Blessings of war
By Reuven Pedatzur, Haaretz, May 7, 2003
Has Israel always aspired to peace? Just the opposite, argues a new analysis of Israeli military culture.  -- "Milhamot lo Korot Mei'atzman" ("Wars Don't Just Happen") by Motti Golani, Modan, 274 pages, NIS 76 -- Motti Golani's book is a fascinating, personal, academic and - to a large extent - intuitive journey into the depths of those characteristics of Israeli culture which together create what he diagnoses as the addiction of Israelis to power. Golani's basic assumption, which - it should be emphasized here - is harshly critical, is that Israeli society has adopted, with almost no questions asked, the "culture of power" and the belief that the relationship between Israel and its neighbors must be based almost exclusively on military might. Golani sums up his thesis in a nutshell: "Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, its leadership has generally preferred to use force to solve problems, not all of which have been life-and-death issues." The most prominent and most controversial argument that Golani presents seems to be that "peace has not always headed Israel's list of priorities and war has not always headed its neighbors' list of priorities. Moreover, at certain stages ... Israel has preferred war to any other option. Between 1949 and 1973, Israel gave the impression that it feared peace more than it feared war." This is, in fact, a bald denial of the sacrosanct Israeli ethos according to which Israel has always aspired to peace, whereas its neighbors have consistently refused to tread the path of peace, choosing the path of war instead. Golani identifies and analyzes the tendency of the Israeli political and military establishments - and, following in their footsteps, Israeli society as a whole - to base themselves on a "culture of power" and on the "understanding" that every problem Israel faces can be solved through the use of military power. He tries to come up with the reasons that have led to "Israel's consistent choice of the military option" and believes that there are three factors behind this choice: First of all, the victory of the "offensive ethos" and its transformation into one of Israel's major policies. Second, the institutionalization of power and its total transfer to the responsibility of the political and military establishments. And, third, Israel's military successes. Every successful war has made it that much easier to choose the use of power in the next war.

Empire of Terror
By I.K Shukla, Academics For Justice, April 23, 2003
Empires have always believed in their necessity and immortality. Divine right, arrogated by them, clerics in tow, convinces them of their universal mission, and the will and means to power persuade them that totalitarian imperialism is what the world around should have been eagerly waiting for. It is this conceit, obsessively delusional and self-servingly induced, that prods them to war and violence in the service of robbery and rapine in an unending spiral of barbaric and brutal orgies. These orgies at the altar of predatory greed, red in tooth and claw, are called, in popular parlance, colonialism and conquest, but by the mercenary flaks of the empire, „white man‚s burden", or more engagingly, „liberation". This semantic somersault presents a putsch as no more than just „regime change". The empire concocts its own „liberation” theology, with misanthropy as its core sentiment, mass murder as its rosary, and loot as its canonical reveille. The empire's verbal chicanery effaces all the grim debris and gory consequences of savage violence, employed in the massive slaughter of innocents, in the destruction and despoliation of their material assets, in the evisceration of their history, and in the extinction of their cultures far older and superior to that of the invader. Empire debases humanity, it plunges civilization into a deadly darkness, and squashes imagination. Even as the empire expands, the human subjects shrink in every way. Terror and genocide are integral to empire, as essential to it as lies, deceit, illegality, betrayal, and tyranny. It buys and breeds traitors in the conquered land.

The American Mongols
By  Husain Haqqani, Foreign Policy, May, 2003
To win the war against terrorism, the United States must overcome the burden of history. -- An invading army is marching toward Baghdad—again. The last time infidels conquered the City of Peace was in 1258, when the Mongol horde, led by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu, defeated the Arab Abbasid caliphate that had ruled for more than five centuries. And if the ripple effects of that episode through Islam’s history are any guide, the latest invasion of Iraq will unleash a new cycle of hatred—unless the United States can find ways to bolster the credibility of moderate Islamic thinkers. Saddam Hussein, who has led Iraq’s Baathist socialist regime for nearly 25 years, is no caliph. The U.S. military has come as self-declared liberators, not as conquerors. Yet the U.S. invasion of Iraq resonates strongly with fundamentalist Muslims because they see Saddam’s downfall—and the broader humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the latter-day Mongols—as righteous punishment. Since the 13th century, Islamic theologians have argued that military defeat at the hands of unbelievers results when Muslims embrace pluralism and worldly knowledge. The story is drilled into Muslim children from Morocco to Indonesia: nearly 2 million people put to the sword; the caliph trampled to death; and the destruction of the great library, the House of Wisdom. The Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 for the same reason Muslims lost Baghdad in 1258: The rulers and their people had gone soft, approaching religion with tolerance and accommodation rather than viewing civilization as divided between Islam and infidels. The U.S.-led invasion of secular Iraq is the ultimate vindication of this worldview, the capstone of a series of modern Muslim defeats that began with the first Gulf War and continued through the next decade with the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the repression of Islamist groups in Algeria and Egypt, Russia’s brutal military campaign against Chechen separatists, and the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Islamists see these cataclysmic events as opportunities to purify Muslim souls and to prepare for an ideological battle with the West.

Who Wants to Be a Martyr?
By Scott Atran, New York Times, May 6, 2003
One given in the war against terrorism seems to be that suicide attackers are evil, deluded or homicidal misfits who thrive in poverty, ignorance and anarchy. President Bush, at last year's United Nations conference on poor nations in Monterrey, Mexico, said that "we fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror." Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican, argued that a new security doctrine including wars of preemption was necessary because "those who would commit suicide in their assaults on the free world are not rational." A State Department report issued on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks said that development aid should be based "on the belief that poverty provides a breeding ground for terrorism." As logical as the poverty-breeds-terrorism argument may seem, study after study shows that suicide attackers and their supporters are rarely ignorant or impoverished. Nor are they crazed, cowardly, apathetic or asocial. If terrorist groups relied on such maladjusted people, "they couldn't produce effective and reliable killers," according to Todd Stewart, a retired Air Force general who directs the Ohio State University program in international and domestic security. In the suicide bombing of a cafe in Tel Aviv last week that killed three bystanders, for instance, the bomber and the man accused of being his accomplice grew up in Britain, in relatively prosperous circumstances, and attended college. The Princeton economist Alan Krueger and others released a study in 2002 comparing Lebanese Hezbollah militants who died in violent action to other Lebanese of the same age group. He found that the Hezbollah members were less likely to come from poor homes and more likely to have a secondary school education. Nasra Hassan, a Pakistani relief worker, interviewed nearly 250 aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters. "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed," she reported in 2001. "They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their families." A 2001 poll by the nonprofit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that Palestinian adults with 12 years or more of education are far more likely to support bomb attacks than those who cannot read. Officials with the Army Defense Intelligence Agency who have interrogated Saudi-born members of Al Qaeda being detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have told me that these fundamentalists, especially those in leadership positions, are often educated above reasonable employment level; a surprising number have graduate degrees and come from high-status families. Their motivation and commitment are evident in their willingness to sacrifice material and emotional comforts (families, jobs, physical security), to travel long distances and to pay their own way.

A shot of democracy
By Dan Plesch, The Guardian, May 7, 2003
Institutions such as the UN, EU and World Trade Organisation have lost credibility. Could the election of national representatives restore it? -- International institutions such as the UN, the EU and the World Trade Organisation are remote from the people. Few of us know how they work, except that we feel they work for the powerful and not for us. There has been a debate in many non-governmental organisations and universities about this problem. It is often posed as a question: "How can we improve international and global governance?" To this problem we now have to add the challenge from George Bush and his advisers, who see little or no role anymore for the UN system. Many people believe that Washington is trying to make the law of the jungle into international law. We need a new strategy to renew the international institutions' credibility. We need, in the Pentagon's language, a strategic counterattack, to reinforce the UN and bring democracy to the secret international bureaucracies that decide our fate. This strategy may be simpler than we imagine. Our national representatives to international bodies should be directly elected at the general election. In addition to electing one MP, we should elect the nation's representatives to the UN, the EU and the WTO. We should start with these most important bodies and then look at including others such as Nato and the negotiations on climate change. In other countries such as Sweden, Germany or Ireland electing key ambassadors would be simpler than in Britain. In these countries, ballot papers have lists of candidates from the parties. So any party could designate people on these lists as candidates to represent the country at, say, the UN. In this way there would be a direct relationship between the electorate and the nation's key ambassadors.

Leo-Cons
By James Atlas, New York Times, May 4, 2003
A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders -- All right, so weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found in Iraq. And no firm link has been established between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. So what was the war in Iraq about, then? According to one school of thought, our most recent military adventure turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western civilization — as interpreted by the late classicist and political philosopher Leo Strauss. If this chain of events seems implausible, consider the tribute President Bush paid in February to the cohort of journalists, political philosophers and policy wonks known — primarily to themselves — as Straussians. "You are some of the best brains in our country," Mr. Bush declared in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, "and my government employs about 20 of you." "Employs" is too weak a verb. To intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firming in the Strauss camp. One is reminded of Asa Leventhal, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel "The Victim," who asks his oppressor, a mysterious figure named Kirby Allbee, "Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?" For those who believe in the power of ideas, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss. So how did it come to pass that a European-born émigré identified by the Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield (also a Straussian) as "an obscure professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who died in 1973" now occupies a position of such disproportionate influence? The answer starts with Strauss's long and influential tenure at Chicago in the mid-20th century and his teachings, mostly from the classics, about the immutability of moral and social values. His lessons were spurned in the 1960's and 70's, in favor of the moral relativism that his disciples believed was polluting foreign policy, from the post-Vietnam imperial malaise to détente with the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, some of Strauss's admirers, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, emerged as house intellectuals — favored dinner guests who gave the intellectual justification for policies usually drawn up by more practical political types. Today's dinner guests are the dominant master strategists in their own right, and the transformation brings us face to face with just how much their intellectual roots influence their exercise of power. It is also reasonable to ask: just what would Leo Strauss think of the policies being carried out in his name?

America's 'Conservative' Christians – and the Middle East's
By Christopher Deliso, Antiwar.com, May 8, 2003 
As the second phase of the Iraqi occupation unfolds, pro-Israel extremists are teaming up with America's evangelical Christians, in the hopes of an ethnically "cleansed" Israel. This is just one of the logical outcomes of Washington's warmongering in the Middle East. Since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the world has gaped, in horrified fascination at an administration based on good and evil, righteous war, and the fundamental duty to proselytize. Behind these ideas are America's powerful evangelical Christians – the self-professed representatives of "conservative" Christianity. However, this label is tenuous at best. To be sure, the evangelicals represent a certain kind of conservatism – the intolerant, prudish, and anti-scientific variety. As we will see, however, their fundamental claim to the conservative throne is totally bogus, compared to the real conservative Christians – who inhabit the very countries Washington bombs, or would like to bomb – Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. All of these countries have age-old Christian communities that speak the original languages and follow the original rites of Jesus' early followers. Some Dangers of Fundamentalism: It would be one thing if the evangelicals would just live out their miserable lives and leave well enough alone. If someone wants to believe in creationism, or an upcoming photo op with the Good Lord Jesus Christ – or even hand-to-hand combat with an oozing, sulphurous Beelzebub – well, that's their business. However, in seeking to forcibly impose a specific belief system on everyone else, America's evangelical Christians display cultural intolerance and fascism. Like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists, they exhibit traits of indoctrinating, quasi-spiritual cults. At their worst, they tend to spit the same venom as any Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or other fundamentalist groups. Ironically, though these groups inevitably profess the deepest of mutual hatreds, they actually have a lot in common.

Israeli Militarism At War
By Ran HaCohen, Palestine Chronicle, May 7, 2003
"The War was supposed to give the Israeli army an opportunity to show its power, to try its new toys and to restore its prestige, damaged by the daily routine of dirty occupation. On the eve of war, Israel's leaders were bargaining the terms of the country's military retaliation .." -- Destroying the Iraqi tyranny, the US has demonstrated that the entire globe is now subject to American dictatorship. Not bothering to obtain even a disguise of international legitimacy from the Security Council, the two dozens of neoconservative men who are running our planet (for the sake of the weapon and oil industry) send hundreds of thousands of troops, and spend tens of billions of dollars, to liberate the Iraqis and their oil wells from their dictator, subjecting the beaten survivors to the visible hand of looting thugs, preparing the hearts for the invisible fist of Cola-Cola and McDonald's. Israel – a beloved ally, challenging Britain for the title of the superpower's closest friend – has had great expectations from this war. Not that it was Israel's war – its favourite targets were rather Syria and Iran. Nevertheless: the Israeli junta – PM Sharon, DM Mofaz, Chief-of-Staff Ya'alon and their aides – were waiting for it eagerly. As high priests in the cult of Militarism – Israel's secular religion – the country's leaders love wars. Every war serves as a proof for the hegemonic militaristic ideology, which considers force to be the best solution to every problem; "and if force doesn't do the job," the Israeli slogan goes, "apply more force". In the words of Minister of Construction and Housing Affe Eitam (a former General, leader of the National Orthodox party), "there is nothing more thrilling than the sight of men going to war" (Ha'aretz, 22.3.2002). So a war is always welcome, especially against a neighbouring Arab country. However, so far the War on Iraq has been much of a disappointment for the junta. It was counting on this war on several fronts; but most of its expectations have proved wrong.