly limited role the U.S. State Department plays in the Occupied Territories. The Israelis are very restrictive, costs of required security in the West Bank are high, and they do not have access to Gaza. We later learned from several sources that there are some fundamental differences between the State Department and the NSC/ White House, and as in most Administrations, the White House view prevails.
We had an informative meeting with Yossi Beilin, founder of the Meretz political party and co-author of the Geneva peace proposal. Soon after, to our surprise, he held a press conference and quoted me (accurately) on several subjects. Our next stop was Sderot, a town of about 20,000 that is near Gaza and has had about two Qassam missiles strike it each day for the past seven years, but the larger proportion has come in the last year. Thirteen people have been killed by the small and inaccurate rockets, and the town is traumatized by the daily attacks. The streets, playgrounds, etc. were empty, and about 3,000 residents have moved away. We looked at nearby Gaza from a hilltop and then had a long discussion with several citizens and Mayor Eli Moyal in his office. He said that there were two ways for a government to protect its people: by diplomacy or military action - and the Israelis were doing neither for his town. We toured the Berzilai hospital in Ashkelon, where trauma victims are brought from Gaza and Israeli communities, with no distinctions between Jews and Arabs. Psychological injuries are most prevalent.
After driving back to Tel Aviv, I spoke to an audience at an Internet convention and engaged in a forum discussion with Ha'aretz reporter David Landau. Our next meeting was with the families of the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah, who have had no indication of whether they are still alive.
Back at our hotel, we had an intriguing discussion with about a dozen distinguished Israelis, who have held major positions in intelligence, government, or the military or who are experts in their personal careers relating to the peace effort. At the end of the session, I felt that most of them approved of my pending visit with Hamas and Syria. Collectively, the group had many years of experience in dealing with the Palestinians and other Arabs, in addition to studying the attitude and history of Israelis over the years.
On Tuesday, 4/15, we drove to Ramallah, where Tim Rothermel in our Carter Center office hosted meetings. We were briefed by staff members of the Palestinian Authority who are advising negotiating teams, but found that they are excluded from the top tier of negotiating, either at the Abbas-Olmert level or even the discussion of "road map" issues. We received some interesting polling data from Dr. Nader Said, which showed no confidence in the current negotiations and rising anger. About 50 members of the diplomatic corps joined us for a reception, and seemed supportive of our mission. They were, almost by definition, sympathetic with the Palestinians.
Perhaps the most emotional event of our entire trip was a meeting with young people, mostly of college age. The description of their deprivations and persecution was appalling, and their determination and hope for a better life brought tears to our eyes. They and their families had had citizenship rights taken away even though born and raised in Ramallah, Jericho, or Nablus, just because they may have visited or studied elsewhere. Many relatives were imprisoned for years because of some non-violent political activity. Including women and children, the Israelis now hold 11,600 prisoners, and about 25 percent of the entire Palestinian populations have been arrested.
After a brief ceremony at Arafat's grave, we had an extensive discussion with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is a very impressive leader. Among other things, he expressed hope for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, but we knew that President Mahmoud Abbas has been told by the U.S. and Israel that the peace talks will end and all funding cut off if he makes this move. He emphasized, quite emotionally, "Unless America stops the Israelis from expanding settlements, there can be no peace. Not one more brick!" has become his mantra. The Prime Minister gave us some suggestions for our meetings with Hamas leaders.
We then had lunch with about a dozen distinguished Palestinian leaders from both political parties. I embraced Eyad Sarraj, a courageous human rights leader from Gaza, who I've known, but the press thought he was one of the people from Hamas, and it became a worldwide news story that I embraced a Hamas leader. (Of 43 Hamas candidates elected to the Palestinian parliament from the West Bank, 41 are in prison.) After other meetings during the afternoon, we returned to East Jerusalem for a session with the Israel-Palestine Business Council, a group attempting to demonstrate that trade and commerce between the two are both possible and profitable.
On Wednesday, we met first with Avigdor Liebeman, leader of "Israel Our Home." He believes that Jews and Arabs should be completely separated, with Israeli Arabs moved east into the West Bank and Jewish settlers returned back to Israel. We then met with the NGO Peace Forum, a room full of representatives from about 120 groups from Israel and Palestine who are striving for peace. As expected, they all supported our mission, and I advised them to concentrate their diverse efforts around the acceptance of the Geneva Accords.
U.S. General Dayton and his multinational staff gave us a briefing as best they could while avoiding all the subjects they are forbidden to discuss. He has been in the region for 2½ years, is obviously dedicated and competent, and has had to accommodate frequent changes in his assigned duties each time there have been different circumstances on the ground. A major project now is to train a professional security force in Jordan. They have just completed training of a 600-person battalion.
Our next meeting was quite interesting, with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industry and Trade Eli Yishai. He is leader of Shas, a conservative religious group of 11 Knesset members that is dedicated to peace – and holding on to all of Jerusalem. He was very interested in our mission, expressed no opposition, and asked us to help arrange a meeting with Hamas leaders for himself in order to orchestrate the release of Corporal Schalit. He was the only member of the Israeli cabinet willing to meet with me.
Our last stop before flying to Egypt was Hadassah Hospital, where wonderful medical work is being done and the main emphasis seems to be on peace between Israelis and Arabs. The patients and also the staff include Jews and Arabs from both Israel and Palestine.
In Cairo, we received an excellent briefing from U.S. Ambassador Ricciardone concerning U.S.-Egypt relations and the ongoing negotiations between Egypt and Hamas on behalf of Israel and the U.S. This was his last day on this assignment, and we attended a going-away reception for him.
Our first meeting on Thursday was with Osamah al-Baz, who was my key Egyptian negotiator at Camp David and the closest confidante of Anwar Sadat. Although no longer active in government, he is one of the wisest and most knowledgeable people I know. Next, we had an intriguing session with Chief of Intelligence Omar Soliman, who is in total charge of all the relations with Hamas. Through him, the U.S. and Israel are negotiating with Hamas while publicly denying any relationship. He was extremely impressive. His position gives him an excellent insight into the intricacies of Middle East political and military affairs.
During an elaborate luncheon with President Hosni Mubarak and his wife Suzanne (old friends), we discussed former times and how much Egypt has been blessed by the peace treaty with Israel. Not engaged in warfare, having their land and oil wells returned, and being a special friend of the U.S., Egypt is thriving. With the president and prime minister, I probed for some more tolerant policies toward non-violent and secular political opponents in coming elections.
Our meeting with Hamas leaders, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, Siad Siam, and Ahmed Yousef went on for more than three hours. Well briefed by Mr. Soliman, we made full use of this time. My primary goal was to induce them to stop all rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, to be flexible in negotiating for a prisoner exchange involving Schalit's release, to accept the basic control premises for the opening of the Rafah gate between Gaza and the Sinai, to be open to the idea of a possible non-partisan government of technocrats, and to agree to accept any agreement negotiated between Abu Mazen and Olmert provided it is then approved by Palestinians, perhaps in a referendum. I also delivered requests from Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yishai and Yossi Beilin to meet with Hamas leaders. It was an amicable and interesting discussion, and helped to prepare us for the meeting in Damascus with Mashaal. In all discussions, Rosalynn, Bob Pastor, and Congressman Solarz played a crucial role.
In the evening, I gave a lecture to a packed crowd at the American University of Cairo and an-swered their questions as frankly as I could.
On Friday, we flew to Damascus, where our first official event was a delightful luncheon with President Bashar al Assad and his wife Asma. Although I had known him as a college student, this was our first meeting since he inherited the office after his father died. In the meantime, Bob, Steve, and Hrair met with Foreign Minister Walid Mualem and his deputy, Faysal Mekdad. We then assembled at the presidential palace for a thorough discussion of all the important issues: Golan Heights, Lebanon, Iran, and U.S.-Syrian relations. Assad was very eager to resume peace talks with Israel, if strongly supported by the U.S. The only precondition would be public acknowledgement that the discussions were being held. The most significant discovery was the obvious personal strength and mastery of details by the young president. He also promised that all the seven imprisoned human rights activists would be released if they request clemency.
We then had a long meeting, before and after supper, with Mashaal and top leaders in the Hamas politburo. I pursued as forcefully as possible the same issues as before, including steps they might take to reduce tension, to resolve some current conflicts with Israel, and to enhance the prospects for progress in the peace talks underway between Israel and the Palestinians representing the PLO. Mashaal and I left before midnight, with Bob, Steve, and Hrair to continue detailed discussions with the remaining Hamas politburo members and to seek written understandings on the issues. We reassembled the following morning to continue our talks, and Mashaal and I agreed on wording of our points, which he said he would submit to the top Hamas leaders, including those from Gaza, and would give us their response to our proposals before our final press conference Monday morning in Israel.
Our plane had a flat tire, but we were given a substitute by President Assad and were able to proceed, on time, to Saudi Arabia. We first met with Prince Turki al-Faisal at the King Faisal Foundation, and were able to share information about our trip and his analysis of various issues of common interest. A major conference was underway at his center on how to resolve the Iraqi quandary. We then visited with King Abdullah for about 45 minutes, who interrupted his weekly session with private Saudi citizens. When I returned to our hotel suite, Saudi's ambassador to the U.S., H.E. Adel Al-Jubair , called to say that his majesty was making a nice contribution for our health work in Africa.
During the evening we had dinner with Prince Alwalid bin Talal and toured his estate. The next morning we proceeded to Jordan (in the prince's plane) for a visit with King Abdullah II, Foreign Minister Salah Eddin al Bashir, and other ministers. They were quite critical of Hamas, Syria, and Iran, but also with the lack of progress and apparent lack of commitment to the peace talks between Israel and Palestine. The king will express his concerns in an upcoming visit to Washington. After a meeting with Adnan abu Odeh we flew to Israel, where we finally received protection from Israel's superb security force. During the night, we received responses to our suggestions and questions from the com-bined Hamas leadership.
Monday morning we first met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and then Shas leader Eli Yishai, to whom we outlined the results of our trip. We prepared a presentation for me to make to a conference sponsored by the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations. Although repeating some of the above, this is the report, slightly revised, that I made to an audience mostly of Israeli leaders, foreign diplomats, and the news media:
"During the past eight days, we traveled to Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan and met with distinguished leaders of each nation – from government, business, academia, and civil society. We visited the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and a hospital in Ashkelon where we saw Israeli and Palestinian doc-tors treating patients from Israel and Palestine equally – a positive sign of what the future could hold if peace is achieved.
"We knew that some of our meetings – particularly with Hamas and the Syrian government – would be viewed negatively in some quarters. The problem is not that we met them, but that the U.S. and Israeli governments refuse to meet with them, making peace harder if not impossible to achieve.
"In Israel, we visited Sderot and Ashkelon and saw the despair and fear due to the barrage of rockets. Aiming these rockets at civilian communities is an act of terrorism, and we urged Hamas to stop. I also visited the Palestinian territories and spoke to families who have lost their loved ones through violence and imprisonment. Most others are impeded from going to work, to school, or to worship because of the intruding wall and a plethora of road blocks. This too is unacceptable.
"On this 60th anniversary of the independence of Israel, I acknowledge a personal sadness that, during 30 years since Camp David, only Jordan has recognized Israel. I am glad that President Bush and Secretary Rice have pledged to complete a peace agreement by the end of the year. I hope that such an agreement will set the stage for wider recognition of Israel and acceptance of a sovereign Palestinian state. Our talks in Syria have led us to conclude that peace with Israel could be within reach, with Syria being the next country to recognize Israel if an agreement is reached.
"Allow me to offer some tentative conclusions based on our many meetings:
1. Public Opinion: Despair. A substantial majority of Israeli and Palestinian citizens and political leaders share the view that the peace negotiations are not making any progress and are unlikely to succeed. Palestinians are convinced that the Israeli government is more focused on expanding settlements than in making peace. Israelis fear more Palestinian attacks. When hope for peace declines and frustration increases, some people begin to turn to violence as the only path, and recent public opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza suggest this is happening.
2. The State of Peace Talks and the Roadmap. Four levels of talks are occurring: (a) between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert on final status issues; (
between Ahmed Qurai and Tzipi Livni on the same issues, though in more detail; © between technical teams on both sides; and (d) among Prime Minister Fayyad, Minister Ehud Barak, and U.S. General Fraser on monitoring the roadmap. President Abbas recently deplored the lack of progress on the major status issues, and without concrete progress at that level there is no chance that the next two levels can be productive. Minister Barak did not even attend the recent session convened by General Fraser to review the roadmap. One possible reason is that he had nothing positive to report. Indeed, not only does there appear to be no progress on the final status issues, but there is regression on the roadmap. Since Annapolis, about 9,000 more settlements have been announced and are being expanded or built; more roadblocks and checkpoints have gone up; and Gaza is increasingly isolated as a prison for 1.5 million Palestinians. On the Pales-tinian side, according to U.S. General Dayton, there has been progress in the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority in the training of security forces.3. Palestinian Desperation. The impression of no progress on final status issues, combined with the expansion of settlements and roadblocks, have left the Palestinians increasingly angry. In a meeting we had with young leaders in the West Bank, several mentioned a "third intifada," based on the feeling that peace is not possible and the facts on the ground are growing worse. They did not defend the position taken by some of their friends on the need for violence, but they understand it. The danger is that most Israelis seem unaware of this growing crisis.
4. Five Interlocking Conflicts. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies at the center of other crises or challenges in the Middle East: intra-Palestinian; Syria-Israel; Lebanon; and Iran's growing influence. While each crisis needs to be addressed on its own, none of them can be solved without addressing or at least taking account of the others.
5. Comprehensive Peace. For peace in the Middle East to be sustainable, it needs to be comprehensive. This means that one needs to relate each crisis to the other, but it also means that actors with an obvious stake in the conflict need to have a stake in finding a solution. Groups such as Hamas view themselves as seeking liberation, but their role is viewed by some as using terrorism to undermine the prospects for peace. Syria, which we believe is ready to negotiate peace with Israel and normal relations with the United States, should also be permitted a place in the overall peace process lest they seek to subvert it.
6. Neighbors. All of Israel's neighbors believe they have much at stake in the success of the negotiations. Egypt is mediating between Hamas and Israel, and Saudi Arabia and Jordan have played key roles in assisting the peace process. And yet all are deeply worried that the negotiations will not succeed, and the effect on the region will be devastating. In our meeting, King Abdullah II of Jordan stressed the absence of tangible progress in the ongoing peace negotiations, and especially the need for stopping the expansion of settlements.
"We did not come as mediators or negotiators, and have been careful not to interfere in the principal peace negotiations. But we think there is a role in listening closely to two excluded actors – Hamas and the Syrian Government – and offering ideas on ways that they could take a more productive road to peace. Our conclusion is that there are good reasons to believe that such a strategy can yield constructive involvement by them, but it will take considerable time and patience.
"Let me focus my remarks on the two most controversial sets of meetings.
Hamas. I understand why Israel and other governments are reluctant to engage Hamas. They have not yet agreed to accept Israel's peaceful existence; they have not renounced violence; and they do not accept previous peace agreements. In our judgment, Hamas should accept all three points, but we do not believe peace is likely and we are certain peace is not sustainable unless a way can be found to ensure that Hamas will not disrupt the peace negotiations.
"The current strategy of isolating and suppressing Hamas and persecuting the people of Gaza is not working. It only exacerbates the cycle of violence, and latest polls show that it increases the relative popularity of Hamas throughout Palestine. Some feel that my meeting with Hamas legitimized them, but their legitimacy came when a plurality of the Palestinian people voted for them in the 2006 elections, which I observed. Israelis know that Hamas won a majority of parliamentary seats, and a recent poll of Israeli citizens indicates strong support (64 percent) for direct Israel-Hamas talks.
"We have no illusions that our brief meetings will stop the violence or produce peace, but we needed to take that first step. It is clear from our conversations that their views, as well as those of Israelis, need to be tested by regular exchanges, such as occurred in the many years of Track II diplomacy with the PLO.
"Violence freezes adversaries in a counterproductive posture. Israelis think the Palestinians will never accept Israel and Palestinians believe that Israel will never accept a genuinely independent Palestine. We think both are wrong and trust Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas to find their path to a two-state solution.
"I met with Hamas leaders from the West Bank, Gaza, and Damascus. After all-day discussions among their leaders, they agreed that they would accept a two-state solution on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians – a departure from long-standing Hamas doctrine that refused to recognize the possibility of two states living side-by-side in peace. This may be a very significant change.
"Specifically, they agreed to these exact words: "If President Abbas succeeds in negotiating a final status agreement with Israel, Hamas will accept the decision made by the Palestinian people and their will through a referendum monitored by international observers, including those from the Carter Center, or by a newly elected Palestinian National Council by mechanisms agreed upon nationally, even if Hamas is opposed to the agreement. In order to ensure that the referendum can be debated and the choice by voters truly reflects the will of the Palestinian people, a national reconciliation and, in particular, between Fatah and Hamas will be necessary.
"Let me underscore the significance of the statement. It means that Hamas will not undermine Abbas' efforts to negotiate the agreement, and whatever position Hamas chooses to take on the agreement, Hamas will accept an agreement if the Palestinian people support it by a free vote. If the agreement calls for a two-state solution and the recognition of Israel and Palestine, Hamas will, in effect, accept Israel's right to exist in peace - if the people agree on the plan.
"Hamas leaders said they did not want violence, but they believed it was necessary to end the occupation. However, they did say they would consider alternative strategies, including non-violence, to achieve their goal of a sovereign Palestinian state.
"In our meetings with Hamas, we made the following additional points:
1. We pressed them hard on a cease-fire. They are negotiating with Egypt, and we urged them to move rapidly to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.
2. We proposed a rapid exchange of prisoners, involving the early transfer of Corporal Schalit to Egypt in exchange for a group of prisoners not guilty of serious crimes, including all the women and children. Hamas considered their negotiations through Egypt to be well advanced and including prisoners whose families had been promised a high priority on their list to be swapped. Mr. Mashaal assured us that Schalit is well and promised a new letter from him to his parents, to be delivered through The Carter Center. Also, Schalit will be transferred to Egypt as an intermediate step in the exchange.
3. Hamas urged that the border crossing at Rafah be reopened. The crossing would be monitored by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, the European Union, and Egypt. Final decisions would be made by Egyptian officials.
4. Hamas is prepared to consider with President Abbas an idea of creating a government of national consensus, with a unified and nonpartisan professional security force for the West Bank and Gaza. There would be a cabinet composed of technocrats belonging neither to Fatah or Hamas, but approved by both. This non-partisan group would govern until the scheduled elections in 2010.
5. The leaders of Hamas asked me to express their greatest concern with the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people and reiterated that the basis for peace would be the fulfillment of Palestinians' national right of self-determination and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
"Syria. Communications between Israel and the United States with Syria are almost non-existent, and relations have been strained when not hostile. The United States and Israel brand Syria as a supporter of terrorism through its cooperation with Iran and the funding and support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Furthermore, the two governments view Syria as undermining the stability of Lebanon and the selection of a President. In our conversations, the Syrian government seemed determined to correct these allegations. Senior government officials pledged to complete an agreement on the Golan Heights and peace with Israel as soon as possible. The government took very seriously the recent comment by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he understood Syrian expectations, and he thought Syria understood Israeli expectations. Since the Syrian government considers that about 85 percent of the issues have been resolved in prior negotiations, it believes the agreement should be completed soon. In Syria's view, there has been agreement on the borders, riparian rights as they apply to the Sea of Galilee, security zones and the presence of international forces.
"The United States has three options. It can continue to oppose such peace talks, which will make it impossible to achieve peace. It can play a neutral role, but that won't be enough. Finally, the U.S. could play a positive and constructive role, as proposed by the Syrian government, and we hope it does. On Lebanon, Syria ac-knowledges that it has some influence but insists that it is no longer playing a large role, as it did when it had troops there, and that the key to the solution is a national dialogue in which the various parties reach a consensus. In effect, this means that on critical issues (constitutional, economic policy, security), the government should ne-gotiate an agreement with the opposition parties that represent 45 percent of the parliament, including Hezbollah.
"In brief, Syria has influence over four of the conflicts that we have been discussing: Syria-Israel; Israel-Palestine; Intra-Palestine; and Lebanon. A successful negotiation on each will have positive effects on the other, and conversely, failure to reach agreement on one would make it harder to solve the others. If there is an agree-ment between Israel and Palestine and reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, then there is no longer any need for Syria to help Hamas; and if there is a consensus on Lebanon, there is no need to support Hezbollah. And finally, if the United States decides to support the negotiations with Israel, then U.S. concerns with Syria's performance will be addressed.
"In Syria, we raised our concerns about the people imprisoned for signing the Damascus Declaration, and President Bashar al-Assad said that there were only seven still being held from the original 90 detained. He said that if they sought clemency, they would receive it. We also asked him about Guy Hever, the young Israeli soldier who has been missing since August 1997, and he said they had no evidence of his whereabouts. We asked about Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who were captured by Hezbollah at the beginning of the war. The Syrian government has no information on them.
Conclusion
"In conclusion, we agree with President Abbas' recent statement that the final status negotiations are moving so slowly, with so few obvious results, that it is very unlikely negotiations will be completed by the deadline at the end of the year. This conclusion is widely shared, and may prove to be tragic. The combination of little or no progress on final status issues and a regression on the roadmap issues – settlements, checkpoints, etc. – and the closure of Gaza – all this means that the frustration level among Palestinians may be reaching the boiling point.
"Therefore, it is essential that we find an alternative and that includes a ceasefire, exchange of prisoners, negotiations between Israel and Syria and some rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas.
"No important achievement has ever occurred in the Middle East without taking a risk. I hope the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the U.S. government are prepared to take risks for peace. The transformation of Israel in sixty years has been wonderful to behold. The next miracle for which we should all pray is the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state that will live in peace with Israel and will cooperate with all their neighbors for the future of the region and its children. The Holy Land is a place of miracles. It is time for the miracle of peace."
After answering a number of questions in the public forum, I had a number of interviews in-cluding CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Fox, Reuters, AP, AFP, Chicago Tribune, ABC, NPR, two Israeli TV channels, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and LA Times. Meetings with the leader of Arab Israelis, Ahmed Tibi, Yossi Beilin, and former Prime Minister Ben Amin concluded a very busy day. Still not having a private plane, we departed Israel about midnight on a Delta flight to Atlanta. As I had predicted to Bob Pastor and Steve Solarz, the entire trip was exciting, challenging, adventurous, adequately productive – and fun!
Copyright ©2006 The Carter Center. All Rights Reserved. cartercenter.org
_______________________________________________
Cowboys and Iranians
by Mohammad Alireza / April 28th, 2008
It is a very sad day in Iranian history when an American presidential candidate needs to threaten to “obliterate” Iran so as to be elected.
The question that every Iranian needs to ask: “Why has Hillary suddenly transformed into a testes-endowed nuclear warmonger?”
Is it the fact that the largest economy of the world, which is driven by the military industrial complex and uses 25% of the planets oil, has concluded that only Iran stands in its way to controlling 60% of the globe’s known petrochemical reserves?
Or, is it because it is only Iran that stands in the way …
(Full article …)
http://amconmag.com/2008/2008_04_21/article1.html
April 21, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Surging to Defeat
Petraeus’s strategy only postponed the inevitable.
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few warriors. We face a large and growing gap between our military commitments and our military capabilities. Something has to give.
Although violence in Iraq has decreased over the past year, attacks on coalition and Iraqi security forces continue to occur at an average rate of 500 per week. This is clearly unacceptable. The likelihood that further U.S. efforts will reduce violence to an acceptable level—however one might define that term—appears remote.
Meanwhile, our military capacity, especially our ability to keep substantial numbers of boots on the ground, is eroding. If the surge is working as some claim, then why not sustain it? Indeed, why not reinforce that success by sending another 30 or 60 or 90,000 reinforcements?
The answer to that question is self-evident: because the necessary troops don’t exist. The cupboard is bare.
Furthermore, recent improvements in security are highly contingent. The Shi’ite militias, Sunni insurgents, and tribal leaders who have agreed to refrain from violence in return for arms, money, and other concessions have by no means bought into the American vision for the future of Iraq. Their interests do not coincide with our own, and we should not delude ourselves by pretending otherwise.
It is as if, in an effort to bring harmony to a fractious, dysfunctional family, we have forged marriages of convenience with as many of that family’s members as possible. Our disparate partners will abide by their vows only so long as they find them convenient.
Unfortunately, partial success in reducing the level of violence has not translated into any substantial political gains. Recall that the purpose of the surge was not to win the war in a military sense. Gen. David Petraeus never promised victory. He and any number of other senior officers have assessed the war as militarily unwinnable. On this point, the architects of the surge were quite clear: the object of the exercise was not to impose our will on the enemy but to facilitate political reconciliation among Iraqis.
A year later, signs of genuine reconciliation are few. In an interview with the Washington Post less than a month ago, General Petraeus said that “no one” in the U.S. government “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.” While it may be nice that the Kurds have begun to display the Iraqi flag alongside their own, to depict such grudging concessions as evidence of an emerging national identity is surely to grasp at straws.
So although the level of violence has subsided somewhat, the war remains essentially stalemated. Iraq today qualifies only nominally as a sovereign nation-state. It has become a dependency of the United States, unable to manage its own affairs or to provide for the well-being of its own people. As recent events in Basra have affirmed, the Iraqi army, a black hole into which the Pentagon has poured some $22 billion in aid and assistance, still cannot hold its own against armed militias.
The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.
What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.
Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.
The abject failure of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine has robbed the Iraq War of any strategic rationale. The war continues in large part because of our refusal to acknowledge and confront this loss of strategic purpose.
The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Even the wisest statecraft cannot create social tissue. It can cut, sew, and redesign social fabric to a limited degree. But the social fabric upon which it works must be ‘given’.”
In Iraq, to the extent that any meaningful social fabric has ever existed, events have now shredded it beyond repair. Persisting in our efforts to stitch Iraq back together will exhaust our Army, divert attention from other urgent problems at home and abroad, and squander untold billions, most of which we are borrowing from foreign countries.
To close the gap between too much war and too few warriors, we must reduce our commitments. That means ending the U.S. combat role in Iraq. It means exerting ourselves, primarily through diplomatic means, to limit the adverse consequences caused by our ill-advised crusade in Iraq. It also means devising a new strategy to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, to replace the failed strategy of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine.
This reformulation of strategy should begin with an explicit abrogation of preventive war. It should include a candid recognition that invading and occupying an Islamic nation in the hope of transforming it qualifies as a fantasy.
There are people of good will who will disagree with this assessment. They will insist that we have no choice but to persevere in Iraq—although to say that the world’s sole superpower has “no choice” in the matter suggests a remarkable failure of imagination. They will insist further that restoring the social fabric of Iraq—engineering the elusive political reconciliation that will stabilize the country—remains an imperative. Such counsel seems certain to exacerbate the problem of having too much war and too few warriors. War is the realm of uncertainty, however. There’s always some chance of catching a lucky break. Perhaps next year the Iraqis will get their act together and settle their internal differences. Perhaps next year Congress will balance the federal budget. Such developments are always possible. They are also highly unlikely.
When it comes to Iraq, a far more likely prospect is that if the United States insists on continuing its war there, it will get what it wants: the war will continue indefinitely. According to General Petraeus, a counterinsurgency is typically a 10 to 12-year proposition. Given that assessment, and with the “surge” now giving way to a “pause,” U.S. combat operations in Iraq could easily drag on for another five or 10 years. A large-scale U. S. military presence might be required for two or three decades.
In that event, a conflict that already ranks as the second longest in our history will claim the title of longest. Already our second most expensive war, it will become the costliest of all. On one point at least, Donald Rumsfeld will be able to claim vindication: Iraq will indeed have become a “long slog.”
For the United States to pursue this course would qualify as an epic misjudgment. Yet if our political leaders insist on the necessity of fighting this open-ended war, then they owe it to those who have already borne five years of combat to provide some relief.
Bluntly, if the country’s leaders in Washington are unable or unwilling to reduce the number of wars in which U.S. forces are engaged, then surely they ought to increase the number of warriors available to fight them.
Today, in a nation that according to President Bush is “at war,” approximately one half of 1 percent of the population is in uniform. The present course, which involves soldiers going back for their third and fourth combat tours while the rest of the country heads to the mall, will break the Army before it produces policy success. Worse, our present strategy—in which a few give their all while most give nothing—is morally indefensible.
If the war in Iraq is as important as some claim, then sustaining that war merits a commitment on the part of the American people, both to fight the war and to pay for it. If neither the American people nor their political leaders are willing to make such a commitment, then the war clearly does not qualify as genuinely important. Our loudly proclaimed determination to “support the troops” rings hollow.
The choice is one that we can no longer afford to dodge: it’s either less war or more warriors.
_______________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August. This essay is adapted from testimony delivered before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
April 21, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
Surging to Defeat
Petraeus’s strategy only postponed the inevitable.
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few warriors. We face a large and growing gap between our military commitments and our military capabilities. Something has to give.
Although violence in Iraq has decreased over the past year, attacks on coalition and Iraqi security forces continue to occur at an average rate of 500 per week. This is clearly unacceptable. The likelihood that further U.S. efforts will reduce violence to an acceptable level—however one might define that term—appears remote.
Meanwhile, our military capacity, especially our ability to keep substantial numbers of boots on the ground, is eroding. If the surge is working as some claim, then why not sustain it? Indeed, why not reinforce that success by sending another 30 or 60 or 90,000 reinforcements?
The answer to that question is self-evident: because the necessary troops don’t exist. The cupboard is bare.
Furthermore, recent improvements in security are highly contingent. The Shi’ite militias, Sunni insurgents, and tribal leaders who have agreed to refrain from violence in return for arms, money, and other concessions have by no means bought into the American vision for the future of Iraq. Their interests do not coincide with our own, and we should not delude ourselves by pretending otherwise.
It is as if, in an effort to bring harmony to a fractious, dysfunctional family, we have forged marriages of convenience with as many of that family’s members as possible. Our disparate partners will abide by their vows only so long as they find them convenient.
Unfortunately, partial success in reducing the level of violence has not translated into any substantial political gains. Recall that the purpose of the surge was not to win the war in a military sense. Gen. David Petraeus never promised victory. He and any number of other senior officers have assessed the war as militarily unwinnable. On this point, the architects of the surge were quite clear: the object of the exercise was not to impose our will on the enemy but to facilitate political reconciliation among Iraqis.
A year later, signs of genuine reconciliation are few. In an interview with the Washington Post less than a month ago, General Petraeus said that “no one” in the U.S. government “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.” While it may be nice that the Kurds have begun to display the Iraqi flag alongside their own, to depict such grudging concessions as evidence of an emerging national identity is surely to grasp at straws.
So although the level of violence has subsided somewhat, the war remains essentially stalemated. Iraq today qualifies only nominally as a sovereign nation-state. It has become a dependency of the United States, unable to manage its own affairs or to provide for the well-being of its own people. As recent events in Basra have affirmed, the Iraqi army, a black hole into which the Pentagon has poured some $22 billion in aid and assistance, still cannot hold its own against armed militias.
The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.
What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war.
Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the United States.
Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats swiftly, decisively, and economically—Saddam Hussein’s removal providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our presence in the Middle East—the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S. power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine hasn’t worked. Saddam is long gone, but we’re stuck. Rather than delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.
The abject failure of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine has robbed the Iraq War of any strategic rationale. The war continues in large part because of our refusal to acknowledge and confront this loss of strategic purpose.
The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Even the wisest statecraft cannot create social tissue. It can cut, sew, and redesign social fabric to a limited degree. But the social fabric upon which it works must be ‘given’.”
In Iraq, to the extent that any meaningful social fabric has ever existed, events have now shredded it beyond repair. Persisting in our efforts to stitch Iraq back together will exhaust our Army, divert attention from other urgent problems at home and abroad, and squander untold billions, most of which we are borrowing from foreign countries.
To close the gap between too much war and too few warriors, we must reduce our commitments. That means ending the U.S. combat role in Iraq. It means exerting ourselves, primarily through diplomatic means, to limit the adverse consequences caused by our ill-advised crusade in Iraq. It also means devising a new strategy to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, to replace the failed strategy of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine.
This reformulation of strategy should begin with an explicit abrogation of preventive war. It should include a candid recognition that invading and occupying an Islamic nation in the hope of transforming it qualifies as a fantasy.
There are people of good will who will disagree with this assessment. They will insist that we have no choice but to persevere in Iraq—although to say that the world’s sole superpower has “no choice” in the matter suggests a remarkable failure of imagination. They will insist further that restoring the social fabric of Iraq—engineering the elusive political reconciliation that will stabilize the country—remains an imperative. Such counsel seems certain to exacerbate the problem of having too much war and too few warriors. War is the realm of uncertainty, however. There’s always some chance of catching a lucky break. Perhaps next year the Iraqis will get their act together and settle their internal differences. Perhaps next year Congress will balance the federal budget. Such developments are always possible. They are also highly unlikely.
When it comes to Iraq, a far more likely prospect is that if the United States insists on continuing its war there, it will get what it wants: the war will continue indefinitely. According to General Petraeus, a counterinsurgency is typically a 10 to 12-year proposition. Given that assessment, and with the “surge” now giving way to a “pause,” U.S. combat operations in Iraq could easily drag on for another five or 10 years. A large-scale U. S. military presence might be required for two or three decades.
In that event, a conflict that already ranks as the second longest in our history will claim the title of longest. Already our second most expensive war, it will become the costliest of all. On one point at least, Donald Rumsfeld will be able to claim vindication: Iraq will indeed have become a “long slog.”
For the United States to pursue this course would qualify as an epic misjudgment. Yet if our political leaders insist on the necessity of fighting this open-ended war, then they owe it to those who have already borne five years of combat to provide some relief.
Bluntly, if the country’s leaders in Washington are unable or unwilling to reduce the number of wars in which U.S. forces are engaged, then surely they ought to increase the number of warriors available to fight them.
Today, in a nation that according to President Bush is “at war,” approximately one half of 1 percent of the population is in uniform. The present course, which involves soldiers going back for their third and fourth combat tours while the rest of the country heads to the mall, will break the Army before it produces policy success. Worse, our present strategy—in which a few give their all while most give nothing—is morally indefensible.
If the war in Iraq is as important as some claim, then sustaining that war merits a commitment on the part of the American people, both to fight the war and to pay for it. If neither the American people nor their political leaders are willing to make such a commitment, then the war clearly does not qualify as genuinely important. Our loudly proclaimed determination to “support the troops” rings hollow.
The choice is one that we can no longer afford to dodge: it’s either less war or more warriors.
_______________________________
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August. This essay is adapted from testimony delivered before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
THE BEAR'S LAIR
Oil in 2012: $200 or $50?
The US broad money supply by one measure has increased at an annual rate above 30% for most of this year. Maintained, that could triple prices within four years and oil would look moderate at US$200 a barrel, with gold hitting $2,000. Good sense by the US Fed and politicians might save the day, or a full-scale revolt by bond dealers. - Martin Hutchinson (Apr 29, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD30Dj02.html
Oil in 2012: $200 or $50?
The US broad money supply by one measure has increased at an annual rate above 30% for most of this year. Maintained, that could triple prices within four years and oil would look moderate at US$200 a barrel, with gold hitting $2,000. Good sense by the US Fed and politicians might save the day, or a full-scale revolt by bond dealers. - Martin Hutchinson (Apr 29, '08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD30Dj02.html
The Israeli Model Surges Toward Iraq
The New Walls of Baghdad
By STEVE NIVA
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.
Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.
While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.
While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:
Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.
The Israeli Laboratory
The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.
Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.
This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.
The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Black-hawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state of the art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay.''
The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.
But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers — again, in secret — when full-field operations begin.
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis — to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."
According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are — we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style
The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.
As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.
But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.
First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy — what he termed "disengagement" — as a new way to "shift the narrative."
This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.
Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.
Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.
Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.
Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.
Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.
The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq
Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation.
One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.
Militarily, the French army did not lose — they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.
Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.
Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, where this piece originally appeared . He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings.
http://www.counterpunch.org/niva04282008.html
The New Walls of Baghdad
By STEVE NIVA
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.
Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveal that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.
While the coffee klatches between Marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.
While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:
Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.
The Israeli Laboratory
The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.
Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.
This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.
The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Black-hawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state of the art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay.''
The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.
But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers — again, in secret — when full-field operations begin.
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis — to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."
According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are — we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style
The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.
As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.
But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.
First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy — what he termed "disengagement" — as a new way to "shift the narrative."
This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.
Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.
Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.
Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.
Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.
Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.
The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq
Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation.
One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.
Militarily, the French army did not lose — they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.
Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.
Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, where this piece originally appeared . He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings.
http://www.counterpunch.org/niva04282008.html
Consider the Consequences of Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Power Plants, and Pray
- by Floyd Rudmin - 2008-04-29
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=8839
- by Floyd Rudmin - 2008-04-29
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=8839
War Propaganda: Disneyland goes to war-torn Iraq- by Michel Chossudovsky - 2008-04-28http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=8837
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/...f_mirrors/1107/
Commentary: Wilderness of mirrors
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- "Every lie contains a truth and every truth contains a lie" is a safe rule of thumb when Shakespeare's powers of observation are applied to the Middle East. With each shake of the kaleidoscope, the configuration of the key players becomes a wilderness of mirrors. Add to the mix a whispering campaign in which rumors and innuendo are spread to conceal ulterior motives, and sorting fact from fancy is frequently mission impossible. Good disinformation contains a kernel of truth spun with a tissue of lies. Even if you understand the game, there is still no Rosetta Stone that can decipher the Middle East's geopolitical hieroglyphics.
Some recent samples:
-- Brokered by Turkey, a Syrian-Israeli deal is in the works. Israel will abandon the Golan Heights and Syria will ditch its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. If your marker's on this square, you're already out of the game. Israelis are not about to become fish in a barrel below the Golan Heights, even if demilitarized. The Heights command Israel's most densely populated regions.
-- A "viable and contiguous" Palestinian state becomes reality before President Bush leaves office Jan. 21, 2009. You lose again. The Israelis continue to build illegal settlements in the West Bank to make sure a Palestinian state is unworkable and discontinuous. There is no peace with Hamas as it spreads its underground influence from Gaza to the West Bank. Conversely, there is no peace without Hamas. Commented Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper: "The dynamic of deception is continuing. Deception of the Americans, deception of the voters for parties that etched peace on their standard, deception of the Palestinians and above all self-deception. Our top leaders have joined together on a course that has no objective."
-- Arab nations don't much care about the Palestinians. Bold move on the board. The $7 billion pledged to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank by the oil-rich Gulf states has yet to materialize. With $3 billion cash, the "Gulfies" could have launched Gaza on its way to becoming the next Dubai on the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Israel's short-to-medium-range interest is to keep fanning the embers of an incipient civil war between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.
-- Israel plans to do something about what most Israelis believe is an existential threat: an Iranian nuclear weapon in the nosecone of an intermediate-range ballistic missile. You're still in the game. A "60 Minutes" segment reported by Bob Simon last Sunday was a rare and heavily censored look inside the Israeli air force, which owns the airspace over the Middle East, or rather shares it with the United States. Gen. Eliezer Shkedy, the IAF chief, categorized Iran as "a very serious threat to Israel but more than this to the whole world. They are talking about wiping us from the Earth." The CBS piece left little doubt the IAF could duplicate the June 1981 bombing of Osirak, Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor, just before it went critical. The Israeli general's Mona Lisa smile left little doubt the IAF, no longer concerned with aerial dogfights, had been honing its long-range bombing skills. They also have enough air-to-air refueling capacity for a flying pit stop over Iraq.
-- President Bush will not leave office with Iran's nuclear bomb-making capacity intact. Still in the game here, too. Bush, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen and new Central Command Gen. David Petraeus, whose area of responsibility includes 25 nations that stretch from Egypt to Pakistan, including two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, take turns accusing Iran's Al Quds Revolutionary Guard Special Forces of smuggling weapons and explosive devices into Iraq that are killing U.S. soldiers. New pictures of Iran's uranium enrichment plant show the mullahs' defense minister in the background -- a geopolitical thumbing of the nose. U.S. Defense Secretary Bob Gates said, "What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and women inside Iraq." The casus belli is now in place. Also in place off the Iranian coastline are two U.S. aircraft carriers. Mullen warned Iran not to assume the U.S. military can't strike. Vice President Dick Cheney, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and prominent neocons like former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Bill Kristol and Michael Ledeen use different formulations to say there is only one thing worse than bombing Iran -- and that's Iran with a nuclear bomb. The rationale for doing it before Bush retires to his Texas ranch in January is that a Democratic president would most probably opt for learning to live with Iran's nuclear weapon. And if McCain becomes president, he may be hobbled by two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress.
-- The United States will be involved in Iraq militarily for several more years, probably the entire length of the next administration. Good bet. No sooner than Petraeus' surge was successfully completed than the insurgents reappeared with rocket and mortar barrages against the green zone where the largest U.S. Embassy in the world is now open for business. Four U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad in one day this week. If a Democratic president were to order a total pullout over 18 months, there is little doubt among Arab and European intelligence personnel based in Iraq that civil war would break out and democracy would not long survive.
-- Pakistan's new democratic coalition government will negotiate with the Taliban to cease and desist using their privileged sanctuaries in the seven tribal areas that abut the Afghan border to attack U.S., NATO and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Faulty assumption. The new team is bending over backward to distance itself from the United States and negotiate live-and-let-live peace pacts with the likes of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban chieftain who controls both South and North Waziristan.
-- All restraints removed, the Pakistan-based Taliban is now free to focus on Afghanistan. Safe bet. This week Taliban insurgents opened fire on an Afghan military parade in downtown Kabul. Mortars and automatic fire killed six and wounded seven in the reviewing stand. Army and police officers fled the scene. Afghan state television shut down its coverage as President Hamid Karzai escaped his fourth assassination attempt unscathed.
-- Rashid Shah, another Taliban chief based in Waziristan, told a Swiss journalist, "It is impossible to stop us." Another safe assumption.
© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
_______________________________________________
Commentary: Wilderness of mirrors
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- "Every lie contains a truth and every truth contains a lie" is a safe rule of thumb when Shakespeare's powers of observation are applied to the Middle East. With each shake of the kaleidoscope, the configuration of the key players becomes a wilderness of mirrors. Add to the mix a whispering campaign in which rumors and innuendo are spread to conceal ulterior motives, and sorting fact from fancy is frequently mission impossible. Good disinformation contains a kernel of truth spun with a tissue of lies. Even if you understand the game, there is still no Rosetta Stone that can decipher the Middle East's geopolitical hieroglyphics.
Some recent samples:
-- Brokered by Turkey, a Syrian-Israeli deal is in the works. Israel will abandon the Golan Heights and Syria will ditch its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. If your marker's on this square, you're already out of the game. Israelis are not about to become fish in a barrel below the Golan Heights, even if demilitarized. The Heights command Israel's most densely populated regions.
-- A "viable and contiguous" Palestinian state becomes reality before President Bush leaves office Jan. 21, 2009. You lose again. The Israelis continue to build illegal settlements in the West Bank to make sure a Palestinian state is unworkable and discontinuous. There is no peace with Hamas as it spreads its underground influence from Gaza to the West Bank. Conversely, there is no peace without Hamas. Commented Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper: "The dynamic of deception is continuing. Deception of the Americans, deception of the voters for parties that etched peace on their standard, deception of the Palestinians and above all self-deception. Our top leaders have joined together on a course that has no objective."
-- Arab nations don't much care about the Palestinians. Bold move on the board. The $7 billion pledged to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank by the oil-rich Gulf states has yet to materialize. With $3 billion cash, the "Gulfies" could have launched Gaza on its way to becoming the next Dubai on the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Israel's short-to-medium-range interest is to keep fanning the embers of an incipient civil war between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.
-- Israel plans to do something about what most Israelis believe is an existential threat: an Iranian nuclear weapon in the nosecone of an intermediate-range ballistic missile. You're still in the game. A "60 Minutes" segment reported by Bob Simon last Sunday was a rare and heavily censored look inside the Israeli air force, which owns the airspace over the Middle East, or rather shares it with the United States. Gen. Eliezer Shkedy, the IAF chief, categorized Iran as "a very serious threat to Israel but more than this to the whole world. They are talking about wiping us from the Earth." The CBS piece left little doubt the IAF could duplicate the June 1981 bombing of Osirak, Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor, just before it went critical. The Israeli general's Mona Lisa smile left little doubt the IAF, no longer concerned with aerial dogfights, had been honing its long-range bombing skills. They also have enough air-to-air refueling capacity for a flying pit stop over Iraq.
-- President Bush will not leave office with Iran's nuclear bomb-making capacity intact. Still in the game here, too. Bush, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen and new Central Command Gen. David Petraeus, whose area of responsibility includes 25 nations that stretch from Egypt to Pakistan, including two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, take turns accusing Iran's Al Quds Revolutionary Guard Special Forces of smuggling weapons and explosive devices into Iraq that are killing U.S. soldiers. New pictures of Iran's uranium enrichment plant show the mullahs' defense minister in the background -- a geopolitical thumbing of the nose. U.S. Defense Secretary Bob Gates said, "What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and women inside Iraq." The casus belli is now in place. Also in place off the Iranian coastline are two U.S. aircraft carriers. Mullen warned Iran not to assume the U.S. military can't strike. Vice President Dick Cheney, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and prominent neocons like former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Bill Kristol and Michael Ledeen use different formulations to say there is only one thing worse than bombing Iran -- and that's Iran with a nuclear bomb. The rationale for doing it before Bush retires to his Texas ranch in January is that a Democratic president would most probably opt for learning to live with Iran's nuclear weapon. And if McCain becomes president, he may be hobbled by two Democrat-controlled houses of Congress.
-- The United States will be involved in Iraq militarily for several more years, probably the entire length of the next administration. Good bet. No sooner than Petraeus' surge was successfully completed than the insurgents reappeared with rocket and mortar barrages against the green zone where the largest U.S. Embassy in the world is now open for business. Four U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad in one day this week. If a Democratic president were to order a total pullout over 18 months, there is little doubt among Arab and European intelligence personnel based in Iraq that civil war would break out and democracy would not long survive.
-- Pakistan's new democratic coalition government will negotiate with the Taliban to cease and desist using their privileged sanctuaries in the seven tribal areas that abut the Afghan border to attack U.S., NATO and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Faulty assumption. The new team is bending over backward to distance itself from the United States and negotiate live-and-let-live peace pacts with the likes of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban chieftain who controls both South and North Waziristan.
-- All restraints removed, the Pakistan-based Taliban is now free to focus on Afghanistan. Safe bet. This week Taliban insurgents opened fire on an Afghan military parade in downtown Kabul. Mortars and automatic fire killed six and wounded seven in the reviewing stand. Army and police officers fled the scene. Afghan state television shut down its coverage as President Hamid Karzai escaped his fourth assassination attempt unscathed.
-- Rashid Shah, another Taliban chief based in Waziristan, told a Swiss journalist, "It is impossible to stop us." Another safe assumption.
© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
_______________________________________________
NEWSWEEK
4/29/08
'Our Dreams Are Dead'
Violence in Gaza gets the headlines. But the slow suffocation of the West Bank should get more attention too, writes a Middle East traveler.
Linda Bird Francke
The walls stand 30 feet high, huge slabs of gray cement, snaking their way through the West Bank for almost 500 miles. They block roads, bisect villages, cut off kids from their schools, farmers from their fields, families from relatives. "Welcome to the Ghetto, Walls of Tears" reads one of the many graffiti. "The Dumb Wall Is Screaming," "Make Love, Not Walls," read others. And my favorite, in huge orange letters on the road to Ramallah: "Control*Alt*Delete." Around Bethlehem the walls have become a protest art gallery—an oversize white donkey with tears running down its cheeks, a dove wearing a flak vest with a bull's-eye painted on its breast, a young girl frisking a soldier. The Israelis call them separation walls. The Palestinians call them apartheid walls. They are a nightmare.
To spend a week among the Palestinians in the West Bank, as I recently did, is grounds for antidepressants. Not half enough has been written about what is going on there. The violence in Gaza gets almost daily press—more border attacks and rockets launched into Israel, a new retaliatory body count (including, just this week, a mother and four young children killed during an Israeli operation in northern Gaza)—but the slow suffocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in every village in the West Bank, gets scant attention. "Our dreams are dead," says Ali Asamil Abkhrka, a bead vendor outside a Bethlehem restaurant. "There can never be peace with the Israelis. Never." A Palestinian policeman in the Church of the Nativity echoes him: "The wall closes the earth, closes the life. Everything is going backward."
I was in Jerusalem with friends to visit our old friend Karim Nashashibi. Karim, a Palestinian, recently retired from the International Monetary Fund in Washington and is now financial adviser to Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Karim could have had any number of high-paying jobs in the United States but felt an obligation to help Fayyad, his friend and predecessor at the IMF, work toward peace with the Israelis. It seems a thankless job to me, but Karim's distinguished family's roots in Jerusalem stretch back five centuries, and his grandfather was mayor in the 1920s. Still, he's up against it.
Consider the Israeli travel restrictions. No Palestinian living in the West Bank is allowed to enter Jerusalem without written permission from the Israeli government. Islah Jad lives in Ramallah and is an associate professor in gender studies at Birzeit University. When her sisters visited her recently from Egypt, they wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Dr. Jad went to a nearby Israeli settlement to apply for a permit. "Come back tomorrow," they said. She went back. "It's not ready. Come back tomorrow," she was told. The third time she came home without a permission slip, she gave up. "Why waste a week for a permit for a few hours," she told me. "It's humiliating." Her sisters went to Jerusalem without her.
The license plate is key. Palestinians living outside Jerusalem in Ramallah or Bethlehem or anywhere in the West Bank have green and white license plates and are forbidden to drive on the smooth, wide "settler" roads that link the necklace of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians who live in Jerusalem have yellow license plates and are allowed on the roads, but such an apparent privilege is muted at the checkpoints, some 500 of them. The blue and white ID cards, which all Israelis and Palestinians carry, identify the bearer's religion and ethnicity. The Israelis are waved through. The Palestinians are pulled aside. "As soon as they see Arabic on the ID card they say, 'Security'," says Najwa, a lovely young Palestinian woman who works in a Jerusalem hotel. "We have to pull over, and they go through the luggage, the glove compartment, the papers of everybody in the car. It can take hours to get through. I have friends in Ramallah whom I haven't seen in years. The hassle is just too great."
The checkpoints have personalities of their own. The direct road from Jerusalem to Ramallah has been blocked by the wall, funneling the traffic through twisty, rutted roads to the Qalandya checkpoint. Getting through the checkpoint to enter the Palestinian city of Ramallah is easy. Getting back is not. Unless they have yellow plates, Palestinians with permission to travel to Jerusalem have to leave their cars on the Palestinian side, walk through a series of security turnstiles on foot, show their papers to the Israeli soldier on duty and then, if cleared, continue their journeys in so-called service cars, beat-up yellow vans jammed to overflowing. The checkpoint on the direct road to Bethlehem is closed to Palestinians altogether.
Despair is the word I hear most often from West Bank Palestinians, 58 percent of whom have fallen below the poverty line. "I can't get work from the Israeli side because I am haram [forbidden], and the Palestinians can't even afford to pay me bus fare," says an architect reduced to working in a bookstore. The night offers particular terrors. Jad, who works late, recognizes the sounds of frequent Israeli raids, "explosions and hard beats on doors and screams," she says.
There are many sympathetic Israeli groups that document the treatment of the Palestinian people. Yesh Din, for example, monitors the trials of West Bank Palestinians in military courts and recently released a scathing report: 99 percent of defendants in 2006 were found guilty, many after hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Another group, Machsom Watch, which is made up of accomplished Israeli women, videotapes the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints. Their latest complaint, filed while I was there, involved 46 Palestinians looking for work being held for 16 hours at a checkpoint. The Palestinians were allowed no food or toilet facilities and were forced to stand for hours on end. "When they sit down they make trouble," the report quoted a member of the IDF saying. At some point during their detention, the tires of their vans were punctured and some of their cars were vandalized.
Prime Minister Fayyad wears heavily the burdens on his people. He looks tired when we meet in his modest office in Ramallah, but he perks up when he tells me about his children. His oldest son is at his American alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, where Fayyad earned his doctorate in economics. His daughter has just received early admission to MIT; his youngest is still in grade school in Jerusalem. Like my friend Karim, Salam Fayyad accepted his post, first as finance minister and then as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, out of a sense of duty. "It was natural and instinctive," he says. "I thought it was important to be in a position to contribute."
Fayyad lays out clearly the Palestinian position. "The objective of this enterprise is to end the occupation and have an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state emerge on the land that was occupied in 1967," he says. "For us Palestinians to get a chance to live as free people in a state of our own, in peace and harmony with all of our neighbors, including Israel." That, of course, is what everyone wants. But how to get there?
Though he doesn't criticize the Israeli government, Fayyad methodically lists the impediments to the peace process. Foremost is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in direct contravention of every peace initiative since 1967, including the current "road map" to peace laid out by the Quartet—the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia—in 2002. "Not one more brick!" Fayyad says emphatically. "It's a road map obligation. It means not one more block, no exceptions, no nothing. And that's not what is happening." In the five-week period following the re-ignition of the peace process in Annapolis in the fall of 2007, he points out, the Israelis added 747 new units to the settlements, which in fact are cities, commanding the tops of hills the length of the West Bank. "If this keeps on happening, clearly the viability of the solution keeps on eroding," he says. "This is logical."
Israel's "security behavior" in the occupied territories is also a deterrent. Fayyad is proud that the Palestinian Authority police force has been effective in bringing about "conditions of law and order after years of complete lawlessness and chaos. It is one of the things we have focused on." But the ongoing raids by the Israeli Army into urban areas "where we have our own troops," he says, undermines the PA's authority and credibility. "It's happening in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, everywhere," he says. "This has to change." So, he says, do the travel restrictions on Palestinians. "We cannot go on like this," he says. "You cannot have economic development under conditions of lack of mobility. The only way you can keep an economy like this afloat is by continuing to inject official assistance into the system, and that's not our vision for Palestine. We do not want to be a beggar nation."
On the Palestinian side, a major setback to statehood, Fayyad readily admits, are the militias. "To tell you the truth," he says, "were it not for the chaos of weapons for the militias roaming around, with everyone doing what they want wherever they want to do it, the political differences would not have translated into the bloodshed we experience." Weapons should be the "sure purview" of the state, he says, and the "key goal" of his government is to try to "import this concept."
Our interview is interrupted by the arrival of Jimmy Carter and his entourage. "He's early," says Fayyad, looking at his watch. Rosalynn Carter, whose memoir I worked on, is startled to see me. "What on earth are you doing here?" she asks as we hug. Fayyad's meeting with Carter is going to last at least an hour, Carter's senior aide says to me apologetically. The meeting with the Palestinian prime minister has become all-important because Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is visiting Washington and the Israeli government has stonewalled Carter because of his intention to meet with the head of Hamas in Syria.
I ask Fayyad when we resume if he is in touch with Hamas in Gaza. "No," he says. "I have no official or unofficial contact with them. However, I talk to the people in Gaza all the time. Here we are. You see? You just made a mistake, unwittingly of course, of using the word 'Hamas' and 'Gaza' interchangeably. That's not the reality. Hamas is in control of Gaza, there's no question about that, but not every Palestinian man, woman and child living and suffering in Gaza is Hamas or under Hamas obligation. This is an odd situation which I hope and pray will not be anything but transitional and will soon be a part of our past."
What about the walls, I ask him, and the checkpoints and the permits and the mood of despair I'd found in the West Bank? "I can definitely tell you it is justified," he says. Is he optimistic that things will change for the better? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm not discouraged," he finally says. "There's a big difference. I'm convinced we're going to get there."
He smiles and tells me a story that he says will illustrate something about his world view. Last week he was in a little village of 300 residents to inaugurate a kindergarten. The minute he stepped out of the car someone stuck a microphone in his face and said, "What about the walls?" "I said, 'Look at all the olive trees around you. The youngest tree is older than the wall.' And the mere fact that this event was about children and the future was the most positive of ironies. [It] was the most positive day of my life as prime minister—notwithstanding the miserable context in which all this is taking place."
4/29/08
'Our Dreams Are Dead'
Violence in Gaza gets the headlines. But the slow suffocation of the West Bank should get more attention too, writes a Middle East traveler.
Linda Bird Francke
The walls stand 30 feet high, huge slabs of gray cement, snaking their way through the West Bank for almost 500 miles. They block roads, bisect villages, cut off kids from their schools, farmers from their fields, families from relatives. "Welcome to the Ghetto, Walls of Tears" reads one of the many graffiti. "The Dumb Wall Is Screaming," "Make Love, Not Walls," read others. And my favorite, in huge orange letters on the road to Ramallah: "Control*Alt*Delete." Around Bethlehem the walls have become a protest art gallery—an oversize white donkey with tears running down its cheeks, a dove wearing a flak vest with a bull's-eye painted on its breast, a young girl frisking a soldier. The Israelis call them separation walls. The Palestinians call them apartheid walls. They are a nightmare.
To spend a week among the Palestinians in the West Bank, as I recently did, is grounds for antidepressants. Not half enough has been written about what is going on there. The violence in Gaza gets almost daily press—more border attacks and rockets launched into Israel, a new retaliatory body count (including, just this week, a mother and four young children killed during an Israeli operation in northern Gaza)—but the slow suffocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in every village in the West Bank, gets scant attention. "Our dreams are dead," says Ali Asamil Abkhrka, a bead vendor outside a Bethlehem restaurant. "There can never be peace with the Israelis. Never." A Palestinian policeman in the Church of the Nativity echoes him: "The wall closes the earth, closes the life. Everything is going backward."
I was in Jerusalem with friends to visit our old friend Karim Nashashibi. Karim, a Palestinian, recently retired from the International Monetary Fund in Washington and is now financial adviser to Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Karim could have had any number of high-paying jobs in the United States but felt an obligation to help Fayyad, his friend and predecessor at the IMF, work toward peace with the Israelis. It seems a thankless job to me, but Karim's distinguished family's roots in Jerusalem stretch back five centuries, and his grandfather was mayor in the 1920s. Still, he's up against it.
Consider the Israeli travel restrictions. No Palestinian living in the West Bank is allowed to enter Jerusalem without written permission from the Israeli government. Islah Jad lives in Ramallah and is an associate professor in gender studies at Birzeit University. When her sisters visited her recently from Egypt, they wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Dr. Jad went to a nearby Israeli settlement to apply for a permit. "Come back tomorrow," they said. She went back. "It's not ready. Come back tomorrow," she was told. The third time she came home without a permission slip, she gave up. "Why waste a week for a permit for a few hours," she told me. "It's humiliating." Her sisters went to Jerusalem without her.
The license plate is key. Palestinians living outside Jerusalem in Ramallah or Bethlehem or anywhere in the West Bank have green and white license plates and are forbidden to drive on the smooth, wide "settler" roads that link the necklace of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians who live in Jerusalem have yellow license plates and are allowed on the roads, but such an apparent privilege is muted at the checkpoints, some 500 of them. The blue and white ID cards, which all Israelis and Palestinians carry, identify the bearer's religion and ethnicity. The Israelis are waved through. The Palestinians are pulled aside. "As soon as they see Arabic on the ID card they say, 'Security'," says Najwa, a lovely young Palestinian woman who works in a Jerusalem hotel. "We have to pull over, and they go through the luggage, the glove compartment, the papers of everybody in the car. It can take hours to get through. I have friends in Ramallah whom I haven't seen in years. The hassle is just too great."
The checkpoints have personalities of their own. The direct road from Jerusalem to Ramallah has been blocked by the wall, funneling the traffic through twisty, rutted roads to the Qalandya checkpoint. Getting through the checkpoint to enter the Palestinian city of Ramallah is easy. Getting back is not. Unless they have yellow plates, Palestinians with permission to travel to Jerusalem have to leave their cars on the Palestinian side, walk through a series of security turnstiles on foot, show their papers to the Israeli soldier on duty and then, if cleared, continue their journeys in so-called service cars, beat-up yellow vans jammed to overflowing. The checkpoint on the direct road to Bethlehem is closed to Palestinians altogether.
Despair is the word I hear most often from West Bank Palestinians, 58 percent of whom have fallen below the poverty line. "I can't get work from the Israeli side because I am haram [forbidden], and the Palestinians can't even afford to pay me bus fare," says an architect reduced to working in a bookstore. The night offers particular terrors. Jad, who works late, recognizes the sounds of frequent Israeli raids, "explosions and hard beats on doors and screams," she says.
There are many sympathetic Israeli groups that document the treatment of the Palestinian people. Yesh Din, for example, monitors the trials of West Bank Palestinians in military courts and recently released a scathing report: 99 percent of defendants in 2006 were found guilty, many after hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Another group, Machsom Watch, which is made up of accomplished Israeli women, videotapes the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints. Their latest complaint, filed while I was there, involved 46 Palestinians looking for work being held for 16 hours at a checkpoint. The Palestinians were allowed no food or toilet facilities and were forced to stand for hours on end. "When they sit down they make trouble," the report quoted a member of the IDF saying. At some point during their detention, the tires of their vans were punctured and some of their cars were vandalized.
Prime Minister Fayyad wears heavily the burdens on his people. He looks tired when we meet in his modest office in Ramallah, but he perks up when he tells me about his children. His oldest son is at his American alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, where Fayyad earned his doctorate in economics. His daughter has just received early admission to MIT; his youngest is still in grade school in Jerusalem. Like my friend Karim, Salam Fayyad accepted his post, first as finance minister and then as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, out of a sense of duty. "It was natural and instinctive," he says. "I thought it was important to be in a position to contribute."
Fayyad lays out clearly the Palestinian position. "The objective of this enterprise is to end the occupation and have an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state emerge on the land that was occupied in 1967," he says. "For us Palestinians to get a chance to live as free people in a state of our own, in peace and harmony with all of our neighbors, including Israel." That, of course, is what everyone wants. But how to get there?
Though he doesn't criticize the Israeli government, Fayyad methodically lists the impediments to the peace process. Foremost is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in direct contravention of every peace initiative since 1967, including the current "road map" to peace laid out by the Quartet—the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia—in 2002. "Not one more brick!" Fayyad says emphatically. "It's a road map obligation. It means not one more block, no exceptions, no nothing. And that's not what is happening." In the five-week period following the re-ignition of the peace process in Annapolis in the fall of 2007, he points out, the Israelis added 747 new units to the settlements, which in fact are cities, commanding the tops of hills the length of the West Bank. "If this keeps on happening, clearly the viability of the solution keeps on eroding," he says. "This is logical."
Israel's "security behavior" in the occupied territories is also a deterrent. Fayyad is proud that the Palestinian Authority police force has been effective in bringing about "conditions of law and order after years of complete lawlessness and chaos. It is one of the things we have focused on." But the ongoing raids by the Israeli Army into urban areas "where we have our own troops," he says, undermines the PA's authority and credibility. "It's happening in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, everywhere," he says. "This has to change." So, he says, do the travel restrictions on Palestinians. "We cannot go on like this," he says. "You cannot have economic development under conditions of lack of mobility. The only way you can keep an economy like this afloat is by continuing to inject official assistance into the system, and that's not our vision for Palestine. We do not want to be a beggar nation."
On the Palestinian side, a major setback to statehood, Fayyad readily admits, are the militias. "To tell you the truth," he says, "were it not for the chaos of weapons for the militias roaming around, with everyone doing what they want wherever they want to do it, the political differences would not have translated into the bloodshed we experience." Weapons should be the "sure purview" of the state, he says, and the "key goal" of his government is to try to "import this concept."
Our interview is interrupted by the arrival of Jimmy Carter and his entourage. "He's early," says Fayyad, looking at his watch. Rosalynn Carter, whose memoir I worked on, is startled to see me. "What on earth are you doing here?" she asks as we hug. Fayyad's meeting with Carter is going to last at least an hour, Carter's senior aide says to me apologetically. The meeting with the Palestinian prime minister has become all-important because Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is visiting Washington and the Israeli government has stonewalled Carter because of his intention to meet with the head of Hamas in Syria.
I ask Fayyad when we resume if he is in touch with Hamas in Gaza. "No," he says. "I have no official or unofficial contact with them. However, I talk to the people in Gaza all the time. Here we are. You see? You just made a mistake, unwittingly of course, of using the word 'Hamas' and 'Gaza' interchangeably. That's not the reality. Hamas is in control of Gaza, there's no question about that, but not every Palestinian man, woman and child living and suffering in Gaza is Hamas or under Hamas obligation. This is an odd situation which I hope and pray will not be anything but transitional and will soon be a part of our past."
What about the walls, I ask him, and the checkpoints and the permits and the mood of despair I'd found in the West Bank? "I can definitely tell you it is justified," he says. Is he optimistic that things will change for the better? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm not discouraged," he finally says. "There's a big difference. I'm convinced we're going to get there."
He smiles and tells me a story that he says will illustrate something about his world view. Last week he was in a little village of 300 residents to inaugurate a kindergarten. The minute he stepped out of the car someone stuck a microphone in his face and said, "What about the walls?" "I said, 'Look at all the olive trees around you. The youngest tree is older than the wall.' And the mere fact that this event was about children and the future was the most positive of ironies. [It] was the most positive day of my life as prime minister—notwithstanding the miserable context in which all this is taking place."
Iraq and Iran: Drifting Toward Conflict?
MEI Commentary
April 30, 2008 Wayne White Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger April 29, 2008
The U.S. once again is stepping up its rhetoric aimed at Iran. Renewed charges of nefarious Iranian activities related to Iraq have been surfacing ever since the hearings featuring General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker earlier this month. Diplomacy is stalled on both Iran's nuclear ambitions and Iraq. It is unclear whether the U.S. and Iran will succeed in avoiding a military confrontation of one sort or another.
Not only have accusations escalated, but also the tone of Administration and U.S. military commentary on Iran has become noticeably more shrill. There has been a focus on Iranian-trained "special groups" operating in Iraq, especially in the context of this month's bloody confrontation involving radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Late last week, Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, alluded to Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" (in Iraq). The normally cautious Mullen even went so far as to note that the Pentagon is preparing for "potential military courses of action" against Iran. General Petraeus reportedly is preparing a briefing on Iran's provision of lethal munitions to anti-U.S. elements in Iraq.
On the nuclear front, Defense Secretary Gates -- also typically reserved -- charged in a speech last week that Iran "is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons."
Tehran probably is guilty of supplying sympathetic militias in Iraq with money, arms, and training. The evidence so far has not made believers of many observers, but the sheer volume of reporting on this is sizeable. Yet, the U.S. does not seem to appreciate that Iraq is in Iran's backyard and expecting the Iranians to eschew involvement therespecially in the face of a robust U.S. presence--is simply unrealistic.
On the diplomatic front, there is little prospect for meaningful progress. Talks between Ambassador Crocker and the Iranians consist of American accusations against Iran and predictable Iranian denials. The restriction of these exchanges to Iraq blocks any useful trade-offs that might be drawn from other contentious issues dividing the two governments. The dim prospects for useful engagement were underscored when Secretary of State Rice apparently went to a major regional meeting on Iraq this month with explicit instructions not to engage with the Iranians.
A key factor the Administration either does not wish to acknowledge or cannot appreciate is that Iran's overall responsibility for the mess in Iraq is actually quite limited. In a country shattered by war, looting and violence, saddled with a dysfunctional, sectarian and corrupt government and ethno-sectarian communities with maximalist agendas, the fundamental problems are inherently Iraqi. Indeed, the Administration's focus on Iran might be, in part, driven by the need to distract attention from the more fundamental reasons for disappointmentven failure--in Iraq.
Regarding Iran's nuclear intentions, Defense Secretary Gates may be right. However, the main driver for any Iranian nuclear weapons program most likely relates to Iran's desire for the ultimate defensive deterrent against U.S. interferenceot a desire to launch a suicidal nuclear first-strike against Israel.
Gates has noted quite accurately that war with Iran would be "disastrous." Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran would trigger a major crisis without a clear end game in the Persian Gulf upon which the world depends for a huge slice of its tightening energy supplies.
Something often neglected in American policymaking is the good sense to proceed cautiously in certain highly complex situations. To avoid another massive crisis the U.S. can ill-afford, it would be best to acknowledge an Iranian role in Iraq, engage Tehran in a less one-dimensional fashion, and prepare to live with a nuclear Iran.
Wayne White is an Adjunct Scholar with the Middle East Institute. Previously he served as Deputy Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office of Analysis for the Near East, with a special focus on Iraq.
Disclaimer: Assertions and opinions in this Commentary are solely those of the above-mentioned author(s) and do not reflect necessarily the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/...rness/index.php
Talking Points Memo Café
April 29, 2008
Obama in the Wilderness
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/avatars/J...0Sleeper_15.jpg
By Jim Sleeper
Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled "race men" like Jeremiah Wright.
Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves - by Johnny Cochran, Hosea Wilson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, Leonard Jeffries, even Derrick Bell, and sometimes Cornel West, and countless other smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried "Racism Forever!" Some of them styled themselves prophets of white doom and black resurrection, reaping an adulation seldom enjoyed by real prophets, who are heard mainly after their time.
These men weren't all bad. More than once, as I recounted here recently concerning Brooklyn's Rev. William Augustus Jones, I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt and stood up for them. And, sometimes, they did not disappoint. On the contrary, their forbearance and fortitude taught me how deeply the world had disappointed them. Yes, I understood "God Damn America!," but not from those who shouted it for the roar of the crowd.
The more I understood the difference between feeling it and shouting it, the more I despised the shouters for massaging poor, downtrodden people's broken hearts on the way to their wallets, and for drawing in still others whose bitterness, more fine-spun, sought something like relief in rhetoric that came with a simulacrum of erudition. Yes, watching Wright at the NAACP takes me back to the many demonstrations I witnessed of imagined racial solidarity in self-doom.
But I reserved a special circle in Hell for guilt-ridden white liberals and opportunistic leftists who supported this sad writhing and the politics of racial paroxysm that gripped this country in the 1980s and 1990s. These supporters' own "white" emotional and ideological effusions delivered nothing to poor, upright, faithful blacks, whose souls were rested only when their feet were tired from marching, who spent years on their knees not in church but scrubbing white people's floors to give their children a better chance.
And now there is another circle, this one reserved for those who are gloating and smirking over Obama's pastor's self-immolation.
Given the odds most blacks have faced through most of American history, it would be wrong to say that some didn't, in fact, get better chances thanks to the Wrights and even the Farrakhans - to those who ran religious institutions that provided services, solidarity in oppression, and some discipline and hope. But sometimes this happened almost despite the iconic leaders (think of Farrakhan's Million Man March, which transcended him.)
So spare me Wright's bloviations about "the prophetic tradition" of "the" black church. As the historian David Chappell, author of the remarkable A Stone of Hope, reminded me this morning, "the" black church is not "prophetic," claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
The only thing "the" black church is... is black. It has had its prophets but also its imposters and parasites, as has the Roman Catholic and every other prideful church whose supercelestial claims belie some subterranean morals.
Wright himself is a strong, smart, wounded, and angry man who has not carried his pain very well. Who among us would do it better? Look at the maunderings of the sonorously judgmental, the worldly (and wordy) Obama-bashing Leon Wieseltier, or the historian-cum-Clinton sycophant Sean Wilentz, smirking or gloating right now over Obama's travails at Wright's hands.
Obama's "Yes we can" speeches summoned memories of those women scrubbing floors, of those scared black churchgoers marching into sunlit Southern courthouse squares, dressed in their Sunday best , shivering in the heat, assured of no safety from federal marshals or God.
Somehow, they summoned the faith-based courage to reenact the Hebrew Exodus myth against the dogs and mobs: "[T]heir very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952 of earlier struggles. "Sometimes the heroes of the faith perished outside the promised land."
Niebuhr hadn't yet heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had recently been a student absorbing Niebuhr's own admonition that "[t]his paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul' (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature."
That faith made the protests uncanny and unsettling. King and others opened the hearts of astonished Northern Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the same Exodus narrative in ages past. Suddenly, it was poor Southern blacks who knew best what the others had forgotten: that the story would unfold only across years of wandering in the wilderness, worship of golden calves, brutal conquests and other perfidies -- including sophistry and charlatanry.
Where in that epic does Jeremiah Wright stand? Even his glib detractors must grant that he would have been marching into the desert away from the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is that side of Wright that Barack Obama came seeking after college.
But even as Obama found what he came seeking, he saw the other side, the man who had become embittered in the wilderness. And now, the dead hand of that past lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Obama will survive those, like the tragic Wright, who now would kill the soul if not the body. But whether the rest of us and the American republic will survive those who are smirking and gloating remains to be seen. I'd like to think that since countless blacks stood up to dogs and mobs, we who support Obama can find in ourselves the faith to withstand his cankered, middling detractors.
Go to www.jimsleeper.com
Talking Points Memo Café
April 29, 2008
Obama in the Wilderness
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/avatars/J...0Sleeper_15.jpg
By Jim Sleeper
Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled "race men" like Jeremiah Wright.
Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves - by Johnny Cochran, Hosea Wilson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, Leonard Jeffries, even Derrick Bell, and sometimes Cornel West, and countless other smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried "Racism Forever!" Some of them styled themselves prophets of white doom and black resurrection, reaping an adulation seldom enjoyed by real prophets, who are heard mainly after their time.
These men weren't all bad. More than once, as I recounted here recently concerning Brooklyn's Rev. William Augustus Jones, I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt and stood up for them. And, sometimes, they did not disappoint. On the contrary, their forbearance and fortitude taught me how deeply the world had disappointed them. Yes, I understood "God Damn America!," but not from those who shouted it for the roar of the crowd.
The more I understood the difference between feeling it and shouting it, the more I despised the shouters for massaging poor, downtrodden people's broken hearts on the way to their wallets, and for drawing in still others whose bitterness, more fine-spun, sought something like relief in rhetoric that came with a simulacrum of erudition. Yes, watching Wright at the NAACP takes me back to the many demonstrations I witnessed of imagined racial solidarity in self-doom.
But I reserved a special circle in Hell for guilt-ridden white liberals and opportunistic leftists who supported this sad writhing and the politics of racial paroxysm that gripped this country in the 1980s and 1990s. These supporters' own "white" emotional and ideological effusions delivered nothing to poor, upright, faithful blacks, whose souls were rested only when their feet were tired from marching, who spent years on their knees not in church but scrubbing white people's floors to give their children a better chance.
And now there is another circle, this one reserved for those who are gloating and smirking over Obama's pastor's self-immolation.
Given the odds most blacks have faced through most of American history, it would be wrong to say that some didn't, in fact, get better chances thanks to the Wrights and even the Farrakhans - to those who ran religious institutions that provided services, solidarity in oppression, and some discipline and hope. But sometimes this happened almost despite the iconic leaders (think of Farrakhan's Million Man March, which transcended him.)
So spare me Wright's bloviations about "the prophetic tradition" of "the" black church. As the historian David Chappell, author of the remarkable A Stone of Hope, reminded me this morning, "the" black church is not "prophetic," claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
The only thing "the" black church is... is black. It has had its prophets but also its imposters and parasites, as has the Roman Catholic and every other prideful church whose supercelestial claims belie some subterranean morals.
Wright himself is a strong, smart, wounded, and angry man who has not carried his pain very well. Who among us would do it better? Look at the maunderings of the sonorously judgmental, the worldly (and wordy) Obama-bashing Leon Wieseltier, or the historian-cum-Clinton sycophant Sean Wilentz, smirking or gloating right now over Obama's travails at Wright's hands.
Obama's "Yes we can" speeches summoned memories of those women scrubbing floors, of those scared black churchgoers marching into sunlit Southern courthouse squares, dressed in their Sunday best , shivering in the heat, assured of no safety from federal marshals or God.
Somehow, they summoned the faith-based courage to reenact the Hebrew Exodus myth against the dogs and mobs: "[T]heir very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952 of earlier struggles. "Sometimes the heroes of the faith perished outside the promised land."
Niebuhr hadn't yet heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had recently been a student absorbing Niebuhr's own admonition that "[t]his paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul' (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature."
That faith made the protests uncanny and unsettling. King and others opened the hearts of astonished Northern Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the same Exodus narrative in ages past. Suddenly, it was poor Southern blacks who knew best what the others had forgotten: that the story would unfold only across years of wandering in the wilderness, worship of golden calves, brutal conquests and other perfidies -- including sophistry and charlatanry.
Where in that epic does Jeremiah Wright stand? Even his glib detractors must grant that he would have been marching into the desert away from the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is that side of Wright that Barack Obama came seeking after college.
But even as Obama found what he came seeking, he saw the other side, the man who had become embittered in the wilderness. And now, the dead hand of that past lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Obama will survive those, like the tragic Wright, who now would kill the soul if not the body. But whether the rest of us and the American republic will survive those who are smirking and gloating remains to be seen. I'd like to think that since countless blacks stood up to dogs and mobs, we who support Obama can find in ourselves the faith to withstand his cankered, middling detractors.
Go to www.jimsleeper.com
Military or Market-Driven Empire Building: 1950-2008
by Prof. James Petras
Global Research, April 29, 2008
Introduction
From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale: One predominantly based on military conquests, involving direct invasions, proxy invading armies and subsidized separatist military forces; and the other predominantly based on large-scale, long-term economic penetration via a combination of investments, loans, credits and trade in which ‘market’ power and the superiority (greater productivity) in the means of production led to the construction of a virtual empire.
Throughout the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, European and US empire building resorted to the military route, especially in Asia, Africa, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. By far the British and US colonized the greatest territories through military force, followed by the introduction of state directed mercantile systems, the Monroe doctrine for the US and imperial preference for the British. South America following independence became the site of the growth of market powered empire building. British and later US capital successfully captured the commanding heights of the economies, especially the agro-mining and petroleum export sectors, trade, finance and in some cases attached customs and treasury to cover debt collection. As late developing capitalist countries and emerging imperial powers (EIP), the US, Germany and Japan faced the hostility of the established European empires and limited access to strategic markets and raw materials. The EIP adopted several strategies in challenging the existing empires. These included demands for free trade with their colonies and the end of imperial (colonial) privilege/ preference. The EIP established parallel colonial settlements and concessions, bordering the old empires. They fomented and financed ‘anti-colonial’ revolts to replace existing colonial collaborators and pursued economic penetration via superior production. They disseminated political propaganda promoting ‘democratic’ values within a market driven empire. World War Two marked the decline of the European military based colonial empire and the US transition from a predominantly market to military-based empire. This ‘transition’ was facilitated by earlier military occupations in the Philippines and the Caribbean and a multitude of invasions in Central America.
Nationalist liberation movements, based on liberal, nationalist and socialist leaders and programs, drawing on returning soldiers, weakened colonial control and post-war European anti-fascist and anti-war sentiments, led to the dismantling of their military-based empires. Internal reconstruction and domestic working class radicalism influenced the agenda for most European colonial powers. The attempts by the European powers to re-impose their colonial empires failed despite bloody wars in Indo-China, Kenya, Algeria, Malaya and elsewhere. The French, English and Israeli invasion and occupation of the Egyptian Suez (1956) marked the last major attempt at military-driven imperialism.
The US opposition to this effort at European re-colonization marked the supremacy of US-centered empire building and, paradoxically, the beginning of US military-driven empire building. The European powers, especially Great Britain, engineered a strategic shift from a colonial-military empire toward market-driven empires based on supporting pro-capitalist nationalist against socialist revolutionaries (India, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.). While Europe transited to the market-driven empire building model based first and foremost on the reconstruction of their war-torn domestic capitalist economy, the US quickly moved toward a military based empire building approach. The US established military bases throughout Europe, militarily intervened in Greece, elaborated a complex and comprehensive military buildup to challenge Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and intervened in the Chinese and especially the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars.
Immediate Post-WWII: The Combination of Market and Military Roads to Empire
Because the US economy and military came out of the victory during WWII with enormous resources far surpassing any other country or group of countries, it was able to pursue a dual approach to empire building, engaging in military and economic expansion. The US dominated over 50% of world trade and had the greatest surplus public and private capital to invest overseas. The US possessed technological and productivity advantages to promote ‘free trade’ among its would-be competitors and to increase domestic living standards.
These advantageous circumstances, directly related and limited to the first decade of the post-WWII period, became embedded in the practice and strategic thinking of US policymakers, Congress, the Executive branch and both major parties. The conjunctural ‘world superiority’ generated a plethora of elite ideologies and a mass mind set in which the US was seen to be ‘by nature’, by ‘divine will’, destined by ‘history’ and its ‘values’, by its ‘superior education, technology and productivity’ to rule over the world. The specific economic and political conditions of the ‘decade’ (1945-1955) were frozen into an unquestioned dogma, which denied the dynamics of changing market, productive and political relations that gradually eroded the original bases of the ideology.
Divergence in the World Economy: US-Europe-Japan
Beginning with the massive military buildup with the ‘Cold War’ and the subsequent hot war in Korea, the US allocated a far greater percentage of its budget and GNP to war and military empire building than Western Europe or Japan.
By the mid-1950’s, while the US vastly expanded its state military apparatus (armed forces, intelligence agencies and clandestine armies), Western Europe and Japan expanded and built up their state economic agencies, public enterprises, investment and loan programs for the private sector. Even more significantly, US military spending and purchases stimulated Japanese and European industries. Equally important state-private procurement policies subsidized US industrial inefficiency via cost over-runs, non-competitive bidding and military-industrial monopolies.
US empire building via projections of military power absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars in government expenditures in regions and countries with low economic payoffs in the Caribbean, Central American, Asia and Africa.
While military-driven empire building did increase short term domestic growth and rising income, and led to some important civilian spin-offs and technological breakthroughs that entered the civilian economy, European and Japanese market-based empire building moved with greater dynamism from domestic to export led growth and began to challenge US predominance in a multiplicity of productive sectors.
The US prolonged and costly war against Indo-China (roughly 1954-74) epitomized the replacement of European colonial-military empire building by the US version. The hundreds of billions of dollars in US government war spending spilled over into Japanese and South Korean high-growth manufacturing industries. Western European manufacturing achieved productivity gains and export markets in former African and Asian colonial nations, while the US Empire’s murderous wars in South East Asia discredited it and its products throughout the world. Domestic unrest, widespread civilian protests and military demoralization further weakened the US capacity to pursue its imperial agenda and defend strategic collaborating regimes in key regions.
The relative decline of US manufacturing exports was accompanied by the massive growth of US public debt, which in turn stimulated the vast expansion of the financial sector which then shaped regional and national policy toward de-industrializing central cities and converting them into a finance-real estate and insurance monoculture.
The contrasting and divergent roads to empire building between the US on the one hand and Europe and Japan on the other, deepened with the advent of the ‘Second Cold War’ under the Carter-Reagan years. While the US spent billions in proxy wars in Southern Africa (Angola and Mozambique), Latin America (Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala) and Asia (Afghanistan), the Europeans were expanding economically into Eastern Europe, China, Latin America and the Middle East. Even at the moment of greatest imperial success, the overthrow of Communism in the USSR and East Europe and China’s transition to capitalism, the US militarily driven empire failed to reap the benefits: Under Clinton the US promoted the raw pillage of the Russian economy and destruction of the state (civilian and military), market and scientific base rather than stabilize and jointly exploit its existing markets and human and material resources. The US spent billions undermining Communism, but the Europeans, primarily Germany, and to a much lesser degree France, England and Japan, were the prime beneficiaries in terms of securing the most productive industries and employing the better part of the skilled labor and engineers in the former Soviet bloc. By the end of the Clinton era and the bursting of the information technology speculative bubble, the European Union eclipsed the US in GNP, outperformed the US in accumulating trade surpluses and foreign debt management.
Market Versus Military Empire Building in the 1990’s
During the Bush-Clinton years, US military-driven empire-building vastly expanded its commitments in financing and providing troops into the Balkan and Iraq wars, military entry into Somalia, the bombing of the Sudan, the increased subsidy of Israel’s colonial wars, the Afghan wars, Colombia’s counter-insurgency and to a lesser extent the Philippine’s counter-insurgency and counter-separatist wars. While the US spent billions to prop up a gangster-ridden and corrupt KLA regime in Kosova in order to spend billions more in building a huge military base, Germany was reaping the economic benefits of its economic hegemony in the relatively prosperous regimes of Croatia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. While the US spent hundreds of billions in the First and Second Gulf Wars, China, the new emerging market-driven empire builder, was looking to sign lucrative oil and gas contracts in the Middle East, especially with Iran. While the US was backing an unpopular minority regime backed by its client Ethiopian military force in Somalia, China was signing major oil contracts in Sudan, Angola and Nigeria and even in Northern Somalia (Puntland). While the US military-centered empire-building state was giving away over $3 billion in military aid (plus transferring its most up-to-date military technology to competitor firms) per year to Israel, European, Asian and Latin American private and public enterprises were signing long-term lucrative contracts with the Gulf oil states as well as with Iran.
A clear sign of the long-term economic decay of the US global competitive position between 2002-2008 is evidenced by the fact that a 40% depreciation of the dollar has failed to substantially improve the US balance of payments, let alone produce a trade surplus. Despite the handicap of appreciating currencies, China, Germany and Japan continued to accumulate trade surpluses, especially with the US. While the US spent hundreds of billions in Asian wars, CIA propaganda and subversive operations in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Caribbean (Cuba/Venezuela) and the Caucuses, the principle beneficiaries were the revitalized European market-driven empire-builders and the newly emerging market empire builders.
While the US spends enormous sums in building new military bases surrounding Russia, including new offensive operations in Kosova, Poland and the Czech Republic, with new preparations for NATO bases in Georgia and the Ukraine, Russian, Chinese and European capital expands buying out or investing in privatized and public-private strategic mining, petrol and manufacturing enterprises in Africa, Latin America, Australia and the Gulf.
While China harnesses foreign capital, including major US MNCs to make itself the ‘manufacturing workshop of the world’, Germany with its high precision heavy manufacturers are prospering by ‘constructing the workshops’ for the Chinese. US manufacturers and productive capital flee to state-subsidized (via tax reductions and low interest rates) financial, real estate and speculative sectors, and go overseas to avoid high rent and fringe payments to US labor. The resulting decline of the domestic market and a shrinking base of industrially trained labor reinforce the overseas and speculative movements on US capital. These capitalist structural changes undermined the economic fundamentals underlying the financial sector.
The deterioration of the US economy became apparent as the speculative paper pyramid (sub-prime and credit crises) collapsed during the 2007-08 recession. The recycling of multiple layers of ‘exotic’ financial ‘instruments’ each more precarious than the other, each more divorced from any tangible productive unit in the real economy characterized this period. Their predictable collapse dragged the US into recession. Even among the big banks and financial houses there is no knowledge of the real value of the paper being traded or of the ‘material collateral’ (housing and commercial property being held). The fictitious economy revolves around unloading the devalued paper, to cover costs and lessen losses…and let the next holder of the paper face the risks and uncertainties. As a result there is a total lack of confidence in the market because the ‘objects’ up for sale have become so lacking of value, i.e. so intangible and unrelated to the real economy.
The decline of the real producer basis of goods and social services and the predominance of the paper economy accentuated the divergence between military-directed empire building and the global economic interests of the US. The paper economy is not directly influenced by imperialist militarism, as is the case with US MNC’s with physical assets at risk from imperial wars, armed resistance, the disruption of trade routes, the destruction of overseas markets and the disarticulation of access to minerals and energy sources.
The ascendancy of speculative finance capital coincides with the greater autonomy of the militarist empire builders over and against the residual influence of American manufacturing and commercial interests supporting market imperialism. The extraordinary role that the pro-Israel power bloc plays in shaping a bellicose Middle East foreign policy over and above what US oil companies looking to sign contracts with Arab countries exercised, can only be understood within the large upsurge of ‘militarist driven imperial policy’.
Washington’s unconditional support of Israel’s militarist colonial regime reflects two important structural changes in US empire building. One is the extraordinary organization and influence of the principle pro-Israel Jewish organization over local, regional, national legislative and executive bodies and in the mass media and financial institutions. The second change is the rise of a political class of executive and legislative militarist policy-makers, which has an affinity with Israeli colonialism and its offensive military strategy. Israel is one of the few – if not only – military-driven ‘emerging imperial powers’ and that is part of the reason for the ‘resonance’ between Jewish leaders in Israel and Washington policy-makers. This is the real basis of the often stated and affirmed ‘common interests and values’ between the two ‘countries’. Military-driven imperial powers, like the US and Israel, do not share ‘democratic values’ – as even the most superficial observer of their savage repression of their conquered peoples and nations (Iraq and Palestine) can attest – they share the military route to empire-building.
Historic Comparison of Market and Military Driven Imperialism
A rational cost efficient evaluation of the US major and minor military invasions demonstrates the high economic cost and low economic benefits to both the capitalist system as a whole and even to many key economic enterprises.
The US blockade and subsequent war with Japan ultimately unleashed the Asian national liberation movements, which undercut European, and US colonial-style military imperialism. The Korean War ignited the massive re-industrialization of Japan and created optimal conditions for Korea’s model of protectionism at home and free trade with the US (so-called Asian state-led export model). The result was the creation of two major manufacturing rivals to the US economic expansion in Asia, North America and later in the rest of the world.
The US invasion, colonial occupation and imperial war in Indochina and its subsequent defeat severely weakened the military capacity to subsequently defend global imperial interests and client states in Southern Africa, Iran and Nicaragua. More to the point, by concentrating resources on war-making the US lost markets to the emerging market empire-builders and diverted capital from increasing the productivity and productive forces which create market dominance.
In the broader picture, military and market driven imperialism, which coexisted and seemed to complement each other diverged in the period between 1963-1973, with the militarist faction gaining supremacy in directing US empire-building. The divergence was papered over by several instances of complementary activity such as the overthrow of President Allende in Chile on behalf of US MNCs and similar earlier cases as in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953) and in other countries where quick imperial victories over smaller countries did not seem to carry any significant economic or political costs.
The ascendancy of Reagan and the negative long-term economic impact of new arms buildup were obscured by the break-up of the Communist system and the Chinese and Vietnamese transitions to capitalism. The windfall gains to US economic interests in the former European communist countries, especially Russia, were largely based on pillaging existing resources in alliance with gangster-capitalists. Long-term, large-scale benefits were not due to US capitalist taking over and developing the forces of production and developing the internal markets of the ex-communist countries. The political and military gains that accrued to US military empire building obscured the continued loss of economic power in the world marketplace to the market-driven imperial powers. Moreover, China unleashed a large-scale, long-term process of dynamic capital accumulation, which in less than two decades displaced the US from manufacturing markets and challenged its access to energy markets.
In other words favorable resolution of the US-Soviet conflict led to their mutual economic decline. What is worse from a practical historical perspective, the military-driven empire builders saw their ‘victory’ over Communism as vindication and license to escalate their militarist approach to empire building. According to this line of argument, the Soviets fell because of military pressure, backed by ideological warfare. Moreover in the absence of a countervailing military pole, the Bush-Clinton-Bush Presidencies saw an open field for pursuing the military road to empire building.
From the Gulf, to the Gulf and Back to the Gulf : 1990-2008 (and beyond)
The first Bush Presidency assumed the military road to empire building but tried to avoid the high costs of occupation and colonization. The Israeli colonial model had to await the Zionist occupation of policy-making positions in later administrations. The first Iraq War was intended to project US imperial military power, secure US economic interests among the Gulf oil states (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) as well as expand Israeli influence in the Middle East. Most of all it was seen as the launching of a ‘New World Order; centered in US world supremacy, supported by docile allies and financed by rich Arab oil states.
Shortly after the Gulf War, the triple alliance, which emerged during the war, collapsed as Europe pursued its own market-driven empire in competition with the US, Saudi Arabia paid some of the US military expenditures and then abruptly ended its funding, and domestic opposition grew as the electorate demanded less imperial expenditures and the re-building of the domestic economy.
Military-Driven Empire-Building (MDE) and Zionism
The Zionist Power Configuration in the United States successfully secured from the White House and Congress massive sustained multi-billion dollar military and economic grant and aid packages for Israel throughout the 1980’s ensuring Israel’s military superiority in the Middle East. Yet both Presidents Reagan and Bush (father) tried to maintain a balance between the interests of major US oil multi-nationals working with Arab regimes on the one hand and on the other Israeli and Washington’s military-driven empire building (MEB).
Bush Senior’s attack of Iraq in the First Gulf War, greatly reduced Baghdad’s military capability but he refrained from destroying its armed forces or overthrowing Saddam Hussein as Israel and the ZPC were demanding at the time. Above all Bush did not want to destabilize the region for US oil deals in the Gulf, even as he imposed a US military presence to ensure dominance.
With the election of Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress, the MDE and the ZPC gained strategic positions in the elaboration and implementation of foreign policy. Madeleine Albright, ‘Sandy’ Berger, Dennis Ross, Cohen, and Martin Indyk and an army of lesser known functionaries, militarists and Zionists launched a series of wars, military attacks and severe sanctions against Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. They devastated their population (over 500,000 children died in Iraq as a direct result of US starvation sanctions), destroyed their national productive facilities and, intentionally disarticulated and fragmented their nations into violent ethno-tribal and religious mini-states. While Clinton embraced the military road to empire building, he was also totally committed to the financial sector of the US economy (in particular, the most speculative activities) by de-regulating all controls, oversight and constraints on ‘hedge funds’, investment banks and equity houses. Under the tutelage of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, the pro-Israel Alan Greenspan, the Clinton regime became the launching pad for the full conversion of the US into a speculation-driven economy, culminating in the dot-com bubble which burst in 2000-2001, and the massive Enron and World Com swindles leading up to the current financial meltdown of 2006-2008.
While the MDE gained a dominant role, the ascendance of speculative capital marginalized and eroded the political influence and economic weight of productive capital, forcing it overseas and/or to transfer funds into the financial-speculative sector. The socio-economic basis of market-driven empire-building (MDEB) was weakened relative to the militarists and the ZPC in setting the US foreign policy agenda. This new power configuration opened the door for the total takeover by these same forces during the 8 years of Bush (Junior)’s presidency. The latter quickly eliminated any residual influence of the market-driven imperialists, forcing the resignation of his first Treasury Secretary O’Neal and others. Even hybrid market-militarists like Colin Powell who went along with the global war strategy but raised tactical questions were subsequently forced into retirement.
MDE were in total control of the government in all spheres, from the elaboration of war propaganda, the build-up of a global network of terror and assassination teams, to colonial wars and the systematic use of torture abroad and the savaging of elementary freedoms at home. Within the MDE, the ZPC gained dominance, especially in the formulation and the implementation of total war strategies in Iraq and the unconditional backing of Israel’s genocidal politics in Gaza and the West Bank. Every sector of the government was geared to war, bellicose action and especially to subordinating economic policies to military practices informed by the military-driven Israeli colonization.
The convergence of policy and practice between the MDE and the ZPC within the highest levels of government and their mutual reinforcement, gave US foreign policy its extremist military character. Zionist cultural and media power provided an army of academic and journalistic ideologues and mass media platforms which the MDE previously lacked – and amplified their message. The linking of traditional US MDE and the emerging power of the Israeli-ZPC buttressed the spread of authoritarian controls and harsh and widespread censorship over any politician, intellectual or media critic of Israel and its unconditional supporters in the ZPC.
The joint forces of the MDE and ZPC have reshaped the US military command to serve their plans for new major wars – against Iran – and the prolongation and extension of wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere. The MDE have failed to pursue the free trade openings in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East – leaving the field wide open for entirely new trading and investment networks involving China, Europe, Japan, India, Russia and the Middle Eastern sovereign funds. Even with the onset of the recession in the US and the meltdown of the financial markets, the militarists have refused to change or alter their stranglehold on the budget and foreign policy, causing the government to resort to printing currency to finance the bailout of speculators and their investment banks.
Imperial Wars, Social Revolutions and Capitalist Restorations
The historical record demonstrates that imperial wars destroy the productive forces and social networks of targeted countries. In contrast, market-driven economic empire building gains hegemony via collaboration with local political and economic elites, taking control of strategic industries, minerals and energy via direct investments and loans, privatizations and denationalization, and favorable trade and monetary agreements. Market-driven empire building takes over, it does not destroy the productive forces; it does not demolish the social fabric, it reconstructs or ‘adjusts’ it to accommodate its accumulation needs.
The evolution of social revolutionary regimes in a post liberation period shows a common pattern reflecting the political-economic external constraints imposed by military imperialism. The revolutionary regimes expropriate and nationalize the major means of production, control foreign trade and organize the planning of the economy. They eliminate foreign control over strategic economic sectors, centralize political and economic control as well as redistribute land and income. In many cases these radical measures were imposed upon the revolutionary governments by imperial economic boycotts, the flight of capitalist and landlords, the non-cooperation of managers and technicians and by the necessity of reconstruction in the face of large-scale destruction. The US embargo and similar constraints on external financial aid have forced revolutionary governments to rely on the rationing of scarce resources for priority public projects, limiting its capacity to increase individual consumption.
As a result, the post-revolutionary regimes were forced to deal with market-driven empire builders. They contracted large-scale short-term and long-term trade agreements, joint investment ventures through equitable profit sharing agreements and a broad range of technological contracts involving royalty payments. In other words, given the unfavorable position of the revolutionary economy in the world market and the low level of development of the forces of production, the market-driven empire building countries were in a position to secure lucrative economic opportunities. In contrast, the military driven empire attempted to inflict maximum economic damage to compensate for its military defeat.
The revolutionary regimes under Communist leadership featured characteristics, which foreshadowed positive future relations with market-driven imperial countries. Their vertical leadership and concentrated political power facilitated quick and relatively easy changes from collectivist to neo-liberal policies, while hindering the democratic mechanisms, which might have corrected erroneous and harmful economic decisions. Secondly, unchecked power at the top in a time of scarcity led to the conversion of power into privilege, corruption and social inequalities. These developments created a wealthy nepotistic elite with an interest in deepening ties with their capitalist counterparts from the imperial states. These internal changes coincided with the interests of market-driven capitalists willing to establish lucrative ‘beach heads’ and relations with elite groups in the post-revolutionary society and state. Market-driven empire builders were attracted to the tight controls exercised over labor and the lack of competition from other military-driven imperial states.
Post-revolutionary economies continued to be embedded in the world capitalist marketplace and subject to its competitive demands. In the best of circumstances, even with a democratic and socially egalitarian leadership and relatively favorable world commodity prices, the revolutionary regime would need to balance the social demands of a socialist domestic economy (with demands for increases in income, social services and workplace improvement and consumer goods) and the world market demands for greater efficiency, increased capital investments, rising productivity and labor discipline. Given the built-in biases toward political and military security embedded in the bureaucratic centralist structures, it was not surprising that production would stagnate. The constraints and the centralized elites’ inability to micro-manage the economy beyond the period of reconstruction was one reason for stagnation. The other was that the regime would prefer a hierarchical organized capitalist structure (over any democratic changes from below), which would not challenge, but rather strengthen, the communist elite’s position in a ‘new’ eclectic system.
In other words there would be a dual transition from imperial-dominated extractive capitalism to centralized socialism which would entail a period of reconstruction and national unification with an organized and disciplined labor force. This would be followed by a transition to a centralized mixed state capitalist economy, increasingly penetrated by market-driven imperial capital.
Was ‘Socialism a Detour to Capitalism’? Were ‘Imperial Wars Necessary for Capitalist Expansion’?
The historical record documents the continued growth and expansion of market-driven empire building throughout the post World War II period, without wars, significant military intervention, boycotts, embargos or other offensive belligerent actions. The expansion took place in the context of non-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes. Germany’s market-driven empire builders traded with the Communist East, China and Russia before, during and after the fall of Communism, accumulating huge trade and productive advantages over the US. The same occurred with Japan with regard to China and other Asian communist countries.
The market imperialists did not depend, as some apologists for military imperialists argue ‘on the protective umbrella’ of US militarism, but on their superior position in the world market and the greater development of the forces of production, which allowed them to enter and secure favorable and lucrative economic positions.
In contrast, the US empire builders, who started the post-war 1945-50 period in a uniquely favorable position in the world market, wasted their massive economic resources in funding wars against successful revolutions - China, Korea, Indochina, Cuba, and now in prolonged colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billions more have been spent in numerous surrogate wars in Angola, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Chile with no economic payoffs for US MNCs over and against its European and Asian competition. The US imperial wars failed to enhance its economic empire. US Empire builders shifted massive resources away from producing goods for the international market and upgrading their industrial productivity in order to retain world and domestic market shares to its monstrous and wasteful military budgets. The result has been a steady decline of the US economic empire relative to its competitor market-driven empires. Ironically, when the centralized collectivist regimes eventually made the transition toward capitalism, it was because of their inner social and economic contradictions and not because of US military policies. The restoration of capitalism had little to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars in US military spending.
In contrast, the market-driven empires from the end of the 1940’s benefited from US imperial wars, by securing lucrative US military contracts and were able to concentrate their state expenditures and investment policies on securing overseas markets. They were in an ideal position to reap the benefits resulting from the socialist regimes’ transition to capitalism.
Given the emergence of post-Communist political and social ruling elites who blindly adhered to free market dogma with their corrupt, authoritarian and privileged political practices, in retrospect ‘socialism’ did appear as a ‘detour’ to capitalist restoration. However the structural changes of some communist political elites, especially in China and Vietnam, created the essential foundations for a capitalist take-off. They unified the country, educated and trained a healthy, disciplined work-force, launched basic industries, eliminated war lords and local ethnic fiefdoms. Subsequently Communist liberalization opened the door to the peaceful economic invasion of market-driven imperialism, safeguarded by a strong centralized state limiting any working class or nationalist opposition or protest. The Communist elites established a framework ideal for subsequent imperialist reentry and expansion.
The historical record makes it clear that imperial wars were not necessary for economic expansion. Empire-driven militarism thoroughly undermined the US long-term competitive position. If the driving force of empire building is economic conquest, then market-driven empires are far superior to military-driven empires. The goal of ‘colonial political dominance’, pursued by military-driven imperialists, is in the modern period, a chimera, as demonstrated by a history of political defeats in Asia, Africa, Latin America and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military-Driven Imperialism Today and the Newly Emerging Imperial Powers
One might conclude that the US imperial leadership would have ‘learned the lessons’ of failed military-driven empire building from the their experience over the past 50 years. But as we pointed out earlier, the internal structural dynamics of the US economy and the reconfiguration of the political elite directing the political system have led in the opposite direction. The 21st century has witnessed the ascendancy of the most zealous exponents of military-driven empire building in the entire post-World War II period. An overview of US imperial policy shows the proliferation and intensification of direct wars, surrogate wars, military confrontations in which the US favors militarist allies over countries with lucrative markets and profitable investment opportunities in natural resources.
Market-Driven Versus Militarist Alliances
The militarist and Zionist takeover of US empire building in the 21st century is manifested in their strategic decisions, alliances and priorities, each and everyone of which is diametrically opposed to market-based empire building and ultimately doomed to further erode the position of the US empire.
The newly emerging empire building states (like China), rely almost exclusively on market-driven strategies designed by political elites linked to industrialists and technocrats. They are quickly dominating manufacturing markets, accessing strategic raw materials and securing long-term trade agreements at the expense of the increasingly militarist, but internally deteriorating US empire. Near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the imperial policies of the US militarists and Zionists have demonstrated their willingness to make deep sacrifices in market growth by choosing to align the US with costly and dubious militarist regimes in all regions of the world, beginning with the US alliance with Israel.
In the Middle East, unlike market-driven empire builders, the US militarists and Zionists have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying many lucrative oil deals and joint ventures and leading to the quadrupling the world price of oil. Instead they have invested (and lost) over a trillion dollars in non-productive, non-economic, military activity. Militarist imperialism has weakened the entire economic fabric of the US Empire without any ‘compensatory’ gains on the military side. The prolonged war in Iraq (6 years and running) has demoralized the US ground troops and weakened US military capability to engage in any ‘third front’ in which the US has important economic interests. US liberal market-driven imperialists describe this as ‘imperial overstretch’. While the US invests in non-productive and unsuccessful military conquests, profoundly indebting the domestic economy, China, India, Korea, Russia, Europe, the Middle East and even Latin America pile up trade surpluses while expanding their economic empires via private and sovereign investments.
Largely because of the political fusion and strategic convergence of interests between militarists and Zionists, the US empire builders choose to sacrifice lucrative ties to the richest markets among the Gulf State in the Middle East and among predominantly Muslim countries in order to favor Israel, a resource-poor militarist-colonial state with a third rate market for goods and investments. US militarists have subjected America’s empire building to strategies in the Middle East, which mostly favor Israel’s colonial and regional hegemonic drive. This places the US on a direct confrontational path with Lebanon, Syria, Iran and even the Gulf States who feel threatened by Israel’s constant resort to offensive military power to attack its neighbors. No Arab oil country, no matter how conservative and pro-capitalist, can afford to open its economy to the US, if it believes that Washington will subordinate it to the vision of a militarist Israel-US dominated sphere of influence. By unconditionally backing Israel’s colonial and hegemonic interests, American militarists have gained a strategic domestic political ally (the Zionist Power Configuration) but it has come at an enormous cost to US economic empire building. Moreover the Israeli state has run the biggest and most aggressive espionage operations in the US of any country since the fall of the USSR, thus calling into question its ‘security benefits.’ The multiplicity of enemies resulting from Israel’s racist-colonialist policies ensures that the US will be engaged in decades of war, or as long as the US taxpayers can sustain the demands of the military empire.
Military-driven empire building is manifested not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. In Africa, the US backs the Ethiopian military regime and its weak and isolated puppet regime in Somalia against an Islamist-secular nationalist coalition representing the majority of Somalis. Washington and Israel finance and arm the Sudanese separatists in Darfur against the oil-rich central Sudanese government. In both Somalia and Sudan, China and other emerging imperial powers have secured access to strategic oil rich sites. While the US spends billions of dollars on endless wars, propaganda campaigns and sanctions, China reaps hundreds of millions in profits. While the US financed African wars destroy the entire fabric of production and society in Somalia, militarizing impoverished Ethiopia, the Chinese build roads and infrastructure to facilitate exports in both the Sudan and Northern Somalia. Pentagon-directed colonial wars in Africa, conducted by surrogates, undermine the political support of economic collaborators while the market-driven empires enhance their ties with local economic elites and political rulers.
In Latin America, the US military imperialists have so far contributed $6 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia’s militarist regime during the 21st century, destroying the entire social fabric in the rural areas, while the rest of Latin America expanded their ties with Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in failed efforts to destabilize Venezuela’s nationalist-democratic Chavez Government. As a result US capitalists have lost out on billions of dollars in investments and trading contracts in Venezuela to China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Iran. By making Colombia the centerpiece of their South American policy, US militarist empire builders have lost out on the enormously lucrative economic opportunities accompanying the commodity price boom in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.
In Asia, despite the deepening US economic dependence on China to sustain to the rapidly depreciating US dollar (China holds $1.5 trillion dollars in foreign reserves which has lost 60% of its value since 2002), the US militarists still engage in sustained anti-Chinese propaganda campaigns and highly provocative incidents. The US-backed violent protests against the Chinese presence in Tibet fomented by the Dalai Lama and CIA-funded exile organizations is only the more recent example. American Zionists have directed a political campaign against the expansion of Chinese investments and contracts (market-driven imperialism) in the Sudan. The Zionist role in the so-called ‘Darfur’ campaign is based on Sudan’s support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza.
China has so far generally overlooked US military provocations such as the shooting down of a Chinese fighter plane, spy flights over Chinese offshore territory, the deliberate bombing of its embassy in Belgrade and the sale of advanced missiles to Taiwan. The US financing of the separatist demonstrations among Tibetan exiles is designed to tarnish China’s image in the lead up to its hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. China’s market-driven empire builders ignore US military provocations because they had little effect on Chinese overseas and domestic economic expansion. Nevertheless China has increased spending on modernizing its military defense capabilities. More significantly, as the US economy declines and enters a deep recession in 2008, and as the dollar continues to fall ($1.60 to 1 Euro as of May 2008), China has turned toward the Asian, European, Middle Eastern markets. Asian markets now account for 50% of world trade growth as of 2008. In 2007 China increased production and the development of its market to sustain growth rates at least five times higher than the militarist-dominated US Empire. Even more significant, the great majority of Chinese exporters (over 800,000) have shifted payments to Euros, Yen, Pounds Sterling and the Renminbi in its trading with non-US trading partners.
Russia, shaking off the shackles of Clinton-backed pillage during the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years in the 1990’s, has taken off during the 21st century under the leadership of President Putin. US military-driven empire builders were able to integrate and subordinate all the former members of the Russia-centered Warsaw Pact into the US-dominated NATO. In the 21st Century, the Russian economy has expanded rapidly between 6% and 8%, established majority control over strategic resources and has sought to lessen its vulnerability to US military encirclement. While Germany, Italy and most of the major Asian trading countries (China, India and Japan) have obtained lucrative trading and investment agreements with Russia, the US militarists have concentrated on military encroachment along Russia’s European and Asian borders. The US is pushing to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and preparing to station offensive, so-called ‘missile shields’ in Poland and the Czech Republic on the absurd pretext that such highly sophisticated installations are intended to protect Western Europe from attacks by distant Iran rather than target Moscow, just 5 minutes away by missile attack.
Conclusion
US military-driven empire building has made costly military alliances with peripheral countries at a catastrophic economic cost. The persistence of militarist empire builders has systematically undercut market-driven empire building and has pushed the domestic US economy to near bankruptcy. The twin motors of the contemporary empire and domestic economy, speculative finance and militarism, have driven the US economy backwards at the same time that established and emerging imperial competitors are advancing.
Comparative historical data covering the entire half-century to the present demonstrates that European, Japanese and now China and India’s market-driven expansion has been far more successful in securing market shares, developing the productive forces and accessing strategic raw materials than US military empire building.
Market-driven empire building has both resulted from and created a strong civil society in which socio-economic priorities take precedent in defining domestic and foreign economic policy over military priorities and definitions of international reality. US empire builders, academics and political advisers have interpreted, what they call ‘the rise of US global power its victory in the Cold War and the decline of Communism’ as a vindication of military-driven empire building. They have ignored the rise of capitalist competitors and the relative and absolute decline of the US as an economic power. It can be argued that the newly emerging market-driven former Communist countries (like China and Russia) represent a greater global challenge to the US Empire than the previous stagnant bureaucratic Communist regimes.
Militarism is deeply embedded in the structure, ideology and policies of the entire US governing class, its political parties, the executive and legislative branches, the judiciary and the armed forces. Over the same half-century countervailing market-driven empire builders have declined as a defining force in the formulation of foreign policy in the US. The growing encroachment of the militant Zionist power configuration within the policy-making directorate has been greatly facilitated by the ascendancy of militarism and the relative decline of economic-empire building.
The long period of incremental decline of US economic empire building and the trillions of dollars wasted by military-driven empire building has come to a climax. In the new millennium with the profound devaluation of the imperial currency (the dollar), the huge indebtedness and loss of markets Washington is totally dependent on the good will of its commercial partners to keep accepting constantly devalued dollars in exchange for essential commodities.
The immediate outcome is likely to be a major domestic crisis, which could be accompanied by one more desperate and futile military attack on Iran and/or Venezuela or a forced confrontation with China and/or Russia. Desperate acts of declining military empires have historically accelerated the demise of imperial rulers.
Out of the debris of failed empires two possible outcomes could emerge. A new rabidly nationalist authoritarian regime or the re-birth of a republic based on the reconstruction of a productive economy centered on the domestic market and social priorities, free from foreign entanglements and power configurations whose only purpose is to subordinate the republic to overseas colonial ambitions.
The dismantling of the military driven empire will not occur ‘by choice’ but by imposed circumstances, including the incapacity of domestic institutions to continue to finance it. The demise of the militarist governing class will follow the collapse of their domestic economic foundations. The result could be a withered empire, or a democratic republic. When and how a new political leadership will emerge will depend on the nature of the social configurations, which undertake the reconstruction of US society.
James Petras is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by James Petras
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8841
by Prof. James Petras
Global Research, April 29, 2008
Introduction
From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale: One predominantly based on military conquests, involving direct invasions, proxy invading armies and subsidized separatist military forces; and the other predominantly based on large-scale, long-term economic penetration via a combination of investments, loans, credits and trade in which ‘market’ power and the superiority (greater productivity) in the means of production led to the construction of a virtual empire.
Throughout the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, European and US empire building resorted to the military route, especially in Asia, Africa, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. By far the British and US colonized the greatest territories through military force, followed by the introduction of state directed mercantile systems, the Monroe doctrine for the US and imperial preference for the British. South America following independence became the site of the growth of market powered empire building. British and later US capital successfully captured the commanding heights of the economies, especially the agro-mining and petroleum export sectors, trade, finance and in some cases attached customs and treasury to cover debt collection. As late developing capitalist countries and emerging imperial powers (EIP), the US, Germany and Japan faced the hostility of the established European empires and limited access to strategic markets and raw materials. The EIP adopted several strategies in challenging the existing empires. These included demands for free trade with their colonies and the end of imperial (colonial) privilege/ preference. The EIP established parallel colonial settlements and concessions, bordering the old empires. They fomented and financed ‘anti-colonial’ revolts to replace existing colonial collaborators and pursued economic penetration via superior production. They disseminated political propaganda promoting ‘democratic’ values within a market driven empire. World War Two marked the decline of the European military based colonial empire and the US transition from a predominantly market to military-based empire. This ‘transition’ was facilitated by earlier military occupations in the Philippines and the Caribbean and a multitude of invasions in Central America.
Nationalist liberation movements, based on liberal, nationalist and socialist leaders and programs, drawing on returning soldiers, weakened colonial control and post-war European anti-fascist and anti-war sentiments, led to the dismantling of their military-based empires. Internal reconstruction and domestic working class radicalism influenced the agenda for most European colonial powers. The attempts by the European powers to re-impose their colonial empires failed despite bloody wars in Indo-China, Kenya, Algeria, Malaya and elsewhere. The French, English and Israeli invasion and occupation of the Egyptian Suez (1956) marked the last major attempt at military-driven imperialism.
The US opposition to this effort at European re-colonization marked the supremacy of US-centered empire building and, paradoxically, the beginning of US military-driven empire building. The European powers, especially Great Britain, engineered a strategic shift from a colonial-military empire toward market-driven empires based on supporting pro-capitalist nationalist against socialist revolutionaries (India, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.). While Europe transited to the market-driven empire building model based first and foremost on the reconstruction of their war-torn domestic capitalist economy, the US quickly moved toward a military based empire building approach. The US established military bases throughout Europe, militarily intervened in Greece, elaborated a complex and comprehensive military buildup to challenge Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and intervened in the Chinese and especially the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars.
Immediate Post-WWII: The Combination of Market and Military Roads to Empire
Because the US economy and military came out of the victory during WWII with enormous resources far surpassing any other country or group of countries, it was able to pursue a dual approach to empire building, engaging in military and economic expansion. The US dominated over 50% of world trade and had the greatest surplus public and private capital to invest overseas. The US possessed technological and productivity advantages to promote ‘free trade’ among its would-be competitors and to increase domestic living standards.
These advantageous circumstances, directly related and limited to the first decade of the post-WWII period, became embedded in the practice and strategic thinking of US policymakers, Congress, the Executive branch and both major parties. The conjunctural ‘world superiority’ generated a plethora of elite ideologies and a mass mind set in which the US was seen to be ‘by nature’, by ‘divine will’, destined by ‘history’ and its ‘values’, by its ‘superior education, technology and productivity’ to rule over the world. The specific economic and political conditions of the ‘decade’ (1945-1955) were frozen into an unquestioned dogma, which denied the dynamics of changing market, productive and political relations that gradually eroded the original bases of the ideology.
Divergence in the World Economy: US-Europe-Japan
Beginning with the massive military buildup with the ‘Cold War’ and the subsequent hot war in Korea, the US allocated a far greater percentage of its budget and GNP to war and military empire building than Western Europe or Japan.
By the mid-1950’s, while the US vastly expanded its state military apparatus (armed forces, intelligence agencies and clandestine armies), Western Europe and Japan expanded and built up their state economic agencies, public enterprises, investment and loan programs for the private sector. Even more significantly, US military spending and purchases stimulated Japanese and European industries. Equally important state-private procurement policies subsidized US industrial inefficiency via cost over-runs, non-competitive bidding and military-industrial monopolies.
US empire building via projections of military power absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars in government expenditures in regions and countries with low economic payoffs in the Caribbean, Central American, Asia and Africa.
While military-driven empire building did increase short term domestic growth and rising income, and led to some important civilian spin-offs and technological breakthroughs that entered the civilian economy, European and Japanese market-based empire building moved with greater dynamism from domestic to export led growth and began to challenge US predominance in a multiplicity of productive sectors.
The US prolonged and costly war against Indo-China (roughly 1954-74) epitomized the replacement of European colonial-military empire building by the US version. The hundreds of billions of dollars in US government war spending spilled over into Japanese and South Korean high-growth manufacturing industries. Western European manufacturing achieved productivity gains and export markets in former African and Asian colonial nations, while the US Empire’s murderous wars in South East Asia discredited it and its products throughout the world. Domestic unrest, widespread civilian protests and military demoralization further weakened the US capacity to pursue its imperial agenda and defend strategic collaborating regimes in key regions.
The relative decline of US manufacturing exports was accompanied by the massive growth of US public debt, which in turn stimulated the vast expansion of the financial sector which then shaped regional and national policy toward de-industrializing central cities and converting them into a finance-real estate and insurance monoculture.
The contrasting and divergent roads to empire building between the US on the one hand and Europe and Japan on the other, deepened with the advent of the ‘Second Cold War’ under the Carter-Reagan years. While the US spent billions in proxy wars in Southern Africa (Angola and Mozambique), Latin America (Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala) and Asia (Afghanistan), the Europeans were expanding economically into Eastern Europe, China, Latin America and the Middle East. Even at the moment of greatest imperial success, the overthrow of Communism in the USSR and East Europe and China’s transition to capitalism, the US militarily driven empire failed to reap the benefits: Under Clinton the US promoted the raw pillage of the Russian economy and destruction of the state (civilian and military), market and scientific base rather than stabilize and jointly exploit its existing markets and human and material resources. The US spent billions undermining Communism, but the Europeans, primarily Germany, and to a much lesser degree France, England and Japan, were the prime beneficiaries in terms of securing the most productive industries and employing the better part of the skilled labor and engineers in the former Soviet bloc. By the end of the Clinton era and the bursting of the information technology speculative bubble, the European Union eclipsed the US in GNP, outperformed the US in accumulating trade surpluses and foreign debt management.
Market Versus Military Empire Building in the 1990’s
During the Bush-Clinton years, US military-driven empire-building vastly expanded its commitments in financing and providing troops into the Balkan and Iraq wars, military entry into Somalia, the bombing of the Sudan, the increased subsidy of Israel’s colonial wars, the Afghan wars, Colombia’s counter-insurgency and to a lesser extent the Philippine’s counter-insurgency and counter-separatist wars. While the US spent billions to prop up a gangster-ridden and corrupt KLA regime in Kosova in order to spend billions more in building a huge military base, Germany was reaping the economic benefits of its economic hegemony in the relatively prosperous regimes of Croatia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. While the US spent hundreds of billions in the First and Second Gulf Wars, China, the new emerging market-driven empire builder, was looking to sign lucrative oil and gas contracts in the Middle East, especially with Iran. While the US was backing an unpopular minority regime backed by its client Ethiopian military force in Somalia, China was signing major oil contracts in Sudan, Angola and Nigeria and even in Northern Somalia (Puntland). While the US military-centered empire-building state was giving away over $3 billion in military aid (plus transferring its most up-to-date military technology to competitor firms) per year to Israel, European, Asian and Latin American private and public enterprises were signing long-term lucrative contracts with the Gulf oil states as well as with Iran.
A clear sign of the long-term economic decay of the US global competitive position between 2002-2008 is evidenced by the fact that a 40% depreciation of the dollar has failed to substantially improve the US balance of payments, let alone produce a trade surplus. Despite the handicap of appreciating currencies, China, Germany and Japan continued to accumulate trade surpluses, especially with the US. While the US spent hundreds of billions in Asian wars, CIA propaganda and subversive operations in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Caribbean (Cuba/Venezuela) and the Caucuses, the principle beneficiaries were the revitalized European market-driven empire-builders and the newly emerging market empire builders.
While the US spends enormous sums in building new military bases surrounding Russia, including new offensive operations in Kosova, Poland and the Czech Republic, with new preparations for NATO bases in Georgia and the Ukraine, Russian, Chinese and European capital expands buying out or investing in privatized and public-private strategic mining, petrol and manufacturing enterprises in Africa, Latin America, Australia and the Gulf.
While China harnesses foreign capital, including major US MNCs to make itself the ‘manufacturing workshop of the world’, Germany with its high precision heavy manufacturers are prospering by ‘constructing the workshops’ for the Chinese. US manufacturers and productive capital flee to state-subsidized (via tax reductions and low interest rates) financial, real estate and speculative sectors, and go overseas to avoid high rent and fringe payments to US labor. The resulting decline of the domestic market and a shrinking base of industrially trained labor reinforce the overseas and speculative movements on US capital. These capitalist structural changes undermined the economic fundamentals underlying the financial sector.
The deterioration of the US economy became apparent as the speculative paper pyramid (sub-prime and credit crises) collapsed during the 2007-08 recession. The recycling of multiple layers of ‘exotic’ financial ‘instruments’ each more precarious than the other, each more divorced from any tangible productive unit in the real economy characterized this period. Their predictable collapse dragged the US into recession. Even among the big banks and financial houses there is no knowledge of the real value of the paper being traded or of the ‘material collateral’ (housing and commercial property being held). The fictitious economy revolves around unloading the devalued paper, to cover costs and lessen losses…and let the next holder of the paper face the risks and uncertainties. As a result there is a total lack of confidence in the market because the ‘objects’ up for sale have become so lacking of value, i.e. so intangible and unrelated to the real economy.
The decline of the real producer basis of goods and social services and the predominance of the paper economy accentuated the divergence between military-directed empire building and the global economic interests of the US. The paper economy is not directly influenced by imperialist militarism, as is the case with US MNC’s with physical assets at risk from imperial wars, armed resistance, the disruption of trade routes, the destruction of overseas markets and the disarticulation of access to minerals and energy sources.
The ascendancy of speculative finance capital coincides with the greater autonomy of the militarist empire builders over and against the residual influence of American manufacturing and commercial interests supporting market imperialism. The extraordinary role that the pro-Israel power bloc plays in shaping a bellicose Middle East foreign policy over and above what US oil companies looking to sign contracts with Arab countries exercised, can only be understood within the large upsurge of ‘militarist driven imperial policy’.
Washington’s unconditional support of Israel’s militarist colonial regime reflects two important structural changes in US empire building. One is the extraordinary organization and influence of the principle pro-Israel Jewish organization over local, regional, national legislative and executive bodies and in the mass media and financial institutions. The second change is the rise of a political class of executive and legislative militarist policy-makers, which has an affinity with Israeli colonialism and its offensive military strategy. Israel is one of the few – if not only – military-driven ‘emerging imperial powers’ and that is part of the reason for the ‘resonance’ between Jewish leaders in Israel and Washington policy-makers. This is the real basis of the often stated and affirmed ‘common interests and values’ between the two ‘countries’. Military-driven imperial powers, like the US and Israel, do not share ‘democratic values’ – as even the most superficial observer of their savage repression of their conquered peoples and nations (Iraq and Palestine) can attest – they share the military route to empire-building.
Historic Comparison of Market and Military Driven Imperialism
A rational cost efficient evaluation of the US major and minor military invasions demonstrates the high economic cost and low economic benefits to both the capitalist system as a whole and even to many key economic enterprises.
The US blockade and subsequent war with Japan ultimately unleashed the Asian national liberation movements, which undercut European, and US colonial-style military imperialism. The Korean War ignited the massive re-industrialization of Japan and created optimal conditions for Korea’s model of protectionism at home and free trade with the US (so-called Asian state-led export model). The result was the creation of two major manufacturing rivals to the US economic expansion in Asia, North America and later in the rest of the world.
The US invasion, colonial occupation and imperial war in Indochina and its subsequent defeat severely weakened the military capacity to subsequently defend global imperial interests and client states in Southern Africa, Iran and Nicaragua. More to the point, by concentrating resources on war-making the US lost markets to the emerging market empire-builders and diverted capital from increasing the productivity and productive forces which create market dominance.
In the broader picture, military and market driven imperialism, which coexisted and seemed to complement each other diverged in the period between 1963-1973, with the militarist faction gaining supremacy in directing US empire-building. The divergence was papered over by several instances of complementary activity such as the overthrow of President Allende in Chile on behalf of US MNCs and similar earlier cases as in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953) and in other countries where quick imperial victories over smaller countries did not seem to carry any significant economic or political costs.
The ascendancy of Reagan and the negative long-term economic impact of new arms buildup were obscured by the break-up of the Communist system and the Chinese and Vietnamese transitions to capitalism. The windfall gains to US economic interests in the former European communist countries, especially Russia, were largely based on pillaging existing resources in alliance with gangster-capitalists. Long-term, large-scale benefits were not due to US capitalist taking over and developing the forces of production and developing the internal markets of the ex-communist countries. The political and military gains that accrued to US military empire building obscured the continued loss of economic power in the world marketplace to the market-driven imperial powers. Moreover, China unleashed a large-scale, long-term process of dynamic capital accumulation, which in less than two decades displaced the US from manufacturing markets and challenged its access to energy markets.
In other words favorable resolution of the US-Soviet conflict led to their mutual economic decline. What is worse from a practical historical perspective, the military-driven empire builders saw their ‘victory’ over Communism as vindication and license to escalate their militarist approach to empire building. According to this line of argument, the Soviets fell because of military pressure, backed by ideological warfare. Moreover in the absence of a countervailing military pole, the Bush-Clinton-Bush Presidencies saw an open field for pursuing the military road to empire building.
From the Gulf, to the Gulf and Back to the Gulf : 1990-2008 (and beyond)
The first Bush Presidency assumed the military road to empire building but tried to avoid the high costs of occupation and colonization. The Israeli colonial model had to await the Zionist occupation of policy-making positions in later administrations. The first Iraq War was intended to project US imperial military power, secure US economic interests among the Gulf oil states (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) as well as expand Israeli influence in the Middle East. Most of all it was seen as the launching of a ‘New World Order; centered in US world supremacy, supported by docile allies and financed by rich Arab oil states.
Shortly after the Gulf War, the triple alliance, which emerged during the war, collapsed as Europe pursued its own market-driven empire in competition with the US, Saudi Arabia paid some of the US military expenditures and then abruptly ended its funding, and domestic opposition grew as the electorate demanded less imperial expenditures and the re-building of the domestic economy.
Military-Driven Empire-Building (MDE) and Zionism
The Zionist Power Configuration in the United States successfully secured from the White House and Congress massive sustained multi-billion dollar military and economic grant and aid packages for Israel throughout the 1980’s ensuring Israel’s military superiority in the Middle East. Yet both Presidents Reagan and Bush (father) tried to maintain a balance between the interests of major US oil multi-nationals working with Arab regimes on the one hand and on the other Israeli and Washington’s military-driven empire building (MEB).
Bush Senior’s attack of Iraq in the First Gulf War, greatly reduced Baghdad’s military capability but he refrained from destroying its armed forces or overthrowing Saddam Hussein as Israel and the ZPC were demanding at the time. Above all Bush did not want to destabilize the region for US oil deals in the Gulf, even as he imposed a US military presence to ensure dominance.
With the election of Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress, the MDE and the ZPC gained strategic positions in the elaboration and implementation of foreign policy. Madeleine Albright, ‘Sandy’ Berger, Dennis Ross, Cohen, and Martin Indyk and an army of lesser known functionaries, militarists and Zionists launched a series of wars, military attacks and severe sanctions against Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. They devastated their population (over 500,000 children died in Iraq as a direct result of US starvation sanctions), destroyed their national productive facilities and, intentionally disarticulated and fragmented their nations into violent ethno-tribal and religious mini-states. While Clinton embraced the military road to empire building, he was also totally committed to the financial sector of the US economy (in particular, the most speculative activities) by de-regulating all controls, oversight and constraints on ‘hedge funds’, investment banks and equity houses. Under the tutelage of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, the pro-Israel Alan Greenspan, the Clinton regime became the launching pad for the full conversion of the US into a speculation-driven economy, culminating in the dot-com bubble which burst in 2000-2001, and the massive Enron and World Com swindles leading up to the current financial meltdown of 2006-2008.
While the MDE gained a dominant role, the ascendance of speculative capital marginalized and eroded the political influence and economic weight of productive capital, forcing it overseas and/or to transfer funds into the financial-speculative sector. The socio-economic basis of market-driven empire-building (MDEB) was weakened relative to the militarists and the ZPC in setting the US foreign policy agenda. This new power configuration opened the door for the total takeover by these same forces during the 8 years of Bush (Junior)’s presidency. The latter quickly eliminated any residual influence of the market-driven imperialists, forcing the resignation of his first Treasury Secretary O’Neal and others. Even hybrid market-militarists like Colin Powell who went along with the global war strategy but raised tactical questions were subsequently forced into retirement.
MDE were in total control of the government in all spheres, from the elaboration of war propaganda, the build-up of a global network of terror and assassination teams, to colonial wars and the systematic use of torture abroad and the savaging of elementary freedoms at home. Within the MDE, the ZPC gained dominance, especially in the formulation and the implementation of total war strategies in Iraq and the unconditional backing of Israel’s genocidal politics in Gaza and the West Bank. Every sector of the government was geared to war, bellicose action and especially to subordinating economic policies to military practices informed by the military-driven Israeli colonization.
The convergence of policy and practice between the MDE and the ZPC within the highest levels of government and their mutual reinforcement, gave US foreign policy its extremist military character. Zionist cultural and media power provided an army of academic and journalistic ideologues and mass media platforms which the MDE previously lacked – and amplified their message. The linking of traditional US MDE and the emerging power of the Israeli-ZPC buttressed the spread of authoritarian controls and harsh and widespread censorship over any politician, intellectual or media critic of Israel and its unconditional supporters in the ZPC.
The joint forces of the MDE and ZPC have reshaped the US military command to serve their plans for new major wars – against Iran – and the prolongation and extension of wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere. The MDE have failed to pursue the free trade openings in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East – leaving the field wide open for entirely new trading and investment networks involving China, Europe, Japan, India, Russia and the Middle Eastern sovereign funds. Even with the onset of the recession in the US and the meltdown of the financial markets, the militarists have refused to change or alter their stranglehold on the budget and foreign policy, causing the government to resort to printing currency to finance the bailout of speculators and their investment banks.
Imperial Wars, Social Revolutions and Capitalist Restorations
The historical record demonstrates that imperial wars destroy the productive forces and social networks of targeted countries. In contrast, market-driven economic empire building gains hegemony via collaboration with local political and economic elites, taking control of strategic industries, minerals and energy via direct investments and loans, privatizations and denationalization, and favorable trade and monetary agreements. Market-driven empire building takes over, it does not destroy the productive forces; it does not demolish the social fabric, it reconstructs or ‘adjusts’ it to accommodate its accumulation needs.
The evolution of social revolutionary regimes in a post liberation period shows a common pattern reflecting the political-economic external constraints imposed by military imperialism. The revolutionary regimes expropriate and nationalize the major means of production, control foreign trade and organize the planning of the economy. They eliminate foreign control over strategic economic sectors, centralize political and economic control as well as redistribute land and income. In many cases these radical measures were imposed upon the revolutionary governments by imperial economic boycotts, the flight of capitalist and landlords, the non-cooperation of managers and technicians and by the necessity of reconstruction in the face of large-scale destruction. The US embargo and similar constraints on external financial aid have forced revolutionary governments to rely on the rationing of scarce resources for priority public projects, limiting its capacity to increase individual consumption.
As a result, the post-revolutionary regimes were forced to deal with market-driven empire builders. They contracted large-scale short-term and long-term trade agreements, joint investment ventures through equitable profit sharing agreements and a broad range of technological contracts involving royalty payments. In other words, given the unfavorable position of the revolutionary economy in the world market and the low level of development of the forces of production, the market-driven empire building countries were in a position to secure lucrative economic opportunities. In contrast, the military driven empire attempted to inflict maximum economic damage to compensate for its military defeat.
The revolutionary regimes under Communist leadership featured characteristics, which foreshadowed positive future relations with market-driven imperial countries. Their vertical leadership and concentrated political power facilitated quick and relatively easy changes from collectivist to neo-liberal policies, while hindering the democratic mechanisms, which might have corrected erroneous and harmful economic decisions. Secondly, unchecked power at the top in a time of scarcity led to the conversion of power into privilege, corruption and social inequalities. These developments created a wealthy nepotistic elite with an interest in deepening ties with their capitalist counterparts from the imperial states. These internal changes coincided with the interests of market-driven capitalists willing to establish lucrative ‘beach heads’ and relations with elite groups in the post-revolutionary society and state. Market-driven empire builders were attracted to the tight controls exercised over labor and the lack of competition from other military-driven imperial states.
Post-revolutionary economies continued to be embedded in the world capitalist marketplace and subject to its competitive demands. In the best of circumstances, even with a democratic and socially egalitarian leadership and relatively favorable world commodity prices, the revolutionary regime would need to balance the social demands of a socialist domestic economy (with demands for increases in income, social services and workplace improvement and consumer goods) and the world market demands for greater efficiency, increased capital investments, rising productivity and labor discipline. Given the built-in biases toward political and military security embedded in the bureaucratic centralist structures, it was not surprising that production would stagnate. The constraints and the centralized elites’ inability to micro-manage the economy beyond the period of reconstruction was one reason for stagnation. The other was that the regime would prefer a hierarchical organized capitalist structure (over any democratic changes from below), which would not challenge, but rather strengthen, the communist elite’s position in a ‘new’ eclectic system.
In other words there would be a dual transition from imperial-dominated extractive capitalism to centralized socialism which would entail a period of reconstruction and national unification with an organized and disciplined labor force. This would be followed by a transition to a centralized mixed state capitalist economy, increasingly penetrated by market-driven imperial capital.
Was ‘Socialism a Detour to Capitalism’? Were ‘Imperial Wars Necessary for Capitalist Expansion’?
The historical record documents the continued growth and expansion of market-driven empire building throughout the post World War II period, without wars, significant military intervention, boycotts, embargos or other offensive belligerent actions. The expansion took place in the context of non-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes. Germany’s market-driven empire builders traded with the Communist East, China and Russia before, during and after the fall of Communism, accumulating huge trade and productive advantages over the US. The same occurred with Japan with regard to China and other Asian communist countries.
The market imperialists did not depend, as some apologists for military imperialists argue ‘on the protective umbrella’ of US militarism, but on their superior position in the world market and the greater development of the forces of production, which allowed them to enter and secure favorable and lucrative economic positions.
In contrast, the US empire builders, who started the post-war 1945-50 period in a uniquely favorable position in the world market, wasted their massive economic resources in funding wars against successful revolutions - China, Korea, Indochina, Cuba, and now in prolonged colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billions more have been spent in numerous surrogate wars in Angola, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Chile with no economic payoffs for US MNCs over and against its European and Asian competition. The US imperial wars failed to enhance its economic empire. US Empire builders shifted massive resources away from producing goods for the international market and upgrading their industrial productivity in order to retain world and domestic market shares to its monstrous and wasteful military budgets. The result has been a steady decline of the US economic empire relative to its competitor market-driven empires. Ironically, when the centralized collectivist regimes eventually made the transition toward capitalism, it was because of their inner social and economic contradictions and not because of US military policies. The restoration of capitalism had little to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars in US military spending.
In contrast, the market-driven empires from the end of the 1940’s benefited from US imperial wars, by securing lucrative US military contracts and were able to concentrate their state expenditures and investment policies on securing overseas markets. They were in an ideal position to reap the benefits resulting from the socialist regimes’ transition to capitalism.
Given the emergence of post-Communist political and social ruling elites who blindly adhered to free market dogma with their corrupt, authoritarian and privileged political practices, in retrospect ‘socialism’ did appear as a ‘detour’ to capitalist restoration. However the structural changes of some communist political elites, especially in China and Vietnam, created the essential foundations for a capitalist take-off. They unified the country, educated and trained a healthy, disciplined work-force, launched basic industries, eliminated war lords and local ethnic fiefdoms. Subsequently Communist liberalization opened the door to the peaceful economic invasion of market-driven imperialism, safeguarded by a strong centralized state limiting any working class or nationalist opposition or protest. The Communist elites established a framework ideal for subsequent imperialist reentry and expansion.
The historical record makes it clear that imperial wars were not necessary for economic expansion. Empire-driven militarism thoroughly undermined the US long-term competitive position. If the driving force of empire building is economic conquest, then market-driven empires are far superior to military-driven empires. The goal of ‘colonial political dominance’, pursued by military-driven imperialists, is in the modern period, a chimera, as demonstrated by a history of political defeats in Asia, Africa, Latin America and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military-Driven Imperialism Today and the Newly Emerging Imperial Powers
One might conclude that the US imperial leadership would have ‘learned the lessons’ of failed military-driven empire building from the their experience over the past 50 years. But as we pointed out earlier, the internal structural dynamics of the US economy and the reconfiguration of the political elite directing the political system have led in the opposite direction. The 21st century has witnessed the ascendancy of the most zealous exponents of military-driven empire building in the entire post-World War II period. An overview of US imperial policy shows the proliferation and intensification of direct wars, surrogate wars, military confrontations in which the US favors militarist allies over countries with lucrative markets and profitable investment opportunities in natural resources.
Market-Driven Versus Militarist Alliances
The militarist and Zionist takeover of US empire building in the 21st century is manifested in their strategic decisions, alliances and priorities, each and everyone of which is diametrically opposed to market-based empire building and ultimately doomed to further erode the position of the US empire.
The newly emerging empire building states (like China), rely almost exclusively on market-driven strategies designed by political elites linked to industrialists and technocrats. They are quickly dominating manufacturing markets, accessing strategic raw materials and securing long-term trade agreements at the expense of the increasingly militarist, but internally deteriorating US empire. Near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the imperial policies of the US militarists and Zionists have demonstrated their willingness to make deep sacrifices in market growth by choosing to align the US with costly and dubious militarist regimes in all regions of the world, beginning with the US alliance with Israel.
In the Middle East, unlike market-driven empire builders, the US militarists and Zionists have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying many lucrative oil deals and joint ventures and leading to the quadrupling the world price of oil. Instead they have invested (and lost) over a trillion dollars in non-productive, non-economic, military activity. Militarist imperialism has weakened the entire economic fabric of the US Empire without any ‘compensatory’ gains on the military side. The prolonged war in Iraq (6 years and running) has demoralized the US ground troops and weakened US military capability to engage in any ‘third front’ in which the US has important economic interests. US liberal market-driven imperialists describe this as ‘imperial overstretch’. While the US invests in non-productive and unsuccessful military conquests, profoundly indebting the domestic economy, China, India, Korea, Russia, Europe, the Middle East and even Latin America pile up trade surpluses while expanding their economic empires via private and sovereign investments.
Largely because of the political fusion and strategic convergence of interests between militarists and Zionists, the US empire builders choose to sacrifice lucrative ties to the richest markets among the Gulf State in the Middle East and among predominantly Muslim countries in order to favor Israel, a resource-poor militarist-colonial state with a third rate market for goods and investments. US militarists have subjected America’s empire building to strategies in the Middle East, which mostly favor Israel’s colonial and regional hegemonic drive. This places the US on a direct confrontational path with Lebanon, Syria, Iran and even the Gulf States who feel threatened by Israel’s constant resort to offensive military power to attack its neighbors. No Arab oil country, no matter how conservative and pro-capitalist, can afford to open its economy to the US, if it believes that Washington will subordinate it to the vision of a militarist Israel-US dominated sphere of influence. By unconditionally backing Israel’s colonial and hegemonic interests, American militarists have gained a strategic domestic political ally (the Zionist Power Configuration) but it has come at an enormous cost to US economic empire building. Moreover the Israeli state has run the biggest and most aggressive espionage operations in the US of any country since the fall of the USSR, thus calling into question its ‘security benefits.’ The multiplicity of enemies resulting from Israel’s racist-colonialist policies ensures that the US will be engaged in decades of war, or as long as the US taxpayers can sustain the demands of the military empire.
Military-driven empire building is manifested not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. In Africa, the US backs the Ethiopian military regime and its weak and isolated puppet regime in Somalia against an Islamist-secular nationalist coalition representing the majority of Somalis. Washington and Israel finance and arm the Sudanese separatists in Darfur against the oil-rich central Sudanese government. In both Somalia and Sudan, China and other emerging imperial powers have secured access to strategic oil rich sites. While the US spends billions of dollars on endless wars, propaganda campaigns and sanctions, China reaps hundreds of millions in profits. While the US financed African wars destroy the entire fabric of production and society in Somalia, militarizing impoverished Ethiopia, the Chinese build roads and infrastructure to facilitate exports in both the Sudan and Northern Somalia. Pentagon-directed colonial wars in Africa, conducted by surrogates, undermine the political support of economic collaborators while the market-driven empires enhance their ties with local economic elites and political rulers.
In Latin America, the US military imperialists have so far contributed $6 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia’s militarist regime during the 21st century, destroying the entire social fabric in the rural areas, while the rest of Latin America expanded their ties with Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in failed efforts to destabilize Venezuela’s nationalist-democratic Chavez Government. As a result US capitalists have lost out on billions of dollars in investments and trading contracts in Venezuela to China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Iran. By making Colombia the centerpiece of their South American policy, US militarist empire builders have lost out on the enormously lucrative economic opportunities accompanying the commodity price boom in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.
In Asia, despite the deepening US economic dependence on China to sustain to the rapidly depreciating US dollar (China holds $1.5 trillion dollars in foreign reserves which has lost 60% of its value since 2002), the US militarists still engage in sustained anti-Chinese propaganda campaigns and highly provocative incidents. The US-backed violent protests against the Chinese presence in Tibet fomented by the Dalai Lama and CIA-funded exile organizations is only the more recent example. American Zionists have directed a political campaign against the expansion of Chinese investments and contracts (market-driven imperialism) in the Sudan. The Zionist role in the so-called ‘Darfur’ campaign is based on Sudan’s support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza.
China has so far generally overlooked US military provocations such as the shooting down of a Chinese fighter plane, spy flights over Chinese offshore territory, the deliberate bombing of its embassy in Belgrade and the sale of advanced missiles to Taiwan. The US financing of the separatist demonstrations among Tibetan exiles is designed to tarnish China’s image in the lead up to its hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. China’s market-driven empire builders ignore US military provocations because they had little effect on Chinese overseas and domestic economic expansion. Nevertheless China has increased spending on modernizing its military defense capabilities. More significantly, as the US economy declines and enters a deep recession in 2008, and as the dollar continues to fall ($1.60 to 1 Euro as of May 2008), China has turned toward the Asian, European, Middle Eastern markets. Asian markets now account for 50% of world trade growth as of 2008. In 2007 China increased production and the development of its market to sustain growth rates at least five times higher than the militarist-dominated US Empire. Even more significant, the great majority of Chinese exporters (over 800,000) have shifted payments to Euros, Yen, Pounds Sterling and the Renminbi in its trading with non-US trading partners.
Russia, shaking off the shackles of Clinton-backed pillage during the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years in the 1990’s, has taken off during the 21st century under the leadership of President Putin. US military-driven empire builders were able to integrate and subordinate all the former members of the Russia-centered Warsaw Pact into the US-dominated NATO. In the 21st Century, the Russian economy has expanded rapidly between 6% and 8%, established majority control over strategic resources and has sought to lessen its vulnerability to US military encirclement. While Germany, Italy and most of the major Asian trading countries (China, India and Japan) have obtained lucrative trading and investment agreements with Russia, the US militarists have concentrated on military encroachment along Russia’s European and Asian borders. The US is pushing to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and preparing to station offensive, so-called ‘missile shields’ in Poland and the Czech Republic on the absurd pretext that such highly sophisticated installations are intended to protect Western Europe from attacks by distant Iran rather than target Moscow, just 5 minutes away by missile attack.
Conclusion
US military-driven empire building has made costly military alliances with peripheral countries at a catastrophic economic cost. The persistence of militarist empire builders has systematically undercut market-driven empire building and has pushed the domestic US economy to near bankruptcy. The twin motors of the contemporary empire and domestic economy, speculative finance and militarism, have driven the US economy backwards at the same time that established and emerging imperial competitors are advancing.
Comparative historical data covering the entire half-century to the present demonstrates that European, Japanese and now China and India’s market-driven expansion has been far more successful in securing market shares, developing the productive forces and accessing strategic raw materials than US military empire building.
Market-driven empire building has both resulted from and created a strong civil society in which socio-economic priorities take precedent in defining domestic and foreign economic policy over military priorities and definitions of international reality. US empire builders, academics and political advisers have interpreted, what they call ‘the rise of US global power its victory in the Cold War and the decline of Communism’ as a vindication of military-driven empire building. They have ignored the rise of capitalist competitors and the relative and absolute decline of the US as an economic power. It can be argued that the newly emerging market-driven former Communist countries (like China and Russia) represent a greater global challenge to the US Empire than the previous stagnant bureaucratic Communist regimes.
Militarism is deeply embedded in the structure, ideology and policies of the entire US governing class, its political parties, the executive and legislative branches, the judiciary and the armed forces. Over the same half-century countervailing market-driven empire builders have declined as a defining force in the formulation of foreign policy in the US. The growing encroachment of the militant Zionist power configuration within the policy-making directorate has been greatly facilitated by the ascendancy of militarism and the relative decline of economic-empire building.
The long period of incremental decline of US economic empire building and the trillions of dollars wasted by military-driven empire building has come to a climax. In the new millennium with the profound devaluation of the imperial currency (the dollar), the huge indebtedness and loss of markets Washington is totally dependent on the good will of its commercial partners to keep accepting constantly devalued dollars in exchange for essential commodities.
The immediate outcome is likely to be a major domestic crisis, which could be accompanied by one more desperate and futile military attack on Iran and/or Venezuela or a forced confrontation with China and/or Russia. Desperate acts of declining military empires have historically accelerated the demise of imperial rulers.
Out of the debris of failed empires two possible outcomes could emerge. A new rabidly nationalist authoritarian regime or the re-birth of a republic based on the reconstruction of a productive economy centered on the domestic market and social priorities, free from foreign entanglements and power configurations whose only purpose is to subordinate the republic to overseas colonial ambitions.
The dismantling of the military driven empire will not occur ‘by choice’ but by imposed circumstances, including the incapacity of domestic institutions to continue to finance it. The demise of the militarist governing class will follow the collapse of their domestic economic foundations. The result could be a withered empire, or a democratic republic. When and how a new political leadership will emerge will depend on the nature of the social configurations, which undertake the reconstruction of US society.
James Petras is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by James Petras
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8841
Bush-Cheney Israel Disinformation Campaign to Justify an Attack on Iran
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8880
Global Research, May 2, 2008
Campaign's Overall Design and Objectives
The Bush administration and Israeli government appear to be operating a joint disinformation campaign, whose objective is to establish a media based alternative reality from which to accuse Syria/Iran of developing nuclear weapons with help from North Korea, by using a real event combined with planted stories establishing a defining narrative. This accusation in turn is augmented with stories about Iranian sponsored "Special Groups killing US troops in Iraq" and purported naval incidents the Persian Gulf, creating self-reinforcing, media based crisis.
The immediate purpose of this disinformation campaign is apparently to help justify the planned US attack on a wide range of Iranian industrial and military targets. And, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the objective is to swiftly inflict substantial damage to the national infrastructure of Iran, followed by an abrupt cessation of attacks and a call for a cease-fire to prevent substantial Iranian retaliation. Again, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the US likely will resist calls for a cessation of the attacks until a significant portion of the Iranian target set has been addressed, then it will accept calls for a cease-fire and demand Iran do the same.
Any subsequent attacks by Iran would probably be characterized by the US as Iranian aggression, further justifying US follow-up attacks on remaining Iranian assets as defensive measures. The transparent duplicity of such US actions and claims is not a problem because US corporate media is prepared to report repeatedly the administration's claims with little or no criticism or mention of alternative assessments. In other words, subjecting its audience to blatant propaganda masquerading as journalism, which is effective as it is because of US corporate media's quantitative monopoly on information provided the public.
As far as can be determined, no credible or even plausible evidence for any of these claims has been presented by the Bush administration, let alone by any independent verification of such claims. Instead, in the pattern similar to the disinformation campaign before the invasion of Iraq, questions about these claims, when raised at all, are ignored or "answered" with repeated or additional claims. Essentially this disinformation campaign, as all such campaigns, is an elaborate set of lies to deceive an enemy, in this case the Unites States Congress and the American people, in pursuit of Bush administration secret policy objectives for the benefit of a foreign government.
Campaign's Origin
The origins of this disinformation campaign was the the Bush administration's appreciation in the late summer of 2007 that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) subsequently released in November 2007 would undermine its attempts to claim Iran was developing nuclear weapons, the then primary justification for an attack on Iran. When it became clear to the Bush administration that the intelligence community would issue the 11/7/07 NIE, completely undermining the administration's claims of Iranian nuclear weapons development, they apparently decided, instead of accepting this judgment or objecting to it within official channels, that an alternative foundation needed to be established for its planned attack on Iran. This alternative would bypass not only the US intelligence community's collective assessments, but also the judgments of the United States' Joint Chiefs of Staff military command.
Essentially, the Bush administration, in cooperation with a foreign government, Israel, decided to bypass the intelligence community as well as the military commands of the United States, in order undertake attacks by US military forces on a foreign nation, Iran, by deliberately ignoring and undermining the judgments of authorities charged by law with informing the US Congress about such data so it can make sound judgments in exercise of its US Constitutional authority over matters of war and peace. Apparently the Bush administration hopes for a fait accompli after attacks on Iran, leaving the next administration with a region-wide tar baby, with Israel the only remaining "friend" in the region, otherwise populated with outright enemies or alienated former allies.
In addition, a likely last minute Israel-Palestinian peace deal negotiated with the unelected Fatah based faction, in which Israel would be granted costly long term aid and security assurances, in exchange for Israeli commitments of limited value and voracity. With Israel positioned to attempt an alliance with the Kurds upon the expected partition of Iraq, following an inevitable US withdrawal. Again, as with the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration's planning is front loaded, focused on the mechanics of military operations or manipulating public and official opinion, with little or no thought given to what happens next, let alone second or third order consequences, except the general intention to take maximum political advantage of any resulting crisis.
On the face of it, some elements of the Bush administration's undertaking appear to be acts of treason, by giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States, in as much as it aided Israel to act in its own interests and without regard for, or to the detriment of, the manifest interests of the United States; however, we defer such judgments to another, more appropriate venue, and only pursue our limited assessment of the administration's actions with regard to their immediate objectives.
First Overt Act
The first known overt act in pursuit of this effort, besides Israel's attack on Syria, was a letter Bush wrote to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, as reported by the BBC on December 6, 2007, wherein Bush asked the Korean leader to reveal any assistance to others in the development of nuclear weapons. While a matter of speculation, this letter combined with other demands by the US government, were meant to pressure the North Korean government into making accusations against Syrian and Iran, in exchange for concessions in the form of released impounded funds and oil shipments promised as by part of the US-North Korean agreement on its weapons development program. According to the NYTimes Dec 15, 2007 report, Bush wrote a letter to the North Korean leader demanding, among other things, he reveal who he have helped with his nuclear technology, as specified in the nuclear declaration or so-called "come clean" section of the US-North Korean agreement.
Because the usual glacial movements of North Korea's foreign policy were incompatible with Bush administration's Iranian timetable, attempts were made to pressure North Korea to give in sooner to US demands by the end of the year, but as U.S. Will Hold North Korea to Nuclear Commitments by Reuters 01/03/08 reports, these efforts failed thus far. Instead, North Korea made a forthright statement, North Korea Says Earlier Disclosure Was Enough by The New York Times 01/05/08, which repudiated such claims. Since this was contrary to Bush administration objectives, it was apparently largely ignore by US corporate media. Pressure continues on North Korea to make such admissions.
Change of Policy
Overall, it appears the sudden US agreement with North Korea, after years of the usual "Bush diplomacy" whereby he refuses to speak to the other side until they concede every major point of contention, was an attempt to clear the decks for attacks against Iran. Among the most informed and insightful observers of national security affairs, Seymour M. Hersh, in a video interview at The New Yorker, suggested that a US agreement with North Korea would be among the clearest signs of US preparation for an attack on Iran. He further discusses, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Feb 7, 2008, US intentions and the likelihood Cheney may have overrode US Joint Chiefs of Staff objections to the attack.
As part of the administration's disinformation campaign, Israel attacked a Syrian site, which was later linked to North Korea through a set of stories released over time to give the impression of information being slowly revealed over time, hoping to establish "facts" more firmly than making accusations at the time of the attack on Syria.
US Corporate Media's Role in the Nuclear Weapons Development Story
It appears that certain media outlets were a party to the disinformation campaign, in that they misled their readers and others with stories clearly designed to establish the impression that North Korea was helping Syria, and likely Iran, to develop a nuclear program, to be conveniently confused in the public's mind with the far more costly and complex development of nuclear weapons. Among those noted, Harretz, the Washington Post and New York Times appear to have been willing conduits of this disinformation campaign, since it would strain all credulity to believe they themselves were deceived, especially since no effort was made to report on other observers who question the validity of these claims:
Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’, Sunday Times, Sept 16, 2007
Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Nuclear Site, Washington Post, Sept 21, 2007
Israel Admits To Sept. Air Attack In Syria, CBS News Oct 2, 2007
Israel Struck Syrian Nuclear Project, Analysts Say, NYTimes Oct 14, 2007
Photographs Said to Show Israeli Target Inside Syria, Washington Post Oct 24, 2007
North Koreans said killed in IAF strike on alleged Syria nuclear reactor site, Harretz Staff and Reuters, Apr 28, 2008
It should be noted: All of these ginned-up, hand ringing stories about programs "to develop the capability; to learn technologies; to establish potentials for securing; etc.," not once mention that Israel is armed with several hundred nuclear warheads, some of which are aboard submarines capable of attacking Europe, Russia and the US.
A New Casus Belli: "Iran Is Killing US Troops"
The Bush administration has augmented and subordinated the nuclear issue and naval incidents as casus belli to the "Iran is killing US troops" propaganda offensive, which immerged with the invention of the so-called "Special Groups" by the US military command, first mentioned by the US Military Command in Iraq on July 2, 2007. They took on new life at the end of March 2008, as reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP) on March 26, 2008, when military spokesman Major General Kevin Bergner, as part of the US Military's effort to "document" Iranian sponsored operations in Iraq, revealed these "Iranian-supported Special Group criminals" were apparently and suddenly everywhere.
Within a month, hundreds of stories in the US corporate media reported all about these "Special Groups", almost without exception identifying them as Iranian trained and fielded. The NYTimes reported by April 24, 2008 that, "73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special groups.'” according to "Senior officers in the American division that secures the capital." As far as can be determined no credible or even plausible evidence for such groups has been presented by the US Military command in Iraq. Clearly, weapons stamped with Iranian manufacturing labels, while subject to counterfeiting, would mean little, even if genuine, in as much as such small arms are trafficked throughout the Middle East and indicate nothing about the actions of the government of Iran. Instead, in a pattern similar to the run up to the invasion of Iraq, questions about these claims, are ignored or met with additional claims.
By the time General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testified before the US Congress in early April, the "special groups" were an established element in the alternative reality maintained by official Washington and US corporate media. In addition, the ever compliant Congress allowed the two to testify for just a single day before the Senate and another day before the House committees in a mockery of oversight, during which not much was made of the question as to whether these claims about "special groups", even if true, legally justified attacking Iran under international law.
It is highly likely arrests of "Iranian agents" and weapons store seizures of "Iranian weapons" will continue, along with "counter infiltration" operations along the Syrian and Iranian borders.
The New York Times Particularly Duplicitous
The New York Times in particular, after its public vows to do better following exposure of its reporter Judith Miller, who made a significant contribution the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" disinformation campaign run out of Cheney's office prior to the invasion of Iraq that ultimately proved to be totally false, now seems to have slipped back into its old habit of blatant pro-Israel coverage and disinformation, while objecting in its editorial page to the very policies it advances in its reporting, making its practices especially duplicitous and irresponsible, given its undisputed influence both on official Washington and the rest of US corporate media.
In another example, a NYTimes Apr 26, 2008 article "Questions Linger on Scope of Iran’s Threat in Iraq" that nominally purports to question the US claims about Iranian/Iraqi "Special Groups" and Iranian involvement in training and arming fighters in Iraq; in fact, reinforces such claims using "directly or indirectly quoted unnamed officials an astounding 30 times," according to an insightful analysis of the article by Jeff Huber "When Did Iran Start Beating Its Wife Again?". The importance of the "Special Groups" claims is clear in that the Bush administration has shifted part of justification for a war with Iran to the charge that "Iran is kill US troops in Iraq", adding to this to its "warnings" about naval incidents in Persian Gulf and nuclear weapons development as Casus Belli options.
Recent encounters involving US and Iranian naval vessels show a evolution toward a much more aggressive and manipulative posture in the Bush administration's characterization of these events. The widely reported incident between US and Iranian vessels on January 6, 2008 in the Strait of Hormuz was actually the third such recent encounter. The first two encounters occurred in December 2007, during one of which on December 19, 2007 the USS Whidbey Island fired warning shots toward an approaching Iranian vessel, causing the Iranian vessel to alter course. The first two encounters passed unreported at the time and were largely routine for the area of operations.
However, the third encounter on January 6, 2008 was not only characterized as a far more grave "incident" by official Washington, accompanied by reports by official US sources of threats made against the US vessels, based on video and voice transmission "evidence" released by the Pentagon to vast coverage by US corporate media. Examination of the voice transmission recordings indicated the actual segment containing the only threat was of doubtful authenticity; and, a later release of an Iranian video of the same incident indicated the Pentagon had mischaracterized its own video, revealing another blatant disinformation effort, but received little coverage in US corporate media.
Another two naval incidents have been hyped by US corporate media, one in the Persian Gulf where a US military chartered cargo vessel, Western Venture, fired warning shots at approaching unidentified small boats without known injuries or damage. While the media attention added to regional tensions and increased oil prices, the incident was much like the other incident at the entrance to Suez Canal, except in that case a boat borne local vendor was shot to death by personnel aboard a US military chartered vessel Global Patriot. Needless to say the dead vendor was of little note in US corporate media.
Finally, the Accusations and Warnings
Perhaps the most transparent effort to link the alleged Syrian and North Korean reactors is the Apr 25, 2008 report in the BBC, which included pictures provided the CIA that "said to have been obtained by Israel - showed striking similarities between the Syrian facility and the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, the US said." The report goes on to note: "The CIA briefing and statement coincides with the end of a two-day meeting between US and North Korean officials on Pyongyang's nuclear programme, which both sides say have gone well - fuelling speculation that a deal may be imminent." What this "deal" is remains to be seen, but bribes paid to a foreign government (North Korea) in exchange for accusations against another foreign government (Syria), in order to justify claims against a third foreign government (Iran) are hardly the stuff upon which grave policy decisions (going to war with Iran) should be made. Unless your objective is to lead the US into yet another war no matter what the facts actually are, as the Bush administration and Israel appear to be trying to do.
Finally, we have Bush himself taking the money shot in the Israeli press, with a truly bizarre parlaying of the accusations against Syria into a warning to Iran: Bush: Revealing details of attack on Syrian site was message to Iran, in a Haaretz Staff and Reuters, Apr 29, 2008, stating that "U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday he released U.S. intelligence about the nuclear facility that Israel bombed in Syria in September so as to put pressure on North Korea and send a message to Iran that it could not hide its own nuclear program." Apart from the fact that a nuclear reactor is not proof of a weapons program in Syria, Iran is not Syria, any more than Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks on the US.
These Bush "warnings" have become a mainstay of US corporate media, in which often baseless threats against others are portrayed as "last, best efforts" to change alleged behavior before action is reluctantly taken, after giving the ever-preferable "diplomacy" a chance. The most blatant example of this is the number of times Saddam Hussein was "warned" about "weapons of mass destruction" and we were all warned about not letting the "smoking gun being the mushroom cloud" as well as warning about his final chances to "come clean." The added virtue of "warnings" is they contain an embedded assertion that the warned party knows full well the truth of the accusation as does the one issuing the warning, as well implying a reasonableness in that the target need only comply to avoid getting what they would otherwise deserve.
Should North Korea finally agree, at likely unknown cost, to "come clean" and mention help to Syria or Iran, such bribery is likely to be no more credible than confessions of tortured prisoners in the Bush administration's special prisons, whether they be "Iranian Agents" or "Terrorists" turned over to US authorities as part of the US's far flung bounty programs. After all, we have all become prisoners to the attendant lunacies of the Bush administration and US corporate media's alternative reality, in which new "warnings" based on disinformation lurk: hair-trigger "facts" poised to "provoke" the US into "defending" itself by attacking Iran, including nuclear program/weapons development; "Special Groups" killing US troops in Iraq; and, hostile naval incidents. By the time time the attack on Iran comes, the US corporate media will be asking why it took the US so long to "react."
author's website: www.concordbridge.net
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8880
Global Research, May 2, 2008
Campaign's Overall Design and Objectives
The Bush administration and Israeli government appear to be operating a joint disinformation campaign, whose objective is to establish a media based alternative reality from which to accuse Syria/Iran of developing nuclear weapons with help from North Korea, by using a real event combined with planted stories establishing a defining narrative. This accusation in turn is augmented with stories about Iranian sponsored "Special Groups killing US troops in Iraq" and purported naval incidents the Persian Gulf, creating self-reinforcing, media based crisis.
The immediate purpose of this disinformation campaign is apparently to help justify the planned US attack on a wide range of Iranian industrial and military targets. And, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the objective is to swiftly inflict substantial damage to the national infrastructure of Iran, followed by an abrupt cessation of attacks and a call for a cease-fire to prevent substantial Iranian retaliation. Again, as in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, the US likely will resist calls for a cessation of the attacks until a significant portion of the Iranian target set has been addressed, then it will accept calls for a cease-fire and demand Iran do the same.
Any subsequent attacks by Iran would probably be characterized by the US as Iranian aggression, further justifying US follow-up attacks on remaining Iranian assets as defensive measures. The transparent duplicity of such US actions and claims is not a problem because US corporate media is prepared to report repeatedly the administration's claims with little or no criticism or mention of alternative assessments. In other words, subjecting its audience to blatant propaganda masquerading as journalism, which is effective as it is because of US corporate media's quantitative monopoly on information provided the public.
As far as can be determined, no credible or even plausible evidence for any of these claims has been presented by the Bush administration, let alone by any independent verification of such claims. Instead, in the pattern similar to the disinformation campaign before the invasion of Iraq, questions about these claims, when raised at all, are ignored or "answered" with repeated or additional claims. Essentially this disinformation campaign, as all such campaigns, is an elaborate set of lies to deceive an enemy, in this case the Unites States Congress and the American people, in pursuit of Bush administration secret policy objectives for the benefit of a foreign government.
Campaign's Origin
The origins of this disinformation campaign was the the Bush administration's appreciation in the late summer of 2007 that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) subsequently released in November 2007 would undermine its attempts to claim Iran was developing nuclear weapons, the then primary justification for an attack on Iran. When it became clear to the Bush administration that the intelligence community would issue the 11/7/07 NIE, completely undermining the administration's claims of Iranian nuclear weapons development, they apparently decided, instead of accepting this judgment or objecting to it within official channels, that an alternative foundation needed to be established for its planned attack on Iran. This alternative would bypass not only the US intelligence community's collective assessments, but also the judgments of the United States' Joint Chiefs of Staff military command.
Essentially, the Bush administration, in cooperation with a foreign government, Israel, decided to bypass the intelligence community as well as the military commands of the United States, in order undertake attacks by US military forces on a foreign nation, Iran, by deliberately ignoring and undermining the judgments of authorities charged by law with informing the US Congress about such data so it can make sound judgments in exercise of its US Constitutional authority over matters of war and peace. Apparently the Bush administration hopes for a fait accompli after attacks on Iran, leaving the next administration with a region-wide tar baby, with Israel the only remaining "friend" in the region, otherwise populated with outright enemies or alienated former allies.
In addition, a likely last minute Israel-Palestinian peace deal negotiated with the unelected Fatah based faction, in which Israel would be granted costly long term aid and security assurances, in exchange for Israeli commitments of limited value and voracity. With Israel positioned to attempt an alliance with the Kurds upon the expected partition of Iraq, following an inevitable US withdrawal. Again, as with the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration's planning is front loaded, focused on the mechanics of military operations or manipulating public and official opinion, with little or no thought given to what happens next, let alone second or third order consequences, except the general intention to take maximum political advantage of any resulting crisis.
On the face of it, some elements of the Bush administration's undertaking appear to be acts of treason, by giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States, in as much as it aided Israel to act in its own interests and without regard for, or to the detriment of, the manifest interests of the United States; however, we defer such judgments to another, more appropriate venue, and only pursue our limited assessment of the administration's actions with regard to their immediate objectives.
First Overt Act
The first known overt act in pursuit of this effort, besides Israel's attack on Syria, was a letter Bush wrote to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, as reported by the BBC on December 6, 2007, wherein Bush asked the Korean leader to reveal any assistance to others in the development of nuclear weapons. While a matter of speculation, this letter combined with other demands by the US government, were meant to pressure the North Korean government into making accusations against Syrian and Iran, in exchange for concessions in the form of released impounded funds and oil shipments promised as by part of the US-North Korean agreement on its weapons development program. According to the NYTimes Dec 15, 2007 report, Bush wrote a letter to the North Korean leader demanding, among other things, he reveal who he have helped with his nuclear technology, as specified in the nuclear declaration or so-called "come clean" section of the US-North Korean agreement.
Because the usual glacial movements of North Korea's foreign policy were incompatible with Bush administration's Iranian timetable, attempts were made to pressure North Korea to give in sooner to US demands by the end of the year, but as U.S. Will Hold North Korea to Nuclear Commitments by Reuters 01/03/08 reports, these efforts failed thus far. Instead, North Korea made a forthright statement, North Korea Says Earlier Disclosure Was Enough by The New York Times 01/05/08, which repudiated such claims. Since this was contrary to Bush administration objectives, it was apparently largely ignore by US corporate media. Pressure continues on North Korea to make such admissions.
Change of Policy
Overall, it appears the sudden US agreement with North Korea, after years of the usual "Bush diplomacy" whereby he refuses to speak to the other side until they concede every major point of contention, was an attempt to clear the decks for attacks against Iran. Among the most informed and insightful observers of national security affairs, Seymour M. Hersh, in a video interview at The New Yorker, suggested that a US agreement with North Korea would be among the clearest signs of US preparation for an attack on Iran. He further discusses, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Feb 7, 2008, US intentions and the likelihood Cheney may have overrode US Joint Chiefs of Staff objections to the attack.
As part of the administration's disinformation campaign, Israel attacked a Syrian site, which was later linked to North Korea through a set of stories released over time to give the impression of information being slowly revealed over time, hoping to establish "facts" more firmly than making accusations at the time of the attack on Syria.
US Corporate Media's Role in the Nuclear Weapons Development Story
It appears that certain media outlets were a party to the disinformation campaign, in that they misled their readers and others with stories clearly designed to establish the impression that North Korea was helping Syria, and likely Iran, to develop a nuclear program, to be conveniently confused in the public's mind with the far more costly and complex development of nuclear weapons. Among those noted, Harretz, the Washington Post and New York Times appear to have been willing conduits of this disinformation campaign, since it would strain all credulity to believe they themselves were deceived, especially since no effort was made to report on other observers who question the validity of these claims:
Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’, Sunday Times, Sept 16, 2007
Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Nuclear Site, Washington Post, Sept 21, 2007
Israel Admits To Sept. Air Attack In Syria, CBS News Oct 2, 2007
Israel Struck Syrian Nuclear Project, Analysts Say, NYTimes Oct 14, 2007
Photographs Said to Show Israeli Target Inside Syria, Washington Post Oct 24, 2007
North Koreans said killed in IAF strike on alleged Syria nuclear reactor site, Harretz Staff and Reuters, Apr 28, 2008
It should be noted: All of these ginned-up, hand ringing stories about programs "to develop the capability; to learn technologies; to establish potentials for securing; etc.," not once mention that Israel is armed with several hundred nuclear warheads, some of which are aboard submarines capable of attacking Europe, Russia and the US.
A New Casus Belli: "Iran Is Killing US Troops"
The Bush administration has augmented and subordinated the nuclear issue and naval incidents as casus belli to the "Iran is killing US troops" propaganda offensive, which immerged with the invention of the so-called "Special Groups" by the US military command, first mentioned by the US Military Command in Iraq on July 2, 2007. They took on new life at the end of March 2008, as reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP) on March 26, 2008, when military spokesman Major General Kevin Bergner, as part of the US Military's effort to "document" Iranian sponsored operations in Iraq, revealed these "Iranian-supported Special Group criminals" were apparently and suddenly everywhere.
Within a month, hundreds of stories in the US corporate media reported all about these "Special Groups", almost without exception identifying them as Iranian trained and fielded. The NYTimes reported by April 24, 2008 that, "73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special groups.'” according to "Senior officers in the American division that secures the capital." As far as can be determined no credible or even plausible evidence for such groups has been presented by the US Military command in Iraq. Clearly, weapons stamped with Iranian manufacturing labels, while subject to counterfeiting, would mean little, even if genuine, in as much as such small arms are trafficked throughout the Middle East and indicate nothing about the actions of the government of Iran. Instead, in a pattern similar to the run up to the invasion of Iraq, questions about these claims, are ignored or met with additional claims.
By the time General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker testified before the US Congress in early April, the "special groups" were an established element in the alternative reality maintained by official Washington and US corporate media. In addition, the ever compliant Congress allowed the two to testify for just a single day before the Senate and another day before the House committees in a mockery of oversight, during which not much was made of the question as to whether these claims about "special groups", even if true, legally justified attacking Iran under international law.
It is highly likely arrests of "Iranian agents" and weapons store seizures of "Iranian weapons" will continue, along with "counter infiltration" operations along the Syrian and Iranian borders.
The New York Times Particularly Duplicitous
The New York Times in particular, after its public vows to do better following exposure of its reporter Judith Miller, who made a significant contribution the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" disinformation campaign run out of Cheney's office prior to the invasion of Iraq that ultimately proved to be totally false, now seems to have slipped back into its old habit of blatant pro-Israel coverage and disinformation, while objecting in its editorial page to the very policies it advances in its reporting, making its practices especially duplicitous and irresponsible, given its undisputed influence both on official Washington and the rest of US corporate media.
In another example, a NYTimes Apr 26, 2008 article "Questions Linger on Scope of Iran’s Threat in Iraq" that nominally purports to question the US claims about Iranian/Iraqi "Special Groups" and Iranian involvement in training and arming fighters in Iraq; in fact, reinforces such claims using "directly or indirectly quoted unnamed officials an astounding 30 times," according to an insightful analysis of the article by Jeff Huber "When Did Iran Start Beating Its Wife Again?". The importance of the "Special Groups" claims is clear in that the Bush administration has shifted part of justification for a war with Iran to the charge that "Iran is kill US troops in Iraq", adding to this to its "warnings" about naval incidents in Persian Gulf and nuclear weapons development as Casus Belli options.
Recent encounters involving US and Iranian naval vessels show a evolution toward a much more aggressive and manipulative posture in the Bush administration's characterization of these events. The widely reported incident between US and Iranian vessels on January 6, 2008 in the Strait of Hormuz was actually the third such recent encounter. The first two encounters occurred in December 2007, during one of which on December 19, 2007 the USS Whidbey Island fired warning shots toward an approaching Iranian vessel, causing the Iranian vessel to alter course. The first two encounters passed unreported at the time and were largely routine for the area of operations.
However, the third encounter on January 6, 2008 was not only characterized as a far more grave "incident" by official Washington, accompanied by reports by official US sources of threats made against the US vessels, based on video and voice transmission "evidence" released by the Pentagon to vast coverage by US corporate media. Examination of the voice transmission recordings indicated the actual segment containing the only threat was of doubtful authenticity; and, a later release of an Iranian video of the same incident indicated the Pentagon had mischaracterized its own video, revealing another blatant disinformation effort, but received little coverage in US corporate media.
Another two naval incidents have been hyped by US corporate media, one in the Persian Gulf where a US military chartered cargo vessel, Western Venture, fired warning shots at approaching unidentified small boats without known injuries or damage. While the media attention added to regional tensions and increased oil prices, the incident was much like the other incident at the entrance to Suez Canal, except in that case a boat borne local vendor was shot to death by personnel aboard a US military chartered vessel Global Patriot. Needless to say the dead vendor was of little note in US corporate media.
Finally, the Accusations and Warnings
Perhaps the most transparent effort to link the alleged Syrian and North Korean reactors is the Apr 25, 2008 report in the BBC, which included pictures provided the CIA that "said to have been obtained by Israel - showed striking similarities between the Syrian facility and the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, the US said." The report goes on to note: "The CIA briefing and statement coincides with the end of a two-day meeting between US and North Korean officials on Pyongyang's nuclear programme, which both sides say have gone well - fuelling speculation that a deal may be imminent." What this "deal" is remains to be seen, but bribes paid to a foreign government (North Korea) in exchange for accusations against another foreign government (Syria), in order to justify claims against a third foreign government (Iran) are hardly the stuff upon which grave policy decisions (going to war with Iran) should be made. Unless your objective is to lead the US into yet another war no matter what the facts actually are, as the Bush administration and Israel appear to be trying to do.
Finally, we have Bush himself taking the money shot in the Israeli press, with a truly bizarre parlaying of the accusations against Syria into a warning to Iran: Bush: Revealing details of attack on Syrian site was message to Iran, in a Haaretz Staff and Reuters, Apr 29, 2008, stating that "U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday he released U.S. intelligence about the nuclear facility that Israel bombed in Syria in September so as to put pressure on North Korea and send a message to Iran that it could not hide its own nuclear program." Apart from the fact that a nuclear reactor is not proof of a weapons program in Syria, Iran is not Syria, any more than Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks on the US.
These Bush "warnings" have become a mainstay of US corporate media, in which often baseless threats against others are portrayed as "last, best efforts" to change alleged behavior before action is reluctantly taken, after giving the ever-preferable "diplomacy" a chance. The most blatant example of this is the number of times Saddam Hussein was "warned" about "weapons of mass destruction" and we were all warned about not letting the "smoking gun being the mushroom cloud" as well as warning about his final chances to "come clean." The added virtue of "warnings" is they contain an embedded assertion that the warned party knows full well the truth of the accusation as does the one issuing the warning, as well implying a reasonableness in that the target need only comply to avoid getting what they would otherwise deserve.
Should North Korea finally agree, at likely unknown cost, to "come clean" and mention help to Syria or Iran, such bribery is likely to be no more credible than confessions of tortured prisoners in the Bush administration's special prisons, whether they be "Iranian Agents" or "Terrorists" turned over to US authorities as part of the US's far flung bounty programs. After all, we have all become prisoners to the attendant lunacies of the Bush administration and US corporate media's alternative reality, in which new "warnings" based on disinformation lurk: hair-trigger "facts" poised to "provoke" the US into "defending" itself by attacking Iran, including nuclear program/weapons development; "Special Groups" killing US troops in Iraq; and, hostile naval incidents. By the time time the attack on Iran comes, the US corporate media will be asking why it took the US so long to "react."
author's website: www.concordbridge.net
The Continuing Debate Over "Jihadists" As The Enemy
By Jeffrey Imm
Last week, the Associated Press reported that the State Department approved National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) guidelines for terminology in defining the enemy created by NCTC's Extremist Messaging Branch, based on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims". In these new guidelines, the term "jihadist" (among others) was not to be used in defining the enemy or its actions.
But this week, it is apparent that these new guidelines are not being reflected in the State Department annual terrorist report and in comments from President Bush.
In the April 2008 State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 released today, anyone can clearly see the use of the terms "jihad", "jihadist", "jihadi", "mujahedin / mujahadin", "caliphate", "Islamist" -- as nouns describing enemy terrorist activity and ideology (not just in the titles of Jihadist groups' names).
Such usage can been easily found in the Microsoft Word version of the State Department report:
- "jihad": pages 63, 75, 81, 107, 126, 127, 174, 187, 272
- "jihadi(s)": pages 10, 93, 94, 103, 107, 122
- "jihadist": pages 116, 117, 120, 121
- "Islamist": pages 17, 52, 62, 75, 87, 93, 95, 122, 188, 271, 291
These references are clearly describing State Department counterterrorist analyst descriptions of enemy terrorist individuals, activity, and ideology. For example, such phrases in the annual State Department terror report as: "promoting jihad and recruiting potential suicide bombers" (p. 75), "a recruitment network for foreign jihadis" (p. 93), "recruiting jihadists to fight" (p. 117), "numerous cells dedicated to sending Jihadi fighters" (p. 122), "AQ leadership has called for jihad against UN forces" (p. 174) -- don't sound like a view of "jihad" as a "spiritual struggle".
Moreover, in President Bush's April 28 press conference, he referred to the enemy as "jihadists" - to an assembled press corps that never asked him a single question about the remark.
In last week's reported NCTC memorandum and DHS report on the proper terminology in describing the enemy, the NCTC is quoted stating that "[n]ever use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahedeen' in conversation to describe the terrorists...calling our enemies 'jihadis' and their movement a global 'jihad' unintentionally legitimizes their actions." As described in last week's article on this subject, I pointed out that this viewpoint challenges many of the key passages in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Does the NCTC and DHS now think that the State Department and President Bush are "legitimizing" the actions of the enemy by using such terms?
Read More »
War on Extremism (W.O.E) versus War on Jihad
In President Bush's April 28 press conference where he defined the enemy as "jihadists", the President also referred to the war with them as an "ideological struggle". But what ideology are we struggling against, Mr. President? "Jihad" or "Extremism"? Or is the newspeak of the War on Extremism (W.O.E.) just too hard for our leadership to remember?
It seems that the administration cannot decide on this critical, defining issue in this global war. This is the result of a reactive, tactical-centric approach to global war with an undefined enemy. The effectiveness of America's global war efforts are dependent on such agreed-upon definitions and clear identification of the enemy. Yet within the past week, one part of the government is stating "never use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahedeen'", while another part of the government is using precisely such terms in policy speeches to the nation and in documentation on the ongoing threat.
In the very visible debate over the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Gates made a similar "gaffe" in the past two weeks. On April 13, Secretary Gates appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation" and clearly communicated his views that "the enemy is extremism in Iraq". Yet a week later, on April 21, when speaking at West Point U.S. Military Academy, Secretary Gates warned of "the threat posed by violent jihadist networks"; this same speech does not once refer to "extremists". Once again, Secretary Gates needs to clarify - who is the enemy - "extremists" or "jihadists"? Surely, the Secretary of Defense can consistently define the global enemy we are fighting.
The State Department's annual report clearly states that Americans are fighting Jihadists in Iraq, and is concerned over such issues as: a "network for foreign jihadis in Iraq" (p. 93), the "travel of jihadists to Iraq" (p. 116), "recruiting jihadists to fight in Iraq" (p. 117), and "cells dedicated to sending Jihadi fighters to Iraq" (p. 122). Or does the State Department really mean "extremists"?
Advocates of a War on Extremism (W.O.E.) and NCTC / DHS Guidelines
As I pointed out in last week's article in the national drift towards a War on Extremism (W.O.E.), the trend towards redefining the war as one of fighting "extremism" and in accommodating Islamists has been growing -- both in the United States and internationally. The NCTC / DHS terminology guidelines represent another worrisome milestone on this dangerous path.
But there are advocates of such a strategy of W.O.E. who have welcomed the NCTC and DHS terminology recommendations to ban the use of terms such as "jihadist".
For example, the NCTC/DHS guidelines were warmly received by the Muslim Brotherhood-founded Muslim American Society (MAS). (Perhaps the NCTC and DHS should ask if they are going in the right direction when a Muslim Brotherhood-founded organization applauds their actions.)
On April 27, the Muslim American Society posted an article from "Think Progress" on the MAS website titled "Homeland Security Report Sharply Rebukes McCain's 'Islamic Extremism' Rhetoric". The article references the efforts by unindicted HLF terror trial co-conspirator, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), in launching "a campaign to persuade Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to drop the adjective 'Islamic' when describing terrorists and extremists". Other political blogs have sought to link the two issues, mockingly challenging the McCain campaign if it thinks "the Bush administration's State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and National Counter Terrorism Center should be ignored, too?"
The political blog "The Carpetbagger Report" believes that the NCTC/DHS guidelines demonstrate that "officials seem to realize the significance of these religio-political words". Like many commentators, the author fails to actually define the significance of such "religio-political" words, but assumes that they are understood. Today's State Department report and President Bush's comments in yesterday's press conference clearly shows how wrong that assumption is.
The Thailand newspaper "The Nation" published an editorial applauding such terminology guidelines in its April 30 edition titled "US govt may be getting the message - finally". For context, Thailand is a nation that, over the past 4 years, has seen 2,776 killed as a result of Jihadist attacks in Thailand's southern regions - nearly the same death toll as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City. Thailand is a nation whose southern region has suffered from a continuous string of cowardly Jihadist attacks on children, women, and the elderly, including the beheading of helpless elders.
Yet The Nation's editorial applauds the W.O.E. tactic of banning the term "jihadist", stating that jihad is an "overused word" that is correctly used to apply to the "broader Islamic concept of the struggle to do good". The Nation states that "[w]alking a dog across the street to ensure it doesn't get hit by a fast-moving car is a jihad, one Islamic cleric told The Nation." The Nation further argues that "if we want to win the hearts and minds...we are going to have to come up with a choice of words, not to mention the need to think outside the box". This editorial was published the same day as three more of Thailand's police were murdered in a Jihadist ambush. Perhaps The Nation can tell this message to the widows and the families of policemen murdered by Thai Jihadists on the very day its newspaper championed banning the use of the term "jihadist" in reference to terrorism. Clearly, appeasement of Jihadists knows no boundaries.
Why Definitions Are So Vital To Our War Strategy
As previously discussed, the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provides a very limited definition of the enemy restricted to "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons". For six and a half years since the AUMF, there has been no consistent or detailed definition of the enemy, nor has there been a clearly defined strategy to defeat this enemy in the global "ideological struggle". This has resulted in a reactive approach to fighting "terrorists", and now "extremists", without an ideological framework of who and why we are fighting.
In developing any blueprint strategy in an "ideological struggle", the first and most fundamental action must be shared, agreed-upon definitions. In a war strategy, such definitions are literally of life-and-death importance. Yet our leadership on this issue continues to send out mixed, confused messages as to who and what the enemy is. Not only is solving this problem a priority for future American political leadership, it is the patriotic responsibility of the current American political leadership. This is not a theoretical discussion for the members of America's armed forces who literally trust their lives on the effectiveness of such leadership in providing such clear strategic guidance.
A nation that cannot define its enemy has little hope of defeating it. Hope is not a strategy, but hope is dependent on a strategy. In a global ideological struggle, the one thing the American people can't afford to lose is hope. As the advocates of War on Extremism (W.O.E.) struggle with newspeak on "extremists" that we must not "legitimize", the security, trust, and hopes of the American people are dependent on American political leadership to effectively define an enemy whose ideology we can strategically counter and defeat.
This recent demonstration of the American government's inability to consistently define the enemy illustrates how vital and imperative such action is.
Sources:
April 30, 2008 - Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 - United States Department of State Publication - Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism (Microsoft Word document)
State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 Web Site (HTML version)
April 28, 2008 - Transcript: Press Conference by the President
April 24, 2008 - Who is America Fighting - Jihadists or Extremists?- The Counterterrorism Blog - Jeffrey Imm
April 24, 2008 - AP: 'Jihadist' booted from government lexicon
April 24, 2008 - AP: Terms to use and avoid when talking about terrorism
April 24, 2008 - JihadWatch.org: 'Jihadist' booted from government lexicon
April 21, 2008 - Secretary of Defense Gates' Speech at West Point
April 13, 2008 - UPI: Gates: Enemy in Iraq is extremism
Authorization for Use of Military Force (Enrolled Bill), September 18, 2001
September 18, 2001 - U.S. Authorization for Use of Military Force
Muslim American Society (MAS) Dossier - The Investigative Project on Terrorism
April 27, 2008 - Muslim American Society Web Site - "Homeland Security Report Sharply Rebukes McCain's 'Islamic Extremism' Rhetoric"
April 25, 2008 - The Carpetbagger Report - Bush administration re-writes the script on terrorism foes
April 30, 2008 - Thailand's The Nation: "US govt may be getting the message - finally"
April 30, 2008 - Thailand's The Nation: 3 policemen killed, 3 others injured in Pattani bomb attack
January 7, 2008 - The Strait Times: Thailand's Muslim south grew bloodier in 2007
August 7, 2007 - Herald Sun: Elderly Buddhists beheaded, house torched
April 25, 2008 - IPT - Dangerous Word Games - by Steven Emerson
February 5, 2008 - Jihadists, Islamists, and "Extremists" - what's in a name? -- The Counterterrorism Blog - Jeffrey Imm
September 11, 2007 - 9/11 and the Inconvenient Truths about Jihad and Islamism -- Jeffrey Imm
July 18, 2007 - Family Security Matters: Preventing the West from Understanding Jihad - Dr. Walid Phares
Things Are Moving, But The Us Is Absent
By Rami Khouri
In The Daily Star (Lebanon), Opinion
April 30, 2008
One of the important developments in Middle Eastern diplomacy that becomes more obvious with every passing month is the continued marginalization of the United States. As the Bush administration and the American presidential candidates find themselves focusing most of their Middle East-related attention on the complex challenges the US invasion of Iraq has created, other important regional issues seem to be moving into the hands of local players and mediators.
The more the US is marginalized diplomatically as a would-be mediator because of its shortsighted tendency to nearly blindly support Israel's positions, buttress Arab autocrats, and oppose the large, populist Islamo-nationalist movements, the more the other mediators from the Middle East make progress in resolving or reducing the intensity of conflicts.
Two cases in particular are noteworthy: the indirect Hamas-Israel negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza (mediated by Egypt), and the indirect Israeli-Syrian contacts to achieve a full peace treaty (mediated by Turkey). Both are enormously important developments. If consummated, they would represent solid, even historic, steps toward a resolution of the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict. The chances of success are slim, but they are not zero, and that in itself is noteworthy.
I find it striking that the four most significant or dynamic mediators on major regional problems in the past year have been four regional players: Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa. President George W. Bush's effort to prod Israeli-Palestinian peace-making, on the other hand, seems hapless and lacking in credibility, because it is aimed more at pleasing Israel than at meeting the minimal demands and rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Egypt is trying to arrange a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel; Turkey is the channel for serious diplomatic feelers between Syria and Israel; Saudi Arabia brokered the Fatah-Hamas unity government agreement last year that later collapsed; and the Arab League continues to seek a resolution of intra-Lebanese and Lebanese-Syrian tensions. This is good news, because it signals both a willingness and a capacity of regional actors to act as diplomatic mediators, rather than to constantly look toward foreign powers to nudge the warring parties toward negotiated accords.
The US, on the other hand, seems often to want to stoke the fires of ideological tension and military conflict by supporting, arming, financing and training one side in domestic political contests such as those in Lebanon and Palestine. The US (and Europe in some cases) is also severely hampered by its decision to boycott or heavily downgrade contacts with key players like Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. The combination of boycotting legitimate actors while actively promoting local confrontations with them is a recipe for what we are witnessing in the Middle East these days: a growing number of political conflicts within countries, and strong linkages between warring actors across the region.
Episodic local tensions have now been transformed into a major and chronic cycle of region-wide political battles, pitting US- and Israeli-backed "moderates" against a wide array of Islamists, "extremists" and "militants" in the Arab world and Iran.
The most important diplomatic process these days is the Syrian-Israeli one. Israelis and Syrians alike have made it clear that something serious is taking place behind the scenes. A negotiated, comprehensive Israeli-Syrian peace agreement is not very difficult at the practical level, for it would follow the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian pattern of full peace and normalization for full Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967. Israel will have to remove its settlements, but such is the price of abiding by international law and UN Security Council resolutions.
A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement would impact heavily on every major issue in the vicinity, because Syria has strategic and tactical relations with every nearby major player and country: Iran, Lebanon, Hizbullah, Iraq, Palestine and Hamas. Syria would have to decide if the gains of a peace treaty - regime stability, cash aid, and international economic integration - were worth the inevitable price that will be demanded from it: breaking or significantly reducing strategic ties with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah.
Syria for its part will also want direct or indirect influence over Lebanon, and a downgrading of the international tribunal that will prosecute those to be indicted for the Hariri and other murders in Lebanon since February 2005. Lebanon and the international community are reluctant to offer these to Syria, but probably do not totally rule out a reasonable, face-saving compromise. Many Lebanese will be rightly worried that they are about to be sold out.
Syrian-Israeli peace would totally change the political equation in the region, and probably lead to historic changes in Lebanon, Hizbullah's standing, Iran's regional role, the Iraqi situation, and political conditions in Palestine. It is telling of the damage that the US has done to its own role and impact in the Middle East that the potentially most important diplomatic development in the past generation seems to be taking place without any significant American role.
By Rami Khouri
In The Daily Star (Lebanon), Opinion
April 30, 2008
One of the important developments in Middle Eastern diplomacy that becomes more obvious with every passing month is the continued marginalization of the United States. As the Bush administration and the American presidential candidates find themselves focusing most of their Middle East-related attention on the complex challenges the US invasion of Iraq has created, other important regional issues seem to be moving into the hands of local players and mediators.
The more the US is marginalized diplomatically as a would-be mediator because of its shortsighted tendency to nearly blindly support Israel's positions, buttress Arab autocrats, and oppose the large, populist Islamo-nationalist movements, the more the other mediators from the Middle East make progress in resolving or reducing the intensity of conflicts.
Two cases in particular are noteworthy: the indirect Hamas-Israel negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza (mediated by Egypt), and the indirect Israeli-Syrian contacts to achieve a full peace treaty (mediated by Turkey). Both are enormously important developments. If consummated, they would represent solid, even historic, steps toward a resolution of the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict. The chances of success are slim, but they are not zero, and that in itself is noteworthy.
I find it striking that the four most significant or dynamic mediators on major regional problems in the past year have been four regional players: Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa. President George W. Bush's effort to prod Israeli-Palestinian peace-making, on the other hand, seems hapless and lacking in credibility, because it is aimed more at pleasing Israel than at meeting the minimal demands and rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Egypt is trying to arrange a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel; Turkey is the channel for serious diplomatic feelers between Syria and Israel; Saudi Arabia brokered the Fatah-Hamas unity government agreement last year that later collapsed; and the Arab League continues to seek a resolution of intra-Lebanese and Lebanese-Syrian tensions. This is good news, because it signals both a willingness and a capacity of regional actors to act as diplomatic mediators, rather than to constantly look toward foreign powers to nudge the warring parties toward negotiated accords.
The US, on the other hand, seems often to want to stoke the fires of ideological tension and military conflict by supporting, arming, financing and training one side in domestic political contests such as those in Lebanon and Palestine. The US (and Europe in some cases) is also severely hampered by its decision to boycott or heavily downgrade contacts with key players like Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. The combination of boycotting legitimate actors while actively promoting local confrontations with them is a recipe for what we are witnessing in the Middle East these days: a growing number of political conflicts within countries, and strong linkages between warring actors across the region.
Episodic local tensions have now been transformed into a major and chronic cycle of region-wide political battles, pitting US- and Israeli-backed "moderates" against a wide array of Islamists, "extremists" and "militants" in the Arab world and Iran.
The most important diplomatic process these days is the Syrian-Israeli one. Israelis and Syrians alike have made it clear that something serious is taking place behind the scenes. A negotiated, comprehensive Israeli-Syrian peace agreement is not very difficult at the practical level, for it would follow the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian pattern of full peace and normalization for full Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967. Israel will have to remove its settlements, but such is the price of abiding by international law and UN Security Council resolutions.
A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement would impact heavily on every major issue in the vicinity, because Syria has strategic and tactical relations with every nearby major player and country: Iran, Lebanon, Hizbullah, Iraq, Palestine and Hamas. Syria would have to decide if the gains of a peace treaty - regime stability, cash aid, and international economic integration - were worth the inevitable price that will be demanded from it: breaking or significantly reducing strategic ties with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah.
Syria for its part will also want direct or indirect influence over Lebanon, and a downgrading of the international tribunal that will prosecute those to be indicted for the Hariri and other murders in Lebanon since February 2005. Lebanon and the international community are reluctant to offer these to Syria, but probably do not totally rule out a reasonable, face-saving compromise. Many Lebanese will be rightly worried that they are about to be sold out.
Syrian-Israeli peace would totally change the political equation in the region, and probably lead to historic changes in Lebanon, Hizbullah's standing, Iran's regional role, the Iraqi situation, and political conditions in Palestine. It is telling of the damage that the US has done to its own role and impact in the Middle East that the potentially most important diplomatic development in the past generation seems to be taking place without any significant American role.
Assassins of Peace
The "war on terrorism" now consists of a worldwide campaign to fund the "good" terrorist groups
by Justin Raimondo
CNN reports that George W. Bush, with his disapproval rating shooting past 70 percent, is the most unpopular president in modern American history, or as long as they've been polling the question – less beloved than Richard Nixon in the weeks prior to his resignation, and, I'd guess, more despised than George III in 1776. Bush II is identified primarily in the public mind with the bane of his presidency, the Iraq war, and support for that, too, has reached a new low at 30 percent. Enthusiasm for our Iraqi misadventure hasn't cracked 35 percent in many months, in spite of all the malarkey about the "success" of the recent escalation. The domestic accompaniment of the "surge" in Iraq is the rising tide of sheer hatred directed at the War Party and all its works and minions.
Yet they don't have anything to worry about this election year: the warmongers can continue on their mad course, oblivious to public opinion, or so they seem to believe, because a U.S. strike at Iran is clearly in the cards. The only question is when.
As we count the days to the end of the Bush II era, the likelihood that the worst president in our history will go out with a bang increases on a daily basis. The latest evidence that zero hour approaches is reported by Andrew Cockburn, author, most recently, of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, and co-producer of the PBS documentary on Iraq The War We Left Behind. According to Cockburn, Bush has signed a presidential finding that greatly increases both the scope and seriousness of covert attempts to destabilize Iran and pave the way for war.
A presidential finding must be divulged to certain members of the intelligence oversight committees in both houses of Congress. The Democratic leadership is not only aware of all this, but fully complicit: the votes were lined up to pass the needed appropriations without any significant opposition (or any coverage in the "mainstream" media, either). Over $300 million has been appropriated to implement this new, far-reaching campaign of covert aggression.
What this means, in practical terms, is that groups that have previously been beyond the pale as far as the U.S. is concerned are now being welcomed into the anti-Iranian united front, which includes everyone from the neo-Marxist Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) to shadowy Arab Sunni groups whose ideology is not far removed from Osama bin Laden's.
The former is a fanatical cult of Marxoid Iranian "dissidents," officially classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department after they killed U.S. embassy and military personnel in terrorist attacks. The MEK was driven out of Iran by the mullahs in the wake of a post-revolutionary power struggle, and the group fled to Iraq, where they were given aid, arms, and sanctuary, as they continued to launch terrorist attacks inside Iran. Saddam used them to crush the Shi'ite rebellion of the early 1990s, which was brutally put down.
With the "liberation" of Iraq, the MEK has been holed up in its cult compound known as Camp Ashraf, ruled over by the wife-and-husband team of Maryam and Massoud Rajavi. The former is the self-proclaimed "president" of Iran, while Mr. Rajavi serves as commander in chief of the armed forces. The MEK is a matriarchy: more than half the members are women, as are the majority of top military officers. But these are no ordinary feminists. Escapees from this weird political sect, which combines Marxism, elements of Islam, and the Rajavi cult of personality, describe a harrowing experience, including torture, imprisonment, and enforced brainwashing techniques. Indeed, the victims of the MEK are so numerous that they and their families have formed their own organization, which publicizes the abuse of members and ex-members by the crazed leadership.
The new finding also reportedly authorizes stepped-up aid to militant Arab groups in southwestern Iran, the Pejak Kurdish group, and, as reported by Seymour Hersh last year, radical, al-Qaeda-allied Sunni militants in Lebanon. Syria, too, is in the War Party's sights. The mysterious explosions that rocked Damascus in February were but a prelude of things to come.
Cockburn also describes authorized tactics in the new finding – signed six weeks ago – as "up to and including the assassination of targeted officials."
The "war on terrorism" now consists of a large-scale campaign to subsidize, organize, and empower favored terrorist groups – the "good" terrorists of the MEK, "former" terrorists of the "Awakening" in Iraq, and a motley assortment of separatists and fanatics whose violent methods are but a reflection of their intrinsic nihilism.
God only knows what kind of blowback we're going to experience as a direct result of this moral slippage. Maybe it's just me, but at a time when the authorities are requiring us to run a veritable gauntlet every time we get on a plane, as a precaution against "terrorism," encouraging (let alone subsidizing!) such groups is yet more proof that we've slipped into the Bizarro dimension, where up is down and funding terrorism is the same as fighting it.
None of this news is at all surprising to longtime observers of the Middle East scene. Laura Rozen, writing in The American Prospect last year, speculated that a presidential "finding" or perhaps a secret White House directive may have been issued:
"There is evidence that, while Bush probably has not signed such a finding regarding Iran, he has recently done so regarding Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon; further, there is evidence that he may have signed an executive order or national security presidential directive regarding a new, more aggressive policy on Iran. Such directives are not required to be reported to Congress – they are more in the realm of the president communicating to authorized people inside the administration his expectations for a policy."
The reporting of Rozen and others has drawn attention to U.S. efforts to effect "regime change" in Iran for quite some time, but now it seems more than covert action is in the works. NBC has reported that plans for air strikes against Iran have been drawn up by U.S. military leaders, as Washington steps up its rhetoric denouncing Iranian "interference" in Iraq. Confronted with this stark fact by Tim Russert on Sunday morning, Barack Obama wilted:
"RUSSERT: [T]he administration, we have reported at NBC, are drawing up some plans for potential air strikes in Iran at different missile weapons factories or special force compounds because we have indications, evidence that the Iranians are helping some of their supporters within Iraq to kill U.S. troops.
"OBAMA: Mm-hmm.
"RUSSERT: If it could be demonstrated that was a fact, would you be in support of such limited attacks in Iran?
"OBAMA: Well, let, let me not speculate yet. I want to, I want to take a, take a look at the kind of evidence that the administration is putting forward, what these plans are exactly. I've always said that, you know, as commander in chief, I don't take military options off the table and I think it's appropriate for us to plan for a whole host of contingencies."
He then goes into the familiar "carrots as well as sticks" Democratic Party mantra, but notice how he evades the question. Would he support an attack on Iran? Damned if I know.
In any case, we may soon find out.
Worse, Obama opines that our withdrawal from Iraq would occur in slow motion, two brigades a month: at that rate, he estimates, it would take two years for all the troops to come home. And, in any case, others would arrive to take their place, albeit in limited numbers, to "partner" with the Iraqis and presumably act as the enforcer of last resort. He reckons at that point we'll have been in Iraq for seven years, and if the Iraqis have still failed to get their act together after all that time then they're unlikely to do it after 50 years.
True, as far as it goes, but there's another way to look at it: with two full years to provoke an incident involving U.S. troops and Iranian forces right across the border, if it hasn't happened at the end of that time it'll be a miracle.
When it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy, we are ready for a lot more than mere "change." Americans are disgusted, appalled, and depressed by the bloody spectacle, which is bankrupting the country morally as well as fiscally, destroying what was left of our moral capital and eating away at our financial assets as we sink into a quagmire of debt. Americans don't just want any old namby-pamby "change" in this realm – they pine for revolution, i.e., a complete reversal of current U.S. policy from relentless aggression to a policy based on building and preserving peace.
Polls show the yawning gap between the belligerence of the laptop bombardiers and the antiwar sentiments of ordinary Americans is growing wider by the day. Obama makes much of his early opposition to the Iraq war, but why does he wimp out when it comes to the next war, the one they're planning against Iran?
We know he's against it: you can hear it in the phrasing of his evasions, in his plea for "direct talks" with the Iranians and his call for a regional settlement. Yet he fails to take an unequivocal stand. He could hit Hillary over the head with her own hawkishness, yet he fails to do so. Whether this is a product of his inherent indecisiveness – indicated, in another instance, by his failure to ditch Jeremiah Wright soon enough – or some ideological-political glitch in his thinking is hard to say. In any case, neither possibility bodes well for his presidential prospects.
While the assassins of peace prowl the world, intent on stirring up violent passions, they don't have much opposition on the home front – except in the hearts and minds of the American people. Yet this heartfelt revulsion against the horrors of the past eight years finds no clear, unstinting voice, no consistent champion among the contenders for leadership in either party.
Pre-Order this Book
Remember the "Silent Majority" of the 1960s, which supposedly supported the War Party and just wanted to sweep the antiwar movement out of the way while instituting a policy of "bombs away" in Southeast Asia? Today we have the Disenfranchised Majority, which wants out of Iraq and no part of a fresh conflict in the Middle East – and yet has no power to stop it.
The seething resentment this sense of powerlessness breeds has been boiling beneath the surface for a long time, and sooner or later it will burst through in a geyser of considerable force. Deprived of any other outlet, this eruption could shake – and even shatter – the very foundations of our constitutional republic. The blame will fall, of course, on allegedly "antisocial" and "radical" elements, who will be smeared as subversives and worse. The real culprits, however, are the political elites – who blocked all expressions of the popular will and allowed the pressure to build past the breaking point.
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12784
The "war on terrorism" now consists of a worldwide campaign to fund the "good" terrorist groups
by Justin Raimondo
CNN reports that George W. Bush, with his disapproval rating shooting past 70 percent, is the most unpopular president in modern American history, or as long as they've been polling the question – less beloved than Richard Nixon in the weeks prior to his resignation, and, I'd guess, more despised than George III in 1776. Bush II is identified primarily in the public mind with the bane of his presidency, the Iraq war, and support for that, too, has reached a new low at 30 percent. Enthusiasm for our Iraqi misadventure hasn't cracked 35 percent in many months, in spite of all the malarkey about the "success" of the recent escalation. The domestic accompaniment of the "surge" in Iraq is the rising tide of sheer hatred directed at the War Party and all its works and minions.
Yet they don't have anything to worry about this election year: the warmongers can continue on their mad course, oblivious to public opinion, or so they seem to believe, because a U.S. strike at Iran is clearly in the cards. The only question is when.
As we count the days to the end of the Bush II era, the likelihood that the worst president in our history will go out with a bang increases on a daily basis. The latest evidence that zero hour approaches is reported by Andrew Cockburn, author, most recently, of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, and co-producer of the PBS documentary on Iraq The War We Left Behind. According to Cockburn, Bush has signed a presidential finding that greatly increases both the scope and seriousness of covert attempts to destabilize Iran and pave the way for war.
A presidential finding must be divulged to certain members of the intelligence oversight committees in both houses of Congress. The Democratic leadership is not only aware of all this, but fully complicit: the votes were lined up to pass the needed appropriations without any significant opposition (or any coverage in the "mainstream" media, either). Over $300 million has been appropriated to implement this new, far-reaching campaign of covert aggression.
What this means, in practical terms, is that groups that have previously been beyond the pale as far as the U.S. is concerned are now being welcomed into the anti-Iranian united front, which includes everyone from the neo-Marxist Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) to shadowy Arab Sunni groups whose ideology is not far removed from Osama bin Laden's.
The former is a fanatical cult of Marxoid Iranian "dissidents," officially classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department after they killed U.S. embassy and military personnel in terrorist attacks. The MEK was driven out of Iran by the mullahs in the wake of a post-revolutionary power struggle, and the group fled to Iraq, where they were given aid, arms, and sanctuary, as they continued to launch terrorist attacks inside Iran. Saddam used them to crush the Shi'ite rebellion of the early 1990s, which was brutally put down.
With the "liberation" of Iraq, the MEK has been holed up in its cult compound known as Camp Ashraf, ruled over by the wife-and-husband team of Maryam and Massoud Rajavi. The former is the self-proclaimed "president" of Iran, while Mr. Rajavi serves as commander in chief of the armed forces. The MEK is a matriarchy: more than half the members are women, as are the majority of top military officers. But these are no ordinary feminists. Escapees from this weird political sect, which combines Marxism, elements of Islam, and the Rajavi cult of personality, describe a harrowing experience, including torture, imprisonment, and enforced brainwashing techniques. Indeed, the victims of the MEK are so numerous that they and their families have formed their own organization, which publicizes the abuse of members and ex-members by the crazed leadership.
The new finding also reportedly authorizes stepped-up aid to militant Arab groups in southwestern Iran, the Pejak Kurdish group, and, as reported by Seymour Hersh last year, radical, al-Qaeda-allied Sunni militants in Lebanon. Syria, too, is in the War Party's sights. The mysterious explosions that rocked Damascus in February were but a prelude of things to come.
Cockburn also describes authorized tactics in the new finding – signed six weeks ago – as "up to and including the assassination of targeted officials."
The "war on terrorism" now consists of a large-scale campaign to subsidize, organize, and empower favored terrorist groups – the "good" terrorists of the MEK, "former" terrorists of the "Awakening" in Iraq, and a motley assortment of separatists and fanatics whose violent methods are but a reflection of their intrinsic nihilism.
God only knows what kind of blowback we're going to experience as a direct result of this moral slippage. Maybe it's just me, but at a time when the authorities are requiring us to run a veritable gauntlet every time we get on a plane, as a precaution against "terrorism," encouraging (let alone subsidizing!) such groups is yet more proof that we've slipped into the Bizarro dimension, where up is down and funding terrorism is the same as fighting it.
None of this news is at all surprising to longtime observers of the Middle East scene. Laura Rozen, writing in The American Prospect last year, speculated that a presidential "finding" or perhaps a secret White House directive may have been issued:
"There is evidence that, while Bush probably has not signed such a finding regarding Iran, he has recently done so regarding Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon; further, there is evidence that he may have signed an executive order or national security presidential directive regarding a new, more aggressive policy on Iran. Such directives are not required to be reported to Congress – they are more in the realm of the president communicating to authorized people inside the administration his expectations for a policy."
The reporting of Rozen and others has drawn attention to U.S. efforts to effect "regime change" in Iran for quite some time, but now it seems more than covert action is in the works. NBC has reported that plans for air strikes against Iran have been drawn up by U.S. military leaders, as Washington steps up its rhetoric denouncing Iranian "interference" in Iraq. Confronted with this stark fact by Tim Russert on Sunday morning, Barack Obama wilted:
"RUSSERT: [T]he administration, we have reported at NBC, are drawing up some plans for potential air strikes in Iran at different missile weapons factories or special force compounds because we have indications, evidence that the Iranians are helping some of their supporters within Iraq to kill U.S. troops.
"OBAMA: Mm-hmm.
"RUSSERT: If it could be demonstrated that was a fact, would you be in support of such limited attacks in Iran?
"OBAMA: Well, let, let me not speculate yet. I want to, I want to take a, take a look at the kind of evidence that the administration is putting forward, what these plans are exactly. I've always said that, you know, as commander in chief, I don't take military options off the table and I think it's appropriate for us to plan for a whole host of contingencies."
He then goes into the familiar "carrots as well as sticks" Democratic Party mantra, but notice how he evades the question. Would he support an attack on Iran? Damned if I know.
In any case, we may soon find out.
Worse, Obama opines that our withdrawal from Iraq would occur in slow motion, two brigades a month: at that rate, he estimates, it would take two years for all the troops to come home. And, in any case, others would arrive to take their place, albeit in limited numbers, to "partner" with the Iraqis and presumably act as the enforcer of last resort. He reckons at that point we'll have been in Iraq for seven years, and if the Iraqis have still failed to get their act together after all that time then they're unlikely to do it after 50 years.
True, as far as it goes, but there's another way to look at it: with two full years to provoke an incident involving U.S. troops and Iranian forces right across the border, if it hasn't happened at the end of that time it'll be a miracle.
When it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy, we are ready for a lot more than mere "change." Americans are disgusted, appalled, and depressed by the bloody spectacle, which is bankrupting the country morally as well as fiscally, destroying what was left of our moral capital and eating away at our financial assets as we sink into a quagmire of debt. Americans don't just want any old namby-pamby "change" in this realm – they pine for revolution, i.e., a complete reversal of current U.S. policy from relentless aggression to a policy based on building and preserving peace.
Polls show the yawning gap between the belligerence of the laptop bombardiers and the antiwar sentiments of ordinary Americans is growing wider by the day. Obama makes much of his early opposition to the Iraq war, but why does he wimp out when it comes to the next war, the one they're planning against Iran?
We know he's against it: you can hear it in the phrasing of his evasions, in his plea for "direct talks" with the Iranians and his call for a regional settlement. Yet he fails to take an unequivocal stand. He could hit Hillary over the head with her own hawkishness, yet he fails to do so. Whether this is a product of his inherent indecisiveness – indicated, in another instance, by his failure to ditch Jeremiah Wright soon enough – or some ideological-political glitch in his thinking is hard to say. In any case, neither possibility bodes well for his presidential prospects.
While the assassins of peace prowl the world, intent on stirring up violent passions, they don't have much opposition on the home front – except in the hearts and minds of the American people. Yet this heartfelt revulsion against the horrors of the past eight years finds no clear, unstinting voice, no consistent champion among the contenders for leadership in either party.
Pre-Order this Book
Remember the "Silent Majority" of the 1960s, which supposedly supported the War Party and just wanted to sweep the antiwar movement out of the way while instituting a policy of "bombs away" in Southeast Asia? Today we have the Disenfranchised Majority, which wants out of Iraq and no part of a fresh conflict in the Middle East – and yet has no power to stop it.
The seething resentment this sense of powerlessness breeds has been boiling beneath the surface for a long time, and sooner or later it will burst through in a geyser of considerable force. Deprived of any other outlet, this eruption could shake – and even shatter – the very foundations of our constitutional republic. The blame will fall, of course, on allegedly "antisocial" and "radical" elements, who will be smeared as subversives and worse. The real culprits, however, are the political elites – who blocked all expressions of the popular will and allowed the pressure to build past the breaking point.
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12784
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