AIPAC’s Extremism

By site admin | May 27, 2011

by Justin Raimondo, May 27, 2011

Coverage of the recent AIPAC conference naturally gave the lion’s share of attention to President Obama’s speech, in which he did his best to placate the most powerful lobby in Washington. The speech, in itself, was a yawner, in that nothing really new was said: the news value was that the President felt compelled to make it. Far more interesting, in terms of content, however – and far less reported on – was AIPAC director Howard Kohr’s peroration, in which he gave the conference attendees what they came there for: red meat. Reddest of all – an argument against US evenhandedness in managing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Outlining the principles that ought to govern US-Israeli relations, Kohr said the first is “trust and confidence between the leaders of Israel and the United States.” What’s interesting is how he defines this “trust.” According to Kohr:

“If Israel’s foes come to believe that there is diplomatic daylight between the United States and Israel, they will have every incentive to try to exploit those differences and shun peace with the Jewish state. That is why it is so important that America and Israel work out whatever differences arise between them privately, and when tensions do arise, that the leaders work together to close those gaps.”

Translation: The President of United States must never ever criticize Israel in public, no matter what.

This “no criticism” injunction leads naturally to the second of Kohr’s principles governing US-Israeli relations:

“The second principle is for America to play its role as honest broker. And let us be clear: That should not be confused with even-handedness. Part of being an honest broker is being honest. One party in this process is our ally — with whom we share values and strategic interests.

“In a world which is demonstrably on the side of the Palestinians and Arabs — where Israel stands virtually alone — the United States has a special role to play. When the United States is even-handed, Israel is automatically at a disadvantage, tilting the diplomatic playing field overwhelmingly toward the Palestinians and Arabs.”

Aside from the illogic of such an argument – isn’t a “broker” supposed to be objective, by definition? – one has to stand back and admire the sheer extremism of this stance. Justice is irrelevant, as is America’s national interest: we must take Israel’s side no matter what. That’s being “honest,” which must never be confused with taking an “even-handed” approach.

The rationale for this lopsided worldview is that we live in “a world which is demonstrably on the side of the Palestinians and Arabs, where Israel stands virtually alone.”

It’s true that Israel stands virtually alone, and yet one has to ask: why is that? Is the whole world awash in a wave of virulent anti-Semitism, or do the policies of the current Israeli government have something to do with it? Like all extremists, Kohr believes alone-ness imbues his cause (in this case, Israel) with some special virtue: besieged by an uncomprehending, inherently hostile, and downright evil world, the extremist perceives his isolation as a badge of honor.

Kohr can’t permit himself to ask the obvious question of why Israel faces a future of growing isolation, for fear the answer would make his head explode: the widespread recognition that the actions of the Israeli government are immoral and impermissible. In making his appeal for unconditional support of Israel, Kohr wisely avoids making any moral argument and instead invokes our formal relationship with Israel as an “ally,” along with some vague talk about shared “values and strategic interests.”

Yet there is nothing vague about the growing divergence of American and Israeli strategic interests, a process which started when the Berlin Wall fell and is still playing itself out. The US-Israeli “special relationship” took shape as a consequence of the worldwide face-off between the West and the Soviet bloc. During the cold war era, Israel was taken into the “Free World” camp after the Soviet Union’s initially friendly relationship with the Israelis turned sour and the Kremlin began to tilt toward the Arab states, such as Syria.

When the cold war ended, however, the entire framework of the “special relationship” crumbled, and there was nothing to replace it. Although the Israeli leadership has maintained the 9/11 terrorist attacks meant that Israel and the US must draw closer together – supposedly because we’re facing “the same enemy” – the strategic interests of the US dictate a quite different course. To give unconditional support to the Israelis means, in effect, ceding the entire Arab world to the likes of al-Qaeda, and making mortal enemies of a billion-plus Muslims.

If our strategic interests have diverged, so, also, have our values: Israeli society has undergone a radical change since the cold war era, both culturally and politically. The influx of immigrants, especially from Russia, has transformed what was formerly a European colony, with a strong democratic heritage, into a fundamentalist enclave that looks to an older and decidedly illiberal tradition. With the rise of openly racist demagogues of Avigdor Lieberman‘s ilk, even Israel’s most fervent defenders have to recognize that the change in Israel is not for the better. If present trends continue – if the Arab minority continues to grow, and the repression accelerates alongside this demographic time-bomb – then Israel cannot last much longer as a state that is both Jewish and a liberal democracy in the Western sense.

The irony – and tragedy – is that Kohr invokes our supposedly shared values just as they are vanishing in Israel. Kohr is blind to the growing extremism that dominates Israeli politics because he has become its chief spokesman in the US. The fanatic cannot see himself as others see him, and so what outsiders perceive as arrogance he sees as evidence of strength: what seems to the rest of us like a distorted and one-sided view is, to the extremist, a perfectly reasonable and even generous stance. This is how it is possible to believe that the US must subsidize Israel to the tune of $3 billion a year – and keep silent when our money is spent on illegal “settlements.” This is how one comes to equate being an “honest broker” with favoring one side over the other.

Amid some conditional and begrudging praise for the “Arab Spring,” Kohr complains that the demonstrations in the streets of Arab cities have taken the focus away from the real problem, the central problem of our times:

“In January and February, we had momentum when it came to Iran. Then the Arab demonstrations began — and the focus shifted. Nations everywhere began dealing with the very legitimate challenges and problems that the turmoil presented, and suddenly the world was not talking about Iran with the same sense of clarity and purpose.”

The monomania of the true fanatic brooks no rivals.

For decades, the Israelis have had an easy time of it: their propaganda in the US successfully created the image of an island of prosperity and democracy in a region where both are in short supply. Yet the page is turning on this happy illusion, and the Israelis, as well as their amen corner in the US, are all too aware of this shift in public perception. And make no mistake: for them, public perception is everything. As a settler colony, Israel is totally dependent on the outside world for its survival: a cut-off or even a substantial reduction in that aid would mean the end of the Jewish state in very short order.

The Israeli lobby, reflecting the cultural and political changes in Israel, has become so unbalanced and extreme that its public pronouncements and actions have about them the air of parody. It’s true their political clout remains just as formidable as it ever was, but one can’t help wondering how long they’ll get to enjoy it. As America’s ability to determine the course of events in the Middle East begins to wane, and as our willingness to put up with constant Israeli demands begins to wear thin, the “special relationship” will either take on an entirely new cast, or else give way to open hostility and recriminations on both sides.

Source: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/05/26/aipacs-extremism/

Echoes of El Salvador in tales of US-approved death squads

By site admin | October 23, 2010

by Patrick Cockburn
Saturday, 23 October 2010

The Iraqi documents released by Wikileaks produce significantly more detail on US actions in the war in Iraq , but do they produce anything that we did not know already?

The Pentagon will huff and puff with rage as it did over the Wikileaks release of US military documents about Afghanistan, when it took the contradictory position that there was little new in what has been leaked, but important sources of intelligence had somehow still been compromised.

The leaks are important because they prove much of what was previously only suspected but never admitted by the US army or explained in detail. It was obvious from 2004 that US forces almost always ignored cases of torture by Iraqi government forces, but this is now shown to have been official policy. Of particular interest to Iraqis, when Wikileaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.

From the summer of 2004 Iraq slipped into a sectarian civil war of great savagery as al-Qa’ida launched attacks on the Shia who increasingly dominated the government. From late in 2004 Interior Ministry troops trained by the Americans were taking part in savage raids on Sunni or suspected Baathist districts. People prominent in Saddam Hussein’s regime were arrested and disappeared for few days until their tortured bodies were dumped beside the roads.

Iraqi leaders whispered that the Americans were involved in the training of what were in fact death squads in official guise. It was said that US actions were modelled on counter-insurgency methods pioneered in El Salvador by US-trained Salvadoran government units.

It was no secret that torture of prisoners had become the norm in Iraqi government prisons as it established its own security services from 2004. Men who were clearly the victims of torture were often put on television where they would confess to murder, torture and rape. But after a time it was noticed that many of those whom they claimed to have killed were still alive.

The Sunni community at this time were terrified of mass sweeps by the US forces, sometimes accompanied by Iraqi government units, in which all young men of military age were arrested. Tribal elders would often rush to the American to demand that the prisoners not be handed over to the Iraqi army or police who were likely to torture or murder them. The power drill was a favourite measure of torture. It is clear that the US military knew all about this.

From the end of 2007 the war began to change as the Americans began to appear as the defenders of the Sunni community. The US military offensives against al-Qa’ida and the Mehdi Army Shiah militia were accompanied by a rash of assassinations. Again it would be interesting to know more detail about how far the US military was involved in these killings, particularly against the followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

There were a series of interconnected conflicts going on in in Iraq during the American occupation in 2004-9. One that the seldom made headlines involved a series of tit-for-tat killings and kidnappings against each other by the Americans and Iranians. This reached its peak in 2007 when the Americans tried to seize Iranian intelligence leaders visiting Kurdistan and US soldiers were killed in an abortive raid in Kerbala. The capture of British naval personnel by Iranian Revolutionary Guards may have been part of this shadowy conflict.

Information about Iraq leaked, like that about Afghanistan, should come with a health warning. The Americans were often told by Iraqis, low level agents or high level ministers, what they supposed the Americans wanted to hear, notably that an Iranian hand was behind many anti-American actions. Much of this is likely to be nonsense.

Information given to the Americans by Afghan intelligence implicating Pakistan and ISI military intelligence in aiding the Taliban was obviously concocted. It is not that the Pakistan military do not help the Taliban but they do so subtly and with care to make sure their involvement cannot be traced. Iraqi intelligence passed to the Americans is likely to be equally biased.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-echoes-of-el-salvador-in-tales-of-usapproved-death-squads-2114410.html

Huge dossier of secret files shows the US ignored torture of Iraqis

By site admin | October 23, 2010

By Jerome Taylor
Saturday, 23 October 2010

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks unveiled its cache of secret Iraq war documents last night in what is the largest leak in US military history.

The reports deliver a devastating verdict on the Coalition’s involvement in Iraq including revelations that the American military:

*Knew Iraqi officials were torturing detainees but ruled against intervening.
*Conspired to cover up the deaths of “hundreds” of Iraqi civilians at manned checkpoints.

*Kept records of the number of Iraqi civilians that were being killed, despite famously claiming that the military “didn’t do body counts”.

The documents also reveal how Iran has provided direct military aid and training to Shia militias behind much of the sectarian bloodletting and attacks on Coalition forces in Baghdad and southern Iraq.

Nearly 400,000 secret documents, an enormous trove of field reports covering more than five years of military involvement in Iraq, have gone online to the consternation of US officials who claim the publication will endanger both soldiers and informants on the ground in Iraq.

The reports show that, despite repeated denials, the US government does indeed have a detailed – though incomplete – list of civilians killed in Iraq with the logs recording 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

According to Iraq Body Count, the London-based organisation which began counting Iraqi civilian casualties after the invasion and has been given access to the Wikileaks cache, the logs reveal at least a further 15,000 extra civilian deaths that were previously unknown. They now intend to revise their total estimate for the number of Iraqi civilians killed from 107,000 to at least 122,000. They say that the US military’s troops tend to underestimate the number of civilians killed. For instance, in the more than 3,800 airstrikes logged in the Iraq war reports, according to US military figures, just 103 fatalities were civilian.

The secret files, which cover a period from January 2004 to December 2009 and are largely made up of reports from units in the field and military intelligence, reveal that torture has remained widespread within the Iraqi police and army, despite repeated assertions from both the Bush and Obama administrations that they would not tolerate such abuses in an Iraq post-Saddam Hussein.

Over the five years covered by the logs, American troops encountered at least 1,300 instances of Iraqi-on-Iraqi torture, including regular reports of detainees being electrocuted, sodomised with objects and beaten to death. At least six prisoners are reported to have died in custody and there are a number of examples of torture continuing up until very recently.

In August 2009, for instance, an Iraqi detainee committed suicide in prison. The American log of the incident found “found bruises and burns on the detainee’s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck.”

Four months later 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied. It is unclear whether any follow up was made by the US authorities to either instances but Amnesty International claims no Iraqi personnel have been jailed for torture since the invasion. Sexual abuse also appears to be commonly employed against women in Iraqi custody.

Such instances will be a major source of embarrassment to the Obama Administration which campaigned during on ending some of the more notorious human rights abuses committed under his predecessor George W Bush.

The documents also reveal how two secret orders handed down to troops in 2004 and 2005 told soldiers that they should only report instances of abuse by Iraqi officials to their commanders and should not intervene directly. The archive also contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters and 700 instances if civilians being killed at manned checkpoints.

In February 2007 an Apache helicopter killed two insurgents from a mortar team who were trying to surrender to them after a military lawyer decided that enemies “cannot surrender to aircraft”. The same helicopter, which used the call sign Crazyhorse 18, was the subject of a previous leak earlier this year which showed how the two man aircraft killed a group of insurgents, civilians and two reporters from the Reuters news agency.

The field reports, which were never meant to be made public, also shine a spotlight in Iran’s involvement in Iraq. US troops were repeatedly warning their commanders that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Lebanon’s Hizbollah were providing Iraqi Shia militias with training, sanctuary and hardware – including rockets, magnetic bombs that can be attached to the underside of cars, and “explosively formed penetrators,” a complex type of explosive device that can punch through armour.

Speaking on Al Jazeera last night Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange described the publication of the documents as an “historic” moment. “This is six years of history, the most extraordinary compendium of war that has ever been released during a time of war,” he said.

But the release has been severely criticised by the US government.

“This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed,” a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday. “Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/huge-dossier-of-secret-files-shows-the-us-ignored-torture-of-iraqis-2114409.html

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AIPAC’s Extremism

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