THE REALITY OF ISRAEL

A MILITARIZED OUTPOST SERVING IMPERIALIST INTERESTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Theodor Herzl was very clear when he stated that Der Judenstaat would form a colonial outpost in Palestine if the Great powers granted it to them and guaranteed their existence. “We would there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral State, remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence”. (Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question. London: H. Pordes, Translated by Sylvie D'avigdor - 6th Edition, p. 30)

On 12 November 1914, Chaim Weizman wrote a letter to C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, stating, “…should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more. They would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal”.

Herbert Samuel, a Jewish British of the British civil sent a memorandum in early 1915 headed “The Future of Palestine” to H. Asquith, the British Prime Minister then. In his diary on January 28, 1915 Asquith wrote that Samuel had “argued at considerable length and with some vehemence in favor of the British annexation of Palestine… He thinks we might plant in this not very promising territory about three or four million European Jews… I confess I am not attracted to this proposed addition to our responsibilities…” Asquith later added, “Curiously enough, the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George. And I need not say he does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future, but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession or under the protectorate of ‘agnostic and atheistic’ France”. (Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949, pp. 148-151)

U.S. relationship with the Middle East began as a neutral power interested in the application of self-determination to all ethnic groups, including Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs who were under Turkish rule. This relationship developed into supporting British designs for control of the area following WWI. It was further developed into supporting Zionist plans in Palestine that gradually enhanced into a strategic alliance between the U.S. and Israel as part of the New World Order led by the U.S. following the disintegration of the USSR in 1991.

On 31 October 1998, a U.S. Memorandum of Agreement was signed by American President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu according to which the U.S. would work jointly for the attainment of the following objectives: enhancing Israel’s defensive and deterrent capabilities, and upgrading the framework of the U.S.-Israeli strategic and military relationships, as well as the technological cooperation between them.

This relationship with the Imperialist powers made it possible for the Zionists to create Israel in 1948. After six decades, Israelis began to wake up to reality. The Palestinian Arabs did not vanish into thin air.

In early 2001, Ariel Sharon won the elections in Israel. He came to power with a declared goal of ending the ‘War of Independence’ of which the war in 1948 was ‘just one chapter’. (“Interview with Sharon” by Ari Shavit, published in Ha’aretz on 12 April 2001)

The war against ‘terror’ gave Sharon a cover to press on with his agenda using brutality and war crimes. Through this brutality, Sharon was hoping to bring about a Palestinian surrender to the Zionist whims and wishes. Moreover, he began building a wall to imprison the Palestinians within ghettos making their life impossible. For five years, Sharon failed to realize his dream.

On 12 July 2006, Israel started an all out war against Lebanon using Hezbollah’s kidnapping of 2 Israeli soldiers as a pretext. The war was ended on 14 August 2006 in complete failure for Israel.

The ‘demographic threat’ came back to haunt the Zionists. A systemic effort to confront the ‘threat’ was introduced according to which annual conferences were held in the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center – Herzliya to discuss and confront this basic and ‘strategic threat’ to the ‘Jewish State’. The first conference was held in December 2001.

Figures published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics on 22 April 2007 indicate that current population of Israel number 7,150,000 of whom 5,725,000 (80%) are Jewish. Arabs living within the borders of Mandate Palestine are approximately 4.5 million. Within ten to fifteen years, Arabs living in Palestine would become the majority even if Palestinian Refugees were not allowed to return to the homes and lands that were usurped from them.

Making peace with the Arabs would mean an end to Israel’s role as a militarized outpost serving Imperialist interests in the Middle East, which would mean an end to the unlimited support Israel gets from the Western Imperialist powers.

The only way out of this vicious circle is for the Israeli Jews to realize the bankruptcy of political Zionism, admit the wrong done to the Arabs, accept the Right of Return and create one Palestinian State within which all citizens would live as equal human beings with equal human rights.


Nizar Sakhnini, 28 April 2007

ElBaradei backs calls for no-nukes Middle East

'This is the last chance to build security ... based on trust and cooperation'

Compiled by Daily Star staff
Monday, April 16, 2007

UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei called on Iran and Israel on Sunday to join a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East and urged other countries not to resort to military action against Tehran. "At the end of the day the Middle East should be a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, a zone in which Israel and Iran are both members," ElBaradei said following talks in Jordan with King Abdullah II.

"This is the last chance to build security in the Middle East based on trust and cooperation and not the possession of nuclear weapons," the International Atomic Energy Agency chief was quoted as saying.

ElBaradei said a peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors "must be reached in parallel with a security agreement in the region based on ridding the region of all weapons of mass destruction."

Israel is considered the sole, albeit undeclared, nuclear power in the region with an arsenal of around 200 warheads.

ElBaradei also noted that "Arab countries have joined the [nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel hasn't."

He said there was an "imbalance" in the nuclear capabilities of Israel and the Arab countries. Israel, he said, "has a nuclear deterrent force while all Arab countries have committed their program to peaceful purposes."

He reiterated calls for Iran "to cooperate with us with sufficient transparency until we make sure that the Iranian program is devoted to peaceful purposes."

"We have not seen that this program is devoted to military purposes and we have not seen underground facilities," he said.

But he added: "There is fear over Iran's future intentions, not today but within the next five to 10 years.

"We still have plenty of time to solve this issue peacefully, [and] the only way to solve the Iranian problem is through negotiations," ElBaradei said, dismissing a possible military option concerning Iran as "unrealistic and disastrous."

ElBaradei is in Jordan to discuss the country's desire to obtain nuclear energy to generate electricity and for other peaceful means. Amman is the third leg of a tour that has also taken him to Saudi Arabia and Oman.

King Abdullah, during closed-door talks with ElBaradei, promised that his country will be a model for nuclear energy it plans to develop for what it insists are peaceful means.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

Jordan, an IAEA member and signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, "will set a model for others in the peaceful use of nuclear energy," Abdullah said, according to the official Petra new agency.

Petra quoted ElBaradei as saying his "agency was ready to help Jordan to benefit from nuclear energy for peaceful purposes." He said the IAEA would dispatch a team to Jordan next week to look into its plans.

Abdullah said the kingdom's nuclear program would only be for "peaceful uses, generating electricity and desalinating water," according to Petra. He said his country needed to develop the technology to diversify its energy sources, mainly due to rising oil prices.

In January, Abdullah publicly announced for the first time that he wanted to develop Jordan's nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes. Several regional states, including the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council - which consists of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - as well as Egypt and Turkey have declared similar intentions.

Abdullah's announcement came in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, a move seen by some as designed to reassure Israel, with which Jordan has a peace treaty, that his nuclear program was not aimed against the Jewish state.

Key US allies, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have expressed concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions and the growing Shiite influence in the region. They claim the Shiite influence is boosting Iran and giving rise to more extremism, while jeopardizing an Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiation and threatening their own states.

Jordan also has real energy concerns. Unlike its Gulf Arab neighbors, Jordan now imports 95 percent of all of its energy needs and once depended on Iraq for all its oil supplies.

Abdullah said he wants to see Jordan set up a nuclear power plant by 2015 and viewed nuclear energy as a clear alternative to importing oil for such purposes.

The desert kingdom is also one of the 10 most water poor countries in the world. Official estimates put its water deficit at more than 30 percent of its available resources. - Agencies

Why Rice will fail in the Middle East

UPDATE - April 15, 2007 - Editor's note: I am posting at the secondary blog(also see Friday's articles at the overflow blog).
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Published: 09/04/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)

By Adel Safty, Special to Gulf News

By her own recent admission, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East contains no grand ideas and is based on the step by step approach. The step by step strategy is the wrong approach to solving the Palestine conflict. It failed before and is bound to fail again.

Rice's approach is based on the theory that if you achieve enough trust between the belligerent parties you will facilitate substantive negotiations for a final resolution of the conflict.

But the Palestine conflict is no ordinary conflict. From the beginning of the Zionist enterprise to take over Palestine from its inhabitants and turn it into a Jewish country, the Palestine conflict has been an existential one. There was no room in the Zionist project for Palestinian people in the Jewish state.

In fact, the very existence of the Palestinian people was eliminated from Palestine in the imagination of the Zionist propagandists seeking to sell their colonial enterprise to the imperial powers. Their most potent and telling slogan said that the Jewish people wanted to colonise Palestine, "a land without a people for a people without land".

A measure of the audacity of the enterprise is evident when you consider that at the time of this slogan the Arab Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) constituted about 93 per cent of the population of Palestine.

How the Zionist Commission managed, with the help of the occupying British forces, the support of the Western imperial powers, to transform Palestine by force from an Arab country into a Jewish state, is one of the most remarkable stories of the 20th century.

In the process the Palestinian people have been expelled by the hundreds of thousands, dispersed, their homeland lost, their society shattered. Those Palestinians who live under the Israeli occupation are regularly subjected to violence, collective punishment, continued dispersion and dispossession.

The Palestinians have suffered gross injustice and Israel's responsibility for this has been admitted by David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, in 1956. Various Israeli historians documented it in the past 20 years or so. And yet it is the Palestinians who are being asked to make concessions.

In 1988 they abandoned their plan for a secular state in Palestine for Jews, Muslims and Christians and agreed to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on roughly half of Palestine. Under the Oslo Agreement, in 1993, they agreed to accept the irreversible loss of 78 per cent of their country to the Israelis and establish a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, about 22 per cent of their former country.

In fact, under various "peace" plans, the Palestinians continued to lose land and hope while at the same time being subjected to the violence of occupation and pressured into making concessions to the occupier.

Asymmetry of power

And it is this asymmetry of power that is being used by American mediators including Rice, as the defining context for "solving" the conflict. In effect, the victim is being asked to stop resisting the occupation, to protect the symbols of dispossession - the Jewish colonies - to accept punishment if they democratically elect the wrong government, and to be grateful when the daily restrictions on their lives are somewhat eased.

The step by step strategy employed by Kissinger after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war produced the Sinai I and Sinai II disengagement agreements between Israelis and Egyptians. This was in the interest of both parties. The Egyptians wanted to reopen the Suez Canal as a reward for their honourable military performance in the war. The Israelis did not want to be over-stretched militarily after the sobering lesson they received at the hands of the Egyptians. They also received a commitment from Washington not to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in effect committing Washington to block any peace with the Palestinians.

The dramatic visit by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel in 1977 helped produce the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement known as the Camp David Agreement in 1978. The Egyptian regained their Sinai, the Israelis removed the most powerful Arab country from the Arab-Israeli conflict and prepared to liquidate Palestinian nationalism once and for all.

This became evident when shortly after the Israelis withdrew from the Sinai in 1982, The Menahem Begin-Ariel Sharon team sent their army into Lebanon in what they hoped would be the final coup to settle the Palestine question by force. They miscalculated - with tragic cost for the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

Clearly the balance of power calculations used by Kissinger in the step by step strategy is utterly unsuitable for the Palestine conflict because of the gross asymmetry of power between the parties, one of which is undeniably a victim the other incontrovertibly a wrongdoer.

What is needed is a clear break with the past; a recognition that the Palestinians have suffered gross injustice and are entitled to reparations and a measure of justice, not as an act of charity and generosity from the occupier but as of right.

And this is what is missing from Rice's small ideas: A vision of peace based on law and justice, not force.

Instead she is focusing on power politics and small steps worthy of her small ideas. Why should the Israelis settle for anything less than what they have achieved by force when Washington is allowing them to flout "peace" plans like the roadmap, build a separation wall, and continue dispossession of the Palestinians?

In his reaction to the renewed Arab League offer of peace on the basis of some justice and some rights for the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmet responded confidently that his government rejected the right of return of even one Palestinian.

Prof Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia. He is author of "From Camp David to the Gulf".

Syria's Already Seated At The Table

NORTON MEZVINSKY

April 5 2007

The Bush administration is making a big mistake by continuing to refuse to have direct talks with the government of Syria, one of the most important players in the current complicated and costly Middle East tragedy.

Syria is in a critically important position to help improve the present situation in Iraq, to begin a constructive process to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to help Lebanon regain stability. Those three points are in the best interest of the United States and its allies in the area, chief among them Israel.

On March 16, I had a two-hour conversation with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus. It confirmed my belief that the Bush administration should immediately agree to engage in direct discussions with the government of Syria. Further, President Bush should accept President Assad's recent offer to meet and talk with no pre-conditions.

Numerous members of Congress and the recently dissolved Baker Commission have recommended such talks, focusing on such major topics as Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Lebanon r. Indeed, some members of Congress have recently traveled to Damascus and have discussed these points with President Assad. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the most recent member to have done so.

President Bush, however, continues to refuse to engage in discussion with the Assad government until and unless Syria meets certain conditions and demands made by both Israel and the United States. Bush publicly places Syria on the verge of the "Axis of Evil" and refers to it as a state that supports terrorism. The March 10 meeting in Baghdad, at which Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared together with Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi officials, was limited to a narrow discussion of the Syrian-Iraqi border and concluded quickly with no positive result.

At the one and only meeting between Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, and a White House official, one of President Bush's closest advisers, Elliot Abrams, said the administration saw no good reason to "reward" Syria by opening discussions.

The Bush administration's position is incorrect. It eliminates any possibility of acquiring advice and help from Syria. First of all, President Assad and others in his government know a great deal about Iraq, its people and its culture. As President Assad emphasized in his conversation with me, an unstable Iraq poses a major problem for Syria. Almost 11/2 million Iraqis, for example, have legally come into Syria from Iraq during the past two years, and an estimated half-million have come illegally. Most of them are destitute.

The Syrians are not terrorizing Iraq; they are worried about a terrorized Iraq troubling their country. Assad and his government believe they, if given the chance, could give constructive advice to the United States about what to do in Iraq.

In addition to Iraq, President Assad discussed at length with me his nation's difficulties with Israel and the present predicament in Lebanon. He explained the value of Syria's maintaining ongoing relations with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. He carefully and repeatedly pointed out that trouble and chaos in countries bordering Syria and in the area are extremely problematic for Syria.

His sophisticated grasp of the issues and his rational analyses were impressive. His sincerity seemed authentic. He spoke with great respect about the former President Bush, who allegedly understood Syria's real concerns. Assad expressed the wish that the current President Bush would become more like his father.

President Assad believes that the United States could play an important role in helping to resolve peacefully the conflicts and problems in the Middle East. From his perspective, the present American approaches are unfortunately not only wrong but dangerous. Realizing that he and President Bush may disagree with each other on certain points, Assad, nevertheless, wants to have the opportunity to discuss them with Bush frankly and to offer some suggestions. Additionally, he wants to explore improving United States-Syrian relations. President Assad is willing to begin discussions with no pre-conditions. President Bush should agree to do the same.

There is nothing to lose and perhaps much to gain.

Norton Mezvinsky, Ph.D., is a CSU professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and is an expert on contemporary Middle East affairs.

Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant

On that so-called "Shi'a Crescent"

Beirut Memories (I)

6.4.07

News reports from Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon harp on and on about the emerging "Shi`a Crescent," which now poses an allegedly mortal danger to the West (whatever that is!). In the last 60 years, we have seen the Red Scare, the Green Scare (politicized Sunni Islam), and of course, the Axis of Evil, which still gets a lot of air time. The political "flavour of the month" is clearly Iran, which, after the events of the last week or so, is increasingly in the cross-hairs of those who believe that traditions, societies, and histories can be collapsed into a catchy soundbyte or a caricature of the Evil Other.

The events, actions, assumptions and textures of everyday life in the Middle East rarely attract the attention of pundits and politicians. Unless, of course, they want to attribute some aspect of foreigners' propensity for evil to their "cultural traditions." If I had a dime for every time I've heard anthropology used to justify or facilitate the war on terror, I'd be able to retire 20 years early. (Perhaps opening an anthropological boot camp and requiring politicians and foreign affairs journalists to attend for six weeks would help bring the hysteria and b.s. level in the US down a few notches. But then, without a good "daily hate," the current administration would not last a week.)

[For anyone inclined to do further reading, I'd suggest Mahmood Mamdani's essay, "Good Muslim/Bad Muslim", in which he does a great job of demolishing "culture talk" and other misuses of anthropology by politicians, journalists, and military planners.]

In an effort to take a closer look at supposedly Very Scary People from a different angle, I'll be posting some memories of my five years in Lebanon for the next week. Here is the first installment:

For the better part of the 1990s, my Lebanese-born husband and I lived and worked in Beirut. In 1994, we organized and held an international conference entitled "Lessons from Lebanon" to explore alternative approaches to conflict resolution and post-war reconciliation. The conference brought together dozens of people from all walks of life and all faith communities who had lived through Lebanon's 16 years of internecine violence. Three days of presentations, workshops and discussions culminated in the formation of task forces to deal with post-war issues of particular concern to the conference participants: the fate of the 800,000 war displaced and their reintegration into the communities they had fled, the situation of the war handicapped, and children's attempts to come to grips with the war, as well as state attempts to educate a new generation to avoid war. A very earnest and kind gentleman of 50, Dr. Ahmad, was a key member of the latter task force. A Shi'i Muslim and a former Lebanese Army officer, Dr. Ahmad had taken his family to the UK for five years in the 1980s, where he received his Ph.D. in childhood education.

As the task forces met and worked, we got to know all the members quite well. Dr. Ahmad invited us to his home for dinner, and we immediately got along with his wife and children. His wife, Lubna, taught Shakespeare in a high school in South Lebanon. She had really enjoyed her time in London and loved English literature and theatre.

Dr. Ahmad's extended family had lost members and houses in the many years of the war, which affected South Lebanon disproportionately, but they expressed no bitterness at all. Although proud to be Shi'a, they were not demonstrably devout. Lubna dressed in blue jeans and kneelength tailored dresses and did not cover her shoulder length brown hair. She had blue-green eyes, as do I, and we joked that maybe we were distantly related. (Many people from Shi'i villages in Southern Lebanon have blue or green eyes.)

In March 1996, as regional political and military events were heating up and anxieties were rising, we learned from a member of the children of war task force that Dr. Ahmad had suffered a cerebral aneurysm while at work. He had had a very bad headache all day, decided to put his head down on his desk to rest, and never awoke again. We immediately went to see him in the hospital, where he was unconscious and breathing thanks to a respirator. Lubna, ashen-faced, was holding his hand and not taking her eyes from his face. I knew he was not going to make it, but asked her if they had given him cumiden and other anticoaglulants, trying to sound confident and sure that technology and modern pharmacology would pull him through.

Two weeks later, we learned that the hospital had turned off the respirator at the family's request and shortly thereafter, Dr. Ahmed had passed away with his wife and children and brothers at his side.

In Islam, one must be buried the same day one has died. But memorial services can take place at any time after the death and burial. There is usually a forty-day memorial service. About a week after his death, a memorial service was held for Dr. Ahmed in early April 1996, about a week before the outbreak of 'Operation: Grapes of Wrath', which was to bring more death and devastation to Lebanon's Shi'i community. George, my former husband, and I were invited to attend the service, held in the southern suburbs of Beirut, home to the city's Shi'a population, as well as some of the armed groups frequently mentioned in news reports, such as Hizbullah and the Amal militia.

We arrived to a large and modern mosque complex on a dismal rainy day. I was dressed in a black, grey, and copper striped blazer covering a black wool turtle neck shirt, a black knee-length skirt, black tights, and black pump shoes. George wore his best black suit and a white shirt with a royal blue tie. As we pulled up to the mosque, we realized that everyone but us was dressed in traditional attire. Some of the men wore turbans, none wore a western suit or tie, and all of the women, old and young, were wearing full black abayas, showing only their hands and eyes.

George and I attempted to enter the building together, but a man stopped us and firmly but politely indicated that I had to enter through the women's door at the other side of the hexagonal building. A crush of people surrounded us. I walked off feeling nervous, alone, and out of place, all the while trying to melt into the stream of women entering the mosque. I felt quite self-conscious about my outfit in this setting, but I was sure that once I entered the building, I'd see Lubna, and that she would be wearing a suit like mine.

But I was mistaken. Once I entered and found a seat I realized I was the only woman in the mosque who was not covered by an abaya. Across the large hexagonal space, I could see George, the only man present in a suit and tie.

My excruciating self-consciousness about being abaya-less soon diminished as speakers got up to recall the wonderful qualities of Dr. Ahmad and his contributions to his family, faith and society. All the women around me were crying, and young girls were coming through the crowd with decorative boxes of tissues and glasses of water. After an hour, the women around me and I became a small community of mourners, sharing tissues, handing one another water, and crying anew each time another speaker began eulogizing Dr. Ahmed and spoke of his young children.

After an hour and a half, some women in front of us got up and left. An older woman seated next to me said "shu!? felleen bakir!" ("What's this, they are leaving too early!") I agreed with her and she clasped my hand in hers until the mourning ceremony ended nearly an hour later.

Once we were all standing up and about to leave, she asked me who I was and how I came to be there. It turned out she was the eldest sister of Lubna, and she took me straight to her sister, the widow, who was wearing a black abaya. Lubna looked at me, her blue eyes red from crying and framed by her black headdress. She seemed happy to see me, abaya-less or not, and hugged me, kissing my face several times and thanking me for coming to the ceremony, and telling me she felt I was "like her sister." Her older sister, whom I'd been sitting next to for the last two hours, also began to hug and kiss me and thanked me for coming. We all started crying again.

I found George outside in the parking lot waiting for me near the car. "How come you didn't tell me that I was wearing the wrong thing?!"

He said "I had no idea; even though I grew up here in Lebanon, I was always in the Christian community. I have never been to a Muslim wedding or funeral until today."

We drove home through a grey and misty rain, listening to BBC reports that left little doubt that Lebanon would see more deaths, more mourning, more funerals, in the coming weeks. Thinking about Dr. Ahmed's memorial service, I realized it was not a "Muslim" or a "Shi'i" event, and that attire did not really matter. Though I'd walked into the mosque feeling so different and isolated, I came out feeling privileged that I had been able to participate with a community mourning the loss of one of its own. Being a Muslim and wearing an abaya had not really mattered; showing up and being there, open to the feelings of those present, did.

Lebanon Beirut Cultural Anthropology
Middle East
Politics
War and conflict

How the Bush Administration Destabilized the "Arc of Instability"

Tomgram: The Theater of the Imperially Absurd

[Tomdispatch recommendations: International human rights lawyer Scott Horton has long had a remarkably informative private newsletter, "No Comment," which is now lodged at the Harper's Magazine website where anyone can read it. It's an invaluable resource. On the subject of invaluable resources, don't miss my daily web-stop, Juan Cole's indispensible Informed Comment. Jonathan Schwarz, who has written for Tomdispatch, recently created a five-minute "Bush intervention" video which amused me greatly. Tom]

Six Crises in Search of an Author

How the Bush Administration Destabilized the "Arc of Instability"
By Tom Engelhardt

One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a seventh character in search of an author, and demanded the same attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh character" was just part of the play, even after he was summarily ejected from the theater.

Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003, officials in the Bush administration and their neocon supporters, retro-think-tank admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their Global War on Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from North Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc of instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the planet and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy supplies flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough to them. The "last superpower," the greatest military force in history, would simply have to put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue" powers of the region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered to stamp a massive "footprint" -- to use a Pentagon term of the time -- in the middle of that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be measured by military bases established.) Also needed was the nerve not just to lob a few cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to offer such an imposing demonstration of American shock-and-awe power that those "rogues" -- Iraq, Syria, Iran (Hezbollah, Hamas) -- would be cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S. allies like oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

It would, in fact, be necessary -- in another of those bluntly descriptive words of the era -- to "decapitate" resistant regimes. This would be the first order of business for the planet's lone "hyperpower," now that it had been psychologically mobilized by the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, what other power on Earth was capable of keeping the uncivilized parts of the planet from descending into failed-state, all-against-all warfare and dragging us (and our energy supplies) down with them?

Mind you, on September 11, 2001, as those towers went down, that arc of instability wasn't exactly a paragon of… well, instability. Yes, on one end was Somalia, a failed state, and on the other, impoverished, rubble-strewn Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled (and al-Qaeda encamped); while in-between Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a severely weakened nation with a suffering populace, but the "arc" was wracked by no great wars, no huge surges of refugees, no striking levels of destruction. Not particularly pleasant autocracies, some of a fundamentalist religious nature, were the rule of the day. Oil flowed (at about $23 a barrel); the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered uncomfortably; and, all in all, it wasn't a pretty picture, nor a particularly democratic one, nor one in which, if you were an inhabitant of most of these lands, you could expect a fair share of justice or a stunningly good life.

Still, the arc of instability, as a name, was then more prediction than reality. And it was a prediction -- soon enough to become a self-fulfilling prophesy -- on which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and all those neocons in the Pentagon readily staked careers and reputations. As a crew, already dazzled by American military power and its potential uses, such a bet undoubtedly looked like a sure winner, like betting with the house in a three-card monte scheme. They would just give the arc what it needed -- a few intense doses of cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in some high-tech military boots-on-the-ground, some night-vision goggled eyes in the desert, some Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead, and some "regime-change"-style injections of further instability. It was to be, as Andrew Bacevich has written, "an experiment in creative destruction."

First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Both pushovers. How could the mightiest force on the planet lose to such puny powers? As a start, you would wage a swift air-war/proxy-war/Special-Forces war/dollar-war -- CIA agents would arrive in friendly areas of Northern Afghanistan in late 2001 carrying suitcases stuffed with money -- in one of the most backward places on the planet. Your campaign would be against an ill-organized, ill-armed, ragtag enemy. You would follow that by thrusting into the soft, military underbelly of the Middle East and taking out the hollow armed forces of Saddam Hussein in a "cakewalk."

Next, with your bases set up in Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of Iran -- and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in hand -- what would it take to run the increasingly unpopular mullahs who governed that land out of Tehran? Meanwhile, Syria, another weakened, wobbly state divided against itself, now hemmed in not only by militarily powerful Israel but American-occupied Iraq on the other would be a pushover. In each of these lands, you would soon enough end up with an American-friendly government, run by some figure like the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi; and, voilà! (okay, they wouldn't have used French), you would have a Middle East made safe for Israel and for American domination. You would, in short, have your allies in Europe and Japan as well as your possible future enemies, Russia and China, by the throat in an increasingly energy-starved world.

Certainly, many of the top officials of the Bush administration and their neocons allies, dreaming of just such an orderly, American-dominated "Greater Middle East," were ready to settle for a little chaos in the process. If a weakened Iraq broke into several parts; or, say, the oil-rich Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia happened to fall off that country, well, too bad. They'd deal.

Little did they know.

The Tin Touch

Here's the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All the Bush administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual instability, often chaos, sometimes outright disaster to set in. It's been quite a record, the very opposite of an imperial golden touch.

And, on any given day, you can see the evidence of this on a case by case basis in your local paper or on the TV news. You can check out the Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or impending disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and potential crises discussed in one place -- without which the magnitude of the present disaster and the dangers in our future are hard to grasp.

Few in the mainstream world have even tried to put them all together since the Bush administration rolled back the media, essentially demobilizing it in 2001-2002, at which point its journalists and pundits simply stopped connecting the dots. Give the Bush administration credit: Its top officials took in the world as a whole and at an imperial glance. They regularly connected the dots as they saw them. The post-9/11 strike at Afghanistan was never simply a strike at al-Qaeda (or the Taliban who hosted them). It was always a prelude to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq was never meant to end in Baghdad (as indicated in the neocon pre-war quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran"). Nor was Tehran to be the end of the line.

Under the rubric of the "Global War on Terror," they were considering literally dozens of countries as potential future targets. Dick Cheney put the matter bluntly back in August 2002 as the public drumbeat for an invasion of Iraq was just revving up:

"The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning of a lengthy campaign, Cheney noted. 'Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might have would be false and temporary,' he said. 'There is a terrorist underworld out there spread among more than 60 countries.'"

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, they began stitching together the arc of instability in their minds with an eye not so much to Arabs, or South Asians, or even Israelis, but to playing their version of what the British imperialists used to call "the Great Game." They had the full-scale rollback of energy-giant Russia in mind as well as the containment or rollback of potential future imperial power, China, already visibly desperate for Iraqi, Iranian, and other energy supplies. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, they were remarkably blunt about this. They proudly published that seminal document of the Bush era, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002, which called for the U.S. to "build and maintain" its military power on the planet "beyond challenge."

Think about that for a moment. A single power on Earth "beyond challenge." This was a dream of planetary dominion that once would have been left to madmen. But in what looked like a world with only one Great Power, it was easy enough to imagine a Great Game with only one great player, an arms race with only one swift runner.

The Bush administration was essentially calling for a world in which no superpower, or bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to challenge this country's supremacy. As the President put it in an address at West Point in 2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The National Security Strategy put the same thought this way: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." That's anywhere on the planet. Ever. And the President and his followers promptly began to hike the Pentagon budget to suit their oversized, military fantasies of what an American "footprint" should be.

With this in mind, the arc of instability, which, in energy-flow terms, was quite literally the planet's heartland, seemed the place to control. And yet -- look hard as you will -– you're unlikely to find a single piece in your daily paper that takes in that arc; that, say, includes Somalia and Pakistan in the same piece, even though Bush administration policy has effectively tied them together in disaster. To take another example, the rise of Iran (and a possible "Shiite crescent"), Iran's influence or interference in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and Iran's off-the-wall president have been near obsessions in the U.S. media; and yet, you would be hard-pressed to find a piece even pointing out that the Bush administration's two invasions and occupations -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- which left both those countries bristling with vast American bases and sprawling American-controlled prison systems, took place on either side of Iran. Add in the fact that the Bush administration, probably through the CIA, is essentially running terror raids into Iran through Pakistan and you have a remarkably different vision of Iran's geostrategic situation than even an informed American media consumer would normally see.

After September 11, 2001, but based on the sort of pre-2001 thinking you could find well represented at the neocon website Project for the New American Century, the Bush administration's top officials wrote their own drama for the arc of instability. They were, of course, the main characters in it, along with the U.S. military, some Afghan and Iraqi exiles who would play their necessary roles in the "liberation" of their countries, and a few evil ogres like Saddam Hussein.

Today, not six years after they raised the curtain on what was to be their grand imperial drama, they find themselves in a dark theater with at least six crises in search of an author, all clamoring for attention – and every possibility that a seventh (not to say a seventeenth) "character" in that rowdy, still gathering, audience may soon rise to insist on a part in the horrific farce that has actually taken place.

Six Crises in Search of an Author

Sweeping across the region from East to West, let's briefly note the six festering or clamoring crisis spots, any one of which could end up with the play's major role before George W. Bush slips out of office.

Pakistan: The Pakistani government was America's main partner, along with the Saudis, in funding, arming, and running the anti-Soviet struggle of the mujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan back in the 1980s; and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, was the godfather of the Taliban (and remains, it seems, a supporter to this day). In September 2001, the Bush administration gave the country's coup-installed military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the basic you're-either-with-us-or-against-us choice. He chose the "with" and in the course of these last years, under constant American pressure, has lost almost complete control over Pakistan's tribal regions along the Afghan border to various tribal groups, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other foreign jihadis, who have established bases there. Now, significant parts of the country are experiencing unrest in what looks increasingly like a countdown to chaos in a nuclear-armed nation.

Afghanistan: In the meantime, from those Pakistani base areas, the revived and rearmed Taliban (and their al-Qaeda partners) are preparing to launch a major spring offensive in Afghanistan, using tactics from the Iraq War (suicide bombers or "Mullah Omar's Missiles," as they call them, and the roadside bomb or IED). They are already capable of taking over southern Afghan districts for periods of time. The Bush administration used the Northern Alliance -- that is, proxy Afghan forces -- to take Kabul in November 2001. It then set up its bases and prisons and established President Hamid Karzai as the "mayor of Kabul," only to abandon the task of providing real security and beginning the genuine reconstruction of the country in order to invade Iraq. The rest of this particular horror story is, by now, reasonably well known. The country beyond booming Kabul remains impoverished and significantly in ruins; the population evidently ever more dissatisfied; the American and NATO air war ever more indiscriminate; and it is again the planet's largest producer of opium poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin. Over five years after its "liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a failed state, home to a successful guerrilla war by one of the most primitively fundamentalist movements on the planet, and a thriving narco-kingdom. It is only likely to get worse. For the first time, the possibility that, like the Russians before them, the Americans (and their NATO allies) could actually suffer defeat in that rugged land seems imaginable.

Iran: The country is a rising regional power, with enormous energy resources, and Shiite allies and allied movements of various sorts throughout the region, including in southern Iraq. But it also has an embattled, divided, fundamentalist government capable of rallying its disgruntled populace only with nationalism (call it, playing the American card). Energy-rich as it is, Iran also has a fractured, weakened economy, threatened with sanctions; and its major enemy, the Bush administration, is running a series of terror operations against it, while trying to cause dissension in its oil-rich minority regions. It is also deploying an unprecedented show of naval and air strength in the Persian Gulf. (An aircraft-carrier, the USS Nimitz, with its strike group, is now on its way to join the two carrier task forces already in place there.) In addition, the administration has threatened to launch a massive air assault on Iran's nuclear and other facilities. Though Iraq runs it a close race, Iran may be the single potentially most explosive hot spot in the arc of instability. In a nanosecond, it would be capable, under U.S. attack, or even some set of miscalculations on all sides, both of suffering grievous harm and of imposing enormous damage not just on American troops in Iraq, or on the oil economy of the region, but on the global economy as well.

Iraq: Do I need to say a word? Iraq is the poster-boy for the Bush administration's ability to turn whatever it touches into hell on Earth. In Iraq, the vaunted American military has been stopped in its tracks by a minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent weeks, however, the war there is threatening to turn into something larger, as the American military launches attacks on radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.) Iraq now is the site of a religio-ethnic civil war of striking brutality, loosing waves of refugees within the country and on neighboring states; neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed and deaths have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Amid all this, the occupying U.S. military fully controls only Baghdad's fortified citadel within a city, the Green Zone (and even there dangers are mounting) as well as a series of enormous, multibillion-dollar bases it has built around the country. Iraq is now essentially a failed state and the situation continues to devolve under the pressure of the President's latest "surge" plan. If that plan were to succeed, the citadel-state of the Green Zone would, at best, be turned into the city-state of Baghdad in a sea of chaos. Like Iran, Iraq has the potential to draw other states in the region into a widening civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.

Israel/Palestine/Lebanon: From an early green light for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to join the Global War on Terror (against the Palestinians) to a green light for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch and continue a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush administration has largely green-lighted Israel these last years. It has also ignored or, in the case of the Lebanon War, purposely held back any possibility of serious peace talks. The provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the heavily populated areas of the Shiite south were strewn with Israeli cluster bombs, making some areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter of the population was, for a time, turned into refugees; parts of Lebanese cities including Beirut were flattened by the Israeli air force; and yet Hezbollah was strengthened, the U.S.-backed Siniora government radically weakened, and the country drawn closer to a possible civil war. In the Palestinian areas, Bush administration democracy-promotion efforts ended with a Hamas electoral victory. Starved of foreign aid and having suffered further Israeli military assaults, the Palestinian population is ever more immiserated; Hamas and Fatah are at each other's throats; and the U.S.-backed President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in a weakened position. In the wake of a disastrous war, Israel, with a government whose head has a 3% approval rate, is hardly the triumphant, dominant power in the Middle East that various Bush administration figures imagined once upon a time. This looks like another deteriorating situation with no end in sight.

Somalia (or Blackhawk Down, Round 2): In 2006, Director Porter Goss's CIA bet on a group of discredited Somali warlords, threw money and support behind them, and -- typically -- lost out to an Islamist militia that took most of the country and imposed relative peace on it for the first time in years. The ever proactive Bush administration then turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its military (advised and armed by the U.S. with a helping hand from the North Koreans) to open "a new front" in the Global War on Terror. The Ethiopians promptly launched their own "preventive" invasion of Somalia (with modest U.S. air support), installed a government in the capital, Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the Islamists, and -- giant surprise --promptly found themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with Iraqi overtones. Today, Somalia, long a failed state and then, for a few months, almost a peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamists fundamentalists), is experiencing the worst fighting and death levels in 15 years. The new government in Mogadishu is shaky; their Ethiopian military supporters bloodied; over 1,000 civilians in the capital are dead or wounded, and tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of need. Rate it: a developing disaster -- with worse to come.

In short, from Somalia to Pakistan, the region is today a genuine arc of instability. It is filled with ever more failed states (Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, which never even made it to statehood before collapse), possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan), ever shakier autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan); and huge floods of refugees, internal and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan) as well as massively damaged areas (Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon). It is also witnessing the growth of extremist and terrorist organizations and sentiments.

A Rube Goldberg Machine

At any moment, somewhere in the now-destabilized "arc of instability," that seventh character could indeed rise, demand attention, and refuse to be ejected from the premises. There are many possible candidates. Here are just a few:

Al-Qaeda, an organization dispersed but never fully dismantled by the Bush administration, has now, according to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, rebuilt itself in the Pakistani borderlands with new training camps, new base areas, and a new generation of leaders in their thirties, all still evidently serving under Osama bin Laden. (In the future, Mazzetti suggests even younger leaders are likely to come from the hardened veterans of campaigns in Bush's Iraq). Al-Qaeda is a wild card throughout the region.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now a relatively peaceful area, but from the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to its Turkish and Iranian borders it is also a potential future powder keg and the focus for interventions of all sorts.

Oil pipelines, which, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, crisscross the region, are almost impossible to defend effectively. At any moment, some group or groups, copying the tactics of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, could decide to begin a sabotage campaign against them (or the other oil facilities in the region).

Saudi Arabia, an increasingly ossified religious autocracy, faces opponents ready to practice terrorism against its oil infrastructure and rising unrest in its oil-rich Shiite areas as well as an ascendant Iran.

Syria, a rickety minority regime, under internal pressure, now faces the launching of a renewed Bush administration campaign to further undermine its power. Though we have no way of knowing the scope of this campaign, it seems the President and his top officials have learned absolutely nothing about what their meddling is likely to accomplish.

Outside the "arc of instability," but deeply affected by what goes on there, let's not forget:

The U.S. Army: 13,000 National Guardsmen have just been notified of a coming call-up, long before they were due for another tour of duty in Iraq. The Army, like the Marine Corps, finds itself under near-unbearable pressure from the Iraq and Afghan Wars and, as a result, is sending less than fully trained troops, recruited under ever lower standards, with worn equipment, into battle. The Army, for instance, is having trouble holding on to its best soldiers. Beyond their minimum five years of service, to take an example, "just 62% of West Pointers re-upped, about 25 percentage points lower than at the other service academies." And the public grumbling of the top brass is on the increase. Who knows what this means for the future?

The American People -- Oh yes, them. They haven't really hit the streets yet, but they've hit the opinion polls hard and last November some of them hit the polling booths -- decisively. Who knows when they will "stand up" and insist on being counted. Perhaps in 2008.

In other words, in addition to the normal cast of characters dreamt up by the Bush administration in its fantasy production in the global round, a whole set of unexpected characters are already moving up and down the aisles, demanding attention, and at any moment, that seventh character -- whether state, ethnic group, terrorist cadre, or some unknown crew in search of an author is likely to make its presence felt.

And let's not forget that there is one more obvious "character" out there in search of an author; that there is one more Bush-destabilized place on the planet not yet mentioned, even though it may be the most important of all. I'm talking, of course, about Washington D.C.; I'm talking about the Bush administration itself.

Consider the process by which it turned Washington into a mini-arc of instability: First, it fantasized about the "arc of instability," then stitched it together into a genuine Rube Goldberg instability machine, one where any group, across thousands of miles, might pull some switch that would set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil heartlands of the planet. Then, remarkably enough, the administration itself and all its dreams -- both of a Pax Americana globe and a Pax Republicana United States -- began to disintegrate. The whole edifice, from Rumsfeld's high-tech military to Karl Rove's political machine, became destabilized under its own tin touch. The putative playwright became just another desperate character.

It's no longer far-fetched to say that, with the President's polling figures in the low 30s, resistance to his war still growing, a Democratic Congress beginning to feel its strength, the Republican Party shaking and its presidential candidates preparing to head for the hills, corruption and political scandals popping up everywhere, and high military figures implicitly reading the riot act to their political leaders, the already listing Bush imperial ship of state seems to be making directly for the next floating iceberg.

Imagine then, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still clinging tenaciously to what's left of their dreams and delusions amid the ruins of their plans -- as the USS Nimitz sails toward the Persian Gulf; as American agents of various sorts "advise" and, however indirectly, shuffle aid to extremist groups eager to fell the Iranian regime; as a new campaign against the Syrian regime is launched; as stolen Iraqi oil money is shuttled to the Siniora government in Lebanon (and then, according to Seymour Hersh, to Sunni jihadi groups in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria); and as American agents continue to "interrogate" suspected jihadis in their latest borrowed secret prisons in Ethiopia, while American-backed Ethiopian troops only find themselves more embroiled in Somalia. Imagine all that, and then ask yourself, what levers on that Rube Goldberg machine they've done so much to create are they still capable of pulling?

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

Flexing Imperial Muscles in the Middle East

Jacob Hornberger’s Commentary

In the wake of the Iranian capture of British sailors, U.S. Naval forces are conducting “exercises” in the Persian Gulf, heightening tensions against Iran. (Surprise, surprise!)

Bush administration officials say that the exercises are intended to send a message — that Iran is not going to be permitted to expand its influence and power in the Middle East. (You would think they would have thought about that before installing a pro-Iran regime in Iraq.)

As one anonymous senior U.S. official put it, “Iran has been trying to send a message for some time that we are on the way out, that they are the natural great power of the region and that everybody should circle around Iran. This whole thing [the Naval exercises] is designed to send a message to the region. We are sending a message that we are here to stay.”

That is classic empire talk! Isn’t that exactly the way officials in the Roman, Soviet, and British empires spoke?

Suppose Iran sent a fleet of battleships and carriers into the Gulf of Mexico and declared to Washington, “This exercise is designed to send you a message about your aims to expand your power and influence in Latin America. You will not be permitted to do so, and we are here to stay.”

U.S. officials would have a conniption fit, no doubt about it.

Now, suppose some Iranian soldiers “strayed” into U.S. territorial waters and were taken into custody by U.S. officials. What do you think would happen to the Iranian captives?

They would never be permitted to set foot on American shores. Instead, they would be shackled and goggled and then shipped to Guantanamo Bay or one of the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, where they would be subject to torture and sex abuse as “enemy combatants” in the “global war on terror.”

Now, how do you think U.S.-British Empire officials would respond if the British soldiers who were recently taken captive were whisked off by Iranian officials to some secret Iranian prison camp, where they were disrobed and subjected to the same mistreatment, torture, and abuse that prisoners have been subjected to at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the CIA’s prison camps?

U.S. and British officials would have a conniption fit, no doubt about it.

The U.S. Empire is currently engaged in the same imperial misconduct in the Middle East in which it has been engaged for decades, which has caused untold damage to America, including the 9/11 attacks. And to what avail? People in the Middle East hate the U.S. more than ever, which makes the threat of terrorism that much greater, which only solidifies the Pentagon’s power over the American people.

Why, even longtime ally Saudi King Abdullah is now calling the U.S. occupation of Iraq “illegal” (which, of course, it is). How long before Abdullah becomes the new Official Enemy, just as former U.S. partners and allies Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did?

The basic issue is: What business does the U.S. government have occupying Iraq, conducting naval exercises in the Persian Gulf, and threatening Iran with war? Answer: No more business than Iran would have occupying Mexico, conducting naval exercises in the Gulf of Mexico, and threatening the U.S. with war.

When Americans finally wish to restore freedom, harmony, and peace of mind to our land, they’re going to have to confront the paradigm of empire, militarism, and interventionism that holds our nation in its grip. Otherwise, if they want their empire, they need to get used to imperial muscle-flexing, perpetual war and international tensions, and to the loss of their liberty, prosperity, and harmony.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East

Tomgram: Karon, Why Condi's Diplomacy Should Start with Bush

Ever since September 2001, the President's central operative image has been "war" -- specifically, his "global war on terror" (promptly transformed into the grim acronym GWOT). With it went the fantasy that we had been plunged into the modern equivalent of World War II with -- as George loved to put it -- "theaters" of operation and "fronts" on a global scale. Remember how, as we occupied Baghdad in April 2003, administration pronouncements almost made it seem as though we were occupying Tokyo or Berlin, 1945? And when things went badly in Iraq, that country quickly became "the central front in the war on terror" in the President's speeches. Well, now it may indeed be just that.

In the framework -- essentially a fundamentalist religion -- of global force and "preventive" war adopted by the Bush administration, the only place for diplomats was assumedly on the sidelines, holding the pens, as the enemy surrendered to the military. (Too bad, when we hit Baghdad, there was no one around to surrender, no way to put a John Hancock on our "victory.") Otherwise, as classically happened in Iraq, where the State Department, despite copious planning for the postwar moment, was cut out of the process and left in the Kuwaiti or Washingtonian dust by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, all issues of diplomacy were essentially relegated to Wimp World. After all, as the infamous neocon slogan once went, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." And it was well known that diplomats were not "real men."

Nowhere on the planet was a diplomat worth a sou. Not surprisingly, then, the two central figures in George W. Bush's second-term diplomatic non-endeavors became his two key female enablers, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Karen Hughes, now undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Not surprisingly, Rice has managed to do nothing of significance on our planet -- even the great diplomatic "success" of this administration, its shaky deal with North Korea, was basically crafted by the Chinese on terms worse than could have been obtained years earlier -- and Hughes, as diplomacy's spinmeister, has managed to put less than no polish on our globally disastrous image.

By now, of course, we've arrived at a moment in the Middle East so grim, so fraught with dangers, so at the edge of who knows what, with so many disparate crises merging, that it's even occurred to Rice something must be done. As Tony Karon, savvy guy, senior editor at Time.com, and the creator of the ever-thoughtful and provocative blog Rootless Cosmopolitan points out, Rice has so far gotten a free ride here. Her approval ratings, until recently, hovered well above 50%, while the President's were sinking close to 30%. Let Karon now explain to you where we really are in the Middle East, diplomatically speaking. Tom

Condi's Free Ride

The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East
By Tony Karon

They must serve up some pretty powerful Kool Aid in the press room down at Foggy Bottom, judging by U.S. media coverage of Condi Rice's latest "Look Busy" tour of the Middle East.

Secretary of State Rice's comings and goings have long been greeted with a jaded disdain by the Arab and Israeli media. As Gideon Levy wrote plaintively (and typically) in Israel's Haaretz last August,

"Rice has been here six times in the course of a year and a half, and what has come of it? Has anyone asked her about this? Does she ask herself? It is hard to understand how the secretary of state allows herself to be so humiliated. It is even harder to understand how the superpower she represents allows itself to act in such a hollow and useless way. The mystery of America remains unsolved: How is it that the United States is doing nothing to advance a solution to the most dangerous and lengthiest conflict in our world?"

The fact that -- this time -- Rice professes to be advancing just such a solution has hardly convinced Middle Eastern scribes. As Beirut's secular, liberal Daily Star put it in an editorial on Monday, "Already this is Rice's fourth Middle East tour aimed at reactivating a stalled peace process, but so far the only measurable progress she has achieved has been racking up extra mileage on her airplane."

Mainstream U.S. media outlets were alone in their willingness to swallow the preposterous narratives offered by Rice's State Department spinners on the significance of her latest diplomatic efforts. For months, we have been reading a fantasy version of American diplomacy in which Rice was at the center of a realignment of forces in the Middle East, building a united front of Arab moderates to stand alongside the U.S. and Israel against Iran and other "extremist" elements. Last week, we were asked to believe that Rice was now about to head back to the region to choreograph a complex and dramatic diplomatic dance that would include such "challenges" as "trying to get the Saudis to talk to the Israelis." Perhaps none of her aides bothered to let her in on the open secret that the Saudis have been doing that for months -- and not under the tutelage of, or at the prompting of, the Secretary of State either.

On the eve of her departure, the Washington Post informed us, Rice would remake the peace process via a new math: 4+2+4. This was cute jargon for grouping various discussions among the Israelis and Palestinians, the "Quartet" (the U.S., the European Union, the UN, and Russia), and an "Arab Quartet" comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. By Monday, only three days later, however, the new math had mysteriously disappeared -- as if Rice had suddenly entered a world of innumeracy -- replaced by "parallel discussions." With the Israelis unwilling to talk to the Palestinians about the "contours of a Palestinian state," each side was instead to discuss such things separately with Rice in a kind of diplomatic confession booth.

For anyone disappointed by the sudden demise of "4+2+4," Condi assured all involved that "we'll use many different geometries, I'm sure, as we go through this process." A day later, the trip's crowning achievement was reported by the New York Times: "After three days of shuttle diplomacy between Israeli and Arab cities and a late night of haggling, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that she had persuaded Israeli and Palestinian leaders to hold talks twice a month." But not, it turned out, on the "final-status issues" -- the contours of a Palestinian state. They would simply chat to "build confidence," while, presumably, regularly reentering her confession booth.

As Lebanon-based Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri put it,

"To overcome the chronic stalemate of bilateral Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, [Rice] is now expanding this into a trilateral failure, as the principal parties who won't talk to each other only to talk to her. It's hard to decide if this is a comedy or a horror show."

It may be a sign of the contempt with which the Bush administration treats the American media that Condi expects such a Pollyannaish pantomime to be reported as if it were history-in-the-making. And it may be a mark of the naiveté with which much of the U.S. media has, over these last years, chronicled Condi's adventures that, in fact, it is reported as if it were history-in-the-making. The Secretary of State has not only chalked up the miles in the air recently, in media terms here in the U.S., she's invariably been given a free ride.

Whose Diplomacy Is This Anyway?

In reality, if significant diplomatic maneuvering is currently underway in the Middle East, it is the work of the Saudis. The Saudi royals had grown so alarmed by the passivity and incompetence of the Bush administration -- and by the rising influence of Iran as well as Islamist movements in the Arab world (whose popularity and credibility is boosted by their willingness to stand up to Israel and the U.S.) -- that it launched an uncharacteristically robust diplomatic campaign on a number of fronts. The Condi-spun media tends to explain this as the Bush administration coaxing Riyadh's royal wallflowers onto the diplomatic dance floor. The Saudi efforts are, however, so clearly at odds with administration policies and desires on key issues that this characterization is impossible to sustain.

As Washington pressed for the isolation of Iran, Riyadh -- supposedly the leader of a new Axis of Moderation being constructed by Washington -- spent the winter vigorously engaging Tehran at the highest level. The purpose was to begin to calm Shiite-Sunni tensions across the region, aggravated by the catastrophic situation in Iraq, and to bring Lebanon's warring factions back from the brink of confrontation. While the U.S. press was generally reporting that the Saudis were entering a period of muscular confrontation with Iran, that country appeared to be searching for mechanisms to manage Saudi/Iranian differences based on a mutual recognition of each other's regional roles. Not exactly what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Condoleezza Rice seems to have had in mind.

Then came the Saudi attempt to bring the warring Palestinian factions together in the Mecca Agreement. Here, the Saudis brokered negotiations to draw Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party into a unity government with Hamas -- even as Washington continued to warn Abbas against doing so. Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, has rarely exhibited any independence from Washington. His willingness to take this step offered a clear signal that the Saudis were orchestrating things on the Israeli-Palestinian front with little patience for indulging Bush administration fantasies. The U.S. had, of course, been seeking the literal overthrow of Hamas since it won legislative elections in 2006 -- something the Saudis recognized as infeasible, given that Hamas is, at this point, far more representative of Palestinian sentiment than Fatah. Saudi leaders were also aware that Washington's campaign to isolate Hamas in the Arab world left it little option but to seek Iranian patronage.

In reality, the Bush administration seems increasingly at odds with the consensus among the Arab moderates it claims to be leading. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, in particular, appears to have sent a signal of this in cancelling -- with little explanation -– a special state dinner that was to be hosted by President Bush on April 17th. Then, at Wednesday's Arab League Summit in Riyadh, the King followed up by demanding an end to the crippling financial siege of the Palestinian Authority imposed by the U.S. and denouncing the American military presence in Iraq as an "illegitimate foreign occupation." This is strong stuff from the Saudis.

Rather than a patient plan crafted by the U.S. Secretary of State as some miraculous alchemist of grand strategy, the latest flurry of activity reflects the maturing of a range of crises in the Middle East that have festered dangerously, while Condi fiddled. These include:

* The fact that the Bush administration has only exerted itself -- and then just symbolically -- on the Israeli-Palestinian front when it was desperate for favors from allied Arab regimes on other fronts, notably the roiling crises in Iraq and Iran. With the U.S. struggling unsuccessfully on both fronts, its vaunted ability to influence events in the region is in precipitous decline.

* The fact that the Arab regimes most closely allied to the U.S. face mounting crises of legitimacy at home, damned not only by their authoritarianism, but also by their paralysis in the face of U.S. and Israeli violence against Arab populations. Delivering the Palestinians to statehood is now seen by those regimes as essential to their own domestic political survival.

* The fact that an Israeli government, which came to power promising peace through unilateral "disengagement" from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, having fought a disastrous war in Lebanon and facing a never-ending struggle in Gaza, is seemingly disengaged from itself, its policies in tatters. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is drowning in a sea of corruption, scandals, and recriminations over the strategic and tactical incompetence he demonstrated in last summer's Lebanon war. With his own approval ratings at an astonishing 3%, he desperately needs a new idea to persuade Israeli voters that there's any reason to keep him in office.

* The fact that the Palestinians are experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian and political breakdown. All factions of the Palestinian government share an overwhelming incentive to get the financial siege lifted from battered, strife-torn Gaza. President Abbas' political future and legacy rest solely on completing the Oslo peace process; while for Hamas -- at least for its more pragmatic political leadership -- allowing President Abbas to pursue that course (particularly when it carries pan-Arab blessing) makes a certain sense. Hamas's political choices have always reflected a keen sense of Palestinian popular sentiment. By maintaining a distant and ambiguous stance towards Abbas's diplomatic efforts, it can plausibly deny complicity if the outcome proves unpopular on the Palestinian street.

The Failure to "Get There"

It is this combined political weakness, the loss of power among all the main players, that makes a renewed push for peace suddenly so attractive -- and so dubious. In recent weeks, both Rice and Olmert have expressed guarded enthusiasm for the Saudi peace proposals, as if they represented some remarkable new set of suggestions. The plan, which offers Israel recognition for full withdrawal to its 1967 borders, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a solution to the Palestinian refugee question based on a "right of return," was actually adopted by the Arab League five years ago. It was simply ignored by Israeli and American administrations that then felt too powerful to consider it. Their sudden willingness to embrace it, even if on their own terms, underscores the failure of their guiding political strategies.

Secretary of State Rice now treats discussions over the contours of a Palestinian state as if everyone were beginning with a blank slate. This is simply a self-serving evasion -- Israelis and Palestinians are well acquainted with the parameters of a final-status agreement, because they've already negotiated over them at length at Camp David and later at Taba in 2001, where they came pretty close to concluding a final status agreement. Even the "roadmap" adopted by the Bush administration in 2003 (partly as a reward for Arab and British support for the Iraq invasion) calls for a settlement that "will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and end the occupation that began in 1967, based on the foundations of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -- endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit." The basic assumption that emerges through all of those venues, resolutions, and initiatives is that the 1967 borders should be the basis for negotiating a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It's the Bush administration that has failed, or refused, to grasp this. "If we all know what [a political settlement] looks like," Condi said last week, "then why haven't we been able to get there?" That's the right question, of course, although Condi clearly intended it only as a rhetorical conversation-stopper. What she refuses to recognize is that the question has an answer: We haven't gotten there because there are elements on all sides of the conflict who don't want to get there.

Sure, the U.S. mainstream media will tell you all about the Palestinian rejectionists. What American reporting seldom makes clear is that Ariel Sharon was also elected prime minister in February 2001 on a rejectionist platform. He rejected the very idea that the conflict could be resolved through a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Instead, Sharon envisaged a unilateral withdrawal from about half of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the Palestinians a little over 42% of the territories they occupied in 1967. A "non-belligerency agreement" would then be concluded for a "lengthy and indefinite period." The latter, of course, sounds not dissimilar to the "long-term truce" advocated by Hamas, which shares Sharon's distaste for a final political settlement -- although nobody in our world pilloried the Israeli leader as an extremist for holding exactly that position.

Sharon's position was so important precisely because it was so influential in Washington. Back in 2001, when Secretary of State Colin Powell warned against the consequences of encouraging Sharon to seek a military solution to the Palestinian uprising, President Bush reportedly snapped, "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." That could be an epitaph for the Age of Bush.

Indeed, to the extent that it was to be addressed at all on President Bush's watch, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was framed primarily as a problem of "terrorism." Sharon was encouraged to escalate the war on the West Bank on the basis that Israel had a right to defend itself. Under Sharon's tutelage, the administration put the onus for restarting any peace process purely on the Palestinians. They were not only tasked with preventing any further violence against Israelis, but also with dismantling the military infrastructure of the likes of Hamas and Fatah. The administration did occasionally pay lip service to the idea of Israel freezing settlement activity, but without conviction (or significant effect).

When President Bush courted Arab support on Iraq in 2002, he made a symbolic declaration of support for Palestinian statehood -- but it was promptly hedged with qualifications. Not only would the Palestinians have to fulfill Israel's security demands before there could be any movement towards such statehood, they would also have to thoroughly reform their political system: President Arafat would have to transfer control of Palestinian funds and security forces to the democratically elected legislature and the cabinet and prime minister it appointed. (The irony, to anyone paying attention, was that, after Hamas won last year's election, the Bush administration did a 180-degree turnabout and now insists that funds and security forces be entirely under the control of the politically reliable President Abbas.)

As Rice's erstwhile mentor, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, put it three years ago, "Sharon just has [President Bush] wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized."

In fact, far from being orchestrated or designed by Secretary of State Rice, events currently underway in the Middle East correspond more closely to a prescription outlined by Scowcroft in an explicit rebuke of Rice at the height of last summer's Lebanon crisis. As Scowcroft warned, the grand bargain that would stabilize the region depended, first and foremost, on the U.S. mustering the political will to press the parties to make unpopular choices. For the past six years, such political will has been conspicuously absent in Washington.

Those, Madame Secretary, are some of the reasons why we haven't yet "been able to get there."

As the Daily Star noted in an editorial last Monday, if Condi Rice wants to revive an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, then her powers of persuasion would be more productively deployed not in the Middle East, but in the West Wing.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. At his own blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, he offers a more pugilistic take on the universe.

Copyright 2007 Tony Karon

On Point on Hezbollah

Related
Augustus Norton on Hezbollah’s Social Services
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Posted on Wednesday, March 21, 2007.

Sources

Yesterday, NPR’s On Point aired an hour-long show about my article from this month's magazine, Parties of God: The Bush Doctrine and the rise of Islamic democracy (excerpted online). Other guests included Augustus Richard Norton, professor of international relations at Boston University, and author of the new book Hezbollah: A Short History; Anthony Shadid, correspondent for the Washington Post; and Gidi Grinstein, a former Israeli peace negotiator and president of the Re'ut Institute.

As I told host Tom Ashbrook in summing up the story, “In this part of the world we frequently ask if the Islamic world is ready for democracy, and there's this suggestion that they're not quite mature enough or ready for it--when in fact what we might be asking is whether the West is ready for Islamic democracy, because for more than the past decade, there's been a real flowering of Islamic political parties across the Middle East.”

“It's difficult to see how you're going to lead to real democratic reform,” said Shadid, “and real democratic change in these countries . . . without some kind of engagement with Islamic movements.” Shadid recently wrote two terrific pieces (piece 1, piece 2) on the Mubarak regime’s repression of Egyptian democratic movements. “They represent such large constituencies,” he said, “but at this point you don't see any real signal from the Americans that they're willing to engage or have a desire to engage them.”

Click here to hear the show.

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This is On Point on Hezbollah by Ken Silverstein, published Wednesday, March 21, 2007. It is part of Washington Babylon, which is part of Harpers.org.