[Peace-discuss] The MidEast after Sharon

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A good account of the situation, I think -- with the proviso
that the major actor remains the US administration.  --CGE] 

 January 7, 2006
  Axis of Fanatics – Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad
  by Norman Solomon

With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a
better chance to become prime minister of Israel.

He's media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television.
And he's very dangerous.

Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States.
Later, during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in
Washington and then became Israel's ambassador to the United
Nations. By the time he moved up to deputy foreign minister in
1988, he was a star on U.S. networks.

The guy is smooth – fluent in American idioms, telegenic to
many eyes – and good at lying on camera. So, when Israeli
police killed 17 Palestinians at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque in
October 1990, Netanyahu led a disinformation blitz asserting
that the Palestinians were killed after they'd rioted and
pelted Jewish worshipers from above the Wailing Wall with huge
stones. At the time, his fable dominated much of the U.S.
media. Later even the official Israeli inquiry debunked
Netanyahu's account and blamed police for starting the clash.

Now, with Netanyahu campaigning to win the Israeli election
for prime minister in late March, he's cranking up rhetoric
against Iran. His outlook seems to be 180 degrees from the
world view of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet in
tangible political ways, they're well-positioned to feed off
each other's fanaticism.

The election that gave the presidency of Iran to Ahmadinejad
last summer was a victory for repressive fundamentalism.
Results have included a negative trend for human rights in the
country and a more bellicose foreign policy.

When Ahmadinejad declared in late October that "Israel must be
wiped off the map," he did a big favor to the most
militaristic of Israel's major politicians – Benjamin
Netanyahu – who demanded that Prime Minster Sharon take
forceful action against Iran. Otherwise, Netanyahu said in
December, "when I form the new Israeli government, we'll do
what we did in the past against Saddam's reactor, which gave
us 20 years of tranquillity."

Netanyahu was referring to Israel's air attack on the Osirak
reactor in June 1981 to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear
weapons. But now the idea of bombing Iran is nonsensical even
to many analysts who are enthusiastic about Israel's large
nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads.

"Preemptive military attack is not a strategy for stopping the
spread of nuclear weapons anymore; the changes in technology
have made it obsolete." That's the current assessment from
Larry Derfner, who often writes about Israeli politics for the
Jerusalem Post. "Concealing a nuclear start-up is so much
easier now than it was in 1981 and it's only going to get
easier yet. Throwing fighter jets, commandos and whatnot at
Iran is more than risky; it's almost certainly futile if not
altogether impossible. Better for Israel and Israelis to
forget about it and instead meet the Iranian threat by making
this country's deterrent power even more intimidating than it
already is."

Derfner added: "A nuclear Iran isn't a cause for indifference
but neither is it a cause for dread and certainly not for
recklessness. A nuclear Iran is actually acceptable. We can
live with it. The truth is we've been living here with threats
very much like it all along."

But Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized that he wants to
launch a military strike on Iran. "This is the Israeli
government's primary obligation," he said. "If it is not done
by the current government, I plan to lead the next government
to stop the Iranians."

The specter of Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad fueling each other's
madness as heads of state is frightening. In such a
circumstance, the primary danger of conflagration would come
from nuclear-armed Israel, not nuclear-unarmed Iran.

Candidate Netanyahu is a standard bearer for nuclear insanity.
He's also an implacable enemy of basic Palestinian human
rights. Many Israelis understand that Netanyahu is an
extremist, and polls published on Jan. 6 indicate that the
post-Sharon era may not be as hospitable to Netanyahu as
initially assumed.

For that matter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not serve out his
full four-year term as Iran's president. Evidently the
hardline clerics who dominate the Iranian government got more
than they bargained for when they threw their weight behind
the Ahmadinejad campaign last June. In recent months, Iran's
supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has shifted more power to the
governmental Expediency Council headed by the shady magnate
Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relatively moderate political hack who
lost in the presidential runoff last year.

Ahmadinejad is good at making statements that cause
international uproars, but he's having a difficult time
exercising presidential leverage. "Even in Iran's mostly
conservative parliament, the hard-line president has found
himself unable to get traction," the Los Angeles Times noted
on Jan. 2. "In a first for the Islamic Republic, lawmakers
turned down four of the ministers Ahmadinejad asked them to
approve. It took him three months and four candidates to seat
an oil minister. Some reformist legislators even agitated for
hearings on the president's 'lack of political competence.'"

Using religious claims to bolster their quests for power,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Benjamin Netanyahu each stand to gain
by pointing to the menacing fanaticism of the other. Yet many
Iranians and Israelis recognize the grave dangers of such
posturing.

As tensions mount and pressures intensify, the White House
might end up acceding to an Israeli air attack on Iran. Or the
Bush administration may prefer to launch its own air strike
against Iran.

Iran. Israel. The United States. Each country has the very
real potential to move in a better direction – away from
lethal righteousness. But in every society, that will require
more effective grassroots efforts for peace and justice.
 
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=8354