While reports
on Trump’s ban emphasize that these are Muslim majority
countries, analysts seem to have ignored another
significant characteristic that these countries share.
With just a
single exception, all of these countries were targeted
for attack by certain top U.S. officials in 2001. In
fact, that policy had roots that went back to 1996,
1991, 1980, and even the 1950s. Below, we will trace
this policy back in time and examine its goals and
proponents.
The fact is
that Trump’s action continues policies influenced by
people working on behalf of a foreign country, whose
goal has been to destabilize and reshape an entire
region. This kind of aggressive interventionism focused
on “regime change” launches cascading effects that
include escalating violence.
Already we’ve
seen devastating wars, massive refugee movement that is
uprooting entire peoples and reshaping parts of Europe,
desperate and horrific terrorism, and now the horror
that is ISIS. If this decades-long effort is not halted,
it will be increasingly devastating for the region, our
country, and the entire world.
2001
Policy Coup
Four-star general
Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, has
described what he called a 2001 “policy coup” by a small
group of people intent on destabilizing and taking over
the Middle East, targeting six of the seven countries
mentioned by Obama and Trump.
Clark gave the
details in 2007 in an
interview
broadcast by Democracy Now and in a
lecture at
the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
Clark described
a chance meeting in the Pentagon in 2001 ten days after
911 in which he learned about the plan to take down
these countries.
After meeting
with then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Clark went downstairs to say
hello to people on the Joint Staff who had worked for
him in the past. One of the generals called him in.
‘Sir, you’ve
got to come in and talk to me a second.” He told Clark,
“We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.”
Clark was
shocked. He said, “We’re going to war against Iraq?
Why?” The officer said he didn’t know. Clark asked if
they had found information connecting Saddam to
Al-Qaeda. The man said, “No, no, there’s nothing new
that way. They just made the decision to go to war with
Iraq.”
A few weeks
later, Clark went back to the Pentagon and spoke to the
general again. He asked whether the U.S. was still
planning to go to war against Iraq.
The general
replied: “Oh, it’s worse than that.” Clark says that the
general picked up a piece of paper and said, “I just got
this down from upstairs today. This is a memo that
describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in
five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Clark asked,
“Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.”
Clark said he
was stunned: “I couldn’t believe it would really be
true. But that’s actually what happened. These people
took control of the policy of the United States.”
1991
Clark says he
then remembered a 1991 meeting he had with Paul
Wolfowitz. In 2001 Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of
Defense, and in 1991 he was Under Secretary of Defense
of Policy, the number three position at the Pentagon.
Wolfowitz is a
pro-Israel neoconservative who an associate has called
“over the top when it comes to Israel.”
Clark describes
going to Wolfowitz’s office in March of 1991. Clark said
to Wolfowitz, “You must be pretty happy with the
performance of the troops in Desert Storm.” Clark says
Wolfowitz replied, “Not really, because the truth is we
should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we
didn’t.”
Wolfowitz
declared the U.S. had an opportunity to clean up “Syria,
Iran, Iraq, before the next super power came on to
challenge us.”
Clark says he
was shocked at Wolfowitz’s proposal that the military
should initiate wars and change governments, and that
Wolfowitz believed that the U.S. should invade countries
whose governments it disliked. “My mind was spinning.”
Clark says
Scooter Libby was at that meeting. Libby is another
pro-Israel neoconservative. In 2001 He was Vice
President Cheney’s chief of staff, and worked closely
with the Office of Special Plans, which
manufactured anti-Iraq talking points.
“This country
was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup,”
Clark said in his 2007 lecture. “Wolfowitz, Rumsfield,
Cheney, and you could name a half dozen other
collaborators from the Project for a New American
Century. They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East,
turn it upside down, make it under our control.”
Clark
continued: “Did they ever tell you this? Was there a
national dialogue on this? Did Senators and Congressmen
stand up and denounce this plan? Was there a
full-fledged American debate on it? Absolutely not. And
there still isn’t.”
Clark noted
that Iran and Syria know about the plan. “All you have
to do is read the Weekly Standard and listen to
Bill Kristol, and he blabbermouths it all over the world
– Richard Perle is the same way. They could hardly wait
to finish Iraq so they could move into Syria.”
Clark says that
Americans did not vote George Bush into office to do
this. Bush, Clark pointed out, had campaigned on “a
humble foreign policy, no ‘peace keeping,’ no ‘nation
building.’”
Others have
described this group, their responsibility for pushing
the invasion of Iraq, and their pro-Israel motivation.
Neoconservatives, Israel, and Iraq
A 2003 article
in Ha’aretz, one of
Israel’s main newspapers, reported bluntly: “The war in
Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals,
most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to
change the course of history.” (Ha’aretz often
highlights the Jewish affiliation of important players
due to its role as a top newspaper of the self-declared
“Jewish State.”)
It gave what it
termed “a partial list” of these neoconservatives: U.S.
government officials Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
Douglas Feith, and Eliot Abrams, and journalists William
Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. The article described
them as “mutual friends who cultivate one another.”
The article
included an interview with New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman, who was quoted as saying:
“It’s the war
the neoconservatives wanted. It’s the war the
neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to
sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy,
did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses
demanded. This is a war of an elite.”
The article
continued:
“Friedman
laughs: ‘I could give you the names of 25 people (all of
whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of
this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert
island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not
have happened.’”
Another
Ha’aretz article described how some of these
individuals, high American officials, gave Israeli
leaders tips on how to manage American actions and
influence US Congressmen, concluding: “Perle, Feith, and
their fellow strategists are walking a fine line between
their loyalty to American governments and Israeli
interests.”
Ha’aretz
reported that the goal was far more than just an
invasion of Iraq: “at a deeper level it is a greater
war, for the shaping of a new Middle East.” The article
said that the war “was being fought to consolidate a new
world order.”
“The Iraq war
is really the beginning of a gigantic historical
experiment…”
We’re now
seeing the tragic and violent result of that
regime-change experiment.
American
author, peace activist, and former CIA analyst Kathleen
Christison discussed the neoconservatives who promoted
war against Iraq in a
2002 article. She wrote: “Although much has been
written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush
administration, their ties to Israel have generally been
treated very gingerly.”
The Bush
administration, she wrote, was “peppered with people who
have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the
United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of
promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with
existing U.S. policy.”
“These people,”
she wrote, “who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists,
are now at all levels of government, from desk officers
at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level
at both State and Defense, as well as on the National
Security Council staff and in the vice president’s
office.”
Author Stephen
Green wrote a meticulously researched 2004
expose describing
how some of these individuals, including Perle and
Wolfowitz, had been investigated through the years by
U.S. intelligence agencies for security “lapses”
benefiting Israel.
Yet, despite a
pattern of highly questionable actions suggestive of
treason, they continued to procure top security
clearances for themselves and cronies. The neocon agenda
also became influential in
Britain.
(During the
recent U.S. presidential election, neoconservatives were
extremely
hostile to Trump, and have been
perturbed to have less influence in his
administration they they expected to have with Hillary
Clinton. They may be relieved to see him targeting their
pet punching bags in the Middle East. It’s unclear
whether neoconservatives will remain outside the White
House’s inner circle for long: neocon
Michael Ledeen is quite
close to Trump’s recently named White House National
Security Advisor
Michael Flynn. And there is talk that Trump may
appoint
Elliott Abrams as Deputy Secretary of State.)
1996 plan
against Iraq and Syria
The neocon
regime-change strategy had been laid out in a 1996
document called “A
Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
It was written for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu by a study group led by Richard Perle.
Although Perle and the other authors were American
citizens, the “realm” in question was Israel.
Perle was
chairman of the United States Defense Policy Board at
that time. He had previously been U.S. Assistant
Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.
The report
stated that in the past, Israel’s strategy was to get
the U.S. to use its money and weaponry to “lure Arabs”
to negotiate. This strategy, the plan stated, “required
funneling American money to repressive and aggressive
regimes.”
The report
recommended, however, that Israel go beyond a strategy
just focused on Israel-Palestine, and address the larger
region – that it “shape its strategic environment.”
It called for
“weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria” and
“removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” The paper
also listed Iran and Lebanon as countries to be dealt
with (and Turkey and Jordan as nations to be used in the
strategy).
The plan
stressed that it was necessary to obtain U.S. support
for the strategy, and advised that Israel use “language
familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of
American administrations during the cold war … .”
Perle, Douglas
Feith (who would be Deputy Under Secretary of Defense by
2001) and the other signatories of the report framed
their proposal as a new concept, but the idea for Israel
to reshape the political landscape of the Middle East
had been discussed for years. (Lest we be unclear,
“reshape the political landscape” means to change
governments, something that has never been accomplished
without massive loss of life and far-reaching
repercussions.)
In 1992 Israeli
leaders were already working to indoctrinate the public
about an alleged need to attack Iran. Israeli analyst
Israel Shahak wrote in his book
Open Secrets that the goal would be “to bring
about Iran’s total military and political defeat.”
Shahak
reported: “In one version, Israel would attack Iran
alone, in another it would ‘persuade’ the West to do the
job. The indoctrination campaign to this effect is
gaining in intensity. It is accompanied by what could be
called semi-official horror scenarios purporting to
detail what Iran could do to Israel, the West and the
entire world when it acquires nuclear weapons as it is
expected to a few years hence.”
1982 & 1950s
Israeli plans to fragment the Middle East
The document,
translated by Israel Shahak, called for the dissolution
of existing Arab states into smaller states which would,
in effect, become Israel’s satellites.
In an analysis
of the plan, Shahak pointed out: “[W]hile lip service is
paid to the idea of the ‘defense of the West’ from
Soviet power, the real aim of the author, and of the
present Israeli establishment is clear: To make an
Imperial Israel into a world power.”
Shahak noted
that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon planned “to
deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the
rest.”
Shahak wrote
that reshaping the Middle East on behalf of Israel had
been discussed since the 1950s: “This is not a new idea,
nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist
strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states
into smaller units has been a recurrent theme.”
As Shahak
pointed out, this strategy was documented in a book
called
Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach.
Drawing on the memoirs of the second Prime Minister of
Israel, Rokach’s
book described, among other things, a
1954 proposal to execute regime change in Lebanon.
The result
Returning to
the present, let’s examine the situation in the
“countries of concern” named by President Trump last
week, by President Obama in 2015, and targeted by
Wolfowitz et al in 2001.
Several years
ago, journalist
Glenn Greenwald commented on General Clark’s
statement about the 2001 policy coup: “If you go down
that list of seven countries that he said the neocons
had planned to basically change the governments of, you
pretty much see that vision… being fulfilled.”
Greenwald noted
that the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Lebanon had
been changed; the U.S. had escalated its proxy fighting
and drone attacks in Somalia; U.S. troops were deployed
in Sudan; “and the most important countries on that
list, Iran and Syria, are clearly the target of all
sorts of covert regime change efforts on the part of the
United States and Israel.”
Below are
sketches of what’s happened:
Iraq
was invaded and the country
destroyed. According to a
2015 NGO report, the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Iraq had led to the deaths of approximately 1 million
Iraqis – 5 percent of the total population of the
country – by 2011. More than
three
million Iraqis are internally displaced, and the
carnage
continues. The destruction of Iraq and
impoverishment of its people is at the root of much of
today’s extremism and it’s been demonstrated that it led
to the rise of ISIS, as
admitted by former British Prime Minister and Iraq
war co-perpetrator Tony Blair.
Libya
was invaded in 2011 and its leader violently overthrown;
in the post-Gaddafi power vacuum, a 2011
UN report revealed torture, lynchings and abuse.
Five years on, the country was still torn by civil war
and ISIS is
reportedly expanding into the chaos. A 2016 Human
Rights Watch report stated: “Libya’s political and
security crisis deepened … the country edged towards a
humanitarian crisis, with almost 400,000 people
internally displaced.” Warring forces “continued with
impunity to arbitrarily detain, torture, unlawfully
kill, indiscriminately attack, abduct and disappear, and
forcefully displace people from their homes. The
domestic criminal justice system collapsed in most parts
of the country, exacerbating the human rights crisis.” [Photos
here]
Sudan:
The U.S. engaged in so-called “nation-building” in
Sudan, advanced the claim in 2005 that the government
was perpetrating a
genocide, and some U.S. players ultimately organized
the secession of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011. (Neocon
Israel partisan Elliott
Abrams was one of these players.) One journalist reported
the result: “[A]n abyss of unspeakable misery and
bloodshed … . Tens of thousands have been killed, 1.5
million have been displaced, and 5 million are in dire
need of humanitarian assistance.”
Somalia: There have been a
number of U.S. interventions in Somalia, most recently a
clandestine war under Obama using Special Operations
troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African
allies; Somali extremists, like others, repeatedly
cite Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, enabled
by the U.S., as motivators of their violent extremism.
Iran:
Iran has long been
targeted by
Israel, and Israel partisans have
driven the
anti-Iran
campaign in the U.S. Most recently there has been a
public relations effort claiming that Iran is developing
nuclear weapons, despite the fact that U.S.
intelligence agencies
and other
experts do
not support these accusations.
Israel and the U.S. deployed a computer virus
against Iran in what has been called the
world’s first digital weapon. Young Iranian nuclear
physicists have been
assassinated by U.S. ally Israel, and the U.S.
instituted a blockade against Iran that caused food
insecurity and mass
suffering among the country’s civilians. (Such a
blockade can be seen as an
act of war.) Democratic Congressman and
Israel partisan Brad Sherman
admitted the objective of the Iran sanctions:
“Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will
hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do
just that.”
Yemen:
The US has launched
drone strikes against Yemen for years, killing
numerous Yemeni civilians and even some Americans. In
2010, a few weeks after Obama won the
Nobel Peace Prize, he
had the military use cluster bombs that killed 35
Yemeni women and children. The Obama administration
killed a 16-year-old American in 2011, and a few
days ago U.S. forces under Trump killed the boy’s
sister. In 2014 American forces attacked a
wedding procession, and in 2015 the Obama
administration admitted it was making
war on Yemen. Today over
two million Yemeni children suffer from
malnutrition. The Yemeni regime that we’re attacking
became politically active in 2003 as a
result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Syria:
In an email revealed by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton
wrote that the “best way to help Israel” was to
overthrow the Syrian regime.
Syria seems to
be a poster child for the destruction recommended by
Israeli strategists. As the UK Guardian
reported in 2002: “Disorder and chaos sweeping
through the region would not be an unfortunate
side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything
is going according to plan.”
Half the Syrian
population is displaced – 5 million have fled the
country and another 6 million are internally displaced –
and over 300,000 are dead from the violence. Major
cities and ancient sites are in
ruins and the countryside devastated. Amnesty
International
calls it “the worst humanitarian crisis of our
time.”
While the
uprising against a ruthless dictator was no doubt begun
by authentic Syrian rebels, others with questionable
agendas flowed in, some supported by the U.S. and
Israel. Israel’s military intelligence chief
said Israel does not want ISIS defeated. Israel’s
defense minister has
admitted that Israel has provided aid to ISIS
fighters.
ISIS
A major factor
in Syria’s chaos and the rise of ISIS was the
destruction of Iraq, as
revealed by in-depth interviews with ISIS fighters
by researchers for Artis International, a consortium for
scientific study in the service of conflict resolution:
“Many assume
that these fighters are motivated by a belief in the
Islamic State… but this just doesn’t hold for the
prisoners we are interviewing. They are woefully
ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering
questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the
caliphate.”
“More pertinent
than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more
convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for
the side they did.”
One interviewee
said: “The Americans came. They took away Saddam, but
they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam,
we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war.
When you came here, the civil war started.”
The report
noted that the fighters “came of age under the
disastrous American occupation after 2003.”
“They are
children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at
crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or
fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against
America and their own government. They are not fueled by
the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders;
rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al
Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a
way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.”
The leader of
the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was imprisoned
for eight months in the infamous
Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run Iraqi prison known for
grotesque torture of prisoners. Photos published at that
time
show U.S. soldiers smiling next to piles of naked
prisoners and a hooded detainee standing on a narrow box
with electrical wires attached to his outstretched
hands.
An Abu Ghraib
interrogator later
revealed that Israelis trained them in the use of
techniques used against Palestinians. General Janis
Karpinski (in charge of the unit that ran the prison)
and others
say that Israelis were
involved in interrogations. It was
reported that the head of the defense contracting
firm implicated in the torture at Abu Ghraib prison had
close ties to Israel and had visited an Israeli training
camp in the West Bank.
Another major
factor in the rise of anti-Western extremism is the
largely unconditional support for Israel’s violent
oppression of Palestinians. As a
UN report
documented, “The scale of human loss and destruction in
Gaza during the 2014 conflict was catastrophic and has …
shocked and shamed the world.”
Professor John
Mearsheimer of and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard
have
written that U.S. policies promoted by the Israel
lobby have given “extremists a powerful recruiting tool,
increases the pool of potential terrorists and
sympathizers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism
around the world.” Osama Bin Laden
cited U.S. support for Israeli crimes against
Palestinians among his reasons for fighting the U.S. The
U.S. gives Israel over
$10
million per day.
Reaction to
the Trump executive order
Thousands of
people across the U.S. have opposed Trump’s order for
the extreme hardship it imposes on multitudes of
refugees. The focus on Muslims (Trump has said that
Christians might be exempted) has caused outrage at such
religious discrimination and unfair profiling (the large
majority of Muslims strongly
oppose extremism).
Individuals
across the political spectrum from Code Pink to the Koch
brothers have decried the order. The Kochs issued a
strong statement against it:
“We believe it
is possible to keep Americans safe without excluding
people who wish to come here to contribute and pursue a
better life for their families. The travel ban is the
wrong approach and will likely be counterproductive. Our
country has benefited tremendously from a history of
welcoming people from all cultures and backgrounds. This
is a hallmark of free and open societies.”
New York
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who supported the Iraq
War and suggests
God sent him to guard Israel,
choked back tears at a
press conference
and called the order “mean-spirited and un-American.”
The
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), known for its fervent
pro-Israel advocacy (and history of smearing criticism
of Israeli policy as “anti-Semitism”), has vowed a “relentless
fight” against the ban.
Some are
concerned that Trump’s action will stoke terrorism,
rather than defend against it. Many others support the
order in the belief it makes them safer from extremist
violence. (As mentioned above, the Obama administration
undertook a similar, though milder, action for a similar
reason.)
I suggest that
everyone – both those who deplore the order for
humanitarian reasons, and those who defend it out of
concern for Americans’ safety – examine the historic
context outlined above and the U.S. policies that led to
this order.
For decades,
Democratic and Republican administrations have enacted
largely parallel policies regarding the Middle East and
Israel-Palestine. We are seeing the results, and most of
us are deeply displeased.
I would submit
that both for humanitarian obligations and for security
necessities, it is urgent that we find a different way
forward.
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