The following article (If the US goes to war with Iran, Netanyahu will be the prime suspect, Chemi Shalev, Haaretz, 16/5/19), is of considerable interest when we consider that Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister at the time of the 2003 Iraq War, felt obliged to keep as low a profile as possible with respect to Israel's crucial role as the key detonator of the war. Sharon relied instead on his US Ziocon assets and the Israel lobby to steer the Bush administration in the direction he wanted, that of regime change and the balkanisation of Iraq, and to utililise the US military, as opposed to the Israeli, to bring this about.
Since that time, it should be clear to all and sundry that the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ditched the pretense of Israel as an innocent bystander in matters of regional regime change and balkanisation, and come out, time and again, publicly swinging in favour of a war with Iran. As Shalev points out, if and when the US takes on Iran militarily, there'll be no hiding the key role of Netanyahu's Israel in initiating the move to Iraq Iran. (Note that I have somewhat truncated Shalev's essay in order to highlight his thesis):
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the only world leader to openly express support for the escalating US campaign against Iran, but his statement is an exception to the general Israeli rule... The attempt to distance itself from an American military operation in the Middle East, as if Israel were merely a fan sitting in the bleachers cheering its favorite team, inevitably sparks analogies to Yitzhak Shamir's policy of restraint in the 1991 Gulf War and Ariel Sharon's similar attitude during the 2003 war in Iraq... And while Israel did not come under direct attack in the 2003 Iraq War, it was nonetheless compelled to defend itself against claims, which proliferated as the war progressed, that it had pushed President George W. Bush to decide on the attack in the first place. In the lead up to that ill-fated war, Netanyahu was once again one of a handful of prominent Israelis who preferred to break the silence. In public testimony before the Government Reform Committee of the House of Representatives in 2002, Netanyahu assured American lawmakers that Saddam either had nuclear weapons or was on the verge of acquiring them... Deposing Saddam, Netanyahu promised, would do wonders for the Middle East as a whole...
"But even without his damning testimony from the past... if war breaks out between the US and Iran, he will be named as the prime suspect as far as its opponents are concerned. Netanyahu... persuaded Donald Trump to abandon Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu convinced Trump that a combination of crippling economic sanctions and a credible military threat will force Tehran to beg for a new and improved nuclear deal, which will include its malevolent regional activities... Netanyahu become a one-man cheerleading squad for Trump's latest moves.
"But while the campaign to blame Israel for the Iraq War was limited to a relatively small clique of its most vociferous critics - the most prominent of which were Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their book about the Israel lobby - conflagration with Iran would dramatically expand the circle of Israel-accusers... It's situation today is substantially worse. After burning his bridges with American liberals, including most Jews... many Democrats are far more likely to point fingers at Netanyahu the moment the first American soldier is killed... Netanyahu believes that the Iranian leadership, like much of the Arab, understands only force. He is convinced that the intense economic pressure coupled with the nightmarish specter of American bombers laying waste to their country will compel Tehran to come back to the negotiating table on all fours in order to carve out the fabled 'better agreement' that both Trump and Netanyahu claim, with no evidence, is eminently achievable... [But] Iran does not view itself as a weak and vulnerable state that has no choice but to capitulate to US ultimatums, but as an equal rival determined to foil Trump or, at worst, survive him...
"Small wonder that in the past 48 hours, White House officials have started to brief US reporters that Trump is less happy with the bellicose approach of his National Security adviser John Bolton, known as one of Israel's closest confidantes in Washington. The catalyst for Trump's reservations was the leaked story of a Pentagon paper prepared for Bolton that envisaged sending 120,000 US troops to fight against the Iranians. Trump boasted that if it came to open conflict, the size of the US force would be much larger, but distanced himself from what critics describe as the warmongering winds emanating from Bolton's office. Experienced Washington observers claim that, based on previous patterns, Trump will soon start criticizing Bolton in public and, after a short hiatus, boot him out of the White House as well... Netanyahu may have to face the possibility that his all-in bet on Trump has failed to produce the dividends he sought and that the anti-Iran strategy built on his beautiful friendship with the US president could be on the verge of collapse.
"The remaining options are both unpalatable for Netanyahu. The first is that Iran will resist recently fortified economics sanctions and continue to incrementally abandon its commitments under the 2015 nuclear accord, without risking any retaliation from the countries that still adhere to it. The second is a military fare-up between Iran and the US, which or may not cripple Tehran's nuclear infrastructure but is certain to inflict human suffering, financial upheaval, escalating internal strife in Washington and the certainty that Netanyahu will be held responsible for them all. Worse, Trump may eventually reach the same conclusion."
Showing posts with label Iraq/Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq/Israel. Show all posts
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Friday, April 20, 2018
Iraq: No 'War for Oil'
I watched George Galloway's fine 2017 doco The Killing$ of Tony Blair last night. If you haven't already seen it, I can assure you it's well worth it.
Should you do so, I have only one, albeit rather large, caution: the film has footage of Noam Chomsky parroting his nonsense about the US invasion and destruction of Iraq being a 'war for oil', a line unfortunately repeated by Galloway at the conclusion of the film.
Just to clarify, here are my top authorities, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, on this furphy:
"Saddam was eager to sell his oil to any customer willing to pay for it. Moreover, if the United States wanted to conquer another country to gain control of its oil, Saudi Arabia - with larger reserves and a smaller population - would have been a much more attractive target. Plus, bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who struck the United States on September 11 were Saudis (none were from Iraq). If control of oil were Bush's real objective, 9/11 would have been an ideal pretext to act... There is also hardly any evidence that oil interests were actively pushing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002-03." (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, 2007, p 254)
Should you do so, I have only one, albeit rather large, caution: the film has footage of Noam Chomsky parroting his nonsense about the US invasion and destruction of Iraq being a 'war for oil', a line unfortunately repeated by Galloway at the conclusion of the film.
Just to clarify, here are my top authorities, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, on this furphy:
"Saddam was eager to sell his oil to any customer willing to pay for it. Moreover, if the United States wanted to conquer another country to gain control of its oil, Saudi Arabia - with larger reserves and a smaller population - would have been a much more attractive target. Plus, bin Laden was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who struck the United States on September 11 were Saudis (none were from Iraq). If control of oil were Bush's real objective, 9/11 would have been an ideal pretext to act... There is also hardly any evidence that oil interests were actively pushing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002-03." (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, 2007, p 254)
Saturday, April 9, 2016
The Palestinian Chair
In its ceaseless campaign to wipe Palestine and Palestinians off the map, Israel has devised (and field-tested) many a fiendish device. One of these, if not already in use in your country's dungeons, could well be on your president/ prime minister/ king/ dictator's wish list as we speak. Meet the Palestinian chair:
"As a former interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI, Eric Fair was stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison and in Fallujah in 2004. While in Fallujah, he witnessed a torture device known as the Palestinian chair. He writes in his new book, Consequence: A Memoir, that the chair was a way to immobilize prisoners in order to break them down both physically and mentally. He also wrote that the Israeli military taught them how to use the Palestinian chair during a joint training exercise...
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War & Peace report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Eric Fair, an Army veteran who worked as a contract interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as well as other places. He's the author of the new book, Consequences: A Memoir. You've said that what happened outside Abu Ghraib, what contractors did, in terms of torture, was often worse than inside Abu Ghraib.
Eric Fair: That was certainly my experience. And again, I'm focusing on my own sort of behavior, my own sort of actions. So, for me, yes, personally, Fallujah was worse than Abu Ghraib.
Amy Goodman: So, why don't you read for us from your book, Consequence?
Eric Fair: We pass by the interrogation room where Tyner has been working on Raad Hussein. We haven't heard Tyner scream or throw anything today. The door to the room, a flimsy sheet of plywood, has blown open in the hot desert wind. Inside, Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It's as if he's been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent. 'Henson comes out into the hallway and walks past the room. He covers the side of his face as he walks by and says, 'I don't even want to know.' I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it. In the coming years, I won't have the audacity to seek it. Witnessing a man being tortured in the Palestinian chair requires the witness to either seek justice or cover his face. Like Henson in Fallujah, I'll spend the rest of my life covering my face.
Amy Goodman: Why did they call it the Palestinian chair?
Eric Fair: I was never clear on the actual origin. The rumors within the interrogation cell were that Army interrogators had learned to use this chair by Israeli interrogators, and the Israeli interrogators presumably called it the Palestinian chair because they were torturing Palestinians in it. I certainly don't know if that's true. And quite frankly, for my own story, I am not sure that it necessarily matters.
Nermeen Shaikh: Well, in the book, you write that interrogators in Iraq said the Israeli military taught them how to use the Palestinian chair during a joint training exercise. In response to this revelation in your book, Sarah Lee Whitson of Human Rights Watch said, quote, 'The description by an American interrogator of a 'Palestinian chair' torture device that he says the Israeli military taught US soldiers how to use is disturbing and shameful on more than one level, suggesting as it does a means of torture used against Palestinian detainees eagerly copied by Americans seeking to interrogate and torture Iraqis... You also sat in the Palestinian chair. Could you talk about what that experience was like?
Eric Fair: I did. I mean, recognizing that there was an actual device that we were using in interrogation was - I was surprised by that. And so a close friend of mine and I made sure that we - I think we at one point had been tempted to use it. I did not use the chair. And that's not to suggest that I wouldn't, if I had stayed longer. But we thought that if we were going to use it, we should sit in it, and we should get a sense of what it was. And so we strapped each other in. And it locks you into what is essentially a squat, a permanent squat, from which you can't recover. We only lasted about a minute...
"As a former interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI, Eric Fair was stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison and in Fallujah in 2004. While in Fallujah, he witnessed a torture device known as the Palestinian chair. He writes in his new book, Consequence: A Memoir, that the chair was a way to immobilize prisoners in order to break them down both physically and mentally. He also wrote that the Israeli military taught them how to use the Palestinian chair during a joint training exercise...
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War & Peace report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Eric Fair, an Army veteran who worked as a contract interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as well as other places. He's the author of the new book, Consequences: A Memoir. You've said that what happened outside Abu Ghraib, what contractors did, in terms of torture, was often worse than inside Abu Ghraib.
Eric Fair: That was certainly my experience. And again, I'm focusing on my own sort of behavior, my own sort of actions. So, for me, yes, personally, Fallujah was worse than Abu Ghraib.
Amy Goodman: So, why don't you read for us from your book, Consequence?
Eric Fair: We pass by the interrogation room where Tyner has been working on Raad Hussein. We haven't heard Tyner scream or throw anything today. The door to the room, a flimsy sheet of plywood, has blown open in the hot desert wind. Inside, Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It's as if he's been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent. 'Henson comes out into the hallway and walks past the room. He covers the side of his face as he walks by and says, 'I don't even want to know.' I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it. In the coming years, I won't have the audacity to seek it. Witnessing a man being tortured in the Palestinian chair requires the witness to either seek justice or cover his face. Like Henson in Fallujah, I'll spend the rest of my life covering my face.
Amy Goodman: Why did they call it the Palestinian chair?
Eric Fair: I was never clear on the actual origin. The rumors within the interrogation cell were that Army interrogators had learned to use this chair by Israeli interrogators, and the Israeli interrogators presumably called it the Palestinian chair because they were torturing Palestinians in it. I certainly don't know if that's true. And quite frankly, for my own story, I am not sure that it necessarily matters.
Nermeen Shaikh: Well, in the book, you write that interrogators in Iraq said the Israeli military taught them how to use the Palestinian chair during a joint training exercise. In response to this revelation in your book, Sarah Lee Whitson of Human Rights Watch said, quote, 'The description by an American interrogator of a 'Palestinian chair' torture device that he says the Israeli military taught US soldiers how to use is disturbing and shameful on more than one level, suggesting as it does a means of torture used against Palestinian detainees eagerly copied by Americans seeking to interrogate and torture Iraqis... You also sat in the Palestinian chair. Could you talk about what that experience was like?
Eric Fair: I did. I mean, recognizing that there was an actual device that we were using in interrogation was - I was surprised by that. And so a close friend of mine and I made sure that we - I think we at one point had been tempted to use it. I did not use the chair. And that's not to suggest that I wouldn't, if I had stayed longer. But we thought that if we were going to use it, we should sit in it, and we should get a sense of what it was. And so we strapped each other in. And it locks you into what is essentially a squat, a permanent squat, from which you can't recover. We only lasted about a minute...
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Made in Israel: America's Next War - Part 1
There's far more to US politics at the moment than the circus antics of presidential wannabes such as Trump or Clinton.
Although you won't read about it in the Australian msm, there's actually a make-or-break struggle going on between Israel (and its US fifth column) and the US president as to whether more American blood and treasure should be spilled/squandered (this time in a war against Iran) to keep Israel in the manner to which it has become accustomed, namely, top dog in the Middle East.
For the big picture, beginning with the background, and concluding tomorrow with the current state of play, here's the latest must-read James Petras essay:
The Conference of 52 Presidents of the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations & the US-Iran Nuclear Agreement: The Centrepiece of US Foreign Policy Struggle
Prologue
In the village of Duma, an 18-month-old baby died following the fire-bombing of his family's home by Israeli settlers. The father of the child died of burns a week later and the surviving mother and young sibling are barely alive - covered with burns from racist Jewish arson.
"The United Nations Special Committee to investigate Israel's practices toward Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory has revealed that the 'root cause' of the escalating violence is the 'continuous policy of Jewish settlement expansion (financed and defended by the Netanyahu regime) and the climate of impunity relating to the activities of the settlers (financed and defended by the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations). (UN News Centre, 10/8/15)
Introduction
The recent US-Iran nuclear agreement, titled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has implications far beyond the ending of nearly 40 years of regional confrontation.
"Several fundamental issues concerning the nature of US policymaking, the power of a foreign regime (Israel) in deciding questions of war and peace, and the role organized power configurations with overseas loyalties play in making and breaking executive and legislative authorities.
"To investigate these fundamental issues it is important to discuss the historical context leading up to the rise of this paradoxical situation: Where a 'global power' is subjected to the dictates of a second-rate state through the strategic penetration and influence of domestic organizations composed of 'nominal citizens' of the subject state with 'divided (to put it politely) loyalties'.
The Centrality of Israel's Unchallenged Regional Supremacy
"The motor force of Israeli foreign and domestic policy is their drive for unchallenged regional supremacy: Military dominance through wars, territorial occupation, brutal armed interventions, extra-territorial political assassinations of opponents and favorable one-sided treaties. To ensure its unquestioned dominance Israel has developed the only nuclear weapons arsenal and largest missile launch capacity in the region, and has openly declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons against regional rivals.
"Israel's repeated mantra that it faces an 'existential threat' from its Arab neighbors and subjugated Palestinians has no factual basis. On the contrary, history has taught the world that Israel, directly and indirectly, has engaged in a series of aggressive wars devastating its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Israel has bombed and/or invaded Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan. Israel has assassinated scientists in Iran and Palestinian political leasers, as well as intellectuals, writers and poets in the Gulf, Jordan and Europe. [And Lebanon: MERC] Even family members have not been spared Israeli terror.
"Israel can brutalize its neighbors with total impunity because of its vast military superiority, but its real power is found in its overseas proxies, the Tel Aviv-dominated Zionist power configurations [ZPCs], especially in North America and Europe. The most important proxy organizations and individuals operate in the United States. Thanks to them Israel has received over $150 billion dollars in economic and military grants and loans from US taxpayers in the past half-century. Each year Israel rakes in billions in tribute, billions in tax-free donations from billionaire Israel loyalists with dual US citizenship, who extract their wealth from American workers, investors and gamblers, and hundreds of billions via unrestricted investments, privileged market access and technology transfers.
"The economic and military transfers to Israel result from the cumulative build-up of political power among powerful US Zionists. No one today disputes that what is dubbed the 'pro-Israel lobby' is the most powerful configuration inside Washington DC today. Focusing primarily on the 'Israel lobby' overlooks the powerful role that influential, Zionist political officials have played in deciding issues prioritized by the Israeli leadership.
"Israeli power over the making and implementing of US Middle East policy has led to the US invasions of Iraq, Syria and Libya; the current economic boycott and blockade of Iran; the breakup of Sudan; and the bombing of Somalia.
"Israeli power in the US operates through various political instruments in different institutional settings. The pro-Israel mass media moguls at the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and all the TV networks unconditionally defend Israel's bombing, dispossession and repression of Palestinians while demonizing any Arab or Muslim states which have opposed its brutality - frequently calling for the US to impose sanctions and/or to launch armed attacks against Israel's critics.
"The US military campaign known as the 'Global War on Terror', a series of brutal invasions and 'regime changes' launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was formulated and promoted by fanatical Israeli proxies in strategic positions within the Bush government, especially Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, 'Scooter' Libby, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle. The boycott of Iran was designed and implemented by US Treasury officials Levey and Cohen. The drumbeat for war in Iraq and the phony 'intelligence' about 'weapons of mass destruction' was propagated by New York Times scribe, Judith Miller, designed by Wolfowitz and Feith, backed by the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, and ultimately paid for with the lives of over 5,000 Americans and well over a million Iraqi civilians. The destruction and breakup of Iraq, a long-time supporter of Palestinian national rights, was accomplished without the loss of a single Israeli life - despite the enormous benefit the Jewish state has enjoyed from the war! The extraordinary success of this highest Israeli military priority was due entirely to the machinations of Israel's highly placed US proxies.
"Yet the cost of the war has been very high for the American people (and unimaginably high for Iraqis): Over a quarter million physical and mental casualties among US troops; two trillion dollars and counting in military expenditures crippling the US economy and a vast and growing army of Islamist and nationalist rebels opposing US interests throughout the region.
"The Israeli power configuration within the US led the US into a war which enhanced Israel's dominance of the Middle East and accelerated its annexation of Palestinian land. But Israeli ambition for total regional power is not complete. It still faces a formidable opponent to its conquest of the Middle East: Iran remains a staunch supporter of the people and national sovereignty of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
"The regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, backed by the entire Israeli political opposition and the majority of the Jewish electorate, has been aggressively pushing for a US confrontation with Iran - through economic and eventually military warfare.
"There have been scores of public and private meetings in the US and elsewhere where Netanyahu's regime 'informed' (or rather dictated to) the entire Zionist power configuration to launch an economic and military attack against Iran with the open aim of 'regime change' and the ultimate aim of breaking up and destroying the Islamic Republic - similar to the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and now Syria."
Part 2 to follow...
Although you won't read about it in the Australian msm, there's actually a make-or-break struggle going on between Israel (and its US fifth column) and the US president as to whether more American blood and treasure should be spilled/squandered (this time in a war against Iran) to keep Israel in the manner to which it has become accustomed, namely, top dog in the Middle East.
For the big picture, beginning with the background, and concluding tomorrow with the current state of play, here's the latest must-read James Petras essay:
The Conference of 52 Presidents of the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations & the US-Iran Nuclear Agreement: The Centrepiece of US Foreign Policy Struggle
Prologue
In the village of Duma, an 18-month-old baby died following the fire-bombing of his family's home by Israeli settlers. The father of the child died of burns a week later and the surviving mother and young sibling are barely alive - covered with burns from racist Jewish arson.
"The United Nations Special Committee to investigate Israel's practices toward Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory has revealed that the 'root cause' of the escalating violence is the 'continuous policy of Jewish settlement expansion (financed and defended by the Netanyahu regime) and the climate of impunity relating to the activities of the settlers (financed and defended by the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations). (UN News Centre, 10/8/15)
Introduction
The recent US-Iran nuclear agreement, titled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has implications far beyond the ending of nearly 40 years of regional confrontation.
"Several fundamental issues concerning the nature of US policymaking, the power of a foreign regime (Israel) in deciding questions of war and peace, and the role organized power configurations with overseas loyalties play in making and breaking executive and legislative authorities.
"To investigate these fundamental issues it is important to discuss the historical context leading up to the rise of this paradoxical situation: Where a 'global power' is subjected to the dictates of a second-rate state through the strategic penetration and influence of domestic organizations composed of 'nominal citizens' of the subject state with 'divided (to put it politely) loyalties'.
The Centrality of Israel's Unchallenged Regional Supremacy
"The motor force of Israeli foreign and domestic policy is their drive for unchallenged regional supremacy: Military dominance through wars, territorial occupation, brutal armed interventions, extra-territorial political assassinations of opponents and favorable one-sided treaties. To ensure its unquestioned dominance Israel has developed the only nuclear weapons arsenal and largest missile launch capacity in the region, and has openly declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons against regional rivals.
"Israel's repeated mantra that it faces an 'existential threat' from its Arab neighbors and subjugated Palestinians has no factual basis. On the contrary, history has taught the world that Israel, directly and indirectly, has engaged in a series of aggressive wars devastating its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Israel has bombed and/or invaded Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan. Israel has assassinated scientists in Iran and Palestinian political leasers, as well as intellectuals, writers and poets in the Gulf, Jordan and Europe. [And Lebanon: MERC] Even family members have not been spared Israeli terror.
"Israel can brutalize its neighbors with total impunity because of its vast military superiority, but its real power is found in its overseas proxies, the Tel Aviv-dominated Zionist power configurations [ZPCs], especially in North America and Europe. The most important proxy organizations and individuals operate in the United States. Thanks to them Israel has received over $150 billion dollars in economic and military grants and loans from US taxpayers in the past half-century. Each year Israel rakes in billions in tribute, billions in tax-free donations from billionaire Israel loyalists with dual US citizenship, who extract their wealth from American workers, investors and gamblers, and hundreds of billions via unrestricted investments, privileged market access and technology transfers.
"The economic and military transfers to Israel result from the cumulative build-up of political power among powerful US Zionists. No one today disputes that what is dubbed the 'pro-Israel lobby' is the most powerful configuration inside Washington DC today. Focusing primarily on the 'Israel lobby' overlooks the powerful role that influential, Zionist political officials have played in deciding issues prioritized by the Israeli leadership.
"Israeli power over the making and implementing of US Middle East policy has led to the US invasions of Iraq, Syria and Libya; the current economic boycott and blockade of Iran; the breakup of Sudan; and the bombing of Somalia.
"Israeli power in the US operates through various political instruments in different institutional settings. The pro-Israel mass media moguls at the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and all the TV networks unconditionally defend Israel's bombing, dispossession and repression of Palestinians while demonizing any Arab or Muslim states which have opposed its brutality - frequently calling for the US to impose sanctions and/or to launch armed attacks against Israel's critics.
"The US military campaign known as the 'Global War on Terror', a series of brutal invasions and 'regime changes' launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was formulated and promoted by fanatical Israeli proxies in strategic positions within the Bush government, especially Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, 'Scooter' Libby, Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle. The boycott of Iran was designed and implemented by US Treasury officials Levey and Cohen. The drumbeat for war in Iraq and the phony 'intelligence' about 'weapons of mass destruction' was propagated by New York Times scribe, Judith Miller, designed by Wolfowitz and Feith, backed by the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, and ultimately paid for with the lives of over 5,000 Americans and well over a million Iraqi civilians. The destruction and breakup of Iraq, a long-time supporter of Palestinian national rights, was accomplished without the loss of a single Israeli life - despite the enormous benefit the Jewish state has enjoyed from the war! The extraordinary success of this highest Israeli military priority was due entirely to the machinations of Israel's highly placed US proxies.
"Yet the cost of the war has been very high for the American people (and unimaginably high for Iraqis): Over a quarter million physical and mental casualties among US troops; two trillion dollars and counting in military expenditures crippling the US economy and a vast and growing army of Islamist and nationalist rebels opposing US interests throughout the region.
"The Israeli power configuration within the US led the US into a war which enhanced Israel's dominance of the Middle East and accelerated its annexation of Palestinian land. But Israeli ambition for total regional power is not complete. It still faces a formidable opponent to its conquest of the Middle East: Iran remains a staunch supporter of the people and national sovereignty of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
"The regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, backed by the entire Israeli political opposition and the majority of the Jewish electorate, has been aggressively pushing for a US confrontation with Iran - through economic and eventually military warfare.
"There have been scores of public and private meetings in the US and elsewhere where Netanyahu's regime 'informed' (or rather dictated to) the entire Zionist power configuration to launch an economic and military attack against Iran with the open aim of 'regime change' and the ultimate aim of breaking up and destroying the Islamic Republic - similar to the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and now Syria."
Part 2 to follow...
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Obama: No More Wars for Israel
The Iraq War theses of James Petras (The Power of Israel in the United States, 2006), John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, 2007), and Stephen Sniegoski (The Transparent Cabal, 2008) have just been vindicated by Barack Obama. (My clarifications in brackets):
"Between now and the congressional vote in September, you're going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising. [Hello, Israel Lobby!] And if the rhetoric in these ads, and the accompanying commentary, sounds familiar, it should - for many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal. [Hello, Ziocons!] Now, when I ran for President, 8 years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war - we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. [Hello, Ziocons!] It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral US action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported." (Remarks by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal, American University, Washington, DC, 5/8/15)
"Between now and the congressional vote in September, you're going to hear a lot of arguments against this deal, backed by tens of millions of dollars in advertising. [Hello, Israel Lobby!] And if the rhetoric in these ads, and the accompanying commentary, sounds familiar, it should - for many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal. [Hello, Ziocons!] Now, when I ran for President, 8 years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war - we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. [Hello, Ziocons!] It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral US action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported." (Remarks by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal, American University, Washington, DC, 5/8/15)
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
An Australian in Washington
In his opinion piece in yesterday's Australian, Restraint is not weakness, Australia's former foreign minister, Bob Carr, offers an overview and defence of Obama's foreign policy: Bush was a foreign policy 'maximalist'. Obama is a foreign policy 'minimalist'. Three cheers for the latter!
But it wasn't Carr's case for Obama that interested me. It was his opening paragraphs. I cannot overestimate their documentary value:
"The caller was an Australian living in the US, effectively embedded in George W Bush's administration. He knew the cabinet, got to see the vice-president, had spent time in the Oval Office. It was March 2003, the Iraq war just launched.
"'America will have a decisive win,' he told me, and went on with arguments imbibed from the feisty, cordite-flavoured atmosphere of a Washington at war. It was all upbeat.
"'Iraq gets a market economy. It becomes a democracy. This changes the Arab world. They make peace with Israel.' He may even have implied a prod or two from this triumphant US military would bring change to Iran.
"Here, then, was the prevailing wisdom of the neo-cons who had salivated over a war with Iraq and the ultranationalists they had recruited for this preposterous mission."
Here is yet further evidence, from an embedded source with access to the highest levels of US decision-making, that the Bush regime's war against Iraq was, first and foremost, a war to rearrange the Middle East in Israel's interest, and that a neocon (more accurately, Ziocon) cabal, already with an eye on using US military muscle to topple the Iranian regime, was leading the charge.
Simply stunning. Thank you, Bob!
On a more mundane level, though, could you please, in the national interest, name your Australian caller of March, 2003? It worries me no end that this credulous fuckwit could currently be embedded somewhere in our own foreign policy machinery, wreaking God-knows-what havoc.
But it wasn't Carr's case for Obama that interested me. It was his opening paragraphs. I cannot overestimate their documentary value:
"The caller was an Australian living in the US, effectively embedded in George W Bush's administration. He knew the cabinet, got to see the vice-president, had spent time in the Oval Office. It was March 2003, the Iraq war just launched.
"'America will have a decisive win,' he told me, and went on with arguments imbibed from the feisty, cordite-flavoured atmosphere of a Washington at war. It was all upbeat.
"'Iraq gets a market economy. It becomes a democracy. This changes the Arab world. They make peace with Israel.' He may even have implied a prod or two from this triumphant US military would bring change to Iran.
"Here, then, was the prevailing wisdom of the neo-cons who had salivated over a war with Iraq and the ultranationalists they had recruited for this preposterous mission."
Here is yet further evidence, from an embedded source with access to the highest levels of US decision-making, that the Bush regime's war against Iraq was, first and foremost, a war to rearrange the Middle East in Israel's interest, and that a neocon (more accurately, Ziocon) cabal, already with an eye on using US military muscle to topple the Iranian regime, was leading the charge.
Simply stunning. Thank you, Bob!
On a more mundane level, though, could you please, in the national interest, name your Australian caller of March, 2003? It worries me no end that this credulous fuckwit could currently be embedded somewhere in our own foreign policy machinery, wreaking God-knows-what havoc.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Anyone Remember 'No War for Oil'?
Remember the bullshit we used to hear about the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq - that it was all about oil?
The fact that it was really all about Israel seldom emerges from the mouths of mainstream political figures. Which is what makes the following snippet so interesting:
"On Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry questioned Mr Netanyahu's foreign policy judgment as he testified before a Republican-dominated foreign affairs committee in the House of Representatives. Referring to Mr Netanyahu's condemnation of the Iran talks, Mr Kerry said with clear irony: 'The Prime Minister was also profoundly forward-leaning and very outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush'." (White House-Israel relations at new low over Iran deal, Nick O'Malley, Sydney Morning Herald, 27/2/15)
For those of you who still have oil on the brain, and still haven't read my 22/12/08 post Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, do so NOW. Just click on the Stephen Sniegoski label below.
The fact that it was really all about Israel seldom emerges from the mouths of mainstream political figures. Which is what makes the following snippet so interesting:
"On Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry questioned Mr Netanyahu's foreign policy judgment as he testified before a Republican-dominated foreign affairs committee in the House of Representatives. Referring to Mr Netanyahu's condemnation of the Iran talks, Mr Kerry said with clear irony: 'The Prime Minister was also profoundly forward-leaning and very outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush'." (White House-Israel relations at new low over Iran deal, Nick O'Malley, Sydney Morning Herald, 27/2/15)
For those of you who still have oil on the brain, and still haven't read my 22/12/08 post Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, do so NOW. Just click on the Stephen Sniegoski label below.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
They Can't Get No Satisfaction
Fair dinkum, there's just no satisfying the Israelis.
Back in 2002:
"Israel urged the United States... to press ahead with a military offensive against Iraq, arguing that any delay would give Saddam Hussein more time to develop weapons of mass destruction." (Sharon urges America to bring down Saddam, Anton La Guardia, telegraph.co.uk, 17/8/02)
Here it is 2014, and:
"Israel's ambassador to Australia, Shmuel Ben-Shmuel... said the 'disintegration' of Iraq and Syria - regardless of whether Iranian-backed Shiites or al-Qa'ida-inspired Sunni Muslims emerged more powerful - would pose a threat to Israel and the Jewish people." (Fear Iraq-Syria focus 'to turn West', Paul Maley & Mark Schliebs, The Australian, 27/6/14)
Back in 2002:
"Israel urged the United States... to press ahead with a military offensive against Iraq, arguing that any delay would give Saddam Hussein more time to develop weapons of mass destruction." (Sharon urges America to bring down Saddam, Anton La Guardia, telegraph.co.uk, 17/8/02)
Here it is 2014, and:
"Israel's ambassador to Australia, Shmuel Ben-Shmuel... said the 'disintegration' of Iraq and Syria - regardless of whether Iranian-backed Shiites or al-Qa'ida-inspired Sunni Muslims emerged more powerful - would pose a threat to Israel and the Jewish people." (Fear Iraq-Syria focus 'to turn West', Paul Maley & Mark Schliebs, The Australian, 27/6/14)
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Neocons: No Beautiful Dreamers
Jonathan Holmes' opinion piece, America's dream of Iraq showing the way has turned into a nightmare in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald is sadly typical of that paper's piss-poor Middle East coverage.
Having produced a 2003 Four Corners documentary (American Dreamers) on the role of the US neo-conservatives in initiating the Iraq war of 2003-11, Holmes thought he'd revisit the subject in yesterday's edition, with the following result:
"Since the end of the first Gulf War in 1992, the neo-cons had been calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of 9/11 they seized their chance... What was really driving the neo-cons was not cynical pragmatism [ie getting hold of Iraqi oil], but an idealistic optimism that American power could be deployed for the benefit of the whole Arab world... It was a beautiful dream. But to many, even then, it was extraordinarily naive."
Unfortunately, about the best that can be said of the above is that at least its author isn't trying to tell us that the Iraq war was all about oil.
Holmes' portrayal of the neocons (more properly, Ziocons) is, to borrow his own words, "extraordinarily naive."
The idea that a bunch of extraordinarily Israel-friendly dreamers simply rocked up, post 9/11, to the Bush White House with a plan, nay, "a Beautiful Dream" to "benefit the Arab world," is of course ludicrous.
Anyone with a serious interest in the genesis of the Bush/Blair aggression on Iraq needs to acquire a copy of Stephen J. Sniegoski's Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008).
Here's an extract contra Holmes' "beautiful dream" nonsense:
"While the neoconservatives were the driving force for the American invasion of Iraq, and the attendant efforts to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East, the idea for such a war did not originate with American neocon thinkers but rather in Israel. An obvious linkage exists between the war position of the neoconservatives and what has been the long-time strategy of the Israeli right...
"The idea of a Middle East war had been bandied about in Israel for many years as a means of enhancing Israeli security. War would serve two purposes. It would improve Israel's external security by weakening and splintering Israel's neighbors. Moreover, such a war and the consequent weakening of Israel's external enemies would serve to resolve the internal Palestinian demographic problem, since the Palestinian resistance depends upon material and moral support from Israel's neighboring states...
[Sniegoski cites here the views of Rabin adviser Yoram Peri, who described in 1982 how the coming to power in Israel of the Likudniks [1977], saw a shift in security conception from coexistence and maintenance of the status quo to hegemony over, and destabilization of, the region via its fragmentation into warring ethno-religious communities.]
"Peri had argued that if Israel went off on its own in destabilizing the Middle East, the United States would abandon Israel, to Israel's detriment. What was needed for the Israeli destabilization plan to work was a transformation of American Middle East policy. If the United States adopted the same destabilization policy as Israel, then such a policy could succeed. For the United States' influence among its allies and in the United Nations, where it held a veto, would be enough to shelter Israel from the animosity of world public opinion, preventing it from ending up as a pariah state such as the white-ruled Repubic of South Africa. Better yet, though perhaps even unimagined in the 1980s, would be to induce the United States to act in Israel's place to destabilize the region.
"Such a policy transformation was impossible in the 1980s. However, through the long-term efforts of the American neoconservatives, that transformation would occur in the Bush II administration. The neocon advocacy of dramatically altering the Middle East status quo stood in stark contrast to the traditional American position of maintaining stability in the area - though it did, of course, mesh perfectly with the long-established Israeli goal of destabilizing its enemies...
***
"To reiterate... the vision of 'regime change' in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing 'democracy' to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States..." (pp 44-57)
[NB: My 22/12/08 post on the neocons and Iraq, Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, which also draws heavily on Sniegoski, covers similar territory to this one.]
Having produced a 2003 Four Corners documentary (American Dreamers) on the role of the US neo-conservatives in initiating the Iraq war of 2003-11, Holmes thought he'd revisit the subject in yesterday's edition, with the following result:
"Since the end of the first Gulf War in 1992, the neo-cons had been calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of 9/11 they seized their chance... What was really driving the neo-cons was not cynical pragmatism [ie getting hold of Iraqi oil], but an idealistic optimism that American power could be deployed for the benefit of the whole Arab world... It was a beautiful dream. But to many, even then, it was extraordinarily naive."
Unfortunately, about the best that can be said of the above is that at least its author isn't trying to tell us that the Iraq war was all about oil.
Holmes' portrayal of the neocons (more properly, Ziocons) is, to borrow his own words, "extraordinarily naive."
The idea that a bunch of extraordinarily Israel-friendly dreamers simply rocked up, post 9/11, to the Bush White House with a plan, nay, "a Beautiful Dream" to "benefit the Arab world," is of course ludicrous.
Anyone with a serious interest in the genesis of the Bush/Blair aggression on Iraq needs to acquire a copy of Stephen J. Sniegoski's Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008).
Here's an extract contra Holmes' "beautiful dream" nonsense:
"While the neoconservatives were the driving force for the American invasion of Iraq, and the attendant efforts to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East, the idea for such a war did not originate with American neocon thinkers but rather in Israel. An obvious linkage exists between the war position of the neoconservatives and what has been the long-time strategy of the Israeli right...
"The idea of a Middle East war had been bandied about in Israel for many years as a means of enhancing Israeli security. War would serve two purposes. It would improve Israel's external security by weakening and splintering Israel's neighbors. Moreover, such a war and the consequent weakening of Israel's external enemies would serve to resolve the internal Palestinian demographic problem, since the Palestinian resistance depends upon material and moral support from Israel's neighboring states...
[Sniegoski cites here the views of Rabin adviser Yoram Peri, who described in 1982 how the coming to power in Israel of the Likudniks [1977], saw a shift in security conception from coexistence and maintenance of the status quo to hegemony over, and destabilization of, the region via its fragmentation into warring ethno-religious communities.]
"Peri had argued that if Israel went off on its own in destabilizing the Middle East, the United States would abandon Israel, to Israel's detriment. What was needed for the Israeli destabilization plan to work was a transformation of American Middle East policy. If the United States adopted the same destabilization policy as Israel, then such a policy could succeed. For the United States' influence among its allies and in the United Nations, where it held a veto, would be enough to shelter Israel from the animosity of world public opinion, preventing it from ending up as a pariah state such as the white-ruled Repubic of South Africa. Better yet, though perhaps even unimagined in the 1980s, would be to induce the United States to act in Israel's place to destabilize the region.
"Such a policy transformation was impossible in the 1980s. However, through the long-term efforts of the American neoconservatives, that transformation would occur in the Bush II administration. The neocon advocacy of dramatically altering the Middle East status quo stood in stark contrast to the traditional American position of maintaining stability in the area - though it did, of course, mesh perfectly with the long-established Israeli goal of destabilizing its enemies...
***
"To reiterate... the vision of 'regime change' in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing 'democracy' to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States..." (pp 44-57)
[NB: My 22/12/08 post on the neocons and Iraq, Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, which also draws heavily on Sniegoski, covers similar territory to this one.]
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Remember Iraq, March 20, 2003
Hands up all those who still think Iraq was mugged for its oil rather than to satisfy an Israeli wet-dream:
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So three or more states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north." (From A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, Kivunim, February, 1982)
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So three or more states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north." (From A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, Kivunim, February, 1982)
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Netanyahu & the Cauldronization of Iraq & Iran
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster please. If ever there was a region that deserved to be cauldronized, it is the Middle East today." Michael Ledeen, 2002
Paul McGeough's reporting in the Fairfax press is nothing short of exemplary. Writing on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the cauldronization of Iraq, he refers to the latest study of the cost in lives and treaure of the Iraq war:
"'Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and [so] completely in their faces,' says US Navel Academy professor John Nagl in an anniversary opinion piece. The cost of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld response to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has been enormous - 300,000 lives and $4 trillion, according to a new study by Brown University in Rhode Island." (Ten years on, war a part of daily life, Paul McGeogh, Sydney Morning Herald, 23/3/13)
Why is this so?
Because the US decision to cauldronize Iraq was far from being a "national decision," by which I mean a war fought in the US national interest. The following lines in McGeough's analysis go part way to explaining what I mean:
"Marking the Iraq war anniversary, The New York Times editorialised: 'None of the Bush administration's war architects have been called to account for their mistakes and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign policy.'"
So who were these "architects"?
They were the 'neoconservatives', more correctly called Zioconservatives, who promoted, both inside and outside the Bush administration, a "war agenda conceived in Israel to advance Israeli interests."* The leading architects of the Iraq war - the 'fucking crazies' as Secretary of State Collin Powell memorably called them - were men such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith.
"One of their fellow travellers," writes McGeogh pointedly, "deserves greater attention today, because of his eagerness for another war - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the eve of this week's visit to Israel by Obama, the Israeli daily Haaretz thoughtfully ran screeds from Netanyahu's September 2002 testimony to a Congressional committee. Substitute '2013/Iran/Tehran/Ahmadinejad' for '2003/Iraq/Baghdad/Saddam' in the following. 'There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons - no question whatsoever. And there is no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately... Every indication we have is that he is pursuing, pursuing with abandon, pursuing with every ounce of effort, the establishment of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. If anyone makes an opposite assumption or cannot draw the line connecting the dots, that is simply not an objective assessment... '"
Netanyahu, it should be remembered, was the recipient of the infamous 1996 neocon policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which called upon Israel to adopt a strategy of destabilising the Middle East, including Iraq.
Another memorable appearance by Netanyahu in the lead up to the 2003 cauldronization of Iraq came not long after 9/11: "The September 11 atrocities created the white-hot climate in which Israel could undertake harsh measures unacceptable under normal conditions. When asked what the terrorist attack would do for US-Israeli relations, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blurted out: 'It's very good.' Then he edited himself: 'Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.' Netanyahu correctly predicted that the attack would 'strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.'" (The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Stephen J. Sniegoski, 2008, p 139)
Like the Zionist agenda of 1948, the Ziocon agenda of a cauldronized Middle East has yet to reach a final conclusion - as McGeough pithily reminds us in his final sentence:
"Tomorrow, Tehran."
Finally, just recalling Netanyahu's near 3-year late 'apology' to Turkey for the deaths of its nationals on the Mavi Marmara and Obama's stopover in Jordan for talks with King Abdullah regarding Syria, how resonant is this advice from the Clean Break document: "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." That sentence, it should be noted, immediately preceded this: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."
[*These are the words of Stephen J. Sniegoski. For a fuller presentation of his thesis, see my 22/12/08 post Absent-minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze.]
Paul McGeough's reporting in the Fairfax press is nothing short of exemplary. Writing on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the cauldronization of Iraq, he refers to the latest study of the cost in lives and treaure of the Iraq war:
"'Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and [so] completely in their faces,' says US Navel Academy professor John Nagl in an anniversary opinion piece. The cost of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld response to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has been enormous - 300,000 lives and $4 trillion, according to a new study by Brown University in Rhode Island." (Ten years on, war a part of daily life, Paul McGeogh, Sydney Morning Herald, 23/3/13)
Why is this so?
Because the US decision to cauldronize Iraq was far from being a "national decision," by which I mean a war fought in the US national interest. The following lines in McGeough's analysis go part way to explaining what I mean:
"Marking the Iraq war anniversary, The New York Times editorialised: 'None of the Bush administration's war architects have been called to account for their mistakes and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign policy.'"
So who were these "architects"?
They were the 'neoconservatives', more correctly called Zioconservatives, who promoted, both inside and outside the Bush administration, a "war agenda conceived in Israel to advance Israeli interests."* The leading architects of the Iraq war - the 'fucking crazies' as Secretary of State Collin Powell memorably called them - were men such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith.
"One of their fellow travellers," writes McGeogh pointedly, "deserves greater attention today, because of his eagerness for another war - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the eve of this week's visit to Israel by Obama, the Israeli daily Haaretz thoughtfully ran screeds from Netanyahu's September 2002 testimony to a Congressional committee. Substitute '2013/Iran/Tehran/Ahmadinejad' for '2003/Iraq/Baghdad/Saddam' in the following. 'There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons - no question whatsoever. And there is no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately... Every indication we have is that he is pursuing, pursuing with abandon, pursuing with every ounce of effort, the establishment of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. If anyone makes an opposite assumption or cannot draw the line connecting the dots, that is simply not an objective assessment... '"
Netanyahu, it should be remembered, was the recipient of the infamous 1996 neocon policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which called upon Israel to adopt a strategy of destabilising the Middle East, including Iraq.
Another memorable appearance by Netanyahu in the lead up to the 2003 cauldronization of Iraq came not long after 9/11: "The September 11 atrocities created the white-hot climate in which Israel could undertake harsh measures unacceptable under normal conditions. When asked what the terrorist attack would do for US-Israeli relations, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blurted out: 'It's very good.' Then he edited himself: 'Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.' Netanyahu correctly predicted that the attack would 'strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.'" (The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Stephen J. Sniegoski, 2008, p 139)
Like the Zionist agenda of 1948, the Ziocon agenda of a cauldronized Middle East has yet to reach a final conclusion - as McGeough pithily reminds us in his final sentence:
"Tomorrow, Tehran."
Finally, just recalling Netanyahu's near 3-year late 'apology' to Turkey for the deaths of its nationals on the Mavi Marmara and Obama's stopover in Jordan for talks with King Abdullah regarding Syria, how resonant is this advice from the Clean Break document: "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." That sentence, it should be noted, immediately preceded this: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."
[*These are the words of Stephen J. Sniegoski. For a fuller presentation of his thesis, see my 22/12/08 post Absent-minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze.]
Monday, December 24, 2012
The Incredible Lightness of Being an American Foreign Correspondent
So who's to blame for the US-led war on Iraq?
According to US foreign correspondent and author of Taliban Shuffle, Kim Barker, it was all the fault of the stoopid American people, with a little help from Fox News. (And so, ipso facto, it had nothing whatever to do with America's Zio-conservative urgers, both in and out of the Bush administration, who saw no daylight, as they say, between America's and Israel's interests. See my 22/12/08 post Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze.)
The following sad exchange comes from an interview with Barker conducted by the presenter of ABC Radio National's Big Ideas program on 23/12/12:
Paul Barclay: But everyone must have known that Afghanistan was the key location in terms of the fight against terrorism [sic], yet so much time was spent in Iraq... Why was that?
Kim Barker: I think there was really a sense that they had handled Afghanistan and they were going to go in and do Iraq, and I think... at that point of time [2003], if you were to poll Americans and ask them if Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, they would probably have said 'yes', and it was just this thing, you could keep writing stories but it didn't matter against the drumbeat of Fox News and the sort of jingoistic media you have now in the States where it's possible to just read and watch what validates your own particular point of view...
PB: But it was wrong, it was baseless...
KB: It was wrong, totally baseless...
PB: So you go to war on a baseless assumption?
KB: Well we went to war in Iraq because they were essentially harbouring WMD, right? That worked out well.
That's right, the American people decided that nothing was more important, certainly not Afghanistan and that Osama whatshisname, than getting rid of Saddam Hussein. There they were, taking to the streets in their millions, brandishing ATTACK IRAQ NOW! placards. Definitely, without all that pressure from below, Bush wouldn't have gone there. Stoopid Americans!
After almost 10 years of murder and mayhem in Iraq and trillions of US dollars down the drain, can such cluelessness in American (or any other) foreign correspondents be forgiven?
According to US foreign correspondent and author of Taliban Shuffle, Kim Barker, it was all the fault of the stoopid American people, with a little help from Fox News. (And so, ipso facto, it had nothing whatever to do with America's Zio-conservative urgers, both in and out of the Bush administration, who saw no daylight, as they say, between America's and Israel's interests. See my 22/12/08 post Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze.)
The following sad exchange comes from an interview with Barker conducted by the presenter of ABC Radio National's Big Ideas program on 23/12/12:
Paul Barclay: But everyone must have known that Afghanistan was the key location in terms of the fight against terrorism [sic], yet so much time was spent in Iraq... Why was that?
Kim Barker: I think there was really a sense that they had handled Afghanistan and they were going to go in and do Iraq, and I think... at that point of time [2003], if you were to poll Americans and ask them if Iraqis and Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, they would probably have said 'yes', and it was just this thing, you could keep writing stories but it didn't matter against the drumbeat of Fox News and the sort of jingoistic media you have now in the States where it's possible to just read and watch what validates your own particular point of view...
PB: But it was wrong, it was baseless...
KB: It was wrong, totally baseless...
PB: So you go to war on a baseless assumption?
KB: Well we went to war in Iraq because they were essentially harbouring WMD, right? That worked out well.
That's right, the American people decided that nothing was more important, certainly not Afghanistan and that Osama whatshisname, than getting rid of Saddam Hussein. There they were, taking to the streets in their millions, brandishing ATTACK IRAQ NOW! placards. Definitely, without all that pressure from below, Bush wouldn't have gone there. Stoopid Americans!
After almost 10 years of murder and mayhem in Iraq and trillions of US dollars down the drain, can such cluelessness in American (or any other) foreign correspondents be forgiven?
Sunday, July 29, 2012
The Refugee Factory
"A few weeks ago I was in Amman, the capital of Transjordan, and spent an evening driving round the town with an official of the Ministry of the Interior. The town was packed with these refugee Arabs [from Palestine], crouching in doorways, lying in the gutters, sleeping in the provincial buses, in schools, in hospitals, in the fields - even in the graveyards. Many of their faces were already gaunt with hunger. For years there has been no begging in this town, but at this time one could not walk ten yards down the street without being acosted for alms." (Letter from 'Middle East Observer' in The Spectator, August 6, 1948)
To revisit the bleeding obvious, Israel is a state built squarely on the foundation and maintenance of a massive 6-decades old Palestinian Arab refugee problem. After first driving out the mass of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948, Israel proceeded to write them off as 'absentees', settle Jewish immigrants in their homes and on their lands, and, in one of history's most breathtaking displays of historical chutzpah and revisionism, has played the sweet innocent ever since.
I was prompted to reflect thus on Israel's historical role as a refugee-producing nation when I read the following sentence: "Iraq will set up camps at two of its three border crossings with Syria to provide support for Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict in their homeland, a government spokesman said on Tuesday." (Iraq to set up camps for Syrian refugees, AFP, 24/7/12)
Who could've imagined, prior to the glory days of GW Bush and his Ziocon urgers, that within the space of a decade Iraqi refugees would be flooding into Syria and Syrian refugees into Iraq? The question then arises: if the war on Iraq (which resulted in a huge refugee exodus, now largely abandoned and barely remembered) was primarily about rearranging the Middle East to suit Israel, then what about the war in Syria? Is Israel, a nation which may well have produced, directly or indirectly, more refugees than any other on the planet, really just the innocent, even fearful, bystander its propagandists make it out to be?
The evidence, I'm afraid, suggests otherwise.
There's the documentary evidence:
In a recent post (22/7/12), Syria's 'Alawis: A Corrective, I quoted the words of Israeli analyst Oded Yinon to the effect that Israel's "targets" in Syria should be a) "the dissolution of [its] military power," and b) "its dissolution into ethnically and religiously unique areas." That was written in 1982 as Israel was cutting a swathe through Lebanon.
In 1996, US Ziocon strategists advising Netanyahu asserted in their infamous document, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' that "Israel can shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria," a strategy closely tied to the idea of regime change in Iraq: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions." Following the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003, the same crowd, from their redoubts in the Bush administration, turned their sights on Syria, with Paul Wolfowitz declaring that there has "got to be regime change in Syria," and Richard Perle telling the Syrians: "You're next." (See The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, p 274.)
And in 2012 we've got the US State Department-funded US Institute of Peace (USIP) and its blueprint for regime change in Syria, The Day After: Supporting a democratic transition in Syria. (So you know where USIP's coming from, its president, US congressman Jim Marshall, voted to restrict UN funding in 2005, co-sponsored the Syria Accountability & Liberation Act in 2007, and signed a 2010 letter to Secretary of State Clinton, along with 326 other congressmen, affirming the US's "unbreakable bond" with Israel. Its leading light on the Syrian front is academic and Syria 'expert' Steven Heydemann, who had this to say of his pet 'project': "We have very purposely stayed away from contributing to the direct overthrow of the Assad regime... Our project is called 'the day after'. There are other groups working on the day before."* Oh, and cui bono? "We should hope for the best, Steven Heydemann says - democracy, secularism, maybe even peace with Israel - but not rule out the worst."**)
There are the links between the key personnel of the two external Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on the one hand, and assorted Ziocon groups and individuals on the other.(See The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?, Charlie Skelton, The Guardian, 12/7/12)
Finally, there are those devastating explosions targeting the key structures and personnel of the Asad regime. Sure, they could have been the handiwork of the Free Syrian Army - anything's possible. But frankly, if educated guesses are more to your liking, you'd probably be on safer ground fingering the folk who brought down Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 and enriched our store of euphemisms with the term 'targeted killings'.
So the question arises: are we today seeing Yinon's wet-dream unfolding?
The scenario sketched by political scientist Virginia Tilley sounds as plausible as any: "[The Syrian] opposition is a mixed bag, with sharp disagreements, particularly about external intervention, as well as whether, when and how to negotiate with the government. These disagreements are certainly sincere and most are principled. Left alone, consensus could gel. But Israel's interests, which weave through them like a fog, run in a different direction: to steer Syrian events away from any process that will generate a representative, stable and strong country in the long run. Far preferable for Israel is to keep things polarised to ensure a catastrophic internal crisis that will dismantle Syria's security forces, permanently fragment its political elite and paralyse domestic politics in bitter internecine squabbles (with rival foreign supporters), which as a package will ensure that a strong state can't be rebuilt. Thus Syria's independent role in the region would evaporate and Israel's foreign policy prerogatives will be secured. Even more perfect would be a Syrian collapse defined by sectarian bigotry, a game at which Israel enjoys grand mastery. Of course, Israel bases its whole existence ideologically on the premise that the Middle East and the world at large are entirely steered by bigotry, but this worldview has also proved useful as realist foreign policy. It's always easy to turn idle biases into rabid racism. The Mossad is also brilliant at infiltrating Arab movements, as Palestinians will bitterly attest, and has been sending agents across the Syrian border to gather intelligence and stoke 'tribal' divisions for decades. It can certainly do this with much greater facility now that the country is in such upheaval. Hence it's only sensible to assume that Israeli plants are all over the Syrian movement, among and within factions, playing off arguments about best ways forward. And as Israel's best outcome is crisis, polarisation and violence that will generate a weak Syria in the end, those arguing about negotiating with the regime must consider which of the voices rejecting negotiations are sincere and which are Israeli hand-puppets." (Crying wolf, foreign agendas & Israel's role in destabilising Syria, Al-Jazeera, 1/2/12)
But back to those Arab refugees - whether they've fled from Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan; from Iraq to Syria and Jordan; or from Syria to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey - one thing's certain, they are all products of the refugee factory that is Israel.
[*Steven Heydemann on the 'Family Business' in Syria, Christopher Lydon, radioopensource.com, 12/5/11;**Inside the quiet effort to plan for a post-Assad Syria, Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy, 20/7/12]
To revisit the bleeding obvious, Israel is a state built squarely on the foundation and maintenance of a massive 6-decades old Palestinian Arab refugee problem. After first driving out the mass of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948, Israel proceeded to write them off as 'absentees', settle Jewish immigrants in their homes and on their lands, and, in one of history's most breathtaking displays of historical chutzpah and revisionism, has played the sweet innocent ever since.
I was prompted to reflect thus on Israel's historical role as a refugee-producing nation when I read the following sentence: "Iraq will set up camps at two of its three border crossings with Syria to provide support for Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict in their homeland, a government spokesman said on Tuesday." (Iraq to set up camps for Syrian refugees, AFP, 24/7/12)
Who could've imagined, prior to the glory days of GW Bush and his Ziocon urgers, that within the space of a decade Iraqi refugees would be flooding into Syria and Syrian refugees into Iraq? The question then arises: if the war on Iraq (which resulted in a huge refugee exodus, now largely abandoned and barely remembered) was primarily about rearranging the Middle East to suit Israel, then what about the war in Syria? Is Israel, a nation which may well have produced, directly or indirectly, more refugees than any other on the planet, really just the innocent, even fearful, bystander its propagandists make it out to be?
The evidence, I'm afraid, suggests otherwise.
There's the documentary evidence:
In a recent post (22/7/12), Syria's 'Alawis: A Corrective, I quoted the words of Israeli analyst Oded Yinon to the effect that Israel's "targets" in Syria should be a) "the dissolution of [its] military power," and b) "its dissolution into ethnically and religiously unique areas." That was written in 1982 as Israel was cutting a swathe through Lebanon.
In 1996, US Ziocon strategists advising Netanyahu asserted in their infamous document, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' that "Israel can shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria," a strategy closely tied to the idea of regime change in Iraq: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions." Following the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003, the same crowd, from their redoubts in the Bush administration, turned their sights on Syria, with Paul Wolfowitz declaring that there has "got to be regime change in Syria," and Richard Perle telling the Syrians: "You're next." (See The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, p 274.)
And in 2012 we've got the US State Department-funded US Institute of Peace (USIP) and its blueprint for regime change in Syria, The Day After: Supporting a democratic transition in Syria. (So you know where USIP's coming from, its president, US congressman Jim Marshall, voted to restrict UN funding in 2005, co-sponsored the Syria Accountability & Liberation Act in 2007, and signed a 2010 letter to Secretary of State Clinton, along with 326 other congressmen, affirming the US's "unbreakable bond" with Israel. Its leading light on the Syrian front is academic and Syria 'expert' Steven Heydemann, who had this to say of his pet 'project': "We have very purposely stayed away from contributing to the direct overthrow of the Assad regime... Our project is called 'the day after'. There are other groups working on the day before."* Oh, and cui bono? "We should hope for the best, Steven Heydemann says - democracy, secularism, maybe even peace with Israel - but not rule out the worst."**)
There are the links between the key personnel of the two external Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on the one hand, and assorted Ziocon groups and individuals on the other.(See The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?, Charlie Skelton, The Guardian, 12/7/12)
Finally, there are those devastating explosions targeting the key structures and personnel of the Asad regime. Sure, they could have been the handiwork of the Free Syrian Army - anything's possible. But frankly, if educated guesses are more to your liking, you'd probably be on safer ground fingering the folk who brought down Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 and enriched our store of euphemisms with the term 'targeted killings'.
So the question arises: are we today seeing Yinon's wet-dream unfolding?
The scenario sketched by political scientist Virginia Tilley sounds as plausible as any: "[The Syrian] opposition is a mixed bag, with sharp disagreements, particularly about external intervention, as well as whether, when and how to negotiate with the government. These disagreements are certainly sincere and most are principled. Left alone, consensus could gel. But Israel's interests, which weave through them like a fog, run in a different direction: to steer Syrian events away from any process that will generate a representative, stable and strong country in the long run. Far preferable for Israel is to keep things polarised to ensure a catastrophic internal crisis that will dismantle Syria's security forces, permanently fragment its political elite and paralyse domestic politics in bitter internecine squabbles (with rival foreign supporters), which as a package will ensure that a strong state can't be rebuilt. Thus Syria's independent role in the region would evaporate and Israel's foreign policy prerogatives will be secured. Even more perfect would be a Syrian collapse defined by sectarian bigotry, a game at which Israel enjoys grand mastery. Of course, Israel bases its whole existence ideologically on the premise that the Middle East and the world at large are entirely steered by bigotry, but this worldview has also proved useful as realist foreign policy. It's always easy to turn idle biases into rabid racism. The Mossad is also brilliant at infiltrating Arab movements, as Palestinians will bitterly attest, and has been sending agents across the Syrian border to gather intelligence and stoke 'tribal' divisions for decades. It can certainly do this with much greater facility now that the country is in such upheaval. Hence it's only sensible to assume that Israeli plants are all over the Syrian movement, among and within factions, playing off arguments about best ways forward. And as Israel's best outcome is crisis, polarisation and violence that will generate a weak Syria in the end, those arguing about negotiating with the regime must consider which of the voices rejecting negotiations are sincere and which are Israeli hand-puppets." (Crying wolf, foreign agendas & Israel's role in destabilising Syria, Al-Jazeera, 1/2/12)
But back to those Arab refugees - whether they've fled from Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan; from Iraq to Syria and Jordan; or from Syria to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey - one thing's certain, they are all products of the refugee factory that is Israel.
[*Steven Heydemann on the 'Family Business' in Syria, Christopher Lydon, radioopensource.com, 12/5/11;**Inside the quiet effort to plan for a post-Assad Syria, Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy, 20/7/12]
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Palestine Comes Closer
irhal, irhal, ya 'ameel, ba'at bilaadak lisraa'eel (anti-Mubarak slogan: Get out, get out, agent/ traitor, you sold your country to Israel)
Reflections of a gloating Angry Arab:
"You can only gloat now about the fortunes - sorry, misfortunes - of the terrorist state of Israel. What can you say about a state that has based its entire strategic posture on the preservation of dictatorial regimes all around it? Do you understand why I have always been confident that Israel's days are numbered? This is a historic necessity that can be analyzed in historical materialist terms. Do you now understand why Netanyahu has ordered his officials to be silent about Egypt? Their panic equals that of the Mubarak family.
"I really doubt there is one Israeli official left in the Israeli espionage embassy in Cairo. I really doubt that now. Do you think that if the Egyptian people were free to choose their representatives, they would impose a siege on Gaza? That they'd invite Netanyahu for Ramadan iftar? Just look at the Iraqi government, which is a puppet government jointly controlled by a kooky Ayatollah (Sistani, the cleric of occupation) and the US occupation. Only one - ONE - elected (in a puppet election) guy, Mithal Allusi, dared to speak for peace with Israel. And how popular was that, even with Israeli and American money allegedly showered on him. Do you know how many assassination attempts he has survived over the years? Two of his sons were assassinated.
"You'd be surprised if you thought my categorical rejection of Israel isn't shared by the Arab people. I met a young Saudi couple on their honeymoon in Lebanon last summer. Do you know what their first destination was? Not the regular tourist sites. They donned kuffiyehs and went to the Resistance Museum in Mlita. Comrade Amer wrote to me yesterday that he never felt Palestine closer. I cannot disagree. The picture will only get bleaker for Israel and for Israelis. This has been the doing of a century of terrorism against Arabs. When I went on a speaking tour to US-run Pakistan 4 years ago, the Pakistanis told me that the US congress had pressured General Musharraf (or Busharraf as Pakistanis liked to call him) to recognise Israel, and he just couldn't because he knew how explosive that'd be among the Pakistani public.
"The US will continue to pay the price for its decades-long, wholehearted embrace of Israeli occupation and terrorist interests above all else. And all for the state of Israel. The US has alienated millions and millions of Arabs over its pro-Israel policies (and of course over its embrace of Middle East dictatorships, part and parcel of its support for Israel). That was what US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, warned against back in 1948 when Truman was considering recognizing Israel. This is not to say the US hasn't imperialist interests of its own: of course it has. There is oil, but the Zionist lobby in Washington DC has really put all policy considerations under the headline of support for Israel. In the long term, Israel will also prove to be a big boost for anti-Semitism around the world, especially when Israel goes under. And for that you may also blame the Zionist state of Israel and its decades of terrorism against Arabs." (angryarab.blogspot.com, 29/1/11)
Reflections of a gloating Angry Arab:
"You can only gloat now about the fortunes - sorry, misfortunes - of the terrorist state of Israel. What can you say about a state that has based its entire strategic posture on the preservation of dictatorial regimes all around it? Do you understand why I have always been confident that Israel's days are numbered? This is a historic necessity that can be analyzed in historical materialist terms. Do you now understand why Netanyahu has ordered his officials to be silent about Egypt? Their panic equals that of the Mubarak family.
"I really doubt there is one Israeli official left in the Israeli espionage embassy in Cairo. I really doubt that now. Do you think that if the Egyptian people were free to choose their representatives, they would impose a siege on Gaza? That they'd invite Netanyahu for Ramadan iftar? Just look at the Iraqi government, which is a puppet government jointly controlled by a kooky Ayatollah (Sistani, the cleric of occupation) and the US occupation. Only one - ONE - elected (in a puppet election) guy, Mithal Allusi, dared to speak for peace with Israel. And how popular was that, even with Israeli and American money allegedly showered on him. Do you know how many assassination attempts he has survived over the years? Two of his sons were assassinated.
"You'd be surprised if you thought my categorical rejection of Israel isn't shared by the Arab people. I met a young Saudi couple on their honeymoon in Lebanon last summer. Do you know what their first destination was? Not the regular tourist sites. They donned kuffiyehs and went to the Resistance Museum in Mlita. Comrade Amer wrote to me yesterday that he never felt Palestine closer. I cannot disagree. The picture will only get bleaker for Israel and for Israelis. This has been the doing of a century of terrorism against Arabs. When I went on a speaking tour to US-run Pakistan 4 years ago, the Pakistanis told me that the US congress had pressured General Musharraf (or Busharraf as Pakistanis liked to call him) to recognise Israel, and he just couldn't because he knew how explosive that'd be among the Pakistani public.
"The US will continue to pay the price for its decades-long, wholehearted embrace of Israeli occupation and terrorist interests above all else. And all for the state of Israel. The US has alienated millions and millions of Arabs over its pro-Israel policies (and of course over its embrace of Middle East dictatorships, part and parcel of its support for Israel). That was what US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, warned against back in 1948 when Truman was considering recognizing Israel. This is not to say the US hasn't imperialist interests of its own: of course it has. There is oil, but the Zionist lobby in Washington DC has really put all policy considerations under the headline of support for Israel. In the long term, Israel will also prove to be a big boost for anti-Semitism around the world, especially when Israel goes under. And for that you may also blame the Zionist state of Israel and its decades of terrorism against Arabs." (angryarab.blogspot.com, 29/1/11)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
The Three of Us
"In early winter [2002], an incident occurred that was seared into my memory. A coworker and I were suddenly directed to go down to the Mall entrance [of the Pentagon] to pick up some Israeli generals. Post-9/11 rules required one escort for every 3 visitors, and there were 6 or 7 of them waiting. The Navy lieutenant commander and I hustled down. Before we could apologize for the delay, the leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary [Douglas] Feith's office on the 4th floor. Two thoughts crossed our minds: are we following close enough to get credit for escorting them, and do they really know where they are going? We did get credit, and they did know. Once in Feith's waiting room, the leader continued to speed to Feith's closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door. 'Mr Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few more minutes'. The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary's head as he demanded, 'Who is in there with him?' This minor crisis of curiosity past, I noticed the security sign-in roster. Our habit, up until a few weeks before this incident, was not to sign in senior vistors like ambassadors. But about once a year, the security inspectors send out a warning letter that they are coming to inspect records. As a result, sign-in rosters were laid out, visible and used. I knew this because in the previous 2 weeks I watched this explanation being awkwardly presented to several North African ambassadors as they signed in for the first time and wondered why and why now. Given all this and seeing the sign-in roster, I asked the secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in?' She raised her hands, both palms toward me, and waved frantically as she shook her head. 'No, no, no, it is not necessary at all'. Her body language told me that I had committed a faux pas for even asking the question. My fellow escort and I chatted on the way back to our office about how the generals knew where they were going (most foreign visitors to the 5-sided asylum don't) and how the generals didn't have to sign in. I felt a bit dirtied by the whole thing and couldn't stop comparing that experience to the grace and gentility of the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian ambassadors with whom I worked." (Open door policy, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, amconmag.com, 19/1/04)
Speaking of nameless, faceless Israelis with seemingly unfettered access to the highest levels of US decision-making, check out the following news report, which to my knowledge, typically, did not make it into the ms Australian media:
"In his recent testimony to the UK Committee investigating the Iraq war, British Prime minister Tony Blair admitted that Israeli officials influenced and participated in the decision by the US and UK governments to attack Iraq in 2003. During testimony regarding his meetings in Texas with then-US President George W Bush in 2002, Blair stated, 'As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this'." (British PM: Israeli officials were part of decision to invade Iraq, Saeed Bannoura, IMEMC News, 20/2/10)
Blair's shifty and tantalising mention of Israeli officials at his meetings with Bush prompted Professor Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, to cite his words as further proof of one of the book's key findings - that "[p]ressure from Israel and the lobby" was "a critical element" in the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in March 2003. (Israel Lobby, p 230) This, of course, was like a red rag to a bull for Israel's hasbara peddlers, hence the pre-emptive publication in the February 18 Age of The Israel lobby myth revived again, by Dvir Abramovich, director of the Centre for Jewish History & Culture at the University of Melbourne.
Predictably, while Abramovich finds some wriggle room in Blair's testimony - "[A] close reading of what Blair actually said ('the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time') reveals that he was referring to Israel's actions in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield, not to the decision to invade Iraq" - he conveniently omits Blair's 2nd (conversations between Bush, Blair and the Israelis) and 3rd sentences (those conversations being a major part of all this), with their suggestion that these conversations had more to do with Operation Iraqi Freedom than Israel's mugging of the West Bank, Operation Defensive Shield.
The full story of Israeli involvement in the war on Iraq is still to be told, with missing pieces like Blair's (and Janis Karpinski's recent reiteration of Israeli agents in Abu Ghraib) popping up from time to time. I've already posted some of Mearsheimer & Walt's citations of Israeli cheerleading in the lead up to the war (Greg Sheridan: Conjuror Extraordinaire, 1/4/08). And I've also posted on Stephen J Sniegoski's superb study The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, & the National Interest of Israel (Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, 22/12/08). Sniegoski's discussion of active Israeli involvement in the decision-making process that led to the Bush/Blair war on Iraq helps place Blair's (and Kwiatkowski's) comments in context:
"Returning to the role of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) [created by Wolfowitz and Feith in August 2002]: as a result of a FBI probe of Israeli spying in the US (ongoing since 1999), which was leaked to the public in... 2004, it came out that Israeli agents had direct contact with members of the OSP. In essence, it was not simply that individuals in the OSP were pro-Israel, but that some of them might be conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud Party; they were, as Robert Dreyfuss called them, 'agents of influence' for a foreign government. The spotlight shifted to the OSP because the FBI, in its probe of Israeli spying, observed OSP analyst Larry Franklin meeting with an Israeli official in the presence of two officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In October 2005, Franklin plead guilty to the charge of having turned over highly classified intelligence documents to an Israeli government official and to members of AIPAC, who in turn handed them to the Israeli Embassy... However, the FBI investigation implied much more than the spying of Franklin and some AIPAC officials, illustrating the Israeli connection to the office that had played such a monumental role in providing the propaganda to justify the US attack on Iraq. For Franklin was intimately involved in secretive activities for the OSP. Without notifying the State Department or the CIA, the OSP had been involved in back channel operations that included a series of secret meetings in Washington, Rome and Paris to discuss regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These meetings brought together OSP staff and consultants (Franklin, Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen), expatriate Iranian arms dealer Manichur Ghorbanifar, AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian and Israeli intelligence officers. In short, it appears that various neoconservatives connected with the Department of Defense were consciously working with Israel in shaping American Middle East policy.
"Israel was also involved in promoting the US attack on Iraq apart from these covert dealings. Some of the spurious intelligence provided to the US came directly from Israel, as shown in a study by Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher at one of Israel's leading think tanks, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. A special panel of the Israeli Knesset investigated and confirmed the charge that Israeli intelligence services had greatly exaggerated the Iraqi WMD threat. Yossi Sarid, a member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee, charged that Israeli intelligence had deliberately misled the US. According to James Risen in State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, Israeli intelligence officials frequently traveled to Washington to brief top government officials. The CIA was skeptical of the Israeli intelligence and after the Israeli briefings would circulate reports throughout the government discounting the Israeli information. Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives who had met with the Israeli officials, were enraged by the CIA's negative response, with Wolfowitz complaining vehemently to CIA Director Tenet.
"It has been alleged that the OSP was provided with information by a special unit created in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office. Israel had a history of providing questionable intelligence in regard to Iraq to make that country appear threatening. As pointed out earlier, shortly after the September 11 terrorism, Aman, Israel's military intelligence service, reportedly claimed that Iraq had been involved in the attacks. In June 2002, Efraim Halevy, the director of the Mossad, informed a closed meeting of the NATO Alliance Council in Brussels that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was renewing its efforts to develop nuclear weapons...
"It has been argued that Israel, in its support for war on Iraq, was simply going along with the US government. Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson maintains that the Israelis initially wanted the US to focus on Iran not Iraq, and only shifted to supporting the war on Iraq in early 2002 upon realizing that a war on Iraq had become definite American policy. As mentioned earlier, the report that the IDF's supreme intelligence agency, Aman, at the time of 9/11, promoted the disinformation that Saddam was behind the terrorist attacks militates against the idea that the Israeli government as a unified entity was opposed to the war during this early period. However, even if there had not been complete Israeli support for a US attack on Iraq prior to the early spring, the director of the Mossad's public backing of the major WMD justification for the war in June 2002, before an influential NATO audience, would belie any argument that Israel was simply a reluctant follower of US policy. The fact of the matter is that the Israeli government was pressing the US to attack Iraq and actively abetting the war propaganda process. Ranaan Gissin, a senior Sharon adviser, told the AP in August 2002, 'It will only give Saddam Hussein more of an opportunity to accelerate his programme of WMD'. Gissin said Sharon sent the US government Israeli intelligence estimates that Saddam had boosted production of chemical and biological weapons in anticipation of war with the US. Gissin also claimed that Saddam had recently ordered Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission to speed up work on developing nuclear weapons. 'Saddam's going to be able to reach a point where these weapons will be operational', Gissin direly warned. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also trumpeting the necessity of war. In September, 2002, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Netanyahu entitled 'The Case for Toppling Saddam', in which he held that 'This is a dictator who is rapidly expanding his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, who has used these WMD against his subjects and his neighbors, and who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons'. Netanyahu waved the red flag of Saddam's purported nuclear threat. 'Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam's nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation', Netanyahu exclaimed... Netanyahu's focus was Iraq's alleged nuclear threat. '[T]he imperative is to defang the Iraqi regime by preventing its acquisition of atomic weapons', Netanyahu solemnly declared in October 2002. 'No inspectors will be able to do that job'. In fact, as early as April 2002, Netanyahu was briefing US senators as to the nuclear danger of Saddam Hussein. According to columnist Robert Novak, Netanyahu warned that Saddam 'not only is acquiring nuclear weapons but may have the means of delivering them against the US' via 'satchels carried by terrorists'.
"It is noteworthy that the pro-war position in Israel transcended the Likudnik right, being taken up by Labor leader Shimon Peres, who was serving as Sharon's Foreign Minister. Peres stated in September 2002 that 'the campaign against Saddam is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors'.* Former Labor Party Prime Minister Ehud Barak also stressed the need for military action... In late December 2002, Robert Novak maintained that Prime Minister Sharon was privately urging American lawmakers to support an attack on Iraq for the benefit of Israel... In February 2003, as the American attack approached, Prime Minister Sharon told a visiting delegation of American congressmen in Israel that the war against Iraq would provide a model for how the US should also deal with Syria, Libya, and Iran. 'These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of WMD, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve'. While Sharon said that Israel will not be directly involved in the attack on Iraq, he emphasized that 'the American action is of vital importance'. In short, Sharon was advising the US how it should deal with Israel's enemies." (pp 168-172)
[*LOL: Read my 7/4/09 post By Way of Deception.]
Speaking of nameless, faceless Israelis with seemingly unfettered access to the highest levels of US decision-making, check out the following news report, which to my knowledge, typically, did not make it into the ms Australian media:
"In his recent testimony to the UK Committee investigating the Iraq war, British Prime minister Tony Blair admitted that Israeli officials influenced and participated in the decision by the US and UK governments to attack Iraq in 2003. During testimony regarding his meetings in Texas with then-US President George W Bush in 2002, Blair stated, 'As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this'." (British PM: Israeli officials were part of decision to invade Iraq, Saeed Bannoura, IMEMC News, 20/2/10)
Blair's shifty and tantalising mention of Israeli officials at his meetings with Bush prompted Professor Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, to cite his words as further proof of one of the book's key findings - that "[p]ressure from Israel and the lobby" was "a critical element" in the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in March 2003. (Israel Lobby, p 230) This, of course, was like a red rag to a bull for Israel's hasbara peddlers, hence the pre-emptive publication in the February 18 Age of The Israel lobby myth revived again, by Dvir Abramovich, director of the Centre for Jewish History & Culture at the University of Melbourne.
Predictably, while Abramovich finds some wriggle room in Blair's testimony - "[A] close reading of what Blair actually said ('the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time') reveals that he was referring to Israel's actions in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield, not to the decision to invade Iraq" - he conveniently omits Blair's 2nd (conversations between Bush, Blair and the Israelis) and 3rd sentences (those conversations being a major part of all this), with their suggestion that these conversations had more to do with Operation Iraqi Freedom than Israel's mugging of the West Bank, Operation Defensive Shield.
The full story of Israeli involvement in the war on Iraq is still to be told, with missing pieces like Blair's (and Janis Karpinski's recent reiteration of Israeli agents in Abu Ghraib) popping up from time to time. I've already posted some of Mearsheimer & Walt's citations of Israeli cheerleading in the lead up to the war (Greg Sheridan: Conjuror Extraordinaire, 1/4/08). And I've also posted on Stephen J Sniegoski's superb study The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, & the National Interest of Israel (Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze, 22/12/08). Sniegoski's discussion of active Israeli involvement in the decision-making process that led to the Bush/Blair war on Iraq helps place Blair's (and Kwiatkowski's) comments in context:
"Returning to the role of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) [created by Wolfowitz and Feith in August 2002]: as a result of a FBI probe of Israeli spying in the US (ongoing since 1999), which was leaked to the public in... 2004, it came out that Israeli agents had direct contact with members of the OSP. In essence, it was not simply that individuals in the OSP were pro-Israel, but that some of them might be conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud Party; they were, as Robert Dreyfuss called them, 'agents of influence' for a foreign government. The spotlight shifted to the OSP because the FBI, in its probe of Israeli spying, observed OSP analyst Larry Franklin meeting with an Israeli official in the presence of two officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In October 2005, Franklin plead guilty to the charge of having turned over highly classified intelligence documents to an Israeli government official and to members of AIPAC, who in turn handed them to the Israeli Embassy... However, the FBI investigation implied much more than the spying of Franklin and some AIPAC officials, illustrating the Israeli connection to the office that had played such a monumental role in providing the propaganda to justify the US attack on Iraq. For Franklin was intimately involved in secretive activities for the OSP. Without notifying the State Department or the CIA, the OSP had been involved in back channel operations that included a series of secret meetings in Washington, Rome and Paris to discuss regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These meetings brought together OSP staff and consultants (Franklin, Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen), expatriate Iranian arms dealer Manichur Ghorbanifar, AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian and Israeli intelligence officers. In short, it appears that various neoconservatives connected with the Department of Defense were consciously working with Israel in shaping American Middle East policy.
"Israel was also involved in promoting the US attack on Iraq apart from these covert dealings. Some of the spurious intelligence provided to the US came directly from Israel, as shown in a study by Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher at one of Israel's leading think tanks, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. A special panel of the Israeli Knesset investigated and confirmed the charge that Israeli intelligence services had greatly exaggerated the Iraqi WMD threat. Yossi Sarid, a member of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee, charged that Israeli intelligence had deliberately misled the US. According to James Risen in State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, Israeli intelligence officials frequently traveled to Washington to brief top government officials. The CIA was skeptical of the Israeli intelligence and after the Israeli briefings would circulate reports throughout the government discounting the Israeli information. Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives who had met with the Israeli officials, were enraged by the CIA's negative response, with Wolfowitz complaining vehemently to CIA Director Tenet.
"It has been alleged that the OSP was provided with information by a special unit created in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office. Israel had a history of providing questionable intelligence in regard to Iraq to make that country appear threatening. As pointed out earlier, shortly after the September 11 terrorism, Aman, Israel's military intelligence service, reportedly claimed that Iraq had been involved in the attacks. In June 2002, Efraim Halevy, the director of the Mossad, informed a closed meeting of the NATO Alliance Council in Brussels that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was renewing its efforts to develop nuclear weapons...
"It has been argued that Israel, in its support for war on Iraq, was simply going along with the US government. Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson maintains that the Israelis initially wanted the US to focus on Iran not Iraq, and only shifted to supporting the war on Iraq in early 2002 upon realizing that a war on Iraq had become definite American policy. As mentioned earlier, the report that the IDF's supreme intelligence agency, Aman, at the time of 9/11, promoted the disinformation that Saddam was behind the terrorist attacks militates against the idea that the Israeli government as a unified entity was opposed to the war during this early period. However, even if there had not been complete Israeli support for a US attack on Iraq prior to the early spring, the director of the Mossad's public backing of the major WMD justification for the war in June 2002, before an influential NATO audience, would belie any argument that Israel was simply a reluctant follower of US policy. The fact of the matter is that the Israeli government was pressing the US to attack Iraq and actively abetting the war propaganda process. Ranaan Gissin, a senior Sharon adviser, told the AP in August 2002, 'It will only give Saddam Hussein more of an opportunity to accelerate his programme of WMD'. Gissin said Sharon sent the US government Israeli intelligence estimates that Saddam had boosted production of chemical and biological weapons in anticipation of war with the US. Gissin also claimed that Saddam had recently ordered Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission to speed up work on developing nuclear weapons. 'Saddam's going to be able to reach a point where these weapons will be operational', Gissin direly warned. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also trumpeting the necessity of war. In September, 2002, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Netanyahu entitled 'The Case for Toppling Saddam', in which he held that 'This is a dictator who is rapidly expanding his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, who has used these WMD against his subjects and his neighbors, and who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons'. Netanyahu waved the red flag of Saddam's purported nuclear threat. 'Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam's nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation', Netanyahu exclaimed... Netanyahu's focus was Iraq's alleged nuclear threat. '[T]he imperative is to defang the Iraqi regime by preventing its acquisition of atomic weapons', Netanyahu solemnly declared in October 2002. 'No inspectors will be able to do that job'. In fact, as early as April 2002, Netanyahu was briefing US senators as to the nuclear danger of Saddam Hussein. According to columnist Robert Novak, Netanyahu warned that Saddam 'not only is acquiring nuclear weapons but may have the means of delivering them against the US' via 'satchels carried by terrorists'.
"It is noteworthy that the pro-war position in Israel transcended the Likudnik right, being taken up by Labor leader Shimon Peres, who was serving as Sharon's Foreign Minister. Peres stated in September 2002 that 'the campaign against Saddam is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors'.* Former Labor Party Prime Minister Ehud Barak also stressed the need for military action... In late December 2002, Robert Novak maintained that Prime Minister Sharon was privately urging American lawmakers to support an attack on Iraq for the benefit of Israel... In February 2003, as the American attack approached, Prime Minister Sharon told a visiting delegation of American congressmen in Israel that the war against Iraq would provide a model for how the US should also deal with Syria, Libya, and Iran. 'These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of WMD, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve'. While Sharon said that Israel will not be directly involved in the attack on Iraq, he emphasized that 'the American action is of vital importance'. In short, Sharon was advising the US how it should deal with Israel's enemies." (pp 168-172)
[*LOL: Read my 7/4/09 post By Way of Deception.]
Monday, December 22, 2008
Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze
Chaos, panic & disorder - our work is done.
"With George W Bush's presidency about to end, what will happen to the neoconservatives? Rarely in the history of US politics has a small number of bookish intellectuals had so much influence on foreign policy as the neo-cons had under Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, neither of whom is noted for his deep intellectual interests... Writing for journals such as The Weekly Standard and using the pulpits of think tanks... neocons offered an intellectual boost to the invasion of Iraq. The logic of the US mission to spread freedom across the globe - grounded, it was argued, in American history since the founding fathers - demanded nothing less." (As wrong as neo-cons were, Obama may have to preserve their ideals, Ian Buruma*, The Australian, 13/12/08)
[* "[P]rofessor of human rights at Bard College, New York state."]
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Libby & Co, all American boys, albeit bookish to a fault, committed to the (exclusively) American ideals of promoting freedom here, there, & everywhere, beginning with Iraq's transformation into a Jeffersonian democracy, just happened to be sauntering by, heads in the clouds as usual, minding their own business, when they were accosted by two "powerful leaders with an authoritarian bent" - the suave and charismatic Dubya and his Svengali Dick Cheney - whose pheromones fairly turned the neocon's cloud-wreathed heads and sucked them into slavish, but "misguided", service of these two ambitious autocrats.
Yeah, right. This is what passes for 'quality journalism' in Murdoch fishwrapper.
Enough already! We are lucky indeed to have an antidote to such rubbish - Stephen J Sniegoski's The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008).
As its title suggests, Sniegoski's book "examines a controversial and in some respects taboo subject: the close relationship of the American neoconservatives with the Israeli Likudnik right, and their role as the fundamental drivers of the Bush administration's militant American policy in the Middle East - a policy which inspired both the 2003 war in Iraq and the equally militant solutions contemplated since for other Middle East policy problems. It marshals evidence to illustrate that the war in Iraq... and the policy that inspired it and continues to inspire our approach to other actors and issues in the Middle East, have their common origin in the orientation of the neoconservative policy towards the service of the interests of Israel... The overarching goal of both the neocons and the Likudniks was to create an improved strategic environment for Israel... [T]his does not necessarily mean that the neocons were deliberately promoting the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States. Instead, they maintained that an identity of interests existed between the two countries - Israel's enemies being ipso facto America's enemies. However, it is apparent that the neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest, as Israeli interest was perceived by the Likudniks." (p 4-5)
Some extracts:-
"With the Likud's assumption of power, the most far-reaching militant proposals entered mainstream Zionist thinking, involving militant destabilization of Israel's neighbors and Palestinian expulsion. An important article in this genre was by Oded Yinon, entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s'... Yinon called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. Yinon believed that this would not be a difficult undertaking because nearly all the Arab states were afflicted with internal ethnic and religious divisions. In essence, the end result would be a Middle East of powerless mini-states that could in no way confront Israeli power. Lebanon, then facing divisive chaos, was Yinon's model for the entire Middle East... Yinon looked upon Iraq as a major target for dissolution, and he believed that the then on-going Iran-Iraq war would promote its break-up... 'In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, 3 (or more) states will exist around the 3 major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north'." (p 50-51)
"[T]he vision of 'regime change' in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing 'democracy' to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States. But the Israeli government would continue to be a fundamental supporter of the regional military action, even as the ostensible justifications for the action changed. Israel advocated the American attack on Iraq and preached the necessity of strong action against Iran. It would appear that for Ariel Sharon during the Bush II administration, the strategic benefits that would accrue to Israel from such a militant restructuring of the Middle East were the same as those that Likudniks sought in the 1980s. But unlike Begin's failed incursion into Lebanon in 1982, the Bush II effort not only relied upon the much greater power of the United States but was also wrapped in a cover of 'democracy' and American national interest, effectively masking the objective of Israeli hegemony. This helps to explain the much greater success of this intervention, which has come at no cost to Israel - but at a heavy cost to the United States." (pp 56-57)
"During the 1990s, the neoconservatives were quite open about their goal of War in the Middle East to destabilize Iraq and other enemies of Israel. A clear indication of the neoconservative thinking on this subject - and the intimate connection with Israeli security - was a 1996 paper entitled 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm', published by an Israeli think tank... Included in the study group that produced the report were figures who would loom large in the Bush II administration's war policy in the Middle East - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser... The 'realm'... was that of Israel. The purpose of the policy paper was to provide a political blueprint for the incoming Israeli Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper stated that Netanyahu should 'make a clean break' with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's claim to the West Bank and Gaza. It presented a plan by which Israel would 'shape its strategic environment', beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. Significantly, the report did not present Saddam's Iraq as the major threat to Israel. Rather, Iraq was more like the weak link among Israel's enemies. By removing Saddam, the study held that Israel would be in a strategic position to get at its more dangerous foes. In short, elimination of Saddam was a first step toward reconfiguring the entire Middle East for the benefit of Israel." (pp 89-90)
"It was apparent that during the Clinton years the neocons had formulated the entire plan for a Middle East war and had established the mechanisms, with their think tanks and media outlets, to disseminate this view to politicians and the public at large. They had become wedded to the idea, developed earlier by Likudnik thinkers, that it was necessary to bring about a reconfiguration of the Middle East, not only by removing those regimes that opposed Israel but also by fragmenting some of those countries. And they perceived Iraq as the initial target for the overall Middle East effort. Significantly, they saw the need for American involvement - quickly moving from the idea that the United States would be supportive of Israeli military action to the point where the United States would initiate military action itself. To achieve such American involvement it would be necessary to show how the United States itself was directly threatened; thus, by the end of the 1990s the neocons were portraying Saddam as an especially lethal threat to the American homeland. In actuality, however, the removal of Saddam was simply intended to be the beginning phase in the overall restructuring of the Middle East. The neocons were quite unified in presenting the danger Saddam allegedly posed to the United States, and their think tanks and media outlets could effectively disseminate this view. However, they could not achieve their goal by simply being a 'shadow defense department'; what was needed was to gain a prominent role in the foreign-policy and national-security apparatus of the next administration, and then perhaps await a 'catastrophic and catalyzing event' (as the PNAC report deemed necessary) to fully implement their program. All of this would soon come to pass." (pp 102-103)
"Whereas George W Bush had not expressed any interest in eliminating Saddam, Cheney, at a celebration dinner after the 2000 presidential campaign, reportedly told a group of friends that the new administration might have an opportunity to correct the mistake of the previous Bush administration of having left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Cheney would be in a position to facilitate this development. Cheney was in charge of the new administration's transition team between the election in November 2000 and Bush's inauguration in January 2001, and used that position to staff national security positions with his neoconservative associates, who would promote the Middle East war agenda." (p 114)
"The neoconservatives made Iraq a key issue in the bush administration from the very beginning. According to Richard Clarke, who was a counter-terrorism advisor early in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in the administration were fixated on Iraq as the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. When, in April 2001, the White House convened a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, Wolfowitz expressed the view that Saddam Hussein was a far more important subject than Al Qaeda, which had been Clarke's focus. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said he could not 'understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden'. The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. To bolster his contention, Wolfowitz cited the eccentric views of neocon favorite Laurie Mylroie, who saw the hand of Saddam behind much of the terrorism of the 1990s, including the World Trade Towers attack of 1993. For Wolfowitz to express Mylroie's unproven Saddam Hussein conspiracy theory was incomprehensible to Clarke, who opined: 'Here was the number 2 person in the Pentagon saying that he agreed with her and disagreed with CIA, with FBI, disagreed with all the massive evidence that Al Qaeda had attacked the World Trade Center in '93, not Iraq. Why anybody as sophisticated as a Wolfowitz or the others would attach themselves to that sort of stuff, I didn't know'. Of course, if Wolfowitz and other neocons wanted propaganda for a war on Iraq, they would promote such unlikely stories, just as they would later focus on the WMD falsehoods." (p 124)
"In the eyes of Israel's leaders, the September 11 attack had joined the United States and Israel together against a common enemy. And that enemy was not in far off Afghanistan, but was geographically close to Israel. Israel's traditional enemies would now become America's as well. Israel now would have a free hand to deal harshly with the Palestinians under the cover of a 'war on terrorism'. Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation would simply be portrayed as 'terrorism'. Conversely, America would make itself the enemy of those who previously had focused on Israel." (p 139)
"For the neocons, the terrible tragedy of 9/11 offered the extremely convenient pretext to implement their war agenda for the United States. 'Before 9/11', war critic Joseph Wilson writes, 'regime change by invasion was still just a fringe part of the debate about how to handle Saddam Hussein'. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the neoconservatives found the perfect climate to publicly push for a wider war on terrorism that would immediately deal with Israel's enemies, starting with Iraq. 'At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. There was no heft', observed neocon Kenneth Adelman. 'That changed with September 11 because then people were willing to confront the reality of an international terrorist network, and terrorist states such as Iraq'. Perle concurred that 'Nine-eleven was the turning point with respect to leaving Saddam unmolested'... According to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, as early as the day after the terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 'raised the question of attacking Iraq Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked." (pp 140-141)
"As a result of 9/11, the neocons became the guiding force in American foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in 2004 explained the neocon's success: 'The neocons were organized. They had intellectual content. Bush was not totally captured by it but tends in that direction'. As time progressed, Bush would follow more and more of their agenda... [T]he events of 9/11... had a profound impact on Bush's psyche, causing him to embrace the neocon's pre-packaged simple solution of a war of good vs evil [which] was undoubtedly in line with Bush's purported Christian evangelical beliefs. Furthermore, Bush's adoption of the neocon war agenda provided him with his purpose in life, which he identified as the will of God." (p 147)
"The adoption of the neocon agenda with its focus on Iraq and the Middle East would distract the United States from consolidating its control of Afghanistan, which could have been used for the American domination of the Eurasian landmass along the lines of the thinking of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Control of Central Asia had been abandoned, or, at least, put on the back burner, in the move to invade Iraq and thence achieve regime change elsewhere in the Middle East. None of these goals had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. The morass that the United States would find in Iraq, a quagmire that was easy to predict, would not enhance American global domination. It would, however, bring about the destabilization of the Middle East sought by the neocons and the Israeli Likudniks. In a fundamental sense, American hegemonic interests had been trumped by Zionist ones." (p 150)
The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel - the perfect companion treatise to Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.
"With George W Bush's presidency about to end, what will happen to the neoconservatives? Rarely in the history of US politics has a small number of bookish intellectuals had so much influence on foreign policy as the neo-cons had under Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, neither of whom is noted for his deep intellectual interests... Writing for journals such as The Weekly Standard and using the pulpits of think tanks... neocons offered an intellectual boost to the invasion of Iraq. The logic of the US mission to spread freedom across the globe - grounded, it was argued, in American history since the founding fathers - demanded nothing less." (As wrong as neo-cons were, Obama may have to preserve their ideals, Ian Buruma*, The Australian, 13/12/08)
[* "[P]rofessor of human rights at Bard College, New York state."]
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Libby & Co, all American boys, albeit bookish to a fault, committed to the (exclusively) American ideals of promoting freedom here, there, & everywhere, beginning with Iraq's transformation into a Jeffersonian democracy, just happened to be sauntering by, heads in the clouds as usual, minding their own business, when they were accosted by two "powerful leaders with an authoritarian bent" - the suave and charismatic Dubya and his Svengali Dick Cheney - whose pheromones fairly turned the neocon's cloud-wreathed heads and sucked them into slavish, but "misguided", service of these two ambitious autocrats.
Yeah, right. This is what passes for 'quality journalism' in Murdoch fishwrapper.
Enough already! We are lucky indeed to have an antidote to such rubbish - Stephen J Sniegoski's The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008).
As its title suggests, Sniegoski's book "examines a controversial and in some respects taboo subject: the close relationship of the American neoconservatives with the Israeli Likudnik right, and their role as the fundamental drivers of the Bush administration's militant American policy in the Middle East - a policy which inspired both the 2003 war in Iraq and the equally militant solutions contemplated since for other Middle East policy problems. It marshals evidence to illustrate that the war in Iraq... and the policy that inspired it and continues to inspire our approach to other actors and issues in the Middle East, have their common origin in the orientation of the neoconservative policy towards the service of the interests of Israel... The overarching goal of both the neocons and the Likudniks was to create an improved strategic environment for Israel... [T]his does not necessarily mean that the neocons were deliberately promoting the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States. Instead, they maintained that an identity of interests existed between the two countries - Israel's enemies being ipso facto America's enemies. However, it is apparent that the neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest, as Israeli interest was perceived by the Likudniks." (p 4-5)
Some extracts:-
"With the Likud's assumption of power, the most far-reaching militant proposals entered mainstream Zionist thinking, involving militant destabilization of Israel's neighbors and Palestinian expulsion. An important article in this genre was by Oded Yinon, entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s'... Yinon called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. Yinon believed that this would not be a difficult undertaking because nearly all the Arab states were afflicted with internal ethnic and religious divisions. In essence, the end result would be a Middle East of powerless mini-states that could in no way confront Israeli power. Lebanon, then facing divisive chaos, was Yinon's model for the entire Middle East... Yinon looked upon Iraq as a major target for dissolution, and he believed that the then on-going Iran-Iraq war would promote its break-up... 'In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, 3 (or more) states will exist around the 3 major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north'." (p 50-51)
"[T]he vision of 'regime change' in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing 'democracy' to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States. But the Israeli government would continue to be a fundamental supporter of the regional military action, even as the ostensible justifications for the action changed. Israel advocated the American attack on Iraq and preached the necessity of strong action against Iran. It would appear that for Ariel Sharon during the Bush II administration, the strategic benefits that would accrue to Israel from such a militant restructuring of the Middle East were the same as those that Likudniks sought in the 1980s. But unlike Begin's failed incursion into Lebanon in 1982, the Bush II effort not only relied upon the much greater power of the United States but was also wrapped in a cover of 'democracy' and American national interest, effectively masking the objective of Israeli hegemony. This helps to explain the much greater success of this intervention, which has come at no cost to Israel - but at a heavy cost to the United States." (pp 56-57)
"During the 1990s, the neoconservatives were quite open about their goal of War in the Middle East to destabilize Iraq and other enemies of Israel. A clear indication of the neoconservative thinking on this subject - and the intimate connection with Israeli security - was a 1996 paper entitled 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm', published by an Israeli think tank... Included in the study group that produced the report were figures who would loom large in the Bush II administration's war policy in the Middle East - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser... The 'realm'... was that of Israel. The purpose of the policy paper was to provide a political blueprint for the incoming Israeli Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper stated that Netanyahu should 'make a clean break' with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's claim to the West Bank and Gaza. It presented a plan by which Israel would 'shape its strategic environment', beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. Significantly, the report did not present Saddam's Iraq as the major threat to Israel. Rather, Iraq was more like the weak link among Israel's enemies. By removing Saddam, the study held that Israel would be in a strategic position to get at its more dangerous foes. In short, elimination of Saddam was a first step toward reconfiguring the entire Middle East for the benefit of Israel." (pp 89-90)
"It was apparent that during the Clinton years the neocons had formulated the entire plan for a Middle East war and had established the mechanisms, with their think tanks and media outlets, to disseminate this view to politicians and the public at large. They had become wedded to the idea, developed earlier by Likudnik thinkers, that it was necessary to bring about a reconfiguration of the Middle East, not only by removing those regimes that opposed Israel but also by fragmenting some of those countries. And they perceived Iraq as the initial target for the overall Middle East effort. Significantly, they saw the need for American involvement - quickly moving from the idea that the United States would be supportive of Israeli military action to the point where the United States would initiate military action itself. To achieve such American involvement it would be necessary to show how the United States itself was directly threatened; thus, by the end of the 1990s the neocons were portraying Saddam as an especially lethal threat to the American homeland. In actuality, however, the removal of Saddam was simply intended to be the beginning phase in the overall restructuring of the Middle East. The neocons were quite unified in presenting the danger Saddam allegedly posed to the United States, and their think tanks and media outlets could effectively disseminate this view. However, they could not achieve their goal by simply being a 'shadow defense department'; what was needed was to gain a prominent role in the foreign-policy and national-security apparatus of the next administration, and then perhaps await a 'catastrophic and catalyzing event' (as the PNAC report deemed necessary) to fully implement their program. All of this would soon come to pass." (pp 102-103)
"Whereas George W Bush had not expressed any interest in eliminating Saddam, Cheney, at a celebration dinner after the 2000 presidential campaign, reportedly told a group of friends that the new administration might have an opportunity to correct the mistake of the previous Bush administration of having left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Cheney would be in a position to facilitate this development. Cheney was in charge of the new administration's transition team between the election in November 2000 and Bush's inauguration in January 2001, and used that position to staff national security positions with his neoconservative associates, who would promote the Middle East war agenda." (p 114)
"The neoconservatives made Iraq a key issue in the bush administration from the very beginning. According to Richard Clarke, who was a counter-terrorism advisor early in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in the administration were fixated on Iraq as the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. When, in April 2001, the White House convened a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, Wolfowitz expressed the view that Saddam Hussein was a far more important subject than Al Qaeda, which had been Clarke's focus. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said he could not 'understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden'. The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. To bolster his contention, Wolfowitz cited the eccentric views of neocon favorite Laurie Mylroie, who saw the hand of Saddam behind much of the terrorism of the 1990s, including the World Trade Towers attack of 1993. For Wolfowitz to express Mylroie's unproven Saddam Hussein conspiracy theory was incomprehensible to Clarke, who opined: 'Here was the number 2 person in the Pentagon saying that he agreed with her and disagreed with CIA, with FBI, disagreed with all the massive evidence that Al Qaeda had attacked the World Trade Center in '93, not Iraq. Why anybody as sophisticated as a Wolfowitz or the others would attach themselves to that sort of stuff, I didn't know'. Of course, if Wolfowitz and other neocons wanted propaganda for a war on Iraq, they would promote such unlikely stories, just as they would later focus on the WMD falsehoods." (p 124)
"In the eyes of Israel's leaders, the September 11 attack had joined the United States and Israel together against a common enemy. And that enemy was not in far off Afghanistan, but was geographically close to Israel. Israel's traditional enemies would now become America's as well. Israel now would have a free hand to deal harshly with the Palestinians under the cover of a 'war on terrorism'. Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation would simply be portrayed as 'terrorism'. Conversely, America would make itself the enemy of those who previously had focused on Israel." (p 139)
"For the neocons, the terrible tragedy of 9/11 offered the extremely convenient pretext to implement their war agenda for the United States. 'Before 9/11', war critic Joseph Wilson writes, 'regime change by invasion was still just a fringe part of the debate about how to handle Saddam Hussein'. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the neoconservatives found the perfect climate to publicly push for a wider war on terrorism that would immediately deal with Israel's enemies, starting with Iraq. 'At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. There was no heft', observed neocon Kenneth Adelman. 'That changed with September 11 because then people were willing to confront the reality of an international terrorist network, and terrorist states such as Iraq'. Perle concurred that 'Nine-eleven was the turning point with respect to leaving Saddam unmolested'... According to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, as early as the day after the terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 'raised the question of attacking Iraq Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked." (pp 140-141)
"As a result of 9/11, the neocons became the guiding force in American foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in 2004 explained the neocon's success: 'The neocons were organized. They had intellectual content. Bush was not totally captured by it but tends in that direction'. As time progressed, Bush would follow more and more of their agenda... [T]he events of 9/11... had a profound impact on Bush's psyche, causing him to embrace the neocon's pre-packaged simple solution of a war of good vs evil [which] was undoubtedly in line with Bush's purported Christian evangelical beliefs. Furthermore, Bush's adoption of the neocon war agenda provided him with his purpose in life, which he identified as the will of God." (p 147)
"The adoption of the neocon agenda with its focus on Iraq and the Middle East would distract the United States from consolidating its control of Afghanistan, which could have been used for the American domination of the Eurasian landmass along the lines of the thinking of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Control of Central Asia had been abandoned, or, at least, put on the back burner, in the move to invade Iraq and thence achieve regime change elsewhere in the Middle East. None of these goals had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. The morass that the United States would find in Iraq, a quagmire that was easy to predict, would not enhance American global domination. It would, however, bring about the destabilization of the Middle East sought by the neocons and the Israeli Likudniks. In a fundamental sense, American hegemonic interests had been trumped by Zionist ones." (p 150)
The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel - the perfect companion treatise to Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Greg Sheridan: Conjurer Extraordinaire
"The Western tradition of the just war is dominated by two fundamental thoughts. Wars have to be the last resort. They can only be waged in a clear-cut case of self-defence. During 2002, after the terrorist outrage of 9/11, George W Bush's administration claimed the right to fight what was effectively a preventive war. As Iraq had committed no act of aggression since 1990, to many of those schooled in the Western tradition of the just war what the Americans and their ally, the British, were proposing to do looked like an act of unprovoked aggression, the most serious of all international crimes. A war of this kind, without the sanction of the United nations, was always going to be difficult for John Howard's government to sell. Its task was made much easier than it might otherwise have been by the conspicuous support offered by the Murdoch press. From a mountain of potential evidence, three significant and concerted contributions stand out - the pre-invasion commentaries of The Australian's foreign editor Greg Sheridan and the Herald Sun's opinion columnist Andrew Bolt, and the post-invasion editorials of The Australian." Murdoch's War, Robert Manne, The Monthly, July 2005
Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan again. The man's magic!
In one and the same propaganda piece (Saddam, the terrorist's friend, The Australian 22/3/08) he manages to spin something out of nothing and nothing out of something! How does he do it?
Spinning Something Out of Nothing:
"This study," Greg says of Saddam and Terrorism, the US Institute for Defence Analyses summary of 600,000 captured Saddam-era documents (See my last post), "found no smoking gun (that is, a direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qa'ida." But then, he continues, the report does refer to "Iraqi support for terrorist organizations that include numerous groups the report identifies as 'part of al-Qa'ida'." You see, he explains, when the report says it's found no smoking gun linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida, it "presumably refers only to Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida central itself." Damn, it's such a dashed "restrictive and precise view of al-Qa'ida," he wails.
"But in any event this report is not claiming...that there was no link with al-Qa'ida, merely that it found no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents." In fact, he concludes, "It is reasonable to assume the most sensitive stuff in a paranoid state such as Saddam's was not written down."
Just as for Donald Rumsfeld there were "known knowns" and "known unknowns," for magic Greg there's "al-Qa'ida central" and your common and garden al-Qa'ida, your "absolute smoking gun" and your common and garden smoking gun.
Spinning Nothing Out of Something:
Reporting the words of yet another of those awesome Israeli visitors to these shores, cabinet minister Isaac Herzog, Greg writes, "He repeats that the Israeli government took no formal position on the operation against Saddam's regime 5 years ago, but notes that Saddam was an enemy of Israel..." Put another way, there's no absolute smoking gun linking Israel with the US rape of Iraq.
But what does the public record say?
"On August 12 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq 'is the greatest danger facing Israel'. Then, on August 16, ten days before Vice President Cheney kicked off the campaign for war...several newspapers and television and radio networks...reported that Israel was urging the US not to delay an attack on Iraq. Sharon told the Bush administration that postponing the operation 'will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future'. Putting off an attack, Ra'anan Gissen [Sharon's spokesman] said, would 'only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction'. Foreign Minister Peres told CNN that 'the problem today is not if, but when'. Postponing an attack would be a grave mistake, he said, because Saddam would be better armed down the road. Deputy Defense Minister Weizman Shiry offered a similar view, warning, 'If the Americans do not do this now, it will be harder to do it in the future. In a year or two, Saddam Hussein will be further along in developing weapons of mass destruction'. Perhaps CBS best captured what was going on in the headline for its story: 'Israel to US: Don't Delay Iraq Attack'. " The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, pp 234-235
Add Israel's dissemination of dodgy intelligence, opposition to weapons inspections and demonization of Saddam, throw in pro-war statements by other Israeli public figures, the machinations of pro-Israel American neocons and a pro-war push by the Israel lobby, and hey, if it looks like an absolute smoking gun and smokes like an absolute smoking gun, then it probably is an absolute smoking gun.
You've got to hand it to Greg, he can do what you or I can't. He can see absolute smoking guns when there are none, and none where there are.
Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan again. The man's magic!
In one and the same propaganda piece (Saddam, the terrorist's friend, The Australian 22/3/08) he manages to spin something out of nothing and nothing out of something! How does he do it?
Spinning Something Out of Nothing:
"This study," Greg says of Saddam and Terrorism, the US Institute for Defence Analyses summary of 600,000 captured Saddam-era documents (See my last post), "found no smoking gun (that is, a direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qa'ida." But then, he continues, the report does refer to "Iraqi support for terrorist organizations that include numerous groups the report identifies as 'part of al-Qa'ida'." You see, he explains, when the report says it's found no smoking gun linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida, it "presumably refers only to Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida central itself." Damn, it's such a dashed "restrictive and precise view of al-Qa'ida," he wails.
"But in any event this report is not claiming...that there was no link with al-Qa'ida, merely that it found no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents." In fact, he concludes, "It is reasonable to assume the most sensitive stuff in a paranoid state such as Saddam's was not written down."
Just as for Donald Rumsfeld there were "known knowns" and "known unknowns," for magic Greg there's "al-Qa'ida central" and your common and garden al-Qa'ida, your "absolute smoking gun" and your common and garden smoking gun.
Spinning Nothing Out of Something:
Reporting the words of yet another of those awesome Israeli visitors to these shores, cabinet minister Isaac Herzog, Greg writes, "He repeats that the Israeli government took no formal position on the operation against Saddam's regime 5 years ago, but notes that Saddam was an enemy of Israel..." Put another way, there's no absolute smoking gun linking Israel with the US rape of Iraq.
But what does the public record say?
"On August 12 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq 'is the greatest danger facing Israel'. Then, on August 16, ten days before Vice President Cheney kicked off the campaign for war...several newspapers and television and radio networks...reported that Israel was urging the US not to delay an attack on Iraq. Sharon told the Bush administration that postponing the operation 'will not create a more convenient environment for action in the future'. Putting off an attack, Ra'anan Gissen [Sharon's spokesman] said, would 'only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction'. Foreign Minister Peres told CNN that 'the problem today is not if, but when'. Postponing an attack would be a grave mistake, he said, because Saddam would be better armed down the road. Deputy Defense Minister Weizman Shiry offered a similar view, warning, 'If the Americans do not do this now, it will be harder to do it in the future. In a year or two, Saddam Hussein will be further along in developing weapons of mass destruction'. Perhaps CBS best captured what was going on in the headline for its story: 'Israel to US: Don't Delay Iraq Attack'. " The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, pp 234-235
Add Israel's dissemination of dodgy intelligence, opposition to weapons inspections and demonization of Saddam, throw in pro-war statements by other Israeli public figures, the machinations of pro-Israel American neocons and a pro-war push by the Israel lobby, and hey, if it looks like an absolute smoking gun and smokes like an absolute smoking gun, then it probably is an absolute smoking gun.
You've got to hand it to Greg, he can do what you or I can't. He can see absolute smoking guns when there are none, and none where there are.
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