ZGram - 4/18/2003 - "The Night After"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

April 18, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

For some reason, I had a difficult time all day today finding 
anything on the Internet that interested me and struck a deep cord. 
It seems that I have read it all before!

The article below was posted on David Irving's website.  I find it to 
be a disturbing article - not for its obvious conclusions but for its 
undercurrents.  I guess I don't like the gloating aspect - that 
"might makes right", to use a well-known phrase.

Not that Uri Avnery agrees - he just notes it as a given, as 
something that has now arrived.  I would have preferred a sharper 
spice.  Maybe I am just tired.

Let's see how my readers react:

[START]

[START]

April 9, 2003

The Night After

By Uri Avnery
Israeli author and journalist


THE next war. It is now fashionable to talk about "the day after". 
Let's talk about night after.

After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will be faced with 
two decisive facts:

*	First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat any 
people in the world, valiant as it may be.

*	Second, the small group that initiated this war - an alliance 
of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives - has won 
big, and from now on it will control Washington almost without limits.

The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger to the world, 
and especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the future of 
Israel. Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the 
enemy of the Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people 
and especially the enemy of the Israeli peace camp.

It does not dream only about an American empire, in the style of the 
Roman one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control of 
the extreme right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in 
all Arab countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the 
consequences of which it is impossible to foresee.

Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological fervor and 
crass material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism and 
right-wing ionism.

That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something of the spirit 
of Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans for 
changing the region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination, 
unbridled chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.

 

  WHO are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or 
neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are 
Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as 
well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating 
American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers.

For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered a right-wing 
agenda in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality, 
pornography and drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in 
Israel, they offered him advise on how to fight the Arabs.

Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin Towers. The 
American public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely 
disoriented, unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. 
The neo-cons were the only group with a ready explanation and a 
solution. Only nine days after the outrage, William Kristol (the son 
of the group's founder, Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to 
President Bush, asserting that it was not enough to annihilate the 
network of Osama bin Laden, but that it was also imperative to 
"remove Saddam Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" against Syria 
and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.

Following is a short list of the main characters. (If it bores you, 
skip to the next section).

The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard, founded by 
Kristol with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who 
donated $10 million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading 
neo-cons, including Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has 
become an extreme right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious 
Encounter [Commentary] magazine, and his wife, Midge Decter, also a 
writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Studies, Robert 
Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer of the 
Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle.

Perle is a central character in this play. Until recently he was the 
chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the Defense Department, which 
also includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the 
Jerusalem Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past 
he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against 
the Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He is a 
leading member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise 
Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign from his Defense 
Department position, when it became known that a private corporation 
had promised to pay him almost a million dollars for the benefit of 
his influence in the administration.

 

  THAT Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the Iraq war. It 
was eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members of the 
group already firmly established in some of its leading positions. 
Paul Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense 
Department, where another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the 
Pentagon Planning Board. John Bolton is State Department 
Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, responsible for the Middle East in the 
National Security Council, was connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel 
scandal. The main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits in the 
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, together with Michael 
Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. He advocates total war not only 
against Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria, 
Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is 
comptroller for the Defense Department.

Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney and 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (right), are associated with the 
"Project for the New American Century", which published a White Paper 
in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance this 'American peace'" 
-- meaning American control of the world.

Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name) is Director 
of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. She 
also writes for the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle 
East Media Research Institute that is, according to the London 
Guardian, connected with Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the 
media and politicians with highly selective quotations from extreme 
Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's 
American Enterprise Institute, heading Middle East Studies. Mention 
should also be made of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy 
of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years was in charge of 
the "peace process" in the Middle East.

In all the important papers there are people close to the group, such 
as William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New York Times 
and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle friend, 
Robert Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal.

If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if they came from 
the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their 
speechwriters, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are 
neo-cons, as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.

The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its 
close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, 
who nowadays control Bush's RRepublican party. The founding fathers 
were Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as 
a present from Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian 
Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to 
finance the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an 
outfit that supports the settlers and their right-wing allies.

Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical ideology of 
the extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle 
between the Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children 
of Darkness (the Arabs and Muslims).

By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have been published 
lately in dozens of articles, both in American and world media. The 
members of the group are proud of them.

 

  The Zionist general. The man who symbolizes this victory is General 
Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the civilian 
administration in Iraq.

He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally. Garner 
is the ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.

Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers, a petition 
organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, 
lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of 
lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian 
Authority," which is certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He 
also stated that "a strong Israel is an asset that American military 
planners and political eaders can rely on."

In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the Patriot 
missiles, which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in 1997, 
he became, not surprisingly, a defense contractor specializing in 
missiles. It was alleged that he landed non-competitive Pentagon 
contracts. This year he obtained a defense contract for $1.5 billion, 
as well as a contract for building Patriot systems in Israel.

Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job of chief of 
the civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when 
contracts for billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be 
handed out, to be paid for by Iraqi oil.

 

  A new Balfour declaration. The ideology of this group, that calls 
for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel, reminds 
one of bygone days.

The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews a homeland in 
Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism (among 
whose adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston and 
Lord Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist 
movement), the father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea 
allowed the British to crowd out their French competitors and take 
possession of Palestine, which was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal 
and the shorter sea route to India.

Now the same thing is happening again. Last year Richard Perle 
organized a briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on 
Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the 
world's oil heartland. Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of 
the justifications for this design is the need to defend Israel.

 

  To bet on our life? Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America 
controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews 
exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power.

But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler, who bets all 
his money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse with no 
current competitor, but still one horse.

The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the Arab and Muslim 
world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding of 
Arab realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand 
the test, only brute force saved their undertaking.

Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain here. We 
have to live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers 
our future.

Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal, Zionist and 
America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures may 
well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will 
threaten our very existence.

The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists may 
engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the 
next election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf 
War, this whole gang will be thrown out.

The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied on the then 
world power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces in the 
east, Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of 
Judea: "Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, 
upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and 
pierce it." (II Kings 18, 21).

Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed. Far from it, he 
is now a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole future on this?

[END]
=====

(Source:  http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/03/04/Avnery090403.html)