By Lasse Wilhelmson
Published in Folket i Bild Kulturfront nr 4/2005
“… The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal (in the US), and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic… People are scared to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful… The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists… Injustice and oppression will never prevail.” Desmond Tutu. The Guardian 29/4, 2002i
Israel would not survive a single day as a Jewish apartheid stateii without the economic and political support of today’s only remaining superpower and of Jews outside Israel. Underpinning the US and Israel’s common war strategy in the Middle East are several significant documents produced by interconnected think tanks. These are made up of a limited number of pro-Israeli hawks and extreme rightwing religious representatives, so-called neocons. Nine of these engineered the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.iii This influential alliance between Christian and Jewish Zionists will probably fall from glory the day the American people demand that Israel be treated the same as all other states, or when American big business wishes to `normalise’ its relations with the regimes of the Arab world.
A discussion taking place today in the US concerns whether the war in Iraq promotes Israeli security more than traditional imperialist US interests (mainly oil). Larisa Alexandrovna interviewed the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, on August 14th 2005.iv This is the third interview of a series dealing with weapons formerly in Iraq and CIA. Ritter implies that Paul Wolfowitz’ job was to sell the war to Congress and that he lied about the costs of the war.
“There is not a responsible member of government who thought this would be quick and cheap. There was nobody who believed that Iraq oil would pay for itself, no one in the oil business thought so. No oil professional in their right mind would support what is happening in Iraq. This isn’t part of a grand ‘oil’ strategy; it is simply pure unadulterated incompetence… Oil company executives are businessmen and they are in a business that requires long-term stability. They love dictators because they bring with them long-term stability.”
Ritter says that Congress was ensnared by neocons in a Catch 22 situation in 1998, when legislation of The Iraq Liberation Act was approved. Two of the neocons’ think tanks - The American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation — set the tone. Ever since 1991 the political aim had been to bring about change of leadership in Iraq but not by military means. The problem arose when Saddam Hussein was branded a threat with his weapons of mass destruction (that didn’t exist) and subsequently nothing was done about it. Congress’ decision concerning the Iraqi war was thus merely a follow through of the 1998 decision.
The FBI, CIA, Pentagon and civil servants at The White House do not agree on the matter either. Proof of this, among other things, is that professional militaries now have less influence and civilian militaries have taken over with war plans based more on ideology.
A Clean Break — a Zionist Document
A significant document is `A Clean Break’v, delivered in 1996 by the neocons to Israel’s then prime minister Netanyahu. It states that the goal, among other things, is to lay waste Iraq and neutralise Syria. A peace process is said to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and weaken the country permanently. The document is a follow-up of `A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’ (The Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organisation, Jerusalem February 1982), also called the Zionist plan for the Middle East.vi Israel Shahak, former chairman of Israel’s association for human rights has translated the document from Hebrew. In the preface he says:
“The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the “best” that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: “The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part’ (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.
The strong connection with Neo-Conservative thought in the USA is very prominent, especially in the author’s notes. But, while lip service is paid to the idea of the “defence of the West” from Soviet power, the real aim of the author, and of the present Israeli establishment is clear: To make an Imperial Israel into a world power. In other words, the aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the rest.”
The Zionist plan goes on to say, among other things:
“The autonomy plan ought also to be rejected, as well as any compromise or division of the territories for, given the plans of the PLO and those of the Israeli Arabs themselves, the Shefa’amr plan of September 1980, it is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river. Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the land only when the Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea they will have neither existence nor security. A nation of their own and security will be theirs only in Jordan.”
PNAC — A Project for World Dominance
Another significant document comes from `The Project for a New American Century’ (PNAC), also called the neocons’ foreign policy project. A project for world dominance through so called pre-emptive wars. The document was written in 2000 and addressed to the Bush administration’s up-and-coming leaders. One of the statements: … `For several decades the US has wished to play a more permanent role in the security of the region around the Persian Gulf. While the unresolved conflict in Iraq can supply justification for the moment, the necessity of long-term US presence in the Gulf is of much greater interest than the problems concerning Saddam Hussein’s regime’vii
When Simon Peres, prominent figure of the Israeli Labour Party, was interviewed on TV after the seizure of Baghdad, he was eager to say that now `we’ must go on and take Tehran. For a long time, Israeli fighter planes have undertaken reconnaissance flights along the Turkish border with Iran, next on the list. However, the Iraqi resistance, despite Israeli training in urban warfare and the assistance of special units, stopped the US armed forces.
Acts of terror against ethnic and religious groups are obviously meant to divide resistance to the occupation, thus pointing to the occupiers and their hangers-on. Some of those acts most recently documented are accounted for here. According to the Washington Post of the 19th September 2005, two British agents were detained, charged with placing bombs among civilians in Basra. A large British force immediately set them free. viii The resistance movement’s news bulletin of the 15th June 2005 reports that Mossad agents in collaboration with CIA had murdered 530 scientists and professors during the last seven months. This occurred when explosives were used against those who refused to cooperate with the occupying powers. ix The UN recently drew attention to a report concerning assassination and torture undertaken by death squads connected to the Quisling regime’s minister for home affairs. x Such events are regularly reported by the Swedish media as `Islamic terrorism’.
Targeting Iran
There are many who think that the war against Iran has already begun even though there have been no official war actions, making comparisons with what happened in Iraq. US military robot missions over Iranian territory and suchlike are taking place. Violating an independent country’s air space is in itself an act of war. According to Scott Ritter, George W Bush has signed a standing order for an airborne attack in June 2005.xi
The most transparent acts of war however, according to Ritter and others, are those supported by the CIA and recently undertaken by Mujahadeen el-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group, earlier in the service of Saddam Hussein. This group, now working exclusively for CIA in Iran, is still classified by Bush as a terrorist organisation in Iraq. In the north, in Azerbaijan, a base is being prepared from which to launch massive military activities to capture Tehran. There is now a much shorter way to Tehran — the motorway along the shores of the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran. The US has recently equipped Israel with 500 so-called bunker-buster bombs and NATO is being given a more active part. The US military has ground to a halt in Iraq and needs help to tackle Iran. A joint airborne attack by Israel and the US with limited forces on the ground, and a gradually more active NATO is the probable scenario according to several international sources.xii
The project is important for the US partly in their mission to gain world dominance, partly to insure long-term access to oil — Afghanistan plays a central geopolitical role here, with NATO- member Turkey to the north and Israel to the west — and partly to prevent Russia and China from competing for the superpower title. For Israel it is partly about realising Zionism’s goal of a Jewish state, at least in the whole of Palestine, and partly consolidating and reinforcing its dominating role in the Arab world. Denationalising and privatising industry in so called Open Societies awards international capitalism maximum profits. The guise to hide the superpower strategy is the fabricated threat of terrorism and `democratic growth’ using Quisling regimes and mercenaries. In their wake, the UN is evaded and abused and international law is ignored.
The September 11th terror attacks became the excuse needed to realise, on a large scale, the doctrine that had been produced earlier –`The New American Century’. The official presentation of the terror attacks and the reasons for going to war in Iraq, are currently being questioned in the US.xiii
Notes
i ‘Apartheid in the Holy Land’ www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,706878,00.html#article_cotinue
ii Lasse Wilhelmson: Democracy or Genocide, SVD Brännpunkt, 3/6 2003 www.svd.se/dynamisk/brannpunkt
iii Article by Stephen Green describing connection between neocons, Israel and the Bush administration http://qumsiyeh.org/neoconsisraelandthebushadministration
iv Scott Ritter: Neocons as Parasites, interview 14/8 2005. www.alternet.org/story/21631/
v A Clean break: Report from The Institute of Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
vi www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/zionist_plan.html
vii PNAC: Many new documents and books have been written since 2000 and can be found on www.newamericancentury.org/index.html
viii Ellen Knickmeyer and Jonathan Finer: British smash into Iraqi Jail to Free Two Detained Soldiers, Washington Post, 20/9 2005. www.washingtonpost.com-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091900572.html?nav=rss_world see special link opened by The Brussels Tribunal www.brusseltribunal.org/BritishBombers.
ix Report 313 from the resistance movement in Iraq. www.freearabvoice.org/Iraq/Report/report313.htm
x UN Report, death squads in Iraq: Reuters 8/9 2005 www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KHA849841.htm
xi Mark Jensen: Scott Ritter says US attack on Iran planned for June 19/2, 2005 www.globalresearch.ca/aricles/JEN505A.html
xii Michel Chossudovsky: Planned US-Israeli attack on Iran 1/5 2005 http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO505A.html
xiii Websites about 11/9 www.911truth.org http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/91Encyclopedia.shtml www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project
