| Antiwar.com, August 19, 2008 |
| by Patrick J. Buchanan |
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The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly. Truman refused to use force to break Stalin’s Berlin blockade. Ike refused to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Jimmy Carter’s response to Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing. These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians who prefer Russians to Georgians. The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad. Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far. And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the British Empire? As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan belonged to Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through breakaway Georgia to the West? For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow. If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us? The swift and decisive action of Putin’s army in running the Georgian forces out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped the hammer on him. What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin’s trap? Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give Saakashvili a green light? Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S. humiliation. The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power. There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO membership to Tbilisi. The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going about it exactly the right way. Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a proud and powerful country, to assert his nation’s primacy in its own sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our side of the Atlantic. A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia. Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe? As for Saakashvili, he’s probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute. COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC. |
Posts Tagged ‘United States’
P.J. Buchanan: Who Started Cold War II?
August 19, 2008American-backed dictator tossed overboard
August 19, 2008explains why the U.S. could no longer keep its man Musharraf in charge of Pakistan.
Socialist Worker, August 19, 2008
Facing impeachment, Pervez Musharraf resigns as president of Pakistan.
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF has now joined an infamous legacy of Pakistani military dictators–Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan–who have been forced to resign because of immense popular pressure.
Musharraf resigned from the presidency on August 18 rather than face impending impeachment charges, thanks to a deal brokered by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. While much of the Western media has been preoccupied with what effect his resignation will have on the “war on terror,” they have ignored how Musharraf’s ouster has invigorated the civil society organizations, unions and left-wing groups that took to the streets in celebration of his downfall.
In reality, Musharraf’s resignation is a crisis of the West’s own making. As Musharraf has drawn Pakistan further and further into the U.S.’s imperial designs, popular dissatisfaction has grown with these policies. And in the past few years, Pakistan has seen its economy decline, its acts of terror increase and violations of civil rights rise dramatically.
This is a far cry from the “order” that Musharraf promised when he came to power in 1999. As the chief of staff of the armed forces, Musharraf overthrew then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in a bloodless coup. Sharif’s regime was riddled with corruption. Also, a section of the domestic ruling class chafed at Sharif’s habit of antagonizing the West, first with nuclear weapons tests which incurred sanctions and then by criticizing U.S. foreign policy. But Sharif overplayed his hand. He threatened to oust Musharraf, but was himself forced from office instead.
Once in power, Musharraf immediately began a policy of reorganizing the military and the Pakistani economy. He benefited from a period of economic growth, stimulated in part by India’s booming economy.
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ONE OF the primary reasons that Musharraf lasted as long as he did was because of the role that he played in the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Musharraf was initially reluctant to collaborate, given that Pakistan’s fortunes and regional influence had actually been raised as a consequence of the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in the 1990s. But after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration needed support from frontline states like Pakistan in order to pull off an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt Osama bin Laden.
Thus, a combination of threats and economic benefits moved Pakistan more fully into the U.S. orbit. Pakistan’s military bases, intelligence and personnel were made available to the U.S. military. In exchange, the U.S. lifted sanctions on Pakistan and helped steer foreign direct investment into the country. This cooperation with the U.S. war on terror, though, brought Musharraf into immediate conflict with several forces inside of his country.
First, there was the military and intelligence establishment, both of which had been inculcated with Islamic ideology since the military regime of Gen. Zia Ul-Haq, who seized power in 1977 and was killed in 1988. Thus, Musharraf’s about face, turning yesterday’s Muslim allies into today’s terrorist enemies, didn’t sit well with large parts of the military. The army and intelligence operatives responded by only half-heartedly participating in efforts to secure the border, drive out al-Qaeda, close Islamic schools (madrassas) and shut down Islamist outfits.
For example, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) did crack down upon some Islamist outfits in the regions bordering Afghanistan–the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWFP). Yet at other times it turned a blind eye to such organizations, allowing the Taliban and al-Qaeda to gain strength in the region. But the repression of Islamist movements antagonized Muslim organizations and ordinary Pakistanis, who chafed at the complicity of the Pakistani military in the U.S. imperial project.
Indeed, Musharraf’s cooperation with the U.S. against Afghanistan and Iraq soon turned major Islamic parties and organizations against him. Several attempts were made on Musharraf’s life by suicide bombers and other would-be assassins. The most spectacular confrontation with the Islamists took place last year, in a bloody police operation to oust Islamist militants who the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the city of Islamabad.
In order to carry out the U.S. war, Musharraf also had to pursue a domestic agenda of neoliberal, pro-business economic policies and the suppression of political freedoms and liberties. The first part of the agenda meant breakneck privatization of state-owned industries at bargain-basement prices, while the second meant that Musharraf routinely suspended the constitution, shut down mainstream media outlets, declared states of emergency and even disappeared political dissidents.
Perhaps the most egregious of Musharraf’s crimes was the political engineering of his tenure as president. The 2002 referendum that Musharraf used to justify his seizing control of the presidency was widely disputed as rigged. Musharraf also angered the judiciary by refusing to resign his position as head of the Pakistani military, despite the fact that the constitution explicitly prohibits the executive from holding a position in the armed forces.
As Musharraf prepared to seek election in 2007, calls for him to resign from the army grew, sparking a protest in the judiciary itself. The election debacle began with the Supreme Court of Pakistan threatening to declare Musharraf’s presidency illegal, and concluded with Musharraf suspending the constitution, firing the judges who opposed him and stacking the judiciary with loyal judges (who still hold their positions). This provoked a massive protest by lawyers, students and ordinary Pakistanis to demand the reinstatement of the judges. Popular dissatisfaction only sharpened.
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL shenanigans of Musharraf allowed the U.S. to engineer the return of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister and head of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), to contest parliamentary elections. She could have provided the legitimacy that the U.S. needed to conduct its war on terror, but her assassination earlier this year meant that the U.S. would have to cobble together a much more fragile set of allies.
In the wake of Bhutto’s assassination, her PPP won the largest number of seats in the parliamentary elections, followed closely by Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N. The two rival parties formed an uneasy anti-Musharraf coalition government, and it appeared that Musharraf might be able to survive because of the government’s weakness.
By summer, however, the PPP and PML-N closed ranks to push for Musharraf’s impeachment. Next, Pakistan’s four provincial legislatures passed votes of no-confidence in Musharraf. An impeachment proceeding appeared inevitable. So Musharraf agreed to a plan hatched by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia which allowed him to leave his office and potentially accept voluntary exile. In the meantime, the office of the presidency will be assumed temporarily by Mohammadmian Soomro, a Musharraf ally, until the parliament can elect a new president.
The biggest beneficiaries of Musharraf’s resignation will be the PPP, headed by Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N. But Musharraf’s resignation has actually ignited and inspired grassroots activism throughout the country–and unless the judiciary is restored and the economy improves markedly, the instability in the country is not likely to end soon.
Also, the resignation of Musharraf hardly caught the West by surprise. Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani of the PPP made a recent trip to Washington with the intention of convincing the Bush regime that the war on terror could be fought without Musharraf at the helm. The U.S., while unhappy at losing a reliable ally, didn’t lift a finger to help Musharraf. The Bush administration realizes that the PPP is willing to play the role the Americans want them to.
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THE U.S. needs continued Pakistani support for a number of political and military objectives. On the one hand, Pakistan’s position as an important Muslim nation allows the U.S. to project the lie that it has regional allies. On the other hand, it needs Pakistan to secure its border with Afghanistan, which has enabled the Taliban and its allies to obtain resources and reach safe havens.
The new civilian government in Pakistan will likely produce some changes in military policy. But these will take some time take effect, and are not likely to be substantial. In fact, both the lawyers’ movement and the PPP have campaigned for Musharraf’s ouster on the basis that they would be better equipped to handle the terrorists without him.
And the problems that Pakistan faces will not be resolved by simply removing Musharraf. Tariq Ali recently explained:
Musharraf’s departure will highlight the problems that confront the country, which is in the grip of a food and power crisis that is creating severe problems in every city. Inflation is out of control and was approaching the 15 percent mark in May 2008. Gas (used for cooking in many homes) prices have risen by 30 percent. Wheat, the staple diet of most people has seen a 20 percent price hike since November 2007, and while the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization admits that the world’s food stocks are at record lows, there is an additional problem in Pakistan. Too much wheat is being smuggled into Afghanistan to serve the needs of the NATO armies. The poor are the worst hit, but middle-class families are also affected and according to a June 2008 survey, 86 percent of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour on a daily basis, for which they blame their own new government.
Some of these economic troubles could have been solved with the extraordinary amount of money that Pakistan spends on its military and the war on terror. But as long as the priorities for Pakistan are determined by what is best for the country’s tiny elite and the U.S. empire, ordinary Pakistanis will continue to suffer.
The hope for real change in Pakistan will depend on whether or not the social movements of the day can seize on the opportunity to advance an altogether different–one that begins with removing Pakistan from the project of building the American empire.
Christians United for Israel and Attacking Iran
August 19, 2008Dedrick Muhammad and Farrah Hassen | Foreign Policy In Focus, August 18,
2008Though the national sentiment favors wrapping up the Iraq War, there exists a small but powerful movement for starting a new military conflict with Iran. The bipartisan drumbeats for aggression reverberate throughout the corridors of Congress. House Resolution 362 and Senate Resolution 580, for example, call on the United States to prevent Iran from “acquiring a nuclear weapons capability through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means.”
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| Photo by Dedrick Muhammad. |
The House’s Iran resolution, sponsored by Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), demands the president impose “stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran.” This legislation effectively requires a blockade on Iran which is considered by international law as an act of war. The Senate’s Iran resolution, sponsored by Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), would require a ban on “the importation of refined petroleum products to Iran.” Neither resolution offers evidence on Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Both neglect to mention any sanctions against the only country known to actually have developed nuclear weapons in the Middle East: Israel.
Evoking Orwellian 2+2=5 logic, both Congressmen have offered sanctions as the means to avoid war by applying economic pressure on Iran. Yet sanctions rarely achieve their intended objective. For instance, unilateral U.S. sanctions failed to topple the Cuban, Iraqi and Libyan governments. They punished (and in Cuba’s case, continue to punish) civilians instead.
Washington-Israel Summit
The “squeeze Iran” and “confront Iran” positions are strongly encouraged by the increasingly powerful Zionist Christian Fundamentalist community. About 5,000 people from across the United States attended the third annual Washington-Israel Summit, organized by Christians United for Israel (CUFI). There, the “Iranian threat” loomed as a pervasive theme.
“What do you do with a maniac like Ahmadinejad? I’m not sure diplomacy works,” Gary Bauer, President of American Values and a CUFI executive board member, told the crowd during the July 22 “Middle East Intelligence Briefing.” Another panelist, Representative Mike Pence (R-IN), urged the attendees to make their support for HR 362 known to their members of Congress.
We attended this “the Rapture” meets “Clash of Civilizations” session – on the only day open to the press. We listened to the never-ending chorus from Bauer, Pence, Representative Elliot Engel (D-NY), and The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol who kept telling the assembled crowd why Americans must fear “Islamo-fascists”/”Islamo-radicals”/”death worshippers,” and their other scary names for Muslims. Panels curiously closed to the press at the three-day conference included “Iran: Eye of the Storm,” “Radical Islam: In Their Own Words” and “How to Stop Funding the Enemy: Divestment, Sanctions and Boycotts.”
As Muslims, we attended the summit to learn more about CUFI. What we found was disturbing. Being well-received and courteously treated by the pleasant staff of a conference that talks of Muslims as “death worshippers” was a truly paradoxical experience. We also found it ironic that the organization’s acronym, CUFI, is pronounced like kufi, an Arabic word for the short, rounded prayer cap worn by devout Muslim men.
Busting the Anthrax Myth
August 15, 2008RINF.COM. August 13, 2008
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart
| Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, chief medical officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional subcommittee on July 22 that the risk of a large-scale biological attack on the nation is significant and that the U.S. government knows its terrorist enemies have sought to use biological agents as instruments of warfare. Runge also said that the United States believes that capability is within the terrorists’ reach.
Runge gave his testimony before a subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology that was holding a field hearing in Providence, R.I., to discuss the topic of “Emerging Biological Threats and Public Health Preparedness.”
During his testimony, Runge specifically pointed to al Qaeda as the most significant threat and testified that the United States had determined that the terrorist organization is seeking to develop and use a biological weapon to cause mass casualties in an attack. According to Runge, U.S. analysis indicates that anthrax is the most likely choice, and a successful single-city attack on an unprepared population could kill hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Later in his testimony, Runge remarked that many do not perceive the threat of bioterrorism to be as significant as that of a nuclear or conventional strike, even though such an attack could kill as many people as a nuclear detonation and have its own long-term environmental effects.
We must admit to being among those who do not perceive the threat of bioterrorism to be as significant as that posed by a nuclear strike. To be fair, it must be noted that we also do not see strikes using chemical or radiological weapons rising to the threshold of a true weapon of mass destruction either. The successful detonation of a nuclear weapon in an American city would be far more devastating than any of these other forms of attack.
In fact, based on the past history of nonstate actors conducting attacks using biological weapons, we remain skeptical that a nonstate actor could conduct a biological weapons strike capable of creating as many casualties as a large strike using conventional explosives — such as the October 2002 Bali bombings that resulted in 202 deaths or the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191.
We do not disagree with Runge’s statements that actors such as al Qaeda have demonstrated an interest in biological weapons. There is ample evidence that al Qaeda has a rudimentary biological weapons capability. However, there is a huge chasm of capability that separates intent and a rudimentary biological weapons program from a biological weapons program that is capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Misconceptions About Biological Weapons
There are many misconceptions involving biological weapons. The three most common are that they are easy to obtain, that they are easy to deploy effectively, and that, when used, they always cause massive casualties.
‘Where Are the Weapons of Mass Destruction?’
August 13, 2008Truthdig, Aug 11, 2008
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| AP photo / Bullit Marquez |
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A U.S. soldier checks the radiation level of a canister that was looted during the invasion from the nuclear facility in Tuwaitha, Iraq. A Harris poll released July 21, 2006, found that 50 percent of U.S. respondents said they believed Iraq had nuclear arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003. |
By Scott Ritter
In the past two decades I have had the opportunity to participate in certain experiences pertaining to my work that fall into the category of “no one will ever believe this.” I usually file these away, calling on them only when events transpire that breathe new life into these extraordinary memories. Ron Suskind, a noted and accomplished journalist, has written a new book, “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism,” in which he claims that the “White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush [Tahir Jalil Habbush, the director of the Mukhabarat], to Saddam [Hussein], backdated to July 1, 2001.” According to Suskind, the letter said that “9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq—thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq.”
This is an extraordinary charge, which both the White House and the CIA vehemently deny. Suskind outlines a scenario which dates to the summer and fall of 2003, troubled times for the Bush administration as its case for invading Iraq was unraveling. I cannot independently confirm Suskind’s findings, but I, too, heard a similar story, from a source I trust implicitly. In my former line of work, intelligence, it was understood that establishing patterns of behavior was important. Past patterns of behavior tend to repeat themselves, and are thus of interest when assessing a set of seemingly separate circumstances around the same source. Of course, given the nature of the story line, it is better if I introduce this information within its proper context.
In the summer of 2003 I was approached by Harper’s Magazine to do a story on the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a CIA-sponsored operation investigating Saddam’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. David Kay, a former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector who served briefly in Iraq in 1991 and 1992, was at that time the head of the ISG. By October 2003 the group had prepared a so-called interim report, which claimed to have eyewitness evidence of Iraqi WMD-related activities prior to the invasion in March. The key to the ISG’s interim report was the testimony of “cooperative sources,” Iraqis of unstated pedigree purportedly providing the ISG with unverifiable information. With one exception—an Iraqi nuclear scientist who had been killed by coalition forces—David Kay failed to provide the name or WMD association of any of the sources he used for his report, making any effort to verify their assertions impossible. Many of the senior Iraqis who had openly contradicted Kay’s report were, and still are to this day, muzzled behind the walls of an American prison in Baghdad. But there was another group of Iraqis, the former scientists and technicians involved in Iraq’s WMD programs who were known to have been interviewed by the ISG, and who were released back into Iraqi society. These scientists held the key to deciphering the vague pronouncements of the ISG interim report, and could help to distinguish between fact and fiction.
US lighting Mideast powder keg?
August 12, 2008Press TV, Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:58:40 GMT
USS Theodor Roosevelt
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Three more US warships are reportedly heading towards the Persian Gulf amid ongoing tension in the region.
DEBKAfiles– an Israeli web site with alleged close links with the regime’s military and intelligence sources– claimed that the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Iwo Jima are sailing towards the Persian Gulf to reinforce the US strike forces deployed to the region.
The report said the expedition could be linked to a conflict between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Citing military experts, the web site reported that through sending more strike forces to the Persian Gulf, the US is tightening its grip on oil resources in the Persian Gulf, after Russia extended its control over Caspian oil resources.
The report added that the US fleet could also support Israeli forces in case of any attack on Iran over the country’s nuclear activities.
According to the Israeli web site the expedition can also be considered as a sign of preparations by the US and its allies to impose partial naval blockade on Iran outside the framework of the UN Security Council, and to keep the Hormuz Striate open in case of a conflict.
Israel has been calling on the US to take a hard line in dealing with Iran’s nuclear issue. The pressure by hawkish Israeli politicians, however, has met with a cold response by many US military and political figures, who see the outcome of any military attack on Iran disastrous.
SB/DA
One state with equal rights
August 8, 2008Socialist Worker, August 8, 2008 | Issue 677
The Oslo Accords of August 1993 were supposed to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel. Fifteen years later, after a vast increase in Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the ongoing erection of an apartheid wall and the barbaric siege of Gaza, increasing numbers of Palestinians and their supporters regard a two-state solution as unworkable. looks at the debate.
Demonstration for Palestinian rights in Chicago
IN THE 1970s, the dominant Fatah group within the Palestine Liberation Organization dropped its demand for a unified state governing all of Palestine with equal rights for all citizens and began the process of promoting a “two-state solution.”
In the aftermath, a consensus grew among the Palestinian left that a Palestinian mini-state was the only viable solution for Palestinians. According to this argument, the best Palestinians could achieve was a state established on the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War–land that amounted to less than 30 percent of historic Palestine.
The conclusion that a two-state solution was the only viable alternative reflected several political realities. The first was the belief that Israel had become a dominant power in the region, with the backing of the United States and Europe. Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War–and the unwillingness and inability of any other states to deliver a decisive military blow against it–confirmed this conclusion.
The second factor was a shift in the thinking of the mainstream Palestinian liberation movement, toward trilateral negotiations (between the PLO, Israel and the U.S.) and away from armed struggle and a broader engagement of regional issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
While armed struggle, in itself, held no hope of winning Palestinian statehood, the trilateral negotiations among unequal powers meant that the PLO had little with which to bargain and much to lose. Once the PLO accepted peace talks and the nebulous “two-state” framework that came with them, a series of political debacles took place under the auspices of the Oslo Accords. Yet the “peace process” reinforced the idea that Palestinian statehood would happen only at Israel’s behest.
The other factor in the debate was a decline in the Palestinian secular left, the long-time proponent of the idea of a single, democratic, secular state in Palestine.
The political weaknesses of the Palestinian left–its traditions of Stalinism and its unwillingness to oppose the Arab ruling classes of other countries in the region–left it unable to meet the challenges it faced. Thus, when the armed struggle posed the possibility of regional revolutions in the 1970s and Arab governments, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon, cracked down savagely on the Palestinian resistance, the left was paralyzed.
With the demise of the secular left, the possibility of a one-state solution seemed to die as well. As a further consequence, Palestinians lost a single banner for a unified movement that represented their concerns as an oppressed nation. Since the 1948 creation of Israel on much of the land of historic Palestine, Palestinians have always been divided between those who live within Israel’s borders, those in the Occupied Territories and those in the diaspora. Abandoning a one-state solution meant accepting those divisions as permanent.
The result was that the Palestinian nationalist struggle gave rise to rival movements and rival local leaders. Israel has been able to play on those divisions and the relative weakness of the Palestinian resistance to tighten the screws on the Palestinian population to unbearable levels.
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BUT ISRAELI policies over the past 15 years, under the auspices of the Oslo Accords, have convinced increasing numbers of Palestinians that the idea of a mini-state, or a two-state solution, isn’t viable.
Rather, it leaves unresolved all the decisive issues that resulted from the creation of the state of Israel in the first place–not the least of which are the rights of the large refugee population.
Peace and Justice Post 
In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe
August 20, 2008Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe. As the custodian of the west’s postwar resistance to the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat it served a purpose. Now it has become a diplomats’ Olympics, irrelevant but with bursts of extravagant self-importance.
Yesterday’s Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels was a fig leaf over the latest fiasco, the failure to counter the predictable Russian intervention in Georgia. Ostensibly to save Russian nationals in South Ossetia, the intervention was, in truth, to tell Georgia and Ukraine that they must not play games with the west along Russia’s frontier. Nato, which Russia would (and should) have joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a running provocation along the eastern rim of Europe.
There was no strategic need for Nato to proselytise for members, and consequent security guarantees, among the Baltic republics and border states to the south. Nor is there any strategic need for the US to place missile sites in Poland or the Czech Republic. This was mere Nato self-aggrandisement reinforcing the lobbying of the Pentagon hawks.
These moves were bound to infuriate the hypersensitive Russians, and did. There is no point in western pundits saying that the thrust of Nato close to the Russian border is quite different from the cold war location of Soviet missiles in Cuba. It seems the same to Russian nationalists.
Nor is it any good pundits remarking that Russia’s defence of Russian minorities in Georgia is quite different from Nato’s intervention to defend the Kurdish minority in Iraq or the Albanian minority in Serbia. Again, that is just how it seems to Russia.
George Bush said earlier this month that “the age of spheres of influence is over”. In that case why push that most potent sphere of influence, Nato, to the Russian border? And what of the sphere-of-influence theory that underpinned Bush’s neoconservative plan to conquer the Muslim world for democracy?
The US’s two greatest bugbears at present, Russia and Iran, both have grounds for feeling encircled by hostile forces. However badly they behave, they too are vulnerable to the politics of irrational fear. Both countries display the rudiments of democratic activity, with paranoia playing on pluralism.
The glib response of Nato’s leaders has been hawkish, that the only thing “these people” understand is tough talk and big sticks. But that just apes Russia’s attitude towards Georgia and Ukraine, which at least Russia has the power to enforce.
The west is not threatened by Russia. Turning its border into a zone of bluff and counter-bluff, so Nato can boast 10 extra flags outside its headquarters, has proved destabilising and provocative. Intelligence, like morality, is supposedly the tribute power should pay to reason. Russia is boorish and belligerent enough already. Why encourage it?
With Russia, Nato is playing with fire. In Afghanistan/Pakistan – which should always be yoked together – it is playing with dynamite. Here Osama bin Laden and Donald Rumsfeld must be laughing in unison: the former because Nato’s conduct of the war against the Taliban has been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida in Pakistan; the latter because everything he said about nation-building has proved true. “Get in fast and get out fast” was his strategy, and he was right.
The fall of Pervez Musharraf might be good news for Pakistan’s democrats. It is dreadful news for Nato’s proconsuls in their fortified enclaves in Kabul. The likelihood of political turbulence in Pakistan can only increase the hold that pro-Taliban tribes have over the long frontier with Afghanistan and, with it, the certainty of an escalating war.
Nato’s performance here has been dreadful. A half-hearted peacekeeper, it had displayed divided counsels, divided leadership and divided rules of engagement. It has reflected the view of the US general in Kosovo, Wesley Clark, that US units should never again be placed under international command. International command means no command at all.
A Pentagon report by General Barry McCaffrey, revealed last week, criticises the lack of command unity in Kabul. “Afghanistan is in misery,” it says. “A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the Afghan theatre of operation does not exist.”
There is said to be a plan for a 12,000-strong reinforcement of US troops to stage a Baghdad-style “surge”, outside the remit of Nato. The idea that the rural Taliban might be susceptible to the same handling as Iraq’s urban militias may be senseless, but is on the cards. Such a surge would mean three rival armies – Afghan, Nato and American – roaming this troubled land, a gift to any enemy.
The newly triumphant coalition in Islamabad must long for the days when its Afghan backyard was quiet. The Taliban regime was funded by opium and the Saudis, and of no strategic (as opposed to terrorist) concern to the west. There were no US Predators bombing villages, no CIA phone-tapping, no suborned Pakistan intelligence officers, no outside interference. Pakistan’s sphere of influence might not be to every taste, but it was roughly stable.
We shall now have the world’s sixth largest country, and with an active nuclear arsenal, in internal turmoil because of a doomed Nato adventure on its border. Taliban units are operating freely throughout the south and east of Afghanistan and within miles of the capital, Kabul, flatly contradicting the mendacious spin of Nato spokesmen over the past two years.
Western governments seem never to learn. Counter-insurgency wars of this sort never work if they become drawn out. At best they leave broken, corrupted, failed states such as Lebanon and Kosovo – and, soon, Iraq. At worst they mean defeat. If ever America were walking into another Vietnam, it is now in Afghanistan, fast replacing Iraq as the mecca for every anti-western fanatic on earth.
Peace in Afghanistan might not matter over much. But its absence will grossly destabilise Pakistan, and that matters greatly. Is this to be another feather in Nato’s cap?
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
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Tags:Afghanistan, Gen. Barry McCaffrey's report, George W. Bush, Georgia, Iran, Musharraf's fall, NATO, Pakistan, Russia, Russian minorities, United States
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