Iran’s Nuclear Option and the IAEA
February 28, 2007
As should be obvious from my piece for NuclearSpin, I am an opponent of nuclear energy. It is dangerous, dirty and expensive. However, I completely support Iran’s right, guaranteed under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to develop it. In fact, I think Iran should bypass the energy option, and go straight for a nuclear deterrent if it is to avoid the kind of bullying in the future that it is presently experiencing from US-Israel and their numerous minions. This will not only strengthen its defenses, it will also marginalize hardliners, as a confident and assertive Iran will have little need for “tough guys” to stand up to would-be bullies.
But there is a more compelling reason why Iran should not comply with IAEA demands: the body has been pressuring Iran, a country that is a signatory to the NPT and has been following its rules to the letter, under pressure from Israel, a country that hasn’t signed the NPT, posesses a massive thermonuclear arsenal, and is the biggest violator of UN Security Council resolutions. More egregiously, IAEA has been passing the information collected during inspections to the Israeli intelligence (both in the case of Iraq and Iran).
At the moment, I am reading Scott Ritter’s book Target Iran: The Truth About the US Plans for Regime Change, and it has the most exhaustive account of IAEA’s dealings with Iran. In it, Ritter reveals the level of collusion between the Israeli Intelligence and IAEA, which on occasion has turned all its collected data over to the Israelis, in order to get their “expert analysis”. Here are some important excerpts from the book:
IAEA-Israel Nexus
Israeli intelligence teams would often travel to Vienna, and rendezvous with IAEA personnel in hotel rooms used as impromptu safe houses. On the issue of Iraq, the israelis had established a similar level of cooperation with the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team…The relationship involved not only the provision by Israel to the IAEA of intelligence information, but also placing at the disposal of the IAEA the extensive resources of Israel’s intelligence analytical community, where the IAEA could pose question to selected technical experts, or have the results of inspections or other intelligence data reviewed by the Israelis. This relationship…operated with the expressed permission of the Director General… [emphasis added] (p. 49)
Thanks to the IAEA inspections, the United States (and Israel) had extremely detailed intelligence on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program… (p. 147)
The IAEA has no moral authority to check Iran’s peaceful nuclear development, when it has done nothing to raise attention to, let alone prevent, Israel’s aggressive nuclear program.
Here are some other important revelations from Ritter’s book.
Germans Spying for Israel
Many Germans secretly supported the Isareli position concerning the ndeed for a preemptive strike. German intelligence agents, operating under economic cover, had been inside Iran for years, often times in support of joint German-Israeli mission objectives…So even while German diplomats negotiated in support of an incentives-based approach towards resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis, German intelligence officials secretly hedged their bets towards an American-backed effort to undermine and ovethrow the regime of the Mullahs. (pp. 154-155)
Bolton’s Incestuous Israel Connection
One determinant of the hardline US stance against Iran has been the personal initiative of the former Undersecretary of State, and Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Ritter writes:
When it came to defining what constituted the naational interest, John Bolton, like many of his neoconservative colleagues, seemed to possess a decidedly split personality, especially when it came to maters involving the state of Israel…Bolton has developed a strong relationship with Israel, one that had him undermine official U.S. policy by keeping policy papers critical of Israeli actions from crossing the desk of the Secretary of State as Bolton did early on in the tenure in the administration of George W. Bush, blocking a memo which suggested that Israel had violated American laws with its July 23, 2000, assassination of Salah Shehada, a senior Hamas activist in Gaza City. Israel reportedly used an American-made F-16 fighter-bomber to drop a bomb on a house in the Gaza Strip, killing Shehada and fourteen others (including women and children), and injuring more than 100 others. In his position as undersecretary of State, Bolton has engaged in numerous one-on-one meetings with Israeli officials without getting prior country clearance from the relevant offices within the State Department. Bolton frequently travels to Israel, where he has developed a strong relationship with Israeli intelligence officials, againt outside of official bureaucratic channels… (p. 141)
On May 22, 2006, at a B’nai B’rith breakfast meeting in which John Bolton had already spoken, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman declared Bolton to be the sixth Isareli diplomat assigned to the United Nations. Gillerman also noted that if the B’nai B’rith membership, hhistorically unquestioningly pro-Israeli, were counted, the Israeli Mission would in fact be one of the largest at the United Nations. (p. 208)
EU-3 as Chamberlain
German, Britain and France were behaving in a manner that was strnkingly similar to the behavior of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when he backed down over Hitler’s demands over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In an effort to forestall another American illegal war of aggression, the europeans were negotiating with Iran to convince the Iranians to give up a nuclear program that operated demonstrably within the framework of international law. Europe committed to the principle of Iranian legal rights regarding the enrichment of uranium, all the while caving in to pressure from the United States to deny Iran this right. (p. 163)
MeK: The Israel Connection
When Israel’s early attempts to sell the Irani WMD threat failed to gain traction in Washington, despite Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer’s personal lobbying (George Tenet rejected the intel casting doubt on its credibility), the Israelis looked for a new conduit for their intelligence that would “spur America to take that threat posed by Iran [sic] more seriously.”
Sobhani [an Iranian con-artist] and CDI [Committee for a Democratic Iran, an AIPAC spinoff] provided an ideal solution, namely that the Israeli government use Reza Pahlavi as the mouthpiece for telling the world about what the Iranians were up to in the field of nuclear weapons, and in exchange Pahlavi would be given immedite credibility and with it front runner status in the race of those trying to rule Iran post-Mullah. Unfortunately for the Israelis and CDI, Reza Pahlavi balked…Undeterred, [Michael] Ledeen and the CI turned to the MEK, or more specifically, its political front in the Washingt, D.C., the NCRI, as the next best option to bring the Israeli intelligence to center stage. CDI reportedly lobbied the NCRI representative, Alireza Jaferzadeh, to serve as the mouthpiece for presenting the Israeli intelligence to the general public…Isareli intelligence had maintained a relationship with the MEK that dated back to the mid-1990s. (p. xxv)
Thus all Israeli intelligence, most of dubious quality, was presented to the American public, and the rest of the world, through a third-party, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of Mujahedin-e-Khalq (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran).
Here is an interview with Ritter from Democracy Now!, (Once again, thanks to my good friend Ann for bringing the vid to my notice) based on his book:
The Friendly Atom
February 28, 2007
Variant, number 28, Spring 2007 (with Leigh French, for NuclearSpin)
On February 15, Tony Blair’s plan to introduce a new generation of nuclear power stations suffered a serious setback when the High Court ruled that the consultation carried out by the government earlier was “misleading” and “seriously flawed”. Justice Sullivan’s ruling enjoins the government to canvass public opinion again, causing a likely delay in the publication of the energy white paper scheduled for March. The judgement is a significant victory for Greenpeace which, describing it as a sham, had applied for a judicial review of the consultation process.
The landmark ruling closed a chapter that started on January 23, 2006 when the government officially launched the 12-week consultation exercise on the UK’s energy needs, entitled: ‘Our Energy Challenge: Securing Clean, Affordable Energy for the Long Term’. The review officially ended in April, and on July 11, Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, gave the green light to a new generation of nuclear power plants extolling that: “nuclear power would make a ‘significant contribution’ to cutting carbon emissions and to securing Britain’s energy future.”
It is obvious why the Energy Review should have been seen as a cynical PR exercise that gave the appearance of a public debate, since Blair had reportedly made up his mind in November 2005, when he was said to be “convinced” of the pro-nuclear argument; and the pro-nuclear bias of his Cabinet was equally well known.
Nuclear revival in the rest of the world is being led by the G8 countries, that intend to resurrect fast breed reactors – which were earlier scrapped in the UK, France and Germany due to their astronomical costs. To be sure, there is scepticism within the ranks of the G8; Italy and Germany would rather dispense with the option. In the rest of Europe, Sweden wants to phase out its nuclear power plants; Austria and Spain are equally keen to diversify.
Failing to take into account any lessons learned from past mistakes, The Energy Review seemed to have “abolished history” according to an editorial in the Sunday Herald. The same editorial quotes Colin Mitchell, a manager of nuclear policy at the Department of Trade and Industry, saying, “in-depth research into the past performance of nuclear industry is not required to carry out the review.” Supreme disdain for learning anything from the past is evident throughout the report.
Only days prior to the High Court decision, British Energy – a company with a disastrous record and 65% owned by the government – was calling for partners to help build a new generation of nuclear plants by 2016. The company had been rescued from bankruptcy earlier by a government bailout, even as it raked in £622 million profit in the first nine months of the financial year and reactors at four of its sites remain out of action due to a lack of maintenance. While most of the proposed sites for new nuclear plants are owned by British Energy, the private financing approach ensures that in the end, while most of the profits remain private, the costs will for the most part be public. The real price of nuclear energy has never been properly disclosed, partly because the public has been saddled with the massive costs of decommissioning. In the UK alone these costs stand at £50 billion, and since the opening of the first civil nuclear power station at Calder Hall in October 1956, the nuclear industry has received global subsidies of around $1 trillion.
But government is now pushing nuclear power on the grounds that it would be impossible for it to meet its carbon emissions targets otherwise, and, invoking the spectre of terror, on the grounds of ‘energy security’.
Peak Uranium
The claims for carbon-free nuclear energy are undermined by the fact that the industry’s advocates want us to overlook the carbon emissions that are an inevitable part of the uranium extraction process. This is only going to get worse as the higher demand for uranium (both nationally and internationally) makes it necessary for it to be extracted in less refined forms, adding to the emissions. In reporting on energy security and uranium reserves, Jan Willem and Storm van Leeuwen, independent nuclear analysts at Ceedata Consulting, state:
A new generation of nuclear reactors will increase demand for uranium ore to produce reactor fuel. In 2005 the world nuclear fleet consumed about 68,000 tonnes of natural uranium, mostly from mined sources. At the end of 2005 the world known recoverable uranium resources amounted to about 3.6 million tonnes. These resources show a wide variation in ore grade and accessibility. … Uranium ore is not an energy resource unless the ore grade is high enough. Below grade 0.02% (U3O8 Uranium Oxide) more energy is required to produce and exploit the uranium fuel than can be generated from it. Falling ore grade leads to rapidly rising CO2 emissions from the nuclear energy cycle. Assuming world nuclear generating capacity remains at 2005 levels, after about 2016 the mean grade of uranium ore will fall significantly from today’s levels, and even more so after 2034. After about 60 years the world nuclear power system will fall off the ‘Energy Cliff’ – meaning that the nuclear system will consume as much energy as can be generated from the uranium fuel. Whether large and rich new uranium ore deposits will be found or not is unknown.
Even according to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee’s sixth report, “the history of nuclear industry gives little confidence about the timescales and costs of new build’; that “nuclear can do nothing to fill the need for…new generating capacity… by 2016, as it simply could not be built in time”; that “uranium mines can only supply just over half the current demand for uranium, and the situation is likely to become more acute”; whilst “nuclear power can justifiably be regarded as a low-carbon source of electricity….the level of emissions associated with nuclear might increase significantly as lower grades of ore are used”; and that “no country in the world has yet solved the problems of long-term disposal of high-level waste. The current work being conducted by CoRWM [Committee on Radioactive Waste Management] will not be sufficient of address the issue”.
If media saturation has been dominated by a crisis of reaching the peak point in oil production – that less oil is left to find than we have already used – the proponents of nuclear power are silent about the nuclear industry’s equally fragile dependency on uranium and the associated insecurities.
As Jan Willem and Storm van Leeuwen state:
“It is inevitable that replacements for uranium fuel will be sought within the lifetime of any new nuclear build in the UK. It is also inevitable that as high grade uranium supplies decrease, the cost of nuclear power will increase along with nuclear CO2 emissions.” And that: “Once high-grade uranium ores are no-longer available, the nuclear industry will rely on uranium and plutonium from military and civil stockpiles. These will last only a few years, and questions remain about the net energy gain from reprocessing these materials. In the future, it is likely that the nuclear industry and governments will look to MOXfuel – a mixture of uranium and plutonium dioxides. In time, the nuclear industry hopes to develop fast breeder reactors fuelled by weapons useable plutonium. The widespread use and production of either fuel has serious implications for nuclear weapons proliferation and the risk of nuclear terrorism.”
Toxic Freedom
While it strives to sell itself as the environment friendly energy option, the nuclear industry seems curiously keen on escaping government regulation. It already caused concern when it started lobbying to lift regulatory constrains through the creation of a new energy agency, independent of government influence, to oversee its operation if a new generation of nuclear plants is to be built. The creation of such a body would free the industry from any kind of enforceable responsibility and enable artificial price hikes. The industry is also shaken by the example of the plant in Olkiluoto, Finland – the first reactor to be built in Western Europe in the past two decades – causing financial losses to its builder Areva by running wildly over budget. The reactor caused losses of £180 million in the first half of the year alone, despite the government expediting its construction through a “streamlined” process that kept public consultation to a minimum.
More alarmingly for the UK, the idea of self regulation has been supported by Dieter Helm, of the Oxera consultancy, an advisor to the Blair government.
In most debate on the nuclear question, the toxic issue of radioactive waste is overlooked. The environmentalist turned industry shill, James Lovelock, has claimed that nuclear waste is so safe that he is willing to store it in his garden shed. (He also claims Chernobyl killed only 45 people, whereas 500,000 people are reported to have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims. Moreover, there were some 50,000 abortion cases in Europe because mothers feared the effects of the radiation.) Serious scientists, on the other hand, remain far less sanguine about storing nuclear waste in back gardens. While all of it is dangerous, some remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Further undermining the rush for nuclear expansion, The Guardian reported in January this year that scientists developing ways to dump Britain’s nuclear waste underground have discovered that ceramic materials proposed to seal high-level waste break down much faster than expected when exposed to the radiation.
Although Westminster and the Scottish Executive have recognised that the 470,000 cubic meters of toxic waste from nuclear plants and weapons needs deep disposal, planning for a new generation of plants when the mess from the last one hasn’t been taken care of seems ill advised at best. Around the world, except for one, all nuclear waste dumps are expected to open only after 2020. The opening of the Yucca Mountain project in the US, originally scheduled for 1998, has been pushed back to 2012. While John Ritch, director of the World Nuclear Association, claims the world needs a 20-fold expansion in nuclear energy, even a tripling of global nuclear capacity, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this would require a “new Yucca-sized dump to be opened somewhere every three or four years”. Sweden, a country that leads the world in research and development into deep disposal facilities, finds it unlikely that such facilities will be available for at least 20 more years – one of the reason why it has decided to phase out nuclear power.
Predictable Fallout
Two already well known consequences come hand-in-hand with the return of nuclear energy; the potential for nuclear proliferation and catastrophic accidents. According to MIT, if the global nuclear capacity triples, it would take the theft of just 0.00025% of the MOX manufactured every year to provide the plutonium for a nuclear bomb. Last year, the G8 leaders had announced their intention to resurrect fast breed reactors, causing controversy since they produce plutonium which is easily weaponised. The same uranium enrichment process used in civilian reactors, increasing the proportion of the U-235 Isotope by a few percent, can be used to reach 90% enrichment, required for weapons grade uranium, making the task of non-proliferation all the more difficult.
While the G8 pay lip service to non-proliferation, they intend to expand the nuclear energy option while keeping “the more sensitive nuclear facilities that can be easily diverted for making bombs within the G8.” Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland responded with dismay that:
“this rich boys’ club seems on course to peddle reactors to the Earth’s poorer nations, at the same time as they are warning us how terribly dangerous the world is.”
According to MIT, traditional risk assessment suggests that there would be four core damage accidents by 2055. The fallout from many past disasters has yet to be taken care of. Only last month, the NDA was reporting delays in the clean up of the defunct nuclear complex at Dounreay in Caithness due to a lack of funds available for decommissioning. This has postponed a series of projects crucial for making Dounreay safe, including the emptying of the radioactive waste shaft on the shoreline which exploded in 1977 and was supposed to have been cleaned up by 2003. In 2005, a cementation plant at Dounreay was closed and an investigation started after the spillage of hazardous, dissolved spent fuel. According to The Times, “the discovery of nuclear particles on neighbouring beaches has led to calls for a full public inquiry into the scale of pollution at the site, while the [United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), responsible for the site] has been accused of a cover-up”. The prototype fast reactor at Dounreay was already shut down in 1994. This was the second scare in less than a year to hit the plant. According to the Daily Mail, a Dounreay spokesman “confirmed that eight workers were being tested for suspected plutonium intake”. The lab was already shut down the previous year “following a similar alarm involving 15 workers… In August, UKAEA started refresher courses following a number of radiation scares, during which contamination was detected on five workers in a week.” In February this year, the waste reprocessing complex was fined all of £140,000 for illegally releasing radioactive waste into the sea for more than 20 years. Radioactive particles from the plant will pollute beaches for decades to come and the environment will never be completely cleaned up, according to one expert study.
In Sellafield, in Cumbria, according to the Sunday Herald, a reprocessing plant has been closed because of a leak, and a plutonium fuel plant and ageing reactors are performing badly. Sellafield has been the site of numerous nuclear leaks, most recently at the Thorpe plant. According to The Guardian, workers ignored more than 100 warnings over six weeks that it had sprung a leak. On February 15, 2006, Sellafield was warned by the European Commission that it was in breach of EU rules. It was urged to tighten controls to ensure that nuclear materials “are not diverted from the peaceful uses for which they have been declared.” The warning followed European Commission inspections of Sellafield, which lead inspectors to conclude that “accounting and reporting procedures presently in place do not fully meet Euratom (EU) standards”. One of the most notable incidents came in 1999, when British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) admitted falsifying documents relating to uranium and plutonium mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel destined for Japan. The scandal was a major embarrassment for BNFL. Japan refused to accept a shipment of the fuel that was already en-route, which meant it had to be returned to Sellafield. The government’s Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment has consistently denied any link between Sellafield and a nearby cluster of childhood leukaemia.
And last summer, the laundry at Hunterston nuclear power plant in North Ayrshire sprung a leak with radioactive water escaping from a tank, causing it to be shut down…
Not-So-Public Relations
When the results of Labour’s long awaited energy review were published in July, the nuclear industry was enthusiastic about the outcome. Keith Parker, CEO of the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), that represents 40,000 nuclear workers “warmly welcomed” the review’s findings that nuclear would make a “significant contribution” to securing Britain’s energy future.
“Nuclear power offers reliable, secure and affordable low carbon electricity for the benefit both of consumers and environment,” said Parker. The choice of words here is deliberate, and part of a carefully crafted PR campaign to repackage nuclear from its traditional image – dirty, dangerous and expensive – to one that is “secure”, “affordable” and “green” (“low carbon”). The industry’s PR strategy has centred around capitalising on the growing concerns with climate change by appropriating environmental rhetoric to sell its re-entry into the energy market.
The PR Company Weber Shandwick wrote a briefing paper called “The Case for Nuclear Energy” for British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL), the state-owned company that runs the controversial Sellafield site, arguing that nuclear power has become “essential” in combating CO2 emissions, the main cause of climate change.
Climate change features in a series of “Racecards” or key messages that the PR company, Strategic Awareness, developed for BNFL to promote nuclear. One is “CO2 Emissions = Climate Change = Irreversible damage to our environment.” The racecards, whose task is to make the issue of energy “personal” and “real”, also use another key selling point: energy security. “Without nuclear we will be reliant on other countries for our energy supplies”. (Despite this being the explicit outcome of policy to deregulate and globalise the energy market.) An October 2005 Strategic Awareness document notes that “without nuclear newbuild, renewables will not make a difference. Nuclear provides ‘always on’ electricity”. The paper also covers the safety angle by suggesting that “everyday emissions into the air are safe”. There is more radiation “in a bottle of mineral water”.
From the beginning, the industry has relied on the “third party” approach – a PR technique where propaganda is presented through someone seemingly independent, with more credibility – to get independent researchers, academics, parliamentarians, the media and trade unions to make its case. Philip Dewhurst, Public Affairs Director of BNFL, chair of NIA and a nuclear spin doctor, let slip during an interview with PR Week that BNFL was spreading its message “via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throat”. The NIA has been central to BNFL’s multimillion pound PR campaign. With British Nuclear Energy Society and other partners in the PR business, the NIA conducted a behind-the-scenes campaign to cultivate sympathetic journalists and politicians. Last summer NIA and BNFL approached key academics and independent researchers to attend a “Media Training Workshop”, run by PR company Weber Shandwick, along with their staff. (Dewhurst has now joined Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, perhaps in a bid to help it gain access to the British market.) A Corporate Watch investigation revealed that Weber Shandwick monitors all relevant parliamentary processes for BNFL, such as the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, whose sixth report, published in March 2006, thoroughly refuted the nuclear argument.
BNFL has also been using Nuklear 21, a trade union lobby group, as a “front” organisation to make a case for nuclear energy on the grounds that it would prevent nuclear workers losing jobs. It also underwrites Supporters of Nuclear Energy (SONE) a pro-nuclear front group headed by well known anti-green campaigner Sir Bernard Ingham. Through NIA, BNFL channelled at least £21,000 to SONE. According to Corporate Watch, Ingham, on BNFL’s behalf, lobbied Digby Jones, the head of the Confederation of British Industry, who in turn promised to approach Blair personally and enlist support of the Energy Intensive Users Group.
While SONE claims to be a proponent of “informed debate”, a different attitude prevails when it is working behind the scenes. David Fishlock, one of its members told the Lord’s Science and Technology Committee, “the public should not be expected to have an opinion. There are many things for which quite legitimately the pubic looks to government to make up the mind of 56 million people. Nuclear energy is a matter that is largely in government hands and is a matter for government decision.”
Conflicts of Interest
The new push for a return of nuclear energy plays out over a landscape marked by a dizzying array of conflicts of interest. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), set up by the government to resolve the issue of nuclear waste and supposedly free from industry or government influence, is closely intertwined with AMEC NNC, a nuclear company with a vested interest in both new nuclear build as well as decommissioning. A NuclearSpin investigation found that besides acting as CoRWM’s programme manager, AMEC NNC managed the discussions at its plenary meetings, organised its public consultation and procurements procedures, along with its PR company, Luther Pendragon. In fact, Luther Pendragon was contracted to AMEC NNC instead of CoRWM. When NuclearSpin put in an Freedom of Information request for all correspondence between CoRWM and Luther Pendragon, after much foot dragging, it was the latter (rather than the government) that chose the information that was eventually released. A similar request by Corporate Watch into the PR activities of BNFL and its relations with Weber Shandwick was finally vetted by Philip Dewhurst, BNFL’s head of PR.
Not too long back, CoRWM itself was accusing a government body, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), of a conflict of interest when it was appointed to oversee the deep disposal of 470,000 cubic metres of waste from nuclear power stations and weapons in the UK. Contrary to CoRWM’s recommendations of establishing an independent body to oversee the disposal of the radioactive waste, the government appointed NDA, a state agency with an interest in promoting short-term efficiency and a dual role as waste creator and waste disposer.
In Scotland, the parliament’s Cross Party Group on the Civil Nuclear Industry, despite declaring five separate items of funding from electricity generator British Energy (BE) from May 2005 to January 2006, does not mention that secretarial support for the parliamentary group is provided by BE, which includes drafting agendas and taking minutes of meetings, none of which is made available to the public. In a meeting with Nuclear Spin, John Home Robertson MSP, chair of the CPG even went so far as to declare, “I work for the nuclear industry”, only hastening to add afterwards that he isn’t paid to do so.
Effective Solutions
Despite an amply resourced propaganda campaign and active collusion of the Blair government, it appears that the nuclear industry has failed to convince the public of the desirability of nuclear energy. In Europe, nuclear power remains the most unpopular source of energy. A whole year of relentless propaganda has failed to rally more than 20% to its cause. Solar and wind energy on the other hand, have 80% and 71% support respectively. In the UK 19% favour nuclear, whereas support for wind power stands at 63%.
On October 5, 2006, Greenpeace launched its court action challenging the validity of the government’s Energy Review, which it claimed was “legally flawed” as “the government did not carry out the full public consultation to which it had committed itself before making its decision”. According to Sarah North, who leads the organisation’s nuclear campaign, “given that there are much more sophisticated, effective and safer ways than nuclear power to meet our energy demands and cut our climate change emissions, Greenpeace feels compelled to challenge the government on its irrational and unsubstantiated pro-nuclear policy.” It is a “dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change,” she added. Climate change is indeed a serious issue, therefore it is important that the available resources are spent on the most viable an effective solutions.
Greenpeace claims their landmark success will mean that the government will be forced to carry out a much more comprehensive consultation that takes into account the full range of issues related to the introduction of a new generation of nuclear power plants: radioactive waste, financial costs and the design of the reactors. However, while the judicial review has disrupted the process, Blair was quick to declare that “this won’t affect policy at all”.
All references are archived at:
www.spinwatch.org
www.nuclearspin.org
Portrait of the Monster as a Young Artist
February 27, 2007
J.M. Coetzee on The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer’s rendering of Hitler.
In his dual biography of the two bloodiest butchers and worst moral monsters of the twentieth century, Stalin and Hitler (but is Mao not up there with them? and does Pol Pot not get a look-in?), Alan Bullock reprints side by side class photographs of young Iosif and young Adolf taken in 1889 and 1899 respectively, in other words, when each was about ten.[*] Peering at the two faces, one tries to descry some quiddity, some dark halo, some sly intimation of the horrors to come; but the photographs are old, definition is poor, one cannot be sure, and besides, a camera is not a divining tool.
The class photograph test—What will be the destinies of these children? Which of them will go the furthest?—has a particular pointedness in the cases of Stalin and Hitler. Is it possible that some of us are evil from the moment we leave our mother’s womb? If not, when does evil enter us, and how? Or, to put the question in a less metaphysical form, how is it that some of us never develop a restraining moral conscience? In regard to Stalin and Hitler, did the fault lie in the way they were reared? With educational practices in Georgia and Austria of the late nineteenth century? Or did the boys in fact develop a conscience, and then at some later time lose it: were Iosif and Adolf, at the time they were photographed, still normal, sweet lads, and did they turn into monsters later, as a consequence perhaps of the books they read, or the company they kept, or the pressures of their times? Or was there nothing special about them after all, early or late: did the script of history simply demand two butchers, a Butcher of Germany and a Butcher of Russia; and had Iosif Dzhugashvili and Adolf Hitler not been in the right place at the right time, would history have found another pair of actors, just as good (that is, just as bad), to play the roles?
“Anyone Can Go To Baghdad; Real Men Go To Tehran”
February 27, 2007
Variant, Number 28, Spring 2007
“What does state mean?” asked Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist, “Is it just the state apparatus – or the whole of organized civil society?” In fact, he argued, State “is the dialectical unity between government power and civil society”. The liberal democratic state relies on civil society’s consent for its legitimacy. It therefore has to allow a sphere of non-interference in which ideas circulate and worldviews take shape. The endorsement that comes out of this seemingly free exchange of ideas gives legitimacy to the existing political order. Far from being passive observers, the ruling elite, through their control of mass media, ensure that their preferred worldview remains dominant. Dissent, within notionally acceptable parameters, has a functional role: it helps sustain the illusion that civil society can be an arbiter of the state’s destiny.[1]
In the lead up to the Iraq war, the antiwar movement itself became the contested space where ideas had to be contained, managed and neutralized, lest they undermine the tenuous support necessary for legitimizing the war. A carefully orchestrated media campaign set the terms of the debate – WMD, regime change, and democracy promotion. The conspicuous absence of oil in the mainstream discourse allowed plenty of room for non-conformist posturing; to triumphantly expose this egregious oversight without having to identify the sources of policy. “No blood for oil” read the popular slogan – this was a war for the control of Iraqi oil.
While the prognosis is accurate, the provenance of the policy is invariably misplaced. Any policy bearing on oil is identified, by default, with Big Oil. That there was no evidence that the industry lobbied for the war was of little significance. With its tendency to frame analysis in economic terms alone, the antiwar movement entirely overlooked alternative motivations for the war. In most instances this was deliberate, since, with the neocon vanguard of the Israel lobby beating the war drums, few wanted their reputations stained by incurring the reflexive charge of anti-Semitism that invariably accompanies mention of Israeli involvement. Instead, most reached for sanitised meta-theory: “It’s imperialism, stupid”, read one explanation. True, once again; but insufficient. Imperialism is an abstract notion; mere structure – it requires agency for its imposition.[2]
This left many perplexed: means were confused for ends (oil); and structure for agency (imperialism). A potentially powerful movement was thus reduced to a caricature of itself with empty slogans and cliché-ridden analysis that made the job all the more easier for the ruling elite. The antiwar movement ensured its own irrelevance.
The war party, on the other hand, was far more successful in organizing and centralizing elements of the civil society to legitimize its agenda. Gramsci’s contention that the civil society is a constitutive element of the state was evident in the various lobby groups, think tanks and support networks that furnished and disseminated propaganda to build support for the war. With a case couched in exaggerated fears and emotive language, it succeeded in engendering the kind of jingoistic unreason that has enabled many wars of aggression.
The Israel Connection
Much has been written about and by the neocons: the former overlook Israel entirely; the latter speak of little else. Yet, when it comes to Left-analysis of the motivations behind the Iraq war, for the most part, the neocon connection to Israel received scant attention. Instead, many went sniffing for clues in putative neocon ideals: the moral dimension in foreign policy; the passion for spreading democracy; the influence of Leo Strauss; the exaggerated view of good and evil. Ho-hum.
There were exceptions: Robert Fisk wrote,[3]
The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush’s most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected… And they weren’t doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons.
A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by – yes, Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.[4]
James Bamford, John Cooley, Jim Lobe, Juan Cole, Scott Ritter et al have elaborated on this connection, yet it continues to be overlooked by the media. When USAF Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski blew the whistle on the fabricated intelligence coming out of the Office of Special Plans, few paid attention.[5] The OSP – set up at the Department of Defence by Douglas Feith, a Zionist fanatic – was working in concert with the VP’s office (where David Wurmser, “Scooter” Libby and Iran-Contra felon, Elliot Abrams held trenches) and a similar intelligence unit at Ariel Sharon’s office. Richard Perle, in the meanwhile was heading the influential Defence Policy Board, home to other influential neocons such as Ken Adelman and former CIA Director James Woolsey.[6]
The chorus was joined from the outside by a bevy of Middle East “experts” at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of AIPAC, the main Israeli lobby group; the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy – set up at the Brookings Institution through a $12.3m donation from Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban – headed by Israel lobbyist Marin Indyk; the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, home to Feith, Perle, Woolsey, Cheney, John Bolton and Jeanne Kirkpatrick; Centre for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney – Zionist extremist, and a frequent guest on BBC; and Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, an organization with overlapping membership with all the aforementioned.
William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservativism, egged the administration on in his influential Weekly Standard. Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Centre, a former CIA analyst, received generous column space in the New York Times; his book, The Threatening Storm, was instrumental in selling the WMD threat[7]. Influential neocon columnists such as Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, Robert Kagan and George Will deluged the media with articles and commentary harping on the mortal threat posed by Iraq. Newspapers frequently quoted individuals and research from these institutions without revealing the possible conflicts of interest.
The reluctant State Department was eventually overwhelmed by the deluge of propaganda emanating from these sources. In his biography Powell is quoted referring to Rumsfeld’s team as the “JINSA crowd.” The neocons in the Defence Department, according to the biography, “supported war against Iraq as the first step to replacing Arab despots with democratic governments that would sever their ties to the Palestinians, thereby enhancing Israel’s security.”
In Fisk’s succinct summation, American-Israeli ambitions in the region were “entwined, almost synonymous”. This was a war about “oil and regional control.”
The Oil Factor
The unmitigated disaster that has unfolded since the invasion, among other things, has also increased America’s energy insecurity – a case of a conflict of between US and Israeli interests (although most of US oil doesn’t originate in the Gulf). Only last year, the new Iraqi government was renegotiating a Saddam era oil contract with China[8]. The production has not even reached pre-war levels. American power in the Middle East, according to the Baker-Hamilton Commission report, is on the wane. Even as some Anglo-American oil companies rake in windfall profits from the astronomical rise in oil prices, their future in the region remains uncertain. In the Western hemisphere, the opening created by American entanglement in Iraq has allowed Venezuela to continue unimpeded on its radically nationalist trajectory, inspiring many others in the region to follow suit. For the first time since the promulgation of the Monroe doctrine, Latin America is breaking free. Most importantly, most of this was predicted by the foreign policy realists who opposed the war[9].
Chomsky is right to suggest that Iraq would not have been invaded, had its primary export been “lettuce and pickles”; he is wrong, however, when he insists that the war is merely a continuation of long standing policy. The evidence he adduces is a six-decade-old statement by the State Department that recognized Middle-East oil as a “stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”. The only recent example he offers is a post-invasion quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski asserting the strategic importance of Iraqi oil.[10] For this precise reason, in fact, Brzezinski opposed the war which he has referred to as “a historic, strategic, and moral calamity…driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris”[11] – so did prominent oil-men, such as James Baker, Bush Sr., and James Carroll (Shell). The reasons Chomsky offers in support of his argument were equally valid in 1991, yet he doesn’t explain why Bush Sr., and Baker consciously avoided occupying Iraq.
The control of Iraqi oil and its subsequent privatization is a neocon idea conceived at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The aim, articulated first in a Project for the New American Century policy document, was to flood the market with cheap Iraqi oil in order to break the OPEC monopoly – and, “to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia”. Big Oil, on the other hand, has pragmatic interests; it has no qualms dealing with an authoritarian regime so long as it ensures stable access. Access, rather than control being its priority, Big Oil preferred regime change; it acquiesced in going to war insofar as it allowed it the opportunity to snatch lucrative concessions back from its Russian, French and Chinese competitors.[12]
In the event, the rising cost of the occupation, burgeoning insurgency, resistance from oil workers’ unions and failed reconstruction soon made compromises necessary. American civil society may have supported the neocon war; it wasn’t too keen on taking sides in an intra-elite factional fight. On Iraq’s resources, the neocons temporarily gave ground to Big Oil. Plans for privatizing Iraqi oil were scrapped, replaced by new ones drafted at the James Baker Institute that called for the creation of a state-owned oil company. This plan mollified the oil industry which feared a repeat of the scenario following Russia’s energy privatization that barred US oil companies from bidding for the reserves.
The Washington Insurgency
By early 2006, the situation in Iraq was dire (it will soon become the costliest war the US ever waged)[13], sending alarms through the ranks of the Washington elite. American hegemony was on the decline and Iraq seemed on the verge of break up. This outcome, while desirable for the neocons, as it increased Israel’s regional hegemony (as envisioned by Yinon)[14] by eliminating a potential Arab challenger, was turning into a palpable nightmare for America as it could complicate matters for three of her allies: Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. American economic elites, who value hegemony over empire, felt their interests increasingly threatened. Under these circumstances, a bipartisan commission, comprising trusted guardians of American economic empire, was instituted in the form of the Iraq Study Group. Led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the commission issued its damning report in November that highlighted the occupation’s failures, and attempted to foil neocon plans for Iraq’s break up by recommending a unified federated Iraq. While urging the President to “restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil”, elsewhere the report advised him to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise”.
The publication of the report was both preceded and followed by attacks from the neocons for castigating the neocon-dominated Department of Defence for its role in the unfolding debacle, recognizing the centrality of the Israel-Palestine conflict to the region’s stability and recommending negotiations with Syria and Iran.
The Quartet of Moderates
Saudi Arabia, which supported the Iraq war while publicly opposing it, is closely monitoring the situation in Iraq, concerned at that the rise of the Shia and the increased radicalization of its own population. During Israel’s war of aggression against Lebanon, along with Jordan and Egypt, it hastened to condemn Hizbullah. The Sunni Arab leaders of these countries, Patrick Cockburn observes, “were embarrassed by the success of the Shia Hizbollah in the war in Lebanon…compared to their own supine incompetence”.[15]
For decades these states have positioned themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause (even as they continued undermined it through their secret dealings with Israel)[16]; rhetorical support alone earned some legitimacy for their corrupt, dysfunctional regimes. Iran’s support for Hizbullah and Hamas, on the other had, and the defiant rhetoric of its president has exposed the inadequacy of their support. This has compelled even the king of Jordan to take time off from his Playstation[17] to issue ominous warnings of a threatening Shia Crescent.
Ever sensitive to changing winds, Israel moved to capitalize on these fears. Under US tutelage it proceeded to form a de facto alliance with a “quartet of moderates” of Sunni states, brought together by their common fear of the ascendant Shia. “Israel now sees its security as relying not so much on a US guarantee”, says Mai Yamani, a Saudi commentator and the daughter of the former Oil Minister, “but on Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey”. Turki al-Faysal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and ambassador to US, met Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, while Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi National Security Advisor, met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jordan.[18]
To rollback Iran’s growing influence, the “moderates”, along with other Gulf States, once again chose Palestine and Lebanon as their preferred battleground. In Lebanon, they started shoring up the Siniora government, which had ordered its military to stand down (with one of its Generals even serving tea to the invading army), as Israel proceeded to destroy half the country. Sectarian divisions were played on, as arms were shipped to the Sunnis and the Phalange, while amplifying fears of a likely Shia coup.
In Occupied Palestine Territories (OPT), the Arab states did little to prevent the starvation of the besieged population by acquiescing in the US-EU sanctions. Their hypocrisy was exposed when Iran became one of the few Muslim countries to reject sanctions and offer aid to the beleaguered Palestinians. Arab states countered by accepting a US-Israeli proposal to undermine the Hamas government by aiding its defeated rival, Fatah. Arms were shipped through Egypt to the gangs of Muhammad Dahlan, the Fatah henchman, and US-Israeli “advisors” started training them, with intelligence agencies of the Arab states setting up shop in the OPT.[19]
Despite the sectarian incitement, it appears that on the popular level, the Arab plan against Palestine has been a failure. According to an IPS report, a “face-to-face survey of a total of 3,850 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates found that close to 80 percent of Arabs consider Israel and the United States the two biggest external threats to their security. Only six percent cited Iran.” For all the scaremongering by hardliners like Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert and Avigdor Lieberman, only 36 percent of Israelis perceive an Iranian nuclear attack the biggest threat.[20]
The New Politics of Oil
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ columnist and establishment mouthpiece, may very well be articulating future policy when he writes: “the best tool we have for curbing Iran’s influence is not containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down in the long term”. Tailoring his pitch to NYT’s liberal audience, Friedman couches his proposal in environmental rhetoric, advocating “conservation and an alternative-energy strategy”.
As it happens, such demands on the consumer may be unnecessary. Because of recent developments, according to the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia “is finally worried enough about Iran to use oil as a weapon”. It has already opposed Iranian-Venezuelan calls for OPEC production cuts to check falling crude prices ($78 a barrel in July to just above $50 by January 2007). This follows threats by Bandar bin Sultan of a resort to “confrontational tactics” against Iran. Nawaf Obaid, one of his close aides had already laid bare Saudi plans in a comment piece in the Washington Post. “If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending” he said, “But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today’s high prices.” (Obaid was subsequently fired)[21]
As during Iran-Iraq war, when all the Gulf States backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, they have once again lined up behind Iran’s adversary – this time US and Israel. The drop in oil revenues coupled with an American instigated financial squeeze, American’s hope, will cause social and political unrest, and lead to the Iranian government’s destabilization. Using colourful Guantanamo-era metaphors, the campaign led by Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the American Treasury has been called financial “waterboarding” and a financial “crusade”. Europeans had already acquiesced; the Gulf States are the real boon.[22]
As in the 80s, Saudi Arabia – “leader of the Muslim world” and home to Islam’s two holiest sites – is using its famed “oil weapon” to subjugate other Muslims and thwart challenges to American hegemony.
The Next War
“Anyone can go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran”, an administration official was heard saying shortly after the fall of Baghdad. If there were doubts as to the motives behind the Iraq war, there should be none when it comes to Iran. According to the Guardian, “Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney.” While many had breathed a sigh when high profile neocons like Wolfowitz, Feith and John Bolton were banished from Departments of Defense and State, the Vice President’s office is still a veritable neocon hotbed. David Wurmser and Elliot Abrams still hold key positions, and their influence over policy is strong enough for the President to reject ISG recommendations in favour of a plan drafted by Fred Kagan of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.[23]
“US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage,” according to the Guardian, “the present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring.” For more than a year, there has been a steady stream of leaks and denials – trial balloons to test public opinion before the inevitable military action. While new appointments at CENTCOM and the deployment of the Second Naval Carrier Group (with the likelihood of a third one, the USS Ronald Reagan, following suit) along with minesweepers to the Persian Gulf are well known, other developments, such as the so called “surge” in Iraq, can only be understood within the context of a planned confrontation with Iran. In an almost comical replay of the lead up to the Iraq war, stories meant to sell the war have already started appearing – by the same actors! Michael Gordon of the New York Times, who co-authored front page stories with Judith Miller on the non-existent Iraqi WMDs, was already busy selling the escalation; on February 10, he contributed a new front page story: “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says”. His sources, once again, remain anonymous.[24]
Kenneth Pollack’s new book, The Persian Puzzle, is doing for Iran, what his earlier book, The Threatening Storm, had already done for Iraq. Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Zionist Orientalism, has issued repeated apocalyptic warnings. Joshua Muravchik is still a leading cheerleader for war. The Iran Policy Committee, an AIPAC spin-off, has been lobbying for at least the past two years for regime change, and support for MeK, a dissident Iranian terrorist organization. AIPAC, the Conference of the Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, Foundation for the Defence of Democracies; Michael Rubin, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen; Krauthammer, Boot, Will, Kristol, Kagan – they are still keen, in the words the Middle East scholar Juan Cole, to use US military as “Israel’s Gurkha army”.[25]
A Movement Gone AWOL
Except for Israel, its powerful lobby, and the columnists and congressmen bought and paid for by it, the war is opposed by everyone: the military, Pentagon, State Department, conservatives, business elite, and the Left. While a year of intense protests had preceded the invasion of Iraq, in this instance, despite the gravity of the situation and abundant warnings, there has been a curious absence of public outrage. A recent star-studded antiwar rally in Washington overlooked the issue entirely. The continuing ineffectuality of the antiwar movement is guaranteed in the nature of praise it garners. At a time when Israel is the only party visibly lobbying for the war, according to one report on the rally, the “antiwar” Rabbi Michael Lerner was pleased that there were “very, very, very few signs that had anything to do with Israel” at the rally. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leading participant said, “the lack of attention directed toward Israel was a credit to the peace movement”. Another participant was relieved that she “did not notice any criticism of Israel at any event”.[26]
In its refusal to point a finger at the main cause of the impending war – the Israel lobby and its stranglehold on the American Congress[27] – the antiwar movement is certainly not impeding the march to war; in fact, it confirms Gramsci’s dictum by passively enabling it in not taking its main proponent to task.
Criminal oversight, or castrated dissent; the question need not detain us here. This is not a war for a compromised antiwar movement to stop. Short of a mutiny in the ranks of the armed forces, economic meltdown, or a conservative revolt, it is unlikely that the drive towards war can be checked. Much was made of the Republican defeat in the last mid-term elections; the Democratic majority that has taken over since, at least on Iran, seems more gung-ho. Only last month, Democratic front runners in the presidential race were at the Herzilya conference in Israel attempting to outdo one another in their threats to Iran.
Endgame
The brinkmanship in both countries – US and Israel – is fuelled by domestic political concerns, but the initiative ultimately lies with the US; Bush’s quest for a diversion from his failures in Iraq could very easily lead him to a new confrontation (evident in the recent strikes on Somalia). He hopes this will lead to a surge of support, with the inordinately jingoistic population reflexively rallying around the flag, and put Democrats on the spot, who, in an effort to appease the Israel lobby, have already pledged maximal measures. [28]
February 21 may be a decisive date, because it is the UN Security Council’s deadline for Iran to suspend “all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development” – even though Iran is well within its rights to do so under the NPT. The hypocrisy is monumental: the Security Council has been dragooned into taking action against Iran, a state that is signatory to the NPT and has adhered by its rules, by Israel, a state which itself refuses to sign the NPT and remains the foremost violator of Security Council resolutions.
The endgame is not yet clear; however, the consequences of inaction are frightening. “[S]ome provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran” warns Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man not given to hyperbole, could culminate in “a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.” Scott Ritter’s plea to the Congress – “Stop the Iran war before it starts”[29] – is therefore worth reiterating:
Summon [AIPAC], or any other lobby promoting confrontation with Iran, to the forefront, so that the warnings they offer in whispers from a back room can be articulated before the American public. Hold these conjurers of doom accountable for their positions by demanding they back them up with hard fact. See if the US intelligence community concurs with the dire warnings…and if it doesn’t, ask who, then, is driving US policy toward Iran?
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch. His regular commentaries appear at http://fanonite.wordpress.com
[1] See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol.1, (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
[2] See for example: Noam Chomsky, “Its Imperialism, Stupid”, Khaleej Times, July 4, 2005
[3] Robert Fisk, “The case against war: A conflict driven by the self-interest of America”, The Independent, February 15, 2003
[4] Zionist plans for breaking up Iraq and turning the region into Israeli sphere of influence, in fact, date back to the February 1982, first articulated by Oded Yinon in, “Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”.
[5] Jim Lobe, “Pentagon Office Home to Neocon Network”, Inter Press Service, August 7, 2003
[6] Perle had to resign his post under accusations of a conflict of interest. In the 70s, an FBI wiretap had caught him passing classified information to the Israeli embassy. In 1983, he had already come under fire on charges of conflict of interest for receiving money to represent an Israeli weapons company’s interests while working at the Defence Department. Feith left the Pentagon in the wake of an espionage investigation by the FBI; his role in selling the war on questionable intelligence has been confirmed more recently by the Pentagon’s own Inspector General.
[7] See Richard Falk & Howard Friel, The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy, (Verso, 2004).
[8] “Iraq, China to revive Saddam-era oil deal as Baghdad seeks investment”, International Herald Tribune, October 28, 2006
[9] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “‘Realists’ Are Not Alone in Opposing War With Iraq”, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2002
[10] Op. cit. Chomsky
[11] Paul Craig Roberts, “Criminals Control the Executive Branch”, Antiwar.com, February 10, 2007
[12] “Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq’s Oil Spark Political Fight Between Neocons and Big Oil”, Democracy Now!, March 21, 2005,
[13] Jamie Wilson, “Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist”, The Guardian, January 7, 2006
[14] See note. 4
[15] Patrick Cockburn, “It is no use blaming Iran for the insurgency in Iraq”, The Independent, February 7, 2007
[16] Robert Fisk, “Twisting Gulf Arms”, New Statesman, October 31, 2005
[17] The King of Jordan spends his free time (of which he reportedly has plenty) playing Playstation.
[18] Mai Yamani, “Changing States”, The Guardian, January 9, 2007
[19] Joseph Massad, “Pinochet in Palestine”, Al Ahram, November 9-15, 2006
[20] Jim Lobe, “Arabs Less Worried About Iran, Poll Finds”, Inter Press Service, February 8, 2007
[21] Jim Hoagland, “Impatience on Iran Carries a Price”, Washington Post, January 21, 2007; Nawaf Obaid, “Stepping Into Iraq”, Washington Post, November 29, 2006
[22] Michael Hirsh, “Emptying Iran’s Pockets”, Newsweek, January 11, 2007
[23] Ewen MacAskill, “Target Iran: US Able to Strike in the Spring”, The Guardian, February 10, 2007; Mark Benjamin, “The Real Iraq Study Group”, Salon, January 6, 2007
[24] Michael Gordon, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says”, New York Times, February 10, 2007; Op. Cit. Falk & Friel
[25] Juan Cole, “AIPAC’s Cover and Overt Ops”, Antiwar.com, August 30, 2004
[26] Gabe Ross, “A change in tone: Anti-Iraq War protest participants say Israel was off the agenda”, Washington Jewish Week, January 31, 2007
[27] Robert Fisk, “United States of Israel?”, The Independent, April 27, 2006; John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, London Review of Books, March 23, 2006
[28] Justin Raimondo, “Homage to Herzliya”, Antiwar.com, January 26, 2007
[29] Scott Ritter, “Stop the Iran War Before It Starts”, The Nation, February, 2007
Know Thy Rats
February 26, 2007
Rejoice Gulf Arabs! For too long your leaders have been accused of decadence, extravagance, pompousness, stupidity and waste. They aren’t taking it anymore. Their portly posteriors have parted with the padded cushions, they have risen up, they have flexed their muscles … and they have opened your airspace to allow Israel to do to your neighbors what you have only seen it do to the Palestinians before.
Three Arab states in the Persian Gulf would be willing to allow the Israel Air force to enter their airspace in order to reach Iran in case of an attack on its nuclear facilities, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyasa reported on Sunday.According to the report, a diplomat from one of the gulf states visiting Washington on Saturday said the three states, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, have told the United States that they would not object to Israel using their airspace, despite their fear of an Iranian response.
Angry Arab, Soft Targets
February 26, 2007
Over the past couple of years, and especially since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, I have been visiting As’ad AbuKhalil’s blog, the Angry Arab News Service, frequently and it has been a great source of knowledge on the internal dynamics of Lebanese politics. On most occasions, I also enjoyed his humour. While some of his critiques have been quite illuminating, over time I have come to realize that he is completely indiscriminate in his choice of targets; his thinking is severely constrained by dogma and a need to uphold an image — the irreverent iconoclast (even though he’s an admirer of right-wing shit-rags like the Economist and proponents of collective punishment, such as Anthony Cordesman). I am quite annoyed, therefore, by his constant and unwarranted attacks on soft targets, such as Carter, Paul Findley, Ramsey Clark, Galloway, Mearsheimer, Walt etc. But after his latest stunt, I have very little respect left for him.
A little more than week before the [debate on the Israel Lobby], those involved in the event: the organizer, Fred Shepherd, of Global Information Services, and the other participants, moderator Khalil Bendib, my debating partner, Dr. Hatem Bazian, of UC Berkeley, and one of our opponents, Prof. Stephen Zunes, of USF, learned that Zunes’ anticipated partner, Prof. As’ad AbuKhalil, of CSU, Stanislaus, was not planning showing up.
Rather than having the courtesy to notify us of his intentions, we had to get the information from people who had written AbuKhalil about the debate and to whom he replied that he was not planning to participate.
When contacted by Shepherd, AbuKhalil wrote that he would not accept to take the “No” side of the debate if the question was, as debated Thursday, “Is the Israel Lobby the Dominant Factor in Determining US Middle East Policy?” but would only participate if the question was changed to “Is the Israel Lobby the Sole and Dominant Factor in Determining US Middle East Policy?” AbuKhalil is smart enough to realize that no one, neither Mearsheimer and Walt, nor anyone with any knowledge of US interests in the region would be willing to argue that the lobby is the only factor in determining US policy. What he was doing, it appeared, was trying to sabotage the debate.
In the March-April issue of the superlative culture jamming magazine Adbusters, Bill and Kathleen Christison have an important article. They conclude:
If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. In the face of the massive human rights violations being committed against Palestinians today, the failure to recognize this reality is where those who belittle the lobby’s power and accept US Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy are particularly dangerous.”
So anyone who lets his dogma take precedence over an understanding of the political realities crucial to the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict does not deserve mine, or anyone elses respect. I have also decided to remove the link to his blog from my website.
It is courageous when you challenge those who have power and are misusing it; it takes no courage whatsoever to attack those who are vulnerable, and are already fending off attacks from Zionists and their right-wing/liberal reactionary cohorts. As’ad’s approach is a hallmark of the sectarian Left a la Monty Python.
Here Jeffrey Blankfort debunks his silly critique of the Mearsheimer & Walt paper.
“I was not thrilled to read the piece,” he wrote since the “authors seem intent on blaming all the ills of US foreign policy on the Israeli lobby.” That is what AbuKhalil may have inferred but it is not what the authors wrote. Their focus was on the Middle East and more specifically, how the lobby was the driving force behind the war on Iraq, a position with which I am in complete agreement and have previously written about.
He writes that the authors “absolve the the US administration, any US administration, from any responsibility” since they are “helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby.” This again is AbuKhalil’s inference and not born out by the article and echoes the black and white, either/or dogmatism of those who argue against (but refuse to debate) the lobby’s power.
AbuKhalil is upset because Mearsheimer and Walt used Israeli sources, implying that the authors are racist because they see the “oppressors and occupiers” as being “credible enough.” and not their victims. This is a straw man, but typical of his approach to the subject. It should, first, be obvious that to a US audience, sources from the Israeli and the American Jewish press will carry more weight than something from Al Jazeera or other Arab media, but more importantly, the issues that M &W wrote about were ignored by the mainstream and discussed only in American Jewish and Israeli publications. Certainly, AbuKhalil was not writing about them and indeed, when I added him twice to my mailing list, much of which is devoted to the lobby’s activities, on each occasion he quickly asked to be removed..
He is further upset because the authors “identify the lobby as ‘comprised of American Jews.’” It isn’t? While there are hundreds of thousands of Christian Zionists who support Israel for religious reasons, only a few of their leaders can be said to lobby, that is, work actively, for Israel. “Now, I am not saying,” AbuKhalil then writes, “that this notion carries a tinge of anti-Semitism, although it may at the hands of some critics of the lobby,” a phraseology that makes one wonder if he is channeling JINSA’s Executive Director Thomas Neumann who said “he was not offended by [Colin] Powell’s reference [to the "JINSA crowd"], although he was surprised that the former secretary of state would single out a Jewish group when naming those who supported the war.’ I am not accusing Powell of anything, but these are words that antisemites might use in the future.’” (Forward, 2/2/07). As’ad AbuKhalil meet Tom Neumann.
JINSA, of course, is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, correctly described by the Forward as “a hawkish think tank that supported the war.” Think Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Stephen Bryen.
AbuKhalil then poses the most remarkable question: “I don’t understand why people don’t see that the most important leaders and implementers of the lobby are the non-Jewish leaders of the US Congress. It is they who empower the lobby and allow it the unprecedented access that it has enjoyed for decades. Reagan, Bush and Clinton are the real power behind the powers of the the pro-Israeli lobby, much more than the particular leaders of the lobby.”
Apart from the fact that he offers no reason for those “non-Jewish leaders and three US presidents to kowtow to the lobby, one must ask, is he serious? Is he that ignorant of how Washington works and of who provides the bulk of the money that feeds the political campaigns year in and year out? Has he never wondered why a member of the US Congress can feel safe publicly criticizing a sitting president but not a present or past prime minister of Israel or why there is no debate on any form of aid or loan guarantees to Israel?
Is he not curious why the Congressional Black Caucus never tried to penalize Israel for selling arms to South Africa or why today, more than a dozen of its members, led by John Conyers, have signed a letter to Jimmy Carter asking him to remove the word, “apartheid” from the title of his book, “Palestine: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” in its next printing? Is he not aware that AIPAC wrote the Lebanese Sovereignty and Syrian Accountability Act that demanded that Syrian troops leave Lebanon and that Hizbollah be disarmed, opening the door for Israel’s massive bombing of his native country last summer?
“On P.16 [of the M&W paper], there is a disturbing quotation attributed to [former AIPAC chief] Morris Amitay,” AbuKhalil writes. “It speaks of ‘infiltration,’ and it underlines the Jewishness of Hill staffers as if non-Jewish staffers in Congress are any less pro-Israeli.” Although AbuKhalil has not bothered to do the research, why should he think non-Jewish staff members should be pro-Israeli and if so, as much as their Jewish counterparts? He also is probably unaware that AIPAC “volunteers” young Jewish interns to work in the offices of members of Congress who, apart from their personal ambitions, function as AIPAC’s eyes (rhymes with “spies”) in those offices.
AbuKhalil then finds fault with M&W for quoting “a variety of Lobby leaders over the years who spoke about the powers of AIPAC.” “But that is what lobby leaders, any leaders of any lobby, including the lobby for olive growers do. They have to brag and exaggerate their powers. You have to see the leaders of ‘the Arab lobby’ when they speak of their achievements.” Again, one must ask, is he serious or seriously ignorant? The so-called Arab lobby is, as he suggests, little more than a joke, but what lobby, other than AIPAC has half of the members of Congress, including the ranking members of both parties, plus the vice president or secretary of state, coming to address its annual meetings and what lobby, other than AIPAC, receives siren screaming police escorts to convey its guests around the capitol during such gatherings?
What other lobby, I would ask Professor AbuKhalil, can get 76 senators to sign a letter to a sitting president, warning it not to take action against its client, as AIPAC did in 1975 to Pres. Ford, when he announced that he was going to make a major foreign policy address which would include a critical reassessment of US-Israel relations which resulted in Ford canceling the speech?
What other lobby could get a different group of senators, 81 in all, a dozen years later, to sign a letter to Pres. Clinton, warning him not to demand of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel withdraw from 13% of the West Bank, and get him not do so? What does AbuKhalil take his readers for?
It gets worse. When the authors write that “the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel,” AbuKhalil declares, “This is it. This shows yet again how the debate in Israel is framed in the US, by those who champion Israel, and by those who are seen as critics of Israel. It is the manifestation of the center of debate on Israel. That even for critics of Israel, the concern or the center of attention is not the victims but the oppressors and occupiers.”
I don’t know either Mearsheimer or Walt, or for that matter, Jimmy Carter, who also expressed his concern for Israel which, whether heart-felt or not, has, thanks largely to the power of the lobby, become a requirement whenever anyone with a career or position in society that might be jeopardized ventures to criticize Israel in any manner and that includes former presidents.
Clearly, from the level of vituperation with which the lobby greeted the M&W paper and the even greater, literally unprecedented level of venom with which its minions attacked and continue to attack Carter, any concern expressed by them for Israel carries no weight with their critics.
AbuKhalil, to be sure, expresses his understanding how, “We, in the pro-Palestinian camp, are so desperate for any mainstream support for Palestinian rights that we are willing to take it from any side, and we are willing to forgive and even not notice the problems that some critics of Israel bring with them.” But that sentence and the one that follows are troubling.
“Yes,” he writes, “one should be pleased that criticisms of Israel has [sic] reached a mainstream corner, but we should be vigilant and not ignore our duty to subject support for AND criticisms of Israel to critical scrutiny lest the baggage come back to haunt us.”
But AbuKhalil doesn’t seemed at all pleased. What is he implying here but that criticism of Israel such as that put forth by Mearsheimer and Walt is “anti-semitic?” Or close enough to it, as I pointed out earlier, to be troubling. Here he sounds like Michael Lerner, who he likes to criticize, like Stephen Zunes (an Episcopalian), like the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Mitchell Plitnick and other Jewish supporters of a two-state solution whose “anti-semitism” detectors seemed tuned to a wider frequency and are far more sensitive than those they employ in behalf of Palestinian rights.
AbuKhalil concludes with a rant against former foreign service officers who since retiring have become critics of the Israel lobby and who founded the Council for the National Interest (CNI), the only organized anti-lobby group (which the left, in its traditional narrow-mindedness, ignores) and suggests that M&W’s paper “does not deviate from the book by the former member of Congress, Paul Findley….They Dare to Speak Out. Having said all that, this piece should be recommended reading for people who are new to the subject, although the shortcomings should be pointed out.”
Findley’s landmark book was published 22 years ago and should be required reading for anyone concerned with the subject. It is not evident from his comments about the Mearsheimer and Walt paper that AbuKhalil has actually taken the time to read it.
I do wish that he had had the courage to join the debate. Or at least to read the book.
Monkey See, Monkey Do: The Case of Pakistani Liberals
February 26, 2007
My good friend Jairo Lugo picked up some English language newspapers on his way back from a week in Pakistan. So here I have the “liberal” Friday Times, “Pakistan’s first Independent weekly”, having raucous fun ridiculing the local language newspapers for their apparent lack of sophistication in its “Nuggets from the Urdu Press” section. Meanwhile on its own front page it carries a grovelling tribute to the “enlightenment” of the country’s dictator; its comments page has one sage arguing how Bush’s escalation is proof of his concern for Iraqi life and International law; and on its letters page it has a cartoon of Imran Khan – in full Taliban garb with prayer beads in hand.
So to these sophisticaed liberals, a dictator who surrounds himself with a gaggle of inept clowns; subjects the indigent of his country to merciless military assaults; calls Ariel Sharon a “a bold man, a great soldier, a courageous leader”; implements the kind of collective punishment that even Sharon would envy, is a paragon of “enlightenment”.
Next, we have a comment piece on Bush’s escalation where one writer mixes a superficial understanding of International Law with total ignorance of Iraqi reality to reach a conclusion that is unintentionally hilarious. Bush’s “surge” (escalation), we are told, is a damn fine idea because it would not only ”spare the Iraqi civilians more deaths”, but also “avoid further allegations of violations of international law”.
Imran Khan, on the other hand, is equated with the Taliban presumably for being the sole mainstream political challenger to the Guantanamo-englightenment and Sharon-modernity that is Musharraf’s gift to Pakistan. Pakistani liberals hated him for raising the issue of the desecration of the Qur’an at Guantanamo — clearly an issue too low-brow for the sophisticated secular humanists (assuming they know what that means). They were also bemused by his audacity for being the only politican to protest Bush’s visit to Pakistan.
But for the Taliban, who could possibly take such matters seriously?
Imran Khan, alas, was not alone in joining the ranks of the Taliban on this matter. So did the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Democracy Now … and pretty much any progressive individual, publication, or organization that you can think of.
Plenty of prayer beads to go around, I would say.
One wonders, however, why the paper would bother looking in the “Urdu press”, when its demand for “nuggets” is matched by an abundant supply of inanity within its own pages? That is, if you have missed the correlation: sophistication is a function of the English language; it is only the vacuity of the Urdu press, therefore, that merits ridicule.
Black Skin, White Masks
In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes: “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is.”
Some may find the idea of English newspapers in a mostly Urdu speaking country odd; but this is merely a legacy of the British colonial rule. The elite, which for the most part owes its status to the munificence of the colonial overlord – usually bestwoed in direct proportion to services rendered — still has a preference for the master’s language. There is, of course, nothing wrong with knowing foreign languages; in fact, the merits of linguistic diversity are manifold. So much of the beauty of foreign language literature is lost in translation. But in Pakistan, speaking or writing English has very different connotations: it is an assertion of class superiority, sophistication and… liberalism! With the West as a point of reference for the majority of Pakistani elite (and middle classes), it is the identification with Western values rather than a progressive outlook that denotes liberalism. Some of the English language publications, while deeply reactionary in their outlook, continue to espouse a “liberal” self-image insofar as their content echoes the worldview propagated by Western media.
“A feeling of inferiority?” asked Fanon, “No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white.” For a Pakistani liberal, then, it is not so much the merit of an idea, as it is the source that determines its value. So long as he finds himself in conformity with the dominant Western orthodoxy, his colonized mind revels in the vicarious existence of borrowed thoughts.
Clandestino
February 26, 2007
From the inordinate attention devoted refugees and asylum seekers in Europe and America, one would be inclined to believe that this were a reflection of the magnitude of the problem. In fact, more than a third of the world’s 12 million refugees live in just two countries, and neither of them are European or American (another third comprises of Palestinians alone, driven from their lands ’48 onwards). Iran and Pakistan host more than 4 million refugees, despite their meagre resources, whereas Britain and Australia frequently send theirs to places like Dungavel (in the case of UK) and concentration camps in Nauru (in the case of Australia). Americans have their borders patrolled by vigilatne’s such as the Minutemen Project who are not averse to the use of violence.
Asylum is a right, and there is no reason why the victims of global economics should escape only to find themselves targets of local politics.
Here is a song for all the refugees and asylum seekers of the world from the brilliant Manu Chao.
Clandestino
Manu Chaosolo voy con mi pena
sola va mi condena
correr es mi destino
para burlar la ley
perdido en el corazon
de la grande babylon
me dicen el clandestino
por no llevar papel
pa una ciudad del norte
yo me fui a trabajar
mi vida la deje
entre ceuta y gibraltar
soy una raya en el mar
fantasma en la ciudad
mi vida va prohibida
dice la autoridadsolo voy con mi pena
sola va mi condena
correr es mi destino
por no llevar papel
perdido en el corazon
de la grande babylon
me dicen el clandestino
yo soy el quiebra leymano negra clandestina
peruano clandestino
africano clandestino
marijuana ilegalsolo voy con mi pena
sola ca mi condena
correr es mi destino
para burlar la ley
perdido en el corazon
de la grande babylon
me dicen el clandestino
por no llevar papel
Hollywood and Israel
February 23, 2007
Hollywood seems to have retained a liberal image despite the deeply reactionary content of the majority of its output. With an extraordinarily early start to the presidential race, Democratic presidential hopefuls are already seeking alliances, and the crucial financial backing, among the ranks of Hollywood’s rich and famous. Clinton, Obama, Edwards; they all seem to be vying for the same dollars, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, come in sums no serious candidate could ignore.
The entertainment industry gave federal candidates $22 million in 2006 donations, according to the Web site opensecrets.org. That’s more than either drug companies or the oil and gas industry.
The liberal veneer of Hollywood could be quite deceiving, as John Edwards discovered to his chagrin; Hollywood may hold liberal views on many things but one issue it blithely dispenses with such pretences: Israel. Vareity magazines reports on one recent reception honouring John Edwards:
The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the “I” word — Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.
The Dreamworks trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen are all backing Obama, whose views have undergone a transformation from fairly critical to obsequiously supportive on the question of Israel. Spielberg, of course, is the director of famous Zionist propaganda, like Munich (While Spielberg sold his sophisticated propaganda as a “balanced” view of the conflict, the extent of his dissent is evident in the fact that during Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon, he signed a statement along with other Tinseltown heavies, pledging his unequivocal support for the campaign of mass murder). David Geffen’s “philanthropic” ventures include funding Jewish immigrants from former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to help them settle on illegally occupied Palestinian lands.
Hillary Clinton on the other hand is courting Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul who is the highest donor in the Democratic Party’s history. Besides his massive media empire, and pro-Israel think-tanks, Saban is known for statements such as “I am a one issue guy and my issue is Israel”. In the year 2,000 alone he donated $12.3 million to the Democratic party.
Obama also has the support of Ari Emanuel (Michael Moore’s agent for the deeply flawed Fahrenheit 9/11, a putative critique of American role in the Middle East which didn’t mention Israel once), brother of Rahm Emanuel, the pro-War Democratic hawk who served in the Israel military. Ari is also a signatory to the aforementioned letter in support of Israel’s destruction of Lebanon.
Reel Bad Arabs
But this, of course, is merely one aspect of Hollywood’s pro-Israel activism. It is the role that it plays in historical engineering, shaping public perceptions and reinforcing anti-Arab/Muslim stereotypes that it does real damage. Jack Shaheen did an excellent study of more than 250 films to show the persistence of cultural stereotypes, reductive interpretation of current affairs and essentialization of people from the East in his book Reel Bad Arabs (Some of the typical Hollywood representations of Arabs have been compiled in this amusing video collage).
The role played by just a single film, Exodus, in shaping Western perceptions of the Israeli state have been instrumental in erasing Palestinian history and the manner of their dispossession. In a two part analysis of Zionism in cinema, Larry Portis writes:
How can the “Western democracies” continue to participate in the genocidal punishment of a population while proclaiming the purest of intentions? One of the reasons is the power of Zionist propaganda over those who lack alternative information and the political fear and hypocrisy that it can inspire in those who understand what is happening. Of the modern means of communication and the formation of consciousness, the cinema is pre-eminent and, in the case of the Zionist state of Israel, one film in particular has been remarkably influential.
In the first chapter of his brilliant book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Norman Finkelstein dissects the racist stereotypes of Arabs that litter Leon Uris’s novel on which the film was based. This book, according to Kathleen Christison, “had an immense influence on an entire generation of Americans”.Could it be that these racist assumptions are less an evidence of the author’s malice than of his ignorance? Larry Portis continues:
It was Dore Schary, a top executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) who suggested the idea for the book to Leon Uris. As Kathleen Christison explains, [in her book Perceptions of Palestine] the whole project “began with a prominent public-relations consultant who in the early 1950s decided that the United States was too apathetic about Israel’s struggle for survival and recognition.” Thanks to Schary, Uris received a contract from Doubleday and went to Israel and Cyprus where he carried out extensive research. The book was published in September, 1958. It was first re-printed in October the following year. By 1964, it had gone through 30 printings. This success was undoubtedly helped by the film’s release in 1960, but not entirely, as Uris’s novel was a book-of-the-month club selection in September 1959 (which perhaps explains the first re-printing).
The film was to be made by MGM. But when the time came, the studio hesitated. The project was perhaps too political for the big producers. It was then that Otto Preminger bought the screen rights from MGM. He produced and directed the film, featuring an all-star cast including Paul Newman, Eva Marie-Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford and other box-office draws of the moment. The film also benefited from a lavish production in “superpanavision 70” after having been filmed on location. The music was composed by Ernest Gold, for which he received an Academy Award for the best music score of 1960. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo. In spite of its length—three and a half hours—the film was a tremendous popular and critical success.
It is noteworthy that the release of Exodus the film in 1960 indicates that its production began upon Exodus the book’s publication. It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose a degree of coordination, in keeping with the origins of the project.
The film was a major success, both politically and financially: the book sold about 20 million copies whereas the film has been seen by hundreds of millions (a Venezuelan friend was telling me recently that it would play on their national TV every christmas). Not only did it shape Western perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it also embedded the myth of the Zionists prevailing in the face of overwhelming odds to establish a Jewish state (In fact, the Haganah [Jewish milita] far outnumbered the combine military forces of all the Arab states in ’48). The Holocaust is milked in the film for maximum propaganda value, even though in Israel itself, holocaust survivors were referred to disaparagingly as “soap” at the time (only last year, Ha’aretz was reporting that 40% of the holocaust survivors in Israel still live below the poverty line). The choice of the names for the protagonists suggests the writers wanted to leave nothing to the imagination.
Commenting on the ”routine bestialisation of Arabs and Muslims” in cinema, Robert Fisk wrote:
Yes, the film O Jerusalem … has reached Europe (mercifully, not yet Britain) and it is everything we have come to expect of the Hollywoodisation of Europe. It is dramatic; it stars the French singer Patrick Bruel as an Israeli commander; there is a flamboyant David Ben-Gurion – all white hair defying gravity – and Saïd Taghmaoui and JJ Feild as that essential duo of all such movies, the honourable, moderate, kind-hearted Arab (Saïd Chahine) and Jew (Bobby Goldman) whose friendship outlives the war between them.
We are used to this pair, of course. Exodus, based on Leon Uris’s novel of the same 1948 events, contained a “good” Arab who befriends Paul Newman’s Jewish hero, just as Ben Hur introduced us to a “good” Arab who lends Charlton Heston’s Jehuda Ben Hur his horses to compete in the chariot race against the nastiest centurion in the history of the Roman Empire. Once we have established that there are “good” Arabs with hearts of gold, we are, of course, free to concentrate on the rotten kind. They murder a young woman in Exodus and they also kill a brave young woman during the battle for Latroun in O Jerusalem…
You only have to watch the Arab slave-trader film Ashanti, again filmed in Israel and starring Roger Moore and (of all people) Omar Sharif, to see Arabs portrayed, Nazi-style, as murderers, thieves and child molesters. Anti-Semitism against Arabs – who are, of course, also Semites – is par for the course in movies…
No, what I object to is the deliberate distortion of history, the twisting of the narrative of events to present Jews as the victims of the Israeli war of independence (6,000 dead) when in fact they were the victors, and the Arabs of Palestine – or at least that part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 – as the cause of this war and the apparent victors (because the Jews of East Jerusalem were forced from their homes after the ceasefire) rather than the principal victims. Take, for example, the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where the Stern gang murdered the Arab villagers of what is now the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul, disembowelled women and threw grenades into rooms full of civilians. In O Jerusalem, the Stern gang is represented as a gang of wicked men, a kind of Jewish al-Qa’ida, hopelessly out of touch with the mainstream Israeli army of young, high-minded guerrilla fighters.
In the movie, you see the bodies of the dead Arabs – and a wounded woman later being treated by an Israeli – but at no point is it made clear that Deir Yassin was just one among many villages in which the inhabitants were butchered – this was particularly the case in Galilee – and the women raped by Jewish fighters. Israel’s “new” historians have already bravely disclosed these facts, along with the irrefutable evidence that they served Israel’s purpose of dispossessing 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in what was to become Israel. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has courageously referred to this period as one of “ethnic cleansing”. But no such suggestion sullies the scene of slaughter at Deir Yassin in O Jerusalem.
Reality has to be separated from us. Thus a massacre that became part of a policy has been turned in the movie into an aberration by a few armed extremists. Indeed, after the film ends, a series of paragraphs on the screen bleakly record the dispossession of the Palestinians as a result of “Arab propaganda”. This itself is a myth. Yet again, Israeli historians have already disproved the lie that the Arab regimes told Palestinian Arabs over the radio that they should leave their homes “until the Jews have been thrown into the sea”. No such broadcasts were made. Most Palestinians fled because they were frightened of ending up like the people of Deir Yassin. The propaganda about radio broadcasts was Israeli, not Arab.
It’s as if a blanket, a curtain, a veil has been thrown over history – so that the shadow of real events is just visible, but their meaning so distorted as to be incomprehensible. “So this is why you wanted guns,” Bobby Goldman shouts at the Stern leader amid the dead of Deir Yassin. And he’s wrong. The guns enabled the Stern gang to murder the Arabs of Deir Yassin to produce the panic that sent three quarters of a million Palestinians on the road to permanent exile
Speaking of the influence of these representations of the Arabs and Muslims, Kathleen Christison had written:
The basic set of assumptions that has governed policymaking on this issue is an enveloping blanket of tightly knit impressions, perceptions, and fixed ideas that’s virtually impossible to unravel. It did not all just start in 1948; it is not a matter only of a very strong pro-Israel lobby; it’s not only the influence of a very manipulative media. These are all part of it, but the frame of reference through which policymakers have always shaped policy began to develop well before 1948, and it’s a much broader phenomenon than just skillful lobbying or media misinformation.
With aspiring politicans required to genuflect to this powerful lobby and its approved narrative, can the West ever be trusted to play the role of an honest broker in the Middle East?
From Baghdad to Tehran
February 22, 2007
Poodle’s little political gimmick, withdrawing 1600 troops from Iraq, has already had some unforeseen consequences: the Danes and Ukrainians are also hinting retreat. The Iraqi resistance has just shot down the 8th US helicopter since the beginning of the year. In the meanwhile, the US-UK-Israel engineered civil war in Baghdad rages on.
By all accounts, it is an unmitigated success. While all the rapes so far had been committed by the occupiers, it would appear its puppets in the Iraqi Vichy government have also joined the sport. The puppet government of al-Maliki was already fending off allegations of rape (by commending the alleged rapists), only to be hit by another.
Four Iraqi soldiers have been accused of raping a 50-year-old Sunni woman and the attempted rape of her two daughters in the second allegation of sexual assault leveled against Iraqi forces this week, an official said Thursday.
Brig. Gen. Nijm Abdullah said the attack allegedly occurred earlier this month in the northern city of Tal Afar during a search for weapons and insurgents.
A lieutenant and three enlisted men denied the charge but later confessed after they were confronted by the woman, a Turkoman. Abdullah said a fifth soldier suspected something was wrong, burst into the house and forced the others at gunpoint to stop the assault.
Nowhere To Hide
The latest issue of the London Review of Books (a publication I highly recommend), carries an excellent report by Patrick Cockburn on the developments in Baghdad. Here are some excerpts:
Baghdad is now effectively a dozen different cities; they are all at war. On walls there are slogans in black paint saying ‘Death to Spies’. A Shia caught in a Sunni district will be killed and vice versa…Between thirty and fifty bodies, often mutilated, are picked up by the police every day…According to the UN, 3000 people are murdered, mostly for sectarian reasons, in Iraq every month.
Everybody in Baghdad is frightened. There are few friends of mine left in the city. One day I got a phone call from Hussein, a businessman I had known since the US invasion, who had remained an optimist longer than most. He now spoke in a frightened voice, and from London. I hadn’t heard from him for a while, he said, because he had been kidnapped last summer. He came from a well-known Shia family and was lucky to be alive. His kidnappers whipped him, and then ‘came back to apologise because a cleric at their mosque told them it was wrong to whip anybody over 40 years of age’; he was released after handing over all his money. He was told to leave the country, which he did, but he has no residence permit and can’t stay in Britain or Jordan indefinitely. He doesn’t know what to do.
Bombs, kidnappings and sectarian killings: these are what people talk about in Baghdad. There is not much Iraqis can do about these threats, except run away. I am always talking to people about how to get to Jordan or Syria, and about the chances of getting asylum in the UK or elsewhere in Europe. Out of a population of 27 million, four million Iraqis – more than the population of Ireland – have fled their homes. This is the biggest exodus of refugees in the Middle East since Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948. Many left after finding a bullet in an envelope slipped under the door or a death threat scrawled on the front of their house. There are relatively safe areas inside Iraq to which the Shia can flee; the Sunni are in danger wherever they go unless they leave the country altogether…
Just how dangerous Baghdad is for Americans was underlined last month when a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni area of al-Fadhil close to the central market. The US army immediately sent in a rescue team, but by the time it arrived four of the five members of the helicopter’s crew had been executed by shots to the head (the fifth died in the crash); within hours their identity cards were being shown on insurgent websites. The lack of US control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. ‘The situation in Baquba,’ they claimed, ‘is reassuring and under control’; nasty rumours, they said, were being ‘circulated by bad people’. A few hours later insurgents stormed Baquba’s mayoral office, kidnapped the mayor and blew up the building. The local council’s response was to sack 1500 members of the Diyala police force on grounds that they had failed to resist the insurgency. The council now complains that insurgents are in effective control of Baquba and that Nouri al-Maliki’s government, which is preoccupied with the Baghdad security plan, has sent them no help.
It is hard to see why Bush’s surge into areas of Iraq that the US army has failed to pacify should succeed this time. Sunni insurgents and Shia militias will simply move elsewhere, or fight back using guerrilla tactics. If the US puts pressure on the Mehdi Army in Baghdad then the long and vulnerable US supply lines to Kuwait – the convoys run through the Shia provinces of southern Iraq – will come under attack, threatening the effective functioning of US forces in the capital…
The enormity of the decisions about future US policy that Bush announced in January has still not sunk in outside the US – and perhaps not even there. The implications are considerable. Bush’s plan is a total rejection of the sensible proposals of the Baker-Hamilton report, which recommended talks with Iran and Syria. He means instead to escalate and widen the war. ‘Shia extremists backed by Iran’, Bush said, were now an enemy as significant as al-Qaida. His demonisation of Iran – the hidden hand controlling the Shia militias – was an expression of the same paranoid fervour that four years ago drove his denunciations of Saddam for building weapons of mass destruction to threaten the Middle East. The level of mendacity about the relationship between Iran and the Iraqi Shia is even greater. The Shia of Iraq – who make up 60 per cent of the population – needed nobody’s prompting to take power through victory in the elections of 2005. Perhaps the most dangerous misconception in the Middle East is to see the Shia of Iraq or Lebanon as the pawns of Iran.
Target Iran
While the most recent antiwar rally in Washington (organized by United For Peace and Justice, a Democratic Party front) ignored the threats against Iran altogether, since most leaders of the Democratic party are as hawkish, if not more, on Iran as the Bush junta, the intellectual luminaries of the antiwar movement have been equally remiss in emphasizing the dangers. Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former US air force officer, instructor at various war colleges, who has carried out war games with Iran as the target warns: “We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq…It is an air operation.”
Only two days back, the BBC reported:
US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country’s military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.
It is understood that any such attack – if ordered – would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres…senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.
That list includes Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say.
Two triggers
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon – which it denies.
Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called “bunker-busting” bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground.
It is well understood in the ranks of the military, diplomatic and financial elite that a war against Iran would be disastrous. Most are opposing it vocally for this reason. The American congress on the other hand is playing to a very different tune. While it may not support Bush if the US leads the attack on Iran, there is hardly anyone in the congress who will raise a bleat if Israel joins the fight first. As we saw during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, in both houses of congress, there was only a single individual who had the courage to utter mild words of criticism — and it was a Republican! Other than Chuck Hagel, everyone else, including the most progressive fringe of the Democratic Party lined up behind Israel. Liberals, such as Nancy Pelosi refused to attend a speech by puppet Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki when criticised Israel during his visit to Washington. Howard Dean went further and declared him an “anti-Semite” for refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to bomb any civilian population its leaders wished.
These cretinous cowardly politicians are aided in their war mongering by the so called “antiwar” movement, which sanitizes its message in accord with the Democratic party’s wishes, and chose to exclude Iran, and Israel’s role in instigating the war, altogether from the agenda of its recent star-studded march in Washington. It even brought “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, a woman who had visited Beirut in 1982 with her husband Tom Hayden to cheer on Ariel Sharon as he proceeded to destroy Lebanon and murder 18,000 of its civilians. (To his credit, Tom Hayden apologized for his craven behavior last year, and als explained the circumstance that dictated his behavior).
There is no reason why the American people should keep themselves in ignorance however. Here is Patrick Cockburn again:
Confrontation with Iran makes little sense in terms of Iraqi politics. The most important elements in the Iraqi government are pro-Iranian, notably the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which used to be based in Iran. When I went to see one of its leaders in Najaf his guards spoke to me in Farsi. The Badr Organisation, SCIRI’s well-organised militia, was set up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war. It is inconceivable that SCIRI would switch its allegiance from Iran to the US. It’s worth noting that the Iraqi nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mehdi Army, prominent on the list of those denounced by Washington as creatures of Iran, have traditionally been anti-Iranian.
Bush’s new vision of Iran as the puppetmaster behind the Shia militias in Iraq is curiously close to that of the Baath Party, which also justifies its attacks on the Shia by claiming that the Shia are Iran’s instruments. The US overthrow of the Baathist regime was bound to benefit both Iran and al-Qaida. ‘We cannot reverse this outcome by more use of military force in Iraq,’ Lt General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘To try to do so would require siding with Sunni leaders and the Baathist insurgents against pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Baathist insurgents constitute the forces most strongly opposed to Iraqi co-operation with Iran.’ Because the Sunni insurgents – both the nationalists and those sponsored by al-Qaida – are fighting primarily in order to end the US occupation they cannot ally themselves with Washington as Saddam did during the Iran-Iraq war. The result is that inside Iraq Bush is alienating the Shia without necessarily gaining the support of the Sunni.
Bush’s confrontation with Iran makes some sense in the context of the politics of the wider Middle East. In Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan he is appealing to sectarian bigotry against the Shia in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere: a powerful sentiment among leaders and people alike. The Shia takeover of the Iraqi government in alliance with the Kurds is being portrayed as the sharp edge of Iranian imperialism. Sunni rulers realise that the success of Hizbullah, which had widespread popular support when it fought Israel to a standstill in Lebanon last year, shows up the impotence, incompetence and corruption of their own regimes. To avoid such damaging comparisons they are happy to join the US in stoking the anti-Shia and anti-Iranian flames.
The real reason for Bush’s anti-Iranian policy may be its effects on American domestic politics. Ever since the overthrow of Saddam was first planned the White House has shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Bush went to war in Iraq in 2003 because, after overthrowing the Taliban so easily in Afghanistan, he thought he could win an easy victory there too, to his great political advantage at home. He was partly right: the Iraqis did not fight for Saddam. But they also soon made it clear that they did not intend to live under permanent US occupation. Spurious turning points were exaggerated or invented in an attempt to prove that progress was being made: Saddam was captured in December 2003; power was supposedly handed over to an Iraqi government in 2004; elections were held in 2005; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed by US bombs in 2006. None of these supposed successes made any real difference on the battlefield, but all were claimed as evidence that the US had put an end to the bloody stalemate. The moment American voters realised the extent of the failure in Iraq was postponed long enough for Bush to win the presidential election in 2004 and hold onto both Houses of Congress until 2006.
US confrontation with Iran will prolong the war in Iraq. ‘The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq, but they cannot afford to be defeated there,’ Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist, told me. If the US stages air-raids, assassinations or small-scale strikes against Iran then the difficulties it finds itself in in Iraq will only increase. Despite Washington’s claims, there is little evidence that Iran gives significant support to either Sunni insurgents or Shia militias. But if pressed it could do so. After spending four years failing to defeat the five million Iraqi Sunni the US could find itself fighting the 17 million Iraqi Shia as well.
