Torture: What's in a Name?

by Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III - Oct 13, 2007

In 1594, Shakespeare wrote, "'Tis but thy name that is my enemy. What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet." As it is with roses, so it is with torture. Physical abuse or extreme measures of interrogation conducted by trained professionals in the administration of a counterterrorism program is still, by all accepted international standards, torture.

For months, President Bush has tried to defend the extreme tactics being used by the CIA to interrogate individuals suspected of terrorist activities. This, in spite of recently released documents from the Justice Department indicating that in 2005, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued a secret opinion authorizing physical abuse to extract information. According to The New York Times, "The new opinion ... provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures."

On Friday, October 5, President Bush said, "This government does not torture people." The problem with his statement is that it contradicts his attorney general's memos, Webster's definition of the term and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Webster's defines torture as "the infliction of intense pain." The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN in 1948, states, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." In my opinion, subjecting human beings to painful physical and psychological tactics is torture.

As further evidence of this contradiction, former President Jimmy Carter, when asked by Wolf Blitzer if President Bush's statement was accurate, said, it was not accurate if you use the accepted international norms of torture, as have been in place certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated. When asked if he thought the US had tortured individuals, former President Carter said emphatically, "I don't think it, I know it."

Carter went on to say, "You can make your own definition of human rights [... ] and you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them." So, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet." So it is with torture.

What are to make of this and why does it matter?

First, most experts will tell you that using techniques such as induced hypothermia, long periods of forced standing, sleep deprivation, and sound and light manipulation do not result in obtaining useful information. According to Newsweek, "US intelligence officers say they have little - if any - evidence that useful intelligence has been obtained using techniques generally understood to be torture."

Second, because of policies such as extraordinary renditions and torture, America has lost its international moral authority as a protector of human rights and a defender of civil liberties. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and United Flight 93's crash in Pennsylvania, galvanized international sympathy for the US. Mainstream media and governments worldwide denounced the attacks and supported America, as evidenced by the headline of France's Le Monde newspaper: "Nous sommes tous Americains" as translated, "We Are All Americans."

Instead of taking the moral high ground and using this tragedy to unite international efforts to work towards peace, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the other "Chicken Hawks" in the Bush administration exploited the circumstance and imposed their corrupt and vile ideology of unilateralism and militarism on the world. Instead of using restraint, moral suasion and diplomacy to find common ground, the Bush administration has become like the very people they called enemies. They have decimated habeas corpus, ignored the UN, used immoral and illegal tactics to invade a sovereign nation, and kidnapped and tortured people. This sounds more like the actions of a dictator than the president of a constitutional republic.

President Bush stated, "The American people expect their government to take action to protect them from further attack." This is true; the problem is, the tactics being used by this administration are not making American people safer; they are putting the American people in harm's way. As a direct result of the tactics used to execute the "War On Terror," The New York Times states, "The Iraq War has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate, found that, rather than stemming the growth of terrorism, the war in Iraq helped fuel its spread across the globe." Is it any wonder why a majority of American's still don't feel safe, six years after 9/11? They are doing with the issue of torture what they have done with the invasion of Iraq and the so called "War on Terror": defend the indefensible.

Just as there were no WMD's, no coordinated efforts between Saddam and Osama, and no attempt by Saddam to buy yellowcake from Niger, you can't make your own definition of human rights and your own definition of torture and say we don't violate them.

GREEN REVOLUTIONS IN CUBA AND VENEZUELA

Cuba is home to thousands of organic farms

by Malcom Lagauche - Oct 14, 2007

When most people hear the word "revolution" about either Cuba or Venezuela, images of the Cuban revolution of the 1950s with Fidel Castro at the forefront, or of Hugo Chavez giving a scathing speech attacking U.S. imperialism are brought to mind. However, both countries are today experiencing a revolution in the way their people eat.

After the Soviet Union dropped Cuba like a hot potato, the island country found itself without finances. At that time, Cuba imported much of its food, so it had to change its methods to feed its citizens. The Independent daily newspaper of Great Britain ran a story on August 8, 2006, titled, "The Good Life in Havana: Cuba’s Green Revolution." According to the article:

Twenty years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro’s small island faced a food crisis. Today, its networks of small urban farmers is thriving, an organic success story that is feeding the nation …

… Mr. Salcines and his small urban farm at Alamar, an eastern suburb of the capital, Havana, are at the center of a social transformation that may turn out to be as important as anything else that has been achieved during Castro’s 47 years in power.

Spurred into action by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous impact on its subsidized economy, the government of Cuba was forced to take radical steps to feed its people. The solution it chose — essentially unprecedented both within the developed and underdeveloped world — was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.

Laura Enriquez, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively on the subject of Latin American agriculture, said, "What happened in Cuba was remarkable. It was remarkable that they decided to prioritize food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at’ and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small farmers."

Today, there are more than 7,000 plots occupying more than 81,000 acres on which organic food is farmed in Cuba. Many of these are located in urban areas as well as rural venues. In Havana, there are more than 200 gardens, some in small spaces between tower block estates, that supply the city’s population with more than 90% of their fruit and vegetables. The farmers are obligated to farm a certain amount of products for the Cuban government. The surplus then belongs to the farmers who sell it for profit, which is divided among them.

This method of producing food has supplied work for thousands of Cubans. Their employment is not dependent upon the whims of international finance.

Currently, the Cuban system of organic farming and distribution, is being implemented in Caracas, Venezuela.

April M. Howard wrote an article called "Feeding Ourselves: Organic Urban Gardens in Caracas, Venezuela" that appeared on www.venezuelanalysis.com on August 10, 2006. According to Howard:

In the middle of the modern, concrete city of Caracas, Venezuela, Norali Venezuela is standing in a garden dressed in jeans and work boots. She is the director of the Organoponico Boliver, the first urban organic garden to show its green face in the heart of the city of Caracas …

… To Venezuelans, the garden represents a shift in the ways that Venezuelans get their food. "People are waking up," she (Venezuela) told the press. We’ve been dependent on McDonald’s and Wendy’s for so long. Now people are learning to eat what we can produce ourselves" …

… The Oganoponicos are inspired by similar projects that sprung up in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet bloc, this means that Venezuelans would buy and consume food grown in Venezuela, as opposed to the current situation in which, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Venezuela imports about 80 percent of the food that it consumes.

Currently, Cuba is entirely independent from the outside world for its food needs. Venezuela is moving toward a similar autonomy.

There could be a monkey wrench in the future for Cuba’s astute program, however. Lately, with Fidel Castro recuperating from an operation, much speculation has been spoken about Cuba’s future. The U.S. government (Republicans and Democrats alike) are speaking about bringing "freedom" to the Cuban people.

If such an unfortunate occurrence comes forth, we have Iraq to look at as an example of some of the "freedoms" brought about by U.S. interference. In Iraq, Paul Bremer, the U.S. viceroy who set up the regulations for a "free" Iraq, posted 100 edicts before he left his post: edicts that can not be broken by successive Iraqi governments. Edict #81 forbids Iraqi farmers from using seeds of their previous crops, a farming method had been in existence for 5,000 years in Iraq. Iraqi farmers now must purchase genetically-modified seeds from Monsanto for their crops. This is a rule that is tightly regulated. Inspectors frequently visit farmers in Iraq to ensure acquiescence. If a farmer uses his own seeds, he is heavily fined.

How can this happen? It’s quite simple. Monsanto takes a seed of a crop, copies it and manufactures the seeds. Once the seed is copied, Monsanto then acquires a patent for the seed design. In other words, any natural seeds with the same patented design become illegal to use.

If Cuba is "freed" by the U.S., there will be an immediate end to Cuban farmers using their own seeds. Then, Cubans will no longer be able to purchase readily-available organic foods at a low price.

In reading about the Cuban and Venezuelan programs, the merit of self-sufficiency and economics play a major factor. However, one point is missing from most of the reports: the health component.

If more than 90% of Cubans, and a growing number of Venezuelans, eat a diet consisting of organic foods, they will become much healthier than the people of industrialized societies whose diets consist mostly of processed, artificial, sugar-laden foods that are slowly poisoning them to death.

Obesity and diabetes are at all-time highs in the U.S. More than 50% of the population are considered overweight. Currently, there are 21 million U.S. citizens who suffer from diabetes. Health experts predict that within 10 years, that figure will be a staggering 45 million. This is an easy prediction because experts follow the degradation of the U.S. diet and can accurately predict the results for a 10-year period.

Before I wrote this article, I performed a little research on diabetes in the U.S. and Cuba. In Cuba, there are about 300,000 people with diabetes. The country has an active educational program on diabetes that begins with school kids.

The Cuban rate of diabetes is about 1/7 of that in the U.S. Of the top at-risk populations for diabetes in the U.S., Cuban-Americans come in at third place, a very high-risk figure.

One does not have to be Einstein to figure out why Cuban-Americans are at such a high risk for diabetes. Their gene pools are similar to those on the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida, so it is not genetic. They are at risk because they have succumbed to the U.S. diet of fast food and junk food.

Possibly, opponents of U.S. imperialism and hegemony should consider patience as a countering force for standing up to Uncle Sam. Within a couple of decades, the U.S. citizenry just may eat itself to death.

David Horowitz: A Nazi mind with a Jewish face

From Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem - Oct 14, 2007

Many people around the world tend to forget that the holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz- Birkenau and the use of Zyklon-B, or even with Kirstallnacht in November 1938, or the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws three years earlier.

In fact, the enormous mass murder during World War II couldn’t have happened had it not been for the solid infrastructure of hate that the Nazis created in the late 1920 and 1930s.

For example, in his book, Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, Hitler uses the main thesis of "The Jewish peril", which speaks of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.

This is exactly, what many Nazi-minded Zionists are doing these days, with their explicit goal being to defame, vilify, demonize and dehumanize the world’s estimated 1.5 million Muslims.

There are numerous aspects to the Zionist-led and Zionist-financed Muslim-vilifying campaign. Today, anyone with access to the internet could observe the huge volume of anti-Muslim literature flooding the world-wide web.

And, needless to say, the ultimate message of the hate literature is almost identical to that promoted by Hitler and his Nazi cohorts against Jews, namely that Muslims are “evil,” “fascist,” “racist anti-Semites,” and “hell-bent on destroying western civiliazation.”

So, the message, often unspoken but easily understood, is that Muslims should be “eliminated” and “exterminated” for the sake of mankind.

In this context, David Horowitz, a notorious icon of Jewish Islamophobia, is embarking on venemous campaign to make American college students hate everything and anything Muslim and Islamic.

In a calculatd effort to vilify Islam and generate support for further US military aggressions against Muslim countries, Horowitz is proclaiming an “Islamo-Fascism Awarness Week” on dozens of American college campuses starting Oct. 22.

The very term “Islamo-fascism” is obviously very tendentious and scandalously inaccurate. In fact, one could argue with absolute certitude that the term is an inherent and eternal oxymoron, since Islam represents the ideological anti-theisis of fascism, a western concept based on authoritarianism, chauvinism, jingoism, bellicosity and militarism.

The Quran proclaims that “ O Mankind, We (God) Created you from a single pair of male and female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may know (cooperate with) each other. Verily, the best of you, is the most God-fearing of you, and God is well-acquainted with all that you do.”

And the Prophet Muhammd taught that “there is no superiority of an Arab-over a non-Arab, or of a White person over a Black person, except through piety and moral excellence”

So, how can a religion as such be braned as “fascist”? Indeed, calling Islam fascist and using infintely corrupt terms such as Islamo-fascism is nothing short of verbal fornication.

Sure, there are Muslim fanatics and terrorists who tarnish the image of Islam by carrying out acts that are decidedly incompaible with its teachings. But these constitute a tiny fraction of Islam’s numerous followers, and are mostly ignorant people pushed into committing criminal acts as a result of real grievances inflicted on Muslim lands and Muslim peoples by Israel and her western allies, especially the United States.

Moreover, if the existence of these fanatical militants justified branding Islam as “fascist,” then what would one speak of the genocidal onslaught being perpetrated against in Iraq and Afghanistan and other Muslim peoples, by the US and other western countreis?

Similarly, if the existence of a few hundred or a few thousand desperate Palestinian resistance fighters defending their country and people in the face of the Nazi-like savagery meted out by a nuclear-armed Israel justified branding Hamas as “Islamo-fascist,” then all fighters for freedom and justice from Adam and Eve, including Jewish defenders of the Ghetto Warsaw, would have to be called Nazi, Satanic and evil.

More to the point, If Muslims are to be branded “fascist” for rejecting Jesus Christ as God or Son of God, as representatives of Christian Zionism claim openly these days, then the rest of the non-Christian world, including all world’s estimated 13 million Jews, will have to be considered “fascist” and must be exterminated, espeically if conversion proves difficult….all in the name of Jesus!!

Of course, Jesus Christ, the messenger of love and charity, is the last thing on earth that would come to Horowitz’ mind as he prepares for his hate campaign against Muslims on American campuses.

His real goal is to prepare the psychological environment for more American wars against Muslims in order to allow Israel to complete its ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in both Israel proper and the West Bank.

Today, extremist Jewish radicals and hate-mongers, people like Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and the the rest of the Zionist-dominated neocon cabal, tightly control American politics and policies, as prominent American politicians, academics and intellectuals have come to realize.

Politicians, presidential candidates congressmen and congresswomen are held hostage to the powerful Jewish lobby -so much so, that they think a thousand times before saying or even suggesting any criticism of Israel’s Nazi-like oppression of Palestinians.

Hence, it is not far-fetched to expect that these Nazi-minded Jews, who actually are a cancer upon Judaism’s moral conscience and spiritual ideals, are trying to use America’s vast resources to wage open-ended war on Islam on Israel’s behalf.

Yesterday, it was Iraq. Now, they want to get the US government to invade and attack Iran. And then Syria…and God knows who is next?

Perhaps, this wicked hysteria could, God forbid, end up in a sort of a nuclear holocaust in which millions, perhaps tens of millions of human beings would perish. Perhaps then people like Horowitz and Daniel Pipes would finally be happy and sleep quietly, with a clear conscience!!

Finally, a word to Jews, especially Jews with a conscience. -Why don’t you speak up against these paragons of hate amongst you? Why don’t you proclaim your opposition to their Nazi-like ideology and behavior? Does a Nazi discourse become kosher or acceptable when promoted by Jews?

It is a sign of hypocrisy and moral duplicity to protest anti-Semitism while playing deaf and dumb in the face of equally virulent Islamophobia which is being fostered and promoted by Jews who claim to be speaking and acting in your collective name.

Jews, of all people, should realize that spreading hate against a racial or religious community leads first to the “denaturalization” (as Avigdor Lieberman is trying to do in Israel and David Horowitz in the US) and then delegitimization of that community. And eventually, this could lead to mass murder.

Moreover, you shouldn’t be intoxicated by your power in America. The consequences of hatred would eventually boomerang on you, because hatred is blind and irrational.

Guru of greed: The cult of selfishness

Fifty years after it was first published, Ayn Rand's most influential book offers a vital clueto why so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests.

By Leonard Doyle - Oct 12, 2007

Why is it that millions of ordinary Americans vote for conservative policies that seem inimical to their lives? Why are the politicians who support healthcare reforms to give access to a doctor for the 47 million Americans without insurance branded as closet socialists or worse?

Why, in this upside-down world do so many blue-collar Americans vote Republican, and family farmers support a President whose Wall Street friends would gladly push them off the land?

Why do people shrug and say "tough", when they read that hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their homes, after falling victims to crooked mortgage salesmen? The most common response is that millions of people who otherwise could never have afforded a home are now enjoying the American Dream.

Perhaps the greatest political riddle of the US is why so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests?

If it were otherwise, then surely John Edwards, the telegenic Democratic candidate for President would lead the polls since he has dedicated his campaign to lifting tens of millions out of poverty. Instead it is Hillary Clinton, whose economic policies might as well have been drafted by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, who looks a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination.

So what's the matter with America?

The answer may be contained in the writings of the Russian emigrée and radical libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. Two decades after her death, she remains the darling of right-thinking Americans and sales of her novels, paens of praise to unbridled capitalism, are even outselling The Da Vinci Code.

More copies of her book Atlas Shrugged are sold now than when she was the literary pied piper of Wall Street. In his early thirties, no less a figure than Alan Greenspan, who married one of her closest friends and went on to become the chairman of the Federal Reserve fawned over her. On Saturday nights he made his way to Rand's deliberately darkened apartment in Manhattan to sit in rapt admiration as passages of her novels were read aloud to her conservative salon.

"Ayn," Mr Greenspan would say according to those who were also present, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!"

Mr Greenspan was already making lots of money as an economics consultant, advising the Wall Street moguls and other captains of industry whom Ms Rand idealised in her books.

At the time Mr Greenspan embraced the Rand dogma, he favoured removing all safety nets from the US economy and bringing back the Gold Standard. When Atlas Shrugged was negatively reviewed as an apology for totalitarianism in the New York Times, Mr Greenspan wrote a letter to the paper, which in retrospect looks like an application for the job that would eventually make him one of the most powerful figures in the world.

To the editor:

Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should,

Alan Greenspan

New York

Over the years as Mr Greenspan became the World's pre-eminent central banker he slipped from Rand's circle of influence. And while never quite dumping her theory of Objectivism – in fact he has fond memories of her salon in his new book – he turned his back on her cold-hearted worldview for the rest of his powerful career.

Some argue that it was Rand herself rather than her philosophical ideas that held the public gaze. Biographies penned by spurned lovers and collections of her letters reveal a difficult personality, alternatively passionate and cold. A woman who kept lists of sworn enemies. She enjoyed kinky sex with swinging couples and enforced a cult of loyalty among her followers.

Rand was born in 1905 in Russia and her comfortable life was turned upside down when the Bolsheviks attacked her father's pharmacy, declaring his business to be state property. She had fled the Soviet Union by1926 and soon arrived in Hollywood. There she looked though the studio gates to see the director Cecil B. DeMille on the set filming a silent movie, King of Kings.

She talked her way onto the set, and got a job as an extra, later becoming a junior screenwriter. There she also met and married the writer Frank O' Connor.

For a few years she wrote screenplays as well as novels that failed to sell. It was only in 1943 that her career took off when word-of-mouth campaign got The Fountainhead noticed and put her on the road to success.

Rand's most influential book, Atlas Shrugged begins in a recession. To save the economy her hero, John Galt, calls for a strike by intellectuals against government interference. Factories, farms and shops close. Riots break out as food becomes scarce. Rand herself said she "set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them".

The book was published into a welter of criticism. The New York Times critic denounced it as "written out of hate" and called it "a triumph of English as a second language". Both conservatives and liberal critics disparaged it, with the right condemning its promotion of a godless ethic and the left condemning its message of "greed is good". Rand cried every day as bad reviews poured in.

But now she is back in fashion of a sort. Her theories have made inroads into academia. Objectivism is taught at more than 30 universities, with fellowships at several leading philosophy departments. The Ayn Rand Institute has a war chest of over $7m to promote her ideas and more than a million high school pupils are being given free copies of her novels to read.
Now a movie, starring Angelina Jolie in the lead role, is being released next year.

As Forbe's magazine – aka The Capitalist's Tool – breathlessly reported: "Sales on Amazon in the first nine months of this year are already almost double the total for 2006." With the 50th anniversary of its publication today, Atlas Shrugged was ranked 124th on Amazon's sales charts while The Da Vinci Code languished at 2,587.

The book made Rand the toast of every Rotary Club in the land.

Legions of readers, including Hillary Clinton, members of the Supreme Court and of course Mr Greenspan count Rand among their formative influences. And the 140,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged, which are sold every year, are a small fraction of the 6 million books sold since the book was first published.

Rand's credo is summed up by the title of a collection of her essays, The Virtue of Selfishness, which have circulated in an almost samizdat fashion among enthusiasts of capitalism red in tooth and claw.

It attracted the devotion of America's top corporate executives, who would only speak of its impact behind closed doors. A staple read of undergraduate business schools, the book provided comfort to each generation of entrepreneurs by telling them that there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

One of the characters in Atlas Shrugged, summarises her philosophy of Objectivism with the following oath: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another human being, or ask another human being to live for mine."

Her novels continue to inspire visceral feelings of worship and disgust among readers. Reviewing the newly published memoir of her acolyte Greenspan, the conservative writer Andrew Ferguson complains in The Weekly Standard that "her creepy philosophy of Objectivism, placing the self at the centre of the moral universe, still is embraced by tens of thousands of pimply teenage boys in the dreamy moments between fits of social insecurity and furious bouts of masturbation."

One way or another Rand's ode to American individualism has made her one of the towering figures of US political thought in the late 20th century.

By rejecting altruism and embracing selfishness she rejected the Judaeo-Christian underpinning of the religious right. The only moral obligation a person had was to his or her own happiness. That meant capitalism should be given a free rein with an unregulated market economy.

She pushed America's cult of individualism into uncharted waters where ruthless self-interest and disdain for poorer members of society were the guiding principles.

Her admirers partly credit her revived appeal to an absence of ideas coming from the US left: "Today's left doesn't have anything positive to offer to young people," says Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "When they were socialists, there was at least something they were fighting for, and they believed in a right and a wrong. Today's leftist agenda is negative and nihilistic – focused on stopping industrialisation, capitalism and even Western civilisation. But young people want positive values. That's why religion is so strong today, because many view it as the only thing that promises a brighter future.

"Ayn Rand is the only voice that offers a secular absolutist morality with a positive vision and agenda, for individuals and for society as a whole."

The coming presidential election will reveal the extent to which ordinary poor Americans will proudly vote themselves out of jobs, off the land and ensure that their children can never afford to go to university or afford health care. It happened in the last two presidential elections, and the Ayn Rand Institute is banking that it will happen again.

The Iron Wall

I would have titled this piece: "The twisted logic of Zionism"

Colonisation of Palestine

Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present

Zionism Must Go Forward

Originally published in Russian under the title O Zheleznoi Stene in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923

"The Jewish Herald" (South Africa) Friday, 26th November, 1937

by Vladimir Jabotinsky - Oct 13, 2007

It is an excellent rule to begin an article with the most important point, but this time, I find it necessary to begin with an introduction , and, moreover , with a personal introduction.

I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine,

and so forth. It is not true.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme , the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews, but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.

I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall

never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try

to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

But it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.

Now, after this introduction, we may proceed to the subject.

Voluntary Agreement Not Possible.

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or ( as some people will remind us ) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad.

Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.

Arabs Not Fools

This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are five hundred years behind us, they have neither our endurance nor our determination; but they are just as good psychologists as we are, and their minds have been sharpened like ours by centuries of fine-spun logomachy. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.

All Natives Resist Colonists

There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."

Arab Comprehension

Some of us have induced ourselves to believe that all the trouble is due to misunderstanding – the Arabs have not understood us, and that is the only reason why they resist us; if we can only make it clear to them how moderate our intentions really are, they will immediately extend to us their hand in friendship.

This belief is utterly unfounded and it has been exploded again and again. I shall recall only one instance of many. A few years ago, when the late Mr. Sokolow was on one of his periodic visits to Palestine, he addressed a meeting on this very question of the "misunderstanding." He demonstrated lucidly and convincingly that the Arabs are terribly mistaken if they think that we have any desire to deprive them of their possessions or to drive them our of the country, or that we want to oppress them. We do not even ask for a Jewish Government to hold the Mandate of the League of Nations.

One of the Arab papers, " El Carmel," replied at the time, in an editorial article, the purport of which was this :

The Zionists are making a fuss about nothing. There is no misunderstanding. All that Mr. Sokolow says about the Zionist intentions is true, but the Arabs know that without him. Of course, the Zionists cannot now be thinking of driving the Arabs out of the country, or oppressing them, not do they contemplate a Jewish Government. Quite obviously, they are now concerned with one thing only- that the Arabs should not hinder their immigration. The Zionists assure us that even immigration will be regulated strictly according to the economic needs of Palestine. The Arabs have never doubted that: it is a truism, for otherwise there can be no immigration.

No "Misunderstanding"

This Arab editor was actually willing to agree that Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding".

The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

This statement of the position by the Arab editor is so logical, so obvious, so indisputable, that everyone ought to know it by heart, and it should be made the basis of all our future discussions on the Arab question. It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.

Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab.

Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.

The Iron Wall

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism.

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.

And we are all of us ,without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.

In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians". Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.

We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about "agreement" which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest.

Zionism Moral and Just

Two brief remarks:

In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just ,or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.

We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.

There is no other morality.

Eventual Agreement

In the second place, this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestine Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields in matters of such a vital character it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no breach in the iron wall. Not till then will they drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is "Never!" And the leadership will pass to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions. Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizen, or Arab national integrity.

And when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbours.

But the only way to obtain such an agreement, is the iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure. In other words, the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.

From the text at http://www.jabotinsky.org/Jaboworld/docs/Iron%20Wall.doc (with some corrections of typography and grammar - emphasis is in the original).

THE ETHICS OF THE IRON WALL

By Vladimir Jabotinsky
'The Jewish Standard', 5/9/1941 (London).

Originally Published in Rassviet (Paris) 11/11/1923 as a continuation of the previous article.

Let us go back to the Helsingfors Programme. Since I am one of those who helped to draft it, I am naturally not disposed to question the justice of the principles advocated there. The programme guarantees citizenship equality, and national self-determination. I am firmly convinced that any impartial judge will accept this programme as the ideal basis for peaceful and neighbourly collaboration between two nations.

But it is absurd to expect the Arabs to have the mentality of an impartial judge; for in this conflict they are not the judges; but one of the contending parties. And after all, our chief question is whether the Arabs, even if they believed in peaceful collaboration they would agree to have any "neighbours", even good neighbours, in the country which they regard as their own. Not even those who try to move us with high-sounding phrases will dare to deny that national homogeneity is more convenient than natural diversity. So why should a nation that is perfectly content with its isolation admit to its country even good neighbours in any considerable number? I want neither your honey nor your sting", is a reasonable answer.

But apart from this fundamental difficulty, why must it be the Arabs who should accept the Helsingfors Programme, or, in that matter any programme for a State which has a mixed national population? To make such a demand is to ask for the impossible. The Springer theory is not more than 30 years old. And no nation, not even the most civilised, has yet agreed to apply this theory honestly in practice. Even the Czechs, under the leadership of Masaryk, the teacher of all autonomists, could not would not do it.

Among the Arabs, even their intellectuals have never heard of this theory. But these same intellectuals would know that a minority always suffers everywhere: the Christians in Turkey, the Moslems in India, the Irish under the British, the Poles and Czechs under the Germans, now the Germans under the Poles and Czechs, and so forth, without end. So that one must be intoxicated with rhetoric to expect the Arabs to believe that the Jews, of all the people in the world, will alone prove able, or will, at least, honestly intend to realise an idea that has not succeeded with other nations who are with much greater authority.

If I insist on this point, it is not because I want the Jews, too, to abandon the Helsigfors Programme as the basis of a future modus vivendi. On the contrary we- at least the writer of these lines – believe in this programme as much as we believe in our ability to give effect to it in political life, though all precedents have failed. But it would be useless now to the Arabs. They would not understand, and they would not place any trust in its principles: they would not be able to appreciate them.

II

And since it is useless, it must also be harmful. It is incredible what political simpletons Jews are. They shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you.

There was a typical example in old Russia, when one of the oppressed nations, with one accord, launched a crusade against the Jews, boycotting them and pogroming them. At the same time, this nation was fighting to gain its own autonomy, without any attempt to conceal it means to use its autonomy for the purpose of oppressing the Jews. Worse than before. And yet, Jewish politicians and writers, (even Jewish nationalists) considered it their duty to support the autonomist efforts of their enemy, on the ground that autonomy is a sacred cause. It is remarkable how we Jews regard it as our duty to stand up and cheer whenever the Marsellaise is played, even if it is played by Haman himself, and Jewish heads are smashed to its accompaniment. I was once told of a man who was an ardent Democrat and always whenever he heard the Marsellaise, he stood stiffly attention, like a soldier on parade. One night burglars broke into his house, and one of them played the Marsellaise. This sort of thing is not morality, it is twaddle. Human society is built up on the basis of mutual advantage. If you take away the mutual principle right becomes a falsehood. Each man who passes my window in the street has a right to live only in so far as he recognises my right to live; but if he is determined to kill me, I cannot admit that he has any right to live. And that is true also of nations. Otherwise, the world would become a jungle of wild beasts, where not only the weak, but also those who have any scrap of feeling would be exterminated.

The world must be a place of co-operation and mutual goodwill. If we are to live we should all live in the same way, and if we are to die we should all die in the same way.

But there is no morality, no ethics that concedes the right of a glutton to gorge, while more tempered people die of starvation. There is only one possible morality, that of humanity, and in practice it amounts in our particular instance to this: if besides the Helsingfors Programme we had our pocket full of concessions of every kind, including our willingness to participate in some fantastic Arab Federation od morza do morza (from sea to sea) negotiations with regard to them would still be possible only if the Arabs would first consent to the creation of a Jewish Palestine. Our ancestors knew that very well. And the Talmud quotes a very instructive legal action – which has a direct bearing on this matter. Two people walking along the road find a piece of cloth. One of them says: " I found it. It is mine:" But the other says: " No: that is not true: I found the cloth, and it is mine: " The judge to whom they appeal cuts the cloth in two, and each of these obstinate folk gets half. But there is another version of this action. It is only one of the two claimants who is obstinate: the other, on the contrary, has determined to make the world wonder at this magnanimity. So he says: " We both found the cloth, and therefore I ask only a half of it, because the second belongs to B. But B. insists that he found it, and that he alone is entitled to it. In this case, the Talmud recommends a wise Judgment, that is, how very disappointing to our magnanimous gentleman. The judge says: " There is agreement about one half of the cloth. A. admits that it belongs to B. So it is only the second half that is in dispute. We shall, therefore divide this into two halves: And the obstinate claimant gets three-quarters of the cloth, while the ”gentleman" has only one quarter, and serve him right. It is a very fine thing to be a gentleman, but it is no reason for being an idiot. Our ancestors knew that. But we have forgotten it. We should bear it in mind. Particularly, since we are very badly situated in this matter of concessions. There is not much that we can concede to Arab nationalism, without destroying Zionism. We cannot abandon the effort to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine. Nor can we permit any Arab control of our immigration, or join an Arab Federation. We cannot even support Arab movement, it is at present hostile to us and consequently we all, including even the pro-Arab rhetoriomongers, rejoice at every defeat sustained by this movement, not only adjacent Transjordan, and Syria, but even in Morocco. And this state of affairs will continue, because it cannot be otherwise, until one day the iron wall will compel the Arabs to come to an arrangement with Zionism once and for all.

III

Let us consider for a moment the point of view of those to whom this seems immoral. We shall trace the root of the evil to this – that we are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force. Everything else that is undesirable grows out of this root with axiomatic inevitability. What then is to be done?

The simplest way out would be to look for a different country to colonise. Like Uganda. But if we look more closely into the matter we shall find that the same evil exists there, too. Uganda also has a native population, which consciously or unconsciously as in every other instance in history, will resist the coming of the colonisers. It is true that these natives happen to be black. But that does not alter the essential fact. If it is immoral to colonise a country against the will of its native population, the same morality must apply equally to the black man as to the white. Of course, the blackman may not be sufficiently advanced to think of sending delegations to London, but he will soon find some kindhearted white friends, who will instruct him. Though should these natives even prove utterly helpless, like children, the matter would only become worse. Then if colonisation is invasion and robbery, the greatest crime of all would be to rob helpless children. Consequently, colonisation in Uganda is also immoral, and colonisation in any other place in the world, whatever it may be called, is immoral. There are no more uninhabited islands in the world. In every oasis there is a native population settled from times immemorial, who will not tolerate an immigrant majority or an invasion of outsiders. So that if there is any landless people in the world, even its dream of a national home must be an immoral dream. . Those who are landless must remain landless to all eternity. The whole earth has been allocated. Basta: Morality has said so:

From the Jewish point of view, morality has a particularly interesting appearance. It is said that we Jews number 15 million people scattered throughout the world. Half of them are now literally homeless, poor, hunted wretches. The number of Arabs totals 38 million. They inhabit Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, Egypt, Syria, Arabia and Iraq – an area that apart from desert equals the size of half Europe. There are in this vast area 16 Arabs to the square mile. It is instructive to recall by way of comparison that Sicily has 352 and England 669 inhabitants to the square mile. It is still more instructive to recall that Palestine constitutes about one two hundredth part of this area.

Yet if homeless Jewry demands Palestine for itself it is "immoral" because it does not suit the native population. Such morality may be accepted among cannibals, but not in a civilised world. The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any. It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people. And if such a big landowning nation resists which is perfectly natural – it must be made to comply by compulsion. Justice that is enforced does not cease to be justice. This is the only Arab policy that we shall find possible. As for an agreement, we shall have time to discuss that later.

All sorts of catchwords are used against Zionism; people invoke Democracy, majority rule national self-determination. Which means, that the Arabs being at present the majority in Palestine, have the right of self-determination, and may therefore insist that Palestine must remain an Arab country. Democracy and self-determination are sacred principles, but sacred principles like the Name of the Lord must not be used in vain –to bolster up a swindle, to conceal injustice. The principle of self-determination does not mean that if someone has seized a stretch of land it must remain in his possession for all time, and that he who was forcibly ejected from his land must always remain homeless. Self-determination means revision – such a revision of the distribution of the earth among the nations that those nations who have too much should have to give up some of it to those nations who have not enough or who have none, so that all should have some place on which to exercise their right of self-determination. And now when the whole of the civilised world has recognised that Jews have a right to return to Palestine, which means that the Jews are, in principle, also "citizens" and "inhabitants" of Palestine, only they were driven out, and their return must be a lengthy process, it is wrong to contend that meanwhile the local population has the right to refuse to allow them to come back and to that "Democracy”. The Democracy of Palestine consists of two national groups, the local group and these who were driven out, and the second group is the larger.

The Mother of all Pretexts

by Uri Avnery - Oct 13, 2007

WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?

At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest.

From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away and - by the standards of the time - primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.

For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise.

But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?

The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss.

Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.

When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.

Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.

Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.

THE FIRST justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything - except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.

When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: It's not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the "effendis". The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors.

That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same "effendis" and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936. Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: the Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people "discovered" that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust. (Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)

World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes, to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe our conscience to this day.

It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.

Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms flowed to us, but that's not important.) It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.

But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO", as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods - the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist - Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.

When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.

Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.

This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot.

THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented - and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.

IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli "Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.

This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism."

Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.

With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else?

And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?

Privatizing Terror, Outsourcing Diplomacy

by Wajahat Ali - Oct 13, 2007

The international outcry over the recent Blackwater shootings forced the world to closely examine and appreciate the complex reality of the United States government's overdependence on private military contractors operating in Iraq. The foremost expert and most cited authority on the subject is Peter Warren Singer, a senior fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institute, co-founder of "The U.S. Policy towards the Islamic World" Program, and author of the seminal work on private military contractors, "Corporate Warriors." This interview, his most recent, examines the most current repercussions caused by the Blackwater scandal and private military firms within an overall context of The Iraq War, U.S. Foreign policy in the Middle East, and America's public relations with the Muslim world.

WAJAHAT ALI: Ok, the first question is an easy one. A fastball right down the middle regarding Blackwater (An American Private Military firm contracted by the U.S. government to provide security in Iraq). On September 16, Blackwater was involved in a catastrophic shooting incident in Iraq's Nisoor Square leaving nearly 20 Iraqi civilians dead. Are you at all shocked or surprised by this revelation?

P.W. SINGER: No. Short answer, no. Long answer is that--look, I've been researching and writing on private military firms for over a decade now. My book, Corporate Warriors, dealt with this issue even before the Iraq War. Since the war started the outsourcing of military functions has been put on steroids not only in terms of the growth of it, but also in terms of the negative aspects coming out of that growth. The incident in question regarding Blackwater needs to be put in a proper context. It's just one company out of 181 other private military companies operating in that space in Iraq. The incidents involving abuses of private military contractors go back to the starting of the war. This includes the incidents at Abu Ghraib (Torture Scandal) and the private contractor Aegis Trophy's infamous video of 2005 (Aegis employees posted a video online showing them shooting at Iraqi civilians.) You also had the Triple Canopy shootings lawsuit in '06. Blackwater is just one of the companies in the game.

Within Blackwater itself there have been multiple incidents well before this most recent one. An example is The Christmas Eve shooting where a Blackwater contractor allegedly got drunk, got into an argument inside the Green Zone with one of the Iraqi Vice President's security guards, and then shot him and killed him. It's been over 10 months since that happened. Weeks before the Nisoor Square September shooting, there were multiple incidents involving the Iraqi Interior Ministry. There was one such incident where an Interior Ministry employee was killed, one where there was an armed standoff between Blackwater contractors and the Iraqi police in which the U.S. military actually had to intervene. One of the U.S. government officials, embedded in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, described this as a "powder keg of anger." That powder keg exploded several weeks later (The September Nisoor Square shooting in Iraq). To answer your question, no, I wasn't surprised. Absolutely not.

The Iraqi government had some harsh words recently for Blackwater, publicly saying, "Blackwater uses employees who disrespect the rights of Iraqi citizens even though they are guests in the country." Could this statement also describe the conduct of the U.S. forces and other American private firms operating in Iraq?

The Iraqi government understands that Blackwater is only one player within a much larger industry--the Iraqis understand that also. They (Blackwater) have become some sort of a symbol. If you ask most contractors, I am dubious that they would see themselves as "guests of the Iraqi government." Most see themselves carrying out a contract, and the client in that contract is not the Iraqi government. It usually is the United States government or United States subcontractors. They view Iraqi governments with a great deal of suspicion. Remember, we are talking about an Iraqi Interior Ministry that just couple of weeks ago an investigation board found to be completely corrupt. The Ministry acted basically as a cover for a number of sectarian militias operating in Iraq, and the recommendation of the investigation board was that the best thing one can do for Iraq was to shut the Ministry down and start over again. So there are a lot of fingers that can be pointed in lot of directions.

At the end of the day, Iraq is starting to act like sovereign state. Sovereign states want to control the forces within their borders--that's what makes them sovereign. That holds equally true for sectarian militia as it does for private military firms operating out there. They are outside the control of the government, or at least what should be the control of government. The point is if Iraq is to be a sovereign state, it needs to be resting control over this, and to be honest, this is how you get the U.S. out of there--you let Iraq have institutions that are able to carry out their jobs as a government.

Has the global microscope on the Blackwater scandal caused an overall strain between the Iraqi and US governments? If so, what are the repercussions in the "Muslim world" and also on the ground when dealing with the Iraqi insurgency?

The United States government aspect of it is - that the unfortunate truth is while contractors are carrying out a number of critical and important missions, the overall effect of their use has actually been undermining rather than assisting U.S. operations and goals. It extends all the way to tactical levels on the field to the grand strategic world.

To the question of the relationship between the Iraqi and U.S. government, it's very interesting remember you need to put this into context. One week before the shootings in Nisoor square (September '07), General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker (U.S. envoy to Iraq) testified to Congress about the "surge strategy." Now, there was huge debate whether the military aspects of the surge strategy were being met or not. They really went back and forth on that. Now, one thing they did talk about was the 43 Iraqi citizens who were shot in Baghdad alone by private contractors that same week. When we talk about what President Bush refers to as a "Return to normalcy" in Iraq--this doesn't feel all that normal, does it? There was no debate at all about the political aspects. Everyone (in Congress) on both sides of the aisle universally agreed that in the year ahead we would have to press the Iraqi government to finally take some action on the political benchmarks. The key to the "surge strategy" success was dependant on this.

Now, let's move forward just one week--within the span of that 20 minute Blackwater gun fight (September '07 Nisoor Square shooting) --that whole strategy falls by the wayside. A couple hours later, Secretary Condoleeza Rice calls up Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, which is extraordinary because she normally doesn't call him. When she calls to speak with him personally, she doesn't press him on the really important issues, such as, "We need you to pass the oil law," or "We need you to deal with the amnesty issues"--both critical political benchmarks.

Instead, she calls to express her sympathies and to apologize for this Blackwater incident. Over the next week, she and Ambassador Crocker have to keep going back to the Iraqis, and they are almost actually begging them to let Blackwater get back into business (Resuming their routine operations in Iraq), because if Blackwater can't operate, then the United States embassy is effectively shut down. This is the complete vulnerability that the United States has created for our operations there in Iraq by depending on private contractors.

One week later, Bush meets with Prime Minister Maliki face to face. They were already scheduled to have this meeting, but now the whole point of the meeting changes. Top of the agenda is no longer, "Prime Minister Maliki, we really need you to get serious about these sectarian killings, because if they don't end, we don't end this war, and I don't get my troops home." Instead, top of the agenda is Blackwater. So, basically this a manner in which private contractor action completely skews the relationship between two governments and undermines the overall strategy.

Now, the second question asks what does this do to the broader, as some people like to say "War of ideas," or however you want to phrase it, regarding the broader Muslim world. And here, too, this is a complete hammer to our image; a hammer to our public diplomacy. Some U.S. military officers on the scene described this as "bad as Abu Ghraib." I personally disagree with that, but it points to the level of negativity. While private contractors are seen as convenient, temporary manpower shift, it's a way of dis-involving your public (American citizens), and it doesn't play that way "outside" (Iraq). When incidents happen, the Iraqis don't just focus on the private companies, instead they blame the U.S. government.

The Blackwater "Nisoor Square" shooting incident resonated negatively not only inside Iraq but throughout the Muslim world. A variety of major media out there in the Middle East like Al Jazeera reported on the Blackwater contractors as "an army that seeks fame, fortune and thrills away from all considerations and ethics of military honor. The employees are known for their roughness, they are known for shooting indiscriminately at vehicles or pedestrians." Even the Daily Star, the regional English language newspaper which is probably one of the most moderate voices in the region, compared the uses of the company to the Mahdi army (Militant Shiite insurgency in Iraq) and put the Mahdi army in a positive light saying "at least they (The Mahdi army) can plausibly claim to be defending their community. No foreign mercenary can plead similar motivations. So, all of them should go." These are all really major quotes, but the timing of it happens at the very same moment that Secretary Rice is in the region trying to save her historic legacy by jump starting the Arab-Israel peace process. Most people would agree the Arab-Israel situation is the real key in sucking the poison out of Muslim-U.S. relations. And instead of her efforts being positive for any kind of U.S. public diplomacy, every commentator (in Iraq) called the conference she was attending "The BlackWater- Black Heart Conference." It is just a hammer blow to our public diplomacy.

The second thing which is fascinating to me is the reaction by Blackwater. While the Arab press is roiling, and it's being covered in other parts of the Muslim world like Indonesia and Pakistan negatively, how did the company react?

That's a great lead in to a question I have regarding Erick Prince, the chairman and owner of Blackwater, who recently testified on Capitol Hill and predictably defended his company's actions.

I was there for all 5 hours of it.

Were you just steaming in the back, fuming the whole time?

Yes (Laughs). To be completely honest.

If you were on the panel, what questions would you have asked? Some key questions you thought were on point and went unasked by the panel?

Well the event played out two ways. One side was craven and the other side was clueless. One side kept going, "Mr. Prince tell us how great you are, tell us how wonderful you are, tell us how special you are." The other side asked questions that were scatterbrained, all over the place, and didn't deal with the issue at hand. So, I have here a couple of questions that would have been interesting if answered.

I would have asked him bout the series of incidents involving his company that date back to 2004. They range from sending out men on a mission to Fallujah without proper equipment, vehicles, training, or even good directions that led to their death, as well helping the Iraqi insurgency.

A simple yes or no question would have been, "Has your firm, based on these patterns of incidents, faced any legal or disciplinary actions from the U.S. government? Have they (the guilty contractors) ever been prosecuted, or lost a contract, or been fined for anything based on this?" Because it seems, as far as the record shows, that the only people to take action, to create consequences when there has been negative effect, has not been the folks (The U.S. Government) paying these contractors. It's been three groups only:

1) The four mothers of the Blackwater employees killed in Fallujah.

2) The parents of the men who were killed in the Blackwater plane crash that resulted from their firm's actions in Afghanistan.

3) And now, The Iraqi government that just got fed up waiting for our government to do something.

Here's another question I would've asked: "We understand that you fired the person that got into a drunken argument on Christmas Eve and killed the Iraqi Vice President's security guard. Our question is who flew him out of the country? Which entity made the decision to get that individual out of the country 36 hours after they potentially committed a murder, which in effect assured prosecution would be difficult and impede the investigation? Was Blackwater operating under its own discretion? Or, were they ordered to do so by its clients and the State Department? Who was it?"

Another one is "Why do your helicopters in Iraq not carry any identifying insignia, such as the numbers painted on U.S. Army vehicles? Is there something that sets the company aside from standard U.S. tactics?

It would have been very interesting to ask him, "Isn't it interesting that the same government individual, who has been reported by one investigative committee to have made the initial decision for Blackwater to get its first contract, is the brother of the current State Department Inspector General, who was found, by the same committee, to have intervened in preventing an investigation into Blackwater's illegal activity?"

These are some examples of the actual questions we could've asked. Instead, one side wanted to talk about everything from Moveon.org to diabetes medication. And the other side oddly kept asking Eric Prince why he didn't prosecute his employees, but conceded ultimately that he couldn't because he was just a C.E.O. of a company.

However, what's good is that no one can claim they don't know about this anymore. Now, when there are negative consequences, they (The U.S.) have to deal with them. But they couldn't claim that before. For example, in 2006 in a public setting right across the street from me, President Bush was asked about the legal status and accountability of private military contractors in Iraq. One student questioned him, and Bush answered with a giggle, you can see this on the web, just Google it. Bush ultimately said, "I'm gonna ask Rumsfeld about it when I get back." If that question had been answered a year ago, we wouldn't be in this problem today but, it wasn't.

Your research has borne many egregious example of private contractors' reckless conduct in Iraq--including the Blackwater shootings, CACI and Titan firms responsible for the notorious Abu Ghraib interrogations, and Aegis Company's "trophy video" in which they posted a video of them shooting at civilians to an Elvis song on the net. What I and others want to know is what legal repercussions do they face, if any, under international law and U.S. law?

What could happen, or what will happen? I mean there are multiple laws that could be applied. Iraqis are claiming that since Blackwater didn't have a license to operate in Iraq, they didn't fall under the immunity laws protecting other private military contractors (Initiated under Paul Bremer in 2003 as head of the CPA).

They also say they want Blackwater to pay over $100 million dollars to the families of the shooting victims. So, instead of sounding like they were trying to ensure rule of law, it actually sounded like an extortion attempt. They undermined their stance.

Now, there's also application of U.S. civilian law. There is a law in the books called Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Basically, it says if you are working for the U.S. government abroad in a military setting, and you commit a felony, then we can potentially prosecute you back home. It has only been utilized twice in Iraq. One time when a contractor came back and was found with child porn on his computer, and another time when there was an attempted rape of a U.S. reservist by a contractor. The challenge of this law is that it gets difficult when you add a non-U.S. victim and a "battlefield environment" like we have in Iraq. So, it'll be hard to ask a civilian jury sitting in the U.S. that we want you, the jury, to not only decide whether a law was broken, but whether the "rules of engagement" in a "battlefield environment" were broken as well. It is very difficult.

Another method is the Uniform Code of Military Justice - the court martial system. In October 2006, the law was changed to allow private contractors to fall under it, and it is probably the most apt one in finding these Blackwater contractors involved in the Nisoor square shooting liable. They were involved in a combat zone, an operational setting, and the question is did they violate the rules of engagement or not? The problem of that is that the law was passed in October, but the Pentagon never issued a procedure to its JAG officers on how to actually use it.

So, is there some semblance of hope that there could be legal accountability?

Could be, but again, it's political will that matters most. With Blackwater, it's like one of those things when projecting the stock market, do you look at past behavior and past facts? Or, do you try and project forward? Using past facts, you shouldn't expect anything to happen. Projecting forward? There's enough attention around this now that you might seem some action along the side - but not major action.

We've woken up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes, but right now all we're willing to do is to ask him to please put a scarf on.

In your article "America, Islam, and the 9-11 War" you state, "The erosion of American credibility in Muslim world not only reinforces recruiting efforts of its foes, but denies Americans ideas and policies a fair hearing." How does this play out in Iraq?

The U.S. was in a strong position during the Cold War with being internationally viewed as a "beacon on the hill." It both had power, but also more importantly, popularity and respect. It wasn't that we had the Atom bomb, but it was also that we had McDonalds and Coca Cola. We had universities people wanted to come to. We had blue jeans. Now, we have power, but now it's not as easy to apply it in the current conflict. Instead of being seen as that "beacon", America, "the land of blue jeans", has become internationally viewed as the "land of armed jumped suits." And that is not a positive when you're dealing with the problem at hand.

It is not that the U.S. is locked in some battle with the broader Muslim World. That is simply false. But you do have a really weird international change, where for the first time a state and a religion are looking at each other through a different lens--a lens of misperceptions. It is a lens of ignorance, but also a lens of anger. And it's getting worse, and we have to recognize that. It's actually fulfilling Bin Laden's wishes, he wanted this kind of conflict, and it is creating it. It's both on how we conduct ourselves, but also how we speak to the world.

Peter, you're the co-founding Director of the Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World at the Saban Center at Brookings. In your experience and opinion, how do we convince the Muslim world that our actions, whether they are rooted in "regime change", or "humanitarian" or "reform" efforts, are not mere tools of American imperialism?

Basically there was an era where the U.S. had it right, and Louis Armstrong sang about it during his jazz tours when he went around the world on behalf of the United States. Louis Armstrong wasn't a stooge, but he spoke the truth and that compared very positively to what they, the people, were seeing from the Soviet Union. But the line that encapsulates what we need to do today is to "Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative."

There are clearly things that are dragging us down and are not all that useful. Accentuate the positive. There are lot of things that the U.S. does like help local NGOs on the ground, and investment in education. We have an amazing spirit as a nation, in terms of not just with the government does, but what the broad base of American society does. We do that but we can do a lot more.

For our generation, this is the equivalent of our cold war. This is our calling: to bridge this growing divide between the U.S. and the Muslim world. It's incumbent on us whether we are in government or outside government. Whether we are a corporation or an NGO. Whether it's faith based or not, it's incumbent on us to bridge this divide.

The same thing goes for the clear negatives that are dragging us down. Those are easy to pick off, you know, most people universally recognize that while the Arab-Israeli peace will not be easy in any shape, way, or form, at least showing action on it is something we can do, instead of ignoring the problem. Same thing goes for GITMO (Guantanamo Bay). We painted ourselves in a corner with that, and we need to find a way out.

Iraq. It's very clear that not only now is it a half trillion dollar investment gone bad, but in terms of U.S. funds, that money could have been spent on lot more effective things. Like I've said, it has been hammer to our public diplomacy.

And finally, the problem with our relationship via authoritarian leaders in the Middle East region. It is clear we have struck a deal with the devils and we are not getting much out of that deal - and that is true. We can pick off the regimes where that is happening and not only does that not help our battles with the extremist groups, but it also undermines our broader effort to speak on behalf of democracy every time we cozy up to a dictator. Clearly, we have to start to disentangle ourselves and start to pressure them on some of the things they can do. An example, I'd say to a current ally, "Buddy, we love what you're doing in giving us intelligence, although it's sorta funny you only give us intelligence a day before one of our senior official visits. But, we don't really like what you did to crack down on free media or that you jailed democracy activists. We are not going to turn aside from that anymore."

We have a record of doing that--that type of dialogue - and it worked in the transformation within South Korea during the Cold War, the transformation that happened within Philippines is another example. We can have a similar attitude towards our very ostensible authoritarian allies.

What of "Islamofascism": An accurate assessment of our enemy or a politically convenient and sexy, new term of choice by certain ideological pundits?

It's not new, and no one likes it. It was a stupid, stupid phrase to use in the first place. It was completely politicized, and they very quickly realized that. Now, the flip side is there are certain people running with it these days to make it appear that the broader U.S. really does believe this term.

Can there honestly be a lasting peace between the United States and the "Muslim world" in our lifetime, or this just whimsical naiveté?

I think there can be, but it's not going to come in a matter of years. It's going to be generational and maybe even multigenerational if we are going to be honest about it. But the fact is there are all sorts of amazing transformation and changes that are going on in the world. This is only one part of it. In part, it's because the world is changing so fast, but I think there are things that can happen. The problem for us on the U.S. side is that we've really wasted the first couple of years of this (Post 9-11). We could've done things more positively, and we did a lot negatively that we are going to be dealing with the consequences for at least a generation. But that doesn't meant all is lost.

Look at the French and the Germans. They spent literally almost a millennium fighting each other. If you would've said in 1945, "The French and German would later be part of this grand consortium. They would have a fairly closely aligned foreign policy and domestic policy. They would be sharing laws, sharing economics, basically they are not going to be considering each other as enemies, but considering themselves as friends they can't live without." If you would've said that in 1945, someone would've sent you to the Loony Bin. So, we can take hope from those examples. There we are today.

"Seven countries in five years"

Wesley Clark's new memoir casts more light on the Bush administration's secret strategies for regime change in Iran and elsewhere.

by Joe Conason - Oct 12, 2007

While the Bush White House promotes the possibility of armed conflict with Iran, a tantalizing passage in Wesley Clark's new memoir suggests that another war is part of a long-planned Department of Defense strategy that anticipated "regime change" by force in no fewer than seven Mideast states. Critics of the war have often voiced suspicions of such imperial schemes, but this is the first time that a high-ranking former military officer has claimed to know that such plans existed.

The existence of that classified memo would certainly cast more dubious light not only on the original decision to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's weapons and ambitions but on the current efforts to justify and even instigate military action against Iran.

In "A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country," published by Palgrave Macmillan last month, the former four-star general recalls two visits to the Pentagon following the terrorist attacks of September 2001. On the first visit, less than two weeks after Sept. 11, he writes, a "senior general" told him, "We're going to attack Iraq. The decision has basically been made."
Six weeks later, Clark returned to Washington to see the same general and inquired whether the plan to strike Iraq was still under consideration. The general's response was stunning:

"'Oh, it's worse than that,' he said, holding up a memo on his desk. 'Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.' And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran."

While Clark doesn't name the other four countries, he has mentioned in televised interviews that the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Indeed, he has described this same conversation on a few occasions over the past year, including in a speech at the University of Alabama in October 2006, in an appearance on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" broadcast last March, and most recently in an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." On "Democracy Now" he spoke about the meetings and the memo in slightly greater detail, saying that he had made the first Pentagon visit "on or about Sept. 20."

Clark says he didn't read the memo from Rumsfeld's office. When the general first held it up, he remembers asking, "Is it classified?" Receiving an affirmative answer, he said, "Well, don't show it to me." He also says that when he saw the same general last year and reminded him of their conversation, the officer said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!"

During the Blitzer interview, Clark backed off slightly, conceding that the memo "wasn't [necessarily] a plan. Maybe it was a think piece. Maybe it was a sort of notional concept, but what it was, was the kind of indication of dialogue around this town in official circles ... that has poisoned the atmosphere and made it very difficult for this administration to achieve any success in the region." Clark's book also describes a telling encounter nearly a decade earlier with neoconservative eminence Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense under Rumsfeld who resigned under a cloud of scandal from the World Bank last spring. In May 1991, according to Clark, he dropped in for a conversation with Wolfowitz, then the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon, to congratulate him on the success of the Gulf War.

"We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president [then George H.W. Bush] believes he'll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it," he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting. "But we did learn one thing that's very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us. And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us ... We could have a little more time, but no one really knows."

More than a decade and a half later, the neoconservative obsession with regime change persists and flourishes in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, where Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly pressing for action against Iran. (Of course, by overthrowing Saddam and putting the Shiites in control of Iraq, Cheney and President Bush have already done more to empower Tehran than the ruling mullahs could ever have imagined in their fondest fantasies.) The stated reasons range from Iran's suspected sponsorship of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to its worrisome pursuit of nuclear power, but Clark's allegations strongly suggest American policymakers chose war years ago, no matter what Tehran ended up doing.

Perhaps it is time for the appropriate Senate and House committees to start asking harder questions about this administration's secret strategies for the Mideast. They might begin by interviewing Clark behind closed doors about that classified memo -- and to what extent such extreme ideas have promoted the "permanent war" policy that is fundamental to neoconservative ideology.

Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."