Putting Facts First

Concerning Benador Associates bio on Kanan Makiya , a small detail has been left out: Mr. Makiyas' career in Trotskyist politics prior to 1981. In an interview with Democratiya in 2006 Makiya claims,

"I feel the left that I came from has almost become nationalist. This language of relativism has translated itself into, 'Well, even if the regime of Saddam Hussein is so nasty, why should we go and liberate it?' Now that is something you would have got from an American isolationist, back in the old days. You would never have got it from somebody on the left. The positive element which I carried from the Trotskyist movement, from the writings of Trotsky himself, was an internationalist spirit. It was more alive in me, I think, than in many of those who claimed Trotsky's mantle, but did not practice that internationalism. It is a very sad state of affairs. The left has turned against its own internationalist traditions and thrown away its own universal values. The older left was able to cross boundaries and think across boundaries. That was its strength and its weakness."

With the word "never", Makiya reveals that the very last thing he took away from his Trotskyist experience was "internationalism", otherwise he'd be sufficiently informed about the international experiences of Trotskyism to know that it was the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party - hardly right wing "American isolationists" - who opposed U.S. entry into World War II as an imperialist war, and that parties' leaders did so, not from the comfort of some postmodern "cultural relativist" ivory tower, but from prison throughout the duration of that war. The anti-imperialist lefts' opposition to the brutal US invasion and occupation of Iraq pales in comparison to that of the SWP during the Second World War, for as beastly as the Saddam Hussein regime was, could it have possibly compared in extent and depth to that of the cruel horror unleashed by the Nazis?

How "unconscionable" of these, the original American Trotskyists! They should have followed the "internationalist" conscience of the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party U.S.A. and done their "moral duty" in "the war against fascism"! That is, if one accepts that the United States entered the war "to fight fascism", rather than for the purposes of its own imperialist aggrandizement - this latter being far closer to the truth.

A similar judgment pertains to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but even more so as the veil of rationales is so much thinner than that deployed in WW2. And so too in the comparison, the promoters of imperialist war stand all the more condemned: in Makyias' case condemned for putting his own self-centered concern for his own subjective "conscience" above any concern for objective reality. And the objective reality of Iraq now is that of an unimaginably bloody catastrophe perpetrated by the U.S.A. exceeding even that of Darfur:

• Hundreds of thousands dead, according to the well known, Lancet survey, studiously ignored by "people of conscience", now finally accepted as "not rubbishable" (though surely they tried!) by the UK's Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific advisor, and Tony Blairs' own Foreign Office.
• Surely uncounted millions injured, for it is a predictable rule of war that for ever death there are upwards 10 wounded.
• Millions - over 4 million at present count - made refugees of war both within and outside Iraq.
• And finally, an infrastructure largely destroyed and never repaired, four years after the invasion.

Add to this the U.N. estimate of 500,000 Iraqi children killed by the Anglo-American bombing sanctions regime imposed with merciless cruelty throughout Bill Clintons' tenure - a cruelty succinctly expressed by that most irrepressible of US "diplomats", Madeleine Albright - oh, how I miss the complacent, uncensored blurtings of the ever self-important Ms. Mad Halfwit! - when she declared this Mongol pyramid of babies' skulls "worth the price" - as did Makiya apparently when he declared the bombs of March 2003 "music to his ears".

Today we are witness to a whole rising mountain range of such Mongol pyramids. And, emphatically, this was the result intended by U.S. imperialism, and no "accident"!

How else - as the appalling scale of Bushs' carnival of blood began to dawn on even the U.S citizenry, always kept in a Soviet-style maximum ignorance of the outside world by the complex of "handlers" found inside the Beltway, in the ivory towers of the Academy, in the corporate "infotainment" media and elsewhere - how else could Mr Cheney calmly chirp in November 2006, as the warlord in chiefs' political house of cards came crashing down around him, that everything "was on course" in Iraq, that "we" need only "stay the course" and "finish the job"? Because the annihilation of Iraq - and not simply Saddam Hussein - has always been the intention of imperialist policy since the beginning of the Persian Gulf War, if not earlier. It is indeed "Mission Accomplished". The proof is very much in the pudding, the reality of Iraq today.

This is indeed the conscious intent of U.S. imperialism, not only for Iraq and its neighbors in the region such as Lebanon, Syria and Iran, but for the entire world, including for the citizens of the U.S.A. itself. This is the real difference with the U.S. involvement in WW2, where at least there were some - no doubt largely unintended - subaltern progressive outcomes that went well beyond the simple "defeat of fascism", especially in the far more important result of the collapse of the Anglo-French colonial empires, as well as in the need to "contain communism" by permitting the social-democratic development of Western Europe - while denying the same "privileges" to its own citizens as well as those of postwar Japan. Today, however, there is not a shred, not a single stitch, of anything "progressive" in the imperialist interventions of the United States of America - there cannot be, as the simple existence of this imperialism itself has become an absolute barrier to human progress worldwide, as its contemporary record clearly shows, as for example in its attitude of support for the plundering of post-Soviet Russia under the drunken rule of Boris Yeltsin. Or was this yet another "accident", a "missed opportunity"?

All are instances that record the relation of the "abstract", "economic" concept of mode of production and productive forces with that of the more "concrete", "political" concept of imperialism. A contradictory relation for the U.S.A., which has gone from possession of some 60% of the worlds' productive force organized under capitalism to an ever shriveling percentage in the low teens today, a state that is now utterly dependent on China to supply its own citizens with many of the consumables of everyday life that it can no longer produce itself, where even more tellingly, its once mighty machine tool industry has simply dropped out of the international rankings of the larger economies of the world - how is that for the "independence of politics"? These are facts that compel this state to enforce its continuing global command over the mode of production by "extra-economic" means - military aggression in the Nazi style - for predatory financial effect. All of this should be palpably clear to those who have managed to pull their heads out of their own "conscience".

So, if Mr. Makiya is having trouble writing his last book on Iraq - and it will be his last, not because he has decided so, but because Iraq will likely cease to exist - may a course of inquiry be suggested? Perhaps Mr. Makiya could investigate into the details of how the U.S. planned and carried out the destruction of Iraq. He could begin immediately on a most poignant note: the obviously deliberately "permitted" plundering of Iraqs' historical and archaeological treasures by Donald "Shit Happens" Rumsfeld, as so painfully recounted by Chalmers Johnson in his recently published "Nemesis", as it should grieve anyone with an "internationalist" conscience to witness what is more than the Iraq "national heritage" - though it is that as well - but the origins of the collective civilized heritage of all humanity, simply go up in smoke or disappear into the void of some capitalists' "private" collection. Truly another milestone of "Mongolian" proportions!

From there Mr. Makiya could go on to document how the U.S. has worked to deliberately promote the sectarian division of and subsequent civil war in Iraq. This is U.S. policy and not an "accident", as in the constant "collateral" slaughter of innocent civilians perpetrated by the U.S. around the world, nor is it some "incompetence" in the implementation of the "well-intentioned" plan. That is exactly what Cheney meant in 2006: It is all going to "plan", and hopefully this wonderful success can be extended to Iran.

Such is the reality of United States imperialism in the world today. One could perform a great service to humanity and describe that reality in concrete detail. That would be the first "duty of conscience" of a real internationalist: to give us a critical description of the greatest international barrier to global human progress today. Or one could continue as the neoconservative "useful idiot" (NYT, may be stale), a truly tragic and dismal prospect, blaming it all on "Arab depravity", ignoring the fact that the favored therapy, imperialist intervention and occupation under the optimal conditions of total control of Iraq, has manifestly "failed" in its therapeutic results, because, our dear dupe, it was never intended to "succeed" in this in the first place.

The fateful choice is Mr. Makiyas' still. In the spirit also of revolutionary optimism, it is never too late.

By way of Jonathan Swifts’ ”A Modest Proposal”: The key to a U.S. victory in the Middle East and South Asia is in a word: genocide.

The oft-repeated comparison performed by the Anglo-American punditry with the ”one counterinsurgency success” - the British in Malaysia in the post war 1940's - is completely inappropriate. There is a need to examine the actual histories of these campaigns. To put it bluntly, the U.S. would have to commit a genocide to ”win” in the Middle East and South Asia.

In Malaysia the British could use their tried and true ”divide and conquer” racial policies to drive a wedge between the largely ethnic Chinese guerrillas and the ethnic Malay population. No politically and militarily costly - not to mention morally reprehensible - ”drain the swamp” tactics were required - in contrast to the concurrent campaign against Kenya’s’ Mau-Maus, where the British did have to ”drain the swamp”, rounding up civilian supporters into gruesome concentration camps, Nazi-style. (The Nazis themselves, of course, faced a huge, Europe-wide ”swamp problem” in the massive Partisan resistance, but a genocidal ”will to power” does not make up for lack of military manpower to carry it out).

The U.S. attempted extensive ”swamp clearing” in South Vietnam, of course, but the problem was that the ”swamp” - i.e. the war against the U.S. - extended beyond South Vietnam to all of Indochina. The U.S. would have had to occupy all of Indochina and drain the entire ”swamp”.

So, quite unlike Malaysia, Iraqs’ Shia, Kurdish and Sunni militias are quite indigenous to their supporting populations - they are indeed defined by their ethno-religious identities, are they not? A massive displacement of the supporting ”swamp” would have to be carried out, well beyond Fallujah (And the fighting still continues there). In a much too conveniently overlooked point, Iraq is like Vietnam in that it is just one battlefield ”for” a larger region, though unlike Indochina a much larger region: the entire Middle East AND South Asia up to India! To ”win” the U.S. would have to spread the conflict in just the way that Bush/Cheney and their ”neocons” wanted to do in the first place: to Syria, Lebanon and Iran, at least.

Finally there is this interesting point of difference compared to both Vietnam and Malaysia (and Kenya): in the Middle East and South Asia, the ”swamp” is mostly urban (including ’villages’), not jungle. As we have seen so often in the Middle East, such close physical proximity binds the population very tightly and intensely to its’ fighters. This urban proximity also facilitates rapid ”fighter replacement” in combat. Far from having to kill/round up into concentration camps a dispersed population, the US would have to destroy/clear the urban areas, ironically dispersing the remaining population. Since there is very little cover in the countryside outside of riverine marshlands (Mesopotamia) or bare mountains (Kurdistan, Afghanistan) to dig into, much of this population will be dispersed to to other regions if it is not rounded up and locked down in the now-ruined conurbations, converting these into the concentration camps, Fallujah or Gaza-style. This dispersal is already happening with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis having fled to Syria, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia. This ”uncontrolled” population will only fan the anti-U.S. flames, as we’ve seen with Israels’ assault on Lebanon, whose chief failing is that of the U.S. itself: its lack of a ”will to genocide”. However, this particular character of the war will require that the genocide necessary for a real U.S. victory be spread to most of the region. Although the U.S. (and Israel) certainly have the nuclear arsenals to accomplish this very quickly, there is the small problem of massive residual radiation. The only alternative would be a drastic increase in U.S. ground forces. Unlike the Nazis, the U.S. would have the advantage of not having their army tied down in combat with huge conventional forces (the Soviet Union, the British Empire), which prevented the Nazis from ”properly” dealing with the partisan resistence (a measure of this would be Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans, who managed to tie down some 20+ Italian and German divisions and still remained undefeated). A million, say, U.S. troops could really focus on the task at hand - conquest of the region and subjugation of its population.

One could imagine GW Bush as a sort of anti-Benjamin Franklin emergent from his very own anti-Constitutional Convention, replying to the question, ”What have we, a monarchy or a republic?” with ”An Empire, madam, if you can keep it”.

Happily, the American people lack the "constitutional fiber" for such a ghastly slaughter - they’d rather go shopping. Shopping at Wallmart is much cheaper. So it is doubtful that they will be keeping Mr. Bushs' would be "Empire".

Perpetual Shopping For Perpetual War

The New Era Of U.S. Hegemony

Initially in response to Sharon Smith's Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon07272006.html

Sharon,

Thank you for your commentary, Lebanon and the Future of the Antiwar Movement. It reflects my own views on what amounts to complicity in an imperialist aggression. When searching about for what actions the US antiwar movement might be planning in response to the Lebanon events, I came across the UFPJ statement quoted in your piece. I too was shocked at the CNN-style parroting of official imperialist war propaganda. And it is hardly confined to UFPJ, but can be seen in the official postures of other organizations of the Democratic party left, such as in the blogosphere, Alternet and Daily Kos.

As I'm sure you understand, this shameful complicity in imperialist war crimes in the case of Israel (one may diplomatically not describe it as such, but that is what it is) has a long pedigree as a very specific expression of the permanent strategy of subordinating the US Left and oppositional movements to the hegemony of the Democratic Party, a strategy adhered to by the large majority of the self-appointed leadership of the that Left. Its specificity lies in the fact that US-backed Israeli atrocities represent a potentially embarrassing weak link in their strategy, as the Democratic Party is, as we all know, fanatically American Zionist.

That is why, when this embarrassing connection ceased to be 'just another issue', but was thrust front and center by the events of the last 5 years, events which have placed this question literally at the very top of an agenda that will determine the future course of the human race, the Democratic party Left acted to demobilize any sort of mass expression by an antiwar or anti-imperialist movement, as now this would place the strategy under direct threat of attack within left progressive organizations and movements. Silence therefore became the order of the day.

But the US-led imperialist war drive has shown signs of stalling in recent months due to its difficulties in Iraq, and that has provoked an attempt to regain the offensive on another front of the same war by the Israeli arm of the same American Zionist transnational ruling class faction that, in the form of the government of George Bush, exercises leadership within and which has governed US imperialism over this same period. I believe this latest Israeli aggression will continue for longer than we are being led to expect. This presents those of us who understand what is immediately at stake within US politics in the present situation - untying the left and mass movements (such as the immigrant rights movement, "America's Palestinians") from the Democratic Party - with a unique opening to reconstruct an antiwar movement for which _anti-imperialism_ - in so many words - will be the founding principle and single focus. Permit me to present a short historical context.

The events surrounding the 2004 election - but not only the election itself - represent an historic betrayal by the official American Left on the scale of those of the 1948-52 and 1968-72 periods. These previous betrayals fundamentally hinged upon a cynical bet made by the American Left: that despite the fact that imperialism had been forced into dramatic retreat on certain fronts (in the first period, China, the Korean stalemate, the ongoing collapse of the Anglo-French empires, the loss of the atomic monopoly - in the second, the retreat from Indochina, a certain retreat in the preeminent economic position of the US, events in South America before the Pinochet coup, and, N.B. the Israeli reversal in the Yom Kippur War ), US imperialism would have the strength to survive the crisis and remain the global imperialist hegemon, even as it beat a retreat and made concessions in certain areas. Since the survival of that global hegemony means the continuation of the "domestic" status quo within the US, the strategy of the Democratic party left, the 'permanent tactic' of the lesser evil, could remain intact. Everything could proceed as before; the left-wing professors of the UFPJ and other bureaucracies could continue to earn their tenure undisturbed.

So too is the expectation at present. Groups such as the UFPJ, reading from the Vietnam era playbook, expect US imperialism to beat a retreat from Iraq at least, and then everything will return to "normal" with the Bush "aberration" out of the way. (As an aside, the Left shares this view with the 'paleoconservative' or libertarian Right, represented by such as Justin Raimondo and Pat Buchanan, prompting the house publication of this section of the Right, The American Conservative, to ask in their recent edition if "the Left-Right distinction mattered anymore". If only the US Left had the imagination to even broach such a question!). But I believe, as the saying goes, this time it is different. A retreat limited even to Iraq would immediately signify the abandonment of the American Zionist strategy for "securing the realm". Knocking over Syria and Iran would be off the table. It would be seen as a huge victory by the masses throughout the "greater Middle East", as the first time US imperialism has suffered direct defeat in the region. It would likewise leave America's twin Arab and Israeli tyrannies exposed to escalating attacks. As the "mainstream" of US politics never tires of reminding us, "failure is not an option" in the Middle East. But why do they think so? Because such a retreat would intersect unfavorably with other global trends shaping the future and fate of US global hegemony.

The importance of the Middle East to US imperialism goes beyond the obvious ones of oil and geopolitics. It must be seen in the context of the total global relation of forces that constrain that imperialism, particularly economic and financial forces through which the dominant system relates itself via the working class to the masses. This set of relations differs qualitatively in each of the periods of crisis already mentioned. The political economic relation is not directly deterministic. In the '48-'52 period, imperialist retreat was accompanied by an unprecedented postwar "boom" throughout the core Amero-European imperialist states and (belatedly by 1960) Japan. This expansion _was_ the "reserve" - to use the perhaps now forgotten language of the old 'Stalinist' influenced sector of the Left - deployed by US imperialism to maintain itself as global hegemon despite the retreats. This period was therefore one of the _absolute_ strengthening of US imperialism.

By the early 1970's this "reserve" had been exhausted. The new "reserve" deployed to preserve US hegemony in a period of retreat was not one of economic expansion, but variously one of selective economic contraction that then unfolded as a vast political economic counterrevolution on a global scale, one whose form still barely remains intact to this day. We can pinpoint the very origin of this counteroffensive in the 1970's: while the imperialist core was left to "idle" in an indeterminate "stagflation", a ferocious counteroffensive was launched in the Southern Cone of South America, in Chile and Argentina. This was soon followed by the emergence of similar "anti-socialist" policies in, interestingly enough, Israel , with the rise to power of the Likud in the latter '70's in the wake of the near catastrophe of the Yom Kippur War - a placement of this aspect of what is conventionally regarded as a "regional" phenomenon into a global context that reveals that Likud Zionism was in the very vanguard of this new counterrevolution, Thatcherite before Thatcher, so to speak, right up there in the "first wave" with Pinochet and Videla. The rest should be familiar: the rise to power of Deng Zhao Ping's "capitalist road" in China, the rise of Reaganism-Thatcherism in the Anglo-American core - where the 'neocon' wing of the Reagan Coalition, then still a junior partner was, though, well placed to transmit the policies pioneered by Pinochet, Videla and Menachem Begin throughout a vastly larger, indeed for the first time global, sphere - leading into the Lebanon and Iran-Iraq wars as well as the Central American counterrevolution of the 1980's, all culminating in the Persian Gulf War and subsequent Siege of Iraq, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the subsequent economic catastrophe visited upon Russia in the 1990's. All of this effected a _relative_ strengthening of the position of US imperialism and the preservation of its global hegemony.

That "reserve" has now in its turn been exhausted. To make this case requires, alas, that we delve into a bit more detail, but bear with me. Beneath the continuing veneer of 'neoliberal' rhetoric, an entirely new set of political economic policies have emerged that signal a profound reversal of the strategy of ever-shifting but sustained assault on the global capitalist periphery, and selective assaults within the imperialist core that by the end of the century came to be known as "the Washington Consensus". Little noted by observers, a new "Washington Policy", if not yet "consensus", has emerged as a sort of ad hoc, unspoken Global New Deal, Hoover-style. Just as the original New Deal had as its primary feature the rapid development of the American South and West which required breaking the monopoly on economic development hitherto exercised by the Northeast and Midwest, so too has a unprecedented wave of highly uneven development swept though much of the capitalist periphery, particularly in parts of East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and even Russia. Despite monetarist rhetoric, this reversal of policy has been led by a new "easy money" policy on the part of the U.S. Federal Reserve bank and the US Treasury Department. It is a new policy of a deliberate and permanent debauchery of the U.S. currency. The reversal of "second era reserve" monetarism and the consequent "surrender" of development to the periphery is the first key hallmark announcing the new era we are moving into. It announces the beginning of the _absolute_ decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony and its imminent end in historical terms.

The second key hallmark follows immediately from the first: the need to replace the terminal decay of U.S. financial dominance with the final "reserve" of every state: military power. This will require the permanent - "perpetual", as Bush/Cheney, PNAC and others have so clearly informed us - and overt application of military force, not simply as an "implicit reserve" backlining the non-military forms of hegemony, but now the frontline itself, the actual and immediate form of continued U.S. global domination. Furthermore the relations between finance and military are not one simply of coincidental replacement of one by the other - the exercise of military power requires enormous financial resources on a global scale, and constant use of military power will be necessary to extort the resources globally, not merely for the military apparatus itself, but more importantly, to also prop up the American domestic economy in order to maintain popular support for constant military actions. For the great innovation of the U.S. in the postwar era was the development of "democratic imperialism", the conscious cultivation in varying degrees of mass sentiment generally favorable to imperialist policies by means of regulated mass economic development within the core countries of capitalism, above all the U.S. This is what George Bush meant when he advised Americans to "keep shopping" as a form of support for his perpetual war, and it is a sentiment that can survive particular reverses such as Vietnam or, now, Iraq. But what has changed is that now the U.S. is dependent upon a world finance, out of its direct control, in order to maintain its "democratic imperialism"- it no longer possesses the independent means to do so. The constant application of military power, by casting a permanent pall of "global terror", is very convenient in securing such global financial acquiescence in keeping both the U.S. Treasury and the American consumer flush with "borrowed" funds at almost any price - in fact at negative real interest rates - because the alternative - to invest those funds elsewhere - would precipitate the unthinkable: the rapid collapse of U.S. imperialism tout courte.

That is why the US will not retreat from the Middle East, including Iraq, until it is thoroughly, soundly defeated in that region. Short of that result, the new era will be sustainable for some time. It is an era most historically analogous to that of the Spanish Hapsburgs of the late 16th - early 17th centuries - the unrivalled military but fiscally bankrupt power of the end times of European feudalism, despite, ironically, the Spanish plunder of the Americas. As with that period, the present looks to be an era of extraordinary violence, alas, making the deliberate demobilization of the antiwar movement and the retreat into the Democratic Party by the Left all the more unforgivable, as they have made themselves a party to the perpetuation of that violence. It won't be the first Left as a partner in right wing crimes. But worse, it will leave the future disarmed and unprepared for what must come after this present era: the end of a hegemonic United States.

In reply to the Monthly Review article, "Confronting Bipartisan Empire: The Case of the Iran Freedom Support Act, at:

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/furuhashi290606.html

Thank you, Yoshie, for the informative "Confronting Bipartisan Empire: The Case of the Iran Freedom Support Act" and, too, for the appalling statistics in regards to what we might begin to call the "Iraqi Nakba", and for much the same causative reasons. In relation to the American Left, it is important to have the concrete facts in hand.I find it interesting to note that two favorite Democratic progressive icons, Barbara Lee (CA, Berkeley/NW Oakland) and John Conyers (MI, Detroit) do not show on the list of nays. Could it be positively confirmed that they have actually voted for this bill? Or were "absent"? It does seem somewhat incongruous, since Lee acquired a bit of fame in being the sole No vote on either the first "Patriot Act" or the first Iraq war authorization bill, I don't recall which. And Conyers is the House repository - or morgue, perhaps - for Bush/Cheney impeachment efforts. This is asked not out of some silly "faith in the icons", but because if they did vote for this bill, it should - and should be used to - provoke quite a scandal within the otherwise somnolent "progressive left", sharing as it does the senility of late American imperialism. For the American Left as we know it(and in my case as I positively do not love it) did quite a bit more than make the mistake of putting all of its eggs in the one basket of electoral politics. In its successful suppression of any visible mass public expression of opposition to Washington's Middle East aggression - a suppression whose effects continue until the present - the Left engaged in a historic betrayal on the scale of 1972 or post-1948. The result is the current spectacle of a fraudulent Democratic Party manufactured "progressivism" parading itself before the eyes of young activists. I wager that it will be its last such betrayal. Much of what we see of the American progressive left can be safely written off as irrelevant for the future. This is not intended as a sectarian prescription, by the way. The issue is not the electoral venue versus the street. The question is, first, what exactly is capitalist and imperialist electoral politics, and therefore what is the role of a determined opposition to capitalism and imperialism within such a venue and how does that role relate to the various other functions of opposition? For if electoral politics is but the political form of abstract (alienated) labor, clearly this is not the way to power no more than is "pure" trade unionism, but rather it is the way to build a public "wedge" faction with a persistent presence in order to daily expose the real workings of the ruling regime and, in the particular case of the U.S., to disable, hopefully permanently, the viability of the Democratic Party as a "lesser evil". Without this electoral faction, "street" movements such as that of the immigrant rights movement will always be hijacked into the Democratic Party.

As of late we have seen once again Democratic Party "progressives" in action in regards US Middle East Policy, this time with the roaring salute given to Israel's Lebanese aggression by the US Congress: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll391.xml

Note that Kucinich, Lee and Waters simply answered "present"! As in "just us chickens"? Certainly not in the spirit of "Presente!".

The paltry Nays:

Abercrombie Conyers Dingell

Kilpatrick (MI) McDermott Paul

Rahall Stark

Stark is the other California East Bay congressperson next store to Lee. Conyers and Dingall are pretty well known. Ron Paul is the Texas Republican libertarian.

The below is a slightly edited version of an email reply to "The Power of the Israel Lobby" by Kathleen and Bill Christison. Their essay, a defence of the Mearsheimer-Walt study on "The Israel Lobby", was a response to certain left wing critiques of that study:

Thanks for your very interesting and well-argued essay, "The Power of the Israel Lobby". Although The Ideological Times adheres to a leftist perspective, it quite some time ago parted ways with what one might call "the Chomskyian thesis", which assumes a general correspondence between the objective foreign policy needs of the US "elite" and the actual policies carried out by that section of the elite that happens to exercise governing power at a given point in time, such that this thesis seeks to explain and fit every event within such assumptions. That is not how things actually happen in the real world, for although history is by definition determined, the future can only be determined as a probabilistic set of outcomes, not all of which, and not even the most probabilistic of them, could be assumed to be congruent with the objective interests of the entity in question, whether that be a nation, its ruling elite, or the mass of its people - each of which, taken separately, have very different objective interests.

That said, I would like to point you attention to parts of several key passages in your essay:

"In the clamor over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left and the right have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of U.S. Middle East policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel...."

and

"...Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis Brandeis.."

Indeed, Brandeis, the great liberal democrat of the old-fashioned, 19th century, "Jeffersonian Republican" sort, is little noted in the history books as the founding father - virtually single-handedly - of what we can call an indigenous American Zionism - note the italics - at a time when Jews, by coming to the United States, were in practice voting with their feet in rejection of the Zionist project. That is why Zionism held a marginal influence within American Jewry until fairly recently, and even now there remains the significant political divergence between - to put it mildly - the rather "hard right" politics of American Zionism together with its Christian fundamentalist and populist-racist American allies - both within the "elite" and the people - and those of the relatively liberal American Jewish community. Brandeis, though, pioneered the democratic populist tendency within the Zionist movement, at that time very much still in the mold of European-style "Labor Zionism", that in time would eventually emerge as the political hegemony of the Likud Party in Israel (surely to the horror of Brandeis had he been alive, but a superb example of what is mentioned in the first paragraph above), and of the so-called American neocon-Zionist "Likudist" nexus within the larger reactionary populist "Reagan Coalition" of the same time. This latter, of course, has turned out to be an important "developmental stage" in the evolution of an indigenous American Zionism that prepared it to assume hegemonic power in a governing coalition of its own making under GW Bush. More on this, below.

"The U.S.-Israeli bond has always had its grounding more in soft emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described the United States' pro-Israeli tilt as a "predisposition," a natural inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost. Israel, he said, takes part in the very "being" of American society and therefore participates in its integrity and its defense.....Other scholars of varying political inclinations have described a similar spiritual and cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with Israel's "national style"; Israel is essential to the "ideological prospering" of the U.S.; each country has "grafted" the heritage of the other onto itself."

"This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, and the lobby does not function like any ordinary lobby."

Yes, indeed, there ane instances where "soft emotions" are able to transform themselves into "hard geopolitical facts" - emotional facts on the ground, so to speak in the language of Zionism. Then why not come to the logical conclusion that the entities we call the United States and Israel are in precisely hard geopolitical fact identical, and that it is redundant at best and misleading at worst to describe as the exercise of a "foreign" lobbying influence what is evidently a coming into power of the most highly organized, focused and determined American political faction within the present ruling regime, that one might even describe as the most militant "Bolshevik vanguard" of its class? Now this opens up the really interesting question, the one of course that the theses on an "Israel Lobby" really seek to explain: aside from its own political determination, how was this particular faction able to move into the centers of executive power in the US?

"The claimed interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli interests ­ and the fact that certain individuals for whom a primary objective is to advance Israel's interests now reside inside the councils of government ­ proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt's principal conclusion that the lobby has been able to convince most Americans, contrary to reality, that there is an essential identity of U.S. and Israeli interests and that the lobby has succeeded for this reason in forging a relationship of unmatched intimacy."

The question is, contrary to whose reality, that of the American people, or that of the ruling American elite? The suggestion is a real identity between elites, where the American elite has no other answer to the many growing problems of maintaining America's uniquely privileged place in the world as it has know it since the end of World War 2 than to defiantly comport itself as a sort of Global Israel.

"The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests ­ that is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and self-defined "national interests" of the political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S. government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. /and/ of Israel ­ groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy."

A crucial shift has taken place in the Christison argument, where the combination of US and Israeli interests congeal into a single "political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties" and "have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy". Ah, shades of Chomsky! So it is not a mere Israel Lobby after all but, perhaps unwittingly, something much closer to the perspectives of The Ideological Times, and the point of antagonism now shifts to one between "real national interests" and that of "The Complex", or as we might describe it, the ruling political regime.

"Real" American interests are of course those of the American people, and as a people, that objective interest - "self-evident truths" certain Americans once called them - is to live in peace with the rest of the world on the basis of mutual respect and equality - "with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" Americans once said a long time ago. But unfortunately that is not the manner in which the American people and economy are presently living in relation to the rest of the world. Rather, the real tragedy is that relation has become an increasingly parasitic and predatory one, exemplified by, among too many indications to account for here, as it would require a book to cantain them, the ever ballooning foreign trade and government deficits and increasing dependence upon truly "foreign" capital, not certainly from Israel, but from East Asia, to fund its economic and governmental activities. But these indications crucially involve the very stuff of the "American Way of Life", and it was of course the notoriously militant Dick Cheney who announced to the world, in the fashion of an ultra-leftist '60's college radical seizing occupation of the campus administration building, that this way of life was "non-negotiable".

Of course it is negotiable and in fact the American people will have no alternative in the future but to radically renegotiate their way of living in relation to the rest of the world and at last rejoin the human race as human beings, and cease living the dream of the "Manifest" Elect of God. But that would require at a minimum a thorough-going political revolution that would mean the end of the existing regime of elites such as Cheney, and that of course cannot be countenanced. That is "not an option", as we are repeatedly reminded in the case of Iraq.

But since the latter Clinton years, when a certain aimless drift took hold among the American policy elite at large, the specter of the end to their own "way of life" as a governing elite has loomed a bit closer as none of the "traditional" factions - especially those contained within that most traditional of parties, the Democratic Party - could develop any coherent ideological vision or political program of action to address the growing legion of problems that threatened to undermine America's and their own position in the world. 9/11, whose true meaning lies in its exposure before the American people of the bankruptcy of US imperialism, all in one blinding flash, was the defining moment that crystallized that drift into a real paralysis. As the policy paralysis set in, it was precisely into that political vacuum that the the most determined of factions, led on by "visions of Zion", could with ease seize the central levers of power, confident that if only they would do so - to paraphrase Richard Perle - "the rest would follow".

So far, Mr. Perle has been proven correct.

"Tehran Splits the Israel Lobby" : I would agree with the general thrust of 'babak's post: As against the much hyped and overrated views of Walt-Mearsheimer, it is a fundamental misreading of the alignments among the imperialist (international) ruling classes to portray organizations such as AIPAC - and by imputation Zionism or neoconservativism as political movements - as a lobby of a "foreign power". Pursuing this misreading leads to overplaying certain distinctions between various ruling class factions to the point of believing that there may be differences of real significance rather than simple tactical manuvers between groups that are generally tightly bound up with one another out of necessity.

To see the situation more clearly, we need to first ask ourselves, is the State of Israel truly an "independent foreign country"? The test for independence is this: how long would the State of Israel continue to exist, let alone continue with its highly aggressive policies of present, without the massive aid and support of both the USA and to a lesser extent Western Europe, both at the state level and in terms of the relatively privileged position of Israel in the global market structure?

Not very long, and no, hundreds of nuclear warheads would not save the State of Israel from rapid extinction.

This explains why the State of Israel is so tightly bound to the USA - since the 1973 war, which Israel almost lost save for the intervention of the US, the Israeli section of the American constellation of imperialist ruling classes has had to accept annexation as the "external section" of an American ruling class faction.

This annexation took place from the Israeli side by means of the rise of the Likud movement, which marked a sharp and decisive break from the European traditions of "labor" Zionism towards that of a typically American democratic populist movement - and going into the historical conjuncture of the Reagan era, a profoundly reactionary democratic populism at that.
The general result then was the complete absorbsion of the old European Zionist movement into the mainstream of American ruling class politics and ideology, in the form of what we could call American Zionism, a homegrown American ideology and movement as American as the proverbial apple pie. Its global center was to be found, not within some small Middle East state with a regional monopoly of nuclear weaponry, but naturally in the centers of power within the United States, whose axis has always been and still remains the Northeast corridor from New York to Washington D.C., the seats of American financial and political power respectively. This is true not because, as some such as Max Sawicky of LBO would have you believe, therein lives "a lotta Jews", but because, well, last we heard, a lot of Americans happen to live there.

This transformation and annexation of the historical Zionist movement could be performed with relative ease, as the Americans themselves rather famously chased after a Zion of their own making, probably best know under the rubric of "Manifest Destiny", but with roots tracing through the Puritans 'New Jerusalem' in New England back to the Protestent republicanism of the English Revolution. Inspired by their reading of both Machievellian Roman Republican neoclassicism and the representative organization of the Biblical Hebraic tribes as a mass movement in arms - both expansive imageries, needless to say - the revolutionary millieu of which the Puritans were a key part saw England as a country "Elect of God" destined to found a new republican empire of an agrarian people in arms that would spread across the North Atlantic. (Aside: Giving our theological poster a run for his money, no)

With this background in mind, it is easy to see how this vision lives on today in the grandiose ideological fantasies of what we call the "neocons", but they are but the tip of the American iceberg. Or, to use an "old fasioned" expression, "neoconism" is in the vanguard of the ruling class. "Neoconism" simply expresses in highly concentrated form what every American has drilled into them in school and out from kindergarten on. Is it any wonder then that such a narrow "cabal" exercises such a wide influence over the American political scene, capable at one point in 2003 in capturing the allegances of 60% of the American population, according to polls at that time measuring support for GW Bush's policies. As well the hegemonic influence of American Zionism encompasses virtually the entire active "mainstream" of American ruling class politics, from Cheney, GW Bush and the Congressional Far Right to McCain, Rice, Clinton, Kerry and the entire leadeship of the Democratic Party, together with leading corporate media outlets ranging from the Far Right FOX outfit to NPR. Moreover, through this hegemonic influence the "mainstream" is united with the "extreme" Right, variously in the form of a highly organized fundamentalist Christian Zionist mass movement and a diffuse, motley populist mass of Arab and Muslim hating racists. In such a broad mix the American Jewish community organizations, including the State of Israel - which after all is a self described "Jewish community organization" with guns and nukes - all play a relatively marginal role.

Far from being the result of a "foreign lobby" that somehow managed to capture the central levers of political power and thereby exercise an enormous influence over an otherwise "normal" American political scene, what we have is a phenomenon emerged straight from the heart of "America" and mistook in typically alienated American fashion for a "foreign power". But that foreign, alien power is ideological "America" itself, the unselfdiscovered America.

But why has American Zionism assumed its stark profile in our own times? For this, one has to scrape through the patina of American ideology to reveal the ongoing and deepening crisis of the USA's mode of existence in the world today, both in terms of its relations with other states as well as its mode of integration into the global economy. That vastly interesting field of analysis is beyond the scope of this commentary, but suffice to say that the result of this crisis process has been to render Israel as a very appealing model for how the USA must make its way in the future, if it wishes to preserve its increasingly threatened and isolated position in the world, and therefore the position of ruling American regime within the USA, one might add. "America" as a Global Israel, a Blight Unto The Nations.

Therein lies the secret of the power and influence of the so-called "neocons". Contrary to present appearances, it is a power and influence that have every promise of growing as the "crisis of America" - of US imperialism - deepens.

Finally, as to the recent manuvers of Rice and GW Bush in relation to Iran, the answer is more straightforward. These were caused, not by splits with American ranks, but by splits beween nations on the global scene: The failure of the USA to get a punitive sanctions resolution out of the Security Council that could be brandished in Teheran's face. It is a failure of US imperialism, a failure of hegemonic leadership and a failure of its relations with respect to Russia and China in particular.

In the face of failure there was no alternative but to beat a (temporary, they hope) retreat to buy time and regroup for another attempt at launching aggressive war. US imperialism today has no other option.