These are strange times we live in, to be sure. On 17th of September, seven
days after the bombing of the World Trade Centre, George Bush forced Ariel
Sharon and Yasser Arafat into a cease-fire, and Israeli tanks withdraw from
Jenin and Hebron. Palestinian Police begin to patrol again in the hot spots
of the West Bank, with orders to fire on any Palestinian gunmen who try to
break the cease-fire.

What’s the cause of all this peace breaking out? The US using the only
weapon which has worked thus far to push Israel to the negotiating table,
the threat of freezing the roughly $3 billion subsidies that Israel receives
form the US each year, as part of the roughly 48% of all US foreign aid that
Israel receives. At the same time, the consequences of not attending the
negotiating table, both military and financial, are spelt out to Yasser
Arafat who in any case is in no position to refuse; the Hamas and Abu jihad
groups fall unwillingly into line since they know the price of refusal.

And, irony of ironies, what is the purpose of this enforced peace? To build
the US coalition for war, since the Arab nations as a whole would be unable
to join such a coalition whilst Israel tramples on the Palestinian Authority
with impunity.

Why have the peoples of the Middle East waited all these decades for a peace
that the US could have brokered at virtually any time? Because the simple
ends of US foreign policy to date, since the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948, have been to keep the Arab nations divided against each
other and maintain Israel as the strong military ally of the US, being the
most cost-effective short-term way of keeping cheap petrol flowing from the
pumps in the US. And in case we forget how important that is, politically,
it’s worth remembering that in the final days of the Clinton presidency,
when huge pressure was being exerted on the White House to release oil from
the US strategic oil reserves in order to keep the price of crude below $40
a barrel, at the highest price crude reached during that ‘crisis’, it was
only one cent more in real terms than it had been in 1954. The presidency of
the US is continually bought and sold on the premise that consumption in and
by the US will never be controlled in the short-term, and the long-term is
always someone else’s fault.

It wasn’t always thus: in the post-war era, the Marshall Plan involved the
expenditure of something akin to 30% of the entire federal budget, about
$228 billion in 1997 dollars, on 16 countries. The premise was simple, that
in order to keep these countries out of the Soviet sphere of influence in
the poverty of the post-WWII period, the best way forward was massive
external investment in infrastructure and industrial capacity, expenditure
on reconstruction and enforced redistribution of land and property. The
result is obvious, that those countries converted by the wirtschaftwunder
multiplied by many times the wealth of the US itself as they traded with it
and absorbed its exports, themselves returning Marshall dollars by
investment in the industrial, service and finance sectors of the US economy.

Why are the current generation of democrats and republicans so determined
not to learn this lesson from history? Why do the US and the UK continue to
support the worst and most corrupt regimes globally, when the result is
inevitable? Does anyone here remember the egregious Douglas Hurd, our
Foreign Secretary in 1987, saying that there were no major points of
disagreement between Saddam Hussein and the government of the UK, shortly
before Saddam gassed the Kurds at Halabjeh, and the Matrix Churchill scandal
of arms sales to Iraq broke out? Are these people so completely unable to
make the connection between treating the most murderous vermin on the planet
as legitimate governments, and the spread of extreme left-wing, nationalist
and Islamic opposition groups?

From when the OSS recruited Ho Chi Minh as an anti-Japanese guerilla during
WWII, promising him that the Vietnamese people would be able to hold their
own elections after the war, and then handing the country back to the
French, US foreign policy has been dictated by men like Henry Kissinger,
whose appetite for blood is only matched by their appetite for power. People
who, to borrow an accusation once levelled at Margaret Thatcher, know the
price of everything and the value of nothing. Or rather, they know the value
of some things, they and their hawkish friends – in the first trading day in
the US following the WTC attacks, whilst the Dow Jones fell 7.1%, the usual
crowd were coining it; Raytheon shares up 27%, Lockheed (with that
invaluable connection to Dick Cheney’s wife) up 15%, General Dynamics up 19%
and Northrop Grumann up 16%……


Jon Cloke





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