War
Anniversary: Israel,
Palestine Links Absent
By Ramzy Baroud
01 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
Stockholm air was too cold, even for the most animated speaker to excite
a crowd. But I had little choice: thousands of anti-war protesters had
descended on the capital’s main square to show their support of
the Iraqi people on the four-year anniversary of the US invasion, and
to demand an immediate American withdrawal.
As I took to the stage and began my speech, I was struck by the fact
that there was not one Palestinian or Lebanese flag. Even the Venezuelan
flag, which is often an invited sign of defiance and steadfastness,
was absent. If that spectacle was a sign of strategic calculation: to
distance the war in Iraq from all others, it was a grave mistake. I
spoke exactly of that: it’s the same war, the same occupation;
Israel and its neoconservative benefactors are recurring faces in the
Middle East’s ongoing chaos. That is a fact that anti-war movements
everywhere must keep at the forefront if they want their message to
have validity or relevance.
The Israeli connection to
the political ‘realignments’ in the region goes back as
early as 1992. The draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which was
circulated around the Pentagon for weeks before being ‘leaked’
to the New York Times, envisaged a future in which the US establishes
uncontested supremacy in the post cold-war world. Though the guidance
didn’t underscore Israel and its role in that new world, those
who composed the document were primarily the well known Israel crowd
in Washington: then-Defense Department staffers Ewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz,
and America’s man in Iraq a few years later, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Israel’s role in that
‘vision’ didn’t crystallise fully until Richard Pearle,
a leading neocon, along with Douglas Feith and others, proposed “A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” to Israeli
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The policy document envisaged a larger
role for Israel in the region that would equate its influence to that
of the US, not a mere client state but an equal hegemon. It plotted
for the toppling of the Iraqi regime and the re-drawing of the geopolitical
map of the entire region. The same recommendations were marketed to
the Clinton administration in 1997/98 but failed; Clinton, who conceded
much of America’s interests to Israel’s, was, perhaps, not
yet ready to accommodate such a grand vision.
That vision, an Israeli one
to the core, was often presented as exclusively American, most notably
by the Project for the New American Century, established by leading
neocons in 1997, the same individuals who vowed allegiance to Israel
for many years. PNAC was the key group behind the war in Iraq. The moment
terrorists struck the Twin Towers with their deadly airplanes, PNAC
campaigners were ready with a map of the Middle East, pointing out the
countries they wished to bomb and the regimes that needed to be changed.
This should not absolve other
war enthusiasts, but to underestimate the neocons’s leading role,
in which Israel’s interests were part and parcel is to defy damning
facts.
The influence of the neocons has faded, or more accurately has gone
into an early state of hibernation due to the disasters they have inflicted
on the country, the scandals they have generated and the negative media
coverage that they could not possibly survive unscathed.
Based on their vision, the
US administration has hoped that its occupation of Iraq would reconfigure
the region and inspire a New Middle East. Four years later, the US-Israeli
plan is faltering. The stiff resistance in Iraq is costing the US its
military reputation and is strengthening the Iranian position, especially
since Iran has its own proxies in Iraq. Syria is also in a strong position
despite its withdrawal from Lebanon which actualised under intense US-led
international pressure. Hezbollah is keeping the Lebanon domain somewhat
free from Israeli influence. In the final analysis, Israel, though it
has gained through the toppling of Saddam and his regime, is still facing
a serious challenge from Iran. The US is losing on all fronts, politically,
financially and militarily.
The US’ so-called de-Baathification
of the country, also a neocon scheme, was its greatest blunder, for
it meant stripping the country from its most important tools of unity:
the army, civil services, thus it national cohesion. This invited disaster,
which rendered all subsequent US efforts irrelevant. The US military
administration replaced the existing regime apparatus, which affected
millions of people, with a sectarian regime that itself was an amalgam
of Shia exclusivism, pro-Iran political groups, unruly militias, etc.
This new assortment reflected itself in the set up of the Iraqi army,
police, government and parliament; the result was devastating, since
the national army and government were tools of division, a fact that
drove the sectarian divide into a civil war. The US democracy project
— tailored perfectly to fit American interests — was also
an astounding failure, and predictably so. The fact was dismissed that
real democracy doesn’t get delivered via tanks and cruise missiles,
but by a civil society capable of asserting itself without fear or intimidation.
What’s happening in Iraq is America’s definition of democracy
for the Arabs, and certainly not the Arabs’ choice for themselves.
The US will leave Iraq; that
should hardly be questioned. It cannot possibly bear such financial
and material losses indefinitely. The New Statesman reports that caring
for the war wounded alone will cost the country $2.5 trillion in the
next few decades. But to ensure that such military chaos, such awesome
losses of irreplaceable lives on all sides are not repeated, one must
not speak of the Iraq war in too general terms: empire, oil and hegemony,
and lose sight of most relevant specifics. Israel and its benefactors
have played and continue to play a major role in all of this. Ignoring
this fact for the sake of not ‘mixing’ the issues would
simply mean fighting the right cause with the wrong strategy, to say
the least.
Ramzy Baroud
is a US writer and journalist. His latest book: The Second Palestinian
Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London)
is available online via Amazon.com and the University of Michigan Press
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