Scharon hält syrischen Staatschef für gefährlich
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| Eröffnet am: | 15.04.03 10:14 | von: Schwedenku. | Anzahl Beiträge: | 21 |
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Der israelische Ministerpräsident Ariel Scharon hat zur Vorsicht vor dem syrischen Präsidenten ermahnt.
«Baschar el Assad ist gefährlich, weil er in der Lage ist, bei der Einschätzung des Kräfteverhältnisses mit Israel denselben Fehler zu begehen wie bei den USA», sagte Scharon der israelischen Zeitung «Jediot Aharonot».
Nach Ansicht des israelischen Regierungschefs habe jeder, der sich vor dem Krieg mit der Lage in der Region beschäftigt habe, den Sieg der USA voraussehen können. «Aber Assad dachte, die USA würden verlieren.»
Das Urteil Assads sei «fehlerhaft», führte Scharon weiter aus. «Während des Kriegs in Irak hat er bewiesen, dass er nicht die richtigen Schlussfolgerungen aus relativ eindeutigen Tatsachen zieht.«
Zudem verfüge der syrische Staatschef mit der libanesischen Schiiten-Miliz Hisbollah über «eine Kraft, die seinen Befehlen folgt».
Syrien hatte sich gegen einen Irak-Krieg gestellt. Die US-Regierung warf Damaskus in den vergangenen Tagen mehrfach vor, dem irakischen Ex-Diktator Saddam Hussein und seinen Anhängern Zuflucht zu gewähren. Außerdem behaupten die USA, Syrien habe Massenvernichtungswaffen.
Herr Assad junior ist dagegen in Belgien "noch nicht" aktenkundig geworden.
Gruß
Euer Fuehler
Die ecklige fette Fresse wenn ich von dem Idioten schon sehe, wird mir schlecht
Da entstanden dann Aufnahmen auf seiner Privatranch, wo er Jeans und Hemd auf einer wiese stand und ein Lämmchen im Arm hielt.
Bei dem Anblick wurde mich leicht schlecht.
"Wie du mir, so do mie"?
also werden sie eingedämmt werden. räumt assad nicht auf, werden andere das tun - ob es uns gefällt oder nicht.
Dieses: "...ob es uns gefällt oder nicht.." (Zitat) ist ja gerade der Grund dafür, dass wir uns hier im Internet aufregen und schimpfen.
Du dagegen klingst wie der Bürger eines Diktatur-regimes, also gerade wie ein Vorzeige-Iraker, wenn du sagst: "Politik wird eben DA OBEN gemacht und wir Bürger sind eh nur Zuschauer"
Das ist keine Anmache sondern eine interessante Frage, bzw. Feststellung.
Über deine Antwort auf diese Frage würde ich mich freuen
Gruß
wenn wir mitgestalten wollen, reicht nicht eine negierende position gegen gerade laufende aktionen. auch entsteht kein starkes europa unter negativer motivation. wir müssen in europa gemeinsam formulieren, wie wir uns die welt wünschen und dann versuchen den lauf der dinge entsprechend zu gestalten.
ich kann leider heute kaum derartige entwicklungen in europa bebachten. ich bin auch nicht der meinung, dass man alles weiter laufen lassen sollte, bis europa endlich zusammengefunden hat. die geschichte wird nicht auf uns warten.
ich bin nicht in allen punkten, mit dem was die amerikanische administration tut - und mit dem wie, einverstanden. ich bin jedoch der überzeugung, dass man die kriegserklärung von islamistischen fundamentalisten und arabischen despoten annehmen muss. und was erblicke ich dazu in europa:
- fundamentalistischer pazifismus - ich will mich jedoch nicht der willkür ausliefern lassen
- tumber antiamerikanismus - lieber eine pax-amerika wie eine chinesische oder russische
die welt ist leider nicht so einfach, dass man mit pro- oder contra-positionen weiter kommt.
Wie der wohl als Geschlechtsführer einer
GmbH agiert?
Verträumt?
Er fühlt sich aber als
Del Fuehlel
Diese Sichtweise würde jede Bewegung im Keime ersticken lassen und mit dieser Sichtweise würde es in Europa bis heute nur Könige und Kaiser geben.
Denk darüber nach.
rot-grün: schon im wahlkampf wäre die koalition auseinandergeflogen wenn man eine etwas differentiertere stellung eingenommen hätte.
schwarz-gelb: sich verstecken so lange es geht um die eigene positionslosigkeit zu verdecken.
ergebnis: tumber antiamerikanismus und eine zerstörung des europäischen einigungsprozesses auf jahre.
mit einer derartigen politik wird man natürlich zu einem unwesentlichen teil im spiel der weltpolitik.
@reab: Ich spreche nur als Weltbürger/ Mensch und Demokrat
Syrien
Kaum Gründe für einen Präventivschlag
Syrien besitzt wahrscheinlich chemische Kampfstoffe, aber entgegen amerikanischen Behauptungen keine wirklichen Massenvernichtungswaffen.
Von Hans Leyendecker
Vor einigen Tagen hielt der Präsident des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND), August Hanning, in Berlin einen vertraulichen Lagevortrag über die Situation im Nahen Osten.
Die Anzeichen mehrten sich, so Hanning, dass die USA Syrien als nächstes Angriffsziel ausgeguckt hätten. Einflussreiche Kräfte in der US-Regierung wollten mit dem Schlag gegen Damaskus vor allem Terror-Organisationen wie Hamas oder Hisbollah treffen.
Einige der Argumente aus der Vorkriegsphase im Irak würden vermutlich mit der „Ortsmarke Syrien“ neu aufgelegt werden. Seit einer Weile verbreiten US-Geheimdienste, Syrien besitze Massenvernichtungswaffen.
C-Waffen im Arsenal
Dass das Land, wie viele Staaten dieser Region, chemische Kampfstoffe im Arsenal hat, steht auch nach Meinung des BND fest. Angeblich begann Damaskus bereits in den achtziger Jahren mit der Produktion von C-Waffen.
Eine Giftgasfabrik soll nahe der türkischen Grenze im Nordosten des Landes liegen. Die zweite soll nahe der Stadt Homs an der Hauptstraße nach Damaskus errichtet worden sein. Angeblich wird in den Anlagen das Nervengas Tabun und die tabunähnliche Verbindung Sarin hergestellt. Beide Stoffe sind 1937 beziehungsweise 1938 von einem deutschen Chemiker erfunden worden.
Das von US-Geheimdiensten verbreitete Gerücht, in den Anlagen werde auch das moderne Nervengas VX hergestellt, scheint Spekulation zu sein. Nach britischen Geheimdienstberichten sollen westeuropäische Firmen die Anlagen geliefert und sowjetische Techniker die Fabriken gebaut haben. Syrien ist nicht der Chemiewaffenkonvention von 1993 beigetreten.
Verdächtige Lieferungen
Einen genauen Überblick über die Situation scheint aber keiner der Geheimdienste zu haben. „Ich denke, wir glauben, dass es in Syrien zum Beispiel chemische Waffen gibt“, sagte US-Präsident George Bush am Sonntag ziemlich gewunden.
Seit 1991 immerhin werden verdächtige Lieferungen nach Syrien auch in der Zentrale des BND systematisch ausgewertet. Auf Order des Bundeswirtschaftsministeriums und des Kanzleramtes musste 1992 die Besatzung des deutschen Frachters German Senator im zyprischen Larnaka 225 Fässer, die schon gelöscht worden waren, wieder an Bord nehmen.
In den Fässern war Trimethylphosphit, das als Vorprodukt für Chemiewaffen taugt. Die 45-Tonnen-Ladung sollte von Zypern aus mit einem Zubringerschiff nach Syrien transportiert werden.
In einem anderen Fall wurde ebenfalls auf Ersuchen bundesdeutscher Behörden in den neunziger Jahren im sizilianischen Hafen Augusta ein estnischer Frachter angehalten, der Maschinen für den Bau von Raketen für Syrien geladen hatte.
Kooperation mit Nordkorea
Damaskus hat kein sehr ehrgeiziges Raketenprogramm. Früher vertraute Syrien auf Waffenlieferungen aus Moskau. Die Russen hatten sich aber geweigert, nach Kurzstreckenraketen der Typen Frog und Scud auch Mittelstreckenraketen zu liefern. Daraufhin kooperierte Syrien mit Nordkorea, um eine eigene Produktion aufzubauen.
So basteln syrische Techniker und Gastarbeiter aus Fernost an der Reichweitenverlängerung der Scud. Bei einem anderen Projekt zum Bau einer weiterreichenden Festtreibstoffrakete arbeitet Syrien mit China zusammen.
Alles in allem liefert Syrien, was angebliche Massenvernichtungswaffen angeht, bislang nicht einmal einen Vorwand für einen Präventivkrieg. Der von US-Geheimdiensten in den vergangenen Tagen lancierte Hinweis, der Irak habe aus Furcht vor US-Bombardements Massenvernichtungswaffen über die Grenze nach Syrien geschafft, scheint pure Propaganda zu sein.
Berüchtigte Verhörmethoden
Kein einfacher Wunschgegner also. Syrien wird zwar von den USA als Schurkenstaat bezeichnet, ist aber gleichzeitig nach dem 11.September 2001 Mitglied in der Anti-Terror-Allianz geworden und arbeitet auch mit amerikanischen Geheimdiensten zusammen.
Seit Monaten wird der aus Hamburg stammende terrorverdächtige Deutsch-Syrer Mohammed Haydar Zammar in einem syrischen Gefängnis wegen seiner Verbindungen zu den Todespiloten des 11. September verhört und wohl auch gefoltert.
Er soll gestanden haben, die aus Hamburg stammenden Selbstmord-Attentäter persönlich nach Afghanistan vermittelt zu haben. Vermutlich war Zammar zunächst in den Händen amerikanischer Geheimdienste.
Die US-Behörden sollen ihn den Syrern übergeben haben, weil deren Verhörmethoden berüchtigt sind. Zumindest das dürfte kein Kriegsgrund sein.
(sueddeutsche.de)
Gruppe in Deutschland und den USA:
(by the way Patrick J. Buchanan war Präsidentschaftskandidat
für die Republikaner)
Whose War?
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: Can you assure American viewers ... that we're in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these
Buchananites toss around neoconservative and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is Jewish conservative. Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism. He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible. (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain's finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the neoconservative (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the neoconservative war party.
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties. Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate's Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of 'anti-Semitism' itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation's founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
If Stanley Hoffman can say this, asks Kaus, why can't Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, The Likudniks are really in charge now. Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a special closeness to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America's interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a passionate attachment to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatisms long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America's rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic rogue states that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
The War Party's plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban, was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America’s future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN that we were in “a struggle between good and evil, that the Congress must declare war on “militant Islam, and that overwhelming force must be used. Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osamas terrorists. How did Bennett know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list, calling for U.S. air strikes on terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt. Yet, not one of Bennett’s six countries, nor one of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward's Bush at War, Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan. Why Iraq? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All, however, were enemies of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror. The Empire, it turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian enclave.
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to the United States?
The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle East war going before America had second thoughts. Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) called for an immediate invasion of Iraq. “Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. … [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” (When the French ambassador in London, at a dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty little country”—meaning Israel—Goldberg’s magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In The War Against the Terror Masters, he identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia. … Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged. …We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution. … Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America’s authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen's enemies list was too restrictive. We must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. [I]t is possible that the demise of some moderate Arab regimes may be just round the corner.
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary even outdid Kristol's Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of civilizations, as it is George W. Bush's mission to fight World War IV the war against militant Islam. By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as friends of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the timorous counsels” of the incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell, wrote Podhoretz, and find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated Islamic world. As the war against al-Qaeda required that we destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the phrase World War IV. Bush was shortly hereafter seen carrying about a gift copy of Cohen's book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and militant Islam.
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam's regime is destroyed, it is of vital importance that the United States disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
We have a great interest in shaping the Middle East the day after the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S. troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate political, economic, diplomatic pressure on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all. They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes, says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. Surely we can do better than Mubarak. Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq which he predicted would be a cakewalk might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, All the better if you ask me.
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec named Saudi Arabia as the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he said. Either you Saudis prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services, and end all propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields, and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize. Leaked reports of Murawiec's briefing did not indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine. Washington's ‘Likudniks, he writes, have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though neocons insist that it was Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam, the origins of their war plans go back far before.
Securing the Realm
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli Embassy. In Jews and American Politics, published in 1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote, “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” In 1983, the New York Times reported that Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a new aggressive strategy:
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. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel's enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish the principle of preemption, has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.
In his own 1997 paper, "A Strategy for Israel", Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy the areas under Palestinian Authority control, though the price in blood would be high.
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities. Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives is the power and reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the aim of American foreign policy and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing. Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor. Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help set the nation's direction for the next century. The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. Containment, the victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to establish and protect a new order.
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Washington Post reporter Tim Reich describes it as a “watershed in U.S. foreign policy that reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at “its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
In confronting America`'s adversaries, the paper declares, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy, Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be indicted for “a decisive surrender in the war on terror should he fail to attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden. For as the neoconservatives have played the anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain had done to the Czechs. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to view its principal Middle Eastern ally’s conduct as inconvenient in much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia's resistance to Hitler’s offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement. Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain and France's sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever for there will be no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the region will relate, America’s failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel’s excesses, and our moral complicity in Israel's looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude. The Israeli people are America’s friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment, endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as America's best friend.
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the machine-gunning of life rafts. This massacre was neither investigated nor punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of Ramallah, ignored Bush's requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology. Only direct U.S. intervention blocked Israel's sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect.
Optionen
Erfreulich ist auch die deutliche Sprache, in der er als Konservativer sich mit den "neocons" auseinandersetzt, so in seinem Kommentar zu Ledeens Machtvisonen (Irak, dann Iran, Syrien, Saudi-Arabien, etc,):
"Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism."
Das ist der Kernpunkt: Diejenigen, die sich heute "neokonservativ" nennen, haben mit konservativem Denken nichts am Hut. Was sie treiben ist schlichte, aus dem Gefühl vollkommenen Rechthabens geborene Machtpolitik, wie sie eher in autoritären Machtstrukturen zu Hause ist. Der Begriff "Neo-Jakobinertum" würde die Politik der USA zur Zeit besser kennzeichnen.
Auch die überbordende Menge staatlicher Machtfülle, wie wir sie im Augenblick leider in den USA sehen müssen, passt nicht in konservatives Denken. Und sie ist auch ganz und gar nicht "ur-amerikanisch".
Noch ein Zitat von Buchanan (NY Times, 8.9.2002)zum Thema "neocons":
"The conservative movement has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement I grew up with."
An die Gegener der derzeitigen US-Politik habe ich die Bitte, nicht immer gleich auf "die Amis" im ganzen zu hauen. Und an die, die sich von solchem Ami-bashing provoziert fühlen, habe ich die Bitte, dass man den Krieg der USA gegen den Irak nicht verteidigt, wenn man die USA gegen ungerechte Vorwürfe verteidigen will.
Der Krieg gegen den Irak ist völkerrechtswidrig und dumm. Und er wird schon auf mittlere Sicht die USA in Probleme und Konflikte treiben, gegen die der 11. September verblassen wird.
Rigomax
Optionen
und rigomax
stimmt. es kommt leider nicht sooo oft vor, daß beiträge wirklich sachlich zusammenhänge beleuchten.
allerdings auf beiden seiten (also nicht nur 'einfach geprägter anti-amerikanismus', sondern auch 'einfach geprägter amerikanismus')
der hier reingestellte artikel von reab ist dafür ein beredtes beispiel:
„Ich denke, wir glauben, dass es in Syrien zum Beispiel chemische Waffen gibt“, sagte US-Präsident George Bush am Sonntag ziemlich gewunden.
so ein blödsinn. schon: ich denke, wir glauben....
was ? denken sie, daß sie glauben ? oder glauben sie daß sie denken ?
das ist das typische 'hetz muster', mit dem offensichtlich genügend 'einfach denker' gefangen werden können.
wir wissen (= offensichtlich wissen ALLE geheimdienste, und nicht nur die) DASS syrien chemische waffen hat !
was jedoch in diesem zusammenhang wichtig zu sagen gewesen wäre, ist:
a) daß es kein gesetz gibt, das syrien den besitz von chemie waffen verbieten würde
b) daß syrien damit noch nie jemanden bedroht oder gar umgebracht hat (meines wissens jedenfalls)
d.h. nur weil die usa jetzt bestimmen (wollen), wer was haben darf und wer nicht, ist eben noch lange nicht gleichzusetzen mit irgend einem verbot oder verbrechen.
Irgend wann stellen USA und Israel dann gegenseitig fest, das die Massenvernichtungswaffen tatsächlich
in ihren eigenen Ländern lagern.
Also USA muß Israel angreifen und umgekehrt muß Israel USA angreifen.
Und ehrlich, mittlerweile bin ich fast soweit, das ich mich drüber freuen würde, wenn diese beiden Terrornationen sich gegenseitig auslöschen würden.
Who’s Next and Why?
By William Bowles
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
"Fuck Saddam," Bush said. "We’re taking him out."
I predicate this essay on the fact that there is no basis whatsoever for the reasons given by the Bush/Blair Axis as to why they invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. As with virtually all the dictators of the 20th century, Saddam Hussein was wholly ‘our’ man from the very beginning of his reign to his ignominious end. Hence our starting point for any serious investigation has to be, what are the real reasons?
Capitalism versus Socialism
For the better part of the 20th century, the battle was between capitalism and socialism, a battle that socialism, in the only form permitted under the circumstances, lost. However, underlying that battle is the fundamental issue, still to be resolved, of who will control the planet’s resources and for what purpose?
This battle is still being waged albeit in a different form. And as the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production have sharpened, especially since the first oil crisis of the early 70s, the question of who pays to maintain the system has brought into sharp relief the increasing inequalities between the rich and poor, both in the developing and developed world.
Several key factors distinguish the current situation:
As the major capitalist power, the US economy has shifted from manufacturing to finance and ‘intellectual’ capital, which has made it extremely vulnerable to an unstable and rapidly evolving global economy;
Its extreme dependence on oil;
Its increasing distance from the other major, ‘post-modern’ economies;
Dependence on a military economy for maintaining a position of superiority.
These major factors have placed the US in an extremely vulnerable position, which limits its options, forcing it to take ever more extreme measures to maintain its hegemonic position. To add to its problems, corruption has led to major instabililities in its self-regulatory mechanisms, that have tended to excerbate the vulnerabilities of the system eg, the dot com bust, stock market speculation, far east financial collapse et al.
Hence the assumptions that have underlaid western capitalism since the 1970s – that with all its faults, it was able to regulate the ‘boom and bust’ cycles that have plagued it for centuries – no longer holds true.
But the necessity to expand – to find new markets – is as strong as ever. But competition between producers is also stronger than ever. There are more of them with ever more efficient production processes. Indeed the world in drowning in products even as it starves. The disequilibrium, the oscillations, are becoming more frequent in spite of all attempts to control them. A way out has to be found.
War
Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic, is the fact that the US has reverted to ‘form’, using war as a method of consuming surplus capital and defeating its competitors. This is truly a return to the barbarism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, finding a rationale for war now that there is no ‘evil empire’ has meant that the Anglo-Saxon Empire has had to invent a new enemy to replace the vanquished one.
Iraq
The initial pretext, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 initiated a chain of events, each one building on the next using a historically tested propaganda machine:
The Cold War Era, 1945-90
‘Iron Curtain’, ‘Containing Communism’, the ‘Domino Theory’, the ‘Evil Empire’
The War on Terror, 1990 - ?
‘War on Terror’, ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’, ‘Rogue States’, ‘Axis of Evil’
So too, the theme of the ‘Anti-Christ’, Atheistic State’ to, ‘Moslem Fundamentalism’, is an expression of the dominant, white, male, Anglo-Saxon culture which also helps explain the Bush/Blair relationship.
In this context then, Yugoslavia can be viewed as a ‘dry run’ for the eastward march of US militarism from its forward bases in Western Europe to the new ones in the Balkans. Pivotal to this process has been the destruction of the Soviet Union upon which the entire edifice of 20th century capitalism was built. As the ‘Economist’ pointed out not long after the fall of the Soviet Union in its front-page editorial, ‘What will we do now?’ ‘We need a new enemy to drive the western economy forward.’ Well they found one, or rather invented one.
Of course, it can be argued, and indeed it has been (see ‘Marx’s Revenge’, Verso Books) that the emergence of the Soviet Union delayed the inevitable, the global conquest of capital, filling every available niche, until…?
But of course ‘alternate’ histories are for science fiction writers, we have only the reality of our situation. Yet the reality of the impact of an alternative to capitalism failed or otherwise, is a major factor in the interplay of forces. For the effect of the socialist ‘ideal’ is everywhere. And even though the socialist ideas that have been utilised by the capitalist economies (state intervention, social security and so on) have been to some measure, reversed, it’s not been accomplished everywhere or without a struggle, a struggle that is on-going. Overall, the effect of socialist ideas has been to heighten the contradictions of capitalism as the struggle over resources (how the cake is shared out) reveals all the more clearly the vast gulf between the developed and developing world.
Judging the interplay of forces is no easy matter especially when we are in the middle of a revolution in production, the IT revolution, a revolution which is essential to the functioning of the global economy. In addition, the arrival of ‘intellectual capital’ has in itself exposed even more starkly the contradictions of capitalism. Increasing automation and the ‘knowledge’ economy highlights the increasing socialisation of production whilst still maintaining private ownership. Even the traditional concept of ‘value’ is being challenged by these new modes of production as machines play an increasing role in replacing human labour.
A Fin de Sieclé Period
This is truly a ‘fin de siecle’ period, during which new social and economic forces are emerging. The entire edifice is contextualised within the greatest crisis the world has known, the future of the biosphere itself, which in an odd cyclical process, is itself the result of unbridled capitalist production and consumption. In order to resolve all these potentially catastrophic events, requires a global solution, one that the US has rejected out of hand based simply on its overwhelming military superiority.
Two mutually exclusive forces are at work:
On the one hand, the USUK alliance which represents the old world of the powerful nation state and its (shrinking) alliances. On the other, the regional and increasingly global approach which recognises the reality of an interconnected and interdependent world existing within a unitary biosphere and with a global production, distribution and consumption system.
‘The New Imperialism’
The irony of the Cooper/Kagan thesis ((http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,680095,00.html. See also my piece, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2474.htm) of the ‘post-modern’ world versus the ‘new imperialism’ (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2788.htm) is that the CK thesis attempts to reconcile two mutually exclusive domains – the result being the invasion of Iraq and all that entails.
The choice is simple, do we regress to the 19th century world of primitive social Darwinism or do we move forward, renouncing the fetish of production for production’s sake?
Oil
That oil, the single, driving force of the US is central to this process, should be apparent to all. It is oil which primes the pump of the US capitalist system and which supplies the rationale for its military economy. Without abundant, cheap oil, the US is reduced to the level of all the other ‘advanced’ economies, forced to recognise that to survive it must make accomodations, not only with the developing world but also with its own population.
So who is next?
The war is over, all barring the shouting or so it would seem. Yet already, as predicted, it seems the Rumsfeld, Cheney clique ensconced in the DOD is setting us up for the next one before the dust has settled in Baghdad.
The US government is itself divided over which course to follow, not from a strategic perspective but over tactics. The current ‘split’ in the US government over how to handle the post-war situation is indicative of these two approaches. Central to the dilemma is Israel which is also the US’s Achiles Heel.
Israel
The sectarian interests of a right-wing colonialist, theocratic state have in reality, little to do with the larger interests of securing cheap oil supplies (except of course as a dagger driven into the heart of the Arab world), there can be no other reason for demonizing Syria, which does not represent either a military or economic threat to the US. It derives from the pro-Israeli camp lodged deep in the heart of the Bush administration (Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz et al). Bush, who is a born again Christian of the Apocalyptic variety, also has a theological connection to the Israeli right-wing fundamentalists. That the overriding interests of the US could be derailed by the Israeli connection should not be dismissed out of hand. But above and beyond this, the US objective does not exist in a vacuum.
The role of the UK
I’m told, by those sceptical of my previous analyses that Blair has come out smelling of roses over this adventure. Okay, so the war only lasted ten times longer than predicted but all in all, with ‘only’ a few thousand arms, legs and other assorted appendages blown off, it’s been a ‘success’ for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ alliance (as one British military leader bizarrely put it on BBC Radio, the Iraqis, "should be celebrating"). But without doubt, the problems of the UK are only just beginning and for a number of very important reasons.
Blair’s supposedly ‘hidden’ objective of ‘guiding’ Bush has already foundered on the Syrian connection and he is going to be hard pressed to convince a British public of the need to ‘liberate’ Syria or Iran, let alone North Korea. This risks a split in the USUK alliance, which if it happened, would isolate the US entirely from the world community, exposing its unilateralist objectives and, to be frank, scare the planet shitless.
The clamour to ‘sort out’ Syria is beginning: John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said recently,
"With respect to the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the post-conflict period, we are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest," he said at a news conference in Rome. He mentioned Syria, Iran and North Korea by name.
Donald Rumsfeld echoes these thoughts when he says,
"We are getting scraps of intelligence saying that Syria has been cooperative in facilitating the movement of people out of Iraq into Syria. And then in some cases they stay there ... finding safekeeping there; in other cases they're moving from Syria to still other places."
He also alleges that Syria continues to move military equipment into Iraq, which Rumsfeld called "unhelpful."
"I've accurately observed that they would be well advised to not provide military capabilities [to] Iraq. They seem to have made conscious… decision to ignore that," he said.
And does he plan to do anything about it, he said, "[He] had nothing to announce. We are still dealing with Iraq."
So already, the idea is being planted in the public’s mind that these countries either already have or intend to obtain, WMDs.
Is this just my paranoia or is there evidence to back up my thesis that the invasion is ‘merely’ a prelude to the execution of a ‘grand design’ for global domination?
(Since writing this, several statements by Rumsfeld, Powell et al support my argument).
The background to the current events is well documented. It’s important that we understand the context of these events as they explain why they are taking place. They also expose the hypocritical nature of these ‘defenders of freedom’ and why it is so important that do all in our power to oppose them.
The Al Queda Connection
A particularly disturbing read is the book by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed ‘The War on Freedom, How and Why America was Attacked, September 11th, 2001" (available as an e-book at http://www.onlinejournal.com/Books___Reviews/...-08-02_Brouillet.pdf)
The book advances a convincing and extremely well documented argument for the idea that the Bush government knew well in advance that the attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were going to take place and, that there were high level connections between Osama bin Laden and the US administration. Ahmed moreover, documents the fact that the US invasion of Afghanistan was planned well in advance of September 11th and for the following reasons, none of which have to do with the Taliban’s human rights record (any more than the invasion of Iraq has to do with the Baath regime’s human rights record).
"Afghanistan has long been recognised as the principal gateway to Central Asia, which was described in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) study as the instrument of control of Eurasia, and thus the world."…. In other words, there could be no claim to ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’ when the U.S. government was covertly supporting the Taliban. The cozy relationship between certain U.S. high-ranking officials and Taliban members in the later half of the 1990s is not a secret…. Indeed, the anti-Taliban stance of the U.S. government grew, not out of any specific concern for the human rights of the Afghan people, but out of a more general and growing realisation that the Taliban regime would be incapable of serving as a vehicle of U.S. entry into Central Asia.
"By the year 2001, while formulating specific plans to invade Afghanistan and topple the Taliban, George W. Bush Jr.’s administration began a series of negotiations with the Taliban to save its relationship with that regime. U.S. officials called for a government of national unity, in which all factions, including the Taliban, would participate—but the Taliban were unwilling to compromise their own power.
"Accordingly, U.S. officials promised the Taliban that they would suffer the consequences by facing "a carpet of bombs," and further noted privately that the military plans would be implemented by October 2001. Extensive evidence on record indicates that the Bush administration intended to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban regime quite independently of the events of 11th September. The war on Afghanistan was thus not a response to 11th September. On the contrary, there is a long record of in-depth strategic planning at the root of U.S. military plans to invade Afghanistan. Much of this evidence is available in a 1997 CFR study by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who discusses in detail U.S. plans to secure hegemony over Central Asia as a means to the control of Eurasia, and thereby the expansion and consolidation of global U.S. hegemony, unhindered by potential rivals, such as Russia and China."
Ahmed goes on to say that,
"…from 1995 to 2001, the American intelligence community was in receipt of multiple credible warnings of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. Contrary to the official line of the Bush administration, this information, which was taken seriously by the U.S. intelligence community, specified the hijacking of civilian airplanes to be flown into key U.S. buildings in Washington, DC and New York City, including the World Trade Centre. The nature of these urgent warnings converged in a manner specifying that the attacks would occur between early and mid-September, while other credible information pinpointed 11th September as a likely watch date. Yet despite this extensive forewarning of the attacks, the Bush administration failed to act.
"The failure to act was even more apparent on 11th September itself. There are clear rules established by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense for responding to emergency situations, including hijacking. Yet, although four planes were almost simultaneously hijacked on 11th September, the U.S. Air Force systematically failed to respond in accordance with these rules, which are normally adhered to with routine, since they constitute Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Subsequently, various official government accounts and statements have been issued attempting to deflect public attention from, thus denying the reality of, the collapse of SOP on 11th September."
What are we to make of these assertions? Let me quote once more from Ahmed’s book,
"The ominous implications of these facts are exacerbated in light of various revelations about the long-standing financial, diplomatic, military and intelligence ties between the members of the Bush administration and figures linked to Osama bin Laden–not to mention Osama himself. Reports indicate that until just after 11th September, the Bush family had close financial ties to the bin Laden family, and both were set to reap substantial profits from the war on Afghanistan through their mutual involvement in the U.S. defence industry. This has been accompanied by credible reports that Osama bin Laden has not broken away from his family and maintains ties with them. Further reports show that the Bush administration has systematically blocked attempts to apprehend Osama bin Laden, along with intelligence investigations of the terrorist connections of the bin Laden family and Saudi royals implicated in supporting Osama."
I’ve quoted extensively from Ahmed’s book because they illustrate quite convincingly the basis for the cynical and hypocritical public face of the Bush/Blair newspeak that attempts to rationalise the invasion of Iraq and any subsequent invasions it has planned. Most importantly of course, is its exposure of the rationale behind their manouverings.
The Future
In the longer term, the issue of the global environment, climate change, resource depletion especially water (at the centre of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict) is going to loom ever larger in the world community’s vision. Given the US track record on these issues, the US will find itself increasingly isolated, even by the EU that will be forced to choose sides, mainly by its populations but also by its ruling elite, who have a far more realistic view of the world.
The second major issue confronting us is the development of viable programmes that address the rich/poor divide and the need to develop a viable and sustainable economic programme that doesn’t see growth as an end in itself. At some point, we are going to have to come around to a real socialist programme but this time set in a global context. A programme that addresses the real needs of the majority of the planet’s population.
There is no reason why for example, the EU cannot develop economic programmes that make sense within the EU framework but which also assist the developing world in raising living standards and creating sustainable, economic programmes, programmes that will not be developed over night. But for example, in the longer term, an international division of labour which sees the EU transferring technology and skills to the developing world in exchange for agricultural products, raw materials and labour that would be mutually beneficial. It would moreover, remove the incentive for the development of GM crops, as the developing world produces excellent organic crops and in large quantities. So too, with craft-based industries. The two economies compliment each other rather than compete.
But as long as the developing world is seen as a bottomless pit of cheap labour, cheap raw materials, cheap food and as a dumping ground for the developed world, we face an ever worsening crisis which threatens to overwhelm the very future of our planet.
The choice is simple, but making it obviously isn’t.
William Bowles
Tuesday, April 15, 2003