End
Of The Strongmen
By Jonathan Cook
in Nazareth
20 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The era of the Middle East strongman,
propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over.
His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the
American Administration’s favoured model across the region.
Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing,
the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and
Iran could soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly
planning on behalf of the US. The reverberations would likely consume
the region.
Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the
West’s failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East.
Were we more engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive
in opposing Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq,
the sectarian fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of
course, that, without the West’s benevolent guidance, Arab societies
are incapable of dragging themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.
But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have
been engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine,
Lebanon and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash
of political ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about
whether to submit to, or resist, American and Israeli interference.
Where the factions derive their funding and legitimacy from -- increasingly
a choice between the US or Iran -- seems to determine where they stand
in this confrontation.
Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between
their democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted -- in free
elections they showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realise
that goal -- and the basic need to put food on the table for their families.
The combined Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government,
and the Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle
for control of resources inevitable.
Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe
that the country’s future lies with attracting Western capital
and welcoming Washington’s embrace, while others regard America’s
interest as cover for Israel realising its long-standing design to turn
Lebanon into a vassal state, with or without a military occupation.
Which side the Lebanese choose in the current stand-off reflects their
judgment of how plausible are claims of Western and Israeli benevolence.
And the slaughter in Iraq is not simply the result of lawlessness --
as is commonly portrayed -- but also about rival groups, the nebulous
“insurgents”, employing various brutal and conflicting strategies:
trying to oust the Anglo-American occupiers and punish local Iraqis
suspected of collaborating with them; extracting benefits from the puppet
Iraqi regime; and jockeying for positions of influence before the inevitable
grand American exit.
All of these outcomes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq could have been
foreseen -- and almost certainly were. More than that, it looks increasingly
like the growing tensions and carnage were planned. Rather than an absence
of Western intervention being the problem, the violence and fragmentation
of these societies seems to be precisely the goal of the intervention.
Evidence has emerged in Britain that suggests such was the case in Iraq.
Testimony given by a senior British official to the 2004 Butler inquiry
investigating intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of
Iraq was belatedly published last week, after attempts by the Foreign
Office to hush it up.
Carne Ross, a diplomat who helped to negotiate several UN security council
resolutions on Iraq, told the inquiry that British and US officials
knew very well that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that bringing him
down would lead to chaos.
“I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view
in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said,
adding: “At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the
US raised the subject, that ‘regime change’ was inadvisable,
primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.”
The obvious question, then, is why would the US want and intend civil
war raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic
interests like oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally,
Israel?
Until the presidency of Bush Jnr, the American doctrine in the Middle
East had been to install or support strongmen, containing them or replacing
them when they fell out of favour. So why the dramatic and, at least
ostensibly, incomprehensible shift in policy?
Why allow Yasser Arafat’s isolation and humiliation in the occupied
territories, followed by Mahmoud Abbas’s, when both could have
easily been cultivated as strongmen had they been given the tools they
were implicitly promised by the Oslo process: a state, the pomp of office
and the coercive means to impose their will on rival groups like Hamas?
With almost nothing to show for years of concessions to Israel, both
looked to the Palestinian public more like lapdogs rather than rottweilers.
Why make a sudden and unnecessary fuss about Syria’s interference
in Lebanon, an interference that the West originally encouraged as a
way to keep the lid on sectarian violence? Why oust Damascus from the
scene and then promote a “Cedar Revolution” that pandered
to the interests of only one section of Lebanese society and continued
to ignore the concerns of the largest and most dissatisfied community,
the Shia? What possible outcome could there be but simmering resentment
and the threat of violence?
And why invade Iraq on the hollow pretext of locating WMDs and then
dislodge its dictator, Saddam Hussein, who for decades had been armed
and supported by the US and had very effectively, if ruthlessly, held
Iraq together? Again from Carne’s testimony, it is clear that
no one in the intelligence community believed Saddam really posed a
threat to the West. Even if he needed “containing” or possibly
replacing, as Bush’s predecessors appeared to believe, why did
the president decide simply to overthrow him, leaving a power void at
Iraq’s heart?
The answer appears to be related to the rise of the neocons, who finally
grasped power with the election of President Bush. Israel’s most
popular news website, Ynet, recently observed of the neocons: “Many
are Jews who share a love for Israel.”
The neocons’ vision of American global supremacy is intimately
tied to, and dependent on, Israel’s regional supremacy. It is
not so much that the neocons choose to promote Israel’s interests
above those of America as that they see the two nations’ interests
as inseparable and identical.
Although usually identified with the Israeli right, the neocons’
political alliance with the Likud mainly reflects their support for
adopting belligerent means to achieve their policy goals rather than
the goals themselves.
The consistent aim of Israeli policy over decades, from the left and
right, has been to acquire more territory at the expense of its neighbours
and entrench its regional supremacy through “divide and rule”,
particularly of its weakest neighbours such as the Palestinians and
the Lebanese. It has always abominated Arab nationalism, especially
of the Baathist variety in Iraq and Syria, because it appeared immune
to Israeli intrigues.
For many years Israel favoured the same traditional colonial approach
the West used in the Middle East, where Britain, France and later the
US supported autocratic leaders, usually from minority populations,
to rule over the majority in the new states they had created, whether
Christians in Lebanon, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, or Hashemites
in Jordan. The majority was thereby weakened, and the minority forced
to become dependent on colonial favours to maintain its privileged position.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, for example, was similarly
designed to anoint a Christian strongman and US stooge, Bashir Gemayel,
as a compliant president who would agree to an anti-Syrian alliance
with Israel.
But decades of controlling and oppressing Palestinian society allowed
Israel to develop a different approach to divide and rule: what might
be termed organised chaos, or the “discord” model, one that
came to dominate first its thinking and later that of the neocons.
During its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel preferred discord
to a strongman, aware that a pre-requisite of the latter would be the
creation of a Palestinian state and its furnishing with a well-armed
security force. Neither option was ever seriously contemplated.
Only briefly under international pressure was Israel forced to relent
and partially adopt the strongman model by allowing the return of Yasser
Arafat from exile. But Israel’s reticence in giving Arafat the
means to assert his rule and suppress his rivals, such as Hamas, led
inevitably to conflict between the Palestinian president and Israel
that ended in the second intifada and the readoption of the discord
model.
This latter approach exploits the fault lines in Palestinian society
to exacerbate tensions and violence. Initially Israel achieved this
by promoting rivalry between regional and clan leaders who were forced
to compete for Israel’s patronage. Later Israel encouraged the
emergence of Islamic extremism, especially in the form of Hamas, as
a counterweight to the growing popularity of the secular nationalism
of Arafat’s Fatah party.
Israel’s discord model is now reaching its apotheosis: low-level
and permanent civil war between the old guard of Fatah and the upstarts
of Hamas. This kind of Palestinian in-fighting usefully depletes the
society’s energies and its ability to organise against the real
enemy: Israel and its enduring occupation.
The neocons, it appears, have been impressed with this model and wanted
to export it to other Middle Eastern states. Under Bush they sold it
to the White House as the solution to the problems of Iraq and Lebanon,
and ultimately of Iran and Syria too.
The provoking of civil war certainly seemed to be the goal of Israel’s
assault on Lebanon over the summer. The attack failed, as even Israelis
admit, because Lebanese society rallied behind Hizbullah’s impressive
show of resistance rather than, as was hoped, turning on the Shia militia.
Last week the Israeli website Ynet interviewed Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli
citizen and co-founder of MEMRI, a service translating Arab leaders’
speeches that is widely suspected of having ties with Israel’s
security services. She is also the wife of David Wurmser, a senior neocon
adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Meyrav Wurmser revealed that the American Administration had publicly
dragged its feet during Israel’s assault on Lebanon because it
was waiting for Israel to expand its attack to Syria.
“The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did
not fight against the Syrians … The neocons are responsible for
the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space … They believed
that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought
that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah.
It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran,
but the thought was that its [Iran’s] strategic and important
ally [Syria] should be hit.”
Wurmser continued: “It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite
revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab
country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow
for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic
map in the Middle East.”
Neocons talk a great deal about changing maps in the Middle East. Like
Israel’s dismemberment of the occupied territories into ever-smaller
ghettos, Iraq is being severed into feuding mini-states. Civil war,
it is hoped, will redirect Iraqis’ energies away from resistance
to the US occupation and into more negative outcomes.
Similar fates appear to be awaiting Iran and Syria, at least if the
neocons, despite their waning influence, manage to realise their vision
in Bush’s last two years.
The reason is that a chaotic and feuding Middle East, although it would
be a disaster in the view of most informed observers, appears to be
greatly desired by Israel and its neocon allies. They believe that the
whole Middle East can be run successfully the way Israel has run its
Palestinian populations inside the occupied territories, where religious
and secular divisions have been accentuated, and inside Israel itself,
where for many decades Arab citizens were “de-Palestinianised”
and turned into identity-starved and quiescent Muslims, Christians,
Druze and Bedouin.
That conclusion may look foolhardy, but then again so does the White
House’s view that it is engaged in a “clash of civilisations”
which it can win with a “war on terror”.
All states are capable of acting in an irrational or self-destructive
manner, but Israel and its supporters may be more vulnerable to this
failing than most. That is because Israelis’ perception of their
region and their future has been grossly distorted by the official state
ideology, Zionism, with its belief in Israel’s inalienable right
to preserve itself as an ethnic state; its confused messianic assumptions,
strange for a secular ideology, about Jews returning to a land promised
by God; and its contempt for, and refusal to understand, everything
Arab or Muslim.
If we expect rational behaviour from Israel or its neocon allies, more
fool us.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State” is recently published by Pluto Press. His
website is www.jkcook.net
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