The Bush Doctrine Is Israel's DoctrineBy Ghali Hassan
06 October, 2004
Countercurrents.orgIt is not coincident to have American tanks and Armour of terror rolling into Iraqi towns killing innocent Iraqi civilians en masse and destroying their homes and communities at the same time Israeli tanks rolled into Palestinian refugee camps and towns killing Palestinian civilians en masse and destroying their homes and communities. Iraq and Palestine are two centres of identical atrocities committed by two close allies against defenceless populations. These atrocities are only allowed to continue because of the silence and passivity of Western citizens, and media pundits.
The implementation of the “Bush doctrine” U.S. National Security Strategy in Iraq is greeted with fanfares in Israel, and particularly among the fascist element of the Israeli elites. No other country has benefited from the destruction and occupation of Iraq more than Israel. Israel was able to built its illegal “Apartheid Wall” and confiscate more Palestinian land. Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian school children point blank. Iraq provided the right diversion for Israel to perpetuate its crimes against the Palestinians. Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians have increased by many folds in the last two years.
The “new” Bush doctrine, “repudiates the core idea of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of international force that is not undertaken in self-defence after the occurrence of an armed attack across an international boundary or pursuant to decision by the UN Security Council”, writes Richard Falk, Professor of International Law and Practise at Princeton University.
There is nothing new about the Bush doctrine. On the contrary, this doctrine has been around for a long time. On June 07, 1981, the world was outraged by Israel’s blatant aggression against Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. The Los Angeles Times called it, “state-sponsored terrorism”. The UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning Israel aggression. The international community, including the US, rejected Israel’s claim of “self-defence”.
In March 1986, US president Roland Reagan ordered an air attack on Libya killing scores of innocent civilians, including the daughter of president Muammar el-Qadaffi. The pretext for Reagan “pre-emptive” strike was “Libya’s association with terrorism”. In 1998, Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missiles attack on Sudan’s al-Shifa Pharmaceutical plant destroying the source of vital medicine, and as a result killed many thousands of innocent people. Both attacks have been condemned by the majority of nations as acts of aggression contrary to Article 51 of the UN Charter.
After the 9/11 attacks on the US, the Bush administration saw an “opportunity” to justify attacking other nations “pre-emptively”. Hence, the tragedy of 9/11 has legitimised the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Afghanistan and Iraq were the immediate victims of this doctrine. As usual, the pretexts were self-defence.
In the case of Iraq, all pretexts proved to be fabricated lies, and we are now told that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is justified because the US is “bringing-democracy” to Iraq and the Middle East by way of mass killings of Iraqi civilians on daily basis. Today, most Iraqis believe that Saddam was not that bad compared with the new “democracy” brought by the US. The US is more interested in building more bases, controlling regions and resources than caring about “moral principle” and solving humanitarian crises.
The US main goal in Iraq is to find a Vichy-style regime, keeps Iraq dependent and has access to bases. The US is interested in domination, not democracy. If the US is interested in free democracy, the best place for the US to start is at home in the US. The people of Iraq are doomed if they do not resist this new tyranny.
After the UN have been sidelined and international laws and norms have been ignored, the doctrine have been modified to allow the freedom of aggression against nations that have the “intent and ability” to develop weapon of mass destruction. In other words, high schools and universities with teaching laboratories are sufficient pretexts for pre-emptive strike. It should be borne in mind that this doctrine is only applies to the US and Israel. For example, Iran, which is threaten by both the US and Israel, does not have a right of self-defence.
One day after the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was commenting on the significance of the 9/11 atrocity on Israel and US relations. “It is very good”, he said. “Well, not very good but it will generate immediate sympathy”, and it would “strengthen the bond between our two people, because we have experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror”.
Two years after the 9/11 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon couldn’t be much happier. President George Bush called him “a man of peace”, and President Bush is adopting Israel’s own doctrine, the Bush-Israel doctrine to “strengthen the bond” between Israel and the US.
Unfortunately, no one seems to have the courage to remind the world of Ariel Sharon, as the oldest terrorist on the scene today. Mr Sharon impeccable career goes back to 1953. The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, recalls Sharon's leading of a massacre in the village of Kibya in 1953. “The soldiers of Major Ariel Sharon killed 70 Palestinians in the reprisal raid, most of them women and children”. Since then, Sharon never looked back. He continued his career of mass murdering Palestinian men, women and children in the refugee camps.
In 1981 invasion of Lebanon, Mr Sharon organised cold-blooded massacre of 2000 Palestinian men, women and children at the Sabre and Chatila camps in Beirut. At least 17,000 civilians were killed in the Israeli invasion and tens of thousands of homes destroyed. Even the Israeli Kahan Commission found Sharon quote “personally responsible” for the massacre.
During the course of the second intifada, the total number of Palestinians killed between September 29, 2000 and May 31, 2004 is 3,023, mostly women and children. In December 2, 2000, Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote: “I am sure we can all agree that Israel has indeed perpetrated the international crime of genocide against the Palestinian People”.
The number of Iraqi civilians killed by US Occupation forces is much higher. It is estimated that between 37,000-55,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The massacres of innocent civilians continue today in Iraq and Palestine.
The reasons for invading Iraq remain hidden from the public: protecting Israel and secure vital energy resources in the Middle East. The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, told Vanity Fair Magazine in early 2004: “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on WMD [to invade Iraq] because it was the one reason everyone could agree on”. He went further to tell journalists that, “economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil”. The reason Mr Wolfowitz was saying was a convenient lie – a lie that has been sold to the citizens of the world. Mr Wolfowitz, who is also know as “Israel-centric” for his loyalty to Israel’s violence against the Palestinians, was one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq.
The US is currently playing the role of the “proxy soldier” for Israel. Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the 9/11 attacks, told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 2002: ”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” he continued, ”and this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell [to Americans],” said Mr Zelikow.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot claims that the Bush doctrine “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine [the mouthpiece of the American Jewish Committee], the neocon bible.” Of course any one mentioning Israel will be blackmailed by being “anti-Semitism”, which is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them, and any who would publish them. Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites. Arabs and Israelis are Semites.
Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman writes of the neocons, “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 odour at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith”.
Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post 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 Defence Department and Elliott Abrams, (the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz) of the National Security Council. 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”, he noted.
Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA analysts for may years, wrote recently, “the suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong” They noted that, “many Israeli analysts believe this”. They cited Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar in a Ha'aretz column “that [Richard] Perle, [Douglas] Feith, and their fellow strategists ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests’”.
Furthermore, peace activist Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom, who wrote a biography of Ariel Sharon and knows him well, has written many times that Sharon “has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the Middle East and that “the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon”. The Israeli project is an imperialist project extending from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean. Iraq is the platform for this “imperialist thrust” eastwards. Israel penetration into Iraq on the back of US tanks is a case in point. Seymour Hersh recently reported in the New Yorker that, Israel is using Kurdish militias in northern Iraq to destabilise Iran.
It is a worrying concern that mainstream media pundits and Western liberals remain silence on this dangerous and violence ideology of few reactionary, self-serving individuals who hijacking the sorrows of the American people in order to serve the interests of Israel.
The Bush doctrine “is an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not politically unsustainable but diplomatically harmful”, wrote Professor John Ikenberry of George Washington University. “ And if history is a guide, it will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in more hostile and divided world”.
The Bush doctrine, like the Israel doctrine, is doomed to fail. Those who support the US Occupation of Iraq are only opportunists, criminals and thugs. No one welcomes occupation and terror with roses and kisses, let alone US-Israel occupations of Arab lands. Anti-imperialist resentment in Iraq is deeply embedded in the Iraqi national psyche, and no American violence will shake it.
The only peaceful solution for the current tragedy and violence is for American allies and civilised citizens to reject the Bush-Israel doctrine and convince the US and Israel to end their occupations of Iraq and Palestine and live like civilised nations.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth Western Australia: He can be reached at e-mail: [email protected]
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