Why Not a Probe of ‘Israel-gate’?
Special Report: As Official Washington fumes about Russia-gate, Israel’s far
more significant political-influence-and-propaganda campaigns are ignored. No
one dares suggest a probe of Israel-gate, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The other day, I asked a longtime Democratic Party insider who is working on the
Russia-gate investigation which country interfered more in U.S. politics, Russia
or Israel. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Israel, of course.”
Which underscores my concern about the hysteria raging across Official
Washington about “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential campaign: There is
no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S.
politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of
Israel-gate.
The problem is that if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the
person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s
extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for
vilification and marginalization.
So, the open secret of Israeli influence is studiously ignored, even as
presidential candidates prostrate themselves before the annual conference of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both
appeared before AIPAC in 2016, with Clinton promising to take the U.S.-Israeli
relationship “to the next level” – whatever that meant – and Trump vowing not to
“pander” and then pandering like crazy.
Congress is no different. It has given Israel’s controversial Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu a record-tying three invitations to address joint sessions of
Congress (matching the number of times British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
appeared). We then witnessed the Republicans and Democrats competing to see how
often their members could bounce up and down and who could cheer Netanyahu the
loudest, even when the Israeli prime minister was instructing the Congress to
follow his position on Iran rather than President Obama’s.
Israeli officials and AIPAC also coordinate their strategies to maximize
political influence, which is derived in large part by who gets the lobby’s
largesse and who doesn’t. On the rare occasion when members of Congress step out
of line – and take a stand that offends Israeli leaders – they can expect a
well-funded opponent in their next race, a tactic that dates back decades.
Well-respected members, such as Rep. Paul Findley and Sen. Charles Percy (both
Republicans from Illinois), were early victims of the Israeli lobby’s wrath when
they opened channels of communication with the Palestine Liberation Organization
in the cause of seeking peace. Findley was targeted and defeated in 1982; Percy
in 1984.
Findley recounted his experience in a 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People
and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, in which Findley called the lobby “the
700-pound gorilla in Washington.” The book was harshly criticized in a New York
Times review by Adam Clymer, who called it “an angry, one-sided book that seems
often to be little more than a stringing together of stray incidents.”
Enforced Silence
Since then, there have been fewer and fewer members of Congress or other
American politicians who have dared to speak out, judging that – when it comes
to the Israeli lobby – discretion is the better part of valor. Today, many U.S.
pols grovel before the Israeli government seeking a sign of favor from Prime
Minister Netanyahu, almost like Medieval kings courting the blessings of the
Pope at the Vatican.
During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu viewed with
suspicion, traveled to Israel to demonstrate sympathy for Israelis within
rocket-range of Gaza while steering clear of showing much empathy for the
Palestinians.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tried to exploit the tense ObamaNetanyahu relationship by stopping in Israel to win a tacit endorsement from
Netanyahu. The 2016 campaign was no exception with both Clinton and Trump
stressing their love of Israel in their appearances before AIPAC.
Money, of course, has become the lifeblood of American politics – and American
supporters of Israel have been particularly strategic in how they have exploited
that reality.
One of Israel’s most devoted advocates, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has
poured millions of dollars in “dark money” into political candidates and groups
that support Israel’s interests. Adelson, who has advocated dropping a nuclear
bomb inside Iran to coerce its government, is a Trump favorite having donated a
record $5 million to Trump’s inaugural celebration.
Of course, many Israel-connected political donations are much smaller but no
less influential. A quarter century ago, I was told how an aide to a Democratic
foreign policy chairman, who faced a surprisingly tough race after
redistricting, turned to the head of AIPAC for help and, almost overnight,
donations were pouring in from all over the country. The chairman was most
thankful.
The October Surprise Mystery
Israel’s involvement in U.S. politics also can be covert. For instance, the
evidence is now overwhelming that the Israeli government of right-wing Prime
Minister Menachem Begin played a key role in helping Ronald Reagan’s campaign in
1980 strike a deal with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to
free 52 American hostages before Election Day.
Begin despised Carter for the Camp David Accords that forced Israel to give back
the Sinai to Egypt. Begin also believed that Carter was too sympathetic to the
Palestinians and – if he won a second term – would conspire with Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat to impose a two-state solution on Israel.
Begin’s contempt for Carter was not even a secret. In a 1991 book, The Last
Option, senior Israeli intelligence and foreign policy official David Kimche
explained Begin’s motive for dreading Carter’s reelection. Kimche said Israeli
officials had gotten wind of “collusion” between Carter and Sadat “to force
Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967,
including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Kimche continued, “This plan prepared behind Israel’s back and without her
knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States’s diplomatic history of
short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation.”
But Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in
1980 when, Kimche wrote, “he would be free to compel Israel to accept a
settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having
to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby.”
In a 1992 memoir, Profits of War, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari BenMenashe also noted that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.
“Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David,”
Ben-Menashe wrote. “As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel,
did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on
Israel’s back.”
So, in order to buy time for Israel to “change the facts on the ground” by
moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to
be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer
hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.
Ben-Menashe was among a couple of dozen government officials and intelligence
operatives who described how Reagan’s campaign, mostly through future CIA
Director William Casey and past CIA Director George H.W. Bush, struck a deal in
1980 with senior Iranians who got promises of arms via Israel in exchange for
keeping the hostages through the election and thus humiliating Carter. (The
hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, after Reagan was sworn in as
President.)
Discrediting History
Though the evidence of the so-called October Surprise deal is far stronger than
the current case for believing that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign,
Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media have refused to accept it,
deeming it a “conspiracy theory.”
One of the reasons for the hostility directed against the 1980 case was the link
to Israel, which did not want its hand in manipulating the election of a U.S.
president to become an accepted part of American history. So, for instance, the
Israeli government went to great lengths to discredit Ben-Menashe after he began
to speak with reporters and to give testimony to the U.S. Congress.
When I was a Newsweek correspondent and first interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990,
the Israeli government initially insisted that he was an impostor, that he had
no connection to Israeli intelligence.
However, when I obtained documentary evidence of Ben-Menashe’s work for a
military intelligence unit, the Israelis admitted that they had lied but then
insisted that he was just a low-level translator, a claim that was further
contradicted by other documents showing that he had traveled widely around the
world on missions to obtain weapons for the Israel-to-Iran arms pipeline.
Nevertheless, the Israeli government along with sympathetic American reporters
and members of the U.S. Congress managed to shut down any serious investigation
into the 1980 operation, which was, in effect, the prequel to Reagan’s IranContra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1984-86. Thus, U.S. history was miswritten.
[For more details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative; Secrecy &
Privilege; and Trick or Treason.]
Looking back over the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, it is clear that Israel
exercised significant influence over U.S. presidents since its founding in 1948,
but the rise of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in the 1970s – led by former
Jewish terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – marked a time when Israel
shed any inhibitions about interfering directly in U.S. politics.
Much as Begin and Shamir engaged in terror attacks on British officials and
Palestinian civilians during Israel’s founding era, the Likudniks who held power
in 1980 believed that the Zionist cause trumped normal restraints on their
actions. In other words, the ends justified the means.
In the 1980s, Israel also mounted spying operations aimed at the U.S.
government, including those of intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, who fed
highly sensitive documents to Israel and – after being caught and spending
almost three decades in prison – was paroled and welcomed as a hero inside
Israel.
A History of Interference
But it is true that foreign interference in U.S. politics is as old as the
American Republic. In the 1790s, French agents – working with the Jeffersonians
– tried to rally Americans behind France’s cause in its conflict with Great
Britain. In part to frustrate the French operation, the Federalists passed the
Alien and Sedition Acts.
In the Twentieth Century, Great Britain undertook covert influence operations to
ensure U.S. support in its conflicts with Germany, while German agents
unsuccessfully sought the opposite.
So, the attempts by erstwhile allies and sometimes adversaries to move U.S.
foreign policy in one direction or another is nothing new, and the U.S.
government engages in similar operations in countries all over the world, both
overtly and covertly.
It was the CIA’s job for decades to use propaganda and dirty tricks to ensure
that pro-U.S. politicians were elected or put in power in Europe, Latin America,
Asia and Africa, pretty much everywhere the U.S. government perceived some
interest. After the U.S. intelligence scandals of the 1970s, however, some of
that responsibility was passed to other organizations, such as the U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID).
NED, USAID and various “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) finance
activists, journalists and other operatives to undermine political leaders who
are deemed to be obstacles to U.S. foreign policy desires.
In particular, NED has been at the center of efforts to flip elections to U.S.backed candidates, such as in Nicaragua in 1990, or to sponsor “color
revolutions,” which typically organize around some color as the symbol for mass
demonstrations. Ukraine – on Russia’s border – has been the target of two such
operations, the Orange Revolution in 2004, which helped install anti-Russian
President Viktor Yushchenko, and the Maidan ouster of elected pro-Russian
President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
NED president Carl Gershman, a neoconservative who has run NED since its
founding in 1983, openly declared that Ukraine was “the biggest prize” in
September 2013 — just months before the Maidan protests — as well as calling it
an important step toward ousting Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2016,
Gershman called directly for regime change in Russia.
The Neoconservatives
Another key issue related to Israeli influence inside the United States is the
role of the neocons, a political movement that emerged in the 1970s as a number
of hawkish Democrats migrated to the Republican Party as a home for more
aggressive policies to protect Israel and take on the Soviet Union and Arab
states.
In some European circles, the neocons are described as “Israel’s American
agents,” which may somewhat overstate the direct linkage between Israel and the
neocons although a central tenet of neocon thinking is that there must be no
daylight between the U.S. and Israel. The neocons say U.S. politicians must
stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel even if that means the Americans sidling
up to the Israelis rather than any movement the other way.
Since the mid-1990s, American neocons have worked closely with Benjamin
Netanyahu. Several prominent neocons (including former Assistant Defense
Secretary Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Robert
Loewenberg) advised Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign and urged a new strategy for
“securing the realm.” Essentially, the idea was to replace negotiations with the
Palestinians and Arab states with “regime change” for governments that were
viewed as troublesome to Israel, including Iraq and Syria.
By 1998, the Project for the New American Century (led by neocons William
Kristol and Robert Kagan) was pressuring President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq,
a plan that was finally put in motion in 2003 under President George W. Bush.
But the follow-on plans to go after Syria and Iran were delayed because the Iraq
War turned into a bloody mess, killing some 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis. Bush could not turn to phase two until near the end of
his presidency and then was frustrated by a U.S. intelligence estimate
concluding that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb (which was to be the
pretext for a bombing campaign).
Bush also could pursue “regime change” in Syria only as a proxy effort of
subversion, rather than a full-scale U.S. invasion. President Barack Obama
escalated the Syrian proxy war in 2011 with the support of Israel and its
strange-bedfellow allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni-ruled Gulf States,
which hated Syria’s government because it was allied with Shiite-ruled Iran —
and Sunnis and Shiites have been enemies since the Seventh Century. Israel
insists that the U.S. take the Sunni side, even if that puts the U.S. in bed
with Al Qaeda.
But Obama dragged his heels on a larger U.S. military intervention in Syria and
angered Netanyahu further by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program
rather than bomb-bomb-bombing Iran.
Showing the Love
Obama’s perceived half-hearted commitment to Israeli interests explained
Romney’s campaign 2012 trip to seek Netanyahu’s blessings. Even after winning a
second term, Obama sought to appease Netanyahu by undertaking a three-day trip
to Israel in 2013 to show his love.
Still, in 2015, when Obama pressed ahead with the Iran nuclear agreement,
Netanyahu went over the President’s head directly to Congress where he was
warmly received, although the Israeli prime minister ultimately failed to sink
the Iran deal.
In Campaign 2016, both Clinton and Trump wore their love for Israel on their
sleeves, Clinton promising to take the relationship to “the next level” (a
phrase that young couples often use when deciding to go from heavy petting to
intercourse). Trump reminded AIPAC that he had a Jewish grandchild and vowed to
move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Both also bristled with hatred toward Iran, repeating the popular falsehood that
“Iran is the principal source of terrorism” when it is Saudi Arabia and other
Sunni sheikdoms that have been the financial and military supporters of Al Qaeda
and Islamic State, the terror groups most threatening to Europe and the United
States.
By contrast to Israel’s long history of playing games with U.S. politics, the
Russian government stands accused of trying to undermine the U.S. political
process recently by hacking into emails of the Democratic National Committee —
revealing the DNC’s improper opposition to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — and
of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — disclosing the contents of Clinton’s
paid speeches to Wall Street and pay-to-play aspects of the Clinton Foundation —
and sharing that information with the American people via WikiLeaks.
Although WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails from the Russians,
the U.S. intelligence community says it has high confidence in its conclusions
about Russian meddling and the mainstream U.S. media treats the allegations as
flat-fact.
The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of
raising doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having
RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates
(who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by
having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such as
“fracking.”
The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining
question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign
colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people
associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to
testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishmentapproved outlets are working with major technology companies on how to
marginalize independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda” (often
conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.
It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the
insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S.
political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of
Israel-gate.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
Dangers from Hating Government
Since Ronald Reagan declared “government is the problem,” the hostility to
public solutions has snowballed, leading to the Republican Party’s selection of
Donald Trump, someone who’s never served in public office, notes ex-CIA analyst
Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
The determination beyond reasonable doubt of the presidential nominees of each
of the two major political parties has invited much analysis of what a Clinton-
vs.-Trump contest means in terms of larger political fault lines. Robert Merry’s
view of the election in terms of globalism and nationalism is an example. But
the contest also is part of a larger pattern not only in terms of issue
preferences that these two candidates represent but also in terms of the
qualities that these individuals would bring to the presidency.
Much of what any president does in office cannot be programmed in advance and
cannot be derived from positions on issues enumerated in a campaign or party
platform or expressed in a campaign speech. Much of the important things a
president does derive instead from the experience, intellect, instincts, and
values that he or she brings into the job and that in turn are based on that
individual’s background.
In that respect one of the most glaring attributes of presumptive Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump is that, were he to become president, he would
be the only president in the history of the United States to have entered that
office with no prior public service. Every U.S. president to date, from
Washington through Obama, has either held elective office at the level of at
least the U.S. Congress or governor of a state, or been appointed to public
office at the level of the federal cabinet, or been a senior military officer at
the level of a general who has commanded major campaigns.
Many U.S. presidents have combined two or more of these qualifications. Not only
has Trump been none of these things; he doesn’t even have any junior-level
experience, civilian or military, that has anything to do with public service.
Even within the private sector, Trump’s background does not extend to the sorts
of decision-making situations that would confront, say, the chief executive
officer of a large, well-established corporation.
Instead, Trump’s career, apart from his flings at presidential campaigning, has
almost exclusively been about deal-making aimed at personal enrichment and
enhancing recognition of the Trump brand name. Against the backdrop of U.S.
history and past U.S. presidents, Trump’s personal qualifications are
breathtakingly narrow and shallow, and his endeavors inwardly oriented.
Differences in Jobs
High public office entails demands that are different in several important
respects from even the most difficult and remunerative endeavors in the private
sector. One difference involves not being able to pick the business lines one
will pursue or the problems one will solve. The problems tend to impose
themselves, especially though not exclusively in foreign affairs.
When making deals about building resorts or naming golf courses, the deal-maker
works with a particular situation because he thinks there is profit to be made
there; if there isn’t profit to be made, he just looks somewhere else to do
business instead. The occupant of the Oval Office has nothing like that sort of
freedom to choose what problems to handle.
Another major difference involves having to deal with multiple and conflicting
constituencies and interests — which is intrinsic to the art and skill of
politics. The CEO of a major corporation gets into this somewhat, in the sense
of having to deal with labor and customers as well as shareholders, but even
there a bottom line of shareholder value (or executive suite value)
predominates.
Juggling commercial balls is not like juggling political balls, given the
fundamentally different sorts of claims for consideration from would-be
stakeholders. And for a wheeler-dealer financial engineer, multiple
constituencies need not be involved at all.
We also should consider the basic dimension of the public interest versus selfinterest, and where the values of an individual really lie as indicated by past
life choices. Of course, public office as well as private sector pursuits can be
used as a vehicle for pursuing blind personal ambition — for a good portrait of
a current example, see Frank Bruni’s take on Ted Cruz. But complete absence of
any public service is itself a strong statement about this dimension.
As with other aspects of the Trump phenomenon — such as the xenophobia, the
misogyny, and the wall-building nationalism — Trump’s success in this election
campaign reflects larger attitudes, be they those of angry white men or
something else. As many commentators have observed, some of the most prominent
themes that Trump has ridden to the nomination had already been nurtured and
ridden, sometimes in slightly different and less crude form, by others —
especially within the Republican Party, and in that sense the party deserves to
get Trump as its nominee.
The same is true of the rejection, also represented by Trump, of public service
and of selfless dedication to a greater public good. Government service and
government programs are not the only way to serve the public good in general,
but for many specific public needs they are the only way to serve them.
We hear the rejection incessantly in the form of the “government bad, private
sector good” mantra that takes innumerable forms every day on Capitol Hill, from
bureaucrat-bashing to ignoring crying needs that can only be answered by a
larger government program — such as repairing debilitated transportation
infrastructure, of which anyone who rides Washington’s maintenance-deferred, and
frequently breaking down, Metro system to work is acutely aware.
Disdain for Government
We have seen other manifestations of the same set of attitudes from other
candidates in this year’s Republican race. There is Cruz, who even before his
inane call to abolish the IRS (so then who collects taxes?) had devoted his
tenure in the Senate to trying to shut down government rather than trying to
make it work better. There is Marco Rubio, who even before his presidential
campaign got rolling, had lost interest in doing his senatorial job and in
working at it full time for six full years on behalf of the constituents who had
elected him to do so.
And speaking of senators doing or not doing their jobs, there is of course the
willful crippling of the Supreme Court for at least a year by the majority party
in the Senate refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nomination to fill a
vacancy.
Aspects of these attitudes, voiced as they are so incessantly from one side of
the political spectrum, have cultivated corresponding attitudes in the larger
American population. Heroes to the American public do not tend to be, as they
once were, those who made exceptional sacrifices or performed exceptional deeds
on behalf of the public good. Today they are at least as likely to be successful
entrepreneurs — someone such as, say, Steve Jobs — who are admired for some
combination of their financial success and the way they have satisfied us not as
citizens but as consumers.
We have seen a slight foreshadowing of the Trump phenomenon in the presidential
nominations in the most recent years. Consider the two Republican opponents who
ran against Barack Obama. In 2008 it was John McCain, a senior senator and a war
hero. In 2012 it was Mitt Romney, who — although his single term as governor of
Massachusetts would have kept alive the unbroken string of public service
experience among U.S. presidents — has devoted the rest of his career to being a
private equity artist. i.e., a financial engineer, making deals to turn profits
without a public interest being served, very much in the manner of Trump’s
dealings. Trump brought this mini-trend full circle last year with his
disgraceful comments in which he said McCain was not a war hero but a loser.
The rejection of a sense of public spirit, and with that rejection the
associated attitude that government is always a problem and never part of the
solution, inflicts immense damage on the public good, even though much of that
damage is less apparent than the condition of Washington’s Metro.
Or sometimes it only becomes apparent when the damage becomes great enough to
cause a crisis, as it has recently with the contamination of the public water
supply in Flint, Michigan. Efforts of Republicans in Congress to deflect blame
away from the Republican governor whose administration had taken control of the
city and aim it instead at part of the despised federal bureaucracy, the
Environmental Protection Agency, ignored how Congress had intentionally
legislated away the power of EPA to do much in such situations.
President Obama, who visited Flint this week, spoke accurately about the
“corrosive attitude” that opposes government investments in public
infrastructure. “It’s a mind-set that says that environmental rules designed to
keep your water clean or your air clean are optional or not that important,” Mr.
Obama said. “That attitude is as corrosive to our democracy as the stuff that
results in lead in your water.”
People focused on making fortunes in the private sector should reflect on the
lesson provided by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in the most recent Foreign
Affairs, in which they explain, “It was the emergence in the first half of the
twentieth century of a robust U.S. government willing and able to act boldly on
behalf of the country as a whole that led to spectacular advances in national
well-being over many decades.”
Steve Jobs was a terrific innovator, but look inside that iPhone that helped
make him a hero, note Hacker and Pierson, and “you’ll find that most of its
major components (GPS, lithium-ion batteries, cellular technology, touch-screen
and LCD displays, Internet connectivity) rest on research that was publicly
funded or even directly carried out by government agencies.”
The authors sadly note that “it has been the withering of government
capabilities, ambitions, and independence in the last generation or two that has
been a major cause of the drying up of the good times” that had prevailed in
particular during the first three decades after World War II.
The dominant public philosophy in the United States about individual citizens’
relationship with their nation and their government has experienced a big turn
for the worse in the half century since John Kennedy was urging citizens to ask
what they can do for their country rather than what their country can do for
them. The nomination by a major party of someone who has done nothing for his
country and instead boasts of an ability to make money-making deals is a
culmination of this terrible trend.
Donald Trump has exploited that trend, but there are many others who share
responsibility for the trend and continue to exert their malign influence on
American attitudes today.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
US Foreign Policy — If Obama Had Lost
Some progressives see little difference between the foreign policies of a
President Obama and a President McCain or Romney or Hillary Clinton. But those
shades of gray can mean invading Syria or bombing Iran or continuing the
occupation of Iraq or not, as Adil E. Shamoo notes.
By Adil E. Shamoo
President Barack Obama’s foreign policy over the past six years has come under
attack from progressives and conservatives alike. From the progressive point of
view, there is much to criticize: the killing of civilians by drones, excessive
surveillance here and abroad in the name of national security, supporting
corrupt regimes when it suits. For this and more, I have opposed Mr. Obama’s
foreign policy.
But, in the early days of the new year, it might be good to take a moment to
recognize that however disappointing President Obama’s policies may be, it could
have been a lot worse if any of his key opponents, Republican or Democrat, were
sitting in the White House today.
If a Republican were president, say Sen. John McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008,
or Mitt Romney, who failed to unseat him in 2012, he would have found a way to
keep as many as 30,000 American combat troops in Iraq, making Iraq a violent
client state rather than the distant disaster it is today. Troops would continue
coming home in coffins, and Iraq would feel the wrath of continued air strikes
and raids.
If Hillary Clinton had won the primary in 2008 and became president, she would
have rallied to keep combat troops in Iraq, too, perhaps only half as many as
President McCain. But backlash from continued occupation, no matter the numbers,
would be persistent and severe.
If a Republican or Ms. Clinton were president, American troops would still be in
Afghanistan, but a higher number of them than the current 50,000 troops there,
with slightly reduced numbers for decades to come. Significant numbers of
American troops would have continued to suffer casualties monthly.
Meanwhile, the Syrian crisis may or may not have been averted under a different
president. But if a Republican were in the White House, American troops would
likely be in Syria right now and President Bashar Assad and his goons toppled
from power. This would have pleased many Americans, including some liberals who
see Syria as a humanitarian disaster in which intervention cannot be avoided.
Yet like Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be heavy American casualties, with
the Syrian death toll in the tens of thousands. The fighting would have spilled
into Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, far more than even today. Possibly the war would
have also engulfed Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. Iran might
become a target of a sustained bombing and possibly a military invasion,
pleasing the war hawks in Congress, Israel and American friends in the Gulf, all
whom have long pushed for intervention there.
On the other hand, if Hillary Clinton were president, she would have, at a
minimum, established a no-fly zone over Syrian air-space and likely dragged the
U.S. into a land war in the region, with similar outcomes just described under a
Republican administration.
If a Republican were in power during the Egyptian revolution in 2011, he might
have supported the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, but he would’ve done everything he
could to prevent the election of any new president hailing from the Muslim
Brotherhood. And if Mohamed Morsi had won anyway, the American president would
have instituted policies to undermine him.
In retrospect, this policy would have pleased many Americans, and certainly the
Egyptian military, too. In fact, the outcome would not be dissimilar to what is
happening in Egypt today. But with flagrant Republican meddling, the U.S. would
be blamed more directly for the political crisis there, fomenting more terrorism
and an increase in anti-Americanism overall.
In short, the Middle East and Afghanistan would be hotbeds of wars and
hostilities if the outcome of the 2008 or 2012 elections had been any different.
In that context, progressives should take a deep breath and appreciate President
Obama for avoiding the conflicts his opponents would have blundered straight
into, or in the case of Iraq, continued to fight.
It is important to remember this discussion when Hillary Clinton runs for
president in 2016.
Adil E. Shamoo is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a
senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, and the author of: Equal Worth, When
Humanity Will Have Peace. His email is [email protected]. [This article
originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun and is reprinted with the author’s
permission.]
A Threat to Nuke Tehran
Exclusive: Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson urged the United States to
coerce Iran by dropping a demonstration nuke in the desert followed by a
blackmail threat that the next one would obliterate Tehran. But this idea of
genocide-extortion has drawn no official U.S. condemnation, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
When the largest donor to Republican political organizations urges the U.S.
military to detonate a nuclear bomb in an Iranian desert with the explicit
warning that “the next one is in the middle of Tehran,” you might expect that
major American political figures and large U.S. media outlets would strongly
denounce such genocidal blackmail.
After all, Tehran has a population of more than eight million people with
millions more living in the suburbs. So, this threat to exterminate Tehran’s
inhabitants from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would be comparable to someone
nuking an empty space in the United States as a warning that if Americans didn’t
capitulate to some demand, a nuclear bomb would be dropped on New York City, the
site of Adelson’s ugly threat.
The fact that the scattered outrage over Adelson’s remarks on Oct. 22 was mostly
limited to the Internet and included no denunciations from prominent U.S.
politicians, including leading Republicans who have benefited from Adelson’s
largesse, suggests that many Muslims and especially Iranians are right to
suspect that they are the object of obscene prejudice in some American power
circles.
Indeed, HuffingtonPost published a vociferous defense of Adelson’s comments by
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who organized the event at Yeshiva University where
Adelson spoke. Boteach, who has been hailed as the “most famous Rabbi in
America,” treated Adelson’s nuke threat as innocent hyperbole only underscoring
how aggressively the world should treat Iran.
Instead of apologizing for letting Adelson go unchallenged as he mused about
murdering millions of Iranians, Boteach expressed outrage over the few
expressions of outrage about Adelson’s plan.
“I found the reaction to his statement illuminating as to the double standards
that are often employed on matters relating to Israel,” wrote Boteach, who then
reprised the infamous false translation of former Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad supposedly saying “that Israel must be wiped off the map.”
Boteach then added to the false quote the assumption that if Israel ceased to
exist as a Jewish state, that would require “the murder of the six million Jews
who live there [as] the precondition of such erasure.” However, there is the
other possibility that Israel/Palestine could become like the United States, a
country that has no official religion but that respects all religions.
To lay out only the two extremes that Israel must be officially a Jewish state
(with non-Jews made second-class citizens or stateless people) as one option and
the other that all the Jews must be murdered invites either apartheid or
genocide.
Boteach also misrepresented recent comments by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei about destroying Tel Aviv and Haifa. The rabbi left out the context of
Khamenei’s remark: the threat was predicated on Israel having first militarily
attacked Iran. In other words, Khamenei was saying that if Israel destroyed
Iranian cities, Iran had the right to retaliate against Israeli cities.
Israel’s Rogue Nuke Arsenal
But one thing that Iran has never threatened to do is to drop a nuclear bomb on
Israel. First, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb; has foresworn any interest in
building one; has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing in
inspectors; and has offered to accept even more intrusive inspections in
exchange for removal of economic sanctions.
By contrast, Israel possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated nuclear
arsenals, albeit one that is undeclared and existing outside international
inspections since Israel has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty. I’ve also been told that Israel’s military contingency plan for possibly
attacking Iran’s hardened nuclear sites includes use of low-yield nuclear
weapons.
So, loose talk from a prominent American Zionist about the value of the United
States launching a ballistic nuclear strike from Nebraska targeting an Iranian
desert with the explicit follow-up threat that the next nuke would obliterate
Iran’s capital could be read by the Iranians as a real possibility, especially
considering Adelson’s close ties to prominent Republicans.
The fact that such a discussion was held in New York City with no meaningful
repercussions for Adelson could be read further as a message to Iran that it
might well need a nuclear deterrence to protect itself from such terroristic
blackmail.
Boteach’s HuffingtonPost commentary also focused only on the part of Adelson’s
remark about dropping a nuclear bomb in an unpopulated area of Iran, where only
“a couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever” would be killed.
Treating the idea like some kind of humanitarian gesture, not a genocidal
extortion threat, Boteach wrote, “Sheldon’s glib comments about nuking rattle
snakes seemed to rattle many of the bloggers who were at our event even more
than Ahmadinejad’s threats.”
But what made Adelson’s remark even more stunning than his idea of a
demonstration nuclear attack in the desert was the follow-up warning: “Then you
say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You
want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your
nuclear development.”
At that point, the audience at Yeshiva University interrupted Adelson with
applause.
The obvious problem with this kind of blackmail threat, of course, is that it
requires the extortionist to follow through if the other side doesn’t
capitulate. To be credible, you have to back up the warning “you want to be
wiped out?” by actually wiping the other side out.
Republican Influence
If Adelson were simply an eccentric old billionaire spouting threats of genocide
at some university forum in New York City, that would be bad enough. But Adelson
is an important behind-the-scenes figure in the Republican Party.
Nearly singlehandedly, Adelson kept afloat the 2012 presidential campaign of
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and then threw his vast financial resources
behind the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who accompanied Adelson
on a high-profile trip to Israel that was designed to highlight tensions between
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Romney’s warm reception in Israel was seen as effectively an endorsement of his
candidacy by Netanyahu, who has rattled many of his own military sabers at Iran.
While in Israel, Romney delivered a belligerent speech suggesting that he, as
U.S. president, would happily support an Israeli war against Iran.
Romney told an audience of Israelis and some wealthy pro-Israel Americans that
he is prepared to employ “any and all measures” to stop Iran from gaining a
nuclear weapons “capability,” a vague concept that arguably already exists.
Romney’s speech in Jerusalem was accompanied by a comment from his top foreign
policy adviser Dan Senor seeming to endorse an Israeli unilateral strike against
Iran. “If Israel has to take action on its own,” Senor said, “the governor would
respect that decision.”
Romney said, “today, the regime in Iran is five years closer to developing
nuclear weapons capability. Preventing that outcome must be our highest national
security priority. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment
is an option. We must lead the effort to prevent Iran from building and
possessing nuclear weapons capability.
“We should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its
nuclear course, and it is our fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures
will do so. In the final analysis, of course, no option should be excluded.”
By elevating Iran’s achievement of a nuclear weapons “capability” to America’s
“highest national security priority” and vowing to “employ any and all measures”
to prevent that eventuality, Romney was essentially threatening war against Iran
under the current circumstances. In that, he went beyond the vague language used
by President Obama, who himself has sounded belligerent with his phrasing about
“all options on the table” to stop Iran if it moves to build a nuclear weapon.
However, the nuance was significant, since U.S. intelligence agencies and even
their Israeli counterparts have concluded that Iran has not decided to build a
nuclear weapon even as it makes progress in a nuclear program that Iranian
leaders say is for peaceful purposes only. Still, those lessons from a peaceful
nuclear program arguably can give a country a nuclear weapons “capability.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes.”]
Though Romney lost the 2012 election, his point of view is common among proIsrael hawks in Congress and throughout Official Washington’s think-tank and
media communities. Adelson also wields real influence because he, along with his
wife Miriam, has poured a fortune into the U.S. political process, calculated at
$92.8 million to outside political groups during the 2012 election cycle,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
And, it is his kind of crazy talk, not uncommon among extreme Zionists, that
makes any political settlement of the Middle East disputes next to impossible.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book
(from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order
Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various rightwing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative.
For details on this offer, click here.
The Right’s Racism Is Showing
Exclusive: The House Republicans dumping the food stamp program, the continuing
GOP assaults on voting rights and the celebrating among some right-wing
commentators over the Trayvon Martin murder verdict are indications that white
racism is alive and well in the United States, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
If there remained any doubt about the connection between American racism and
“small-government conservatism,” the Tea Party-dominated House Republican
majority helped remove it last week in its handling of the farm bill. The
Republicans larded on extra money for agricultural subsidies benefiting mostly
white-owned agribusiness and then lopped off the food-stamp program entirely.
It, after all, benefits a disproportionate share of blacks and other racial
minorities.
In this exercise of government favoritism for wealthy whites and cruelty toward
the poor (many blacks and other minorities), the pretense of free-market
economics was even stripped away. If “libertarianism” were not just a polite
cover for racism, the House Republicans would have killed agricultural
subsidies, too.
But the Republicans didn’t. They seemed fine with various forms of taxpayer
giveaways to white-owned agribusinesses, but they were determined to inflict as
much pain as possible on blacks and minorities who already have suffered the
most from the Great Recession. There was even a cruel vindictiveness to the
process.
In justifying the House action on food stamps, Rep. Stephen Fincher, RTennessee, referred to the New Testament but ignored the teachings of Jesus, who
told his followers to feed the poor and care for the needy. Instead, Fincher
extracted a line from Thessalonians, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not
eat.”
But it turned out that the starving mandate did not apply to Fincher, who has
been a recipient of several million dollars in farm subsidies, including $70,000
in direct payments in 2012 alone for doing nothing. As New York Times columnist
Paul Krugman wrote on Monday, “I don’t think the word ‘hypocrisy’ does it
justice.”
Obviously, the Republican mean-spirited behavior is not entirely aimed at
minorities. As Krugman noted, “almost half of food stamp recipients are nonHispanic whites” and the percentage is 63 percent in Fincher’s Tennessee
district. But race remains a powerful driving force for the GOP’s behavior.
Indeed, whenever you run up against right-wing hypocrisy, it’s a safe bet that
race is a factor. For instance, Tea Partiers love to go to Washington, dress up
in Revolutionary War costumes and protest their taxation with representation.
But they are remarkably silent about a continuation of “taxation without
representation” for the residents of the District, many of whom are black.
Yes, it’s true that D.C. whites are also denied congressional representation but
you can bet that if D.C. were overwhelmingly white (and right-wing) rather than
substantially black (and liberal), the Tea Partiers would be screaming about the
injustice of it all.
It’s also true that the Republican insistence on voter IDs (to eliminate the
virtually non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud) will disenfranchise
some poor and elderly whites who may not have drivers’ licenses. But the rightwing politicians who are pushing these laws know that on balance it will keep
more black- and brown-skinned Americans from the polls.
That’s the numbers game they’re playing. But to rig the elections, they must
frame their maneuvers in “race-neutral” ways, which means that, sadly, some
whites must be disenfranchised along with blacks and other minorities. Those
whites shut out from elections amount to collateral damage in the war to “take
our country back.”
Pleasing Euphemisms
“Free market,” “libertarian,” “contract rights” and “small government” are the
current in-vogue euphemisms for maintaining white supremacy. Though you still
hear, “states’ rights” from some right-wing politicians, the phrase does have a
stigma from the battles to protect segregation a half century ago.
But these various concepts all targeting the possibility that the federal
government might reflect the democratic will of the American people and act
against racial bigotry or other injustices
can be traced back to the original
political battles of the young Republic over slavery.
The Federalists, who were the prime movers behind the Constitution, were what
you might call “pragmatic nationalists.” They understood that the point of the
document crafted in Philadelphia in 1787 and ratified in 1788 was to centralize
power in the federal government and enable it to take the actions necessary to
build the country.
Their “originalist” view of the Constitution could be described as the federal
government doing whatever it must to protect the country and advance the
nation’s “general welfare.” Many Framers were troubled by slavery but they were
not purists. They even accepted repulsive compromises that counted black slaves
as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation in Congress. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Made-up Constitution.”]
Nevertheless, Southern Anti-Federalists the likes of Virginia’s George Mason and
Patrick Henry argued that the Constitution, by centralizing power in the federal
government, would inevitably lead the United States to outlaw slavery and cost
wealthy plantation owners their massive capital investment in human chattel.
Though these Anti-Federalists narrowly lost the fight over ratification, they
didn’t fade away. They organized behind the charismatic Thomas Jefferson, who
had been in France during the writing and ratifying of the Constitution.
Jefferson served as Secretary of State under Federalist George Washington and as
Vice President under Federalist John Adams, but he fought the ambitious nationbuilding plans of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and undermined Adams.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rethinking Thomas Jefferson.”]
Protecting Slavery
As the new constitutional Republic took shape, worried plantation owners,
including many Anti-Federalists, organized themselves as the core of an
agrarian-based political movement that is commonly referred to as Jefferson’s
Democratic-Republican Party. The party presented itself as representing the
interests of simple farmers, but in reality the base of Jefferson’s movement was
in the slaveholding aristocracy.
Jefferson himself was a deeply racist individual who made a mockery of the words
he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” He
engaged in the pseudo-science of skull measurements to argue in Notes on the
State of Virginia that African-Americans were inferior to whites. He also
insisted that it would be impossible for whites to live in the same country with
freed blacks.
But Jefferson proved to be a skilled if unscrupulous political leader. His
party’s success, in first demonizing the Federalist Party and then dethroning
its leaders, led to a 24-year run of Virginian presidents, starting with
Jefferson in 1801 and followed by Jefferson’s neighbors and protégés, James
Madison (a former Federalist ally of Washington) in 1809 and James Monroe (who
had been one of the early Anti-Federalists allied with Mason and Henry) in 1817.
All three were slaveholders who defended the institution of slavery and opposed
the manumission (or freeing) of slaves in the United States. As Virginia’s
governor in 1800, Monroe called out the state militia to brutally put down an
incipient slave revolt known as Gabriel’s Rebellion, with 26 alleged
conspirators hanged. Jefferson and Madison pondered various schemes for
deporting freed African-Americans.
Though slavery was always in the background, the chief political principle of
Jefferson’s party was to roll back the Constitution’s empowerment of the federal
government and to claim that the document’s seemingly expansive powers were
really quite narrow. The effect was to shield the interests of slaveholders who
feared that their investments in bondage might otherwise be lost.
By the end of the Virginia Dynasty in 1825, the roots of slavery had dug down
even deeper in America’s soil with many Virginian plantation owners, who had
exhausted their own land by overuse, starting a new industry: breeding slaves
for sale to the new slave states to the west. The United States was on course
for the Civil War. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Dubious Claim to
Madison.”]
The Demise of Slavery
Ironically, just as the Anti-Federalists had feared, the growing industrial
power of the North and its swelling immigrant population tilted national power
away from the South. But slavery was still defended by Jefferson’s Democratic
Party, which competed against the Whigs and then the Republicans, based
primarily in the North.
The election of anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln was the final straw for
hard-line slavers who then orchestrated the secession of 11 Southern states.
With secession, the Democratic Party lost much of its representation in
Congress.
Despite the centrality of slavery to the War Between the States, Southerners
insisted then and some still do today that the conflict was not about slavery,
but about “limited government,” “constraints on federal power,” “states’
rights,” and “contract rights.” But the inconvenient truth was that the
Confederacy quickly drafted a constitution perpetuating slavery and the South
conditioned its later peace negotiations on slavery’s continuation.
In the final days of the war in 1865, while the Southern states were still in
rebellion, Lincoln engineered passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing
slavery. After the South’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the Radical
Republicans pushed through the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal
protection under the law and the Fifteenth Amendment assuring the right to vote
regardless of one’s color.
After the Southern states returned to the Union and especially after
Reconstruction ended in 1877 the pro-slave Democratic Party became the party of
Jim Crow and made possible the brutal oppression of freed blacks, who faced
lynching and other acts of terror. The solid Democratic South only changed in
the 1960s when the national Democratic Party took the lead in passing major
civil rights laws.
The so-called Dixie-crats were then welcomed into the Republican Party by
opportunistic politicians such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Given the
stigma of outright racism, Nixon, Reagan and other Republicans employed code
words dog whistles that were heard by the white racists but could be explained
away to more enlightened Americans.
Rebranding as Patriots
Thus, we were back to euphemisms about “limited government,” “constraints on
federal power,” “states’ rights,” and “contract rights.” One other cosmetic
change in the new millennium was for the Right to “rebrand” itself from its
overt love of the Old Confederacy to a supposed harkening back to the Framers’
“originalist” view of the Constitution.
Except that instead of citing the pragmatic nationalism of Washington, Hamilton,
Adams and the earlier incarnation of Madison who all favored a vibrant central
government the Right promoted the revisionist version of a weak central
government as devised by Jefferson and the Southern slaveholders.
With the election of the first African-American president in 2008, and with it
the recognition of the demographic changes that Barack Obama represented, the
lightly repressed racism of the American Right bubbled to the surface with
conspiracy theories about Obama’s supposed Kenyan birth and posters showing him
in African tribal dress with a bone through his nose.
Of course, Republican and Tea Party leaders still insisted that their political
movement was not about racism, but about free markets and removing the heavy
hand of government regulation. But their actions kept belying their words, both
in the racially tinged legislation like discriminatory voter ID laws, resistance
to immigration reform and elimination of food stamps and in the rulings of the
right-wing Supreme Court, such as gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Then, there was the right-wing backlash on Fox News and talk radio against the
public outrage over the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old African-American boy
Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Some right-wing commentators even celebrated
the acquittal of his killer George Zimmerman on Saturday, much as an earlier
generation of racists cheered “not guilty” verdicts for Klansmen accused of
lynching uppity Negroes.
When confronting the apparent glee that some right-wingers expressed over
Zimmerman’s acquittal and facing comparable sentiments when the Supreme Court’s
majority trashed the Voting Rights Act and House Republicans axed food stamps
for the poor one has to wonder where these white racists hope to take the United
States.
In their ugly words and deeds, there is an echo of Jefferson and an earlier
generation of American racists who wistfully hoped that they could ship nonwhites out of the United States and make the young nation white and homogenous.
We heard that wistful voice again last year in Republican presidential candidate
Mitt Romney wanting to make life so miserable for Hispanic immigrants that they
would “self-deport” and complaining that Obama was giving “stuff” to the
unworthy “47 percent” whose color in the mind’s eyes of Romney’s white listeners
was surely of a darker hue.
The current dysfunction of the Congress is another distant echo of the pre-Civil
War days when Southern whites obstructed any proposal for federal government
action, even disaster relief, as a possible precedent for ending slavery. In the
modern case, the fear may be that the federal government will help non-whites
gain genuine political power.
So, what is becoming painfully apparent is that the pleasant thought that the
United States was finally reaching a post-racial future isn’t true. The only
question is whether the reassertion of white supremacy now in the guise of
“small-government conservatism” will succeed in creating a Second Jim Crow era.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
Making ‘Other America’ Fail
Exclusive: Behind today’s fight over government spending is a bigger struggle
for U.S.
democracy’s future, pitting the traditional white-ruled country
against a new multicultural nation, or the Right’s Real America against Other
America. To win, Real America must make Other America fail, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
You might have thought that Election 2012, in which Barack Obama thumped Mitt
Romney and Democrats bested Republicans in total votes for Congress, provided a
popular mandate for more government investments in national infrastructure,
cutting-edge research and public education paid for with slightly higher taxes
on the rich
and less interest in austerity that will cost jobs. But, if you
thought so, you were wrong.
From the point of view of the Right or what some like to call the Real Americans
there is no reason to respect last November’s electoral judgment because it was
delivered by the Other Americans, who are seen as essentially an enemy country
that just happens to be located inside the territorial United States. And that
enemy country must not only be defeated, but must be made into an example of
what happens to those who challenge Real America.
What President Obama and many Democrats have yet to realize is that they are not
just in a political fight or even an ideological battle. They are in a zero-sum
war over whether Real America will govern this land or whether political control
will be ceded to Other America.
Similar struggles were waged when European whites wrested the land from Native
Americans in colonial and post-colonial times and when Southern whites reclaimed
control of the former Confederacy from freed African-American slaves after
Reconstruction. Now, with Republicans losing the demographic competition having
alienated blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites the Right
must resort to anti-democratic and other under-handed tactics to win.
In doing so, the Right also is drawing on the history of the Cold War when it
was common U.S. government practice to wreck the economies of Third World
governments that were viewed as flirting with “socialism.” There were two goals:
to oust their wayward leaders (replacing them with more compliant figures) and
to make the devastated countries examples for others.
Thus, you had CIA covert operations staging coups in Iran in 1953 (because Prime
Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was nationalizing foreign-owned oil wells); in
Guatemala in 1954 (because President Jacobo Arbenz was pushing land reform); and
in Chile in 1973 (because President Salvador Allende was trying to reduce income
inequality).
In Nicaragua in the 1980s, a leftist Sandinista government opened health clinics
and launched literacy programs, making it the ideological enemy of President
Ronald Reagan who waged a ruthless campaign to reduce Nicaragua’s economy to
rubble, to terrorize the population, and to set the stage for the election of a
pro-U.S. politician.
While getting rid of troublemakers in these and other cases was part of
Washington’s agenda, perhaps more important was the demonstration to nearby
countries about what would befall them if they deviated from the model of
unregulated or lightly regulated capitalism, i.e., if they challenged the
economic status quo in which privileged elites collaborated with multinational
corporations.
Thus, you had National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about the
strategic insignificance of Chile as “a dagger pointed at the heart of
Antarctica.” In other words, the U.S. government knew that Chile itself was
unimportant to the Cold War chessboard but still was determined to stop Chile
from becoming a successful model for other Latin American countries. President
Richard Nixon’s stated goal regarding Chile was “to make the economy scream.”
Coming Home to Roost
This history is relevant today because the United States is seeing something
comparable occurring not in some faraway land but at home. Well-funded elements
of the American Right are determined to do to the country that elected Obama
twice what the CIA did to places like Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua,
i.e., whatever is necessary to wreck the economy and to create angry political
divisions.
These right-wingers also don’t see what they’re doing as treasonous, which could
be defined as willfully acting to damage or destroy your own country. The reason
is that they no longer consider the America that elected Obama to be their
country. They see it as a foreign entity increasingly controlled politically by
brown-skinned minorities, feminists, gays, and young whites who are comfortable
in a multicultural world.
In the Right’s opinion, America should be ruled by whites, albeit with the help
of a few token blacks and Hispanics; that’s the proper order of things. It’s
what Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other right-wingers have called the “Real
America”; it’s what they mean when they talk about “taking our country back.”
The “Other America” is not just seen as a political rival with some different
ideas but as an alien being that has come to inhabit the body of the United
States. It is a rampaging virus, a metastasizing cancer. It must be eradicated
or at least brought under control and managed.
So, if you must suppress the votes of “those people” by imposing new “ballot
security” measures or by rigging control of Congress through extreme
gerrymandering of districts (and thus devaluing the votes of blacks, Hispanics
and young city dwellers), then that’s okay.
Some Republican-controlled states that tend to vote Democratic in national
elections are now trying to apportion presidential electors from those deformed
congressional districts, rather than from the state as a whole, in order to make
the votes of rural whites more powerful than the votes of minorities and urban
residents. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Return of Three-Fifths of a Person.”]
Or, if you must whip up some crazy dreams of armed insurrection against the U.S.
government by distorting the original intent of the Second Amendment and
allowing weapons of war into the hands of unstable people that serves the
purpose of putting everyone on edge and creating useful insecurity. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Second Amendment Lies.”]
Similarly, some right-wing public officials, including Texas Gov. Rick
Perry, offer loose talk about “secession” in which the states of Real America
would secede from the Union of the Other America, much as the Confederate states
seceded in the early 1860s to protect the institution of slavery.
And, if you must disrupt the economy of the Obama-controlled Other America by
threatening to make the United States default on its debts, that has benefits,
too. Certainly, before Election 2012, such disruptions helped keep unemployment
high and boosted Mitt Romney’s electoral chances.
But even after the election, there remains a necessity to beat down the U.S.
economy, to make it “scream,” whether by implementing major spending cuts as in
the current “sequester” or by forcing periodic crises in the functioning of
government like standoffs over government shut-downs and debt defaults.
Bad Is Good
Certainly, there is no interest in supporting public spending on infrastructure,
research or education, which might only put people back to work or make the
government look useful. Today’s Right doesn’t care that the predictable results
of austerity as Europe has shown is a likely double-dip recession and more pain,
indeed that appears to be the plan.
After more years of high unemployment and decaying services, the Right can then
pound away at the talking point that Obama’s modest policy reforms, including
slight increases in tax rates on the rich, failed. The political space might be
created for restoring full right-wing control of Congress in 2014 and over the
entire federal government in 2016.
Then, more permanent alterations in democracy can be installed to give
substantially more weight to the votes of Real Americans while ensuring
that Other Americans never get their hands on real power.
Perhaps President Obama’s biggest miscalculation has been his lack of
appreciation for how radical the Right and its chief political vehicle, the
Republican Party, have become. In 2009, he assumed that the depth of the
financial crisis would force greater cooperation with his proposals for saving
the auto industry, stimulating the economy and achieving some reform of health
care. Instead he faced near unanimous GOP opposition.
With his “base” demoralized in 2010, Obama saw the Republican Party and its Tea
Party faction make major gains in Congress, seizing control of the House and
growing even more emboldened about using the filibuster to tie up the Senate.
GOP governors and statehouses also moved to reshape congressional districts to
enhance Republican power.
In 2011, to stop the GOP from forcing a default on the U.S. debt and throwing
the world’s economy into crisis Obama agreed to an unpalatable across-the-board
cut in future spending, called “the sequester.” By doing so, Obama at least kept
the U.S. economy on a slight growth path through Election 2012.
Though Obama won reelection decisively and Democrats outpolled Republicans in
congressional races, the Republicans retained control of the House largely due
to the aggressive gerrymandering of districts. Combined with the Senate
filibuster, the House majority has given the GOP effective veto power over
Obama’s agenda.
Heading into his second term, Obama is surely less starry-eyed than he was in
2009, but he continues to underestimate what is confronting him from the more
extreme elements of the Republican Party the neo-Confederates, the Tea Partiers,
the Ayn Rand acolytes and the Christian fundamentalists. These groups are not at
all interested in making things work in the Other America; they want pretty much
everything to fail.
These extremists financed by the likes of the Koch Brothers and other antigovernment ideologues view Other America as an enemy state that must be hobbled,
put back in its place and forced to let Real America reassert control. If that
can be achieved in 2014 and 2016, Real America would then move with more
determination to reshape the electoral system to give even greater weight to its
votes and less value to the votes of Other America.
To hold back the demographic shift toward a “multicultural America,”
“traditional America” must impose a form of American apartheid, that is, legal
arrangements to ensure future white control even though non-whites and urban
youth might make up the majority. In effect, they would be given some lesser
status as citizens. Their votes might count as, say, three-fifths of a person.
That is the project that the Republican Party began in earnest in 2011 with laws
to restrict voting times, to impose new obstacles for casting ballots, and to
reshape districts to maximize the electoral clout of rural whites (while
minimizing the influence of urban non-whites and other city dwellers).
Now, the next phase of this war is playing out in the right-wing obstructionism
toward virtually every economic policy proposed by President Obama. It is very
important to the Right’s strategy that the U.S. economy be made to “scream.”
[For a limited time, you can purchase Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush family,
which includes detailed accounts of these false narratives, for only $34. For
details, click here.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new
book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book
(from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Reality Bites Back
Exclusive: More than a Right-Left battle, the conflict for the world’s future is
between empiricists and fantasists, those who are committed to reality and
rationality and those who happily embrace propaganda as truth. It is a struggle
with global implications, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The war for the world’s future pitting people anchored in reality against others
free-floating in make-believe appears to have begun in earnest with the
rationalists scoring some surprising early victories in what is sure to be
a long and ugly fight.
In Israel’s recent election, Yesh Atid, a new party of secularists, surged to a
second-place finish on a platform that challenged the power of the ultraOrthodox who have sought to impose a fundamentalist version of Judaism on large
swaths of the country, including forcing women to sit at the back of buses and
driving secular Jews out of some neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican
presidential prospect for 2016, finally acknowledged the obvious, calling his
GOP the “stupid party.” And Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, another Republican upand-comer, signed on to a bipartisan plan for immigration reform that included a
path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, what the GOP’s nativist wing
has long derided as “amnesty.”
These various moves suggest some new respect for the real world. But the
ugliness of what lies ahead was underscored at a legislative hearing in
Hartford, Connecticut, on Monday when Neil Heslin, the parent of a child
massacred in Newtown on Dec. 14, was heckled by pro-gun activists who claimed,
falsely, that the Second Amendment guaranteed them the right to own assault
weapons. (Not even today’s right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court says that.)
Republicans also haven’t given up on their racist arguments about the need to
rig election rules in ways to devalue or suppress the votes of AfricanAmericans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other urban dwellers and to exaggerate
the value of ballots cast by rural whites. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Return of
‘Three-Fifths’ of a Person.”]
There is also no indication as yet that the Republicans will budge on other key
elements of their “stupid” agenda, including their denial of the science on
global warming, their pandering to pro-gun extremists and their resistance to
pretty much anything that President Barack Obama is for.
Still, pro-rationalists have to take some encouragement from small signs that
the anti-rationalism of the Republican Party is beginning to crack. Fox News
parted ways with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a commentator. The GOP’s vice
presidential nominee in 2008 — known for her know-nothingism — went the way of
the crazy Glenn Beck. It seems that even right-wing propaganda on Fox has its
limits.
The even faster disappearance of the GOP’s chameleon-like 2012 standard-bearer,
Mitt Romney, is another sign that Republicans want to forget the clown show of
their last presidential selection process. It culminated in a national
convention built on taking Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote out of context.
Any thinking person knew that Obama was referring to the broader national
infrastructure of roads, bridges, etc., not to some individual’s small business,
but Romney pretended otherwise.
The Republican Party had reached a point where it seemed to relish the process
of ginning up its idiotic “base” around outright lies. If it wasn’t Palin
yelling about non-existent “death panels,” it was mogul Donald Trump and Sheriff
Joe Arpaio questioning the Hawaiian birth records proving that Barack Obama was
born in the United States.
Treating Americans as Simpletons
Of course, the GOP’s decoupling from reality can be traced back many more years,
at least several decades to the emergence of former actor Ronald Reagan who
demonstrated how a casual relationship with the truth could work wonders
politically. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s War for
Reality.”]
But the substitution of right-wing ideology for reason advanced dramatically
last decade under the presidency of George W. Bush, who empowered a clique of
clever intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. The neocons treated the
American people as simpletons easily manipulated through techniques of
“perception management.”
Aided by Fox News and abetted by a careerist mainstream news media, the neocons
felt free to push any hot buttons that worked, scaring Americans with
exaggerated stories of foreign threats and impugning the patriotism of anyone
who got in the way. The invasion of Iraq to find non-existent WMD was one
result.
Similarly, Republican presidents from Reagan through the two Bushes stocked the
U.S. Supreme Court with ideologues who pretended to be “strict constructionists”
on the Constitution but actually applied shoddy scholarship to reach rulings in
line with their political preferences.
For instance, Antonin Scalia and the three other right-wing justices, in an
angry dissent regarding the Affordable Care Act, cited constitutional Framer
Alexander Hamilton in support of their concern about the alleged overreach of
Congress in regulating commerce.
In their dissent on June 28, 2012, they wrote: “If Congress can reach out and
command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in
the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in
Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws
. . .
spare
neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.’” They footnoted
Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 33.
That sounded pretty authoritative. After all, Hamilton was one of the strongest
advocates for the federal powers in the Constitution and here he was offering a
prescient warning about “Obamacare” from the distant past of 1788. The only
problem was that Scalia and his cohorts were turning Hamilton’s words inside
out.
In Federalist Paper No. 33, Hamilton was not writing about the Commerce Clause.
He was referring to clauses in the Constitution that grant Congress the power to
make laws that are “necessary and proper” for executing its powers and that
establish federal law as “the supreme law of the land.”
And Hamilton wasn’t condemning those powers, as Scalia’s opinion would have you
believe. Hamilton was defending the two clauses by poking fun at the AntiFederalist alarmists who had stirred up opposition to the Constitution with
warnings about how it would trample America’s liberties. In the cited section of
No. 33, Hamilton is saying the two clauses had been unfairly targeted by
“virulent invective and petulant declamation.”
It is in that context that Hamilton complains that the two clauses “have been
held up to the people in all the exaggerated colors of misrepresentation as the
pernicious engines by which their local governments were to be destroyed and
their liberties exterminated; as the hideous monster whose devouring jaws would
spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”
In other words, Scalia and the three other right-wingers not only applied
Hamilton’s comments to the wrong section of the Constitution but reversed their
meaning. Hamilton was mocking those who were claiming that these clauses would
be “the hideous monster.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen
Narrative.]
Legal Wording to Go
Though Scalia is typically hailed by the Washington press corps as a brilliant
legal scholar, he really is more of an ideological hack who reaches his
conclusions based on what he wants the outcome to be and then picks out some
legal wording to wrap around his judicial activism.
He did the same in using the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection under the
law” principle to prevent a recount in Florida in Election 2000 and thus hand
George W. Bush the presidency. He and four other Republican justices settled on
their desired outcome and then went searching for a rationalization, no matter
how ludicrous. [See the book Neck Deep for details.]
One of the motivations for the five partisan justices to make Bush the president
despite the people’s electoral preference for Al Gore was that Bush would then
appoint more right-wing Republicans to the high court and thus perpetuate their
ability to redefine the Constitution.
Thus, in 2008 and 2010, the right-wing majority reversed longstanding precedents
regarding the interpretation of the Second Amendment as a collective right of
the states to organize militias. By a narrow 5-to-4 majority, the Republican
justices made it a personal right, albeit one that could be restricted by local,
state and federal laws.
In 2010, the right-wing court also by a 5-to-4 vote unleashed the power of
wealthy individuals to dominate the U.S. political process through unlimited
financing of TV ads and other propaganda. The underlying motivation was that
right-wing billionaires could then, in essence, buy elections for Republican
candidates.
So, the nation’s predicament in 2013 is that the Republican practice of using
sophistry and spin to control the American political/media system is deeply
rooted in the judicial, political and media structures. Millions of Americans
having watched too much Fox News and listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and
Glenn Beck believe strongly in a faux reality and get angry when their illusions
are challenged.
Of course, it’s not just the Republicans and the Right that are to blame for
this mess. They, after all, have been doing simply what works for them
politically. It is also the fault of the Democrats, the Left and the
professional news media for largely abandoning this field of battle over
reality, retreating in the face of well-funded propagandists and angry rightwing activists.
Yes, there also have been cases in which some elements of the Left and the
Democratic Party have opted to fight fire with fire, i.e. making up their own
fact-free conspiracy theories to discredit Republicans. But the preponderance of
this behavior has been on the Right.
Indeed, the emerging backlash against right-wing fantasists could represent an
important turning point in the fight for the world’s future. If thoughtful
people will plant their flag in the firm ground of rationality and empiricism,
they could create a rallying point for a new brand of politics, one based on
pragmatism, realism and mutual respect.
Within such a political framework, there would still be vigorous debates over
how best to address the world’s problems including how big a role for government
versus the private sector but those discussions would be based on facts, not
nonsense. To build that future, however, rationalists must be as tough and
determined as the ideologues.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
The Right’s Dangerously Bad History
Exclusive: Reacting to President Obama’s modest executive orders on gun safety
and his proposed legislation to Congress, the Right is engaging in hysterical
rhetoric about “tyranny” and riling up angry whites to arm themselves. But key
Republicans can’t even get their historical facts straight, notes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
One conceit of America’s right-wingers is that they respect U.S. history and
especially the Constitution in ways that other Americans don’t. But not only has
the Right absorbed a grossly distorted idea of the Constitution but many
prominent conservatives have a shoddy understanding of history, most recently
revealed by Sen. Rand Paul.
On Wednesday, the Kentucky Republican appeared on Fox News to liken President
Barack Obama’s executive orders on gun safety to the behavior of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who guided the nation through much of the Great
Depression and World War II.
According to Paul’s version of that history, “FDR had a little bit of this ‘king
complex’” like Obama, so “we had to limit FDR finally because he served so many
terms that I think he would have ruled in perpetuity, and I’m very concerned
about this president [Obama] garnering so much power and arrogance that he
thinks he can do whatever he wants.”
Regarding the FDR point, Paul is referring to the 22nd Amendment which limits a
U.S. president to two four-year terms. Roosevelt was the only president elected
more than twice, having won four elections. But the 22nd Amendment did nothing
“to limit FDR.”
Roosevelt died shortly into his fourth term in 1945. The 22nd Amendment was
passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1951. In other words,
Roosevelt was no longer around at the time of the 22nd Amendment.
Paul’s erroneous history puts him in the company of other prominent Republicans
who profess to love American history and the Constitution, but don’t seem
interested enough to get their facts straight. For instance, several GOP
candidates for President in 2012, including one who served as governor of
Massachusetts, displayed ignorance of basic facts about the American Revolution.
Mitt Romney, who served four years as governor of the state where the war began,
wrote in his book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, that the
Revolutionary War began in April 1775 when the British attacked Boston by sea.
“In April 1775, British warships laid siege on Boston Harbor and successfully
took command of the city,” Romney wrote.
However, in the actual history, the British military controlled Boston long
before April 1775, garrisoning Redcoats in the rebellious city since 1768. The
British clamped down more tightly after the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1773,
imposing the so-called “Intolerable Acts” in 1774, reinforcing the Boston
garrison and stopping commerce into Boston Harbor.
The aggressive British actions forced dissident leaders Sam Adams and John
Hancock to flee the city and take refuge in Lexington, as colonial militias
built up their stocks of arms and ammunition in nearby Concord.
The Revolutionary War began not with British forces seizing Boston in April 1775
as Romney wrote, but when the Redcoats ventured forth from Boston on April 19,
1775, to seize Adams and Hancock in Lexington and then go farther inland to
destroy the colonial arms cache in Concord.
The British failed in both endeavors, but touched off the war by killing eight
Massachusetts men at Lexington Green. The Redcoats then encountered a larger
force of Minutemen near Concord Bridge and were driven back in a daylong retreat
to Boston, suffering heavy losses. Thus, the Revolutionary War began with a
stunning American victory, not with the American defeat that Romney described in
a book that he claims to have written himself.
Romney’s misrepresentation of the start of the war is particularly stunning
because Massachusetts celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord every year
in a holiday called Patriots Day, with the Boston Red Sox playing an unusual
morning game so fans can exit Fenway Park in time to watch the end of the Boston
Marathon.
Wrong Century, Wrong State
Other rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination also got basic
facts about the nation’s founding wrong.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry put the American Revolution in the 1500s. “The reason that
th
we fought the revolution in the 16
Century was to get away from that kind of
onerous crown if you will,” Perry said, missing the actual date for the war for
independence by two centuries and even placing it before the first permanent
English settlement in the New World, Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the first
decade of the 17
th
Century.
While pandering to Tea Party voters in New Hampshire, Rep. Michele Bachmann of
Minnesota declared, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world
in Lexington and Concord.” (She may have gotten confused because there is a
Concord, New Hampshire, as well as a Concord, Massachusetts.)
More significantly, however, the American Right has inculcated in its followers
a bogus idea of what the U.S. Constitution did. Typically, the Right’s founding
narrative jumps from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the
Constitution, which was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. What is usually
left out is the nation’s experience with the Articles of Confederation, which
governed the new nation from 1777 to 1787.
By ignoring the Articles, the Right can pretend that the Constitution was
written with the goal of establishing a system dominated by the states with the
central government kept small and weak. That version of history then is cited to
support right-wing claims that federal officials, such as Roosevelt and Obama,
violate the Constitution when they seek national solutions to the country’s
economic and social problems.
However, in the real history, the Framers of the Constitution, particularly
George Washington and James Madison, were rejecting the structure of
“independent” and “sovereign” states (with a weak central government or “league
of friendship”) as established by the Articles of Confederation. The Framers had
witnessed how that system had failed and how it was threatening the future of
the newly independent nation.
Thus, Washington and Madison led what amounted to a coup d’etat at the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Though their instructions were simply
to propose amendments to the Articles and refer those suggestions back to the
state legislatures, Washington and Madison instead threw out the Articles
entirely and produced a dramatically different structure.
Gone was the language in the Articles about “sovereign” and “independent”
states. Instead, national sovereignty was shifted to “We the People of the
United States.” The new Constitution made federal law supreme and granted the
central government sweeping new powers over currency and commerce as well as
broad authority to act on behalf of the “general Welfare.”
Washington and Madison also circumvented the state legislatures, putting the new
Constitution before special conventions and requiring only approval of nine of
the 13 states for ratification. The proposed changes were so radical that a
determined opposition arose, known as the Anti-Federalists.
To save his plan, Madison joined in writing a series of articles called the
Federalist Papers, in which he mostly tried to downplay how radical the changes
actually were. He also agreed to tack on a Bill of Rights, spelling out specific
guarantees for individuals and the states.
Misreading Amendments
Some of the first ten amendments were substantive and others mostly rhetorical,
For instance, the Tenth Amendment states that powers not granted by the
Constitution to the central government remain with the people and the states.
However, the whole point of any constitution is to define the limits of a
government’s powers and the powers granted to the central government by the
Constitution were extraordinarily broad.
So, the Tenth Amendment despite efforts by today’s Right to exaggerate its
significance was mostly a sop to the Anti-Federalists. To recognize how
insignificant it is, it should be contrasted with Article Two of the Articles of
Confederation, which it essentially replaced. [See Robert Parry’s America’s
Stolen Narrative.]
Today’s Right also has misrepresented the original intent of the Second
Amendment, which reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall
not be infringed.” This concession also was primarily to the states which wanted
militias to maintain “security.”
The context for those concerns related to the recent experience of Shays’
Rebellion in western Massachusetts (in 1786-87) as well as the fear of slave
revolts in the South and raids by Native Americans on the frontier. The states
wanted their own militias to put down such uprisings.
In the early days of the Republic, the Second Amendment also was not seen as a
universal right for individuals. For instance, some states passed “Black Codes”
that barred all African-Americans from owning guns. When the Second Congress
passed the Militia Act of 1792, the law specified arming “white” men of military
age.
Yet, despite some of the ugly compromises that went into drafting the
Constitution, such as its tolerance of slavery, the chief goal of the Framers
was to create a framework for a democratic Republic that would enable the new
nation to pass laws necessary for the country’s growth and success.
European monarchies were predicting that this experiment in self-governance
would fail, so the likes of Washington and Madison wanted to show that Americans
could govern themselves without resort to violence. The Framers stated as one of
their top goals, “domestic Tranquility.”
The Framers also recognized the failure of the Articles and the need for a
vibrant central government in a country as sprawling as the United States. The
last thing they wanted was an armed population violently resisting the
constitutionally elected government of the United States. Indeed, they
declared such behavior to be “treason.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “More Second
Amendment Madness.”]
But today’s neo-Confederates and other right-wingers have spent vast sums of
money distorting American history and deluding many Americans into believing
that they must do whatever is necessary to “take back” their country from the
likes of Barack Obama.
Any modest steps toward rational gun safety even provisions cleared by the
conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are deemed “tyranny” on par with
the British Crown imposing its will on the Thirteen Colonies, which were
denied representation in the British Parliament.
What is particularly dangerous about the Right’s hodgepodge of bad history is
that with the nation’s first African-American president millions of whites are
rushing to arm themselves while believing they have some duty to enforce the
Constitution, without the foggiest idea of what the Framers were trying to do
with it.
Not only is some of the right-wing rhetoric wildly hyperbolic comparing a twiceelected U.S. president seeking modest gun safety in the wake of a horrendous
school massacre to an English monarch
but Rand Paul and many of his fellow
Republicans don’t even bother to get their history straight.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
The Why Behind the Benghazi Attack
From the Archive: A State Department inquiry found serious lapses in security at
the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. ambassador and three other
Americans died in an assault last Sept. 11. But the CIA’s connection is
still downplayed, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman noted last month.
By Melvin A. Goodman (Originally published on Nov. 4, 2012)
On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, a group of militants attacked the American
diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and
three other Americans.
The Romney campaign has accused the Obama administration with a cover-up of the
details of the attack, and various pundits have sown great confusion over a
tragic event that points to a failure of intelligence analysis and operational
tradecraft at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The unwillingness of the White House’s senior adviser on counter-terrorism, John
Brennan, to play a public role in the aftermath of this tragedy left the Obama
administration without an authoritative voice on the event.
It’s now apparent that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was no ordinary consulate;
in fact, it probably was no consulate at all. The consulate’s primary mission
was to provide an intelligence platform that would allow the CIA to maintain an
operational and analytical role in eastern Libya.
The region is home to myriad militant and terrorist organizations that threaten
Western interests in North Africa and, more importantly, the creation of a
stable state in Libya. In other words, the consulate was the diplomatic cover
for an intelligence platform and whatever diplomatic functions took place in
Benghazi also served as cover for an important CIA base. Both the State
Department and the CIA share responsibility for seriously underestimating the
security threat in Libya, particularly in Benghazi.
Any CIA component in the Middle East or North Africa is a likely target of the
wrath of militant and terrorist organizations because of the Agency’s key role
in the global war on terror waged by the Bush administration and the
increasingly widespread covert campaign of drone aircraft of the Obama
administration.
U.S. programs that included the use of secret prisons, extraordinary renditions,
and torture and abuse involved CIA collaboration with despotic Arab regimes,
including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The U.S. campaign to overthrow Gaddafi didn’t
clean the slate of these abuses; it merely opened up the opportunity for
militants and Islamists to avenge U.S. actions over the past ten years.
At home, Americans are devoting far too much attention to whether a so-called
proper level of security in Benghazi could have prevented the attack, instead of
trying to learn the motives and anticipate the actions of these militant
organizations.
The CIA failure to provide adequate security for its personnel stems from
degradation in the operational tradecraft capabilities of the CIA since the socalled intelligence reforms that followed the 9/11 attacks. Nearly three years
ago, nine CIA operatives and contractors were killed by a suicide bomber at
their base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan in the deadliest attack on CIA
personnel in decades.
Virtually every aspect of sound tradecraft was ignored in this episode as an
unvetted Jordanian double agent was allowed to enter a sensitive CIA facility
(instead of a CIA safe house), where he was met by the entire base leadership (a
breach of longstanding tradecraft).
The base commander in Khost had insufficient training and experience for the
posting and had been promoted regularly by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations
despite having been cited in a CIA internal review on 9/11, according to the
Washington Post, for failing to warn the FBI about two al-Qaeda operatives who
had entered the country in 2000.
No reprimands were assessed in the aftermath of the 2009 bombing, although highlevel Agency officials had to approve the assignment of the base commander as
well as the entry of the Jordanian double agent onto the Agency’s most sensitive
facility in eastern Afghanistan.
The security situation in Libya, particularly Benghazi, was obviously
deteriorating; the consulate was a target of a bomb in June and the British
consulate closed its doors in the summer, leaving the U.S. consulate as the last
official foreign presence in the city.
Overall security for the consulate had been in the hands of a small British
security firm that placed unarmed Libyans on the perimeter of the building
complex. The CIA contributed to the problem with its reliance on Libyan militias
and a new Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for its
personnel in Benghazi.
On the night of the attack, the CIA security team was slow to respond to the
consulate’s call for help, spending more than 20 minutes trying to garner
additional support from militias and the Libyan intelligence service that never
responded.
Although nearly 30 Americans were airlifted out of Libya in less than ten hours,
there is no indication that these individuals were debriefed in order to get a
better understanding of the militia attacks. The lack of such essential
information from those who had been under attack contributed to the confused
assessments in the wake of the attacks.
There were other complications as well. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was an
extremely successful and popular ambassador in Libya, but he had become too
relaxed about security in a country that had become a war zone.
UN Ambassador Susan Rice was too quick to pronounce judgments on the Benghazi
attack before the facts were known, which could be attributed to her interest in
assuming a public role in order to buttress her case for becoming Secretary of
State in a second Obama administration.
The public role belonged to Brennan, but he had previously mishandled duties in
the wake of the attempt of a young Nigerian to board a commercial airliner with
explosives in December 2009 as well as in the immediate aftermath of the killing
of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
The systemic failures surrounding the Nigerian bomber involved the entire
intelligence community, including the CIA, the National Counter-Terrorism
Center, and the National Security Agency. The Benghazi tragedy points to
continued systemic failures in the intelligence community as well as within the
State Department. A failure to conduct proper threat assessments will
predictably lead to security failures.
The Benghazi failure is one more reminder of the unfortunate militarization of
the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, in the wake of 9/11 that finds
our major civilian intelligence service becoming a paramilitary center in
support of the war-fighter.
Last year’s appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director; the CIA’s
increased role in drone attacks in Southwest Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Horn
of Africa; and the insufficient attention to providing strategic intelligence
for the policymaker have weakened the Agency’s central missions.
The success of the Bush and Obama administrations in compromising the CIA’s
Office of the Inspector General has ensured that the Agency’s flaws have gone
uncorrected. The politicization of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War in
2003 was the worst intelligence scandal in the CIA’s history, but there were no
penalties for those who shared CIA Director George Tenet’s willingness to make
phony intelligence a “slam dunk.”
If more attention is not given to the biblical inscription at the entrance to
the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, that only “the truth will set you
free,” the decline of the intelligence community will continue.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and
the author of the forthcoming “National Insecurity: The Costs of American
Militarism” (City Lights Publishing, January 2013).
A Shot for a Possible New World
Exclusive: President Obama’s reelection perhaps even more than his first victory
marks a potential shift in the political and economic structure of the United
States, as the old white ruling elite loses its grip. There is even a chance for
revolutionary change, says Morgan Strong.
By Morgan Strong
Near dawn on April 19, 1775, as British regulars confronted American militiamen
at Lexington Green in Massachusetts, a shot rang out, leading to a brief
skirmish that killed eight Americans and touched off the Revolutionary War. The
moment has gone down in history as “the shot heard round the world.”
But the reelection of Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American
president, may mark the beginning of another American Revolution, one in which
the nation’s white oligarchy and its mostly white electoral supporters face a
demographic change that is altering the power relationships of the United
States.
Obama’s reelection defeating Mitt Romney, a wealthy white investor of life-long
privilege was driven by non-white voters of African, Hispanic and Asian descent
as well as by unmarried women, gays and young whites who have embraced the
nation’s multicultural future.
Though some skeptics dispute the significance of this electoral shift arguing
that Obama is just one more lackey of the nation’s wealthy elites and is too
cautious to do much the election’s outcome offers a rare opportunity for a major
shift in America’s power relationships. The biracial son of a single mother who
needed food stamps is clearly not what the white oligarchy had in mind for U.S.
president in 2013.
Perhaps the oligarchy and its apologists could slough off Obama’s first term as
a quirk in history, the result of his unique personal skills and the fact that
Wall Street had just led the nation into the worst economic crisis since the
Great Depression. But a second term, especially with unemployment still high and
people frustrated by political gridlock in Washington, was harder to explain.
After all, Romney was the overwhelming choice of rich white men and many white
men of lesser means, especially in the South. Until the stunning results of
Election Night, Romney and his well-to-do supporters were envisioning years of
Republican dominance, making life easier for corporate chieftains and the
investor class while slashing programs for the poor, retirees and middle class.
After all, that was the way things traditionally were in America, with a few
exceptions like the period of the New Deal after Wall Street similarly drove the
nation into an economic crisis in the 1930s. Through most of its history,
America has been ruled by an oligarchy. So why should things change now?
Since the nation’s start, wealthy, well-positioned men (and a few women) have
controlled the political process and ruled through their surrogates in elective
office. That is how so-called “revisionist” historians describe U.S. history,
taking a less romanticized version of our past and present. They cut to the
quick, offering a dispassionate, less heroic version of the American experience
by analyzing causes and effects, decisions and evidence.
G. William Domhoff, in his book Who Rules America, described the political
process of the U.S. as one held captive by a small percentile of the population
whose position and wealth have allowed them to control the ordinary citizen’s
political and economic condition, a classic oligarchy.
Domhoff first published his “revisionist” thesis in 1967 and added new editions
in 1983, 1998, 2002 and 2006. He demonstrated the interrelationship, between
U.S. presidents and their extended families, to show the close ties of many
national leaders from the country’s inception. These leaders served their own
and the oligarchy’s interests, maintaining the status quo that is most to their
advantage, politically and economically.
Looking at U.S. history through this lens, we see that the American Revolution
was begun as a rejection of the burden of taxation by the elite of early
American society. George Washington, perhaps America’s greatest hero, was more a
corporation than an individual. He was the largest landowner in the country and
owned the largest whisky distillery.
Similar interests were shared by nearly all the Founding Fathers. John Hancock
owned a fleet of ships. Benjamin Franklin was a businessman publishing
newspapers and books. Thomas Jefferson owned a vast plantation. They all found
the Crown’s taxation excessive.
These principals of the Revolution agitated successfully among the American
populace for a break with the British King. The King himself, an absolute
monarch, made a great deal of money through conquest, colonization and taxation.
Taxation of all colonies was necessary to support his wars and his expansion of
territory.
There was no noble purpose to British conquest; it was only a matter of creating
wealth and power. Among America’s revolutionary leaders, the prevailing opinion
was better to keep the money at home, according to the “revisionist” historians.
With victory over the British, America’s revolutionary elite seized and held
power through a wealthy oligarchy of its own.
Domhoff also described the close personal and family ties that developed among
many past presidents. There were a number of intermarriages among the oligarchy
to ensure continuation of its dominance of American politics and economy. The
Roosevelts, originally an American colonial family of Dutch descent, are an
example.
The rich coalesced into a social class that developed institutions through which
the children of its members were socialized into a permanent upper class.
Members of this class still control many of the major corporations, the primary
mechanism for generating and holding wealth in this country.
In this reality, the ordinary American had less power through the electoral
process than was understood (or claimed in U.S. civics classes). The ability of
the electorate to force changes that benefited the masses and to create a more
equitable society was severely limited by the elite’s resistance.
Voting does not necessarily make government responsive to the will of the
majority when the control of the government is actually in the hands of an elite
that will not permit its primacy to be undone or its wealth diminished.
That is perhaps until now. In recent decades, American society has changed with
non-whites making up a larger and larger percentage of the electorate, and many
from this group do not want to continue the old structure favoring the wealthy
white oligarchy. The influence of the have not’s is growing. The white,
complacent majority is no longer the deciding factor in U.S. elections.
There has been a great deal said about the brilliance of President Obama’s
electoral campaign, but there also were other important factors: the changing
electorate, a desire for real change, and a rejection of what is seen by many as
an obstructionist elite that has grown obscenely rich while making the lives of
the majority more difficult and even untenable.
No candidate in modern U.S. politics represented this elite class more fully
than did Mitt Romney. In a private meeting with rich supporters last May, Romney
disparaged the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax
(although most are assessed payroll taxes and others in the group are retirees
and soldiers in combat zones).
But Romney made clear that he and his class view these Americans (and others who
receive government assistance) as society’s parasites. His 47 percent comment
was a revealingly thoughtless remark by a member of the oligarchy, albeit a
remark that correctly expressed a frustration with the changing demographics,
which are contrary to the elite’s interests.
Thus, Romney’s defeat creates an opportunity for the country to change direction
in a revolutionary way, responding to the frustrated dreams of the embattled
middle class, the poor and the young. But there remain many forces resisting any
new political or economic paradigm and there are doubts that the often
conciliatory Obama can be an agent for fundamental change.
As for Romney, after his defeat, many supporters abandoned him like a sinking
ship, clamoring down ropes like rats and distancing themselves from his
incompetence as a candidate. For his part, Romney reprised his 47 percent
comment by telling financial backers that he lost because Obama provided “gifts”
to favored demographic groups and then turned them out to vote.
Though an insult to those voters, Romney’s remark reflected something real: the
fact that the U.S. political/economic paradigm is shifting away from the old
status quo which for generations has
insured that well-to-do whites could
confidently expect to receive most of the nation’s bounty.
Morgan Strong was a professor of Middle Eastern and American history, and was an
advisor to CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.