Archive for June, 2008
Written by Radical Daily on 10 June 2008
By Nathan Sheva
Even the powerful euro has had a hard time competing with what has become probably the strongest currency in the world since the beginning of 2008: the Israeli shekel.
Since the beginning of 2008 the shekel has made some serious gains against nearly all the major world currencies. The shekel has gained 15% against the dollar, slightly more against the British pound and the Canadian dollar, as well as 8% versus the Swedish kroner and 24% against the South African rand.
Even the solid euro has had a hard time competing with the shekel, and has fallen from NIS 5.74 at the beginning of April by 12% to NIS 5.00 – its lowest rate in five years. Since the start of the year, the shekel has strengthened against the euro by 9%.
A week ago the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Triche, praised the euro to the Wall Street Journal, saying the European currency would provide price stability in the medium-term.
Even compared to the currencies of countries rich in natural resources and raw materials, such as Australia and Canada, it has done well.
One opinion is that the shekel will continue to gain in the next few months against the dollar and euro, at least until the November elections.
The real question is, which elections – those in America or maybe those here in Israel?
Haaretz.com
Tags: Dollar, Economy, Euro, Israel, Shekel
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Written by Radical Daily on 09 June 2008
NEW DELHI, India – International forces in Afghanistan have mismanaged the fight against the Taliban, leading to a rise in violence, and now risk losing people’s goodwill, President Hamid Karzai told an Indian news channel.
Karzai has often criticised the Western conduct of the war in Afghanistan, saying civilian casualties must stop.
In turn, the president, who wants to stand for re-election next year, is often criticised at home for being overly influenced by the United States and Britain.
In an interview to be aired on Indian television on Monday, he said foreign troops had failed to go after “the sanctuaries of the terrorists” which Afghan officials say exist over the border in Pakistan.
Karzai did not directly mention Pakistan but the Afghan government has said that the West should have done more to crack down on Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan.
“It was a serious neglect of that, in spite of our warning,” he told CNBC TV 18, adding that other former members of the Taliban who had given up arms were unfairly hunted down within Afghan territory.
“Some of the Taliban who have laid down their arms, who are living in the Afghan villages peacefully, who have accepted Afghanistan’s new order, they were chased, they were hunted for no reason, and they were forced to flee the country.”
Ousted from power in 2001 by U.S.-led and Afghan forces, the Taliban has vowed to topple the Afghan government and drive out the foreign troops who back it.
Some 13,000 people, including more than 380 foreign troops and 81 Canadian soldiers, have been killed in violence since 2006.
“The international community came to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and that fight has to be real and effective,” Karzai said.
“There is no way we can win this war against terrorism unless and until Afghanistan is . . . detached from the other interests or views that some of our partners have in this region.”
On the one hand the Taliban have shown a desire for political dialogue but on the other stepped up attacks, including a high-profile strike at a state parade attended by Karzai and Western diplomats in April.
Karzai also said violence had risen because not enough attention was paid in time to the training of a new Afghan army and police force.
There are 2,500 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led international force.
The Afghan president said he did not accept charges in the Western media of corruption, ineptitude and paranoia in his government.
“I don’t even recognise it,” he said.
Reuters
Tags: Afghanistan, Cold War, War
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Written by Radical Daily on 08 June 2008
The June 12 vote on the Lisbon Treaty now seems less certain, as opposition groups, some businessmen and farmers raise concerns about sovereignty.
By Kim Murphy
NENAGH, IRELAND — The “Yes on the EU” bus rolled into town blaring a foot-stomping “Galway Girl” from its megaphone one afternoon last week, but what it got was a whole lot of no.
An Irishman has always been a hard sell, and never more so than when issues of sovereignty are at stake.
“People died for your freedom,” declares one of the signs that have popped up in this agricultural town as Ireland prepares to vote June 12 on the European Union’s new constitution. “Don’t throw it away.”
Farmer Ida McLoughlin isn’t sold on the other posters plastered around town: “Vote yes for jobs, the economy and Ireland’s future.”
“Since the EU, all you see are 4×4s going down the street and big buildings going up. The thatched cottages are gone,” McLoughlin said. “You have all these Johnny-come-lately people who were poor and got rich, and they’re dreadful people. We’ve lost our Irish values.”
Adoption of the so-called Lisbon Treaty requires ratification by all 27 member states of the EU, which could take a much more prominent role on the world stage under the streamlined diplomacy and beefed-up military readiness the document envisions.
Fourteen nations have ratified the agreement through their parliaments, and the remainder are expected to do so by the end of the year. Only Ireland’s constitution requires a referendum — and that could make or break the long-awaited constitution.
The Irish government, most business leaders and political parties of nearly every stripe have come out overwhelmingly in favor of the Lisbon Treaty, pointing out how Ireland’s membership in the EU over the last 35 years has helped transform the Emerald Isle of 4.1 million people from an impoverished backwater dependent on Britain to one of Europe’s most robust economies.
But a newly vigorous opposition composed of farmers, a few wealthy businessmen with vague connections to the U.S. defense establishment and the leftist Irish republican party, Sinn Fein, have gained quickly in recent polls, and the outcome is suddenly no longer a sure thing.
It is not clear what happens if Ireland says no — except that the union would surely be plunged, as it was when France and the Netherlands voted down an earlier EU constitution in 2005, into uncertainty and more tedious negotiations on what EU leaders say is a badly needed framework for decision-making among its suddenly more numerous member states.
“It would put us in the very tortured position of going back to the drawing board,” said Marc Coleman, a Dublin-based economic analyst.
The treaty signed in Lisbon in December would help Europe project itself more forcefully on the international stage by creating a European Council president and foreign affairs representative while outlining a framework for EU troop deployments in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
The treaty would broaden and establish a legal basis for the EU’s lawmaking powers in some areas while making them subject much more directly to national parliaments and citizens initiatives. It would set out voting weights between large and small countries, improve cross-border cooperation in areas such as crime fighting and climate change and streamline the European Commission to a manageable decision-making body of 18.
Under the treaty, member nations still would retain their historic veto power in crucial areas such as defense, foreign policy, taxation and social security, but not on issues like immigration and energy policy.
Voters in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland worry that the nation would be forced to expand abortion rights (no), forfeit its long tradition of military neutrality (no) or give up the holy grail of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle, Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate (probably not, though some in Europe would like to try).
Treaty opponents say the government is too smoothly dismissing what may be legitimate fears and is too quick to warn that Ireland would incur the wrath of the rest of Europe if it voted no.
“People always say Ireland is in very good standing at the European level. But why wouldn’t we be? We haven’t invaded one of the partner countries, we haven’t partitioned them. But we’re also a small member state, and in the power structure that is the EU, small states have to be very careful in how they protect their status and institutions,” said Mary Lou McDonald, a member of the European Parliament with Sinn Fein.
Here in County Tipperary, the “Yes on the EU” bus was stopping in front of village cafes and bakeries; young activists from the majority Fianna Fail party trailed out in yellow T-shirts. They smiled and passed out leaflets touting EU membership as a bonanza for Ireland — the country received 58 billion euros in European funds for agriculture, infrastructure and other programs from 1973 to 2003. Its exports to other EU states increased from 45 billion euros in 1997 to 87 billion in 2006.
Maire Hoctor, a Fianna Fail lawmaker and a minister of state from Nenagh, strolled the sidewalks, stopping for hugs, handshakes and an occasional tongue-lashing. She was joined by party colleague Jim Casey, mayor of North Tipperary.
“They’re not going to give us anything. They’re going to take it away, for sure,” said Bernie O’Brien, an elderly woman who resisted their overtures.
“I remember when we had nothing in this county: We had a one-way ticket to Britain, and that was our lot,” Hoctor told her.
Much of the opposition in rural Ireland involves an issue that has nothing to do with the EU treaty at all: agriculture proposals submitted last month to the World Trade Organization by the European trade commissioner, who is Britain’s former envoy to the British province of Northern Ireland.
Irish farmers say the trade proposals could put 50,000 cattle farmers in Ireland out of business by easing importation of Brazilian and Argentine beef and driving down prices. The Irish Farmers Assn. says it will urge its members to vote “no” on the EU treaty if Ireland doesn’t exercise its EU veto to block the trade proposals.
“It’s just going to decimate farms,” McLoughlin told Hoctor. “Sure, we’ve gotten subsidies from the EU. We got the check in the post, like everyone else. We were bought. We were humiliated. My husband has been told what to grow, when to grow it.”
Casey said the issue shouldn’t be used to block a treaty that will be good for Ireland.
“We’ve always negotiated good deals for the farmers in Ireland in Europe, and I’m convinced that will continue,” he said. “The EU has provided well for farmers. Since we entered Europe, everything has gotten much, much better.”
The other main source of opposition has come from a group called Libertas, fronted by two wealthy businessmen who have had extensive contracts with the U.S. military. This has caused some in the Irish media to speculate that the group is advancing the agenda of U.S. conservatives, some of whom worry that a stronger, united Europe would undermine U.S. interests on the continent.
But Ulick McEvaddy, a former military intelligence officer whose company has contracts for aerial refueling with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and who is one of Libertas’ biggest supporters, said he was worried about threats to Ireland’s independence.
“We’re handing over direct responsibility and huge issues of sovereignty to the Brussels parliament,” McEvaddy said. “If they believe in this great experiment, put it to all the people of Europe.”
Even in County Tipperary, some are willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
“Europe hasn’t let us down yet,” said Mick Connell, a member of the local council in Templemore, not far from Nenagh. “That should be good enough.”
From the Los Angeles Times
Tags: Europe, Ireland, Lisbon, Sovereignty
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Written by Radical Daily on 07 June 2008
By Peter Phillips
Carlos Bastidas was only 23 years of age when he was assassinated by Fulgencio Batista’s secret police after having visited Fidel Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos’ brother, told about how a river of changed flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother’s efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.
The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. World Press Freedom day was proclaimed by the UN in 1993 to honor journalists who have lost their lives reporting the news, and to defend media freedom worldwide.
During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba.
I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over 90 municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province.
During the course of several hours in each station I was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose. This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests.
Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 resulting in the deaths of seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people and several hotel bombings in the 1990s one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.
In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.
Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is bias and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one organic country in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctor from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43% increase in GDP over the past three years.
Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly, discussed bias in the US media, “how often do you see Gore Vidal interviewed on the US media?” he asked. Vidal has recently said that the US is in its ‘worst phase in history.’ “Perhaps Cuba uses corporate news to excess,” he said, “Cuban journalists need to link more to independent news sources in the US.” Alarcon went on to say that Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.
As the Cuban socialist system improves, the US does everything it can to artificially force cold-war conditions by funding terrorist attacks, maintaining an economic boycott, launching a new anti-terrorism Caribbean naval fleet, and increasingly limiting US citizen travel to Cuba. It is time to reverse this cold-war isolationist position, honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system and build a positive working relationship between journalists in support of media democracy in both our countries.
Media Channel, 2008
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology and Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research organization. He traveled to Cuba as an invited guest of the Journalist Union of Cuba May 10 to 15, 2008.
Tags: Cold War, Cuba, Journalism, Press Freedom
Posted in Communism, History, Media, Opinion, Saswat | No Comments »
Written by Radical Daily on 05 June 2008
Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu has called Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip an “abomination.” (CLICK HERE for video)
He strongly condemned what he called international “silence and complicity” on the blockade, which he compared to the actions of Burma’s leaders.
Speaking at the end of a two day mission to the area, the former archbishop said the humanitarian situation there could not be justified.
Earlier, 60 Palestinians were detained in an Israeli raid on northern Gaza.
Residents in the Beit Hanoun area were summoned to a local square by Israeli troops with loudhailers before dozens were taken away, witnesses said.
‘International complicity’
Mr Tutu was in Gaza on a United Nations fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinians by Israeli shellfire in November 2006.
The former archbishop of Cape Town said the international community’s “silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all”.
Mr Tutu said conflicts were resolved through talking to enemies not friends.
He said his meeting with the deposed prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights.
During his two-day visit, Mr Tutu met relatives of 19 civilians killed in the Israeli shelling of two houses in Beit Hanoun and is due to report his findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He condemned the incident as a “massacre”.
Israel says the Beit Hanoun deaths in November 2006 were a mistake during action to target areas used by Palestinian militants.
The Israeli military confirmed its pre-dawn incursion into Gaza on Thursday and said about 60 “wanted Palestinians” were being interrogated.
Armoured military bulldozers destroyed farmland during the incursion, witnesses told AFP news agency.
Israeli forces launch frequent attacks into Gaza which they say are aimed at combating Palestinian militants who fire rockets into Israel.
Further comments on this article on Canadian Dimension
Tags: Israel, Middle East, Tutu
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Written by Radical Daily on 04 June 2008
By Robert Scheer
What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago?
You wouldn’t know it from the most-exhausting-ever presidential primary campaigns, but the 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars) to defeat a ragtag band of terrorists than it spent at the height of the Cold War fighting the Soviet superpower and what we alleged were its surrogates in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget—or covert—operations.
And what are we spending all this money on? We are talking high-tech war toys designed to fight a Cold War enemy that no longer exists, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, with its estimated total price tag of $300 billion, and Virginia-class submarines at $2.5 billion each. Who cares that the terrorists lack submarines for the Navy to battle deep in the ocean, for which the Virginia-class submarine was designed?
Then there are the F-22 Raptor jet fighters that no longer fill a credible military purpose but will take $65 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets. The Raptor includes stealth technology and elaborate electronics designed to counter threatened leaps in Soviet war-fighting capability. In 2005, Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, wrote that the Raptor “is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon.”
Since President Bush’s first year in office, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Department has doubled its future planned investment in those ultra-pricey weapons from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion.
When pressed on why the massive weapons arsenal we already possess, which was credited with intimidating the Soviet Union into surrender, isn’t sufficient to keep the peace in a suddenly unipolar world, defense hawks sometimes cite what they claim is an emerging threat from China. “The Chinese are designing new classes of submarines with increased capabilities,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “If we do not move to produce two submarines a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind.”
That is nonsense. China is not even a serious regional power, as the Pentagon’s 2007 report to Congress makes clear: “The intelligence community estimates China will take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a moderate-size adversary.” The report noted that “China’s military is focused on assuring the capability to prevent Taiwan independence,” but this last week the military threat to Taiwan gave way to a historic peace opening, with the first visit by the head of Taiwan’s ruling party to the mainland since the 1949 revolution.
Oh, and here’s another thing. Those Virginia-class submarines that Lieberman says are so important to our national security and for which he lobbied so hard? General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Co. has received multibillion-dollar contracts to build them. The company is based in Connecticut, suggesting that the real goal here was to find an enemy—any enemy—that would justify spending U.S. tax dollars on weapons produced in his home state.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district.
As President George H.W. Bush noted in his 1992 State of the Union address, “communism died this year,” and, he promised, “we can stop making the sacrifices we had to make when we had an avowed enemy that was a superpower. Now we can look homeward even more and set right what needs to be set right.” Toward that end, he ordered his secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to initiate a 30% cut in defense spending. Gloom and doom in the military-industrial complex was palpable.
But then came what defense industry lobbyists and their many allies on both sides of the aisle in Congress came to treat as the gift of 9/11, offering dramatic imagery of a new global enemy. Fortunately for those who profit from a permanent war economy, few in government or the media were inclined to challenge the enemy bait-and-switch game that unfolded. The defense industry and the Pentagon bureaucracy that services it were all too happy to accept whatever war they could embrace, even if the new “global war on terrorism” that President George W. Bush launched was to be fought against an enemy armed primarily with weapons that could be purchased for a few dollars at Home Depot.
The Soviets had developed the most modern arsenals, and the 9/11 hijackers were armed with box cutters, so how could we justify spending more to defeat al-Qaida than we ever did to combat the communist enemy? That is the third-rail issue that politicians and the media dread touching because of the national security hysteria generated after the 9/11 attacks. Yet no presidential candidate can be serious about cutting the federal debt, improving education, holding down taxes or paying for any of the other things that the candidates of both parties promise without cutting military spending.
Without slashing the inflated military budget, the next president, who will inherit at least a $400-billion current-accounts deficit along with debt service on seven years of profligate military spending, will not be able to finance any of the domestic reforms that both the surviving Republican candidate and his two Democratic opponents advocate.
Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn’t it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history—35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined—is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?
That is because politicians from both parties are complicit in the waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons systems that deliver jobs to their home districts and profits to their defense industry campaign contributors. It is a disease of our political system predicted by two of our great wartime generals-turned-president. First was George Washington, warning in his farewell address that once a nation embarks on the path of imperial adventure, the irrationality of false patriotic appeals would trump reason. What better time to recall Washington’s historic caution to the nation “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
In Eisenhower’s farewell address, he warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
There is no better evidence of the prescience of Washington and Eisenhower than the fact that the most obscenely bloated military budget in U.S. history is not an issue in the current presidential campaign. Sadly, defense spending has become enshrined in our political system as a totem to be worshiped rather than a policy program to be critically examined.
Robert Scheer is the author, most recently, of ”The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” to be published this week by Twelve Books.
This Op-Ed was originally published in The Los Angeles Times.
Tags: Bush, Cold War, Economy, War
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Written by Radical Daily on 03 June 2008
By Pepe Escobar
WASHINGTON – They’re all here – and they’re all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates – John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.
Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.
Few books in recent years have been as explosive or controversial as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, written by Stephen Walt from Harvard University and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, published in 2007. In it, professors Walt and Mearsheimer argued the case of the Israeli lobby not as “a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ US foreign policy”, but as an extremely powerful interest group made up of Jews and non-Jews, a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations tirelessly working to move US foreign policy in Israel’s direction”.
Walt and Mearsheimer also made the key point that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite”. Anyone for that matter who “says that there is an Israeli lobby” also runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism.
All the candidates in the House say yeah
Republican presidential candidate McCain is opening this year’s AIPAC jamboree; Clinton and Obama are closing it on Wednesday. Walt and Mearsheimer’s verdict on the dangerous liaisons between presidential candidates and AIPAC remains unimpeachable: “None of the candidates is likely to criticize Israel in any significant way or suggest that the US ought to pursue a more evenhanded policy in the region. And those who do will probably fall by the wayside.”
Take what Clinton said in February at an AIPAC meeting in New York: “Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism.” A year before, Clinton was in favor of sitting and talking to Iran’s leadership.
And take what Obama said in March at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago; no reference at all to Palestinian “suffering”, as he had done on the campaign trail in March 2007. Obama also made it clear he would do nothing to alter the US-Israeli relationship.
No wonder AIPAC is considered by most members of the US Congress as more powerful than the National Rifle Association or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
AIPAC has explicit Zionist roots. The founder, “Si” Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951. The body was reorganized as a US lobby – the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs – in 1953-4, and then renamed AIPAC in 1959. Under Tom Dine, in the 1970s, it was turned into a mass organization with more than 150 employees and a budget of up to US$60 million today. Dine was later ousted because he was considered not hawkish enough.
The top leadership – mostly former AIPAC presidents – is always more hawkish on the Middle East than most Jewish Americans. AIPAC only dropped its opposition to a Palestinian state – without endorsing it – when Ehud Barak became Israeli prime minister in 1999.
AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby – Jews and non-Jews (It’s important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous “A Clean Break” document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 – the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)
The house that AIPAC built
AIPAC in the US Congress is a rough beast indeed. Former president Bill Clinton defined it as “stunningly effective”. Former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general-interest group across the entire planet”. The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel”. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, before his involvement in a corruption scandal, said. “Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world.”
AIPAC maintains a virtual stranglehold over the US Congress. Critics of the Israel lobby other than Walt and Mearsheimer also contend that AIPAC essentially prevents any possibility of open debate on US policy towards Israel. Compare it with a 2004 report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, according to which “Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies”.
AIPAC should not be crossed. It rewards those who support its agenda, and punishes those who don’t. In the end, it’s all about money – specifically campaign contributions. From 2000 to 2004, according to the Washington Post, AIPAC honchos contributed an average of $72,000 each to campaigns and political committees. For pro-AIPAC politicians, money simply pours from all over the US.
Every member of the US Congress receives AIPAC’s bi-weekly newsletter, the Near East Report. Walt and Mearsheimer stress that Congressmen and their staff “usually turn to AIPAC when they need info; AIPAC is called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes”.
Hillary Clinton has learned long ago she should not cross AIPAC. Clinton used to support a Palestinian state in 1998. She even embraced Suha Arafat, Yasser’s wife, in 1999. After much scolding, she suddenly became a vigorous defender of Israel, and years later wholeheartedly supported the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Clinton may have gotten the bulk of Jewish American donations for her 2008 presidential campaign.
Rice also learned about facts on the ground. She tried to restart the eternally moribund “peace process” when visiting the Middle East in March 2007. Before the trip, she got an AIPAC letter signed by no less than 79 US senators telling her not to talk to the new Palestinian unity government until it “recognized Israel, renounced terror and agreed to abide by Palestinian-Israeli agreements”.
AIPAC and Iraq
It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: “Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.”
And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war”.
Compare it with a 2007 Gallup study based on 13 different polls, according to which 77% of American Jews were opposed to the Iraq war, compared to 52% of Americans.
Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, and especially its neo-con wing. The lobby is not always representative of the larger community for which it often claims to speak.”
AIPAC and Iran
Now it is Iran time. Walt and Mearsheimer contend “the lobby is fighting to prevent the US from reversing course and seeking a rapprochement with Tehran. They continue to promote an increasingly confrontational and counterproductive policy instead”. Not much different from the embattled Olmert, who told Germany’s Focus magazine in April 2007 that “it would take 10 days … and 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles” to set back Iran’s nuclear program.
A measure of Walt and Mearsheimer’s power to rattle reputations is that the Zionist establishment had to bring out all its big guns to refute their argument, again and again.
Walt and Mearsheimer are no ideologues. They are realpolitik practitioners – very much at ease in the top circles of US foreign policy establishment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their book is that they argued four points that the establishment never mentions in public. Essentially these are:
# The US has already won its major wars in the Middle East, against Arab secular nationalism and against communism, and does not need Israel quite as much.
# Israel is now so much more powerful than all Arab nations combined that it can take care of itself.
# The unconditional support for Israel, regardless of its outrageous deeds, does harm US interests, destabilizes pro-US regimes like Hosi Mubarak’s Egypt and King Abdullah’s Jordan, and plays into the hands of Salafi-jihadi radicals.
# Fighting Israel’s wars on its behalf is the surefire way to lead to the collapse of US power in the Middle East.
Walt and Mearsheimer also seem not to accept that oil, and rivalry with Russia and China, have also played a crucial part in why the US went to war in Iraq and may attack Iran in the near future. Anyway only insiders as themselves – with unassailable establishment credentials – could have started, at the highest levels of public debate, a serious discussion of extreme pro-Zionism in the public and political life of the US.
Meanwhile, the power of the lobby seems unassailable. In March 2007, the US Congress was trying to attach a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would have required President George W Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it – because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option “off the table”. The provision was killed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said this was due to AIPAC.
AIPAC made a lot of waves in 2002, when the theme of the annual meeting was “America and Israel standing against terror”. Everyone bashed Arafat, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria at the same time – just as in PNAC’s letter to Bush in April 2002 claiming that Israel was also fighting an “axis of evil” alongside the US.
During AIPAC’s jamboree in 2004, Bush received 23 standing ovations defending his Iraq policy. Last year, the star was Cheney, making the case for the troop “surge” in Iraq. Pelosi was dutifully present. But it was pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain recently refused, who really made a killing – even though Hagee maintains that “anti-Semitism is the result of the Jews’ rebellion against God”.
On Iran, Hagee definitely set the tone: “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and [President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad is the new [Adolf] Hitler. We must stop Iran’s nuclear threat and stand boldly with Israel.” He received multiple standing ovations. McCain may be sure to get the same treatment this year – and he’ll certainly have no trouble remaining on message.
(Asia Times, 2008).
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Tags: AIPAC, Israel, Middle East
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