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Tail, Dog, Wag
The U.S., together with France, had authored the recent UN Gaza ceasefire resolution but then, in the evening of January 8 between 9:15pm and 10:15pm, was the only one to abstain from it. How come?
Julian Berger wrote for The Guardian on January 9:
The US change of mind came at the last moment, as a result of White House intervention following a call from Olmert. Rice was overridden and in the final vote, the US abstained. In her remarks afterwards, Rice made clear she backed the resolution, saying the US "fully supports" its goals, text and objectives.
Aluf Benn for Haaretz reported yesterday:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supported the UN Resolution and assisted with its formulation. Livni was in contact with Rice in an attempt to soften its wording.
At the last minute, at 3:30 A.M., Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also intervened with a desperate phone call to President George W. Bush, requesting that the United States veto the resolution. Bush refused, simply instructing Rice to abstain from the vote.
Now Olmert gives his version of that day:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.
"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.
…
The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.
"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said
"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.
"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."
Bush was in Philadelphia on January 8 talking about the no child left behind sham between 11am and 12am. The time difference between Israel and U.S. eastern is -7 hours. If Olmert called at 3:30 that would have been 8:30pm in Washington DC, not during any official speech in Philadelphia, but right before the Security Council meeting.
So Olmert is exaggerating his influence here – he did not get Bush to interrupt a speech, but he did get him to change a UN vote..
But the essence is clear. Israel called and the U.S. president did as he was told to do.
Dog, Tail, Wag, whatever …
sorry for the cut & paste but….
Israel Is Losing This War
by Uri Avnery
NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.
IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army – with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks – and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.
Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.
Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.
True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.
War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.
The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.
An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.
Later the official liar claimed that “our soldiers were shot at from inside the school”. Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.
But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that “they shot from inside the school”, and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.
So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a “symbol of Hamas rule”. Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the “most moral army in the world”.
THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity”, a sociopathic disorder.
The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.
The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah’s peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel – neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population – not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past – but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.
From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not “hide behind the population”, the population views them as their only defenders.
Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners rose up against Churchill.
He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that “they will change their ways” and “it will sear their consciousness”, so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.
A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.
This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.
Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.
That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare – and that has been its Achilles heel.
A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: “Not a Nice Guy, but a Leader”) cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and crying out: “Mama! Mama!”
The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli journalists, to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic news, while they themselves remained miles away from the events. Foreign journalists were not allowed in either, until they protested and were taken for quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others – the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.
THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the war.
Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.
The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a dangerous ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of terrified refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in Washington, who until that time had blocked all calls for a cease-fire. These began to understand the menace to vital American interests in the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude – causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.
People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of normal people and must guess their reactions. “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin sneered. “How many divisions have people of conscience?” Ehud Barak may well be asking.
As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when the atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that can decide a war.
THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.
Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.
If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.
What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.
In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.
© 2009 The Progressive
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 13 2009 2:59 utc | 34
Whew, fireworks!
Comments #1 & 13 are outright racist and suceeded in their goal of derailing any intelligent discourse.
As far as b’s post, my take is closest to annie’s, although not identical: I see Olmert’s statement as fulfilling the same function as Bush’s in calling the largest protests in the history of the world before he invaded Iraq, “a focus group.” The aim is to completely demoralize any growing opposition. The stuff with Rice is just theatre: agendas have to be pushed along at the consequence of reputation, which can be rebuilt later to the tune of $5M advances for writing memoirs. Rice will never be the “first Black President,” anyway.
As to rehashing Mearsheimer/Walt redux, but substituting emotion for evidence, here is my quick take: Zionists (I believe the proper term for what we are discussing) have vastly disproportionate but not completely dispositive influence on US government policies.
I find myself agreeing when slothrop opines pithily about Obama:
“He seems almost to be the final symptom of the triumph of system over agency.”
Avnery writes:
This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.
Again, this canard raises its head. More properly, Avnery should state that the war is influencing the election campaign. But, by the way he puts it, Avnery is implying that in Israel this month, agency is triumphing over system. How can he claim that a war which, admittedly, was planned two years ago is just “part of the election campaign?” Did Israel’s military undertake an invasion to help one candidate, and if so, which one? Do all of Israel’s military leaders support that candidate? Is Israel’s military leadership prepared to damage its reputation, as it did in Lebanon, in order to throw an election? These questions (and many others) are begged by the election theorist claimants and, by right, aught to be addressed by them. Or, more likely, is Avnery — perhaps with the best of intentions — seeking to diminish, or even cover-up, the Spartan militarism upon which modern Israel rests?
The fact that an Israeli government spokesman on NPR asserted today that it would be “unseemly” to carry on a slaughter while the new Imperial Manager was being sworn in, and that the operation would be over by then, certainly indicates that the perimeters of the US election, and the opportunities posed by the interregnum were keenly understood by Israeli military planners.
Rather than believing that the past month has been an election campaign which somehow veered off into “irrational exuberance,” and despite my belief in the currency of US/Anglo/Israeli world power predominance, I do see their allied power to be rapidly waning, and I see a system in crisis responding irrationally by creating more contradictions.
I really did not understand the initial tactics used in the Iraq invasion. If they wanted to march straight into Iran, they should have used far more firepower and violence in the initial steps in Iraq, or if they wanted to establish a reliable neo-liberal outpost in the middle east they should have followed Garner’s lead in setting up a secure puppet government for a year or two before pushing neo-liberal reforms down the Iraqi’s throats. The best that can be said is that in order to build up the necessary consensus for war, Bush needed to compromise between the militarists and the neo-liberal economic camp, and yet by doing so, achieved neither of their maximal goals at far greater than expected cost.
Similarly, I am confused by Israeli actions. Clearly, they have done everything possible to avoid, derail, and even render impossible, a relatively just, mutually acceptable, peace, the general parameters of which have been limned out ages ago — only to have gathered dust for decades. The long-term plan to continually displace Arabs and seize their land seems clear. And yet, there is a minority of the Israeli elite who can clearly read the writing on the wall that this may not be possible. (This is similar to establishment figures like Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin Phillips, and Jimmy Carter speaking out in the US.)
Since the pullout from Gaza, the Israelis have done everything possible — from daily sonic booms, impoverishment and confinement, to the current campaign — in order to terrorize the Gazan population and make life unbearable. The casualties of the past month, as high as they have been (and of course as tragic), are clearly nowhere near what Israel is capable of, or what would be necessary to de-populate the strip.
What we are witnessing is not a war, or a “conflict” as the corporate media refers to it, but a counter-insurgency being waged against an occupied people. The effects are horrific to witness, but so clearly destined to fail that one might ask if that were the plan, and for what longer-term reason?
Are the Israelis, constrained by perhaps fear of inflaming Arab opinion to the point of toppling friendly puppet leaders, reduced to — as in Lebanon, with the last minute dropping of cluster bombs — simply terrorizing the population in order to mask their strategic powerlessness? Or do they have faith in an unrevealed longer-term plan? Is there a workable plan to drive the Gazans out of the strip? Or is this “Shock Doctrine and Awe” campaign merely an ad-hoc plan to steal gas and oil revenues? (Which as we read, even under the best of conditions, would only have given Palestinians 10% of the revenue. Questions of how that revenue would be divided between Gaza and the West Bank also arise.)
As I believe — with evidence — that this current attack was prepared long in advance, and unquestionably known about by the US, I would not be surprised if this is to be used to establish Obama’s power and reputation as a World Leader, in order to restore the Imperial image. We will know within several weeks if Obama puts forth a “Grand Peace Plan,” similar in scope to Oslo. Any such plan would have been a long time in the making, involving vastly complex behind the scenes negotiating — necessarily including many different centers of interest and nations — and having nothing to do with Obama himself, who (as idiotically as Bush) was busy body surfing and flashing “shaka” signs: thus giving credence to my assertion that most world events are pre-planned and staged.
If no plan appears, then we must first watch the immediate economic details outlined above.
Gaza will need a tremendous amount of rebuilding (all of which helps the world economy). Just who finances that rebuilding and what influence they seek in exchange, and what Israel will allow, will need to be watched carefully. How will the “new and improved” Gaza be constructed? Will the economy also be restructured?
(International law is clear that Israel, as the occupying power, is responsible for the welfare of the Palestinians. That they choose not to fulfill that responsibility and that other nations, such as Finland, seek to fill the needs gap, raises an important question: Are those nations aidng the people of Gaza more than they are aiding an illegal occupation? Or is the reverse true? Are they aiding or abetting? Or in seeking to do both, are they “aiding and abetting” a long-standing unresolved, deepening, war crime of masive proportions? Why?)
Finally, we will need to watch Israel closely to see whether they have an achievable, coherent, long-term strategy — just or unjust — or whether they are slowly sinking into the quicksand of incoherent contradiction as their power drains irrevocably away.
Listening to NPR while driving home this evening, I was struck to hear a story about the US military training for counter-insurgency exactly identical to one that had run five years ago — except that the word “Iraq” was replaced by “Afghanistan.” (Orwell would have been proud at the Fordism of it.) Obama ran on a platform of escalating the illegal invasion of Afghanistan and expanding it into Pakistan; now the national media is doing everything possible to prime us for it. As the US’s model for counter-insurgency is based upon the Israeli model and expertise, it behooves us to study the Israeli experience closely: They are a bellweather of our own waning power and Imperial contradictions.
The next several months will bring us “change,” to be sure, but not of the type people chose to believe in. There will be no happy dance towards a “Just World,” whatever that means — but the tired and tarnished Imperial Image will be given a lot of attention; it will be brightened and burnished, and re-branded with a shiny new logo. In some areas of the globe, wars will expand. But elsewhere we will be asked to help others by spreading the products and services of our corporations around unselfishly. At that point, we will find out how the Middle East figures into the newer “New World Order” we will be asked to support.
Back in the hauntingly beautiful land once called Palestine one thing is certain: both the Palestinians and the Zionists have shown limitless patience in realizing their aspirations. Yet today one eats while the other starves. And that cannot bode well for the future of the Middle East, or the future of man, no matter how shiny the Imperial logo, or how catchy the new Imperial motto.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 13 2009 8:55 utc | 53
@anna missed:
I was just thinking of you, and left you a follow-up to Domhoff/Mann you might want to explore over here.
Yes, well, one big difference is that Israel is so small that everyone knows everyone else in the power structure personally, and many are interrelated, and/or decendants of founders: kinda like the US in 1802.
One similarity is that organized religion is NOT included in the central power and planning group. However, organized religion has much more power in Israel than the US, especially in “get out the vote” efforts. And because of the nature of their coalition-style government, they are much more successful in exacting demands from politicians, hence another justification for the illegal West Bank settlements.
(As a matter of fact, it is this shot-gun marriage of necessity that quite possibly truly poses the greatest existential threat that Israel faces.)
Many ultra-orthodox do not serve in the military, creating a kind of caste system with poor Russians and Sephardics in the military defending their settlements. By and large though, the religious are handled similarly to how Bush handled the religious right: Promise them what you need to get elected and them throw them a bone or two later, then ignore them. (Which is one reason why I wasn’t worried about McCain, since foreign policies are almost identical, with members of the Brzezinski family on both sides.)
Of course, like Rodney Dangerfield, the religious never get any respect. When they get troublesome, as American gadfly Wellstone did, they are simply erased. For instance, Meir Kahane:
An Egyptian by the name El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League, was connected to Adbel-Rahman and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “At his trial, Mr. Nosair claimed that the reason he had military manuals was that he was being trained by the US, not because he was intent on terrorism,” Andrew Marshall wrote for the Independent on November 1, 1998.
It is said Nosair was trained by a former Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohamed, allegedly with connections to al-Qaeda. “Yet Mr. Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the US government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green Beret, part of America’s Special Forces. … [Mohamed’s recruits, under the auspices of Operation Cyclone] received brief paramilitary training and weapons instruction in the New York area, according to evidence in earlier trials, before being sent to fight with [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar [a major CIA asset in Afghanistan]. Even Sheikh Abdel-Rahman had, apparently, entered the US with the full knowledge of the CIA in 1990.” (For more on Hekmatyar, see Gary Leupp’s Meet Mr. Blowback: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Operative and Homicidal Thug.)
Another difference is the complete integration of the military into the power structure, much as in fascism, whereby it is only recently that politicans could get anywhere without being military heroes.
The nature of Israeli business, so much of it being high-tech and knowledge — often spying — based differs from the US. All small nations find niches to compete in. Israel is in the business of knowing everyone else’s business. IF your firm monitors high speed data transactions worldwide, you have a different relationship with your government than if your firm manufactures Dial soap.
Israel has perhaps the second most extensive spy network worldwide after the US, and so many powerful Jews worldwide (Not just in the US, but in Poland, Russia, Georgia, to name a few countries.) have dual allegiances; some could even be considered part of Israel’s power elite.
Israel’s hold on the diamond industry gives it extensive worldwide contacts, and it maintains a world-wide contact system of foreign mercenaries and organized crime syndicates.
I agree with your assertion that both countries are experimenting in pushing the boundaries of international law and independent action.
Time for bed.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 13 2009 12:01 utc | 59
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