James Petras is Bartle professor (emeritus) of sociology at the
State University of New York, Binghamton. I.e., no slouch. He
is a noted academic figure on the US Left, a well-respected expert
on Latin America, and a longtime chronicler of that region's popular
struggles. He is also an adviser to the landless workers in Brazil
and the unemployed workers movement in Argentina.
Along the way, Dr. Petras managed
to find time to write several hundred articles and 62 books published
in 29 languages, including his latest book, in which he explains
the complexities of another vital world region. He has extensive
knowledge of the Middle East, and has written frequently about
the state of Israel and its relations with its Palestinian neighbors
and, perhaps most important, with the United States.
THE POWER OF ISRAEL IN THE
U.S.:
A REVIEW OF THE NEW BOOK BY JAMES PETRAS
BY: STEPHEN LENDMAN, a journalist
based in the American Midwest. SOURCE: Published on 10-27-06 by
CounterCurrents.org.
URL: http://countercurrents.org/us-lendman271006.htm
Dr. Petras's remarkably insightful new book is titled
The Power Of Israel In The United States. It is an epic work of magisterial
writing and essential reading that documents the enormous influence
of the Jewish Lobby on US policy in the Middle East. It focuses like
a laser on the Lobby's pressure to conform US policy with Israel's
long-term goals for regional hegemony. It demonstrates that the Lobby's
influence is broad and deep enough to include officials at the highest
levels of American government, the business community, academia, the
clergy (especially the dominant fundamentalist Christian Zionists),
and of course the mass media.
Dr. Petras shows how the combined forces which constitute
the Jewish Lobby have assured the full and unconditional US support
for all elements of Israel's agenda for decades--even when that agenda
harms American interests, such as the unwinnable war in Iraq, any
future war against Iran, and the appallingly brutal subjugation and
colonization of the Palestinian people. In spite of the fact that
these policy choices often serve no US interest whatsoever, the Lobby
is able to get the US to go along with Israel unconditionally because
it tolerates no serious American opposition to its agenda.
Dr. Petras' new book is divided into four parts.
This review will cover each part in detail, and what is discussed
below will probably surprise any reader who is unfamiliar with its
thoroughly-documented and compellingly-presented account of the Lobby's
activities.
Dr. Petras sets the table in his lucid introduction
for what is to come in the later chapters. He opens by noting what
author J.J. Goldberg reported in his book, Jewish Power: Inside The
Jewish Establishment--that 45% of the Democratic Party fundraising,
and 25% of the Republican Party fundraising, came from the Jewish-funded
Political Action Committees (PACs) in the early 1990s. Then he updates
these numbers by citing those published recently in the Washington
Post by columnist Richard Cohen, which are now at a whopping 60% for
Democrats and 35% for Republicans. Moreover, the Jewish Lobby's funding
relates to a single core issue--the recipient political party must
unconditionally support Israel's agenda, including those egregious
parts which human rights activists and conscientious observers would
no doubt judge to be illegal.
Petras stresses that no other single US lobby--including
Big Pharma, Big Oil, Agribusiness, etc.--can exercise this dominant
degree of influence over the American political process. Indeed, the
Zionist neocon, or "Ziocon," ideologues have succeeded in becoming
our foreign policymakers. And the Ziocons' goal in the Middle East,
under the fraudulent cover of "promoting democracy," is to transform
the region into an "American-Israeli Co-Prosperity Sphere" through
the barrel of a gun.
Dr. Petras explains that the root of the Lobby's
power lies in the high proportion of Jewish families who are among
this country's wealthiest and most influential families. He cites
a Forbes Magazine report that 25% to 30% of the wealthiest American
families are Jewish, despite the much smaller percentage of Jews in
the overall US population. Furthermore, these wealthy Jewish-American
families include a significant number of billionaires who wield enormous
influence. Along with the others who comprise the Jewish Lobby, they
have created a "tyranny of Israel over the US," with consequences
grave enough to threaten world peace and stability, the global economy,
and the very future of democracy in this country.
That democracy, and our constitutionally-protected
rights, now hang by a thread after the recent passage of the Military
Commissions Act of 2006 (a.k.a. the "Torture Authorization Act," or
more accurately the "US Constitutional Annulment Act"), which makes
everyone everywhere potentially an "enemy combatant" who can be subjected
to arrest, and secretly held in detention anywhere in the world, without
regard for our former constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Further
note that this terrible new law also applies to US citizens, as per
the Jose Padilla case. We've effectively lost our hallowed rights
of habeas corpus and due process, even though we technically still
have them.
Dr. Petras reports that the US has unconditionally
supported Israel's wars of aggression since 1967 because of the Jewish
Lobby's power. Its unparalleled influence led the US into the Gulf
War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003, the latter of which is now raging
out of control, and is seen by noted foreign-policy analysts as not
merely unwinnable but also causing potentially-irreparable economic
and political harm to this nation. Nonetheless, the Iraq War persists
with no agreed-upon plan to bring it to an end.
The Lobby also guaranteed America's unconditional
support for Israel's wars of aggression against Lebanon and Palestine,
with all the horrendous devastation they caused, and the futile consequences
because the underlying conflicts were exacerbated or remain unresolved.
For example, the Palestinian conflict still rages under the radar,
and the ceasefire status in Lebanon hangs by a hair-trigger, ready
to erupt again any time Israel decides to resume hostilities. Another
factor inflaming the Middle Eastern powderkeg to near exploding point
is the strong possibility that the US, and/or Israel, will attack
Iran because Israel wants it, and the Jewish Lobby in America has
put its powerful support behind it. More about this, Palestine, and
Lebanon below.
Today, the situation in the Middle East is so dire
that Dr. Petras reports a large majority of Europeans, and a growing
number of Americans, believe Israel itself is the single greatest
threat to world peace and stability. Nonetheless, the Bush administration
acquiesces to the Lobby, and has even attempted to "bludgeon" its
European partners into going along with its uncompromising support
for the Jewish state, despite all of the increasingly-obvious perils.
This book also addresses the Jewish Lobby's extremely
negative "chilling effect" on freedom of speech. In America, the Lobby
routinely: stifles open debate about US foreign policy; smears as
anti-semitic, pillories, ridicules and even physically threatens any
public figure or academic who dares to air even one truthful comment
about the Middle East or Israel; and never tolerates serious dissent
in the corporate-owned media or the so-called public radio that it
funds and controls--not even the PBS part thereof.
No publication is more servile to, blindly supportive
of, or influential than, this nation's so-called "paper of record"
that publishes "All The News That's Fit To Print"--the New York Times.
The Times is important because the stories it chooses to feature get
disseminated around the country and the world. And yet this dominant
American newspaper pledges its unconditional support and fealty to
the state of Israel, no matter what Israel does. Everyone knows this,
yet the major media play along, unquestioningly cranking out one-sided,
pro-Israel-uber-alles propaganda which allows no opposition voices
to represent other points of view. We call that a "free press"--but
it's only free for those who can afford to own one.
The state of the corporate-controlled mass media
inside this country is now so pathetic that Reporters Sans Frontieres--or
Reporters Without Borders, an organization promoting freedom of the
press--just ranked the United States 53rd in the world in press freedom,
behind countries like Benin, Namibia, Jamaica, and Bolivia.
James Petras is a courageous independent voice who
bucks this disturbing trend by refusing to go along with its systematic
suppression of truth. His powerful and carefully-documented new book
gives no quarter in countering the mendacity, deceit, and danger of
the Lobby, its acolytes and hangers-on, and its corrupting influence
on major media. His bold introduction calls for a "counter-hegemonic
movement" to free us from our destructive "Israeli entanglements."
He says his book is a modest effort toward the goal of rebuilding
our democratic freedoms, which are somewhere between life-support
and the crematorium. It is considerably more than that. It deserves
to be read nationwide, so Americans can learn the vital information
it contains. Hopefully, this in-depth review will arouse your desire
to give this book a cover-to-cover reading.
PART I: ZIONIST POWER IN AMERICA
Petras begins with the question as to who fabricated
the pre-war lies about Iraq posing a supposedly-imminent threat to
our national security, and why they might have done this. He finds
two competing channels of Washington policymakers and advisors (1)
the longstanding formal structure of career military and civilian
professionals inside the Pentagon and State Department; and (2) a
new parallel structure that the Bush administration neocons set up,
solely for the purpose of promoting war with Iraq, inside the Pentagon,
which they named the Office of Special Plans (OSP), and which they
staffed with neocon political appointees.
It was the OSP's job to cook the intelligence data,
to fabricate the idea of a huge Weapons of Mass Destruction arsenal,
to ignore any clear evidence to the contrary, and thus to contrive
a fraudulent case for war against Iraq. The people who were chosen
to staff the OSP were directly in Donald Rumsfeld's and Paul Wolfowitz's
chain of command, and they were all closely connected to a number
of influential neocon thinktanks and pro-Israel organizations. The
OSP justified the invasion on the basis of lies because Israel's agenda
demanded war to achieve its own security and hegemony in the region--beginning
with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and followed by forcible
regime changes in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia.
Petras points out that, contrary to popular belief,
the Iraq War happened largely due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby,
representing the interests of Israel. Indeed, Big Oil actually opposed
the idea because it feared that attacking Iraq would jeopardize its
business prospects with other oil-producing states in the region.
Nevertheless, Israel and the Jewish Lobby got their war, and aside
from Big Oil's temporary gain from higher oil prices, it may very
well end up a longer-term loser as a consequence.
US oil interests always prefer stability and normal
relationships with countries where they operate, or wish to operate
(thus their support for the despotic House of Saud). Big Oil was quite
comfortable dealing with Saddam Hussein, and did not want to risk
a war that might upset an otherwise-profitable arrangement. Their
fears proved justified, as the war created so much unresolved turbulence
that Iraq has become too dangerous, and thus unprofitable, to undertake
new ventures there (except perhaps in parts of the Kurdish-controlled
north). Big Oil also chafes at US sanctions that prevent them from
competing for Iranian oil contracts, which are going the Europeans
and others because they cannot do business there. For those reasons,
Big Oil does NOT support US-Israeli belligerence in the Middle East,
but they dare not oppose it publicly.
Petras observes that public discussion of the US-Israeli
relationship is never allowed in the American mainstream media--especially
any hint that the US attacked Iraq to serve Israel's interests. There
should be much public discussion on this point because the consequences
have been so enormous. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have enraged
not only hundreds of millions of Muslims but all people of conscience
worldwide. And they have caused the US to be viewed globally as a
rogue-state pariah, and George W. Bush as the dangerous and morally-depraved
leader of a failed administration.
Bush and those closest to him--like Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld--are reviled around the world and increasingly
here at home (as evidenced by the many thousands who took to the streets
on October 5, 2006, in over 200 US cities on "The World Can't Wait
Day: Drive Out the Bush Regime!"). Consider that: the financial and
human costs of Bush's wars far exceed any possible future benefits
from them; our national security has been jeopardized; the nation's
reputational status has been badly compromised; and some analysts
forecast that the total cost of the Iraq War may eventually top $2
TRILLION--a price-tag so staggeringly high that key business leaders
and responsible people in government are deeply worried about the
harm will do to this nation's economy.
The only clear beneficiary of the Bush necons' war
agenda is Israel. The Iraq War removed its main adversary in the region
by cutting off the political and economic support Saddam gave to the
Palestinians. Petras points out that Iraq, along with Iran and Syria,
comprised the region's core resistance to Israel's expansionist plans:
to crush the Palestinians by genocidally eliminating them from their
own homeland; to seize the Palestinian land as part of its long-term
Zionist project of creating a "Greater Israel"; and to acheive unchallengeable
regional dominance.
Petras notes that Israel is the only country in
the world with undeclared borders. Israel has intentionally kept that
status to give itself maximum latitude to forcibly annex all of the
territory it can in its drive to achieve the Zionist goal of a Greater
Israel--"Eretz Israel"-- which would include the ancient biblical
lands of "Judea" and "Summaria," plus all of the West Bank that the
Palestinians now claim as their homeland.
Through its US proxy, Israel has removed any Iraqi
threat to its plan for regional supremacy. Externally, Israel's imperialist
plans for regional hegemony are still opposed by a resilient Hezbollah
that humiliated Israel during its summer invasion of Lebanon, plus
Iran and Syria. Internally, Israel still faces determined resistance
from the Palestinians, despite having crushed their democratically-elected
government, Hamas. And Israel faces some homegrown opposition to its
war-and-colonization agenda because of its enormous cost and the added
insecurity it will cause. Israelis are now leaving in numbers that
exceed new arrivals. And Israel's social programs are eroding because
it needs money for its aggression-and-annexation agenda. Just like
what's happening under Bush: the people pay for imperialist wars abroad
by fiscal decay and authoritarianism at home.
Obstacles and setbacks aside, Israel has pursued
its ostensible goal of "democratizing" the region through a belligerent
policy of destroying its enemies by force. The Israelis have crafted
an imperialist plan which calls for a series of wars--with its proxy
American military taking the lead--and with the eventual goal of establishing
joint US-Israeli control over the entire region. Israel can implement
this plan only if it can pressure US administrations into playing
along, which hasn't been a problem thus far, and indeed has never
been easier than with this Bush administration.
The Bush national-security and foreign-policy teams
are run by high-level, pro-Zionist neoconservative officials with
long-standing ties to Israel. They have the most important policymaking
positions in government, or are closely associated with the ones who
do. These Ziocon officials have a long history of dedication to Israel's
interests, even when they conflict with US interests. The "Israel-firsters"are
in not only the Bush administration but also Congress, most influential
Jewish organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, and perhaps the singlemost
powerful lobbying group in Washington--AIPAC.
Committed American support for Israel also comes
from the "Jewish Diaspora" that comprises thousands of dedicated activists:
doctors, dentists, lawyers, philanthropists, and key individuals in
major banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, corporations , the
major media, the clergy, and academics. Journalists are given special
prominence due to their willingness to sell their integrity in return
for the handsome benefits they get for their unconditional public
support, and contrived rationalizations, for the Israeli agenda. Of
course, this kind of corrupting influence results in support that
has made Israel by far the largest recipient in the world of US financial
aid, which amounts to about $3 billion per year up front, with more
forthcoming any time Israel needs funding for weapons, plus large
low- or no-interest loans that may never have to be repaid.
Israel also gets these unheard-of advantages from
the US: routine transfers of the latest state-of-the-art US weaponry
and technology; unrestricted US market access for its products and
services; free entry of its immigrants into the US; unconditional
support for its aggressive wars against, and colonization of, the
Palestinians and Lebanese; guaranteed US vetoes of any UN Security
Council resolution that is unfavorable to its interests; all criticism
of Israel is labeled anti-semitic by prominent Washington officials
and the corporate-run mainstream media whenever this ruse serves its
purpose; allowed to conduct intelligence operations inside the US,
including its covert penetration of military bases, FBI, IRS, INS,
EPA and other government agencies.
In addition, strong probative evidence shows Israeli
agents knew in advance about the 9/11 attack but withheld that information,
knowing it would serve their interests to let it happen. There is
also considerable evidence that high-level US officials either knew
about 9/11 themselves but remained passive because they knew it would
give them free reign at home and abroad they never could have gotten
any other way, or they were complicit in carrying it out. This is
a story that neither will nor should go away, and one day we may finally
learn the facts about which we can only speculate now.
Petras notes that Israel's unparalleled ties to
our centers of power in government and media allow it to get back
$50 in return for every dollar it spends. Israel then uses money from
US coffers to finance its military and build colonial settlements
on annexed land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Jewish
networks here try to justify these practices as compensation for victims
of the Holocaust (the ones they want us to regard as "worthy victims")
by circulating that ideology in our mainstream media. These networks
reinforce anti-Muslim hysteria by stereotyping Arabs as untrustworthy,
radical Islamic fundamentalists, or "Islamo-fascists" (the ones they
want us to regard as "unworthy victims"), so they can claim the "right"
to attack and kill them in imperialist wars, or to arrest, torture,
and mete out summary justice in military tribunals.
Although Israel has been fleecing the US government
for decades, the real-world consequences for Israel have been disastrous
because the Palestinians have steadfastly refused, for almost six
decades, to accede to this abuse and have waged two Intifadas to bring
it to an end. With little more than fierce determination, their bodies
and crude weapons, they have fought back, sometimes with suicide bombing
attacks on public facilities in Israel, knowing they will face harsh
retaliation afterward.
The American people have also paid a heavy price,
in the steady erosion of freedom and democracy, for bankrolling Israel
and committing our military to fight its proxy wars. This is evidenced
by the Bush administration's increasingly harsh legislation, beginning
with the infamous USA Patriot Act in the aftermath of 9/11, followed
by other facially-unconstitutional oppressive laws, and cowardly judicial
acquiescence or craven silence about illegal practices like secret
warrantless domestic surveillance and secret renditions of targeted
people to torture-prisons in countries that ignore human rights.
Petras points out that none of these negative consequences
deter the unscrupulous-and- powerful supporters of Israel, who continue
to raise billions of dollars to support that country's war machine
and finance its colonization of annexed Palestinian land, plus the
Golan Heights land it seized and never returned to Syria after the
1967 war. Israel's economy most certainly is not self-sufficient.
Without massive incoming American aid, it would have to make unpopular
cuts in social services, reduce its military budget, and curtail its
expansionary plans to forcibly seize more land from its neighbors.
With that $3 BILLION a year in direct US contributions, plus lots
more US help given indirectly, the American taxpayers are unwisely
shouldering the burden of funding Israel's imperialist agenda of belligerence
and colonization.
Petras itemizes what this massive largesse flowing into Israel costs
the US taxpayer:
-- $3 BILLION annually in direct aid.
-- BILLIONS more in annual loans to Israel as
needed.
-- MILLIONS ANNUALLY for resettlement help to
Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.
-- A $10 BILLION loan guarantee in 1990, and a
further $9 BILLION loan guarantee in 2004, plus BILLIONS MORE for
the asking, which request will be forthcoming soon to pay the costs
of Israel's wars against Lebanon and Palestine in 2006.
-- Since 1981, major economic aid made in direct
cash transfers; and since 1985, major military aid has been given
the same way (BILLIONS).
-- $45 BILLION in loan repayments waved since
1974, and yet BILLIONS MORE have been extended just for the asking--all
of which is free money at US taxpayer expense.
-- Since 1982, ESF cash transfers every year in
one early-in-the-fiscal-year lump sum, with NO strings attached,
while other countries receiving them are paid quarterly (not in
one lump sum) with their use closely monitored. Israel then invests
this money in US treasuries costing US taxpayers MILLIONS MORE ANNUALLY,
and also gets special FMS funding arrangements costing US taxpayers
well over $1 BILLION since 1991.
-- Other privileged benefits include BILLIONS
in additional US financial aid: to develop Israel's defense industry;
to transfer state-of-the-art technology and the latest US weapons;
to provide a US guarantee for Israel's access to oil; and for Israel's
upcoming massive funding requests to defray the "special costs"
of its Gaza "disengagement plan," which has morphed into Israel's
colonization of whatever parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory
it wishes to annex for new settlements at US taxpayer expense.
-- Add to this some $22 BILLION Israel got over
the past 50 years through the sale to the US of its below-market
interest paying bonds that have financed half of its development,
which means Americans have provided the money for Israel's colonization
of annexed Palestinian lands and military funding for its predatory
imperial wars.
Petras explains that the Zionist power structure
in the US makes all of this possible because its reach extends well
beyond the Jewish Lobby.
He identifies a "Zionist Power Configuration" (hereinafter
"ZPC"), in which AIPAC is one part of a "complex network of interrelated
formal and informal groupings, operating at the international, national,
regional and local levels," all unconditionally supporting the state
of Israel and its policies--including its wars, colonization and oppression.
The ZPC is like a malignant cancer metastasizing through our highest
levels of government and the other centers of power and influence.
It controls the selection of political candidates by defeating any
incumbent or aspirant who dares to criticize Israel, and it controls
the mass media reports on Israel by suppressing unsupportive or critical
truths. Worst of all, the ZPC routinely ruins lives and weakens this
nation by getting our best politicians, journalists and academicians--those
whose integrity is not for sale--fired and banished from their professions
for daring to tell us the truth.
Petras reports that the ZPC's power was evident
in the run-up to both the Iraq War and the Gulf War in 1991. The George
H. W. Bush administration wanted regime change in Iraq, but its desire
was heavily influenced by the ZPC's belief that Saddam had to be removed
because he was Israel's mortal enemy. He survived through the 1990s
despite the US-led efforts to destabilize Iraq and bring him to his
knees. But George W. Bush took office in 2001 with neocon advisers
already planning the war he believed his father had left unfinished.
Paul Wolfowitz and other powerful Zionists were in key policymaking
positions. And with the support of Democrats like Senator Joe Lieberman
(D-CT), "the senator from AIPAC," they could invent the WMD threat
to bring about the invasion by March of 2003--all based on lies, deceit
and subservience to Israel's imperialist agenda.
When the US military forcibly removed Saddam, it
conducted a scorched-earth campaign to destroy Iraqi society, its
infrastructure, and historical treasures, so as to "dismantle the
secular state [and] turn the country in a desert kingdom--a loose
collection of at least three 'tribal' client mini-states based on
ethnicities, religious-tribal loyalties [and no viable threat against]
Israeli expansionism, particularly in Northern Iraq." The effort to
do this is now underway after the Iraq puppet parliament passed its
federalism bill, to take effect in 18 months, that will divide the
country into the three supposedly-more-easily-governed parts, all
in accordance with the US-Israeli ordered grand design.
It is unlikely this partition plan can work, but
now it is clearer than ever how horrific the human cost of our war
has been for the people of Iraq. The Iraq War has caused the violent
deaths of about 601,000 Iraqis, according to a shocking new study
published by The Lancet--a prestigious British medical journal--which
updated an earlier study from the autumn of 2004. This study was done
by MIT and the John Hopkins School of Public Health. Their researchers
used the statistically-reliable technique of "cluster sampling," in
which personal interviews were conducted at random households across
the country, which included verification by a showing of the death
certificate in the great majority of cases, in order to arrive at
the total number of 601,000 violent Iraqi deaths.
It is likely that the true number is actually much
higher than this already-appalling number because the interviewers
were unable to include in their count: (a) the most dangerous and
violent parts of the country--like Fallujah, Ramadi, and other areas
of al-Anbar province where mass killing still goes on daily; and (b)
many families--likely in the thousands--in which every last person
was killed and nobody was left alive to interview.
Consider this: those 601,000 violent Iraqi deaths
cover the three-and-one-half-year period since the US invaded Iraq
in March 2003; Human Rights Watch estimates that 250,000 to 290,000
Iraqi people were killed by the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein
over its 20-year existence. This statistical comparison amplifies
the outrageous barbarity of our supreme international crime of aggressive
war.
Our willing descent into this savagery cannot possibly
be justified by the now-empty rhetoric about "achieving a Greater
Middle East US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere," which is mass-murder
so greed-driven Israel can grab the extra water, oil, capital, and
markets it says it lacks. It also implicates the "Greater Israel"
agenda of Ariel Sharon's Likud, and Ehud Olmert's Kadima, governments
to implement shameful policies of racist annexation and apartheid
separation. Finally, the entrenched Zionist influence in the Bush
administration assured that no opposition could emerge--then or now--to
stop the living hell they created in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Occupied
Palestinian Territories.
It is profoundly unnerving that all of this insane
powerlust, moneylust, bloodlust, and warlust has been given free reign,
despite the global mass movement of anti-imperialist resistance. Our
ruling elites are sociopaths and psychopaths who are so disconnected
from common decency that they arrogantly disregard the norms of morally-acceptable
behavior and the standards of international law. In pursuit of an
expansionist agenda, Israel and the US willfully violate:
(1) the United Nations Charter's outlawry of aggressive
war; and
(2) the Hague and Geneva Conventions relative
to the conduct of war, which prohibit wanton destruction of infrastructure
and historical sites, inhumane treatment of prisoners, torture,
and the establishment of puppet-run client regimes through conquest
to plunder natural resources and exploit people in the service of
the dominant capital-interests of their imperial conquerors.
The US and Israel resort to the most extreme rogue-state
methods to quell the resistance and tighten security, including mass
arrests and indeterminate detentions, the use of torture, and targeted
assassinations as state policy. Amnesty International reportee after
the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that the US and
Israel are the ONLY two countries in the world to have legalized the
use of torture. Dr. Petras and others report that the top Pentagon
leaders, up through Donald Rumsfeld, specifically ordered the use
of torture "while the Justice and Defense Departments insisted that
the President could OVERRIDE any laws--international or national as
well as the US Constitution--in defending the empire."
Therefore, these top officials in key areas of government
have audaciously given the US President "de facto and de jure DICTATORIAL
powers" to do whatever he chooses to establish "Imperial Security."
This ominous development makes our citizens at home no safer than
the victims of US and Israeli imperial aggression in Iraq, Lebanon,
Palestine or anywhere else in the world.
But Petras reports that our rapid deterioration
into a rogue state is even worse because the exposé of US torture
in Iraq also revealed a highly-organized network of US and Israeli
assassins. They operate in Iraq and worldwide as international death-squads,
engaging in "killing, kidnapping and torturing 'suspects' and sympathizers
of resistance movements." Petras calls our side of this appalling
phenomenon a US-sponsored "Murder Incorporated." It is composed of
Army Special Forces, Navy Seals and a DELTA force operating in a new
Special Agency Program (SAP). It has adopted the same evil practices
that have long been used by Israel's Institute for Intelligence and
Special Operations--the Mossad--which aims to remove all opposition
by any extralegal method it chooses while ignoring international law.
It "justifies" its murderous activities at the highest levels of government
as a matter of "national security" policy. In other words, democracy
means "you must agree with us or we will have you killed!"
Petras further points to the UN International Leadership
report on the destruction of civilian and military infrastructure
in Iraq (much like what Israel did in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
discussed below). It showed that "84% of Iraq's higher-learning institutions
have been burnt, looted or destroyed." Archeological museums, historic
sites, libraries and archives have also been plundered. And targeted
assassinations have been carried out against academicians, teachers,
senior military personnel, journalists, and other professionals, including
doctors. In addition, US-directed "Salvador option" death squads are
running random and targeted daily terror killings, as well as thousands
of kidnappings and other systematic horrors, that make life an intolerable
hell for almost everyone in Iraq who lives outside the four-square-kilometer
fortress in central Baghdad, known as the Green Zone, that is headquarters
for "coalition" officials and their puppet Iraqi "interim government."
This is all part of the Washington-Tel Aviv design
to destroy Iraq's cultural identity as an Arab state, separate its
oil resources from its large population base, and divide the nation
into more easily-governed parts, just like it was done in the breakup
of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It has now been reported that the longtime
Bush family consigliere, James Baker III, is co-chairing an Iraq Study
Group that will formerly propose a plan similar to that of the Iraq
puppet government, putting a quasi-official US imprimatur on Israel's
divide-to-permanently-conquer strategy. However, their plan for the
partititioning of Iraq might not be as easy to implement as the balkanization
of the former Yugoslavia, or the simple north-south divisions of Korea
and Vietnam after World War II.
Why not? Today, Iraq and Palestine have descended
into outrageously bloody chaos. Petras refers to both countries as
a "House of Horrors," in which the Pentagon's Zionist militarists
and their Israeli Zionist counterparts are in charge of their respective
"Horror Shows ... under the big tent of a 'Mid-East Democratic Reform
Initiative.'" This is the modus operandi of neocolonial empire-building
program: first, blast and tear a nation to shreds so it can never
again exist as it once did; second, terrorize the people into submission
and murder everyone who resists. This is an astoundingly barbaric
thumb stuck into the eye of humanity, but deliberately sadistic cruelty
is what criminal empires do--especially when they're nuclear rogue
states too powerful to challenge.
The US killing machine is in full operation in Iraq,
and it is aping the Israeli killing machine that has long been operating
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Petras calls the latter one
"Israel's Final Solution" or the "Palestinian Holocaust." Its focal
point is the Gaza Strip, which is the world's largest open-air prison
for 1.45 million Palestinians, who are packed into the most densely-populated
space of its size in the world. Today, the Strip and the West Bank
are Israeli-operated killing fields for the targeting of Palestinian
civilians too helpless to stop the grisly carnage, beyond their courageous
acts of desperate resistance with their bodies, rocks, and crude weapons
pitted against tanks, F-16s, helicopter gunships, and illegal-and-immoral
terror weapons like white phosphorus bombs, depleted-uranium munitions,
cluster bombs that never stop killing and maiming, and experimental
weapons so new that they don't have any publicly-known names.
Israel's monstrously unjust war on Palestine has
gone on unchecked for nearly six decades. September 28, 2006, marked
the sixth anniversary of the latest Palestinian resistance, known
as the al-Aqsa Mosque Intifada, which began with Ariel Sharon's provocative
visit to that holy site in 2000. Israel dramatically escalated the
conflict after a minor incident on 6-25-06 at an Israeli military
post near the Kerem Shalom crossing, killing two Israeli soldiers,
injuring several others, and capturing a third who is still held,
and whose name the mainstream media made sure everyone knows, whereas
they will never reveal any names of the more than 10,000 Palestinian
prisoners being held in Israeli prisons (according to the the Zionist-controlled
mainstream media propaganda, this is the "fate" of the "unworthy victims").
The June clash followed a series of bloody Israeli
attacks on Gaza earlier in the month, including the widely-reported
shelling of a beach that killed eight Palestinian civilians and injured
32 more, including 13 children. Much as it did in Lebanon (discussed
below), Israel's response was swift, deadly, grossly disproportionate
to what had happened, and planned months in advance--as revealed by
General Yoav Galant, in charge of Gaza, in a candid interview he gave
in Israel's Maariv daily newspaper.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented
all of the devastation Israel has inflicted on them for the past six
years, through which it deliberately created a state of mass-immiseration
for the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank:
-- destroyed essential infrastructure to eliminate
power, clean water and sanitation;
-- restricted or denied the Palestinian people's
mobility;
-- imposed an embargo threatening the collapse
of an already-weak Palestinian economy, thereby creating massive
unemployment up to 80% of the population;
-- daily hostile incursions into Occupied Palestinian
Territory to kill people, and frequent extra-judicial assassinations;
-- innumerable demolitions of civilian homes and
destruction of their property;
-- mass arbitrary arrests, "administrative detentions"
of more than ten thousand Palestinians who are being held without
charges, and the systematic use of torture on people who are being
held, including the torture of women and children;
-- willful destruction of the viable Hamas-led
Palestinian Authority (PA) through the imprisonment of its democratically-elected
members, who are then held without charges or with phony trumped-up
charges against them;
-- wanton destruction of the democratically-elected
Palestinian government's indispensable civil infrastructure and
necessary security facilities;
-- and many more depraved acts of violence too
numerous and hideous to mention here.
Israel has done this, and much more, to incrementally
destroy both the cultural identity and the very existence of the Palestinian
people (somewhat like the US is doing in Iraq). Israel's Nazi-like
strategy is to prevent the Palestinians from ever having a viable
independent state of their own while it creates a bloody, intolerable,
and hopeless situation inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories,
through which it intends to force them into a mass-Palestinian exodus
to Arab states that are willing to help them escape.
Israel's plan to crush these defenseless people
now includes credible evidence that the Bush and Olmert administrations
have been arming, training and plotting with Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah followers to lead an uprising against
the democratically-elected Palestinian Authority (PA) to destroy Hamas
by force. It follows that Palestinian efforts to form a national-unity
government have failed because Hamas has refused Fatah's traitorous
demand that it abandon its pledge to serve the welfare of its own
people and govern as Israel's enforcer.
In an interview on 10-8-06 in the London Sunday
Times, Fatah militia leader Tawfig Tirawi inflamed matters by accusing
Hamas of "accumulating weapons," and by warning that "a full-scale
civil war can break out at any moment." This was in the context of
Tirawi's earlier statement that "civil war is inevitable." The paper
also reported that President Abbas "notified the US, Jordan and Egypt
that he is preparing to take action against Hamas."
These crazy statements by Fatah defy the Palestinian
Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who has firmly said he will
never allow a civil war to happen, and it is unimaginable the Palestinian
people want one. But PM Haniyeh and his people might not have a choice
because the current joint US-Israeli strategy is to seek the destruction
of democratically-elected Hamas with the help of Fatah President Abbas.
This is the same man who pledged his fealty to Israel as a participant
in the crafting the Oslo Accords that would sell out his own people,
and as a principle in the corrupt Arafat-led mismanagement of the
Palestinian Authority until Hamas finally won a majority of the seats
in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in the elections of January
2006.
The Bush and Olmert governments then publicly contradicted
their own cover story about "democratizing" the Middle East because
they would not tolerate that indisputably democratic outcome. Indeed,
the New York Times reported right after the Palestinian election that
US and Israeli officials had met at the "highest level" to plan the
destruction of Hamas by "starving" the Palestinian Authority and making
the people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory pay the greatest
price. In other words, "democracy" means your puppet client state
will be run by iron-fisted enforcers who operate fascist death squads
with the prior approval of their American and Israeli conquerors.
For Israel, this is part of its Nazi-like policy
of "ethnic-cleansing" through slow-motion genocide and out-migration--all
leading to the destruction of the Palestinian identity. Israel wants
to corrupt, and then coopt, the Palestinian leadership of its choice
so they will act as Israel's enforcer and partner in the destruction
of their own people. Its goal is to erase an entire peoples' history,
as per former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier's racist comment
that "There are no Palestinians." And Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's
earlier statement, after Jews had brutally expelled Palestinians from
their homes and land during the 1948 war to establish the state of
Israel: "We have come and we have stolen their country. ... We must
do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return."
And 10 years earlier, Ben Gurion had written to his son: "We will
expel the Arabs and take their places ... with the force at our disposal."
From the beginning, Ben Gurion and his successors
planned to include all the biblical land of "Eretz Israel" (or Greater
Israel) within the final fixed borders of a much larger Israeli state
whenever those borders were finally declared. Today, the Zionist-controlled
Bush administration and most of our spineless Congress unconditionally
supports Israel's expansionist plan to do exactly this, as well as
its policy of regional hegemony through military conquest, destructive
occupation, plunder, enslavement and exploitation.
However, as Petras correctly explains: "No one in
their right mind can claim that the Israeli assault on Gaza advances
US policies, interests or US imperial power." Evidently rational pursuit
of the American national interest doesn't matter because the intimidation
power of the Jewish Lobby got full support for its wars from the Bush
administration anyway, and nearly-unanimous support for it wars from
Congress.
THE RAPE OF LEBANON
What Israel did to the Palestinians over six decades,
it did to Lebanon in 1978, from 1982 halway through 2000, and for
about five weeks in a blitzkrieg that began on 7-12-06, and ended
with a formal but fragile UN-brokered ceasefire on 8-14-06. Dr. Petras
compares Israel's latest assault on Lebanon to Nazi Germany's infamous
Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938.
He calls the German event a "garden party" compared to Israel's rape
and vast devastation of Lebanon.
Israel invaded after Hezbollah's cross-border incursion
on July 12th, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the exchange
that followed and two more were captured. There is still a factual
dispute as to which side of the Lebanese border that incident took
actually place on. For many years, Israel has routinely made hostile
incursions into Lebanon by land and air, and it still illegally occupies
the 25-square-kilometer Shebaa Farms area of Southern Lebanon that
it never relinquished after it was seized in the 1967 War.
Just as it did in Gaza, Israel swiftly responded
with a grossly disproportionately reign of terror against the Lebanese
people by land, air, and sea. The Israelis indiscriminately killed
and wounded thousands of innocent Lebanese civilian noncombatants,
and displaced more than a million Lebanese civilians. It also systematically
destroyed Lebanon's essentials for life, other vital civilian infrastructure,
and unnecessarily inflicted a disproportionate amount of physical
devastation, from which it could take a generation to recover, if
Israel even allows it to happen.
Israel attempted to justify its insanely-vindictive
rape of Lebanon as the means to destroy Hezbollah, both as a political
entity and as an effective resistance force (against Israel's imperial
designs on southern Lebanon). But Israel's plans are much more far-reaching
than it admitted in its self-serving wartime statements, as explained
below.
Petras reports that Middle East scholar Juan Cole,
among other such experts, claimed that Israel wanted to make war on
Lebanon and planned it for at least one year in advance. Matthew Kallman
of the San Francisco Chronicle also found, and then reported, compelling
evidence that Israel's preparations for this invasion began in May
of 2000, immediately after Israel ended an 18-year occupation of Lebanon
that began with a brutal invasion in 1982 that killed about 18,000
Lebanese people. Kallman also reported that more than one year before
Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, a senior Israeli military official
gave "PowerPoint presentations," off the record, to officials from
the US and other nations, unnamed journalists, and think-tankers,
in which he explained "in revealing detail" how the Israeli attack
on Lebanon would unfold.
Again, Israel got the Bush administration's full
backing, funding, and the armaments it requested to carry it out its
war on Lebanon, effectively making this gruesome adventure a joint
US-Israeli operation. Israel's vicious goals, in addition to neutralizing
the Hezbollah resistance, was to destroy Lebanon as a functioning
modern country, to "ethnically-cleanse" all of southern Lebanon up
to the Litani River, so it could control and eventually annex southern
Lebanon, as it did the Golan Heights after the 1967 War.
Israel falsely claims this area (like the Golan)
is important for security reasons, but its greatest value (again,
like the Golan) is as a source of fresh water from the Litani River
and from the Wazzani springs that feed into the Hasbani River, which
is a tributary of the Jordan River. The Hasbani River flows into Israel
two miles downstream from the Wazzani and runs into the Sea of Galilee,
which is Israel's largest source of fresh water.
Israel has had imperialist designs on Lebanon for
40 years or more, so it has kept that country in a state of instability,
partial occupation, and conflict over most of that time. Now it has
reduced Lebanon to a devastated near-wasteland that is monitored by
so-called (Israel-approved and friendly) UN Blue Helmets along with
Lebanese Armed Forces that have replacing the Israeli military on
the ground under a fragile UN-brokered ceasefire arrangement that
could end any time on any pretext under which Israel wishes to unleash
its war machine. There is nothing to deter Israel from doing this
so long as it has the unconditional support of the Jewish Lobby and
whatever US administration it controls. Unless the American situation
changes, the people of Lebanon, like those in Iraq and Palestine,
can only anticipate more conflict, pain and suffering from Israel.
That's because there is still unfinished business
in the Middle East for both empires, and it is unlikely that either
one will renounce that which they're determined to achieve. Although
Iraq is a hopeless quagmire, the Bush administration says it will
"stay the course." And so long as Israel has full US backing, it will
continue its pursuit of an imperial agenda, despite Israeli's humiliating
inability to dislodge Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and the Palestinian
unwillingness to end their determined resistance, short of genocide
or forced expulsion.
But it's not all smooth sailing for the unholy US-Israeli
alliance. It faces a threat it cannot ignore which could derail it:
a growing broad-based worldwide anti-imperialist movement against
these two partnered pariah states. It remains to be seen how far the
anti-imperialist movement will go, whether it can achieve critical
mass in the US and in Israel, and if it can succeed in changing the
direction of these two belligerents who are seemingly unstoppable
and determined to go on unchecked by what currently passes for the
civilized western world.
PART II: ISRAEL AND MIDDLE EAST WARFARE
IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE READER: Due to its unusual
length, you are now slightly more than halfway through Stephen Lendman's
excellent review of Dr. James Petras' new book, The Power Of Israel
In The United States (Clarity Press, September 2006). Please read
the second half of this worthwhile book review--which covers Parts
II, III, and IV--online at this URL:
http://countercurrents.org/us-lendman271006.htm
QUOTES WORTH REMEMBERING:
"I'M HERE TO TELL YOU WE'RE GOING TO STAY THE COURSE.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, NOV. 28, 2003
WE'VE GOT TO STAY THE COURSE, AND WE WILL STAY THE COURSE.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, APRIL 5, 2004
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL STAY THE COURSE.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, NOV. 21, 2004
WE WILL STAY THE COURSE; WE WILL COMPLETE THE JOB IN IRAQ.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, AUG. 4, 2005
WE WILL STAY THE COURSE, WE WILL HELP THIS YOUNG IRAQI DEMOCRACY
SUCCEED.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, AUG. 31, 2006
LISTEN, WE'VE NEVER BEEN 'STAY THE COURSE.'
--GEORGE W. BUSH, OCT. 22, 2006
All cited in Leonard Pitts Jr.'s 10-29-06 Baltimore
Sun article,
"Simply Orwellian: Cutting and Running from 'Stay the Course'":
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pitts29oct29,0,2592960.st
ory?coll=bal-oped-headlines
