Eric Margolis

THE COUP AGAINST HAMAS

America’s foreign policy works pretty well around most of the world, but when it comes to the Mideast, Washington seems to make a mess wherever it goes.

After the huge fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, Washington’s political alchemists are now working their latest magic in the Palestinian Territories, two, giant, open-air prison camps – the West Bank and Gaza - surrounded by Israeli security forces.

Having gotten rid of Fatah founder Yasser Arafat, who refused to condone US-Israeli plans to parcel up his nation, Washington installed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian leader. Arafat’s death still remains highly suspicious and should, like the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, be formally investigated by the United Nations.

The compliant Abbas is lauded in the west as a `moderate’ – a code word Arab leaders who faithfully cooperate American policies. Those who do not are branded `supporters of terrorism’ and `leaders of rogue states.’

But once Abbas was in office, Israel simply ignored him and his feeble pleas to halt their colonizing the West Bank. Having undermined Abbas, the Americans and Israeli then built up his tough security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, into a mini-Saddam and heir apparent.

After President George Bush commanded democracy to flower in the Arab World, to his shock and awe, Hamas won a major democratic electoral victory in the region’s second free election. The first, in Algeria in 1991, produced a landslide for the Islamist reformist movement, FIS. Algeria’s French and US-backed army quickly annulled the election and jailed FIS leaders.

Washington quickly sent $80 million of US arms to Dahlan’s Fatah fighters, who were trained and organized by CIA specialists. Mirroring events in Algeria, the Bush Administration and Israel set about planning a coup against the democratically-elected Hamas-led government. Seeing an attack imminent, Hamas struck first, running the US proxy Fatah forces out of Gaza.

The `moderate’ Palestinians Washington has put into power, backed by tens of millions in cash, lack political legitimacy or much popular support. Abbas’ Fatah, like most other Arab regimes, has degenerated into a party devoted to self-enrichment that ignores the plight of ordinary people.

But now, after long scorning the feeble Abbas, the US and Israel are busy trying to build him up as a major political figure to counteract the popularity of Hamas.

Hamas won power in good part because of the refusal of Israel’s rightwing governments and the Bush Administration to halt West Bank settlement even though it violate international law, the 1993 Oslo Accords, and UN Resolution 242.

West Bank Jewish settlers grew from 111,000 in 1993 to nearly 500,000 today – in spite of Israel’s agreement at Oslo to stop settlements. Israeli human rights groups estimate 40% of the West Bank has been taken over by Israeli settlements, military bases, the ugly new Berlin-style `security’ wall, and Jewish-only road networks that chop up the territory into tiny, isolated, South African-style Bantustans.

As 1.3 million increasingly enraged West Bank Palestinians saw their lands and water being taken away by Israeli settlers and soldiers, Fatah seemed to offer only more concessions or overt collaboration with the occupiers. Hamas offered more able, comparatively honest government, as well as resistance and defiance to Israel, however hopeless.

In a campaign that was both criminal and totally self-defeating, both Hamas and Fatah launched suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. Israeli, with equal illegality, continued its campaign of targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants.

Building up Fatah to fight Hamas, splitting Palestinians, and getting them to accept Israeli land claims will only bring more West Bank violence. In fact, it seems likely that as Israeli colonization and assassinations continue, that more and more West Bank Palestinians will turn to Hamas and against Fatah, repeating what happened in Gaza.

Inter-Palestinian violence and political chaos, of course, suit Israel’s expansionist right-wingers very well. They want turmoil on the West Bank. Palestinian infighting supplies them the perfect excuse to avoid ever having to make serious land concessions and provides useful cover under which to keep building settlements. The Bush Administration appears to have quietly adopted this same view.

America can always buy local yes-men, but it can’t buy popular support, respect, or peace in the Arab World. But the harsh lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Somalia seem to have made no impression on the neoconservatives and born-again Christian extremists who are driving the Bush Administration’s hugely destructive Mideast policy.

If the United States truly wants peace and stability in the region, it will have to enter into a genuine political dialogue with Hamas, as well as Hezbullah and Iran. They are, as Israelis hardliners are so fond of saying, `facts on the ground’ that cannot be ignored.

Finally, we are still hearing rumor in the bazaar that President Bush may name Tony Blair, who is making his long goodbye as Britain’s prime minister, as a sort of peace Czar to deal with the Palestinians. Just when White House policies couldn’t get any more bizarre or counter-productive, along comes this daft notion.

Blair is discredited at home in Britain for launched a war of naked aggression and becoming a serial liar to promote it. He is viewed with hatred and contempt in the Muslim World as a lackey of the Washington neocons. The oleaginous Blair should be selling kitchen appliance or aluminum siding, not dealing with the world’s most explosive issue that he helped worsen when in office.




copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

WHO REALLY STARTED THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR?

PARIS - One of the primary causes of the epochal 1967 Arab-Israeli War has been largely forgotten or ignored.

In the months before the June, 1967 conflict, Israel and Syria fought increasingly violent clashes along their border as Israeli paramilitary settlers pushed into the demilitarized zone separating the two states.

Hawkish Israeli generals, led by Moshe Dayan, sought to provoke a limited war with Syria in hopes of grabbing water resources around Lake Tiberias. Palestinian `fedayeen’ were staging raids across Israel’s borders.

As tensions surged, the Soviet Union, then Egypt’s close ally, urgently warned Cairo and Damascus that its spy satellites were detecting Israeli armored formations massing to attack Syria. The Arabs had no independent means of verifying Moscow’s warnings, but could not ignore them.

Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, believed an Israeli invasion of his close ally Syria was imminent and came under intense pressure from Damascus and his own generals to counter Israel’s threat. Egypt’s rivals in the Arab World heaped scorn on Nasser for timidity, demanding Cairo take action to defend Syria.

So Nasser ordered four Egyptian divisions into Sinai. They were deployed in defensive formations in the middle of the peninsula, well away from Israel’s border.

In reality, Israel was not massing troops to attack Syria. Moscow’s warnings to Cairo and Damascus of an impending Israeli attack were false. In late 1990, the US used similarly doctored satellite photos to fool the Saudis into believing Iraq had massed troops on its border and was about to invade.

Moscow’s disinformation lit the fuse that ignited the second major Arab-Israeli war. Syria, knowing its military forces were useless, was gripped by panic and pleaded with Nasser to deter the imagined Israeli attack by making some powerful demonstration.

Israelis were gripped by panic, believing deployment of Egyptian divisions into Sinai heralded a war that would destroy their young state.

Israel’s hawkish military establishment seized upon popular panic to pressure the government of Levi Eshkol to activate a long-planned campaign to seize the West Bank and Golan Heights.

Meanwhile, Palestinian spokesman Ahmad Shukairy and other windbags thundered, `we will drive the Jews into the sea.’ Such empty threats won worldwide sympathy for Israel and provided it with a perfect pretext to launch what it called a `self-defensive war of survival.’

As pressure on Nasser intensified, he made a fateful error. Nasser had no intention of going to war. But he desperately sought to dissuade Israel from the attack Moscow warned was coming. Nasser ordered UN troops in Sinai to withdraw, and closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Withdrawing UN troops was mistakenly seen by the outside world as the beginning of an Egyptian offensive into Israel. So did closing Israel’s access to the Red Sea.

Israel’s hawks finally convinced PM Levi Eshkol a major Arab offensive was imminent. He authorized surprise attacks on the Arab states. Nasser had fallen right into a trap. But who had set it?

Two hundred Israeli warplanes quickly destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Satellite information covertly supplied by the United States allowed Israel to evade Egypt’s air defense system. Attractive Israeli female spies had seduced Egyptian pilots into revealing the times when their defenses would be most vulnerable.

When the Israeli air attack were launched, Egypt’s supreme military commander, Field Marshall Abdul Hakim Amer, who had assured his old friend Nasser that Egyptian forces would crush any Israeli attack, was flying towards Sinai, reportedly smoking hashish.

Arab land forces, caught in open terrain without air cover, were slaughtered. In six short days, the Arab forces were totally crushed in one of modern military history’s most humiliating routs.

A US intelligence vessel, the USS `Liberty,’ off the Sinai coast monitoring the war and Israel’s preparations to attack Syria, was repeatedly attacked by waves of Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats and reduced to a burning wreck. Israeli warships even machine-gunned the Liberty’s’ survivors in the water. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Israeli attack covered up.

Moscow’s false warnings to Cairo and Damascus that triggered the June, 1967 war remain one of the Cold War’s great abiding mysteries.

Did Moscow believe its Arab allies could actually defeat Israel? Or did the Soviets think a major defeat might drive the Arabs ever deeper into their embrace? Did pro-Israel KGB officers send the false data. Whatever the case, it was the worst Soviet strategic miscalculation until the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and a disaster for all concerned.
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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

THE MOTHER OF ALL SCANDALS

Anyone who wants to understand what really goes on in the Mideast should have a look at the scandal that erupted earlier this month over the outsized character of Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia.

Bandar has long been a renowned mover, shaker and charmer. As Saudi ambassador to the US, the influential Bandar schmoozed official Washington for two decades. He became an intimate of the Bush family. He invested a least $60 million in Saudi funds in the Carlyle Corp, in which the Bush family has important interests. Equally significant, Prince Bandar was a particular favorite at CIA, where he was long considered one of its prime Mideast `assets.’

Bandar flew in his own personal Airbus A-340 painted in the colors of his favorite US football team, and threw lavish parties in his $135 million Aspen house and in Washington. He was Mr. SaudiAmerica. Congress, the media, and the rest of official Washington hailed Bandar as a the kind of `good Arab’ with whom the US was happy to do business.

After leaving Washington, Bandar returned home to become the highly influential head of national security and chief foreign policy advisor to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. Bandar’s father, Crown Prince Sultan, is the nation’s powerful defense minister and next in line to the throne. Many Saudi observers believed Bandar was being positioned to sit one day on the throne of Saudi Arabia.

On top of all this, Bandar is also a marketing genius.

The UK `Guardian’ newspaper and BBC recently revealed that Bandar personally received over US $2 billion in `marketing fees’ from the British defense firm BAE as part of the huge, 1985 al-Yamamah arms deal. Al-Yamamah means dove in Arabic. Charges of massive corruption over the Al-Yamamah deal have swirled for years. But even for the rich Saudis, $2 billion is a lot of money. That’s twice what Washington’s most important Arab ally, Egypt, was given.

For the Saudi royals, Britain’s outgoing PM Tony Blair, and Washington, the `dove’ and Bandar’s $2 billion worth of payola have become one big albatross.

During the 1980’s, Saudi Arabia sought to buy modern US warplanes. But the US pro-Israel lobby blocked the sale, costing the loss of billions in sales by US industry and 100,000 American jobs. The Reagan Administration advised the Saudis to go buy their warplanes from Britain.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was only too happy have the British defense firm, known today as BAE, sell the Saudis 120 Tornado strike aircraft, Hawk trainers, military equipment, and lucrative training and maintenance programs worth some $90-100 billion and the 100,000 jobs America lost. Over their operational lives of 20 or so years, warplanes consumer six times their original cost in spare parts. These supply contract also went to BAE and other British industrial firms.

The Saudis could barely operate the modern military equipment they bought from the US, Britain and France. Their military forces were a big zero. Most of it stayed in storage, or was operated by foreign mercenaries. The Saudi arms deals were really about buying military protection from the western powers.

All arms sales to the west’s Mideast clients routinely include 10-15% `commissions’ to heads of state, generals, and their cronies. These funds are traditionally channelled through middlemen, the flamboyant Adnan Kashoggi being the most notorious.

Kickbacks, rechristened `marketing fees,’ were of course expected in the Al-Yamamah deal. But Bandar’s $2 billion set a record for size and venality. Thatcher ordered Bandar’s payments carefully hidden from public gaze. They remained so until recent years when British and American government investigators began questioning secret, multi-million dollar payments to Prince Bandar routed from the UK to the shady Riggs Bank in Washington. Before it was shut down after a series of scandals, Riggs had become one of the favorite handlers of `black’ money for pro-US autocratic regimes.

When Britain’s Serious Fraud Office began probing BAE’s secret payoffs to Bandar, Tony Blair sanctimoniously ordered the investigation shut down for `national security’ reasons. The Saudis threatened to cancel their arms deals with Britain if payoff charges were made public by HM’s government. Blair was trying to sell the Saudis BAE’s new, high-tech Eurofighter. He blocked similar investigations by OECD, the international anti-bribery watchdog agency which was also closing in on the Saudi money trail.

Bandar denies any wrongdoing, claiming the `marketing’ funds all went into a legitimate Defense Ministry account had were properly accounted for and audited.

Few believe him. The only `marketing’ effort in the arms deal was payola to high Saudi officials. If the funds were legit, why all the secrecy and money laundering? Were the payments simply western `baksheesh’ for Bandar and his clan? Were they to help him against his main power rival, Prince Turki Faisal, who is not seen as amenable to US and British interests as Bandar?

Could the billions have been used for covert operations, possibly with US participation? One recalls the Reagan years when money from Israel’s secret sales of US arms to Iran were used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras.

The most significant effect of this revolting scandal is being felt in the Muslim World. One of the major reasons for the fast-spreading influence of militant Islamic groups like Hezbullah, Hamas, and Taliban has been their success in uprooting the Muslim World’s endemic corruption and nepotism. We are so used to Islamists being demonized as `terrorists’ that their highly effective and popular social accomplishments are rarely noted. In fact, their appeal and popularity is based primarily on their welfare and incorruptibility.

Islamic militants insist the west exploits their nations by keeping deeply corrupt regimes in power. In exchange for protection from their own people and neighbors, and fabulous wealth, these authoritarian Arab regimes – always termed `moderates’ by western media – sell oil on the cheap to the west and do its bidding. US-installed governments in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan are all noted for egregious corruption, including secret payoffs from Washington to their leaders.

No wonder Prince Bandar was always so amiable and accommodating. Or that he managed to fly out a planeload of Saudis the day after 9/11 when all US flights were grounded. Or that the Bush Administration was trying to position the always amenable prince as the next Saudi monarch.

The Bandar scandal is hugely embarrassing for Blair and Bush who claim to be leading a crusade to bring democracy and good government to the benighted Muslim World. It starkly confirms Islamist’s accusations that the west promotes corruption. And it dramatically exposes the dirty underbelly of the west’s much-vaunted `special relationship’ with the Saudi royal family.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

The G-8 PRODUCES A 0

PARIS – G-8 summits are about as spontaneous and exciting as Japanese ritual Kabuki dances. Last week’s summit at a heavily-guarded German Baltic
Resort was no different.

Leaders of the world’s leading industrial nations spent much of their time trying to hammer out agreement on how to deal with global warming.
Who would have thought a few years ago that weather, that most banal of subjects, would become intensely politicized and a subject of furious debate?

The G-8 leaders failed to achieve any meaningful progress, papering over deep differences with the usual post-summit platitudes, empty smiles, and calls for yet more talks.

G-8 nations represent 63% of world economic activity and produce much of the carbon pollution causing global warming. Here in Europe, glaciers are melting and summers increasingly torrid.

Germany’s lackluster chancellor, Angela Merkel, is under heavy voter pressure to achieve long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases. Global warming has become the European Union’s most important political issue. The EU today leads the world in enlightened environmental policies and effective emission controls.

Enter President George W. Bush, who, until lately dismissed scientist’s warnings of global warming as voodoo science from `tree huggers.’ But faced by fast growing concern of American voters over global warming, Bush and fellow Republicans had to do something.

So Bush offered a nebulous plan designed to placate voters by urging more studies and talks. His real agenda was to stave off the original Kyoto accords designed to sharply reduce global carbon emissions and delay any painful actions until well after the next round of US elections.

Speaking of US domestic politics, the White House’s major fracas with Moscow over Bush’s plan to implant anti-missile defenses in Central Europe against non-existent Iranian missiles provided a handy pick-me-up for sagging Republican fortunes.

Conjuring up Cold War rivalries with Russia is a dandy way to divert Americans from Bush’s debacle in Iraq, and rekindle patriotic support from Republicans. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, reacted to Bush’s anti-missile plan with predictable fury and saber-rattling, thrilling all those nostalgic Americans and Russians who miss the Cold War.

But then the clever Putin wrong-footed Bush by proposing the US and Russia share a Soviet-era ABM radar site in the mountains of Azerbaijan. The US delegation glumly returned home, mumbling about needing to study Moscow’s new demarche.

Missiles aside, President Bush was very right about one thing. No environmental accords make sense without inclusion of China and India. And he should have added Indonesia, as well.

China is due to build 240 coal-fired power plants. India refuses to take serious action to control its growing pollution. India is incredibly filthy; its rivers have become open sewers.

Indonesia is now the world’s third largest carbon producer after the US and China. Each spring the criminal burning of its Borneo forests blankets South Asia in a miasma of smog.

`You polluted the atmosphere for the last 150 years during your industrial revolutions,’ Third World emitters scold the developed world, `now it’s our turn.’ Not so.

A mere two and a half centuries ago, people considered it normal to throw their garbage and human waste out the window into the street. Herds of pigs were occasionally brought in to eat the refuse. Cholera, typhoid and a legion of other diseases resulted.

Until recently, most of us thought it proper to dispose of our industrial waste by pumping it into the atmosphere we breathe. In recent years, however, a new, international awareness has developed that dumping filth into the air is as dangerous and uncivilized as throwing feces into the street.

Europeans are furious at the Bush Administration for its persistent efforts to derail plans to curb carbon emissions. But Bush, as usual, is playing to his core Republican supporters.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting pals in Fortune 500 companies bitterly oppose costly emission controls and efforts to save forests and wildlife. Many Conservative Republicans think hunting - the act of slaughtering defenseless animals - and pillaging nature are somehow manly pursuits. They believe efforts to protect the environment are a sinister leftist plot.

Many Bush supporters on America’s loopy Christian Evangelical far right believe the world is about to be destroyed in Armageddon so there’s no need to conserve air, water, trees or anything else.

China, India and Indonesia, rushing headlong to industrialize, couldn’t care less. They refuse to take meaningful action even though their own people are increasingly at risk from pollution.

We understand their desire to industrialize and end poverty. But earth faces an emergency. If the G-8 won’t take effective action, consumers worldwide can. Boycotting products from nations that refuse to stop polluting our air would force them to begin enforcing emission controls and implementing new clean air technology.

Consumers of the world, unite!


Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

THE RUSSIAN BEAR AWAKES

PARIS - As Washington and Moscow exchange increasingly angry accusations and rebukes these recent weeks, it is hard to avoid a sense of Cold War deja vu.

Last Tuesday, Russia launched with great fanfare a new RS-24 intercontinental ballistic missile that it claimed could penetrate new US anti-missile defenses. President Vladimir Putin warned the Bush Administration’s plans to deploy anti-missile radars and missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland would turn Europe into a `powder keg.’

Moscow accused the Bush Administration of violating international law, following double standards, and being a major violator of human rights. After crushing the life out of Chechnya, Russia was hardly in any position to lecture the US about human rights.

Washington fired back, accusing Putin of extinguishing democracy, silencing political opponents, and bullying his neighbors. The US, with 150,000 troops in Iraq, even had the nerve to accuse Russia of `meddling’ in the Mideast. The American pot was calling the Russian kettle black.

Behind the barrages of invective, what’s really going on is that Russia is finally returning to being Russia, as this writer has long predicted it would. Russia the lap dog is gone. The Russian bear has awakened from a hibernation of two decades and is both hungry and ill-tempered.

In the 1980’s, the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev sought to humanize and modernize the crumbling Soviet Union. Gorbachev ended his nation’s confrontation with the west and sought accommodation with Washington – far too much, claimed Russian critics. Gorbachev’s well-intentioned efforts failed. The once mighty Soviet Union collapsed, leaving bankruptcy and massive social suffering in its wake.

Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s successor, allowed criminals and shady financers to plunder Russia. In a story that has yet to be fully revealed, his shaky, financially destitute government was propped up by billions in secret US payments. Washington more or less managed to buy up Russia’s government. In an outrageous, shameful act, the Yeltsin Kremlin even sold the Pentagon the crown jewels of Russia’s military technology. Everything and almost everyone was for sale.

During this period of weakness and corruption, bankrupt Russia allowed the US pretty much a free hand around the world, particularly in the Mideast. Russia’s defense spending plummeted. Washington hailed Moscow’s `cooperation.’

In 1999, the KGB, renamed FSB and SVR, staged a palace coup. Former FSB director Valdimir Putin became Russia’s new leader. President Putin and his hard men set about re-nationalizing Russia’s industrial and resource assets, crushing the robber barons, and restoring Kremlin political control over the nation.

Ironically, George Bush’s invasion of Iraq caused worldwide oil prices to surge, bringing Putin’s `new Russia’ a huge financial windfall. Russia, which produces more oil than Saudi Arabia, is flush with cash from its current oil, gas, and mineral bonanza, which has revitalized the nation’s defense budget.

Putin long made clear his desire to rebuild the Soviet Union – minus communism – and restore his nation as a world power. This means asserting Russia’s historic interests in Eastern Europe and the Mideast, using energy exports to advance foreign policy, and increasingly standing up to the United States.

There is nothing sinister about this development. The last 20 years of Russian history were an anomaly, rather like the feeble Kerensky government just prior top the 1917 revolution. Russia is off its knees and back on its feet. The days of Moscow’s unnatural accommodation with Washington are past.

The US has become too used to Moscow as a compliant vassal. Washington will now have to resume treating the Russians as a great power with legitimate international interests. The first step is reversing the Bush Administration’s contemptuous and dangerously reckless repudiation of major arms control treaties with Moscow.

The White House’s provocative plan to build anti-missile systems and open military bases in Eastern Europe should be cancelled. Pushing NATO all the way east to Russia’s borders has been another dangerous provocation.

Infuriating and humiliating Moscow in order to create a preposterous, technologically iffy anti-missile defenses against missiles and warheads which Iran does not even possess is the latest folly of the Bush Administration’s ideological crusaders.

The US is going to have to eventually share some of its world power with a renascent Russia and surging China. Treating both great powers with dignity and respect is a good way to start.
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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007