Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
War Anniversary: Israel, Palestine Links Absent
by Ramzy Baroud
The Stockholm air was too cold, even for the most animated speaker to excite a crowd. But I had little choice: thousands of anti-war protesters had descended on the capital’s main square to show their support of the Iraqi people on the four-year anniversary of the US invasion, and to demand an immediate American withdrawal.
As I took to the stage and began my speech, I was struck by the fact that there was not one Palestinian or Lebanese flag. Even the Venezuelan flag, which is often an invited sign of defiance and steadfastness, was absent. If that spectacle was a sign of strategic calculation: to distance the war in Iraq from all others, it was a grave mistake. I spoke exactly of that: it’s the same war, the same occupation; Israel and its neoconservative benefactors are recurring faces in the Middle East’s ongoing chaos. That is a fact that anti-war movements everywhere must keep at the forefront if they want their message to have validity or relevance.
The Israeli connection to the political ‘realignments’ in
the region goes back as early as 1992. The draft Defense Planning
Guidance (DPG), which was circulated around the Pentagon for weeks
before being ‘leaked’ to the New York Times, envisaged a future in
which the US establishes uncontested supremacy in the post cold-war
world. Though the guidance didn’t underscore Israel and its role in
that new world, those who composed the document were primarily the well
known Israel crowd in Washington: then-Defense Department staffers Ewis
Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and America’s man in Iraq a few years later,
Zalmay Khalilzad.
Israel’s role in that ‘vision’ didn’t
crystallise fully until Richard Pearle, a leading neocon, along with
Douglas Feith and others, proposed “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm” to Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The
policy document envisaged a larger role for Israel in the region that
would equate its influence to that of the US, not a mere client state
but an equal hegemon. It plotted for the toppling of the Iraqi regime
and the re-drawing of the geopolitical map of the entire region. The
same recommendations were marketed to the Clinton administration in
1997/98 but failed; Clinton, who conceded much of America’s interests
to Israel’s, was, perhaps, not yet ready to accommodate such a grand
vision.
That vision, an Israeli one to the core, was often
presented as exclusively American, most notably by the Project for the
New American Century, established by leading neocons in 1997, the same
individuals who vowed allegiance to Israel for many years. PNAC was the
key group behind the war in Iraq. The moment terrorists struck the Twin
Towers with their deadly airplanes, PNAC campaigners were ready with a
map of the Middle East, pointing out the countries they wished to bomb
and the regimes that needed to be changed.
This should not absolve other war enthusiasts, but to
underestimate the neocons’s leading role, in which Israel’s interests
were part and parcel is to defy damning facts.
The influence of the neocons
has faded, or more accurately has gone into an early state of
hibernation due to the disasters they have inflicted on the country,
the scandals they have generated and the negative media coverage that
they could not possibly survive unscathed.
Based on their
vision, the US administration has hoped that its occupation of Iraq
would reconfigure the region and inspire a New Middle East. Four years
later, the US-Israeli plan is faltering. The stiff resistance in Iraq
is costing the US its military reputation and is strengthening the
Iranian position, especially since Iran has its own proxies in Iraq.
Syria is also in a strong position despite its withdrawal from Lebanon
which actualised under intense US-led international pressure. Hezbollah
is keeping the Lebanon domain somewhat free from Israeli influence. In
the final analysis, Israel, though it has gained through the toppling
of Saddam and his regime, is still facing a serious challenge from
Iran. The US is losing on all fronts, politically, financially and
militarily.
The US’ so-called de-Baathification of the country,
also a neocon scheme, was its greatest blunder, for it meant stripping
the country from its most important tools of unity: the army, civil
services, thus it national cohesion. This invited disaster, which
rendered all subsequent US efforts irrelevant. The US military
administration replaced the existing regime apparatus, which affected
millions of people, with a sectarian regime that itself was an amalgam
of Shia exclusivism, pro-Iran political groups, unruly militias, etc.
This new assortment reflected itself in the set up of the Iraqi army,
police, government and parliament; the result was devastating, since
the national army and government were tools of division, a fact that
drove the sectarian divide into a civil war. The US democracy project —
tailored perfectly to fit American interests — was also an astounding
failure, and predictably so.
The fact was dismissed that real democracy
doesn’t get delivered via tanks and cruise missiles, but by a civil
society capable of asserting itself without fear or intimidation.
What’s happening in Iraq is America’s definition of democracy for the
Arabs, and certainly not the Arabs’ choice for themselves.
The US will leave Iraq; that should hardly be questioned. It
cannot possibly bear such financial and material losses indefinitely.
The New Statesman reports that caring for the war wounded alone will
cost the country $2.5 trillion in the next few decades. But to ensure
that such military chaos, such awesome losses of irreplaceable lives on
all sides are not repeated, one must not speak of the Iraq war in too
general terms: empire, oil and hegemony, and lose sight of most
relevant specifics.
Israel and its benefactors have played and
continue to play a major role in all of this. Ignoring this fact for
the sake of not ‘mixing’ the issues would simply mean fighting the
right cause with the wrong strategy, to say the least.
- Ramzy Baroud is a US writer
and journalist. His latest book: The Second Palestinian Intifada: A
Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London) is available
online via Amazon.com and the University of Michigan Press
Writings 
The Stockholm air was too cold, even for the most animated speaker to excite a crowd. But I had little choice: thousands of anti-war protesters had descended on the capital’s main square to show their support of the Iraqi people on the four-year anniversary of the US invasion, and to demand an immediate American withdrawal. 
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