|
Recent
Stories
April
9, 2003
Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
War
Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
John
Chuckman
America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
with the Christian Right
Ray
Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
Racism, Hypocrisy and the War on Iraq
David Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
the War Is About Oil
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/9
April
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Killing the Messengers: It Doesn't
Matter If It's Deliberate or Accidental
Richard
Lichtman
Dr. Phil in the Trenches
John
Brown
Why Uncle Ben Hasn't Sold Uncle Sam:
a Former Foreign Service Staffer on Bush's Policy Failures
Ben
Terrall
Report from the Oakland Docks: "The
Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"
Jason Leopold
FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
May Have Violated Federal Law
Anthony
Gancarski
Conyers Heeds the Call on Perle
Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
Ahmad
Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
Browne
Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
Summit
Larry Kearney
I Understand There's a Boy in
a Baghdad Hospital
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/8
M. Shahid
Alam
The Israelization of America
April
7, 2003
Todd
Chretien
Wooden Bullets & Grenades: Oakland
Cops Attack Peace Protesters and Dock Workers
David
N. Gibbs
Spying, Secrecy and the University:
The CIA is Back on Campus
Harry Browne
War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
Gideon
Levy
America is Not a Role Model
Diane
Christian
A Scene from an Obscene War
Jules
Rabin
Remembering Deir Yassin
James Davis
Oddsmaking in Dublin: Will Bush
Shake Gerry's Hand?
Robert
Fisk
The Twisted Language of War
Patrick
Cockburn
Slaughter on the Road to Dibagah
John
Mackay
War and Art
Seth Sandronsky
Wars and the Color Line
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/7
April
5, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
in Shambles
Anne
Gwynne
A Drowning in Salem
Uri
Avnery
Roadmap to Nowhere
Chris
Floyd
Hell for Leather: Bombs, Bullets, Bibles and Bush
William
Cook
Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) Off to War If...
Gila
Svirsky
A Busy Day for Bulldozers
Mike Ferner
Back from Baghdad: What Next for the Peace Movement?
Joanne
Mariner
Civilian Deaths and Official Apologies
John Stanton
Bush Takes His Killing Orders
from the Lord
Romi
Mahajan
Learning to Count the Dead
Aluf Benn
After Iraq, US Vows to Deal with
Other Mideast Regimes
Mary
Ellen Peterson
Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
William
MacDougall
Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
Jacobs
War and Occupation
Bernie
Pattison
Aborigines and the Different God
Mark
Engler
Iraq War as Arms Expo
Adam Engel
Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
Poets'
Basement
Tripp, Albert, Katz
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flesh and Its Discontents: the Paintings of Lucian Freud
Norman
Madarasz
Canada and the War
April
4, 2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
Hot Stories
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
Burn Your Sweatshop Clothes!
Buy Union Made Apparel!
|
April 10,
2003
The Night After
The Easier the Victory,
the Harder the Peace
By URI AVNERY
It is now fashionable to talk about "the
day after". Let's talk about the night after.
After the end of hostilities in Iraq,
the world will be faced with two decisive facts:
First, the immense superiority of American
arms can beat any people in the world, valiant as it may be.
Second, the small group that initiated
this war--an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish
neo-conservatives--has won big, and from now on it will control
Washington almost without limits.
The combination of these two facts constitutes
a danger to the world, and especially to the Middle East, the
Arab peoples and the future of Israel. Because this alliance
is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the Arab governments,
the enemy of the Palestinian people and especially the enemy
of the Israeli peace camp.
It does not dream only about an American
empire, in the style of the Roman one, but also of an Israeli
mini-empire, under the control of the extreme right and the settlers.
It wants to change the regimes in all Arab countries. It will
cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences of which
it is impossible to foresee.
Its mental world consists of a mixture
of ideological fervor and crass material interests, an exaggerated
American patriotism and right-wing Zionism.
That is a dangerous mixture. There is
in it something of the spirit of Ariel Sharon, a man who has
always had grandiose plans for changing the region, consisting
of a mixture of creative imagination, unbridled chauvinism and
a primitive faith in brute force.
Who are the winners?
They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives.
A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They
hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as
in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating
American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers.
For many years, this was a marginal group
that fostered a right-wing agenda in all fields. They fought
against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and drugs. When
Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, they offered him
advise on how to fight the Arabs.
Their big moment arrived with the collapse
of the Twin Towers. The American public and politicians were
in a state of shock, completely disoriented, unable to understand
a world that had changed overnight. The neo-cons were the only
group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only nine days
after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder,
Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting
that it was not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin
Laden, but that it was also imperative to "remove Saddam
Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" against
Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.
Following is a short list of the main
characters. (If it bores you, skip to the next section).
The Open Letter was published in the
Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol with the money of ultra-right
press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $ 10 million to the cause.
It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons, including Norman Podhoretz,
a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme right-wing
icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter magazine, and his wife,
Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for
Security Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard,
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard
Perle.
Perle is a central character in this
play. Until recently he was the chairman of the Defense Policy
Board of the  Defense Department, which also includes
Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the Jerusalem
Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past he
was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against
the Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He
is a leading member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise
Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign from his Defense Department
position, when it became known that a private corporation had
promised to pay him almost a million dollars for he benefit
of his influence in the administration.
That Open Letter was, in effect, the
beginning of the Iraq war. It was eagerly received by the Bush
administration, with members of the group already firmly established
in some of its leading positions. Paul Wolfowitz, the father
of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department, where another
friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning
Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot
Abrams, responsible for the Middle East in the National Security
Council, was connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The
main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits in the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, together with Michael Ledeen,
another hero of the scandal. Headvocates total war not only against
Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi
Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is comptroller
for the Defense Department.
Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are associated with the
"Project for the New American Century", which published
a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance
this 'American peace'"--meaning American control of the
world.
Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new
Israeli first name) is Director of the Center for Middle East
Policy at the Hudson Institute. She also writes for the Jerusalem
Post and is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute
that is, according to the London Guardian, connected with Israeli
Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians with
highly selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's
husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute,
heading Middle East Studies. Mention should also be made of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy of our old acquaintance,
Dennis Ross, who for years was in charge of the "peace process"
in the Middle East.
In all the important papers there are
people close to the group, such as William Safire, a man hypnotized
by Sharon, in the New York Times and Charles Krauthammer in the
Washington Post. Another Perle friend, Robert Bartley, is the
editor of the Wall Street Journal.
If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often
sound as if they came from the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons
may be that their speechwriters, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully
and John McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff,
Lewis Libby.
The immense influence of this largely
Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing
Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican
party. The founding fathers were Jerry Falwell of the Moral
Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present from Menachem
Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the Christian
Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy
in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports
the settlers and their right-wing allies.
Common to both groups is their adherence
to the fanatical ideology of the extreme right in Israel. They
see the Iraq war as a struggle between the Children of Light
(America and Israel) and the Children of Darkness (the Arabs
and Muslims).
By the way, none of these facts are secret.
They have been published lately in dozens of articles, both in
American and world media. The members of the group are proud
of them.
The Zionist general.
The man who symbolizes this victory is
General Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the
civilian administration in Iraq.
He is no anonymous general who has been
picked accidentally. Garner is the ideological partner of Paul
Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.
Two years ago he signed, together with
26 other officers, a petition organized by the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable
restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the
leadership of the Palestinian Authority," which is certainly
news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that "a
strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and
political leaders can rely on."
In the first Gulf War he praised the
performance of the Patriot missiles, which had failed miserably.
After leaving the army in 1997, he became, not surprisingly,
a defense contractor specializing in missiles. It was alleged
that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts. This year
he obtained a defense contract for $ 1.5 billion, as well as
a contract for building Patriot systems in Israel.
Therefore, there can be no better candidate
for the job of chief of the civilian administration in Iraq,
especially at a time when contracts for billions of dollars for
reconstruction have to be handed out, to be paid for by Iraqi
oil.
A new Balfour declaration.
The ideology of this group, that calls
for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel,
reminds one of bygone days.
The Balfour declaration of 1917, that
promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, had two parents. The
mother was Christian Zionism (among whose adherents were illustrious
statesmen like Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, long before
the foundation of the Zionist movement), the father was British
imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British to crowd out
their French competitors and take possession of Palestine, which
was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route
to India.
Now the same thing is happening again.
Last year Richard Perle organized a briefing in which a speaker
proposed war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt
as well, in order to secure the world's oil heartland. Iraq,
he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications for
this design is the need to defend Israel.
To bet on our life?
Seemingly, all this is good for Israel.
America controls the world, we control America. Never before
have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of
world power.
But this tendency troubles me. We are
like a gambler, who bets all his money and his future on one
horse. A good horse, a horse with no current competitor, but
still one horse.
The neo-cons will cause a long period
of chaos in the Arab and Muslim world. The Iraqi war has already
shown that their understanding of Arab realities is shaky. Their
political assumptions did not stand the test, only brute force
saved their undertaking.
Some day the Americans will go home,
but we shall remain here. We have to live with the Arab peoples.
Chaos in the Arab world endangers our future.
Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic,
liberal, Zionist and America-loving Middle East, but the result
of their adventures may well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist
region that will threaten our very existence.
The partnership of the neo-cons and the
Christian fundamentalists may engender counter-forces in Washington.
And if Bush is defeated in the next election, like his father
after his victory in the first Gulf War, this whole gang will
be thrown out.
The Bible tells us about the kings of
Judea, who relied on the then world power, Egypt. They did not
appreciate the rise of forces in the east, Assyria and Babylon.
An Assyrian general told the king of Judea: "Behold, thou
trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on
which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it."
(II kings 18, 21).
Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not
a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now a very strong reed. But
should we bet our whole future on this?
Uri Avnery
is an Israeli journalist. His essays are included in The
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.
Today's
Features
Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
War
Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
John
Chuckman
America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
with the Christian Right
Ray
Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
Racism, Hypocrisy and the War on Iraq
David Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
the War Is About Oil
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/9
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|