[News] The Night After, The Easier the Victory, the Harder the Peace

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The Night After, The Easier the Victory, the Harder the Peace

By URI AVNERY

April 10, 2003

<http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html>http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html

It is now fashionable to talk about "the day after". Let's talk about the 
night after.

After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will be faced with two 
decisive facts:

First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat any people in the 
world, valiant as it may be.

Second, the small group that initiated this war--an alliance of Christian 
fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives--has won big, and from now on 
it will control Washington almost without limits.

The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger to the world, and 
especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the future of Israel. 
Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the 
Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people and especially the 
enemy of the Israeli peace camp.

It does not dream only about an American empire, in the style of the Roman 
one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control of the extreme 
right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in all Arab 
countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences of 
which it is impossible to foresee.

Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological fervor and crass 
material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism and right-wing Zionism.

That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something of the spirit of 
Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans for changing the 
region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination, unbridled 
chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.

Who are the winners?

They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, 
almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the 
Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important 
role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential 
newspapers.

For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered a right-wing agenda 
in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and 
drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, they offered him 
advise on how to fight the Arabs.

Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin Towers. The American 
public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely disoriented, 
unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. The neo-cons were 
the only group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only nine days 
after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder, Irving 
Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting that it was 
not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin Laden, but that it was 
also imperative to "remove Saddam Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" 
against Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.

Following is a short list of the main characters. (If it bores you, skip to 
the next section).

The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol 
with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $ 10 
million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons, including 
Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme 
right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter magazine, and his 
wife, Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security 
Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer of 
the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle.

Perle<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156584789X/counterpunchmaga> 
is a central character in this play. Until recently he was the chairman of 
the Defense Policy Board of the Defense Department, which also includes 
Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the Jerusalem Post, now 
owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past he was an aide to Senator 
Henry Jackson, who led the fight against the Soviet Union on behalf of the 
Jews who wanted to leave. He is a leading member of the influential 
right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign 
from his Defense Department position, when it became known that a private 
corporation had promised to pay him almost a million dollars for he benefit 
of his influence in the administration.

That Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the Iraq war. It was 
eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members of the group 
already firmly established in some of its leading positions. Paul 
Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department, where 
another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning 
Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, 
responsible for the Middle East in the National Security Council, was 
connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The main hero of the 
scandal, Oliver North, sits in the Jewish Institute for National Security 
Affairs, together with Michael Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. 
Headvocates total war not only against Iraq, but also against Israel's 
other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov 
Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense 
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are associated with the "Project for the New 
American Century", which published a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to 
preserve and enhance this 'American peace'"--meaning American control of 
the world.

Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name) is Director of the 
Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. She also writes for 
the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research 
Institute that is, according to the London Guardian, connected with Israeli 
Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians with highly 
selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, 
Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute, heading Middle 
East Studies. Mention should also be made of the Washington Institute for 
Near East Policy of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years was in 
charge of the "peace process" in the Middle East.

In all the important papers there are people close to the group, such as 
William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New York Times and 
Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle friend, Robert 
Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal.

If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if they came from the 
lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their speechwriters, Joseph 
Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys 
Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.

The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close 
alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who 
nowadays control Bush's Republican party. The founding fathers were Jerry 
Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present from 
Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the 
Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy 
in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports the settlers 
and their right-wing allies.

Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical ideology of the 
extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle between the 
Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children of Darkness (the 
Arabs and Muslims).

By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have been published lately 
in dozens of articles, both in American and world media. The members of the 
group are proud of them.

The Zionist general.

The man who symbolizes this victory is General Jay Garner, who has just 
been appointed chief of the civilian administration in Iraq.

He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally. Garner is the 
ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.

Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers, a petition 
organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, lauding 
the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence 
orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority," which is 
certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that "a strong 
Israel is an asset that American military planners and political leaders 
can rely on."

In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the Patriot missiles, 
which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in 1997, he became, not 
surprisingly, a defense contractor specializing in missiles. It was alleged 
that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts. This year he obtained a 
defense contract for $ 1.5 billion, as well as a contract for building 
Patriot systems in Israel.

Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job of chief of the 
civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when contracts for 
billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be handed out, to be paid 
for by Iraqi oil.

A new Balfour declaration.

The ideology of this group, that calls for an American world-empire as well 
as for a Greater Israel, reminds one of bygone days.

The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews a homeland in 
Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism (among whose 
adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston and Lord 
Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist movement), the 
father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British to 
crowd out their French competitors and take possession of Palestine, which 
was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route to India.

Now the same thing is happening again. Last year Richard Perle organized a 
briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi 
Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the world's oil heartland. 
Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications for this 
design is the need to defend Israel.

To bet on our life?

Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we 
control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence 
on the center of world power.

But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler, who bets all his 
money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse with no current 
competitor, but still one horse.

The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the Arab and Muslim 
world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding of Arab 
realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand the test, 
only brute force saved their undertaking.

Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain here. We have to 
live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers our future.

Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal, Zionist and 
America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures may well 
turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will threaten our 
very existence.

The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists may 
engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the next 
election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf War, this 
whole gang will be thrown out.

The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied on the then world 
power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces in the east, 
Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of Judea: "Behold, 
thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on which if 
a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it." (II kings 18, 21).

Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now 
a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole future on this?

* Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist. His essays are included in 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156584789X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.




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