Bulletin
N° 241
Subject: ON THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY AGAINST THE
COSMOLOGY OF "ESSENTIALISM".
The Fourth of July 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleauges and Friends of CEIMSA,
At the beginning of his radical critique of western thought, The
Great Chain of Being, a Study of the History of an Idea, the
philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy quotes Alfred North Whitehead : "the
safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition
is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato." But, adds
Lovejoy, "there are two conflicting major strains in Plato and in the
Platonic tradition" : In reference to the cleavage between otherworldliness
and this-worldliness, Plato and his heirs stood firmly
on both sides. The logical contradiction presumably is that a Perfect
Being could not create less-than-perfect beings to
populate His world, not even as a "perfect joke".
But even after removal in 19th century philosophy of the Christian
Godhead at the top of this pyramid, Plato's metaphysical hierarchy was
unaltered. It remained a hierarchy characterized by plenitude, continuity,
and linear gradation, "in which each discrete item therein"
contained, to varying degrees, an approximation to its own imaginary
essence.
In the real world, according to Professor Anthony Wilden, the
predominant application of such digital thinking has caused
much mischief. In fact, according to this author, it is nothing less
than an epistemological error embedded in western technology and
science to this day, and it represents a real threat to the very
existence of our species and its environment.
This contradiction between the otherworldliness of Perfect
Omnipotent Good and this-worldliness of essential moral
differences is illustrated by Peter Kropotkin in his popular history of
The Great French Revolution, where he describes
Robespierre taking action on 6 December 1793 to restore the power of
the Catholicism in France; he opposed the Cult of Reason
and aimed to reestablish the worship of the Supreme Being in
French churches.
In what Kropotkin described as Robespierre's "first speech, and a very
violent one," at the Jacobin Club in Paris on 21 November 1793, the
Jacobin leader railed against the worship of Reason, and the fêtes
of Reason that were being organized in the various sections
were denounced. He proclaimed at this historic meeting that he saw no
harm in the popular belief in a "Great Being watching over oppressed
innocence and punishing crime". The "dechristianizers" he denounced as
"traitors, as agents of the enemies of France, who wished to repel
those foreigners whom the cause of humanity and common interests
attracted towards the Republic." (p.526)
The Fête of the Supreme Being was celebrated with
great pomp in Paris on 8 June 1794, with Robespierre "posing as the
founder of a new State religion, which was to combat atheism."
- Celebrated as it was by the wish
of the Committee of Public Safety --soon after Chaumette and Gobel,
- who had all the sympathies of
the masses with them, had been executed for their irreligious opinions
by
- this committee-- the fête
[of the Supreme Being] wore too much the character of a bloody triumph
of the
- Jacobin government over the
advanced spirits among the people and the Commune, to be agreeable to
- the people. And by the openly
hostile attitude of several members of the Convention towards
Robespierre,
- during the fête itself, it
became the prelude of the 9th Thermidor --the prelude of the grand
finale." (p.527)
Thus the revolutionary project of teaching literacy in the
widest meaning of the term (i.e. how to decode information embedded in
nature and in society) was indefinitely postponed for reasons of
"national security."
Nearly one hundred years later, Frederick Nietzsche's triumphal
declaration, "God is dead!" changed nothing. Essentialism would
remain the hallmark of German culture, with or without the presence of
an omnipotent and omniscient Supreme Goodness and Perfection
(i.e. God) at the top of the pyramid.
Historically, we can see that such social phenomena as diverse as the
French Revolution and the Fascist seizures of power in Italy and
Germany both shared a common flaw, the ardent distrust of democracy in
the name of order and progress, while
others have argued that real progress could only occur at local
levels through genuine democratic participation, respecting legitimate
social hierarchies based on communication, negotiations, and
understanding of the real, as opposed to simply obeying the imaginary
and perpetuating superstition and ignorance.
The metaphysics of essentialism remain with us after
more than two thousand years, according to Professor Lovejoy. Dr.
Wilden, citing Lovejoy's radical analysis, attributes to this western
heritage the fact that even the most educated among us are illiterate.
We are too often blinded by the notion of an imaginary pyramid of essential
relationships, characterized by plenitude, continuity,
and linear gradation, a virtual cosmology which inhibits us
from gaining access to a deeper understanding of ourselves, by learning
to read the meanings of relationships between relationships
within society and to recognize the diverse patterns which interconnect
society with nature. The German philosopher, Leibniz reflected this
centuries-old epistemological error of essentialism, according
to Lovejoy, when he wrote to a friend in the last year of his life
(1715) :
- I have, ever since my youth,
been greatly satisfied with the ethics of Plato, and also, in a way,
- with his metaphysics; these two,
moreover, go together, like mathematics and physics. If someone
- should reduce Plato to a system
he would render a great service to the human race; and it will be
- seen that I have made some
slight approximation to this. (cited on p.149)
Anthony Wilden proposes a radical break with this reductionist
thinking. Instead of reproducing the imaginary universe of plenitude,
continuity, and lineal gradation, which was promoted by
such influential philosophers as Leibniz and Spinoza, and instead of
reaffirming a virtual digital tyranny (either/or
& true/false logic) as a modus operandi,
the author of The Rules are No Game suggests that
western mankind has much to learn from the Australian aborigines, whose
use of dreamwork (i.e. deriving meaning from their
direct contact with reality by coding it at night while they slept)
assured their adaptability to their real environment for thousands of
years, until the European imperialists arrived and destroyed them.
Wilden presents this comparison of the culture of western societies
with the extraordinary longevity of aboriginal societies as evidence of
the practicality of analog and iconic communications
(employing also the logic of both/and & more/less)
which, in fact, reflect the complexities of reality at a higher logical
level than the predominantly digital communication of our own
culture, which, in addition to its exclusiveness and rigidity, is
usually nothing more than a unsustainable reflection of the Symbolic
and the Imaginary, many times removed from the Real.
The theoretical writings of Lovejoy and Wilden, may offer readers
the opportunity to analyze in a new light the information on American
institutions and social movements received by CEIMSA over the past few
days.
We are reminded daily by our friends and associates at CEIMSA that the
mass murders by U.S. government agents in Iraq continue relentlessly.
Efforts to put an end to these brutal imperialist tactics demand a
deeper understanding of the political economic system which generates
such tactics and the environmental context in which the grand
strategies associated with these actions are born. The agents paid to
carry out these deeds are, indeed, not the causes of these crimes.
Understanding of U.S. policy can only come at a higher logical level,
and for this reason we invite readers to look for patterns of behavior
in the communities where they live and to identify how the destructive
relationships in Iraq are reproduced in daily life, generation after
generation, inside all the former empires, in America like Europe. . . .
Dr. Bertell Ollman's most recent confrontation at FoxNews in New
York City, Bertell
Ollman on Hannity & Colmes, is a successful illustration of a
confrontation within one illegitimate hierarchy inside the
Empire, which is governed by the private
profit motive and corporate
censorship, and defended by an essentialist
metaphysics and a mode of digital exchange with no reference to a gestalt. His
efforts to introduce into this
narrow field of corporate discourse values such as democracy and
free speech are as foreign to U.S. corporate culture as the Code of
Hammurabi. The FoxNews broadcasters were able to understand little more
than that Ollman had succeeded in getting "free advertising" for democracynow.org. These corporate
representatives on the News channel were typically illiterate;
any other meaning
embedded in this public call for strengthing democracy in America was
entirely inaccessible to them; they were unable
to read (to decode) Ollman's radical critique of the role of
corporate media in a "democratic" society.
Item A. is a reality check on the
continuing massacre of Iraq by U.S. forces, as of July 2006.
Item B. is a Fourth of July
proposal to Americans by Howard Zinn, "Put Away the Flags".
Item C., forwarded to us by our
research associate Dr. Edward S. Herman, is an essay by Walter
Uhler, demanding international accountability for those charged
with crimes against humanity.
Item D. is a bitter satire by
Israeli writer Benni Zipper, reporting on the
American-sponsored murders conducted by the Israeli armed forces, and
forwarded to us by our research associate Dr. Elisabeth Chamorand.
Item E., from investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh, is an article of "the U.S. military
problem with President Bush's Iran policy".
And finally, item F. is a
reminder that hope springs eternal in the human breast: Thousands of
U.S. soldiers now have demonstrated the courage of their convictions.
At great risk, they have become literate, reading the
signs and finding good reasons to abandoned their government's
imperialist project in Iraq. Please visit the video documentary: "AWOL:
GI War Resistance in Canada," by Geoffrey Millard and Sari
Gelzer.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal
Grenoble, France
http://www.ceimsa.org/
_____________________
A.
from Information Clearing House :
Date 1 July 2006
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
__________________
B.
from Howard Zinn :
Date: 2 July 2006
The Progressive
Put away the flags
by Howard Zinn
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its
symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its
insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so
fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time,
along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from
childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for
those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking
both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway,
Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge,
possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have
been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others
and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from
others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other
lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts
Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot
Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking
of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the
Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for
thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy
possession."
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women
and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was
supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell
that day."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our
"Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence."
After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We
believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to
war.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the
Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize
and Christianize" the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least
600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our
secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from
all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is
the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of
peace and happiness."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps
against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And
some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return
without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of
proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the
justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for
killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be
blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two
countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year
that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally
superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one
nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the
best-selling "A People's History of the United States" (Perennial
Classics, 2003, latest edition). He can be reached at
pmproj@progressive.org
__________________
C.
From: Ed Herman
Subject: Uhler on "Unfit to Lead the World"
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2006
Francis,
Here is a solid
piece by Walter Uhler, an ally of mine here in Philadelphia.
Ed Herman
Appropriately, much has
been made of the recent survey conducted by Foreign Policy and
the Center for American Progress, which found that 84 percent
(of the more than 100) of America's top foreign policy experts believed
that the United States is not winning the war on terror. Not only do
they dispute President Bush's insular and politically self-serving
assertion that America is winning that war, they also "see a national
security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to
protect the public from the next attack." [See "The Terrorism Index,"
July/August 2006]
"Disrepair" is an understatement. Not only has former domestic policy
advisor, John Dilulio, decried the "complete lack of a policy
apparatus" within the Bush administration, where "policy analysis is
just backfill, to back up a political maneuver," Colin Powell's former
chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, also has complained about policy
formulation and implementation by a "cabal."
According to Ron Suskind, writing in his recent book, The One
Percent Doctrine, "The policy process, in fact, never changed much.
Issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and
principals rarely seemed to go upstairs in their fullest form to the
President's desk; and, if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to
have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his
'instinct' or 'gut.'" [p. 225]
Suskind describes a meeting between Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince
Abdullah and President Bush in April 2002 that "could get no traction."
Often Bush just "stared blankly" at his Saudi guests. "It was as though
Bush never read the packet that they sent over to the White House in
preparation for the meeting." And, in fact, he didn't. The packet "had
been diverted to Dick Cheney's office. The President never got it,
never read it." [pp. 110-111]
Even more potentially harmful was the mysterious deletion of the line
from Bush's September 12, 2002 speech to the United Nations, in which
he would ask for a new resolution regarding Iraq. "Yet that line - the
most important line, one that Cheney and others opposed - was
mysteriously missing from the text. Bush noticed the absence, and
clumsily improvised this key line midway through his recitation." [pp.
170-171]
From these examples, one might conclude that "abandonment" or
"sabotage" of the national security apparatus is a more appropriate
term than "disrepair." Nevertheless, the 100 plus foreign policy
experts certainly were correct when they specifically faulted the Bush
administration for having "a totally unrealistic view of what they can
accomplish with military force and threats of force." ["The Terrorism
Index"]
Taken as a whole, the answers to this survey of foreign policy experts
raise new doubts about the very fitness of both America's democratic
institutions and their current office holders to perform adequately as
the world's leader.
New doubts? Yes, such doubts had troubled the mind of one of America's
wisest of "wise men," the late George F. Kennan. Mr. Kennan repeatedly
and consistently expressed his conviction that "our political system is
in many ways poorly designed for the conduct of the foreign policies of
a great power aspiring to world leadership." [Kennan, At a
Century's Ending, p. 136]
Specifically, Kennan excoriated the policy distortions caused by the
unwarranted intrusions of "particularly aggressive and vociferous
minorities or lobbies." [Ibid, p. 135] And although he wrote those
words years before America's neoconservatives so egregiously weakened
America's national security by successfully beating the drums for war
against Iraq, their actions prove his point once again. .
Kennan also decried the American politician's "tendency, when speaking
or acting on matters of foreign policy, to be more concerned for the
domestic-political effects of what he is saying or doing than about the
actual effects on our relations with other countries." [Ibid] "Freedom
fries," anyone?
More significantly, Kennan firmly believed that "our greatest mistakes
in national policy seem to occur where the military factor is most
involved." [Ibid] Finally, Kennan never retreated from his steadfast
belief "in a limitless human capacity for error," [Washington Post
March 18, 2005] a belief which clearly informed his views about the
need to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons and the need to err on the
side of eschewing war.
Kennan lived long enough to presciently repudiate the Bush
administration's propaganda about Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, calling them
"pathetically unsupportive and unreliable" as early as September 2002.
A month later Kennan prophetically warned the Bush administration: "The
apparently imminent use of American armed forces to drive Saddam
Hussein from power...seems to me well out of proportion to the dangers
involved. I have seen no evidence that we have any realistic plans for
dealing with the great state of confusion in Iraqian affairs which
would presumably follow even after the successful elimination of the
dictator." [Jane Mayer, "A Doctrine Passes," The New Yorker,
October 14-21, 2002]
Fortunately, this foremost of America's foreign policy "realists"
passed away before learning the depths of the folly and immorality of
our current leaders, which propelled America's invasion of Iraq. He
never learned, as we have from Mr. Suskind, that illegal, immoral
preventive war became de facto American policy in late November 2001,
when Vice President Cheney asserted: "If there's a one percent chance
that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a
nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our
response. It's not about our analysis or finding a preponderance of
evidence. It's about our response." [p. 62]
According to Suskind, Cheney's "one percent" doctrine "became the
standard of action that would frame events and responses from the
administration for years to come." [Ibid]
Simply recall that, by the time Cheney imposed his "one percent"
doctrine, President Bush already had authorized "an astonishing
expansion of CIA authority," by approving the financing of a
"'Worldwide Attack Matrix'...that detailed operations against
terrorists in eighty countries." [Suskind, p. 20] Similar Department of
Defense special operations would soon follow.
Thus, given the military nature of "our response," simply ask yourself:
"How immoral is a doctrine that compels a military response even when
99% of the evidence remains silent or fails to justify it?" And what
should we think about an individual who demands such an immoral
standard?
Moreover, is it merely a coincidence that the individual, who set the
bar so cowardly and dishonorably low, also happens to possess five
draft deferments, which allowed him to avoid harm's way during the
Vietnam War?
Cheney's cowardly behavior aside, his "one percent" doctrine goes far
to explain the behavior of the Bush administration during the run-up to
the invasion of Iraq. First, it explains why the administration failed
to request a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq. (You'll recall
that the Senate belatedly requested it, not the Bush administration.)
Second, it explains why the Bush administration ignored five legitimate
intelligence reports from the Intelligence Community that argued
against any significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. After all, the
neocon Douglas Feith, through his rogue Policy Counterterrorism
Evaluation Group, had already supplied neocon Paul Wolfowitz and, thus,
Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney with the shards of undigested and bogus raw
intelligence - especially about Mohamed Atta -- that easily met the
latter's one percent threshold.
Third, Cheney's "one percent" doctrine explains why, in July 2002,
British intelligence could secretly report to Prime Minister Tony
Blair: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to
remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy." [Michael Smith, "June 26, 2006, Testimony to the
Senate Democratic Policy Committee Hearing on Pre-War Intelligence
Relating to Iraq"]
Fourth, Cheney's "one percent" doctrine explains why the Bush
administration had to resort to exaggerations and lies about Iraq, as
soon as Op-Eds, such as Brent Scowcroft's "Don't Attack Saddam,"
compelled a hurried public relations counteroffensive.
Thus, Cheney asserted: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts
to acquire nuclear weapons." Yet he cherry-picked from contradictory
evidence that was approximately seven years old. Why would he say, "We
now know?" Moreover, the CIA's Jami Misic asked at the time: "Where is
he getting that stuff from?" [Suskind, pp. 168-169]
Thus, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed that Iraq's
aluminum tubes could "only" be used in its nuclear weapons program,
knowing full well that Energy Department's experts doubted such use.
And thus, bogus intelligence about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium
from Niger - suspected by the CIA of being bogus and already excised
from an earlier speech by Bush - found its way into his January 2003
State of Union address.
Unfortunately, as Suskind concludes, Cheney's "one percent" program
"released George W. Bush from his area of greatest weakness - the
analytical abilities so prized in America's professional class - and
freed his decision making to rely on impulse and improvisation to a
degree that was without precedent for a modern president. Cheney
essentially crafted a platform, an architecture, for Bush to be Bush,
while still being President." [p. 308]
Thus far, the Bush administration's perverse "one percent" morality and
incompetence have killed 2,500 American soldiers and wounded tens of
thousands, have killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqi civilians and,
in just the past four months, have displaced another 130,000.
Its perverse morality and incompetence permitted the looting that
destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, caused oil prices to soar,
precipitated civil war, elevated Iran's strategic position in the
Middle East and earned the United States the hatred of much of the
world. Such enormous harm to America's national security brings to mind
Paul Miliukov's immortal words: "Is this stupidity or treason?"
Even when one puts aside their horrible handling of the Hurricane
Katrina disaster, the evidence is clear: These men are unfit to rule
America, let alone lead the world.
One only can guess at what George Kennan would make of the Cheney/Bush
"one percent" doctrine. In his absence, I've taken comfort in the
recommendations of the highly esteemed military historian, Martin van
Creveld:
"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war
since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost
them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once removed from office, put
on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted,
they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins." ["Costly
Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War," Forward,
November 25, 2005.
__________________
D.
from Elisabeth Chamorand :
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006
Subject: FW: Benni Zipper: the Israeli Jonathan Swift
Francis,
I am forwarding this piece which was sent to me by former U.S. Senator
James Abourezk, whom as you will recall was refused funding to
participate in CEIMSA's International Colloquium with Jim Hightower in
spring 2004.
Here, Israeli journalist Benni Zipper has written a bitter irony in the
tradition of Jonathan Swift....
Elisabeth
----------
De : "Jim Abourezk" <hungryjim@sio.midco.net>
Date : Sun, 2 Jul 2006 11:59:10 -0500
Objet : Fw: Benni Zipper: the Israeli Jonathan Swift
Lets admit right away: We are bad. Very, very bad.
by Benni Zipper
Ha¹aretz
Conclusion: The artillery shells that turned seven vacationers
who ate corn on the cob at the Gaza beach to pieces of bleeding flesh
fell from the sky and were not launched by the IDF. I came to that
conclusion without waiting for any decision of a Commission of Inquiry
because, simply, the IDF is such a humane and considerate army, and not
cruel like the terrorist Palestinians damned their name and memory,
that its not possible that it would do such a
thing. The Palestinians are capable of anything and what the Commission
of Inquiry must check is whether the mother of the family who died in
such an
extreme manner, did not pretend to be dead and whether this whole show
on the part of the girl who ran like a mad woman on the sand was not
just a
year-end play of the theater club of her school. After all we already
experienced such things coming from them, when they staged funerals.
Today one can stage anything or carry out tricks through the computer
and convince the entire world that this is the whole truth.
Another conclusion. (I reached it yesterday after watching Amir Peretz
in a direct broadcast from the Southern Command Headquarters): It is
entirely possible that the man who spoke yesterday on TV was not the
real Amir Peretz but rather an actor from Beit Tzvi who impersonates
him perfectly and
parrots what he needs to parrot in cases of such calamities, all this
in order to enable to real Peretz to devote, at least on the weekend,
quality time with his family members who love him and who miss him so
during weekdays.
To me it was clear that this was not the real Peretz because he,
continuously, repeated the same identical three sentences as a response
to any question that was not asked of him. He , once again, said that
the IDF avoids the use of many means at its disposal in order not to
hurt civilians. Also, that he personally thinks that it is not right to
hurt civilians. We could see that the moustache of this actor
pretending to be Peretz was pasted. I¹m telling you. Ask the
Military Reporter, Carmela Menashe who was the closest to him from the
side whether what I am saying is not correct.
And another conclusion, and this time completely seriously: I stopped
believing, a long time ago, that there is someone who is more right or
less right in this entire story about the conflict. All this
sanctimoniousness piety of ours simply does not work on anybody except
ourselves. So, as the first step, lets stop relying so much on the
formalistics of IDF investigating committees and instead admit that we
are bad, very, very bad and that our lack of intention to do bad things
does not cancel the fact that we commit bad and repeatedly so, all day
long. It stems mainly from the fact that our means of destruction are
not toys but rather are designed to process human flesh: to kill,
disintegrate and grind exactly like these tools do when they belong to
others, and when we use these means of destruction they necessarily do
their job.
After we admit that we are bad, very, very bad, we will discover
suddenly that from a badness point of view we have an enormous
advantage over our bad
neighbors. The advantage of our badness over their badness is that our
badness is sophisticated and theirs - primitive. We always mean not to
kill, but we still kill. While they mean to kill, these idiots, and
they don¹t even hide their intention. Their badness comes from
their guts and our badness comes from the brain.
The problem is that because of the Holocaust and all that, we are not
capable of believing, even in our most cynical dreams, that there is a
Jewish soldier who is capable of killing just for the sake of killing.
The problems that rises out of all this is that every time that someone
gets killed just like that we find some rationalization for it as if it
was not just like that. It just doesn¹t enter our heads that among
our people there are persons without conscience or with an
underdeveloped conscience compared to the typical Jewish merciful norm,
who can do bad or stupid things just like that. We nurtured this great
illusion and now we are eating it and by doing so cause ourselves to be
self righteously uppity so much so that no one believes anymore in the
sincerity of our intentions even when they are sincere. Lets admit: It
is a fact that we do bad indeed. It doesn¹t matter whether the
circumstances forced us to be bad. The fact is that we are bad.
There is another thing that should finally be admitted: We are equally
bad on the Left as on the Right, enough with the illusions. Fact: A
Leftist Minister of Defense acts exactly like a Rightist Minister of
Defense and there is no difference between Left or Right, and that the
entire election were in fact Bull-Shit supreme, and conversely, Amir
Peretz, at the bottom of his heart is even proud that he does not fall
behind in his performance from previous Ministers of Defense and that
he is lacing into the Palestinians as they deserve, and by doing so
lifts the morale of the blood thirsty from among our people. This is
good in order for Labor to be strengthened and return to full time
ruling when the day will come.
Final conclusion, but one that should remain among us: Its actually not
bad at all that this family got killed on the beach in Gaza. With its
death it bequeathed life to the Labor party and its leader, who now can
present himself as a man - man, both compassionate and rigid when
necessary, in the
best Israeli tradition of shooting and weeping. Please admit it,
isn¹t he cute, this Amir Peretz when he is acting as the
principled man of the people? More power to you, Peretz. Shoot and then
weep. We love you, you are proving slowly that you deserve us, that you
are as bad as necessary, bad but with a moral backing as needed. Such
clean badness, that thinks that you can take off the badness like a
dirty shirt and throw into the laundry and the machine will clean it.
Not like the Palestinians, who as you saw, are dirty, they eat with
their hands, in the sand, without a minimal hygiene and then they are
surprised that they die.
____________________
E.
From Seymour Hersh :
Date 2 July 2006
New
Yorker
Last Stand
The military’s problem with the President’s Iran
policy.
by Seymour M. Hersh
On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what
appeared to be a major change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bush
Administration, she said, would be willing to join Russia, China, and
its European allies in direct talks with Iran about its nuclear
program. There was a condition, however: the negotiations would not
begin until, as the President put it in a June 19th speech at the U.S.
Merchant Marine Academy, “the Iranian regime fully and verifiably
suspends its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities.” Iran,
which has insisted on its right to enrich uranium, was being asked to
concede the main point of the negotiations before they started. The
question was whether the Administration expected the Iranians to agree,
or was laying the diplomatic groundwork for future military action. In
his speech, Bush also talked about “freedom for the Iranian people,”
and he added, “Iran’s leaders have a clear choice.” There was an
unspoken threat: the U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air
Force, has been drawing up plans, at the President’s direction, for a
major bombing campaign in Iran.
Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the
President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and
officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that
the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s
nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to
serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United
States.
A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the
fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found
specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the
war planners are not sure what to hit. “The target array in Iran is
huge, but it’s amorphous,” a high-ranking general told me. “The
question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into
something nefarious?” The high-ranking general added that the
military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass
destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We
built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is
son of Iraq,” he said.
“There is a war about the war going on inside the building,” a Pentagon
consultant said. “If we go, we have to find something.”
In President Bush’s June speech, he accused Iran of pursuing a secret
weapons program along with its civilian nuclear-research program (which
it is allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty). The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the
President’s contention that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb,
but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior
intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking,
“What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt
and covert, and these guys”the Iranians“have been working on
this for eighteen years, and we have nothing? We’re coming up with jack
shit.”
A senior military official told me, “Even if we knew where the Iranian
enriched uranium wasand we don’twe don’t know where world
opinion would stand. The issue is whether it’s a clear and present
danger. If you’re a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is
the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a
punitive responselike cutting off oil shipments? What would that
cost us?” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides
“really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the
capability of the adversary,” he said.
In 1986, Congress authorized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
to act as the “principal military adviser” to the President. In this
case, I was told, the current chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, has
gone further in his advice to the White House by addressing the
consequences of an attack on Iran. “Here’s the military telling the
President what he can’t do politically”raising concerns about
rising oil prices, for examplethe former senior intelligence
official said. “The J.C.S. chairman going to the President with an
economic argumentwhat’s going on here?” (General Pace and the
White House declined to comment. The Defense Department responded to a
detailed request for comment by saying that the Administration was
“working diligently” on a diplomatic solution and that it could not
comment on classified matters.)
A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system
is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be
condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’ ”
The military leadership is also raising tactical arguments against the
proposal for bombing Iran, many of which are related to the
consequences for Iraq. According to retired Army Major General William
Nash, who was commanding general of the First Armored Division, served
in Iraq and Bosnia, and worked for the United Nations in Kosovo,
attacking Iran would heighten the risks to American and coalition
forces inside Iraq. “What if one hundred thousand Iranian volunteers
came across the border?” Nash asked. “If we bomb Iran, they cannot
retaliate militarily by aironly on the ground or by sea, and only
in Iraq or the Gulf. A military planner cannot discount that
possibility, and he cannot make an ideological assumption that the
Iranians wouldn’t do it. We’re not talking about victory or
defeatonly about what damage Iran could do to our interests.”
Nash, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said,
“Their first possible response would be to send forces into Iraq. And,
since the Iraqi Army has limited capacity, it means that the coalition
forces would have to engage them.”
The Americans serving as advisers to the Iraqi police and military may
be at special risk, Nash added, since an American bombing “would be
seen not only as an attack on Shiites but as an attack on all Muslims.
Throughout the Middle East, it would likely be seen as another example
of American imperialism. It would probably cause the war to spread.”
In contrast, some conservatives are arguing that America’s position in
Iraq would improve if Iran chose to retaliate there, according to a
government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon’s civilian
leaders, because Iranian interference would divide the Shiites into
pro- and anti-Iranian camps, and unify the Kurds and the Sunnis. The
Iran hawks in the White House and the State Department, including
Elliott Abrams and Michael Doran, both of whom are National Security
Council advisers on the Middle East, also have an answer for those who
believe that the bombing of Iran would put American soldiers in Iraq at
risk, the consultant said. He described the counterargument this way:
“Yes, there will be Americans under attack, but they are under attack
now.”
Iran’s geography would also complicate an air war. The senior military
official said that, when it came to air strikes, “this is not Iraq,”
which is fairly flat, except in the northeast. “Much of Iran is akin to
Afghanistan in terms of topography and flight mappinga pretty
tough target,” the military official said. Over rugged terrain, planes
have to come in closer, and “Iran has a lot of mature air-defense
systems and networks,” he said. “Global operations are always risky,
and if we go down that road we have to be prepared to follow up with
ground troops.”
The U.S. Navy has a separate set of concerns. Iran has more than seven
hundred undeclared dock and port facilities along its Persian Gulf
coast. The small ports, known as “invisible piers,” were constructed
two decades ago by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to accommodate small
private boats used for smuggling. (The Guards relied on smuggling to
finance their activities and enrich themselves.) The ports, an Iran
expert who advises the U.S. government told me, provide “the
infrastructure to enable the Guards to go after American aircraft
carriers with suicide water bombers”small vessels loaded with high
explosives. He said that the Iranians have conducted exercises in the
Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf to the
Arabian Sea and then on to the Indian Ocean. The strait is regularly
traversed by oil tankers, in which a thousand small Iranian boats
simulated attacks on American ships. “That would be the hardest problem
we’d face in the water: a thousand small targets weaving in and out
among our ships.”
America’s allies in the Gulf also believe that an attack on Iran would
endanger them, and many American military planners agree. “Iran can do
a lot of thingsall asymmetrical,” a Pentagon adviser on
counter-insurgency told me. “They have agents all over the Gulf, and
the ability to strike at will.” In May, according to a well-informed
oil-industry expert, the Emir of Qatar made a private visit to Tehran
to discuss security in the Gulf after the Iraq war. He sought some
words of non-aggression from the Iranian leadership. Instead, the
Iranians suggested that Qatar, which is the site of the regional
headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, would be its first target in
the event of an American attack. Qatar is a leading exporter of gas and
currently operates several major offshore oil platforms, all of which
would be extremely vulnerable. (Nasser bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa, Qatar’s
ambassador to Washington, denied that any threats were issued during
the Emir’s meetings in Tehran. He told me that it was “a very nice
visit.”)
A retired American diplomat, who has experience in the Gulf, confirmed
that the Qatari government is “very scared of what America will do” in
Iran, and “scared to death” about what Iran would do in response.
Iran’s message to the oil-producing Gulf states, the retired diplomat
said, has been that it will respond, and “you are on the wrong side of
history.”
In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace,
achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence
that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a
nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz,
nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes
large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in
the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges.
“Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the
former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to
them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is
politically unacceptable.’ ” At the time, a number of retired officers,
including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and
Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the
Administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many
in the Pentagon as “the April Revolution.”
“An event like this doesn’t get papered over very quickly,” the former
official added. “The bad feelings over the nuclear option are still
felt. The civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the
brass, and the brass feel they were tricked into it”the nuclear
planning“by being asked to provide all options in the planning
papers.”
Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College
before retiring from the Air Force as a colonel, said that Rumsfeld’s
second-guessing and micromanagement were a fundamental problem. “Plans
are more and more being directed and run by civilians from the Office
of the Secretary of Defense,” Gardiner said. “It causes a lot of
tensions. I’m hearing that the military is increasingly upset about not
being taken seriously by Rumsfeld and his staff.”
Gardiner went on, “The consequence is that, for Iran and other
missions, Rumsfeld will be pushed more and more in the direction of
special operations, where he has direct authority and does not have to
put up with the objections of the Chiefs.” Since taking office in 2001,
Rumsfeld has been engaged in a running dispute with many senior
commanders over his plans to transform the military, and his belief
that future wars will be fought, and won, with airpower and Special
Forces. That combination worked, at first, in Afghanistan, but the
growing stalemate there, and in Iraq, has created a rift, especially
inside the Army. The senior military official said, “The policymakers
are in love with Special Opsthe guys on camels.”
The discord over Iran can, in part, be ascribed to Rumsfeld’s testy
relationship with the generals. They see him as high-handed and
unwilling to accept responsibility for what has gone wrong in Iraq. A
former Bush Administration official described a recent meeting between
Rumsfeld and four-star generals and admirals at a military commanders’
conference, on a base outside Washington, that, he was told, went
badly. The commanders later told General Pace that “they didn’t come
here to be lectured by the Defense Secretary. They wanted to tell
Rumsfeld what their concerns were.” A few of the officers attended a
subsequent meeting between Pace and Rumsfeld, and were unhappy, the
former official said, when “Pace did not repeat any of their
complaints. There was disappointment about Pace.” The retired four-star
general also described the commanders’ conference as “very fractious.”
He added, “We’ve got twenty-five hundred dead, people running all over
the world doing stupid things, and officers outside the Beltway asking,
‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Pace’s supporters say that he is in a difficult position, given
Rumsfeld’s penchant for viewing generals who disagree with him as
disloyal. “It’s a very narrow line between being responsive and
effective and being outspoken and ineffective,” the former senior
intelligence official said.
But Rumsfeld is not alone in the Administration where Iran is
concerned; he is closely allied with Dick Cheney, and, the Pentagon
consultant said, “the President generally defers to the Vice-President
on all these issues,” such as dealing with the specifics of a bombing
campaign if diplomacy fails. “He feels that Cheney has an informational
advantage. Cheney is not a renegade. He represents the conventional
wisdom in all of this. He appeals to the strategic-bombing lobby in the
Air Forcewho think that carpet bombing is the solution to all
problems.”
Bombing may not work against Natanz, let alone against the rest of
Iran’s nuclear program. The possibility of using tactical nuclear
weapons gained support in the Administration because of the belief that
it was the only way to insure the destruction of Natanz’s buried
laboratories. When that option proved to be politically untenable (a
nuclear warhead would, among other things, vent fatal radiation for
miles), the Air Force came up with a new bombing plan, using advanced
guidance systems to deliver a series of large
bunker-bustersconventional bombs filled with high
explosiveson the same target, in swift succession. The Air Force
argued that the impact would generate sufficient concussive force to
accomplish what a tactical nuclear warhead would achieve, but without
provoking an outcry over what would be the first use of a nuclear
weapon in a conflict since Nagasaki.
The new bombing concept has provoked controversy among Pentagon
planners and outside experts. Robert Pape, a professor at the
University of Chicago who has taught at the Air Force’s School of
Advanced Air and Space Studies, told me, “We always have a few new
toys, new gimmicks, and rarely do these new tricks lead to a phenomenal
breakthrough. The dilemma is that Natanz is a very large underground
area, and even if the roof came down we won’t be able to get a good
estimate of the bomb damage without people on the ground. We don’t even
know where it goes underground, and we won’t have much confidence in
assessing what we’ve actually done. Absent capturing an Iranian nuclear
scientist and documents, it’s impossible to set back the program for
sure.”
One complicating aspect of the multiple-hit tactic, the Pentagon
consultant told me, is “the liquefaction problem”the fact that the
soil would lose its consistency owing to the enormous heat generated by
the impact of the first bomb. “It will be like bombing water, with its
currents and eddies. The bombs would likely be diverted.” Intelligence
has also shown that for the past two years the Iranians have been
shifting their most sensitive nuclear-related materials and production
facilities, moving some into urban areas, in anticipation of a bombing
raid.
“The Air Force is hawking it to the other services,” the former senior
intelligence official said. “They’re all excited by it, but they’re
being terribly criticized for it.” The main problem, he said, is that
the other services do not believe the tactic will work. “The Navy says,
‘It’s not our plan.’ The Marines are against itthey know they’re
going to be the guys on the ground if things go south.”
“It’s the bomber mentality,” the Pentagon consultant said. “The Air
Force is saying, ‘We’ve got it covered, we can hit all the distributed
targets.’ ” The Air Force arsenal includes a cluster bomb that can
deploy scores of small bomblets with individual guidance systems to
home in on specific targets. The weapons were deployed in Kosovo and
during the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Air Force
is claiming that the same techniques can be used with larger bombs,
allowing them to be targeted from twenty-five thousand feet against a
multitude of widely dispersed targets. “The Chiefs all know that ‘shock
and awe’ is dead on arrival,” the Pentagon consultant said. “All except
the Air Force.”
“Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on thisthey don’t want to
repeat the mistake of doing too little,” the government consultant with
ties to Pentagon civilians told me. “The lesson they took from Iraq is
that there should have been more troops on the ground”an
impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces
in Iraq“so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force.”
Many of the Bush Administration’s supporters view the abrupt change in
negotiating policy as a deft move that won public plaudits and obscured
the fact that Washington had no other good options. “The United States
has done what its international partners have asked it to do,” said
Patrick Clawson, who is an expert on Iran and the deputy director for
research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a
conservative think tank. “The ball is now in their courtfor both
the Iranians and the Europeans.” Bush’s goal, Clawson said, was to
assuage his allies, as well as Russia and China, whose votes, or
abstentions, in the United Nations would be needed if the talks broke
down and the U.S. decided to seek Security Council sanctions or a U.N.
resolution that allowed for the use of force against Iran.
“If Iran refuses to re-start negotiations, it will also be difficult
for Russia and China to reject a U.N. call for International Atomic
Energy Agency inspections,” Clawson said. “And the longer we go without
accelerated I.A.E.A. access, the more important the issue of Iran’s
hidden facilities will become.” The drawback to the new American
position, Clawson added, was that “the Iranians might take Bush’s
agreeing to join the talks as a sign that their hard line has worked.”
Clawson acknowledged that intelligence on Iran’s nuclear-weapons
progress was limited. “There was a time when we had reasonable
confidence in what we knew,” he said. “We could say, ‘There’s less time
than we think,’ or, ‘It’s going more slowly.’ Take your choice. Lack of
information is a problem, but we know they’ve made rapid progress with
their centrifuges.” (The most recent American intelligence estimate is
that Iran could build a warhead sometime between 2010 and 2015.)
Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council aide for the Bush
Administration, told me, “The only reason Bush and Cheney relented
about talking to Iran was because they were within weeks of a
diplomatic meltdown in the United Nations. Russia and China were going
to stiff us”that is, prevent the passage of a U.N. resolution.
Leverett, a project director at the New America Foundation, added that
the White House’s proposal, despite offering trade and economic
incentives for Iran, has not “resolved any of the fundamental
contradictions of U.S. policy.” The precondition for the talks, he
saidan open-ended halt to all Iranian enrichment
activity“amounts to the President wanting a guarantee that they’ll
surrender before he talks to them. Iran cannot accept long-term
constraints on its fuel-cycle activity as part of a settlement without
a security guarantee”for example, some form of mutual
non-aggression pact with the United States.
Leverett told me that, without a change in U.S. policy, the balance of
power in the negotiations will shift to Russia. “Russia sees Iran as a
beachhead against American interests in the Middle East, and they’re
playing a very sophisticated game,” he said. “Russia is quite
comfortable with Iran having nuclear fuel cycles that would be
monitored, and they’ll support the Iranian position”in part,
because it gives them the opportunity to sell billions of dollars’
worth of nuclear fuel and materials to Tehran. “They believe they can
manage their long- and short-term interests with Iran, and still manage
the security interests,” Leverett said. China, which, like Russia, has
veto power on the Security Council, was motivated in part by its
growing need for oil, he said. “They don’t want punitive measures, such
as sanctions, on energy producers, and they don’t want to see the U.S.
take a unilateral stance on a state that matters to them.” But, he
said, “they’re happy to let Russia take the lead in this.” (China, a
major purchaser of Iranian oil, is negotiating a multibillion-dollar
deal with Iran for the purchase of liquefied natural gas over a period
of twenty-five years.) As for the Bush Administration, he added,
“unless there’s a shift, it’s only a question of when its policy falls
apart.”
It’s not clear whether the Administration will be able to keep the
Europeans in accord with American policy if the talks break down.
Morton Abramowitz, a former head of State Department intelligence, who
was one of the founders of the International Crisis Group, said, “The
world is different than it was three years ago, and while the Europeans
want good relations with us, they will not go to war with Iran unless
they know that an exhaustive negotiating effort was made by Bush.
There’s just too much involved, like the price of oil. There will be
great pressure put on the Europeans, but I don’t think they’ll roll
over and support a war.”
The Europeans, like the generals at the Pentagon, are concerned about
the quality of intelligence. A senior European intelligence official
said that while “there was every reason to assume” that the Iranians
were working on a bomb, there wasn’t enough evidence to exclude the
possibility that they were bluffing, and hadn’t moved beyond a civilian
research program. The intelligence official was not optimistic about
the current negotiations. “It’s a mess, and I don’t see any
possibility, at the moment, of solving the problem,” he said. “The only
thing to do is contain it. The question is, What is the redline? Is it
when you master the nuclear fuel cycle? Or is it just about building a
bomb?” Every country had a different criterion, he said. One worry he
had was that, in addition to its security concerns, the Bush
Administration was driven by its interest in “democratizing” the
region. “The United States is on a mission,” he said.
A European diplomat told me that his government would be willing to
discuss Iran’s security concernsa dialogue he said Iran offered
Washington three years ago. The diplomat added that “no one wants to be
faced with the alternative if the negotiations don’t succeed: either
accept the bomb or bomb them. That’s why our goal is to keep the
pressure on, and see what Iran’s answer will be.”
A second European diplomat, speaking of the Iranians, said, “Their
tactic is going to be to stall and appear reasonableto say, ‘Yes,
but . . .’ We know what’s going on, and the timeline we’re under. The
Iranians have repeatedly been in violation of I.A.E.A. safeguards and
have given us years of coverup and deception. The international
community does not want them to have a bomb, and if we let them
continue to enrich that’s throwing in the towelgiving up before we
talk.” The diplomat went on, “It would be a mistake to predict an
inevitable failure of our strategy. Iran is a regime that is primarily
concerned with its own survival, and if its existence is threatened it
would do whatever it needed to doincluding backing down.”
The Iranian regime’s calculations about its survival also depend on
internal political factors. The nuclear program is popular with the
Iranian people, including thosethe young and the secularwho
are most hostile to the religious leadership. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
President of Iran, has effectively used the program to rally the nation
behind him, and against Washington. Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics
have said that they believe Bush’s goal is not to prevent them from
building a bomb but to drive them out of office.
Several current and former officials I spoke to expressed doubt that
President Bush would settle for a negotiated resolution of the nuclear
crisis. A former high-level Pentagon civilian official, who still deals
with sensitive issues for the government, said that Bush remains
confident in his military decisions. The President and others in the
Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in
public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was
punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting
appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill “seemed like a Texan
to me. He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged
ahead, and the world is better for it.”
The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a clandestine
program to build a bomb, and will do so as soon as it can. Israeli
officials have emphasized that their “redline” is the moment Iran
masters the nuclear fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to
produce weapons-grade uranium. “Iran managed to surprise everyone in
terms of the enrichment capability,” one diplomat familiar with the
Israeli position told me, referring to Iran’s announcement, this
spring, that it had successfully enriched uranium to the 3.6-per-cent
level needed to fuel a nuclear-power reactor. The Israelis believe that
Iran must be stopped as soon as possible, because, once it is able to
enrich uranium for fuel, the next stepenriching it to the
ninety-per-cent level needed for a nuclear bombis merely a
mechanical process.
Israeli intelligence, however, has also failed to provide specific
evidence about secret sites in Iran, according to current and former
military and intelligence officials. In May, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
visited Washington and, addressing a joint session of Congress, said
that Iran “stands on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons” that would
pose “an existential threat” to Israel. Olmert noted that Ahmadinejad
had questioned the reality of the Holocaust, and he added, “It is not
Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to
stability in the Middle East and to the well-being of the world at
large.” But at a secret intelligence exchange that took place at the
Pentagon during the visit, the Pentagon consultant said, “what the
Israelis provided fell way short” of what would be needed to publicly
justify preventive action.
The issue of what to do, and when, seems far from resolved inside the
Israeli government. Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel,
who is now the director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for
Middle East Policy, told me, “Israel would like to see diplomacy
succeed, but they’re worried that in the meantime Iran will cross a
threshold of nuclear know-howand they’re worried about an American
military attack not working. They assume they’ll be struck first in
retaliation by Iran.” Indyk added, “At the end of the day, the United
States can live with Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian nuclear
bombsbut for Israel there’s no Mutual Assured Destruction. If they
have to live with an Iranian bomb, there will be a great deal of
anxiety in Israel, and a lot of tension between Israel and Iran, and
between Israel and the U.S.”
Iran has not, so far, officially answered President Bush’s proposal.
But its initial response has been dismissive. In a June 22nd interview
with the Guardian, Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator,
rejected Washington’s demand that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment
before talks could begin. “If they want to put this prerequisite, why
are we negotiating at all?” Larijani said. “We should put aside the
sanctions and give up all this talk about regime change.” He
characterized the American offer as a “sermon,” and insisted that Iran
was not building a bomb. “We don’t want the bomb,” he said. Ahmadinejad
has said that Iran would make a formal counterproposal by August 22nd,
but last week Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader,
declared, on state radio, “Negotiation with the United States has no
benefits for us.”
Despite the tough rhetoric, Iran would be reluctant to reject a
dialogue with the United States, according to Giandomenico Picco, who,
as a representative of the United Nations, helped to negotiate the
ceasefire that ended the Iran-Iraq War, in 1988. “If you engage a
superpower, you feel you are a superpower,” Picco told me. “And now the
haggling in the Persian bazaar begins. We are negotiating over a
carpet”the suspected weapons program“that we’re not sure
exists, and that we don’t want to exist. And if at the end there never
was a carpet it’ll be the negotiation of the century.”
If the talks do break down, and the Administration decides on military
action, the generals will, of course, follow their orders; the American
military remains loyal to the concept of civilian control. But some
officers have been pushing for what they call the “middle way,” which
the Pentagon consultant described as “a mix of options that require a
number of Special Forces teams and air cover to protect them to send
into Iran to grab the evidence so the world will know what Iran is
doing.” He added that, unlike Rumsfeld, he and others who support this
approach were under no illusion that it could bring about regime
change. The goal, he said, was to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., said in a
speech this spring that his agency believed there was still time for
diplomacy to achieve that goal. “We should have learned some lessons
from Iraq,” ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said.
“We should have learned that we should be very careful about assessing
our intelligence. . . . We should have learned that we should try to
exhaust every possible diplomatic means to solve the problem before
thinking of any other enforcement measures.”
He went on, “When you push a country into a corner, you are always
giving the driver’s seat to the hard-liners. . . . If Iran were to move
out of the nonproliferation regime altogether, if Iran were to develop
a nuclear weapon program, we clearly will have a much, much more
serious problem.”
________________
F.
from Truthout :
Date 1 July 2006
http://www.truthout.org
The Department of Defense has recently
reported that 8,000 members of the US military are listed as AWOL.
Currently 24 war resisters are known to be in Canada trying to
establish citizenship, with an estimated several hundred more living
there underground. Truthout's Sari Gelzer and Geoffrey Millard report
from Buffalo, New York, and Fort Erie, Ontario, to bring you coverage
of Peace Has No Borders, an event that brought US attention to
political refugees in Canada. Geoffrey Millard interviews war resisters
about their decision to refuse deployment to Iraq and seek asylum in
Canada.
*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université de Grenoble-3
Grenoble, France
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/