US
Middle East Wars: Social Opposition And Political Impotence
By James Petras
16 July, 2007
James
Petras Website
Everywhere
I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists
and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary
citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing
of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of
Afghans since 2001?
“You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home
and abroad”
US Marine Colonel
from Tennessee.
Why, they ask, is a public,
which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing
US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading
business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government
from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world’s
major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike
oil deals with Teheran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin
America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace
movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House
and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the
slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation
of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?
Absence of a Peace Movement?
Just prior to the US invasion
of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against
the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as
the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war
with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is
largely the result of the major peace organizations’ decision
to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics,
namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic
candidates – most of whom have supported the war. The rationale
offered by these ‘peace leaders’ was that once elected the
Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office.
Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace
movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget
since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of
the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect
on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders.
Absence of a National Movement
As David Brooks (La Jornada
July 2, 2007) correctly reported at the US Social forum there is no
coherent national social movement in the US. Instead we have a collection
of fragmented ‘identity groups’ each embedded in narrow
sets of (identity) interests, and totally incapable of building a national
movement against the war. The proliferation of these sectarian ‘non-governmental’
‘identity’ ‘groups’ is based on their structure,
financing and leadership. Many depend on private foundations and public
agencies for their financing, which precludes them from taking political
positions. At best they operate as ‘lobbies’ simply pressuring
the elite politicians of both parties. Their leaders depend on maintaining
a separate existence in order to justify their salaries and secure future
advances in government agencies.
The US trade unions are virtually
non-existent in more than half of the United States: They represent
less than 9% of the private sector and 12% of the total labor force.
Most national, regional and city-wide trade union officials receive
salaries comparable to senior business executives: between $300,000
to $500,000 dollars a year. Almost 90% of the top trade union bureaucrats
finance and support pro-war Democrats and have supported Bush and the
Congressional war budgets, bought Israel Bonds ($25 billion dollars)
and the slaughter of Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.
The Unopposed War Lobby
The US is the only country
in the world where the peace movement is unwilling to recognize, publically
condemn or oppose the major influential political and social institutions
consistently supporting and promoting the US wars in the Middle East.
The political power of the pro-Israel power configuration, led by the
American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supported within
the government by highly placed pro-Israel Congressional leaders and
White House and Pentagon officials has been well documented in books
and articles by leading journalists, scholars and former President Jimmy
Carter. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has over two thousand
full-time functionaries, more than 250,000 activists, over a thousand
billionaire and multi-millionaire political donors who contribute funds
both political parties. The ZPC secures 20% of the US foreign military
aid budget for Israel, over 95% congressional support for Israel’s
boycott and armed incursions in Gaza, invasion of Lebanon and preemptive
military option against Iran.
The US invasion and occupation
policy in Iraq, including the fabricated evidence justifying the invasion,
was deeply influenced by top officials with long-standing loyalties
and ties to Israel. Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon,
are life-long Zionists, who lost security clearance early in their careers
for handing over documents to Israel. Vice President Cheney’s
chief foreign policy adviser in the planning of the Iraq invasion is
Irving Lewis Liebowitz (‘Scooter Libby’). He is a protégé
and long-time collaborator of Wolfowitz and a convicted felon.
Libby-Liebowitz committed
perjury, defending the White House’s complicity in punishing officials
critical of its Iraq war propaganda. Libby-Liebowitz received powerful
political and financial support from the pro-Israel lobby during his
trial. No sooner did he lose his appeal on his conviction on five counts
of perjury, obstructing justice and lying, than the ZPC convinced President
Bush to ‘commute’ his prison sentence, in effect freeing
him from a 30 month prison sentence before he had served a day. While
Democratic politicians and some peace leaders criticized President Bush,
none dared hold responsible the pro-Israel lobby which pressured the
White House.
The Presidents of the Major
American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) – numbering 52 – and
their regional and local affiliates are the leading force transmitting
Israel’s war agenda against Iran. The PMAJO, working closely with
US-Israeli Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and leading Zionist Senators Charles
Schumer and Joseph Lieberman, succeeded in eliminating a clause in the
budget appropriation setting a date for the withdrawal for US troops
from Iraq.
In contrast to the successful
vast propaganda, congressional and media campaigns, organized and funded
by the pro-Israel lobbies for the war policies, there is no public record
of the big oil companies supporting the Iraq war, the Israeli invasion
of Lebanon or the military threats of preemptive attacks on Iran. Interviews
with investment bankers, oil company executives and a thorough review
of the major Petroleum Institute publications over the past seven years
provide conclusive evidence that ‘Big Oil’ was deeply interested
in negotiating oil agreements with Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Islamic
government. ‘Big Oil’ perceives US Middle East wars as a
threat to their long-standing profitable relations with all the conservative
Arab oil states in the Gulf. Despite the strategic position in the US
economy and their great wealth '‘Big Oil' was totally incapable
of countering their political power and organized influence of the pro-Israel
lobby. In fact Big Oil was totally marginalized by the White House National
Security Advisor for the Middle East, Elliot Abrams, a fanatical Zionist
and militarist.
Despite the massive and sustained
pro-war activity of the leading Zionist organizations inside and outside
of the government and despite the absence of any overt or covert pro-war
campaign by ‘Big Oil’, the leaders of the US peace movement
have refused to attack the pro-Israel war lobby and continue to mouth
unfounded clichés about the role of ‘Big Oil’ in
the Middle East conflicts.
The apparently ‘radical’
slogans against the oil industry by some leading intellectual critics
of the war has served as a ‘cover’ to avoid the much more
challenging task of taking on the powerful, Zionist lobby. There are
several reasons for the failure of the leaders of the peace movement
to confront the militant Zionist lobby. One is fear of the powerful
propaganda and smear campaign which the pro-Israel lobby is expert at
mounting, with its aggressive accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’
and its capacity to blacklist critics, leading to job loss, career destruction,
public abuse and death threats.
The second reason that peace
leaders fail to criticize the leading pro-war lobby is because of the
influence of pro-Israel ‘progressives’ in the movement.
These progressives condition their support of ‘peace in Iraq’
only if the movement does not criticize the pro-war Israel lobby in
and outside the US government, the role of Israel as a belligerent partner
to the US in Lebanon, Palestine and Kurdish Northern Iraq. A movement
claiming to be in favor of peace, which refuses to attack the main proponents
of war, is pursuing irrelevance: it deflects attention from the pro-Israel
high officials in the government and the lobbyists in Congress who back
the war and set the White House’s Middle East agenda. By focusing
attention exclusively on President Bush, the peace leaders failed to
confront the majority pro-Israel Democratic congress people who fund
Bush’s war, back his escalation of troops and give unconditional
support to Israel’s military option for Iran.
The collapse of the US peace
movement, the lack of credibility of most of its leaders and the demoralization
of many activists can be traced to strategic political failures: the
unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and
the inability to create a political alternative to the bellicose Democratic
Party. The political failure of the leaders of the peace movement is
all the more dramatic in the face of the large majority of passive Americans
who oppose the war, most of whom did not display their flags this Fourth
of July and are not led in tow by either the pro-Israel lobby or their
intellectual apologists within progressive circles.
The word to anti-war critics
of the world is that over sixty percent of the US public opposes the
war but our streets are empty because our peace movement leaders are
spineless and politically impotent.
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