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Politics > Politics-USA |
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"peace.seeker.27" |
| Date: |
12 Aug 2006 05:19:33 PM |
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Lebanon as a U.S. Proxy War: Israel Disappoints the Neo-cons |
Tony Karon
August 4, 2006
Israel Disappoints the Neo-cons: More on Lebanon as a U.S. Proxy War
Hear, Oh Israel! Charles Krauthammer is disappointed. Very
disappointed.
And he clearly speaks (http://tinyurl.com/pghw3) for the rest of the
neo-conservative fraternity that has worked so hard to destroy any
distinction between U.S. interests and Israeli interests.
That's because, as we pointed out a couple of days ago ("Is Israel
Fighting a Proxy War for Washington?" http://tinyurl.com/h2fyq), the
Bush administration sees Israel's war in Lebanon as its own war, by
proxy, against Iran.
And Israel is quite simply failing to deliver the knockout blow against
Hezbollah that Washington is demanding - it can't be done, of course,
but reality has never restrained the neocons from pursuing their
fantasies, at the expense of thousands of lives. Krauthammer offers
candid confirmation of what many, including Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah, have suspected all along:
"Israel's leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous a military
failure in Lebanon would be to its relationship with America, Israel's
most vital lifeline... America's green light for Israel to defend
itself is seen as a favor to Israel. But that is a tendentious,
misleadingly partial analysis. The green light - indeed, the
encouragement - is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants,
America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat".
He explains, as we've done, that the U.S. sees Hezbollah as nothing
more than a cat's paw for Iran, which it sees as its major strategic
competitor in the Middle East. It therefore saw the Hezbollah
provocation as a gold opportunity to strike a blow, by proxy, at an
organization deemed an important part of Iran's own deterrent
capability. It is also mindful of the power of the challenge offered by
Hezbollah to further destabilize the decrepit autocracies in Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia on which its influence in the Arab world rests.
Krauthammer continues:
"Hence Israel's rare opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for
its great American patron. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss
for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would lose its
foothold in Lebanon. It would lose its major means to destabilize and
inject itself into the heart of the Middle East. It would be shown to
have vastly overreached in trying to establish itself as the regional
superpower".
"The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to
win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel's ability to
do the job. It has been disappointed... (Olmert's) search for victory
on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but
America's confidence in Israel as well. That confidence - and the
relationship it reinforces - is as important to Israel's survival as
its own army".
From the horse's mouth.
Much of the debate over the influence of the Israel Lobby in the U.S.
(http://tinyurl.com/hmjs7) focuses on the question of whether the
relationship advances or compromises U.S. interests.
My own thinking has long been that it doesn't help to try and examine
this question viewing either Israel or the U.S. in monolithic terms. In
fact, what Krauthammer's comments reveal is the fact that there's an
extremist ideological element at worth both in Washington and in
Israeli political circles (although there it is concentrated in the
more hardline Likud minority of Bibi Netanyahu), whose common purpose
is a (misguided) revolutionary drive to forcefully remake the whole
Middle East on terms more favorable to the U.S. and Israel -
essentially, to crush all challengers to either ("Zionist plan for the
Middle East":
http://theunjustmedia.com/the%20zionist_plan_for_the_middle_east.htm).
Their enemies were not simply the realist custodians in Washington of a
policy to pursue U.S. interests by balancing those of Israel and its
Arab neighbors - most importantly by pressing Israel to conclude a
peace with its neighbors based on UN Resolution 242 - but also the
Israeli peace camp.
Today, Sharon's propagandists may have convinced much of the U.S. media
that the reason there was no peace was that Arafat wouldn't make a
deal, but it's conveniently forgotten that Ariel Sharon himself opposed
the deal offered by Ehud Barak at Camp David far more vehemently than
Arafat ever did. More importantly, it's also ignored that the neo-cons
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile) who have guided so much of the
Bush Administration's Middle East policy - Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot
Abrahams, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle (and even others who are not
neocons, just ignorant ultra-nationalists like ***** Cheney) - were as
vehemently opposed to the Oslo Peace process. And just as they set out
to overturn the U.S. involvement in pressing Israel to conclude a
two-state peace based on the 1967 borders, they also set out to
overturn the Israeli electorate's preference for governments committed
to the same principle.
Richard Perle, in fact, led a study group that included Douglas Feith
and which compiled a strategic guideline for the incoming Binyamin
(Bibi) Netanyahu government in 1996, titled "A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)"
(http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm), which amounted to a manifesto to
reverse the prevailing "Land for Peace" logic and instead pursue tough
action to remake the Middle East, including Iraq - which they (as if
to illustrate the almost psychedelic giddiness of their fantasies)
envisaged turning into another kingdom under the rule of the Jordanian
royal house.
Thoughtful Israeli voices are beginning to count the cost of the
"friendship" from the U.S. to Israel orchestrated by this crowd. Daniel
Levy writes in Ha'aretz Israel ("Ending the neoconservative nightmare":
http://tinyurl.com/zvhwr), that in the case of Lebanon, "Israel was
actually in need of an early exit strategy, had its diplomatic options
narrowed by American weakness and marginalization in the region, and
found itself ratcheting up aerial and ground operations in ways that
largely worked to Hezbollah's advantage".
This, says Daniel Levy, is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which is
the hegemony in Washington's Middle East decision making of the
neo-cons' fabulist narrative:
"The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications
may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region
we live in. This tight-knit group of "defense intellectuals" - centered
around William "Bill" Kristol, Michael "P2" Ledeen, Elliott Abrams,
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others - were considered somewhat
off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans
like ***** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the
emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an
aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of
transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the
Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to "old Likud"
politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after
9/11.
Daniel Levy continues:
"Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire,
the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying
their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and
blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite
shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran,
with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization".
"Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon
"creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent
challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape
the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots,
devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or
redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel.
The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable
to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in
Washington and Jerusalem".
Elsewhere, former adviser to president Clinton, Sydney Blumenthal ("The
neocons' next war": http://tinyurl.com/knzxx) provides fascinating
insights into the neocons' operations within the administration,
suggesting that Rice is actually marginalized by the neo-cons, which
accounts for the skittishness that has characterized her interventions
throughout the crisis - and that the U.S. is extending Israel's
target range by supplying NSA intelligence supposedly showing the
movement of weapons from Syria and Iran to Hezbollah, creating
conditions and pretexts for an expansion of the conflict.
Blumenthal adds:
"Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is
attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament
with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see
the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle
U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize
the fantasies of 'A Clean Break' ".
"By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush
administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with
untold consequences - from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to
Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring
of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate,
calculated and methodical plot".
This is far more serious than lunatic but influential televangelists
lobbying for an attack on Iran to hasten Armageddon and 'Rapture'
("Lobbying for Armageddon": http://www.alternet.org/story/39748), this
is a case of geopolitical berserkers with all the sobriety of a bunch
of teenage Maoists on crack - but who are taken far too seriously for
our collective good in Washington and in the U.S. national media -
trying to start a war, with Israel at its epicenter.
The US-Israel relationship under the current administration, then, is a
blank check only to the extent that Israel is willing to go to war to
realize a neo-con Likudnik fantasy.
Israelis have typically unleashed the dogs of war while expecting the
U.S. to apply the brakes and walk it away from the precipice. Instead,
they have found this administration baying for more. Tom Segev
("Between two friends": http://tinyurl.com/jmj4t), my favorite of all
Israel's historian-journalists, puts it eloquently:
"Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us,
not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is
still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States;
only the release of government records of the past three weeks will
shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that
the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing
adventure in Iraq ..."
"... If Europe had some say in the region, Israel may have started
negotiations with Hezbollah on the release of the soldiers it abducted
- and hopefully, it still will do so - instead of getting mixed up in
war. For some years now, more Middle East-related wisdom emanates from
Europe than from the United States. It wasn't Europe but the United
States that invented the diplomatic fable called the 'road map'; it
wasn't Europe but the United States that encouraged unilateral
disengagement and is allowing Israel to continue oppressing the
population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank".
"The United States is not engaged with Syria; Europe is. Syria is
relevant not only for settling the situation in Lebanon, but also in
managing relations with the Palestinians. This is the real problem.
Because, even if the United States conquers Tehran, we will still have
to live with the Palestinians. In Europe, they already understand
this".
[Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME magazine]
http://tonykaron.com/2006/08/04/israel-disappoints-the-neo-cons-more-on-lebanon-as-a-us-proxy-war/
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