Brutality and Reality: The American-Israeli Arrangement
by Chris Floyd
Israel admits it used phosphorus weapons (Guardian)
Israel Adds Far-Right Party to Coalition (NY Times)
The good news just keeps rolling in from Israel, where the "light unto the nations" plows on in its relentless self-exile into outer darkness. That epithet of "light" once had the tang of truth, in the great line of thinkers, artists, activists, theologians, healers, humorists, and diviners of the natural world, largely in the Diaspora, from Maimonides to Mendelssohn, from Judah Ha-Levi to Boris Pasternak and Bob Dylan, from the Baal Shem Tov to Martin Buber, from Spinoza to Einstein, and on and on in every field of worthy endeavor. But the political inheritors of this matchless legacy seem hellbent on squandering what once seemed an inexhaustible storehouse of the human spirit.
Every week seems to bring some new brutality, some new degradation, some further coarsening – and some new parallel with the Bush Regime and the brutal,
coarse and degraded currents in American society that it so amply embodies and represents.As a side note – or maybe even a main note – I'm not one of those who subscribe to the "Israel made us do it" meme that seems to loom large in the dissident blogosphere. I just can't buy the idea that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang are somehow being jerked around by wily Zionists – as if they wouldn't be following their "unitary executive"-global domination-war profiteering agenda even if Israel didn't exist. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the American ruling class – and yes, Virginia, there is an American ruling class and a pretty vicious, voracious, self-serving lot they are, too. The idea that these factions of gargantuan wealth and privilege – much of it, as with the Bushes, going back for generations – could be induced to act against their own narrowly defined but passionately held interests by the arguments of third-rate hacks like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, or Douglas Feith seems fairly risible.
Yes, they are happy to make use of the neo-cons, the Likudniks, AIPAC, etc. etc., especially as the hard-right in Israel dovetails neatly with the American elite's own harsh, bellicose vision of the world. And yes, the Israel lobby has a broad and pernicious influence on the workings of American politics – just as, say, the Turkish lobby does (ask Denny Hastert about those suitcases stuffed with Turkish cash; Foleygate is nothing compared to the yet-untold story of Treasongate), or the Saudi lobby, which has spread infinitely more baksheesh through the American system than the Israeli lobby could ever hope to match . But when the American elite go to war, they go to war for themselves, for their own benefit, not for anyone else. Despite various contretemps over the years (that little spot of bother about the USS Liberty, for example), Israel has ultimately served the American elite's purposes. If it didn't, then the untold billions of dollars in American cash and arms that have propped up Israel for decades would disappear overnight, and the country would be left to its fate.
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Iraq is the great tragedy
of our generation. Every day men and women are brazenly killed
in their own homes or cities by foreign troops who occupy the
country without justification. 
Most people won’t pay any attention to this week’s energy summit in Lahti, Finland, but they should. It is particularly instructive for anyone who is interested in the latest developments in the global resource war.
The Bush administration, losing the war in Iraq, has come with a "new" strategy: setting a timetable for Iraq's puppet regime and its fledgling army to "stand up" to the task of running the country so that the U.S. military can "stand down."
Nothing in the past 60 years revealed the true face of Israel to the world at large (and perhaps to the Lord above) as its illegal invasion of Lebanon. Never before has the Israeli government allowed the world to witness the depth of its brutal aggression as it defied international law with its collective punishment of the innocent. At no time in the past has Israel lost control of the flow of information allowed into or out of Israel and the occupied territories until it abandoned its borders and invaded Lebanon. That mistake ripped away the veil of “victim hood†that the Israeli propaganda machine had constructed around the tiny, beleaguered state beset with fanatics intent on erasing it “from the map†and suicide bombers that threatened death in the streets.