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Grasping the connections
by
Mohamed Hakki
The most important
outcome of the invasion of Iraq is visible not in the Gulf
country but in Israel. Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon told
Israeli reporters last week that the recent developments
concerning the "roadmap" will eventually be seen "as the end of
the conflict. It is certainly a victory for Israel," he said.
Palestinians, such as Samir
Al-Masharawi, a Fatah leader, had a different take on the matter. "When
the Intifada began, the demand was, 'end the occupation, because the
negotiations led nowhere.' Now, the Palestinians' demands are a return to
the situation right before the Intifada; we are negotiating about this?"
Al-Masharawi said that during
one of his prison terms in an Israeli facility, he and other inmates
demanded chairs and a table. In response, he said, the Israelis took their
mattresses. A month after the prisoners demanded them back, the Israelis
returned the mattresses, giving Al- Masharawi and his fellow prisoners the
sense they had achieved something.
Compare that account to events
following the 1991 Gulf War. First, all major Arab countries, including
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, fought alongside the US. The US promised was
that once the war was finished, it would settle the Arab-Israeli problem.
The result was interminable negotiations in Washington ahead of an
agreement in Oslo.
In a chain of events that is
somewhat similar, the new Bush administration promised to settle the
Palestinian-Israeli problem -- even before dispatching forces to invade
Iraq. President Bush even promised the creation of a Palestinian state
alongside Israel. Regardless of whether the decision to invade Iraq had
already been taken when Bush said he would work to address Palestinian
concerns, that commitment at least confirmed in Arab eyes that there was
recognition somewhere in the administration of the interconnectedness
between the two problems. What the Israelis now perceive, indeed talk
about publicly, is that it was all a sham. The whole business of holding
summits, first in Sharm El- Sheikh, and then in Aqaba, was simply another
ruse. It is unclear whether the Palestinians will even recover their
mattresses this time.
What has changed? Before
President Bush embarked on his trip to Europe and the Middle East last
month, there was sense of optimism. To Arab leaders, Bush looked and
sounded determined. When asked by a reporter whether, with an election
year coming up, the president had the political ability to pressure
Israel, he shot back "of course I can. If I were afraid of making the
decisions necessary for political reasons to move the process forward, I
wouldn't be going [to the region]," Bush said. "I believe that I have
responsibilities, now that the conditions are such to move the process
forward."
All this had changed. Today,
President Bush and his administration are bogged down in attempts to
explain two problems. The first concerns nagging questions about Iraq's
alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Where precisely
was the irrefutable evidence the administration said it had in every
official statement, including the president's State of the Union speech?
And, although the majority of Iraqis were happy to get rid of Saddam
Hussein, it is clear they are not happy with the US military occupation.
If the administration was conned about WMDs, it in turn conned the
American people with predictions that Iraqis would warmly welcome US
soldiers. With the death of US soldiers and Iraqi citizens every day,
Donald Rumsfeld's lame explanations no longer convince anyone -- in the
US, the Arab world or anywhere else. There may very well be some
Ba'athists, or even a few foreigners "resisting" the occupation, but the
administration conned the American public and the whole world about the
facts. The story of WMDs was the last fig leaf. Now the emperor is
completely naked.
The question remains: Who fed
the administration this bag of lies? The last person to expose such
fictions was retired US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA
to Niger to investigate the story that Iraq tried to obtain uranium there
for nuclear weapons. In a statement to the Washington Post, Wilson
said that US and British officials ignored his findings and exaggerated
the public case for invading Iraq. He not only said that the
administration misrepresented the facts, he even asked, what else it was
lying about.
So, where did this information
come from? When George Stephanopolous asked Condoleezza Rice on a Sunday
talk show how such allegations became part of the State of the Union
speech, Rice, looking flabbergasted, responded, "the president was quoting
Prime Minister Blair." What? Then again how did such ideas reach Bush and
Blair? Two writers are now piecing the story together, Patrick Seale, and
Robert Dreyfuss, in the Nation magazine. Those writers said that
current and former US intelligence analysts point their fingers at the
Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, headed by Abram Shulsky, a hawkish
neo- conservative ideologue who got his start in politics working
alongside Elliott Abrams in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office in the
1970s. The Office of Special Plans was set up in the fall of 2001 as a
two-man shop, but it grew into an 18- member nerve centre of the
Pentagon's effort to create disinformation alleging that Iraq possessed
WMDs and had connections with terrorist groups. Much of the garbage
produced by that office found its way into speeches by Rumsfeld, Cheney
and George Bush.
It should be noted that the
office was created after 9/11 by two of the most fervent and determined
neo-cons: Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, and Douglas Feith,
under- secretary of defence for policy, to probe into Saddam's WMD
programmes and his links to Al-Qa'eda, because, it is alleged, they did
not trust other intelligence agencies of the US government to come up with
the goods.
Seale put his finger on the
interconnectedness we mentioned earlier. He calls it the overlapping trend
because it involved many of the same people who are narrowly focussed on
Israel: right- wing Jewish neo-cons. He says, "Most prominent neo-cons are
right-wing Jews, and tend to be pro- Israeli zealots who believe that
American and Israeli interests are inseparable -- much to the alarm of the
liberal pro-peace Jews, whether in America, Europe, or Israel itself.
Friends of Ariel Sharon's Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims.
For them, the cause of 'liberating' Iraq had little to do with the
well-being of Iraqis, just as the cause of 'liberating' Iran and ending
it's nuclear programme -- recently advocated by Shimon Peres -- has little
to do with the well-being of Iranians. What they sought was an improvement
in Israel's military and strategic environment."
So who will put the brakes on
this madness, defend US national interests and give the administration
wise counsel? Congress?
One would certainly hope so.
But Congress refuses to do anything to shed its reputation that it is
Israeli "occupied territory". The House said last week that Israel was
justified in it's "forceful response to Palestinian attacks", and
concluded that Middle East violence would stop only when Palestinian
strikes cease. A House resolution, passed 399-5, condemned attacks on
Israel since Bush, Sharon and Abbas met in Jordan last month to affirm
their support for the US-developed peace plan. Only a handful of lawmakers
warned that the measure, coming on the same day that Islamist militants
agreed to halt attacks on Israel for three months, was one-sided. They
said it says nothing about Israel's attempts to assassinate Islamist
militants and undermines the US role as fair mediator in the peacemaking
efforts.
In the meantime, slowly but
surely, as some of my Jewish friends are telling me, the United States is
becoming a country of the Middle East. It will be in the region for 25 or
maybe 50 years. Against all Israeli expectations, it may evolve into a
force for stability. Virtually every diplomat, every military expert who
has ever been exposed to the Arab-Israeli problem became pro- Arab. The US
may never change the Middle East, but the Middle East will certainly
change the US. It will at least change American perceptions, American bias
towards Israel and against the Arabs. One thing is for sure, nothing will
be the same again.
Source:
by the same author:
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