Dog & Pony Show in Israeli Occupied Territories
December 20, 2006
We all know that the Palestinian Authority has a flag and a post office, but the third great achievement of the Oslo “peace process” has been hitherto overlooked — a red carpet.
So the poodle is now in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (yes, despite the red carpet, the territories still remain occupied) and he promises to bring Palestinians the same thing he has already inundated Iraqis with – dogshit (otherwise known as his “Middle East plan”). The Guardian reports:
Tony Blair yesterday proposed a controversial plan to bolster Mahmoud Abbas in his escalating battle against Hamas by funnelling millions of pounds in aid directly to security forces under the Palestinian leader’s control.The risky move…has been agreed with the US …Mr Blair is suggesting that some of the aid be used to fund the civilian police and increase Mr Abbas’s own security guard, seen as one of the more reliable forces in the region. The guard could be used to secure border passages. Some reports say as much as $26m (£13.4m) in aid would be required.
Ed Balls, the economic secretary to the Treasury, arrived in Israel last night to discuss details of the aid.
In Britain, there must clearly be elatation that the Prime Minister is attempting to elevate himself from poodle to statesman.
Mr Blair faced the accusation at home that he was in danger of funding militias in a country on the brink of civil war.
What about the Palestinians? They must surely have been bowled over by such visionary diplocmay.
Tell us Karma Nabulsi, what do you think?
What we are witnessing today is the horrific and inevitable outcome of a process of deliberate coercion, designed to force an occupied people to surrender their elected representatives.
Surely there must be someone who acknowledges Blair diplomatic achievement?
Mr Olmert praised Mr Blair’s “good and interesting ideas”, saying it was in every one’s interest for the “moderate [Palestinian] elements to be strengthened”.
So Mahmoud Abbas, in this difficult hour for Palestine, when children are being gunned down by Israeli soldiers every day, the entire population is being starved, what message do you have for the Israeli Prime Minister, the architect of these atrocities?
Mr Abbas…said he was ready to meet Mr Olmert, saying: “We need each other. We have a joint cause.”
Small step forward for a poodle; giant leap backward for humanity.
Iconic Burgalry: Lolita and Beyond
December 19, 2006
“The cover of RLT is an iconic burglary. It photographically kidnaps two young Iranian women, while they are busy reading a newspaper, following the parliamentary election in their homeland, and thus participating in the democratic aspirations of their people, and incarcerates them inside a colonial harem” — Hamid Dabashi, in Lolita and Beyond
The following excerpt from Hamid Dabashi’s essay traces the Orientalist genealogy of the representation of Irani girls on the cover of Azar Nafisi’s novel.
By far the most immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its cover, which shows two female teenagers bending their heads forward in an obvious gesture of reading something. What exactly is it they are reading, we do not see or know. Over their heads we read “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” The immediate suggestion is very simple. The subject of the book purports to be reading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” in Tehran, and here are two Iranian-looking teenagers in their headscarves reading (one thing or another). The two young women appear happily engaged with what they are reading, and they do so in such an endearing way that solicits sympathy, and even evokes complicity. What better picture to represent the idea–leaving it to the imagination of the observer that they are indeed reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita ? Right? Wrong.
A moment of pause on this cover begins to reveal something entirely different. Under the banner of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the image and the caption put together–in a classical case best read and analysed by Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay on “The Photographic Message”–suggest the tantalising addition of an Oriental twist to the most notorious case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Both as social sign and as literary signifier, the term “Lolita” invokes illicit sex with teenagers. The covered heads of these two Iranian teenagers thus suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes a phantasmagoric Oriental fantasy and lends it to the most lurid case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Under the rubric that he called a photographic paradox, Barthes gave a brilliant diagnosis of how such imitative arts as photography “comprises two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the matter in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.” (Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in A Barthes Reader. Hills and Wang, 1982: 195-198).
The denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading “Lolita” in Tehran–they are reading (“Lolita”), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that–illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran ? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion–as with astonishment asking, “can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?”–competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against a phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of the US empire in New York.
One of the most common clichés of the desirable Orient is the under-aged men and women, staged in numerous Orientalist paintings . Sir Frank Dicksee’s “Leila” (1892) and William Clarke Wontner, “Safie, One of the Three Ladies of Baghdad” (undated) are among the most immediate archeological traces of the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran, itself a photographic updating of a long tradition in Orientalist painting.
Equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women–staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995). In his study of these colonially manufactured photographs, Malek Alloula has demonstrated how the pathological colonial phantasm generated and sustained what Barthes has called “the degree zero” of photographic evidence to represent and own the colonised body. I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage “girls” and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi’s book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes’ binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are “Reading Lolita”–with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of “in Tehran.” In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami–the iconic representation of the reformist movement–out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading “Lolita” strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.
Dog & Shit
December 19, 2006
Comment is superfluous.
Iraq’s Death Squads
December 18, 2006
Despite the dodgy conclusion echoing Bush and Blair, this Channel 4 documentary provides valuable insights into Iraq’s horrifying daily realities. The film fails, however, to link the activities encouraged by the Ministry of Interior to the supervising occupation authorities.
Robert Fisk has been speaking for some time about an attempt by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq.
The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…
We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting – that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide – is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.
Lets also not forget the event (which has since been swept under) of the two British SRS men, dressed as members of the Mahdi Army, who were captured with explosives in their car. There had already been talk of the Pentagon employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis. The appointment of John Negroponte, who oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the ’80s, as US ambssador to Iraq did little to allay fears of US designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupations interests in two important ways: one, Iraqi fire directed at each other takes the heat off the occupier; two, it furnishes the rationale for a continued presence of the occupiers who can then claim that their presence is necessary to prevent a civil war – a conclusion reinforced by this documentary.
Carter on AIPAC and Israeli Apartheid
December 17, 2006
Carter’s recent book on Palestine, despite its various shortcomings, is a valuable contribution to the debate. Besides rattling the Zionists, it has opened up the debate in the American mainstream media for the first time. Earlier in the year, when Mearsheimer & Walt published their paper on the Israel Lobby, it generated heated debate but still failed to make it into the networks. Carter has finally succeeded in breaking the taboo, not just on the subject, but also on Israel being called by its true name – Apartheid.
While it is important to support Carter as the attack-dogs of the Lobby rush to smear and silence, the flaws in his argument need pointing out. Israel’s Apartheid obtains not only in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but also within its pre-’67 borders through various laws that discriminate against its 20 percent non-Jewish citizens. Carter is also wrong in suggesting that AIPAC’s activities are perfectly legitimate as unlike other similar lobbies, it is not registered as an agent for a foreign government hence allowing it to have a much more invasive presence and insidious grip on the American political establishment.
I have just received my copy of the book, I’ll review it here later. For now, I would like to remind all that it is important that this time we do not allow the debate to be buried under a pile of the lobby’s defamatory manure.
Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian Alliance Against Palestine II
December 16, 2006
It has been a bad year for Israel. First, the Mearsheimer & Walt paper, then its failure to enlist US military might in fighting another war for it against Iran, then Carter’s broadside against its Apartheid regime, and now comes the Baker-Hamilton Commission’s report.
How does Israel meet this challenge?
New York Times reports:
Senior Israeli officials have met in recent months not only with Jordanians and Egyptians but — most notably — with Saudis…
“The Saudis are saying to us, ‘We are afraid of Iran and want to work with you but the Palestinian issue has to be solved,’ ” a senior Israeli official said, insisting on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Their “overriding concern” according to the paper ”is the rise of Iran and its nuclear program”. Having supported Israel against Hizbullah in the invasion of Lebanon earlier this year, the three countries are using sectarian fears to conceal their own concern with the rise of popular movements in Lebanon and Palestine. In Palestine, they are openly collaborating with Israel and the United States in arming Fatah’s thugs against the Hamas government. So NYT tells us:
He added that the growing domination of Palestinian politics by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that calls for Israel’s destruction and has received Iranian aid, is a threat to secular Arab rulers just as it is to Israel. So they want to boost the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who favors negotiations with Israel — and that, too, coincides with Israel’s view.
Notice the use of the word “secular Arab rulers”? Thats quite an achievement for Saudi Arabia, which within a year has gone from becoming a medieval fundamentalist monarchy first to a “moderate” and now a “secular” Arab state. Bear in mind that this is the same Ethan Bronner, New York Times‘ Middle-East “expert”, who had given Alan Dershowitz’s famous hoax, The Case for Israel, a rave review in the pages of the same paper.
For an excellent analysis of the machinations underway to create a civil war in Lebanon with Fatah acting as the new SLA, check out Joseph Massad’s Pinochet in Palestine.
Dogshit!
December 16, 2006
So, the poodle has made another mess. For the first time in British history, a serving Prime Minister was interviewed by the Police over allegations of distributing honours for cash. The interview was conveniently timed with the release of the findings of the investigation into Princess Diana and Dodi El Fayed’s deaths.
The only thing that is surprising about this news is its timing. It has been well known for nearly ten years that the government has been rewarding generous donors to the party with peerages and positions. As I had shown earlier in an investigation of the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel, its main fundraiser, Michael Levy, and one of the donors, David Sainsbury, were not only ennobled, but also appointed to questionable positions with obvious conflicts of interests.
Let us start with Lord Levy. Here is an introduction to the man from my earlier investigation:
Michael Abraham Levyis a former chairman of the Jewish Care Community Foundation, a member of the Jewish Agency World Board of Governors, and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. According to Andrew Porter of The Business, Levy expressed his willingness “to raise large sums of money for the party” which led to a “tacit understanding that Labour would never again, while Blair was leader, be anti-Israel”. The partnership proceeded as Levy started inviting potential donors for tennis at his palatial home where Tony Blair would join them for a set or two. Levy would then proceed to ask the guests for donations after Blair had left. The genius of Levy’s fundraising strategy ensured that most of Labour’s election funds came from private sources, rather than its traditional source – the trade unions, thereby weakening their say over policy.
Levy’s investment eventually paid off, with Blair’s accession to power. The reward was not long in coming as Levy was ennobled and subsequently retained as a “special envoy” to the Middle-East, leading predictably to the development of a strong pro-Israel line. Given the fact that Levy has both a business and a house in Israel and his son Daniel used to work for Yossi Beilin – the former Justice Minister of Israel – speaks of a serious conflict of interest, especially when he is the man assigned by Blair to negotiate impartially with Palestinians and Israelis. The fact that Levy acted as a fundraiser for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak casts further doubt on his capacity for impartiality.
In his book Labour Party Plc., David Osler is incredulous at the “astonishing appointment” of Levy as the PM’s special envoy to the Middle East giving his “open espousal of Zionism and ties to the Israeli establishment” which “automatically compromise him in Arab eyes”. Osler points out that “there is nothing on his curriculum vitae that indicates any experince relevant to this delicate diplomatic role in a perpetually crisis-ridden region”. The former record company executive was described as “schlock merchant” by his close friend Pete Waterman but given the roster to bands he signed — Alivn Stardust, Bad Manners and the Darts — Osler observes that “even that description grossly overestimates the man’s musical tastes”. (p.59)
Moving on now to Lord David Sainsbury. In September 1997 Sainsbury gave Labour its biggest ever single donation, on October 3 1997 he was made a life peer by Blair and a year later Minister for Science. Mark Seddon, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, told the BBC, “In any other country I think a government minister donating such vast amounts of money and effectively buying a political party would be seen for what it is, a form of corruption of the political process.” Seddon said it was causing Labour to lose members amid criticism from the grassroots that the party was now “in the pockets of the powerful and the rich.”
Sainsbury is also a member of the cabinet biotechnology committee, Sci-Bio, responsible for national policy on GM crops and foods, and as such is a key adviser to Blair on GM technology.
In the wake of the scandal, although Sainsbury has finally had to resign, but this comes nearly 8 years too late, as the conflict of interest was obvious from day one. According to Spinwatch:
Through his Gatsby Charitable Foundation Lord Sainsbury has also put millions into the study of plant genetics. Gatsby gives approximately 2 million a year to the Sainsbury Laboratory of the John Innes Centre, which does research into GM crops. Lord Sainsbury helped found the Laboratory in 1987 and his Gatsby Foundation remains its principal source of funding, although it also receives over 800,000 a year from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) , for which Sainsbury is responsible in his ministerial role. Its grant has increased several fold during Sainsbury’s time as minister.
Like his biotech investments, his Gatsby contributions have been administered through a blind trust run by his solicitor Judith Portrait since Sainsbury became UK Science Minister. Portrait is also a Gatsby trustee. Although he does not attend Gatsby meetings or make decisions, Sainsbury retains the power to appoint and dismiss its trustees.
For some, the choice of an unelected biotech investor and food industrialist to be Science Minister, based within the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), is more than emblematic of the UK’s corporate-science culture.
Authors: Howard Friel & Richard Falk
Publisher: Verso
Hardback: 320 pages
In May 2003 when it was revealed that Jayson Blair, a staff reporter, had fabricated and plagiarized many of his domestic human interest stories, a 7000-word front-page report in the New York Times described it as ‘a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper’.
About the same time in Iraq a bloody invasion had failed to uncover the Weapons of Mass Destruction that served as the rationale for the paper’s endorsement of the war. No apologies were forthcoming. Whereas in the Blair case it was only the credibility of the paper that suffered, the latter has since translated into hundreds of thousands of deaths. When the paper did issue an apology, it was a year later, was only 1,100 words long and was tucked safely away from intruding eyes in the inner pages.
Unlike Blair, serial fabricators like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon were never mentioned by name and the role of the editorial page in reinforcing government propaganda was overlooked entirely. In their scathing study, The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal that far from a lapse, this behavior is consistent with the paper’s coverage of past conflicts which were avoidable had International Law been used as a standard for judging the merits of foreign policy.
The New York Times has been variously described as the ‘paper of record’, the ‘agenda setting newspaper’ and the ‘most important newspaper in the world’. Its influence, at least within the United States, is undeniable. It is often held up as the paragon of journalistic excellence within the US. This reputation confers responsibilities best articulated in the words of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black who in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers described the media’s role as one of ‘bar[ing] the secrets of government and inform[ing] the people’.
But as Friel & Falk demonstrate, the New York Times, since its birth, has adopted a policy of ‘impartiality’ and ‘non-crusading…centrism’ which frequently amounts to mere positioning with little regard for fact or law. The only consistency is in accommodating both the liberal and conservative point of views, regardless of merit, in a peculiarly American notion of ‘balance’. Through various case studies and examples Friel & Falk expose the deleterious effects of this policy on the country’s foreign policy.
Friel & Falk show the egregious absence of the International Law dimension in debates on contemporary foreign policy. The paper has consistently refused to publish International Law arguments against a given policy, however, column space is indeed provided so long as the legal expert’s views are consistent with current government policy. The paper invokes international law only when an official enemy is in breach, but in the case of the US government it simply does not apply. This trend is reinforced in the paper’s editorial pages which, true to its policy of ‘non-crusading…centrism’, acknowledge the merits of international law, but prescribe unilateral action if the laws do not accommodate US foreign policy.
Tracing back the genealogy of this editorial line, Friel & Falk expose the recurring patters in the paper’s coverage of earlier conflicts where the failure to consider the legality of foreign policy options removed the single check which may have helped avoid disaster. Vietnam and Iraq are the obvious examples. They argue that even if the paper had no way of knowing if the Gulf of Tonkin incident were real, and whether Iraq possessed WMD’s, had the paper emphasized the illegality of US actions in both cases, the truth of both claims could have been ascertained in due time without needless loss of life.
But as they demonstrate, this constitutes the least of the paper’s concerns. Far from exercising its constitutional role of holding the government’s feet to the fire and creating an informed citizenry, the paper offered its pages to propagandists like Kenneth Pollack and liberal apologists like Michael Ignatieff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, George Packer and Ruth Wedgwood. Whereas Ignatieff, a leading scholar on human rights used the paper’s pages to argue in favor of torture, Ruth Wedgwood, its resident International Law expert, used her column space arguing the irrelevance of international law.
Friel & Falk use the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles to emphasize the enormity of the crimes committed in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. They meticulously expose the bloodier side of ‘democracy promotion’ as the US-UK juggernaut rolled over the Iraqi population. True to its character, the New York Times endeavored to cast maximum doubt over reports of the atrocities committed by the occupiers. With an emphasis on detail and a dearth of facts – easily verifiable in most instances, as demonstrated with examples from the British press – the paper tried to balance its need to convey journalistic rigor with its long standing policy of “non-crusading…centrism”.
In three excellent case studies – Vietnam, Nicaragua and Venezuela – Friel & Falk further illustrate the paper’s record vis-à-vis international law as it endorsed foreign policy despite the fact that it was in clear breach of international law. This, they argue, is symptomatic of the media’s failure in the world’s most powerful democracy to fulfill its role in the system of checks and balances. Integrating international law as a standard for judging foreign policy into the editorial practices is the only way, they argue, that future catastrophes could be avoided.
Friel & Falk’s incisive analysis comes as a searing indictment of the America’s most reputed media organization which has so often facilitated the breach of the constitution and international law by providing cover to government excesses. Not given to polemics or hyperbole the authors let the sheer weight of their evidence incriminate the mediocre journalism that emanates from the ill-conceived notion of ‘balance’. This book could not be recommended highly enough. At a time when a menacing storm looms over Iran and the threat of nuclear apocalypse is all too real, journalists and concerned citizens would do well to internalize these arguments.
Weapons of Mass Destruction Finally Discovered
December 13, 2006
Three years ago Iraq was invaded for the alleged posession of WMDs. Since then, more than 655,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, its infrastructure ruined, its heritage destroyed, yet no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Or so we thought.
The WMDs have been finally discovered — in Israel.
After decades in which Israel has stuck to a doctrine of nuclear ambiguity, Mr Olmert let slip during an interview in Germany that Israel did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.
The leaders had argued that they would go to any lengths to prevent a rogue regime from possessing WMDs that routinely flouts international law, threatens its neighbors and abuses human rights at home. Let hope they invade soon.
But what about the EU? With its committment against proliferation of nuclear weapons and its tough stance on Iran, surely it must be demanding tough action now that the rogue Israeli regime has come clean on its posession of nuclear weapons, even if the fact is well known worldwide. Sanctions at least?
AFP Reports:
The Finnish presidency of the European Union called on Wednesday for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to explain his apparent admission that the Jewish state has nuclear weapons.
“I think that Mr Olmert must explain more fully what this information means,” Finnish Defence Minister Seppo Kaariainen said in German newspaper Berliner Zeitung.
Something tells me the failure of comprehension has nothing to do with the EU president’s language skills.
What about EU’s committment to nonproliferation. What tough measures do they have in mind?
“The EU will be watching very closely to see what reaction the Israeli explanation provokes.”
Baker-Hamilton and the Myth of the Oil War
December 11, 2006
The publication of the ISG report has elicited a strong reaction from across the political spectrum. As people on the left and right cherry pick facts to suit their own ideological predispositions, important aspects of the report have been for the most part overlooked. To the right, the mention of phased withdrawal and dialogue with Iran and Syria is surrendering American interests; to the left the recommendation to privatize Iraqi oil is a confirmation that the war was all about oil.
Both are wrong.
In order to understand the significance of the report, three important aspects need to be analyzed: (1) the recommendations of the report; (2) the context of its publication; (3) the composition of the commission.
Recommendations
Most ISG recommendations don’t indicate a major break with longstanding US policy in the region. It is the few, but significant, departures from the prevailing orthodoxy that are noteworthy.
First, the report rejects the neocon design for fragmenting Iraq. Instead, the ISG puts economic interests first and envisages a unified Iraq with oil revenues managed by the central government (p.39).
Second, the report aims to prevent the conflict spreading to Iraq’s neighbors. It stresses negotiations over confrontation and recommends establishing an International Support Structure which “should actively engage Iran and Syria in its diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions” (p.50). If adopted, these recommendations could bring to naught the Syria and Iran Accountability Acts engineered by the Israel Lobby.
The report also recommends direct talks with Grand Ayatullah Sistani, spiritual leader of Iraq’s shia, as well as Muqtada al Sadr, leader of the anti-occupation Mahdi Army (also Shia). (Recommendation 35: p.67)
Third, the report confirms the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the region’s politics and makes some notable recommendations which, besides affirming the need for a solution based on UN 242 and 338, mention the need for addressing the Palestinian’s right of return. (Recommendation 16-17: p.56)
This is clearly an important shift, as Clinton, under the influence of his advisors, mostly from the Israel lobby, had changed the paradigm from international mediation to bilateral negotiations rendering UN resolutions irrelevant. Given the prevailing balance of power this clearly worked to Israel’s advantage.
Fourth, the report reserves some of its most scathing criticism for the neocon dominated Defense Department which it accuses of fraying the tradition of civil-military relationship preventing the military leaders from giving direct advice to the Pentagon, President and NSC. (Recommendation 46: p.76-77)
Beyond these recommendations, however, the report stays true to the general neoliberal orientation and conservative politics of the members of the commission.
While the President is urged to “restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil”(Recommendation 23:p.61), he is advised elsewhere to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” (Recommendation 63:p.85). It also urges Iraq to accept IMF diktats and reduce energy subsidies (Recommendation 62: p.85).
The arms industry also receives a nod in Recommendation 45 which encourages the Iraqi government “to accelerate its Foreign Military Sales requests” (p.75).
The violence in Iraq is blamed entirely on the Iraqis: Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and the ubiquitous Al-Qaida. There is no mention of ending the occupation. Rather, the report recommends Vietnamization (changing the color of the corpses) of the conflict where Iraqis are responsible for the repression and US personnel play an advisory role.
The “phased withdrawal” is a ruse, as the report suggests continued presence of US forces well into the foreseeable future and advises against setting deadlines. Even as Bush is urged to issue public statements rejecting the notion that the United States seeks “permanent military bases within Iraq” (p.60), it adds:
Even after the United States has moved all combat brigades out of Iraq, we would maintain a considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant force in Iraq and with our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan (p.72).
Short of a Saigon scenario, it is clear that the United States will be unwilling to voluntarily abandon bases it has spent billions installing.
From Iraq’s government, the report demands tougher measures against the militias (presumably the Mahdi Army, since it is the only one it singles out) and a reversal of the de-Baathification process to facilitate national reconciliation. It urges the Iraqi government to provide amnesty to insurgents and share oil revenue.
Context
While the provenance of the report is imperialist (albeit of an economic expansionist variety) there is a realization therein of the diminishing American power in the region coupled with economic decline at home. The war against Iraq is seen as precipitating this disaster. Despite its cautious approach, the report is an indictment of the neocon grand design which is seen as jeopardizing long term American interests in the region.
The very first page starts with the admission that “the ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing” (p.1). To underscore this, the report issues a stark warning: “If the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe for Iraq, the United States, the region, and the world” (p.33).
Composition
The 10 member bipartisan commission while mostly conservative in its worldview pointedly excluded neocons from its ranks. The four working groups did include some prominent neocons and Israel lobbyists – William Kristol, Clifford May, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Hillel Fradkin, George Will, Kenneth Pollack, Jeffrey A. White, Martin Indyk and Michael Eisenstadt – but their influence is largely absent except, perhaps, in the demands made of Syria (p.56). [1]
In an important article, Sidney Blumenthal had already noted attempts at sabotaging the ISG proceedings by the few token neocons on the working groups through leaks and demurrals.
Curious Admissions
The report is frank about tactical failures. It reveals that there is “significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq” (p.94); just in the month of October 2006 attacks averaged “180 per day, up from 70 per day in January 2006.”(p.3)
The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals (p.94-95).
It admits that “sectarian cleansing” has displaced 1.6 million within Iraq, and another 1.8 million have fled the country (p.4).
The sprawling Baghdad embassy housing 1,000 personnel has only “33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency” (p.92).
It reveals that the estimates for the final cost of the war run as high as $2 trillion (p.32). It chastises the executive for “bypassing the normal review” which has eroded “budget discipline and accountability”(p.91).
As for the “liberated”, it shows that ’79 percent of Iraqis have a “mostly negative” view of the influence that the United States has in their country’ whereas 61 percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on the occupying forces (p.35).
War for Oil?
Baker’s links to Big Oil and Recommendations 62-63 (encouraging privatization of Iraqi oil) are being held up by some in the anti-War movement as evidence that this war was all about oil. Tom Hayden challenges: “Who said it was not about blood for oil?”
This would indeed clinch the argument, so long as we overlook the fact that Baker, Gates, Eagleburger et al – the foreign policy realists – were not in favour of the war and it was precisely because of their links to Big Oil.
While the neocon plan for reordering the Middle East had for its primary goal the elimination of a potential threat to Israel’s regional hegemony and a policy of “dual rollback” (as opposed to the earlier “dual containment”) to weaken Iran by exploiting a schism between the Irani and Iraqi Shia, it also envisaged flooding the world market with cheap Iraqi oil to undermine OPEC and wean the United States away from Saudi Arabia, long seen as a contender to the “strategic asset” label painstakingly cultivated for Israel.
The neocon plans for Iraq’s oil were clearly at variance with Big Oil’s interests.
Regarding the privatisation of oil, once again, it doesn’t say much. All members of the commission are of neoliberal predisposition. Their recommendation would be no different had Iraq’s primary export been “lettuce and pickles”.
Conclusions
This year has dealt the Israel lobby and its neocon vanguard major blows. The levee holding back criticism of Israel’s disastrous influence on US Middle-East policy has finally broken. The power of the Israel lobby is now part of mainstream debate. Polls are showing a growing awareness of its role in dragging US into war.
In this context the commissioning of the ISG – with Israel’s loyalists in the Bush administration pointedly excluded from its ranks – and the publication of its report take added significance. It belies the notion of Washington power elite as a monolith with unified interests and exposes a significant rift. While it is undeniable that any political calculation on Iraq will inevitably include oil as a factor, it is important to realize that this war was not waged for oil. The ISG report, rightly, identifies the Arab-Israeli conflict as the root of this war.
One would have had to be deluded to expect the establishment figures that constitute the ISG to offer a panacea, but in the limited space available for dissent, they have gone as far as one could reasonably expect. The viciousness of the attacks on the report (and on Baker in particular) are instructive in the fear that it has generated among architects of the Iraq war. With Baker’s history of confronting Israel doing little to allay fears of its supporters, Olmert was relying on the American “Jewish Lobby” (the preferred label for the Israel Lobby in the Israeli media) to ”rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians”. [2]
In the past all efforts to check the power of the Israel Lobby have foundered for the the lack of popular support. It is therefore necessary that the role of the Lobby, in particular the neocons, in manufacturing this war is exposed and the people responsible held to account. Towards this end, the ISG report makes a modest contribution.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a researcher at Spinwatch. His regular commentaries appear on The Fanonite
[1] The working groups also included pundits such as Thomas Friedman and George Packer, which presumably accounts for some of the more amusing aspects of the report (unintentional, of course).For instance, the report suggests that the United States “does its ally Israel no favors in avoiding direct involvement” in the Arab-Israeli conflict (p.54). This, of course, assumes that the $5bn in military aid, grants and loan guarantees Israel receives annually and the countless US vetoes in defence of Israeli intransigence do not constitute “direct involvement”.[2] Paul Craig Roberts offers further analysis of Baker’s confrontation with the Israel Lobby.
