Israel’s tail is wagging Harper government’s dog
By Khaled Mouammar | October 15, 2010
The Harper government’s failure to get Canada elected to the Security Council was a diplomatic fiasco that brought Canada humiliation and shame on the world stage.
As usual the Harperites reacted by blaming everyone else for their misguided and failed policies. So far the list includes Michael Ignatieff, the Europeans, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Arab countries, Muslim countries and the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF).
Sensing that Canadians did not buy these hysterical accusations, Prime Minister Harper decided to switch gear and now says with tongue in cheek that his foreign policy is “based on the promotion of our values — freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, justice, development, humanitarian assistance for those who need it,” and is not based on popularity.
This is the same government that domestically has eroded the protection of free speech and has weakened, marginalized and silenced Canadian democratic institutions and civil society organizations by cutting funding to numerous organizations that disagree with the Government’s positions; barring British MP George Galloway last year from entering Canada; continually violating the human rights of Omar Khadr a Canadian child; and undermining the Rights and Democracy agency.
On the international scene the Harper government has undermined international law, international humanitarian law, and human rights and environmental principles by refusing to sign the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; reducing its foreign aid to Africa; cutting its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that assists 4.5 million Palestinian refugees who were dispossessed with the creation of Israel in 1948; supporting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006; justifying Israel’s ghastly assault on Gaza and the deadly Israeli raid on the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza; and refusing to endorse the Kyoto climate change accord.
Shamefully, Mr Harper repeatedly declares that ‘Canada and Israel share the same values” when Israel has been found by various UN and international bodies and inquiries of violating the Geneva Convention by transferring 500 thousand Jewish colonists into occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and erecting a Separation Wall inside that territory; of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Gaza; of violating international law when it raided the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla in international waters; and of torturing prisoners.
Most troubling, Mr Harper has blindly aligned Canada with a country that defines itself as a “Jewish state” and whose citizenship, immigration and land ownership laws discriminate against its Muslim and Christian citizens who make up 25 percent of the population. One wonders if he will next define Canada as a “white, Christian state.”
“Many Canadians believe that the Harper government appears far more concerned with protecting Israel’s interest than enhancing the traditional good reputation of Canada in the world, and seems ready and willing to bring disrepute and isolation to Canada for the sake of such a pariah state,” said Khaled Mouammar, CAF National President.
Toronto Star columnist James Travers best summarizes how the Harper government has betrayed Canadian values and tarnished Canada’s reputation when he states that “The confluence of domestic politics, Christian fundamentalism and foreign policy is now so strong that Israel’s tail is wagging Canada’s dog.”
The Main Question that Israel Misses
Dennis Ross is ‘a crucial conduit between’ the White House and Israel
By George S. Hishmeh – Palestine Chronicle – October 14, 2010
It is generally recognized that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), now a 100,000-member pro-Israeli lobbying group, has had an impressive record since the fifties in advocating pro-Israel policies mostly to Congress. But of late several key officials, all American Jews in sensitive government positions, have outpaced this lobbying group established in 1950.
It may be a sign of their self-confidence that these officials are now publicly discussing the role of their colleagues in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians, who have yet to establish their independent state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip where they number about four million. (Israel’s population totals a little over seven million including some 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs mostly in the Galilee region).
Take the case, revealed recently, of how an unidentified person had inserted in a speech of then Secretary of State Colin L. Powell who had then called nine years ago on the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” This phrase is now belatedly one of the many divisive issues that are plaguing the recently disrupted peace negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas. President George W. Bush and, more recently, President Barack Obama had used the phrase unaware of its damaging potential.
Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who wrote the first draft of Powell’s speech and had participated in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations for many years, told The Washington Post the sentence did not ring many alarm bells when it mysteriously appeared in the speech.
But the then former Israeli ambassador in Washington, David Ivry, admitted that he had contacted the then deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and persuaded him to “slip in” the reference to the speech. But Powell told the Post he checked with Armitage and Armitage has no memory of that.
Lately, Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East expert at the State Department, and now a senior White House aide, has emerged, according to the Post, “as a crucial, behind-the-scenes conduit between the White House and the Israeli government … to discreetly smooth out differences between the two governments.”
The incentives that Ross thought of offering the Israelis were reportedly leaked to his onetime colleague, David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an influential pro-Israel think-tank founded by Martin Indyk, a former deputy research director at AIPAC and now vice president for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. Until recently Indyk was the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings and had also served two stints as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Makovsky and Ross had co-authored a book titled “Myths, Illusion and Peace: A New Guide for the Middle East.”
Makovsky’s article mentioned a shocking list of assurances to the Israelis, including a lengthy “transitional period” for Jordan Valley security, which Makovsky called “an apparent allusion to keeping Israeli troops in that (Palestinian) region for an extended period of time.”
More about the influence of American Jewish influence within U.S. administration was revealed in the declassification of confidential discussions of top Israel during the Yom Kippur or October War in 1973. Israeli leaders appeared to be at wits end in the early hours of the war for fear that they would be overrun by Arab troops from Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In response, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir considered making a clandestine trip to Washington to request help from then President Richard Nixon.
She did not go and instead chose to appeal to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. As a result, the American president sent an airlift of materiel that made all the difference in Israel’s favor in the 20-day war.
Commenting on the released documents, Yehezkel Dror, described as one of Israel’s most distinguished political scientists, told an Israeli radio audience that the Israeli leaders failed to realize the war’s true goal which he said was to pressure Israel to return the captured Arab territories.
The Egyptians, he explained, “used the war for a political goal. Why didn’t we understand this? Because we didn’t think politically. He who thinks militarily does not understand that the other side sees the arms as a political tool, not to conquest but to reach a better deal on the Sinai.”
The same applied to the Turkish flotilla last May when Israel troops boarded the Turkish boat. What is need in leadership is both subtlety and clarity, Dror stressed. Israel’s approach to the peace process with the Palestinians was another example, he added, reported the Post. “The main question of what Israel wants is unclear.”
Let’s hope Obama will also absorb this point, regardless what the Israeli lobby or his Jewish advisers are telling him.
– George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. Contact him at: Hishmehg@aol.com.
See also:
Shifting the “War on Terror” to Pakistan: The Real Target is Pakistan’s Nuclear Potential
By A R Jerral | The Nation | October 14, 2010
Excerpt
In a previous article regarding America’s strategic objectives in Pakistan, I had opined that the ongoing war on terror in Afghanistan is aimed to take the operations into the Pakistani territory. The real target is Pakistan’s nuclear potential; they have no plausible security threat from the ill-equipped Talibans or ragtag extremist. Arthur Herman, an author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has hinted at the real objective of the US. AEI is a think tank closely associated with the neoconservatives and is openly committed to Israel’s security. It supplies advisors to officials of the US administration and serves as “incubator for new policy ideas and is critical part of the web of power in Washington” (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt).
What Herman suggests in his write-up is in fact a policy direction to the US administration. He implies that the policy of sending drones and attacking the militant hideouts in the Pakistan territory has not worked. His line of argument is that Pakistan encourages drone attacks on those terrorist who pose a threat to them; they do not support attack on groups who target the Afghan government. His underlying thrust is obvious, he wants to tell the US and NATO forces to prop up the Afghan government against Pakistan.
One can understand now why President Hamid Karazai vents his anger on Pakistan from time to time. Herman suggests that if Pakistan government is further destabilised “the only thing keeping the country’s nukes out of the hands of Al-Qaeda may have to be the US troops.” So, the thrust is Pakistan’s nukes. It is a tacit way to tell the policymakers in Washington to keep the pressure on our country, which will weaken the Pakistani government’s standing causing instability. That will provide the reason for the US troops to move in.
What is unknown to the public in Pakistan is that the pressure is escalating. Herman quotes interesting figures of NATO excursions into the Pakistan territory. In 2009, he lists 45 Predator drone attacks, in 2010 so far the attacks have tripled – 22 attacks in September alone. We know about the drone attacks as these are reported in the media, but what we do not know and our media does not report, is the fact that the US-led NATO forces are launching crossborder raids into Pakistan to flush out the Taliban insurgents. For this, CIA is operating Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams in Afghanistan. These teams are regularly mounting ground raids into the Pak territory. Bob Woodard in his latest book, Obama’s Wars, claims that CIA boss Leon Panetta has demanded more powers and authority to wage a secret war inside Pakistan. In this way, things are getting hot as far as the war on terror is concerned. Pakistan is moving to become centre stage in this war. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and NSC official, has advised Mr Obama to shift the focus of war “from Afghanistan to Pakistan”; this is what we are witnessing in the shape of heightened war effort into the Pakistan territory.
U.S. Threat to Attack Iran with Nukes is “Criminal”
By Sherwood Ross | Global Research | October 12, 2010
The U.S. today is threatening to attack Iran “under the completely bogus pretext” that it might have a nuclear weapon, a distinguished American international legal authority says.
When Obama administration officials, like those of the Bush regime before it, say “all options are on the table,” they are threatening nuclear war and that is prohibited by international law, says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign.
Not only has the International Atomic Energy Commission said this charge against Iran “is simply not true,” Boyle pointed out, but threatening Iran with nuclear war in itself constitutes an international crime.
“If we don’t act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran that has already been threatened publicly by (President George W.) Bush Jr.,” he asserted.
In a speech on nuclear deterrence to the 18th conference on “Direct Democracy” in Feldkirch, Austria, Boyle said it has been estimated an attack on Iran with tactical nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Israel could kill nearly 3-million people.
(Boyle charges the U.S. has already committed “acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit…outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine.”)
Nuclear weapons and “nuclear deterrence” have “never been legitimate instruments of state policy but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior,” Boyle said.
Thus, the governments of all the nuclear weapons states are “criminal” for threatening to exterminate humanity. Boyle named the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. He reminded that “If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.”
“The whole (George W.) Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected,” Boyle said.
He noted Article 2 of the UN Charter “prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense” and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, “do not qualify under that definition.” He adds the U.S. today is engaged in “ongoing international criminal activity” for “planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.”
What’s more, “the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law,” Boyle said.
And the leaders of NATO states that go along with U.S. nuclear policies “are all accomplices as well,” Boyle said, noting that pressure is mounting within Germany for the removal of U.S. nuclear warheads and that public opinion in much of Europe favors the elimination of nuclear arsenals.
The expansion of NATO, Boyle says, has now drawn in “almost all of Europe” and that even Sweden, Austria, and Finland have basically abandoned their neutrality. “Even Ireland,” Boyle says, has been compelled to join the so-called Partnership For Peace and send troops to Afghanistan. “The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland,” Boyle says, and because it refuses to commit troops to the wars in the Middle East it has been subjected to much pressure by the U.S. “including an attack on its banking and financial system.”
The nonpartisan Arms Control Association of Washington, meanwhile, has published an article in the October issue of “Arms Control Today” calling for NATO ministers at their forthcoming October 14th session “to initiate a comprehensive review of outdated NATO nuclear policy” to “reduce the role and salience of nuclear weapons and support reductions of U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear bombs.”
Co-authors Oliver Meier and Paul Ingram point out that NATO’s 28 states “remain divided” over key issues, including “the future role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s defense posture.” What’s more, they say, in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands “there now exists broad parliamentary and popular support for a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from their territories.”
In a related development, the Associated Press reported October 9, “From the 1950s’ Pentagon to today’s Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.”
“Just this past April,” AP writers Charles Hanley and Randy Herschaft said, “issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “all options are on the table” for dealing with Pyongyang—meaning U.S. nuclear strikes are not ruled out.”
During the Korean War (1950-53), U.S. Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea’s capital and on August 20, 1953, after the fighting ended, the Strategic Air Command sent Air Force headquarters a plan for “an air atomic offensive against China, Manchuria, and North Korea” if the Communists resumed hostilities. Called OpPlan 8-53, it advocated use of “large numbers of atomic weapons.
President Jimmy Carter scaled back the U.S. nuclear arsenal in South Korea and its complete withdrawal was announced in 1991, “although the North Koreans at times accuse the U.S. of maintaining a secret nuclear stockpile,” AP says. Korea specialists generally accept Pyongyang’s stated rationale that it sought its own bomb for defensive reasons in response to U.S. positioning of nuclear weapons in South Korea, AP reported.
Professor Boyle is the author of “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” and “Destroying World Order,” both published by Clarity Press.
Sherwood Ross is director of the Anti-War News Service, of Coral Gables, Florida. To comment on this article or contribute to the news service, reach him at Sherwoodross10@gmail.com. Ross worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and contributed weekly columns for many years to several wire services.
Challenging the Power of the Jewish Lobby: What Should Be Done?
By James Petras | September 29, 2006
A number of writers have recently written critical articles or reviews about the power of the pro-Israel or Jewish Lobby and its influence on US policy in the Middle East. Most of these writings emphasize the power of the lobby over Congress, the two major parties (especially the Democrats) and the Executive branch. Some even describe the pro-Israel lobbies and the allied Jewish federations, the numerous propaganda institutes described as ‘think tanks’, publications as well as their influence or control over the mass media, from Hollywood, the print media, television to corporate “public” radio. However these critics and analysts paint themselves into a corner, attributing to the Jewish lobby so much power as to virtually incapacitate any effort to counter its influence and change the direction of US policy. The image of a near-omniscient and omnipotent Jewish lobby overlooks its vulnerability and significant issues around which an opposition or counter-hegemonic movement can be organized in the United States.
A starting point for building such a movement in some cases already exists in single issue campaigns; in other instances, some of the critical reports on the actions and behavior of the Lobby can become rallying points for organizing and pressing for new legislation and improving legislative restraints on Lobby activities.
What Should be Done: 18 Points of Action
1. Pressure can be exerted to force the Pro-Israel lobby to register as an agent of a foreign power. There is an abundance of evidence based on public documents, observation, testimony, interviews which demonstrate that the leaders of the Lobby take orders from the Israeli government, serve as transmission belts of Israeli policies into the US, formulate the legislation for the US Congress based on Israeli priorities, coordinate and transmit information from the US government to the Israeli government and have even engaged in espionage in the US for the Israeli secret police (Mossad). If for example AIPAC is obligated to register as an agent of a foreign power, it can be expected that a substantial number of its members/supporters will resign or withdraw, and big contributors will hold back funding, weakening the activist and financial base of the Lobby. Secondly, other members of the pro-Israel coalition will balk at allying with an agency of a foreign power. Thirdly, elected and appointed officials will be more hesitant to follow the lead or share the platform of an organization identified with a foreign government because of the possible legal implications or at least unfavorable publicity.
2. Organize a campaign to withdraw investments in US companies which supply the Israeli regime with weapons of mass destruction and construction equipment to extend Israeli colonization of Palestine. The boycott should include targeting military industries which contribute to Lobby controlled “think tanks”, State and Union pension funds which invest in Israeli Bonds should be pressured to reallocate to productive industries and social services which create jobs and health benefits for Americans.
3. Create a data bank on all the key political officials who have long-standing, primary commitments to the state of Israel and who have collaborated with the pro-Israeli lobby. This data bank can focus on the role of the Zionist power configuration engaged in harnessing US policy to Israel’s expansionist policies. The data bank can list all the major pieces of legislation fashioned by the Lobby for Israel; the total sum of US grants, and guaranteed loans, technological transfers secured for Israel through the Lobby; the number of junkets and visits organized by the Lobby for policymakers. In addition, information should be collected on all levels of “consultation” between key lobby leaders, religious notables, and international Zionist organizations and the Israeli state. The “information bank” can provide the bases for demonstrating how the Lobby serves Israeli foreign policy, distorts US domestic and overseas priorities and contributes to silencing and undermining internal democratic debate. In other words, the anti-Lobby campaign can be an important part of the battle of ideas, and engage in the struggle to throw off foreign tutelage, and regain our freedom to openly discuss the role of Israel and the Lobby in US politics.
4. Support the worldwide boycott against scholarly and academic exchanges with Israeli counterparts and institutes which uphold and participate in the colonization and repression of the Palestinians. In particular, psychologists and psychiatrists should pressure their association to reject all Israeli counterparts who engage in interrogation (usually accompanied by torture) of political prisoners.
5. Legislation should be passed barring individuals who hold dual-citizenship (Israeli-US), especially those connected with the military-intelligence networks from holding sensitive positions in the government or controlling the political party nomination process, as is now the case of the Democratic Party. Numerous cases have emerged of Israeli-US citizens in the high tech field who have direct access to software affecting US national security, as well as high Pentagon officials with ‘dual citizenship’ promoting policies favorable to Israel at great cost in lives and money to the US.
6. Organize to eliminate Israel’s special privileges in tax exemption, trade, technology, and citizenship which burdens US taxpayers, increases Israeli competitiveness at the expense of US producers and facilitates Israeli emigration at the expense of other groups. Above all, demand the elimination or drastic reduction of Israel’s $3 billion plus foreign aid and $10 billion in guaranteed loans a country with a $21,000 per capita income. The funds which cover over 40% of the total US foreign aid packages, should be spent in covering health care for the 45 million US citizens who lack coverage, or at least allocated to countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia whose per capita income is below $1000 dollars a year.
7. Support efforts to end the US embargo on goods, services and financial assistance to Palestine, recognize the democratically elected Hamas government. Join with European Parliamentarians, Lebanese and most Middle Eastern governments and the great majority of the Third World in recognizing Hezbollah as a legitimate electoral party and social movement in Lebanon. Here as in many other issues, the Lobby and its supporters are a small minority in the international community of nations and world public opinion. Through their dominance of US policy on Lebanon and Palestine, the Lobby has contributed to the isolation of the US, provoked the ire of all the mainline humanitarian groups and given credence to the world communities’ belief that Washington is a handmaiden of Israeli policy-makers.
8. Raise the issues of bringing Israeli officials to the International War Crimes Tribunal, or to criminal courts on charges of violating the Geneva Conventions and the protocols of the Nuremberg Tribunal. By having criminal charges in various courts of justice, Israeli military and civilian war criminals will be reluctant to travel abroad for fear of arrest. Likewise civil suits can be initiated to impound Israeli bank accounts and assets to pay war reparations to Lebanese civilians for the 15,000 homes destroyed and for damages exceeding $10 billion dollars. Families of assassinated civilian victims and UN peace keepers should be encouraged to seek compensation in the United States as well as in their own national courts.
9. Convert the issue of the US-Israeli claim of nuclear dangers resulting from Iranian uranium enrichment into a more consequential and general demand to turn the entire Middle East into a nuclear free zone. Thus highlighting the fact that Israeli possession of at least 300 nuclear bombs is the outstanding threat to nuclear war in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Lobby’s campaign against Iran is directed toward maintaining Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons as an instrument to intimidate any challenges to its expansionist goals.
10. Call for the International Atomic Energy Commission and other UN nuclear inspection organizations to investigate charges that Israel is manufacturing and storing nuclear bombs, and chemical and biological weapons contrary to the non-proliferation agreement. The Lobby will clearly be on the defensive, having to defend Israel’s deception and secrecy regarding weapons of mass destruction.
11. Organize boycotts and campaigns to demand that local, regional, and national mass media outlets report and interview Israeli critics as well as its spokespeople. Propose debates, round tables, and forums which include Israeli critics as well as its spokespeople; file legal suits against Jewish lobbyists making libelous accusations of “anti-semitism” against informed critics who suffer loss of career appointments or promotions. Organize legal teams to challenge the impunity of the vicious slanderers and perpetrators of hate crimes among pro-Israel ideologues.
12. Demand that newscasters, analysts, and commentators dealing with Middle Eastern issues have their organizational and political affiliations clearly identified. This will help focus the public on the extraordinary one-sided pro-Israeli bias in the media and weaken a key propaganda arm of the Lobby.
13. Legislation should be supported which bars individuals with dual citizenship and therefore dual loyalties from holding executive or legislative positions in the government. As we have seen, numerous top policymakers with a strong commitment to Israeli interests lead our country to disastrous Middle Eastern wars.
14. Support legislation revoking the citizenship of individuals who enlist or engage in military activity for a foreign government. The Lobby sends thousands of US Jews to Israel to engage in civilian and “security” activities alongside and integrated with IDF soldiers, creating “returnees” fully indoctrinated into Israel’s militarist worldview.
15. One of the vehicles used by the Lobby to influence or buy the loyalty of legislators and US officials are paid junkets to Israel, where they are indoctrinated and propagandized by a bevy of Israeli politicians, and advocates of the Zionist state. Legislation to outlaw paid propaganda and vote buying junkets came before Congress but was stopped largely through the efforts of the Jewish Lobby. Clearly this is an area where corruption and foreign control over our foreign policy converge and is strongly susceptible to a campaign to moralize public policy.
16. Since 9/11, hundreds of suspected Israeli spies have been deported, and several Lobbyists, US military and government officials have been charged with spying for Israel. Yet no public statements or media exposure has resulted. Campaigns should demand equal treatment and publicity of Israeli spies with non-Israeli operatives. Israeli handlers operating out of their Embassy should be named and arrested, instead of allowing easy exits, as is currently practiced.
17. Legislation should be presented and veterans’ groups of all wars should be mobilized to demand Congressional hearings on the Israeli bombing of the US surveillance ship Liberty with prime witnesses among our naval survivors. The Commission should investigate the subsequent cover up by the Johnson Administration and the role of the Lobby.
18. Support political parties and candidates who oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine, its $3 billion dollar annual aid package and the Lobby’s pro-war Mid East agenda. Support a pro-American policy of anti-colonialism, conversion of Israeli billion dollar handouts into rebuilding de-industrialized regions in the US and eschewing military intervention in the Middle East either for Israeli or imperial interests.
Conclusion
Can we stop the Lobby’s efforts to force America’s hand and pressure our government into sending more of our soldiers to the Middle East to die for Greater Israel? Yes – but it most obviously won’t be easy because of the big money that flows into the Congressional troughs, the terrible mass media bias and the cowardice of many of our political opinion-makers. But a start has been made. Leading military officials, active and retired, have opposed the Zioncon policymakers in the Pentagon, State Department and Congress. Leading religious institutes like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Church of Christ, as well as high Church officials in the Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Church have forcefully criticized Israel’s human rights record and have supported various types of boycotts.
Major trade unions in Canada (public sector union in Ontario – CUPE), South Africa, and in the European Union and Middle East have expressed opposition to Israeli ethnic cleansing and militarism. University teachers, led by British and Irish educators, are supporting a boycott of Israeli scholars and institutes collaborating with the Israeli regime. Even within the United States, despite the Lobby’s propaganda campaigns, a majority of US citizens did not support Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and no longer support the Lobby engineered US war in Iraq.
Opposition and collaboration with the Israel Lobby cuts across the ideological spectrum. Opponents of the Lobby’s dominant role in shaping US-Mid East policy in favor of Israel have provoked the ire of numerous traditional conservative writers, politicians and military officials as well as a substantial number of democrats, pacifists, leftists, Greens, mainline Christian churches, and grassroots Democrats. Support for the Lobby includes the leadership of both major parties, all the mainstream Jewish organization and religious bodies, most liberal Jews, and non-Jews, as well as the neo-conservatives, media moguls, and fundamentalist Christian Zionists.
Two momentous issues come out in what is a major test of forces: war or peace in the Middle East – the question of who rules America? The Lobby, in and out of the Executive branch and Congress, was instrumental in pushing us into the Iraq war. They are the leading pressure group propelling us into a war with Iran – a war which will ignite major confrontation throughout the Middle East and military attacks in the West, putting our security in jeopardy and provoking a major oil and energy crisis, that will likely lead to a major recession.
The Lobby’s war-making powers exceed those of any elected body as they are constituted today because of the terrible fear that elected officials and opinion makers have of the Lobby’s retaliatory, political thuggery.
The second major issue we as American citizens face is the loss of control over our own political process; the power of the Lobby is at the unconditional service of the Israeli state; what Israel dictates the Lobby pursues through its network of several hundred thousand activists and hundreds of millions in cash flow. Those of us who stand up for America’s right to decide its own policies in the Middle East free of Israeli-Lobby intervention, are faced with the challenge of taking back our freedom to choose. The freedom to choose who and what we support in the Middle East without facing political, financial, or social retribution, slander or public ostracism. We the strongest military and economic power have been politically and culturally colonized. Like other national liberation movements, we must struggle to free ourselves from the tyranny of Israel over our politics in the Middle East. In the 1950’s we faced McCarthyite anti-communism as a ruse to propel us into World War Three. Today we face the slander of Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ as a ruse to propel us into a new world war against Islamic nations and states who oppose Israeli expansion.
Just as a broad coalition from the left to the Secretary of the Army defeated McCarthyism in the 1950’s and led to détente in the 1970’s so too a similar coalition today can defeat the Israeli Lobby’s war policies and lead to our self-determination and national dignity in pursuit of a democratic foreign policy.
Gird your loins, empty your bladder, this is going to be one hell of a fight – no holds barred.
FT: “Seoul finds new way to finance Iran trade”
This past September, The Wall Street Journal Asia’s editorial board heralded the Japanese and South Korean enforcement of UN sanctions against Iran as “worth cheering” and a sign that South Korea was “growing up as a democracy.”
But the news today that South Korea has appointed two state-run banks to finance trade with Iran, might make the WSJ editorial board rethink their premature exuberance over the effectiveness of the sanctions regime.
Christian Oliver, Song Jung-a and Anna Fifield write in the Financial Times:
The US had pressured South Korea to cut out trade with Iran following the imposition of sanctions in September. Washington praised Seoul when South Korea announced its own measures.
Soon after the sanctions announcement, however, South Korea quietly reached a financing agreement with the Iranian central bank to buttress trade.
Seoul says that from this month Woori Bank and the Industrial Bank of Korea can finance legitimate trade with Iran in sectors unaffected by sanctions.
South Korea has a $10 billion annual trade relationship with Iran and is clearly eager to retain what commerce they can with the Islamic Republic.
Seoul’s effort to find ways of maintaining its commercial relationships with Iran is yet another example of the challenge of imposing a sanctions regime on Iran, which has a diverse and well established set of trading relationships in the increasingly globalized and interconnected economy.
The FT article says:
But in Washington officials said the South Korean move would increase transparency in dealings with Iran. “This is a measure to ensure that some of the shadier private banks in Iran are not involved [in business transactions],” said a state department spokesman.
The Iranian central bank will deposit proceeds from oil sales in South Korea at Woori and IBK. The funds will be used to ensure payments for South Korean exporters that had been retreating from Iran.
Obama’s man on the Middle East
Lamis Andoni | Al-Jazeera | 07 Oct 2010
The Obama administration’s letter of assurances and incentives to Israel has Dennis Ross written all over it.
The draft letter written by the Obama administration to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and revealed by David Makovsky on the website of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has Dennis Ross written all over it.
The veteran American negotiator who has championed Israeli security needs while repudiating Palestinian rights for the past two decades reportedly convinced Barack Obama, the US president, that the letter of assurances and incentives was necessary to persuade Israel to extend the settlement freeze that expired at the end of last month.
At first glance, the letter appears to be trying to accommodate the Palestinian demand for a freeze in settlement construction in return for the resumption of stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks.
Strengthening Israel’s hand
But the equation is hugely unbalanced. In exchange for a partial two-month settlement freeze, Israel is offered US endorsement of all of its “security needs” – as defined, of course, by Israel.
Included within this are assurances aimed at stopping the infiltration of weapons into Palestinian territories and the positioning of Israeli troops in the Jordan Valley – all of which is consistent with the Israeli vision of a demilitarised Palestinian state. The letter effectively offers to consolidate the integration of Israeli security interests into US national strategy and pledges to engage Arab parties and Israel in discussions on a “regional security architecture”; a convoluted euphemism for an arrangement to address Israel’s need to confront Iran.
Furthermore, the letter promises that after the initial 60-day extension of the freeze, the US would not ask Israel for another – leaving the status of the settlements to be decided only as part of final status negotiations.
The terms are such that they would only serve Israel’s strategic goals and further strengthen the Israeli hand at already asymmetrical negotiations.
Under such conditions, the construction of colonies would continue unabated as soon as the extended freeze expired, leaving Palestinians unable even to raise the issue of Israel’s ongoing land grab. The letter offers Israel what it wants, while effectively setting the stage for the legitimisation of settlement building and the fulfillment of Israeli plans to annex the major settlements as part of a final deal.
No surprises, no secrets
But as damaging as these assurances are to Palestinian interests, they should not come as a surprise. After all it is not the first time that Ross has helped find “a solution” to an impasse in Israeli-Palestinian talks in a way that provides strategic benefits to Israel.
In 1997, during negotiations over the Hebron Protocol, Ross played a crucial role in convincing Netanyahu, who was prime minister then too, to accept a partial withdrawal from the Palestinian town.
He is also said to have written a memo that – for the first time since the 1993 Oslo Accords – stipulated that future Israeli implementation of its obligations under the agreement hinged on Palestinians meeting Israel’s security requirements (as defined by Israel).
During the Camp David talks in 2000, according to his published memoirs, Ross pushed for Israeli “security need” to take top priority while dismissing any discussion of Palestinian rights.
But the US diplomat’s bias in favour of Israel is hardly a secret. Palestinian negotiators have always complained that Ross was bargaining on behalf of Israel, while other Obama aides have more recently accused him of placing Netanyahu’s concerns above all others.
The international law impediment
Ross’ imprint on the letter is testimony to his influence over Obama – an influence that took root long before Ross was moved from his position at the State Department to the White House in the summer of 2009.
He has come to represent continuity in US foreign policy – having held positions under George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton, George Bush Jnr and now Obama. And even when he took a break from these positions, he worked for the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which gave him a forum from which to influence decision makers and to shape media and public perceptions.
WINEP was a perfect fit for Ross as it has become the most influential think tank openly promoting Israeli interests and goals as the basis for discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Ross, who as an official stays away from public statements, openly articulated his pro-Israeli views in a book he co-authored with fellow WINEP associate David Makovsky, in which he argued that the US should foster a partnership with Israel in its policy towards Iran.
But it was his memoirs that revealed the true extent of his support for Israel and his dismissal of Palestinian rights. For Ross, Palestinians are held hostage to a culture of victimhood that breeds a sense “of entitlement” to land and self-perceived rights without paying attention to “Israeli needs”.
The Orientalist view Ross espouses discards Palestinian rights as a subjective narrative existing only in Palestinian eyes. International law and UN resolutions that affirm Palestinian national rights are, in his view, a cumbersome impediment to finding a solution on the premise of “Israeli needs”; a view reflected in the letter’s promise to veto any UN Security Council resolutions during the one-year negotiating period.
But Ross is not alone within the US establishment in dismissing UN resolutions relating to Israel and Palestine, for US policy in general is based on the belief that Israeli military-imposed facts on the ground should determine the shape of a final solution to the conflict. In other words the party that controls the land determines the parameters for a solution.
Wielding influence
Ross’ blatant bias against the Palestinians was already well known when the Obama administration decided to recruit him as their main advisor on Middle Eastern affairs.
But Ross’ value was not based simply on his knowledge and experience of the region. His initial role was to garner votes for Obama within pro-Israeli Jewish circles.
In June 2008, he was sent to Florida, a swing state, to convince pro-Israeli Jewish voters that Obama was a true friend to Israel. He also gave interviews to Israeli newspapers to placate Israeli fears.
After the elections Ross became the point man on Iran at the state department. A former member of the Obama campaign, visiting the Middle East after the elections, told me that Arabs had no need to worry about Ross because he would not have Obama’s ear as long as he was at the State Department.
But, in the summer of 2009, all that changed when Ross was promoted to the role of special assistant to the president and head of “the region” at the National Security Council. His influence – and that of his former associates at WINEP – can now be clearly detected.
Obama had initially stated that a halt to settlement building was a prerequisite to the resumption of negotiations. In a speech to the UN he even called the settlements illegal. But then WINEP stepped in. Ross’ former associates began a campaign portraying Obama’s statement as a policy error or even a blunder that should be rectified.
In their articles and media appearances WINEP fellows sought to divert attention from the settlement issue and to place the “Iranian threat” at the centre of US policy towards the region.
Obama, meanwhile, was gradually abandoning his position.
Even as Israel agreed to a partial 10-month settlement freeze under US pressure, Ross and Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, were negotiating the very terms that appeared in the letter.
Under the guise of meeting Palestinian demands, the letter aims primarily at repudiating international law and UN resolutions once and for all, while making Israeli “security needs” the main focus of final status talks… Full article
Comment by Philip Weiss:
Dennis Ross is the former chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute of Israel, which opposes assimilation and intermarriage; he is a former leader of the Israel lobby who has argued that it does not exist, and he is now installed in the Obama administration in a crucial role, and why? Because he has great authority in the Jewish community, that’s why. Because his presence says to the conservative and wealthy Jewish community, Obama won’t sell us out. No wonder this guy has survived from Republican to Democratic administrations, his constituency transcends party. No wonder that MJ Rosenberg has written that Netanyahu is more powerful than Obama.
See also:
By Atheo | March 8, 2009
Israel Threatens Holocaust in Damascus
Israel Releases 1973 War Minutes To Send Syria, Hezbollah, “Strong Warning”
Al-Manar – 07/10/2010
The Israeli intelligence Website Debkafile quoted “military and intelligence sources” as saying that PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak have decided to release the minutes of the deliberations on an air blitz against Damascus – held in Jerusalem before and during the 1973 war – “as a strong warning” to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Then, a decision to take out Damascus to halt the Syrian offensive was overruled. This time could be different: Bashar Assad regime’s own centers of power could be at risk if Syria and Hizballah go through with their plan to overpower Beirut and topple Saad Hariri’s sovereign government,” the sources told Debkafile.
The Website said that in the hours leading up to Oct. 6, 1973, Lt. Gen. David Elazar told PM Golda Meir that the Israeli forces can wipe out the entire Syrian air force by noon that day, and that they need another 30 hours to destroy Syrian missiles.
“Then, if they go on the offensive at 5 pm, our air force will be free to strike the Syrian army. To me, this operational option is attractive.” Three days later, on Oct. 9, catastrophe stared Israel in the face: The IDF was in a bad way and taking casualties in the realm of hundreds dead and thousands injured; their defense lines in Sinai and the Golan had fallen and there was nothing in the way of the Syrian army going all the way to the Sea of Galilee and Tiberias.
In a closed meeting with Golda Meir, the iconic defense minister Moshe Dayan asked for permission to bomb Damascus. “Inside the city?” she asked. “Inside the city and its environs,” he replied. “We have to break the Syrians,” Dayan explained that he proposed to strike the Syrian General Command and infrastructure in Damascus. “We’ve done enough going around the fields (a reference to targets outside the Syrian capital). There are no more key targets left. Damascus is the only one. We can’t promise the population won’t be hurt,” Debkafile reported.
It added that “Golda’s permission was withheld.”
The Israeli military and intelligence sources told Debkafile that the decision to release the documents and the section relating to Syria was taken in Jerusalem “after the Obama administration failed to prevent the two-day state visit to Lebanon by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taking place on Oct. 13.”
According to the Israeli site, the message “goes beyond uncovering secret operational and intelligence decision-making and is unusually wide-ranging.”
Livni Tells UN to Mind its Own Business over Flotilla Probe
Al-Manar – 07/10/2010
Israeli Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Wednesday accused the United Nations of intervening in Israel’s affairs through its probe into an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Livni told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that his decision to appoint a panel to investigate the May 31 commando raid, which left nine pro-Palestinian activists martyred, was “unacceptable”.
“Any international intervention in military operations carried out by Israel is unacceptable, just as it would be unacceptable to any other country fighting terrorism,” Livni told Ban in a meeting at his office at the UN building in New York.
Israel has launched its own examination of the flotilla raid, which saw “navy commandos rappel onto the deck of the flagged aid boat ‘Mavi Marmara,’ where they clashed bloodily with Turkish activists.”
“Israel is investigating the events of the flotilla itself, and that is enough,” said Livni, who leads Kadima, the second largest party in Israel’s Knesset.
Livni also slammed the UN for hosting speeches by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“You must stop giving a platform to Ahmadinejad. His last speech at the UN was dangerous and showed that economic sanctions [against Iran] are not enough,” she told Ban. “There need to be added diplomatic sanctions that will prevent Iran’s leaders from gaining a platform for their extremist views.”
In his remarks to Livni, Ban focused on Israeli building in the occupied West Bank, reiterating UN pressure on Israel to re-impose a freeze on settlement construction. The prior freeze expired in late September, bringing to a near-standstill the new “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinians.
Iran War: United States Military Versus Israel Firsters
By James Petras | November 27, 2007
Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight and mount instead a diplomatic assault? – Leonard Fein, Forward
Introduction
As the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, opposing a new Middle East War. While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig, November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict, attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a more stringent and accurate assessment puts the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate.
There is a great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they concern the future of the United States.
Recent History of the Civilian Militarists versus Anti-War Movements
Over the past seven years, the civilian militarists in the executive branch and Congress have resoundingly defeated any and all efforts by Congressional critics and anti-war leaders to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, the peace movement has practically vanished from the streets – in large part a product of its own self-destruction. The great majority of anti-war leaders opted for Democratic Party-electoral politics, a strategy that led to the successful election of a pro-war Democratic majority. The retreat of the anti-war movement turned into a full-scale rout when the government moved toward a new war with Iran: the Zionist-influenced half of the peace movement refused to join forces to oppose the Iran war agenda – heavily influenced by their loyalty to Israel and its shrill cries of an ‘existential’ danger from non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons and dependent on ‘liberal’ Zionist donors.
Along with the capitulation of the anti-war leaders and absence of any street politics, liberal Democrats, or what passes for them, fell into line with the Israel First Democratic congress-people pushing for an increasingly bellicose political agenda toward Iran. The White House, especially the Vice President’s office were fully in tune with the Israel Firsters and the ZPC keeping the ‘military option’ on the table and priming the US forces in the Gulf for offensive action. Within the military and the intelligence services strong opposition emerged to an attack on Iran.
American Military Versus the ZPC Fight over Middle East Wars
The battle between the civilian militarists (Zion-Cons) in the Pentagon and the military brass took place, in large part, behind closed doors: From the beginning, the military was severely handicapped in so far as they could not engage in public debate. The military elite did not possess an army of lobbyists, activist ideologues and the entire mass media apparatus to promote their point of view. The ZPC-Israel Firsters’ Wars-For-Israel crowd did have all of these resources in abundance, and they used them to the maximum in a spiteful and arrogant fashion, when the occasion arose – such as when military officers testifying before Congress questioned the war-to-be in Iraq. Zion-militarists like Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz and their influential cohort baited the military for having “the most advanced arms and refusing to use them”, of being fearful of expending troops to defend US security interests in the Middle East, of being ultra-cautious when audacity and preemptive action was necessary.
The Israel-Firsters, who not only never risked a broken fingernail on any battlefield, deprecated the generals to increase their power to order them around through their servile operatives in the Rumsfeld Pentagon, Vice President’s Office and in Bush’s National Security Council. The Zion-Cons’ arm-chair military strategists have absolutely no qualms in sending US troops to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran to enhance Israeli regional power because 99.8% of the rank and file troops are not of their kin and kind. On the contrary they ridicule the US military precisely to prosecute wars and avoid the loss of Israeli-Jewish lives, resulting from an Israeli attack on Iran to enhance its power in the Middle East.
Israel-Firsters Win Round One
For all of the above-enumerated reasons, the Israel-Firsters overcame the doubts and questions on the war by the military in the run-up to and continuation of the Iraq War. The ZPC’s success in launching the war over military objections was largely due to their control over US civilian institutions and the primacy of these institutions over any and all military political dissent. However the ZPC was not content with repressing civilian dissent, they aggressively repressed and silenced any opposition from within the military:
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army saw his career destroyed when he questioned US policy on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Two years later, General Peter Pace was denied a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he rejected claims by the White House and the ZPC that Iran was supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgents.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was retired following his call for the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, which he later described as “a nightmare with no end in sight”.
General John Abazaid followed. Captains and Colonels in the Pentagon who disagreed with the lies and fabrication of ‘intelligence’ by the Zion-Cons in the Pentagon leading to the Iraq invasion were marginalized and/or silenced.
CIA: Zion-Cons in the Pentagon marginalized CIA intelligence reports that didn’t fit in with their war propaganda – these studies were-written, cut and spliced to serve their ends. The Zion-Cons in the Pentagon established a parallel ‘intelligence’ office under their exclusive control (Office of Special Planning) and placed one of their own, Abraham Shumsky, in charge.
In the Zion-Con charge to push the US into a new war with Iran, they (along with Vice President Cheney) have successfully delayed and forced the rewrite of a collective report by various intelligence agencies, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, because it had to fit in with their war plans.
The humiliating defeats and gratuitous public insults which the victorious ZPC inflicted on the US military has had the effect of raising the back of senior officers in the run-up to a military attack on Iran. The military is going public and fighting back with biting open criticism of the White House and Zion-Con war planners. The underlying deep and widespread hostility of the high-ranking military officials has nothing to do with Zion-Con charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ and everything to do with the destruction, demoralization and discredit of the US military which has resulted from following Zion-Con war policies in Iraq.
The US armed forces have crumbled and decayed as the Iraq occupation and counter-insurgency progresses into its 6th year. Over half of the officers are refusing to re-enlist, recruiting quotas are not being reached except by drastically lowering standards, and morale of on-duty reservists is at it’s lowest because of extended tours of duty. Black enlistment has dropped precipitously. Despite the war being portrayed by President Bush and Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Olmert as for Israel’s national survival, American Jewish war-time enlistment is at its lowest in almost a century.
Public sentiment for the military has declined sharply since the war, exacerbated by Zionist (Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk) charges of incompetence against American military occupation forces. The loss of prestige, enlistment and the increasing over-stretch of the army and the abrasive and domineering way in which the Zion-Cons denigrate active US military commanders has raised their ire. At one point in an interview, General Tommy Franks referred to Zion-Con, ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith as ‘the dumbest bastard I ever knew’.
Round Two: American Military Versus Israel-Firsters: The Iran War
Recognizing how they were outgunned by the Zion-Con monopoly of public space for political discussion in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the military has gone public. Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM (Central Command) has launched a series of interviews designed to counter-Zion-Con war propaganda. He has formed an anti-War-With-Iran alliance with senior military officers, Secretary of Defense Gates and sectors of the intelligence services not under Zion-Con influence (Financial Times Nov. 12, 2007 p.1). The Secretary of Defense is not a reliable ally to the officers opposed to an Iran war, since he is notorious for caving in to ZPC pressure when his post in under threat.
Every major Israeli public spokes-person has at least raised the issue of a sneak attack (translation: ‘preventive war’ in Zion-speak) and many are in favor of an immediate attack. Reliable sources in Israel claim that war preparations are already advanced.
Fabricating ‘existential threats’ to Israeli existence, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has spoken forcefully even shrilly, about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ a much repeated, deliberate mistranslation of the Prime Minister’s reference to Israel (more reliable translations refer to ‘the regime currently occupying Jerusalem disappearing into history’).
While Israeli officials have placed war with Iran as their second most important priority on their foreign policy agenda, by far their highest priority is convincing and manipulating the US to carry out the war and save Israel the enormous economic cost and loss of Israeli lives. The Israeli state has made its war policy the central task for their agents and their apparatus in the US. The ZPC has taken up the Israeli line with a vengeance. Several hundred full-time functionaries from all the major Jewish organizations have visited and ‘advised’ Congress that bellicose support for a war against Iran is the primary way to demonstrate their unconditional defense of Israel’s ‘survival’ and guarantee campaign financing from their wealthy political donor base.
Over the past year, several major daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines from the New York Times through Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and the entire yellow press (NY Post, New York Sun, The Daily News) have published reams of propaganda articles fabricating an Iranian nuclear threat, demonizing Iran and its leaders and calling for the US to bomb Iran and eliminate Israel’s ‘existential’ (the most nauseating and overused cliche) threat.
Several thousand op-ed pieces have been written parroting the Israeli war-line by a small army of Zionist academics and think tank propagandists. Breathless and vitriolic, the Israel Firsters claim that ‘time is running out’, that Iran’s pursuit of diplomacy is a ploy for inaction, that Iran’s well-documented openness to negotiations is a trick. Venomous attacks are launched against Europeans for not pursuing the military option; Germany is slandered as following in the footsteps of the Nazis because its industries and banks still do business with Iran. US critics of the ZPC’s pursuit of an Iranian war for Israel are accused of being ‘soft on terrorism’, appeasers, and almost always labeled as overt or covert ‘anti-Semites’.
The massive, sustained and one-sided dominance by the ZPC of the Iranian war narrative has been successful. US public opinion surveys show over half (52% according to a Zogby Poll) of the US public is in favor of offensive bombing of Iran. Thus speaks the State of Israel via its overbearing politically dominant Fifth Column to the American People: The purpose of the USA is to serve and sacrifice for the greater good (and power and wealth and dominance) of Israel.
The clearest and most vicious Zion-Con counter-attack against the US military’s harsh reaction to their leading us into the Iraq War came from a predictable ultra-Zionist think-tank, the Foreign Policy Research Center (FPRC) run by Ilan Berman, a close collaborator with the Israeli extremist Likud leader Netanyahu. Speaking at a meeting co-sponsored by the FPRC and the Reserve Officers Association on October 15 2007 entitled Mind the Gap: Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America, senior fellow Frank Hoffman attempted to turn senior military officers’ criticism of the disastrous Zion-Con authored Iraq War into a sinister military plot:
The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging ‘stab-in-the-back’ thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact (sic) and code of conduct (sic) that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy (the Zion-Cons) and the dedicated servants (the military) we ask to carry it out. (Dereliction of Duty Redux?).
Hoffman attempts to deflect military and public anger at the enormous damage in morale, recruitment and lives which the Zion-Con war policies have inflicted on the US Armed Forces by invoking an abstract entity: “Our collective failure (sic) to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security” (ibid)
Obfuscating Zionist control over war policy, Hoffman instead refers to ‘civilian’ control over the military as being “constitutionally, structurally (?) and historical well-grounded.” This is nonsense: there is no provision, article or clause in the American Constitution which states that the military should submit to civilian power subordinate to a foreign state.
After a vacuous general discussion of civilian-military relations in the lead-up to the Zion-Con designed Iraq War, Hoffman then tries to paint the military critics of Zion-Con Donald Rumsfeld as attacking an innovative defender of civilian supremacy over the military – even as he embraced wholesale torture techniques and violated every principle of the Geneva Convention of War and US Military Code of Conduct toward prisoners and civilians.
Hoffman turns up the Zion-Con venom against military officers who dared to question Rumsfeld’s application of Israel’s illegal and totalitarian technique of colonial warfare in Iraq. He then launches a diatribe against the professional competence of senior military advisers, “who failed to provide military counsel because they were intimidated ‘yes men’ or who failed to recognize the complexity of war” (ibid).
Berman’s prodigy, Hoffman, makes a case that the Zion-Con ‘masters of Iraq war policy’ were not responsible for the disastrous war – it was the military officers “who failed to provide candid advice, who fail in their duty to their immediate superiors and stay in their posts (who) are guilty of dereliction of duty to the President, the Congress and their subordinates.” (ibid) The same Zion-Cons who drove out and forced the resignation of American generals who had dissented with Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Rumsfeld are now judged and condemned for dereliction of duty by the same Zion-Cons.
The Zion-Cons follow the Goebbels principle
“The Big Lie repeated often enough can convince the stupid masses.”
The Berman-Hoffman FPRC counter-attack against American military officers speaking truth to power is a limp effort to deflect attention from the Zion-Con policymakers’ treasonous behavior and their role in degrading the US military. The FPRC document blaming the military and unnamed civilians (exclusively non-Zionist) for the Iraq debacle is one of the numerous variants on the same theme by Zionist academic militarists justifying the power of the ZPC in the name of civilian supremacy, without spelling out the national loyalties of the ‘civilian’ masters of career military officers.
According to a detailed report published in the Financial Times (November 12, 2007), the US military is not buying the Zion-Con line:
“Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said that while dealing with Iran was a ‘challenge’ a military strike was not in the offing.” (Page 1 and 9)
Backed by many active senior officers and numerous retired generals, Fallon has dismissed the Zion-Con intellectuals and propagandists as ignorant war-mongers. In his own words: “It astounds me that so many pundits and other s are spending so much time yakking about this topic (of a military attack on Iran)” (FT: November 12, 2007 p.9).
In direct repudiation of the ZPC’s frenetic campaigning for economic sanctions leading to a military attack, top US military officials and even Secretary of Defense Gates have for the time being blocked the military option. Addressing the Zionist strategy of sequential wars against Israel’s enemies (Iran, Syria, Lebanon), Fallon stated: “It seems to me that we don’t need more problems”. His remarks are understood to reflect the views of the majority of senior officers in the Middle East combat zone but not Bush’s politically ambitious General Petraeus, who worked with his Israeli-Mossad partners (in Northern Iraq) in training and arming the Kurdish militia death squads – Peshmerga.
Retired Generals Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar, both former heads of CENTCOM, have pointed their fingers at the menace of the Zion-Cons and Israel-Firsters in the government. According to Gen. Hoar,
“There is no doubt that an element in the government wants to strike Iran. But the good news is that the Secretary of Defense and senior military are against it” (FT November 12, 2007).
The forced and voluntary retirement, including the indictment and jailing of some highly placed Zion-Cons in the Pentagon, White House, Treasury and State Departments have weakened their stranglehold over US policy in the White House. The top Zion-Con policymakers who have left or are in jail include Rumsfeld (Gentile Zionist), Wolfowitz, Feith, Franklin, Shumsky, Perle – in the Pentagon; Irving Libby, Wurmser, Ari Fleicher, Frum in the White House and many others too numerous to name.
While the Zion-Cons retain power in the higher circles of government, at this moment, they are not able to run roughshod over their military critics and opponents as they did in the run-up to the Iraq war. In part this is because of the horrendous situation resulting from their war in Iraq, which has undermined their credibility and turned the vast majority of the US public against their war. Equally the Zion-Cons’ war and the disastrous impact of a prolonged (5 year) urban guerrilla resistance on the US Armed Forces, in terms of loss of personnel, morale, junior and senior officers and the over-extension of the US military to the detriment of the defense of the US Empire’s interests around the world has served as a wake-up call for senior military command.
Drawing on their experience from the invasion of Iraq, few if any accept the Israeli-Zion-Con evaluations of the outcome and response to a military attack. They remember too well the optimistic propaganda put out by Zionist academic ideologues like Kagan and Cohen that the Iraqis will celebrate and welcome American forces into Baghdad as liberators.
According to a report in the Financial Times, retired General Zinni speaking for the many active senior officers says:
“… even a limited American attack could push Teheran to retaliate in a number of ways such as firing missiles at Israel, Saudi oilfields and US bases in Iraq, mining the Straits (sic) of Hormuz and activating sleeper terrorist cells around the world.” (FT op cit).
He concluded by pointing out, “It is not a matter of a one-strike option.” A more circumspect criticism of the Iran war reasoning has been voiced by Admiral Mike Muller. He objected to the US-Israeli agents “putting the military option on the table”. Admiral Muller added,
“We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now. We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.”(FT Op Cit).
Israeli Sneak Air Attack
One of the biggest dangers in forcing the US into a war with Iran is an Israeli sneak air attack, in which it destroys Iranian military installations causing Iran to retaliate against the US, Israel’s ally, main financier and armaments supplier. An Israeli air strike is not the only war provocation – the Mossad is deeply in involved in training Kurdish commandos to carry out terrorist cross-border attacks from Iraq, killing Iranian civilians and soldiers, bombing military installations and collecting intelligence, hoping to provoke a large-scale Iranian military response against ‘Kurdistan’. Iranian retaliation against Mossad trained Kurdish terrorists could then be twisted by Zion-Con ideologues and their political elements in Washington (to quote Admiral Fallon) into a major invasion of Iraq, with the hope of convincing the Bush White House to “counter-attack in defense of our troops in Iraq”.
The Israeli regime and its Fifth Column in the United States have been pressing for unilateral intervention against Iran, preferably military, ever since 2003. The Daily Alert, mouthpiece of the 52 biggest Jewish organizations (The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations) has published scores of articles each week, characterizing the Europeans as ‘foot draggers’, ‘weak on Iran’, ‘playing down’ or ‘failing’ to take serious the ‘existential threat to Israel’. The US Zion-Cons have their own State Department and overseas missions, with their own foreign policy-makers and spokespeople. They meet with European, Asian and Latin American heads of State in the US or during visits overseas, mobilizing advising, organizing and strengthening Zion-Con outposts throughout Europe and beyond.
Their international reach has succeeded in a number of important decisions and appointments, most notably in Brussels and in Sarkozy’s appointment of Zionist fanatic Bernard Kouchner as France’s Minister of Foreign Relations. In a rather crude and undiplomatic show of Zionist loyalty immediately upon taking office, Kouchner declared France to be in favor of a military option against Iran. He was later pressured to retract, but Sarkozy, who himself is no minor league Israel supporter, has echoed Kouchner’s line. One of Kouchner’s first acts was to travel to American-occupied Iraq to express his personal support for the occupation. As a result of Israeli and Zion-Con pressure on the White House, France, Germany and England have all supported the escalation of sanctions against Iran – the Zionist strategy of ‘strangle the economy now and bomb later’.
The Zion-Cons’ weakness is relative: Although they no longer can purge (or retire) or silence senior military officers opposed to their Mid East Wars for Israel, they are extremely effective in discrediting any and all impartial international bodies and reports which fail to support the Israeli line that Iran represents an ‘existential threat’ to its survival (code language for ‘challenges or resists Israel’s drive to dominate the region’).
Zion-Cons vs. The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Predictably taking their cue from the Israeli foreign office’s dismissal of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency’s report (November 15, 2007) which documented that Iran had no nuclear arms program and no capacity to construct a nuclear weapon at least for the next five years, the ZPC unleashed a mass media propaganda campaign attacking the IAEA chairman as a ‘pro-Iranian’ agent (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007). At the same time the news ‘reports’ used potted quotes from the Report, mentioning only the IAEA ‘reservations’ and the ‘questions unanswered’ and ‘issues not addressed’. US Senator from Tel Aviv, Joseph Lieberman combined both a distorted (or blatantly falsified) version of the IAEA Report and a vicious attack on its Chief, El Baradei, claiming that the Report “made it clear (sic) that Iran was still hiding (sic) large parts of its nuclear program” (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007).
A careful or even casual reading of the IAEA Report shows not a single paragraph, line or word stating that Iran was ‘hiding large parts of its nuclear program’ as Lieberman accused. Ever mendacious, Lieberman, who had publicly called for an immediate military attack on Iran, Iraq and Syria just days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, viciously attacked El Baradei for “writing in the report that Iran was cooperating and for not recommending a new round of sanctions”.
In other words, the Zion-Cons with their mediocre academic mouth-pieces can save the UN, the IAEA and El Baradei’s time and money in site visits and delicate radiologic and satellite monitoring by handing over the Israeli Foreign Office’s pre-packaged press handouts or sexed-up intelligence reports. The Zion-Cons make up in zeal what they lack in fact: Cooking up threats and telling the eager world that Iran is not cooperative and should be heavily sanctioned, starved or bombed into submission. The Zion-Cons follow the guidelines of the Jewish state’s agenda, to turn Iran into a Gaza Strip of deprivation and desperation.
The Israeli dismissal of the UN report on Iran, and the Zion-Con falsification of its contest and attack on its chief negotiator, El Baradei, was echoed by the White House and the Zion-colonized Congress. With a lack of originality characteristic of US Middle East policy-makers, they also cited the potted quotes from the IAEA Report to justify harsher sanctions and a greater degree of confrontation. The purpose is to provoke a breakup of the dialog long established between the IAEA and Iran.
The Zion-Con-White House strategy is to implicate the IAEA in their savage attacks on Iran, and via harsher economic sanctions end Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA. Having forced the IAEA out they would then accuse Iran of rejecting dialog and cooperation with the United Nations. This contrived scenario (like the earlier phony claims that ‘Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors’) would set the stage for a US-British led military attack under the pretext that all diplomatic approaches failed to deter Iran’s nuclear program which the IAEA denied had any military component.
It ill behooves anyone to actually consult the IAEA website and read the reports’ favorable account of Iran’s willing cooperation in providing site visits, documents and responses in answer to many of the key issues raised by the IAEA, the US and the EU. The report ultimately refutes the major accusations cooked up by the Zion-Cons and their political assets in the White House, State Department and Congress. The most important information contained in the IAEA Report is that its inspectors found no evidence of any Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons.
US Military-Israel-Firsters: Fundamental Issues in Dispute
There are at least 4 fundamental issues in dispute between senior American military officials and ZPC. These include:
- The nature of the Iranian threat: The ZPC argues that Iran represents an immediate deadly threat to the US, Israel, Iraq and the Gulf States. The American officers do not see the Iranians as a threat because they have engaged the Iranians in stopping the flow of arms and fighters to the Iraqi resistance; they recognize Iranian positive diplomatic overtures to all the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia; the US armada in the Persian Gulf is confident they can act as a deterrent to any Iranian attack; and finally the US Central Command know they are in the Persian Gulf facing Iran because of the White House’s provocative offensive strategy – and that Iran has not demonstrated anything but a defensive capability. Senior American officers view favorably Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer “to discuss with Arab nations a plan to enrich uranium outside the region in a neutral country such as Switzerland.” (Dow Jones News Service in Saudia Arabia, quoted in BBC News November 18, 2007). Not a single major television or print media in the US ran the Iranian president’s offer – as would be predictable in our Zionized media.
- Uranium Program: The Israelis, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, and among the top five nuclear powers, argue that Iran, which does not have a single nuclear weapon or even a weapons program, is an ‘existential (sic) threat’ to Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. This is one argument that the ZPC have used to convince the Democratic Party majority in Congress, the White House and the pro-Israel wing of the US Peace Movement to escalate economic sanctions and keep the ‘military option’ on the table.The only problem is that most European, Asian, African and Latin American diplomats, experts, the majority of world public opinion and most senior American officers don’t buy Israel’s shrill disinformation. All legal experts who have given a perfunctory look at the non-proliferation agreement (NPA) insist that there is absolutely no clause or article prohibiting uranium enrichment. The job of the ZPC, pursued at full speed, is to bury the NPA under mountains of fabrications, arguing that enriching uranium itself is a violation of ‘international law’. The purpose of this attempt to concoct a full state of belligerency is to escalate US and Israeli attacks on Iran and hasten the timing of a surprise, offensive onslaught. This is exactly the reason why American intelligence briefings and IAEA reports have aroused the fury of Israel and its operatives in the US and their calling for El Baradei’s dismissal.
- Iranian Arms to Iraq: The US Military and CENTCOM have repeatedly denied, especially in light of another ZPC onslaught to the contrary, that the Iranian government is supplying arms, especially roadside mines or IEDs to Iraqi ‘terrorists’ and its allied militia forces. Contrary to the assertion of the leading Israeli spokes-people in the US Senate, the US military categorically denies that the IEDs are made in Iran, having discovered bomb-making factories in Iraq and from interrogation and actually studying the construction and contents of the IEDs. Zionist-colonized Senators led by Hillary Clinton have followed the lead of Israeli Senatorial Spokesman Joseph Leiberman, rather than consulting with the American military, and are mouthing the rhetoric of Iranian arms killing American soldiers (FT November 12, 2007 p.9). Following the Lieberman-Israeli-ZPC propaganda blitz, the US Senate voted in favor of the Liberman-Kyle resolution naming Iran’s principle border defense force, the Republican Guard, a “terrorist organization”, moving one step closer to an attack. The hollowness of this resolution is reflected in the fact that not one of any of the US’s servile allies chose to follow its lead in denouncing the Republican Guard. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the Israeli-ZPC colonization of the US congress than on questions of war and peace, when the legislature is more likely to follow the dictates of Israeli propagandists than to consult its own senior military officials.
- Consequences of an attack on Iran: The main concern of the ZPC and its political clients in the White House and Congress is that an attack on Iran will secure the safety of Israel, eliminating a ‘mortal enemy’, preventing ‘another Holocaust’ and stopping a ‘new Hitler’. In pursuit of this policy, Israel’s US agents have repeatedly blocked every open-ended Iranian effort to cooperate with the US against the Taliban, Al Queda and other ‘terrorists groups’ as is profusely documented by two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration’s National Security Council, Hiliary Mann and Flynt Leverett,. (see The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know, Esquire Magazine, November 2007).
Every Iranian offer of unconditional negotiation and cooperation with the US to fight terrorism, as the US defines it, was rejected by key extremist Zion-Cons in the Pentagon (Feith), the Vice President’s office (Irving Libby), the National Security Council (Elliott Abrams and the President’s National Security Adviser (Stephen Hadley, a zealous Gentile Zion-Con among the brotherhood).
The Zion-cons paint a picture of an air attack which would simultaneously blow up all Iranian nuclear research facilities, infrastructure, airfields, military bases and ports – preventing any and all Iranian counter attacks against US strategic interests in the region. They further embellish their totalitarian vision by arguing that the Islamic republic would be overthrown by a populace grateful to the Americans for bombing their country, destroying its infrastructure and killing thousands. The Neo-Cons’ infantile delusions then lead them to project the emergence of a pro-Western Iranian secular state favorable to American occupation of the Middle East and, of course, wholeheartedly renouncing any ‘existential’ threats to the survival of its new ally, Israel.
On the issue of the consequences of an attack on Iran, the US military is totally at odds with the Israeli-ZPC propaganda. Senior military officials based on real estimates on the ground and from hard data from intelligence experts, estimate that Iran will be in a position to retaliate and cause enormous immediate and long-term damage to strategic US and global interests:
First, CENTCOM estimates that Iran will set-off air to sea missiles aimed at the US fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf and land-to-land missiles destroying oil production sites in the Gulf States, creating a major world oil shortage, doubling oil prices and provoking a world recession as energy scarcities paralyze production.
Second, the Iranians will send several tens of thousands of its elite forces across the border into Iraq, joining with its Iraqi Shia allies to overrun US bases and endanger the lives of the 160,000 US troops currently in Iraq. This would undermine the entire Iraq war effort, inflicting a strategic defeat and further undermine US military capacity in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Third, the Iranians will be able to easily block the Strait of Hormuz so that one third of the Middle East’s oil shipments will be paralyzed.
Fourth, military intelligence estimates that Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ in Asia, Africa, Europe and perhaps in North America will be activated and engage in ‘big impact’ terrorist missions. Whatever the likelihood of this scenario, it is clear that the US military anticipates major protests and perhaps even the violent overthrow of its clients in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.
Zion-Cons have neither countered military intelligence estimates with any credible counter-facts, nor even seriously considered the likely disastrous consequences affecting the US, Europe and Asia: They only consider Israel’s ‘security’ and its regional ambitions.
No Zionophile or Zion-Con has considered the enormous costs in terms of US lives and damage to the fragile economy and society of a full scale third prolonged war. In effect, the Zion-cons will kill their own US goose, which has laid golden eggs for Israel for almost 6 decades. It is an example of the Zion-Cons’ supreme arrogance and sense of their own power that they feel they can plunge the US into a third Asian war which will devastate the US economy and cause world-wide energy scarcity, and still secure their yearly tribute of $3 Billion Dollars foreign aid for Israel as well as guaranteeing oil for Israel by diverting it from the needs of American consumers and industries. It is clear that in doing a cost-benefit analysis on a US attack on Iran, Israeli and ZPC operatives have approvingly figured that the costs are on the US side of the ledger and the benefits are for the Israelis. Were it known, American public opinion might disapprove.
The main difference is that the US does not have a comparable Washington Power Configuration in Tel Aviv to influence Israeli policy to match the Jewish state’s Zionist Power Configuration which shapes and influences US Middle East policy.
Military-Zioncon: Punch and Counter-Punch
By the end of 2007 it is clear that the US military, led by CENTCOM Commander, Admiral William Fallon and Security of Defense Gates, have successfully, if temporarily contained the strenuous Israeli-Zion-Con military thrust to war. Though Gates backtracked under ZPC pressure and later denied that he had taken the military option off the table. In response, the Zion-Cons launched an end-around tactic by intensifying their efforts to impose a global economic blockade to strangle the Iranian economy. The Zionized White House has pressured and secured the whole-hearted support of Gordon Brown of Great Britain, and Sarkozy of France for a set of economic sanctions that will in effect rupture all dialog with the IAEA.
This is the strategic goal of the Zion-Cons: no dialog, no diplomacy, and blockaded economy, ripe for Anglo-French-American bombing. The Zion-cons have shrewdly avoided a head on confrontation with Fallon and his allies. They recognize that a bruising battle in which they might expose their Fifth Column credentials and in which their ‘anti-Semitic’ slanders against a popular patriotic American general might backfire by finally arousing a silent, latent anti-Zionist majority to speak out. Since the military would be called upon to carry out the military option which it strongly opposes, the Zion-Cons turn to their automatic, rubber-stamp majority in the US Congress and especially their most zealous Zionists in the federal bureaucracy. Treasury Department functionary Levey has devoted all of his working time browbeating, banning and blacklisting any and all businesses and banks dealing directly or indirectly with Iran or its trading partners.
Judeo-Centrism: From Ghetto Defense to Imperial Ambitions
One of the driving forces of the ZPC’s accumulation of political power is their ability to totally displace pre-existing non-Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations from influence in the Jewish community over the past 60 years. Secondly the formation of the ZPC resulted from the unification and centralization of a vast array of disparate groups and local community organizations around a single dominant political issue: unconditional and total support for a foreign power, Israel, with a kind of intolerant religious fervor which in the past burnt dissenters in public displays of piety and today hounds them from public office. In the past and in the recent period, there was a popular Yiddish saying in evaluating public policy: “Is it good for the Jews?” This narrow, parochial viewpoint had special meaning at a time when Jews were a persecuted minority trying to maximize their security and minimize risks in relatively closed societies. In recent times, in certain New York intellectual circles, it was part of a jocular repertoire designed at one and the same time to recall an earlier identity and to mock some of the overweening pretensions of new rich upstarts, especially real estate billionaires who displace and exploit low-income and minority tenants while making generous contributions to Israel.
But what was defensive and perhaps justified in an earlier era has become a deadly practice in the context of affluence, political power and organizational cohesion. A Judeocentric view of the world, which sees the embodiment of ‘what’s good for the Jews’ in providing unconditional support to an aggressive colonial state (Israel), has become a formula for disaster. In the new context where Jews represent almost a quarter of US billionaires and occupy high positions of government decision-making, the dominant Zionist discourse and practice has resulted not in defensive measures protecting a persecuted minority but offensive actions prejudicing the American majority.
In the case of Iraq, this has led to the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians and the displacement of many millions more. In the US it has resulted in milking the US taxpayers annually for well-over $3 billion dollars to subsidize an Israeli-Jewish population with an annual per capita income of $30,000 and universal health care. The Judeo-centric view as interpreted by the Israel-Firsters has led to the sacrifice of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq. In the US, Judeocentric narrative has led to the denial of our democratic rights, our freedom to debate our Zionist problem, and the ZPC’s support for Israel’s pursuit of Middle East dominance through American military power.
Judeocentrism and US Jews: Judeocentrism is not the ideology or practice of the great majority of US Jews, even less a rising number of young, better-educated Jews with no deep ideological ties to Israel. But Judeocentrism is the perspective which guides the organized, active minority driving the major Zionist organizations and their billionaire camp followers. And it is always the organized, zealous and well-financed minority, which assumes ‘legitimate’ claim to speak ‘for the community’ – despite the protests of numerous un-organized Jewish intellectual critics.
CONCLUSION
The deepening and all-important conflict between the pro-Israel warmongers and the anti-war American senior officers is reaching a bitter climax. As the US military disintegrates under prolonged colonial warfare, the ZPC intensifies its campaign for a third war for Israel and against Iran, a war which will totally shatter the US military forces.
The fundamental question emerging for most senior officers, in private gatherings and informal discussions is “Who commands our Commander in Chief?” The deep animosity of US senior active military officers frequently erupts at the ZPC’s careless and callous disregard for American lives. They disdainfully refer to the Zion-Con policymakers as ‘arm-chair military strategists’ who never fought a war, never shot or been shot. At one level, the senior military officers are appalled by the ignorance of the Zion-Con military ‘experts’ and policy-makers featured by the Zion-Con controlled mass media.
Exit Strategies
One of the most frequent military criticisms is that the Zion-Con policy-makers don’t have an exit strategy – attributing it to their lack of knowledge or strategic thinking. In reality, the lack of Zion-Con concern for a realistic exit strategy is because the Zion-Cons are concerned (in light of Israel’s priorities) only with an entry policy, namely degrading the invaded countries’ military and economic potential. Secondly the Zion-Cons do not have an exit strategy because they believe the US should stay, colonize, build bases and engage in a prolonged war for a chimerical total victory.
The question of ‘who commands the Commander in Chief’ goes to the entire core of our constitutional order, because it raises the deeper question of ‘who defines the national interests’ for which the military are fighting? If as we have documented, the ZPC has effectively colonized the White House and Legislative Branches (and the Justice Department and the appointment of an ultra-Zionist Attorney General Michael Mulkasey and Israel-First Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff), to serve the interests of a foreign power (Israel) – in what sense does a colonized political system serve the interests of a democratic public? Does there exist a primary condition that makes it possible to speak of a democracy, namely national self-determination, de-colonization necessary for the re-democratization of American political institutions?
So far the only effective resistance to colonization has comes from the US military. The military is a non-democratic, hierarchical institution but an institution representative of the public’s opposition to colonial encroachments.
What would normally be considered the prime movers challenging Zion-Con colonization, namely the President, Congress, the political parties or even the antiwar movements have abdicated their responsibilities — they have been in part or whole colonized and neutralized.
By default, it has fallen to senior military commanders who reject being commanded by the ZPC at the service of Israel
Paradoxically, it is the military, which has taken over the struggle against an offensive war with Iran, a struggle where the American peace movement has failed. It is the military, which has challenged the Zion-Con agenda, where the Congress has been corrupted and capitulated for reasons of campaign financing, political blackmail and double loyalty.
Where does that leave us, as democrats and anti-colonists?
We should be able to have both an independent de-colonized and democratic America, governed by patriotic Americans. But suppose we have to choose between de-colonization led by the military or a corrupt colonized electoral system – what should be done?
The ideal solution would be a revitalized civil society including secularist citizens, non-fundamentalist Muslims and Christians, and non-Zionist Jews, organized in an anti-war, anti-colonial movement and political parties allied with patriotic officers to ‘re-found the republic’. The purpose would be to establish a republic to ‘defend the heartland’ from fires, floods, economic pillage, terrorists, ecological predators and foreign agents acting on behalf of alien regimes. Can it happen? We shall see. What is becoming clear however is that the anti-colonial imperative is growing stronger by the day, if it doesn’t come from below, it may have to come from above.
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China names world’s ‘hacking empire’
RT | March 15, 2022
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February. … continue
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