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Making Sense of the Middle East
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and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know!
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IT'S REALLY A JOINT ISRAELI-AMERICAN WAR ON THE ARABS AND
ON MUSLIMS
...AND ONE BROUGHT ON BY THE ISRAELI/JEWISH LOBBY AND MINIONS
IN WASHINGTON
"Washington is intoxicated by the vision of imposing a
Pax
Americana on the Arab world on the model of the
imperial
'order' which Britain imposed on the entire region in
an
earlier age... This is not a purely
American project. Rather
it must be seen as the culmination of America's strategic partnership
with Israel... Much of the ideological justification and political
pressure
for war against Iraq has come from right-wing American Zionists,
many of them Jews, closely allied to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
and occupying influential positions both inside and outside
the Bush
administration. It is neither exaggeration, nor anti-Semitism, as they
MID-EAST REALITIES - MER -
www.MiddleEast.Org
- Washington - 2 April 2003: A few days ago I bumped into
Stephen Rosenfeld, long-time past Editor of the Editorial Pages of the
Washington Post and card-carrying American Jewish "liberal"
long-associated with the the Labor Party/Peace Now wing of the powerful
Israeli/Jewish lobby -- one of the main reasons for today's historic war and
Israeli neo-Apartheid in the Middle East. We had a little
conversation over coffee about what has happened to our country, about what
has happened to Israel, and about what has happened to American journalism.
The subject of complicity in war crimes came up; as did the biases and
inadequacies of today's major American media, Washington Post certainly
high-up on the list. I reminded Rosenfeld that 25 years ago when I
first began writing from Washington he had written an editorial specifically
applauding me personally by name for my insights into things Middle Eastern.
By this time of course he was squirming a little...and we both were aware we
had little more to say to each other.
It truly is a sorry state of affairs in the US today,
especially in Washington, especially in 'establishment' Jewish circles,
regardless of whether hard-line right (Likud) or hypocritical left
(Labor/Meretz). So...in other words...don't expect to see this very
important article by Patrick Seale on the Op Ed page of The Washington Post;
those who have replaced Rosenfeld are just as bad...actually considerably
worse. Indeed, don't expect the very subject of the extraordinary power
and shady workings of the Israeli/Jewish lobby on network American TV screens
or popular newspaper pages -- there's an informal agreement not to do so, a
lot of fear for what happens if one does, and, truth be told, many persons
connected with 'the lobby' are in fact owners and senior editors of the
publications and TV networks who are guilty of such culpable journalistic and
historical negligence.
In the lead-up to this war, one which the hard-line
Zionists and Christian fundamentalists clearly used 9/11 as the excuse to
bring about, rather than the cause, the new American President changed the
foreign-frequent-visitor policy of the White House on its head. For the
last President that award went to none other to Yasser Arafat. For this
new President the award goes to Ariel Sharon, who was in fact given the green
light by Bush personally to put old Arafat under house arrest.
Then a few days ago non other than Colin Powell went over to the AIPAC
convention (that's the lead public organization of the Israeli/Jewish lobby)
and gave a rousing speech before the 3000 assembled that may well go down in
history as his opening shot to be America's first Black (or almost Black)
President -- or at least VP should Cheney tire or be medically unfit for the
job in 2004. Oh yes, almost forgot, the retired top General the Pentagon
is pushing to take over running Iraq -- General Commander President should be
his title -- is one long associated with the Israelis, one who has been wined
and dined by the Israelis on their dime, and a long time JINSA devotee (that's
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a lobbying group to which a
list of today's powerbrokers have been associated for years among them Abrams,
Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith...and the list goes on).
And...more about this sordid situation in today's
Washington as well others whose public profile is not as harsh but who are
also part of the extended team -- including Wolf Blitzer and Ted Koppel -- in
the weeks ahead.
Mark Bruzonsky
WAR US THE CLIMAX OF THE AMERICAN-ISRAELI PARTNERSHIP
==========================================
By Patrick Seale*, 21 March 2003
The United States has embarked on an imperial
adventure in
the Middle East. This is the true meaning of the war
against
Iraq. The war is not about the disarmament of Iraq.
That was
always a hollow and cynical pretext. No one
with any real
knowledge of the situation believed that Iraq, on its
knees
from two disastrous wars and from twelve years
of punitive
sanctions, presented any sort
of 'imminent threat' to
anyone. In any event, from the start of last
November when
UN inspectors returned to
Iraq under Security Council
Resolution 1441, the Washington hawks wanted the
inspectors
to fail and then pressed impatiently
for war, just when
inspections showed real signs of progress.
Nor is the war only, or even
primarily, about toppling
Saddam Hussein. Indeed the White House
announced that US
forces would enter Iraq whether or not
the Iraqi leader
resigned and left the country. The war has bigger
aims: it
is about the implementation of
a vast - and probably
demented - strategic plan.
Washington is intoxicated by the vision of
imposing a Pax
Americana on the Arab world on the model
of the imperial
'order' which Britain imposed on the entire
region in an
earlier age -- with its Gulf and South Arabian strong
points
protecting the route to India, its occupation
of Egypt in
1882, and then the extension of its rule
after the First
World War to some of the Arab provinces
of the defeated
Ottoman Empire. The result was the creation
under British
tutelage of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan.
America's imperial ambitions
With bases across the region from Oman
to Central Asia,
America is now seeking to recreate the British Empire
at its
apogee. The occupation of Iraq, a major Arab country
at the
strategic heart of the region, will allow the United
States
to control the resources of the Middle East and
reshape its
geopolitics to its advantage - or
so the Anglo-American
strategists hope. But if things go badly, history
may well
judge the war to be a criminal enterprise
- unjustified,
unprovoked, illegitimate, catastrophic for the Iraqi
victims
of the conflict and
destructive of the rules of
international relations as they have evolved over
the past
half century.
The fatal flaw is that this
is not a purely American
project. Rather it must be seen
as the culmination of
America's strategic partnership with Israel which
began 36
years ago when, in 1967, President Charles de
Gaulle told
Israel that it would lose French support if it
attacked its
Arab neighbours. Israel promptly switched
its attentions
from Europe to the US, which it gradually
made its main
external ally and subsidizer. The
relationship has since
grown more intimate with every passing year, to
the extent
that the tail now wags the dog.
Much of the ideological justification and political
pressure
for war against Iraq has come
from right-wing American
Zionists, many of them Jews, closely
allied to Israel's
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
and occupying influential
positions both inside and outside the Bush
administration.
It is neither exaggeration, nor anti-Semitism, as
they would
have it, to say that this is a Bush-Sharon war
against Iraq.
As is now widely understood, the genesis
of the idea of
occupying Iraq can be dated back to the
mid-1990s. Richard
Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board and
often described as the intellectual
driving force behind
President Bush's world-view, has for years been
pressing US
and Israeli leaders to go to war against Iraq.
On 8 July
1996, shortly after Benyamin Netanyahu's
election victory
over Shimon Peres, Perle handed Netanyahu a
strategy paper
entitled 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the
Realm'. It called for the removal of Saddam Hussein
as a key
Israeli objective and as a means of weakening Syria.
The call for an attack on Iraq was then taken up in
1997 by
a right-wing American group called The Project
for a New
American Century (PNAC), whose
members included Richard
Perle; Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz; Eliot
Abrams, Middle East director of Bush's
National Security
Council; Randy Scheunemann, President of the
Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq; and two
influential conservative
editors, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard
and Norman
Podhoretz of Commentary. With
friends such as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfled and Vice-President
Dick Cheney,
and backed by half a dozen
right-wing think-tanks, this
group formed a formidable pressure
group. The terrorist
attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001
gave these
advocates of American empire and of the US-Israeli
alliance
their chance. They were able to
make the inexperienced
President George W Bush, who
came to power after a
questionable election, the vehicle for their agenda.
The result is the war we are now witnessing.
The ultimate
objective is to change the map
of the Middle East by
destroying or intimidating all the enemies of
the US and
Israel. If America's imperium turns out to
be benevolent,
which is most improbable, the Arabs may
accept it for a
while. But they will always resist Israel's
domination of
their region. That is the flaw in the project.
Britain's Labour Prime Minister Tony
Blair is a strange
bedfellow of these right-wing ideologues.
He has spoken
passionately not only of the need to 'disarm Iraq'
but also
of a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestine conflict.
He has castigated France for opposing the war and of
thereby
allegedly missing the chance
of promoting Arab-Israeli
peace. This is contorted and unconvincing logic.
Blair knows that Sharon, who has
rubbished the Quartet's
'road-map' and has devoted his life to the
achievement of a
'Greater Israel', has no intention of allowing the
emergence
of a viable Palestinian state. On the contrary, he is
using
the crisis to continue his
wholesale destruction of
Palestinian society. Blair has not
commented on the 80
Palestinians Israel has killed, and the
hundreds it has
wounded, in the first 18 days of this
month, nor has he
spoken of the 48,000 Palestinian houses damaged or
destroyed
in the past 30 months. Blair has squandered a great
deal of
his integrity in order to
protect Britain's so-called
'special relationship' with Washington. But if,
after the
war, attention turns to the Arab-Israeli conflict,
he will
find that Sharon has more influence in the American
capital
than he has - in spite of the 45,000 British troops
he has
committed to battle. As evidence of this influence,
neither
the White House nor the State
Department has chosen to
protest at the death of a young American
peace activist,
Rachel Corrie, crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in
Gaza this
week as she tried to stop the demolition of
a Palestinian
home.
Will America's war meet resistance?
The United States is counting
on a swift, successful,
relatively 'clean' war in Iraq, in which
American troops
will be seen as liberators not occupiers. It intends
to buy
goodwill by embarking immediately
on a programme of
reconstruction of roads, power plants,
hospitals, schools
and so forth. But who will pay for this
reconstruction? Will
it be money drawn from Iraq's oil revenues? In
particular,
will American companies, who intend to
secure the lion's
share of the contracts, be paid out of the UN escrow
account
established under the oil-for-food
programme? This will
require a new Security Council Resolution. If France,
Russia
and China are cut out of the reconstruction
contracts and
the oil concessions, they will undoubtedly
fight any such
American monopoly. Some Western diplomats see
this as the
next diplomatic battle.
In this war, the great
unanswered question is whether
American and British troops
will meet any serious
resistance, not just from the elite units of the
Iraqi army
but also from the civilian population. After the
first flush
of victory, will the occupying armies be
harassed by hit-
and-run guerrillas, as happened to Israel after its
invasion
of Lebanon in 1982? Will an Iraqi 'Hizballah' emerge
on the
model of the resistance movement
which eventually drove
Israel out of south Lebanon?
A successful resistance
movement needs outside support, a flow of arms
and money,
safe havens when the going gets tough. In Lebanon,
Hizballah
had such support from Syria and Iran. In 1983, it was
Syria
and its local allies that
managed to defeat American
attempts, brokered by George Shultz, then US
Secretary of
State, to draw Lebanon into Israel's sphere
of influence.
Who in the region today could
extend help to an Iraqi
resistance movement? Syria has become too vulnerable
to play
any such role, Iran too fearful of being the
next target,
Turkey too preoccupied in
keeping a lid on Kurdish
aspirations to statehood in northern Iraq. The
most likely
resistance might come from elsewhere. A non-state
actor like
Osama bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida,
drawing inspiration and
recruits from the violent anti-American
and anti-Israeli
sentiments now sweeping the Muslim world, might take
up the
challenge. Occupation breeds insurrection. This is an
axiom
of history.
*Patrick Seale is a distinguished British historian
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