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.

Alleged Former Paramilitary Named Military Commander in Colombia

A general who is believed to have once been a member of a right-wing terrorist group now heads Colombia's armed forces.

Just days before signing a trade agreement with the U.S. which will accelerate the sell-off of Colombia’s land and resources to foreign corporations, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe appointed General Mario Montoya to head Colombia’s armed forces.

Uribe brought in Montoya, long a favorite of the U.S., to help rehabilitate the military’s image following a hazing scandal. Montoya, however, has his own dark past – throughout a long career, working to consolidate resource-rich areas, the general has frequently been charged with working hand in hand with right-wing paramilitaries. At the press conference announcing Montoya’s promotion, Uribe said “In this moment of our Nation’s history we need triumphant commanders. We don’t need commanders to justify defeats” and called for “a final victory” -- giving Montoya a clear go-ahead to use any means necessary to crush resistance in Colombia.

I wrote about Montoya’s sordid career in some detail a few years back, but it seems time to review a few of the details:


Montoya is widely believed to have been an active participant in a bombing campaign carried out by the paramilitary group “American Anti-Communist Action” in 1978. According to Fr. Javier Giraldo, SJ, the group, which was led by military intelligence officers, blew up the offices of the Communist party, a daily newspaper, and a magazine and kidnapped and disappeared activists. Human rights groups made the charges against Montoya public in the 1992 report, “State Terrorism in Colombia.” The following year he served as a guest instructor at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. (See also the 12/31/77 entry in Giraldo’s “Cronología de hechos reveladores del Paramilitarismo como política de Estado.”)

Montoya commanded the 24th Brigade in Putumayo, where he was charged with taking control of the countryside back from the FARC . Visiting the region in 2000 the San Francisco Chronicle’s Robert Collier reported:

“Since early last year, when the army started a gradual offensive to try to take back rebel-dominated Putumayo, the paramilitaries have been right behind them, working in silent tandem.

“The paramilitaries came to La Hormiga in January 1999. With army troops from thenearby 24th Brigade blocking roads behind them, the gunmen selected 26 people,mostly youths, and executed them on suspicion of being guerrillas. In November 1999, the death squads massacred 12 more people in El Placer, 10 miles away. And over the past year, as many as 100 civilians have been killed in the province, mostly one by one.”

The 24th Brigade was barred from receiving U.S. funding due to mounting evidence of strong cooperation between the military and the paramilitaries at La Hormiga. Nevertheless, Montoya was placed in charge of two counter-narcotics battalions entirely armed, trained, and funded by the U.S. while maintaining command of the 24th. The U.S. Embassy was fully aware that the 1st Counter-Narcotics Battalion was sharing barracks and intelligence with the 24th Brigade.

Montoya was later moved to the Fourth Brigade, based in Medellin, which carried out operations throughout Antioquia and Choco. In May of 2002, Montoya ordered a massive assault on the poor Comuna 13 neighborhood of Medellin. Forrest Hylton reported:

"In the early morning hours of May 21, 2002, some 700 troops backed by tanks moved in while neighborhood militias attempted to impede the advance with machine guns. Blackhawk helicopters rained down bullets indiscriminately on targeted neighborhoods; house-to-house searches that gave way to looting were conducted with no warrant and announced with bullets through front doors; young men were dragged into the streets, bound, beaten and/or killed with children looking on. Heroic neighborhood residents tried to rescue the injured and provide medical attention amidst a hail of bullets fired by agents of the state. People hung white sheets, towels, and shirts from their windows to express their desire for a cease-fire; children armed with sticks and stones confronted soldiers and police, demanding that they leave the neighborhood, shouting, 'We want peace! We want peace!' The siege lasted more than twelve hours, and by the time it was finished, nine people including three children were dead, while 37 were injured and 55 detained.

"General Mario Montoya, head of the army's Fourth Brigade and leader of the scorched earth campaigns in Putumayo in 2000-2001, characterized the May 21 operation in Comuna 13 as an unqualified success: 'We have obtained excellent results against the various bands of criminals that operate in the city. We will not stop.'"

Montoya went onto command the military's First Division and was implicated in the kidnapping of a Colombian teacher and activist from Venezuela.

Years ago a Colombian journalist told me that North Americans who accuse the Colombian military of running paramilitary groups have it backwards -- its the paramilitaries and the far right that control the military. Montoya's appointment seems to confirm his theory.

Brown Skin / Yellow Star: Turning the Corner Toward Fascism in the US by Juan Santos

The color of our skin will mark us as suspects, as felons, as threats to "the homeland." Any cop will be free to stop us at any time, under any pretext, to check -- not for dope -- but for our "papers."

At first it won't seem like much. Quietly, at first, a few of us will begin to disappear, just like some 60 thousand immigrants of Muslim and Arabic descent have disappeared since the onset of the Patriot Act; without a word. Like them, we will become targets of the so-called "war on terror."

First it will be dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.

Mothers will disappear walking to the corner store. Fathers will never come home from work. Children will be left behind, sobbing in apartments empty of food, warmth, money and life. The neighbors will be afraid. The tens of thousands could readily become millions.

The picture painted above is nothing but hard headed realism. Legislation now before the US Senate would make every undocumented person in the US a felon and authorize every police department in the country to arrest people on immigration charges.

The size of the Border Patrol would, in effect, increase by 60 times, from the current 11,000 Migra agents to 663,546 enforcers. If each authorized officer in the US arrested one undocumented migrant once every three months, within five years over 11 million migrants would be gone ­ an ethnic cleansing without parallel in US history.

This is the future they have planned. Certain neighborhoods -- the Gulfton District or the North Side in Houston, Pico Union and Boyle Heights in LA, the San Francisco Mission District -- will be targeted. Almost everyone in them will be considered a "felon," or someone who has aided the "felons." They won't be able to be able to tell us apart. "A Mexican is a Mexican," is what they will say.

In certain neighborhoods concrete barriers will block the streets. Police and La Migra will arrange themselves in hunting parties together. Like clockwork, a police cruiser will turn the corner near your place, once every 60 seconds. No one will breathe. The children will have nightmares.

This isn’t just emotional rhetoric. It’s happened before; in the Gulfton District in Houston in 1990 and ‘95, and in Pico Union in LA in 1990. This is how it’s done. The barrio will be besieged, taken over from within.

They want to build detention camps for us. They are debating it now. They want to label us felons, but deny us a trial. They’re debating it now. They want to build a wall -- they want us to die, tongue swollen and hallucinating, without water in the desert. They are debating it now.

These are the human impacts of planning already underway. New border fences are an integral part of current legislative initiatives.

On Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds for migrants, part of a10-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME.

According to a Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME aims to carry out goals “articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798." Homeland Security is seeking the ability to "remove all removable aliens," including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers or potential terrorists."

Mr. Bush and the Christian fascists in power have found their scapegoat ­ and it is us. We are the new Jews in a new Germany in a new century. They call it the New American Century, a New World Order, a “unipolar” Reich ­ a White America over all.

E Pluribus Unum: the many eradicated; reduced to One. White. Nation.

This is the pretext. They call us "invaders." We represent a "destabilizing factor" for the "nation." They say we are dirty, just like they said the Jews were dirty -- and disease ridden.

They say our neighborhoods and our culture are "cesspools." They want to keep their culture “pure.” They say we “steal” the jobs that they have in fact shipped overseas, and that are nowhere to be found. And now they're calling us "terrorists,” just like they called our ancestors “savages.”

After decades the nation’s long-suppressed racism is finding an open voice once more, and they are openly strategizing about how to best appeal to the unconscious racist sentiments just beneath the surface among a broader public.

US Congressman Tom Tancredo warns about us: we (Mexicans and migrant peoples) "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."

It’s a matter of “spin.” One strategist on the right wing web site RedState.org tells them how to spin it. He says that to deal effectively with us our enemies must “focus on terminology.”

“People who are in this country without proper documentation,” he writes “are foreign infiltrators. These foreign infiltrators operate clandestinely within our country. They are no different than the foreign infiltrators who destroyed the world trade center and attacked the Pentagon. Except that they haven't done anything yet.”

“ÉOnce you have the terminology correct,” he continues, “it is easy to define a solution to discourage foreign infiltration. First, treat any foreign infiltrator as a prisoner of war. Turn them over to the militaryÉ No hearings, no public defenders, no backlogged courts, no squandering of American tax dollars protecting the non-existent civil rights of foreign infiltrators.”

The strategizing isn’t empty: these Minutemen fantasies are on the verge of becoming national reality.

Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Sensenbrenner’s HR 4437, The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, recently passed the US House of Representatives. Its most extreme and punitive provisions are being upheld by the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.

This legislation would do just what the RedState strategist ordered.

Key elements of the Sensenbrenner bill include:

~Making it a felony to be in the U.S. without legal documents. Under current law this is a simple civil violation. Millions of us would be classified as "felons" and subject to immediate detention and deportation, often without so much as a hearing. Access to the courts will be severely restricted if legislation currently under consideration is approved.

How can they tell who’s a felon? The felons will have brown skin. Fifty million of us. All of us will be suspects. What will they stop us for? Anything they please. After all, they already stop us for anything they please.

~ Making it a federal crime to “assist” our people who are without documents. Those who leave water in the desert to save the lives of migrants would become felons. Millions of teachers, doctors, priests, nurses, attorneys and others who give any kind of help or services to undocumented people will also become felons ­ overnight - and could face five years in prison and have their assets seized by the government.

Giving a ride to someone without the proper “papers” could lead to felony charges. It remains unclear if renting an apartment or selling a car to someone without “papers” would become a felony.

Cardinal Mahoney of the 5 million member Los Angeles Diocese of the Catholic Church has declared he will order his priests to defy this law, if it is passed.

~Expanding police powers over immigrants. Police departments would be granted greater power to check legal status, a move that would increase the number of immigration enforcement agents by 60 times the current number. Local law enforcement agencies would be paid for detaining our people and turning us over to federal authorities.

These provisions will turn police into bounty hunters, the moral equivalent of Cazamigrantes, and highlight their role as a modern version of the Night Riders that once terrorized communities of color.

~ The construction of five double-layer border fences--totaling 698 miles--in California and Arizona.

Over 4,000 people have died trying to cross the US/ Mexican border since fences in California forced people to cross at points in the Sonora desert into Arizona.

~ Requiring employers to collect Social Security numbers and other data on workers and turn it over to the Department of Homeland Security, which would then verify worker’s "legal status" and store the data. All workers would, in effect, need a government clearance before they could have a job, any job.

~ In a related development, the U.S. government announced in February 2006 that it plans to pay Halliburton $385 million to build new “detention centers” to imprison us.

This is a chilling and potentially deadly development in a nation that kidnaps and spirits captives to secret prisons in Europe and which runs torture centers in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo ­ torture centers which are condemned and denounced the world over.

In concert with the specter of mass deportations, pogroms, and widespread, race-based scapegoating, new “detention centers” strikes a chord eerily close to concentration camp.

As one writer questioned “Just what will happen in these detention centers, built to lock away undocumented people whose legal rights have been disappeared, and who have been cast as "hordes," "invaders," and a threat to national security? “

On the ultra-Right, anti-Mexican shock groups such as the National Policy Institute, Minutemen leaders, and others are calling for our mass deportation.

The Minutemen’s Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to be deployed at the Mexican / US border. Gilchrist’s partner and rival in the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, makes the agenda clear, saying, "Oh, Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up. They are hard-core criminals. They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil people."

While there is no mention of using the National Guard under the federal legislation currently under consideration, clear steps leading toward a police state for people of indigenous descent are being advanced ­ and the record shows that when the Euro-colonialist leadership of the US chooses to attack us, mass deportation of migrants and Chicanos alike is the weapon of choice. It can happen here. In fact, it has.

Over 1 million of us were deported during the racist “Operation Wetback” in the year 1954, alone.

Before the mass deportations during the Great Depression a Congressman from Texas testified in formal hearings that a strict quota system should be imposed on Mexicans because we are "germ-carriers, inassimilable, a people who are with us but not of us, and not for us." We are, he said "É incapable of development away from” a condition of “moral and financial pauperism,” and that our influence was causing “the breaking down of [the] social fabric...."

If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. It is the unchanging rhetoric of white nationalism.

That such rhetoric is being used again by the highest authorities in the US should be cause for deep alarm, especially in the context of the Patriot Act and other dramatic moves toward legalized fascism in the US.

That the State is acting on this rhetoric to create a felonized, legally scapegoated racial and cultural under-caste calls for uncompromising action aimed at our self defense as a People.

------------------------------------

Juan Santos is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.


* * * * * * * * * *
La Voz de Aztlan
http://www.aztlan.net

WHEN THE CUBAN AIRLINE EXPLODED... In 1976 Posada was actively working for the CIA

LUIS Posada Carriles was actively working for the CIA in February 1976 in Caracas, just a few months before the sabotage of the Cubana Aviation passenger plane, although the agency tried to cover up the relationship by means of a deceptive document.

This was confirmed by a recently declassified document from headquarters of the Venezuelan Intelligence Agency (DISIP) during the Carlos Andrés Pérez government, which describes the terrorist’s activities and clearly defines the level of relationship that he maintained at that time with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.

For now, Posada is to remain detained in the United States, According to a written statement from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency issued on March 22, which does not rule out "removing him to a third country" other than Cuba or Venezuela.

To date, the U.S. authorities have not expressly stated the true status of Posada’s relationship with the CIA at the time of the attack, which led to the death of 73 people, apart from declassifying scant elements of information that were released with the obvious intention of deflecting responsibility for the terrorist act from the Agency.

Dated February 26, 1976, the aforementioned document was written on a form titled AGENT REPORT with the control number 00314.

In the first box is written verbatim:

Subject: LUIS POSADA CARRILES (aka.) EL BAMBI, C.I. 5.304.069

Place: Caracas.

Regarding: INFORMATION ABOUT THE SUBJECT, COPEY AND U.S. AGENT (COPEY is an obvious misspelling of the political party acronym COPEI)

The text is typed and in the bottom corner a box titled "Agent Code," reads "A-12."

DEATH THREATS

The first point of the document explains that the agency "has information" that Posada is carrying out an investigation into the whereabouts of a DISIP Inspector, "specifically in his residence."

It details that "the subject has threatened the life of civilian William Casas for accusing the subject’s employee, civilian Adolfo Reyes Mejias (aka. Hernan), of blackmail and extortion."

According to the text, this Hernan used his job in the National Inspectorate of Identification and Aliens "to facilitate investigations carried out by the agency headed by the subject, which is located at Edificio Majestic, Piso 7, Oficinas-apartamento 78" on the downtown Avenida Libertador.

This document is of course referring to the Commercial and Industrial Investigations Agency (ICICA) that Posada created in June 1975.

In the document’s second point, agent "A-12" defines the subject as having 36 employees who engage in investigations, track individuals, tap telephones, and enter homes with the aid of modern locksmiths’ equipment, etc."

"Much of this equipment was unduly appropriated and is the property of the DISIP. The equipment was stolen by civilian Adolfo Reyes Mejías", specified the individual who drafted the report.

JOAQUIN CHAFARDET AND HERMES ROJAS

Listed in the third point, among the names of Posada’s collaborators, is Joaquín Chaffardet Ramos, the Venezuelan lawyer who was the sole witness for the defense in Luis Posada Carriles’ recent trial before an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas.

Also mentioned is "Hermes José Rojas Peralta, C.I. 3.185.945". Incredibly, up until 2004, Rojas occupied the post of police chief for the state of Miranda, Venezuela and was the right-hand man of coup leader Governor Enrique Mendoza. Fortunately, both were swept away in the 2004 elections.

It has also been revealed, 30 years later, that this character worked under the orders of Luis Posada Carriles during the operations leading to the overthrow and death of Chilean President Salvador Allende.

He currently maintains relations with Venezuelan and Cuba- American terrorist circles in Miami, including Rodolfo Frómeta, who heads the paramilitary group Comandos F4, tolerated by the FBI. Frómeta was one of the most loquacious of the extremists who made a recent statement on Miami television in favor of the use of terrorist violence against Cuba.

CIA AGENT FROM WHEN TO WHEN?

Regarding the clandestine character of Posada’s activities and those of his investigation agency, the declassified DISIP document states in a fourth point:

"We have information that the subject has undertaken special tasks for the U.S. embassy, specifically for the CIA, which has him classified as a mercenary."

And added as a "note" to signal the importance of the reported matter: "Regarding the present report, Inspector (NAME CROSSED OUT) would like to personally discuss other points with the ranking Colonel of the Interior Security Division."

According to another document declassified in May 2005 by the National Security Archives of George Washington University, Luis Posada Carriles was recruited by the CIA when he was in the U.S. army, between 1963 and 1965. However, other sources reveal his ties to the Agency began when he was recruited as a participant in Operation 40, which united a group of specially trained thugs at the same time as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

The CIA placed Posada Carriles in Venezuela in 1967, as a functionary of DIGEPOL, which later became the DISIP where, under the name Commissioner Basilio, he directed bloody operations of repression.

In the course of 1976, Posada and his investigations agency was linked to a series of violent actions carried out in various countries by the CORU, an organization which he directed in partnership with Orlando Bosch and with the complicity of terrorists such as José Pepe Vázquez Blanco, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Héctor Carbonel Arenas, Francisco Pimentel, Nelly Rojas and Salvador Romaní Orúe, several of whom are still engaging in conspiratorial activities.

The U.S. declassified document tries to place the end of relations between Posada and the CIA in 1974, although it admits to some contact with him as late as June 1976.

The sabotage of the Cuban passenger plane occurred on October 6, 1976. Venezuelans Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano concealed two bombs on the DC-8. All 73 passengers died, including a pregnant woman.

Upon interrogation by the Barbados police, Lugo and Ricardo stated that they had contacts with the CIA – a notebook with the telephone numbers of various officers located in Caracas was taken from them – and they immediately exposed their bosses: Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. The DISIP subsequently arrested both Posada and Bosch and found abundant evidence in Posada Carriles’ office not only of his participation in this crime together with his accomplices, but also of various other crimes.

Oddly, it was through the FBI — and NOT its own agency — that this document was declassified in May 2005. The CIA report dated October 16, 1976 attempts to explain the agency’s relation with Posada just days after the explosion of the aircraft. The author of the declassified text maintained the necessary confusion and did not specify when Posada joined that controversial U.S. intelligence agency.

The text simply says:

The employer in Caracas of both Lugo and Lozano is Luis Posada Carriles, former chief of the counterintelligence division of the DISIP (…). Posada is a former agent of the CIA. He was amicably terminated in July 1967 but contact was reestablished in October 1967. He lost his position with the DISIP in March 1974 as a result of a change in the Venezuelan government and was amicably terminated. We have maintained occasional contact with him. His last reported contact with us was in June 1976 when he unsuccessfully sought assistance regarding a visa problem."

Lies. The facts demonstrate much more clearly the real relationship of Posada and his partner Orlando Bosch with the CIA at that time: only four days after having been arrested, due to the confessions of Lugo and Lozano regarding the sabotage of the plane in Barbados, the U.S. government began maneuvers to extradite both terrorists to the United States for reasons still undisclosed.

Another secret report, written only days after the explosion of the plane and declassified by the Venezuelan Direction of Military Intelligence, literally explains not only the support given by the U.S. State Department to Posada and his agency but also the material aid provided to him precisely by the CIA.

This recently revealed document specifies that "information has been received that the U.S. Department of State, through the CIA, assisted him with technical equipment for the tracking and interception of communications and to set up an Investigations Office."

Posada escaped from the San Carlos Prison in Caracas August 18, 1985, and immediately joined the trafficking of drugs for weapons operation devised by the CIA and managed by Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, operating out of the Salvadorian airport of Ilopango.

What is irrefutable is that in one way or another, with or without a formal contract, U.S. authorities maintained a frequent, close, and constant relationship with their "mercenary" and his investigations agency and that they not only learned of his plans but also could have perfectly known, directed, revised, authorized and even financed them.

And for this reason, they have always protected, in one way or another, Posada, Bosch and other related criminals. Just like they are doing now in the totally manipulated immigration case of Posada, a man who, under the nickname Commissioner Basilio, freely tortured and murdered people in the basement of the DISIP offices for years.

That is why the work of the five Cubans still imprisoned in the United States for having infiltrated the ranks of the Miami mafia is so deserving of respect and why the struggle for their liberation is such a noble one.

A Call to All Good Americans by Ralph Nader

Attention please, good people! Adjust your routines and come to the aid of your country, and your children with your thoughtful patriotism. Don't just hope for impeachment, demand the resignation now of the mad hatters in the White House - George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

Already, a large majority of you do not consider this shifty duo trustworthy. By more than two to one you disapprove of Bush's war in Iraq. Similar majorities believe this is also a President whose administrative incompetence - note the post-Katrina debacles compared to his promises last September in that devastated New Orleans - nearly matches his penchant for daily fabrications.

The precipitous drop in Bush's polls (Cheney's are even lower) is not coming from liberals who long ago registered negative in these national surveys. The drop is coming from millions of erstwhile Bush supporters, Bush voters, Bush-loving conservatives.

Why? Just look at or read the news every day. There goes Bush and Cheney insisting that conditions in Iraq are getting better and better, when they are getting worse and worse. And Americans also know this because hundreds of thousands of soldiers and other personnel are rotating from Iraq back into every state and community and telling millions of people the truth.

Repeated reports from diverse official, media and eyewitness accounts say that there is less electricity, more disease, less drinkable water, less housing, far less street security, less health care, less gasoline, fewer jobs and far more violence against civilians after the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion in March 2003 than before the sanctioned, tottering, besieged dictator, Saddam Hussein, was toppled.

With Bush's own ambassador to Iraq warning of a possible civil war and Bush's handpicked interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi saying "We are in a terrible civil conflict now," the serial delusionists, Bush and Cheney, having lied five ways into their war, go around daily as smarmy pollyannas spouting what Bush calls "a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq".

Why, didn't you know about all the progress in Iraq? If only the media would report it, they both say again and again. Really! What about all the corruption by the many contractors, all the brutal militias that now often do their work wearing Iraqi soldier or police uniforms, all the bogus reconstruction, paid with billions of American taxpayer money? What about the spreading chaos that Bush has no intention of confronting, as international law requires invading occupiers to remedy. Remember Colin Powell's tight phrase, "We broke it, we own it," that sums up the global law on this subject.

Massive separation from reality frequently involves ordinary personalities with psychotherapy. Read the words of the The Washington Post's respected columnist, Eugene Robinson:

The people running this country sound convinced that reality is whatever they say it is. And if they've actually strayed into the realm of genuine self-delusion - if they actually believe the fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they made in Iraq over the past three years - then things are even worse than I thought.

He described Bush as "divorced from reality".

Worse still is the delusion that claims the Bush-Cheney War is not generating more terrorists. Mr. Bush doesn't listen to intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, or even to his CIA Director Porter Goss. Mr. Goss has testified that the U.S. occupation is a magnet and a training ground for even more terrorists from outside and inside Iraq. Thereby, setting up a boomerang against our national security in the future.

One area, however, in Iraq is proceeding on schedule - the building of four massive, permanent super-bases, complete with American suburban amenities such as Pizza Hut, Burger King, miniature golf courses, theaters, swimming pools and even a football field. There is almost a news blackout about Balad Air Base, al-Asad Airbase and others, thought not quite the blockage that the two White House draft-dodgers have placed on reporters trying to cover the return of the fallen soldiers to Dover, Delaware.

Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) spoke about the growing opposition by both Republican and Democratic Senators, to what can deliberately be called disinformation coming out of the Bush administration. Not to mention the refusal to respond at all to serious inquiries by members of Congress.

Unlike the Presidential ordering of military invasions that violate our domestic laws, our Constitution and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, massive delusion in the White House is not an impeachable offense. But it should be a cause for resignation driven by popular bipartisan demand. Bush and Cheney have arrayed their no-fault power, their political egos against the interests of our country. They are obsessively-compulsed.

Bush recently traveled to West Virginia and did not speak to the poverty among some of the hardest workers in America. He went to Ohio on Air Force One and ignored the huge loss of manufacturing jobs there to Mexico, China and other authoritarian nations. No, instead, he brings his gigantic sign, "Plan for Victory", stands in front of it and, as befits the Mayor of Baghdad, talks about his delusions in that oil-rich, devastated country.

Reality, good citizens, can fairly describe the dictatorial Bush and Cheney as psychiatrically challenged. Send them to the unemployment lines, where Halliburton and Exxon will certainly pick them up.

###

ECUADOR - Indigenous-led uprising challenges FTA, U.S. domination

Ecuadorian Indigenous organizations are in the leadership of the most recent uprising in that country, which began on March 13. Tired of being lied to, exploited and excluded, they have taken on the courageous road of challenging the Free Trade Agreement that is secretly, behind closed doors, being negotiated with the United States by President Alfredo Palacios.

The treaty with the U.S., already signed by Colombia and Peru, is scheduled to be finalized on March 23 in Washington, D.C.—but not with the acquiescence of the Ecuadorian masses.

Their demands also include the termination of the government’s contract with U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum, rejection of Ecuador’s participation in Plan Colombia, the ousting of U.S. troops from Manta military base and the convening of a Constitutional Assembly.

On the 13th, the Ecuadorian Confed eration of Indigenous Nations (CONAIE), the principal and most influential Indigenous organization, and the Confederation of Peoples of the Kichwa Nation (ECUARUNARI) initiated a series of actions in which their voices were heard loud and clear. They closed down traffic on highways all over Ecuador with marches, demonstrations and roadblocks made of burning tires, tree trunks and rocks.

Organizations of peasants, students, workers, home makers, professionals, retirees and small businesses supported and actively participated in various actions. The transport union has been threatening a national strike, since 4,000 trucks have been idled due to roadblocks.

This campaign is called the National Mobilization in Defense of Life and says “No to the FTA, out with Oxy, no to Plan Colombia, yes to Life and yes to the National Constitutional Assembly.” Within a few days it had paralyzed commerce and traffic in 11 of Ecuador’s 22 provinces.

The government has responded with fury. Marchers, including women, children and elderly persons who are suspected of participating in the revolt and oppose the FTA, have increasingly been harassed, teargassed and detained. They are subject to searches and seizures even in their own homes.

The police have used brutal force to prevent demonstrators from reaching the government palace and the cathedral in the capital, Quito. On March 20, in response to the government’s failure to respond to their demands while escalating repression, CONAIE renewed the actions and started a general Indigenous uprising, calling for broadening it into a national peasant and popular uprising. Their slogan is “shuk shunkulla” (one heart), “shuk makilla” (one fist), “shuk shimilla” (one voice).

The police in turn have been detaining any person who “looks Indigenous.” They board buses that arrive from the southern part of the country and detain by force all those with Indigenous features or whom ever they suspect are protesting against the FTA.

A march to Quito from the Amazon region that started in mid March was stopped for more than three hours by police; 25 of the marchers were detained and their whereabouts are unknown.

As of March 21, 30 peasants had been hurt and hospitalized and 100 had been arrested. Luis Macas, president of CONAIE, and Humberto Cholango, president of ECUARUNARI, have been threat ened with arrest if they do not stop the national uprising. Their response has been to call for an increase of the resistance until the government ceases its negotiations with the U.S. for a “free trade” agreement.

The Indigenous and peasants appear determined. Maria Sillo, who makes $15 a week by selling the vegetables she plants, says, “This trade deal will starve us to death. We prefer to die fighting this deal than to starve to death.” The FTA would flood Ecuador with cheap, subsidized U.S. agricultural products to the detriment of the country’s small farmers.

Sillo echoes the reasoning of the ECUARUNARI/CONAIE organizers who wrote in a news release: “Now 50 out of 100 Indigenous children suffer from chronic malnutrition, hunger; with the FTA that will affect the production of food, it will be millions of children and adolescents along with their parents that will suffer hunger and will have to migrate to the big cities or to other countries.”

President Palacio took office 10 months ago after a popular uprising ousted Lucio Gutierrez. Ironically, Gutierrez had been elected with the strong backing of the Indigenous movement, but soon sold out to U.S. interests.

Palacio has not been any different. None of the promises made to the people have been met, including the convening of a Constitutional Assembly. The popular movements charge that he has ruled only for the benefit of the oligarchy and U.S. corporations, and has added ultra-reactionaries to his cabinet. For example, he named a representative of the flower industry, which will be a major beneficiary of the FTA and is an infamous transnational exploiter of women in particular, as his secretary of commerce.

Under Palacio’s administration, the repression of the social and popular movement has increased. He has repeatedly declared states of emergency in order to suspend civil rights, including the rights to associate and mobilize freely, and carry out indiscriminate house searches. Like President Alvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia, he has called social and popular leaders criminals.

He has accused the protesters of “destabilizing” Ecuador. A March 19 report by Reuters quoted Enrique Proano, Palacio’s spokesperson, as saying: “We will not allow these marches to reach Quito because they aim to destabilize democracy,” adding, “The armed forces have dispatched a contingent along the highways leading to Quito.”

Palacio has also facilitated U.S. intervention in the region by collaborating with the U.S. and Colombian military against the insurgent forces of Colombia. U.S. troops are now stationed in the Manta base.

His government is also helping the U.S. in its quest to isolate the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. During the current uprising, the president of the Ecuadorian Congress stated that “external forces” were responsible for the Indigenous and popular uprising, directly blaming Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

But recent history has shown what the unwavering determination of the Ecua dorian masses, led by the Indi genous, can accomplish. In 2000 they helped overthrow President Jamil Mahuad; in 2005 it was Gutierrez’s turn. Now the future is in their hands.

Sensenbrenner Awakens A Sleeping Giant - More Than 500,000 Rally in L.A. for Immigrants' Rights

"I have just returned from the largest, most energized demonstration I have ever witnessed in my life. Over 500,000 people filled the streets of downtown Los Angeles to march against HR 4437, a bill authored by Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner (heir to the Kotex fortune) which would turn 11 million undocumented immigrants into felons, punish anyone guilty of providing them assistance, and construct an iron wall between the US and Mexico....read on"

Digby has more

Counting Bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina

It turns out that, not just once, but at least twice over the past three months, in late December and then again in early March, the U.S. Department of State’s Review of European Security Issues has recognized that the “official death toll” from the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ca. 1992 - 1995, is dramatically lower than had been almost universally accepted as recently as last fall: On the order of 100,000 people on all sides in the wars there, civilian, military, and paramilitaries included. ,,,,

....In a nutshell, here is the history of the American involvement in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Lie about the nature and scope of the conflicts. Stoke up mass hysteria about events on the ground---including sexed-up claims about Greater Serb Aggression; a sexed-up "joint criminal enterprise" involving ethnic Serbs and only ethnic Serbs; and a sexed-up genocide. Stall. And stall. And stall some more. Blocking every effort by other negotiators to bring an end to the fighting. And in the end, bomb---then move in and take over behind the kind of multilateral facades that only a neocolonial regime has at its command.

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No, the Iran Oil Bourse is not a casus belli... by F. William Engdahl

A number of writings have recently appeared with the thesis that the announced plans of the Teheran government to institute a Teheran Oil Bourse, perhaps as early as this month, is the real hidden reason behind the evident march to war on Iran from the Anglo-American powers. The thesis is in our opinion mistaken for many reasons, not the least, that war on Iran has been in planning since the 1990’s, as an integral part of the US Greater Middle East strategy.
More significantly, the Oil Bourse argument is a Red Herring that diverts attention from the real geopolitical grounds behind the march towards war which have been detailed on this website, including my piece, ‘Calculating the Risk of War in Iran’ which was posted on GlobalResearch.ca on January 29, 2006

In 1996, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, two neo-conservatives later to play an important role in formulation of Bush Administration Pentagon policy in the Middle East, authored a paper for then-newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. That advisory paper, ‘A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ called on Netanyahu to make a ‘clean break from the peace process.’ They also called on Netanyahu to strengthen Israel’s defenses to better confront Syria and Iraq, and to go after Iran as the prop of Syria.

More than a year before President Bush declared Operation Shock and Awe against Iraq, he made his now infamous January 2002 State of the Union address to Congress in which he labelled Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as the ‘Axis of Evil’ trio. This was well before anyone in Teheran was even considering establishing an oil bourse to trade oil in various currencies.

The argument by those who believe that the Teheran Oil Bourse would be the casus belli, the trigger pushing Washington down the road to potential thermonuclear annihilation of Iran, seems to rest on the claim that by openly trading oil to other nations or buyers in Euros, Teheran would set into motion a chain of events in which nation after nation, buyer after buyer, would line up to buy oil no longer in US dollars but in Euros. That in turn, so goes the argument, would lead to a panic selling of dollars on world foreign exchange markets and a collapse of the role of the dollar as reserve currency, one of the ‘pillars of Empire.’ Basta! There goes the American Century down the tubes with the onset of the Teheran Oil Bourse…Reality is a little different.

Some background considerations

That argument fails to convince for a number of reasons. First, in the case of at least one of the Oil Bourse theory writers, their argument is based on a misunderstanding of the process which I described in my book, A Century of War, regarding the creation in 1974 of ‘petrodollar recycling’ in the wake of the orchestrated 400% OPEC oil price hike, a process with which then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was deeply involved.

The dollar then did not become a ‘petrodollar’ although Kissinger spoke about the process of ‘recycling petrodollars.’ Instead what he referred to was the initiation of a new phase of US global hegemony in which the ‘petrodollar’ export earnings of OPEC oil lands would be recycled into the hands of the major New York and London banks and re-lent in form of dollar loans to oil deficit countries like Brazil or Argentina, creating what soon came to be known as he Latin American Debt Crisis.

The dollar at that time had been a fiat currency since August 1971 when President Richard Nixon first abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty and refused to redeem US dollars held by foreign central banks for gold bullion. The dollar floated against other major currencies, falling more or less until it was revived by the turbo change of the 1973-4 oil price shock.

What the 1973 oil shock achieved for the sagging dollar was a sudden injection of global demand from nations confronted with 400% higher oil import bills. At that time, by postwar convention and convenience, as the dollar was the only reserve currency held around the world other than gold, oil was priced by all OPEC members in dollars as a practical exigency.

With the 400% price rise, nations such as France, Germany, Japan and other importers suddenly found reason to try to buy their oil directly in their own currencies—French Franc, German Deutschemarks or Japanese Yen—in order to lessen the pressure on their rapidly declining reserves of trade dollars. The US Treasury and Pentagon made certain that did not happen, partly with some Kissinger secret diplomacy, bullying threats, and a whopping big US military agreement with the key OPEC producer, Saudi Arabia. At that time it helped that the late Shah of Iran was seen in Washington to be a vassal of Kissinger.

The point was not that the dollar became a ‘petro’ currency. The point was that the reserve status of the dollar, now a paper currency, was bolstered by the 400% increase in world demand for dollars to buy oil. But that was only a part of the dollar story. In 1979, following the accession to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, oil prices shot through the roof for the second time in six years. Yet, paradoxically, later that year the dollar began a precipitous free-fall, not rise. It was no ‘petrodollar.’

Foreign dollar holders began dumping their dollars as a protest to the foreign policies of the Jimmy Carter Administration. It was to deal with that dollar crisis that Carter was forced to bring in Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve in 1979. In October 1979 Volcker gave the dollar another turbo-charge by allowing interest rates in the US to rise some 300% in weeks, to well over 20%. That in turn forced global interest rates through the roof, triggered a global recession, mass unemployment and misery. It also ‘saved’ the dollar as sole reserve currency. The dollar was not a ‘petrodollar.’ It was the currency of issue of the greatest Superpower, a superpower determined to do what it needed to keep it that way.

The F-16 dollar backing

Since 1979 the US power establishment from Wall Street to Washington has maintained the status of the dollar as unchallenged global reserve currency. The role, however, is not a purely economic one. Reserve currency status is an adjunct of global power, of the US determination to dominate other nations and the global economic process. The US didn’t get reserve currency status by a democratic vote of world central banks, nor did the British Empire in the 19th Century. They fought wars for it.

For that reason, the status of the dollar as reserve currency depends on the status of the United States as the world’s unchallenged military superpower. In a sense, since August 1971 the dollar is no longer backed by gold. Instead, it is backed by F-16’s and MI Abrams battle tanks, operating in some 130 US bases around the world, defending liberty and the dollar.

A Euro challenge?

In order for the Euro to begin to challenge the reserve role of the US dollar a virtual revolution in policy would have to take place in Euroland. First the European Central Bank, the institutionalized, undemocratic institution created by the Maastricht Treaty in order to maintain the power of creditor banks in collecting their debts, would have to surrender power to elected legislators. It would then have to turn on the Euro printing presses and print Euros like there was no tomorrow. That is because the current size of the publicly-traded Euroland government bond market is still tiny in comparison with the huge US Treasury market.

As Michael Hudson explains in his brilliant and too-little studied work, ‘Super Imperialism,’ the peverse genius of the US global dollar hegemony was the realization, in the months after August 1971, that US power under a fiat dollar system was directly tied to the creation of dollar debt. The debt and US trade deficit was not the ‘problem,’ they realized. It was the ‘solution.’

The US could print endless quantities of dollars to pay for foreign imports of Toyotas, Hondas, BMW’s or other goods in a system in which the trading partners of the USA, holding paper dollars for their exports feared for a dollar collapse enough to continue to support the dollar by buying US Treasury bonds and bills. In fact in the thirty years since abandoning gold exchange for paper dollars, the US dollars in reserve have risen by a whopping 2,500% and grows at double-digit rates today.

This system continued into the 1980’s and 1990’s unchallenged. US policy was one of crisis management coupled with skilful and coordinated projection of US military power. Japan in the 1980’s, fearful of antagonizing its US nuclear umbrella provider, bought endless volumes of US Treasury debt even though they lost a King’s ransom in the process. It was a political, not an investment decision.

The only potential challenge to the reserve role of the dollar came in the late 1990’s with the European Union decision to create a single currency, the Euro, to be administered by single central bank, the ECB. Europe appeared to be emerging as a unified, independent policy voice of what Chirac then called a multi-polar world. Those multi-polar illusions vanished with the unpublicized decision of the ECB and national central banks not to pool their gold reserves as backing for the new Euro. That decision not to use gold as backing came amid a heated controversy over Nazi gold and alleged wartime abuses by Germany, Switzerland, France and other European countries.

Since the shocks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing declaration of a US global War on Terror, including a unilateral decision to ignore the United Nations and the community of nations and go to war against a defenceless Iraq, few countries have even dared to challenge the dollar hegemony. The combined defense spending of all nations of the EU today pales by comparison to the total of current US budgeted and unbudgeted defense spending. US defense outlays will reach an official, staggering level of $663 billion in the current Fiscal 2007 year. The combined EU spending amounts to a mere $75 billion, with tendency declining, in part owing to ECB Maastricht deficit pressures on its governments.

So today, at least for the present, there are no signs of Japanese, EU or other dollar holders engaging in dollar asset liquidation. Even China, unhappy as she is with Washington bully politics, seems reluctant to rouse the American dragon to fury.

The Origins of the Oil Bourse

The idea of creating a new trading platform in Iran to trade oil and to create a new oil benchmark crude apparently originated with the former Director of the London International Petroleum Exchange, Chris Cook. In a January 21 article in the Asia Times, Cook explained the background. Describing a letter he had written in 2001 to the Governor of the Iranian Central Bank, Dr Mohsen Nourbakhsh, Cook explained what he advised then:

‘In this letter I pointed out that the structure of global oil markets massively favors intermediary traders and particularly investment banks, and that both consumers and producers such as Iran are adversely affected by this. I recommended that Iran consider as a matter of urgency the creation of a Middle Eastern energy exchange, and particularly a new Persian Gulf benchmark oil price.

’It is therefore with wry amusement that I have seen a myth being widely propagated on the Internet that the genesis of this "Iran bourse" project is a wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros.

’As anyone familiar with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will know, the denomination of oil sales in currencies other than the dollar is not a new subject, and as anyone familiar with economics will tell you, the denomination of oil sales is merely a transactional issue: what matters is in what assets (or, in the case of the United States, liabilities ) these proceeds are then invested.’

A full challenge to the domination of the dollar as world central bank reserve currency entails a de facto declaration of war on the ‘full spectrum dominance’ of the United States today. The mighty members of the European Central Bank Council well know this. The heads of state of every EU country know that. The Chinese leadership as well as Japanese and Indian know that. So does Vladimir Putin.

Until some combination of those Eurasian powers congeal in a cohesive challenge to the unbridled domination of the USA as sole superpower, there will be no Euro or Yen or even Chinese Yuan challenging the role of the dollar. The issue is of enormous importance, as it is vital to understand the true dynamics bringing the world to the brink of possible nuclear catastrophe today.

As a small ending note, a good friend in Oslo recently forwarded me an article from the Norwegian press. At the end of December, Sven Arild Andersen, Director of the Oslo Bourse, announced he was fed up with depending on the London oil bourse trading oil in dollars. Norway, a major oil producer, selling most of its oil into Euro countries in the EU, he said, should set up its own oil bourse and trade its oil in Euros. Will NATO member Norway become the next target for the wrath of the Pentagon?

* F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopoliti

The Truth behind the Death of Slobodan Milosevic by Tiphaine Dickson

STATEMENT OF TIPHAINE DICKSON, LEGAL SPOKESPERSON OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE TO DEFEND SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, AT THE ICDSM PRESS CONFERENCE HELD AT THE BELAIR TULIP IN THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS, MARCH 14th, 2006.

Tiphaine Dickson

This press conference was initially planned last week, to present a request signed by well-known jurists, including the former Attorney General of the United States, Mr. Ramsey Clark, and prominent political figures, including a member of the Russian Duma, the Czech Parliament as well as the European Parliament, which was filed last Friday with the Security Council of the United Nations as well as the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY, to direct the latter institution to permit President Milosevic to receive the specialized medical treatment his well-known and longstanding medical condition required at the Bakoulev Center in Moscow.

It obviously pains me to have made this last trip to The Hague without any hope that Slobodan Milosevic’s health will ever be stabilized.

What an indecent end to a disgraceful process, starting on day one, when in a blaze of astonishing irony, the president of Yugoslavia was indicted by this body for allegations of crimes against Humanity in Kosovo, a claim backed by evidence so slender and biased that it was inversely proportional to its political and indeed its military charge.

The bombing itself—all 78 days of it—was executed in violation of international law, a classic case of aggression, held by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the supreme international crime in that it holds within it the accumulated evil of all other war crimes.

That the NATO bombing was a violation of international law was acknowledged by Wesley Clark, to the US weekly The New Yorker, but that admission was deemed inadmissible before this Security Council institution, the ICTY. Mr Milosevic was prevented from raising General Clark’s candid admission before this body, although it was so obviously germane to his defense.

NATO short-circuited the Security Council to bomb, yet instrumentalized a Security Council body to indict President Milosevic and kept bombing, as the Prosecutor announced that because of the indictment of the President of the country being bombed in violation of international law, the president, the reprentative of his people, was no longer a suitable guarantor in any peace negotiations.

Disgraceful from the start.

And so it went, with President Milosevic’s removal from then Yugoslavia, without as much as a court order to the director of the Belgrade jail in which he was being held, and in violation of a decision by Yugoslavia’s constitutional court.

And it ground on, with every single request for provisional release, based on his ill-health, denied.

Was the presumption that President Milosevic would abscond? Such a conclusion is preposterous, as in four years, he made clear his tireless commitment to defending himself, and above all he demonstrated his unrelenting passion for setting out the facts about the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

His commitment to presenting his case, that there were no Balkan wars but indeed one war, waged against Yugoslavia, was evident for all to observe.

This was most obvious when President Milosevic was poised to begin his defense in late August 2004. His health was better than it became in recent months, yet, incredibly, Dr. Falke, the ICTY prison doctor, reported that Slobodan Milosevic would not have the ability to represent himself in the proceedings against him.

Contrast this finding—a matter of law, which in any event, a medical practitioner is not entitled to determine—with the trial Chamber’s subsequent findings questioning the necessity of specialized medical care in Moscow.

Contradictory positions with a common thread: the violation of the rights of an accused person.

That Pavle Strugar, accused before the ICTY, may receive hip replacement surgery—a minor procedure—based on the guarantees of Montenegro, seems absurdly inconsistent with the denial of complex vascular and cardiac care in a renowned specialized facility in Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council.

I can tell you that President Milosevic was hoping that our letter to the Security Council and to the Trial Chamber would be persuasive, and that this press conference could help him receive treatment so that he could finish his defense without fear of a hypertensive crisis or constant ringing in his ears.

But that is not to be.

Our hope is that the confidentiality of all medical records, doctors’ notes, prescription protocols and records, as well as test results be waived and be available for scrutiny and for discussion, without exception.

We will shortly be requesting that the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan, waive the civil and criminal immunity of certain individuals who by systematic neglect, potential medical malpractice, or worse, precipitated the death of a man, who even in death, stands wrongfully accused of having been its cause.

We hope, and are fully confident, that the truth will emerge.

Iraq: Was rescue of CPT members staged?

First consider that when British, US and Canadian forces broke into the house where the CPT members were being held captive, not one shot was fired.

Not one kidnapper was to be found. The house was empty save for the three hostages.

No weapons were found.

Were the kidnappers on a lunch break? Maybe a sojourn to Euro Disney.

According to the Toronto Star, "Questions remain about how the rescue unfolded and the level of Canada's involvement. The fact no kidnappers were there when the rescuers arrived gave rise to speculation the men were released as part of a pre-arranged agreement."
Contrary to early reports that an Iraqi detainee had provided information to the Iraqis, the Toronto Star went on to quote an Iraqi interior ministry official:

A senior Iraqi interior ministry official, who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity, said they had no prior knowledge of the operation to free the hostages.

"We knew nothing about it," he said. "This was strictly a foreign intelligence operation involving foreign forces. It came as a complete surprise."

Did the "foreign forces" silently pay a ransom?

Something was definitely afoot.

Consider the following comment from Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper:

"We had some indication that some developments might occur in these few days," Harper said.

In the same article, we get "But the Washington-based SITE institute, which monitors extremists' websites, notices a posting yesterday on an Arabic website that claimed Christian Peacemaker Teams had paid a ransom for the release."

CPT denied the claim.

Further complicating matters is the statement from one of the three hostages that Tom Fox had been separated from the group a few weeks ago.

Why?

Canadian media has also reported that Fox may have been killed while trying to escape.

Chavez Slams Bush as a "Coward and a murderer"

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has rejected recent attacks by the US administration on his government, and slammed President George W. Bush as a "coward, murderer and responsible for genocide," in an outspoken talk on his weekly TV program, Aló Presidente, on March 19. He was responding to criticism of Venezuela contained in the recently released Bush administration document, Strategy for National Security, 2006.

The document alleges that, "In Venezuela, a demagogue inundated with petrol money is undermining democracy and trying to destabilize the region." Chavez replied by blasting president George W. Bush over the war on Iraq, and contrasting popular support for himself with the international opposition to the US president.

Referring to the passage of three years since the invasion of Iraq, President Chavez reminded Bush that "that the entire world opposes his imperialist war, his demented attitude of domination; that 70 per cent of his own people are against him....," according to a report on the Aló Presidente program in the March 20 Diario Vea newspaper.

"God save the world from this threat.... You are a coward, murderer, and responsible for genocide. Why don't you go to Iraq and command your armed forces there?" Chavez demanded of the US president. He warned Bush that if some day it occurred to him to invade Venezuela, then the whole country would immediately rush to its defense.

In a comment on the failure of the right-wing parties in Venezuela to endorse a serious candidate to challenge him in the presidential elections due in December this year, Chavez said, "This only confirms that Bush is the [real] chief of the Venezuelan opposition. I challenge his minions here in Venezuela, such as [media owners] Granier, Ravell, Otero, and Mata Osorio, to publicize the [recent opinion] polls.... They won't do it because no candidate of the opposition can do any better."

Chavez was referring to the poll, quoted in the March 18 Diario Vea, conducted by the research company Seijas, which noted "increasing support for President Chavez, with a popular backing of 82 per cent," in regard to the next presidential election due on December 3. "According to this poll, the head of state would win with ease against any possible opposition candidate," the paper noted. Seijas is not a firm linked to the Venezuelan government, having worked for the traditional right-wing party Accion Democratica for many years.

The Venezuelan president's comments followed a strong rejection of the Bush attacks on Chavez by Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vincent Rangel. According to the March 18 Diario Vea, Rangel pointed out that "the biggest force for destabilization in the region is the politics of Bush."

He called attention to the fact that for the first time Bush's aggression was direct and personal against Chavez, leaving aside officials [such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] who had previously carried out this type of attack. "It is a sign of the desperation, frustration and failure that has entered into the campaign led Washington against Venezuela," Rangel concluded.

Depleted Uranium for Dummies by Irving Wesley Hall

At the beginning of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, hundreds of thousands of 1991 Operation Desert Storm vets suffering from Gulf War Illness were praying that United Nations weapons inspectors were right and that Bush and Cheney were lying about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After all, the ailing vets were casualties of those weapons even though the Pentagon maintains that Iraq never used them.

How could that be?

First, on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, the United States government is not a reliable source, as you know if you have been paying attention for the past six years. This is also the case with the causes of Gulf War Illness.

Second, Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in 1991. Many were illegally supplied by the Reagan-Bush administration, in which both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld served. Dr. Doug Rokke was a health physicist for the US Army. He was part of the professional team on the ground training the troops to protect themselves from WMDs. He is prominently featured in the DVD, Beyond Treason.

In a recent interview he informed me that Iraq employed WMDs on a limited basis via sprayers, a few missiles and land mines. But most of Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear substances were delivered to our troops by their own government.

Under the direction of Secretary of Defense Cheney, the 1991 Gulf War began with a “shock and awe” bombing campaign that destroyed large biological laboratories, chemical plants, and nuclear enrichment facilities, most of them around Baghdad. As the supplier, the United States government knew the locations.

Biological, chemical and nuclear weapons damage the bodies of soldiers in distinct ways. The first employs deadly bacteria and viruses to cause known illnesses. The second uses poisonous, or toxic, substances to attack the body’s chemistry. Nuclear weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU), were unimaginable before World War II. They attack the body with invisible radioactive energy that, as you will soon read, produces a wider variety of symptoms that develop over a longer period of time. Radioactive heavy metal particles embedded in the body are both radioactive and toxic.

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