Category: News

One of the favored tactics of Israeli politicians over the years has been to promote the fact that they are willing to negotiate with the Palestinians “without preconditions.” This tactic is a beneficial public relations stunt because it is juxtaposed by the Palestinian side, which has opposed negotiations unless Israel first freezes its illegal settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel gets to pretend like they are the less obstinate side, more willing to talk peace.

Now that Secretary of State John Kerry has somehow persuaded both Israelis and Palestinians to come back to the negotiating table, it looks to me like Israel is employing another PR tactic: provoke the Palestinians into angrily withdrawing from negotiations. Israel would get to pretend, again, like they are still waiting peacefully to engage in talks.

In mid-August, a matter of days after it was announced that the Palestinians dropped all preconditions for talks and would sit down with Israel in U.S.-brokered negotiations, Israel announced the construction of more than 1,000 new housing units on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It was quite obviously a deliberate provocation.

“If the Israeli government believes that every week they’re going to cross a red line by settlement activity,” Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters, “what they’re advertising is the unsustainability of the negotiations.”

“We believe that Israel is deliberately sending a message to the US, to the rest of the world that regardless of any attempt at launching negotiations, ‘we are going to press ahead with stealing more land, building more settlements and destroying the two-state-solution,'” PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC.

But the Palestinian side sucked it up, stopping short of withdrawing from negotiations.

This week, Israel moved into Palestinian-owned land in East Jerusalem with bulldozers after announcing the approval for construction of 1,500 additional housing units. Again, a deliberate provocation.

Finally, undercover Israeli forces wearing civilian clothes began to infiltrate a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank in the middle of the night last night. Their stated aim was to arrest “a suspect” in the camp. When refugees resisted the Israeli military’s early morning encroachment by throwing rocks, Israeli forces shot and killed three unarmed Palestinians, wounding at least 15 others, six of whom are in a critical condition.

If the situation was reversed, and plain-clothes Palestinian forces killed three Israelis, it would be just the kind of event that would prompt Israel to launch an air war in Gaza and kill a thousand or so Palestinians. The Palestinian response so far to this awful event has been to call off a scheduled meeting for peace talks today. It is unclear whether they will call off negotiations entirely.

It’s difficult to come to any other conclusion: Israel is trying to derail negotiations by provoking Palestinian pullout with repeated offenses, like killing unarmed Palestinians and continuing to engage in territorial expansion in Palestinian land.

And people wondered why cynicism was in order.

Aaron David Miller thinks the Obama administration will bomb Syria, aiming not to topple the Assad regime but to “make a point.”

Noting the Obama administration’s reluctance to go to war in Syria, Miller expects a “middle-ground response” like “targeted attacks against Syrian military units associated with chemical-weapons capacity and infrastructure,” which would “split the difference between doing nothing on the one hand and using the chemical-weapons issue to change the battlefield balance against the regime on the other.”

Obama has long viewed toppling Assad as problematic. The State Department said early this year that it is of utmost importance to “maintain the functions of the state” in Syria, so as to avoid a power vacuum that the al-Qaeda-linked jihadists could take advantage of. As Phil Giraldi, former CIA intelligence officer and Antiwar.com columnist, told me back in March, “Obama has come around to the view that regime change is more fraught with dangers than letting Assad remain.”

So, amid heightened pressure to respond with force to allegations about the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, Obama could be fishing for a middle ground, as Miller argues. The alternative is ugly. If the Obama administration tried to bomb the Assad regime out of existence, the U.S. would then have to militarily occupy Syria, at least to prevent the chemical weapons stockpiles from getting into the hands of the rebels. That occupation would last for the foreseeable future, given the lack of competent or legitimate interim government post-Assad. In that scenario, the U.S. would be fighting another armed insurgency in a crumbling Middle East country – exactly what everyone doesn’t want.

But in a way, this “middle ground” scenario Miller describes – “a single retaliatory attack that strives to make a point rather than a difference” – is even more nefarious than an all-out, boost-on-the-ground war for regime change in Syria. Imagine if President Obama came before the American people and said, “I’m going to bomb another country to make a point. Not to defend American security or interests. Not even to protect the Syrian people from Bashar al-Assad. Just to make a point.” Do you think the American people would buy this for a second?

This is the old “credibility” argument. Obama told the world that Assad’s use of chemical weapons is a “red line” that would prompt U.S. military action. So, to protect Obama’s reputation as a reliable war-maker who bombs people when he says he will, we have to go to war in Syria? Eh, ok…

In his criticism of this doctrine, Micah Zenko described the myth thusly: “Whenever the decision of a foreign leader contrasts with what Washington demands, U.S. global credibility is ‘waning’ and in need of being ‘restored.'”

Rubbish. Going to war “to make a point” is as morally repellent as the use of chemical weapons.

The calls for U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war are growing louder and louder amidst allegations that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, killing hundreds of people. The use of chemical weapons is beyond the pale, we’re told, and must be met with force to show Assad and the world that it is unacceptable.

But it’s important to remember that Washington doesn’t view the use of chemical weapons as unacceptable always and everywhere. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its war against Iran throughout the 1980s, even as they knew Saddam was deploying chemical weapons on a scale far more devastating than anything seen in Syria to date. Indeed, it isn’t enough to say that we supported Hussein while he was deploying chemical weapons; we supplied him with intelligence about what Iranian targets to hit with the expectation that he would attack with chemical weapons. We then proceeded to block Iranian attempts to bring a case against Iraq to the United Nations.

Foreign Policy:

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq’s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.

U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.

“The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew,” he told Foreign Policy.

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government.

Foreign Policy presents the information here as an exclusive revelation not known before. But Francona spoke to the press about this as far back as 2002. The Guardian reported then that not only did the U.S. know about Iraq’s “daily” use of chemical weapons, but it even supplied Hussein with “vital ingredients for chemical weapons.”

The US provided [Iraq] less conventional military equipment than British or German companies but it did allow the export of biological agents, including anthrax; vital ingredients for chemical weapons; and cluster bombs sold by a CIA front organisation in Chile, the report says.

Intelligence on Iranian troop movements was provided, despite detailed knowledge of Iraq’s use of nerve gas.

Rick Francona, an ex-army intelligence lieutenant-colonel who served in the US embassy in Baghdad in 1987 and 1988, told the Guardian: “We believed the Iraqis were using mustard gas all through the war, but that was not as sinister as nerve gas.

“They started using tabun [a nerve gas] as early as ’83 or ’84, but in a very limited way. They were probably figuring out how to use it. And in ’88, they developed sarin.”

On November 1 1983, the secretary of state, George Shultz, was passed intelligence reports of “almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]” by Iraq.

Beyond the historical hypocrisy on this issue, there are other indications readily available that suggest the excitement over chemical weapons use in Syria isn’t entirely rational or honest. To begin with, the estimates for total number of dead in the Syrian war go as high as 100,000. The current allegations are that 355 people were killed by the Syrian military’s use of chemical weapons. How does it make sense to inch towards all out war on the basis of .003 percent of the total deaths in the war?

I tried to explain that and other things in my latest piece at The Washington Times, in which I argued that chemical weapons use in Syria should do nothing to alter the case for U.S. intervention. The truth is, a U.S. intervention would almost certainly be worse, from a humanitarian and strategic perspective, than if the latest allegations are confirmed.

That’s still the case, and the American people agree. “Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria’s government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed,” Reuters reports using data from a recent poll (emphasis mine).

In an interview with Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007, U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.), explained that the Bush Administration planned to take out 7 countries in 7 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

So, with the pending illegal action against Syria, is the Obama Administration following Bush’s mid-east plan?

 

Even as they condemn the Syrian regime’s use of cluster munitions, the U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs. Cluster munitions have been banned in 83 countries on account of their indiscriminate nature and their record of killing children.

John Reed at Foreign Policy:

These weapons are loathed because in addition to killing enemy combatants, their fairly indiscriminate nature means they can kill plenty of civilians. And not just in the heat of battle. The little ball-shaped bomblets dispersed by cluster munitions don’t always detonate on first impact. Often, they will just sit there on the ground until someone, often a child, picks them up and causes them to explode.

So far, 112 countries have signed an international treaty banning cluster bombs, with 83 ratifying it.

The international ban began to take effect in June 2010, just after a U.S. cluster bomb killed 35 women and children in Yemen, with the Pentagon stubbornly refusing to admit to the wrongdoing despite damning evidence compiled by Amnesty International, which was later corroborated by classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Cluster bombs were used in the initial phases of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the Obama administration has firmly opposed their prohibition, as have countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia. What’s that old saying about how you’re known by the company you keep?

It’s also worth pointing out how eager the U.S. is to keep giving Saudi Arabia, one of the most horrific, repressive, mysogynist theocracies in the world, all the weapons and money it asks for. Reed again:

The cluster bomb sale is just the latest in a string ongoing arms deals between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that include dozens of F-15SA Strike Eagle fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, H-60 Blackhawk helicopters and AH-6 Little Bird choppers as well as radars, anti-ship missiles, guided bombs, anti-radar missiles, surface to air missiles and even cyber defenses for those brand new Strike Eagles. It’s a relationship that’s worth tens of billions to American defense contractors. And even though the Saudi and the American governments have recently been at odds over a range of issues — Riyadh recently offered to replace any financial aid to Egypt’s military rulers that the U.S. withdrew —  those arms sales are all-but-certain to continue. If the Saudis want cluster bombs, the U.S. will provide — no matter what the world thinks.

On the one hand, the U.S. is desperate to maintain the geo-political dominance it has held over the Middle East at a time when it seems to be slipping through their fingers. And on the other, one of the strongest lobbies in Washington – the defense corporations – really want to proceeds of these nefarious weapons sales. And you gotta please them.

Matthew Schrier, a photojournalist covering the war in Syria, was captured by al-Qaeda-linked rebels and held for seven months. He finally escaped and has now told his story to various media outlets.

Once, when he was caught trying to escape, his captors tortured him as punishment.

They “forced a car tire over his knees” and “slid a wooden rod behind his legs,” proceeding to beat the bottom of his feet with a metal cable more than 100 times. At the end of it, he couldn’t walk.

The rebels dragged him back to his cell and their parting words, according to Schrier, were “Have you heard of Guantanamo Bay?”