The Redirection (3)

by Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 2007-02-25

Funding Sunni extremists against Shiites

Seymour Hersh on 24 hour plan to attack Iran

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government.

In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father’s assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.”

According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian.
In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. “We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here,” he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict.”

[Walid] Jumblatt [the leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and a strong Siniora supporter] then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”
There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.

Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. “I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyptians”—whose moderate Sunni leadership has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades—“won’t like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don’t take on Syria we will be face to face in Lebanon with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win.”

Nasrallah [Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah] accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon.

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.

Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.

Read the entire article here.

Portrait of William Scott Ritter

William Scott Ritter, Jr. (born July 15, 1961) served from 1991 to 1998 as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq in the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), which was charged with finding and destroying all weapons of mass destruction and WMD-related manufacturing capabilities in Iraq. He was chief inspector in fourteen of the more than thirty inspection missions in which he participated.

Scott Ritter is most noted for being a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East stemming from his experiences as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, Ritter repeatedly stated that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Because of the prevailing political climate in the United States at the time, Ritter was widely condemned for this position.

Already in February 18, 2005 Scott Ritter in a speech indicated that George Bush had signed-off on preparations to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Ritter reiterated and clarified his statements about Iran in a March 30 article published by Al Jazeera.

Ritter published "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change" in 2006. In his book Ritter claims that Israel is pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran. He also accuses the U.S. pro-Israel lobby of dual loyalty and outright espionage.

Randi Rhodes interviews Scott Ritter 2/19/07 part 1

Randi Rhodes interviews Scott Ritter 2/19/07 part 2

Scott Ritter: Target Iran (1). Interview with Seymour Hersh

Scott Ritter: Target Iran (2). Interview with Seymour Hersh

Bush may use nuclear weapons against Iran. Interview with Wolf Blitzer.

The Redirection (2)

by Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 2007-02-25

The role of Saudis

Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focused on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.”

The Saudis are driven by their fear that Iran could tilt the balance of power not only in the region but within their own country. Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its Eastern Province, a region of major oil fields; sectarian tensions are high in the province. The royal family believes that Iranian operatives, working with local Shiites, have been behind many terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, according to Vali Nasr. “Today, the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States. You’re now dealing with an Iran that could be nuclear-capable and has a standing army of four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.” (Saudi Arabia has seventy-five thousand troops in its standing army.)

Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”

The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.

This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”
The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.”

Read the entire article here.

The Redirection (1)

by Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 2007-02-25

A strategic shift

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites.

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser.

“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

The U.S. military also has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq. “The word went out last August for the military to snatch as many Iranians in Iraq as they can,” a former senior intelligence official said. “They had five hundred locked up at one time. We’re working these guys and getting information from them."

According to current and former American intelligence and military officials, secret operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine operations targeting Iran. American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.

The Pentagon consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been captured by American forces in recent months. But he told me that that total includes many Iranian humanitarian and aid workers, who “get scooped up and released in a short time,” after they have been interrogated.

Many in Congress have greeted the claims about Iran with wariness; in the Senate on February 14th, Hillary Clinton said, “We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President, what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.”

In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

The former senior intelligence official said that the current contingency plans allow for an attack order this spring. He added, however, that senior officers on the Joint Chiefs were counting on the White House’s not being “foolish enough to do this in the face of Iraq, and the problems it would give the Republicans in 2008.”

To be continued...
Read the entire article here.

US generals 'will quit' if Bush orders Iran Attack

By Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith
From The Sunday Times, February 25, 2007

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defense and intelligence sources.
Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learned that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.
“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defense source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”

A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. “American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.

The threat of a wave of resignations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all options, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a comment by Tony Blair that it would not “be right to take military action against Iran”.
A second US navy aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS John C. Stennis arrived in the Gulf last week, doubling the US presence there. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the US Fifth Fleet, warned: “The US will take military action if ships are attacked or if countries in the region are targeted or US troops come under direct attack.” But General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said recently there was “zero chance” of a war with Iran. He played down claims by US intelligence that the Iranian government was responsible for supplying insurgents in Iraq, forcing Bush on the defensive. Pace’s view was backed up by British intelligence officials who said the extent of the Iranian government’s involvement in activities inside Iraq by a small number of Revolutionary Guards was “far from clear”.

A British official said the US navy was well aware of the risks of confrontation and was being “seriously careful” in the Gulf. The US air force is regarded as being more willing to attack Iran. General Michael Moseley, the head of the air force, cited Iran as the main likely target for American aircraft at a military conference earlier this month.

According to a report in The New Yorker magazine, the Pentagon has already set up a working group to plan air strikes on Iran. The panel initially focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and on regime change but has more recently been instructed to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq.

©Copyright Sarah Baxter, The Times (London), 2007

The End of Iraq (3)

By Peter Galbraith
The End of Iraq - part 1
The End of Iraq - part 2

Tuwaitha is a sprawling complex south of Baghdad where Iraq once did its research into nuclear power and nuclear weapons. After the first Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervised the destruction of some of the nuclear-related materials at Tuwaitha while making a careful inventory of other materials that were then se­cured with IAEA seals. Among the IAEA-monitored materials at the complex were barrels containing "yellowcake;' unprocessed uranium that, when enriched, is the fissile material for a nuclear bomb. Tuwaitha and its contents were well known to American intelligence. But, in case U.S. officials failed to appreciate the potential dangers at Tuwaitha, IAEA Director General Mohamed EIBaradei personally told American diplomats in Vienna on April 1 0,2003, of the "need to secure the nuclear material stored at Tuwaitha:'
When U.S. troops arrived at Tuwaitha, the yellowcake was in a locked warehouse that had been secured by the IAEA before the in­spectors left at the start of the war. While U.S. troops were actually at Tuwaitha, looters broke into the warehouse. They took the barrels and apparently dumped the yellowcake. Almost two tons went missing. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said Iraq's efforts to acquire yellowcake from Niger were so dangerous that they justified a war, even though the intelligence about Iraq's Niger connection was transparently fraudulent. Yet his Administration did not consider Iraq's actual stockpile of yellowcake important enough to justify or­dering U.S. troops at the location to protect it.
The End of Iraq, page 103.


In early April, U.S. troops had arrived at al-Qaqaa, a large facility thirty miles south of Baghdad. The bunkers at the complex contained194 metric tons of High Melting Point Explosive (HMX) and 141 met­ric tons of Rapid Detonation Explosive (RDX). High explosives, like RDX and HMX, are used to implode a uranium or plutonium sphere and thus trigger a chain reaction leading to a nuclear explosion. "Fat Boy," the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, used one ton of high explosives. While Iraq acquired RDX and HMX for its nuclear program in the 1980s, the explosives are also used for construction and other civilian purposes. Rather than destroy these stockpiles, the IAEA monitored them in the 1990s. After Iraq agreed to resume inspections in 2002, EIBaradei ordered his inspectors back to al-Qaqaa, and re­ported to the Security Council in January 2003 on the stockpiles' status. Immediately after Saddam's fall, the IAEA expressed its concern about the physical security of the explosives to U.S. diplomats at its Vienna headquarters.
In spite of these warnings, U.S. troops left the al-Qaqaa bunkers un­guarded. In the months that followed, looters removed the RDX, the HMX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, a third explosive. This was no small operation. Removing so much material would have required at least forty ten-ton trucks.
The End of Iraq, page 104.

Over the three weeks I was in Iraq, I went unchallenged into many important Iraqi buildings and facilities. These included the Foreign Ministry, the Trade Ministry, the former Royal Palace, the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, Mosul University, Uday Hussein's house, prisons, arms depots, and intelligence facilities. Looters were at work in every building I visited...
Many of the sites I visited had obvious intelligence value, and there were many more American troops in Baghdad than ABC journalists. Yet neither the Pentagon nor the CIA seems to have made any effort to mine these sites for intelligence.
The End of Iraq, page 111-112.

Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq: 'Stuff happens'

Rumsfeld did think the Oil Ministry was important, and as I passed it on April IS, I saw an American tank and a handful of troops sta­tioned in its walled compound. Nearby, the Ministry of Irrigation burned, destroying the plans and blueprints for Iraq's dams, barrages, pumping stations, and thousands of kilometers of canals. The implica­tions were obvious. Oil was a priority, but the water on which millions of Iraqis depended was not. Many Iraqis had the same thought.
The End of Iraq, page 113.

To be continued...
Pictures and titles in this article are not from the book "The End of Iraq".

2003 Memo Says Iranian Leaders Backed Talks

By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Swiss ambassador to Iran informed U.S. officials in 2003 that an Iranian proposal for comprehensive talks with the United States had been reviewed and approved by Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; then-President Mohammad Khatami; and then-Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, according to a copy of the cover letter to the Iranian document.

"I got the clear impression that there is a strong will of the regime to tackle the problem with the U.S. now and to try it with this initiative," Tim Guldimann, the ambassador, wrote in a cover letter that was faxed to the State Department on May 4, 2003. Guldimann attached a one-page Iranian document labeled "Roadmap" that listed U.S. and Iranian aims for potential negotiations, putting on the table such issues as an end to Iran's support for anti-Israeli militants, action against terrorist groups on Iranian soil and acceptance of Israel's right to exist.

The cover letter, which had not been previously disclosed, was provided by a source who felt its contents were mischaracterized by State Department officials.
...
Guldimann wrote that he had several long discussions with Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran's ambassador to France -- and also nephew to the foreign minister and brother-in-law to Khamenei's son. According to Guldimann, Sadegh Kharrazi reported going "through every word of this paper" with Khamenei, Khatami and the foreign minister. "The question is dealt with in high secrecy. Therefore no one else has been informed," Kharrazi added.

The supreme leader had reservations on some points but agreed with 85 to 90 percent of the road map, and "everything can be negotiated," Kharrazi said, noting any reservations could be discussed at the first bilateral meeting. Kharrazi added: "There is a clear interest to tackle the problem of our relations with the U.S. I told them, this is a golden opportunity." Guldimann noted that the "lack of trust in the U.S. imposes them to proceed very carefully and very confidentially."
...

Read the entire article here.
Read the roadmap here.
Read Gareth Porter's article on the subject here.

The Tail Wagging The Dog ?!

The Role of The Israeli Lobby and AIPAC in American Middle East policy

In U.S. there are two weapons of choice, whenever a distinguished individual publishes a soundly researched paper or book critical of Israel or its powerful lobby.
The first weapon of choice is silence. If it's a book, it rarely gets reviewed and it's author never gets interviewed. If it's a paper, there are no news stories in the big corporate press, no interviews with the authors, no television appearances. For the average American who depends on the press and TV to tell him what's going on, it's as if the criticism never existed.
The second weapon is to launch vicious personal attacks and labeling the author as being anti-semitic.

There have been lots of papers and books by distinguished individuals that have "enjoyed" either or both treatments. Prominent examples of such papers and books are:
1. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter former president of U.S.
2. They Dare to Speak Out, by former Rep. Paul Findley.
3. The Passionate Attachment, by George W. Ball, the U.S. Undersecretary of State in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
4. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, by Norman Finkelstein, Jewish American professor of political science and the son of Holocaust survivors.

Both methods (silencing and personal attacks) are now again being used against an astounding paper titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. It was written by two renowned academics, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. It is worth noting that the Anti-Defamation League one of the interest groups in the Israeli Lobby, was quoted in a Jewish publication after the publication of the paper as saying that if the paper gained the attention of the mainstream media, then a "more vigorous attack" would be launched.

Read the short version of the paper here.
Read the unedited pdf version of the original paper here.
Read John Mearsheimer's and Stephen Walt's reply in London Review of Books to various negative criticisms here.
See the debate "The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?", which took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union.

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (3)

By Jimmy Carter
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid - part 1
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid - part 2

The Israeli Apartheid - part 1

(When visiting King Hussein in 1983)
Hussein emphasized to us that about 12,000 Palestinians a year were being induced or forced to leave their ancestral homes and move east, either into Jordan or to join the many wandering refugees in other countries.
...They [King Hussein and his brother Crown Prince Hassan] showed me statistics to prove that water resources from the upper Jordan River valley were being channeled almost exclusively to Israelis and that Arabs were even prohibited from digging a new well or deepening an old one dried up by adjacent wells being dug by Jewish set­tlers. They condemned Israel's policy of forbidding the deliv­ery of foreign aid through Amman to the West Bank and Gaza for such projects as education, housing, and agriculture.
We had already heard most of these complaints from those living in the West Bank and Gaza, but now we were presented with color photographs, bar graphs, pages of statistics, and official documents.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 86-87.

(During Carter's and his wife's Rosalynn's regular visits to the Middle East in the first ten years after leaving the White House)
Some[Palestinians] showed us the wreckage of their former homes, which had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers and dyna­mite, with claims by Israel that they had been built too near Israeli settlements, on property needed by the Israeli gov­ernment, or that some member of the family was a security threat.
In assessing these claims, the Israeli human rights organ­ization B'Tselem explained that, on average, twelve innocent families lost their homes for every person accused of partici­pation in attacks against Israelis, with almost half of the de­molished homes never occupied by anyone suspected of involvement in any violent act against Israel, even throwing stones.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 116.

Many Palestinians emphasized that they were deprived of their most basic human rights. They could not assemble peacefully, travel without restrictions, or own property with­out fear of its being confiscated by a multitude of legal ruses. As a people, they were branded by Israeli officials as terror­ists, and even minor expressions of displeasure brought the most severe punishment from the military authorities. They claimed that their people were arrested and held without trial for extended periods, some tortured in attempts to force confessions, a number executed, and their trials often held with their accusers acting as judges. Their own lawyers were not permitted to defend them in the Israeli courts, and ap­peals were costly, long delayed, and usually fruitless.
They claimed that any demonstration against Israeli abuses resulted in mass arrests of Palestinians, including children throwing stones, bystanders who were not involved, families of protesters, and those known to make disparaging statements about the occupation. Once incarcerated, they had little hope for a fair trial and often had no access to their families or legal counsel. If they were presented with charges, the alleged crimes were usually described in very general terms equivalent to "disturbing the peace," and the sentences were often indefinite. Most of the cases were tried in military tribunals, but 90 percent of the inmates were being held in civilian jails. They pointed out that this policy of holding thousands of prisoners touched almost every Pales­tinian family and was a major source of festering resentment.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 118.


To be continued...
Pictures, maps and titles in this article are not from the book "Peace Not Apartheid".

The End of Iraq (2)

By Peter Galbraith
Read the first part of this article here.

On US support of Saddam

Saddam Hussein meets with Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad in 1983

In March 1984, the U.N. secretary-general submitted an experts' re­port to the Security Council on Iraq's use of chemical weapons. The Dutch and British representatives to the U.N. circulated a resolution condemning the use of chemical weapons (without specifically blam­ing Iraq) but the United States took no significant actions to support its allies. The State Department did meet with Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq's ambassador to the United States, to discuss how the Security Council might handle the issue in a way that would cause the fewest objections in Baghdad. The Iraqis did not want the Security Council to adopt a resolution on the matter (which could have been legally consequen­tial) and asked instead for U.S. support in limiting any Security Coun­cil action to a statement by the council's president. The Reagan Administration obliged and the Iraqis got the outcome they desired. At the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Reagan Administration went a step further and actively opposed a resolution condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan removed Iraq from the State Department's list of countries supporting terrorism, although there had been no sig­nificant change in Iraq's support for radical Palestinian groups that were the principal terrorist concern at the time. The Administration began providing guarantees from the government-controlled Com­modity Credit Corporation for Iraqi purchases of U.S. agricultural products in 1983 and extended Export-Import Bank credits to Iraq in 1984. While these credits were intended to finance the purchases of U.S. agricultural and manufactured goods, they aided Iraq's war effort by freeing up other funds that could be used for military purposes. By 1988, U.S. subsidies to Iraq approached $1 billion a year.
In 1983, the Reagan Administration ordered the CIA to share bat­tlefield intelligence with Iraq. Liaison officers provided Iraq with the locations of Iranian units, which enabled Iraq to anticipate and pre­pare for Iranian attacks. Assisted by American intelligence, Iraq was able to target Iranian troop concentrations with chemical weapons. The Administration certainly knew how its intelligence was being used. Thus, while the State Department publicly criticized Iraq for the use of chemical weapons, the Reagan Administration was working se­cretly to make them more effective.
The End of Iraq, page 18-19.

To be continued...
Pictures, maps and titles in this article are not from the book "The End of Iraq".

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2)

By Jimmy Carter
Read the first part of this article here.

Palestinian villages and Zionist colonists in Palestine at the beginning of the British Mandate, 1920. Click on the map to enlarge.

A succession of Turks, Kurds, and European Crusaders ruled Palestine until the Ottoman Turks incorporated Pales­tine into their empire in 1516. They were on the losing side in World War I, and France and Great Britain initially assumed authority over the various parts of the Middle East. The League of Nations assigned to Great Britain the super­vision of the Mandate of Palestine, which we now know as the lands of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan. After Jordan was separated from the Mandate in 1922, the remain­ing territory between the Jordan River and the Mediter­ranean Sea became known as Palestine.

Although Christian and Muslim Arabs had continued to live in this same land since Roman times, they had no real commitment to establish a separate and independent nation. Their concern was with family and tribe and, for the Mus­lims, the broader world of Islam. Strong ideas of nationhood began to take shape among the Arabs only when they saw increasing numbers of Zionists immigrate to Palestine, buying tracts of land for permanent homes with the goal of estab­lishing their own nation.

In 1947 the United Nations approved a partition plan for Palestine. A Jewish state was to include 55 percent of this territory, Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to be internationalized as holy sites, and the remainder of the land was to constitute an Arab state. The Jewish Agency (an official group that represented the Jewish community in Palestine to the British Mandate) and other Zionist repre­sentatives approved the plan, but Arab leaders were almost unanimous in their opposition. When Jews declared their independence as a nation, the Arabs attacked militarily but were defeated. The 1949 armistice demarcation lines be­came the borders of the new nation of Israel and were ac­cepted by Israel and the United States, and recognized officially by the United Nations.

Zionist expansion and depopulating Palestine villages between 1948-1967. Click on the map to enlarge.

Israelis had taken 77 percent of the disputed land, and the Palestinians were left with two small separate areas, to be known as the West Bank (annexed by Jordan) and Gaza (ad­ministered by Egypt). Jews who lived within their new na­tion took the name Israelis, while Christian and Muslim Arabs in the Holy Land outside of Israel preferred to be known as Palestinians. The Palestinians' own most expan­sive definition includes "all those, and their descendants, who were residents of the land before 14 May 1948 (when Israel became a state]."

UN partition plan in 1947 vs. Rhodes Armistice Line in 1949. Click on the map to enlarge.

When Britain conducted a census in Palestine in 1922, there were about 84,000 Jews and 670,000 Arabs, of whom 71,000 were Christians. By the time the area was partitioned by the United Nations, these numbers had grown to about 600,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arabs, 10 percent of whom were Christians. During and after the 1948 war, about 420 Palestinian villages in the territory that became the State of Israel were destroyed and some 700,000 Palestinian resi­dents fled or were driven out.
The Palestinians and individual Arab leaders continued their vehement objections to the increasing Israeli en­croachment on what they considered to be their lands and rights. However, it was not until the announcement of Is­rael's plans to divert water from the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River to irrigate western Israel and the Negev desert that the first summit meeting of Arab leaders took place early in 1964 and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formally organized. The United Nations esti­mated that by this time there were 1.3 million Palestinian refugees, with one-fourth in Jordan, about 150,000 each in Lebanon and Syria, and most of the others in West Bank and Gaza refugee camps.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, page 56-58.

To be continued...
Pictures, maps and titles in this article are not from the book "Peace Not Apartheid".

Bush is seeking a pretext to attack Iran

A political bombshell from Zbigniew Brzezinski Ex-national security adviser warns that Bush is seeking a pretext to attack Iran
By Barry Grey in Washington DC, 2 February 2007

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

Brzezinski, who opposed the March 2003 invasion and has publicly denounced the war as a colossal foreign policy blunder, began his remarks on what he called the “war of choice” in Iraq by characterizing it as “a historic, strategic and moral calamity.”

...
Brzezinski derided Bush’s talk of a “decisive ideological struggle” against radical Islam as “simplistic and demagogic,” and called it a “mythical historical narrative” employed to justify a “protracted and potentially expanding war.”

“To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.

Most stunning and disturbing was his description of a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” It would, he suggested, involve “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He called the senators’ attention to a March 27, 2006 report in the New York Times on “a private meeting between the president and Prime Minister Blair, two months before the war, based on a memorandum prepared by the British official present at this meeting.” In the article, Brzezinski said, “the president is cited as saying he is concerned that there may not be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, and that there must be some consideration given to finding a different basis for undertaking the action.”

He continued: “I’ll just read you what this memo allegedly says, according to the New York Times: ‘The memo states that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation.’

“He described the several ways in which this could be done. I won’t go into that... the ways were quite sensational, at least one of them.

...
“I am perplexed,” he said, “by the fact that major strategic decisions seem to be made within a very narrow circle of individuals—just a few, probably a handful, perhaps not more than the fingers on my hand. And these are the individuals, all of whom but one, who made the original decision to go to war, and used the original justifications to go to war.”

...
Following the hearing, this reporter asked Brzezinski directly if he was suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself. The former national security adviser was evasive.

The following exchange took place:
Q: Dr. Brzezinski, who do you think would be carrying out this possible provocation?
A: I have no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous.
Q: Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?
A: I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace.

A short clip of Zbigniew Brzezinski's testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Read the entire article here.
Emphases added by Middle-Easterner.

Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says

From the article "Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says" published in New York Times in March 27, 2006.
By Don Van Natta Jr.

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

...
Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

...
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

...

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information.

...
The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

...
At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable

...
Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

...
Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway."

...
Despite intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president on that late January day at the White House.

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice tell the truth about Iraq's WMD before the invasion

Read the entire article here.

Emphases added by Middle-Easterner.