[Peace-discuss] Proxy

[C. G. Estabrook]

Karen Medina wrote:
> Bob,
> 
> Are you really serious that you don't think Israel is serving the US
> as a proxy?

[On this subject, here's a piece of mine that appeared (remarkably 
enough) in the Public I just before the US invasion of Iraq.  --CGE]


	Israel and the US War on Iraq

It's remarkable how rarely Israel is mentioned in regard to the American 
plans to attack Iraq -- with the exception of occasional notices of how 
strongly the Israeli government supports those plans. A proper 
assessment of its part in this war depends upon an understanding of 
Israel's position in the United States' overall policy for the Middle 
East, and how that policy is being implemented with specific regard to Iraq.

Patrick Buchanan was thoroughly rebuked when he remarked on the eve of 
the US attack on Iraq in 1991, "There are only two groups that are 
beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli Defense 
Ministry and its amen corner in the United States." But he was saying 
aloud what few others were. What his national chauvinism prevented him 
from noticing was that, in its avidity for war, the Israeli government 
was acting -- as it had for more than a generation -- as the principal 
US client, our "local cop on the beat," as the Nixon Administration had 
put it. It's this ongoing role that explains what part Israel has in the 
current slaughter of Iraqis.

US FOREIGN POLICY: THE MIDDLE EAST

Since the Second World War -- from which the United States emerged as 
the world's only undamaged major country and proceeded to organize the 
economy of the world -- a cornerstone of American policy has been 
control of Middle East energy resources, the greatest geopolitical prize 
in the modern world. Control, not just access, was what was demanded by 
all US administrations, Republican and Democrat, because control of 
those resources gave the US control of its principal economic 
competitors -- which turned out to be, by the late 20th century, a 
German-led Europe and a Japan-led East Asia.

The US has never in fact required Mideast oil for its own society -- all 
the energy requirements of the US could be filled from national sources 
(especially when we include in "national sources," our "backyard" -- 
Latin America) But Germany imports 80% of its energy resources, and 
Japan, 100%. Who controls world oil, controls the life-line of the 
modern world.

And the principal threat to U.S. control has always come from what the 
US called "domestic radicalism" -- the dangerous idea amongst the 
peoples of the oil-producing regions that their natural wealth should be 
used for their benefit, rather than for that of the corporations and the 
economic elites to whom the US might assign it. And the chief form of 
"domestic radicalism" was Arab nationalism. To guard against it, the US 
constructed (and took over from Britain) a series of repressive Arab 
governments, the family dictatorships around the Persian Gulf, with 
Saudi Arabia at their head.

US FOREIGN POLICY: ISRAEL

Since it launched a war and destroyed the center of Arab nationalism in 
1967, Israel's job in America's "overall framework of order," in Henry 
Kissinger's phrase, was to guarantee that those conservative Arab 
governments were protected from their most dangerous enemy -- their own 
populations. Israel was to be the final bulwark against the dangers that 
would be posed to US control if "domestic radicals" came to power in one 
of the oil-producing states -- as happened in Iran in 1979.

For that reason (and not because of some imagined invincibility of the 
pro-Israel lobby), the US is willing to provide Israel with vastly more 
money and support than it gives to any other country in the world. (In 
second place is Egypt, Israel's principal antagonist in 1967, whom the 
Carter administration bought off at Camp David in 1978, securing 
Israel's southern border; in third, Turkey, Israel's principal military 
ally in the present-day Middle East.) Today as a result Israel has 
perhaps the third strongest military in the world, with hundreds of 
advanced nuclear weapons (Israel did not sign the Nuclear 
Non-proliferation Treaty), missiles and submarines with which to deliver 
them, and an air force of US-supplied F-16s and attack helicopters.

For that reason too the US is willing to support Israel's brutal and 
racist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (condemned by the United 
Nations thirty-five years ago in Security Council Resolution 242) and 
its settlement of its citizens in the occupied territories (recognized 
as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- a war crime -- around 
the world). Not only have these been the consistent policies of all 
Israeli governments, Labor and Likud, they also serve the US purpose of 
discouraging domestic radicalism, a democratic and secular Palestine 
being seen as a "threat of a good example" even by some Arab states. To 
discourage the threat of progressive Arab nationalism, the US and Israel 
have on occasion been willing to fund even Islamicist movements (Hamas 
and the Mujahideen) that they saw as counters to it. Consistent 
US/Israeli policy has been largely successful in destroying secular Arab 
nationalism as it existed two generations ago -- and replacing it with 
religious fundamentalism.

In 1982, in order to consolidate the Israeli control over the occupied 
territories, the US armed and supported the most extreme terrorist act 
in the Middle East in a generation, the invasion of Lebanon, which 
killed about 20,000 people (many more than Iraq's invasion of Kuwait). 
It was conducted by the current Prime Minister of Israel and launched 
because of the danger that peace might break out in the Middle East. 
That motive grows to the extent that the state is militarized. In the 
principal American client as perhaps nowhere else in the world is it 
true that war is the health of the state. And that war is principally a 
war against Palestinians.

That war is not simply killing. To take one example from far too many, 
Israeli forces closed the Islamic University and the Polytechnic 
Institute in Hebron last month, actions to which even the US State 
Department took mild exception. Elsewhere, the Israeli army looked for 
similarly creative forms of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing: 
in east Jerusalem, they sealed the apartments of three imprisoned Hamas 
militants (one of whom had been sentenced to thirty-five consecutive 
life terms) by filling the rooms with concrete. The Guardian (UK) 
reports that now more than a thousand Palestinians are held by the 
Israeli army under detention without charge (the sort of thing we used 
to think only totalitarian governments did -- it is of course now US 
practice, too).

This oppressive and anti-intellectual policy is practiced by other 
American clients as well. US financial and military aid to Turkey was 
used brutally to suppress the Kurds in the southeast in the 1990s, 
creating millions of refugees, destroying some 3500 villages, and 
killing tens of thousands of people -- an ethnic cleansing supported by 
the Clinton administration. Since the military coup in 1980, Turkish 
universities have been rife with police spies, and evidence of Kurdish 
culture, to say nothing of Kurdish nationalism, has been suppressed. 
America and its clients in the Middle East have as their enemies whole 
peoples of the region.

Any understanding of Israel's role in the coming US attack on Iraq has 
to begin with the Jewish state's continuing position in US policy. Those 
on the American Right (and elsewhere) who think that the Israeli tail is 
wagging the US dog have got it quite wrong: the dog is firmly in 
control. Israeli governments, whether Labor or Likud, do nothing without 
the approval of their American paymasters. Noam Chomsky offers three 
recent examples, beginning with the first Bush administration:

	"--The Bush #1 case involved $10 million in loan guarantees, which 
Israel was using (illegally, but with US connivance) for settlement in 
the territories. The Shamir government was doing it in a brazen way that 
annoyed Baker-Bush. Bush suspended the guarantees, ... Israel returned 
to the preferred Labor-style hypocrisy ('thickening settlements,' 
'natural growth,' etc.) and all was well.

	"--In 2000, Israel's highly militarized high-tech economy was counting 
heavily on a huge sale of Phalcon air war technology to China. The US 
didn't like it. Barak said Israel would never back down. Clinton told 
them quietly, 'Sorry, no.' End of story.

	"--Sharon's siege of Arafat in Ramallah was interfering with Bush 
administration efforts to garner support for the war on Iraq. The orders 
came quietly from Washington. Same [result]."

Chomsky points out that there are many such cases, "some major ones 
(like Eisenhower ordering Israel out of Egyptian territory on the eve of 
a presidential election), others minor ones like Ramallah, many in 
between." Were it not for the part that Israel plays in the US 
government's decades-long plan for control of Middle East energy 
resources, it would be of no more concern to us than any other state 
with a questionable racial policy and a population less than that of New 
York City -- Zimbabwe, say, or Uganda (even if the latter had become a 
Jewish state, as was once proposed).

Israel's military usefulness to the US is not limited to the Middle 
East. In two of the worst examples -- near-genocidal campaigns in which 
the US government was hampered by political pressure at home -- Israel 
carried out the bidding of its patron. In the 1970s, at the request of 
the Carter administration, Israel transferred war-planes to Indonesia to 
aid in the suppression of the East Timorese, a massacre comparable to 
those in Cambodia. In the 1980s, Israeli military advisors aided the 
Reagan administration in genocidal campaigns in Guatemala (for which 
Clinton later apologized, with monstrous inadequacy).

Chomsky refers to Israel as "virtually an offshore US military 
establishment." An Israeli journalist recently described the country as 
"an army with a state, not state with an army," and that army is "almost 
an offshoot of the Pentagon," Chomsky adds. He points out, 
"Unfortunately for Israel, it's coming to resemble the US in other ways. 
It approximates the US in having the highest inequality in the 
industrial world, and its social welfare system, once impressive, is 
visibly declining. It may end up being almost a caricature of the worst 
features of American society. These are consequences of the choice of 
confrontation and dependency rather than peaceful integration into the 
region, fateful choices decades ago." It also makes the Israeli polity 
dependent on war: Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US, is 
quoted as saying recently to Israel's Military Radio (GALATZ), "The 
postponement of the war against Iraq is against the Israeli interests."

US FOREIGN POLICY: IRAQ

In 1934 Fascist Italy invaded the impoverished kingdom of Ethiopia to 
build its new Empire, and in the event the principal contemporary organ 
of international law, the League of Nations, was destroyed. The US war 
on Iraq resembles Italy's, not least in that it shreds international law 
and subverts the UN. The comparison perhaps reverses a famous 
observation about everything in history happening twice: the first time 
it may have been a farce, but the second may be a great tragedy indeed.

The Bush administration has at least three important goals in launching 
this criminal enterprise:

     First, consistent with the fundamental principle of US foreign 
policy, this is a war for oil, for control of (not just access to) Iraqi 
oil reserves, the second largest in the world. That control rather than 
access is the issue, is shown by the hesitation of the large oil 
companies about this war: they have access now and fear its disruption.

     Second, it is a demonstration war, as all US wars since World War 
II (including Vietnam) have been: a state which refuses to obey 
Washington's orders -- or has the dangerous idea that it wants to use 
its resources for the purposes of its population, rather than integrate 
them into the world economy on terms set by the US -- must be punished 
severely.

     Third, the war distracts from our wretched economy at home; the 
administration mobilizes for war and encourages the fear of terrorism to 
cover over their understandably unpopular economic policy -- nothing 
less than the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich -- and 
nevertheless to assure their reelection (if you agree that they were 
elected in the first place).

The war is meant to secure and defend the long-term foreign policy of 
the US, in the Middle East and in the world at large. To understand why 
that policy requires the reduction of Iraq -- and indeed the destruction 
of any regional power with "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) -- we 
need to grasp what might be called "asymmetrical deterrence," the way in 
which a weak state may have just enough weapons to deter the threats of 
a strong one.

The US enjoys nuclear dominance in the world and Israel, with a stronger 
military than any European NATO country, nuclear dominance in the 
region. (General Lee Butler, head of the Strategic Command under 
Clinton: "It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of 
animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, 
ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the 
hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so.") These weapons are 
used primarily as a threat against weaker, non-nuclear countries. Thus 
every US president since Truman has threatened to use nuclear weapons 
against a Third World country. But the US ability to threaten another 
country is limited if, even though the US reduced that country to 
nuclear waste, it could itself be hit with even one nuclear weapon.

Similarly, Israel has an overwhelming dominance of weapons of mass 
destruction (nuclear, biological, and chemical) in the region, but the 
possession of only a few -- or even one -- by a rival to the US cop can 
neutralize the cop's offensive dominance. Of course it would be insanity 
for Iraq or any other state to attack Israel -- it would be immediately 
obliterated by Israel and the US -- but Israel has to hesitate to use 
its weapons of mass destruction, or even threaten to do so, if there is 
any chance that the cost would be Tel Aviv...

The American "framework of order" is endangered if its regional enforcer 
can be constrained. It is in this way that the possession of a few WMDs 
(by Iraq, Iran, or any other state in the region) is a defensive 
posture, not an offensive one -- and surely the policy that would have 
to be adopted even if the government in Baghdad were democratic (highly 
unlikely, because the US doesn't want it). Similarly, on an 
international scale, China developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to 
deliver them a generation ago and produced about twenty, which they 
still have -- not an offensive threat, but a defensive caution to the US 
and Russia.

The new US attack on Iraq, then, is based first of all on maintaining 
the persistent US position in the Middle East and eliminating a check on 
America's regional enforcer. But it is a good deal more than that. It is 
also part of a plan for a new colonialism, a plan quite publicly 
announced by the most extreme elements in the US government, in league 
with the most right-wing elements in Israel (much to the right of the 
current prime minister, war criminal as he may be).

As Kurt Nimmo explained in CounterPunch, "...the idea of killing Saddam 
Hussein and inflicting depredation on the Iraqi people is not a Bush 
idea (it can be argued Bush has no original ideas of his own) -- the 
current scheme was a roughcast devised by Likudite Richard Perle. In 
1996, Perle (and Douglas Feith) wrote 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for 
Securing the Realm,' which he presented to then Israel Prime Minister 
Netanyahu. The plan called for not only eliminating Hussein and 
installing a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad, but also for trashing the 
Oslo Accords, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and 
overthrowing or destabilizing the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi 
Arabia, and Iran. Perle's master plan for Likud regional dominance ... 
was crafted for the Jerusalem and Washington, D.C.-based Institute for 
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)..."

The plan had been announced in the Clinton administration (which was 
more extreme on Israel than the first Bush administration), but the 
planners came to power in the Pentagon and the State Department in the 
second Bush administration. They saw 9/11 as a heaven-sent opportunity 
to put the plan into operation. As the Washington Post recently 
reported, Bush signed a document directing the Pentagon to begin 
planning for an invasion of Iraq less than a week after the terrorist 
attacks on New York and Washington -- although the administration has 
never had any evidence of Iraqi complicity in those attacks. And, quite 
consistently with the views of the Washington hawks ("chicken-hawks" who 
avoided the military themselves), Israeli Prime Minister Sharon told The 
Times (UK) that Iran -- one of the "axis of evil" powers identified by 
Bush -- should be targeted "the day after" action against Iraq ends 
because of its role as a "centre of world terror". The plan is clearly 
underway.

* * *

IN SUMMARY, ISRAEL'S PART in the US attack on Iraq depends on its 
central role in the on-going American policy of controlling Middle East 
energy resources, which gives the US a strangle-hold on the world 
economy; the US attack removes the defensive constraint that even one 
weapon of mass destruction might have on Israel's ability to threaten 
its neighbors with its overwhelming nuclear advantage, while the US 
issues a lethal warning to the world of what happens to American clients 
who stop obeying orders.

The conservative columnist Robert Novak said on Meet the Press in 
December that the extremists in the Bush administration never wanted 
inspections in Iraq: "This is really about change of regime in Iraq and 
change of the political outlines in the Middle East more to Israel's 
benefit. That's what this has all been about, and since it's very hard 
to sell that to the American people, they have done it on a weapons of 
mass destruction basis." With the proviso that "Israel's benefit" here 
means the enhancement of the role that US foreign policy provides for a 
militarized Israel -- hardly to the benefit of the people of Israel -- 
the comment seems about right.

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