Thursday, January 05, 2006
Sharon and the Future
It’s over.
Ariel Sharon yesterday suffered, in the words of AOL News, a “massive” stroke. Though he is undergoing surgery to stem the damage, it looks like he will have some permanent brain damage and will not be able to discharge the duties of his office.
His new, more centrist party will be stillborn. Sharon never had time to fill all the necessary positions.
It is a good allegory for his life: too late. His move to the center: too late. His moves to move the peace process forward: too late.
Sharon has worked for the most nationalist forces in Israel for a lifetime. He led an elite military unit in the Israeli war of independence in 1948. He led this same force to commit atrocities in Jordan in 1953. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes that, during the 1956 Suez War, he “captured the Mitla Pass in the Sinai Peninsula, again garnering praise for his military ability and criticism for his ruthlessness.” He was a general in the 1967 war and the October 1973 war. He founded the far-right Likud Front in 1973. He joined Prime Minister Begin’s administration in 1977 and was one of the most outspoken advocates of illegal Jewish settlements in occupied Arab territories. He was appointed the minister of defense in June 1981 and, again as the Encyclopedia Britannica relates, “was the principal architect of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a war that brought world-wide censure of Israel.” Israel’s commission of inquiry into massacres at Palestinian refugee camps found his indirectly responsible for failing to take action to prevent the bloodshed.
He later resigned from government but returned, as we know, to govern Israel as Prime Minister for many years. He withdrew several thousand vulnerable settlers from Gaza but oversaw the construction of more settlements in the West Bank and the wall on the West Bank, an action that was recently condemned by the World Court.
Sharon was a vile leader, a war criminal and Israeli imperialist. But he represented the will of the Israeli people, at least many of them, for many years.
Although most in Israel supported a more aggressive withdraw of settlements, Sharon delayed, hedged, and made minimal concessions even after he had already expanded those settlements.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the Israeli people wanted or didn’t want: to this day 460,000 Israeli settlers live on occupied territory in violation of UN rulings. Sharon was their nationalist hero. He laid the foundations of their illegal settlements and refused, for generations, to organize a withdrawal or even a cessation of expansion. He oversaw the Israeli policy for decades to seize Palestinian territory, control roads and checkpoints, and divide Palestinian territory into Bantustans that make it impossible for Palestinians to live or work without constant Israeli military interference, random searches, and raids. He engineered extrajudicial assassinations of suspected militants that usually killed innocent civilians, too. He ordered Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze homes of suspected militants and put entire families on the streets for the crimes of their family and friends that were never proved in any court of law.
When he dies, tomorrow or in a dozen years, all decent people should dance on his grave. Sharon was a lawless oppressor of innocent people, an executor of collective punishment, and a defiant warmonger. He was a roadblock to the peace process in the Middle East and an arrogant defender of Israeli oppression, in defiance of world opinion and UN rulings, that, as my Chicago Tribune points out in regard to Iraq, were “toothless.”
He did this with the unwavering military support of the United States, which has given more of this aid to Israel than to any other nation on Earth. He did this with the political support of neoconservatives and MSM outlets all across this nation, who ran front-page stories for every suicide bombing that happened and zoomed in acutely close on the pain and suffering of the survivors while ignoring the deaths of far more Palestinians who died at the hands of IDF reprisals.
Israel was extended a rare privilege for any nation, owing to sympathetic audiences in the U.S. and neoconservatives who valued an imperialist partner in the Middle East more than they did human rights: Israel was shielded with the same Teflon cloak of infallibility that MSM outlets usually only reserve for the foreign policy of conservative presidents. Their goals and dreams were given sympathetic hearing, their atrocities were minimized, and the best intentions were ascribed to their every action.
Their most ardent defenders were always the worst criminals of the U.S. political spectrum, a telling fact if there ever was one. The Douglas Feiths, the Elliott Abrams, and the associated writers and broadcasters of the right-wing were always the most unwilling to do anything but sing the praise of Israeli foreign policy and accuse the UN of being “biased,” accuse the rest of the world of being unfair.
This is why the Middle East hates us. This is the blackened, diseased heart of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
There are other reasons. Our insatiable hunger for oil led U.S. administrations to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953 and support the infinitely corrupt House of Saud, reviled by their people and all people of the world who value freedom. Our hunger led us to support any Emir of Qatar or dusty sheik who controlled oil resources that we needed.
In a way, oil motivated our friendship for Israel, too. U.S. administrations needed a stable, pro-western ally in the oil-rich Middle East and Israel was only one we could count on. So we armed them to the teeth, gave them nuclear weapons, and backed their every move. Eventually, support for Israel became a kind of religion for the far-right, a moral precept beyond question or reason.
Israel, in turn, supported U.S. administrations in whatever dark scheme they desired. Israel helped fund and train the contras and other Central American terrorist groups in the 1980s, as well as giving the U.S. its vote in UN measures.
This sick relationship continues to this day. Charles Krauthammer recently wrote a piece I lambasted concerning Israel’s “peace” efforts. Eliott Abrams, rabid pro-Israeli neocon, is in charge of the Middle Eastern affairs section of the National Security Council.
This war on terror is largely their fault. While there can be no excuse for slaughtering civilians (for either side), the terrorists we face today were spawned as a violent overreaction to the oppression devised and condoned by Sharon and his neocon financiers. Osama bin Laden cited two reasons as the main source of his hatred for America: support for Israel and military bases in Saudi Arabia, military bases that were supposed to be withdrawn after the first Gulf War but never were. This projection of military power into the Middle East is the dream of the Republican Party. It is a black mark on the record of Bill Clinton and every democrat who held the presidency that they didn’t do more to reverse this lust for empire.
But I won’t spend time castigating the moderates in this venue when the insane, blood-soaked warmongers who championed these policies go unpunished. Not while this republofascist military junta rules this country, a second incarnation of the oligarchs who drove U.S. foreign policy to ruin in the 1980s, raping the treasury and strangling dissent while screaming mantras of patriotism and manifest destiny, all the while throwing money to corporations while lecturing the poor on the virtues of discipline and good judgment.
Being robbed is one thing, but being insulted and lectured while being robbed is a whole different ballgame.
This is war. This is the war on terror in the most important place of all: our own country. I’ll start with the brigands in my own government before I worry about Iraq, or Israel, or the Middle East. Once decent men and women govern our nation, we will be able to affect change in the Middle East for the better. But until then I won’t engage in inane talk about how to win Iraq when the people actually running the war aren’t listening and couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing even if they were. I won’t debate issues of “what should we do now” while the idiot son of Ronald Reagan is the commander-in-chief or while Nixon’s favorite flunky is the Defense Secretary or while the Butcher of the Honduras is the national intelligence chief. Not while Iran-Contra prison escapees populate our executive branch. Not while The Most Unfit Man Ever to Hold Public Office is in charge of setting our policy in the Middle East for the NSC.
I’m willing to share my vision of the world but not while Liberty is being gang-raped in the next room and the Fourth Amendment is being ball-gagged and thrown into the trunk of an unmarked NSA van. Not while Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh publicly beat Truth into a bloody, whimpering mess every day. Not while Southern Partisan defends Tom DeLay or Bill Frist sets the agenda in the senate between bouts of disemboweling cats and lying his ass off on MSNBC, dodging SEC inquiries and positioning himself for a presidential run in 2008. Not while Neal Boortz advocates saving the rich first and the poor last in the event of a natural emergency like a demented replay of the Titanic and the golden age of robber barons, 12 hour workdays, and child labor.
We have more urgent business to attend to. Conservatives are bulldozing our national security into a landing strip for their Learjets as we speak. George Bush and James Dobson are busy trying to glue the ten commandments to the Statue of Liberty. Chris Matthews is taking a jackhammer to Abraham Lincoln’s face trying to transform his visage into George Bush’s on Mount Rushmore. We have a ways to go before it is a national priority to help out Iraqis with their freedom when we have failed to safeguard ours.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 1:28 AM 
Comments:
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Well done.
Although refuting these people is easy, it's hard to find people who are sufficiently motivated to do so. How many well-informed critical thinkers would want to purchase their "steaming mound of shitty writing" in the first place? I think very few.
I am tempted to label them cooks, charlatans or conspiracy theorists. Anyone who adduces Colin Powell's U.N. presentation long after the man himself has renounced it, well, one is forced to wonder.
I, too, have written about Salman Pak. And passing readers may also be interested in a brief exchange I had with Richard Miniter on this very topic.
Both pieces reenforce the excellent work done here.
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Although refuting these people is easy, it's hard to find people who are sufficiently motivated to do so. How many well-informed critical thinkers would want to purchase their "steaming mound of shitty writing" in the first place? I think very few.
I am tempted to label them cooks, charlatans or conspiracy theorists. Anyone who adduces Colin Powell's U.N. presentation long after the man himself has renounced it, well, one is forced to wonder.
I, too, have written about Salman Pak. And passing readers may also be interested in a brief exchange I had with Richard Miniter on this very topic.
Both pieces reenforce the excellent work done here.
# posted by 
: 12:00 AM
: 12:00 AM << Home
