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Why the US and Israel Should
Lose Middle East Wars
BILL CHRISTISON
Counterpunch
Tuesday Aug 28, 2007
George
W. Bush has once again thrown down the gauntlet. The Mideast wars
of the United States, he announced to the Veterans of Foreign
Wars National Convention on August 22, must end only with a U.S.
victory. He has not wavered in this position since September 11,
2001. The unspoken but real purpose of his efforts has been and
will be to concentrate increasing power over the Middle East in
the hands of the small group of rich and greedy elites who rule
the U.S. and Israel today, and perhaps he will achieve this goal.
The more important result, however, will be the elimination of
any movement toward greater global justice, stability, and peace
in the world for decades to come.
It is past time to challenge the arrogant
Mr. Bush directly.
For overwhelming moral reasons, I do
not want the U. S. and Israeli governments to be victorious
in any present or future Middle East wars. I want them to lose
such wars.
U.S. policies in the Middle East
since 9/11 have already caused a million or so killings and have
created more injustice in the world than existed formerly. Every
day results in more killings, more injustice. Unless might does
indeed make right, we have no right whatever to win these wars.
We should lose them.
If the U.S. were to "win"
these wars, whatever that means, more of the world's people than
at present would be ruled by the U.S. Most of these people do
not want to be ruled by the U.S. -- which makes the wars themselves
anti-democratic. That fact alone is reason enough to conclude
that our country should lose these wars.
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My personal belief is that the United
States and Israel will inevitably lose these wars over time in
any case. If this loss is in fact inevitable, conventional wisdom
would argue that it is better for the loss to happen rapidly in
order to hold casualties down. In a continuing civil war over
which outsiders have limited control, however, conventional wisdom
may not apply.
Nevertheless, a truly rapid -- meaning
within the next six months -- acceptance of defeat by the U.S.
and Israel of their own Mideast policies would probably offer
the only possibility of mitigating the blame assigned to these
two nations by the rest of the world for future mass killings
of human beings throughout this unstable area.
Much of global public opinion will in
any case correctly attribute a large residual responsibility to
the U.S. and Israel for the utterly disproportionate and one-sided
killings already carried out since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Further killings that occur
during even a short and rapid transition to inevitable U.S. and
Israeli defeat will only enlarge this residual. But a short, quick,
and determined acceptance of defeat will still reduce to some
extent the charges of U.S. responsibility for future killings.
A lasting peace in the Middle East will
only happen, of course, if the U.S. and Israel are wise enough
publicly (and honestly) to end their drive for joint imperium
over the Middle East and Central Asia and also to cease their
efforts to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria. In other
words, as has long been the case, the U.S. and Israel will need
to make serious long-term changes in their own foreign policies
if they wish to avoid a conflict lasting for generations that
ultimately they cannot win.
As of now, no evidence exists that
either country is willing even to consider such policy changes,
and no evidence exists that either the Republican or Democratic
Parties in the U.S., any political parties in Israel, the military-industrial
complexes of the U.S. and Israel, the Israel lobby in the U.S.,
the U.S. Protestant Christian Right, the Catholic Church, or the
ruling elites of any EU states will bring one jot of meaningful
pressure to bear on the Israeli or the U.S. government to change
their policies.
If change is to come, it must come
from ordinary voters, particularly in the U.S., applying pressure
on the various groups listed above, or from ordinary people succeeding
in setting up new groups or parties that will succeed in bringing
greater pressure to bear. The pressures must be very strong and
very explicit. People must emphasize day after day to both Democratic
and Republican members of Congress and to every presidential candidate
that the U.S. must first and foremost change its own policies.
And people must emphasize to all politicians that the Israel lobby
is one of the strongest forces pressing both Democrats and Republicans
not to change U.S. policies, thereby preventing healthy political
debate in the country. This must stop.
Finally, my hope is that sensible U.S.
voters will agree with the opinions summarized here and in addition
create a groundswell of support for the immediate impeachment
and conviction of Bush and Cheney. This is the only action, in
my view, that opens up the possibility of rapidly bringing about
the necessary changes in U.S. policies.
Other Considerations
Let's say it bluntly. War with Iran is
inevitable before January 2009 unless Bush and Cheney are both
impeached first. New Israeli-U.S. hostilities in Lebanon are also
likely. Either warfare or covert actions conducted by the U.S.
and/or Israel to bring about regime change in Syria are also probable.
But those of us in the U.S. who claim to
be peace activists ought to be ashamed. With rare exceptions,
the powers in the movement are confident that things are already
going our way, what with the Democratic Party's success in the
2006 congressional elections and the continuing disaster the Bush
administration faces in Iraq. Most self-labeled peace activists
think the odds so favor further Democratic victories that, as
a group, we do not need to run any risks or do anything new to
take the presidency away from the Republicans in 2008. It's old
hat, maybe, but the best thing to do, most peace activists believe,
is just to keep talking about withdrawal from Iraq, while patting
ourselves on the back and emphasizing to each other that we are
being admirably mature and responsible in not moving too fast
toward actual withdrawal.
So let's admit that many of us sustain
ourselves with hot air even when the subject is limited to Iraq.
Let's admit too that few want to discuss the role Israel played
in encouraging the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, because that would
be unnecessarily criticizing Israel. In fact, both the Israel
lobby and the Israeli government probably concluded as early as
May 2003 that they had already achieved their own principal objectives
in Iraq, and that it was counterproductive for them to waste their
own credibility by continuing to oppose every aspect of the U.S.
peace movement's criticism of the war. Even before things began
going wrong in the war's execution, Israeli propagandists were
soft-pedaling their own top officials' support for the war. But
underneath, the support was definitely there, hard and firm.
When it comes to matters in the Middle
East other than Iraq, most peaceniks are even less willing to
address questions of the Israel lobby's involvement in U.S. policymaking.
Talking about this would be the surest way to reveal the disunity
and embarrassing differences within the so-called peace movement.
In order to avoid an open discussion, it is easier for most of
us simply to ignore the voluminous evidence that both the lobby,
and senior U.S. officials who are in effect part of the lobby,
are pushing the U.S. toward war, particularly with Iran, but also
toward regime change in Syria and resumed hostilities in Lebanon.
If it comes to war with any or all of these countries, most peace
types note that they are not pushing for it, and they will silently
hope more wars do not erupt, but they will not make a lot of noise
about stopping such wars before they start. In this, they are
simply following most of the leaders of the Democratic Party.
All of this, of course, is logically nonsensical.
Take a minute and think of the mess the peace movement has created.
First, the very name reflects the movement's shallowness. What
good is a hypocritical, utterly out-of-touch and ineffective "peace
movement," when beyond question ordinary people on this earth
want justice before they want peace? The U.S. government and its
ultra-close ally Israel actually want more unjust colonial wars
and covert action to strengthen their own already unjust influence
over a major part of the globe, in this case the Middle East.
Peace above all is for those who support the status quo,
but if you're in that category you're in a small minority. So
let's banish the peace movement and get a global justice
movement going. Peace may be all right long-term, but if you're
one of the angry billions on this earth constantly surrounded
by a stench of injustice that smothers all hope, chances are that,
in your mind, peace should follow justice, not precede it. Chances
are, in fact, that you have no favorable thoughts of any type
about U.S. peaceniks.
Let's look at another question that is
not just about the Middle East but is about the broader Islamic
world as well. It seems clear that Samuel Huntington's concept
of a clash of civilizations has expanded its intellectual
appeal since September 11, 2001. We do indeed seem to have an
example of a clash of civilizations that has become a growing
force today. This force is nourished by the desire of Muslims
for real freedom from the increasing political domination over
the Islamic peoples by Western (Christian and Jewish) parts of
the world. The principal Islamic motivation has little to do with
"hatred of our freedoms." The Islamic hatred (and it
does exist) is aimed at U.S., Israeli, and Western policies.
Huntington's book was published in the
mid-1990s, and the events of September 11 can be seen as a major
example of this type of clash of civilizations. The point to be
made here is that ideas in the book, conveniently titled The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order,
lend themselves to being twisted fairly easily into ideas that
the neocons, the Israel lobby, recent Israeli governments, EU
elites, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Christian Right in
the U.S., and the Bush administration itself all have established
as part of their own views toward the Islamic world. The book
therefore becomes an object of considerable value to the present
rulers of the United States and Israel, since it can be seen as
providing intellectual justification not only for the special
relationship between these two nations, but also for the newly
cordial ties of the European Union to U.S. and Israeli policies.
Those among us who wish to counter the
notion that a clash of civilizations justifies what the U.S. and
Israel are doing in the Middle East today should stand up and
state their opposition loudly and directly. Supporters of the
concept that the "clash" is a significant part of the
present global political system seem to suggest that the very
existence of the clash makes unjust, oppressive treatment of Islamic
people somehow acceptable. But we should point out that the existence
of a real clash is questionable, and that in any case injustice
and oppression are never acceptable. People everywhere should
realize that in this increasingly globalized world the importance
of nationalism is beginning to fade. All of us should begin thinking
much more about what are the best policies for the entire world
to pursue, not what are the best policies for their own nations.
To start this ball rolling, those who happen to live in the U.S.
should stop thinking of themselves as exceptional. Americans are
perfectly average -- no better and no worse than average people
everywhere else. There are some -- a few -- exceptional people
anywhere you look, but most of us do not make the cut.
We should emphasize that in today's world
a Middle East empire dominated jointly by two nationalist powers,
the U.S. and Israel, is not only anti-democratic, but is impossibly
anachronistic as well.
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