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Today's
Stories
July
1, 2004
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
June
29, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
The Cloak-and-Dagger Handover
Robert
Fisk
Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland
Troy
Selvaratnam
New York Times Boosts Pet Developer
Harry
Browne
Bush in Ireland
Ray
McGovern
The CIA According to Anonymous
Elaine
Cassel
Hamdi, Padilla & Rasul: Who Really
Won?
June
28, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn / Leyla Linton
Grisly Rituals in Iraq
Amira
Hass
Confronting Myths and Deadly Power
June
26 / 27, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
Patrick
Cockburn
Iyad Allawi, the CIA's New Stooge
in Iraq
Dennis
Hans
Once They Were Sweethearts: Cheney,
the NYTs and the Myth of an Iraq Link to 9/11
Ben
Tripp
Adventures in Fuel Efficiency
Dave
Lindorff
That State Department Terrorism
Report: What They Knew, But Didn't Tell You
Chris
Floyd
Cold Irons Bound: the Russian Gambit
Ali
Tonak
Contamination at Berkeley: Profit Motives,
Academic Freedom and the Case of Ignacio Chapela
Keith
Rosenthal
The Withering of the Anti-War Movement
Bryan
Sacks
The Failure of the 9/11 Commission
Wayne
Madsen
Another Case of Blowback
Thomas
St. John
L. Frank Baum, Racist: Indian-Hating
in the Wizard of Oz
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
American Swadeshi
June
25, 2004
Stephen
Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"
Saul
Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege:
Bush Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction
Amir
Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace
Jack
McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal?
Did Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?
Greg
Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader
June 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
John
Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing
Death Threats
Harry Browne
On
the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe
Bill Kaufman
Another
Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush,
Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did
They Tell?
Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?
John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy
Diana Johnstone
Kerry
and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"
June 23, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Bush
and Castro Face Off
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"
Kurt Nimmo
From
Saddam, With Love
Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars
Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"
Patrick Cockburn
The
Pretense of an Independent Iraq
Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib
June 22, 2004
Dave Lindorff
The
Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption
Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?
Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings
Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq
John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales
Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity
Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés
Bruce Jackson
Saying
No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify
Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill
June
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos
Upon Chaos
Cockburn
/ Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty
Uri
Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage
June
19 / 20, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid
and Isolated
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation
on Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh
Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother
Nature
Col.
Dan Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis
in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a
Year Later
Prudence
Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!
Poets'
Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert
Kathy
Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids
June
18, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave
Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player
& Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American
Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
18, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron
Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They
Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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July
1, 2004
The
Dogma of Richard Perle
Zionism
and Legal Skepticism
By
WILLIAM JAMES MARTIN
Writing in the Guardian of London on
March 21, 2003, under the title, "Thank God for the Death
of the UN", just as the American invasion of Iraq was
getting underway, Richard Perle, member of the Pentagon's Defense
Advisory Board, said of Saddam Hussein:
... He will go quickly, but
not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with
him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part
will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain,
the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will
die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world
order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve,
the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the
liberal conceit of safety through international law administered
by international institutions.
As free Iraqis document the
quarter-century nightmare of Saddam's rule, let us not forget
who held that the moral authority of the international community
was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who
marched against "regime change". In the spirit of
postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender,
we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world
order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise
their own citizens and menace ours.
Mr. Perle's contempt for Saddam
Hussein seems matched by his contempt for the United Nations
as well as for international law more generally. In light of
the incongruence of these words with the picture as it has evolved
over the past year, it is well to contemplate how much power
Perle has wielded in both the Reagan and Bush administrations
and the influence he has had on this administration's decision
to undertake a pre-emptive war to overthrow another government.
Perle continues:
The most dangerous of these
states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq is one, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that
they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from
terrorists rest on the certainty and effectiveness with which
they are confronted. The chronic failure of the Security Council
to enforce its own resolution is unmistakable; it is simply
not up to the task. We are left with the coalition of the willing.
Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order,
we should recognize that they are, by default, the best hope
for that order and the true alternative to the anarchy of the
abject failure of the UN.
Mr. Perle's claim that the
UN will die as a result of the American defiance of the UN manifest
by the US's (effectively) unilateral invasion of Iraq strains
one's sense of logic. But Mr. Perle's lack of logical acuity
as well as his disposition to invent facts is hardly new. In
any event, time has shown not only the falseness of Mr. Perle's
claims but also that it was not the UN whose prestige was diminished
but that of the United States. The model of sobriety provided
by the deliberative process of the UN Security Council which
included the reservations expressed by the UN representatives
of France, Germany, and Russia as well as the expertise and
competence marshaled by the UN weapons inspection team led by
Hans Blix, in retrospect, certainly appears to be a far more
reliable guide to the future in adjudicating the tensions of
diplomacy versus war than the model provided by the small group
of conservative neo-cons who now control the American government
and who are the champions of unilateralism and pre-emptive wars.
If Perle was basing his claim
of the death of the UN as an effective force in maintaining
world order on the obvious good that would be derive from the
invasion of Iraq as opposed to a containment strategy in which
the UN would play a major role, that good has not been realized
and it is unlikely that bypassing the UN for the purpose of
initiating an armed attack on another nation has gained any
more adherents in light of the evolution of the occupation over
the last year.
Such distain for international
law is very clearly expressed in considerable detail in a 1996
document prepared for the incoming Natanyahu government of Israel
of that year entitled, A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing
the Realm", prepared by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David
and Meyrav Wurmser, James Colbert, and Robert Loenberg in their
capacity as members of The Institute for Advanced Strategy
and Political Studies' "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy
Toward 2000" a Washington/Jerusalem based think tank providing
policy analyses for the government of Israel
This document is remarkable
for its very existence because it constitutes a policy manifesto
for the Israeli government penned by members of the current
US government. From the perspective of a reader of this document
and from one who has also watched its program unfold during
the course of the Bush administration, one can best view the
confluence and the inseparability of the Israeli and the American
governments. In addition to Perle, Douglas Feith is currently
undersecretary of defense for policy, the departments number
three man and a protege of Perle who has worked closely with
him in the past. David Wurmser initially assistant to undersecretary
for arms control, John Bolton, at the State Department, the
latter coming from the far right conservative American Enterprise
Institute has since moved into the Vice President's office.
This document advocates the
scrapping of UN Resolutions 242 and 338 - the "land for
peace" formula - in favor of one based on the "balance
of power". Since Israel possesses the 4th largest army
in the world with essentially unlimited weaponry, unrestrictedly
provided by the US, and since the Palestinians have no army
at all, the "balance of power" formula application
simply means that Israel should respect no constraints of its
expansionist aspirations. Indeed, the authors state, "Only
the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially
in their territorial dimensions, "peace for peace,"
is a solid basis for the future." Surely this also means
"the unconditional acceptance of the Israel's unilateral
definition of Israel's rights."
Other declarations of unilateralism
are:
1. ...a clean break from the
slogan "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept
of strategy based on balance of power."
2. "Displaying moral ambivalence
between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to
annihilate it by trading "land for peace" will not
secure "peace now." Our claim to the land -- to which
we have clung for hope for 2000 years -- is legitimate and noble..."
The authors go on to affirm
the continued commitment of Israel to overthrowing Saddam Hussein
in Iraq both because Saddam Hussein poses a direct threat to
Israel and in order to exert pressure on Syria whom the authors
feel poses an equal threat to Israel. The authors also advocate
"Striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should
that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria
proper."
Though Arafat is the leader
of the Palestinian Authority as recognized under Oslo, the authors
state, "Israel should change the nature of its relations
with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot
pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and [should
nurture] alternatives to Arafat's exclusive grip on Palestinian
society" [italics mine]. The authors also state, "
Israel has the right to insist on compliance [presumably with
Oslo], including closing Orient House..." Orient House
in East Jerusalem was envisioned under Oslo as the seat of the
Palestinian Authority. Thus the provisions of the internationally
recognized and mutually negotiated Oslo Accords are not merely
ignored but are overridden.
Israel has violated more that
60 UN Security Council resolutions and has never recognized
the constraints of UNR 242 and 338 which requires the relinquishing
of the parts of Palestine taken by force in the '67 War, much
less UN Resolution 194 which call for the reparation of the
indigenous Palestinian population expelled from Palestine in
1948. Recently Israel refused to recognize, along with US support,
the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in its
petition from the Palestinians regarding the illegality of the
imposition by force of the construction of the wall running
through the West Bank which is obviously designed to annex large
portions of the West Bank to Israel as well as to confine Palestinians
to areas designated by Israel to serve Israel's need to expand
while simultaneously meeting Israel's demographic concerns of
the maintenance of a pure Jewish state. The US joined Israel
in boycotting the hearings of the court.
Israel's disregard for the
Geneva Accords has been a persistent feature of Israel's 37
year old occupation which includes the recent rampage of destruction
and demolitions in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. There,
Israel killed 62 people, destroyed more than 150 houses and
created more that 1900 homeless to add to the 20,000 or so residents
of Rafah already made homeless in 3 * years of the intifada.
Israel, during its 37 year old occupation, has demolished more
than 12,000 Palestinian homes and destroyed more than 10% of
Palestinian agricultural lands. These flagrant breaches of
the 4th Geneva Accords continue year after year with no end
in sight.
Mr. Perle and his disciples,
to which we should add Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz,
seem to have functioned as a conduit to equalize the long running
distains of Israel's disregard for international law with that
of the American government under George Bush.
The United States has now matched
Israel in its contempt for international law as the US has now
declared to the world that it will no longer abide by the ABM
treaty, nor by the Comprehensive Test Ban, put into place under
Clinton, nor by the Chemical Weapons Treaty. It has rejected
the Kyoto Accords, and also the Protocol to the Biological Weapons
Conventions which was written to strengthen compliance with
that treaty. And it has said that it will not honor the procedures
of the recently formed International Criminal Court. The US
repeatedly threatened the UN with irrelevancy in its run-up
to the Iraq invasion.
The administration has promulgated
the new strategic doctrine that the United States will arrogate
the right to pre-emptively attack any state which, in its view,
might threaten its security at some indeterminate time in the
indefinite future, which also happens to be a long standing
Israeli military doctrine. That's what the Iraq war is about.
This arrogant principle is a challenge to the very foundation
of the United Nations and its prohibition against the non defensive
use of force. The Bush administration and a strong viable and
effective regime of international law cannot co-exist.
If the US is now matching Israel
in its distain and disregard for international law, it is not
unrelated to the actions of Perle, Wofowitz, and the authors
of "A clean break" who provide a bridge between the
two governments and form a common intersection.
Perle continues:
...[I]n the heady aftermath
of the allied victory, the hope that security could be made
collective was embodied in the UN security council - with abject
results. During the cold war the Security Council was hopelessly
paralyzed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and
Eastern Europe liberated, not by the UN, but by the mother of
all coalitions, Nato....
Facing Milosevic's multiple
aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect
its victims. It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia
from extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in
Dayton, Ohio, not in the UN. The rescue of Muslims in Kosovo
was not a UN action: their cause never gained security council
approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved
the Falklands.
Perhaps two of the UN's greatest
recent disappointments have been its failure to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its failure to prevent the
American pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Both of these owe much
to the influence exerted by Richard Perle and his fellow neo-cons.
If the Security Council was paralyzed in the case of the case
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it was because of the US's
consistent vetoes of resolutions put forward by the Palestinians
and the US's seduction by Israel's claim in each case that the
resolution "was not balanced for not also condemning Palestinian
terrorism".
Perle may be motivated by a
skepticism that neither human intelligence and ingenuity, nor
the evolution of moral and legal thinking and experience is
capable of producing a body of principles of international law
that can mitigate international violence, resolve conflicts
if not prevent them, and protect the weaker states from the
exploitation if not the ravages of the strong. Alternately,
Perle may be just motivated by his Zionism which takes the form,
in fact, of a Revisionist Zionism which views the UN as a potential
threat to Israel's existence as a pure Jewish state because
of UN Resolution 194 requiring the reparation of the Palestinian
refugees expelled in 1948, and also because the UN is a potential
constraint on the expansion of Israel to all of historical Palestine
which is the goal of the Revisionists.
Of course, we need not be obliged
to choose between the two and we may well understand that the
ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967, without which the state of
Israel as a racially pure or almost racially pure Jewish state
could not exists, and the contempt for the international humanitarian
principles embodied in international law are necessarily interlinked.
William James Martin is a visiting Instructor of Mathematics
at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. He can be reached
at: martinw@email.unc.edu
Weekend Edition
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