The Grand Old Strategy
The Big Stick, Then and Now
by Hakki Alacakaptan
Part I - The Dubya Doctrine
The National Security Strategy released last month by the White House may be the most significant U.S. foreign policy statement since NSC 68, the 1950 paper that codified the containment doctrine. Yet oddly most of the debate has focused on only one of its aspects -- the promise that America will strike preemptively against potential threats. Almost no one is criticizing President Bush's pledge to maintain American military hegemony.
This silence is curious, considering the flap that occurred the last time such an assertion was made. In 1992 staffers working for Paul Wolfowitz (then the No. 3 Pentagon official, now No. 2) drafted a planning document that suggested the United States should "maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." This mild language -- which referred to "mechanisms," not brute strength -- provoked fits in official Washington. As Andrew Bacevich reminds us in his forthcoming book "American Empire," Sen. Alan Cranston of California attacked the Bush administration for proposing to make the United States "the only main honcho on the world block, the global Big Enchilada." An embarrassed administration hastily retracted this indiscreet language.
Now the Big Enchilada doctrine is back. The new Bush strategy proclaims: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." This is even stronger language than that used a decade ago. But now the reaction is . . . pretty much, zip. Why?
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 After the carpet of bombs, the carpet of gold. From left to right: Unocal representative and CIA administrator of Pipelineistan, US-supported military dictator of End-of-the-pipelineistan, US-supported dictator of Gas-for-the-pipelineistan. |
The Amarillo Globe-News reported on a 1998 talk to oil executives in which
Cheney said that "the current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil
reserves in the Caspian Sea region." "The potential for this region
turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf, though, does not concern Cheney,"
the article continued. "You've got to go where the oil is," he said.
"I don't worry about it a lot." Sure enough, 3 years later Cheney's
Midas instincts proved true. A chain of lucky coincidences - the 2000
"election" and the "unexpected" S11 terrorist attack -
produced the felicitous result that Cheney's investment was now safe under the
watchful eye of the US military, installed in its new Central Asian bases built
and run by Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary. The time-honored
bananistan business model was once again being deployed by Big-Stick-wielding US
capitalist-politicians.
They call it the "Bay of
Piglets." In Venezuela, the world's fourth-largest producer of oil, a
coup ousted a democratically-elected leader and installed a businessman in his
place, before popular outrage forced the return of President Hugo Chavez. The
White House denied responsibility, but senior members of the Bush
administration met with the coup plotters before Chavez's ouster. According to
School of the Americas Watch (www.soaw.org),
leaders of the coup were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at
Fort Benning, Ga., known in Latin America as the "School of Coups."
[...]
In Central Asia, the U.S. is establishing military bases
and training local defense forces. The Caspian Sea basin holds the world's
largest reserves of oil after the Persian Gulf. Plans for pipelines to
transport oil and gas across Afghanistan have a new lease on life with the
defeat of the Taliban. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to
Afghanistan, is a former consultant to Unocal, the leader of the CentGas
pipeline consortium. Khalilzad is said to have played a major role in
negotiations to construct the proposed $2.5 billion pipeline.
[...]
The use of the U.S. military to promote private
oil interests is nearly as old as the oil business itself. Maj. Gen. Smedley
Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps put it bluntly in 1935: "I helped make
Mexico . . . safe for American oil interests in 1914. . . . In China in 1927 I
helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
A self-described "gangster for
capitalism" who "helped in the raping of half a dozen Central
American republics for the benefit of Wall Street," Butler experienced
a conversion in later life, and became an outspoken critic of U.S. military
interventions. (See Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the
Contradictions of American Military History, by Hans Schmidt.)[2]
David L. Winkler,
'Evildoers'
always perch on oil fields, The
Arizona Republic
May 30, 2002
What "New Grand Strategy?"
If Kubrick were still around he might have been tempted to
plagiarize himself by cutting a shot of Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick flipping in
the air with one of JDAM smart bombs crashing a wedding party. So many
parallels, so little new, but gusts of hot air have nevertheless needlessly
been added to the globe's
already overwarm atmosphere over the recent publication in the Sept/Oct 2002
issue of Foreign Policy of G. John Ikenberry's "America's Imperial
Ambition": A NEW GRAND STRATEGY
This is all total nonsense of course. The so-called "new" strategy is based - on Ikenberry's own admission - on the bone-chilling 1992 Defence Planning Guidance document commissioned by the then veep Cheney and written by none other than neocon Likudniks Wolfowitz and Libby, who termed the "new" mission of the US in the world as "adult supervision". Since Brooks Adams, who used to spout megabloopers like "the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority", BS ideologues have not evolved an iota in their total lack of subtlety (Another Adams blooper: "war [is] the ultimate form of economic competition" It's like he was trying to give Lenin ideas.).
In a classified blueprint intended to help "set the nation's direction for the next century," the Defense Department calls for concerted efforts to preserve American global military supremacy and to thwart the emergence of a rival superpower in Europe, Asia or the former Soviet Union. The 46-page memorandum describes itself as "definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense" for preparation of defense budgets for fiscal 1994 through 1999. It defies the predictions of some outside analysts that the Pentagon would relax resistance to further budget cuts after the turmoil of the election year.
Instead it mounts a detailed argument for maintaining the current "base force" of 1.6 million active-duty troops to the end of the decade and beyond [italics mine].
Though noting that "the passing of the Cold War reduces pressure for U.S. military involvement in every potential regional or local conflict," the document argues not only for preserving but expanding the most demanding American commitments and for resisting efforts by key allies to provide their own security.
In particular, the document raises the prospects of "a
unilateral U.S. defense guarantee" to Eastern Europe,
"preferably in cooperation with other NATO states," and contemplates use of American military power to preempt or
punish use of nuclear, biological or chemical
weapons, "even in conflicts that otherwise do
not directly engage U.S. interests."[italics mine]
[...]
The central strategy of the Pentagon framework is to
"establish and protect a new order" that
accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations
to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time
maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring
potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
"While the U.S. cannot become the world's 'policeman,' by
assuming responsibility for righting every wrong,
we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs
which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or
which could seriously unsettle international relations,"
the document states.
[...]
But the new memo gives central
billing to U.S. efforts to prevent emergence of a rival superpower, a diplomatically
sensitive subject that has not been prominent in
public debate.
That objective, the document states, "is a dominant
consideration underlying the new regional
defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from
dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate
global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of
the former Soviet Union and Southwest Asia."[italics mine]
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control
of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The
United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf
regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the
immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in
the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam
Hussein.'
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Truman's Big Stick: The Cold War
NSC 20/1 lays out the US war aims against
the USSR and the conditions for its "capitulation", including the political breakup of the
Soviet heartland (officially the war aims were "containment" - see
sidebar). The USSR, having defeated the Nazi war machine singlehanded
(the Red Army destroyed 88% of the Wehrmacht) at a cost of - among other
things - 20 million lives, had been extremely civil to sit down and talk with
the US, which had twirled its thumbs in North Africa and pretended to fight in
Italy while the Soviets bled,
only to swoop in at the last minute to prevent them from entering the
industrial heartland of Europe. Stalin and FDR agreed at Yalta on peaceful coexistence with mutual respect for
respective zones of influence. This new threat of peace looked bad for the
future of the BS, so Truman stepped in softly carrying a big old
A-bomb.
NSC 20/1 isn't just about slowly burying the SU, though. It also warns that "The creation of a unified Europe requires political decision which is tantamount to a will of independence... A united Europe, in this sense, could be build only in opposition to America." NSC 48 makes analogous provisions for East Asia, this time stressing that Japan has to be kept under control and under US "protection."
NSC 68, from the pen of Paul Nitze, the guy who dreamt up the Soviet plan to invade Europe, recommends increasing US defense spending by a whopping 400% to counter this fictional threat.
In 1947, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that his vision of a militarized economy would only materialize if he first "scared the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were coming. Truman saw his point. A war was required, so nutball Douglas MacArthur was dispatched to Korea. Before you knew it a million Chinese had poured over the border and the maniac was calling for 30-plus nuclear strikes on China. 3 million Koreans were massacred and the country bombed flat, thereby setting performance targets for Vietnam. Dean Acheson later said the Korean war "came along and saved us." Besides the NSC, Truman and his head of policy planning George Kennan gave us - as a part of the Cold War package, at no extra charge - the DoD, the Air Force and SAC, the CIA, and the NSA. Viz. the brave new world as we know and cherish it.
"The United States must
cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will
enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana."
--U.S. Department of State, 1942
Source: Minutes S-3 of the Security Subcommittee,
Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, 6 May, 1942, Notter File, Box
77, Record Group 59, Records of the Department of State, National Archives,
DC.
Who were the cold warriors? Meet the CFR
It's the damnedest thing, isn't it, how those Cold War types popped up out of nowhere when FDR died, just as he was making peace with Stalin. It's like they were hiding behind the curtains or something, all jazzed up and ready to go. Here's how it happened:
The minutes of the closet meetings that were held between the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations beginning in 1939 explicitly detail the role of the U.S. as a replacement for the British...The minutes of the Council's Security Sub-Committee of the Advisory Committee of the Post-War Foreign Policy set the likely parameters of U.S. post-war foreign policy: '..the British Empire as it existed in the past will
never reappear and...the United States may have to take its place...'. The US 'must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms , amounting... to Pax
Americana.' Americans could retain their vitality only by accepting the logic of endless
expansionism.
In 1942 , the Council's director , Isaiah Bowman , wrote, 'The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory...(The US must secure areas) strategically necessary for world
control.'"
Nikolai von Kreitor, NATO
and the Architects of American Lebensraum
"To the degree that the United States is the arsenal of
the democracies, it will be the final arsenal at the moment of victory. It
cannot throw the contents of that arsenal away. It must accept world
responsibility . . . The measure of our victory will be the measure of our
domination after victory."
--U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, 1941
Source: Memorandum, Bowman to Armstrong, 15 December 1941, Bowman
Papers, Armstrong File, Johns Hopkins University Library.
Now let's hear it from the horse's mouth:
...within a week of the outbreak of war in early September 1939, [Hamilton Fish] Armstrong and his strong right hand, Walter Mallory, were in Washington offering to put the Council's organizational skills and ability to select good people to work for the government. Four study groups were formed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, to assess how the war might develop, where it would leave the world, and especially the United States... Several of the secretaries of the groups went to work directly for State.... Three of the original key figures in putting [NATO and the Marshall plan] together, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, and George Kennan, were members of the Council, as were many who worked in it...
Foreign Affairs (publication of the CFR), Brief History
So now we know where those cold warriors came from. But where do the Rockefellers fit in?
It thus came as a severe
shock to learn that several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in
league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G.
Farben, the colossal Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz. Those leaders
interlocked through an association I have dubbed The Fraternity. Each of these
business leaders was entangled with the others through interlocking directorates
or financial sources. All were represented internationally by the National City
Bank or by the Chase National Bank and by the Nazi attorneys Gerhardt Westrick
and Dr. Heinrich Albert. All had connections to that crucial Nazi economist,
Emil Puhl, of Hitler's Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements.
The Rockefellers' Chase National
Bank (later the Chase Manhattan) was the richest and most powerful financial
institution in the United States at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Rockefellers
owned Standard Oil of New Jersey, the German accounts of which were siphoned
through their own bank, the Chase, as well as through the independent National
City Bank of New York, which also handled Standard, Sterling Products, General
Aniline and Film, SKF, and ITT, whose chief, Sosthenes Behn, was a director of
the N.C.B. Two executives of Standard Oil's German subsidiary were Karl
Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures in Himmler's Circle of Friends
of the Gestapo-its chief financiers-and close friends and colleagues of the
BIS's Baron von Schroder.
[...]
In 1941, Standard Oil of New Jersey was the largest petroleum corporation in the
world. Its bank was Chase, its owners the Rockefellers. Its chairman, Walter C.
Teagle, and its president, William S. Farish, matched Joseph J. Larkin's
extensive connections with the Nazi government.
[...]
He remained in partnership with Farben in the matter of tetraethyl lead, an
additive used in aviation gasoline. Goring's air force couldn't fly without it.
Only Standard, Du Pont, and General Motors had the rights to it. Teagle helped
to organize a sale of the precious substance to Schmitz, who in 1938 traveled to
London and "borrowed" 500 tons from Ethyl, the British Standard
subsidiary. Next year, Schmitz and his partners returned to London and obtained
$15 million worth. The result was that Hitler's air force was rendered capable
of bombing London, the city that had provided the supplies. Also, by supplying
Japan with tetraethyl, Teagle helped make it possible for the Japanese to wage
World War II.
[...]
On September 22,1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the
subject. He said, ''Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of
its relationships with I.G. Farben-after the United States and Germany had
become active enemies." The appeal was denied.
Charles Higham, Trading
with the Enemy: The Nazi - American Money Plot 1933-1949, Delacorte Press,
1983
OK, now we know what the cold war was about. The
USSR, instead of quietly allowing itself to be annihilated by the Nazis as US
finance capital had expected and banked on (see Dulles sidebar), had the nerve
to reduce the thousand-year reich to smoking rubble. So it became the enemy du
jour, providing the excuse for a furious new phase of imperialist expansion.
Simultaneously, US finance capital replaced FDR's administration (they had already attempted a military coup before the war). They
needed a government to work with, since
Hitler was no longer available to further their goals of imperialist expansion
and suppression of the working class. Not for nothing does von Kreitor equate US
imperialism with Hitler's Lebensraum doctrine: They were essentially
indistinguishable during the Nazi period. Hitler was in effect an agent of US
business interests providing them both with profits and the means of defeating
the working class struggle. In comparison with hitler, FDR was a pinko, if not
downright red.
Given the situation in 1945 where the US was unchallenged in all respects by a
war-ravaged industrialized world, US imperialist expansion was a foregone
conclusion. There was no need for a war, cold or otherwise. But the CFR,
representing Nazi-sympathising big business, was out to finish what the Nazis
began (concerning the USSR and the working class), and make a pile of money at
the Pentagon trough in the process.
Cold Warriors were Nazi collaborators. So
what?
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Wilson thus set the stage for an institutional, ideologically as well as physically hegemonic empire, in place of the ad hoc plundering of the early years. But his project for an international body to prevent war met with failure. Capitalism had only benefited from WW I. There was no peace dividend, no profits that came anything near to what war offered. As the US Nuremberg prosecutor noted:
The rearmament of Germany gave Krupp huge orders and corresponding profits. Before this Nazi menace to the peace began, the Krupps were operating at a substantial loss. But the net profits after taxes, gifts, and reserves steadily rose with rise of Nazi rearmament, being as follows:
| For year ending 30 September 1935 | 57,216,392 marks |
| For year ending 30 September 1938 | 97,071,632 marks |
| For year ending 30 September 1941 | 111,555,216 marks |
The Avalon Project : Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1
But a good deal of these profits vanished under the bombs, which had previously only fallen at a safe distance from capitalist wealth, on battlefields strewn wth the corpses of the working class. The unprecedented destruction of World War II - meaning the destruction of capital and the loss of trained workforce - that laid bare the increased vulnerability of advanced capitalism to modern warfare made Wilson's grand design a reality. With the UN charter, imperialism moved into a new phase, accepting to repress its predatory nature in order to protect its sprawling and exposed wealth. US imperalism recognized the need to foster regional capitalist powers in the interest of stability, helping to rebuild Japan and Germany's economies and promoting closer European cooperation. In a similar way, the working class was refunded a greater portion of the value of its purloined labor and made into a client of capitalism, creating the global peacetime market that capitalism needed to avoid demand deflation without resorting to the economic pump-priming of war. The wars between imperialist powers thus came to a final end, in a way that Lenin failed to predict in the mayhem of WW I, and Kautsky prophesied ahead of his time. Ultraimperialism was born.
The pro-Nazi Cold Warriors resisted the impulse to retake Stalingrad or nuke Moscow so that their new investments in Europe would not once again go up in smoke. Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam all demonstrated that imperialist wars would henceforth be fought in capital-poor regions and any spillover to capital-rich areas would be diligently prevented.
Ultraimperialism developed and matured with the Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik, the Carter-Brzezinski trilateralism, and the GH Bush - Clinton NWO. With the NWO, US ultraimperialism put on a benevolent, smiling face, largely erasing the image of the Ugly American of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Reagan years. EU and Asian capitalist states cooperated with the US plans for breaking down the barriers of national sovereignty impeding the onslaught of capital. They cooperated in establishing the legal precedents for "humanitarian" military interventions with the widely popular "liberation" of Kuwait and the interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
All this prompted even those who should have known better - Hardt and Negri, namely - to declare that imperialism was dead and that a "new form of sovereignty" had replaced it, without borders and without a center, having an autonomous existence transcending and taking precedence over the actions and policies of the US state apparatus. H&N's Empire is a tribute to the success of US ultraimperialism in that its supposedly politically-aware authors were taken in wholesale by the aura of universal legitimacy painstakingly constructed by US empire-builders like FDR, Brzezinski, GH Bush, and Clinton. What they mistook for "deterritorialization" and decentralization was nothing but the postwar US policy of promoting regional economic power centers, economic unions,and military aliances, a policy theme reformulated by Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, where he proposed that the countries of ex-Soviet Central Asia and Eastern Europe which were to be assimilated into the US Empire be given regional political roles and a sense of partnership with the US in order to obtain their full cooperation.
Nevertheless, despite the evolutionary progress towards ultraimperialism, the BS has been with us on and off ever since the US finished its American Indian genocide and wrapped up the war on its secessionists. But never since the 1890's has it been so nakedly, bluntly wielded. Even the Nazi-collaborator cold warriors were full aware of the strategic importance of conquering the moral high ground so that their imperialist agression could be perceived as a "defense of freedom". The Dulles brothers' brutal excesses, culminating in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, were subsequently seen by the ruling class as an unnecessary compromise of the imperial project's perceived legitimacy.
Why is the empire turning outlaw?
What then has brought the Dubya junta to the
conclusion that naked unilateral coercion is the best method of imperial rule, despite
ample historical proof and precedent of the contrary? Is US capitalism in the
throes of some violent crisis that has reversed the normal course of
empire-building? Or can the spread of religious
fundamentalism and downright ignorance in the US explain this
atavistic regression?
The present recessionary conjuncture does not constitute a crisis of capitalism of a
magnitude that could account for the radical, overnight policy shift that has
occurred. The deflating US bubble is now being compared to Japan's, where
deflation and the collapse of the financial system has been going on for years
without any sign of political or social upheaval. If Japan can manage its
crisis, the US, with its incomparably greater imperial advantages, its capital
and consumer markets for which there is no real alternative, and the many
pressures it can bring to bear on its tributaries to foot the bill for its
economic recovery, is incomparably more secure in its position. Yet, it chooses
to act like desparate, end-of-his-rope Saddam in his attempted colonial
occupation of Kuwait. Is US finance capital really in so great distress that it
needs now to invade Iraq to steal its oil? Despite the upstart Texas robber
barons who in their geopolitical ignorance and myopia see easy pickings in such
a venture, and the arms conglomerates eager for the business, the global
disruptions and instability that are already being created by this reversion to
primitive lawless colonial aggression are a far greater threat for global
capitalism than deflation.
The collapse of the Israeli economy under the weight of Likud's unending colonialist wars, the suicide attacks against the USS Cole, the French tanker off theYemen coast, the WTC, the Bali nightclub, the recent denial-or-device attack on the main Internet servers, and the extrapolation of such attacks to a war-fighting strategy that defeated the US juggernaut in the Millenium Challenge 2002 war games, all demonstrate one thing: The mature capitalist state is an exposed and vulnerable structure that cannot afford to brutalize its subjects into suicidal fury or despair.
One of the other explanations I mentioned, the dumbing of America and the increasing dysfunctionality of US society, is an end result, not a cause. It's also a long-term phenomenon, so it fails to explain the overnight switch from the GH Bush - Clinton NWO to the GW Bush BS. This abrupt change can be explained by looking at its engineers: The Pro-Likud neocons orbiting around Richard Perle at the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, their wide network of supporters in neocon think tanks, the political pressure exerted on Congress and the WH by AIPAC, and the actions of the Likud party dating back to the 70's, which has coordinated all these different elements. In fact, what happened to US foreign policy under GW Bush is a hugely magnified version of the CFR takeover in 1939, which ultimately prepared and led to the Potsdam coup of the cold warriors. With this difference: The CFR grabbed power in war time by exploiting the government's unpreparedness for war in order to infiltrate and invest it, then used the government to "scare the American people to death", thus manufacturing the constituency for its policies. Likud, OTOH, proceeded with the infiltration of the US government and its alliance with the Christian Coalition simultaneously, thus manufacturing its US constituency while consolidating its hold on US policy. This is what I attempt to demonstrate below.
Part II - The neocon Likudniks *
At the center of the Dubya war party, we see the two ideologues - Perle and Wolfowitz - who established the neocons' foreign policy credentials under Reagan and emerged as apparent victors of the cold war because they had supposedly arms-raced the USSR into bankrupcy.
First, let's remember what the neocon project is about. In 1971, Nixon's Supreme Court nominee Lewis Powell Jr. wrote to the D.C. Chamber of Commerce and to an attorney friend at GM urging US business to adopt his plan for an anti-liberal restoration, aiming to roll back liberal advances in education, media, poitics, and the legal system. The Powell memo hit the right note for several big US capitalist dynasties, who bankrolled a number of foundations to finance the neocon restoration movement. Irving Kristol, ex-trotskyite and major kingpin of the 50's CIA front International Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a key figure in setting up these foundations, as was William Buckley, another CIA operative.
That's the point where the neocon Likudniks found an opening. Conservatives had been traditionally uninterested in foreign policy, leaving a void that they hastened to fill, just like the CFR did in 1939. Kristol came from a circle of ex-trotskyites such as Norman Podohertz, Daniel Bell, and Ben Wattenberg, all preoccupied with what they perceived as the increasingly pro-Arab tilt in US policy, and all of whom dropped their progressive views to become neocons. Kristol's son William is now the influential editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and has a network of friends, including Wolfowitz, inside the Dubya junta. It was a Weekly Standard writer, David Frum, who wrote Bush's "axis of evil" speech and recently entered PNAC. Kristol's wife sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation and ACTA... the network goes on and on.
While this nucleus of neocons was forming, publishing its views in Podohertz's journal Commentary, Richard Perle got connected to the ex-Trostkyites around Irving Kristol through his mentor at the University of Chicago, Albert Wohlstetter. A mathematical genius who later at RAND would formulate US nuclear strategy, creating concepts like "second strike" and "fail safe" that have become part of American nuclear folklore, Wohlstetter guided his prize student and son-in-law Perle towards a man under his hawkish influence: Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a.k.a the senator from Boeing. As Jackson's aide, Perle teamed up with his protégé Frank Gaffney to mount successive campaigns torpedoing Nixon and Carter initiatives for détente with the Soviets and Middle East peace. Forcing the Soviets to allow Jewish immigration (Yitzak Shamir's pet project) and resupplying the IDF after the Yom Kippur war were at the top of their agenda.
A closer look at the process of the movement's inception is illuminating. In the 50's the CIA took an interest in fighting Soviet Marxism on its own ground by coopting non-Stalinist intellectuals. At the City College of New York, with its large group of Jews unable to attend Ivy League colleges due to insufficient means and race quotas, Stalinist and Trotskyists clashed regularly. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at CCNY and editor of the socialist magazine the New Leader, Sidney Hook was a CIA recruiter and controller, harnessing this pool of anti-Stalinist activism for the cold war. Under the supervision of CIA operative Michael Josselson, Hook, together with CCNY alumnus and Berlin-based CIA officer Melvin Lasky, founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a cultural version of Operation Nightingale (the CIA's buyout of the media). Ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol was appointed as co-editor (with Stephen Spender) of the London-based Encounter - the CIA's answer to The New Statesman - and Hook installed him into a new professorship at CCNY, also convincing Daniel Bell to enter Columbia - another college with a large proportion of Jewish students - thus extending his network with two new recruiter/controllers. From then on, the CIA-financed writers, artists, and performers of the CCF succeeded in pushing back and marginalizing Marxism and anti-imperialism among European intellectuals, helped along by Uncle Joe's thuggish tactics. In New York, the Hook/Kristol/Bell network had a virtual hegemony over US high culture, allowing Joe McCarthy to conduct his purges unopposed by intellectuals.
The CIA's romance with the anticommunist left ended with Vietnam, as intellectuals turned against US imperialism. When the CIA covert funding of the CCF was exposed by Ramparts and the New York Times named names, it was all over. One could legitimately speculate that the CIA "blew" the operation in order to shut it down. But once the contretemps of the 60's blew over, it was time for the next step: Deprived of Marxist dialectic, the left was now an ideological pushover, and pushed it would be, all the way to the right. Enter neoconservatism.
Howard Hunt's acolyte William Buckley Jr.'s National Review was the platform
of choice for the ex-Trotskyite neocons when they completed their migration to
the right and deserted the Democrats altogether. Many of them found a place in
the Reagan administration. Richard Perle was assistant secretary of defense,
with Gaffney at his side,
where he emerged as the leader of neocon foreign strategy, along with Paul
Wolfowitz, another Wohlstetter protégé (Zalmay Khalilzad was also Wolfstetter
student).
The years when Perle's neocon foreign policy network rose to power coincided
with the Likud's accession to the Israeli government under its founder Begin (1977) and
Shamir (1983). These old, ruthless fighters of the Zionist underground were finally in command
of the Jewish people's destiny. To understand how these two events interconnect,
we have to look at Likud's revisionist past.
Menachem Begin described himself as a student of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, the founder of the Zionist armed resistance. Jabotinsky's push for armed struggle, however, was never directed against the Holocaust perpetrators. Like all zionists, he abhorred any alliance with Marxists, who were the only ones who could have defeated fascism, and ultimately did (in the form of the Red Army). Instead, Jabotinsky collaborated with the anti-Bolshevik Ukranian army, which had just murdered 30,000 jews, and with Mussolini.
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| Revisionist zionism, then and now: King Arik under a scary-looking Jabotinsky |
In Poland, where Begin was the head of Jabotinsky's Betarim brownshirt youth, the Jewish Bund was fighting fascism in alliance with the socialists. The Betar, needless to say, kept its distance from them. Begin fled Poland when the Nazis invaded, while the Bund stayed to fight and die in the Warsaw ghetto. This refusal to associate with the non-Jewish antifascists was not peculiar to Jabotinsky, but was a feature of Zionism in general, whose prime tenet was a sort of mirror image of antisemitism. What made Jabotinsky so different, and his actions so extreme, was that he was far more lucid that any of the other zionists about the hard, cruel choices that zionism entailed. This lucid ruthlessness was his main legacy to Israel's future leaders.
Jabotinsky's armed struggle had three targets: the Arabs, the British, and his Jewish opponents. The venue of the struggle was primarily Palestine, the land to be colonized, rather than Europe, where Jews were being massacred. Accordingly, Begin made his way to Palestine and took command of the Irgun to start terrorist attacks against the British, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel, the British Palestine HQ. A splinter group that called itself the Stern Gang, later to become the LEHI, was more into assassination, terrorism against Arab civilians, and robberies. Both Begin's Irgun and Avraham Stern's gang were totalitarian, even more so than Jabotinsky himself, who despite the brownshirts surrounding him, remained relatively broad-minded. Stern really took the cake when he formally proposed, with Shamir's full knowledge, a long-term alliance with the Nazis on the basis of shared racial and totalitarian ideals. Stern's "Principles of Renaissance", the official LEHI ideology, read like Mein Kampf: The historical Jewish homeland included everything between The Nile and the Euphrates, the Jews would drive out the "aliens" living there, monarchy would be restored, and war would go on until Israel became the dominant power in the Mediterranean . Shamir, like other LEHI veterans, remains faithful to its ideology, and the old network maintains its cohesion with periodic meetings and a conspiracy of silence about its shady past, even though its members may have drifted to opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Begin's struggle for power was uninterrupted from the day he set foot in Palestine. In June 1948, he attempted to seize it by force, and nearly died trying. Irgun and LEHI were consequently disbanded. Begin continued his struggle with the Herut movement while Shamir drifted away from politics for a time, then became a Mossad officer, quickly chalking up some more assassinations to his name, this time by letter-bomb. The two ruthless totalitarian terrorists later joined forces in the Herut party, and subsequently incorporated other right-wing splinter parties to come to power under the Likud (Union) name, dislodging Labor and increasing the body count in Israel and Palestine by several orders of magnitude. Netanyahu, Barak, and even Sharon are now not much more than driftwood in the currents of fanaticism and the transatlantic political machine that these two have created.
Begin, the man who made Judea and Samaria household words in the US, was also responsible for launching the militarization of Israel's economy (it's now the world's 7th arms exporter), the desecularization of the state and the irreversible trend of concessions to the orthodox zealots, the illegal settlement of the West Bank, alliances - both as a US proxy and independently - with repressive right-wing regimes like South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina, the development of battlefield and strategic nuclear weaponry, and, of course, the annexation of the Golan, the invasion of Lebanon, and the horrors of Sabra and Shatila. He bore the shame of the Camp David peace and the 1978 Nobel peace prize (which he shared with Sadat), a blemish that he succeeded in washing off with rivers of Arab (and a great deal of Jewish) blood.
Shamir was not able to exploit the momentum created by Begin, dissipating his resources on assassinations of PLO cadres in Tunis and confrontations with the US, during which the IDF was defeated in Lebanon by Hezbollah, and Shamir forced into negotiation with the Arabs, including some of the very PLO cadres he had been trying to kill. This and economic pressure from the GH Bush administration to freeze the settlements cost Likud the 1992 election. However, he advanced the Likud project of changing Israel's demography with a massive influx of Russian immigrants.
The Likud-neocon-Christian Zionist coalition: An American catastrophe
Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin had the misfortune of being in office at the same time. Carter's foreign policy czar Brzezinski has two priorities: Expanding US hegemony and destroying the USSR (Zbig is a Polish aristocrat). His plan was to light a Muslim fundamentalist fire under the USSR's Central Asian republics - the famous "green belt" - and Saudi Arabia was to have a far more important role in this than Israel. Zbig wanted Israel to keep quiet and get along with its Arab neighbors, whereas Begin was itching to invade them now that he was finally in command. Begin endured three years of Carter's peace initiatives, his advocacy of a Palestinian homeland, and the final humiliation of Camp David, forcing him to drag his settlers kicking and screaming out of the land that he considered was righfully theirs by divine decree: The biblical "brook of Egypt", the Sinai.
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As the US presidential elections drew near, Begin mobilized not only AIPAC but also a new ally, Jerry Falwell, for the Reagan campaign. The Moral Majority blitzkrieg'd the 1980 GOP convention. The rest is history:
In 1976-77 several events occurred simultaneously which had the effect of accelerating the influence of Christian Zionism as a political phenomenon in America.
A religious and political marriage was consummated between American Zionist organisations, Israeli leadership, and Fundamentalist Christian Zionists.[1]
In 1977 the Likud party under Menachem Begin came to power on an expansionist Zionist platform using biblical phraseology to justify the settlement of the West Bank. It was Begin for example who first renamed Israel and the Occupied Territories as Judaea and Samaria. In America the Jewish lobby realised the potential significance of wooing the political endorsement of the powerful 50-60 million Evangelical block vote through their fundamentalist leadership. With this in mind, in 1979, the Israeli government honoured Jerry Falwell with the Jabotinsky Award in appreciation of his support of Israel. They also provided him with a Lear jet to assist in his work on their behalf.
The downfall of President Carter, in part due to his support for a Palestinian homeland and consequent loss of the Fundamentalist block vote; the exploitation of the media by a group known as 'Evangelicals' Concern for Israel' including well known figures as Pat Boone and Vernon Grounds; the rise of Moral Majority as a political campaigning organisation under Jerry Falwell; and the election of Ronald Reagan as a President who publicly subscribed to a Fundamentalist premillennial dispensational theology, all combined to give a considerable boost to the Zionist cause. In the 1980 presidential elections, Wagner claims that 80% of Evangelicals supported the conservative wing of the Republican party, and Ronald Reagan in particular.
[1] Donald E. Wagner, "Beyond Armageddon," (The Link) New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding; October-November, 1992
Stephen Sizer: The Historical Origins of Christian Zionism
Likud and the October Surprise
The obvious Likud-neocon nexus is the October surprise, which finished off Carter and brought Reagan to power, triggering the migration of the Jewish neocons to the GOP. The October surprise is personified in Michael Ledeen, presently lead drummer of the Dubya war party, whose short bio at the New Republic site conceals a rich and varied career, the first highlight of which is his appointment as the first executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA - see sidebar). But JINSA was still young in 1980, when alarm bells rang at the Reagan campaign HQ about the Carter WH being on the point of securing the release of the Iran hostages. Veep-to-be and ex-CIA director GH Bush put ex-CIA covert ops veteran Ted Shackley a.k.a. "The blond ghost" on the job:
In 1980, Shackley had teamed up with Ledeen as paid
consultants to a "war game" for SISMI, the Italian intelligence
service with close ties to the secret international right-wing Masonic lodge,
P-2. As the 1980 campaign neared its end, Italian intelligence leaked a damaging
-- and questionable -- story to Ledeen about President Carter's brother Billy
and his business ties to Libya. Ledeen wrote the story for The New Republic
without mentioning that he was working for SISMI or assisting the Reagan-Bush
campaign. (See David Corn's The Blond Ghost, p. 359.)
Robert Parry: Bush
& a CIA Power Play The Consortium
The CIA station chief in Rome was Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, who would later be indicted as an Iran-contra conspirator, and pardoned by GH Bush. According to an undisclosed report by the 1992 bipartisan House of Representatives Task Force found by Robert Parry:
Another task force discovery -- also dropped from the
final report -- was that conservative "journalist" Michael Ledeen,
also a Shackley associate, was privately collaborating with the Reagan-Bush
campaign on the Iran hostage issue. The draft chapter said Ledeen was an
unofficial member of the campaign's "October Surprise" group. A
separate page of Allen's notes revealed Ledeen joining campaign director,
William J. Casey, in a Sept. 16 meeting for what was called the "Persian
Gulf Project."
Robert Parry: Ibid.
Ledeen has left no further traces in the House Task Force investigation, maybe because the chief investigator, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., a BCCI attorney, was a close friend. But he wasn't so discrete when the time came to deliver the arms that Bush's team promised the Iranians in exchange for delaying the hostages' release until Reagan's inauguration. Carter had offered the Iranians low-grade arms from Turkey. Bush (i.e. Reagan) topped Carter's bid with top-of-the line goods from Israel. Who made the first contact with Israeli intelligence in 1980 to arrange the Paris meeting? We don't know, but we do know that Ledeen sponsored Iranian arms dealer Gorbhanifar, a known scammer who had been put on a "burn notice" - a US govt blacklist - by the CIA. Ledeen asserted that Gorbhanifar was recommended to him by Shimon Peres during a private meeting.
The end result of the Iran side of Iran-Contra was that Iran maintained its fighting capability against US ally and Israel's enemy Iraq, Israel developed its covert relations with the mullahs (who posed a convenient threat not only to Iraq but also to Saudi Arabia) and the US got a total of two Beirut hostages (in addition to the initial 52 Teheran hostages), at which point two more Americans were kidnapped in Beirut. This debacle prompted Poindexter to remove McFarlane and Ledeen, but the latter was replaced by Amiram Nir, Shimon Peres's "counterterrorism advisor." One Mossad operative had been replaced by another. Poindexter attempted to cut out Mir and Gorbhanifar, dealing with the Iranians through a new channel, but this resulted in the operation being blown by one or more of the jilted parties, and Iran-Contragate was in the house.
Who is this Michael Ledeen who pops into the Israeli PM's office to discuss international intrigue? A man of great intelligence, Ledeen has multiple careers. Before his Reagan days, he wrote several books in Italy on Italian history, and notably several on fascism that are still widely quoted. However he "was denied tenure at Washington University in St. Louis after he was charged with plagiarism." Following the typical neocon pattern, he was posing as a leftie, mixing with Italian intellectuals, while maintaining contacts with the fascist IMSI and the "blond ghost". The Italian press routinely described him as a CIA agent. During his Iran-Contra involvement, he also worked on Casey's propaganda campaign to smear the Soviets for supporting terrorism - a total baseless claim even for CIA analysts - and testified before a senate subcommittee that the shooting of Pope John Paul II by a band of Turkish fascists (whom Duane Clarridge had sponsored in Turkey prior to his transfer to Rome) was in fact a Kremlin operation. Ledeen pursued his propaganda work with his commented compilation of Grenada Documents, purporting to prove that Maurice Bishop was a stooge of the "evil empire". All this was a response to and in support of Casey's neocon reshuffle - both ideological and in terms of staffing - at the CIA.
Why is Ledeen my subject, and not Perle, or Kristol? Perle is manifestly a if not the prime mover in the neocon Likudnik network. However, what I'm trying to demonstrate here is the multiple connectivity between these operators' roles as propagandists, public bureaucrats, private or unofficial advisers, fixers, lobbyists, political fund managers, campaigners, etc., and covert operatives for both the US and Israeli intelligence. The multipurpose, chameleonlike Ledeen is therefore a better example than Perle, who has been more careful in concealing his intelligence work for Israel.
During the watershed Reagan years, Perle earned his nickname "prince of darkness" by pushing extreme views on SDI and nuclear strategy under Cap Weinberger. Perle's assistant was Stephen Bryen. In 1978-79, Bryen became the subject of a DoJ investigation for "unusually close ties with Israel", including spying, being an unregistered Israeli lobbyist, and lying about it. He then left his job at the State Department to become Ledeen's successor at JINSA, which he transformed into an aggressive weapons procurement machine for Israel, as if to show how little he cared about the investigation. His disdain was justified when the file was closed without any charges being made. Two years later he was hired by Perle and received the highest security clearance at the DoD.
Critics at the time cited the placement of Bryen in
one of the most sensitive positions at the Pentagon as evidence of the tilt in
US policy toward Israel under Reagan.
"They don't say 'no' anymore to Israel at the Pentagon, " said a
former high-ranking Defense Department official. "Israel is the 51st
state."
It was during the Reagan era that US economic aid to Israel rose to $1.2
billion annually, and military aid to $1.8 billion annually. Bryen had a role
in choosing not only what US weaponry Israel would be allowed to purchase with
those funds, but also what sensitive US military technology would be made
available to Israel for use in its own burgeoning arms industry.
Mark H. Milstein Ibid.
| The bombs that bind: Every explosion brings the US closer to Likud |
 The wreckage of the Marine barracks, where 241 died. |
 The US embassy, where the CIA's entire Middle East section was killed. |
During Reagan's second term, Perle hired another Likudnik who had fallen out of favor: Douglas Feith, formerly an aide to Richard Allen, Reagan's national security advisor. Feith, a notorious Zionist agitator, had been a vocal opponent of US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, working to block them from within the administration while AIPAC was campaigning against them in Congress. Reagan was under pressure from oil and defense conglomerates to make the sale. Feith's boss Allen added to the embarrassment by getting Secretary of State Haig to sign the "green light" letter for Begin's June 1982 invasion of lebanon. The invasion, and the failed US attempt to broker a peace, resulted in the deaths of over 268 Marines, of which 241 died in a Hezbollah truck bomb attack that Mossad had been aware of from the start, and the deaths of 17 Americans at the US embassy, including the CIA's top Middle East experts, by a massive car bomb explosion, again with Mossad foreknowledge. A spate of Hezbollah kidnappings of US nationals followed, the CIA Station Chief William Buckley being one of them. As if Hezbollah wasn't enough trouble, the Israeli army was harrassing and endangering the lives of US marines in Beirut in an attempt to force them to leave or join forces with the IDF. They left. The US presence in Lebanon, dating back to the 1958 Marines landing, was effectively over. This disaster prompted Reagan to fire Haig along with his policy team. But Perle, confident that his reputation as an unimpeachable cold warrior would keep him above reproach, added the offending Likudnik underling Feith to his team.
Shamir's cold war against the US
Concurrently with the Beirut debacle, Saddam began to lose his war against Iran. Carter's foreign strategy honcho Brzezinski had started a rapprochement with Iraq with the result that Saddam abandoned al-Bakr's pro-Soviet Baathism to swing westward. Reagan sent Rumsfeld to Baghdad in December 1983. Rumsfeld told the NYT: "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world,... It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems." On January 1, The Washington Post reported that the US "in a shift in policy, has informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be ‘contrary to U.S. interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result." The "moves" were called Operation Staunch, an embargo on arms deliveries to Iran. Relations with Iraq were restored and economic and military aid began.
Shamir's reaction can be guessed, since it was only 3 years since Israeli jets had bombed Iraq's Osirak reactor. So Ledeen and McFarlane (who had already duped the US into taking sides against the Arabs in Lebanon) took the Reagan administration on an arms-for-hostages ride that opened the way for Israel to bypass the embargo and make massive arms deliveries as well as pass on information from CIA spy satellites to Iran, generating fabulous profits. Shamir's primary objective was, of course, to prevent a victory for either side, but especially for Iraq. A victorious Saddam would immediately become the Arab world's champion against Israel, and a Saddam on good terms with the US would be even worse.
Several investigations and arrests took place in the US concerning Israelis arms deliveries to Iran. JINSA board member Paul Sjeklocha was convicted in 1985 of conspiring to sell antitank missiles to Iran. A sting operation in Bermuda netted a retired Israeli general, two Israeli businessmen and two Americans who were procuring arms for Iran. Two Israelis, one of them a reserve Lt. Colonel, were charged in a separate case involving antitank missiles.
While Shamir continued to wreck US-Arab relations by unleashing his settlers on the occupied territories, annexing the Golan, and assassinating PLO leaders in Tunis, he was also busy conducting a massive spying effort against the US. Jonathan Pollard, a civilian naval intelligence analyst, became Mossad's courier, lugging a suitcase full of classified documents every two weeks to the home of an Israeli embassy secretary. Arrested in 1985 and sentenced to life imprisonment, Pollard's was one of the most damaging intelligence leaks in US history. The mole who supplied Pollard with the names of the documents to retreive and their daily access codes was never discovered. Israel never allowed Pollard's controllers to be debriefed by the US, nor did it return the purloined documents. Instead, Shamir personally passed on parts of Pollard's intelligence to Yevgeni Primakov, with two visible results: A number of CIA agents were executed and tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel.
In 1982, congressman Paul Findley lost the Illinois seat that he had held for 22 years to an opponent that AIPAC openly endorsed and financed, while his own friends and supporters deserted him, fearing AIPAC's retribution. The reason for AIPAC's hostility was Findley's position that the US should talk with the PLO in order to achieve a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. In 1985, Findley published a collection of insider accounts of Israeli infiltration, control, Zionist influence and political pressure from Nixon to Reagan. The book, called They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, portrays a US government in which no information, no asset can be withheld or concealed from Israel, where Israeli awareness of government activities is total, and instead of being concealed, is flaunted with impunity. Former Chariman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer is quoted in the book as saying "If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on."
During the Reagan-Begin-Shamir years, the US got a first taste of Israeli full spectrum dominance, as US imperial power was shaken and subverted by this tiny state with big ambitions. Israeli political and military influence extended to Soviet-aligned India, which Israel assisted in becoming a nuclear power and challenging US ally Pakistan. Israel shared military and nuclear technology with South Africa, passing on CIA intelligence to the racist regime so that US detection of joint nuclear tests could be avoided. Israel even penetrated the US's Monroe Doctrine sanctuary under the guise of helping the US defeat "communism" in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, etc.
GHW Bush won the 1988 presidency thanks largely to his dismal rival Dukakis, but also to his powers of overt and covert political manipulation and intrigue. His real constituency was the predatory robber barons of the 80's LBO craze and business interests impressed by his Task Force on Regulatory Relief, which blazed the way for today's wild west capitalism in the US. Dan Quayle was his flytrap for catching the Bible vote, and a batch of Likudniks from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an AIPAC spinoff, took care of the Jewish lobby.
Among these were Dennis Ross of the WINEAP, author of WINEAP's first policy paper calling on the US not to be proactive in Arab-Israeli matters. Ross became SoS Baker's head of policy planning and had his two assistants write a paper singling out Iraq as the main threat for Middle East peace, calling for a containment policy against Iraq. There was also Larry Eagleburger, a Kissinger associate and signatory of a 1988 WINEAP report which pushed for a "small steps" US policy for the peace process, a view adopted by Baker. Eagleburger became Deputy Secretary of State. Richard Haass, who participated in preparing the 1988 report, became Bush's National Security Council adviser for Middle East affairs. At his suggestion, several meetings were held at the State Department to discuss whether it was time for an "adjustment" to the US policy of limited cooperation with Iraq.
The Boston Globe's Stephen Kurkjian wrote that the way Bush confronted Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was straight out of a 1990 book by Haass, Conflicts Unending—The United States and Regional Disputes (Yale University Press). Kurkjian wrote that Haass "has been intricately involved in shaping the administration's response to the Gulf crisis. From the decision to deploy U. S. troops in Saudi Arabia to deciding what message Bush should stress in his television address to the Iraqi people, Haass has been one of a handful of White House advisers consistently at Bush's side during the crisis."
Paul Wolfowitz was also there, as Defence Secretary Dick Cheney's right-hand man, asking for Saddam's head, as usual.
However, despite these and other Likudniks in the administration, Bush and Baker promoted US imperial interests before those of Israel. Bush settled the Iraq question with the policy of "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran and not the elimination of Saddam, as Wolfowitz insisted. Desert Storm/Desert Shield served to strengthen US links with the Sauds and the US military presence in the Gulf was increased. Syria became a coalition partner and shedded its pariah status. Koweitis and Saudis started naming their new-born children Bush. Gorbachev and Bush collaborated on a Middle East peace initiative and Shamir suddenly found himself at Madrid, facing Syrians and PLO representatives that he had been trying to kill a few months ago. When he started ranting (justifiably, as it happens) about Syrian support for terrorism, the Syrian foreign minister Farouk Charaa took out a photograph and held it up for him: An old British "wanted" photo of Shamir as a Stern Gang terrorist. Israel's public image took a bashing.
Getting Shamir to Madrid wasn't easy, but Bush, despite the approaching election, threatened to defer $2 billion in aid if he didn't show up. The Soviet Jews that Shamir had traded US strategic secrets for were arriving en masse and Shamir was asking the US for $10 billion in loan guarantees over 5 years on top of the $3 to $5.6 billion yearly aid for housing the new arrivals in illegal settlements on the West Bank and buying some more arms with what was left over. Bush was fed up with Shamir, who promised to stop new settlement building and during James Baker's visits to Israel, opened up a new settlement every day that Baker was there, in deliberate provocation. Earlier in the year, AIPAC had lobbied against the delivery of US arms to Saudi Arabia and Bush had told the lobbyists, according to Yediot Ahronot: "The central question is the security of the American soldiers in Saudi Arabia. If you keep opposing the deliveries of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, I am going public to explain to the American nation who is with us and who is against us."
The struggle that broke out in September 1991 on Capitol Hill was epic. AIPAC launched a 2-day lobbying blitzkrieg to get the loan guarantees voted, prompting Bush to become the last president ever to denounce the Jewish lobby in public: "there are 1,000 lobbyists up on the Hill today lobbying Congress for loan guarantees for Israel and I'm one lonely little guy down here asking Congress to delay its consideration of loan guarantees for 120 days." In the heat of the battle, James Baker was overheard expleting "Fuck the Jews."
The neocon Likudniks vs the NWO
In the end, both Bush and Shamir were down for the count. But Bush's New World Order legacy and the dual containment strategy in the Gulf would be maintained by Clinton against formidable Likudnik pressure. The pressure to destroy the Iraqi regime took the form of the Iraq Liberation Act and the 1998 Project for a New American Century letter. The NWO was also under attack from neocon Likudnik propagandists who systematically decried US treaty commitments and the UN in view of creating an international climate of lawlessness where Israel and (so they argued) the US would have a freer hand.
One of these was John Bolton, the Dubya junta's undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs who was once endorsed by Jesse Helms with the words "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon." Bolton wrote an article called "Kofi Annan's UN Power Grab" in Kristol's Weekly Standard (10/4/99) excoriating the UN Secretary General for trying to limit warfare and to establish the supremacy of UN forces. In Bolton's words, "If the United States allows that claim to go unchallenged, its discretion in using force to advance its national interests is likely to be inhibited in the future." He was a hard-line opponent of US peacekeeping missions and denounced Clinton's so-called "nation building." He was and remains adamantly opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the ABM Treaty.
More lobbying against international law came from the Center for Security Policy, a Likudnik propaganda body that serves as JINSA's shock troops:
CSP was instrumental in developing the arguments against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 CSP memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court.
Jason Vest: "The Men From JINSA and CSP" The Nation September 2, 2002
At the same time, Perle had assembled his Pentagon acolytes to help run Netanyahu's campaign. After the election, Perle advised him to pursue an outlaw policy.
On July 8, 1996, Perle presented a document to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," spelling out a new Israeli foreign policy, calling for a repudiation of the Oslo Accords and "land for peace"; for the permanent annexation of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip; and for the elimination of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad, as a first step towards overthrowing or destabilizing the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The document was prepared for the Jerusalem and
the D.C.-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, financed by Richard Mellon-Scaife. The
report was co-authored by Perle; Douglas Feith, currently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy; David Wurmser, currently special assistant to
John Bolton; and Meyrav Wurmser, now director of Mideast Policy at the Hudson Institute.
Two days later, Netanyahu delivered a speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, which strongly echoed the IASPS outline.
A WSJ editorial endorsed the Perle document the next day.
But despite the fierce pressure and the impeachment conspiracy, Clinton resisted the calls to kick off a new era of international anarchy by attacking Iraq. He showed that he was aware of the stakes when he said, after the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “Imagine the world we will live in if they prevail.”
There's no need to strain our imagination now, it's all plain to see.
I hope that it has become clear why we are in this waking nightmare. The m.o. of a mature global empire should normally be something in the line of the Bush/Clinton New World Order - until the working class gets its act together and shuts it down, that is. There is no reason, no crisis serious enough for the US empire to discard the legal and ideological structure of its empire and expose its naked imperialist nature, inviting revolt. Empires are held together by legitimacy, not force. Instead, we see the US empire reverting to its primal "Big Stick" form, a clearly unsustainable state of affairs. The currents of reaction within the US body politic associated with this reversion have existed for decades. The question is, why did they prevail at this advanced stage?
The US may be a mature empire but Israel and its Likud rulers, whose influence on US policy now borders on total control, are still colonialists. Their goals and needs are those of the 19th century. They consider that world-wide anti-semitism has denied them their right to complete their nationalist-colonialist expansion at a time when such actions were unregulated, whereas international law has now become established, freezing the territorial status quo. They intend to incapacitate the international order for the duration of their conquests while at the same time bullying and brutalizing neighboring populations with a "make my day" strategy aimed at provoking them, in the pretense that Israeli aggression is self-defense.
These provocations have an even more sinister goal: To create great numbers of Jewish victims, so that no peaceful reconciliation with their enemies is possible. Likud's fostering of Islamic fundamentalism in the occupied territories is well documented. Its provocations - such as Sharon's infamous Temple Mount incursion (carried out under heavy armed escort) - that ultimately drove these zealots to suicidal fury are also a matter of record. Tha al Aqsa intifadeh drove the Israelis into the arms of Sharon, hoping to find security there. Instead, they found death. September 11 projected the jihadist revolt to Gentile soil, recruiting, in the process, the non-Christian-zionist US population for Israel's war on the Arabs. In fear and terror, the American people rallied around their Likud-controlled leaders to join in revisionist zionism's colonialist war.
As Ze'ev Jabotinsky said: "We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or French on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire." That childhood disease of capitalism is still virulent within Likud, and it has re-infected the US with it.
Last revision: October 27, 20002
NOTES
Or should we call it the Dubya Shogunate? From the foreword of The Last Empire (present in the manuscript, removed from the published edition - for national security reasons?):
"I am writing this note a dozen days before the Inauguration of the loser of the year 2000 presidential election. Lost republic as well as last empire.
"We are now faced with a Japanese seventeenth-century-style arrangement: a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors. Do they dream, as did the shoguns of yore, of the conquest of China? We shall know more soon, I should think, than late. Sayonara."
Gore Vidal
11 January 2001
WASHINGTON — The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached.
"Oh, man," he wailed. "North Korea's got nukes. Sheriff Musharraf was helping them. Al Qaeda's blowing stuff up again.
[...]
"This is not the way my new doctrine was supposed to work. We are supposed to decide who we pre-empt and when we pre-empt them.
[...]
"Get me Condi!" he yelled. "And a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
Maureen Dowd, "The Soufflé Doctrine",
The New York Times October 20, 2002
Here's Greg Palast's
testimony about how 21st-C yellow media actively participates in BS
imperialism as if Teddy's Rough Riders were still storming San Juan hill.
Lappé: What's something hot you're working on now. You were talking about Enron years before that broke. What's the next big story [This interview was conducted on April 2, 2002 - ed.]?
Palast: Look at Venezuela. You are not getting that story. What they are doing is they are already preparing you with propaganda war. They're telling you Hugo Chavez is a dictator. Think about this a minute: George Bush is elected through stolen votes in Florida. Surely, he didn't win the popular vote by even by close. So an unelected president, we are supposed to praise him. And you have Hugo Chavez who was elected with something like 70% of the vote, and he's the dictator. There is this drum beat to set up the approval of a coup d'etat.
Why do they want to get this guy? He did two things: he's passed two laws, only two. But the two laws are unused land in Venezuela, which there is plenty, goes to the landless. Radical enough. The other thing was he doubled the royalties that are payment to be paid from the international oil companies. Venezuela was the number exporter of oil, even greater than Saudi Arabia. So we cut way back on purchases on Venezuela to tried and squeeze him. That wasn't good enough.
Watch, they are going to try and assassinate this guy. I was going down to interview him. And a member of his staff said do you really want to be in a room with him this week because we think they are going to try and get him.
Look for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, or a move to have him removed. You won't see this on the British Petroleum documentary about globalization. This is globalization led by bullets.
Lappé: Thanks so much.
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: New Stories They Don't Want You to Hear
Quoted in Noam Chomsky: Year 501, South End Press, Ch. 17, section 2 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-c07-s02.html
Robocopworld : The State-Corporate Military Consortium
I prefer SCMC to military-industrial complex, a term born as a parting gesture of candor that retiring US officials occasionally make after a lifetime of dissembling. "Consortium" denotes a confluence of interests that "complex" does not. "Military" should not refer to the DoD, as Ike did, but to the general nature of the consortium, whose activities are primarily focused on the US war machine, both overt and covert, both of the military proper and what is euphemistically called "civilian" security. The corporate component is not limited to "industry" in any meaningful sense of the word, but extends to all conceivable areas, from formulating nuclear strategy and designing strategic nuclear weapons (RAND) to supplying mercenaries (Dyncorp) to running intelligence-gathering and covert action operations (Fred Ikle and Richard Armitage via Geopol). The state-corporate military consortium serves corporate profits, to be sure, but also serves to uphold and transform the state apparatus that generates those profits. It finances propaganda, campaigns, and lobbies, produces jobs and votes, generates export revenue, and formulates policy. In other words - those of the NYT below - it "blurs the lines:"
With the war on terror already a year old and the possibility of war against Iraq growing by the day, a modern version of an ancient practice — one as old as warfare itself — is reasserting itself at the Pentagon. Mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving — only this time they are called private military contractors, and some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies.
The Pentagon cannot go to war without them.
Often run by retired military officers, including three- and four-star generals, private military contractors are the new business face of war. Blurring the line between military and civilian, they provide stand-ins for active soldiers in everything from logistical support to battlefield training and military advice at home and abroad.
Some are helping to conduct training exercises using live ammunition for American troops in Kuwait, under the code name Desert Spring. One has just been hired to guard President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, the target of a recent assassination attempt. Another is helping to write the book on airport security. Others have employees who don their old uniforms to work under contract as military recruiters and instructors in R.O.T.C. classes, selecting and training the next generation of soldiers.
In the darker recesses of the world, private contractors go where the Pentagon would prefer not to be seen, carrying out military exercises for the American government, far from Washington's view. In the last few years, they have sent their employees to Bosnia, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia and other global hot spots.
Motivated as much by profits as politics, these companies — about 35 all told in the United States — need the government's permission to be in business. A few are somewhat familiar names, like Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the {Halliburton Company} that operates for the government in Cuba and Central Asia. Others have more cryptic names, like DynCorp; Vinnell, a subsidiary of {TRW}; SAIC; ICI of Oregon; and Logicon, a unit of Northrop Grumman. One of the best known, MPRI, boasts of having "more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon."
During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10. No one knows for sure how big this secretive industry is, but some military experts estimate the global market at $100 billion. As for the public companies that own private military contractors, they say little if anything about them to shareholders.
"Contractors are indispensible," said John J. Hamre, deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. "Will there be more in the future? Yes, and they are not just running the soup kitchens."
[...]
MPRI, formerly known as Military Professionals Resources Inc., may provide the best example of how skilled retired soldiers cash in on their military training. Its roster includes Gen. Carl E. Vuono, the former Army chief of staff who led the gulf war and the Panama invasion; Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, the former commander of the United States Army in Europe; and Gen. Ron Griffith, the former Army vice chief of staff. There are also dozens of retired top-ranked generals, an admiral and more than 10,000 former military personnel, including elite special forces, on call and ready for assignment.
"We can have 20 qualified people on the Serbian border within 24 hours," said Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, the company's spokesman and a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "The Army can't do that. But contractors can."
For that, MPRI is paid well. Its revenue exceeds $100 million a year, mainly from Pentagon and State Department contracts. Retired military personnel working for MPRI receive two to three times their Pentagon salaries, in addition to their retirement benefits and corporate benefits like stock options and 401(k) plans. MPRI's founders became millionaires in July 2000, when they and about 35 equity holders sold the company for $40 million in cash to L-3 Communications, a military contractor traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Within the military, the use of contractors is Defense Department policy for filling the gaps as the number of troops falls. At the time of the gulf war, there were 780,000 Army troops; today there are 480,000. Over the same period, overall military forces have fallen by 500,000.
Pentagon officials did not respond to many telephone calls and e-mail messages requesting interviews, but they have maintained that contractors are a cost-effective way of extending the military's reach when Congress and the American public are reluctant to pay for more soldiers.
"The main reason for using a contractor is that it saves you from having to use troops, so troops can focus on war fighting," said Col. Thomas W. Sweeney, a professor of strategic logistics at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "It's cheaper because you only pay for contractors when you use them."
But one person's cost-saving device can be another's "guns for hire," as David Hackworth, a former Army colonel and frequent critic of the military, called them.
"These new mercenaries work for the Defense and State Department and Congress looks the other way," Colonel Hackworth, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, said. "It's a very dangerous situation. It allows us to get into fights where we would be reluctant to send the Defense Department or the C.I.A. The American taxpayer is paying for our own mercenary army, which violates what our founding fathers said."
They are not mercenaries in the classic sense. Most, but not all, private military contractors are unarmed, even when they oversee others with guns. They have even formed a trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, to promote industry standards.
"We don't want to risk getting contracts by being called mercenaries," said Doug Brooks, president of the association. "But we can do things on short notice and keep our mouths shut."
That, some critics say, is part of the problem. By using for-profit soldiers, the government, especially the executive branch, can evade Congressional limits on troop strength. For instance, in Bosnia, where a cap of 20,000 troops was imposed by Congress, the addition of 2,000 contractors helped skirt that restriction.
Contractors also allow the administration to carry out foreign policy goals in low-level skirmishes around the globe — often fueled by ethnic hatreds and a surplus of cold war weapons — without having to fear the media attention that comes if American soldiers are sent home in body bags.
At least five DynCorp employees have been killed in Latin America, with no public outcry. Denial is easier for the government when those working overseas do not wear uniforms — they often wear fatigues or military-looking clothes but not official uniforms.
[...]
It's hard to tell where the United States military ends and MPRI begins. For the last four years, MPRI has run R.O.T.C. training programs at more than 200 universities, under a contract that has allowed retired military to put their uniforms back on. It recently lost the contract to a lower bidder, but MPRI offset the loss with one to provide former soldiers to run recruitment offices.
The company, which has 900 full-time employees, helps run the United States Army Force Management School at Fort Belvoir. It also provides instructors for advanced training classes at Fort Leavenworth, teaches the Civil Air Patrol and designs courses at Fort Sill, Fort Knox, Fort Lee and other military centers.
The Pentagon has even hired MPRI to help it write military doctrine — including the field manual called "Contractors Support on the Battlefield" that sets rules for how the Army should interact with private contractors, like itself.
Overseas, MPRI is, if anything, more active. Under a program it calls "democracy transition," the company has offered countries like Nigeria, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Croatia and Macedonia training in American-style warfare, including war games, military instruction and weapons training.
In Croatia, MPRI was brought in to provide border monitors in the early 1990's. Then, in 1994, as the United States grew concerned about the poor quality of the Croatian forces and their ability to maintain regional stability, it turned to MPRI. A United Nations arms embargo in 1991, approved by the United States, prohibited the sale of weapons or the providing of training to any warring party in the Balkans. But the Pentagon referred MPRI to Croatia's defense minister, who hired the company to train its forces.
In 1995, MPRI started doing so, teaching the fledgling army military tactics that MPRI executives had developed while on active duty commanding the gulf war invasion. Several months later, armed with this new training, the Croatian army began Operation Storm, one of the bloodiest episodes of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, an event that also reshaped the military balance in the region.
The operation drove more than 100,000 Serbs from their homes in a four-day assault. Investigators for the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague found that the Croatian army carried out summary executions and indiscriminately shelled civilians. "In a widespread and systematic matter, Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts," investigators said in their report. Several Croatian generals in charge of the operation have been indicted for war crimes and are being sought for trial.
"No MPRI employee played a role in planning, monitoring or assisting in Operation Storm," said Lieutenant General Soyster, the MPRI spokesman. He did say that a few Croatian graduates of MPRI's training course participated in the operation.
Yet what happened in Croatia gave MPRI international brand recognition and more business in that region. When Bosnian Muslims balked in 1995 at signing the Dayton peace accords out of fear that their army was ill-equipped to provide sufficient protection, MPRI was called in.
"The Bosnians said they would not sign unless they had help building their army," said Peter Singer, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution who is writing a book on contractors. "And they said they wanted the same guys who helped the Croatians."
That is who they got. Under a plan worked out by American negotiators, the Bosnian Muslims hired MPRI using money that was provided by a group of Islamic nations, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. These nations deposited money in the United States Treasury, which MPRI drew against.
"It was a brilliant move in that the U.S. government got someone else to pay for what we wanted from a policy standpoint," Mr. Singer said.
At the moment, MPRI is advertising for special forces for antiterrorist operations, is bulking up to train American forces in Kuwait and is looking for people with special skills like basic-training instruction and counterintelligence. Recently, however, it lost a $4.3 million contract to provide training to the army in Colombia when officials there complained about what they called the poor quality of MPRI's services.
In Africa, MPRI has conducted training programs on security issues for about 120 African leaders and more than 5,500 African troops. Most recently, it went toe to toe with the State Department, and won, gaining permission to do business in Equatorial Guinea, a country with a deplorable human rights record where the United States does not have an embassy.
After two years of lobbying at the State Department, and after being turned down twice on human rights grounds, MPRI was finally given approval last year to work with President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, whom the State Department describes as holding power through torture, fraud and a 98 percent election mandate. MPRI advised President Obiang on building a coast guard to protect the oil-rich waters being explored by {Exxon Mobil} off the coast.
[...]
"We sort of blur the lines," Col. Steven J. Zamparelli of the Air Force said in an interview. In an article in 1999 for the Air Force Journal of Logistics, Colonel Zamaparelli said: "The Department of Defense is gambling future military victory on contractors' performing operational functions in the battlefield."
Others in the military are more blunt about the effect on soldiers. "Are we ultimately trading their blood to save a relatively insignificant amount in the national budget?" said Lt. Col. Lourdes A. Castillo of the Air Force, a logistics expert, in a 2000 article in Aerospace Power Journal. "If this grand experiment undertaken by our national leadership fails during wartime, the results will be unthinkable."
Leslie Wayne America's For-Profit Secret Army The New York Times October 13, 2002
Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy
Manoeuvres shaped by horsetrading between America, Russia and France over control of untapped oilfields
Ed Vulliamy in New York, Paul Webster in Paris, and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Sunday October 6, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4516111,00.html
Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer investigation.
The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad, which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America installs a successor to Saddam.
A Russian official at the United Nations in New York told the Observer last week that the $7 billion in Soviet-era debt was not the main 'economic interest' in Iraq about which the Kremlin is voicing its concerns. The main fear was a post-Saddam government would not honour extraction contracts Moscow has signed with Iraq.
Russian business has long-standing interests in Iraq. Lukoil, the biggest oil company in Russia, signed a $20bn contract in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oilfield. Such a deal could evaporate along with the Saddam regime, together with a more recent contract with Russian giant Zarubezhneft, which was granted a potential $90bn concession to develop the bin Umar oilfield. The total value of Saddam's foreign contract awards could reach $1.1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2001.
[...]
A government insider in Paris told The Observer that France also feared suffering economically from US oil ambitions at the end of a war. But the dilemma for Paris is more complex. Despite President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany agreeing last week to oppose changing the rules governing weapons inspectors, France may back military action.
Government sources say they fear - existing concessions aside - France could be cut out of the spoils if it did not support the war and show a significant military presence. If it comes to war, France is determined to be allotted a more prestigious role in the fighting than in the 1991 Gulf war, when its main role was to occupy lightly defended ground. Negotiations have been going on between the state-owned TotalFinaElf company and the US about redistribution of oil regions between the world's major companies.
Washington's predatory interest in Iraqi oil is clear, whatever its political protestations about its motives for war. The US National Energy Policy Report of 2001 - known as the 'Cheney Report' after its author Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly one of America's richest and most powerful oil industry magnates - demanded a priority on easing US access to Persian Gulf supplies.
Doubts about Saudi Arabia - even before 11 September, and even more so in its wake - led US strategists to seek a backup supply in the region. America needs 20 million barrels of crude a day, and analysts have singled out the country that could meet up to half that requirement: Iraq.
The current high price of oil is dragging the US economy further into recession. US control of the Iraqi reserves, perhaps the biggest unmapped reservoir in the world, would break Saudi Arabia's hold on the oil-pricing cartel Opec, and dictate prices for the next century.
This could spell disaster for Russian oil giants, keen to expand their sales to the West. Russia has sought to prolong negotiations, official statements going between opposition to any new UN resolution and possible support for military action against an Iraqi regime proven to be developing weapons of mass destruction.
While France is thought likely to support US military action, and China will probably fall in line because of its admission to the World Trade Organisation, Putin is left holding the wild cards.
[...]
Moscow's trust of Washington may be slipping after what a Russian UN official calls 'broken promises' that followed negotiations over Moscow's support for the Afghan campaign.
Russia turned a blind eye to US troops in central Asia, on the tacit condition that US-Russian trade restrictions would be lifted. But they are still there, and other benefits expected after 11 September have also not materialised.
'They've been making this point very strongly,' a senior Bush administration official conceded to the Washington Post , 'that this can't be an all-give-and-no-get relationship... They do have a point that the growing relationship has got to be reciprocal.'
Lenin
dismissed Kautsky's "ultraimperialism" by arguing that the ultimate
form of capitalism wasn't the cartel but the monopoly, as it maximised profits
(generated superprofit). Therefore, the logical tendency of finance capital was
not towards harmonious association, but towards total hegemony. War would always
be an option for securing spheres of influence and colonies. They were both
right, but Lenin was righter for his time, i.e. WW I.
After 1945, a war between the major capitalist powers became unthinkable, partly
but not only because of the US's absolute military supremacy. The main reason
was what Kautsky had foreseen: The risks, costs, and expected profits associated
with war between capitalist powers were no longer attractive.
V. I. Lenin
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Chapter
5
DIVISION OF THE WORLD
AMONG CAPITALIST ASSOCIATIONS
[...]
Certain bourgeois writers (now joined by Karl Kautsky, who has completely
abandoned the Marxist position he had held, for example, in 1909) have expressed
the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking
expressions of the internationalisation of capital, give the hope of peace among
nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd,
while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defence of the worst
opportunism.[...]The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular
malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces
them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it
"in proportion to capital", "in proportion to strength",
because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production
and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political
development. In order to understand what is taking place, it is necessary to
know what questions are settled by the changes in strength. The question as to
whether these changes are "purely" economic or non-economic (e.g.,
military) is a secondary one, which cannot in the least affect fundamental views
on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute the question of the form of the
struggle and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow warlike, the next day warlike
again) for the question of the substance of the struggle and agreements between
capitalist associations is to sink to the role of a sophist.
The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the "struggle for spheres of influence".
[Back]
[...] Economic supremacy, claimed
Adams, was the basis for all power . Free trade and economic internationalism
i.e. international economy under American control, was the key to world
domination.
"Adams argued that the United States must take an
increasingly large role in policing the world order. "Economic (and moral) power
had to be translated into military power if America was to have, as Franklin D.
Roosevelt (influenced by Adams) put it, its "rendezvous with
destiny".
Adams American Economic Supremacy (1900) was the old
handbook for American empire builders. Childs writing in 1945 pointed out: "If
Adams had written last year , for publication this year, he would have had to
alter scarcely anything to relate his views to the world of today"(21) . The
same is true for the period after 1991. The father of containment George Kennan
, in explaining and defending the policy of containment, mentioned Adam's as one
of the small number of American's who had recognized the proper basis of foreign
policy...Kennan's analysis and argument was in many respects similar to that of
Adams."The Truman Doctrine was a classic example of the Frontier Thesis designed
to facilitate American expansionism, and in one speech Truman called it "The
American Frontier".
"By the end of W.W.II , American leaders were
thinking even more explicitly within the pattern evolved in the 1890s." "Like a
good many aspect of 20th century American history, the military definition of
the world was a direct product of the frontier-expansionist
outlook.
Admiral Mahan provided the earliest rationale for NATO.
"Expressing himself in a menacing and efficient attitude of physical force",
Mahan envisioned a future in which the industrial expansion led to a rivalry for
markets and sources of raw materials and would ultimately result in need of
power to open and conquer new markets. Sea power was the ultimate vehicle for
this expansion, the new "open door' colonialism demanded the services of
American navy. As Walter LaFeber points out, Mahan summarized his theory in a
postulate : "In these three things-production , with the necessity of exchanging
products, shipping , whereby the exchange is carried on, and colonies...-is to
be found the key to much of the history , as well as the policy , of nations
bordering on the sea" Production leads to a need for shipping , which in turn
creates the need for colonies.
John Hay's "Open Door Notes "- the
proclamation of American Lebensraum in 1899, and 1900 signified the beginning of
the American commercial invasion of the world, the future American imperialist
expansionism through the policy of Open Door As I have already pointed out
Woodrow Willson's words "World safe for democracy" translated in reality "World
safe for American Lebensraum". Wilson saw overseas economic expansion as the
frontier to replace the American continent that has been conquered. In a section
of volume V of his "History of the American People", which reads as a paraphrase
of essays written by Brooks Adams, Wilson claimed that United States is destined
to command "the economic fortunes of the world" through the "Open Door"
expansionism. "Diplomacy, and if need be, power, must make an open way." In a
series of lectures at Columbia University in April of 1907, he was even more
forthright:
"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer
insists on having the world as a marked, the flag of his nation must follow him,
and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions
obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the
sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be
obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be
overlooked or left unused" .
Nikolai von Kreitor, NATO and the Architects of American Lebensraum
[Back]
Smedley Butler, the anti-imperialist
Marine General:
The short quotes don't do justice to the two-time-medal-of-honor-born-again-anti-imperialist-pacifist-jarhead, who experienced his conversion when approached by US capitalists in 1933 to lead a fascist coup against FDR.
This gyrine rocks!
[...]
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the
making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well,
their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And,
like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did
their profits jump - or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their
1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of
$5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of
$21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
[...]
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the
war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was
expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in
profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum.
And it went to a very few.
[...]
Boys with a
normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and
classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made
over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order
of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology,
they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained
them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital
in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a
barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the
porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even
look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in
good shape; mentally, they are gone.
[...]
At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes
up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of
them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that
"We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation."
Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great
naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of
this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people.
Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight
the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud
people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States
fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents
of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the
Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
[...]
5: TO HELL WITH WAR!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.
So..."
[...]
Smedley Darlington Butler "WAR
IS A RACKET" Forum magazine September, 1934
The Korean War massacres
[...]
"Civilian Massacres During the Korean War" The Memory Hole website
Steven R. Kangas, THE BUSINESS PLOT TO OVERTHROW ROOSEVELT
The late Steve Kangas was a liberal political researcher and Russian linguist who worked as a Russian-language communication analyst during his military service. The main source on the FDR coup, Jules Archer's book, is unfortunately out of print.
The Desert Fox air campaign against Iraq, launched by the US & UK in December 1998 without UNSC approval and against the protests of Arab states, can be seen as Clinton's concession to the political pressure that manifested itself in the January 26 PNAC letter calling for an end to the containment policy and the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in November of the same year. The PNAC letter's signatories included Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Woolsey, Armitage, Bolton, Fukuyama, Kagan, and Khalilzad. The letter called for "regime change" because of the threat of - what else - "weapons of mass destruction":
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
Israeli PM Netanyahu and British PM Blair also pressured Clinton to
attack Iraq and remove Saddam, to no avail.
While I was writing this, Paul Knox scooped me with the very same
observation:
The roots of George W. Bush's first-strike folly go back a century, to another
Republican who had a talent for marrying foreign policy and water-cooler wisdom.
Theodore Roosevelt led his country to world-power status, first as a cavalry
commander and then as its 26th president. It was he who advised the United
States to speak softly in global councils, and carry a big stick.
 Sniper alley, 1992 |
It's impossible to debate the Sloboheads' theory that NATO action against Yugoslavia was unprovoked aggression.since they have managed to wipe their memories clean of the images we all saw of Serb gunners turning the multiethnic city of Sarajevo into a modern vision of hell.
As Milosevic now elaborates his conspiracy theory about Western plans to balkanize the last valiant holdout of socialism with the story of how French intelligence carried out the Srebrenica massacre, Sloboheads will unerringly nod in agreement. There is no doubt that German machinations, the Vatican, Croatian fascists in the US, etc. had a hand in setting off the Yugoslav war, but it's pretty hard to understand how the uncompromising, ruthless chauvinism of Slobodan Milosevic, confidently resting on his formidable military might, gets absolved of its overwhelming guilt and brutality in the fantasy world of the Sloboheads, or how they sustain their faith in the "strategic value" of ex-Yugoslavia for US imperialism. As the author of La déchirure yugoslave (The Yugoslav fracture) wrote:
The conspiracy theory explains nothing - neither the economic, moral and political crisis of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was blatantly obvious throughout the 1980s and paralysed the federal institutions, nor the specific conflict in Kosovo, which runs through the whole of Yugoslav history.
Catherine Samary, Dismantling Yugoslavia Le Monde Diplomatique November 1988
R.M.A.: Atari imperialism
The Revolution in Military Affairs is the corporate-state military consortium's corollary to Star Wars. This concept of deeply bunkered console warriors operating missiles and other robotic engines of war is a project for a capital-intensive, labor-free imperial military.
[...]
The R.M.A. idea was first set forth by Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, then the chief of the Soviet General Staff, in a 1982 pamphlet entitled "Vsegda v Gotovnosti k Zashchite Otechestva" ("Always Ready to Defend the Fatherland"), in which he pointed out that recent American advances in missile technology had the potential to change the nature of warfare. During the Cold War, a standard part of the cultural equipment of Republican defense experts was the idea that strategic genius resided within the Soviet military; otherwise life would be as pallid as a James Bond movie in which the villain doesn't have a fiendishly clever diabolical scheme. Ogarkov quickly became required reading in American defense circles. The most important promoter of the R.M.A. in America has been Andrew W. Marshall, the head of the Pentagon's obscure Office of Net Assessment, a cult figure in his own right, and one of the most curious and interesting figures in the defense world....
Bush promised that, as President, he would order up "an immediate, comprehensive review of our military" and give the Secretary of Defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo." Sure enough, this February, only a couple of weeks into the Bush Administration, newspaper stories reported that the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, would be conducting a broad review of the military-or, rather, that Andrew Marshall would be conducting it on his behalf. During the Clinton Administration, William Cohen, as the Secretary of Defense, tried, without success, to exile the Office of Net Assessment and Marshall, who is seventy-nine, to the National Defense University. Now, in 2001, it looked as if Andy Marshall was back-emphatically so, in a position of higher influence than at any other point in his long career.
Marshall is the last active member in government of a cadre of strategic thinkers that took form more than fifty years ago at the original think tank, the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, California.
[...]
The Revolution in Military Affairs, Marshall's main cause for the past ten years, can be seen as a return to his RAND roots. There is a substantial R.M.A. literature, and one should be cautious about attributing all its main points to Marshall, but most of it posits a version of conventional war that would be waged in much the same way as nuclear war, with strategists at remote computer screens targeting precision missile strikes. The R.M.A. has been up and running-in seminar rooms, at least-for long enough now that it has a language all its own (such as "deep-strike architecture," "systems of systems," "info dominance," and "asymmetric competitors"), which, like all insider jargon, has the effect of pushing non-members away.
... Advances in information technology have made possible a host of new military equipment, from long-range smart missiles to drone airplanes to spy satellites to computer viruses that can take out an enemy's communications system. All these high-tech military systems, in the R.M.A. vision, could be networked together and deployed in a coördinated fashion by a central command. It was coördination of this kind, rather than the presence of a single new piece of equipment, that explains the success of the German Panzer division, a favorite historical example of the R.M.A. New technology makes it possible to hope for the great reduction, or even the elimination, of Carl von Clausewitz's "fog of war," the enveloping confusion of the battlefield. Maybe there would be no battlefield, no "closing with the enemy"-just people at terminals launching missiles.
To the R.M.A. crowd, the end of the Cold War means that the main threat to the United States in the next few decades will come from smaller nations that have acquired the new missiles and computers, not to mention chemical and biological weapons. (Marshall and his followers also believe that the next world power will be China, but not for a while; one of Marshall's summer studies involved war games set in the future against "a large Asian country.") Rather than attacking traditional military targets, these "street-fighter states" could aim at American water supplies, or oil wells, or forests. In response, instead of our stationing large conventional forces abroad, R.M.A. strategists want us to be able to respond instantaneously to enemies who might be attacking from any direction, with no warning. The R.M.A. isn't overtly ideological, but it makes for a good fit with a foreign policy that is suspicious of international alliances and prefers to see the United States act mainly alone and mainly to protect itself. (It makes for a good fit, too, with the Administration's other leading military cause, missile defense.) The R.M.A. is supposed to be an appropriate defense policy for a time of public intolerance for drawn-out conflicts, since engagements would theoretically play themselves out
rapidly.
[...]
Nicholas Lemann "Dreaming About War" The New Yorker 16 July 2001
MC2002: Game Over for R.M.A.
The Pentagon's civilian Atari warriors suffered an ignominous defeat at the hands of virtual Arab kamikazes during the technology showcasing Millennium Challenge 2002 war games.
The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game's Opposing Force.
[...]
Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is a frequent player in military war games and is regarded as a Red team specialist. He said the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly free-play experiment.
Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed the Opposing Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units, he said
"We were directed … to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land," he said. "We were simply directed to turn [the air-defense systems] off or move them. … So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be."
Retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, who participated in the experiment as Red civilian leader, said Van Riper was outthinking the Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.
Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue's high-tech eavesdropping capabilities, Oakley said. Then, when the Blue fleet sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes sailing and flying in apparently innocuous circles.
When the Blue commander issued an ultimatum to Red to surrender or face destruction,
Van Riper took the initiative, issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country's mosques. His force's small boats and aircraft sped into action
"By that time there wasn't enough time left to intercept them," Oakley said. As a result of Van Riper's cunning, much of the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and "refloat" the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.
Sean D. Naylor War games rigged?
General says Millennium Challenge 02 ‘was almost entirely scripted' Army
Times, August 16, 2002
Geov Parrish does a retake on that August story in the light of the new spate of Islamic terrorist attacks:
The government of Yemen confirmed that the October 6 explosion that blew a hole and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil from the French oil tanker Limburg was a terrorist attack. More importantly, it confirmed how the attack was carried out: by a small skiff, packed with explosives, that crashed kamikaze-style into the tanker.
A similar method was used in Yemen two years ago in the attack upon the USS Cole. But what ties this all together is the infamous war game exercises conducted several months ago by the U.S. Army. The war games were to recreate an invasion of an unnamed Middle East oil dictatorship -- obviously, a practice for an invasion of Iraq.
Blue -- the good guys -- got destroyed by the Red (unnamed dictatorship) team. The war was over almost before it began. The general leading the Red team was then told he must give away his troops' positions and movements. Same result. He then had radio communications cut off. The Americans still lost, badly. Finally, the Army just called the whole damn thing off and declared Blue the winner.
Red's commander, now retired, has been giving interviews in the European press in recent weeks describing his strategy. It's simplicity itself. The U.S. has no land bases to work with, so any invasion, at this point, will be completely reliant upon aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and especially the Persian Gulf. Red simply used small fishing vessels -- indistinguishable from the civilian boats that dot the region -- and had then repeatedly launch kamikaze attacks on the aircraft carriers. And sank most of them.
That's a particularly ominous exercise since -- as the recent attacks in Bali and Kuwait also suggest -- there are plenty of people outside Iraq, and beyond Al-Qaeda, that would come after Americans should they attack Baghdad. Most will not be part of any nation's recognizable armed forces, and American soldiers will be surrounded, for a thousand or more miles in every direction, by countries that don't want its military forces there.
Geov Parrish "The Empire's soft underbelly"
workingforchange.com October 21 2002
[Back]
Movement conservatism was a power tool formulated by scholars such as Irving
Kristol, political organizers like the late Treasury Secretary William
Simon, opinion molders and popularizers such as William
F. Buckley, and a phalanx of think-tank operatives including Edwin
Feulner and Paul Weyrich. A highly integrated front
of activist organizations has been generously funded by the banking and oil
money of the Mellon-Scaifes of Pittsburgh, the
manufacturing fortunes of Lynde and Harry Bradley of
Milwaukee, the energy revenues of the Koch family of
Kansas, the chemical profits of John M. Olin of New
York, the Vicks patent-medicine empire of the Smith
Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C., and the brewing assets of the
Coors dynasty of Colorado, and others.
Jerry M. Landay The
Powell Manifesto: How A Prominent Lawyer's Attack Memo Changed
America for Mediatransparency.org
Here are some sources:
Funding the US
Neoconservatives Eurolegal Services
Cursor's Media
Transparency
Leon T. Hadar The
"Neocons": From the Cold War to the "Global Intifada" Washington
Report On Middle East Affairs April 1991
Jason Vest The
Men From JINSA and CSP The Nation September 2, 2002
[Back]
Money managers who met with Iranian officials this week in Frankfurt and
Paris said they might buy some of the E500 million ($489 million) of bonds
underwritten by Commerzbank AG and BNP Paribas SA. "Nobody in Germany or
Continental Europe agrees with Bush," said Holger Friedrich, a fund manager
at Union Investment GmbH in Frankfurt. Many European money managers are ignoring
Bush's January statement that Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, supports
terrorists like those that destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
[...]
But despite Washington's hard-line stance, Iran, the second-biggest producer in
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, still attracts investment
from international oil companies.
Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Eni SpA and TotalFinaElf SA have invested $10.5 billion
in the country since 1997, according to the Congressional Research Service, the
public policy research arm of the U.S. Congress.
Gavin Serkin 'Evil' label doesn't deter European firms on Iran Bloomberg News July 6, 2002
Five years ago, Hussein's government struck a 23-year, $3.5-billion deal with a consortium headed by Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, to rehabilitate Iraqi oil fields. But the U.N. sanctions have prevented the work from proceeding.
Baghdad has entered into smaller development deals with companies in Russia, China and France, in part to undermine political support for U.S. policy toward Iraq. All three countries have veto power on the United Nations Security Council.
Warren Vieth "Oil Is Factor in Iraq War Equation"
LA Times October 16 2002
Given the success of the struggle for Dreyfus, French Jewry - right and left - saw Zionism as irrelevant. Herzl savaged them in his Diary: "They seek protection from the Socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order ... Truly they are not Jews any more. To be sure, they are no Frenchmen either. They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism."
Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol.II, pp.672-3, quoted in http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch01.htm
Back in the West, Herzl went even further in his collaboration with tsarism. That summer, during the World Zionist Congress in Basle, he had a secret meeting with Chaim Zhitlovsky, then a leading figure in the Social Revolutionary Party. (World Zionist Congresses are held every two years, in odd years; the 1903 Congress was the sixth.) Later Zhitlovsky wrote of this extraordinary conversation. The Zionist told him that:
I have just come from Plevhe. I have his positive, binding promise that in 15 years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition: the Jewish revolutionaries shall cease their struggle against the Russian government. If in 15 years from the time of the agreement Plevhe does not effectuate the charter, they become free again to do what they consider necessary.
Samuel Portnoy (ed.), Vladimir Medem - The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, pp.295-8, quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch01.htm
From the beginning the Revisionists saw the middle class as their clientele and they had a long hatred of the left. In 1933 a youth wrote to Jabotinsky asking why he had become so vehemently anti-Marxist; Jabotinsky wrote a remarkable article, Zionism and Communism, explaining their total incompatibility. In terms of Jewry, "Communism strives to annihilate the only source of our constructive capital - the Jewish bourgeoisie - because their foundation is our root, and its principle is the class struggle against the bourgeoisie." In Palestine Marxism, by definition, meant the sharpest opposition to Zionism:
The essence of Communism consists in that it agitates and must incite the Eastern Nations against European dominance. This dominance in its eyes is "imperialistic" and exploitative. I believe otherwise and think that European dominance makes them civilised, but that is an incidental question and does not belong to the matter. One thing is clear: Communism incites and must incite the Eastern Nations and this it can do only in the name of national freedom. It tells them and must tell them:
Your lands belong to you and not to any strangers. This is how it must speak to the Arabs and the Arabs of Palestine ... For our Zionist lungs, Communism is suffocating gas and this is how you must deal with it.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Zionism and Communism", Hadar
(February 1941), p.33., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch10.htm
Jabotinsky: Zionism is colonialism. Get over it.
Jabotinsky never shared the naive illusion that the Palestinians would some day welcome foreign domination of their country. At a time when Ben-Gurion and his friends still thought they could convince the Palestinian masses to accept Zionism as in their own interest, Jabotinsky developed his own blunt thesis in an article, The Iron War (We and the Arabs), written in 1923:
Zionist colonisation must be either terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population - an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs ... A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future.
Marie Syrkin, "Labor Zionism Replies", Menorah Journal
(Spring 1935), p.72, quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the
Dictators http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch10.htm
He had nothing but ridicule for the Zionist leaders who mouthed peace while demanding that the British Army protect them; or their hope of an Arab ruler (the favoured candidate was Faisal of Iraq) who would deal with them over the heads of the Palestinians and impose them on the natives with an Arab bayonet. He repeated over and over that there could be only one way to a Zionist state:
If you wish to colonise a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some "rich man" or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else - or else, give up your colonisation, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonisation, colonisation is impossible, not "difficult", not "dangerous", but IMPOSSIBLE! ... Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important ... to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot - or else I am through with playing at colonisation.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Law, Selected Writings
(South Africa, 1962), p.26., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of
the Dictators http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch10.htm
Zionism: Anti-semitism turned inside-out
[Theodor Herzl's successor as head of the World Zionist Organization Max] Nordau was married to a Christian, and was afraid that his wife would be resented by the Orthodox among the ranks. [1] He was already married when he converted to Zionism and, despite his own Gentile wife, he soon became a confirmed Jewish racist. On 21 December 1903 he gave an interview to Eduard Drumont's rabid anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole, in which he said that Zionism wasn't a question of religion, but exclusively of race, and "there is no one with whom I am in greater agreement on this point than M. Drumont". [2]
[1] Amos Elon, Herzl, p.255. and [2] Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, p.322., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
Weizmann, the prestigious scientist and President of the WZO, who was well connected in London, did next to nothing for German Jewry. He had never liked them, nor did he have any sympathy for their defence efforts against anti-Semitism. As early as 18 March 1912 he had actually been brazen enough to tell a Berlin audience that "each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn't want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews." [*] In his chat with Balfour, in 1914, he went further, telling him that "we too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believed that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralising phenomena".
[*] Chaim Weizmann to Ahad Ha'am, in Leonard Stein (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol.VII, p.81., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
Brenner argues that middle-class German Jews, among whom the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) type of Zionism developed, were thus seeking an accomodation with the rising tide of antisemitism, as their class interests were incompatible with the Marxist inernationalism of the working class. Their fundamental position, accepted also by Labor zionists, was that the Jews were a separate racial unit within Gentile society, and that integration was impossible. During WW I, they strived to demonstrate that their loyalty to the state by patriotically supporting the war. But the rise of antisemitism in the 30's made demonstrations of loyalty meaningless. Zionists judged that the cause of antisemitism was the parasitic existence of the Diaspora on gentile land, rather than on its own. It was futile to fight antisemitism, what was needed was to bring Blut and Boden together in the land of Abraham.
These tenets combined were known as shelilat ha'galut (the Negation of the Diaspora), and were held by the entire spectrum of Zionists who varied only on matters of detail. They were argued vigorously in the Zionist press, where the distinctive quality of many articles was their hostility to the entire Jewish people. Anyone reading these pieces without knowing their source would have automatically assumed that they came from the anti-Semitic press. The Weltanschauung of the youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair (Young Watchmen), originally composed in 1917, but republished again as late as 1936, was typical of these effusions:
The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline. [*]
[*] Our Shomer "Weltanschauung", Hashomer Hatzair (December 1936), p.26., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
This style of Jewish self-hatred permeated a great deal of Zionist writing. In 1934 Yehezkel Kaufman, then famous as a scholar of biblical history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and himself a Zionist, though an opponent of the bizarre theory of the Negation of the Diaspora, aroused furious controversy by culling the Hebrew literature for yet worse examples. In Hebrew the ranters could really attack their fellow Jews without fear of being accused of providing ammunition for the Jew-haters. Kaufman's Hurban Hanefesh (Holocaust of the Soul) cited three of the classic Zionist thinkers. For Micah Yosef Berdichevsky the Jews were "not a nation, not a people, not human". To Yosef Chaim Brenner they were nothing more than "Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded, dogs". To A.D. Gordon his people were no better than "parasites, people fundamentally useless". [*]
[*] Yehezkel Kaufman, Hurban Hanefesh: "A Discussion of Zionism and Anti-Semitism", Issues (Winter 1967), p.106., quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
Irgun and LEHI: Zionist terrorists
The Irgun (Irgun Zvei Leumi: National Military Organisation), headed by Menachem Begin, and the LEHI (Lohamei Herut Yisrael - Fighters for the Freedom of Israel a.k.a. the Stern Gang), of which Yitzak Shamir was one of the three top commanders, refused to cooperate with the Haganah, which they considered their enemy, during the Israeli war of independence. [1] Their favored method of action was terrorism, and their favored targets were Arab civilians, the British, and their Jewish opponents (including some within their own ranks):
Begin's rap sheet: 1 - Deir Yassin
When a Jerusalem Haganah representative approached Irgun and LEHI to ask for their assistance in attacking the vital strategic objective of Kastel, they accepted, in exchange for a big consignment of arms. When they received the arms, instead of assisting the Haganah, which they didn't, they used their new firepower to attack Deir Yassin [2], a village which "was studiously honoring a Haganah-sponsored agreement to refrain from hostilities with neighboring Jewish areas in exchange for protection from Jewish attack." [3]
The survivors of the ensuing massacre and atrocities, which took place on April 9, 1948, were paraded by Irgun through Jerusalem. Irgun presented the massacre as their contribution to the Kastel attack, to demonstrate their (nonexistent) ability as a military force.
Begin's rap sheet: 2 - Irgun's putsch attempt
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During the next month, the Arab Legion rolled back the Haganah and only a UNSC-imposed cease fire saved Israel. During the cease fire, the zionists received enormous amounts of military supplies in violation of the embargo, thus reversing the balance of forces in their favor. Confident of his military superiority, Ben Gurion ordered Irgun and LEHI to integrate the Haganah. Begin refused to submit to Ben Gurion's authority and organized an arms shipment for the Irgun. On June 20, the cargo ship Altalena, carrying 5000 rifles, 300 submachine guns, five armored half tracks, and 300 men, ran aground 100 meters offshore of Tel Aviv, with Begin on its deck. Irgun fighters briefly took control of the city but Haganah gunners destroyed the ship, almost killing Begin, and a Haganah counterattack ended with Irgun's defeat and 83 casualties. Ben Gurion later declared that "the cannon that sank the Altalena deserves a place in the museum of Israel's war."[4]
Official accounts of the "Altalena affair" pretend that the ship was sunk because it was violating the arms embargo. This spin-doctoring attempt borders on the ridiculous: During the cease-fire month, the Haganah received 22 tanks and 400 machine guns from Czechoslovakia alone. Its air force grew from a handful of civilian planes to the most powerful in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the name "Altalena" is still revered among Likudniks.
Shamir's body count
When Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner for the Middle East, was assassinated in Cairo in 1944 by two members of the "Stern Gang", a Revisionist splinter group, a Palestinian ballistics expert, F.W. Bird, examined the murder weapon and found it had been used in no less than seven previous political slayings: two Arabs, four British police and the Chaim Arlosoroff murder. [Arlosoff, who as Political Secretary of the Jewish Agency carried out negotiations with the Nazis for the export of Jewish capital to Palestine, was denounced by Jabotinski's crowd as a "mountebank" of the "Stalin-Ben Gurion-Hitler alliance"] [5] Shamir, meanwhile, killed his friend and superior Eliyahu Gil'adi while taking a stroll with him, and got promoted (his actual motive seems to have had something to do with the control of the Stern Gang's larceny operations). [6]
While filling its pockets from robberies and bank heists (such as that of the Histadrut bank, where two clerks were killed) the gang spread terror among Arab civilians: "between 1937 and 1939, [the Stern Gang] killed more than 300 Arab civilians by machine-gunning passing buses and bombing open air restaurants and marketplaces. On one July day in 1938, they rolled an oil drum laden with explosives downhill into a bus stop in Haifa, killing 35 men, women and children and leaving others maimed and bleeding." [7] The Gang also killed about the same number of British, provoking a crackdown that cost its leader Avraham Stern his life, and sent Shamir (then called Yitzhak Yzernitzky) to a prison camp in Eritrea [8] Shamir (as he now called himself) and his friends escaped and returned to Palestine.
The LEHI triumvirate, now including Shamir, decided to assassine the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who was about to arrange a ceasefire. The June ceasefire had saved Israel, but now that the Haganah had rearmed and was winning, it was in no mood for peace. Ben Gurion announced his objectives: "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." [9]
The LEHI assassin emptied the clip of his Sten gun on Bernadotte and the French colonel next to him. The killer would later become Ben-Gurion's close friend and bodyguard. Nathan Yalin-Mor, one of the LEHI triumvirate who was sentenced as an accomplice, would win a Knesset seat in 1949 and be amnistied.[10] Shamir, the LEHI operations leader who had directly ordered the assassination, was never arrested. They were all heroes. His irresistible rise had just begun, as had that of his body count.
[1] Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins Ô Jerusalem, Editions
Robert Laffont, 1971, p.268
[2] Leni Brenner Zionism
in the Age of the Dictators, ch.11
[3] Matthew Hogan THE
1948 MASSACRE AT DEIR YASSIN REVISITED Historian Winter, 2001
[4] Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, ibid., pp.571-572.
[5] Lenni Brenner, ibid.
[6] Israel Shahak Yitzhak
Shamir, Then and Now hosted by Middle East Policy Council
[7] Richard H. Curtiss Why
Did Syria Call Israel's Prime Minister a "Terrorist"? Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs, December/January 1991/92, Page 41
[8] Ibid.
[9] May 1948, to the General Staff. From Michael Ben-Zohar: Ben-Gurion, A
Biography Delacorte, New York 1978.
[9] Leni Brenner, The Iron Wall, Ch.15: Yitzhak
Shamir Takes Over
Excerpts from the "Ankara document" discovered in the files of the German embassy in Turkey after the war:
Fundamental Features of the Proposal of the National
Military Organization in Palestine (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of
the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the
Side of Germany
(1941)
It is often stated in the speeches and
utterances of the leading statesmen of National Socialist Germany that a
prerequisite of the New Order in Europe requires the radical solution of the
Jewish question through evacuation ("Jew-free Europe").
[...]
The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich
government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and
towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
[...]
The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in
Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a
positive-radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the
above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would
extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all
humanity.
[...]
The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its
ideology and structure.
Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall, London 1984, pp.195-197. http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/irgunazi.htm
Brenner wrote about this obscene proposal:
Stern was one of the Revisionists who felt that the Zionists, and the Jews, had betrayed Mussolini and not the reverse. Zionism had to show the Axis that they were serious, by coming into direct military conflict with Britain, so that the totalitarians could see a potential military advantage in allying themselves with Zionism. To win, Stern argued, they had to ally themselves with the Fascists and Nazis alike: one could not deal with a Petliura or a Mussolini and then draw back from a Hitler.
Did Yitzhak Yzertinsky - Rabbi Shamir - to use his underground nom de
guerre, now the Foreign Minister of Israel, know of his movement's
proposed confederation with Adolf Hitler? In recent years the wartime activities
of the Stern Gang have been thoroughly researched by one of the youths who
joined it in the post-war period, when it was no longer pro-Nazi. Baruch Nadel
is absolutely certain that Yzertinsky-Shamir was fully aware of Stern's plan:
"They all knew about it."
Leni Brenner: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch.26
The aim of LEHI is defined as the establishment of
"the Kingdom of Israel." Principle D, "THE MISSION" reads:
"The [Jewish] nation cannot undergo a renaissance without restoration of
the monarchy." Similarly, there is not even a lip-service to peace, no
matter under what conditions. Principle I, "WAR," proclaims: "An eternal
war shall be waged against all those who satanically stand in the way of
the realization [of our] aims" (emphases mine). Principle J,
"CONQUEST," postulates "the conquest of the homeland by force
from aliens for perpetuity," while Principle N, "THE FATE OF THE
ALIENS," reads: "The problem of the aliens will be solved through
population exchanges." Even in the aftermath of the conquest and
"population exchanges," and after the "total ingathering of the
[Jewish] exiles in the Kingdom of Israel," as anticipated by Principle Q,
takes place, war and renewed conquest remain the only prospects. Principle P,
"RULE" postulates, after the expulsion of the
"aliens" and the ingathering of all Jews to Land of Israel, "an
aggrandizement of the Hebrew nation into a military, political, cultural and
economic power of the first rank in the entire [Middle] East and on all the
shores of the Mediterranean.
Israel Shahak: Yitzhak
Shamir, Then and Now hosted by Middle East Policy Council
54 years after its foundation, Israel has still not officially defined its borders. Likudniks make no bones about their contempt for UNSC resolution 242 and affirm that Gaza, Judea and Samaria are part of "Eretz Yisrael" - Greater Israel:
That claim is central to the Likud manifesto, which unequivocally states: "The right of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael is eternal and indisputable, and linked to our right to security and peace. The State of Israel has a right and a claim to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. In time, Israel will invoke this claim and strive to realize it. Any plan involving the hand-over of parts of western Eretz Yisrael to foreign rule, as proposed by the Labor Alignment, denies our right to this country."
Elfi Pallis, "The Likud Party:A Primer," Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1992, pp. 42-43. quoted in Donald Neff: Ex-Terrorist Shamir Becomes the Likud's New Leader of Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs October 1996, p.87
But do the claims stop there?
The exact geographical definition of the term 'Land of Israel' is much disputed in the Talmud and the talmudic literature, and the debate has continued in modern times between the various shades of zionist opinion. According to the maximalist view, the Land of Israel includes (in addition to Palestine itself) not only the whole of Sinai, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, but also considerable parts of Turkey.The more prevalent 'minimalist' interpretation puts the northern border 'only' about half way through Syria and Lebanon, at the latitude of Homs. This view was supported by Ben Gurion. However, even those who thus exclude parts of Syria-Lebanon agree that certain special discriminatory laws (though less oppressive than in the Land of Israel proper) apply to the Gentiles of those parts, because that territory was included in David's kingdom. In all talmudic interpretations the Land of Israel includes Cyprus.
Israel Shahak: Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years Ch. 5
Here's an example of Talmudic argumentation over the borders of Eretz Yisrael:
THE QUESTIONS
As we read this story in chapter 22, several questions arise that require
explanation.
[...]
EXPANDING BORDERS
Two cliche's, both based on psukim in Tanach, are
commonly used to describe the expanse of the borders of the Land of
Israel:
The discrepancy between these
two borders is immense! According to (B), Eretz Yisrael encompasses almost the
entire
Middle East, while according to (A), Israel is a tiny country not much bigger
than the state of Rhode Island.
To understand why, it is necessary to differentiate
between:
The basic borders of Eretz
Yisrael are those of "Eretz Canaan" (A), i.e. 'from Dan to Beer
Sheva', as promised to Avraham Avinu in Brit Milah. These borders constitute a
natural geographic area; for Eretz Canaan is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea
on the West, the Negev desert on the South, the Syrio-African Rift (Jordan
River) to the East, and the Lebanon
Mountain Range to the North (see also Breishit 10:19-20).
Should Bnei Yisrael first conquer this 'kernel' area,
then potentially the borders can be (but do not have to be) extended. The
potential limits of this expansion are set by Brit Bein HaBtarim, whose borders
- "from the Nile to Euphrates" (Breishit 15:18) - can be understood as
geographic LIMITS rather than physical borders. In other words, each river
represents one of
the two centers of ancient civilization - Egypt (Nile) and Mesopotamia
(Euphrates). After conquering Eretz Canaan, Am Yisrael can, if necessary, expand
its borders by continuous settlement outward, up until (but not including) the
two ancient centers of civilization, Egypt and Mesopotamia.
YEHOSHUA - CHAPTER 22 THE
MIZBAYACH of BNEI GAD & REUVEN THE TANACH STUDY CENTER
In other words, settling Canaan is mandatory; settling everything from the
Nile to the Euphrates - Ha'aretz - is optional!
So what do Israel's leaders say? Ben Gurion was quite clear, and we haven't
heard a disclaimer yet:
| The Zionist frontier spirit: Keep those borders movin' |
 From the Nile to the Euphrates? The offending 10 agora coin. |
 Jabotinsky institute logo. Behind the hand holding a rifle, there's an artist's impression of what Israel will look like when it gobbles up Jordan. |
 Betar pin issued after the 1967 war making it graphically clear that for the Sinai, it's finders keepers. |
The boundaries of Zionist aspiration include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today's Jordan, all of Cis-Jordan [West Bank] and the
Sinai.
Statement made in 1938 to the World Council of Poale Zion Tel Aviv quoted
in Ralf Schoenman: The Hidden History of Zionism, Veritas
Press, Santa Barbara (Calif.) 1988
Ariel Sharon, when he was minister of industry in 1989, said: "Originally Palestine had included Jordan."
Everywhere in Israel you will see a quotation from the Bible which reads: "This land do I give to them, even to the children of Israel. . ." and each pupil who is taught the Bible from the age of six knows that this land extends from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates". Here we have both the idea of "greater Israel" and a justification of present and future seizures of Arab territories.
In [an] address delivered to Israeli Army representatives on October 28, 1958, Knesset Member and Zionist leader Menahem Beigin said: ''You Israelis must have no compunction when you kill your enemy. You must not sympathise with him until we have destroyed the so-called Arab culture, on whose ruins we shall build our civilisation." [1]
Ex-Prime Minister of Israel Ben-Gurion impressed the following idea on the students: "The map [of Israel - Y. I.] is not the map of our country. We have another map which you students and youngsters in Jewish schools must translate into reality. The Israeli nation must expand its territory from the Euphrates to the Nile." [2]
[1] and [2] Walichnowski, T., "Od Jeufratu az do Nilu", Kontynenty No. 2, 1968 quoted in Yuri Ivanov: CAUTION: ZIONISM! Essays on the Ideology, Organisation and Practice of Zionism, Progress Publishers Moscow, pp. 100-101
Avraham Stern's doctrine, which is still valid for old LEHI hands like Shamir and their (probably limited) contemporary following, also subscribes to the Nile-to-Euphrates demarcation:
Once out of the Revisionist camp, Stern-Yair's mind ran riot. His manifesto, Ikarei ha Tehiyyah (The Principles of Revival), defined their objectives: the Jewish people as the Chosen People were fully entitled to the entire Biblical patrimony as laid down in Genesis 15:18 - everything from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.
Lenni Brenner: The Iron Wall Ch.15
This ambiguity about its territorial aspirations has also crept into Israel's coinage. There is an Israeli 10-agora coin that is not accepted by Palestinians because an outline in the coin's design looks like the Nile-to-Euphrates version of Eretz Yisrael. Neocon Likudnik Daniel Pipes argues that the outline represents a broken ancient coin on which the modern one is based, and doesn't remotely resemble the Middle East. But he doesn't provide any pictures as evidence. The opposition does (on the right), but not a good one.
However, there's no doubt US Christian zionists subscribe to the maximalist version of Erez Yisrael, as do the settlers.
Organs and writers with well-known CIA connections picked up the "Soviet plot" story. Il Giornale Nuovo, a Milan newspaper that began touting the story in May, 1981, long boasted of having Michael Ledeen as an associate. A specialist on Italy, Ledeen is openly spoken of in the Italian press as a CIA officer. He is now at the Georgetown Institute for Strategic and International Studies, an expert on Soviet terrorism, and adviser to President Reagan. Last summer Ledeen promoted the "Soviet plot" tale before Senator Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, as did Robert Moss and Claire Sterling. Sterling's 1980 book The Terror Network, which blames the Soviets for all terrorist violence in the world while explicitly refusing to discuss CIA terrorism, uses as its main evidence "Western intelligence sources", including Ledeen's articles in Il Giornale Nuovo...
Grover C. Furr: The Politics Behind the Shooting of the Pope Comment (Montclair State College, NJ), Vol. 2, no: 1 (1983), p. 16
The book edited by Michael Ledeen (1984)
Grenada Documents, released by the U.S. Department of Defense, Washington D.C.,
purports to be a simple compilation of the documents seized by the U.S. government
following the invasion in 1983. Taken as a whole, this collection is likely a real
treasure trove. However, Ledeen, who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair
(see Mike Yard--1984--Iran-Contra, Monthly Review Press,p41) so poisons the
selection with commentary, for example declaring that the Port Salines airport was
unquestionably for military use, against the grain of all critique post-invasion,
that his selection of documents is in question.
Rich Gibson: The Grenadian Literacy Project:
Freire in Practice
Gibson is associate professor of Social Studies in the College of Education at San Diego State University and a Z-Mag contributor.
Intelligence Politicized
CIA's objectivity and integrity on a number of critical issues, particularly those concerning the Soviet Union, ended abruptly in 1981 when Bill Casey became director of central intelligence and, for the first time, the DCI became a member of the president's cabinet.[19] Bob Gates became his deputy director for intelligence (DDI) in 1982 and also chaired the National Intelligence Council, the successor to ONE. For the first time, one individual had the last word on all national intelligence estimates and all current intelligence. Gates appointed Douglas MacEachin (eventually deputy director for intelligence) and then George Kolt (currently National Intelligence Officer for Russia) to head the office of Soviet analysis from 1983 to 1991; they were in command of Soviet assessments during the period of politicization.[20]
The USSR and International Terrorism.
Casey cooked the books in his very first intelligence estimate, which dealt with the Soviet Union and international terrorism. The day after Reagan's inauguration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, believing that Moscow had tried to assassinate him in Europe where he served as Supreme Allied Commander, linked the Soviet Union to all acts of international terrorism.[21] There was no evidence to support such a charge but Casey had read the late Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and—like Haig—was convinced that a Soviet conspiracy was behind global terrorism. Specialists at CIA dismissed the book, knowing that much of it was based on CIA "black propaganda," anti- communist allegations planted in the European press. But Casey contemptuously told CIA analysts that he had learned more from Sterling than from all of them.
State Department officials requested a national intelligence estimate on the subject of international terrorism in order to convince Haig that Moscow was not the coordinator of international terrorism. Haig's special consultant at the department was Michael Ledeen, a major player in Iran- contra, who believed that international terrorism was a "sort of Wurlitzer being played by people in the basement of the Kremlin." [22]
[...]
The Papal Canard
Gates used similar techniques four years later to get a Papal plot assessment, citing another Sterling book — The Time of the Assassins — which traced the assassination attempt to the KGB. When the CIA produced a specious assessment in 1985 to prosecute the Kremlin for the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II, its politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union reached rock bottom. Earlier CIA assessments—and Gates's testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1983—had concluded that Moscow had no role in the papal plot, and senior officials of the directorate of operations informed both Casey and Gates that Moscow had stopped political assassination and that strong evidence indicated neither the Soviets nor the Bulgarians were involved.
But Casey wanted a document to undermine Shultz's efforts to improve relations with Moscow, and Gates made sure that CIA analysts worked in camera to prevent proper vetting and coordination of the assessment. An internal CIA post-mortem concluded several months after publication of the paper that the assessment had "stacked the deck" and "circumvented" the coordination process; the authors of the post-mortem—a panel of senior managers at the CIA—described the article as "deliberately skewed" and stated they could find "no one at the working level in the directorates of intelligence or operations—other than the primary authors of the paper—who agreed with the thrust of the assessment."[25]. James Worthen, "The Gates Hearings: Politicization and Soviet Analysis at CIA," Studies in Intelligence, Spring 1994, pp. 7- 20.
Indeed, "Agca's Attempt to Kill the Pope: The Case for Soviet Involvement" read like a novelist's fantasy of communist conspiracy, but Gates's covering note to the president and the vice- president described the report as a "comprehensive examination" that "we feel able to present . . . with some confidence."[26] The character of the still classified report is revealed in its reasoning: "The Soviets were reluctant to invade Poland in 1981 so they decided to demoralize [the Polish] opposition by killing the Polish Pope."[27] The report conceptually tracked an earlier article by a former CIA analyst and then Rand official, Harry Gelman, who concluded that, "since the Soviets have not been blamed by world opinion thus far, they are then more inclined than before to undertake adventurous actions."[28] Casey was not going to let the facts stand in his way and Gates, who previously had told the SSCI that the Soviets were not involved, again pandered to the Casey agenda, making sure that the draft document was reviewed in less than twenty-four hours and not seen by senior officials familiar with the issue.
The CIA also provided an intelligence rationale for the arms sales to Iran in 1985, when the CIA's Graham Fuller prepared an estimate that warned of Soviet intentions in Iran. For several years, the CIA and the intelligence community were in agreement that Moscow had failed to gain influence in Tehran, that Soviet- Iranian relations were severely strained, and that Moscow was unlikely to consider military intervention. Suddenly, in May 1985, Fuller collaborated with NSC officials and prepared an estimate that made Iran the key target of opportunity for Soviet influence and predicted a resumption of Soviet arms sales to Iran. There were no intelligence documents to support any of these judgments, which contradicted the consensus in the intelligence community.[29]
At the same time, he distributed his own memorandum to senior policymakers encouraging Washington to steal a march on Moscow by cultivating so- called moderates in the Khomeini regime.
Melvin A. Goodman: Ending the CIA's Cold War Legacy [page containing footnotes was not available]
Goodman is co-author of The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze (Penn State Press, 1997), a professor of international security at the National War College, and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He was a senior analyst on Soviet policy at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1966 to 1986.
In 1984 people known to have intimate
links with Israel were employed in offices throughout the bureaucracy and
particularly in the Defense Department, where top-secret weapons technology and
other sensitive matters are routinely handled.
[...]
Perle previously served on the staff of Democratic Senator
henry Jackson of Washington, one of Israel's most ardent boosters, and had the
reputation of being a conduit of information to the Israeli government.
[...]
Perle himself was also the subject of an Israel-related controversy.
An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified
information with someone at the Israeli embassy.
He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received
substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company.
Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received
payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense
Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm.
Because of these controversies both Perle and Bryen were given assignments in the Reagan administration which - it was expected - would keep him isolated from issues relating to Israel. But, observes a State Department official, it has not worked out that way. Sensitive questions of technology transfer which affect Israeli interests are often settled in the offices of Perle and Bryen.
Findley, Paul. They Dare to Speak Out. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. 1989, ch.5
David Ignatius, "Reagan Warns 5 Nations of U.S. Right To Defend Itself Against Acts of Terror," Wall StreetJournal 9 July 1985
Mark H. Milstein: Strategic
Ties or Tentacles? Institute for National Security Affairs Washington Report
on Middle East Affairs October 1991, p. 27
The CCF: The CIA's Culture Farm
The CCF was the CIA's response to the natural affinity of European intellectuals for Marxism and their campaign to denounce the expansion of US imperialism under the fabricated pretext of Soviet aggression. This US drive to co-opt and quash European and domestic dissent was facilitated by heavy-handed Stalinist control over the international peace movement that alienated its strongest voices and confirmed the McCarthyist propaganda that those who called for peace with the USSR were Soviet agents. The below excerpt from an edited CIA study contains an account of the of the anti-cold war movement when it was at its apex, at which point CIA academic Sydney Hook mounted a guerilla-style attack against it:
Cultural cold war
Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50(1)
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the soldiers--of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.
Sidney Hook, 1949
The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It published literary and political journals such as Encounter, hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most eminent Western thinkers, and even did what it could to help intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. Somehow this organization of scholars and artists--egotistical, free-thinking, and even anti-American in their politics--managed to reach out from its Paris headquarters to demonstrate that Communism, despite its blandishments, was a deadly foe of art and thought. Getting such people to cooperate at all was a feat, but the Congress's Administrative Secretary, Michael Josselson, kept them working together for almost two decades until the Agency arranged an amicable separation from the Congress in
1966.
[...]
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with
Stalin... Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
[...]
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
Hook's new group called itself the Americans for Intellectual Freedom. Its big names included critics Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and commentator Max Eastman. Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist union leaders, remembered the excitement of tweaking the Soviet delegates and their fellow conferees: ``We didn't have any staff, we didn't have any salaries to pay anything. But inside of about one day the place was just busting with people volunteering." One of Beichman's union friends persuaded the sold-out Waldorf to base Hook and his group in a three-room suite (``I told them if you don't get that suite we'll close the hotel down,'' he explained to Beichman), and another union contact installed 10 phone lines on a Sunday morning.
(1)This article is an excerpt from a larger classified draft study of CIA involvement with anti-Communist groups in the Cold War. The author retains a footnoted copy of the article in the CIA History Staff. This version of the article has been redacted for security considerstions (phrases in brackets denote some of the redactions).
http://bss.sfsu.edu/fischer/IR%20360/Readings/Congress%20Cultural%20Freedom.htm
The full story of the CCF is documented in Frances Stonor Saunders's The
Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press,
2000). The CCF sponsored Isaiah Berlin, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy,
Hannah Arendt, Mark Rothko,
Jackson Pollock, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schlesinger, Edward Shils, Malcom Muggeridge, Dwight
Macdonald, Arthur Koestler, André Malraux, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, George Orwell,
and many others. Saunders shows that most of these benighted apostles of freedom
(and abstract expressionism) knew who was footing the bills and pulling the
strings. Saunders writes that "scores of western intellectuals were now roped to the CIA by an
umbilical cord of gold." The CIA made the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, northern Italy, "available to the Congress as an informal retreat for its more eminent members -- a kind of officers mess where frontliners in the
Kulturkampf could recover their energies." Hannah Arendt wrote to her friend Mary McCarthy that "You feel as if you are lodged in a kind of Versailles. The place has 53 servants, including men who take care of the gardens. The staff is presided over by a kind of headwaiter who dates from the time of the 'principassa' and has face and manner of a great gentleman of fifteenth-century Florence." CCF stars were housed at the Connaught in London, the Inghilterra in Rome, or, if calling on Irving Brown in Paris, the Royal Suite at the Hotel Baltimore.
Sidney Hook: Three Intellectual Troubadours: In Praise of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Melvin Lasky Excerpted from The American Spectator, January 1985, No. 1
Israel always gets what it wants
In its 1973 Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, Israel sustained heavy losses in weapons of all kinds, especially tanks. It looked to the United States for the quickest possible resupply. Henry Kissinger was their avenue. Richard Nixon was entangled in the Watergate controversy and soon to leave the presidency, but under his authority the government agreed to deliver substantial quantities of tanks to Israel.
Tanks were to be taken from the inventory of U.S. military units on active duty, reserve units, even straight off production lines. Nothing was held back in an effort to bring Israeli forces back to the desired strength as quickly as possible.
Israel wanted only the latest-model tanks equipped with 90 millimeter guns. But a sufficient number could not be found even by stripping U.S. forces. The Pentagon met the problem by filling part of the order with an earlier model fitted with 90-millimeter guns. When these arrived, the Israelis grumbled about having to take "second-hand junk." Then they discovered they had no ammunition of the right size and sent an urgent appeal for a supply of 90 -millimeter rounds.
The Pentagon made a search and found none. Thomas Pianka, an officer then serving at the Pentagon with the International Security Agency, recalls: "We made an honest effort to find the ammunition. We checked everywhere. We checked through all the services - Army, Navy, Marines. We couldn't find any 90-milimeter ammunition at all." Pianka says the Pentagon sent Israel the bad news: "In so many words, we said: "Sorry, we don't have any of the ammunition you need. We've combed all depots and warehouses, and we simply have none."
A few days later the Israelis
came back with a surprising message:
"Yes, you do. There
are 15,000 rounds in the Marine Corps supply depot in Hawaii." Pianka
recalls, "We looked in Hawaii and, sure enough, there they were. The Israelis had found a U.S. supply of 90-millimeter ammunition we
couldn't find ourselves."
[...]
Unrestricted supplies to Israel were especially
debilitating in the 1974 - 77 period when U.S. military services were
trying to recover from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
In that conflict the United States stripped its own army and air
forces in order to supply Israel.
During this period of U.S. shortage,
Israel kept bringing in its shopping lists.
The official recalls that the Pentagon would insist, "No, we can't
provide what you want now. Come
back in a year or so." In almost
every one of those cases, he said, the Pentagon position was overruled by a
political decision out of the White House.
This demoralized the professionals in the Pentagon but, still worse,
handicapped national security: "Defense
Department decisions made according to the highest professional standards went
by the board in order to satisfy Israeli requests."
[...]
Admiral Thomas Moorer recalls a dramatic example of Israeli lobby power from his
days as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At the time of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war Mordacai [Mordechai] Gur,
the defense attaché at the Israeli embassy who later became commander-in-chief
of Israeli forces, came to Moorer demanding that the U.S. provide Israel with
aircraft equipped with a high technology air-to-surface anti-tank missile called
the Maverick. At the time, the U.S. had only one squadron so equipped.
Moorer recalls telling Gur:
I can't let you have those
aircraft. We have just one
squadron. Besides, we've been
testifying before the Congress convincing then we need this equipment.
If we gave you our only squadron, Congress would raise hell with us.
Moorer looks at me with a steady piercing gaze that must have kept a generation of ensigns trembling in their boots: "And do you know what he said?" Gur told me, "You get us the airplanes; I'll take care of the Congress.'" Moorer pauses, then adds, "And he did." America's only squadron with Mavericks went to Israel.
Moorer, speaking in his office in Washington as a senior counselor at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, says he strongly opposed the transfer but was overruled by "political expediency at the presidential level." He notes President Richard Nixon was then in the throes of Watergate. "But," he adds,
I've never seen a President - I don't care who he is - stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on.
Paul Findley: They Dare to Speak Out. Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books. 1989 Chapter 5: Penetrating the Defenses at Defense - and State
"Exchanges" That Work Only in One Direction
The Israelis are particularly adept at exploiting sympathetic officials, as a former Pentagon officer explains:
We have people sympathizing with Israel in about every office in the Pentagon. A lot of military personnel have been in Israel, and some served there, making friends and, of course, a number of Israeli personnel study in U.S. military schools.
The guts, the energy, the skill of the Israelis are much admired in the Pentagon. Israelis are very good at passing back to us their performance records using our equipment. Throughout our military schools are always a large number of Israeli students. They develop great professional rapport with our people.
For years, the United States and Israel have exchanged military personnel. On paper, it works both ways. In practice, Israel is the major beneficiary. The process is more one of national character than anything clandestine. Israeli officers generally speak English, so it's no problem for them to come to America and quickly establish rapport with U.S. officers. On the other hand, hardly any U.S. officers speak Hebrew.
Language disparity is not the only problem. One of equal gravity is the American laxity in enforcing its security regulations. Many Israeli officers spend a year in a sensitive area - one of the U.S. training commands, or a research and development laboratory. At the start they are told they cannot enter certain restricted areas. Then, little by little, the rules are relaxed. A former Defense Department official explains:
The young Israeli speaks good English. He is likeable. You know how Americans are: they take him in, and he's their buddy. First thing you know, the restrictions are forgotten, and the Israeli officers are admitted to everything in our laboratories, our training facilities, our operational bases.
The former official quickly adds that rules are seldom relaxed at the other end:
This means that the officer training exchange is really a one-way street. Israel does not permit our officers, whether they speak Hebrew or not, to serve in sensitive military facilities in Israel. Many areas are totally off limits. They are very strict about that. Our officers cannot be present even when U.S. - supplied equipment and weapons are being delivered for the first time.
U.S. officers on exchange programs in Israel are, more often than not, given a desk in an office down the hall, and assigned just enough to do to keep them busy and prevent them from being too frustrated. Without knowledge of Hebrew, they have almost no way to know what is going on.
Camaraderie is also an element. Many employees in the executive branch, Jewish and non-Jewish, feel that the United States and Israel are somehow "in this together" and therefore cooperate without limit. Many also believe that Israel is a strategic asset and that weapons and other technology provided to Israel serve U.S. purposes. These feelings sometimes cause official restrictions on sharing of information to be modified or conveniently forgotten. As one Defense official puts it, the rules get "placed deeper and deeper into the file":
A sensitive document is picked up by an Israeli officer while his friend, a Defense Department official, deliberately looks the other way. Nothing is said. Nothing is written. And the U.S. official probably does not feel he has done anything wrong. Meanwhile the Israelis ask for more and more.
Paul Findley: Ibid.
The unholy alliance: Likud and the Bible loonies
A tragic result of a nation's intelligentsia being forcibly lobotomized of Marxist dialectic can be seen in the prevailing analysis - or lack thereof - of the Christian Zionist phenomenon. Even an old Enver Hoxa fan with a solid Stalinist background like Chip Berlet bases his analysis - or rather his taxonomy - of the Christian right on the assumption that all this evangelical frenzy is caused by the Scofield Bible. To be fair, Berlet doesn't make much of an attempt at analysis, preferring to classify and re-classify the countless schisms within the evangelical community, a confused profusion that loudly begs the question that he never answers: Why is this happening at this precise point in history? Berlet seems to think that the year 2000 in itself created an armageddon frenzy. Why should the number 2000 a priori invoke thoughts of armageddon? Why not something more cheerful? Sadly, we're back to the pre-German Ideology and pre-Anti-Dühring days when abstract ideas were thought capable of causing material historical changes.
The wildfire spread of Christian Zionism in the US is an extremely peculiar phenomenon that simply can't be idealistically explained by the existence of dispensationalist texts. Why did the Scofield Bible suddenly become so popular? Isn't it remarkable that so many US evangelists, divided over so many issues, have now reached a consensus on the religious significance of Israel? What is even more remarkable is that this significance is an extremely positive one: Jews are no longer the murderers of Christ, as they have been for hundreds of years in the eyes of Christian zealots, but the chosen people. The strangeness is multiplied by the fact that orthodox Jews are pressing these idolatrous Gentiles to their breasts.
The novel, extremely peculiar, and totally uncharacteristic Bible Belt philo-semitism socially coexists with the traditional rabid antisemitism of white supremacists and patriot militia. It's not as if the Christian right has turned a new leaf and renounced its racist ways; it's even more racist than before, having now put Moslems at the top of its most hated list, but Jews have for some reason become VIP's.
Curiouser and curiouser: Billy Graham, whose heartfelt antisemitism Nixon taped for posterity, hasn't been shriveled by the ADL for his treachery. The Jewish community has been uncommonly lenient with this man who said "A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth, but they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them" and that the Jewish "stranglehold" on the media "has got to be broken or this country's going down the drain". This bizzare lenience also extends to Pat Robertson, whose ravings about Freemason and Illuminati conspiracies, while carefully skirting any direct antisemitic slurs, nevertheless make references to antisemitic sources. It's only a small step from Robertson'sdisguised anti-semitism to the Catholic publication the Michael Journal whose Illuminati conspiracism openly celebrates the memory of the 1930's anti-semitic radio priest Father Coughlin - who had a peak audience of 1/3 of the US. [1]
It's entirely obvious that there is no sincere conviction behind the ravings of Christian zionist evangelists, who must renounce even their professed goal of saving souls when it comes to Jews for fear of angering their political and economic benefactors. The strain of repressing their anti-semitic reflexes in order to satisy their greed inevitably shows, as it did in this Jerry Falwell blooper:
Meanwhile, born-again Superstar Jerry Falwell, in a forum on Jewish-Christian relations, voiced love and admiration for the Jewish people, and unequivocal support for Israeli policies in the Mideast. Falwell received the Jabotinsky Award from former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1980. But no more than five minutes after his talk before the religious broadcasters, he moved to another room for a press conference on South Africa. There Falwell taunted a black reporter with "You're biased. You're obviously with the Jewish media." [2]
Falwell is also famous for his line: "Antichrist is probably alive and he is in the form of a male Jew," and Jimmy Swaggart for "Don't ever bargain with Jesus. He's a Jew." On the rare occasions when these bigots are confronted with their anti-semitic ravings, they simply apologize and all is forgiven.
It is no accident that US televangelists contort themselves against nature so painfully for Israel while contributions from the neocons' shady financiers - the Scaifes, the Olins, the Bradleys, Reverend Moon etc. - pour into their coffers and AIPAC works overtime to keep it all tax- and IRS-free (which is more important than the backstage financing, since the TV preachers' main source of income is the fleecing of their flock). Neither is it by compassion that the Jewish community tolerates these bigots, going so far as to suggest that the ADL and other anti-discrimination groups should "lay off" the likes of Falwell and Robertson until Israel's wars are over. Here is a view from an orthodox Jew, outlining how practising Jews accomodate Christian evangelist zealotry in a religious context and, more importantly, how they use it for what they perceive as Israel's interest.
During the last twenty-five years, the Israeli government has recognized the economic and political clout of the evangelical camp. The Foreign Office designated former 50's pop star
Pat Boone, a senior spokesperson for missionary causes, as the Israeli ambassador to the
Christians. In those blissful days before the Palestinian's Oslo War, the Tourism Ministry sponsored hundreds of "fam trips" to bring thousands of Christian tour leaders to Israel. More than twenty years ago, evangelicals from Europe and the United States established the {International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem} which has brought tens of thousands of jubilant evangelicals to celebrate their annual version of Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, which the prophet Isaiah says will be observed by all the nations in the messianic age.
[...]
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Beverly LaHaye, Jack Hayford, and
Oral Roberts are some of the more widely recognized evangelical leaders who advocate fervent and practical Christian support of Israel. Even Billy Graham shares this sentiment, in spite of the recent disclosure of his patently anti-Semitic remarks thirty years ago in the Nixon White House.
Bibi Netanyahu is the savviest Israeli leader to tap Christian love of Israel. Thrilling packed churches on the lecture trail with his erudition, composure, and tough talk on Arafat, he has sought to creatively guide Christian support into areas of benefit to Israel, such as tourism and commerce.
There are serious historical and theological reasons to be guarded in accepting Christian overtures. Rabbi Michael Skobac of the Toronto branch of
Jews for Judaism cautions that it is a Trojan horse, hiding a missionary agenda based on currying favor with Jews and Israel through charitable deeds. Rabbi Skobac is correct, given the rampant misrepresentations made by the "messianics" to pass themselves off as bona fide members of the Jewish community, camouflaging their ties to big money backers from blatantly missionary sources. The 15-million member Southern Baptist denomination rankled the Jewish world in 1996 by establishing a directorate commissioned with the wholesale
conversion of Jews worldwide. Jews for Jesus, funded heavily by Baptist dollars, uses canned sermons and seminars to recruit new donors from amongst Christian churches, telling them they will help bring about the Second Coming of Jesus by hastening the conversion of Jews.
However, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and
Jews, has spent the last several years working side by side with noted leaders in the Christian right camp to fund projects vital to Jewish existence, including airlifting Soviet Jews to Israel. While welcoming the compassionate and substantive help, Rabbi Eckstein has clearly stated the Jewish position vis-à-vis Christian missions in his popular book,
"What Christians Should Know About Jews and Judaism". Nevertheless, his work continues to grow with the participation of some of the best-known influence brokers from the evangelical right.
Israel National News, quoting the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz, reports that just last month, Rabbi Eckstein's organization gave one million dollars to the municipality of Jerusalem and another million dollars to the Jewish Agency for assisting in the absorption of Argentinean Jews.
A number of Jewish organizations are wrestling with the "how to" question of translating this widespread Christian zeal for Israel into positive and practical outcomes. Several implementation proposals are on the hot list, including:
1. Mobilize Christian churches and affinity groups to mirror the same kinds of letter, postcard, faxing, e-mail, and phone campaigns currently in motion throughout North American Jewish communities.
2. Provide more directed opportunities for Christians to funnel contributions to Israeli victims of the PLO war, as we see at "{Stand With Israel}".
3. Gather larger donations for taking out full-size pro-Israel ads in major publications, as well as radio, TV, billboards, and Internet banner links.
4. Promote commerce with Israel. Create a boycott list for France, Belgium, and other sponsoring anti-Semitic countries. Suggest alternatives from Israel. Support strategic high tech alliances.
5. Launch a speakers' bureau to raise awareness and recruit activists amongst Christian schools, organizations and churches.
6. Produce and distribute activist kits and collateral materials such as bumper stickers, buttons, email .pdf documents, and CD-ROMs.
While no single Jewish organization has stepped up to declare itself quarterback for the project, there are certainly several capable of seizing the moment, including AIPAC, ZOA, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. At present, the IFJC under Rabbi Eckstein leads the pack of candidates. Of note to watch will be the response from the larger Orthodox community. This is a seminal moment in history when the Orthodox Union, Agudat Yisrael, Young Israel, and a constellation of Orthodox educational institutions could unite to lead the way as a " light to the nations".
[...]
Gavriel Aryeh Sanders, a senior religion columnist for Jewsweek.com, is a former Pentecostal, fundamentalist minister who was a covert missionary in Israel and Saudi Arabia.
... His studies of Tanakh persuaded him to convert to Judaism "al pi halakhah".
... Sanders spent two and half years working in Saudi Arabia, including the period during the Gulf War. He also was exposed to the Arab mind up close and personal as a teacher in a Saudi Naval academy.
Gavriel Aryeh Sanders Christian support for Israel: Wield it or waste it?
jewsweek.com
It's pretty obvious that racists who talk about "the Arab mind" are not going to welcome with open arms the followers of an alien faith who their religious scriptures condemn in the harshest terms unless they have an extremely vital ulterior motive. Israel Shahak in his Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, explains how the Talmud considers Christianity as idolatry, Gentiles as expendable servants of the Jews, and how these very explicit and, in Israel, always topical rules translate into the everyday contempt and brutality of Hasidic settlers and soldiers towards non-Jews. So for anyone with a minimal notion of Jewish religion, it's absolutely crystal clear that there can be no meeting of souls between religious Christians and Jews, only a marriage of convenience.
Secular zionists are even more candid about their motives:
We have, first of all, to come to the conclusion that the right-wing reactionaries are the natural allies of Zionism, not the liberals. [3]
Jews can live with all the domestic priorities of the Christian right on which liberal Jews differ so radically because none of these concerns is important as Israel. [4]
There can be no question, therefore, of sincere beliefs engendered by scriptural revelations being the cause of all this hypocrisy. The cause is clearly material interest, and if the details of Israel's contribution to the US televangelists' welfare is not as open to scrutiny as are the billions of dollars flowing to Israel from the fleecing of the Bible loonies, it is simply because AIPAC has prevented such scrutiny.
Let's now remember the last time when the Scofield Bible was such a hit: The turn of the century, when Britain took an active interest in the "Eastern Question", taking control of the Suez Canal and setting its sights on the Near East in view of the expected breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
The idea of a Jewish national Restoration to Palestine had resurfaced in Western European culture at a politically most opportune time. During the course of the 19th Century, a Jewish presence in Palestine, apart from its previous religious-prophetical, benevolent or philo-Semitic connotations, now came to be a political issue for the secular European powers that aspired to overseas expansion and empires. Religious and philanthropic ideas were now skilfully combined with the hard-headed Realpolitik of acquiring or strengthening spheres of influence in the Near East... Secular authorities, as well as religious ones, were now toying with Zionist ideas for their potential usefulness... Palestine suddenly found itself within the orbit of European power politics and under the contending influences of all the major powers: France, Britain and Russia... Britain's interest in the Near East, and of course Palestine, had been stirred by the Napoleonic expedition of 1799. The area's strategic importance to the British Empire had already been fully recognized. The vital necessity of preventing French control over the area had not only resulted in the battles of the Nile and Acre, but also spawned a British military expedition eastwards. Soon Britain's main concern was to hold back Russia by maintaining Turkish sovereignty at all costs. [5]
In fact, to see imperialist politics at work, one needs to look no further than the Scofield Bible itself:
That the primary reference is to the northern (European) powers, headed up by Russia, all agree. The whole passage should be read in connection with Zech. 12:1-4; 14:1-9; Mt. 24: 14-30; Rev. 14: 14-20; 19:17-20. "Gog" is the prince, "Magog," his land. The reference to Meshech and Tubal (Moscow and Tobolsk) is a clear mark of identification. Russia and the northern powers have been the latest persecutors of dispersed Israel, and it is congruous both with divine justice and with the covenant. . . that destruction should fall at the climax of the last mad attempt to exterminate the remnant of Israel in Jerusalem. The whole prophecy belongs to the yet future "day of Jehovah" (Isa. 2: 10-22; Rev. 19: 11-21), and to the battle of Armageddon (Rev. 16: 14; 19:19, note), but includes also the final revolt of the nations at the close of the kingdom-age (Rev. 20:7-9) . Apparently the defeat of Russia was associated with the battle of Armageddon, which Scofield explains in a note at Revelation 19:17: "Armageddon (the ancient hill and valley of Megiddo, west of Jordan in the plain of Jezreel) is the appointed place for the beginning of the great battle in which the Lord, at His coming in glory, will deliver the Jewish remnant besieged by the Gentile world-powers under the Beast and False Prophet (Rev. 16:13-16; Zech. 12:1 -9)."
Now, however, dispensationalism works in reverse: No longer is the global empire using it to promote its colonialist plans, but it's the former colony that is using millenialism to wag the dog.
[1] Nicholas Kristof: "Bigotry in Islam — And Here" NY
Times, July 09, 2002
[2] Sara Diamond: "Extremist Elements within Christian Right"
Commentary 1986
[3] Jacques Torczyner from the World Zionist Organisation, quoted in Gregory
Krupey "The Christian Right, Zionism and the Coming of the
Penteholocaust" Apocalypse Culture, Adam Parfrey,ed., Feral House,
1987 Nothing has changed since Jabotinsky.
[4] Nathan Perlmutter from the Anti Defamation League of B'nai B'rith quoted
in Noam Chomsky The Fateful Triangle ch. 2, South End Press, Boston,
1983
[5] Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, Its Roots in Western History
London, Zed, 1983 p.54
[6] Dwight Wilson: Armageddon
Now! The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 PDF file,
3.7 Mb, Institute for Christian Economics Tyler, Texas
Pat Robertson's Reward
Jewish Conservatives Join Forces With Christian Evangelicals
On Sunday, July 14, televangelist Pat Robertson was presented with the State of Israel Friendship Award at the annual "Salute to Israel" dinner held by the Chicago chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). According to a ZOA spokesperson, Robertson, through his Christian Broadcasting Network and his daily program, "The 700 Club," has consistently supported Israel during this latest wave of tension and turmoil in the Middle East.
[...]
One of Stand for Israel's primary activities will be to counter what they see as media bias against Israel -- a long held belief shared by both Israelis and Christian right activists.
Some critics were flabbergasted by the ZOA's choice, questioning how the organization could disregard Robertson's past anti-Semitic statements and writings. "We wouldn't do it," Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told the New York City-based newspaper, The Forward. "He's not deserving, but I have no objections to other groups honoring him."
Foxman's ADL has been monitoring Robertson's work for a number of years. The stormy relationship between Foxman and Robertson reached hurricane status after the publication of a 1994 ADL report titled "The Religious Right and the Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America." Author David Cantor wrote: "Robertson's repeated references to America as a 'Christian nation' and to American governance as a 'Christian order' insults not merely Jews but all who value religious freedom." The report set off a bitter debate between Jewish conservatives who leaped to defend Robertson and those who believed Cantor was on target.
According to The Forward, "In April [of this year], Foxman sent Robertson a letter protesting the network's broadcast of an Easter cartoon 'saturated with sinister caricatures of Jews reminiscent of the anti-Semitic stereotypes promulgated only in the darkest periods of Christianity.' In a letter written in reply, Robertson described Foxman as the Democratic Party's 'principal secret agent' whose 'focus is not the defense of worldwide Jewry, but the domestic political agenda of the Democratic Party.'"
ZOA doesn't appear to be concerned about infighting between conservative and liberal Jews. "We wanted to give our thanks to one of our Christian friends," the Chicago chapter's executive director, A. Yami Isaacs, said. "We chose Dr. Robertson, based primarily on 'The 700 Club' and its presentation of the situation in Israel, and on his benevolent work in Israel." The ZOA claims it is "the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel organizations in the U.S.," with a membership of over 50,000 in chapters throughout the country.
The ZOA award is not Robertson's first from Jewish organizations. According to PatRobertson.com, the televangelist has received "the Millennium Jerusalem 2000 Council Award by the State of Israel Jerusalem Heritage Study Programs, Defender of Israel Award in 1994 by the Christians' Israel Public Action Campaign, and the Distinguished Merit of Citation Award in 1979 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews."
Jewish Conservatives and Christian Evangelicals Join Forces
American Zionists and evangelical Christians have a history of strategic cooperation at least as long as the history of Israel. As violence and tension between Israel and Palestinians have mounted, cooperation between the groups has intensified -- several new initiatives involving Jewish conservatives and Christian evangelicals have been launched in the past few months. In late-May, Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), and Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and current Republican Party chairman of Georgia, joined forces for a new project, "Stand for Israel."
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that "Stand for Israel" hoped to become a "Christian version of the pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." One of the group's primary activities will be to counter what they see as media bias against Israel -- a long held belief shared by both Israelis and Christian right activists.
In early July, AgapePress, a Christian news service, reported on a new venture aimed at linking conservative Jews with Christian evangelicals. The organization, called the American Alliance of Jews and Christians (AAJC), is headed by Rabbi Lapin and Gary Bauer, the failed presidential candidate who is currently president of American Values. According to a press release from Toward Tradition, the Washington, D.C.-based AAJC will be "a unique synthesis of Jewish authenticity and Christian grassroots muscle." Bauer believes the new project will help to ensure the alliance between America and Israel while at the same time build a movement of Jews and Christians for traditional values.
If Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of the conservative Jewish organization, Toward Tradition, has his way, the ZOA affair will only be the first of a new series of Jewish-sponsored events honoring Christian evangelicals. In a June 21, article in The Forward, titled "Born-Again Allies," Rabbi Lapin argues that it is time for Jews to take action to concretely thank Christian evangelicals for their support of Israel -- or risk losing that support.
Rabbi Lapin praises President Bush, and Texas Republican Congressmen Tom DeLay and Dick Armey for their support of Israel. The newly resurgent friendship between Christians and Jews may obligate Jews to reciprocate. "At very least," he writes, "we have an obligation to desist from thinking of ourselves as the parole officer for the Rev. Billy Graham, who was recently humiliated for offensive remarks made long ago. We should also stop acting as the watchdogs over Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and many other Christian leaders, all of whom are devotedly pro-Israel and who are guilty of nothing more than frankly stating their religious beliefs, some of which we as Jews do not hold."
David Klinghoffer, editorial director of Toward Tradition and author of the book "The Lord Will Gather Me In," echoes Rabbi Lapin's suggestion in a late-June piece in National Review online: "At a minimum, Christians can reasonably ask that groups like the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, and Wiesenthal Center lay off a bit. In exchange for their vital support of Israel, at least until the Mideast crisis has subsided, let [Abe] Foxman et al. declare a moratorium on bashing Christians."
The "End Times" Elephant
The elephant in the room, the issue Jewish conservatives prefer to ignore or gloss over, is the question of "end times" theology. Rabbi Lapin glides over this controversial issue in his column and Klinghofer appears to underestimate how significant it is to Christian evangelicals.
Veteran journalist and author Frederick Clarkson, in his book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, (Common Courage Press, 1997), points out that "most evangelicals in [the 20th] century have been pre-millenialists, that is, Christians who believe it is not possible to reform this world until Jesus returns (the Second Coming), which will be followed by a 1000-year rule of Jesus and the Christians.... The key episode in pre-millennial theology is an event called 'the rapture' in which all the saved Christians, dead and alive, are brought up into the clouds with Jesus prior, during or after (depending of the school of theology) a period called 'the tribulation.'"
In recent years -- and more so since September 11 -- the "end times" has taken on an almost religio/pop-culture status. It has been popularized in a number of Christian novels, particularly the profoundly popular best-selling "Left Behind" series, co-authored by longtime religious-right leader the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The "end times" was featured recently in a Time magazine cover story titled, "The Bible & the Apocalypse: Why more Americans are reading and talking about The End of The World" (July 1, 2002).
How seriously do American Christians consider the "end times"? According to Time: 36 percent of Americans believe "the Bible is the word of God and is to be taken literally"; 59 percent believe "the prophecies in the Book of Revelation will come true"; 35 percent "say they are paying closer attention to news events and how they relate to the coming end of the world since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11"; and 36 percent "support Israel...because they believe in biblical prophecies that Jews must control Israel before Christ will come again."
[...]
Twenty-First Century Politics
Traditional Jewish religious practices are as threatened by modern tastes and practices as are those of conservative Christians.
"End-times" Biblical interpretations are not the only thing that links the Christian Right with the Jewish community. Jean Hardisty, author of Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers (Beacon Press, 1999), contends that Christian and Jewish fundamentalists in the U.S. have much more in common than one might think. "Many conservative Jews, especially those whose religious practices are orthodox, feel a similar sense of alienation from secular society [as Christian fundamentalists]. Traditional Jewish religious practices are as threatened by modern tastes and practices as are those of conservative Christians."
According to Hardisty, Rabbi Daniel Lapin "argues that the proper practice of Jewish faith dictates a belief in moral values that are more closely aligned with those of conservative Christians than with those of liberals, whose 'secular humanism' runs against the grain of all religious practice."
Over the past several years, Jewish religious conservatives have become coveted guests at Christian and conservative public gatherings.
The ZOA's Morton Klein told The Foward that he has not been asked to support the social agenda of Christian organizations in exchange for their support of Israel. "No Christian leader -- and I talk to almost all of them -- has ever asked me, 'If I speak out in favor of Israel, will you support me on this?'" Klein said. "Never."
One would think, however, that all the "rapture" and "end times" talk would raise red flags for Jews. After all, when the day of reckoning comes, they will be amongst those left behind. To disregard evangelicals beliefs in the "end-times" would be "playing with fire," Harvey Cox, professor of divinity at Harvard University, told Time. "I'd be awfully cautious of this alliance if I were on the Israeli side." Cox's admonition was echoed by Gershom Gorenberg, a Jewish expert on the Christian end times. "In my view," he said, "any theology that continues to deny the validity of Judaism and to fantasize about looking forward to the conversion or destruction of the Jews is one that should arouse a great deal of caution among Jews."
Bill Berkowitz "Pat Robertson's Reward:
Jewish Conservatives Join Forces With Christian Evangelicals" www.tompaine.com August 01 2002
This is a typical JINSA account of one of its junkets, every line of which pushes a zionist thesis or a spin-doctored version of an event for which Israel has been internationally condemned. The time-honored "a land without a people for a people without a land" myth appears here as "a large majority of the West Bank is empty." PLO booby traps are blamed for the view at Jenin's ground zero. And just in time for the JINSA visit, Palestinian terrorists try to bomb "Israel's equivalent of the World Trade Center," but are stopped in the nick of time. The professional soldiers on this trip won't necessarily be taken in by all of this - they know perfectly well that booby traps don't pulverize entire buildings - but the relentless propaganda will have its effect.
The 20th JINSA Flag and General Officers Trip to Israel took place 21-29 April. Nine retired American Admirals and Generals traveled the country (and to Jordan) and met with the Israeli security establishment from the highest levels to soldiers in the field. They met with the Prime Minister and the King of Jordan. Their observations will be compiled into a report, but before that is available, we will be providing observations from the field. This first one is by David Steinmann, Chairman of JINSA's Board of Advisors, on the day we traveled to Israel's Central Command.
We took off from an IDF airbase and circled Kalkilya, Tulkarm and Jenin, then flew along the Green Line between Israel proper and the Palestinians in the disputed territories to see how close to each other they are and to be reminded that a large majority of the West Bank is totally empty, with neither Palestinians nor Israelis living there. This needs to be made clear since the media often shows a small land crowded with people. In fact, when you do see towns and villages established by Israelis there, as often as not they are surrounded by empty land, neither competing with nor encroaching on Palestinian towns.
We landed in a strategic area near the line where Kfar Saba (Israeli) and Tulkarm (Palestinian) are closely adjoined. We were briefed by and had lunch with troops of the Fire Arrows Brigade in their field encampment.
Like troops with whom we spent time everywhere from the Golan Heights to Gaza, these soldiers made it clear that they were grateful for our visit, that Israelis feel alone now because of the hypocrisy and antisemitism radiating from so much of the world, and that they appreciate America's staunch friendship and support. We told them in turn that we are grateful to them for fighting our common fight and assured them that Americans know who their friends are.
Our view of Jenin showed what the media only now begun to show -- a large town where the vast majority of the structures were undamaged, but with an area of great damage where the pitched battle took place, much of the damage from booby-trapped buildings blown up by Palestinian explosives set to detonate and kill Israelis who were going house to house searching for terrorists rather then simply bombing from the air, which would have caused much greater damage and loss of life. No massacre. Palestinian sources now report 56 dead including six civilians, but Israel gets little credit for its unprecedented caution and restraint under fire.
We had been told an operation had begun the evening before as a result of intelligence received about three terrorists preparing to launch attacks inside Israel. The IDF had captured two and was in hot pursuit of the third. All were caught. The IDF also knew a very large explosive attack was being readied in one of these Palestinian towns. Just as we lifted off to have another look at Kalkilya, half a dozen Apache attack helicopters were overhead, supporting an incursion in search of the explosive device.
We made our way back to the coast and then south to the air base from which we had launched that morning. Later we learned that a Palestinian car bomb planned to demolish the Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv - Israel's equivalent of the World Trade Center - had been found and dismantled.
http://www.israelmybeloved.com/news/opinion_archive/020506_visit_in_israel.htm
There are no less than 6 JINSA members in the Dubya junta: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Woolsey, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith (the third highest ranking Pentagon official), Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
JINSA has campaigned, in parallel with Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy but with much more clout, for withdrawing from the ABM treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the International Criminal Court - all of which have become part of the Dubya doctrine. JINSA lobbies for any issue that affects Israeli interests, including US relations with China, which has become a major Israeli arms client.
Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of advisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or has worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon and Israel. While some keep a low profile as self-employed "consultants" and avoid mention of their clients, others are less shy about their associations, including with the private mercenary firm Military Professional Resources International, weapons broker and military consultancy Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which oversees several ongoing joint projects with Israel.
The behemoths of military contracting are also well represented in JINSA's ranks. For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon Edney, Adm. David Jeremiah and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, have served Northrop Grumman or its subsidiaries as either consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has built ships for the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force (as well as the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army for use in its attack helicopters). It also works with Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries, to produce an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lockheed Martin has sold more than $2 billion worth of F-16s to Israel since 1999, as well as flight simulators, multiple-launch rocket systems and Seahawk heavyweight torpedoes. At one time or another, General May, retired Lieut. Gen. Paul Cerjanand retired Adm. Carlisle Trost have labored in LockMart's vineyards. Trost has also sat on the board of General Dynamics, whose Gulfstream subsidiary has a $206 million contract to supply planes to Israel to be used for "special electronics missions."
By far the most profitably diversified of the JINSAns is retired Adm. David Jeremiah. President and partner of Technology Strategies & Alliances Corporation (described as a "strategic advisory firm and investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, telecommunications and electronics industries"), Jeremiah also sits on the boards of Northrop Grumman's Litton subsidiary and of defense giant Alliant Techsystems, which--in partnership with Israel's TAAS--does a brisk business in rubber bullets. And he has a seat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle.
Jason Vest: "The Men From JINSA and CSP"
The Nation September 2, 2002
According to Teicher, the "progenitor" of the notion that the "United States should tilt toward Iraq to counterbalance America's lost influence in Iran" was Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor during the Carter Administration. "As early as 1979, in interagency meetings and private discussions...Brzezinski was discreetly floating the idea that perhaps Washington should reconsider its `nonrelationship' with Iraq." (Twin Pillars, p. 61). Five months prior to Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran the "tilt" became more public when Brzezinski editorialized in the New York Times: "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq...We feel that American-Iraqi relations need not be frozen in antagonism."
Bruce W. Jentelson With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam 1982-1990 (1994), p.34
Brzezinski's approach should come as no surprise since Saddam was helped into his dictator's seat by the CIA in the first place.
Regime change—the phrase sounds so cool and antiseptic. But before Congress bought President Bush's prescription for curing the world’s ills, it should have reviewed some medical history on the disastrous side-effects of this quack remedy.
The first patient in line for this harsh medicine—Iraq—has already taken it twice before. The results turned a minor regional irritant into a wound of worldwide concern.
Iraq’s first dose came in 1963, when a young CIA protege named Saddam Hussein helped overthrow Gen. Abdul Qassim, who had nationalized some of the country's foreign oil interests two years earlier.
According to one history, “CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency’s radio station inside the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and solicitation of advice (on who) should be eliminated once the coup was successful.”
After more domestic political instability, another CIA-backed coup in 1968 installed Hussein as deputy to the new military ruler. Hussein waited his turn and became dictator in 1979.
Jonathan Marshall (Independent Institute) "Iraq: Foreign Policy Malpractice" San Francisco Chronicle October 20, 2002
It was 12 years ago, on March 14, 1983, that the commandant of the Marine Corps sent a highly unusual letter to the secretary of defense expressing frustration and anger at Israel. General R.H. Barrow charged that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of Marines serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon. There was, he wrote, a systematic pattern of harassment by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that was resulting in "life-threatening situations, replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniform and country."
Barrow's letter added: "It is inconceivable to me why Americans serving in peacekeeping roles must be harassed, endangered by an ally...It is evident to me, and the opinion of the U.S. commanders afloat and ashore, that the incidents between the Marines and the IDF are timed, orchestrated, and executed for obtuse Israeli political purposes."1
Israel's motives were less obtuse than the diplomatic general pretended. It was widely believed then, and now, that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most Machiavellian politician-generals, was creating the incidents deliberately in an effort to convince Washington that the two forces had to coordinate their actions in order to avoid such tensions. This, of course, would have been taken by the Arabs as proof that the Marines were not really in Lebanon as neutral peacekeepers but as allies of the Israelis, a perception that would have obvious advantages for Israel.
[...]
In the Feb. 2 incident, the checkpoint was commanded by Marine Capt. Charles Johnson, who firmly refused permission for Landsberg to advance. When two of the Israeli tanks ignored his warning to halt, Johnson leaped on Landsberg's tank with pistol drawn and demanded Landsberg and his tanks withdraw. They did.
[...]
Israel accelerated the building conflict on Sept. 3, 1993 by unilaterally withdrawing its troops southward, leaving the Marines exposed behind their thin lines at the airport. The United States had asked the Israeli government to delay its withdrawal until the Marines could be replaced by units of the Lebanese army, but Israel
refused. The result was as feared. Heavy fighting immediately broke out between the Christian Lebanese Forces and the pro-Syrian Druze units, both seeking to occupy positions evacuated by Israel, while the Marines were left in the crossfire. 23On Sept. 5, two Marines were killed and three wounded as fighting escalated between Christian and Muslim militias.
[...]
On Sept. 13, President Reagan authorized what was called aggressive self-defense for the Marines, including air and naval strikes.27 Five days later the United States essentially joined the war against the Muslims when four U.S. warships unleashed the heaviest naval bombardment since Vietnam into Syrian and Druze positions in eastern Lebanon in support of the Lebanese Christians.28 The bombardment lasted for three days and was personally ordered by National Security Council director Robert McFarlane, a Marine Corps officer detailed to the White House who was in Lebanon at the time and was also a strong supporter of Israel and its Lebanese Maronite Christian allies. McFarlane issued the order despite the fact that the Marine commander at the airport, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, strenuously argued against it because, in the words of correspondent Thomas L. Friedman, "he knew that it would make his soldiers party to what was now clearly an intra-Lebanese fight, and that the Lebanese Muslims would not retaliate against the Navy's ships at sea but against the Marines on shore."
Donald Neff: "Israel Charged With Systematic Harassment of U.S. Marines"
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March 1995, pp. 79-81
The source of the revelation that Yitzak Shamir bartered US strategic secrets for Soviet Jews was Seymour Hersh's book The Sampson Option, and Hersh's source was controversial ex-Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe. Newsweek made a sustained effort to demolish Ben-Menashe's allegations but much of what Newsweek reporters presented as damning evidence was in fact supplied by hostile sources, namely the US and Israeli governments. Whatever Ben-Menashe's merits or demerits may be, CIA counterintelligence has determined that sensitive information shared with Israel was being persistently leaked to the Soviets since the 60's.
"Pollard and Beyond" Editorial, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs July 14, 1986, p.2
Shamir was more than a little foxy as he covered his tracks by making Tariq Aziz an offer he had to refuse. The source of the information is NSC official Howard Teicher's 1995 affidavit:
Rumsfeld was carrying a letter offering help from then-Israeli Foreign Minister Itzhak Shamir. "Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir asked Rumsfeld if the United States would deliver a secret offer of Israeli assistance to Iraq. The United States agreed. I traveled with Rumsfeld to Baghdad and was present at the meeting in which Rumsfeld told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz about Israel's offer of assistance. Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis' letter to Hussein offering assistance, because Aziz told us that he would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so."
Robert Windrem, "Rumsfeld key player
in Iraq policy shift" NBC News, August 18, 2002
Robert Gessner, "Brown Shirts in Zion", New Masses 19 February 1935, p.11
Last section of the 24-slide presentation by ex-Laroucheite (now also ex-) RAND "analyst" Laurent Murawiec, sponsored by Richard Perle.
Source:
Jack Shafer: The
PowerPoint That Rocked the Pentagon: The LaRouchie defector who's advising the
defense establishment on Saudi Arabia, Slate August 7, 2002
Taking Saudi Out of Arabia
Laurent Murawiec
RAND
Defense Policy Board
July 10, 2002
[...]
What is to be done?
"Saudi Arabia" is not a God-
given entity
An ultimatum to the House of
Saud
Or else ...
Other Arabs?
Grand strategy for the Middle East
• Iraq is the tactical pivot
• Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot
• Egypt the prize
Antisemitism disclaimer:
In this essay I will be talking about the cynical, even machievellian actions of pro-Likud zionists in the US government and Israel. No part of this analysis should be taken as a moral judgement. No nation that has recently suffered near-extinction through genocide while the so-called civilized world ignored, approved of, or assisted said genocide, can be morally judged by any other than itself. No exiled people that has suffered genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout its history should be morally accused - at least for some period of peace and security proportionate to that of its past sufferings. The Jews' suffering continued during their struggle to conquer their homeland, and the scars are still livid. So although the Jewish people may at long last be objectively safe and secure if it weren't for their own constant belligerence, no one can judge the Jews morally for the traumatic fear, pain, and mistrust that impels them to seek security in conquering land and subjugating their enemies, rather than in treaties.
Of course, the same principle also applies to the peoples of the ex-USSR, 20 million of whom were killed by Nazi racist executioners, the survivors of Maoism and the Khmer Rouge, the survivors of US holocausts in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, and, last but not least, the Palestinians. Granted, their victimization was of much lesser duration than that of the Jews.
A particular point that requires clarification is the implicit judgement in Brenner's book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators - which I liberally quoted - that the predominantly middle class European Jews were responsible for their own doom, since they tagged along with the fascists like the rest of the petty bourgeoisie, instead of emulating the Jews of France, who had succeeded in facing down protofascist antisemitism. In Brenner's analysis I don't see a particular condemnation of Jewry, but of the petty bourgeoisie as a class, of which Jews are simply a disproportionate part.
To be sure, the Jews themselves were and are acutely aware of this tendency and it is no accident that many great revolutionaries and socialists were Jews. Marx alone is proof enough of the power of this pro-working-class current in modern Jewish history. Labor zionism, the Histadrut , the Kibbutz movement, all attest to a strong socialist current. Although they have been defeated by anti-marxist revisionist zionism as has the Diaspora's liberalism by neoconservatism, they are clear proof that Jewishness is not a priori anti-working-class.
So to wrap it up, I believe that the Jews are suffering from a deeply-ingrained post-traumatic stress disorder. Like shell-shocked veterans who see enemies and threats everywhere, they need help to acknowledge and address their condition, as well as external restraint to prevent them from harming themselves and the rest of the world. Their magnificient survival skills, however, makes it very difficult to help them in any way without becoming a target for their extremely effective attacks.
Reading notes:
Quoted text is marked with this color instead of indenting to save space. Links are underlined and have this color . When you place your mouse over the link it won't look like this (try it to see) but like this so that it doesn't overlap with the tooltip that just popped up . The tooltip tells you whether the link takes you to a footnote on this page or to an external link, in which case you may choose to right-click and open the link in a new window. The tooltips are important for the CHM format that doesn't display the URL of the link in the status bar.
You've noticed, of course, the static pop-out navigational menu that works
just like a Windows Explorer folder tree. The 
icons designate footnotes. Since most of the content is in the footnotes, I
thought that the more important ones at least should be be accessible from the
menu.
Copyright notice:
This document can be freely quoted and mirrored. A zipped copy is provided for easy download and mirroring. It's also available as a single Windows - compatible .CHM file. A PDF version is unavailable because the javascript navigation code does not readily export to that format. Correct me if I'm wrong.
