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Targeting Arafat: A Predictable Outcome
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Is
his record any worse than the American president’s? |
For
aficionados of CNN and Fox News, where the dictum of how a question always
presupposes its answer rules supreme, the time has come to face up to a query:
How has Bush’s pre-emptive strike doctrine changed the low-end of
international relations?
First
of all, the term “pre-emptive” should not be allowed to rhyme too strongly
with “preventive.” For decades the US has impressed the world with its
claims on technological superiority in information gathering. The world now
knows that to be a half-truth. The pre-emptive strike doctrine, without due
legal and diplomatic legitimacy, professes to be based on the transparency and
certainty ensured by such information acquisition. Yet, due to national security
constraints, that information cannot be shared with the general public, a swishy
mass of folk in which enemies easily prosper.
At
least that’s what Washington and other capitals would have us believe. They
plead their case even as the information on why pre-9/11 intelligence
investigations on terrorist ploys against the US were botched—despite the
handsome remuneration received by FBI and CIA agents and their counterparts.
Then again, for lack of opening your files to the public, you can just blame the
Canadians.
The
list of the Bush administration’s murders of international leaders has grown.
It has also fostered copy cats. Clone among clones, it is hardly surprising that
Ariel Sharon’s cabinet no longer sees any need to hide its broader strategy.
With Powell in Baghdad, and at least some of the world focused on the failing
WTO trade summit in Cancun, and with no Hamas attacks on the horizon, Sharon’s
team had to stay on TV. On Thursday, his Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom declared
the cabinet to have decided to “remove” Yasser Arafat.
The list of the Bush administration’s murders of international leaders has grown. |
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Recall
that General Ariel Sharon, unlike Arafat, was held indirectly responsible by an
Israeli commission of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Over 800 Palestinian
refugees, living in squalor on the outskirts of Beirut, were found dead, and
over 1200 are still missing. They were slaughtered by Christian Maronite
Phalangist militia, led by the notorious Elie Hobeika on September 16-18, 1982,
under the observing eye of the IDF. Israel had invaded Lebanon at the time and
hard barely stopped pounding Beirut with daily bombing. Ariel Sharon was
Minister of Defense. He had planned and directed operation “Peace for
Galilee,” the result of which was Arafat and the PLO’s forced exile to
Tunis.
Faced
with mass demonstrations in Israel and the results of the Kahan Commission,
Sharon resigned in 1983. Internationally, the Kahan Commission was seen as too
tepid in its final conclusions. Richard
Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, interviewed by the
BBC’s Panomara program in June 2001, explained: "Sharon's specific
command responsibility arises from the fact that he was Minister of Defence in
touch with the field commanders, that he actually was present there in Beirut,
that he met with the Phalange leadership and it was he that gave the directions
and orders that resulted in the Phalange entering the camps in September."
Falk concluded: "I think there is no question in my mind that he is
indictable for the kind of knowledge that he either had or should have
had." Also on the same program, former Chief
Prosecutor to the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda,
Judge Richard Goldstone agreed that:
"… in the case of Sabra and Shatila, clearly the Kahan Commission found
that very serious crimes had been committed and I have no doubt any decent
person would regret the fact that not a single criminal prosecution
followed."
Israeli voters consciously elected a mass murderer to govern them. |
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Could
anyone from outside of Israel have intuited Sharon’s return to politics in the
guise of Prime Minister? Only the most doom stricken, for only they could
imagine the horror the world would have to get used to under his rule. As
predicted, Prime Minister Sharon went on to destroy Oslo, invade the Occupied
Territories, increase and intensify illegal settlements, and trigger Hamas’
ire by assassinating its leaders, to say nothing of giving Orthodox Jews free
sway over transforming the liberal principles of governance in the Holy Land.
Hamas would of course retaliate savagely by waging a desperate suicide terror
bombing campaign against the Israeli State and civilians. In the meantime, the
IDF kept making martyrs of child stone throwers, thus ensuring many Intifadas to
come.
There
has never been any illusion that Israeli voters, in fear and desperation, had
consciously elected a mass murderer to govern them. Were one to demure by
claiming Sharon had no direct blood on his hands, one could not help but recall
the Nuremberg war crime trials. They exposed the moral fraudulence behind the
oft repeated refrain diligently uttered by Nazi commissars and leaders according
to which they were only following orders to shed blood, but that they themselves
were innocent from it. The supply chain of state-sponsored terrorism hides
behind a vanished economy of commands and orders.
Too
many wars, far too many massacres have passed to keep repeating that it is
nothing but a short-sighted masquerade to allot individually committed murders
with more guilt than those done under a State’s legitimacy. No, an individual
stabber or psychopath is not worth a dime of guilt compared to a state leader
who is given the men, weapons and wherewithal to shed blood all in the name of
ever higher ideals: the Party, the People, the Nation, the State, God himself.
His crime is even greater in terms of moral outrage, for those in power owe
their respective nations the example shown in the behavior worthy of statesmen.
An individual stabber is not worth a dime of guilt compared to a state leader. |
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What’s
been more typical recently is quite the opposite, a descent into hell. Bush’s
pre-emptive strike doctrine has made it possible for democratically-elected
governments, like Israel’s and his own, to put a price on the head of state
leaders. It is a sickening sight how Sharon’s cynicism destroyed the
conciliatory work of Mahmud Abbas by choosing single-handedly to exterminate the
Hamas leadership--all justified with respect to the twin adjudicators: God and
America’s War on Terror. How to defuse Hamas’ rampage was a decision to be
taken together by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, for the founding
of a Palestinian State is a decision Sharon’s colonial regency and racist
policies can only achieve through self-dissolution and fostered partnership.
What
did Bush gain by blowing Saddam’s sons to bits, Apache helicopters evaporating
light-mortar fire? Had American military intelligence finally identified Odai
and Qusai as sitting atop the WMDs? So far only a worsening situation has
arisen, repeatedly denied by all in the American high command save for Paul
Bremer himself. Would it be that the information supply chain is also run by a
command economy? Certainly, the world lost out on the precious information that
Saddam’s sons, were they to have faced trial at the International Criminal
Court, would have told.
It’s
an entirely other ball game to what appears to be happening in Afghanistan. Bin
Laden’s continual flight has indirectly legitimated pursuing the war on
terror--despite what Britain’s former environment minister, Michael Meacher,
cites in Time, ABC and AP as reporting that attempts to capture the
al-Qaeda leader were inexplicably thwarted, and seemingly so at the highest
levels. So be it, the war on terror’s reach swept up Saddam’s fiefdom. Think
of how pleased Qaddafi must be with the UN lifting sanctions against Libya in
the midst of this Orwellian Realpolitik–
after all, he had never even been an American pawn!
The
abundance and divergence of alternative news sources notwithstanding, some
information comes from White House/Pentagon proxy think tanks, proving that the
Cheney-Rumsfeld clan had already planned to strike at Iraq before 9/11. Given
that the majority of the American population still erroneously believes in a
“hidden” connection between Saddam and Osama, any inculpating clarity simply
falls outside of the realm of belief. The X-Files made it clear: the truth may
be out there, but it’s only hidden. Then again weren’t the evil doers in
that program the FBI and National Security Agency? What a magical tool
television indeed is when the same is automatically permutated into being
different, and Mommy’s early lessons always return as if in an eternal dream:
don’t believe anything you watch on TV.
The
thing is that among the awful students who never listened, most of us never
realized she meant only TV, and not the press, not investigative reporting, not
analysis and not commentary. This is where our chance for clearer news lies.
Murder does not act out responsibility for supporting a violent regime. |
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By
yearning for Saddam’s murder, as for Arafat’s, no one can claim that
fiercely critical feelings expressed toward America and Americans worldwide are
misplaced or are a hysterical exaggeration. International norms and standards
deserving of a republic have been corrupted by democracies throughout
history--this is true. But never have the people had the means to assert
themselves more than today to remind nation-states that past behavior cannot
stand to legitimate continued bloodshed.
This
is what is happening internationally: criticism, calls to responsibility,
demands for human--and not infinite--justice. The anti-American scent leads only
to a distorted trail to follow. Like the choir in Ancient Greek tragedy, we
commoners ask: What did Saddam Hussein ever do to the US or to Americans in the
first place? This is NO plea for Saddam—the record largely details his
butchery. But murder can never sufficiently act out our collective denial of the
responsibility involved in establishing his violent regime as an ally in the
first place.
Arafat
is ever further from the mark. No one should be deluded by Bush’s claims to be
opposed to this decision. His administration had de
facto condemned Arafat long ago by refusing to meet with him as a head of
state.
The war on Palestinians is comprehensive, touching every aspect of their lives. |
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Never
an ally of the US, Arafat is more than a man, despite his human failures and
administrative mismanagement. Think for a second: Is his record any worse than
the American president’s? Arafat is the symbol of the persistence of the
bravest, self-sacrificial resistance movement the world has known since World
War II. It can only be compared to some of the most desperate colonial wars, for
lack of means, in recent history, like the Lakota Sioux, culminating in the 1890
Wounded Knee Creek massacre—a people who live in their own Gaza on Pine Ridge,
right in the heart of the USA. Comparisons can also be drawn with South
Africa’s anti-apartheid resistance movements, to Hungary’s still-enchained
serfs battling through the 1848 war of independence from the Hapsburg Empire, or
indeed the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Shalom’s
call to murder is merely a symptom of a general pathological strategy occupying
the minds of Sharon’s staff: the forced deportation of all the Palestinians
from what remains of their battered lands, who are already being forced to live
behind a caged fence. Theirs is a war not only fought against by the world’s
technologically most sophisticated army, the US’ very own--Israel is but a
miniature version of it, and then some. It is an environmental war, on water; an
immigration war, on the refusal to let Palestinians return to their homeland; an
employment war, the 39,000 Palestinians still working in Israel in the fourth
quarter of 2001 were the lucky ones in the 60% unemployment rate afflicting the
Palestinian economy and preventing residents from even spending at home.
The
supply chain of state murder, as in its economic principles, produces ever new
goods to keep up with changing times. The marketing principles dictating how to
keep ahead of the competition converge into the perverted final victory of
Bush’s pre-emptive strike doctrine. The concentration camp of Guantanamo Bay
and the Israeli government’s open intention to murder the leader of Palestine,
Yasser Arafat, are its prime innovations, and for the murderers running the
world, its luxury productions.
Norman
Madarasz is a Canadian
philosopher residing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With a Ph.D. from the University
of Paris, he teaches and writes on international relations, political economy
and philosophy. He is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch and has
published think pieces and philosophical research extensively. You can reach him
at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
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