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 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.
Texas Versus Tel Aviv: US Policy in the Middle East
The struggle within the US power structure between the economic empire builders (EEB) and the civilian militarists/Zioncons over US Middle East and global policy is now out in the open and intensifying. The EEB now have a politically powerful organizational expression, the Baker Commission (known officially as the Iraq Study Group) led by the formidable former Secretary of State, James Baker. The EEB are backed by a group of bipartisan congressional leaders, sectors of the traditional military elite, a powerful coalition of Texas-based oil and gas groups and sectors of Wall Street financial houses and potentially a large majority of public opinion. Against them are the civilian militarists in the Pentagon, State Department and White House (Rumsfelt, Chaney, Rice, Bolton and Bush), a declining majority of Congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations headed by the America-Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their influential apparatchiks in the mass media and their numerous ‘grass roots’ political fronts (political action committees).
What is at stake is of fundamental importance to the future of US politics; not only in the Middle East, which is the immediate catalyst for the drawing up of sides, but the entire way in which US policy is formulated and equally important how the US will engage in defending and expanding its global empire.
Crises and Opportunities: The Basis of Confrontation
Several factors have converged to precipitate this intra-elite
confrontation. First and foremost is the prolonged, costly and
un-winnable war in Iraq. The Zioncon-civilian-militarist (ZCCM) policy
of colonial invasions and military occupation in pursuit of destroying
Israel’s adversaries and enhancing its dominance of the Middle East has
weakened the US efforts to sustain its global dominance. The vast
absorption of military resources, troops, reserves and logistical
support systems in pursuit of a prolonged guerrilla war without end,
has severely weakened Washington’s capacity to apply military force to
intimidate and enforce or intervene in other strategic regions or
countries of conflict. The military losses in Iraq have undermined
domestic public support for present and future overseas military
interventions in support of empire building. The sustained military and
political resistance to the vast US military occupation army has
lowered the intimidation factor so necessary in sustaining imperial
diplomacy. In a word, the Iraq war has become a major impediment to
empire building, its defense and its domestic economic and political
support, a principal motivating factor in the crystallization of the
Baker Commission.
Secondly the ZCCM policy of promoting Israel's Middle East supremacy is
enormously damaging to some of the biggest petroleum and financial
institutions in the US. At a time when the headlines of the major
financial press read "seas of cash flooding into the Gulf brings an
explosion of investment companies", "Dubai plans fund to tap Gulf
liquidity" and "Global insurers see rich seam to be mined in Saudi
Arabia",(Financial Times Oct 19, 2006 p.4), the White House and
Pentagon plot new highly destabilizing military confrontations with
Syria and Iran, potentially wrecking hundreds of billions of dollars in
lucrative investments, contracts and returns. The entire Zioncon
political apparatus is the only major force in the US consistently
pushing for Congressional and Executive military action jeopardizing
the potential profits of major US petroleum, investment banking,
insurance and other key sectors of the US global economic elite. The
paradox is that many of the same wealthy investment bankers eager to
tap into the Middle East bonanza are the same groups, which finance the
AIPAC-Zioncon warmongers. This raises concerns of cross pressures,
double allegiances, tribal loyalties and dollar signs!
From the perspective of defending US global interests, being tied down
militarily in Iraq in a long-term, large-scale engagement is not only
counterproductive but has created a political crisis. The domestic
consensus among the political elite concerning the compatibility of
imperialism and democracy is threatened with being torn asunder to
sustain the war. The ZCCM power bloc increasingly resorts to
authoritarian war powers totally at variance with the existing
constitutional order peeling layers of legitimacy from the existing
political system.
The Baker Commission is attempting to reassert the supremacy of the
market over the military in defining the driving forces of empire
building, that is, the economic interests of US petrol and finance
capital over Israeli military dominance in shaping US Middle East
interests.
For economic determinists, for whom foreign policy is simply the
unmediated result of powerful economic interests, the failure of the US
government to scuttle a mendicant, miniscule militarist state forever
milking the US Treasury in favor of the most powerful US energy
companies pursuing multi-billion dollar deals with resource-rich
free-market Arab-Muslim countries is an inexplicable mystery.
Inexplicable because these ‘economic determinists’ are either willfully
blind or they deliberately choose to ignore the political power of the
ZCCM power configuration in overriding US global economic interests. To
continue with the current state of affairs is to deepen the political
crisis of empire – both domestically and internationally – and to lose
out on the greatest economic opportunities in the global economy.
The Empire Strikes Back
The relative passivity and/or impotence of the US ‘empire firsters’, in
relation to the ZCCM, in the run up to the Iraq invasion can be
attributed to several factors. In the first place there is the
extraordinary systematic and well-organized penetration of the Bush
Administration by the ZCCM. Armed with a ‘mission’, an intense and
highly motivated belief in military action as the supreme arbiter of
imperial expansion, the civilian militarists joined forces with the
Zioncons who embraced with equal zeal their mission of using US
military power to enhance Israeli dominance in the Middle East as the
over-riding priority in US foreign policy.
During a long march through the institutions over the previous 25
years, the ZCCM was able to penetrate and take over all the key policy
positions in the Pentagon, State Department and White House. While
there were scattered objections by marginal voices – namely retired
military officials, traditional conservatives, pacifists and leftists,
few were able or willing to point their finger at the Zioncon power
configuration especially after 9/11. More important, the economic
empire builders lacked an alternative political leadership and bought
into the civilian militarists ‘War on Terror’ as a necessary security
strategy and the Pentagon-Zioncon claim that the Iraq invasion would
result in a quick and complete victory (with plenty of benefits for
all). The economic empire builders, accustomed to dealing with
well-informed bright and capable pro-Israel colleagues in the financial
world, assumed that their counterpart political-military strategists
were equally competent in ‘advising and directing’ imperial politics.
What the economic elite did not foresee was the fact that the Zioncon
policy-makers did not share their political priorities: Zioncon policy
was not directed toward creating a stable regime friendly to US
political-economic interests but toward physically destroying any Arab
or Muslim country capable of challenging Israeli domination of the
region. Destroying Iraq for Greater Israeli-US dominance meant the
dismembering of the Iraqi Republic, the imposition of a brutal US
colonial regime and the gradual introduction of ethnically-cleansed
tribal client regimes which would be subject to Israel interests and
open to foreign oil companies. The promise of the latter was a
‘sweetener’ thrown in to secure big oil support or neutrality for the
pro-Israeli (Israel-centered) policy.
While the ZCCM succeeded in destroying Iraq as a viable state and
economy, thus accomplishing the Israeli goals of the war, the economic
empire-builders witnessed the complete and total unraveling of all the
political-economic payoffs promised by the Zioncons. The invasion led
to prolonged peoples guerrilla war. The Zionist-designed destruction of
the Iraqi state institutions (with Paul Bremer’s dismissing all Iraqi
state employees, officials and military personnel) led to hundreds of
thousands of former trained and armed ex-soldiers, officers and police
joining the armed resistance. Regional instability and hostility to US
economic interests multiplied. As it became transparent throughout the
Middle East and elsewhere that the ZCCM were masters of US Middle East
policy and that Washington’s priority was fighting Israel’s wars, the
US became a pariah in the Middle East, like its Israeli partner.
The misplaced confidence of a convergence of interests between the
economic empire builders and the ZCCM soon gave way as the political
and economic costs began to weigh on the minds of the ideologues and
subsequently the political leaders of the economic elite. Numerous
scatter-shot responses weakened the most vulnerable and obvious targets
among the Zioncons. Initially it was the traditional conservatives who
sounded the nationalist alarm, pointing to the Israel-Firsters’
takeover of US policy in the interest of Israel. A much weaker, but
pointed, criticism of the Israeli lobby appeared in the web pages of
individual leftist writers. Former intelligence, FBI officials and
retired colonels and generals with continued ties to their agencies
attacked the Zioncons, referred to as ‘neo-cons’, for misleading and
falsifying data in the run-up to the war. Key Israeli operatives in top
echelons of the Pentagon (Wolfowitz and Feith) withdrew from office.
The FBI arrested two leading members of AIPAC for spying for Israel. US
public opinion, thanks to the internet and alternative sources of
information and despite the massive pro-Israel bias in the corporate
media, registered a near majority view that the Iraq invasion was in
Israel’s, not US, interests. Leading civilian militarists, Rumsfeld and
Chaney, became the most disliked politicians in the Administrations.
Despite these setbacks in personnel, the ZCCM apparatus remained
intact. AIPAC still drew raves from all the leading Congress members,
Party and Executive officials at their yearly conference. Congress
still provided near unanimous support for the Israel invasion of
Lebanon, approval for over $3 billion dollars (the annual dole) to
Israel, and enthusiastically backed Israel’s starvation blockade of the
democratically elected Palestinian government in Gaza. Rumsfeld,
Chaney, Bush, Rice and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the
Major Jewish Organizations of America continued to pursue the ‘war to
victory’ in Iraq and new wars strategies against Iran, Syria and
elsewhere, even as Bush’s popularity plummeted, the death toll among US
soldiers surpassed 3000 and US economic weaknesses became more
apparent.
The widespread, dispersed and muted criticism of the economic elite
finally crystallized, particularly among the economic empire-builders,
embodied in James Baker, lifetime confidant of the Bush family and ‘man
of confidence’ in US-Middle East financial and petroleum circles.
The Baker Panel
The strength of the Zioncon power configuration is evident even in the
manner and composition as well as the deliberations of the panel, which
James Baker III has formed to present alternatives to current US policy
in the Middle East. Baker’s panel is bipartisan, including former
Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders, CIA directors, a
retired Supreme Court Justice, an ex-Secretary of Defense and other
establishment notables. Secondly the panel does not include a single
Zioncon ideologue, retired Bush Jr. administration official or allied
Congressperson, though some are sprinkled among the scores of ‘experts’
involved in the four working groups. Baker’s tactic is to be inclusive
enough to represent various strands of elite opinion to buttress its
authority when its report is presented to the President, Congress and
the public, and selective to minimize the influence of the ‘Israel
Firsters’ and the ‘war to military victory’ crowd. Thirdly the Baker
Commission has as its strategic goal the subordination of military
policy to economic empire building, rather than the current approach of
harnessing economic policy to military conquests and Zioncon
ideological missions. What this means in practical terms is giving
greater room for diplomacy, heterodox political alliances based on
common economic interests and pursuit of lucrative economic contracts
and agreements with Arab and Muslim nations. Fourthly, the Baker
Commission has not and will not directly attack the Zioncon power
structure or even question the civilian militarists who run the Bush
War Machine. Instead the panel will de facto set in notion a series of
alternative policies which implicitly point to a new political
administration – one which is free of the Israeli stranglehold on
Washington’s Middle East policy and beholden first and foremost to US
empire building without the encumbrances of Israel’s regional power
grabs.
The tactic of ignoring the Zioncon power bloc while building an
alternative is a delicate operation given the power of the Jewish
lobbies to manipulate the ‘anti-Israel’, ‘anti-Semite’ labeling
technique amplified by its Congressional and media acolytes. Hence the
Baker Commission will reiterate the ritual affirmation of support for
Israel’s security and massive foreign aid package, while emphasizing
greater pressure on Israel to resolve the Palestinian issue. How far
Baker will move on the Palestinian issue depends on how much legitimacy
he feels the Commission has to withstand a Zioncon-orchestrated calumny
campaign. Will the Abe Foxmans of the ADL have the gall to accuse a
bipartisan, gold ribbon establishment elite of being anti-Semite for
not fighting Israel’s wars and not backing Israel’s policy of ethnic
cleansing?
If Baker has moved methodically and prudently toward a re-orientation
of US policy from the line pushed by the ZCCM, he has done so by
carefully organizing an army of researchers, experts and notables whose
reports will be distilled into a series of policy proposals which will
argue for a ‘winning empire-building strategy’ as opposed to the
current impasse and decline of empire. Baker knows first hand the power
of the Zioncon configuration and therefore it is highly unlikely that
he will openly attribute the current disastrous course of policy to the
subordination of US policy to the interests of the State of Israel.
Instead he has established an organizational apparatus whose
composition in fact excludes the Zioncons, and therefore re-establishes
US imperial interests as the centerpiece of policy-making. Likewise
Baker will not directly confront Rumsfeld, Chaney, Rice, Elliot Abrams
and the other civilian-militarists in power; instead he will present a
series of findings and proposals, which will be incompatible with their
tenure in office. Baker is counting on the growing majority of
Republican and Democratic Congress-members questioning current policy,
a shift in the mass media, growing dissent among active Generals,
career State Department and Pentagon officials, sectors of the economic
elite and massive repudiation by public opinion to force the
Rumsfeld-Hadley-Abrams power center out of office and their replacement
by officials and advisers more open to a new approach to the Middle
East.
If it is true that the primary purpose of the Baker Commission is to
take back US Middle East policy-making from the ‘Israel Firsters’ and
secondly to subordinate military approaches to empire building to
market interests, the question arises as to what strategic policies,
tactical alliances, regional realignments and specific proposals
dealing with the US military presence in Iraq Baker will propose? The
Baker Plan
First and foremost it should be understood that Baker’s perspective is
how to protect US empire building on a global scale, and in particular
defend and expand US imperial interests in the Middle East. Secondly he
is concerned with a restoration of US military interventionist
capability in the face of the precipitous losses in personnel and
morale resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thirdly
Baker is concerned with limiting the political-economic fallout of any
reduction in US military presence in Iraq on strategic client states in
the region. Fourthly he seeks to build new tactical relations with
current adversaries without alienating Israel and subsequently its
vociferous and aggressive agents in the US.
Within these parameters Baker has several lines of policy which are open and being explored. The Baker Options
In all likelihood, Baker’s Panel will not recommend a phased withdrawal
of US troops unless there is a collapse of the Iraqi army and police.
Instead he will press for a policy of including the main combatants or
insurgents (including the Baathists and pro-Iranians) in a
‘power-sharing’ scheme in the hope that the resistance can be
fragmented, isolated and eventually weakened. This will be packaged as
a ‘new direction’. To that end Baker will propose negotiations with
Iran and Syria in order to secure their influence in pressuring their
allies in Iraq to join in the power-sharing scheme. In order to enter
into discussion with Iran and Syria and to persuade them to cut off
military support for the Iraqi resistance, he will have to offer some
sort of peaceful coexistence, in effect dropping the threats of
military intervention, economic sanctions and the funding of
CIA-sponsored terrorist groups. Clearly Iran and Syria will not
co-operate if Washington pursues the Zioncon militarist agenda of
confrontation. Baker knows that within the Iranian power structure,
there are liberal technocrats, wealthy business leaders, opportunistic
clerics, corrupt state officials in the oil and gas sector and leading
politicians who are open to negotiating with the US and eager to cut a
deal with Washington, even at the expense of their Iraqi Shia
colleagues – if Washington makes an offer of power-sharing in Iraq,
drops its belligerent posturing and frees itself of the Zioncon policy
of Israeli regional supremacy. Syria and Iran have a track record of
collaborating with Washington in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq
and even afterward, sharing intelligence and subsequently supporting
the US-orchestrated electoral process. That important sectors of the
Iraqi Shia resistance look to Iran for material and moral support is
unquestionable; that they would abide by a US-Iranian agreement which
in effect retains US military presence and its current puppets is
doubtful. Baker may underestimate the degree of autonomy, which the
local Shia resistance has secured. A US-Iranian-Syrian deal would also
exclude the important role that the non-Shia (Sunnis, Baathists and
others) resistance plays in the war.
The ‘Yugoslav Solution’, namely the breakup of the Iraqi Republic into
client mini-states (what the Zioncons like Leslie Gelb, former
President of the Council on Foreign Relations have advocated as a
‘Tri-State Solution’) is an option, which the Baker Commission is
surely considering. This is the favored plan of the Democratic Party
Hawks, like Hilary Clinton, Charles Schumer and Joseph Biden. This
would involve the division of Iraq into a series of mini-fiefdoms run
by US-Israeli clients: Kurds in the North, Sunni tribal leaders in the
Center-West and a Shia South with Baghdad starved into submission. This
would be a complicated, violent and difficult scheme to execute because
it depends on massive ethnic cleansing, uprooting millions. Moreover
the highly unequal geographical distribution of natural resources would
exclude the most combative group – the Sunnis from the most lucrative
sources of income.
The Tri-State Solution would require the break up of the current army
and its reorganization along ethnic-religious lines at a time of highly
volatile military conflict and with virtually no leadership with any
standing in the resistance willing to settle for an impoverished
fragment of a hitherto unified secular state. Apart from Iraqi tribal
leaders, expatriate clients and the Kurds, the process of
national-deconstruction would increase conflict, not ameliorate it. The
positive side would be the strong support, which this proposal would
receive from Israel and thus the entire Jewish Lobby and its clients
–The US Congress and White House.
Almost without exception, Israel’s ideological soldiers have taken to
the opinion columns of all the major newspapers, television and radio
shows (as self-reputed Middle East experts) to promote the breaking up
of Iraq into mini-states and to pursue the killing fields beyond the
over 650,000 slaughtered Iraqi civilians and 3,000 dead US soldiers.
One only has to read the obscene op-ed articles which dominate the
October 26, 2006 issue of the Financial Times to capture this
unrelenting campaign to totally obliterate Iraq from the map and from
Israel’s cross hairs (see Michael Rubin’s “Why Withdrawal from Iraq is
the Worst Option”, Lawrence Freedman’s “America Must Learn to have
Patience”, Richard Betts’ “Look to Bosnia, not Vietnam, for a Realistic
Solution” Financial Times, October 26, 2006 page 13). Needless to say,
with Jews representing less than 0.5% of US armed forces personnel and
an even far smaller proportion being active soldiers on the front lines
and with virtually none of the prominent Zioncon ideologues having
children or grandchildren among the US occupation troops facing hostile
Iraqi resistance, it is easy for the Rubins and Freedmans of the US and
UK to preach ‘patience’ for an endless war.
Baker has to face up to a full-scale ideological offensive by Israel’s
US-based ideological soldiers, precisely as almost everyone else is
turning against the war, and ever more Americans find the courage to
point a finger of responsibility at the Jewish Lobby. Oblivious to
their isolation among Americans concerned with the useless loss of
American lives and limbs, the Israel-Firsters are focusing all their
attention on influencing or neutralizing the recommendations, which
come out of the Baker Commission. The Zioncons follow the British
imperial dictum: Rule via unending war or ruin through tribal/ethnic
mini-states.
Since serious diplomatic openings to Syria and Iran, which Baker has
already suggested (“politics is about talking to your enemies”), are
highly unlikely given the current direction of White House policy and
given the lack of an Iraqi leader with any following willing to carve
up the country, the Baker Panel may be inclined to pay lip-service to a
proposal for a gradual ‘redeployment’, the gradual reduction of US
combat troops from frontline positions. This may be making a virtue of
necessity, as the US Generals in Iraq have stated, the US cannot long
sustain 140,000 occupation troops. The ‘redeployment strategy’ however
is not a strategy for withdrawal but a method of co-opting Democratic
support for the continuation of the war into 2008, the Presidential
election year- especially in light of Republican losses in Congress and
the Senate. (Leading members of the Democratic Party, like Clinton,
Biden and Schumer want to send even more troops to Iraq!) The lowering
of US troop strength in the absence of a political power-sharing deal
with the local insurgents and Iran however is likely to increase the
likelihood of regime fragility and greater defections/infiltration of
the US-directed ‘Iraqi’ Army. A US countdown will increase the
likelihood of ‘coalition’ partners following suit even earlier and
withdrawing their troops even before the Americans. Already the top
British Army General Richard Dannatt took the unprecedented stand of
publicly voicing his dissent from Prime Minister Blair’s support for
the war, stating that the presence of coalition troops only
‘exacerbates the security problem in Iraq (Daily Mail (London), Oct 12,
2006).
The Baker Commission’s task of finding ‘new policies’ to contain the
effects of the Iraq invasion are incompatible with the increasingly
belligerent Middle East policy pursued by the Bush White House and
their Zioncon supporters. Baker cannot avoid challenging the Zioncon
Middle East policy if he is to stabilize Iraq: he needs Iranian and
Syrian co-operation to co-opt insurgents and/or subdivide Iraq. No
amount of clever maneuvering, at which Baker excels (as witnessed by
his ‘smart moves’ in the stolen election in Florida 2000), can avoid
the hard realities of a losing regional war, in which the US is playing
with an ever-weaker hand of cards. At some point, as the US debacle
deepens and US public disapproval of Bush’s handling of the invasion
exceeds its current 62% and as the resistance to occupation itself
grows and turns even bloodier, as the casualties and deaths of
Americans climb by the hundreds each month, as the ‘civil war’ in Iraq
totally undermines all government authority, as one US client replaces
another and most of all as popular rebellion threatens the rule of the
US strategic assets in the regions (like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Egypt), then and only then in the name of the empire, of the free
market and of oil will Baker be forced to turn against the
Zioncon-militarists architects of Middle East policy and call for an
accelerated withdrawal.
Needless to say US public opinion is running far ahead of any
elite-designed ‘new course’. Fifty percent of Americans between 18-29
believe that ‘the work of the Israel Lobby in Congress and the Bush
Administration has been a key factor for going to war with Iraq and now
confronting Iran’. Over 52% of US liberals hold similar beliefs.
The elite divisions in an around the Administration are coming to the
fore: Alberto Fernandez, Director of Public Diplomacy at the State
Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs publicly denounced US
‘arrogance and stupidity in Iraq’ right after Bush came out for
‘staying the course’. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State from
2001-2005, came out for a ‘phased withdrawal of US forces in Iraq’.
As the Zioncon-civilian-militarists hunker down in their White House
situation rooms and among their moneyed backers, as Baker’s Iraq Study
Group grope for ‘proposals’ without interlocutors in the President’s
office and without followers in the America public, it is clear that in
the absence of any consequential withdrawal of US troops, the wounds of
war will fester and spread from the battle fronts of Baghdad to the
streets of America. Only a catastrophic defeat in the Middle East will
move us to a new course, out of Iraq, at peace with Iran and most of
all out of the stranglehold of the Israel Lobby albatross.
Writings 
The struggle within the US power structure between the economic empire builders (EEB) and the civilian militarists/Zioncons over US Middle East and global policy is now out in the open and intensifying. The EEB now have a politically powerful organizational expression, the Baker Commission (known officially as the Iraq Study Group) led by the formidable former Secretary of State, James Baker. The EEB are backed by a group of bipartisan congressional leaders, sectors of the traditional military elite, a powerful coalition of Texas-based oil and gas groups and sectors of Wall Street financial houses and potentially a large majority of public opinion. Against them are the civilian militarists in the Pentagon, State Department and White House (Rumsfelt, Chaney, Rice, Bolton and Bush), a declining majority of Congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations headed by the America-Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and their influential apparatchiks in the mass media and their numerous ‘grass roots’ political fronts (political action committees). 
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