The Black Panther Party and Palestine Solidarity
Matthew Quest
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PANW Editor's Note: The views expressed in the following article are those of the author and do not reflect the editorial viewpoint of the Pan-African News Wire.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We Are Against the Government that Will Persecute the Palestinian People": Clarifying the Position of the Black Panther Party in Huey Newton’s To Die For The People
Huey Newton, with Bobby Seale, was cofounder of the Black Panther Party (BPP). According to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a campaign by the state to disrupt domestic radical political organizations, the BPP was said to be one of the major threats to American national security in the twentieth century. In their battles against white supremacy and empire, the BPP throughout its history (1966-1982), was more accurately a profound threat to the American ruling class.
The Panthers, as an autonomous Black liberation organization, embodied for many both the independent validity of the expression of revolutionary Black nationalism, and the need to forge principled multi-racial united fronts to fight injustice. Organizing armed community patrols to fight police brutality, breakfast for children, independent media, and community health programs; the Panthers for a time forged a socialist ethic of popular self-management through direct action among urban working class African-American communities, and became an international inspiration toward a free society. The BPP had many linkages to insurgent national liberation movements and defiant communist regimes in Vietnam, Cuba, China, Algeria, and Mozambique, to name merely a few.[1]
Perhaps the international solidarity linkage most overlooked and relevant to contemporary battles against empire is the Panthers’ solidarity with Palestine[2]. The following is an examination of the BPP’s stance on Palestine through one historical text, Huey Newton’s communiqué “On The Middle East” (1970) in his volume of collected writings, To Die For The People (1972, 1995)[3]. It is beyond the scope of this essay to comprehensively document historical opinion of the BPP as a whole, which should not be confused with the ideas of one of its major leaders. To do so, it would be necessary to examine views of many of the thousands of members and local chapters nationwide. Rather, the following is an analysis of this one statement by Newton for insights to contemporary struggles for building Palestine solidarity with a particular concern for African American linkages, accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry, and opposing not any particular policy of Israel, but this colonial settler state as a whole.
On September 5, 1970 the BPP called a press conference in response to media allegations, and a memo spread internationally through embassies, that there was a Panther delegation in Jordan led by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) promoting the interests of the Black Power movement’s solidarity with Palestine “against the Jewish people.” Stokely Carmichael was a major leader of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)[4], a multi-racial organization famous for using direct action in the Jim Crow South to register Black folks to vote. He became famous for leading the transformation of SNCC into a black nationalist organization. Huey Newton repudiated this news item about Carmichael and the Panthers as incorrect for two reasons before explaining in more general terms the BPP’s philosophy toward Palestine solidarity in a climate of numerous accusations that the Panthers were “anti-Semitic.”
First, the Panthers did not have a delegation in Jordan. They did have an authorized international chapter based in Algeria, led by Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, and these Panthers were in “daily contact” with the Palestine Liberation Organization.[5] Second, Newton distanced the BPP from Carmichael, who was briefly associated with them after the decline of SNCC, continuing a series of unwise destructive exchanges discussing their political differences in public. Admittedly “without evidence”, but under the pressure of COINTELPRO tactics of disruption, Newton sadly accused Carmichael of being a CIA agent, largely over strategic differences in the African American liberation struggle.[6] However, their political differences, as discussed by Newton, are worthy of our attention. Not because he fairly characterized all of Carmichael’s positions at that time, or in view of history Carmichael’s evolving political philosophy in comparison with his own. Rather, because Newton asserts certain principles critical to Black and by extension Palestinian liberation.[7]
Newton took issue with the BPP being reported as doing solidarity work under the banner of “Black Power,” a slogan originally closely associated with Carmichael. Carmichael in these years inconsistently advocated socialism and saw the highest stage of Black Power as Pan-Africanism. Newton critical of ethnic capitalism as the collective economics of liberation, illustrated a similarity between Stokely Carmichael’s and Richard Nixon’s opportunistic support for “black capitalism.”[8] Further while expressing his support for African liberation struggles against imperialism, Newton could not support Pan-Africanism because too many advocates of this philosophy were African governments which in fact aligned themselves with U.S. imperialism.
In other words, these governments are saying that if the United States will let us exist as a class to oppress our African people then we will cooperate; in other words Black oppressing Black…We know that without the support of the United States imperialism no reactionary government can exist. So we are very careful when we start supporting a government that has relationships in support of the United States.[9]
Newton was seeking to demonstrate “the Black Panther Party [was] internationalist,” and this meant not just international solidarity with all peoples oppressed by white supremacy but international resistance against all whom he understood to be the bodyguards of capital.[10] He did not think the establishment of socialism would automatically eliminate white supremacy but that “the only way to start changing the racist nature of the society is to revolutionize or transform the institutions” of society.[11]
Huey Newton in this statement “On the Middle East” had to preface it with an acknowledgement the Panthers were being attacked for being anti-Semitic, that individual members had in the past said some hurtful inappropriate things towards Jews which could be publicly cited by enemies of his party, but the official position of the BPP was not anti-Semitic.[12] The Panthers were in the whirlwind of national media incidents where Black Power was in conflict with Jewish Americans.[13] Capitalist economic relations, marked by white racism and ethnic competition for and control over scarce resources, explains, not excuses, some pejorative epithets against Jews by some Black community activists.[14] However, it was also a fact that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program was using Black-Jewish tensions as a wedge to disrupt sympathy for the Panthers including manufacturing conflicts which had no material basis.[15] Emerging out of this difficult climate Newton stated the following:
As far as the Israeli people are concerned we are not against the Jewish people. We are against that government that will persecute the Palestinian people. We have to admit that there is something wrong in the Middle East. The Palestinian people are living in hovels, they don’t have any land, they’ve been stripped and murdered; and we cannot support that for any reason.[16]
Huey Newton then explains he recognized the “shortcomings” of what was supposed to be the progressive United Arab Republic, and the inability or lack of desire of other Arab nation-states, to consistently defend Palestine.[17] He believed that everyday Palestinian people were in the forefront of liberating the Middle East, and that he was in solidarity as well with the few Israelis “who were working to see that the Zionist government of Israel is transformed into a secular people’s state” instead of one which privileged those of a certain religion.[18] Newton said Israel was based on “the height of chauvinism and ethnocentrism” and contrasting the Panther viewpoint with Israel’s claim as representative of every Jewish person he stated: “We are chiefly interested in the survival of our people, but not at the expense of other people.”[19]
After implying African Americans have a shared history of racial and colonial oppression with Jews and Palestinians and thus a tendency towards solidarity with both, Huey Newton then shares a comparative view on Jewish autonomy, as supposedly represented by the state of Israel, and the hope for Black self-determination in America. It has an immediate relevance to the struggle for Palestinian autonomy as well.
We have a long history of being enslaved and murdered. We have wrestled with the question of nationalism and we have concluded we have a moral right to embrace nationalism. We have a moral right to choose separatism, just as the Jewish people have that moral right. But we realize that the United States will not allow us to separate and live side by side with United States Imperialism. It’s obvious that we can not become self-determined because the United States will not let countries exist 15 million miles away in freedom…so they will certainly not let us exist in a separate state in North America in freedom. So the question can be put into the future.[20]
Newton in this statement causes the reader to ask why has the US embraced the nation-state of Israel as representative of Jewish autonomy when it allows no other nationality of historically oppressed peoples to be self-determining miles away or within its own borders? Newton exclaims “our central task is the overthrow of the ruling circle, who will not permit the question of self-determination to exist in this world.”[21]
This transformation can only take place by wiping out United States imperialism and establishing a new earth, a new society, a new world. So politically and strategically the correct action to take is not separation but world revolution in order to wipe out imperialism. Then people will be free to decide their destiny. Self-determination and national liberation can not really exist while United States imperialism is alive. That is why we don’t support nationalism as our goal. [22]
“In some instances,” Newton explained he did support revolutionary nationalism, such as some aspects of the Palestinian national liberation struggle, “as a strategy.” This is because:
The motives are internationalist because the revolutionists are attempting to secure liberated territory in order to choke imperialism by cutting them off from the countryside. [However,] when the motive for national liberation is solely to create a capitalist state so that the ruling circle of that capitalist state can align itself with [U.S.] imperialism, then it is reactionary nationalism and can not be supported by revolutionaries.[23]
Unfortunately, this conservative motive for national liberation, which fairly characterizes Zionism, overlords Palestinian national liberation as well to this day led by Yasir Arafat, once their defender and ally of the BPP, now a dictator.[24] This is true whether the U.S. rulers characterizes him as such or imagine still he is their best hope for a dependent pawn as head of an oppressive future Palestinian regime.
Huey Newton characterizes accurately an appropriate standard for anti-racist solidarity with Jewish, Arab, and Muslim individuals and communities as historically oppressed peoples. Do they allow their nationalism to be a pawn for imperialism? Do they oppose not merely some policies of the state of Israel but the Zionist government as a whole?
Israel was created by Western imperialism and maintained by Western fire power. The Jewish people have a right to exist [there] as long as they exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli government. [The African American] situation is similar in so many ways; we say that morally perhaps, the Jewish people can make a case for separatism and a Zionist state based upon their religion for self-defense. We say morally perhaps we could accept this, but politically and strategically we know it is incorrect. In the first place it is perpetuating nationalism…if nationalism is reaction, and I think the United States proves this by using nationalism to rape the world and dominate everyone else. In other words, it went from nationalism to the natural conclusion which is empire or imperialism. So the Jewish people must be careful not to be an agent of imperialism.[25]
Huey Newton concludes this communiqué “On the Middle East” with acknowledgement of two positive developments which he saw emerging three decades ago and a sharp declarative statement. First, Newton felt there was emerging a vocal minority of Jewish people struggling against the racist tactics of the Zionist Israeli government. He expressed the Panthers’ solidarity as evidence they were not anti-Semitic. Second, Newton thought it was a great development that the Arab and Muslim nation states were showing their true colors; their “contradictory” incapacity to defend Palestinian freedom, for to do so compromised the relative privileges of their rulers with American imperialism and inspired visions of freedom among their own subjects.
Finally, Newton took a clear stand against the perpetual assault by Zionist Jews, who insist to be opposed to the state of Israel is to attack the Jewish community as a whole:
We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such. We have respect for all people, and we have respect for the right of any people to exist. So we want the Palestinian people and the Jewish people to live in harmony together. We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live. [26]
Footnotes:
For global dimensions of the influence of the BPP see Michael L. Clemons’ and Charles E. Jones’ “Global Solidarity: the Black Panther Party in the International Arena.” In New Political Science. 21.2 (1999) 177-204.
Perhaps another international BPP solidarity alliance neglected, related to this story, beyond the scope of this article, but deserving of its own in light of Palestine solidarity is the story of the Black Panther Party of Israel, an organization of “oriental Jews” fighting discrimination against the European dominated Zionist state. See Deborah Bernstein’s “Conflict and Protest in Israeli Society: The Case of the Black Panthers of Israel.” Youth and Society. 14 (1984) 129-151.
Huey P. Newton. “On The Middle East.” In To Die For the People. New York: Random House, 1972. 191-197. The new 1995 edition by the publisher Writers and Readers may be more accessible.
The standard work on SNCC is Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
These basic facts in the Newton “On the Middle East” document were briefly introduced by another Panther David Hilliard. For further information on the Panther’s Algeria chapter see Kathleen Neal Cleaver’s “Back to Africa: the Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972)” In Charles E. Jones ed. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998. 211-256.
Newton, 191.
An informative treatment of Stokely Carmichael’s politics in the context of the Black Power era can be found in Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.
An older text worth examining on the emergence of “black capitalism” as a political force which clearly illustrates how populist ethnic entrepreneurial schemes undermine the class struggle within national liberation movements is Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s The Myth of Black Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
Newton, 192.
Ibid, 192.
Ibid, 193.
Ibid, 193.
These included other Black Power groups support of Palestine, such as SNCC’s and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’, as well as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn, NY) public school strike for Black community control which clashed with the predominantly Jewish teachers’ union.
An interesting argument is made that one source of Black resentment towards Jews is consistent with African resentment to middle or model minorities such as Koreans, South Asians, and Arabs. See Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.
The Jewish Defense League (JDL) was invented with the help of the FBI to disrupt Black liberation struggles in NYC. See Robert I. Friedman’s The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant To Knesset Member. Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990. 96-97.
Newton, 193-194.
The United Arab Republic was a nominal Pan-Arab secular federation of nation-states which was led by Gamal Nasser’s Egypt in unity with Syria and for a time Iraq. Defense of Palestine was often the populist basis for this union. Appearing a strong presence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and decimated in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, by 1970 the U.A.R. was proven a myth as a serious opponent of Israel.
Newton, 194.
Ibid, 194.
Ibid, 194.
Ibid, 195.
Ibid, 195.
Ibid, 195.
A concise informative biography of Yasir Arafat is Said K. Aburish’s Arafat: From Defender to Dictator. New York: Bloomsbury, 1998.Newton, 195-196.
Newton, 195-196.
Ibid, 196.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Arab-Americans & Palestine Solidarity
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Arab Americans and Palestine Solidarity
Lauren Ray
Palestine solidarity activists face intimidation. If we are talented at what we do, organizing and educating about the nature of Israel’s white supremacy and colonialism, it is a real risk that we may lose our jobs or get thrown out of school. That the media, the twin managers of corporate capital and trade union bureaucracy, and even so-called defenders of intellectual freedom are liable to turn against us is an occupational hazard. John Watson, member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and student editor of the South End, the campus newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, confronted these obstacles in 1968.The paper published an article/editorial favorable toward Palestinian guerrilla operations against Israel. The reaction far outstripped anything before thrown at the South End and set off a series of events that would lead to Watson being pushed out as editor.
Meanwhile in the auto plants of Detroit, thousands of Arab immigrants were laboring, like their African American co-workers, under difficult conditions and represented by a United Auto Workers (UAW) union that was, when not openly hostile, showed willful neglect. By 1973 the number of Arab auto workers had grown significantly. As a sign of increasing militancy, they organized against Leonard Woodcock, then president of the UAW, for accepting an award from B’nai B’rith and against Local 600 for buying Israeli bonds. As well, whereas in the past they had often crossed the picket lines, these Arab auto workers participated in the wildcat strikes called by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
Racial and class subordination at home, along with imperialism abroad, produced important and significant activity among Black and Arab workers in the Detroit area. Looking at such a confluence can bring historical weight to the vital strategic importance of a principled and consistent anti-racist democratic perspective which is independent and antagonistic to the permanent hypocrisy of the politicians, local officials, administrators and the union bosses.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers arose out of the growing militancy of the Black Freedom Movement during the 1960s.[1] The struggle for black autonomy, that found its form in both non-violent direct action and armed uprisings across the U.S., was being unrelentingly repressed by the forces of coercion protecting white supremacy. The so-called progressive moves by the state to expand public welfare and civil rights legislation were finally implemented to subdue rebellious masses (not forge a “Great Society” as the state pretended). Out of continued frustration, anger, and the hopeless limitations of these progressive moves, Black communities exploded from Watts to Newark to Detroit.
The Detroit rebellion of July 1967 was one of the largest Black insurrections this country has seen. It lasted about five days, and during that time African Americans responded to years of police brutality and oppression in the workplace by taking to the streets and battling all the forces of coercion that the U.S. state had to offer—the Detroit police, the National Guard and the U.S. army were called out to suppress the uprising.
Out of the ashes of the city wide rebellion, Black workers brought militant rebellion directly to their capitalist managers. In May of 1968, while the world was watching an epic uprising in France of workers and students which nearly toppled the French rulers, between three and four thousand workers participated in a wildcat strike at the Dodge Main auto plant. This strike was a protest against two main factors. First, black workers were being stifled in the factory by racist policies that kept them in the most back-breaking jobs with no chance of promotion or pay increase. At a time when intellectuals were theorizing about automation making workers obsolete, black workers at another plant were beginning to refer with ironic humor to the conditions of labor they faced as “niggermation.”
Second, Black workers faced racism in the unions, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), which the League renamed “U Ain’t White” for its policies of discrimination and exclusion towards black folks. This fact has not always been clear in the historical record because the major leader of the UAW, Walter Reuther, while doing nothing to fight racism where he had the power to do so inside his own union, has been written up more as a symbol of unity between civil rights and organized labor than for his actual substance.[2]
Several of the Black workers decided to organize the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). A number of other RUMs were soon established at other factories in Detroit including the famous and huge Ford River Rouge Plant, and Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant, but also with spinoffs nationally.[3] With increasing success and popularity of RUM wildcat strikes and popular associations among black workers, an umbrella organization, named the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), was created in 1969 to centralize the organizing efforts.
During its short lifetime, the LRBW was to become a radical beacon of light in the struggle for Black autonomy in a turbulent time of political assassinations, state repression, and growing imperialist aggression at the hands of the U.S. state. The founding leaders of the LRBW along with John Watson were Ken Cockrel, Luke Tripp, Mike Hamlin, General Baker, and Chuck Wooten. Ernest Allen and James Forman would play prominent roles subsequently. They would be inspired by such precursors as the Afro-American Student Movement, the ideas of CLR James and James and Grace Lee Boggs, Pan-Africanism, and Third World Marxist ideas associated with China and Cuba. There would be a permanent tension between race and class as a prism for maintaining the direction of the LRBW’s political philosophy which would lead ultimately to its collapse.
On one hand the LRBW with its initial dual unionism approach was not advocating for a progressive ruling class, where folks of color would replace the colonial or white rulers to whom they were currently enslaved. On the other, their dual unionism did not maintain ideals of working class self-management but contributed to the compromise of affirmative action in both union and managerial leadership. However, in keeping focus on their international outlook, they did maintain that the key to worldwide liberation lie in the dismantling of white supremacy and empire, and the creation of societies based on the self-determination of all people. Elements from the DRUM constitution demonstrate this aspect of internationalism within the LRBW. The organizers wrote:
We recognize our struggle is not an isolated one and that we have common cause with the black workers in this racist nation and throughout the world…By being in the forefront of this revolutionary struggle we must act swiftly to help organize DRUM-type organizations…be it in Lynn Townsend’s kitchen, the White House, White Castle, Ford Rouge, the Mississippi Delta, the plains of Wyoming, the tin mines of Bolivia, the rubber plantation of Indonesia, the oil fields of Biafra, or the Chrysler plants in South Africa.[4]
The LRBW’s solidarity with international struggles found its way into many of the organization’s writings. Every organization needs its mouthpiece, and for some time the messenger for DRUM, and later the League, was the Inner City Voice (ICV). A publication distributed mostly among Black workers in the various Detroit auto factories, it was originally published in 1967. When funding began to run out for the ICV a year later, the DRUM organizers sought another outlet through which they could continue to advocate autonomous organization of the Black workers and denounce institutionalized oppressions.
John Watson soon found that opportunity when, as a student at Wayne State University, he ran for editor of the student newspaper and won. The South End was turned into an important outlet for LRBW perspectives and a mass circulation paper. Watson sought to distribute the paper off-campus as well. It would become a platform for which it advocated support for a number of national liberation and guerilla warfare struggles in Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa as well as Palestine, making systematic connections between conditions at home and struggles abroad.[5] Making these connections was to lead the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to cultivate links with Arab groups and showing films on the Palestinian struggle. Finally, in 1973, Watson went to the Middle East and met with Palestinian guerrilla organizations.
“Pandora’s Box”[6]
After Watson published the editorial statement on Palestinian resistance to Israel in Wayne State’s student paper, President Keast of the university—already eager to remove Watson because of the publishing of articles on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marxism and the struggle in Greece, as well as local controversies such as attacking the United Auto Workers leadership—attacked the paper saying it was “reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany.”[7] City, state, union officials, local papers and television shortly followed suit, culminating in an arson attack on South End offices. The alumni group and state legislature threatened to cut off funding and even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made a censuring statement. A Pandora’s Box was opened.
Watson’s response cut to the heart of the matter. If all of these people were so horrified by racism then why did all of the critics of the editorial say nothing about the institutional racism against Black and Arab workers in the auto plants or in the city. Official society protested criticism of the abuses committed by the Zionist state, and yet remained silent about the abuses being suffered by Black and Arab workers in Detroit, even though the facts and figures displayed these abuses for all to see. Watson also asked why some critics of the editorial belonged to the exclusive Detroit Athletic Club, which discriminated against Jews, or lived in the exclusive suburb Gross Pointe, known to discriminate against Blacks. For Watson the South End, like the League, took a stand against all forms of racism but the critics only selectively and disingenuously responded to racism when it benefited them. Further, Detroit had the largest Arab population in the United States and he wondered why they were so dangerous that their points of view had to be kept in the closet at all costs.
Considering Watson’s response from a contemporary point of view is rewarding. While today’s politicians, union officials, alumni groups and newspapers piously celebrate jumbled and falsified versions of the African and African American freedom struggles, the Arab struggle is designated still as a major enemy. The discontents and battles fought by Arab Americans are silenced as the state attempts to mold them into another “model minority,” when convenient, leaving suppressed a rich history of resistance, especially surrounding Palestine solidarity. On the other hand, when Palestinians and Arabs do not comply, the state, politicians, experts and “responsible” leaders mobilize the rainbow-colored coalition against the “bad races.” This reflects the structural relations in the Middle East where the Palestinian struggle is in the forefront of fighting imperialism and colonialism. The “Pandora’s Box” is indicative of this important point. The greater the oppression the greater the hysteria over the racial threat found in the Arab peoples and, in particular Palestinians.
We are told that Palestine solidarity arose in the states during the 1980s by white college kids. This historical account offered to us, like most accounts of U.S. history we receive in school and elsewhere, ignores not only the more radical grassroots elements of Palestine solidarity among Arab Americans, but likewise the essential multi-racial alliances forged by Arab Americans with African Americans, among other groups. White supremacy and imperialism cross all racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries and have been the tools facilitating the oppression of peoples in Detroit and around the globe. As one radical group operating out of the Dodge Main plant put it, “Chrysler figures that no one will try to help an Arab worker when Chrysler attacks him. So now Chrysler is attacking…It’s the same kind of shit they have pulled with black people.”[8]
Many Arab workers in turn honored wildcat strikes called by the League and when their numbers increased they became more organized, like Black workers, independently within the union. The confluence of fighting white supremacy in the union and the auto plant and in Israel/Palestine took shape in organizational form during this period in Detroit. Arab workers like African American workers got the worst jobs and the least pay – something the union facilitated for the management. Union leadership, had since just after the Second World War, worked with capitalist management to discipline workers from any further advance toward control of the union and ultimately production. Further, union bureaucracy worked with management to use people of color workers as strike breaking leverage, while at the same time tried to keep them out of the union or from forming their own organizations.
By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Arab workers were experiencing this same dynamic. Not only did they get low pay, the worst jobs, and were the first to be fired. But when the local union boss, Leonard Woodcock accepted a Humanitarian Award from B’nai B’rith, Arab and other workers walked off the job as two afternoon shifts were shut down to protest the UAW purchase of Israeli bonds. When Ford local 600 union bought Israeli bonds, only adding to its three-quarters of a million in bonds it already held, Arab workers decided to organize against union leadership. Arab workers made the argument that the Union should not be invested in the Zionist state just like it should not be invested in the Afrikaaner or Rhodesian regime. 3,000 marched to the union’s offices.[9] The ignoring and coercion of Arab workers by the union bureaucrats and the management was part of a long history of racism and class warfare against the rank and file that is still with us today.
This Pandora’s Box in America, its explosive potential for fundamental change, suggests two lessons on some of the key struggles of this period for our own time. The first was in the contradictions within the union between discipline from above and rank-and-file control of the union and, ultimately, moving out into control of production in the plant. The second was the contradictions between two forces. While all along the state and official society talked about democracy and freedom, there was racism directed against Black and Arab workers and students at home along with U.S. support abroad for the racist war in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and the Portuguese colonies, and Apartheid under the Afrikaaner and Zionist regimes. On the other was the struggle by ordinary people against this systematic racial oppression. These two diametrically opposed traditions of democracy still hold their explosive force today – one seeking to enforce racial and class discipline from above in the name of democracy and freedom, and the other the struggle and implementation of self-government towards the abolishment of class and white supremacy from below.
Conclusion
Arab and African American workers never formed an organization coming out of this period of ferment in early 1970’s Detroit. However, what is important is that Black and Arab workers, while coming from different cultural histories, found themselves together under white supremacy and capitalism in the U.S., and African and Arab nations attacked and subordinated by imperialism and settler colonialism abroad. Facing this they began to move in the same direction. The explosiveness of the Palestine/Israel situation was indicative of this. Nowhere in the world are the contradictions of imperialism and liberal and social democracy so sharp and clear than in the oppression of the Palestinians. Watson and the LRBW’s experience shows how the officials who said they support civil rights could say so little about the exploitation of Black people and workers in Detroit and elsewhere, or about the oppression of the Palestinian people. At this point the state had assimilated the civil rights agenda and used it as a way to beat back more fundamental change suggested by aspects of the Black Power movement, including efforts towards an end to imperialism and colonialism abroad, such as that which the Palestinians live under in the Jewish state. We are witnessing a similar trend today, as rulers, politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S. and Palestine/Israel pay lip service to the desire for peace and justice, while blatantly working to destroy any such hopes by denying return of refugees, equal access for Palestinians to land and water resources, open travel, and the support of Arab-only zones, both financially and militarily.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was not the only Black radical organization of its era to express support for Palestine’s freedom; numerous groups, from SNCC to the Black Panther Party, likewise expressed solidarity with Palestinians. At the same time the League’s solidarity was unique in several ways that we can draw lessons from today. The organization of workers, both in Palestine/Israel and here in the U.S., will be essential to a successful fight against the institutions, such as white supremacy, which oppress us. This is especially instrumental for divestment campaigns; we cannot organize, isolated on our campuses from the outside world, but must actively incorporate the local communities and the thousands of workers who are involved with and give support to our universities. Likewise, the struggle for a free Palestine is not an Arab or Arab American battle, but must be a multi-racial, multi-ethnic struggle of all justice seeking peoples who are opposed to imperialist and racist agendas. And finally, our struggle must be against all forces which desire to block the self-activity of the Palestinians to liberate themselves—from Arafat and his lackeys, to Western imperialists, to Zionists (leftist, liberal or right-wing). As the League wrote so many years ago, we must continue to battle those enemies “who would further impoverish the poor, exploit the exploited, and take advantage of the powerless.”
Thanks to Aaron Michael Love and Matthew Quest for their assistance with this article.
Footnotes
The definitive study of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers is Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. 2nd ed. Boston: South End Press, 1998. The other major full length account is James Geschwender’s Class, Race and Worker’s Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Cambridge University Press, 1977. The following are two other important accounts. Ernest Allen. “Dying for the Inside: the Decline of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” In They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee. Dick Cluster ed. Boston: South End Press, 1979.; Akbar Muhammad Ahmad. “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: A Historical Study.” Circa 1979. Collective Action Notes. 13 October, 2003.
Walter Reuther was the major representative speaker for organized labor at the Dr. Martin Luther King led March on Washington of 1963 – one of the many reasons Malcolm X’s assessment of it as “The Farce on Washington” needs to be remembered. For a vision of Walter Reuther seen at his most progressive see Nelson Lictensstein’s The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995. For a critique of this study see “Walter Reuther and the Decline of the American Labor Movement.” In Martin Glaberman’s Punching Out and Other Writings. Staughton Lynd, ed. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2002. 64-92.
These national spin off included RUMS in the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama, and auto plants in Fremont, California, Baltimore, Maryland, and Mahwah, New Jersey. For insight on the latter see “Wilbur Haddock on the United Black Brothers.” Souls. 2.2 (Spring 2000): 27-33.
DRUM Constitution (1968) quoted in “Black revolutionary union Movement: Drum, The League, BWC.” EBlack Studies. 1 September, 2003. Lynn Townsend was the corporate chairman of Chrysler at that time. Biafra was predominately Igbo republic breaking away from the nation-state in the Nigeria Civil War which began in 1967.
John Watson (Sept. 26, 1968) quoted by Nicole Lanctot in “Revolution at Wayne State’s Student Newspaper from 1968-1969.” In South End. 13, November, 2002. 1 September.
Quoted in Georgakas and Surkin, p. 51. The phrase was used by a comrade of Watson’s, Nick Medvecky, at the South End: “When John Watson and myself, as the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of last year’s South End, came out with a front page news/editorial statement on Al Fatah, little did we realize at the time what a Pandora’s Box had been opened.” Inner City Voice, November 1969.
Ibid.; pg. 51-52.
Ibid.; pg. 30.
Ibid.; pg. 65
Lauren Ray
Palestine solidarity activists face intimidation. If we are talented at what we do, organizing and educating about the nature of Israel’s white supremacy and colonialism, it is a real risk that we may lose our jobs or get thrown out of school. That the media, the twin managers of corporate capital and trade union bureaucracy, and even so-called defenders of intellectual freedom are liable to turn against us is an occupational hazard. John Watson, member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and student editor of the South End, the campus newspaper of Wayne State University in Detroit, confronted these obstacles in 1968.The paper published an article/editorial favorable toward Palestinian guerrilla operations against Israel. The reaction far outstripped anything before thrown at the South End and set off a series of events that would lead to Watson being pushed out as editor.
Meanwhile in the auto plants of Detroit, thousands of Arab immigrants were laboring, like their African American co-workers, under difficult conditions and represented by a United Auto Workers (UAW) union that was, when not openly hostile, showed willful neglect. By 1973 the number of Arab auto workers had grown significantly. As a sign of increasing militancy, they organized against Leonard Woodcock, then president of the UAW, for accepting an award from B’nai B’rith and against Local 600 for buying Israeli bonds. As well, whereas in the past they had often crossed the picket lines, these Arab auto workers participated in the wildcat strikes called by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
Racial and class subordination at home, along with imperialism abroad, produced important and significant activity among Black and Arab workers in the Detroit area. Looking at such a confluence can bring historical weight to the vital strategic importance of a principled and consistent anti-racist democratic perspective which is independent and antagonistic to the permanent hypocrisy of the politicians, local officials, administrators and the union bosses.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers arose out of the growing militancy of the Black Freedom Movement during the 1960s.[1] The struggle for black autonomy, that found its form in both non-violent direct action and armed uprisings across the U.S., was being unrelentingly repressed by the forces of coercion protecting white supremacy. The so-called progressive moves by the state to expand public welfare and civil rights legislation were finally implemented to subdue rebellious masses (not forge a “Great Society” as the state pretended). Out of continued frustration, anger, and the hopeless limitations of these progressive moves, Black communities exploded from Watts to Newark to Detroit.
The Detroit rebellion of July 1967 was one of the largest Black insurrections this country has seen. It lasted about five days, and during that time African Americans responded to years of police brutality and oppression in the workplace by taking to the streets and battling all the forces of coercion that the U.S. state had to offer—the Detroit police, the National Guard and the U.S. army were called out to suppress the uprising.
Out of the ashes of the city wide rebellion, Black workers brought militant rebellion directly to their capitalist managers. In May of 1968, while the world was watching an epic uprising in France of workers and students which nearly toppled the French rulers, between three and four thousand workers participated in a wildcat strike at the Dodge Main auto plant. This strike was a protest against two main factors. First, black workers were being stifled in the factory by racist policies that kept them in the most back-breaking jobs with no chance of promotion or pay increase. At a time when intellectuals were theorizing about automation making workers obsolete, black workers at another plant were beginning to refer with ironic humor to the conditions of labor they faced as “niggermation.”
Second, Black workers faced racism in the unions, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), which the League renamed “U Ain’t White” for its policies of discrimination and exclusion towards black folks. This fact has not always been clear in the historical record because the major leader of the UAW, Walter Reuther, while doing nothing to fight racism where he had the power to do so inside his own union, has been written up more as a symbol of unity between civil rights and organized labor than for his actual substance.[2]
Several of the Black workers decided to organize the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). A number of other RUMs were soon established at other factories in Detroit including the famous and huge Ford River Rouge Plant, and Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant, but also with spinoffs nationally.[3] With increasing success and popularity of RUM wildcat strikes and popular associations among black workers, an umbrella organization, named the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), was created in 1969 to centralize the organizing efforts.
During its short lifetime, the LRBW was to become a radical beacon of light in the struggle for Black autonomy in a turbulent time of political assassinations, state repression, and growing imperialist aggression at the hands of the U.S. state. The founding leaders of the LRBW along with John Watson were Ken Cockrel, Luke Tripp, Mike Hamlin, General Baker, and Chuck Wooten. Ernest Allen and James Forman would play prominent roles subsequently. They would be inspired by such precursors as the Afro-American Student Movement, the ideas of CLR James and James and Grace Lee Boggs, Pan-Africanism, and Third World Marxist ideas associated with China and Cuba. There would be a permanent tension between race and class as a prism for maintaining the direction of the LRBW’s political philosophy which would lead ultimately to its collapse.
On one hand the LRBW with its initial dual unionism approach was not advocating for a progressive ruling class, where folks of color would replace the colonial or white rulers to whom they were currently enslaved. On the other, their dual unionism did not maintain ideals of working class self-management but contributed to the compromise of affirmative action in both union and managerial leadership. However, in keeping focus on their international outlook, they did maintain that the key to worldwide liberation lie in the dismantling of white supremacy and empire, and the creation of societies based on the self-determination of all people. Elements from the DRUM constitution demonstrate this aspect of internationalism within the LRBW. The organizers wrote:
We recognize our struggle is not an isolated one and that we have common cause with the black workers in this racist nation and throughout the world…By being in the forefront of this revolutionary struggle we must act swiftly to help organize DRUM-type organizations…be it in Lynn Townsend’s kitchen, the White House, White Castle, Ford Rouge, the Mississippi Delta, the plains of Wyoming, the tin mines of Bolivia, the rubber plantation of Indonesia, the oil fields of Biafra, or the Chrysler plants in South Africa.[4]
The LRBW’s solidarity with international struggles found its way into many of the organization’s writings. Every organization needs its mouthpiece, and for some time the messenger for DRUM, and later the League, was the Inner City Voice (ICV). A publication distributed mostly among Black workers in the various Detroit auto factories, it was originally published in 1967. When funding began to run out for the ICV a year later, the DRUM organizers sought another outlet through which they could continue to advocate autonomous organization of the Black workers and denounce institutionalized oppressions.
John Watson soon found that opportunity when, as a student at Wayne State University, he ran for editor of the student newspaper and won. The South End was turned into an important outlet for LRBW perspectives and a mass circulation paper. Watson sought to distribute the paper off-campus as well. It would become a platform for which it advocated support for a number of national liberation and guerilla warfare struggles in Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa as well as Palestine, making systematic connections between conditions at home and struggles abroad.[5] Making these connections was to lead the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to cultivate links with Arab groups and showing films on the Palestinian struggle. Finally, in 1973, Watson went to the Middle East and met with Palestinian guerrilla organizations.
“Pandora’s Box”[6]
After Watson published the editorial statement on Palestinian resistance to Israel in Wayne State’s student paper, President Keast of the university—already eager to remove Watson because of the publishing of articles on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marxism and the struggle in Greece, as well as local controversies such as attacking the United Auto Workers leadership—attacked the paper saying it was “reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany.”[7] City, state, union officials, local papers and television shortly followed suit, culminating in an arson attack on South End offices. The alumni group and state legislature threatened to cut off funding and even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made a censuring statement. A Pandora’s Box was opened.
Watson’s response cut to the heart of the matter. If all of these people were so horrified by racism then why did all of the critics of the editorial say nothing about the institutional racism against Black and Arab workers in the auto plants or in the city. Official society protested criticism of the abuses committed by the Zionist state, and yet remained silent about the abuses being suffered by Black and Arab workers in Detroit, even though the facts and figures displayed these abuses for all to see. Watson also asked why some critics of the editorial belonged to the exclusive Detroit Athletic Club, which discriminated against Jews, or lived in the exclusive suburb Gross Pointe, known to discriminate against Blacks. For Watson the South End, like the League, took a stand against all forms of racism but the critics only selectively and disingenuously responded to racism when it benefited them. Further, Detroit had the largest Arab population in the United States and he wondered why they were so dangerous that their points of view had to be kept in the closet at all costs.
Considering Watson’s response from a contemporary point of view is rewarding. While today’s politicians, union officials, alumni groups and newspapers piously celebrate jumbled and falsified versions of the African and African American freedom struggles, the Arab struggle is designated still as a major enemy. The discontents and battles fought by Arab Americans are silenced as the state attempts to mold them into another “model minority,” when convenient, leaving suppressed a rich history of resistance, especially surrounding Palestine solidarity. On the other hand, when Palestinians and Arabs do not comply, the state, politicians, experts and “responsible” leaders mobilize the rainbow-colored coalition against the “bad races.” This reflects the structural relations in the Middle East where the Palestinian struggle is in the forefront of fighting imperialism and colonialism. The “Pandora’s Box” is indicative of this important point. The greater the oppression the greater the hysteria over the racial threat found in the Arab peoples and, in particular Palestinians.
We are told that Palestine solidarity arose in the states during the 1980s by white college kids. This historical account offered to us, like most accounts of U.S. history we receive in school and elsewhere, ignores not only the more radical grassroots elements of Palestine solidarity among Arab Americans, but likewise the essential multi-racial alliances forged by Arab Americans with African Americans, among other groups. White supremacy and imperialism cross all racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries and have been the tools facilitating the oppression of peoples in Detroit and around the globe. As one radical group operating out of the Dodge Main plant put it, “Chrysler figures that no one will try to help an Arab worker when Chrysler attacks him. So now Chrysler is attacking…It’s the same kind of shit they have pulled with black people.”[8]
Many Arab workers in turn honored wildcat strikes called by the League and when their numbers increased they became more organized, like Black workers, independently within the union. The confluence of fighting white supremacy in the union and the auto plant and in Israel/Palestine took shape in organizational form during this period in Detroit. Arab workers like African American workers got the worst jobs and the least pay – something the union facilitated for the management. Union leadership, had since just after the Second World War, worked with capitalist management to discipline workers from any further advance toward control of the union and ultimately production. Further, union bureaucracy worked with management to use people of color workers as strike breaking leverage, while at the same time tried to keep them out of the union or from forming their own organizations.
By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Arab workers were experiencing this same dynamic. Not only did they get low pay, the worst jobs, and were the first to be fired. But when the local union boss, Leonard Woodcock accepted a Humanitarian Award from B’nai B’rith, Arab and other workers walked off the job as two afternoon shifts were shut down to protest the UAW purchase of Israeli bonds. When Ford local 600 union bought Israeli bonds, only adding to its three-quarters of a million in bonds it already held, Arab workers decided to organize against union leadership. Arab workers made the argument that the Union should not be invested in the Zionist state just like it should not be invested in the Afrikaaner or Rhodesian regime. 3,000 marched to the union’s offices.[9] The ignoring and coercion of Arab workers by the union bureaucrats and the management was part of a long history of racism and class warfare against the rank and file that is still with us today.
This Pandora’s Box in America, its explosive potential for fundamental change, suggests two lessons on some of the key struggles of this period for our own time. The first was in the contradictions within the union between discipline from above and rank-and-file control of the union and, ultimately, moving out into control of production in the plant. The second was the contradictions between two forces. While all along the state and official society talked about democracy and freedom, there was racism directed against Black and Arab workers and students at home along with U.S. support abroad for the racist war in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and the Portuguese colonies, and Apartheid under the Afrikaaner and Zionist regimes. On the other was the struggle by ordinary people against this systematic racial oppression. These two diametrically opposed traditions of democracy still hold their explosive force today – one seeking to enforce racial and class discipline from above in the name of democracy and freedom, and the other the struggle and implementation of self-government towards the abolishment of class and white supremacy from below.
Conclusion
Arab and African American workers never formed an organization coming out of this period of ferment in early 1970’s Detroit. However, what is important is that Black and Arab workers, while coming from different cultural histories, found themselves together under white supremacy and capitalism in the U.S., and African and Arab nations attacked and subordinated by imperialism and settler colonialism abroad. Facing this they began to move in the same direction. The explosiveness of the Palestine/Israel situation was indicative of this. Nowhere in the world are the contradictions of imperialism and liberal and social democracy so sharp and clear than in the oppression of the Palestinians. Watson and the LRBW’s experience shows how the officials who said they support civil rights could say so little about the exploitation of Black people and workers in Detroit and elsewhere, or about the oppression of the Palestinian people. At this point the state had assimilated the civil rights agenda and used it as a way to beat back more fundamental change suggested by aspects of the Black Power movement, including efforts towards an end to imperialism and colonialism abroad, such as that which the Palestinians live under in the Jewish state. We are witnessing a similar trend today, as rulers, politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S. and Palestine/Israel pay lip service to the desire for peace and justice, while blatantly working to destroy any such hopes by denying return of refugees, equal access for Palestinians to land and water resources, open travel, and the support of Arab-only zones, both financially and militarily.
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was not the only Black radical organization of its era to express support for Palestine’s freedom; numerous groups, from SNCC to the Black Panther Party, likewise expressed solidarity with Palestinians. At the same time the League’s solidarity was unique in several ways that we can draw lessons from today. The organization of workers, both in Palestine/Israel and here in the U.S., will be essential to a successful fight against the institutions, such as white supremacy, which oppress us. This is especially instrumental for divestment campaigns; we cannot organize, isolated on our campuses from the outside world, but must actively incorporate the local communities and the thousands of workers who are involved with and give support to our universities. Likewise, the struggle for a free Palestine is not an Arab or Arab American battle, but must be a multi-racial, multi-ethnic struggle of all justice seeking peoples who are opposed to imperialist and racist agendas. And finally, our struggle must be against all forces which desire to block the self-activity of the Palestinians to liberate themselves—from Arafat and his lackeys, to Western imperialists, to Zionists (leftist, liberal or right-wing). As the League wrote so many years ago, we must continue to battle those enemies “who would further impoverish the poor, exploit the exploited, and take advantage of the powerless.”
Thanks to Aaron Michael Love and Matthew Quest for their assistance with this article.
Footnotes
The definitive study of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers is Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. 2nd ed. Boston: South End Press, 1998. The other major full length account is James Geschwender’s Class, Race and Worker’s Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Cambridge University Press, 1977. The following are two other important accounts. Ernest Allen. “Dying for the Inside: the Decline of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” In They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee. Dick Cluster ed. Boston: South End Press, 1979.; Akbar Muhammad Ahmad. “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers: A Historical Study.” Circa 1979. Collective Action Notes. 13 October, 2003
Walter Reuther was the major representative speaker for organized labor at the Dr. Martin Luther King led March on Washington of 1963 – one of the many reasons Malcolm X’s assessment of it as “The Farce on Washington” needs to be remembered. For a vision of Walter Reuther seen at his most progressive see Nelson Lictensstein’s The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995. For a critique of this study see “Walter Reuther and the Decline of the American Labor Movement.” In Martin Glaberman’s Punching Out and Other Writings. Staughton Lynd, ed. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2002. 64-92.
These national spin off included RUMS in the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama, and auto plants in Fremont, California, Baltimore, Maryland, and Mahwah, New Jersey. For insight on the latter see “Wilbur Haddock on the United Black Brothers.” Souls. 2.2 (Spring 2000): 27-33.
DRUM Constitution (1968) quoted in “Black revolutionary union Movement: Drum, The League, BWC.” EBlack Studies. 1 September, 2003
John Watson (Sept. 26, 1968) quoted by Nicole Lanctot in “Revolution at Wayne State’s Student Newspaper from 1968-1969.” In South End. 13, November, 2002. 1 September
Quoted in Georgakas and Surkin, p. 51. The phrase was used by a comrade of Watson’s, Nick Medvecky, at the South End: “When John Watson and myself, as the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of last year’s South End, came out with a front page news/editorial statement on Al Fatah, little did we realize at the time what a Pandora’s Box had been opened.” Inner City Voice, November 1969.
Ibid.; pg. 51-52.
Ibid.; pg. 30.
Ibid.; pg. 65
Friday, August 18, 2006
Zimbabwe Update: SADC Youth Call For Integration, etc.
President Mugabe of Zimbabwe & United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire.
By Peter Matambanadzo recently in VICTORIA FALLS
Courtesy of the Herald Newspaper
SOUTHERN African governments should establish and strengthen national youth organisations to enhance youths’ participation and contribution in the socio-economic development of the region, delegates who attended last week’s Southern African Youths Festival have said.
In a communiqué at the end of the festival, heads of youth co-ordinating bodies from 11 Sadc countries called for integration and co-operation among youths in the region.
"We the participants at the Southern Africa Youth Festival, representing national youth co-ordinating bodies from 11 nations of the Southern African Development Community and guided by the deliberations, presentations and discussions that have taken place during the festival, urge governments in Southern Africa to establish and strengthen national youth co-ordinating bodies, and ensure that these bodies are properly legislated and governed by acts of parliament," the communiqué said.
The delegates implored governments and the civic society to assist in the funding of youth organisations to ensure that youths can effectively and efficiently address some of the socio-economic challenges faced by the region.
Sadc governments were also challenged to include young people in their delegations to inter-governmental meetings as this would enable youths to be involved in international relations and foster greater integration and co-operation.
The delegates also noted the prevalence of poverty, unemployment and HIV and Aids in the region and urged Governments to come up with a consolidated approach towards addressing the problems.
On youths and economic empowerment, the delegates agreed that there was need for young people to be active participants in the economic development of the region.
"Youth economic empowerment is an essential forerunner to full and effective youth economic participation. We call for subsidies and concessions to be provided to youth enterprises particularly in the fields of agriculture, fishing and tourism," the communiqué said.
It also emphasised the need for training in life skills which result in capacity building and empowerment of youths.
The delegates stressed the need for scientific and technological revolution to enhance the efficiency of industry and commerce in Sadc, which will go a long way in the eradication of poverty.
The delegates also welcomed the hosting of the World Cup 2010 by South Africa and urged youths to grasp the economic opportunities during the event.
The four-day inaugural Southern African Youth Festival ended on Monday. Participants were drawn from Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The major aim of the festival, which coincided with commemorations to mark the International Youth Day, was to open dialogue on how the youths can play a pivotal role in national development matters, HIV and Aids, unemployment and poverty alleviation.
The festival was also attended by the Namibian Deputy Minister of Youth, National Service, Sport and Culture, Mr Shifeta Pohamba, Deputy Minister of Youth Development and Employment Creation Cde Saviour Kasukuwere, Deputy Minister of Information and Publicity, Cde Bright Matonga, Science and Technology Development Deputy Minister Cde Patrick Zhuwawo, Kadoma-Sanyati-Ngezi Senator Cde Ratidzo Gava, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Youth Council Advocate Farai Mutamangira and representatives from the Zanu-PF Youth League.
President commends Sadc defence organ
From Caesar Zvayi in MASERU, Lesotho
PRESIDENT Mugabe last night commended the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) Organ on Defence and Security Co-operation for bringing peace to the Kingdom of Lesotho that was disturbed by an insurrection 10 years ago.
He said the organ’s efforts had enabled Maseru to host this year’s summit in a peaceful and enabling environment.
The President said this while giving a vote of thanks at a State banquet hosted by King Letsie III last night.
He said whenever there is need to ensure peace and security in the region, the organ should move in the same way it did in Lesotho.
Lesotho, President Mugabe said, was today one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
Citing the wars in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, he said: "These situations are caused by some leaders at the frontline of international leadership, but they have become great states as sources of barbarism and terrorism.
"They have also been sources of great hypocrisy. On one hand they talk peace and stability, but on the other hand they cause mayhem in countries like Lebanon," Cde Mugabe said.
He, however, said Sadc had a long way to go in terms of economic integration.
It seemed the grouping worked better before 1992 when it was still the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (Sadcc) that had clear demarcations of responsibilities.
"There are projects that, once upon a time, were assigned to each and every country in the Sadcc; my own country had food security. It would appear that we worked better then.
"I do not know what has gone wrong now. Is it overdependence on donor funding or something within Sadc that has failed? But our spirit of meeting challenges must propel us to greater heights."
The President said in light of the challenges facing the region, Sadc should come up with programmes to deal with the challenges.
"In the case of agriculture, we have seen two projects on the mountains (here) that can be used for various projects, done one mountain valleys that appear to be insurmountable. If that can be done on such mountains, why it can’t it be done on rivers like the Zambezi and Limpopo? Let’s do it so that we can share the benefits . . . We should have programmes in Lesotho, in Angola, the DRC — that is what we were talking about this morning when we were talking about economic inte- gration."
Fuel prices slashed
Herald Reporters
GOVERNMENT and the oil industry have — with immediate effect — fixed the price of diesel at $320 and that of petrol at $335 a litre for all users in the country.
This effectively means that farmers, Government and public transporters, who were accessing fuel from the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (Noczim) at a heavily subsidised rate, will have to pay the new increased prices, while private motorists, who were being charged around $700 for a litre of both petrol and diesel, will now pay less.
The Government also announced that both A1 (communal and small-scale) and A2 (large-scale) farmers would be able to use their concessionary loans to access fuel at the new price, without subsidy.
Dealers early this month unilaterally increased the price of fuel, resulting in petrol and diesel selling at between $600 and $800 a litre. This resultantly triggered bus fare increases.
Public transport utility, the Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (Zupco) doubled its fares with effect from yesterday.
A trip from the city centre to Kuwadzana, Glen View, Budiriro and Dzivaresekwa now costs $150, up from $60. Commuters from Chitungwiza will now pay $200 from the previous $80 while those from Norton and Goromonzi will pay $300 from $150.
The Harare-Mutare fare has been increased from $900 to $2 000 and Bulawayo travellers will be required to pay $2 800, up from $1 400 .
Harare-Masvingo will now cost $2 400, up from $1 700.
All fares are based on the revalued currency.
Zupco public relations manager Mr Richard Mlambo attributed the increases to high fuel and maintenance costs.
Dealers argue that they buy their foreign currency on the black market and the new prices might trigger fuel shortages.
However, some observers argued that the dealers were profiteering.
The Minister of Energy and Power Development, Retired Lieutenant General Mike Nyambuya, yesterday said Cabinet approved the new fuel prices last week.
He said the prices were reached after consultations between his ministry and the oil industry.
"On August 11 2006, Cabinet approved the new prices of fuel of $320 and $335 per litre for diesel and petrol, respectively. These are the prices my ministry, together with the oil industry, had agreed on in our consultations and are applicable immediately as announced in the media by the oil industry," Rtd Lt Gen Nyambuya said at a Press conference he jointly addressed with the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Gideon Gono.
The minister said the consultations were held in terms of Statutory Instrument 248 of 2003, which states that the price of any petroleum product would be increased with the approval of the Ministry of Energy.
Rtd Lt Gen Nyambuya said the law would take its course on all those who fail to adhere to the new prices "as the unilaterally declared old prices are now illegal".
His ministry and the central bank would continue to support farmers with diesel for their operations at the new price.
"In line with the economic turnaround strategy of supporting agriculture, my ministry and the Reserve Bank will continue to support farmers with diesel for farming activities. My ministry, through Noczim, will continue to receive applications for fuel forms and sell diesel to farmers at the new price.
"Because the price has increased significantly, it may be a substantial challenge to some farmers. Any farmer who finds it difficult to buy fuel for farming activities should approach his bank to access the facility fund that has been set up by the Reserve Bank.
"My ministry, therefore, urges all farmers in need to ensure that they follow the procedures outlined above in order to ensure that farming operations carry on without disruptions," he added.
The minister added that Government would also make sure that the price of paraffin remains affordable to those who need it.
"Paraffin is a commodity we get after pumping Jet A1 and the country has not procured Jet A1 for some time now. Arrangements are underway to have it pumped. I would like to assure the nation that the price of paraffin remains affordable to all those who need it," said Rtd Lt Gen Nyambuya.
Reserve Bank Governor Dr Gono said Government’s decision on fair pricing would cascade to all sectors of the economy and benefit the nation.
"The minister has taken a very bold step in the process of removing distortions in our economy. Industry and commerce has been calling for the removal of distortions in the fuel prices and today represents a significant step in the unification of the fuel price. Fuel is a basic commodity whose price is pervasive throughout the economy," Dr Gono said.
He said the central bank would continue supporting the oil industry to import fuel.
The Governor said money was also available to assist farmers but warned those in the habit of abusing the facility that "the law will catch up with such abuse".
Founding Statement From the A-APRP (GC)
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) Speaking at C. J. Dunn Arena on the Campus of Alabama State University, 1975
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire.
To: All Current and Former Members and Supporters of the A-APRP.
We hope this email finds each and all of you and your families in the very best of health and Revolutionary spirits!
As you know, Kwame Ture never tired of demanding that if you can not join and help build the A-APRP, you should find and join any organization that is working for the People; and if you can not find an existing organization that you want to join and help build, create one.
This axiom was not new to Kwame or to those of us who had worked with other organizations before the A-APRP. In fact, it is this axiom which propelled him and us, forward, despite numerous disappointments and setbacks, organizational and personal, from SNCC to the MFDP, LCFO, BPP, A-APRP and PDG; and in a larger and much more Pan-African and Internationalist sense, from the host of other organizations that we were members and supporters of in the past, to the host of organizations that we are members and supporters of today.
Consistent with this uncompromising principle, and after much and long, principled, non-personal and non-sentimental discussion and deliberation, we, the undersigned, take this occasion, the birth date of the Honorable Marcus Garvey, to publicly announce to all current and former members and supporters of the A-APRP, in all of its multiple and varied manifestations and forms, that:
As of August 9, 2006, we are conscious members of the A-APRP (Guinea Conakry), which is known as the PRPAG in Guinea, accepting all responsibilities as Revolutionary Militants and acknowledging with the fulfillment of our Revolutionary duties, that we are entitled to and will be accorded the same rights as all members.
We reaffirm our uncompromising belief that Africa remains primary, for all Africans, those in Africa, and those abroad, in the struggle for Revolutionary Pan-Africanism, which includes scientific socialism, and that we have and will always place politics over and before economics, and social services, Revolution over reform.
We reaffirm our uncompromising belief, as Nkrumahists-Toureists, that Guinea (Conakry) remains our organizational and ideological base, and that we will continue to work, study and struggle in every zone, every country, every city, every community and every campus wherever one African can be found in the world.
We reaffirm, as Nkrumahists-Toureists, our principled and uncompromising solidarity with and support for all Revolutionary movements, parties and governments, and all of Oppressed Humanity in every corner of the world.
We understand that the PRPAG/A-APRP (GC) is the inheritor and continuator of the Revolutionary work and struggle of the PDG (RDA) under President Ahmed Sekou Toure's and President Kwame Nkrumah's time.
We understand that the A-APRP (GC)/PRPAG is the inheritor and continuator of the Revolutionary work and struggle of the A-APRP under Kwame Nkrumah's and Kwame Ture's time.
We accept, as responsible Militants, the Revolutionary work and struggle, as defined by and under the Revolutionary guidance and leadership of the A-APRP (GC)/PRPAG.
We launch, publicly, militantly and uncompromisingly, with and through this email, a massive and militant drive to recruit members, supporters and allies to the A-APRP (GC)/PRPPAG in Africa and every corner of the African Diaspora, and the world.
We send our dues and contributions directly to the PRPAG/A-APRP (GC) in Guinea-Conakry, and ask all members, supporters and allies whom we recruit to send their dues and contributions, material and immaterial, directly to the PRPAG/A-APRP (GC) in Guinea-Conakry, as well.
Our primary work was and remains political education and recruitment. Check out our New WebPortal http://www.a-aprpgc.org
By and through this positive and Revolutionary decision and act, we honor Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, Kwame Ture, Ken Tyler, Mawina Kouyatte, untold ancestors, and ourselves, as we continue to intensify their and our Revolutionary work, study and struggle. By and through this positive and Revolutionary decision and act, we admit to ourselves, the People and the world, that despite their and our contributions, sacrifices and achievements, despite their and our victories and setbacks, personal and organizational, the A-APRP was not completely built in Kwame Nkrumah's or Kwame Ture's time. By and through this positive and Revolutionary decision and act, we also reaffirm our confidence in the People that their Revolutionary Cadre, the almighty People and their Revolutionary Militants, will in the final analysis, build the A-APRP (GC)/PRPAG, or some other Revolutionary, mass, all-African political party that is truly working in the interest and on behalf of the more than 1 billion African People who are scattered, suffering and struggling in every corner of Africa and the African Diaspora, even if not in our lifetime.
We know and can prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, even if the masses of our People and other progressive and Revolutionary movements and parties do not know the truth, that history, as made thus far, records that we have made our contributions, quantitatively and qualitatively, towards the 40-year struggle to build the A-APRP. And we know and declare to you, African People, and the world, that history will etch on our tombstones that we made even greater contributions, quantitatively and qualitatively, to the struggle to build the A-APRP (GC)/PRPAG from this day forward!
For us, a much needed and long struggled for dialectical leap and categorical conversion to a higher, more ramified and rarefied quality of consciousness and organization has been made. Matter, organizationally and personally, is indeed a plenum of forces in tension; and it is out of this tension, out of this Positive Action, that a new cadre, a new woman, man, and youth, a new PRPAG/A-APRP (GC), a new Guinea, a new Africa, and a new world is struggling to be born!
We firmly and principally believe, to paraphrase Ahmed Sekou Toure, that those forces, organizational and personal, who are preoccupied with the past, with the old, instead of the future, and of the new, who are preoccupied with structure and procedure, with titles and rewards, with form over essence, are dead already, ideologically and organizationally, even if not physically!
Nkrumah is correct, "thought without action is empty, and action without thought is blind." Permit us to suggest, that plans and programs, without Revolutionary Cadre who are committed to work, study and struggle, sacrifice and suffer to implement them, are equally as empty, and structures and titles without Revolutionary Cadre who trust and respect them is equally as blind!
Again, we wish all current and former members and supporters of the A-APRP the best of health and Revolutionary spirits, and pray that you will implement Kwame's demand, as paraphrased above, in any and all ways that you can!
We, the undersigned, stand ready to help build the A-APRP (GC)/PRPAG!
Forward ever, Backward never!
Anthony Williams
Banbose Shango
Bobbi Brown
David Brown
Kamau Benjamin
Kwakou Leak
Lee Robinson
Mwalimu Keita
Odinga Muktar
Stuart Barbee
Susan Ribreiro
Wesley Brown
Detroit Federal Judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, Halts Warrantless Wiretapping by NSA
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret, By James Bamford
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire.
AFP
A US judge halted warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency and ruled that President George W. Bush overstepped his authority when authorizing an unconstitutional program.
Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ordered a permanent injunction barring the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which has been used to monitor millions of US citizens.
"It was never the intent of the (Constitutional) framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," Taylor wrote in a 43-page opinion.
The ruling was immediately appealed by the NSA and the injunction was temporarily stayed ahead of an appeals court ruling.
The decision was a significant blow to Bush's attempts to expand presidential powers in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
It comes just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration overstepped its authority in setting up military tribunals to try war on terror detainees held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"It's pretty sweeping," said Robert Bennett, a professor at Northwestern University's law school, noting that the ruling went beyond faulting the administration for violating Congressional rules on wiretapping.
"The Bush administration is losing pretty regularly on assertions that it's overstepping its authority."
The wiretapping suit was filed in Michigan by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a number of journalists, lawyers, scholars and rights workers who believed their communications had been monitored.
They argued that the program prevented them from doing their work because people were afraid to speak with them on the telephone or send e-mails that could be monitored.
Taylor ruled that they had faced "irreparable injury" because the surveillance program violated their rights to free speech and protection from unwarranted searches.
"The public interest is clear, in the manner," Taylor wrote. "It is the upholding of our constitution."
The decision was hailed by the ACLU.
"Today's ruling is a landmark victory against the abuse of power that has become the hallmark of the Bush administration," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU.
"Government spying on innocent Americans without any kind of warrant and without Congressional approval runs counter to the very foundations of our democracy."
The White House sharply criticized the ruling and said the program was "firmly grounded in law and regularly reviewed to make sure steps are taken to protect civil liberties."
"United States intelligence officials have confirmed that the program has helped stop terrorist attacks and saved American lives," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said.
"That's what the American people expect from their government, and it is the president's most solemn duty to ensure their protection."
Congress restricted the use of electronic surveillance of citizens after the Watergate scandal which brought down President Richard Nixon.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created a secret court which has only denied three requests in nearly 30 years and which allows law enforcement to initiate surveillance before the warrant is obtained.
"It's not the most difficult statute to comply with but they do have to have some reasonable belief that the person may commit a crime," said Evan Caminker, dean of the University of Michigan's law school, explaining that this ruling outlaws "fishing expeditions."
Democrats said the ruling highlighted Bush's skewed priorities.
"Rather than griping about having to go to a FISA court for legal clearance to wiretap potential terrorists, the Bush Administration should fully inspect cargo put on passenger planes and make sure that a nuclear bomb isn't sent on a container ship to a major US port," said Representative Ed Markey, a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Senator Ted Kennedy said Bush's cavalier decision to make up his own rules undermined national security.
"By ignoring that law, the Administration took a path filled with legal uncertainty, putting employees of the National Security Agency at risk of criminal penalties and jeopardizing prosecutions of terrorists who may be able to successfully challenge the evidence against them," Kennedy said.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Ceasefire in Lebanon: Hezbollah Claims Victory; Text of Resolution
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Leader of Hezbollah Resistance Movement
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire.
Staff and agencies
Monday August 14, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
The leader of Hizbullah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, tonight claimed a "strategic and historic victory" over Israel as the first day of a ceasefire in the Middle East crisis brought a seemingly fragile calm following a month of fighting.
"We came out victorious in a war in which big Arab armies were defeated [before]," the cleric said.
Sheik Nasrallah insisted now was not the time to debate the disarmament of his guerrilla fighters, a key Israeli requirement of a sustainable ceasefire.
"This is immoral, incorrect and inappropriate," he said. "It is wrong timing on the psychological and moral level particularly before the ceasefire," he said in reference to calls from critics for the guerrillas to disarm.
"We are today before a strategic, historic victory, without
exaggeration," he said in a taped speech on Hizbullah's al-Manar TV.
In a defiant message, Sheik Nasrallah gave the strong impression that he had no intention of ordering his troops to withdraw and declared that the Lebanese army and international troops were "incapable of protecting Lebanon".
He promised the militant Shia organisation would help the Lebanese people rebuild, and estimated some 15,000 housing units had been completely destroyed.
He made his comments as thousands of refugees were returning to their homes in southern Lebanon.
The guns fell silent after a major Israeli push in the closing hours before the ceasefire deadline at 8am local time (0600 BST).
However, the truce's fragile nature was underlined when the Israeli military reported shooting a man they described as a Hizbullah guerrilla in the town of Hadatha, around a mile north of the Israeli border, today.
They said the man had been part of a group approaching an Israeli outpost "in a threatening way", and was only a few metres away when troops opened fire.
"The unit was under threat, so they fired in self-defence," an army statement said. "But the armed men didn't open fire first."
In northern Israel, families were beginning to emerge from the bunkers in which they had been sheltering from Hizbullah rocket fire for much of the past month.
Despite the late military push and political pressure within Israel for it to take control of all Lebanese territory south of the Litani river, 18 miles north of the border, Israeli troops stopped around six miles south of the river.
Nevertheless, refugees streamed back to their homes, crowding roads in spite of Israel's insistence that a ban on road traffic south of the Litani would be enforced regardless of the ceasefire.
Reuters reported that thousands of cars were queuing on a bomb-damaged road leading south from the port city of Sidon. Drivers hooted their horns, gave victory salutes and showed pictures of Sheik Nasrallah.
"Since day one, the resistance [Hizbillah] told us that it will get us back our homes, and now it has delivered on its promise," one woman told Reuters. "Thank you, Hassan Nasrallah."
"I'm going to make sure my house is okay," Adel Abbas, from a village near Tyre, told Reuters. "If Israel sticks to its word and continues to stick to the ceasefire, I'll take my family back home later today."
However, Lebanese government officials warned people against returning to their homes until army engineers had swept the area for unexploded weapons.
Officials said at least one child and 15 adults had been killed by artillery or bombs that went off as they began returning home.
In southern Beirut, air strikes continued until 15 minutes before the deadline, with warplanes destroying an antenna belonging to al-Manar.
Half an hour after the deadline, reports said Israeli warplanes had disappeared from the Lebanese skies, where they have been a regular sight for weeks. Traffic in Beirut and other cities appeared busier than in previous days.
In a statement, the Israeli army said the military had been told not to initiate any action after the UN deadline, but added that "forces will do everything to prevent being hit".
Israel is also maintaining its air and sea blockade of Lebanon to prevent arms from reaching Hizbullah guerrillas, army officials said.
Throughout the night, Israeli artillery pounded targets across the border, and at least 23 Lebanese civilians and five Israeli soldiers were killed in yesterday's hostilities.
Yesterday, Hizbullah fired more than 250 rockets on northern Israel, the highest number since the fighting began. One man was killed and 53 people injured, while huge fires were started in the port city of Haifa.
Isaac Herzog, a senior minister in the Israeli cabinet, today said it was unlikely all fighting would be stopped immediately. "Experience teaches us that after that a process begins of phased relaxation [in the fighting]," he said.
The Israeli deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, said Israel was uncertain whether the truce would hold. "I believe that it has a chance. I can't say for certain," Mr Peres said, speaking moments before it came into force.
Israel's cabinet accepted the ceasefire deal yesterday, with the Lebanese cabinet having accepted it the day before.
But Lebanon's cabinet prompted fears the deal was unravelling when it yesterday indefinitely postponed a crucial meeting dealing with plans to send its army into Hizbullah's southern Lebanese stronghold.
Lebanese media reported that the cabinet was sharply divided over demands for Hizbullah to surrender its weapons in the area.
A 2,000-strong UN force in southern Lebanon is due to be boosted to 15,000 soldiers. Together with a 15,000-man Lebanese army contingent, it is gradually to take control of the border area.
The deployment of the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers is a cornerstone of the ceasefire resolution passed by the UN security council in New York on Friday.
The forces are supposed to keep Hizbullah fighters out of the 18-mile zone between the border and the Litani river.
France and Italy, along with Turkey and Malaysia, indicated willingness to contribute troops to the peacekeeping deployment.
However, consultations to decide the make-up and mandate of the force are still needed are still needed, and it is uncertain when it will reach full capacity.
Lebanon said nearly 791 people have been killed since the conflict began on July 12. It had previously given higher figures for fatalities. Israel said 116 soldiers and 39 civilians had been killed in fighting or by Hizbullah rocket attacks.
Ceasefire holds despite rockets
Tuesday 15 August 2006 1:43 AM GMT
Scores have died in the conflict which began on July 12
A dozen rockets have been fired at positions held by Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon, an Israeli army spokesman says.
The spokesman said that Israeli soldiers did not return fire.
He said the rockets, fired in the early hours of Tuesday morning, were the first since the ceasefire went into effect at 8am (0500 GMT) on Monday.
The rocket attacks caused neither casualties nor damage, the spokesman said.
Hezbollah rejected as "baseless" Israeli army claims on Monday that at least four armed Hezbollah fighters were killed following the ceasefire after trying to approach Israeli troops.
"Islamic Resistance [the armed wing of Hezbollah] has not had any martyrs since the entry into force of the ceasefire at 8am" on Monday, it said in a statement issued in Beirut on Tuesday.
Despite accepting the resolution, Hezbollah has vowed to keep on fighting until the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanon and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, promised to hunt down the group's leaders.
Israeli dissent
Meanwhile, Olmert took full responsibility for the conduct of the battle with Hezbollah, as Israel's wartime unity collapsed and opposition politicians began criticising the month-long fight against Hezbollah.
Opposition politicians demanded a commission of inquiry into the conduct of the battle as a new poll showed support for Olmert and his centrist Kadima party had plummeted.
In a nationally televised speech to parliament hours after a ceasefire took effect in Lebanon, Olmert painted the war and the UN resolution that ended the fighting as an important victory for Israel that changed the strategic balance in the region and badly weakened Hezbollah.
Olmert said: "[Israeli] soldiers have, to an extent not yet publicly disclosed, battered this murderous organisation, its military and organisational infrastructure, its long-term capabilities, its huge arsenal, which it built over many years, and also the self-confidence of its members and leaders."
Hezbollah said 68 of its fighters were killed in battle since the fighting began on July 12, but Israel said its forces killed 530 fighters.
Donors to meet
Sweden invited 60 countries and aid agencies to a donors' conference aimed at helping Lebanon rebuild homes, roads and lives shattered by weeks of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Big donor nations such as the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Norway and Japan as well as the Gulf states were among those invited to the August 31 conference in Stockholm, Swedish aid minister Carin Jamtin said on Monday.
She declined to place a figure on how much aid was needed, saying that was up to Lebanon to determine.
Peacekeeping force
Also on Monday, the French general who leads the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said he wants reinforcements quickly, warning that even one "stray act" could unravel a diplomatic effort to halt the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Alain Pellegrini said the UN resolution could give unprecedented new strength to the 28-year-old UNIFIL force - which has often been criticised as ineffective in the past.
Pellegrini said: "They need to arrive as quickly as possible."
The UN plan calls for a joint Lebanese-international force to move south of the Litani river, about 30km from the Israeli border, and act as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
Agencies
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/28B398D5-2FBC-4C7F-9386-1D0F64FF9C06.htm
Both sides claim victory
Monday 14 August 2006 9:19 AM GMT
Israel wants Lebanon to reassert its sovereignty in the south
Israel and Hezbollah both claimed victory as a UN-brokered truce to end the month-old fighting took effect.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said his guerrillas had achieved a "strategic, historic victory" against Israel.
"We came out victorious in a war in which big Arab armies were defeated [before]," he said in a pre-recorded address on Al-Manar television on Monday.
Nasrallah also said that now was not the time to debate the disarmament of Hezbollah fighters, arguing that the issue should be done in secret sessions of the government to avoid serving Israeli interests.
"This is immoral, incorrect and inappropriate," he said. "It is wrong timing on the psychological and moral level particularly before the ceasefire.
"Who will defend Lebanon in case of a new Israeli offensive? The Lebanese army and international troops are incapable of protecting Lebanon."
Moments after his speech ended, celebratory gunfire erupted across Beirut.
Earlier, posters of Nasrallah were distributed in Beirut's Shia-dominant southern suburbs with the caption: "The divine victory."
Counter-claims
However, Israel maintained on Monday that it had won a diplomatic victory over Hezbollah because the UN resolution would put the group under international scrutiny.
"We have the diplomatic advantage as Hezbollah is now under the microscope of the international community," Yigal Palmor, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Hezbollah and its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, "will have to respect resolution 1701", he said, which calls for an embargo on arms and training to fighters in Lebanon.
"This means that there will no longer be a state within a state along our northern border to keep provoking us," he said.
Palmor said: "Politically and militarily, Hezbollah can no longer do what it likes in Lebanon."
Shimon Peres, the deputy prime minister of Israel, said: "Hezbollah will not finish a huge hero, but with its tail between its legs."
Agencies
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/31DA80B0-A492-4CEB-8AF3-A252F7ADD2A2.htm
Full text: UN Lebanon resolution
Sunday 13 August 2006, 6:58 Makka Time, 3:58 GMT
Delegates approve the resolution at the UN
Following is the text of the operative provisions of a resolution adopted on Friday.
Determining that the situation in Lebanon constitutes a threat to international peace and security;
1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations;
2. Upon full cessation of hostilities, calls upon the government of Lebanon and UNIFIL (The UN Interim Force in Lebanon) as authorized by paragraph 11 to deploy their forces together throughout the south and calls upon the government of Israel, as that deployment begins, to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon in parallel;
3. Emphasizes the importance of the extension of the control of the government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory in accordance with the provisions of resolution 1559 (2004) and resolution 1680 (2006), and of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, for it to exercise its full sovereignty, so that there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon;
4. Reiterates its strong support for full respect for the Blue Line (separating Israel and Lebanon);
5. Also reiterates its strong support, as recalled in all its previous relevant resolutions, for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized borders, as contemplated by the Israeli-Lebanese General Armistice Agreement of 23 March 1949;
6. Calls on the international community to take immediate steps to extend its financial and humanitarian assistance to the Lebanese people, including through facilitating the safe return of displaced persons and, under the authority of the government of Lebanon, reopening airports and harbors, consistent with paragraphs 14 and 15, and calls on it also to consider further assistance in the future to contribute to the reconstruction and development of Lebanon;
7. Affirms that all parties are responsible for ensuring that no action is taken contrary to paragraph 1 that might adversely affect the search for a long-term solution, humanitarian access to civilian populations, including safe passage for humanitarian convoys, or the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons, and calls on all parties to comply with this responsibility and to cooperate with the Security Council; humanitarian convoys, or the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons, and calls on all parties to comply with this responsibility and to cooperate with the Security Council;
8. Calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a permanent cease-fire and a long-term solution based on the following principles and elements:
- full respect for the Blue Line by both parties,
- security arrangements to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani River of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11, deployed in this area,
- full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state,
- no foreign forces in Lebanon without the consent of its government,
- no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its government,
- provision to the United Nations of all remaining maps of land mines in Lebanon in Israel's possession;
9. Invites the Secretary-General (Kofi Annan) to support efforts to secure as soon as possible agreements in principle from the government of Lebanon and the government of Israel to the principles and elements for a long-term solution as set forth in paragraph 8, and expresses its intention to be actively involved;
10. Requests the secretary-general to develop, in liaison with relevant international actors and the concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), including disarmament, and for delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including by dealing with the Shebaa farms area, and to present to the Security Council those proposals within thirty days;
11. Decides, in order to supplement and enhance the force in numbers, equipment, mandate and scope of operations, to authorize an increase in the force strength of UNIFIL to a maximum of 15,000 troops, and that the force shall, in addition to carrying out its mandate under resolutions 425 and 426 (1978):
a. Monitor the cessation of hostilities;
b. Accompany and support the Lebanese armed forces as they deploy throughout the south, including along the Blue Line, as Israel withdraws its armed forces from Lebanon as provided in paragraph 2;
c. Coordinate its activities related to paragraph 11 (b) with the government of Lebanon and the government of Israel;
d. Extend its assistance to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons;
e. Assist the Lebanese armed forces in taking steps towards the establishment of the area as referred to in paragraph 8;
f. Assist the government of Lebanon, at its request, to implement paragraph 14;
12. Acting in support of a request from the government of Lebanon to deploy an international force to assist it to exercise its authority throughout the territory, authorizes UNIFIL to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind, to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the mandate of the Security Council, and to protect United Nations personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, ensure the security and freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, humanitarian workers, and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Lebanon, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence;
13. Requests the secretary general urgently to put in place measures to ensure UNIFIL is able to carry out the functions envisaged in this resolution, urges member states to consider making appropriate contributions to UNIFIL and to respond positively to requests for assistance from the force, and expresses its strong appreciation to those who have contributed to UNIFIL in the past;
14. Calls upon the government of Lebanon to secure its borders and other entry points to prevent the entry in Lebanon without its consent of arms or related materiel and requests UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11 to assist the government of Lebanon at its request;
15. Decides further that all states shall take the necessary measures to prevent, by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels or aircraft,
(a) the sale or supply to any entity or individual in Lebanon of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, whether or not originating in their territories, and
(b) the provision to any entity or individual in Lebanon of any technical training or assistance related to the provision, manufacture, maintenance or use of the items listed in subparagraph (a) above, except that these prohibitions shall not apply to arms, related material, training or assistance authorized by the government of Lebanon or by UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11;
16. Decides to extend the mandate of UNIFIL until 31 August 2007, and expresses its intention to consider in a later resolution further enhancements to the mandate and other steps to contribute to the implementation of a permanent cease-fire and a long-term solution;
17. Requests the secretary-general to report to the council within one week on the implementation of this resolution and subsequently on a regular basis;
18. Stresses the importance of, and the need to achieve, a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, based on all its relevant resolutions including its resolutions 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967 and 338 (1973) of 22 October 1973;
19. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War
WATCHING LEBANON
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
Issue of 2006-08-21
Posted 2006-08-14
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”
The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”
Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.
The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.
“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah
“may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”
David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”
“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone.
“Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”
The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”
In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”
Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”
A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”
There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”
Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”
The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”
The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
Issue of 2006-08-21
Posted 2006-08-14
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”
The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”
Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.
The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.
“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah
“may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”
David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”
“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone.
“Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”
The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”
In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”
Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”
A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”
There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”
Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”
The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”
The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)