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Faithful Circle – A response to Noam Chomsky’s book ‘Fateful Triangle’

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests

By Jay Knott | September 17, 2010

Hypotheses and Tests
1. Hypotheses

“Dear Mr. President: We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel, and encourage you to continue to do [so] before international organizations such as the United Nations. The United States has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest and must continue to do so. Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and a vibrant democracy. Israel is also a partner to the United States on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran.” – Jewish Virtual Library [1].

This is the beginning of the resolution passed by the US Senate on June 21 2010, supporting Israel’s attack on a convoy of unarmed aid ships headed toward Gaza, which killed nine people.

It begins with four sentences, each one of which asserts that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA. But if Israel is such an ally, why the need to emphasize it? It’s as if the senators are arguing with someone who says that Israel is NOT as useful as we tend to believe. Whoever that is, it’s not Noam Chomsky. Both left-wing thinkers like Chomsky and establishment politicians reinforce the idea that US interests coincide with those of Israel, though they differ on how good US interests are. Sometimes, when people say something too stridently, it is because they secretly know that it is false.

This review was sparked by an online critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Middle East by Jeff Blankfort, a reply to it, and the internet discussions around them [2], [3]. Several contributors to these discussions come from traditional anti-racist left-wing backgrounds, but, unlike most of the left, have taken it to its logical conclusion, opposing Jewish power as the most important form of ethnically-based oppression in the West today.

Chomsky fan Jeremy Hammond [3] urges Blankfort’s supporters to read Chomsky’s “Fateful Triangle” [4]. So I did. I am not impressed by Chomsky’s fame nor by the book’s approximately two thousand references. I look at the arguments.

Professor Chomsky made one of the greatest discoveries in twentieth-century science, the language instinct, in a 1959 critique of psychologist B. F. Skinner [5]. Because he’s a genius, we expect more of him than unsubstantiated platitudes. But everyone makes mistakes. Einstein spent the better part of his career trying to explain why the universe is not expanding, and Chomsky didn’t figure out that there are genes for grammar [6].

He flayed Skinner on the vagueness of his terms, and for changing the meaning of words when convenient. Chomsky therefore knows that vagueness makes a hypothesis untestable, and therefore unscientific.

Chomsky brought clarity to the science of language development, but he is surprisingly contradictory on the politics of the Middle East, for a man with such a scientific, logical brain. For example, on the one hand, he denies the importance of the Israel Lobby. After all, if Israel is helping US ‘elites’ maintain their ‘hegemony’ in the ‘region’, they would hardly need a lobby to remind them of it. Universities and co-operatives are tentatively discussing a boycott of Israel. Chomsky argues against a boycott of Israeli produce, because the Lobby would call us ‘hypocrites’, unless we boycott the US too [7]. So he thinks this ‘unimportant’ Lobby could undermine a boycott of Israel by mere accusations.

By page 4, Chomsky already makes it clear that he defends the Jewish State. He criticizes its current policies, which he says are caused by American Zionists, who cause its “moral degeneration and ultimate destruction”. In my pamphlet “The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism” [8], I sarcastically cited Stephen Zunes [9] for claiming America was responsible for pushing poor little Israel into Lebanon in 2006. I didn’t realize how close Zunes’s attempt to make excuses for Jewish murderers was to Chomsky’s position until I read ‘Fateful Triangle’. Chomsky and his followers want us to believe that Israeli ethnic cleansing has ‘degenerated’ since 1948 because of American influence. This means the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 was morally superior to those in Lebanon in 1982, but the Hanukkah slaughter of 2008-9 was worse.

He says US ‘support’ has blocked Israel trying more moral policies, to the ‘despair’ of progressive Israeli Jews, on page 442. There is a cruder version of this ‘corruption’ narrative. It is part of the almost universally believed story of Jews as eternal victims. It enables Jewish Americans to support apartheid whilst thinking of themselves as liberals. They blackmail the left into accepting a much softer attitude toward Jewish supremacy than toward white identity.

Chomsky is by no means the worst example of chutzpah in the left. He is contradictory rather than duplicitous. He exposes Jewish emotional blackmail. He is contemptuous of professional Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. He is fearless and merciless at ridiculing the hypocrisy and hysteria for which American Jewish organizations are notorious, who claim that critics of the Lobby are anti-Semitic. Some on the left also harass and slander pro-Palestinian peace activists. Since Israel is the only beneficiary of these divisive tactics, we call them ‘crypto-Zionists’.

But Chomsky’s main weakness is his failure to scientifically test his assertion that Israel is an ally of the USA. On page 3, without evidence, he says that US policy favors “a Greater Israel that will dominate the region in the interests of American power”.

To this end, Chomsky assumes that Arab nationalism is anti-West, whereas Jewish nationalism is pro-West. The former was allied to the Soviet Union. But this is at root a circular argument – the US supports Israel because it is an ally, and Israel is an ally because the US supports it. The reason some Arab leaders temporarily turned to Russia is because they were rejected by America, and the main reason for that is the influence of Israel. Chomsky confuses cause and effect.

The phrase ‘control of the oil’ is thrown around by Chomsky and his circle as liberally as the word ‘region’. It’s a vague leftist feel-good dumbing-down designed to prevent us from thinking through exactly what ‘control’ means, why precisely cruise missiles are useful to oil companies, and if killing Palestinian children helps US interests.

At this point, I should define ‘US interests’. I mean the interests of the US capitalist class. Unconditional support for Israel is obviously against the interests of the majority of Americans, who belong to the proletariat. But in that respect, it doesn’t differ from other unethical US foreign policies. What differentiates Zionism is that it is opposed to the interests of most of the ruling class too.

I used a Marxist phrase there. Chomsky prefers saying ‘elites’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ in his bestselling books. Even if the ‘elites’ really do ‘perceive’ it is in US interests to throw seven million dollars a day into a black hole, they are mistaken, and Palestine Solidarity has the task of explaining that to them and to those who work and vote for them.

Chomsky claims that the US supports Israel because Israel supports US war crimes – “Israel showed how to treat third-world upstarts properly” (page 29). This puts the cart before the horse. Right after World War II, Zionists were third-world upstarts themselves, engaged in terrorism in Palestine against an imperialist power. President Truman supported these upstarts, and later, when they were no longer upstarts, president Eisenhower supported upstarts against them.

This shows two things:

1. America doesn’t automatically oppose upstarts, and
2. Israel persuaded America to support its fight against upstarts which threaten Israel, rather than America supporting Israel because it combats upstarts which oppose America.

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests. But its friends in the media make it look as if the two countries’ enemies are the same, by amalgamating very different Arab and Muslim causes and parties. Most of these oppose Israel in principle – only a very small subset are inherently anti-American. It is in America’s interests to divide them. It is in Israel’s interests to prevent this. And it is in humanity’s interest to divorce America and Israel.

Chomsky claims that to be a Zionist means a bi-national state, with the right of ‘self-determination’ of the two nations within Palestine. It’s clear which of the nations would dominate the other, but Chomsky appears to be unaware of this.

To his credit, on page 442 of his book, Chomsky predicted the defeat of the Israeli Defense Forces, which didn’t happen until seven years later, in Lebanon, in 2006. The Gaza flotilla massacre of 2010 was another disastrous error for Israel, leading to a split with Turkey, formerly its most important ally in the ‘region’. There is an opportunity to start to undermine Zionism, the only remaining example of serious racial oppression in the Western world. Is Chomsky on board?

Contradicting his view that Israel obeys America, Chomsky refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as ‘complete obedience’ to Zionist opposition to freedom of speech, on page 337, under the heading ‘The West Falls Into Line’. He also says how the allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to blackmail the elite political spectrum in Western countries into supporting Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, but then he drops the ball, reiterating hackneyed rhetoric about US policy. It’s not really US policy. It is the policy of supporters of a foreign power pretending to be pro-American.

Note that my argument does not imply promoting patriotism. It means saying, in effect, IF you are a patriotic American, you should oppose your country’s ardent support for Israel. Neither does it imply anti-Semitism. It means recognizing that the interests of most of the inhabitants of the USA would be served by reducing support to Israel. The interests of the Jewish minority would be served by increasing it. This should not be controversial. In particular, the American left, with its keen awareness of ‘privilege’, should be able to listen to this argument. But mostly, it cannot.

At one point, Chomsky discusses the hypocrisy of the Israeli leaders in using pogroms against Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century as an excuse for doing the same thing in Lebanon in 1982. But he doesn’t try to question the view that Jews have always been victims, wherever they have wandered. This myth was reiterated by Republican president George Bush Senior when he was trying to defend himself against the ‘anti-Semitism’ slur by groveling to the Lobby in 1991.

On page 446, Chomsky describes young American Jews, raised on the handouts of the Anti-Defamation League, having a ‘corrupting’ effect on Israel. He must also be very aware of the corruption of Israeli teenagers effected by taking them to the ruins of German concentration camps and teaching them to hate [10], or the Hillel Jewish campus organization which teaches young American Jews that Israel is their homeland. He doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the obsession with ‘the’ Holocaust which gets more intense the further it recedes into history.

After complaining about Israel’s rape of Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties for a few hundred pages, Chomsky resorts to the ‘region’ trick to try to explain it. Page 442:

“The US has been more than pleased to acquire a militarized dependency, technologically advanced and ready to undertake tasks that few are willing to endure – support for the Guatemalan genocide, for example – while helping to contain threats to American dominance in the most critical region in the world, where ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ [the Saudi oilfields] must be firmly held”.

On page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”. One would expect that the USA would not give a country $7 million a day, more than all other countries combined – without demanding that it serves its interests. But the predictions of this hypothesis fail. Israel feels no pressure at all to serve US interests, and Israeli politicians boast of American subservience, whilst their American accomplices harass those who state this simple truth. This is true whether you are a media mogul, a movie star, a politician, or an anti-war activist.

At the beginning of his book, Chomsky claims that Israel helps the US by protecting the Saudi oilfields. At the end, he says it blackmails the US by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on this great material prize. Iran could also greatly harm the Western world by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which fleets of oil tankers pass – but somehow, America stands up to Iran. Why can’t it stand up to Israel? Because it’s an asset?

Chomsky expends effort showing how the US media is biased in favor of Israel and against Palestinians, but he doesn’t call a spade a spade: the only serious racial prejudice left in America is pro-Jewish bias. That is why Israeli children’s deaths are reported at a rate seven times higher than those of Palestinian’s [11].

2. Tests

I propose testing Chomsky’s views using the time-honored methods of asking
– what does the theory predict will happen, and does it actually happen?
– is the theory the simplest explanation of what happens?
– what would we expect to happen if the theory was not true, and does it actually happen?
– is there an alternative theory which better explains what happens?

There are two rival hypotheses:

1. The main reason for the USA’s unconditional support for Israel’s unique persistence in imposing apartheid is that it is in US capitalist interests
2. The main reason for this support is the power of American Jewish organizations
Chomsky defends, with contradictions, the first hypothesis. Mearsheimer and Walt defend the second.

Let’s test each theory using scientific methods. Politics is not an exact science like physics, but we can at least try.

1. The basic principle of science: does Chomsky’s hypothesis [4] lead to a simpler explanation of events than Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel Lobby theory [12]?

2. An abstract test. ‘Abstract’ does not mean ‘vague’, but is scientifically respectable. Without any concrete examples, one can test the Chomsky hypothesis as follows: it is reasonable to say that, for any two nations, they have areas where their interests coincide, and areas where they clash. The USA never acts against Israel’s interests, with some very minor exceptions. This means that, without giving any examples, we can say that America always supports Israel’s interests when their interests collide.

3. Falsification: ask what would be the case if Chomsky’s hypothesis is wrong. What would poor little Israel do if it were NOT serving US interests, if Americans ceased to corrupt it? Would it let the Palestinians back, decommission its nuclear weapons, and abandon its racial definition of citizenship?

4. Which of the arguments depends on the scientific methods outlined above, and which on vague, shifting definitions?

Chomsky makes, without argument, the assertion that if it were not for Israel’s ‘perceived geopolitical role’, a trite, content-free phrase, the Israel Lobby would ‘probably’ be unable to persuade the ‘elite’ to support Israel (page 22). So why do they bother, then? Why do Jews rant and rave in the media about ‘anti-Semitic incidents’ whenever anyone in the US makes timid criticism of their country? It’s not that politicians perceive that Israel is an asset, it’s just that they know what happens to those who perceive otherwise – the Lobby makes some calls, and they lose their jobs [13]. Chomsky’s theory that Israel is an ally would predict the Israel Lobby would barely exist – real allies of the US like Japan don’t have energetic, well-funded lobbies in Washington DC, ready to call on hordes of faithful followers to phone politicians and write letters to newspapers defending their nations’ interests. They don’t need them. Chomsky’s theory fails the test.

There is more to it than just rich Jewish organizations like the ADL and AIPAC. There is social pressure not to mention the Lobby. Whereas no-one accuses Chomsky of racism for claiming that Jews suffer for the interests of other Western peoples, in complete defiance of the evidence, those of us who point out that the reverse is true, with the facts on our side, are accused of anti-Semitism. If Israel were an asset, there would be no need for this manipulation of Western European culture, which has a unique record of abandoning racism, despite what the left tells us.

The ‘Israeli Sparta’ argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal etc. by Jewish neoconservatives posing as classical scholars can easily be disposed of. Sparta defended Greece. Israel does not defend America. On page 21, ignoring the evidence, Chomsky agrees with the pseudo-Hellenists, saying that the Israeli Defense Forces provides a backup for the US armed forces. In fact Israel has never been able to supply soldiers for any US operation in the region. In the Iraq crisis of 1990, Syria gave military support to the US, but not Israel. Israel was unable to respond even when Iraqi missiles landed on Tel Aviv, because it would have split the coalition invading Iraq. Chomsky’s argument fails the test.

Chomsky reviewed ‘The Israel Lobby’ [12] when it broke through the censors of the US liberal left [14]. “Another problem that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life… How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby?” he asks [15]. Chomsky’s review of ‘The Israel Lobby’ implies the oil companies CANNOT be powerless in the face of a mere lobby. But the assumptions behind Chomsky’s question don’t stand up. Mearsheimer and Walt DO address the role of these companies, explaining how, if they had their way, US policy in the Middle East would change. Leftists in America half-adopt Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ without naming it (they say ‘corporate greed’ instead). It is one of the few aspects of Marxism which can be tested, and it fails miserably to explain the US position on the Israel/Palestine question. The interests of big corporations do not lead to invading Lebanon, persecuting Palestine, and stirring up Islamic extremism.

Why has the US consistently supported Israel, and inconsistently supported Arab nationalists? Egypt’s Nasser, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s al-Assad all had a pretty good record of keeping down ‘upstarts’, particularly radical Islamic ones, so why not, according to Chomsky’s logic, ally with the radical Arab nationalist states? The US has allied with various Middle Eastern states at various times, but only its support for Israel is invariant. Again, these questions constitute a test of Chomsky’s hypothesis. You try to figure out what the hypothesis would predict, then try to find counter-examples, where the actual events are incompatible with the predicted ones. It isn’t difficult, particularly in this case.

Chomsky claims that one reason America supports Israel is because it is a ‘laboratory’ for US military and surveillance technology. This is easily tested by asking if any other country would be eager to take Israel’s place.

The argument that oil is the main reason for US support for Israel is too trivial to waste time on. When America attacks a Middle Eastern country, the left chants ‘no war for oil’. If the policy causes the price of oil to drop, capitalism benefits. If the price rises, the oil companies benefit. Either way, the left trumpets the evidence. The ‘oil’ explanation cannot be falsified. It is not wrong – it is not even a valid hypothesis.

In a similar violation of scientific methodology, Chomsky tries to use the fact that the USA approves of Israeli war crimes as evidence that the dog wags the tail, that Israel serves Uncle Sam. In fact, this ‘evidence’ contributes nothing at all to our understanding of the relationship between the two states. It is equally compatible with the two opposing arguments, so it is not a test which selects which of them are true. Chomsky does give some of the same examples of American subservience as Mearsheimer and Walt in ‘The Israel Lobby’ [12]

– US presidents mildly criticize Israel building settlements on Palestinian land
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass

but Chomsky doesn’t ask the obvious question – is this all

1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for white/US/capitalist hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps Western European interests in the USA?

By means of the Lobby, the tail wags the dog. Its the simplest, clearest, and most economical explanation of the facts. This is how science progresses. A good example of why simpler is better can be found in a recent paper on the evolution of social insects such as ants and bees [16]. We should try to use the same criterion in the study of human societies.

Like everything else, the question of Jewish control of the media can be approached emotionally. I prefer the scientific approach. I approach the argument about Jewish control of the press, etc., on its merits, not on how much it reminds people of ancient Tsarist calumnies. Surely the most simple explanation of the fact that

“Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship” (page 31)

is because Jews are overrepresented in mainstream journalism and scholarship, and quite a few of these Jews defend Jewish interests. This kind of statement is acceptable in Israel, whose inhabitants are mostly proud of what they call ‘the Jewish Lobby’ in America. It is acceptable in countries like Malaysia. Why is it so difficult for us?

The answer is obvious. We are afraid of being anti-Semitic. I found a solution to this problem. I stopped caring about it.

1. – US Senate Resolution, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/ussen062110.html
2. – Jeff Blankfort, http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/07/21/jeff-blankfort-chomsky-and-palestine-asset-or-liability
3. – Jeremy Hammond, http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/rejoinder-to-criticism-of-chomsky-asset-or-liability
4. – ‘Fateful Triangle’, Noam Chomsky, South End Press, 1999
5. – “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior”, Noam Chomsky, http://cogprints.org/1148/1/chomsky.htm
6. – ‘The Language Instinct’, Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, November 2000
7. – Alison Weir, radio interview with Noam Chomsky – http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/CNI:-Jerusalem-Calling/archives/date/selected/07-08-2010.html
8. – ‘The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism’, Jay Knott, 2008, http://pacificaforum.org/mass
9. – ‘How Washington Goaded Israel Into War’, Stephen Zunes, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=9605, August 2006
10. – ‘Defamation’ – a movie about the Anti-Defamation League – http://ishare.rediff.com/video/others/defamation-movie-trailer/888451
11. – ‘If Americans Knew’ media analyzes, http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/
12. – ‘The Israel Lobby’, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007
13. – “They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby”, Paul Findlay, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989
14. – ‘The Atlantic’ magazine rejected the original ‘Israel Lobby’ paper, on the transparently false grounds of ‘poor scholarship’. When it came out as a book, the authors toured the USA to promote it, but found that local papers didn’t send reporters to cover it. The Lobby demonstrated the authors’ hypothesis by trying to suppress it.
15. – ‘The Israel Lobby?’ – Noam Chomsky, 2006, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-israel-lobby-by-noam-chomsky
16. – “Natural selection alone can explain eusociality”, Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson – http://www.physorg.com/news201957206.html

September 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, Israel, Jewish Virtual Library, Middle East, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, United States | Leave a comment

On James Petras’ Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama

By James Petras | Axis of Logic | October 29, 2008

The presidential elections in the US, once again, provide an acid test of the integrity and consequential conduct of US intellectuals. If it is the duty and responsibility of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, the recent statements of most of our well-known and prestigious public pundits have failed miserably. Instead of highlighting, exposing and denouncing the reactionary foreign and domestic policies of Democratic Party candidate Senator Barack Obama, they have chosen to support him, ‘critically, offering as excuses that even ‘limited differences’ can result in positive outcomes,and that ‘Obama is the lesser evil’ and ‘creates an opportunity for a possibility of change.’

What makes these arguments untenable is the fact that Obama’s public pronouncements, his top policy advisers, and the likely policymakers in his government have openly defined a most bellicose foreign policy and a profoundly reactionary domestic economic policy totally in line with Paulson-Bush-Wall Street. On the major issues of war, peace, the economic crisis and the savaging of the US wage and salaried class, Obama promises to extend and deepen the policies which the majority of Americans reject and repudiate.

Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama

1. Obama publicly and repeatedly promises to escalate the US military intervention in Afghanistan, increasing the number of US troops, expanding their operations and engaging in systematic cross-border attacks. In other words, Obama is a greater warmonger than Bush.

2. Obama publicly has declared that his regime will extend the ‘war against terrorism’ by systematic, large-scale ground and air attacks on Pakistan, thus escalating the war to include villages, towns and cities deemed sympathetic to the Afghan resistance.

3. Obama opposes the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq in favor of redeployment; the relocation of US troops from combat zones to training and logistical positions, contingent on the military capability of the Iraqi Army to defeat the resistance. Obama opposes a clearly defined deadline to withdraw US forces from Iraq because US troops in Iraq are essential to pursuing his overall policies in the Middle East, which include military confrontations with Iran, Syria and Southern Lebanon.

4. Obama has declared his unconditional support for the position of the pro-Israel Lobby and the colonial expansionist and bellicose policies of the Jewish state. He has promised to back Israeli military attacks whatever the cost to the US. His abject servility to Israel was evident in his speech at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington 2008. Top advisers who have long and notorious links to the top echelons of the principle Zionist propaganda mills and the Presidents of the Leading Jewish American Organizations wrote the speech and formulate his Middle East policy.

5. Obama has promised to attack Iran if it continues to process uranium for its nuclear programs. Twice, just weeks before the elections, Obama’s running mate Joseph Biden spelled out a series of ‘points of conflict’ (including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea) emphasizing that Obama ‘would respond forcefully’. Obama’s senior Middle East advisers include leading Zionists like Dennis Ross, closely linked to the ‘Bipartisan Policy Center’, which published a report serving as a blueprint for war with Iran. Obama’s proposed offer to negotiate with Iran is little more than a pretext for issuing an ultimatum to Iran to surrender its sovereignty or face massive military assault.

6. Obama unconditionally supports Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the leading cause of Middle East hostility, warfare and the discredit of US policy in the region. With three dozen Israel-Firsters among his leading campaign organizers, top policy advisers, speech writers and among the likely candidates for cabinet positions, there is virtually no hope of ‘influencing from within’ or ‘applying popular pressure’ to change Obama’s slavish submission to the Zionist Power Configuration. By supporting Obama, the “progressive intellectuals” are, in effect, allies of his Zionist mentors.

7. On the domestic front, Obama’s key economic advisers have impeccable Wall Street credentials. He gave unquestioning and immediate endorsement to Treasury Secretary Paulson’s $700 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the richest investment banks in the US. Obama has failed to challenge Paulson or the banks over the use of Federal funds for buyouts and acquisitions instead of loans and credit to producers and homeowners. Obama’s backing of Paulson and the Wall Street bailout is matched by his meager proposals to suspend mortgage foreclosures for a three-month period, pending re-negotiations of interest payments. Obama proposes to escalate transfers of government funds to mismanaged financial institutions and bankrupt capitalist corporations, in efforts to save failed capitalism rather than pursue any new large-scale, long-term public investment programs which will generate well-paid employment for workers.

1. Obama’s economic team has openly declared their embrace and practice of ‘free market’ ideology and opposition to any effort to engage in large-scale injections of government funds in publicly-owned productive activity and social services in the face of wide-spread private sector failure, corruption and collapse.

2. Obama embraces failed private sector health plans, run and controlled by corporate insurance companies, conservative medical and hospital associations and Big Pharma. He publicly rejects a universal national health program modeled after the successful Federal Medicare program in favor of inefficient, state-subsidized private for profit plans that are costly and beyond the means of over one third of US families.

3. Obama is and continues to be an advocate for Big Agro and its highly subsidized and profitable ethanol program, which has increased food prices for millions in the US and for hundreds of millions in the world.

4. Obama advocates continuing the criminal embargo on Cuba, hostile confrontation with Venezuela’s populist President Chavez and other Latin American reformers and the duplicitous policy of promoting protectionism at home and free market access to Latin America. His key policy advisers on Latin America propose cosmetic changes in style and diplomacy but unrelenting support for re-asserting US hegemony.

5. Obama has not proposed, nor do his free market advisers and billionaire financial backers envision, any comprehensive plan or strategy to get us out of the deepening recession. On the contrary, the course of piecemeal measures presented by Obama are internally inconsistent: Fiscal austerity is incompatible with job creation; bailing out Wall Street drains funds from productive investment; and pursuing new wars undermine domestic recovery.

CONCLUSION

The intellectuals who, in the name of ‘realism’, support a politician who publicly and openly embraces new wars, billionaire bailouts and for profit, private sector-run health programs are repudiating their own claims as ‘responsible critics’. They are what C. Wright Mills called ‘crackpot realists’, abdicating their responsibility as critical intellectuals. In purporting to support the ‘lesser evil’ they are promoting the ‘greater evil’: The continuation of four more years of deepening recession, colonial wars and popular alienation. Moreover, they are allies of the mass media, major parties and the legal system which has marginalized or outright excluded the alternative candidates, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, who do speak out and oppose the war, the pro-Wall Street bailouts and propose genuine large-scale public investment in the domestic economy, a universal single payer health program, sustainable and pro-environment economic policies and large-scale, long-term income redistributive policies.

What is crass and unacceptable is the argument of these intellectuals, (an insignificant pimple on the Democratic donkey’s rear-end) that for a single moment believe that their ‘critical support’ of the Obama political machine will open space for radical ideas. The Zionists and civilian militarists totally control Obama’s war policy in the Middle East: There will be no space for peace with Iran, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq. Wall Street controls the Obama’s financial policy: There will be no space for some Cambridge progressive to sneak in a handout for families losing their homes.

If the trade unions that have spent a hundred million dollars on each presidential campaign have failed to secure a single piece of progressive legislation in over 50 years, isn’t it delusional for our progressive ‘public intellectuals’ to imagine that they, in their splendid organizational isolation, can ‘pressure’ President Obama to renounce his advisers, backers and public defense of military escalation, to see his way to peace with Iran and to promote social justice for our workers and unemployed?

August 14, 2010 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iran, Middle East, Obama, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Israel’s War with Iran and The Zionist Power Configuration in America

By Prof. James Petras | July 15, 2008

“My strong preference here is to handle all this (US conflict with Iran) diplomatically with the other powers of government, ours and many others as opposed to any kind of strike occurring… From the US perspective, from the United States military perspective in particular, opening up a third front (Israeli and/or US act of war against Iran) would be extremely stressful to us” testimony of Admiral Michael Mulligan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. July 2, 2008.

“If Iran continues its nuclear arms program – we will attack it. The sanctions aren’t effective. There will be no choice but to attack Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear program.” Shaul Mofaz, Israeli Minister of Transportation in Yediot Ahronot, June 6, 2008.

“The present economic sanctions on Iran have exhausted themselves. Iranian businesspeople who would not be able to land anywhere in the world would pressure the regime.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, speaking to US House Speaker, Senator Nancy Pelosi in favor of a unilateral, pre-emptive US naval blockade of Iran. (Haaretz May 21, 2008.)

“It was a triumphalist conference. Even this powerful organization (AIPAC), the most powerful group in the US Israel lobby, had never seen anything like. Seven thousand Jewish functionaries from all over the United States came together to accept the obeisance of the entire Washington elite. The three presidential hopefuls (Hillary went too) made speeches, trying to outdo each other in flattery. Three hundred senators and members of Congress crowded the hallways. Everybody who wanted to be elected or re-elected to any office came to see and be seen.” Uri Avnery, London Review of Books, July 3, 2008. page 18

House Resolution 362 received unanimous support from all the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations including the 7,000 delegation attending the AIPAC Conference in Washington DC on June 2-4, 2008.

“Resolution 362 became our chief legislative priority”, according to AIPAC’s website, June 4, 2008.

“The President should prohibit the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products imposing stringent inspection requirements in all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo ships enters and departing Iran .” US House Resolution 362 introduced May 22, 2008.

Resolution 362 gained 170 co-sponsors or nearly 40% of the House and 19 co-sponsors in the Senate in less than a month.

Introduction

Zionists and their allies in Congress authored, implemented and enforced sanctions against Iran, which hinder the ambitions of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Israeli war exercises and public declarations threatening a massive air assault on Iran have pushed petroleum prices to world records. This spring 2008, the most powerful pro-Israel Jewish Lobby in the US , AIPAC held their annual conference and secured the support and commitment of both major US Presidential candidates and the majority of US members of Congress for an Israeli initiative to impose extreme economic sanctions on Iran with threats of a US/Israeli military attack. In early summer 2008, the AIPAC operatives, who wrote this US Congressional resolution, successfully rounded up Congressional leaders’ support of an air and naval blockade of all critical imports into Iran – a blatant act of war.

Israel adopts a ‘peace policy’ designed to isolate Iran in preparation for an attack – and then immediately violates its terms. The entire spectrum of major Jewish organizations unquestioningly and unconditionally give their active support, as they have in the past, to AIPAC’s domination of the US Presidential candidates as well as to the twists and turns in Israel’s war preparations via military exercises and phony peace gestures.

In the entire history of US relations with oil and gas-producing countries, there is not a single previous case in which it sacrificed profitable investments by its major oil companies at the behest of a foreign power ( Israel ) and its “lobby” – the Zionist Power Configuration.

Israel ’s Two Track Policy Toward Iran

Israel ’s policy to obliterate Iran , in much the same way that the US has devastated Iraq , has followed a carefully planned multi-prong strategy. Israel has relied on direct military attacks, all out wars, economic blockades and the use of overseas Zionist front organizations to destroy Iran ’s allies and strangle its economy.

The Israeli strategy is directed at undermining, weakening and enticing Iranian allies to politically and militarily isolate Tehran , in order to facilitate a full-scale massive air assault without having to deal with military fallout from Iranian allies on its borders.

In pursuit of this ‘isolate and destroy’ strategy, Israel launched a full-scale invasion and massive air and missile bombing of Lebanon knocking out critical civilian infrastructure in the hopes of obliterating Hezbollah, a staunch Iranian ally. Israeli preparation for its Lebanese war began a full year before its sneak attack, using a common minor border incident to invade Hezbollah strongholds in Southern Lebanon . Israel ’s offensive against Hezbollah made no sense from the point of view of its border security. No Israeli military official ever envisioned Hezbollah being any kind of military threat to its national security. At most Israel saw Hezbollah as a serious counterweight to its anemic puppet allies in Beirut .

From the perspective of Israel ’s regional hegemonic perspective, an attack and destruction of Hezbollah would isolate Iran and allow Israel to develop a strategic Middle East client in Beirut , facilitating an air attack.

Hezbollah’s defeat of the Israeli invasion seriously weakened Tel Aviv’s military based strategy to ‘isolate Iran ’ and strengthened Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon , raising its prestige immensely among the Arab and Muslim populations.

The second prong in Israel ’s strategy was to destroy the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine by financing and arming a coup attempt by its Arab clients in the Palestinian Authority,Abbas and Dahlens. Hamas successfully routed the putschists and proceeded to consolidate its rule in Gaza . Israel turned toward a destructive blockade to starve the 1.5 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza into revolt against Hamas. Israel ’s allies in the US and EU poured hundreds of millions of dollars and euros to prop up the corrupt Israeli client regime in the West Bank . Once again Israel failed to militarily or economically destroy Hamas, but that didn’t prevent the Jewish state from turning to its third target – Syria .

In 2007 Israel launched an air invasion of Syria , bombing what it described as a ‘military target’, a low-grade non-military nuclear facility in order to intimidate Syria and weaken the Assad regime’s ties to Iran . While Israel demonstrated its military capacity to violate Syrian sovereignty with impunity, its action did not have any major impact on Iran-Syrian ties.

In response to the repeated failures of the Israeli military strategy of undermining Iran ’s allies, Tel Aviv turned toward a different ‘divide and conquer’ approach. Israel , through its Turkish ally, began ‘peace negotiations’ with Syria , offering to discuss the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights . The trade off for Israel takes the form of peace talks over the Golan in exchange for lessening Damascus ’ military dependence on Iran . Since the Israeli public and most of the Knesset are overwhelmingly opposed to returning the Golan, the peace talks are not intended to end Israeli occupation, but to give the Assad regime a certain credibility among the Western imperial powers and lessen its isolation. The Israeli regime had no trouble selling its new line on Syria to its highly subservient and disciplined supporters among the Presidents of the fifty-two leading American-Jewish organizations. They are well practiced in following the zig-zag of Israeli policy, switching policy of demonizing Syria one day and acknowledging its pragmatism the next. French President Sarkozy followed up the Israeli initiative by inviting Syrian President Assad to Paris with all the pomp and honors of a chief of state.

Two years after its failed military invasion of Lebanon , Tel Aviv sought and pursued negotiations with Hezbollah to exchange prisoners (and/or their remains) as part of a tactical mini-‘détente’. Once again, the US Zionist Power Configuration, after years of denouncing Hezbollah as a mere tool of Iran , accommodated the new Israeli line of recognizing Hezbollah as an independent political interlocutor.

At about the same time (June 2, 2008), Israel finally and perhaps temporarily recognized it could not militarily or economically destroy Hamas, or prevent its military retaliation against Israeli attacks or undermine its mass base of support and signed a military truce to end armed incursions and open entry points in exchange for the end of retaliatory rocket attacks on Israeli towns.

While the new Israeli turn toward peace negotiations, cease fire agreements and prisoner negotiations seems to augur a less belligerent and more realistic assessment of the Middle East balance of power, in fact the new policy is linked with a more extremist, aggressive and war-threatening military policy toward Iran. In late May and early June 2008, while Israel was proposing a more conciliatory approach toward Iran ’s allies, it engaged in a massive military exercise, involving over a hundred warplanes and thousands of commandos in an unmistaken dress rehearsal for an offensive war against Iran . Top officials from the Israeli military command, cabinet and Knesset publicly pronounced their intention to bomb Iran if it proceeded in its entirely legal and non-military uranium enrichment program. Israeli officials secured the tacit and overt approval of US and European Union for its military posture. More important Israel practically dictated the terms of debate in the United Nations Security Council by insisting that it would launch a war unless the harshest economic sanctions (and even a military-economic blockade) were not implemented and enforced by the United Nations.

Israeli policy was operating on several parallel and reinforcing tracks: The ‘peace track’ to engage and neutralize Iran’s Middle East allies, to isolate Iran and polish up its image in the Western mass media; the ‘military track’ to prepare for war, which remains its defining strategy in order to destroy an isolated (from its allies) and economically weakened (by US/EU/UN sanctions) Iran. In pursuit of its relentless drive for Middle East supremacy and the implementation of its two-track strategy, the Israeli state depends on the power of the major American Jewish organizations to promote the policies of the Jewish state in the US .

The Centrality of the ZPC in Israel ’s Pursuit of the Destruction of Iran The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), through its dominant role in making US-Middle East policy, plays a central part in the implementation of all aspects of Israeli foreign policy goals in the region. Israel ’s principle goal over the past five years is the destruction of Iran , to end its opposition to Israel ’s domination of the region. In pursuit of the Israeli agenda, the ZPC led by AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has exploited its control and influence over the US Congress and Executive branches. AIPAC has leveraged the presence of highly placed Israel-Firsters in key positions in Treasury, the Pentagon, Commerce, the National Security Council, the Justice Department and Homeland Security to design and pursue economic and military policies in line with Israel’s war policies toward Iran. AIPAC, through its media and economic leverage undermined domestic opposition. Israel’s power over US bellicose policy toward Iran is so complete that even critics of Washington’s military posture toward Iran refrain from mentioning the powerful role of the ZPC in designing and implementing that policy.

Zionist power was on open display at its annual conference in Washington . At the 2008 AIPAC Conference, over 7,000 delegates representing 100,000 members, met to discuss how to force Washington to implement Israel ’s Middle East priorities, overwhelmingly focused on the Jewish State’s stated objective of militarily destroying Iran . Over 300 US Congress members attended (over 60% of all members of both houses) along with the three major presidential candidates, major cabinet members, including the Secretary of State, Vice President Cheney from the White House and a host of Hollywood celebrities, media moguls and prominent financial and real estate billionaires from Wall Street and its environs.

Presidential candidates competed with each other in swearing their total and unconditional servility to Israel , swearing their utmost to back any and all past, present and future Israeli military attacks. Hillary Clinton promised to implement the equivalent of twelve holocausts against Iran ’s 70 million citizens in her rant to ‘obliterate Iran ’ if it endangered Israel . Obama backed the ultra-orthodox Jewish demand to give Israel sole control over Jerusalem , and joined John McCain and Clinton in promising to bomb Iran if it continued its uranium enrichment program (which they equated with a nuclear weapon – despite the objections of the IAEA and the US intelligence community). All endorsed Israel ’s starvation of Gaza ’s 1.5 million inhabitants and rejected any concessions or negotiations with Hamas , Syria and Hezbollah – even as Israel was already engaged in negotiations for tactical reasons. AIPAC’s entire agenda has been endorsed by the US Congress, the Executive and both parties, including a military blockade of Iran, harsher world sanctions against all global oil and gas corporations, banks and industries dealing with Iran, the immediate transfer of the most advanced missile and attack technology to Israel to facilitate an attack on Iran, and a substantial increase in yearly US military grants to Israel totaling an additional $30 billion dollars over the next decade. The top Israeli officials present, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Prime Minister Olmert took the opportunity to reiterate and re-affirm their will to use military power to force Iran to submit or face destruction, to standing ovations and wild cheering from the ecstatic AIPAC delegates, deriving delirious pleasure from these blood thirsty calls for US military and economic sacrifice!

Nary a single word of dissent was heard from the entire Congressional entourage in attendance; the Presidential candidates assured the zealous Israel-firsters that for the next 4 years Israeli interests would be the centerpiece of US Middle East policies.

The AIPAC conference was no simple ‘show of force’ nor an exercise in ‘group think’ meant to keep the faith of the zealots. It was the kick-off to a full-scale ZPC campaign to implement a series of measures designed to accelerate a US and Israeli military assault against Iran .

The Congressmen and women in attendance at the AIPAC were there for a purpose: to be instructed on what Middle East policies Israel and the ZPC would demand of them. Their presence at the AIPAC conference was not just a courtesy call intended to ‘network’ with wealthy Jewish campaign fund contributors. They were there because of long-standing and intense relations with the ZPC, which made it obligatory to show up and pay obeisance to demanding paymasters who shortly thereafter visited their offices and presented them with proposals and resolutions for immediate action.

The Aftermath of the AIPAC Conference Under AIPAC tutelage, if not actual authorship, a Congressional resolution was introduced, which called for a naval blockade of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a deliberate act of war. H. Con. Res. 362 calls on the President of the United States to stop all incoming international shipments of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran by any means. By the middle of June 2008, three weeks after it was introduced, the resolution had attracted 146 co-sponsors. In the Senate in two weeks time a similar measure secured 19 co-sponsors. The Congressional resolutions use almost the exact wording of an AIPAC memo issued just prior to the Congressional action. AIPAC got its cue from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who, in early May 2008, told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that sanctions were not enough and called a US naval blockade ‘a good possibility’ (Global Research June 18, 2008). The loyal AIPAC servants made their Israeli masters’ wish a reality – in a matter of days. (Who says critical issues get ‘bogged down’ in Washington ?)

In late June 2008, under AIPAC leadership and direction, the US Congress added $170,000,000 dollar increase in military assistance to Israel as part of a 10 year, $30 billion dollar war commitment to the Jewish state. AIPAC was instrumental in drawing up the bill and openly declared that the addition was designed to maintain Israel ’s military dominance and superiority in the Middle East but specifically designed for its war preparation against Iran and the Palestinians. AIPAC pointedly emphasized that, “The US commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge is the cornerstone of American (sic-ZPC) policy in the region…This year’s package holds heightened significance…as the US and Israel face new challenged from Iran’s drive to acquire (sic) nuclear weapons…” (AFP June 27, 2008).

At a time when the US government faces a major financial crisis and refuses to refinance millions of Americans facing loss of their homes through foreclosures, AIPAC secured a 25% increase in military handouts to Israel. Olmert praised his US Zionist agents for improving Israel ’s take. The 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations and their million members and affiliates successfully pursued AIPAC’s proposal to increase economic sanctions on Iran via its captive US Congressional bloc, its appointed agents in the Treasury Department and in the UN Security Council via its influence in the White House. Each and every sanction introduced by the US representative in the United Nations is a thinly veiled copy of memos and resolutions written and powerfully pushed in the Executive branch by AIPAC. They are backed by several hundred professional lobbyists and scores of pro-Israel PACs (political action committees) and ten propaganda mills (the so-called ‘think tanks’) with tight links to AIPAC. Through their influence in the US , the ZPC has successfully secured the acquiescence of other members of the UN Security Council.

Throughout 2008, a presidential election year, the ZPC has successfully engaged in sustained interrogation and pressure on the major candidates, securing pledges of unconditional support for every aspect of Israel ’s murderous policies in Gaza and the West Bank , including its policies of starvation and assault. All major candidates have echoed the ZPC-Israeli line of labeling the elected Hamas movement, Hezbollah , Iran and Syria as ‘terrorist’ organizations and states and pledged to attack or back an Israeli offensive war against Iran .

In so far as the Middle East is the center of US foreign policy, the ZPC has ensured that the next President of the United States will continue the bellicose pro-Israel policies pursued by George W. Bush. The ZPC’s influence over the next US President guarantees that the issues of war and peace will be dictated by a minority of a minority ethno-religious group, comprising less than 3% of the population and loyal to a foreign state. Whichever party wins the Presidential election or controls Congress, the ZPC will set the Middle East agenda, the head of which is the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During the entire run-op to the November 2008 elections, not a single political leader has raised the issue of the catastrophic consequences of a war with Iran for the world economy, the astronomical rise in oil prices, which will result in the conversion of the US recession into a depression, the killing of hundreds (if not millions) of Iranian citizens and the loss of American lives. In other words, the greatest of all ZPC successes is their ability to focus the entire political elite and mass media on the advantages of launching a preemptive war for Israel and to distract public and political attention away from any reports relating the world-shattering destructive consequences.

Zionist Power: Big Oil and Liberal Obfuscation

One of the most salient issues in the run-up of oil and gas prices has been the power and policies of the ZPC. Iran possesses some of the most potentially productive and rich oil and gas fields, which are not yet exploited. Iran possesses 15-17% of the world’s supply of gas. It is number two in the world. Israel , and therefore the ZPC, has been the leading voice in blocking all investment and financing in Iran by the world’s leading public and private gas and oil multinationals. Thanks to AIPAC authored Congressional legislation, any and all oil and gas companies investing more than $20 million dollars in Iran are barred from the US market and subject to criminal investigation and fines (if not imprisonment of executives). AIPAC authored Congressional legislation, which labeled the Iranian National Guard, the so-called ‘Revolutionary Guard’, as an international ‘terrorist organization’, subject to military attack by the Pentagon.

By extension, any multinational corporation, which signs economic agreements over Iranian oil assets, is considered to be financing terrorism. Huge quantities of Iranian gas and oil are not coming onto the world market and lowering the price of gasoline, solely due to US Congressional policies authored and enforced by the ZPC. According to the Financial Times (June 25, 2008) every major US , European and Asian oil company is eager to invest in Iran but are blocked by Zionist authored legislation: “American companies are prohibited from any involvement in Iran ’s energy sector. Those non-US international groups that have invested in Iran are for now going slow. They are trying to avoid pressing ahead with investments that would anger Washington , while also trying to avoid pulling out; which could annoy Tehran .” (FT June 25, 2008. p.9).

The US Treasury Department houses the most influential enforcement agency for policing the behavior of Big Oil, Big Banking and Big Construction companies, which would normally invest in Iran , given the world historic prices. According to investigator Grant Smith (Classified Deceptions: 2007): “In 2004, AIPAC and its affiliated think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), lobbied for a new separate US Treasury unit to be created – the ‘Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence’ (OTFI). It is headed by AIPAC vetted leadership and many OTFI briefings are delivered directly to WINEP. OFTI’s secretive financial operations that target Iran and its trading partners are tightly coordinated with Israel ’s leadership.” (Smith. page 59). Stuart Levey, sub-secretary of the Treasury and a zealous Zionist, who runs OTFI, and his staff have successfully pressured many of the biggest multi-billion dollar public pension funds in states like New York, Florida, Texas and California to disinvest in any company investing, trading or engaged in any economic activity with any Iranian public or private enterprise. Secondly, it has arbitrarily labeled any humanitarian organization dealing with Iran as a possible ‘terrorist conduit’. Levey has made frequent visits to Europe and Asia, threatening US reprisals to any country or corporation trading or investing in Iran . Levey and the OTFI have formulated Treasury policy memos which have decisively shaped US sanctions policy and proposals to the United Nations. It is clear that Cheney, Bush and the Democratic Congress make decisions largely drawn up, promoted and enforced by AIPAC and its key operative in Treasury, who in turn openly coordinate policy with their mentors in the Israeli foreign and financial ministries and the office of the Israeli Prime Minister.

Clearly the power of the ZPC is as much from its capacity to leverage malleable non-Zionist Congress people, public agencies, private financial institutions as it is to apply direct control over public policy. In other words for every dues paying member or leader of AIPAC, and of the 52 leading Jewish organizations in America, there are a multiplicity of state and civil society leaders and organizations who are influenced to initiate and implement pro-Israeli policies. The surprise expressed by some critical overseas Israeli observers, like Uri Avnery, over how a tiny minority of American Jews can dominate US Middle East policy, overlooks their leverage, access, and power to shape the agenda of vast sectors of US public and civil society policy makers.

While the oversight of foreign observers is understandable, what is absolutely inexcusable is the behavior of liberal critics of US war policy toward Iran . Bill Moyers, ignoring the abundant evidence published in all the major financial media on the economic sanctions against the oil companies spearheaded by the ZPC, argues that the Middle East wars are “about oil”. (Moyers and Winship June 28/29, 2008 Counterpunch). Citing as evidence for Big Oil’s role in Middle East wars, they quoted a number of former top Zionist officials in the US government (Greenspan, Wolfowitz and others). They argued that the signing of oil contracts in Iraq eight years after the start of the war is evidence that US policy was a product of Big Oil. Instead of examining Wolfowitz and over three dozen pro-Israel top policymakers in the Bush Administration who designed and executed the policy to invade Iraq – and the current all out push by the ZPC toward war with Iran – Moyers and Winship cite obscure meetings between Cheney and the oil companies. Instead of discussing the public overt campaigning for war with Iraq and Iran by the 52 leading Jewish organizations in the United States and the public policies of leading policymakers in the government, Moyers resorts to individual conspiracies between Cheney and the ‘oil industry’. Moyers admits he knows nothing about the content of the meetings and why the secret meeting did not lead to any direct lobbying for war by Big Oil (in contrast to AIPAC and its affiliates). Moyers article in Counterpunch totally avoids making a single reference to the massive, sustained and successful Zionist war campaign in the Executive and Legislative offices as well as in the Op-Ed pages of all the major daily and weekly newspapers and magazines.

A similar kind of liberal cover-,up is found in the July 17, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books, entitled “Iran: The Threat” by Thomas Powers who puts the entire burden for war policy toward Iran solely on Bush and Cheney, overlooking the intense and successful economic sanctions and war resolutions authored by AIPAC and implemented by the Democratic Congress. Powers omits the entire war propaganda campaign which appears in the mass media written by academics from Zionist ‘think tanks’, the entire groveling for Israel exercises by the US presidential candidates and three-quarters of the US Congress and Senate at the AIPAC conference, (which took place just prior to the Powers article). Powers says nothing about the entire political class’ blind support for Israel ’s promise to go to war with Iran . Powers, a supporter of killer sanctions as an alternative to an air and missile attack, doesn’t even mention the fact that the ZPC is the leading advocate of sanctions. His research didn’t include the crucial fact that the implementation and enforcement of sanctions are in the Treasury Department (OTFI), which coordinates with Israeli agencies and is run by Stuart Levey, an Israel-Firster.

Noam Chomsky has long been one of the great obfuscators of AIPAC and the existence of Zionist power over US Middle East policy. One of his most blatant examples of cover-up occurred during the AIPAC conference in early June 2008. In answer to a question on what it would take to change US unconditional support for Israel, Chomsky ignored the servility of US Presidential candidates to Israel and the AIPAC at the AIPAC conference; Congressional approval of AIPAC authored sanctions resolutions and their implementation by Treasury Department Under-Secretary Levey; the role of the ZPC in shaping media demonizing of Iran, Palestine, Hezbollah and Syria. Instead Chomsky engages in vacuous circumlocution. With reference to US support for Israel , he claims, “We have to consider the sources of support. The corporate sector in the US , which dominates policy formation, appears to be quite satisfied with the current situation. One indication is the increasing flow of investment to Israel by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and other leading elements of the high tech economy. Military and intelligence relations remain very strong. Since 1967, US intellectuals have had a virtual love affair with Israel, for reasons that relate more to the US than to Israel, in my opinion. That strongly affects portrayal of events and history in media and journals.”

Chomsky deliberately omits the elementary step of actually looking at the process of ‘policy formation’ and noting the role of the AIPAC lobby in shaping US Middle Eastern policy, a point noted by every major expert, Congressional staffer and observer on and off the scene. He mentions ‘the corporate sector’, a vague entity without mentioning how the Zionist lobby has successfully blocked the major oil companies from investing billions in Iran and who undermined US investment agreements with pre-war Iraq. None of the high tech investors he cites has ever lobbied to shape US policy in the Middle East, least of all pressured the US to support Israeli occupation and eviction of Palestinians, the invasion of Lebanon, its military attack of Syria. To suggest that Micro-Soft’s Bill Gates has been lobbying for Israel , as Chomsky does, is the height of silliness. But the Presidents of the 52 Major Jewish Organizations in America have. No conference organized by high-tech companies has ever drawn 65% of the members of Congress and the Senate and all major Presidential candidates to pledge their allegiance to their corporate interests in Israel. But the AIPAC conference in June drew a huge majority of Congress members and McCain, Obama and Clinton who pledged their unconditional support for Israel ’s policies and interests.

Chomsky’s claim that the US has a love affair with Israel omits the systematic repression by pro-Israel and mostly Jewish professors of any critics of Israel , including the firing, smearing and censorship of critical fellow academics. What makes Chomsky’s simple-minded and blatant cover up of Zion-power in shaping US policy so grotesque is that it occurs at a time when it is at its highest point of power – when AIPAC has presidential candidates publicly swearing unconditional support to Israel at its major conference in Washington even as two top officials of AIPAC have been indicted for espionage for Israel.

Chomsky, Moyers and Powers (and a host of liberal critics of US threats to bomb Iran ) ignore the power of US Zionists backing of Israel ’s overt war exercises and naked threats to bomb Iran . By covering up the role of the ZPC, who are the principle Congressional and Presidential backers of sanctions, embargo and war, the liberal critics undermine our efforts to prevent a catastrophic war.

Intellectuals silently complicit with the main purveyors of war for Israel are abdicating their responsibility to speak truth to power – in this case Zionist power. At some point intellectual abdication becomes co-responsibility for a Middle East catastrophe. In the face of the complicity of our political leaders and their Zionist mentors in pursuit of Israel ’s apocalyptic war strategy toward Iran , the American public becomes of utmost relevance (contrary to Chomsky). To argue otherwise is to become complicit with the great crimes committed in our names, by leaders and ideologues with foreign allegiances.

To continue to masquerade as ‘war critics’ while ignoring the central role of the Zionist Power Configuration makes pundits like Chomsky, Moyers and Powers and their acolytes irrelevant to the anti-war struggle. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

James Petras’ latest book is Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (August 2008) (Clarity Press, Ste 469 , 3277 Rosewell Road, NE , Atlanta , Georgia. 30305).

Source

August 13, 2010 Posted by aletho | Wars for Israel | AIPAC, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Syria, United States | Leave a comment

The Next 9/11: Made in Israel?

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | May 1, 2010

Citing the possibility of a terrorist organization getting hold of a nuclear weapon as the greatest threat to U.S. security, Barack Obama persuaded 46 other countries at the recent Nuclear Security Summit to agree to secure the world’s loose nuclear material. Those leaders who came to Washington might have done more to avert a nuclear attack, however, if they had asked the U.S. President to account for America’s own loose nukes.

Of course, President Obama may not even be aware of the egregious failure of the United States to secure its nuclear materials and know-how from the predation of its alleged “closest ally.” But since Obama is unwilling to even “speculate” about which country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons, he could hardly be expected to acknowledge how it got them.

In a recent article aptly titled “Loose Nukes in Israel,” Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) and author of Spy Trade: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy, shows how “the U.S is a sieve for Israeli nuclear espionage.”

The massive arms smuggling network set up by David Ben-Gurion in the United States in the 1940s had acquired a nuclear branch within a decade, according to Smith. The 1955 purchase of the Apollo Steel Company plant in Pennsylvania was financed by David Lowenthal, a close friend of Israel’s first prime minister and a former member of the Haganah, the precursor to the Israeli army. The following year, Dr. Zalman Shapiro, head of a local Zionist Organization of America chapter, incorporated the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) at Apollo. Before long, NUMEC was receiving large quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from Westinghouse and the U.S. Navy for nuclear reprocessing.

By the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) became suspicious of security lapses at NUMEC, and even considered suspending its “classified weapons work.” A 1965 AEC audit discovered that 220 pounds of highly enriched uranium were unaccounted for. The following year, the FBI launched its own investigation, codenamed Project Divert, to monitor NUMEC’s management and its frequent Israeli visitors. Nevertheless, the diversion of nuclear material to Israel continued unabated. After a September 10, 1968 visit by four Israelis, including Mossad agent Rafi Eitan, a further 587 pounds of highly enriched uranium went missing.

Israel’s nuclear espionage against the United States didn’t end with its accession to the nuclear club in the late 1960s, however. As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds revealed, its smuggling network received crucial assistance from three high-ranking officials in the George W. Bush administration. All three have close ties to Israel’s military-industrial complex.

According to the FBI whistleblower, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith provided Marc Grossman, the third highest-ranking official in the State Department, with a list of Department of Defense employees with access to sensitive data, including nuclear technology. The list also included highly sensitive personal details, such as sexual preference, problems with gambling or alcoholism, and how much they owed on their mortgages. Grossman then passed on the information to Israeli and Turkish agents, who used it to “hook” those Pentagon officials. In addition, as Edmonds testified in an Ohio court case, the foreign operatives had recruited people “on almost every major nuclear facility in the United States.”

After Israel and Turkey took what they wanted from the pilfered secrets, their agents offered what was left to the highest bidder. As Edmonds has told the Sunday Times, American Conservative and Military.com, nuclear information was sold on the black market, where anyone-even al-Qaeda-could buy it.

So then, it would seem that those who shout loudest about the threat of terrorists-namely, neoconservatives like Perle, Feith and Grossman and their Israeli counterparts-are the very ones who are aiding them, at least indirectly, to acquire those much touted weapons of mass destruction.

But why, one might reasonably ask, would Israeli agents help their supposed enemies get hold of the bomb?

Well, what would be the likely outcome if Obama’s worst fears of a nuclear attack on the United States-or one of its allies-are realized?

Regardless of the facts, some Islamic country- most likely, Iran or Pakistan-would be blamed for aiding the terrorists. And it doesn’t require an advanced degree in game theory to predict what America’s reaction would be. The retaliation would be so swift and devastating that the designated evildoers might envy the fate of post-invasion Iraqis-also victims of an Israeli misdirection.

If, as Benjamin Netanyahu admitted, 9/11 was “very good” for Israel, a nuclear 9/11 might be even better. As the spellbinding effects of that traumatic event nine years ago have begun to wear off, and with Americans increasingly questioning the costs of a one-sided alliance, it may even be considered necessary.

May 2, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, Marc Grossman, Middle East, Obama, Rafi Eitan, United States, Zalman Shapiro | Leave a comment

Electronic Intifada and the mudkicker

By M. Idrees | Pulse Media | May 1, 2010

The Electronic Intifada has on its front page a ludicrous, factually challenged and logically flawed attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s work — work that has been pivotal in shifting the debate on US Middle East policy. It is not clear to me what EI was hoping to achieve with this self-defeating move. But I don’t blame the author of the article — the fellow is clueless, he has cobbled together his screed from arguments and quotes randomly lifted from Noam Chomsky’s writings — I blame EI’s political and editorial judgment. At a time when Israeli colonization is intensifying, with the land in the grip of a neo-Fascist government, one’s priorities must be seriously upside down to spend precious time impugning the invaluable work of allies. It appears for some supporters of Palestine the need to feel self-righteous takes precedence over the imperative to be effective. Now, it is beneath me to respond to someone who freely purloins others’ work, misuses sources, and constructs a slipshod argument. But I’ll give two illustrative examples of the kind of deliberate distortions that keep resurfacing in these ideological assaults on M & W (in both cases the specific claims have been ‘borrowed’ from Chomsky):

Chomsky has long maintained that the war in Iraq was for oil. He always produces the same evidence to support his case. A state department document from 1945, a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski and another from George Kennan. Chomsky argues that Middle East oil is ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ (State Department), and anyone who controls Iraq’s vast oil reserves gains ‘critical leverage’ (Brzezinski), indeed ‘veto power’ (Kennan), over competitors. All of this is indisputable: the United States would no doubt like to control Iraqi oil; it recognizes the ‘critical leverage’ the control affords it; and the critical leverage no doubt would grant it ‘veto power’. Now here is the problem: The State department document Chomsky cites is about Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. And it recommends that, precisely because Saudi oil is so important, US must always maintain friendly relations with the kingdom. Also, it does not follow that regime change is the only means to achieve these goals. Indeed, all of these claims have been just as true the past half century, but they did not necessitate war. The US has long preferred shoring up authoritarian regimes which could ensure its dominance and maintain a stable flow of oil.

Secondly, The Iraqi government was not withholding its oil; it was the US-led sanctions that were preventing it from reaching the markets. There is no evidence that Iraq was unwilling to cede control of its oil to the United States. Indeed, in the months leading up to war Saddam Hussein’s government made several attempts to stave off war by offering the United States exclusive concessions to its oil reserves. If oil was indeed the motivation, then one would expect plentiful evidence of oil interests influencing policy, or at least in selling the war. Chomsky offers none. Nor does he inform readers that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man whose words he cites as evidence of Iraq as a ‘resource war’, was one of its most vocal opponents. Bzrezinski has called the war ‘a historic, strategic, and moral calamity…driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris’.

In his peculiar reading of Brzezinski, Chomsky ascribes him a view that is an inversion of what he actually says. Brzezinski, who saw the invasion as an unnecessary war by the pro-Israel neoconservatives, avers:

American and Israeli interests in the region are not entirely congruent. America has major strategic and economic interests in the Middle East that are dictated by the region’s vast energy supplies. Not only does America benefit economically from the relatively low costs of Middle Eastern oil, but America’s security role in the region gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region. Hence good relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates… is in the U.S. national interest. From Israel’s standpoint, however, the resulting American-Arab ties are disadvantageous: they not only limit the degree to which the United States is prepared to back Israel’s territorial aspirations, they also stimulate American sensitivity to Arab grievances against Israel. (my emphasis)

Since the EI scrivener reproduces Chomsky’s exact interpretation of the ‘critical leverage’ quote along with Kennan’s on ‘veto power’, it is clear that he hasn’t even bothered reading the original sources. The same is true of his other comment about Israel serving as an offshore base for the US (which he mistakenly attributes to Chomsky, who is in fact quoting Alexander Haig). What this fellow doesn’t know is that the comment was uttered in a certain context: i.e., Haig’s bureaucratic struggle against Reagan (whom he saw as an intellectual inferior) in which he was keen to enlist Israel lobby support. (For more on this, see Patrick Tyler’s excellent A World of Trouble or my review of it). So long as the de-contextualized quotes fit preconceived notions, who cares what was actually said or done?

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim called this the ‘ideological method’: the use of ‘notions to govern the collation of facts, rather than deriving notions from them’. In the a-historical writings of these analysts-on-the-cheap, one frequently finds that two and two add up to yield twenty-two. If US support for Israel and its interests in the region’s oil have remained constant over the years, it must mean the two are complementary. They aren’t. As I explained elsewhere:

United States Middle East policy has been defined since World War II by the tension between two competing concerns: the strategic interests which require good relations with Arab-Muslim states, and domestic political imperatives which demand unquestioning allegiance to Israel. That the US interest in the region’s energy resources has remained consistent, as well as its support for Israel, leads some to conclude that somehow the two are complementary. They aren’t. US President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel the day of its founding over the strenuous objections of his State Department in order to court the Jewish vote and, more significantly, Jewish money for his re-election campaign. Every president since — with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, who saw no cause to feign balance — has sought to address this tension with attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All these efforts have so far foundered. A study of US policy in the region over the decades, then, is inevitably a study of the causes of these failures [among which the Israel lobby looms largest].

It is not clear to me why The Electronic Intifada would undermine years of valuable work by giving platform to this discreditable piece of charlatanry. It has certainly made me reconsider any future association with the publication. We are at a juncture that calls for political maturity, to make the most of the openings recently created. This type of reactionary posturing and myopic absolutism merely serves as an alibi for inaction.

Chomsky Acknowledges the Neocons as the Dominant Force in Pushing for Iraq War (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Wars for Israel | Electronic Intifada, Iraq, Middle East, Noam Chomsky, United States, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Zionism | Leave a comment

The Decline of Israel: Interview with Jonathan Cook

By New Left Project | March 12, 2010

In a wide-ranging interview with the New Left Project, Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook describes the increasingly repressive nature of Israeli society and the prospects for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict

NLP: What did you make of Ehud Barak’s recent comparison of Israel to South Africa?

JC: We should be extremely wary of ascribing a leftwing agenda to senior Israeli politicians who make use of the word “apartheid” in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Barak was not claiming that Israel is an apartheid state when he addressed the high-powered delegates at the Herzliya conference last month; he was warning the Netanyahu government that its approach to the two-state solution was endangering Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world that would eventually lead to it being called an apartheid state. He was politicking. His goal was to intimidate Netanyahu into signing up to his, and the Israeli centre’s, long-standing agenda of “unilateral separation”: statehood imposed on the Palestinians as a series of bantustans (be sure, the irony is entirely lost on Barak and others). Barak knows that Netanyahu currently has no intention of creating any kind of Palestinian state, even a bogus one, despite his commitments to the US.

The last senior Israeli politician to talk of “apartheid” was Ehud Olmert, and it is worth remembering why he used the term. It was back in November 2003, when he was deputy prime minister and desperately trying to scare his boss, Ariel Sharon, into reversing his long-standing support for the settlements and adopt instead the disengagement plan for Gaza. Olmert’s thinking was that by severing Gaza from the Greater Israel project – by pretending the occupation had ended there – Israel could buy a few more years before it faced a Palestinian majority and the danger of being compared to apartheid South Africa. It worked and Sharon became the improbable “man of peace” for which he is today remembered. (Strangely, Olmert, like Barak, defined apartheid in purely mathematical terms: Israeli rule over the Palestinians would only qualify as apartheid at the moment Jews became a numerical minority.)

Barak is playing a similar game with Netanyahu, this time trying to pressure him to separate from the main populated areas of the West Bank. It is not surprising the task has fallen to the Labor leader. The two other chief exponents of unilateral separation are out of the way: Olmert is standing trial and Tzipi Livni is in the wilderness of opposition. Barak is hoping to apply pressure from inside the government. Barak is eminently qualified for the job. He took on the mantel of the Oslo process after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and then tried to engineer the final separation implicit in Oslo at Camp David in 2000 – on extremely advantageous terms for Israel.

Can he succeed in changing Netanyahu’s mind? It seems unlikely.

NLP: Avi Shlaim recently described Tony Blair as ‘Gaza’s Great Betrayer’. What do you make of Tony Blair’s role as Middle East peace envoy?

JC: Blair is a glorified salesman, selling the same snakeoil to different customers.

First, he is here to provide a façade of Western concern about mending the Middle East. He suggests that the West is committed to action even as it fails to intervene and the situation of the Palestinians generally, and those in Gaza in particular, deteriorates rapidly. He sells us the continuing dispossession of the Palestinians in a bottle labelled “peace”.

He is also here as a sort of European proconsul to advise the Americans on how to repackage their policies. The US has become aware that it has lost all credibility with the rest of the world on this issue. Blair’s job is to redesign the bottle labelled “US honest broker” so that we will be prepared to buy the product again.

His next task is to try to wheedle out of Israel any minor concession he can secure on behalf of the Palestinians and persuade Tel Aviv to cooperate in selling an empty bottle labelled “hope” as a breakthrough in the peace process.

And finally, he is here to create the impression that his chief task is to defend the interests of the Palestinians. To this end, he collects the three bottles, puts them in some pretty wrapping paper and writes on the label “Palestinian state”.

For his labours he is being handsomely rewarded, especially by Israel.

NLP: You have described how Israel is becoming increasingly repressive regarding its own Arab population. In what ways?

JC: Let’s be clear: Israel has always been “repressive” of its Palestinian minority. Its first two decades were marked by a very harsh military government for the Palestinian population inside Israel. Thousands of Bedouin, for example, were expelled from their homes in the Negev several years after Israel’s establishment and forced into the Sinai. Israel’s past should not be glorified.

What I have argued is that the direction taken by Israeli policy since the Oslo process began has been increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian minority. Before Oslo, Israel was chiefly interested in containing and controlling the minority. After Oslo, it has been trying to engineer a situation in which it can claim to no longer be responsible for the Palestinians inside Israel with formal citizenship.

This is intimately tied to Israel’s more general policy of “unilateral separation” from the Palestinians under occupation: in Gaza, through the disengagement; in the West Bank, through the building of the wall. Israel’s chief concern is that – post-separation, were Palestinian citizens to remain inside the Jewish state – they would have far greater legitimacy in demanding the same rights as Jews. Israelis regard that as an existential threat to their state: Palestinian citizens could use their power, for example, to demand a right of return for their relatives and thereby create a Palestinian majority. The problem for Israel is that Palestinian citizens can expose the sham of Israel’s claims to being a democratic state.

So as part of its policy of separation, Israel has been thinking about how to get rid of the Palestinian minority, or at the very least how to disenfranchise it in a way that appears democratic. It is a long game that I describe in detail in my book Blood and Religion.

Policymakers are considering different approaches, from physically expelling Israel’s Palestinian citizens to the bantustans in the territories to stripping them incrementally of their remaining citizenship rights, in the hope that they will choose to leave. At the moment we are seeing the latter policy being pursued, but there are plenty of people in the government who want the former policy implemented when the political climate is right.

NLP: The frequent claim by Israeli officials is that Israel is a democracy and that Israeli Arabs are afforded the same rights as other citizens. What is your view?

JC: The widely shared assumption that Israel is a democracy is a strange one.

This is a democracy without defined borders, encompassing parts of a foreign territory, the West Bank, in which one ethnic / religious group – the Jewish settlers – has been given the vote while another – the Palestinians – has not. Those settlers, who are living outside the internationally recognised borders of Israel, actually put Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman into power.

It is also a democracy that has transferred control over 13 per cent of its sovereign territory (and a large proportion of its inhabited land) to an external organisation, the Jewish National Fund, which prevents a significant proportion of Israel’s own citizenry – the 20 per cent who are Palestinian – from having access to that land, again based on ethnic / religious criteria.

It is a democracy that historically gerrymandered its electoral constituency by expelling most of the indigenous population outside its borders – now referred to as the Palestinian refugees – to ensure a Jewish majority. It has continued to gerrymander its voting base by giving one ethnic group, Jews around the world, an automatic right to become citizens while denying that same right to another ethnic group, Palestinian Arabs.

This is a democracy that, despite a plethora of parties and the necessity of creating broad coalition governments, has consistently ensured that one set of parties (the Palestinian and anti-Zionist ones) has been excluded from government. In fact, Israel’s “democracy” is not a competition between different visions of society, as you would expect, but a country driven by a single ideology called Zionism. In that sense, there has been one-party rule in Israel since its birth. All the many parties that have participated in government over the years have agreed on one thing: that Israel should be a state that gives privileges to citizens who belong to one ethnic group. Where there is disagreement, it is over narrow sectoral interests or over how to manage the details of the occupation – an issue related to territory outside Israel’s borders.

Defenders of the idea that Israel is a democracy point to the country’s universal suffrage. But that is hardly sufficient grounds for classing Israel as a democracy. Israel was also considered a democracy in the 1950s and early 1960s – before the occupation began – when a fifth of the populace, the Palestinian minority inside Israel, lived under a military government. Then as now, they had the vote but during that period they could not leave their villages without a permit from the authorities.

My point is that giving the vote to 20 per cent of the electorate that is Palestinian is no proof of democracy if Israeli Jews have rigged their “democracy” beforehand through ethnic cleansing (the 1948 war); through discriminatory immigration policies (the Law of Return); and through the manipulation of borders to include the settlers while excluding the occupied Palestinians, even though both live in the same territory.

Israeli academics who consider these things have had to devise new classifications to cope with these strange features of the Israeli “democratic” landscape. The generous ones call it an “ethnic democracy”; the more critical ones an “ethnocracy”. Most are agreed, however, that it is not the liberal democracy of most Westerners’ imaginations.

NLP: You describe the long time anti-occupation activist and writer Uri Avnery as being a “compromised critic” of Israel. What do you mean by this? What is wrong with Avnery’s position on the occupation?

JC: There’s nothing wrong with Avnery’s position on the occupation. He wants to end it, and he has worked strenuously and bravely to do so over many decades.

The problem derives from our, his readers’, tendency to misunderstand his reasons for seeking an end to the occupation, and in that sense I think his role in the Palestinian solidarity movement has not been entirely helpful. Avnery wants the occupation to end but, it is clear from his writings, he is driven primarily by a desire to protect Israel as a Jewish state, the kind of ethnocratic state I have just described. Avnery does not hide this: he has always declared himself a proud Zionist. But in my view, his attachment to a state privileging Jews compromises his ability to critique the inherent logic of Zionism and to respond to Israel’s fast-moving policies on the ground, especially the goals of separation.

In a sense Avnery is stuck romantically in the 1970s and 1980s, the heydey of Palestinian resistance. Then the Palestinian struggle was much more straightforward: it was for national liberation. In those days Avnery’s battle was chiefly inside the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not inside Israel. He favoured a two-state solution when many in the PLO were promoting a vision of a single democratic state encompassing both Palestinians and Israelis. As we know, Avnery won that ideological battle: Arafat signed up to the two-state vision and eventually became the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian government-in-waiting.

But with Oslo, and formal Palestinian consent to the partition of historic Palestine, Avnery had to switch the focus of his struggle back to Israel, where there was much more resistance to the idea. While the Palestinian leaders were willing, even enthusiastic participants in the Oslo process, Israel’s leaders were much more cynical. They wanted a Palestinian dictatorship in the OPTs, led by Arafat, that would suppress all dissent while Israel would continue exploiting the land and water resources and the Palestinian labour-force through a series of industrial zones.

Because of his emotional investment in the separation policy of Oslo, Avnery has been very slow to appreciate Israel’s bad faith in this process. As the horrors of the wall and the massacres in Gaza have unfolded, I have started to see in his writings a very belated caution, a hesitation. That is to be welcomed. But I think looking to Avnery for guidance about where the Palestinian struggle against the occupation should head now – for instance, on the question of boycott, divestment and sanctions – is probably unwise. On other matters, he still has many fascinating insights to offer.

NLP: You are an advocate of a one state solution to the conflict. Given the overwhelming opposition of most Israelis to such a solution how is this to come about?

JC: Let me make an initial qualification. I do not regard myself as being an “advocate” for any particular solution to the conflict. I would happily support a two-state solution if I thought it was possible. I do not have a view about which technical arrangement is needed for Palestinians and Israelis to live happy, secure lives. If that can be achieved in a two-state solution, then I am all in favour.

My support for one state follows from the fact that I have yet to see anyone making a convincing case for two states, given the current realities. Those in the progressive community who advocate for the two-state solution seem to do so because their knowledge of the conflict is based on understandings a decade or more out of date, and typically because they know little about what drives Israeli policies inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders – which is hardly surprising, given the dearth of reporting on the subject.

This relates to the question of how Israelis can be won over. If the criterion for deciding whether a solution is viable is whether it is acceptable to Israeli Jewish public opinion, then the two-state crowd have exactly the same problem as the one-state crowd. There is no popular backing in Israel for a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders; a connection between the West Bank and Gaza; open borders for the Palestinian state and the right for it to forge diplomatic alliances as it chooses; a Palestinian army and air force; Palestinian rights to their water resources; Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital; and so on. Almost no Israeli Jews would vote for a government advocating that solution.

When we hear of polls showing an Israeli majority for a two-state solution, that is not what the respondents are referring to: they mean a series of bantustans surrounded by Israeli territory and settlers; severe controls on Palestinian movement between those bantustans; Palestine’s capital in Abu Dis or some other village near Jerusalem; Israel’s continuing control of the water; no Palestinian army; and so on. The Israeli public’s vision of Palestine is the same as its leadership’s: an extension of the Gaza model to the West Bank.

So we might as well forget about pandering to Israeli public opinion for the moment. It will change when it is offered a different cost-benefit calculus for its continuing rule over the Palestinians, as occurred among white South Africans who were encouraged to turn against the apartheid regime. That is the purpose of campaigns like boycott, divestment and sanctions. Let’s think instead about workable solutions that accord with the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to live decent lives.

Interestingly, despite the mistaken assumption that Israelis favour a (real) two-state solution over a one-state solution, there are now indications that a broad coalition of Israelis accept that the moment for a two-state solution has passed. Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, is one from the Zionist left. But surprisingly he was recently joined by Tzipi Hotovely, an influential MP from Netanyahu’s Likud party, who argues for granting citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank.

NLP: Other writers such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein argue in favour of a two-state solution, pointing out that world opinion and international law is firmly on the side of such a solution. How do you respond?

JC: Much as I respect Finkelstein and Chomsky, I find those arguments unconvincing.

“World opinion” in this case means little more than opinion in Washington, and as Chomsky has eloquently pointed out on many occasions the US, along with Israel, is the rejectionist party to the conflict. In fact, it is precisely because the US and Israel are the rejectionist camp that we should be wary of accepting that a two-state arrangement is a viable solution to the conflict now that the leaderships of both countries ostensibly support it.

Rather I would argue that the US and Israel pay lipserve to a two-state solution to provide cover for the emerging reality on the ground, in which Jewish privilege is being maintained in a unilaterally imposed one-state solution by Israel. Without that cover, the apartheid nature of the regime and the creeping programme of ethnic cleansing would be blindingly obvious to everyone.

Since Oslo, Barak, Sharon, Olmert and Livni all understood that “world opinion” could be kept at bay only as long as Israel appeared to favour a two-state solution. Netanyahu has embarrassed the West, and the US in particular, by dropping that pretence. It is why he is so unpopular and why we are starting to see more critical coverage of Israel in the media. Things are not worse, at least in the occupied territories, than they were under Olmert and co (in fact, it could be argued that they are moderately better), but it is much easier for journalists to cover some of the reality now. I guess this is a way of bringing Netanyahu into line.

The international law argument in this context is not much more helpful. While international law offers a discrete and invaluable set of principles when it comes to determining the rules of war, for instance, matters are not so straightforward when related to borders and territory.

Which bit of international law are we referring to? Why not take as our reference point the 1947 partition plan, which would see nearly half of historic Palestine returned to the Palestinians, and Jerusalem under international control? And what are we to make of UN Resolution 242, which refers to “the acquisition of territories” in the English version and “the acquisition of the territories” in the French version? Should the Palestinians be offered 28 per cent of their homeland or less than 28 per cent? And what do the Oslo accords mean in practice for Palestinian statehood, given that the final status issues were left open?

One can argue over these points endlessly, and dwelling on them to the exclusion of all other considerations is a recipe for helping the powerful in their struggle to ensure that the status quo – the occupation – is maintained.

The primary goals of international law are twofold: to safeguard the dignity of human beings; and to ensure their right to self-determination. In my view, those aims cannot be realised in a two-state solution, given both the realities on the ground and the conditions on Palestinian sovereignty being demanded by Israel and the international community.

Instead we should look to international law to provide a frame of reference for finding a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it should not tie our hands. The objective is to find a practical and creative political arrangement that has legitimacy in the eyes of both parties and can ensure that Israelis and Palestinians lead happy, secure lives. The goal here is not a technical solution; it is an enduring peace.

NLP: British media coverage of the conflict is typically more sympathetic towards Israel than towards Palestinians and generally fails to give proper historical background to the conflict. Why do you believe the British media behaves in this way regarding the conflict?

JC: There are various reasons that are sometimes difficult to disentangle. For the sake of simplicity, I will separate them into three categories: practical issues facing journalists covering the conflict; expectations imposed by the supposed “professionalism” of journalism; and ideological and structural constraints that reflect the fact that the dominant journalism practised today is a journalism cowed by corporate interests.

Of the practical issues, one of the most important – though least spoken of, for obvious reasons – is the fact that foreign desks prefer to appoint Jewish reporters to cover the conflict. In part the preference for Jewish reporters reflects an assessment, and probably a correct one, by editors that Israel, not the Palestinians, makes the news and that Jewish reporters will fare better as they negotiate the corridors of power in a self-declared Jewish state. Faced with candidates for the job, a foreign editor will often take the easy choice of a Jew who speaks fluent Hebrew, has family here who will provide ready-made contacts, and has some sort of commitment to living here and gaining a deeper understanding of (Israeli) life. Of course, those are precisely the reasons why an editor ought to judge the reporter unsuitable, but in practice it does not work that way.

I know from my own experiences that most Israeli officials try to find out whether you are Jewish before they will build any kind of intimacy with you as a reporter. That works to the advantage of Jewish reporters when a job comes up in Jerusalem.

I should add that the historical tendency of the British media to appoint Jewish reporters has diminished in recent years, possibly because the desks have become more self-conscious about it. But it is still very strong among the American media, and it is the American media that set the news agenda on the conflict. The NYT’s Ethan Bronner is fairly typical on that score and the paper’s indulgent decision to allow him to continue in his posting after revelations of a clear conflict of interest – that his son has joined the Israeli army – simply highlights the point.

A second practical issue is the location of British bureaus: in Jewish West Jerusalem. That results in a natural identification with Israeli concerns. It would be just as easy, and cheaper, to locate journalists a short distance away in Ramallah, or even in a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, but few if any do so.

Then there are the local sources of information that a reporter relies on. He or she reads the Israeli media, most of which have English editions, and comes to understand the conflict through the analyses and commentaries of Israeli journalists. This is even more true for those reporters who read Hebrew. Are there any British journalists reading the Palestinian media in Arabic? I doubt it.

Similarly, Israeli spokespeople are much more likely to be sources of information: they usually speak English; they are accessible, especially if you are Jewish and seen as “sympathetic” to Israel; and they are authoritative from the point of view of the correspondents. By contrast, the Palestinians are in a much weaker position. Who counts as a Palestinian spokesperson? Usually reporters turn to the Palestinian Authority for comments, even though the PA’s agenda is severely compromised and Palestinian opinion is deeply divided. In addition, official Palestinian spokespeople are often hamstrung by a rigid bureaucracy, lack of accountability, problems of language, and little knowledge of the decisions being taken in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem that shape their lives.

Issues deriving from journalism’s so-called “professionalism” must be factored in too. The professional training of journalists encourages them to believe that there are objective criteria that define what counts as news. A consequence is that professional journalists are expected to follow similar lines of inquiry and turn to the same groups of “neutral” contacts. This justifies both the hunting-in-packs philosophy that underpins most mainstream journalism and the reliance on establishment sources whom journalists use to interpret the news story.

In the case of Israel-Palestine, we end up with very similar looking accounts of the conflict that are usually filtered through the perspectives of a narrow elite of politicians, academics and diplomats who share in the main fanciful assumptions about the conflict: that there is a meaningful peace process; that Israeli leaders are acting in good faith; that the occupation is unpleasant but temporary; that the Palestinians are their own worst enemies or genetically prone to terrorism; that the occupation in Gaza has ended; that the Americans are a neutral broker in the conflict; and so on.

“Balance” is also seen as an essential quality in any professional news report. Balance of the “Israel said-the Palestinians said” variety encourages a view that the two sides in the conflict are equal. It favours the status quo, which favours Israel because it is the dominant party.

Another issue that skews coverage is the fact that professional journalists are supposed to take directions in their coverage from senior editors, usually thousands of miles away. The mainstream media is very hierarchical and few journalists will risk engaging in repeated fights with senior editors if they wish to be successful. The problem is that those editors have formed their views of the conflict in part by reading influential columnists, particularly those in the US who are considered to be close to the centres of power. That means that Zionist commentators like Thomas Friedman and the late William Safire shape British editors’ understanding of the region and therefore also the sort of coverage they expect from their reporters. Professional journalists do not usually invent things to satisfy their editors but they do steer clear of certain topics and lines of inquiry that conflict with their editors’ assumptions.

This tendency is strongly reinforced by the pro-Israel lobby in Britain, which gives reporters and their editors a hard time whenever they depart from common, and usually erroneous, assumptions about Israel. The sheer weight of the lobby, both in terms of its leaders’ connections to the British elites and its large number of foot soldiers, makes it very intimidating to the media. Minor matters of interpretation by a reporter can quickly be blown into a full-scale scandal of biased reporting or accusations of anti-Semitism. Even accurate reporting that is critical of Israel can be damaging to a journalist’s reputation, as Jeremy Bowen found out last year when absurd complaints against him were upheld by the BBC Trust.

The effect of the lobby in Britain is further heightened by the far greater power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US. British editors, as we have already noted, look to US commentators for guidance about the conflict. So the US lobby, in shaping the views of the American media, also affects the British media’s conceptions too.

These last problems are closely related to the much larger structural and ideological issues affecting modern journalism that direct the coverage of Israel-Palestine.

In my early career working for British newspapers, I was a very traditional liberal journalist. Only when I turned freelance, moved to the Middle East and started covering the Israel-Palestine conflict from a Palestinian city did I discover that most of my life-long assumptions about the liberal British media were untenable. It was a period of rapid and profound disillusionment. Out here, I was faced with a stark choice: report the conflict in the same distorted and misleading manner adopted by the mainstream reporters or become a so-called “dissident” journalist. I struggled with the first option for a while, publishing in the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune when I could, but it was with a heavy conscience. It was during this period that I heard about the propaganda model of Ed Hermann and Noam Chomsky, as well as websites like Media Lens, which finally made sense of my own experiences as a journalist.

The structural problem of modern journalism is a huge subject I cannot do more than outline here.

Professional journalism exists in its current state because it is subsidised by fabulously wealthy owners and fabulously wealthy advertisers, both of whom share the interests of the corporate elites that rule our societies. The corporate-owned media ensures its journalists share its corporate values through a process of “filtering”. Journalists who make it to a position like Jerusalem bureau chief, for example, have gone through a very lengthy selection process that weeds out anyone considered undesirable. Typically an undesirable journalist fails to abide by the implicit rules of the profession: she is not intimidated in the face of power and authority, she looks beyond the elites to other sources of information, she rejects the bogus idea of objectivity and neutrality, and so on. Such journalists either get stuck in lowly jobs or are pushed out.

The result is a sort of Darwinian natural selection that ensures corporate, clubbable journalists rise to the top and select in their image those who follow behind them.

Report details ill-treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli forces (alethonews.wordpress.com)
he Rise of Ultra-Semitism in Israel (alethonews.wordpress.com)

March 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Tzipi Livni, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment

Chilling memories of US mass murder

By Linda S. Heard | Online Journal | February 17, 2010

February 13 marked 19 years since the US bombing of Baghdad’s two-storey Al Amiriya bomb shelter when 480 civilians were literally incinerated by two American 2,000 pound laser-guided “smart bombs,” designed to penetrate multiple layers of concrete. Most of the victims were Iraqi, but there were also a number of Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians and Egyptians who were consumed by the blasts.

It was 4:30 in the morning on February 13, 1991, when the pilots of two stealth bombers released their deadly cargo. Until then, the women, children and elderly inside had felt they were safe in the purpose-built facility designed to protect against nuclear attack — and equipped with bunk beds, televisions, bathrooms, kitchens and a clinic. Their spirits were high after celebrating Eid Al Fitr the previous evening, but some were worried about fathers, brothers and husbands who had remained in their homes to ensure that there was enough room in the shelter for their loved ones.

In the event, their own lives were tragically cut short. Those sheltering on the upper floor were burnt to death; in some instances their silhouettes — carbonised by high temperatures — were eerily seared onto the walls, including that of a woman clutching onto her baby. Most of those in the lower hall were killed by boiling water that gushed from the shelter’s two enormous water tanks following the impact of the bombs.

Only 14 survived, but they could hardly be considered the lucky ones since the majority sustained terrible injuries from the blasts. Rescuers who rushed to the scene were frustrated by a lack of electricity to power their equipment and a thick steel door that was so hot it was glowing. All they could do was listen to the screams and the cries of the dying.

The US government initially claimed that it had received intelligence reports that the bunker was not a civilian shelter, but one of Saddam Hussain’s military command centres.

However, the US Department of Defence later admitted that they knew the facility had previously been used for civil defence purposes. No evidence that the site had been used by the military was ever found, but that didn’t deter the White House from accusing Saddam of using “select civilians” as a cover for the facility’s true mission. Like many other US accusations this turned out to be untrue.

Today, Al Amiriya shelter stands as a monument to the dead; its walls adorned with photographs of victims, commemoratory brass plaques, prayers and flowers. Visitors who must steel their emotions before entering often emerge traumatised. Writing about the experience Na’eem Jeenah relates: “A feeling of revulsion and disgust towards these creatures we call human beings and for the ease with which we allow ourselves to become less than human.”

Ebrahim Alloush says anyone with “one-tenth of a heart and one percent of a conscience will shake with rage and anguish as they try to hold back the tears.”

Outside Iraq and the Middle East, the story of Al Amiriya was soon forgotten as the world celebrated St Valentine’s Day just hours after the attack. Now, a young Moroccan-born French filmmaker based in Dubai is determined to keep alive the memories of those who died such a terrible death.

Fervent hope

For her first short film, Faces of Wrath, that focused on the horrors in Gaza, Siham Jouhari received an award from Al Jazeera’s fifth International Documentary Film Festival 2009 in the category ‘New Horizon.’ It is her fervent hope that her second — and much more ambitious — film, Al Amiraya: The Shelter, will be completed in time to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Al Amiriya tragedy.

The script is a simple, uncomplicated yet poignant account of real people who lost those they cared for most, such as Abu Ali and his wife Saoussan who were robbed of their four children. It also recounts the story of a taxi driver Yousuf who lost his entire family, save one son, and Ahmad, a young man in love, whose burns were so severe that he had to be sent abroad for treatment, but who never stops searching for his beautiful childhood sweetheart Bouchra.

We will never know what extraordinary accomplishments these ordinary people could have achieved had they been allowed to continue with their lives, but they deserve to be acknowledged and remembered — firstly, as a reminder to mankind to never again sink to such depths and, secondly, to honour their memories and the memories of all the innocent victims of Iraq.

For some, Al Amiraya: the Shelter may be hard to watch, but its essence is one of hope and courage. Those of us who are appalled at the callous way big powers write-off innocent deaths as “collateral damage” can only wish Jouhari well with her respectful and loving mission to ensure that there’s one American valentine signed in blood that we must never ever forget.

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.

Source

February 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Al Amiriya, Amiriyah shelter bombing, Iraq, Middle East, United States, White House | Leave a comment

A review of ZIONISM, MILITARISM AND THE DECLINE OF US POWER by James Petras

December 2009 issue of Culture Wars magazine – Ken Freeland

The hegemonic influence of Zionist-Israeli forces over America’s foreign policy, particularly Middle East policy, is a phenomenon without historical precedent. While right-wing radicals, with their focus on patriotism and constitutional values, set off early alarms about this perceived foreign domination, the Left pretty much slept through its insidious ascent to power.

The American Left, indeed, has a long and unfortunate history of giving a free pass to Israel, reserving the whole of its diatribe for imperialists of the indigenous variety. (As James Petras makes clear again and again, this is a predictable result of the antiwar movement’s frequently pro-Israel leadership, and the ubiquitous Zionist-liberal influence within it.)

For the traditional Left, this emergence of a Zionist power elite within the United States presents a significant theoretical problem… it really does not follow from the normal Leftist-materialist construction of the political world, and so it tends to be just ignored. The popular antiwar movement slogan “no war for oil” is its residue: the Left is happy to pin the war tail on the donkey of Big Oil, a traditional bogeyman, and one which fits neatly into a materialist paradigm…

This dismal record of “progressives” is what makes the work of James Petras unique. He is an indefatigable Leftist whose widely published anti-imperialist oeuvre covers some fifty years of contributions to some very prestigious journals. He once shared with me that he broadcasts a 30-minute radio program that is heard weekly in Uruguay. For a professor emeritus (retired), James Petras is one heck of a fireball:

In 2006 he broke new ground with the first installment of what I am going to call his current trilogy: The Power of Israel in the United States. Fully a year before Walt and Mearsheimer would critique this same phenomenon from an Establishmentarian perspective in their The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” Petras was exposing it from the Left. While other critics considered themselves cutting-edge for attacking the “neo-conservatives” (neo-cons), this did not suffice for James Petras… after all, the roots of neo-conservatism are not conservative at all, but Zionist….and so he coined the term “Zion-con” to emphasize this analytic difference. Where Walt and Mearsheimer, in their effort to encompass the wider phenomenon of Zionist organization and power in America, would stretch the term “Israel Lobby” to cover a multifarious network of Zionist-Israel’s promoters, many of whom do not engage in actual lobbying, Petras approaches the same phenomenon with fresh conceptual clarity, naming it the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which has become the bedrock of his further analysis — “a complex network of interrelated and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional and local levels, and directly and systematically subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.”(p.46)

The second work in this series, Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,was published a year ago. While that work is concerned primarily with Latin American and other rulers, examining the extent to which they really represent a political challenge to US imperialism, several chapters continue his analysis of the ZPC, which he says “far exceeds the resources of AIPAC or the ‘the Lobby.’”

As I reflect on Petras’ series of books dealing with this subject, I am reminded of the hurricane I recently weathered: like its pulsating, blistering winds, each of Petras’ attempts to grapple with this problem is more sweeping and intense than the last, sweeping the moribund detritus off the political landscape and leaving us with fresh, clear language that perfectly corresponds with the political realities we face, but were formerly unable to name. As Confucius says, the first step to political reform is calling things by their proper names. And in Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power, Petras’ Zhi’ngmi’ng (the Chinese word for the Confucian “rectification of terms”) keeps pace with fast-moving political developments: Here we meet with the Zion-libs (as opposed to neo-libs); they are no more grounded in traditional liberalism than the Zion-cons are in conservatism. As to the Zion-cons, they have transmogrified into Zion-fascists:

There is no transcendent event that defines the moment in which Zion-Conservatism became Zion-Fascism. The transition was an evolutionary process during which racism, militarism and authoritarianism developed a mass community base, took hold over time, and became the definitive modus operandi of the ZPC.

Like earlier fascist movements, Zion-fascism subscribes to racialist doctrines of knowledge. According to Zionist epistemology only Jews can (if they dare) criticize Jews as knowledge of Jewry is monopolized by a closed communally defined people. This Zion-fascist theory of knowledge is buttressed by the frequent utterances of progressive or leftist Zionists who frequently dismiss or warn non-Jewish writers that they enter the ‘Jewish’ debate at their peril. (p.41)

Much of this latest book anatomizes the political integuments that connect the ship of state to the ZPC, who then navigate it into the stormy sea of Zionist bellicosity. But considerable space is also devoted to reexamining the long history of US provocation of its “enemies” as a pretext for imperial war, and to which the events of 9/11, according to the author, were no exception.

There are two schools of thought within the 9/11 Truth movement: One of them believes that the events were a false flag operation in which some US government had a direct hand. This is the “Made It Happen on Purpose (MHOP)” school. Its counterpart believes that The US government became aware of the 9/11 plan, but allowed it to happen rather than trying to intercept it so that a pretext for Middle East wars could be provided – the Let it Happen On Purpose” (LHOP) school of thought. Petras’ view is an interesting hybrid, where the US government deliberately politically provokes it into happening, then allows it to happen and covers up the role of its own and allied facilitators (the Israelis) in the interest of targeting Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. While my own predilections are of the MHOP variety, for reasons we do not have the space to consider here, I can very much appreciate the detailed expose Petras provides of US government and Israeli support for the 9/11 actions. Whether or not a widening of US militarized imperialism was the actual motivation for causing, provoking or allowing these criminal events to take place, it is unarguable that this is how those events have been politically exploited.

More conceptual groundbreaking is done in his chapter called “Military-driven vs. Market-driven Empire.” Here he cogently makes the case that America’s costly militarized empire building (at Israel’s behest) is costing it much and gaining it little, while Japan, Russia, China and other market-driven imperialists are making tremendous gains with their more constructive approaches. Anyone not familiar with his earlier work might suspect that Petras is advocating the more profitable market-driven empire in place of this costly military-driven one. So I asked the author to respond to a hypothetical reader who might have this concern. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“Opposing the Iraq war and war threats to Iran is in no way implicitly supporting any imperialism..The book argues that there are two paths to empire via capital expansion and via military conquest . One is more destructive the other is more exploitative of labor. Neither is progressive and both must be fought. However, when US imperial power is used –by Zionists- to serve a foreign power-Israel- we have an additional problem: to recover our national independence so that the American people can decide our policies best.”

A clear and reassuring answer, yet I wish he had been clearer about the “both must be fought” aspect in this book for the benefit of new readers. Of course, anyone who doubts it only needs to review his earlier years of published solid opposition to market-driven imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere.

The threat of the ZPC to basic American democratic values and to the integrity of the antiwar movement is clearly spelled out in the book’s final pages. As a lifelong antiwar activist myself, I cannot too strongly concur with this timely observation:

The collapse of the US peace movement, the lack of credibility of many of its leaders and the demoralization of many activists can be traced to strategic failures: the unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and the inability to create a political alternative the the bellicose Democratic Party.

Anyone with in an interest in this problem is encouraged to read my recent report about the subversion of the National Assembly against the War (a recent effort to reunify our fractured antiwar movement) by these very same Zionists, who imposed their “war for oil” slogan over the democratic decision of the Assembly to identify the machinations of the Zionist lobbies as a primary cause (Petras spends a great deal of time in his book debunking the “war for oil” canard, as have other cutting-edge writers, such as Jonathon Cook, Israel Adam Shamir, etc.)

All three books in this trilogy are published only in paperback edition, at low prices affordable to working people. Anyone who has come to understand the problem of Zionism in the US political arena, and anyone who is coming to understand it, will not find a better guide than this irrefragable sociologist James Petras, the C. Wright Mills of our times.

Source

January 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | American Left, Israel, James Petras, Middle East, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Chomsky’s Latest Gasser: Israel is US military base

ww3zionism | December 12, 2009

Renowned American sociopolitical analyst Noam Chomsky says Israel functions as Washington’s main weapons storage base in the Middle East.

“Israel is essentially a US military base, the US positions weapons there, that’s a very close military and intelligence tie,” the Jewish academic told Press TV on Wednesday while explaining the complexity of relations between Washington and Tel Aviv.

Commenting on the weapons that Israel received from the US before launching its 2007-2008 offensive in the Gaza Strip, Chomsky said that the exchange of weapons between the two sides was not surprising.

“[Israel] is receiving weapons constantly. In fact, weapons were sent during the invasion of Gaza. They tried to send them, they were supposed to send them from Greece, and Greece refused to ship them,” he said.

“When pentagon was asked about this, they responded (I think correctly) that the weapons were not being sent for the Gaza invasion which was underway with the US weapons of course; rather, the US was positioning weapons in Israel,” he added.

Source article is here.

P.S. This is quite a gasser. It’s right up there with “it doesn’t matter who did 9/11.”

December 12, 2009 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Noam Chomsky, United States | Leave a comment

Are They Really Oil Wars?

By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
July 9, 2008

A most widely-cited factor behind the recent U.S. wars of choice is said to be oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war. While some of these opponents argue that the war is driven by the U.S. desire for cheap oil, others claim that it is prompted by big oil’s wish for high oil prices and profits. Interestingly, most antiwar forces use both claims interchangeably without paying attention to the fact that they are diametrically-opposed assertions.

Not only do the two arguments contradict each other, but each argument is also wanting and unconvincing on its own grounds; not because the U.S. does not wish for cheap oil, or because Big Oil does not desire higher oil prices, but because war is no longer the way to control or gain access to energy resources. Colonial-type occupation or direct control of energy resources is no longer efficient or economical and has, therefore, been abandoned for more than four decades.

The view that recent U.S. military adventures in the Middle East and the broader Central Asia are driven by energy considerations is further reinforced by the dubious theory of Peak Oil, which maintains that, having peaked, world oil resources are now dwindling and that, therefore, war power and military strength are key to access or control of the shrinking energy resources.

In this study I will first argue that the Peak Oil theory is unscientific, unrealistic, and perhaps even fraudulent. I will then show that war and military force are no longer the necessary or appropriate means to gain access to sources of energy, and that resorting to military measures can, indeed, lead to costly, not cheap, oil. Next, I will demonstrate that, despite the lucrative spoils of war resulting from high oil prices and profits, Big Oil prefers peace and stability, not war and geopolitical turbulence, in global energy markets. Finally, I will argue a case that behind the drive to war and military adventures in the Middle East lie some powerful special interests (vested in war, militarism, and geopolitical concerns of Israel) that use oil as an issue of “national interest”—as a façade or pretext—in order to justify military adventures to derive high dividends, both economic and geopolitical, from war.

Has Oil Really Peaked—and Is It Running Out?

Peak oil thesis, as noted above, maintains that world oil reserves, having reached their maximum capacity, are now dwindling—with grave consequences of oil shortage and high energy prices. While this has led many to call for more vigorous conservation, it has led others to argue in favor of unrestrained exploration and extraction of oil reserves, especially those located in the Alaskan Wildlife regions.

Significant policy and/or political implications follow from the view that oil is running out. For one thing, this view provides fodder for the cannons of war profiteering militarists who are constantly on the look out to invent new enemies and find new pretexts for continued war and escalation of military spending. For another, it tends to disarm many antiwar forces that accept this thesis and, therefore, “internalize responsibility for U.S. foreign policy every time they fill their gas tank. Thus they own the wars.”[1]

The Peak Oil thesis serves as a powerful trap and a clever manipulation in that it lets the real forces of war and militarism (the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby) “off the hook; it is a fabulous redirection. All evils are blamed on a commodity upon which we are all utterly dependent.”[2]

The fact, however, is that there is no hard evidence that oil has peaked, or that global oil reserves are shrinking, or that the current skyrocketing price of oil is due to a supply shortage. (As shown below, there is actually an oil surplus, no shortage.)

Peak oil theory is not altogether new. It was originally floated around in the 1940s, arguing that world oil reserves would be exhausted within the next two decades or so. It then resurfaced in the 1970s and early 1980s in reaction to the oil price hikes of those years—which were, incidentally, precipitated not by oil shortages but by international political convulsions, revolutions and wars. But it died down once the price of oil fell back to pre-crises levels.

As recent geopolitical convulsions in the Middle East (especially the U.S. war on Iraq, and the resultant booming speculation in oil markets) have triggered a new round of oil price hikes, Peak Oil theory has once again become fashionable. The theory is being promoted not only by war profiteers and proponents of an unbridled domestic oil exploration and extraction, especially in Alaska, but also by some apparently antiwar liberals such as Michael T. Klare and James H. Kunstler.[3]

Peak oil theory is based on a number of assumptions and omissions that make it less than reliable. To begin with, it discounts or disregards the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved (and will continue to further improve) the efficiency of oil consumption. Evidence shows that, for example, “over a period of five years (1994-99), U.S. GDP expanded over 20 percent while oil usage rose by only nine percent. Before the 1973 oil shock, the ratio was about one to one.”[4]

Second, Peak Oil theory pays scant attention to the drastically enabling new technologies that have made (and will continue to make) possible discovery and extraction of oil reserves that were inaccessible only a short time ago. One of the results of the more efficient means of research and development has been a far higher success rate in finding new oil fields. The success rate has risen in twenty years from less than 70 percent to over 80 percent. Computers have helped to reduce the number of dry holes. Horizontal drilling has boosted extraction. Another important development has been deep-water offshore drilling, which the new technologies now permit. Good examples are the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and more recently, the promising offshore oil fields of West Africa.[5]

Third, Peak Oil theory also pays short shrift to what is sometimes called non-conventional oil. These include Canada’s giant reserves of extra-heavy bitumen that can be processed to produce conventional oil. Although this was originally considered cost inefficient, experts working in this area now claim that they have brought down the cost from over $20 a barrel to $8 per barrel. Similar developments are taking place in Venezuela. It is thanks to developments like these that since 1970, world oil reserves have more than doubled, despite the extraction of hundreds of millions of barrels.[6]

Fourth, Peak Oil thesis pays insufficient attention to energy sources other than oil. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. Gas is now about 25 percent of energy demand worldwide. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be the main source of energy in the world. A number of American, European, and Japanese firms have and are investing heavily in developing fuel cells for cars and other vehicles that would significantly reduce gasoline consumption.[7]

Fifth, proponents of Peak Oil tend to exaggerate the impact of the increased oil demand coming from China and India on both the amount and the price of oil in global markets. The alleged disparity between supply and demand is said to be due to the rapidly growing demand coming from China and India. But that rapid growth in demand is largely offset by a number of counterbalancing factors. These include slower growth in U.S. demand due to its slower economic growth, efficient energy utilization in industrially advanced countries, and increases in oil production by OPEC, Russia, and other oil producing countries.

Finally, and perhaps more importantly, claims of “peaked and dwindling” oil are refuted by the available facts and figures on global oil supply. Statistical evidence shows that there is absolutely no supply-demand imbalance in global oil markets. Contrary to the claims of the proponents of Peak Oil and champions of war and militarism, the current oil price shocks are a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the Middle East, not oil shortages. These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the threat of a looming war against Iran. The record of soaring oil prices shows that anytime there is a renewed U.S. military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.

The war also contributes to the escalation of fuel prices in indirect ways—for example, by plunging the U.S. ever deeper into debt and depreciating the dollar, or by creating favorable grounds for speculation. As oil is priced largely in U.S. dollars, oil exporting countries ask for more dollars per barrel of oil as the dollar loses value. Perhaps more importantly, an atmosphere of war and geopolitical instability in global oil markets serves as an auspicious ground for hoarding and speculation in commodity markets, especially oil, which is heavily contributing to the recently soaring oil prices.

As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. . . . Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the ‘tail that wags the dog.’[8]

Wall Street financial giants that created the Third World debt crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the tech bubble in the 1990s, and the housing bubble in the 2000s are now hard at work creating the oil bubble. By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for oil companies to buy even more oil and place it in storage. A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher.[9]

This has led to a steady rise in crude oil inventories over the last two years, “resulting in US crude oil inventories that are now higher than at any time in the previous eight years. The large influx of speculative investment into oil futures has led to a situation where we have both high supplies of crude oil and high crude oil prices. . . . In fact, during this period global supplies have exceeded demand, according to the US Department of Energy.”[10]

The fact that the skyrocketing oil prices of late have been accompanied by a surplus in global oil markets was also brought to the attention of President George W. Bush by Saudi officials when he asked them during a recent trip to the kingdom to increase production in order to stem the rising prices. Saudi officials reminded the President that “there is plenty of oil on the market. Iran has put some 30 million barrels of oil that it can’t sell into floating storage. ‘If we produced more oil, it wouldn’t find buyers,’ says the Saudi source. It wouldn’t affect the price at all.”[11]

And why producing more oil “wouldn’t affect the price at all”? Well, because what is driving the soaring oil prices is not shortage but speculation: “with so much investment money sloshing around in the commodities markets, the Saudis calculate they have no hope of controlling short-term price fluctuations. They blame the recent price run-ups on speculation and fear of shortages [not real shortages], factors they say are beyond their control.”[12]

War for Cheap Oil?

The widely-shared view that the U.S. desire for access to abundant and cheap oil lurks behind the Bush administration’s drive to war in the Middle East rests on the implicit but dubious assumption that access to energy resources requires direct control of oil fields and/or oil producing countries. There are at least three problems with this postulation.

First, if control of or influence over oil producing countries in the Middle East is a requirement for access to cheap oil, the United States already enjoys significant influence over some of the major oil producers in the region—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a number of other smaller producers. Why, then, would the U.S. want to bring about war and political turmoil in the region that might undermine that long and firmly-established influence?

Let us assume for a moment that the neoconservative militarists are sincere in their alleged desire to bring about democratic rule and representational government in the Middle East. Let us further assume that they succeed in realizing this purported objective. Would, then, the thus-emerging democratic governments, representing the wishes of the majority of their citizens, be as accommodating to U.S. economic and geopolitical objectives, including its oil needs, as are its currently friendly rulers in the region? Most probably not.

Secondly, and more importantly, access to oil no longer requires control of oil fields or oil producers—as was the case in times past. For more than a century, that is, from the early days of oil extraction in the United States in the 1870s until the mid-1970s, the price of oil was determined administratively, that is, by independent producers operating in different parts of the world without having to compete with each other. Under those circumstances, colonial or imperial wars of conquest and occupation were crucial to the control of oil (and other) resources.

Beginning with the 1950s, however, that pattern of local, non-competitive price determination began to gradually change in favor of regional and/or international markets. By the mid 1970s, an internationally competitive oil market emerged that effectively ended the century-old pattern of local, administrative pricing. Today, oil prices (like most other commodity prices) are determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in competitive global energy markets; and any country or company can have as much oil as they wish if they pay the going market (or spot) price.[13]

To the extent that competitive oil markets and/or prices are occasionally manipulated, such subversions of competitive market forces are often brought about not so much by OPEC or other oil producing countries as by manipulative speculations of financial giants in New York and London. As was discussed earlier, gigantic Wall Street financial institutions have accomplished this feat through “innovative” financial instruments such as establishment of energy hedge funds and speculative oil futures markets in New York and London.[14]

It is true that collective supply decisions of oil producing countries can, and sometimes does, affect the competitively determined market price. But a number of important issues need to be considered here.

To begin with, although such supply manipulations obviously affect or influence market-determined prices, they do not determine those prices. In other words, competitive international oil markets determine its price with or without oil producers’ supply manipulations. Such supply managements are, however, designed not to create volatility in energy markets, or chronic oil price hikes. Instead, they are designed to stabilize global oil prices because oil exporting countries prefer stability, predictability and long-term planning for their economic development and industrialization projects. Here is how Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo describe this relationship:

As a result, we conclude that the global oil market is the prime mover [i.e., prime determinant of oil price] and OPEC indeed follows its trajectory accordingly and consistently. . . . When market price (both spot and futures) is falling, OPEC decreases its output; when market price is rising, OPEC attempts to increase its output; and when market price is steady, OPEC keeps its output unchanged. . . . And, this is a kind of oil market we have experienced after the dust settled following the crisis of de-cartelization and globalization of oil industry in the 1970s.[15]

Producers’ policy to sometimes curtail or limit the supply of oil, the so-called “limited flow” policy, is designed to raise the actual trading price above the market-determined price in order to keep high-cost U.S. producers in business while leaving low-cost Middle East producers with an above average, or “super,” profit. While for low-cost producers this limited flow policy is largely a matter of making more or less profits, for high-cost U.S. producers it is a matter of survival, of being able to stay in or go out of business—an important but rarely mentioned or acknowledged fact.

A hypothetical numerical example might be helpful here. Suppose that the market-determined, or free-flow, price of oil is $30 per barrel. Further, suppose this price entails an average rate of profit of 10 percent, or $3 per barrel. The word “average” in this context refers to average conditions of production, that is, producers who produce under average conditions of production in terms of productivity and cost of production. This means that producers who produce under better-than-average conditions, that is, low-cost, high productivity producers, will make a profit higher than $3 per barrel while high-cost, low efficiency producers will end up making less than $3 per barrel. This also means that some of the high-cost producers may end up going out of business altogether. Now, if the limited flow policy raises the actual trading price to $35 per barrel, it will raise the profits of all producers accordingly, thereby also keeping in business some high-cost producers that might otherwise have gone out of business.

Furthermore, supply manipulation (in pursuit of price manipulation) is not limited to the oil industry. In today’s economic environment of giant corporations and big businesses, many of the major industries try, and often succeed in controlling supply in order to control price. Take, for example, the automobile industry. Theoretically, automobile producers could flood the market with a huge supply of cars. But that would not be good business as it would lower prices and profits. So, they control supply, just as do oil producers, in order to manipulate price. During the past several decades, the price of automobiles, in real terms, has been going up every year, at least to the tune of inflation. During this period, the industry (and the economy in general) has enjoyed a many-fold increase in labor productivity. Increased labor productivity is supposed to translate into lower costs and, therefore, lower prices. Yet, that has not materialized in the case of this industry—as it has in the case of, for example, pocket calculators or computers.

Another example of price control through supply manipulation is the case of U.S. grain producers. The so-called “set aside” policy that pays farmers not to cultivate part of their land in order to curtail supply and prop up price is not different—nay, it is worse— than OPEC’s policy of supply and/or price manipulation.

It is also necessary to keep in mind that OPEC’s desire to sometimes limit the supply of oil in order to shore up its price is limited by a number of factors. For one thing, the share, and hence the influence, of Middle Eastern oil producers as a percentage of world oil production has steadily declined over time, from almost 40 percent when OPEC was established to about 30 percent today.[16] For another, OPEC members are not unmindful of the fact that inordinately high oil prices can hurt their own long-term interests as this might prompt oil importers to economize on oil consumption and search for alternative sources of energy, thereby limiting producers’ export markets.

OPEC members also know that inordinately high oil prices could precipitate economic recessions in oil importing countries that would, once again, lower demand for their oil. In addition, high oil prices tend to raise the cost of oil producers’ imports of manufactured products as high energy costs are bound to affect production costs of those manufactured products.

War for Expensive Oil?

Now let us consider the widely-shared view that attributes the Bush administration’s drive to war to the influence of big oil companies in pursuit of higher oil prices and profits. As noted, this is obviously the opposite of the “war for cheap oil” argument, as it claims that Big Oil tends to instigate war and political tension in the Middle East in order to cause an oil price hike and increase its profits. Like the “war for cheap oil” theory, this claim is not supported by facts. Although the claim has an element of a prima facie reasonableness, that apparently facile credibility rests more on precedent and perception than reality. Part of the perception is due to the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But the fact is that George W. Bush was never more than an unsuccessful petty oil prospector and Dick Cheney headed a company, the notorious Halliburton, that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.

The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies do benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of the war (that result from oil price hikes) in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, some observers automatically conclude that, therefore, Big Oil must have been behind the war.[17] But there is no evidence that, at least in the case of the current invasion of Iraq, oil companies pushed for or supported the war.

On the contrary, there is strong evidence that, in fact, oil companies did not welcome the war because they prefer stability and predictability to periodic oil spikes that follow war and political convulsion: “Looking back over the last 20 years, there is plenty of evidence showing the industry’s push for stability and cooperation with Middle Eastern countries and leaders, and the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony works against the oil industry.”[18] As Thierry Desmarest, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of France’s giant oil company, TotalFinaElf, put it, “A few months of cash generation is not a big deal. Stable, not volatile, prices and a $25 price (per barrel) would be convenient for everyone.”[19]

It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries—at times, even by military force. But that pattern of colonial or imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big Oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: “The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,” says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. “Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,” adds Mohamedi.[20]

Big Oil interests also know that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access. Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact. Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources. But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.

When Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia he was willing to allow American energy companies to continue with the one-sided contracts they had drawn up during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Putin built a seemingly trusting relationship with George Bush who looked into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw. The two leaders grew even closer in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon—when Russia provided “help for America’s invasion of Afghanistan.” Soon after this generous cooperation, however, “Bush repudiated the anti-ballistic missile treaty in the belief that America could develop the technology for winning a nuclear war. This posed a huge strategic threat to Russia.”[21]

Describing the heavy-handed, imperial U.S. policy toward Russia, Stephen F. Cohen writes: “The real US policy has been very different—a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia’s post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington’s approach to Soviet Communist Russia.”[22]

Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty not merely posed an existential threat to Russia but was almost a betrayal of the trust that Putin had put in him. This led to Putin’s disenchantment with America. “Eventually he seems to have decided that every time America transgressed against Russian interests he would retaliate by stopping another American company from exploiting Russian resources.”[23]

During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.

On March 15, 1995 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12957 which banned all U.S. contributions to the development of Iran’s petroleum resources, a crushing blow to the oil industry, especially to the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran. The deal marked a strong indication that Iran was willing to improve its relationship with the United States, only to have President Clinton effectively nullify it. Two months later, sighting “an extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.,” President Clinton issued another order, 1259, that expanded the sanctions to become a total trade and investment embargo against Iran. Then a year later came ILSA which extended the sanctions imposed on Iran to Libya as well.

It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in Washington. The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of the oil industry pales vis-à-vis the influence of the Zionist lobby.[24]

ILSA was originally to be imposed on both U.S. and foreign companies. However, in the end it was the U.S. companies that suffered the most due to waivers that were given to European companies after pressure from the European Union. In 1996 the EU pursued its distaste of ILSA by lodging complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. and through adopting “blocking legislation” that would prevent EU companies from complying with ILSA. Meanwhile, the contract that Iran had originally signed with Conoco was awarded to TotalFinaElf of France for $760 million; the deal also left the door open for Total to sign an additional contract with Iran for $2 billion in 1997 with their partners Gazprom and Petronas.

In May of 1997 major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other (non-military) U.S. companies to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.

Alas, Washington’s perverse, misguided and ineffectual policy of economic sanctions for political purposes—often in compliance with the wishes of some powerful special interests—continues unabated. “Even with the increased pro-trade lobbying efforts of the oil industry and groups like USAEngage, whose membership ranges from farmers and small business owners to Wall Street executives and oilmen, the lack of support from Washington and the Bush administration could not allow them [major oil companies and other non-military transnational companies] to overtake or counteract the already rolling momentum of AIPAC’s influence on Middle East policy or the renewal of ISLA.”[25]

Despite the fact that oil companies nowadays view war and political turmoil in the Middle East as detrimental to their long-term interests and, therefore, do not support policies that are conducive to war and militarism, and despite the fact that war is no longer the way to gain access to oil, the widespread perception that every U.S. military engagement in the region, including the current invasion of Iraq, is prompted by oil considerations continues. The question is why?

Behind the Myth of War for Oil

The widely-shared but erroneous view that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven by oil concerns is partly due to precedence: the fact that for a long time military force was key to colonial or imperialist control and exploitation of foreign markets and resources, including oil. It is also partly due to perception: the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But, as noted earlier, George W. Bush was never more than an ineffective minor oil prospector and Dick Cheney was never really an oil man; he headed the notorious Halliburton company that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.

But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that drive U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for military hardware, and recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.

There is also evidence that for every dollar’s worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to “secure” the flow of that oil! This is a clear indication that the claim that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud .[26]

While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports. During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz’s response was: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”[27]

Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence—some of which presented in the preceding pages—that for the last several decades oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations, however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.

These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional façades to serve the defacto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby, have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East—often over the objections and frustrations of major U.S. oil companies. It is a well established fact that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these jingoistic think tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.

These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East. Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.

The oil and other non-military transnational corporations’ aversion to war and military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?

Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray U.S. military operations in the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to “safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies.” Yet, a close scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps the causality is the other way around. That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more likely to be the result, not the cause, of U.S. foreign policy in the region, especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The U.S. policy of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the neighborhood or community in order to, then, portray his parasitic role as necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process, fill out his deep pockets.

No matter how crucial oil is to the world economy, the fact remains that it is, after all, a commodity. As such, international trade in oil is as important to its importers as it is to its exporters. There is absolutely no reason that, in a world free of the influence of the beneficiaries of war and militarism and their powerful lobbies (the armaments and the pro-Israel lobbies), the flow of oil could not be guaranteed by international trade conventions and commercial treaties.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of the recently published The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

References

[1] Ron Andreas, reporter/researcher, e-mail correspondence with the author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Holt paperbacks 2002); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005).
[4] Eliyahu Kanovsky, “Oil: Who’s Really Over a Barrel?” Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2003).
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Wall Street Journal (17 May 2001); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[7] The Wall Street Journal (10 March 1998); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[8] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008)
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Stanley Reed, “Help from the House of Saud: Why the leading oil producer wants to cool off the market,” Business Week (29 May 2008)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007); for a discussion of the theory and history of oil price determination see also, Cyrus Bina, “The Rhetoric of Oil and the Dilemma of War and American Hegemony,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993); also Cyrus Bina, “Limits of OPEC Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil Accumulation,” OPEC Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1990).
[14] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008),
[15] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007).
[16] Gary S. Becker, “Why War with Iraq Is Not about Oil,” Business Week (17 March 2003): 30.
[17] Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Global Political Economy of Israel (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002).
[18] Melinda K. Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” unpublished Senior thesis, Dept. of Economics and Finance, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa (spring 2004), 10.
[19] As quoted in Ruby, Ibid., P. 13.
[20] As cited by Roger Burbach, “Bush Ideologues vs. Big Oil: The Iraq Game Gets Even Stranger,” CounterPunch.
[21] Israel Shamir, The Writings of Israel Shamir, Contributor 45
[22] Stephen F. Cohen “The New American Cold War,” The Nation (10 July 2006); as quoted in Shamir, Ibid.
[23] Shamir, Ibid.
[24] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 14-15; see also Herman Franssen and Elaine Morton, “A Review of U.S. Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran,” Middle East Economic Survey 45, no. 34 (26 August 2002), pp. D1-D5 (D section contains op eds. as opposed to staff-written articles).
[25] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 16-17; see also David Ivanovich, “Conoco’s Chief Blasts Sanctions,” Houston Chronicle (12 February 1997).
[27] The statement was widely reported by many news papers and other media outlets. See, for example, The Guardian (4 June 2003)

http://www.counterpunch.org/zadeh07092008.html

December 3, 2009 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | China, Middle East, OPEC, Peak Oil, Russia | Leave a comment

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MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?

Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024

… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article

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