The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)—a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/.

Tom Barry, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) www.irc-online.org and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be contacted at lt;tom@irc-online.org>.

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Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

MIDEAST POLICY AND THE RIGHT WING
By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry

FPIF TALKING POINTS ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE
By Stephen Zunes and Chris Toensing

II. Letters and Comments

MIDEAST LUNACY

MIDEAST RATIONALITY

NO FUTURE FOR AMERICA

I. Updates and Out-takes

MIDEAST POLICY AND THE RIGHT WING
By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0204pnac.html .)

Under the Bush administration, Middle East foreign policy--together with most other dimensions of U.S. foreign policy--have largely reflected the positions voiced by several right-wing front groups and think tanks, notably The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the opinions found in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, and Washington Times.

As international pressure mounted for the U.S. to back away from its support of Sharon's war on Palestine, PNAC sent a letter to the president commending Bush for "your strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism." Among the 31 signers of the PNAC letter were the chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle; former CIA director R. James Woolsey; Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; and former Education Secretary and drug czar William Bennett. They warned the president that:

"It can no longer be the policy of the United States to urge, much less to pressure, Israel to continue negotiating with Arafat, any more than we would be willing to be pressured to negotiate with Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Nor should the United States provide financial support to a Palestinian Authority that acts as a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism, any more than we would approve of others providing assistance to Al Qaeda."

The PNAC letter came on the heels of a statement by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld in which he identified Syria, Iran, and Iraq, as well as the PLO, as targets in the war against terrorism. This was the same list of alleged miscreants identified in a PNAC letter sent to Bush just nine days after the September 11 attacks. That one was signed by almost 40 prominent neoconservatives and Christian Right activists.

A Two-Edged Foreign Policy Crisis

The political violence in Israel and Palestine represents not only the continuation of a long-running regional crisis but also a profound crisis in U.S. international relations. For the hardliners who now dominate U.S. foreign policy, there is rising concern that international pressure will force the president to deviate from the aggressive agenda they have set forth. And for the more moderate right--including many officials at the State Department's Near East Bureau--the new instability in Israel and Palestine threatens to undermine the historical foundations of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

The hardline faction, whose views on the war on terrorism, Iraq, and Israel are clearly articulated by PNAC, is concerned that domestic and international criticism of Sharon's aggression might persuade the White House to deviate from its right-wing foreign policy agenda, including its campaign against Iraq and its support for the Likud. Clearly concerned that the deepening crisis would result in backsliding from that agenda, PNAC urged the president "to accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power." With regard to Israel, the PNAC statement concluded: "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel's victory is an important part of our victory. For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism."

With extremely powerful allies within the administration--Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were PNAC charter members--they and their fellow signers have churned out scores of articles and appeared on dozens of TV talk shows since September 11, which have not only shaped the public debate on the war on terrorism and the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) alleged role in it, but have challenged, if not overthrown, four decades of traditional U.S. thinking about the Middle East. The signers of the PNAC letter--a coalition long opposed to a land-for-peace formula and Christian Rightists some of whom believe that Israeli control of Palestine fulfills Biblical prophecy--have made the State Department itself almost as much a target of their campaign as Arafat himself.

In all of their writings, they have pounded the same themes over and over again. The most important of these:

• The Palestine Liberation Organization is a terrorist organization, and Israel should not be compelled to negotiate with it.
• The U.S. should not intervene if Sharon moves to dismantle the PA and with it the Oslo process.
• The war against terrorism will not be complete until Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is ousted from power and other enemies of Israel--notably Syria, Iran, and Hizbollah in Lebanon--are put firmly in their place.
• The president should not heed the entreaties of State Department Mideast experts, or the calls of traditional U.S. Mideast allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to rein in Sharon because they are themselves responsible for fostering support for terrorism against the United States.

The basic assumption underlying all of these points is well-articulated by William Bennett. Two weeks ago, Bennett, who plays a key role in linking the primarily Jewish neoconservatives with the Christian Right, wrote "America's fate and Israel's fate are one and the same."

But the radicals who have promoted the alliance with the Israeli hardliners and are cheerleading for an assault on Iraq believe that an overhaul of Middle East policy is long overdue. No longer should U.S. foreign policy be constrained by Arab-Israeli balance-of-power considerations. The U.S. should operate from a position of strength and power with U.S. national interests the only key determinant of policy.

A Turning Point

Powell's trip to the Middle East is the most recent in a long line of U.S. "peace" missions to the region. But, as all observers and actors are now recognizing, the Middle East crisis has developed frightening new dimensions and the prospects of arriving at any new political settlement are dim at best.

U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is at a critical turning point. Clearly, it has failed and needs serious renovation. Enough is enough. For too long has the U.S. supported and armed the region's repressive Arab regimes, and for too long has the U.S. turned a blind eye toward Israel's violations of international law and its illegal land occupations and settlements--all the while providing it with more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign aid. While going through the motions of calling for the end of Israeli military incursions and of calling for political solutions, the administration has not threatened to end its economic and military support for Israel.

One danger is that the U.S. will simply try to muddle through the current crisis. The greater danger lies in the likelihood that the Bush presidency--caught up in the logic of its global war on terrorism and seeing no alternatives for Middle East policy--will fully yield to the prescriptions offered by the military hardliners and the neoconservatives. Such an agenda runs exactly counter to the conclusions of virtually every independent, State Department, and CIA analyst who has studied the region. The right-wing ideologues will continue to critique all administration statements and measures that do not unequivocally reflect their own support of the Likud and their targeting of Iraq. But the policy reality is that they have already succeeded in framing the terms of the debate about U.S. Mideast policy, and to an alarming extent U.S. policy itself.

(Jim Lobe <jlobe@starpower.net> writes regularly for Inter Press Service and Foreign Policy In Focus. Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus.)

Also see:

Foreign Policy: Face Right
By Tom Barry and Jim Lobe
http://www.fpif.org/papers/02right/index.html

War on Dissent
By Jim Lobe
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0203avot.html

FPIF TALKING POINTS ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE
By Stephen Zunes and Chris Toensing

(Editor's Note: Follows is a new Global Affairs Commentary also posted at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0204israeltalk.html )

General:

• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of competing nationalist movements battling for a homeland on the same territory. It is not a religious or ethnic conflict at its root. The conflict is not intractable: the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians are willing to accept territorial compromise and share historic Palestine in two states side by side in return for peace and security.
• The root of the present war is Israel's 34-year occupation of Palestinian lands: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. This phenomenon, rather than the person of Ariel Sharon or the person of Yasir Arafat, is the primary obstacle to peace. The centerpiece of U.S. policy should be to end the occupation, including removal of settlements, as soon as possible. Ceasefires fall considerably short of this goal.
• To stop the present frightening escalation in Israel-Palestine, it is urgent that the U.S. support the immediate deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to not only guarantee security of Israeli and Palestinian civilians but also to oversee the end of the occupation.

Palestinian Violence:

• Occupation and repression can never justify terrorism. Similarly, terrorism can never justify occupation and repression, nor do terrorist acts by a few negate the Palestinian people's right to self-determination.
• The Palestinian Authority under President Yasir Arafat has been inept, corrupt, and autocratic. But Arafat is the elected leader of the Palestinians, and both Israel and the U.S. must treat him as such. The U.S. should support Palestinian NGO leaders' call for new elections in Palestinian self-rule areas, as well as an end to the Israeli occupation.
• A clear distinction should be made between violent Palestinian resistance that targets civilians inside Israel and violent Palestinian resistance that targets Israeli occupation forces in the occupied territories. The former is a war crime and can never be legitimized. The latter is recognized as legitimate under international law. However, nonviolent forms of resistance by the Palestinians would likely be the most effective means of advancing their cause.

Israeli Security:

• Israel would be far more secure within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders than attempting to defend an archipelago of illegal settlements amidst a hostile population. Israelis have died from political violence in greater numbers in the occupied territories than within Israel itself. Similarly, Israel utilizes far more troops as occupation forces than it does defending the country's borders or maintaining internal security.
• As reiterated in the recent Arab summit in Beirut, an Israeli withdrawal to within its internationally recognized borders (perhaps with some minor and reciprocal adjustments), would result in the security guarantees and full normalized relations from Arab states that Israel has long sought. This would put both Israel and its neighbors into compliance with UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, long considered to be the basis for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, and recently reiterated by the Bush administration as the basis of U.S. policy.

The Peace Process:

• On virtually all of the outstanding issues in the peace process (the extent of the Israeli withdrawal, the fate of the Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees), the Palestinian negotiating position is far more consistent with international law, UN Security Council resolutions, and U.S. policy prior to the Clinton administration than is the Israeli negotiating position.

United States Policy:

• The United States' contradictory role as the chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as the chief military, economic, and diplomatic supporter of Israel's occupation has been a major contribution to the collapse of the peace process. Since 1969, the U.S. has used its veto power in the UN Security Council to protect Israel from censure for its violations of international law more than thirty times. Tacit Bush administration support for Israeli offensives in the West Bank in March-April 2002 revealed the complete isolation of U.S. policy toward this conflict in the international arena. The U.S. has so far lost credibility as a broker in the peace process that it should step down. Instead, the U.S. should support UN efforts, most urgently a peacekeeping force, to resolve the conflict based on principles of international law and good-faith negotiations.
• U.S. diplomats have encouraged anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world by greatly exaggerating to their counterparts the influence of American Jews in shaping U.S. foreign policy as a means of avoiding responsibility for U.S. use of Israel to advance its own strategic interests. A more balanced U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine is urgent to undercut the anti-Jewish appeals of some elements in the Arab and Islamic world.
• Israel's ongoing violations of internationally recognized human rights standards--including mass detention without charge, collective punishment, destruction of civilian targets, extrajudicial killings, and torture on an administrative basis--requires a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel under the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids security assistance to any government which "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights" without a waiver [22 U.S.C. Secs. 2034, 2151n]. The U.S. must make military and other aid to Israel conditional upon its progress in ending the occupation and negotiating in good faith on other outstanding issues in the peace process.

(Stephen Zunes, <zunes@usfca.edu> FPIF's Mideast Editor, compiled these talking points together with Chris Toensing, <ctoensing@merip.org> editor of the Middle East Report.)

II. Letters and Comments

MIDEAST LUNACY

Lev Grinberg's article "Israel's State Terrorism" (online at http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0204israel.html ) shows an amazing lack of intelligence for one purporting to be a university academic. Does he not realize that Arafat is aiding and abetting these poor desperate souls who commit these unspeakable acts of barbarity. These bombers are manipulated and paid for their deliberate indiscriminate attacks on usually helpless elderly people, women, and children. Then miscreant myopes like Grinberg try to draw a nonsensical moral equivalence to the action of Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinian gunmen and "policemen" (read soldiers) in retaliation. What lunacy and sheer hypocrisy.

- L. Klein <gasman@dr.com>

MIDEAST RATIONALITY

"Israel's State Terrorism" was a great article. I tend to ignore most of the news these days due to anti-Palestinian sentiment and a lack of facts. It's fantastic to finally read a rational article that is based on facts, not fabrications.

- Shervin

NO FUTURE FOR AMERICA

Your column on PNAC and the neoconservatives (online at http://www.fpif.org/papers/02right/index.html ) is frankly scary. William Bennett may well be one of the most dangerous menaces to the American Way since Ike left office. Mr. Clinton was so assailed by this group of people, who spent billions trying to hinder everything he did, that he wound up a very ineffective president, but at least he did little harm.

The Reagan administration, while being a "feel good, real good" group, led by a charismatic man, left us in a true dilemma, some of which has been repaired. There is no future for America in what I am seeing now. No matter the rhetoric, we are not the guardians of the world; ours is not the only way, and I am deeply troubled by the necessity of the "Judeo-Christian" right attempting to force its values upon the average citizen. I can understand why this is happening, but I cannot understand why the "bad liberal media" is not screaming. Are we now so afraid to speak out, for fear of being branded traitor?

God bless America, God help America, we sure need it.

- David Pruett <hesedlv@ipa.net>

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