Different Side of Same Coin....

Neocons Salivate Over Hillary
Sunday July 29th 2007, 1:27 pm

It should come as no surprise prominent neocons are gushing over Hillary Clinton, as noted by the Seattle Times. Fred Barnes of the neocon house organ, the Weekly Standard, couldn’t contain his admiration for the Bilderberger Queen. Ditto for Rich Lowry of National Review, David Brooks, and the Joseph Goebbels of the neocon movement, Charles Krauthammer.

“She excels,” Lory praised. “Clinton has run a nearly flawless campaign and has done more than any other Democrat to show she’s ready to be president,” that is to say any other neocon, or neolib, not that there is a whole heck of a lot of difference, as the neocons understand. Clinton has repeatedly indicated her desire to “confront” Iran, that is to say bomb the country, or at least starve it into submission, and that naturally warms the cockles of psychopathic neocon hearts, or lack thereof.

“All this from a crowd that has spent the better part of two decades demonizing Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton,” writes a clueless Matt Stearns, corporate scribe for McClatchy Newspapers. “Is the conservative chattering class just hedging its bets, wary that Clinton might win the White House and banish them all?”

No, Matt. Point is, demonstrated well enough here, there is little difference between mainstream Democrats and neocon “conservatives,” who take their pedigree from Trotskyites and Jabotinskyite, Arab-killing terrorists. Some of them are fond of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, who wrote about dictatorship and the “death machine” of the state, while others admire Niccolò Machiavelli and the idea of principe nuovo, a pragmatic and ruthless dictator. A few of them gathered at the foot of Leo Strauss, who advocated the concept of Plato’s “noble lie,” that is to say brazen deception, a common enough practice in government these days. Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky were students of Strauss, while Andrew Sullivan, Elliott Abrams, Alan Keyes, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, and Irving Kristol studied under the Straussian Harvey C. Mansfield, who advocates a “strong executive,” that is to say the sort of decidership Schmitt wrote about. Democrats, while not explicit Straussians or stark raving fascists along the lines sketched out by Carl Schmitt, are indeed authoritarians, more socialist in a classical sense but despots nonetheless.

Hillary Clinton was selected by the ruling elite to be the next president, so it makes sense the neocons, who have made a career out of attacking and slandering Democrats, as part of the false left-right political paradigm, are enthusiastically onboard, praising the Bilderberger selectee Clinton now, same as the old communist politburo praised without hesitation the leader appointed by the Central Committee. If serious neocons understand anything it is that power from on-high must be respected and obeyed, lest they are led to the political wilderness, a dreaded prospect worse than death for most of the neocon megalomaniacs.

“Hillary Clinton is our best shot to win the White House. That’s pretty much consensus by Republican insiders,” the Seattle Times reports “a Republican strategist with a top-tier GOP candidate” as admitting. In other words, none of the Republicans currently strutting, preening, and bloviating have a chance, as the elite want a Democrat this time around, not that there is a lick of difference between Democrats and Republicans. It is interesting this admission comes from a “strategist” for a “top-tier GOP candidate.”

But then not so interesting or surprising, as little of substance will change under Queen Hillary. Of course, the masses will be fooled again, as usual, and that’s why the corporate media is now trotting out letters Hillary Rodham wrote to high school friend John Peavoy while attending Wellesley College back in the day. “The letters were written during a period when the future Mrs. Clinton was undergoing a period of profound political transformation, from the ‘Goldwater girl’ who shared her father’s conservative outlook to a liberal antiwar activist,” reports the Boston Globe. In other words, lib Dems need not be concerned, as deep down inside Hillary remains “a liberal antiwar activist.” Meanwhile, Republicans may rest easy knowing Hillary got her start supporting Goldwater, not that the neocon Republicans of today follow the principles of Barry Goldwater, indeed a real conservative.

Musharraf's Way Ouy

Time for Pakistani Generals to Tell the Truth
By: ABID ULLAH JAN
Published: July 14, 2006

OPERATION 9/11 was a carefully planned intelligence operation, much like the smaller Operation C-Chase to entrap the BCCI. The 9/11 hijackers were agents and double agents and probably unaware of the scope of the operation. They, along with the ISI, were instruments of a carefully planned international intelligence operation, which was designed to entrap Osama bin Laden and allow for war on Afghanistan. The evidence confirms that the ISI was used as the local arm of the CIA in South Asia. After all, the ISI owes its existence to the CIA. Now that the truth is becoming known, what lies ahead for the ISI and Pakistan will depend on when Washington feels the time is right to turn Pakistan into another Iraq and Afghanistan. The ISI’s role in 9/11 has already forced Pakistan to pay a price in the form of permanent U.S. forces in Pakistan, and the agreement of continued provision of support to the U.S. war of aggression on Afghanistan.

History shows that the U.S. government has previously attempted to use ISI crimes to press Pakistani governments into submission. The Washington Post published a report by John Ward and Kamran Khan in its September 12, 1994 edition in an attempt to implicate the Pakistan army in drug trafficking. The News published the same report in October 1994. Another attempt was made through Kamran Khan in the April 04, 1999 edition of The News. More recently, the ISI faced severe criticism at a U.S. Senate briefing on the drug trade, a crime in which the CIA has been involved since 1960.285 This hearing of the U.S. Senate was just another threat in the vast trap being laid for the Pakistani army for the next several years.

The entrapment process adopted by the U.S. agencies is very simple. They plan and commit a crime of serious magnitude. They achieve their strategic objective behind the crime. At the same time, they involve the victim in just a fraction of the overall criminal plan. The unknown/unintended cooperation in the crime is then later used to punish the victim. This is exactly how the BCCI was trapped. Irrefutable evidence, as discussed in the earlier sections of this book, demonstrates that the CIA funded the operation against the BCCI with drug money, earned through the organized selling of drugs to its own employees. According to the court transcripts of the BCCI case: “By late 1987, the agents had passed approximately $2.2 million derived from Don Chepe’s proceeds through the IDC account, and had split the 7-8 percent commission profit with Mora and Don Chepe’s representative Javier Ospina, without telling any BCCI officers about drugs.”286 Yet, it was the BCCI that paid the price.

Similarly, the U.S. lawmakers planned to punish the ISI and Pakistan for drug trafficking, yet ignored the fact that even if some military or ISI officials were involved in drug trafficking on a personal level, the amount they privately smuggled into the United States was no more than a fraction of the amount trafficked by the U.S. agencies. According to Paul Johnson, Modern Times, “By the end of the 1980s it was calculated that the illegal use of drugs in the United States now netted its controllers over $110 billion a year.”287

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune (August 13, 1996), Celerino Castelo—a former DEA agent—stated that together with three other ex-DEA agents, they were willing to testify in Congress regarding their direct knowledge of CIA involvement in international drug trafficking. Castillo estimates that approximately 75 percent of narcotics entered the United States with the acquiescence or direct participation of CIA and foreign intelligence agents.

The drug case against the ISI was used to extract more obedience from Islamabad for strategic reasons. However, the case was set aside once the military regime accepted additional conditions, which are not publicly known. However, this will not be the case when it is time to discard the ISI and remove Pakistan as a hurdle in achieving unknown future strategic objectives of the administrations in Washington or Tel Aviv.

Making a case on the basis of the ISI’s involvement in drug trafficking was sufficient only for blackmailing the opportunist dictator in Islamabad into further submission. The case on the basis of the ISI’s involvement in Operation 9/11 can now pave the way for aggression against Pakistan. When it is time to turn Pakistan into another Iraq, as General Musharraf indicated as a possibility in early 2003, the Washington administration will ignore the fact that 9/11 was well-orchestrated, well-planned, and the product of numerous agencies—including the aviation authority, the Air Force, the FBI, the Immigration Services, and a centralized secret group of planners with international intelligence connections with the CIA, the ISI, and others. Only the ISI will be held accountable for everything that transpired on 9/11. If India is used to play a lead role in neutralizing Pakistan, that would realize General Musharraf’s worst nightmare. India has already been used as a threat to scare Musharraf into compromising on Pakistan’s sovereignty, principles of international law, and the norms of human decency.

In the case of Afghanistan, the United States was not ready to listen to any proposals from the Taliban government—as if it had already decided that occupation of Afghanistan was the only solution. The numerous, almost daily Taliban appeals to the United States for patience and restraint were dismissed. In Mullah Omar’s words:

“America always repeats threats and makes various accusations and now it is threatening military attack. This is being done in circumstances in which we have offered alternatives on the Osama issue. We have said, if you have evidence against Osama, give it to the Afghan Supreme Court or the Ulema (clerics) of three Islamic countries, or have OIC (Organization of Islamic Countries) observers keep an eye on Osama. But America rejected these, one by one. If America had considered these suggestions there would not have been a chance of such a great misunderstanding. We appeal to the American government to exercise complete patience, and we want America to gather complete information and find the actual culprits. We assure the whole world that neither Osama nor anyone else can use the Afghan land against anyone else.288

Future entreaties from General Musharraf or any Pakistani head of state at the time of U.S., Indian, or Israeli aggression—or any combination of these—against Pakistan would likely also fall on deaf ears. The United States will not want to lose the opportunity it created by engineering Operation 9/11. Under the leadership of an opportunist and myopic military leadership, Pakistan has slipped far too deep into the trap.

There is only one solution to the present crisis. Only truth will save Pakistan from the eternal bullying and blackmail by Washington. Air force Chief Mushaf Ali Mir has been eliminated. General Mahmood has been removed from his job and completely silenced. Saeed Sheikh has been convicted of a crime that he never committed. Khalid Sheikh is in the custody of the CIA, which has no plans to put him on public trial. All these individuals have a lot to tell. The information they possess can expose those individuals behind Operation 9/11.

One of the last remaining people who can tell the truth, and thus save Pakistan, is General Musharraf. He can tell the world how he is being blackmailed and what information is being used to blackmail him. Will he tell the truth to save Pakistan from further abuse and the rest of the humanity from the totalitarian designs of modern day fascists? Musharraf may worry about the consequences. Yes, he will undoubtedly lose his position, and even put his life at stake, but there are those who will believe. The world already knows so much. The information he could share would unravel the mysteries still surrounding the 9/11 attacks. These ambiguities exist due to the U.S. administration’s refusal to share basic information, such as details from the black boxes of the planes that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Silence on the part of General Musharraf will never save Pakistan or keep him in power forever. General Musharraf will eventually be replaced, like many in positions of power before him. Both General Musharraf and General Mahmood are presently in a position to perform a service to humanity that no other individual can—they can tell the truth about the involvement of the ISI in 9/11, about the role of Saeed Sheikh and Khalid Sheikh, and about the evidence General Musharraf was shown before the U.S. attack on Afghanistan that forced him to submit to every demand from Washington and prompted his utterance, “The Taliban days are numbered.”

Unlike the silence of Pakistan’s chief of Air Staff, Mushaf Ali Mir, the silence of General Mahmood has saved his life—so far. Of course, revealing the facts about what actually transpired between General Mahmood and his fellow CIA and Mossad contacts in the United States before and on September 11 will jeopardize his life, but by telling the truth he will save the lives of thousands who are already dying and the millions who may die in the bigger wars to come. If General Musharraf and General Mahmood choose to remain silent, they will die with the blood of all those who are dead or dying due to Operation 9/11 on their hands.

General Musharraf wants to remain president-in-uniform till 2012. America wants to keep Pakistan occupied by its armed forces for as long as possible. It seems that with these complimentary objectives, Musharraf and Washington are getting along well. The reality, however, is totally different.

The United States extracted all concessions from General Musharraf through sheer blackmail. Musharraf would never have surrendered Pakistan’s sovereignty and independence merely on a phone call from Collin Powell or George W. Bush if he were not blackmailed for the ISI’s role in Operation 9/11.

Of course, the ISI was used to frame Arabs for the 9/11 attacks. But in the process, ISI’s guilt was established as an agency supporting and financing the so-declared hijackers. There are ample reasons to believe that evidence about ISI’s involvement in Operation 9/11 was used to blackmail General Musharraf into the quickest surrender of our age.

Washington knows that the general did not concede much by choice. With elections for the next parliament due in 2007, General Musharraf is desperately building a political base in the country to get a re-election from the new parliament for the next term or to get a change in the constitution to a presidential democracy to be able to shed the uniform and also to retain the political and executive powers as president. If Musharraf succeeds in this plan, this will go in favor of Washington. But Washington sees some serious problems, which would derail Musharraf’s bid to remain the most powerful man in Pakistan. This may lead Washington to settle General Musharraf’s issue the way it dealt with General Zia. The following factors show that assassinating Musharraf might become one of the best options for the United States in the present circumstances.

General Musharraf has not outlived his utility for Washington as yet. However, it is not possible for General Musharraf to remain the army chief forever. The best way Washington believes its interest could be served is to make General Musharraf’s autocratic rule look more democratic. For that, instead of crafting new webs and making another leader to fully submit to the colonial masters of present age, Washington would like to see Musharraf become another Hosnie Mubarak in Islamabad. Washington now wants him to shed his uniform and become a civilian president in the present setup.

The dilemma before Washington, however, is that Musharraf can become a president for life by deception and intrigue. However, he can never remain the chief of armed forces for life. On the other hand, no civilian ruler can use the military in the service of the United States as effectively as General Musharraf is doing because of his position as the military chief. At the same time, the U.S. efforts to create an alternate political leadership in the country to increase pressure on Musharraf also seem to be getting nowhere.

At the home front, General Musharraf’s present political allies are more of a liability than asset for him now. The main political allies, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML Quid-e-Azam group), are most corrupt, inefficient and ineffective, with no hope of securing required seats in the next elections. There is also serious internal dissent within the PML (Q).

General Musharraf’s other ally, Mutahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), is also considered a corrupt, blackmailing, sub-nationalist-minded, mafia-styled gang, which is fully exploiting the weaknesses of the General. MQM is the most unreliable, even treacherous, political ally for him.

Musharraf propped up the religious alliance of Muthahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and then used it for constitutional changes in his favor. Musharraf reneged on public promises to MMA to relinquish the post of Chief of Army Staff as part of the process of restoring democracy in Pakistan. Islamabad’s suspension from Commonwealth was lifted on the condition that General Musharraf would give up his military uniform by the end of 2004 as a proof of his commitment to democratic reform. Now the religious alliance is sensing his weaknesses and is gearing up its barrage against him.

There is a very strong perception within the religious parties that the MQM was behind the Karachi blast in April 2006. Scores of people, including prominent MMA leader Haji Hanif Billo, were killed when a bomb went off at a religious gathering in Karachi. Since then, the government has contemplated no action against the MQM, a factor that will agitate more public anger.

Former prime ministers Nawaz, Sharif and Benazir are now flexing their muscles to challenge him in the coming days. There are talks of joint efforts to remove Musharraf and even the MQM is signaling that it is willing to join such a campaign. If Benazir and Nawaz decided to return before the elections, even their arrest would make them political heroes, creating more embarrassment for the General.

The entire governance and economy is in a big mess. Musharraf relied on Shaukat Aziz, who has miserably failed on all counts. Inflation is wrecking the life of the common man – the vote bank in any elections. That vote bank is not impressed with Shaukat Aziz blowing smoke in their face with economic jargon. For a common man, for example, it is enough to know that the sugar crisis is still haunting the country. The prices have almost doubled in recent months to record levels. Still, there are no imports and all the national demands are being met in abundant supply from local stocks. The price hike gave windfall profits of billions of rupees to a few select sugar cartel mafias within a few months. The much-vaunted National Accountability Bureau was forced to drop the probe immediately after it started. The common man knows that corruption is at an all-time high within the state machinery. Abuse of power and authority are daily headlines. Police and the judiciary system remain most corrupt as well.

Thus, General Musharraf and Washington are now left with extremely limited, difficult and almost impossible options.

· Even if the military is still behind General Musharraf, it is highly unlikely that he may decide to confront the Americans, forget about democracy, stop taking international pressures, and take absolute power in his own hands once again as he had when he took power in October 1999. It does not seem possible that Musharraf would once more abolish the assemblies, defer the constitution, draft his own constitution, and declare a presidential system or even martial law. In the past, he formed a team of so-considered honest, selfless and efficient professionals to rectify the damages done in the past few years and tried to bring back control in the economy, security, governance, judiciary and social welfare of the country. He has clearly failed. Of course, the suffering masses are not interested in democracy or martial law. They want security, dignity, cheap food and energy, as well as economic development. It does not matter to them who delivers this. Nevertheless, it will be a huge task to fool them twice with the same mantra. On the part of General Musharraf, it would amount to saying, “I am redoing the eight-year experiment from the scratch.”

· Another option is renegotiating with the Americans. It is not a problem for him to bend backwards even more. He would send Pakistani forces to Iraq, recognize Israel, commit more troops to Miran Shah and other tribal areas, take responsibility for finishing off the anti-occupation resistance in Afghanistan and the Madrassas in Pakistan, and allow more unrestricted access to the United States into Pakistan’s security and intelligence, as well as nuke apparatus. Nevertheless, for sustaining these approaches, he has to remain the chief of armed forces. With these measures, he can immediately become the blue-eyed boy of the Americans once again and there will be no further chatter in Washington about democracy, which is only intended to push Musharraf into further submission. But Musharraf will have a revolt on hand in the home front and perhaps even a rebellion in the army.

· The third option is to contest elections with whatever support base the General has so far and keep Benazir, Nawaz and Sharif out of the electoral process to weaken their collective nuisance. Some heavy-duty management will be required to “arrange” the required results and to neutralize the MMA and PPP/Nawaz factor. The general has done this with the help of ISI before and can do the same again. Consequently, MQM will continue to exploit the situation and basically nothing will improve in the country in terms of economy and governance or law and order; likewise, the same team of suspects will reappear to exploit him even further for the next four years. Things can get mismanaged if Nawaz and Benazir decided to come back before the elections and launch a street protest calling their court cases politically motivated. The MMA would also join them and a bit of “hidden hand” support could start an unexpected but very real inferno. Even if everything goes well, General Musharraf will have to give up his position as the military chief. Losing his military position will make him lose all attractiveness to Washington, which is mainly concerned with sustaining Pakistan’s occupation with the Pakistani armed forces and using the Pakistani army in the interest of the United States.

· The fourth option is that the General reads the writing on the wall and decides to quit, handing over power to the next army chief who would promise the elections or would decide to stay in power depending upon what he wants to do. Musharraf will have to leave the country with his family and may settle in some friendly or neutral country like Turkey or a country in Europe. This option suits Washington, but General Musharraf is addicted to power to an extent that it is highly unlikely that he will hang his boots up so easily.

· The last option is assassination. General Musharraf may be assassinated either by his army men, any local resistance groups, Baluchistan Liberation army assassins, or, most probably, someone sent by the Americans to blame “religious extremists” and pave the way for another military general to take over and continue Pakistan’s occupation for another decade or so. Being in charge of Musharraf’s personal security in many ways, it is only the Americans who can successfully carry out the assassination operation against him. His departure in a violent manner will serve many of the United States’ strategic objectives.

In the near future, events would basically unfold in one of the many options discussed above. Right now, both Musharraf and Washington are confused and have not clearly decided on any of the options.

For Washington, the assassination option carries the most weight. We know from experience that leaders in the Muslim world who associated themselves with Washington unconditionally are doomed. The Shah of Iran, General Zia and Saddam Hussein are prominent examples. General Musharraf may continue to rule by force and power, but would not have any grassroots support and hence would remain on shaky ground within his own country.

Besides blackmailing to the fullest, Washington is giving General Musharraf a very tough time. Musharraf was the architect of Kargil operation against India. At that time he was dare devil, hardly caring about anyone. However, after the blackmail for ISI’s misadventures, he has been turned into Washington’s most submissive serf. Out of fear, he has surrendered so much that now he is not finding the courage to stand up to Washington or to face the nation. He has gone silent these days and is not defending U.S. actions, nor is he making supportive statements about the U.S. strategy in the Muslim world. General Musharraf was under the misconception that Washington would appreciate his concessions, which it was obtaining from the General through blackmail, as his favors. This, however, was not the case. Washington didn’t appreciate the “sincerity” and “sacrifice” of the entrapped general. Now, the disillusioned general is annoyed and offended by the American rebuffs to his demands and is feeling ditched and betrayed. That is a sick feeling for a man who had put all his eggs in one big American basket and is now left alone and abandoned to be replaced with another strongman, who could keep himself in uniform for a longer period than the burnt out General Musharraf. A more docile and cooperative political leadership would be the last option considered in Washington.

General Musharraf is in the middle of nowhere at the moment. His only option is to come out clean on his relations with the Americans and to give voice to what he has been hiding from his people and the whole world. He might be portrayed as insane, but to save Pakistan and the world from the scourge of a greater war, he must tell the truth. To grab the initiative back and restore the confidence of his nation in his words and deeds, General Musharraf has to tell the whole story of his entrapment. Unless General Musharraf restores the confidence of his people in his policies at home by telling the whole truth about the way the ISI was used in 9/11 and how Pakistan has been blackmailed, he is doomed.

Unfortunately, General Musharraf’s doom will not be the end of the story. That will mark the beginning of some unprecedented problems for Pakistan, which has become perfectly entangled in the American web as a result of the ISI’s misadventures and military leadership’s myopic and supine approach.

Since there is no hope that Pakistanis will make their military accountable to the people; that political leadership in Pakistan and the masses will liberate themselves from the military occupation and exploitation; that they will get a lesson from the past; that America, India and Israel will give up undermining Pakistan’s very existence, the whole South Asian region is at the verge of witnessing prelude to the Greater War in the Middle East.

The day is not far away when Pakistan, India and Afghanistan will be burning in the same flames which have engulfed Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas today. The planners of Operation 9/11 were expert in deceiving the world. However, they were naïve enough to assume that their actions will have no side effects other than what they had planned to achieve their sinister objectives. Unfortunately Operation 9/11 was not another Operation C-Chase, nor will Pakistan disappear with whimper like the demise of the BCCI.

The culprits of 9/11 will not plead guilty. Nevertheless, the world knows what really happened and who was behind the whole operation. The world only needs an insider to come out and tell it all. General Musharraf was probably not part of the planning process. But he can tell how he was blackmailed and forced into submission to the U.S. illegitimate demands. He knows how General Mahmood was used and abused in the set-up phase of the 9/11. By telling the truth about the ISI’s saga of entrapment, these two persons can save the humanity from the scourge of a greater war. They can save lives of millions from the curse of modern day fascism.



This is an excerpt. For details and references, refer to Abid Ullah Jan’s book From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues.

Bush the Destroyer of Worlds

July 27, 2007

Editor’s Note: As the nation and the world face 18 more months of George W. Bush’s presidency, a chilling prospect is that Bush – confronted with more defeats and reversals – might just “lose it” and undertake even more reckless military adventures.

In this special memorandum, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) collaborated with psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, to assess the potential dangers and possible countermeasures available to constrain Bush:

Recent events have put a great deal more pressure on President George W. Bush, who has shown little regard for the constitutional system bequeathed to us by the Founders. Having bragged about being commander in chief of the “first war of the 21st century,” one he began under false pretenses, success in Iraq is now a pipedream.
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The “new” strategy of surging troops in Baghdad has simply wasted more lives and bought some time for the president. His strategy boils down to keeping as many of our soldiers engaged as possible, in order to stave off definitive defeat in Iraq before January 2009.

Bush is commander in chief, but Congress must approve funding for the war, and its patience is running out. The war – and the polls – are going so badly that it is no longer a sure thing that the administration will be able to fund continuance of the war.

There is an outside chance Congress will succeed in forcing a pullout starting in the next several months. What would the president likely do in reaction to that slap in the face?

What would he do if the Resistance succeeded in mounting a large attack on U.S. facilities in the Green Zone or elsewhere in Iraq? How would he react if Israel mounted a preemptive attack on the nuclear-related facilities in Iran and wider war ensued?

Applied Psychoanalysis

The answers to such questions depend on a host of factors for which intelligence analysts use a variety of tools. One such tool involves applying the principles of psychoanalysis to acquire insights into the minds of key leaders, with an eye to facilitating predictions as to how they might react in certain circumstances.

For U.S. intelligence, this common-law marriage of psychoanalysis and intelligence work dates back to the early 1940s, when CIA’s forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services commissioned two studies of Adolf Hitler.

We call such assessments “at-a-distance leader personality assessments.” Many were quite useful. VIPS found the 2004 book Bush on the Couch, by Washington psychiatrist Justin Frank, MD, a very helpful assessment in this genre. We now have two more years of experience of observing Bush closely.

As we watched the pressure build on President Bush, looked toward the additional challenges we expect him to face over the next 18 months, and pondered his tendency to disregard the law and the Constitution, we felt very much in need of professional help in trying to estimate what kinds of decisions he is likely to make.

Dr. Frank, it turned out, had been thinking along the same lines, when we asked to meet with him just three weeks ago. What follows is a collaborative Frank-VIPS effort, with the psychological insights volunteered by Dr. Frank, who shares the imperative we feel to draw on all disciplines to assess what courses of action President George W. Bush is likely to decide upon in reacting to reverse after reverse in the coming months.

Parental discretion advised. The outlook is not only somber but potentially violent—and includes all manner of threats born of George W. Bush’s mental state (as well as the unusual relationship he has with his vice president).

Things are going to hell in a hand basket for this administration, and Bush/Cheney have shown a willingness to act in extra-Constitutional ways, as they see fit.

While Bush and his advisers make a fetish of it, he is nonetheless commander in chief of the armed forces and the question becomes how he might feel justified in using them and is there still any restraining force—any checks on the increasing power of the executive in our three-branch government.

We have a president whose psychological makeup inclines him to do as he pleases. Because Congress has been cowed, and the judiciary stacked with loyalists, he has gotten away with it—so far.

But the polls show growing discontent among the people, especially over the war in Iraq. Congress, too, is starting to challenge the executive, as it should—but slowly, slower than it should. The way things are moving, there is infinite opportunity to diddle and dodge—in effect conducting business pretty much as usual over the next 18 months.

Could Start Another War...

Meanwhile, the president may well feel free to start another war, with little reference to the Congress or the UN, against Iran.

The commander of CENTO forces, Admiral William Fallon is quoted as having said we “will not go to war with Iran on my watch.” Tough words; but should the president order an attack on Iran, chances are Fallon and others will do what they are accustomed to doing, salute smartly and carry out orders, UNLESS they show more regard for the U.S. Constitution than the president does.

There is an orderly remedy written into the Constitution aimed at preventing a president from usurping the power of the people and acting like a king; the process, of course, is impeachment.

The usual focus on impeachment is on abuses of the past, and a compelling case can surely be made. We believe an equally compelling incentive can be seen in looking toward the next 18 months.

In this paper, we are primarily concerned about what future misadventures are likely if this administration is not somehow held to account; that is, if Bush and Cheney are not removed from office.

Unless Checked

If the constitutional process of impeachment is under way when President Bush orders our military to begin a war against Iran, there is a good chance that, rather than salute like automatons and start World War III, our senior military would find a way to prevent more carnage until such time as the representatives of the people in the House have spoken.

This administration’s capacity for mischief would not end until conviction in the Senate. But initiating the impeachment process appears to be the only way to launch a shot across the bow of this particular ship of state. For it is captained by a president with a psychological makeup likely to lead to new misadventures likely to end in a ship wreck unless the Constitution is brought alongside and a new pilot boarded.

We are grateful that Dr. Frank agreed to collaborate with us and to issue under VIPS auspices the psychological assessment that follows.

Discussion of the three scenarios after his profiling of President Bush was very much a collaborative exercise aimed at applying Frank’s insights to contingencies our president may have to address before he leaves office. Our conclusions are, of necessity, speculative—and, sorry, scary.

The Assessment of Dr. Frank:

If a patient came into my consulting room missing an arm, the first question I would ask is, “What happened to your arm?” The same would be true for a patient who has no guilt, no conscience. I would want to know what happened to it.

No Conscience

George W. Bush is without conscience, and it would require a lengthy series of clinical sessions to find out what happened to it. By identifying himself as all good and on the side of right, he has been able to vanquish any guilt, any sense of doing wrong.

In Bush on the Couch I gave examples illustrating that remarkable lack of conscience. From his youthful days blowing up frogs with firecrackers to his unapologetic public endorsement of torture, there has been no change.

Observers are gradually becoming aware of this fundamental deficit. For example, after watching the president’s press conference on July 12, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote, “He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush?”

No Shame

George W. Bush seems also to be without shame. He expresses no regret or embarrassment about his failure to help Katrina victims, or to tell the truth. He says whatever he thinks people want to hear, whether it be “stay the course” or “I’ve never been about ‘stay the course.’” He does whatever he wants.

He lies—not just to us, but to himself as well. What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt—for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him.

That he could say so baldly that he’d never been about “stay the course” is bone chilling. So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.

Fear of Humiliation

Despite having no shame, Bush has a profound fear of failure and humiliation. He defends himself from this by any means at his disposal—most frequently with indifference or contempt.

He will flinch only if directly confronted about being a failure or a liar. Otherwise world events are enough removed from him that he can spin them into his intact defense system.

This deep fear helps to explain his relentlessly escalating attacks on others, his bullying, and his use of nicknames to put people down. There is fear of being found out not to be as big in every way as his father.

What a burden to have to face his many inadequacies—now held up to the light of day—whether it is his difficulty in speaking, thinking, reading, managing anxiety, or making good decisions. He will not change, because for him change means humiliating collapse. He is very fearful of public exposure of his many inadequacies.

Contempt for Truth?

Contempt itself is a defense, a form of self-protection, which helps Bush appear at ease and relaxed—at least to big fans like New York Times columnist David Brooks.

The president’s contempt defense protects his belief system, a system he clings to as if his beliefs were well-researched facts. His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth.

What gets lost in this process is growth—the George W. Bush of 2007 is exactly the same as the one of 2001. Helen Thomas has said that of all the presidents she has covered over the years, Bush is the least changed by his job, by his experience. This is why there is no possibility of dialogue or reasoning with him.

Sadistic

His certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers.

His comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular with reporters when talking about American casualties in Iraq. Instead of seeing a president in anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans died.

Break It!

Bush likes to break things, needs to break things. And this is most shockingly seen in how he is systematically destroying our armed forces.

In the early days of the Iraq invasion he refused to approve the large number of troop the generals said were needed in order to try to invade and pacify Iraq and acquiesced in the firing of any general who disagreed.

He turned a blind eye to giving the troops proper equipment and cut funding for needed health care. Health care and other social programs have one thing in common: they are paid for by public funds.

It may well be that, unconsciously, the government represents his neglectful parents, and those helped by the government represent the siblings he resents. If George W. Bush wanted to destroy his own family, he could scarcely have done better. Thanks to him, no Bush is likely to be elected to high office for generations to come.

Where Does This Leave Us?

It leaves us with a regressed president who needs to protect himself more than ever from diminishment, humiliation, and collapse. He is so busy trying to manage his own anxiety that he has little capacity left to attend to national and world problems.

And so, we are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

This makes it a monumental challenge—as urgent as it is difficult—not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure—like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of “the first war of the 21st century.”

Iran would make number three—all the compelling reasons against it notwithstanding

* * *

Contingencies:

We will now attempt to put flesh on the discussion by positing and examining scenarios that would force Bush to react, and applying the observations above and other data to forecast what form that reaction might take.

Outlined below are three illustrative contingencies, each of which would pose a neuralgic threat to George W. Bush’s shaky self-esteem, his over-determined efforts to stave off humiliation, and his unending need for self-protection.

These are not seat-of-the-pants scenarios. Each of them is possible—arguably, even probable. The importance of coming up with educated guesses regarding Bush’s response BEFORE they occur is, we hope, clear.

Scenario A: Destructive Attack on the Green Zone

The U.S. military is out in front of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other policymakers in Washington in seeing the hand of Iran’s government behind “the enemy” in Iraq.

On July 26, the operational commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, blamed the recent “significant improvement” in the accuracy of mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone on “training conducted inside Iran.” Odierno also repeated that roadside bombs are being smuggled into Iraq from Iran.

Last week, Gen. David Petraeus warned that insurgents intend to “pull off a variety of sensational attacks and grab the headlines to create a ‘mini-Tet.’” (Tet refers to the surprise country-wide offensive mounted by the Vietnamese Communists in early 1968, which indicated to most Americans that the war was lost.)

Attacks on the Green Zone have doubled in recent months. Despite this, the senior military appear to be in denial with respect to the vulnerability of the Green Zone—oblivious even to the reality that mortar rounds and rocket fire have little respect for walled enclaves.

Anyone with a mortar and access to maps and images on Google can calibrate fire to devastating effect—with or without training in Iran. It is just a matter of time before mortar round or rocket takes out part of the spanking new $600-million U.S. embassy together with people working there or nearby.

And/or, the insurgents could conceivably mount a multi-point assault on the zone and gain control of a couple of buildings and take hostages—perhaps including senior diplomats and military officers.

Given what we think we know of George Bush, if there were an embarrassing attack on U.S. installations in the Green Zone or some other major U.S. facility, he would immediately order a retaliatory series of air strikes, and let the bombs and missiles fall where they may.

The reaction would come from deep within and would warn, in effect: This is what you get if you try to make me look bad.

Scenario B: Israeli Attack on Nuclear Targets in Iran.

This would be madness and would elicit counterattacks from an Iran with many viable options for significant retaliation. Nevertheless, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D, Conn) and his namesake Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, are openly calling for such strikes, which would have to be on much more massive a scale than Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981.

For that attack in 1981, Cheney, a great fan of preemptive strikes, congratulated the Israelis, even though the U.S. joined other UN Security Council members in unanimously condemning the Israeli attack.

Five years ago, on Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney became the first U.S. official publicly to refer approvingly to the bombing of Osirak. And in an interview two and a half years ago, on Inauguration Day 2005, Cheney referred nonchalantly to the possibility that “the Israelis might well decide to act first [to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities] and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”

One thing Cheney says is indisputably—if myopically—true: Bush has been Israel’s best friend. In his speeches, he has fostered the false impression that the U.S. is treaty-bound to defend Israel, should it come under attack—as would be likely, were Israel to attack Iran.

With the U.S. Congress firmly in the Israeli camp, Cheney might see little disincentive to giving a green-light wink to Israel and then let the president “worry about cleaning up.”

Reporting from Seymour Hersh’s administration sources serve to strengthen the impression shining through Bush’s speeches that he is eager to strike Iran. But how to justify it?

Curiously, a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear capability, a study scheduled for completion early this year, has been sent back several times—probably because its predictions are not as alarmist as the warnings that Cheney and the Israelis are whispering into the president’s ear.

Senior U.S. military officers have warned against the folly of attacking Iran, but Cheney has shown himself, time and time again, able to overrule the military.

But What if Impeachment Begins?

Is there nothing to rein in Bush and Cheney? It seems likely that only if impeachment proceedings were under way would senior officers like CENTCOM commander, Admiral William Fallon, be likely to parry an unlawful order to start yet another war without the approval of Congress and the UN.

With impeachment under way, such senior officers might be reminded that all officers and national security officials swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States—NOT to protect and defend the president.

It was a highly revealing moment when on July 11, former White House political director Sara Taylor solemnly reminded the Senate Judiciary Committee, that as a commissioned officer, “I took an oath and I take that oath to the president very seriously.”

Committee chair Patrick Leahy had to remind Taylor: “We understand your personal loyalty to President Bush. I appreciate you correcting that your oath was not to the president, but to the Constitution.”

The most senior officers, military included, can get their loyalties mixed up. And this is of transcendent importance in a context described by Seymour Hersh: “These guys are scary as hell...you can’t use the word ‘delusional,’ for it’s actually a medical term. Wacky. That’s a fair word.”

One does not need psychoanalytic training to see that Bush and Cheney do not care about facts, treaties (or the lack thereof), or other legal niceties, unless it suits their purpose. This gives an even more ominous ring to what Hersh is hearing from his sources.

If Israel attacks Iran, President Bush is likely to spring to Israel’s defense, regardless of whether he was inside or outside the loop before the attack; and the world will see a dangerously widened war in the Middle East.

Psychologically, Bush would almost certainly need to join the attack, mainly to sustain his illusion of safety and masculinity. And Cheney, knowing that, would be pushing him hard on U.S. energy and other perceived strategic interests.

Scenario C: Congress Cuts War Funding This Fall

We posit that Congress finally grows weary of the increasingly obvious bait-and-switch, the “we-need-more-time” tactic, and cuts off all funding except for that needed to bring the troops home.

The talk now is about getting a “meaningful” progress report in November, because September is said to be too soon. The Iraqi parliament is behaving much like its American counterpart by taking August off. But our soldiers do not get a month-long hiatus from constant danger.

It is clear even to the press that the surge has simply brought more American deaths and an upsurge of insurgent attacks. What is less clear is why Bush remains so positive. It is probably not just an act, but an idée fixe he needs to hold onto tightly.

Since doubt is dangerous, we see a compensatory smile fixe on the face of the president and other senior officials, dismissing any trace of uncertainty or doubt.

If Congress cut off funding for war in Iraq, Bush might well cast about for a casus belli to “justify” an attack on Iran.

Would the senior military again go along with orders for an unprovoked, unconstitutional war on a country posing no threat to the U.S.? Hard to say.

In this context, an ongoing impeachment process could provide welcome evidence that influential members of Congress, like many senior military officers, see through Bush’s need to strike out elsewhere. Military commanders might think twice before saluting smartly and executing an illegal order.

In such circumstances, Dick “it-won’t stop-us” Cheney, could be expected to try to pull out all the stops. But if he, too, were in danger of being impeached, uniformed military officers could conceivably block administration plans.

There is only a remote chance that Defense Secretary Gates would be a tempering voice in all this. Far more likely, he would smell in any restrictive legislation traces of the Boland amendment, which he assisted in circumventing during the Iran-Contra misadventure.

Petraeus ex Machina

With “David” or “General Petraeus” punctuating the president’s every other sentence at recent press conferences, the script for September seems clear. This is one four-star general with exquisite PR and political acumen—pedigree and discipline the president can count on.

And with his nine rows of ribbons, he calls to mind the U.S. commander in Saigon, Gen. William Westmoreland at a similar juncture in Vietnam (after the Tet offensive when popular support dropped off rapidly).

It is virtually certain that Petraeus will press hard for more time and more troops. Potemkin-style improvements will be used by Bush to justify continuing the “new” surge strategy, with the calculation that enough Democrats might be overcome by the fear of being charged with “losing Iraq.”

In the past Bush seems to have bought Cheney’s “analysis” that increased enemy attacks were signs of desperation. Hard as it is to believe that Bush has not learned from that repeated experience, it is at the same town possible to “misunderestimate” one’s capacity for wooden-headedness, particularly with respect to someone with the psychological makeup of our president.

He is extraordinarily adept at finding only rose-colored glasses to help him see.

With Cheney egging him on from the wings of the “unitary executive,” but Congress no longer bowing to that novel interpretation of the Constitution, Bush will be sorely tempted to lash out in some violent way, if further funding for the war is denied.

To do that effectively, he will need senior generals and admirals as co-conspirators. It will be up to them to choose between career and Constitution. All too often, in such circumstances, the tendency has been to choose career.

Impeachment hearings, though, could encourage senior officers like Admiral Fallon to pause long enough to remember that their oath is to defend the Constitution, and that they are not required to follow orders to start another war in order to stave off political and personal disaster for the president and vice president.

Justin Frank, M.D.

With,

David MacMichael
Tom Maertens
Ray McGovern
Coleen Rowley

Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

The Iraqis’ Failure to Pass the U.S.-Authored Oil Law

Missing the Benchmark

by Gary Leupp / July 27th, 2007

When it became apparent as of mid-2003 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the mendacious Bush administration found a scapegoat: the CIA and its “intelligence failures.” No matter that the lies about Iraq originated in the circle around the Vice President, rather than the intelligence community; the CIA (powerless to protest by its very role in the system) was faulted and “reorganized” in an embarrassingly public way to make it friendlier to the Straussian/neocon concept of intelligence based on deception. The real disseminators of disinformation were meanwhile left off the hook. Anyway, arch-neocon lie-peddler Paul Wolfowitz told reporters after returning from an Iraq visit in July 2003, Americans shouldn’t be “fussing so much about this [merely] historical issue” when there are so many practical issues to attend to in Iraq, like fighting the Baathists and building democracy.

The reconstruction and democratization of Iraq became the new rationale for the invasion and occupation. But it’s become apparent that these are as much chimeras as the missing WMDs. The real prospect of failure looms — the failure of the U.S. to implant a government perceived by the people as legitimate; the failure to obtain adequate international cover for occupation; the failure to sufficiently persuade the American people that their youth aren’t dying for an Iraqi regime weak, doomed, paralyzed by factional division, dominated by various forms of Islamic fundamentalism. (One has to emphasize that this Islamist empowerment followed the wholesale purging of the secular Baathists accomplished in 2003. Bush now wants to undo that last deed, declaring January 10, 2007 that “to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government [of Iraq] will reform de-Baathification laws — and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution.” Washington worked well enough with the Baathists all through the Cold War, favoring them as a mainstream secular alternative to Islamists, and also anticommunist. Now bringing back secular Baathists is a benchmark for the Iraqis to meet. The problem is the U.S. has placed in most of the top positions people who don’t want to do that.)

If the U.S. must withdraw, those responsible for the war will need to deflect liability for the failure from themselves. The “sovereign” Iraqi regime — which was in fact created in response to massive demonstrations beginning in late 2003, created as window-dressing for ongoing occupation — has been targeted as the scapegoat for some time, threatened repeatedly with the withdrawal of U.S. support if it doesn’t meet Washington’s demands.

Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the administration, all take part in the scapegoating and thus (wittingly or not) protect the neocons responsible for the unfolding crime of occupation. They are blaming the victims: the Iraqi people who never asked to be invaded and have responded with a mix of violent resistance, militant protest, militia organizing, and sectarian fighting. The sectarian fighting would not be taking place had a secular government that had provided order, firmly separated mosque and state and kept the lid on political Islam not been destroyed by the invaders. But in U.S. political discourse it is attributed to Iraqis’ arcane centuries-old religious disputes, while attacks on U.S. troops are chalked up to fanatical anti-Americanism. “These are the same people who attacked us on 9-11,” insists Bush.

Of course the U.S. has few friends in Iraq. Polls have shown for a long time that the vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out! Such friends as it has are in the client regime headed by Nouri al-Maliki, a man highly uncomfortable in his position. He said in January, “I wish I could be done with it even before the end of this term. I didn’t want to take this position. I only agreed because I thought it would serve the national interest, and I will not accept it again.” Contradictions have developed between his administration (one divided within itself) and new Parliament on the one hand, and the U.S. government on the other. A majority of Iraqi legislators have recently called for the U.S. to withdraw. If you can’t get better cooperation than that from people risking their lives and reputations to work with you and give your imperialist project some cloak of legitimacy, you’re in big trouble.

So what do you do, if you’re an official in the government of the imperialist country responsible? While rabid American news commentators complain about how ungrateful the Iraqi people are for all America’s sacrifice on their behalf, you express your disappointment at the failure of the Iraqi “government” to meet U.S.-posted “benchmarks.” If you’re a legislator urging gradual withdrawal you say, “Well, Maliki’s government isn’t doing its job so we’re not going to help him anymore.” As though all this slaughter of Iraqis has been a form of altruistic assistance requited with incompetence. If on the other hand you’re urging, “Stay the course,” you can at some point proclaim some failing on the part of this sovereign Iraqi government the last straw and join your colleagues in endorsing an end to the war.

Reasons for blaming the victim vary. There are those who simply find it politically useful to say, “We did our best at establishing a democracy, but we should get out now and avoid involvement in their civil war.” That means not having to say you’re sorry about the dead and all that, while still satisfying the American masses’ demand for withdrawal. Then there are those mulling the replacement of Maliki by a military coup which might posture as a regime better organized to meet the dictated benchmarks as the country prepares for a “return to democracy.” (The U.S. has historically had no problem with military coups. The one in September last year in Thailand, deposing the first democratically elected prime minister in Thai history, met with a State Department statement of “disappointment,” zero media coverage and few cries of outrage. And have Americans been reminded lately that in October 1999 the constitutional prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, sought to replace the man who is now Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who then seized power? Musharraf was the Army Chief of Staff, promoted to that post by Sharif a year earlier. When Sharif tried to replace him, the army executed a coup d’état. These days the State Department hails Musharraf as a statesman and key ally in the War on terror.)

What are these benchmarks Iraq is supposed to achieve? While administration officials have used the term broadly and vaguely, there are actually 18 specified in the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007. That’s Public Law 110-28, which mandated two reports from the president (one just released) indicating his judgment about Iraq’s progress in achieving the benchmarks. These involve security, political reconciliation, diplomacy, economic changes, etc., with the establishment of an effective Iraqi (puppet) army and reintegration of reconcilable Baathists near the top of the list. But the most important single benchmark to the neocons centered around Vice President Cheney’s office is the passing of the Hydrocarbon Act by the Iraqi parliament. This would reverse the nationalization of Iraqi oil accomplished by law in 1975.

As Rep. Dennis Kucinich recently explained in a long, detailed speech before the House of Representatives, the law was drafted by BearingPoint (a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting provider listed by the Center for Corporate Policy as the number 2 top war profiteer of 2004) in February 2006. It was presented soon thereafter to the newly-appointed Iraqi Oil Minister Dr. Hussein Al-Shahristani (a scientist in exile from 1991 who returned with the invaders in 2003). Shahristani then met in Washington DC with representatives of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips to get their comments on the draft. Shahristani promised (optimistically, as it turns out) the International Monetary Fund that the Iraqi parliament would pass the law by the end of 2006. But as Kucinich noted, the Iraqi parliament bunkered in the Green Zone hadn’t even seen the draft law yet. (The 33-page text was only leaked to the press on Feb. 15 of this year. One could say that like most products of Cheney’s office it had been marked “top secret.”) Months earlier an Oil Ministry official had said that Iraqi civil society and the general public would not be consulted at all on this matter!

London-based Iraqi political analyst Munir Chalabi has written that an as yet, unrevealed appendix to the draft law “will decide which oil fields will be allocated to the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) and which of the existing fields will be allocated to the IOCs [international oil companies]. The appendices will determine if 10% or possibly up to 80% of these major oil fields will be given to the IOCs.” Six women recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize recently wrote that the Hydrocarbon Act “would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model to a commercial model that is much more open to U.S. corporate control. Its provisions allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of Iraq and into the pockets of international oil companies.” These voices are part of a rising chorus challenging the oil law.

Kucinich nicely documents U.S. efforts to shove this law down the Iraqi people’s throats and the smug assurance the law’s authors felt about its passage. But something happened — something the arrogant, sneaky, bullying, greedy proponents of the law in this country somehow didn’t anticipate. Civil society rebelled against the Hydrocarbon Act. The Sunni bloc in parliament rejected the law. So did the Shiite followers of Muqtada al-Sadr who denounce the act as an attack on Iraqi sovereignty. Oil field workers have staged protests and vowed “mutiny” if the law is passed. “This law cancels the great achievements of the Iraq people,” Subhi al-Badri, who heads the Iraqi Federation of Union Councils, said in a televised interview last week. “If the Iraqi Parliament approves this law, we will resort to mutiny. This law is a bomb that may kill everyone. Iraqi oil. … belongs to all future generations.” Even the Iraqi minister of planning and development, Ali Baban, has vowed to “resign one hour after [the] passing [of the] oil and gas draft law.”

Cheney, with one foot in the military-industrial complex and the other in the neocon cabal, is upset about this. In his last trip to Iraq, he told the Los Angeles Times, May 13, “I did make it clear that we believe it is very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion and any undue delay would be difficult to explain.” (Explain to whom? Certainly not the Iraqi people, who don’t want “their” lawmakers to approve the law. Nor the American people, who aren’t well-informed about the issue and not very well-disposed to the oil companies. Maybe Cheney means it would be hard to explain to Congress, where so many have signed onto a demand for progress on this benchmark as a condition for continued U.S. “support.”) Secretary of Defense Gates also, according to the Guardian, “rebuked politicians” during an Iraq visit in June “for failing to reach consensus on sharing oil revenues” — a euphemism for failing to provoke the Iraqi people by selling off the precious natural resource that produces 90% of Iraq’s revenue!

Yes, they are getting very upset at the Iraqi legislators’ failure to pass that act. No doubt angry too at the oil workers; the Sunni bloc in parliament, the Sadrists and the foreign critics. So they try to depict opposition as being ethnic-based (a squabble among these inscrutable fractious people about who gets what quantity of the oil profits) rather than acknowledging their own desire to claim a hefty share. They want to depict the Iraqi politicians’ delay in passing this law so crucial to their own rapacious selves as a reflection of conflicting Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish claims to shares of oil revenue petty enough to resolve through a few days of talks with some expert U.S. input. But as Kucinich notes, the “fact is that except for three scant lines, the entire 33 page ‘Hydrocarbon Law,’ is about creating a complex legal structure to facilitate the privatization of Iraqi oil.” The issue holding up passage isn’t ethnic and religious rivalries but Iraqi nationalism versus imperialist globalization.

The Iraqi parliament’s plans for a long summer break have drawn strong reaction in Washington. Maybe it’s to escape the 130 degree heat, Bush spokesman Tony Snow suggested. That drew reactions from legislators again blaming Iraqis for this whole mess. “If they go off on vacation for two months while our troops fight — that would be the outrage of outrages,” declared Rep. Chris Shays ( R-Conn). (Snow was forced to apologize for his remark and thus cave in to the bashing of the Iraqi lawmakers.) But maybe the parliament, that has met rarely and often lacked a quorum, just finds itself inclined to respond to overbearing U.S. pressure on this oil issue and others by absenting itself for awhile. Sort of like going on strike.

Thus the failure of Iraqis to meet this “benchmark” in a timely fashion, as demanded by Dick Cheney, the International Monetary Fund, Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips, and the U.S. Congress is a failure to say, “Yes, Boss, go ahead and rape my country. Even more than you already have! You overthrew our dictator, so your deserve it! Thank you!” Congress and the administration are almost united in demanding this statement of abject submission in the form of the Hydrocarbon Law. Sen. John Warner in particular has led efforts to pressure the Iraqi puppet regime to get this passed and he’s produced overwhelming bipartisan support. Just goes to show you: we live in an imperialist country in which those holding high political office almost inevitably cast their votes for what the Nobel laureates cited above call “more U.S. corporate control.”

Kucinich seems to be an exception. By no coincidence, he has introduced House Resolution 333, calling for Vice President’s impeachment. As the people of Iraq rise up against this made-in-Cheney’s-office draft law, we can help them by forcing the ouster (now!) of the Cheney/Bush regime.

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.

How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
by John Pilger – ANTIWAR.com July 26, 2007

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target." The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist." At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.

Dr. David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honor Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel."

He received no reply.

The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)

While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanors provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest.

The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a program about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing." Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The program was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces," surely as benign as that British institution, St. John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders," neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonizing Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders.

"The great crimes against most of humanity," wrote the American cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought... [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite.

It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament.

The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "skeptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's "new world order."

"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.

Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death..."

FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"

Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully..."

The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons program" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first... ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country."

So tick your favorite bombers.

The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by those who censor by omission.

However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial process... PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them."

This is known today as "perception management." The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honorable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.

He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?" "I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.

What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could bathe in their silence.”
http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=11349

This article appears in the July 27, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Guns of August 2007:
Cheney's Finger Is Already on the Trigger

by Jeffrey Steinberg

On July 16, the London Guardian reported that President Bush, under the powerful influence of Vice President Dick Cheney, has tilted in favor of military action against Iran before he leaves office. According to the Guardian account, a series of meetings during June and July, involving top White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials, was used by the Vice President to assert that the diplomatic track, ostensibly pressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had failed to produce any results, and that no future U.S. administration would have the courage to act militarily against Tehran. President Bush, according to the account, went along with Cheney, and once again, the prospects for a new Persian Gulf preemptive war loom large over Washington.

Highly informed sources contacted by EIR confirmed and elaborated on the Guardian leak, which came from circles close to the White House who are adamantly opposed to the prospects of an American or Israeli preventive strike against targets inside Iran. EIR's sources confirmed that President Bush had, indeed, tilted back towards supporting Cheney's position that Iran's alleged nuclear weapons sites must be hit preemptively, and that one of the most persuasive arguments mounted by Cheney and his neo-con allies, is that unless the U.S. strikes against Tehran, Israel will launch an attack, and this will create an even bigger mess for Washington.

Speaking for some of Cheney's London patrons, Patrick Cronin, director of studies at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading Anglo-American think tank, is quoted by the Guardian: "Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact.... The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack; the US will have to take decisive action. The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."

In fact, the consensus among American military strategists is that Israel does not have the capacity to do serious damage to Iran's now widely dispersed nuclear research program—unless it were to use nuclear weapons.
The Two Liebermans

As Cheney was making his power play inside Administration circles, he was receiving back-up from "the two Liebermans." In early July, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, traveled to Brussels to confer with top NATO officials, and on his return, he told Israeli Army Radio that he had won backing from the United States and Europe for preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites. Lieberman, who is known among Israeli analysts as "Israel's closest thing to a National Socialist," elaborated that, if Israel were to launch air attacks against Iran's nuclear sites, NATO would join in to defend Israel in the event of Iranian retaliation. Lieberman could not have been more blunt: "We're stuck in Afghanistan, and European and American troops are wallowing in the Iraqi quagmire, which is something that is going to prevent the leaders of countries in Europe and America from deciding on the use of force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. Therefore," he concluded, "at the end of the day, Israel is going to have to remove the nuclear threat posed by Iran with the means at its disposal, and it won't be able to count on international cooperation." But, the Israeli minister then declared, "Europe and the U.S. will support us."

The very day that Avigdor Lieberman was threatening Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran, July 11, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill, demanding that U.S. intelligence agencies report to Congress every 60 days on Iran's activities inside Iraq. Although Lieberman's amendment, which contained a string of dubious or outright false claims of Iranian combat support operations against American forces in Iraq, was clearly aimed at putting the Senate on record as supporting a warlike policy against Iran, the entire Senate sheepishly voted, 97-0, in favor of the Lieberman ploy.

Lest there be any doubt that Joe Lieberman's actions were tightly coordinated with Cheney, the text of the Lieberman amendment quoted extensively from Gen. Kevin Bergner, the former top military aide to neo-con Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council, who was dispatched to Baghdad in June 2007, to conduct White House "spin control" over the war reporting. Bergner has put out a steady stream of disinformation and/or exaggerated claims of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. Bergner's propaganda from Baghdad, according to Pentagon sources, has infuriated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who see it as a replay of the "stovepipe" of fake intelligence, funneled from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to the Vice President's office, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. This time, there is no pretense that the war propaganda is being vetted by the Pentagon intelligence services. It is being funneled directly from Baghdad via General Bergner, directly to Cheney, Lieberman, et al., and is increasingly showing up on CNN and other news outlets.
Impeach or Remove Cheney Now

The turn toward war against Iran, coming from the "usual suspects" in Washington, must be assessed against the backdrop of the July 1-2 Kennebunkport, Maine summit meeting between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two days of discussion, hosted by former President George H.W. Bush, represented a potential strategic breakthrough in U.S.-Russian relations. President Putin proposed a long-term strategic partnership between Washington and Moscow, encompassing all of Eurasia in a security alliance, built upon Lyndon LaRouche's original strategic defense proposal, which later became President Reagan's SDI. Just days before Kennebunkport, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech in Yalta, Ukraine, had also signed on to the proposal, indicating a powerful intervention by the institution of the U.S. Presidency—along with that of the Russian Presidency—to avoid war in Eurasia for decades to come.

It was in response to that initiative that Cheney made his move, and set the United States potentially back on a course towards near-term war, a war that would soon spread from Southwest Asia to other parts of Eurasia, and ultimately lead into World War IV—pitting the United States against Russia and China.

It is for this reason that LaRouche, in a dialogue in Washington with a group of diplomats on July 19 (see transcript, this issue), asserted that the only way to avoid war at this late date, is for Dick Cheney to be either impeached or removed from office now—before the guns of August are fired.

It was also in this context that LaRouche reiterated his message to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), the ostensible Democratic Party front-runner for the Presidential nomination. LaRouche called upon Clinton to take the lead in the fight to remove Cheney from office, promising that if she does so, she will be "virtually acclaimed" as the next President, by an American electorate that is overwhelmingly demanding Cheney's ouster.

LaRouche's message is also resonating among leading Republican circles, who fear a total wipeout in the 2008 general elections, if Cheney remains long on the job—and if the preemptive strikes against Iran take place. While some Republican Party voices, including former Reagan Justice Deparment official Bruce Fein, former Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and retired CIA officer and American Conservative columnist Phil Giraldi, all have demanded Cheney's immediate ouster to stop an Iran fiasco, GOP leaders have so far failed to come forward to confront President Bush and force Cheney's ouster. And Congressional Democrats have chosen to dodge the Cheney bullet and opt for impotent gestures, like the all-night Senate debate over Bush Administration Iraq policy, in which Cheney's name was not mentioned once. The ultimate cowardly act was the Democratic Senate capitulation to the "Buckleyite Damn-ocrat" Joe Lieberman's Iran war gambit. Such cowardice and opportunism, LaRouche has frequently warned, could bring about the doom of the American republic and a global "permanent war" that would engulf the planet for several generations to come.
Cheney and Bandar

While General Bergner's "wurlitzer" continues to churn out war propaganda from Baghdad, pushing the idea of military action against Iran to "save the lives of American GIs" fighting the "Iranian-backed" insurgency in Iraq, U.S. intelligence specialists have alerted EIR that there is growing worry about another aspect of the Iraq insurgency. Saudi Arabia, through Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Cheney's chief ally and the purported national security advisor to King Abdullah, has been pouring money and weapons into Sunni tribes in western Iraq, who have now emerged as what some U.S. intelligence officials brand "al-Qaeda II." These Iraqi Wahabi networks, distinct from the bin Laden/Zawaheri "al-Qaeda in Iraq" apparatus of largely foreign fighters, have emerged in recent months as a significant element within the overall insurgency. According to these sources, "al-Qaeda II" is part of Cheney's scheme—designed in London by the likes of Dr. Bernard Lewis—to promote a permanent Sunni versus Shi'ite conflict in the region.

This Cheney-Bandar effort, the sources warn, is one of the driving factors, provoking Iran, and fueling the prospects of a near-term explosion. Earlier in July 2007, an emissary of Prince Bandar delivered $750,000 to the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that formerly worked for Saddam Hussein, and which is on the U.S. State Department's international terrorist organizations (ITO) list, for having assassinated American military officers in Iran. The MEK is actively engaged in sabotage and assassination operations inside Iran—with the enthisiastic support of Washington neo-cons, typified by Daniel Pipes, who recently attended the MEK gathering outside of Paris where the Bandar money was delivered.

The U.S. Department of Justice is already investigating Prince Bandar for his role in the BAE Systems scandal, involving the $100 billion offshore covert operations fund, established under the British-Saudi "Al-Yamamah" barter deal. At least $2 billion in "Al-Yamamah" funds went directly to Bandar's bank accounts in the United States, and some of those funds went to a range of Wahabi insurgencies, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One question that Justice Department investigators should take up is whether some of those funds are now going to the MEK to fuel Dick Cheney's Iran war schemes.

Israel's "Right" to Exist...?

Israel's "right" to exist
by Anisa Abd el Fattah
(Thursday, June 8, 2006)

"It’s time to set the stage for resolution of this conflict, and that requires a legal definition of rights to exist, issued either by the ICJ, or through negotiations on borders, and where Israel will exist, first."

Does Israel have a “right” to exist? One would imagine with all of the emphasis being placed upon this supposed ‘right” that the idea of a Jewish only state is an idea that had been voted and agreed upon by a majority of the indigenous Palestinian population and their descendants prior to the occupation, and not in response to the threat of starvation, and at the point of a gun, a tank, an F-16 and a nuclear arsenal, backed up by threats and the political mischief of the United States and Europe. Use of the word “right” implies that a law exists somewhere that mandates the establishment of a Jewish only state in Palestine. To those who argue that indeed the British mandate represents such a law, I answer that Britain had no right to mandate a Jewish only state on land that it also had no “right” to either partition, or to give away. Israel is an entity that by normal legal standards was established illegally, including the esoteric argument in respect to who it was exactly that followed Moses out of Egypt, and whether or not the exodus was an exclusively “Jewish” phenomenon. There really is no legal, or other basis for the recognition of this supposed right of Israel to exist as a Zionist implanted entity claiming rights to sovereignty in Palestine, and also to dominance over the Palestinian people. Whereas in most cases the need and desire to move forward discourages too much hindsight, since Israel, the US and the EU feel that recognition of this non existent right is the basis for recognition of the very real, and non-negotiable human rights of the Palestinians, not to be starved to death, and continuously rounded up, and victimized by home demolitions, murder by illegal Israeli military raids and operations, and targeted assassinations in Palestine, it seems that resolving the issue of “right” to exist is the jumping off point for what might be called, the basic agreements in respect to Israel and Palestine as competing interests. Whose claimed right to the disputed land is the legitimate right? There is a body of international law that makes the legal parameters for this discussion very clear, and that gives us some clues as to how legally this dispute might be resolved, yet since it does not play to the favor of Israel, these laws have been symbolically buried beneath the more emotional, hysterical and racist rhetoric of the Zionist and pro-Zionist ideologues and their Arab puppets, who never saw a law protecting the rights of Gentiles, and especially Christians and Muslims, that they didn’t hate and seek to either abolish or force into obsolescence.

Peacemakers will no doubt, if read this, scratch their heads and ask what is to be gained by such a discussion. The answer is quite simple, the absurdity of the demand that Palestine recognize a right for Israel to acquire land by military conquest, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and every other international law that seeks to discourage military domination of smaller and non nuclear nation/states by larger more aggressive and nuclear armed nation/ states, dictates such an examination of the law, and discussion if not negotiation on this issue of rights to exist. There is a strand of thought which suggests that capitulation to Israel’s demanded and self created and defined “right” to exit is nothing more than a another attempt by Zionist to abolish international law through so-called negotiated agreements which in their opinion, nullifies all relevant law on such issues, even though the Geneva Conventions rules out negations on topics already settled in international law, and especially such negations between a belligerent occupier, and its victims. The reasons for this Geneva Convention approach are obvious, and particularly so in respect to the Palestine/ Israel conflict.

Since there is no body of law to support Israel’s illegal behavior, its self created rights, etc., Israel’s legitimacy, and acceptance of its’ Talmudic justice is dependent upon negotiations where they call the shots. By self-admission, Zionism is aimed at securing the supremacy of the Jewish race over all others, and to acquire a land wherein their supremacist ideals can take root and expand. The only means by which to attain the legitimacy and recognition that Israel, as a Zionist state, desperately needs and desires is to force Palestine into recognition of the fictional right. It is very sad that the EU and the US, aided by the so-called “Church” are willing to concede, not only to this racist, but also self defeating idea. It is even sadder and shameful that these same interests would actually act to abolish through fraud, all international law relevant to the relations between nations that seek to protect sovereign borders and to define the sovereign rights of all people, and not only Jews. To accept that Israel has a right to exist in Palestine, means that we also recognize the right of Israel to exist as a so-called “Jewish Only” state wherever it lays claim to its rights according to a fantasy map which outlines its desired borders, which includes Iraq, Sudan, and most of the Arab lands. To legitimize the map, Israel also has created a history that existed only in the minds of Theodore Hertzl, a secularist, and those who realized that his scheme to illegally confiscate land, and to establish an exclusively Jewish Only state, created by non-Jewish East European Zionist in the heart of the Muslim and Arab world, could succeed, so long as the powerful Western nations could be convinced that a well armed Israel, not bridled by laws, morality or custom could serve Zionist Christianity and its subservient European and US client governments, as an outpost in the Middle East against the spreading influence of Islam.

With Islam now spreading both East and West, and manifesting not only as the religious but also the political choice of a growing number of adherents East and West, it should be clear that Hertzl’s plan did not work, and that Israel is not capable, even with nuclear weapons to stop the spread of Islam. What it has achieved is an unparalleled hatred of the US for our, until now “unconditional” support for the criminal Zionist project, and also for our cooperation in its illegal occupation of Palestine, and its proxy wars in Iraq and Sudan.

There is hope. Rather than to premise the human rights of the Palestinian people upon recognition of the fictional right to exist of Israel, it might be smarter to leave discussions of Israel’s right to exist to negotiators who would decide whether to seek to resolve this issue through the international court who could determine the legal borders of both entities and where any right to exit does legally exist for both interests, according to international law. Negotiators might also decide to attempt to resolve the issue of borders themselves, guided by the law and only within legal parameters which would who automatically return the Israel to the 1967 borders, since it is illegal to acquire land through military conquest. The result is that we would be left to examine the British mandate, and to decide either to cure its defects, or to throw it out completely, deferring instead to the UN partition of 1948. Its basis is also flimsy, but in comparison to world war, it is more desirable.

This issue of borders, once resolved automatically leads to a renunciation of violence by both the Israelis and the Palestinians, since there would no longer be any border dispute that allows for ambiguity as to the illegality of military operations on the lands of either by the other.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will make a serious mistake if he continues to press for a popular referendum on a solution to this conflict at this stage, or should he continue to promote the Israeli prison peace plan. Why he feels that either of these approaches are worthy of his time and effort escape most people, and he should reconsider, taking into consideration that not only will Palestine be affected by his ill conceived actions, but also the entire Arab world. We should get the cart and the horse in their proper positions before any talk of peace can ensue. That means that we must first legally define Israel, and where it has a right to exist, and the same for Palestine.

The Palestinian people of course have the right to determine what their own political definition and configuration will be, whether that is a state, or a bi-national state, etc. What is not purely a Palestinian issue is Israel’s right to exist as a Zionist entity in the Muslim world that will expand through military conquest into other Arab and Muslim lands, and that is the issue that stands before us today, and unfortunately the human rights of the Palestinian people, which are unalienable, have been put at stake the United States, EU and Israel in an attempt to isolate Palestine, and force it into submission. Once accomplished, Israel will, as before seek to complete its conquest of the lands in which it has claimed already, and arbitrarily to own rights.

After so many years of hell in Palestine, a little purgatory can’t hurt much worse. It’s time to set the stage for resolution of this conflict, and that requires a legal definition of rights to exist, issued either by the ICJ, or through negotiations on borders, and where Israel will exist, first.