by Michael Yoder
ELIZABETHTOWN, Pa. - The date Aug. 4, 1964 still haunts Daniel Ellsberg, despite the passage of more than 40 years.
He was a 33-year-old on his first day at the Pentagon as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton. It also was the day the North Vietnamese navy allegedly fired 21 torpedoes at U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Ellsberg was one of 100 people who saw top secret transmissions later in the day saying the attack never happened, yet President Lyndon Johnson used the alleged incident to drive the U.S. into full-scale war in Vietnam.
“I knew Congress was being deceived into a declaration of war and that the public was being totally deceived into a landslide victory for a man who was about to plunge them into a big war,” Ellsberg told a crowd of more than 200 people Thursday evening at the inaugural Ware Seminar on Global Citizenship at Elizabethtown College’s Center for Global Citizenship.
The 76-year-old activist gained notoriety during the Vietnam War when he released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers, detailing internal U.S. policy decisions regarding the war and its escalation.
Ellsberg said in the last few weeks he has begun to think a coup has occurred in the presidency of George Bush, which he characterized as a “rogue administration.”
He said that if a new 9/11 terrorist attack happens in the United States, the president would not hesitate to suspend and dismantle the Constitution and that hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and dissidents could end up in detention camps. “I think we’re in danger - we’re in a crisis,” he said.
Ellsberg pointed to actions taken by Bush that he said violate the law, including endorsing warrantless surveillance and lying to Congress about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At the same time, he was quick to chastise the Democrats in Congress, saying that by going along with Bush’s war they’ve failed their duty to uphold the Constitution.
He said the Senate resolution passed Wednesday declaring Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization is an invitation for Bush to declare war on Iran.
Ellsberg compared Wednesday’s resolution to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed Aug. 7, 1964, that gave Johnson a virtually blank check for combat in North Vietnam. He laid out a scenario of $200 a barrel for oil, the possibility of retaliatory attacks against the U.S. and the president keeping open the “nuclear option” to attack Iran. He said he is asking people in government who have information that could stop such a war before it happens to not do what he did by releasing the Pentagon Papers after the war started. He said they should do what he didn’t do - release the information before a disaster happens. “Don’t wait till the war has started,” Ellsberg told the audience. “Don’t wait till the bombs are falling or thousands more have died.”
Ellsberg said he has been called a traitor numerous times for breaking a “vow of secrecy” when he released the Pentagon Papers. But Ellsberg said he took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution - the same oath all military and public servants are required to take.
“It is not an oath to the president,” Ellsberg said. “And it’s not an oath to keep secrets. And it’s not an oath to the commander in chief, or the Fuhrer or Caesar or to the flag. “It is an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
Monday, October 01, 2007
How to Make Iraq Look Like Whipped Cream - So What About Iran? By URI AVNERY
A respected American paper posted a scoop this week: Vice-President Dick Cheney, the King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by launching missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for an American attack on Iran.
Far-fetched? Not really. It is rather like what happened in 1956. Then France, Israel and Britain secretly planned to attack Egypt in order to topple Gamal Abd-al-Nasser ("regime change" in today's lingo.) It was agreed that Israeli paratroops would be dropped near the Suez Canal, and that the resulting conflict would serve as a pretext for the French and British to occupy the canal area in order to "secure" the waterway. This plan was implemented (and failed miserably).
What would happen to us if we agreed to Cheney's plan? Our pilots would risk their lives to bomb the heavily defended Iranian installations. Then, Iranian missiles would rain down on our cities. Hundreds, perhaps thousands would be killed. All this in order to supply the Americans with a pretext to go to war.
Would the pretext have stood up? In other words, is the US obliged to enter a war on our side, even when that war is caused by us? In theory, the answer is yes. The current agreements between the US and Israel say that America has to come to Israel's aid in any war - whoever started it.
Is there any substance to this leak? Hard to know. But it strengthens the suspicion that an attack on Iran is more imminent than people imagine.
* * *
Do Bush, Cheney & Co. indeed intend to attack Iran?
I don't know, but my suspicion that they might is getting stronger.
Why? Because George Bush is nearing the end of his term of office. If it ends the way things look now, he will be remembered as a very bad - if not the worst - president in the annals of the republic. His term started with the Twin Towers catastrophe, which reflected no great credit on the intelligence agencies, and would come to a close with the grievous Iraq fiasco.
There is only one year left to do something impressive and save his name in the history books. In such situations, leaders tend to look for military adventures. Taking into account the man's demonstrated character traits, the war option suddenly seems quite frightening.
True, the American army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even people like Bush and Cheney could not dream, at this time, of invading a country four times larger than Iraq, with three times the population.
But, quite possibly the war-mongers are whispering in Bush's ear: What are you worrying about? No need for an invasion. Enough to bomb Iran, as we bombed Serbia and Afghanistan. We shall use the smartest bombs and the most sophisticated missiles against the two thousand or so targets, in order to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear sites but also their military installations and government offices. "We shall bomb them back into the stone age," as an American general once said about Vietnam, or "turn their clock back 20 years," as the Israeli Air Force general Dan Halutz said about Lebanon.
That's a tempting idea. The US will only use its mighty Air Force, missiles of all kinds and the powerful aircraft-carriers, which are already deployed in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. All these can be sent into action at any time on short notice. For a failed president approaching the end of his term, the idea of an easy, short war must have an immense attraction. And this president has already shown how hard it is for him to resist temptations of this kind.
* * *
Would this indeed be such an easy operation, a "piece of cake" in American parlance?
I doubt it.
Even "smart" bombs kill people. The Iranians are a proud, resolute and highly motivated people. They point out that for two thousand years they have never attacked another country, but during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war they have amply proved their determination to defend their own when attacked.
Their first reaction to an American attack would be to close the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf. That would choke off a large part of the world's oil supply and cause an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis. To open the straits (if this is at all possible), the US army would have to capture and hold large areas of Iranian territory.
The short and easy war would turn into a long and hard war. What does that mean for us in Israel?
There can be little doubt that if attacked, Iran will respond as it has promised: by bombarding us with the rockets it is preparing for this precise purpose. That will not endanger Israel's existence, but it will not be pleasant either.
If the American attack turns into a long war of attrition, and if the American public comes to see it as a disaster (as is happening right now with the Iraqi adventure), some will surely put the blame on Israel. It is no secret that the Pro-Israel lobby and its allies - the (mostly Jewish) neo-cons and the Christian Zionists - are pushing America into this war, just as they pushed it into Iraq. For Israeli policy, the hoped-for gains of this war may turn into giant losses - not only for Israel, but also for the American Jewish community.
* * *
If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, the Israeli government would have had to invent him.
He has got almost everything one could wish for in an enemy. He has a big mouth. He is a braggart. He enjoys causing scandals. He is a Holocaust denier. He prophesies that Israel will "vanish from the map" (though he did not say, as falsely reported, the he would wipe Israel off the map.)
This week, the pro-Israel lobby organized big demonstrations against his visit to New York. They were a huge success - for Ahmadinejad. He has realized his dream of becoming the center of world attention. He has been given the opportunity to voice his arguments against Israel -- some outrageous, some valid - before a world-wide audience.
But Ahmadinejad is not Iran. True, he has won popular elections, but Iran is like the orthodox parties in Israel: it is not their politicians who count, but their rabbis. The Shiite religious leadership makes the decisions and commands the armed forces, and this body is neither boastful nor vociferous not scandal-mongering. It exercises a lot of caution.
If Iran was really so eager to obtain a nuclear bomb, it would have acted in utmost silence and kept as low a profile as possible (as Israel did). The swaggering of Ahmadinejad would hurt this effort more than any enemy of Iran could.
It is highly unpleasant to think about a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands (and, indeed, in any hands.) I hope it can be avoided by offering inducements and/or imposing sanctions. But even if this does not succeed, it would not be the end of the world, nor the end of Israel. In this area, more than in any other, Israel's deterrent power is immense. Even Ahmadinejad will not risk an exchange of queens - the destruction of Iran for the destruction of Israel.
* * *
Napoleon said that to understand a country's policy, one has only to look at the map.
If we do this, we shall see that there is no objective reason for war between Israel and Iran. On the contrary, for a long time it was believed in Jerusalem that the two countries were natural allies.
David Ben-Gurion advocated an "alliance of the periphery". He was convinced that the entire Arab world is the natural enemy of Israel, and that, therefore, allies should be sought on the fringes of the Arab world - Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, Chad etc. (He also looked for allies inside the Arab world - communities that are not Sunni-Arab, such as the Maronites, the Copts, the Kurds, the Shiites and others.)
At the time of the Shah, very close connections existed between Iran and Israel, some positive, some negative, some outright sinister. The Shah helped to build a pipeline from Eilat to Askelon, in order to transport Iranian oil to the Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal. The Israel internal secret service (Shabak) trained its notorious Iranian counterpart (Savak). Israelis and Iranians acted together in Iraqi Kurdistan, helping the Kurds against their Sunni-Arab oppressors.
The Khomeini revolution did not, in the beginning, put an end to this alliance, it only drove it underground. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel supplied Iran with arms, on the assumption that anyone fighting Arabs is our friend. At the same time, the Americans supplied arms to Saddam Hussein - one of the rare instances of a clear divergence between Washington and Jerusalem. This was bridged in the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Americans helped Israel to sell arms to the Ayatollahs.
Today, an ideological struggle is raging between the two countries, but it is mainly fought out on the rhetorical and demagogical level. I dare to say that Ahmadinejad doesn't give a fig for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he only uses it to make friends in the Arab world. If I were a Palestinian, I would not rely on it. Sooner or later, geography will tell and Israeli-Iranian relations will return to what they were - hopefully on a far more positive basis.
* * *
One thing I am ready to predict with confidence: whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to regret it.
Some adventures are easy to get into but hard to get out of.
The last one to find this out was Saddam Hussein. He thought that it would be a cakewalk - after all, Khomeini had killed off most of the officers, and especially the pilots, of the Shah's military. He believed that one quick Iraqi blow would be enough to bring about the collapse of Iran. He had eight long years of war to regret it.
Both the Americans and we may soon be feeling that the Iraqi mud is like whipped cream compared to the Iranian quagmire.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
Far-fetched? Not really. It is rather like what happened in 1956. Then France, Israel and Britain secretly planned to attack Egypt in order to topple Gamal Abd-al-Nasser ("regime change" in today's lingo.) It was agreed that Israeli paratroops would be dropped near the Suez Canal, and that the resulting conflict would serve as a pretext for the French and British to occupy the canal area in order to "secure" the waterway. This plan was implemented (and failed miserably).
What would happen to us if we agreed to Cheney's plan? Our pilots would risk their lives to bomb the heavily defended Iranian installations. Then, Iranian missiles would rain down on our cities. Hundreds, perhaps thousands would be killed. All this in order to supply the Americans with a pretext to go to war.
Would the pretext have stood up? In other words, is the US obliged to enter a war on our side, even when that war is caused by us? In theory, the answer is yes. The current agreements between the US and Israel say that America has to come to Israel's aid in any war - whoever started it.
Is there any substance to this leak? Hard to know. But it strengthens the suspicion that an attack on Iran is more imminent than people imagine.
* * *
Do Bush, Cheney & Co. indeed intend to attack Iran?
I don't know, but my suspicion that they might is getting stronger.
Why? Because George Bush is nearing the end of his term of office. If it ends the way things look now, he will be remembered as a very bad - if not the worst - president in the annals of the republic. His term started with the Twin Towers catastrophe, which reflected no great credit on the intelligence agencies, and would come to a close with the grievous Iraq fiasco.
There is only one year left to do something impressive and save his name in the history books. In such situations, leaders tend to look for military adventures. Taking into account the man's demonstrated character traits, the war option suddenly seems quite frightening.
True, the American army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even people like Bush and Cheney could not dream, at this time, of invading a country four times larger than Iraq, with three times the population.
But, quite possibly the war-mongers are whispering in Bush's ear: What are you worrying about? No need for an invasion. Enough to bomb Iran, as we bombed Serbia and Afghanistan. We shall use the smartest bombs and the most sophisticated missiles against the two thousand or so targets, in order to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear sites but also their military installations and government offices. "We shall bomb them back into the stone age," as an American general once said about Vietnam, or "turn their clock back 20 years," as the Israeli Air Force general Dan Halutz said about Lebanon.
That's a tempting idea. The US will only use its mighty Air Force, missiles of all kinds and the powerful aircraft-carriers, which are already deployed in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. All these can be sent into action at any time on short notice. For a failed president approaching the end of his term, the idea of an easy, short war must have an immense attraction. And this president has already shown how hard it is for him to resist temptations of this kind.
* * *
Would this indeed be such an easy operation, a "piece of cake" in American parlance?
I doubt it.
Even "smart" bombs kill people. The Iranians are a proud, resolute and highly motivated people. They point out that for two thousand years they have never attacked another country, but during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war they have amply proved their determination to defend their own when attacked.
Their first reaction to an American attack would be to close the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf. That would choke off a large part of the world's oil supply and cause an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis. To open the straits (if this is at all possible), the US army would have to capture and hold large areas of Iranian territory.
The short and easy war would turn into a long and hard war. What does that mean for us in Israel?
There can be little doubt that if attacked, Iran will respond as it has promised: by bombarding us with the rockets it is preparing for this precise purpose. That will not endanger Israel's existence, but it will not be pleasant either.
If the American attack turns into a long war of attrition, and if the American public comes to see it as a disaster (as is happening right now with the Iraqi adventure), some will surely put the blame on Israel. It is no secret that the Pro-Israel lobby and its allies - the (mostly Jewish) neo-cons and the Christian Zionists - are pushing America into this war, just as they pushed it into Iraq. For Israeli policy, the hoped-for gains of this war may turn into giant losses - not only for Israel, but also for the American Jewish community.
* * *
If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, the Israeli government would have had to invent him.
He has got almost everything one could wish for in an enemy. He has a big mouth. He is a braggart. He enjoys causing scandals. He is a Holocaust denier. He prophesies that Israel will "vanish from the map" (though he did not say, as falsely reported, the he would wipe Israel off the map.)
This week, the pro-Israel lobby organized big demonstrations against his visit to New York. They were a huge success - for Ahmadinejad. He has realized his dream of becoming the center of world attention. He has been given the opportunity to voice his arguments against Israel -- some outrageous, some valid - before a world-wide audience.
But Ahmadinejad is not Iran. True, he has won popular elections, but Iran is like the orthodox parties in Israel: it is not their politicians who count, but their rabbis. The Shiite religious leadership makes the decisions and commands the armed forces, and this body is neither boastful nor vociferous not scandal-mongering. It exercises a lot of caution.
If Iran was really so eager to obtain a nuclear bomb, it would have acted in utmost silence and kept as low a profile as possible (as Israel did). The swaggering of Ahmadinejad would hurt this effort more than any enemy of Iran could.
It is highly unpleasant to think about a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands (and, indeed, in any hands.) I hope it can be avoided by offering inducements and/or imposing sanctions. But even if this does not succeed, it would not be the end of the world, nor the end of Israel. In this area, more than in any other, Israel's deterrent power is immense. Even Ahmadinejad will not risk an exchange of queens - the destruction of Iran for the destruction of Israel.
* * *
Napoleon said that to understand a country's policy, one has only to look at the map.
If we do this, we shall see that there is no objective reason for war between Israel and Iran. On the contrary, for a long time it was believed in Jerusalem that the two countries were natural allies.
David Ben-Gurion advocated an "alliance of the periphery". He was convinced that the entire Arab world is the natural enemy of Israel, and that, therefore, allies should be sought on the fringes of the Arab world - Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia, Chad etc. (He also looked for allies inside the Arab world - communities that are not Sunni-Arab, such as the Maronites, the Copts, the Kurds, the Shiites and others.)
At the time of the Shah, very close connections existed between Iran and Israel, some positive, some negative, some outright sinister. The Shah helped to build a pipeline from Eilat to Askelon, in order to transport Iranian oil to the Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal. The Israel internal secret service (Shabak) trained its notorious Iranian counterpart (Savak). Israelis and Iranians acted together in Iraqi Kurdistan, helping the Kurds against their Sunni-Arab oppressors.
The Khomeini revolution did not, in the beginning, put an end to this alliance, it only drove it underground. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel supplied Iran with arms, on the assumption that anyone fighting Arabs is our friend. At the same time, the Americans supplied arms to Saddam Hussein - one of the rare instances of a clear divergence between Washington and Jerusalem. This was bridged in the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Americans helped Israel to sell arms to the Ayatollahs.
Today, an ideological struggle is raging between the two countries, but it is mainly fought out on the rhetorical and demagogical level. I dare to say that Ahmadinejad doesn't give a fig for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he only uses it to make friends in the Arab world. If I were a Palestinian, I would not rely on it. Sooner or later, geography will tell and Israeli-Iranian relations will return to what they were - hopefully on a far more positive basis.
* * *
One thing I am ready to predict with confidence: whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to regret it.
Some adventures are easy to get into but hard to get out of.
The last one to find this out was Saddam Hussein. He thought that it would be a cakewalk - after all, Khomeini had killed off most of the officers, and especially the pilots, of the Shah's military. He believed that one quick Iraqi blow would be enough to bring about the collapse of Iran. He had eight long years of war to regret it.
Both the Americans and we may soon be feeling that the Iraqi mud is like whipped cream compared to the Iranian quagmire.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
REFLECTIONS OF PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: One more argument for the UN
WHILE working on the already famous Greenspan book, I read an article published by El PaÃs, a Spanish newspaper with a circulation of more than 500,000, according to reports; I would like to pass this on to the readers. It is signed by Ernesto Ekaizer, and it literally reads:
"Four weeks before the Iraq invasion which happened in the night of March 19 to 20, 2003, George W. Bush publicly sustained his demands of Saddam Hussein in the following terms: disarmament or war. In private, Bush acknowledged that war was inevitable. In a long private conversation with the then Spanish president, José MarÃa Aznar, held on Saturday, February 22, 2003 at the Crawford Ranch in Texas, Bush made it clear that the moment had come to get rid of Saddam. ‘We have two weeks. In two weeks our military will be ready. We will be in Baghdad at the end of March', he told Aznar.
"The moment has come to get rid of Saddam.
"As part of this plan, Bush had accepted, on January 31, 2003 – after an interview with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair – to make a last diplomatic maneuver: to introduce a second resolution to the United Nations Security Council. His objective: to clear the way legally for a unilateral war that the United States was getting ready to unleash with more than 200,000 soldiers who were in the region ready to attack.
"Bush was aware of Blair’s internal difficulties and he knew of Aznar’s. Only seven days before that meeting at the Crawford Ranch, three million people were demonstrating in several Spanish cities against the imminent war. ‘We need your help with our public opinion’, Aznar asks. Bush explains to him the scope of the new resolution that he is going to present: ‘The resolution will be tailor made to help you. I don’t care about the content’. To this, Aznar replies: ‘That text would help us to be able to co-sponsor it and be its co-authors, and get many people to sponsor it’. Aznar then offers to give Bush European coverage, together with Blair. Aznar’s dream of consolidating a relationship with the United States, following in the footsteps of the United Kingdom, was about to become reality.
"Aznar had traveled with his wife, Ana Botella, on February 20 to the United States making a stopover in Mexico to persuade President Vicente Fox –unsuccessfully– of the need to support Bush. On the 21st, the couple, accompanied by the President’s assistants, arrived in Texas. Aznar and his wife stayed at the ranch guest house.
"In the meeting on the following day, Saturday, President Bush, his then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Daniel Fried, the chief of European Affairs at the National Security Council, were present. Aznar, on his side, was accompanied by his international policy advisor, Alberto Carnero and the Spanish Ambassador in Washington, Javier Rupérez. As part of the meeting, Bush and Aznar had a four-way telephone conversation with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.
"Ambassador Rupérez translated from the English for Aznar and also from the Italian for Condoleezza Rice; another two interpreters did the same for Bush and his collaborators. It was Rupérez who drafted the minutes of the conversation in a memorandum that has been kept secret until today.
"The conversation is impressive because of its direct, friendly and even menacing tone when, for example, they refer to the necessity of some countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon and Russia, members of the UN Security Council, voting for the new resolution as a show of friendship towards the United States or else they would have to suffer the consequences.
"They are cautioned about zero expectations for the work of the inspectors, whose chief, Hans Blix, had dismantled just one week earlier, on February 14, the arguments presented by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell at the Security Council on February 5, 2003, with ‘solid facts’ enthusiastically supported by the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Palacio. The same facts that Powell himself later described as a bunch of lies.
"The Blix Report
"According to Blix, Iraq was taking steps towards active cooperation in solving the pending issue of disarmament. His tone had been less critical than that of his report of January 27, 2003. ‘Since we arrived in Iraq three months ago we have made more than 400 inspections, with no advance warning at 300 sites. Until now, the inspectors have found no prohibited weapons…If Iraq decides to cooperate even more closely, the period of disarmament by the inspections can still be short´, the chief inspector pointed out.
"The General Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei released information on February 14 that there were still some technical issues left to clear up. But, he added, ‘now there are no more disarmament problems left to solve’. According to him, absolutely no proof had been found that Iraq had been carrying out nuclear activities or activities related to nuclear energy, another clear lie about what Powell had stated about the Iraqi nuclear program.
"Both the first results of the inspections and the end of the United States preparations led Bush to set the beginning of the military operation towards the date of March 10, 2003. Later, nine days were added in order to get the second resolution. The process of moral persuasion in which Aznar and Palacios worked by phone and in bilateral meetings did not succeed in pulling in more than four votes: those of the three promoters and Bulgaria. They needed 9 votes.
"The failure of this legal coverage for the imminent war led Bush, with Blair and Aznar, to agree to a summit meeting in the Azores on March 16, 2003, a place suggested by Aznar as an alternative to Bermuda for a reason he explained to Bush: ‘Just the name of these islands suggests an item of clothing that is not exactly the most appropriate for the seriousness of the moment in which we find ourselves’. There, on that March 16, Blair, Bush and Aznar decided to replace the United Nations Security Council. They usurped its functions to declare war on Iraq at their own risk. On the morning of March 17, the United Kingdom ambassador at the UN announced in New York the withdrawal of the second resolution. A defeat in the voting would have complicated even further the race towards war."
Fidel Castro Ruz
September 27, 2007.
7:25 p.m.
Translated by ESTI
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
"Four weeks before the Iraq invasion which happened in the night of March 19 to 20, 2003, George W. Bush publicly sustained his demands of Saddam Hussein in the following terms: disarmament or war. In private, Bush acknowledged that war was inevitable. In a long private conversation with the then Spanish president, José MarÃa Aznar, held on Saturday, February 22, 2003 at the Crawford Ranch in Texas, Bush made it clear that the moment had come to get rid of Saddam. ‘We have two weeks. In two weeks our military will be ready. We will be in Baghdad at the end of March', he told Aznar.
"The moment has come to get rid of Saddam.
"As part of this plan, Bush had accepted, on January 31, 2003 – after an interview with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair – to make a last diplomatic maneuver: to introduce a second resolution to the United Nations Security Council. His objective: to clear the way legally for a unilateral war that the United States was getting ready to unleash with more than 200,000 soldiers who were in the region ready to attack.
"Bush was aware of Blair’s internal difficulties and he knew of Aznar’s. Only seven days before that meeting at the Crawford Ranch, three million people were demonstrating in several Spanish cities against the imminent war. ‘We need your help with our public opinion’, Aznar asks. Bush explains to him the scope of the new resolution that he is going to present: ‘The resolution will be tailor made to help you. I don’t care about the content’. To this, Aznar replies: ‘That text would help us to be able to co-sponsor it and be its co-authors, and get many people to sponsor it’. Aznar then offers to give Bush European coverage, together with Blair. Aznar’s dream of consolidating a relationship with the United States, following in the footsteps of the United Kingdom, was about to become reality.
"Aznar had traveled with his wife, Ana Botella, on February 20 to the United States making a stopover in Mexico to persuade President Vicente Fox –unsuccessfully– of the need to support Bush. On the 21st, the couple, accompanied by the President’s assistants, arrived in Texas. Aznar and his wife stayed at the ranch guest house.
"In the meeting on the following day, Saturday, President Bush, his then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Daniel Fried, the chief of European Affairs at the National Security Council, were present. Aznar, on his side, was accompanied by his international policy advisor, Alberto Carnero and the Spanish Ambassador in Washington, Javier Rupérez. As part of the meeting, Bush and Aznar had a four-way telephone conversation with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.
"Ambassador Rupérez translated from the English for Aznar and also from the Italian for Condoleezza Rice; another two interpreters did the same for Bush and his collaborators. It was Rupérez who drafted the minutes of the conversation in a memorandum that has been kept secret until today.
"The conversation is impressive because of its direct, friendly and even menacing tone when, for example, they refer to the necessity of some countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon and Russia, members of the UN Security Council, voting for the new resolution as a show of friendship towards the United States or else they would have to suffer the consequences.
"They are cautioned about zero expectations for the work of the inspectors, whose chief, Hans Blix, had dismantled just one week earlier, on February 14, the arguments presented by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell at the Security Council on February 5, 2003, with ‘solid facts’ enthusiastically supported by the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ana Palacio. The same facts that Powell himself later described as a bunch of lies.
"The Blix Report
"According to Blix, Iraq was taking steps towards active cooperation in solving the pending issue of disarmament. His tone had been less critical than that of his report of January 27, 2003. ‘Since we arrived in Iraq three months ago we have made more than 400 inspections, with no advance warning at 300 sites. Until now, the inspectors have found no prohibited weapons…If Iraq decides to cooperate even more closely, the period of disarmament by the inspections can still be short´, the chief inspector pointed out.
"The General Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei released information on February 14 that there were still some technical issues left to clear up. But, he added, ‘now there are no more disarmament problems left to solve’. According to him, absolutely no proof had been found that Iraq had been carrying out nuclear activities or activities related to nuclear energy, another clear lie about what Powell had stated about the Iraqi nuclear program.
"Both the first results of the inspections and the end of the United States preparations led Bush to set the beginning of the military operation towards the date of March 10, 2003. Later, nine days were added in order to get the second resolution. The process of moral persuasion in which Aznar and Palacios worked by phone and in bilateral meetings did not succeed in pulling in more than four votes: those of the three promoters and Bulgaria. They needed 9 votes.
"The failure of this legal coverage for the imminent war led Bush, with Blair and Aznar, to agree to a summit meeting in the Azores on March 16, 2003, a place suggested by Aznar as an alternative to Bermuda for a reason he explained to Bush: ‘Just the name of these islands suggests an item of clothing that is not exactly the most appropriate for the seriousness of the moment in which we find ourselves’. There, on that March 16, Blair, Bush and Aznar decided to replace the United Nations Security Council. They usurped its functions to declare war on Iraq at their own risk. On the morning of March 17, the United Kingdom ambassador at the UN announced in New York the withdrawal of the second resolution. A defeat in the voting would have complicated even further the race towards war."
Fidel Castro Ruz
September 27, 2007.
7:25 p.m.
Translated by ESTI
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
WHY Does Google Censor Cuba?
A number of services offered by the grand search engine are not available to Cubans, and with no explanation given. Federal prohibitions enabling the US blockade of the island could be the key to the mystery
By: Amaury E. del Valle
The largest and most-used search engine on the Internet is marking its tenth anniversary. Over that that time it has censored a series of services, making them inaccessible in Cuba – and with no clear explanation why.
«We’re sorry, but this service is not available for your country» is the brief message that appears in English on the computer screen when anyone on the island tries to access one of the mega-searcher’s well-known utilities, such as Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Google Code or Google Toolbar.
The Google.com website —famous the world over for providing a simple and quick way to find information on close to 8.2 billion web pages— is consulted more than 200 million times a day. In addition, it offers its users other facilities, like searching for free or open source code, finding maps and aerial photos, locating on-line ads or finding information lost on one’s own computer. However, these options are not available in Cuba.
The computer giant
Google is considered by many to be a prototypical high-tech firm. It was founded on September 27, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two computer science doctoral students at Stanford University. Starting up out of a friend’s garage, and with financing from family and friends, they created their site using a search algorithm that they cracked.
At the beginning, eight people made up the entire Google staff, for a while still in the garage. Later moved to a modest office, while today the mega-firm has hundreds of employees, with its central offices in California and branches in Dublin, Ireland and Buenos Aires.
With profits considered among the highest in the computer industry, it is one of the most valuable companies on the stock exchange. Recently it expanded with several buyouts and mergers, such as the October 2006 acquisition of the famous video site YouTube, for $1.65 billion, and the April 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick, a company specializing in internet publicity, for which Google paid the jaw-dropping sum of $3.1 billion.
In addition, Google is engaged in highly significant projects, among these being the development of online tools for word processing that challenge the hegemony of Microsoft Office and Windows. Likewise, it has become a world news reference service through its Google News.
To all this must be added the increasingly global vision of the virtual world enabled the launching of vital online utilities, such as those for translating (Google Translate), books and school information searches, a technique that allows one to situate their webpage in a good position for a searcher (also known as PageRank), and the creation of local sites in each country, including Cuba.
Being located in United States —and despite its seemingly liberal philosophy— Google not only complies with that country’s laws, but has increasingly strengthened its complicity with those policies.
Prohibitive listing
A simple request from a Cuban server to access certain Google services will prompt a courteous but definitively negative response from several of these sites. Among the forbidden fruits are:
Extraterritorial limits
The cases above constitute a mere sample of some of the programs that Google denies Cuba. What is curious is that some of these, such as Google Earth or Google Desktop, were not at first prohibited. For several months Cuban nationals could load them, something that is not possible today.
It is ironic that the blocking of other features —like Google Code Search, which supposedly promotes the altruism of free software— are in contradiction to what the creators of Google have always declared themselves to be defenders.
Some of these restrictions, such as not being able to download programs that require payment, can be easily explained by US blockade laws against Cuba, which prevent most commercial transactions with the island. However, these laws directed against Cuba can be applied in third countries, like Spain and Argentina.
In the case of the Iberian nation, for example, Google Desktop states in its «Terms and Conditions” that these “will be regulated for and interpreted in accordance with Spanish legislation and regulations.»
That would mean that the denial by Google in Spain to offer this program to Cuba could be violating Spanish laws, because there is no type of commercial limitation between Cuba and that country that prevents the exchange of products.
This same situation arises with Argentina, a country where the administrative offices of many Google are located, and to whose national laws the company is subject. Therefore the denial of some service by virtue of the American Helms-Burton Act, or any other another absurd US regulation, would be in fact a violation of the laws of that South American country.
A question without an answer
It would be absurd not to recognize that the enormous utility of Google is an indispensable tool for the acquisition and exchange of knowledge.
The Cuban government has even facilitated Google’s effort to create a customize page for the island under the national domain «cu.»
It is necessary then to wonder why the super searcher doesn't respond equally and facilitate national access to all of its benefits; or is it that perhaps Google is also blockading us now?
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
By: Amaury E. del Valle
The largest and most-used search engine on the Internet is marking its tenth anniversary. Over that that time it has censored a series of services, making them inaccessible in Cuba – and with no clear explanation why.
«We’re sorry, but this service is not available for your country» is the brief message that appears in English on the computer screen when anyone on the island tries to access one of the mega-searcher’s well-known utilities, such as Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Google Code or Google Toolbar.
The Google.com website —famous the world over for providing a simple and quick way to find information on close to 8.2 billion web pages— is consulted more than 200 million times a day. In addition, it offers its users other facilities, like searching for free or open source code, finding maps and aerial photos, locating on-line ads or finding information lost on one’s own computer. However, these options are not available in Cuba.
The computer giant
Google is considered by many to be a prototypical high-tech firm. It was founded on September 27, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two computer science doctoral students at Stanford University. Starting up out of a friend’s garage, and with financing from family and friends, they created their site using a search algorithm that they cracked.
At the beginning, eight people made up the entire Google staff, for a while still in the garage. Later moved to a modest office, while today the mega-firm has hundreds of employees, with its central offices in California and branches in Dublin, Ireland and Buenos Aires.
With profits considered among the highest in the computer industry, it is one of the most valuable companies on the stock exchange. Recently it expanded with several buyouts and mergers, such as the October 2006 acquisition of the famous video site YouTube, for $1.65 billion, and the April 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick, a company specializing in internet publicity, for which Google paid the jaw-dropping sum of $3.1 billion.
In addition, Google is engaged in highly significant projects, among these being the development of online tools for word processing that challenge the hegemony of Microsoft Office and Windows. Likewise, it has become a world news reference service through its Google News.
To all this must be added the increasingly global vision of the virtual world enabled the launching of vital online utilities, such as those for translating (Google Translate), books and school information searches, a technique that allows one to situate their webpage in a good position for a searcher (also known as PageRank), and the creation of local sites in each country, including Cuba.
Being located in United States —and despite its seemingly liberal philosophy— Google not only complies with that country’s laws, but has increasingly strengthened its complicity with those policies.
Prohibitive listing
A simple request from a Cuban server to access certain Google services will prompt a courteous but definitively negative response from several of these sites. Among the forbidden fruits are:
- Google Earth: A program that displays high-quality satellite-captured aerial images of locations all over the world
- Google Sky: Since August 2007, Google has offered non-Cubans a virtual telescope that allows users to virtually peer into space.
- Google Desktop: This tool permits the possibility of locating ones own e-mail messages, files, chats and visited web pages, avoiding having to have to organize files and messages manually.
- Google AdSense: This is a service for webmasters and companies seeking publicity via the Internet.
- Google Adwords: Quick and easy tool that allows the posting of ads online.
- Google Code Search: Launched on October 5, 2006, this feature allows users to browse the web for Open Source or Free Code. This allows program developers to exchange knowledge and take advantage of the experiences of others.
Extraterritorial limits
The cases above constitute a mere sample of some of the programs that Google denies Cuba. What is curious is that some of these, such as Google Earth or Google Desktop, were not at first prohibited. For several months Cuban nationals could load them, something that is not possible today.
It is ironic that the blocking of other features —like Google Code Search, which supposedly promotes the altruism of free software— are in contradiction to what the creators of Google have always declared themselves to be defenders.
Some of these restrictions, such as not being able to download programs that require payment, can be easily explained by US blockade laws against Cuba, which prevent most commercial transactions with the island. However, these laws directed against Cuba can be applied in third countries, like Spain and Argentina.
In the case of the Iberian nation, for example, Google Desktop states in its «Terms and Conditions” that these “will be regulated for and interpreted in accordance with Spanish legislation and regulations.»
That would mean that the denial by Google in Spain to offer this program to Cuba could be violating Spanish laws, because there is no type of commercial limitation between Cuba and that country that prevents the exchange of products.
This same situation arises with Argentina, a country where the administrative offices of many Google are located, and to whose national laws the company is subject. Therefore the denial of some service by virtue of the American Helms-Burton Act, or any other another absurd US regulation, would be in fact a violation of the laws of that South American country.
A question without an answer
It would be absurd not to recognize that the enormous utility of Google is an indispensable tool for the acquisition and exchange of knowledge.
The Cuban government has even facilitated Google’s effort to create a customize page for the island under the national domain «cu.»
It is necessary then to wonder why the super searcher doesn't respond equally and facilitate national access to all of its benefits; or is it that perhaps Google is also blockading us now?
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
Israeli military aid to Burmese regime: Crisis in Burma - it's good for the Zionists!
jews sans frontieres
AN ANTI-ZIONIST BLOG - BROWSING THE MEDIA
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Crisis in Burma - it's good for the Zionists!
News just in the from the World War IV Report. Killing unarmed demonstrators in Burma is good for Jews. See this:
The Burmese junta currently shooting unarmed protestors received a cynical plea for restraint from the Israel government on Sept. 29. According to the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, the Israeli foreign ministry announced "Israel is concerned by the situation in Myanmar, and urges the government to demonstrate restraint and refrain from harming demonstrators." The article ended by pointing out that "Israel denies selling weapons to Burma or Myanmar." (Ha'aretz, Sept. 29)
Not true, according a March 1, 2000 report in the authoritative British publication Jane's Intelligence Review by William Ashton. The article, titled "Myanmar and Israel develop military," details how Israeli companies and the Israeli government have been supplying and developing weapons for the Burmese regime, and sharing intelligence:
In August 1997 it was revealed that the Israeli defence manufacturing company Elbit had won a contract to upgrade Myanmar's (then) three squadrons of Chinese-built F-7 fighters and FT-7 trainers. The F-7 is a derivative of the Mikoyan MiG-21 'Fishbed' jet fighter. The FT-7 is the export version of the GAIC JJ-7, itself a copy of the MiG-21 'Mongol-B' trainer. Since they began to be delivered by China in 1991, the Myanmar Air Force has progressively acquired about 54 (or four squadrons) of these aircraft, the latest arriving at Hmawbi air base only last year. In related sales, the air force has also acquired about 350 PL-2A air-to-air missiles (AAM) from China and at least one shipment of the more sophisticated PL-5 AAMs.
Since their delivery to Myanmar, these new aircraft have caused the air force considerable problems. Several aircraft (and pilots) have already been lost through accidents, raising questions about the reliability of the Chinese technology. There have also been reliable reports that the F-7s were delivered without the computer software to permit the AAMs to be fired in flight. Also, the air force has complained that the F-7s are difficult to maintain, in part reflecting major differences between the structure and underlying philosophy of the Myanmar and Chinese logistics systems. Spare parts have been in very short supply. In addition, the air force seems to have experienced difficulties in using the F-7 (designed primarily for air defence) in a ground attack role. These, and other problems, seem to have prompted the air force to turn to Israel for assistance.
Of course if there are sanctions against Burma, as it's not "illegal" to discuss boycotts of states other than Israel, this will be even better for Jews because Israel has always been chief among sanction busters. Ask a South African. No ask a Rhodesian. Oh dear, you can't ask a Rhodesian, Rhodesia no longer exists.
Israeli military aid to Burmese regime: Jane's
http://ww4report.com/node/4491
Submitted by David Bloom on Sat, 09/29/2007 - 20:14.
The Burmese junta currently shooting unarmed protestors received a cynical plea for restraint from the Israel government on Sept. 29. According to the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, the Israeli foreign ministry announced "Israel is concerned by the situation in Myanmar, and urges the government to demonstrate restraint and refrain from harming demonstrators." The article ended by pointing out that "Israel denies selling weapons to Burma or Myanmar." (Ha'aretz, Sept. 29)
Not true, according to a March 1, 2000 report in the authoritative British publication Jane's Intelligence Review by William Ashton. The article, titled "Myanmar and Israel develop military pact," details how Israeli companies and the Israeli government have been supplying and developing weapons for the Burmese regime, and sharing intelligence:
In August 1997 it was revealed that the Israeli defence manufacturing company Elbit had won a contract to upgrade Myanmar's (then) three squadrons of Chinese-built F-7 fighters and FT-7 trainers. The F-7 is a derivative of the Mikoyan MiG-21 'Fishbed' jet fighter. The FT-7 is the export version of the GAIC JJ-7, itself a copy of the MiG-21 'Mongol-B' trainer. Since they began to be delivered by China in 1991, the Myanmar Air Force has progressively acquired about 54 (or four squadrons) of these aircraft, the latest arriving at Hmawbi air base only last year. In related sales, the air force has also acquired about 350 PL-2A air-to-air missiles (AAM) from China and at least one shipment of the more sophisticated PL-5 AAMs.
Since their delivery to Myanmar, these new aircraft have caused the air force considerable problems. Several aircraft (and pilots) have already been lost through accidents, raising questions about the reliability of the Chinese technology. There have also been reliable reports that the F-7s were delivered without the computer software to permit the AAMs to be fired in flight. Also, the air force has complained that the F-7s are difficult to maintain, in part reflecting major differences between the structure and underlying philosophy of the Myanmar and Chinese logistics systems. Spare parts have been in very short supply. In addition, the air force seems to have experienced difficulties in using the F-7 (designed primarily for air defence) in a ground attack role. These, and other problems, seem to have prompted the air force to turn to Israel for assistance.
According to sources in the international arms market, 36 of Myanmar's F-7 fighters are to be retro-fitted with the Elta EL/M- 2032 air-to-air radar, Rafael Python 3 infrared, short range AAMs, and Litening laser designator pods. The same equipment will also be installed on the two-seater FT-7 fighter trainers. In a related deal, Israel will also sell Myanmar at least one consignment of laser-guided bombs. Since the Elbit contract was won in 1997, the air force has acquired at least one more squadron of F-7 and FT-7 aircraft from China, but it is not known whether the Israeli-backed upgrade programme will now be extended to include the additional aircraft. Myanmar's critical shortage of foreign exchange will be a major factor in the SPDC's decision.
The army has also benefited from Myanmar's new closeness to Israel.
As part of the regime's massive military modernisation and expansion programme, considerable effort has been put into upgrading the army's artillery capabilities. In keeping with its practice of never abandoning any equipment of value, the army clearly still aims, as far as possible, to keep older weapons operational. (Pakistan, for example, has recently provided Myanmar with ammunition for its vintage 25 pounder field guns). The older UK, US and Yugoslav guns in the Tatmadaw's [Myanmar Armed Forces] inventory have been supplemented over the past 10 years with a range of new towed and self-propelled artillery pieces. Purchased mainly from China, they include 122mm howitzers, anti-tank guns, 57mm Type 80 anti-aircraft guns, 37mm Type 74 anti-aircraft guns and 107mm Type 63 multiple rocket launchers. In a barter deal brokered by China last year, the SPDC has also managed to acquire about 16 130mm artillery pieces from North Korea. Despite all this new firepower, however, the army has still looked to Israel to help equip its new artillery battalions.
Around 1998 Myanmar negotiated the purchase of 16 155mm Soltam towed howitzers, possibly through a third party like Singapore. These guns are believed to be second-hand pieces no longer required by the Israel Defence Force. Last year, ammunition for these guns (including high explosive and white phosphorous rounds) was ordered from Pakistan's government ordnance factories. Before the purchase of these new Chinese and North Korean weapons, Myanmar's largest artillery pieces were 105mm medium guns, provided by the USA almost 40 years ago. Acquiring the Israeli weapons thus marks a major capability leap for Myanmar's army gunners. It is possible that either Israel or Pakistan has provided instructors to help the army learn to use and maintain these new weapons.
Nor has the Myanmar Navy missed out on Israeli assistance. There have been several reports that Israel is playing a crucial role in the construction and fitting out of three new warships, currently being built in Yangon.
Myanmar's military leaders have long wanted to acquire two or three frigates to replace the country's obsolete PCE-827 and Admirable- class corvettes, decommissioned in 1994, and its two 1960s-vintage Nawarat-class corvettes, which have been gradually phased out since 1989. As military ties with China rapidly grew during the 1990s, the SLORC hoped to buy two or three Jiangnan- or even Jianghu-class frigates, but it could not afford even the special 'friendship' prices being asked by Beijing. As a compromise, the SPDC has now purchased three Chinese hulls, and is currently fitting them out as corvettes in Yangon's Sinmalaik shipyard.
According to reliable reports, the three vessels will each be about 75m long and displace about 1,200 tons. Despite a European Community embargo against arms sales to Myanmar, the ships' main guns are being imported (apparently through a third party) from Italy. Based on the information currently available, they are likely to be 76mm OTO Melara Compact guns, weapons which (perhaps coincidentally) have been extensively combat-tested by the Israeli Navy on its Reshef- class fast attack missile patrol boats. The corvettes will probably also be fitted with anti-submarine weapons, but it is not known what, if any, surface-to-surface and SAMs the ships will carry.
Israel's main role in fitting out the three corvettes is apparently to provide their electronics suites. Details of the full contract are not known, but it is expected that each package will include at least a surface-search radar, a fire-control radar, a navigation radar and a hull-mounted sonar.
The first of these warships will probably be commissioned and commence sea trials later this year.
Only sales or a strategic imperative?
While Myanmar remains a pariah state, subject to comprehensive sanctions by the USA and European Community, it is unlikely that Israel will ever admit publicly to having military links with the Tatmadaw. Until it does, the reasons for Israel's secret partnership with the Yangon regime will remain unclear. A number of factors, however, have probably played a part in influencing policy decisions in Tel Aviv.
There is clearly a strong commercial imperative behind some of these ventures. From a regional base in Singapore, with which it shares a very close relationship, Israel has already managed to penetrate the lucrative Chinese arms market. It is now aggressively seeking new targets for sales of weapons and military equipment in the Asia- Pacific. These sales are sometimes supported by offers of technology transfers and specialised advice. This approach has led to fears among some countries that Israel will introduce new military capabilities into the region which could encourage a mini arms race, as others attempt to catch up. The weapon systems being provided to the Myanmar armed forces are not that new, and the Asian economic crisis has dramatically reduced the purchasing power of many regional countries, but Israel's current activities in Myanmar will add to those concerns.
Given the nature of some of these sales, and other probable forms of military assistance to Myanmar, these initiatives would appear to enjoy the strong support of the Israeli government. In addition to the ever-present trade imperative, one reason for this support could be a calculation by senior Israeli officials that closer ties to Myanmar could reap diplomatic and intelligence dividends. For example, Myanmar is now a full member of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which, despite the economic crisis, is still a major force in a part of the world which has received much closer attention from strategic analysts since the end of the Cold War. Israel's regional base will remain Singapore, but it is possible that Tel Aviv believes Myanmar can provide another avenue for influence in ASEAN, and a useful vantage point from which to monitor critical strategic developments in places like China and India.
In particular, Israel is interested in the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the transfer of technologies related to the development of ballistic and other missiles. Myanmar has close military relations with China and Pakistan, both of which have been accused of transferring sensitive weapons technologies to rogue Islamic states, such as Iran. Myanmar is also a neighbour of India, another nuclear power that has resisted international pressure to curb its proliferation activities. Yangon could thus be seen by Israel as a useful listening post from which to monitor and report on these countries.
Also, despite accusations over the years that Myanmar has developed chemical and biological weapons, and more convincing arguments that Israel has a sizeable nuclear arsenal of its own, both countries share an interest in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Myanmar's support for anti-proliferation initiatives, in multilateral forums like the UN General Assembly and the Committee on Disarmament, would seem to be worth a modest investment by the Israeli government in bilateral relations with the SPDC. In addition to training Myanmar agriculturalists in Israel, assisting the Tatmadaw to upgrade its military capabilities seems a sure way of getting close to the Yangon regime.
Israel's repeated denial of any military links with Myanmar are not unexpected. Israel has never liked advertising such ties, particularly with countries like Myanmar, South Africa and China, which have been condemned by the international community for gross abuses of human rights. Even Israel's very close military ties with Singapore are routinely denied by both sides. Yet there seems little room for doubt that, after the 1988 takeover, Israel did start to develop close links with the SLORC, which are continuing to grow under the SPDC. In these circumstances, it would be surprising if Israel was not still looking for opportunities to restore the kind of mutually beneficial bilateral relationship that was first established when both countries became independent modern states in 1948.
It is noteworthy that Elbit Systems is one of the Israeli companies involved in Myanmar. Elbit supplies electronics used in the separation wall that Israel is building illegally in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, enclosing up to 10% of Palestinian land on the "Israeli" side. It is ironic that Israel expresses concern about protestors being killed by the Burmese military it supplies, when Israel itself has killed ten Palestinians protesting the annexation of large sections of their farmland, and injured hundreds of others, including Israeli and international demonstators, who have been beaten, arrested and expelled by the Israeli military. (JPost, Sept. 5) Just today in the village of Bil'in in the West Bank, the Israeli military injured nine non-violent protestors, according to the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC, Sept. 29)
That the Burmese military has fired into crowds recalls that a month into the second Palestinian intifada, before any armed attacks or shooting came from the Palestinian side, Israeli forces had fired 1.3 million bullets at Palestinians, according to Yitzhak Laor, an Israeli columnist who often writes for Ha'aretz:
A month after the Intifada began, four years ago, Major General Amos Malka, by then No. 3 in the military hierarchy, and until 2001 the head of Israeli military Intelligence (MI), asked one of his officers (Major Kuperwasser) how many 5.56 bullets the Central Command had fired during that month (that is, only in the West Bank). Three years later Malka talked about these horrific figures. This is what he said to Ha'aretz's diplomatic commentator, Akiva Eldar about the first month of the Intifada, 30 days of unrest, no terrorist attacks yet, no Palestinian shooting:
Kuperwasser got back to me with the number, 850,000 bullets. My figure was 1.3 million bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. This is a strategic figure that says that our soldiers are shooting and shooting and shooting. I asked: "Is this what you intended in your preparations?" and he replied in the negative. I said: "Then the significance is that we are determining the height of the flames." (Ha'aretz, 11.6.2004).
It was a bullet for every Palestinian child, said one of the officers in that meeting, or at least this is what the Israeli daily Maariv revealed two years ago, when the horrible figures were first leaked. It didn't much change "public opinion", neither here nor in the West, neither two years ago nor 4 months ago when Malka finally opened his mouth. It read as if it had happened somewhere else, or a long time ago, or as if it was just one version, a voice in a polyphony, hiding behind the principle theme: we, the Israelis are right, and they are wrong. (Counterpunch, Oct. 20, 2004)
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
AN ANTI-ZIONIST BLOG - BROWSING THE MEDIA
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Crisis in Burma - it's good for the Zionists!
News just in the from the World War IV Report. Killing unarmed demonstrators in Burma is good for Jews. See this:
The Burmese junta currently shooting unarmed protestors received a cynical plea for restraint from the Israel government on Sept. 29. According to the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, the Israeli foreign ministry announced "Israel is concerned by the situation in Myanmar, and urges the government to demonstrate restraint and refrain from harming demonstrators." The article ended by pointing out that "Israel denies selling weapons to Burma or Myanmar." (Ha'aretz, Sept. 29)
Not true, according a March 1, 2000 report in the authoritative British publication Jane's Intelligence Review by William Ashton. The article, titled "Myanmar and Israel develop military," details how Israeli companies and the Israeli government have been supplying and developing weapons for the Burmese regime, and sharing intelligence:
In August 1997 it was revealed that the Israeli defence manufacturing company Elbit had won a contract to upgrade Myanmar's (then) three squadrons of Chinese-built F-7 fighters and FT-7 trainers. The F-7 is a derivative of the Mikoyan MiG-21 'Fishbed' jet fighter. The FT-7 is the export version of the GAIC JJ-7, itself a copy of the MiG-21 'Mongol-B' trainer. Since they began to be delivered by China in 1991, the Myanmar Air Force has progressively acquired about 54 (or four squadrons) of these aircraft, the latest arriving at Hmawbi air base only last year. In related sales, the air force has also acquired about 350 PL-2A air-to-air missiles (AAM) from China and at least one shipment of the more sophisticated PL-5 AAMs.
Since their delivery to Myanmar, these new aircraft have caused the air force considerable problems. Several aircraft (and pilots) have already been lost through accidents, raising questions about the reliability of the Chinese technology. There have also been reliable reports that the F-7s were delivered without the computer software to permit the AAMs to be fired in flight. Also, the air force has complained that the F-7s are difficult to maintain, in part reflecting major differences between the structure and underlying philosophy of the Myanmar and Chinese logistics systems. Spare parts have been in very short supply. In addition, the air force seems to have experienced difficulties in using the F-7 (designed primarily for air defence) in a ground attack role. These, and other problems, seem to have prompted the air force to turn to Israel for assistance.
Of course if there are sanctions against Burma, as it's not "illegal" to discuss boycotts of states other than Israel, this will be even better for Jews because Israel has always been chief among sanction busters. Ask a South African. No ask a Rhodesian. Oh dear, you can't ask a Rhodesian, Rhodesia no longer exists.
Israeli military aid to Burmese regime: Jane's
http://ww4report.com/node/4491
Submitted by David Bloom on Sat, 09/29/2007 - 20:14.
The Burmese junta currently shooting unarmed protestors received a cynical plea for restraint from the Israel government on Sept. 29. According to the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, the Israeli foreign ministry announced "Israel is concerned by the situation in Myanmar, and urges the government to demonstrate restraint and refrain from harming demonstrators." The article ended by pointing out that "Israel denies selling weapons to Burma or Myanmar." (Ha'aretz, Sept. 29)
Not true, according to a March 1, 2000 report in the authoritative British publication Jane's Intelligence Review by William Ashton. The article, titled "Myanmar and Israel develop military pact," details how Israeli companies and the Israeli government have been supplying and developing weapons for the Burmese regime, and sharing intelligence:
In August 1997 it was revealed that the Israeli defence manufacturing company Elbit had won a contract to upgrade Myanmar's (then) three squadrons of Chinese-built F-7 fighters and FT-7 trainers. The F-7 is a derivative of the Mikoyan MiG-21 'Fishbed' jet fighter. The FT-7 is the export version of the GAIC JJ-7, itself a copy of the MiG-21 'Mongol-B' trainer. Since they began to be delivered by China in 1991, the Myanmar Air Force has progressively acquired about 54 (or four squadrons) of these aircraft, the latest arriving at Hmawbi air base only last year. In related sales, the air force has also acquired about 350 PL-2A air-to-air missiles (AAM) from China and at least one shipment of the more sophisticated PL-5 AAMs.
Since their delivery to Myanmar, these new aircraft have caused the air force considerable problems. Several aircraft (and pilots) have already been lost through accidents, raising questions about the reliability of the Chinese technology. There have also been reliable reports that the F-7s were delivered without the computer software to permit the AAMs to be fired in flight. Also, the air force has complained that the F-7s are difficult to maintain, in part reflecting major differences between the structure and underlying philosophy of the Myanmar and Chinese logistics systems. Spare parts have been in very short supply. In addition, the air force seems to have experienced difficulties in using the F-7 (designed primarily for air defence) in a ground attack role. These, and other problems, seem to have prompted the air force to turn to Israel for assistance.
According to sources in the international arms market, 36 of Myanmar's F-7 fighters are to be retro-fitted with the Elta EL/M- 2032 air-to-air radar, Rafael Python 3 infrared, short range AAMs, and Litening laser designator pods. The same equipment will also be installed on the two-seater FT-7 fighter trainers. In a related deal, Israel will also sell Myanmar at least one consignment of laser-guided bombs. Since the Elbit contract was won in 1997, the air force has acquired at least one more squadron of F-7 and FT-7 aircraft from China, but it is not known whether the Israeli-backed upgrade programme will now be extended to include the additional aircraft. Myanmar's critical shortage of foreign exchange will be a major factor in the SPDC's decision.
The army has also benefited from Myanmar's new closeness to Israel.
As part of the regime's massive military modernisation and expansion programme, considerable effort has been put into upgrading the army's artillery capabilities. In keeping with its practice of never abandoning any equipment of value, the army clearly still aims, as far as possible, to keep older weapons operational. (Pakistan, for example, has recently provided Myanmar with ammunition for its vintage 25 pounder field guns). The older UK, US and Yugoslav guns in the Tatmadaw's [Myanmar Armed Forces] inventory have been supplemented over the past 10 years with a range of new towed and self-propelled artillery pieces. Purchased mainly from China, they include 122mm howitzers, anti-tank guns, 57mm Type 80 anti-aircraft guns, 37mm Type 74 anti-aircraft guns and 107mm Type 63 multiple rocket launchers. In a barter deal brokered by China last year, the SPDC has also managed to acquire about 16 130mm artillery pieces from North Korea. Despite all this new firepower, however, the army has still looked to Israel to help equip its new artillery battalions.
Around 1998 Myanmar negotiated the purchase of 16 155mm Soltam towed howitzers, possibly through a third party like Singapore. These guns are believed to be second-hand pieces no longer required by the Israel Defence Force. Last year, ammunition for these guns (including high explosive and white phosphorous rounds) was ordered from Pakistan's government ordnance factories. Before the purchase of these new Chinese and North Korean weapons, Myanmar's largest artillery pieces were 105mm medium guns, provided by the USA almost 40 years ago. Acquiring the Israeli weapons thus marks a major capability leap for Myanmar's army gunners. It is possible that either Israel or Pakistan has provided instructors to help the army learn to use and maintain these new weapons.
Nor has the Myanmar Navy missed out on Israeli assistance. There have been several reports that Israel is playing a crucial role in the construction and fitting out of three new warships, currently being built in Yangon.
Myanmar's military leaders have long wanted to acquire two or three frigates to replace the country's obsolete PCE-827 and Admirable- class corvettes, decommissioned in 1994, and its two 1960s-vintage Nawarat-class corvettes, which have been gradually phased out since 1989. As military ties with China rapidly grew during the 1990s, the SLORC hoped to buy two or three Jiangnan- or even Jianghu-class frigates, but it could not afford even the special 'friendship' prices being asked by Beijing. As a compromise, the SPDC has now purchased three Chinese hulls, and is currently fitting them out as corvettes in Yangon's Sinmalaik shipyard.
According to reliable reports, the three vessels will each be about 75m long and displace about 1,200 tons. Despite a European Community embargo against arms sales to Myanmar, the ships' main guns are being imported (apparently through a third party) from Italy. Based on the information currently available, they are likely to be 76mm OTO Melara Compact guns, weapons which (perhaps coincidentally) have been extensively combat-tested by the Israeli Navy on its Reshef- class fast attack missile patrol boats. The corvettes will probably also be fitted with anti-submarine weapons, but it is not known what, if any, surface-to-surface and SAMs the ships will carry.
Israel's main role in fitting out the three corvettes is apparently to provide their electronics suites. Details of the full contract are not known, but it is expected that each package will include at least a surface-search radar, a fire-control radar, a navigation radar and a hull-mounted sonar.
The first of these warships will probably be commissioned and commence sea trials later this year.
Only sales or a strategic imperative?
While Myanmar remains a pariah state, subject to comprehensive sanctions by the USA and European Community, it is unlikely that Israel will ever admit publicly to having military links with the Tatmadaw. Until it does, the reasons for Israel's secret partnership with the Yangon regime will remain unclear. A number of factors, however, have probably played a part in influencing policy decisions in Tel Aviv.
There is clearly a strong commercial imperative behind some of these ventures. From a regional base in Singapore, with which it shares a very close relationship, Israel has already managed to penetrate the lucrative Chinese arms market. It is now aggressively seeking new targets for sales of weapons and military equipment in the Asia- Pacific. These sales are sometimes supported by offers of technology transfers and specialised advice. This approach has led to fears among some countries that Israel will introduce new military capabilities into the region which could encourage a mini arms race, as others attempt to catch up. The weapon systems being provided to the Myanmar armed forces are not that new, and the Asian economic crisis has dramatically reduced the purchasing power of many regional countries, but Israel's current activities in Myanmar will add to those concerns.
Given the nature of some of these sales, and other probable forms of military assistance to Myanmar, these initiatives would appear to enjoy the strong support of the Israeli government. In addition to the ever-present trade imperative, one reason for this support could be a calculation by senior Israeli officials that closer ties to Myanmar could reap diplomatic and intelligence dividends. For example, Myanmar is now a full member of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which, despite the economic crisis, is still a major force in a part of the world which has received much closer attention from strategic analysts since the end of the Cold War. Israel's regional base will remain Singapore, but it is possible that Tel Aviv believes Myanmar can provide another avenue for influence in ASEAN, and a useful vantage point from which to monitor critical strategic developments in places like China and India.
In particular, Israel is interested in the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the transfer of technologies related to the development of ballistic and other missiles. Myanmar has close military relations with China and Pakistan, both of which have been accused of transferring sensitive weapons technologies to rogue Islamic states, such as Iran. Myanmar is also a neighbour of India, another nuclear power that has resisted international pressure to curb its proliferation activities. Yangon could thus be seen by Israel as a useful listening post from which to monitor and report on these countries.
Also, despite accusations over the years that Myanmar has developed chemical and biological weapons, and more convincing arguments that Israel has a sizeable nuclear arsenal of its own, both countries share an interest in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Myanmar's support for anti-proliferation initiatives, in multilateral forums like the UN General Assembly and the Committee on Disarmament, would seem to be worth a modest investment by the Israeli government in bilateral relations with the SPDC. In addition to training Myanmar agriculturalists in Israel, assisting the Tatmadaw to upgrade its military capabilities seems a sure way of getting close to the Yangon regime.
Israel's repeated denial of any military links with Myanmar are not unexpected. Israel has never liked advertising such ties, particularly with countries like Myanmar, South Africa and China, which have been condemned by the international community for gross abuses of human rights. Even Israel's very close military ties with Singapore are routinely denied by both sides. Yet there seems little room for doubt that, after the 1988 takeover, Israel did start to develop close links with the SLORC, which are continuing to grow under the SPDC. In these circumstances, it would be surprising if Israel was not still looking for opportunities to restore the kind of mutually beneficial bilateral relationship that was first established when both countries became independent modern states in 1948.
It is noteworthy that Elbit Systems is one of the Israeli companies involved in Myanmar. Elbit supplies electronics used in the separation wall that Israel is building illegally in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, enclosing up to 10% of Palestinian land on the "Israeli" side. It is ironic that Israel expresses concern about protestors being killed by the Burmese military it supplies, when Israel itself has killed ten Palestinians protesting the annexation of large sections of their farmland, and injured hundreds of others, including Israeli and international demonstators, who have been beaten, arrested and expelled by the Israeli military. (JPost, Sept. 5) Just today in the village of Bil'in in the West Bank, the Israeli military injured nine non-violent protestors, according to the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC, Sept. 29)
That the Burmese military has fired into crowds recalls that a month into the second Palestinian intifada, before any armed attacks or shooting came from the Palestinian side, Israeli forces had fired 1.3 million bullets at Palestinians, according to Yitzhak Laor, an Israeli columnist who often writes for Ha'aretz:
A month after the Intifada began, four years ago, Major General Amos Malka, by then No. 3 in the military hierarchy, and until 2001 the head of Israeli military Intelligence (MI), asked one of his officers (Major Kuperwasser) how many 5.56 bullets the Central Command had fired during that month (that is, only in the West Bank). Three years later Malka talked about these horrific figures. This is what he said to Ha'aretz's diplomatic commentator, Akiva Eldar about the first month of the Intifada, 30 days of unrest, no terrorist attacks yet, no Palestinian shooting:
Kuperwasser got back to me with the number, 850,000 bullets. My figure was 1.3 million bullets in the West Bank and Gaza. This is a strategic figure that says that our soldiers are shooting and shooting and shooting. I asked: "Is this what you intended in your preparations?" and he replied in the negative. I said: "Then the significance is that we are determining the height of the flames." (Ha'aretz, 11.6.2004).
It was a bullet for every Palestinian child, said one of the officers in that meeting, or at least this is what the Israeli daily Maariv revealed two years ago, when the horrible figures were first leaked. It didn't much change "public opinion", neither here nor in the West, neither two years ago nor 4 months ago when Malka finally opened his mouth. It read as if it had happened somewhere else, or a long time ago, or as if it was just one version, a voice in a polyphony, hiding behind the principle theme: we, the Israelis are right, and they are wrong. (Counterpunch, Oct. 20, 2004)
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
In a speech at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended Iran's right to nuclear power but denied Iran was seeking to build nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad's appearance sparked widespread protests at Columbia. We speak with Trita Parsi, author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" and Baruch professor Ervand Abrahamian, co-author of "Targeting Iran."
Ervand Abrahamian, Iran expert and CUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of several books on Iran and the co-author of a new book from City Lights called "Targeting Iran."
Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the largest Iranian-American organization in the US. He is the author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States."
AMY GOODMAN: For more on Ahmadinejad's visit, we're joined by two guests. Ervand Abrahamian is an Iran expert and CUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College here at the City University of New York. He's the author of several books on Iran, co-author of a new book from City Lights called Targeting Iran. And joining me from Washington, D.C. is Trita Parsi. He’s the president of the National Iranian American Council, the largest Iranian American organization in the United States, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States.
First, Ervand Abrahamian, can you talk about the president's visit? Did anything he said -- this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- surprise you?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I was surprised because he didn't really use the opportunity to try to lower the tempo, the serious problem we have now, which is we're at the abyss of war, basically. And there are people pushing for war in the next few months. And this would have been a very good opportunity to try to smooth things over, try to calm the tempo down.
And it's not just he who missed the opportunity. I think Bollinger missed the opportunity. In fact, Bollinger's speech was like a drumbeat for war. And most of the questions from the audience missed the opportunity. They dealt basically with important identity questions, but they didn't really deal with the issue that we are really on the abyss of war. And this is a far more serious issue than, you know, either ethnic or gender issues.
And he, actually, I think -- although he made some statements about Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons, he could have been more forthright and more categorical about the policies of Iran in terms of the nuclear project.
AMY GOODMAN: Does this remind you of Saddam Hussein before the war?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: It does. In fact, Ahmadinejad didn't say it last night -- yesterday, but his policy is that there is no likelihood of war, because no one in their right senses would think of invading or attacking Iran. And that's the premise he works on, which is, I think, a completely wrong premise, because he doesn't seem to understand American politics, the same people who gave us the war on Iraq, the same people who are running foreign policy now. But he begins from the premise that no one in their right senses would think of attacking Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you have written a very interesting book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. Can you take us back in time and talk about the relationship, the secret dealings, between these three countries?
TRITA PARSI: Israel has for a very long time been a critical factor in America's formulation of a policy vis-Ã -vis Iran. But what's really interesting is that the influence of Israel has gone in completely different directions, if we just go back fifteen years. During the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian Revolution, in spite of Ayatollah Khomeini’s many, many harsh remarks about Israel, far, far worse than what anything Ahmadinejad has said so far, Israel at the time was the country that was lobbying the United States to open up talks with Iran to try to rebuild the US-Iran relations, because of strategic imperatives that Israel had. Israel needed Iran, because it was fearing the Arab world and a potential war with the Arabs.
After 1991, ’92, that's when you see the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations, because that's when the entire geopolitical map of the Middle East is redrawn. The Soviet Union collapses. The last standing army of the Arabs, that of Saddam Hussein, is defeated in the Persian Gulf War. And you have an entirely new security environment in the Middle East, in which the two factors, the Soviets and the Arabs, that had pushed Iran and Israel closer together suddenly evaporate. But as their security environment improves, they also start to realize that they may be ending up in a situation in which they can become potential threats to each other. And that's when you see how the Israelis shift 180 degrees. Now the Israeli argument was that the United States should not talk to Iran, because there is no such thing as Iranian moderates.
And ever since, the Israelis and the pro-Israel interest in the United States have lobbied to make sure that there is no dialogue or there’s no rapprochement between the United States and Iran. And the Iranians have done similar things. They have undermined every US foreign policy initiative in the Middle East that they feared would be beneficial to Israel. So the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations come after the Cold War, not with the revolution in 1979.
AMY GOODMAN: But I also do want you to go right back to 1948 and talk about that period up to 1991. What were the secret relationships?
TRITA PARSI: Well, immediately after Israel was founded, Iran was actually one of the states on the committee at the UN who was preparing a plan, and they were against the partition. They were against the idea of creating two states. And Iran, at the time, said that this would lead to several decades of crisis. But once Israel was a fact, the Iranian government felt that because it was facing a hostile Arab world, as well as a very hostile Arab ideology, Pan-Arabism, Israel was a potential ally for the Iranians, particularly as Israel started to shift closer and closer to the Western camp and the United States. So throughout the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the Iranians and the Israelis were working very, very closely together, had a very robust alliance.
They tried to keep it secret. It wasn't necessarily very secret, but Iran never recognized Israel de jure. They recognized it de facto. They had an Israeli mission in Tehran, but they never permitted it to be called an embassy. They had an Israeli envoy to Tehran, but they never called him an ambassador. When the Israeli planes were landing at the Tehran airport, they created -- they built a specific tarmac off the airport for Israeli planes to land, so that no one would really see that there are so many El Al planes flying to Tehran. And the reason why the Iranians were doing this is because, on the one hand, they needed Israel as an ally because they were fearful of the Arab world, and, on the other hand, they felt that if they got too close to Israel, they would only fuel Arab anger towards Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you have a number of revelations in your book. One of them is that the Iranian prime minister asked Israel permission to assassinate Khomeini. Describe the circumstance.
TRITA PARSI: Circumstances was right before the revolution, in which the Israelis were very, very concerned. They were fearful that the new regime would be very hostile to Israel, and they weren't certain that they would be able to build the same type of secret relations with Iran as they had during the time of the Shah. It later on turned out that they actually did have that ability, not to the same extent, but they still could do it.
But the Iranian prime minister was eager to be able to get rid of Khomeini, fearing -- thinking that by Khomeini being eliminated, the revolution would be able to move in a different direction. And he asked the Israelis if they could do it, because Khomeini at the time was in Paris; the Iranians did not have the ability to do anything, but they thought that perhaps the Israelis would. The Israeli answer was apparently that this is not Israel's job and that Israel is not the policemen of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Israel reaching out to Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War?
TRITA PARSI: After the first Persian Gulf War, there was a thinking in Israel at the time that Saddam had now been weakened, he was no longer a real threat, and at the end of the day the real potential threat in the future, the rising power, was Iran. So the Israelis were trying to find different ways of being able to find some sort of a modus vivendi with Saddam Hussein.
This significantly angered the Clinton administration, that was pursuing a policy of isolating both Iran and Iraq at the same time, and they were very annoyed that the Israelis were trying to find some sort of a relationship with Saddam in the midst of all of that.
Now, the Israeli initiative didn't go anywhere, but it was guided by the thinking that Iran was going to be the major threat. And even though Iran at the time really was not a threat to Israel, Israel already at that time treated it as an actual threat.
AMY GOODMAN: The United States foiling Iran's plan to withdraw support from Hamas and Hezbollah.
TRITA PARSI: We talked about that before, that there was a 2003 proposal that the Iranians sent over to the United States trying to find a larger accommodation between the United States and Iran, in which they basically put all the different issues on the table, including an offer, within the framework of the negotiations, to disarm Hezbollah and turn it into a mere political organization -- had that happened, there would probably not have been a war last year between Israel and Lebanon -- secondly, to end all support for Islamic jihad and Hamas and encourage the Palestinians to go a political route, rather than military route, in their dealings with Israel.
But what’s revealed in the book, as well, that has not been out in the media a lot is that prior to giving this proposal to the United States, the Iranians were fishing it around in Europe, trying to create some support for it. And, most importantly, they went to places that they knew Israelis were going to be. And they were presenting the framework, the concept of this grand bargain, and they wanted to make sure that the Israelis felt that this would not be something that would come at their expense, because they were concerned that the Israelis would try to undermine it. So they were basically sending a signal: Look, if we can have this accommodation with the United States, we will disentangle and basically not be so involved in the Israeli-Palestinian issue anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi is author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. Our guest also, Ervand Abrahamian, Iran expert, Distinguished Professor at Baruch College. I wanted, Professor Abrahamian, to read from Juan Cole's piece, who says, talking about Ahmadinejad, “He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament,” that Khamenei is the one with the real power.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He is right on target, yes. I think Juan Cole sums it up. And the question is, then, why is basically in American politics so much focused on Ahmadinejad? I think he serves the function that Saddam Hussein played. He's an easy person to demonize. And yesterday's Bollinger's introduction, when he described him as a dictator, I think, shows how little people like Bollinger really know about the Iranian political system. One can call Ahmadinejad many things, but a dictator he is by no means. He can’t even -- he doesn't even have the power to appoint his own cabinet ministers. It's a presidency with very limited power. And to claim that he is in a position to threaten the United States or Israel is just bizarre, frankly. I think someone like Bollinger should know more about Iran before they sling around smears like terms such as “dictator.”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about Khamenei, then, if he is the one with real power.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Here, again, he is, you can say, the Supreme Leader, but the Iranian system is actually very sort of a collective leadership. The foreign policy is made in a council, where the Supreme Leader appoints those members, but there are very different views there. And Ahmadinejad does not run that committee. Someone like Rafsanjani has a great deal of influence. The former President Khatami has a great deal of influence. And they are much more willing to negotiate.
In fact, they were, I think, the people who offered this grand bargain in 2003 to settle all the issues with the United States. And for reasons that are not clear, the White House just basically brushed it aside. They were not interested in pursuing this. And this is why it leads me to think that this administration is adamant in resolving the nuclear problem by military force, because if it was interested in resolving it through diplomacy, there were offers made to them to follow that route, and they have very consciously decided not follow the diplomatic routes. So if you don't follow the diplomatic route, the only other route there is is the military route. And, of course, it’s only a question of time when they decide on air strikes.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Trita Parsi, about this Newsweek magazine report that says that Vice President Cheney considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the US a pretext to attack Iran. A few months before he quit, the Middle East Adviser to Cheney, David Wurmser, told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz and perhaps other sites, in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. Citing two knowledgeable sources, Newsweek put out this report. Your response?
TRITA PARSI: I think it's definitely a plausible scenario, because one thing that we know for certain, with great certainty, is that the Israelis lack the military capability to take out Iran's nuclear program. They can attack it, but they cannot destroy it. And the only thing that it would result to is some sort of Iranian retaliation, which would then suck the United States right into the conflict, because the United States would not be able to stand without it -- outside of it, and obviously many elements in the White House would probably prefer to immediately get into it.
One of the things that I describe in the book that I think is extremely important is that when you take a look at how Iran has made its decisions vis-Ã -vis Israel, it's actually been geopolitical and strategic factors that have been driving their decisions. It’s not been ideology. And I think this is a critical point, because right now you have a metaphor being presented by Bibi Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, in which he's saying that it's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And then he goes on to imply that Ahmadinejad is Hitler. If we accept that premise, that it is 1938, that Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then who, which leader, in his or her right mind, would want to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? It's a metaphor whose premise basically puts us in a situation in which conflict is completely inevitable. And there's no other way, because negotiations and diplomacy simply cannot be pursued.
Fortunately, this is a false premise. Iran and Israel and the United States and Israel are not engaged in an ideological zero-sum game battle. This is a strategic rivalry. It is solvable, but it requires a tremendous amount of diplomacy to be able to find a way out of it. And unfortunately, right now, diplomacy is the last thing that one can describe the foreign policies of these countries, particularly the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: I interviewed exiled Iranian activist Azar Derakhshan earlier this summer. She's the editor of the Women of March 8 magazine and helped organize the 2006 European march against anti-women laws in Iran. I just want to play an excerpt from my conversation with her. This is Azar Derakhshan.
AZAR DERAKHSHAN: I have seen a portrait in the media, Western media. In the media, there is two sides. There is the United States and government of Iran. There are clashes. And the people, the voice of people is absent completely. And the opinion of -- foreigner opinion, they think that this thing, the future of Iran is going to be decided by these two powers.
I try to tell to the people in foreigner countries, in European countries, it's not true, this portrait. There is another fact, very important. The people of Iran, the movement, they are going to take the future. They are not forced to choose between neither the United States, neither the government of Iran. There is another force in Iran. If really somebody wants to prevent the war, the clashes, should be support this movement, this movement for equality, for freedom.
We don't need United States to liberate us. First of all, we are here, and this is our legitimate to liberate ourselves. We want to decide about our future ourselves. We want to fight our native enemy by ourselves. We don’t need -- that’s first. Second one, we already have seen, because Afghanistan and Iraq, they are neighbor of Iran. And the women of Iran, they can see it. Maybe before, not, but right now it’s really -- it’s enough to know what kind of program they have for the people of Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Iranian dissident, Azar Derakhshan. Professor Abrahamian, your response?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think she's right in that there are -- Iran is a very complicated society. There are very different political movements. And the idea that somehow it's a frozen system, that it's not going to change, already precludes any type of possibility of negotiations and changes. In fact, the Iranian system has an electoral system -- is and electoral system. We are going to come up with elections very soon. There is no guarantee that Ahmadinejad would be re-elected again. It's very possible that reformers, liberals, would get in into power again.
AMY GOODMAN: When is the election?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: In less than two years' time. And the base, in fact, of Ahmadinejad’s -- I would say the core base -- is very similar to Bush's core base. It's about 25%. For him to get re-elected, he has to stretch out and find independents and others, and this is going to be very hard. If the reformers can actually rally around one candidate, as they did in the 1990s, they could have landslide victories, in which over 70% of the electorate was voting for liberals and reformers.
AMY GOODMAN: And what direction would a US attack on Iran push the election?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Oh, it would play right into the hands of Ahmadinejad, because you would have a national emergency. He would declare, basically, the country's in danger. Everyone would have to rally around the flag. People who disliked him would keep their mouth shut. At a time of when the existence of the state is in question, you don't mess around with the leaders. He would basically be able to act as a much more of a strongman national leader.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you've had unusual access to US decision makers, Israeli decision makers, Iranian leaders. What is your sense of a strike, the US or Israel, on Iran? Is it imminent?
TRITA PARSI: Well, I don't think an Israeli strike is imminent, unless there is some sort of coordination with the United States with the aim of being able to draw the US into the conflict. I do believe that some sort of a conflict between the United States and Iran is quite probable right now, mindful of the lack of diplomacy that is taking place.
And I also do believe that this is not necessarily something that will go away automatically just because there's going to be a change of government in the United States within the next two years. Many of the decisions that are made right now have the impact of limiting the maneuverability of future administrations. We're making it more and more difficult, not only for this administration, but also for future administrations, to pursue diplomacy.
And what we're seeing in the Middle East right now is not necessarily just a conflict over what's going on in Iraq or about Iran's nuclear program. This is a conflict that, at the end of the day, is about two powerhouses in the region, and it's a conflict about hegemony, for lack of a better word.
And these type of shifts, with the United States currently declining and finding itself in a more and more difficult situation in Iraq and with Iran finding itself in a stronger position and acting very, very confidently, these type of shifts historically do not take place peacefully, unless there is a tremendous amount of diplomacy. And again, we're not seeing that right now.
And I’m very concerned that even if we manage to avoid war for the next two years, the next US administration may find itself in a position in which its maneuverability is so limited that the military option once again becomes a very viable one for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Could Ahmadinejad be playing a game like Saddam Hussein, where if it is clear he doesn't have nuclear weapons, he's weaker, the US would be more likely to attack? He looks at the example of North Korea, where they do have nuclear weapons, and now the US is just pursuing a diplomatic option?
TRITA PARSI: I think there's a combination of two. On the one hand, I think a lot of his statements and his behavior is aimed to be a deterrent against the United States. He's acting confident, and he's talking about the United States not being able to attack. This is a way of saying that the US can't do it, and if you do it, you will face a tremendously difficult situation. So he's doing this partly, too, as a deterrence. It has the negative impact of scaring the daylights out of a lot of people, including a lot of Iran's neighbors that are now gravitating towards the United States's position, because they are very fearful of what Ahmadinejad may be capable of doing.
At the same time, I do believe that, to a certain extent, but not fully, he has actually convinced himself that Iran is in such a strong position, the United States is in such a weak position, that it can't do it. But I think it's a combination of these two. And I think it's important to keep in mind that most of the belligerence that he's doing is probably for the purpose of deterrence, not necessarily as an offensive strategy.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran's role in Iraq?
TRITA PARSI: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Iran's role in Iraq?
TRITA PARSI: I think the Iranians have played a game in Iraq in which they basically have invested in every potential faction in Iraq, making sure that whoever comes up on top is going to be a player who has strong relations with Iran, because it's in Iran’s hardcore national interest to make sure that Iraq never again becomes a hostile state, so they never have to experience the eight-year war that they had with Iraq in the 1980s. So, again, I think we're seeing a policy by the Iranian government there that is quite independent of whether Ahmadinejad is in power or not. It's probably something that another Iranian government would be pursuing, as well, at least under this regime that we're having in Iran right now.
And I think the only way for the United States to be able to find a way out of Iraq is not only to talk to the Iranians, but really include all of the other neighbors of Iraq into the process, giving these neighbors not only a stake in the outcome, but also a stake in the process itself. We have a tremendous amount of problems with what the Saudis are doing in Iraq and also what the Jordanians are doing. We're not talking about that at all. On the contrary, we’re just focusing on Iran's role.
AMY GOODMAN: Saudi's role, very briefly?
TRITA PARSI: Saudi’s role -- well, a military report just came out about two months ago -- it was leaked in the LA Times -- that showed that about 45% of all the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi nationals. We've known for quite some time that there's a lot of money flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia that is going to the Sunni insurgents, because their belief is that they're fighting a war against Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. We're not talking about that.
On the contrary, Saudi Arabia got praised by Ambassador Crocker during his testimony. And I think it's a very one-sided way of looking at the problems we're facing in Iraq. And as long as we pursue a very political perspective on the Iraqi situation, then I fear that we will continue to be in a rather difficult mess over there.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
TRITA PARSI: Thank you so much for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Your book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. And a final question for Professor Abrahamian: Are you afraid for your people? Are you afraid for the people of Iran?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes. I’m very much concerned that in the next few months there will be air strikes. I think what we saw before with Iraq, we are having a rerun of that, very much the same rhetoric. The same type of people are pushing for war and using even the same sort of arguments that often -- unsubstantiated arguments blown out of proportion. For instance, the constant drumbeat that Iran is actually supplying weaponry to the insurgents that are killing Americans, this is basically saying that Iran has already declared war on the United States. When you try to actually pin down what is the evidence for that, it boils down to the yellowcake stories and the stuff about Saddam Hussein being behind al-Qaeda. Until the United States actually gets real evidence that Iran is providing lethal weapons to the insurgents, I would not accept any of those arguments at face value.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Abrahamian, thank you, as well, for being with us. Ervand Abrahamian is author of the book Targeting Iran.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Ervand Abrahamian, Iran expert and CUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of several books on Iran and the co-author of a new book from City Lights called "Targeting Iran."
Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the largest Iranian-American organization in the US. He is the author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States."
AMY GOODMAN: For more on Ahmadinejad's visit, we're joined by two guests. Ervand Abrahamian is an Iran expert and CUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College here at the City University of New York. He's the author of several books on Iran, co-author of a new book from City Lights called Targeting Iran. And joining me from Washington, D.C. is Trita Parsi. He’s the president of the National Iranian American Council, the largest Iranian American organization in the United States, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States.
First, Ervand Abrahamian, can you talk about the president's visit? Did anything he said -- this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- surprise you?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I was surprised because he didn't really use the opportunity to try to lower the tempo, the serious problem we have now, which is we're at the abyss of war, basically. And there are people pushing for war in the next few months. And this would have been a very good opportunity to try to smooth things over, try to calm the tempo down.
And it's not just he who missed the opportunity. I think Bollinger missed the opportunity. In fact, Bollinger's speech was like a drumbeat for war. And most of the questions from the audience missed the opportunity. They dealt basically with important identity questions, but they didn't really deal with the issue that we are really on the abyss of war. And this is a far more serious issue than, you know, either ethnic or gender issues.
And he, actually, I think -- although he made some statements about Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons, he could have been more forthright and more categorical about the policies of Iran in terms of the nuclear project.
AMY GOODMAN: Does this remind you of Saddam Hussein before the war?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: It does. In fact, Ahmadinejad didn't say it last night -- yesterday, but his policy is that there is no likelihood of war, because no one in their right senses would think of invading or attacking Iran. And that's the premise he works on, which is, I think, a completely wrong premise, because he doesn't seem to understand American politics, the same people who gave us the war on Iraq, the same people who are running foreign policy now. But he begins from the premise that no one in their right senses would think of attacking Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you have written a very interesting book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. Can you take us back in time and talk about the relationship, the secret dealings, between these three countries?
TRITA PARSI: Israel has for a very long time been a critical factor in America's formulation of a policy vis-Ã -vis Iran. But what's really interesting is that the influence of Israel has gone in completely different directions, if we just go back fifteen years. During the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian Revolution, in spite of Ayatollah Khomeini’s many, many harsh remarks about Israel, far, far worse than what anything Ahmadinejad has said so far, Israel at the time was the country that was lobbying the United States to open up talks with Iran to try to rebuild the US-Iran relations, because of strategic imperatives that Israel had. Israel needed Iran, because it was fearing the Arab world and a potential war with the Arabs.
After 1991, ’92, that's when you see the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations, because that's when the entire geopolitical map of the Middle East is redrawn. The Soviet Union collapses. The last standing army of the Arabs, that of Saddam Hussein, is defeated in the Persian Gulf War. And you have an entirely new security environment in the Middle East, in which the two factors, the Soviets and the Arabs, that had pushed Iran and Israel closer together suddenly evaporate. But as their security environment improves, they also start to realize that they may be ending up in a situation in which they can become potential threats to each other. And that's when you see how the Israelis shift 180 degrees. Now the Israeli argument was that the United States should not talk to Iran, because there is no such thing as Iranian moderates.
And ever since, the Israelis and the pro-Israel interest in the United States have lobbied to make sure that there is no dialogue or there’s no rapprochement between the United States and Iran. And the Iranians have done similar things. They have undermined every US foreign policy initiative in the Middle East that they feared would be beneficial to Israel. So the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations come after the Cold War, not with the revolution in 1979.
AMY GOODMAN: But I also do want you to go right back to 1948 and talk about that period up to 1991. What were the secret relationships?
TRITA PARSI: Well, immediately after Israel was founded, Iran was actually one of the states on the committee at the UN who was preparing a plan, and they were against the partition. They were against the idea of creating two states. And Iran, at the time, said that this would lead to several decades of crisis. But once Israel was a fact, the Iranian government felt that because it was facing a hostile Arab world, as well as a very hostile Arab ideology, Pan-Arabism, Israel was a potential ally for the Iranians, particularly as Israel started to shift closer and closer to the Western camp and the United States. So throughout the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the Iranians and the Israelis were working very, very closely together, had a very robust alliance.
They tried to keep it secret. It wasn't necessarily very secret, but Iran never recognized Israel de jure. They recognized it de facto. They had an Israeli mission in Tehran, but they never permitted it to be called an embassy. They had an Israeli envoy to Tehran, but they never called him an ambassador. When the Israeli planes were landing at the Tehran airport, they created -- they built a specific tarmac off the airport for Israeli planes to land, so that no one would really see that there are so many El Al planes flying to Tehran. And the reason why the Iranians were doing this is because, on the one hand, they needed Israel as an ally because they were fearful of the Arab world, and, on the other hand, they felt that if they got too close to Israel, they would only fuel Arab anger towards Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you have a number of revelations in your book. One of them is that the Iranian prime minister asked Israel permission to assassinate Khomeini. Describe the circumstance.
TRITA PARSI: Circumstances was right before the revolution, in which the Israelis were very, very concerned. They were fearful that the new regime would be very hostile to Israel, and they weren't certain that they would be able to build the same type of secret relations with Iran as they had during the time of the Shah. It later on turned out that they actually did have that ability, not to the same extent, but they still could do it.
But the Iranian prime minister was eager to be able to get rid of Khomeini, fearing -- thinking that by Khomeini being eliminated, the revolution would be able to move in a different direction. And he asked the Israelis if they could do it, because Khomeini at the time was in Paris; the Iranians did not have the ability to do anything, but they thought that perhaps the Israelis would. The Israeli answer was apparently that this is not Israel's job and that Israel is not the policemen of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Israel reaching out to Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War?
TRITA PARSI: After the first Persian Gulf War, there was a thinking in Israel at the time that Saddam had now been weakened, he was no longer a real threat, and at the end of the day the real potential threat in the future, the rising power, was Iran. So the Israelis were trying to find different ways of being able to find some sort of a modus vivendi with Saddam Hussein.
This significantly angered the Clinton administration, that was pursuing a policy of isolating both Iran and Iraq at the same time, and they were very annoyed that the Israelis were trying to find some sort of a relationship with Saddam in the midst of all of that.
Now, the Israeli initiative didn't go anywhere, but it was guided by the thinking that Iran was going to be the major threat. And even though Iran at the time really was not a threat to Israel, Israel already at that time treated it as an actual threat.
AMY GOODMAN: The United States foiling Iran's plan to withdraw support from Hamas and Hezbollah.
TRITA PARSI: We talked about that before, that there was a 2003 proposal that the Iranians sent over to the United States trying to find a larger accommodation between the United States and Iran, in which they basically put all the different issues on the table, including an offer, within the framework of the negotiations, to disarm Hezbollah and turn it into a mere political organization -- had that happened, there would probably not have been a war last year between Israel and Lebanon -- secondly, to end all support for Islamic jihad and Hamas and encourage the Palestinians to go a political route, rather than military route, in their dealings with Israel.
But what’s revealed in the book, as well, that has not been out in the media a lot is that prior to giving this proposal to the United States, the Iranians were fishing it around in Europe, trying to create some support for it. And, most importantly, they went to places that they knew Israelis were going to be. And they were presenting the framework, the concept of this grand bargain, and they wanted to make sure that the Israelis felt that this would not be something that would come at their expense, because they were concerned that the Israelis would try to undermine it. So they were basically sending a signal: Look, if we can have this accommodation with the United States, we will disentangle and basically not be so involved in the Israeli-Palestinian issue anymore.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi is author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. Our guest also, Ervand Abrahamian, Iran expert, Distinguished Professor at Baruch College. I wanted, Professor Abrahamian, to read from Juan Cole's piece, who says, talking about Ahmadinejad, “He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament,” that Khamenei is the one with the real power.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: He is right on target, yes. I think Juan Cole sums it up. And the question is, then, why is basically in American politics so much focused on Ahmadinejad? I think he serves the function that Saddam Hussein played. He's an easy person to demonize. And yesterday's Bollinger's introduction, when he described him as a dictator, I think, shows how little people like Bollinger really know about the Iranian political system. One can call Ahmadinejad many things, but a dictator he is by no means. He can’t even -- he doesn't even have the power to appoint his own cabinet ministers. It's a presidency with very limited power. And to claim that he is in a position to threaten the United States or Israel is just bizarre, frankly. I think someone like Bollinger should know more about Iran before they sling around smears like terms such as “dictator.”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about Khamenei, then, if he is the one with real power.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Here, again, he is, you can say, the Supreme Leader, but the Iranian system is actually very sort of a collective leadership. The foreign policy is made in a council, where the Supreme Leader appoints those members, but there are very different views there. And Ahmadinejad does not run that committee. Someone like Rafsanjani has a great deal of influence. The former President Khatami has a great deal of influence. And they are much more willing to negotiate.
In fact, they were, I think, the people who offered this grand bargain in 2003 to settle all the issues with the United States. And for reasons that are not clear, the White House just basically brushed it aside. They were not interested in pursuing this. And this is why it leads me to think that this administration is adamant in resolving the nuclear problem by military force, because if it was interested in resolving it through diplomacy, there were offers made to them to follow that route, and they have very consciously decided not follow the diplomatic routes. So if you don't follow the diplomatic route, the only other route there is is the military route. And, of course, it’s only a question of time when they decide on air strikes.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Trita Parsi, about this Newsweek magazine report that says that Vice President Cheney considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the US a pretext to attack Iran. A few months before he quit, the Middle East Adviser to Cheney, David Wurmser, told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz and perhaps other sites, in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. Citing two knowledgeable sources, Newsweek put out this report. Your response?
TRITA PARSI: I think it's definitely a plausible scenario, because one thing that we know for certain, with great certainty, is that the Israelis lack the military capability to take out Iran's nuclear program. They can attack it, but they cannot destroy it. And the only thing that it would result to is some sort of Iranian retaliation, which would then suck the United States right into the conflict, because the United States would not be able to stand without it -- outside of it, and obviously many elements in the White House would probably prefer to immediately get into it.
One of the things that I describe in the book that I think is extremely important is that when you take a look at how Iran has made its decisions vis-Ã -vis Israel, it's actually been geopolitical and strategic factors that have been driving their decisions. It’s not been ideology. And I think this is a critical point, because right now you have a metaphor being presented by Bibi Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, in which he's saying that it's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And then he goes on to imply that Ahmadinejad is Hitler. If we accept that premise, that it is 1938, that Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then who, which leader, in his or her right mind, would want to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? It's a metaphor whose premise basically puts us in a situation in which conflict is completely inevitable. And there's no other way, because negotiations and diplomacy simply cannot be pursued.
Fortunately, this is a false premise. Iran and Israel and the United States and Israel are not engaged in an ideological zero-sum game battle. This is a strategic rivalry. It is solvable, but it requires a tremendous amount of diplomacy to be able to find a way out of it. And unfortunately, right now, diplomacy is the last thing that one can describe the foreign policies of these countries, particularly the Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: I interviewed exiled Iranian activist Azar Derakhshan earlier this summer. She's the editor of the Women of March 8 magazine and helped organize the 2006 European march against anti-women laws in Iran. I just want to play an excerpt from my conversation with her. This is Azar Derakhshan.
AZAR DERAKHSHAN: I have seen a portrait in the media, Western media. In the media, there is two sides. There is the United States and government of Iran. There are clashes. And the people, the voice of people is absent completely. And the opinion of -- foreigner opinion, they think that this thing, the future of Iran is going to be decided by these two powers.
I try to tell to the people in foreigner countries, in European countries, it's not true, this portrait. There is another fact, very important. The people of Iran, the movement, they are going to take the future. They are not forced to choose between neither the United States, neither the government of Iran. There is another force in Iran. If really somebody wants to prevent the war, the clashes, should be support this movement, this movement for equality, for freedom.
We don't need United States to liberate us. First of all, we are here, and this is our legitimate to liberate ourselves. We want to decide about our future ourselves. We want to fight our native enemy by ourselves. We don’t need -- that’s first. Second one, we already have seen, because Afghanistan and Iraq, they are neighbor of Iran. And the women of Iran, they can see it. Maybe before, not, but right now it’s really -- it’s enough to know what kind of program they have for the people of Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Iranian dissident, Azar Derakhshan. Professor Abrahamian, your response?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I think she's right in that there are -- Iran is a very complicated society. There are very different political movements. And the idea that somehow it's a frozen system, that it's not going to change, already precludes any type of possibility of negotiations and changes. In fact, the Iranian system has an electoral system -- is and electoral system. We are going to come up with elections very soon. There is no guarantee that Ahmadinejad would be re-elected again. It's very possible that reformers, liberals, would get in into power again.
AMY GOODMAN: When is the election?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: In less than two years' time. And the base, in fact, of Ahmadinejad’s -- I would say the core base -- is very similar to Bush's core base. It's about 25%. For him to get re-elected, he has to stretch out and find independents and others, and this is going to be very hard. If the reformers can actually rally around one candidate, as they did in the 1990s, they could have landslide victories, in which over 70% of the electorate was voting for liberals and reformers.
AMY GOODMAN: And what direction would a US attack on Iran push the election?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Oh, it would play right into the hands of Ahmadinejad, because you would have a national emergency. He would declare, basically, the country's in danger. Everyone would have to rally around the flag. People who disliked him would keep their mouth shut. At a time of when the existence of the state is in question, you don't mess around with the leaders. He would basically be able to act as a much more of a strongman national leader.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, you've had unusual access to US decision makers, Israeli decision makers, Iranian leaders. What is your sense of a strike, the US or Israel, on Iran? Is it imminent?
TRITA PARSI: Well, I don't think an Israeli strike is imminent, unless there is some sort of coordination with the United States with the aim of being able to draw the US into the conflict. I do believe that some sort of a conflict between the United States and Iran is quite probable right now, mindful of the lack of diplomacy that is taking place.
And I also do believe that this is not necessarily something that will go away automatically just because there's going to be a change of government in the United States within the next two years. Many of the decisions that are made right now have the impact of limiting the maneuverability of future administrations. We're making it more and more difficult, not only for this administration, but also for future administrations, to pursue diplomacy.
And what we're seeing in the Middle East right now is not necessarily just a conflict over what's going on in Iraq or about Iran's nuclear program. This is a conflict that, at the end of the day, is about two powerhouses in the region, and it's a conflict about hegemony, for lack of a better word.
And these type of shifts, with the United States currently declining and finding itself in a more and more difficult situation in Iraq and with Iran finding itself in a stronger position and acting very, very confidently, these type of shifts historically do not take place peacefully, unless there is a tremendous amount of diplomacy. And again, we're not seeing that right now.
And I’m very concerned that even if we manage to avoid war for the next two years, the next US administration may find itself in a position in which its maneuverability is so limited that the military option once again becomes a very viable one for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Could Ahmadinejad be playing a game like Saddam Hussein, where if it is clear he doesn't have nuclear weapons, he's weaker, the US would be more likely to attack? He looks at the example of North Korea, where they do have nuclear weapons, and now the US is just pursuing a diplomatic option?
TRITA PARSI: I think there's a combination of two. On the one hand, I think a lot of his statements and his behavior is aimed to be a deterrent against the United States. He's acting confident, and he's talking about the United States not being able to attack. This is a way of saying that the US can't do it, and if you do it, you will face a tremendously difficult situation. So he's doing this partly, too, as a deterrence. It has the negative impact of scaring the daylights out of a lot of people, including a lot of Iran's neighbors that are now gravitating towards the United States's position, because they are very fearful of what Ahmadinejad may be capable of doing.
At the same time, I do believe that, to a certain extent, but not fully, he has actually convinced himself that Iran is in such a strong position, the United States is in such a weak position, that it can't do it. But I think it's a combination of these two. And I think it's important to keep in mind that most of the belligerence that he's doing is probably for the purpose of deterrence, not necessarily as an offensive strategy.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran's role in Iraq?
TRITA PARSI: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Iran's role in Iraq?
TRITA PARSI: I think the Iranians have played a game in Iraq in which they basically have invested in every potential faction in Iraq, making sure that whoever comes up on top is going to be a player who has strong relations with Iran, because it's in Iran’s hardcore national interest to make sure that Iraq never again becomes a hostile state, so they never have to experience the eight-year war that they had with Iraq in the 1980s. So, again, I think we're seeing a policy by the Iranian government there that is quite independent of whether Ahmadinejad is in power or not. It's probably something that another Iranian government would be pursuing, as well, at least under this regime that we're having in Iran right now.
And I think the only way for the United States to be able to find a way out of Iraq is not only to talk to the Iranians, but really include all of the other neighbors of Iraq into the process, giving these neighbors not only a stake in the outcome, but also a stake in the process itself. We have a tremendous amount of problems with what the Saudis are doing in Iraq and also what the Jordanians are doing. We're not talking about that at all. On the contrary, we’re just focusing on Iran's role.
AMY GOODMAN: Saudi's role, very briefly?
TRITA PARSI: Saudi’s role -- well, a military report just came out about two months ago -- it was leaked in the LA Times -- that showed that about 45% of all the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudi nationals. We've known for quite some time that there's a lot of money flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia that is going to the Sunni insurgents, because their belief is that they're fighting a war against Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. We're not talking about that.
On the contrary, Saudi Arabia got praised by Ambassador Crocker during his testimony. And I think it's a very one-sided way of looking at the problems we're facing in Iraq. And as long as we pursue a very political perspective on the Iraqi situation, then I fear that we will continue to be in a rather difficult mess over there.
AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
TRITA PARSI: Thank you so much for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Your book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. And a final question for Professor Abrahamian: Are you afraid for your people? Are you afraid for the people of Iran?
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes. I’m very much concerned that in the next few months there will be air strikes. I think what we saw before with Iraq, we are having a rerun of that, very much the same rhetoric. The same type of people are pushing for war and using even the same sort of arguments that often -- unsubstantiated arguments blown out of proportion. For instance, the constant drumbeat that Iran is actually supplying weaponry to the insurgents that are killing Americans, this is basically saying that Iran has already declared war on the United States. When you try to actually pin down what is the evidence for that, it boils down to the yellowcake stories and the stuff about Saddam Hussein being behind al-Qaeda. Until the United States actually gets real evidence that Iran is providing lethal weapons to the insurgents, I would not accept any of those arguments at face value.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Abrahamian, thank you, as well, for being with us. Ervand Abrahamian is author of the book Targeting Iran.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
INTERVIEW WITH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST SEYMOUR HERSH - 'President Bush Accepted Ethnic Cleansing'
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam, and how the US press failed the First Amendment.
Seymour Hersh began his career as a police reporter. But since then, he has risen to become one of the most important investigative journalists in the history of American journalism. Hersh first made a name for himself in 1969 by uncovering the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Hersh has worked for the New Yorker since 1992 and in 2004 was instrumental in uncovering the US military's abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Hersh was in Berlin this week to accept the Democracy Prize handed out by the political journal "Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik."
Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.
For now, American troops are on the Iraq side of the border with Iran. Might that change?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York (more...) for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?
Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what (IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei (more...) and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?
Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What interest does the White House have in moving us to the brink with Tehran?
Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for going to war in Vietnam. You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again. I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even after Iraq? Aren't there strategic reasons for getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?
Hersh: Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?
Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?
Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" (eds. The "Surge" refers to President Bush's commitment of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security in the country.) as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?
Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.
SPIEGEL ONLINE:So what are the lessons of the Surge (more...)?
Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have the Shiites in the South.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?
Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but they don't care.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the Iraq war does end up as a defeat for the US, will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?
Hersh: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic. How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front, though, we'll rationalize it away. Don't worry about that. Again, there's no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We'll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?
Hersh: Oh yeah. They've done a better job since. But back then, they blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who's going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he's going to put everybody in jeopardy and he's secretive and he doesn't tell Congress anything and he's inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible failing. I'm asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they're going to have to live with it.
Interview conducted by Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Seymour Hersh began his career as a police reporter. But since then, he has risen to become one of the most important investigative journalists in the history of American journalism. Hersh first made a name for himself in 1969 by uncovering the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Hersh has worked for the New Yorker since 1992 and in 2004 was instrumental in uncovering the US military's abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Hersh was in Berlin this week to accept the Democracy Prize handed out by the political journal "Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik."
Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.
For now, American troops are on the Iraq side of the border with Iran. Might that change?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York (more...) for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?
Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what (IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei (more...) and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?
Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What interest does the White House have in moving us to the brink with Tehran?
Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for going to war in Vietnam. You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again. I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even after Iraq? Aren't there strategic reasons for getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?
Hersh: Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?
Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?
Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" (eds. The "Surge" refers to President Bush's commitment of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security in the country.) as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?
Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.
SPIEGEL ONLINE:So what are the lessons of the Surge (more...)?
Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have the Shiites in the South.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?
Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but they don't care.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the Iraq war does end up as a defeat for the US, will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?
Hersh: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic. How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front, though, we'll rationalize it away. Don't worry about that. Again, there's no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We'll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did in the run-up to the Iraq War?
Hersh: Oh yeah. They've done a better job since. But back then, they blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who's going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he's going to put everybody in jeopardy and he's secretive and he doesn't tell Congress anything and he's inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible failing. I'm asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they're going to have to live with it.
Interview conducted by Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Friday, September 21, 2007
Welcome to Planet Gaza By Pepe Escobar
THE ROVING EYE
By Pepe Escobar
It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded "international community"? It's the standard "three monkeys" - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.
This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet's decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a "hostile territory" has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun "gradually" to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.
Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza's hospitals will not be affected.
There's more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz so nicely put it, this is just a "plan to limit services to civilians".
Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.
This comes on top of other "restrictions" already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs".
It was up to AMIN (Arabic Media Internet Network), Ramallah's information site, to put things in perspective. Ramallah is in the West Bank. The West Bank is "friendly". Gaza is "hostile". So West Bank residents can now "thank God for having escaped this collective punishment" - even though they still have to contend with walls, curfews, military incursions, arbitrary arrests and a thousand checkpoints.
Residents of the "hostile entity", according to AMIN, will closely follow the example of the "friendly entity", where walls and blast walls still bloom. The (good) point is to have been classified as "friendly"; "It's better being half 'enemy' than being it full-time, it's more comfortable being half deprived of electricity and fuel, it's better being half exposed to air raids, it's more benign to be half destructed than totally."
AMIN also points out that Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah government in the West Bank can always blame Hamas' government in Gaza for this sorry outcome. Then the "secular" will win over the "Islamists". But there's still a choice to be made. Gaza, full of shame for being branded an "enemy", may succumb to Israel's dictates. Or the West Bank, full of shame for being branded "friendly", may fight Israel's dictates. Conclusion: "What's worse under occupation, to be an 'enemy' or to be a 'friend'?"
And now for the monkeys
While this was being announced, US President George W Bush's Sunni Arab allies in the "axis of fear" - from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf petromonarchies - had better fish to fry, from taking over almost half of the London Stock Exchange (Dubai, Qatar) to turning the screws on internal repression and fanning the specter of "the Persians". "Classic" al-Qaeda (not the diet Iraqi brand), through resident oracle Ayman al-Zawahiri in person and Osama bin Laden's voice, was more interested on its new video-op calling for a jihad against "infidel" Bush ally President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.
It was up to a lone, meek United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to urge Israel to "reconsider" its decision - which once more is "contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law" (as if that other occupying power, the US in Iraq, was giving a damn to the suffering of the Iraqi civilian population). Ban should have also explained what "hostile entity" means in international law: nothing.
Israeli strategy is to bring down the "quality" - non-quality, rather - of life in Gaza to unbearable levels, thus sabotaging any attempt by Hamas to govern the Strip properly. The crude Qassam rockets fired over Israel - the apparent reason for the blockade - are not even fired by Hamas, but by al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, for instance, connected to Islamic Jihad. The actual blockade anyway comes on top of any further military incursions, soon to be decided by Israel, according to the Israeli press.
The US subscribes to everything. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - who is right in the middle of intense lobbying for a US-sponsored, and already discredited, November peace conference - incredibly said that Hamas "is indeed a hostile entity. It is a hostile entity to the US as well." Nobody asked Rice what kind of "peace" she is exactly lobbying for.
Rice added that the US "will make every effort to deal with their [Palestinian] humanitarian needs". How? By bombing Gaza with cornflakes? "Hostile" Hamas called the plan "a declaration of war". "Friendly" Palestinian Authority chairman Abbas - who meets his friend Bush next week in New York - only called it "oppressive". It was up to one of his ministers, Ashraf Ajami, to dare to use the crystal-clear words "collective punishment".
Voices of reason in Israel, such as Meretz (leftist political party) chairman Yossi Beilin, at least had the courage to denounce the plan as "foolish as well as dangerous".
University of Michigan professor and Informed Comment blogger Juan Cole has defined Gaza as "the worst outcome of Western colonialism anywhere in the world outside the Belgian Congo". And just like contemporary Belgium in relation to the Congo, Israel will never admit to what it has inflicted on Palestine.
No wonder Likud superstar Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu loves these Likudnik-style methods. It proves how the majority of Israel's political elite is still wallowing in the mire of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist in love with fascism in 1930s Europe. This treatment of Palestinians bears all the elements of fascism: radical (Israeli) nationalism; racism (the demonization of Palestinians as a sub-race); colonialism; expansionism (the goal of Israel); a penchant for a military dictatorship (the preferred method for ruling Palestinians); and absolute indifference to the point of despising the (Arab) poor.
As much as peace and security for Israel are more than a just cause, the colonization and hardcore repression of the "friendly" West Bank and "hostile" Gaza are nothing but fascism. Professor Toni Negri, author of Empire and Multitudes, is one among throngs of top public intellectuals appalled that among so much cosmopolitanism at a global level, many Jews are simply not part of it, and are still attracted by "archaic and barbarian" ideologies such as Zionism.
Get me to my gulag on time
Planet Gaza may be our contemporary Congo - the heart of darkness, especially when taken in conjunction with that other heart of darkness, Iraq. There's nothing about a "Korea model" in Iraq - as much as Washington will try to keep an array of permanent military bases in Mesopotamia.
The logic of the US in Iraq is pure Planet Gaza. French geopolitical master Alain Joxe, in his book L'Empire du chaos, has been one of the few who have identified Palestine as the ultimate live textbook on urban repression - a "technical experiment" in the ultimate red zone carefully studied by the Pentagon, with all its known attributes (blast walls, checkpoints, pinpoint military incursions and "acquisition of targets", collective punishment, etc).
The Israeli wall penetrating the "friendly" West Bank like a dagger has been replicated by mini-walls in Baghdad. As much as Israeli armed settler/missionaries do their ethnic cleansing in slow motion in Palestine, mercenary Blackwater and their ilk do the dirty work in Iraq. "Friendly" West Bank Fatah and "hostile" Gaza Hamas are mirrored in Iraq by the "good" (Sunni tribes, collaborator Shi'ite parties Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Da'wa, the Kurds) and the "bad" (Sunni guerrillas, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, the Shi'ite Mahdi Army).
Iraq is actually Planet Gaza redux. According to British polling organization ORB, no fewer than 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violent deaths, most of them caused directly or indirectly by the occupation, since 2003. That's close to the entire population of Gaza.
Invisibility is also part of the logic of Planet Gaza. Invisibility at least for US and Israeli exceptionalism - as both could not possibly assimilate the hard truth pointing to US and Israeli administrations killing loads of innocent Arab civilians. The "international community" - an antiseptic construct that basically means the US and western Europe - may not see it; autocratic, incompetent, corrupt Arab leaders may not see it; but the real world - public opinion in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Russia - sees Planet Gaza for what it is. It's not about "al-Qaeda". It's not about "Islamo-fascist terrorists". It's about fighting neocolonialism. It's about national liberation. And - barring any possibility of dialogue - it's about perennial blowback.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
By Pepe Escobar
It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded "international community"? It's the standard "three monkeys" - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.
This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet's decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a "hostile territory" has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun "gradually" to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.
Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza's hospitals will not be affected.
There's more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz so nicely put it, this is just a "plan to limit services to civilians".
Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.
This comes on top of other "restrictions" already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs".
It was up to AMIN (Arabic Media Internet Network), Ramallah's information site, to put things in perspective. Ramallah is in the West Bank. The West Bank is "friendly". Gaza is "hostile". So West Bank residents can now "thank God for having escaped this collective punishment" - even though they still have to contend with walls, curfews, military incursions, arbitrary arrests and a thousand checkpoints.
Residents of the "hostile entity", according to AMIN, will closely follow the example of the "friendly entity", where walls and blast walls still bloom. The (good) point is to have been classified as "friendly"; "It's better being half 'enemy' than being it full-time, it's more comfortable being half deprived of electricity and fuel, it's better being half exposed to air raids, it's more benign to be half destructed than totally."
AMIN also points out that Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah government in the West Bank can always blame Hamas' government in Gaza for this sorry outcome. Then the "secular" will win over the "Islamists". But there's still a choice to be made. Gaza, full of shame for being branded an "enemy", may succumb to Israel's dictates. Or the West Bank, full of shame for being branded "friendly", may fight Israel's dictates. Conclusion: "What's worse under occupation, to be an 'enemy' or to be a 'friend'?"
And now for the monkeys
While this was being announced, US President George W Bush's Sunni Arab allies in the "axis of fear" - from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf petromonarchies - had better fish to fry, from taking over almost half of the London Stock Exchange (Dubai, Qatar) to turning the screws on internal repression and fanning the specter of "the Persians". "Classic" al-Qaeda (not the diet Iraqi brand), through resident oracle Ayman al-Zawahiri in person and Osama bin Laden's voice, was more interested on its new video-op calling for a jihad against "infidel" Bush ally President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.
It was up to a lone, meek United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to urge Israel to "reconsider" its decision - which once more is "contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law" (as if that other occupying power, the US in Iraq, was giving a damn to the suffering of the Iraqi civilian population). Ban should have also explained what "hostile entity" means in international law: nothing.
Israeli strategy is to bring down the "quality" - non-quality, rather - of life in Gaza to unbearable levels, thus sabotaging any attempt by Hamas to govern the Strip properly. The crude Qassam rockets fired over Israel - the apparent reason for the blockade - are not even fired by Hamas, but by al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, for instance, connected to Islamic Jihad. The actual blockade anyway comes on top of any further military incursions, soon to be decided by Israel, according to the Israeli press.
The US subscribes to everything. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - who is right in the middle of intense lobbying for a US-sponsored, and already discredited, November peace conference - incredibly said that Hamas "is indeed a hostile entity. It is a hostile entity to the US as well." Nobody asked Rice what kind of "peace" she is exactly lobbying for.
Rice added that the US "will make every effort to deal with their [Palestinian] humanitarian needs". How? By bombing Gaza with cornflakes? "Hostile" Hamas called the plan "a declaration of war". "Friendly" Palestinian Authority chairman Abbas - who meets his friend Bush next week in New York - only called it "oppressive". It was up to one of his ministers, Ashraf Ajami, to dare to use the crystal-clear words "collective punishment".
Voices of reason in Israel, such as Meretz (leftist political party) chairman Yossi Beilin, at least had the courage to denounce the plan as "foolish as well as dangerous".
University of Michigan professor and Informed Comment blogger Juan Cole has defined Gaza as "the worst outcome of Western colonialism anywhere in the world outside the Belgian Congo". And just like contemporary Belgium in relation to the Congo, Israel will never admit to what it has inflicted on Palestine.
No wonder Likud superstar Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu loves these Likudnik-style methods. It proves how the majority of Israel's political elite is still wallowing in the mire of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist in love with fascism in 1930s Europe. This treatment of Palestinians bears all the elements of fascism: radical (Israeli) nationalism; racism (the demonization of Palestinians as a sub-race); colonialism; expansionism (the goal of Israel); a penchant for a military dictatorship (the preferred method for ruling Palestinians); and absolute indifference to the point of despising the (Arab) poor.
As much as peace and security for Israel are more than a just cause, the colonization and hardcore repression of the "friendly" West Bank and "hostile" Gaza are nothing but fascism. Professor Toni Negri, author of Empire and Multitudes, is one among throngs of top public intellectuals appalled that among so much cosmopolitanism at a global level, many Jews are simply not part of it, and are still attracted by "archaic and barbarian" ideologies such as Zionism.
Get me to my gulag on time
Planet Gaza may be our contemporary Congo - the heart of darkness, especially when taken in conjunction with that other heart of darkness, Iraq. There's nothing about a "Korea model" in Iraq - as much as Washington will try to keep an array of permanent military bases in Mesopotamia.
The logic of the US in Iraq is pure Planet Gaza. French geopolitical master Alain Joxe, in his book L'Empire du chaos, has been one of the few who have identified Palestine as the ultimate live textbook on urban repression - a "technical experiment" in the ultimate red zone carefully studied by the Pentagon, with all its known attributes (blast walls, checkpoints, pinpoint military incursions and "acquisition of targets", collective punishment, etc).
The Israeli wall penetrating the "friendly" West Bank like a dagger has been replicated by mini-walls in Baghdad. As much as Israeli armed settler/missionaries do their ethnic cleansing in slow motion in Palestine, mercenary Blackwater and their ilk do the dirty work in Iraq. "Friendly" West Bank Fatah and "hostile" Gaza Hamas are mirrored in Iraq by the "good" (Sunni tribes, collaborator Shi'ite parties Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Da'wa, the Kurds) and the "bad" (Sunni guerrillas, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, the Shi'ite Mahdi Army).
Iraq is actually Planet Gaza redux. According to British polling organization ORB, no fewer than 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violent deaths, most of them caused directly or indirectly by the occupation, since 2003. That's close to the entire population of Gaza.
Invisibility is also part of the logic of Planet Gaza. Invisibility at least for US and Israeli exceptionalism - as both could not possibly assimilate the hard truth pointing to US and Israeli administrations killing loads of innocent Arab civilians. The "international community" - an antiseptic construct that basically means the US and western Europe - may not see it; autocratic, incompetent, corrupt Arab leaders may not see it; but the real world - public opinion in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Russia - sees Planet Gaza for what it is. It's not about "al-Qaeda". It's not about "Islamo-fascist terrorists". It's about fighting neocolonialism. It's about national liberation. And - barring any possibility of dialogue - it's about perennial blowback.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
History Will Not Absolve Us: Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial by Nat Hentoff
Global Research, September 20, 2007
Village Voice - 2007-08-28
If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament-as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).
While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world-or else governments wouldn't let them in.
But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do-on the orders of the president-to "protect American values."
She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place without it changing you."
Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques-without disclosing anything about them.
If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.
We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.
Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques-so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.
As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on-at the White House, really-and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were."
She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."
Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial-and Congress continues to stay asleep-future historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations-which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"-"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval (emphasis added).
In 2002, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the "torture" memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also tell us. But Powell's objections should keep him out of the defendants' dock in any future international trial.
From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department have utterly violated:
In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into U.S. law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which is defined as "an act 'committed by an [officially authorized] person' . . . specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control."
The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act "criminalizes . . . specifically enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as 'grave breaches' of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], including the war crimes of torture and 'cruel or inhuman treatment.'"
The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme Court- before Chief Justice John Roberts took over-into the war-crimes record of this administration. I strongly suggest that Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility send their report-with the following section underlined-to every current member of the Supreme Court and Congress:
"The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to violate substantive due process if the treatment 'shocks the conscience,' is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or offends 'a principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.'"
Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the report continues, are "the rights to bodily integrity [and] the right to have [one's] basic needs met; and the right to basic human dignity" (emphasis added).
If the conscience of a majority on the Roberts Court isn't shocked by what we've done to our prisoners, then it will be up to the next president and the next Congress-and, therefore, up to us-to alter, in some respects, how history will judge us. But do you see any considerable signs, among average Americans, of the conscience being shocked? How about the presidential candidates of both parties?
Global Research Articles by Nat Hentoff
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Village Voice - 2007-08-28
If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament-as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).
While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world-or else governments wouldn't let them in.
But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do-on the orders of the president-to "protect American values."
She quotes a former CIA officer: "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can't go back to that dark a place without it changing you."
Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques-without disclosing anything about them.
If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.
We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.
Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques-so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.
As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is "a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on-at the White House, really-and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were."
She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also "kept in . . . a small cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn't stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box."
Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial-and Congress continues to stay asleep-future historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The report emphasizes that the president's July executive order on CIA interrogations-which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning "torture and cruel and inhuman treatment"-"fails explicitly to rule out the use of the 'enhanced' techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, "with the president's approval (emphasis added).
In 2002, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the "torture" memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that reached the White House. It's a pity he didn't also tell us. But Powell's objections should keep him out of the defendants' dock in any future international trial.
From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department have utterly violated:
In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into U.S. law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which is defined as "an act 'committed by an [officially authorized] person' . . . specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control."
The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act "criminalizes . . . specifically enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as 'grave breaches' of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], including the war crimes of torture and 'cruel or inhuman treatment.'"
The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme Court- before Chief Justice John Roberts took over-into the war-crimes record of this administration. I strongly suggest that Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility send their report-with the following section underlined-to every current member of the Supreme Court and Congress:
"The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to violate substantive due process if the treatment 'shocks the conscience,' is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or offends 'a principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.'"
Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the report continues, are "the rights to bodily integrity [and] the right to have [one's] basic needs met; and the right to basic human dignity" (emphasis added).
If the conscience of a majority on the Roberts Court isn't shocked by what we've done to our prisoners, then it will be up to the next president and the next Congress-and, therefore, up to us-to alter, in some respects, how history will judge us. But do you see any considerable signs, among average Americans, of the conscience being shocked? How about the presidential candidates of both parties?
Global Research Articles by Nat Hentoff
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
US exceptionalism meets Team Jesus - Interview by Tom Engelhardt
He's a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned anti-war activist in the Vietnam era, Carroll also wrote a moving memoir about his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency.
Carroll in essence grew up in that five-sided monument to US imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was "the largest playhouse in the world", and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his socks, as he has written in the introduction to his recent magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.
As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice - and warn against - a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of September 11, 2001, when US President George W Bush referred briefly to his new "global war on terror" as a "crusade". Carroll was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the United States to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks - now just another of Bush's missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq war "lost" in print. ("The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?")
His stirring columns on the early years of Bush's attempt to bring "freedom" to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful moral voice from - to use a very American phrase - the (media) wilderness until much of the American world finally caught up with him.
He has most recently completed, with director Oren Jacoby, a stirring documentary film, also titled Constantine's Sword, in which he explores the roots of religiously inspired violence in our present world. He submitted to a Tomdispatch interview in August 2005 and when, this summer, I suggested that we meet again, he agreed to discuss "American fundamentalisms", a subject that receives remarkably less coverage and consideration than other fundamentalisms of the world.
We met on a warm day, just after a rare downpour in a dry summer, in the study of his house in the state of Massachusetts. His many books dot the bookshelves. Out the window is a piney landscape, not quite the one the Puritans first saw when they arrived from England early in the 17th century, but beautiful nonetheless. Carroll, his hair graying, has not so much a worn as a well-inhabited face. You can see him thinking as he speaks - not so common a trait as you might imagine. As he warms up to the subject of American fundamentalisms, his voice gains the quiet yet powerful passion that any reader of his weekly columns has come to expect, a passion that nonetheless leaves room for reason and criticism, for further thought.
I put my two small tape recorders on a modest coffee table, turned them on, asked my first question, and discovered that this was an interview in name only. It was more like being back in the most riveting classroom of my life. A single lecture, an hour's genuine education, stretching from America's first Puritan moments to Bush's Iraq, with hardly an interpolation needed on my part.
Tom Engelhardt: I recently heard this joke: How many neo-cons does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: Neo-cons don't believe in light bulbs, they declare war on evil and set the house on fire.
[Carroll chuckles.]
TE: That's my introduction to a discussion of American fundamentalism. Any comments?
James Carroll: Well, embedded in that joke is a central idea: that what matters is not outcome, but purity of intent. A mark of a fundamentalist mindset is that one's own personal virtue is the ultimate value. The American fundamentalist ethos of the Cold War prepared us to destroy the world. In other words, a world absolutely devastated through nuclear war was acceptable as an outcome because it reflected the virtue of our opposition to the evil of communism. Better dead than red.
TE: A phrase I hadn't thought about in a long time ...
JC: Better the world destroyed than taken over by communism. It's profoundly nihilistic, which is also one of the marks of the fundamentalist mindset. An irony, of course, is that so much, then and now, is done in the name of realism, but this is such a profoundly unrealistic way of thinking.
TE: It's in this sense, I suppose, that our president has been unable to learn. So give me the basics on American fundamentalisms, as you see them.
JC: First of all, what is fundamentalism? The word itself was coined in the early 20th century and applied to a particular brand of Protestantism. It comes from a determination to protect what were called, in foundational manifestos, the five fundamentals of Christian belief, particularly the inerrancy of scripture. Scripture can't make a mistake, right? It has to be read literally.
This was a counterattack against so-called liberal religion's embrace of the insights of the Enlightenment and the scientific age. Can you apply normal standards of historical criticism to religious belief? The fundamentalists said no, because normal standards might lead you to understand texts as having been composed in normal human circumstances, instead of inspired by God. So when you read the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus through the lens of historical critical method, you may conclude that the three kings never actually traveled to Bethlehem, that it's a mythical story created to make a point - a genre that the people who wrote it were comfortable with.
Fundamentalists reacted against any mitigating of the literal fact of the three kings. To read texts for their theological meaning rather than for their historical literalness would undercut the whole affirmation of the religion. The next thing, you'd be saying that Jesus didn't rise from the dead on the third day. And if that didn't happen, where are you?
That was then. Today, fundamentalism remains a useful point of reference in understanding the human panic that can be engendered by the uncertainties attached to Enlightenment thinking - when the world view of science tells you that nothing is dependable, that everything has to be submitted to the test of experimentation, verification.
My argument is that religious belief can mature, can be moved to a new level of sophistication by historical, critical, enlightened thinking, but a lot of people are completely threatened by it. Not to denigrate them. Human beings all over the world are dislocated - all of us are - by so many things we don't control, the various revolutions sweeping the globe, the degradation of the environment, the challenge to the very integrity of communities.
The 'city on a hill'
For our conversation, fundamentalist Christianity is a perfect paradigm within which to understand what has been happening in America, a profoundly Christian super-culture. America is also a secular nation, of course. The separation of church and state was a critical innovation, giving us this special standing as a people. The separation's purpose was to protect the conscientious freedom of every individual by making the state neutral on questions of religious conscience. An absolutely ingenious insight.
It's important, however, to understand the profoundly American origins of this insight. The argument began in the first generation. John Cotton, a Puritan preacher, embodied the first idea America had of itself, captured in the image his colleague John Winthrop used in defining the new settlement as "the city on a hill", a phrase that's fodder for political speeches every four years.
Americans don't generally like to think this way, but the United States of America is more descended from Massachusetts than Virginia - an important distinction, because the people who settled Virginia were adventurers and entrepreneurs. The people who settled Massachusetts were religious zealots who had left England as an act of dissent against the Church of England, which they considered too popish. Their dissent was against a certain kind of religion, but not in favor of religious freedom. They came to America assuming the power of the state over the religious convictions of the civic body.
TE: : They just wanted a different religion to do the coercing?
JC: Exactly. Of course, these folks thought of themselves as re-enacting the journey of Exodus. What was the city on a hill? Jerusalem, of course - a biblical reference. They had been brought out of the slave condition of a popish church. They were now across the water - think of "the Jordan River" as the Atlantic Ocean - in the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey. Hello, there are Canaanites here.
Finally, after 1,600 years, the true vision of Jesus Christ was going to be realized - and there was no room for another way of looking at it, no room for what we would call dissent, and certainly no room for any tolerance of the "paganism" of the native Americans. One of the first manifestations of the settlers' zealotry was the religious coercion that began to mark their relationships with the native Americans they met right here in this very place where we're now talking. They felt empowered to offer the ancient choice of conversion or death to the people they called the Indians.
One of the members of this early party objected. His name was Roger Williams, and he rejected the coercive violence he saw wielded against native peoples. He rejected the whole idea that the magistrate should be in charge of the religious impulse of the citizen. As a result, he was banished from Boston, exiled to Salem, then banished from Salem. Finally, he started his own foundation in what we call Rhode Island and organized a new kind of state in which the magistrate would have no power over the religious practice of the citizens. This is all within the first generation.
Roger Williams lost the argument in his own day, but he planted the seed of something. He was the first person to use the phrase "wall of separation" between the magistrate and the religion. One hundred eighty years later, Thomas Jefferson picks up that phrase to describe the distinction between the church and the state.
The point here is that the initial city-on-a-hill impulse has never stopped being part of our self-understanding - the idea of America as having a mission to the world or, in biblical terms, a mission to the gentiles. "Go forth and teach all nations," Jesus commands. This commission is implicit in George Bush's war to establish democracy - or "freedom" - everywhere. When Americans talk about freedom, it's our secular code word for salvation. There's no salvation outside the church; there's no freedom outside the American way of life. Notice how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet system, there is still something called the "Free World". As opposed to what?
A special mission to Iraq - and the world
This missionizing in the name of freedom is a basic American impulse. [President Abraham] Lincoln was the high priest of this rhetoric, "the last best hope of mankind". The United States of America is justified by the virtue of its mission. The entire movement of American power across the continent of North America was a movement to fulfill the "manifest destiny" of a free people extending freedom. Because this is understood as a profoundly virtuous impulse, we've seldom criticized it. As a nation, we have begun to reckon with the crime of slavery, but we haven't begun to reckon with the crime of genocide against the native American peoples. That's because we haven't really acknowledged what was wrong with it.
Think of that phrase - "manifest destiny". A key doctrine in what I am calling American fundamentalism. It remains an inch below the surface of the American belief system. What's interesting is that this sense of special mission cuts across the spectrum - right wing/left wing, liberals/conservatives - because generally the liberal argument against government policies since World War II is that our wars - Vietnam then, Iraq now - represent an egregious failure to live up to America's true calling. We're better than this. Even anti-war critics, who begin to bang the drum, do it by appealing to an exceptional American missionizing impulse. You don't get the sense, even from most liberals, that - no, America is a nation like other nations and we're going to screw things up the way other nations do.
TE: That kind of realism is in short supply here.
JC: It hardly exists even now.
Let me make one final point about that missionizing impulse, and the way it transcends right and left. One reason we're in Iraq today is because, in the 1990s, the left was split on the question of American violence, the proper use of American power. It was split over the issue of what was called "humanitarian intervention". There are times, it was argued, when the forceful exercise of American power is necessary for the sake of humanitarian causes. Human rights, beginning in [president] Jimmy Carter's day, became a new form of American religion. If conservatives go abroad speaking the language of freedom, liberals go abroad speaking the language of human rights. And if we have to destroy a nation so that it can exercise human rights, so be it. That's why, in the early days of the Iraq war, so many surprising people supported it.
The liberal embrace of humanitarian intervention is part of what set loose this new phenomenon of the Bush moment - an explicit appeal to religious motivation in the exercise of American power. Since George W Bush came to power, the religious right has been set free to use overt religious language, missionizing language that actually moves from "freedom" to "salvation", as a justification for American power. We cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein entirely in terms of a binary evil-versus-good contest. Bush's appeals to evil were a staple of his speechmaking from the earliest days of this war. The purpose of his war was, he told us, not just to spread democracy, but to end evil. You see what's happening. We've moved into specifically religious categories, and that was all right in America.
Tom, here's the thing that's important to acknowledge: if Americans are upset with the war in Iraq today, it's mainly because it failed. If we could have "ended evil" with this war, it would have been a good thing. It goes back to the joke you began with: if we have to destroy the world in order to purify it of evil, that's all right. It's the key to the apocalyptic mindset that Robert J Lifton has written about so eloquently, in which the destruction of the Earth can be an act of purification. The destruction of Iraq was an act of purification. Even today, look at the rhetoric that's unfolding as we begin to talk about ending the war in Iraq. It's the Iraqis who have failed. They wouldn't yield on their "sectarian" agendas. These people won't get together and form a cohesive government. Now, we're going to let them stew in their own mess. We're going to withdraw from this war because they're not worthy of us.
That's the mainstream Democratic anti-war position! America is a city on a hill, exceptional; so, if we do it, by definition it must be virtuous. If we've gone to Iraq and all hell's broken loose, it may be a fiasco, but in origin it can't be our fault because we were motivated by good intentions.
Now, put all of that in the context of this astounding religious resurgence ...
TE: It's the surge ...
JC [laughs]: Yes, the surge of overt religious claims within the United States government, people who understand themselves as fulfilling their sworn oaths to uphold the United States constitution in the name of religion. I interviewed the chief chaplain of the US Air Force, who said to me: "I have two commissions. One commission is to uphold the US constitution and the other is to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they go hand in hand with each other."
I grew up in the air force. I gotta tell ya, there was no chaplain in the air force in my day who would have said that. In fact, the chaplains I knew didn't see themselves as having a commission to preach the Gospel at all. You bent over backward not to do that when you were dealing with soldiers outside of the chapel.
A Christian defense of the nation
TE: You have a new film, based on your book Constantine's Sword, in which you explore this change at, among other places, the Air Force Academy, right?
JC: Yes, what happened there was striking. Take just this example: a couple of years ago, Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ rendered in profoundly fundamentalist ways, most terribly, the death of Jesus as caused by "the Jews", not the Romans. In that movie, [Pontius] Pilate is a good guy, the Jewish high priest the villain. Gibson justified this by saying it was how the Gospels tell the story, which is literally true. A fundamentalist reading of the Gospel story ignores what we know from history and from scientific inquiry and analysis of the Gospels. It wasn't "the Jews" who murdered Jesus, it was the Romans, pure and simple. There were complicated reasons why the Gospels were written that way, but a fundamentalist reading of those texts is dangerous. Gibson demonized the Jews, while celebrating grotesque violence as a mode of salvation, as willed by God.
And then that film was featured at the United States Air Force Academy. Its commanders made it clear that every one of the cadets, over 4,000 of them, was supposed to see that movie. Repeatedly over a week, every time cadets went into H H Arnold Mess Hall, they found fliers on their dinner plates announcing that this movie was being shown. I saw posters that said: "See The Passion of the Christ" and "This is an official Air Force Academy event, do not remove this poster."
As a result of that film, there was an outbreak of pressure, practically coercion, by born-again evangelical Christians aimed at non-Christian cadets and, in a special way, at Jews. This went on for months, and when the whistle was blown by a Jewish cadet and his father, the air force denied it, tried to cover it up. Yale University sent a team from the Yale Divinity School to investigate. They issued a devastating report. The commander at the academy was finally removed; the air force was forced to acknowledge that there was a problem.
In fact, the academy had allowed itself to become a proselytizing outpost for evangelical Christian mega-churches in the Colorado Springs area. Chief among them were Ted Haggard's and James Dobson's, both men then in the inner circle of the Bush White House, involved in the sort of faith-based initiatives that marked the Bush administration.
In the Pentagon today, there is active proselytizing by Christian groups that is allowed by the chain of command. When your superior expects you to show up at his prayer breakfast, you may not feel free to say no. It's not at all clear what will happen to your career. He writes your efficiency report. And the next thing you know, you have, in the culture of the Pentagon, more and more active religious outreach.
Imagine, then, a military motivated by an explicit Christian, missionizing impulse at the worst possible moment in our history, because we're confronting an enemy - and yes, we do have an enemy: fringe, fascist, nihilist extremists coming out of the Islamic world - who define the conflict entirely in religious terms. They too want to see this as a new "crusade". That's the language that Osama bin Laden uses. For the United States of America at this moment to allow its military to begin to wear the badges of a religious movement is a disaster!
TE: What does this point to, when it comes to the future?
JC: Well, the best thing that's happened, when it comes to all of this, has been the near-complete political and moral collapse of the Bush administration, but that doesn't mean this movement is going away. Bush was a sponsor of it. But look how it took off! Bush sponsored it, to take another example, in the Justice Department under attorney general [Alberto] Gonzales - all those born-again Christian lawyers coming from fundamentalist Christian law schools that have no history of excellence.
We must be aware that there's something much deeper than the Bush administration and a particular wing of the Republican Party at work here, however. This isn't just Karl Rove, though he was ingenious at exploiting it.
Let's go back to what kind of a nation the United States is. Here is something I read recently: though we are officially a secular people, there are more self-identified Christians in this country than self-identified Jews in Israel in percentage terms. We commonly think of Israel as a Jewish state. Something like 75% of Israelis would identify themselves as Jewish. Eighty percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian! And we're not a Christian nation? We have to be wary of our Christian roots and of the city-on-a-hill impulse that still lives just an inch below the surface.
Our war against the Soviet Union was a religious war. [Secretary of state] John Foster Dulles [under president Dwight Eisenhower] was practically explicit about this in his speeches, which were like sermons. Not just "communism", but "atheistic communism". Dwight D Eisenhower was baptized while he was president - part of a Cold War feeling that we were involved in a Christian defense of the nation against an atheistic enemy.
Huddling up for Team Jesus
TE: And, of course, he titled his memoir Crusade in Europe.
JC: Christian points of reference came very easily in those years, but what has made the Bush era especially dangerous is that a political party has explicitly, overtly embraced a religious movement for the political power it generates. Fundamentalists have their rights, their place, in America, but there's no place for a political movement that aims to take control of the levers of state power in the name of religion. That's a violation of the "wall of separation". You can't have military commanders giving orders down the chain of command that have religious content to them. You can't, on the eve of battle, require your soldiers to gather in a huddle the way a coach might, and say the Lord's Prayer.
TE: And yet it's happening ...
JC: It's happening all the time! At the Air Force Academy, "Team Jesus" was one of the nicknames for the football team and one of the most vociferous evangelical Christian proselytizers was the football coach. Look at it from his point of view. What happens when he can get his huddle together and they're all saying the Lord's Prayer? A chief military virtue is "unit cohesion". It can be created in any number of ways, but one shortcut is if you can get everybody into a kind of Pentecostal religious fervor. If you can get your young men and women feeling the presence of the Lord, they're going to fight better, possibly more selflessly. That's what's in it for the military. Let's think cynically. There may be some military commanders who don't give much of a damn about God, but who see what God can do for fighting spirit. It works.
Let's all gather around the Humvee before we head into this village. Let us pray. You can bet that's going on in Iraq right now. Here's the question: What happens to the kid who doesn't want to get around that Humvee or, more to the point, to the Muslim bystanders who see American soldiers invoking God on their way into battle?
TE: Or when you loose well-armed, even nuclear-armed people eager to purify the world ...
JC: If I have a point to make, it's this: the religious tradition of Christian fundamentalism is one thing; the tradition of American exceptionalism another. They both have their roots in the same experience. They were separated. Under George Bush they've been brought together.
TE: When it comes to the Bush administration, complete collapse or not, we know that this man, without the possibility of changing his mind, and his vice president, without the possibility of changing his mind, with whomever they can still control in their own government and military, are there until January 2009. What does it mean to have people in a fundamentalist mindset, but thoroughly embattled and on the downward slide? I wouldn't like to write off the next year and a half. It's a potential nightmare.
JC: It could indeed be. But this issue involves more than the temperament of George Bush. It involves the structure of the fundamentalist mind. One pillar is bipolarity - the understanding of reality as divided between good and evil; you're on the side of good and they're on the side of evil. However, they can begin by being Osama bin Laden's band, which then becomes the Taliban, which becomes Afghanistan, which becomes all the Muslims who ever talked about the Great Satan, which becomes Iraq, and now maybe Iran, and even critics in the US. "They", "they", "they". We see that progression in Bush.
A second pillar is an absolute allergy to doubt. The fundamentalist mindset doesn't survive once you admit doubt or self-criticism. When asked for an example of a mistake he had made, Bush surprised people two years ago by claiming he couldn't think of one. The tragedy of Bush is, if you ask that question of him today, I'm sure he would answer the same way.
A world religiously aflame
Let's just step back a minute, though. How different are the Democratic presidential candidates really? What I hear from them, too, is a world divided between the good and the bad. I also hear - this is the meaning of the new rhetoric about the failure of Iraq being the failure of Iraqis - that we Americans are not to criticize what we've done in any basic way. "I wouldn't renounce my vote." "The president lied to me, that's why I voted the way I did." No capacity for self-criticism, for doubt.
You know, the genius of the American system - why the constitution is worth defending - is that our constitution comes from Roger Williams, not John Winthrop and John Cotton. It assumes a world not divided between good and evil, but one where everybody participates in the whole mess.
What are checks and balances? The constitution's authors understood that even people motivated by good intentions are going to screw up. So everybody, every institution, needs to be checked. This system assumes not bipolarity but unipolarity, in the sense that we're all capable of mistakes, that we all have to be constantly criticized. The constitution is an ingenious structure for living in the real world.
TE: And yet, in recent years, the presidency and the Pentagon, in particular, as you've written in your history of the Pentagon, House of War, have seemingly grown beyond institutional checks and balances.
JC: The question today is whether the constitution continues to exist as anything beyond a kind of totem, a vestige. Recent history certainly suggests that the Pentagon is now "unchecked". And if we can end our present war by blaming the Iraqis, then the Pentagon will be immune from criticism and prepared for the next foray of American power. That's why we must challenge this laying the blame on the Iraqi people, as if their "sectarianism" weighs more than our hubris. As of now, I fear, we'll be getting out of this war with what brought us into it intact.
TE: People sometimes ask me about Iraq: "Well, what would you do?" It's a question that drives me crazy. I always think: Well, why didn't you ask me back when it mattered? Why didn't you ask me when I could have said, "Don't go in"? So I'm hesitant to ask you, but if you had the power to begin to organize people in some fashion, what first steps would you take to mend this world?
JC: Let me just say that we've been talking only America here, in part because I think people are attuned to the threat from what's called "Islamic fundamentalism". My own conviction is that a crucial 21st-century problem is going to be Christian fundamentalism. Its global growth is an unnoticed story in the United States. Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are now absolutely on fire with zealous belief in the saving power of Jesus, in the most intolerant of ways. A religious ideology that affirms the salvific power of violence is taking hold. It denigrates people who are not part of the saved community, permitting discrimination, and ultimately violence. Hundreds of millions of people are embracing this kind of Christianity.
So what am I doing? I'm a Christian. I'm raising this alarm from within the community. That's why I believe, as a Roman Catholic, that my own tradition must be rescued from its current temptation to fundamentalism. There are a billion Catholics in the world. For all its problems, Roman Catholicism has reckoned with the Enlightenment, has accepted the scientific world view, has no argument with evolution, has learned to read the Bible in metaphoric ways, as opposed to literal ones. Today we have a fundamentalist pope, but he rules from the margin. It's hugely important that the Catholic tradition not go fundamentalist.
You ask me what I would do. I think, for one thing, that believing people, whether Jews, Muslims or Christians, need to affirm the importance of pluralism, respect for the other, and modesty about religious claims. I could be a Jew sitting in Jerusalem and offer exactly the same argument about the Jewish zealots making claims on land in the name of God. So Jewish zealotry, Muslim zealotry, Christian zealotry, all three empowered lately, all three armed to the teeth. That's what's really terrifying - and, in the world of weapons of mass destruction, it's not that hard to get armed to the teeth.
So here's a message addressed to the participants in the Tomdispatch community who may have a religious interest: embrace it. Fight for it. Fight for a post-Enlightenment, post-modern, intelligent approach to religion. Don't surrender religion to the wackos.
If the wackos take over religion, they're going to take over state power, and the world won't survive the 21st century. And the United States of America has been at the center of this. When George W Bush launched his war in the name of God ... even more, when this nation took the September 11 assaults as a religious war, Muslims attacking us good, virtuous - we didn't call ourselves Christians, but we were an inch away from it - that's when we began to make our part of this mistake.
TE: And we should have taken it as ...?
JC: A savage crime. Think of al-Qaeda as the Mafia. When the Mafia blows up a distillery and kills 18 people in the neighborhood as part of a turf war, or goes after a hardware dealer who doesn't pay protection money and paralyzes the neighborhood with fear, or when the Mafia takes over a whole region of a nation, as it did in Italy for most of the 20th century, fight back; but fight back against the criminal network with a massive act of law enforcement the way the Italian government did.
It took the Italian government 50 years to break the Mafia's hold over Sicily, and they still have to keep fighting. But they never declared war on Sicily. They never went in and bombed Sicily. They gave their judges and police inspectors and detectives body armor and they went after the Mafia hitmen with highly armed SWAT [special weapons and tactics] teams. I'm not talking about pacifism here. But keep religious ideology out of this. And keep the language of war out, too.
You know, only in going to war do humans feel the need to appeal to God. There's no "God with us" on the belt buckles of cops. God gets invoked in war, because it's a much more extreme state of the human condition. War always brings you very quickly to the point of "us or them".
When somebody comes at you with a savage act of violence, go back at them with your best, most heavily armed cops. Don't go to war against them. It's a very basic idea. It can't be emphasized enough. We're going to have another terrorist attack in this country. It's crucially important that, however horrendous, it be treated as a crime - not an act of war.
Unbuilding the Pentagon
TE: You've written a whole book recently about the Pentagon. In this period, it has grown fantastically. We've even ended up with two Pentagons, the second being the Department of Homeland Security. Now, we have a North American Command, Northcom, for the first time ...
JC: ... And there's another deeply troubling phenomenon, these so-called "contractors" outside the purview of the Pentagon, of the US government, people paid to serve, who are not sworn officers of the government ...
TE: And isn't the all-volunteer army itself becoming a part-mercenary army, because they're having to pay and pay and pay to lure in reluctant recruits? My question is: Do you see a way to begin to unbuild the Pentagon? Are we stuck with the Department of Homeland Security forever?
JC: If any nation was ever stuck with an all-powerful, untouchable military establishment, it was the Soviet Union. By 1987, 1988, the only institution in Soviet society that was working, the only one that was funded, was the military; and it was the most reactionary wing of society.
If the Russians could get out from under that, there's no reason in the world why we can't get out from under our version of the same. But it takes a Gorbachev. Who knows when such a figure will come here?
Two things happened that enabled [general secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail] Gorbachev to defeat his own military and dismantle the Soviet system. One was the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a massive, horrendous public mistake - and the mistake wasn't just the nuclear meltdown, but the way in which the militarized establishment dealt with it. They sent hundreds of people in to shut down a poisoned reactor, saying there was no threat to their health. They were mostly poisoned. Dead very quickly. And then the militarized establishment told the people of Ukraine and the eastern Soviet territories that there was no radioactive threat to them, and hundreds of people later came down with serious illnesses and cancers. That happened in 1986, within months of Gorbachev's coming to power. It prepared the people for a different kind of power.
And then there was that second, wonderful incident, forgotten today. An absolute fluke, pure serendipity. These things happen in life. A young German kid named Mathias Rust flew a Piper Cub plane from Germany to Moscow and landed in Red Square, untouched. He had demonstrated in the most graphic way possible that the best-funded, most vaunted system in the Soviet Empire, the anti-aircraft defense system, a supposedly unbreachable set of defenses, could be totally fooled by a prankster. It was madness.
Anybody else would have executed that kid! But Gorbachev had him sent right home to Germany. Then he fired his entire military establishment - army and air ministers, a hundred generals - his reactionary nemesis. Rust's flight was such an embarrassment that he could do it.
I'm saying: don't ever claim the system is unreformable. [US president Bill] Clinton had a golden opportunity after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991-92. Les Aspin, a dove, an expert at arms reduction and arms control, was put in as secretary of defense. And you remember who Clinton's national security adviser was? Anthony Lake, who had resigned in an act of conscience against the invasion of Cambodia. Clinton's motive upon coming to office was to disempower the Pentagon. I'm certain of it. He failed. Aspin was destroyed by the president's failure to support him. The gays-in-the-military episode was part of the story. The real "don't ask/don't tell" story of that moment, though, was the Pentagon's: don't ask us about our nuclear weapons and we won't tell you what we're doing to maintain them.
Could we get out of this trap? Yes, but Democrats would have to be far more direct in challenging the assumptions and structures of the American military ethos.
TE: Last words?
JC [pauses]: Well, the last word in this conversation is: religion and politics, religion and military power, are a deadly mix in an age of weapons of mass destruction; and, if the United States of America gets this wrong, there's no reason to think anybody else is going to get it right. Casting an eye across the century to come, this is the issue.
(Used by permission Tomdispatch)
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
Carroll in essence grew up in that five-sided monument to US imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was "the largest playhouse in the world", and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his socks, as he has written in the introduction to his recent magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.
As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice - and warn against - a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of September 11, 2001, when US President George W Bush referred briefly to his new "global war on terror" as a "crusade". Carroll was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the United States to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks - now just another of Bush's missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq war "lost" in print. ("The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?")
His stirring columns on the early years of Bush's attempt to bring "freedom" to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful moral voice from - to use a very American phrase - the (media) wilderness until much of the American world finally caught up with him.
He has most recently completed, with director Oren Jacoby, a stirring documentary film, also titled Constantine's Sword, in which he explores the roots of religiously inspired violence in our present world. He submitted to a Tomdispatch interview in August 2005 and when, this summer, I suggested that we meet again, he agreed to discuss "American fundamentalisms", a subject that receives remarkably less coverage and consideration than other fundamentalisms of the world.
We met on a warm day, just after a rare downpour in a dry summer, in the study of his house in the state of Massachusetts. His many books dot the bookshelves. Out the window is a piney landscape, not quite the one the Puritans first saw when they arrived from England early in the 17th century, but beautiful nonetheless. Carroll, his hair graying, has not so much a worn as a well-inhabited face. You can see him thinking as he speaks - not so common a trait as you might imagine. As he warms up to the subject of American fundamentalisms, his voice gains the quiet yet powerful passion that any reader of his weekly columns has come to expect, a passion that nonetheless leaves room for reason and criticism, for further thought.
I put my two small tape recorders on a modest coffee table, turned them on, asked my first question, and discovered that this was an interview in name only. It was more like being back in the most riveting classroom of my life. A single lecture, an hour's genuine education, stretching from America's first Puritan moments to Bush's Iraq, with hardly an interpolation needed on my part.
Tom Engelhardt: I recently heard this joke: How many neo-cons does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: Neo-cons don't believe in light bulbs, they declare war on evil and set the house on fire.
[Carroll chuckles.]
TE: That's my introduction to a discussion of American fundamentalism. Any comments?
James Carroll: Well, embedded in that joke is a central idea: that what matters is not outcome, but purity of intent. A mark of a fundamentalist mindset is that one's own personal virtue is the ultimate value. The American fundamentalist ethos of the Cold War prepared us to destroy the world. In other words, a world absolutely devastated through nuclear war was acceptable as an outcome because it reflected the virtue of our opposition to the evil of communism. Better dead than red.
TE: A phrase I hadn't thought about in a long time ...
JC: Better the world destroyed than taken over by communism. It's profoundly nihilistic, which is also one of the marks of the fundamentalist mindset. An irony, of course, is that so much, then and now, is done in the name of realism, but this is such a profoundly unrealistic way of thinking.
TE: It's in this sense, I suppose, that our president has been unable to learn. So give me the basics on American fundamentalisms, as you see them.
JC: First of all, what is fundamentalism? The word itself was coined in the early 20th century and applied to a particular brand of Protestantism. It comes from a determination to protect what were called, in foundational manifestos, the five fundamentals of Christian belief, particularly the inerrancy of scripture. Scripture can't make a mistake, right? It has to be read literally.
This was a counterattack against so-called liberal religion's embrace of the insights of the Enlightenment and the scientific age. Can you apply normal standards of historical criticism to religious belief? The fundamentalists said no, because normal standards might lead you to understand texts as having been composed in normal human circumstances, instead of inspired by God. So when you read the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus through the lens of historical critical method, you may conclude that the three kings never actually traveled to Bethlehem, that it's a mythical story created to make a point - a genre that the people who wrote it were comfortable with.
Fundamentalists reacted against any mitigating of the literal fact of the three kings. To read texts for their theological meaning rather than for their historical literalness would undercut the whole affirmation of the religion. The next thing, you'd be saying that Jesus didn't rise from the dead on the third day. And if that didn't happen, where are you?
That was then. Today, fundamentalism remains a useful point of reference in understanding the human panic that can be engendered by the uncertainties attached to Enlightenment thinking - when the world view of science tells you that nothing is dependable, that everything has to be submitted to the test of experimentation, verification.
My argument is that religious belief can mature, can be moved to a new level of sophistication by historical, critical, enlightened thinking, but a lot of people are completely threatened by it. Not to denigrate them. Human beings all over the world are dislocated - all of us are - by so many things we don't control, the various revolutions sweeping the globe, the degradation of the environment, the challenge to the very integrity of communities.
The 'city on a hill'
For our conversation, fundamentalist Christianity is a perfect paradigm within which to understand what has been happening in America, a profoundly Christian super-culture. America is also a secular nation, of course. The separation of church and state was a critical innovation, giving us this special standing as a people. The separation's purpose was to protect the conscientious freedom of every individual by making the state neutral on questions of religious conscience. An absolutely ingenious insight.
It's important, however, to understand the profoundly American origins of this insight. The argument began in the first generation. John Cotton, a Puritan preacher, embodied the first idea America had of itself, captured in the image his colleague John Winthrop used in defining the new settlement as "the city on a hill", a phrase that's fodder for political speeches every four years.
Americans don't generally like to think this way, but the United States of America is more descended from Massachusetts than Virginia - an important distinction, because the people who settled Virginia were adventurers and entrepreneurs. The people who settled Massachusetts were religious zealots who had left England as an act of dissent against the Church of England, which they considered too popish. Their dissent was against a certain kind of religion, but not in favor of religious freedom. They came to America assuming the power of the state over the religious convictions of the civic body.
TE: : They just wanted a different religion to do the coercing?
JC: Exactly. Of course, these folks thought of themselves as re-enacting the journey of Exodus. What was the city on a hill? Jerusalem, of course - a biblical reference. They had been brought out of the slave condition of a popish church. They were now across the water - think of "the Jordan River" as the Atlantic Ocean - in the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey. Hello, there are Canaanites here.
Finally, after 1,600 years, the true vision of Jesus Christ was going to be realized - and there was no room for another way of looking at it, no room for what we would call dissent, and certainly no room for any tolerance of the "paganism" of the native Americans. One of the first manifestations of the settlers' zealotry was the religious coercion that began to mark their relationships with the native Americans they met right here in this very place where we're now talking. They felt empowered to offer the ancient choice of conversion or death to the people they called the Indians.
One of the members of this early party objected. His name was Roger Williams, and he rejected the coercive violence he saw wielded against native peoples. He rejected the whole idea that the magistrate should be in charge of the religious impulse of the citizen. As a result, he was banished from Boston, exiled to Salem, then banished from Salem. Finally, he started his own foundation in what we call Rhode Island and organized a new kind of state in which the magistrate would have no power over the religious practice of the citizens. This is all within the first generation.
Roger Williams lost the argument in his own day, but he planted the seed of something. He was the first person to use the phrase "wall of separation" between the magistrate and the religion. One hundred eighty years later, Thomas Jefferson picks up that phrase to describe the distinction between the church and the state.
The point here is that the initial city-on-a-hill impulse has never stopped being part of our self-understanding - the idea of America as having a mission to the world or, in biblical terms, a mission to the gentiles. "Go forth and teach all nations," Jesus commands. This commission is implicit in George Bush's war to establish democracy - or "freedom" - everywhere. When Americans talk about freedom, it's our secular code word for salvation. There's no salvation outside the church; there's no freedom outside the American way of life. Notice how, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet system, there is still something called the "Free World". As opposed to what?
A special mission to Iraq - and the world
This missionizing in the name of freedom is a basic American impulse. [President Abraham] Lincoln was the high priest of this rhetoric, "the last best hope of mankind". The United States of America is justified by the virtue of its mission. The entire movement of American power across the continent of North America was a movement to fulfill the "manifest destiny" of a free people extending freedom. Because this is understood as a profoundly virtuous impulse, we've seldom criticized it. As a nation, we have begun to reckon with the crime of slavery, but we haven't begun to reckon with the crime of genocide against the native American peoples. That's because we haven't really acknowledged what was wrong with it.
Think of that phrase - "manifest destiny". A key doctrine in what I am calling American fundamentalism. It remains an inch below the surface of the American belief system. What's interesting is that this sense of special mission cuts across the spectrum - right wing/left wing, liberals/conservatives - because generally the liberal argument against government policies since World War II is that our wars - Vietnam then, Iraq now - represent an egregious failure to live up to America's true calling. We're better than this. Even anti-war critics, who begin to bang the drum, do it by appealing to an exceptional American missionizing impulse. You don't get the sense, even from most liberals, that - no, America is a nation like other nations and we're going to screw things up the way other nations do.
TE: That kind of realism is in short supply here.
JC: It hardly exists even now.
Let me make one final point about that missionizing impulse, and the way it transcends right and left. One reason we're in Iraq today is because, in the 1990s, the left was split on the question of American violence, the proper use of American power. It was split over the issue of what was called "humanitarian intervention". There are times, it was argued, when the forceful exercise of American power is necessary for the sake of humanitarian causes. Human rights, beginning in [president] Jimmy Carter's day, became a new form of American religion. If conservatives go abroad speaking the language of freedom, liberals go abroad speaking the language of human rights. And if we have to destroy a nation so that it can exercise human rights, so be it. That's why, in the early days of the Iraq war, so many surprising people supported it.
The liberal embrace of humanitarian intervention is part of what set loose this new phenomenon of the Bush moment - an explicit appeal to religious motivation in the exercise of American power. Since George W Bush came to power, the religious right has been set free to use overt religious language, missionizing language that actually moves from "freedom" to "salvation", as a justification for American power. We cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein entirely in terms of a binary evil-versus-good contest. Bush's appeals to evil were a staple of his speechmaking from the earliest days of this war. The purpose of his war was, he told us, not just to spread democracy, but to end evil. You see what's happening. We've moved into specifically religious categories, and that was all right in America.
Tom, here's the thing that's important to acknowledge: if Americans are upset with the war in Iraq today, it's mainly because it failed. If we could have "ended evil" with this war, it would have been a good thing. It goes back to the joke you began with: if we have to destroy the world in order to purify it of evil, that's all right. It's the key to the apocalyptic mindset that Robert J Lifton has written about so eloquently, in which the destruction of the Earth can be an act of purification. The destruction of Iraq was an act of purification. Even today, look at the rhetoric that's unfolding as we begin to talk about ending the war in Iraq. It's the Iraqis who have failed. They wouldn't yield on their "sectarian" agendas. These people won't get together and form a cohesive government. Now, we're going to let them stew in their own mess. We're going to withdraw from this war because they're not worthy of us.
That's the mainstream Democratic anti-war position! America is a city on a hill, exceptional; so, if we do it, by definition it must be virtuous. If we've gone to Iraq and all hell's broken loose, it may be a fiasco, but in origin it can't be our fault because we were motivated by good intentions.
Now, put all of that in the context of this astounding religious resurgence ...
TE: It's the surge ...
JC [laughs]: Yes, the surge of overt religious claims within the United States government, people who understand themselves as fulfilling their sworn oaths to uphold the United States constitution in the name of religion. I interviewed the chief chaplain of the US Air Force, who said to me: "I have two commissions. One commission is to uphold the US constitution and the other is to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they go hand in hand with each other."
I grew up in the air force. I gotta tell ya, there was no chaplain in the air force in my day who would have said that. In fact, the chaplains I knew didn't see themselves as having a commission to preach the Gospel at all. You bent over backward not to do that when you were dealing with soldiers outside of the chapel.
A Christian defense of the nation
TE: You have a new film, based on your book Constantine's Sword, in which you explore this change at, among other places, the Air Force Academy, right?
JC: Yes, what happened there was striking. Take just this example: a couple of years ago, Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ rendered in profoundly fundamentalist ways, most terribly, the death of Jesus as caused by "the Jews", not the Romans. In that movie, [Pontius] Pilate is a good guy, the Jewish high priest the villain. Gibson justified this by saying it was how the Gospels tell the story, which is literally true. A fundamentalist reading of the Gospel story ignores what we know from history and from scientific inquiry and analysis of the Gospels. It wasn't "the Jews" who murdered Jesus, it was the Romans, pure and simple. There were complicated reasons why the Gospels were written that way, but a fundamentalist reading of those texts is dangerous. Gibson demonized the Jews, while celebrating grotesque violence as a mode of salvation, as willed by God.
And then that film was featured at the United States Air Force Academy. Its commanders made it clear that every one of the cadets, over 4,000 of them, was supposed to see that movie. Repeatedly over a week, every time cadets went into H H Arnold Mess Hall, they found fliers on their dinner plates announcing that this movie was being shown. I saw posters that said: "See The Passion of the Christ" and "This is an official Air Force Academy event, do not remove this poster."
As a result of that film, there was an outbreak of pressure, practically coercion, by born-again evangelical Christians aimed at non-Christian cadets and, in a special way, at Jews. This went on for months, and when the whistle was blown by a Jewish cadet and his father, the air force denied it, tried to cover it up. Yale University sent a team from the Yale Divinity School to investigate. They issued a devastating report. The commander at the academy was finally removed; the air force was forced to acknowledge that there was a problem.
In fact, the academy had allowed itself to become a proselytizing outpost for evangelical Christian mega-churches in the Colorado Springs area. Chief among them were Ted Haggard's and James Dobson's, both men then in the inner circle of the Bush White House, involved in the sort of faith-based initiatives that marked the Bush administration.
In the Pentagon today, there is active proselytizing by Christian groups that is allowed by the chain of command. When your superior expects you to show up at his prayer breakfast, you may not feel free to say no. It's not at all clear what will happen to your career. He writes your efficiency report. And the next thing you know, you have, in the culture of the Pentagon, more and more active religious outreach.
Imagine, then, a military motivated by an explicit Christian, missionizing impulse at the worst possible moment in our history, because we're confronting an enemy - and yes, we do have an enemy: fringe, fascist, nihilist extremists coming out of the Islamic world - who define the conflict entirely in religious terms. They too want to see this as a new "crusade". That's the language that Osama bin Laden uses. For the United States of America at this moment to allow its military to begin to wear the badges of a religious movement is a disaster!
TE: What does this point to, when it comes to the future?
JC: Well, the best thing that's happened, when it comes to all of this, has been the near-complete political and moral collapse of the Bush administration, but that doesn't mean this movement is going away. Bush was a sponsor of it. But look how it took off! Bush sponsored it, to take another example, in the Justice Department under attorney general [Alberto] Gonzales - all those born-again Christian lawyers coming from fundamentalist Christian law schools that have no history of excellence.
We must be aware that there's something much deeper than the Bush administration and a particular wing of the Republican Party at work here, however. This isn't just Karl Rove, though he was ingenious at exploiting it.
Let's go back to what kind of a nation the United States is. Here is something I read recently: though we are officially a secular people, there are more self-identified Christians in this country than self-identified Jews in Israel in percentage terms. We commonly think of Israel as a Jewish state. Something like 75% of Israelis would identify themselves as Jewish. Eighty percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian! And we're not a Christian nation? We have to be wary of our Christian roots and of the city-on-a-hill impulse that still lives just an inch below the surface.
Our war against the Soviet Union was a religious war. [Secretary of state] John Foster Dulles [under president Dwight Eisenhower] was practically explicit about this in his speeches, which were like sermons. Not just "communism", but "atheistic communism". Dwight D Eisenhower was baptized while he was president - part of a Cold War feeling that we were involved in a Christian defense of the nation against an atheistic enemy.
Huddling up for Team Jesus
TE: And, of course, he titled his memoir Crusade in Europe.
JC: Christian points of reference came very easily in those years, but what has made the Bush era especially dangerous is that a political party has explicitly, overtly embraced a religious movement for the political power it generates. Fundamentalists have their rights, their place, in America, but there's no place for a political movement that aims to take control of the levers of state power in the name of religion. That's a violation of the "wall of separation". You can't have military commanders giving orders down the chain of command that have religious content to them. You can't, on the eve of battle, require your soldiers to gather in a huddle the way a coach might, and say the Lord's Prayer.
TE: And yet it's happening ...
JC: It's happening all the time! At the Air Force Academy, "Team Jesus" was one of the nicknames for the football team and one of the most vociferous evangelical Christian proselytizers was the football coach. Look at it from his point of view. What happens when he can get his huddle together and they're all saying the Lord's Prayer? A chief military virtue is "unit cohesion". It can be created in any number of ways, but one shortcut is if you can get everybody into a kind of Pentecostal religious fervor. If you can get your young men and women feeling the presence of the Lord, they're going to fight better, possibly more selflessly. That's what's in it for the military. Let's think cynically. There may be some military commanders who don't give much of a damn about God, but who see what God can do for fighting spirit. It works.
Let's all gather around the Humvee before we head into this village. Let us pray. You can bet that's going on in Iraq right now. Here's the question: What happens to the kid who doesn't want to get around that Humvee or, more to the point, to the Muslim bystanders who see American soldiers invoking God on their way into battle?
TE: Or when you loose well-armed, even nuclear-armed people eager to purify the world ...
JC: If I have a point to make, it's this: the religious tradition of Christian fundamentalism is one thing; the tradition of American exceptionalism another. They both have their roots in the same experience. They were separated. Under George Bush they've been brought together.
TE: When it comes to the Bush administration, complete collapse or not, we know that this man, without the possibility of changing his mind, and his vice president, without the possibility of changing his mind, with whomever they can still control in their own government and military, are there until January 2009. What does it mean to have people in a fundamentalist mindset, but thoroughly embattled and on the downward slide? I wouldn't like to write off the next year and a half. It's a potential nightmare.
JC: It could indeed be. But this issue involves more than the temperament of George Bush. It involves the structure of the fundamentalist mind. One pillar is bipolarity - the understanding of reality as divided between good and evil; you're on the side of good and they're on the side of evil. However, they can begin by being Osama bin Laden's band, which then becomes the Taliban, which becomes Afghanistan, which becomes all the Muslims who ever talked about the Great Satan, which becomes Iraq, and now maybe Iran, and even critics in the US. "They", "they", "they". We see that progression in Bush.
A second pillar is an absolute allergy to doubt. The fundamentalist mindset doesn't survive once you admit doubt or self-criticism. When asked for an example of a mistake he had made, Bush surprised people two years ago by claiming he couldn't think of one. The tragedy of Bush is, if you ask that question of him today, I'm sure he would answer the same way.
A world religiously aflame
Let's just step back a minute, though. How different are the Democratic presidential candidates really? What I hear from them, too, is a world divided between the good and the bad. I also hear - this is the meaning of the new rhetoric about the failure of Iraq being the failure of Iraqis - that we Americans are not to criticize what we've done in any basic way. "I wouldn't renounce my vote." "The president lied to me, that's why I voted the way I did." No capacity for self-criticism, for doubt.
You know, the genius of the American system - why the constitution is worth defending - is that our constitution comes from Roger Williams, not John Winthrop and John Cotton. It assumes a world not divided between good and evil, but one where everybody participates in the whole mess.
What are checks and balances? The constitution's authors understood that even people motivated by good intentions are going to screw up. So everybody, every institution, needs to be checked. This system assumes not bipolarity but unipolarity, in the sense that we're all capable of mistakes, that we all have to be constantly criticized. The constitution is an ingenious structure for living in the real world.
TE: And yet, in recent years, the presidency and the Pentagon, in particular, as you've written in your history of the Pentagon, House of War, have seemingly grown beyond institutional checks and balances.
JC: The question today is whether the constitution continues to exist as anything beyond a kind of totem, a vestige. Recent history certainly suggests that the Pentagon is now "unchecked". And if we can end our present war by blaming the Iraqis, then the Pentagon will be immune from criticism and prepared for the next foray of American power. That's why we must challenge this laying the blame on the Iraqi people, as if their "sectarianism" weighs more than our hubris. As of now, I fear, we'll be getting out of this war with what brought us into it intact.
TE: People sometimes ask me about Iraq: "Well, what would you do?" It's a question that drives me crazy. I always think: Well, why didn't you ask me back when it mattered? Why didn't you ask me when I could have said, "Don't go in"? So I'm hesitant to ask you, but if you had the power to begin to organize people in some fashion, what first steps would you take to mend this world?
JC: Let me just say that we've been talking only America here, in part because I think people are attuned to the threat from what's called "Islamic fundamentalism". My own conviction is that a crucial 21st-century problem is going to be Christian fundamentalism. Its global growth is an unnoticed story in the United States. Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are now absolutely on fire with zealous belief in the saving power of Jesus, in the most intolerant of ways. A religious ideology that affirms the salvific power of violence is taking hold. It denigrates people who are not part of the saved community, permitting discrimination, and ultimately violence. Hundreds of millions of people are embracing this kind of Christianity.
So what am I doing? I'm a Christian. I'm raising this alarm from within the community. That's why I believe, as a Roman Catholic, that my own tradition must be rescued from its current temptation to fundamentalism. There are a billion Catholics in the world. For all its problems, Roman Catholicism has reckoned with the Enlightenment, has accepted the scientific world view, has no argument with evolution, has learned to read the Bible in metaphoric ways, as opposed to literal ones. Today we have a fundamentalist pope, but he rules from the margin. It's hugely important that the Catholic tradition not go fundamentalist.
You ask me what I would do. I think, for one thing, that believing people, whether Jews, Muslims or Christians, need to affirm the importance of pluralism, respect for the other, and modesty about religious claims. I could be a Jew sitting in Jerusalem and offer exactly the same argument about the Jewish zealots making claims on land in the name of God. So Jewish zealotry, Muslim zealotry, Christian zealotry, all three empowered lately, all three armed to the teeth. That's what's really terrifying - and, in the world of weapons of mass destruction, it's not that hard to get armed to the teeth.
So here's a message addressed to the participants in the Tomdispatch community who may have a religious interest: embrace it. Fight for it. Fight for a post-Enlightenment, post-modern, intelligent approach to religion. Don't surrender religion to the wackos.
If the wackos take over religion, they're going to take over state power, and the world won't survive the 21st century. And the United States of America has been at the center of this. When George W Bush launched his war in the name of God ... even more, when this nation took the September 11 assaults as a religious war, Muslims attacking us good, virtuous - we didn't call ourselves Christians, but we were an inch away from it - that's when we began to make our part of this mistake.
TE: And we should have taken it as ...?
JC: A savage crime. Think of al-Qaeda as the Mafia. When the Mafia blows up a distillery and kills 18 people in the neighborhood as part of a turf war, or goes after a hardware dealer who doesn't pay protection money and paralyzes the neighborhood with fear, or when the Mafia takes over a whole region of a nation, as it did in Italy for most of the 20th century, fight back; but fight back against the criminal network with a massive act of law enforcement the way the Italian government did.
It took the Italian government 50 years to break the Mafia's hold over Sicily, and they still have to keep fighting. But they never declared war on Sicily. They never went in and bombed Sicily. They gave their judges and police inspectors and detectives body armor and they went after the Mafia hitmen with highly armed SWAT [special weapons and tactics] teams. I'm not talking about pacifism here. But keep religious ideology out of this. And keep the language of war out, too.
You know, only in going to war do humans feel the need to appeal to God. There's no "God with us" on the belt buckles of cops. God gets invoked in war, because it's a much more extreme state of the human condition. War always brings you very quickly to the point of "us or them".
When somebody comes at you with a savage act of violence, go back at them with your best, most heavily armed cops. Don't go to war against them. It's a very basic idea. It can't be emphasized enough. We're going to have another terrorist attack in this country. It's crucially important that, however horrendous, it be treated as a crime - not an act of war.
Unbuilding the Pentagon
TE: You've written a whole book recently about the Pentagon. In this period, it has grown fantastically. We've even ended up with two Pentagons, the second being the Department of Homeland Security. Now, we have a North American Command, Northcom, for the first time ...
JC: ... And there's another deeply troubling phenomenon, these so-called "contractors" outside the purview of the Pentagon, of the US government, people paid to serve, who are not sworn officers of the government ...
TE: And isn't the all-volunteer army itself becoming a part-mercenary army, because they're having to pay and pay and pay to lure in reluctant recruits? My question is: Do you see a way to begin to unbuild the Pentagon? Are we stuck with the Department of Homeland Security forever?
JC: If any nation was ever stuck with an all-powerful, untouchable military establishment, it was the Soviet Union. By 1987, 1988, the only institution in Soviet society that was working, the only one that was funded, was the military; and it was the most reactionary wing of society.
If the Russians could get out from under that, there's no reason in the world why we can't get out from under our version of the same. But it takes a Gorbachev. Who knows when such a figure will come here?
Two things happened that enabled [general secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail] Gorbachev to defeat his own military and dismantle the Soviet system. One was the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a massive, horrendous public mistake - and the mistake wasn't just the nuclear meltdown, but the way in which the militarized establishment dealt with it. They sent hundreds of people in to shut down a poisoned reactor, saying there was no threat to their health. They were mostly poisoned. Dead very quickly. And then the militarized establishment told the people of Ukraine and the eastern Soviet territories that there was no radioactive threat to them, and hundreds of people later came down with serious illnesses and cancers. That happened in 1986, within months of Gorbachev's coming to power. It prepared the people for a different kind of power.
And then there was that second, wonderful incident, forgotten today. An absolute fluke, pure serendipity. These things happen in life. A young German kid named Mathias Rust flew a Piper Cub plane from Germany to Moscow and landed in Red Square, untouched. He had demonstrated in the most graphic way possible that the best-funded, most vaunted system in the Soviet Empire, the anti-aircraft defense system, a supposedly unbreachable set of defenses, could be totally fooled by a prankster. It was madness.
Anybody else would have executed that kid! But Gorbachev had him sent right home to Germany. Then he fired his entire military establishment - army and air ministers, a hundred generals - his reactionary nemesis. Rust's flight was such an embarrassment that he could do it.
I'm saying: don't ever claim the system is unreformable. [US president Bill] Clinton had a golden opportunity after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991-92. Les Aspin, a dove, an expert at arms reduction and arms control, was put in as secretary of defense. And you remember who Clinton's national security adviser was? Anthony Lake, who had resigned in an act of conscience against the invasion of Cambodia. Clinton's motive upon coming to office was to disempower the Pentagon. I'm certain of it. He failed. Aspin was destroyed by the president's failure to support him. The gays-in-the-military episode was part of the story. The real "don't ask/don't tell" story of that moment, though, was the Pentagon's: don't ask us about our nuclear weapons and we won't tell you what we're doing to maintain them.
Could we get out of this trap? Yes, but Democrats would have to be far more direct in challenging the assumptions and structures of the American military ethos.
TE: Last words?
JC [pauses]: Well, the last word in this conversation is: religion and politics, religion and military power, are a deadly mix in an age of weapons of mass destruction; and, if the United States of America gets this wrong, there's no reason to think anybody else is going to get it right. Casting an eye across the century to come, this is the issue.
(Used by permission Tomdispatch)
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
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