IF Obama could put America’s own real interests first…
What Iran’s leaders and also those of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Taliban want most of all is an end to American exceptionalism, for which read imperialism, and all the arrogance, bullying and interference, as well as the killing, maiming and destruction, that comes with it.
On Israel-Palestine real positions (as opposed to Zionist assertions about them) are clear. Hamas is explicitly on the record with the statement that while it will not formally recognise Israel’s right to exist, it is pragmatically prepared to accept Israel’s actual existence inside its 1967 (pre-war) borders and to live in peace with it. And though they don’t say so openly, Iran and Hizbollah have a common pragmatic position. They will accept, reluctantly no doubt, whatever the Palestinians accept.
An American president who was free to put the best interests of his own nation and people first would now give priority to talking constructively to “the enemy”. With the assistance of the leaders of Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas, Obama (possibly at the risk of assassination) could create a whole new Middle East, one in which justice for the Palestinians and peace and security for all could flourish. (I’m sure that most of us would welcome a return to the days when we could check into an airport without being treated as a possible or probable terrorist).
It is, of course, true that there are powerful vested interests in the U.S. (Jewish and non-Jewish) which actually believe that unconditional support for Israel right or wrong is in America’s best interests. Because they are not completely stupid, they know this policy is not cost free. The presumption has to be that they also believe the cost in terms of American blood and treasure is a price worth paying. Hopefully the time is coming when enough Americans will say to them: “Stop this madness! You’re wrong. It’s not a price worth paying.”
For the neo-cons and their associates who marshal and deliver support for Israel right or wrong, and who by so doing subvert what passes for democracy in America, I have a New Year message. Learn the lesson of America’s costly and catastrophic adventure in Vietnam. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are militarily, you cannot destroy ideas with bullets and bombs, especially ideas rooted in the need for self-determination, justice and human and political rights.
I have no expectation that Zionism can learn this lesson. I believe it, Zionism, to be congenitally incapable of doing so. But one day most if not all Americans will learn it – won’t they…?
Footnote
It was in Vietnam as a very young correspondent for ITN (Independent Television News), when I was observing the U.S. spending six million dollars a minute on a war it could not win and should not have waged, that I first started to ask myself questions about why things are as they are in the world. Some years later the notion that America could not have won the war in Vietnam was challenged by Senator Barry Goldwater in private conversation with me. In 1964 this five-term senator from Arizona was the Republican Party’s nominee for president. He didn’t make it to the White House in part because President Johnson branded him as an extremist who might plunge America into a nuclear war. When I was on assignment for the BBC’s Panorama programme, Goldwater said to me in his Senate office: “We could have won the war in Vietnam. We should have nuked the North. What’s the point in spending so much money on developing nuclear weapons if you’re not prepared to use them?” (With Iran and North Korea on their minds, I imagine that some of today’s neo-con nuts agree with that. And I note that after he failed to secure a second term, perhaps because he offended the Zionist lobby too much by wanting to be serious about peacemaking in the Middle East, former President Bush the First said that his dream was of a “winnable nuclear war”).
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Laurent:
December 29th, 2010 at 9:37 am
A price worth paying…it rings a bell. It reminds me of Madeleine Albright and the hundred thousands of dead children old folks those in need of health care and her infamous answer.
I think it’s high time to not waste anymore time on what Obama could do had he the “cojones”…but maybe it’s not so much of “cojones” but rather a matter of being a true human being, with a heart, a conscience. High time to face the facts that Obama is a psychopath and a lot one worse than Bush was.
Bush must be laughing out loud…
rosemary spiota:
December 29th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Alan it is not only Arabs and other Moslems who are against what the US does. They have a weird way of thinking: so-called Christians, always wanting an enemy to fight, overloaded with guns,the only “civilised” country with the death penalty, assasinations okay for almost anyone (think of Assange but also poor Bradley Manning). How the European Union and so many other countries’ leaders let them get away with it is terrible, and the reason Israel can continue it’s illegal actions.
Tom Mysiewicz:
December 30th, 2010 at 12:03 am
I was telling a friend in the Mid East that it’s strictly control of the media that makes Americans react the way they do to the region. The 1997 sci-fi movie “Stargate” got great audience response for helping Palestinian-like peoples in the “Kalium” galaxy to liberate themselves from the Israeli-like Ra. That’s the normal response of Americans to what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza. Obama is simply the parakeet in this guilded Faraday cage of propaganda. I’m really concerned about his (and the first lady’s) behavior at every turn. Who gives them this advice? Like going to Hawaii with the family and having “fun in the sun” while 60% of Americans are freezing and/or stuck in areas where municipal budgets strained by the economy do not allow efficient snow removal!
Douglas Zork:
December 30th, 2010 at 12:11 am
Alan, is it really your position that a fifth of a loaf, without control of the fresh water resources to wash it down with, is better than none, and people of good will, or pragmatic people anyway, should accept such a deal as payment in full of the debt of justice that the world owes to the Palestinian people?
Your repeatedly proffered solution of a Palestinian rump state or “Bantustan” within lines of the occupied Palestinian territories of 1967, at one stroke denies justice for the victims Nakba of 1947-1949, and grants international legality to the existence of Israel as a religio-ethnic Jewish Apartheid state and hegemonic power over the adjacent Palestinian rump state.
Such a solution depends upon international recognition of a coopted, corrupt Palestinian leadership, who are prepared to sell their brothers’ and sisters’ birthright to live with full rights in all of Palestine/Israel, for a measure of illegitimate power, doled out by Israel and its backers: the USA and the EU.
Alan, please throw your considerable influence to support the only just and durable democratic solution: a unitary democratic state guaranteeing full political, economic, cultural, and human rights for all nationals of Israel/Palestine, as well as all refugees of the Nakba and their direct descendants.
The pragmatic “two-state” solution stinks to high heaven.
Elandalussii:
December 30th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Obama was hired by the zionists lobby as US president to “clean the Augean stables” Bush left. Arabs and muslims don’t hate american people. But they are eagger to see them awake and firmly standing in their boots against the zionists monster in America. Indeed “We are all palestinians”.
Ronald Douglas Kennedy:
December 30th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Alan: Question of timing of the US. in Vietnam and what was happening in the zionization of Palestine. Probably way off Americas concerns during these War Years. Has any one done a time line of what the Zionist were doing during this period? Also wear any Israel weapons used by North Korea or China against South Korea or our Finest?
Also I just don’t belive mouse ears, will grow in to king rat and clean house in DC. General Colin Powell should have been our President for a real change.