Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Zionazis should't call others Nazis
Cong. Shiff should be careful whom he calls "Nazi" as the new lebensraum Greater Israel thesis turns Zionism into Zionazism, attempting anti-Semitic Holocaust: the extermination of Palestinian "Semites" as a people because they will not repeat the 1947 Nakba flight to die in the desert. American Zionazis are seeking a sense of "mensch-hood," thinking that talking like a killer will, as in the case of Goebbles, give them a false sence of macho. But Shiff should not try to talk like what the Jewish Ethic he was raised by will NOT allow him to advocate. Israel's Lebanon and Gaza massacres were no different from Hitler's use of Stuka bombers on civilians. This is how the weak try to look tough. But Netanyahu-- A REAL TOUGH MENSCH-- has the idea of economically integrating the Palestinians into Israel's economy, leaving political problems for AFTER economic ones are solved. This will lead to Israel's integration into the Arab world, from where it can help them escape their one crop (oil) economies into sci/tech modernity. The Zionist Founders sought to make Israel "a light onto the [Arab] nations." Netayahu is trying to do exactly that economically, leaving politics for when both sides better appeciate their common struggle against the desert. Sabra-Palestinians will succed but crazy frelading "settlers" are not welcome. HAMAS is a lot cleaner Gov that Israel or Arab states. That why it got elected and it should be talked into integration, not slandered by Jews safe abroad who are not held accountable for their bach bravado.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Who controls South/Central Asia controls Afghanistan
http://www.ww4report.com/node/6943
A rather interesting analysis above raises the issue of the Bush Administration's role in Central Asia. It was really a Bush Administration imperial crime on top of an imperial grab by the Clinton Administration. President Obama inherits a most shameful post Cold War Great Grab for oil and gas rich Central Asia. Our nation now is attempting to hold Afghanistan which is nothing but a cork to the Islamic spread throughout the South and Central Asian regions. Therein lays a severely sticky and high traction momentum for which Clinton and Bush must hold personal responsibility. The feebleness of Russia under Yeltsin permitted Western avarice to become paroxysmal. In particular, the American right-wing "wrecking crew" so well described in recent literature accelerated libertine expression of this corporate avarice to a point of utter recklessness.
Defensive reactions were inevitable. Firstly, alQaeda entered the negotiating realm with an Islamo-ideologic argument based on the role of Islamic religion to Soviet anti-ecclesiastic campaign. It can be factually argued that, not President Reagan, but the Muslims of the USSR defeated the Soviet Union. The CIA's role was as a limitless supplier of arms and cash only. alQaeda had argued that the Islamic Revolution of Afghanistan must be advanced "Westward" as well as Southeastward into India. The Taliban bought into the transnational argument of binLaden. But we were fraudulently presented with the "westward" argument as defining attacking Europe and the US when in fact the target was Central and South Asia. At first, Saudi Arabia and Iran fully supported the anti-Soviet Afghan War. China-- which has long been fighting the Uygur Muslim nationalists in Sinkiang Province, nevertheless, supported Muslim Pakistan as the bridgehead to dismembering of India, its main Asian enemy.
Since the 1980s we have witnessed a Sunni-Shia unity directed from Teheran that undermined the Egyptian and Saudi governments. These in turn supported Saddam Hussein as a transition to Islamism. Perceiving the Iranian Iean-to-Iraq collaboration to destroy the Western economic hold in the Middle East, the US worked a wedge war between Baghdad and Teheran. This drained American power out of South Asia (Afghanistan). The EU was well aware that the "western" target of the Muslims was limited to the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia and insisted on maintaining emphasis on diplomatic efforts in the Middle East on the promise of an Iraq-Iran switch from the perto$ to the Euro would enrich its European members. The Bush Administration, without any logical reason expected that as US troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan the European would be forced to fill the void. But just as they favored on-intervention in Iraq they felt no need to invade Afghanistan. Such expectation from NATO only exposes the utter illusion of dominion that the Bush Administration felt it had over Europe.
Bush Administration reckless bully diplomacy forced a Russo-Chinese collaboration, the Shanghai Accord, which on the surface pretends to be only a trade accord but is in fact a security pact created by Moscow in response to the Chinese panic over pre-9/11 US policy to surround China. Over the post 9/11 years, the Bush Administration was skillfully maneuvered, dissipating the credibility of its bully threats, so that now the Shanghai Accord extends to Central and Mainland Asia, including India, Pakistan, Iran and all the Central Asian states. Admittedly this construction is still amorphous and a work in progress suffering much internal contradictions. But it is a means to an end that is united on one point only: the US cannot be allowed to dominate Afghanistan. Despite their opposition to each other, the Shanghai Accord members have a common goal of keeping Afghanistan as a means of exasanguinating US power while never allowing a resolution by the US and US withdrawal. A sort of "1984" Russo-Asian Bloc is standing against the even weaker western US-EU Bloc that seeks domination of Afghanistan to cut off Asian influence over Central Asia, leaving a weak Russia alone as an easy Western barrier to Western corporate domination of Central Asia. Alas, the Shanghai Accord surrounds Afghanistan, the EU sees no reason to lose more wealth and lives there and the US is exasanguinating hopelessly alone because it cannot afford to invest the massive effort required to dominate that vast mountainous nation. The crux of the matter is that America is finding itself abandoned by NATO and alone in Central-South Asia and can only stay there if manipulated to Shanghai Accord interests because the American economy is dependent on its Shanghai Accord bankers. The range of options permitted the US because of the internal contradictions of the Shanghai Accord does not range to include any prospect of successful elimination of the Taliban.
It has been propagandized by right-wing Republicans that if the US withdraws it will betray the women of Afghanistan. Videos of a 13 y/o girl whipped for taking to a boy is used to make the case. But if one were to consider the violation of women's rights in India, Pakistan and China--America's illusory allies and bankers-- the entire case seems utterly hypocritical. It seems utterly irresponsible for the United States-- much like the late Roman Empire-- to waste its volunteer army under incompetent command in areas where victory is beyond their abilities and the investment of resources required far beyond what the American people are willing to invest. It is true that, in the absence of conscription, most Americans care so little for the lives of the heroic soldiers in the field that staying in the fight will be supported when contraposed with defeat-- a position would never have been accepted had we drawn the troops through universal draft. But the material costs will soon sour the US public to this incredibly poorly fought war, almost as bad as the Soviet effort. By then, this grossly mishandled "Bush's War" will have become "Obama's War," leaving him to bear responsibility for the withdrawal in defeat that is inevitable. It will be like blaming an operation botched by a lead surgeon on the one who sutures the wound because the patient died while the latter was closing.
Nevertheless, Americans traditionally avoid learning from the past. Too many defeats have been wiped from analytic memory in shame and a desire to maintain the illusion of military omnipotence. Like the Israeli army, the American military pretends that the incompetence of its command is not the issue and that the growing competence of its opponents can never match its own.
So what would happen if the US withdrew from Afghanistan?
First and foremost, let us recall that the real concern of Americans is that the Islamic struggle would then pour out of Afghanistan to flood Pakistan. In retort, let us recall that a) Pakistan's original involvement with the Taliban is because of the latter's strategic importance in its endless war with India. India is attempting an end-run around Pakistan by exploiting economic relations with non-Taliban Afghan tribes. That forces Pakistan to stand with the Taliban at cost of the Taliban having created a Pakistani Islamist Taliban to overthrow the secular Pakistani government and establish the first nuclear Sharia. India's hope is that in this way it convinces the US/EU alliance to dismember Pakistan and return it to Indian rule, as it had been under British colonialism. Seeking depth, Pakistan cannot afford to succumb to Western demands that it be engulfed by India while Pakistan serves as the staging base for a Western defeat of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns. This Indian scheme, however, would never be allowed by China because Pakistan is the most critical ally of China in Asia and the sole barrier between Western China-- where Muslim resistance is a problem-- and India. Pakistan is also China's Southern port outlet and inlet for its Mideast oil. And, Pakistan is the best means China has of putting pressure on India in the economic-strategic competition between the two states. b) The bonds of the Shanghai Accord constitute a complex balance between all its members. That is why there is little formal organizational rigidity in it except for economic processes; that is why it is misread as an economic accord. That strategic flexible balance becomes far more stressed and at the same time far more necessary to all its members if the US withdraws from Central Asia so that no one wins and no one loses. And, as the region ceases to be a war zone resisting Western imperialism, these internal contradictions become increasingly prominent, causing these nations to resort to complex diplomacy rather than combat. Also, many of these contradictions can only be ameliorated by economic ties to the West as none of the members can really dominate nor satisfy the needs of each member.
American presence in the area will only polarize the locals as more and more non-combatant "collateral damage" results from defensive American/NATO action. NATO can destroy itself, overcome by its inadequacy in Afghanistan, as opposed to its orderly operation as a European Defense Structure only. The Shanghai Accord needs only operate as an opportunity to Central/South Asian states seeking a bypass of American power, as the above article seems to imply.
Obama has very little time to bite the bullet. As the Iraq War ends muddled and unresolved, his presidency cannot afford Afghanistan also ending as HIS failure. His only hope is to transfer the whole problem to the Shanghai Accord where it will forever be entangled in the Accord's fluidity where no one loses, no one wins. It has been mendaciously put forward by VP Cheney, Rumsfeld (though now he dares no longer speak as recklessly as before), Rove and several FOXNEWS Republican propagandists that if we withdraw from Afghanistan we will again face a repeat of 9/11. What they fail to truthfully admit is that post-9/11 Bush mendaciously covered for the airline companies that had violated laws established during the 1970s when the US faced multiple skyjackings. It was decreed at the time that all airlines would be provided a locked impenetrable pilot's cabin and two sky marshals would be put on every plane. But because of cheap fares competition all the airlines violated this law. As a result, Jihadi shahids looking for a way to try again to destroy the World Trade Center and to do damage to Wash DC government buildings, while riding First Class cross country, discovered that the pilot's cabin is never locked. Thus, on 9/11, four aircrafts were completely taken over within ten minutes each. Unless we repeat this gross negligence, such conversion of airlines into missiles will never again occur. To say, therefore, that 9/11 happened, because Afghanistan was a "rogue" state controlled by the Taliban, we suffered 9/11 is a gross lie. It happened because security LAWS WERE DISOBEYED. I can only conclude that utterly irresponsible political opportunists are making the current Republican case. For had Afghanistan been so important, Bush would have held to his refusal to cannibalize the Afghan War in order to present Congress with a fait accompli in Iraq, as proposed by Rumsfeld, wherein US troops in battle could not be refused funding.
Americans as a people cannot pretend that the past does not exist and that they, therefore, do not have to face its consequences. The US had its chance to deal with the Islamic Jihad and totally failed. This fact cannot be erased with mechanized killing of Muslims using remote controlled drones guided by platoons on the ground. This nation is exsanguinating its young men and resources, manipulated by nations that have no match in force but are endowed far greater ability in diplomacy and "stratergerizing." Obama cannot be a repeat of corrupt Bush II. He must courageously face the amputation required to avoid the systemic infection that the Soviet Union faced after its defeated veterans returned from Afghanistan. Those returned PTSD victims, the maimed and the families of the dead are Bush's victims. Soon they will be Obama's. His only hope is to dare to do the right thing now and not wait for some miraculous "Dayton Accord" illusion.
Daniel E. Teodoru
A rather interesting analysis above raises the issue of the Bush Administration's role in Central Asia. It was really a Bush Administration imperial crime on top of an imperial grab by the Clinton Administration. President Obama inherits a most shameful post Cold War Great Grab for oil and gas rich Central Asia. Our nation now is attempting to hold Afghanistan which is nothing but a cork to the Islamic spread throughout the South and Central Asian regions. Therein lays a severely sticky and high traction momentum for which Clinton and Bush must hold personal responsibility. The feebleness of Russia under Yeltsin permitted Western avarice to become paroxysmal. In particular, the American right-wing "wrecking crew" so well described in recent literature accelerated libertine expression of this corporate avarice to a point of utter recklessness.
Defensive reactions were inevitable. Firstly, alQaeda entered the negotiating realm with an Islamo-ideologic argument based on the role of Islamic religion to Soviet anti-ecclesiastic campaign. It can be factually argued that, not President Reagan, but the Muslims of the USSR defeated the Soviet Union. The CIA's role was as a limitless supplier of arms and cash only. alQaeda had argued that the Islamic Revolution of Afghanistan must be advanced "Westward" as well as Southeastward into India. The Taliban bought into the transnational argument of binLaden. But we were fraudulently presented with the "westward" argument as defining attacking Europe and the US when in fact the target was Central and South Asia. At first, Saudi Arabia and Iran fully supported the anti-Soviet Afghan War. China-- which has long been fighting the Uygur Muslim nationalists in Sinkiang Province, nevertheless, supported Muslim Pakistan as the bridgehead to dismembering of India, its main Asian enemy.
Since the 1980s we have witnessed a Sunni-Shia unity directed from Teheran that undermined the Egyptian and Saudi governments. These in turn supported Saddam Hussein as a transition to Islamism. Perceiving the Iranian Iean-to-Iraq collaboration to destroy the Western economic hold in the Middle East, the US worked a wedge war between Baghdad and Teheran. This drained American power out of South Asia (Afghanistan). The EU was well aware that the "western" target of the Muslims was limited to the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia and insisted on maintaining emphasis on diplomatic efforts in the Middle East on the promise of an Iraq-Iran switch from the perto$ to the Euro would enrich its European members. The Bush Administration, without any logical reason expected that as US troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan the European would be forced to fill the void. But just as they favored on-intervention in Iraq they felt no need to invade Afghanistan. Such expectation from NATO only exposes the utter illusion of dominion that the Bush Administration felt it had over Europe.
Bush Administration reckless bully diplomacy forced a Russo-Chinese collaboration, the Shanghai Accord, which on the surface pretends to be only a trade accord but is in fact a security pact created by Moscow in response to the Chinese panic over pre-9/11 US policy to surround China. Over the post 9/11 years, the Bush Administration was skillfully maneuvered, dissipating the credibility of its bully threats, so that now the Shanghai Accord extends to Central and Mainland Asia, including India, Pakistan, Iran and all the Central Asian states. Admittedly this construction is still amorphous and a work in progress suffering much internal contradictions. But it is a means to an end that is united on one point only: the US cannot be allowed to dominate Afghanistan. Despite their opposition to each other, the Shanghai Accord members have a common goal of keeping Afghanistan as a means of exasanguinating US power while never allowing a resolution by the US and US withdrawal. A sort of "1984" Russo-Asian Bloc is standing against the even weaker western US-EU Bloc that seeks domination of Afghanistan to cut off Asian influence over Central Asia, leaving a weak Russia alone as an easy Western barrier to Western corporate domination of Central Asia. Alas, the Shanghai Accord surrounds Afghanistan, the EU sees no reason to lose more wealth and lives there and the US is exasanguinating hopelessly alone because it cannot afford to invest the massive effort required to dominate that vast mountainous nation. The crux of the matter is that America is finding itself abandoned by NATO and alone in Central-South Asia and can only stay there if manipulated to Shanghai Accord interests because the American economy is dependent on its Shanghai Accord bankers. The range of options permitted the US because of the internal contradictions of the Shanghai Accord does not range to include any prospect of successful elimination of the Taliban.
It has been propagandized by right-wing Republicans that if the US withdraws it will betray the women of Afghanistan. Videos of a 13 y/o girl whipped for taking to a boy is used to make the case. But if one were to consider the violation of women's rights in India, Pakistan and China--America's illusory allies and bankers-- the entire case seems utterly hypocritical. It seems utterly irresponsible for the United States-- much like the late Roman Empire-- to waste its volunteer army under incompetent command in areas where victory is beyond their abilities and the investment of resources required far beyond what the American people are willing to invest. It is true that, in the absence of conscription, most Americans care so little for the lives of the heroic soldiers in the field that staying in the fight will be supported when contraposed with defeat-- a position would never have been accepted had we drawn the troops through universal draft. But the material costs will soon sour the US public to this incredibly poorly fought war, almost as bad as the Soviet effort. By then, this grossly mishandled "Bush's War" will have become "Obama's War," leaving him to bear responsibility for the withdrawal in defeat that is inevitable. It will be like blaming an operation botched by a lead surgeon on the one who sutures the wound because the patient died while the latter was closing.
Nevertheless, Americans traditionally avoid learning from the past. Too many defeats have been wiped from analytic memory in shame and a desire to maintain the illusion of military omnipotence. Like the Israeli army, the American military pretends that the incompetence of its command is not the issue and that the growing competence of its opponents can never match its own.
So what would happen if the US withdrew from Afghanistan?
First and foremost, let us recall that the real concern of Americans is that the Islamic struggle would then pour out of Afghanistan to flood Pakistan. In retort, let us recall that a) Pakistan's original involvement with the Taliban is because of the latter's strategic importance in its endless war with India. India is attempting an end-run around Pakistan by exploiting economic relations with non-Taliban Afghan tribes. That forces Pakistan to stand with the Taliban at cost of the Taliban having created a Pakistani Islamist Taliban to overthrow the secular Pakistani government and establish the first nuclear Sharia. India's hope is that in this way it convinces the US/EU alliance to dismember Pakistan and return it to Indian rule, as it had been under British colonialism. Seeking depth, Pakistan cannot afford to succumb to Western demands that it be engulfed by India while Pakistan serves as the staging base for a Western defeat of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns. This Indian scheme, however, would never be allowed by China because Pakistan is the most critical ally of China in Asia and the sole barrier between Western China-- where Muslim resistance is a problem-- and India. Pakistan is also China's Southern port outlet and inlet for its Mideast oil. And, Pakistan is the best means China has of putting pressure on India in the economic-strategic competition between the two states. b) The bonds of the Shanghai Accord constitute a complex balance between all its members. That is why there is little formal organizational rigidity in it except for economic processes; that is why it is misread as an economic accord. That strategic flexible balance becomes far more stressed and at the same time far more necessary to all its members if the US withdraws from Central Asia so that no one wins and no one loses. And, as the region ceases to be a war zone resisting Western imperialism, these internal contradictions become increasingly prominent, causing these nations to resort to complex diplomacy rather than combat. Also, many of these contradictions can only be ameliorated by economic ties to the West as none of the members can really dominate nor satisfy the needs of each member.
American presence in the area will only polarize the locals as more and more non-combatant "collateral damage" results from defensive American/NATO action. NATO can destroy itself, overcome by its inadequacy in Afghanistan, as opposed to its orderly operation as a European Defense Structure only. The Shanghai Accord needs only operate as an opportunity to Central/South Asian states seeking a bypass of American power, as the above article seems to imply.
Obama has very little time to bite the bullet. As the Iraq War ends muddled and unresolved, his presidency cannot afford Afghanistan also ending as HIS failure. His only hope is to transfer the whole problem to the Shanghai Accord where it will forever be entangled in the Accord's fluidity where no one loses, no one wins. It has been mendaciously put forward by VP Cheney, Rumsfeld (though now he dares no longer speak as recklessly as before), Rove and several FOXNEWS Republican propagandists that if we withdraw from Afghanistan we will again face a repeat of 9/11. What they fail to truthfully admit is that post-9/11 Bush mendaciously covered for the airline companies that had violated laws established during the 1970s when the US faced multiple skyjackings. It was decreed at the time that all airlines would be provided a locked impenetrable pilot's cabin and two sky marshals would be put on every plane. But because of cheap fares competition all the airlines violated this law. As a result, Jihadi shahids looking for a way to try again to destroy the World Trade Center and to do damage to Wash DC government buildings, while riding First Class cross country, discovered that the pilot's cabin is never locked. Thus, on 9/11, four aircrafts were completely taken over within ten minutes each. Unless we repeat this gross negligence, such conversion of airlines into missiles will never again occur. To say, therefore, that 9/11 happened, because Afghanistan was a "rogue" state controlled by the Taliban, we suffered 9/11 is a gross lie. It happened because security LAWS WERE DISOBEYED. I can only conclude that utterly irresponsible political opportunists are making the current Republican case. For had Afghanistan been so important, Bush would have held to his refusal to cannibalize the Afghan War in order to present Congress with a fait accompli in Iraq, as proposed by Rumsfeld, wherein US troops in battle could not be refused funding.
Americans as a people cannot pretend that the past does not exist and that they, therefore, do not have to face its consequences. The US had its chance to deal with the Islamic Jihad and totally failed. This fact cannot be erased with mechanized killing of Muslims using remote controlled drones guided by platoons on the ground. This nation is exsanguinating its young men and resources, manipulated by nations that have no match in force but are endowed far greater ability in diplomacy and "stratergerizing." Obama cannot be a repeat of corrupt Bush II. He must courageously face the amputation required to avoid the systemic infection that the Soviet Union faced after its defeated veterans returned from Afghanistan. Those returned PTSD victims, the maimed and the families of the dead are Bush's victims. Soon they will be Obama's. His only hope is to dare to do the right thing now and not wait for some miraculous "Dayton Accord" illusion.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Monday, February 9, 2009
WHY I WANT NETANYAHU TO WIN
I'm for Netanyahu. Livni proved totally irresponsible in shedding so much blood only so as to counter the rabbis' declaration that a girl can't be Prime Minister of a Jewish State. Netanyahu, however, is of that old school that can make pragmatic pirouettes on a dime, turning from stick to carrot, because he knows where he wants to go: an Israel that is a REAL state, integrated in the area, with universally recognized borders and productive ties to the Palestinians ("Greater Israel" is merely a campaign slogan, as was the Ingrun idea of a Jewish state between the two rivers-- the star between the stripes on the flag-- Nile and Euphrates. He was the only one to see the danger in the Israeli policy of treating Gaza like the Warsaw Ghetto, starving the Palestinians out and then shooting them like fish in a barrel. He therefore could be the only one of the PM candidates that Arabs can respect. The other candidates have proven to be crazy, whores or fools. Netanyahu has been around long enough to realize that under all that rage the Palestinians admire Israel and would love to have an Israel-like Palestine for their children. Also, Netanyahu is not a coward, like most Israeli politicians; he has both the chutzpah to be a crook and the guts to be a hero. He alone is not afraid of HAMAS and so can compete with it for the hearts and minds of the Palestinians. And, unlike many other Israeli politicians, he has more than cheap pride, he has inherited a sense of real dignity. Having dignity, he can appreciate Arab dignity. As for Sharon, for him, a hard line is not an end, but a means to a cohabitation end. He sees, as did Sharon, a limited purpose to the bloodletting: to get the Palestinians to better appreciate the carrot over the stick. Don't get me wrong, he shared Israel's Zionazi lebensraum thesis, achieved through ethnic cleansing. But he also realizes that Israel is no longer a country of willing executioners. He also realizes that young Israelis have no stomach for that and that the world will not permit it.Young Sabras stay as "reservists" in the IDF long enough to finish school and then dream of a job in LA. So good is their education in Israel that finding jobs abroad is a sinch...hence the aliyah in reverse. So Obama would do well to hope for Netanyahu to win and then be ready to stand firm and say: my way or you're on your own. Netanyhu will diplomatically appreciate that as the right of the payer over the payee. Few Israelis are as realist as Netanyahu, with no illusions about what the Diaspora can be made to do for Israel. He has enough dignity to understand that he who feeds you tells you what to do, hence his determination to make Israel totally self-sufficient; he also realizes that the more he integrates Israel into the Middle East, the less his nation must bow to America. And, the less Israel seems to the Arabs like a barking dog on an American leash, the more likely they are to accept Israel in their midst. Since BenGurion to Begin-- LaRonde midgets obsessed with compensating for their size by being shysters-- Israel had been ruled Lilliputian complexes relying on a foreign giant, America. Only the likes of real mensch like Dayan and Rabin could face the Palestinians man-to-man. Sharon knew that he would have to deceive Israelis by talking tough. PM Netanyahu did the same. But both came to be respected by the Arabs. Consequently, Obama can count on Netanyahu to realize, before any negotiating begins, that the better the economic integration with the Palestinians, the better the deal Israel can get from the Arab World. The tough talk is only to squeeze campaign dollars from Diaspora Jews and votes from Israelis. Once in power, like Sharon, his goal is peace and, like Sharon, he realizes that use of the stick only results from failure at providing the right carrot. The American similarity is Richard Nixon. He had a reputation as a "mad man" when it comes to the Soviets and Chicoms. Because of that, only he could make peace with China and work out an ABM Treaty. Even if you are not convinced, you will agree that nothing could be worse than the chick trying to prove that she is Dracula and the crazy MIT physicist general who thinks entropy by means of WMDs is the best solution.
hasEML = false;
hasEML = false;
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Lieberman's Israel, like HAMAS Gaza, is not with us
According to the New York Times, Avigor Lieberman stands to win big in the soon to be held Israeli elections:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/middleeast/09israel.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
Avigdor Lieberman is one of those refuge-ed "victims" of Soviet Communism that seems to have had done quite alright under it. Indeed, his old "Commie" acquaintances reportedly get him private sessions, to this day, with the likes of Communist President Voronin of Moldova-- also a former Soviet Party hack-- and together the two are reported to have shared how humorous it is that America elected "a monkey" for president. This story may or may not be apocryphal, but it goes well with a lot of the racist remarks about the kind of Israel Lieberman wants, racist comments for which Lieberman is notorious. The point is that he is not part of some mythical Semitic "lost tribe" from among "God's Chosen People," but might well be a decedent of the long ago East European converts that "adapted" through fraud and guile in order to survive-- and survive they did. Like many others, I see him as one of many East European who rightly objected to the way they were treated by fellow East Europeans, so they moved to Palestine to mistreat indigenous Arabs EXACTLY as they were mistreated by their fellow East Europeans. Indeed, many such East Europeans aligned with the Likud Party started by Jabotinsky-- a party that then admired Hitler, despite his unfortunate dislike of Jews, because "he was very good for the German people." History has spoke, but Jabotinsky did not live to see its final judgment on Hitler.
But I would point out that for every Lieberman, I can site ten Jews who are outraged by everything he stands for. As examples I offer my Jewish mentors, friends of my parents, scholars all, who tutored me through our long refuge West. For them, the likes of Lieberman and Eichmann, were only distinguishable by circumcision and by Communist vs. Nazi distinction. The thesis on racial superiority is not distinguishable even if in any way different. One got to Israel, kidnapped by Mossad, the other as an alleged "victim" of Soviet anti-Semitsm at US taxpayer's expense.
But it must be said that Lieberman's personal perspective, his ideology, his racism and his crooked deals, all blurring any distinction between him and the people who supposedly persecuted him with their anti-Semitism (he certainly didn't do too badly under his alleged oppressors) seems besides the point. What really matters is evident and to the point when we recall that, in response to the election of HAMAS to lead Gaza-- fair and square-- the Israelis cut off and starved the Palestinians, engaging in "targeted assassinations" against them at will. And so, if the Israelis choose Mr. Lieberman for their government, my reaction is: THAT'S JUST FINE. We have no choice but to accept the will of the people as "democratically" expressed at the ballot box. But then, remembering what we did with Gaza after the Palestinian election of HAMAS, perhaps the perfect answer is: you chose him, now it's the end....We are broke and can't afford $14 billions a year for Israel with our people out of jobs. So, the best to you Israel-- YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!
No more war toys used in "war crimes" fashion in a replay of the Warsaw Ghetto against innocent Palestinians in Gaza on the receiving end. No more dollars to engorge a $placenta for illegal settlements, expanding Israel by a lebensraum thesis like Hitler's done through ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. No more supporting the worthless shekel with dollars loans, a debt that Congress later quietly "forgives." Yes, yes, yes, as PM Sharon once said: "Israel is not Czechoslovakia" and as a sovereign state can do as it pleases. But the United States of America also a sovereign state and is also a broke nation that can't afford to lavishly support a nation that behaves in the worst ways of any East European nation in history. Israel can do, and MUST be allowed to do, as it wants. But if it elects Lieberman, the United States of America's President Obama has a duty not to associate America with Lieberman's brand of racism and criminality. It is not worth supporting his kind of Israel-- and if he is elected, it means that Israelis want his kind of Israel. So, as in the case of HAMAS, we must simply turn our backs to it.
My concern is not for Israel but for the Diaspora Jews that chose NOT to make the "Great Aliyah," moving to the "Jewish state." American Jews are as American as apple pie and are in grave danger in an economically and militarily declining America where many people looking for scapegoats for their personal dire predicaments. Already the rumor that Madoff hides his money in Israel for favored investors to pick it up has been spread all through the Internet. News reports of his crimes had been appearing on TV news right after (not even with a commercial break) news of the massacre of Gazans by the Israeli forces. Whatever the rights or wrongs of both stories, it should be recalled that Madoff's victims were mostly OUR fellow American Jews. Unfortunately, desperate people, as in post WW I Germany, are more likely to be looking for scapegoats and conveniently forget distinguishing facts as they look for someone else to blame for their "shop until you drop" excesses called for by Bush as the "patriotic" response to 9/11. To my reckoning we are at 10 to Midnight on the Krystalnacht clock in a crashing America. Our government's primary duty is to our Americans-- protecting our Jews included-- and more so that, in light of the propensity to anti-Semitsm if people discover the "lobby" pressures on Congress to give Israel $14 billions a year-- while the US is broke-- so it can perpetrate its lebensraum thesis a la Lieberman. President Obama must cut our ties with a Lieberman Israel, just as we cut off our ties with a HAMAS led Gaza. Our Jews are us and we should never suspect them of dual loyalty. It must be recalled that though the neocons slandered Obama with their "Negro problem," about the same proportion of American Jews voted for Obama as Black Americans. I suspect that with Lieberman as a leader in the government of Israel after the election, few American Jews will want to be his kind of Zionists. So, we can let Israel decide what's best for Israel-- we never did differently; yet, Americans in turn, must decide what's best for America...and I don't think Americans will want anything to do with a Lieberman Israel, just as they decided that they don't want anything to do with a HAMAS Palestine.
Daniel E. Teodoru
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/middleeast/09israel.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print
Avigdor Lieberman is one of those refuge-ed "victims" of Soviet Communism that seems to have had done quite alright under it. Indeed, his old "Commie" acquaintances reportedly get him private sessions, to this day, with the likes of Communist President Voronin of Moldova-- also a former Soviet Party hack-- and together the two are reported to have shared how humorous it is that America elected "a monkey" for president. This story may or may not be apocryphal, but it goes well with a lot of the racist remarks about the kind of Israel Lieberman wants, racist comments for which Lieberman is notorious. The point is that he is not part of some mythical Semitic "lost tribe" from among "God's Chosen People," but might well be a decedent of the long ago East European converts that "adapted" through fraud and guile in order to survive-- and survive they did. Like many others, I see him as one of many East European who rightly objected to the way they were treated by fellow East Europeans, so they moved to Palestine to mistreat indigenous Arabs EXACTLY as they were mistreated by their fellow East Europeans. Indeed, many such East Europeans aligned with the Likud Party started by Jabotinsky-- a party that then admired Hitler, despite his unfortunate dislike of Jews, because "he was very good for the German people." History has spoke, but Jabotinsky did not live to see its final judgment on Hitler.
But I would point out that for every Lieberman, I can site ten Jews who are outraged by everything he stands for. As examples I offer my Jewish mentors, friends of my parents, scholars all, who tutored me through our long refuge West. For them, the likes of Lieberman and Eichmann, were only distinguishable by circumcision and by Communist vs. Nazi distinction. The thesis on racial superiority is not distinguishable even if in any way different. One got to Israel, kidnapped by Mossad, the other as an alleged "victim" of Soviet anti-Semitsm at US taxpayer's expense.
But it must be said that Lieberman's personal perspective, his ideology, his racism and his crooked deals, all blurring any distinction between him and the people who supposedly persecuted him with their anti-Semitism (he certainly didn't do too badly under his alleged oppressors) seems besides the point. What really matters is evident and to the point when we recall that, in response to the election of HAMAS to lead Gaza-- fair and square-- the Israelis cut off and starved the Palestinians, engaging in "targeted assassinations" against them at will. And so, if the Israelis choose Mr. Lieberman for their government, my reaction is: THAT'S JUST FINE. We have no choice but to accept the will of the people as "democratically" expressed at the ballot box. But then, remembering what we did with Gaza after the Palestinian election of HAMAS, perhaps the perfect answer is: you chose him, now it's the end....We are broke and can't afford $14 billions a year for Israel with our people out of jobs. So, the best to you Israel-- YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!
No more war toys used in "war crimes" fashion in a replay of the Warsaw Ghetto against innocent Palestinians in Gaza on the receiving end. No more dollars to engorge a $placenta for illegal settlements, expanding Israel by a lebensraum thesis like Hitler's done through ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. No more supporting the worthless shekel with dollars loans, a debt that Congress later quietly "forgives." Yes, yes, yes, as PM Sharon once said: "Israel is not Czechoslovakia" and as a sovereign state can do as it pleases. But the United States of America also a sovereign state and is also a broke nation that can't afford to lavishly support a nation that behaves in the worst ways of any East European nation in history. Israel can do, and MUST be allowed to do, as it wants. But if it elects Lieberman, the United States of America's President Obama has a duty not to associate America with Lieberman's brand of racism and criminality. It is not worth supporting his kind of Israel-- and if he is elected, it means that Israelis want his kind of Israel. So, as in the case of HAMAS, we must simply turn our backs to it.
My concern is not for Israel but for the Diaspora Jews that chose NOT to make the "Great Aliyah," moving to the "Jewish state." American Jews are as American as apple pie and are in grave danger in an economically and militarily declining America where many people looking for scapegoats for their personal dire predicaments. Already the rumor that Madoff hides his money in Israel for favored investors to pick it up has been spread all through the Internet. News reports of his crimes had been appearing on TV news right after (not even with a commercial break) news of the massacre of Gazans by the Israeli forces. Whatever the rights or wrongs of both stories, it should be recalled that Madoff's victims were mostly OUR fellow American Jews. Unfortunately, desperate people, as in post WW I Germany, are more likely to be looking for scapegoats and conveniently forget distinguishing facts as they look for someone else to blame for their "shop until you drop" excesses called for by Bush as the "patriotic" response to 9/11. To my reckoning we are at 10 to Midnight on the Krystalnacht clock in a crashing America. Our government's primary duty is to our Americans-- protecting our Jews included-- and more so that, in light of the propensity to anti-Semitsm if people discover the "lobby" pressures on Congress to give Israel $14 billions a year-- while the US is broke-- so it can perpetrate its lebensraum thesis a la Lieberman. President Obama must cut our ties with a Lieberman Israel, just as we cut off our ties with a HAMAS led Gaza. Our Jews are us and we should never suspect them of dual loyalty. It must be recalled that though the neocons slandered Obama with their "Negro problem," about the same proportion of American Jews voted for Obama as Black Americans. I suspect that with Lieberman as a leader in the government of Israel after the election, few American Jews will want to be his kind of Zionists. So, we can let Israel decide what's best for Israel-- we never did differently; yet, Americans in turn, must decide what's best for America...and I don't think Americans will want anything to do with a Lieberman Israel, just as they decided that they don't want anything to do with a HAMAS Palestine.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Nor just apartheid but ethnic cleansing!
David Brooks tells us in the NYTimes that Israel is in a psychological war with HAMAS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06brooks.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
And, a Norwegian physician treating Palestinian war victims in Gaza describes the use by the Israelis of new and illegal weapons:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11636
Max Blumenthal in the HUFFINGTON POST describes the claims of Zionist American pundits on how good are Israel's assaults on Gaza and how this is withering away US support for Israel:
http://www.alternet.org/audits/117568/
All in all, we are seeing a seismic shift in the moral standing of a nation that is really not a nation because it has no recognized borders, being in constant violent expansion and so refusing to define its limits. A noted Israeli political theorist once concluded that, as a result of no defined borders and consequent non-recognition of this expanding state by its neighbors, it cannot call itself a nation. So, a fetus of a nation on a very richly $$$ supplied American placenta, Israel has had the illusion that it is bound by no law either of physics or man. Even in response to American Jews that risk their own American standing in support of Israel, the Jerusalem Govt insisted since 2001 that these are foreigners and should mind their own business as Israel does whatever it wants. Yet, Israel is a helpless fetus on an American cash placenta supplying it billions of dollars a year.
And today, Israel is swinging between the Nazi Lebensraum thesis and the Holocaust victim due from the world reparations-- cash for moral hazard-- as it perpetrates war crimes for which, in the past, others have been hung.
The question is: does Israel do all this for "existential survival"?
The answer obviously is NO, particularly as TV news footage of the combat was interspersed with "shalom" appeals for tourism to Israel at this very time. Rather, numerous analysts in Israel and abroad define Israel's real existential problems as two:
1) Young Israelis, once educated, "sneak out" of Israel to take offers of jobs abroad that pay well in recognition of the high quality of Israeli education;
2) Diaspora Jews who have something to contribute to Israel refuse to move there. For example, Israel feels no compunction about advertising to American Jewish doctors-- DESPITE AMERICA'S DESPERATE SHORTAGE-- to "make the aliyah" to Israel, offering them all sorts of grants and fees at US taxpayers' expense (Ha'aretz). Yet, only older Diaspora Jews, in the main, retire to Israel; however, invariably, they leave in disgust as their pensions are exhausted on high taxes.
Today, "settlements" sneak out over Palestinian territories, engulfing them by force, if not by sheer madness. But the US DeptState tells us that 78% of these settlements are unpopulated because there are not enough settlers coming to live there. The Great Aliyah has dwindled to a trickle. And still, Israel expands, substituting "security" for lebensraum in its rhetoric as it disregards all efforts by its American benefactors to bring it into line with the moral and legal demands of the World Community.
"Security," let us recall, is how Hitler justified Germany's brutal expansion. The result was not security but destruction of all peoples subjugated vas well as the German "master race." In 2006, Israel was forced by GW Bush into an attack on Lebanon that was expected to expand to Syria and Iran. But Israel Army (IDF) incompetence and hubris cost a stalling of the attack resulting in a courageous withdrawal of forces by Israeli PM Olmert. For that, he was slandered in a neocon-Israeli conspiracy that depicted him as a petty thief of public funds. With an election before them, his Israeli successors in power-- Livni and Barak-- face severe biases that favor Netanyahu, the seeming Zionist hardliner of Likud: Livni is a woman and so was declared ineligible for the Premiership by the rabbis; and Barak is still despised for his bungling of the Clinton Peace Plan and is reputed to be a tricksters who invariably fails and tries to cover up with lies and erratic violence. This should be kept in mind when reading the following by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a rather radical pro-Zionist-Right publicist:
"The immediate objective in Gaza against Hamas is to restore Israel's image of military invincibility, badly damaged 2 1/2 years ago when a punitive raid into south Lebanon triggered a hail of Hezbollah rockets and missiles that forced the population of northern Israel into underground shelters. A botched Israeli military operation gave the Israel Defense Forces a black eye -- and invincible Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, became vincible."
Borchgrave provides us further analysis that, if correct, suggests that not only is the current "shooting fish [Palestinians] in a barbell [Gaza]"-- reminiscent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews in the militarily surrounded and strangulated Warsaw Ghetto-- is a mere political gambit by the various electoral parties competing in the forthcoming election; but also, that the creeping "settlements" for non-existent "settlers" are really the main functions of an attempt to make sure that no Palestinian State ever comes into existence. This makes Israel's efforts even worse than those of the white racist Afrikaners in South Africa, trying to squeeze the blacks into Bantustans, and more like Milosevic’s attempt at "ethnic cleansing," because Israel is indeed trying to create an ever expanding purely JEWISH state by eliminating the Palestinians through displacement as refugees in the Arab world or through extermination by means of "made in the USA" firepower:
" For two of Israel's three principal contenders in the Feb. 10 elections, Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hundreds of air strikes, a massive artillery barrage and a ground offensive against Hamas targets demonstrated they could be just as tough as the challenger, superhawk and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For those whose priority objective is the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- the United States, the European Union , 22 Arab countries -- it was yet another setback.
The geopolitical can named "Palestinian state" has been kicked down the road one more time. Slowly working its way back center stage was the 2002 Saudi plan that called for the recognition of Israel by all 22 Arab states in return for the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War (with minor adjustments in Israel's favor to be negotiated). Originally put forward by Saudi King Abdullah seven years ago, and endorsed by the entire Arab world, moderate Arab leaders have been hinting President Obama would adopt it for his new Middle East roadmap.
Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008/09 have convinced an overwhelming majority of Israelis that a Palestinian state cannot coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. The 260,000 Jewish settlers in 140 settlements in the West Bank are not about to upstake to make room for a revanchist Palestinian state. The lessons of Hezbollah's missiles in 2006 and Hamas' in 2008 have convinced most Israelis a Palestinian nation in the West Bank, even if demilitarized under U.N. or even U.S. control, would not give up the dream of recovering the homes their fathers and grandfathers lost 62 years ago.
A month after Israel forced 8,500 Jewish settlers out of Gaza in December 2005, Hamas defeated the corrupt and ineffective Fattah movement in parliamentary elections. By 2007, a civil war drove Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his government out of Gaza to the West Bank, now under Israeli control.
Another showstopper for a Palestinian state is Jerusalem, specifically Arab East Jerusalem, where several thousand Israelis have moved in piecemeal over the past four decades. No Palestinian leader could accept anything less than a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, which no Israeli leader, expecting to stay alive politically, could endorse.
Meanwhile, Israel's rekindled status as invincible carried the day, aided and assisted in the midst of the Gaza offensive by the IDF's new YouTube channel, using the blogosphere as another war zone. Israeli politicians, drowned out by the voices of Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, dominated news networks with footage from unmanned drones and fighter-bombers that showed Hamas loading rockets onto a pickup truck to be driven closer to the border -- but hit by an IAF air strike almost immediately."
Below is the URL for the entire de Borchgrave article:
http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/01/05/Commentary_Israels_endgame/UPI-96761231165240/
Some American Zionist organizations are mercilessly punishing and trying to silence any questioners of critics of Israel's own version of the Warsaw Ghetto perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza. But hubris provokes reckless bragging by the Israelis and their friends over their ability to literally exterminate Palestinians. Thus, fear from defeat in Lebanon two years ago may have motivated the initial assault, but the hubris born of the massacre of a helpless people is producing rhetoric that has an eerie similarity to that emanating from Germany while it destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.
One of the Founding Fathers of Zionism coined the term "Zionazis" to warn his people of the wrong path they were on, blinded by the ease with which they could murder, rape and pillage Palestinian villages. For those of us who consider the Jewish Community in the West a pillar of what is best in our moral culture, Israeli militarism and the blind support it extracts from much of the OFFICIAL Diaspora Jewish Community leaders, make us wonder if our enthusiastic support for Israel-- "my ally right no matter what"-- may not have been a disservice to it, fomenting the creation of a Frankenstein with our dollars and arms. Worst still, an America, broke and tethering on depression, cannot help but notice the monster it has nurtured through its immense foreign aid $$ placenta and fueled with its arms giveaway to Israel. Following Israel's tutoring of our troops post-9/11, we are more or less defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And just when we came to realize the devastating consequences of this "boom,boom,boom...kill, kill, kill" policy, we are asked to support what can only be classified as a "Zionazi" operation, using the term EXACTLY as devised by its Zionism Founding Father.
As Israeli casualties mount-- inevitable, given that the victims see no escape, just an opportunity to take some of the massacring IDF troops with them-- there is no doubt that the same political motives that moved Livni (noted in the Israeli press as an amoral opportunist) and Barak (also noted as a man driven mad by his own arrogance) into this war of annihilation, will drive them-- AS IN LEBANON-- into a meaningless cease-fire... meaningless in that though the fire ceases, the hate and thirst for revenge does not. Israel will then be surrounded by vengeful hate that turns into fearless military discipline. Such negative homogeneity it has not known for 50 years. Nothing, therefore, will have been accomplished to justify the current massacre from the air and from artillery, probably not even an end to the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. As the troops go in, IDF hubris born of bravado, will turn to an annoying whiney plea for $billions upon $billions more from the USA; these will be mixed with Israeli threats that if the American placenta is not engorged with dollars, the Israeli "Defense" Forces will be forced to attack anew, perhaps even Iran while US forces are helpless in next door Iraq.
Of course, coming from a self-depleting Israel, it will all be a bluff. Alas, HAMAS will have shown that, like Hezbollah, it can die in dignity and keep on firing those strategically meaningless rockets, nothing but symbols of defiance of a year long blockade and strangulation of Gaza interrupted by Israeli "targeted assassinations of HAMAS elected leaders.
Rabin, one courageous Israeli soldier said: "enough of the killing; let us make peace for our children." For his irresistible reasoning he got a bullet in the head when the rabbis issued a "fatwa" that any Jew willing to give an inch of "Jewish land" (sic) deserves to die. That was the end of the TWO states solution. The question Livni/Barak forced us to face is: FINE, IF YOU INSIST ON A *ONE* STATE SOLUTION, WHY DO WE HAVE TO EXSANGUINATE AMERICA SO THAT AN EXCLUSIVELY JEWISH STATE CAN KEEP THREATENING AND EXTERMINATING ITS OWN PALESTINIANS?
This invariably brings us back to the "one state" solution of two peoples in one nation that Arafat warned about. In such a state, where in loco Jews and Arabs have one-man-one-vote equality, soon the birth rate of Arabs will make Israel a predominantly Muslim state. The only option Zionists see for preventing that is to force Diaspora Jews to move "back home" (sic) to Israel. There exists no state today that distinguishes its Jewish from its other citizens. Therefore, there is no way that Israel can blackmail the West into expelling its Jews to Israel. Furthermore, it would be sheer folly to confuse the affection Jews have for Israel with duality of loyalty. Indeed, in the current crisis, few Israeli born "reverse aliyah" Americans returned to join the struggle. Instead-- like Rehm Emanuel, soon to be Obama's White House Chief-of-Staff-- they remained in their new homelands to loyally serve the interests of their adopted Diaspora homelands. The olims go West, not to Israel, in a reverse aliyah. The compelling reason has to do with something a hundred times as old as Zionism: Jewish culture and Jewish ethic, based on peace and building, not on war and destroying for lebensraum.
I can only hope that the American people, in their desperate search for a scapegoat for their economic catastrophe, do not look to their fellow American Jews. What the neocons will have to be in the docket of public opinion and history to account for in no way relates to American Jews, loyal "AMERICA FIRST" Americans-- mostly because they have recently suffered the opposite of what America stands for and thus have not not forgotten.
The totalitarian media in the West today, spewing propaganda on behalf of Israel, in no way suggests that "THE JEWS" are in control or in favor of what goes on in Gaza. The first neocon lie that they alone speak for American Jews and that Jews who oppose them are unbalanced "self-hating Jews" is a foolish gimmick that is the reason for current purging of the neocons from any position of influence. Obama won as much Jewish as black support, despite the malevolent "Big Lie" propaganda of the neocons that he is a Muslim and an anti-Semite. Indeed, as I can personally attest, the "anti-Semite" smear is an hysterical smokescreen put up by "professional" Jews-- reminiscent of "professional" anti-Communists-- whose goal is fear, hysteria and isolation so that OUR Jews live in panic and duly feed the coffers of these high-life frauds. Madoff's prototypes can be found as easily in the so-called "Holocaust Industry" as on Wall Street. It is up to us to make sure that our fellow Americans never lose sight Americanism of the mass majority of Jews who contributed so much to our society and so generously to our well being, forever distinguishing themselves from the small group of freaks, frauds and cheats who seek to acquire "mensch-hood" by stampeding us "goyim cattle" into what they want: they call it "World War IV."
Jews are as tortured by video from Gaza as any of us. Humanitarianism is as Jewish as is circumcision. And the bravura of old ex-Reds who seek to feel manly applauding the bloodshed is the abnormal in the Jewish Community, NOT the mass normal. We should all guard our Jewish neighbors' safety for, as ever in the short history of Zionism, the Zionists cared and care little for the Diaspora Jews that, in the words of PM Sharon, "will be damned, losing their Jewish soul" if they don't move to Israel with all their gelt by 2020. Throughout history Zionist cared little for those who remain diasporic, even through the Holocaust.
Israel is a wonderful nation that I always admired when I went there to learn about it and bathe in its achievements. But a mix of local motives and migrants from afar has driven it to grandomania madness. There is a most touching Israeli poem about an old man who spends his lonely grief-ridden days at the grave of his son, felled IDF soldier. The son cries out from the grave: do not cry for your loneliness, father, but for me who is under the dark, damp, cold ground because of your grandiose ideologies. I had so many dreams and could have done so much but you took it all from me, sending me to die for your ideologies. Israel's army is not professional, it is all reservists. Young Israelis, not knowing when they shave in the morning, whether they will put on a uniform to fight or a suit to build a career, have had enough and have been seeking refuge in the West. This bleeding of its youth is fatal to a nation and all the Arabs know it.
Now Iran stands to frighten Arabs with its future puny atomic bomb. This will draw them to seek protection under Israel's nuclear umbrella, the world's 4th largest, in exchange for which Israel can demand acceptance as an equal member of the region. Only Israel's high-tech ability can take the Arabs out of their one crop (oil) banana republic economies, making it indeed the "light onto the [Arab] nations" which the Founding Fathers of Zionism originally sought to become. But for now, we in the West must more vigilantly than ever protect our Jews; meanwhile, the Israelis must seek some sort of two nations, one economy relation with the Palestinians. HAMAS is nothing but the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Fundamentalist revolutionary organization which came into existence through the help of Ayatollah Khomeini of Shia Iran and Sharon of Israel, the latter hoping it would fragment Palestinian nationalism under Arafat. Like Hezbollah, it is a resistance religious group that seeks a return to religious compliance through combat. But most Palestinians are secular, distinguishing religion from politics. They voted for HAMAS (in an election forced on them by Bush) as a protest against corruption and incompetence in the Palestinian Authority. If instead of Zionazi punitive tactics for the way they voted (there is no need to mention GW Bush's criminal incompetence and irresponsible support for such "collective punishment" on all Gaza Palestinians), Israel had come to terms with HAMAS and had rewarded good management with economic cooperation, the present crisis, nor the rockets that fell on Israel, would have been the essence of the current scene. But Israel, as Borchgrave admits, is out to eliminate any Palestinian state. As he reports, that's why Israel feeds "facts on the ground" expansion of so-called settlements. A DETERMINED TRADE OF SETTLEMENTS BACK TO A 1967 BORDER IN EXCHANGE FOR A COMMON INTEGRATED ECONOMY WITH THE REGION WOULD MAKE ISRAEL THE LEADER RATHER THAN THE PARIAH OF THE MIDDLE EAST. Even now it is not too late. The weakness Israel has shown through its sedding of Gaza blood can more than be neutralized by an abandonment of its current Zionazi lebensraum policy, adopting in exchange, a total peace accord. Radical Islam is tired. Outrage may arouse it momentarily here and there, but nothing will make it slumber again like a real fair and mutually beneficial peace. This is the challenge for Obama and this is what Israel must courageously face.
The world's only religion born of forgiveness and kindness came from the same peoples who today manufacture hate towards each other. A civil ethic consistent with the roots of the region can convert the unforgiving desert in which these peoples live. If we stop buying their oil as if addicts ready to pay any price and allow the planet to reclaim the sand and the peoples therein, once we end our global warming pollution, the peoples of the Middle East will rediscover the old Jewish ethic of fairness from which both peoples provene.
Daniel E. Teodoru
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06brooks.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
And, a Norwegian physician treating Palestinian war victims in Gaza describes the use by the Israelis of new and illegal weapons:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11636
Max Blumenthal in the HUFFINGTON POST describes the claims of Zionist American pundits on how good are Israel's assaults on Gaza and how this is withering away US support for Israel:
http://www.alternet.org/audits/117568/
All in all, we are seeing a seismic shift in the moral standing of a nation that is really not a nation because it has no recognized borders, being in constant violent expansion and so refusing to define its limits. A noted Israeli political theorist once concluded that, as a result of no defined borders and consequent non-recognition of this expanding state by its neighbors, it cannot call itself a nation. So, a fetus of a nation on a very richly $$$ supplied American placenta, Israel has had the illusion that it is bound by no law either of physics or man. Even in response to American Jews that risk their own American standing in support of Israel, the Jerusalem Govt insisted since 2001 that these are foreigners and should mind their own business as Israel does whatever it wants. Yet, Israel is a helpless fetus on an American cash placenta supplying it billions of dollars a year.
And today, Israel is swinging between the Nazi Lebensraum thesis and the Holocaust victim due from the world reparations-- cash for moral hazard-- as it perpetrates war crimes for which, in the past, others have been hung.
The question is: does Israel do all this for "existential survival"?
The answer obviously is NO, particularly as TV news footage of the combat was interspersed with "shalom" appeals for tourism to Israel at this very time. Rather, numerous analysts in Israel and abroad define Israel's real existential problems as two:
1) Young Israelis, once educated, "sneak out" of Israel to take offers of jobs abroad that pay well in recognition of the high quality of Israeli education;
2) Diaspora Jews who have something to contribute to Israel refuse to move there. For example, Israel feels no compunction about advertising to American Jewish doctors-- DESPITE AMERICA'S DESPERATE SHORTAGE-- to "make the aliyah" to Israel, offering them all sorts of grants and fees at US taxpayers' expense (Ha'aretz). Yet, only older Diaspora Jews, in the main, retire to Israel; however, invariably, they leave in disgust as their pensions are exhausted on high taxes.
Today, "settlements" sneak out over Palestinian territories, engulfing them by force, if not by sheer madness. But the US DeptState tells us that 78% of these settlements are unpopulated because there are not enough settlers coming to live there. The Great Aliyah has dwindled to a trickle. And still, Israel expands, substituting "security" for lebensraum in its rhetoric as it disregards all efforts by its American benefactors to bring it into line with the moral and legal demands of the World Community.
"Security," let us recall, is how Hitler justified Germany's brutal expansion. The result was not security but destruction of all peoples subjugated vas well as the German "master race." In 2006, Israel was forced by GW Bush into an attack on Lebanon that was expected to expand to Syria and Iran. But Israel Army (IDF) incompetence and hubris cost a stalling of the attack resulting in a courageous withdrawal of forces by Israeli PM Olmert. For that, he was slandered in a neocon-Israeli conspiracy that depicted him as a petty thief of public funds. With an election before them, his Israeli successors in power-- Livni and Barak-- face severe biases that favor Netanyahu, the seeming Zionist hardliner of Likud: Livni is a woman and so was declared ineligible for the Premiership by the rabbis; and Barak is still despised for his bungling of the Clinton Peace Plan and is reputed to be a tricksters who invariably fails and tries to cover up with lies and erratic violence. This should be kept in mind when reading the following by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a rather radical pro-Zionist-Right publicist:
"The immediate objective in Gaza against Hamas is to restore Israel's image of military invincibility, badly damaged 2 1/2 years ago when a punitive raid into south Lebanon triggered a hail of Hezbollah rockets and missiles that forced the population of northern Israel into underground shelters. A botched Israeli military operation gave the Israel Defense Forces a black eye -- and invincible Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, became vincible."
Borchgrave provides us further analysis that, if correct, suggests that not only is the current "shooting fish [Palestinians] in a barbell [Gaza]"-- reminiscent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews in the militarily surrounded and strangulated Warsaw Ghetto-- is a mere political gambit by the various electoral parties competing in the forthcoming election; but also, that the creeping "settlements" for non-existent "settlers" are really the main functions of an attempt to make sure that no Palestinian State ever comes into existence. This makes Israel's efforts even worse than those of the white racist Afrikaners in South Africa, trying to squeeze the blacks into Bantustans, and more like Milosevic’s attempt at "ethnic cleansing," because Israel is indeed trying to create an ever expanding purely JEWISH state by eliminating the Palestinians through displacement as refugees in the Arab world or through extermination by means of "made in the USA" firepower:
" For two of Israel's three principal contenders in the Feb. 10 elections, Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hundreds of air strikes, a massive artillery barrage and a ground offensive against Hamas targets demonstrated they could be just as tough as the challenger, superhawk and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For those whose priority objective is the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- the United States, the European Union , 22 Arab countries -- it was yet another setback.
The geopolitical can named "Palestinian state" has been kicked down the road one more time. Slowly working its way back center stage was the 2002 Saudi plan that called for the recognition of Israel by all 22 Arab states in return for the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War (with minor adjustments in Israel's favor to be negotiated). Originally put forward by Saudi King Abdullah seven years ago, and endorsed by the entire Arab world, moderate Arab leaders have been hinting President Obama would adopt it for his new Middle East roadmap.
Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008/09 have convinced an overwhelming majority of Israelis that a Palestinian state cannot coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. The 260,000 Jewish settlers in 140 settlements in the West Bank are not about to upstake to make room for a revanchist Palestinian state. The lessons of Hezbollah's missiles in 2006 and Hamas' in 2008 have convinced most Israelis a Palestinian nation in the West Bank, even if demilitarized under U.N. or even U.S. control, would not give up the dream of recovering the homes their fathers and grandfathers lost 62 years ago.
A month after Israel forced 8,500 Jewish settlers out of Gaza in December 2005, Hamas defeated the corrupt and ineffective Fattah movement in parliamentary elections. By 2007, a civil war drove Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his government out of Gaza to the West Bank, now under Israeli control.
Another showstopper for a Palestinian state is Jerusalem, specifically Arab East Jerusalem, where several thousand Israelis have moved in piecemeal over the past four decades. No Palestinian leader could accept anything less than a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, which no Israeli leader, expecting to stay alive politically, could endorse.
Meanwhile, Israel's rekindled status as invincible carried the day, aided and assisted in the midst of the Gaza offensive by the IDF's new YouTube channel, using the blogosphere as another war zone. Israeli politicians, drowned out by the voices of Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, dominated news networks with footage from unmanned drones and fighter-bombers that showed Hamas loading rockets onto a pickup truck to be driven closer to the border -- but hit by an IAF air strike almost immediately."
Below is the URL for the entire de Borchgrave article:
http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/01/05/Commentary_Israels_endgame/UPI-96761231165240/
Some American Zionist organizations are mercilessly punishing and trying to silence any questioners of critics of Israel's own version of the Warsaw Ghetto perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza. But hubris provokes reckless bragging by the Israelis and their friends over their ability to literally exterminate Palestinians. Thus, fear from defeat in Lebanon two years ago may have motivated the initial assault, but the hubris born of the massacre of a helpless people is producing rhetoric that has an eerie similarity to that emanating from Germany while it destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.
One of the Founding Fathers of Zionism coined the term "Zionazis" to warn his people of the wrong path they were on, blinded by the ease with which they could murder, rape and pillage Palestinian villages. For those of us who consider the Jewish Community in the West a pillar of what is best in our moral culture, Israeli militarism and the blind support it extracts from much of the OFFICIAL Diaspora Jewish Community leaders, make us wonder if our enthusiastic support for Israel-- "my ally right no matter what"-- may not have been a disservice to it, fomenting the creation of a Frankenstein with our dollars and arms. Worst still, an America, broke and tethering on depression, cannot help but notice the monster it has nurtured through its immense foreign aid $$ placenta and fueled with its arms giveaway to Israel. Following Israel's tutoring of our troops post-9/11, we are more or less defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And just when we came to realize the devastating consequences of this "boom,boom,boom...kill, kill, kill" policy, we are asked to support what can only be classified as a "Zionazi" operation, using the term EXACTLY as devised by its Zionism Founding Father.
As Israeli casualties mount-- inevitable, given that the victims see no escape, just an opportunity to take some of the massacring IDF troops with them-- there is no doubt that the same political motives that moved Livni (noted in the Israeli press as an amoral opportunist) and Barak (also noted as a man driven mad by his own arrogance) into this war of annihilation, will drive them-- AS IN LEBANON-- into a meaningless cease-fire... meaningless in that though the fire ceases, the hate and thirst for revenge does not. Israel will then be surrounded by vengeful hate that turns into fearless military discipline. Such negative homogeneity it has not known for 50 years. Nothing, therefore, will have been accomplished to justify the current massacre from the air and from artillery, probably not even an end to the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. As the troops go in, IDF hubris born of bravado, will turn to an annoying whiney plea for $billions upon $billions more from the USA; these will be mixed with Israeli threats that if the American placenta is not engorged with dollars, the Israeli "Defense" Forces will be forced to attack anew, perhaps even Iran while US forces are helpless in next door Iraq.
Of course, coming from a self-depleting Israel, it will all be a bluff. Alas, HAMAS will have shown that, like Hezbollah, it can die in dignity and keep on firing those strategically meaningless rockets, nothing but symbols of defiance of a year long blockade and strangulation of Gaza interrupted by Israeli "targeted assassinations of HAMAS elected leaders.
Rabin, one courageous Israeli soldier said: "enough of the killing; let us make peace for our children." For his irresistible reasoning he got a bullet in the head when the rabbis issued a "fatwa" that any Jew willing to give an inch of "Jewish land" (sic) deserves to die. That was the end of the TWO states solution. The question Livni/Barak forced us to face is: FINE, IF YOU INSIST ON A *ONE* STATE SOLUTION, WHY DO WE HAVE TO EXSANGUINATE AMERICA SO THAT AN EXCLUSIVELY JEWISH STATE CAN KEEP THREATENING AND EXTERMINATING ITS OWN PALESTINIANS?
This invariably brings us back to the "one state" solution of two peoples in one nation that Arafat warned about. In such a state, where in loco Jews and Arabs have one-man-one-vote equality, soon the birth rate of Arabs will make Israel a predominantly Muslim state. The only option Zionists see for preventing that is to force Diaspora Jews to move "back home" (sic) to Israel. There exists no state today that distinguishes its Jewish from its other citizens. Therefore, there is no way that Israel can blackmail the West into expelling its Jews to Israel. Furthermore, it would be sheer folly to confuse the affection Jews have for Israel with duality of loyalty. Indeed, in the current crisis, few Israeli born "reverse aliyah" Americans returned to join the struggle. Instead-- like Rehm Emanuel, soon to be Obama's White House Chief-of-Staff-- they remained in their new homelands to loyally serve the interests of their adopted Diaspora homelands. The olims go West, not to Israel, in a reverse aliyah. The compelling reason has to do with something a hundred times as old as Zionism: Jewish culture and Jewish ethic, based on peace and building, not on war and destroying for lebensraum.
I can only hope that the American people, in their desperate search for a scapegoat for their economic catastrophe, do not look to their fellow American Jews. What the neocons will have to be in the docket of public opinion and history to account for in no way relates to American Jews, loyal "AMERICA FIRST" Americans-- mostly because they have recently suffered the opposite of what America stands for and thus have not not forgotten.
The totalitarian media in the West today, spewing propaganda on behalf of Israel, in no way suggests that "THE JEWS" are in control or in favor of what goes on in Gaza. The first neocon lie that they alone speak for American Jews and that Jews who oppose them are unbalanced "self-hating Jews" is a foolish gimmick that is the reason for current purging of the neocons from any position of influence. Obama won as much Jewish as black support, despite the malevolent "Big Lie" propaganda of the neocons that he is a Muslim and an anti-Semite. Indeed, as I can personally attest, the "anti-Semite" smear is an hysterical smokescreen put up by "professional" Jews-- reminiscent of "professional" anti-Communists-- whose goal is fear, hysteria and isolation so that OUR Jews live in panic and duly feed the coffers of these high-life frauds. Madoff's prototypes can be found as easily in the so-called "Holocaust Industry" as on Wall Street. It is up to us to make sure that our fellow Americans never lose sight Americanism of the mass majority of Jews who contributed so much to our society and so generously to our well being, forever distinguishing themselves from the small group of freaks, frauds and cheats who seek to acquire "mensch-hood" by stampeding us "goyim cattle" into what they want: they call it "World War IV."
Jews are as tortured by video from Gaza as any of us. Humanitarianism is as Jewish as is circumcision. And the bravura of old ex-Reds who seek to feel manly applauding the bloodshed is the abnormal in the Jewish Community, NOT the mass normal. We should all guard our Jewish neighbors' safety for, as ever in the short history of Zionism, the Zionists cared and care little for the Diaspora Jews that, in the words of PM Sharon, "will be damned, losing their Jewish soul" if they don't move to Israel with all their gelt by 2020. Throughout history Zionist cared little for those who remain diasporic, even through the Holocaust.
Israel is a wonderful nation that I always admired when I went there to learn about it and bathe in its achievements. But a mix of local motives and migrants from afar has driven it to grandomania madness. There is a most touching Israeli poem about an old man who spends his lonely grief-ridden days at the grave of his son, felled IDF soldier. The son cries out from the grave: do not cry for your loneliness, father, but for me who is under the dark, damp, cold ground because of your grandiose ideologies. I had so many dreams and could have done so much but you took it all from me, sending me to die for your ideologies. Israel's army is not professional, it is all reservists. Young Israelis, not knowing when they shave in the morning, whether they will put on a uniform to fight or a suit to build a career, have had enough and have been seeking refuge in the West. This bleeding of its youth is fatal to a nation and all the Arabs know it.
Now Iran stands to frighten Arabs with its future puny atomic bomb. This will draw them to seek protection under Israel's nuclear umbrella, the world's 4th largest, in exchange for which Israel can demand acceptance as an equal member of the region. Only Israel's high-tech ability can take the Arabs out of their one crop (oil) banana republic economies, making it indeed the "light onto the [Arab] nations" which the Founding Fathers of Zionism originally sought to become. But for now, we in the West must more vigilantly than ever protect our Jews; meanwhile, the Israelis must seek some sort of two nations, one economy relation with the Palestinians. HAMAS is nothing but the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Fundamentalist revolutionary organization which came into existence through the help of Ayatollah Khomeini of Shia Iran and Sharon of Israel, the latter hoping it would fragment Palestinian nationalism under Arafat. Like Hezbollah, it is a resistance religious group that seeks a return to religious compliance through combat. But most Palestinians are secular, distinguishing religion from politics. They voted for HAMAS (in an election forced on them by Bush) as a protest against corruption and incompetence in the Palestinian Authority. If instead of Zionazi punitive tactics for the way they voted (there is no need to mention GW Bush's criminal incompetence and irresponsible support for such "collective punishment" on all Gaza Palestinians), Israel had come to terms with HAMAS and had rewarded good management with economic cooperation, the present crisis, nor the rockets that fell on Israel, would have been the essence of the current scene. But Israel, as Borchgrave admits, is out to eliminate any Palestinian state. As he reports, that's why Israel feeds "facts on the ground" expansion of so-called settlements. A DETERMINED TRADE OF SETTLEMENTS BACK TO A 1967 BORDER IN EXCHANGE FOR A COMMON INTEGRATED ECONOMY WITH THE REGION WOULD MAKE ISRAEL THE LEADER RATHER THAN THE PARIAH OF THE MIDDLE EAST. Even now it is not too late. The weakness Israel has shown through its sedding of Gaza blood can more than be neutralized by an abandonment of its current Zionazi lebensraum policy, adopting in exchange, a total peace accord. Radical Islam is tired. Outrage may arouse it momentarily here and there, but nothing will make it slumber again like a real fair and mutually beneficial peace. This is the challenge for Obama and this is what Israel must courageously face.
The world's only religion born of forgiveness and kindness came from the same peoples who today manufacture hate towards each other. A civil ethic consistent with the roots of the region can convert the unforgiving desert in which these peoples live. If we stop buying their oil as if addicts ready to pay any price and allow the planet to reclaim the sand and the peoples therein, once we end our global warming pollution, the peoples of the Middle East will rediscover the old Jewish ethic of fairness from which both peoples provene.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Is Israel provoking Diaspora ant-Semitism in Gaza?
One is reminded of PM Sharon's insistent admonition that all Jews who do not make the Great Aliyah to Israel by 2020 are damned as they will "lose their Jewish souls." One cannot help but wonder if the current crisis, planned for over a year, had not been initiated at a time when the US is economically unable to maintain its lavish support of the Israeli economy in order to force Diaspora Jews into an anti-Semitism driven flight to Israel. The outrageous "hasbarah" imposed on Western press, the suppression of opposition or negative reporting by Israel's advocates abroad, and the current crashing of the White House site along with clogging of White House phone line with demands for release of Israeli spy Pollard, convicted to life in prison-- all ordered from Israel-- make one wonder what lies behind this insolent attempt to implicate the US into a Mideast crisis of Israel's making at the very time when US focus is moving away from the Middle East and onto South Asia. What is Netanyahu doing campaigning in the US when his nation is in crisis? Who will engorge the American $$ placenta from which the fetal state of Israel draws sustenance? How will Israel recoup the WMDs it is so liberally dispensing on Gaza, making it all look like a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto?
Every period of military domination of Israeli policy is followed by a period referred to by Likudniks as "post-Zionism," when land for peace becomes a national mantra. Given that the rabbis nixed FM Livni for the PM slot merely on grounds that she is a woman, it is clear that she initiated the current offensive to prove that she can be as violent as any man. PM Olmert seems to be seeking to regain some standing after his forced resignation for corruption by ordering the shooting of fish [Palestinians] in a barrel [Gaza]. No one seems to note that, in the US and EU media, stories censored to impose official Israeli hasbarah about the Gaza bloodbath are followed immediately, without even a commercial break, by stories about Madoff, the American investor charged with swindling $50 billions. At the same time, the story, just released by the NY Times and David Sanger in his book THE INHERITANCE, about how Israel tried to force the US to provide it materials and Iraq over flight permission to bomb Iran without any consideration for the consequences to American troops in Iraq, shows a level of disregard for the interests of the American $placenta from which Israel subsists, reminiscent of the story about killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. We aware also informed on the CHARLIE ROSE SHOW by CBS 60 MINUTES producer David Simon that the two states solution is dead and that the only options are either one state or apartheid.
The question of exploiting anti-Semitism by Zionists in the 1930s was made quite stark by Tom Segev, the Israeli historian, in his book THE SEVENTH MILLION. I do not believe that one could read his book without seeing a similar attempt to entangle involuntarily Diaspora Jews into the Zionist interests, repeating history, except that now a deliberate attempt to foment non-existent anti-Semitism seems underway. Two stories in the FORWARD are mind numbing: (1) a former Israeli intel head brags of his multiple passports, allowing him the privileges of safety in several states; (2) also in the FORWARD, is an article bragging that the Jewish power in Congress managed to "earmark" $178 millions for "Jewish interests" from the Financial Bailout Bill meant for US banks exclusively. Why are such inflammatory stories put forward at the very time when the risk of inflaming anti-Semitism is greatest?
Diaspora Jews, in the main, consider Israel a nice place to visit but they have shown that they would not like to live there. Many cases of older Diaspora Jews retiring to Israel and returning after the Israeli tax system consumed their pensions are well known. Many young Israelis are unable to accept any longer that when they shave in the morning, they can't be sure whether to put on a business suit in order to follow their careers or a uniform to serve an open ended mobilization as reservists; so upon finishing their excusive Israeli education, they migrate to the West for jobs. The alyiah is, it seems, has long been in reverse. So, is there now a desperate attempt to fan the flames of anti-Semitism through all of the above enumerated items-- all presented at the very time that the US is plunging into economic depression? Is it deliberately done in the hope that Diaspora Jews will be forced to make the Great Aliyah in fear?
All this comes at the very time when Israel's prospects look brightest. A puny Iranian atomic bomb will drive all the Sunni Arab states to seek protection under Israel's nuclear umbrella. Arab leaders are realizing that continuation of their banana republic one crop (oil) status is untenable. Israel is the only country they can turn to for leadership in escaping their current techno/sci backwardness. Yet, it seems, Israel takes this moment to polarize Arabs, to expand its settlements-. According to the US DeptState 78% are homes built at US taxpayers' expense are empty because there are not enough "olims" to settle them; they are merely used as excuse to expel Palestinians and create hollow "facts on the ground" with which to make the case for Greater Israel.
If Israel is indeed seeking to create a backfire of anti-Semitism in the Diaspora that forces Jews to stampede to Israel in fear, seizing their assets, it is making a fatal mistake. What Israel needs now is Palestinians who can serve as deal-makers for it with the Arabs. But the illegal use of anti-personnel weapons in Gaza is only-- as did the Lebanon War-- producing recruits for HAMAS who live to kill in revenge for Israel's repeated massacre from the air. Diaspora Jews are first and foremost loyal to their nations of birth. The flight of East European Jews in the 1980s, coming to Israel to escape Communism, has been reversed after the downfall of Communism. This should be a cardinal sign of how hopeless is any attempt at a fear driven aliyah stampede.
HAMAS is not Palestinian. It was made by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood escapees whom Israel invited and supported in the hope that they would destroy Arafat and the PLO when the world was ready to accept the PLO as spokesman for the Palestinians. Now Israel's goals have reversed because HAMAS won an election forced on the Palestinians by GW Bush so he could claim that he brought "democracy" (sic) to the Middle East. HAMAS is well aware of its tenuous hold on Palestinians, the most secular of Arabs, many are Christians. HAMAS leaders understand quite well that every massacre of Palestinians attempt by the IDF is followed by a long era of political dominance by the post-Zionist doves. The Israeli polity, no matter what weapons are used to create mass casualties, is extremely casualties averse-- morally over both Palestinian and Israeli. There is no way to destroy HAMAS without accepting intolerable IDF and civilian Palestinian casualties. Consequently, Israel will lose lose its taste for massacre. So it is not too late for Israel to swallow its losses and propose a generous two-states-one-economy solution en route to demanding full diplomatic and economic recognition by the Sunni Arabs who will avail themselves of its nuclear umbrella and will follow its lead into a modernization revolution. Frivolous short term electoral tactics imposing mass casualties but lacking any strategic foresight leave Israel open to extinction. To date, as pointed out by a leading Israeli international law expert, Israel is a country but not a nation, for it is totally dependent on a foreign placenta, it's economy is in shambles, its currency is based on a dollar backing of the shekel (a debt quietly "forgiven" by Congress periodically), not recognized by its neighbors and without set borders, expanding constantly. Up to now Israel has held on by the skin of its teeth, lavished by massive US aid. But now the US is going into economic depression and it is hard to imagine the $placenta not drying up.
Israel must commit to a TOTAL first step solution as developed, not at Camp David, but at Taba-- a productive step that the rise to power of Bush and Sharon made untenable. Well, now, eight years later, the US political process is reversed and a real effort which eliminates most of the settlements must become a reality. BUT FIRST AND FOREMOST, Israel must realize that its hasbara is not effective smoke but very transparent wind; and, no matter what Israel does to provoke Diaspora anti-Semitism, the Jews are first and foremost natives to their homelands of birth, not cattle to be stampeded in fear in Israel's direction.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Every period of military domination of Israeli policy is followed by a period referred to by Likudniks as "post-Zionism," when land for peace becomes a national mantra. Given that the rabbis nixed FM Livni for the PM slot merely on grounds that she is a woman, it is clear that she initiated the current offensive to prove that she can be as violent as any man. PM Olmert seems to be seeking to regain some standing after his forced resignation for corruption by ordering the shooting of fish [Palestinians] in a barrel [Gaza]. No one seems to note that, in the US and EU media, stories censored to impose official Israeli hasbarah about the Gaza bloodbath are followed immediately, without even a commercial break, by stories about Madoff, the American investor charged with swindling $50 billions. At the same time, the story, just released by the NY Times and David Sanger in his book THE INHERITANCE, about how Israel tried to force the US to provide it materials and Iraq over flight permission to bomb Iran without any consideration for the consequences to American troops in Iraq, shows a level of disregard for the interests of the American $placenta from which Israel subsists, reminiscent of the story about killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. We aware also informed on the CHARLIE ROSE SHOW by CBS 60 MINUTES producer David Simon that the two states solution is dead and that the only options are either one state or apartheid.
The question of exploiting anti-Semitism by Zionists in the 1930s was made quite stark by Tom Segev, the Israeli historian, in his book THE SEVENTH MILLION. I do not believe that one could read his book without seeing a similar attempt to entangle involuntarily Diaspora Jews into the Zionist interests, repeating history, except that now a deliberate attempt to foment non-existent anti-Semitism seems underway. Two stories in the FORWARD are mind numbing: (1) a former Israeli intel head brags of his multiple passports, allowing him the privileges of safety in several states; (2) also in the FORWARD, is an article bragging that the Jewish power in Congress managed to "earmark" $178 millions for "Jewish interests" from the Financial Bailout Bill meant for US banks exclusively. Why are such inflammatory stories put forward at the very time when the risk of inflaming anti-Semitism is greatest?
Diaspora Jews, in the main, consider Israel a nice place to visit but they have shown that they would not like to live there. Many cases of older Diaspora Jews retiring to Israel and returning after the Israeli tax system consumed their pensions are well known. Many young Israelis are unable to accept any longer that when they shave in the morning, they can't be sure whether to put on a business suit in order to follow their careers or a uniform to serve an open ended mobilization as reservists; so upon finishing their excusive Israeli education, they migrate to the West for jobs. The alyiah is, it seems, has long been in reverse. So, is there now a desperate attempt to fan the flames of anti-Semitism through all of the above enumerated items-- all presented at the very time that the US is plunging into economic depression? Is it deliberately done in the hope that Diaspora Jews will be forced to make the Great Aliyah in fear?
All this comes at the very time when Israel's prospects look brightest. A puny Iranian atomic bomb will drive all the Sunni Arab states to seek protection under Israel's nuclear umbrella. Arab leaders are realizing that continuation of their banana republic one crop (oil) status is untenable. Israel is the only country they can turn to for leadership in escaping their current techno/sci backwardness. Yet, it seems, Israel takes this moment to polarize Arabs, to expand its settlements-. According to the US DeptState 78% are homes built at US taxpayers' expense are empty because there are not enough "olims" to settle them; they are merely used as excuse to expel Palestinians and create hollow "facts on the ground" with which to make the case for Greater Israel.
If Israel is indeed seeking to create a backfire of anti-Semitism in the Diaspora that forces Jews to stampede to Israel in fear, seizing their assets, it is making a fatal mistake. What Israel needs now is Palestinians who can serve as deal-makers for it with the Arabs. But the illegal use of anti-personnel weapons in Gaza is only-- as did the Lebanon War-- producing recruits for HAMAS who live to kill in revenge for Israel's repeated massacre from the air. Diaspora Jews are first and foremost loyal to their nations of birth. The flight of East European Jews in the 1980s, coming to Israel to escape Communism, has been reversed after the downfall of Communism. This should be a cardinal sign of how hopeless is any attempt at a fear driven aliyah stampede.
HAMAS is not Palestinian. It was made by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood escapees whom Israel invited and supported in the hope that they would destroy Arafat and the PLO when the world was ready to accept the PLO as spokesman for the Palestinians. Now Israel's goals have reversed because HAMAS won an election forced on the Palestinians by GW Bush so he could claim that he brought "democracy" (sic) to the Middle East. HAMAS is well aware of its tenuous hold on Palestinians, the most secular of Arabs, many are Christians. HAMAS leaders understand quite well that every massacre of Palestinians attempt by the IDF is followed by a long era of political dominance by the post-Zionist doves. The Israeli polity, no matter what weapons are used to create mass casualties, is extremely casualties averse-- morally over both Palestinian and Israeli. There is no way to destroy HAMAS without accepting intolerable IDF and civilian Palestinian casualties. Consequently, Israel will lose lose its taste for massacre. So it is not too late for Israel to swallow its losses and propose a generous two-states-one-economy solution en route to demanding full diplomatic and economic recognition by the Sunni Arabs who will avail themselves of its nuclear umbrella and will follow its lead into a modernization revolution. Frivolous short term electoral tactics imposing mass casualties but lacking any strategic foresight leave Israel open to extinction. To date, as pointed out by a leading Israeli international law expert, Israel is a country but not a nation, for it is totally dependent on a foreign placenta, it's economy is in shambles, its currency is based on a dollar backing of the shekel (a debt quietly "forgiven" by Congress periodically), not recognized by its neighbors and without set borders, expanding constantly. Up to now Israel has held on by the skin of its teeth, lavished by massive US aid. But now the US is going into economic depression and it is hard to imagine the $placenta not drying up.
Israel must commit to a TOTAL first step solution as developed, not at Camp David, but at Taba-- a productive step that the rise to power of Bush and Sharon made untenable. Well, now, eight years later, the US political process is reversed and a real effort which eliminates most of the settlements must become a reality. BUT FIRST AND FOREMOST, Israel must realize that its hasbara is not effective smoke but very transparent wind; and, no matter what Israel does to provoke Diaspora anti-Semitism, the Jews are first and foremost natives to their homelands of birth, not cattle to be stampeded in fear in Israel's direction.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Don't let "Bush's War" become "Obama's War"
As one who was with Nixon when LBJ's War became "Nixon's War" in the Democrat/left-antiwar mantras, allow me to draw upon that experience to explain what grave end to his presidential career President Obama faces if, despite his preoccupation with a full-blown economic depression, he does not quickly disengage from: a) The Iraq Quagmire, b) the Afghan trap and c) the Israeli use of America as its mad dog with which to threaten the Middle East.
Nixon had, prior to the 1968 Campaign, made clear that the US could not continue to exsanguinate its standing as a global power, the lifeblood of our then foreign policy, losing its troops to North Vietnamese ambushes in the triple-canopy jungles of South East Asia. He was well aware that the Soviet supplies, shipped in broad daylight from Vladivostok via Haiphong Harbor to Hanoi on a 30 miles rail line sacrosanct, "off limits" to our bombers, cost more in treasure rather than blood to destroy after dispersal into triple canopy jungle from Hanoi to the South via the Mui Gia Pass into Laos, than the cost in blood more than treasure after getting to Hanoi's forces (PAVN) in South Vietnam to be used against our forces. Nixon thus decided to expand the Vietnam War into a diplomatic manipulation involving the entire Asian theater and other controlling super-powers. Towards that end, in 1967, he promised privately that he would use China to diplomatically attack Russia and Russia to diplomatically attack China...both achieved through devastating blows against North Vietnam while negotiating with it directly in Paris. There is no question that PAVN was a Soviet proxy supposed to march West across Southeast Asia in order to link with Soviet-friendly India and thus encircle China in a final arc around its SE Asian soft underbelly.
At the same time, the Soviets had in mind a massive nuclear air assault on North China's nuclear installations. Warning of a Soviet “tonsillectomy” against China’s nuclear installations, Russian diplomats sought Nixon’s accord. At the time only President-elect, Nixon passed word to the Soviets that the US would protect China's northern border against any Soviet incursions, deeming an attack on China's North an attack on the USA. Once President, Nixon offered China hegemony over Indochina so long as it prevents Hanoi's march on Thailand. To prove that the US had no designs for permanent bases at China's soft underbelly, he offered to pull US forces out of SE Asia if China could assure South Vietnam's survival.
Why Thailand? Back in 1958, at an NSC meeting, President Eisenhower made clear that our involvement in Indochina was to protect Thailand, for if Thailand is free, the rest of SE Asia will not capitulate. At that same meeting, Nixon stood up to the SecState and CIA Chief Dulles Brothers and insisted that North Vietnam was Soviet dominated, not by the Chinese. So any American threat of direct US retaliation against China if it moves against SE Asia, insisted Nixon, would only encourage Soviet support of Hanoi's dream to dominate the SE Asian region; US troops in SE Asia and Soviet pressure on China's northern border, he insisted, would force China to submit to Moscow. Mao would then be removed and ex-Soviet-agent Liu Shao Chi would replace him. That would reunite the Communist Bloc under Soviet rule.
A decade later, Nixon as President elaborated on that prescient perspective: to "lose" in Indochina in order to win a permanent Sino-Soviet split by protecting China against Soviet overthrow of Mao. Withdrawing from Indochina, the US would guarantee Chinese domination of SE Asia if China guaranteed that, while the US protects China from Russia, China protects the SE Asian Mainland from North Vietnamese conquest. Had President Duong Van Minh, Nguyen Van Thieu's successor, accepted to hold off surrender for 48 hrs (as France pleaded with him to do) in April 1975, when Hanoi's forces were marching on Saigon, China would have kept its word and would have blunted Hanoi's flagrant violation of the Paris Peace Accord. Alas, Minh chickened out, surrendered, and China's halt of Hanoi's westward march could only come later in Cambodia. Still, Thailand and the rest of the SE Asian members of ASEAN never suffered Hanoi takeover because China kept its word to Nixon. Nixon, therefore, won the Indochina War by Eisenhower's standards, obvious when China attacked Vietnam from the North in order to halt its Westward march into Cambodia and Thailand.
In fact, South Vietnam was salvageable if the Paris Accords had been enforced by an air attack on Hanoi in 1974, as requested by Kissinger, and the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) had been respelled in weapons and gasoline. But the Democrats were so fearful of Korea-- a war Democrats start and fumble but Republicans end successfully-- that they passed a Senator Ted Kennedy rider that left South Vietnam disarmed and defenseless after Ford took over the American Presidency. Soon after the embargo on logistic support to the army of South Vietnam passed through Congress, Hanoi realized that there would be no means of resistance. Watergate only added to Hanoi's winning gamble. Hanoi used all its forces to attack South Vietnam, except for one division that it held back in the North to defend the whole country!
So the point is that by (1) making the Vietnam War "Nixon's War" and then (2) making the Paris Peace Accord unenforceable because of Congressional embargo on US air power and resample of ARVN, the Democrats cynically assured a Republican defeat in "Nixon's War."
President Obama opposed the Iraq War on grounds that it made no sense, coming at the expense of our 2001 "mission UNaccomplished" of catching binLaden and destroying the alQaeda/Taliban alliance. It turns out that GW Bush-- the UNdecider-- capitulated to Rumsfeld/Cheney and the neocons who wanted an anti-Arab "World War IV" for domination of the Middle East. The neocons and Israel assumed that if the US attacks Iraq, after an easy victory, it would move on to attack Iran and Syria. As one Israeli leader said: "Forevermore we would look East and see American soldiers instead of an Islamic threat." For Americans, the fantastic oil reserves of Iraq made it worthwhile. For Rumsfeld, a successful blitzkrieg in Iraq would make him a hero, giving him his last chance to run for President in 2004. For the neocons and the Likudniks, the "World War IV" crusade against Islam which they demanded of Bush would be a windfall for their arms industry benefactors-- from which the neocons received commissions for influence peddling-- while eliminating any potential Muslim force that might compete for Mideast dominance with Israel. For the Saudis and Kuwaitis, defeat of Saddam would end that threat and would enable them to demand the removal of US bases from sacred Muslim ground, moving US bases instead to Shia Iraq and Iran. It was truly a perfect storm of irreconcilable factions enjoying a common interest.
But, in fact, Iran played Bush for a fool, convincing him that if he turned Iraq to the Iran-controlled Shia of Hakim (SCIRI Party), Jafari (Da'awa Party) and Chalabi's INC, Iran would drop its nuclear plans, enabling the US to normalize its diplomatic relation with Iran, thus allowing US oil companies back to exploit Iran as well. Since 2002, behind America's back, a most enigmatic Iran-Iraq alliance to combine their petro-dollars at turn them into Euros at a great profit, thus blocking US access to their oil in order to destroy the American economy. Realization of this double-cross made dismembering Iraq and attacking Ira, seem ever more necessary to the Bush Administration. Consequently, the plan to leave Iraq right after overthrow of Saddam had to be abandoned so long as the US could not permit the takeover of Iraq by Shia factions aligned with Iran. Bush's original plan to, in effect, turn Iraq over to Iran so both would become trading partners for the US, had to be abandoned. It is then that Israel began insisting that the US *must* attack Iran and destroy both its nuclear and missile installations. Others were advising Bush that if Iran develops nuclear power for peaceful uses, it could devote more oil to the fungible world market, thus lowering the price of oil. Bush thought that by a demonstration of "shock and awe," as advised by Israel, he would not need to attack Iran because it would become cooperative in awe and shock. Unfortunately, looking at the US war in Afghanistan and the failure to capture binLaden, Iran concluded that it could still stand up to the US. Consequently, like our Saudi and Kuwaiti allies, who all through the Iraq War were helping the Sunni and Ba'athist insurrection in the West of Iraq, Iran fully supported the Shia insurrection in the East of Iraq. Iraq had become a quagmire sandwich where US power bled at the hand of insurgents supported by its Arab and Iranian "partners" in the Iraq invasion venture. For six years, Bush continued to "double down" in Iraq to avoid going into the history books as the president who pointlessly exsanguinated military power in Iraq, fooled by Iraq's Arab and Iranian neighbors.
Bush's situation was analogous to that of LBJ. Clever by half, LBJ accused the Joint Chiefs of trying to get him "into a shooting war with China." To deny them this supposed wish he responded with half measures to all their recommendation so that Vietnam not fall on his watch while inserting forces in South Vietnam without attacking Soviet supply lines via China so as not to provoke a Chinese invasion. The more he responded with force to Hanoi's "invasion from the north" (title of a DoS White Paper), the more concessions he made in attempts to negotiate. He thus kept the war on a frustrating unending "even keel" with no prospects of ending the cost in lives and treasure on his watch. His only consolation was that he, at least, was balancing Hanoi and not losing South Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive is an interesting case-in-point of the LBJ-type half-measures. In the mountainous II Corps, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail then ended, Gen. Westmoreland by 1967 had managed to exterminate more PAVN men and weapons that Hanoi could send it (in the words of McNamara, Westy reached "the cross-over point"). Desperately, Hanoi "doubled down" a la GW Bush with an all-out assault on South Vietnam's cities, where the Viet Cong had no real infrastructure. AS PAVN was preparing for the assault on the Cambodian side of the western border with Cambodia, Westy asked LBJ to allow him to hit the staging bases in Cambodia before some major offensive sets off. LBJ deemed that a provocation of China because Prince Sihanouk claimed that China was protecting his "neutrality." As a result, the Tet Offensive was a militarily suicidal campaign for Hanoi but a propaganda coup, for it made it look as if the enemy could attack anywhere anytime; nowhere was safe in the eyes of Americans watching the offensive on TV. Two months later, LBJ surrendered the presidency-- "I will not run..." speech of March 1968-- and cut off all bombing of North Vietnam north of the 19th Parallel, leaving the Mui Gia Pass unmolested. He had decided that he would try to negotiate an end to the war within the remaining ten months of his presidency, even if it meant abandoning any demands that give the Republican Govt of Saigon any chance of survival. Of course, a desperate clock is like underarm nervous perspiration, the other side can smell it, and LBJ left office without any prospect of peace. Receiving massive Soviet support, Hanoi had more to lose from peace than from war; as a Communist International state supporting a world socialist revolution, for Hanoi, the pain of its people was beside the point.
As soon as Nixon took over the Presidency, he sought to end the Vietnam War before it becomes "Nixon's war" in the media. Unfortunately, in the rush, he signaled the other side that his political clock was running out for him too. As a result, no one shared his rush to finish everything. On the contrary, Hanoi tried several armored and artillery backed offensives in order to strengthen its position-- all failed. Nevertheless, Nixon troop wit drawl clock was running out fast while Hanoi's Soviet support was increasing, not decreasing. The odds favored Hanoi, despite the accelerating improvement of ARVN and the change of South Vietnam's population profile from 85% rural to 75% urban; if the Viet Cong were "fish" and the peasants "the sea," the sea was drying up with urbanization and the fish were left high and dry to be triangulated by the Phoenix Program. Alas, it was too late. Nixon had to get all US troops out before the election and he felt that, the war having become "Nixon's War" in the media, he had to get a peace accord by then too. Sop he settled on the exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split as explained above.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Republicans hope that Obama is forced to delay withdrawal from the Iraq/Afghan "War on Terror" long enough for it to become "Obama's War." Gen. Petraeus also seeks to delay troop withdrawal from Iraq for reinvestment into a losing war in Afghanistan, as Obama is wont to do, because the Afghan War was not his responsibility but the Iraq War "surge" is what made his career. Fearing that the inconclusiveness of the military "surge" campaign and its political backsliding due to thoughtlessness would be found out, despite claiming victory for himself, Petraeus wants troops to stay put long enough so that it becomes someone else's war. Obama seems to have appreciated that in the curt way in which he distinguished his job from that of Petraeus: your job is to keep these troops and mine is to get them out, but I am the president with the responsibility and authority to make policy.
Ex-Gen. Keane is now working with the Republicans and the neocons to force Obama to hang on in Iraq long enough for it to become "Obama's War." But Obama's plan-- like Nixon before him-- is to get US troops out fast enough for all Muslim forces to realize that the US is a strategic, not a conventional force; therefore, it is pulling out, but if the states in the region continue to feed the Sunni and Shia faction in their Iraq carnage of each other and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan (these are two different Talibans), the US will respond as a STRATEGIC, not an INFANTRY power. Obama thus takes the same position toward Iran as Nixon took toward the North Vietnamese: we are getting out but if you attack Saigon (Baghdad), we will pulverize Hanoi (Teheran). Fortunately for Obama, he has a Democrat Congress that wants him out as soon as possible but will be a lot more patient and less demanding than was Republican Nixon's Democrat Congress. Desperate for an Obama debacle, the Republicans and neocons are seeking the assistance of Israel. How?
Obama's goal is a one...two shots solution. He hopes to pull out of Iraq while negotiating assistance from Iran under threat of an American strategic attack of its nuclear installations. This he cannot do now because, as in Korea, US troops in Iraq (as on the Korean border) are vulnerable to Iranian (North Korean) retaliation. So the faster he pulls troops out of Iraq, the sooner will his strategic threat against Iran become credible.
In the case of Afghanistan, he wants to invest more forces there as a bargaining chip. There is in fact no purpose for our forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban knows it. Obama hopes to use our increasing force investment there to convince more moderate Taliban fighters to come to terms with the Kabul Govt, possibly with an elected replacement for President Karzai. But as the US withdraws from the Middle East (all forces in Iraq stopped fighting so as not to delay US withdrawal) Israel feels that it will be left to face Iran alone. It is too accustomed to its domination of Bush through the neocons and does not trust Obama's commitment. And so, it chose to attack Gaza in the dying days of the Bush Administration so that incoming President Obama will be told, in effect: if you pull forces out of the region, we have no choice but to exterminate the Palestinians. Forcing Diaspora Jews into a radical position, it hopes that their power in the Democrat Party will turn it against Obama and will slow him down, just as if he were Nixon dealing with a Democrat Congress. It is hoped that bi-partisan Zionists would slow things down to the point that Iraq become "Obama's War' and he, like Bush, will not dare to pull out troops for fear that collapse would happen on his watch.
First and foremost, Obama must recall that the same proportion of Jews voted for him as blacks. So the neocons are in no way a decisive political power. Secondly, Israel is a state on welfare and can't afford a shrinking of its lavish American welfare check for the next year based on the fact that the US is broke. A Zionist pressure to push such an enormous sum of money through Congress cannot be accomplished secretly; and, when made public, it will cause quite a furor, especially if the President is openly bullied by Zionist lobbies and Congressmen in his own party. After the recent Gaza incident, Israel's standing in American opinion is quite low, probably as much because of as despite the propaganda blitz and silencing of critics in the US media and press by Zionist pressure. Here Obama would do well to consult ex-President GHW Bush, the father, for he had much experience with Israeli sabotage of peace talks to a two-state solution. Furthermore, the Saudis have made clear that they will be patient only so long before they force on us an oil embargo like that which they imposed on us in the 1970s.
So in fact, if he has the courage, Obama is in a position to set his own pace. Unlike Nixon who had a great idea but was slowed down by all sides, Obama can balance all the forces against his policy for a regional solution by diplomatic means, playing them one against the other so they do not paralyze him with their toxic stings. In the Middle East, in other words, America has no friends, only common interests. These Obama can intercalate so he achieves what is best for America within the limits in patience of the American electorate.
Obama must have a sense of how much time he has while the status quo courtesy of the Bush incompetence is still appreciated as the prime causal factor for our unfortunate predicament. His solutions must be timed to flower before it all becomes "Obama's War on Terror." At that point people will no longer care what mess he inherited from his predecessor. Any up tick of violence or any challenge to the American withdrawal will be seen as products of his failed policies. He soon must first exit Iraq; second, negotiate an exit from Afghanistan; third, end Israel's massacre-strategy to bully him into capitulation to a ONE state solution, where the Palestinians are "transferred" to Jordan by greater Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Toward that end he has to convince all parties that the US has turned 180 degrees on the Bush policy of interventionist "preemptive" imperialism in a "World War IV" crusade against Islam. Only then can he make clear, as Nixon did, that he is mad-enough to apply the strategic stick if his interlocutors do not act constructively at the negotiation table to prevent cataclysmic warfare and terror to occur. Whether the states in the region need US protection, withdrawal or assistance, Obama is in a wonderful position to give each what it needs. What he must have of his own is the courage to be believable and seem determined though reasonable.
We have been through an era where our foreign policy was recklessly exploited for fun and profit much as was our economy with very much the same disastrous results in both cases. We are not yet sure if we can save either one. But there is no question that Obama is as brilliant in foreign policy as was Nixon. He only need the clarity of courage to force a schedule on developments that achieve the desired ends before the utterly outrageous "War on Terror" become "Obama's War" in the minds of the voters.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Nixon had, prior to the 1968 Campaign, made clear that the US could not continue to exsanguinate its standing as a global power, the lifeblood of our then foreign policy, losing its troops to North Vietnamese ambushes in the triple-canopy jungles of South East Asia. He was well aware that the Soviet supplies, shipped in broad daylight from Vladivostok via Haiphong Harbor to Hanoi on a 30 miles rail line sacrosanct, "off limits" to our bombers, cost more in treasure rather than blood to destroy after dispersal into triple canopy jungle from Hanoi to the South via the Mui Gia Pass into Laos, than the cost in blood more than treasure after getting to Hanoi's forces (PAVN) in South Vietnam to be used against our forces. Nixon thus decided to expand the Vietnam War into a diplomatic manipulation involving the entire Asian theater and other controlling super-powers. Towards that end, in 1967, he promised privately that he would use China to diplomatically attack Russia and Russia to diplomatically attack China...both achieved through devastating blows against North Vietnam while negotiating with it directly in Paris. There is no question that PAVN was a Soviet proxy supposed to march West across Southeast Asia in order to link with Soviet-friendly India and thus encircle China in a final arc around its SE Asian soft underbelly.
At the same time, the Soviets had in mind a massive nuclear air assault on North China's nuclear installations. Warning of a Soviet “tonsillectomy” against China’s nuclear installations, Russian diplomats sought Nixon’s accord. At the time only President-elect, Nixon passed word to the Soviets that the US would protect China's northern border against any Soviet incursions, deeming an attack on China's North an attack on the USA. Once President, Nixon offered China hegemony over Indochina so long as it prevents Hanoi's march on Thailand. To prove that the US had no designs for permanent bases at China's soft underbelly, he offered to pull US forces out of SE Asia if China could assure South Vietnam's survival.
Why Thailand? Back in 1958, at an NSC meeting, President Eisenhower made clear that our involvement in Indochina was to protect Thailand, for if Thailand is free, the rest of SE Asia will not capitulate. At that same meeting, Nixon stood up to the SecState and CIA Chief Dulles Brothers and insisted that North Vietnam was Soviet dominated, not by the Chinese. So any American threat of direct US retaliation against China if it moves against SE Asia, insisted Nixon, would only encourage Soviet support of Hanoi's dream to dominate the SE Asian region; US troops in SE Asia and Soviet pressure on China's northern border, he insisted, would force China to submit to Moscow. Mao would then be removed and ex-Soviet-agent Liu Shao Chi would replace him. That would reunite the Communist Bloc under Soviet rule.
A decade later, Nixon as President elaborated on that prescient perspective: to "lose" in Indochina in order to win a permanent Sino-Soviet split by protecting China against Soviet overthrow of Mao. Withdrawing from Indochina, the US would guarantee Chinese domination of SE Asia if China guaranteed that, while the US protects China from Russia, China protects the SE Asian Mainland from North Vietnamese conquest. Had President Duong Van Minh, Nguyen Van Thieu's successor, accepted to hold off surrender for 48 hrs (as France pleaded with him to do) in April 1975, when Hanoi's forces were marching on Saigon, China would have kept its word and would have blunted Hanoi's flagrant violation of the Paris Peace Accord. Alas, Minh chickened out, surrendered, and China's halt of Hanoi's westward march could only come later in Cambodia. Still, Thailand and the rest of the SE Asian members of ASEAN never suffered Hanoi takeover because China kept its word to Nixon. Nixon, therefore, won the Indochina War by Eisenhower's standards, obvious when China attacked Vietnam from the North in order to halt its Westward march into Cambodia and Thailand.
In fact, South Vietnam was salvageable if the Paris Accords had been enforced by an air attack on Hanoi in 1974, as requested by Kissinger, and the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) had been respelled in weapons and gasoline. But the Democrats were so fearful of Korea-- a war Democrats start and fumble but Republicans end successfully-- that they passed a Senator Ted Kennedy rider that left South Vietnam disarmed and defenseless after Ford took over the American Presidency. Soon after the embargo on logistic support to the army of South Vietnam passed through Congress, Hanoi realized that there would be no means of resistance. Watergate only added to Hanoi's winning gamble. Hanoi used all its forces to attack South Vietnam, except for one division that it held back in the North to defend the whole country!
So the point is that by (1) making the Vietnam War "Nixon's War" and then (2) making the Paris Peace Accord unenforceable because of Congressional embargo on US air power and resample of ARVN, the Democrats cynically assured a Republican defeat in "Nixon's War."
President Obama opposed the Iraq War on grounds that it made no sense, coming at the expense of our 2001 "mission UNaccomplished" of catching binLaden and destroying the alQaeda/Taliban alliance. It turns out that GW Bush-- the UNdecider-- capitulated to Rumsfeld/Cheney and the neocons who wanted an anti-Arab "World War IV" for domination of the Middle East. The neocons and Israel assumed that if the US attacks Iraq, after an easy victory, it would move on to attack Iran and Syria. As one Israeli leader said: "Forevermore we would look East and see American soldiers instead of an Islamic threat." For Americans, the fantastic oil reserves of Iraq made it worthwhile. For Rumsfeld, a successful blitzkrieg in Iraq would make him a hero, giving him his last chance to run for President in 2004. For the neocons and the Likudniks, the "World War IV" crusade against Islam which they demanded of Bush would be a windfall for their arms industry benefactors-- from which the neocons received commissions for influence peddling-- while eliminating any potential Muslim force that might compete for Mideast dominance with Israel. For the Saudis and Kuwaitis, defeat of Saddam would end that threat and would enable them to demand the removal of US bases from sacred Muslim ground, moving US bases instead to Shia Iraq and Iran. It was truly a perfect storm of irreconcilable factions enjoying a common interest.
But, in fact, Iran played Bush for a fool, convincing him that if he turned Iraq to the Iran-controlled Shia of Hakim (SCIRI Party), Jafari (Da'awa Party) and Chalabi's INC, Iran would drop its nuclear plans, enabling the US to normalize its diplomatic relation with Iran, thus allowing US oil companies back to exploit Iran as well. Since 2002, behind America's back, a most enigmatic Iran-Iraq alliance to combine their petro-dollars at turn them into Euros at a great profit, thus blocking US access to their oil in order to destroy the American economy. Realization of this double-cross made dismembering Iraq and attacking Ira, seem ever more necessary to the Bush Administration. Consequently, the plan to leave Iraq right after overthrow of Saddam had to be abandoned so long as the US could not permit the takeover of Iraq by Shia factions aligned with Iran. Bush's original plan to, in effect, turn Iraq over to Iran so both would become trading partners for the US, had to be abandoned. It is then that Israel began insisting that the US *must* attack Iran and destroy both its nuclear and missile installations. Others were advising Bush that if Iran develops nuclear power for peaceful uses, it could devote more oil to the fungible world market, thus lowering the price of oil. Bush thought that by a demonstration of "shock and awe," as advised by Israel, he would not need to attack Iran because it would become cooperative in awe and shock. Unfortunately, looking at the US war in Afghanistan and the failure to capture binLaden, Iran concluded that it could still stand up to the US. Consequently, like our Saudi and Kuwaiti allies, who all through the Iraq War were helping the Sunni and Ba'athist insurrection in the West of Iraq, Iran fully supported the Shia insurrection in the East of Iraq. Iraq had become a quagmire sandwich where US power bled at the hand of insurgents supported by its Arab and Iranian "partners" in the Iraq invasion venture. For six years, Bush continued to "double down" in Iraq to avoid going into the history books as the president who pointlessly exsanguinated military power in Iraq, fooled by Iraq's Arab and Iranian neighbors.
Bush's situation was analogous to that of LBJ. Clever by half, LBJ accused the Joint Chiefs of trying to get him "into a shooting war with China." To deny them this supposed wish he responded with half measures to all their recommendation so that Vietnam not fall on his watch while inserting forces in South Vietnam without attacking Soviet supply lines via China so as not to provoke a Chinese invasion. The more he responded with force to Hanoi's "invasion from the north" (title of a DoS White Paper), the more concessions he made in attempts to negotiate. He thus kept the war on a frustrating unending "even keel" with no prospects of ending the cost in lives and treasure on his watch. His only consolation was that he, at least, was balancing Hanoi and not losing South Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive is an interesting case-in-point of the LBJ-type half-measures. In the mountainous II Corps, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail then ended, Gen. Westmoreland by 1967 had managed to exterminate more PAVN men and weapons that Hanoi could send it (in the words of McNamara, Westy reached "the cross-over point"). Desperately, Hanoi "doubled down" a la GW Bush with an all-out assault on South Vietnam's cities, where the Viet Cong had no real infrastructure. AS PAVN was preparing for the assault on the Cambodian side of the western border with Cambodia, Westy asked LBJ to allow him to hit the staging bases in Cambodia before some major offensive sets off. LBJ deemed that a provocation of China because Prince Sihanouk claimed that China was protecting his "neutrality." As a result, the Tet Offensive was a militarily suicidal campaign for Hanoi but a propaganda coup, for it made it look as if the enemy could attack anywhere anytime; nowhere was safe in the eyes of Americans watching the offensive on TV. Two months later, LBJ surrendered the presidency-- "I will not run..." speech of March 1968-- and cut off all bombing of North Vietnam north of the 19th Parallel, leaving the Mui Gia Pass unmolested. He had decided that he would try to negotiate an end to the war within the remaining ten months of his presidency, even if it meant abandoning any demands that give the Republican Govt of Saigon any chance of survival. Of course, a desperate clock is like underarm nervous perspiration, the other side can smell it, and LBJ left office without any prospect of peace. Receiving massive Soviet support, Hanoi had more to lose from peace than from war; as a Communist International state supporting a world socialist revolution, for Hanoi, the pain of its people was beside the point.
As soon as Nixon took over the Presidency, he sought to end the Vietnam War before it becomes "Nixon's war" in the media. Unfortunately, in the rush, he signaled the other side that his political clock was running out for him too. As a result, no one shared his rush to finish everything. On the contrary, Hanoi tried several armored and artillery backed offensives in order to strengthen its position-- all failed. Nevertheless, Nixon troop wit drawl clock was running out fast while Hanoi's Soviet support was increasing, not decreasing. The odds favored Hanoi, despite the accelerating improvement of ARVN and the change of South Vietnam's population profile from 85% rural to 75% urban; if the Viet Cong were "fish" and the peasants "the sea," the sea was drying up with urbanization and the fish were left high and dry to be triangulated by the Phoenix Program. Alas, it was too late. Nixon had to get all US troops out before the election and he felt that, the war having become "Nixon's War" in the media, he had to get a peace accord by then too. Sop he settled on the exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split as explained above.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Republicans hope that Obama is forced to delay withdrawal from the Iraq/Afghan "War on Terror" long enough for it to become "Obama's War." Gen. Petraeus also seeks to delay troop withdrawal from Iraq for reinvestment into a losing war in Afghanistan, as Obama is wont to do, because the Afghan War was not his responsibility but the Iraq War "surge" is what made his career. Fearing that the inconclusiveness of the military "surge" campaign and its political backsliding due to thoughtlessness would be found out, despite claiming victory for himself, Petraeus wants troops to stay put long enough so that it becomes someone else's war. Obama seems to have appreciated that in the curt way in which he distinguished his job from that of Petraeus: your job is to keep these troops and mine is to get them out, but I am the president with the responsibility and authority to make policy.
Ex-Gen. Keane is now working with the Republicans and the neocons to force Obama to hang on in Iraq long enough for it to become "Obama's War." But Obama's plan-- like Nixon before him-- is to get US troops out fast enough for all Muslim forces to realize that the US is a strategic, not a conventional force; therefore, it is pulling out, but if the states in the region continue to feed the Sunni and Shia faction in their Iraq carnage of each other and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan (these are two different Talibans), the US will respond as a STRATEGIC, not an INFANTRY power. Obama thus takes the same position toward Iran as Nixon took toward the North Vietnamese: we are getting out but if you attack Saigon (Baghdad), we will pulverize Hanoi (Teheran). Fortunately for Obama, he has a Democrat Congress that wants him out as soon as possible but will be a lot more patient and less demanding than was Republican Nixon's Democrat Congress. Desperate for an Obama debacle, the Republicans and neocons are seeking the assistance of Israel. How?
Obama's goal is a one...two shots solution. He hopes to pull out of Iraq while negotiating assistance from Iran under threat of an American strategic attack of its nuclear installations. This he cannot do now because, as in Korea, US troops in Iraq (as on the Korean border) are vulnerable to Iranian (North Korean) retaliation. So the faster he pulls troops out of Iraq, the sooner will his strategic threat against Iran become credible.
In the case of Afghanistan, he wants to invest more forces there as a bargaining chip. There is in fact no purpose for our forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban knows it. Obama hopes to use our increasing force investment there to convince more moderate Taliban fighters to come to terms with the Kabul Govt, possibly with an elected replacement for President Karzai. But as the US withdraws from the Middle East (all forces in Iraq stopped fighting so as not to delay US withdrawal) Israel feels that it will be left to face Iran alone. It is too accustomed to its domination of Bush through the neocons and does not trust Obama's commitment. And so, it chose to attack Gaza in the dying days of the Bush Administration so that incoming President Obama will be told, in effect: if you pull forces out of the region, we have no choice but to exterminate the Palestinians. Forcing Diaspora Jews into a radical position, it hopes that their power in the Democrat Party will turn it against Obama and will slow him down, just as if he were Nixon dealing with a Democrat Congress. It is hoped that bi-partisan Zionists would slow things down to the point that Iraq become "Obama's War' and he, like Bush, will not dare to pull out troops for fear that collapse would happen on his watch.
First and foremost, Obama must recall that the same proportion of Jews voted for him as blacks. So the neocons are in no way a decisive political power. Secondly, Israel is a state on welfare and can't afford a shrinking of its lavish American welfare check for the next year based on the fact that the US is broke. A Zionist pressure to push such an enormous sum of money through Congress cannot be accomplished secretly; and, when made public, it will cause quite a furor, especially if the President is openly bullied by Zionist lobbies and Congressmen in his own party. After the recent Gaza incident, Israel's standing in American opinion is quite low, probably as much because of as despite the propaganda blitz and silencing of critics in the US media and press by Zionist pressure. Here Obama would do well to consult ex-President GHW Bush, the father, for he had much experience with Israeli sabotage of peace talks to a two-state solution. Furthermore, the Saudis have made clear that they will be patient only so long before they force on us an oil embargo like that which they imposed on us in the 1970s.
So in fact, if he has the courage, Obama is in a position to set his own pace. Unlike Nixon who had a great idea but was slowed down by all sides, Obama can balance all the forces against his policy for a regional solution by diplomatic means, playing them one against the other so they do not paralyze him with their toxic stings. In the Middle East, in other words, America has no friends, only common interests. These Obama can intercalate so he achieves what is best for America within the limits in patience of the American electorate.
Obama must have a sense of how much time he has while the status quo courtesy of the Bush incompetence is still appreciated as the prime causal factor for our unfortunate predicament. His solutions must be timed to flower before it all becomes "Obama's War on Terror." At that point people will no longer care what mess he inherited from his predecessor. Any up tick of violence or any challenge to the American withdrawal will be seen as products of his failed policies. He soon must first exit Iraq; second, negotiate an exit from Afghanistan; third, end Israel's massacre-strategy to bully him into capitulation to a ONE state solution, where the Palestinians are "transferred" to Jordan by greater Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Toward that end he has to convince all parties that the US has turned 180 degrees on the Bush policy of interventionist "preemptive" imperialism in a "World War IV" crusade against Islam. Only then can he make clear, as Nixon did, that he is mad-enough to apply the strategic stick if his interlocutors do not act constructively at the negotiation table to prevent cataclysmic warfare and terror to occur. Whether the states in the region need US protection, withdrawal or assistance, Obama is in a wonderful position to give each what it needs. What he must have of his own is the courage to be believable and seem determined though reasonable.
We have been through an era where our foreign policy was recklessly exploited for fun and profit much as was our economy with very much the same disastrous results in both cases. We are not yet sure if we can save either one. But there is no question that Obama is as brilliant in foreign policy as was Nixon. He only need the clarity of courage to force a schedule on developments that achieve the desired ends before the utterly outrageous "War on Terror" become "Obama's War" in the minds of the voters.
Daniel E. Teodoru
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