| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 3:08 pm Post subject: The Unopposed Zionist War Lobby |
| Here is an excerpt from the excellent article below by James Petras (his lastest) as Petras' book on the power/influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the USA can currently be purchased at the same time when the Mearsheimer/Walt book is pre-ordered/ordered via www.amazon.com as shipping is included if over 25 dollars is spent (I ordered his book and pre-ordered the Mearsheimer/Walt book as well - simply do a search for 'Mearsheimer' there to find it):
The Unopposed War Lobby
The US is the only country in the world where the peace movement is unwilling to recognize, publically condemn or oppose the major influential political and social institutions consistently supporting and promoting the US wars in the Middle East. The political power of the pro-Israel power configuration, led by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supported within the government by highly placed pro-Israel Congressional leaders and White House and Pentagon officials has been well documented in books and articles by leading journalists, scholars and former President Jimmy Carter. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has over two thousand full-time functionaries, more than 250,000 activists, over a thousand billionaire and multi-millionaire political donors who contribute funds both political parties. The ZPC secures 20% of the US foreign military aid budget for Israel, over 95% congressional support for Israel’s boycott and armed incursions in Gaza, invasion of Lebanon and preemptive military option against Iran.
US Middle East Wars: Social Opposition and Political Impotence
James Petras
July 4 2007
http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1704&more=1&c=1
“You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home and abroad,”
US Marine Colonel from Tennessee.
Everywhere I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of Afghans since 2001? Why, they ask, is a public, which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world’s major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike oil deals with Teheran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?
Absence of a Peace Movement?
Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is largely the result of the major peace organizations’ decision to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics, namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic candidates – most of whom have supported the war. The rationale offered by these ‘peace leaders’ was that once elected the Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office. Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders.
Absence of a National Movement
As David Brooks (La Jornada July 2, 2007) correctly reported at the US Social forum there is no coherent national social movement in the US. Instead we have a collection of fragmented ‘identity groups’ each embedded in narrow sets of (identity) interests, and totally incapable of building a national movement against the war. The proliferation of these sectarian ‘non-governmental’ ‘identity’ ‘groups’ is based on their structure, financing and leadership. Many depend on private foundations and public agencies for their financing, which precludes them from taking political positions. At best they operate as ‘lobbies’ simply pressuring the elite politicians of both parties. Their leaders depend on maintaining a separate existence in order to justify their salaries and secure future advances in government agencies.
The US trade unions are virtually non-existent in more than half of the United States: They represent less than 9% of the private sector and 12% of the total labor force. Most national, regional and city-wide trade union officials receive salaries comparable to senior business executives: between $300,000 to $500,000 dollars a year. Almost 90% of the top trade union bureaucrats finance and support pro-war Democrats and have supported Bush and the Congressional war budgets, bought Israel Bonds ($25 billion dollars) and the slaughter of Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
The Unopposed War Lobby
The US is the only country in the world where the peace movement is unwilling to recognize, publically condemn or oppose the major influential political and social institutions consistently supporting and promoting the US wars in the Middle East. The political power of the pro-Israel power configuration, led by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supported within the government by highly placed pro-Israel Congressional leaders and White House and Pentagon officials has been well documented in books and articles by leading journalists, scholars and former President Jimmy Carter. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has over two thousand full-time functionaries, more than 250,000 activists, over a thousand billionaire and multi-millionaire political donors who contribute funds both political parties. The ZPC secures 20% of the US foreign military aid budget for Israel, over 95% congressional support for Israel’s boycott and armed incursions in Gaza, invasion of Lebanon and preemptive military option against Iran. The US invasion and occupation policy in Iraq, including the fabricated evidence justifying the invasion, was deeply influenced by top officials with long-standing loyalties and ties to Israel. Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon, are life-long Zionists, who lost security clearance early in their careers for handing over documents to Israel. Vice President Cheney’s chief foreign policy adviser in the planning of the Iraq invasion is Irving Lewis Liebowitz (‘Scooter Libby’). He is a protégé and long-time collaborator of Wolfowitz and a convicted felon. Libby-Liebowitz committed perjury, defending the White House’s complicity in punishing officials critical of its Iraq war propaganda. Libby-Liebowitz received powerful political and financial support from the pro-Israel lobby during his trial. No sooner did he lose his appeal on his conviction on five counts of perjury, obstructing justice and lying, than the ZPC convinced President Bush to ‘commute’ his prison sentence, in effect freeing him from a 30 month prison sentence before he had served a day. While Democratic politicians and some peace leaders criticized President Bush, none dared hold responsible the pro-Israel lobby which pressured the White House.
The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) – numbering 52 – and their regional and local affiliates are the leading force transmitting Israel’s war agenda against Iran. The PMAJO, working closely with US-Israeli Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and leading Zionist Senators Charles Schumer and Joseph Lieberman, succeeded in eliminating a clause in the budget appropriation setting a date for the withdrawal for US troops from Iraq.
In contrast to the successful vast propaganda, congressional and media campaigns, organized and funded by the pro-Israel lobbies for the war policies, there is no public record of the big oil companies supporting the Iraq war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the military threats of preemptive attacks on Iran. Interviews with investment bankers, oil company executives and a thorough review of the major Petroleum Institute publications over the past seven years provide conclusive evidence that ‘Big Oil’ was deeply interested in negotiating oil agreements with Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Islamic government. ‘Big Oil’ perceives US Middle East wars as a threat to their long-standing profitable relations with all the conservative Arab oil states in the Gulf. Despite the strategic position in the US economy and their great wealth '‘Big Oil' was totally incapable of countering their political power and organized influence of the pro-Israel lobby. In fact Big Oil was totally marginalized by the White House National Security Advisor for the Middle East, Elliot Abrams, a fanatical Zionist and militarist.
Despite the massive and sustained pro-war activity of the leading Zionist organizations inside and outside of the government and despite the absence of any overt or covert pro-war campaign by ‘Big Oil’, the leaders of the US peace movement have refused to attack the pro-Israel war lobby and continue to mouth unfounded clichés about the role of ‘Big Oil’ in the Middle East conflicts.
The apparently ‘radical’ slogans against the oil industry by some leading intellectual critics of the war has served as a ‘cover’ to avoid the much more challenging task of taking on the powerful, Zionist lobby. There are several reasons for the failure of the leaders of the peace movement to confront the militant Zionist lobby. One is fear of the powerful propaganda and smear campaign which the pro-Israel lobby is expert at mounting, with its aggressive accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and its capacity to blacklist critics, leading to job loss, career destruction, public abuse and death threats.
The second reason that peace leaders fail to criticize the leading pro-war lobby is because of the influence of pro-Israel ‘progressives’ in the movement. These progressives condition their support of ‘peace in Iraq’ only if the movement does not criticize the pro-war Israel lobby in and outside the US government, the role of Israel as a belligerent partner to the US in Lebanon, Palestine and Kurdish Northern Iraq. A movement claiming to be in favor of peace, which refuses to attack the main proponents of war, is pursuing irrelevance: it deflects attention from the pro-Israel high officials in the government and the lobbyists in Congress who back the war and set the White House’s Middle East agenda. By focusing attention exclusively on President Bush, the peace leaders failed to confront the majority pro-Israel Democratic congress people who fund Bush’s war, back his escalation of troops and give unconditional support to Israel’s military option for Iran.
The collapse of the US peace movement, the lack of credibility of most of its leaders and the demoralization of many activists can be traced to strategic political failures: the unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and the inability to create a political alternative to the bellicose Democratic Party. The political failure of the leaders of the peace movement is all the more dramatic in the face of the large majority of passive Americans who oppose the war, most of whom did not display their flags this Fourth of July and are not led in tow by either the pro-Israel lobby or their intellectual apologists within progressive circles.
The word to anti-war critics of the world is that over sixty percent of the US public opposes the war but our streets are empty because our peace movement leaders are spineless and politically impotent.
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July 6, 2007
How Scooter Skated
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Why did Bush do it?
Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby?
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=11247
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Subject: CP: Kroth: "Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:45:52 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Subject: CP: Kroth: "Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Another new voice from academia speaking important truth about AIPAC and the Zionist lobby. No wonder the lobby and its Campus Watch are worried. They have been doing what is described here for decades with scarcely a peep from those purporting to support Palestinian rights (and there is still not a peep about the subject from the misleading organizations of the anti-war movement. How come?-JB
http://www.counterpunch.org/kroth07102007.html
July 10, 2007
"Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Democratic Defectors and the Israel Lobby
By JERRY KROTH
In November, the American electorate repudiated Bush's Iraq debacle and established Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate promising to bring this "flawed policy wrapped in illusion" to a decisive end. Bush vetoed their withdrawal timetable, but voters urged their leaders to hold the line and not be bullied. In the end, though, 37 Democratic senators capitulated and gratuitously gave the President his $100 billion no-strings- attached blank check . . . enough money to pay tuition and fees for 1.3 million college students for four solid years!
Deep disappointment set in. Cindy Sheehan, the liberal icon, was so demoralized she resigned and returned to private life. In June, a CNN poll reported that "respect for Congress" plummeted to the lowest level "ever recorded."
Bloggers called them "traitor Democrats", and the descriptor is apropos. At the time of the vote, sixty-two percent of the American people favored a time-table for a withdrawal, but, more significantly, "seventy percent" of Democrats were so inclined. Voting against this burgeoning tide of anger betrayed the will of the people and party that put these Democrats in office.
Curiously, all of the traitor democrats were huge career recipients of funds from the Israeli lobby. If we took ten Democratic apostates and compared them to ten Democrats who stood by the voters, pro-Israeli PAC contributions were "ten times" greater for the turncoats than those who stayed with their constituencies ($322,000 versus $34,000 on average).
To be specific: Carl Levin, outspoken critic of the war and, we thought, a loyal supporter of the new regime to end it, defected and blithely turned his back on his Michigan support base. Despite his strident anti-war rhetoric, the Grand Rapids Independent reports Levin has supported Bush all the way "consistently funding the war and not introducing any meaningful legislation to bring it closer to an end." Practically unknown to his constituents, Levin is one of the largest beneficiaries of Pro-Israeli PAC funds collecting $600,000 in career contributions according to the Washington Report on Mideast Affairs.
Barbara Boxer, Denis Kucinich, and Earl Blaumenauer, all opponents of the war, collectively got $73,000, but turncoat-democrats, Dan Durbin, Max Baucus, and Frank Lautenberg scooped up in excess of a million plus untold benes like travel funds.
What comes out in the wash is the best PAC money can buy: Three months before we invaded Iraq, a New York Times poll showed only 30 percent of the American people favored an all-out invasion, but the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) did, and it prevailed. Hardly a sprinkling of Americans favored the "surge", a meager fourteen percent, but AIPAC did, and the surge is surging as we speak. Fewer than thirty percent of Democrats supported that no-strings-budget, but AIPAC did, and the conclusion plays out another hackneyed chorus of "Whatever AIPAC wants, AIPAC gets."
In 1992, the director of the Israeli lobby, David Steiner, was surreptitiously recorded bragging about playing a role in selecting the Secretary of State and what he got for Israel: "Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don't even know about!" When the tape was made public, Steiner resigned, but it underscored the incredible power, access, and influence this lobby has.
Two professors, Mearsheimer and Walt, recently insinuated that American democracy has been suborned by the Israeli lobby, echoing Senator Fulbright's 1989 indictment that AIPAC had usurped the electoral process and could "elect or defeat nearly any congressman or senator that they wish." Such observations do not fall on deaf ears. Over half the senate and a third of the congress obediently attended the AIPAC annual convention (versus less than a dozen visiting the NAACP's event). Non-attendance can suggest a lawmaker might be soft on terrorism, or, god forbid, anti-Semitic.
Anti-war idealists might think that soon this American war crime, the shock-and-awe carnage, the torture, and the renditions are coming to an end, but the agenda of AIPAC seems bent on keeping American armies in the Middle East as an Israeli first line of defense for the indefinite future. Their major attack dog, Joe Lieberman, recently gave a hint on Face the Nation as to might be next: " military strikes" against Iran. . . all apparently to guarantee that Israel will remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
So if you think you voted, or are planning to vote, to bring the troops home and end this national embarrassment, some fool's gold waiting for you at the end of that rainbow.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology in California and author of Conspiracy in Camelot: the complete history of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He may be reached at anya@sj.znet.com
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:52 pm; edited 4 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 3:09 pm Post subject: |
| One can see Christopher Hedges during the Iraq war panel discussion at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA in Los Angeles this past April.. To watch online, simply go to www.booktv.org and do a search for 'LA Times Festival of Books' in the search field there and click on the Iraq war panel.. Hedges was excellent. Perhaps the guy who posed the question/comment about the Mearsheimer/Walt paper in the 'Q & A' inspired Hedges to write about Israel like he did below as he included mention of Mearsheimer/Walt as well..
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070702_a_declaration_of_independence_from_israel/
A Declaration of Independence From Israel
Posted on Jul 2, 2007
AP Photo/Hatem Moussa
Armed Palestinian women burn Israeli and U.S. flags during a protest against Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
By Chris Hedges
Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.
The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has provided to the Jewish state.
Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.
Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got Israel’s withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington’s enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.
The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.
The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region’s first nuclear weapons program.
U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.
There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional conflagration.
The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement in American military operations in the Middle East is impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.
President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.
"In Israel,” Bush said recently, “terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”
Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. “spin” paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.
Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. In the “gated community” market it has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security sector.
The key products and services,” as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, “are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems—precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”
The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel’s enemies are our enemies is not that simple.
"Terrorism is not a single adversary,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, “but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”
Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
Washington was once willing to stay Israel’s hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.
The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to “halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.” It never happened. After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel’s allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon “a man of peace.” It was a humiliating moment for the United States, a clear sign of who pulled the strings.
There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because the Americans don’t have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.
Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.
The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.
This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.
The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world’s major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.
The future is ominous. Not only do Israel’s foreign policy objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was none before, to America’s rivals. It is not in Israel’s interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 3:59 pm Post subject: |
| "Sit Down!" The Power to Silence
Leo Braudy says there's only a few minutes left YET he finds time for himself to ask two more questions! When does a panel discussion ever end, go to the Q and A and THEN go back to the moderator asking even more questions of the panel? (when you want to serve Israel's agenda)
It is depraved to deny the main motive for the 9/11 attacks (US SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7EB1FxENxQ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject: |
| The following (Mearsheimer/Walt) book can currently be pre-ordered via www.amazon.com as mentioned above as well:
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Hardcover) (EXPANDED)
by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (Authors)
Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 4, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374177724
ISBN-13: 978-0374177720
Editorial Reviews
Book Description.......The Israel Lobby,” by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy.
Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.
Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.” The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
About the Author
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. He has published several books, including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Stephen M. Walt is the Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and was academic dean of the Kennedy School from 2002 to 2006. He is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, among other books.
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More on Mearsheimer/Walt:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
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Seymour Hersh details Bush's-Cheney's lunatic plans for Iran
http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/1801/1/
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 6:00 pm Post subject: |
| -------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ufpj-iran] Kucinich & Paul lonely voices against anti-Iran
war propaganda in House
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 00:46:55 -0700 (PDT)
COMMENTARY: Kucinich and Paul lonely voices against anti-Iran war
propaganda in House
[One Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an embarrassing
AIPAC-designed resolution calling on the U.N. Security Council to take up
genocide charges against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling
for Israel to be "wiped off the map." -- The resolution is an absurd one
and the House should be ashamed of its 411-2 vote, since in fact the
Iranian president never said any such thing.
(http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6222/) -- Kucinich raised the
question of the mistranslation of Ahmadinejad's remarks and tried to
correct the record by having alternative translations read into the
record, but the House preferred to remain in its AIPAC-induced state of
error. -- "Kucinich attempted to insert into the *Congressional Record*
two independent translations of the speech from the *New York Times* and
Middle East Media Research Institute, which contain significant
differences in the translations of the speech compared to the resolution
before the House. However, Members objected formally and the attempt was
blocked."[1] -- Indeed, the record
(http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/HConRes%20debate.pdf) shows that
one third of the debate on the floor of the House consisted of Dennis
Kucinich's unsuccessful attempt to have more accurate translations of
Ahmadinejad's remarks -- from the *New York Times* no less! -- inserted
into the record. -- Since these remarks were supposedly the reason for
the resolution, nothing could have been more germane, but unanimous
consent was denied, on the grounds that the speech contained the very
ideas that Kucinich questioned whether it contained -- a very nice
*petitio principi*, or begging of the question. -- The only other
representative voting against the resolution was Ron Paul (R-TX 14th), who
called it "an exercise in propaganda that serves one purpose: to move us
closer to initiating a war against Iran."[2] --Mark]
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/6350/
1.
[From the web site of Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH 10th)]
NO QUESTIONS ASKED?
** Congress Votes to Send the President of Iran Before a United NationÂ’s
Court While Refusing a New York Times Translation of the PresidentÂ’s
Remarks **
June 20, 2007
http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=67929
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today the House of Representatives passed H.
Con.Res.21, a resolution that pressures the United Nations Security
Council to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the
1948 Convention on Genocide and the United Nations Charter because of his
alleged calls for the destruction of Israel.
“There is reasonable doubt with regard to the accuracy of the translations
of President AhmadinejadÂ’s words in this resolution. President
AhmadinejadÂ’s speeches can also be translated as a call for regime change,
much in the same manner the Bush Administration has called for regime
change in Iraq and Iran, making this resolution very ironic,” Kucinich
said.
Kucinich attempted to insert into the *Congressional Record* two
independent translations of the speech from the *New York Times* and
Middle East Media Research Institute, which contain significant
differences in the translations of the speech compared to the resolution
before the House. However, Members objected formally and the attempt was
blocked.
“When I learned of these translations, I felt obligated to bring it to the
attention of the House. It seems that much has been lost in translation.
Members have a right to know of the translations and the refusal to permit
them to become a part of the *Congressional Record* does a disservice to
Members.”
A similar House resolution, H. Res. 523, passed the House two days after
the October 26, 2005, speech and before these translations were available.
Kucinich supported that resolution in the 109th Congress.
“I am unequivocal in my support for the security and survival of Israel,
and I do have serious concerns with the remarks made by Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, President of Iran. But, I object to resolutions that lay the
groundwork for an offensive, unprovoked war.
“The resolution passed by the House today sets a dangerous precedent in
foreign affairs. A mistranslation could become a cause of war. The
United States House may unwittingly be setting the stage for a war with
Iran.
“We must make every effort to ascertain the truth because peace in the
world may hang in the balance. The only way to definitively know what
President Ahmadinejad meant is for the United States to engage in
meaningful, diplomatic relations with the country of Iran.”
2.
STATEMENT ON H CON RES 21
By Ron Paul (R-TX 14th)
June 20, 2007
http://ronpaul08.blog-city.com/statement_on_h_con_res_21.htm
Madam Speaker: I rise in strong opposition to this resolution.
(http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hc110-21) This
resolution is an exercise in propaganda that serves one purpose: to move
us closer to initiating a war against Iran. Citing various controversial
statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this legislation
demands that the United Nations Security Council charge Ahmadinejad with
violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide.
Having already initiated a disastrous war against Iraq citing U.N.
resolutions as justification, this resolution is like déja vu. Have we
forgotten 2003 already? Do we really want to go to war again for U.N.
resolutions? That is where this resolution, and the many others we have
passed over the last several years on Iran, is leading us. I hope my
colleagues understand that a vote for this bill is a vote to move us
closer to war with Iran.
Clearly, language threatening to wipe a nation or a group of people off
the map is to be condemned by all civilized people. And I do condemn any
such language. But why does threatening Iran with a pre-emptive nuclear
strike, as many here have done, not also deserve the same kind of
condemnation? Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran
will not wipe a people off the map? When it is said that nothing,
including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who say it
not also threatening genocide? And we wonder why the rest of the world
accuses us of behaving hypocritically, of telling the rest of the world
“do as we say, not as we do.”
I strongly urge my colleagues to consider a different approach to Iran,
and to foreign policy in general. General William Odom, President
ReaganÂ’s director of the National Security Agency, outlined a much more
sensible approach in a recent article titled “Exit From Iraq Should Be
Through Iran.” General Odom wrote: “Increasingly bogged down in the
sands of Iraq, the U.S. thrashes about looking for an honorable exit.
Restoring cooperation between Washington and Tehran is the single most
important step that could be taken to rescue the U.S. from its predicament
in Iraq.” General Odom makes good sense. We need to engage the rest of
the world, including Iran and Syria, through diplomacy, trade, and travel
rather than pass threatening legislation like this that paves the way to
war. We have seen the limitations of force as a tool of U.S. foreign
policy. It is time to try a more traditional and conservative approach.
I urge a “no” vote on this resolution.
_______________________________________________
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moore.net | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 10:44 pm Post subject: |
| Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2007 14:48:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: YNET: Risk of war with Syria this Summer warns former senior (Jewish/AIPAC associated) US diplomat
Dennis Ross is with the AIPAC spin-off think tank in D.C. (the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) and seems to be pushing the 'A Clean Break' agenda (http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=28769 ) below as well (it had been conveyed that he was associated with AIPAC to Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1bm2GPoFfg and http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/gorilla-in-room-is-us-support-for.html ):
Jeff Blankfort wrote:
"Syria has rearmed Hizbullah to the teeth – there should be a price to pay for that," Ross insisted, pointing out that the Bush administration had failed to implement its own Syria Accountability Act. He said the US and Europe should aim to "squeeze the Syrian economy" and use a policy of "sticks before carrots" in their dealings with Damascus. "
Ross, a member of the "liberal" wing of the American Zionist Fifth Column, is pushing for a confrontation with Syria by peddling the nonsense that Israel is about to be attacked by Damascus, thereby justifying in advance, another of Israel's fabled pre-emptive strikes, "fabled" being the operative word in this case. The problem is that Israel must find a way to restore the fractured public image of the invincible Israeli warrior that Hezbollah demolished for the second time last summer because that image, created by Israel's founders, is a subject of universal worship by Jewish Zionists in Israel and throughout the world.-JB
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3421839,00.html
Ross: Risk of war
Former senior US diplomat warns of risk of war with Syria this summer in exclusive Ynetnews interview; criticizes US for being soft on Damascus; says Fatah will lose West Bank to Hamas if it does not change
Jeff Barak
YNet News
Published: 07.06.07, 07:18 / Israel News
Dennis Ross, the former senior American Middle East peace negotiator, says he thinks "there is a risk of war" between Israel and Syria this summer. <> In an exclusive telephone interview with Ynetnews before next week's Conference on the Future of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, Ross
said that "nobody has made any decision (about going to war), but the Syrians are positioning themselves for war."
The ex-State Department official criticized the Bush administration for being "tough rhetorically and soft practically" on Damascus, saying that "we have reached the worst of all worlds. The Syrians don't see what they have to lose by not changing their behavior and they don't see what they would gain by changing their behavior.
"Syria has rearmed Hizbullah to the teeth – there should be a price to pay for that," Ross insisted, pointing out that the Bush administration had failed to implement its own Syria Accountability Act. He said the US and Europe should aim to "squeeze the Syrian economy" and use a policy of "sticks before carrots" in their dealings with Damascus.
As far as Israel's relations with Syria were concerned, Ross said that Jerusalem had "its own ways of communications" with Damascus, and that not talking with Syria only increased the chance of war while "if you talk, then that reduces the chance of war."
'Fatah has to change'
Ross also warned of the dangers to Israel following Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip. "I don't share the view (of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) that we have a new opportunity… there should be a new sense of urgency."
The competition between Fatah and Hamas "is very important. If Hamas takes over then it (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) becomes a religious conflict. Israel has a huge stake in the nature of this conflict."
Fatah will only remain in charge of the West Bank if it changed, said Ross, noting that it had lost the Palestinian Authority elections because it had lost the confidence of the Palestinian people. "It has to end the image and reality of its corruption… It has to show it can deliver on a better life for Palestinians and achieve Palestinian national aspirations. If it doesn't, it will lose in the West Bank."
Ross said the onus was also on Fatah to deliver in terms of fighting terrorism. "If the security situation does not change, all the fine words will be for nothing. There has to be coordination between Israel and Fatah, but Fatah has to deliver." The former diplomat said he thought the US and Tony Blair, the Quartet's new Middle East envoy, could help facilitate the strengthening of Palestinian institutions, but stressed "we're going to have see leadership from Fatah." The Bush administration, he said, should be focused on "the 18 months they have left to ensure that Fatah is in a better situation vis-à-vis Hamas."
Ross also criticized the Bush administration for its passivity during Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. He said Washington should have made it a priority to have tried to coordinate the withdrawal with Fatah, so that it was not just a case of Israel leaving Gaza "and throwing the keys over the fence."
Slow-motion diplomacy
Ross, the author of the recently published "Statecraft: and How to Restore America's Standing in the World", also said that the West had to ratchet up the sanctions against Iran to stop its nuclear program.
"We have slow-motion diplomacy matched against their fast-paced nuclear development," he said, arguing that Europe was not applying enough economic pressure "to get the attention of the Iranian leadership". While he doubted that economic sanctions would deter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said others in the Iranian leadership would take notice and work towards changing the country's policy.
Conference for the Future of the Jewish People
The chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, Ross will be in Jerusalem next week for the Conference for the Future of the Jewish People, which the JPPPI has organized.
He said the aim of the conference was "to create a different type of conversation" between Israeli and Diaspora leaders and to identify the priorities that the Jewish world had to face. A third aim of the conference, he said, was to create an ongoing set of discussions to see how its recommendations could be implemented.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One can see Christopher Hedges during the Iraq war panel discussion at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA in Los Angeles this past April.. To watch online, simply go to www.booktv.org and do a search for 'LA Times Festival of Books' in the search field there and click on the Iraq war panel.. Hedges was excellent. Perhaps the guy who posed the question/comment about the Mearsheimer/Walt paper in the 'Q & A' inspired Hedges to write about Israel like he did below as he included mention of Mearsheimer/Walt as well..
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070702_a_declaration_of_independence_from_israel/
A Declaration of Independence From Israel
Posted on Jul 2, 2007
AP Photo/Hatem Moussa
Armed Palestinian women burn Israeli and U.S. flags during a protest against Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
By Chris Hedges
Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.
The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has provided to the Jewish state.
Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.
Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got Israel’s withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington’s enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.
The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.
The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region’s first nuclear weapons program.
U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.
There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional conflagration.
The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement in American military operations in the Middle East is impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.
President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.
"In Israel,” Bush said recently, “terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”
Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. “spin” paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.
Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. In the “gated community” market it has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security sector.
The key products and services,” as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, “are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems—precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”
The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel’s enemies are our enemies is not that simple.
"Terrorism is not a single adversary,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, “but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”
Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
Washington was once willing to stay Israel’s hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.
The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to “halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.” It never happened. After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel’s allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon “a man of peace.” It was a humiliating moment for the United States, a clear sign of who pulled the strings.
There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because the Americans don’t have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.
Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.
The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.
This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.
The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world’s major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.
The future is ominous. Not only do Israel’s foreign policy objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was none before, to America’s rivals. It is not in Israel’s interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.
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The Unopposed Zionist War Lobby:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/07/07/the-unopposed-zionist-war-lobby.php | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
