Antiwar.com Blog

I made a mistake and rush to correct it. The photo of the Afghan mujahadin does not include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar because, contrary to my contention in this post, he did not meet with Ronald Reagan in the White House. It was not for lack of an invitation, however. In fact, it was Hekmatyar who spurned the White House’s invitation.

Hekmatyar came to the U.S. in 1985 as part of a delegation of mujahadin leaders to lobby diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly. Despite enormous pressure by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which channeled a disproportionate amount of CIA and Saudi covert aid to him, Hekmatyar reportedly refused to meet with Reagan, arguing that any “palling around” with the leader of the Free World would be used by the Soviet Union and the Afghan secret police, the KHAD, to discredit his nationalist and religious credentials.

This doesn’t undermine the central point of the post, however: Reagan had intended to publicly meet with and presumably praise Hekmatyar as a “freedom fighter” — the moniker he used to describe the mujahadin depicted in the photo — at the White House and had invited him there for that purpose. But it was Hekmatyar, whose use of terrorism over more than three decades is undisputed, who turned Reagan down.

A propos, did anyone notice the elevation (due in major part to pressure from western embassies in Kabul, according to the New York Times) of a former KHAD special forces officer, Hanif Atmar, to head the Interior Ministry under President Hamid Karzai? What goes around comes around; one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. In any event, I apologize for the mistaken identity.

I didn’t want the week to go by completely without noting the revealing interview given by Likud Party leader and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the Financial Times and published in its October 7 edition. The interview makes clear that Netanyahu, who, according to recent polls, would be the front-runner in Israel if new elections were held today, has no interest in a two-state solution and would prefer to lead his country and the Palestinian territories under its control into a de facto apartheid state, bantustans and all. To quote from the FT:

“…Mr. Netanyahu wants to see the West Bank divided into a collection of disconnected economic zones with dedicated business projects.

“The ancient town of Jericho, for instance, should capitalise on its proximity to the Jordan River to attract Baptist tourists from the US — a location which the hawkish leader of the Israeli opposition says is ‘easily worth tens of thousands of jobs.’”

“The Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu adds, would be allowed to hold on to their population centres. Other parts of the West Bank, such as the Judean desert and the Jordan Valley, should not leave Israeli control. ‘These areas are very significant for us because they are our strategic security belt,’ he says.

“…’It is not so much that peace brings prosperity – it is that prosperity brings peace,’ he says.”

All this sounds, of course, a lot like a recipe for setting up Bantustans. Instead of casinos in Sun City in Bophuthatswana, Netanyahu proposes Biblical tourism for Christian Zionists as a possible economic engine for Palestinian development.

Netanyahu goes on to offer his worldview, one that demonstrates clearly what the neo-conservatives have tried to do since 9/11 — subordinate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a “clash of civilizations” in which the U.S. and the West would naturally have to support Israel. Quoting again from the FT:

“Resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians …is a second-order issue for the Likud leader. ‘The issue for me is not the Palestinian problem. I think that conflict has been replaced by the battle between radical Islam and the western world,’ he says.” [Editor’s note: Is there any doubt that distribution of ‘Obsession’ in the U.S. and abroad serves Likud’s purposes exceptionally well?]

“Handing back control of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the Palestinians as part of a peace deal, argues Mr. Netanyahu, would strengthen the hand of Iran. ‘Any area we withdraw from will be taken over by Iran and its proxies,’ he claims, pointing to the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, last year. ‘Both Lebanon and Gaza have become Iranian bases and they would get a third one if we retreat from the West Bank.’”

So, if Netanyahu somehow regains the premiership and has sufficient political power (and U.S. backing) to follow through on his current views, the inevitable result will be a de facto apartheid Israel and, one way or another, the end of a state that is both Jewish and democratic. Indeed, the biggest threat to Israel’s existence clearly lies not with Iran and its allies, but rather from Netanyahu the Likud and those who support them abroad, particularly in the U.S.

Speaking of which, check out a bizarre story in the current issue of The Forward about a U.S. group called “Stand Up America” led by two retired U.S. generals who have retained a U.S. attorney to represent former Israeli defense minister Gen. Shaul Mofaz in any legal effort to reverse his defeat last month in the Kadima primary election by Tzipi Livni. Mofaz, of course, represents the right wing of the centrist party, although, historically, his views are virtually indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s, Mofaz’ former mentor in Likud. (It was Mofaz whose threats against Iran last spring contributed substantially to the biggest daily spike in the global price of oil in its historic rise through the summer.)

The two generals are Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely who have long advocated a military attack on Iran and have been members of the Iraq Policy Committee, a group that has lobbied hard (and so far unsuccessfully) for taking the cultish Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MeK) off the State Department’s terrorism and for providing it with loads of assistance as leader of the “democratic opposition” to the theocracy. Stand Up America, according to McInerny, is to “protect America and let people understand the danger of radical Islam and the seriousness of global jihad.”

“We do not want a government in Israel that will support appeasement,” McInerney told The Forward. “…We believe it is 1938 and everyone is going on, in denial.”

The two generals’ last trip to Israel was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

[audio:http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/download.php?filename=2008-10-09_045_the_fraudulent_war.mp3]

Lew Rockwell, founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and proprietor of LewRockwell.com, and Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, discuss the fraudulent case for war with Iraq, the longstanding policy of regime change there, the horrible sanctions, the deliberate conflation of nukes and mustard gas into “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the hopefully receding danger of war with Iran and Pakistan due to the collapse of the American economy, McCain and Obama’s plans for “National Service” conscription and the great success of the Restoring the Republic conference.

MP3 here. (12:37)

Check out more of Lew’s show here.

Lew Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, and publisher of the political Web site LewRockwell.com. He served as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982. Check out his new podcast show here.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, publisher of The Freeman and Freedom Daily. Fluent in Spanish and conversant in Italian, he has delivered speeches and engaged in debates and discussions about free-market principles with groups all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Europe, and Latin America, including Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina. He has also advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on FOX New’s Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows. His editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, La Prensa San Diego, El Nuevo Miami Herald, and many others, both in the United States and in Latin America. He is a co-editor or contributor to the eight books that have been published by the Foundation.

In a speech today, John McCain told the audience: “Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners.”

Here is a 13 second YouTube clip from the speech.

I thought McCain had been in politics long enough to know not to notify people that he was nullifying all their rights until after the election.

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The current issue will be of interest to my readers. Check out my take on the proposal for a “league of democracies” over at The American Conservative. Also, in the same issue, you might want to look at Anthony Gregory’s great review of my recently republished book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. The latter is available to subscribers.

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