Exploiting two-faced western policies
How DOES Israel get away with it?
SEVEN YEARS after the Gulf War Bill Clinton's attempt to repeat the international coalition in support of the US plans to attack Iraq has met with near complete failure, with only Britain and Israel offering wholehearted support.
Even Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to sign up for the US adventure. Why has the US been unable to repeat its 1990 diplomatic and political triumph in 1997?
In 1990, US President George Bush succeeded in building an unprecedented alliance to supports his assault against Iraq. This included not only traditional US allies like Britain and Israel, but also the then USSR and most Arab states, including the nominally anti-western Syria.
The 1991 Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe and left the US as the world's first superpower, was supposed to introduce a "New World Order".
Regional disputes would be settled, unruly states would be disciplined, and capital would be enabled to operate unhindered in nearly every corner of the globe.
For a while it looked as if this vision would be substantiated. The USSR disintegrated, leaving massively weakened and impoverished successor states, in no position to challenge US hegemony.
Meanwhile, the US was sponsoring "peace processes" and agreements in some of the apparently more intractable regional conflicts, in particular in Ireland, South Africa and the Middle East. The world was being made safe for US capital to operate unfettered.
No wonder that Francis Fukuyama could proclaim "The End of History", like an academic version of "1066 And All That".
This 'Pax Americana', however, has not lasted long. Despite the near integration of some regions into the western economy, the collapse of the eastern bloc has not brought many of the hoped-for gains. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the Bosnia War has shown that even in Europe the "New World Order" is unstable and unreliable.
Unravelling
The pinnacle of US diplomatic success, the Middle East "Peace Agreement", is unravelling fast, threatening a calamity for US policy and its allies in the region. Meanwhile, the UN sanctions against Iraq have led directly to the death through malnutrition or lack of essential medical supplies of over one million Iraqi civilians, more than half of them children.
In 1990, the USA managed to buy the support of most Arab regimes with the implied promise of a comprehensive peace agreement, Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Even at the time, it seemed unlikely that the Israeli government would be willing to comply with these promises.
But President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were able to cajole and convince the feudal monarchs, military dictators and venal politicians heading most Arab states to join the anti-Iraq coalition, while persuading Israel (with some difficulty) that its interests would be best served by exercising restraint and not openly intervening in the war.
This balancing act could not last long, particularly without some real movement by Israel towards meeting Palestinian demands and Arab expectations. By a combination of careful diplomacy, political pressure and material rewards, Bush and then Bill Clinton managed to bring about the famous Washington meeting and the Oslo accords between Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yassir Arafat. As a result of this agreement, Rabin - a former war criminal -and Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the main architect of the agreement, Shimon Peres.
Although many observers agreed with Socialist Outlook that there was little substance to these agreements, which merely confirmed and legitimised Israeli rule over the whole of Palestine, this view was not shared in Israel.
Most Israelis believed that the agreements would necessarily lead in the end to an independent Palestinian state; Israeli society was split down the middle over whether to accept or reject this prospect.
Denounced
Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu led the chorus of denunciation of Rabin as a traitor; the incitement and fevered atmosphere eventually led to Rabin's assassination by right-wing religious fanatic Yigal Amir in November 1995.
The controversy over responsibility for Rabin's assassination continues. New evidence shows that a Shin Bet double agent, Avishai Raviv, incited Amir, while passing on information about the plot which was never acted on.
The government argues that the failure to prevent the assassination was due to incompetence; the right insists that there was a top-level conspiracy, and that Netanyahu's demagogic speeches against the agreement played little part in creating the environment for the assassination.
Rabin's successor Peres, although personally committed to the agreements, was widely distrusted in Israel as, in Rabin's own words, "an inveterate schemer". In a vain attempt to establish his nationalist credentials during a closely-fought election campaign, Peres ordered an invasion of Lebanon, in the course of which over 100 civilians were killed while seeking refuge in a UN base.
This failed to win him nationalist support, while alienating many Palestinian citizens of Israel who might otherwise have voted for him, and Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister in 1996.
Netanyahu - a product of American business schools - believes that he has stronger support in Congress than Clinton himself for his forthright opposition to the Washington and Oslo accords. In rejecting and subverting the few concessions necessary to give a semblance of substance to these agreements, he has revealed their essential hollowness.
This has weakened not only Yasser Arafat, whose control of events in the 1967-occupied territories has grown ever shakier, but also the whole network of alliances and clients established by the USA and used by previous Israeli governments.
Seven years ago, Arab rulers were able to persuade themselves, and argue to their people, that the defeat of Iraq and its military removal from Kuwait would lead to the removal of Israel from the 1967-occupied territories.
This belief is now demonstrably false. It has become obvious that all of the US strictures against occupation of territory by force, oppression of civilians, arbitrary arrests, murder and terror may apply to Iraq, but certainly not to Israel.
The latest US concerns also appear partial. Iraq may indeed be developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which could be a threat to other states in the region as well as to Saddam Hussein's oppressed subjects. But there is no similar ultimatum to Israel, the region's strongest nuclear power, while Israel's recent use of an unknown biological or chemical weapon against a Hamas activist in Jordan has gone unpunished.
Palestinian children continue to die from Israeli "rubber" bullets, civilians are still poisoned by Israeli tear gas, and Israel continues its occupation of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Iraq's flouting of UN resolutions is as nothing compared to Israel's record.
Only this week, Israel is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of UN resolution 191, by which Palestine was partitioned. But even this resolution, on which Israel bases its international diplomatic legitimacy, was never implemented, with Israel seizing far more land than it was allocated while expelling the majority of the Palestinian inhabitants.
War-plunder
Israel, of course, has never been threatened with a UN-sanctioned attack to force it to disgorge its war plunder, nor with sanctions to enforce even minimal respect for the situation of civilians living under its military rule.
This is not to argue, as some racists and simplistic analysts do, that Israel controls western foreign policy. This argument - which is also supported by both Israeli and Arab leaders - ignores the reality of US strategic interests in the Middle East.
Israel is by far the biggest recipient of US overseas aid, receiving over $3 billion a year. It also receives almost unlimited US political and diplomatic backing, despite occasional critical noises. This level of support is not bought by political lobbying or by donations to presidential campaigns.
Unless it were in US interests to support Israel, no amount of money or pressure could gain this support. The truth is that the continued existence of Israel as a major military power, whose interests conflict with those of its neighbours, and which threatens the stability of every regime in the region, is a corner-stone of the US strategic approach to the Middle East.
Those who deny or ignore this fundamental reality can never hope to develop a strategy for Palestinian liberation, for an end to the sanctions against Iraq, or for the replacement of the rotten regimes in nearly every Arab state.
Once again, more starkly than before, the urgent need is posed for the development of a revolutionary strategy in the Arab world, which will achieve liberation and independence for the peoples of the Middle East through a struggle against both western imperialism and its local political and economic allies and clients.