News & Letters, December 1998

Lead Article

Middle East crises simmer: from Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

by Kevin A. Barry

Despite the fact that the Clinton administration called off at the last minute its air attack on Iraq, no one believes that this will bring more than a temporary respite to the region. Few expect that Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein will adhere to his promises to allow unimpeded UN arms inspections. Even fewer expect any change of heart in Washington, where both Clinton and his far-right opponents in the Congress seem determined to continue indefinitely an economic embargo that over the past nine years has resulted in untold suffering and death among the Iraqi people.

During the same weeks that the U.S.-Iraq confrontation flared up again, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued its slow burn, despite Clinton's very limited Wye Plantation accord.

The Middle East and Global Politics

These twin crises-each of them involving the U.S., the Arab world, Israel, Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United Nations-show that conflicts in the Middle East continue to have a major global impact in today's unipolar world. The U.S., as the sole remaining superpower, continues everywhere its drive for single world domination. It seeks to prove its "resolve" and its indispensability, whether in the Middle East or in other areas of crisis such as the Balkans, South Asia, Central Africa, or East Asia. The Middle East remains key for several reasons.

(1) It is the world's chief oil supplier, especially to Western Europe. The fact that new oil fields are being developed in the nearby Caspian region of Central Asia increases rather than decreases the importance of the Middle East in world politics. The U.S. is determined that it, and neither the peoples of the region nor rival powers, be the determinant in controlling that oil.

(2) The Arab-Israeli conflict contains the seeds of nuclear conflict. Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for some three decades, but both Iran and Iraq may soon have the technology to do so.

(3) The Arab-Israeli conflict, especially the issue of Israel's determination to control in perpetuity the whole of Jerusalem, involves the entire Muslim world, which claims Jerusalem as a primary religious center, as do Christians as well. It is above all the question of Jerusalem that has been a rallying cry for Islamic fundamentalists the world over and for the terror campaigns of some of them against Israel and its chief backer, the U.S.

(4) Finally we should not forget that the Middle East is a region where a number of authoritarian regimes face the prospect, sooner or later, of overthrow by their own masses. This is true not only of opponents of the U.S. such as the brutal Ba'thist regime in Iraq or Iran's reactionary clerics, the latter challenged both from below and by a less conservative faction that won the 1997 presidential election. It is also true of U.S. allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

While the U.S.-Iraq confrontation was in the headlines for only a brief period in November, no one should mistake its seriousness. The U.S. called off its planes and missiles only hours before they were due to go into action. Nor was this a pinprick assault of the type used against Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, a U.S. opponent viewed as more congenial.

According to the NEW YORK TIMES (11/17/98) "Pentagon estimates" suggested that a very serious attack indeed came within a hair's breadth of being carried out, one where "several thousand Iraqis, including civilians, would be killed in the air strikes, a death toll far greater than from any other American military strike since the Persian Gulf War in 1991."

U.S.-UN Sanctions Decimate Iraq

The effects of the U.S.-UN economic sanctions since 1990-91 cannot be overestimated. These effects are rarely discussed by the U.S. media, which has engaged in a conspiracy of silence. In order to keep it that way, the Clinton administration has recently denied permission to CNN to set up a Baghdad bureau.

Listen to Irish-born Dennis Halliday, a high UN official who resigned in protest this fall, in an interview with the London-based journal MIDDLE EAST INTERNATIONAL (11/13/98): "The cost of the sanctions was completely unacceptable-killing 6-7,000 children a month. Sustaining a level of malnutrition of about 30% for children under five leads to physical and mental problems. It's incompatible with the UN Charter, with the Convention on Human Rights, with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and probably with many other international agreements. I just found that impossible to accept as the head of the UN in Iraq."

To its credit, the French press has prominently covered the situation. Listen for example to the noted cancer specialist and human rights activist Leon Schwartzenberg, writing in LE MONDE Aug. 25. Schwartzenberg is one of France's leading supporters of Bosnia and has also spoken out frequently against racism and anti-Semitism. He reported, after a visit to Iraq, that "the number of patients stricken with cancer has increased six-fold since the war" because due to the sanctions, "the drugs needed for their treatment are for the most part lacking. As to surgical strikes, with which the American president and Congress regularly threaten Iraq, they can reassure themselves that these strikes take place daily and with precision on children uncared for, on adults denied treatment."

The economic sanctions, which have resulted in up to 500,000 deaths since 1991, have also had a dire effect on the country's cultural and intellectual life. The Ba'thist regime has been stifling enough, with its brutal repression of all political activity and of minority rights, but today the noose has tightened even further, thanks to the "democratic" West! As reported also in LE MONDE (11/14/98), the head librarian at Al-Moustansiriyeh University in Baghdad notes that they hold 273,000 books, but almost none of them published since 1990. None of the 2,000 international journals to which they had subscribed have arrived for the past eight years either.

The Iraqi Opposition and the U.S.

Ever since the Gulf War, the U.S. has claimed to support the Iraqi opposition and to favor a democratic Iraq. As he called off the air strikes, Clinton announced publicly that the U.S. would give more support to the opposition. Given the hatred of the U.S. in Iraq and the region, and the U.S.'s own record of duplicity toward the Kurds, the Shiites, and other oppositional groups, such news will probably serve to weaken rather than help the opposition.

U.S actions, as opposed to its rhetoric, show a fairly clear pattern over the past decade. In 1991, for example, the U.S. held back from even ordering the regime to ground its helicopters, allowing it to crush a Shiite uprising in the South as well as a Kurdish one in the North. Together, the Kurds and the Shiites comprise a clear majority of the country, yet U.S. policy has favored continued control by the Sunni Arab minority in the center of the country, some of whom form Saddam Hussein's base of support.

Dr. Ahmad Chalabi, a leader of the exile Iraqi National Congress, a group that attempts to unite Kurds, Shiites, leftists, and liberals, stated last spring: "For too long, U.S.-Iraq policy has been decided by a small group of so-called experts who view the Iraqi people as incapable of self-government-as a people who require a brutal dictatorship to live and work together. Such a view is racist....The Iraqi National Congress rejects the CIA's characterization of a small group of ex-Iraqi army officers as a major opposition party. The INC deplores recent CIA-sponsored radio broadcasts promoting military rule of Iraq" (cited by Christopher Hitchens in THE NATION 4/13/98).

Nowhere is the U.S. support for authoritarian rule clearer than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The recent Wye Plantation peace agreement is no exception.

After the Wye Peace Agreement

The agreement promises to return to the Palestinians a tiny portion of the West Bank, calls for Israel to release political prisoners, to allow a Palestinian airport and access road between the West Bank and Gaza, and calls on the Palestinian Authority to crack down on terrorism and (once again) to delete from its charter language calling for the destruction of Israel.

So intransigent and duplicitous was Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, both during and after the negotiations, that even the Clinton administration seemed to be shocked at a few points, leaning more than ever before toward a measure of even-handedness toward Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority. This was especially true after Netanyahu returned home and announced that he would add several new conditions before carrying out his side of the agreement.

To be sure, Netanyahu's minor concessions to the Palestinians at Wye outraged the neo-fascist fringe of the settler movement and the religious extremists, but he seemed to have broad support for his policies not only among the secular Right, but also from many parts of Labor. That policy seems to be shaping up as follows:

The Palestinian Authority will be given a few more slivers of land on the West Bank, but these pockets of land will be divided by highways limited to Israelis and by a network of Jewish settlements. The U.S. will pay for the highways. As for Jerusalem, this will never be given up, not even in part.

Most of these policies have the support also of the Labor Party, which is why there is talk of a Likud-Labor unity government at some time in the near future. For example, Leah Rabin, the widow of Yitzhak Rabin, the martyred architect of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, has recently attacked Netanyahu for "slandering" her husband by suggesting that he would have been willing to give up part of Jerusalem to the Palestinians. For his part, Ehud Barak, the present head of the Labor Party, criticized Netanyahu for giving up too much land at Wye!

Other voices within Israel are of course more willing to face reality, but they are marginalized vis-a-vis a growing Israeli consensus that a West Bank permeated by settler camps and highways preventing direct contact between the various Arab communities would provide "stability." Longtime peace activist Adam Keller recently attacked such notions: "But it is impossible to stabilize a situation in which fanatic settler enclaves will remain stuck as thorns within self-governing Palestinian territories, which will themselves constitute enclaves within an outer ring of Israeli settlements" (THE OTHER ISRAEL, 10/25/98).

Another set of stubborn facts the Israeli government and public are being forced to confront is in Lebanon, where Israeli soldiers continue to die defending a swath of territory they have illegally occupied and dubbed a security zone. Even hawks like Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon have called for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal.

University students have also gone on strike demanding the lowering of exorbitantly high tuition rates, gaining the support of the labor movement. The students have attacked massive spending on highways and religious schools rather than secular public universities.

For its part, the Palestinian Authority has gained a bit of support through the dramatic opening of an airport in Gaza, but its crackdowns on dissent have alienated still further a population that has already begun to run out of hope. This can only strengthen the rejectionists and the fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Given the record of financial corruption of Arafat's Authority, the Arab masses will also wonder where the billions of dolloars in aid pledged in Washington Nov. 30 will end up.

Nor will the open role of the CIA in enforcing the agreement win much support among either Palestinian Arabs or in the Middle East more generally. The people of the region remember all too well the CIA's toppling of the democratically elected Mossadegh regime in Iran in 1953 and its installation of the Shah, its aid to Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party during the 1960s against the leftist Qasim regime in Iraq, its betrayal again and again of the Kurdish movement, to name just a few examples.

Recently, the Clinton administration, without any debate, gave the CIA its greatest budget increase since 1983, a whopping $1.8 billion in a total intelligence budget of $29 billion, in order to, among other things, "undertake more covert operations" (NEW YORK TIMES, 10/22/98). This is a far truer indicator of Washington's moral compass than the sanctimonious debate over impeachment.

Future months are sure to see further crises over Iraq and in the Israeli-Arab negotiations. Living under U.S.-UN sanctions and the murderous Ba'thist regime will mean continued death and suffering for the people of Iraq. The Palestinian masses will also continue to experience the oppression of occupation and denial of their democratic and human rights, while the Israelis will continue to live in insecurity and as a hated occupying power in the region. Only a mass movement for freedom throughout the region can alter in any fundamental way this bleak reality. That is why, since the Gulf War, we have raised the slogan, "To the barbarism of war, we pose the new society."

Dec. 2, 1998

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