Three years after the war, with tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths on her hands and the knowledge her lies helped destroy Iraq, Condi Rice has admitted making mistakes in Iraq:
"I know we've made tactical errors - thousands of them, I'm sure," Ms Rice said in a session of questions after her speech, organised by BBC Radio 4's Today programme and Chatham House international affairs institution.
Yes, Rice, those thousands of mistakes are why thousands of Iraqis lie buried in makeshift graves, why thousands of other Iraqis lie unburied in the wasteland, and why thousands have been found bound and executed.
Those thousands of mistakes are also why we have death squads which your military trained (was this one of the mistakes?) roaming the countryside picking off who they consider to be threat - Sunni, Shia, Turkmen, Christian, no matter.
Those thousands of mistakes are also why Iran rules Iraq, why the 3afitallah Khoemini rules Iraq ... in spirit of course (he dialled up from Hell and only Georgie of Crawford, TX would take the call).
Those thousands of mistakes are also why women in Iraq are today more repressed than ever, why school children are threatened if they go to school, why their teachers are killed, why leading academics are eradicated, why the country's scientists have been executed, why Iraq's doctors have fled.
Those thousands of mistakes are also why very little has been reconstructed (please, I know am being much too kind here), why Iraq's oil industry is on the verge of collapse, why Iraq has no army, why kidnapping is the most booming economic option.
Let me explain the thousands of mistakes a bit more carefully.
Mistake: Believing anything the US government said about Iraq
Mistake: Believing the invasion of Iraq was for liberty and freedom of the Iraqi people.
Mistake: Believing the invasion of Iraq was to protect the liberty and freedom of the American people.
Mistake: Believing the US government ever had any semblance of intelligence when dealing with Iraq.
Mistake: Believing that the Iraqi people would not rise up and fight the tyranny of the imperialist mercenaries come to wreak havoc in our country.
Mistake: Believing that the Resistance is foreign-bred. Damn the foreigners.
Mistake: Believing the US military is not racist.
Mistake: Believing the US military has not engaged in widespread atrocities, violations of the Geneva conventions and crimes against humanity.
Mistake: Believing the US military will try its personnel for crimes and equivocally sentence them.
Mistake: Believing the US military will not cover up its crimes.
Mistake: Believing the US military does not engage in My Lai in Iraq each and every day.
Mistake: Believing Iraq is better off today.
Mistake: Believing Iraq has a representative government.
Mistake: Believing that Iraq's elections (a farce in no greater words) is a sign of blossoming democracy.
C'mon, Condi, be man enough and list the mistakes.
The tide is turning. Americans today are waking up to the fiasco, Vietnam, quagmire - name it what you will - that Iraq has become.
They have realized - after Katrina and the fraudulent tax cut, declining state of health care, "No kid left behind" brainwashing - that they have been swindled.
Expect to see some seriously desperate measures in the day ahead from the pro-war crowd. Soon, we will hear the anti-Christ is in Iraq and he has to be smoked out.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
WTO, GMO and Total Spectrum Dominance
The powerful private interests who control WTO agriculture policy prefer to remain in the background as little-publicized NGO’s. One of the most influential in creating the WTO is a little-publicized organization called the IPC — the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council, shortened to International Policy Council.
The WTO today is nothing more than the global policeman for the powerful GMO lobby and the agribusiness firms tied to it.
The WTO today is nothing more than the global policeman for the powerful GMO lobby and the agribusiness firms tied to it.
Can President Alfredo Palacio Survive Ecuador's Indigenous Uprising?
Ecuador is South America's fifth-largest oil producer and more than half of its exports go to the United States. Petroleum is Ecuador’s biggest export but their petroleum reserves are expected to be depleted in 20 years based on their current rate of extraction. At full capacity, over a half-million barrels of oil are pumped from beneath Ecuadoran soil each day. Moreover, oil accounts for about 50% of Ecuador's export revenues.
President Alfredo Palacio's Stone
In a somewhat misleading analysis today, Financial Times reports,
"Ecuador’s Congress has voted to impose a tax of 60 per cent on the 'extraordinary profits' earned by foreign investors in the oil sector - a proposal that could earn the country up to $500m in extra revenues."
The "devil in the details" of this report lies in the word "could". In another report published in Forbes.com we read, "The tax could boost the country's revenues by up to 500 mln usd". Ecuador's Economy Minister, Diego Borja is quoted: "Profit margins for foreign companies have been very great and a clause in favor of the state could lead to economic equilibrium between the foreign companies and the state.' (Forbes.com-AFX Hong Kong). In what appears to be an aggressive vote by the Ecuadoran Congress to tax foreign oil companies there lies (no pun) an attempt to kill 2 birds with one stone.
Killing One Bird
It is interesting that the congress of this U.S. backed regime under the leadership of Ecuadoran President Alfredo Palacio, chose this time to impose "a tax of 60pct on the 'extraordinary profits' earned by foreign investors in the oil sector" - just after the most recent popular uprising (March 16) against the government. Two weeks ago, the indigenous people of Ecuador marched on Quito and shut down 11 of Ecuador's provinces with roadblocks, demanding that President Palacio stop negotiating with the U.S. on the so-called, "Free Trade Agreements". If Palacio thinks this imposition of a 60pct tax on oil profits will pacify Ecuador's masses (killing one bird), he had better think again. 60pct sounds impressive, so why should they not be satisfied? Because there is an important difference between taxing oil profits on the one hand, and imposition of royalties, on the other.
Killing the Other Bird
Taxes are more difficult for the government to collect from the foreign oil companies because of the loopholes, bluntly stated, that make it possible for the corporations to cheat. Royalties, on the other hand, involve a fixed price per barrel extracted that foreign companies are required to pay to the host government - and even royalties can be renegotiated between corrupt oil regimes and foreign oil companies. These are the reasons why President Chávez doubled the oil royalties in Venezuela's new oil reform law in 2001 and reduced the taxes imposed on foreign oil profits. In his 8/30/03 analysis for Venezuelanalysis, Gregory Wilpert explains:
"the government can track very easily how much oil is being extracted and what the royalty payments should be based on the current price of oil. However, taxes based on oil income are much more difficult to control because PDVSA or other oil companies deduct their expenses from the income on which they have to pay the taxes. Since expenses are not that easily identifiable for an outside auditor, the tax payer can attempt to inflate expenses, in order to lower their tax payments. By shifting government revenues from taxes to royalties, the government is basically closing loopholes in the tax collection process."
The relationship between Petroecuador and the central government presents another important problem for the people of Ecuador. Petroecuador is "nationalized" and run by the Ecuadoran government. Petroecuador controls petroleum blocks in the country. However, it has historically given away Ecuador's petroleum through sweetheart deals with Northern petroleum companies like Burlington, Texaco, Arco, Halliburton, Repsol, Shell, Occidental who have collected 80% or more of the profits and only about 20% of the responsibility for cleanup. The cleanup is as important as the profits and part and parcel thereof: In his "Ecua-blog", Lee Gilman writes:
"Petroleum extraction is devastating to the environment, and the as-of-yet unexplored Central-Southern region is thought to have lower quality and less concentrated reserves, which translates into greater toxic waste in separation processes and greater environmental destruction."
Lessons Learned from Venezuela
Washington, of all places and people, are fond of accusing Venezuela's President Chávez of interfering in the domestic affairs of neighboring countries, thus amounting to a "destabilizing force" in Latin America. Their accusation is another lame attempt to discredit President Chávez. But Washington's fear that neighboring countries are learning from the control the Venezuelan people have gained over their own natural resources is right-on. It appears that the people of Ecuador are indeed learning from Venezuela's history with their nationalized oil company PDVSA just as the people of Bolivia have learned. In August, 2003, Gregory Wilpert reported: "Chávez and his supporters have long claimed that PDVSA is providing too little of its revenues to the central government, the company’s only shareholder." Push came to shove between the Chávez administration and PDVSA in 2002-03, when the technocrat-managers who were still running PDVSA went on strike in an attempted economic coup against government. Earlier this month, Andy Goodall, writing for Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (Britain) stated:
Last year we (Axis of Logic) also described the PDVSA strike:
With oil revenues now pumped into Venezuela's successful social programs, all the people of Venezuela are benefiting. In the meantime, Washington and the multinational oil companies just don't get it - or perhaps better said, they "get it" all too well. Their problem a simple one. It lies in a presumption that they have a legitimate claim to the natural resources owned by other sovereign nations. In March, 2005, President Chávez' delivered his clear and unequivocal response: "The United States government would very much like to keep all our oil for itself ... But our oil reserve does not belong to Mr. Bush. The oil belongs to the Venezuelan people."
[Luis Macas, left, president of the indigenous organization, CONAIE, watches a ceremony for Solsticio in Quito, Ecuador, Tuesday, March 21, 2006. The ceremony is at the same time of indigenous protests against Free Trade Agreement with United States. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa R.)]
3 Ecuadoran Interior Ministers busted in 11 months
None of Venezuela's experience is lost on the people of Ecuador who know that their national resources belong to them - not the multinational corporations.
Over 40 percent of Ecuador's 13 million people belong to indigenous communities. They are primarily led by Ecuador's Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE). Just as they have been marching on Quito, forcing 3 interior ministers to resign in the 11 months, they continue their demand that their government end the free lunch at its petroleum table. [Chart on Right] New Internationalist, 2001
Luis Macas, President of CONAIE: “Respect for diversity is the foundation for all social construction. If an individual, nationality or people impose their will on the rest, things will not work. We need to find links that bring us together in a space that fosters respect.”*
After years of living under the heel of the trans-national corporations, almost 70% of the people of Ecuador still live in poverty. In January, 2006, Paul Martin, UNICEF representative in Ecuador reported:
"As in most of Latin America, the big challenge in Ecuador is poverty. "There isn’t money to pay for children to go to school or for their textbooks, or for their uniforms. There isn’t money for the family to pay for them to go to a doctor. But, poverty itself in a country like Ecuador also comes from exclusion. The poor are not equally distributed in the society. Indigenous children are much more poor, Afro-descendent children are much more poor – both on average and in absolute terms."
We should not be surprised if we see President Palacio's resignation on the table in the not to distant future. We predict that the people of Ecuador will not be fooled by this latest maneuver on the part of the Ecuadoran Congress to tax the profits of the multinationals. They continue their campaign to stop Palacio's unilateral negotiations with the U.S. on "Free-Trade". Yesterday, Prensa Latina reported,
"Ecuador's Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) accused the Alfredo Palacio administration of dictatorial actions against the legitimate right of the people to defend their interests and sovereignty."
The Political Fate of President Alfredo Palacio
When Palacio assumed office, he threw an olive leaf to CONAIE by reinstating their representatives to head several state bodies. (They had been removed by his ousted predecessor, Luis Gutiérrez.) He also offered the CONAIE the vice-presidency and provincial governorships. However, Palacio also left open the possibility of continuing Gutiérrez' neoliberal policies:
"We will continue discussing all aspects concerning the free trade agreement and all of the treaties that the globalisation process will impose on us, because that is the way history is moving. We can't bury our head in the sand like an ostrich," he stated, adding that "there is no reason to be afraid of the free trade deal, but we should negotiate as equals with the United States."
At the time of his election, he also told Washington they should not worry about losing their Manta Air Base in Ecuador. These hints of his neo-liberal tendencies are now borne out and adamantly opposed by those he attempted to pacify. His attempts appear to have failed.
Yesterday, CONAIE Vice President, Santiago de la Cruz, hammered Palacio for "[using] violence and brutal repression against everyone opposed to the signing of the free trade treaty with the US." Some may wonder why heads of Latin American states like Palacio do not wake up and begin to represent the interests of the people of Ecuador. The question is of course naíve because it ignores Palacio's neoliberal views and organic relationship with the U.S and the multinationals. CONAIE has correctly accused Palacio of reaching a "compromise with the nation’s oligarchies" and "committing the country to a process of no return with the signing of a free trade deal with the United States."
Last week, Green Left Weekly warned: "If Palacio doesn’t respond to these popular demands, he faces the risk of becoming the fourth Ecuadorian president to be overthrown in 10 years, following his predecessor Lucio Gutierrez, who fled the country amid protests last April."
According to the GLW report Palacio's approval rating has dropped to 14% and Mesias Tatamues, president of the trade union federation Cedoc-Cut, told Granma International on March 15: “We are going to show him that if he doesn’t listen to us he will have to go home, because the general slogan, from the countryside to the city, is: FTA signed, Palacio out.”
Based upon the growing refutation of neo-liberal economic policies throughout Latin America - from the successful Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela to the ousting of President Mesa in Bolivia in favor of newly-elected President Evo Morales - it is reasonable to expect Alfred Palacio's resignation in 2006 and another notch added to the economic guns of Latin America's indigenous people.
President Alfredo Palacio's Stone
In a somewhat misleading analysis today, Financial Times reports,
"Ecuador’s Congress has voted to impose a tax of 60 per cent on the 'extraordinary profits' earned by foreign investors in the oil sector - a proposal that could earn the country up to $500m in extra revenues."
The "devil in the details" of this report lies in the word "could". In another report published in Forbes.com we read, "The tax could boost the country's revenues by up to 500 mln usd". Ecuador's Economy Minister, Diego Borja is quoted: "Profit margins for foreign companies have been very great and a clause in favor of the state could lead to economic equilibrium between the foreign companies and the state.' (Forbes.com-AFX Hong Kong). In what appears to be an aggressive vote by the Ecuadoran Congress to tax foreign oil companies there lies (no pun) an attempt to kill 2 birds with one stone.
Killing One Bird
It is interesting that the congress of this U.S. backed regime under the leadership of Ecuadoran President Alfredo Palacio, chose this time to impose "a tax of 60pct on the 'extraordinary profits' earned by foreign investors in the oil sector" - just after the most recent popular uprising (March 16) against the government. Two weeks ago, the indigenous people of Ecuador marched on Quito and shut down 11 of Ecuador's provinces with roadblocks, demanding that President Palacio stop negotiating with the U.S. on the so-called, "Free Trade Agreements". If Palacio thinks this imposition of a 60pct tax on oil profits will pacify Ecuador's masses (killing one bird), he had better think again. 60pct sounds impressive, so why should they not be satisfied? Because there is an important difference between taxing oil profits on the one hand, and imposition of royalties, on the other.
Killing the Other Bird
Taxes are more difficult for the government to collect from the foreign oil companies because of the loopholes, bluntly stated, that make it possible for the corporations to cheat. Royalties, on the other hand, involve a fixed price per barrel extracted that foreign companies are required to pay to the host government - and even royalties can be renegotiated between corrupt oil regimes and foreign oil companies. These are the reasons why President Chávez doubled the oil royalties in Venezuela's new oil reform law in 2001 and reduced the taxes imposed on foreign oil profits. In his 8/30/03 analysis for Venezuelanalysis, Gregory Wilpert explains:
"the government can track very easily how much oil is being extracted and what the royalty payments should be based on the current price of oil. However, taxes based on oil income are much more difficult to control because PDVSA or other oil companies deduct their expenses from the income on which they have to pay the taxes. Since expenses are not that easily identifiable for an outside auditor, the tax payer can attempt to inflate expenses, in order to lower their tax payments. By shifting government revenues from taxes to royalties, the government is basically closing loopholes in the tax collection process."
The relationship between Petroecuador and the central government presents another important problem for the people of Ecuador. Petroecuador is "nationalized" and run by the Ecuadoran government. Petroecuador controls petroleum blocks in the country. However, it has historically given away Ecuador's petroleum through sweetheart deals with Northern petroleum companies like Burlington, Texaco, Arco, Halliburton, Repsol, Shell, Occidental who have collected 80% or more of the profits and only about 20% of the responsibility for cleanup. The cleanup is as important as the profits and part and parcel thereof: In his "Ecua-blog", Lee Gilman writes:
"Petroleum extraction is devastating to the environment, and the as-of-yet unexplored Central-Southern region is thought to have lower quality and less concentrated reserves, which translates into greater toxic waste in separation processes and greater environmental destruction."
Lessons Learned from Venezuela
Washington, of all places and people, are fond of accusing Venezuela's President Chávez of interfering in the domestic affairs of neighboring countries, thus amounting to a "destabilizing force" in Latin America. Their accusation is another lame attempt to discredit President Chávez. But Washington's fear that neighboring countries are learning from the control the Venezuelan people have gained over their own natural resources is right-on. It appears that the people of Ecuador are indeed learning from Venezuela's history with their nationalized oil company PDVSA just as the people of Bolivia have learned. In August, 2003, Gregory Wilpert reported: "Chávez and his supporters have long claimed that PDVSA is providing too little of its revenues to the central government, the company’s only shareholder." Push came to shove between the Chávez administration and PDVSA in 2002-03, when the technocrat-managers who were still running PDVSA went on strike in an attempted economic coup against government. Earlier this month, Andy Goodall, writing for Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (Britain) stated:
"It is worth recalling that the lock out and oil industry sabotage which lasted from December 2nd 2002 till February 4th 2003 cost Venezuela an estimated US$14 billion in lost oil revenues and a further US$11 billion in lost industrial production. During the lock out, there was hardly any petrol or domestic gas and the poor were reduced to cutting up their furniture in order to cook a hot meals, if they could find basic foodstuffs."
Last year we (Axis of Logic) also described the PDVSA strike:
"On December 2, 2002, the US-backed executives and managers of Venezuela's state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) went on strike, shutting down Venezuela's oil industry in an ill-advised tactic to bring down the Chavez government. When they went on strike they sabotaged the industry by destroying essential documents, computers and software. The people who worked in the industry, however, learned how to repair the damage and restore the flow of oil and took over PDVSA. 18,000 managers were fired for their role in the strike in February, 2003."
With oil revenues now pumped into Venezuela's successful social programs, all the people of Venezuela are benefiting. In the meantime, Washington and the multinational oil companies just don't get it - or perhaps better said, they "get it" all too well. Their problem a simple one. It lies in a presumption that they have a legitimate claim to the natural resources owned by other sovereign nations. In March, 2005, President Chávez' delivered his clear and unequivocal response: "The United States government would very much like to keep all our oil for itself ... But our oil reserve does not belong to Mr. Bush. The oil belongs to the Venezuelan people."
[Luis Macas, left, president of the indigenous organization, CONAIE, watches a ceremony for Solsticio in Quito, Ecuador, Tuesday, March 21, 2006. The ceremony is at the same time of indigenous protests against Free Trade Agreement with United States. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa R.)]
3 Ecuadoran Interior Ministers busted in 11 months
None of Venezuela's experience is lost on the people of Ecuador who know that their national resources belong to them - not the multinational corporations.
Over 40 percent of Ecuador's 13 million people belong to indigenous communities. They are primarily led by Ecuador's Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE). Just as they have been marching on Quito, forcing 3 interior ministers to resign in the 11 months, they continue their demand that their government end the free lunch at its petroleum table. [Chart on Right] New Internationalist, 2001
Luis Macas, President of CONAIE: “Respect for diversity is the foundation for all social construction. If an individual, nationality or people impose their will on the rest, things will not work. We need to find links that bring us together in a space that fosters respect.”*
After years of living under the heel of the trans-national corporations, almost 70% of the people of Ecuador still live in poverty. In January, 2006, Paul Martin, UNICEF representative in Ecuador reported:
"As in most of Latin America, the big challenge in Ecuador is poverty. "There isn’t money to pay for children to go to school or for their textbooks, or for their uniforms. There isn’t money for the family to pay for them to go to a doctor. But, poverty itself in a country like Ecuador also comes from exclusion. The poor are not equally distributed in the society. Indigenous children are much more poor, Afro-descendent children are much more poor – both on average and in absolute terms."
We should not be surprised if we see President Palacio's resignation on the table in the not to distant future. We predict that the people of Ecuador will not be fooled by this latest maneuver on the part of the Ecuadoran Congress to tax the profits of the multinationals. They continue their campaign to stop Palacio's unilateral negotiations with the U.S. on "Free-Trade". Yesterday, Prensa Latina reported,
"Ecuador's Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) accused the Alfredo Palacio administration of dictatorial actions against the legitimate right of the people to defend their interests and sovereignty."
The Political Fate of President Alfredo Palacio
When Palacio assumed office, he threw an olive leaf to CONAIE by reinstating their representatives to head several state bodies. (They had been removed by his ousted predecessor, Luis Gutiérrez.) He also offered the CONAIE the vice-presidency and provincial governorships. However, Palacio also left open the possibility of continuing Gutiérrez' neoliberal policies:
"We will continue discussing all aspects concerning the free trade agreement and all of the treaties that the globalisation process will impose on us, because that is the way history is moving. We can't bury our head in the sand like an ostrich," he stated, adding that "there is no reason to be afraid of the free trade deal, but we should negotiate as equals with the United States."
At the time of his election, he also told Washington they should not worry about losing their Manta Air Base in Ecuador. These hints of his neo-liberal tendencies are now borne out and adamantly opposed by those he attempted to pacify. His attempts appear to have failed.
Yesterday, CONAIE Vice President, Santiago de la Cruz, hammered Palacio for "[using] violence and brutal repression against everyone opposed to the signing of the free trade treaty with the US." Some may wonder why heads of Latin American states like Palacio do not wake up and begin to represent the interests of the people of Ecuador. The question is of course naíve because it ignores Palacio's neoliberal views and organic relationship with the U.S and the multinationals. CONAIE has correctly accused Palacio of reaching a "compromise with the nation’s oligarchies" and "committing the country to a process of no return with the signing of a free trade deal with the United States."
Last week, Green Left Weekly warned: "If Palacio doesn’t respond to these popular demands, he faces the risk of becoming the fourth Ecuadorian president to be overthrown in 10 years, following his predecessor Lucio Gutierrez, who fled the country amid protests last April."
According to the GLW report Palacio's approval rating has dropped to 14% and Mesias Tatamues, president of the trade union federation Cedoc-Cut, told Granma International on March 15: “We are going to show him that if he doesn’t listen to us he will have to go home, because the general slogan, from the countryside to the city, is: FTA signed, Palacio out.”
Based upon the growing refutation of neo-liberal economic policies throughout Latin America - from the successful Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela to the ousting of President Mesa in Bolivia in favor of newly-elected President Evo Morales - it is reasonable to expect Alfred Palacio's resignation in 2006 and another notch added to the economic guns of Latin America's indigenous people.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Cuba & Pakistan
Cuba & Pakistan
I've written about the 2260 health care professionals that Cuba sent to help Pakistani earthquake victims, and about how they had treated 1,043,125 patients, but even that didn't prepare me for the latest statistic: 73% of the earthquake victims who received medical care, received it from Cuban doctors and paramedics.
SPEECH BY DAVID CLINE, PRESIDENT OF VETERANS FOR PEACE, USA AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE VIETNAM AGENT ORANGE RELIEF AND RESPONSIBILITY CAMPAIGN
First let me thank the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/dioxin
for organizing this international conference and to the Agent Orange Vets
from Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada who have traveled here to
participate.
The US delegation I am leading is made up of Agent Orange vets Frank
Corcoran, Joan Duffy, Ralph Steele Dan Shea.
I was an infantryman with the 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi and Tay Ninh
in 1967 and was wounded 3 times but do not suffer from dioxin related health
conditions myself.
When I came back from the war, I had knowledge of the use of Agent Orange
having seen sprayed areas and knew that they destroyed nature but had no
knowledge of the negative effects these defoliants had on human beings.
I remember in 1969 a veteran I knew named Jeff Sharlett died of cancer at
age 27 in the Miami, Florida Veterans Hospital and thinking it was strange
that someone so young had cancer.
Over the years other friends of mine got sick or had deformed children or
sometimes died. Mike Keegan and John Miffin who died and John and Rena
Kopystenski who had several children with birth defects are among them. So
this issue has always been personal to me.
In 1977, a woman who worked as a claims representative at the Chicago
Veterans Administration named Maude DeVictor was the first person to really
put two and two together when she witnessed the VA higher-ups denying
veterans claims and covering up their health problems and the connections to
dixon exposure.
The next year, 1978, a veteran name Paul Reutershan who was sick with cancer
got on television and said "my government killed me in Vietnam and I didn't
even know it". He began a lawsuit against the chemical companies who
manufactured Agent Orange, Blue, White, Purple etc. but he never lived to
see that lawsuit completed because he died within the year.
The reason that this lawsuit was started was because the VA was denying
veterans claims for medical treatment and compensation and according to US
law, citizens cannot sue the government for these type of claims.
From 1978-1984 the lawsuit continued and was eventually settled, although
many veterans opposed the settlement for millions of dollars. Sadly many
veterans got very little of that money since the army of lawyers who got
involved got a good portion of it in legal fees.
I have been a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War since 1970 and that
organization played a critical role in launching the movement for justice
for Agent Orange vets, supporting Maude Devictor who became the godmother of
the movement, recruiting veterans to joining the lawsuit and raising general
public awareness of this issue.
But we always believed that while the chemical companies had responsibility
and should be held liable, the primary responsibility lay with the US
government which ordered and continued to use these poisons after they were
becoming aware of the negative effects on people. Instead of changing
course, they covered up the facts and kept using them until 1971. After that
they gave their remaining supplies to the former Army of the Republic of
Vietnam who continued to use them until 1975 when that regime ceased to
exist.
In VVAW, our demand has always been Testing, Treatment and Compensation for
Agent Orange Victims. We never thought the lawsuit against the chemical
companies was the answer, but rather a way to continue putting pressure on
the US government.
Finally progress was made on that front when in 1991, Congress passed the
Agent Orange Act, acknowledging several conditions as being dioxin related
for purposes of medical treatment and disability compensation. It also
established a mechanism for the National Academy of Sciences Institute of
Medicine to review new studies and make recommendations to the Secretary of
the Veterans Administration for expanding the recognized conditions.
Currently there are thirteen conditions acknowledged by the VA including two
conditions among veterans children but over 27 conditions have been rejected
since there was a finding by the IOM of not enough scientific research to
indicate a connection to dioxin exposure.
So many veterans are still not being treated with any fairness. And how does
someone give justice to all those who have died? The hidden casualties of
the Vietnam War continue to grow but the struggle continues as well.
And today we need to talk about the other side of the coin, not just
American, Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian veterans but the
people of Vietnam as well.
Remember also that these chemicals were also used in parts of Cambodia and
Laos as well as along the DMZ in Korea and in Panama.
In the United States we began the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and
Responsibility Campaign to support the efforts of VAVA and join with
concerned veterans and people in other countries to demand Justice for ALL
Agent Orange Victims!
While the Campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace, it is made up of war
veterans, Vietnamese-Americans, peace activists, environmentalists and other
friends of Vietnam. We are supporting the international petition drive in
support of the VAVA lawsuit and recently sponsored a 10 city speaking tour
by 4 VAVA members.
We are also planning to encourage sympathetic representatives and senators
to introduce legislation in Congress for the US government to step up to the
plate and provide compensation and medical assistance, if not for political
reasons, then fro moral and humanitarian purposes. It is time to really heal
the wounds of that war, not to ignore them or let them fade into history.
Let me make on last point. This is a struggle to expose and end the use of
chemical weapons by all nations but especially by my government. This is not
just about something that happened over 30 years ago. Today the Bush
administration has led our country and the world into another invasion and
occupation, this time in Iraq and is now used Depleted Uranium that will in
time poison US troops and Iraqi citizens. They have also used White
Phosphorus bombs against whole cities like Fallujah.
It is time for humanity to demand an end to these weapons as part of our
efforts to abolish war. That is what Veterans For Peace is pledged to work
for. That will only come through the determined efforts of all of us,
throughout the world.
The great American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass said:
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground, they want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the
ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, but it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it
never will"
With that as our watchword, lets make this conference a call to all the
people of the world.
JUSTICE FOR ALL AGENT ORANGE VICTIMS!
for organizing this international conference and to the Agent Orange Vets
from Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada who have traveled here to
participate.
The US delegation I am leading is made up of Agent Orange vets Frank
Corcoran, Joan Duffy, Ralph Steele Dan Shea.
I was an infantryman with the 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi and Tay Ninh
in 1967 and was wounded 3 times but do not suffer from dioxin related health
conditions myself.
When I came back from the war, I had knowledge of the use of Agent Orange
having seen sprayed areas and knew that they destroyed nature but had no
knowledge of the negative effects these defoliants had on human beings.
I remember in 1969 a veteran I knew named Jeff Sharlett died of cancer at
age 27 in the Miami, Florida Veterans Hospital and thinking it was strange
that someone so young had cancer.
Over the years other friends of mine got sick or had deformed children or
sometimes died. Mike Keegan and John Miffin who died and John and Rena
Kopystenski who had several children with birth defects are among them. So
this issue has always been personal to me.
In 1977, a woman who worked as a claims representative at the Chicago
Veterans Administration named Maude DeVictor was the first person to really
put two and two together when she witnessed the VA higher-ups denying
veterans claims and covering up their health problems and the connections to
dixon exposure.
The next year, 1978, a veteran name Paul Reutershan who was sick with cancer
got on television and said "my government killed me in Vietnam and I didn't
even know it". He began a lawsuit against the chemical companies who
manufactured Agent Orange, Blue, White, Purple etc. but he never lived to
see that lawsuit completed because he died within the year.
The reason that this lawsuit was started was because the VA was denying
veterans claims for medical treatment and compensation and according to US
law, citizens cannot sue the government for these type of claims.
From 1978-1984 the lawsuit continued and was eventually settled, although
many veterans opposed the settlement for millions of dollars. Sadly many
veterans got very little of that money since the army of lawyers who got
involved got a good portion of it in legal fees.
I have been a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War since 1970 and that
organization played a critical role in launching the movement for justice
for Agent Orange vets, supporting Maude Devictor who became the godmother of
the movement, recruiting veterans to joining the lawsuit and raising general
public awareness of this issue.
But we always believed that while the chemical companies had responsibility
and should be held liable, the primary responsibility lay with the US
government which ordered and continued to use these poisons after they were
becoming aware of the negative effects on people. Instead of changing
course, they covered up the facts and kept using them until 1971. After that
they gave their remaining supplies to the former Army of the Republic of
Vietnam who continued to use them until 1975 when that regime ceased to
exist.
In VVAW, our demand has always been Testing, Treatment and Compensation for
Agent Orange Victims. We never thought the lawsuit against the chemical
companies was the answer, but rather a way to continue putting pressure on
the US government.
Finally progress was made on that front when in 1991, Congress passed the
Agent Orange Act, acknowledging several conditions as being dioxin related
for purposes of medical treatment and disability compensation. It also
established a mechanism for the National Academy of Sciences Institute of
Medicine to review new studies and make recommendations to the Secretary of
the Veterans Administration for expanding the recognized conditions.
Currently there are thirteen conditions acknowledged by the VA including two
conditions among veterans children but over 27 conditions have been rejected
since there was a finding by the IOM of not enough scientific research to
indicate a connection to dioxin exposure.
So many veterans are still not being treated with any fairness. And how does
someone give justice to all those who have died? The hidden casualties of
the Vietnam War continue to grow but the struggle continues as well.
And today we need to talk about the other side of the coin, not just
American, Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian veterans but the
people of Vietnam as well.
Remember also that these chemicals were also used in parts of Cambodia and
Laos as well as along the DMZ in Korea and in Panama.
In the United States we began the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and
Responsibility Campaign to support the efforts of VAVA and join with
concerned veterans and people in other countries to demand Justice for ALL
Agent Orange Victims!
While the Campaign is sponsored by Veterans For Peace, it is made up of war
veterans, Vietnamese-Americans, peace activists, environmentalists and other
friends of Vietnam. We are supporting the international petition drive in
support of the VAVA lawsuit and recently sponsored a 10 city speaking tour
by 4 VAVA members.
We are also planning to encourage sympathetic representatives and senators
to introduce legislation in Congress for the US government to step up to the
plate and provide compensation and medical assistance, if not for political
reasons, then fro moral and humanitarian purposes. It is time to really heal
the wounds of that war, not to ignore them or let them fade into history.
Let me make on last point. This is a struggle to expose and end the use of
chemical weapons by all nations but especially by my government. This is not
just about something that happened over 30 years ago. Today the Bush
administration has led our country and the world into another invasion and
occupation, this time in Iraq and is now used Depleted Uranium that will in
time poison US troops and Iraqi citizens. They have also used White
Phosphorus bombs against whole cities like Fallujah.
It is time for humanity to demand an end to these weapons as part of our
efforts to abolish war. That is what Veterans For Peace is pledged to work
for. That will only come through the determined efforts of all of us,
throughout the world.
The great American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass said:
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground, they want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the
ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, but it must
be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it
never will"
With that as our watchword, lets make this conference a call to all the
people of the world.
JUSTICE FOR ALL AGENT ORANGE VICTIMS!
D.C. JUDGE GIVES PROTESTERS "TIME SERVED" FOR DISRUPTING CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON IRAQ WAR FUNDING
WASHINGTON - A District of Columbia Superior Court Judge this morning
sentenced two anti-war activists to "time served" for disrupting a March 8
meeting of the House Appropriations Committee as it considered an additional
$67,000,000 for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Federal rosecutors had asked Judge Stephen Milliken to sentence Ed Kinane,
of Syracuse, who had previous arrests at the School of the Americas at Ft.
Benning, Georgia, to 180 days in jail, suspended except for one weekend,
probation, and a "stay away order" from the grounds of the Capitol, and Mike
Ferner, of Toledo, to probation and a "stay away order."
At the Appropriations Committee hearing, Ferner stood up and began reading a
list of names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war, and
Kinane stood, holding a banner that said, "Stop the Killing!" The two were
quickly taken from the hearing room by Capitol Police and arrested. After
being booked they were later released at 2:00 am, the morning of March 9.
This morning in court, Kinane pled no contest and Ferner pled guilty to one
charge each of disrupting a Congressional committee hearing. National
Lawyers Guild attorney, Mark Goldstone, represented Ferner and advised
Kinane w ho conducted his own defense. Each of the defendants read a
prepared statement to Judge Milliken who had several questions for the two
men and then imposed his sentence of "time served."
In his statement to the judge, Kinane, 62, said, "I saw myself as
petitioning my elected representatives, my government, for redress of a
policy that grieves me enormously," and concluded by saying, "May each of us
do whatever we can to end this heinous war as soon as humanly possible."
In his statement, Ferner, 55, described his experiences as a Navy Hospital
Corpsman taking care of wounded soldiers and Marines during the Viet Nam
war. He said images of those days have not left his mind for 35 years and
that he believes the U.S. government is committing war crimes in Iraq.
"I cannot stand by and watch these crimes continue. I must add my voice to
the thousands of others crying out for an end to them until we awaken
America's conscience," and invted the judge to "help us wake our nation's
conscience by ruling what I did.was not a disruption but a civic duty."
Ferner's statement follows.
###
Statement by Mike Ferner
Washington, D.C. Superior Court
March 28, 2006
Your Honor, when some people learn of my appearance before you today they ask me why I found it necessary to disrupt the House Appropriations Committee as it was preparing to vote another $67,000,000,000 for war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"What justifies disrupting Congress," they ask?
I answer them, and can tell you in one word: images.
Images that have not left my mind for 35 years; from when I worked as a Corpsman in a Navy hospital during the Viet Nam war. Images of young soldiers and Marines lying in row upon row of hospital beds, shrouded in layers of white bandages.
Images of picking shrapnel out of Mike Ramsack's backside.of dressing Bob Butikofer's wounds every day, trying not to make h! im screa m.of changing colostomy bags on guys hoping they wouldn't defecate out the hole in their guts caused by a gunshot wound.
Images of the young soldier I couldn't hook up properly for a brain scan because he was missing his entire left temporal lobe.
Images of long lines of ambulatory patients waiting for supper in the hospital chow hall, sitting in wheelchairs, leaning on crutches, missing arms and legs and eyes.Images of a young man, silent and broken, sitting in a corner of the psychiatric ward.
And there are other, more recent images from my trips to Iraq that I cannot forget.
Images of the kids I met on the streets of Baghdad, and the ones in Abu Hishma who shared their chicken and rice dinner with an American journalist two days after a cruise missile blew their orange grove to bits.
Images of the young U.S. Army sergeant from West Virginia I accompanied on patrol one night near Balad, who answered my question, "why are you in Iraq?" with a tired shrug saying, "I reallydon't know." And his partner, just as bone tired, who answered simply, "oil."
I see these images every day. And I know that the young men in that Navy hospital 35 years ago, just like the ones I met last year in Iraq, are getting killed and maimed for a preposterous lie.
As my blood boils I tell my government to "BRING THEM HOME NOW!" by writing letters, signing petitions, speaking at rallies, and yes, when I can, testifying uninvited to the very committee preparing to vote more billions for this war.
Before the Capitol Police put me face down on the floor outside the Appropriations Committee hearing room, I told the committee members that their actions were making Americans less safe, not more; that in addition to causing great suffering, they were also violating dozens of international and domestic laws, waging a war of aggression, committing crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. A chill should run through our very soul as we remember when those words were use! d to ind ict another nation's warmaking, a nation over which we stood in judgement.
And just as Good Germans were complicit in the crimes of their government not that very long ago, so to are we American citizens complicit in the crimes of our own government. Because we are complicit, we must speak out against this monstrous war in every nonviolent way possible if we want to absolve ourselves of that complicity.
Your Honor, I cannot stand by and watch these crimes continue. I must add my voice to the thousands of others crying out for an end to it until we awaken America's conscience. I invite you to help us wake our nation's conscience by ruling that what I did when I read the names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis killed in this war, to a Congressional Committee about to vote more money to prolong the killing, was not a disruption but a civic duty.
###
sentenced two anti-war activists to "time served" for disrupting a March 8
meeting of the House Appropriations Committee as it considered an additional
$67,000,000 for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Federal rosecutors had asked Judge Stephen Milliken to sentence Ed Kinane,
of Syracuse, who had previous arrests at the School of the Americas at Ft.
Benning, Georgia, to 180 days in jail, suspended except for one weekend,
probation, and a "stay away order" from the grounds of the Capitol, and Mike
Ferner, of Toledo, to probation and a "stay away order."
At the Appropriations Committee hearing, Ferner stood up and began reading a
list of names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war, and
Kinane stood, holding a banner that said, "Stop the Killing!" The two were
quickly taken from the hearing room by Capitol Police and arrested. After
being booked they were later released at 2:00 am, the morning of March 9.
This morning in court, Kinane pled no contest and Ferner pled guilty to one
charge each of disrupting a Congressional committee hearing. National
Lawyers Guild attorney, Mark Goldstone, represented Ferner and advised
Kinane w ho conducted his own defense. Each of the defendants read a
prepared statement to Judge Milliken who had several questions for the two
men and then imposed his sentence of "time served."
In his statement to the judge, Kinane, 62, said, "I saw myself as
petitioning my elected representatives, my government, for redress of a
policy that grieves me enormously," and concluded by saying, "May each of us
do whatever we can to end this heinous war as soon as humanly possible."
In his statement, Ferner, 55, described his experiences as a Navy Hospital
Corpsman taking care of wounded soldiers and Marines during the Viet Nam
war. He said images of those days have not left his mind for 35 years and
that he believes the U.S. government is committing war crimes in Iraq.
"I cannot stand by and watch these crimes continue. I must add my voice to
the thousands of others crying out for an end to them until we awaken
America's conscience," and invted the judge to "help us wake our nation's
conscience by ruling what I did.was not a disruption but a civic duty."
Ferner's statement follows.
###
Statement by Mike Ferner
Washington, D.C. Superior Court
March 28, 2006
Your Honor, when some people learn of my appearance before you today they ask me why I found it necessary to disrupt the House Appropriations Committee as it was preparing to vote another $67,000,000,000 for war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"What justifies disrupting Congress," they ask?
I answer them, and can tell you in one word: images.
Images that have not left my mind for 35 years; from when I worked as a Corpsman in a Navy hospital during the Viet Nam war. Images of young soldiers and Marines lying in row upon row of hospital beds, shrouded in layers of white bandages.
Images of picking shrapnel out of Mike Ramsack's backside.of dressing Bob Butikofer's wounds every day, trying not to make h! im screa m.of changing colostomy bags on guys hoping they wouldn't defecate out the hole in their guts caused by a gunshot wound.
Images of the young soldier I couldn't hook up properly for a brain scan because he was missing his entire left temporal lobe.
Images of long lines of ambulatory patients waiting for supper in the hospital chow hall, sitting in wheelchairs, leaning on crutches, missing arms and legs and eyes.Images of a young man, silent and broken, sitting in a corner of the psychiatric ward.
And there are other, more recent images from my trips to Iraq that I cannot forget.
Images of the kids I met on the streets of Baghdad, and the ones in Abu Hishma who shared their chicken and rice dinner with an American journalist two days after a cruise missile blew their orange grove to bits.
Images of the young U.S. Army sergeant from West Virginia I accompanied on patrol one night near Balad, who answered my question, "why are you in Iraq?" with a tired shrug saying, "I reallydon't know." And his partner, just as bone tired, who answered simply, "oil."
I see these images every day. And I know that the young men in that Navy hospital 35 years ago, just like the ones I met last year in Iraq, are getting killed and maimed for a preposterous lie.
As my blood boils I tell my government to "BRING THEM HOME NOW!" by writing letters, signing petitions, speaking at rallies, and yes, when I can, testifying uninvited to the very committee preparing to vote more billions for this war.
Before the Capitol Police put me face down on the floor outside the Appropriations Committee hearing room, I told the committee members that their actions were making Americans less safe, not more; that in addition to causing great suffering, they were also violating dozens of international and domestic laws, waging a war of aggression, committing crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. A chill should run through our very soul as we remember when those words were use! d to ind ict another nation's warmaking, a nation over which we stood in judgement.
And just as Good Germans were complicit in the crimes of their government not that very long ago, so to are we American citizens complicit in the crimes of our own government. Because we are complicit, we must speak out against this monstrous war in every nonviolent way possible if we want to absolve ourselves of that complicity.
Your Honor, I cannot stand by and watch these crimes continue. I must add my voice to the thousands of others crying out for an end to it until we awaken America's conscience. I invite you to help us wake our nation's conscience by ruling that what I did when I read the names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis killed in this war, to a Congressional Committee about to vote more money to prolong the killing, was not a disruption but a civic duty.
###
In the Path of a Storm, Vets Protest a War by CHRISTIAN PARENTI
New Orleans
A column of American military veterans of wars in Iraq, Vietnam and points in
between, as well as parents and families of soldiers, marched into New
Orleans Sunday chanting radical cadences and flying a 1776 version of the American
flag.
Young Iraq vets led the column of roughly 250 through the gray, wrecked
landscape, many wearing their desert camouflage uniforms, with upside-down American
flag patches on their shoulders, sporting shades, beards, kaffiyehs and
chests full of metals. At night and along the roads the conversation frequently
turns to PTSD, poverty, depleted uranium-caused cancer, unpaid student loans,
Ramadi, Tikrit, IEDs and the intense camaraderie of this new movement.
Older veterans, mostly from the Vietnam War, who helped a younger generation
of soldiers to launch Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are still as angry
as they were thirty years ago, but their once-youthful anger and grief has
been tempered by a generation of struggle. And it is upon this platform that the
young Iraq vets are now building their piece of the movement.
"Our motto is that never again will one generation of veterans turn their
back on another," said Dave Cline, a longtime activist and early member of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The column spent the six days prior to arriving in New Orleans tromping and
caravanning from Mobile, Alabama, through the devastation that is, still, the
Gulf Coast. Along the way the vets and their supporters left teams to help
"muck out" some of the trashed homes along the small towns of the Gulf Coast. But
the protest's larger aim was to make the connections between the devastation
here and the ruin of Iraq. The protesters say corruption, incompetence and
inhumanity mark both.
"All the money that is going to Iraq could be going down here," says former
Army sniper and IVAW member Garrett Reppenhagen.
According to the IVAW, the invasion and occupation of Iraq could cost $2.65
trillion. Other numbers mentioned along the march were the more than 2,400
American troops and 100,000 Iraqis killed.
At times the connections between Iraq and the Gulf Coast became all too real,
or even surreal. The ruined homes, lack of water and sporadic electricity
along the way reminded many vets of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan that
some had left only months before.
"In Gulfport I heard a pop or a snap and looked back, and one of my guys took
a knee," said Navy corps and combat vet Charles Anderson, referring to the
common military position of kneeling in preparation for action. "I went back to
him, put my hand on him and told him: 'It's OK, we're in Mississippi now.' "
On Thursday, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the
marchers were camped deep in the wrecked bayou country east of New Orleans and the
mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. In a clearing by a brackish creek, among a forest
of dry, ashen-colored, half-toppled pine trees, the vets listened to the
stories of local residents who spoke from a small plywood stage about the horrors
of the storm and the abandonment that followed. Bereft of state or federal aid,
many of the people there were still in bare survival mode.
A local man named Raymond Couture broke down in tears as he told his story of
finding thirty-four corpses in a local nursing home. "They ain't done nothing
for us here yet, so I know they ain't done nothing for them people in Iraq."
Then the vets and military families spoke. Tina Garnanez, a young Navajo,
lesbian and vet, spoke of her experiences in Iraq. She described the track record
of lies, broken promises and rising violence in Iraq as mirroring the history
of broken treaties, genocide and poverty that shape reservation life in the
United States.
Dinner in the broken forest was alligator gumbo; the IVAW kids partied out
and then slept under the stars.
Later, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Demond Mullins, who returned
from heavy combat in Iraq only five months ago, looked out at the ravaged,
filthy wreckage in a quiet fury. "I can't believe this. This is worse than
Baghdad. What my country has become sickens me."
The march from Mobile to New Orleans marks a new stage in organizing among
Iraq veterans and thus a new stage for the peace movement. A year ago IVAW was,
in reality, mostly just a good idea and a small speakers' bureau. Now it is a
real organization and a key piece in the larger coalition of groups like
Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out that make up the heart of peace
movement
A column of American military veterans of wars in Iraq, Vietnam and points in
between, as well as parents and families of soldiers, marched into New
Orleans Sunday chanting radical cadences and flying a 1776 version of the American
flag.
Young Iraq vets led the column of roughly 250 through the gray, wrecked
landscape, many wearing their desert camouflage uniforms, with upside-down American
flag patches on their shoulders, sporting shades, beards, kaffiyehs and
chests full of metals. At night and along the roads the conversation frequently
turns to PTSD, poverty, depleted uranium-caused cancer, unpaid student loans,
Ramadi, Tikrit, IEDs and the intense camaraderie of this new movement.
Older veterans, mostly from the Vietnam War, who helped a younger generation
of soldiers to launch Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) are still as angry
as they were thirty years ago, but their once-youthful anger and grief has
been tempered by a generation of struggle. And it is upon this platform that the
young Iraq vets are now building their piece of the movement.
"Our motto is that never again will one generation of veterans turn their
back on another," said Dave Cline, a longtime activist and early member of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The column spent the six days prior to arriving in New Orleans tromping and
caravanning from Mobile, Alabama, through the devastation that is, still, the
Gulf Coast. Along the way the vets and their supporters left teams to help
"muck out" some of the trashed homes along the small towns of the Gulf Coast. But
the protest's larger aim was to make the connections between the devastation
here and the ruin of Iraq. The protesters say corruption, incompetence and
inhumanity mark both.
"All the money that is going to Iraq could be going down here," says former
Army sniper and IVAW member Garrett Reppenhagen.
According to the IVAW, the invasion and occupation of Iraq could cost $2.65
trillion. Other numbers mentioned along the march were the more than 2,400
American troops and 100,000 Iraqis killed.
At times the connections between Iraq and the Gulf Coast became all too real,
or even surreal. The ruined homes, lack of water and sporadic electricity
along the way reminded many vets of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan that
some had left only months before.
"In Gulfport I heard a pop or a snap and looked back, and one of my guys took
a knee," said Navy corps and combat vet Charles Anderson, referring to the
common military position of kneeling in preparation for action. "I went back to
him, put my hand on him and told him: 'It's OK, we're in Mississippi now.' "
On Thursday, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the
marchers were camped deep in the wrecked bayou country east of New Orleans and the
mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. In a clearing by a brackish creek, among a forest
of dry, ashen-colored, half-toppled pine trees, the vets listened to the
stories of local residents who spoke from a small plywood stage about the horrors
of the storm and the abandonment that followed. Bereft of state or federal aid,
many of the people there were still in bare survival mode.
A local man named Raymond Couture broke down in tears as he told his story of
finding thirty-four corpses in a local nursing home. "They ain't done nothing
for us here yet, so I know they ain't done nothing for them people in Iraq."
Then the vets and military families spoke. Tina Garnanez, a young Navajo,
lesbian and vet, spoke of her experiences in Iraq. She described the track record
of lies, broken promises and rising violence in Iraq as mirroring the history
of broken treaties, genocide and poverty that shape reservation life in the
United States.
Dinner in the broken forest was alligator gumbo; the IVAW kids partied out
and then slept under the stars.
Later, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Demond Mullins, who returned
from heavy combat in Iraq only five months ago, looked out at the ravaged,
filthy wreckage in a quiet fury. "I can't believe this. This is worse than
Baghdad. What my country has become sickens me."
The march from Mobile to New Orleans marks a new stage in organizing among
Iraq veterans and thus a new stage for the peace movement. A year ago IVAW was,
in reality, mostly just a good idea and a small speakers' bureau. Now it is a
real organization and a key piece in the larger coalition of groups like
Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out that make up the heart of peace
movement
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
John Pilger On Channel 4 UK "Hugo Chavez Report"
On March 27, Channel 4 News broadcast a relatively long piece on Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. On Channel 4's website you get a flavour: “He is in danger of joining a rogue’s gallery of dictators and despots — Washington’s latest Latin nightmare.”
This was a piece seemingly written by the US State Department, although Channel 4's Washington correspondent, Jonathan Rugman, appeared on screen. It was one of the worst, most distorted pieces of journalism I have ever seen, qualifying as crude propaganda. I have been in Venezuela lately and almost nothing in Rugman’s rant coincides with reality. Factories are like “Soviet collectives”; a dictatorship is on the rise; Chavez is like Hitler (Rumsfeld); and the media is under government attack. The inversion of the truth throughout this travesty is demonstrated in the “coverage” of a cowed media. Venezuela is a country in which 95 per cent of the press and TV and radio are owned by the far-right. who mount unrelenting daily attacks on the government unhindered. The Latin American Murdoch, Cisneros, unfettered, controls much of it. Indeed, it is probably the most concentrated, reactionary media on earth — but that was not worthy of a single word from Rugman.
The dishonesty of interviewing Maria Corina Machado and calling her a “human rights activist” was breathtaking. She is a leader of Sumate (’Join up’), an extreme right organisati on that was deeply involved in the 2002 coup. She met Bush in the White House shortly before the coup. There was no mention of this. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, is dismissed as a Chavez protege”, a puppet, a ludicrous description of a man who has been in polityics longer than Chavez and has just won a landslide election. No mention of this.
Chavez himself is portrayed by Rugman as a comical dictator, with his folksy Latin way (one reason ordinary people love him) taken out of any context. In fact, this highly intelligent, accessible man has overseen victory in nine democratic elections in less than eight years — a world record. In crude Soviet-flick style, he is shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafy when these brief encounters only had to do with Opec and oil. (He met Saddam literally in a day-long stopover).
Chavez is said to have “torn up contracts” with foreign oil companies. The con tracts were barely legal, based on loopholes which Chavez’s predecessaor Rafael Caldera exploited to give away much of Venezuela’s oil, in effect; billions of dollars went into the pockets of Venezuela’s wealthy minority. No mention of this.
Utter bullshit about Venezuela helping Iran develop a nuclear capability is sourced to “press reports” (discredited in the United States) peddled by axe-grinding outsiders, in league with Washington, along with other half-baked hearsay. There was little, apart from tokens, about the way the Chavez government has changed millions of people’s lives for the better. Rugman whined that he was “held for 30 hours” by police in Caracas. Oh, how dramatic for him. This is a country threatened day and night by the United States; there was nothing from our Channel 4 hero about “Operation Bilbao”, to which serious US analysts like William Arkin have given credibility and which is about overthrowing the elected government of Ve nezuela. In his brief captivity, Rugman would have learned that this is a country, although under constant military threat, and threats from within, has not a single political prisoner.
While Chavez was offered up as a clown, Condaleeza Rice was given true gravitas. I could go on, but that’s enough. This was a disgrace from beginning to end. Worse, it joined the kind of hysteria in the US that is following the Bush administration’s agenda of “positioning” Venezuela as a “rogue state” and a threat to US interests: in other words, softening it up for attack. If and when it comes, the Rugmans will share some of the responsibility.
John Pilger
This was a piece seemingly written by the US State Department, although Channel 4's Washington correspondent, Jonathan Rugman, appeared on screen. It was one of the worst, most distorted pieces of journalism I have ever seen, qualifying as crude propaganda. I have been in Venezuela lately and almost nothing in Rugman’s rant coincides with reality. Factories are like “Soviet collectives”; a dictatorship is on the rise; Chavez is like Hitler (Rumsfeld); and the media is under government attack. The inversion of the truth throughout this travesty is demonstrated in the “coverage” of a cowed media. Venezuela is a country in which 95 per cent of the press and TV and radio are owned by the far-right. who mount unrelenting daily attacks on the government unhindered. The Latin American Murdoch, Cisneros, unfettered, controls much of it. Indeed, it is probably the most concentrated, reactionary media on earth — but that was not worthy of a single word from Rugman.
The dishonesty of interviewing Maria Corina Machado and calling her a “human rights activist” was breathtaking. She is a leader of Sumate (’Join up’), an extreme right organisati on that was deeply involved in the 2002 coup. She met Bush in the White House shortly before the coup. There was no mention of this. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, is dismissed as a Chavez protege”, a puppet, a ludicrous description of a man who has been in polityics longer than Chavez and has just won a landslide election. No mention of this.
Chavez himself is portrayed by Rugman as a comical dictator, with his folksy Latin way (one reason ordinary people love him) taken out of any context. In fact, this highly intelligent, accessible man has overseen victory in nine democratic elections in less than eight years — a world record. In crude Soviet-flick style, he is shown with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafy when these brief encounters only had to do with Opec and oil. (He met Saddam literally in a day-long stopover).
Chavez is said to have “torn up contracts” with foreign oil companies. The con tracts were barely legal, based on loopholes which Chavez’s predecessaor Rafael Caldera exploited to give away much of Venezuela’s oil, in effect; billions of dollars went into the pockets of Venezuela’s wealthy minority. No mention of this.
Utter bullshit about Venezuela helping Iran develop a nuclear capability is sourced to “press reports” (discredited in the United States) peddled by axe-grinding outsiders, in league with Washington, along with other half-baked hearsay. There was little, apart from tokens, about the way the Chavez government has changed millions of people’s lives for the better. Rugman whined that he was “held for 30 hours” by police in Caracas. Oh, how dramatic for him. This is a country threatened day and night by the United States; there was nothing from our Channel 4 hero about “Operation Bilbao”, to which serious US analysts like William Arkin have given credibility and which is about overthrowing the elected government of Ve nezuela. In his brief captivity, Rugman would have learned that this is a country, although under constant military threat, and threats from within, has not a single political prisoner.
While Chavez was offered up as a clown, Condaleeza Rice was given true gravitas. I could go on, but that’s enough. This was a disgrace from beginning to end. Worse, it joined the kind of hysteria in the US that is following the Bush administration’s agenda of “positioning” Venezuela as a “rogue state” and a threat to US interests: in other words, softening it up for attack. If and when it comes, the Rugmans will share some of the responsibility.
John Pilger
Legalize the 'Illegals' By Robert Scheer
There is no immigration crisis — other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes. So it has always been throughout the history of this country when anti-immigrant hysteria periodically reigns during low ebbs in our national sense of security and vision.
The script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the “flood” or “tidal wave” or “river” sneaking across our porous borders — be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War. Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don’t let any more in.
Luckily, although it sometimes takes years or even decades, saner voices eventually prevail, acknowledging that the continued influx of immigrants has always fueled America’s astonishing economic and cultural rise ever since the original natives were bum-rushed off their turf. Immigration laws are liberalized, compromises are reached, amnesties are offered, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service bureaucracy grinds on.
Having intermittently covered this issue for the Los Angeles Times over 30 years, I can well recall the peaks of panic in which we reporters were dispatched to the border and out into the fields to witness the arrest of people desperate to find work — only to be embarrassed by the hunted eyes and clutched crosses of the enemy discovered.
Such frenzied attention was inevitably followed by a lull in which most Americans were quite happy to eat the food harvested by those same harassed and abused workers as well as entrusting the “illegals” with the care of American homes and children. On no other issue is there such an extreme disconnect between attitudes and actions.
When Wal-Mart was busted for hiring undocumented workers, did anybody boycott the company for it? Of course not; consumers value price and aren’t concerned, for the most part, about how a company accomplishes cheapness. If, however, people do really care about keeping all jobs open to American citizens, then there is only one effective strategy: Level the playing field by enforcing labor laws.
Some 2 million immigrant workers now earn less than the minimum wage and millions more work without the occupational safety, workers’ compensation, overtime pay and other protections legal status offers. Consequently, when the president says that immigrants perform work that legal residents are unwilling to do, he may be right — but we don’t know. The only way to test that hypothesis is to bring this black market labor pool above ground.
That approach has been tried in California with some success. José Millan, who until this year ran such an enforcement program as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s labor commissioner and before that for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, told me that legalization of undocumented workers is essential to improving the situation for everybody.
“I am in favor of anything that brings these workers out of the shadows and into the sunlight; it’s very easy to exploit a population when they’re afraid,” Millan told me Monday. “We would be a better country if we recognized the fact that there are 10 million undocumented workers in our midst, and we would be better off if they were granted the benefits and responsibilities of a legal existence.”
This current xenophobia is no more warranted than it has been in the past. The number of claimed “illegal aliens” as a percentage of the population is clearly absorbable by the job market as our low unemployment rate demonstrates. Yet, the Republican Party and the Congress it dominates are currently teetering between driving undocumented workers further underground or taking a saner compromise approach.
The former, a draconian bill already passed by the House of Representatives, would legalize witch-hunts of undocumented workers, by reclassifying them as felons; their employers would be subject to a year or more in prison and punitive fines; as would even church and nonprofit organizations who offer succor to them.
Because employers are not trained to play cop, they will simply be driven to discriminate against job applicants based on “foreignness” determined by ethnicity or accent. The more reasonable alternative co-authored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and embraced as the heart of the proposal adopted by the Judiciary Committee on Monday, shuns the criminalization of the undocumented, instead offering paths — albeit long, arduous and uncertain ones — to legal status for undocumented workers already here.
This is a moment of truth for America. It is time to acknowledge that we need the immigrant workers as much as they need us, and to begin to treat them with the respect they deserve.
The script is as old as the Mayflower: A false alarm is sounded that the values, wages and safety of the current roster of credentialed Americans are jeopardized by the “flood” or “tidal wave” or “river” sneaking across our porous borders — be they Irish, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Mexican or even the freed slaves seeking to earn an honest living in Northern cities after the Civil War. Any and all manner of societal problems are to be laid on these scapegoats, and the same simplistic solution offered: Find and deport them, and don’t let any more in.
Luckily, although it sometimes takes years or even decades, saner voices eventually prevail, acknowledging that the continued influx of immigrants has always fueled America’s astonishing economic and cultural rise ever since the original natives were bum-rushed off their turf. Immigration laws are liberalized, compromises are reached, amnesties are offered, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service bureaucracy grinds on.
Having intermittently covered this issue for the Los Angeles Times over 30 years, I can well recall the peaks of panic in which we reporters were dispatched to the border and out into the fields to witness the arrest of people desperate to find work — only to be embarrassed by the hunted eyes and clutched crosses of the enemy discovered.
Such frenzied attention was inevitably followed by a lull in which most Americans were quite happy to eat the food harvested by those same harassed and abused workers as well as entrusting the “illegals” with the care of American homes and children. On no other issue is there such an extreme disconnect between attitudes and actions.
When Wal-Mart was busted for hiring undocumented workers, did anybody boycott the company for it? Of course not; consumers value price and aren’t concerned, for the most part, about how a company accomplishes cheapness. If, however, people do really care about keeping all jobs open to American citizens, then there is only one effective strategy: Level the playing field by enforcing labor laws.
Some 2 million immigrant workers now earn less than the minimum wage and millions more work without the occupational safety, workers’ compensation, overtime pay and other protections legal status offers. Consequently, when the president says that immigrants perform work that legal residents are unwilling to do, he may be right — but we don’t know. The only way to test that hypothesis is to bring this black market labor pool above ground.
That approach has been tried in California with some success. José Millan, who until this year ran such an enforcement program as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s labor commissioner and before that for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, told me that legalization of undocumented workers is essential to improving the situation for everybody.
“I am in favor of anything that brings these workers out of the shadows and into the sunlight; it’s very easy to exploit a population when they’re afraid,” Millan told me Monday. “We would be a better country if we recognized the fact that there are 10 million undocumented workers in our midst, and we would be better off if they were granted the benefits and responsibilities of a legal existence.”
This current xenophobia is no more warranted than it has been in the past. The number of claimed “illegal aliens” as a percentage of the population is clearly absorbable by the job market as our low unemployment rate demonstrates. Yet, the Republican Party and the Congress it dominates are currently teetering between driving undocumented workers further underground or taking a saner compromise approach.
The former, a draconian bill already passed by the House of Representatives, would legalize witch-hunts of undocumented workers, by reclassifying them as felons; their employers would be subject to a year or more in prison and punitive fines; as would even church and nonprofit organizations who offer succor to them.
Because employers are not trained to play cop, they will simply be driven to discriminate against job applicants based on “foreignness” determined by ethnicity or accent. The more reasonable alternative co-authored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and embraced as the heart of the proposal adopted by the Judiciary Committee on Monday, shuns the criminalization of the undocumented, instead offering paths — albeit long, arduous and uncertain ones — to legal status for undocumented workers already here.
This is a moment of truth for America. It is time to acknowledge that we need the immigrant workers as much as they need us, and to begin to treat them with the respect they deserve.
The Cowards Path - An open letter OF APOLOGY to Ralph Nader By Linda H Riegler
03/28/06 -- ---
Dear Mr. Nadar,
Sir, I owe you an apology…
It is now the season of Lent, and although I am a recovered catholic, old habits such as guilt and self-loathing are difficult habits to break.
I grew up in the south, during the civil rights/Viet-Nam era in a home of Dixie-crats (allow me to clarify briefly the term Dixie-crat). A dixie-crat is not a conservative democrat—a dixie-crat is a republican, in every sense, who registers to vote in the democratic primary in order to manipulate the outcome.
Consequently, as a result of growing up around all of this cynicism, I became a democrat—a life long democrat. I became a democrat because, where republicans were corrupt, democrats were courageous; where republicans were self-interested, democrats were committed to the common good; where republicans were advancing the “military industrial complex”, the democrats were trying to end the war…
And whenever democrats where exposed as being less than honorable…I told myself that the democratic platform is larger than any single corrupt democratic legislator. Our platform advances the common good.
Well…I was young…
However, in the 2000 elections even as I was impassioned by your words, and although inspired by your courage in a way that has alluded me since my youth. I sat silently applauding you (I even considered “vote-swapping”), but in the end, I cast my vote for Al Gore. I was completely secure in my convictions. As desperately, as we needed you, it was far more critical to elect Al Gore than to risk (I’d been doing my homework over the last twenty years) allowing America to fall into the hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
When the 2004 elections rolled around--again I was mute, but this time I was even more resolute in my convictions, that a vote for you was a vote squandered. You were a luxury that we could not afford. Our constitution was under threat—Bush must clearly and definitively be re-defeated!
Moreover, as the Downing Street Memo exposed Bush and the lies he told taking us to war in Iraq, a war of profit, a war of pestilence wrought on the peoples of Iraq after so many years enduring the tyrannies of Saddam Hussein. A pestilence that will haunt the peoples of the Middle East as well as the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, who’s patriotism has been exploited so unconscionably by this regime. Depleted Uranium is the legacy that will resonate for generations to come. Brutality, torture and empire will now be the values most often associated with the United States. Mean-spirited debate and incivility are the new currency in Bush’s America.
Yet, while the lies and corruption continue to spill forth, we have in our democratic leadership, people unwilling to stand up, unwilling to stand up to protect our representative democracy, our basic civil liberties and our constitution. I like many across the country have stood by, nearly pulling out my hair, making phone calls, writing letters, signing petitions, watching in anguish, as our democratic leadership serves up more power and legitimacy to this regime.
Now, here we are, a year and a half into Bush’s second term—Lent. Lent, and although I no longer consider myself a catholic, I still find myself falling into the ritual of self-reflection, and a good habit indeed—one of my few...
and sir, I owe you an apology...
I understand now, that I am a war criminal. I am responsible. I am complicit in disseminating depleted uranium throughout the Middle East. I am responsible for the renditions, for Abu Ghraib, for the torture, for the illegal spying, etc. I am responsible. I am responsible for it all.
I am responsible because, when we choose the cowardly path as we step into the ballot box, we choose cowardly people to represent us. We choose fear to dictate our actions rather than courage. Little wonder that that is what we see reflected back to us by our leadership. More importantly, in choosing weak and cowardly people, we choose to allow unspeakable acts to be committed in our name and for that, sir—I owe you and the world, an apology.
Linda H Riegler
Dear Mr. Nadar,
Sir, I owe you an apology…
It is now the season of Lent, and although I am a recovered catholic, old habits such as guilt and self-loathing are difficult habits to break.
I grew up in the south, during the civil rights/Viet-Nam era in a home of Dixie-crats (allow me to clarify briefly the term Dixie-crat). A dixie-crat is not a conservative democrat—a dixie-crat is a republican, in every sense, who registers to vote in the democratic primary in order to manipulate the outcome.
Consequently, as a result of growing up around all of this cynicism, I became a democrat—a life long democrat. I became a democrat because, where republicans were corrupt, democrats were courageous; where republicans were self-interested, democrats were committed to the common good; where republicans were advancing the “military industrial complex”, the democrats were trying to end the war…
And whenever democrats where exposed as being less than honorable…I told myself that the democratic platform is larger than any single corrupt democratic legislator. Our platform advances the common good.
Well…I was young…
However, in the 2000 elections even as I was impassioned by your words, and although inspired by your courage in a way that has alluded me since my youth. I sat silently applauding you (I even considered “vote-swapping”), but in the end, I cast my vote for Al Gore. I was completely secure in my convictions. As desperately, as we needed you, it was far more critical to elect Al Gore than to risk (I’d been doing my homework over the last twenty years) allowing America to fall into the hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
When the 2004 elections rolled around--again I was mute, but this time I was even more resolute in my convictions, that a vote for you was a vote squandered. You were a luxury that we could not afford. Our constitution was under threat—Bush must clearly and definitively be re-defeated!
Moreover, as the Downing Street Memo exposed Bush and the lies he told taking us to war in Iraq, a war of profit, a war of pestilence wrought on the peoples of Iraq after so many years enduring the tyrannies of Saddam Hussein. A pestilence that will haunt the peoples of the Middle East as well as the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, who’s patriotism has been exploited so unconscionably by this regime. Depleted Uranium is the legacy that will resonate for generations to come. Brutality, torture and empire will now be the values most often associated with the United States. Mean-spirited debate and incivility are the new currency in Bush’s America.
Yet, while the lies and corruption continue to spill forth, we have in our democratic leadership, people unwilling to stand up, unwilling to stand up to protect our representative democracy, our basic civil liberties and our constitution. I like many across the country have stood by, nearly pulling out my hair, making phone calls, writing letters, signing petitions, watching in anguish, as our democratic leadership serves up more power and legitimacy to this regime.
Now, here we are, a year and a half into Bush’s second term—Lent. Lent, and although I no longer consider myself a catholic, I still find myself falling into the ritual of self-reflection, and a good habit indeed—one of my few...
and sir, I owe you an apology...
I understand now, that I am a war criminal. I am responsible. I am complicit in disseminating depleted uranium throughout the Middle East. I am responsible for the renditions, for Abu Ghraib, for the torture, for the illegal spying, etc. I am responsible. I am responsible for it all.
I am responsible because, when we choose the cowardly path as we step into the ballot box, we choose cowardly people to represent us. We choose fear to dictate our actions rather than courage. Little wonder that that is what we see reflected back to us by our leadership. More importantly, in choosing weak and cowardly people, we choose to allow unspeakable acts to be committed in our name and for that, sir—I owe you and the world, an apology.
Linda H Riegler
Pardoning the Pentagon BY Molly Ivins
The Pentagon has investigated its own habit of paying people to lie -- and, lo and behold, it found itself not guilty.
The Pentagon has once again investigated itself! And -- have a seat, get the smelling salts, hold all hats -- the Pentagon has once again concluded the Pentagon did absolutely nothing wrong and will continue to do so.
In this particularly fascinating case, the Pentagon investigated its own habit of paying people to make up lies about how well the war in Iraq is going, and then paying other people to put those lies in the Iraqi media, thus fooling the Iraqis into thinking everything in their country is tickety-boo. Well, if we can't fool them, whom can we fool?
The case revolves around a contract worth several million dollars given by the U.S. military command in Baghdad to the Lincoln Group, a public relations outfit started by two young entrepreneurs, one British, one American, in 2003 in Iraq. Articles were written by American military personnel from the American point of view about the war -- to wit, it's going well. Lincoln Group in turn paid Iraqi journalists, some "on retainer," to print the articles without revealing the source.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Ecuador: State of emergency declared to halt protests
The past three weeks have left their mark on Ecuadorian society. The magnificent revolutionary movement has risen once again forcing the government to declare a state of emergency in four main provinces. The armed forces have been given permission to use “extraordinary” measures to bring the situation under control. What we are witnessing is the early beginnings of a movement that could develop towards a new insurrection.
The immediate cause of this recent wave of mass protests were the declarations of the president of Ecuador, Alfredo Palacio, who has stated that he wants to sign the TLC (FTA), a free-trade agreement that US imperialism is trying to impose on the Latin American countries. The TLC is a free-trade agreement that will give even more freedom to US-multinationals to operate in Ecuador. It will give them wide access to the rich resources of the country and make it possible for them to make millions of dollars, for example from the big oil-reserves.
As we explained in a previously published article (see Ecuador: New explosions are being prepared), the continued presence in the country of the US oil company OXY, is a source of anger and frustration for the oppressed masses of Ecuadorian workers, urban poor, indigenous people and youth. While social spending is being cut this multinational is allowed to continue its business in Ecuador, in spite of clear evidence that it is violating its contract with the state. If the TLC is applied in Ecuador it will open the gates for more such companies and it will mean complete bankruptcy for many small peasants and small-scale producers, as US-based producers of agricultural goods will be free to export whatever they want to Ecuador.
The recent protests began on March 8, international working women’s day, where a national mobilization and a 24-hour general strike was called by various trade-union confederations with the backing of social movements and the secondary school students of the capital. In Quito several important roads were blocked by protesters and the main squares became the scene of mass demonstrations that were violently broken up by the police firing tear-gas.
In a number of provinces cases of rioting were also registered, most significant being in the Eastern part of the country where the workers of the oil plants followed suit and brought the installations to a halt in Shushufindi, Libertador, Lago Agrio, Sacha, Auca, and the Amazonian district. These workers are demanding payment of their wages that sub-contracting companies have been holding back for some time, in some cases even up to four months.
But the actions of March 8 were just a warm-up to the recent wave of protests that started on March 13 with a number of local risings across the whole country. Associated Press affirmed that, “Several thousand Indians started blockading roads with burning tires, rocks and tree trunks on March 13, tying up traffic and halting commerce across Ecuador's highlands and much of the eastern jungle.”
The movement spread rapidly and was effectively lead by CONAIE (The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) that organized a march on the capital. The indigenous minority, numbering around 30% of the population, is an extremely exploited layer and has therefore been in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement over and over and again. This time it had the firm support of the majority of the masses, especially the students that clashed with the police on a daily basis in Quito.
The declared aim of the movement was to stop the TLC negotiations and call for a national referendum to decide on the issue. Palacio rejected any kind of concessions and declared a state of emergency in four Ecuadorian provinces on Tuesday, March 21, giving permission to the military to use special measures to get the situation under control. In a joint statement issued last Thursday, the indigenous organizations CONAIE and ECUARONARI, explained how the military have been ordered to track down the leaders of the movement, enter their homes if necessary, beat them up and take them to the Riobamba prison.
It is not totally clear what will happen next. Obviously the ferocious repression has had an effect on the movement. The vice-president of CONAIE, Santiago de la Cruz, stated that it is necessary to make a “strategic retreat” in order to discuss thoroughly in the local indigenous communities a plan of action “with much greater radicalism”. The idea is to organise mass assemblies in every region leading up to a national assembly next week. The situation is still very open and can produce all kinds of results.
In a desperate attempt to distract the attention of the masses, officials of the Ecuadorian government have accused Hugo Chavez of being behind the popular protests. That the riots could in any way be financed by Chavez is clearly false and it is merely one of the many dirty tricks being employed to side-track the real issues at stake. Chavez himself responded that: “It is not the Venezuelan government that is stirring up protests... it is the conscience of peoples that have decided to live and be free.”
Reactionaries always push the line that strikes are started because a small minority of energetic agitators are “provoking” action. In the same way, these people think that Chavez is an agitator that can “manipulate” the masses into action. Clearly the masses of Ecuador, as in every other country in Latin America, look to the Venezuelan revolution as a great example. But it is not simply the events in Venezuela that are the causes of these risings. On the contrary, it is the result of a number of contradictions that have accumulated within Ecuador over a long period.
In fact, the TLC is simply the last straw that broke the camel's back. What many people do not understand is, that it is not this or that reform, but the very existence of capitalism that hinders a harmonious development of the countries in Latin America. The ruling classes of the continent came onto the scene of history at a relatively late stage and were thus organically linked to the interests of imperialism. At the decisive moments they have always sided with imperialism against the movement for national independence. The history of Ecuador is in itself a very good testimony to that.
So long as capitalism survives, so long as the present ruling class remains in power and holds the key economic levers there will be no lasting solution to the problems faced by the Ecuadorian masses. The acceptance of the TLC merely reflects the position of the local oligarchy. It is a pliant tool in the hands of US imperialism in particular. It is correct to oppose the TLC, but it is necessary to go beyond this.
What is necessary is not only to reject the TLC, but also to build an alternative that can effectively sweep away and replace the discredited bourgeois parliament. This can only come about if the organizations of the working class, the indigenous minority and the peasantry take decisive steps to organize a new insurrection, a revolution that will eliminate the capitalist mode of production and create the conditions for a socialist society.
The immediate cause of this recent wave of mass protests were the declarations of the president of Ecuador, Alfredo Palacio, who has stated that he wants to sign the TLC (FTA), a free-trade agreement that US imperialism is trying to impose on the Latin American countries. The TLC is a free-trade agreement that will give even more freedom to US-multinationals to operate in Ecuador. It will give them wide access to the rich resources of the country and make it possible for them to make millions of dollars, for example from the big oil-reserves.
As we explained in a previously published article (see Ecuador: New explosions are being prepared), the continued presence in the country of the US oil company OXY, is a source of anger and frustration for the oppressed masses of Ecuadorian workers, urban poor, indigenous people and youth. While social spending is being cut this multinational is allowed to continue its business in Ecuador, in spite of clear evidence that it is violating its contract with the state. If the TLC is applied in Ecuador it will open the gates for more such companies and it will mean complete bankruptcy for many small peasants and small-scale producers, as US-based producers of agricultural goods will be free to export whatever they want to Ecuador.
The recent protests began on March 8, international working women’s day, where a national mobilization and a 24-hour general strike was called by various trade-union confederations with the backing of social movements and the secondary school students of the capital. In Quito several important roads were blocked by protesters and the main squares became the scene of mass demonstrations that were violently broken up by the police firing tear-gas.
In a number of provinces cases of rioting were also registered, most significant being in the Eastern part of the country where the workers of the oil plants followed suit and brought the installations to a halt in Shushufindi, Libertador, Lago Agrio, Sacha, Auca, and the Amazonian district. These workers are demanding payment of their wages that sub-contracting companies have been holding back for some time, in some cases even up to four months.
But the actions of March 8 were just a warm-up to the recent wave of protests that started on March 13 with a number of local risings across the whole country. Associated Press affirmed that, “Several thousand Indians started blockading roads with burning tires, rocks and tree trunks on March 13, tying up traffic and halting commerce across Ecuador's highlands and much of the eastern jungle.”
The movement spread rapidly and was effectively lead by CONAIE (The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) that organized a march on the capital. The indigenous minority, numbering around 30% of the population, is an extremely exploited layer and has therefore been in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement over and over and again. This time it had the firm support of the majority of the masses, especially the students that clashed with the police on a daily basis in Quito.
The declared aim of the movement was to stop the TLC negotiations and call for a national referendum to decide on the issue. Palacio rejected any kind of concessions and declared a state of emergency in four Ecuadorian provinces on Tuesday, March 21, giving permission to the military to use special measures to get the situation under control. In a joint statement issued last Thursday, the indigenous organizations CONAIE and ECUARONARI, explained how the military have been ordered to track down the leaders of the movement, enter their homes if necessary, beat them up and take them to the Riobamba prison.
It is not totally clear what will happen next. Obviously the ferocious repression has had an effect on the movement. The vice-president of CONAIE, Santiago de la Cruz, stated that it is necessary to make a “strategic retreat” in order to discuss thoroughly in the local indigenous communities a plan of action “with much greater radicalism”. The idea is to organise mass assemblies in every region leading up to a national assembly next week. The situation is still very open and can produce all kinds of results.
In a desperate attempt to distract the attention of the masses, officials of the Ecuadorian government have accused Hugo Chavez of being behind the popular protests. That the riots could in any way be financed by Chavez is clearly false and it is merely one of the many dirty tricks being employed to side-track the real issues at stake. Chavez himself responded that: “It is not the Venezuelan government that is stirring up protests... it is the conscience of peoples that have decided to live and be free.”
Reactionaries always push the line that strikes are started because a small minority of energetic agitators are “provoking” action. In the same way, these people think that Chavez is an agitator that can “manipulate” the masses into action. Clearly the masses of Ecuador, as in every other country in Latin America, look to the Venezuelan revolution as a great example. But it is not simply the events in Venezuela that are the causes of these risings. On the contrary, it is the result of a number of contradictions that have accumulated within Ecuador over a long period.
In fact, the TLC is simply the last straw that broke the camel's back. What many people do not understand is, that it is not this or that reform, but the very existence of capitalism that hinders a harmonious development of the countries in Latin America. The ruling classes of the continent came onto the scene of history at a relatively late stage and were thus organically linked to the interests of imperialism. At the decisive moments they have always sided with imperialism against the movement for national independence. The history of Ecuador is in itself a very good testimony to that.
So long as capitalism survives, so long as the present ruling class remains in power and holds the key economic levers there will be no lasting solution to the problems faced by the Ecuadorian masses. The acceptance of the TLC merely reflects the position of the local oligarchy. It is a pliant tool in the hands of US imperialism in particular. It is correct to oppose the TLC, but it is necessary to go beyond this.
What is necessary is not only to reject the TLC, but also to build an alternative that can effectively sweep away and replace the discredited bourgeois parliament. This can only come about if the organizations of the working class, the indigenous minority and the peasantry take decisive steps to organize a new insurrection, a revolution that will eliminate the capitalist mode of production and create the conditions for a socialist society.
Monday, March 27, 2006
The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.
Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.
A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.
Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’
Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.
In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.
A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’
AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’
This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.
During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.
No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.
The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.
No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.
Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.
Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.
Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.
The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.
By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.
In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.
In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.
The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.
US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.
Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.
At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.
Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.
Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.
This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.
Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.
Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’
Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’
Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.
This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’
By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.
Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):
Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.
Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.
Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.
Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.
The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.
Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.
Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.
Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’
The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.
The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.
One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.
It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.
Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.
But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.
The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.
Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.
There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.
Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.
Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.
There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.
10 March
Footnotes
An unedited version of this article is available at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011, or at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=891198.
John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.
Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.
A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.
Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’
Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.
In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.
A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’
AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’
This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.
During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.
No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.
The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.
No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.
Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.
Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.
Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.
The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.
By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.
In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.
In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.
The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.
US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.
Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.
Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.
At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.
Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.
Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.
This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.
Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.
Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’
Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’
Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.
This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’
By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.
Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):
Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.
Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.
Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.
Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.
The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.
Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.
Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.
Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’
The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.
The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.
One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.
It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.
Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.
But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.
The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.
Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.
There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.
Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.
Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.
There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.
10 March
Footnotes
An unedited version of this article is available at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011, or at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=891198.
John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy.