Iran, Israel und die USA
..
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and
Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This
effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important
Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s
regional ambitions." [source: A Clean Break: A
New Strategy for Security in the Realm; 1996]
The entire regime change operation we are seeing unfold in the Middle
East is a veritable laundry list of neoconservative goals as outlined in the
“Clean Break” document, as well as in the agenda of the Project for a New
American Century (PNAC), Bill Kristol’s vehicle for injecting a strong dose of
interventionism into the incoming Bush administration. Aside from calling for
regime change in practically every Middle Eastern state — all this prior to the
9/11 terrorist attacks — PNAC’s proposal for tripling the military budget was
prefaced by a yearning for “a new Pearl Harbor,” which would wake the American
people up to the imperative of American military supremacy at any cost. ....
---------------------------------
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32734.htm
Why
Target Iran?
Roots of the Iranian 'Crisis'
By Justin Raimondo
October 13, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - On the front
page of a prominent newspaper the news is grim: a Middle Eastern country run by
a ruthless dictatorial regime has been secretly developing “weapons of mass
destruction.” While in public they deny it, in their underground labs their
scientists are busy, cooking up a radioactive horror that will soon be visited
upon the world — that is, unless we act.
How do we
know this? An exile group of so-called “freedom-fighters” has made this
“intelligence” available to a reporter for a widely-read US newspaper, which
splashes this scoop all over its front pages.
I could be
talking about the year 2002 — or 2012, with only difference being the names of
the target countries. We have been down this road before
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now saying it is only a matter of a year or so before Iran
is ready to join the nuclear club — of course, he said the same thing last year, and the
year before, and the year before that.
Adding to
our sense of deja-vu, we have an Iranian version of the Iraqi National Congress exile group
providing the same quality of “intelligence”:
the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), or Peoples’
Warriors, a weird Marxist-Islamic cult which once served Saddam Hussein and was given a
base in Iraq to conduct terrorist activities in Iran. When the southern
Shi’ites rose against Saddam in the 1990s, Saddam called in these mercenaries
to slaughter the ill-armed
rebels. The War Party won a big victory the other day when Hillary Clinton
announced the MEK had been taken off the official list
of designated terrorist groups. They have been a constant source of phony “evidence” that Iran is secretly
working on nuclear weapons
Hardly a
day goes by without some supposedly sensational
revelation or claim about Iran’s alleged “weapons
of mass destruction.” It seems like only yesterday, however, that we were
seeing exactly the same headlines, and the same articles, only this time it is Iran instead of Iraq that stands
accused. Back in 2002, it was a series of pieces bylined
by a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller — whose name has
become virtually synonymous with deception. Ms. Miller was being fed her
information by Chalabi’s group, via her close
connections to the administration, and in particular to a group of political
operatives deemed the neoconservatives.
This was —
is — a small but highly
influential coterie of what used to be called cold war liberals, whose views
were shaped by migratory ex-Trotskyites with a bone to
pick with Stalin. Not your run of the mill
European-style Social Democrats, mind you, but militant interventionists with a
vision of a world reshaped by American military power. Or, as one neocon
writing in a prominent foreign policy journal put it: the goal of US foreign policy
ought to be “benevolent global hegemony” — as opposed, one
must assume, to the malevolent global hegemony dreamed of by Communists,
national socialists, and other villains throughout history.
The fabled
journey of the neocons from far left to far right has
been celebrated in story and song, and there is no need to go into all the gory
details here: we’ve heard it all before — in a PBS documentary, “Arguing the World,” and in numerous memoirs by the participants. Yet this
famous hegira didn’t take them anywhere: it was a journey standing still. For
they had simply transferred their allegiance from the Soviet Union to the
United States without changing the basic underlying assumptions of their radical
universalism: instead of a world communist revolution as advocated by Leon
Trotsky and his followers, these disillusioned Marxists now dreamed of a “global democratic revolution,” as one of George
W. Bush’s speechwriters put it in a presidential
oration celebrating the anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Having walked out of the Democratic party, disgusted with the alleged “pacifism” of George
McGovern, these Scoop Jackson Democrats wound up in the Republican party just
as the Reagan Revolution, so-called, was picking up steam. When Reagan went to Washington, the neocons
followed in his wake, and wound up ensconced in the National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded
with them in mind. There Reagan’s advisers could keep an eye on them, while
they stayed largely out of sight of the general public.
From a
small coterie of social democratic intellectuals, the neocons soon branched out and established a
Washington network that tied them into the right-wing cold war coalition of social conservatives, free market types, and professional anti-communists. The neocons fit
neatly into the latter category, but were never quite comfortable with the
other members of the coalition. Some of them remained socialists, or at least
social democrats of one sort or another, and as far as capitalism was
concerned, they could only give it two cheers, at the most — as
Irving Kristol put it in the title of one of his books. When it came to
domestic issues, the neocons were all over the map, from Sidney Hook — the quintessential New York intellectual — who
remained a socialist until his dying day, to Irving Kristol, a former
Trotksyist who wound up founding a veritable dynasty based on the ideological
assumptions to be found in the Republican party
platform.
What
unified them, and defined them as a cohesive group, was a fanatical hatred of
Stalinism and their dedication to the idea of spreading democracy — at
gunpoint, if necessary — throughout the world. During the cold war, the CIA made use of them as the US sought to counter
Soviet influence on the international left. Having displaced the older
generation of conservatives, who were derided as “isolationists,” these New
Conservatives — or neoconservatives, as they came to be known — came to
dominate the American right-wing and soon seized control of the
philanthropic foundations that poured money into right-wing causes.
As the
cold war ended, however, they saw their influence waning. When Reagan met with
Gorbachev and signed a treaty limiting long-range missiles based in Europe,
they accused the man who had
coined the phrase “evil empire” with selling out to the commies and leaving the
US defenseless against the Kremlin. They failed to understand what was
happening when the Soviet colossus began to crack because they never “got it”
that communism’s biggest enemies were its own internal contradictions.
With the
fall of Communism, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the professional
anti-communists were out of work. Suddenly there
was a big hole in their worldview: the rationalization for our interventionist
foreign policy had disappeared almost overnight. Worse, from their point of
view, the Republicans were drifting back to their “isolationist” roots. When,
during the Clinton administration,
the Republicans in Congress threatened to pull the
funding from our military adventure in Kosovo, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly
Standard, threatened to walk out of the Republican
party.
Ah, but
all was not lost. When George W. Bush went to Washington, a gaggle of
neocons followed him. Showing up for work that fateful winter were all the
familiar faces who had worked for Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Boeing),
organized the Committee on the Present Danger (and other neocon front groups),
and served as the de facto command center of the War Party in previous
administrations: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Eliot Cohen, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith — and, sitting in
the peanut gallery, the neocon publicists like Bill Kristol, son of Irving,
editor of the Weekly Standard: Max Boot, former CIA analyst, the gang
over at Commentary magazine, the staff of the American Enterprise Institute — the most
prominent and certainly the wealthiest conservative think tank — and various
and sundry Republican politicians, as well as ostensible Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman. The policy office of the Pentagon and the National Security Council were packed with neocons, and they had their agenda all set to go when George W.
Bush entered the Oval Office.
They went to Washington with a plan: invade and subjugate Iraq. They had found a
new enemy to take the place of the Kremlin, and it wasn’t just the Iraq dictator —
although Saddam was their initial target — but the entire
Muslim world, which they determined had to be
transformed. The “swamp,” they averred, had to be “drained.” In their view, the entire
Arab world had been deformed and kept back from achieving “modernity” due to
certain characteristics of what they called the “Arab mind” —
deformations that could be traced back to the all-pervasive influence of Islam
on the development of Arab civilization.
The stage
was set for the disaster that was about to unfold….
It’s
All About Israel - Part II of
“Roots of the Iranian ‘Crisis’”
It was and
is a matter of high principle for the neoconservatives that the US unconditionally support Israel in its struggle
against the Arab world. Disputing the neocons’ claim to the mantle of
Wilsonianism, Michael Lind described this odd nexus of
radical universalism and ethno-nationalism as “Trotsky’s theory of the
permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism,”
adding: “Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people
such as the Palestinians.”
Saddam
Hussein, you’ll recall, had been offering bounties for suicide bombers, at
least according to the propaganda we heard, and —
alongside the contention that he was also
developing nuclear weapons — this was the pitch the neocons, and the Israel lobby, gave in public to
justify the invasion. Yet there was another layer of rationalization which went
largely undetected in America, and the argument
was contained in a paper prepared for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, in 1996, under the auspices of the Israeli Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies, which had organized a “Study Group on a New
Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” The paper was shaped by a series of seminars in
which several figures who would figure prominently in the administration of
George W. Bush participated, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Meyrav
Wurmser. Entitled “A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the proposal proffered by
these future American policymakers urged Netanyahu to undertake a long-term
project to break Israel out of its
geographic and demographic boundaries and engage in a campaign of “regime
change” in the Middle East. To the incoming Prime
Minister, who had upended the long rule of the Israeli Labor Party, they gave
the following advice: ditch the peace process, and make a “clean break” with
the policy of appeasing both the Palestinians and the United States. Stand up to Uncle
Sam, insist on mutuality, build up support for Israeli objectives in the US
Congress, and go on the offensive against the enemies of the Jewish state:
“Israel
can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by
weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can
focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli
strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional
ambitions.”
The entire
regime change operation we are seeing unfold in the Middle East is a veritable
laundry list of neoconservative goals as outlined in the “Clean Break”
document, as well as in the agenda of the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC), Bill Kristol’s vehicle for injecting a strong dose of
interventionism into the incoming Bush administration. Aside from calling for
regime change in practically every Middle Eastern state — all this prior to the
9/11 terrorist attacks — PNAC’s proposal for tripling the military budget was
prefaced by a yearning for “a new Pearl Harbor,” which would wake the American
people up to the imperative of American military supremacy at any cost.
The
neocons got their Pearl Harbor
on September 11, 2001, and they were more than ready to take full advantage of the opportunity
to implement their agenda of permanent war. While the
administration made a half-hearted attempt to capture
Osama bin Laden they failed to corner him in Afghanistan, and the top
leadership slipped through the American dragnet with the help of its Taliban allies. This,
however, didn’t really concern the neocons all that much: Paul Wolfowitz and
others were arguing inside the
administration that the real enemy was in Baghdad. After the
preliminaries in Afghanistan, they turned their
sights on the real object of their war-lust: Iraq.
The “Clean
Break” scenario envisioned the overthrow of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime
as a prerequisite for Israel’s success, and the Israel lobby, in concert with the neoconservatives, played a key role
in dragging us into that disastrous war of aggression. Yet that was just the
beginning of the road they wanted to take us on, and we are halfway down it
already. As Ariel Sharon told a delegation of American congressmen in 2003,
after Iraq must come Iran, Libya, and Syria:
“These are
irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a
successful American move in Iraq as a model will
make that easier to achieve," said the Prime Minister to his guests,
rather like a commander issuing orders to his foot-soldiers. While noting that Israel was not itself at
war with Iraq, he went on to say
that “the American action is of vital importance.”
Of course
it was, but as far as the Israelis and their American amen corner were
concerned, it was to be just the beginning.
The Israelization of American
foreign policy under George W. Bush was a policy consciously promoted by the
neoconservatives from their well-situated perch at the heights of the national
security apparatus. The progenitors of the “Clean Break” scenario saw the
Israeli state facing a terminal crisis: the Jewish state, in their view, was
suffering from an “exhaustion” that could lead to extinction. The idea was to
break with the idea of “containment” and go for a policy of preemption. As the
“Clean Break” document put it:
“Notable
Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel’s floundering and
loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving
true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous
strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another
Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a
policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing
the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to
absorb blows to the nation without response.”
This
doctrine of preemption came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, but it really
ought to be called the Sharon-Bush Doctrine, given its true origins. When
George W. Bush declared that the United States has the “right,”
and even the obligation, to attack any
nation on earth, on the grounds that the target poses a potential threat to US
interests, he was merely echoing what had by that time already become official
Israeli policy. This policy was given free rein in a whole series of wars,
aside from the permanent state of war prevailing in the occupied
territories of Palestine: two invasions of Lebanon, and, today, terrorist attacks inside Iran
carried out by Israeli intelligence agencies in cooperation with their proxies,
such as the Mujahideen Khalq. The ultimate
example of preemption would be an attack on Iran — and here we see
a real conflict developing between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s
government.
The
Israeli position on Iran is an application
of the Bush Doctrine taken to its logical extreme. While the American
intelligence community is clear that the Iranians
abandoned their embryonic nuclear weapons program in 2003, and all subsequent
“evidence” of a viable Iranian nuke in the making has turned out to be either forgeries or pre-2003
materials, Netanyahu gets around this by upping the ante. The danger, he says,
is that the Iranians will achieve the capacity to put together a
nuclear weapon on very short notice. The Romney campaign, taking its cues from
Tel Aviv, has echoed this escalation of Israeli demands, with the formulation
that they don’t want Tehran “one turn of the screwdriver away” from acquiring
nuclear weapons.
This is a
technical impossibility, a crude bit of war propaganda that has no basis in
reality: but then again, that’s what war propaganda usually is — blind
assertions meant to evoke an emotional response rather than one based on
reason, or, in this case, on science. As the Wilson Center study on the costs and
benefits of an attack on Iran put it, it would
take at least two years or more for Iran to develop a
deliverable nuclear warhead — and the effort would be detected long before
that.
In short,
the ticking time bomb scenario described by Netanyahu and his American
co-thinkers is pure nonsense: in no sense could the Iranians ever be “one turn
of the screwdriver away” from nuking Israel. Even given the
doctrine of preemption, in light of these facts the justification for war
simply does not exist. Netanyahu and his defense minister claim Israel faces an “existential” crisis, nothing
less than the prospect of a second Holocaust. Yet there are no
facts to back up this assertion: it is simply an emotional appeal. Something
else is at work here other than fear of a genuine threat, and it is quite
simply politics — that is, the internal politics of Israel, and also of the United States.
Objectively,
there is no threat to Israel, or to the West,
emanating from Iran: armed with nuclear weapons, and so far advanced militarily over
its neighbors that the distance between them can only be measured in light
years, Israel has no real reason
to fear an attack that is not forthcoming in any event. The whole thing is
manufactured by politicians who have but one goal in mind: to stay in power.
Meir
Dagan, former head of the Mossad, says the idea of a
preemptive attack on Iran is “the stupidest
idea I’ve ever heard,” and inside Israel support for
Netanyahu’s gambit is far from solid. Shimon Peres, one of the last
of the old-style (i.e. rational) Israeli leaders, recently went on television
to expressly dissent from Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric and to give support
to President Obama as a reliable ally.
What’s
interesting is that the rhetoric coming from Netanyahu and his defense
minister, Ehud Barak, has a distinctly anti-American strain. As Barak put it, in arguing for a
unilateral Israeli strike on Iran:
“Ronald
Reagan did not want to see a nuclear Pakistan, but Pakistan did go nuclear.
Bill Clinton did not want to see a nuclear North Korea, but North Korea went nuclear.”
“If Israel forgoes the chance
to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act, the
likelihood of an American action will decrease… We cannot wait to discover one
morning that we relied on the Americans but were fooled because the Americans
didn’t act in the end…. Israel will do what it has
to do.”
Barak’s
message is all too clear: the Americans are mercurial,
and weak-willed — they can’t be counted on, and besides we have to do what we
have to do. This is the spirit and letter of the “Clean Break” document, which
decried US “intervention” in Israel’s internal
affairs, and it is the language of the extreme nationalists, such as Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign
minister, who once advocated bombing the Aswan dam and is a
former bouncer in a bar. His extremist right-wing party advocates a “Greater
Israel,” and is supported by the “settler” movement — violent fanatics who want
to create a Greater Israel based on their interpretation of the Bible.
In the
context of growing extremism infecting the Israeli body politic, a politician
like Netanyahu is considered a centrist. To his right are even more
anti-American ultra-nationalists, and this movement is
growing. In order to accommodate it, and contain it within the confines of his
own party, Netanyahu has had to move in an even more extreme direction, even
going so far as to threaten that Israel will
strike Iran on its own, without US support.
This, of
course, is a policy of de facto blackmail, since any war between Israel and Iran will almost inevitably see the Americans
dragged in. This has been the whole Israeli strategy, so far — except that it
hasn’t worked. The President has steadfastly refused to give in, at
least up until this point. He has even gone so far as to inform the Iranians in advance that
any such attack by Israeli forces will not have the sanction or support of the
US — and, in such an event, to please refrain from attacking American targets
in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
In view of
the lack of American support for war, both in Washington and among the
American electorate, the persistence of the debate within Israel over whether they
should attack all on their own is disturbing. Such a scenario could only be
disastrous for the region, and for Israel in particular, as Gen. Dempsey, head of the US joint
chiefs of staff, has recently made plain. The Israeli defense and
intelligence establishment has been saying the same thing, and still
Netanyahu and Barak continue to talk about it
as if it were a real option.
While
Netanyahu is bound to be deterred by the cold reception this idea has received
in Washington, in this context
we have to ask ourselves a sobering question: will Avigdor Lieberman’s finger some day
be on Israel’s nuclear trigger?
This is a question the Iranians, and others in the region, have no doubt asked
themselves. That it is even a possibility is profoundly unsettling — and this,
not the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, is the source of
the real danger looming over the Middle East.
Israel’s nuclear monopoly
in the region is the real issue at hand, and it is one the Israelis have not
had to face. It is known the Israelis possess at least two-hundred warheads. Their
policy is one of “nuclear ambiguity,” neither confirming nor denying the
existence of their deadly arsenal. Unlike Iran, they have refused to sign the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and inspections of their nuclear
facilities are therefore out of the question.
Iran, on the other
hand, regularly submits to a tight schedule of inspections
from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would soon discover
any weaponization procedures in progress. Israel’s contemptuous
attitude toward the international community is given a free pass by the US and its allies,
while the Iranians are subjected to crippling sanctions and an international
campaign of vilification on the mere suspicion that they might one day have the
capacity to develop nuclear weapons. To call this a double standard is to
understate the case.
The
destabilizing effects of Israel’s nuclear monopoly are a major cause of regional
tensions — and the entire basis for assuming Iran has nuclear ambitions above
and beyond its stated intention of harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful
purposes. One of the arguments against containing Iran, as opposed to
taking the military option, is that the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal by Tehran will spark a dangerous arms race throughout the
region. Yet this is disproved by the existence of Israel’s own arsenal, which
has sparked no such race — even though the Jewish state’s Muslim neighbors have
ample reason to believe the Israelis could conceivably launch a first strike on
them. This, after all, is the essence of the doctrine of preemption, which the
Israelis have embraced.
While
there is zero evidence the Iranians have restarted
their nuclear weapons program, could one blame them if they did? How else could
they possibly hope to deter an Israeli first strike? In a 2008 op-ed piece in
the New York Times, the noted Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote:
“Iran’s leaders would do
well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the
best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air
assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean
thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the
alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear
wasteland.”
An Israeli
nuclear strike at Iran is not
inconceivable: indeed, it is all too conceivable. So who are the real
aggressors in the Middle East?
The Israel Lobby and the Road
to War - Part III of "Roots of the Iranian ‘crisis’"
Israel is like a spoiled
child who has grown stronger, more willful, and outright dangerous under the
nurturing care of its US parent – a parent
who has lost all authority and can no longer restrain its juvenile delinquent
progeny. The US-Israeli "special relationship" has destabilized the Middle East and made war much
more likely than it would be otherwise. Israel can act in the
knowledge that there will be no consequences for its actions, that it will not
be held accountable or blamed – in public – in any way for what follows.
This, in
turn, has energized extremist movements inside Israel, who demand more
and yet more of the United States – and come to resent Uncle Sam for supposedly
restraining the Israelis from achieving what they believe is their just due.
The response is very far from gratitude, if we take Netanyahu’s recent behavior
as indicative. We pour billions every year into Israel, with economic and
military aid, and with Congress in their back pocket no American president
dares threaten them with an aid cutoff. The result is that we have created –
and empowered – a monster, one that may one day turn on us.
Indeed, Israel has already turned
on us if we define that as brazen interference in American
politics. The Israel lobby, which wields plenty of money and political clout,
has so distorted the national discourse on foreign policy issues that it is no
longer possible for any politician to challenge the course we have taken.
Defenders
of the Israel lobby say this is
because the American people support Israel, but the truth is
far more prosaic. In reality, most Americans have no opinion about who is right
and who is wrong in the Middle East: they are neutral when it comes to
siding with the Israelis or the Palestinians, and would prefer that the US government refrain
from taking sides. But they don’t feel very passionately about it. On the other
hand, Israel’s supporters do feel passionately, and the lopsided congressional
support for Israel – even when it’s against the interests of
the United States – is the result of a passionate
minority’s efforts. If there was a national plebiscite on US aid to Israel, you can bet there would be no
more goodies forthcoming from Washington – not just to Israel, but to anyone.
No matter
what the "Clean Break" document
aspires to, Israel’s whole survival
strategy has always been to rely on aid from the outside: without the billions
that flow from the US Treasury into Israeli coffers, the entire Zionist project
would have failed long ago. It has been kept on life support all these years by
money from abroad, and by the hopes of the Israeli leadership that more Jews
will emigrate to the Promised Land. The main problem, however, is that American
Jews are so thoroughly assimilated that the idea of taking up residence in
Israel never occurs to them: for American Jews, America is the Promised
Land. Aside from that, the appeal of moving to a country that sees itself as
besieged – and whose leaders every day assert that they are sitting on the edge
of a second Holocaust – is necessarily
quite limited.
To make
matters worse, the younger generation of American Jews
increasingly does not identify with Israel, at least not to
the degree their mothers and fathers did. Netanyahu’s barely disguised support for Mitt
Romney in the US presidential election is not helping the Republicans much with
that particular constituency: instead, it is garnering support from born again
Christians of the dispensationalist school, who believe a war in the
Middle East involving Israel, the United States, and Iran, will be the
fulfillment of biblical prophecy and hasten the Second Coming. These are the
people who write and call Congress whenever the
administration defies one of Netanyahu’s whims.
The irony
here is that these far right-wing crazies also believe the Jews will convert to
Christianity when Armageddon comes – and that those who don’t will burn in Hell. Yet the Israel
lobby doesn’t hesitate to use these folks in order to generate support for
Israeli government policies: their leader, the Rev. John Hagee, has been a featured speaker at the national
conference of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he
fulminated against the "forces of Satan" who are supposedly
conspiring to bring Israel down.
Yes, Israel has enemies, but
these days it is it’s own worst enemy. The other day I
saw a video of an Israeli army soldier bashing a Palestinian
teenager’s head against the stone pavement of the Al-Aqsa mosque. I saw Muslim
worshippers driven out in response to a demonstration by Israeli extremists
affiliated with the "settler" movement. And it isn’t just
Palestinians, although they bear the great brunt of this treatment – it’s
Christians in Jerusalem and elsewhere who
are being pushed out by an increasingly
aggressive and xenophobic spirit within Israel, a toxic mix of
religious fundamentalism and racism. There is a movement afoot in Israel that campaigns for
expelling all Arabs from the land of Israel. In every society,
of course, there is a fringe element, but in the Israel of today they are
in the government.
There is,
in short, an incipient fascist movement that is
gaining ground by the day in the one country on earth where one would least
expect such a phenomenon to arise. Yet history is replete with these tragic
ironies, and if we have to witness the rise of the Jewish equivalent of Hitler then
apparently we are to be spared nothing.
When
talking about why we are targeting Iran, and why we’re
seeing such a relentless wave of war propaganda calling for an attack, we have
to talk about Israel, because in the
end that’s what it’s all about. We are being asked, in a rather peremptory
tone, to go to war for Israel’s sake. I have
already demonstrated that Israel’s
alleged "existential crisis" is nothing but hysterics on the part of
Israel’s leaders, but let’s leave that aside for the moment and ask a more
fundamental question: where do Israel’s interests end and America’s begin, or
is there no daylight between the two?
During the
cold war, Israel was a mixed case:
a reliable ally whose friendship cost us support in the Arab world and gave the
Soviets a wedge to extend their influence. Now that we are fighting an apparently eternal "war on
terrorism," Israel has become an
unmitigated liability. If we must fight a war against over a billion Muslims,
then we will surely lose: the only hope is to somehow split the Muslim world,
and rally the moderates against the radical Islamists of bin Laden’s sort.
Now, I’m not
saying this is what I’m advocating: I am merely describing the objective
circumstances that drive US policy, and this
goes for both the present and the previous administration.
The Obama
administration has taken this Muslim-centric strategy one step further,
however, and is openly allying with what can only
be described as radical Islamists one step removed from al-Qaeda. The idea is
to co-opt and defuse Islamist movements which Washington sees as the
inevitable inheritors of the decaying Sunni monarchies that are bound to fall
sooner rather than later.
The Bush
administration and its neoconservative cheerleaders thrilled to the
idea that the "liberation" of Iraq would spark
democratic revolutions throughout the region. What happened, instead, is that
it sparked revolutions against US-supported dictators like Hosni Mubarak that
have little to do with liberal democracy as we know it in the West. Instead,
what we see is the rise of a most illiberal democracy, and not only in Egypt. Our policymakers
envision the Turkification of the Middle East – the creation of
moderate Islamist governments with military and economic ties to the West. But
of course central planning from Washington doesn’t work any better when it
comes to foreign policy than it does in domestic policy. We saw the real world
results of this policy in Benghazi.
On the
other hand, the Israelis have a far different vision, exemplified by
Netanyahu’s recent speech to the United
Nations in which he held up Israel as the great
defender of "modernity" against the savage hordes. It’s the new
public face of Israel: subway posters that urge us to
"support the civilized man" against the "savage." Aside from
being laughably untrue – Israel is no less
threatened by a rising religious fundamentalism than its neighbors, with
fanatic "settlers" running wild and even challenging the IDF – this line of
argument underscores Israel’s growing
isolation on the world stage, and its slide into a frightening extremism.
Netanyahu’s Manichean view of Israel fighting virtually
alone against an array of enemies – and the broken promises of its less than
reliable friends – serves Netanyahu and his party well.
According
to my theory of international relations, which I call "libertarian realism," this is the
origin of all foreign policy decisions by the leaders of nations: these
decisions, like all other political decisions, are made in order to preserve
and extend the power, wealth, and prestige of these leaders and their supporters.
Therefore such questions as whether or not Iran really is intent
on building nuclear weapons and deploying them against Israel are irrelevant.
Objective facts don’t enter into the equation: it’s all about creating a
narrative suitable for domestic consumption.
The
problem for Netanyahu is that his narrative necessarily collides with Washington’s current view of
US interests in the region. The resulting din can be heard in the raised voices
of both US and Israeli leaders as the debate goes public during a presidential
election year. Netanyahu’s clear preference for Romney is a
brazen intervention in US politics of the sort that no previous Israeli leader
has ever dared attempt. The fuss about meeting
Netanyahu at the UN, the demand for a "red line," and
Netanyahu’s preexisting personal
relationship with Romney aren’t the only evidences of Netanyahu’s sympathies.
Both the Israeli leader and the Republican nominee share a major donor in
common: Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who had pledged to spend $100
million to defeat President Obama, and has spent more than that to subsidize a free Israeli newspaper that is a
veritable Netanyahu campaign organ. As David Andrew Weinberg pointed out in the
Christian Science Monitor, Netanyahu has taken to the US airwaves to chastise the White House
for its lack of support:
"Netanyahu’s
recent sound bites on Iran are already being
featured in a million-dollar ad buy attacking Obama in Florida. The group
distributing this ad, Secure America Now,
is founded by a Republican strategist notorious for having a direct line to the
prime minister, so Netanyahu was probably aware of how such remarks would be
utilized by American conservatives."
Such
interference in American elections by a foreign power is intolerable. Too bad
the Obama administration doesn’t have the courage to name what is happening and
call out Netanyahu. The American people would welcome it. However, I’m afraid
the Israel lobby is just as powerful in the Democratic party as it is among the Republicans, and so we’ll see none
of that.
This is
why Iran has been chosen as
the latest target: because the powerful lobby of a foreign government is pulling
out all the stops in a bid to drag us into a ruinous war. That such a conflict
would benefit Israel in the long run,
or even in the short term, is a highly dubious proposition. While the largely
mythical threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel might dissipate,
for a while at least, the benefits of dispelling a potential danger are far
outweighed by the near certain danger of worldwide economic collapse. With the
price of oil skyrocketing to unprecedented heights, world markets already
reeling from the global recession would be knocked for a loop by the oil shock.
The effects would be felt not only here in the US but also in Israel, where protests
over rising prices and austerity budgets are already erupting. If you thought
the crash of ’08 was a big deal, just wait until the prospect of war triggers
an economic meltdown that makes ’08 look like a blip on the screen.
Justin
Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the
Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American
Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is
the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993;
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The
Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books,
2000].