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Nada
Posts:387
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Posted:12/20/2006 9:22 PM |
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End of the Strongmen
Do America and Israel
actually want the Middle East
engulfed by civil war?
Jonathan Cook
CounterPunch
December 19, 2006
The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western
policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule
by civil war, apparently now the American Administration's favoured model
across the region.
Fratricidal fighting is threatening to engulf, or already engulfing, the
occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could
soon be next, torn apart by attacks Israel is reportedly planning on behalf
of the US. The reverberations would likely consume the region.
Western politicians like to portray civil war as a consequence of the West's
failure to intervene more effectively in the Middle East. Were we more
engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more aggressive in opposing
Syrian manipulations in Lebanon, or more hands-on in Iraq, the sectarian
fighting could be prevented. The implication being, of course, that, without
the West's benevolent guidance, Arab societies are incapable of dragging
themselves out of their primal state of barbarity.
But in fact, each of these breakdowns of social order appears to have been
engineered either by the United States or by Israel. In Palestine, Lebanon
and Iraq, sectarian difference is less important than a clash of political
ideologies and interests as rival factions disagree about whether to submit to,
or resist, American and Israeli interference. Where the factions derive
their funding and legitimacy from -- increasingly a choice between the US or
Iran -- seems to determine where they stand in this confrontation.
Palestine is in ferment because ordinary Palestinians are torn between their
democratic wish to see Israeli occupation resisted -- in free elections they
showed they believed Hamas the party best placed to realise that goal -- and
the basic need to put food on the table for their families. The combined
Israeli and international economic siege of the Hamas government, and the
Palestinian population, has made a bitter internal struggle for control of
resources inevitable.
Lebanon is falling apart because the Lebanese are divided: some believe that
the country's future lies with attracting Western capital and welcoming
Washington's embrace, while others regard America's interest as cover for
Israel realising its long-standing design to turn Lebanon into a vassal
state, with or without a military occupation. Which side the Lebanese choose
in the current stand-off reflects their judgment of how plausible are claims
of Western and Israeli benevolence.
And the slaughter in Iraq is not simply the result of lawlessness -- as is
commonly portrayed -- but also about rival groups, the nebulous
"insurgents", employing various brutal and conflicting strategies: trying to
oust the Anglo-American occupiers and punish local Iraqis suspected of
collaborating with them; extracting benefits from the puppet Iraqi regime;
and jockeying for positions of influence before the inevitable grand
American exit.
All of these outcomes in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq could have been
foreseen -- and almost certainly were. More than that, it looks increasingly
like the growing tensions and carnage were planned. Rather than an absence
of Western intervention being the problem, the violence and fragmentation
of these societies seems to be precisely the goal of the intervention.
Evidence has emerged in Britain that suggests such was the case in Iraq.
Testimony given by a senior British official to the 2004 Butler inquiry
investigating intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was
belatedly published last week, after attempts by the Foreign Office to
hush it up.
Carne Ross, a diplomat who helped to negotiate several UN security council
resolutions on Iraq, told the inquiry that British and US officials knew
very well that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that bringing him down
would lead to chaos.
"I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms
during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said, adding: "
At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject,
that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq
would collapse into chaos."
The obvious question, then, is why would the US want and intend civil war
raging across the Middle East, apparently threatening strategic interests like
oil supplies and the security of a key regional ally, Israel?
Until the presidency of Bush Jnr, the American doctrine in the Middle East
had been to install or support strongmen, containing them or replacing them
when they fell out of favour. So why the dramatic and, at least ostensibly,
incomprehensible shift in policy?
Why allow Yasser Arafat's isolation and humiliation in the occupied
territories, followed by Mahmoud Abbas's, when both could have easily been
cultivated as strongmen had they been given the tools they were implicitly
promised by the Oslo process: a state, the pomp of office and the coercive
means to impose their will on rival groups like Hamas? With almost nothing
to show for years of concessions to Israel, both looked to the Palestinian
public more like lapdogs rather than rottweilers.
Why make a sudden and unnecessary fuss about Syria's interference in
Lebanon, an interference that the West originally encouraged as a way to keep
the lid on sectarian violence? Why oust Damascus from the scene and
then promote a "Cedar Revolution" that pandered to the interests of only one
section of Lebanese society and continued to ignore the concerns of the
largest and most dissatisfied community, the Shia? What possible outcome
could there be but simmering resentment and the threat of violence?
And why invade Iraq on the hollow pretext of locating WMDs and then
dislodge its dictator, Saddam Hussein, who for decades had been armed and
supported by the US and had very effectively, if ruthlessly, held Iraq together?
Again from Carne's testimony, it is clear that no one in the intelligence
community believed Saddam really posed a threat to the West. Even if he
needed "containing" or possibly replacing, as Bush's predecessors appeared
to believe, why did the president decide simply to overthrow him, leaving
a power void at Iraq's heart?
The answer appears to be related to the rise of the neocons, who finally
grasped power with the election of President Bush. Israel's most popular
news website, Ynet, recently observed of the neocons: "Many are Jews who
share a love for Israel."
The neocons' vision of American global supremacy is intimately tied to, and
dependent on, Israel's regional supremacy. It is not so much that the
neocons choose to promote Israel's interests above those of America as that
they see the two nations' interests as inseparable and identical.
Although usually identified with the Israeli right, the neocons' political
alliance with the Likud mainly reflects their support for adopting belligerent
means to achieve their policy goals rather than the goals themselves.
The consistent aim of Israeli policy over decades, from the left and right,
has been to acquire more territory at the expense of its neighbours and
entrench its regional supremacy through "divide and rule", particularly of its
weakest neighbours such as the Palestinians and the Lebanese. It has always
abominated Arab nationalism, especially of the Baathist variety in Iraq and
Syria, because it appeared immune to Israeli intrigues.
For many years Israel favoured the same traditional colonial approach the
West used in the Middle East, where Britain, France and later the US
supported autocratic leaders, usually from minority populations, to rule
over the majority in the new states they had created, whether Christians in
Lebanon, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, or Hashemites in Jordan.
The majority was thereby weakened, and the minority forced to become
dependent on colonial favours to maintain its privileged position.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, for example, was similarly designed to
anoint a Christian strongman and US stooge, Bashir Gemayel, as a compliant
president who would agree to an anti-Syrian alliance with Israel.
But decades of controlling and oppressing Palestinian society allowed Israel
to develop a different approach to divide and rule: what might be termed
organised chaos, or the "discord" model, one that came to dominate first its
thinking and later that of the neocons.
During its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel preferred discord
to a strongman, aware that a pre-requisite of the latter would be the creation
of a Palestinian state and its furnishing with a well-armed security force.
Neither option was ever seriously contemplated.
Only briefly under international pressure was Israel forced to relent and
partially adopt the strongman model by allowing the return of Yasser Arafat
from exile. But Israel's reticence in giving Arafat the means to assert his
rule and suppress his rivals, such as Hamas, led inevitably to conflict between
the Palestinian president and Israel that ended in the second intifada and
the readoption of the discord model.
This latter approach exploits the fault lines in Palestinian society to
exacerbate tensions and violence. Initially Israel achieved this by promoting
rivalry between regional and clan leaders who were forced to compete
for Israel's patronage. Later Israel encouraged the emergence of Islamic
extremism, especially in the form of Hamas, as a counterweight to
the growing popularity of the secular nationalism of Arafat's Fatah party.
Israel's discord model is now reaching its apotheosis: low-level and
permanent civil war between the old guard of Fatah and the upstarts of
Hamas. This kind of Palestinian in-fighting usefully depletes the society's
energies and its ability to organise against the real enemy: Israel and its
enduring occupation.
The neocons, it appears, have been impressed with this model and wanted to
export it to other Middle Eastern states. Under Bush they sold it to the White House as the solution to the problems of Iraq and Lebanon, and ultimately
of Iran and Syria too.
The provoking of civil war certainly seemed to be the goal of Israel's assault
on Lebanon over the summer. The attack failed, as even Israelis admit,
because Lebanese society rallied behind Hizbullah's impressive show of
resistance rather than, as was hoped, turning on the Shia militia.
Last week the Israeli website Ynet interviewed Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli
citizen and co-founder of MEMRI, a service translating Arab leaders'
speeches that is widely suspected of having ties with Israel's security services.
She is also the wife of David Wurmser, a senior neocon adviser to
Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Meyrav Wurmser revealed that the American Administration had publicly
dragged its feet during Israel's assault on Lebanon because it was waiting for
Israel to expand its attack to Syria.
"The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight
against the Syrians. ... The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got
a lot of time and space... They believed that Israel should be allowed to win.
A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real
enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight
directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran's] strategic and
important ally [Syria] should be hit."
Wurmser continued: "It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution
without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had
hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have
weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East."*
Neocons talk a great deal about changing maps in the Middle East. Like
Israel's dismemberment of the occupied territories into ever-smaller ghettos,
Iraq is being severed into feuding mini-states. Civil war, it is hoped, will
redirect Iraqis' energies away from resistance to the US occupation and into
more negative outcomes.
Similar fates appear to be awaiting Iran and Syria, at least if the neocons,
despite their waning influence, manage to realise their vision in Bush's last
two years.
The reason is that a chaotic and feuding Middle East, although it would be a
disaster in the view of most informed observers, appears to be greatly
desired by Israel and its neocon allies. They believe that the whole Middle East can be run successfully the way Israel has run its Palestinian populations
inside the occupied territories, where religious and secular divisions have
been accentuated, and inside Israel itself, where for many decades Arab
citizens were "de-Palestinianised" and turned into identity-starved and
quiescent Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin.
That conclusion may look foolhardy, but then again so does the White
House's view that it is engaged in a "clash of civilisations" which it can win
with a "war on terror".
All states are capable of acting in an irrational or self-destructive manner,
but Israel and its supporters may be more vulnerable to this failing than most.
That is because Israelis' perception of their region and their future has been
grossly distorted by the official state ideology, Zionism, with its belief
in Israel's inalienable right to preserve itself as an ethnic state; its confused
messianic assumptions, strange for a secular ideology, about Jews returning
to a land promised by God; and its contempt for, and refusal to understand,
everything Arab or Muslim.
If we expect rational behaviour from Israel or its neocon allies, more fool us.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel. His
book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State,
is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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