| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 7:11 am Post subject: Robert Fisk-Live interview: Iraq power handover 'a fraud' |
| Date: Tue Apr 20, 2004 2:20 pm
Subject: Robert Fisk-Live interview
Iraq power handover 'a fraud'
Reporter: Tony Jones
TONY JONES: Back now to the day's developments in Israel and Iraq.
The assassination of Hamas leader Dr Abdel-Aziz Rantissi at the weekend has unleashed rage and fury on the streets of Gaza just days after President George W Bush backed Israel's sovereignty over West Bank settlements in return for a total pull-out of settlers from the Gaza Strip.
In Iraq, meanwhile, troops from Spain are preparing to go home just as America has announced the death of its 700th soldier in fighting there.
Well, joining me now is Robert Fisk.
He's a correspondent for the British newspaper the 'Independent' and is a 25-year veteran of reporting from the Middle East.
Robert Fisk, thanks for joining us.
ROBERT FISK, WRITER & JOURNALIST: Thank you.
TONY JONES: Let's start with Iraq if we can and the immense problems the United States now faces in handing the country back to Iraqis.
Just to start with that, anyway.
The June 30th deadline now looks like it's going to be postponed.
What will be the consequences if it is?
ROBERT FISK: Nothing.
The handover is basically a fraud.
The governing council, which is appointed by the Americans, and which is the Iraqi Government at the moment would merely be handing over to another group of American-picked Iraqis.
They're not democratically elected, the new institution, whatever it is.
We don't even know what it's going to be.
I notice that when President Bush gave his press conference three days ago, he said that Mr Brahimi was working on that, referring to Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister who's special envoy to Iraq for the UN's Kofi Annan, but Mr Brahimi found that quite a surprise.
He's not trying to put together a future government - he's trying to arrange elections and that may not be until next year.
Even if there was a democratically elected government to hand over sovereignty to, which is there not, the sovereignty doesn't mean anything because under the laws that Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Baghdad has already enacted for post June 30, all the Iraqi security forces will be commanded by United States officers, so that's not a handover of sovereignty.
TONY JONES: The Americans obviously were putting a lot of faith in Mr Brahimi performing some kind of miracle.
You think that's not going to happen.
Could, however, the United Nations be under much more pressure now to get seriously involved in perhaps taking over the administration of Iraq?
ROBERT FISK: Well, the poor old UN.
You know, when we wanted to rush into war, we batted the UN donkey around the ear and told them it wasn't standing up enough and now we're trying to drag the old UN donkey to save us in Iraq because after all we realise it's all gone wrong.
I don't think that the UN is going to go into Iraq on June 30.
I cannot see the end, or the depth, to which the current bloodshed is going.
I can't see a way out at the moment.
Ultimately, I think it will have to be - if it's not just going to be an abandoned Iraq with Iraqis trying to run it, I think it would be - it has to be Arab force, an Arab league force.
We're going to have to see Syrians in there, Emirates, the Saudis, Egyptians, but even that will start to fracture and fragment across the Arab world in the Middle East.
I simply can't see a way out, when you build a war on illusions and fantasies and you don't get international mandate to run it, then your occupation will fail.
The British occupation in Iraq took three years to fail between 1917 and 1920.
It took us, the British, three years to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis behind us.
It's quite an achievement - the Americans have managed to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis against them in just one year.
TONY JONES: I'll come specifically to that possibility in a moment.
First, let's look at the immediate crisis faced by the US administrator, Paul Bremer, in Najaf.
The Americans have already said they're going to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.
What will happen if they go into Najaf with guns blazing?
ROBERT FISK: I don't think they will.
I think that there's a kind of discontinuation of serious political relations between Bremer and the US military.
Because what Bremer says and sometimes what Bush says doesn't bear any relation to what people like Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy chief of US operations in Iraq, or General Sanchez for that matter actually say.
I don't think Bremer ordered anyone to arrest or kill, certainly arrest but not necessarily kill, Moqtada al-Sadr.
But the direct result of what the Americans have said is quite simple.
Shiites, who would never have dreamt of supporting Moqtada al-Sadr, are now prepared to fight the Americans if they come into Najaf.
Of course, the Americans have boxed themselves in.
First of all, they were going to go into Fallujah and capture the men, the terrorists - everyone's a terrorist if you fight the Americans - who had so brutally murdered those four American mercenaries three weeks ago but they're not Fallujah, they realise they've killed so many Iraqis, at least 600, many of them women and children, that they simply can't go on.
Now they're standing around Najaf with what?
2,500 troops.
You can't conquer a city of so many Shiites with 2,500 troops.
It's going to need a massive bombardment.
To do that to the major Shiite shrine in the world, one of the major Shiite shrines, it's unthinkable.
I think the Americans have reached a point where they can't do much more militarily and politically they finished quite a while ago.
It's a terrible, terrible situation but mostly, remember, for the Iraqis.
They're doing more dying than our soldiers are doing.
TONY JONES: What role then do you think the old Ayatollahs, particularly Sistani, are going to play as this situation starts to play itself out around Najaf?
ROBERT FISK: Well, Sistani, you see, still hopes that if there is a future administration the Shiites will basically run it.
They are the majority population.
They are 60 per cent of the population of Iraq.
He doesn't want to do anything which is going to allow the Sunnis to come back and run the country as they did under Kassim, Saddam, the Ba'ath Party and so on.
There's going to come a time and he's beginning to speak much more harshly - when he's not going to be able any longer to hold back an overall Shi'ite resistance against the United States.
He's not going to be able to do it.
If the Americans do try to enter the holy city of Najaf, they're in the suburbs at the moment but they're nowhere near the shrines, if they do try to enter, then I think Sistani will have to call for a war against them.
He'll be finished if he doesn't.
TONY JONES: This is before the war, you predicted on this program, you predicted a likely civil war in Iraq if the invasion went ahead.
The Americans are now saying that the thing they most fear as you started referring to at the beginning of this interview is a temporary alliance between the Shiites and the Sunnis and some of the American analysts are pointing to what happened in Lebanon when the Sunnis and Shia got together to push the Israelis out.
They're saying that's the analogy they most fear, not Vietnam but Lebanon?
ROBERT FISK: The Americans have got it wrong.
As so often happens in the Middle East, the Sunnis played no part in throwing the Israelis out of Lebanon.
That's what the Shiites did and the Sunnis did very little about the resistance.
It was basically a Shi'ite resistance on its own that threw the Israelis out of Lebanon.
I think, although unfortunately my prediction of serious resistance more than a year ago is proving tragically to be correct, I think I was probably wrong in saying there would be a civil war.
The only people who are talking about civil war at the moment in Iraq are the Americans and the British and the Western journalists who suck up their lines and push it back out as their own analysis.
I haven't actually met an Iraqi who wants a civil war or who's talked about a civil war.
There's never been a civil war in Iraq.
I rather suspect that this danger of civil war - and I'm guilty before the war quite rightly predicting there might be --is being pushed out by the Americans and the British in order to frighten the Iraqis into obedience.
"If you don't put your guns, down look what might happen, you'll have civil war."
I think the reason why they're wrong and why I was wrong is that they never appreciated that the Iraqi tribal system covers both communities - many Shiite tribes also are Sunnis, they're in the same tribes.
I went out the other day - and this is an interesting example, to go to the funeral of a doctor, of a Sunni, who had been murdered almost certainly by a Shiite gang of gunmen.
When I said, "What does this make you feel about your neighbours?", they said, "Nothing.
"They're our friends and our comrades and our neighbours."
"Because," he said "our tribes include the Shiites."
The brother of the doctor said, "Look, my wife is a Shiite.
"Want do you want me to do?
"Go and kill her?
"Because my brother was killed by a Shiite?
"No, we will not have a civil war."
So I think possibly there will not a civil war and I think it is becoming highly provocative of the occupying power to constantly talk about it in this way as if they almost want a civil war.
If we journalists started talking it about after the occupation we would have called irresponsible by the occupying power.
So why are they suddenly talking about civil war now?
TONY JONES: Going back to what you said at the beginning of the program and as a summary of what you just told us, are we likely to see a temporary alliance between the Shia and the Sunni to throw the Americans out?
ROBERT FISK: I think it's going that way.
We're not yet at a serious alliance.
After all the British are in Basra, a major Shiite city and compared to the Americans there is some violence but compared to the Americans they're getting off lightly.
This at the moment, remember, is primarily an anti-American resistance.
Although, we know the Italians have been attacked, the Spanish have been attacked and are leaving, the British have been a little bit attacked, it is primarily an anti-American resistance.
But if the Shiites do join in full it will become an anti-Westerner resistance just as the whole hostage-taking fiasco is turning into an anti-Western campaign.
But, again, I stress there have never been a civil war in Iraq and I think that the tribal system there which is everything, unfortunately, that stands against the possibility of democracy, the tribal system might save Iraq from that, if in the end we have to go and leave Iraq with our tail between our legs which of course Mr Bush has no intention of doing because he wants to win an election in November.
TONY JONES: Let's move to the other flash point.
We've just seen the assassination of yet another Hamas leader and only days before that Ariel Sharon was cutting a deal in Washington with the President to allow effectively the cessation of West Bank settlements.
Those two things, how do they fit together and what's the future hold do you think, at least the immediate future, in that part of the Middle East?
ROBERT FISK: Well, let's bring Iraq and the Palestine-Israeli conflict together.
They have one thing in common - they are about occupation.
President Bush in his letter to Sharon, PM Sharon of Israel, has effectively said, he has said in fact, that there is no obligation on Israel withdrawing to the '67 borders which they were behind prior to the '67 Middle East war which means that the whole of UN Security Council resolution 242, the fundamentals of peace has been overruled by the Bush Administration.
Now, it is apparently legitimate for the reality of the statements to be accepted so that land taken from Arabs illegally under international law for Jews and Jews only by the Israelis, that's now OK around Jerusalem.
Well, what we're dealing with here, and with Hamas which is an extremely brutal organisation - let's not get romantic about it - both with the Palestinians and with the Iraqis two groups of people who say, "We will not be occupied by other people, we want to keep our land."
Whether you are talking about the Palestinians who say, "We'll accept the Palestine, 22 per cent of Palestine left as opposed to all of Palestine including what is now Israel, or whether you're talking about the extremists and whether you're talking about Iraqis who don't really want warfare in their streets but hate the occupying power, what we're dealing with in the Middle East is two occupying forces coming up against an unstoppable opposition.
The brutality that that can give way we saw in Fallujah with the murder of the four American mercenaries and their mutilation and we've seen it again with the massive causalities the marines have inflicted on the people if Fallujah.
But if you want to know how bad it can get, go back to the French war in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, it has followed identical patterns - the French put settlements in or the French said, "We will crush any opposition."
It started off low yield - bombs beside the road, a bomb in front of a train then it went on to kidnapping then it went onto bombs in discos, the same as pizza houses or the same as hotels in Baghdad, and then it escalated to mass killings in the cities of Algeria and, of course, it ended with a humiliating French retreat which changed French history forever.
TONY JONES: Robert Fisk on that rather grim note we will have to leave it.
We thank you once again for coming in to talking to us tonight. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:32 am Post subject: Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All? |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-shatz15apr15,1,3155260.story
April 15, 2004
COMMENTARY
Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All?
Bush's lumping together of dissimilar militant groups is a dangerous mistake.
COMMENTARY
By Adam Shatz
"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar," President Bush argued, with seductive simplicity, in Tuesday's press conference.
"The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad," he continued, "is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on Sept. 11, 2001."
Bush's argument boiled down to this: A terrorist is a terrorist, whether he is a member of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas or of an Iraqi resistance organization fighting American troops — and, whatever their differences, they are all inflamed by the "same ideology of murder." Intended as an expression of "moral clarity," it's likely to convince many Americans. But does it hold up? Are such groups all the same, and are they actually driven by an identical ideology?
Let's start by defining terrorism. It's a notoriously slippery concept: As the cliche goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But the most widely accepted and neutral definition is that it is violence against civilians to achieve political aims.
Do all of Bush's examples pass the test? Certainly the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in Bali and Madrid, do. But what about the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 by Lebanese militants belonging to Islamic Jihad (the precursor to Hezbollah), which Bush also referred to? However appalling, this was directed at a military target in the midst of a civil war. The Marines landed in Beirut as peacekeepers, but they came in the aftermath of Israel's invasion and were perceived by the Shiite community as intervening on the side of Israel and its Christian Falangist allies.
Likewise, however much one deplores the roadside bombings of American soldiers by Iraqi fighters, such acts scarcely qualify as "terrorism." The aim is not to kill American civilians but to target soldiers and thereby drive the American army out of Iraq. Whether you support it or oppose it, it's not terrorism; it's resistance to occupation.
As for the horrifying suicide attacks by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade on buses and in restaurants in Israel, they certainly qualify as terrorism — i.e., violence against civilians to achieve political aims. But it is unfair (and misleading) to say that these attacks are motivated by a diffuse "ideology of murder." In fact, they're motivated by long-simmering nationalist rage against a 37-year-old occupation that shows few signs of abating; despite the similarity in methods, they are distinct from Al Qaeda's attacks on trains and resorts. This does not excuse such attacks, but it does distinguish them.
Unlike Al Qaeda, moreover, Palestinian militants are not at war with the U.S. Hamas' arena of operations is limited, and so are its aims: Its struggle is with Israel, not with the West.
Giandomenico Picco, the former U.N. diplomat who helped secure the release of the Western hostages held by Shiite militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s, believes it is important to draw a careful distinction between "tactical" and "strategic" terrorism. Tactical terror, however murderous, is a means of pursuing concrete territorial goals that — whether we agree with them or not — are at least real goals. Strategic terror, by contrast, is an end in itself.
Many nationalist groups have used tactical terrorism, from Algeria's National Liberation Front to South Africa's African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army to the Irgun and Stern Gang in Palestine during the British mandate period. Once they achieved independence, these groups generally abandoned terrorism, and many former "terrorists" have become statesmen, among them Nelson Mandela (the leader of a group long classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department) and Menachem Begin (who, as the leader of the Irgun militia, presided over the July 22, 1946, bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 civilians).
Since the end of Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon four years ago, Hezbollah has largely followed this pattern. The organization now has nine deputies in the Lebanese parliament, where it has focused its efforts on improving the lives of its Shiite constituents. Although the party continues to exchange fire with Israeli soldiers on the border and to offer rhetorical and logistical support for Palestinian militants, it has not been implicated in an attack on Western civilians in more than a decade. The first Islamic cleric to denounce 9/11 was none other than Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior Shiite cleric who served as Hezbollah's spiritual guide at the time of the 1983 bombings. Like most Shiites, he loathes the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, who in turn revile the Shiites.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, has declared war on the United States and the West, and its terrorism is strategic: not simply a means to an end but an end in itself. Its ideology is fanatical, apocalyptic and expansionist, and its goal — the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of "Crusaders and Zionists" — is a recipe for endless war.
Far from being an expression of moral clarity, Bush's promiscuous definition of terrorism blinds us to the distinctions among groups with very different and often-clashing agendas and threatens to drag us into further unnecessary wars.
To insist upon these distinctions is not to excuse the murder of civilians, which must be condemned, or to endorse the agenda of nationalist insurgencies that use "tactical terror." Rather, it is to acknowledge that terror comes in different forms, and that in order to combat it successfully, we need to know which kind we're confronting.
Adam Shatz is literary editor of The Nation. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject: JINSA/PNAC Zionist Extremists after Hizbollah/Syria for Isra |
| http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17060 (see the links which are embedded in this URL):
'A Clean Break' is an embedded link at the following article and is a must read:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j100603.html
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles114.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
Notice how JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs)/PNAC (Project for the New American Century) Zionist extremists Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (who co-authored the 'A Clean Break' document for Likudite Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu back in 1996) are ardently in supportive of going after Hizbollah in Lebanon/Syria for Israel (be sure to read the 'War Conceived in Israel' article which is linked under the map of 'greater Israel' after scrolling down to it on the left at www.nowarforisrael.com as more about 'A Clean Break' is also linked after scrolling down to it at www.irmep.org):
Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004
Email to a friend
Review
In Search of Hezbollah
By Adam Shatz
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
(click for larger image)
WORKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE
Hizbollah: Rebel Without a Cause?
by the International Crisis Group
a briefing paper, July 30, 2003
My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing
by Christoph Reuter, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby
Princeton University Press, 200 pp., $24.95
Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion
by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
Pluto, 254 pp., $69.95
Should Hezbollah Be Next?
by Daniel Byman
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003
Hizballah of Lebanon: Extremist Ideals vs. Mundane Politics
a paper by Augustus Richard Norton
Council on Foreign Relations, 1999
Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism
by Judith Palmer Harik
I.B. Tauris, 241 pp., $24.95
Hizballah: Terrorism, National Liberation, or Menace?
a report by Sami G. Hajjar
Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, August 2002
1.
Beirut used to be known as the Paris of the Middle East, and in the well-to-do Christian and Sunni quarters of the city, the capital of Lebanon still manages to cast a spell. The central business district—a battleground on the dividing line between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut during the Lebanese civil war—has been rebuilt by a construction firm whose largest shareholder is Lebanon's prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, a billionaire entrepreneur. The cafés are thick with smoke and conversation in Arabic, English, and French, techno music blares from clubs until four in the morning, and everywhere there are women in miniskirts. The old, pre-war Beirut, the sophisticated world where it mattered to people to be seen, seems to have been resurrected.
But "Haririgrad," as downtown Beirut is sometimes called, is hardly representative of the country. If you take a ten-minute drive to the city's southern suburbs, a series of dingy, overcrowded slums, you will see another country, where hejabs are more common than miniskirts, liquor is hard to find, and you're less likely to see posters of Prime Minister Hariri than of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the forty-four-year-old secretary-general of Hezbollah, the Party of God. A prominent Shiite cleric, shrewd militia leader, and political strategist, Nasrallah is admired throughout the Arab world for leading a campaign of resistance to Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in May 2000, and for his successful dealings with the Israeli government. Most recently, after three years of on-and-off negotiations through a German mediator, Nasrallah persuaded Ariel Sharon to hand over 429 prisoners, as well as the bodies of fifty-nine Hezbollah fighters killed in combat, in exchange for freeing an Israeli businessman kidnapped by Hezbollah and returning the remains of three Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon. The deal sparked a day of national celebration in Lebanon, and has been seen by some as a vindication of Hezbollah's use of violence for political leverage.
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Most of the residents of southern Beirut, where Nasrallah has his headquarters, are Shiites, who account for 40 percent of Lebanon's population, outnumbering both Christians and Sunnis. Until the 1960s, Lebanon's Shiites were a neglected, invisible community, oppressed by feudal landlords and disdained by their fellow Lebanese. Today, they are a rising political force, thanks in large part to the militant political movement Hezbollah. It is now a virtual state-within-a-state, with an army of several thousand men, an extensive social service network, a popular satellite television station called al-Manar ("the Beacon of Light"), and an annual budget in excess of $100 million, much of which comes from Iran, Hezbollah's major patron.
The movement first emerged during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese died, most of them civilians and many of them Shiites. Militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hezbollah's original cadres were organized and trained by a 1,500-member contingent of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who arrived in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the summer of 1982, with the permission of the Syrian government. For Iran, whose efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to the Arab world had been stymied by its war with Iraq, Hezbollah provided a means of gaining a foothold in Middle East politics.
Syria's vehemently secular leader Hafez Assad, for his part, had no affection for Hezbollah's religious ideology but keenly grasped its potential as a proxy militia. For Syria, whose principal goal has been to reclaim the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, Hezbollah is the only "card" it has to pressure its far more powerful neighbor. Unlike the leftist Lebanese forces that, until that point, had led the resistance to the Israelis, Hezbollah guerrillas could not be penetrated by Israeli intelligence. And in their discipline and willingness to die for their cause they had few rivals, as the world was to discover the following year, when members of the clandestine "Islamic Resistance" (a precursor to Hezbollah, which did not yet officially exist) launched a series of terrifying suicide attacks in Lebanon against American, French, and Israeli targets.
Following the bombings, the Western forces made a fast exit from Beirut; in 1985, faced with fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters, Israel withdrew to a so-called security zone, a strip of territory along Lebanon's southern border that soon became known as its "insecurity zone." Over the next fifteen years, Hezbollah waged an efficient, disciplined, and popular guerrilla war against the Israeli military.
In May 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to bring an end to an occupation that had cost more than one thousand Israeli lives, and ordered a unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The withdrawal did not include a formal peace agreement with Lebanon, and the Israeli army continued to occupy the patch of border territory called the Shebaa Farms, which Hezbollah regards as part of Lebanon. But Lebanese Shiites (as well as a number of Barak's Israeli critics) saw the withdrawal as a major Hez- bollah victory—"the first Arab victory in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict," as Hezbollah often proclaims.[1] It is an event that has helped make Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, one of the most important men in Lebanon.
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Hezbollah now has some 100,000 supporters, about half of whom are party members. When Nasrallah raises his voice, the Lebanese pay close attention to what he says, whether or not they like him. Bashar Assad, Syria's young leader and Hezbollah's other major sponsor, is said to revere him.[2] Although Nasrallah depends on Iranian arms and Syria's support for his military operations, he has achieved a significant degree of autonomy from both parties, which may complicate future efforts to disband it. Hezbollah, which adheres to the principle of wilayat al-faqih, or rule by the Islamic jurist, regards Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as its ultimate leader, and maintains close ties to Iran's leadership, especially to the hard-line clerics who helped organize the party in the early 1980s.[3] It was Khamenei who reportedly influenced Hezbollah's decision to maintain its armed wing rather than devote all its energies to Lebanese politics after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. But Hezbollah has long ceased to be an Iranian-controlled militia. (The last remaining Revolutionary Guards left the Bekaa Valley in 1998.) Although Hezbollah is believed to coordinate foreign policy matters with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the Lebanese and Western experts I've talked to say it reaches most of its everyday decisions without consulting Iran. Moreover, they say, Khamenei has never overruled Nasrallah.
Syria's control of Hezbollah has also declined, and it is widely believed that Bashar Assad—a weak, inexperienced leader who has inherited his father's airs but not his authority—depends more on Nasrallah's "endorsement" than Nasrallah does on his support. For, in the eyes of many Arabs, Hezbollah has succeeded where Syria, which has long prided itself on being a redoubtable opponent of Israeli ambitions, has failed: in defeating Israel on the battlefield. Nasrallah is one of the most resourceful adversaries Israel has ever faced, and his successful guerrilla war against Israel in southern Lebanon has strongly impressed Palestinians and made him a hero in the Occupied Territories, particularly in the refugee camps.
Although Lebanese Shiites have often regarded the Palestinian population in southern Lebanon with suspicion, Hezbollah's ties to Palestinian groups go back more than a decade. In late 1992, Israel expelled to Lebanon 415 leading members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and during the following year, they received training from Hezbollah in both combat strategies and the ideology of martyrdom. In the 1980s, Hezbollah had endorsed suicide attacks as a legitimate and efficient resistance strategy—and some experts argue that the group helped introduce the technique to Israel in 1993, while the exiled Palestinian extremists were in Lebanon.[4]
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More recently, Nasrallah has deepened his party's involvement in the second intifada. Hezbollah has offered logistical support and training in the use of explosives and anti-tank missiles to Palestinian extremists, particularly members of Islamic Jihad, and has attempted to smuggle arms into the Occupied Territories to various groups, from the Palestinian Authority to Hamas.[5] In June 2002, shortly after the Israeli government launched Operation Defensive Shield, which culminated in the invasion of the Jenin refugee camp, Nasrallah gave a speech in which he defended and praised suicide bombings of Israeli targets by members of Palestinian groups for "creating a deterrence and equalizing fear." Although he did not claim that Hezbollah had been directly involved in the attacks, he said, "We [Hezbollah] are trying to find a way for this weapon to become more developed, effective, and capable, leading the resistance movement in Palestine to a new and exceptional phase." He continued, "This weapon is today the most powerful weapon the Palestinian people...could ever have." Israeli officials have also alleged that Hezbollah is recruiting Israeli Arabs and trying to organize Iranian-funded terrorist cells in Palestine known as the Return Brigades, though no attacks have been tied to such a group.
Nasrallah's struggle with Israel did not end with the withdrawal of Israeli troops. On March 22, hours after the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, Hezbollah demonstrated its solidarity with the Palestinian group by firing more than sixty-five rockets at six different Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa Farms. The Israeli air force responded by sending warplanes into Lebanon and firing at suspected Hezbollah bases, reportedly foiling in one case a second Hezbollah rocket attack. According to Haaretz, the Israeli Defense Force has also placed Nasrallah, along with Yasser Arafat, on a list of targets for future assassinations.
Hezbollah has vigorously responded to other Israeli activity along the border. In January, a month after Israeli commandos killed two Lebanese men who had wandered into Israeli territory, Hezbollah guerrillas fired on an Israeli bulldozer which had crossed several yards into Lebanese territory to dismantle roadside bombs, and killed one Israeli soldier. As the Lebanese scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb underscores in her perceptive new book, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Ideology, Hezbollah views the conflict with Israel as "'an existential struggle' as opposed to 'a conflict over land.'" In the words of Sheikh Naim Qasim, Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general, "Even if hundreds of years pass by, Israel's existence will continue to be an illegal existence."
Although Hezbollah has denounced attacks on Western civilians—Nawaf al-Musawi, the party's foreign minister, told me in no uncertain terms that he viewed September 11 as an act of terrorism—it makes an exception in the case of Israel. As Nasrallah puts it, "in occupied Palestine there is no difference between a soldier and a civilian, for they are all invaders, occupiers and usurpers of the land." When Nasrallah was asked whether he was prepared to live with a two-state settlement between Israel and Palestine, he said in interviews with both Seymour Hersh and me that he would not sabotage what is finally a "Palestinian matter."[6] But until such a settlement is reached, he will, he said, continue to encourage Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has found him to be a credible, although exasperatingly tough, negotiator. (Nasrallah has voiced similar respect for Israeli leaders, praising their determination to get back their soldiers' remains. "These values are our values too," he told his followers after the recent prisoner exchange.) It is clear, on the other hand, that he thrives on ambiguity about his intentions toward Israel, and enjoys the confusion it sows across Lebanon's southern border.
Some secular Palestinians, for their part, make plain their anger at the efforts of Nasrallah and Hezbollah to influence the Palestinian cause. I recently talked to a ranking Palestinian official who strongly disputed the analogy between occupied Palestine and South Lebanon. "There were no Israeli settlers in South Lebanon," the official said, and "Israel would have eventually left, with or without Hezbollah." The Palestinian, who declined to be identified, criticized Hezbollah for encouraging Hamas and Islamic Jihad to make suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. "I do not consider this resistance," the official said.
2.
Like most of Hezbollah's leaders, Nasrallah studied both at religious seminaries in Najaf, with Iraqi clerics close to the pro-Iranian Islamic Dawa party, and in the Iranian holy city of Qom, with Iranian disciples of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. But he is a modern Lebanese politician, and the language he speaks is that of nationalism, albeit one saturated with the elements of Shiite theology that emphasize resistance to persecution and martyrdom. The Shia cult of martyrdom is part of a tradition going back to Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, who was slaughtered, along with a small number of his followers, by the army of the hostile caliph Yazid at Karbala in 680 AD. During the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah used the cult of Hussein to glorify self-sacrifice among its fighters and to launch suicide attacks, or "martyrdom operations," against the Israeli army. Since the Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah's culture of victimhood has given way to celebrations of victory, but the group has used its satellite channel, al-Manar, to promote the same ideology of resistance and martyrdom among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Nasrallah, who wears the full beard, dark turban, and robes of a Shia cleric, spoke with me in his office in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the so-called Belt of Misery. The office is in an apartment building in a gated courtyard on Abbas Musawi Street, named for Nasrallah's predecessor, who was assassinated in Lebanon in 1992 in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack that also killed his wife and son. The reception room where we spoke was decorated with portraits of Musawi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei; all the blinds were drawn for security. On the wall just outside hung a portrait of Nasrallah's son, Hadi, who was killed six years ago at age eighteen while fighting Israeli soldiers.
A short, plump man with boyish features his beard does little to conceal, Nasrallah is not impressive-looking but he is a stirring speaker. His speeches —detailed examinations of Arab politics, and of Hezbollah strategy—are analytical rather than flowery. He seldom makes claims he cannot defend —a rarity in the region, where the relationship between words and deeds is sometimes comically tenuous. Nasrallah knows how to address ordinary Lebanese Shiites because he is one of them. Born in 1960 in East Beirut, he is the son of a grocer who was a follower of the Imam Musa Sadr, an Iranian cleric who settled in Lebanon in the late Fifties and awakened the long-quiescent Shiite population.
If Israel's leaders hoped that, by killing Sheikh Abbas Musawi, they would get a more pliable, or less capable, adversary, they badly miscalculated. Not only did Nasrallah prove to be a more effective military leader than Musawi, he has adroitly translated his military successes into political gains for Hezbollah and its Shiite constituents. Immediately upon assuming power in 1992, he decided that Hezbollah should openly take part in Lebanon's "confessional" political system, in which parliamentary seats are allocated according to religious identity. Radicals accused him of betraying his party's revolutionary principles, but Nasrallah argued that Hezbollah was better off working within the political system than protesting from the sidelines. His gamble paid off. Hezbollah became the biggest of Lebanon's many political factions, commanding the largest single bloc in the country's parliament, and its leader emerged stronger than ever.
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Today Hezbollah has nine of the twenty-seven seats reserved for Shiites in the 128-member Lebanese parliament; it also controls three additional seats held by allied parties and occupied, respectively, by a Christian and two Sunnis. Were it not for Syrian backing not only of Hezbollah but of Hezbollah's principal Shiite rival, Amal, Hezbollah would have even more. (The first major Shia organization in Lebanon, Amal was created in 1974 and, along with Hezbollah and other groups, fought against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. Although it has shared Hezbollah's hostility toward Israel, Amal is far more secular in its politics. It was never as close to Iran, and fought a bloody turf war with Hezbollah over southern Lebanon between 1985 and 1989. Today it has eight delegates in the Lebanese parliament, and maintains a strong following among Shiite professionals, who depend on the extensive patronage network run by Amal's leader, Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament.)
After Israel's withdrawal, some analysts predicted—and many Lebanese hoped—that Hezbollah would soon wind down its military operations and become a purely political party. But Nasrallah has greater ambitions than to win more seats in Lebanon's parliament, and he has had the firm backing of Iran and Syria. At once a determined radical and an astute pragmatist, he views Hezbollah both as a Lebanese party committed to assuring the welfare of its constituents and as a vanguard in the pan-Islamic struggle to destroy Israel and restore Palestine to its native inhabitants.
Nasrallah is not about to surrender power that he believes he might end up needing in the future. Although Hezbollah is a liability for Syria and Iran in their present efforts to improve relations with the American government, the party's arsenal of long-range Katyusha rockets provides it with a defensive shield against Israel. Instead of choosing between politics and "resistance," Nasrallah is pursuing both tracks at once, with a combination of extreme rhetoric and tactical caution that has made Hezbollah the most enigmatic and successful guerrilla organization in the Middle East. Which aspect of Hezbollah's identity he chooses to emphasize will depend, to a large extent, on what happens in the region.
If anything has convinced Nasrallah that now is not the time to disarm, it is intensified American hostility since September 11. In early September 2002, Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, characterized Hezbollah as "the A-team of terrorists," while "maybe al-Qaeda is actually the B-team," and promised to "go after them just like a high school wrestler goes after opponents." Before the US invasion of Iraq, Democratic senator Bob Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, had told 60 Minutes that Hezbollah represented a graver threat than Saddam Hussein. Dick Cheney's new adviser on Syrian policy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud ideologue, is an open advocate of preemptive war against Syria and Hezbollah, a position favored by neoconservatives in and close to the Bush admin- istration, such as Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Richard Perle. Perhaps not coincidentally, there have also been lurid accounts of Hezbollah in the American press. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The New Yorker, called Hezbollah an "organization devoted to jihad, not to logic," one that "might attack American interests regardless of American interests in Lebanon."[7]
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Hezbollah's reputation for violence against the West is well deserved. The group was behind some of the worst attacks against Western military and diplomatic targets of the 1980s, including the October 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut (in which 241 servicemen died) and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight (in which an American serviceman on board was brutally beaten, then killed and dumped on the tarmac). Western intelligence officials also believe that in the mid-1980s the group participated in the kidnapping and assassination of American citizens in Lebanon, such as Terry Anderson and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured before he was killed. A Lebanese terrorist group called Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for many of these attacks, but the group shared many of the same leaders as Hezbollah, and US intelligence officials allege it was merely a cover for Hezbollah's military wing.
In the early 1990s, Hezbollah members were connected to two notorious attacks in Buenos Aires: the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy, which killed twenty-nine people, ostensibly in retaliation for Israel's assassination of Sheikh Musawi; and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, which killed eighty-five civilians. American and Saudi officials have also implicated Hezbollah in the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a US military base in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen US servicemen, although their evidence has been questioned by some experts.[8] According to Western officials, many of these attacks were organized by Imad Mughnieh, a shadowy pro-Iranian terrorist who is said at the time to have led Hezbollah's "external security apparatus," an extremist wing of the party that has organized Hezbollah cells and raised funds abroad. Reportedly based in Tehran, Mughnieh is one of three Hezbollah members who remain on the State Department's list of "23 Most Wanted Terrorists." He is alleged to run a network of terrorist cells and training camps in Asia, Europe, and along South America's "triple frontier," where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil intersect, and may have had some contact with al-Qaeda in the early 1990s.[9]
In view of these attacks, the concerns of the American government are understandable. And Hezbollah's ideology—a fiery mixture of revolutionary Khomeinism, Shiite nationalism, celebration of martyrdom, and militant anti-Zionism, occasionally accompanied by crude, neo-fascist anti-Semitism—only exacerbates concern about the organization's potential for violence. Nevertheless, there has been little evidence of violence sponsored by Hezbollah itself against Western targets in recent years and the extent of Mughnieh's current ties with Hezbollah's political leadership remains in doubt. Several experts on Hezbollah I spoke to believe that Mughnieh now works solely on behalf of Iran.
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Hezbollah's announced long-term objectives—the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon, and the elimination of the State of Israel— have not changed. But it interprets its founding principles with considerable suppleness, as when Nasrallah says he will not sabotage an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. Today it is not only prominent in Lebanese politics; it is also a major provider of schools, where the principles of Islam according to Ayatollah Khamenei and Hezbollah ideology are folded into a normal curriculum that is approved by the Lebanese government. It also provides an impressive range of social services such as hospitals and job training to the Shiite community.
In a country mired in patronage and back-room dealing, Hezbollah is respected for its lack of corruption. Although the party's yellow-and-green flag—depicting a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov, posed against a globe— still advocates "the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon," Hezbollah has recently said little about an Islamic state, and begun to build alliances across religious lines, particularly at the municipal level and in professional unions. In 1999, for example, Hezbollah members of Lebanon's engineering syndicate formed a coalition with the Phalange Party, a rightist Christian group, and the National Liberal Party, both allies of Israel during the civil war. Another change that is impossible to ignore is the growing prominence of female activists in the party, a development that makes the party progressive by Islamist standards. "One would have to be blind not to notice the changes Hezbollah has undergone," says Joseph Samaha, a secular Christian writer for the daily as-Safir. "Has Hezbollah tried to ban books or impose sharia? Not once. Their electoral program is [an] almost social democratic [one]. So we're confronting a very different kind of Fundamentalist party."
Moreover, as Daniel Byman, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, points out in his article "Should Hezbollah Be Next?" in Foreign Affairs, over the last decade Hezbollah's military wing has concentrated most of its efforts on strengthening its defensive capacity; according to Byman, Hezbollah has not been linked to a "single attack on a US target" since the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers. In its guerrilla war with Israel in southern Lebanon, it targeted soldiers, not civilians, although it is said to provide both financing and training for Hamas.
While Iran continues to supply Hezbollah with money and arms, including Katyushas that arrive through Syrian ports, it has shown increasing restraint since the mid-1990s, when it used Hezbollah agents to strike at American and Jewish targets outside Israel. Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, has urged Nasrallah to avoid giving Israel a pretext for attacking Lebanon. Although American officials have called attention to the presence of about a hundred Hezbollah members in Iraq, few believe that they are organizing violent resistance.[10] Every Hezbollah official I spoke to vehemently denied such reports, some indicating that they would welcome diplomatic relations with the United States.
Observing these changes, a growing number of American scholars, notably Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, Judith Harik of the American University in Beirut, and Sami Hajjar of the US Army War College, argue that the party has undergone a genuine transformation, that it cannot be regarded as a terrorist group comparable to al-Qaeda, and that it would be pragmatic to engage in talks with Hezbollah and test its intentions. Their views are shared both by European diplomats such as Giandome-nico Picco, former assistant secretary-general for political affairs at the United Nations, and by retired American diplomats, such as Richard Murphy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and by some officials in the State Department. Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy under the first Bush and Clinton administrations, has stated that Hezbollah's resistance to the Israeli occupation, unlike its past activities aimed at Western targets, is not terrorism.[11] While the United States, Israel, and Canada classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, European allies of the US, including Britain, say a distinction should be made between Hezbollah's political wing and the terrorist "external security apparatus." In their view Nasrallah and his Lebanese political organization are giving support to Palestinian extremists but are not directly involved in international terrorism.
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The difference between American and Arab perceptions of Hezbollah is even wider. Michel Samaha, Lebanon's minister of information, insists that Hezbollah has been an important ally in the war against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. According to Samaha, who is close to the Syrian government and often meets with Nasrallah, Hezbollah has been providing the Lebanese government with intelligence on Sunni extremists operating in refugee camps in southern Lebanon. "What astonishes us is the American attempt to link Hez- bollah to al-Qaeda," Samaha said in his Beirut office. While al-Qaeda is known throughout the Arab world as a terrorist outfit, Hezbollah is just as widely seen as a legitimate resistance organization that has defended its land against the Israeli occupying force, and consistently stood up to the Israeli army.
Which is not to say that Hezbollah is universally well-liked in Lebanon. Although support runs high among Shiites, patience with the party is wearing thin among many Christians and some Sunnis. While they may have cheered Hezbollah's guerrilla war against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, they are decidedly less enthusiastic about Nasrallah's decision to continue "the resistance" after the Israeli withdrawal. Lebanon has been at peace since the signing of the Taif Accords in 1991, but at the price of losing its sovereignty to Syria, which maintains thousands of troops in the Bekaa Valley and exerts veto power over Lebanese foreign policy. By Syrian design, Hezbollah's is the only militia that was not dismantled after the Lebanese civil war ended, and its refusal to disarm after Israel's withdrawal is a cause of growing irritation among some Lebanese. "We want to go back to normal life," Samir Qassir, a journalist for the daily paper an-Nahar, told me. "Hezbollah is using the struggle with Israel as leverage to gain power in Lebanon."
Last August, a teenager in northern Israel was killed by a Hezbollah anti-aircraft missile, fired after Ali Hussein Saleh, a liaison between Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups, died in a car bomb explosion in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an apparent "message" from Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. Saleh, who was a Hezbollah security official and a driver for the Iranian embassy in Beirut, was suspected of channeling funds to Pal-estinian militants, possibly with Iranian assistance, although his actual role remains unclear. Within days, Israeli planes flew over Beirut and created a deafening "sonic boom." Many people in Beirut fled the city, terrified of an invasion. It was a false alarm, but the Lebanese fear that events such as this could easily spiral out of control.
If Hezbollah is, to many Lebanese, a painful reminder of their truncated sovereignty, it also raises more visceral fears of Iran's influence over young Shiites—some of whom march in Hezbollah demonstrations in full military dress, with red bandannas and rifles. "These people are an Iranian import," said Gebran Tuení, the conservative, Orthodox Christian editor of an-Nahar. "They have nothing to do with Arab civilization." Like many Christians, particularly Maronites who have seen their numbers and power decline in recent years, Tuení believes that Hezbollah's evolution is cosmetic, concealing a sinister long-term strategy to Islamicize Lebanon and lead it into a ruinous war with Israel. "Ask Mr. Nasrallah whether there would be a place for Christians in the Islamic Republic of Lebanon," he said, "You might remind him that we are not an external force. We've been here longer than the Muslims—we are not Afrikaners!"
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Tuení's fears are understandable, but they may be exaggerated. Although Hezbollah has repeatedly shown its readiness to engage in hostile action on the Israeli border, it has until now avoided large-scale attacks that might result in a broader conflict. Hezbollah's parliamentary representatives and mayors have avoided appeals to religion; they have worked instead to raise the standard of living in poor Shiite communities. After Israel's withdrawal, Nasrallah took steps to ensure that there were no revenge killings against Christians in the south, and that Christians who had fled to Israel during the war could return home safely, although some were sentenced to short terms in prison by the Lebanese government. When I asked Nasrallah about his views on an Islamic state, he said,
We believe the requirement for an Islamic state is to have an overwhelming popular desire, and we're not talking about fifty percent plus one, but a large majority. And this is not available in Lebanon and probably never will be.
While Nasrallah's pan-Islamic message of fighting the Israelis until the "liberation of Jerusalem" appeals to Hezbollah's soldiers, the roots of Hezbollah's popularity among Shiites lie elsewhere. Judith Harik's surveys of Shiite opinion have shown that "deep religiosity and strong support of Islamic goals were not significant as a determinant of popular support for Hezbollah." What is significant, in addition to the party's success in ending a hated occupation, are its social services, especially in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and in the south, a region of some 250 small villages recovering from two decades of war. By emphasizing public works over piety, Hezbollah has succeeded in embedding itself deeply into Lebanese society, a fact that anyone seeking to confront its military wing will have to face. Hezbollah's growing popularity in Lebanon will be the subject of a second article.
—March 31, 2004
Notes
[1] See, for example, "Hezbollah 2, Israel 0," by Israel's former defense minister Moshe Arens, Haaretz, February 16, 2004. "It is Hezbollah's second vic- tory over Israel," Arens wrote of the recent prisoner exchange. "Its first victory over Israel was when Ehud Barak decided to pull the IDF out of southern Lebanon."
[2] By contrast, Bashar's father, the late dictator Hafez Assad, held Hezbollah officials at arm's length, punishing them harshly when they defied his wishes. In 1987, when Hezbollah refused to hand over its bases in West Beirut to Syria, Syrian troops killed twenty-three Hezbollah fighters.
[3] According to the International Crisis Group, in its briefing paper "Hizbollah: Rebel Without a Cause?," the Lebanese cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was considered Hezbollah's spiritual leader through the early 1990s but has distanced himself from the party's leadership in recent years. Fadlallah, who was the first cleric in the Islamic world to condemn publicly the attacks of September 11, is believed to agree with Hezbollah on most political issues but diverges on religious doctrine. According to some reports, he has emerged as a rival to Hezbollah for influence in the Lebanese Shiite community, although some experts believe he remains a mentor to members of Hezbollah.
[4] According to Christoph Reuter in My Life Is a Weapon, the first suicide attack in Israel took place in April 1993. Jessica Stern also suggests Hezbollah taught suicide bombing to the Palestinians in Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Ecco, 2003), p. 47.
[5] In 2002, Israel intercepted a ship carrying arms that had embarked from Iran with a Hezbollah-trained crew, the so-called Karine A shipment; Hezbollah agents have also tried to smuggle wea-pons into the West Bank via Jordan.
[6] Seymour Hersh, "The Syrian Bet," The New Yorker, July 28, 2003.
[7] Jeffrey Goldberg, "In the Party of God," The New Yorker, July 14 and 21, 2002.
[8] Of all the charges made against Hezbollah, the connection to the Khobar bombing is the least persuasive. In his recent book Against All Enemies (Free Press, 2004), Richard A. Clarke cites a Saudi who claimed to the FBI that the Khobar attack was partly directed by a leader of "Saudi Hezbollah" —an Iranian-sponsored Saudi Shiite group; although Clarke suggests that some members of Saudi Hezbollah may have received training in the Bekaa Valley, he does not accuse the Lebanese party of planning the Khobar attack. When I spoke to Robert Baer, a former CIA analyst stationed in Beirut and an expert on terrorism, he expressed strong doubts that Lebanese Hezbollah participated in Khobar, which he believes to have been the work of Saudi Hezbollah, backed by Iran and possibly al-Qaeda as well.
[9] According to court testimony by Alie Abdelseoud Mohammed, an al-Qaeda member and former US Army sergeant who was arrested in September 1998, Mughnieh met with Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s.
[10] "Hezbollah, in Iraq, Refrains from Attacks on Americans," The New York Times, November 24, 2003.
[11] Ross stated in the daily as-Safir that the US included Hezbollah on its list of terrorist groups for Hezbollah's past activities, not for its ongoing resistance to Israel. See Sami Hajjar, "Hizballah: Terrorism, National Liberation, or Menace?," p. 48. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 11:54 pm Post subject: Raimondo: War on Iraq as a "Covert Operation" |
| Subj: Raimondo: War on Iraq as a "Covert Operation"
Date: 4/21/04 4:27:07 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
Raimondo: War on Iraq as a "Covert Operation"
Raimondo asks and answers the question that mainstream Bob Woodward dares not consider. "Bob Woodward says the neocons set up a 'separate government' – but to what purpose?" I am not even sure Woodward dared to utter the word "neocon," but that was the cast of characters he identified. Raimondo writes: "While mind-reading George W. Bush is like trying to discern the hidden meaning of a blank page, the neoconservative mindset is hardly a state secret. In understanding what motivates them in their relentless pursuit of ‘regime change,’ not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, one only has to ask: Who benefits, and who pays?" Of course, America pays, Sharon’s Israel benefits.
Regarding the benefits to Sharon’s Israel, Raimondo points out:
"Israel's West Bank annexation – piously described as a ‘unilateral withdrawal’ by Sharon and his amen corner in the West – is the first big payoff"
"The de facto disintegration and break-up of Iraq as a unitary nation, an increasingly likely consequence of the U.S. invasion, is an outcome that, again, benefits Israel, to the detriment of American interests. A campaign to similarly atomize Syria is next, with economic sanctions already in place, and a border incident waiting to happen. But the War Party's agenda doesn't end in Damascus: it's on to Tehran, Riyadh, and, eventually, Cairo."
Of course, destabilization of the Middle East was long time Likudnik policy—Oded Yinon’s policy paper entitled, "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," proposed a plan for the destabilization and fragmentation of Israel’s Middle East enemies. [http://www.theunjustmedia.com/the%20zionist_plan_for_the_middle_east.htm].
And, as I pointed out in an earlier message [Iraq in Israel’s Grand Strategy], the idea of breaking up Israel’s Arab neighbors actually was Zionist policy prior to the independence of Israel in 1948, and was promoted by David Ben-Gurion himself. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2003/634/op2.htm
What Woodward describes as the "separate government" (run by neocons) actually became THE US GOVERNMENT.
Raimondo writes: "In effect, the neocons pulled off a coup d'etat, a palace revolution in which veteran government officials like Richard Clarke, and the CIA and Pentagon ‘old guard,’ were pushed aside. . . . If the purpose of the U.S. government is to protect American security and interests, then why did there need to be a "separate" and competing government – unless that government was pursuing other, non-American interests?"
Raimondo goes on to describe the war on Iraq as a successful "covert operation."
"There is, however, no way to understand where we are, and how we got here, unless we see the push to get us into Iraq as a successful covert operation. A success, that is, not in terms of American interests, but in the terms of those who carried it out."
"On the other hand, the concept of the Iraq war as a successful Israeli covert operation is altogether plausible. It would hardly be the first time a foreign government made a concerted effort to drag us into war on their side. And just look at the pattern of recent events: Israel gains, America pays: Israel assassinates, Americans die: Israel conquers, and the American government concurs wholeheartedly: Israel says ‘Jump!’ and the government of the United States only wants to know how high. Israel's partisans inside the U.S. government – who, according to top officials and other ‘defectors,’ set up their own ‘separate government’ – seized the helm and steered the American ship of state into turbulent waters."
Raimondo has done an excellent job in pointing out how the neocons were the fundamental driving force for this was and actually drove the build-up for the war. He has been on this issue from the very beginning, and must be commended for having the courage to do so. However, I disagree with his description of the neocon operation as a "covert operation." There was nothing very covert about Israel or the neocons, and their very open support of Israel. They have made it quite public. And many openly hold important positions of power regarding national security in the Bush administration. Obviously, some of their operations have been secretive, and they didn’t just come out and say that they were leading the US into war to advance the interests of Israel. However, the link between the neocons and Israel and Israel and the war on Iraq was quite obvious. It has even seeped out in the mainstream media. But most mainstream folk have not have the courage to pursue the issue very far and give it the publicity that it needs. Hence, average Americans are generally unaware of the neocons’ role. Of course, this failure and fear is due the taboo on saying anything that displeases powerful Jewish organizations, which can bring about the lethal charge of "anti-Semitism."
I discussed all this in my "The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel." http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm
The only activity that was definitely "covert" (if it did exist) was the possible links between Administration officials and Israel to the September 11 terrorism. Did leading members of the Bush Administration intentionally avoid authorizing actions that might have stopped the terrorists? What was the connection to 911 of the Mossad agents in the US, some of whom lived near chief terrorist Mohammed Atta in Hollywood, Florida, while others took pictures of the burning World Trade Towers and celebrated? In short, the neocon push for war was pretty open, although more can still be learned, but the September 11 terrorism still has its significant mysteries, which may never be uncovered (and, of course, will definitely never be uncovered if no one dares to make an extensive investigation).
_________________________________________________
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2340
April 19, 2004
Plan of Attack
Bob Woodward says the neocons set up a 'separate government' – but to what purpose?
by Justin Raimondo
It was a twofer for the serial killers at the helm in Tel Aviv. Israeli helicopter gunships had just taken out a blind paraplegic, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, when his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, also went up in a puff of smoke. The United States, as usual, exculpated Israel, while the Arab world blamed Uncle Sam. What made it all so typical of Israeli behavior was the timing.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had barely stepped off the plane, back from his triumphant visit to Washington – where the President of the United States had capitulated to his every whim, agreeing to the annexation of key portions of the West Bank. While the Arabs writhed in helpless fury, and the fighting in Iraq rose to new heights of blood-drenched fury, Rantisi was struck down along with several bystanders, and the Arab are blaming us for that, too.
Israeli policies are undeniably fueling the Iraqi insurgency, and swelling radical Islamist ranks. In a statement issued by a previously-unknown group claiming responsibility for the horrific death-by-mutilation of four American quasi-military contractors in Fallujah, the link was made explicitly:
"'This is a gift from the people of Fallujah to the people of Palestine and the family of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who was assassinated by the criminal Zionists,' said in the statement from the 'Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin.' 'We advise the US forces to withdraw from Iraq and we advise the families of the American soldiers and the contractors not to come to Iraq.'"
How many more Americans soldiers will die in Iraq as a result of Sharon's calculated murders is a grim statistic to contemplate. As an emboldened Israel continues its rampage through Palestine, that number will surely grow.
Far from trying to mitigate these fatal consequences, the Israelis revel in their leverage with the Imperial hegemon. As one member of the Israeli delegation put it:
"I think this will probably be remembered as one of the most important successful political initiatives that Israel has ever undertaken vis-a-vis the United States. It takes into consideration all the important elements: that the (Palestinian refugees') claim of return is not to Israel but to a Palestinian state, the need for defensible borders and the recognition that Israel cannot return to the 1949 lines and a recognition of the demographic realities. As far as the statement is concerned, the outline of any future permanent agreement with the Palestinians has been documented and signed by the president of the United States."
Recent events have greatly clarified the exact meaning and motives of the War Party in recklessly invading Iraq without a plan, without enough troops to police the place, and without a clue as to the consequences. As the body-bags come home and the bills come in, a growing number of conservative Republicans are beginning to ask: whatever possessed him to do it? Why did he go against the advice and example of his own father, and listen to the false counsel of the neocons – and what was their motive, anyway?
While mind-reading George W. Bush is like trying to discern the hidden meaning of a blank page, the neoconservative mindset is hardly a state secret. In understanding what motivates them in their relentless pursuit of "regime change," not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, one only has to ask: Who benefits, and who pays?
Israel's West Bank annexation – piously described as a "unilateral withdrawal" by Sharon and his amen corner in the West – is the first big payoff. That it comes just as the American casualty rate is beginning to soar underscores the essence of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. While America's fight against Al Qaeda and defending the homeland against terrorism is made more difficult by the occupation of Iraq, the Israeli goal of leveling any and all threats to its national security has been advanced – and the chaos, too, is a benefit.
The de facto disintegration and break-up of Iraq as a unitary nation, an increasingly likely consequence of the U.S. invasion, is an outcome that, again, benefits Israel, to the detriment of American interests. A campaign to similarly atomize Syria is next, with economic sanctions already in place, and a border incident waiting to happen. But the War Party's agenda doesn't end in Damascus: it's on to Tehran, Riyadh, and, eventually, Cairo. As Laurent Murawiec, the ex-LaRouche cultist who famously briefed the Pentagon Policy Board at Richard Perle's invitation, put it:
"Iraq is the tactical pivot,
Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot,
Egypt the prize."
While Murawiec may not have fully recovered from his decade-plus immersion in a nut-cult, one has to wonder if the leaders of our own government are any less nutty. Which raises the question, just who is running things, anyway? The answer, according to Colin Powell, reports Bob Woodward in his new book, Plan of Attack, is not at all clear:
"Powell felt Cheney and his allies – his chief aide, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's 'Gestapo' office – had established what amounted to a separate government."
In effect, the neocons pulled off a coup d'etat, a palace revolution in which veteran government officials like Richard Clarke, and the CIA and Pentagon "old guard," were pushed aside. (Go here for an up close and detailed description of the purge by former Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski.) If the purpose of the US government is to protect American security and interests, then why did there need to be a "separate" and competing government – unless that government was pursuing other, non-American interests?
Not only the Woodward book, but the series of whistleblowers who have come out of the closet and revealed the inner workings of the Bush administration, lead us into territory that, for want of a better word, can only be called a "conspiracy theory." Which, one supposes, is one way of saying that everything is not an accident. There is, however, no way to understand where we are, and how we got here, unless we see the push to get us into Iraq as a successful covert operation. A success, that is, not in terms of American interests, but in the terms of those who carried it out.
The Iraq war, the diversion away from the real authors of 9/11, the costly obsession with Saddam Hussein, the professed intention of "staying the course" of an unsustainable policy – none of it makes any sense when viewed through the prism of American national interests. The entire thrust of our Middle East policy is counter-intuitive and counterproductive. Only two parties benefited from the invasion of Iraq: the Likudniks (and their American branch office) loyal to Sharon and the jihadists associated with Osama Bin Laden.
Sharon now has a weapon to wield against the radicals in his own party, who want all the settlements to stay in the West Bank, and the Labor Party, which accuses him of being too intransigent. Also, perhaps, his triumph has provided him with a shield to ward off the growing stench of personal scandal. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is winning a worldwide following and recruiting hand over fist, forging the next generation of suicide-bombing fanatics, who dream of two, three, many more 9/11s.
No, I'm not saying that agents of Osama bin Laden have taken over the US government. Although Coleen Rowley and her co-workers at the FBI used to joke that headquarters acted at times as if it had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda, and Clarke quips in his book that Bush must have been "channeling Osama bin Laden" in coming up with the scheme to invade Iraq, this kind of rhetorical flourish is not meant to be taken literally.
On the other hand, the concept of the Iraq war as a successful Israeli covert operation is altogether plausible. It would hardly be the first time a foreign government made a concerted effort to drag us into war on their side. And just look at the pattern of recent events: Israel gains, America pays: Israel assassinates, Americans die: Israel conquers, and the American government concurs wholeheartedly: Israel says "Jump!" and the government of the United States only wants to know how high. Israel's partisans inside the US government – who, according to top officials and other "defectors," set up their own "separate government" – seized the helm and steered the American ship of state into turbulent waters.
The storm, I fear, is only just beginning. What began as a police action, a "mopping up" of Ba'athist "remnants," is now taking on the scope of a nationwide anti-American insurgency. Americans want to know how and why we were rushed into war – and by whom.
This war, and the policy that gave birth to it, is criminal in so many different ways, but surely treason is not the least of the crimes that can be ascribed to the leaders of the War Party. The investigation into the machinations of this group – who acted, in effect if not consciously, as agents of a foreign power – is a ticking time-bomb for this administration – or, at least, for the "separate government" set up by the Cheney-Wolfowitz-Feith junta.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I hate to say "I told you so," but, hey, didn't I predict that military operations in Iraq would soon come to resemble the siege at Waco? The news that our "psyops" brigade is playing heavy metal rock really really loud in hopes of flushing out Fallujah's defenders confirms it. Okay, so I was writing about the siege of Najaf, not Fallujah, where the heavy metal weapon is being deployed, but, hey, it's all the same, isn't it – at least according to professional ignoramus Andrew Sullivan, who writes:
"SADR CAPITULATES: I'm unnerved by the presence of Iranians helping to broker some kind of deal with al Sadr, but heartened by the fact that the extremist revolt in Fallujah seems to have been quelled – largely by Marine force and by moderate Shiite realism."
But of course Sadr is in Najaf, not Fallujah, which is Sunni, not Shi'ite. And somebody ought to tell those rebellious Fallujans they've been "quelled," because they don't seem to have realized it as yet. Why anyone takes Sullivan seriously – gay affirmative action? – is waaaaay beyond me.
–Justin Raimondo
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